April 2008 Archives

After a year as acting dean of the School of International and Public Affairs, John Coatsworth has been named to the position permanently, University President Lee Bollinger announced in an email Tuesday afternoon.

Coatsworth, a renowned scholar of the economic history of Latin America, took over as acting dean in the summer of 2007 while a committee searched for a permanent replacement for former dean Lisa Anderson.

He became well-known outside of academic circles early in his tenure when he brought Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to campus last October for a controversial speaking appearance. Coatsworth was assailed by many political pundits for hosting such a politically controversial figure, but he was also praised by many at Columbia for his calm handling of the event...

Jewish leaders planned the Holocaust to kill "disabled and handicapped" Jews to avoid having to care for them, according to a Hamas TV educational program. As much of the world prepared to commemorate Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, Hamas TV presented its latest sinister twist on Holocaust denial.

The Hamas TV educational program, broadcast last week, taught that the murder of Jews in the Holocaust was a Zionist plot with two goals:

1- To eliminate "disabled and handicapped" Jews by sending them to death camps, so they would not be a burden on the future state of Israel.

2- At the same time, the Holocaust served to make "the Jews seem persecuted" so they could "benefit from international sympathy."

Amin Dabur, head of the Palestinian "Center for Strategic Research" explained that "the Israeli Holocaust - the whole thing was a joke, and part of the perfect show that [Zionist leader and future Israeli prime minister] Ben Gurion put on." The "young energetic and able" were sent to Israel, while the handicapped were sent "so there would be a Holocaust."...

...The cultural jihadists have enjoyed disturbing success. Two events in particular--the 2004 assassination in Amsterdam of Theo van Gogh in retaliation for his film about Islam's oppression of women, and the global wave of riots, murders, and vandalism that followed a Danish newspaper's 2005 publication of cartoons satirizing Mohammed -- have had a massive ripple effect throughout the West. Motivated variously, and doubtless sometimes simultaneously, by fear, misguided sympathy, and multicultural ideology -- which teaches us to belittle our freedoms and to genuflect to non-Western -- cultures, however repressive -- people at every level of Western society, but especially elites, have allowed concerns about what fundamentalist Muslims will feel, think, or do to influence their actions and expressions. These Westerners have begun, in other words, to internalize the strictures of sharia, and thus implicitly to accept the deferential status of dhimmis -- infidels living in Muslim societies.

Call it a cultural surrender. The House of War is slowly--or not so slowly, in Europe's case--being absorbed into the House of Submission...

"If The Siege Is Not Lifted... We Will Explode In The Face Of Everybody" [Watch that!]

Khaled Mash'al: "Our only real motive for seeking tahdiah ['calm'] and for our willingness to deal with the Egyptians efforts, which were generated in order to achieve a tahdiah, with full knowledge of the Americans, of Rice, and David Welch, and through the efforts Egypt has exerted vis-à-vis the Israeli side, is to put an end to the aggression against our people in Gaza and the West Bank, and to get the siege lifted and the border crossings opened...

Hamas expressed a vigorous objection on Sunday to resolutions passed in both houses of the United States Congress this week stating American support for Israel as the homeland of the Jewish people...

Hamas leader Dr. Nizar Rian said that the organization will not put down its weapons until Jaffa, Haifa, Ashkelon, and all of the Palestinian cities are released, "and until Muslims return to pray at the mosques in those cities."...

..Anti-Israel Divestment seems to have died within the United Methodist Church. Good Riddance!

We are heartened by the rejection of all five divestment petitions. Portraying Israel as the Western oppressor and the Palestinians as a Third World victim is not helpful in advocating justice and peace for all.

The United Methodist Church has now joined all other Mainline denominations in refusing to target Israel for divestment.

The decisions to withdraw an anti-Caterpillar resolution and the defeat of one-sided anti-Israel divestment resolutions in committee are decisive steps towards adopting a more equitable stance on the Middle East.

...Raoul Wallenberg was a minor official of a neutral country, with an unimposing appearance and gentle manner. Recruited and financed by the U.S., he was sent into Hungary to save Jews. He bullied, bluffed and bribed powerful Nazis to prevent the deportation of 20,000 Hungarian Jews to concentration camps, and averted the massacre of 70,000 more people in Budapest's ghetto by threatening to have the Nazi commander hanged as a war criminal.

Then, on Jan. 17, 1945, days after the Soviets moved into Budapest, the 32-year-old Wallenberg and his Hungarian driver, Vilmos Langfelder, drove off under a Russian security escort, and vanished forever.

And because he was a rare flicker of humanity in the man-made hell of the Holocaust, the world has celebrated him ever since. Streets have been named after him and his face has been on postage stamps. And researchers have wrestled with two enduring mysteries: Why was Wallenberg arrested, and did he really die in Soviet custody in 1947?

Researchers have sifted through hundreds of purported sightings of Wallenberg into the 1980s, right down to plotting his movements from cell to cell while in custody. And fresh documents are to become public which might cast light on another puzzle: Whether Wallenberg was connected, directly or indirectly, to a super-secret wartime U.S. intelligence agency known as "the Pond," operating as World War II was drawing to a close and the Soviets were growing increasingly suspicious of Western intentions in eastern Europe...

RAMALLAH, West Bank (AFP) -- The Palestinian health ministry in the West Bank on Sunday accused the Islamist Hamas movement of preventing the delivery of fuel oils to hospitals in the Gaza Strip.

"Members of Hamas in the Gaza Strip opened fire on Sunday on fuel trucks that were full of fuel destined for hospitals in the territory," the ministry said in a statement issued in the Palestinian political capital of Ramallah...

...Israel halted deliveries of fuel to Gaza on April 9 after Palestinian militants attacked the Nahal Oz terminal, through which all of Gaza's fuel needs are delivered.

It says it cannot deliver any more fuel as the tanks on the Palestinian side of the terminal are full because Hamas will not allow the distribution of the one million litres of petrol and diesel stored there...

The trucks turned back without the fuel, that was supposed to go to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency and to Gaza hospitals, the Jerusalem Post reported Sunday, quoting sources in the Palestinian Petroleum Authority.

Israel agreed over the weekend to provide the Palestinian Petroleum Authority with 250,000 additional liters of fuel to enable it to distribute food aid in the Gaza Strip.

The Post reported that Hamas members had confiscated fuel-laden trucks as they headed to Gaza City at least four times in the last several weeks. Palestinian Authority officials accuse Hamas of trying to create a fuel crisis in order to cause the international community to pressure Israel to open border crossings.

Former Palestinian Authority minister Feisal Husseini paid $8,000 for the legal defense of historian Teddy Katz, the kibbutz member whose master's thesis, "The Departure of Arabs from Villages on the Southern Slopes of Mount Carmel," claimed that Arabs in the village of Tantura were massacred in 1948, sparking a bitter legal fight with veterans of the 33rd battalion of the Alexandroni Brigade. The PA's funding for Katz was reported yesterday by Yedioth Ahronoth.

Responding yesterday, Katz said he will not comment until he submits a revised version of his work to Haifa University. He indicated, however, that he does not believe there have to been anything wrong with taking money from Husseini...

...After a report on his research was published in Ma'ariv, members of the battalion sued Katz for libel.

During the trial Alexandroni veterans' lawyers pointed to discrepancies between the taped interviews Katz conducted and descriptions in his thesis. By June 2000, Katz knew he faced a protracted legal battle and so approached Feisal Husseini for help.

In December 2000, Katz published an apology and retracted allegations about the massacre. He has tried subsequently to revoke the deal with the Alexandroni veterans.

Hamas chief Khaled Mashaal said Saturday that the Islamist group's request for a ceasefire with Israel was "a tactic in conducting the struggle."

In an interview with Al-Jazeera, Mashaal explained that "it is normal for any resistance...to sometimes escalate, other times retreat a bit." Hamas has implemented ceasefires in the past and has later resumed attacks, he pointed out, citing 2003 as a specific example.

According to Israel Radio, Mashaal said that he views Israel's pursuit of a cease-fire as proof that Hamas has succeeded in warding off IDF operations in Gaza.

Hamas has been negotiating with Egyptian officials for a six-month ceasefire period during which Hamas would halt its terrorist attacks and Israel would stop all counterterrorism operations. Nothing would prevent Hamas from continuing to import and manufacture weapons and train terrorists.

Hamas has also offered the promise of a 10-year pause in their attacks, if Israel would agree to relinquish all of Judea, Samaria, and eastern Jerusalem, including the Old City, and to grant citizenship to millions of foreign Arabs. If Israel were to meet those conditions, Hamas leaders say, they would agree to a 10-year ceasefire, after which they would resume their efforts to destroy the Jewish state...

...In 2004, I traveled to the region. In the occupied territories, I saw the terrible apartheid that Anglican Bishop Desmond Tutu and others have described.

Throughout the West Bank, construction cranes were building Israeli settlements on confiscated Palestinian land. People of Jewish ancestry from all over the world are invited to live on property taken from Palestinians. Yet Christians and Muslims whose ancestors have lived in the Holy Land for 2,000 years and 1,300 years, respectively, cannot return...

In fact, many people in Bethlehem and the West Bank descended from Christ's earliest followers and have lived there for thousands of years. Now they suffer alongside their Muslim neighbors as Israeli bulldozers destroy everything in the path of expanding Jewish settlements and the wall.

It has long been my position that any type of participation in democracy is a type of approval of that system. I have no doubt that democracy is antithetical to Islam. However, having read and listened to the sayings of many scholars on this issue, and being faced with the reality of a growing Muslim population here in the UK, who for all intents and purposes consider this their home, it has become clear to me that we must participate in every aspect of society as much as possible to ensure our rights and continued existence and well being in this society. This participation most certainly includes voting for whichever party or candidate best serves the needs and interests of the UK and indeed world wide Muslim population. This does not mean approval or acceptance of the ideal of secular democracy, but the intention is to use the means and avenues available to benefit Muslims and the communities we reside in.

The United States registered an official protest with Israel against its ambassador to the United Nations, Dan Gillerman, for calling former U.S. President Jimmy Carter an "enemy of Israel" prior to Carter's recent visit to the region.

A senior Foreign Ministry source said Saturday that the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv asked that Gillerman be made aware of the U.S. administration's dissatisfaction with the disrespectful comments about the former U.S. President.

In addition, the State Department is planning to issue a public statement condemning comments made by Gillerman at a press conference in New York on Thursday, where he called Carter a "bigot."

Carter, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, "went to the region with soiled hands and came back with bloody hands after shaking the hand of Khaled Meshal, the leader of Hamas," Gillerman told reporters. Gillerman also described the Carter-Meshal as "a very sad episode in American history."

Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni refused yesterday to respond to the demand by MK Yossi Beilin that Gillerman be recalled for his statements against Carter. Beilin described the ambassador's statements as "mad."...

The United Nations says it is being forced to stop delivering food aid to Gaza because of the fuel shortages caused by Israel's response to militant attacks.

Almost a million Palestinians will go hungry if the UN stops deliveries, compounding an already dire humanitarian situation.

The fuel blockade means pumps have already been turned off, causing water shortages and sewage problems, while the vaccination stocks at Gaza's main hospital were spoiled after it had to turn off its refrigerators...

Palestinian residents disrupting UNRWA activities in the Gaza Strip (Communicated by the Coordination and Liaison Administration, Erez)

Col. Nir Press, head of the Coordination & Liaison Administration to the Gaza Strip, addressed the issue of UNRWA fuel shortages today (Thursday, 24 April 2008) stating that: "After receiving an update and a request from UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees) regarding the depletion of fuel required by the organization, we yesterday coordinated with UNRWA, the Palestinian fuel association and the Palestinian fuel administrator, the transfer of fuel required by UNRWA.

Curious George & Friends, Harvard Square's legendary children's book and toy store features a full range of books from preschool through high school as well as the definitive Curious George Collection. You'll also find Babar, Madeline, Tin Tin and all your other favorites here.

TEHRAN -- In a dramatic plea made during a live broadcast of regional affairs debate program Middle East Today on international broadcaster PressTV, an American lawyer called on Tehran to support his bid to sue Israel for genocide against the Palestinians.

"I would like to propose here today on this program that President Mahmood Ahmadinejad and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei give me the authority to sue Israel at the International Court of Justice in The Hague for inflicting genocide against the Palestinian people," said panelist Francis A. Boyle, Professor of International Law.

Speaking Thursday evening on the phone from Champaign, Illinois, Boyle said, "I think that would be one way that the deadlock at the United Nations Security Council could be very easily broken and could shake up the American people and the European Union to the developing genocide being inflicted on the Palestinians in Gaza today."

Boyle was referring to the repeated use of the US veto at the UNSC to block any resolutions critical of its key ally in the Middle East...

...the MEALAC department's course offerings reflect a certain ideological bent. In the spring 2008 semester, for instance, courses that were offered included: Freud and Derrida, Reading Orientalism, Postcolonial Theory, and Orientalism and Islam...

...Laurel Ackerson, a 40-year-old General Studies student who came to MEALAC from a job as a legal secretary in California, said she wanted definitive answers about the Middle East, information she wasn't getting from the media or other sources.

Ackerson hopes to study Arabic in Yemen this summer, but, despite the fact that upon graduation she will be more than $120,000 in debt, she refuses to entertain the notion of working for the government. "It feels to me like I'd be selling my soul...to work for the government would be unfair to the people I'm studying. Especially because of the tenor of what's going on in the country right now."

She credits MEALAC courses on Islam and Arab society with "opening up a part of the world I felt like I'd never be able to touch."...

Divestment can hurt regional peace, interfaith dialogue and intra-church fellowship.

More than a thousand delegates representing the 10 million strong United Methodist Church are gathered in Fort Worth, with divestment once again on the organization's agenda.

Although the situation in Darfur has very recently appeared on the church's radar, divestment from Israel has received the most attention from activists who have been instrumental in getting divestment resolutions considered by a number of mainline Protestant churches since 2004.

General Conference delegates have been asked to carefully consider a number of petitions, including one from the New England Conference that has drawn up a list of divestment targets. These include familiar names like Caterpillar (the United Methodists held $5,163,587 at the time of the most recent annual report) and some novel additions like Blockbuster Video (which runs video kiosks in disputed towns around Jerusalem -- church investment, $208,595).

This list was the work of eight clergy and lay members of the New England group, which spent more than two years carefully reviewing the church portfolio for Middle Eastern investments of questionable moral value.

Despite all of this effort, this committee seems to have missed a number of items that a 10-minute review of the 1,000 stocks owned by the Methodists' Domestic Stock Fund (DSF) and International Stock Fund (ISF) would reveal.

Most notably, five companies -- Italy's ENI, France's BNP and Total, Germany's Siemens and India's Oil and Natural Gas -- have been identified by organizations such as the Sudan Divestment Taskforce and the Center for Security Policy as investors in states responsible for terrorism, repression and severe human rights abuses.

...every lesson in history tells us that the greater risk lies in appeasement, and this is the specter our well-meaning liberal friends refuse to face--that their policy of accommodation is appeasement, and it gives no choice between peace and war, only between fight and surrender. If we continue to accommodate, continue to back and retreat, eventually we have to face the final demand--the ultimatum. And what then? When Nikita Khrushchev has told his people he knows what our answer will be? He has told them that we are retreating under the pressure of the Cold War, and someday when the time comes to deliver the ultimatum, our surrender will be voluntary because by that time we will have weakened from within spiritually, morally, and economically. He believes this because from our side he has heard voices pleading for "peace at any price" or "better Red than dead," or as one commentator put it, he would rather "live on his knees than die on his feet." And therein lies the road to war, because those voices don't speak for the rest of us. You and I know and do not believe that life is so dear and peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery. If nothing in life is worth dying for, when did this begin--just in the face of this enemy? Or should Moses have told the children of Israel to live in slavery under the pharaohs? Should Christ have refused the cross? Should the patriots at Concord Bridge have thrown down their guns and refused to fire the shot heard 'round the world? The martyrs of history were not fools, and our honored dead who gave their lives to stop the advance of the Nazis didn't die in vain. Where, then, is the road to peace? Well, it's a simple answer after all.

You and I have the courage to say to our enemies, "There is a price we will not pay." There is a point beyond which they must not advance...

Within that conflictual economy of colonial discourse which Edward Said describes as the tension between the synchronic panoptical vision of domination--the demand for identity, stasis--and the counter-pressure of the diachrony of history--change, difference--mimicry represents an ironic [emphasis in the original!] compromise. If I may adapt Samuel Weber's formulation of the marginalizing vision of castration, ...

For more than two decades after he allegedly furnished an Israeli operative with secrets about U.S. nuclear initiatives and sensitive weapons programs, Ben-Ami Kadish lived unnoticed by law enforcement authorities in suburban New Jersey.

Until yesterday, that is, when Kadish, 84, was arrested at his home, taken to a federal courthouse in Manhattan and charged with four counts of conspiracy allegedly for serving as an foreign agent and allegedly for lying to the FBI about a recent telephone conversation he had with his alleged Israeli handler.

Kadish, a mechanical engineer, worked at the U.S. Army's research arsenal in Dover, N.J., in the early 1980s. He routinely checked classified documents out of a library there and passed them to an unnamed Israeli official who had provided a list of what he wanted, according to a four-count criminal complaint the FBI filed yesterday.

The official photographed pages related to nuclear weaponry, the F-15 fighter jet program and the U.S. Patriot missile defense system, according to an FBI affidavit on which the complaint is based.

Kadish's actions appear to have escaped detection for years even though his handler allegedly also collected classified information from Jonathan Pollard, a former Navy intelligence analyst. Pollard is serving a life sentence in a federal prison in Butner, N.C., after pleading guilty to an espionage-related crime in 1986...

The following are excerpts from an interview with Saudi cleric Muhammad Al-Munajid. The interview aired on Al-Majd TV on March 30, 2008.

..."The problem is that they want to open a debate on whether Islam is true or not, and on whether Judaism and Christianity are false or not. In other words, they want to open up everything for debate. Now they want to open up all issues for debate. That's it.

"It begins with freedom of thought, it continues with freedom of speech, and it ends up with freedom of belief. So where's the conspiracy?

"They say: Let's have freedom of thought in Islam. Well, what do they want? They say: I think, therefore I want to express my thoughts. I want to express myself, I want to talk and say, for example, that there are loopholes in Islam, or that Christianity is the truth.

"Then they will talk about freedom of belief, and say that anyone is entitled to believe in whatever he wants... If you want to become an apostate - go ahead. You like Buddhism? Leave Islam, and join Buddhism. No problem. That's what freedom of belief is all about. They want freedom of everything. What they want is very dangerous....

..."Freedom of thought, within some constraints, is blessed. Islam calls for thinking, for interpretation, and for the use of the mind. But as for freedom of heresy, which allows anyone to criticize whatever he wants in Islam, saying, for example, that he does not like the punishment for apostasy, that he doesn't like the punishment for drinking alcohol, or that he does not like the punishment of stoning adulterers - this is barbarism.

"They ask: Why should a thief have his hand chopped off? Some of them say that this is 'too much.' Two-three much on you and your rotten mind. If you abolish this punishment, you will see the rise in thefts. On the other hand, people feel their property is secure because of this punishment."

UNITED NATIONS -- The United States, France and Britain walked out of a Security Council debate on the Middle East on Wednesday after Libya compared the situation in the Gaza Strip to that of Nazi "concentration camps," diplomats said.

French Ambassador Jean-Maurice Ripert plucked off his translation earpiece and walked out, followed by his two colleagues, after Libyan Deputy Ambassador Ibrahim Dabbashi made the statement.

Syrian U.N. Ambassador Bashar Jaafari told reporters, "Unfortunately, those who complain of being victims of genocide [during World War II] are repeating the same kind of genocide against the Palestinians."

"The issue for us is to see the Security Council properly involved in finding solutions" to the crisis, in particular "the Israeli persecution of the Palestinians," he said...

A video taken inside a secret Syrian facility last summer convinced the Israeli government and the Bush administration that North Korea was helping to construct a reactor similar to one that produces plutonium for North Korea's nuclear arsenal, according to senior U.S. officials who said it would be shared with lawmakers today.

The officials said the video of the remote site, code-named Al Kibar by the Syrians, shows North Koreans inside. It played a pivotal role in Israel's decision to bomb the facility late at night last Sept. 6, a move that was publicly denounced by Damascus but not by Washington.

Sources familiar with the video say it also shows that the Syrian reactor core's design is the same as that of the North Korean reactor at Yongbyon, including a virtually identical configuration and number of holes for fuel rods. It shows "remarkable resemblances inside and out to Yongbyon," a U.S. intelligence official said. A nuclear weapons specialist called the video "very, very damning."

Nuclear weapons analysts and U.S. officials predicted that CIA Director Michael V. Hayden's planned disclosures to Capitol Hill could complicate U.S. efforts to improve relations with North Korea as a way to stop its nuclear weapons program. They come as factions inside the administration and in Congress have been battling over the merits of a nuclear-related deal with North Korea...

The raid at Khaybar

Allah had promised the Muslims disgruntled by the Treaty of Hudaybiyya "much booty" (Qur'an 48:19). Perhaps to fulfill this promise, Muhammad led them against the Khaybar oasis, which was inhabited by Jews - many of them exiles from Medina. One of the Muslims later remembered: "When the apostle raided a people he waited until the morning. If he heard a call to prayer he held back; if he did not hear it he attacked. We came to Khaybar by night, and the apostle passed the night there; and when morning came he did not hear the call to prayer, so he rode and we rode with him....We met the workers of Khaybar coming out in the morning with their spades and baskets. When they saw the apostle and the army they cried, 'Muhammad with his force,' and turned tail and fled. The apostle said, 'Allah Akbar! Khaybar is destroyed. When we arrive in a people's square it is a bad morning for those who have been warned.'"[i]

The Muslim advance was inexorable. "The apostle," according to Ibn Ishaq, "seized the property piece by piece and conquered the forts one by one as he came to them."[ii] Ibn Sa'd reports that the battle was fierce: the "polytheists...killed a large number of [Muhammad's] Companions and he also put to death a very large number of them....He killed ninety-three men of the Jews..."[iii] Muhammad and his men offered the fajr prayer, the Islamic dawn prayer, before it was light, and then entered Khaybar itself. The Muslims immediately set out to locate the inhabitants' wealth. Kinana bin al-Rabi, a Jewish leader of Khaybar who was supposed to have been entrusted with the treasure of the Banu Nadir, was brought before Muhammad. Kinana denied knowing where this treasure was, but Muhammad pressed him: "Do you know that if we find you have it I shall kill you?" Kinana said yes.

Some of the treasure was found. To find the rest, Muhammad gave orders concerning Kinana: "Torture him until you extract what he has." One of the Muslims built a fire on Kinana's chest, but Kinana would not give up his secret. When he was at the point of death, Muhammad bin Maslama, killer of the poet Ka'b bin Al-Ashraf, beheaded him.[iv]

Muhammad agreed to let the people of Khaybar go into exile, allowing them, as he had the Banu Nadir, to keep as much of their property as they could carry.[v] However, he commanded them to leave behind all their gold and silver.[vi] He had intended to expel all of them, but some, who were farmers, begged him to allow them to let them stay if they gave him half their yield annually.[vii] Muhammad agreed: "I will allow you to continue here, so long as we would desire."[viii] He warned them: "If we wish to expel you we will expel you."[ix] They no longer had any rights that did not depend upon the good will and sufferance of Muhammad and the Muslims. And indeed, when the Muslims discovered some treasure that some of the Khaybar Jews had hidden, he ordered the women of the tribe enslaved and seized the perpetrators' land.[x] A hadith notes that "the Prophet had their warriors killed, their offspring and woman taken as captives."[xi]

Later, during the caliphate of Umar (634-644), the Jews who remained at Khaybar were banished to Syria, and the rest of their land seized.[xii]

By the way, I am not at all sure that Kibar is Khaybar, but I'd have to see the Arabic...FWIW, al-kibar is "the great one." Or "the powerful one."

In modern times, Khaybar has inspired an Arabic chant commonly used in demonstrations against Israel. The chant essentially goes, Khaybar Khaybar ya Yahud, jaysh Muhammad sawfa ya'ud, and the translation is "Khaybar, Khaybar o Jews, the army of Muhammad will return". Another version is Khaybar, Khaybar ya Sahyun, Hizbullah qadimun "Khaybar, Khaybar you Zionists, Hizbullah is coming".

Armed Hezbollah militants warded off members of the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) last month when the peacekeepers discovered a truck carrying weapons and ammunition belonging to the Lebanon-based guerilla group.

The incident was referred to briefly in a semi-yearly report submitted to the UN Security Council by UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon. The incident was the first time that UNIFIL forces were confronted by armed Hezbollah men south of Lebanon's Litani River, an area which Security Council resolution 1701 prohibits Hezbollah from entering.

According to a government source in Jerusalem, the incident caused great embarrassment for UNIFIL. The source described the incident, explaining that UNIFIL troops on patrol discovered the truck and chased it down and pulled it over. When the UNIFIL troops approached the vehicle, the source said, armed Hezbollah men exited the truck and threatened the troops at gunpoint. The UNIFIL patrol then went back into their cars, according to the source, and returned to their base.

The report submitted to the Security Council said the incident occurred on the night between the 30 and 31 of March. "This serious violation of the UN resolution raises concerns," the report said.

The incident was not reported in the media at the time of its occurrence...

...Kramer (no relation to me) also has given the back story to her piece in a radio interview (from minute 21:00), where she makes a telltale confession: "I felt a deep commitment to write this piece, part of it having to do with being Jewish myself, and I thought to myself, Jewish people also have to stand up for her integrity." Ah, another Jew working through an identity complex on a Palestinian canvas. "Guilt-saddled New Yorker, Jewish, seeks stylish, well-bred Palestinian-American academic to love, admire, share Darwish and opera. Make me feel chosen again."

The odd thing is that Kramer goes to great lengths to deny that Nadia Abu El-Haj is a Palestinian at all. "Is Nadia Abu El-Haj a Palestinian?" asks the interviewer. Answer: "No, she's actually an Episcopalian from the United States, born in Long Island. Her father was Palestinian." Kramer again: "She [Abu El-Haj] came to this project [of Israeli archaeology] as an American with no particular axe to grind." (Amazing quote, that.) Kramer even scolds Paula Stern, Barnard alumna and author of the petition against tenure for Abu El-Haj, because Stern "didn't know Abu El-Haj wasn't Palestinian."

Well, by these criteria, (New York-born) Rashid Khalidi and (Champaign, Illinois-born) Lila Abu-Lughod and (Washington-born) Ali Abunimah aren't Palestinians either. They were born here, not there, and they're U.S. citizens. (As for being an Episcopalian, so was Edward Said.) Jane Kramer is so clueless that she seems not to have figured out that "Palestinian" can be an identity. To judge from Nadia Abu El-Haj's choices--from keeping her father's Arabic name to working exclusively on undermining Israel's claims--it's obvious that her Palestinian identity is profoundly meaningful (and useful) to her...

...When it suits a narrative, Abu El-Haj is an "American." When it suits her career, she is a "Palestinian-American." Among many interesting points in the post, it is obvious that there are certain contexts in which being of Palestinian Arab descent benefits an academic career in the United States (presumably because of its built-in victim status), and is therefore useful to advertise. Unless, of course, that self-identification tends to impeach the scholar's professional objectivity, in which case Nadia Abu El-Haj becomes, simply, an American.

Filasteen and the Arab Student Association at Columbia are pleased to announce:

The 60th Anniversary of Al-Nakba Week at Columbia University

And would like to invite you to:

*60 Years of Nakba: The Catastrophe of Palestine 1948-2008*

Monday, April 28th 7 pm 501 Schermerhorn, Columbia University (116th st. and Broadway)

*A Faculty Panel Discussion with *

*Prof. Nadia Abu El-Haj
Prof. Lila Abu Lughod
Prof. Gil Anidjar
Prof. Joseph Massad
Prof. Noha Radwan*

...It's hard to see what good [Jane] Kramer's article, with its patent biases, will do: it doesn't inform, it doesn't analyze, it doesn't investigate, it doesn't question. Written as it is in the dead-in-the-water prose that characterizes so much American big-title journalism, it doesn't even entertain. It fails to engage with any of the serious criticisms of Nadia Abu El Haj's work, and barely acknowledges their existence. It seeks to relate the Facts on the Ground controversy to the wider issue of the politicization of Middle East Studies, but does so in a way so skewed and blinkered that what it tries to say is rendered worthless; how seriously can you take someone who quotes Rashid Khalidi as an authority on academic ethics, and does so apparently with a straight face?

On the plus side, this being The New Yorker, there are some good cartoons in there.

Following are excerpts from an interview with Hamas Culture Minister 'Atallah Abu Al-Subh, which aired on Al-Aqsa TV on April 9, 2008.

'Atallah Abu Al-Subh: I return to this book - The Protocols of the Elders of Zion - time and again. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is the faith that every Jew harbors in his heart. This book was published by Al-Nafiza publishers in Cairo. The research was conducted by Ahmad Hijaz Al-Saqqa and Hisham Khadhr, and the introduction was written by Dr. 'Ali Gum'a, who later became, and still is, the Mufti of Egypt. Al-'Aqqad once called this a "hellish" book, in his introduction to the translation by Mahmoud Khalifa Al-Tunisi, which is the most famous translation, which fate had me read in 1971 or 1972. I picked up this book again, so that I could present excerpts to readers throughout the Arab and Islamic world. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and Their Biblical and Talmudic Roots. I'd like to read just one paragraph, before the producer tells me that our time is up. "It is well known that Ahad Ha'am was the spiritual mentor of [Chaim] Weizmann. It is not surprising that Weizmann admitted in his 1948 memoirs..."By the way, we may review his memoirs, Trial and Error, one day. "He admitted that Ahad Ha'am was his mentor, and he also admitted that The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is nothing but a wicked Jewish conspiracy to control the world. Weizmann unequivocally described this conspiracy as wicked. This book, which Al-'Aqqad described as "hellish" in his introduction to the Mahmoud Khalifa Al-Tunisi translation... The Jews deny this book exists, but Weizmann admits it. Everything we see in the Arab region and around the world - the evil of the Jews, their deceit, their cunningness, their warmongering, their control of the world, and their contempt and scorn for all the peoples of the world, which they consider to be animals, cockroaches, lizards, snakes, and despicable maggots that need to be stepped on - Like [Rabbi] Ovadia [Yosef] said... The Jews say all these things, especially in the first of these protocols

Here is yet another indication that, contrary to both the dominant mainstream and the race/ethnicity-based parties of Europe, the jihad is not a matter of race, but ideology. The dominant mainstream sees resistance to the jihad and Islamic supremacism as "racism," while the neo-fascist parties regard resistance to the jihad as required for the preservation of white Europe. But if it is all about whites and non-whites, what of a white convert to Islam like Suleyman Simon Keeler? The focus needs to be on the destructive ideology people like Keeler have embraced -- and the fact that he embraced it shows that talk of race and racism in this context is just a red herring. I've said it before, but like so many things in this struggle, I'm going to keep saying them until someone listens and probably after that as well. A race-based approach to the anti-jihad resistance is harmful in a number of ways...

1. Will call for a government investigation of all U.S. military chaplains who were approved by Abdurahman Alamoudi.
2. Will call for a government investigation of all U.S. prison chaplains who were approved by Abdurahman Alamoudi.
3. Will call for the Government Accounting Office (GAO) to investigate the selection process of Arabic translators in the FBI and DoD.
4. Will call for the Internal Revenue Service to investigate the Council on American-Islamic Relations' (CAIR) 501(c)(3) non-profit status which restricts "lobbying on behalf of a foreign government."
5. Introduce a bill to make the preaching, publication, or distribution of materials that call for the death of American citizens, attacks on the United States Government or Armed Forces, or the financing of the means and/or operations to accomplish these acts, acts of sedition and/or solicitation of treason.
6. Will call on the Government Accountability Office to conduct an audit to verify the total sovereign wealth fund investment in the United States.
7. Will attempt to cancel scholarship student visa program with Saudi Arabia until they reform their textbooks.
8. Will introduce a bill to restrict R-1/R-2 religious visas for imams who come from countries that do not allow reciprocal visits by non-Muslim clergy.
9. Will introduce a bill to cancel contracts to train Saudi police and other security forces in US Counterterrorism tactics until the Saudi's certify the prosecution of Al Qaeda financiers, like Yasin al-Kadi, and the detention of repatriated Guantanamo terrorists that keep being released into the general population after being "rehabilitated."
10. Will introduce or sponsor a bill to block the sale of sensitive military munitions, especially Joint Direct Attack Munitions (JDAMs), to Saudi Arabia.

Following are excerpts from an interview with Egyptian author Dr. Sharif Hatata, husband of Egyptian author Nawal Al-Sa'dawi, which aired on Al-Mihwar TV on March 31, 2008.

Interviewer: When I entered the house, I saw the name "Dr. Nawal Al-Sa'dawi" on the door. It is customary to have the husband's name - let's say, "Dr. Sharif Hatata." I even thought the production crew had made a mistake, and had given me the wrong address, when we saw the name of Dr. Nawal Al-Sa'dawi on the door. How do you explain this?

Dr. Sharif Hatata: It was me who prepared the sign on the door.

Interviewer: You?

Dr. Sharif Hatata: Yes, me. I did this for a simple reason - Dr. Nawal Al-Sa'dawi is more famous than me. This reflects the truth, regardless of the fact that she is a woman and I am a man. What's important to me is the human being, and I don't care whether this human being is a man or a woman. In my opinion, many women are better than men, and there are also men who are better than women. I did this because I hold Dr. Nawal in esteem, and I want to make a statement and bring about change...

The Liberal Enemies of Liberty

Passover Holiday, also known as the Holiday of Freedom in Hebrew. In honour of this holiday, Ben-Dror Yemini counters eight "progressive" lies about Israel

Oh, the feast of Jewish liberty, which we must always fight to preserve. Every generation witnesses new efforts striving to deny us this freedom, whether Jewish freedom in the Diaspora or in Israel. Nowadays, a strange coalition has emerged, of Islamists, skinheads and liberal academics, galvanized by the enlightened Chomsky and the benighted Ahmadinejad.

The fight against Israel's freedom is creeping to the mainstream. The threat, posturing as liberal, is more dangerous than the dark threat. It penetrated even the Daily Kos, a Democratic Party stronghold. Ahmadinejad can draw upon this site as a resource for justifications to wipe out the Zionist Entity. It is so important, in fact, that Israel's Foreign Office invited one of its editors to visit Israel.

In one of the Kos's more recent articles, a point-by-point indictment against Israel was presented. Here is my response to the some of more temperate criticism which is worth rebutting. I did not bother with the more virulent type.

1. Israeli Occupation

Israel is the cause of one of the longest occupations, controlling the life of over 2 million Palestinians.

Not quite. There are longer occupations, such as China in Tibet and Russia in Chechnya. But more importantly it is imperative to restore the correct chronology of events. War was declared upon Israel in response to which Israel waged a defensive war. The occupation was thrust upon Israel. It is a result, not a cause. Israel has already divested itself of most of this occupation: through mutual agreement with the Palestinians in the Oslo Accords and more recently through its unilateral withdrawal from Gaza.

2. Nuclear Israel

Israel is the only country in the region that has internationally unsupervised nuclear weapons

It is unclear what justification exists for Britain or France to possess nuclear weapons. Neither of them is under any threat of obliteration. Such a threat, however, does loom over Israel. On the day that some regional leaders will suspect that Israel has no nuclear capabilities, Israel will "be wiped off the map of the world".

Devotees of such leaders extol the virtues of annihilating the Jews. Israel is permitted to give credence to these openly declarative statements, especially considering the fact that Muslims have massacred more than 10 million Muslims since Israel was established. This is the justification for Israel's nuclear defensive capabilities.

3. Gaza is a Concentration Camp, overseen by Israel

Nonsense and lies. Tens of millions human beings in Africa live under much worse conditions, subjected to famine, disease, and wars. Israel quit Gaza. In response, Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Fatah continued to lob Qassams at Israel.

Israel is no longer in Gaza, nor does it want to control Gaza. Israel continues to provide fuel, electric power and humanitarian assistance to Gazans. Yet Gaza retaliates by sending Qassams into Israel. These missiles are not motivated by a desire for peace or to put an end to the occupation, which no longer exists. The declared purpose is the liquidation of the state of Israel. How exactly would American Democrats react to such consistent attacks targeting kindergartens and hospitals by an organization boasting of a racist or anti-Semitic platform, explicitly declaring its desire to annihilate the United States?

4. Israel practices Apartheid in the west Bank.

When a tidal wave of suicide terrorists threatens a civilian population, Israel has to resort to disagreeable measures. Not all means are justified but it is highly doubtful that any other democratic country would employ any less severe measures.

5. Israel does not accept the rights of refugees, by refusing to accept the right of return of two million Palestinians.

Utter nonsense. Over 40 million people have undergone the experience of population exchange, mostly as a result of wars. There is not one historical precedent that acknowledges a right of return. It is a Palestinian invention. As Palestinians themselves keep admitting, this is their trump card for the destruction of Israel.

True, 650,000 Arabs left or were forced to leave, the Jewish state, after they had declared a war of annihilation upon the newly-born State it. 850,000 Jews left or were forced to leave Arab countries and arrived in Israel, following that same attempted war of annihilation. Of all the refugees at large in the world, only the Palestinians were perpetuated as such. A special UN agency was created, just for them (UNRWA). Only they have been kept on, like an ever- bleeding wound, because Arab countries denied them rights.

6. Israel is founded upon a racist ideology

Israel maintains a regime grounded in the failed Zionist ideology, which is based on racist nationalism that gives rights to only one ethnic or religious group.

Israel is indeed a nation-state, like the Czech Republic, Slovenia, Hungary and many others. Zionism started as a Jewish liberation movement. It is part and parcel of the natural right for self-determination. It is no different from any other right of self-determination, be it Albanian, Romanian or Slovenian.

This charge in and of itself, when it is tossed at Jews and none other but Jews, is inherently racist. The implicit and explicit premise of such an accusation is that Palestinians have national rights but Jews do not. The negation of such rights was the staple of antisemites. It is a tragedy of historical magnitude that "progressive forces" today have come to own this negation of Jewish rights.

As for discrimination: Israel has a large Arab minority. Minorities like this one can be found any place in Europe. Israeli Arabs enjoy a condition of freedom that is much better than Muslims enjoy in neighbouring countries. As a minority they are in a much better position than any other minority in Europe. This is fact, not opinion.

The social discrimination is largely due to the Arab minority's choice to discriminate against their women. Those who have a preference for oppressing members of their society cannot complain when they cannot live according to first world standards. In this respect the Arab minority is no different from the ultra-orthodox Jewish community in Israel. They, like the Haredim, prefer to live by a patriarchal scheme.

A breakthrough will occur when the forces of progress in the world will cease to coddle Muslims as if they were simple-minded children who should be allowed to maintain their inner structures of oppression. The forces of darkness and the sad condition of Muslims continue as long as Israel, and other factors, are blamed.

7. Palestinians are the victims of violence

Israelis claim they suffer from terrorism, but Palestinians are the victims, in a 13:1 ratio.

Lies and demagoguery. Upwards of 1,500 Israelis were killed in terrorist attacks, originating from the occupied territories. About 6,000 Palestinians were killed during the 40 years of occupation, most of whom were terrorists. This is the smallest death toll in histories of conflicts around the world. Much less than the 20,000 Syrians murdered by Assad in 1982, much less than the 10,000 Palestinians killed in 1971 during Black September in Jordan, much less than the number of Kurds killed by Turkey, much less than the 8,000 killed in Srebrenitza at the heart of Europe. Never mind Algeria, Sudan, Afghanistan or Iraq where Muslims have massacred and are still killing, masses of other Muslims.

8. Israel invaded Lebanon twice.

Twice Israel invaded Lebanon and continues to infringe upon Lebanon's aerial space.

Just like that Israel invaded Lebanon, for no reason whatsoever? Lebanon turned into a launching base for hostile assaults against Israel. First it was the Fatah that had turned Lebanon into a protectorate. Now it is Hezbollah, an Iranian terrorist organization which openly declares its goal of destroying Israel, that amasses enough weapons to threaten a country the size of California, and then attacks Israel even though there is no Israeli presence nor Israeli provocation in Lebanon.

Antisemites are not distracted by facts

It is possible and permissible to criticize Israel but key facts must be acknowledged, for example, that Israel recognizes the right of Palestinians for self-determination and statehood. The Arabs, and Palestinians, however, have unfailingly rejected every proposal. They said no to the Peel commission, no to the UN partition plan, no to Barrack's proposals at Camp David, no to Clinton's bridging proposals that offered them a state and a solution for the refugee problem.

Israel even supports the Saudi peace plan, with one caveat: that Palestinian Right of return will take place within the context of a Palestinian state and not for the purpose of liquidating Israel. Whoever supports RoR perpetuates the conflict in general and Palestinian suffering in particular.

These facts have not distracted those who fell into the anti-Israel obsession, just as facts have never dented the will of those who caught the antisemitic bug. But there are those who are open to facts, and those who might be disabused of their antisemitic obsessions. It is therefore worthwhile to re-iterate this simple fact: That the people of Israel is also deserving of independence and freedom, As deserving as any other group that demands self-determination. As deserving as Palestinian claims for self-determination, but alongside Israel, not in place of Israel.

Two IDF soldiers were moderately wounded and 11 others were lightly wounded Saturday morning at the Kerem Shalom crossing in the southern Gaza Strip, when Hamas gunmen initiated a coordinated attack on the Israeli side of the crossing, which included heavy gunfire, mortar shell barrages and two car bombs.

The attack began close to 7 a.m. when two vehicles arrived at the crossing under the cover of heavy fog and one of them detonated near army forces, wounding the 13 soldiers. The second booby-trapped car was spotted by troops after the initial explosion and did not go off, the army said.

Immediately afterwards, an armored car - which may have once belonged to Fatah security forces - arrived at the scene, and its occupants began firing at the soldiers, backed by heavy mortar shell barrages.

Four gunmen, including the driver of the car bomb, were believed to have been killed in the explosion and the exchanges of fire that ensued. Forces then entered Gaza in order to search for remaining members of the cell...

...Meanwhile, another armored vehicle was identified approaching the Kissufim crossing, north of Kerem Shalom. An IDF tank fired at the vehicle and hit it, apparently preventing a second attack...

...Defense officials have said the attack was probably the result of months of planning, and its perpeterators probably aimed to kill as many soldiers as possible as well as abduct others. The soldiers' readiness and quick response prevented a much deadlier attack on the eve of Pessah, they said...

...In Gaza City, a Hamas leader, Sami Abu Zuhri, said Hamas would carry out more attacks on crossings to break the nearly yearlong blockade of the territory...

Look at it this way: More money for this guy's group means less money for CAIR.

OTOH maybe CAIR will turn out to be less anti-Israel. We'll see.

"I was a protocol officer for a 3 star general on my second deployment to the Middle-East and sure enough, here comes Barbara Boxer and Harry Reid in the door for their briefing before they go to see soldiers. And they got so frustrated from their lack of knowledge of military operations, like the acronyms we use or even what an up armored Humvee was, between level 2 or 3 armor, that they got frustrated, got up in the middle of this briefing with Lt. General Whitcomb, commander of Third Army, and left in disgust. And I said, "who are these people to do that?"

...Over the past few years, Harvard University has received millions in endowments from rich Saudi and Emirate sheiks. Now it's returning the favor by Islamizing its campus and promoting the Shariah agenda of its new Arab masters...

...this weekend it hosted a $400-per-person conference on Shariah finance led by officials from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. The goal of the forum -- sponsored by Harvard's Islamic Finance Project -- is to "integrate" Islamic finance into the mainstream economy.

That's a tough fit, because Islamic, or Shariah, finance forbids investment in major Western industries, including those that derive substantial income from interest.

Banking and insurance, as well as alcohol, tobacco or pork-related industries, are not considered "halal," or allowable, under Islam. Entertainment is also unlawful.

Shariah-compliant investments are monitored by paid Shariah law advisers who must "purify" certain returns by donating them to Islamic charities -- including some that promote jihad and support suicide bombings.

With $800 billion already in Shariah assets -- and $1 trillion to $2 trillion in Arab petrodollars annually looking for an investment home -- the potential for billions being siphoned off for terrorism is real...

...One prominent Shariah adviser is Sheik Yusuf al-Qaradawi [Qaradhawi]. He's a paid adviser to Arcapita (formerly Crescent Capital), which happens to sponsor Harvard's Islamic Finance Project along with Abu Dhabi Islamic Bank.

Al-Qaradawi is an Egyptian who has advocated suicide bombings and described Shariah finance as nothing less than "jihad with money."

He heads the Islamic American University and is a proposed trustee of the Islamic Society of Boston. The director of Harvard's Islamic Finance Project, S. Nazim Ali, is active in both the university and the Islamic Society. Ali is neither an economist nor a scholar. His background is in computers...

Senior academics and officials in the British Jewish community are gearing up for another boycott motion in their country against Israeli academia but lament they've lost a valuable resource which could lead the battle against well-funded proponents of the boycott. Though the motion may not have practical implications, leaders are concerned they may lose ground on the PR front because the Israeli academic body that led last year's anti-boycott campaign, the Advisory Board for Academic Freedom (IAB), closed down for lack of funding.

The British academic union, the University and College Union (UCU), is planning to hold a conference next month in Manchester where it will consider the renewed call for a boycott...

...Despite last year's precedent, however, Israeli academics in the U.K. are on edge and say the lack of funding for groups like IAB has negative implications at a critical time when cooperation is needed more than ever. "I've tried to bring Israeli lecturers [to the U.K.] and organize academic exchanges, but without funding, it has been problematic," said Prof. David Newman, a British-born lecturer at Ben Gurion University, who is now on sabbatical at the University of London. He claimed Palestinian supporters hold conferences on U.K. campuses every week "about Israel as an apartheid state." Newman complained, "There needs to be a greater balance, but my hands are tied because I have no budget."...

..."The small, hard core group that wants to see this (boycott) go through has bigger funding behind them. They are not just a small group of academics, but we haven't been able to unravel where their funding is coming from."...

...Education Minister Yuli Tamir is less concerned with the boycott effort. She told Anglo File in an interview this week that despite what she believes to be a temporary closure of the IAB, the boycott issue is less pressing than in years past simply because both the British government and the country's mainstream academic establishment remain firmly committed to open academic ties with Israel...

The General Board of Church and Society's petition to the 2008 United Methodist General Conference calling for divestment from Caterpillar Inc. has achieved positive results. Caterpillar has opened discussions with the board, issued a statement denouncing immoral use of its equipment, and has agreed to continued dialogue.

As a result, the General Board of Church & Society (GBCS) will withdraw its petition calling for divestment from Caterpillar. Other petitions remain before the General Conference regarding divestment from companies aiding the occupation. These deserve careful consideration by the delegates.

The GBCS petition was submitted to General Conference, the denomination's top decision-making body, because Caterpillar equipment, fitted with armored plating, is used by Israeli Defense Forces to destroy Palestinian homes, orchards and olive groves in the Occupied Territories, and to clear Palestinian land for illegal Israeli settlements, segregated roads and the separation barrier...

AUSTIN, Texas -- Police on Thursday identified a man who was found bound with duct tape in Lady Bird Lake in East Austin.

Parkgoers discovered the body of Riad Hamad, 55, Wednesday afternoon just east of the Interstate 35 bridge near Festival Beach.

Hamad was a computer teacher at Small Middle School and had been planning a trip to Palestine to teach children there.

Witnesses who found Hamad said the man had duct tape on his face, and his hands were tied.

Police have called the death suspicious. Investigators on Thursday said family and other sources have told them that Hamad was suicidal...

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

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

...these worthy goals are being undermined by the promotion of an atmosphere of hatred and violence. There is no humanitarian justification for publishing drawings by small children depicting the burning maps of the State of Israel. The T-shirt on sale with the poem alluding to martyrdom only helps to push Palestinian children deeper into more misery. The message board includes outrageous claims that reflect the propaganda of those wishing to pursue the conflict without end. On the basis of this evidence, one can conclude that this NGO raises its funds on false premises, and that its activities are a far cry from the purely humanitarian mission claimed in its mission statement.

...Hamad has said, "Britain allowed several hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants to land in Palestine, despite the opposition of the original inhabitants. In our opinion, [the Jews] arrived illegally and will be deported to their nation of origin...sooner or later." He has also suggested that it is a misconception to assume "that most of us Arabs recognize the right of Israel to exist."

The FBI has investigated Hamad on a number of occasions. His resume includes being fired from Austin Community College for allegedly "making racist slurs and sexist jokes in the classroom." In Hamad's version of the event, however, he explains that he was in fact fired for "making statements against the U.S. government." Hamad is currently an instructor at a different school, in his words, "till I get fired again."

...tape was found around the eyes, and the hands and legs were loosely bound. The bindings of his hands and legs and placement of the tape were consistent with Hamad having done this to himself. Detectives know that Hamad walked from his vehicle to the water on his own based on evidence retrieved from the scene.

...Captain Jones: I wish more Americans knew about the good things Marines are doing at the lower levels. They see a lot of things we're doing at the general level, but they don't see what the privates and lance corporals are doing to further this relationship with the Iraqis and help the Iraqi people. We came here in part to liberate the Iraqi people and help the Iraqi people. And truly we have, at the lowest level. As we move away from kinetic warfare, we have those diplomats if you will, the strategic corporals, who is out there every day, helping Iraqis paint their businesses, helping Iraqis open their businesses, helping disabled people out of their own pockets, starting the Adopt a School programs because they can't get school supplies through the Iraqi chain.

Schools back in the States, through family members, adopt some of these schools and they send school supplies out. Those kinds of things I wish the Americans could see. The actual good things. The progress. I wish Americans could see the number of kids who attached to you today. They were happy, they weren't throwing rocks at you. They were happy to see you and talk to you. They probably asked you for chocolate, but you know, still, they talk to you. That's the message. That's what I want them to know about.

Not all Iraqi people are bad. There are some really truly good people. The fact that they would not let you leave their house today until you ate their food, until you were full, things like that. A lot of people open up their homes when they see that Americans are actually here to help them.

...In February, Abu El-Haj went to a Barnard faculty meeting and met Alan Segal for the first time. "There he was, standing up and making a big pitch for academic freedom, saying that all those terrible outside attacks had made it impossible to have a real intellectual conversation about my work," she told me. "He came up to me on his way out, he introduced himself, he actually invited me to speak to his class. I was so mad. I could have killed him."...

...Outraged by the nonscholarly approach of Afrocentric writers, she [Mary Lefkowitz] somewhat naïvely imagined that facts would put their extreme theories to rest. She noted, for instance, that Socrates couldn't have been black, as alleged, because his parents were Athenian citizens and blacks, in classical Athens, were not eligible for citizenship. She noted, as well, that Aristotle would have had a tough time stealing his philosophy from the library at Alexandria, since he died before the library was built. Such arguments went nowhere, Ms. Lefkowitz writes, with those who saw Greek philosophy "as yet another case of a colonialist European plundering of Africa."

While Ms. Lefkowitz was being targeted by Afrocentrists nationally, she fell into a war on her own campus with Anthony Martin, a vituperative and litigious tenured professor of "Africana studies." It was an odd battle. Ms. Lefkowitz kept trying to make it a debate about evidence and truth. Mr. Martin made it personal and added a large helping of anti-Semitism. Eventually he turned out a book titled "The Jewish Onslaught," endorsed the crackpot theory that Jews had dominated the slave trade and demanded Jewish reparations to blacks...

Seven ancient synagogues in the Iranian capital, Tehran, have been destroyed by local authorities.

The synagogues were in the Oudlajan suburb of Tehran, where many Iranian Jews used to live.

"These buildings, which were part of our cultural, artistic and architectural heritage were burnt to the ground," said Ahmad Mohit Tabatabaii, the director of the International Council of Museums' (ICOM) office in Tehran.

"With the excuse of renovating this ancient quarter, they are erasing a part of our history," said Tabatabaii.

A forthcoming report on American student internships in Israel and the Palestinian territories says that some programs are promoting extremist politics instead of academic values.

The report, "Human Rights Internships That Promote Conflict, Not Education," is to be published in May by NGO Monitor, an Israeli watchdog based here.

A draft copy of the report obtained by The Chronicle singles out programs at the University of Denver's Graduate School of International Studies and George Mason University's Center for Global Education, both of which send students as interns to human-rights nongovernmental organizations, or NGO's, in the Middle East...

..."The NGO's involved in these internship programs are systematically biased in promoting a pro-Palestinian political agenda, and present human-rights and international law in a simplistic, partisan, and misleading manner, in which the environment of terrorism and asymmetric warfare is erased," the draft charges.

Some targets of the criticism assailed the draft report as a right-wing smear, and they said the interns furthered their studies in rigorous academic programs.

Among the NGO's criticized is the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, an Israeli group that promotes an anti-Israeli boycott and denounces Israeli "apartheid" and "atrocities." That committee and Mossawa, an Israeli-Arab rights group, have compared Israel to Nazi Germany. Another group criticized in the draft report, I'lam, was involved in an "Israel Apartheid" week at the University of London's School of Oriental and African Studies...

Congressman Joe Knollenberg, of Farmington Hills, Michigan, introduced today H.R. 5816, the CARTER Act, acronym for the Coordinated American Response to Extreme Radicals Act.

The CARTER Act would prohibit any taxpayer dollars from being directed to the former President Carter's Carter Center...

...The $19 million pales beside the tens of millions that have flowed to the Carter Center from MidEast sources. I've been told by researchers experienced in the funding of such organizations that they've been unable to penetrate the walls erected by the Carter Center to know its exact finances...

On the eve of the anniversary of the horrific 2002 Passover massacre in Netanya's Park Hotel, Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas has delivered a stinging reminder that "moderacy" on the Palestinian side is a relative term.

The Jerusalem Post reports that the Al Quds Mark of Honor, the PLO's highest medal, will be given to two female terrorists who helped kill Israelis.

Ahlam Tamimi, a Hamas-linked terrorist in prison for assisting the suicide bomber who killed at least six people in the Sbarro restaurant in Jerusalem, and Amra Muna, who seduced Ophir Rahum over the Internet and then lured him to Ramallah to be murdered, will be awarded the medal.

Conferring the Al Quds Mark of Honor is decided at the discretion of the Palestinian Authority's president, and he alone has the final say when choosing the Palestinians to be honored with the medal.

It is highly unlikely that this appalling story will be covered by the mainstream media, which regularly describes Abbas as a "moderate". While this may be true in comparison with the absolute fanaticism of Hamas, this incident is yet another demonstration of how the media is too quick to cast Palestinian leaders in these terms...

...In a similar vein, former US President Jimmy Carter laid a wreath Tuesday on the grave of Yasser Arafat, whom he claimed, fought for the advancement of the Palestinians and other just causes in the world. Is this the same godfather of terror responsible for the deaths of thousands of innocents in a bloodstained career? Or was he a "moderate" Palestinian leader?...

..."I'll ... I'll be out shortly." He sat back in the chair after they closed the door, hanging on to the armrests, his head pounding. The cheerleaders had ignored him, left the TV on, and there was Barry ... the president grinning away while he clapped his hands, and Michelle, as usual, looking like she wanted to slap somebody, anybody.

Nothing on the tube but those two, and nothing on radio but Air America from sea to shining sea, the bad-news-and-it's-your-fault radio network. Some girl in Salt Lake fell and skinned her knee, the American people and their past leaders had failed her, past leaders meaning him, Willie Boy, Elvis, the Big Him. Like he should have installed marshmallow sidewalks or given away bubble wrap pants. He absently rubbed the I'm Sorry button in his lapel. Well, he might be wearing the button, but he wasn't sorry.

Rush Limbaugh wasn't sorry either. After he got bounced off the U.S. airwaves, Rush had set up a pirate station in the Bahamas, a real blowtorch, powerful enough to reach across the country. It had been a problem for a while, then Barry had stationed the coast guard up and down the whole east coast to jam the broadcasts. Cost a lot of money, but there was plenty now since Barry cut the defense budget by 2/3 after the Iranians promised to play nice. Must be nice to be able to get that through congress...

Following are excerpts of a video clip featuring Saudi cleric Omar Al-Sweilem, which was posted on the Internet. The video quality is low in the original.

Omar Al-Sweilem: "Harith Ibn Al-Muhasibi told us what would happen when we meet the black-eyed virgin with her black hair and white face - praised be He who created night and day.

"What hair! What a chest! What a mouth! What cheeks! What a figure! What breasts! What thighs! What legs! What whiteness! What softness! Without any creams - no Nivea, no Vaseline. No nothing!"

"He said that faces would be soft that day. Even your own face will be soft without any powder or makeup. You yourself will be soft, so how soft will a black-eyed virgin be, when she comes to you so tall and with her beautiful face, her black hair and white face - praised be He who created night and day. Just feel her palm, Sheikh!...

Following are excerpts from an interview with Hamas spokesman Ismail Radhwan, which aired on Al-Jazeera TV on April 16, 2008:

Ismail Radhwan: [President Carter's visit] reflects the recognition that the Hamas movement cannot be ignored. We will benefit from this meeting by explaining our cause, our positions, and our principles and by presenting our just cause. We will adhere to our principles, and will demand that the oppressive siege be lifted from our Palestinian people.

Dr. Norman Finkelstein on "Israel/Palestine: Roots of Conflict, Paths to Peace"

When? Wednesday, April 16, 2008 | 4:30 p.m

Where? Gasson Hall, Room 305

Description: Dr. Norman Finkelstein is one of the foremost scholars on Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the son of Holocaust survivors. He is the author of Beyond Chutzpah, The Rise and Fall of Palestine: A personal account of the intifada years, The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering and various other works. He received his PhD from Princeton University for his dissertation on Zionism. He was most recently an assistant professor at De Paul University, but was placed on academic leave due to a high profile dispute with Harvard professor Alan Dershowitz.

This event is sponsored by the Arab Students Association, Muslim Students Association, Sociology Department, Fine Arts Department, Global Justice Project, Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies Students Association and Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies Minor

This event is sponsored by the Arab Students Association, Muslim Students Association, Sociology Department, Fine Arts Department, Global Justice Project, Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies Students Association and Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies Minor

Conservative leader Silvio Berlusconi has scored a decisive victory in Italy's parliamentary elections, setting the colorful billionaire and staunch U.S. ally on course for his third stint as premier.

The victory in Italy's election Sunday and Monday marks a remarkable return to power for the 71-year-old Berlusconi, avenging his loss two years ago at the hand of the center-left.

"I'm moved, I feel a great responsibility," Berlusconi said Monday evening in a phone call to RAI public television. The media mogul remained out of sight, taking in the results at his villa outside Milan and, according to Italian news agencies, having a private dinner with key aides...

... Berlusconi has also affirmed that he is one of Israel's closest friends in Europe.

On Monday, he said he would make the first foreign visit of his third term to Israel, to mark the Mideast country's 60th anniversary. It would be, he said, a show of support for "the only real democracy in the Middle East."...

Gaza's main fuel distributor is holding back one million litres of fuel, UN figures showed on Monday a day after Israel claimed Hamas was stage-managing a crisis in the Palestinian territory.

However, a UN official who requested anonymity said that the current stocks of fuel and industrial gasoline stored in Gaza are sufficient for only several days.

"The general petroleum association refuses to distribute in protest of the lack of supply of fuel by Israel," he said.

The Palestinian General Petroleum Corporation is responsible for the distribution of fuel across the Hamas-run territory, where the union of petrol station owners went on strike several days ago in protest at the fuel cuts.

Israel shut the Nahal Oz crossing and fuel terminal on Wednesday after a raid by Palestinian gunmen killed two Israeli employees and shattered a month-long lull in violence.

An Israeli army spokeswoman told AFP that the terminal will remain closed for several days as the army was examining ways to beef up security procedures there in the wake of the deadly attack...

The UN official also said that there was "a clear increase" in the number of trucks crossing from Israel into Gaza carrying humanitarian aid and basic supplies in March compared with the previous month.

More than 2,800 trucks filled with basic supplies -- mainly food, drugs, cleaning products and construction material -- entered Gaza through the four crossings with Israel in March.

Another 430 trucks carrying humanitarian aid also reached Gaza last month, he said...

Extremist ideas are being spread by Islamic study centres linked to British universities and backed by multi-million-pound donations from Saudi Arabia and Muslim organisations, a new report claims.

Eight universities, including Oxford and Cambridge, have accepted more than £233.5 million from Saudi and Muslim sources since 1995, with much of the money going to Islamic study centres, according to the report.

The total sum, revealed by Anthony Glees, the director of Brunel University's Centre for Intelligence and Security Studies, amounts to the largest source of external funding to UK universities.

Arab donors have argued that their gifts to academic institutions help to promote understanding between the West and the Islamic world. However, Prof Glees claims in his unpublished report that the propagation of one-sided views of Islam and the Middle East at universities amounts to anti-Western propaganda.

Prof Glees attracted controversy in 2005 when he claimed that up to 48 universities had been infiltrated by fundamentalists and warned that the threat posed by radical groups should be "urgently addressed"...

New York magazine reports that a multi-multi-million dollar deal to set up a New York University campus in the Arab city-state of Abu Dhabi is all but closed. The Gulf campus will be a clone of the Manhattan one "but with an Arab twist," according to Khaldoon Al Mubarak, the CEO of the government-owned investment company overseeing the deal...

..."I would say to any student here that wants to go to the Abu Dhabi campus, 'Go.' Gay students, Israeli students, I refuse to think in those categories." (As if the problem lies in Americans thinking in those categories.) This whole thing is, for Sexton, a great big multi-culti wet kiss to the post-9/11 Arab world:

After that day, we were forced to confront the critical choice of the 21st century. What is our attitude toward 'the other' going to be? Is it going to be a clash of civilizations? Or is it going to be an ecumenical gift?

Do I have a vote? Because I'm willing to clash with any civilization that flogs homosexuals and outlaws Israeli visitors. By selling a degraded clone of itself to the highest bidder, NYU is doing irreversible damage to U.S. universities as a whole. This frightening love-child of Western multi-cultural lunacy and Arab oil money represents a new low. As NYU professor Marcelo Suárez-Orozco enthusiastically stated, "This is not just study abroad on steroids . . . This is really upping the ante. It will be a complete game-changer for higher education as we know it."

...patriotism might be the scoundrels' last refuge, as Samuel Johnson said in 1775, but hating one's country and religion is the first.

At any rate, the Middle East is not ready for this Lennonist vision. For those confronting the real threat of radical Arab nationalism and Islamism, Lennonism is unilateral disarmament. The more Lennonist the West, the more contemptuous and certain of victory are its enemies...

...The real world is tough. Conflict is real, hate effective, and there are people out there trying to kill you. Better hope there are some on your own side motivated enough by patriotism, religion, and love of liberty that they'll put their bodies between you and the bullets because they think there is something worth killing and dying for.

Lennonism is intoxicating: believe in change; all can be okay if we just keep apologizing and don't offend anyone. Unfortunately, though, nowadays there are many who, to quote Lennon, "dream the world will be one." And the world they envision as one would be living under a caliphate.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts has denounced Harvard University for photographing protesters at a political rally last month near Harvard Square during which university police arrested two protesters.

Officials at the ACLU also want Harvard to explain why an undercover officer was taking photographs at the rally, what the university intends to do with the photos, and whether it is sharing information with the FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Forces, as have universities around the country.

"The concern we have is that Harvard police were gathering intelligence about a lawful political protest on public property," said John Reinstein, the ACLU's legal director. "A university is a place where we would expect there's room for political discussion, where appropriate protests would be allowed, as part of academic freedom. We want to find out the scope of the university's activities."

In a statement, Joe Wrinn, a Harvard spokesman, said the university is not participating with the Joint Terrorism Task Forces and that it does not have a political intelligence unit or an undercover unit...

...He added that Harvard does not have a policy on filming protests. "We film when there is potential for violence, property damage, vandalism, HUPD arrest, or other circumstances require it," he said...

...Shareef Fam, a member of the Boston Coalition for Palestinian Rights who was at the protest, said that the protest was nonviolent and that he spoke with uniformed police officers about keeping pedestrian passageways clear at the beginning of the event. He said that Nieves was taking pictures during the protest, which was called by Harvard students, with the intent of distributing the photos later to the rest of the protesters present...

An Italian woman artist who was hitch-hiking to the Middle East dressed as a bride to promote world peace has been found murdered in Turkey.

The naked body of Giuseppina Pasqualino di Marineo, 33, known as Pippa Bacca, was found in bushes near the northern city of Gebze on Friday.

She had said she wanted to show that she could put her trust in the kindness of local people.

Turkish police say they have detained a man in connection with the killing...

Today, I filed a complaint to the Canadian Human Rights Commission (CHRC) for "hate propaganda" against Montreal salafi imam Hammaad Abu Sulaiman Al-Dameus Hayiti who officiates at the Association Musulmane de Montréal Est mosque. The complaint relates to his book L'Islam ou l'Intégrisme ? À la lumière du Qor'an et de la Sounnah downloadable from the Internet, and his extremist teachings that are also broadcast on the Internet.

The teachings of imam Al-Hayiti are suprematists, misogynistic and hateful. According to the imam, his fellow non-Muslims are "koufars" (unbelievers, infidels, impious), Québec women are perverse, and the population is "stupid and ignorant." The imam also calls for the destruction of the "idols" of the West: democracy, human rights, secularism, freedom and modernity. By disseminating his teachings on the Internet, the imam tries to win adherents to his extreme views...

...If the CHRC refuse to investigate my complaint, the public will be free to conclude that an institution meant to promote human rights is practicing a form of one-way absurd censorship. As a result, legitimate criticism of Islam is discouraged, while those who advocate the destruction of democracy and freedoms are protected. If the CHRC agrees to open an investigation, the writings of the imam will be exposed and scrutinized and, hopefully, discredited by the media. In the future, the media and the public will feel free to denounce subversive and hateful preachers without having to resort to the CHRC.

Marc Lebuis, Director, Point de BASCULE

Following are excerpts from an address by Hamas MP and cleric Yunis Al-Astal, which aired on Al-Aqsa TV on April 11, 2008.

Yunis Al-Astal: Allah has chosen you for Himself and for His religion, so that you will serve as the engine pulling this nation to the phase of succession, security, and consolidation of power, and even to conquests thorough da'wa and military conquests of the capitals of the entire world. Very soon, Allah willing, Rome will be conquered, just like Constantinople was, as was prophesized by our Prophet Muhammad. Today, Rome is the capital of the Catholics, or the Crusader capital, which has declared its hostility to Islam, and has planted the brothers of apes and pigs in Palestine in order to prevent the reawakening of Islam - this capital of theirs will be an advanced post for the Islamic conquests, which will spread through Europe in its entirety, and then will turn to the two Americas, and even Eastern Europe.

I believe that our children or our grandchildren will inherit our Jihad and our sacrifices, and Allah willing, the commanders of the conquest will come from among them. Today, we instill these good tidings in their souls, and by means of the mosques and the Koran books, and the history of our Prophets, his companions, and the great leaders, we prepare them for the mission of saving humanity from the hellfire on the brink of which they stand.

Following are excerpts from an interview with Abbas Zaki, Palestinian Authority representative in Lebanon, which aired on NBN TV on April 9, 2008:

Abbas Zaki: We believe wholeheartedly that the Right of Return is guaranteed by our will, by our weapons, and by our faith.

Interviewer: Do you still believe in weapons, not just in negotiations?

Abbas Zaki: The use of weapons alone will not bring results, and the use of politics without weapons will not bring results. We act on the basis of our extensive experience. We analyze our situation carefully. We know what climate leads to victory and what climate leads to suicide. We talk politics, but our principles are clear. It was our pioneering leader, Yasser Arafat, who persevered with this revolution, when empires collapsed. Our armed struggle has been going on for 43 years, and the political struggle, on all levels, has been going on for 50 years. We harvest U.N. resolutions, and we shame the world so that it doesn't gang up on us, because the world is led by people who have given their brains a vacation - the American administration and the neocons...

...Young Palestinian: As I recall, the invasion of 1982 and the destruction of South Lebanon was not just in response to missile attacks, but in response to operations as well. Israel does not use only the missiles as a pretext. It uses any activity of the resistance as a pretext.

Abbas Zaki: The important thing is that in any operation, Israel will pay a price. We don't want cases in which you don't kill even a chicken, but Israel kills 20 of you. I salute any operation that makes Israel pay a heavy price...

...The P.L.O. is the sole legitimate representative [of the Palestinian people], and it has not changed its platform even one iota. In light of the weakness of the Arab nation and the lack of values, and in light of the American control over the world, the P.L.O. proceeds through phases, without changing its strategy. Let me tell you, when the ideology of Israel collapses, and we take, at least, Jerusalem, the Israeli ideology will collapse in its entirety, and we will begin to progress with our own ideology, Allah willing, and drive them out of all of Palestine.

...So did I hear about this film festival from the local Muslim American Society or the Islamic Society of Boston or the local college Muslime-mail notices about screenings of Occupation 101 or Gaza Strip, which provides a "look inside the stark realities of Palestinian life and death under Israeli military occupation." But not a peep, not one e-mail about the Think-Different Women film festival. This series includes the movie Shadya (screening this Wednesday at BU, 6:30 PM), about 17-year old Shadya Zoabi, who is "a world champion in karate, a feminist in a male-dominated culture and a Muslim Arab living in Israel." An Israeli citizen who's an Arab Muslim wins the 2003 World Shotokan Karate Champion? Oopsy, that doesn't fit the desperate Palestinian victim narrative, does it?...

...Legal Jihad is gaining momentum with a ripple effect, and we must expect that Islamists will engage in future legal efforts along these lines. Indeed, the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) and the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC) have both stated publicly that they are considering filing defamation lawsuits against their critics. The Muslim World League has called for the establishment of a commission to take legal action against those who abuse Islam and its prophet Mohammed. During the recent two-day summit in Dakar, taking legal action against those who defame Islam was a key issue debated at length by Muslim leaders.

For its part, the Council on American-Islamic Relations has announced an ambitious fundraising goal of $1 million, in part to "defend against defamatory attacks on Muslims and Islam." One of its staffers, Rabiah Ahmed, has stated that lawsuits are increasingly an 'instrument' for it to use." Moreover, CAIR's chairman, Parvez Ahmed, has stated that "People who make statements connecting CAIR to terrorism should understand the legal consequences of their attempted slander and defamation."

This is not a Left or Right issue...

The Olympic torch relay will be closed to the public when it reaches Pakistan on Wednesday because of security concerns, a Pakistani government spokesman told CNN.

Instead of the original plan of holding the relay in public streets in Islamabad, the relay will be held in front of invited guests in a stadium, said Lt. Col. Baseer Haider Malik.

The decision to move the relay behind closed doors came a day after Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf attacked the West over the protests that have dogged the event.

Musharraf accused Western leaders and media of politicizing the Olympics by criticizing China's human rights record and its policy in Tibet.

"First of all, we consider Tibet an inalienable part of China," he said in an interview with China Daily on Sunday. If "anyone is harboring or abetting the separatists, we condemn that."

Musharraf is in Beijing to meet with various Chinese officials...

..."You cannot superimpose the human rights and democracy environment of a Western country onto other countries," Musharraf added. "That is the error that the West and the Western media makes. This does not work at all and this must stop."...

In an unusual gesture of solidarity for Israel's 60th anniversary, villagers in one Arab-Israeli town have have painted the dome of their mosque in the national colors, blue and white.

The gesture in A-Taibeh, a village in the Galilee near the Gilboa, comes at a time when Arab-Jewish relations in the region have been marked by tensions, and many Israeli Arabs have vowed to boycott the anniversary celebrations and commemorations.

"We are residents of Israel. Our religion encourages love and closeness among nations. Jews, Muslims, we are all cousins, right?" A-Taibeh Mayor Hisham Zuabi was quoted as telling Maariv newspaper.

"We decided to paint the mosque's dome, the most important, dear, and holy site for us, in the national colors. We are all citizens of the state of Israel. As far as we are concerned, there is no difference here between Jews, Muslims, and Christians."...

...Zuabi was quoted as saying that village residents don't fear criticism or threats because of their decision. Instead, they hope it will serve to unite Arabs and Jews. "The goal is purification, coexistence," said Zoabi. "A Jew who enters the mosque will not feel hostility, but rather will feel at home."

A resident assaulted a TV crew saying that the publication caused them shame all over the Muslim world and painted (pun intended) them as collaborators. They say they only wanted the blue to symbolize the sky and white as the color designating the pure soul of the Muslim.

PROMINENT scholar Sheikh Yousuf al-Qaradawi has denounced Pope Benedict's baptism of a Muslim-born journalist during the last Easter Mass at the Vatican as a "provocative and hostile act against Muslims".

Sheikh Qaradawi, who is the head of the International Union of Muslim Scholars (IUMS) and the European Council for Fatwa and Research, said the public baptism of Majdi Allam has provoked Muslims around the world...

..."It is not strange that Allam, who betrayed his country and supported Israel, left his religion. We know that he is an agent of Israel. He would not contribute to Islam if he were a Muslim," he said...

...The scholar also blamed the West for worsening relations with Islam. "We try to seek peace with the Vatican and the World Council of Churches but in vain. They keep provoking us by their hostility."

Have you ever wondered how you would react to an emergency situation? A real emergency? All of us have been tested. But most people haven't been tested with the ultimate test of all: What if you could save the lives of others by giving up your own?

On April 16, 2007, Liviu Librescu was given the ultimate test.

He was able to save his own life but some of his students would die or he could give his life, but many young students - with their whole life ahead of them - would be spared the murderous weapon of a fellow classmate.

Librescu passed the test and gave up his life. He took four bullets on that day, while he held the door to his classroom closed so his students could escape...

In the past 24 hours, a mortar bomb fell in the area of Nir Oz, near a group of local authority heads. No injuries were reported.

Also today, 121 humanitarian aid trucks carrying rice, sugar, oil, fruit and dairy products have been transferred to Gaza via the Sufa and Kerem Shalom crossings.

It should be noted that in recent weeks, the Palestinians have been attempting to generate an energy crisis by failing to withdraw from fuel supplies available to them at the Palestinian terminal of the Nahal Oz fuel depot. Moreover, Hamas bears responsibility for the murderous 9 April attacks on Israeli workers at the Nahal Oz fuel depot, which has caused some disruption in the terminal's service in recent days. Yet at the same time, they have been instigating a strike and protest rallies, as well as carrying out a campaign in the media regarding supposed shortages.

Al-Awda, an islamofascist group is holding their annual Jew-hate fest at Hilton Hotels once again this year. It's crucial to get as many signatures as possible on the new petition to make a statement to Hilton! Please sign this and pass it on to friends and newgroups you might belong to. The petition is rather long and detailed...

...We have written to Hilton as a concerned group of Jewish and Christian Americans about an upcoming international conference scheduled at the Embassy Suites in Garden Grove, a Hilton Hotel, to be held there by a group known as Al-Awda, the Palestine Right of Return Coalition This year, Al-Awda kept their venue secret only to announce it will be holding the same conference again at the Embassy Suites Hotel courtesy of Hilton management. Last year, Embassy Suites manager Dominic Acolino, and Hilton corporate management said they would not invite them back once they learned the truth about this organization.

They lied. ..

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said here Thursday that the allies hope for survival of the Israeli regime is waning.

Ahmadinejad made the remark in a meeting with his Senegalese counterpart Abdoulaye Wade in Mashhad, Khorasan Razavi province, adding that the countdown for fall of Tel Aviv regime has started, and that their strives are in full desperation.

The fake Israeli regime carries out the most ugliest crimes against humanity massacring civilians in Palestine in clear example of genocide, he said, adding that the best way out for the current crisis is to hold referendum in Palestine.

The issue of Palestine is considered a benchmark for assessing sincerity of nations and governments in abiding by democracy, human rights and freedom, he noted. [Talk about turnspeak!]

Urging the Organization of the Islamic Conference and all Muslim nations to support the oppressed nation of Palestine [read: Destroy Israel], he said that the organization can play decisive role in different problems of the Islamic world.

The Jeddah-based OIC is the second largest international organization after the United Nations...

...Rev. Goldstein's narrative is in many ways, similar to the intra-Jewish polemic in the New Testament which includes condemnations of Jews who did not accept Christ, written by those who did. The tragedy and the danger came not when Jews disagreed over the nature of Jesus Christ, but when these condemnations fell into the hands of non-Jews who had no ties to the Jewish community and used them to demonize an entire group of people. It is one thing for Rev. Goldstein, who was raised as a Jew, to project his unhappiness over the Jewishness he experienced as a youth onto the modern state of Israel; it is another thing altogether for a Christian institution to offer such a polemic as a peacemaking document...

Hamas seizes half the fuel Israel sends to the Gaza Strip and uses it in part for its military wing's vehicles, Israeli and Palestinian Authority officials said Thursday.

Israel cut off the only source of fuel for Gaza's 1.4 million people Thursday after Wednesday's deadly attack on the only fuel transfer point into the territory.

But Israeli defense officials indicated that the cutoff would not last past the weekend. Nir Press, commander of the military liaison unit for Gaza, said Hamas takes about half the fuel transferred to the Gaza Strip.

Hussein al-Sheikh, a PA official, confirmed to Haaretz that Hamas seizes half the amount of fuel transferred by Israel to the Strip. The amount confiscated is approximately 400,000 of the 800,000 liters of diesel transferred to Gaza weekly and intended for uses such as generators, hospitals, water pumps and sewage pumps. In contrast, Hamas uses this fuel for militant purposes....

..."Hamas is trying to create a false fuel crisis in the Gaza Strip," a senior government source said. "The simulated strike by Gaza's gas-station owners is also organized by Hamas. They want to create long lines for gas and a feeling that Israel is tightening the siege on Gaza, although this is not the case," he said.

Israel has discussed the situation with European Union officials in charge of financing Gaza's fuel.

Israeli sources said they were concerned that in addition to fuel, Hamas would try to create the impression of a food shortage, although food supplies were sufficient.

Also Thursday, a hair-dressing salon in the center of Gaza City was blown up before dawn, apparently by religious zealots. [Are there any other kind?]

A Palestinian sniper in Gaza opened fire Friday at Israeli farmers who were cultivating lands belonging to Kibbutz Nir Oz. No injuries were reported but a tractor was damaged.

The incident marks the second time this month that a Palestinian sniper targeted the Nir Oz farmers, who use armored tractors for protection.

Uri Dan, head of security at the western Negev kibbutz, said that during today's incident the single 0.5 millimeter bullet that was fired in the farmers' direction hit a tractor's bullet-proof glass shield.

"If the tractor hadn't been bullet-proof, the bullet would have killed its driver," he said, adding that the farmers went to work in coordination with the IDF. Soldiers were scouring the area in search of the sniper...

A bulky "Missions Opportunities Book" distributed to directors reported a notable increase in recent GBGM funding of outside political groups, including...

...$5,000 to the U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation (dismisses Israeli security concerns and promotes "comprehensive divestment" against Israel) The GBGM and the unofficial Methodist Federation for Social Action (MFSA) are both members of this organization...

The purpose of Scarves for Solidarity is to help save battered women while spreading awareness about Islam. The Muslim Student Association is working with sponsors who plan to donate $5 to Battered Women's Shelter for every female who volunteers to wear a head-scarf/hijab on Monday, April 7th 2007.

Head-scarves will be available (FOR FREE) at the Union lobby between 12 pm and 3 pm throughout the week of Monday, March 31st. All that is required from you is to wear the scarf provided for you from 10am until 7:30 pm on April 7th. The scarves will all be the same color so that you can recognize other women volunteering to save battered women...

...Israel is perhaps the worst 'ethnic cleanser' in the history of man. Based on census figures and demographic trends, in 1947 there were most likely about 740,000 Palestinians living in the area formerly called Palestine. Today, the West bank, Gaza and the Arab citizens of Israel comprise a total of over five million Palestinians (including Israeli Arabs) and over nine million worldwide refer to themselves as Palestinian.

To use the popular population growth rate equation, P = Poekt, would mean that the Palestinian growth rate is well above both the average, and even close to double, that of Asia and Africa for a comparable period of time.

However, when compared with the demographic trends for the Jews of Asia and North Africa, there appears to be only one type of ethnic-cleansing in the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Before 1948 there were nearly 900,000 Jews in 'Arab lands' and only 6,500 in 2001. This means that that there are more than 150 times less Jews in Arab nations than there was 60 years ago. When compared with the demographic trends for the Palestinians, there appears to be only one type of ethnic-cleansing in the Arab-Israeli conflict...

...According to The New York Times on May 16, 1948 a series of measures taken by the Arab League to marginalize and persecute the Jewish residents of Arab League member states [sic]. The Times article reported on a "text of a law drafted by the Political Committee of the Arab League which was intended to govern the legal status of Jewish residents of Arab League countries. It provides that beginning on an unspecified date all Jews except citizens of non-Arab states, would be considered 'members of the Jewish minority state of Palestine.' Their bank accounts would be frozen and used to finance resistance to 'Zionist ambitions in Palestine.' Jews believed to be active Zionists would be interned and their assets confiscated."...

...A lone emissary from the Dadolzai making an inquiry or offering to negotiate a settlement would have conveyed an impression of weakness. Only by making publicly known their capacity to swiftly unify and fight to preserve their interests would the Dadolzai prevent future abuse in the lawless desert environment, whatever the intentions of the Kamil Hanzai had been in this particular case. The Dadolzai meant to fight only if blocked from retrieving the palm trunks, yet it was crucial that they be seen as willing to do battle. Had the Kamil Hanzai in fact seized the palm trunks with hostile intent, a lone Dadolzai emissary would have been in serious danger. Only after retrieving the palm trunks unopposed did the Dadolzai send an emissary--not a Dadolzai, but a member of a neutral lineage who would not be at personal risk--to inquire after the Kamil Hanzai's intent. And only then was it discovered that the apparent theft of the palm trunks had been an innocent mistake.

Arab tribesmen are preoccupied with maintaining deterrence and prepared to use force preemptively, if necessary--rather like über neocons. The ironic but very real parallel is a function of the de facto stateless anarchy in which Arab Bedouin live--and the de facto global anarchy that hawkish conservatives rightly believe to be the underlying reality of the international system. Saddam Hus-sein's interest in being taken to possess WMDs, whether or not he actually had them, makes sense in light of the link between deterrence and reputation. The emboldening effects of America's pre-9/11 retreats in Somalia, Lebanon, and elsewhere show the reverse of the medal. Although this is a familiar litany, I'd argue that the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, the rage against the Muhammad cartoons, the killing of Theo van Gogh, and a host of related acts of intimidation ought to be placed under the heading of pro-active deterrence as well...

An Israeli study says Hamas, the militant group that controls Gaza, is engaged in the broadest and most significant military buildup in its history with help from Syria and Iran. It adds that Hamas is restructuring more hierarchically and using more and more powerful weapons, especially longer-range rockets against Israel's southern communities.

The study, by an independent research group with close ties to the Israeli military establishment, says that though the buildup will take some years to complete, it is in an intensive phase that has already led to better infiltration into Israel and a rise in the breadth and precision of rocket fire...

I have to tell you of an experience I had last night that was so anti semitic and frightening:

Last night I was honored by Kappa Alpha Psi fraternity, for my work with Children Uniting nations with African American children who are living out of home care. I have dedicated my life to saving these children from abuse, neglect and a life of crime. We created 'adoption day' and "Day of the child" determined to recruit caring adults to be mentors and life savers for our at risk children in the inner cities...

...After I spoke and thanked the fraternity and their members, Rev. Eric Lee, pres. and CEO of Southern Christian Leadership Conference of greater Los Angeles, was introduced as the key note speaker.

He began his speech by thanking Jesus for Obama, who is going to be the leader of the world. He continued by referring to other leaders Like Dr. King,being that this was the moment of celebrating Dr. King's spirit on the anniversary of his death, and Malcolm X.

It was right after the mention of Malcolm X that he looked right at me and started talking about the African American children who are suffering because of the JEWS that have featured them as rapists and murderers. He spoke of a Jewish Rabbi, and then corrected himself to say "What other kind of Rabbis are there, but JEWS". He told how this Rabbi came to him to say that he would like to bring the AA community and the Jewish community together. "NO, NO, NO,!!!!" he shouted into the crowd, we are not going to come together. "The Jews have made money on us in the music business and we are the entertainers, and they are economically enslaving us"

He continued as to how now the salvation has come and the gates have open for African Americans to come together behind Barack Obama, because now is the time to show them.(meaning the jews).

He continued to speak about ' White supremecy' vs the talents and visionaries in the core of African Americans. He demeaned being given freedom, by saying "To what?" to a country that kills women and children.

I could no longer be polite and sit in front of the crowd, so I walked out...

The next UN investigator into Israeli conduct in the occupied territories has stood by comments comparing Israeli actions in Gaza to those of the Nazis.

Speaking to the BBC, Professor Richard Falk said he believed that up to now Israel had been successful in avoiding the criticism that it was due.

Professor Falk is scheduled to take up his post for the UN Human Rights Council later in the year.

But Israel wants his mandate changed to probe Palestinian actions as well...

The Israeli Foreign Ministry said Tuesday that it will not allow the U.N. official appointed to investigate Israeli-Palestinian human rights to enter the country, after he stood by comments comparing Israelis to Nazis.

Richard Falk is scheduled to take up his post with the U.N. Human Rights Council in May, but Israel's Foreign Ministry said it will deny Falk a visa to enter Israel, Gaza and the West Bank, at least until a September meeting of the council...

...The program's stated intent was for the approximately 7,000 students in U.D.'s residence halls to espouse, in FIRE's words, "highly specific university-approved views on politics, race, sexuality, sociology, moral philosophy, and environmentalism."

Program materials for this ideological reeducation, which have been removed from the U.D. Website, included race/gender/class/sexual orientation "trainer" Shakti Butler's definition of a racist as "all white people living in the United States" and her edict that "people of color cannot be racists." An intrusive rating instrument, "Discovery Wheel," was used to prompt students to admit to their putative racism, and they were instructed that the U.S. is as "an oppressive society" whose "structures of oppression" it is their "duty" to eliminate.

"The treatment" was also mandatory and punitive. Students were required to attend training sessions, group floor meetings, and one-on-one meetings with their Resident Advisers (RAs), who, having been coached in interrogating vulnerable freshmen, plied them with invasive questions. Thereafter students were rated on a scale of "best" to "worst," according to how they complied with the prescribed campus orthodoxy. For example, students were grilled about when they first discovered their sexual identity. One resistant student who replied, "That is none of your damn business," was written up as having one of the "wors[t] one-on-one" sessions, and identified by name and room number...

Shortly after 15:00, Palestinian terrorists fired a salvo of mortars at the Nahal Oz area and penetrated the fuel terminal. Two Israeli civilians employed at the terminal, which supplies the Gaza Strip with most of its fuel, were killed in the attack, which took place just after the latest delivery of fuel for the Gaza power plant funded by the European Union.

(Communicated by the Foreign Ministry Spokesman)

Israel views the Hamas, who controls the Gaza Strip, as responsible for today's (Wednesday, April 9) terror attack on the Nahal Oz fuel crossing terminal. Hamas bears the responsibility for this attack, and will bear the consequences as well.

Today's attack proves yet again that the terrorists in Gaza not only attack Israelis, but also try to harm the civilian infrastructure that allows a normal way of life in the Gaza Strip. It is plain to see that the terrorists' goal is to kill as many Israelis as possible while also undermining any example of coexistence between Israelis and Palestinians, such as occurs at the crossing points between Israel and Gaza.

Israel transfers food, fuel, medicines, equipment and humanitarian supplies on a daily basis to the residents of the Gaza Strip. The terrorists who attacked the fuel terminal today are trying to harm this activity and thereby harm the lives and welfare of the residents of Gaza.

Israel will determine how to defend itself and will act against the terrorist organizations, their commanders and operators. At the same time, Israel will continue with its efforts to prevent a humanitarian crisis in Gaza.

Richard "The Boy Named Sue" Warman has finally filed his statement of claim.

Canada's busiest litigant, serial "human rights" complainant and -- the guy Mark Steyn has called "Canada's most sensitive man" -- Richard Warman is now suing his most vocal critics -- including me...

...Richard Warman used to work for the notorious Human Rights Commission, which runs the "kangaroo courts" who've charged Mark Steyn with "flagrant Islamophobia."

Richard Warman has brought almost half these cases single-handledly, getting websites he doesn't like shut down, and making tens of thousands of tax free dollars in "compensation" out of web site owners who can't afford to fight back or don't even realize they can...

...Warman's not just suing me. He's suing some of the biggest names in the Canadian blogosphere - from Kate McMillan of Small Dead Animals to Kathy Shaidle of Five Feet of Fury (or, Five Feet of Furry, as the lawsuit says on page 2), to Free Dominion, the largest conservative chat site in Canada. Warman's goal is breathtaking in its chutzpah: he wants to muzzle the Canadian conservative Internet. It's not just his goal - it's the goal of the CHRC itself, and its friends at the Canadian Jewish Congress, who have stated their goal is to "tame" the Internet - or at least those voices they disagree with. It wouldn't surprise me one bit if the CJC was bankrolling Warman's lawsuit - they've done joint legal work together before, and Warman's number one defender is on the CJC's legal committee. The CJC hates conservatives, and this would be a way for them to do damage to the conservative blogosphere without taking the political flak for it...

A leader of the Islamist Hamas group warned on Tuesday the Gaza Strip's border with Egypt could soon be breached again, saying an "explosion" was imminent if the frontier remained closed.

"I say clearly all options are open ... What is coming will be bigger than what happened in the past, not only at the borders with Egypt but in other areas too," Khalil al-Hayya told a news conference...

... Hayya said a blockade Israel has tightened around the Gaza Strip since Hamas violently took over the territory last June was tantamount to "a death penalty being slowly carried out against 1.5 million people in the largest prison in history".

"We urge all concerned parties to intervene to break the siege. Otherwise, we warn of an imminent and unprecedented explosion if the siege continues," he said...

Today (8 April as of 16:30 Israel time), terrorists in the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip fired 32 mortar bombs and three Kassam rockets at Israeli territory. So far, there have been no reported injuries or damage.

In addition, during an IDF operation against terrorists operating near the border fence between Israel and the northern Gaza Strip, terrorists opened fire on the IDF force. The IDF soldiers returned fire, hitting two gunmen. Rocket-propelled grenades and Kalashnikov rifles were found on the two terrorists.

At the same time, 127 humanitarian aid trucks, carrying medical equipment, diapers and basic food products were transferred today from Israel to the Palestinian population in Gaza, via the Sufa and Kerem Shalom crossings.

Israel is facilitating the entry of humanitarian aid into the Gaza Strip while at the same time it is being attacked from that territory. Israel holds Hamas fully responsible for these attacks and their consequences.

On Aug. 9, 2001, a suicide terrorist entered the Sbarro pizza shop in the center of Jerusalem and detonated his bomb, killing 15 people, including seven children. Five members of the same family were wiped out. The woman who helped plan the attack and drove the terrorist, a university student named Ahlam Tamimi, was sentenced to 16 terms of life imprisonment in Israel. In prison, she married a male terrorist murderer, her cousin Nizar Tamimi.

Continuing the current trend in the Palestinian Authority media to honor past and present terrorists, the Palestinian daily Al Quds yesterday published an interview with the Palestinian poet, Mutawakil Taha, who wrote a book honoring the terrorist couple. He described them as "the two great heroic prisoners Nizar Tamimi and Ahlam Tamimi."

In its introduction, the Palestinian daily cited the importance of his work:

"The work of the Palestinian poet, Dr. Mutawakil Taha, has a clear presence and influence on the Palestinian and Arabic culture and literature."

Mutawakil Taha:

"Two years ago I wrote the book "Ahlam ibn al-Nabi" about the two great heroic prisoners Nizar Tamimi and Ahlam Tamimi, whom we are proud of. A month ago I wrote the poem "Marwan" about Marwan Barghouthi, [serving 5 life sentences for murder - Editor] as a symbol of the fight voiced by the prisoners. I feel that the prisoners are Martyrs in potential, and that we should bond with them without question or accounting. We should bond to the prisoners unconditionally as we bond to the Martyrs and the homeland." [Al-Quds, April 7, 2008]

Rockefeller believes McCain has become insensitive to many human issues. "McCain was a fighter pilot, who dropped laser-guided missiles from 35,000 feet. He was long gone when they hit.

"What happened when they [the missiles] get to the ground? He doesn't know. You have to care about the lives of people. McCain never gets into those issues."

A street will be named in memory of Dr. Haim Yassky, the director-general of the Hadassah Medical Organization who led an ill-fated supply convoy to Hadassah Hospital on Mount Scopus 60 years ago.

In April 1948, the medical convoy was attacked by Arabs and 80 people - 79 Jews and a British soldier - were killed. Memorial events will be held on Wednesday.

The massacre - announced by the Arab League and instigated and planned in part by the Grand Mufti Hajj Amin al-Husseini, aiming for the ethnic cleansing of the Jews of Jerusalem and Palestine - included ambushes, sniper fire and shelling, and was accompanied by a blockade of Jerusalem that resulted in near starvation, and invasion by armies of the Arab states.

In the convoy massacre, 80 people - mostly civilians, including doctors and nurses - were murdered while trying to bring medical supplies and personnel to Hadassah Hospital, which had been cut off. The massacre was a gross violation of international military conventions and human rights. According to documents in the hands of Hadassah, British mandatory personnel cooperated and participated in it. No one was ever prosecuted, and British collaborators were never investigated...

...From Gordon Brown? Silence. From the Home Secretary? Silence. From the Minister for Community Cohesion? Silence. Business as usual.

A Palestinian news agency that receives financial support from the governments of The Netherlands and Denmark glorifies terrorists, releases news stories using hate language and is a highly politicized, hate-promoting news organization. Paradoxically, Ma'an News claims to be "objective, accurate, balanced" and to "increase Palestinian media credibility," according to its web site.

1- Ma'an Honoring Terrorists and Murderers as Shahids

Ma'an has glorified the recent Palestinian murderer of eight Israeli yeshiva students, the Dimona suicide terrorist, the killers of the two Israeli hikers and the terrorists who attacked a boys' high school with the very highest Islamic status attainable, elevating them to the status of "Shahids" or "Martyrs for Allah." According to the accepted Palestinian interpretation of Islam, there is no higher status that a Muslim can achieve today than that of Shahid. In defining terrorist murderers as "Shahids," Ma'an is by definition sending its readers a straightforward message of honor for the killers, and approval for the many murders. Negative or dishonorable actions could not elevate an individual to Shahid status. (See below for full sources.)

In its English versions of these reports, Ma'an did not honor the terrorists as "Shahids" or use the similar English term "Martyrs." Note, for example, the difference in Ma'an reporting on the murder of the two hikers:

Ma'an English News: "Two Israelis, two Palestinians killed by gunfire near Hebron."

Ma'an Arabic News: "Two of the operatives died as Shahids." [Dec. 28, 2007]...

...The UK deeply values its strong and vibrant Jewish community. Indeed, I find it impossible to imagine a Britain without its Jewish community. For over 350 years now, the world of arts, science, literature, trade etc have all benefited from the invaluable contribution of Britain's Jewish community.

As part of my preparations to come out to Israel as ambassador in the summer of 2006, I spent as much time as I could meeting members of that community. This was at the time that my country was celebrating the 350th anniversary of the re-establishment of the UK's Jewish community. If this community is relatively small in terms of numbers, it is strikingly impressive in terms of quality...

With great respect Tom Phillips is not in any position to disagree with Prof Robert S Wistrich's assertions about anti-Semitism in the UK, how can he, he is not a Jew so he has not experienced it first hand, I am and I have.

What can he know about walking to Shul in the respectable leafy London suburb where I live and receive abuse from passing cars or have your grandchild's school bus attacked by brick throwing yobs because it has Jewish children on board attending those same Jewish schools that need security, reinforced windows and guards at the gate. What can he know of the fear and intimidation that goes on in our Universities to Jewish students like my Granddaughter? Is that because there is no anti-Semitism no synagogues vandalised, cemeteries desecrated (Plashett Cemetery in East London just this week) Jews physically and verbally attacked?

Prime Minister Gordon Brown has said "I commit that never again will the Jewish community have to fight anti-Semitism alone, the Jewish community do not cause anti-Semitism and it must not fall on them to have to defeat it." Why then do we need the Community Security Trust funded by the Jewish community who work with the police in order to protect our Synagogues, schools, functions, social gatherings and individuals, does he think that this is necessary because we are safe and free from fear in the UK?

Carol Gould writes: It is interesting that I, an American, feel anti-Semitism keenly here these days after thirty-two years in the UK. My non-Jewish British friends and media colleagues of many years' standing routinely berate me lately about 'genocide' and 'apartheid' in Palestine, hence my circle of friends has narrowed down to about five people. My Canadian friend Milli upped sticks and has left London after 42 years
because of the anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism! My South African friend Issy is leaving after 45 years and making aliyah because of the anti-Semitism here. I would like to leave but cannot sell my flat after a year on the market. I might even consider being repossessed and go back to the USA penniless but not berated by anyone for being an American or a Jew.

Michael Gove writes, Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, said: vIf we searched the entire world for a person more cowardly, despicable, weak and feeble in psyche, mind, ideology and religion, we would not find anyone like the Jew. Notice, I do not say the Israeli." That summer the streets of London were filled with our fellow citizens chanting: "We are all Hezbollah now."

Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi says suicide bombing which targeted Israelis was justified: "I consider this type of martyrdom operation as an evidence of God's justice. Allah Almighty is just; through His infinite wisdom He has given the weak a weapon that the strong do not have, and that is their ability to turn their bodies into bombs as Palestinians do." The Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, invited the Sheikh to City Hall in 2004 as an "honoured guest".

Mr Phillips says that "my government has a zero-tolerance approach to anti-Semitism" however "my Government" has denied Israelis visitors' visas, threatened them with arrest upon entry and worse. Among them Major General Almog who faced arrest and Moshe Feiglin, head of the Jewish Leadership faction within the Likud party who had no intentions of visiting the UK had not even applied for a visa but received a letter from Ms Smith of "my Government" banning his presence. Sheikh Yusuf Al-Qaradawi however has been granted visas on many occasions although he praised terrorist attacks against Israelis and Americans, called for the destruction of Israel, and said that homosexuals should "be put to death".

Yours etc., Janet Clifford

...So why have you stopped?

"In part because of the conflict between Fatah and Hamas. Look, it's perfectly clear to me that we won't be able to defeat Israel. My aim was for us, by means of the 'resistance' [code for terror attacks], to get a message out to the world. Back in Abu Amar's day [the nom de guerre of Yasser Arafat], we had a plan, there was a strategy, and we would carry his orders."

In effect, are you saying what Amos Gilad and intelligence always said, that Arafat planned everything?

"Right. Everything that was done in the intifada was done according to Arafat's instructions, but he didn't need to tell us the things explicitly. We understood his message."

And today there is no leadership?

"Today I can say explicitly: We failed entirely in the intifada. We haven't seen any benefit or positive result from it. We achieved nothing. It's a crushing failure. We failed at the political level - we didn't succeed in translating the military actions into political achievements. The current leadership does not want armed actions, and since the death of Abu Amar, there's no one who is capable of using our actions to bring about such achievements. When Abu Amar died, the armed intifada died with him."

What happened? Why did it die?

"Why? Because our politicians are whores. Our leadership is garbage. Look at Ruhi Fatouh, who was president of the PA for 60 days, as Yasser Arafat's replacement. He smuggled mobile phones. Do you understand? We have been defeated. The political splits and schisms have destroyed us not only politically - they have destroyed our national identity. Today there is no Palestinian identity. Go up to anyone in the street and ask him, 'Who are you?' He'll answer you, 'I'm a Fatah activist,' 'I'm a Hamas activist,' or an activist of some other organization, but he won't say to you, 'I am a Palestinian.' Every organization flies its own flag, but no one is raising the flag of Palestine."

Are you, who used to be a symbol of the intifada, saying, "We have been defeated, we have failed, the intifada is dead?"

"Even Gamal Abdel Nasser admitted his defeat, so why not me?...

GAZA CITY (AFP) -- A Palestinian farmer was killed by an Israeli artillery round on Saturday as he worked in his fields near the border between the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip and Israel, Palestinian medics said...

...An Israeli army spokeswoman said Palestinians had opened fire and launched an anti-tank missile at an Israeli border patrol along the northern perimeter fencem, but that the patrol did not return fire...

Palestinian sources say man killed, another wounded from Israeli artillery fire in northern Gaza - but local residents say cause of explosion was Palestinian rocket which failed to reach its destination across the border. IDF denies any shells fired

Medical sources in the Gaza Strip reported on Saturday afternoon that a Palestinian farmer was killed and another wounded in an IDF artillery strike in northern Gaza. However local residents say the farmer was killed after a rocket fired by Palestinian terrorists toward Israel fell short and hit him.

The army said that while troops patrolling the border earlier in the afternoon did indeed come under Palestinian fire, they did not respond to the anti-tank missile launched at them...

...Fatah, the Palestinian group loyal to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, claims Hamas uses this group for their dirty work. Fatah blames Popular Resistance for killing the cousin of the late Palestinian President Yasir Arafat. They're also responsible for firing rockets. But when Hamas gives them the orders to stop ... they listen.

The group says their political agenda is "to liberate Palestine from the Mediterranean sea to the Jordan River." Meaning, they believe, Israel has no right to exist and and the land belongs to the Palestinians only...

The president of Columbia University and university officials did not attend a weekend historians' conference in New York on the university's ties with Nazi Germany during the 1930s.

The Sunday evening conference, which was organized by the Washington-based David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, featured an American historian who has just completed a book about the American academic community's response to Nazism in the 1930s.

Columbia University President Lee Bollinger, who was invited to speak at the event, did not attend, nor did any member of the university's administration, said Wyman Institute director Dr. Rafael Medoff.

The event, which was held in Manhattan's Center for Jewish History, attracted about 100 people, including Holocaust survivors and a former Columbia student who attended the university during that time.

University of Oklahoma professor Stephen H. Norwood recounted how then-Columbia president Nicholas Murray Butler had welcomed Nazi Germany's ambassador, Hans Luther, to the campus in December 1933 and tried to forge friendly relations with Nazi-controlled German universities in the mid-'30s...

I work with a [journalist from a small European country] who writes a lot about Gaza/West Bank. We've done many stories on Palestinian suffering.

For a year she has tried to get her paper to write a story about Sderot or Ashkelon but they refuse...

This article by a German or Swiss journalist also tells the part of the story not mention in the world press (never saw anything about it in the UK press):

"Like all Islamic terrorists, the Hamas ideologues love death -- even the death of their own women and children, when it serves their insane purpose"

The story of Hamas use of Human shields will be told as well... eventually.

Infant mortality increased slightly in 2002, largely due to very premature babies born from in-vitro fertilization and congenital defects found mostly in Arab families that inbreed.

Although efforts to discourage marriages between first cousins have not borne fruit, the Health Ministry has accepted a recommendation that will limit the number of IVF embryos implanted in the womb to two, thus reducing the risk of premature delivery...

...True, there are gaps between Arabs and Jews with regard to health, educational, and economic indicators, but, as I showed in a paper last year issued by the American Jewish Committee, these gaps are rapidly reducing. Thus, for instance, life expectancy of Israeli Arab males (74.7 in 2002), while somewhat lower than that of the Israeli male Jews (77.9), is slightly higher than the American male life expectancy figure of 74.6 years.

Furthermore, there are substantial differences between Muslim Arabs and Christian Arabs. Despite the fact that both communities share a common origin, language, and nationalist feelings, the Christians, who are 10% of Israeli Arabs, have achieved a very high standard of living, and their health and education indicators are higher than those of the Jews. Indeed, infant mortality - 2.7 per 10,000 births - is among the world's lowest (the American figure is 6.8), which indicates that there is something wrong with the accusation that Israel's policies are to blame for every ill...

...The World Health Organization's (WHO) representative for Gaza and the West Bank issued a report criticizing Israeli security for slowing the access of Gazans to Israeli hospitals, saying - as the Associated Press reports -- "The U.N. agency listed 32 cases since October in which Gaza residents, ranging from a 1-year-old child to a 77-year-old man, died because they could not obtain urgent medical treatment."

However, deep in the AP article we find:

In 2006, Israel admitted 4,932 patients from Gaza. In 2007, that number jumped to 7,176, with more than half of the patients, or 4,084, being admitted between July 1 and Dec. 31, after the Hamas takeover....

Col. Nir Press [sic Peres], commander of the IDF's Gaza Coordination and Liaison Administration, rejected the report which he said was mistaken and ignored the fact that of the five case studies presented by the WHO, two of the sick Palestinians were in fact treated in Israeli hospitals.

The other three, he said, were all granted permits that were never used due to internal Palestinian considerations...

GAZA (Reuters) - Palestinian gunmen blew up a monument in a British-run cemetery for foreign soldiers in the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip on Thursday, witnesses and British diplomats said.

Witnesses said gunmen blew up the two-metre (6.5-foot) high stone monument in Britain's Gaza War Cemetery in central Gaza. No group claimed responsibility for the attack.

A statement issued by the British Consulate General in Jerusalem said the Gaza War Cemetery contains graves of British and other foreign soldiers who were killed in conflicts in the region from as early as World War One.

Many tombstones in the graveyard are marked with a cross or star of David, indicating that both Christians and Jews were buried there...

Residents of a Gaza town complained this week after Hamas forces constructing a weapons storage facility under the local schoolhouse severed a water main.

The Ramallah-based Palestine Press news agency reported that Hamas hoped to use the school to shield some of their heavy US and Iranian-made weapons from Israeli raids and air strikes....

In other Gaza news, Hamas gunmen on Thursday bombed a cemetery where British soldiers who helped liberate the area from Ottoman Turkish rule during World War I are buried.

The Palestinian Center for Human Rights later reported that two of its workers and two accompanying Reuters correspondents were attacked by Hamas security forces when they arrived at the scene to interview cemetery guards. The Hamas police reportedly confiscated the reporters' camera memory cards and all video footage taken at the site.

A state grand jury in Manhattan is investigating the appearance of a noose in October on the office door of a black education professor at Columbia University, officials said on Monday.

The spokeswoman, Marcia Horowitz, confirmed that the university had received a subpoena for records pertaining to the Teachers College professor, Madonna G. Constantine, whose specialty is race and multiculturalism. Ms. Horowitz said the university was turning over records, but she would not be specific...

...The noose made national news, with Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg saying it was "despicable" and Lee C. Bollinger, Columbia's president, describing it as "an assault on all of us" in an e-mail message to students and faculty members.

In February, university officials revealed that Dr. Constantine had been under an internal investigation for plagiarism for the previous 18 months, which included the time when the noose appeared on her door...

...The referendum's outcome is a serious setback. But the resolute response of President Chávez, plus the vigor and determination of the Bolivarian ranks, provide good reason to believe that the revolution will resume its forward march.

Following are excerpts from an interview with Dr. Abd Al-Hamid Al-'Ubeidi, an Iraqi expert on Islamic law, which aired on Al-Rafidein TV on March 14, 2008:

Dr. Abd Al-Hamid Al-Ubeidi: There is no minimum marriage age for either men or women in Islamic law. The law in many countries permits girls to marry only from the age of 18. This is arbitrary legislation, not Islamic law. Why? Because there might be cases in which it is impossible to keep the girl [single] until the age of maturity.

For example, in Bosnia-Herzegovina, the Serbs killed many Albanian Muslims, and there are many mass graves there. [Muslim] families fled from that war, and so did small children, who were not yet at the age of marriage. But if a man takes such a girl in, he might desire her, and eventually commit a sin, even though his intentions were noble. So he can formally marry her, but without having sex with her. She will remain like that until she grows up, and then someone will ask to marry her, or he will find her a husband - this happens in many Islamic countries with girls from Bosnia-Herzegovina - and when he finds her a husband, he will divorce her, so that she can marry again. In such a case, there should be no waiting period. So there is no need for the girl to be of age.

Most of the time we act according to what is acceptable to most people, and indeed, most men do not marry a girl until she is of age. In some Islamic countries, the age of maturity can be 8 or 10 years. In Yemen, a girl might get her period at the age of 8. In cold countries, such as Russia, Belarus, Scandinavia, New Zealand, Canada, and so on, a girl might not reach maturity until she is 22 years old. She might not get her period until then. Therefore, the greatness of Islamic law is manifest in the fact that marriage is not just for pleasure. True, it is the basic objective for marriage, but there are some cases that require solutions...[snip]

THE GLOBAL jihad is unpleasant. Consequently "Fitna," the controversial new film about the Koran and jihadist violence produced by the Dutch parliamentarian Geert Wilders, is also unpleasant. Parts of it are graphic and violent, and you might find it difficult to watch.

But watch it you should, if only to remind yourself of two things the media are generally too intimidated or politically correct to dwell on: Jihadists are waging a bloody and barbaric war, and they are waging it with explicit reference to their religion...

...Yet what has been controversial about "Fitna" is not the abhorrent behavior it depicts, but that Wilders links such behavior to the Koran. Why that should be so notorious is unclear - after all, the jihadists themselves emphatically cite the Koran to justify their violence.

Nevertheless, "Fitna" has been widely condemned. The Dutch prime minister issued statements in Dutch and English saying the film "serves no other purpose than to cause offense." UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon pronounced it "offensively anti-Islamic." The European Union's Slovenian presidency blasted it for "inflaming hatred...

...Cringing before bullies is not the way to defend Western civilization. There is room for "Fitna" in the marketplace of ideas. Heaven help us if we are too timorous to say so.

he U.S. House of Representatives recognized the rights of Jewish refugees from Arab lands in any final peace deal.

The nonbinding resolution, backed by a bipartisan slate of lawmakers, passed in a voice vote Tuesday. It urges any U.S. government to ensure that the rights of such refugees -- believed to number approximately 850,000 -- are part of a final peace deal between Israel and the Arabs.

Pro-Palestinian groups criticized the legislation as undermining the claims of Palestinian refugees, but U.S. Rep. Jerrold Nadler, (D-N.Y.), the legislation's lead sponsor, rejected such claims.

"This should not be an impediment to the peace process in any way," Nadler said in a conference call Wednesday. "It is important to raise the question of Jewish refugees and the property left behind in Arab countries. It does not in any way say that the rights of Palestinian refugees should not be handled."

Stanley Urman, the executive director of Justice for Jews from Arab Countries, the Jewish group that led the lobbying effort for the resolution, said it "restored truth to the Middle East narrative."

..."The world needs to understand that it is not just the Arabs and it's not just the Palestinians in the Middle East, but also Jewish people who themselves were dispossessed of their possessions and their homes, and were victims of terrorist acts," one of the bill's co-sponsors, Rep. Joseph Crowley (D-N.Y.) said.

"Jewish refugees outnumbered Palestinian refugees, and their forced exile from Arab lands must not be omitted from public discussion on the peace process," said Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY)...

The sixty-year-old Palestinian refugee issue has little connection with reality. It has become solely a bargaining chip used by Arabs and Palestinians in peace talks with Israel and, as such, is a distraction from the real issues of terrorism and boundaries. Indeed, continuing to call Palestinians refugees is a misnomer. They no longer live in tents or temporary quarters. In addition, the Palestinian refugee issue is unique. Since 1920 all other major refugee crises involving the exchange of religious or ethnic populations, while creating hardships, were dealt with in a single generation. Meanwhile, issues such as the "right of return" and compensation never were adequately resolved and were largely forgotten. The same pattern evolved for Jews who fled Middle Eastern and North African countries, even though their number was some 50 percent larger than Palestinian refugees and the difference in individual assets lost was even greater...

Panel and Discussion:

Jewish Voices Say End the Israeli Occupation of Palestine

RESCHEDULED Wednesday, April 2 at 7:00 PM
St. John's United Methodist Church
80 Mt. Auburn Street, Watertown

As Americans are becoming more aware of the imbalance of power in Israel and Palestine, many American Jews are speaking out to oppose Israel's military occupation of Palestinian territory and the U.S. government's support and financing of that occupation.

In the face of accusations of anti-Semitism and even personal attack, these Jewish peacemakers courageously offer an alternative voice. Following their conscience, they raise their voice for justice for the Palestinians in order to move toward a future of peace and reconciliation.

Hear the stories of four Boston-area Jewish peace activists - how they came to oppose Israel's policy of occupation - and the impact their decision has had on their lives:

Marty Federman, Co-Chair, Boston Chapter, Jewish Voice for Peace,
Ted German, Member, WCES' Justice with Peace Task Force,
Eva Moseley, Board Member, Massachusetts Peace Action, and
Abby Yanow, Co-Founder, Israel-Palestine Task Force of United for Justice with Peace; Member, Jewish Voice for Peace.

Parking & Public Transportation - If you are driving, there is a parking lot to the left of the church and on- street parking on the side opposite the church. For public transportation, take the #71 bus from Harvard Square; the stop is in front of the church, across the street from Starbucks.

The United States has presented to North Korea a list of names of North Korean nuclear experts allegedly involved in offering nuclear technology to Syria, a Seoul newspaper reported Tuesday.

The list was presented when top U.S. nuclear envoy Christopher Hill had talks with his North Korean counterpart Kim Kye Gwan recently, the Chosun Ilbo reported, quoting a "highly placed source" concerned with diplomacy and security affairs.

An Israeli airstrike against Syria last September targeted a nuclear-related facility that was under construction with technical assistance from North Korea, according to Israel's prime minister.

Japanese government sources said over the weekend that the Israeli leader, Ehud Olmert, briefed Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda about the attack during summit talks in Tokyo on Feb. 27.

It is apparently the first time that the intended target had been disclosed to the head of a foreign government.

Previously, Jerusalem had only acknowledged it carried out the Sept. 6, 2007, attack, but stopped short of identifying the type of facility.

Tokyo has shown keen interest in the disclosure as it suggests Pyongyang was providing nuclear technology to Damascus in violation of an agreement made at six-party talks on the North Korean nuclear issue not to transfer nuclear materials, technology or know-how...

Saudi billionaire Saudi billionaire Khalid Salim Bin Mahfouz, who successfully sued Cambridge University Press last July, has failed in his efforts to silence Rachel Ehrenfeld.

The American Center for Democracy in Defense of Freedom, which Ehrenfeld directs, has just issued the following press release. The New York State legislature today passed the "Libel Tourism Protection Act," which will help protect American writers from the likes of Bin Mahfouz, who uses his millions to silence critics of his own past and of others who work to spread Wahhabi Islam around the world. For the likes of Bin Mahfouz, the inability to convince people of the merits of your arguments leads instead to efforts to sue them into silence. That underhanded assault on our freedom of speech has now become more difficult, as this new legislation corrects holes in New York's law that had left Ehrenfeld, and other authors, open to suits from foreigners like Bin Mahfouz...

...So, the American Friends Service Committee's key Iraq person claims that the U.S. presence in Iraq has killed "millions" and that the occupants of the White House, Congress, and Pentagon "don't care about the lives of Iraqis or Americans." Flat out false, and truly disgusting.