July 2003 Archives

Among other encouraging aspects of this story is the reaction of Islamic authorities. Before agreeing to donate the child's organs, "the family asked the Mufti of Jerusalem for permission... who in turn asked the Mufti of Saudi Arabia, who replied in a fax to the family that it was an important good deed." There's at least one prominent Saudi holy man, then, who believes that it is an "important good deed" to save the lives of Israeli children.

The fall conference will be hosted by a group called New Jersey Solidarity, a self-described pro-Palestinian organization that openly calls for the destruction of Israel. Most of the media's initial reports on NJ Solidarity ignored the extremism and avowed goals of the organization. Only following widespread criticism of the group from the community, Rutgers' President McCormick, and Governor McGreevey did the newspapers begin reporting the facts about NJ Solidarity. Still, much of the media continues to obscure the most contentious fact - that the group's proclaimed "mission" is to "liberate all of historic Palestine," that is, area comprising modern Israel, the West Bank and Gaza.[...]

"This is like loading up seven Boeing 747 airliners each day, then deliberately crashing them into Mt. Kilimanjaro," said Dr. Wenceslaus Kilama, Malaria Foundation International Chairman.[...]

After the train left North Quincy, while crossing the Neponset River around 7:20 a.m., passengers reported hearing a muffled groan. Judge, dressed in a pink velour top and matching skirt, stood in the middle of the fourth car. Suddenly, her water broke.

''At first I thought someone spilled coffee, but it kept dripping,'' said Chin, 32. ''But she stood staring out the window ... I started doubting what I saw.''

About 90 seconds later, Chin said, ''I saw a head, then full baby fall out from her skirt, hit the floor sideways and slide the length of the doorway, stopping when he bumped up against the next row of seats. Still she stared out the window. Either she didn't know it happened or didn't want to acknowledge it.''

Judge bent down, picked up the baby and wrapped it in her scarf, Chin said.

As passengers slowly realized what had happened, witnesses said, the train rallied around the new mother. People offered sweaters and implored her to sit or lie down. Still, Judge refused.

''I'm fine,'' she repeated throughout the trip. ''I'm fine.''[...]

At one point, Judge took some nearby newspapers and placed them on the floor to soak up the blood. Some witnesses heard Judge apologize for the mess.

After leaving the train and heading for the stairs up to the station's main lobby, witnesses said, the placenta fell to the platform. Judge turned around, grabbed the afterbirth, put it in her shoulder bag, and headed upstairs.

''She just literally picked it up with her hand and put it in some kind of bag she was carrying, and this was in mid-stride ... It was the craziest thing I've ever seen,'' said Robert Busby, of Weymouth.[...]

An initiative by Arab states seeking support for the Palestinian right of return was rejected and instead a resolution was passed calling for refugees to be settled in the countries where they live, or in other countries, and to grant full compensation and rights to those who remain in Arab countries.

The council did not mention any UN resolutions regarding the right of return, nor any Israeli duty to accept some of the refugees, but there was a demand for European countries to accept some of the refugees.[...]

A second surprise emanated from the French humanitarian society, Medecins Sans Frontieres International. The organization has in the past condemned the IDF for crimes in the territories but, as reported by Liberation on July 22, it has now published a particularly vehement and critical report on the Palestinian Authority for the suicide bombings...

The report says suicide bombings are planned and organized and are not sporadic acts of despair. The organization emphasizes the moral and political responsibility of the PA for creating "a climate of immunity" for the crimes and not taking steps to prevent them...

The third surprise came from Le Monde, which on July 11 reviewed some Israeli and Palestinian books...The surprise comes from Sylvain Cypel's review. The Le Monde critic does praise Kimmerling's book but reprimands him for describing Israel as a fascist state, explaining that not every state involved in a colonial war is fascist. He also criticizes the symmetry that Boniface creates between the Jewish and Muslim communities in France, saying the second group
threatens the first, not vice versa.[...]

-Diana

If you are a Rutgers grad, please join Rutgers Alumni Against Terrorism in asking President McCormick to forbid the use of the campus by the Palestinian Solidarity Movement by signing the petition at: www.petitiononline.com/yo16ni.

If you are a resident of New Jersey, please join us in demanding that Gobernor McGreevey refuse to allow a terrorist-support group to meet on the Rutgers campus by signing the petition which can be found at either www.cjcamcha.org or www.petitiononline.com/amcha703.

Wherever you live, please write to Governor McGreevey and demand that he refuse to allow this terrorism-support Movement to meet on the Rutgers campus. http://www.state.nj.us/governor/govmail.html

At the peak of the Holocaust, in early 1944, Hope volunteered to perform in an all-star show at Madison Square Garden to benefit the Emergency Committee to Save the Jewish People of Europe.

This was not merely another benefit concert for a worthy cause. For Hope to support the controversial Emergency Committee took real political courage. The Committee's public criticism of the Allies apathy toward the Holocaust had infuriated government officials in Washington and London. In fact, the State Department repeatedly tried to have the Emergency Committee's chairman, Peter Bergson, drafted or deported. At State's urging, the FBI opened Bergson's mail, rummaged through his trash, and planted informants in his organization in an unsuccessful search for information that could be used to muzzle or prosecute the Bergson activists.[...]

The government granted the new status to the group of about 2,000 American citizens, who followed Chicago bus driver Ben Ami Carter to the southern Israeli desert town of Dimona in the belief that they are descended from the 10 lost tribes of Israel.[...]

According to the Hamas-affiliated Palestine Information Center, Jbarra who served 28 years of a life sentence for murdering 14 people when he planted a booby-trapped refrigerator in Jerusalem's Kikar Zion in 1975 was speaking at a Bethlehem rally held in his honor on Sunday night. The report said he "indirectly" urged Palestinians to abduct IDF soldiers.

Jbarra, 68 and better known by his nom de guerre, Abu Sukkar, was appointed earlier this month as Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat's special adviser on the issue of the prisoners.

According to the center, he told the rally that there would be no peace or security for Israel without the release of all the prisoners.

"I would like to remind all the national and Islamic factions that in return for three soldiers, Israel released 1,150 prisoners in the famous exchange," Jbarra was quoted as saying, referring to the 1985 prisoner swap between Israel and the Syrian-backed Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestinian-General Command, headed by Ahmed Jibril.

Jbarra also praised the Palestinians for killing one Jew for every three Palestinians killed during the current intifada, noting that in the previous intifada, the figure stood at one Jew for every 28 Palestinians killed in clashes with the IDF.[...]

Instead of reciprocating, the Palestinians say they can't move forward unless Israel does more. They are now calling for the release of all prisoners, including known terrorists and murderers, faster dismantling of Jewish settlements, further withdrawal of Israeli troops and removal of all restrictions on Yasser Arafat.

These demands are accompanied by threats from the Palestinian terrorist leaders that unless Israel complies, they will resume their suicide bombings against Israeli civilians.

This is not the way it was supposed to be. The demands go well beyond the road map.[...]

Let me give you one view of what that is, based on watching my craft evolve over 30 years as a senior editor. I think we're coming to the end of the era of "objectivity" that has dominated journalism over this time. We need to define a new ethic that lends legitimacy to opinion, honestly disclosed and disciplined by some sense of propriety.[...]

Just ask the 20-some members of the new city council in this holy city of Shiite Islam. Their chairs are arrayed in a circle to hear from Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defense, who invites questions. The first man to speak wants to know two things: There's a U.S. election next year, and if President Bush loses will the Americans go home? And second, are you secretly holding Saddam Hussein in custody as a way to intimidate us with the fear that he might return? Mr. Wolfowitz replies no to both points, with more conviction on the second than the first. But the question reveals the complicated anxiety of the post-Saddam Iraqi mind.[...]

"We have succeeded significantly, where Israel with its military might has failed, in reducing violence," added Mr. Abbas...

"I'm going to tell you point-blank that we must make sure that any terrorist activity is rooted out in order for us to be able to deal with these big issues," Mr. Bush told Mr. Abbas in a Rose Garden appearance.

"Nobody is going to accept a situation in which they become less secure, whether it be the Palestinian people or the Israeli people. Security is the essential roadblock to achieving the road map to peace."

"Surely nobody wants to let a cold-blooded killer out of prison that would help derail the process," Mr. Bush said. "I mean, after all, it doesn't make any sense if you've got somebody who is bent upon destroying lives and killing people in prison to, if you were to let him out, it would make it harder to achieve the peace we all want.

"And so I think it's very important to analyze the prisoner situation on a case-by-case basis."

Scratch an honest historian or international relations scholar, and s/he will tell you that all of these answers have some validity. States often go to war for a melange of reasons that go beyond self-defense. Read either the relevant section of Bush’s State of the Union speech or his AEI speech from this February and you will see all of the reasons listed in the previous paragraph mentioned.

This is why I can’t accept the “Bush lied” meme. I agree with Marshall and Den Beste that the administration emphasized the WMD issue more than the others. However, Saddam’s treatment of his citizens and the desire to spread democracy to the Middle East were mentioned on a fairly regular basis. There is a clear dividing line between lying and spinning, and the administration’s explanations for why an invasion of Iraq would be a just war fall into the latter category.[...]

A BOY known to internet users worldwide as Star Wars Kid is suing classmates for making him a laughing stock.

Tubby Ghyslain Raza, 15, made a film of himself prancing around with a mock up Star Wars light sabre.

But school pals got hold of the tape he made for a school project which shows him taking part in a pretend battle.

They released a two-minute clip on to the internet.

Millions of people downloaded it and doctored versions have appeared with special effects on a string of sites.

One shows geeky Ghyslain moving at fast-forward speed to the Benny Hill theme tune.

Ghyslain, of Trois-Rivires, Canada, claims he has been teased so much he has dropped out of school and needs psychiatric treatment.

He is claiming £140,000 damages from four schoolmates.

His family’s lawsuit states: “Ghyslain had to endure, and still endures harassment and derision from high school mates and the public.”

Introduction:
PMW has been reporting on the repeated Palestinian Authority [PA] naming of children's camps this summer after terrorists, including suicide terrorists, and it seems from the mention of "UNICEF" in the PA papers that the UN is a significant supporter of these camps. The summer camps, are often named after specific terrorists or just the general term “Shahid”, meaning "Died for Allah", the term the PA uses to honor the terrorists, as well as others who died in the conflict with Israel. A girl's summer camp was named after Wafa Idris, a woman suicide terrorist.

Beyond the act of naming the summer camps for terrorists, the camps include activities and lectures designed to present the terrorists as role models and heroes for the children, such as visits to their families, discussions about them and more. The camps are under the auspices of the PA Ministry of Youth and Sports and UNICEF is singled out and thanked in news articles for their financial support of the camps.

The following are articles mentioning UNICEF or describing the activities, from among many other similar articles:

1. “Yesterday the activities of the scouts’ Shahid [died for Allah] camp in Dir Al-Ballah were officially unveiled … under the supervision of the scouts’ authority in the Youth and Sports Department … and with the support of UNICEF. 140 scouts of both sexes took part in the camp …” [Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, July 22, 2003]

2. In the Ibn-Al-Hitham elementary school in Nablus, activities at the “Shahids of Chattin” summer camp drew to a close. This [camp] had been organized by the Youth and Sports Department, in conjunction with the Chattin division scouts’ club, UNICEF and the national committee for summer camps. In honor of this event a grand ceremony took place … Al-Issui gave a speech on behalf of the Minister of Youth and Sport in which he recalled the Shahids for Palestine, after whom the camp was named. During the ceremony there were artistic interludes presented by the Shahid Mahmad Al-Tzabar choir, along with the Shahid Abu Jibran Group and the group [named after] the two Shahid brothers Kemal and Tissir Abu-Shahab …”
[Al-Quds, July 23, 2003]

3. “Yesterday, activities ended in the camp named after the Shahida [Died for Allah] Wafa Idris, for girls in the city of Kalkiliya. The camp was founded by the Scout general administration in the Ministry of Youth and Sports. The camp was under the supervision of the Scouts in the Kalkiliya Administration and about 100 girls from the organizing committee of the city’s Scouts participated.
“…[At the closing ceremonies thanks were given including] to UNICEF for its support of the camps.” [Al-Ayyam July 18, 2003]
[Note: Wafa Idris, was the first woman suicide terrorist.]

4. “The Palestinian Union for Culture, Sciences and Development continues with the activities of the fifth round of the summer camps (which) bears the title: “The Shahid Al-Amarin.” [150 boys and girls aged 12 and 13 are taking part in this camp.]
Yesterday the camp’s participants went to the home of the Shahid [died for Allah] Jihad Al-Amarin, where (they were greeted by) the Shahid’s wife, children and family. During the visit there were speeches praising the virtues of the Shahid Jihad Al-Amarin, who was assassinated a year ago by the forces of the occupation.
[note: Jihad Al-Amarin, the founder of the Al-Aksa Martyrs’ Brigade, was killed by Israel.]

The Shahid’s wife expressed her joy at our people’s loyalty to her husband, stating that the Shahid Jihad followed a national mission. During the visit the Shahid’s wife was presented with the camp’s shield.” [Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, July 13, 2003]

Just as we migrate from Scott Peterson to Kobe Bryant and back to Jessica Lynch, so too did the snowy peaks of Afghanistan bow out to the sandstorm-induced pause in Iraq and that in turn to 16 words of the president's speech. But amid all these expressions of fleeting American madness, we need to carefully separate larger truths from the folklore that our elite mob for the moment is mouthing. Here are a random five examples of the current groupspeak that defy common sense.[...]

The reporter became an object of scorn by talk-radio hosts when the Reuters dispatch appeared, and she wrote a column yesterday for her newspaper explaining that the story was not hers. The controversy is particularly acute in the West Virginia hills, where Pfc. Lynch, from the tiny town of Palestine, is a very special heroine.

Deanna Wrenn of the Charleston Daily Mail filed her story last week, at the request of Reuters, about plans for the homecoming of Pfc. Lynch, whose capture and rescue made her the most famous American soldier in the Iraq war, but when it appeared on the Reuters wire, she hardly recognized it.[...]

In a rare public appearance, the vice president cited a now-declassified intelligence document in which six U.S. security agencies concurred that "Baghdad is reconstituting its nuclear weapons program" and "could make a nuclear weapon in months to a year once it acquires sufficient weapons-grade fissile material."

"This warning could hardly be more blunt or disturbing," Mr. Cheney said in a speech to about 200 people at American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank.

"To shrug off such a warning would have been irresponsible in the extreme. And so President Bush faced that information and acted to remove the danger." [...]

She thought Paris far from appealing, for all the splendor of its public buildings. And if she had not seen all of it, she had "smelt it." Given its state of sanitation, the stench was more than she could bear...The people themselves were the "dirtiest creatures" she had ever laid eyes on, and the number of prostitutes was appalling...

CSICOP Fellow James Oberg forwards the following from Will Bueche - Center for Psychology & Social Change:

A feature article on the alien encounter experience, by Times writer Bruce Grierson will appear in the Sunday July 27th edition of The New York Times Magazine.** The article is not expected to be favorable towards experiencers of alien contact (though stranger things have happened).

The article focuses on a young Harvard researcher, Susan Clancy, who designed a memory experiment in an effort to disprove the validity of repressed memories of childhood sexual abuse. For the experiment, she recruited subjects whose memories are, in her opinion, patently false: "experiencers" of alien contact.

The article is expected to highlight Clancy's remarkable resistance to criticism from researchers such as Dr. John Mack who believe that alien encounters are real, and from her Harvard Medical School colleagues who believe that traumatic memories are routinely repressed.

Interviews were conducted in Cambridge, Massachusetts earlier this year with Susan Clancy, her colleague Richard McNally, John Mack, filmmaker Laurel Chiten (of the documentary film "Touched"), some of the subjects who took part in Clancy's experiment and went on to speak out against her conclusions, and others from Harvard (the final article may or may not include all of these perspectives).

**Those wishing to get an advance look at the article should sign on to the New York Times website on the Friday before that Sunday's issue: the Times' website gets a head start on the print edition. Here is the direct link:

http://nytimes.com/magazine

Click here to view on ADSL
Click here to view on 56K

The lyrics:

"My sister, Wafa, My sister, Wafa,
"Oh, the heartbeat of pride,
"Oh, blossom who was on the Earth and is now in heaven, (2x)
"My sister, Wafa"
"Allah Akbar! Oh Palestine of the Arabs
"Allah Akbar, Oh Wafa!"
"But you chose Shahada [Death for Allah - Martyrdom]
"In death you have brought life to our will.
"But you chose Shahada,
"In death you have brought life to our will."
[PATV, July 24, 2003 and others]

My favorite story is about an amusement park that the coalition forces refurbished for the kids in the region. Like children anywhere, the kids were eager to try the rides, so the PTB decided to put one Marine in each car with the kids. My son told me that he had his M-16 locked and loaded between his legs and then about a dozen little kids climbed in the car. No problem, short ride? Not quite. The ride started and the operators couldn't shut it off. 20 minutes later, the wheel was still going around and around and around. Moving on to the merry-go round, my son was ordered to ride guard on a horse. They filled up the carousel with eager kids . . . and couldn't get the ride started. Rather than disappoint the kids, the Marines hooked up chains to the ride and ran around in circles pulling the merry-go-round. The kids were delighted and the Marines, wearing full body armor in 130 degree heat, got quite a workout.

Every package I send has, at my son's request, candy for the kids. He plays soccer with them and teases them like he would his own brother and sister. In the process, he's building some very positive relationships. The kids love the Marines. And most of their parents do too. The mainstream press seems to focus on negativity. There is much positive progress.

This letter is to let you know how seriously I take the nomination of Daniel Pipes to the United States Institute for Peace.

I was disappointed to learn that you failed to support the nomination of Dr. Pipes to the position he has been nominated for. I believe it is extremely important for truthful, non-hateful scholars such as Dr. Pipes to have their voices amplified. I have read every bit on this issue, including the great majority of Dr. Pipes’ writing and find him to be an excellent scholar of profound importance at this point in history.

I have been a life-long Democratic Party voter, but the behavior of several of the Democratic members of the committee charged with approving Dr. Pipes, including yourself, has been one more straw on the back of my party affiliation.

I strongly ask you to reconsider your position. Do the right thing. Do not give in to the slanderous statements being made about this eminent scholar and support Daniel Pipes.

Sincerely,

In fact, the real reason we went into Iraq was precisely to "nation build": to create a secularized, liberated, cosmopolitan society in a core Arab nation. To create a place where Arabs were free and safe and unafraid and happy and successful and not ruled by corrupt monarchs or brutal dictators. This would demonstrate to the other people in the Arab and Muslim worlds that they can succeed, but only if they abandon those political, cultural and religious chains that are holding them back.

We are not doing this out of altruism. We are not trying to give them a liberalized Western democracy because we're evangelistic liberal democrats (with both liberal and democrat taking historical meanings). We are bringing reform to Iraq out of narrow self-interest. We have to foster reform in the Arab/Muslim world because it's the only real way in the long run to make them stop trying to kill us.[...]

The groups include units of the Al Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades organization, a military affiliate of Arafat's Fatah movement that is listed as a terrorist group by the US State Department. In recent days, the Brigades led attacks on pro-Abbas leaders in major West Bank cities and hounded from office the governor of Jenin. Control of this chaotic and lawless city, from which numerous terror attacks have been launched against Israel, is essential if the Palestinian Authority is to meet its commitments under the US-backed ''road map'' toward Mideast peace.

''They won -- they have forced me to resign,'' a bruised and battered Governor Haider Irsheid said in his home as he recovered from his abduction and public beating last Saturday at the hands of armed militants in Jenin. He said he would continue functioning as governor until he leaves on a two-month vacation today, then will insist that Arafat accept his resignation. ''I am exhausted,'' the 49-year-old Jenin native and former diplomat said. ''They beat me all over my body.''

When told that Zakariah al Zubaidi, the head of the Brigades in the Jenin camp, told Globe reporters that they did not accept the cease-fire and mounted attacks as recently as Sunday, Hamayel said, ''That's not true.''[...]

But he has a political platform of his own, a website called oliverwillis.com, which he runs from his sparsely furnished apartment in Dedham. And when he posted an essay there, promoting former Vermont governor Howard Dean for Democratic nominee, he drew a flood of comments from people he had never met. When Oliver Willis talks, it turns out, the blogosphere cares.

That's the beauty of a ''blog'' (short for weblog), an online journal that can turn anyone with an Internet connection into a mini-media outlet. Blogs are easy to create, cheap to set up, and commonplace on the Web. They can draw thousands of readers per day and dozens of posted comments in a running conversation that Willis likes to think of as talk radio for the wired.[...]

The statement has caused furore in many quarters and the opposition parties, particularly the MMA, has threatened to launch a mass movement to oust him from power if he goes ahead with recognition. This article proposes to take up a number of issues: what is the significance of Musharraf’s statement at this point; what are the arguments, which militate against recognition; what are the benefits accruing from recognising Israel; finally, what would be the timing of recognition, if Pakistan does decide to go ahead with it?[...]

-John Adams

DATE: 21 July, 2003
TYPE: Program Announcement
SCOPE: United States

SUBJ: Dore Gold Presentation

WordsWorth Books in Cambridge, MA, is proud to present Ambassador Dore Gold, former Israeli Permanent Representative to the United Nations, Foreign Policy Advisor to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and currently Director of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. Dr. Gold will discuss current events in Israel and the region and will autograph his bestselling new book, "Hatred's Kingdom." Dr. Gold served as Foreign Policy Advisor to Prime Minister Netanyahu from June 1996 to June 1997. In this capacity he dealt extensively with the Prime Minister's contacts in the Palestinian Authority, Egypt, Jordan, and other parts of the Arab world.

In "Hatred's Kingdom," Dore Gold has the goods on Saudi Arabia, proving how it is actively supporting terrorism. Using previously unpublished documents, Dr. Gold, internationally known Middle East strategy expert, pieces together the links between the current wave of global terrorism, from the World Trade Center to Bali, Indonesia...and the ideology of hatred taught in the schools and
mosques of Saudi Arabia.

LOCATION AND TIME

The Charles Hotel, The Lowell Room
Harvard Square
Cambridge, MA
617-864-1200

Wednesday, July 23rd at 7:00 PM

Gilligan doesn't go in for any of that. He never tells us what went wrong with the airport story. We don't hear why he thinks Iraqi support for Saddam, 'stronger than we thought' on April 1st has evaporated a week later.

In fact, not one single recapitulation, reversal or reanalysis in 6000 words.

Instead, when a prediction or report is wrong, Gilligan moves seamlessly on to the next one.[...]

You won't see it reported on the Times' front page, so here's the scoop: The Gray Lady is a greedy leech, siphoning off millions of dollars in state taxpayer subsidies for private real estate development disguised as a public good. Now, the company stands to benefit from a federal tax-exempt bond program intended to help businesses devastated by the September 11 terrorist attacks.

It has been revealed that the Times Co.'s development partner for the headquarters project has asked city officials for $400 million in federally financed "Liberty Bonds." The federal program was meant for rebuilding in New York City's September 11 disaster zone, not for subsidizing a private newspaper's long-planned palatial ambitions.[...]

Bin Sultan made the comments in a press statement over the weekend in response to Gold's testimony last Tuesday before the House International Relations Subcommittee on the Middle East and Central Asia.

Gold told the subcommittee that more than 50 percent of Hamas funding comes from Saudi Arabia, and is increasing despite US President George W. Bush's call to the kingdom to halt aid to Palestinian terrorist groups.

"It should be known that Dore Gold is not an expert on Saudi society, faith or culture. He is simply hatred's scribe. He has opposed virtually every major peace initiative over the past two decades. Dore Gold has carried on a campaign of lies, and unsubstantiated accusations. His goal is to malign the Saudi government and drive a wedge between the United States and Saudi Arabia. Ironically, this is the very same objective shared by Osama bin Laden," bin Sultan said.

Dore Gold, who received his PhD in Saudi Arabia studies from Columbia University, told the Jerusalem Post Sunday that evidence linking Saudi Arabia to the Hamas and Islamic Jihad terror organizations was found in Palestinian headquarters in the West Bank last year.[...]

As to the accusation that Gold opposes virtually every major peace initiative, the former ambassador said, "I attended the Aqaba peace summit at the invitation of Prime Minister Sharon, but I don't remember seeing Prince Bandar there."

Watching him in the fiery 115-degree heat and the blinding glare of a parched wasteland that stretches far beyond the horizon, you know that there is nowhere else in the world Wolfowitz would rather be.[...]

This grueling trip has confirmed rather than shaken the long-distance vision of Iraq that Wolfowitz began to develop in 1979 when, as a junior policy analyst at the Pentagon, he identified Iraq as a regional challenge for the United States. This was, he recalls, "when others pooh-poohed" the idea.

"You can be elated that these people are free but still remember how much they suffered and how much of that suffering was unnecessarily prolonged," Wolfowitz says, referring indirectly to the premature ending of the Gulf war in 1991 by the first Bush administration.

"At least there was still a Marsh Arab civilization capable of being preserved. They would not have lasted another 12 years."[...]

"It is important for Iraqis to show what Arabs can do when they live in freedom," he says to the local leaders gathered here. He has arranged to meet them in the company of Britain's Baroness Emma Nicholson, the redoubtable human rights campaigner who has championed the Marsh Arabs in the European Parliament.

"What we are seeing," Wolfowitz tells me later, "eliminates any moral doubt about whether this was a war against Iraq, or a war for Iraq. This was a war for Iraq."

The invasion of Iraq, after all, was billed as Phase II in the war on terror that began after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. But was there ever a credible basis for carrying that battle to Iraq?

Don't misunderstand — we should all be glad to see the Iraqi people freed from Saddam Hussein's tyranny, and the defeat of Iraq did spell the demise of the world's No. 4 state sponsor of international terrorism (Iran, Syria and Sudan all have more blood on their hands in the last decade). But the connection the administration asserted between Iraq and Al Qaeda, the organization that made catastrophic terrorism a reality, seems more uncertain than ever.[...]

The discovery of the new evidence, which one senior administration official cautioned was "very worrisome, but still not conclusive," came just as North Korea declared to the United States 11 days ago that it had completed reprocessing 8,000 spent nuclear fuel rods, enough to make a half dozen or so nuclear weapons.

American officials have said they cannot verify that claim, though they confirm that sensors set up on North Korea's borders have begun to detect elevated levels of krypton 85, a gas emitted as spent fuel is converted into plutonium.

What concerns American, South Korean and Japanese analysts, however, is not simply the presence of the hard-to-detect gas but its source. While American satellites have been focused for years on North Korea's main nuclear plant, at Yongbyon, the computer analyses that track the gases as they are blown across the Korean Peninsula appeared to rule out the Yongbyon reprocessing plant as their origin. Instead, the analysis strongly suggests that the gas originated from a second, secret plant, perhaps buried in the mountains.

American officials have long suspected that North Korea would try to build a second plant to protect itself against a pre-emptive strike by the United States. The United States even demanded an inspection of one underground site five years ago, only to find it empty, but this is the first time evidence has emerged that a second plant may be in operation. [...]

''By God, I guarantee you we've made tremendous progress,'' Sanchez said at a news conference. ''We are way ahead of schedule.''

In southern Iraq, US Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz, a key architect of the war, insisted that the United States is committed to rebuilding the country and stressed that bringing the regime's former leader to justice is a top priority. ''We're not playing any games with Saddam Hussein,'' Wolfowitz, on a four-day visit to Iraq, said in Najaf. ''The sooner we catch that bastard -- excuse me -- the better off everybody will be.''

Wolfowitz also visited the site of a mass grave in Hillah that is thought to contain the remains of thousands of Iraqis.

Also yesterday, US forces took the first significant step toward establishing a new 40,000-member Iraqi army. About 3,000 people, including some who fought against the Americans, lined up at Baghdad's airport to interview for places in the military. Coalition officials have said that the army will be vital to stabilizing the country.[...]

``Having now informed Dr. Kelly's family, we can confirm that Dr. Kelly was the principal source'' for a radio piece in which reporter Andrew Gilligan quoted an anonymous official as saying the government had exaggerated claims of Iraqi weapons, the network said in a statement.

``The BBC believes we accurately interpreted and reported the factual information obtained by us during interviews with Dr. Kelly,'' the statement continued.

The statement said Kelly, an internationally respected weapons expert, had also been the source for a piece by reporter Susan Watts on the BBC's ``Newsnight'' analysis program.

Kelly had told a Parliamentary committee he spoke privately to Gilligan but did not recognize his claims in the reporter's piece and believed he was not its main source.[...]

The reporter quoted his source as saying the government had ``sexed up'' its evidence on Iraqi weapons in order to justify war and insisted on publishing a claim that Saddam Hussein could deploy some chemical and biological weapons within 45 minutes, despite intelligence experts' doubts.

Gilligan later said the source had accused Alastair Campbell, Prime Minister Tony Blair's communications adviser, of insisting the 45 minutes claim be included in a government dossier on Iraqi weapons. The House of Commons Foreign Affairs committee cleared Campbell of that charge.

``I believe I am not the main source,'' Kelly told the committee Tuesday. ``From the conversation I had, I don't see how (Gilligan) could make the authoritative statement he was making.'' [...]

Unfaithfulness in public stations is deeply criminal [he wrote to Abigail]. But there is no encouragement to be faithful. Neither profit, nor honor, nor applause is aquired by faithfulness...There is too much corruption, even in this infant age of our Republic. Virtue is not in fashion. Vice is not infamous.

>>Women's rights, education, and career opportunities in Afghanistan
[snip]
>>Eradication of opium production all over Afghanistan

>>The truth behind the destruction of the Buddha statues

A furious mob smashed glass and furniture, trashed potted plants and pelted the center's director, Khalil Shikaki, with eggs on Sunday.

His crime? Publishing the results of an opinion poll of Palestinian refugees that suggested only 10 percent of them would exercise the long-sought "right of return" to their former homes in what is now Israel if that right were granted.

Shikaki was only the latest Palestinian intellectual to learn that deviating from the Palestinian Authority's political line can be dangerous. [...]

ISLAMABAD – In a rare display of policy somersault the Foreign Office has strongly supported covert, if not overt, diplomatic ties with Israel claiming the shift would bring about a bonanza of political, military, and economic benefits for Pakistan.

The advantages and disadvantages of this significant decision have been spelt out in a confidential summary prepared by the Middle East section of the Foreign Office last month on instructions from “some high office.”

The Nation learnt reliably that Pakistan had discussed this issue with Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates many times over during the last few months. The issue also came up for discussion during Pervez Musharraf’s visit to Saudi Arabia in June. On Monday (today) Musharraf is leaving for a visit to Tunisia, Algiers and Morocco where the issue is expected to stay on top of the agenda.

The Foreign Office summary, which claims Pakistan will not have any disadvantage if it recognizes Israel, was handed over to General Musharraf before he embarked upon a four-nation visit last month to UK, US, Germany, and France.

“We don’t see any harm in recognizing Israel,” said a senior Foreign Office official, requesting not to be named, when contacted for his comments. He, however, hurried to add the summary was not the brainchild of Foreign Office but reflected the thinking at the highest level to bring a policy shift on the issue of Israel. “You can say that we have done the cost and benefit analysis.” [...]

Recognizing this, HonestReporting monitored headlines of Reuters news agency reports on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict during the one-month period June 10 - July 10, 2003. This critical period commenced with the Israeli strike against Hamas leader Abdel Aziz Rantisi, and ended with the relative calm of the Palestinian hudna.

During this time frame, Reuters issued headlines describing six acts of violence by Palestinians against Israelis, and twelve acts of violence by Israel against Palestinians. Among these, HonestReporting found the following patterns of bias:[...]

Safran committed the one unpardonable sin in his field. You can kowtow to Middle Eastern despots, take money from oil-sodden emirs, apologize for suicide bombers, and mislead the American public on a grand scale. Hundreds of professors in Middle Eastern studies have done all these things, and have gotten promotions. But get too intimate with the CIA, and you're done. Safran passed away on July 5. The Harvard Crimson ended its obituary on this note: "He taught for a few more years after his resignation as director of the center and was disappointed that the controversy followed him. Later in life, he was interested in painting." A young professor reading these lines can't miss the message.[...]

North Korea fired first with four shots at a South Korean army position near the town of Yonchon at 6:10 a.m. The South fired 17 rounds in response one minute later, said Maj. Lee of the South Korean Joint Chiefs of Staff.

The South reported no injuries among its soldiers, and it was not immediately known if any casualties were suffered on the North's side. Over the decades, violence has periodically broken out at the DMZ, though such engagements have tapered off in recent years and are now considered rare.

The clash between the two neighbors comes amid heightened tensions on the peninsula over the closed-off communist country's nuclear ambitions.

Diplomacy had appeared to be making headway Wednesday, when the United States was told by Chinese officials Pyongyang (search) was no longer insisting on bilateral negotiations on its nuclear weapons programs, Fox News learned.[...]

It was misty white, he said, and it blossomed above the gulch near the Iranian border where he and his security men had deposited 10 truckloads of political prisoners. Hours later, waiting at a nearby roadblock, he watched the trucks return. They were piled with dead bodies. Civilian technicians accompanying the grim convoy angrily ordered him to keep his distance.

"That's when I realized this was no ordinary execution," said the officer, a retired colonel with the Iraqi Second Army Corps who spoke on condition of anonymity. "The government was using prisoners to test its chemical weapons."

U.S. forces have failed to find chemical or biological weapons in Iraq, frustrating a Bush administration that had argued war was necessary to eliminate Saddam Hussein's alleged stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction.

But there is no doubt that Saddam had used such weapons in the past, including the gassing of Kurdish villages in the 1980s.

Now reports are surfacing that Saddam used human subjects to test the weapons. Senior intelligence officers, weapons engineers and the families of alleged testing victims are stepping forward to describe one of the darkest crimes the old regime inflicted on its people.[...]

The ceremony Wednesday, marks the first time Washington has given financial aid directly to the Palestinian people. Previously Washington has funneled money to the Palestinians through international organizations, but the Bush administration has recently expressed its confidence in Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas. [...]

The grand strategy of a war requires pacing and preparation; you pick your fights when you're ready, and choose the sequence so as to maximize the chance of success and minimize the chance of self-immolation. In the case of the current war, one of the things which was important was to make sure that the economy of the world didn't collapse or go into serious spasms while the war was being fought.[...]

SO ADVANCED is the technology that Zink says he isn't worried about possible competition. Indeed, the official "vision statement" of Metal Storm refers not to "next-generation" but rather "generation-after-next" defense systems for Australia's armed forces as well as the United States "to enhance national security." The company's chief concern is to make sure the technology is safeguarded from "potential enemies."

I have developed a habit when confronted by letters to the editor in support of the Israeli government to look at the signature to see if the writer has a Jewish name. If so, I tend not to read it.

Too few people in this modern world are prepared to declare an interest when it comes to this kind of thing. It would be enormously helpful, for example, if those clerics and journalists who have been defending Canon Jeffrey John, the so-called gay bishop, were to tell us whether they themselves are gay. Some do, but more don't.

The issue arises partly because, in both cases, these people are often accusing the other side of being prejudiced and biased - we are either homophobes or anti-Semites.

The other day, for example, the Canadian journalist Barbara Amiel wrote a long denunciation of the BBC in the Daily Telegraph, accusing the Corporation of being anti-Israel in its Middle East coverage.

Many readers of the Daily Telegraph may have been impressed by her arguments, assuming her to be just another journalist or even, as she was recently described in another newspaper, an 'international-affairs commentator'.

They might have been less impressed if the paper had told them that Barbara Amiel is not only Jewish but that her husband's company, in which she has an interest, owns not only the Daily Telegraph but the Jerusalem Post .

In other words, when it comes to accusing people of bias on the Middle East, she is not ideally qualified for the role.

England immediately upon this began to increase (the particular and minute cause of which I am not historian enough to trace) in power and magnificance, and is now the greatest nation upon the globe.

Soon after the Reformation a few people came over into the new world for conscience sake. Perhaps this (apparently) trivial incident may transfer the great seat of empire into America. It looks likely to me. For if we can remove the turbulent Gallics [they even had trouble with the French back then!], our people according to exactest computations, will in another century, become more numerous than England itself. Should this be the case, since we have (I may say) all the naval stores of the nation in our hands, it will be easy to obtain the mastery of the seas, and then the united force of all Europe, will not be able to subdue us. The only way to keep us from setting up for ourselves is to disunite us. Divide et impera. Keep us in distinct colonies, and then, some great men in each colonu, desiring the monarchy of the whoole, they will destroy each others' influence and keep the country in equilibrio.

Be not surprised that I am turned politician. The whole town is immersed in politics.

The following is the first in a series of reports issued by MEMRI's newly established office in Baghdad . The reports will provide a comprehensive overview of the new Iraqi press.

The decision culminates days of discussion on the matter, including an exchange between Ambassador to the UK Zvi Shtauber and the Foreign Ministry on the wisdom of imposing sanctions on the BBC. [...]

When I went back to Italy, some of my fellow students stared at me as somebody new, an enemy, a wicked person who would soon become an imperialist. My life was about to change. I didn't yet know that, because I simply thought that Israel rightly won a war after having been assaulted with an incredible number of harassments. But I soon noticed that I had lost the innocence of the good Jew, of the very special Jewish friend, their Jew: I was now connected with the Jews of the State of Israel, and slowly I was put out of the dodecaphonic, psychoanalytic, Bob Dylan, Woody Allen, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Philip Roth, Freud shtetl, the coterie that sanctified my Judaism in left wing eyes.

I have tried for a long time to bring back that sanctification, and they tried to give it back to me, because we desperately needed each other, the left and the Jews. But today's anti Semitism has overwhelmed any good intention.[...]

It is political insanity. Instead of looking back at what went wrong in the last campaign season and correcting it, they seem determined to repeat the mistakes - and make matters worse for the next round. This is because they are blaming O'Brien for the loss last November to Republican Mitt Romney - and not seeing their own role in the election debacle.

The thinking goes like this: The Democratic Party gave O'Brien everything possible, from Senator Ted Kennedy to Boston Mayor Tom Menino. It embraced her as the centrist candidate who could defy liberal labeling - in other words, stand for as little as possible. In the heat of campaign battle, neither the theory nor the candidate held up. O'Brien lost. Now it is one strike and she is out. And the state party begins its search for another candidate it can surround, smother, and ultimately help destroy - after it first destroys challengers the party deems unworthy.

The party's push for O'Brien began when party leaders believed she would be running against another female candidate, Acting Governor Jane Swift. When Swift was elbowed out of the way by Romney, the Democratic Party stuck with O'Brien. They figured female voters would support her and enough men would, too, if they saw familiar faces behind her. Arrogant and egotistical as ever, party leaders believed they were propping O'Brien up. Instead they were weighing her down.[...]

Miller, a Vietnam War veteran and longtime advocate for Cambodian and Vietnamese refugees, fell to the pavement and was run over. The driver sped away without ever slowing, police said.

''The poor fellow. He kept yelling, `Stop, stop, stop,' '' said Bill Kelly, the owner of the Dorchester Tara Pub on Dorchester Avenue, who said he was checking a patron's identification at the door around 11:45 p.m. when he heard frantic yells.

Kelly, who estimated that the vehicle was traveling at least 50 miles per hour, rushed over to Miller, but he was already dead.

''This is something you see in the movies,'' Kelly said. ''I saw this flash of red and the next thing I see he's rolling on the ground and his head is all over the road.''

There is an Arab proverb that says a thousand days of tyranny is better than one day of anarchy. It's time we kick that proverb to the curb.

MI6 had more than one "different and credible" piece of intelligence to show that Iraq was attempting to buy the ore, known as yellowcake, British officials insisted. But it was given to them by at least one and possibly two intelligence services and, under the rules governing cooperation, it could not be shared with anyone else without the originator's permission.

US intelligence sources believe that the most likely source of the MI6 intelligence was the French secret service, the DGSE. Niger is a former French colony and its uranium mines are run by a French company that comes under the control of the French Atomic Energy Commission.

A further factor in the refusal to hand over the information might have been concern that the US administration's willingness to publicise intelligence might lead to sources being inadvertently disclosed.

US sources also point out that the French government was vehemently opposed to the war with Iraq and so suggest that it would have been instinctively against the idea of passing on the intelligence.[...]

The battle took place between April 4 and April 11 of 2002.

The research, which was conducted by Jonathan D. HaLevi and the JCPA from a wide and comprehensive variety of Palestinian written testimony and material which was published recently in Palestinian newspapers, books and Websites, reveals for the first time that Palestinian terror organizations saw themselves as armed combatants and not as civilians who died in a deadly massacre.

The 35 page study, which is based on primary sources, clearly illustrates that Fatah, Islamic Jihad and Hamas prepared themselves thoroughly with automatic weapons, grenades, anti-tank missiles and explosives and perceived the confrontation with IDF troops as nothing less than a "military to military battle." [...]

At the same time, the council will establish procedures to write Iraq's new constitution. Once it is ratified by the people, elections can be held and a sovereign Iraqi government will come into being. So the question of how long the coalition will stay in Iraq depends in part on how quickly the Iraqi people can write and approve a constitution.[...]

"He'd no business, whatever to call me," Truman wrote. "The Jews have no sense of proportion nor do they have any judgement [sic] on world affairs. Henry brought a thousand Jews to New York on a supposedly temporary basis and they stayed."

Truman then went into a rant about Jews: "The Jews, I find, are very, very selfish. They care not how many Estonians, Latvians, Finns, Poles, Yugoslavs or Greeks get murdered or mistreated as D[isplaced] P[ersons] as long as the Jews get special treatment. Yet when they have power, physical, financial or political neither Hitler nor Stalin has anything on them for cruelty or mistreatment to the under dog. Put an underdog on top and it makes no difference whether his name is Russian, Jewish, Negro, Management, Labor, Mormon, Baptist he goes haywire. I've found very, very few who remember their past condition when prosperity comes."

In the corridor, Greenwald lounged against the wall and remarked to Maryk, "Captain Blakely doesn't like Jews. Intonations on the name 'Greenwald.' I have absolute pitch for those harmonies."

"Jesus," said Maryk miserably.

"It won't make any difference. You're not supposed to love Jews necessarily, just to give them a fair shake. I've always had a fair shake in the Navy, and I'll get it from Blakely, too, despite the eyebrows."

Tenet said that agency officials approved of including the accusation in the president's speech with the caveat that it had been reported by the British government, even though the US officials doubted the veracity of the report that the British had cited.

''This should not have been the test for clearing a presidential address,'' Tenet said in a statement released by the CIA last evening. ''CIA should have ensured that it was removed.'' The director said the underlying assertion, that Iraq was trying to reconstitute its nuclear program, was sound.

The statement, which gave a rare, detailed glimpse into the intelligence process, was released at the end of a day of finger-pointing by White House officials and intensifying criticism from congressional Democrats about how the administration used intelligence to build the case for going to war. Tenet's statemet appeared designed to quell the controversy.

''First, CIA approved the president's State of the Union address before it was delivered,'' he said. ''Second, I am responsible for the approval process in my agency. And, third, the president had every reason to believe that the text presented him was sound.'' [...]

I am looking at the document as I write this story from my hotel room overlooking the Tigris River in Baghdad.

One of the lawyers with whom I have been working for the past five weeks had come to me and asked me whether a list of the 600 people closest to Saddam Hussein would be of any value now to the Americans.

I said, yes, of course. He said that the list contained not only the names of the 55 ''deck of cards'' players who have already been revealed, but also 550 others.

When I began questioning him about the list, how he obtained it and what else it showed, he asked would it be of interest to the Americans to know that Saddam had an ongoing relationship with Osama bin Laden.

I said yes, the Americans have, so far as I am aware, have never been able to prove that relationship, but the president and others have said that they believe it exists. He said, ''Well, judge, there is no doubt it exists, and I will bring you the proof tomorrow.''

So today he brought me the proof, and there is no doubt in my mind that he is right.

The document shows that an Iraqi intelligence officer, Abid Al-Karim Muhamed Aswod, assigned to the Iraq embassy in Pakistan, is ''responsible for the coordination of activities with the Osama bin Laden group.''

The document shows that it was written over the signature of Uday Saddam Hussein, the son of Saddam Hussein. The story of how the document came about is as follows.

Saddam gave Uday authority to control all press and media outlets in Iraq. Uday was the publisher of the Babylon Daily Political Newspaper.

On the front page of the paper's four-page edition for Nov. 14, 2002, there was a picture of Osama bin Laden speaking, next to which was a picture of Saddam and his ''Revolutionary Council,'' together with stories about Israeli tanks attacking a group of Palestinians.

On the back page was a story headlined ''List of Honor.'' In a box below the headline was ''A list of men we publish for the public.'' The lead sentence refers to a list of ''regime persons'' with their names and positions.

The list has 600 names and titles in three columns. It contains, for example, the names of the important officials who are members of Saddam's family, such as Uday, and then other high officials, including the 55 American ''deck of cards'' Iraqi officials, some of whom have been apprehended.

Halfway down the middle column is written: ''Abid Al-Karim Muhamed Aswod, intelligence officer responsible for the coordination of activities with the Osama bin Laden group at the Iraqi embassy in Pakistan.''[...]

In postwar Japan, the focus was on the emperor: Had His Highness Hirohito broadcast calls for terrorist resistance, the occupation might have been far more difficult and the Americans hardly deferential to his person, despite his divinity.

Perhaps, as products of a sophisticated, rational, and liberal society, we now believe that sane people can judge for themselves that an Osama bin Laden or Saddam Hussein is discredited and hiding in miserable circumstances, if not wounded or dead. But the nature of their rule — unlike Western consensual government — was never sane or rational, hinging instead on precisely the opposite emotions of fear, romance, and personal magnetism in lieu of reason.[...]

One was the idea that all moral questions, all issues of right and wrong, good and evil, were subject to being correctly decided on the basis of man's reason alone, without the necessity (better put, without the interference) of divine revelation or organized religion. Man, and man alone, would be the final and autonomous arbiter of morality.

This idea brought with it, as a necessary corollary, the firm belief that man left to his own reasoning devices would invariably choose to do what is right, what promotes life and fairness and the common good.[...]

But none of these theories have proven true. Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Milosevic and the entire slew of other murderers of the 20th century have all given the lie to these fantasies about human morality and rectitude. One-third of all of the commandants of the Nazi death camps held either a Ph.D. or M.D. degree. Man, left to his own reason, will not choose right. Reason, by itself, is death and destruction, oppressive theories and murderous social engineering. No faith and no belief have led us to the brink of the social abyss of self-destruction.[...]

In January, Bush boldly proclaimed that ''in an age of miraculous medicine'' no person should be denied treatment for AIDS and announced that ''this nation can lead the world in sparing innocent people from a plague of nature.'' Recently he set the standard by which America's efforts against AIDS should be judged: ''We care more about results than words. We're interested in lives saved.''

Since that speech, a million Africans have died of the disease while Bush has dithered on the emergency. In fact, since Bush has come into office, about 5 million Africans have died of AIDS while the US bilateral assistance programs under the president's watch have provided antiretroviral treatment for only a handful of people.[...]

It would officially recognize that European-Americans, whether they come from a long line of American citizens or whether their parents came over dirt poor from Europe in the 20th century, continue to benefit from a white privilege that allowed them to move up the ladder into the suburbs. Meanwhile, slavery's replacement, segregation, blocked generations of African-Americans from building up wealth because of redlining, intellectual capital through inferior public schools, and political capital through disenfranchisement.[...]

The trouble is that life is lived forwards, not backwards. If the Marines had been dispatched, no one would have known how many lives they saved, and then the very same people who condemn the Americans for not having dispatched them would have blamed the Americans for other reasons. They would have said that the Americans were trying to secure West African diamonds, or its iron and manganese deposits. There is no pleasing some people.[...]

These clips are gone, said Carmon, but another video, which he calls just as troubling, is still being shown.

In it, a Palestinian youth sees his girlfriend get killed by Israeli soldiers and then decides to seek revenge. He is enticed to become a martyr by pictures of beautiful women with long flowing hair dressed in white gowns frolicking and dancing in pools of water in a garden - the Islamic dream of paradise.

Palestinians consider those who die in confrontations with Israeli troops or those who carry out terror attacks to be martyrs. Suicide bombers particularly are promised that 72 virgins await them in paradise.

The video clip is simple. But in a society where it is taboo for young men to be close to the opposite sex, this is very enticing, said Carmon

"This is a video clip in which a youth can see with his own eyes [what] the 72...virgins promised to a shaheed [martyr] look like," he said. "This is incitement to the suicide bomber."[...]

In the end, Justice Thomas, the man who wants to overturn his own past, seems trapped in it. Justice O'Connor has accepted the past and moved on. He's still uncomfortable in his seat. She has made the robe her own - and made affirmative action our own.[...]

I shook hands with the President last week. I was wearing my kippah and said simply "thank you for everything you do" and then turned and began to walk away. In front of hundreds of people he called me back, looked me straight in the eye and said "remember, security first, then peace". This is from a born again who 80% of Jews vote against! He gets it! I hope American Jews will start to change their antediluvian political perspective.

"Palestinian resistance in all its forms has been a very powerful tool of justice," said Kates, 23, a Rutgers law student. "All forms, from armed struggle to mass protest."

And does Israel have a right to exist?

"Israel is an apartheid, colonial settler state. I do not believe apartheid, colonial settler states have a right to exist." [...]

Threats to the government remain. Former prime minister Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a self-styled Islamic fundamentalist with a militia of his own, reportedly has joined forces with Taliban and al-Qaeda holdouts. The Taliban's leader, Mohammed Omar, remains at large. And infighting among warlords, especially in the north, could threaten the tenuous stability.

But some influential religious leaders who might have been expected to oppose the U.S.-supported Karzai government have instead expressed support.

"I have two messages," says Ahmmad Nabi Mohammadi, leader of the Islamic Revolutionary Movement of Afghanistan, which has followers in all 32 provinces. "One is that we strongly request the USA to continue supporting the government of Hamid Karzai. ... The other is that everyone understand this is the exact government that Afghanistan needs now and to support that government."

In Istalif, the picnickers are not the only people who say Afghanistan is chipping away at its challenges.

Muhammad Naseem Qadeer Zada, 19, lived with his family in Pakistan for nearly 10 years. Now he's back, and he runs a small shop where he sells blue-and-green pottery — a specialty of his village — that he, his brothers and father make.

The people of Iraq who worry about having foreigners in their country, Zada says, "should understand that as long as those people are there to benefit that country, they should stay."

Says his father, Abdul Qadeer, 50: "I'm optimistic about the future of Afghanistan. Before, Afghanistan was gone. Now it is back."

The claim of responsibility for the bombing came from a branch of Islamic Jihad based in the West Bank town of Jenin. A statement issued there said the attack in the Israeli village of Kfar Yavetz was only the first and that more attacks would follow unless Israel releases all Palestinian prisoners.

But an Islamic Jihad spokesman in the Gaza Strip said the organization remains committed to the ceasefire they announced 10 days ago.

Israeli police had initially blamed a natural gas leak for the explosion that leveled the home of a 65-year-old woman. But after finding the body of an unidentified man in the rubble they began investigating it as a possible terror attack.

A police spokesman said they now have conclusive evidence that the explosion was a suicide bombing.

It is the first suicide attack since the three main Palestinian militant groups declared a temporary cease-fire on June 29.[...]

Khalidi seriously overstated the percentage of Palestinian civilian casualties. According to the International Policy Institute for Counter-Terrorism, 2,329 Palestinians have died in the conflict between Sept. 2000 and June 15, 2003, and 785 have died on the Israeli side. On the Palestinian side, 867 were “non-combatants killed by the opposite side.” In contrast, on the Israeli side, 604 killed were non-combatants killed by the opposite side.” Thus, while it is true that at 76.9 percent, most Israelis killed were civilians, it is not true that most Palestinian fatalities were civilians. Only 37.2 percent of Palestinian fatalities were civilians. (See www.ict.org.il for details.)[...]

SMHS history courses routinely omitted essential components of U.S. history—everything from the pioneers to the Second Amendment—but spent an inordinate amount of time condemning this nation's past. My own U.S. history teacher instructed us that our nation's past fears about Communism were unjustified; in fact, capitalism had been a sinister force in the world. The Mexican-American War (or, as it was referred to in class, the “North American invasion”!) was labeled a barbaric undertaking. Through America’s history as a “terrorist nation,” she brought upon herself the sinister attacks of 9/11.[...]

I began running Coulter columns on Frontpagemag.com shortly after she came up with her most infamous line, which urged America to put jihadists to the sword and convert them to Christianity. Liberals were horrified; I was not. I thought to myself, this is a perfect send-up of what our Islamo-fascist enemies believe – that as infidels we should be put to the sword and converted to Islam. I regarded Coulter’s phillipic as a Swiftian commentary on liberal illusions of multi-cultural outreach to people who want to rip out our hearts.

Another reason I have enjoyed Ann’s attacks on liberals is because they have been so richly deserved. No one wields the verbal knife more ruthlessly than so-called liberal pundits like Joe Conason, to cite but one example. I have been the subject of many below-the-belt Conason attacks. If people Joe Conason admired were the objects of acid Coulterisms, so much the better. If Conason was outraged, I was confident that justice had been done.

But now to my dismay, I find myself unable to find such satisfaction in Conason’s reaction to Ann’s new book Treason, or in the responses of other liberals like The Washington Post’s Richard Cohen (who has also attacked me in the past). In a review in the Post, Cohen dismisses Ann’s book as “Crackpot Conservatism,” reflecting the fact that their responses are not so much yelps of outrage as cackles over what they view as an argument so over the top that only true believers will take it seriously. It is distressing when someone you admire gives credibility to liberal attacks. But that, unfortunately, is what this book has done.[...]

Washington has been working with African governments in the past month in a frantic bid to hunt down the cargo plane, amid fears the aircraft could be used by terrorists in a repeat of the September 11 attacks.

The paper said the plane was spotted on June 28 by a Canadian pilot, Bob Strother, in Conakry, sporting a new coat of paint and a Guinean registration number.

But Strother told the paper that two letters of the plane's old tail number - N844AA - were still showing, proving the aircraft was the same Boeing that was being sought by US diplomats throughout Africa.

"There's absolutely no doubt it's the same aircraft, the old registration is clearly visible," he was quoted as saying.

"Whoever owns it must have some important friends to get it re-registered in two days: going by the book, the whole process usually takes a couple of months," he added.

"We only saw it that one time, now it's gone".[...]

News from the front:

Sent: Thursday, June 26, 2003 1:45 PM
Subject: Open Current Events Letter From A U.S. Army Major In Iraq

It has been a while since I have written to my friends at First Lutheran Church about what's really going on here in Iraq. The news you watch on TV is exaggerated, sensationalized and selective. Good news doesn't sell.

The stuff you don't hear about on CNN? Let's start with Electrical Power production in Iraq. The day after the war was declared over, there was nearly 0 power being generated in Iraq; 45 days later, in a partnership between the Army, the Iraqi people and some private companies, there are now 3200 mega watts (Mw) of power produced daily, or 1/3 of the total national potential. Downed power lines ( big stuff, 400 Kilovolt (Kv) and 132 Kv) are being repaired and are now about 70% complete.

Then there is water purification.

In central Iraq between Baghdad and Mosul, home of the 4th Infantry Division, water treatment was spotty at best. The facilities existed, but the controls were never implemented. Simple chemicals like Chlorine for purification and Alum (Aluminum Sulfate) for sediment settling (the Tigris River is about as clear as the Mississippi River) were in very short supply. Or not used at all. And when chlorine was used, it was metered by guessing.

So some people got pool water to drink and some people got water with lots of little things floating around in it. We are slowly but surely solving that. Contracts for repairs to facilities [that are only 50% or less operational ] are being let. Chemicals are being delivered, although we don't have the metering problem solved yet (... but again, it's only been 45 days).

How about oil and fuel?

Well the war was all about oil wasn't it? You bet it was. It was all about oil for the Iraqi people ! They have no other income. They produce nothing else. Oil is 95% of the Iraqi GNP. For this nation to survive, it MUST sell oil.

The Refinery at Bayji is at 75% of capacity in producing gasoline. The crude oil pipeline between Kirkuk (Oil Central) and Bayji will be repaired by tomorrow (2 June). LPG, what all Iraqi's use to cook and heat with, is at 103% of normal production. And WE, the US ARMY, are insuring it is being distributed FAIRLY to ALL Iraqi's.

You have to remember that only 3 months ago, ALL these things were used by the Sadam regime as weapons against the population to keep them in line. If your town misbehaved, gasoline shipments stopped .. LPG pipelines and trucks stopped .. water was turned off .. power was turned off.

Now, until exports start again, every drop of gasoline produced goes to the Iraqi people. Crude oil production is being stored and the country is at 75% capacity right now. They need to export or stop pumping soon, ... so thank the UN for that delay.

ALL LPG goes to the Iraqi people EVERYWHERE. And water is being purified as best it can be, but at least it's running all the time to everyone.

Are we still getting shot at? Yep. Are American Soldiers still dying? Yep, about 1 a day from my outfit, the 4th Infantry Division, most in accidents. But dead is dead.

If we are doing all this for the Iraqis, why are they shooting at us?

The general Iraqi population isn't shooting at us. There are still bad guys, who won't let go of the old regime. They are Ba'ath party members (read Nazi Party, but not as nice) who have known nothing but .. and supported nothing but .. the regime all of their lives. These are the thugs for the regime that caused many to disappear in the night. They have no other skills. At least the Nazis had jobs and a semblance of a national infrastructure that they could go back to after the war, .. as plumbers, managers, engineers, etc. These people have no skills .. but terror. They are simply applying their skills. But we are applying ours. There is no Christian way to say this .. but they must be eliminated and we are doing so with all the efficiency we can muster.

Our troops are shot at literally everyday by small arms and Rocket Propelled Grenades (RPGs). We respond and 100% of the time, the Ba'ath party guys come out with the short end of the stick.

The most amazing thing to me is that they don't realize that if they stopped shooting at us, we would focus on .. fixing things more quickly .. and then leave back to the land of the Big PX. And the more they shoot at us, the longer we will have to stay.

Lastly, all of you please realize that 90% of the damage you see on TV was caused by Iraqi's, NOT by us and not by the war. Sure we took out a few bridges from military necessity, we took out a few power and phone lines to disrupt communications, sure we drilled a few palaces and government headquarters buildings with 2000 lb. laser guided bombs (I work 100 yards from where two hit the Tikrit Palace), he had plenty to spare. But, ANY damage you see to schools, hospitals, power generation facilities, refineries, pipelines, was ALL caused either by .. the Iraqi Army in its death throes .. or from much of the Iraqi civilians looting the places.

Could we have prevented it? Nope.

We can and do it now, but 45 days ago the average soldier was fighting for his own survival .. and trying to get to his objectives as fast as possible. He was lucky to know what town he was in much less be informed enough to know .. who owned what .. or have the power to stop a 1,000 people from looting and burning a building by himself.

The United States and our Allies, especially Great Britain, are doing a very noble thing here. We stuck our necks out on the world's chopping block to free an entire people from the grip of a horrible terror that was beyond belief.

I've already talked the weapons of mass destruction thing to death, .. bottom line, who cares? This country was one big conventional weapons ammo dump anyway. We have probably destroyed more ground weapons and ammo in the last 30 days than the US Army has ever fired in the last 30 years (Remember, this is a country the size of Texas), so drop the WMD argument as the reason we came here ... if we find them GREAT.. if we don't, SO WHAT?

I'm living in a "guest palace" on a 500 acre palace compound with 20 palaces with like facilities built in half a dozen towns all over Iraq that were built for one man. Drive down the street and out into the country side 5 miles away, like I have, and see all the families of 10 or more, all living in mud huts and herding the two dozen sheep on which their very existence depends, ...then tell me why you think we are here.

WMD ? ...important .. have to find 'em wherever they may be (.. in Syria?), but not OUR real motivator. Don't let it be yours either.

Respectfully,

E. R. MAJOR Deputy Division Engineer 4th Infantry Division

"Our view is not very different from the view of the United Kingdom on this issue, in particular as far as the role of the nation state is concerned," he said. "We also believe the role of national parliaments must be stressed. We are not for the model of a United States of Europe. We are very sensitive to such values as sovereignty and identity.

"Poland fought for her independence for such a long time" that any attempt to create a federal Europe would be unacceptable to Polish public opinion, Mr Miller told The Telegraph. "All these pro-federal trends would be badly received in Poland."

The prime minister, attending ceremonies in London marking the 60th anniversary of the death of the wartime leader Gen Wladyslaw Sikorski, pointed out that both then and now Britons and Poles have fought side by side.

"We fought arm-in-arm during the Second World War and today arm-in-arm we are working for the normalisation and stabilisation of the situation in Iraq, and we are on the right side," he said.

Poland infuriated the French and German governments by committing troops to the American-led campaign in Iraq.

Mr Miller said Poland had done nothing to "inflame this conflict" with France and Germany and emphasised that he had no desire to antagonise either country. He said Poland was generally "positive" about the draft European constitution.

Mr Miller made plain Poland would continue to support the American and British efforts to rebuild Iraq and is keen to send large numbers of civilian experts.

He pointed out that in the 1970s and '80s more than 30,000 Polish engineers and other workers helped to build roads and other installations in Iraq. He said many of these experts with local knowledge of Iraqi conditions were ready to return there.

This correspondent is still not very sure of their names. After reading the fine print of a recent piece by Ikram Sehgal, an entrepreneur-cum-opinion building columnist from Karachi, however, one is tempted to infer that he was included among those visitors.

Most of them had apparently went to Israel from Jordan after attending the much-hyped congregation of World Economic Forum (WEF), held from June 21 to 23 at Shounneh, a resort on the Dead Sea.

Eleven heads of state and 36 ministers from different countries interacted with top business executives, and movers and shakers of the global economy there. The UN secretary general and a former US president, Bill Clinton, addressed some of the WEF sessions.

Pakistan was represented by a delegation of minister-level finance managers, including Hafiz Sheikh, besides a select group of private sector entrepreneurs. Israel's presence was also high profile.

On a Pakistani passport, you can travel "all countries except Israel." Yet some people from this country have been occasionally slipping into that country in the name of visiting some historic sites, also considered "holy" by Muslims. A few would hunt for the business and trade prospects through third countries.[...]

Lies and half-truths -- readily believed by a nation of people who learned long ago to be skeptical of rulers' motives -- are complicating America's mission in Iraq, fueling anti-U.S. sentiment as troops struggle to quell a growing uprising.

"They want to destabilize Iraq," said Ali Mohammed Said, a 26-year-old law school graduate who blamed U.S. soldiers for a blast on Saturday that targeted a graduation parade of U.S.-trained police cadets in Ramadi, west of Baghdad. Seven were killed.

"They want to drive a wedge between us so we fight each other while they stand by and watch," he said.

U.S. officials dismiss such claims as absurd. The Ramadi blast, they say, was the work of pro-Saddam insurgents. The American-led provisional administration is using radio waves, newsletters and a planned TV station to try to dispel the rumors.

After an Iraqi newspaper claimed U.S. Marines raped a young girl and left her for dead, U.S. officials persuaded the publisher to run a retraction and fire the offending reporter.

When a newspaper reported that American night vision equipment can be used to see through women's clothing, U.S. civil affairs troops visited the editors personally to let them look through the goggles. [...]

His real baby, however, is Dotomi, where he holds the position of chief technology officer. It's not surprising that Dotomi should attract so much of Goldfinger's attention since in many ways it is the closest in character and concept to Mirabilis. "I can contribute the most to Dotomi," admits Goldfinger, who is one of the founding members of the company.

Dotomi, which was founded in 2000, has developed a new direct communication channel for relationship marketing between corporations and their customers, via the web and interactive TV. The technology enables companies to send personal one-to-one messages via advertising spaces on the web to clients who opt into the service, creating a highly focused, permission-based new marketing channel.[...]

But for the 100,000 Americans who are diagnosed each year with glaucoma, that drainage is blocked, and the increased pressure pushes on and damages the optic nerve at the back of the eye. Usually glaucoma can be controlled with medication. Sometimes laser treatment is needed to reopen the drainage channels: but some people aren't helped by any of those treatments.

Now a new device developed in Israel is providing hope and relief for glaucoma sufferers who have been previously dismissed as untreatable. Optonol's Ex-Press shunt is an effective, long-term alternative to traditional glaucoma surgery and can significantly improve the quality of life of glaucoma patients by providing possible relief from life-long dependency on drug therapy.

The FDA-approved shunt is a miniature glaucoma drainage device, just the tiny spike at the end of the needle. A simple, short procedure inserts the shunt at the edge of the colored part of the eye, the limbus. The microscopic conduit drains excess fluid out of the eye and into the tissues surrounding the eye, where it can`t do any harm. The pressure reduction brings down the pain level and reduces the patient's need for medications to relieve that pain.[...]

Gribanov and Tatiana Yankelevich, Sakharov's stepdaughter and the assistant director of the archives, feel that this is how the archives are widely regarded - as an island that history has passed by.[...]

The Government's ox was the BBC's coverage of the war in Iraq. The BBC was careful in its approach. It did not explicitly undermine our fighting soldiers - even while maintaining a steady anti-coalition campaign.

This approach was capped by its report of an uncorroborated, anonymous intelligence source who claimed the Prime Minister and Alastair Campbell lied to the nation concerning the reasons for war.

For the Tories, the ox was the coverage of the local elections last May. The Tories compiled a dossier on the short shrift the corporation gave them and claim to have wrung a verbal apology from director-general Greg Dyke.

My oxen are the BBC's relentless anti-Israel and anti-America biases. These two biases often meet, as in last Saturday's BBC Arabic Services programme analysing President George Bush's forthcoming visit to Africa.

Was it about peace or was it all part of his plan to militarily, economically and politically dominate the world? Arabic Services have never subjected the policy of any contemporary ruling Arab leader to such scrutiny.

Last week, the government of Israel decided it would refuse BBC interviews, impose visa restrictions on BBC personnel and generally make life difficult for BBC employees. I happen not to agree with this Israeli action, but I understand the impulse.[...]

For the last half-century proponents of judicial activism have borrowed the prestige the court gained by being activist on civil rights and used it to justify judicial legislation in every other field of endeavor. On a recent edition of Inside Washington, for example, my friend and fellow panelist Colby King of The Washington Post characterized my opposition to the sodomy decision as "right out of the Southern Manifesto.''

IT WAS a bit of a stretch (delivered with a bit of a smile). Invoking segregation is a clever tactic and a staple of judicial activism, but it fails because segregation was unique. The argument against judicial activism is that it impedes, overrides and in effect destroys normal democratic practice.

But in the segregated South there was no normal democratic practice. Blacks were disenfranchised. They could not undo the injustice by legislative means because they had been deprived of those very means. It was a Catch-22.

That's why the court had to intervene. That's why the court was right to intervene. It did not mint new rights; it extended to African-Americans the normal rights of democratic participation. [...]

Transportation Minister Avigdor Lieberman was asked to serve on the committee but declined, saying he would be happy instead to drive the prisoners to a place from which they would never return.[...]

"This is the most important issue for us," Abdel-Razak told Israel Radio. "Israel must decide on principle that they will release all of the prisoners and implement the decision gradually. If this is not done then there will not be negotiations, no road map. In this deal we will not be partners."[...]

An aide to Abbas suggested that "the Israelis want to keep the issue as a bargaining card so they can release gradually some more prisoners each time Sharon and Abu Mazen meet or they need to make a gesture to satisfy the Americans." The aide predicted that Israel was likely to spread the release of most prisoners over a period of two years.[...]

The calls by Taylor and Nigeria's leader for a peaceful transition increase pressure on President Bush to send U.S. troops to Liberia to enforce a cease-fire in the war-torn nation. Bush heads to Africa on Monday for visits to five nations _ including Nigeria, the top powerbroker in West Africa.

A team of 15 U.S. military experts were heading to Liberia late Sunday to begin assessing whether to deploy troops as part of a regional force, as the Untied Nations, European powers and the Liberians have sought. West African nations have offered 3,000 troops and have suggested that the United States contribute another 2,000.

Taylor is under intense international pressure to step down _ Bush has said he would "not take 'no' for an answer' _ and is holed up in a capital surrounded by rebels. But he has insisted peacekeepers deploy before he will go to ensure fighting does not erupt again.[...]

Mohammed was arrested by Pakistan's powerful Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) agency in Rawalpindi on Feb. 28.

Pakistani intelligence officials said they since received cogent information that several key al Qaeda fugitives who were hiding in Pakistan had moved to Iran.

Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf said in an interview during his Washington trip late last month that some al Qaeda operatives "certainly" had relocated to Iran in the wake of the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan, although he could not say for certain who the fugitives were.

"Al Qaeda is on the run, and they are transiting to all the neighboring countries," Gen. Musharraf told editors and reporters at a luncheon June 26 at The Washington Times. "Certainly, they are transiting to Iran as well, although we can't say for sure how senior these people are."

Saif Al-Adel, an Egyptian national who has been appointed the military chief of al Qaeda after the arrest of Mohammed, is hiding in the Iranian city of Zahedan, which borders with Pakistan, Pakistani intelligence officials say.[...]

During the course of nearly three weeks in the country, it is evident that people here at all levels of society are grateful to the United States. But as one of only a handful of Westerners ever to venture so far up into these mountains to spend time with Afghans and then visit with them in their homes, mosques, hospitals and bazaars, one does not miss the hazards as innocent questions are put directly.

Nagging questions[...]

Which is where the political calculations start. If Davis is still there in 2004, the Bush team reckon they'll take California and be heading for an electoral-college landslide. On the other hand, whoever takes over from Davis is likely to be just as unpopular by then as Davis is now: nobody seriously thinks the place can be fixed between now and then.

So this time next year Governor Arnie will be reviled as a Republican usurper, and the California recall will somehow be tied to the Florida recount, and Bush will lose the state, as he did in 2000. Ambitious California Dems have concluded that tossing poor old Gray in the shark tank and letting ravenous Republicans chow down on him for a few months may be the best way to position themselves for the next time.[...]

The truth is that we are confused as to what motivates the double standard and bias Europeans employ against us. Perhaps post-modernism blinds them to identifying evil, even when it confronts them in the face.

How else to explain the moral equivalency Europeans employ by bracketing the actions of soldiers who try to protect civilians with the ghouls seeking an early entry to paradise by blowing themselves up amidst our women and children?

It takes a myopic delusion not to recognize the hatred that suffuses Palestinian society at all levels, resembling the evil with which the Nazis indoctrinated an entire generation. How else to classify kindergarten children being groomed to murder their neighbors? Or mothers sanctifying children who blow themselves up as "martyrs?"
I would ask Moratinos: If that is not evil, what is?[...]

Some of the missiles failed to explode, others exploded near homes and parked cars in and around Kiryat Shmona causing some damage but no injuries and sparking several brush fires that were later extinguished.

"The powerful booms of Hizbullah's anti-aircraft rockets being launched at us is much louder than the actual explosions they make when they hit the ground," a security source told The Jerusalem Post.

"This is nothing more and nothing less than an organized campaign of psychological terrorism. The physical damage is limited to brush fires and scraps on buildings and cars," the source said.

The source stated that people on Israel's northern border are ordered into shelters only when the IDF believes that the physical threat is severe.

"Many of our children have been traumatized by these attacks. As the anti-aircraft shells were being fired in our direction this morning, my dog was shivering as he tore through our screen door to scratch on the main door, letting us know that he desperately wanted to come in."

The source concluded: "Most of us have become immune to these almost daily cross-border terror attacks, we continue with our normal routines - but the effect on our children may not be known for years to come."

(Margot Dudkevitch contributed to this report)

The star, known only as HD70642, is 90 light years away in the constellation Puppis. Scientists estimate this star is orbited, once every six years, by a planet about twice the mass of Jupiter. Jupiter - more massive than all its companion planets combined - takes 12 years to orbit the sun.

"This is the closest we have yet got to a real solar-system-like planet, and advances our search for systems that are even more like our own," said Hugh Jones of Liverpool John Moores University, who announced the discovery yesterday at a conference on extrasolar planets in Paris.

He and colleagues used a 3.9 metre Anglo-Australian telescope at Siding Springs in New South Wales for the work.

Until 1995, there was no evidence at all of planets orbiting other stars. Since the first dramatic discovery eight years ago, researchers have identified more than 100 planetary systems within 150 light years of Earth.

No one has seen any of these planets: researchers infer the presence of an orbiting planet from a kind of wobble in the light from the parent star. The technique is reliable but has limitations. It can most easily detect star systems with an enormous planet, probably made of gas, in an elliptical orbit that moves very close to the parent star.

But this rules out the possibility of life as Captain James T Kirk and Mr Spock in the television series Star Trek might know it. No conceivable creature could survive on a giant planet, and the presence of such a monster so close to a star would rule out any chance of a small, rocky planet in the same orbit.

Earth is known to astronomers as a "Goldilocks" planet, not so far away that water freezes, not so close that it boils: in fact, just right for life to evolve. The excitement over HD70642 is because its orbital system leaves room for a series of rocky planets much nearer the parent star. It is the first evidence so far that other stars could be encircled by planets like earth.

"It is the exquisite precision of our measurements that lets us search for these Jupiters - they are harder to find than the more exotic planets found so far," said Alan Penny of the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Oxfordshire, another member of the team. "Perhaps most stars will be shown to have planets like our own solar system."

Chris McCarthy of the Carnegie Institution in Washington, also in the partnership, said: "The discovery of planets orbiting other stars allows us to put our own Earth and solar system in a bigger context, a galactic context, for the first time."

The universe contains perhaps 100bn galaxies, each containing 100bn stars. Researchers can only hope to study the nearest of these. Astronomers backed by the US National Science Foundation are working to put all 2,000 of the nearest sun-like stars under scrutiny, out to distances of 150 light years.[...]

But if freedom brings out the worst in people, it also brings out the best. The millions of Americans who live decent, praiseworthy lives deserve our highest admiration because they have opted for the good when the good is not the only available option. Even amid the temptations that a rich and free society offers, they have remained on the straight path. Their virtue has special luster because it is freely chosen. The free society does not guarantee virtue, any more than it guarantees happiness. But it allows for the pursuit of both, a pursuit rendered all the more meaningful and profound because success is not guaranteed but has to be won through personal striving.

By contrast, the authoritarian society that Islamic fundamentalists advocate undermines the possibility of virtue. If the supply of virtue is insufficient in free societies, it is almost nonexistent in Islamic societies, because coerced virtues are not virtues at all. Consider the woman who is required to wear a veil. There is no modesty in this, because the woman is being compelled. Compulsion cannot produce virtue; it can only produce the outward semblance of virtue.[...]

President Pervaiz Musharraf has caused a storm in Pakistan by urging recognition of Israel.

Islamic leaders have threatened to launch a mass movement to oust him from power if he goes ahead with recognition.

Two days after meeting President George W Bush at Camp David and receiving a £2 billion US aid package for the next five years, Gen Musharraf said the media should have an open debate about the merits of recognising Israel.

He said: "The debate should be serious. There should be no emotionalism of the extremists. What is our dispute with Israel ? We should think."

But Maulana Fazlur Rehman, secretary-general of the Mutahidda Majlis-e-Amal, an alliance of six Islamic parties said: "Gen Musharraf has no right to recognise Israel and if any action is taken at any level, the MMA would launch a mass agitation to overthrow him."

The Israeli prime minister, Ariel Sharon, is due to pay a state visit next month to India - Pakistan's old foe and nuclear rival.

A western diplomat in Islamabad said: "The army is worried about the military, economic and intelligence ties that India has developed with Israel in order to fight Pakistani-backed Islamic insurgents in Kashmir."

PROTEST DEMONSTRATION

On Tuesday, July 1, at 6:30 pm, there will be a demonstration at 51 Inman Street, Cambridge (behind Cambridge City Hall, between Harvard St and Mass. Ave). ISM is meeting in the Peace Commission offices at 7:00.

We will protest the support by Massachusetts taxpayers of a group that endorses and supports terrorism.

More info given below.

BACKGROUND

International Solidarity Movement (ISM) is a group of socialist estremists that supports Palestinian terrorism by sending "peace" activists, some of whom are currently under indictment in Israel for shielding known terrorists from arrest. ISM is explicit in its support for the Palestinian right to commit terrorist attacks on Israeli civilians. Although several ISM activists are now under indictment for
shielding terrorists from arrest, the group denies that its support for terrorism goes beyond the verbal.

The city of Cambridge has a Peace Commission that supports ISM in various ways, including allowing the group to hold its regular meetings in the Peace Commission's city-owned offices.

The Director of the Cambridge Peace Commission, Cathy Hoffman, is quite open about her belief that the Palestinians should be supported in their liberation struggle and that they have a right to use terrorism in that struggle. Hoffman is a salaried employee of the City of Cambridge.

ACTION

1. If you live in the Boston area, try to join the protest.

2. Spread this message to others who might participate.

An Israeli army spokesman said a Palestinian armed with a pistol opened fire at a military roadblock near the West Bank city of Tulkarm and was shot dead by soldiers. There were no other casualties or any immediate claim of responsibility.

A Bulgarian road worker was killed in a shooting attack on Monday in the West Bank claimed by a cell of the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, a militant group affiliated with the Fatah (news - web sites) faction of Palestinian President Yasser Arafat (news - web sites).

Arafat told reporters that Palestinian security forces had arrested those behind the ambush but did not elaborate. [...]

Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz confirmed Israel would follow up by handing over the West Bank city of Bethlehem on Wednesday, but said details had to be ironed out to ensure Jewish settlers nearby or access to a Jewish shrine would not be endangered.

But a refusal of West Bank-based militants in Fatah to endorse the temporary truce it proclaimed with Islamic radicals in Gaza on Sunday could hold up a broader Israeli pullback.[...]