October 2009 Archives

The United Nations and much of the world media have blasted Israel for alleged war crimes during its incursion into the Gaza Strip in January, but one Israeli tank commander is mounting a spirited defense, using declassified video footage from Israel Defense Force drones and commercial media.

The video clips show the extraordinary efforts the IDF made to avoid civilian casualties, at times steering bombs away from their intended targets, because the target had moved into a crowd of civilians.

They also provide graphic testimony of war crimes committed by Hamas. In one scene, an armed Hamas fighter can be seen grabbing a child by the arm holding the child in front of him as he crossed the street.

"He knows that our snipers shoot them when they are in the open, crossing the street," says Col. Ben-Tzion Gruber. "So they grab children as human shields. He knows we don't shoot when there are children around."

In another scene, a Hamas fighter can be seen launching a rocket from the roof of a house, and then calling in neighborhood children to serve as human shields so he can leave before Israeli jets bomb the house. In yet another, a Hamas fighter actually hides behind three children as he shoots at Israeli troops.

In a remarkable sequence filmed by The Associated Press on the ground in Gaza on the Palestinian side, armed Hamas fighters piled into an ambulance with the huge letters "UN" painted on its side as Israeli forces advanced into the street where they had prepared an ambush.

"How many Hamas terrorists will fit into a United Nations ambulance? Count them," Gruber told an audience on Capitol Hill on Wednesday, as he pointed to the fighters and their weapons.

Seven armed fighters piled into the back of the ambulance, some of them carrying bulky antitank weapons.

Shortly after Hamas took over Gaza 2 1/2 years ago, they fired all 500 ambulance drivers and 7,000 teachers in U.N. employ, replacing them with people loyal to them who allowed Hamas to use the ambulances to carry troops and munitions and the schools as rocket launch-sites, Gruber said...

Due to tremendous pressure applied by the United States Department of State, Zelaya is on the road to reinstatement as president of Honduras.

In its continuing efforts to denigrate constitutional government and the rule of law, the State Department -- represented by Mr. Thomas Shannon, the U.S. assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere affairs -- has forced an agreement on the Honduran government which may or may not result in reinstatement of former President Manuel Zelaya.

Although the formal text of the agreement has not been released, it appears clear that the question of his reinstatement will be submitted to the Honduran Congress and that the Honduran Supreme Court will have a voice in the matter...

A Honduran compromise provides Secretary of State Hillary Clinton with an elegant diplomatic exit.

The big news in Honduras is that the good guys seem to have won a four-month political standoff over the exile of former President Manuel Zelaya. Current President Roberto Micheletti agreed yesterday to submit Mr. Zelaya's request for reinstatement as president to the Supreme Court and Congress, and in return the U.S. will withdraw its sanctions and recognize next month's presidential elections.

Mr. Zelaya, whose term would have expired in January, isn't likely to be reinstated, given that the court has twice ruled against his right to remain in office. The Honduran Congress, which voted in June to remove Mr. Zelaya, will then use that high court's opinion to decide if he should be restored to power.

There is a risk that Venezeula's Hugo Chávez and other Zelaya allies will try to buy support for their man and stir other trouble. But Hondurans who have rightly stood up to enormous U.S. pressure to reinstate Mr. Zelaya aren't likely to be intimidated now...

1- Why did you write the op-ed in the NY Times last week? what was the 'straw that broke the camel back' from your point of view?

ANSWER TO QUESTION 1 - Actually it has been brewing for a long time. I had been trying to do a long piece because many of my views about human rights in the Middle East are different from those being expressed by Human Rights Watch. The Goldstone Report made me feel I should get something out, so I wrote the NY Times op-ed piece.

2- What was your vision when you founded Human Right Watch and does the organization follow your vision in the recent years?

ANSWER TO QUESTION 2 - My vision, I should say our vision because it was supported by a wonderful board - was to go into closed societies and try and help people in those societies who wanted free speech. I was a book publisher so that was an especially important principle to me and it's a key part of the Declaration of Human Rights. But, of course, other basic human rights are also vitally important. - freedom of religion, equal rights for women, to name just two. When governments of closed societies asked us what we were doing about our own country we would explain that the United States had many faults but because we were an open society we had many organizations and other ways to try and bring change. But after a while we decided we would do some work in the United States but try to not replicate what was being done by others.

I also believe there can be times to do some work in open societies but, now focus is on the Middle East. I think Israel is a country where most people believe in human rights. But at this time many Israelis, and I share their view, do not believe that HRW in the issues it chooses, its tone, and even its interpretations of law are not helping to bring Arabs and Israelis together.

I had a lot to learn when I began feeling uncomfortable with HRW positions on Israel-Palestine issues in 2005 and certainly still do have a lot to learn, but almost from the beginning HRW has cast me as pro-Israel. I think that is the easiest thing to do - say someone is pro-Israel or pro-Palestinian. I like to think I am pro-human rights. Now that I have stated publicly, very sadly incidentally, that I am in disagreement with HRW, this will play out and others can decide if my views make sense.

3- You told me that you were amazed by the reaction, from general people and mostly from people inside HRW. Can you explain? (you said, 'they think they are God' - off the record)

ANSWER TO QUESTION 3 - I was amazed and encouraged by the reaction to my op-ed. Because so many of the positive comments have come, not from those considered hard liners but from people who think a lot about human rights, I have been particularly encouraged.

4- What do you think about the Goldstone report? Is it part of the big problem you were talking about with me? And if so, why does he, and other human rights organizations, focus mostly on Israel?

ANSWER TO QUESTION 4 - I think the Goldstone Report is deeply flawed. I was surprised Judge Goldstone, who I know and admired, took the job. He had to head a commission created by the United Nations Human Rights Council, which I think any fair-minded person would say had to clean up itself before it dared to criticize anything.

When I read Judge Goldstone's op-ed in the September 17 issue of the NY Times and he said "While Israel has begun investigating into alleged violations they are unlikely to be serious and objective" I felt he was just "judging" too much.

5- What do you think should be Israel's response to the Goldstone Report as well as to some of the HRW reports?

ANSWER TO QUESTION 5 - I can't tell Israel what to do. I do not think any country would want to put up with a war of attrition, which can explode into real war any time. However I certainly don't know the best way to stop it. I fault HRW for not taking a position on the war. The fact that Hamas-Hezbollah and Iran have declared it is their intention to try and wipe out Israel and all Jews seems to me, to be incitement to genocide, especially when it is backed by rocket attacks.

Former ambassador to the UN Dore Gold should probably buy himself a flak jacket. Gold is scheduled to debate Richard Goldstone at Brandeis University next Thursday and the anti-Israel forces are organizing quite a reception for him.

Goldstone, who chaired the UN Human Rights Council's commission charged with accusing Israel of committing war crimes in Gaza during Operation Cast Lead, has become a darling of the anti-Israel Left in the weeks since his report accusing Israel of committing both war crimes and crimes against humanity was published last month. And anti-Israeli leftists don't like the idea of someone challenging his libelous attacks against Israel in a public debate at a university.

In an email to a campus list-serve, Brandeis student and anti-Israel activist Jonathan Sussman called on his fellow anti-Zionists to disrupt the event that will pit the "neutral" Goldstone against Gold with his "wildly pro-Zionist message." Sussman invited his list-serve members to join him at a meeting to "discuss a possible response."

As the young community organizer sees it, "Possibilities include inviting Palestinian speakers to come participate, seeding the audience with people who can disrupt the Zionist narrative, protest and direct action." He closed his missive with a plaintive call to arms: "Fk the occupation."

Apparently the aspiring political organizer never considered another possibility: listening to what Gold has to say.

It seems rather unfair to pick on a small fry like Sussman. A brief web search indicates that Gold's would-be silencer divides his time fairly equally between publishing rambling, Communist verses to paramours and calling for the overthrow of the US government.

The problem is that Sussman's planned "direct action" against Gold is not an isolated incident. On college campuses throughout the US, Israelis and supporters of Israel are regularly denied the right to speak by leftist activists claiming to act on behalf of Israel's "victims," or in the cause of "peace." In the name of the Palestinians or peace these radicals seek to coerce their fellow students into following their lead by demonizing and brutally silencing all voices of dissent...

Old Soviet joke: Moscow, 1953. Stalin calls in Khrushchev. "Niki, I'm dying. Don't have much to leave you. Just three envelopes. Open them, one at a time, when you get into big trouble."

A few years later, first crisis. Khrushchev opens envelope 1: "Blame everything on me. Uncle Joe."

A few years later, a really big crisis. Opens envelope 2: "Blame everything on me. Again. Good luck, Uncle Joe."

Third crisis. Opens envelope 3: "Prepare three envelopes."

In the Barack Obama version, there are 50 or so such blame-Bush free passes before the gig is up. By my calculation, Obama has already burned through a good 49. Is there anything he hasn't blamed George W. Bush for?

The economy, global warming, the credit crisis, Middle East stalemate, the deficit, anti-Americanism abroad -- everything but swine flu.

It's as if Obama's presidency hasn't really started. He's still taking inventory of the Bush years. Just this Monday, he referred to "long years of drift" in Afghanistan in order to, I suppose, explain away his own, well, yearlong drift on Afghanistan...

James Traficant's release from jail reminded us all of his -- in retrospect -- charming eccentricities: The hair, the grandiosity, the "beam me up."

His first column in newest issue of the American Free Press -- described by the Anti-Defamation League as an "anti-Semitic, conspiracy-oriented publication" -- is a reminder of what, to some, where always less charming features of his career.

"I encourage you to subscribe to AFP and read my weekly column," he writes in a column that runs online opposite a piece calling for a new investigation of 9/11. "I plan to address the influence and power of AIPAC and its control over our very lives. The reason to abolish the Federal Reserve system; the reason to abolish our Communist progressive income tax; the absolute need to repeal the 16th Amendment to the Constitution; and my proposals to save and create jobs; to stop the hemorrhaging of our federal debt, to reverse our massive trade deficit and stop illegal immigration."...

AS A DISPUTE over land and statehood, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is combustible enough. But recent clashes over the site in Jerusalem that Jews call the Temple Mount and Muslims call Haram al-Sharif are injecting religious passions into one of the world's most dangerous confrontations. Extremists on both sides are playing with fire. But since Israel is the dominant power, the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu bears primary responsibility for smothering that fire before it erupts into a much larger conflagration.

The current crisis originates in Palestinian fear and anger over archaeological excavations near, but not underneath, the Al Aqsa mosque. The digs are under the control of an ultra-nationalist Israeli group intent on justifying a Jewish claim to Jerusalem by locating remnants of what is called the City of David. Those excavations have weakened the foundations of nearby Arab houses and led critics across the Muslim world to warn of a plot to cause the collapse of the Al Aqsa mosque...

DETROIT - A leader of a radical U.S. Sunni Islam group killed in a shootout with federal agents near Detroit repeatedly told followers that the government was the enemy and they must be willing to take on the FBI -- even if it meant death, authorities said.

"You cannot have a nonviolent revolution," Luqman Ameen Abdullah said, according to a 2008 conversation secretly recorded by a confidential FBI source.

Abdullah, 53, was killed Wednesday at a warehouse in Dearborn, where agents were attempting to arrest him on charges that included conspiracy to sell stolen goods and illegal possession and sale of firearms. He was one of 11 people named in a criminal complaint after a two-year investigation.

FBI spokeswoman Sandra Berchtold said Abdullah refused to surrender, fired a weapon and was killed by gunfire from agents.

The 43-page complaint described Abdullah as an extremist who believed the FBI bombed New York's World Trade Center in 1993 and the Oklahoma City federal building two years later. Abdullah beat children with sticks at his Detroit mosque, the complaint claimed, and was trained with his followers in the use of firearms, martial arts and swords.

Neither Abdullah nor his co-defendants were charged with terrorism. But he was "advocating and encouraging his followers to commit violent acts against the United States," FBI agent Gary Leone wrote in an affidavit filed with the complaint.

'Simply shoot a cop in the head'

The FBI said Abdullah, also known as Christopher Thomas, was an imam, or prayer leader, of a radical group named Ummah whose primary mission is to establish an Islamic state within the U.S.

Abdullah told followers that it was their "duty to oppose the FBI and the government and it does not matter if they die" and to "simply shoot a cop in the head" if they wanted the officer's bulletproof vest, Leone wrote...

Hey!

As many of you know, Brandeis will be hosting a forum next Thursday, 11/5, to discuss the Goldstone Report, a report from the United Nations which determined that Israel used excessive force in its occupation of Gaza. Believe it or not, this was poorly received within the Zionist community.

Thus Brandeis is hosting a forum between the report's author, international jurist Richard Goldstone, and former Israeli Ambassador to the UN, Dore Gold. Full details here: http://brandeis.edu/now/2009/october/goldstonegold.html.

Many of us are concerned that this forum is inherently slanted, as it contrasts 'nuetral' international opinion with a wildly pro-Zionist message, excluding voices from the Palestinian community. In light of this, activists across campus will be meeting this Wednesday, 10/28 @ 10 PM in the Village C Lounge to discuss a possible response. Possibilities include inviting Palestinian speakers to come participate, seeding the audience with people who can disrupt the Zionist narrative, protest, and direct action.

Please come and help us coordinate a response!

Fuck the occupation,
Jon

[snip original event announcement]

...Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu: Let me first start by completing the story of the history of the Goldstone report. What I would like to put on record is that the OIC was the initiator of this process.

On January 3, during the attacks on Gaza, we convened the executive committee of the OIC on a ministerial level. It was decided that the OIC group in Geneva should ask the Human Rights Council to convene and consider the possibility of sending a fact-finding mission to Gaza.

The OIC was instrumental in getting through this resolution and thanks to the good offices of Ms Pilay, the UN high commissioner, that she formed this fact-finding mission headed by Judge Goldstone.

On October 8, I visited Geneva and had a meeting with OIC ambassadors and the high commissioner. We revived the process again and the Goldstone report has been approved by the rights council...

A man impersonating the Kentucky Fried Chicken founder Colonel Sanders managed to dupe his way into the UN headquarters in New York and shake hands with a senior official.

Dressed in the fast food icon's familiar white suit and black bow tie, the actor evaded tight security to gain access to the restricted areas of the complex. [He sprinkled around a few free extra-crispy buckets to the cops, no doubt...]

He even posed for a photograph with Ali Treki, the new president of the UN General Assembly, before the alarm was raised and he was ejected.

A spokeswoman for Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary-general, yesterday said that an investigation had been launched into the security breach, which was dreamed up by KFC as a promotional stunt.

"It should not have happened - that I will stress, and very strongly," Michele Montas told Canwest News Service, the Canadian news agency.

"There was some lapse in security and the individual in question was, on the initiative of one security guard, taken into the UN." [What I tell ya? Anyway, they let Qaddafi in, but they wouldn't let a Kentucky Colonel in? I'm outraged as an American!]

As part of its campaign to promote a new menu range, KFC is "lobbying" the UN for the fictional Grilled Nation to be accepted as a member state.

The fast food giant has written to Mr Ki-moon personally asking for grilled chicken lovers to be be represented at the assembly, in a letter dismissed by Mrs Montas as "absolutely void". [Sharp, these UN-types.]

A spokesman for Dr Treki, a former Libyan foreign minister, [This is perhaps the most disturbing part of the entire report.] denied that he held a meeting with the Colonel Sanders impersonator, claiming that he only shook his hand out of courtesy during the incident on Thursday...

In the iconic teen movie "Say Anything," a despondent John Cusack holds a boombox above his head and blares the song "In Your Eyes" outside the bedroom window of his estranged girlfriend.

When Cusack does this, it's cute and heartfelt. But when the CIA uses the same technique, it's cruel and heartless.

The Orwellian-named National Security Archive, the group that launched the Close Gitmo Now campaign, wants to put an end to the use of annoying music to weaken Americas enemies. The activists filed a Freedom of Information Act request last week demanding that the U.S. government release the full list of songs used as Muzak at CIA interrogation centers around the globe...

...Fast forward to Iraq and Afghanistan. Now, recording artists such as R.E.M., Pearl Jam, Nine Inch Nails, Bonnie Raitt and David Byrne are demanding to know if any of their songs were part of this musical injustice. What they are going to do about it, besides complain, is unclear.

Audio torture is all relative. For some detainees, it might be listening to the Sammy Hagar version of Van Halen. Others might break out into hives from the David Lee Roth version. I personally cringe at James Taylor's sappy "You've Got a Friend" and "American Idol's" old farewell ditty, Daniel Powter's "Bad Day."

According to Spin magazine, Gitmo inmates rioted when camp loudspeakers first blared Neil Diamond's "America," which also happened to be the theme of the 1988 Michael Dukakis presidential campaign. No word if there were any attempts to play "Sweet Caroline."...

... During the Cold War, there were anti-Communists, and what one wag deemed "anti-anti-Communists." The anti-anti-Communists were people who purported to be against Communism, but they spent almost all their efforts denouncing the "right-wing" anti-Communists, and precious little effort fighting Communism. Similarly, JStreet risks claiming to be "pro-Israel," but really in practice being primarily a lobby against pro-Israel people who are further to the right, and spending precious little time battling truly anti-Israel folks on the Left. (Would that make JStreet anti-anti-anti-Israel? Or just "anti-pro-Israel"?) Most of its energy so far, from what I can tell, has been spent attacking "right-wing" Jewish groups and individuals, and even Israeli government policies, and precious little battling the extreme hostility to Israel one often finds on the progressive left.

Over the Summer, JStreet honored the so-called "Juicebox Mafia"-young liberal Jewish bloggers Ackerman, Duss, Klein, and Yglesias. Now, these youngsters may be Jewsh, progressive, and pro-peace, and in their hearts they may even be pro-Israel. But I've read many posts from them related to Israel over the years, and I can't remember a single one that actually defended Israel from an unfair charge emanating from the left. They attack Marty Peretz, attack AIPAC, defend Walt and Mearsheimer, and so forth, none of which necessarily means that they can't also be pro-Israel. But how does their pro-Israelness manifest itself? Certainly not in their blogging (Duss and Yglesias have vigorously, defended Human Rights Watch, for example, seemingly on the sole ground that it was under attack from pro-Israel people). And judging by their comments section, it's not like they don't have plenty of readers who are clearly not pro-Israel. So exactly why did JStreet honor them? (Yglesias is appearing on a JStreet panel Tuesday, "What does it Mean to be pro-Israel?" I'd like to see that one...)

J Street's university arm has dropped the "pro-Israel" part of the left-wing US lobby's "pro-Israel, pro-peace" slogan to avoid alienating students...

..."We don't want to isolate people because they don't feel quite so comfortable with 'pro-Israel,' so we say 'pro-peace,'" said American University junior Lauren Barr of the "J Street U" slogan, "but behind that is 'pro-Israel.'"

Barr, secretary of the J Street U student board that decided the slogan's terminology, explained that on campus, "people feel alienated when the conversation revolves around a connection to Israel only, because people feel connected to Palestine, people feel connected to social justice, people feel connected to the Middle East."

She noted that the individual student chapters would be free to add "pro-Israel," "pro-Israel, pro-Palestine," or other wording that they felt would be effective on this issue, since "it's up to the individuals on campus to know their audience."

Yonatan Shechter, a junior at Hampshire College, said the ultra-liberal Massachusetts campus is inhospitable to terms like "Zionist" and that when his former organization, the Union of Progressive Zionists (which has been absorbed into J Street U), dropped that last word of its name, "people were so relieved."...

...Hmmm....Twenty Eight statements (and counting) in six months lobbying for the Goldstone mission and Zero reports on slavery in Mauritania in fifteen years? I guess the slaves of Mauritania will continue to suffer because as Ken Roth admitted in an interview in the Tablet, "'Why are we more concerned about the [Gaza] war rather than on other rights abuses?' Well, we've got to pick and choose-we've got finite resources."

The "independent" blogger panel at J Street's conference can only be described as clownish. The panel consisted mostly of crackpots and self-described anti-Zionists and "one-staters" (J Street director Jeremy Ben-Ami calls the one-state solution a "nightmare," but it seems to be the dream of many of the organization's supporters). Though J Street tried to distance itself from the panel by describing it as an "unofficial" and "independent" event, the bloggers used one of the rooms otherwise reserved for conference events, a podium in the front had a J Street placard on it, and a J Street banner hung on the back wall of the room. Ben-Ami came in to "check up" on the panel, and a J Street flack ejected someone from the room at the behest of one of the panelists. If this wasn't an official event, I don't know what official means...

1. The Goldstone report draws its conclusions on the basis of 36 incidents it says it investigated. The report says that incidents are illustrative and therefore justify the broader conclusions made by the report. But Goldstone admits that the report lied in saying that the incidents are "illustrative" and in saying that the Mission worked according to its self-described neutral mandate rather than the official biased one. Goldstone says "We chose those 36 because they seemed to be, to represent the most serious, the highest death toll, the highest injury toll. And they appear to represent situations where there was little or no military justification for what happened." In other words, the Mission chose incidents that were seen as NOT ILLUSTRATIVE, and, rather, most likely to support a finding of war crimes.

2. Goldstone repeatedly misstates the law in the interview.

1. Goldstone implicitly misstates the rule of distinction. Goldstone rightly says that the rule of distinction requires combatants to distinguish between "combatants and innocent civilians." But then, he "proves" that Israel violated the rule of distinction by saying "We found evidence in statements made by present and former political and military leaders, who said, quite openly, that there's going to be a disproportionate attack. They said that if rockets are going to continue, we're going to hit back disproportionately." Stating that a counter-attack will be disproportionate to the attack isn't a violation of the rule of distinction. The rule of distinction requires that Israel not aim its fire at civilians as such. It has nothing to do with how much fire Israel can aim at legitimate targets.


2. Regarding the rules of distinction and proportionality, Moyers asks Goldstone, "Who is to say that? Who is to make that distinction?" Goldstone answers, "Well, that distinction must be made after the event." That is absolutely, positively, not the law. The law is that commanders must make judgments on the basis of knowledge they have at the time, not that one second-guesses them after the event and judges them guilty on the basis of knowledge they may not have had. Thus, for example, Newton testified "In order to properly assess a real proportionality assessment therefore, the relevant question is what did the commander know? What information was available to him?"

   This is not an isolated misstatement by Goldstone. Throughout the interview, he keeps giving examples of judging after the fact. For example, he says: "We spoke to the owner of a home in Gaza City. He said he looked out of his window and he saw some militants, whether Hamas or other Palestinian groups, setting up their mortar launchers in his yard. He ran out and said, "Get out of here. I don't want you doing this here. You're going to endanger my family, because they going to bomb. Get out." And in fact, they left. Whether that was typical or atypical, I don't know, we didn't, obviously, cover the field. But assuming they had disobeyed them, assuming they had launched the rockets from over the objections of the household owner, and his family, they launched the rockets and disappeared. It would be a war crime, as I understand it, for Israel to have bombed the home of that innocent household, who didn't want this to happen." Goldstone again, is wrong. Even if the facts were as Goldstone stated them, and the owner was absolutely innocent, the launching point of rockets would still be a legitimate target, and it would be permissible to attack it if the collateral damage were proportionate to anticipated military advantage, notwithstanding the damage to an innocent owner.

   Here's another example. Moyer prompts "so there was intention," meaning Israel deliberately violated the rule of distinction. Goldstone responds: "Well, certainly. You know, one thing one can't say about the Israel Defense Forces is that they make too many mistakes. They're very, a sophisticated army. And if they attack a mosque or attack a factory, and over 200 factories were bombed, there's just no basis to ascribe that to error. That must be intentional." Goldstone again is arguing that he can determine whether there was a crime by looking after the fact at what was destroyed, without any evidence of what the commander thought was the military advantage in attacking the site and what the commander thought would be the collateral damage. In Goldstone's favor, here he at least tries to provide an excuse for his misstatement of the law: his preposterous assumption of Israeli omniscience.

3. Goldstone falsely states that the only legal way to fight in an urban area is with commando actions. Moyer asks him: "But when the terrorists, the militants, whatever one wants to call them, are known to be embedded in, as you say, those tight, complex, concentrated areas, what's the other army to do?" Goldstone says: "It's for example, to launch commando actions, to get at the militants and not the innocent civilians." This is clearly not in line with the practice of any other state in the world.

Palestinian men compete during a bodybuilding contest in Gaza City, Friday, Oct. 23, 2009. Approximately 20 men competed in the contest, and over 500 people attended the event. Although not the first of its kind to be held in the Gaza Strip, bodybuilding contests are rare in the Hamas controlled territory. (AP Photo/Ashraf Amra)

October 24 2009

In their October 21st letter to the editor, Jane Olson, current chair of Human Rights Watch and Jonathan Fanton, past chair wrote that they "were saddened to see Robert L. Bernstein argue that Israel should be judged by a different human rights standard than the rest of the world." This is not what I believe or what I wrote in my op-ed piece.

I believe that Israel should be judged by the highest possible standard and I have never argued anything else. What is more important than what I believe, or what Human Rights Watch believes, is that Israelis themselves believe they should be held to the highest standard.

That is why they have 80 Human Rights organizations challenging their government daily. Does any other country in the Middle East have anything remotely near that? That is why they have a vibrant free press. Does any other country in the Middle East have anything remotely near that? That is why they have a democratically elected government. That is why they have a judiciary that frequently rules against the government, a politically active academia, multiple political societies, etc etc etc.

I have argued that open societies , while far from perfect, have ways to correct themselves and that is particularly true in the case of Israel. Millions of Arabs, on the other hand, live in societies where there is little respect for or protection of human rights.

The current argument is whether Human Rights Watch's facts and judgments about the Gaza conflict are correct.That is certainly a necessary and legitimate discussion.

I should add that over the years I have had the highest regard for Human Rights Watch's work around the world and from what I know, with the notable exception of the Middle East, that is still the case.

Robert L. Bernstein

Father moves out of town weeks after son questioned by the FBI

• Media reports on the Boston terror arrest have named three individuals as conspirators in the plot to machine gun people in shopping malls and kill American officials.Two, Daniel Maldonado and Tareq Mehanna, are in custody. The third, however, Ahmad Abousamra, escaped to Syria after being questioned by the FBI in 2006.
• According to the complaint, it was Abousamra who introduced Maldonado and Mehanna to each other during an afternoon of watching "jihad videos" in which Islamic terrorists killed and mutilated American soldiers...
• ...Ahmad Abousamra is the oldest son of Abdul-Badi Abousamra, former vice president of the Boston branch of the Muslim American Society, which operates the largest Islamic center in the Northeast. The MAS has branches in 34 cities within 23 states.
• The Muslim American Society, according to Federal prosecutors, "was founded as the overt arm of the Muslim Brotherhood in America." The Muslim Brotherhood is considered to be the first truly modern Islamic supremacist movement. As such, it has spawned or aided most of the Islamic terrorist organizations functioning around the globe today, including Al Qaeda, Hamas, and Lashkar-e-Taibah.
• In December of 2006, Abdul-Badi Abousamra suddenly left Boston and moved to Detroit, just weeks after his son was questioned by the FBI.
• In the 1990s, Abdul-Badi Abousamra became the president of the Islamic Center of New England (ICNE)...

The world is fast becoming a more dangerous place. Liberty and peace are threatened in new and frightful ways. Russia is returning to its authoritarian ways, fueled by its energy stranglehold on Europe.

China has married the power of free enterprise with the oppression of Communist rule. Violent jihadists are fighting to crush people and nations across the globe.

And rogue nations with maniacal autocrats are recklessly pursuing nuclear capabilities that put the world in jeopardy. Left unchecked, a nuclear race will be joined by many, many others.

For all these reasons, America needs strong allies.

This is one reason why I am so very concerned by the current drift in our government's relationship with Israel. In pursuit of a peace process, the United States today has exerted substantial pressure on Israel while putting almost no pressure on the Palestinians and the Arab world...

...It's telling that Romney chose to place this in a New Hampshire paper. The home of the first-in-the-nation primary still demands some attention. But it's also interesting that Romney, at least now, is choosing to make foreign policy and Israel specifically such prominent issues. One can argue that this is simply smart politics -- hitting the president where he's weak, demonstrating greater comfort with a subject his opponent dominated in the last presidential run, and appealing not only to Jewish Republicans (they may be a minority of Jewish voters but they play an active role in the party monetarily and otherwise) but also to evangelical Christians (whose affection for Israel is boundless)...

...Torethy's life would not be transformed by foreign countries making immediate carbon cuts.

What would change her life? Having a boat in the village to use for fishing, transporting goods to sell, and to get to hospital in emergencies. She doesn't want more aid money because, "there is too much corruption in the government and it goes in people's pockets," but she would like microfinance schemes instead. "Give the money directly to the people for businesses so we can support ourselves without having to rely on the government."

Vanuatu's politicians speak with a loud voice on the world stage. But the inhabitants of Vanuatu, like Torethy Frank, tell a very different story.

They're dropping off like flies - and it's not because of the "vast, right wing conspiracy". Legislator after legislator has been quietly issuing excuses for not attending J Street's Israel-bashing gala next week. As more of J Street luminaries like Josh "hate Israel" Healey and Salam al Marayati have their cv's laid bare to the public, senators and congressmen are putting lots of daylight between themselves and Mr. Ben Ami's group. Here's the latest tally of dropouts...

A 27-year-old Sudbury man allegedly plotted to launch terrorist attacks on shopping malls in which he and his fellow conspirators would mow down civilians with automatic weapons, federal authorities said today as they announced his arrest.

Desiring to take "some kind of action in furtherance of jihad," Tarek Mehanna and his co-conspirators allegedly had multiple conversations about obtaining weapons and randomly shooting people in malls, including discussions of the logistics of the mall attacks, assaulting from different entrances, and attacking emergency responders, acting US Attorney Michael Loucks said this morning.

Federal authorities said Mehanna's arrest early this morning at his Sudbury residence had foiled plots to launch terrorist attacks both inside and outside the United States. Read the affidavit here.

Mehanna, who faces a charge of conspiring to provide material support to terrorists, was ordered held without bail until an Oct. 30 detention hearing at his initial appearance this afternoon before US Magistrate Judge Leo Sorokin in Boston. He conspired with Ahmad Abousamra, who left the country for Syria several years ago, and others, Loucks said in a news conference today at his office in Boston.

Mehanna was first arrested and charged a year ago with lying to FBI agents in a terrorism investigation. "Today's arrest, done in conjunction with a search of his home, involves broader and more serious charges," Loucks said.

The conspirators also discussed attacking two members of the executive branch, Loucks said. Those people are no longer in the executive branch and "neither were in any danger at any time from Mehanna or his co-conspirators," he emphasized...

...The answer is, apparently, "at least somewhat longer." Consider how Yglesias starts his piece yesterday on R. Bernstein: "It's certainly news that Human Rights Watch's critics were able to get a former HRW chairman to slam the organization for having the temerity to hold Israel to the same standards of international humanitarian law to which it holds every other country."

Yglesias provides no evidence that HRW's critics "got" R. Bernstein to do anything. HRW's harshest and most persistent critics are a motley collection of bloggers and tiny NGOs like CAMERA and NGO Monitor, who are in no position to influence a person of R. Bernstein's stature in any way, except of course through the force of their critiques. It seems beyond Yglesias to acknowledge that R. Bernstein is simply a long-time human rights activist who is sincerely troubled by the sharp left-wing, anti-Israel turn HRW has taken...

Andrew Sullivan, now a leading spokesman for the UN Human Rights Council approach to Israel, lists as his quote of the day the following inanity from the Bobby Bigwheel of the Juicebox Mafia, Matt Yglesias:

"If people want to say that the whole quest to articulate objective human rights standards and international humanitarian law is inherently futile or misguided, then fine. But an awful lot of people who claim not to believe that seem to want to turn around and reject the underlying premises of the endeavor when it turns out that Israel -- like its adversaries -- sometimes violates those standards," - Matt Yglesias.

It turns out that Hamas and Hezbollah sometimes violate human rights standards? The self-declared purpose of these groups is to destroy Israel and murder Jews everywhere through the use of terrorism. They sometimes violate human rights standards? Every moment of their existence is a violation of human rights standards.

This is where the Juiceboxers and their new playground chaperone repudiate one of the most important tenets of international legal and humanitarian traditions: the concept of jus ad bellum, which asks the question of whether instigating hostilities is legitimate. To put it simply, this is the moral distinction between killing an intruder who seeks to murder your family and being the intruder himself. In the former case, you have a right to open fire. In the latter case, you have no right to expect not to be on the receiving end of open fire.

Yet Yglesias and Sullivan do not acknowledge any such distinction. To them, there appears to be little or no moral difference between the al-Qassam Brigades and the Israeli army, because the intentions of these two fighting forces count for nothing...

...On the question of whether HRW focuses grossly disproportionate resources to target Israel, "helping those who wish to turn Israel into a pariah state", simply counting publications from the Middle East division is very misleading. Some HRW statements are "fire and forget", while others (mainly when Israel is the target) are accompanied by major marketing campaigns. HRW issued four lengthy and largely fictitious "research reports" condemning Israel in six months -- each with a press conference at the American Colony Hotel (the hub of the Palestinian media campaign) in Jerusalem, numerous one-on-one press interviews, and meetings with diplomats. In contrast, most of the statements on the Saudi, Egypt, etc. are quickly buried, with no UN investigations , sanctions or ICC action. The token report on Hamas rocket attacks (HRW's artificial "balance" and involving no research) appeared six months after the war ended, with no mention of Iranian support and weapons. A week later, HRW held another press conference which generated far more attention via the sensational (and fabricated) charge that the IDF killed Palestinian civilians waving white flags. The Hamas rocket report, like HRW's criticism of Hezbollah in 2006, was immediately forgotten.

None of this means that violations by Israel and other democratic societies involved in dirty asymmetric warfare should be ignored. But this is far from the grossly disproportionate targeting of Israel by HRW's biased Middle East division, which, among other damage, is responsible for the total devaluation of universal human rights norms.

...Nowhere did Bernstein argue that open societies should not be subject to scrutiny. What he said is that the amount of attention HRW pays to Israel is wildly out of proportion to Israel's violations, especially when Israel is compared with the Middle East's dozens of dictatorships. Misrepresenting the plain meaning of Bernstein's argument allows HRW to rebut an accusation that he never made...

...Perhaps HRW is trying to win over its prospective Saudi patrons who have routinely backed the Sudanese government led by ICC fugitive Omar al-Bashir. In addition to Saudi Arabia, HRW's support of Goldstone aligns it with such human rights stalwarts as Cuba, Libya, Iran, Malaysia, Venezuela, Egypt and Hamas, which have all vigorously advocated for Goldstone's adoption. In contrast, democratic countries like Canada, the US, Italy, Hungary and the Netherlands all refused to endorse the mission's mandate or its findings.

HRW's overzealous promotion of Goldstone and its siding with the world's worst regimes are further examples of why Elie Wiesel has called for a full and complete investigation of HRW, Irwin Cotler (former Canadian justice minister and attorney for Nelson Mandela) has remarked that Ken "Roth writes not like a lawyer - let alone a human rights lawyer - but as a propagandist," and now its own founder believes the group needs to "resurrect itself" and return to its "spirit of humility."...

...Why aren't Hamas leaders worried by the report? The reason can be found in a speech Ismail Haniyeh made on October 14, 2009 to Palestinians wounded during the war. He said, "We bless the committee, we gave it everything it needed to investigate, as well as documents which helped publish it in its present form. Occasional comments here and there about the resistance (sic) and the right of the Palestinian people to defend itself do not mean that we do not support the Report."

In effect, he dismissed out of hand everything the report said about terrorist attacks and firing rockets into Israel, considering it lip service paid by the Committee and without practical importance for Hamas.

Reading the Goldstone Report shows that Ismail Haniyeh's interpretation was correct. The Hamas de-facto administration and its leaders are never accused of responsibility for terrorism and firing rockets. Rather, nebulous "Palestinian armed groups" are responsible. The theme is repeated in the report's few references to Palestinian terrorism. For example, Paragraph 1747, page 541, reads "In relation to the firing of rockets and mortars into Southern Israel by Palestinian armed groups operating in the Gaza Strip, the Mission finds that the Palestinian armed groups fail to distinguish between military targets and the civilian population and civilian objects in Southern Israel. The launching of rockets and mortars which cannot be aimed with sufficient precisions at military targets breaches the fundamental principle of distinction. Where there is no intended military target and the rockets and mortars are launched into civilian areas, they constitute a deliberate attack against the civilian population. These actions would constitute war crimes and may amount to crimes against humanity."...

Hamas children's program, "Tomorrow's Pioneers", last week included a part in which children learned that it is important to know English because it is "the language of their enemy."

Following is the transcript:
Child host: "What do you want to be in the future, Allah willing?"
Child caller: "A teacher of the English language."
Host: "Why do you want to be specifically an English teacher?"
Child: "To teach children the language of their enemy." [Child host smiles.]
Host: "Very nice. A great field. It is not enough for us to know our own language... We also want to study the language of our enemies, to know how to have contacts with them, and so that we can convey the message of Palestinian children..."
Nassur: "Like me! Just like I know the Zionist enemy's language."
Host: "Really?"
Nassur: "Hebrew."
Host: "Okay, speak [in Hebrew]."
Nassur: "I can't." [laughing].
[Al-Aqsa (Hamas) TV, Oct. 16, 2009]

Allah willing, the day will come when we'll return to Lod and all the areas they [Israel] have occupied." [PA TV (Fatah), Sept. 22, 2009]

PA TV continues to teach Palestinian children that all of Israel is "occupied Palestine." Despite continued pledges to change this message and to recognize Israel and its right to exist, the PA has not progressed.

Last month, the PA TV host Wallaa expressed the above wish at an outdoor broadcast of the weekly children's program "The Best Home."

The following is the transcript:

Child: "I'm from Palestine."
Host: "From where in Palestine? We're all from Palestine."
Child: "I'm from Lod [Israeli city]."
Host: "Oh, Lod is a very, very beautiful city. Anyone who goes there is so lucky! Do you really go in and out of Lod?" [from the PA to Israel]
Child: "But they [Israelis] have occupied it."
Host: "You mean you are from Lod, but you live here [in Ramallah]. Never mind, my dear. Allah willing, the day will come when we will return to Lod and to all the areas they have occupied."

...That's right: Amherst is ASKING the Obama administration to send them graduates of Gitmo High.  Talk about an open admissions policy.  And given the politics on campus, they'll fit right in at the School Of Middle Eastern Studies.  In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if Harvard doesn't try to snatch them up, too. After all, it's a Sharia-friendly campus, and they've never turned down a dollar of terrorist blood money.

I also love the fact that the chairwoman's objection isn't "we don't want Al Qaeda in Amherst," but rather a technical issue.  It must be comforting for every parent of a UMass-Amherst student to know that the town is so inviting to such a "diverse" community.

And besides, if the US military clears them, what could possibly go wrong?...

...It's idiotic, but of course that won't stop it from being enacted. However futile it may be, I feel obliged to point out that (a) there is nothing wrongful about detaining an enemy combatant without trial, let alone conviction, during wartime -- the U.S. has done it in millions of cases throughout our history and even the current Supreme Court reaffirmed combatant detention in 2004 (in fact, it has been federal law since 1798 that, in a declared war, the citizens of an enemy nation-state may be detained just because they are citzens of the enemy -- no requirement that they be soldiers or commit hostile acts); and (b) the main congressional provision that bars relocating Gitmo detainees in the U.S. is the REAL ID Act, which bars admission for aliens who have either (or both) been members of a foreign terrorist organization or (and) have received training in terrorist camps. Given that the idea is to prevent "hostile attacks against the U.S.," there is no requirement that the alien be shown to have committed such acts before the ban kicks in...

...It's time to call out Jeremy Ben-Ami, J Street's director, to answer the following questions:

1: You served as Fenton Communications' senior vice president until you established J Street, launched in 2008. In early 2009, Fenton signed contracts with a Qatari foundation to lead an 18-month long anti-Israel campaign in the United States with a special focus on campuses. The actual text of the contract called for: "An international public opinion awareness campaign that advocates for the accountability of those who participated in attacks against schools in Gaza."

Did you sever your ties with Fenton when you began J Street? Do you retain any role or holdings in Fenton today? Did you play any role in introducing Fenton to the Qatari agents or play any role in facilitating the contract? Were you aware of the negotiations or the contract signed on March 12, 2009?

These questions are relevant because it's important to know if J Street's refusal to support Israel's anti-Hamas military campaign was influenced by your ties with Fenton, whose promotional material claims: "We only represent people and projects we believe in."

Were there discussions with Fenton prior to J Street's refusal to condemn the Goldstone Report on Gaza, a report that certainly serves the Fenton/Qatari interests? Were there communications with Fenton surrounding J Street's support for Rep. Donna Edwards who refused to sign a congressional resolution supporting Israeli actions in Gaza?

2: You were recently asked in an interview about funds J Street received from Palestinians, Arab-Americans, and Iranian-Americans, to which you answered: "J Street does have some Arab and Muslim donors -- about five. These are individuals, not organizations, corporations or foreign countries. Well over 90 percent of our money comes from Jewish Americans and Christians."

Did you really say J Street has only five Arab and Muslim donors? A partial listing quickly extracted from the U.S. Federal Election Commission shows more than 30 contributors, many with ties to Arab-American organizations...

J Street's big inaugural conference starts next Sunday evening... And at lunchtime on Monday, Oct. 26, there'll be a great affiliated event: a panel discussion involving a large number of pro-peace bloggers, including yours truly...

...I'm really excited because I'll get to meet, in real physical space, many bloggers whose work I have long admired but whom I have not yet actually met.

They include panel organizers Richard Silverstein of Tikkun Olam and Jerry Haber of the Magnes Zionist. Also Phil Weiss of Mondoweiss and Max Blumenthal, who blogs various various places-- and also does those famous videos.

Laila El-Haddad of Gaza Mom is coming, and Matt Duss of the Wonk Room, and a bunch of other great bloggers. I imagine the best way to keep updated on the participant list will be to check Richard's blog...

Following are excerpts from a speech delivered by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, which aired on IRINN, September 18, 2009.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad: Even before World War I, there was some talk [about forming] a very vicious and twisted organization to take over the entire world. Using their experience from colonialist days, they planned to take over all the nations, along with the material and spiritual resources of the world.

After World War I, exploiting the lack of vigilance of the region's peoples and of the Muslims, they turned the land of Palestine into the mandate of the old colonialism - England. During that period, the organized criminal Zionists created an atmosphere that enabled them to invade the land of Palestine. Under the guise of purchasing farms, orchards, and lands, they plundered a vast part of the land, using weapons, slaughter, and terror. With the help of the English government, and with the support of the spearheads of the English government, they turned the people into refugees.

Before World War II, the talk intensified and the activities increased. In the European countries, the very twisted show of "anti-Semitism" began. Of course, some governments and their people always hated the Jews because of the ugly conduct of some of them. They wanted to drive the Jews out of Europe. But anti-Semitism was planned mainly by some European governments and politicians, and by the Zionist network. They made hundreds of films, wrote hundreds of books, spread rumors, and conducted psychological warfare, in order to drive them away, to the land of Palestine.

Four or five years after World War II, they suddenly claimed that during that war, the Holocaust affair had taken place. In other words, according to their claims, several million Jews were burned in the crematoria. They created two slogans. The first was about the injustice suffered by the Jewish people. By means of lies, very twisted propaganda, and psychological warfare, they created the notion that the Jews suffered injustice, and, secondly, that they needed a land and an independent state. They acted so effectively that some of the world's politicians and intellectuals were also deceived and influenced.

With regard to that false injustice...

South African jurist Richard Goldstone, who headed a United Nations investigation into the conduct of Israel and the Palestinian group Hamas during Israel's offensive in Gaza last winter, criticized on Friday the United Nations Human Rights Council's decision to endorse the report his commission had compiled.

The council on Friday endorsed the report, which accused both Israel and the militant group Hamas of committing war crimes during the December-January conflict in Gaza.

Goldstone told the Swiss newspaper Le Temps before the vote that the wording of the resolution was unfortunate because it included only censure of Israel. He voiced hope that the Human Rights Council would alter the wording of the draft...

25 Yes, 11 Abstain, 6 No

Abstentions: Belgium, Bosnia, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Gabon, Japan, Mexico, Norway, Korea, Slovenia, Uruguay

No: Hungary, Italy, Netherlands, Slovakia, Ukraine, USA

Countries that did not vote: United Kingdom, Madagascar, Kyrgyzstan, France, Angola

Yes: Argentina, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, China, Cuba, Djbouti, Egypt, Ghana, India, Indonesia, Jordan, Mauritius, Nicaragua, Nigeria, Pakistan, Philippines, Qatar, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, South Africa, Zambia

While they may not have been the markings of a pair of Naot sandals, Israel Antiquities Authority conservators discovered footprints over 1,700 years old in early October under the Lod mosaic and at least one print resembling a modern sandal.

Head of the Israel Antiquities Authority Art Conservation Branch Jacques Neguer said that when removing a section of a mosaic, it is customary to clean its bedding, and study the material from which it is made and the construction stages. It was during that process that they found the footprints under the mosaic.

"We look for drawings and sketches that the artists made in the plaster and marked where each of the tesserae will be placed," Neguer said...

...He said that similarities of the footprints of the sandals lie in the fact that sandals today are based on the footwear of the past.

"They're simple," Neguer said. "If it's comfortable, why change it...

It was supposed to be a silent protest against Israeli policies in Gaza and the West Bank.

But things got a bit noisy on the streets of Brookline Saturday when the Boston Palestinian Equal Rights Walk encountered marchers mobilized in a last-minute blitz by pro-Israel protestors. Some 40 people wearing matching T-shirts and keffiyehs and waving Palestinian flags carried on a moving shout fest with some 25 people holding small blue-and-white signs and waving Israeli flags.

The Palestinian group set off at 1 p.m. to walk from Coolidge Corner to Copley Square, passing Temple Ohabai Shalom on Beacon Street and the Chabad House of Greater Boston on Commonwealth Avenue.

The protest was in conjunction with others organized around the country by the American Association for Palestinian Equal Rights, a Washington D.C.-based non-profit organization.

"The whole point of it is to walk in silence and dignity," said local organizer Kathy Felgram of Watertown, who is Jewish. "We're trying to make people aware that the media here carries only the Israeli side of the story and that there are gross injustices on a daily basis."...

About the only thing more comical than Barack Obama's Nobel Peace Prize was the reaction of those who deemed the award "premature," as if the brilliance of Obama's foreign policy is so self-evident and its success so assured that if only the Norway Five had waited a few years, his Nobel worthiness would have been universally acknowledged.

To believe this, you have to be a dreamy adolescent (preferably Scandinavian and a member of the Socialist International) or an indiscriminate imbiber of White House talking points. After all, this was precisely the spin on the president's various apology tours through Europe and the Middle East: National self-denigration -- excuse me, outreach and understanding -- is not meant to yield immediate results; it simply plants the seeds of good feeling from which foreign policy successes shall come.

Chauncey Gardiner could not have said it better. Well, at nine months, let's review.

What's come from Obama holding his tongue while Iranian demonstrators were being shot and from his recognizing the legitimacy of a thug regime illegitimately returned to power in a fraudulent election? Iran cracks down even more mercilessly on the opposition and races ahead with its nuclear program.

What's come from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton taking human rights off the table on a visit to China and from Obama's shameful refusal to see the Dalai Lama (a postponement, we are told)? China hasn't moved an inch on North Korea, Iran or human rights. Indeed, it's pushing with Russia to dethrone the dollar as the world's reserve currency...

The former Harvard law student who won widespread notoriety for his videotaped clash with Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) now wants to join him in Congress.

Joel Pollak, 32, who gained national attention after his heated exchange with the House Financial Services Committee chairman hit YouTube and Fox News, is hoping to unseat Democratic Rep. Jan Schakowsky in Illinois's 9th District.

His bid caps a whirlwind six months that began in April when, after Frank's speech at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government, Pollak asked the congressman if he acknowledged responsibility, if any, for the financial crisis.

Frank's peevish reaction -- and Pollak's cool responses to the fearsome debater -- turned Pollak into an instant conservative cult hero...

This weekend, after White House communications director Anita Dunn forthrightly declared war on Fox News, some people thought she might have gone a little too far in explaining a tacit understanding in the Obama administration that they didn't deal directly with the right-leaning network. One almost expected to see a clarification of the remarks afterward, as Fox anchors like Bill O'Reilly and Glenn Beck gleefully ran with the story. But of course, Dunn's statements had been carefully scripted by the Obama team -- as is pretty much everything you hear from them, except things that are supposed to be off the record. And what's more, Dunn herself was selected to fire off the opening salvo for a specific reason: On a strategy team largely dominated by men, she's acknowledged to be the toughest member...

...Footage released by Hezbollah's al-Manar television on Wednesday night showed UNIFIL peacekeepers watching as workers loaded a metal door onto a truck in daylight. Al Manar said the footage was taken in the nearby village of Deir Qanoun al-Nahr which it said was the location shown in the Israeli footage.

"Here are soldiers from UNIFIL and the Lebanese army. The place is empty except for the same truck and the alleged rocket. The surprise is that it is merely an iron garage door of the shop where the explosion occurred," a voice-over says during al-Manar's footage...

1. The hezbollah video was shot in broad daylight, whereas the IDF footage was taken at night, shortly after the blast occurred.

2. The position of the truck in the hezbollah version and the IDF video are not the same. in the hezbollah version the truck is backed up directly to the loading dock and there are two men shoving the debris into the back of the truck. in the IDF footage, the truck is parked a little bit away and there are at least 5 men carefully carrying the disputed object and loading it onto the truck.

3. In order for the Hezbollah video to disprove the IDF footage, their video has to be of the same event, which is impossible given points 1 and 2.

4. If it is not of the same event, and the Hezbollah video was shot the next day, then that does not disprove anything, since they could have shown up, and started clearing debris while filming themselves. This would also account for the presence of the Leb. Military and UNIFIL since Hezbollah gave them access to the explosion site several hours after the explosion, after they had removed various items.

5. The IDF video shot shortly after the explosion shows Hezbollah cordoning off the area, loading items which could be a missile onto a truck and then driving the trucks 4km away to a known Hezbollah arms depot in another village. After they were done clearing the house, they let UNIFIl and the Leb Military enter the area.

6. a couple of questions:
-If they were not clearing the area of weapons, why would they have sealed off the area?
-why would they have transfered the objects (whatever they may have been) to known weapons depot?
-and why would they have gone through the trouble of making this video when it is so blatantly proves nothing?

Unfortunately as of right now the mainstream sources are reporting it as a "he said she said" story, without actually looking at the two videos, comparing them and checking with the timeline of events (i.e. the fact that the explosion occurred at night).

What we have here is Hezbollah releasing a video of "garbage collectors" removing detritus from the bomb site, calling it proof that the IDF allegations are false, and the MSM reporting it as a credible refutation.

IDF Video -- Hezbollah Video

...Unlike his recent predecessors, Obama has gone out of his way to signal a distinct coolness toward Israel and its interests. At a White House meeting with the leaders of American Jewish organizations in July, he suggested that because there had been "no daylight" between Israel and the United States when George W. Bush was president, there had been "no progress" toward peace.

In fact, there had often been "daylight" between Washington and Jerusalem during the Bush years. There had been plenty of movement too, from the adoption of the Roadmap to the Israeli "disengagement" from Gaza to the final-status negotiations that followed the Annapolis conference.

Still: Obama was right when he said there had been no progress toward Arab-Israeli peace under Bush. Nor had there been any under Clinton. Nor, as things stand now, will there be any under Obama...

...Diplomacy cannot settle the Arab-Israeli conflict until the Palestinians abandon their anti-Israel rejectionism. US policy should be focused, therefore, on getting them to abandon it. The Palestinians must be put "on notice that benefits will flow to them only after they prove their acceptance of Israel. Until then -- no diplomacy, no discussion of final status, no recognition as a state, and certainly no financial aid or weapons."...

Please join us for Israel's first ever appearance at the "Head of the Charles" regatta where we'll be holding a raffle for a free trip to Israel, and giving away tons of free gifts! The "Head of the Charles" is the largest regatta in the world, drawing over 300,000 spectators including politicians, Olympic athletes, and celebrities. Don't miss this exciting opportunity!

We look forward to seeing you on October 17th and 18th.

...European Union Special Representative (EUSR) to the Middle East Peace Process Marc Otte explained as he toured an EU-funded police station in Bethlehem this week...

..."I know that a political solution include the resolution of other problems like refugees, Jerusalem, as east Jerusalem should become the capital of the Palestinian state. All that needs to be done...I think the honor of the police is to have started to be pioneer in creating the condition for that state," he continued...

I can't help fearing that the Zionist enterprise will one day be seen to have done the Jewish people more harm than good. Our tenacious hold on this strip of homeland has become the scapegoat for the world's terrorism and this wouldn't be the case if we remained a people of the diaspora.

At the Aspen Institute's Ideas Festival this past July, Salam Fayyad, acting prime minister of the Palestinian Authority, spoke enthusiastically about the rule of law in a future Palestine. I asked him whether the same rights would be available to Jewish citizens of a Palestinian state that are available to the over one million Arab citizens of Israel. Could they enjoy freedom of religion and speech, and be able to vote for real representatives in a real legislature? Most importantly, would they be able to sleep at night without worrying that someone might kick down the door and kill them?

Mr. Fayyad responded: "I'm not someone who will say that they would or should be treated differently than Israeli Arabs are treated in Israel. In fact, the kind of state that we want to have, that we aspire to have, is one that would definitely espouse high values of tolerance, coexistence, mutual respect and deference to all cultures, religions. No discrimination whatsoever, on any basis whatsoever. Jews, to the extent they choose to stay and live in the state of Palestine, will enjoy those rights and certainly will not enjoy any less rights than Israeli Arabs enjoy now in the state of Israel."

Such a policy would mark a substantial change from the Palestinian Authority's first law adopted in 1994: the death penalty for any Palestinian who sells land to Jews. Over 100 Palestinians have died, under sentence or extrajudicially, for such sales in the last 15 years, including one last May. The Fatah (Mr. Fayyad's party) charter foresees a Palestine that is free of Jews. And recently Fatah demanded that Israel give up all of Jerusalem before it would begin negotiations on a two-state solution.

But suppose Mr. Fayyad's statement marks a tentative turn away from these positions?

The Obama administration seems determined to discourage any such shift...

...Israeli defense officials said Ankara canceled the drill after the U.S. pulled out over the Turkish decision to exclude Israel. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter with the media...

Sri Lanka last night scored a major propaganda coup when the UN human rights council praised its victory over the Tamil Tigers and refused calls to investigate allegations of war crimes by both sides in the final chapter of a bloody 25-year conflict. In a shock move, which dismayed western nations critical of Sri Lanka's approach, the island's diplomats succeeded in lobbying enough of its south Asian allies to pass a resolution describing the conflict as a "domestic matter that doesn't warrant outside interference".

The genius of democracy is the rotation of power, which forces the opposition to be serious -- particularly about things like war, about which until Jan. 20 of this year Democrats were decidedly unserious.

When the Iraq war (which a majority of Senate Democrats voted for) ran into trouble and casualties began to mount, Democrats followed the shifting winds of public opinion and turned decidedly antiwar. But needing political cover because of their post-Vietnam reputation for weakness on national defense, they adopted Afghanistan as their pet war.

"I was part of the 2004 Kerry campaign, which elevated the idea of Afghanistan as 'the right war' to conventional Democratic wisdom," wrote Democratic consultant Bob Shrum shortly after President Obama was elected. "This was accurate as criticism of the Bush administration, but it was also reflexive and perhaps by now even misleading as policy."

Which is a clever way to say that championing victory in Afghanistan was a contrived and disingenuous policy in which Democrats never seriously believed, a convenient two-by-four with which to bash George Bush over Iraq -- while still appearing warlike enough to fend off the soft-on-defense stereotype.

Brilliantly crafted and perfectly cynical, the "Iraq war bad, Afghan war good" posture worked. Democrats first won Congress, then the White House. But now, unfortunately, they must govern...

British actress Vanessa Redgrave - a well-known critic of Israel - has joined the controversy surrounding the Toronto Film Festival's decision to showcase Tel Aviv, according to the Jewish Chronicle.

Only this time, she is on Israel's side.

In a letter to the New York Review of Books co-signed by artist Julian Schnabel and playwright Martin Sherman, Redgrave defends the festival's choice to spotlight Tel Aviv and denounces those who have called for a boycott.

"We oppose the current Israeli government, but it is a government," Redgrave and her co-signatories wrote in their letter, "Freely elected. Not a regime. Words matter."

Redgrave and her co-signatories went on to say in their letter that the films being showcase in Toronto deserved applause and encouragment, precisely because they were created by Israeli troubled by their own government's actions..

...In their letter the protesters say that "Tel Aviv is built on destroyed Palestinian villages." True. [Well,that's not true, but read on. They rescue the point.] Just as much of America is built on obliterated Indian property. Are they implying that Tel Aviv should not exist? At least not in its present form? Which would mean that the State of Israel (the original State of Israel, not including the occupied territories) should not exist. Thousands of Palestinians have died through the years because the Israeli government, military, and part of the population fervently believe that the Arab states and, indeed, much of the world do not want Israel to exist. How then are we halting this never-ending cycle of violence by promoting the very fears that cause it?...

When: Saturday, October 10, 2009, 1:00 [pm]
Where: Coolidge Corner to Copley

I am writing to some of you for the first time and to others with new information about the American Association for Palestinian Equal Rights (AAPER). They have asked me (along with Paige Austin of the Kennedy School at Harvard) to help coordinate a Silent March in Boston on October 10 to call attention to the injustices faced by the Palestinian people. We need all of the help we can get...and that means people who would commit to walking with us...

...Our proposed route will be from Coolidge Corner in Brookline to Copley Square, in front of Trinity Church, where we will conclude with a silent vigil. During and after the vigil, people may feel free to leave the group to engage in conversations with onlookers and to continue to distribute flyers supplied by AAPER. I have attached a flyer to this email so that you can review it. AAPER is advocating a silent march because silence often gets more attention from onlookers; marches throughout the country should have a unified and dignified appearance. By joining this march, you are not giving up your rights to make other types of protest actions on other days, wherever you like...

FYI CODEPINK Greater Boston (the now official name for what was temporarily Code Pink Cambridge) is pleased as pink to announce that at its first meeting, September 23,it endorsed the AAPER Silent March October 10, after the eloquent presentation by Kathy Felgran, Paige Austin, and Roberta Koffman. GO KATHY! Righteous, vivacious Sister...

The effect of a silent march through the (mostly but not entirely) liberal Jewish neighborhood on the Sabbath with a banner saying Freedom and Equality for Palestine! should be strikng indeed...

Stoughton's Ahavath Torah Congregation will have a program featuring two veteran Zionist, one Christian and the other Jewish, activists

Thursday, October 15, 7:30 PM.

Ahavath Torah Congregation will host:

• JoAnn Magnuson, VP, Office of the National Director for Bridges for Peace in the USA, and
• Esther Levens, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of the Unity Coalition for Israel (UCI), a coalition of more than 200 organizations to educate Americans and others about Israel, the Middle East and radical Islam

on Thursday, October 15 at 7:30 PM. Their topic will be: Building Christian-Jewish Understanding and Pro-Israel Partnerships: The Nexus between the Holocaust and Israelphobia in today's world.

The UN Fact-finding Report on Gaza: 21st Century Blood Libel

The Goldstone Report was commissioned by the UN Human Rights Council following Israel's military action in Gaza. The Council's objective was the political defeat of Israel by gutting any lawful exercise of the country's right of self-defense.

The Council set a mandate to focus only on Israel and its predetermined violations of international law. The Council selected investigators who had already publicly expressed the view that Israel was guilty.

This video contains footage of the Council's consideration of the Goldstone report. Lining up to congratulate Goldstone are some of the world's leading human rights abusers. They understood the report as granting a license to declare Israel guilty of a "holocaust," "concentration camps," "genocide," and "crimes against humanity."

Also in the video are statements by Israel's accusers which illustrate the political agenda behind the Goldstone mission.

The video includes Anne Bayefsky's response to Goldstone during his "dialogue" with states and non-governmental organizations at the Council, and Goldstone's Israel/South African apartheid analogy as an answer to her cricitism. While the President of the Human Rights Council castigates Bayefsky for her remarks, he has no difficulty thanking Israel's attackers for their hate-filled demonization of the Jewish state.

The uproar over Israeli Consul General Nadav Tamir's leaked three-page memo in which he criticizes the Netanyahu government blew over more than a month ago, but the Consul General of New England is taking pains to make amends with his local constituents.

"It is unfortunate that a cable gets leaked," Tamir told the Journal in a recent interview. "It was supposed to be between us (diplomats) and our superiors. We have a lot of debates in order to improve our policies."...

...While the liberal Boston Jewish leadership defended and supported Tamir, conservatives blasted him. Boston's Russian Jewish community in a scathing letter printed in the Russian Jewish Telegraph requested that Tamir -- who was summoned back to Israel to answer to his superiors -- be recalled from Boston.

Tamir, who returned from Israel with his job intact, declared that he was never worried about being transferred out of Boston even though the controversy occupied the front pages of newspapers, TV stations and websites from Boston to Israel.

In his interview with the Jewish Journal, Tamir asserted that he respects both the conservative and liberal camps.

"I know they all care deeply about Israel. I want to reach out to Jews wherever they are in New England," including the Russian Jewish community, he said. "I still see myself as their Consul General and I serve them with love."...

A videotape is behind the decision by the Palestinian Authority to delay the vote on a UN report accusing Israel of war crimes during its offensive on the Gaza Strip, a Palestinian news agency has reported.

Quoting what it called reliable sources, Shahab news agency said on Tuesady that PA representatives at a meeting in Washington had initially rejected Israel's request not to endorse the report and were determined to stick to this position.

But, the agency added, Brigadier Eli Avraham played a videotape showing a meeting between Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, and Ehud Barak, the Israeli defence minister. The meeting was also attended by Tzipi Livni, Israel's former foreign minister.

The video showed Abbas trying to convince Barak to continue the war on Gaza, while Barak looked hesitant, although Livni appeared to be in support of the plan, Shahab quoted its sources as saying....

...Shahab also reported that Avraham played an audiotape of a telephone call between Dov Weissglas, the director of the Israeli chief of staff bureau, and al-Tayyib Abdul Rahim, secretary-general of the Palestinian presidency.

In the conversation, Abdul Rahim says that circumstances were suitable for entry of the Israeli army into Jabalya and al-Shatea refugee camps, and adds that the fall of these two camps would end Hamas's rule in Gaza Strip, Shahab says.

Weissglas then told Abdul Rahim that this operation would lead to the death of thousands of civilians, but, according to Shahab, Abdul Rahim said: "They have all elected Hamas, so they are the ones who have chosen their fate, not us."

Shehab says that the Israeli delegation threatened the PA representatives that it would present the recorded material to the UN and news organisations, forcing the delegation to accept Israel's request to delay the vote on the report...

I've got to say, even for the Obama administration, this is a real shocker.

The Clinton State Department has decided to cut off all funding for the Iran Human Rights Documentation Center (IHRDC), which was compiling lists of protestors imprisoned in this summer's unrest, as well as those who were killed in the crackdown.

IHRDC is what human-rights advocates should be: methodical, precise, and apolitical in their work. And yet, the Obama administration has, without explanation, cut off all federal funding to the group which has consistently fulfilled its mandate...

...John Ging, UNRWA's director of operations in the Strip, said any human rights course would be incomplete without a discussion of the Holocaust.

"No human-rights curriculum is complete without the inclusion of the facts of the Holocaust, and its lessons," Ging told Britain's The Independent. He said he was "confident and determined" the Holocaust would be included in the new curriculum. But it will only be a part of the lessons, which will touch on genocide in Rwanda, the apartheid regime in South Africa, ethnic cleansing in the Balkans and the "Nakba," or Palestinian "day of catastrophe."...

...Professor David Yeroshalmi, author of The Jews of Iran in the 19th century and an expert on Iranian Jewish communities, disputes the validity of this argument. "There is no such meaning for the word 'sabour' in any of the Persian Jewish dialects, nor does it mean Jewish prayer shawl in Persian. Also, the name Sabourjian is not a well-known Jewish name," he stated in a recent interview. In fact, Iranian Jews use the Hebrew word "tzitzit" to describe the Jewish prayer shawl. Yeroshalmi, a scholar at Tel Aviv University's Center for Iranian Studies, also went on to dispute the article's findings that the "-jian" ending to the name specifically showed the family had been practising Jews. "This ending is in no way sufficient to judge whether someone has a Jewish background. Many Muslim surnames have the same ending," he stated.

Upon closer inspection, a completely different interpretation of "Sabourjian" emerges. According to Robert Tait, a Guardian correspondent who travelled to Ahmadinejad's native village in 2005, the name "derives from thread painter - sabor in Farsi - a once common and humble occupation in the carpet industry in Semnan province, where Aradan is situated". This is confirmed by Kasra Naji, who also wrote a biography of Ahmadinejad and met his family in his native village. Carpet weaving or colouring carpet threads are not professions associated with Jews in Iran.

According to both Naji and Tait, Ahmadinejad's father Ahmad was in fact a religious Shia, who taught the Quran before and after Ahmadinejad's birth and their move to Tehran. So religious was Ahmad Sabourjian that he bought a house near a Hosseinieh, a religious club that he frequented during the holy month of Moharram to mourn the martyrdom of Imam Hossein...

...Meir Javedanfar argues in London's Guardian that the claim is a myth, and we must confess we are a bit skeptical. Sabourjian sounds to us like an Armenian name to us. This revelation may end up complicating Tehran's relations with Ankara.

A photograph of the Iranian president holding up his identity card during elections in March 2008 clearly shows his family has Jewish roots.

A close-up of the document reveals he was previously known as Sabourjian - a Jewish name meaning cloth weaver.

The short note scrawled on the card suggests his family changed its name to Ahmadinejad when they converted to embrace Islam after his birth.

The Sabourjians traditionally hail from Aradan, Mr Ahmadinejad's birthplace, and the name derives from "weaver of the Sabour", the name for the Jewish Tallit shawl in Persia. The name is even on the list of reserved names for Iranian Jews compiled by Iran's Ministry of the Interior.

Experts last night suggested Mr Ahmadinejad's track record for hate-filled attacks on Jews could be an overcompensation to hide his past...

...A London-based expert on Iranian Jewry said that "jian" ending to the name specifically showed the family had been practising Jews.

"He has changed his name for religious reasons, or at least his parents had," said the Iranian-born Jew living in London. "Sabourjian is well known Jewish name in Iran."...

...The Iranian leader has not denied his name was changed when his family moved to Tehran in the 1950s. But he has never revealed what it was change from or directly addressed the reason for the switch.

Relatives have previously said a mixture of religious reasons and economic pressures forced his blacksmith father Ahmad to change when Mr Ahmadinejad was aged four...

...During this year's presidential debate on television he was goaded to admit that his name had changed but he ignored the jibe.

However Mehdi Khazali, an internet blogger, who called for an investigation of Mr Ahmadinejad's roots was arrested this summer...

...Ahmadinejad isn't the only covert from Judaism. THE most dangerous bloodthirsty psychopath, Habibollah Asgaroladi, the head of the Motalefeh party and his deputy Elias Eliasi are also newly Jewish converts to Islam...to say...they converted 35 years ago...

But what about Hagel? Here the answer is clear: if Bloomberg takes Hagel with him, the panel will no longer think he is a candidate favorable to Israel. Five of the panelists said such move will make them very uneasy with Bloomberg. Three of the panelists said it would not matter - but not one said it would make Bloomberg more appealing.

...Senator Hagel often appears before Arab-American groups to air his views regarding the Middle East. Among the gems of wisdom: support for Israel shouldn't be automatic.

He has also joined a chorus of people surrounding Barack Obama who have made derogatory remarks about the so-called Jewish Lobby.

Says Hagel: "The political reality is that... the Jewish lobby intimidates a lot of people up here." This audio should be heard to truly gauge his own feelings.

Google "Chuck Hagel and Israel" for a history of his views.

Note his use of the term "Jewish Lobby". There are many millions of Americans who are not Jewish, who are also active in supporting the American-Israel relationship...

July 22 1941. The girl next door is getting married. Anne Frank is leaning out of the window of her house in Amsterdam to get a good look at the bride and groom. It is the only time Anne Frank has ever been captured on film. At the time of her wedding, the bride lived on the second floor at Merwedeplein 39. The Frank family lived at number 37, also on the second floor. The Anne Frank House can offer you this film footage thanks to the cooperation of the couple.

Maya Wind and Netta Mishly went to jail rather than serve in the Israeli Defense Forces. They will explain why Oct. 5 when they visit Brandeis University as part of a nationwide tour of college campuses.

Wind, a Jerusalem native, spent 40 days in military prison and Mishly, a Tel Aviv native, spent 20 days in jail.

"At first, like many other Israeli citizens, I too could not bring myself to confront or criticize the Israeli military's immoral actions," said Wind in a statement before going to jail. "I realize that this difficulty originated from my sense of identification with soldiers my own age. ... Today it is precisely this realization that leads me to refuse to serve. I cannot recognize the humanity of Israelis but not that of Palestinians."

The two women, both 19, were invited to campus by the Brandeis Students for Justice in Palestine. The same day the women will also appear at Harvard and Northeastern universities...

...The resisters' appearance is cosponsored by Code Pink, a women's anti-war organization, and Jewish Voice for Peace, a human rights organization dedicated to stopping the conflict in the Middle East.

Sydney Levy, the campaign director for the San Francisco-based Jewish Voice for Peace, said Wind and Mishly were politicized by early experiences with violence. Wind attended school with rightwing settlers and witnessed a bus explosion.

"They came to conclusions that took me years of my life to come to at a very early age, and they are willing to pay a very heavy price," Levy said of the women.

...The Goldstone report is an opinion by one group of people putting forward their judgments, with limited access to the facts, and reflecting their own prejudices. The difference in tone and attitude in the report when discussing Israeli and Hamas actions is surprising.

I probably do not need to state for most readers that as a soldier who has run a war against an opponent not dissimilar to Hamas, facing problems perhaps similar to those faced by Israeli commanders, my sympathies tend to lie with the Israelis. I can hold and openly declare those prejudices even while I acknowledge that within institutions that may be overall just and moral, there can be individuals or small groups who act outside the law. They must be dealt with, and in my war, they were.

But having stated my prejudice, I think I may be more honest than Goldstone, who seems to pass off his prejudices in a report that cannot be based on fact, and uses judicial language and credibility to do so. It comes down to equality of scepticism: if you refuse to believe anything the Israelis say, then you have no right to unquestioningly accept what Hamas says.

Goldstone is a former chief prosecutor for war-crime tribunals on Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia. Perhaps it is easier to come to a judicial decision with some integrity in such circumstances, than it is to examine the Israeli and Hamas roles in the last Gaza war. This kind of report, with all its biases, is one of the reasons why the US did not subject its military to the International Criminal Court. But Australia did.

As George Walden recently wrote in Britain's The Times, "Morality minus practicality is pious grandstanding, something best left to pop stars and theatre folk." And perhaps to the UN.

...So, although Goldstone did not find any direct corroboration for the terrible stories he tells of heartless IDF soldiers consistently picking out and shooting women and children from close range, he felt that "Ram"'s supposed testimony to the Rabin Academy acts as a reasonable proof of the Palestinian Arab testimony.

The problem is that after Ha'aretz published the Rabin Academy talks, the other Israeli newspapers went to great lengths to find out whether the stories told were true. This specific incident was especially heinous and one of the soldiers that recounted the incident was tracked down by Israel's Channel Two, and he told the reporter that he did not witness the incident and in fact was not even in Gaza!...

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has nixed the idea of setting up an inquiry committee into alleged Israeli war crimes in the Gaza Strip as a means of dealing with the Goldstone Commission's report.

...Netanyahu, who held two meetings on the subject on Wednesday, believes a more effective way of blocking the report would be to make it clear to the international community that referral to the ICC would sound the death knell of the peace process...

...The prime minister, they explained, fears that setting up an inquiry commission would imply that the probes now being conducted by the Israel Defense Forces are untrustworthy.

In contrast, Foreign Ministry sources said Israeli representatives overseas have been flooded with messages from friendly governments urging the establishment of an inquiry commission as the best way to block the report.

The defense minister's office said the government will therefore try to find some kind of compromise mechanism, headed by a senior legal figure such as Aharon Barak, that would show the international community Israel has stepped up its efforts to investigate the allegations.

From Israel's perspective, the best decision the Human Rights Council could make is to continue dealing with the matter itself, while the worst would be referral to either the General Assembly or the Security Council, and thence, perhaps, the ICC. Jerusalem and Washington are coordinating closely on diplomatic efforts to achieve the former result, and are currently focusing on trying to win over the European Union, whose member states have yet to reach a consensus on the matter.

In a briefing held Wednesday for ambassadors from the Asia-Pacific region, Netanyahu warned that referral to the ICC would deal a mortal blow to the peace process - as well as to democratic states' ability to fight terror...