June 2008 Archives

Not long after leaving Stahrenberg's I had become aware of the common methods used by Nazis and their American transmission belters. I knew that their sources of inspiration were the same. Their methods were basically the same, and the mediums to which they resorted to bring about the discontent and defeatism and revolution were essentially common to all twenty-eight [indicted for sedition on July 22, 1943]. Although not all knew each other well enough to work together, I had found that they were engaged in doing and saying the same things in slightly different ways, and on varying level of society. Whether they knew it or not, they were all heading in one direction.

In addition, I had been acutely aware that many among them exchanged information, and met frequently in "Christian" conventions or co-ordinated their "patriotic" plans during informal visitations. Many exchanged mailing lists so that placement on the list of one resulted, in due time, in placement on the lists of many of the others. Most of them recommended each other, distributed one another's literature and kept in constant touch through intimate correspondence. The indictment expressed it in the vigorous language of the law:

It being the plan and purpose of said defendants, and divers other persons to the Grand Jurors unknown, to destroy the morale and faith and confidence of the members of the military and naval forces of the United States and the people of the United States in their public officials and Republican form of government...

...the said defendants...planning and intending to seize upon and use and misuse the right of freedom of speech and of the press to spread their disloyal doctrines, intending and believing that any nation allowing to its people the right of freedom of speech and of the press is powerless to defend itself against enemies masquerading as patriots and seeking to obstruct, impede, break down and destroy the proper functioning of its republican form of government under the guise of honest criticism...

...the said defendants...knowing full well and intending that a government bereft of the faith and confidence of the members of the military and naval forces and of the people is powerless to defend the nation or the people against armed attack from without or treachery from within and cannot long survive.

Narrator: "The concentrated efforts of the Zionist lobbies in America have led the U.S. government to be the greatest supporter of the regime occupying Jerusalem. In recent years, following the exposure of certain information, hatred towards the Zionists has developed and intensified among various sectors of society in this country. Therefore, some of the efforts of the Zionist propaganda machine are aimed at improving the image of Zionism, and at painting a false picture of the historical role of the Zionists in American society."[...]

Dr. Majid Shah-Hosseini, Iranian film critic: "[In The Matrix ], Zion symbolizes the utopian Jewish Zionist land. These are the roots of Zionism. How come in such a popular and seemingly fictional American film, the utopia of liberty and humanity, which heralds the era of modernity - in the technical, rather than theoretical sense - is symbolized by a Zionist name - 'Zion?'

"Moreover, names may be selected for their rhyming value. 'Zion' sometimes becomes 'Ryan,' as in Saving Private Ryan. They exploit even the similarity of names.

"The Jewish Steven Spielberg, whose previous film Schindler's List reflected Zionist goals, and who turned the false story of the Holocaust into an influential movie, is now making a new movie, about Private Ryan."[...]

Asher's friend, Carl H. Mote, is president and general manager of the Northern Indiana Telephone Company, th Commonwealth Telephone Corporation and has other utility business connections. He is an attorney and a former newspaper editor. Mote wrote at least three articles for Pelley's Roll-Call which appeared in the February 17, March 3 and March 24, 1941 issues. All were true to the Pelley pattern and one was so "good" that Pelley placed it on the front cover. Mote branded the President's message to Hitler at the time of the Munich appeasement as "an impudent telegram." [Hello Columbia U. -S] And his apology for Hitler in Roll-Call was far from subtle:

Whatever may be said against the morals of Adold HItler, no one has ever dated accuse him of having had any part in the destruction of Germany which began with the Versailles Treaty and continued to the first months of 1933. [Hello Pat Buchanan. -S]

Judged purely by the amount of abuse and vindictiveness in his writing for Pelley's magazine, Mote hated the President and the Administration infinitely more than Hitler and National-Socialism. This note was implicit during my talk with him as we sat at the Antlers Bar in Indianapolis...

...Doubtless Mote thought himself on the right side when he objected to peace-time conscription as a measure of national defense. Whether he realized it at the time or not, Mote was actually paraphrasing the Nazi short wave broadcasts when he wrote in Pelley's Role-Call:

We are spending billions for peace-time conscription, for airplanes and for ships, when most everybody suspects, though few will dare say, that the "defense program," including peace-time conscription, is the master hoax of the New Deal. It takes rare impertinence and bold hypocrisy...

Mote claimed he was not anti-Semitic, and yet he spoke constantly of the "Jewish League of Nations," referred to "money changers" and "internationalists" -- popular Park Avenue terms for "Jew"; harped on Jewish surnames to the exclusion of others, and indulged in such cheap Pelley devices as ridiculing Willkie by calling him Vendell L. Villkie [Hello BBC. -S]. Mote further insulted Mr. Willkie by calling him "more alien than American" and branded his repudiation of Father Coughlin's support (which Coughlin offered voluntarily during the 1940 elections) as "asinine," because Willkie had said: "I consider anti-Semitism in America as a possible criminal movement and every anti-Semite as a possible traitor to America."...

...In a vicious booklet he circulated after Pearl Harbor, Mote quoted Mrs. Dilling, fascist Lawrence Dennis and even the discredited Protocols to support his contentions. Mote looked upon all Jews as "war mongers," but he said nothing about Hitler's gigantic preparations for total war, or his extensive conspiracies for territorial and world ideological conquest.

And in the booklet quoting Dennis and the Protocols as authorities, Mote made "predictions" of violence and a military dictator I have heard a hundred times at Nazi meetings:

Unless there is a shortage of rope, at the end of five years human necks will be more talked about than bottlenecks...If and when a Caesar appears, he is likely to come from the Army. the Navy, the Air Force, the Marines...

If you had been there with me at the Antlers Bar, you would have found it hard to believe that these threatening and vengeful utterances could have been voiced by the mild-mannered man who faced me. It became all too apparent to me that Mote was the sad victim of a complex: the hate-Roosevelt complex. Hate the President at any cost. Hate everything he does, hate them even before he does them. Hate him more than you hate Hitler and Stalin. Hate the very ground he walks on and curse the very bed he sleeps in. Hate till you blind your own reason and reduce yourself to the level of a Bundist who knows nothing but hate and sees nothing but revolution and pogroms ahead.

As I left Mote I experienced a sadness which is difficult to put into words. Sleep was out of the question. I had met personally a fine man who doubtless loved his family and country. What a shame, I thought, that a man of Mote's calibre and interests would reduce himself to the level of a vile Pelley. What a blow to Democracy to have Mote on Pelley's side. What a blow to Democracy to have Mote on Pelley's side, rather than on the side of those who were fighting for a world of decency and equality and justice for all men. I regarded Mote as a tragic victim of the most ruthless, hateful, soul-searing propaganda machinery the world has ever seen!

...I sensed Chicago was the hotbed of a native fascism which was truly alarming in proportion and intensity. I had never had this feeling before. As I analyze Chicago, I can readily understand why. In addition to the Dillings, Jungs, Van Hynings, Willards, the America First Committee which had first festered there, there was the factor of the "Washington-New York-Chicago newspaper Axis," with the Chicago Tribune as the cornerstone.

Its publisher was a remarkable and profound man. He himself said so -- and who should know better than Colonel Robert R. McCormick, "Bertie" for short...

...Whereas the influence of the Dillings and Jungs extended among thousands only, "Bertie" reached millions (average daily circulation of the Tribune was 1,076,866) with a daily barrage of obstructionism and defeatism of the war effort, carping at the national leadership, berating Democracy and denouncing our military allies under the guise of "patriotism" and "freedom of the press."...

...Other partners of the "newspaper Axis" were the New York Daily News, published by McCormick's cousin, Captain Joseph Medill Patterson; and the Washington Times-Herald, published by Patterson's sister, Eleanor "Cissy" Patterson. Their combined audience was estimated at five million readers daily. The party line was the same for all three.

On December 14, 1938 under the by-line of its Washington correspondent, John O'Donnell, the Daily News honored an American Nazi, Pelley, by publishing in its entirety the contents of one of his booklets purporting to show the number of "Jews in Washington." Pelley's picture was inserted and the cover of his vicious booklet reproduced. The story was featured on page two under a screaming three-column headline and continued for nearly two and a half pages...

..."Hardly a day goes by," wrote William Shirer, "that they [these three papers] are not cited by Goebbels to prove one of his points." And as I stood on the Chicago sidewalk and looked at the impressive office building of the Tribune, with McCormick sitting high up in his ivory tower I recalled the righteous indignation of Congressman Elmer J. Holland which he expressed so eloquently in the Congressional Record.

Despite their cloak of prosperity, their fine building...these three papers are in spirit and in conduct members of the "vermin press." Separate their editorials from the trappings of a large city newspaper, publish them as a separate book, and read them as a continuous theme. You will see their net effect is to preach defeatism among our civilians and mutiny among our soldiers, to spread dismay among out allies, and to create joy in the hearts of our enemies...

This is no small matter...This means that approximately 5% of the total population of these United States is being daily exposed to the virus of Fascist philosophy -- to the direct assault of the enemy propaganda campaign. No propaganda broadcast of the Axis radio -- no enemy leaflets -- can reach so many Americans as do these Fascists of the native brand.

With deadly effect the corrupt Parisian press poisoned and paralyzed the spirit and morale of the French. And -- when we recall that the total circulation of the most powerful members of this venal press reached less than one half of one percent of the total population of France -- we can clearly judge the danger with which we are faced.

It is not necessary to be in contact with the enemy in order to bring him aid and comfort. It is only necessary to share a common hatred; to desire the same results; to think in the same patterns...This is a foreign war, yet it is also a war of ideas...To the end that this group consists of Americans, Mr. Speaker, this war is a civil war as well as a foreign war. It cannot be won until our enemies at home are conquered and rendered harmless.

A Palestinian Arab activist and former college professor who has been locked in a long-running legal battle with federal prosecutors, Sami Al-Arian, was indicted yesterday on two counts of criminal contempt for refusing to testify before grand juries investigating Islamic charities based in Virginia and elsewhere.

Al-Arian, 50, has argued that he could not be required to testify in the probes under the terms of his guilty plea in 2006 to a charge of providing assistance to a terrorist organization. The plea resolved the stalemate that followed a six-month-long criminal trial in Florida in 2005 stemming from allegations that he acted as Palestinian Islamic Jihad's chief representative in America. A jury acquitted Al-Arian on some charges, but could not reach a verdict on others

Two federal appeals courts rejected Al-Arian's claims that his plea absolved him from having to testify in the investigations being pursued from Alexandria, Va. Al-Arian, who has been in jail since he was indicted in the Florida case in 2003, was scheduled to be released and deported last year, but a judge extended Al-Arian's sentence while he was in civil contempt for refusing to testify...

Following are excerpts from an interview with Dr. Khalil Ibrahim, leader of the Sudanese Justice and Equality Movement, which aired on Al-Jazeera TV on June 15, 2008

Interviewer: "Abd Al-Wahed Nur, the leader of the Sudanese Liberation Movement, has announced that his movement has an office in Israel. Do you support such a measure?"

Dr. Khalil Ibrahim: "This is the business of the Sudanese Liberation Movement and Abd Al-Wahed. Israel is a country just like any other country in the world.

"The Prophet Muhammad had good ties with the Israelis [sic]. When he died, he had a debt to a Jew. He would trade with Jews.

"Relations with Israel are not a crime. How many Arab countries have Israeli embassies in their capitals? The Israelis are of the People of the Book, and so are the Christians and the Muslims.

"Allah said: 'Argue not with the People of the Book unless it is done in the best way.' The Sudanese government is trying to create what is called 'a taboo.' A taboo forbids something that was not forbidden by Allah.

"Relations with any country or citizen... If Allah did not want these people, why did he create them? Israelis, Arabs, British people, Americans, and Africans - Allah created them all. When Allah created Adam, he was just one person. Now there are over seven billion descendents of Adam in the world. If Allah did not want them, he could have annihilated them. It is Allah who holds people accountable."...

...People should work to resolve their problems. We support a two-state solution - one for the Palestinians and the other for the Israelis. These two states should coexist peacefully, as good neighbors. If it is possible for them to coexist - fine. If not, each side should establish its country, and they should live in peace. What is wrong?"

...In May, 2007, Earle was hosting a comedy night at Zesty's restaurant in Vancouver. He says a couple of lesbians came in, got drunk and starting making out right in front of the stage. He said they also heckled him and other comedians.

In other words, like anyone else -- gay, straight or otherwise -- they set themselves up for some wise-cracks. And crack wise Earle did.

But didn't he know he was in the People's Republic of British Columbia?...

President of the Mothers of the United States of America, [Mrs. Rosa M. Farber], she had known as early as May, 1941, she confessed, that Laura Ingalls was on the Nazi pay roll. "There was a lot more about her than appeared in the newspapers," she said mysteriously. "What was printed was only half the story."

How did she know that?

And why had she continued to associate with her?

It was nearly ten o'clock. So far I had learned little from Mrs. Farber that was worth while. Then, as the hour hand on the living room clock pointed to ten, Mrs. Farber suddenly came out with: "There is no other way out for us than through a revolution."

"You mean a revolution with bloodshed?" I asked, surprised at her sudden remark.

She nodded: "It's the only way."

"I was going to start an underground organization last fall," she explained, "but they [meaning gossipy women] would not have been able to keep it secret and I gave up the idea. It's the only thing left to do now -- start an underground movement." Mrs. Farber wasn't holding meetings of any kind now. "You only make yourself a target," she said. "They'll shut you down. The only way to work now is through conversation."

She called it that. What she actually did was to outline a whispering campaign. She gave me her formula as she practiced it day by day. She recounted how she had spread defeatism at the local school. One of the teachers giving out ration cards had said that rationing was necessary for psychological reasons. But Mrs. Farber had argued back: "If the want us to know that we are in the war then let them publish the casualty lists and also send the bodies back." One of the teachers had commented, "Yes, come to think of it, those lists haven't been published, have they."

Mrs. Farber boasted, "You see? I planted an idea in her head, now she'll think of it again."

Thoroughly warmed up to her subject, she went on: "I just plant seeds like that every day. They are little ideas which I put in my conversations day by day. I do it all the time. That is all I do. That is all you can do now. Here, let me show you something." She got up from her chair and went over to the bureau. From it she pulled out a large pocketbook and drew out a newspaper picture of Attorney General Francis Biddle. "Look at that face," she said. "It's one hundred per cent Jewish." (footnote: Attorney General Biddle is a member of the famous non-Jewish Philadelphia family.)

From another folder in her pocketbook she took out a picture of a child whose grand-uncle was captioned as being General MacArthur. She said that his face, too, was Jewish. And then this statement from Mrs. Farber: "People say that MacArthur's little son looks like a little kike."

"Should we, in these conversations you suggest, use anti-Semitism?" I asked innocently.

"What do you think I'm doing when I show Biddle's picture and tell people he looks like a Jew?" she exploded. "Preach anti-Semitism all you can, the more the better."

After this Mrs. Farber lost all self-composure and all reason. Having controlled herself all through the early evening, she now let go and subjected me to a half hour of fantastic delusions. One of these was the amazing statement that Polish Jews had willingly and wantonly encouraged Hitler's attack on Poland. The Sanhedrin, or a mythical world Jewish Council (existing only in the imagination of Jew-baiters) had decreed this in order that Hitler devastate all of Europe.

"How would the Jews benefit from this?" I asked incredulously.

Mrs. Farber explained that it was to further a plot of world ruin so that Communist elements might be in a position to offer Communism as the only antidote for National-Socialism. "Hitler," Mrs. Farber said, out of all reason, "is being kept alive as a hate object by those who want our civilization destroyed in order to set up an international world order."

I could hardly believe my ears, for here was a woman, hitherto rational, whose blind hatreds and fanaticisms led her to believe and propagate the most fantastic lies. She became just like the crackpots I had met on countless occasions. In her defamation of Jewry, in her attempt to lay the blame of the war at the feet of persecuted Polish Jews, Mrs. Farber may have been attempting to absolve Hitler of all blame. In her lumping together of Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, Churchill and Roosevelt Mrs. Farber followed another favorite Nazi device used to discredit the national leadership, and sow mistrust toward the national war effort. On leaving, she loaded me down with a huge stack of pre-Pearl Harbor isolationist literature.

I learned from Mrs. Farber that Mrs. Beatrice Knowles, president of American Mothers, was holding underground meeting. Phoning, I told her of my visits to Mrs. Farber, Vietig and Parker Sage. "Come right over," she invited...

...The MoveOn ad is unapologetic in its selfishness, and barely disguised in its disdain for those who have chosen to serve — and its contempt for those parents who might be proud of sons and daughters who are serving. The ad boldly embraces a vision of a selfish and infantilized America, suggesting that military service and sacrifice are unnecessary and deplorable relics of the past.

And the sole responsibility of others.

...In this light—that is, in light of what was actually known at the time about Saddam Hussein’s actions and intentions, and in light of what was added to our knowledge through his post-capture interrogations by the FBI—the decision to go to war takes on a very different character. The story that emerges is of a choice not only carefully weighed and deliberately arrived at but, in the circumstances, the one moral choice that any American President could make.

Had, moreover, Bush failed to act when he did, the consequences could have been truly disastrous. The next American President would surely have faced the need, in decidedly less favorable circumstances, to pick up the challenge Bush had neglected. And since Bush’s unwillingness to do the necessary thing might rightly have cost him his second term, that next President would probably have been one of the many Democrats who, until March 2003, actually saw the same threat George Bush did.

It is too often forgotten, not least by historians, that George W. Bush did not invent the idea of deposing the Iraqi tyrant. For years before he came on the scene, removing Saddam Hussein had been a priority embraced by the Democratic administration of Bill Clinton and by Clinton’s most vocal supporters in the Senate...

The militant group Hamas said it remains committed to a cease-fire with Israel, but will not act as Israel's "police force" in confronting militants who breach the truce.

The comments by Hamas leader Khalil al-Haya came shortly after Gaza militants fired three rockets into southern Israel Tuesday, lightly wounding two Israelis. It was the first attack since the truce took effect last Thursday [Third -- See below].

Israel responded by closing Gaza's border crossings, which are used to deliver food and basic supplies into the area.

Hamas said it was exerting pressure on Islamic Jihad, which claimed responsibility for the attack, to stop the rocket fire and demanded that Israel open the crossings. But al-Haya said its forces would not confront rocket launching squads on the ground.

"Even if there is a violation by some factions, Hamas emphasizes its commitment to the calm and is working to implement the calm," al-Haya said.

"But Hamas is not going to be a police securing the border of the occupation," he added. "No one will enjoy a happy moment seeing Hamas holding a rifle in the face of a resistance fighter."...

For the third time in eight days, Palestinian Authority terrorists violated the Egyptian-brokered ceasefire with Israel Thursday afternoon in an attack the Fatah-aligned Al Aksa Martyrs Brigade operatives claimed was meant to force Israel to expand the agreement to include Judea and Samaria.

The terrorists fired a Kassam rocket from northern Gaza toward the direction of the western Negev city of Sderot shortly after 1:00 p.m., the third violation since the tahadiyeh, or temporary truce went into effect one week ago...

SAN JOSE, Calif. — The Presbyterian Church is hearing impassioned pleas to declare its solidarity with the Palestinian Arabs by adopting a series of anti-Israel measures, including proposals for divestment and for backing a suspension of American military aid to the Jewish state.

At a session that began yesterday afternoon and stretched into the night, a church committee on peacemaking heard a range of public testimony on the measures, which may be referred on to the American church's general assembly holding its biannual meeting here this week.

"The situation in Palestine is dire. The call from our Palestinian brothers and sisters has fallen on deaf ears," a Presbyterian minister, Reverend William McGarvey of San Francisco, told the committee. "The American Christian church has largely watched this catastrophe continue as if we did not care."

In the first round of votes, the Presbyterian committee seemed to signal a reluctance to trigger a new round of recriminations by re-embracing a divestment initiative that the church adopted in 2004, but shied away from two years later. Last night, the peacemaking panel voted, 32-23, to strike language that would authorize a council of church leaders to carry out divestment without further approval from the general assembly.

However, moments later, the committee voted, 38-26, to endorse the Amman Call, a peace proposal that includes a Palestinian Arab "right of return," a guarantee that Jewish leaders contend would lead to the demise of Israel as a Jewish state...

They came to our home at 8.00pm and took us to their base and beat us throughout the night. They kept us without anything to eat for the next day then they gave us a final beating at the end of the second day and let us go. There were youths and war vets. (Victim testimony)

On March 29th 2008 Zimbabweans went to the polls and changed history. For the first time since Independence in 1980, the Zanu PF party lost its majority in parliament and Robert Mugabe lost the Presidential vote. The Zanu PF regime immediately embarked on a campaign of violence and reprisal attacks against an unarmed peaceful civilian population. Images of brutalised people accompanied by video testimony from the victims has been viewed around the world instilling horror in all those who have seen it.

Sokwanele has mapped a sample of the cases based on recorded first hand testimony from victims, and the interactive map so far bears witness to over 1,000 confirmed experiences of terror and intimidation. The map can be viewed on our website at this url: http://www.sokwanele.com/map/electionviolence.

We have to stress that this map reflects only a sample of the cases of violence in Zimbabwe...

A new study using data from Chandra and ground-based telescopes, combined with detailed theoretical models, shows that the supermassive black hole in M81 feeds just like stellar mass black holes, with masses of only about ten times that of the sun. This discovery supports Einstein's relativity theory that states black holes of all sizes have similar properties.

...Which is why the identification and captivation with Jewish and Zionist ideas that Obama expressed to Jeffrey Goldberg recently came so naturally to him. No self-aware person with Obama’s background could have failed to notice the harmony between his experience and the experiences of the Jews. But more importantly, he augmented that harmony by living a life deeply informed by Jewish influences and profoundly if not uniquely Jewish in the shape it took. Though not a Person of the Book, he is a person of books, of philosophy and literature, in a richer sense than any president (excepting Lincoln) since the early days of the American republic — with all the baggage as well as the benefits attendant upon a commitment to a life of self-reflection. The otherwise inexplicable angst, hesitation, and “on the other hand”-ism he frequently displays in answering what ought to be straightforward questions are a direct product of the time he spent in latter-day Talmud study in a particularly philosophically-inclined law faculty at Chicago.

If elected, Obama will be the first president to demonstrate so many symptoms of what Joyce called the agenbite of inwit (from ME, meaning “remorse of conscience”), a soul-sickness carrying the potential both to debilitate and to creatively free the introspective man or woman. For Joyce, the concept of the agenbite is expansive enough to cover nearly all those in the modern age grasping for and unable to find concrete, stable concepts of identity and historical progression by which to gain a foothold on their world—- a universal concept.

But at the same time, it is no accident that the paradigm case of the agenbite, Joyce’s autobiographical projection Stephen Dedalus, is called a “jesting jew jesuit.” The condition is both a blessing and a curse the Jewish people have bequeathed onto the societies in which they have dwelt in their nomadic wanderings, and a bridge that links any “stranger in a strange land” to each other and to Jewish history...

Teachers College at Columbia University is suspending indefinitely Madonna Constantine, a professor who claimed she was the victim of a hate crime after an investigation began into allegations that she committed plagiarism.

In a letter sent out yesterday to Teachers College faculty, the college president, Susan Fuhrman, and dean, Thomas James, said the faculty advisory committee had rejected Ms. Constantine's appeal of the plagiarism charges. They said Ms. Constantine was suspended as of yesterday but that she is entitled to appeal the decision or request a hearing before the faculty executive committee.

The letter, obtained by The New York Sun from a source at Teachers College, said the faculty advisory committee upheld an 18-month investigation by a Manhattan law firm, Hughes Hubbard & Reed, which found that Ms. Constantine had plagiarized two dozen times works of two former doctoral students and a former colleague.

"During the months since the College levied sanctions against her," the letter said, "Professor Constantine continued to make accusations of plagiarism, including in at least one instance to the press, against those whose works she had plagiarized."...

The publisher of a prominent academic art journal has paid $75,000 and committed to making a public apology to an Israeli scholar who was the subject of a critical review by a controversial Columbia University professor, the Forward has learned.

The College Art Association, publisher of Art Journal, made the payment as part of a settlement reached a month ago pertaining to an article written by Joseph Massad, an associate professor of modern Arab politics at Columbia who is embroiled in a tenure dispute and has been criticized by some Jewish students on campus.

The CAA had been threatened by a lawsuit in the United Kingdom by Gannit Ankori, chair of the art-history department at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Ankori objected to an article written by Massad that was published in the fall 2007 edition of Art Journal. In his article, which was titled "Permission to Paint: Palestinian Art and the Colonial Encounter," Massad accused Ankori of "drawing heavily" on the works of a Palestinian artist in her book "Palestinian Art" without giving proper credit — allegations that Ankori disputed.

The Chronicle of Higher Education first reported on the existence of the settlement between Ankori and the CAA, but additional details of the agreement, in particular the financial compensation, were obtained by the Forward on Friday. In an e-mail, Ankori said that she will use the settlement money to pay for her legal bills and donate the remainder to the Parents Circle, a grass-roots organization of Palestinian and Israeli families who lost loved ones in the conflict and are now working together for peace.

Massad, who could not be reached for comment Friday, told the Chronicle that the settlement was a "cowardly act." He acknowledged that his article did contain a few errors but said that the CAA should have defended the right to an open academic debate...

Few remember that there were more Jewish refugees from Arab countries than of Palestinians from Israel. In 1948 there were 856,000 Jews living in Arab countries. By 2005, only about 5,000.

This Monday, through Wednesday, in London a cooperative of 77 Jewish communities and organizations in 20 countries, Justice For Jews, will hold a conference and briefing to Parliament on the plight of these Jews...

The people of Israel cannot claim to be planted as vines in the land; they cannot be rooted in the vineyard unless they are first grafted into Jesus. Branches that attempt living in the land, the vineyard, which refuse to be attached to Jesus will be cast out and burned. (Whose Land, Whose Promise, Page 176)...

...Once upon a time, and not that long ago, it meant something if your book was reviewed in The New York Times Book Review. A Times review imparted a vital existential certification as well as a commercial boost. Is that still the case? Less and less, I believe. The Times in general has lost influence as the paper has receded into parochial, left-liberal boosterism and politically correct reportage. And where its news and comment have become increasingly politicized, its cultural coverage has become increasingly superficial and increasingly captive of establishment, i.e., left-liberal, pieties and “lifestyle” radicalism.

Sure, a positive review in the Times still helps sell books. But it’s quite clear that books from Encounter won’t be getting those reviews, so it is pointless for us to send copies of our books to the Times—worse than pointless, because by so doing we help to perpetuate the charade that the Book Review is anything like even-handed in its treatment of conservative books. There is also this fact: the real impetus in selling books has decisively shifted away from legacy outlets like The New York Times towards the pluralistic universe of talk radio and the “blogosphere.” That is why Encounter can see its books on the Times’s bestseller list without ever making it into the paper’s review columns...

The America First Committee had become the voice of American Fascism and the spearhead aimed at the heart of Democracy, carrying to their doom many who were innocent and would have resigned in disgust had they known what went on behind the scenes. An official of the Committee, Judge Mildred Dugan confirmed my convictions by saying candidly:

"Eighty per cent of the membership is Coughlinite, and there isn't the least doubt in my mind that at the present rate the anti-Semites and the Coughlinites will come out on top eventually."

The Monday after Pearl Harbor I received the December 6 issue of the America First Bulletin and read the headline: "Blame for Rift with Japan Rests on Administration." It was the same old cry of denouncing our own family of Americans and, by implication, exonerating the Axis of all evil. And by an irony of fate, a typical letter from William R. Castle appeared in the New York Sunday Herald Tribune on the morning of Pearl Harbor, and it read:

Why should we go to war with Japan? To that question I have never received a reasonable answer, except the answer always made by those who feel we should interfere anywhere in the world. People like our bellicose Secretery of the Navy announce that trouble is inevitable...

...Foxnews reports that UNICEF has linked up with a Saudi Arabian charity organization with branches that the US Treasury has designated "terrorist entities." The organization, IIRO, has offices in the Philippines and Indonesia which fund and support terrorist groups that have killed hundreds in East Asia. The Philippine branch was founded by Osama bin Laden's brother-in-law, Muhammad Jamal Khalifah, and has long had ties to Al Qaeda.

In addition, the UN itself has singled out the above two branches for an asset freeze, arms embargo and travel ban on members of the groups. The UN says that the Indonesian and Philippine branches of IIRO are tied to Al Qaeda and the Taliban...

...Regarding IIRO, de Bono said, "UNICEF does not and will not engage with" the two East Asian branches of IIRO, Foxnews reported. But according to Anne Bayefsky, senior editor of watchdog group Eye on the U.N., it is far from clear that "an organization that's headquartered in one country is really disconnected from operations which bear the same name in other countries and are referred to as branches."

In fact, the U.S. Treasury Department says that Abd Al Hamid Sulaiman Al-Mujil, who heads the IIRO's Eastern Province branch, has been directly funding the two terror-tied branches - as well as Al-Qaeda - straight from his office in Saudi Arabia.

Into the America First offices poured a daily stream of my "friends" I knew or personally recognized seeing at subversive meetings. There was no partiality. Anyone who asked for literature got it -- free of charge.

The office [of the America First Committee] at 515 Madison Avenue, where I worked as volunteer was a bedlam. Volunteers stayed till the early morning hours, energized by a hot revivalist fever. Mothers stayed away from their homes and family life was disrupted in a crusade for peace at any sell-out price. Sitting at the volunteers' table, I heard a great deal of intimate talk. This sort of thing:

"I haven't cooked supper in three weeks and my husband is sore."

"Well, we've all got to sacrifice to save our country. After all, it's Roosevelt who wants war, not Hitler."

"Roosevelt and the internationalists."

"You mean the Jews. Don't be afraid to say it, sister."

"They ain't all bad. There's a Rabbi Charles Fleischer who speaks for the Committee, and that fellow doing the publicity for us..."

"Sydney Hertzberg, that's his name."

"Yeah, and Mrs. Paul palmer on the Committee. She's wealthy and she's Jewish, you know."

"These are good Jews, but most of them are bad."

I had been watching a small, kindly-faced grandmother with white hair and a wrinkled face. She worked quietly and rarely spoke. Once or twice we had exchanged smiles and I had taken a fancy to her. I felt she had something on her mind and had noticed her leave the table several times when the discussion was hottest. Suddenly she froze the volunteers by saying in a thin, clear voice:

"I don't think it's fair of you to talk that way about the Jews. We're not fighting this war against the Jews and I can't understand why you are always talking against them. I'm here because I don't want to see my grandchildren go to war, but I'm not going to speak against any race of people. I don't think you ladies are being Christian at all."

I felt like rushing over and hugging grandma, but it would have been my suicide as investigator.

According to the report, Leviev, who is the chairman of Africa Israel Investments, is in charge of at least one company in his conglomerate which the Arab rights advocacy group Adalah-NY claims built Jewish settlements on West Bank land.

Adalah-NY launched a campaign against Leviev whereby they appealed to the UN children's fund UNICEF to cut its connection with the Israeli businessman, the report said. UNICEF has received direct and indirect funding from Leviev over the years.

Following its review of the charges set by Adalah-NY, the UN group decided to end its relationship with Leviev after concluding that there was "at least a reasonable grounds for suspecting" his company had supported West Bank construction, Reuters reported...

How can there be such a discrepancy in interpretations of international law? When Israel is accused of violations, such as over the blockade of Gaza, is it not possible simply to read what's on the books?

Herein lies the problem. Most of international law is not "on the books."

Here's an analogy: Imagine you're at a football game, and you don't really know the rules. You watch these players running around on the field and try to figure out from what they're doing what the rules are. You see one player pushing another, and ask yourself: Is that according to the rules? Is that against the rules? Do the rules even have anything to say about that? And the only people who will give you answers are fans of one team or the other. So naturally, many of them are giving you selective interpretations. In other words, it's very difficult to figure out what international law actually is. Much of it is known as "customary law" - the law that is not written anywhere, but which states do because they think they're legally obliged to do. To figure out what the custom is, you have to see states do it, and figure that the reason they did it is because they think they're supposed to by law.

Precisely because it's hard to know what the actual law is, there is a great reliance on experts. But experts have their ideologies, like everyone else, and many experts mix in their ideology with their expertise. So, you end up with legal opinions that are half politics and half law. And the hotter the legal issue - the more it's something like the Arab-Israeli conflict - the harder it is to get a straight opinion about anything...

Scientists with the Phoenix Mars mission yesterday declared for certain that there is ice on the Red Planet, putting them an essential step closer to answering the question that has driven three decades of Mars exploration and centuries of Earth-bound speculation: Could there have been life there?

Pictures beamed 170 million miles to Earth from the Phoenix lander atop Mars's northern polar plain erased any doubt about the presence of ice, they said.

But the evidence came in a roundabout way. Last Sunday, several dice-size solids were observed at the bottom of a trench that had been dug by Phoenix's robotic arm. On Thursday, they were gone.

The only reasonable explanation, the scientists said, is that the objects were pieces of ice that evaporated into the dry Martian atmosphere through a process called sublimation. And the presence of ice means that Mars might once have had liquid water, which is essential for life -- at least as it is known on Earth.

It is too soon to know whether the entire astrophysical community will accept the disappearing objects reported yesterday as proof, but the Phoenix researchers said they do not need any more convincing...

True, its leadership at first was as American as Plymouth Rock. But the rank and file following -- at first sincere and respectable -- was later polluted by the Pelleys, Coughlins, McWilliamses; the Vierecks, Kuhns and Deatherages; by Klansmen; by Japanese and Nazi agents. And its weak-kneed leadership, cowed and bullied by stories of Nazi might, swayed by Chamberlain sentimentality and Pollyanna smugness, took craven comfort in the delusion that they were "defending America." The surrender of a mighty nation in appeasement to Hitler might easily have been the outcome if the designs of its two most publicized spokesmen had been carried through.

Its national chairman, General Robert E. Wood, told Kenneth Crawford a reporter for PM, a New York newspaper, that in the event of an invasion of South America by a Nazi armada, he would defend our Latin Allies "only the part as far south as the bulge of Brazil." Without firing a shot in self-defense, the General indicated his willingness to let Hitler seize more than half of South America, plant his legions firmly on the Western Hemisphere and place the Panama Canal at the mercy of his Luftwaffe.

William R. Castle, another founder of the America First Committee, expressed amazing shortsightedness for a former official of the State Department. Apparently dominated by Viereck's syrupy assurances that Hitler was the friend of all and the enemy of none, Castle wrote in the Nazi organ Today's Challenge:

Let's mind our own business -- and keep our powder dry -- avoid all the ideologies which are contrary to our own good system. Let us so live our own lives in a world of neighbors that we shall be a power for good because we have the respect of all.

This sample of infantile trust after years of relentless Nazi aggression during which Democracies crumbled one by one because they, too, believed in Hitler's promises, remained dominant with the "new leadership." Faith in Hitler but an unreasoning lack of faith in the Administration -- these were the cornerstones of the Committee's policy of appeasement and defeatism which corroded our democratic fibre. It delighted Nazi commentators, who crooned from Berlin: "The America First Committee is known as true Americanism and true patriotism, as opposed to the synthetic brand."

"Patriotic" meetings of the Mobilizers and the Bund fell down in attendance, while most of the other fascistic groups were suspended altogether as their members flocked to America First rallies...

...Respected U.S. foreign policy experts call for Washington to be cautious in the Middle East and warn presidents that too much support for Israel will carry serious international costs. When presidents overrule their expert advisers and take a pro-Israel position, observers attribute the move to the "Israel lobby" and credit (or blame) it for swaying the chief executive. But there is another factor to consider. As the Truman biographer David McCullough has written, Truman's support for the Jewish state was "wildly popular" throughout the United States. A Gallup poll in June 1948 showed that almost three times as many Americans "sympathized with the Jews" as "sympathized with the Arabs." That support was no flash in the pan. Widespread gentile support for Israel is one of the most potent political forces in U.S. foreign policy, and in the last 60 years, there has never been a Gallup poll showing more Americans sympathizing with the Arabs or the Palestinians than with the Israelis.

Over time, moreover, the pro-Israel sentiment in the United States has increased, especially among non-Jews. The years of the George W. Bush administration have seen support for Israel in U.S. public opinion reach the highest level ever, and it has remained there throughout Bush's two terms. The increase has occurred even as the demographic importance of Jews has diminished. In 1948, Jews constituted an estimated 3.8 percent of the U.S. population. Assuming that almost every American Jew favored a pro-Israel foreign policy that year, a little more than ten percent of U.S. supporters of Israel were of Jewish origin. By 2007, Jews were only 1.8 percent of the population of the United States, accounting at most for three percent of Israel's supporters in the United States.

These figures, dramatic as they are, also probably underestimate the true level of public support for Israel...

Think back some 40 years to the release of Nostra Aetate, the revolutionary Vatican document that inexorably changed the nature of Catholic-Jewish relations. It firmly confronted old church attitudes and teachings that Jews suffered under for centuries. It unequivocally asserted the historical and theological dignity of the Jewish people.

Imagine if, a week later, Pope Paul VI stood on the porch of Castel Gandolfo and announced, "There has been a terrible misunderstanding. All we meant is that when we complain, as we must from time to time, about price-gouging around Christmas by pushy Jewish merchants (by that we only mean some of them, of course), we should not go so far as to blame them for the crucifixion. That hurts their feelings."

In May, the Presbyterian Church (USA) released "Vigilance against Anti-Jewish Ideas and Bias." Jewish organizations were effusive in their praise. The last decade has seen a spike in violent anti-Semitic hate crimes in Europe. The document could not have been more welcomed and well timed.

The love-fest was short lived. In June, the PC(USA) removed the original document from its website and replaced it with "Vigilance against Anti-Jewish Bias: In the Pursuit of Israeli-Palestinian Peace."

It would be hard to construct two more dissimilar documents with similar titles...

Intelligence agencies in the United States and Canada are warning of mounting signs that Hezbollah, backed by Iran, is poised to mount a terror attack against "Jewish targets" somewhere outside the Middle East.

Intelligence officials tell ABC News the group has activated suspected "sleeper cells" in Canada and key operatives have been tracked moving outside the group's Lebanon base to Canada, Europe and Africa.

Officials say Hezbollah is seeking revenge for the February assassination of Hezbollah's military commander, Imad Mugniyah, killed by a car bomb in Damascus, Syria.

The group's leaders blamed Israel, an allegation denied by Israeli officials.

There is no credible information on a specific target, according to the officials.

Suspected Hezbollah operatives have conducted recent surveillance on the Israeli embassy in Ottawa, Canada and on several synagogues in Toronto, according to the officials...

As Israel, Hamas and Hezbollah negotiate the release of Israeli soldiers captured in terror attacks, Hamas is sowing the seeds of the next kidnapping.

Hamas TV is broadcasting a video clip showing Hamas training exercises that include the simulated kidnapping of an Israeli soldier. The segment includes an Israeli tank exploding, followed by images of a Hamas fighter carrying and running with a captured Israeli soldier.

..."The Jewish groups go nuts every time we make any statement they interpret as favorable to Palestine or the Palestinians," Van Marter told NJJN.

Van Marter said church leaders amended their first statement "to make it more balanced, and apparently it still doesn’t satisfy our Jewish friends. It is tough for Presbyterians because there is a Christian population in the occupied territories. The Christians are a very small minority, and they are shrinking because they are caught in the crossfires. The Presbyterian Church understands precisely why Jewish groups are upset, because we refuse to be one-sided. We’ve been on record for a two-state solution for 60 years now."...

..."A paper that supposedly is dealing with removing anti-Jewish bias in fact becomes a paper on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. If you read it through, that's really the major theme," said Rabbi Eric Yoffie, president of the Union for Reform Judaism. "And it presents that conflict in a terribly one-sided way. Ultimately, the anti-Semitism part seems in many cases like an afterthought."...

A few nights later I went to Carnegie Hall. As George Pagnanelli, the "patriotic" editor, I was invited to grace the platform, but I sat there only long enough to ascertain that the corpulent fellow occupying a platform seat was John Cecil, speaker for the American Nationalist Party and the Christian Front. I saw a lot of ladies dressed in fine clothes, and I saw my rabble pals hobnobbing with Park Avenue. Thomas Malone, salesman for National American was distributing free copies of The American Vindicator, next to a salesman selling Social Justice...

...Was this, too, a "coalition" meeting of America First? Not quite. It was a meeting of Women United, an America First Committee subsidiary, and Senator Reynolds was the guest of honor. Deatherage took it upon himself to instruct Mrs. Geraldine Buchanan Parker, executive secretary, on the "respectable" way of disseminating anti-Semitism:

Your literature does not need to state the word -- Jew. All you have to do in order to place the blame where the people can understand it is to accuse the international bankers. The masses have now been educated to understand what is meant...Senator Holt can give you the information, you can quote from the Congressional Record -- it is there.

...At Congregation Shearith Israel, a conservative synagogue in Virginia-Highland, where Pamela Harris works as the senior nonclerical staff member, at least eight of the roughly 20 people learning about Judaism with Rabbi Hillel Norry are black.

At the Marcus Jewish Community Center in Dunwoody, roughly 20 percent of the nearly two dozen people enrolled in Steven Chervin's introduction to Judaism classes are black.

Although there are no sound statistics on the subject, anecdotal evidence suggests that, in the past 15 years, increasing numbers of black Americans are exploring Judaism, said Gary Tobin, president of the Institute for Jewish & Community Research in San Francisco.

"Ten years ago, it was almost unheard of that a black person would come in and want to convert," said Rabbi Ilan Feldman, who is working with the Harrises and two other black people pursuing conversion.

Until their conversion courses intensified last year, the Harrises led a weekly learning/support group in Decatur for about a dozen African-Americans interested in Judaism...

Following are excerpts from an interview with Hamas Minister of Culture 'Atallah Abu Al-Subh, which aired on Al-Aqsa TV on June 15, 2008.

'Atallah Abu Al-Subh: "Assalam Alaykum and Allah's mercy and blessings upon you. In the name of Allah, the Merciful, the Compassionate. May Allah give us the strength to confront all the satans, and first and foremost, Condoleezza Rice, who has come to the region for the sixth time since the conspiracy of Annapolis - the lie most dangerous to the Palestinian people in recent months...

..."With the arrival of that black scorpion with a cobra's head, Condoleezza, I began to worry that she would use her venomous fangs and hiss to kill this initiative and new spirit that we should protect...

..."The arrival of Condoleezza Rice is not a good sign. An even worse sign is the meeting between the Palestinian leadership and the Zionist entity, in the presence of that scorpion-cobra. Condoleezza Rice, you are not welcome...

..."Every proud Palestinian views you as a murderer, and sees the blood of the children of Palestine between your lips and on your fangs. I pray to Allah that you will soon slither away, along with your master who is more Zionist than the Zionists, that murderer and criminal, whose place in history is more advanced than that of Nero, Hulagu, Genghis Khan, Timor the Lame, Hitler, and Mussolini, and before them that of Nimrod - that criminal murderer, little Bush, who is striving to fan the flames in this region...

..."Bush believes in the same idea as the Jews: The land from the Euphrates to the Nile is yours, oh Israel...

..."We must be very wary of the rotten American policies in the region, which are represented by the scorpion-cobra Condoleezza...

..."Rest assured that we will foil the Zionist-American enterprise, which is represented and implemented by the neocons, led by little Bush and the scorpion-cobra, Condoleezza Rice. May Allah curse her and her visit. She is not welcome."

In September, the University of Michigan Press faced intense criticism from pro-Israel groups — and questions from some regents — over its distribution of a book called Overcoming Zionism, which argues that the creation of Israel was a mistake and urges adoption of the “one state” solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in which Israelis and Palestinians would form a new country, without a Jewish character. Michigan wasn’t the publisher, but it distributed the book under a deal with Pluto Press, a leftist British publisher with extensive lists on the Middle East and international affairs.

Some critics of the book demanded that Michigan stop distributing the book, which it briefly did, and cut ties to Pluto immediately. The university declined to do so, and resumed distributing the book, citing both contractual obligations to Pluto and concerns that halting distribution because of content would raise issues of academic freedom. By the end of this year, however, Michigan will no longer be distributing the book or have any ties to Pluto Press...

I believe you were interested in the status of the distribution contract between Pluto Press and the University of Michigan Press. An update… the UM Press executive board recently completed a review of all current press distribution clients.. After careful examination, the UM Press Executive Board determined that the Pluto Press mission and procedures are not reasonably similar to UM Press as specified by the guidelines and therefore do not meet the requirements to continue as a distribution client. As a result the contract was terminated, effective December 31, 2008.

It seems too lunatic to be true. But here a hair salon boss reveals how she was driven to the brink of ruin - and forced to pay £4,000 for 'hurt feelings' - after refusing to hire a Muslim stylist who wouldn't show her hair at work

For Sarah Desrosiers, meeting Bushra Noah was not a moment in her life that she would describe as especially memorable.

Not only was it brief - lasting little more than ten minutes - but it was rapidly obvious to Sarah that Bushra was not the person for the junior stylist position she was trying to fill at her hairdressing salon.

Sarah's reasoning? Quite simply that Bushra, a Muslim who wears a headscarf for religions reasons, had made it clear she would not be removing the garment even while at work.

Sarah felt that a job requirement of any hairdresser was that the stylist's hair would provide clients with a showcase of different looks. Especially one working in a salon such as hers, which specialises in alternative cuts and colours.

Yet the ten minutes during which Sarah's world collided with Bushra's has resulted in an extraordinary employment battle, in which she was accused of 'direct' and 'indirect' discrimination.

For a year, Sarah has been facing financial ruin, due to a compensation claim for £34,000 brought by Bushra, 19, who has maintained she is due that figure after being turned down for a job at the Wedge salon in London's King's Cross.

In the event, the tribunal ruled this week that while Bushra's claim of direct discrimination failed, her claim for indirect discrimination had succeeded.

Sarah has therefore been ordered to pay £4,000 compensation by way of 'injury to feelings'...

I was also eager to interview Congressman John E. Rankin because of a tragic event which took place in the Hose on June 4, 1941. On that day Ranking delivered one of several blistering condemnations of American Jews as "war mongers." Rising to protest against the slander, Representative M. Michael Edelstein pointed out that the meeting of so-called "international bankers" which "took place yesterday on the steps of the Sub-Treasury [Building] was entirely controlled by persons other than Jewish bankers."

As Congressman Edelstein's closing words: "All men are created equal, regardless of race, creed or color" rang to the applause of his colleagues, he strode from the House to go to his chambers. Just outside the entrance he collapsed. He was carried, limp, to a couch in the adjacent House reading room. Congressman Edelstein was dead.

His tragic death was greeted by American Nazis with all the fanfare of a Nazi military victory. Fascist speakers turned down other topics to apostrophize the "patriotism" of the Congressman from Mississippi. Rankin's name became indelibly inscribed on the international fascist roll of honor and was lauded in the January 15, 1940, issue of World Service.

This was the man I arranged to see.

A sharp-eyed, shrewd, callous little man, with volatile and fanatic energy, Rankin asked me to leave my camera behind as we walked into his room. My first thought was that he was a Klansman. Peculiarly enough, during the ensuing conversation he brought up the subject and said that he had been charged with being a Klansman. He had answered: "I don't have to belong to any organization to be pro-American."

He had received my letter, he said, and read the inclosures, but could not find it at the moment. He asked for my name again and when I repeated it, he demanded:

"First tell me why you wanted to see me."

I wold him that we had read about Congressman Edelstein and I was eager to shake the hand of an "American." This obviously pleased Rankin because he burst into a smile. "Yeah, he keeled over," he said. Crossing his little legs, Rankin turned his face, cross-patched with wrinkles and advised:

"When you go back to New York, you tell them this. There is only one way to win this fight and that is to expose the international Jewish bankers as the war mongers. Tell the people that it is the Jews who want war. Do that and you've got half the battle won." Rankin then boasted that Senator Hiram W. Johnson had said of him: "This man has done more in one minute than any other man in the past six months."

The most complex, "mind-boggling" crop circle ever to be seen in Britain has been discovered in a barley field in Wiltshire.

The formation, measuring 150ft in diameter, is apparently a coded image representing the first 10 digits, 3.141592654, of pi.

It is has appeared in a field near Barbury Castle, an iron-age hill fort above Wroughton, Wilts, and has been described by astrophysicists as "mind-boggling".

Michael Reed, an astrophysicist, said: "The tenth digit has even been correctly rounded up. The little dot near the centre is the decimal point...

Harvard Professor J. Lorand Matory claims that he is seeking a greater civility on campus through reasoned academic discourse, but his real intention seems to be to create that civility by having only his side of the discussion be heard.

As evidence of what Professor Edward Alexander has called "the explosive power of boredom" in rousing the liberal professoriate to its ideological feet, Harvard's prolific Professor of Anthropology and of African and African American Studies, J. Lorand Matory, was yet again fulminating in the June 5th issue of the Harvard Crimson about the “chilling” of free speech on campus and seeking, as he has been for some time now, "a civil dialogue in which people with a broad range of perspectives feel safe and are encouraged to express their reasoned and evidence-based ideas."

And what were those "reasoned" ideas that had caused Professor Matory to feel "unsafe" on Harvard's insulated campus? Criticism of Zionism and Israel, of course, an issue about which Professor Matory and others have many notorious opinions, but which are being suppressed, in his ominous view, through "imbalances in access to money, media, and society’s administrative apparatuses [which] constitute the censorship of dissent." Professor Matory's implication is that on this one issue — criticism of Israel — the sacrosanct notion of "academic free speech" is being threatened by Israel’s defenders who wish to stifle all speech critical of the Jewish state.

That reference in Matory’s opening line to “access to money, media, and society’s administrative apparatuses” as a tool to obviate criticism of Israel is itself particularly odious, as it echoes precisely the classic form of anti-Semitism which positions Jews as the holders of great power, wealth, and influence, and those able to sway public opinion to protect Jewish interests — which in current times has meant Israel’s interests...

...Finally, what is most curious about Corrie’s Journals is that hard as she tried to impose the ISM narrative on what she saw, her reports constantly contradicted this narrative, though she didn’t recognize the contradictions.

She wrote that decades of occupation had oppressed Palestinians, yet Gazans kept saying that their difficult situation was due to the Intifada and to Israel’s subsequent counterterrorism measures, not to a decades-old occupation. One Gazan said, “There was a peaceful time in the late seventies and early eighties…things were better before Sharon”—that is, before Sharon became Prime Minister in 2001. (253) Another told her: “Before—no tanks, no bulldozers, no gunshots. Quiet….No noise. After Intifada, daily. Gunshots daily.”

She even confirmed that conditions in Gaza worsened only with the Intifada. She wrote that 60,000 people from Rafah had worked in Israel in 2001, but that the number had dropped to 600 by 2003. But she never drew the logical conclusion that her Gazan informants kept repeating—the terrorist campaign had forced Israel to take defensive measures.

Similarly, Corrie demonized the Israeli soldiers, but they hardly appear demonic. When she and other internationals stand in front of the tanks, the soldiers “open their weird tank lids and wave at us.” The Israeli district command officer worked to “ensure the safety of Palestinian workers.”

Nor, to her surprise, were Palestinians afraid of the soldiers. When a Gazan runs from his home with his two children after ISM mistakenly informed him that his house was to be demolished, she “was terrified to think that this man felt it was less of a risk to walk out in view of the tanks with his kids than to stay in his house.” She tried to interpose herself between him and the tanks, yet he clearly did not need her protection. Children play in full view of the tanks, apparently unafraid. (She was stunned to find that despite tanks and bulldozers passing by, “all of these people are genuinely cheerful”—even though this did not fit into her preconceived notions. When IDF soldiers entered a house to position themselves on the roof, no one was bothered or harassed. The children just watched cartoons on TV...

...The greater tragedy is that her parents are doing the same. Their lack of curiosity about the ISM and their wholesale acceptance of its propaganda are startling, especially given that the ISM put their daughter in danger. Nor has evidence that the ISM activists sheltered known suicide bombers and terrorists, and was barred from entering Israel, dampened their defense of the organization. Instead of using their bitter experience as a warning to parents of other would-be ISM recruits, they are using their position as bereaved parents to win sympathy for the group most responsible for their daughter’s death.

...The Bantu-speaking Lemba are monotheistic, have resisted assimilation, are endogamous, practice circumcision, are buried horizontally (almost all other African tribes bury their dead in a sitting position), practice animal sacrifice, follow a lunar calendar, and observe strict dietary laws akin to kashrut (they do not mix milk and meat or eat pork). Goldstein allows that none of these cultural aspects can be considered "diagnostic"--but again, the whole picture is sufficiently suggestive to hunt for genetic data that could support a link to the Jews. Trefor Jenkins, a South African authority on the genetics of African populations, reported in 1996 that a significant fraction of Y chromosomes of the Lemba was of Semitic origin and not related to other Bantu speakers. Further analysis by Bradman and Goldstein supported Jenkins's early work. Drawing on oral traditions and historical documents, they postulate that the Lemba may have originated in Judea, migrated to Yemen, and then moved to the African continent...

...Tracing genetic lineage is not restricted to studies of the male Y chromosome. We have DNA in our mitochondria, small organelles that are energy factories in the cells. This mitochondrial DNA is inherited strictly from our mothers, and thus traces a matrilineal arc through time. Goldstein recounts the controversy about the Bnei Menashe members of the Kuki-Chin-Mizo tribes in northeastern India near the Myanmar border, who number some seven thousand. Like the Lemba, they have for generations observed strikingly Jewish-like rituals including circumcision and a festival centered around unleavened bread. (Hillel Halkin popularized their story in his book Across the Sabbath River, initially with deep skepticism, and then believing that they may indeed be a remnant of the Lost Tribe of Manasseh.) Genetic analysis failed to demonstrate any "cohanim" Y chromosomes and there was "only equivocal evidence of a Near Eastern origin" using mitochondrial DNA.

Goldstein observes of this skeptical finding that "some commentators took the opportunity to say, essentially, "Ha--told you they weren't 'real' Jews." Then, three years ago, the Sephardic rabbinate recognized them as Jews. Many of them now are making their way to Israel. "In my view, this is a perfect example of when we are best served by ignoring DNA--if living, breathing people want to embrace Judaism, genetics should have nothing to say about it one way or the other." That is the true and ringing message of Goldstein's book...

The Center for Policy and Research at Seton Hall University School of Law has published a new report analyzing false information published as fact in Justice Scalia's dissent to last weeks Guantanamo Bay focused Boumediene v. Bush Supreme Court decision.

JUSTICE SCALIA AND THE URBAN LEGEND OF RECIDIVIST GUANTANAMO DETAINEES

In last week’s pinnacle Supreme Court decision Boumediene v. Bush, the court decided by narrow majority that alleged terrorists held as prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, have a right to access US courts to refute their prisoner status and argue for release. The decision has raised controversy and concern for many reasons. Justice Antonin Scalia’s dissent fueled the fire by using rescinded false statements made by the Department of Defense to argue that the US will be at a great security risk by allowing prisoners to access the court system, rather than relying on the Federal Government and military to determine what prisoners are eligible for release. Using a June 2007 Senate Minority Report based on misinformation provided by the Department of Defense, Scalia illustrated the future “danger” posed by the decision, writing “at least 30 of those prisoners hitherto released from Guantanamo Bay have returned to the battlefield.” Scalia’s statement has been proven false by recent Congressional hearings and additional press releases from the Department of Defense. Scalia’s use of knowingly rescinded information discredits the integrity of the Supreme Court, and serves to perpetuate a series of false information and unwarranted fears held by the general public.

In the latest report commissioned by Congress and published by the Seton Hall University School of Law Center for Policy and Research, entitled Justice Scalia, The Department of Defense, and the Perpetuation of an Urban Legend: The Truth about Recidivism of Released Guantanamo Detainees, the issue of recidivist prisoners is analyzed using Department of Defense and other government released data. During the past 16 months the Department of Defense has regularly refuted its own information, and has backtracked on its own statements concerning operations and prisoner information at Guantanamo Bay. The most recent information released by the Department of Defense on May 20, 2008, reduces the claimed number of recidivist prisoners from 30 to 12. Of the 12 prisoners released who have allegedly returned to the battle field, only six were included in the original 2007 information from which Scalia based his dissent. The May 20 release also states that not one of the 12 prisoners has killed an American, and 11 of the 12 have either been killed or are being held in prison once again.

Several days after police opened an investigation to identify the masked men who were videotaped beating three members of a Palestinian family with sticks a week ago, two settlers from the southern Mount Hebron area were arrested on Tuesday.

One of those arrested is a minor and police estimated that more arrests would be made.

The two settlers who were held Tuesday did not try to resist arrest. They were caught after a police undercover operation...

In February, 1941 through "chain" recommendations from one American Fascist to another, I was urged to go as a delegate with the Paul Revere Sentinels leaving for Washington to sabotage passage of the Lend-Lease Bill. When I phoned Sanctuary he urged me to come and pick up a "package of patriotic literature."

He loaded me down with a huge bundle containing a variety of anti-war, anti-Semitic leaflets, with instructions to give it to Charles Hudson. "If he's not there Mrs. Dilling will do," he said. About twenty-five of us from the Paul Revere Sentinels and the Christian Front arrived in Washington on the morning of February 26, 1941. Mrs. Dilling was in charge of the Mothers' Movement and the lobby of the Plaza Hotel was crowded with a wild, milling mob of women and some men.

"This is my thundering herd," Mrs. Dilling told me. "How do you like it?"

She was perfect in the role of a herd leader.

"Come on, mothers," she yelled. "Let's picket the Senate Building."

Sixty or more women rushed to the exits and took their places in line, carrying American flags. Round and round the Senate Building they went singing The Star-Spangled Banner and Battle Hymn of the Republic. Watching from the opposite sidewalk with other men, the demonstration struck me as pointless. Getting no attention from reporters Mrs. Dilling decided to storm the Capitol steps, hoping for publicity by violating Capitol ordinances. The cops promptly stopped the mob, which was just what Mrs. Dilling wanted. It broke into a howl.

"Don't you dare tell us we can't parade with our sacred American flags."

"These are the flags of our Republic, but wouldn't know that, you Jew stooges," one woman yelled.

"I'll bet it was the internationalists who made the laws."

"Is this America? Who runs this country, the Americans or the internationalist Jews?"

The cops laughed good-naturedly and gently pushed them back. I was amazed at their patience in the face of the abuse and clawing. There was a sentimental side to the scene. Some of the mothers began to cry over sons or husbands killed in the World War. I could sympathize with that and my heart went out to these sincere mothers, for I knew the tragedies that war can bring. But prominent among the mothers was a tall gawky woman who reminded me of the professional weepers the Nazis sent into France to weep in public places and lower morale. When this woman began to cry again, I asked who she was.

"Her name is Miss Rooney," I was told in confidence. "She always cries."

And whenever she cried the short, roly-poly Polish woman from South Bend, Indiana invariably followed. Both began to bawl in sight of reporters, several others began to take out handkerchiefs, and the thing gave signs of spreading through the mob when some of the more farsighted ones put a stop to the crying jag.

"Don't start that now," one of the women whispered to Miss Rooney. "Wait till Mrs. Dilling gets back."

Mrs. Dilling who had quietly gone off, came back panting with the announcement that Congressman Clare E. Hoffman had agreed to see them.

"There, now, there is a Christian man for you," came in a chorus.

The pack instantly fell into line to follow Mrs. Dilling. On the way over they knelt on the dirty sidewalk and committed the sacrilege of reciting the Lord's Prayer -- for the benefit of newspaper reporters and photographers. Anything which publicized their shameful conduct was deemed "patriotic." A man of fanatic leaning, Representative Hoffman received the herd, commended their "patriotism" and said:

"Apparently the Red flag of Communists and the flag of every other organization and country is today more welcome here in Washington than is the flag which carries the Stars and Stripes."

Led by Hoffman, the pack milled its way down to Roy O. Woodruff, Hoffman's colleague from Michigan. Here the Congressmen posed for photographers, while Mrs. Dilling held a placard "Kill Bill 1776 -- Not Our Boys" and Hoffman held the flag. So Mrs. Dilling finally got the publicity she craved.

[...]

Publicity became the mania of their leaders in order to create the impression that their stunts represented the majority of American mothers. This was far from true. "News crazy" reporters, however, provided wide publicity to such stunts as the hanging in effigy of Senator Claude "Benedict Arnold" Pepper and the "death watch" in which mothers dressed completely in black and sat in Senate and House galleries. They badgered officials hostile to appeasement, but were received with open arms by those who thought in like terms. And these Coughlinite Mothers' groups, noisy and discordant, later became another gear within the multiple-geared America First Committee of organized appeasement and defeatism.

The Chicago group -- We, the Mothers, Mobilize for America, Inc. -- reached the lowest ebb of unmotherly infamy when over the signature of Mrs. Grace Keefe, it sent a letter to a Louisiana mother mourning the death of her son on the high seas:

Legal experts advise that if any soldier, draftee, or otherwise, loses his life while executing orders which his superiors have no constitutional authority to give, then those official can be sued as private citizens. We owe it to our loved dead, to the country for which they died, to call to account those who violated our Constitution and heartlessly placed our men in the danger zone between two warring nations while we are at peace...

We, the mothers of American boys, beg you to place the blame for the death of your son where it belongs, and not be deceived by propaganda into blaming a foreign power. In the name of justice, we ask you to call to justice the real murderers of your loved one.

"Impeach Roosevelt" became the cry...

...Two of the three major local bookstores have participated in this censorship process. I have mentioned Harvard Book Store’s disinvitation of Finkelstein. In 2002, Hillel Stavis, owner of the now-defunct Wordsworth bookstore in Harvard Square, played a prominent role in a highly damaging donor boycott of public radio station WBUR, on the grounds that it allegedly broadcast pro-Palestinian points of view too freely. Following my December 2007 lecture at Harvard Law School about the context of my FAS motion, in which I referred to Stavis as having “led” the boycott, he screamed at me from the audience and threatened to sue me...

Apparently, the subject of Jews and Israel has taken over the cranium of Professor J. Lorand Matory. It would seem that his area of expertise in the field of African Anthropology has taken a back seat to his obsession with Israel’s alleged "crimes". Not content with misrepresenting and slandering me at a Center for Middle Eastern Studies talk he gave at the Law School last December ("What's Troubling about Zionism: An African-American Perspective"), Professor Matory decided recently to compound his original venality by publishing yet another personal attack (I was not alone as the object of his screed) in The Crimson (June 12th, 2008 - "What Do Critics of Israel Have to Fear?").

I had never met nor laid eyes on Mr. Matory when I decided to attend his December "lecture". To my surprise, he launched into a personal rant against me and my decision to suspend my advertising on WBUR, the local NPR affiliate. I was sitting less than 3 feet from the professor as he looked at me, not knowing who I was, and proceeded to hurl insults at me for the apparent mortal sin of choosing which non-profit organizations to contribute to. Obviously, the Israel-obsessed professor didn’t expect the object of his derision to be sitting next to him. His shock was so great that, in my opinion, his first defensive reaction was to hurl even more invectives my way. During the Q and A I identified myself - to Professor Matory’s chagrin - and disabused him of his misrepresentations of fact. I also asked him to supply me with a list of the non-profit groups he contributed to so that I might vet them for eventual approval.

Contrary to the shocked Professor’s assertion that I "screamed at him", I laid out the facts of the case calmly and accurately. I informed him that I had led no boycott and my decision was a personal one, arising out of NPR’s clearly documented history of imbalance when dealing with the Israel-Arab conflict. Reminding him that NPR is obligated, under Federal Law, to report with fairness and balance, I cited numerous examples in which that requirement had been violated. Indeed, NPR was so roundly criticized for its coverage of the Arab Israeli conflict, that in 2003, its president, Kevin Klose, aided by an expensive Washington PR firm and WBUR’s then director, Jane Christo, appeared before an audience of hundreds of people, but failed to provide credible responses to scores of documented instances of bias and factual errors.

Given the amount of time Professor Matory spends denigrating and misrepresenting Israel, perhaps he should shift his efforts to the The Center for Middle Eastern Studies. From his obsession, it is now clear that his spearheading the drive to oust former President Summers arose not from any ill-chosen comments on women in the sciences, but primarily from President Summers’ opposition to the divestment- from- Israel campaign led by Mr. Matory. Professor Matory had his knives out for Larry Summers the minute he detected support for Israel. The perverse use of professorial tenure to launch personal attacks on anyone who dares to engage in legitimate criticism is a blight on Harvard’s good name.

Sincerely,
Hillel Stavis
Cambridge

• Over the past several years, Iranian leaders - most prominently, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad - have made numerous statements calling for the destruction of Israel and the Jewish people. While certain experts have interpreted these statements to be simple expressions of dissatisfaction with the current Israeli government and its policies, in reality, the intent behind Ahmadinejad's language and that of others is clear.
• What emerges from a comprehensive analysis of what Ahmadinejad actually said - and how it has been interpreted in Iran - is that the Iranian president was not just calling for "regime change" in Jerusalem, but rather the actual physical destruction of the State of Israel. When Ahmadinejad punctuates his speech with "Death to Israel" (marg bar Esraiil), this is no longer open to various interpretations.
• A common motif of genocide incitement is the dehumanization of the target population. The Nazi weekly Der Stürmer portrayed Jews as parasites and locusts. Ahmadinejad said in a speech on October 26, 2005: "In the Middle East, they [the global powers] have created a black and filthy microbe called the Zionist regime."
• Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who succeeded Ayatollah Khomeini in 1989, has made statements about Israel similar to Ahmadinejad. On December 15, 2000, he declared on Iranian TV: "Iran's position, which was first expressed by the Imam [Khomeini] and stated several times by those responsible, is that the cancerous tumor called Israel must be uprooted from the region.
• Michael Axworthy, who served as the Head of the Iran Section of Britain's Foreign and Commonwealth Office, notes that when the slogan "Israel must be wiped off the map" appeared "draped over missiles in military parades, that meaning was pretty clear."
• There is an ample legal basis for the prosecution of Ahmadinejad in the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court for direct and public incitement to commit genocide and crimes against humanity.

[Buchanan’s citation of the quip of the aristocratic hostess Nancy Witcher Langhorne as an authority on Versailles is revealing and gives his game away—a woman known for her virulent anti-Semitism, pro-Hitler appeasement, and close correspondence with another kindred soul in Ambassador Joseph Kennedy. Her slurs about Czechoslovakian refugees, prejudice toward Catholics, lunatic pronouncements on slavery and blacks, and reprehensible slanders of British soldiers proved her to be unhinged—but apparently earns a citation of wisdom from Buchanan.]

A Palestinian Arab mob on Saturday night attacked a group of Israeli soldiers sent to arrest seven wanted terrorists in a village near Bethlehem.

Several Israeli army jeeps surrounded the house where the terrorists were located and demanded they surrender themselves. Moments later, some 200 Palestinians from the arrived at the scene and began hurling stones at the Israelis.

Israel National News reports that the soldiers, looking to give the kind of proportional response the international community demands of Israel, hurled the stones right back at their assailants. Seven of the Arabs were wounded. There were no reports of injuries to Israeli military personnel.

The University of Michigan Press Board sent a letter to Pluto Press last week informing them that the University Press will not be renewing its distribution contract with Pluto. As you know, Pluto Press is a British based publisher of many anti-America, anti-Semitic and anti-Israel books. After the contractually obligated six months notice period, UM Press will no longer be distributing Pluto Press books. The official announcement should be made this week at the U of M Board of Regents meeting.

In the fall of 1938 while riding in a New York subway, I picked up a leaflet entitled Why Are Jews Persecuted for Their Religion? It was printed on cheap, gray newsprint and included four pages of bitterly anti-Semitic quotations and distorted passages from American History. The leaflet urged "American patriots" to "rise up as one man and clean house politically and economically." It bore the imprint of the Nationalist Press Association, 147 East 116th Street, New York. Pricked by curiosity I decided to look up these headquarters of "Americanism."

We moved along to Times Square and stopped in front of Nedick's orange drink stand at the corner of 42nd Street to watch five Social Justice salesmen in operation. [Social Justice was Father Coughlin's paper. -S] Pete Stahrenberg was there, waiting for Dan and me. After a while Dan displayed the National American and began to call out his slogans.

"I'll be watching you if anything happens," Pete told Dan.

Then it suddenly happened...

A Jewish youth with thin features and large eyes, goaded by the insults the hawkers were screaming, knocked down the pile of National American from Dan's hand. Dan swung with his free right hand and the blow caught the youth on the shoulder. A crowd gathered instantly and I saw the goon squad coming down on the run -- eyes blazing, fists ready to pummel the Jewish youth into a bloody pulp. I turned away my face.

"C'mon, c'mon, keep moving you. Break it up."

By the Grace of God the cops got there first, surrounded the Jewish youth, protectively backing him up against a taxi-cab fender, and pushed Dan away. More police stepped in and dispersed the crowd. Dan and the Jewish youth were then led away, followed by Pete.

When the salesmen for Social Justice resumed their hawking, the goon squads glared menacingly at Jewish passersby.

"Those Goddam cops beat us to it," they muttered. "We gotta get there first next time."

"Yeah. It ain't no fun if you don't do nuthin'."

I stood there alone, leaning against a building, stunned by the nightmarish scene. Again I had that curious feeling of unreality. I kept saying to myself: "This is New York. This isn't Berlin. This is the City of New York, in the United States. You are not in Turkey. You are in New York."

I looked up. The clock atop the Paramount Building pointed to midnight.

An international smuggling ring that sold bomb-related parts to Libya, Iran and North Korea also managed to acquire blueprints for an advanced nuclear weapon, according to a draft report by a former top U.N. arms inspector that suggests the plans could have been shared secretly with any number of countries or rogue groups.

The drawings, discovered in 2006 on computers owned by Swiss businessmen, included essential details for building a compact nuclear device that could be fitted on a type of ballistic missile used by Iran and more than a dozen developing countries, the report states.

The computer contents -- among more than 1,000 gigabytes of data seized -- were recently destroyed by Swiss authorities under the supervision of the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency, which is investigating the now-defunct smuggling ring previously led by Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan.

But U.N. officials cannot rule out the possibility that the blueprints were shared with others before their discovery, said the report's author, David Albright, a prominent nuclear weapons expert who spent four years researching the smuggling network.
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"These advanced nuclear weapons designs may have long ago been sold off to some of the most treacherous regimes in the world,"...

...Should Bush obtain a legal basis for the occupation from the Iraqi government rather than the United Nations, he would surely cite it as an after-the-fact justification for his war policy and its toll in lives and treasure. He could use this treaty-equivalent as proof that he had indeed reshaped a strategically vital area of the world, endowing Iraqis with freedom, democracy, and stability...

I did not call parishioners/worshippers scumbags as they exited the church. I treated people as they treated me. MOST ignored me, and I ignored them. Some pleasant, as was I. A few disrespectful, with whom I stood my ground. Some Cathedral and Diocesan employees harassed me - most notably their foul-mouthed custodian who ejected me from public property under threat of arrest (the Cathedral's brick patio encroaches onto public sidewalk).

...Liat Weingart, one of the groups leaders (Jewish Voice for Peace), recently lobbied the United Methodists to divest their pension funds from Israel. In the course of her speech to the United Methodist General Conference, she said "(i)f you haven’t been accused of anti-Semitism yet, you haven’t been doing the work of Justice." The audience reportedly "gasped and laughed".

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) today warned American Muslims and others concerned with personal privacy of a security procedure recently implemented by the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) that scans full-body images of passengers through their clothing, revealing intimate body parts to screeners...

SYRACUSE, N.Y. — A 22-gun British warship that sank during the American Revolution and has long been regarded as one of the "Holy Grail" shipwrecks in the Great Lakes has been discovered at the bottom of Lake Ontario, astonishingly well-preserved in the cold, deep water, explorers announced Friday.

Shipwreck enthusiasts Jim Kennard and Dan Scoville used side-scanning sonar and an unmanned submersible to locate the HMS Ontario, which was lost with barely a trace and as many as 130 people aboard during a gale in 1780.

The 80-foot sloop of war is the oldest shipwreck and the only fully intact British warship ever found in the Great Lakes, Scoville and Kennard said.

"To have a Revolutionary War vessel that's practically intact is unbelievable. It's an archaeological miracle," said Canadian author Arthur Britton Smith, who chronicled the history of the HMS Ontario in a 1997 book, "The Legend of the Lake."...

...The sloop was discovered resting partially on its side, with two masts extending more than 70 feet above the lake bottom.

"Usually when ships go down in big storms, they get beat up quite a bit. They don't sink nice and square. This went down in a huge storm, and it still managed to stay intact," Scoville said. "There are even two windows that aren't broken. Just going down, the pressure difference, can break the windows. It's a beautiful ship."

Smith, who was shown underwater video of the find, said: "If it wasn't for the zebra mussels, she looks like she only sunk last week."...

For the first time in five Sundays of gatherings, the small group of Washington area Muslims and Jews around the fireside table seemed like it was about to move from polite chat on religious history to something unavoidably combustible: Zionism.

An imam had taken out a book titled "Palestinian Holocaust" and quoted a tiny ultra-orthodox Jewish sect that opposes the state of Israel. An African American Muslim said Zionism struck him as apartheid-like. A rabbi cited the "billions of dollars" donors give Palestinians.

"This seems like a good place for a period," Khalil Shadeed, one of the two organizers of the three-month-long dialogue group, said gently. "I do recognize this is very challenging."

And with that, Shadeed stopped the two-hour discussion before it plunged too deeply into unnavigable waters. The clock had run out, and it was best, he said, to keep the discussion calm -- a mantra of interfaith dialogue...

...Methuselah, as the 26-month-old plant has been named (after the oldest human being who ever lived), appears to be healthy, almost 4 feet tall, and growing strong, according to an update reported in the June 13 2008 issue of the journal Science.

Famed archaeologist and former IDF Chief of Staff Yigal Yadin, who led the excavations at Masada, stored the pile of seeds he had found at Bar Ilan University, where they sat for another 40 years...

...The Radio-Carbon Laboratory estimated that the seeds were approximately 2,000 years old, an analysis that made sense; Masada was built 2,044 years ago and destroyed by the Romans approximately 100 years later..

The seeds were indeed most likely remnants of the fruit stored by the Jews who lived in the fortress, hoping to avoid the invaders who had destroyed Second Holy Temple in Jerusalem. The young date palm is a sprout of an ancient Judean variety that was believed to be extinct for thousands of years.

The Dead Sea region, where Masada is located, and the Jordan River Valley which extends to the Sea of Galilee, were once a lush forest of such date palms. The large, sweet fruit was famous throughout the civilized world both for its distinctive flavor as well as for its medicinal properties, which are mentioned in the Bible...

Following are excerpts from a segment of an Iranian documentary series on Hollywood cinema focusing on the film "Chicken Run." The segment aired on the Islamic Republic of Iran News Network (IRINN), on May 29, 2008:

Narrator: "Movies into which huge amounts of money are poured, in an effort to turn Zionist themes into entertainment, include movies created for children and youth. Animated films produced since the 1990s have joined other film genres in becoming a tool for Zionist propaganda. Sometimes this is achieved using falsified biblical narratives, like in the case of 'Prince of Egypt.' Other times, it is achieved in a very subtle, crafty, and indirect manner, like in 'Chicken Run.'"...

...Iranian film critic Dr. Majid Shah-Hosseini: "Many films from the 1960s and 1970s indirectly convey the notion that the Jews were oppressed. This is conveyed through the themes of distance from the motherland, and the search for one's mother, who symbolizes the motherland. These messages were gradually introduced into animation and children's films."...

...Iranian film critic Sayyid Abu-Alhassan Allawi Tabatabai: "These people never make a film without a premeditated motive...

..."Two emotional themes can be identified in children's films, especially animation. One is the lost mother, and the other is the lost land. There is also the lost dog... These three themes frequently appear in animation produced since the 1970s."

The revised document, according to the Jewish statement, "is infused with the very bias that the original statement condemned." The Jewish agencies note "with profound hurt" that the "new season of mutual understanding and dialogue" called for by the 2006 Presbyterian General Assembly "has indeed not yet arrived."

The Following is a Joint Statement issued from the American Jewish Committee; American Jewish Congress; Anti-Defamation League; B'nai B'rith International; Central Conference of American Rabbis; Hadassah: The Women's Zionist Organization
Jewish Council for Public Affairs; Jewish Reconstructionist Federation; The Rabbinical Assembly; United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism; Union for Reform Judaism; Women's League for Conservative Judaism; and the Women of Reform Judaism.

The joint agency statement follows:

"We are deeply distressed by the revisions made to the Presbyterian Church (USA)'s recent statement calling for "Vigilance against anti-Jewish ideas and bias."

The revised statement is infused with the very bias that the original statement condemned. We are disappointed that after taking steps toward better relations, the church has rescinded many of the positive statements it made about rooting out anti-Jewish invective. It is even more disturbing that this occurs after Jewish groups had warmly welcomed the original statement, and only days before the church's upcoming biennial. As such, we can no longer welcome its publication and must rescind the letters and statements in which we welcomed the original document...

Dear Reverend Kirkpatrick-

Candor compels us to respond immediately and clearly to the “expanded” and “revised” publication of “Vigilance against Anti-Jewish Ideas and Bias,” and to tell you as plainly as we know how that the new statement marks a new low-point in Presbyterian-Jewish relations...

Dozens of soldiers and officers from a reserve IDF infantry brigade have written a letter to the chief of the general staff, asking that he prevent Israel from freeing hundreds of Palestinian prisoners in exchange for their release in the event that they are captured by the enemy, Channel 2 reported Tuesday.

"We are willing to sit in the enemy's prison as long as it takes," wrote the soldiers of the brigade, which is considered to be one of the army's finest, and would be one of the first to enter the Gaza Strip if the government decides on a large-scale military operation there.

The soldiers intend to send the letter to IDF Chief of Staff Lt.-Gen Gabi Ashkenazi when such a decision is made.

In it, they also request that no negotiations be held over bodies or body parts.

...the director is Yehuda Avner, former ambassador to the UK and Ireland and advisor to five Israeli prime-ministers...

...The Middle East Strategic Information (MESI) project provides a unique in-depth analysis of the Middle East and its strategic issues as they relate to the outside world. The MESI informs beyond the headlines and provides news and evaluations that provide important relevant data to the understanding of the Middle East.

What makes us unique is as part of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs; the MESI has access to senior politicians, diplomats, high-ranking security officials, academics, legal experts and strategists from Israel and around the Middle East. These provide MESI with an important infrastructure to disseminate a professional and credible analysis of events from the region.

..."In making the case for war, the administration repeatedly presented intelligence as fact when it was unsubstantiated, contradicted or even nonexistent," he said...

...But dive into Rockefeller's report, in search of where exactly President Bush lied about what his intelligence agencies were telling him about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein, and you may be surprised by what you find.

On Iraq's nuclear weapons program? The president's statements "were generally substantiated by intelligence community estimates."

On biological weapons, production capability and those infamous mobile laboratories? The president's statements "were substantiated by intelligence information."

Two of Ernesto "Che" Guevara's children said Thursday they were tired of seeing their father's image used to sell everything from T-shirts to vodka, calling the growth of the revolutionary as a global super-brand "embarrassing." [I'll say. -S]

Aleida Guevara, the eldest of Guevara's four children by his second wife, Cuban revolutionary Aleida March, said the commercialization of her father's image contributed to tension between rich and poor in some countries.

"Something that bothers me now is the appropriation of the figure of Che that has been used to make enemies from different classes. It's embarrassing," she wrote during an Internet forum sponsored by Cuba's government ahead of what would have been her father's 80th birthday on June 14...

...Aleida Guevara was asked about the use of her father's image to sell British vodka and French soft drinks. She decried those campaigns as well one in Switzerland that uses his likeness to peddle cell phones.

"We don't want money, we demand respect," wrote Guevara, who is a trained physician like her father...

...In responding to Eastwood's Guardian interview, he said: "First of all, the man is not my father and we're not on a plantation either. He's a great director. He makes his films, I make my films ... And a comment like 'A guy like that should shut his face' - come on Clint, come on. He sounds like an angry old man right there."

Lee's comments to abcnews.com were provoked by the equally blunt interview Eastwood gave to the Guardian last week. Riled by Lee's "whites-only" mauling of his films Flags of our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima, Eastwood accused him of historical ignorance before growling his advice to shut up.

He also mockingly implied that Lee's views exaggerated equal opportunities by quipping about his own next big film, The Human Factor, set in post-independence South Africa: "I'm not going to make Nelson Mandela a white guy."

Now Lee has repeated his charge that black US troops, who fought in a munitions company at Iwo Jima, had not been given a second of the four hours in Eastwood's two films.

Drawing on his two degrees from universities in Atlanta and New York, he added: "I'm not making this up. I know history. I'm a student of history. And I know the history of Hollywood and its omission of the one million African-American men and women who contributed to the second world war. Not everything was John Wayne, baby."

Lee accused Eastwood of ignoring other critics who picked up on the absence of black soldiers when Flags of Our Fathers premiered.

Thomas McPhatter, a US marines sergeant who crawled up the landing beach under a hail of Japanese fire, was one of hundreds of black servicemen involved in the attack.

He said: "Of all the movies that have been made of Iwo Jima, you never see a black face. This is the last straw. I feel like I've been denied, I've been insulted, I've been mistreated. But what can you do? We still have a strong underlying force in my country of rabid racism."...

...Perhaps it is not clear exactly what occurred during this incident. What is clear from CAMERA's investigation, however, is the patent unreliability of Palestinian eyewitnesses and sources along with the media's apparent willingness to report conjecture as fact.

So, is the BBC's Aleem Maqbool a genuine eyewitness to these events in Ramallah a year ago? And if so, which version of this contradictory story is he prepared to stick by? Or is he simply regurgitating the Palestinian version designed to cause maximum damage to Israel's image in a minimum number of sentences?

Typical of the BBC's reporting is the failure to provide adequate context to its stories or to verify unreliable sources. If the BBC is prepared to make such a serious allegation of an IDF "execution", then the least its reporter can provide is hard facts and background material, which was severely lacking in this particular story...

The Obamatons of the mainstream media have failed to report one of the most chilling campaign promises thus far uttered by the presumptive Democrat nominee for president.

He made it before the Iowa caucus to a left-wing pacifist group that seeks to reallocate defense dollars to welfare programs. The lobbying group, Caucus for Priorities, was so impressed by Obama's anti-military offering that it steered its 10,000 devotees his way.

In a 132-word videotaped pledge (still viewable on YouTube), Obama agreed to hollow out the U.S. military by slashing both conventional and nuclear weapons.

The scope of his planned defense cuts, combined with his angry tone, is breathtaking. He sounds as if the military is the enemy, not the bad guys it's fighting. Here is a transcript:

"I'm the only major candidate who opposed this war from the beginning; and as president, I will end it.

"Second, I will cut tens of billions of dollars in wasteful spending. I will cut investments in unproven missile defense systems. I will not weaponize space. I will slow our development of future combat systems.

"I will institute an independent defense priorities board to ensure that the Quadrennial Review is not used to justify unnecessary defense spending.

"Third, I will set a goal for a world without nuclear weapons. To seek that goal, I will not develop nuclear weapons; I will seek a global ban on the production of fissile material; and I will negotiate with Russia to take our ICBMs off hair-trigger alert, and to achieve deep cuts in our nuclear arsenal."

You can bet that Obama will not make this sweeping indictment of our security forces again as he tries to move to the center in the general election. But this is what he thinks, and this is what he plans to do...

...A resident of Caesarea who is a lover of antiquarian books and Judaica found in Budapest an old book, in Latin, which had been written by a Christian named Reland, chronicling his trip in the land of Israel in 1695/6.

The writer, Reland, a man of many talents - a geographer, a cartographer and a philologist - knew Hebrew, Arabic and Ancient Greek, as well as the European languages, perfectly. The book was written in Latin. In the year 1695, Reland was sent on a tour of the land of Israel or, as it was then called, Palestine. During that trip, he visited approximately 2500 places which had been inhabited and mentioned in the Bible or in the Mishnah (a collection of early oral interpretations of the scriptures compiled about A.D. 200.)...

...No settlement in the land of Israel has a name of Arabic extraction. The names of settlements are mostly of Hebrew extraction; some of Greek or Latin-Roman. In fact, no Arab settlement (except for Ramla) has had an original Arabic name to this day. Most names of Arab settlements are of Hebrew or Greek extraction which have been impaired and replaced by meaningless names in Arabic. There is no meaning in Arabic for the names Acre, Haifa, Jaffa, Nablus, Gaza or Jenin and the names of cities, such as Ramallah, El-Halil and El-Kuds have no historical or philological roots in Arabic. In the year 1696, the year in which the tour was taken, Ramallah, for example, was called Beit El, Hebron was called Hebron and Mearat HaMachpelah was called El Chalil (a name for Abraham of the Bible).

The land was, on the whole, empty and desolate; the inhabitants were few and concentrated in the cities of Jeusalem, Acre, Safed, Jaffa, Tiberius and Gaza. Most of the inhabitants of the cities were Jews, the others were Christian; there were very few Moslems, mostly nomadic Bedouins. Nablus (Schem) was different, with a population of about 120 people from the Moslem Natsha family and about 70 Shomronites. In Nazareth, the capital of the Galilee, there were approximately 700 people - all Christians...

We keep saying they should all be fired. Not good enough. There should be criminal prosecutions and criminal convictions before we are done.

Yesterday, Thursday, June 5, 2008 during an interview on the National Public Radio Boston affiliate (WBUR) program "Here and Now," with Robin Young, author James Carroll opined with distressingly ignorant certitude,

"The Christian tradition of antisemitism has spread like a virus and it has been picked up—caught by segments of Arab, Islamic culture but one of the things to be quite aware of is that there is nothing endemic to the religion of Islam or to certainly the text of the Koran that leads to Antisemitism." [emphasis added].

I debunk this corrosive drivel at great length in The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism, and in an essay on Koranic Antisemitism derived from the book.

Here is a very brief synopsis of the Koran’s virulent Antisemitism from my Hudson Institute lecture of May 21, 2008...

Clint Eastwood folds his gangly frame behind a clifftop table at the Hotel Du Cap, a few miles up the coast from Cannes, sighs deeply, and squints out over the Mediterranean. "Has he ever studied the history?" he asks, in that familiar near-whisper.

The "he" is Spike Lee, and the reason Eastwood is asking is because of something Lee had said about Eastwood's Iwo Jima movie Flags of Our Fathers, while promoting his own war movie, Miracle at St Anna, about a black US unit in the second world war. Lee had noted the lack of African-Americans in Eastwood's movie and told reporters: "That was his version. The negro version did not exist."

Eastwood has no time for Lee's gripes. "He was complaining when I did Bird [the 1988 biopic of Charlie Parker]. Why would a white guy be doing that? I was the only guy who made it, that's why. He could have gone ahead and made it. Instead he was making something else." As for Flags of Our Fathers, he says, yes, there was a small detachment of black troops on Iwo Jima as a part of a munitions company, "but they didn't raise the flag. The story is Flags of Our Fathers, the famous flag-raising picture, and they didn't do that. If I go ahead and put an African-American actor in there, people'd go, 'This guy's lost his mind.' I mean, it's not accurate."

Lee shouldn't be demanding African-Americans in Eastwood's next picture, either. Changeling is set in Los Angeles during the Depression, before the city's make-up was changed by the large black influx. "What are you going to do, you gonna tell a fuckin' story about that?" he growls. "Make it look like a commercial for an equal opportunity player? I'm not in that game. I'm playing it the way I read it historically, and that's the way it is. When I do a picture and it's 90% black, like Bird, I use 90% black people."

Eastwood pauses, deliberately - once it would have provided him with the beat in which to spit out his cheroot before flinging back his poncho - and offers a last word of advice to the most influential black director in American movies. "A guy like him should shut his face."...

...In the essay [The Power of the Powerless], Havel imagined a man who runs a fruit and vegetable stand in Communist Czechoslovakia (runs, not owns: in Communist Europe, of course, all businesses were owned by the state). The man puts in his store window a sign bearing a Communist slogan: “Workers of the world, unite!” Why, Havel asked, does he do this? The answer: he’s afraid. He wants to live “in harmony with society,” and must prove he’s obedient. Havel noted that such a man might hesitate, out of shame, to post a sign explicitly admitting his fear; but the sign bearing the Communist slogan helps him conceal his cowardice from himself by hiding it behind the façade of ideology — an ideology that offers people “the illusion of an identity, of dignity, and of morality while making it easier for them to part with them.” Communist ideology, Havel pointed out, obliges people to “live within a lie. They need not accept the lie. It is enough for them to have accepted their life with it and in it. For by this very fact, individuals confirm the system, fulfill the system, make the system, are the system.” Moreover, while life in free societies “moves toward plurality, diversity, independent self-constitution, and self-organization,” life under Communism “demands conformity, uniformity, and discipline.” People like Havel’s greengrocer, by going along with all this, become not only victims of the system’s oppression but also collaborators in it — for the sign in the window, in addition to testifying to the shopkeeper’s meek compliance, increases pressure on other merchants to put signs in their windows lest the authorities start asking why they haven’t. So it is that ordinary people, by kowtowing to the system, become its enforcers. (Thus are the subjects of Communism the equivalent of dhimmis under Islam.)

Havel went on to ask: what if the greengrocer takes down his sign?...

...When one examines the responses of many in the West to the challenge of Islam, it’s hard not to feel that Havel and Solzhenitsyn were absolutely right. Living a lie, once ubiquitous behind the Iron Curtain, is now widespread in the West owing to a profound fear of Islam. Every Western journalist who writes that Islam is a religion of peace, who chides terrorists for hijacking a peaceful religion, and who celebrates Muhammed as a messenger of ecumenical harmony — all the time knowing that these are lies — is doing the equivalent of the greengrocer putting a sign in his window to avoid trouble...

PARIS, France (AP) -- A Paris court on Tuesday convicted Brigitte Bardot of provoking discrimination and racial hatred for writing that Muslims are destroying France.

The court also handed down a $23,325 fine against the former screen siren and animal rights campaigner.

A leading French anti-racism group known as MRAP filed a lawsuit last year over a letter she sent to then-Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy. The remarks were published in her foundation's quarterly journal.

In the December 2006 letter to Sarkozy, now the president, Bardot said France is "tired of being led by the nose by this population that is destroying us, destroying our country by imposing its acts."

She was referring to the Muslim feast of Aid el-Kebir, celebrated by slaughtering sheep.

French anti-racism laws prevent inciting hatred and discrimination on racial or religious or racial grounds. Bardot had been convicted four times previously for inciting racial hatred.

George Galloway: I hope that the new presidency in the United States... I pray for the safety of Barack Obama, and I pray that he can shift the United States attitude to this question. But as you know, Palestine cannot free itself. It is a small country against a huge superpower. The real problem is not in Palestine. It's not even in London or Washington. The real problem is in the Arab world. From Marrakesh to Bahrain - 300 million Arabs, oil at 136 dollars per barrel... If the Arabs wanted to solve this Palestine problem, they could do so in six days.

[...]

The Americans are not in a position to intervene anywhere in the Arab world, because they have been defeated by the muqawama [resistance] in Iraq. And so, sunk in this swamp in Iraq and in Afghanistan, the U.S. is no longer able to assist its puppets in the Middle East. So as we come towards the November elections, and the real prospect of a significant victory for Obama, everyone will have to re-find their footing, and these puppet presidents and corrupt kings may discover that the ground has moved under their feet, Allah willing...[etc...]

SEATTLE, Washington (AP) -- A judge declared a mistrial Wednesday in the case of a man who stormed into a Jewish center two years ago and shot six women, killing one, as he ranted against Israel and the Iraq war.

Jurors had indicated in questions posed to the judge that they were hopelessly deadlocked and struggling to determine whether Naveed Haq, 32, was not guilty by reason of insanity, as he claimed.

King County Superior Court Judge Paris Kallas ended the jury's deliberations in their eighth day.

The jurors reached a partial verdict on only one of the 15 counts against Haq, finding him not guilty of attempted first-degree murder of one of the women. But they couldn't agree on the lesser charge of attempted second-degree murder or any of the other 14 charges, which included murder. Video Watch a report on the mistrial »

Haq held a teenage girl at gunpoint to force his way into the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle on July 28, 2006. Once in the second-floor office, he began railing against U.S. policies and opened fire when someone tried to call 911. He shot some people in their cubicles, some in the hall and one, Pamela Waechter, fatally as she fled down a stairwell...

... During the six-week trial, prosecutors did not dispute that Haq had mental problems and had struggled to make friends and hold down jobs. But he knew right from wrong, could tell what he was doing and wanted to get his message out, they said.

They noted that Haq planned the shooting for days, drove from his eastern Washington home to Seattle the morning of the shooting and hid in the building's foyer to avoid detection.

Haq's lawyers, however, argued that he had a long history of mental illness that had been worsened by a change in his medication. A defense expert diagnosed bipolar disorder with psychotic tendencies...

Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, brother of slain U.S. President John F. Kennedy and former U.S. Attorney General, was the leading Democratic candidate for president when he was gunned down at a primary victory celebration in California on June 5, 1968. His Palestinian assassin, Sirhan Sirhan, said he killed Kennedy due to his vocal support for Israel.

In April 1948, one month before Israel declared independence, Robert Kennedy, then 22, traveled to Palestine to report on the conflict for the Boston Post. His four dispatches from the scene were published in June 1948. The newspaper closed in 1956, and for decades the reports were virtually forgotten.

Kennedy arrived in a chaotic and dangerous land on the eve of the British departure. Jewish Jerusalem and the Jewish Quarter of the Old City were under Arab siege and regular Arab armies were pouring into the territory. The British authorities were hampering Jews' efforts to defend themselves and were even countenancing Arab attacks against Jews.

Kennedy was liberal in his praise of the Palestinian Jews (only one month later did the name "Israel" and the term "Israelis" come into being). "The Jewish people in Palestine who believe in and have been working toward this national state have become an immensely proud and determined people," Kennedy wrote. "It is already a truly great modern example of the birth of a nation with the primary ingredients of dignity and self-respect."

One of his dispatches was headlined, "Jews Make Up for Lack of Arms with Undying Spirit, Unparalleled Courage." In one of his accounts, Kennedy describes his traveling with Haganah fighters in a convoy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

The young reporter was critical of a temporary slippage of the American government's support for Jewish statehood. He feared that the U.S. was shifting towards Britain's negative policies and its aim "to crush" the Zionist cause. "If the American people knew the true facts," Kennedy wrote, "I am certain a more honest and forthright policy would be substituted for the benefit of all."...

• "Unfortunately for [the Jews, Jerusalem's water] reservoir is situated in the mountains and it and the whole pipeline are controlled by the Arabs. The British would not let them cut the water off until after May 15th but an Arab told me they would not even do it then. First they would poison it."
• The Arab responsible for the blowing up of the Jewish Agency on March 11, 1948, said "that after the explosion, upon reaching the British post which separated the Jewish section from a small neutral zone set up in the middle of Jerusalem, he was questioned by the British officers in charge. He quite freely admitted what he had done and was given immediate passage with the remark, ‘Nice going.'"
• "The Jews informed the British government that 600 Iraqi troops were going to cross into Palestine from Trans-Jordan by the Allenby Bridge on a certain date and requested the British to take appropriate action to prevent this passage. The troops crossed unmolested....I saw several thousand non-Palestinian Arab troops in Palestine, including many of the famed British-trained and equipped Arab legionnaires of King Abdullah [of Trans-Jordan]. There were also soldiers from Syria, Lebanon, Iraq."
• "The Arabs in command believe that eventually victory must be theirs. It is against all law and nature that this Jewish state should exist. They...promise that if it does become a reality it will never have as neighbors anything but hostile countries, which will continue the fight militarily and economically until victory is achieved."
• "The Jews on the other hand believe that in a few more years, if a Jewish state is formed, it will be the only stabilizing factor remaining in the Near and Middle East. The Arab world is made up of many disgruntled factions which would have been at each other's throats long ago if it had not been for the common war against Zionism."

Following are excerpts from a public address by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, which aired on the Iranian News Channel IRINN TV on June 2, 2008.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad: "Our beloved Imam [Khomeini], you commanded that the arrogant [powers] of the world must be destroyed. You commanded that the global rule of hegemony must be removed. I'd like to say that thanks to your illuminating presence, thanks to your guidance, thanks to your ardent and divine words, thanks to the continuance of your illuminating rule, and thanks to the steadfastness of the Iranian people, today, the cruel and arrogant [powers] have reached a total dead end, and thanks to God, the countdown for the decline of America's demonic power has begun."

Crowd: "Death to America [eight times]."

Ahmadinejad: "The Zionist regime has lost its raison d'être. Today, the Palestinians identify with your name [Khomeini], your memory, and in your path. They are walking in your illuminated path, and the Zionist regime has reached a total dead end. Thanks to God, your wish will soon be realized, and this germ of corruption will be wiped off the face of the world."

...In parallel to the (de)gradation of this political debate, violence arose through personal confrontations. On the first day, we were offended by angry rhetoric at the Youth summit. The second day, we were accused of being murderers, «sucking the blood» of the Palestinians. The third day, people fixed our eyes and said: «We know who you are». The tone became increasingly personal. When walking, we began turning our heads to make sure nobody was following us. The fourth day, we were no longer walking alone in the stadium...

...A member of the Union of the Arab Lawyers offers a brochure to those who are bored queuing. The cover juxtaposes a swastika on the star of David. The notebook abounds in anti-Semitic caricatures. Jews with long hooked noses smile cruelly. Their serpent fangs are soaked in blood. They are depicted as sadists, obsessed by money. Their military uniforms are decorated with swastikas. And to perfect the picture, these judeo-nazis are pointing their rifles at terrified Palestinians.

Andrew cannot get over it. Those who are waiting in line casually flick through the pages, rather indifferently. Why is he the only one to react? On behalf of the organisation he runs in Geneva, UN Watch, he calls to cancel the accreditation of the Union of Arab Lawyers to the gathering, due to racist defamation. He sends his request at once to the steering group. A few hours later, an answer is given to him: «Sorry, we cannot do anything. This brochure is a political expression.»...

Attorneys Robert Tolchin of New York City and Nitsana Darshan-Leitner of the Israel-based human rights organization "Shurat HaDin-Israel Law Center" have dispatched a stern warning letter to the Israeli energy company Dor Alon Energy demanding that it immediately stop supplying fuel to Hamas in the Gaza Strip or face both criminal and civil actions in United States. The letter was sent by the attorneys on behalf of victims of recent Hamas "qassam" missile attacks in Southern Israel.

Supplying fuel to the Hamas controlled Gaza Strip, it is alleged, is a direct violation of American law which prohibits aiding, abetting and providing material support to terrorist organizations. In addition, to criminal prosecution, the attorneys have warned that Dor Alon would be facing civil actions in American courts that could potentially award the American and Israeli victims of the Hamas missile attacks millions of dollars in compensation.

A federal judge today threw out the most serious charges for which three officers of a defunct Muslim charity were convicted.

Muhamed Mubayyid of Shrewsbury, Emadeddin Z. Muntasser of Braintree and Samir Al-Monla, of Brookline - the latter both formerly of Worcester - were convicted in January of conspiracy to defraud the United States by securing and maintaining tax-exempt status between 1993 and 2003 for the defunct Boston charity, Care International Inc., and other charges.

U.S. District Court Judge F. Dennis Saylor IV dismissed all of the charges against Mr. Al-Monla and all but one charge against Mr. Muntasser.

The judge also set aside Mr. Mubayyid’s conviction for conspiracy to defraud the United States, but let stand most of the other charges for which he was convicted...

...“Yes,” he said. “You also have some kind of stereotypes. The first is that there is an international conspiracy against Serbia, and that behind that are Americans and Jews with the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.”

“Oh, you're kidding,” Sean said. He spent six months in Denmark while I was in Lebanon, and he never heard that kind of thing there.

“Really,” David said. “They say Jews control America.”

Sean couldn't help but laugh at the absurdity.

“And the second,” David said, “is that all independent journalists and non-government members are traitors who are paid by the West. These two stereotypes exist now, in this moment. I am against this, you know, because I am Jewish.”

“Is that a problem for you here?” I said.

“It's an attack on international Jews,” he said, “not Jews here, because, you know, in Serbia there are only 2,000 Jews. A lot of people who attack Jews and are anti-Semites, they have never seen in their lives any Jews. In this moment, we have over 100 anti-Semitic books. A lot of them are reprinted books that were written during the Nazi occupation of Serbia during the Second World War. They are trying to explain how it's possible that Serbia lost all its wars. They are saying that it's an international conspiracy. And people believe it. You know, the bombing of Belgrade. It's true that in the American administration you have lots of Jews. But they are Americans, they act like Americans, not like Jews. I think so.”...

Not everyone in Serbia hates Americans, though.

“I supported Americans from the first moment here,” David said. “I mean, you can criticize Bush or some aspects of his politics, but without the United States we couldn't have resolved any of the problems in the former Yugoslavia. Because European countries have no strength. When the United States came, all the problems were resolved. It stopped. It stopped the fight. Yes, the United States is some kind of policeman, but you must have some kind of policeman in the world who is ready to stop, to intervene. We had that kind of situation in the Second World War, too. When Americans came, it was finished.”

“But we're very conflicted about it,” Sean said. “We don't want to be the world's policeman, but we keep having to do it.”

“It would be very dangerous for the entire world if there was complete isolation of America,” David said. “If Americans said they were no longer interested in Europe, it would be a catastrophe here.”

“You think?” Sean said.

“Yes,” David said, “because Europe can't stop anything.”...

Following are excerpts from an interview with Arab-American psychiatrist Wafa Sultan, which aired on Al-Hayat TV on May 29, 2008.

Wafa Sultan: When I examined the Koran, the hadith, and the Islamic books under a microscope, I came to the absolute conviction that it is impossible - impossible! - for any human being to read the biography of Muhammad and believe in it, and yet emerge a psychologically and mentally healthy person...

...Do you remember the way that [the Prophet Muhammad] killed "Asmaa bint Marwan? His followers tore her body apart limb from limb, while she was breastfeeding her child. When they returned to him shouting "Allah Akbar," he said: "No two goats will lock horns over her." As you know, goals lock horns over the most inconsequential thing. For Muhammad, however, the killing of a woman while breastfeeding was too trivial a reason for goats "to lock horns over." Is this a prophet of God?...

...It makes me very sad that Al-Jazeera TV allows an insane and terroristic creature like Al-Qaradhawi to use it as a medium for the spreading of his poisons, his terroristic fatwas, and his babbling. The words he used against me incited many young Muslims - who have been brainwashed and blindfolded, and who have been programmed to hate - to rain curses and threats upon me, right after the show in which he discussed my appearance on Al-Jazeera...

...When Islam considers women to be deficient in reason, and I refute this assertion - in that case Islam attacks me, and I am merely attacking back. When Islam calls to kill whoever does not believe in it, and I refute this, in that case Islam attacks me, and I am merely attacking back. I do not attack Islam. I criticize it, but unfortunately, we, the victims of Islamic upbringing, view any criticism as an attack...

Following is an interview with Iraqi restoration expert Miqdad Al-Baghdadi, which aired on Baghdad TV on May 4, 2008:

Miqdad Al-Baghdadi: Another very dangerous element is Judaism. The Jews look for any historical evidence that will establish their rights in the region. The library uncovered in Assur - the Library of Assurbanipal - which consists of more than 30,000 clay tablets, is called the library of clay tablets, the Library of Assurbanipal. This library has been taken... Not a single tablet has been left in Iraq. The Jews tried to find...

Interviewer: Where has it been taken to?

Miqdad Al-Baghdadi: To Britain...

...The Jews are trying to find any trace that they ever existed in this region, but so far, they have been unsuccessful. Even in the studies they are conducting in Jerusalem, and in the Cave of the Patriarchs, they are trying to find any evidence...

Interviewer: To support their claim that they existed in the region.

Miqdad Al-Baghdadi: Yes. Something that would prove that they existed and were people of culture, but every buried document they excavate shows that they have always spread corruption.

Interviewer: This has been their nature throughout the ages.

Miqdad Al-Baghdadi: Exactly.

[...]

Hamas authorities in Gaza should investigate the recent abduction and apparent torture of three men by the armed wing of Islamic Jihad, Human Rights Watch said today. The authorities should hold accountable any individuals responsible for serious abuses.

On May 20, 2008, the al-Quds Brigades, the armed wing of Islamic Jihad, announced that it had arrested three men who they claimed were part of a larger "cell" working with Israeli security services. A statement said that: "The cell that was uncovered by the Security Apparatus of the Al-Quds Battalions includes very dangerous collaborators who were recruited by the Occupation in the 1990s."

An Islamic Jihad spokesman who gave his name as "Abu Ahmad" told Human Rights Watch in a telephone interview that the group held the men in a private detention center and interrogated them for close to two weeks.

"An armed group like al-Quds Brigades has no legal right to arrest, detain, or interrogate suspects," said Joe Stork, deputy director of Human Rights Watch’s Middle East and North Africa Division. "As the de facto political authority in Gaza, the government of Prime Minister Ismail Haniya needs to show it won’t tolerate vigilante abuse."...

They say they were told by a Muslim police community support officer that they could not preach there and that attempting to convert Muslims to Christianity was a hate crime.

The community officer is also said to have told the two men: 'You have been warned. If you come back here and get beat up, well, you have been warned.'

A police constable who was present during the incident in the Alum Rock area of Birmingham is also alleged to have told the preachers not to return to the district.

It comes amid growing concern over the development of Islamic 'no-go areas'.

The preachers, Americans Arthur Cunningham and Joseph Abraham, are demanding an apology and compensation from West Midlands Police.

They say their treatment breaks the Human Rights Act, which guarantees freedom of religious expression...

...Mr Abraham, 65, who was born a Muslim in Egypt and is a convert to Christianity, said: 'He told us we were trying to convert Muslims to Christianity and that that was a hate crime.

'He was very intimidating and it concerns me that somebody holding his views can become a police officer, albeit at PCSO level.'

Mr Cunningham, 48, a fellow American Baptist missionary, said: 'He realised we were Americans and then started ranting at us about George Bush and American foreign policy.

'He said we were in a Muslim area and were not allowed to spread our Christian message. He said he was going to take us to the police station.'

Mr Cunningham added: 'I am dumfounded that the police seem so nonchalant. They seem content not to make it clear that what we were doing was perfectly legal. This is a free country and to suggest we were guilty of a hate crime for spreading God's word is outrageous.'...

...the 20 million killed in Russia, the millions killed in Cambodia, the millions killed in Rwanda, and all of these places: you can never say these are Holocausts; these are massacres. That implies that the Holocaust is something that has happened only to the Jews. They say this will never happen again, but what they really mean is this will never happen to them again. They do not seem to be very concerned about this kind of violence taking place in other parts of the world...

Israel released convicted Hizbullah spy Nissim Nasser on Sunday morning - and in return, received a box allegedly containing body parts of Israeli soldiers.

Hizbullah spokesman Wafik Safa made the announcement on the terrorist group's Al-Manar television network, standing next to a brown box which he said contained the remains. Nassar was shown standing next to Safa.

"We today are handing over some of the remains of a number of Israeli soldiers who were killed in the July war and who the Israeli army left in Lebanon," said the Hizbullah spokesman, upon Nasser's arrival.

The Hizbullah spy was transferred by Israeli officials to representatives from the Red Cross and UNIFIL at the Rosh Hanikra crossing on the border with Lebanon earlier in the day.

Nasser was born to a Jewish woman but later converted to Islam. He immigrated to Israel in 1991 under the Law of Return, but said he eventually decided to spy for Hizbullah because he considered himself to be a "Lebanese patriot and a Muslim." He relinquished his Israeli citizenship as part of the deal to be returned to Lebanon.

The International Red Cross Association confirmed shortly after 12:00 noon that its officials had received a box containing remains of IDF soldiers who fell in battle during the 2006 Second Lebanon War...

...Zvi Regev, father of kidnapped IDF reservist Eldad Regev said he was not encouraged by the return of a box of body parts of Israeli soldiers by Hizbullah terrorists in exchange for the freedom of a live spy.

Regev, whose son Eldad was kidnapped with fellow reservist Ehud Goldwasser by Hizbullah terrorists along the northern border at the outset of the Second Lebanon War on July 12, 2006, said he had not been updated by Israeli officials on the exchange...