October 2006 Archives

The president of Andover's teachers union and the ACLU of Massachusetts are accusing school officials of stifling free speech by abruptly canceling a talk by critics of the US and Israeli governments.

Tom Meyers, the union president and a social studies teacher at Andover High [Meyers is a Ron Francis true-believer. -S], said he and five other social studies teachers had invited Hassan Fouda and Joe Carr of Wheels of Justice, a group of peace activists touring the nation in a converted school bus, to speak to about 200 students on Friday.

But Meyers said the principal canceled the talk Thursday, after several people complained about the group. Wheels of Justice offi- cials came to campus Friday and asked the principal to reconsider, but a police officer told them to leave, Meyers said.

He said it was the first time the school has canceled a talk in his 21 years of teaching there. Wheels of Justice planned to speak about its criticisms of the war in Iraq and Israel's treatment of Palestinians.

"I find it highly problematic that a few people, because they don't like the ideas of the speaker, feel they have the right to shut that person down," Meyers said yesterday.

He is working with the American Civil Liberties Union to have the talk proceed.

Leonard Kesten, a Boston lawyer representing the School Committee on this issue, said school of- ficials postponed the talk to make sure the discussion would be appropriate for high school students.

The principal could not be reached, and School Superintendent Claudia Bach refused to comment.

"They have not been forbidden to speak," Kesten said. "There's some legitimate questions being raised by some parents."

Refusing to allow the speakers wouldn't violate the First Amendment, he said.

"A high school is not a soapbox in the park," he said. "Not everybody can just come in and say what they want."

But Sarah Wunsch, a staff lawyer with the ACLU of Massachusetts, wrote to Kesten last week that the First Amendment does not permit the government, including public school officials, to discriminate against speakers because of their views...

...Ron Francis, an Andover High physics teacher, helped arrange the talk in his capacity as a pro- Palestinian activist off campus. He called the school's decision "political discrimination tinged with racism."

"The Zionists, by that I mean people who support a Jewish privileged state, the Zionists don't want people to be educated about the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians," Francis said.

On my computer screen, a picture pops up, one of a few thousand that stream into the Post's photo department daily. In the photo, reproduced on this page, a Palestinian man clutches his automatic rifle, aiming at an unseen target, while an old woman looks on.

Just another gritty war scene from the Middle East? Not quite. A few awkward details pique my interest: (1) the woman is casually leaning against a doorframe amidst what purports to be a gunfight; (2) the fighter holds the rifle unnaturally high, so as to conveniently hide his face from the camera; (3) the rifle's butt-end, designed to brace snugly in the shoulder joint, is held at an odd angle. Had he fired the weapon from that position, the gun's recoil would have bruised him, and the rifle might even have kicked him in the face.

All of this convinced me the photo was staged. As an additional bit of evidence, the text in the caption provided says the Islamic Jihad gunman "holds his weapon" after an Israeli attack. From experience, I know that phrases such as this are used as euphemisms for the obvious: The guy is posing for the camera.

Such a photo should never make it into mass-circulated press agency databases. But, as in this case, they do. And too often, naive photo editors end up publishing them.

A staged picture such as this must pass at least two filters before it reaches the newspaper. First, it should have been eliminated by the photographer under scrutiny of his own professional conscience. Failing that, the photo should have been disposed of by an editor at the agency that received the photo.

From my own experience as a war photographer, I know that sometimes it's impossible to avoid people posing for the camera. But that doesn't mean those images have to end up in a newspaper: Whenever confronted with posing combatants aiming their guns at an imaginary enemy, I would dutifully take a few pictures, thank them and dispose of those pictures at the earliest opportunity...

At least 80 militants have been killed in an air strike by Pakistani forces on a madrassa (religious school) used as a militant training camp, the army says.

The army said the madrassa in the tribal area of Bajaur bordering Afghanistan was destroyed by helicopter gunships early on Monday.

One eyewitness told the BBC that 70-80 students were inside. A leading local politician says the dead were innocent.

Pakistan has deployed nearly 80,000 troops along the border...

I just spoke with a military intelligence source who confirmed that the Bajur airstrike (see Andy Cochran's post on it) was conducted by a U.S. Predator, adding that helicopters were also involved. The strike occurred around dawn, as people in the camp were preparing for their morning prayers. My source is skeptical of speculation that Zawahiri may have been killed in the strike, saying that Zawahiri sightings are a dime a dozen. He says it's possible that Matiur Rehman was killed, but is also skeptical of that...

The American Civil Liberties Union has dropped a three-year-old lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the USA Patriot Act, months after Congress rewrote parts of the law.

The ACLU said Friday it is withdrawing the lawsuit because of "improvements to the law."

"While the reauthorized Patriot Act is far from perfect, we succeeded in stemming the damage from some of the Bush administration's most reckless policies," Ann Beeson, the New York-based associate legal director of the ACLU, said in a written statement.

The Justice Department said it is pleased with the ACLU's action.

"The Patriot Act is a legitimate and important tool that has better helped law enforcement fight terrorism while simultaneously protecting our valued civil liberties," Justice spokeswoman Tasia Scolinos said in Washington...

Cleared for publication: The police on Sunday evening arrested four Palestinians and an Israeli Arab in Umm el-Fahem. Three of them are suspected of planning to carry out a terror attack in Israel and are related to earlier security warnings. The other two detainees are illegal residents.

Following a security warning, the Wadi Ara road in the north of Israel was blocked for traffic for hours...

...On Sunday afternoon, the police blocked Road 65 for traffic from east to west following warnings on terrorists' plans to carry out a terror attack. The road reopened after three hours.

The police set up roadblocks in the entire area, and every vehicle underwent a security check, for fear that a terrorist was hiding in one of the cars.

The Northern District Police spokesman added that "due to the high alert in the Northern District area, focusing on the Wadi Ara and Umm el-Fahem areas, police cars will patrol the routes, roadblocks will be set up, and comprehensive security checks of vehicles and suspects will take place."

The Northern District Police called on the public to be patient and not come near the area at this stage...

According to indictment, 20-year-old young woman, Wurood Kassem, from Tira made connections to aid enemy in time of war after she helped organize bomb attack in Spaghetim restaurant in Ra'anana

District prosecutors issued a severe indictment Sunday to the Tel Aviv District Court against Wurood Kassem, an Arab-Israeli woman, accused of conspiracy to aid the enemy in time of war, contact with a foreign agent, illegally carrying a weapon, and membership in a terrorist group.

According to the indictment, in May 2006 Qalqilya resident Bassal Hamad decided to establish a terrorist cell of the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade with the goal of carrying out operations against IDF soldiers, carrying out shooting attacks at District Coordination Offices in Qalqilya and kidnapping and interrogating Palestinians collaborating with Israel.

Members of the cell included Balan resident Mahmad Yaakov, known as al-Hamour, Tulkarm resident Ahmad Muhammad, known as al-Har, Nablus resident Muhammad Bubli, Wurood's cousin, and another woman named Khaulah from al-Ram. Most of the cell members are not residents of the Palestinian Authority and do not have permission to enter Israel.

According to the facts presented in the indictment, during May 2006, the accused arrived together with al-Har to al-Hamour's workplace where she received Palestinian propaganda material from him. She even shot into the air with a gun he showed her. The same day, al-Hamour uploaded her details on a Fatah membership card and gave it to her. Two months later in July after al-Hamour joined the cell, Wurood went to al-Har's home with al-Hamour. In this meeting he asked her if she is prepared "to act to help the homeland" and to take part in terrorist activity by helping transfer weapons from Israel to the West Bank and to help get bombs into Israel.

The accused, according to the indictment, agreed. A few days later, al-Hamour was told to accept a bomb weighing seven kilograms (15.4 pounds) that could be activated by two telephones in order to transfer the bomb into Israel and to detonate it in a crowded place. Following this, al-Hamour set a meeting with Wurood and al-Har in order to take something to Ramallah...

...How does it work? By making it harder to cross from the Palestinian Authority areas into Israel, smuggling is reduced, with traffic channelled through monitored border crossing points. Before the fence was erected, Israeli security managed to prevent around 30% of attempted terrorist attacks. Today, the number is closer to 95%. Waroud KasemA case study is young 20 year old Israeli Arab Warud Qasem (pictured). Qasem worked in our local Ra'anana supermarket as a cashier. Her cousin was an illegal Palestinian worker in Ra'anana's Spaghettim restaurant. Three months ago, she joined Fatah's Al-Aksa Martyrs Brigades. [You will recall that Al-Aksa is an official organ of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah party, and that many of its active terrorists received salaries and benefits from internationally funded Palestinian Authority budgets.] Qasem was able to use her citizenship and familiarity with Israel to help weapons smuggling and to pinpoint terror targets. She recruited her cousin in a plan to plant a bomb in the Spaghettim Restaurant. But, asked to smuggle the 7 kilogram bomb into Israel in her car (which has Israeli license plates) she demurred, because the border police were likely to catch her. The bomb was driven around the West Bank, searching for a way around the fence into Israel, when Qasem was arrested with it in her possession. She is now facing charges - our town's citizens having been saved from attack by the security fence and the ever alert Israeli security services.

Of course, the intrepid Kofi Anan has never been one to let facts, public opinion or the potential saving of the lives of innocent civilians stand in the way of demonizing Israel. In his fading days as UN Secretary General, the ever vigilant crusader for the rights of Palestinians to murder Jews has found yet another way to divert even more UN resources to the Palestinian international propaganda campaign...

Whew! Give me a second to catch my breath. Dabashi and two other other American Muslim scholars quoted in the Globe article criticized Reading Lolita in Tehran for not presenting the "full context" of the Iranian revolution, and for omitting the "Islamic strands of feminism in Iran." What nonsense! Azar Nafisi wrote a memoir about her experiences teaching literature during and after the Iranian revolution. It's a memoir, not propaganda for Islamists. If you've got a story to tell, write your own damn book.

Public Citizen, the national organization founded by Ralph Nader to fight for openness and democratic accountability in government, has filed a Friend of the Court Brief calling upon the Massachusetts courts to dismiss the lawsuit brought by the Islamic Society of Boston ("ISB") against various non-profit organizations and private citizens who called for government review of the Boston Redevelopment Authority's controversial land deal with the ISB. Along with numerous citizens, organizations and public officials, The David Project called for review of the land deal in 2004 after public reports disclosed evidence that various past and present ISB leaders had defended and supported acts of violence against Jews, Americans and others, and that the key BRA official managing the transaction was simultaneously a fundraiser for the ISB at the same time that he was on the BRA payroll.

In a brief filed with the Massachusetts Appeals Court earlier this week, Public Citizen, a non-profit organization headquartered in Washington, D.C. with approximately 100,000 members across the United States, urged that the ISB lawsuit be dismissed at a preliminary stage under the Massachusetts Anti-SLAPP statute, a statute enacted by the Massachusetts Legislature to stop lawsuits aimed at intimidating citizens and chilling the exercise of their First Amendment rights. Public Citizen, founded by Ralph Nader in 1971, stated that prior to the statute's enactment, "concerned individuals and groups could be intimidated by the risk that, as a direct result of their petitioning activity, they would be forced to defend protracted and expensive litigation. An anti-SLAPP statute is intended not only to prevent the chilling effects SLAPP suits have on an individual's right to petition the government, but to further the operation of representative government itself."

The organization urged that the ISB lawsuit against The David Project and other citizens be dismissed at the threshold, under a statutory provision which entitles defendants who win dismissal of the case to an award of their attorney's fees.

Over the years, Israel has been accused of many diabolical acts and condemned before the full evidence is presented. The Jenin "massacre" and Gaza Beach libels are but two examples. Now, the Independent of 28 October has run a front page exclusive by Robert Fisk alleging Israeli use of a "secret uranium bomb" in Lebanon during the recent war.

The charge is based on two soil samples showing "elevated radiation signatures". We are not experts in this field and perhaps those investigating will eventually find something to stain Israel's image. But unlike Fisk who rushes to judgement, even the Middle East director of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) has stated: "If uranium was in fact used we will find this out and make an announcement. We cannot confirm anything at this stage, and we will wait for the results."

Israeli Foreign Ministry Spokesman Mark Regev raises the issue of double standards in the way in which Israel is singled out: "The weapons we used in Lebanon have been used by NATO and Western countries for years. Sometimes it seems that when it comes to the Jewish State - it is decided to treat the matter differently. Someone has to ask why an accusatory finger is being pointed at Israel."...

A vote for Joe Lieberman is a vote for more war.

By contrast, ten minutes from you today is ten minutes towards bringing our brave men and women home from Iraq.

Short and sweet, here's the ask: please click any of the links in this email; use the tool to find family, friends and neighbors you know in Connecticut; type out a short note explaining why you support Ned Lamont ... and you're done...

...Your participation this afternoon will go a long way towards doing something Joe Lieberman refuses to: hold our elected officials responsible for the quagmire in Iraq.

Joe sponsored the original regime change resolution in the Senate, has voted against every serious bill attempting to change the course, and even bragged about President Bush actually enforcing his policy in Iraq.

And now Joe's gotta go...

...Stop at Lamont office nearest you. Get a roll of Lamont Stickers.

On Halloween night, stick those onto your candy bars you are handing out.

Buy a Case of small Poland Spring or other Mineral water bottles. Put Lamont stickers on those.
Hand them out to whomever, wherever...

She stood out in the midst of an anti-Israel rally. She stood out even more as she joined the pro-Israel Jewish students to sing “The Star Spangled Banner.” She really, really stood out when she glared at an “Israel is a Racist State” sign and then sang “Ha-Tikvah.” Cornetta Lane is a young black woman.

Cornetta is a member of The Fellowship for Israel and Black America. This summer, Cornetta participated in a training session along with 111 college and college-bound students in understanding the Arab-Israeli conflict and in leadership skills. The goal of these sessions is to build the pro-Israel forces on campus, teaching students to make Israel’s case – from the left or from the right. Christians participated in all three of the summer’s week-long programs. In one of the programs, four of the Christians were African Americans.

At registration, Jewish students were baffled. Why would American blacks want to stand up for Israel and Jewish students on campus? The African Americans explained that their pastor, Glen Plummer, who heads FIBA, teaches that it was the Jews who helped African Americans during the civil rights era. They contributed significantly – with funding and advice – to the founding of both the NAACP and the Urban League. They were key advisors to Martin Luther King. They stuck their necks out and advocated for equal rights for blacks long before it was comfortable.

When Cornetta got an alert from an Israel campus advocacy team about a rally against Israel at Wayne State University on Oct. 12, she decided to go. The Anti-Racist Action (ARA) – an off-campus group in Detroit sought to press Wayne State to divest from Israel. Cornetta wanted to express what she believes: Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East and it deserves to exist in peace as a Jewish state.

Cornetta’s presence and defiance completely undermined the basis for the ARA’s divestment campaign – the calumny that “Israel = White Supremacy.” Outnumbered and flummoxed by Cornetta and the 30 Jewish students with her, the anti-Zionists walked off. Irvin D. Reid, president of Wayne State, witnessed all this and the next day condemned “divestment” in the Detroit Free Press. Cornetta said that she was proud to stand up for Jewish people and would “do this again” at a moment’s notice.

The morning of the rally – before we knew of Cornetta’s actions, Boston Pastor Gerald Bell and I had flown to Detroit to meet FIBA Director, Glenn Plummer. He spoke about the benefit of teaching FIBA students how to defend Jews and Israel. He spoke at length about black-Jewish relations. He said that black Christians believe that the Bible is the literal word of G-d, and this certainly includes the promise in Genesis that “those who bless the Jews will be blessed.” Now may we be blessed with a thousand Cornetta Lanes.

No Fisk, you’ve got it wrong. The same Hezb’allah which pulled children’s bodies from the wreckage of the carnage which they themselves provoked, only to rebury those poor children’s bodies, and dig them up again for the next news crew; the same Hezb’allah which in the most cynical fashion launched, from within the Lebanese civilian population, their attacks against Israel’s civilian population in order to achieve maximum casualties of both, should have it on their consciences. So should their journalist appeasers and apologists, who enabled them and continue to cover up their crimes.

That Fisk is one such appeaser and apologist becomes clear...

...Now history is surely about to repeat itself once again. Israel’s occupation of Gaza ended with disengagement. The Palestinians have been left alone to get on with constructing the civil society to furnish the state that the world assumes they want so badly. They have not done so. Instead, they are descending into the chaos and anarchy of civil war, while equipping themselves with ever more fearsome rockets and other weapons in order to attack Israel with ever greater ferocity. Moreover, Iran is helpfully training them to become an army to wage war all the more professionally upon Israel from the land it has vacated, just like Hezbollah was used to attack it from Lebanon. Israel will have no option but to go back into Gaza to try to protect its citizens from such aggression. And how will the western media report this when it does so? Undoubtedly by screaming once again about Israeli atrocities and war crimes, just as they did over Jenin and Lebanon.

What has happened in Lebanon and Gaza dramatically exposes the utter hollowness of the ‘occupation causes resistance’ argument. In both cases, the ending of occupation merely facilitated even greater aggression. Instead of ‘land for peace’, the real deal is land for war...

Well, today was an exciting day at AHS. Two speakers from Wheels of Justice showed up to speak, even though it was canceled yesterday. I don't know if Ron ever told them not to come. Administrators didn't let them in. Ron distributed a flyer to all the students saying that 6 social studies teachers agreed to have them speak and the administrators blocked them. Went on to say that they always have speakers at AHS but he guesses they don't like Arab speakers. He went on to say there was an emergency teacher's meeting after school. The Administrators and School committee are looking into this...From what I'm hearing, other teachers are very scared of Ron and union pres., Tom Myers. AHS has a problem when Ron can invite Wheels of Justice without principal's knowledge...

The head of news at the state-owned South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) has been accused of acting arbitrarily in unofficially blacklisting eight journalists and commentators. Among the banned journalists is Israel-based freelancer Paula Slier, a Jerusalem Post contributor, who has been barred from reporting because she is a Jew.

SABC management set up a commission under former SABC head Zwelakhe Sisulu and advocate Gilbert Marcus - after complaints about a ruling, allegedly by news head Snuki Zikalala, that certain commentators and analysts not be used because they were critical of South African President Thabo Mbeki.

The commission, which has now released its findings, said AM Live anchor John Perlman was right when he had said that blacklisting of commentators and analysts was happening "by instruction."

Zikalala ordered an outright ban on reports from Slier because, the commission found, he assumed that since Slier was Jewish she supported Israel.

Zikalala admits to supporting the PLO and justified his ban on Slier, who used to report regularly for the SABC until barred in 2004, by calling the conflict in the Middle East a "Jewish war" and saying the corporation needed someone who was "impartial."

But the commission ruled that Slier's reports were impartial and that the ban was in direct conflict with SABC's policies and bylaws.

Zikalala and Perlman have now been instructed to submit statements explaining their actions to a disciplinary hearing.

Here, in a very personal account of her journalistic motivations and experiences, including with the SABC, Slier laments the growing conformism and culture of censorship in South Africa today...

...I cannot describe the depth of my disappointment... This is deeply offensive... it makes me angry. I'd wish I could believe the correspondence was simply mis-understood... It's utterly disheartening.

After doing a bit more reading about this, [just google it, there is plenty of material] it appears that Kennedy may have begun his overtures as early as 1978! It wasn't partisan politics nor was it dislike of Reagan that motivated him. He tried to work, (if he didn't actually work) with our enemy to bring down both a Democratic and a Republican President... all for selfish personal ambition.

The antipathy that congressional Democrats have today toward President George W. Bush is reminiscent of their distrust of President Ronald Reagan during the Cold War, a political science professor says...

... In his book, which came out this week, Kengor focuses on a KGB letter written at the height of the Cold War that shows that Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) offered to assist Soviet leaders in formulating a public relations strategy to counter President Reagan's foreign policy and to complicate his re-election efforts.

The letter, dated May 14, 1983, was sent from the head of the KGB to Yuri Andropov, who was then General Secretary of the Soviet Union's Communist Party.

In his letter, KGB head Viktor Chebrikov offered Andropov his interpretation of Kennedy's offer. Former U.S. Sen. John Tunney (D-Calif.) had traveled to Moscow on behalf of Kennedy to seek out a partnership with Andropov and other Soviet officials, Kengor claims in his book...

...Specifically, Kennedy proposed that Andropov make a direct appeal to the American people in a series of television interviews that would be organized in August and September of 1983, according to the letter.

"Tunney told his contacts that Kennedy was very troubled about the decline in U.S -Soviet relations under Reagan," Kengor said. "But Kennedy attributed this decline to Reagan, not to the Soviets. In one of the most striking parts of this letter, Kennedy is said to be very impressed with Andropov and other Soviet leaders."...

...As a prelude to the public relations strategy Kennedy hoped to facilitate on behalf of the Soviets, Kengor said, the Massachusetts senator had also proposed meeting with Andropov in Moscow -- to discuss the challenges associated with disarmament...

BUENOS AIRES (AFP) - Argentine prosecutors charged Iran and the Shiite militia Hezbollah with the 1994 bombing of a Jewish charities office in Argentina that killed 85 people and injured 300.

Prosecutors demanded an international arrest warrant for then-Iranian president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and six other top Iranian officials at the time of the attack, and a former Hezbollah foreign security service chief, Imad Fayez Moughnieh.

In a country with a murky record in pursuing the 12-year-old case, relatives and friends of the victims called on President Nestor Kirchner to take swift and strong action to bring it to trial.

In a statement, Argentine chief prosecutor Alberto Nisman declared: "We deem it proven that the decision to carry out an attack July 18, 1994 on the AMIA (the Argentine Jewish Mutual Association, a Jewish charities association headquarters in Buenos Aires) was made by the highest authorities of the Islamic Republic of Iran which directed Hezbollah to carry out the attack."

AMIA, supported by Israel and the United States, had long accused Iran of organizing the attack and getting Hezbollah to carry it out.

Those accusations, based on intelligence gathered by the secret services of Argentina, Israel and the US, have been consistently rejected by the Iranian government and Hezbollah.

In Beirut, a Hezbollah source said she had not yet heard that the Shiite militia had been formally charged but that it came as no surprise.

"I have not yet heard that but it is not new," she told AFP. "The Zionists want that (the two parties be charged)."

The Jewish community in Argentina, some 300,000 strong and the largest in South America, had marked the July 18 bombing annually with a demand that justice be served for the attack, the worst on Argentina's soil, and another 1992 attack against the Israeli embassy, which claimed 22 lives...

The taxi controversy at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport has caught the nation's attention. But the dispute may go deeper than the quandary over whether to accommodate Somali Muslim cabdrivers who refuse to carry passengers carrying alcohol. Behind the scenes, a struggle for power and religious authority is apparently playing out...

...An animated circle of Somalis gathered when the question of the airport controversy was raised.

"I was surprised and shocked when I heard it was an issue at the airport," said Faysal Omar. "Back in Somalia, there was never any problem with taking alcohol in a taxi."

Jama Dirie said, "If a driver doesn't pick up everyone, he should get his license canceled and get kicked out of the airport."

Two of the Somalis present defended the idea that Islam prohibits cabdrivers from transporting passengers with alcohol. An argument erupted. The consensus seemed to be that only a small number of Somalis object to transporting alcohol. It's a matter of personal opinion, not Islamic law, several men said...

..."This is one of those new concoctions."It is being foisted on the Somali community by an inside or outside group," he added. "I do not know who."

But many Somali drivers at the airport are refusing to carry passengers with alcohol. When I asked Patrick Hogan, Metropolitan Airports Commission spokesman, for his explanation, he forwarded a fatwa, or religious edict, that the MAC had received. The fatwa proclaims that "Islamic jurisprudence" prohibits taxi drivers from carrying passengers with alcohol, "because it involves cooperating in sin according to the Islam."

The fatwa, dated June 6, 2006, was issued by the "fatwa department" of the Muslim American Society, Minnesota chapter, and signed by society officials.

The society is mediating the conflict between the cab drivers and the MAC. That seems odd, since the society itself clearly has a stake in the controversy's outcome.

How did the MAC connect with the society? "The Minnesota Department of Human Rights recommended them to us to help us figure out how to handle this problem," Hogan said.

Omar Jamal, director of the Somali Justice Advocacy Center, thinks he knows why the society is promoting a "no-alcohol-carry" agenda with no basis in Somali culture. "MAS is an Arab group; we Somalis are African, not Arabs," he said. "MAS wants to polarize the world, create two camps. I think they are trying to hijack the Somali community for their Middle East agenda. They look for issues they can capitalize on, like religion, to rally the community around. The majority of Somalis oppose this, but they are vulnerable because of their social and economic situation."

The society

What is the Muslim American Society? In September 2004 the Chicago Tribune published an investigative article. The society was incorporated in 1993, the paper reported, and is the name under which the U.S. branch of the Muslim Brotherhood operates.

The Muslim Brotherhood was founded in Egypt in 1928 by Hassan al-Banna. The Tribune described the Brotherhood as "the world's most influential Islamic fundamentalist group."Because of its hard-line beliefs, the U.S. Brotherhood has been an increasingly divisive force within Islam in America, fueling the often bitter struggle between moderate and conservative Muslims," the paper reported.

The international Muslim Brotherhood "preaches that religion and politics cannot be separated and that governments eventually should be Islamic," according to the Tribune. U.S. members emphasize that they follow American laws, but want people here to convert to Islam so that one day a majority will support a society governed by Islamic law.

How are society members to respond when questioned about a Muslim Brotherhood connection? The Tribune cites an undated internal memo: "If asked, 'Are you the Muslim Brothers?' leaders should respond that they are an independent group called the Muslim American Society." [does that sound familiar? -S]

The April 2001 issue of the society's magazine, the American Muslim, lists "essential books" for understanding Islam. They include works by Hassan al-Banna, the Brotherhood's founder, and Sayyid Qutb, one of its most violent theoreticians...

In order to understand the real underlying issues of the Somerville Divestment Project's deceitful effort to con voters into supporting Questions 5 and 6 on Election Day, a few simple facts will suffice...

...Lastly, Mr. Francis, who has spearheaded this initiative, is a schoolteacher in Andover and, thus, is a member of the State Teachers Retirement System, yet he has chosen to ask the employees and retirees of the city of Somerville and "indirectly" the taxpayers to support his position and suffer any financial consequences that occur. How convenient for him that he does not ask his own pension system, of which he has a much greater financial stake, to assume the same burden. Apparently, he is an advocate for "human rights" only when it adds no risk to his own pension. Again, please vote "no" on Question 6.

On Nov. 7, you will be asked to vote on Question 5, which asks that the descendants of Palestinians who left Israel in 1948 - and who now number in the millions - all be allowed to return to Israel. The intention of this "right of return" is to put an end to Israel as a democratic Jewish state that protects the civil rights of all minorities, and to replace it with a Muslim state. The promoters of this initiative depend on lies and distortions to support their case...

Dr. Hassan Fouda is an independent science consultant and former Assistant Director at Global Research and Development, Pfizer, Inc. He was also a member of the Board of Directors of Tandem Lab, a Contract Research Organization based in Salt Lake City Utah. Currently, Hassan, serves on the Board of Directors of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolition (ICAHD-USA: www.ICAHD.org). He was a member of the Executive Committee of the Palestine Right to Return Coalition [Al Awda] and served as the Connecticut chair. He is also active in several educational and interfaith peace advocacy groups including the Council for National Interest (CNIonline .org), If Americans Knew (IfAmericansKnew.org) and the Connecticut based We Refuse to be Enemies (Jews, Moslems and Christians in Coalition for Peace)...

Joe Carr is an anti-oppression activist and performance artist from Kansas City, Missouri. He graduated with a BA from the Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington in 2004, having organized with direct-action movements such as Earth First, Food Not Bombs, and Arts in Activism. In the last three years, he’s worked with the International Solidarity Movement in Palestine where he witnessed Israeli soldiers murder international activists Rachel Corrie and Tom Hurndall, and with the Christian Peacemaker Teams in Palestine and Iraq, he is friends with those currently held hostage. This is his third national speaking tour, he's appeared in several documentaries, has had his writing published in major media outlets, and just released his second album of music and poetry.

The following is the text [original video at the link above] from an Iranian dramatic clip, titled "The New Middle East," which aired on the Iranian news channel (IRINN) on October 19, 2006. In it, a small girl expresses her wish for the killing of U.S. Secretary State Condoleezza Rice.

Girl [voice over]: How come we are considered terrorists? You are the ones who bomb and harm Lebanon. You are destroying its beauty, its appeal, its land, its people, its happiness... And after all this, we are the terrorists?! A journalist once asked me: If they took you to see Condoleezza Rice, what would you say to her? I told the journalist that I would say to Condoleezza Rice: For me to be happy - you should be killed. Just these words.

[Condoleezza Rice is then shown on screen playing the piano, against a rolling backdrop of war scenes. The following text is shown on screen, as the backdrop continues]

United States of America - U.S.A. - Presented

The New Middle East, Lebanon - 2006

Directed by: Israel

Production: George Bush

Location Manager: [Israeli Prime Minister] Ehud Olmert

Script Writing: Condoleezza Rice

Script Supervisor: [Israeli Foreign Minister] Tzipi Livni

Art Director: [Israeli Defense Minister] Amir Peretz

Special Effects: [Israeli Chief of Staff] Dan Halutz

Sponsored by The United Nations

The Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown University has been renamed after Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal donated $20 million to its projects. And while that may be just the tail, the dog appears to be moving away from its historic Catholic and Jesuit teaching philosophy too.

The Center's leaders say it now will be used to put on workshops regarding Islam, fostering exchanges with the Muslim world, addressing U.S. policy towards the Muslim world, working on the relationship of Islam and Arab culture, addressing Muslim citizenship and civil liberties, and developing exchange programs for students from the Muslim world.

The "Christian" part of the center's projects at the university that has a history of 200 years of higher education following its Christian founding, is conspicuous by its absence in its website plans for its 10-year future.

But that won't be a surprise to leaders of a number of Christian evangelical groups whose leaders recently were told to leave the campus and not list Georgetown University as a site for operations in the future...

...The school's Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding confirmed several months ago that the $20 million donation was made by Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, and a short time later the Center was given the added moniker as Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding.

The organization now features a number of pro-Muslim statements and articles, with little reference to any Christian statements or understandings. It even has co-sponsored events with CAIR, the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

CAIR is a spin-off of the Islamic Association for Palestine, identified by two former FBI counterterrorism chiefs as a "front group" for the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas. Several CAIR leaders have been convicted on terrorism-related charges.

The center's chief, John L. Esposito, summarizes the goals of the organization clearly: "The Prince Alwaleed Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding is concerned with Islam and the West and Islam in the West. The Center, since its creation in 1993, has built bridges of understanding between the Muslim world and the West, addressing stereotypes of Islam and Muslims and issues and questions such as the clash of civilizations, and the compatibility of Islam and modern life – from democratization and pluralism to the status of women, minorities and human rights – and American foreign policy in the Muslim world."...

...The Center's assistant director, Huma Malik, told WND that the $20 million came from the prince because the center is working on projects that interest him, but she could not comment on the influence of the donation or why the evangelical Christians were barred from campus...

...The message of acting as an information source for Islam was reinforced in the fact that while the Center's website includes a link for Islamic Resources, there is none for Christian resources.

It also takes a distinct policy stance, with Esposito noting in a recent posting that "despite 'HAMAS' victory in free and democratic elections, the United States and Europe failed to give the party full recognition and support," he wrote.

That type of behavior, he said, provides reasons for "many Muslim autocratic rulers' to retreat from democratization, and he cited a Gallup World Study that says it is the policies of the U.S. that generate hurt in the Muslim world...

...He said "HAMAS and Hizbollah" both are elected political parties, even though the U.S. and others have labeled them "terrorist organizations."

The Center, on a daily news clip posting, highlighted stories quoting a Mecca Imam saying non-Muslims are attacking Muslims out of fear of being over-run by Muslims and the London mayor noting that Muslims in Britain are being "demonized," comparing their recent treatment in London to the treatment of Jews in Nazi Germany...

...He also had given a similar $20 million gift to Harvard, which sponsors a Harvard Law School Islamic Legal Studies Program, and the Islamic Finance Project, which looks at the legal and sharia points of view of situations, officials said.

The Alliance Defense Fund earlier wrote a letter to Georgetown asking for reconsideration of its ban on several Christian groups. Officials said no response was received...

...IN THE French judicial system, the people's interest is represented by a special court reporter who recommends verdicts to the judges. It is rare for judges to disregard the reporter's recommendations. During his trial, Karsenty and his witnesses produced piece after piece of evidence that called into question the credibility of the France 2 film.

For its part, France 2 sent no representatives to the trial. Its attorney did not question any of the evidence submitted by Karsenty nor did she cross-examine any of his witnesses. She brought no witnesses of her own. She simply produced a letter of support for France 2 from President Jacques Chirac. The court reporter recommended dismissing the case.

In their judgment last week, the judges argued that Karsenty's allegations against Enderlin and France 2 could not be credible since "no Israeli authority, neither the army which is nonetheless most affected, nor the Justice [Ministry] have ever accorded the slightest credit to these allegations" regarding the mendacity of the Dura film.

Over the years Israeli officials have justified their silence by saying that it was a losing proposition to reopen the Dura case. We'll be accused of blaming the victim, they said.

This statement is both cowardly and irresponsible. As the French verdict shows, without an Israeli protest, the protests of private individuals, however substantial, ring hollow. When Israel refuses to defend itself from blood libels, it gives silent license to attacks against Israel and world Jewry in the name of those libels.

In 2000, Barak was desperately trying to close a peace deal with Yasser Arafat. The last thing he wanted was to admit that Arafat was promulgating blood libels against Israel. So he was silent. This is unforgivable, but understandable.

Israel's continued silence is a sign that Israeli officialdom has still not understood what the war of images demands of it. The Dura film, like the fictional massacre of Lebanese children at Kafr Kana in Lebanon this summer, shows that victory or defeat in wars is today largely determined on television. To win, Israel must go on the offensive and attack untruthful, distorted images that are used to justify the killing of Israelis and Jews throughout the world...

Phoenix City Council members last week removed Marwan Ahmad, a Palestinian and Muslim, from the Human Relations Commission after more than five years of service, saying he was promoting messages of intolerance against Israel, the Jewish community and at least one member of the Islamic community.

Mayor Phil Gordon didn't give a specific reason why they ousted Ahmad, but Ahmad's monthly newspaper, Muslim Voice, has come under fire in the past.

In that newspaper, Ahmad depicted a member of the Islamic community as a dog in an editorial cartoon.

Ahmad also publishes the Multicultural Yellow Pages, which excludes references to the Valley's Jewish cultural institutions and replaces Israel with the name Palestine on a Middle East map. He also omits area codes, airlines and restaurants associated with Israel.

Bill Straus, Arizona regional director of the Anti-Defamation League, called that book "one of our community's most glaring examples of cultural division."...

... Ahmad said the City Council has violated his freedom of speech and is mixing local and international politics.

The City Council is "under the influence of the pro-Israel groups, and they're putting Israeli interests before the city's interests," he said...

...Mohammed Riyad, a member of American Moderate Muslims for Public Awareness, said groups are prepared to conduct demonstrations, strikes, counterelection campaigns and file lawsuits if they don't get relief.

While critics of the council decision concede that Ceman, Ahmad's replacement on the board, is a "good man," they consider Ahmad's removal as an affront to Muslims...

GAZA, Oct. 23 (UPI) -- The foreign minister of the Hamas-led Palestinian Authority told Germany's Der Spiegel magazine Palestinians will never recognize the state of Israel.

In an interview, Mahmoud al-Zahar acknowledged there were differences within Hamas on the issue of recognizing Israeli sovereignty, "But the big majority supports the resistance" to a two-state solution.

"We will never recognize Israel," Zahar said. "The Zionists have occupied our land like the Nazis did with France during the Second World War. Israel is a foreign element in the Middle East. Why don't the Jews establish their state in Europe?"

Asked by the magazine about Palestinian Prime Minister Nasser al-Shaer's views that an indirect recognition of Israel is possible, Zahar was instantly dismissive.

"That is his personal opinion and not the position of the government," Zahar said.

...The Sox's ace has formed a game company focusing on massively multiplayer online games called Green Monster Games, named after the famous left-field wall at Fenway Park in Boston. The company's first game is currently in preproduction--no release date or game details have been announced.

"The challenge is not simply in publishing a game but in publishing a game that changes the landscape of the online marketplace," said Schilling. "Our company motto is 'If you can't do it better than it's ever been done before, work for someone else.'"

Schilling knows that, like with baseball, getting a game together is a team effort and has enlisted the help of some other entertainment luminaries. Serving as art director will be Todd McFarlane, creator of the Spawn comic and noted baseball memorabilia junkie. R.A. Salvatore, a fantasy writer who will keynote the upcoming Dark Age of Camelot Roundtable in Las Vegas, will be the publisher's creative director.

When Schilling isn't on the field mowing down batters with his split-fingered fastball, he's mowing down enemies with fireballs in PC games. A longtime Everquest fan, Schilling teamed up with Sony Online Entertainment earlier this year to help fight Lou Gehrig's disease. A virtual Schilling was put into the game, and every time gamers defeated him, money was donated to the ALS Association...

Emilio Morenatti, a Spanish photographer working for the Associated Press, was kidnapped Tuesday morning in Gaza. His photos show he was trusted by Palestinian terrorists.

No terror organization has yet taken responsibility for the kidnapping, but Hamas Authority sources said a search was underway.

Morenatti, 37, was forced into a car near his apartment by four armed men in Palestinian Authority-controlled Gaza, according to another AP employee. Spain's Foreign Minister Miguel Angel Moratinos told reporters in Madrid that officials were acting to free him "as quickly as possible," and that he had contacted PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas and other PA figures on the matter.

Morenatti was apparently trusted by PA terrorists, as his photos include inside views of Al-Aksa Brigades terrorists preparing for attacks against Israeli civilians and IDF soldiers. Morenatti has photographed an Al-Aksa terrorist laying a bomb, and another one carrying a reel wire; the caption of the latter specifies that the terrorist had set "up an anti tank bomb following an Israeli strike."...

...Click here and here to see some of Morenatti's terrorist-close-up photos...

A source from one of the major wire services told an Arutz-7 correspondent that all the agencies are given such access to pre-terror preparations, and that Morenatti's photos are not an indication of heightened involvement with the groups. Asked if the terrorists are not concerned that the photographers might warn the Israelis of an impending attack, the source said that "trust," as well as possibly the fear of getting killed, offset these concerns...

The following are excerpts from a speech delivered by Lebanese cleric Fathi Yakan, head of the Lebanese Islamic Action Front, which aired on Al-Manar TV on October 20, 2006.

Fathi Yakan: Tomorrow, Allah willing, the "true promise" will be fulfilled in Palestine, all of Palestine - not just in Jerusalem, not just in the 1967 territories, but on all Palestinian soil, the land of the frontline. Then, brothers, the greatest victory awaits us - the promise of the world to come. These promises will be followed by other promises, and then the greatest promise will be fulfilled, through the words of the Prophet Muhammad: "Judgment Day will only come when the Muslims fight the Jews, and kill them." This is the promise of the world to come. Through the true promise in Lebanon and in Palestine, we proceed, Allah willing, to the final promise, when the state of Israel, this cancerous growth, will be eliminated, Allah willing...

...Every day, the Israeli enemy opens a small window, and looks out at what happened in Lebanon, confirming that the resistance and Lebanon were victorious, and that defeat was the lot of Israel and this accursed Israeli people - this accursed nation, the offspring of apes and pigs. I say to you, brothers, with all honesty: I suggest that the Lebanese who feel [Israel won the war] should go see a doctor, because they may be afflicted with psychological or mental AIDS.

Philippe Karsenty asked me to write something about my (obviously premature) enthusiasm for “Republican France” after the trial, in view of last week’s judgment. I have now read the judgment, which is, from the point of view of an historian who tries to reconstruct past events, a monument of the kind of facetious reasoning that I’ve already complained about both among French medievalists and among French/European media.

To say that the decision was disappointing is obviously putting it mildly. But it was not unexpected. Numerous people wrote me to say, watch out. As one American blogger who lives in France wrote:

I followed closely your reports on the first part of the trial. I’m still pessimistic. The reason I’m pessimistic is because they’re only asking for the symbolic euro. France2 wants the case just so they can say the courts ruled in their favor, not in order for sanction actually to be applied. I’m afraid the French courts are so politicized that they will give them what they want.

Others noted that the absence of any effort on the part of France2 — no witnesses, no questions for hostile witnesses, no presence of either Enderlin or Chabot — could indicate not a lack of preparation (alone), but a secure knowledge that they need do nothing since they knew they’d win. Several people who claimed to know, informed me and Karsenty independently, that the fix was on before the trial. When I suggested that to an Israeli lawyer I know after the first trial but before the decision, she responded indignantly, “No. The French judiciary is really independent.” I wanted to believe that...

It was the day that a host of BBC executives and star presenters admitted what critics have been telling them for years: the BBC is dominated by trendy, Left-leaning liberals who are biased against Christianity and in favour of multiculturalism.

A leaked account of an 'impartiality summit' called by BBC chairman Michael Grade, is certain to lead to a new row about the BBC and its reporting on key issues, especially concerning Muslims and the war on terror.

It reveals that executives would let the Bible be thrown into a dustbin on a TV comedy show, but not the Koran, and that they would broadcast an interview with Osama Bin Laden if given the opportunity. Further, it discloses that the BBC's 'diversity tsar', wants Muslim women newsreaders to be allowed to wear veils when on air.

At the secret meeting in London last month, which was hosted by veteran broadcaster Sue Lawley, BBC executives admitted the corporation is dominated by homosexuals and people from ethnic minorities, deliberately promotes multiculturalism, is anti-American, anti-countryside and more sensitive to the feelings of Muslims than Christians.

One veteran BBC executive said: 'There was widespread acknowledgement that we may have gone too far in the direction of political correctness.

'Unfortunately, much of it is so deeply embedded in the BBC's culture, that it is very hard to change it.' ...

WASHINGTON – Who hates whom in America?

If the latest FBI hate-crime statistics are any indication, of the 1,314 verified offenses motivated by religious bias, 68.5 percent were anti-Jewish.

Only 11.1 percent were anti-Islamic, despite claims of rampant anti-Muslim bigotry in the U.S. by groups like the Council on American Islamic Relations.

Across the board, hate crimes in the U.S. dropped last year by 6 percent, according to the 2005 FBI report release last week, although violence against people based on their race accounted more than half of the reported incidents.

Police nationwide reported 7,163 hate crime incidents in 2005, targeting victims based on their race, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation and disabilities. That was down from 2004, when the FBI reported 7,649 incidents...

...Sixty percent of the known offenders in 2005 were white, and 20 percent were black, the report showed...

WASHINGTON - Eighty-one percent of American Jews believe that the real goal of the Arabs is the destruction of Israel and not the return of occupied land, according to the annual survey of the American Jewish Committee(AJC) on various issues.

While 54 percent said they supported the establishment of a Palestinian state, only 38 percent said Israel and the Arabs could solve the conflict peacefully. Another 56 percent said they believed the conflict could not be resolved.

According to the survey, a slim majority of American Jews do not believe that the United States should act militarily to stop Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons. Fifty-four percent opposed such action and 38 percent supported it. However, 57 percent said Israel would be justified in taking military action against Iran, while 35 percent were opposed...

I moved from Andover, Massachusetts to Israel over five years ago, so the day-to-day happenings in my hometown are largely off my radar screen. However, Andover High School (AHS) physics teacher Ron Francis, a former teacher of mine, first caught my attention when I saw an article he wrote in February of 2006. The article was entitled “Media Bias Against Hamas,”[1] and was written in an attempt to support the Palestinian terror group Hamas and to demonize Israel. Francis never once condemned Hamas’ terror tactics or its anti-Semitic ideology, and he even discussed the “silver lining” of Hamas’ victory. Francis challenged Israel’s right to exist in the article by complaining that “the question of the validity of a Jewish-priviledge state is never raised.”[2] (It is interesting that a public school teacher apparently does not know how to correctly spell “privilege”).

Francis’ article was posted on the Website of the “Somerville Divestment Project” (SDP),[3] a group he founded in Somerville, Massachusetts several years ago (Francis teaches in Andover but lives in Somerville). The SDP has been trying unsuccessfully for years to convince the city of Somerville to divest “from Israel bonds and military companies tied to Israel's occupation.”[4] Needless to say, the SDP advocates boycott and divestment of one country in the entire world – the Jewish country of Israel.

The SDP’s Website is filled with hateful propaganda against Israel, and contains articles suggesting that the recent war in Iraq was fought because a cabal of powerful Jews manipulated the U.S. government. One section of the SDP’s Website is entitled, “Iraq: A War for Israel?”[5] This section contains the following quotation from Pat Buchanan: “We charge them [neo-cons] with colluding with Israel to ignite those wars and destroy the Oslo Accords… (They) harbor a ‘passionate attachment’ to a nation not our own that causes them to subordinate the interests of their own country and to act on an assumption that, somehow, what's good for Israel is good for America."[6]

Francis is not content to merely provide quotations of others bashing Israel and Jews. He has also perpetuated the anti-Semitic stereotype that Jews manipulate political process in America and control the media (although he is very careful to always write “zionists” – with a lowercase “z” to show his lack of respect – instead of “Jews”):

"Another strategy that the zionists use is to buy out elected officials. They are also very good at this - witness US congressional votes - no further comment needed!

"A third strategy is to control the discourse in the media about zionism. They are also very good at this...,”[7] wrote Francis.

Despite always claiming to be a human rights activist, Francis was also quoted in the Andover Townsman newspaper as supporting Palestinian suicide bombers: "I do not condemn the Palestinian people because the actions they are taking, given the circumstances they face, (are) completely understandable and within the bounds of normal human behavior. I have to ask myself, would I be any different?"[8]...

LONDON (EJP)--- A Conservative MP came under fire in the British parliament after comparing Israeli air strikes during this summer's war with Hezbollah to tactics used by the Nazis during WWII.

Andrew Turner, who represents the Isle of White, a small island just off the south coast of England, was speaking during a debate on the Middle East in the House of Commons last week.

Having first questioned whether Israel's bombing of south Lebanon was legal, he made the comparison to the German strikes over England and other areas in the 1940s.

"Those were the tactics of the Nazis in 1939 and 1940, attacking fleeing civilians from the air," Turner said...

...Jewish Labour MP Louise Ellman, the representative for Liverpool Riverside, responded by asking if Turner was making “a serious point...rather than criticism of Israel's policy?”

But the Conservative replied: “If she was a little more careful in the way in which she listened to other members instead of parading her prejudices she would have heard what I said which was that Israel attacked fleeing civilians and that is all I said."...

In the commotion, one man fell from a considerable height onto his back and was seriously injured. He was then helped by others who rushed him to an ambulance. A well-known Associated Press photographer also photographed the injured man as he was carried through the street to an ambulance. Given the complexity of the situation, the AP photographer and I discussed our captions that evening.

in one word: yes.

this thread and some others has shed the light on who’s who…and exposed motives and bias to all to see. [Clarification: He's not talking about his own bias, the potential bias of other photographers quoted here or those who agree with them. He's talking about those who ask too many questions.]

...unlike murder-bloggers like Malkin, who have only been around five minutes, but have consistently trumpeted and cheered for a kill-fest which has so far, put up to 600,000 civilians through a meatgrinder.

...Iraq is not the first war to plummet in popularity. At the start of the Civil War, many Northerners giddily anticipated a quick victory. Secretary of State William Seward ``thought the war would be over in 90 days," writes historian David Herbert Donald in his biography of Abraham Lincoln. ``The New York Times predicted victory in 30 days."

Had they had an inkling of the carnage to come, would they have cheered Lincoln's bid to save the Union? Long before the war's end, the cheers would turn to censure. By 1863, the war was being denounced in Congress as ``an utter, disastrous, and most bloody failure," while Lincoln and his administration were despised for their incompetence. ``There never was such a shambling, half-and-half set of incapables collected in one government," Senator William Pitt Fessendon of Maine said in disgust, ``before or since the world began."

The point isn't that the violent mess in Iraq today is analogous to the Civil War in 1863, or to the Ardennes in 1944, or to the burning of Washington in 1814. The point is that we don't know. Like earlier Americans, we have to choose between resolve and retreat, with no guarantees about how it will end. All we can be sure of is that the stakes once again are liberty and decency vs. tyranny and terror -- that we are fighting an enemy that feeds on weakness and expects us to lose heart -- and that Americans for generations to come will remember whether we flinched.

Lieberman, running as an independent after losing the Aug. 8 Democratic primary to Lamont, leads the Greenwich businessman 52 percent to 35 percent among Connecticut likely voters in the poll released Friday. Republican Alan Schlesinger trailed with 6 percent, and 7 percent were undecided.

A similar poll released on September 28 showed Lieberman with a 10-point lead.

The debate between Lieberman and Lamont on Monday was their first since the August primary. Among those in the poll who watched the debate or read or heard about it, only 3 percent said it changed their minds.

"Ned Lamont needed to score a knockout in the debates to catch Sen. Joseph Lieberman, but he apparently didn't lay a glove on him," poll director Douglas Schwartz said.

The poll suggested that Lieberman's support among Republicans and independent voters was substantial.

Lieberman leads Lamont 70 percent to 9 percent among likely Republican voters, with 18 percent for Schlesinger, and 58-36 among likely independent voters. Likely Democratic voters back Lamont, 55 percent to 36 percent...

I don’t know precisely what to make of today’s poll – - still waiting to hear what the R/D/I breakdown was, cause that isn’t released in the cross-tabs. I also know that it doesn’t track with our internal numbers, and probably not Joe’s either (given their whining the past few days).

We still have another debate left, prime time on Monday night. The current q-poll doesn’t include last night’s debate. We have a record ad buy running next week that Joe Lieberman can’t match. And Lord knows our ground game is unrivaled by any other major or minor party candidate in the race. The q-poll has a history of being off by double digits in this race (see, primary). Then there’s the absolute wild-card of Joe’s ballot placement...

Far from a tactic to generate West Bank and Gaza warrior heat, Islamic anti-Semitism has become the engine of the global jihad. Yet, while contempt of Jews boils on every continent, most “progressives” – outraged at every other prejudice – choose to ignore the hate that killed millions in Europe and fueled WWII. Muslims around the world preach that Jews are the sons of monkeys and pigs. They produce films about Jews harvesting the organs of Muslim children. They run campaigns to deny the Holocaust, and no one makes much of a fuss. In this, too, the “progressives” have abandoned the Jews.

So what are Jews to do? In the face of Islam’s enmity, a frequently heard suggestion is that we “dialogue” with the Muslim community. The idea is apparently to foster a spirit of open communication, address issues in a spirit of mutual respect and understanding, and get to know the true concerns of the other side – all things we value. Yet there have been problems with Muslim-Jewish dialogue. Jewish groups engage in open discussions with Muslim organizations in a safe and “tolerant” atmosphere, yet less than a week later representatives from the same Muslim organization appear at rallies denouncing Israel’s right to exist. So dialogue, while always desirable, might need to be approached with a bit of caution.

But what is most curious is that some of the very people and organizations calling for Jewish-Muslim dialogue are promoting silence inside the Jewish community on the issue of Islamic anti-Semitism. Jewish audiences I address around the country are shocked when I show them videos from memri.org and Palestinian Media Watch of what Muslims say and teach about Jews. They are shocked when I quote from the AJC pamphlet. I find it astonishing that a great many – even most – Jews are broadly unaware of this threat. Think about it: Islamic anti-Semitism is the biggest threat to Jews since Hitler. The Jews of Europe can’t safely wear kippot. Jewish kids in France go to school fearing physical violence from Muslims; Jewish students in California are berated by Muslim anti-Semites, and on and on. Yet when was the last time an establishment Jewish organization had a heart-to-heart dialogue with its own constituency about the biggest threat to our lives? How about Jewish-Jewish dialogue about real concerns?

The network's programming includes a mix of entertainment, sports, news, documentaries, and advertisements from companies like Ford, with an emphasis on religious programs...

...Every night, Bridges TV shows a news program, "Talking Points." Its guest on October 4 was Imam Mohammad Alo Elahi, whom it described as a leading "interfaith figure." According to his Web site, Imam Elahi was a spiritual leader in Ayatollah Khomeini's Iranian navy and also is the leader of "one of the largest mosques in the U.S.," in Dearborn, Mich.

The Web site describes his meetings with world leaders and shows photographs of him with the spiritual adviser of Hezbollah, Ayatollah Muhammad Hussein Fadlallah; Ayatollah Khomeini; Presidents Khatemi and Rafsanjani of Iran; Secretary-General Annan of the United Nations; and Minister Louis Farrakhan.

Throughout the day, Bridges TV airs segments of Koranic verses, quite a few of which denounce "unbelievers." One notable verse that aired October 9 praised martyrdom.

Since the Islamic holy month of Ramadan began, the channel has been showing official, Saudi government-controlled Wahhabi sermons from Mecca's holiest mosque, Al-Haram. The sermons stream live via Saudi TV Channel one every day at 4 p.m., and Bridges TV adds its own English subtitles.

An anti-Jewish, anti-Christian sermon from October 5 included the call, "May God destroy them!"...

...One of the stars of Bridges TV is a cofounder and vice chairman of the international health care company CBay Inc., Donald "Skip" Conover, who hosts and produces a show called "Words Matter." He was the subject of a gushing article in the Saudi daily Arab News on September 27.

In the article, Mr. Conover expressed "his disgust" at what he called inflammatory statements about Arabs and Muslims in the press.

He also discussed the power of the "Jewish lobby" and called on all Muslims to vote for the Democratic Party. "Every American politician is in lockstep with Israel. … If they vote against, then the Jewish lobby will put a lot of money behind the candidate against them in their districts in the future. I have news for the Muslim community. All American politicians are in the pocket of the Jewish lobby today because they control a lot of money, and they spend a lot of money in politics."...

"This regime, thanks to God, has lost the reason for its existence," Ahmadinejad told a crowd of thousands gathered at a rally in support of the Palestinians in the capital Tehran.

"Efforts to stabilize this fake (Israeli) regime, by the grace of God, have completely failed... You should believe that this regime is disappearing," he said.

Ahmadinejad also called Israeli leaders a "group of terrorists" and threatened any country that supports the Jewish state, as millions of Iranians took to the streets for anti-Israel protests.

"You imposed a group of terrorists ... on the region," Ahmadinejad said, addressing the U.S. and its allies. "It is in your own interest to distance yourself from these criminals... This is an ultimatum. Don't complain tomorrow."

"Nations will take revenge," he told hundreds of thousands of supporters at a pro-Palestinian rally in the capital Tehran.

Ahmadinejad also called the U.N. Security Council "illegitimate," ahead of diplomats' planned circulation of a draft resolution on Iran next week...

Bolton this week neatly organized a majority coalition to block Hugo Chavez's Venezuela from getting the Latin American seat on the Security Council.

A nation needs two-thirds of the 192-member General Assembly to win a two-year term on the council. After a near-record 22 rounds of voting Monday and Tuesday, U.S.-backed Guatemala ended with 102 votes, while Venezuela was way back with 77. Speculation grew that both countries will eventually withdraw in favor of a consensus candidate, such as Chile.

Make no mistake, though; the rejection of Venezuela is a victory for the United States - and for Bolton.

Chavez has been the bully on the regional block for years, capitalizing on Venezuela's oil wealth. He's been adopted by Cuba's ailing Fidel Castro, and thus stands to step in as the region's left-wing champion for the 21st Century.

A seat on the Security Council would give Chavez an international platform to spew his anti-American rhetoric - much as he used his address to the General Assembly last month to attack President Bush.

Thanks to Bolton, that likely won't happen...

Since then, political cooperation has been close, while business ties have boomed. Israeli businessmen, who have made investments in Poland globally amounting to some $2 billion, say the climate they encounter in the country is very encouraging. Poland also is buying weapons from Israel and maintains close military and security ties with Jerusalem.

“We don’t talk in public about those things. We just do them,” says a former Polish ambassador to Israel, Maciej Kozlowski.

These policies, supported by all of Poland’s governments, left or right, also have the support of the country’s media, which are markedly more objective about Israel than their Western European counterparts.

The main Polish daily newspapers, for example, played up the recent Amnesty International report accusing Hezbollah of war crimes in the recent fighting in Lebanon, while Western European papers were less interested. Seminars about Israel at Polish universities attract students genuinely interested in learning about the country, not the PLO sympathizers you’d expect in Paris or Rome...

One significant message that has been strongly emphasized by repeated broadcasting of the same programs is the denial of Israel’s right to exist. One program, which recently appeared on PA TV three times in the course of a single week, features Dr. Hassan Khader, founder of the Al Quds Encyclopedia, who argues that the Jews have no ancient historical connection to the Western Wall of the Temple. He teaches:

"The first connection of the Jews to this site began in the 16th Century... The Jewish connection to this site is a recent connection, not ancient… like the roots of the Islamic connection… Who would have believed that the Israelis would arrive 1400 years [after the beginning of Islam], conquer Jerusalem and would make this wall into their special place of worship, where they worship and pray?”

The true name of the Western Wall of the Temple, according to the PA academic, is really the Al Buraq Wall – named after Muhammad’s horse which was tied to the wall – according to an Islamic tradition that attempts to honor Jerusalem.

Finally, Khader praises all the violence and death the Palestinians have initiated to prevent Jews’ access to the Western Wall and Temple Mount, from the beginning of the 20th century until now, and indicates that it will continue if Jews insist on the right to the Western Wall...

Egypt’s secret police transferred Bahaa el-Din Ahmed Hussein el-Akkad, 57, to the Wadi el-Natroun Prison last month. He was told he would remain there indefinitely unless he agreed to work as a government informer against other converts to Christianity.

According to the prisoner’s Cairo attorney, Athanasius William, his client remains incarcerated in this desert prison “only because he has chosen a different belief, to be a Christian.”

El-Akkad was imprisoned without charges for more than a year after officials of the State Security Investigation (SSI) arrested him in Cairo on April 6, 2005...

In his first speech to the Jewish community since being elected, Harper told attendees at a B'nai Brith dinner event that he believes Israel has the right to defend its citizens against terrorists and can always count on Canada's backing.

"When it comes to dealing with a war between Israel and a terrorist organization, this country and this government cannot and will never be neutral," Harper said to a standing ovation.

"Those who seek to destroy the Jews, who seek to destroy Israel, will ... ultimately seek to destroy us all. It is why Canada's new government has reacted with speed and spoken with clarity on the recent events in the Middle East."

Last week, Harper accused the candidates vying for the leadership of the Liberal party of being anti-Israel, specifically pointing to front-runner Michael Ignatieff's statement that Israel had committed a war crime with its attack on Lebanon...

Judging from an advance review manuscript of the new work, published by Simon & Schuster and set for release November 14, Carter places the bulk of the blame on Israel for its continuing conflict with the Palestinians. But critics of the former president probably will be most offended by his use of the word “apartheid” in the book’s title and text.

Israel’s current policy in the territories, Carter writes in the book’s summary, is “a system of apartheid, with two peoples occupying the same land but completely separated from each other, with Israelis totally dominant and suppressing violence by depriving Palestinians of their basic human rights.” In a separate passage in the advance draft, the former president stated that “Israel’s continued control and colonization of Palestinian land have been the primary obstacles to a comprehensive peace agreement in the Holy Land.”

In addition, Carter takes what is being interpreted by some critics as a swipe at the pro-Israel lobby. “Because of powerful political, economic, and religious forces in the United States, Israeli government decisions are rarely questioned or condemned,” the former president writes.

Carter’s book comes as the Republican Jewish Coalition is already waging a nationwide media campaign to convince Jewish voters that the Democratic Party no longer can be counted on to provide unflinching support for Israel. (See story on Page A6.) One of the recent RJC ads features a large image of Carter and quotes the former president as saying, “I don’t think Israel has any legal or moral justification for their massive bombing of the entire nation of Lebanon.”

Simon & Schuster spokeswoman Elizabeth Hayes confirmed the substance of the quotes from Carter’s book, but said that the wording could change in the final edition...

CAIR ACTION ALERT #503

DEMAND AN END TO TUNISIAN BAN ON HIJAB
Contact the Tunisian Embassy and U.S. Department of State Today

(WASHINGTON D.C., 10/18/06) - CAIR is urging all people of conscience to contact the government of Tunisia and the U.S. Department of State to demand that the religious rights of Tunisian women who choose to wear hijab be protected.

Media reports indicate that Tunisian police are stopping women on the streets and asking them to take off their headscarves and to sign a pledge that they will not wear a scarf again. A 1981 Tunisian law prohibits Islamic attire in schools or government offices...

...In a statement, CAIR said: "Freedom of religion should be a valued aspect of any society. People of all faiths must be granted the right to freely practice their religion without government interference or intimidation.

"The Tunisian law banning Islamic attire in certain areas, and the apparent expanded interpretation of that law, violates international human rights standards set forth by the United Nations and ratified by virtually every nation on earth.

"We call on the government of Tunisia to respect the religious rights of its citizens by ending all measures that restrict the wearing of religiously-mandated headscarves. We also call on the U.S. Department of State to use whatever influence it has to convince Tunisian authorities to abide by international norms of religious freedom.

"Tunisia cannot claim to be a free and open society while carrying out such repressive and authoritarian actions."...

Wayne State opposes divestiture and has no intention of divesting itself of stocks in companies doing business with Israel or any other legitimate state.

We encourage our students to use their right to free speech, but accusations, acrimony and demands such as divestiture are counter to the intelligent dialogue and free discourse for which this university stands.

In a complex, international economy, divestiture is by no means a responsible approach to influence political or economic policy. Rather, it is my obligation to pursue legal, rational and productive investments on behalf of the institution.

Hezbollah’s deployment of the Chinese-made Type-81 122mm rocket is also the first confirmed use of this particular model of cluster munition anywhere in the world. Human Rights Watch documented two Type-81 cluster strikes that took place on July 25 in the Galilee village of Mghar.

“We are disturbed to discover that not only Israel but also Hezbollah used cluster munitions in their recent conflict, at a time when many countries are turning away from this kind of weapon precisely because of its impact on civilians,” said Steve Goose, director of Human Rights Watch's Arms Division. “Use of cluster munitions is never justified in civilian-populated areas because they are inaccurate and unreliable.”...

...Each of the Type-81 cluster munition 122mm rockets used by Hezbollah carries 39 Type-90 or MZD submunitions. Each submunition in turn shoots out hundreds of steel spheres, about 3.5mm in diameter, with deadly force. Human Rights Watch discovered evidence of Hezbollah’s unprecedented use of this cluster munition in the course of ongoing investigations of the group’s attacks on northern Israel during the war that lasted from July 12 until August 14. Israeli authorities had until now prevented publication of details of Hezbollah cluster strikes in Israel, citing security concerns...

...Israeli police also showed Human Rights Watch physical evidence of a submunition from a Type-81 rocket that they said landed in the town of Karmiel and matched the one Human Rights Watch researchers saw in Mhgar.

Police and army officials did not disclose to Human Rights Watch the estimated dud rate of the submunitions from the 113 cluster rockets that they said they had handled...

From November 16 until December 1, the national offices of the United Church of Christ will be co-sponsoring and hosting the traveling art exhibition "Not Enough Space" commemorating the 25 years of imprisonment of terrorists Carlos Alberto Torres and Oscar López Rivera.

In their promotional materials, the UCC is positioning the terrorists as political prisoners "serving long prison terms for acts and beliefs in favor of Puerto Rican independence."

Sounds innocent enough, doesn't it? The truth is much different...

Forsooth! Shylock,/Is it thine name I hear/ringing/in my ear?

Ah yes, the old stereotype: Jews and money.

On October 15, The Media Line news agency conducted an exclusive interview with the newly appointed Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and the Palestinian Lands Sheikh Muhammad Ahmad Hussein. During the interview the mufti said he endorsed the phenomenon of the suicide bombers, as it was part of the Palestinian people's legitimate resistance.

The post of the grand mufti was never reduced to merely delving into religious issues. In the 1940s the grand mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin Al-Husseini, was the most powerful and influential leader of the Palestinians. Politics and religion were completely mixed back then, and Al-Husseini was considered a political leader as much as he was a religious one...

...An informed Palestinian source told The Media Line that Hussein was "a simple man, born to a family of humble means." He was chosen by Abbas because of an important quality he had – an ability to avoid controversies. According to the source, Hussein fears to lose all he has gained, and "Abbas knows he will never jeopardize his position."

For three months the new grand mufti followed Abbas' expectations. People who came to listen to him preach on Fridays in Al-Aqsa Mosque never heard him inciting against Israel. His fatwas (religious decrees) also avoided such controversial statements.

Hussein explains that the authority of the grand mufti was wide-ranging.

"We discuss worship, personal issues, economic issues, social issues and political issues – everything which is related to Islam."

Hussein went on to explain that the mufti discusses all aspects of Islam, including politics.

And then he made a surprising comment.

"It is the Palestinian people's right to engage in resistance until the occupation ends. As long as the resistance is legitimate, everything related to it is also legitimate."

Asked to express his view with regard to suicide bombing, the mufti answered: "It is legitimate, of course, as long as it plays a role in the resistance."...

The cameraman, Imad Muhammad Intisar Boghnat, was arrested and charged as a result of violent riots in the Arab village of Bil'in, in the Modi'in region, on October 6, 2006. A videotape that the prosecution presented to the judge shows Boghnat encouraging and directing rioters in Bil'in to throw large chunks of rock at Israeli vehicles in such a way as to cause maximum damage. The accused is heard shouting, "Throw, throw!" and later, "Throw towards the little window!"...

So it is with Dabashi. He keeps his hands relatively clean in the books he publishes with Routledge. He puts out his contracts, or at least this one contract on Nafisi, in the well-thumbed Al-Ahram English weekly. To use the sexual metaphors so pleasing to Dabashi (and to Said, too), the professor of Iranian Literature and senior member of the Middle East Institute at Columbia had gotten their rocks off in private. That's OK, too. But soon everyone will know. The stain is now there for all to see. This is also Said's legacy. Bollinger will have much trouble tending to it...

"Now, that's really outrageous and, of course, it is a lie," Lieberman said at a hastily called press conference, where he blamed the episode on his opponent, Ned Lamont.

Hours earlier, former state Treasurer Henry E. Parker had questioned Lieberman's oft-cited civil rights history as he and other black leaders endorsed Lamont.

"I'm saying that my view is there's no evidence of what he's done. Let him prove that he's been there," Parker said at a press conference attended by Lamont.

Lamont's campaign, which immediately seemed to grasp the political misstep, disavowed Parker's claim even before Lieberman produced news clippings placing him in Mississippi...

...the damage was done. The episode gave Lieberman an opportunity to reinforce a constant theme of his campaign - that Lamont has relentlessly distorted Lieberman's record in the contest for the U.S. Senate.

"Don't put this on Hank Parker. This is an open letter to me at a press conference for Ned Lamont," Lieberman said. "Ned Lamont was right there. He can't disown this."

Lamont stood with Parker and other members of the Connecticut Federation of Black Democratic Clubs as they endorsed Lamont and released an open letter to Lieberman. The letter disputed a television ad that recounts his civil rights involvement.

The Lamont campaign paid for 300 to 400 copies of the open letter in which the federation said that it was "offended by your television ad which claims you were an advocate for African Americans' first class citizenship and as such you marched for our civil rights."...

...Lieberman's campaign announced Friday that he had raised $14.8 million in contributions as of Sept. 30 in his quest for a fourth term - $5.1 million of it since early August, when he switched to an independent candidacy...

...Lamont's campaign declined to release its totals before Sunday's Federal Election Commission deadline. But earlier in the week it reported that the multimillionaire candidate had kicked in an additional $2 million of his own to bring his self-contributed total to $8.7 million. That, combined with his outside fundraising, put his campaign's total at about $10 million...

But the real shock came when I mentioned this to Enderlin, who said he trusted this cameraman. "They always do that," he said. "It's a cultural style." So why wouldn't they have faked Al Durah? "They're not good enough," he said. A year later, the higher-ups at France2 made the same remark to three French journalists who also noted the pervasive staging: "You know well that it's always like that," they said.

I tried unsuccessfully to interest the mainstream press in this obvious fakery, but nobody was interested. "I don't know how much appetite there is for this material here," one person at a major studio told me. So I made Pallywood (Palestinian Hollywood)--a video-essay showing the dishonesty and the still-more-astounding Western complicity in using this footage to inform us about the Middle East. Then I made a follow-up, Al Durah: The Making of an Icon (and soon, Icon of Hatred). I established a website, The Second Draft, where I posted the movies along with my evidence so that, unlike France2, people could check my sources. And now the accused have asked me to testify...

Petty Officer 2nd Class Michael A. Monsoor, 25, of Garden Grove, Calif., died Sept. 29 while conducting combat operations against enemy forces in Ramadi, Iraq.

Monsoor was a Navy SEAL assigned to a West-Coast based command.

Monsoor gave his life in order to save the lives of his brothers in arms. An Iraqi insurgent threw a grenade into a position occupied by Monsoor and three other SEALS. According to a report in the Associated Press Monsoor was struck in the chest by the grenade. Monsoor immediately threw himself on top of the grenade saving the lives of the other three. Two other SEALs where injured and the fourth was unhurt.

From Rear Adm. Joe Maguire, USN - Commander Naval Special Warfare Command, "On behalf of the entire Naval Special Warfare community, we mourn the loss of Master at Arms Second Class (SEAL) Michael A. Monsoor, who died conducting some of our military's most important missions. It's been said that we

cannot decide whether we live or die - we know one day we will die - but as people, as men and warriors, we can only decide what we will die for. This Sailor along with our two wounded teammates chose a life of significant meaning -- to defend freedom and protect America and its allies from terrorism. We grieve with and support the family and friends who support our warriors on a daily basis. We hope that in time Michael's family is comforted in knowing that he died fighting for what he believed in and we will not forget his sacrifice."

According to The Navy Times, Monsoor was a native of Garden Grove, Calif., and joined the service in March 2001, according to Navy records. He was a member of BUD/S class 250, and had been serving with SEAL Team 3 since April 2005.

Monsoor is the second SEAL to die in Iraq.

Petty Officer 2nd Class Michael A. Monsoor, the definition of the word hero.

In a series of hot-headed e-mails sent to a variety of e-mail chains, one of which included myself and the rest of which were forwarded to me in the spirit of the free exchange of ideas, Judt misreported some of the facts of the case. Abraham Foxman, whom he insanely calls a "fascist," did not speak to anybody at the Polish consulate, as Judt claims he did, and neither Foxman nor anybody else at the ADL promised to "smear the charge of Polish collaboration with anti-Israeli anti-Semites all over the front page of every daily paper in the city." In one e-mail Judt paranoically maintains that The New York Sun learned of the incident within ten minutes, in another e-mail within seven minutes. Also, the newspaper is not owned by Rupert Murdoch--but the fascists are all alike, aren't they? Here is Judt on October 4: "Maybe you really do have to have grown up under Communism to recognise the house style of a demagogic rag like the New York Sun ... and yes, it helps to have read Kafka to know what it feels like to go to bed a liberal, secular historian of Jewish background and wake up the next morning an anti-semitic Israel-denier." Only somebody who did not grow up under communism and did not read Kafka could have written that sentence, or someone romantically involved with himself...

The corporation is mounting a landmark High Court action to prevent the release of The Balen Report under the Freedom of Information Act, despite the fact that BBC reporters often use the Act to pursue their journalism.

The action will increase suspicions that the report, which is believed to run to 20,000 words, includes evidence of anti-Israeli bias in news programming.

The court case will have far reaching implications for the future working of the Act and the BBC. If the corporation loses, it will have to release thousands of pages of other documents that have been held back.

Like all public bodies, the BBC is obliged to release information about itself under the Act. However, along with Channel 4, Britain's other public service broadcaster, it is allowed to hold back material that deals with the production of its art, entertainment and journalism.

The High Court action is the latest stage of a lengthy and expensive battle by Steven Sugar, a lawyer, to get access to the document, which was compiled by Malcolm Balen, a senior editorial adviser, in 2004...

The regime of North Korea has done a most efficient job of wiping out Korea's 5,000-year history, imbued with Buddhism, Shamanism and Confucianism, with one amnesia-inflicting spell called "Juche," its political philosophy of self-reliance. And what seems to make the Great Leader so "great" is that he has replaced their lost memory. For my uncle to have survived there, he either would have had to forget everything he had known, or learned to believe in the Great Leader. Or it is possible that he held on with the hope for the two Koreas to reunite; my grandmother did, until she passed away 25 years after he went missing.

In the 1970s in South Korea, I grew up with the anthem, "Our Wish is Reunification," which children still sing. Today, however, South Koreans readily claim North Koreans as their siblings and yet they hesitate upon the topic of the Kim Jong Il regime's collapse, which might lead to the breakdown of 38th Parallel and to millions of refugees pouring south. President Roh Moo Hyun's increasingly less popular "sunshine policy" has provided a conduit through which money is funneled into North Korea for supposed economic reform, although it now looks as though it has effectually funded the North's nuclear program...

While Khosrokhavar’s sample of Islamists may not be “typical,” in light of this strong French connection, the fact is that Islamism as a self-consciously transnational ideology — in this respect, as in so many others, resembling twentieth-century Marxism-Leninism — draws its adherents from widely different parts of the globe: both from the Dar al-Islam, the traditional Islamic lands, and from the Dar al-Dawa, the lands of Islamic proselytism. In contemporary Islamist discourse — in the fatwas of Yusuf Al-Qaradawi, head of the European Council for Fatwa and Research, for example, or in the writings of Qaradawi’s admirer Tariq Ramadan — Europe precisely represents a privileged terrain for Dawa: for proselytism.5 It is thus distinguished from, say, Russia or Israel or, for that matter, the United States, all of which, as judged by the practice of the jihadists, clearly fall within the Dar al-Harb: the lands “of war” targeted for military defeat...

...And then, of course, there is the most famous French jihadist of all: Zacarias Moussaoui.7 As with the subjects of the Khosrokhavar interviews, Moussaoui’s relationship to France is “conflicted,” to say the least. Nonetheless, when, early on in the court proceedings against him and in an apparent gesture of multicultural sensitivity, Judge Leonie Brinkema advised Moussaoui that he would in her court have to abide by rules with which he might be unfamiliar from “his culture,” Moussaoui pointedly replied: “by the way, I’m born in France, educated — I have a masters degree in international business. I’m fully acquainted with western system of justice, okay? I never live in the Middle East country or in Arabic country, okay?”...

The resolution, which becomes AFT policy, condemns the use of violence by terrorist organizations as well as the undemocratic states of Syria and Iran that supply these violent groups with arms. The union called for the implementation of U.N. Resolution 1559, which demands the complete disarmament of Hezbollah and its withdrawal from southern Lebanon. AFT also called on the parties to negotiate a cease-fire and for the world community to support the democratically elected government of Lebanon.

After a spirited hourlong debate, the majority of the more than 3,000 delegates voted overwhelmingly to support a resolution that strongly supports "Israel's right and responsibility to defend its borders and citizens from terrorist attacks and other threats to its sovereignty." They rejected a substitute measure that called for cessation of violence by all parties.

In introducing the resolution, AFT vice president Herb Magidson asked delegates to "support sanity, democracy, civilization and this resolution." Other delegates used phrases like "fundamental fairness" and "social justice" to explain the AFT’s need to stake a position on the Middle East crisis.

It all began when Tunisian President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali declared this week that "we must fight ethnic clothing" – the common name given to the headscarf in official media.

During a meeting with the state's Minister of Religious Affairs Boubaker El Akhzouri, the president stated that "we must separate between the foreign ethnic clothing and the original Tunisian clothing, which is the focus of identity, in order to avoid any resentment."

To his opposers he said: "Tunisia has always stuck to its loyal Islamism and stressed the value of modesty, which is views as part of its clothing tradition in cities and villages."

Ben Ali's remarks were made in support of the stance of his party's secretary-general, al-Hadi Mahni, who expressed his complete rejection of what he referred to as "the ethnic clothing which has nothing to do with the country's identity and which impairs the accomplishments and gains achieved by the Tunisian woman."

In Tunisia, which has proudly maintained its secular identity over the years, clashes and arguments immediately broke out over the ban. Clashes took place in the north of the capital between security forces and Islamic activists. The clashes in a northern suburb of the city, near a mosque, were so severe that security forces in the area were reinforced.

Women wearing headscarfs began complaining that the security forces were trying to force them to sign a commitment to remove the hijab while entering police stations.

In another incident, legal source in Tunisia noted that security forces detained four young women wearing headscarfs and beat them. A human rights activist in Tunisia said that security officers wearing civil clothing attacked the young women and threatened to beat them if they would not remove the scarf. This incident, which was the first of its kind since the Tunisian government launched its current struggle against the headscarf, caused a lot of anger...

One of the signs can be seen in the fact that Hizbullah decided to cancel the central rally for Jerusalem Day – the last Friday of the month of Ramadan, in which supporters of the Shiite militia commemorate Jerusalem every year through military demonstrations and belligerent statements.

This year Hizbullah officials announced that the central event has been cancelled and that local rallies will be held in the different regions. The organization's statement said that this is a historical year, in which the "robber of Jerusalem" (i.e. Israel ) suffered a crushing and historical defeat by the group's fighters, and that the organization has decided to settle for the mass victory rally held on September 22.

"In order to ease on our honorable public, we decided to replace the central event with local activities," the statement said.

It appears that Hizbullah is trying hard to find ways to "ease on the public" as time passes since the war. The school year has just begun, and in Beirut's Dahiya neighborhood students arrived at the ruins which were once their schools.

In the Bekaa Valley, a large number of students flocked to the classrooms which have already began operating, and fears rise over the winter which is on its way, especially among those who have been left homeless.

Therefore, it is not surprising that in Hizbullah's stronghold of Baalbek, demonstrators have already taken to the streets, claiming that they are on the verge of hunger.

"The failure to deliver governmental compensation for the demolished houses is pushing us to a state of hunger," owners of the ruined houses chanted during a demonstration Friday. Although the protest was directed at Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Siniora, it appears that if the situation is not improved, Hizbullah will also hear about it...

As AbuNab points out, DeVos "stands with his boss, George Bush, squarely on the side of Israel." This is no surprise. The Republican Party has long been under the sway of the Israel Lobby. As far back as 1972, Nixon received more than 60% of his contributions from Jewish donors. The recent rise of the predominantly-Jewish "neo-conservatives" in the White House is only the latest manifestation of the Lobby's influence...

...There is ample proof that the Democrats are even more deeply indebted to the Israel Lobby than the Republicans. In Mearsheimer and Walt's groundbreaking paper "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy," an aide to former President Jimmy Carter says, "Out of 125 members of the Democratic National Finance Council, over 70 are Jewish. In 1976, over 60 percent of the large donors to the Democratic Party were Jewish." In 1968, more than 70 percent of Hubert Humphrey's contributions came from Jewish Americans. And for decades, the massive AFL-CIO union has "provided millions of dollars for pro-Israel Democrats," according to Jeff Blankfort.

The Clinton years, 1992-2000, were marked by numerous concessions to the Lobby. Several of Clinton's top aides had close ties to Israel, including Martin Indyk, Dennis Ross and Aaron Miller. "Time Magazine" observed, "President Clinton appointed more Jews to his Cabinet than any of his predecessors." Three times Clinton vetoed U.N. Security Council resolutions that would have halted land annexation and new settlements in the Occupied Territories. At least a dozen times he voted, alone with Israel, against world opinion in the U.N. General Assembly.

And of course, there was the most dramatic sign: Al Gore's surprising selection of Joe Lieberman, a prominent Israel supporter, for running mate in 2000. Many believe that this action single-handedly cost Gore the election, putting Bush and the neo-cons in the White House...

...There is an alternative. The Green Party is running a slate of candidates who strongly oppose the war in Iraq, who oppose aid to Israel and who support the rights of Palestinians and other Arabs. In 2005 the national Greens passed Resolution 190, calling for immediate divestment and boycott of Israel. The Michigan Greens fully support this stand. There is only one anti-war party, and it is Green...

Funded primarily by donations and merchandise sales, the tour is sponsored by the International Solidarity Movement, Al-Awda, Voices in the Wilderness and the Middle East Children's Alliance. According to its Web site, the tour was created to "build upon and reassert the massive domestic opposition to war against Iraq and occupation of the Palestinians" by offering "first-hand experience irrespective of partisan politics and sound bite sloganeering." The sponsors and organizers of "Wheels of Justice" are unapologetic in their criticism of Israel and support for the plight of the Palestinians. No attempts are made to present a balanced view of the conflict. The toll on Israelis and bloodshed by Palestinian terrorists is often minimized...

...A flier with information about the tour's school programming, posted on the Voices in the Wilderness Web site, reads: "At high schools, we often speak to assemblies, show slides/videos or PowerPoint, and visit classrooms…either going to the classroom or having classes visit us in a reserved room is the norm, but we are flexible."

Mazin Qumsiyeh, a Yale University associate professor and founder of the anti-Israel group Al-Awda, joined Wheels of Justice as a speaker in April 2004. Qumsiyeh has made no attempt to hide his strongly anti-Israel views. As a participant in the Duke University conference, Qumsiyeh called Zionism "a disease." Qumsiyeh also asked audience members, "If apartheid was a problem in South Africa, why do we consider it a solution in Palestine and Israel?"

Alison Weir took part in the tour in 2004. Weir is the founder of If Americans Knew, a Berkley-based anti-Israel organization. She often writes for the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, an anti-Israel publication that frequently serves as an apologist for Muslim American groups advocating anti-Semitism and support for terrorism. She also writes for CounterPunch, an anti-Zionist radical left newsletter...

In the email, Qumsiyeh wrote that "the U.S. occupation of Iraq illegal and immoral (sic)" and that the YCP should "continue to challenge the hegemony of the U.S. on the Arab world." Although such opinions are certainly acceptable and even welcomed at a university that encourages the exchange of ideas, Qumsiyeh closed his email with a chilling statement: "I include here the list of members of Yale Students 'for Democracy,' the pro war cabal . . . I think you will find the list informative. Note that there is significant overlap of this list with the 'Yale Friends of Israel' listserve."

Qumsiyeh then listed the Yale email addresses of 64 students, which contained students' full names, whom he claimed belonged to Yale College Students for Democracy (YCSD), a group that supported the war in Iraq.

However, the people he listed belonged not to YCSD, but to the Yale Friends of Israel (YFI) itself...

Al-Watan, October 3, 2006 (Oman)
The stereotypical Jew is drinking blood of the infighting Palestinian Arabs.

“NEVER AGAIN” is, I fear, a phrase that we may hear again all too soon — but too late to warn people, let alone save lives. Under the cover of secrecy the fundamentalist regime in Tehran is waging a sustained, bloody campaign of intimidation and persecution against its Arab minority. These Arabs believe that they are victims of “ethnic cleansing” by Iran’s Persian majority.

Sixteen Arab rights activists have been sentenced to death, according to reports in the Iranian media. They were found guilty of insurgency in secret trials before revolutionary courts. But most of the defendants were convicted solely on the basis of confessions extracted under torture. Ten are expected to be hanged in a couple of weeks, after the end of Ramadan...

...Tehran’s latest tactic is to hold Ahwazi children as hostages. According to Amnesty International, children as young as 2 have been jailed with their mothers to force their fugitive, political-activist fathers to surrender to the police. Protests against these abuses are brutally suppressed. Ahwazi political parties, trade unions and student groups are illegal. In the past year, 25,000 Ahwazis have been arrested, 131 executed and 150 have disappeared, reports AHRO. The bodies of many of those executed have been dumped in a place that the Government calls lanat abad, the place of the damned. They are buried in shallow graves; dogs dig up and eat the bodies.

Nearly 250,000 Arabs have been displaced from their villages after the Iranian Government’s confiscation of more than 200,000 hectares of farmland for a huge sugar-cane project. Dozens more towns and villages will be erased, making a possible further 400,000 Ahwazis homeless, by the creation of a military-industrial security zone, covering more than 3,000 sq km, along the Shatt al-Arab waterway, which borders Iraq.

Ironically, the Hezbollah in Lebanon — the supposed embodiment of Arab resistance in the Middle East — is complicit in the displacement of Ahwazi Arabs. On confiscated Arab land Tehran has set up training camps for Hezbollah and for the Badr Brigades, the Iraqi fundamentalist militia. Badr death squads in Iraq are murdering Sunnis, unveiled women, gay people, men wearing shorts, barbers, sellers of alcohol and people listening to Western music.

Tehran has a grand plan to make the Ahwazi a minority in their own land through “ethnic restructuring”. Financial incentives, such as zero- interest loans, are given to ethnic Persians to settle in Ahwaz. New townships are planned, which will house 500,000 non-Arabs. Meanwhile, tens of thousands of displaced Ahwazis eke out a subsistence existence in shanty towns on the outskirts of Ahwaz city. Others have been forcibly relocated to poverty-stricken, far-flung northern regions of Iran...

...Former Moderator, Rev. Dr. Fahed Abu Akel can surely choose where he eats. The Presbyterian church involved can surely host whomever they want. But as a former moderator of the PC(USA), Rev. Dr. Abu Akel’s presence at an Al Awda event – unless he makes clear his rejection of their profoundly unfair and unchristian philosophy – signifies endorsement. Once again, the PC(USA)’s credibility as an honest broker working for the peace and well being of Palestinians and Israelis is harmed by such an action.

Heathrow check-in worker Nadia Eweida was sent home after refusing to remove the crucifix which breached BA's dress code...

...Miss Eweida, who has an unblemished record during seven years at BA, is suing her employer for religious discrimination after being suspended from work without pay for two weeks.

She said her treatment was all the more extraordinary as she and fellow employees had just undergone "diversity training" - including receiving advice from pressure group Stonewall on how to treat gays and lesbians in the workplace.

The airline's uniform code states that staff must not wear visible jewellery or other 'adornments' while on duty without permission from management.

It makes exceptions for Muslim and Sikh minorities by allowing them to wear hijabs and turbans.

Under rules drawn up by BA's 'diversity team' and 'uniform committee', Sikh employees can even wear the traditional iron bangle - even though this would usually be classed as jewellery - while Muslim workers are also allowed prayer breaks during work time...

When the cab drivers chose to drive a cab they interred into an agreement to perform a public service that is essential to the economy of any city. They have no right to refuse a fare because the passenger is holding a bottle of wine or other spirits.

The Free Muslims Coalition believes that the cab drivers should be banned all together from picking up passengers at the airport and we would even support the cancellation of their taxi permits.

These Somali drivers are choosing to impose a minority view in Islam on the general population and this is simply unacceptable.

By following financial rules that are part of the Islamic code called Shariah, Caribou is among a small but growing list of Western businesses looking to make themselves as attractive as possible to Muslim investors. Some, like Caribou, are motivated by principle, while others see Muslim investors as an attractive new source of money.

Middle Eastern investors flush with oil profits are looking for new places to invest, and American Muslims are looking to invest in a way that doesn't conflict with their faith.

"There's a bunch of Islamic investors who are prohibited from a lot of regular investments, so a lot of money is sitting in cash not earning anything at all," said Khalid Howladar, a vice president for Middle Eastern and Islamic Structured Finance with Moody's Investors Service in London.

Companies and governments who need to raise money are saying, "'There's a bunch of people out there with money they can't spend — how about I create something for them?'" he added.

Dow Jones has created an Islamic investing index. A Texas company issued almost $166 million in Shariah-compliant bonds to finance natural gas operations in the Gulf of Mexico. And the German state of Saxony-Anhalt issued a floating-rate 100-million euro note — managed by Citigroup — that followed Shariah rules.

Assets invested at two Shariah-compliant funds run by Saturna Capital in Bellingham, Wash. have swelled nearly 10-fold, since 2002 from $34 million in 2002 to $331 million now — though that's still tiny by mutual fund standards. The funds invest only in companies that are Shariah-compliant...

The teenager had not been in school the day before due to a hospital appointment and had missed the start of a project, so the teacher allocated her a group to sit with.

"She said I had to sit there with five Asian pupils," said Codie yesterday.

"Only one could speak English, so she had to tell that one what to do so she could explain in their language. Then she sat me with them and said 'Discuss'."

According to Codie, the five - four boys and a girl - then began talking in a language she didn't understand, thought to be Urdu, so she went to speak to the teacher.

"I said 'I'm not being funny, but can I change groups because I can't understand them?' But she started shouting and screaming, saying 'It's racist, you're going to get done by the police'."

Codie said she went outside to calm down where another teacher found her and, after speaking to her class teacher, put her in isolation for the rest of the day.

A complaint was made to a police officer based full-time at the school, and more than a week after the incident on September 26 she was taken to Swinton police station and placed under arrest.

"They told me to take my laces out of my shoes and remove my jewellery, and I had my fingerprints and photograph taken," said Codie. "It was awful."

After questioning on suspicion of committing a section five racial public order offence, her mother Nicola says she was placed in a bare cell for three-and-a-half hours then released without charge...

Professor Reinhart, who will give a public lecture at the University of Melbourne tomorrow night, said Israel's walling of the large and prosperous West Bank was cutting off the Palestinian people from their lands and each other.

She said she could no longer live in Israel while it did what she said was the first attempt in history to imprison a nation with a wall that cut off villages from their farmland.

"This is not something I know from history, that you could control people by simply locking them in designated areas," Professor Reinhart said in Adelaide, where she delivered the Edward Said Memorial Lecture...

...The first question posed to voters by the SDP calls on [State Rep.] Provost to issue a statement on behalf of Massachusetts that would support the Right of Return for all refugees, including Palestinian refugees, to their land of return. The second question asks voters if they support government entities in Massachusetts divesting from Israeli bonds or in companies supplying military equipment to Israel.

Provost said that she would consult a private counsel to discuss her obligation if the voters support the measures, noting that she feels like she does not have enough authority to make decisions on Israeli and Palestinian relations...

“I think 99% of what people think of Columbus is wrong,” said Emily McLaughlin, 16, a Brookline High School student. “He did not have great relations with Native Americans and he was definitely not a hero. He shouldn’t be celebrated.”

Emily herself became active in the Tribal Community Alliance when one of her best friends, Alicia Mucha, 16, found out about a year ago that she is part Native American. Alicia was raised as being half white, but in reality her father is black and her mother is African American, Cherokee, and Mohawk. The two friends began asking questions and became very interested in Native American struggles, culture, and history; things that they weren’t taught in school.

“I want for people to realize that where they live is where people were murdered, were raped, where families were torn apart. They don’t see that genocide happened right here. They think that it only happened in other countries,” said Alicia, now one of the lead organizers of Tribal Community Alliance. She said she tries very hard not to get upset during History class and to counteract common misconceptions that her classmates have about indigenous people’s struggles...

I heard that this entire thing packed up and left when some started carrying a Palestinian flag and could not be intimidated by the Indy media people there to put it away.

What is the message when the ENTIRE crowd leaves because some one has a sign that says...

"USA" and "Israel" are genocidal projects that must be shut down'

support palestine...by using your brain by anonomous participant:

well...When someone brings a palestinian flag into a highschool in a town where almost 100% of people are Jewish, without taking into account that these are highschool students who probably have never been exposed to the palestinians' side of the story, without contacting the organizers, without trying to have a conversation with the attendees, without any relevant literature... without even so much as a simple explaination of how the struggle in Palestine completely connects with the genocide started by columbus (which it does).. what the hell do you expect!! And then to call them "racists little zionists"... That so called "palestinian rights activist" did more to promote zionism and blind hate for palestinians that anything else. Maybe next time he should think about his tactics, and try talking to people like fellow humans as opposed to being selfish, overly confrontational, and unflinching. Props to the organizers from Brookline high, I hope that said individual's actions does not deter them from learning about the struggles of the palestinian people, which are very similar to the struggles of native americans...

In the 1980s, Ostow led a group of psychologists in a study that examined the causes of anti-Semitism. Reviewing the case histories of patients, the group found that negative feelings toward Jews could be traced to early childhood..

They suggested that troubles in toilet training or an Oedipal rivalry, in which a son’s negative feelings toward his father could be projected onto Jews, could be the cause.

With David Rolde being an offspring of two psychiatrists with Harvard and McGill pedigrees (specializing in child psychology, to boot), he is a walking malpractice case for his parents medical practices in Weston, MA, a wealthy Boston suburb. With mommy and daddy's mansion and them picking up his bills, his sole occupation seems to run around Boston to look for any Jewish events. Note that both his kefyah (the blankie?) and the Palestinian flag could use a good wash.

Sincerely,

Jewelnel Davis
University Chaplain
Associate Provost
Director of the Earl Hall Center

I wonder what prompted you to suddenly change the attendance policy? I mean, I have signed up well in advance (prior notice, hint-hint), got the confirmation on time (hint-hint), and left Boston on time, having spent $50 for the roundtrip ticket.

It couldn't be due to political correctness, could it? I mean, you wouldn't be afraid of some outsiders coming to the event from afar so as to get educated, enlightened, and inspired, right?

This, dear Jewelnel, smells of a scandal. Which you are about to have, on account of this cancellation, as well as for quite a few other reasons. Your decision is outrageous, unfair, inconsiderate, undemocratic, anti-intellectual, anti-academic, frivolous, gratuitous, etc. Oh, wait, I forgot -- did I mention it was also highly untimely? This decision flies in the face of the First Amendment and everything else that makes this country great.

It's not as if Columbia U. didn't have enough scandals already, especially lately. So what's another scandal? No sweat of Columbia's back, right?

Well, we'll see about that last one, won't we? I hope you have good legal in-house counsel, for you have just made a whole lot of people quite unhappy. I am sure the reporters will have a field day once again. Enter the press ...

Unbelievable ...

Seva Brodsky

On July 13, the Student Center Governing Board approved the mural in a 6-4 vote. But within hours of the vote, board members received a letter from SF State President Robert Corrigan expressing his displeasure with the action and placing an immediate moratorium on all new murals at the student center, in effect vetoing the board’s decision, said Mirishae McDonald, chairwoman of the project.

In a previous statement, just a week before the vote, Corrigan told board members the mural is “conflict-centered” and “its focus is on international issues, not on pride in one’s heritage.”

“In short, it is at odds with the most fundamental values to which San Francisco State University is committed,” Corrigan said.

The planned mural, primarily sponsored by the General Union of Palestinian Students, has been in the making for more than a year and would be what is believed to be the first Palestinian mural at a U.S. university...

...According to the letter from Corrigan, he also rebutted the board’s approval of the mural because the Student Center Governing Board has not adequately adopted a policy to allocate the center’s limited amount of space and what standards and criteria any future mural for the Student Center should have.

Corrigan said the moratorium would not be lifted until the board creates such a policy.

In addition to the Palestinian mural, a Native-American themed mural is planned for the Student Center.

“The proposed mural runs counter to values that we hope have taken deep root at San Francisco State, among them, pride in one’s own culture expressed without hostility or denigration of another,” Corrigan wrote...

“TYRE, LEBANON. WEDNESDAY, JULY 26, 2006: Israeli aircraft struck and destroyed two buildings in downtown Tyre, Lebanon Wednesday evening. As people searched through the burning remains, aircraft again could be heard overhead, panicking the people that a second strike was coming. This man fell and was injured in the panic to flee the scene. He is helped by another man, and carried to an ambulance. (Photo: Tyler Hicks/The New York Times)”

The New York Times published this photograph in the next day’s newspaper. The caption published in the newspaper read as follows:

“After an Israeli airstrike destroyed a building in Tyre, Lebanon, yesterday, one man helped another who had fallen and was hurt. Cars packed with refugees snaked away from the town. (Tyler Hicks/The New York Times)”

The problem came later when this photograph appeared among a slide show of my photographs on The New York Times website. The web published the following caption:

“The mayor of Tyre said that in the worst-hit areas, bodies were still buried under the rubble, and he appealed to the Israelis to allow government authorities time to pull them out.”

As you can see, the caption was totally misleading. I received an apology from the person responsible at the website, stating that the photo had been captioned from “…a generic sentence taken from the article [written by the reporter] that made it appear the man was injured in the attack instead of the aftermath. We should have used the caption information you filed with the photo…”...

The Arabs in these lands were not too different from Europeans: With war waging around them, most stood by and did nothing; many participated fully and willingly in the persecution of Jews; and a brave few even helped save Jews.

Arab collaborators were everywhere. These included Arab officials conniving against Jews at royal courts, Arab overseers of Jewish work gangs, sadistic Arab guards at Jewish labor camps and Arab interpreters who went house to house with SS officers pointing out where Jews lived. Without the help of local Arabs, the persecution of Jews would have been virtually impossible...

...But not all Arabs joined with the European-spawned campaign against the Jews. The few who risked their lives to save Jews provide inspiration beyond their numbers.

Arabs welcomed Jews into their homes, guarded Jews' valuables so Germans could not confiscate them, shared with Jews their meager rations and warned Jewish leaders of coming SS raids. The sultan of Morocco and the bey of Tunis provided moral support and, at times, practical help to Jewish subjects. In Vichy-controlled Algiers, mosque preachers gave Friday sermons forbidding believers from serving as conservators of confiscated Jewish property. In the words of Yaacov Zrivy, from a small town near Sfax, Tunisia, "The Arabs watched over the Jews."

I found remarkable stories of rescue, too. In the rolling hills west of Tunis, 60 Jewish internees escaped from an Axis labor camp and banged on the farm door of a man named Si Ali Sakkat, who courageously hid them until liberation by the Allies. In the Tunisian coastal town of Mahdia, a dashing local notable named Khaled Abdelwahhab scooped up several families in the middle of the night and whisked them to his countryside estate to protect one of the women from the predations of a German officer bent on rape.

And there is strong evidence that the most influential Arab in Europe -- Si Kaddour Benghabrit, the rector of the Great Mosque of Paris -- saved as many as 100 Jews by having the mosque's administrative personnel give them certificates of Muslim identity, with which they could evade arrest and deportation. These men, and others, were true heroes...

He is 1st Lt. Shannon E. Estill, U.S. Army Air Forces, of Cedar Rapids, Iowa. He will be buried on October 10 in Arlington National Cemetery near Washington, D.C.

On April 13, 1945, Estill’s P-38J Lightning was struck by enemy anti-aircraft fire while attacking targets in eastern Germany. Another U.S. pilot reported seeing Estill’s aircraft explode and crash. Because the location of the crash site was within the Russian-controlled sector of occupied Germany, U.S. military personnel could not recover Estill’s remains after the war.

In 2003, a team from the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command (JPAC) investigated a crash site near the town of Elsnig in eastern Germany. The site had been reported by two German nationals whose hobby is finding the location of World War II crash sites. They also claimed to have found remains at the site, which they turned over to U.S. Army officials. The team surveyed the site and interviewed two more men who witnessed the crash as children.

In 2005, another JPAC team excavated the crash site and recovered additional human remains as well as P-38 wreckage. Included in the recovered wreckage was an aircraft data plate from Estill’s plane...

Dr. Zion Evrony, speaking at an open lecture organized by the law school, was first greeted with dozens of shouting protestors waving Palestinian flags. During the speech 20 students attempted to "blow up" the lecture by using an agreed signal and suddenly shouting and waving signs and flags. The protestors were asked to leave the hall.

After the speech and Q&A portion of the 90 minute lecture were over the ambassador exited the hall surrounded by police officers. However as he was leaving the campus grounds several dozen angry protestors attacked his vehicle, pounding their fists against the car and climbing onto the car. No one was arrested...

“I tell you with all honesty, we will not recognize Israel, we will not recognize Israel, we will not recognize Israel,” Mr. Haniya said to thunderous applause from tens of thousands of supporters, many waving green Hamas flags, at the Yarmouk soccer stadium in Gaza City.

Mr. Haniya’s remarks appeared to be aimed at the Palestinian Authority president, Mahmoud Abbas, and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who met Wednesday in the West Bank. At that time, Mr. Abbas declared that talks between his secular Fatah movement and Hamas on a Palestinian unity government had broken down, and that the political stalemate could not go on indefinitely.

Mr. Abbas says there is a need for a new Palestinian government that will recognize Israel and deal with it. He also indicated that he was prepared to invoke his presidential powers and dismiss the current government, which is dominated by Hamas, the radical Islamic movement...

Dr. Muhammad Salim Al-Awa: The Muslims who fight the Zionists in the West Bank and Gaza - in Palestine - have begun to use young women as [human] bombs in self-sacrifice operations, in which a person blows himself up in a Zionist crowd of soldiers or policemen, and so on. One [sheik] ruled that this is forbidden. Why? He said: "Because Allah created women for pregnancy and childbirth, so if you send her to explode, or convince her to blow herself up, you prevent the will of Allah from being fulfilled, because this woman will never marry, get pregnant, or give birth." Well, what if she dies in a car crash or a plane crash? What if she dies a natural death? What if she never gets married? What is this nonsense? What is more important: The right of countries to be liberated from the colonialists, or the right of a woman to get married and give birth? If this can be called a right at all, because it may or may not happen... This fatwa had a negative effect in Palestine, I'm sad to say, because many mothers - good, dear mothers – began to fear that if their daughters did this, they would be committing a sin, so they told them that this sheik forbade it. A long debate ensued, but, Allah be praised, eventually people ignored this fatwa.

The poll shows Lieberman garnering significant Republican support, with GOP candidate Alan Schlesinger earning 4 percent of the vote. Fourteen percent of respondents were undecided...

..."Lieberman's got a slight lead among independents (10 percentage points), and Lamont is holding his own among Democrats," said Monika McDermott of the University of Connecticut's Center for Survey Research and Analysis, which conducted the poll. "The most noticeable thing is, at least in Fairfield County, it's like theLieberman-Lamont race is only between two candidates, and Lieberman is the Republican."

The phone poll, which has a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points, was conducted Sept. 25 to Oct. 1. UConn pollsters contacted 753 registered voters in the 4th Congressional District...

John Edwards, Ted Kennedy, and Wesley Clark are the best Lamont has mustered onto to the trail for him so far. People are wondering where the Clintons are. Their absence is a sure sign that Lamont is not seen as a winner. Hillary Clinton appeared in Fairfield County on Friday, October 6th, but there’s no word on returning for Lamont...

Speaking to a largely Jewish group of a few dozen supporters, Mr. Lieberman said that Ned Lamont, who defeated him in the Democratic primary, had been “surrounded by people who are either naïve or are isolationists or, frankly, some more explicitly against Israel.”

Mr. Lieberman, who is running on his own party line, pointed to Representative Maxine Waters, a Democrat from Los Angeles, who campaigned for Mr. Lamont during the primary. This summer, Ms. Waters was one of a dozen Democrats who did not vote in favor of a resolution condemning Hezbollah for attacking Israel during the war in Lebanon...

...“So far I would say my opponent is saying basically a pro-Israel line,” Mr. Lieberman said at the fund-raiser. “But look, the position he’s taking on Iraq is not good for America and not good for the Middle East. Secondly, you know to some extent you’ve got to judge people by their friends. I’m glad to be judged by my friends like Ed Koch and all of you.”...

...In his remarks, Mr. Lieberman also recalled the appearance of the Rev. Al Sharpton at Mr. Lamont’s side on primary night, calling it “a remarkable moment.”

Since primary night, Mr. Lieberman and his aides have repeatedly raised questions about Mr. Lamont’s alliance with Mr. Sharpton, whom they have described as divisive. Mr. Lieberman, however, has been on friendly terms with Mr. Sharpton in the past, particularly when the two ran for the most recent Democratic presidential nomination. This summer, Mr. Lieberman also asked Mr. Sharpton not to campaign for Mr. Lamont.

Tom Swan, Mr. Lamont’s campaign manager, said that Mr. Lieberman’s campaign was playing “racial politics.”...

"I'm disappointed in them," Koch said after stumping with Lieberman - now running as an independent - among Connecticut-bound commuters at Grand Central Station.

"I support both of those people - but until Joe, I've never had a perfect candidate," said Koch, who said Lieberman is "correctly perceived as the conscience of the Senate."

Lieberman called Koch a friend and mentor...

...Next week's event, scheduled for October 11, is expected to draw an even larger crowd, according to a university spokesman, Robert Hornsby. It will feature a former Palestinian Liberation Organization terrorist, Walid Shoebat, a former Lebanese terrorist, Zachariah Anani, and a former member of the Hitler youth and Nazi soldier, Hilmar von Campe.

Messrs. Shoebat and Anani, who both committed terrorist attacks against Israel, now say they are ardent supporters of the Jewish state.

Mr. Shoebat runs an eponymous organization, the Walid Shoebat Foundation, which "cries out for the justice of Israel and the Jewish people," according to the group's Web site. Messrs. Shoebat and Anani oppose the creation of a Palestinian state. The foundation's Web site displays gory pictures of Palestinian Arab atrocities and asks, "Is this the justice the Western supporters of a Palestinian State wish for?"...

...Messrs. Shoebat, Anani, and von Campe plan to criticize members of the Columbia faculty who "teach America hatred and pro-extremist messages," Maria Silwa [sic -- Sliwa], the trio's public relations representative, told The New York Sun. Ms. Silwa said Messrs. Shoebat, Anani, and von Campe favor free speech but "worry about the problem of indoctrination."

"When people from right leaning views go onto a campus they often get shut out," Ms. Silwa said...

..."You have people like Michael Moore going into foreign countries saying Americans are the stupidest people in the world," Zucker said. "I want to tell the real America story, that America is a force for good."

Politics became deadly serious for Zucker on Sept. 11; he was disturbed by liberals who, he said, blamed America or spoke of root causes. Zucker said he found himself supporting Bush's robust response to the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. As time passed, he tired of listening to calls for "talk, talk, talk" and the United Nations to solve the world's most tangled problems, including the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Despite his continued pro-choice, anti-nuclear power, pro-environmental beliefs, he found himself drawn to Republican national security policies. In 2004, he re-registered, made the anti-Kerry ad, appeared on a few talk shows to discuss his political conversion and "fell in with the dark side," quipped his brother Jerry Zucker, director of "Ghost" and "Rat Race," among other films.

"I still can't believe I'm a Republican," Zucker said. "There are just certain things ingrained in our Jewish roots. Our fathers voted for Roosevelt, and we voted for JFK, [Hubert] Humphrey and Clinton. But the Democratic Party has changed."...

Sir Ian said: "Having learned of this issue I have asked for an urgent review of the situation and a full report into the circumstances."

PC Alexander Omar Basha - a member of the Metropolitan Police's Diplomatic Protection Group - refused to be posted there because he objected to Israeli bombings in Lebanon and the resulting civilian casualties of fellow Muslims.

In a move which has caused widespread astonishment at Scotland Yard, senior officers in the DPG agreed that that PC Basha should be given an alternative posting.

The officer, who carries a gun, is now thought to be guarding another embassy.

Critics accused Met chiefs of bowing to political correctness, saying the decision set a dangerous precedent...

...Richard Barnes, a Tory member of the Metropolitan Police Authority, accused senior officers of lacking tact.

He said: "I think it was crass management in the first place. They should have recognised there could have been a problem and not suggested this officer be posted at this embassy...

But Met insiders blame Sir Ian for creating a culture of political correctness since taking over as head of the force in February last year.

One of the first initiatives taken by Sir Ian after taking up the post was to change the Met's log from a handwritten style to a bland type in capitals because it discriminated against short-sighted people.

Next he approved the hiring of 24 'diversity advisors' to give advice on race and gay issues to police investigating major crimes.

Last year he was found 'guilty' of 'hanging three white detectives out to dry' to prove his anti-racist credentials...

Pc Alexander Omar-Basha's father-in-law is related to Bakri, who performed an Islamic ceremony at the family home in north London.

The cleric, who founded the now disbanded Al-Muhajiroun group of radical Muslims, is living in Lebanon after being barred from the UK.

Bakri caused consternation when he said he would never warn the police if he learned of an impending suicide bomber attack by fellow Muslims. He also called the July 7 London suicide bombers "the fantastic four"...

...The officer's father-in-law, Abdul Majid el-Katme, is a doctor and Muslim activist, although he does not share Bakri's extremist views.

Bakri said yesterday he was not aware that Pc Omar-Basha was a policeman until he was involved in the arrest of some of his followers in Wood Green, north London.

Bakri said he had told Pc Omar-Basha to leave the police. Speaking from the Lebanon, Bakri said: "After a while I learned he was in the police force because brothers were arrested in Wood Green for distributing leaflets outside the library which, they said, offended homosexuals.

"I was told he was involved in stopping the stall."

Dr el-Katme is the president of the Islamic Medical Association and a member of the Muslim Council of Britain. Bakri said yesterday: "I know the couple because I married them. Alex's father-in-law is also my brother-in-law. He also asked me to give a little talk in front of the family after they got married. To be honest we didn't have a good relationship because of my radical views."

Bakri claims to have performed 1,300 Muslim wedding ceremonies.

Pc Omar-Basha, 24, married his wife, Dania, three years ago when she was 17 and at school. They have a two-year-old son and live in north London. Pc Omar-Basha's father is an electronics engineer...

• Human rights groups – Amnesty International (AI) and Human Rights Watch (HRW) – scold the Jewish state as though she were among the cruelest of nations, while downplaying abuses in Arab and Islamic nations. AI hectors Israel but makes no great fuss about Arab nations supporting a trade in black slaves today in Sudan and Mauritania. Tellingly, AI and HRW won’t utter the word “dhimmi” – the Islamic religious category for subjugated Jews and Christians in Islamic lands. Ironically, it’s the “right wing” pope who champions religious equality in the Middle East, not “progressive” Amnesty.
• Left wing blog communities at the base of the Democratic Party are exhibiting blatant anti-Semitic tendencies. Lanny Davis, former speech writer for President Clinton, wrote in shock about the anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic cartoons and postings found on the most popular left wing blogs – the Daily Kos and Huffington Post – whose “netizens” have serious influence in the Democratic Party. Some of the most popular hits on Daily Kos are entries naming the benefits to the world if Israel did not exist. Other postings simply spew Jew-hatred. This net community is large, growing and powerful. Kos takes pride in having sabotaged the campaigns of both Senator Joseph Lieberman and Martin Frost, the moderate Jewish Democrat from Texas who had hoped to become the DNC Chair.
• Democratic Party woes: A recent American Thinker article traced “a clear decline in support for Israel among all Democrats,” citing an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll: 84 percent of Republicans and only 43 percent of Democrats sympathize with Israel, and an L.A. Times/Bloomberg poll where only 39 percent of Democrats wanted America to align with Israel against Hezbollah while 63 percent of Republicans did.

A growing number of Democrats in Congress – James Moran, Cynthia McKinney, Charles Rangel, Ray McGovern, John Dingell, Jim McDermott, Neil Abercrombie – openly express opposition to Jewish concerns.

Jewish liberals must take this on. The first step is to end the denial: admit that our problem on the radical left is penetrating the mainstream. This is intolerable. Jews must and can wage a powerful fight against the anti-democratic, anti-Israel and anti-Western forces aiming to hijack liberalism. Liberals can be won away from alliances with those who oppose rights not only for Jews but for gays, women, racial and religious minorities, labor leaders, free speech advocates, atheists, agnostics and apostates. Indeed, a powerful group of liberal intellectuals (www.eustonmanifesto.com) has begun this fight. They are openly challenging the rise of anti-Semitism on the left, concealed, they write, “behind the formula of anti-Zionism.” We need to rally behind them. Every JCRC should mobilize its liberal base for this battle.

The Human Rights Committee of United Teachers Los Angeles had announced it would be a co-host of the rally at UTLA headquarters a week from Saturday, and support a boycott against Israel. After meeting with committee members, union President A.J. Duffy issued a statement saying the meeting could not take place at the union's building.

"While as educators and union members we encourage a respectful debate on the important issues of the day, this event has provoked very sharp feelings among our members and concerns that this meeting is inappropriate," Duffy said.

It was not immediately clear whether the committee would participate in the campaign against Israeli policies or whether the rally would be moved to another site.

Earlier, Duffy, who is Jewish [To the Left, a person's "status" is extremely important -- as important as the substance of what they have to say.], had taken an announcement of the rally off the UTLA website but said the committee was free to express its opposition to Israel. "This is a democratic union in a democratic nation and I will not sponsor censorship," he wrote on the website...

"While as educators and union members we encourage a respectful debate on the important issues of the day, this event has provoked very sharp feelings among our members and concerns that this meeting is inappropriate."

"We believe that to proceed with this meeting will only polarize our union members and members of the community. No one benefits from further hostility on these issues. We would hope that people of good will with differing views on the Middle East and other issues will find the appropriate settings for these discussions."...

The following are excerpts from the articles which are part of MEMRI's Antisemitism Documentation Project archives:

Muslims Must Be Familiar With the Protocols in Order to Know How to Defend Themselves

In the first article of the series, published July 26, 2005, Al-Zahhar explains why she chose to write about the Protocols: "These articles will prove to you [Muslim readers] beyond a doubt that you are being targeted by world Zionism, which is trying to ensnare you at every moment and in every way... Will you surrender meekly and willingly? In the eyes [of the Zionists], you are goyim... i.e. inferior to the Jews. More than that – you are inferior [even] to animals.

"Judaism regards you with contempt, makes your killing licit, and makes it licit [to harm] your religion, your honor, and your values. It has been meticulously planning and carrying out its schemes for thousands of years, and now it is trying to reap the benefits. Read in these articles about the schemes of the Zionist serpent, compare them to reality as you experience it, and you will find that [the schemes] are realized in full...

Before coming to DePaul he had been fired from several adjunct jobs at academic institutions in the New York area for his lack of serious academic credentials and scholarship. Virtually Finkelstein’s entire publication record consists of anti-Jewish and anti-Israel books and non-professional articles. He has no publications whatsoever in any refereed academic journals, although he has hundreds in anti-Semitic, Holocaust Denial, and neo-nazi web magazines. The closest Finkelstein ever got to journal publication was with a couple of propaganda pieces in New Politics, a “socialist” non-academic magazine of far-leftist agitprop, sponsored by – among others – Noam Chomsky. This “journal” openly states that it “stands in opposition to all forms of imperialism, and is uncompromising in its defense of feminism and affirmative action.” Finkelstein also writes in assorted pro-terror Palestinian “journals”...

In no way did the League urge or demand that the Polish consulate cancel the October 3 event. Indeed, Polish consular officials have publicly made clear that the decision to cancel the talk was theirs and theirs alone.

ADL does not believe in stifling freedom of speech on this issue or any other. Rather, we believe strongly that all views should be heard in our free society, and that the answer to extremist or offensive speech is to counter it -- just as vigorously -- with more speech.

Sadly, Mr. Judt is now using this incident to mount a campaign of disinformation to tar his critics and to further his claim of a conspiracy to stifle anti-Israel activists from having their say. His arguments lack credibility, given the many prominent public forums he has enjoyed over the years including, the op-ed page of the New York Times and many speaking engagements in New York City, most recently at Cooper Union, and elsewhere.

[B]: We all were traumatized by 9/11. I’m a native New Yorker who's lived in Seattle since 1987. I knew people who died at the WTC. It was impossible to believe, shocking. The difference between 9/11 and 12/7/41 [Pearl Harbor] is that with 9/11 some people went into denial, and therein lies our disunity.

After 9/11, I was thinking “I’m a patriot.” To me it was a December 7th moment. But I knew there was an antiwar movement waiting in the wings, who would seek to disrupt the unity. When I mentioned that fact back then, everyone was shocked. It was thought to be a quirky point of view. I called up Barry Farber, a New York talk show host from the past whose show I’d appeared on before. He'd been the voice of New York talk radio for conservatives in the 60s, 70s, and 80s.

I called him--he was elderly now--and asked, “Do you remember me?” I'd been on his show a lot in the past as a Socialist, a union guy. I said I want to speak as a former antiwar person on why I support this war, and against disunity. That started to lead to my transition. At that time everyone was still agreeing. But soon the antiwar movement grew and disunity began.

I contacted every blogger and talk show I knew of, and Young Democrat and Young Republican chapters, saying, "Here’s my bio, here's my website, I want to come to your campus and speak." And already, at that early time, I got lots of hate mail from the Young Democrats: don’t send me that, you’re a traitor...

Smugglers have been caught trying to traffick dangerous radioactive material more than 300 times since 2002, statistics from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) show. Most of the incidents are understood to have occurred in Europe.

The disclosures come as al-Qaeda is known to be intensfiying its efforts to obtain a radoactive device. Last year, Western security services, including MI5 and MI6, thwarted 16 attempts to smuggle plutonium or uranium. On two occasions small quantities of highly enriched uranium were reported missing. All were feared to have been destined for terror groups.

Scientists responsible for analysing the seizures have given warning that traffickers are turning to hospital X-ray equipment and laboratory supplies as an illicit source of radioactive material.

Investigators believe that the smugglers, who come mainly from the former Eastern bloc, are interested only in making a swift fortune and believe that they may have no compunction in selling to jihadist groups. Most undercover operations and recent seizures have been kept secret to protect the activities of Western security services...

The decision to cancel the speech, which was billed as being about "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy," is a signal of the quickening entente between free Poland and Israel, a relationship that is all the more remarkable for the fact that among the founders of Israel were Jews fleeing anti-Semitism in Poland. A Polish diplomat told The New York Sun that the speech, by the NYU professor Tony Judt, would have been inappropriate for the Polish consulate.

"It is a diplomatic post. Whatever is organized here should be in compliance with Poland's foreign policy," the deputy consul general of Poland in New York, Marek Skulimowski, said. "The consulate is not a Hyde Park, it's not a discussion club, it's a consulate." Mr. Skulimowski said that Mr. Judt had been "very critical" of Israel, while the president of Poland had just made a warm visit to Israel a few weeks ago.

The Polish decision was hailed by one of the leading Jewish defense organizations. "Bravo to them for doing the right thing," said the executive director of the American Jewish Committee, David Harris. "Tony Judt's message is the polar opposite of the remarkable surge in bilateral relations between Poland and Israel and between Poland and world Jewry."...

The lives lost in the firebombing of Dresden or the nuclear flash over Hiroshima are no less significant, and the military choices that brought about those deaths remain profoundly disturbing, but they at least took place in the context of war. Whole societies were caught up in a life-or-death struggle.

What the Holocaust demonstrates is the danger of a one-party state. It shows what can happen when a group of true believers, convinced of the superiority of their own ideas, have unchecked power. They are then free to rewrite history to suit their political ends, and crush those who disagree or protest . . . or who worship God in a different way.

Like, say, the mullahs in Iran.

The UN is in reform mode as it recovers from the oil-for-food Iraq scandal. It also faces questions on whether it is relevant in a world that has become so divided among political, economic and ideological lines. And for the first time in more than 30 years, an Asian is set to head the United Nations as the region touts its emerging and powerful role in world affairs.

With the support of most of the Security Council and of all of the permanent members, the UN General Assembly can appoint Ban to take over after current Secretary General Kofi Annan's mandate is over at the end of the year.

In Ban, the Security Council, which has the ultimate say in choosing the new head, gets a balanced and neutral choice. His appointment would satisfy both the calls for an Asian secretary general and the United States, which considers South Korea to be a staunch ally.

"The Americans would certainly support the South Korean candidacy because that's sort of a validation of South Korea, which has been under the American orbit since the 1950s," Dr. Arne Kislenko, who teaches history and international relations at Ryerson University and University of Toronto, told CBC.ca.

Ban has indicated that he wants help steer the organization though change, noting that the "United Nations family must stay the course of reform." ...

WHEN ? Saturday, October 14 , 2006 1 PM to 3 PM

WHERE ? United Teachers of Los Angeles Headquarters...

...Israel's apartheid and racist system of oppression closely resembles that which South Africa once had but which was eventually abolished in large part due to an international grassroots, activist movement to stop financial support of the regime.

HOW ?

A similar campaign to support the Palestinian people has been endorsed by over 150 organizations world-wide. We in Los Angeles can join this world-wide effort to bring justice to the Palestinian people through :

Boycott ( not buying Israeli products/services and boycotting companies that are invested in Israel or Israeli owned companies with a presence in Los Angeles )

Divestment ( stopping capital investment by companies doing business in Israel and by stopping trade unions , local / state governments ,churches and universities from investing their pension / endowment funds in Israeli companies , US companies invested in Israel or companies supplying Israel with military weapons )

Sanctions ( working to end US government foreign and military aid to Israel and impose a trade embargo )

Meeting Sponsored by : Los Angeles Chapter of MDS

Meeting Endorsed by : Los Angeles Palestine Labor Solidarity Committee
Cafe Intifada

Meeting Hosted by : UTLA Human Rights Committee...

It is distressing that there are individuals whom the community entrusts with our children, who are so willing to turn a blind eye to Arab terrorists targeting Israeli kids, their families and schools, and who present Israelis only as kidnappers, oppressors, racists, and perpetrators of apartheid. These are the charges that appear in MDS’s brief memo heralding their meeting at the UTLA Human Rights Committee (sic) [heh]. In the world in which we live today, such extreme anti-Israel demonization often leads to outright antisemitism-in word and deed...

Therefore, I have decided to eliminate any links from UTLA Committee pages to outside websites. I apologize for any confusion this has created.

I will not interject my personal feelings into this matter and will simply remind you that this is a democratic union in a democratic nation and I will not sponsor censorship. As incensed as you or I might be, I would hope you would be ten times as incensed if I started to determine who can and who cannot speak on issues in our committees. The UTLA Human Rights Committee is one of 33 UTLA standing committees.

I encourage Jewish organizations to contact the Human Rights Committee to express their concerns and arrange for a presentation of their views.

Contact Stephen Seal, Human Rights Committee Chair at srs1984@lausd.k12.ca.us

You are now leaving the UTLA website.

As soon as the meeting commenced, everything proceeded downhill rather quickly...

Salah Uddin Shoaib Choudhury, a Bangladeshi Muslim journalist who invited Benkin to write about Israel from a Jewish point of view, will be tried this month on charges of spying for the Jewish state. The crime is punishable by death in predominantly Muslim Bangladesh...

... For more than three years, Benkin's friendship with Choudhury has become a brotherly bond. It started when Choudhury, the editor of an English-language weekly newspaper in Bangladesh, e-mailed Benkin to help him foster a conversation in his country about Israel.

"In the Muslim world there is a tremendous misconception spread by the terrorists and the religious in the mosques," Choudhury said in a telephone interview. "They are told that Christians and Jews are the enemies of Islam. Whenever they are referring to that issue, they are also waving their fingers to Israel as an extremist country persecuting the Muslims."With Choudhury's support, Benkin wrote the first pro-Zionist articles published in Bangladesh. Choudhury in turn condemned Muslim extremism in the Israeli media.

"It was very clear to both of us that there was something genuine here," Benkin said. "This was an incredible opportunity to participate in something special. The fact that this man was going to stand up and do something like that, in what turned out to be a very dangerous environment, only made me admire and love him even more."

The exchange abruptly ended in November 2003. Choudhury was arrested at Dhaka-Zia International Airport before boarding a flight to Israel, where he was scheduled to deliver a lecture on Muslim-Jewish relations. After several months behind bars, he was charged with sedition, a capital offense in Bangladesh...

Nobody seemed to realize that when Donner was talking about a nation that opted for abandoning liberal democracy in favor of implementing Sharia it was one that would likely be very different from the one that the Dutch inhabit today. Donner’s scenario was thus highly speculative and even if it were to come to fruition, would, to use Mark Steyn’s estimate, not occur until the year 2050...

...What is even more interesting is the debate that ensued over the boundaries of voting in free democracies. If a situation could arise where a majority could agree to shred a constitution in favor of religious law – and one from the Middle Ages at that - than doesn’t a democracy have an obligation to devise mechanism whereby such choices could be neutralized?...

This information was confirmed in recent reports by the defense journal Jane's.

Syria's centrality to the collection and transfer of intelligence to Hezbollah is based on separate agreements Damascus signed with Moscow and Tehran on intelligence cooperation.

The agreement with Russia is much older than the one with Iran, which was signed earlier this year.

As happened with the significant numbers of advanced Russian anti-tank missiles procured by Syria and transferred to Hezbollah, Russia found itself operating indirectly in favor of the Lebanese Shi'ite organization in matters of intelligence.

In addition to the profits from arms sales to Syria, the Russo-Syrian intelligence cooperation benefits Moscow in terms of the actual first-hand data collected by the listening posts.

Russia is also involved in assisting Syria to enlarge two of its ports on the Mediterranean, Latakia and Tartus. Reports of this development have emerged only recently...

...The intelligence cooperation agreement between Syria and Iran is new. It is part of a broader strategic cooperation accord between the two states that was achieved in November 2005 and confirmed during the visit to Damascus in January 2006 of Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad.

The agreement on intelligence cooperation gives great emphasis to electronic surveillance and involves the construction of four listening stations.

According to Jane's, the funding for the stations, estimated in the neighborhood of dozens of million dollars, came mostly from the budget of Iran's Revolutionary Guard...

...The Revolutionary Guard is keen to broaden its involvement in the Middle East in general and enhance its intelligence-gathering capabilities on activities in the Mediterranean region. In addition to Israel, which is an obvious target of this intelligence-gathering effort, Turkey, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and American forces in the region are also of great interest.

According to the Jane's report, in its agreement of intelligence cooperation with Syria, Iran insisted that no Russian intelligence officers should be allowed access to the new listening posts, in spite the long standing deal between Damascus and Moscow.

The student Senate unanimously approved a resolution last Tuesday calling on the Board of Regents, which also sets policy for Michigan's campuses in Ann Arbor and Flint, to divest from companies that profit from the actions of the Israeli military in what the resolution claims are "illegally occupied territories."

"We want the university to withdraw their investments so these companies think twice about selling their products or their services to the military," said Bilal Dabaja, 21, a senior political science major.

The vote passed unanimously, and Dabaja said it had nothing to do with the campus's location in Dearborn, the heart of the region's Arab-American community...

If the gambit in Cairo succeeds [good luck], it will boost American efforts to punish Iran for its defiance of international resolutions on its nuclear program. In the last 18 months, the Bush administration has quietly succeeded in pressing four large European banks, including London-based HSBC, to stop doing business with Iran.

Indeed, when the Treasury Department announced earlier this month that Iran's Bank Saderat would be barred from American financial markets, three large Japanese banks also cut ties with the bank. Yesterday, the Iranian press announced that talks between Iran and Japan on a $2 billion deal to develop the Azadegan oil field had collapsed.

The Iran Freedom and Support Act, which the Senate passed Saturday and President Bush is expected to sign this week, threatens to bar from American financial markets all banks and companies that are found to be contributing to the Iranian nuclear project or its development of advanced weapons.

In this respect, the most important attendee at tomorrow's meeting will be the foreign minister of the United Arab Emirates, Sheik Abdullah bin Zayed al-Nahyan. The banks of Dubai, a kind of Arabian Switzerland, handle the personal and corporate bank accounts of many of the Iranian regime's leaders. So far, Arab states have been signaling quietly through the Gulf Cooperation Council that they would like to see Iran end its enrichment of uranium...

..."Jihad is here. We must wage jihad against the enemies of Allah here. The enemies of Allah are in our midst. They claim to be Muslims, although they are as far as can be from Islam. They call themselves 'reformists' or 'preachers,' and say that we support the West. They are hostile to us on these grounds. Yet at the same time, the Westerners and others claim that we are the birthplace of these people. Where are we? Why don't we tell these people who we are? Why don't we argue with them, discuss things with them? Why don't we respond to everything they say? Why don't we restrict the ignorant among us, or even those who think they are Islamic scholars?"...

..."Is it not an insult to Islam in general that someone so plain and worthless like Osama bin Laden is considered important? Does anyone accept this? Not only is he worthless, but he is an agent. He was an agent of foreign intelligence agencies, and he still is – him and those who support him. Who established Al-Qaeda?"...

..."My brothers, the danger is even greater. Even those people have become tools in the hands of the enemies. Unless we face reality with truth, courage, and evidence, and if we do not stop all the transgressors who are trying to distort Islam with their claims of reform and their corrupt progress – this will be dangerous. These people have been tempted by the West, and have been employed in its service. We are familiar with their relations with foreign elements. We are fighting them and will continue to fight them, and we will cut off their tongues."

In the Sunday Globe "Ideas" section (which was truly inspired when it was edited by TNR alumnus Alex Star), someone else--a real somebody (and I don't mean this sardonically)--has been summoned to wag his finger, too, at the Israelis at the end of their ten-day period of contrition and on the very eve of their Day of Atonement. And who has been mustered? Rashid Khalidi, the Edward Said professor of Arab studies at Columbia University. Where else?...

...Back to Khalidi. His article, an excerpt from his new book, The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood, is titled "Unwritten History." It makes the argument, stated in a large pull-quote, that "it is important to ascribe agency to the Palestinians, to avoid seeing them as helpless victims of forces greater than themselves--or as driven solely by self-destructive tendencies." But, in this 40 inches of type, he devotes barely ten to what the Palestinians did or failed to do on their own over the century of the conflict. Raising this question is a good thing to do...

*This week U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is meeting with Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas during her visit to occupied Palestine. She will be outlining steps that the U.S. will take to strengthen Abbas and weaken the democratically elected Hamas government. In particular, the U.S. plans to strengthen security forces loyal to Abbas, who are responsible for the current riots in Gaza and the West Bank. Please take a moment to write to your elected officials and to express to them your outrage over what seems to be U.S. advocacy for civil war in the Occupied Territories.

*Also, tell your representatives to pressure President Mahmoud Abbas to reign in his security forces within the territories, and, to pressure Israel to release Hamas Parliamentarians, two-thirds of which are being held hostage by the Israeli government. These Parliamentarians were kidnapped by the Israelis and they are being held as bargaining chips for the release of a kidnapped Israeli soldier which Hamas had nothing to do with. Ask your elected officials to demand a clear explanation from the White House as to whether this country is serious about supporting democracy in the Middle East, or whether this country is merely playing lip service in order to continue to prop up and support regimes in the Middle East that were not elected by the people. Ask your elected officials to stop the current administration before it succeeds in turning the Palestinian territories into another Iraq.

To empower those who seek a fair and balanced approach to the middle east conflict [Apparently that's fairness to Hamas and balance between terrorists and their victims. -S]. We hope to help members and visitors contact congress with a clear message against the occupation in the holy land.

PRINCIPLES AND ISSUES

We unequivocally stand for justice, human rights, and democracy for all and recognize that no lasting peace in any region, or the world itself, can exist until people are free and all their rights are fully recognized.

• End Aid to Israel & all other countries which are oppressive and guilty of violating international human rights laws. [Including the Palestinian Authority?]
• End the Occupation of Palestine
• The Right of Return for all refugees (Palestinian or others)
• Protect Civil Liberties of Arab Americans by influencing national legislation.

And this is a critical point: Two of the reporters responsible for this report are Volker Steinhoff and John Goetz. Steinhoff and Goetz also teamed up for this horrific piece of slanderous propaganda aimed at the US military on which we reported last year. The music and format are remarkably similar. It seems that both Steinhoff and Goetz are certified experts when it comes to producing one-sided, anti-American hate propaganda. These two "journalists" have done more to poison German-American relations than most people could ever hope to...

What is the smell of a thousand terrified people being herded to their deaths? What is the smell of a room in which a thousand terrified people have been kept for a day and a half, deprived of toilets, a room in which the stove has been lighted, a room in which perhaps a few dozen people have been shot to death, a woman has gone into labor?

How can one write a story of six people who left so little trace of their existence? The answer depends on what Mendelsohn can learn about the world in which they lived from historical documents and from what the witnesses can tell him. At the Yad Vashem Center in Israel, he finds a transcript of the testimony a woman gave in 1946, which gives the fullest account so far of what occurred during the first Aktion in Bolechów in 1941 in which at least one of his relatives perished. Another deposition made in July 1946 by a certain Matylda Gelernter, thirty-eight years of age, describes the next roundup in which Ester, Lorka, and Bronia died:

On the 3rd, 4th and 5th of September 1942, the second action in Bolechów took place without a list: Men, women and children were caught in their houses, attics, hiding places. About 660 children were taken. People were killed in the town square in Bolechów and in the streets. The action lasted from before evening on Wednesday until Saturday. On Friday it was said that the action was already over. People decided to come out of hiding but the action started up again on Saturday and on that one day more people were killed than in the preceding days. The Germans and Ukrainians preyed especially on the children. They took the children by their legs and bashed their heads on the edge of the sidewalks, whilst they laughed and tried to kill them with one blow. Others threw children from the height of the first floor, so a child fell on the brick pavement until it was just pulp. The Gestapo men bragged that they killed 600 children and the Ukrainian Matowiecki (from Rozdol/y near near Zydaczowy) proudly guessed that he had killed 96 Jews himself, mostly children.

IRAN

Parisa (f)
Iran (f)] full names known to Amnesty International
Khayrieh (f)
Shamameh Ghorbani (also known as Malek) (f)
Kobra Najjar (f, aged 44)
Soghra Mola'i (f)
Fatemeh (f)

The women named above are at risk of execution by stoning.

Parisa was arrested in April 2004, while working as a prostitute in the city of Shiraz in southern Iran. She confessed to the charge of adultery during the preliminary investigations, claiming that she had been forced into prostitution by her husband due to the family's poverty. Her trial took place in June 2004, during which Parisa retracted her confession. Nevertheless, on 21 June 2004, Branch 5 of Fars province Criminal Court sentenced her to death by stoning for adultery. The sentence was upheld by Branch 32 of the Supreme Court on 15 November 2005. Her case is currently being reviewed by the Supreme Court. Parisa is detained in Adelabad prison in Shiraz.

Iran, an Ahwazi Arab from the Bakhtiari clan, was reportedly talking to the son of a neighbour in the courtyard of her house, when her husband attacked her with a knife. She was badly beaten and left bleeding and unconscious on the floor. While she was unconscious, it is alleged that the man killed her husband with his own knife. While police were interrogating her about the killing, Iran reportedly confessed to adultery with the son of her neighbour. However she later retracted her confession. A court in a city in Khuzestan sentenced her to five years' imprisonment for being an accomplice in the murder of her husband, and to execution by stoning for adultery. The verdict was upheld by the Supreme Court in April 2006. Her lawyer has appealed against the sentence. She is detained in Sepidar prison, in Ahvaz city.

Khayrieh, an Ahwazi Arab, was reportedly subjected to domestic violence by her husband. She allegedly began an affair with a relative of her husband, who then murdered him. She was sentenced to death by Branch 3 of Behbahan Court, in Khuzestan in southwestern Iran, for being an accomplice in the murder of her husband, and death by stoning for adultery. Khayrieh has denied any involvement in her husband's murder, but confessed to adultery. The sentence was upheld, and the case has reportedly been sent to the Head of the Judiciary for permission to be implemented. Talking about her fate, Khayrieh said "I am ready to be hanged, but they should not stone me. They could strangle you and you would die, but it is very difficult to have stones hitting you in the head".

Shamameh Ghorbani (also known as Malek), arrested in June 2005, was sentenced to execution by stoning for adultery by a court in Oromieh in June 2006. She is reportedly held in Oromieh prison. Her brothers and husband reportedly murdered a man that they found in her house, and she too was nearly killed after they stabbed her with a knife. Shamameh Ghorbani's case is reportedly being re-examined.

Militants from the opposition Fatah group retaliated by torching the Palestinian Cabinet building in the West Bank. The violence comes amid growing frustration over the parties' failure to form a national-unity government that could end crippling economic sanctions.

The fighting continued throughout the day and sent schoolchildren and other civilians in downtown Gaza City fleeing for cover...

The violence, the worst of its kind since the establishment of the Palestinian Authority more than a decade ago, followed allegations by Hamas leaders that PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas and his Fatah party were planning a coup against the Hamas-led government.

Most of the casualties were reported in the Gaza Strip. One person was killed and two were wounded in a battle between Fatah and Hamas Monday night in Rafah, a day after nine people were killed and dozens were injured during heavy fighting between the two parties on Sunday.

On Monday, the violence spilled over to the West Bank, where a Palestinian was shot to death in Jericho and six others were wounded by gunfire in Nablus. In addition, several PA institutions and Hamas-run organizations were set on fire, including the offices of the PA Prime Minister in Ramallah...

"We ask God to punish the so-called Israel and the allies of Israel and to punish those who recognize Israel and those who called on us to recognize Israel," Hamas lawmaker Mushir al-Masri told the crowd that thronged the Jabalya refugee camp.

"We vow to God that we will never recognise Israel even if we would be all killed," Masri told the cheering audience of men, women and children, many of whom were wearing green Hamas baseball caps and held aloft Hamas banners.

Masri, a popular young lawmaker, also aimed criticism at Fatah, a rival movement headed by Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas, saying it was trying to pressure Hamas, which now runs the Palestinian government, into recognizing Israel.

"Those people are demanding of us openly to recognize the occupation and that will never happen," Masri said...

..."The protest aims to stress our rejection to recognize the legitimacy of the occupation," Masri said, referring to what Hamas views as Israel's occupation of all of what is calls historic Palestine....

He said: "Greece supports Iran in its relations with the EU." He described the primarily economic accord as a "very important development."

Papandreou was accompanied on his visit by Dimitris Zafiropoulos, Secretary of State for International Economic Relations.

Mr Zafiropoulos put forward proposals for the creation of a bilateral organisation which would guarantee exportation funds from Iran.

Beglitis said this initiative would fall into the framework of "an aid programme for the development of countries financed by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development from 2002 to 2006."

And Zafiropoulos also suggested Greek aid to Iran to develop the public sector framework, with a view to fitting in with European legislation.

According to a statement released by Zafiropoulos on Monday, the OECD would need to provide 20 to 30 million dollars to finance the initiatives.

In a public letter, the Central Board of Jewish Communities in Greece "expresses its strong protest against the insulting presence" in Greece of Udo Voigt, president of Germany's far-right NPD party.

According to a report in Greece's Ta Nea daily, Voigt is to attend a Saturday rally by Dimitris Zafiropoulos, the far-right Patriotic Alliance party's candidate for mayor of Athens in Greece's October 15 municipal elections.

The Jewish board's president, Moses Constantini, said Voigt's planned presence in Greece "represents the resurgence of Nazi prototypes and symbols, as well as lack of respect for the memory of the victims."

Greece's small Jewish community was nearly wiped out in the Nazi occupation during World War II. More than 65,000 Greek Jews - nearly 90 percent of the Jewish population at the time - were killed.

Drawing on voter dissatisfaction in eastern Germany, the NPD two weeks ago entered the state parliament of Mecklenburg-West Pomerania - home base of German Chancellor Angela Merkel - and aspires to representation in the federal parliament.

...``We Palestinians are the key for America's lovability around the world," he told leaders of Brit Tzedek v'Shalom -- Hebrew for Covenant of Justice and Peace -- a pro-Israel group that favors creation of a Palestinian state on territory Israel occupied in the Six-Day War of 1967...

``For an American administration to have a truly open attitude toward us, it must have an American Jewish fig leaf -- respectable, if not representative, Jewish-American voices who say this is kosher," he told the Brit Tzedek group over bagels and coffee in the home of one of its members. ``I am happy there is an alternative Jewish voice that is not AIPAC" -- a reference to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a powerful lobbying group that usually supports Israeli government positions...

``Hezbollah compared with Israel is an amateur in terrorism," Safieh said in an interview. ``The way Israel responded in the Lebanese conflagration was horrible." He also said that no one who fails to condemn Israeli bombings that kill Palestinian civilians is morally qualified to condemn suicide attacks.