April 2006 Archives

A cell consisting of operatives from the Popular Resistance Committee (PRC), the Shin Bet revealed, arrived at the Palestinian side of Karni last Wednesday in three cars, one of which was filled with explosive canisters. The plan was to blow a hole in a wall dividing the PA side of the terminal from the Israeli side, which the gunmen would then use to infiltrate the crossing. The attack was however thwarted by PA policemen who stopped the cars at a roadblock leading into the crossing...

...Government officials noted the irony that while Hamas was warning of a humanitarian disaster inside the Gaza Strip, and while the Palestinian Authority was lobbying the world to pressure Israel to keep the Karni crossing open, Hamas was involved in an attack aimed at blowing up the crossing. Due to numerous terror specific warnings, Karni has been repeatedly opened and closed by Israel since the disengagement from Gaza last year. The closures are often depicted by the PA as collective punishment on the Palestinian people, which relies on the goods transferred through the crossing.

"Hamas spokespeople who have continuously complained to the western media of a so-called Israeli policy to starve the Palestinian people are now exposed as cynical hypocrites whose real agenda is nihilism. They have no scruples about bringing suffering on their own people to advance their own extreme political agenda," one government official in Jerusalem said...

..."Hamas has never ceased its involvement," the official said, "they just did not take credit."...

"Jihad in Europe: Past as Prologue?" based upon his recently published book, The Legacy of Jihad

Friday April 28, 2006 5-6 PM
The Semitic Museum, Room 201
6 Divinity Avenue
Cambridge, MA

Admission Free

Contact: Dr. James Russell

Sweden called off its participation in the air force exercises to take place in Italy next month because of the involvement of the Israel Air Force in the drills.

Prosor told Rydberg that those who do not see Israel as a legitimate peacekeeping force could not be surprised that Israel does not view them as having legitimate involvement in the Middle East peace process...

...Regarding the NATO drill, Rydberg said that Sweden had "technical and financial" reasons for dropping out of the exercise, and pointed out that Israel and Sweden had never participated in the same peacekeeping exercise.

Prosor replied that the envoy's remarks were "insulting and unacceptable."

For example,

• President Vicente Fox ($236,693) makes more than the leaders of France ($95,658), the U.K. ($211,434), and Canada ($75,582).
• Although they are in session only a few months a year, Mexican deputies take home at least $148,000—substantially more than their counterparts in France ($78,000), Germany ($105,000), and congressmen throughout Latin America.
• At the end of the three-year term, Mexican deputies voted themselves a $28,000 "leaving-office bonus."
• Members of the 32 state legislatures ($60,632) earn on average twice the amount earned by U.S. state legislators ($28,261). The salaries and bonuses of the lawmakers in Baja California ($158,149), Guerrero ($129,630), and Guanajuato ($111,358) exceed the salaries of legislators in California ($110,880), the District of Columbia ($92,500), Michigan ($79,650), and New York ($79,500)...

Of the 5000 employees of the Lyon-Saint-Exupéry Airport, only 20 are considered to be radicals…

Mr. Kushner, who has called the founding of Israel a "mistake," and has accused the Jewish state of "behaving abominably towards the Palestinian people," is among seven people who are slated to receive honorary doctorates from the Waltham, Mass.-based university, which has Jewish roots but is nonsectarian.

The degrees are to be awarded on May 21, when Prince Hassan bin Talal of Jordan will give the commencement address and receive an honorary degree.

The Zionist Organization of America is calling on Brandeis to reconsider its decision to honor Mr. Kushner. "A Jewish-oriented college should not be giving respectability and legitimacy to someone who has been such a hostile critic of Israel," the president of ZOA, Morton Klein, said...

"You can't imagine how pleased I was," Findley says. "I think I can pose as a foremost expert on the lobby for Israel, because I was the target the last three years I was in Congress."

Findley is a fierce critic of Israel's policy toward the Palestinians [Is that all, really? -S]. Findley's lobby group, the Council for the National Interest, published a full-page ad in The New York Times calling for the Israel lobby to be brought under control...

The issue is whether the cause is just. The public opinion polls in America are clear. The Jews, the Catholics and the Protestants are overwhelmingly supportive of Israel - with enough quibbles about the particulars to keep the Israeli Lobby busy for decades to come, because no one, not even those crafty Jews, controls American foreign policy.

"As an artist I have a lot more leeway in Israel than in any other country -- nobody censors me, nobody threatens me," he says. He participates in demonstrations against the construction of the wall that will separate Israeli and Palestinian areas and exhibits with Palestinian artists. He doesn't care whether his contest plays right into the hands of anti-Semites. "They don't need me," he says. "They have enough ideas on their own."

And so he quietly, and with a trained eye, reviews the truly anti-Semitic cartoons on www.irancartoon.com. Some, he admits, "are really well done." While mostly amateurs took part in his contest for the best anti-Semitic cartoon, many professionals were among the 181 participants from 42 countries (including Russia, Switzerland and the US) that took part in the official Iranian contest.

Now Sandy's hoping that the Palestinians can learn from the contest and someday sponsor the best anti-Palestinian cartoon contest. "That would be a sign of political maturity," he says. "But if someone tried that today, they'd have to fear for their life."

...Who will rise up for me against the evil-doers? Who will stand up for me against the workers of iniquity?

Unless the Lord had been my help, my soul had soon dwelt in silence...

...They gather themselves together against the soul of the righteous, and condemn innocent blood...

In this war - and it is a war against Israel that the PA is waging - the EU is far from being a neutral observer. Since the beginning of the 90s, the EU is trying to play a role in the region, based on the excellent relations that the Federal Republic of Germany and other countries maintain to most Arab countries.

Officially, the institutions of the European Union always declare that they are - well balanced - calling upon both sides to hold peace again. But in reading the resolutions, in following the policy of the EU, you know that this is not the case...

When a Jewish person calls something anti-Semitic, she noted, some Europeans discount it because it is coming from a Jew.

This kind of bias is not uncommon among Europeans, said Schroeder, and she has been fighting it ever since she decided that it was essential to speak out about the E.U.'s support of the Palestinian Authority.

Elected to the E.U. Parliament as a member of the German Green Party in 1999 (she later left the party to become an independent, but still allies with the left), Schroeder said she came to the body without a particularly strong view on the Middle East.

The Sept. 11 attacks changed that, she said, making her realize how widespread anti-American and anti-Semitic attitudes were in the E.U. countries.

She saw the attacks not only as directed against the U.S., but against Jews as well, since al-Qaeda was attacking what it sees as the hallmarks of Jewish influence -- Wall Street and the U.S. government. But many Europeans reacted to Sept. 11 not with outrage, but with cries of "These people are poor, we have to understand them."

It was then she realized that she had to become an activist...

The lawsuit filed Thursday in U.S. District Court in Manhattan says Ali Mahmoud Ali Shafi was kidnapped on September 22, 2001, in Palestinian Authority-controlled territory and tortured for six months.

Shafi lived in the West Bank town of Qalqilya from 1948, when the state of Israel was created, until 1994, when he moved to Haifa, the lawsuit says. Before moving to Israel, he helped the Israeli security services prevent terrorist attacks on its citizens, it says.

In September 2001, he returned to Qalqilya so his daughter could visit her grandmother, and members of the Palestinian security service entered their house and asked him to accompany them to their headquarters for 10 minutes, the lawsuit says.

When he arrived at the headquarters, he was stripped, handcuffed and beaten, and hot salt water was poured onto his wounds, the lawsuit says. He escaped when Israel Defense Forces soldiers passed through town, scaring his guards, it says.

The lawsuit seeks unspecified damages on Shafi's behalf, saying it would be impossible for him to get justice in areas controlled by the defendants, which include the Palestinian Authority and the Palestine Liberation Organization...

In a news article about the march, the L'Osservatore Romano newspaper called the anti-Israel protests a "serious and disgusting offense."

"To offend a flag means to offend the people for whom it is a symbol, and therefore in this case it was an offense to the entire Jewish people, precisely on the day in which we celebrate liberation from their infamous oppressors," L'Osservatore wrote.

Earlier on Wednesday,the Israeli ambassador to Italy condemned as "barbarous" the anti-Israeli demonstrations held "As a Jew and an Israeli, I was filled with shame and anger at the sight of the barbarous behavior of the 'fascists' who defiled the sanctity of the Liberation Day holiday," Ambassador Ehud Gol said in a statement.

The protests occurred near a march Tuesday commemorating the 61st anniversary of Italy's liberation from fascism. Demonstrators trampled and burned Israeli flags and yelled "Intifada" in support of the Palestinian uprising, according to media reports.

The protesters reportedly were angered by the presence in the march of Israeli flags in honor of members of the Jewish Infantry Brigade Group, which helped liberate Italy...

Similarly, Finkelstein’s humour reminds one of Irving or perhaps Le Pen, who can never resist a pun about gas ovens. Recounting Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s joy at the American D’Amato’s victory over the Swiss, Finkelstein writes: ‘…"a triumph of the spirit". Pity he didn’t say "the will".’ (p.103) One does not have to have any liking for Netanyahu or D’Amato to find this reference to Leni Riefenstahl and the Nuremburg Rally offensive. Finkelstein excuses his Swiss heroes by a comparison with the Americans: ‘And, although swamped in size and resources by the United States, Switzerland admitted just as many Jewish refugees as the US (approximately 20 000) during the Nazi Holocaust.’ (p.104) Finkelstein conveniently forgets that, unlike the USA, Switzerland had a border with the Third Reich, and that, unlike the USA, the Swiss sent Jewish refugees back in the 1940s knowing that they would die, which is very different from the unintended medium-term consequences of the St Louis tragedy in early 1939.

Finkelstein’s appetite for anti-Semitic humour is as gross and insatiable as Irving’s or Le Pen’s: ‘Unsurprisingly, the Holocaust industry didn’t launch a campaign to investigate US banks. An audit of our banks on the scale of the Swiss audit would cost American taxpayers not millions but billions of dollars. By the time it was completed American Jews would be seeking asylum in Munich.’ (p.117)...

If PCUSA News is truly impartial and unprejudiced, it would also run this more shocking story. A Jewish woman travelling on her own is attacked by an Arab mob – she could have been killed. The mob of Jewish youths, on the other hand, attacked a group of cowardly foreign ‘activists’, who ran away, nursing a few bruises...

And then it all started;

Exactly at 1340 we got the call that a suicide bomber hit a crowded Falafel Restaurant in Jaffa, a part of Tel-Aviv down town….

Immediately we started to evacuate the injured and sick people that were in walking position from our ER, and started to arrange the Hall for the arrival of the wounded from the Terror attack.

Mostly from that moment I remember an old lady, in her 80’s, which fell a few hours earlier in the street and cracked her head on the floor, getting an ugly scar on her forehead and an hematoma around her eye, she waited patiently to get her CT scan, and as she heard the terrible news, she immediately told me that she is OK, and she can wait, and walked to the other side of the ER!...

Samuels noted, "This Council was ostensibly conceived to replace the morally bankrupt U.N. Human Rights Commission, which has served as a haven for human rights violations. Indeed, it was Ziegler who, as Rapporteur on the Right to Food for the last six years, represented all that was wrong with the Commission."

The letter suggested that "Switzerland propose a more appropriate Swiss citizen than the founder of the 'Muammar Khadafi Foundation for Human Rights,' established by Ziegler in 1989, four months after the Libyan sponsored terrorist bombing of Pan Am Flight 103. The 2002 Khadafi Human Rights laureates were Ziegler and convicted French Holocaust denier, Roger Garaudy."

Samuels continued, "While charging the United States and Israel for starvation genocide in Cuba and the Palestine Authority respectively, he has ignored the famines of Burundi, Chad, Central African Republic and other stricken nations…"

"…According to UN Watch, he has served Mengistu, the perpetrator of mass murder by starvation in Ethiopia, in assisting in writing that country's one party constitution."

The letter emphasized, "Ziegler has acted as an apologist for totalitarian despots, and is the only Rapporteur to have ever been condemned by the UN Secretary-General and the Human Rights Commissioner for an antisemitic slur characterizing Israeli soldiers as concentration camp guards."

The Centre joined associations of victims of torture and political prisoners of Cuba and Libya, in urging Switzerland to withdraw this outrageous nomination.

Samuels concluded, "Ziegler's appointment to the new Council is an exercise in the theatre of the absurd. It makes a mockery of the UN's claim that this new structure will take the control of the agenda away from the violators of basic freedoms..."

"...Ziegler at the Council will turn the term 'human rights' into a travesty."

...This makes me tend towards the possibility that a foreign element - the enemies, and maybe the Israeli Mossad - are behind this operation, especially since we cannot ignore the fact that all three operations were preceded by Israeli warnings to the Israeli citizens not to stay in Sinai because of the possibility of terrorist attacks.

[...]

It is noteworthy that the bombings in Taba, Sharm Al-Sheik, and now Dahab were preceded by Israeli warnings - not to the Egyptian authorities, but to the Israelis. They warn them and say to them: Do not stay in Sinai at this time. There are two possibilities: Either they analyze certain positions and conclude that operations may take place at this time and in this area, or else they are, at the very least, behind these operations. There is a third, unlikely, possibility that they managed to infiltrate some of these organizations or groups, and so they are aware of their plans at this stage.

[...]

I remind them - and especially our brothers in Fatah, who are very powerful and many... I remind them of their Islamic religious roots, which were based on resistance and Jihad from day one. They announced their motto: "Revolution until victory." I remind Abu Mazen of his oath to Allah from day one - Revolution until victory. I remind them of this. All the attempts to reach what they call peace, but is in fact surrender, are completely futile, and will not get them the slightest thing.

[...]

The Palestinian people has sacrificed its blood. It has easily sacrificed its souls, for the sake of its cause, its religion, and its homeland. Should we not give them money?

The Jews throughout the world - despite their well-known stinginess, miserliness, and selfishness, and despite their worship of gold... The Jews contributed generously to the Jewish state, before and after its establishment, and they are still contributing to this day. Shouldn't the Arabs and Muslims contribute for their sacred cause?

[...]

According to Islam, any land invaded by the enemy, even if it is only a small piece of land - it is the duty of its people to defend it. If they cannot or are remiss in this, it becomes the duty of their neighbors - and so on, until it includes all the Muslims of the world. I believe that the Muslims throughout the world have become responsible for the liberation of Palestine and Al-Aqsa Mosque.

Mr. Cole's appointment would be problematic on several fronts. First, his scholarship is largely on the 19th-century Middle East, not on contemporary issues. "He has since abandoned scholarship in favor of blog commentary," says Michael Rubin, a Yale graduate and editor of the Middle East Quarterly. Mr. Cole's postings at his blog, Informed Comment, appear to be a far cry from scholarship. They feature highly polemical writing and dubious conspiracy theories.

In justifying all the time he spends on his blog, Mr. Cole told the Yale Herald that "when you become a public intellectual, it has the effect of dragging you into a lot of mud." Mr. Cole has done his share of splattering. He calls Israel "the most dangerous regime in the Middle East." That ties in with his recurring theme that the American Israel Public Affairs Committee effectively controls Congress and much of U.S. foreign policy. In an article titled "Dual Loyalties," he wrote, "I simply think that we deserve to have American public servants who are centrally commited [sic] to the interests of the United States, rather than to the interests of a foreign political party," namely Israel's right-wing Likud, which was the ruling party until Ariel Sharon formed the centrist Kadima Party. Mr. Cole claims that "pro-Likud intellectuals" routinely "use the Pentagon as Israel's Gurkha regiment, fighting elective wars on behalf of Tel Aviv."...

...Appointing someone as hotheaded and intolerant as Mr. Cole to a prestigious appointment at Yale wouldn't seem to make any sense. The drive to hire him can be explained in part by the same impulses that prompted Yale to admit Mr. Hashemi. "Perhaps the folks who still want to let Taliban Man into the degree program are also thinking Cole would make a great faculty advisor for him," jokes Mr. Taylor, the alumnus leading the NailYale protest.

But that might not be a joke. Many Yale faculty members are deadly serious about wanting Mr. Cole to become their newest colleague, and their views hold great sway. Unlike at Harvard, the university president at Yale has no power to veto the faculty's hiring choice. So even if the admissions department rejects Mr. Hashemi's application for the fall semester, Yale may jump out of the Taliban frying pan and into the Cole fire.

' He calls Israel "the most dangerous regime in the Middle East." '

This a lie. I never said that. Try googling it.

How did it do that? One way would have been to squeeze Israel relentlessly. But the United States understood that making Israel feel less secure would only enhance the likelihood of another war. It would also encourage the Arab states to prepare for yet another round. Instead, the U.S. solution was to show such strong support for Israel, as to make Arab states despair of defeating it, and fearful of the cost of trying; and to bring Israel entirely into the U.S. orbit, to make of it a dependent client through arms and aid. The mechanism for tying it all together was and still is the "peace process," a series of U.S.-mediated Israeli concessions of territory Israel occupied in 1967.

The results of this strategy have been stupendously successful. There has not been a general Arab-Israeli war since 1973. The Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty changed the dynamic. Jordan came in later, and Syria has kept its direct front with Israel quiet for just as long. Thanks to this stability, and the absence of destructive wars between Israel and Arab states, 1973 has not been repeated.

Now, Israel continues to confront some Palestinians. But we have learned that even the worst of these contests does not have the same impact as a full-blown war between Israel and Arab states. When these conflicts erupt, Arab oil states send aid to the Palestinians, and they even come up with their own peace initiatives. But they do not threaten an oil embargo against the West or the United States. (There are not even boycotts of U.S. goods. Arab consumers have not punished the United States for its support of Israel the way they have punished Denmark for a few cartoons in its press.)

So I return to my earlier point. A superpower can not only sustain seeming contradictions in its policy, it can turn contradictions into compatibilities. U.S. support for Israel--indeed, the illusion of its unconditionality-- has compelled Israel's Arab neighbors to join the pax Americana or at least acquiesce in it. And the United States, by enhancing and sustaining support for Israel these past thirty years, has prevented the one kind of Arab-Israeli war that might impede the flow of oil. All this has been done with a comparatively modest investment of treasure, and only symbolic deployments of U.S. forces, well out of harm's way. (Sinai observers and a few Patriot missile batteries are the sum of it.)...

To those who would say that this inflates the power or even role of the press in America today, I would reply: You don't expect the Democrats to keep us out of war, do you? Just as they would not stand up to the president on Iraq for fear of appearing "weak on terror," they would likely be wary of appearing "weak on the Tehran Bomb." Let’s face it: All the Democrats want to do right now is stagger through to November with an unpopular president in office, and hope that, maybe, they can re-take at least one house of Congress -- without having to stick their necks out.

So the media, usually only a middle-reliever or in a mop-up role on this playing field, might have to pitch with the game on the line...

...Thankfully, there are signs that the press may be ready to douse a few flames. Recent media accounts have often cast a skeptical eye on the trumped-up Iran threat, and reporters are already asking probing questions at White House briefings -- before the war this time, not months after an attack...

Moreover, the art of directing masses and individuals by means of cleverly manipulated theory and verbiage, by regulations of life in common and all sorts of other quirks, in all which the GOYIM understand nothing, belongs likewise to the specialists of our administrative brain. Reared on analysis, observation, on delicacies of fine calculation, in this species of skill we have no rivals, any more than we have either in the drawing up of plans of political actions and solidarity.
-- Protocol 5, Paragraph 4

Instead of driving around the potholed streets firing their AK47s in the air, his advisers gathered in a tin-roofed hut in a remote part of the Gaza territory, safe - they hoped - from prying ears.

For now is a dangerous time to be the Palestinians' security supremo, and Abu Samhadana's allies know that even if the Israelis do not succeed in killing him, there are plenty of Palestinian rivals who might like to.

In his first interview with a British newspaper since his controversial appointment as Hamas's "iron glove" last week, Abu Samhadana, 43, revealed his ambitions for the paramilitary force under his control.

"This will be the nucleus of the future Palestinian army," he said. "The resistance must continue."

Abu Samhadana was speaking only days after nine Israelis were killed by a Palestinian suicide bomber. He can expect that Israel security officials are hungry for revenge for the Tel Aviv bombing and regard him as an attractive target.

For his part, the new commander-in-chief remained defiant and gave no sign that he would seek to rein in future attacks.

He told The Sunday Telegraph: "We have only one enemy. They are Jews. We have no other enemy. I will continue to carry the rifle and pull the trigger whenever required to defend my people."...

...In recent months, he has directed the continuing barrage of Qassam rockets fired from Gaza into Israel, guaranteeing that he remains a high-priority target for Israel. Hours after his appointment, Zeev Boim, Israel's housing minister, said Abu Samhadana's new status conferred no immunity on him.

"We have a long account to settle with this notorious terrorist. Sooner or later, we will get our hands on him," he said...

With a dogged determination that any dissident can appreciate, Mr. Bush, faced with overwhelming opposition, stands his ideological ground, motivated in large measure by what appears to be a refusal to countenance moral failure.

I myself have not been uncritical of Mr. Bush. Like my teacher, Andrei Sakharov, I agree with the president that promoting democracy is critical for international security. But I believe that too much focus has been placed on holding quick elections, while too little attention has been paid to help build free societies by protecting those freedoms--of conscience, speech, press, religion, etc.--that lie at democracy's core.

I believe that such a mistaken approach is one of the reasons why a terrorist organization such as Hamas could come to power through ostensibly democratic means in a Palestinian society long ruled by fear and intimidation.

I also believe that not enough effort has been made to turn the policy of promoting democracy into a bipartisan effort. The enemies of freedom must know that the commitment of the world's lone superpower to help expand freedom beyond its borders will not depend on the results of the next election...

...Penn State spokesman Bill Mahon said in a separate e-mail that "the heart of this issue is the student never mentioned outside sponsorship" when the exhibit was approved.

But e-mails from Stulman to Garoian, obtained by the Centre Daily Times, show that Stulman wrote March 1 that "the opening is sponsored by Penn State Hillel" and offered contact information for Penn State's Hillel director, Tuvia Abramson. Hillel is a Jewish organization.

On April 11, Garoian e-mailed Abramson and Stulman and suggested the three get together to write a news release about the exhibit. Garoian and Abramson corresponded several more times without mentioning the sponsorship.

Hillel was providing $75 to $100 for a reception, Abramson said. Hillel did the same for a February exhibit, Abramson and Stulman said, and encountered no problems...

Several fliers were removed or defaced in the Visual Arts Building, including one that had a swastika drawn on it.

In one of Stulman's paintings, an Arab-looking man is extending his right arm in a Nazi salute. On his headgear is written type in Arabic, translated as "I am a murderer." The colors of the painting match the colors of the Palestinian flag: red, black, white and green.

It is meant to shock and challenge, but it is not an anti-Muslim statement, Stulman said. The painting is to show "the appropriation of Nazi symbols and its use in Hamas and other terrorist organizations," he said.

"This is a terrorist, and I think anyone who sees this painting will see a terrorist," he said...

The move highlighted long-standing fears Hamas would use its win in last January's Palestinian parliamentary elections to impose an anti-Christian, anti-Jewish hard-line Islamist regime in the West Bank and Gaza.

"The face of the new Hamas government is coming to the forefront now that they finally took over and have a lot more confidence. They want to create a territory free of Christians and Jews," said a Christian leader associated with the YMCA in Qalqiliya, a West Bank town under the jurisdiction of the Palestinian Authority.

Yesterday, major Muslim organizations in Qalqiliya in conjunction with local mosques, the city's Mufti and municipal leaders, sent a letter to the interior minister of the Hamas-led PA accusing the YMCA of missionary activities and demanding the Palestinian government immediately shut down the Christian offices.

The YMCA has operated in Qalqiliya since 2000.

The petition, obtained by WND, states, "We the preachers of the mosques and representatives of major families in Qalqiliya ask you to close the offices of the YMCA because the population of Qalqiliya doesn't need such offices, especially since there are not many Christians in our city."

It warned, "The act of these institutions of the YMCA, including attempting to convert Muslims in our city, will bring violence and tension."

Already this past weekend several Molotov cocktails were thrown at Qalqiliya's YMCA.

Three days before his 10-piece exhibit -- Portraits of Terror -- was scheduled to open at the Patterson Building, Stulman (senior-painting and anthropology) received an e-mail message from the School of Visual Arts that said his exhibit on images of terrorism "did not promote cultural diversity" or "opportunities for democratic dialogue" and the display would be cancelled.

The exhibit, Stulman said, which is based mainly on the conflict in Palestinian territories, raises questions concerning the destruction of Jewish religious shrines, anti-Semitic propaganda and cartoons in Palestinian newspapers, the disregard for rules of engagement and treatment of prisoners, and the indoctrination of youth into terrorist acts.

"I'm being censored and the reason for censoring me doesn't make sense," Stulman said.

Charles Garoian, professor and director of the School of Visual Arts, said Stulman's controversial images did not mesh with the university's educational mission.

The decision to cancel the exhibit came after reviewing Penn State's Policy AD42: Statement on Nondiscrimination and Harassment and Penn State's Zero Tolerance Policy for Hate, he wrote...

Conspicuously absent from Rev. Graf's list of those Americans sending a message to the world through their actions are the American solders who ended a decade of tyranny in Afghanistan and many more decades of brutal rule by Saddam Hussein. Again, contemporary political labels (Left, Right, Anti-War, Pro-Peace, Pro-Freedom) make it difficult to think about, much less talk about warriors as agents for good. And yet Reverend Graf was bold enough to present the 9/11 hijackers in the context of their own self-identification, as committing " an act of faith and courage, a carefully planned statement against what they saw as the evils of a corrupt and oppressive nation." Is it too much to ask that America's post-9/11 military actions be judged as something other than violent retribution and revenge? While I may or may not consider the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq to be "just wars" aimed largely at liberation, a review of the life of Afghan women pre- and post-Taliban (among other considerations) at least gives such an argument a legitimate place at the table.

While Rev. Graf's arguments – reviewed fairly and in their entirety – seem like avoidance of difficult questions disguised as confronting them, it should be stated that she has gone miles further in addressing these contemporary challenges than have church leaders who appointed her to oversee their committee on Middle East issues...

The Anti-CAIR website, www.anti-cair-net.org, reports a "mutually agreeable settlement," the terms of which are confidential. However, Whitehead notes that he issued no public apology to CAIR, made no retractions or corrections, and left the Anti-CAIR website unchanged, so that it continues to post the statements that triggered CAIR's suit. Specifically, CAIR had complained about Whitehead calling it a "terrorist supporting front organization … founded by Hamas supporters" that aims "to make radical Islam the dominant religion in the United States." It also objected to being described as "dedicated to the overthrow of the United States Constitution and the installation of an Islamic theocracy in America."

That clears the decks; no additional actions are pending between these two parties. In brief, Whitehead won a sweet victory, while CAIR suffered a humiliating defeat.

CAIR initially filed suit in a Virginia Circuit Court on March 31, 2004, claiming six of Whitehead's statements were false, that Whitehead made them "with knowledge of their falsity," and that the statements were actionable because "they impute the commission of a criminal offense." CAIR further claimed injury to its "standing and reputation throughout the United States and elsewhere," and sought $1 million in compensatory damages, $350,000 in punitive damages, plus legal fees and interest. It did so despite Whitehead's telling a reporter "I haven't got any [money]."

The original five statements as quoted in CAIR's complaint were:

Abbas issued a presidential decree vetoing the decisions made a day earlier by Interior Minister Said Siyam of Hamas. As president, Abbas wields considerable power and has the right to approve or reject key appointments.

Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh of Hamas was to meet with his interior minister later Friday to weigh a response.

Siyam's decision Thursday to set up the new force and appoint Jamal Abu Samhadana as its commander was seen as a major provocation to Abbas, to Israel and to the international community...

At one point, however, the earthly gore became a matter of concern. "In the past," wrote the semi-official Iranian daily Ettelaat as the war raged on, "we had child-volunteers: 14-, 15-, and 16-year-olds. They went into the minefields. Their eyes saw nothing. Their ears heard nothing. And then, a few moments later, one saw clouds of dust. When the dust had settled again, there was nothing more to be seen of them. Somewhere, widely scattered in the landscape, there lay scraps of burnt flesh and pieces of bone." Such scenes would henceforth be avoided, Ettelaat assured its readers. "Before entering the minefields, the children [now] wrap themselves in blankets and they roll on the ground, so that their body parts stay together after the explosion of the mines and one can carry them to the graves."

These children who rolled to their deaths were part of the Basiji, a mass movement created by Khomeini in 1979 and militarized after the war started in order to supplement his beleaguered army.The Basij Mostazafan--or "mobilization of the oppressed"--was essentially a volunteer militia, most of whose members were not yet 18. They went enthusiastically, and by the thousands, to their own destruction. "The young men cleared the mines with their own bodies," one veteran of the Iran-Iraq War recalled in 2002 to the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine. "It was sometimes like a race. Even without the commander's orders, everyone wanted to be first."

The sacrifice of the Basiji was ghastly. And yet, today, it is a source not of national shame, but of growing pride. Since the end of hostilities against Iraq in 1988, the Basiji have grown both in numbers and influence. They have been deployed, above all, as a vice squad to enforce religious law in Iran, and their elite "special units" have been used as shock troops against anti-government forces. In both 1999 and 2003, for instance, the Basiji were used to suppress student unrest. And, last year, they formed the potent core of the political base that propelled Mahmoud Ahmadinejad--a man who reportedly served as a Basij instructor during the Iran-Iraq War--to the presidency...

Poking fun at the president, the regime's senior figures and its policies, has reportedly become a national pastime in Iran. The Iranian authorities are paying particular attention to jokes comparing Iran's nuclear programme with sex. Several people are widely believed to have received court summonses for sending nuclear-related jokes, according to Rooz Online.

"While the outcome of the recent arrests in connection with SMS messaging is not clear yet, what is certain is that SMS jokes have already put some people into serious trouble," wrote Rooz Online...

Last week our little and peaceful family was struck by the tragic loss of one of its members in a savage criminal act of assassination. The member we lost was my sister's husband who lived with their two little children in our house.
He was a brilliant young doctor with a whole future awaiting him, the couple were the top graduates in their branch of specialty. They had to travel abroad to get their degrees and the war started while they were there but months after Saddam fallen they decided to come back to help rebuild the country and serve their people. We welcomed them with all love and care, we would sit and talk everyday about our hopes and dreams for a better future for the new generation and for their two little children. We realized that time is needed before they could have a secure and prosperous life and we were satisfied with the little we could make because we believed in the future.

He was not affiliated with any political party or movement and spent all his time working at the hospital or studying at home and he was dreaming of building a medical center for his specialty to serve the poor who cannot afford going to expensive private clinics. We didn't know or anticipate that cruel times were waiting for a chance to assassinate the dream and kill the future.

It was the day he was celebrating the opening of a foundation that was going to offer essential services to the poor but the criminals were waiting for him to end his life with their evil bullets and to stab our family deep in the heart...

The number two man on Israel's most wanted list and commander of the Popular Resistance Committees, Jamal Abu Samhadana, has been appointed Thursday as director-general of the Palestinian Interior and National Security Ministry.

Samhadana, whose group is behind countless rocket attacks on Israeli targets, survived an IDF assassination attempt in the past and will now become the number two figure in the Palestinian Authority's most important ministry, which oversees PA security forces.

In the post-disengagement era, Samhadana's group has become the leader in rocket attacks on Israel alongside the Islamic Jihad. The Resistence Committees also led the effort to transfer rocket production know-how and infrastructure from the Gaza Strip to the West Bank.

Last week, the IDF killed the head of the rocket infrastructure in the West Bank, a member of the Committees, in the Bethlehem region. In response, Samhadana's group promised a painful revenge.

'Resistance will continue'

In a talk with Ynet, Resistence Committees' Spokesman Abu Abir vowed that Samhadana's appointment would not prevent the group from continuing its attacks on Israel...

by Miki Sagi

Only two weeks ago FIFA, the world soccer body, issued a list of new disciplinary measures as part of its efforts to fight racism in soccer stadiums. It seems FIFA did not expect that so soon it would needed to implement the new penalties.

Rodrigo Goldberg, the non-Jewish Chilean striker who starred with Maccabi Tel Aviv from 1997 to 2003, won two cups, and later moved back to Chile to play for Snatiago Morning, is demanding the new penalties be used after being subjected to anti-Semitic abuse during a recent match.

Last Saturday, Goldberg made headlines in Chile after fans of Palestino, a Chilean team set up by Palestinian refugees in the South American country, mistook him for a Jew and hurled racist comments against him.

"I've heard many curses against me; people think I am a Jew because of my name, but what happened last Saturday broke all records," Goldberg told Ynet.

What did they shout?

A combination of every swear word you can think of and the word Jew. They called me "Jewish garbage," "son of a bitch Jew," many curses. As I said, it happened in the past but this time it crossed the limits.

So you decided to seek the implementation of the new FIFA regulations?

Yes, I went to the disciplinary committee of the Chilean Soccer Union to ask these fans be banned from stadiums for two years. I asked the team not be punished because they are not guilty and their president apologized to me after the game. I want them to punish the four or five fans who swore. FIFA penalties are clear: A ban from attending games for two years for fans who use abusive language and maybe abstracting points for the team.

Were you seriously offended by the insults?

I am not ready to suffer these things at a soccer stadium. People in Chile don't like the fact that I support Israel whenever the opportunity arises, but I don't care. I already said they called me a Jew on many occasions, although I am not, but it is not insulting. To the contrary, for me it's a compliment. I respect Jews and love them dearly.

Two other main Palestinian militant groups, Hamas and Islamic Jihad, also said they supported violence to free more than 8,000 prisoners held by the Jewish state, but neither explicitly backed attacks on Jews outside Israel.

The call by militants of the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades could heighten tension between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, which has been crippled financially by the loss of Western aid, and of tax and customs revenues frozen by Israel, after Hamas's crushing electoral win over Fatah in January. "This is an open call to all our fighters in the homeland to focus on kidnapping Israeli soldiers and civilians inside our occupied land. And if the enemy does not release our prisoners, then Zionists outside Palestine will be an easy target for our fighters," the group said in a statement.

The threat was made shortly before a Palestinian suicide bomber killed himself and six other people at a sandwich stand in Tel Aviv, an attack claimed by both Islamic Jihad and al-Aqsa...

...Senior Fatah official and lawmaker Saeb Erekat declined to comment directly on the threat, but said securing freedom for prisoners was at the top of Abbas's agenda...

Within hours of his death Hammad was a fully accessorised “martyr”, complete with farewell video, posters and heroic slogans. Sitting on the few cushions remaining in the small hilltop house his mother Samya, 42, complied with photographers who clamoured for her to pose with a poster, but the house was unadorned with militant propaganda.

“He was a hero and I am proud of Samir but I have suffered from his loss,” she said of her eldest son. “I have seen their soldiers killing our children and destroying our home, making everything bad, so how can I see them sympathetically or kindly?”

The family described Hammad as intelligent and frustrated by lack of opportunities, notably being forced to drop his studies with al-Quds (Jerusalem) Open University because his family had no money. His uncle, Imad, blamed his becoming a bomber on “psychological pressure” caused by the conflict.

In a statement, the British Transplantation Society condemned the practice as unacceptable and a breach of human rights.

The move comes less than a week after Chinese officials publicly denied the practice took place.

In March, China said it would ban the sale of human organs from July.

'Selection'

The British Transplantation Society says an accumulating weight of evidence suggests the organs of thousands of executed prisoners in China are being removed for transplants without consent.

Professor Stephen Wigmore, who chairs the society's ethics committee, told the BBC that the speed of matching donors and patients, sometimes as little as a week, implied prisoners were being selected before execution...

Transplant tourism

Professor Wigmore said: "The weight of evidence has accumulated to a point over the last few months where it's really incontrovertible in our opinion.

"We feel that it's the right time to take a stance against this practice."

The emergence of transplant tourism has made the sale of health organs even more lucrative...

The difference is that when Communism was discredited in Eastern Europe, it was still Poles who lived in Polish cities, Bulgarians who lived in Bulgarian cities etc. When the veil of Multiculturalism disappears, it will be Pakistanis who live in London, Turks who live in Berlin, Algerians who live in Paris and Moroccans who live in Amsterdam. And then the show begins...

On April 18, 1942, 16 Army B-25 Mitchell airplanes containing 80 volunteer airmen from the U.S. Army Air Forces, led by Army Lt. Col. James H. "Jimmy" Doolittle, took off from the U.S. Navy aircraft carrier Hornet on a daring mission to strike at the heart of Imperial Japan. It was the first U.S. offensive action of World War II, just four months after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

The plan called for the B-25s to take off from the carrier about 450 miles from the Japanese islands, bomb selected targets, and then fly another 1,200 miles to friendly airfields on mainland China. The plan took a detour when a Japanese patrol boat sighted the Hornet and its flotilla and radioed back to Japan about an impending attack. American commanders decided to launch their attack ahead of schedule and about 700 miles off shore.

All 16 planes, containing five crewmembers each, reached the Japanese islands and dropped their bombs on various targets, including oil stores, factories and military installations. They then proceeded across the East China Sea.

As darkness fell, the raiders were running low on fuel and a storm kicked up. The airmen were flying over Japanese-occupied Chinese territory when they realized they could not reach the safe harbor of the Chinese airfields. Eleven of the crews bailed out, and four crash-landed -- one offshore, one inland and two on the coastline. The 16th plane landed in Vladivostok in the Soviet Union, where the crew was held captive until they escaped through Iran in 1943.

Two of the crewmen drowned, and a third died while ditching his plane.

The Japanese captured eight of the Doolittle Raiders. These prisoners of war were tortured and starved, and the Japanese eventually executed three of the men. Another later died of malnutrition. The remaining four were freed by American troops in August 1945.

The crewmembers who were not captured or killed made their way to safety, many with the aid of Chinese citizens...

Mr. Cole's most frequent public statements and writing - many of which appear on his blog, Informed Comment - have deviated considerably from his areas of expertise. He rarely misses an opportunity to inveigh against Israel. If it were up to Mr. Cole, the country wouldn't exist at all. It would have been preferable, he claims, for the British to have accepted Jewish refugees "rather than saddling a small, poor peasant country with 500,000 immigrants hungry to make the place their own." Today's Israel, Mr. Cole contends, is "the most dangerous regime in the Middle East" and the primary instigator of the terrorist threat against America.

According to Mr. Cole, American Jews both inside and out of government are primarily loyal to Israel and subvert American interests for those of the Jewish State. He believes that American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the American pro-Israel lobby group that is one of the targets of the Mearsheimer/Walt paper, has Congress in its back pocket. "This level of the control of congress by what is essentially the agent of a foreign government has deeply distorted US foreign policy and made the US a dishonest broker." He has written that "pro-Likud intellectuals" "use the Pentagon as Israel's Gurkha regiment, fighting elective wars on behalf of Tel-Aviv." Mr. Cole has even hypothesized that "powerful Likudniks inside the US government are deliberately engineering a diplomatic rift in NATO, so as to ensure that Paris and Moscow cannot position themselves to influence Washington's position (usually supine) toward Sharon's excesses." According to Cole, these same Likudniks launched the war in Iraq in order to "defang" the country "as a favor to Ariel Sharon." In a 2004 article entitled "Dual Loyalties," Mr. Cole wrote, "I simply think that we deserve to have American public servants who are centrally commited [sic] to the interests of the United States, rather than to the interests of a foreign political party."

Only last month, Mr. Cole made headlines for effusively praising the Walt/Mearsheimer paper. The paper essentially charges Jewish government employees with loyalty to Israel over America; it accuses Jews of stifling public dialogue through control of the press, think tanks, and government; and it alleges that Jews dupe non-Jews into "fighting, dying ... and paying" for causes that are "not in the American national interest."...

Since the latest wave of unprecedented Israeli military aggression throughout the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT), Israeli troops killed hundreds of Palestinians and wounded thousands (the majority of whom are civilians killed and wounded in cold blood inside their homes). Israeli troops have been terrorizing Palestinian civilians throughout the OPT, unleashing an unprecedented and uncompromising policy of brute military force against women, children, and men in every Palestinian city, town, village, and refugee camp...

Less than two minutes’ drive away their fellow Islamists in Hamas were squeezing pinstriped trousers behind new desks and ministerial cars, to the barely disguised scorn of these hard-eyed Islamic Jihadists sitting in a windowless annexe in Gaza City.

“There will forever be conflict. It is not going to be solved soon and it won’t be solved with the ballot box,” the leader said, his minders listening for Israeli helicopters and spotter drones overhead.

“We as Islamic Jihad don’t believe that the step Hamas has taken to democracy and elections will take us to the end of the struggle. Our ideology, through the way we understand Islam, is that our struggle will only end with the end of the State of Israel. For us it is an existential struggle, it is either us or them.”

Stark, uncompromising and with the utter clarity of the fundamentalist, this was the Islamic Jihad world view spelt out to The Times by its fighters in Gaza just days before yesterday’s bombing.

Older, but smaller than Hamas, Islamic Jihad is rejectionist to the core. Having denounced Yassir Arafat for signing peace agreements with Israel in the mid-1990s, a decade later it spurned the elections that swept Hamas to power...

Tuesday, April 18, 12:30PM

PLO Mission to the UN:

115 East 65th Street New York

As an immediate response to today’s Palestinian terror suicide bombing in Tel Aviv which killed 7 and wounded 49, Rabbi Avi Weiss will lead a memorial protest at the PLO UN Mission, 65th Street and Park Avenue, tomorrow at 12:30PM.

“It is time to remove the PLO Mission UN Mission from New York,” Rabbi Weiss declared. “America wouldn’t let Osama Bin Ladin have a diplomatic mission in New York. We cannot understand why the terror group Hamas, which now runs the Palestinian Authority, should have a diplomatic presence as well.”

During a five-month trial, prosecutors cast Al-Arian as the North American leader of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, an organization that has claimed responsibility for suicide bombings in Israel and its occupied territories. The government presented evidence that Al-Arian was, at one time, a member of the group's governing body.

Although Al-Arian was never accused of direct involvement in violence, the prosecution said he led a cell that helped fund and operate the Islamic Jihad.

Moffitt conceded during the trial that the evidence showed Al-Arian was part of the organization in the early 1990s, before support for the group became illegal. He said any involvement Al-Arian might have had in the group was political and separate from its campaign of violence...

Not in question because of wiretaps and phone and fax intercepts is that al-Arian had an intimate relationship with Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ). Also not in dispute is that al-Arian mocked an executive order designating PIJ a terrorist entity just weeks after it was signed by President Clinton, calling it the result of “a war staged by Zionists.” The setting was an intercepted phone conversation with Lou’ay Safi, then the research director IIIT.

Also uncontested is that al-Arian played host to some of the world’s most notorious Islamic terrorists. The Islamic Conference of Palestine (ICP), founded by the former USF professor, held annual conferences that played host to what the Tampa Tribune dubbed a “militant all-star team”: PIJ founder and spiritual leader Abdel Aziz-Odeh, Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman (spiritual leader of the 1993 World Trade Center bombers), leading Hamas official Mohammed Sakr, and high-ranking Sudanese terrorist Hassan Turabi.

It was during this time that IIIT reportedly provided the lion’s share of funding for ICP and its sister organization, World and Islam Enterprise (WISE). According to an FBI affidavit, al-Alwani admitted to attending and speaking at various ICP conferences.

Not only did none of the Islamic terrorists in his presence apparently shock him, but al-Alwani probably felt quite at home. In that same affidavit, the FBI reveals that al-Alwani wrote a fatwa “at some point between December 1988 and November 1989” that said, “Jihad is the only way to liberate Palestine. …[N]o person or authority may settle the Jews on the land of Palestine or cede to them any part thereof.”

Striking a similar theme, al-Arian called for “true armed jihad against the enemy in Israel” during his speech at a 1990 ICP conference. At an ICP conference in Cleveland the following year, he set his violent sites on the United States: “Let us damn America. Let us damn Israel. Let us damn their allies until death.”

Even though most of al-Arian’s fiery speeches were caught on camera, many groups and prominent individuals lined up to support him. One such defender was Prof. Esposito, the other keynote speaker at last month’s IIIT conference. When USF moved to fire al-Arian in 2002, Prof. Esposito wrote a letter to the university’s president stating that he was he was “stunned, astonished, and saddened” because the man who—without a doubt—gave many jihadist speeches was a “consummate professional.”

This was not the first unambiguous jihadist to be defended by Esposito, who has a long history of apologizing for Islamic terror. He co-edited a book in 2000 with Azzam Tamimi, who stated unequivocally in an interview with a Spanish newspaper in November 2001, “I support Hamas.” In the same interview, he also said, “I admire the Taliban; they are courageous.”...

I get my colleagues' message. Somewhere between teaching students to try to think critically about the world and their place in it and giving students a reading, delivering a lecture, or asking them to discuss issues that might land me in the middle of a public witchhunt, there's a line that can't be crossed. The problem is that no one can tell me where that line is. …

So I stand in front of my class. I think about the articles I won't write and the book I won't publish if I inadvertently take a wrong step and have to spend all of my time defending my integrity as a scholar and a teacher to the university administration.

Bier puts it negatively, but her little crisis actually benefits herself and her students. It improves the life of the mind when instructors with strong commitments (as a student, Bier signed a petition urging divestment from Israel) rethink their premises. The purpose of the university, after all, is to stimulate ideas. Campus Watch compelled Bier to weigh her words and consider what she needs to do to prevent her colleagues from abandoning her. She now has to take another viewpoint into account. Perhaps she will even understand that the classroom is not a soapbox...

The history department at Princeton University has approved the hiring of Mr. Khalidi, a historian of Arab nationalism who is best known for his harsh criticisms of American foreign policy and activism on behalf of Palestinian Arabs, the source said.

The department's approval doesn't necessarily mean that Princeton will hire Mr. Khalidi. His candidacy now goes before a high-level university committee whose membership includes the dean of the faculty, David Dobkin, the source said...

...While scholars in his field have praised Mr. Khalidi for his scholarship on the making of the modern Middle East, his critics have said his work veers toward anti-Americanism and is biased against Israel.

In his book "Resurrecting Empire," Mr. Khalidi said America started a war in Iraq to gain "hegemony over the region, in collaboration with Israel." In public statements, Mr. Khalidi has doubted the possibility of a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

In an article he wrote last month for the Financial Times, Mr. Khalidi said the most pressing problem in the region is Israel's occupation of the West Bank. He said America and Israel would be making a disastrous mistake if they didn't deal with Hamas.

(VIDEO) Terror disrupts Passover celebrations once again: Nine people were killed Monday after a Palestinian suicide bomber detonated himself at a crowded fast food stand near Tel Aviv's old central bus station, in the city's southern Neve Sha'anan neighborhood.

At least 65 people were wounded in the huge blast, which was heard kilometers away, including one person who is in criticial condition and nine others who sustained serious wounds.

The explosion occurred around 1:30 p.m. at a shawarma stand, where a previous bombing took place. This time, however, the blast was much more powerful and deadly.

According to a videotape released by the Islamic Jihad in Jenin, the attack was carried out by Sami Salim Khamad, who entered Israel from the West Bank. Fatah's al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades also claimed responsibility for the attack.

According to one eyewitness account, the terrorist entered the store and detonated himself when a security guard at the site asked him to open his bag for inspection...

Then we will have to obtain at least 54,000-60,000 [centrifuges], in order to produce industrial fuel for our reactor. This process will take between one and two years. We plan to produce 20,000 MW of nuclear electricity. The Bushehr reactor will be the first to produce electricity - 1,000 MW. We have also signed contracts for two more reactors, and 17 more will be signed in the future. within one or two years, we will be able to produce fuel for these reactors.

Sami Al-Arian, who had met with U.S. presidents and other political leaders before his terrorism indictment in 2003, reached an agreement with prosecutors to plead guilty to a lesser charge and be deported, two lawyers familiar with the case said Friday. The arrangement requires the approval of a judge.

It was not clear where Al-Arian would be sent...

WASHINGTON, D.C., 4/14/06) - The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) today welcomed the government's decision not to retry Sami Al-Arian, a Florida Muslim professor who remained in jail despite being acquitted late last year of eight out of 17 federal charges brought against him. The jury deadlocked on the other charges.

According to media reports, Al-Arian reached an agreement with prosecutors to plead guilty to a lesser charge and be deported to an unidentified country. A former defense attorney in the case said the government conceded in the agreement that there were no acts of violence committed by Al-Arian. Details of the agreement have not been made public and still require the approval of a judge...

An Israeli Arab citizen was murdered Wednesday night in the West Bank town of Jericho, and his body was burned. The police estimated that the man was killed for selling a building in the east Jerusalem neighborhood of a-Tur to Jews.

The Judea and Samaria District Police launched an investigation into the incident. Palestinian sources reported that the al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades, Fatah's military wing, claimed responsibility for the murder...

Police said one worshipper was killed and more than a dozen wounded in the simultaneous attacks in the northern city of Alexandria.

Police were searching for three men, one in each attack.

Hundreds of Christians gathered in angry protest outside the Coptic Christian churches, and witnesses said clashes erupted between Christians and Muslims.

Initial police reports said a total of 17 people were injured: 10 at the Saints Church in downtown Alexandria and three at the nearby Mar Girgis Church. A third attacker wounded four worshippers at a church in Abu Qir, a few miles to the east...

I am upset though because the attacks happened in Alexandria. A once beautiful cosmopolitan city that housed vibrant Muslim, Christian, and Jewish communities who lived in peace and harmony.

May God curse who is turning Egypt into such an ugly thing. Say Amen.

U.S. Ambassador John Bolton said the draft, even after three days of intense negotiations, “was disproportionately critical of Israel, and unfairly so, and needlessly so.”

But Palestinian U.N. Observer Riyad Mansour accused Washington of “shielding and protecting Israeli activities and aggression against the Palestinian people.”

“It was obvious that many of their concerns were accommodated but yet they kept coming back and coming back for additional things. It was obvious they did not want the Security Council to have a position,” Mansour said.

Washington does not have formal veto power when it comes to council statements. But it was nonetheless able to block the draft single-handedly because council rules require that statements be unanimous supported by all 15 of its members. During Thursday’s closed-door negotiations, the United States effectively killed the text by seeking amendment after amendment until Qatar, the council’s sole Arab member, gave up the fight.

Asked by reporters to confirm that Washington alone had opposed issuing the statement, Bolton responded, “If I were the only holdout, I’d be proud of that fact.”

Qatar, acting on behalf of the Arab group at the United Nations, the 57-nation Organization of the Islamic Conference and the Non-Aligned Movement of 112 nations, immediately requested an open council debate on the Middle East, which was scheduled for Monday afternoon.

"I don't see that that meeting is going to be productive, because I don't think the Security Council is an exercise in group therapy," Bolton said...

Ellis said that although the espionage statute had been around for almost 90 years, there were few precedents he could follow and that Rosen and Weissman were the first non-government employees to be indicted for receiving and transmitting national defense information orally.

The case has drawn attention from First Amendment lawyers because the judge, the prosecutors and the defense attorneys have all noted that the two lobbyists, in receiving and disseminating classified information, are doing what journalists, academics and experts at think tanks do every day.

There is no memorial more fitting today than to look in the face of death and to choose life – not only for ourselves, but for all the world's people. There is no answer to terror more appropriate than to say, "You were wrong. We are not evil, and we intend to share our goodness with our brothers and sisters around the globe. We will export development and not destruction. We will share our knowledge, our food, our health care, our commitment to justice and our hope for a better life until you come to know us as a good and generous people - as we know ourselves."...

Sabri is the sixth man to hold the title of Mufti of Jerusalem, having been appointed to the position by Yasser Arafat in October of 1994. He is the considered the highest official of religious law in the area.

The first “Grand Mufti” of Jerusalem (and third Mufti) was Haj Amin Al-Husseini. In 1921, at the time of his appointment, Amin Al-Husseini had been considered a violent extremist. Later, he would be declared a war criminal in Nuremburg for his actions with regard to the Nazis. In his memoirs, he wrote, “Our fundamental condition for cooperating with Germany was a free hand to eradicate every last Jew from Palestine and the Arab world. I asked Hitler for an explicit undertaking to allow us to solve the Jewish problem in a manner befitting our national and racial aspirations and according to the scientific methods innovated by Germany in the handling of its Jews. The answer I got was: ‘The Jews are yours.’”

Like Amin Al-Husseini, Ikrima Sa’id Sabri’s hatred of Jews is prolific. About them, he has stated, “I enter the mosque of Al-Aqsa with my head up and at the same time I am filled with rage toward the Jews. I have never greeted a Jew when I came near one. I never will. They cannot even dream that I will. The Jews do not dare to bother me, because they are the most cowardly creatures Allah has ever created...”...

What seems not to have occurred to the "NO HUMAN BEING IS ILLEGAL" crowd is that this is a country, not a public park.

There are more than 6 billion people in the world, many of whom apparently like the idea of living in the wealthiest democracy on Earth. But if the billions of people of the world did live here, it wouldn't be "here" anymore. America is special for a reason that must transcend the right to vote – or everyone would be trying to immigrate to Iraq right now...

Long considered a “moderate” by many in the West, Rafsanjani has been a key figure in Iran’s secret nuclear weapons program since 1985, when he sponsored a series of conferences to entice exiled nuclear scientists to return to Iran.

By announcing the success of Iran’s uranium enrichment program, Rafsanjani upstaged the current president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who made a similar announcement on Wednesday in the northeastern city of Mashad, bordering Afghanistan.

Rafsanjani beat Ahmadinejad to the punch by almost twenty-four hours in an interview with the Kuwait News Agency. The two men have been archrivals since Ahmadinejad bested Rafsanjani in a stage-managed election last June.

If nothing else, Rafsanjani’s involvement should remind us in the West that for all the factional fighting in Tehran, this regime stands united in its determination to development nuclear weapons and is willing to pay a high cost to achieve nuclear capability...

Dr. Khan reportedly provided the United Nations gumshoes new information about the equipment and blueprints he sold the Iranians starting in the late 1980s that directly contradicted Iran’s declarations to the International Atomic Energy Agency.

Dr. Khan’s information convinced the IAEA analysts that Iran has been operating a clandestine uranium enrichment plant, possibly for many years, and that Iran has been lying all along. Shocking!

Officials said the government of Prime Minister Tony Blair has approved the sale of non-lethal military and security equipment to Iran. They said the exports were approved after Teheran pledged not to use the equipment for the military.

"We don't see our concern over the nuclear program as being connected to other Iranian missions which we have seen as vital," a British official said.

In mid-September, the government approved an export of body armor for Iranian security forces. Officials said the armor would be supplied to Iranian forces along the border of Afghanistan and Pakistan...

Ambassador Samir Shakir Mahmood Sumaidaie told Rice he was "honored and delighted to be here today as the first ambassador for the state of Iraq in 15 years and the first ambassador since we got rid of the regime of Saddam Hussein with your help."

Sumaidaie, who was appointed Iraq's permanent representative to the United Nations in August 2004, said he looks forward to working with the United States on behalf of the Iraqi people. His goal, he said, is "to bring a better understanding of the aspirations of the people of Iraq for democracy, freedom and a better life, which we are determined we will achieve with the help of our friends."...

...To this group of authors, news of our military's difficulties is good news, for the United States and its military represent some of the most serious problems facing the world today. If the Pentagon, Albright, Perry, and Casey are to be believed, the military is in serious trouble. The authors admit this; Louis and Marti Hiken write, "The military is having a tough time meeting its recruitment goals. There are not enough troops available to send to Iraq." And a sentence later, here is the advice they offer young Americans: "The best advice we can give is not to join in the first place." Paul Rockwell argues that "[r]efusing to enlist is more than a career decision. It is a moral and political act, a contribution to the burgeoning, international movement for a better, more peaceful world." Not only that, but joining the military is unpatriotic, writes Rae Abileah of the antiwar women's group Code Pink: "[I]t takes more honor and courage to dedicate one's life to working for social change. Teachers, community organizers, activists, engineers, public defense attorneys, lobbyists, and artists are the true patriots." (The true patriots? Lobbyists?) The explicit argument is clear: No one should enlist in the military. Left unsaid is that if no one enlisted, America would have no military at all. Presumably, this is what the authors want...

...How does Sheehan propose America face its increasing national security threats? "We need to demand that our leaders use their words to solve problems. We need to demand that other nations use their words, too." It's a point that strikes at the heart of the book's fatal flaw--and at the fatal flaw with liberal anti-military sentiment: Sure, it'd be nice if we could "demand" that world leaders use words "to solve problems." But if the Sudanese government were so enthralled with diplomacy, would it be slowly obliterating an entire portion of its own population? And if the president of Iran valued words above all else, would he be so worried about building a nuclear arsenal?...

...I am here in Amman as the coordinator of the MECC Ecumenical Relief Service program. I am working with MECC staff to find ways to continue this program and especially to help the children in this camp. Of 700 persons, almost 300 are children between the ages of 5 and 18.

After three years, there is now hope that they may be resettled in another country. Pray with us that this will happen soon.

MECC in Amman is also working with Iraqi Christians in Jordan who have desperate needs, including food, clothing, rent, health care, and education for their children. MECC was able to get funding from a Christian agency to support them.

Several churches in Amman are ministering to these Iraqis, but their resources are very limited and diminishing. I worshipped with them at one of the churches and was very much impressed by the number of people. The church was full, and people were standing outside — more than 300 persons gathered in a small chapel. They were all singing and praising God in Aramaic, the language our Lord spoke. Most Iraqis Christian still speak Aramaic [They must have been on their land for a long time. -S]...

...If they cannot go back, they at least deserve a better life, either in Jordan or in another country. Most of them would like to emigrate and start a new life for their children in another country. I myself was challenged by their faith, their joy, and their trust that God will not leave them. I learned as I talked to some of them that their faith and belief is stronger than despair, and their hope is stronger then depression...

The answer has much to do with misunderstanding the science of climate, plus a willingness to debase climate science into a triangle of alarmism. Ambiguous scientific statements about climate are hyped by those with a vested interest in alarm, thus raising the political stakes for policy makers who provide funds for more science research to feed more alarm to increase the political stakes. After all, who puts money into science--whether for AIDS, or space, or climate--where there is nothing really alarming? Indeed, the success of climate alarmism can be counted in the increased federal spending on climate research from a few hundred million dollars pre-1990 to $1.7 billion today. It can also be seen in heightened spending on solar, wind, hydrogen, ethanol and clean coal technologies, as well as on other energy-investment decisions.

But there is a more sinister side to this feeding frenzy. Scientists who dissent from the alarmism have seen their grant funds disappear, their work derided, and themselves libeled as industry stooges, scientific hacks or worse. Consequently, lies about climate change gain credence even when they fly in the face of the science that supposedly is their basis...

In the build-up to the Iraq War, [Douglas] Feith had a phalanx of Israeli generals visiting him in the Pentagon and ignored post-9/11 requirements that they sign in. Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was a vocal advocate of a US war against Iraq, who "put pressure" on Washington about it. (If Sharon wanted a war against Iraq, why didn't he fight it himself instead of pushing it off on American boys?)

The illogic, the immoderation, the barely-concealed bigotry of this passage, show Cole at his darkest. He wants to be a Yale professor. You can spew these sorts of things after you break into the big three (e.g., Walt). But if you've said them before--well, you're an embarrassment just waiting to happen...

FIFA has condemned Israel for an air strike on an empty soccer field in the Gaza Strip that was used for training exercises by Islamic Jihad and the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade. This strike did not cause any injuries. But at the same time FIFA has refused to condemn a Palestinian rocket attack on an Israeli soccer field last week which did cause injuries...

In February, Tal Ben Haim — the Israeli national soccer team captain, who plays his club soccer for the English Premiership team Bolton Wanderers — was banned from joining his Bolton teammates for their training matches in Dubai. FIFA pointedly ignored this. So did Bolton despite the fact that the team claims to be among the leaders of the campaign to "Kick racism out of football" in the U.K.

Only last week, another English club, West Ham, left their two Israeli players, Yossi Benayoun and Yaniv Katan, at home when they went to Dubai. FIFA naturally had nothing to say.

Whilst Israel is often slandered as an "apartheid state," (despite having several Arabs playing in its national team), Dubai has received no criticism for what appears to be a clear "apartheid" policy...

The 534 commissioners — 267 elders and 267 ministers — will be randomly assigned to the 15 committees. Nearly every item of business before the Assembly will be processed by one of the committees, which will make recommendations to the full Assembly. The committees will meet all day on June 16 and 17, and on the afternoon of June 18 if necessary.

Some Assembly committees will be more closely watched than others...

...Various proposals related to Middle East peace and to the 2004 Assembly’s decision to “initiate the process of selective, phased divestment” from multinational corporations profiting from the occupation of Gaza and the West Bank and the construction of Israel’s security barrier will be considered by Assembly Committee 11 -- Peacemaking and International Issues...

One year ago today, 19 young men on a mission profoundly changed our lives and the life of our nation. This was an act of faith and courage, a carefully planned statement against what they saw as the evils of a corrupt and oppressive nation. They were willing to give their lives so that the world would see their outrage.

I was at the end of my first semester of teaching Middle Eastern history at a large research university in the South. Like any new faculty member, my anxieties revolved primarily around not breaking the Powerpoint projector, not being mistaken yet again for a graduate student instead of a professor, and not spilling spinach dip on the dean at one of the innumerable faculty mixers held at the beginning of the academic year. Hate mail wasn't on the list.

Since neither of the letters specified exactly what I had done to place myself in the ranks of someone who, as one of the letters put it, "shoveled Jews into the ovens at Dachau," it took me a couple of days of inquiries and some Google searching to figure out what was going on.

Two weeks earlier I had spoken on a panel about the Israeli occupation of Palestine. It was on the closing night of a weeklong Palestinian film festival called "Life Under Occupation" sponsored jointly by a few human rights groups on the campus and a Palestinian advocacy group for which I am the faculty adviser. The group is a university-approved student organization that aims to educate and raise awareness about the plight of Palestinians living under Israeli rule. Similar organizations are found on many American campuses...

In February 1999, Zahawie left his Vatican office for a few days and paid an official visit to Niger, a country known for absolutely nothing except its vast deposits of uranium ore. It was from Niger that Iraq had originally acquired uranium in 1981, as confirmed in the Duelfer Report. In order to take the Joseph Wilson view of this Baathist ambassadorial initiative, you have to be able to believe that Saddam Hussein's long-term main man on nuclear issues was in Niger to talk about something other than the obvious. Italian intelligence (which first noticed the Zahawie trip from Rome) found it difficult to take this view and alerted French intelligence (which has better contacts in West Africa and a stronger interest in nuclear questions). In due time, the French tipped off the British, who in their cousinly way conveyed the suggestive information to Washington. As everyone now knows, the disclosure appeared in watered-down and secondhand form in the president's State of the Union address in January 2003...

Today, we have the capability to make missiles like candy. This capability is 100 times greater than we had even in the early days of the [Iran-Iraq] war, when we used 60 mm mortars by the Khorramshahr Bridge...

And the minute you have to ask, you know the answer. If, say, Norway or Ireland acquired nuclear weapons, we might regret the “proliferation,” but we wouldn’t have to contemplate mushroom clouds over neighboring states. In that sense, the civilized world has already lost: to enter into negotiations with a jurisdiction headed by a Holocaust-denying millenarian nut job is, in itself, an act of profound weakness—the first concession, regardless of what weaselly settlement might eventually emerge.

Conversely, a key reason to stop Iran is to demonstrate that we can still muster the will to do so...

In a nationally televised speech, Ahmadinejad called on the West "not to cause an everlasting hatred in the hearts of Iranians" by trying to force Iran to abandon uranium enrichment...

..."At this historic moment, with the blessings of God almighty and the efforts made by our scientists, I declare here that the laboratory-scale nuclear fuel cycle has been completed and young scientists produced enriched uranium needed to the degree for nuclear power plants Sunday," Ahmadinejad said.

"I formally declare that Iran has joined the club of nuclear countries," he told an audience that included top military commanders and clerics in the northwestern holy city of Mashhad. The crowd broke into cheers of "Allahu akbar!" or "God is great!" Some stood and thrust their fists in the air...

The following are excerpts from Al-Baghdadi's article:

..."Statements made by preachers in the mosques, in articles and on various media channels accusing non-Muslims of heresy, the [preachers'] curses, and their characterization of Jews as the descendents of apes and pigs - [all these] cause Westerners to perceive Islam as an intolerant religion that rejects religious pluralism.

"The Muslims, therefore, are responsible for the distorted image of Islam prevalent in the modern West, and they are the ones who failed to present a positive image of Islam. Thus, they are responsible for the problems experienced by the Muslims today...

"Among those who incite to jihad, have you seen a single one who set out [to wage jihad] himself, or sent one of his sons to wage jihad for the sake of Allah? On the contrary - while encouraging innocent people to wage jihad in Iraq and in Chechnya, they themselves take additional wives..."...

Interviewer: How will you deal with the issue of suicide operations against Israeli civilians? Abu Mazen condemns these operations. What will be your position?

Mahmoud Al-Zahar: These are not suicide operations. This is a despicable term used by the Israelis in order to say that these are suicide operations, knowing that suicide is forbidden in Islam. This is just for the sake of clarification. These are martyrdom-seeking operations, approved by all the authorities of the Islamic nation, who consider them to be the highest level of martyrdom. It is a form of resistance, and resistance against the occupation is legitimate.

When we have F-16 airplanes, Apache helicopters, espionage planes, helicopters, and tanks like theirs, we will use them - one army against the other. But as long as there is a nuclear arsenal facing an unarmed people, I believe this people has a right to defend itself with the means at its disposal.

The barrier is part of a package to secure the Kingdom’s 6,500km of borders in an attempt to improve internal security and bolster its defences against external threats.

Saudi Arabia is concerned that the chaos in Iraq could cause an overspill of sectarian violence and terrorism. The kingdom claims to be winning the battle against al-Qaeda’s Saudi wing but wants to protect itself against Saudi insurgents returning from Iraq.

“There’s no suggestion that the border isn’t secure at the moment, so it could be a bit of an expensive white elephant,” a European diplomat in Riyadh said. Saudi militants join ing the insurgency use other routes, such as Syria...

When the family of another young Egyptian man found out their son was gay, they beat him and then sent him to a therapist. He convinced a young woman to pose as his girlfriend for a while, but once that ruse was up, his family beat him again, this time so harshly that he fled Egypt for the United States, where he applied for political asylum.

These are just a few among the many anecdotes that Brian Whitaker, the Middle East editor for The Guardian newspaper in London, relates in his new, groundbreaking book, "Unspeakable Love: Gay and Lesbian Life in the Middle East."...

High Confidence

- Iraq is continuing, and in some areas expanding its chemical, biological, nuclear and missile programs contrary to UN resolutions.

- We are not detecting portions of these weapons programs.

- Iraq possesses proscribed chemical and biological weapons and missiles.

- Iraq could make a nuclear weapon in months to a year once it acquires sufficient weapons grade fissile material

Moderate Confidence

- Iraq does not yet have a nuclear weapon or sufficient material to make one but is likely to have a weapon by 2007 to 2009.

Therefore, as I said on previous shows, they have organizations for homosexuals, organizations for people who marry animals - she marries a dog, a donkey, and so on... The organizations exist, and strangely enough, they are official. They have websites, and they publish magazines with pictures...

Our goal is for frontline information to break through and be heard. We hope that over time, a more comprehensive and accurate picture of what is happening on the ground can emerge...

Raghad Saddam Hussein called the trial "a farce and unfair" and praised the seven men who are facing charges with her father for the deaths of 148 Shiite Muslims in 1982 in the town of Dujail, particularly her uncle.

"My uncle Barzan has been remarkable in court, very courageous and a real hero," Hussein said. "He has clarified the wrong impression that was made about Iraqi men. Those who surround my father, they are what could be called Iraq's real men, the honorable image that represents our country."...

"In the same way that Trafalgar Square has had an interesting history, not always a peaceful one, there's a very clear parallel," he said.

"We've had some interesting riots in Trafalgar Square - I mean, only 20 years ago, the poll tax riots, and flames licking up."...

By the time I showed up at the amphitheater style lecture hall on campus, police officers were already standing at each entrance. Nearly half of the hall was filled with Muslims with their leaders dressed Osama Bin Laden style sitting in the front two rows at eye level making “their point,” that I wasn’t going to get away with speaking freely.

Just as the program was about to begin, a Muslim student walked to the front and asked the crowd to raise their hands if they believed that this lecture was “undemocratic.” They complained that I would be taking questions on cards instead of allowing them to ask them publicly. Experienced in these settings, I knew they would make speeches, spew anti American and Israeli sentiments and create chaos in the room during the Q&A. I decided that they were not going to do that. The provocative Muslim student behavior before I even began my lecture proved my foresight. Dr. Patterson explained that taking questions from cards distributed to the audience was normal protocol at university speaking events like mine.

Patterson tried to calm the unruly crowd but nothing was working. Fed up, I went straight to the podium and ordered everyone to sit. I told them, this is my lecture and I run the show. If they didn’t like the way I conducted my lecture and my questions they could leave the room, now. Shocked at my behavior and authority they shut-up. The non-Muslim members of the audience applauded...

Plainly, Tivnan's arguments have changed nothing. Americans like Israel, come what may. I will bet that the very similar ones of Walt and Mearsheimer make little difference either.

That’s a curious piece of logic.

UNRWA is a criminally negligent terrorist enabler that has done everything in its power in its 56 years of existence to promote Palestinian grievance — and violence — against Israel. The UNRWA was supposed to be a temporary organization, the purpose of which was to provide relief to the million or so Palestinians displaced by the Israeli War of Independence. It was distinct, however, from the UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), which is responsible for the world’s refugees, in that its remit did not contain any obligation to actually assist in alleviating the Palestinians’ plight. Such a practical end would not have served its political purpose, which was quite different...

In 1942, the Nazis created a special "Einsatzgruppe", a mobile SS death squad, which was to carry out the mass slaughter of Jews in Palestine similar to the way they operated in eastern Europe, the historians argue in a new study.

The director of the Nazi research center in Ludwigsburg, Klaus-Michael Mallman, and Berlin historian Martin Cueppers say an Einsatzgruppe was all set to go to Palestine and begin killing the roughly half a million Jews that had fled Europe to escape Nazi death camps like Auschwitz and Birkenau.

In the study, published last month, they say "Einsatzgruppe Egypt" was standing by in Athens and was ready to disembark for Palestine in the summer of 1942, attached to the "Afrika Korps" led by the famed desert commander General Erwin Rommel.

The Middle East death squad, similar to those operating throughout eastern Europe during the war, was to be led by SS Obersturmbannfuehrer Walther Rauff, the historians say.

"The central plan for the group was the realization of the Holocaust in Palestine," the authors wrote in their study that appears in a book entitled "Germans, Jews, Genocide: The Holocaust as History and the Present."

But since Germany never conquered British-controlled Palestine, plans for bringing the Holocaust to what is now Israel and the Palestinian territories never came to fruition...

...In the battle of El Alamein, Egypt, British General Bernard Montgomery turned the tide of the war in north Africa by routing Rommel's "Afrika Korps" and ending his African campaign.

As they did in eastern Europe, the plan was for the 24 members involved in the death squad to enlist Palestinian collaborators so that the "mass murder would continue under German leadership without interruption."

Fortunately for the Jews in Palestine, "Einsatzgruppe Egypt" never made it out of Greece.

"The history of the Middle East would have been completely different and a Jewish state could never have been established if the Germans and Arabs had joined forces," the historians conclude.

Regarding the question why this is emerging 61 years after the end of World War Two, Mallmann and Cueppers said they simply unearthed something other historians had not found yet.

''It is in the wind in a way it wasn't before," Skerry said. ''It is on the agenda, and Muslims, like earlier groups of immigrants, are learning to take their cues from the society around them."

Nearly all the job gains were in services and professions such as health care, hospitality, retail, architecture and engineering, with manufacturing posting a decline of 5,000 jobs, the Labor Department reported yesterday. Average wage gains fell off slightly to a 3.4 percent pace over last year, but remained near five-year highs.

Many signs have emerged of a strengthening labor market this year. Joblessness is falling among all the main worker groups, from blacks and Hispanics to adult white men and women, and the number of discouraged workers and people working part-time because they must is dwindling. The number of workers on unemployment rolls is dropping by the week.

"The job market is good, and there is no danger of a sudden end to the economic expansion," despite a sharp slowdown in the housing market, high energy prices, and threats of bankruptcy in Detroit, said Roger M. Kubarych, an economist with HVB Group...

Whereas such open revisionism concerning the role of the US in the liberation of Europe has hitherto been largely limited to "leftist" intellectual circles -- as well, of course, as neo-Nazi ones (who on this, like so many other points, are essentially indistinguishable from the former) -- in France it has now decidedly hit the mainstream. On Friday evening, March 24, French public television channel France 3 broadcast an hour-long documentary titled "The Dark Side of the Liberators." Morbidly turning the cheerfulness of George Bush's anecdote to derision, "The Dark Side" is about what it presents as the mass rape of French women by American troops in the aftermath of the Normandy operation. Rapes of English women by American soldiers stationed in the UK prior to the launch and then of German women, following the American crossing of the Rhine, are added into the mix -- seemingly in order to arrive at a more impressive number of cases -- as preamble and coda...

Nothing. They all covered previous pro-illegal events on Beacon Hill, and they all blew us off.

Kudos, however, to the Boston Herald, Metrowest Daily News and NECN for doing something the Boston Globe abandoned long ago: Covering the actual news...

Forget employer sanctions. Build a barrier. It is simply ridiculous to say it cannot be done. If one fence won't do it, then build a second 100 yards behind it. And then build a road for patrols in between. Put in cameras. Put in sensors. Put out lots of patrols.

Can't be done? Israel's border fence has been extraordinarily successful in keeping out potential infiltrators who are far more determined than mere immigrants. Nor have very many North Koreans crossed into South Korea in the past 50 years.

Of course it will be ugly. So are the concrete barriers to keep truck bombs from driving into the White House. But sometimes necessity trumps aesthetics. And don't tell me that this is our Berlin Wall. When you build a wall to keep people in, that's a prison. When you build a wall to keep people out, that's an expression of sovereignty. The fence around your house is a perfectly legitimate expression of your desire to control who comes into your house to eat, sleep and use the facilities. It imprisons no one...

2) The media can't satisfy their audiences by merely reporting what their audience wants to hear. If alternative sources of information prove that a news organization has distorted the news, the organization will suffer a loss of reputation, and hence of profit. The authors predict more bias in stories where the outcomes aren't realized for some time (foreign war reporting, for example) and less bias where the outcomes are immediately apparent (a weather forecast or a sports score). Indeed, almost nobody accuses the New York Times or Fox News Channel of slanting their weather reports.

3) Less bias occurs when competition produces a healthy tension between a news organization's desire to conform to audience expectations and maintaining its reputation...

Remarkable as was John Paul II's achievement, and welcome as it was in Israel, what astounds is how overdue it was. Antagonism toward Jewish presence in Palestine dominated the Western imagination for 1,500 years. It should be no surprise, therefore, that contemporary suspicion of that presence, even when attached to reasonable objections to Israeli policies, shows itself with a visceral edge. Now the dark energy of this tradition has been efficiently tapped by many Muslims, even though its underlying theology is irrelevant to Islam. Any appropriation, including by Palestinians, of what has proven across centuries to be perhaps the most lethal impulse to which humans have ever succumbed must be roundly condemned.

Anti-Semitism, with its racial overtones, is a modern phenomenon. Contempt for Jews and Judaism is ancient. Such impossible threads weave invisibly through attempts to reckon with Israel's dilemma, forming a rope that trips up the well-intentioned and the unaware, even as others use it, as so often before, to fashion a noose.

In the hours between captivity and true freedom, Carroll was seen in one propaganda film describing the mujahideen as ''good people fighting an honorable fight" and in another interview saying she was never threatened. An online jeering section bought it hook, line, and sinker without waiting to hear that the videos were made under threat. As Alex Jones of Harvard's Shorenstein Center said, ''They were gulled by a clever piece of propaganda and ought to be ashamed of themselves."...

Yet one day later, once she was safely out of Iraq, Carroll issued a statement repudiating the ''things that I was forced to say while captive." She bitterly labeled the men who kidnapped her and murdered her translator, Alan Enwiya, as ''criminals, at best." What she thought of the opinionated prodigies who couldn't wait to climb on their soapboxes and tell the world what to think about her, Carroll didn't say. Perhaps she was being polite. Perhaps, unlike them, she prefers to think before she vents.

With the swelling influence of the Internet and the blogosphere, the pressure to generate instant commentary is only going to grow more intense. But it is a deeply unhealthy impulse, and commentators -- in every medium -- should resist it. It's nice to be first. It's better to be right.

Cy, short for Cyclops, a kitten born with only one eye and no nose, is shown in this photo provided by its owner in Redmond, Oregon, on Wednesday, Dec. 28, 2005. The kitten, a ragdoll breed, which died after living for one day, was one of two in the litter. Its sibling was born normal and healthy. (AP Photo/Traci Allen)

By signing this letter, you are signaling that you support FUM's 4 Principles:

1. The United States Was Attacked.
2. Our Troops Want to Finish the Job.
3. Democracy Abroad Is Necessary for Our Security At Home.
4. We Will Not Be Safe Until the Terrorists are Defeated.

Al-Watan, March 25, 2006 (Qatar)
On the left from top to bottom: “Iran, Iraq and Syria.” The Jew is shouting “War.”

A senior Palestinian diplomat at the United Nations said on Tuesday that Zahar, a senior leader of the Islamic militant group, had made the reference in a letter he sent to U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan this week.

But a Hamas official in Gaza told Reuters the wrong letter had been sent. The official said Zahar made changes to an initial draft of the letter, such as deleting references to the two-state solution. The older version was mistakenly sent.

Earlier, Zahar angrily denied referring to a two-state solution in the letter, dated April 4.

"Such a sentence was not used in the letter," Zahar told Reuters in the Gaza Strip. A version of the letter circulated in Gaza was the updated one.

Hamas, which swept parliamentary elections in January and is sworn to destroy Israel, has vowed to keep fighting the Jewish state since taking over the Palestinian government last week. It says talks with Israel would be a waste of time...

Hamas's own charter declares that "liberation of Palestine is an individual duty for every Muslim wherever he may be ... Israel will ... continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it", while more recently Khaled Mashaal, Hamas's most senior leader, speaking in Syria after the Palestinian elections, had this promise for Israelis: "God willing, before they die, they will experience humiliation and degradation every day."

Which then portrays the more honest reflection of Hamas - a sugar-coated article in English, or a speech in Arabic in a Damascus mosque?

Perhaps, though, Haniyeh's more moderate message signals a genuine change in the Hamas position? If so, someone forgot to tell his foreign minister, Mahmoud al-Zahar, who remarked in an interview three days after Haniyeh's article: "I hope that our dream of having an independent state on the entire territory of historical Palestine will be realised one day, and I am sure that there is no room for the state of Israel on this land."

Hamas believes the land of "Palestine" is an Islamic waqf - territory once ruled by Muslims that must never be relinquished. This position leaves no room for compromise...

But many Area Studies Centers, particularly those which deal with the Middle East, have become captive to narrow agendas: they propagate misleading or one-sided curricula for students and K-12 teachers, negatively portray Israel at every turn, and even bar military and intelligence agencies from advertising job openings.

I prize free academic debate and wide open discourse, but we must make sure that the Area Studies Centers carry out the role we created for them.

Which is why I'm supporting changes to the Higher Education Act that will ensure that these Centers fulfill their role to facilitate national security and foster global democracy.

"Even the churches where the Americans pray are led by Jews who were converted to Christianity, but they were converted to keep controlling the Americans," Mohammad Abu Tir, the number two Hamas terrorist in the newly formed Palestinian Authority government said during an exclusive interview from his home yesterday with top radio host Rusty Humphries and WND Jerusalem bureau chief Aaron Klein.

"I made a study and I know very well that all this radicalism in some parts of the Christianity, [including] the Anglicans who are being led by Bush [Even the Anglicans! You just can't please some people! -S], is because of the control of Zionists," said Abu Tir.

The Hamas official, famous for his orange-dyed beard, went on to accuse "Zionists" of controlling Western media organizations and "leading terrorism inside the mass communications media." [It's all those CNN suicide bombers.]

Abu Tir was elected to the number two spot in the PA in January's legislative ballots in which Hamas won by a large margin. He spent nearly 25 years in Israeli prisons for directing terror activities, including the attempted poisoning in the early 1990s of Israel's water supplies...

Oddly, these international relations realists -- who in their more normal academic lives declare that state interests determine policy, and domestic politics matters little -- have discovered the one case in which domestic politics has, for decades, determined the policy of the world's greatest state. Their theories proclaim the importance of power, not ideals, yet they abhor the thought of allying with the strongest military and most vibrant economy in the Middle East. Reporting persecution, they have declared that they could not publish their work in the United States, but they have neglected to name the academic journals that turned them down.

Inept, even kooky academic work, then, but is it anti-Semitic? If by anti-Semitism one means obsessive and irrationally hostile beliefs about Jews; if one accuses them of disloyalty, subversion or treachery, of having occult powers and of participating in secret combinations that manipulate institutions and governments; if one systematically selects everything unfair, ugly or wrong about Jews as individuals or a group and equally systematically suppresses any exculpatory information -- why, yes, this paper is anti-Semitic...

The article, published late last year, suggested the UN called for Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from territories seized during the six-day war when in fact it called for a negotiated "land for peace" settlement between Israel and "every state in the area".

The governors report, which specifically singled out the reporting of the UN resolution after the 1967 Israeli-Arab ’Six-day war’, stated that the piece on the BBC news website did not give a balanced view of events.

Absence of factual reporting

The UN Security Council 242 is very specific when it calls for a connection between a "withdrawal from territories" and all nations in the region’s "right to live in peace".

The wording of the resolution refers to "territories" and not "the territories" meaning that the resolution never calls on Israel to withdraw from all territory captured during the war.

At the time the British Ambassador who drafted the approved resolution, Lord Caradon said: "It would have been wrong to demand that Israel return to its positions of June 4, 1967, because those positions were undesirable and artificial.”

The BBC governors’ report concluded: "The committee considered that by selecting only references to Israel, the online article did not accurately reflect this balance and gave a biased impression. It therefore breached editorial standards on both accuracy and impartiality"...

The hate website Radio Islam continues to spew forth its coarse Anti-Semitism, spread lists of Jews (real or imagined) and conspiracy theories on its site without the security police or the prosecuting authorities doing anything about it. When the radical right-wing party the Sweden Democrats on the other hand, had one of the Muhammed cartoons on its web-site, it was closed down after a quick and direct intervention by an official from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

At the beginning of this year, the Chancellor of Justice*, Goran Lambertz, discontinued his preliminary investigation against the great mosque in Stockholm. Cassette tapes had been sold in the bookshop of the mosque with a violently Anti-Semitic contents. After a couple of broadcasts on the 26 and 27th November last year, the Stockholm mosque was reported to the police.

In his decision to discontinue the preliminary investigation Lambertz wrote that “the lecture at hand contains statements that are strongly degrading to Jews, among other things, they are throughout called brothers of apes and pigs.” Furthermore a curse is expressed over the Jews and “Jihad is called for, to kill the Jews, whereby suicide bombers - celebrated as martyrs - are the most effective weapon”.

The Chancellor raises the question whether the statements “should be judged differently, and be considered allowed, because they are used by one side in a continuing profound conflict, where battle cries and invectives are part of everyday occurrences in the rhetoric that surround the conflict.” Lambertz thought that the “recently mentioned statements in spite of their contents are not to be considered “incitement against an ethnic group according to Swedish law”. His conclusions were that the preliminary investigation should be discontinued because this case of incitement against Jews could be said to originate from the Middle East conflict. That is, in spite of the calls for ”killing the Jews”, these statements are not a crime in the legal sense in Sweden, because of the current conflict in the Middle East, according to the Chancellor of Justice. The logical conclusion is clear. If one mentions Palestine in hate speeches and calls for massmurder against Jews, one risks nothing in Sweden...

But the local Islamic school’s connection to the international Muslim Brotherhood terror network is far from the only manifestation of the hometown jihad. Among the regular speakers at the school is Hilliard resident, Dr. Salah Sultan, who gives monthly lectures on a number of Islam-related topics. Sultan was the founding president of the Islamic American University in Dearborn, Michigan, and still serves on the European Council for Fatwa and Research . He has self-published a number of Islamic titles available through his own publishing company. On his online resume, Sultan lists as his personal vision: “To live happily. To die as a martyr. To meet the beloved ones in the Paradise of the Lord of Heaven and the earth.”...

...Some try to make personal accusations against me, because of my strong ties with America, saying that my relations with it are excellent, in an effort to harm me, my investments, or my regional and international connections. I say to them: My relations with America are not just excellent, but exceptional. But you should know that these relations will never be at the expense of my brotherly Arab and Muslim relations, like my relations with Syria and its president...

...People die, but homelands remain. Loyal positions are eternal... History will pass them by... They are not worthy of being included in history. Allah be praised, they are a minority in one of Syria's neighbors. A tiny minority...

As for Syria, allow me, Mr. President, to quote you: "Syria is protected by Allah..." Yes, Mr. President, I always follow your speeches.

Some people call this terrorism. America, its allies, and its satellites want to present any type of resistance as terrorism. Our brothers in Palestine are the first among these "terrorists." They are defending their land, their honor, and their holy places, so how can they be terrorists? Divine laws, international laws, moral values, and even the laws of nature itself...

According to Allah's creation, when a foreign object enters the human body, Allah mobilizes a special army inside the body to expel these foreign objects. This is the nature of Allah's creation. So how can they be considered terrorists?...

...I am a terrorist, and so are Dr. 'Amara, Sheik Kubeisi, and Dr. Al-Bashir. We are all terrorists, because we say they have a right to self defense, and because we permit these martyrdom-seeking operations, and call them "martyrdom-seeking" operations, and reject those who call them suicide operations, because they are anything but suicide. They have the right to defend themselves.

At times, a woman or child may be hurt. First of all, in Israeli society, even women are recruited to the army. Israeli society is militaristic to the core. Men and women are recruited, either to the regular army or as reservists. If children are hurt, they are hurt unintentionally. These are necessities of war.

Hassan Nasrallah: I say again, in front of you, that no one, either in Lebanon or outside it, will be able to punish the resistance for its accomplishments. Whoever wants to forcefully disarm the resistance - and I have said this more than once - we will chop off his hand, behead him, and get rid of his soul. We are that determined. We are that determined.

[...]

The real option that can bring an end to the American occupation in Iraq is the option of armed resistance. We, as resistance fighters, and from a cultural-ideological perspective, and from a practical perspective, believe in this. Therefore, we declare - and this is not the first time I am being so candid... We publicly declare our support of the Iraqi resistance.

Indian officials and western diplomats have been alarmed by an increase in terrorist attacks by militant groups linked to Al-Qaeda and by the Dhaka government’s failure to crack down on them.

One group said to have links with the government claimed responsibility for 500 synchronised explosions in 63 of Bangladesh’s 64 districts in August.

India’s cabinet has decided to speed up work on the 8ft security fence, which is intended to keep out terrorists and arms smugglers. The fence, which cuts a swathe through some of India’s densest rainforests, will be finished by the end of next year and patrolled by a border security force. Key stretches are being electrified...

Sabir Hossain Chowdhury, an opposition leader who was detained for three months after complaining about Islamic militants linked to the government, said Bangladesh was being subjected to a campaign of intimidation and the government was guilty of complicity. “Bangladesh is probably the only government in the world that includes a group which is committed to jihad and sharia,” he said.

The country was undergoing creeping “Islamicisation”, he added. “If you look at state TV, more presenters are wearing beards. On the radio they’re reciting more and more from the Koran. The most notable example is at Dhaka airport where signs are now in Arabic but no one speaks it.”...

"I dreams of hanging a huge map of the world on the wall at my Gaza home which does not show Israel on it," he said. "I hope that our dream to have our independent state on all historic Palestine (including Israel)."

"This dream will become real one day. I'm certain of this because there is no place for the state of Israel on this land," said al-Zahar.

However, he didn't rule out the possibility of having Jews, Muslims and Christians living under the sovereignty of an Islamic state, adding that the Palestinians never hated the Jews and that only the Israeli occupation was their enemy...

Mrs. Bailey's sister, whose daughter graduated from Yale last year, has written Mr. Levin three times to demand an explanation. All she has gotten back is a single "form letter" that repeats the same vague 144-word response that has been Yale's sole statement on its Taliban Man for the past five weeks. "It's insulting and not at all brave," says Mrs. Bailey. Ms. Pothier is even more blunt: "Can't they see they are causing people pain and making it worse by ignoring our questions?"

In the past month, Mrs. Bailey and Ms. Pothier have had to be painfully reminded of Ace Bailey's death twice. The first was when they both watched a live TV feed of the trial of Zacarias Moussaoui, the so-called 20th hijacker who was arrested a month before 9/11 and now has confessed to helping plot the attacks.

The second was when they learned that Yale had admitted Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi, a 27-year-old former official of the Taliban, the murderous regime that harbored Osama bin Laden...

My intention is to demonstrate an example of how even relatively small disputes here in our region often have many layers of complexity. Much as we would love them to be... things are rarely black and white. As you will soon see, there is plenty of blame to go around.

There is a man who does some light yard work for us from time to time who, for the sake of this post, we'll call Ibrahim.

Ibrahim lives with his wife and children in a neighboring Arab village, and like many people in his village he cultivates a few dunam of table grapes to supplement his meager income. The land he farms is his by legal purchase and document, but he has had several recent disputes with his Jewish neighbors over where exactly his property ends.

In a recent show of solidarity with Israeli residents in my area, a visiting group of American Jews spent a few days enthusiastically planting trees out on the hills between our town and Ibrahim's. Whether by accident or design they planted many of the trees on Ibrahim's land...

by Judea Pearl

As public debate of the brutal murder of Ilan Halimi settles into the usual ideological patterns, it is instructive to step back and reflect on the role of society in this tragedy.

In particular it is important to critically examine the role of the media in creating a climate where criminal gangs would target Jews over other preys, and where it becomes possible to torture a human being in such blatant defiance of natural empathy.

Empathy, or the identification with "the other," requires that "the other" be deemed equal in human qualities, as reflected in the dignity and respect that society extends to its members. Unfortunately, as a collective, Jews have not enjoyed standard norms of dignity and respect in French society - they have been defamed, villainized and dehumanized as no other group has.

Of course, only Israelis are dehumanized today in the French media, not all Jews, and French Jews are no longer resented for their religious belief, or for killing a deity; they are now villainized for one and only one crime: loving and caring for that "shitty little country," as French Ambassador Bernard called Israel, a country that according to a 2005 survey, the majority of Europeans consider "the greatest threat to world peace."

Horenstein was one of four individuals, including two Jews and two Palestinians—one Christian and one Muslim—who shared their perspectives on the long dispute between Israelis and Palestinians for the benefit of the assembled Presbyterians...

...Each of the four speakers was allotted 10 minutes to address two questions: 1. "What needs to happen for there to be peace between Palestine and Israel?" 2. "What can Presbyterians do to encourage this to happen?"

Horenstein began by voicing support for a two-state solution, which two others among the speakers also would support.

While desirable, that option, in Horentstein's view, is not possible unless, he said, there is "unequivocal Arab, and especially Palestinian, acceptance of Israel's right to exist."...

The conference is set to take place at the school from March 31 to April 2. The organizer received a $10,000 grant from Swarthmore's Lang Center for Civic and Social Responsibility. Roughly 250 students are expected to attend the event.

Saed Atshan, a 21-year-old Swarthmore senior who grew up in Ramallah in the West Bank, said that the conference will focus on fostering dialogue and creating a network of resources for students of Palestinian heritage attending American colleges.

Atshan clearly drew a distinction between his group and the Palestine Solidarity Movement, which for the past five years has organized university conferences that have pushed for divestment from Israel and sought to link the Jewish state with apartheid South Africa.

"We do not have a political platform," Atshan wrote in an e-mail. "The purpose of the inaugural conference is to provide an opportunity for internal dialogue so that students collectively can decide how they would like to define the Palestinian Student Society."

Yet the Palestine Solidarity Movement - which has set aside March 30 as "National Day of Divestment Action" - is one of the links provided on the Palestinian Student Society's Web site.

The two featured speakers and workshop leaders - Columbia University professor Joseph Massad and Noura Erakat, legal counsel for the U.S. Campaign to End the Occupation - are known for their staunchly anti-Israel views, according to Lori Lowenthal Marcus, president of the Zionist Organization of America's Philadelphia chapter...

The councilor’s order for hearings on the controversial project, filed earlier this month, comes after new documents have surfaced suggesting that the estimated market value of the land conveyed to the ISB was not $401,000, the price the BRA set on the land, but $2 million. The BRA had sold the land for $175,000 to the ISB, which was to furnish a “community benefits” package, including a lecture series on Islam and an Islamic library, to make up the difference.

The main purpose of the hearing would be to “vet this deal out publicly and ask if [this] is standard procedure for the BRA,” said McDermott, who chairs the Post-Audit and Oversight Committee...

...“There are broader questions about people associated with the ISB in the past that maybe prior to 9/11 no one bothered to check,” said McDermott. “I would’ve thought after that date, more scrutiny would’ve been given to … where funding sources were coming from and who we were signing a deed with.”...

The test, code-named "Divine Strake," will occur on June 2 about 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas in a high desert valley bounded by mountains, according to Pentagon and Energy Department officials.

"This is the largest single explosive we could imagine doing," said James A. Tegnelia, director of the Pentagon's Defense Threat Reduction Agency, which is conducting the test. ["I don't know; I can imagine quite a bit." - Han Solo]...

...The June test will detonate 700 tons of heavy ammonium nitrate-fuel oil emulsion -- creating a blast equivalent to 593 tons of TNT -- in a 36-foot-deep hole near a tunnel in the center of the Nevada Test Site, according to official reports. It aims to allow scientists to model the type of ground shock that will be created, and to weigh the effectiveness of such a weapon against its collateral impact...

The Fajr-3, which means ''victory" in Farsi, can reach Israel and US bases in the Middle East, Iranian state media indicated. The announcement of the test-firing probably will stoke regional tensions and feed suspicion about Tehran's military intentions and nuclear ambitions...

...state-run television described the weapon as ''ballistic" -- suggesting it is of comparable range to Iran's existing ballistic rocket, which can travel about 1,200 miles and reach arch-foe Israel and US bases in Iraq and the Persian Gulf region...

...''It can avoid antimissile missiles and strike the target," the general said.

He said the missile would carry a multiple warhead, and each warhead would be capable of hitting its target precisely...

In testimony Tuesday to Congress on the FBI’s budget request, director Robert Mueller said most recent reports on terrorist smuggling do not pan out.

However, he identified one that did: “This was an occasion in which Hezbollah operatives were assisting others with some association with Hezbollah in coming to the United States,” Mueller said. “That was an organization that we dismantled and identified those persons who had been smuggled in. And they have been addressed as well.”

Mueller did not elaborate further, except to say that the ring had attempted to smuggle the operatives into the United States from Mexico.

...The indictment charges that between 1996 and 2004, a group of individuals worked together in a criminal enterprise to traffic in contraband cigarettes, counterfeit Zig Zag rolling papers and counterfeit Viagra, to produce counterfeit cigarette tax stamps, to transport stolen property, and to launder money. The enterprise operated from Lebanon, Canada, China, Brazil, Paraguay and the United States. The indictment, returned by a federal grand jury on April 14, 2004, was sealed pursuant to a court order until today.

Arrested this morning by members of the Detroit Joint Terrorism Task Force (“JTTF”) were: Karim Hassan Nasser, 37, of Windsor, Ontario; Fadi Mohamad-Musbah Hammoud, 33, of Dearborn; Majid Mohamad Hammoud, 39, of Dearborn Heights; Jihad Hammoud, 47, of Dearborn; Youssef Aoun Bakri, 36, of Dearborn Heights; Ali Najib Berjaoui, 39, of Dearborn; Mohammed Fawzi Zeidan, 41, of Canton; Imad Majed Hamadeh, 51, of Dearborn Heights; Adel Isak, 37, of Sterling Heights

Zahar said a day after being sworn in as a member of the new Palestinian cabinet that America was committing "big crimes" against Arab and Islamic countries.

He was responding to President George W. Bush's statement on Wednesday that the United States would not give aid to the Hamas-led government because it has expressed its desire to destroy Israel.

"We obviously unequivocally reject that proposition and I would note also to Foreign Minister Zahar that casual slander is an inauspicious way to begin," Bolton said during a U.N. Security Council meeting on the Middle East...

Congress spent two weeks overreacting to news that Dubai Ports World would operate several American ports, including Miami's, but a better target for their hysteria would be the acquisition by Smartmatic International of California-based Sequoia Voting Systems, whose machines serve millions of U.S. voters. That Smartmatic -- which has been accused by Venezuela's opposition of helping Chávez rig elections in his favor -- now controls a major U.S. e-voting firm should give pause to anybody who thinks that replacing our antiquated butterfly ballots and hanging chads will restore Americans' faith in our electoral process.

Consider the lack of confidence Venezuelans have in their voting system. Anti-Chávez groups have such little faith in Smartmatic's machines that they refuse to run candidates in elections anymore as reports surface of fraud and irregularities from Chávez's 2004 victory in a recall referendum. Yet somehow Smartmatic International and its Venezuelan owners were able to purchase Sequoia last year without the deal receiving any scrutiny from federal regulators -- including the Treasury Department's Committee on Foreign Investments in the United States (CFIUS), which is tasked with determining whether foreign takeovers pose security risks.

CFIUS generally investigates such transactions only when the parties voluntarily submit themselves to review -- which Smartmatic did not do. But it retains the authority to initiate an investigation when it suspects a takeover compromises national security...

...Smartmatic International is owned by a Netherlands corporation, which is in turn owned by a Curacao corporation, which is in turn held by a number of Curacao trusts controlled by proxy holders who represent unnamed investors, almost certainly among them Venezuelans Mugica and Anzola and possibly others.

Why Smartmatic has chosen yet again to abuse the corporate form apparently to conceal the nationality and identity of its true owners is a question that should worry anyone who votes using one of its machines. Congress panicked upon hearing that our ports would be run by an American ally, Dubai, but never asked whether America's actual enemies in Venezuela have been able to acquire influence in our electoral process.