Friday, June 29, 2007

The End of the Katsav Affair

The Katsav affair is now over. Almost no one is happy with the results.
After blocking any attempt at a deal or plea bargain because he was
determined to indict Katsav for rape, the leftist Israeli Attorney General
Mazoz suddenly dropped the rape charges unexpectedl and signed a
compromise plea bargain. Under the deal Katsav could plea to sexual
harassment and misconduct and resign the presidency without doing any jail
time or face criminal indictment.

71% of Israelis dislike the deal, but that is because at least 50% think
Katsav is innocent, and the others probably just want an actual indictment
and trial to set the record straight. The feminists are outraged, and
were hoping to see Katsav marched into a prison in orange fatigues and
raped by motorcycle gang members there for his disrespect towards women.
The women who accused him of raping them are outraged that no charges were
filed against him based on their assertions. The Labor Party
establishment never forgave Katsav for beating Shimon Peres for the
Presidency in 2000. Peres only got to move into the Pres' mansion a few
days ago, after Katsav's presidency imploded under the prosecutions and
investigations.

Ben Dror Yemini, an editor at Maariv, called for the Attorney General to
resign, now that the whole country knows he pursued a political vendetta
against Katsav and dragged the affair out unreasonably and unnecessarily,
building a case on conflicting and dubious pieces of evidence, acting
unprofessionally, indicting Katsav through the media.

Did Katsav actually rape anyone? Did he really molest women (in the plea
he concedes he did, but also says he signed just to get it all over with)
or was he targeted for harassment by vindictive prosecutors out to score
points for themselves in the media? We do not really know, even after the
"deal" has been struck. Some Knesset members are trying to strip Katsav
of his pension and perqs.

Kalman Libskind is the main "scandal investigation" reporter for Maariv.
He is not particularly identified either with the Right or the Left. He
is very good at digging out muck. He has long attacked Peres, but less
because of Peres' idiotic "ideas" and more because of his corruption.

Here are some excerpts from his column in Maariv today, not online, in
print only in Hebrew, my translation:

'Are the Media at Fault? Damned Right!

'....There are two main reasons for the stigma of shame attached to the
Israeli media. The first is not related only to the Katsav affair. It
has to do with the conversion of journalism into the indentured servant of
its sources. A great deal of the sources are leaks from people whom
journalists themselves should regard with suspicion, but prefer not to
check out deeply, that is, "source" people who are promoting specific
personal interests. It is because journalists know that if they check
sources the leaks will end. ... The truth? It can wait for better days!

'The second reason for the disrespect that Katsav got from the media is
directly related to the points Katsav raised in his press conference. The
truth needs to be proclaimed: The Attorney General spilled Kastav's
blood, the police coerced witnesses so that testimony would fit its
agenda, the media endlessly mocked Katsav and his people. Katsav and his
people asked the media again and again to check facts, to ask questions,
raise doubts. And time after time the media looked down at them in
condescension, like lords looking down upon a few punks in Kiryat Malachi
(Katsav's home town)...

'Let's say it clearly even if it is unpleasant to hear. The Israeli media
are so unidimensional and monolithic that they are a major threat to
democracy itself. There are no real flows of ideas in them and no new
faces there of "others". All of the members of the media are almost the
exact same, and almost none of them look like Moshe Katsav. The media are
composed of white, Ashkenazi, secularist, leftist elitists, who look down
upon anyone who is not just like them as an outsider. Anyone who checks
how many journalists live in Haim Ramon's neighborhood and how many live
in Katsav's neighborhood in Kiryat Malachi will understand the point
instantly. In this entire dismal affair, the media serve not as reporters
but as self-interested, biased, and self-promoting. Anyone who thinks the
media will now conduct a self-evaluation should go get a cold drink and
think again. The media only investigate other people, never themselves.'


Thursday, June 28, 2007

Finkelstein's Islamofascist Groupies

1. Counter-boycott!
http://www.nysun.com/article/57280

2. Islamofascists rushing to defend Finkelstein:
http://www.normanfinkelstein.com/article.php?pg=11&ar=1112

3. Rabbi Woodstock Conducting Acts Prohibited by the Torah with CAIR
Islamofascists:
http://yidwithlid.blogspot.com/2007/06/arthur-waskow-bogus-rabbi-and-cair.html


4. Being circulated by Middle East Forum:
BECOME A MIDDLE EAST/ISLAM EXPERT AND EARN BIG BUCKS!

Dear Career Counselor:
I am in bad shape. I cannot get a job or support myself. I want to
be rich and famous and powerful but I have no idea what to do. Can you
suggest a powerful, prestigious, high-paying field where I need do no
study or training? Signed, Destitute and Dumb

Dear D&D:
I.m so glad you wrote me as I have the perfect solution: become an
expert on the Middle East and Islam. It.s easy, painless (for you, though
many others will pay for it with their lives), and profitable. Just look
at these examples:

Stephen Mearsheimer and John Walt. Sure they were tenured professors
but they hadn.t produced anything of note in years. Then they had an idea.
Write a paper attacking the power of the Jewish lobby. Years of study?
Intensive research? Nah. A few hours by a grad student on the internet.
Result: Fame, a huge book contract, invitations to speak, largely
respectful media coverage! Within months.

Or how about Bob Leiken. A washed-up Latin American expert, former
Marxist revolutionary. The left hated him because he was an instrument of
Oliver North in supporting the Nicaraguan Contras. Even North made fun of
him. Things got so bad he had to sell his house and move his family into
an apartment. Things looked dim. And then, presto! A grant from
Smith-Richardson, another grant from the CIA, two articles in Foreign
Affairs, a contract with Oxford University Press. All this within about a
year. Invited to brief the State Department. Why? Because he decided to be
an instant Middle East expert. Did he take courses, learn languages, spend
hours reading texts? Nope. Just sat in a room with some radical Islamists.
They told him they were moderates. He wrote it down.
And like the great language expert, the rival of Henry Higgins,
who in .My Fair Lady. proclaims that the flowerseller Eliza Doolittle is a
Hungarian princess of royal blood, Leiken proclaims that the radical
Islamists are really moderates who the United States can engage. Wow says
Condi Rice. Do tell, asks the State Department.
Has he read their extremist statements in Arabic? Nope, who
needs Arabic. How about the translations and academic papers on the
subject? Waste of time. Study of Koranic and Islamic sources? That.s for
wimps and suckers. All you have to do is talk to them and then you know.
Because hardline supporters of terrorism who cheer the murder of people by
kidnappers and suicide bombers wouldn.t lie to you, would they?

Or how about Mary Habeck? A military historian, lost her job at
Yale. Hey, why is everyone else having all the fun! I.ll be an expert on
the Middle East and on Islam too! So she loaded up the truck and took a
brief trip to Iraq. Next thing you know she.s got a book, testifies to
Congress, is briefing Hilary Clinton, and being consulted by the great and
powerful. Does she know anything about Islam? She thinks that jihad is an
inner struggle, not having much to do with smiting infidels and conquering
lands. But what.s the difference? If you don.t want to do so you don.t
have to see the dead bodies produced by your advice.

So what are you waiting for? How could you NOT decide to be a
Middle East expert or a sage about Islam? You.d have to be crazy not to do
it. Operators are standing by.

By the way, all of the above is completely true.and other
examples could be cited. But if not cast in the form of a satire, who.d
believe it? And remember: it isn't as if the fate of Western
civilization, freedom, and democracy were at stake or anything important
like that.


Professor Barry Rubin,
Director, Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center
Editor, Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA) Journal
Editor, Turkish Studies


4. New Republic on the Pestilinians:
THIS THE END OF PALESTINE?

Last Act

by Martin Peretz The New Republic
Post date 06.25.07 | Issue date 07.02.07 Discuss this article (30)
www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=20070702&s=peretz070207

Think back two years. Ariel Sharon was not only alive but healthy and
staking his place in history on an idea he had never truly believed: that
the Arabs of Palestine might be ready for peace with the Jewish state.
This idea may have run against both his deepest convictions and his basic
instincts. But somehow he carried many of his old comrades with him:
comrades from Israel's old wars and comrades from the political
right--where, after a brief parliamentary stint on the left, he had
positioned himself.

Carrying comrades to a place they had not been before also entailed making
enemies, and Sharon's enemies were bitter and vindictive. Nonetheless, he
carried out the withdrawal of all 8,000 or so Israelis from Gaza
unconditionally and without making explicit demands on the
Palestinians--or inexplicit ones, for that matter. He also dismantled four
settlements in the West Bank, from what he and his friends called Samaria.
No one thought that these would be the last to be vacated, no one. And
Israel's entire security establishment (army, intelligence, the diplomatic
corps) laid out various maps for discussion that were uncannily
reminiscent of the (overly generous) proposals put forward by Ehud Barak
in the waning days, the pathetic waning days, of the Clinton
administration. Condoleezza Rice even persuaded a few American Jewish
zillionaires to ante up roughly $15 million to buy, as a parting gift from
the Jews at once symbolic and practical, for the Gaza Arabs the hothouses
that had helped make local agriculture, for the first time in history, so
abundant and also valuable. Ask about the hothouses of Gaza now, and
people will laugh. Ask about the rest of Gaza, and people will cry.

They cried even before Gaza was put through the trauma of civil war. For
what was unraveling was the whole idea of the Palestine nation itself. Of
course, some said, "I told you so." (I count myself among those entitled
to say that.) I was never taken in by the dream of Palestine, although I
realized that Israeli dominion over so many Arabs did somewhat dim the
incandescence of the Zionist reality, a free Jewish people, free in
politics and in spirit, in arts and in science and above all in
literature, in law, and in the press, free from the religious coercion of
the rabbis, a nation speaking its own language at home at last.

No people moves without an elite committed to the whole. That the
Palestinian elites were and are corrupt is a historic reality, a shabby
reality. It was the Palestinian aristocracy that sold off its lands for
Jewish settlement from the very beginning of the Zionist experiment. And
the last act broadcast on television: the dismantling of the gaudy riches
of Palestine's "revolutionaries" in Gaza.

Contrast this with the secular, although economically impoverished,
aristocracy of the kibbutz, created by the early Zionists, which, as
Dorothea Krook has shown, shaped the ethos of both the movement and the
state. There was an exhilarating and learned asceticism to the Jewish
pioneers, an asceticism that has almost altogether vanished but remains as
contingent reproach. It is needed now.

Most of the Arabs of Palestine resented the Jews. But resentment is not a
foundation for a nation. In some uncanny way, Yasir Arafat grasped the
guilefulness of Palestinian peoplehood and so was always inventing new
myths (e.g., Jesus was the first Palestinian). There has been a big to-do
in academic circles over the last quarter-century about "imagined
communities" as nations. This was meant to help legitimize groups whose
coherence was incoherent. But, alas, even Benedict Anderson, in fitting
his lax definitions with history, does not refer at all to the
Palestinians. The British Communist historian Eric Hobsbawm does allude to
the Palestinians in his book on nationalism, but only to dismiss them as a
nationalist movement.

One of the harsh truths that we have learned is that terrorism may be the
prime expression of a fledgling nationalism, perhaps even its only
collective expression. But it does bring a certain dread to its
adversaries, and Palestinian terrorism has over the decades brought that
dread to Israel. A suicide bomb also makes a big and incredulous splash,
and with that comes to its instigators the sense that they can no longer
be ignored. Of course, their hapless but willing instrument is dead. Poor
man, increasingly we can also say poor woman, poor pregnant woman.

"Palestine" is not the only place where the very idea of the nation is so
weak that its violent eruptions seem to be dismal admissions of failure.
But, however impoverished the reality, it has caught the fancy of many
outside Palestine. The fact is that, had these outsiders--some cynical,
some hopelessly muddle-headed--not embraced the cause, the cause already
would have perished from its own exhaustion.

So what is Palestine? It is an improvisation from a series of rude facts.
Palestine was never anything of especial importance to the Arabs or to the
larger orbit of Muslims. Palestine was never even an integral territory of
the Ottomans but split up in sanjaks that crossed later postWorld War I
borders, a geographical and political jumble. When General Allenby
captured Jerusalem, it was a great happening for believing Christian
Europe, not a tragedy for Islam. When the 1947 U.N. Partition Plan for
Palestine was passed, envisioning a "Jewish" state and an "Arab" (not,
mind you, Palestinian) state, even the idea of a separate Arab realm was
met at best with a yawn. Though almost no Arab wanted Jewish sovereignty
in any of Palestine, virtually no Arab seemed to crave Arab sovereignty,
either.
Foreign Arab armies did the fighting against the Haganah, and foreign
states sat for the Palestinians at the cease-fire negotiations, as they
had sat for decades at the international conferences on Palestine convened
by the powers. Palestine was being fought over to be divvied up by Cairo,
Amman, and Damascus. The Syrian army was overwhelmed by the Israelis. No
rewards there. It was different for King Farouk and Abdullah I, who got
land in reward for their soldiers' combat.

Indeed, from 1949 through 1967, what was the West Bank of Arab Palestine
was annexed--yes, annexed--by Jordan, and what was the Gaza Strip was a
captive territory of Egypt, unannexed so that Gazans had no rights as
Egyptians (whereas the West Bankers had rights as Jordanians). The
Palestine
Liberation Organization, founded in 1964, was not founded to liberate
these territories. It was founded to liberate that part of Palestine held
by Israel. We are long past this history, and Israel had become
accustomed to the idea--if not exactly the precise reality--of an
independent Palestine for the Palestinians, the name of their desire. Ehud
Olmert gladly would have signed on the dotted line if the Palestinian
Authority could bring itself to realize it would get what it could get
(and perhaps even a little more) if the Palestinians would finally stop
their war against the Jews. And their rage.

But the Palestinians' war against the Jews is actually also a war against
one another. While Mahmoud Abbas probably would have settled for being
president of a cartographically realistic Palestine, there were integral
parts of Fatah, and particularly its fighting gangs, that still held out
for the grand irredentist map--if not "from the river to the sea,"
something more than was ordained in 1967. Could Abbas, in the end, rein
them in? Not when Hamas had set the terms of the intra-Palestinian
conflict as all or nothing. Those are characteristic Hamas conditions,
with other Arabs as with the Jews. It is true that Fatah men of combat
were battling for their lives. But they were not battling for peace with
Israel.

The disintegration of Gaza began as soon as the Israelis departed. This
was not an issue of what Israel did or did not do. The ur-religious and
the ur-nationalist were in psychological control of the strip from the
beginning. Hamas did not shoot (many) rockets across the border into enemy
territory. But its surrogates did. Hamas did nothing about this, and Fatah
really couldn't. They couldn't, although Lieutenant General Keith Dayton,
the American coordinator in the area, assured they could, especially after
supplying arms to Fatah and persuading Olmert to supply more weapons,
which, as luck would have it, are now in Hamas's possession. The ordinary
Gazans clearly were not pleased by the chaos and the haphazard murders on
the streets. They were and are objects not subjects, victims not
victimizers. But Hamas is also bitter, embittered by its costly victory.
For them, there remains the project of Reconstruction, in the American
Civil War sense, of the souls of their neighbors.

The final fall of Gaza to Hamas puts the whole question of Palestine and
the Palestinians into a new perspective. There are now three cohorts of
Palestinians between the Jordan and the Mediterranean. (Four, if you count
the Palestinian majority under Hashemite rule.)

Let's deal first with the easiest of these to grasp: the Arabs of Israel,
citizens of Israel with freedoms--legal and social--that are unimaginable
in any Arab country. Their loyalties are always tested by kin and
undermined by the residual discriminations of the Jewish state. But their
loyalties are also the subject of an inevitable internal struggle. They
are, after all, the privileged Palestinians, the Palestinians who live in
a decent society. But one thing of which they will not hear--and that is a
perfectly logical proposal--is that some of them, together with their land
and homes, become part of whatever Palestine will be. The hostility to
this idea will, by way of compensation, radicalize these Israeli Arabs and
thus make them more and more suspect by their Jewish fellow citizens.

Then, there is the West Bank. The optimism about peace prospects there is,
at least, very much premature. And, frankly, from what I know about
locales like Jenin and Hebron, I wonder why commentators think that the
Judea and Samaria territories are so different from Gaza. In fact, these
Palestinian cities historically have been centers of Arab extremism,
although--and this is a curious characteristic of Arab extremism--this
rarely ties one locale to another. So what you have is the bane of
fanaticism without the bonds of community. Indeed, the defining loyalty
among many Palestinians is loyalty to family, clan, and tribe, not
progressive social formations, as they say. But Rashid Khalidi does not
focus on these persistences in his book Palestinian Identity, which he
optimistically subtitled The Construction of Modern National
Consciousness. In fact, the persistence of these antique ties is another
reason why the Palestinians are far from being a coherent people. But,
then, Pakistan is also not a nation, and neither is Iraq. I recall that
Palestinian embroidery differs in every town and city. That is
quaint, and it makes for pretty dresses in many styles. But it is not a
model for a nation-state.

The initiative remains with the Gaza Palestinians, which is to say, Hamas.
It will not be tempted, as many of the journalistic prophets informed us
when the group won the parliamentary elections, to become responsible.
Rage is actually its way in the world, and it is a shrewd, if not wise,
tactic. Your adversary becomes uncertain and jittery, afraid to provoke
but loath to ignore. Rockets will continue to land in the towns and
kibbutzim of the Negev and further into Israel. More advanced weapons will
be smuggled into Gaza--alas, from Egypt, which did not, over the past
years, demonstrate either the will or the capacity to stop the running of
war materials from the Sinai to the Strip.

Israel must now make choices that will determine Egypt's responsibilities.
Given the fact that Hamas has declared war on Israel, Jerusalem could
decide to simply seal its border with Gaza. Enemies at war do not
generally supply one other with food and medical provisions, let alone gas
and electricity. What should persuade Israel to make such arrangements? To
win goodwill? Nonsense.

Of course, Egypt could assume greater responsibility, including the
shepherding of endangered Fatah Palestinians to safety. But a corollary to
that would be the obligation to truly bar weapons from being sent
underground to Hamas. So what if Israel responds to Hamas rocket and
missile assaults harshly and with the precision that its air power
permits? Is not Mubarak afraid of Hamas's cousins in the streets of Cairo,
the Muslim Brotherhood, already chafing under the regime's heavy hand?
Israel might also recapture the Philadelphia Corridor and police the Gaza
border with Egypt.

There is at least one assumption that we can make: Israel will not permit
attacks without appropriate response. The abandonment of Sderot by a third
of its population is a stain on Zionism. It will not occur again. And,
with Israel under such intense pressure from Gaza, it is hardly possible
to imagine that even Fatah will be able to resist the temptation of armed
mischief. And why do I say even Fatah? I shouldn't.

Then, of course, Hezbollah may be tempted, and Syria, too. The resulting
combination--assaults from the north, the east, and the west--would be a
peril for Israel. But the most serious near-term danger actually comes
from the West Bank. For rockets and more precise weapons aimed at the
thickly populated heart and narrow waist of Israel from almost any place
in what is now Fatah land would revive both the anxieties and military
reflexes of the state and its population. Surely that would not be good
for the Arabs.

That is why U.S. policy must not assume that there are facile ways to
render the West Bank peaceful. Almost everyone has admitted, some with
bitterness,
that what keeps that area of Palestine more orderly than Gaza is the
proximate presence of Israeli troops near Arab population centers.

Would that there were a mature national will among the Palestinians. It
might even be able to temper the rage of the Arabs against one another.
Not until their
sense of peoplehood conquers their rage against one another will they be
in the psychological position to think of peace with Israel. I doubt this
will happen any time soon. This is the end of Palestine, the bitter end.

Martin Peretz is editor-in-chief of The New Republic.


6. Nice piece:
http://www.jewishpress.com/page.do/21976/The_Rupture.html
Especially:
Here.s a pop quiz: Before 1967, what did the Arabs in Judea and Samaria
call themselves?

1) Brooklynites

2) Klingons

3) Jordanians

4) Palestinians


7. Moonbrits:
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=28931

8. I kind of liked this:
http://la.indymedia.org/uploads/2007/06/abbas-olmert_two-step.jpgmid.jpg


9. The Un-Entebbe:
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1182409647133&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull

10. June 28, 2007


COMMENTARY

An Academic Hijacking
By ALAN M. DERSHOWITZ
June 28, 2007; Page A13

When a relatively small number of British academics tried to hijack the
traditional trade union agenda of the British University and College Union
by calling for an academic boycott of Israel, they expected little
opposition. The union, after all, is British, and the nation whose
academics were to be boycotted is Israel.

Anti-Israel sentiment among left-wing academics, journalists, and
politicians in Britain is politically correct and relatively
uncontroversial (as is anti-American sentiment). Several years earlier, a
petition to boycott several Israeli universities initially passed but was
later rescinded, and the British National Union of Journalists has also
voted to boycott Israeli products. At about the same time, a British
academic journal fired two of its board members apparently because they
were Israeli Jews. Some popular British political leaders, most
notoriously, London's Mayor "Red Ken" Livingstone, have made anti-Israel
statements that border on anti-Semitism, in one instance comparing a
Jewish journalist to a Nazi "war criminal."


Many of the academics who have been pushing the boycott most energetically
are members of hard-left socialist-worker groups. These radicals devote
more time and energy to international issues than to the domestic welfare
of their own members, who have suffered a serious decline in salary and
working conditions. Their pet peeve, sometimes it appears their only
peeve, is the Israeli occupation -- not of the West Bank and, before its
return, of Gaza but rather of all of Palestine, including Tel Aviv and
Jerusalem. These are not advocates of the two-state solution, but of a
one-state dissolution of Israel, with the resulting state being controlled
by Hamas.

In a world in which dissident academics are murdered in Iran, tortured in
Egypt, imprisoned in China and fired in many other parts of the world, the
British Union decided to boycott only academics from a country with as
much academic freedom as in Britain and far more academic freedom -- and
more actual academic dissent -- than in any Arab or Muslim country.
Indeed, Arabs have more academic (and journalistic) freedom in Israel,
even in the West Bank, than in any Arab or Muslim nation.

But these union activists couldn't care less about academic freedom, or
any other kind of freedom for that matter. Nor do they care much about the
actual plight of the Palestinians. If they did, they would be supporting
the Palestinian Authority in its efforts to make peace with Israel based
on mutual compromise, rather than Hamas in its futile efforts to destroy
Israel as well as the PA.

What they care about -- and all they seem to care about -- is Israel,
which they despise, without regard to what the Jewish state actually does
or fails to do. The fact that this boycott effort is being undertaken at
precisely the time when Israel has ended the occupation of Gaza and is
reaching out to the PA, and even to Syria, in an effort to make peace
proves that the boycott is not intended to protest specific Israeli
policies or actions, but rather to delegitimize and demonize Israel as a
democratic Jewish nation. One union activist said on a BBC radio show that
"Israel is worse than Stalinist Russia."

The boycotters know that Israel, without oil or other natural resources,
lives by its universities, research centers and other academic
institutions. After the U.S., Israeli scientists hold more patents than
any nation in the world, have more start-up companies listed on Nasdaq,
and export more life-saving medical technology.

Israelis have received more Nobel and other international science prizes
than all the Arab and Muslim nations combined. Cutting Israel's academics
off from collaboration with other academics would deal a death blow to the
Israeli high-tech economy, but it would also set back research and
academic collaboration throughout the world.

Moreover, many Israeli academics, precisely those who would be boycotted,
are at the forefront in advocating peace efforts. They, perhaps more than
others, understand the "peace dividend" the world would reap if Israeli
military expenses could be cut and the money devoted to life-saving
scientific research.

It is for these reasons that so many American academics, of all religious,
ideological and political backgrounds, reacted so strongly to the threat
of an academic boycott against Israel. As soon as it was reported, I
helped to draft a simple petition in which signatories agreed to regard
themselves as honorary Israeli academics for purposes of any boycott and
"decline to participate in any activity from which Israeli academics are
excluded."

Working with Prof. Steven Weinberg, a Nobel laureate in physics, and Ed
Beck, the president of Scholars For Peace in the Middle East, we
circulated the petition. I expected to gather several hundred signatures.

To my surprise, we have secured nearly 6,000 signatures, including those
of 20 Nobel Prize winners, 14 university presidents as well as several
heads of academic and professional societies. Three university presidents
-- Lee Bollinger of Columbia, Robert Birgeneau of Berkeley and John Sexton
of New York University -- have issued public statements declaring that if
Israeli universities are boycotted, their American universities should be
boycotted as well. Every day, I receive emails from other academics asking
to be included as honorary Israeli academics for purposes of any boycott.
We expect to reach at least 10,000 names on our petition.

It is fair to say, therefore, that the British boycott appears to be
backfiring. British academics are on notice that if they try to isolate
Israeli academics, it is they -- the British academics -- who will end up
being isolated from some of the world's most prominent academics and
scientists.

No one wants that to happen. Academics and scientists should collaborate
with each other in the interests of promoting knowledge. The hope is that
this ill-conceived boycott will be voted down by general membership of the
university and college union, and that those radicals who are pushing it
will be delegitimized in the eyes of the vast majority of British
academics who will not want to see their union hijacked by single-issue
bigots.

Mr. Dershowitz is a professor at Harvard University school of law and the
author of "Blasphemy -- How The Religious Right Is Hijacking Our
Declaration of Independence" (Wiley, 2007).

URL for this article:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118299766713051016.html

11. Finkelstein's Iranian Friends:
http://normanfinkelstein.com/article.php?pg=11&ar=1120


Wednesday, June 27, 2007

The Anti-Terror Campaign that Succeeded

http://www.jewishpress.com/page.do/21967/The_Anti%2DTerror_Campaign_That_Succeeded.html
The Anti-Terror Campaign That Succeeded

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
By: Steven Plaut Wednesday, June 27, 2007
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

After their military defeat by regular forces, the occupied population
produced terrorists who engaged in bombings, sniping, poisonings, and
other attacks on occupation forces and on the civilian population. They
operated as irregulars in small terror units, armed with automatic weapons
and bazookas.


Women and minors as young as eight participated in the terror attacks.
They attempted to build weapons of mass destruction, using chemical
poisons. They assassinated officials of the occupation regime. They had a
special obsession with torturing and murdering "collaborators." They
murdered hundreds of civilians, while thousands of the terrorists
themselves were killed by the occupation armed forces. The occupiers
responded to terror with brutality and force, sometimes using collective
punishment.

**************************************************************


The above does not refer to or describe the anti-American and anti-British
terror in Iraq and Afghanistan. Nor does it describe Palestinian terrorism
against Israel launched from the West Bank and Gaza.

What it does refer to is the campaign of terrorism directed against Allied
forces in Europe in the aftermath of the defeat of Nazi Germany. The
terrorists were members of a number of underground "resistance"
organizations attempting to punish the Allied "occupiers" and drive them
out. The most important of the terror groups was known as Werwolf (German
for werewolf).

Until recently, relatively little was known about groups like Werwolf. But
several books, particular those authored by Perry Biddiscombe, a professor
of history at the University of British Columbia, have shed light on the
activities of the groups and on the anti-terror strategies that ultimately
defeated them.

Most of what follows is based on the research of Biddiscombe. There are
valuable lessons to be learned from the campaign against the Werwolf, both
for the U.S.-led coalition fighting in Iraq and for Israel in its battles
against Arab terrorism.

For many years now the conventional wisdom has been that terrorism cannot
be defeated militarily, that it can only be stopped when its underlying
grievances are redressed and appeased. Moreover, the entire strategy of
dealing with terrorism militarily has long been under assault by the
Western chattering classes as ineffective and unjust.

Anti-terror tactics used by the contemporary Allies in Iraq and
Afghanistan or by Israel against its enemies have been denounced by the
media and by countless public figures, especially in Western Europe. But
the claim that terrorism and guerilla warfare cannot be defeated
militarily is false, as illustrated by the campaign against the Werwolf.

Origins and Tactics

Nazi preparations for a campaign of terrorism against the invading Allies
were underway by 1943. At first the intention was for irregular fighters
to serve as a diversionary force operating behind enemy lines. The name
"Werwolf" (also spelled "Wehrwolf") was chosen from a book by Hermann Lons
(Der Wehrwolf) glamorizing a 17th century German guerilla fighter.

The Werwolf developed into a large full-fledged terrorist organization,
operating under the command of the SS. It operated in "groups" consisting
of 4 to 6 fighters, with 6 to 10 groups forming a "sector" and 6 to 8
sectors forming a "section." At its height, the Werwolf organization
probably had about 6,000 fighters, though it could call on the support and
cooperation of other units such as the Volksturm, a militia of the elderly
and very young set up by Hitler near the end of the war. Himmler took
personal control of operations starting in 1944.

The technology of those terrorists was of course far more primitive than
that used by modern Middle East terrorists, but some of the similarities
in technique are striking. Beheadings were a common Werwolf tactic.
Decades before the pilfering of the museums of Baghdad, the Werwolf were
under orders to sabotage and destroy art galleries, museums and other
cultural institutions. While Germany never produced a campaign of suicide
bombers, Werwolf terrorists were equipped with cyanide tablets and
expected to commit suicide rather than be taken captive.

In the campaign against the Werwolf, an estimated 3,000-5,500 terrorists
were killed. Werwolf terrorism continued well after formal hostilities
ended and Germany had surrendered. In the German area of Italy, South
Tyrol, where a German separatist movement was active, sabotage, bombings
and Werwolf guerilla violence continued into the 1960's.

As part of the campaign of terrorism, German Red Cross ambulances
routinely carried arms and munitions, long before the Palestinians
perfected that technique. Buildings thought to be designated for use as
Allied barracks were mined, especially in Lorraine (where the attacks were
directed against the U.S. Third Army). Werwolf terrorists collected caches
of poison gases and chemical weapons, most of which were discovered by
Allied forces before they could be used.

The Werwolf used death squads and assassination hit teams, often against
German civilians whom the terrorists suspected of collaboration or
defeatism. Civil authorities in German towns under Allied occupation were
favorite targets. Priests, public officials, and even German villagers
flying white surrender flags were attacked.

Werwolf terrorists were each typically equipped with 15-20 pounds of
explosives and small arms, often including bazookas. Generally they
operated stealthily without uniform, in civilian clothes. They set up
caches of armaments in farms, caves, forests, and abandoned mines.
Interestingly, there was a female contingent of terrorists, a unit of
which, equipped with bazookas, played an important role in the last weeks
of fighting around Berlin.

Children were also frequently used in terror attacks. The Hitlerjugend, or
Hitler Youth, was one of the main sources of recruits for the Werwolf.
Entire units of Werwolf consisted of minors. Teenage Werwolf terrorists
were involved in bombing the Red Army barracks near Hindenberg. Child
snipers shot and threw grenades at advancing American forces. Himmler
himself invented an incentive system for Hitler Youth serving in the
Werwolf: 100 cigarettes for ten sniper kills; 20 days' leave for twenty
kills; a watch and Iron Cross for fifty kills.


A unit of 14-year-olds attacked U.S. forces near Nuremberg. "Operation
Nursery," a campaign against Werwolf terrorism by minors, was mounted by
U.S. and British troops and continued well into 1946.

The terrorists used a variety of techniques. In addition to sniping and
bombings, decapitation wires were popular - thin piano wire stretched
across a road just at the height of the necks of drivers of Allied
vehicles or motorcycles. Allied forces sometimes retaliated against such
attacks by beheading captured terrorists. In Schleswig-Holstein, the
British lopped off the heads of a dozen terrorists.

Mass poisoning was another favorite terrorist method. It was used with
horrific success especially, but not exclusively, against Red Army troops.
Between February and July 1945, 180 American troops were murdered with
poisoned liquor. The Werwolf would spike liquor and food with odorless
poison and wait for the troops to indulge. A special entity called the
KTI, or Criminal Technical Institute, would prepare the poisons.

While the armed conflict raged, Werwolf terrorists were active in
capturing, torturing and murdering enemy troops. But as the war drew to a
close, the Werwolf began to specialize in terrorizing German civilians
suspected of collaborating with or failing to resist the Allies' advance.

Werwolf terrorism was strongest on the Eastern front, as Soviet forces
threatened East Prussia, Silesia, and other areas regarded by Germans as
part of their heartland. The Werwolf even ran its own radio station.

Ferocious Response

How were those terrorists eventually defeated? With brutal military force
and counter-terrorism combined with a long-term program of denazification
of German civilians.

The Soviets were by far the least squeamish of the Allies when it came to
suppressing Werwolf terrorism. According to a Vatican report, "Russian
reprisals were terrible. Using flame-throwers the Russians destroyed
entire blocks of houses causing the deaths of hundreds of the
inhabitants."

Soviet troops dealt with the threat through mass executions, mass arrests,
marauding, and arson directed against German civilians. Hostages were
grabbed from areas where any Werwolf sabotage took place and often were
summarily executed. Any Germans - even hunters - possessing any weapons
were shot on the spot as terrorists. Any German witnessing terror attacks
who did not come forward to testify about them was shot. Those hiding
terrorists or weapons were shot and their homes burned to the ground.

As of October 1946, the Soviets were holding 3,336 Werwolf terrorists in
prison within the Soviet zone. The Soviets also crowded 240,000 suspected
Werwolf sympathizers into a prison camp (where fully a third simply
perished). In Jarmin in Pomerania, when German terrorists killed two
Soviet troops, the entire town was demolished. In Schivelbein, after a
Soviet general was killed by a sniper, the Soviets murdered every man in
town.

Soviet looting and marauding in occupied German areas continued
unrestrained into 1947. While such behavior may strike us as barbarous
retaliation, Biddiscombe describes it thus: "None the less, given what the
Werwolf was doing, or trying to do, the responses of the occupiers do not
lay beyond the realm of comprehension." The Soviets were still concerned
about threats of Werwolf sabotage and terror in Eastern Europe during the
1950's.

The French were second to the Soviets in the viciousness and ferocity of
their suppression of Werwolf terrorism. French soldiers pillaged German
areas as they fell under their control. Random beatings of Germans by the
French were common. The French forcibly expelled all German civilians from
numerous towns and villages in their area of control. General Le Clerc
issued an edict on November 25, 1944 to shoot five Germans for every act
of sniping near Strasbourg.

Following some Werwolf activity around Constance, French forces grabbed
400 hostages and executed two. Any building in the French zone with
Werwolf graffiti on it was immediately demolished. Owners had at most an
hour to remove such graffiti once it appeared in order to avoid such a
fate. Collective fines were imposed on German civilians for sabotage
activities in their area. Wholesale travel and curfew restrictions were
imposed on the entire German population.

While American troops generally avoided the excesses of the Soviets and
French, they were sharply criticized by the British for using excessive
brutality and force in suppressing the Werwolf. General Eisenhower ordered
the execution of all Werwolf fighters captured in civilian garb.

It was understood among U.S. troops that they had a green light for
applying frontier justice to terrorists, with no lawyers or trials. The
counterinsurgency manual issued by the Supreme Headquarters Allied
Expedition Force (SHAEF) recommended that troops simply ignore Geneva
Convention rules when dealing with the Werwolf.

SHAEF instructions allowed using captive Germans in forced labor; seizure
of German civilians as hostages; collective punishment; shooting of
hostages; and massive bombings of civilian areas containing terrorists.
Threats to shoot all curfew violators were commonly made. At Lutzkampen,
Allied troops threatened to burn down the village if there were any
violations of curfew.

When U.S. troops were attacked at Aschaffenburg in Lower Franconia, the
entire town was annihilated by Seventh Army artillery. In the fall of
1945, well after the surrender, U.S. forces still regarded Werwolf bands
as "one of the biggest potential threats to security in both the American
and Allied Zones of Occupation."

Around Stuttgart, members of Werwolf bazooka teams were shot on sight by
American troops. Massive artillery bombardment of civilian areas with
snipers was used whenever it was thought such action could prevent Allied
troop casualties. In Krefeld, one of the first towns taken by the
Americans, 120,000 civilians were rounded up and held in detention camps.

Other Allied forces were vicious in suppressing the Werwolf. The
Czechoslovaks routinely tortured and abused captured terrorists. The most
dramatic Czechoslovak actions took place in the Sudetenland. After some
Czechs were murdered by the Werwolf, local authorities threatened to shoot
all German refugees there who had arrived from Silesia.

In July 1945 a large explosion took place in Aussig an der Elbe, killing
50 people. Blaming local ethnic Germans, the authorities killed German
civilians in reprisal. The remaining German population was expelled from
the town. Slovaks and Poles often treated Germans little better.

Canadian forces were also brutal in suppressing terrorism. Canadian
General Chris Vokes carried out large-scale destruction of German property
in retaliation for guerilla activities. Towns from which sniper fire was
directed against Canadian troops were reduced to rubble. Orders were given
to demolish buildings housing snipers rather than risk the lives of
troops. German homes were bulldozed. No "solidarity" protesters picketed
the corporate headquarters of the companies manufacturing the bulldozers.

As is the case with the terrorism directed against U.S. troops in Iraq and
against Jews in Israel, Werwolf terror was never in and of itself an
existential threat, nor did it represent a serious military strategy
capable of defeating regular armies. Rather, it was designed to demoralize
- to defeat the enemy by generating growing casualties over long periods
and trigger defeatism among the enemy's home population.

While no one in his or her right mind would advocate some of the more
excessive means used to suppress the German terrorists of the late 1940's,
that era nevertheless teaches us that a determined no-nonsense campaign of
wiping out terrorism with armed force is capable of succeeding, even
against the most brutal of opponents. Determined denazification of fanatic
violent populations was also shown to work.

Such success is not easy, nor does it come cheaply.


Tuesday, June 26, 2007

Finkelstein hates not only Joos

1. Finkelstein does not only Jews:
Finkelstein's Sexism
By Alan M. Dershowitz
FrontPageMagazine.com | June 25, 2007


So now it turns out that the martyr of the academic hard left, Norman
Finkelstein, was denied tenure at DePaul University not so much because of
my critique of his non-scholarship, but in large part because of his overt
sexism.


According to a news story in today.s Chicago Sun-Times, a report filed
against his tenure by three members of the Political Science faculty
.claims that Finkelstein allegedly called a female staff member a
.bitch... The report also claimed that Finkelstein .shunned. colleagues
who disagreed with him and that his boorish conduct extended to
.dramatically closing his office door when his colleague arrives.. In
addition to describing his abusive sexist behavior toward a subordinate,
the report characterized Finkelstein as .mean spirit. and as
.unprofessional..

This negative report was suppressed by Finkelstein supporters who leaked
other, more favorable assessments.

Finkelstein refused to comment on the newly disclosed report, just as he
refused to confirm or deny that he had arranged for a neo-Nazi cartoonist
to draw a picture of me masturbating in ecstatic joy at dead Lebanese
civilians. He did apparently demand that the authors of the negative
report provide .proof. of his use of the b-word against a subordinate, but
that is his usual way of issuing a non-denial denial.

So in addition to being a Jewish anti-Semite, Finkelstein now emerges as a
left wing sexist bigot who is willing to use abusive words to a
subordinate. Will he still remain the darling of the hard Left now that
this darker sexist side has emerged?
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Printable.asp?ID=28881


2. Meet a nice professor:
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=28870


3. Human Rights under assault:
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1182409629420&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull


4. The Palestinian Gestapo chambers:
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=28861


5. Oslo trashed Gaza:
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=28862


6. Danger - Global COOLING:
http://www.newsmax.com/archives/ic/2007/6/21/123227.shtml?s=ic


7. Fatah Farce:
http://www.jihadwatch.org/dhimmiwatch/archives/017028.php


8. Daytime Fantasies
http://www.jewishsf.com/content/2-0-/module/displaystory/story_id/32875/format/html/displaystory.html


9. GIGO:
http://www.jewishexponent.com/article/13316/


10. Funding Hate:
http://web.israelinsider.com/Views/11552.htm


11. Very nice presentation:
http://www.terrorismawareness.org/what-really-happened/


12. R&D Now:
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1182409609548&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull


13. The pseudo-religious political party "SHAS", which just made Shimon
Peres Israel's President, has discovered a name unpure:
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3415783,00.html


14. The First Christian Zionist:
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3416287,00.html


15. Socialism vs Zionism:
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1182409638386&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull


16. Yaron London, a longtime far leftist, at last joins the University of
Duh?
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3417156,00.html


Thursday, June 21, 2007

Rushdie Apprehended by Speech Patrol!

1. Oldies reprint - the timing is right:

Israeli Police Arrest Salman Rushdie (June 25, 200?):

In a surprise development, it has just been learned that Israeli police,
tipped off by the Mossad, have arrested controversial author Salman
Rushdie. The exiled Iranian writer had been on a private visit to Israel,
shortly after being knighted in Britain.

Rushdie was apprehended while visiting the Middle East Studies department
at the Hebrew University. He had originally been scheduled to address the
political science department at Ben Gurion University, but the professors
there all announced that they had decided to boycott Rushdie's talk, since
Rushdie was offensive to Moslem sensitivities and politically incorrect.

Upon commencement of his talk at the University, Israeli police suddenly
broke into the lecture hall and dragged a handcuffed Rushdie away. He is
being held in isolation in an unspecified Israeli prison while his fate is
being decided. Rushdie's arrest came as part of Israel's new campaign to
imprison those whose expression and speech is offensive to Moslems. It
will be recalled that a fanatical woman named Tatiana Suskin was recently
sentenced to two years in Israeli prison for distributing posters in
Hebron that show the Prophet Mohammed as a pig. Unnamed sources have been
quoted as saying that Rushdie and Suskin will be sharing the same cell.

The Knesset immediately went into emergency session to debate the Rushdie
Affair. The government's recommendation is that Rushdie be handed over to
Iran as a goodwill gesture. Iran has an outstanding warrant for the arrest
of the author, and it is believed he would be immediately executed if
extradited to Iran.

The Hadash Communist Party has initiated a Knesset resolution that would
create an exemption to Israel's criminal code, which generally bans
capital punishment, and would allow Rushdie to be executed within Israel
itself, or at least turned over to the Palestinian Authority for
execution. The Likud and Labor Party are expected to vote in favor of the
Hadash proposal, while other parties are still undecided. Newly appointed
President Shimon Peres insisted that both arrests were part of
the breaking out of good relations in the New Middle East.

Congratulations to Israel have been coming in from all over the world. The
heads of the Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Congress in
the United States have issued statements supporting the arrest. "After
all," explained ADL chief Abraham Foxman, "Rushdie's Satanic Verses is at
least as objectionable as Suskin's pig poster. Israel is to be
congratulated for its defense of freedom of expression."

Reactions in the Moslem world have been mixed. While congratulating Israel
for the arrests of Suskin and Rushdie, the Prime Minister of Malaysia
added that this still did not excuse the international Jewish conspiracy
to control the world. Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, backed by
singer Cat Stevens, is quoted as saying that while both Rushdie and Suskin
deserve the death penalty for offensive statements, Judaism is still a
gutter religion. Jesse Jackson expressed satisfaction that Rushdie and
"that Hymie-girl Suskin" got what they had coming to them for making
offensive statements.

Palestinian Authority President Abu Mazen expressed satisfaction that
the Oslo peace process was at last producing some progress and forward
momentum.

2. Academic Integrity

As The Jewish Press reported, Norman Finkelstein was turned down for
tenure at DePaul University, a Catholic institution in Chicago (news
story, June 15). Finkelstein is best known for defaming Holocaust
survivors, calling them liars and thieves, and for claiming that Germany
is the victim of Jewish extortion. Finkelstein also praises Holocaust
denier David Irving and cheers when Israel is the victim of Islamic
terror.

Finkelstein tried to build an academic career on anti-Jewish hate and
defamation. DePaul made the proper and courageous decision to deny
Finkelstein tenure, maintaining serious academic standards.

But DePaul's courage just serves to dramatize the cowardice of others.
A few weeks back, the spokeswoman for Ben Gurion University wrote a letter
to The Jewish Press defending school.s lack of academic integrity and its
refusal to take actions similar to DePaul.s. At Ben Gurion University
there are numerous anti-Israel extremists who have built academic careers
by manufacturing anti-Israel political propaganda and calling it
scholarship.

DePaul has behaved in an honorable and principled manner. It is sad
when an Israeli university fails to do the same.

Jeff Weiss
http://www.jewishpress.com/page.do/21915/Letters_To_The_Editor.html

3. The Radical Evil Of The Palestinian Arab Population (Ben Shapiro On
The 21st Century Nazis Alert)
Townhall.com ^ | 06/20/2007 | Ben Shapiro

Posted on 06/19/2007 11:25:42 PM PDT by goldstategop

The battle over the Palestinian Arab territory in the Gaza Strip is a
battle between extremists and more radical extremists. Last week, the
extremists, led by Holocaust denier and Fatah strongman Mahmoud Abbas,
were ousted in a bloody coup by the radical extremists, Islamist terrorist
group Hamas.

Yet, instead of allowing Fatah and Hamas to slug it out, Secretary of
State Condoleezza Rice informed newly appointed Abbas frontman Prime
Minister Salam Fayyad that America would resume aid to the Palestinian
Authority. "I told the prime minister that we want to work with his
government and support his efforts to enforce the rule of law and to
ensure a better life for the Palestinian people," Rice told the media.

Ah, the fabled Palestinian people. The Palestinian people, who simply want
"a better life." The Palestinian people, who, President George W. Bush has
repeatedly informed us, "long for a society in which the y can raise the
ir children in peace and hope."

The Palestinian people, who support, fund and execute suicide bombings.
The Palestinian people, who dress the ir toddlers in bomb belts and the n
take family snapshots. The Palestinian people, who cheered on September 11
as the World Trade Center towers fell. The Palestinian people, who
followed terrorist extraordinaire Yasser Arafat, supported Saddam Hussein,
shredded the blooming rose that was once Christian Lebanon, and almost
toppled the Western-friendly Jordanian monarchy. The Palestinian people,
who destroy relics on the Temple Mount , openly call for the destruction
of the state of Israel , ally with Syria and Iran , and elect Hamas. The
Palestinian people, who teach the ir children that the Holocaust is a
fairy tale, and that Jews routinely poison Palestinian candy. The
Palestinian people, who stage injuries in order to solicit Western media
sympathy, and the n roar madly as the y hold up the ir hands, red with the
blood of murdered Israeli soldiers.

The idea of an entire population corrupted by bloodthirsty anti-Semitism
and anti-Americanism violates modern ideas of politics. According to the
Bush administration, the problem with the Palestinian Arabs isn't the
Palestinian Arabs -- it's the ir leadership. During Yasser Arafat's
tenure, the problem was Yasser Arafat, not the hundreds of thousands who
followed him. Now the problem is Hamas, not the hundreds of thousands who
supported and elected the m.

The problem runs deeper than a few figureheads. The Palestinian Arab
population is rotten to the core. There are many to be blamed: Yasser
Arafat, who lined his pockets with cash and subsidized murder while
playing the victim of oppression. An Arab world that refused to absorb the
Palestinian population, preferring to use it as a political pawn against
Israel . The United Nations, which suckled the Palestinian Arab population
into dependency at the international teat. Israel , for emboldening the
Palestinian Arabs by conceding to the m.

But in the end, the blame must lie with the Palestinian Arabs the mselves.
They have accepted the ir role with relish. They are as responsible for
the ir government's longstanding evil as the Germans were for the Nazis'.

It is far more convenient, however, for the Bush administration and the
international community to treat the Palestinian Arabs' thoroughgoing
radicalism as a top-down problem. Throw a bit of money at the Holocaust
denier, pressure Israel into concessions and hope that the Palestinian
Arabs will abandon the ir attachment to Islamofascism, the logic runs.

Such policy demonstrates an adolescent understanding of Palestinian Arab
motivation. Palestinian Arabs will not be bribed: The West has bribed the
m for decades, and the Palestinian Arabs have demonstrated the ir
preference for suicide bombing over working toilets. Palestinian Arabs
will not be moderated: Israel has ceded land continuously since 1993, and
the Palestinian Arabs have demonstrated the ir preference for murder over
peace. Palestinian Arabs must be fought on the ir own terms: as a people
dedicated to an evil cause.

So far, Israel and America have willfully blinded the mselves to the harsh
reality of popular evil. They have refused to come to terms with the harsh
fact that collective choices require collective treatment.

Treating collective problems as problems of individuals is a vacuous
panacea. Waiting for Arafat to die of old age did not moderate the
Palestinian Arabs; supporting one radical over ano the r will not moderate
the m, ei the r. The Palestinian Arab population breeds terrorism,
anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism. If Israel and America refuse to
recognize that simple truth, the y will continue to pay the price in blood
and treasure.


4. You will all be happy to hear who the guest speaker is to be at Sapir
College, a college in Israel. One of its "lecturers" is Eyal Sivan, the
fanatical anti-Israel far-leftiest film maker who cussed his way thru the
Knesset as we recently reported. Well, he decided to host terrorist Tali
Fahima, who spent time in prison for helping her Palestinian boyfriend
plan terror atrocities, as his special guest lecturer at the college.
Story in Hebrew is reported here:
http://www.nrg.co.il/online/1/ART1/597/150.html
Want to tell the bosses at the college what you think of their turning its
campus into a Hamas training grounds?
Write Prof. Zeev Tzahor, President, and Dr. Nachmi Paz Director,
Fax 972 -8- 6899412
EMail: info@sapir.ac.il
Phone 972-8-6802764

Let them know their chances of ever doing any fund raising in YOUR
continent!


Wednesday, June 20, 2007

The Left's New Vision

1. The Left's New Vision:
Two states for two peoples:

http://img160.imageshack.us/img160/9894/untitledcopyjt7.jpg


2. June 20, 2007
COMMENTARY

Fatah Isn't the Answer
By MICHAEL OREN
June 20, 2007; Page A17

America and its Middle Eastern allies have every reason to panic. The
green flags of Hamas are furling over Gaza and the al-Fatah forces trained
and financed by the United States have ignominiously fled. Fears are rife
that Iranian-backed and Syrian-hosted terror will next achieve dominance
over the West Bank and proceed to undermine the pro-Western governments of
Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt and the Gulf.

To avert this catastrophe, the U.S. has joined with the Israelis and the
Europeans in resuming the flow of hundreds of millions of dollars in
financial aid to the Palestinian Authority under the leadership of its
Fatah president, Mahmoud Abbas, and accelerating talks for the
establishment of a West Bank Palestinian state. The goal is to provide
Palestinians with an affluent, secular and peaceful alternative to Hamas,
and persuade Gazans to return to the Fatah fold. But the policy ignores
every lesson of the abortive peace process to date as well as Fatah's
monumental corruption, jihadism and militancy. Indeed, any sovereign
edifice built on the rotten foundations of the Palestinian Authority is
doomed to implode, enhancing, rather than diminishing, Hamas's influence.


Gunmen from the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades. Is funding them the path to
peace?
Since its creation by the so-called Oslo Accords of 1993, the PA has
garnered more international aid than any entity in modern history -- more,
per capita, than the European states under the Marshall Plan. The lion's
share of this fortune has been siphoned into the private accounts of Fatah
leaders or used to pay off the commanders of some 16 semi-autonomous
militias. The PA also maintains an estimated 60,000 uniformed gunmen on
its payroll, giving the West Bank the world's highest percentage of
policemen-to-population.

The Palestinian people, meanwhile, languish in ever-deepening poverty and
unemployment, while lawlessness plagues Palestinian streets. The unbridled
corruption of the PA and its Fatah headmen served as a principal cause of
Hamas's electoral victory in 2006, as well its takeover of Gaza. Viewers
of Hamas television have recently been treated to tours of the lavish
villas maintained by Fatah officials in the Strip, and video clips showing
PA policemen, more abundantly armed and more numerous than Hamas's troops,
fleeing at the first sign of battle.

Though Fatah originally aspired to replace Israel with a secular,
democratic state in Palestine, the organization refashioned itself in
1990s as an Islamic movement, embracing the lexicon of jihad. Hundreds of
mosques were built with public funds, and imams were hired to spread the
message of martyrdom and the hatred of Christians and Jews. These themes
became the staple of the official PA media, inciting the suicide bombings
that began in 2000 and poisoning an entire generation of Palestinian
youth. Ironically, the Islamization of Fatah legitimized Hamas and
contributed to the cadres of religious extremists who are now defying its
authority.

In addition to its fiscal malfeasance and Islamic radicalism, Fatah has
never fulfilled its pledges to crack down on terror. Though Mahmoud Abbas
routinely criticizes Palestinian terrorist attacks as "contrary to the
Palestinian national interest" -- not an affront to morality and
international law -- he has never disavowed the al-Aqsa Brigades, a Fatah
affiliate responsible for some of the bloodiest attacks against Israeli
civilians.

In the past, such assaults have served as a means of maintaining Fatah's
legitimacy as a resistance movement and countering charges that the
organization sold out to America and Israel. In fact, a distinct
correlation exists between the amount of support that Fatah receives from
the West and its need to prove its "Palestinianess" through terror.

In view of its performance over the past 14 years, the Palestinian
Authority under Fatah can be counted on to squander most or all of the
vast sums now being given to it by the U.S. and the international
community. More gunmen will be hired and better weapons procured, but in
the absence of a unified command and a leadership worth fighting for, PA
soldiers will perform no more credibly than they did in Gaza. Mr. Abbas
will continue to denounce terror while ignoring the terrorist units within
his own organization, while PA imams will persist in preaching their
jihadist sermons.

In response, Israel will be precluded from lifting the checkpoints that
not only block suicide bombers but hinder communication between
Palestinian cities. Impeded by Palestinian attacks and Israeli
countermeasures, the peace talks will inexorably grind to a halt. In the
end, the Palestinian people will remain impoverished, divided and
stateless, and more than ever amenable to the purist polity of Hamas.

If funding and empowering Fatah is not a viable option for the U.S., what
other courses might the administration take? Clearly no progress toward
Palestinian statehood can be made before Fatah has reformed itself
financially, ideologically and structurally. Even under the most
propitious circumstances this process is certain to take many years --
longer if economic aid and political support are provided to the PA
unconditionally. Similarly, proposals for containing Hamas's influence by
stationing an international force along the Gaza border are unlikely to
succeed if for no other reason than Hamas's avowed determination to resist
such a deployment. Yet the need to combat Hamas and provide Palestinians
with an attractive diplomatic horizon remains acute. There is,
fortunately, an interim answer.

The U.S., together with its Quartet partners, can work to establish areas
of extensive Palestinian autonomy in the West Bank. Within these
districts, local Palestinian leaders will be fully empowered to manage all
aspects of daily life including health, education and resource management.
A national assembly, comprised of representatives from each district, will
meet regularly to deliberate issues of West Bank-wide concern. Security,
however, will be jointly administered by Israel and Jordan. The Jordanian
involvement is crucial to convincing Palestinians that the status quo of
occupation has ended and they may in the future assume full responsibility
for their internal defense. Such an arrangement will benefit Jordan as
well, by facilitating its efforts to fight radicalism and stem the flight
of Palestinians over its borders.

Visiting Washington this week, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert
described the Hamas conquest of Gaza as an opportunity for the
Palestinians. This indeed may be the case, but not by resurrecting
long-failed policies and imposing a state structure on a corrupt and
incompetent Fatah. Doing so is tantamount to investing in the Titanic.
Significant opportunities do, however, exist for policy makers --
American, Israeli, and Palestinian -- who are willing to consider new
paradigms and incremental steps toward the realization of a durable peace.

Mr. Oren is a senior fellow at the Shalem Center and the author of "Power,
Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East, 1776 to the Present"
(Norton, 2007).

URL for this article:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118230210250741414.html


3. Fighting the Jihadniks in Court:
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=28816


4. Afterword on Finkelstein affair:
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/alan_dershowitz/2007/06/finkelstein_the_case_against.html


5. UC Intifada:
http://frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=28787


6. The world of the make pretend (Oslo):
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1181813065538&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull


7. Very good blog page on the nefarious Eyal Sivan (we have commented on
him earlier)
http://imshin.net/?p=684

Earlier material:

http://zioncon.blogspot.com/2007/04/protocols-of-herr-sivan.html
http://atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com/atlas_shrugs/2006/07/court_dismisses.html
http://myrightword.blogspot.com/search/label/Eyal%20Sivan


8. Boycotting universities
http://www.economist.com/world/international/displaystory.cfm?story_id=9340508&CFID=7728041&CFTOKEN=23416611
Slamming Israel, giving Palestinians a free pass


9. Cartoon-Gate:
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3414643,00.html


Monday, June 18, 2007

Two States for Two Terrorist Organizations?

1.
So let's see if we understand the set of "solutions" being bandied about
for resolving the Arab war against Israel and Jewish self-determination.

First there was the "Two-States for Two Peoples" solution, Part A. That
was the one adopted in 1921, when the eastern part of Mandatory Palestine
was separated from the western part, with the west earmarked to become a
Jewish homeland and the eastern part an Arab state, Transjordan. Then
came the "Two States for Two Peoples" solution, Part B, in 1947 when the
UN proposed created yet another Arab state and a Jewish state out of
Western Palestine. It should have been called three states for two
peoples (the Jewish and Arab peoples), or - better yet - 23 states for two
peoples (22 states for the Arab people and one state for the Jewish
people), two of those Arab states in Palestine.

Then there is the "one state solution" currently being promoted by the
Israeli self-hating Left and the Jews for a Second Holocaust, also known
as the Rwanda Solution, where western Palestine would become a single
Islamofascist terrorist state with an Arab majority and a Jewish minority,
and the Jewish minority would face a Rwanda style fate. Naturally, every
Neo-Nazi and anti-Semite on earth likes THAT solution.

Then in recent weeks the Israeli Moonbatocracy has come up with a new
idea. TWO different states for the imaginary "Palestinian people," one
for the Hamas in the Gaza Strip and the second in the West Bank for the
Fat'h.

I kid you not.

The Israeli media are filled with people raising that as a serious
suggestion. The idea arose after the Hamas turned Gaza into a killing
field for Fat'h members. This weeks thousands of Fat'h members are
begging to be allowed to enter the genocidal Zionist entity in order to
take asylum there from the Hamas, even inside Israeli prisons, so that
their lives may be saved. (Those prisons are not so bad, by the way,
with three square meals a day and nice DVDs.) And not even a smirk of
embarrassment from all those Israel bashers long claiming that the
"Palestinians" are victims of ISRAELI brutality!

So to solve the "problems" of these po' Palestinians, the newest peace
proposal being debated should be called "Two States for two Terrorist
Organizations." There is one example of such a proposal here in Hebrew:

http://www.nrg.co.il/online/1/ART1/596/496.html

You know, the newest
version of Good Terrorist Bad Terrorist. Israel would make peace with the
Fat'h good terrorists in the West Bank and later this would embarrass
Hamastan into joining the peace.

Now I know what you are thinking and that is that this proposal does not
go nearly far enough. After all, if each "Palestinian" terrorist
organization is entitled to self-determination in the Lands of Israel,
then why limit things to Hamastan in Gaza, and Fat'h-land in the West
Bank?

What about the terrorists of Islamic Jihad? Aren't they also in
desperate need of national self-determination? Don't they need their own
state? So I propose turning Ramat Aviv over to them, including and
especially the Tel Aviv University campus. I mean, it is not like there
will have to be a lot of changes made on campus after they take over! As
for Al-Qaida, clearly Ben Gurion University should be converted into their
new nation-state. The Hezbollah will have to settle for the University
of Haifa. The Taliban can take the Hebrew University.

Oh, there is one other conceivable alternative to all the above
"solutions", but it is not one any Israeli political leader is considering
or proposing. It is R&D = Re-Occupation and De-Nazification.

As it turns out, THAT is the only proposal that could work, and the only
one not based upon endless Oslo-style self-delusion and make-pretend.
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Blogs/Blog.aspx/1#2195


2. Today's Funniest Story:
(from Jerusalem Post)

Looters raid Arafat's home, steal his Nobel Peace Prize

By KHALED ABU TOAMEH

Talkbacks for this article: 68

Enraged Fatah leaders on Saturday accused Hamas militiamen of looting the
home of former Palestinian Authority chairman Yasser Arafat in Gaza City.

"They stole almost everything inside the house, including Arafat's Nobel
Peace Prize medal," said Ramallah-based Fatah spokesman Ahmed Abdel
Rahman. "Hamas militiamen and gangsters blew up the main entrance to the
house before storming it. They stole many of Arafat's documents and files,
gifts he had received from world leaders and even his military outfits."

Abdel Rahman said the attackers also raided the second floor of the house
and stole the personal belongings of his widow, Suha, and daughter, Zahwa.
"They stole all the widow's clothes and shoes," he added. "They also took
Arafat's pictures with his daughter."


Eyewitnesses told The Jerusalem Post that dozens of Palestinians
participated in the raid, which took place late Friday.

"Most of the looters were just ordinary citizens," they said. "They stole
almost everything, including furniture, tiles, water pipes, closets and
beds."

According to the Fatah spokesman, the raid on Arafat's house, which has
been empty since 2001, occurred despite promises from Syria-based Hamas
leader Khaled Mashaal to prevent such an attack.

"The Palestinian people will never forgive the Hamas gangs for looting the
home of the Palestinian people's great leader, Yasser Arafat," Abdel
Rahman said. "This crime will remain a stain of disgrace on the forehead
of Hamas and its despicable gangs."

The homes of several other Fatah leaders have also been looted over the
past few days, Palestinian reporters in Gaza City said over the weekend.
Among them are the homes of Muhammad Dahlan and Intisar al-Wazir (Um
Jihad).

Wazir complained that looters stole her jewelry, furniture, clothes and
family albums and the personal belongings of her husband, Khalil al-Wazir
(Abu Jihad), a top PLO leader who was assassinated by Israel in 1988 in
Tunis.

She said the looting occurred in broad daylight and under the watchful eye
of Hamas militiamen. "We don't feel secure any more," she said. "We fear
for our lives and property."

The Popular Resistance Committees, an alliance of various armed groups,
announced over the weekend that its men stormed Dahlan's house and
confiscated a suitcase full of gold, forged US and Pakistani passports and
an ID card belonging to Nissim Toledano, an Israeli Border Police officer
from Lod who was kidnapped and murdered by Hamas in December 1992.

Following the raid, hundreds of Palestinians rampaged the house and stole
all of Dahlan's furniture and clothes.

Dahlan and some 80 top Fatah officials are now staying in hotels in
Ramallah. On Friday night, a group of 15 senior Fatah security commanders
arrived in the city after Israel gave them permission to leave the Gaza
Strip. At least 150 other Fatah security commanders and activists have
fled to Egypt aboard fishing boats.

The Fatah officials who fled to Ramallah had been abducted by Hamas
militiamen late Thursday night and released a few hours later. They
include Jamal Kayed, commander of the PA's National Security Force; Musbah
al-Buhaisi, commander of Abbas's Presidential Guard, and his deputy,
Hamoudeh al-Sheikh; Tawfik Abu Khoussa, Fatah's spokesman in the Gaza
Strip; and Majed Abu Shamalah, a Fatah legislator.

"What's happening in the Gaza Strip these days reminds me of the first
days after the US invasion of Baghdad," said Omar al-Ghul, a columnist
from Gaza City. "In Baghdad, the Iraqis stole everything they could get
their hands on inside Iraqi ministries and institutions. And in Gaza City
the Palestinians stormed security installations and stole everything,
including windows, doors and food."

see photo on

http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1181813047962&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull

3.

http://www.democracy-project.com/archives/003361.html

The High Cost of Free Speech
By Dr. Rachel Ehrenfeld

4. Some leading Jews for the Destruction of Israel and Murder of Jews:
http://vineyardsaker.blogspot.com/2007/06/uk-jews-and-israelis-behind-anti-israel.html

5. The Eclipse of Reason:
http://vineyardsaker.blogspot.com/2007/06/uk-jews-and-israelis-behind-anti-israel.html


6. Speaking of Isaac Newton:
MAN OF THE MILLENNIUM
By Jeff Jacoby
The Boston Globe


December 20, 1999


In 1665, an outbreak of plague forced Cambridge University to
temporarily close its doors. Isaac Newton, a 23-year-old mathematics
student who had just earned his B.A., returned to his family's estate
in
Lincolnshire, where he spent the next 18 months thinking and studying
alone. Those 18 months of study and thought are without parallel in the
past 1,000 years.


To begin with, Newton discovered the composition of light. For
centuries, the received wisdom had held that white light was
homogeneous
and "pure," and that colors appeared when white light was altered.
Newton overthrew the old thinking by proving that white light is a
blend
of all colors. It is only when light rays are refracted at different
angles that colors become visible. All of modern optics builds upon
Newton's discovery.


He turned his attention to movement and inertia and worked out the
threeessential laws of motion. The first holds that bodies in motion
(or
at rest) will stay in motion (or at rest) until acted upon by an
outside
force. The second stated the relationship among velocity, acceleration,
and time. The most famous is the third, known to everyone: For every
action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. All of modern physics
grows out of Newton's laws.


The mathematics required to derive the laws of motion -- which
involved multiple variables with continuously changing quantities --
did
not exist in Newton's day. So he invented an entirely new mathematical
discipline: the calculus. (Working independently, the German scholar
Gottfried Leibniz would later devise it as well.) Modern mathematics
without the calculus is impossible to imagine.


Any of these achievements, let alone all three, would have assured
Newton's fame. But the heights he scaled were greater still.


In his garden one day, an apple really did fall. Newton pondered the
attraction that pulled it to the earth. It was a force that seemed to
operate even at great distances -- an apple dropping from the highest
tree imaginable would still hit the ground. How far out did this force
reach? All the way to -- say -- the moon? Yet the moon didn't fall to
the earth, but traveled around it instead. Why?


The problem of celestial movement vexed the intellectuals of
Newton's
day. They envisioned a globe being swung on a chain, circling round and
round, centripetal force holding it in a steady orbit. Cut the chain
and
the circular motion immediately stops -- the globe flies off in a
straight line. But heavenly bodies don't fly off in straight lines.
Though untethered by chains, they move in fixed orbits. What makes that
possible?


Alone in Lincolnshire, reasoning and calculating, Newton solved the
puzzle by discovering the law of gravity. The same force that pulls an
apple to the ground holds distant planets in their paths. Gravitation
was the chain linking the moon to the earth, the planets to the sun. It
couldn't be seen or touched, but it could be proved with an elegant
mathematical formula. And that formula, Newton would later write,
"allows me to explain the system of the world."


For nearly 20 years, Newton told no one of his discovery. When he
finally published his great treatise on motion and gravitation, *
Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica,* or "Mathematical
Principles of Natural Philosophy," the effect was seismic. Alan Charles
Kors, the renowned scholar of Western thought at the University of
Pennsylvania, calls Newton's discovery "one of the most extraordinary
scientific syntheses in the history of the human mind."


The *Principia* rocked Western civilization, for it showed that the
universe was lawful, logical -- above all, knowable. To a deeply pious
Europe, it meant that mere mortals could perceive the very blueprint of
Creation. To study the world empirically, to understand its workings,
was to come closer to God. Newton's legacy was nothing less than the
triumph of the scientific method, and with it, the transformations of
the modern world.


In a famous couplet, Alexander Pope summarized Newton's towering
achievement:


Nature and Nature's laws lay hid in night,
God said, "Let Newton be!" -- and all was light."

See also this:

http://www.amazon.com/Theology-International-Archives-internationales-dhistoire/dp/0792349962


Sunday, June 17, 2007

Sir Isaac Newton and the SHMA

1. In recent years, one of the most amusing "causes" of the Whacky
Secularist Left has been attacking "intelligent design".

The "intelligent design"
school basically argues that Darwin's theory of evolution is at best
incomplete because it does not explain how events whose likelihood is
infinitesimally small, events that should occur at random only once in
quadrillions of years (while the universe itself is nowhere near that
all), seem to have occurred all the time. That being the case, some
other principle or force must have trumped mere randomness in the process
of creation and development of life, including in evolution. I am no
biologist, Senator, so I wiill not attempt to review all the details of
the debate.

The problem is that the Radical Secularist Left does not see "intelligent
design" as merely an alternative point of view or even as a discredited
(in their opinion) school of thought. Instead, they see it as backdoor
"creationism", anti-science, and an attempt to short-circuit the
Constitution in the US to impose religion in the biology class. And so
they have set up an Inquisition against the heresy. There have been
numerous court petitions to prohibit even the mention of intelligent
design as a minority opinion inside classrooms.

In reality, the hysteria and ad hominem attacks coming from the radical
secularists against intelligent design are what constitute anti-rational
non-science and witchcraft. By insisting
that science is post-modern totalitarianism, they believe that anyone
who believes in anything religious or in beliefs outside the realm of
empiricism is a medieval archaic troglodyte. Never mind that empiricism
is in fact the starting point of the "intelligent design" "heresy." And
heresy is what the radical want the world to regard it. Who are the
real anti-rationalists here?

Now since scientific empiricism is the only legitimate form of inquiry and
thought in the opinion of the radical secularists, those who argue
otherwise, even if they are noted scientists, must be attacked, defamed,
discredited.

All of which brings me to Sir Isaac Newton. Simply put, I want to see
what the forces of radical secularist intolerance and darkness will have
to say about Sir Isaac NOW.

Sir Isaac of course was the father of modern science and especially
physics. With the possible but not certain exception of Einstein, Newton
contributed more to science and modern thought than any other human.

But the radical secularists are going to have a problem with him.

This article at Haaretz
(http://haaretz.com/hasen/spages/871784.html) describes
an exhibit of the papers and letters of Sir Isaac Newton now on exhibit
at the Hebrew University. Newton was not only a believer in God, but an
avid reader and researcher of the Bible. According to the curator of the
event:
'"During the scientific revolution, religion and science were entwined with
each other," Ben-Menachem explains. "Scientists of the 17th century did
not fight religion; most scientific giants were religious. Newton was also
a very religious man and, as opposed to other learned people of his day,
he even believed in a personal God.'

Accordingly, he would be prohibited from teaching science in many a public
school.

"Newton understood nature as a book that we can decipher, as the Holy
Scriptures are read. He considered himself a kind of prophet of the
natural sciences. In both these areas he looked for the hidden message to
be unraveled."

The papers include quite a few interesting things. In one, Newton had
evidently written in his own hand the phrase in Hebrew: "Barukh Shem Kavod
Malkhuto L'olam Va'ed", the verse repeated after the daily reecitations of
the "SHMA" (among other times). That is correct; Sir Isaac Newton either
wrote or had someone write out for him one of the basic pronouncements of
Jewish theological belief, in his scientific papers.

You can see the phrase in question here:
http://jnul.huji.ac.il/heb/images/newton.jpg and here

http://www.haaretz.co.il/hasite/spages/871781.html
More information about the exhibit appears here:
http://jnul.huji.ac.il/eng/events.html

Newton would scoff at the attempts by the radical secularists to demonize
"intelligent design".

I wonder what he would have to say about the British anti-Semites seeking
to boycott those who recite that same phrase at least twice a day.

2. Meanwhile Israel's own anti-democratic Left has a new jihad against
freedom of speech in Israel. Leftist "human rights organizations", the
sort that believe that Arabs have the human right to murder Jews but Jews
do not have the human right to defend themselves, have filed a court
petition to abolish freedom of speech for those who work in the State
Prosecutor's Office (see http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/871783.html).

It seems two lawyers for the Prosecutor's Office made comments about the
REAL agenda of several anti-Israel "human rights" groups that the Left did
not like. The two lawyers wrote to the court that "[the Association
for Civil Rights in Israel] and Adalah [an anti-Israel Arab lobby
grouyp] are
comfortable with the possibility of a prime minister, cabinet minister or
MP from Hamas ordering Qassam rockets launched at Sderot, [abducted
Israeli soldier] Gilad Shalit not being released and as many Israeli
citizens as possible killed, in the spirit of the Hamas charter, while at
the same time being entitled to reside permanently in Israel and to enjoy
National Insurance Institute allowances and complete freedom of movement
in the country." For more on the ACRI, see this

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/3469.

Haaretz reports that the comments were made as Hamas members in the
Palestinian parliament appeal against the Interior Ministry's revocation
of their permanent residency status in East Jerusalem.

So in other words, the eight radical groups filing the court petition want
to make it illegal for members of the Prosector's Office to tell the truth
and relay clear facts and unambiguous truths.

The groups filing the petition are all foreign-financed anti-Israel
pro-terror propaganda organizations: The Public Committee Against Torture
in Israel; B'Tselem; Amnesty International, Israel Section; Gisha: Center
for the Legal Protection of Freedom of Movement; HaMoked Center for the
Defense of the Individual; Yesh Din - Volunteers for Human Rights;
Physicians for Human Rights and Rabbis for Human Rights.

You may wish to write the Minister of Justice and urge him to ignore the
"petition" of these people and - instead - to prosecute THEM for insulting
public figures (a crime in Israel):

Ministry Of Justice - Head Office
mancal@justice.gov.il

Tel : 02-6466340/321
Fax : 02-6466357
Address : Salah -a - Din 29 P.O.Box 49029 Jerusalem 91490


3. Boycotters:
http://haaretz.com/hasen/spages/871784.html


Friday, June 15, 2007

Hamastan

1. In Britain (and France), frivolous anti-Zionist SLAPP suits filed by
anti-Semites get thrown out of court.
See http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=28726
If only that were the case in Israel.


2. Furry Finkelsteins:
http://zalmi.blogspot.com/2007/06/posterboys-of-arab-boycott.html


3. Beeb Boob C:
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/122764


4. Anti-Boycott Brits:
http://www.thes.co.uk/current_edition/story.aspx?story_id=2037095


5. The Cockburn Cockroaches are rallying:
http://counterpunch.com/christison06132007.html


6. Anti-Zionist Scum of all sorts:
http://www.jewishworldreview.com/0607/tobin061307.php3
What a surprise - the Moonbrits who boycott Israel want to see Israel
destroyed:
http://haaretz.com/hasen/spages/871413.html


7. Hamastan:
June 15, 2007

Hamastan
By BARRY RUBIN
June 15, 2007; Page A16

The seizure of the Gaza Strip by Hamas opens a new period in the history
of the Arab-Israeli conflict and the Middle East. A new Islamist state is
being established and it doesn't bode well for the West or regional
stability.

And yet we can hope that something will be learned from this experience.
Israel's left-leaning Ha'aretz expresses the lesson with what some would
call British understatement: "Anyone in Israel still contemplating the
question of a Palestinian partner might also need to do some rethinking.
In Gaza, at least, it seems there is nobody left for Israel to talk to."

In 2000, Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat turned down President Bill
Clinton's offer of an independent Palestinian state with its capital in
east Jerusalem and an opening offer of $23 billion in aid. Ever since then
it has been clear that there is no diplomatic solution for the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Arafat's renewal of terrorist violence only
reinforced this point.

The problem was not just Arafat, but the overall strategy of the
Fatah-dominated Palestinian movement. Since the peace process began in
1993 with the Oslo Accords, that leadership made hardly a single effort to
move Palestinian society toward peace and moderation. Fatah did have an
attractive alternative it could have offered: We will get a state, return
the refugees to live in it, develop our economy and culture and enjoy
large-scale international aid in exchange for ending the conflict.

Instead it continued to glorify violence, spread hatred of Israel and
America, and raise a new generation with a belief in eventual "total"
victory and the extinction of Israel. After Arafat died, Fatah remained
incompetent and corrupt but lacked a strong leader. Unable to obtain a
state, unwilling to make peace and uninterested in governing well, Fatah
dug its own grave. Why should anyone be surprised that Hamas replaced it?
At most, Israel's withdrawal from the Gaza Strip and American pressure to
hold fair elections only accelerated this process.

There has been another important lesson in this recent history: Most of
the Arab states and movements need the conflict to continue. After all,
what would mismanaging dictatorial regimes do without having Israel as a
scapegoat? If, for example, Syria made peace with Israel in exchange for
getting back the Golan Heights, it would be the beginning of the end for
that regime. Within weeks, its people would be demanding human rights and
free-enterprise economic reforms. The regime could not use anti-Israel and
anti-American demons as an excuse to continue the dictatorship, deprive
its people of rights and material well-being, and mobilize support. The
same applies to radical Islamist movements seeking to gain power.

So let's get this straight: There is no near-term solution to the
Arab-Israeli conflict. There is no Palestinian side with which a
compromise agreement can be negotiated. Many Arab states seek to exploit
the conflict. Others would like to make peace but are too scared, and it
is to the West's discredit that such states don't believe that it can or
will protect them.

There are several key policy conclusions to be drawn from the Hamas
triumph. First, Western and especially U.S. policy must get beyond an
obsession with solving this conflict. It is going to go on for decades.
Peace plans will go nowhere. Hamas will not be persuaded to moderate --
why should it when it expects victory at home and appeasement from Europe?
Hamas is the enemy, just as much as al Qaeda, because it is part of the
radical Islamist effort to seize control of the region, overthrow anything
even vaguely moderate, and expel any Western influence.

Second, since Palestinian politics have clearly returned to a pre-1993
status, so must Western and U.S. policy. This means no Western aid and no
diplomatic support until their leaders change policies. The Palestinian
movement can only earn financial help and political backing on the very
distant day when it accepts Israel's right to exist, stops endorsing and
using terrorism, and is serious about negotiating a real two-state
solution.

Third, it is time to support Israel proudly and fully. Israel has done
everything possible for peace, taking great risks to do so. But the idea
that evenhanded, confidence-building behavior can broker peace is
regrettably dead.

There are wider strategic implications for U.S. and Western interests in
this dramatic yet predictable development. The radical forces have gained
a major new asset that will encourage the recruitment of new cadre. Iran,
Syria and Hezbollah will grow more confident and aggressive.

We are now in the middle of the third great battle with totalitarianism in
living memory. As with the struggles against fascism and communism, this
conflict can only be won by a mobilization of Western resources and
resolve. What has happened in the Gaza Strip is a lost battle in that
process. There is not room for too many more of these defeats.

Mr. Rubin is director of the Global Research in International Affairs
(GLORIA) Center and the author of "The Truth About Syria"
(Palgrave-Macmillan, 2007).

URL for this article:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118186922078136232.html


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