Thanks to ICJW's UNESCO delegate in Paris, Dr. Gabrielle Voignac, I have just received all the information on the UNESCO
UNIVERSAL DECLARATION ON BIOETHICS AND HUMAN RIGHTS.
See
www.unesco.org/shs/ethics and
The Global Ethics Observatory (GEObs) at
www.unesco.org/shs/ethics/geobs
which has a system of databases with worldwide coverage in bioethics and other areas of applied ethics in science and technology such as environmental ethics, science ethics, and technology ethics.
The above Declaration was adopted on 19 october 2005 by the 33rd session of the General Conference of UNESCO, "when the member States committed themselves and the international community to respect and apply the fudamental principles of bioethics set forth within a single text."
SCOPE.
1.The Declaration addresses ethical issues relating to medicine, life sciences and associated technologies as applied to human beings, taking into account their social, legal and environmental dimensions.
2. This Declaration is addressed to States. As appropriate and relevant, it also provides guidance to decisions or practices of individuals, groups, communities, institutions and corporations, public and private.
The 28 Articles deal with the AIMS, PRINCIPLES of human dignity and human rights; benefit and harm; autonomy and individual responsibility; consent; etc.
GEObs has set up 4 Databases: 1. who's who in ethics. 2. ethics in institutions. 3. ethics teaching programs. 4. ethics related legislation and guidelines.
They invite contributions to GEObs by providing data which anyone may like to see included in any of the above databases. One can contact UNESCO
Division of Ethics of Science and Technology, Social and HumanScience Sector.
1, rue Miollis
75732 Pris Cedex 15.
Email: geo@unesco.org.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
See previous post on STEM CELL RESEARCH AND CLONING
http://anivlam.blogspot.com/2006/10/therapeutic-cloning-embryonic-stem.html
MM
Thursday, December 28, 2006
Strange change of fortunes:asylum-seeking DARFUR REFUGEES in ISRAEL.
EDITOR'S NOTE: this is about a strange change of fortunes, Holocaust (be it Jewish or not), (Jewish)ethics, Israel and a Rumanian born Member of Knesset,Islamic drive to kill the "infidel", but also about the question on how do others protect their... or any other victims for that matter?!Alin Sebastian~~~
Israeli lawmakers receive Sudanese refugees from Darfur
27 December 2006
Dec 26, 2006 (JERUSALEM) —
Sudanese refugees in Israel were received yesterday in the Israeli parliament to request lawmakers' help to get political asylum; the Jerusalem based Israel Today reported.
Sudanese refugees visited the Knesset Monday at the request of the committee for foreign laborers. The two refugees, Ahmad and Yassin, spoke about their horrible life-story as they saw their family members murdered before their eyes, were themselves tortured by government agents, and were subjects of humiliation and abuse until they managed to cross the border from Egypt to Israel. One of the refugees, who came to the committee in order to ask them to help him get political asylum, brought the Knesset members to tears. He addressed MK Sarah Marom-Shalev (Pensioners' party) who was born in Romania and survived the Holocaust and asked her:“Please, as a survivor of the Jewish Holocaust, please help the victims of the Sudanese holocaust. There was nobody who could have helped the Jews of WWII, but today the Jewish state is a strong democratic country and has the power to help survivors of a similar genocide.”
About 250 of Sudanese refugees managed to arrive in Israel and asked for political asylum, but instead of receiving protection, they were thrown in jail for long months because they are nationals of an enemy state.The committee for the refugees of Darfur has so far managed to release about 50 of the refugees to kibbutzim and moshavim, and there is an ongoing public struggle to release those who remained in custody.
Technically the Sudanese are citizens of what Israel deems an enemy state and cannot stay. But their cause has been taken up by Holocaust campaigners and civil rights groups, who argue that Israel, of all countries, should give refuge to people fleeing genocide.“We cannot ignore refugees of the Darfur genocide when they knock on our door,” Avner Shalev, the director of Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial, said. According to The Times in June 2006, he had written toEhud Olmert, the Israeli Prime Minister, comparing their plight to Jews who in vain sought sanctuary from European countries during the Second World War.
(Israel Today/Times)
www.sudantribune.com/spip.php?article19459__._,_.___
Israeli lawmakers receive Sudanese refugees from Darfur
27 December 2006
Dec 26, 2006 (JERUSALEM) —
Sudanese refugees in Israel were received yesterday in the Israeli parliament to request lawmakers' help to get political asylum; the Jerusalem based Israel Today reported.
Sudanese refugees visited the Knesset Monday at the request of the committee for foreign laborers. The two refugees, Ahmad and Yassin, spoke about their horrible life-story as they saw their family members murdered before their eyes, were themselves tortured by government agents, and were subjects of humiliation and abuse until they managed to cross the border from Egypt to Israel. One of the refugees, who came to the committee in order to ask them to help him get political asylum, brought the Knesset members to tears. He addressed MK Sarah Marom-Shalev (Pensioners' party) who was born in Romania and survived the Holocaust and asked her:“Please, as a survivor of the Jewish Holocaust, please help the victims of the Sudanese holocaust. There was nobody who could have helped the Jews of WWII, but today the Jewish state is a strong democratic country and has the power to help survivors of a similar genocide.”
About 250 of Sudanese refugees managed to arrive in Israel and asked for political asylum, but instead of receiving protection, they were thrown in jail for long months because they are nationals of an enemy state.The committee for the refugees of Darfur has so far managed to release about 50 of the refugees to kibbutzim and moshavim, and there is an ongoing public struggle to release those who remained in custody.
Technically the Sudanese are citizens of what Israel deems an enemy state and cannot stay. But their cause has been taken up by Holocaust campaigners and civil rights groups, who argue that Israel, of all countries, should give refuge to people fleeing genocide.“We cannot ignore refugees of the Darfur genocide when they knock on our door,” Avner Shalev, the director of Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial, said. According to The Times in June 2006, he had written toEhud Olmert, the Israeli Prime Minister, comparing their plight to Jews who in vain sought sanctuary from European countries during the Second World War.
(Israel Today/Times)
www.sudantribune.com/spip.php?article19459__._,_.___
Tuesday, December 26, 2006
PALESTINIANS. Necessary Civil War.(Barry Rubin)
Necessary civil war of Fatah, Hamas
By Barry Rubin
Korea Herald
December 26, 2006
http://tinyurl.com/yl947q
or http://www.koreaherald.co.kr/SITE/data/html_dir/2006/12/26/200612260010.asp
Regardless of the latest hastily negotiated truce, the battle between nationalist Fatah and Islamist Hamas seems to be gaining intensity. Palestinian politics, always self-destructive, has reached new heights of internal conflict, pulling the population deeper into disorder and pushing them further away from statehood.
The movement's remarkable ability to sabotage itself is not new. In the late 1960s, the PLO, led by Fatah, antagonized its Jordanian hosts until they expelled it by force. During the 1970s, the PLO entered Lebanon's civil war, wearing out its welcome there. The sole issue on which Israel, Syria, and Lebanese political leaders agreed in the 1980s was that the PLO should be thrown out of Lebanon. During the 1990s, the PLO botched its opportunity to govern the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, create a stable and development-oriented regime there, and make peace with Israel.
Rejecting a deal with Israel in 2000, Fatah instead launched a violent revolt that has lasted ever since then, destroying the infrastructure built up in the Palestinian territories during the previous decade. Massive foreign aid was stolen, squandered, or wrecked by unnecessary violence.
When Yassir Arafat, the perennial PLO, Fatah, and Palestinian Authority leader, died, Palestinians in theory had a chance to end this history of disasters. Yet Arafat's replacement, Mahmoud Abbas, was a colorless, not particularly strong figure with no real political or military base of his own.
During the 1990s, as the challenge from Hamas steadily grew, Arafat thought he could use the Islamists - after all, he was basically one himself - and refused to curb them. He was notorious for refusing to build strong institutions. So once Arafat died, the roof caved in on Fatah.
Three main factors brought Hamas into leadership in the January 2006 parliamentary elections. First, Arafat's legacy left Fatah and the PLO completely undisciplined. Its deep divisions meant that Fatah candidates split the vote and ensured a Hamas landslide.
Second, Fatah never gave Palestinians any alternative vision. Apart from a few scattered speeches - some by Abbas himself - it never accepted peace and compromise. In this respect, Fatah was not much different from Hamas, and the two competed to prove who waged terrorism better and was more militant.
Finally, Fatah did a terrible job at governing, bringing Palestinians neither material benefits nor a state. Instead, it brought massive corruption and administrative incompetence, together with breathtaking arrogance. When I predicted Hamas' victory before the election, Fatah's campaign manager replied, "Everyone will vote for Abbas and everything will be all right." But while Abbas remains chief executive, Hamas controls the parliament and the government.
Yet Fatah was hardly going to give up. One of Fatah's few remaining assets is that the West, horrified by Hamas' more open hate-mongering and extremism, has largely boycotted the new Palestinian regime and cut off aid. With Hamas allied to Iran and Syria, Fatah has seemed more attractive in geopolitical terms.
On this issue, however, there are unfortunate realities that few will admit. Instead, the West continues to believe that there is still a chance of Arab-Israeli peace, that this problem is the region's centerpiece, that Hamas might become more moderate, and that Fatah and Hamas can somehow create a government of national unity.
People of good will who want a real negotiated solution, with Israel and Palestine living peacefully as neighbors, simply don't want to face the fact that any such deal is now decades away. In Palestinian politics, total victory and Israel's destruction is still preferable to an honest assessment that this goal is unattainable, terrorism must be abandoned, and law and order must be imposed.
But Fatah is almost as extreme as Hamas. Anarchy rules, and there is no one with the vision and strength to end it. Dozens of international plans and proposals collapse one after the other. The current "ceasefire" with Israel is violated by the daily of salvos of missiles fired from Gaza, while ceasefires among Palestinians have typically been broken by gunfire and assassination attempts within a few hours.
Now Abbas has called for new elections, which Hamas rejects, and it seems unlikely that he has the capacity to impose his will. Many people advocate the simple expedient of "strengthening Abbas" as a moderate, but one cannot strengthen a wet noodle.
The irony is that real change could come about only from a civil war won by moderates. But the Palestinians are not engaged in a civil war pitting moderates versus extremists. The reciprocal low-level violence between Hamas and Fatah is simply a struggle fueled by greed and patronage. There are limits to how far that struggle will go, but the Palestinians are not going to stop fighting among themselves or against Israel.
This is an unfortunate truth. But recognizing it is crucial to understanding why no political solution works, and why every clever plan to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian or inter-Palestinian conflicts fails.
_________
Barry Rubin is director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center, Interdisciplinary University. His latest book is "The Truth About Syria." - Ed.
By Barry Rubin
Korea Herald
December 26, 2006
http://tinyurl.com/yl947q
or http://www.koreaherald.co.kr/SITE/data/html_dir/2006/12/26/200612260010.asp
Regardless of the latest hastily negotiated truce, the battle between nationalist Fatah and Islamist Hamas seems to be gaining intensity. Palestinian politics, always self-destructive, has reached new heights of internal conflict, pulling the population deeper into disorder and pushing them further away from statehood.
The movement's remarkable ability to sabotage itself is not new. In the late 1960s, the PLO, led by Fatah, antagonized its Jordanian hosts until they expelled it by force. During the 1970s, the PLO entered Lebanon's civil war, wearing out its welcome there. The sole issue on which Israel, Syria, and Lebanese political leaders agreed in the 1980s was that the PLO should be thrown out of Lebanon. During the 1990s, the PLO botched its opportunity to govern the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, create a stable and development-oriented regime there, and make peace with Israel.
Rejecting a deal with Israel in 2000, Fatah instead launched a violent revolt that has lasted ever since then, destroying the infrastructure built up in the Palestinian territories during the previous decade. Massive foreign aid was stolen, squandered, or wrecked by unnecessary violence.
When Yassir Arafat, the perennial PLO, Fatah, and Palestinian Authority leader, died, Palestinians in theory had a chance to end this history of disasters. Yet Arafat's replacement, Mahmoud Abbas, was a colorless, not particularly strong figure with no real political or military base of his own.
During the 1990s, as the challenge from Hamas steadily grew, Arafat thought he could use the Islamists - after all, he was basically one himself - and refused to curb them. He was notorious for refusing to build strong institutions. So once Arafat died, the roof caved in on Fatah.
Three main factors brought Hamas into leadership in the January 2006 parliamentary elections. First, Arafat's legacy left Fatah and the PLO completely undisciplined. Its deep divisions meant that Fatah candidates split the vote and ensured a Hamas landslide.
Second, Fatah never gave Palestinians any alternative vision. Apart from a few scattered speeches - some by Abbas himself - it never accepted peace and compromise. In this respect, Fatah was not much different from Hamas, and the two competed to prove who waged terrorism better and was more militant.
Finally, Fatah did a terrible job at governing, bringing Palestinians neither material benefits nor a state. Instead, it brought massive corruption and administrative incompetence, together with breathtaking arrogance. When I predicted Hamas' victory before the election, Fatah's campaign manager replied, "Everyone will vote for Abbas and everything will be all right." But while Abbas remains chief executive, Hamas controls the parliament and the government.
Yet Fatah was hardly going to give up. One of Fatah's few remaining assets is that the West, horrified by Hamas' more open hate-mongering and extremism, has largely boycotted the new Palestinian regime and cut off aid. With Hamas allied to Iran and Syria, Fatah has seemed more attractive in geopolitical terms.
On this issue, however, there are unfortunate realities that few will admit. Instead, the West continues to believe that there is still a chance of Arab-Israeli peace, that this problem is the region's centerpiece, that Hamas might become more moderate, and that Fatah and Hamas can somehow create a government of national unity.
People of good will who want a real negotiated solution, with Israel and Palestine living peacefully as neighbors, simply don't want to face the fact that any such deal is now decades away. In Palestinian politics, total victory and Israel's destruction is still preferable to an honest assessment that this goal is unattainable, terrorism must be abandoned, and law and order must be imposed.
But Fatah is almost as extreme as Hamas. Anarchy rules, and there is no one with the vision and strength to end it. Dozens of international plans and proposals collapse one after the other. The current "ceasefire" with Israel is violated by the daily of salvos of missiles fired from Gaza, while ceasefires among Palestinians have typically been broken by gunfire and assassination attempts within a few hours.
Now Abbas has called for new elections, which Hamas rejects, and it seems unlikely that he has the capacity to impose his will. Many people advocate the simple expedient of "strengthening Abbas" as a moderate, but one cannot strengthen a wet noodle.
The irony is that real change could come about only from a civil war won by moderates. But the Palestinians are not engaged in a civil war pitting moderates versus extremists. The reciprocal low-level violence between Hamas and Fatah is simply a struggle fueled by greed and patronage. There are limits to how far that struggle will go, but the Palestinians are not going to stop fighting among themselves or against Israel.
This is an unfortunate truth. But recognizing it is crucial to understanding why no political solution works, and why every clever plan to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian or inter-Palestinian conflicts fails.
_________
Barry Rubin is director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center, Interdisciplinary University. His latest book is "The Truth About Syria." - Ed.
Monday, December 25, 2006
GENOCIDE OR COEXISTENCE: the lion vs. antelope! (Essay by Yashiko Sagamori.)
THINK-ISRAEL
HOME
November-December 2006 Featured Stories
Background Information
THE INEVITABILITY OF GENOCIDE
by Yashiko Sagamori
An Israeli friend, a wise and gentle man, told me once, after having spent a few days at a hospital, that his favorite doctor there was an Arab. My friend simply could not imagine that a doctor so competent, so pleasant, so attentive to a Jewish patient could possibly be an enemy of Israel.
"Are you sure he doesn't send half of his salary to Hamas?" I asked, cynical as usual.
"I don't know, could be," my friend said. "But he seems knowledgeable and kind, and I can't imagine that he dreams of destroying Israel and exterminating the Jews."
A bright young man, a freshman at a large Mid-Western university, who had read some of my articles, presented me with irrefutable proof that everything I had ever written about Islam and Muslims was wrong. He shared his room at the dorm with a Muslim kid, he told me defiantly.
"So?" I asked.
"And he is nice!" the boy said.
"And?" I still missed the point.
"I mean, really nice."
"Do you mean to tell me that we cannot be at war against nice people?" I asked.
"Can we?" he snickered at me.
What a question. What a perfectly understandable question. How much easier it must've been to be at war against vampires or cockroaches.
We have all read so much about German atrocities during World War II, that it looks to us as appropriate retribution for those atrocities. We feel that the act of killing a German soldier was, in essence, the execution of a condemned criminal who, in all fairness, did not deserve to live due to the extreme depravity of his actions.
In reality, more often than not, the dead German soldier was a high-school kid, decent, honest, respectful of his parents, hoping to live through the war, to come home, to meet the girl of his dreams, to become a husband and a father, and to spend the rest of his life as a scientist, or a farmer, or a businessman. More often than not, prior to being killed, he had demonstrated uncommon courage and excellent fighting skills in battle against a formidable enemy. More often than not, he had done absolutely nothing to deserve being killed. Regardless of his personal traits, his death was not a punishment. Killing him was as impersonal an act as issuing a parking ticket. He was killed only because we were at war with Germany and he happened to be wearing a German uniform. Á la guerre comme á la guerre.
Contrary to what most people think, we didn't enter the war in Europe to punish Germany for its crimes against humanity. The atrocities that took place in Cambodia under Pol Pot, in North Korea under both Kims, in the Soviet Union under Stalin, or in China during the Cultural Revolution, were no better than the Nazi atrocities, and yet we never declared war on any of those countries. Besides, most people on our side knew little and cared less about those German crimes. As a matter of fact, when it was absolutely impossible not to print the news of German atrocities, the papers did their best to bury it somewhere between articles about a drought in Togo and a beauty contest in Rio de Janeiro.
Come to think of it, our own, passionately beloved FDR was personally responsible for the death of a few hundred German Jews who had managed to escape from Germany and arrived at US shores after trying and failing to gain asylum in several countries on the American continent. Nobody wanted them. America was their last hope. When President Roosevelt refused to let them enter this country, they were forced to return to Germany, where they were promptly transferred to a death camp. An Estonian or Ukrainian immigrant responsible for one tenth of FDR's accomplishment would be tried for war crimes even today and, with comparable evidence against him, most certainly convicted. And rightly so.
Here's the thing. We had to fight and defeat Nazism not because Nazi doctors were all butchers with awful bedside manners or because Nazi college students made unpleasant roommates. We didn't fight Nazism because of the Nazi crimes either, even though those crimes were perfectly real, my eulogy for the dead German soldier notwithstanding. We had to fight Nazism because its existence had become incompatible with the existence of our way of life. If we wanted freedom and democracy to survive in the United States of America, we had no choice but to fight Nazism in Europe and destroy it.
Today, if we want freedom and democracy to survive in this country, we must fight Islam and destroy it everywhere it has established roots, which means everywhere, period. It's not because we are good people and Muslims are bad people. Of course, they do a lot of things that we find disgusting and inhumane. But, believe it or not, we also do a lot of things they find disgusting and inhumane. That is not a reason to go to war. At least, not to us.
Sometimes, if you want to understand what's happening in the world, you shouldn't apply moral criteria, because moral criteria are never absolute. They become meaningless and invalid as soon as you cross the border of the culture that produced them. Instead, you must look at the conflict as if you were an extraterrestrial with no personal stake in the outcome. Or, if sci-fi metaphors leave you unconvinced, try to look at it the way you watch a documentary about wild life in the African Savannah. The lions are trying to eat the antelopes; the antelopes are doing their best not to get eaten. You are watching it with a detached amusement; you don't really care whether any animal that happens to get into the frame survives until the time you switch the channel to something less boring. If the filming is good and you don't flip the channel too soon, your cynical attitude may help you understand the dynamics of daily life in the Savannah.
By the way, if I were an antelope, I would be wondering why the lions, instead of hunting us relentlessly, don't graze peacefully together with our entire herd. We never claimed any exclusive rights on the grass; we welcome everyone to join us. I feel inspired by the vision of lions peacefully munching the grass alongside the antelopes, enjoying the advantages of the herbivorous way of life, and teaching their young not to kill but to be extremely kind to every living creature in the universe.
The beauty of the antelopes' way of life must be plainly obvious to anyone with an ounce of brain: you don't have to exert yourself chasing your prey; you don't have to choose between dying of hunger and committing murder; and you don't have to suffer from terrible guilt recalling all the innocent lives you have taken. And all you need to do to enjoy it is join the antelopes and all the grass in the world will be at your feet.
I have to add that if I were an antelope, I would most probably be a dead one, because I would be irresistibly tempted to enlighten the lions by presenting my perfectly logical arguments to them. Since antelopes, as all herbivores, are not really famous for their superb intellect, I would be most likely remembered as a hero rather than a fool, and my example would inspire other well-intended idiots to follow in my hoofsteps.
If Sean Hannity were an antelope, he would firmly believe that the absolute majority of lions in Africa are dreaming of becoming vegetarians. He wouldn't be able to tell what stops them from doing so.
If George W. Bush were an antelope, he would capture a couple of lion prides and waste the rest of his term as an antelope unsuccessfully trying to convince the captured lions to look happy while he stuffs grass down their throats. Seeing that it doesn't work, he would try to improve the situation be feeding them, first, Israeli grass and then Israeli people. As you should know by now, that wouldn't work either, and the captive lions, deprived of their usual quarry, would try to tear each other apart at the every opportunity.
Here's a simple fact beyond the grasp of an antelope: Even the kindest, gentlest lion in the world is no more capable of living the life of an herbivore than even the cruelest, most vicious antelope in all of Africa is capable of hunting down another animal, crushing its windpipe, and devouring it while it is still struggling.
Unfortunately, we are the antelopes rather than the lions in that analogy. We don't want to kill anyone. All we want is to be left alone. We wholeheartedly welcome anyone to graze on our grass, and when lions come in overwhelming numbers and mix with the herd, we suppress our healthy instincts with the politically-correct, but absolutely baseless assertions that most of those lions have come here not to crush our windpipes and devour us while our hearts are still beating, but merely in search for greener grass, for which our pastures are so deservedly famous all over the world.
Despite the obvious beauty of my analogy, even I have to admit that it is not quite perfect. Herbivores and predators are condemned to follow their respective biological imperatives. We, on the other hand, both Muslims and infidels, are equally human. We belong to the same wondrous species; we share the same dreams.
No, let's stop at the species; dreams, with the exception of wet ones, are not a product of biology. They are shaped by purely societal stimuli. They are culture-dependent. They are the byproducts of civilizations, and different civilizations induce drastically different dreams. While antelopes are dreaming of grass, lions are dreaming of antelopes.
The antelopes in our midst keep bleating that Islam is just another religion. This is not true. Islam does not stop at stating a religious dogma to those who follow it willingly. Unlike any other religion, Islam imposes its own peculiar way of life on every person within its power, regardless of whether that person is Muslim or not.
I am a Jew, but my way of life is not really different from that of my Christian relatives, friends, neighbors and colleagues. They go to church on Easter and Christmas; I go to the temple on Passover and Yom Kippur. That's the extent of the difference, although when the time comes for the Jews to march to the gas chambers again, other aspects of it may be revealed to everyone's surprise. When presented with a choice between imposing our religious beliefs on others and productive coexistence with each other, we wisely opted for coexistence and turned our faiths into an intimately personal matter. As a result, tolerance has become our way of life. Thank God for that! How can you not love the grass?
Now, if, instead of an antelope, I were a lion, my view of the conflict would be entirely different.
My faith is Islam, but my way of life is jihad. For 14 centuries, never letting up for even a minute, Islam has demanded of me that I continue jihad until the last infidel stops breathing. How can you counter my upbringing? By reeducating me? By trying to teach me to live on grass? You won't succeed even if you keep at it for the next 14 centuries, but, considering your staying power (or, rather, lack thereof), your effort is not likely to last 14 months.
I don't expect the infidels to approve of it; after all, it's my sword against their throats. But even they must admit two facts. First, Islam has always kept its doors open for newcomers. Grazing at your side doesn't attract me the least; but if you decide to say the shahadah[1], you are welcome into the pride.
Second, my way of life has a huge seniority over yours. My way of life existed for at least 12 centuries before the half-baked ideas of democracy and tolerance began having their first practical effects on the Godless society where they emerged.
While my world, Dar el-Islam, was enjoying comfortable stability in the course of many centuries, the West kept changing itself, its ideology, its philosophy, its way of life. And every time they came up with something new, they were so proud of themselves, so sure that the folly they were living at the moment would last forever. This is a special kind of blindness that Allah inflicts upon the infidels. How can they expect that I will give up my way of life in favor of theirs?
"But wait," an antelope is sure to ask. "Can't you enjoy your way of life without destroying mine?"
No more than a lion can survive on grass. In His infinite wisdom, Allah created the antelopes as sustenance for the lions. In His infinite mercy, He gave every antelope an opportunity to become a lion. Don't blame the lions for your failure to make the right choice.
Your peacemongers may sing sweet songs about Islam's benevolence, but the truth is: Islam and jihad are as inseparable as the two poles of a magnet. A smart demagogue may describe them as two opposites, but you know as well as I do that the two cannot exist without each other. Jihad is the only state in which Islam has ever existed since the day when the infidel fools exiled the Prophet from Mecca. Jihad is the only state in which Islam can exist.
A Muslim's ancient urge for jihad is so great, so unquenchable, so uncompromising that whenever he is deprived of his sacred right to murder the infidels, he will inevitably begin killing his own brothers, using obscure tribal or sectarian distinction as the cause of war. Just look what's going on in Iraq today, where Muslims successfully resist the infidel occupation by murdering each other.
The history of Islam is the history of jihad. The purpose of jihad is expansion. We don't send out missionaries. We send out warriors. We give you a fair choice to accept Allah and His Messenger or die. That's the extent of Allah's boundless mercy to the infidel. That's the extent of benevolence your female Secretary of State so lavishly praised.
And if you don't destroy Islam at least as thoroughly as you destroyed Nazism, Islam will destroy you as thoroughly, as it has destroyed everything and everybody in its way during the 14 centuries of unending jihad.
Endnote
[1] According to the Wikipedia Encyclopedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shahadah) "A single honest recitation of the shahadah in Arabic, in front of two Muslim witnesses, is all that is required for a person to become a Muslim according to most traditional schools." "The shahadah is the Muslim declaration of belief in the oneness of God and in Muhammad as his final prophet."
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Yashiko Sagamori is a New York-based Information Technology consultant. To read other articles by the author, go to http://www.middleeastfacts.com/yashiko/ or email yashiko.sagamori@gmail.com
This essay was submitted November 1, 2006.
___________________________End of Story___________________________
HOME
November-December 2006 Featured Stories
Background Information
THE INEVITABILITY OF GENOCIDE
by Yashiko Sagamori
An Israeli friend, a wise and gentle man, told me once, after having spent a few days at a hospital, that his favorite doctor there was an Arab. My friend simply could not imagine that a doctor so competent, so pleasant, so attentive to a Jewish patient could possibly be an enemy of Israel.
"Are you sure he doesn't send half of his salary to Hamas?" I asked, cynical as usual.
"I don't know, could be," my friend said. "But he seems knowledgeable and kind, and I can't imagine that he dreams of destroying Israel and exterminating the Jews."
A bright young man, a freshman at a large Mid-Western university, who had read some of my articles, presented me with irrefutable proof that everything I had ever written about Islam and Muslims was wrong. He shared his room at the dorm with a Muslim kid, he told me defiantly.
"So?" I asked.
"And he is nice!" the boy said.
"And?" I still missed the point.
"I mean, really nice."
"Do you mean to tell me that we cannot be at war against nice people?" I asked.
"Can we?" he snickered at me.
What a question. What a perfectly understandable question. How much easier it must've been to be at war against vampires or cockroaches.
We have all read so much about German atrocities during World War II, that it looks to us as appropriate retribution for those atrocities. We feel that the act of killing a German soldier was, in essence, the execution of a condemned criminal who, in all fairness, did not deserve to live due to the extreme depravity of his actions.
In reality, more often than not, the dead German soldier was a high-school kid, decent, honest, respectful of his parents, hoping to live through the war, to come home, to meet the girl of his dreams, to become a husband and a father, and to spend the rest of his life as a scientist, or a farmer, or a businessman. More often than not, prior to being killed, he had demonstrated uncommon courage and excellent fighting skills in battle against a formidable enemy. More often than not, he had done absolutely nothing to deserve being killed. Regardless of his personal traits, his death was not a punishment. Killing him was as impersonal an act as issuing a parking ticket. He was killed only because we were at war with Germany and he happened to be wearing a German uniform. Á la guerre comme á la guerre.
Contrary to what most people think, we didn't enter the war in Europe to punish Germany for its crimes against humanity. The atrocities that took place in Cambodia under Pol Pot, in North Korea under both Kims, in the Soviet Union under Stalin, or in China during the Cultural Revolution, were no better than the Nazi atrocities, and yet we never declared war on any of those countries. Besides, most people on our side knew little and cared less about those German crimes. As a matter of fact, when it was absolutely impossible not to print the news of German atrocities, the papers did their best to bury it somewhere between articles about a drought in Togo and a beauty contest in Rio de Janeiro.
Come to think of it, our own, passionately beloved FDR was personally responsible for the death of a few hundred German Jews who had managed to escape from Germany and arrived at US shores after trying and failing to gain asylum in several countries on the American continent. Nobody wanted them. America was their last hope. When President Roosevelt refused to let them enter this country, they were forced to return to Germany, where they were promptly transferred to a death camp. An Estonian or Ukrainian immigrant responsible for one tenth of FDR's accomplishment would be tried for war crimes even today and, with comparable evidence against him, most certainly convicted. And rightly so.
Here's the thing. We had to fight and defeat Nazism not because Nazi doctors were all butchers with awful bedside manners or because Nazi college students made unpleasant roommates. We didn't fight Nazism because of the Nazi crimes either, even though those crimes were perfectly real, my eulogy for the dead German soldier notwithstanding. We had to fight Nazism because its existence had become incompatible with the existence of our way of life. If we wanted freedom and democracy to survive in the United States of America, we had no choice but to fight Nazism in Europe and destroy it.
Today, if we want freedom and democracy to survive in this country, we must fight Islam and destroy it everywhere it has established roots, which means everywhere, period. It's not because we are good people and Muslims are bad people. Of course, they do a lot of things that we find disgusting and inhumane. But, believe it or not, we also do a lot of things they find disgusting and inhumane. That is not a reason to go to war. At least, not to us.
Sometimes, if you want to understand what's happening in the world, you shouldn't apply moral criteria, because moral criteria are never absolute. They become meaningless and invalid as soon as you cross the border of the culture that produced them. Instead, you must look at the conflict as if you were an extraterrestrial with no personal stake in the outcome. Or, if sci-fi metaphors leave you unconvinced, try to look at it the way you watch a documentary about wild life in the African Savannah. The lions are trying to eat the antelopes; the antelopes are doing their best not to get eaten. You are watching it with a detached amusement; you don't really care whether any animal that happens to get into the frame survives until the time you switch the channel to something less boring. If the filming is good and you don't flip the channel too soon, your cynical attitude may help you understand the dynamics of daily life in the Savannah.
By the way, if I were an antelope, I would be wondering why the lions, instead of hunting us relentlessly, don't graze peacefully together with our entire herd. We never claimed any exclusive rights on the grass; we welcome everyone to join us. I feel inspired by the vision of lions peacefully munching the grass alongside the antelopes, enjoying the advantages of the herbivorous way of life, and teaching their young not to kill but to be extremely kind to every living creature in the universe.
The beauty of the antelopes' way of life must be plainly obvious to anyone with an ounce of brain: you don't have to exert yourself chasing your prey; you don't have to choose between dying of hunger and committing murder; and you don't have to suffer from terrible guilt recalling all the innocent lives you have taken. And all you need to do to enjoy it is join the antelopes and all the grass in the world will be at your feet.
I have to add that if I were an antelope, I would most probably be a dead one, because I would be irresistibly tempted to enlighten the lions by presenting my perfectly logical arguments to them. Since antelopes, as all herbivores, are not really famous for their superb intellect, I would be most likely remembered as a hero rather than a fool, and my example would inspire other well-intended idiots to follow in my hoofsteps.
If Sean Hannity were an antelope, he would firmly believe that the absolute majority of lions in Africa are dreaming of becoming vegetarians. He wouldn't be able to tell what stops them from doing so.
If George W. Bush were an antelope, he would capture a couple of lion prides and waste the rest of his term as an antelope unsuccessfully trying to convince the captured lions to look happy while he stuffs grass down their throats. Seeing that it doesn't work, he would try to improve the situation be feeding them, first, Israeli grass and then Israeli people. As you should know by now, that wouldn't work either, and the captive lions, deprived of their usual quarry, would try to tear each other apart at the every opportunity.
Here's a simple fact beyond the grasp of an antelope: Even the kindest, gentlest lion in the world is no more capable of living the life of an herbivore than even the cruelest, most vicious antelope in all of Africa is capable of hunting down another animal, crushing its windpipe, and devouring it while it is still struggling.
Unfortunately, we are the antelopes rather than the lions in that analogy. We don't want to kill anyone. All we want is to be left alone. We wholeheartedly welcome anyone to graze on our grass, and when lions come in overwhelming numbers and mix with the herd, we suppress our healthy instincts with the politically-correct, but absolutely baseless assertions that most of those lions have come here not to crush our windpipes and devour us while our hearts are still beating, but merely in search for greener grass, for which our pastures are so deservedly famous all over the world.
Despite the obvious beauty of my analogy, even I have to admit that it is not quite perfect. Herbivores and predators are condemned to follow their respective biological imperatives. We, on the other hand, both Muslims and infidels, are equally human. We belong to the same wondrous species; we share the same dreams.
No, let's stop at the species; dreams, with the exception of wet ones, are not a product of biology. They are shaped by purely societal stimuli. They are culture-dependent. They are the byproducts of civilizations, and different civilizations induce drastically different dreams. While antelopes are dreaming of grass, lions are dreaming of antelopes.
The antelopes in our midst keep bleating that Islam is just another religion. This is not true. Islam does not stop at stating a religious dogma to those who follow it willingly. Unlike any other religion, Islam imposes its own peculiar way of life on every person within its power, regardless of whether that person is Muslim or not.
I am a Jew, but my way of life is not really different from that of my Christian relatives, friends, neighbors and colleagues. They go to church on Easter and Christmas; I go to the temple on Passover and Yom Kippur. That's the extent of the difference, although when the time comes for the Jews to march to the gas chambers again, other aspects of it may be revealed to everyone's surprise. When presented with a choice between imposing our religious beliefs on others and productive coexistence with each other, we wisely opted for coexistence and turned our faiths into an intimately personal matter. As a result, tolerance has become our way of life. Thank God for that! How can you not love the grass?
Now, if, instead of an antelope, I were a lion, my view of the conflict would be entirely different.
My faith is Islam, but my way of life is jihad. For 14 centuries, never letting up for even a minute, Islam has demanded of me that I continue jihad until the last infidel stops breathing. How can you counter my upbringing? By reeducating me? By trying to teach me to live on grass? You won't succeed even if you keep at it for the next 14 centuries, but, considering your staying power (or, rather, lack thereof), your effort is not likely to last 14 months.
I don't expect the infidels to approve of it; after all, it's my sword against their throats. But even they must admit two facts. First, Islam has always kept its doors open for newcomers. Grazing at your side doesn't attract me the least; but if you decide to say the shahadah[1], you are welcome into the pride.
Second, my way of life has a huge seniority over yours. My way of life existed for at least 12 centuries before the half-baked ideas of democracy and tolerance began having their first practical effects on the Godless society where they emerged.
While my world, Dar el-Islam, was enjoying comfortable stability in the course of many centuries, the West kept changing itself, its ideology, its philosophy, its way of life. And every time they came up with something new, they were so proud of themselves, so sure that the folly they were living at the moment would last forever. This is a special kind of blindness that Allah inflicts upon the infidels. How can they expect that I will give up my way of life in favor of theirs?
"But wait," an antelope is sure to ask. "Can't you enjoy your way of life without destroying mine?"
No more than a lion can survive on grass. In His infinite wisdom, Allah created the antelopes as sustenance for the lions. In His infinite mercy, He gave every antelope an opportunity to become a lion. Don't blame the lions for your failure to make the right choice.
Your peacemongers may sing sweet songs about Islam's benevolence, but the truth is: Islam and jihad are as inseparable as the two poles of a magnet. A smart demagogue may describe them as two opposites, but you know as well as I do that the two cannot exist without each other. Jihad is the only state in which Islam has ever existed since the day when the infidel fools exiled the Prophet from Mecca. Jihad is the only state in which Islam can exist.
A Muslim's ancient urge for jihad is so great, so unquenchable, so uncompromising that whenever he is deprived of his sacred right to murder the infidels, he will inevitably begin killing his own brothers, using obscure tribal or sectarian distinction as the cause of war. Just look what's going on in Iraq today, where Muslims successfully resist the infidel occupation by murdering each other.
The history of Islam is the history of jihad. The purpose of jihad is expansion. We don't send out missionaries. We send out warriors. We give you a fair choice to accept Allah and His Messenger or die. That's the extent of Allah's boundless mercy to the infidel. That's the extent of benevolence your female Secretary of State so lavishly praised.
And if you don't destroy Islam at least as thoroughly as you destroyed Nazism, Islam will destroy you as thoroughly, as it has destroyed everything and everybody in its way during the 14 centuries of unending jihad.
Endnote
[1] According to the Wikipedia Encyclopedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shahadah) "A single honest recitation of the shahadah in Arabic, in front of two Muslim witnesses, is all that is required for a person to become a Muslim according to most traditional schools." "The shahadah is the Muslim declaration of belief in the oneness of God and in Muhammad as his final prophet."
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Yashiko Sagamori is a New York-based Information Technology consultant. To read other articles by the author, go to http://www.middleeastfacts.com/yashiko/ or email yashiko.sagamori@gmail.com
This essay was submitted November 1, 2006.
___________________________End of Story___________________________
Thursday, December 21, 2006
RELIGION: Letter in reply re "authentic Judaism"!
Letter to the Australian Jewish News (printed 21/12/06)
David Travers (Letters, 15/12) tries to make the point that only the authentic traditional Judaism ensured the survival of the Jewish people. Really? Which kind of "authentic Judaism" does he advocate?
The Manchester Evening Guardian reports that a certain Rabbi Cohen from Manchester was attending the Tehran Holocaust deniers' conference. It reports:
"Mr (sic) Cohen, 83, is a member of a sect known as Neturei Karta, which believes that it is wrong for Jews to set up their own state and that the exile of Jews can only end with the arrival of the Messiah.
On arriving in Tehran, Mr Cohen was reported as saying he had come to put across the Orthodox Jewish viewpoint.
He told the Daily Mail: "We certainly say there was a Holocaust. But in no way can it be used as a justification for perpetrating unjust acts against the Palestinians."
Rabbi Yehuda Brodie, registrar of the Jewish Ecclesiastical Court for Greater Manchester, rejected Mr Cohen's claim he was speaking for Orthodox Jews.
He said: "His involvement is a stab in the heart of the Jewish community and of all decent law-abiding people. Coming from one who styles himself 'rabbi', it brings disgrace on our community and desecrates all that Judaism stands for." (end of quote).
The Holocaust is not the justification for Israel as these people believe, but had there been an independent Jewish State established by the time Hitler started his campaign of genocide against our people, (as the Balfour Declaration decreed) there would not have been a Holocaust.
I thank the Almighty that these days we have choices of ritual observances in our lives in this democratic, pluralist Jewish Diaspora community. At the same time, we should disavow these "anti-Jews" and anti-Zionists of all persuasions who still pretend to belong to our people while giving succor to our publicly avowed enemies.
(Miriam)
David Travers (Letters, 15/12) tries to make the point that only the authentic traditional Judaism ensured the survival of the Jewish people. Really? Which kind of "authentic Judaism" does he advocate?
The Manchester Evening Guardian reports that a certain Rabbi Cohen from Manchester was attending the Tehran Holocaust deniers' conference. It reports:
"Mr (sic) Cohen, 83, is a member of a sect known as Neturei Karta, which believes that it is wrong for Jews to set up their own state and that the exile of Jews can only end with the arrival of the Messiah.
On arriving in Tehran, Mr Cohen was reported as saying he had come to put across the Orthodox Jewish viewpoint.
He told the Daily Mail: "We certainly say there was a Holocaust. But in no way can it be used as a justification for perpetrating unjust acts against the Palestinians."
Rabbi Yehuda Brodie, registrar of the Jewish Ecclesiastical Court for Greater Manchester, rejected Mr Cohen's claim he was speaking for Orthodox Jews.
He said: "His involvement is a stab in the heart of the Jewish community and of all decent law-abiding people. Coming from one who styles himself 'rabbi', it brings disgrace on our community and desecrates all that Judaism stands for." (end of quote).
The Holocaust is not the justification for Israel as these people believe, but had there been an independent Jewish State established by the time Hitler started his campaign of genocide against our people, (as the Balfour Declaration decreed) there would not have been a Holocaust.
I thank the Almighty that these days we have choices of ritual observances in our lives in this democratic, pluralist Jewish Diaspora community. At the same time, we should disavow these "anti-Jews" and anti-Zionists of all persuasions who still pretend to belong to our people while giving succor to our publicly avowed enemies.
(Miriam)
Re Arab Lobby vs. "Jewish Lobby". (Letter to the Australian)
TO: The Editor
THE AUSTRALIAN.
It's funny how every time someone wants to destroy the credibility of the Jewish people, they cry 'foul',- we cannot discuss it,- it's about 'free speech', the "Jewish lobby" doesn't allow it,- etc.. It takes an Iranian President to allow the denial of the Holocaust to be discussed by the 'flat-earth racist brigade'("How could anyone deny the horrors of the gas chambers"?)and it takes an ex-President to cry about the 'Jewish lobby" when he writes drivel about "Israeli apartheid".
Looking into Mr. Carter's background we find out the following: " the Carter Center, the combination research and activist project he founded at Emory University in 1982, has for years prospered from the largesse of assorted Arab financiers".
Not only has he received millions of dollars for his center and received accolades from all over the Arab world, but while "on its face, there is nothing objectionable about these contacts what has raised critics’ eyebrows is Carter’s immense chutzpah: In securing the financial support of assorted Arab leaders, Carter has gradually come to parrot their anti-Israel political agenda -- even as he styles himself as a dispassionate mediator in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict". ( "Jimmy Carter and the Arab Lobby",FrontPageMagazine.com, 18/12/06).
There is no "impartiality" in ex-President Carter's approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and it has not been there for years. The Arab lobby is built on billions of petro-dollars,- the "Jewish lobby" if it exists is simply built on truths and a fair-go against those who would wish to finish what the Nazis started...
MM
THE AUSTRALIAN.
It's funny how every time someone wants to destroy the credibility of the Jewish people, they cry 'foul',- we cannot discuss it,- it's about 'free speech', the "Jewish lobby" doesn't allow it,- etc.. It takes an Iranian President to allow the denial of the Holocaust to be discussed by the 'flat-earth racist brigade'("How could anyone deny the horrors of the gas chambers"?)and it takes an ex-President to cry about the 'Jewish lobby" when he writes drivel about "Israeli apartheid".
Looking into Mr. Carter's background we find out the following: " the Carter Center, the combination research and activist project he founded at Emory University in 1982, has for years prospered from the largesse of assorted Arab financiers".
Not only has he received millions of dollars for his center and received accolades from all over the Arab world, but while "on its face, there is nothing objectionable about these contacts what has raised critics’ eyebrows is Carter’s immense chutzpah: In securing the financial support of assorted Arab leaders, Carter has gradually come to parrot their anti-Israel political agenda -- even as he styles himself as a dispassionate mediator in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict". ( "Jimmy Carter and the Arab Lobby",FrontPageMagazine.com, 18/12/06).
There is no "impartiality" in ex-President Carter's approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and it has not been there for years. The Arab lobby is built on billions of petro-dollars,- the "Jewish lobby" if it exists is simply built on truths and a fair-go against those who would wish to finish what the Nazis started...
MM
Tuesday, December 19, 2006
Other Victims of Denial (Mahmoud Al-Safari)
Other Victims of Denial
by Mahmoud Al-Safadi
A Letter to the President of Iran
Mr. President, I write to you following the announcement of your intention to organize a conference on the Holocaust in Teheran on 11-12 December, and I sincerely hope that this letter will be brought to your attention.
First of all, allow me to introduce myself: Mahmoud Al-Safadi, a former prisoner from occupied Jerusalem. I was released less than three months ago from the Israeli prison where I had been locked up for eighteen years for having been a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and having taken an active part in resistance to the occupation during the first Intifada. Since you were elected president, I have followed your declarations with great interest -- in particular those relating to the Holocaust. I respect your opposition to the American and Western injunctions concerning the Iranian nuclear program and believe it legitimate that you complain of the double standard that the world has with regard to the nuclear development of certain regimes.
But I am furious about your insistence on claiming that the Holocaust never took place and about your doubts about the number of Jews who were murdered in the extermination and concentration camps, organized massacres, and gas chambers, consequently denying the universal historical significance of the Nazi period.
Allow me to say, Mr. President, with all due respect to you, that you made these statements without really knowing the Nazi industry of death. To have read the works of some deniers seems to be enough for you -- a little like a man who shouts above a well and hears only the echo of his own voice. I believe that a man in your position should not make such an enormous error, because it could be turned against him and, worse still, his people.
Like you and millions of people in the world -- among whom, alas, are innumerable Palestinians and Arabs -- I was also convinced that the Jews exaggerated and lied about the Holocaust, etc., even apart from the fact that the Zionist movement and Israel use the Holocaust to justify their policy, first of all against my own people.
My long imprisonment provided me with the occasion to read books and articles that our ideology and social norms made inaccessible to us outside the prison. These documents gave me a thorough knowledge of the history of the Nazi regime and genocide that it perpetrated. At the beginning of the 1990s, by reading articles written by the Palestinian intellectuals Edward Said and Azmi Bishara, I discovered facts and positions which contradicted mine and those of many Palestinians. Their writings having piqued my curiosity and given birth inside me to the need to know more, I set about reading accounts of survivors of the Holocaust and the Nazi occupation. These testimonies were written by people of various nationalities, Jews or non-Jews.
The more I learned, the more I realized that the Holocaust was indeed a historical fact and the more I became aware of the monumental dimension of the crime committed by Nazi Germany against the Jews, other social and national groups, and humanity in general. I discovered that Nazi Germany aspired to found a "new world order" dominated by the "pure Aryan race" thanks to the physical annihilation of "impure races" and the enslavement of other nations. I discovered that various "normal" official institutions --
bureaucracies, judicial systems, medical and educational authorities, municipalities, railroad companies, and others -- had taken part and collaborated in the implementation of this new world order. From a theoretical point of view, this objective, just like the victories won at the time by the Nazi armies of occupation, threatened the existence of the Arabs and Muslims as well.
Whatever the number of victims -- Jewish and non-Jewish -- the crime is monumental. Any attempt to deny it deprives the denier of his own humanity and sends him immediately to the side of torturers. Whoever denies the fact that this human disaster really took place should not be astonished that others deny the sufferings and persecutions inflicted on his own people by tyrannical leaders or foreign occupiers. Ask yourself, I beg you, the following question: were hundreds of thousands of testimonies written about death camps, gas chambers, ghettos, and mass murders committed by the German army, tens of thousands of works of research based on German documents, numerous filmed sequences, some of which were shot by German soldiers --
were all these masses of evidence completely fabricated?
Can all that be summed up simply as an imperialist-Zionist plot? Are the confessions of high-ranking Nazis officials about their personal role in the project of extermination of whole nations only the fruit of the imagination of some disturbed spirit?
And all these heroic deeds of the people subjected to the German occupation
-- the first among whom were Russians, Polish, and Yugoslavs -- only lies and gross exaggerations? Could the struggle of the Soviets against Nazi Germany be only a phantasm? The Russians continue to celebrate their victory over Nazi Germany and remember millions of their civilian and military compatriots who lost their lives in this struggle. Are they lying, too?
I invite you to read historical studies and serious testimonies before making your public statements. You divide the world in two camps: the imperialists-Zionists, who manufactured the myth of the Holocaust, and the adversaries of imperialism, who know the truth and uncover the plot. Perhaps you think that the act of denying the Holocaust places you at the vanguard of the Muslim world and that this refusal constitutes a useful tool in the combat against American imperialism and Western hegemony. By doing so, you actually do great disservice to popular struggles the world over.
At best, you cover your people and yourself with ridicule in the eyes of political forces who reject imperialism but cannot take your ideas and arguments seriously, due to the fact that you obsessively deny the existence of an abundantly documented and studied historical period whose consequences are still felt and discussed today.
At worst, you discourage and weaken the political, social, and intellectual forces who, in Europe and in the United States, reject the policy of confrontation and war carried out by George Bush, but are forced to conclude that you, too, jeopardize the world by your declarations denying the genocide and by your nuclear program.
Concerning the struggle of my people for their independence and their
freedom: perhaps do you regard the negation of the Holocaust as an expression of support for the Palestinians? There, again, you are mistaken. We fight for our existence and our rights and against the historical injustice which was inflicted on us in 1948. We will not win our victory and our independence by denying the genocide perpetrated against the Jewish people, even though the forces who occupy our country today and dispossess us are part of the Jewish people.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
----
Mahmoud Al-Safadi is a former Palestinian militant, He was imprisoned in Israel for eighteen years and freed in 2006. The French text, a translation from English by Gilles Berton, was published in Le Monde on 4 December 2006. The English original was unavailable on the Net, so the English text on the right is a translation from the French text published in Le Monde. English translation by Yoshie Furuhashi.
by Mahmoud Al-Safadi
A Letter to the President of Iran
Mr. President, I write to you following the announcement of your intention to organize a conference on the Holocaust in Teheran on 11-12 December, and I sincerely hope that this letter will be brought to your attention.
First of all, allow me to introduce myself: Mahmoud Al-Safadi, a former prisoner from occupied Jerusalem. I was released less than three months ago from the Israeli prison where I had been locked up for eighteen years for having been a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and having taken an active part in resistance to the occupation during the first Intifada. Since you were elected president, I have followed your declarations with great interest -- in particular those relating to the Holocaust. I respect your opposition to the American and Western injunctions concerning the Iranian nuclear program and believe it legitimate that you complain of the double standard that the world has with regard to the nuclear development of certain regimes.
But I am furious about your insistence on claiming that the Holocaust never took place and about your doubts about the number of Jews who were murdered in the extermination and concentration camps, organized massacres, and gas chambers, consequently denying the universal historical significance of the Nazi period.
Allow me to say, Mr. President, with all due respect to you, that you made these statements without really knowing the Nazi industry of death. To have read the works of some deniers seems to be enough for you -- a little like a man who shouts above a well and hears only the echo of his own voice. I believe that a man in your position should not make such an enormous error, because it could be turned against him and, worse still, his people.
Like you and millions of people in the world -- among whom, alas, are innumerable Palestinians and Arabs -- I was also convinced that the Jews exaggerated and lied about the Holocaust, etc., even apart from the fact that the Zionist movement and Israel use the Holocaust to justify their policy, first of all against my own people.
My long imprisonment provided me with the occasion to read books and articles that our ideology and social norms made inaccessible to us outside the prison. These documents gave me a thorough knowledge of the history of the Nazi regime and genocide that it perpetrated. At the beginning of the 1990s, by reading articles written by the Palestinian intellectuals Edward Said and Azmi Bishara, I discovered facts and positions which contradicted mine and those of many Palestinians. Their writings having piqued my curiosity and given birth inside me to the need to know more, I set about reading accounts of survivors of the Holocaust and the Nazi occupation. These testimonies were written by people of various nationalities, Jews or non-Jews.
The more I learned, the more I realized that the Holocaust was indeed a historical fact and the more I became aware of the monumental dimension of the crime committed by Nazi Germany against the Jews, other social and national groups, and humanity in general. I discovered that Nazi Germany aspired to found a "new world order" dominated by the "pure Aryan race" thanks to the physical annihilation of "impure races" and the enslavement of other nations. I discovered that various "normal" official institutions --
bureaucracies, judicial systems, medical and educational authorities, municipalities, railroad companies, and others -- had taken part and collaborated in the implementation of this new world order. From a theoretical point of view, this objective, just like the victories won at the time by the Nazi armies of occupation, threatened the existence of the Arabs and Muslims as well.
Whatever the number of victims -- Jewish and non-Jewish -- the crime is monumental. Any attempt to deny it deprives the denier of his own humanity and sends him immediately to the side of torturers. Whoever denies the fact that this human disaster really took place should not be astonished that others deny the sufferings and persecutions inflicted on his own people by tyrannical leaders or foreign occupiers. Ask yourself, I beg you, the following question: were hundreds of thousands of testimonies written about death camps, gas chambers, ghettos, and mass murders committed by the German army, tens of thousands of works of research based on German documents, numerous filmed sequences, some of which were shot by German soldiers --
were all these masses of evidence completely fabricated?
Can all that be summed up simply as an imperialist-Zionist plot? Are the confessions of high-ranking Nazis officials about their personal role in the project of extermination of whole nations only the fruit of the imagination of some disturbed spirit?
And all these heroic deeds of the people subjected to the German occupation
-- the first among whom were Russians, Polish, and Yugoslavs -- only lies and gross exaggerations? Could the struggle of the Soviets against Nazi Germany be only a phantasm? The Russians continue to celebrate their victory over Nazi Germany and remember millions of their civilian and military compatriots who lost their lives in this struggle. Are they lying, too?
I invite you to read historical studies and serious testimonies before making your public statements. You divide the world in two camps: the imperialists-Zionists, who manufactured the myth of the Holocaust, and the adversaries of imperialism, who know the truth and uncover the plot. Perhaps you think that the act of denying the Holocaust places you at the vanguard of the Muslim world and that this refusal constitutes a useful tool in the combat against American imperialism and Western hegemony. By doing so, you actually do great disservice to popular struggles the world over.
At best, you cover your people and yourself with ridicule in the eyes of political forces who reject imperialism but cannot take your ideas and arguments seriously, due to the fact that you obsessively deny the existence of an abundantly documented and studied historical period whose consequences are still felt and discussed today.
At worst, you discourage and weaken the political, social, and intellectual forces who, in Europe and in the United States, reject the policy of confrontation and war carried out by George Bush, but are forced to conclude that you, too, jeopardize the world by your declarations denying the genocide and by your nuclear program.
Concerning the struggle of my people for their independence and their
freedom: perhaps do you regard the negation of the Holocaust as an expression of support for the Palestinians? There, again, you are mistaken. We fight for our existence and our rights and against the historical injustice which was inflicted on us in 1948. We will not win our victory and our independence by denying the genocide perpetrated against the Jewish people, even though the forces who occupy our country today and dispossess us are part of the Jewish people.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
----
Mahmoud Al-Safadi is a former Palestinian militant, He was imprisoned in Israel for eighteen years and freed in 2006. The French text, a translation from English by Gilles Berton, was published in Le Monde on 4 December 2006. The English original was unavailable on the Net, so the English text on the right is a translation from the French text published in Le Monde. English translation by Yoshie Furuhashi.
Bad Arolson Archive video from '60Minutes' CBS
:
Bad Arolson Archive video from 60 Minutes, CBS
From the US:
You can watch this video on the link below if you missed it Sunday (16/12/06) on CBS:
http://www.cbsnews.com/sections/i_video/main500251.shtml?channel=60Sunday
Meticulously kept records in archives of 15 million victims of Nazi camps opened to the public for the first time.
And they say it never happened?
MM
Bad Arolson Archive video from 60 Minutes, CBS
From the US:
You can watch this video on the link below if you missed it Sunday (16/12/06) on CBS:
http://www.cbsnews.com/sections/i_video/main500251.shtml?channel=60Sunday
Meticulously kept records in archives of 15 million victims of Nazi camps opened to the public for the first time.
And they say it never happened?
MM
ARAB LOBBY & President Carter. (Front Page Magazine)
Jimmy Carter and the Arab Lobby
By Jacob Laksin
FrontPageMagazine.com
December 18, 2006
Nothing demonstrates more clearly the defects of Jimmy Carter’s latest brief against Israel, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, than the ex-president’s reluctance to defend the book on its merits. Rather than take up that unenviable task, Carter has sought to shift the focus away from the criticism -- especially as it concerns the book’s serial distortions and outright falsehoods -- and onto the critics.
In particular, Carter claims that critics are compromised by their support for Israel, their ties to pro-Israel lobbying organizations, and -- a more pernicious charge -- their Jewish background. In interviews about his book, Carter has seldom missed an opportunity to invoke what he calls the “powerful influence of AIPAC,” with the subtext that it is the lobbying group, and not his slanderous charges about Israel, that is mainly responsible for mobilizing popular outrage over Palestine. In a related line of defense, Carter has singled out “representatives of Jewish organizations” in the media as the prime culprits behind his poor reviews and “university campuses with high Jewish enrollment” as the main obstacle to forthright debate about his book on American universities. (Ironically, when challenged last week by Alan Dershowitz to a debate about his book at Brandeis University, which has a large Jewish student body, Carter rejected the invitation.)
Bluster aside, Carter’s chief complaint seems to be that anyone who identifies with Israel, whether in the form of individual support or in a more organized capacity, is incapable of grappling honestly with the issues in the Arab-Israeli conflict. But Carter is poorly placed to make this claim. If such connections alone are sufficient to discredit his critics, then by his own logic Carter is undeserving of a hearing. After all, the Carter Center, the combination research and activist project he founded at Emory University in 1982, has for years prospered from the largesse of assorted Arab financiers.
Especially lucrative have been Carter’s ties to Saudi Arabia. Before his death in 2005, King Fahd was a longtime contributor to the Carter Center and on more than one occasion contributed million-dollar donations. In 1993 alone, the king presented Carter with a gift of $7.6 million. And the king was not the only Saudi royal to commit funds to Carter’s cause. As of 2005, the king’s high-living nephew, Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal, has donated at least $5 million to the Carter Center.
Meanwhile the Saudi Fund for Development, the kingdom’s leading loan organization, turns up repeatedly on the center’s list of supporters. Carter has also found moneyed allies in the Bin Laden family, and in 2000 he secured a promise from ten of Osama bin Laden's brothers for a $1 million contribution to his center. To be sure, there is no evidence that the Bin Ladens maintain any contact with their terrorist relation. But applying Carter’s own standard, his extensive contacts with the Saudi elite must make his views on the Middle East suspect.
High praise for Carter’s work -- and not inconsiderable financial support -- also comes from the United Arab Emirates. In 2001, Carter even traveled to the country to accept the Zayed International Prize for the Environment, named for Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan al-Nahyan, the late UAE potentate and former president-for-life. Having claimed his $500,000 purse, Carter enthused that the “award has special significance for me because it is named for my personal friend, Sheikh Zayed Bin Sultan al-Nahyan.” Carter also hailed the UAE as an “almost completely open and free society” -- a surreal depiction of a rigidly authoritarian country where the government handpicks a select group of citizens to vote and strictly controls the editorial content of the newspapers and where Islamic Shari’a courts judge “sodomy” punishable by death. (To appreciate the depth of Carter’s cynicism, one need only compare his gushing encomia to the emirates with his likening of Israel, the most modern and democratic country in the entire Middle East, with the racist “apartheid” of South Africa.)
On top of these official honors, Carter was offered a forum at the Abu Dhabi-based Zayed Center for Coordination and Follow Up, the country’s official “think-tank.” For his part, Carter declared his intention to forge a “partnership” with the center; in a 2002 letter, Carter praised its efforts to “promote peace, health, and human rights around the world.” Inconveniently for Carter, the center has since become famous for a different reason: It has repeatedly played host to anti-Semitic speakers who have denied the Holocaust, supported terrorism, and alleged an international conspiracy of Jews and Zionists to dominate the world. (Harvard University, in contrast to Carter’s enthusiasm for Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan al-Nahyan, rejected a $2.5 million from the ruler in 2004 due to his ties to the Zayed Center.)
Nor does this exhaust the list of Carter’s backers in the Arab world. Still other supporters include Sultan Qaboos bin Said, who sits atop Oman’s absolute monarchy. An occasional host to Carter, the sultan has also made generous contributions to his center. Prior to inviting Carter for a “personal visit” in 1998, the sultan pledged $1 million to the Carter Center, promising additional support in the future. Similarly, Morocco’s Prince Moulay Hicham Ben Abdallah, the second in line to the kingdom’s throne, has in the past partnered with Carter on the center’s initiatives.
On its face, there is nothing objectionable about these contacts. What has raised critics’ eyebrows is Carter’s immense chutzpah: In securing the financial support of assorted Arab leaders, Carter has gradually come to parrot their anti-Israel political agenda -- even as he styles himself as a dispassionate mediator in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
This was nowhere more evident than in Carter’s credulous support for the late Yasir Arafat. Although Carter had championed Araft as a committed peacemaker since his presidency, in the face of ample evidence to the contrary, his apologies for the terrorist chieftain became particularly shameless in the 1990s. When Arafat and his PLO backed Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, thereby loosing the support and -- more important for the corrupt Arafat -- the funding of neighboring Sunni Arab powers, Carter embarked on a Middle East publicity tour to revive Arafat’s diminishing fortunes. As recorded by Carter biographer Douglas Brinkley, “together [Carter and Arafat] strategized on how to recover the PLO’s standing in the United States.” In desperation, Carter turned up in Saudi Arabia on what Brinkley called “essentially a fund-raising mission for the PLO,” pleading with King Fahd to restore Arafat to the Saudi dole.
Now that Arafat’s Fatah has been replaced with Hamas, Carter has again proven himself a reliable ally of Palestinian extremism. Scarcely had the terrorist group ascended to power last January than Carter launched a media blitz urging the United States to circumvent its own laws against financing terrorism in order to fund Hamas. As the New York Times put with exquisite finesse, Carter called on Western nations to "redirect their relief aid to United Nations organizations and nongovernmental organizations to skirt legal restrictions” -- that is, to launder money to a terrorist group. When American policymakers declined to heed his advice, and Israel proved unwilling to bankroll the enemy seeking its destruction, Carter promptly denounced the both countries for their “common commitment to eviscerate the government of elected Hamas.”
With its relentless disparagement of Israel and its reckless abuse of the historical record, Carter’s latest book may fairly be seen as the logical culmination of his many years of anti-Israel incitement. There was of course no shortage of clues about Carter’s sympathies in his earlier books. In his 2004 memoir Sharing Good Times, for instance, Carter recalled the trips he has taken over the years to Arab dictatorships in Syria and Saudi Arabia and noted with evident satisfaction that he was “always greeted with smiles and friendship.”
Readers may be forgiven for finding nothing shocking in this admission. Carter may still harbor illusions of grandeur, seeing himself as an instrument of peace in the Middle East. But an altogether different element explains his enduring popularity in Arab capitals: Not for all the millions they have sunk into the Carter Center over the years could Arab elites have hoped to purchase such a prominent and willing propaganda tool.
Click Here to support Frontpagemag.com.
By Jacob Laksin
FrontPageMagazine.com
December 18, 2006
Nothing demonstrates more clearly the defects of Jimmy Carter’s latest brief against Israel, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, than the ex-president’s reluctance to defend the book on its merits. Rather than take up that unenviable task, Carter has sought to shift the focus away from the criticism -- especially as it concerns the book’s serial distortions and outright falsehoods -- and onto the critics.
In particular, Carter claims that critics are compromised by their support for Israel, their ties to pro-Israel lobbying organizations, and -- a more pernicious charge -- their Jewish background. In interviews about his book, Carter has seldom missed an opportunity to invoke what he calls the “powerful influence of AIPAC,” with the subtext that it is the lobbying group, and not his slanderous charges about Israel, that is mainly responsible for mobilizing popular outrage over Palestine. In a related line of defense, Carter has singled out “representatives of Jewish organizations” in the media as the prime culprits behind his poor reviews and “university campuses with high Jewish enrollment” as the main obstacle to forthright debate about his book on American universities. (Ironically, when challenged last week by Alan Dershowitz to a debate about his book at Brandeis University, which has a large Jewish student body, Carter rejected the invitation.)
Bluster aside, Carter’s chief complaint seems to be that anyone who identifies with Israel, whether in the form of individual support or in a more organized capacity, is incapable of grappling honestly with the issues in the Arab-Israeli conflict. But Carter is poorly placed to make this claim. If such connections alone are sufficient to discredit his critics, then by his own logic Carter is undeserving of a hearing. After all, the Carter Center, the combination research and activist project he founded at Emory University in 1982, has for years prospered from the largesse of assorted Arab financiers.
Especially lucrative have been Carter’s ties to Saudi Arabia. Before his death in 2005, King Fahd was a longtime contributor to the Carter Center and on more than one occasion contributed million-dollar donations. In 1993 alone, the king presented Carter with a gift of $7.6 million. And the king was not the only Saudi royal to commit funds to Carter’s cause. As of 2005, the king’s high-living nephew, Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal, has donated at least $5 million to the Carter Center.
Meanwhile the Saudi Fund for Development, the kingdom’s leading loan organization, turns up repeatedly on the center’s list of supporters. Carter has also found moneyed allies in the Bin Laden family, and in 2000 he secured a promise from ten of Osama bin Laden's brothers for a $1 million contribution to his center. To be sure, there is no evidence that the Bin Ladens maintain any contact with their terrorist relation. But applying Carter’s own standard, his extensive contacts with the Saudi elite must make his views on the Middle East suspect.
High praise for Carter’s work -- and not inconsiderable financial support -- also comes from the United Arab Emirates. In 2001, Carter even traveled to the country to accept the Zayed International Prize for the Environment, named for Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan al-Nahyan, the late UAE potentate and former president-for-life. Having claimed his $500,000 purse, Carter enthused that the “award has special significance for me because it is named for my personal friend, Sheikh Zayed Bin Sultan al-Nahyan.” Carter also hailed the UAE as an “almost completely open and free society” -- a surreal depiction of a rigidly authoritarian country where the government handpicks a select group of citizens to vote and strictly controls the editorial content of the newspapers and where Islamic Shari’a courts judge “sodomy” punishable by death. (To appreciate the depth of Carter’s cynicism, one need only compare his gushing encomia to the emirates with his likening of Israel, the most modern and democratic country in the entire Middle East, with the racist “apartheid” of South Africa.)
On top of these official honors, Carter was offered a forum at the Abu Dhabi-based Zayed Center for Coordination and Follow Up, the country’s official “think-tank.” For his part, Carter declared his intention to forge a “partnership” with the center; in a 2002 letter, Carter praised its efforts to “promote peace, health, and human rights around the world.” Inconveniently for Carter, the center has since become famous for a different reason: It has repeatedly played host to anti-Semitic speakers who have denied the Holocaust, supported terrorism, and alleged an international conspiracy of Jews and Zionists to dominate the world. (Harvard University, in contrast to Carter’s enthusiasm for Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan al-Nahyan, rejected a $2.5 million from the ruler in 2004 due to his ties to the Zayed Center.)
Nor does this exhaust the list of Carter’s backers in the Arab world. Still other supporters include Sultan Qaboos bin Said, who sits atop Oman’s absolute monarchy. An occasional host to Carter, the sultan has also made generous contributions to his center. Prior to inviting Carter for a “personal visit” in 1998, the sultan pledged $1 million to the Carter Center, promising additional support in the future. Similarly, Morocco’s Prince Moulay Hicham Ben Abdallah, the second in line to the kingdom’s throne, has in the past partnered with Carter on the center’s initiatives.
On its face, there is nothing objectionable about these contacts. What has raised critics’ eyebrows is Carter’s immense chutzpah: In securing the financial support of assorted Arab leaders, Carter has gradually come to parrot their anti-Israel political agenda -- even as he styles himself as a dispassionate mediator in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
This was nowhere more evident than in Carter’s credulous support for the late Yasir Arafat. Although Carter had championed Araft as a committed peacemaker since his presidency, in the face of ample evidence to the contrary, his apologies for the terrorist chieftain became particularly shameless in the 1990s. When Arafat and his PLO backed Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, thereby loosing the support and -- more important for the corrupt Arafat -- the funding of neighboring Sunni Arab powers, Carter embarked on a Middle East publicity tour to revive Arafat’s diminishing fortunes. As recorded by Carter biographer Douglas Brinkley, “together [Carter and Arafat] strategized on how to recover the PLO’s standing in the United States.” In desperation, Carter turned up in Saudi Arabia on what Brinkley called “essentially a fund-raising mission for the PLO,” pleading with King Fahd to restore Arafat to the Saudi dole.
Now that Arafat’s Fatah has been replaced with Hamas, Carter has again proven himself a reliable ally of Palestinian extremism. Scarcely had the terrorist group ascended to power last January than Carter launched a media blitz urging the United States to circumvent its own laws against financing terrorism in order to fund Hamas. As the New York Times put with exquisite finesse, Carter called on Western nations to "redirect their relief aid to United Nations organizations and nongovernmental organizations to skirt legal restrictions” -- that is, to launder money to a terrorist group. When American policymakers declined to heed his advice, and Israel proved unwilling to bankroll the enemy seeking its destruction, Carter promptly denounced the both countries for their “common commitment to eviscerate the government of elected Hamas.”
With its relentless disparagement of Israel and its reckless abuse of the historical record, Carter’s latest book may fairly be seen as the logical culmination of his many years of anti-Israel incitement. There was of course no shortage of clues about Carter’s sympathies in his earlier books. In his 2004 memoir Sharing Good Times, for instance, Carter recalled the trips he has taken over the years to Arab dictatorships in Syria and Saudi Arabia and noted with evident satisfaction that he was “always greeted with smiles and friendship.”
Readers may be forgiven for finding nothing shocking in this admission. Carter may still harbor illusions of grandeur, seeing himself as an instrument of peace in the Middle East. But an altogether different element explains his enduring popularity in Arab capitals: Not for all the millions they have sunk into the Carter Center over the years could Arab elites have hoped to purchase such a prominent and willing propaganda tool.
Click Here to support Frontpagemag.com.
Monday, December 18, 2006
WOMEN IN TERRORISM:a Palestinian feminist revolution or gender oppression.
December 9, 2006
Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center
at the Center for Special Studies (C.S.S)
www.terrorism-info.org.il/malam_multimedia/English/eng_n/html/women_terror_e.htm
Women in terrorism: a Palestinian feminist revolution or gender oppression?
Dr. Anat Berko and Prof. Edna Erez
Summary
Women in Palestinian society are doubly oppressed, suffering from both
political and gender oppression. Both play a role in their involvement in
terrorism. In effect, two types of women participate in terrorist attacks:
those whose motives are political, for example those who oppose the
occupation or want to revenge the deaths of relatives, and are forced to
channel their activity through the gender construct of Palestinian Arab
society. On the other hand, there are those who try to rebel against the
repressive gender construct, and use the political conflict as a legitimate,
respectable cover for the rebellion, although the division is not absolute
and there are women whose motives are mixed.
The study revealed that the gender oppression from which Palestinian women
suffer, which includes forced marriage, multiple wives, restrictions on
movement and contacts with members of the opposite sex, and their being
considered child-bearing machines, has turned women into rebels, and that
rebellion is exploited by the terrorist-operatives who recruit them. The
fondest wish of such women is to make themselves more valuable and feel that
they belong and contribute to the national effort, and it cannot, in
reality, be achieved. The result is that such women, according to the
standards of the society in which they live, cannot be both terrorists and
"good women."
As opposed to the claim that women who are involved in terrorism are
progressive and liberated, the data of this study showed that they are
extremely conservative, firmly fixed in place by the norms of a patriarchal
society and that their roles as terrorists are secondary and marginal. It
would seem that in terrorism as in the Palestinian society which generated
it, there is a strict division of roles between the sexes, and that women
continue to obey the terrorist men who pull the strings. When the
Palestinian woman turns to terrorism the game is lost before it has begun,
because the sensation of freedom (especially in contacts with members of the
opposite sex) they have by participating in terrorism is temporary, and the
relations between the sexes in Palestinian society, of the ruler and ruled,
are transposed into the world of terrorism, according to the Arab model of
society from which they came.
(Full report with references at the URL above.)
Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center
at the Center for Special Studies (C.S.S)
www.terrorism-info.org.il/malam_multimedia/English/eng_n/html/women_terror_e.htm
Women in terrorism: a Palestinian feminist revolution or gender oppression?
Dr. Anat Berko and Prof. Edna Erez
Summary
Women in Palestinian society are doubly oppressed, suffering from both
political and gender oppression. Both play a role in their involvement in
terrorism. In effect, two types of women participate in terrorist attacks:
those whose motives are political, for example those who oppose the
occupation or want to revenge the deaths of relatives, and are forced to
channel their activity through the gender construct of Palestinian Arab
society. On the other hand, there are those who try to rebel against the
repressive gender construct, and use the political conflict as a legitimate,
respectable cover for the rebellion, although the division is not absolute
and there are women whose motives are mixed.
The study revealed that the gender oppression from which Palestinian women
suffer, which includes forced marriage, multiple wives, restrictions on
movement and contacts with members of the opposite sex, and their being
considered child-bearing machines, has turned women into rebels, and that
rebellion is exploited by the terrorist-operatives who recruit them. The
fondest wish of such women is to make themselves more valuable and feel that
they belong and contribute to the national effort, and it cannot, in
reality, be achieved. The result is that such women, according to the
standards of the society in which they live, cannot be both terrorists and
"good women."
As opposed to the claim that women who are involved in terrorism are
progressive and liberated, the data of this study showed that they are
extremely conservative, firmly fixed in place by the norms of a patriarchal
society and that their roles as terrorists are secondary and marginal. It
would seem that in terrorism as in the Palestinian society which generated
it, there is a strict division of roles between the sexes, and that women
continue to obey the terrorist men who pull the strings. When the
Palestinian woman turns to terrorism the game is lost before it has begun,
because the sensation of freedom (especially in contacts with members of the
opposite sex) they have by participating in terrorism is temporary, and the
relations between the sexes in Palestinian society, of the ruler and ruled,
are transposed into the world of terrorism, according to the Arab model of
society from which they came.
(Full report with references at the URL above.)
Sunday, December 17, 2006
Aid NGOs and Donor Countries ignore Islamic racist teachings.
Confronting Holocaust denial
[Perhaps the first place to start is to counter the Islamic philanthropy that comes laced with hatred against the Jews. Western and Christian charities in the third world should take it upon themselves to inform Muslims and non- Muslims alike, in the areas where they are active, about the Holocaust.]
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The International Herald Tribune
Confronting Holocaust denial
Ayaan Ali
Friday, December 15, 2006
WASHINGTON
One day In 1994, living in Ede, a small town in Holland, I got a visit from my half-sister. She and I had applied for asylum in Holland. I was granted one, she was denied. The fact that I got asylum gave me the opportunity to study. My half- sister could not.
In order for me to be admitted to the institute of higher education I wanted to attend, I needed to pass three courses: language, civics and history. It was in this preparatory history course that I, for the first time, heard of the Holocaust. I was 24 years old; my half-sister was 21.
In those days, the daily news was filled with the Rwandan genocide and ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia. On the day that my half-sister visited me, my head was reeling from what happened to 6 million Jews in Germany, Holland, France and Eastern Europe. I learned that innocent men, women and children were separated from each other. Stars pinned to their shoulders, transported by train to camps, they were gassed for no other reason than for being Jewish. It was the most systematic and cruel attempt in the history of mankind to annihilate a people.
I saw pictures of masses of skeletons, even of kids. I heard horrifying accounts of some of the people who had survived the terror of Auschwitz and Sobibor.
I told my half-sister all this and showed her the pictures in my history book. What she said shocked me more than the awful information in my book.
With great conviction my half-sister cried: "It's a lie! Jews have a way of blinding people. They were not killed, gassed nor massacred. But I pray to Allah that one day all the Jews in the world will be destroyed."
My 21-year-old sister did not say anything new. My shock was partly at her reaction in the light of so much evidence and partly because of the genocides of our own time.
Growing up as a child in Saudi Arabia, I remember my teachers, my mom and our neighbors telling us practically on a daily basis that Jews were evil, the sworn enemies of Muslims who's only goal was to destroy Islam. We were never informed about the Holocaust.
Later in Kenya, as a teenager, when Saudi and other Gulf philanthropy reached us in Africa, I remember that the building of mosques and donations to hospitals and the poor went hand in hand with the cursing of Jews. Jews were said to be responsible for the deaths of babies, epidemics like AIDS, for the cause of wars. They were greedy and would do absolutely anything to kill us Muslims. And if we ever wanted to know peace and stability we would have to destroy them before they would wipe us out. For those of us who were not in a position to take arms against the Jews it was enough for us to cup our hands, raise our eyes heavenward and pray to Allah to destroy them.
Western leaders today who say they are shocked by the conference of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran denying the Holocaust need to wake up to that reality. For the majority of Muslims in the world the Holocaust is not a major historical event they deny; they simply do not know because they were never informed. Worse, most of us are groomed to wish for a Holocaust of Jews.
I remember the presence of Western philanthropists, nongovernmental organizations and such institutions as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. Their agents brought those they thought of as needy medicine, condoms, vaccines, building materials — but no information on the Holocaust.
Secular and Christian donors and relief organizations did not come with an agenda of hate, but neither with a message of love. This was surely a missed opportunity in the light of the hate- spreading charities from oil-rich Muslim countries.
The total number of Jews in the world today is estimated to be around 15 million, certainly no more than 20 million. In terms of fertility, their growth can be compared to that of the developed world, and in terms of aging too.
On the other hand, the Muslim population is estimated to be 1.2 to 1.5 billion people, and it is not only rapidly growing but also very young. What's striking about Ahmadinejad's conference is the (silent) acquiescence of mainstream Muslims.
I cannot help but wonder: Why is there no counter-conference in Riyadh, Cairo, Lahore, Khartoum or Jakarta condemning Ahmadinejad? Why is the Organization of the Islamic Conference silent on this?
Could the answer be as simple as it is horrifying: For generations the leaders of these so-called Muslim countries have been spoon-feeding their populations a constant diet of propaganda similar to the one that generations of Germans (and other Europeans) were fed that Jews are vermin and should be dealt with as such. In Europe, the logical conclusion was the Holocaust. If Ahmadinejad has his way, he will not wait for compliant Muslims ready to act on his wish.
The world needs conferences of love, a promotion of understanding of cultures and antiracist campaigns, but more urgently the world needs to be informed again and again of the Holocaust. Not only in the interest of the Jews who survived the Holocaust and their offspring, but in the interest of humanity in general.
[Perhaps the first place to start is to counter the Islamic philanthropy that comes laced with hatred against the Jews. Western and Christian charities in the third world should take it upon themselves to inform Muslims and non- Muslims alike, in the areas where they are active, about the Holocaust.]
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The International Herald Tribune
Confronting Holocaust denial
Ayaan Ali
Friday, December 15, 2006
WASHINGTON
One day In 1994, living in Ede, a small town in Holland, I got a visit from my half-sister. She and I had applied for asylum in Holland. I was granted one, she was denied. The fact that I got asylum gave me the opportunity to study. My half- sister could not.
In order for me to be admitted to the institute of higher education I wanted to attend, I needed to pass three courses: language, civics and history. It was in this preparatory history course that I, for the first time, heard of the Holocaust. I was 24 years old; my half-sister was 21.
In those days, the daily news was filled with the Rwandan genocide and ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia. On the day that my half-sister visited me, my head was reeling from what happened to 6 million Jews in Germany, Holland, France and Eastern Europe. I learned that innocent men, women and children were separated from each other. Stars pinned to their shoulders, transported by train to camps, they were gassed for no other reason than for being Jewish. It was the most systematic and cruel attempt in the history of mankind to annihilate a people.
I saw pictures of masses of skeletons, even of kids. I heard horrifying accounts of some of the people who had survived the terror of Auschwitz and Sobibor.
I told my half-sister all this and showed her the pictures in my history book. What she said shocked me more than the awful information in my book.
With great conviction my half-sister cried: "It's a lie! Jews have a way of blinding people. They were not killed, gassed nor massacred. But I pray to Allah that one day all the Jews in the world will be destroyed."
My 21-year-old sister did not say anything new. My shock was partly at her reaction in the light of so much evidence and partly because of the genocides of our own time.
Growing up as a child in Saudi Arabia, I remember my teachers, my mom and our neighbors telling us practically on a daily basis that Jews were evil, the sworn enemies of Muslims who's only goal was to destroy Islam. We were never informed about the Holocaust.
Later in Kenya, as a teenager, when Saudi and other Gulf philanthropy reached us in Africa, I remember that the building of mosques and donations to hospitals and the poor went hand in hand with the cursing of Jews. Jews were said to be responsible for the deaths of babies, epidemics like AIDS, for the cause of wars. They were greedy and would do absolutely anything to kill us Muslims. And if we ever wanted to know peace and stability we would have to destroy them before they would wipe us out. For those of us who were not in a position to take arms against the Jews it was enough for us to cup our hands, raise our eyes heavenward and pray to Allah to destroy them.
Western leaders today who say they are shocked by the conference of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran denying the Holocaust need to wake up to that reality. For the majority of Muslims in the world the Holocaust is not a major historical event they deny; they simply do not know because they were never informed. Worse, most of us are groomed to wish for a Holocaust of Jews.
I remember the presence of Western philanthropists, nongovernmental organizations and such institutions as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. Their agents brought those they thought of as needy medicine, condoms, vaccines, building materials — but no information on the Holocaust.
Secular and Christian donors and relief organizations did not come with an agenda of hate, but neither with a message of love. This was surely a missed opportunity in the light of the hate- spreading charities from oil-rich Muslim countries.
The total number of Jews in the world today is estimated to be around 15 million, certainly no more than 20 million. In terms of fertility, their growth can be compared to that of the developed world, and in terms of aging too.
On the other hand, the Muslim population is estimated to be 1.2 to 1.5 billion people, and it is not only rapidly growing but also very young. What's striking about Ahmadinejad's conference is the (silent) acquiescence of mainstream Muslims.
I cannot help but wonder: Why is there no counter-conference in Riyadh, Cairo, Lahore, Khartoum or Jakarta condemning Ahmadinejad? Why is the Organization of the Islamic Conference silent on this?
Could the answer be as simple as it is horrifying: For generations the leaders of these so-called Muslim countries have been spoon-feeding their populations a constant diet of propaganda similar to the one that generations of Germans (and other Europeans) were fed that Jews are vermin and should be dealt with as such. In Europe, the logical conclusion was the Holocaust. If Ahmadinejad has his way, he will not wait for compliant Muslims ready to act on his wish.
The world needs conferences of love, a promotion of understanding of cultures and antiracist campaigns, but more urgently the world needs to be informed again and again of the Holocaust. Not only in the interest of the Jews who survived the Holocaust and their offspring, but in the interest of humanity in general.
Saturday, December 16, 2006
Pride and humiliation: the reality of the ISRAEL-PALESTINIAN conflict
[Blogger Ratna Pele (Netherland) quoting Al Jazeera editor Ahmed Sheikh, puts her finger on the root causes of the RELENTLESS Arab hostility to the tiny, single Jewish State among the hugely larger mass of Islamic States in the ME. Why does Israel bother them so?
It's simple. No person likes being shown-up, being upstaged or being humiliated due to their self-centered feelings of superiority,- or inferiority complexes! They therefore clamour for attention in any way they can, with the resultant rejection which only compounds their feelings.
How much less so do those purveyors of religious messages who claim direct communications with their "messenger from God", -like being upstaged by the "infidels". Their messages of hate come straight from hell, but unfortunately they are too dense to realize it.
MM]
Pride and Humiliation
Ratna Pele
14.12. 2006
http://www.zionism-israel.com/log/archives/00000310.html
Original content copyright by the author
Zionism & Israel Center http://zionism-israel.com
Recently Swiss journalist Pierre Heumann interviewed the editor-in-chief of Al Jazeera, Ahmed Sheikh, a man of Palestinian origin. The following excerpt is particularly interesting:
(Ahmed Sheikh:) In many Arab states, the middle class is disappearing. The rich get richer and the poor get still poorer. Look at the schools in Jordan, Egypt or Morocco: You have up to 70 youngsters crammed together in a single classroom. How can teachers do their jobs in such circumstances? The public hospitals are also in a hopeless condition. These are just examples. They show how hopeless the situation is for us in the Middle East.
(Pierre Heumann:) Who is responsible for the situation?
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is one of the most important reasons why these crises and problems continue to simmer. The day when Israel was founded created the basis for our problems. The West should finally come to understand this. Everything would be much calmer if the Palestinians were given their rights.
Do you mean to say that if Israel did not exist, there would suddenly be democracy in Egypt, that the schools in Morocco would be better, that the public clinics in Jordan would function better?
I think so.
Can you please explain to me what the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has to do with these problems?
The Palestinian cause is central for Arab thinking.
In the end, is it a matter of feelings of self-esteem?
Exactly. It's because we always lose to Israel. It gnaws at the people in the Middle East that such a small country as Israel, with only about 7 million inhabitants, can defeat the Arab nation with its 350 million. That hurts our collective ego. The Palestinian problem is in the genes of every Arab. The West's problem is that it does not understand this.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I think he is absolutely right in those final remarks. We don't realize enough how much the Arabs are driven by humiliation and insulted pride. See the extreme reactions to the Danish cartoons and to the speech by the Pope in Regensburg, and a political murder and many threats because of the film Submission in the Netherlands. But the worst of all is Israel, which came out of nothing and within decades grew to be the most prosperous, strongest and most democratic state of the region. And which grew from their own midst, while they did everything to prevent this (the Arab League was founded in part for that very purpose).
Israel shows most clearly the failure of the Arab states, their lack of unity (without which they would have probably succeeded in defeating Israel), and the hegemony of the West. The difference between the Arab world and the West is visible between the Gaza Strip and Ashkelon, 20 kilometers apart, or between Ariel and the nearby Palestinian refugee camps. Nowhere it is as close as where Palestinians work inside Jewish settlements for less than Israeli minimum wages, but multiple of what they would earn in the Palestinian territories. The question of Palestine is not 'central to Arab thinking' because the Palestinians are more oppressed than Arabs elsewhere in the Middle East, or in Chechnya or in Iran, but because the humiliation is felt as so much worse. 'Such a small country can defeat the Arab nation. That hurts our collective ego'.The rest is, excuse me, nonsense.
Without Israel no school or hospital in the Arab world would have better teachers or more medicine, women and dissidents would not have more rights and the Syrians and Egyptians would not be more thriving nations. The problems of the Middle East existed before Israel's foundation, and will be no less after her eventual disappearance. Israel put them under a magnifying glass, made them visible, like a good pupil in a class of mediocres makes the latter's failing painfully obvious and contradicts all excuses like that the lessons or the teacher are no good. The frustration about the lack of development in the Arab world finds an outlet in hate for Israel. Ahmed Sheikh's remarks also show that it is not so much about the occupation, but about Israel itself, about the fact that it exists and that the Arab states have been incompetent in abolishing it.
The Arab world has set an unattainable goal in destroying Israel, and can apparently only regain its dignity and pride by defeating Israel. Small or partial victories (or even not being utterly defeated) are played up, like the Egyptian 'victory' in 1973 or the 'victory' of Hezbollah in the recent war in Lebanon. Although this could be the key for ending the deadlock between Israel and the Arab states (after all, Egypt was capable of making peace with Israel only after it felt it had restored its honor), the recent 'victories' of Hezbollah and Hamas (which Palestinians generally believe succeeded in chasing Israel out of the Gaza Strip), did not lead towards any moderation or a more reconciliatory attitude, but have merely increased the desire for more victories and the conviction that this would be possible.
In stead of aiming to restore their honor by continuing to fight, they would be better advised to restore their honor by showing to the world that they are capable of building their own society, of providing proper education and health care to their own citizens, and of creating employment. Wouldn't it be the greatest victory over Israel if the Palestinians were capable of surpassing it in economic growth and education level? If there would be more Arab than Jewish Nobel Prize winners?
Ratna Pelle
Original content is Copyright by the author 2006.
Posted at ZioNation-Zionism and Israel Web Log, http://www.zionism-israel.com/log/archives/00000310.htmlwhere your intelligent and constructive comments are welcome. Disributed by ZNN list. Subscribe by sending a message to ZNN-subscribe@yahoogroups.com. Please forward by e-mail with this notice, cite this article and link to it. Other uses by permission only.
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It's simple. No person likes being shown-up, being upstaged or being humiliated due to their self-centered feelings of superiority,- or inferiority complexes! They therefore clamour for attention in any way they can, with the resultant rejection which only compounds their feelings.
How much less so do those purveyors of religious messages who claim direct communications with their "messenger from God", -like being upstaged by the "infidels". Their messages of hate come straight from hell, but unfortunately they are too dense to realize it.
MM]
Pride and Humiliation
Ratna Pele
14.12. 2006
http://www.zionism-israel.com/log/archives/00000310.html
Original content copyright by the author
Zionism & Israel Center http://zionism-israel.com
Recently Swiss journalist Pierre Heumann interviewed the editor-in-chief of Al Jazeera, Ahmed Sheikh, a man of Palestinian origin. The following excerpt is particularly interesting:
(Ahmed Sheikh:) In many Arab states, the middle class is disappearing. The rich get richer and the poor get still poorer. Look at the schools in Jordan, Egypt or Morocco: You have up to 70 youngsters crammed together in a single classroom. How can teachers do their jobs in such circumstances? The public hospitals are also in a hopeless condition. These are just examples. They show how hopeless the situation is for us in the Middle East.
(Pierre Heumann:) Who is responsible for the situation?
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is one of the most important reasons why these crises and problems continue to simmer. The day when Israel was founded created the basis for our problems. The West should finally come to understand this. Everything would be much calmer if the Palestinians were given their rights.
Do you mean to say that if Israel did not exist, there would suddenly be democracy in Egypt, that the schools in Morocco would be better, that the public clinics in Jordan would function better?
I think so.
Can you please explain to me what the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has to do with these problems?
The Palestinian cause is central for Arab thinking.
In the end, is it a matter of feelings of self-esteem?
Exactly. It's because we always lose to Israel. It gnaws at the people in the Middle East that such a small country as Israel, with only about 7 million inhabitants, can defeat the Arab nation with its 350 million. That hurts our collective ego. The Palestinian problem is in the genes of every Arab. The West's problem is that it does not understand this.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I think he is absolutely right in those final remarks. We don't realize enough how much the Arabs are driven by humiliation and insulted pride. See the extreme reactions to the Danish cartoons and to the speech by the Pope in Regensburg, and a political murder and many threats because of the film Submission in the Netherlands. But the worst of all is Israel, which came out of nothing and within decades grew to be the most prosperous, strongest and most democratic state of the region. And which grew from their own midst, while they did everything to prevent this (the Arab League was founded in part for that very purpose).
Israel shows most clearly the failure of the Arab states, their lack of unity (without which they would have probably succeeded in defeating Israel), and the hegemony of the West. The difference between the Arab world and the West is visible between the Gaza Strip and Ashkelon, 20 kilometers apart, or between Ariel and the nearby Palestinian refugee camps. Nowhere it is as close as where Palestinians work inside Jewish settlements for less than Israeli minimum wages, but multiple of what they would earn in the Palestinian territories. The question of Palestine is not 'central to Arab thinking' because the Palestinians are more oppressed than Arabs elsewhere in the Middle East, or in Chechnya or in Iran, but because the humiliation is felt as so much worse. 'Such a small country can defeat the Arab nation. That hurts our collective ego'.The rest is, excuse me, nonsense.
Without Israel no school or hospital in the Arab world would have better teachers or more medicine, women and dissidents would not have more rights and the Syrians and Egyptians would not be more thriving nations. The problems of the Middle East existed before Israel's foundation, and will be no less after her eventual disappearance. Israel put them under a magnifying glass, made them visible, like a good pupil in a class of mediocres makes the latter's failing painfully obvious and contradicts all excuses like that the lessons or the teacher are no good. The frustration about the lack of development in the Arab world finds an outlet in hate for Israel. Ahmed Sheikh's remarks also show that it is not so much about the occupation, but about Israel itself, about the fact that it exists and that the Arab states have been incompetent in abolishing it.
The Arab world has set an unattainable goal in destroying Israel, and can apparently only regain its dignity and pride by defeating Israel. Small or partial victories (or even not being utterly defeated) are played up, like the Egyptian 'victory' in 1973 or the 'victory' of Hezbollah in the recent war in Lebanon. Although this could be the key for ending the deadlock between Israel and the Arab states (after all, Egypt was capable of making peace with Israel only after it felt it had restored its honor), the recent 'victories' of Hezbollah and Hamas (which Palestinians generally believe succeeded in chasing Israel out of the Gaza Strip), did not lead towards any moderation or a more reconciliatory attitude, but have merely increased the desire for more victories and the conviction that this would be possible.
In stead of aiming to restore their honor by continuing to fight, they would be better advised to restore their honor by showing to the world that they are capable of building their own society, of providing proper education and health care to their own citizens, and of creating employment. Wouldn't it be the greatest victory over Israel if the Palestinians were capable of surpassing it in economic growth and education level? If there would be more Arab than Jewish Nobel Prize winners?
Ratna Pelle
Original content is Copyright by the author 2006.
Posted at ZioNation-Zionism and Israel Web Log, http://www.zionism-israel.com/log/archives/00000310.htmlwhere your intelligent and constructive comments are welcome. Disributed by ZNN list. Subscribe by sending a message to ZNN-subscribe@yahoogroups.com. Please forward by e-mail with this notice, cite this article and link to it. Other uses by permission only.
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IRAN: Where Holocaust denial is welcomed. (BBC)
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/6183061.stm
Where Holocaust denial is welcomed
By Frances Harrison
BBC News, Iran
Iran has been severely criticised for hosting a conference questioning the Holocaust. Delegates included not only some of the world's best-known Holocaust deniers, but also white supremacists and anti-Semites.
In the BBC there's a lot of talk about impartial broadcasting. I've always wondered how that would work if you were the BBC correspondent in Nazi Germany reporting on Hitler.
Would you not have to take sides? Well I got closer than ever before to this problem reporting on Iran's Holocaust conference.
I have interviewed suicide bombers, sexually-abused children, raped women - I have seen the devastation of war and the tsunami.
But I have never reported on anything like this. On the second day some of the delegates were coming up to me congratulating me on my coverage of the story.
The guest list was a who's who of holocaust deniers - men who have spent time in prison in Europe for saying Hitler's gas chambers never existed
I was actually lurking around wondering if they wanted to kill me for calling them Holocaust deniers and members of the Ku Klux Klan.
Quite the contrary - all publicity is good publicity for these sort of people. They were delighted to have made it onto the BBC and did not think being called a holocaust denier was at all insulting.
Only one Malaysian woman whose interview I didn't broadcast looked at me rather sourly.
Nazi apologists
The conference was organised by the Iranian Foreign Ministry in a centre where normally the topic of discussion is the price of oil or the future of the non-aligned movement.
When it is so difficult for an American to get an Iranian visa, I cannot understand how the government here let in a man who has been described as perhaps America's best known racist.
There's a photograph on the internet of a young David Duke wearing a swastika on his arm.
He formed the National Association for the Advancement of White People, not to mention the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.
One of my colleagues tried to explain to a foreign ministry official what sort of organisation the Klan was - he talked of its history - men in white hoods going around lynching black people.
Every delegate I interviewed congratulated Iran on its commitment to freedom of speech which they said was absent in the West
The official just shrugged it off. I wondered if the Foreign Ministry lost control over the guest list but then again the visa process is rigorous - it took my mother more than three months to get a tourist visa for Iran.
But it was not just white supremacists - the guest list was a who's who of Holocaust deniers - men who have spent time in prison in Europe for saying Hitler's gas chambers never existed.
A small clique of apologists for the Third Reich with only fringe appeal suddenly revelling in being mainstream - well mainstream at least in Iran.
Free speech
Let me give you a flavour of the so-called academic papers they delivered. One French speaker said: "The Holocaust is a gigantic lie and the gas chambers should be put in the rubbish bin of history."
CONFERENCE PARTICIPANTS
Australian Fredrick Toeben , jailed in Germany for incitement and insulting the memory of the dead
Frenchman Robert Faurisson , convicted in France under Holocaust denial laws
Frenchman Georges Thiel , convicted in France under Holocaust denial laws
American David Duke , a former KKK leader and white supremacist
He had already spent one year in prison because of what he called "one of his little books". Little books - but big lies - denying the Nazis had a deliberate policy to exterminate the Jewish people.
He summed up his argument succinctly. He claimed there were no gas chambers at all - millions of Jews did not die - therefore there was no holocaust.
And if there was no Holocaust then there was no justification for the creation of the state of Israel. Therefore Israel was an impostor.
It had all the simplicity of a mathematical proof - refuting the worst genocide in living memory and absolving one of the most evil and wicked regimes in history of its crimes against humanity.
So this was the aim of the conference for Iran - to undermine the very argument for the existence of Israel.
And also to score a few points over the West on the issue of freedom of speech. Every delegate I interviewed congratulated Iran on its commitment to freedom of speech which they said was absent in the West where their comrades were in jail for denying the Holocaust.
They all paid tribute to their new hero, President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad. I asked them if they knew about the journalists and students who have been jailed in Iran for pushing the limits of freedom of speech in this country.
They were vague - happy to whitewash Iran without knowing the facts. As a journalist living and working in Iran I found it particularly galling to be told that I had freedom of speech by these people.
Eventually I found one of the movers and shakers behind the conference - a friend of President Ahmedinejad and asked him why there was freedom of speech to deny the Holocaust but not to criticise the Iranian government.
He told me there was complete freedom but the Western media was in the pocket of the Zionists and sent spies to undermine Iran's national security.
Presumably he meant all the students, bloggers, journalists and human rights lawyers who've been jailed here are Zionist spies.
Then he went on to say that the very presence of a BBC correspondent in Iran proved there was freedom of speech. Another twisted logic.
But when all the delegates were taken to see President Ahmedinejad for a mutual admiration session, the BBC, unlike other foreign media, was excluded from covering it. So much for Iranian freedom of speech.
From Our Own Correspondent was broadcast on Saturday, 16 December, 2006 at 1130 GMT on BBC Radio 4. Please check the programme schedules for World Service transmission times.
T
Where Holocaust denial is welcomed
By Frances Harrison
BBC News, Iran
Iran has been severely criticised for hosting a conference questioning the Holocaust. Delegates included not only some of the world's best-known Holocaust deniers, but also white supremacists and anti-Semites.
In the BBC there's a lot of talk about impartial broadcasting. I've always wondered how that would work if you were the BBC correspondent in Nazi Germany reporting on Hitler.
Would you not have to take sides? Well I got closer than ever before to this problem reporting on Iran's Holocaust conference.
I have interviewed suicide bombers, sexually-abused children, raped women - I have seen the devastation of war and the tsunami.
But I have never reported on anything like this. On the second day some of the delegates were coming up to me congratulating me on my coverage of the story.
The guest list was a who's who of holocaust deniers - men who have spent time in prison in Europe for saying Hitler's gas chambers never existed
I was actually lurking around wondering if they wanted to kill me for calling them Holocaust deniers and members of the Ku Klux Klan.
Quite the contrary - all publicity is good publicity for these sort of people. They were delighted to have made it onto the BBC and did not think being called a holocaust denier was at all insulting.
Only one Malaysian woman whose interview I didn't broadcast looked at me rather sourly.
Nazi apologists
The conference was organised by the Iranian Foreign Ministry in a centre where normally the topic of discussion is the price of oil or the future of the non-aligned movement.
When it is so difficult for an American to get an Iranian visa, I cannot understand how the government here let in a man who has been described as perhaps America's best known racist.
There's a photograph on the internet of a young David Duke wearing a swastika on his arm.
He formed the National Association for the Advancement of White People, not to mention the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.
One of my colleagues tried to explain to a foreign ministry official what sort of organisation the Klan was - he talked of its history - men in white hoods going around lynching black people.
Every delegate I interviewed congratulated Iran on its commitment to freedom of speech which they said was absent in the West
The official just shrugged it off. I wondered if the Foreign Ministry lost control over the guest list but then again the visa process is rigorous - it took my mother more than three months to get a tourist visa for Iran.
But it was not just white supremacists - the guest list was a who's who of Holocaust deniers - men who have spent time in prison in Europe for saying Hitler's gas chambers never existed.
A small clique of apologists for the Third Reich with only fringe appeal suddenly revelling in being mainstream - well mainstream at least in Iran.
Free speech
Let me give you a flavour of the so-called academic papers they delivered. One French speaker said: "The Holocaust is a gigantic lie and the gas chambers should be put in the rubbish bin of history."
CONFERENCE PARTICIPANTS
Australian Fredrick Toeben , jailed in Germany for incitement and insulting the memory of the dead
Frenchman Robert Faurisson , convicted in France under Holocaust denial laws
Frenchman Georges Thiel , convicted in France under Holocaust denial laws
American David Duke , a former KKK leader and white supremacist
He had already spent one year in prison because of what he called "one of his little books". Little books - but big lies - denying the Nazis had a deliberate policy to exterminate the Jewish people.
He summed up his argument succinctly. He claimed there were no gas chambers at all - millions of Jews did not die - therefore there was no holocaust.
And if there was no Holocaust then there was no justification for the creation of the state of Israel. Therefore Israel was an impostor.
It had all the simplicity of a mathematical proof - refuting the worst genocide in living memory and absolving one of the most evil and wicked regimes in history of its crimes against humanity.
So this was the aim of the conference for Iran - to undermine the very argument for the existence of Israel.
And also to score a few points over the West on the issue of freedom of speech. Every delegate I interviewed congratulated Iran on its commitment to freedom of speech which they said was absent in the West where their comrades were in jail for denying the Holocaust.
They all paid tribute to their new hero, President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad. I asked them if they knew about the journalists and students who have been jailed in Iran for pushing the limits of freedom of speech in this country.
They were vague - happy to whitewash Iran without knowing the facts. As a journalist living and working in Iran I found it particularly galling to be told that I had freedom of speech by these people.
Eventually I found one of the movers and shakers behind the conference - a friend of President Ahmedinejad and asked him why there was freedom of speech to deny the Holocaust but not to criticise the Iranian government.
He told me there was complete freedom but the Western media was in the pocket of the Zionists and sent spies to undermine Iran's national security.
Presumably he meant all the students, bloggers, journalists and human rights lawyers who've been jailed here are Zionist spies.
Then he went on to say that the very presence of a BBC correspondent in Iran proved there was freedom of speech. Another twisted logic.
But when all the delegates were taken to see President Ahmedinejad for a mutual admiration session, the BBC, unlike other foreign media, was excluded from covering it. So much for Iranian freedom of speech.
From Our Own Correspondent was broadcast on Saturday, 16 December, 2006 at 1130 GMT on BBC Radio 4. Please check the programme schedules for World Service transmission times.
T
Thursday, December 14, 2006
RELIGIOUS LAW: Conference of Rabbis to discuss AGUNOT cancelled.
Read all about it.
Chief Rabbi cancels agunot conferenceYNet News 11/02/06http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3323056,00.html
2. "All in the (Jewish) family" by Tamar RothemHaaretz (English edition) Thursday November 9th 2006http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/785115.html
3. Agunah Conference Abruptly CanceledIsrael National News 14:17 Nov 07, '06 / 16 Cheshvan 5767http://www.israelnationalnews.com/news.php3?id=114949
4. Looking for Rabbinic Heroes by Leah AharonovJewish Press, Wednesday November 8th 2006http://www.jewishpress.com/page.do/19840/Looking_For_Rabbinic_Heroes.html
5. "Dismayed but Undeterred" by Sharon ShenhavJewish Press, Wednesday November 15th 2006http://www.jewishpress.com/page.do/19901/Dismayed_But_Undeterred.html
6. Women's rights leaders outraged as conference on agunot cancelled By Jacob Berkman, JTA,
November 3, 2006 http://www.jta.org/page_view_story.asp?intarticleid=17246&intcategoryid=1
http://anivlam.blogspot.com
Chief Rabbi cancels agunot conferenceYNet News 11/02/06http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3323056,00.html
2. "All in the (Jewish) family" by Tamar RothemHaaretz (English edition) Thursday November 9th 2006http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/785115.html
3. Agunah Conference Abruptly CanceledIsrael National News 14:17 Nov 07, '06 / 16 Cheshvan 5767http://www.israelnationalnews.com/news.php3?id=114949
4. Looking for Rabbinic Heroes by Leah AharonovJewish Press, Wednesday November 8th 2006http://www.jewishpress.com/page.do/19840/Looking_For_Rabbinic_Heroes.html
5. "Dismayed but Undeterred" by Sharon ShenhavJewish Press, Wednesday November 15th 2006http://www.jewishpress.com/page.do/19901/Dismayed_But_Undeterred.html
6. Women's rights leaders outraged as conference on agunot cancelled By Jacob Berkman, JTA,
November 3, 2006 http://www.jta.org/page_view_story.asp?intarticleid=17246&intcategoryid=1
http://anivlam.blogspot.com
ANTI-ZIONISTS.The Rebbe from hell: Moshe A. Friedman
http://www.zionism-israel.com/log/archives/00000309.html
Rabbi Moshe (Moishe) Aryeh Friedman in his element among Iranian Holocaust deniers
14.12. 2006
http://www.zionism-israel.com/log/archives/00000309.html
Original content copyright by the author
Zionism & Israel Center http://zionism-israel.com
Another installment in tales of the Rebbe from Hell. Moshe (Moishe) Aryeh Friedman had to show up, of course at the Iranian Holocaust deniers conference. He was in good company with KKK Grand Wizard David Duke, Neturei Karteh members, bona fide regular neo-Nazis and Iranian wannabe neo-Nazi Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Friedman is among his element with these progressive humanitarians, having previously allied himself with Austrian neo-Nazis and with the Hamas. At the meeting, according to the German Stern journal, Friedman praised the Holocaust denial conference as advancing "knowledge" about the Holocaust, and claimed that the latest research shows that "only" a million Jews were killed in the Holocaust, and not 6 million. The number 6 million, according to him, was taken from a prophecy by Theodor Herzl.
According to an English language report from the Iranian Republic of Iran Broadcasting Web site:
Rabbi Moshe Aryeh Friedman from Austria and chief of the Orthodox Anti-Zionist society of Austria, French professor Robert Faurisson, David Reis a member of anti-Zionist rabbis society in America, Ian Bernhoff a Swedish researcher, Fredrick Toeben a prominent German-born Australian revisionist of the Holocaust, David Duke a political science professor in Ukraine's university, Leonardo De Chlirchi from Belgium, Kriptian Lindenz a professor from Denmark and Alexander Baron from Britain.
12 rabbis membering the anti-Zionist rabbis society in America and Austria are participating in the conference. (source:http://www. iribnews.ir/Full_en.asp?news_id=227186 )
Well, not exactly English, but close enough. The report refers to the participation of these demented rabbis and Klan Wizard Duke as "Top researchers in Holocaust meeting."
The "anti-Zionist rabbis society in America" apparently refers to the Neturei Karteh, who got a hefty subsidy from Yasser Arafat, and who are accredited to the United Nations Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People (CEIRPP) (see "The Question of Palestine"). Apparently, the inalienable rights of the Palestinians and the Iranians include Holocaust denial.
So tell me, Reb Holocaust Denier, what is the Halachic ruling for sucking the blood of your brothers? Is it kosher or not kosher?
With Jews like that, who needs Nazis?
The people really missing from this conference were the compilers of the Iran Study Group report, who should have been there to engage Mr. Ahmadinejad.
Ami Isseroff
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Original content is Copyright by the author 2006. Posted at ZioNation-Zionism and Israel Web Log, http://www.zionism-israel.com/log/archives/00000309.html where your intelligent and constructive comments are welcome. Disributed by ZNN list. Subscribe by sending a message to ZNN-subscribe@yahoogroups.com. Please forward by e-mail with this notice, cite this article and link to it. Other uses by permission only.
Rabbi Moshe (Moishe) Aryeh Friedman in his element among Iranian Holocaust deniers
14.12. 2006
http://www.zionism-israel.com/log/archives/00000309.html
Original content copyright by the author
Zionism & Israel Center http://zionism-israel.com
Another installment in tales of the Rebbe from Hell. Moshe (Moishe) Aryeh Friedman had to show up, of course at the Iranian Holocaust deniers conference. He was in good company with KKK Grand Wizard David Duke, Neturei Karteh members, bona fide regular neo-Nazis and Iranian wannabe neo-Nazi Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Friedman is among his element with these progressive humanitarians, having previously allied himself with Austrian neo-Nazis and with the Hamas. At the meeting, according to the German Stern journal, Friedman praised the Holocaust denial conference as advancing "knowledge" about the Holocaust, and claimed that the latest research shows that "only" a million Jews were killed in the Holocaust, and not 6 million. The number 6 million, according to him, was taken from a prophecy by Theodor Herzl.
According to an English language report from the Iranian Republic of Iran Broadcasting Web site:
Rabbi Moshe Aryeh Friedman from Austria and chief of the Orthodox Anti-Zionist society of Austria, French professor Robert Faurisson, David Reis a member of anti-Zionist rabbis society in America, Ian Bernhoff a Swedish researcher, Fredrick Toeben a prominent German-born Australian revisionist of the Holocaust, David Duke a political science professor in Ukraine's university, Leonardo De Chlirchi from Belgium, Kriptian Lindenz a professor from Denmark and Alexander Baron from Britain.
12 rabbis membering the anti-Zionist rabbis society in America and Austria are participating in the conference. (source:http://www. iribnews.ir/Full_en.asp?news_id=227186 )
Well, not exactly English, but close enough. The report refers to the participation of these demented rabbis and Klan Wizard Duke as "Top researchers in Holocaust meeting."
The "anti-Zionist rabbis society in America" apparently refers to the Neturei Karteh, who got a hefty subsidy from Yasser Arafat, and who are accredited to the United Nations Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People (CEIRPP) (see "The Question of Palestine"). Apparently, the inalienable rights of the Palestinians and the Iranians include Holocaust denial.
So tell me, Reb Holocaust Denier, what is the Halachic ruling for sucking the blood of your brothers? Is it kosher or not kosher?
With Jews like that, who needs Nazis?
The people really missing from this conference were the compilers of the Iran Study Group report, who should have been there to engage Mr. Ahmadinejad.
Ami Isseroff
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Original content is Copyright by the author 2006. Posted at ZioNation-Zionism and Israel Web Log, http://www.zionism-israel.com/log/archives/00000309.html where your intelligent and constructive comments are welcome. Disributed by ZNN list. Subscribe by sending a message to ZNN-subscribe@yahoogroups.com. Please forward by e-mail with this notice, cite this article and link to it. Other uses by permission only.
Wednesday, December 13, 2006
HOLOCAUST. The witnesses are dying off. (The First Post)
The Holocaust’s witnesses are dying off Soon no one will be left to speak out against those who deny the reality of the Nazi death camps,
By Colin BOSTOCK-SMITH
The First Post
December 13, 2006
http://www.thefirstpost.co.uk/?menudID=1&subID=974
It's disturbing to watch those madmen as they gather in Tehran, eager to deny that during the late 1930s and early 1940s there was a determined attempt to exterminate the entire Jewish race.
Those invited to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's provocative two-day conference - Review of the Holocaust: Global Vision - include David Duke, a former imperial wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, and Michele Renouf, a London-based associate of the revisonist author David Irving, in jail in Vienna for Holocaust denial.
More disturbing is the realisation that the people who actually witnessed the death camps, (after the war, as well as the survivors themselves) who freed the skeletons, who bulldozed the corpses into pits... those people are now dying themselves.
Before too long, the only evidence that the Holocaust ever took place will be found in the
records. Then the Holocaust-deniers will come into their own; there will be no witnesses left to refute the claim, made by Duke and Irving and others like them, that it was all a lie.
My godmother, Nancy, was one such witness. She was a pretty and charismatic woman, and she was an ambulance driver in the first British army convoy to enter Belsen.
Before the war, Nancy was something of a free spirit. The youngest daughter of strict parents, she resisted the dual attractions of marriage and a proper career, and instead went on the stage. She was, apparently, not much good on it. But she had fun. Late nights. Loads of men. She was a bright young thing. She revelled in life. She sparkled.
When hostilities broke out, she joined up, she drove her ambulance, and in the spring of 1945 she drove it into Belsen.
That much I knew as a child. I wanted to know more. But Nancy wasn't telling.
With the end of hostilities, her life changed abruptly. She no longer wanted anything to do with the stage, with her former life. Instead she emigrated. She got on a boat for Kenya, married a tea farmer, and stayed there until her death.
Of course, she came home occasionally. 'On leave', as the Kenyan whites called it. And when she did, I pestered her to tell me more about Belsen. She always refused.
Then, in the early 1990s, she came back one last time. One evening, after a heavy and convivial dinner, and far too much burgundy, I asked her about it again. What was it like? How did she feel? Her answer sobered us all up at a stroke.
"The worst thing," she began, "the worst thing was the doctor's rounds. I would have to go round the huts with a doctor, looking at the people. And the doctor would indicate to me which ones to take out for treatment. In other words, which ones stood a chance of surviving. The others were beyond help. They simply had to be left where they were, to die."
‘I can never forget their eyes,’ said Nancy . ‘They were beyond help. They had to be left to die’
She didn't have to point out the grotesque irony of those selections - that people who had survived the Nazi selections for death were now being selected for life. Or not.
"The doctor knew that those who were left would die. I knew they would die. And they knew they would die. You could see it in their eyes. They crawled at our feet, begging to be taken out. But we couldn't take them all. We just couldn't."
She got up, the convivial evening lying in pieces at her feet. "It's their eyes," she told me coldly. "I can never forget their eyes."
Then she went up to bed. Days later she left England for the last time, returned to her farm in Kenya, and died a few months later after a short illness.
Related links Are Israelis gearing up to bomb Iran?
Iran uses proxies to provoke Israel
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By Colin BOSTOCK-SMITH
The First Post
December 13, 2006
http://www.thefirstpost.co.uk/?menudID=1&subID=974
It's disturbing to watch those madmen as they gather in Tehran, eager to deny that during the late 1930s and early 1940s there was a determined attempt to exterminate the entire Jewish race.
Those invited to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's provocative two-day conference - Review of the Holocaust: Global Vision - include David Duke, a former imperial wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, and Michele Renouf, a London-based associate of the revisonist author David Irving, in jail in Vienna for Holocaust denial.
More disturbing is the realisation that the people who actually witnessed the death camps, (after the war, as well as the survivors themselves) who freed the skeletons, who bulldozed the corpses into pits... those people are now dying themselves.
Before too long, the only evidence that the Holocaust ever took place will be found in the
records. Then the Holocaust-deniers will come into their own; there will be no witnesses left to refute the claim, made by Duke and Irving and others like them, that it was all a lie.
My godmother, Nancy, was one such witness. She was a pretty and charismatic woman, and she was an ambulance driver in the first British army convoy to enter Belsen.
Before the war, Nancy was something of a free spirit. The youngest daughter of strict parents, she resisted the dual attractions of marriage and a proper career, and instead went on the stage. She was, apparently, not much good on it. But she had fun. Late nights. Loads of men. She was a bright young thing. She revelled in life. She sparkled.
When hostilities broke out, she joined up, she drove her ambulance, and in the spring of 1945 she drove it into Belsen.
That much I knew as a child. I wanted to know more. But Nancy wasn't telling.
With the end of hostilities, her life changed abruptly. She no longer wanted anything to do with the stage, with her former life. Instead she emigrated. She got on a boat for Kenya, married a tea farmer, and stayed there until her death.
Of course, she came home occasionally. 'On leave', as the Kenyan whites called it. And when she did, I pestered her to tell me more about Belsen. She always refused.
Then, in the early 1990s, she came back one last time. One evening, after a heavy and convivial dinner, and far too much burgundy, I asked her about it again. What was it like? How did she feel? Her answer sobered us all up at a stroke.
"The worst thing," she began, "the worst thing was the doctor's rounds. I would have to go round the huts with a doctor, looking at the people. And the doctor would indicate to me which ones to take out for treatment. In other words, which ones stood a chance of surviving. The others were beyond help. They simply had to be left where they were, to die."
‘I can never forget their eyes,’ said Nancy . ‘They were beyond help. They had to be left to die’
She didn't have to point out the grotesque irony of those selections - that people who had survived the Nazi selections for death were now being selected for life. Or not.
"The doctor knew that those who were left would die. I knew they would die. And they knew they would die. You could see it in their eyes. They crawled at our feet, begging to be taken out. But we couldn't take them all. We just couldn't."
She got up, the convivial evening lying in pieces at her feet. "It's their eyes," she told me coldly. "I can never forget their eyes."
Then she went up to bed. Days later she left England for the last time, returned to her farm in Kenya, and died a few months later after a short illness.
Related links Are Israelis gearing up to bomb Iran?
Iran uses proxies to provoke Israel
The First Post's Middle East file
__._,_.___ announcements.============================================================================
SPONSORED LINKS
Middle east
Human rights
Human rights campaign
International human right
Human rights abuses
Tuesday, December 12, 2006
HOLOCAUST. Iran's Israel denial at a "historians'" conference.
JERUSALEM POST
12th December 2006.
Iran's Israel denial
The organizers of a conference that opened yesterday in Teheran to"study" the Holocaust claim that their aim is "neither to deny orprove" that the Holocaust took place. How generous - and true. Indeed, Iranian leaders could care less about parsing European history. The real purpose of the conference was succinctly expressed by Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki: "If the official version of the Holocaust is thrown into doubt, then the identity and nature of Israel will be thrown into doubt. And if, during this review, it is proved that the Holocaust was a historical reality, then what is the reason for the Muslim people of the region and the Palestinians having to pay the cost of the Nazis' crimes?"
While Holocaust denial is in most places either illegal or the province of quacks, the claim and belief that the Palestinians are paying the price for Western Holocaust guilt is much more widespread.Though coming from the exact opposite angle, Israel constantly reinforces the linkage between our existence and the Holocaust, in that we inculcate in everyone from foreign leaders to IDF officers the notion that if Israel had existed earlier, the Holocaust would not have happened.Israel, in other words, often portrays itself as the answer and antidote to the Holocaust.
Iranian calls to "wipe Israel off the map" have been accentuating our case for some time. If, not long ago, it was difficult to convince people that the Muslim world had not come to terms with Israel's existence, now this is a fact that is hard to avoid. Iran is helping make clear that the "Arab-Israeli conflict" is not about borders, settlements or refugees, but about the radical Islamist refusal to accept the right of a Jewish state to exist in any shape or form.The Iranian conference illustrates the linkage between Holocaust denial and Israel denial. In addition, it should serve as an opportunity to debunk the claim that the historical, legal and moral basis of Israel's existence is solely, or even mainly, born of European atonement for the Holocaust.
It was 89 years ago this month that Lord Arthur Balfour declared: "His Majesty's Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities inPalestine..."
In 1922 this policy was ratified by a vote of the League of Nations,which gave the British a mandate over Palestine with the express purpose of creating a "Jewish national home." The justice of this -decades before the Holocaust - became more obvious as the world came to recognize more than a dozen new Arab states at about the same time it accepted one Jewish state, Israel.
While most of the new Arab states had no national historical antecedents, the Jewish state, of course, did. The capital of Israel became Jerusalem, the city that King David established as his capital some 3,000 years before, where the First and Second Temples had stood for approximately 1,000 years, and toward which Jews had prayed for 2,000 years.The point of Iran's "study conference" is to argue that Israel is an alien colonial implant. Actually, the Jewish state could not be more indigenous to this area, and its revival represents perhaps the greatest example of restorationist justice in history.
Nor is this view new, or even solely Jewish. As historian Michael Oren's new book, Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the MiddleEast, 1776 to the Present exhaustively documents, for centuries, long before the word "Zionism" was coined, leaders such as George Washington, Benjamin Franklin and Abraham Lincoln believed in"restorationism" - the idea that the Jewish people should be restored to a state in their land.The restoration of Jewish sovereignty over a small sliver of land was hardly at the expense of the Arabs, who came to enjoy many independent states of their own. The Iranian idea of justice is that the 22nd member of the Arab League, Palestine, be founded not alongside Israel but on our ashes.
(©) The Jerusalem Post
12th December 2006.
Iran's Israel denial
The organizers of a conference that opened yesterday in Teheran to"study" the Holocaust claim that their aim is "neither to deny orprove" that the Holocaust took place. How generous - and true. Indeed, Iranian leaders could care less about parsing European history. The real purpose of the conference was succinctly expressed by Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki: "If the official version of the Holocaust is thrown into doubt, then the identity and nature of Israel will be thrown into doubt. And if, during this review, it is proved that the Holocaust was a historical reality, then what is the reason for the Muslim people of the region and the Palestinians having to pay the cost of the Nazis' crimes?"
While Holocaust denial is in most places either illegal or the province of quacks, the claim and belief that the Palestinians are paying the price for Western Holocaust guilt is much more widespread.Though coming from the exact opposite angle, Israel constantly reinforces the linkage between our existence and the Holocaust, in that we inculcate in everyone from foreign leaders to IDF officers the notion that if Israel had existed earlier, the Holocaust would not have happened.Israel, in other words, often portrays itself as the answer and antidote to the Holocaust.
Iranian calls to "wipe Israel off the map" have been accentuating our case for some time. If, not long ago, it was difficult to convince people that the Muslim world had not come to terms with Israel's existence, now this is a fact that is hard to avoid. Iran is helping make clear that the "Arab-Israeli conflict" is not about borders, settlements or refugees, but about the radical Islamist refusal to accept the right of a Jewish state to exist in any shape or form.The Iranian conference illustrates the linkage between Holocaust denial and Israel denial. In addition, it should serve as an opportunity to debunk the claim that the historical, legal and moral basis of Israel's existence is solely, or even mainly, born of European atonement for the Holocaust.
It was 89 years ago this month that Lord Arthur Balfour declared: "His Majesty's Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities inPalestine..."
In 1922 this policy was ratified by a vote of the League of Nations,which gave the British a mandate over Palestine with the express purpose of creating a "Jewish national home." The justice of this -decades before the Holocaust - became more obvious as the world came to recognize more than a dozen new Arab states at about the same time it accepted one Jewish state, Israel.
While most of the new Arab states had no national historical antecedents, the Jewish state, of course, did. The capital of Israel became Jerusalem, the city that King David established as his capital some 3,000 years before, where the First and Second Temples had stood for approximately 1,000 years, and toward which Jews had prayed for 2,000 years.The point of Iran's "study conference" is to argue that Israel is an alien colonial implant. Actually, the Jewish state could not be more indigenous to this area, and its revival represents perhaps the greatest example of restorationist justice in history.
Nor is this view new, or even solely Jewish. As historian Michael Oren's new book, Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the MiddleEast, 1776 to the Present exhaustively documents, for centuries, long before the word "Zionism" was coined, leaders such as George Washington, Benjamin Franklin and Abraham Lincoln believed in"restorationism" - the idea that the Jewish people should be restored to a state in their land.The restoration of Jewish sovereignty over a small sliver of land was hardly at the expense of the Arabs, who came to enjoy many independent states of their own. The Iranian idea of justice is that the 22nd member of the Arab League, Palestine, be founded not alongside Israel but on our ashes.
(©) The Jerusalem Post
Saturday, December 09, 2006
WOMEN: "Give working mums a break" (The Australian)
(Way back in the 70s I had to give up my interesting bio-medical research career in order to satisfy my family-caring duties. It did not pay me to work part-time, pay for child-minding and home help. Both my husband and I worked odd and long hours, necessitating some help with after-school child-care, proper meals prepared for us all instead of take-aways, etc. After paying my helper and taxes, there was very little left for me,- so I decided to look after the kids and house myself. Soon afterwards, my 11-year old asked me: "mum what do you do all day? Most mums go to work to earn money as you used to!"
There is no great appreciation for-stay-at-home mums,- nor for those who work for little reward! Give them a tax-break for all home help and then see how many marriages are saved because the blokes won't have to do, or be begged to do some of the housework.
MM. )
THE AUSTRALIAN
Caroline Overington
Give working mums a break
Friday, December 08, 2006
IT’S about time that well-paid, hard-working parents got a tax break on childcare.
They ought to be able to claim all their childcare costs, including the wages paid to nannies. How are parents supposed to go to work, if they don’t have childcare? It’s obviously a work-related expense.
The government provides funds to mums who want to stay home, in the form of Family Tax Benefit, A and B. It also provides funds to mums who put their children in long day care centres. But the women who have stormed the workforce since the 1970s work as police officers, firefighters, surgeons, anaesthetists, pilots, lawyers, judges and flight attendants. They don’t have 9-5 rosters. They work on weekends. They can’t use childcare centres.
Some mums have one child at school, another still a toddler. They need nannies, too. There’s an idea—a stupid one—that only rich people have nannies. Actually, it’s the highly-educated, taxed-like-crazy, hard-working class that have nannies.
At the moment, the nanny industry is all black market, unregulated and unsatisfactory.
Professional women contribute a massive amount to the economy, both in personal taxes and in spending power. Their taxes are doled out to mums who don’t work, and that’s fine; or to mums who use childcare centres, and that’s fine, too.
But it’s time to give them something, as well. A tax break is a good start. What do you think?
There is no great appreciation for-stay-at-home mums,- nor for those who work for little reward! Give them a tax-break for all home help and then see how many marriages are saved because the blokes won't have to do, or be begged to do some of the housework.
MM. )
THE AUSTRALIAN
Caroline Overington
Give working mums a break
Friday, December 08, 2006
IT’S about time that well-paid, hard-working parents got a tax break on childcare.
They ought to be able to claim all their childcare costs, including the wages paid to nannies. How are parents supposed to go to work, if they don’t have childcare? It’s obviously a work-related expense.
The government provides funds to mums who want to stay home, in the form of Family Tax Benefit, A and B. It also provides funds to mums who put their children in long day care centres. But the women who have stormed the workforce since the 1970s work as police officers, firefighters, surgeons, anaesthetists, pilots, lawyers, judges and flight attendants. They don’t have 9-5 rosters. They work on weekends. They can’t use childcare centres.
Some mums have one child at school, another still a toddler. They need nannies, too. There’s an idea—a stupid one—that only rich people have nannies. Actually, it’s the highly-educated, taxed-like-crazy, hard-working class that have nannies.
At the moment, the nanny industry is all black market, unregulated and unsatisfactory.
Professional women contribute a massive amount to the economy, both in personal taxes and in spending power. Their taxes are doled out to mums who don’t work, and that’s fine; or to mums who use childcare centres, and that’s fine, too.
But it’s time to give them something, as well. A tax break is a good start. What do you think?
ISRAEL;"Piece Now" falls apart. (Daryl Temkin)
(The "lose-lose" situation. Whether "giving it away" or "taking it", -what's the difference for the Jewish State? Nothing!
Hang-in there Israel!
MM)
"Piece Now" Falls Apart
December 05, 2006
by Daryl Temkin, Ph.D.
The organization, Peace Now, which is sarcastically renamed, "Piece Now", has been devoted and beholden to the wishful concept of "land for peace". They have a firm belief that if Israel would only give away every parcel of land that has a possible Arab claim, the Arabs would become so satisfied that they would stop sending missiles and suicide bombers to destroy Israeli citizens and property.
Peace Now is committed to the idea that Arabs only want Israeli land up to the 1949 borders and have no concern about all the pre-1948 towns and villages where some 700,000 Arabs once resided. Giving land for peace means Israel gives a tangible item, namely land, and the Arabs give an intangible promise or even a signed piece of paper which asserts the deterrence of their citizens from killing Jews and participating in further terrorist acts. At the drop of a hat, the "promise" can be broken by one or many terrorists, an intifada revolt, or even a military attack. And if a breach should happen, once Israel has given away the land, the only way to recover the land, which to Israel spells "security", is by a major war.That type of war would include an untold number of deaths as well as an avalanche of worldwide anti-Israel condemnation. (So what's new? M.)
Even though there is no balance of security in the Land for Peace equation, and Israel is only left holding the short end of the stick, this equation became so popular among law makers and intellectuals that even the average person began to chant the mantra"Land for Peace". In 1956, after conquering the sizable land mass, the Sinai Dessert Peninsula, Israel gave that land back to Egypt. In return, Israel received a "peace" which somewhat lasted until June of 1967 when once again Israel was required, for its future security, to retake the Sinai Peninsula.
Five years later, Egypt's1973 surprise attack to destroy Israel was not successful in part because the Sinai land mass protected Israel's citizens from an immediate invasion. Then in 1978, the famous Begin-Sadat handshake representing Israel's quest for peace resulted in Israel's again giving Egypt the Sinai Peninsula .Today, without this protective buffer, the world sees Egypt smuggling a steady stream of weapons to Gaza and now there are over 5,000 Egyptian troops stationed on Israel's southern border. Due to their receipt of America's multi-billion dollar generous foreign aid, Egypt has upgraded its militaryto such an extent that it has been recognized as oneof the best if not the strongest Arab armies. The Egyptian army still is focused on a victorious attack upon Israel and has been able to use Gaza, the recent"land for peace" dream, as their weapons stockpile.
Furthermore, the recently established 5,000 Egyptian soldiers stationed on the Gaza border has been justified to the world as being there to prevent Egyptian weapon smuggling and tunneling into Gaza. Strange that truck size weapons are still able to be driven right into Gaza! One would think that this is a comedy for the mindless.
Israel offering the Sinai Peninsula for peace and more recently Gaza-for-peace has been one of the great overriding mistakes in Israel's diplomatic history. Its land return or land for peace diplomacy has always meant an empowerment to its enemies' ultimate goal, and has never and will likely never mean a peace agreement to be respected and upheld. But many Israelis with their Western outlook have lived by a belief that people will do what they say and sign. Only later, the opposite is discovered to show that the peace deals and ceasefires are typically not worth the paper they are written on. This is because, the West remains steadfast in its refusal to understand that the Arab/Islamic issue is not "land for peace" or even a desire to build an additional Arab state.
Due to the refusal to understand the fundamental Arab/Islamic quest, Israeli and world politicians, along with academics continually return to the failed past results of dismal road maps and peace plans, expecting that this time, the results will be different. For some reason, it still is a surprise when the outcome is the same. The only outcome to the repetitive experiment is that more precious Israeli lives are sacrificed for no meaningful let alone legitimate reason
. So it is that Peace Now and the other similar styled organizations refuse to give up their passion for Israel's responsibility to return to the 1949 or even 1948 borders. History and facts on the ground are of little consequence because Peace Now has a fervent"religious" belief that Israel is responsible for all Arab Palestinian hatred and angst. In their opinion, Israel is this immoral and horrific occupier of"Palestinian" land. This is used as a justification of the Arab Palestinian need to blow up buses, restaurants, stores, cafes and discothèques, as well as to shoot thousands of indiscriminately targeted missiles specifically meant to land in Israeli populated neighborhoods.
Peace Now is gravely challenged by the fact that it was in 1964 when the PLO, the Palestinian Liberation Organization, was established -- years before there were any "occupied" territories. It's a very big problem for Peace Now to explain the intensions of thePLO/Fatah in 1964 as they crowned Egyptian born Yassir Arafat as the model "Palestinian". To make more effective rhetoric, Arafat's birthplace was changed to Ramallah. After all, what difference does it make where a "national liberator" and the "Father of the Palestinians" is actually born?
Peace Now is further diminished as they try to claim that the Palestinians recognized the State of Israel as a result of the Oslo Agreement which was somewhat short lived. It's a problem for Peace Now's vision that the PLO charter which repeatedly calls for the destruction of the State of Israel has never been revised from its 42 year old original. Peace Now is somewhat cornered into saying that in 1964, if the PLO really wanted their own state, they would have attacked Jordan which controlled the West Bank, and they would be interested in attacking Egypt which controlled the Gaza Strip. Due to this absurdity, and the reality that the PLO was only looking to attack and destroy Israel, this topic is stringently avoided. Israel's 1967 glorious victory became Peace Now's day of darkness. For Peace Now, Israel had become an immoral occupier, and it was their task to right the wrongs of the victorious Israeli Defense Force.
The August 2005 Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip was a remarkable event for Peace Now's glory. Finally, in their mind, Israel was taking the right moral action and peace would begin to fill the world. The actual results of that thinking were "slightly" different unless one considers sixteen months of almost daily rocket firings a definition of peace and honest recognition. Again, results are not important; it's the moral vision that counts, so after the devastating aftermath of the Gaza withdrawal, Peace Now needed the speedyIsraeli withdrawal from the West Bank. The glitch ofo ver 1,000 deadly rockets being launched upon Israel from the "non occupied" Gaza made no difference to Peace Now because "Jewish" morality was being served and protected. But then came glitch number two:Hezbollah shooting some 4,000 rockets and missiles into Israel's northern cities including Haifa, Safed, Naharia, and even threatening Tel Aviv. T
he disgrace and abhorrence of the Hezbollah aggression forced the Israeli government to table its West Bank withdrawal plan. Israelis were now more aware that if they want to remain alive, there was little sense in giving the militarized Hamas control of the West Bank highlands overlooking Tel Aviv and its surrounding population centers. Peace loving Israelis began to realize that the Arab leaders who have been telling the world that they intend to destroy Israel actually plan to fulfill their stated dreams. Disturbed by this sway in the Israeli public opinion away from West Bank withdrawal, Peace Now needed a wayto get the issue back on the table.
Last week, PeaceNow issued a "secret source" report claiming that up to 40% of the Jewish towns and cities built in the West Bank are illegally built upon private Palestinian owned land. Past president, Jimmy Carter picked this up and publicized the claim on multiple nation wide television interviews. It's somewhat interesting that it took 35 – 40 years for such a “secret report” to be revealed, just at the time when immediate West Bank withdrawal has been determined to be out of the question. Peace Now, claiming to be concerned aboutIsrael losing its moral backbone which to them cannot exist if there are Jews living in the West Bank, has ventured far out on a very flimsy limb with this disclosure. Within hours, a shower of alarming questions fell upon the Peace Now report shredding its claims with a lengthy list of factual errors.
It reveals that the“secret report” lacks credible sources, skips legal land definitions, doesn't produce land deeds from the Ottoman Empire, British Empire or from Jordanian rule,and, in addition, the report indicates that Jewish purchased land with valid existing land deeds, still is counted as Arab lands. Like Holocaust denial, this land denial serves one main purpose, to try to show that 270,000 – 450,000 Jews have no right to their homes and their land which leads to the bottom line Arab claim that Israel's 5.8 million Jews also have no existential legitimacy.
Furthermore, it plays into the anti-Israel propaganda claiming that the Jews stole the land. (This is exactly what biblical scholars know as being the opening concern of Rashi's commentary). If the suspect Peace Now claim was credible, the immediate Peace Now moral correction would be a total Israeli withdrawal to the 1949 borders. Peace Now presents no security concerns or security plans for Israel's protection from its sworn and highly militarized enemies. Peace Now fails miserably by not even expressing a concern for placing the entire Jewish nation at mortal risk. Peace Now 's only concern appears to be extricating themselves from a self imposed moral disease which bloodies their hands and soul as well as it destroys their moral fiber. One can say that the pieces of Peace Now are now falling apart at the seams.
Publishing and publicizing what appears to be a fabricated and anonymously written report will not improve the moral fiber of a country but will only call into question all future attempts for Peace Now to achieve integrity. As the story unfolds, it appears that Peace Now has been caught in an outright deception in their continued attempt to create a national hysteria, nation embarrassment and indignation, as well as national shame. Furthermore, Peace Now, discovered to be mainly financed by anti-Israel European governments, actively works to give the terrorist enemies of Israel legitimate reasons to inflame and fuel their anti-Israel anger.
They enjoy feeding reports of any new Israeli land developments to the proper Palestinian factions all of which control Gazan missile launching sites. Being professional "tattletales", Peace Now feels that they are proudly acting as "moral" agents who just happen to also publish fabricated and highly deceptive reports. How many Israelis are now dead, wounded or maimed for life because of Peace Now's moral agenda? It is often apparent that Peace Now cares less about dead Israelis and more about promoting their pseudo-morality even if its outcome risks destroying the Jewish State.
Peace Now followers live with their own "ardent" religious belief that it is better to be a dead Jew than to live with any type of a moral angst. In the case of Israeli West Bank towns, there will be a thorough published report with revealed sources documenting legal land deeds which will likely leave one with no valid "grounds" for moral angst. We would all like "peace" to come "now". But, we want a peace to be a peace that contains wholeness and not a peace that threatens to leave the world in pieces. _____________________________________________
Daryl Temkin, Ph.D. is the director of the Israel Education Institute which is devoted to teaching history and contemporary issues of Israel to Jews and Non-Jews throughout the world. He can be reached at: DT@Israel-Institute.com. This weekly column is published in Shalom LA, Israel-Jewish Life, and also appears in various North American and European publications, web magazines, and blogs. Requests for publishing this or other writingsby Dr. Temkin can be sent to: Publishing@Israel-Institute.com. For speaking engagements and lecture dates, contact: DarylTemkin@Israel-Institute.com. For Membership and Donor Leadership to the IsraelInstitute, contact: Membership@Israel-Institute.com. Daryl Temkin, Ph.D. Israel Institute ----------------------------------------------------------email: daryltemkinphd@gmail.com phone: 310.508.0950 web: http://israel-institute.org/ Forward emailIsrael Institute 1227 Smithwood Dr Los Angeles CA 90035
.
__,_._,___
Hang-in there Israel!
MM)
"Piece Now" Falls Apart
December 05, 2006
by Daryl Temkin, Ph.D.
The organization, Peace Now, which is sarcastically renamed, "Piece Now", has been devoted and beholden to the wishful concept of "land for peace". They have a firm belief that if Israel would only give away every parcel of land that has a possible Arab claim, the Arabs would become so satisfied that they would stop sending missiles and suicide bombers to destroy Israeli citizens and property.
Peace Now is committed to the idea that Arabs only want Israeli land up to the 1949 borders and have no concern about all the pre-1948 towns and villages where some 700,000 Arabs once resided. Giving land for peace means Israel gives a tangible item, namely land, and the Arabs give an intangible promise or even a signed piece of paper which asserts the deterrence of their citizens from killing Jews and participating in further terrorist acts. At the drop of a hat, the "promise" can be broken by one or many terrorists, an intifada revolt, or even a military attack. And if a breach should happen, once Israel has given away the land, the only way to recover the land, which to Israel spells "security", is by a major war.That type of war would include an untold number of deaths as well as an avalanche of worldwide anti-Israel condemnation. (So what's new? M.)
Even though there is no balance of security in the Land for Peace equation, and Israel is only left holding the short end of the stick, this equation became so popular among law makers and intellectuals that even the average person began to chant the mantra"Land for Peace". In 1956, after conquering the sizable land mass, the Sinai Dessert Peninsula, Israel gave that land back to Egypt. In return, Israel received a "peace" which somewhat lasted until June of 1967 when once again Israel was required, for its future security, to retake the Sinai Peninsula.
Five years later, Egypt's1973 surprise attack to destroy Israel was not successful in part because the Sinai land mass protected Israel's citizens from an immediate invasion. Then in 1978, the famous Begin-Sadat handshake representing Israel's quest for peace resulted in Israel's again giving Egypt the Sinai Peninsula .Today, without this protective buffer, the world sees Egypt smuggling a steady stream of weapons to Gaza and now there are over 5,000 Egyptian troops stationed on Israel's southern border. Due to their receipt of America's multi-billion dollar generous foreign aid, Egypt has upgraded its militaryto such an extent that it has been recognized as oneof the best if not the strongest Arab armies. The Egyptian army still is focused on a victorious attack upon Israel and has been able to use Gaza, the recent"land for peace" dream, as their weapons stockpile.
Furthermore, the recently established 5,000 Egyptian soldiers stationed on the Gaza border has been justified to the world as being there to prevent Egyptian weapon smuggling and tunneling into Gaza. Strange that truck size weapons are still able to be driven right into Gaza! One would think that this is a comedy for the mindless.
Israel offering the Sinai Peninsula for peace and more recently Gaza-for-peace has been one of the great overriding mistakes in Israel's diplomatic history. Its land return or land for peace diplomacy has always meant an empowerment to its enemies' ultimate goal, and has never and will likely never mean a peace agreement to be respected and upheld. But many Israelis with their Western outlook have lived by a belief that people will do what they say and sign. Only later, the opposite is discovered to show that the peace deals and ceasefires are typically not worth the paper they are written on. This is because, the West remains steadfast in its refusal to understand that the Arab/Islamic issue is not "land for peace" or even a desire to build an additional Arab state.
Due to the refusal to understand the fundamental Arab/Islamic quest, Israeli and world politicians, along with academics continually return to the failed past results of dismal road maps and peace plans, expecting that this time, the results will be different. For some reason, it still is a surprise when the outcome is the same. The only outcome to the repetitive experiment is that more precious Israeli lives are sacrificed for no meaningful let alone legitimate reason
. So it is that Peace Now and the other similar styled organizations refuse to give up their passion for Israel's responsibility to return to the 1949 or even 1948 borders. History and facts on the ground are of little consequence because Peace Now has a fervent"religious" belief that Israel is responsible for all Arab Palestinian hatred and angst. In their opinion, Israel is this immoral and horrific occupier of"Palestinian" land. This is used as a justification of the Arab Palestinian need to blow up buses, restaurants, stores, cafes and discothèques, as well as to shoot thousands of indiscriminately targeted missiles specifically meant to land in Israeli populated neighborhoods.
Peace Now is gravely challenged by the fact that it was in 1964 when the PLO, the Palestinian Liberation Organization, was established -- years before there were any "occupied" territories. It's a very big problem for Peace Now to explain the intensions of thePLO/Fatah in 1964 as they crowned Egyptian born Yassir Arafat as the model "Palestinian". To make more effective rhetoric, Arafat's birthplace was changed to Ramallah. After all, what difference does it make where a "national liberator" and the "Father of the Palestinians" is actually born?
Peace Now is further diminished as they try to claim that the Palestinians recognized the State of Israel as a result of the Oslo Agreement which was somewhat short lived. It's a problem for Peace Now's vision that the PLO charter which repeatedly calls for the destruction of the State of Israel has never been revised from its 42 year old original. Peace Now is somewhat cornered into saying that in 1964, if the PLO really wanted their own state, they would have attacked Jordan which controlled the West Bank, and they would be interested in attacking Egypt which controlled the Gaza Strip. Due to this absurdity, and the reality that the PLO was only looking to attack and destroy Israel, this topic is stringently avoided. Israel's 1967 glorious victory became Peace Now's day of darkness. For Peace Now, Israel had become an immoral occupier, and it was their task to right the wrongs of the victorious Israeli Defense Force.
The August 2005 Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip was a remarkable event for Peace Now's glory. Finally, in their mind, Israel was taking the right moral action and peace would begin to fill the world. The actual results of that thinking were "slightly" different unless one considers sixteen months of almost daily rocket firings a definition of peace and honest recognition. Again, results are not important; it's the moral vision that counts, so after the devastating aftermath of the Gaza withdrawal, Peace Now needed the speedyIsraeli withdrawal from the West Bank. The glitch ofo ver 1,000 deadly rockets being launched upon Israel from the "non occupied" Gaza made no difference to Peace Now because "Jewish" morality was being served and protected. But then came glitch number two:Hezbollah shooting some 4,000 rockets and missiles into Israel's northern cities including Haifa, Safed, Naharia, and even threatening Tel Aviv. T
he disgrace and abhorrence of the Hezbollah aggression forced the Israeli government to table its West Bank withdrawal plan. Israelis were now more aware that if they want to remain alive, there was little sense in giving the militarized Hamas control of the West Bank highlands overlooking Tel Aviv and its surrounding population centers. Peace loving Israelis began to realize that the Arab leaders who have been telling the world that they intend to destroy Israel actually plan to fulfill their stated dreams. Disturbed by this sway in the Israeli public opinion away from West Bank withdrawal, Peace Now needed a wayto get the issue back on the table.
Last week, PeaceNow issued a "secret source" report claiming that up to 40% of the Jewish towns and cities built in the West Bank are illegally built upon private Palestinian owned land. Past president, Jimmy Carter picked this up and publicized the claim on multiple nation wide television interviews. It's somewhat interesting that it took 35 – 40 years for such a “secret report” to be revealed, just at the time when immediate West Bank withdrawal has been determined to be out of the question. Peace Now, claiming to be concerned aboutIsrael losing its moral backbone which to them cannot exist if there are Jews living in the West Bank, has ventured far out on a very flimsy limb with this disclosure. Within hours, a shower of alarming questions fell upon the Peace Now report shredding its claims with a lengthy list of factual errors.
It reveals that the“secret report” lacks credible sources, skips legal land definitions, doesn't produce land deeds from the Ottoman Empire, British Empire or from Jordanian rule,and, in addition, the report indicates that Jewish purchased land with valid existing land deeds, still is counted as Arab lands. Like Holocaust denial, this land denial serves one main purpose, to try to show that 270,000 – 450,000 Jews have no right to their homes and their land which leads to the bottom line Arab claim that Israel's 5.8 million Jews also have no existential legitimacy.
Furthermore, it plays into the anti-Israel propaganda claiming that the Jews stole the land. (This is exactly what biblical scholars know as being the opening concern of Rashi's commentary). If the suspect Peace Now claim was credible, the immediate Peace Now moral correction would be a total Israeli withdrawal to the 1949 borders. Peace Now presents no security concerns or security plans for Israel's protection from its sworn and highly militarized enemies. Peace Now fails miserably by not even expressing a concern for placing the entire Jewish nation at mortal risk. Peace Now 's only concern appears to be extricating themselves from a self imposed moral disease which bloodies their hands and soul as well as it destroys their moral fiber. One can say that the pieces of Peace Now are now falling apart at the seams.
Publishing and publicizing what appears to be a fabricated and anonymously written report will not improve the moral fiber of a country but will only call into question all future attempts for Peace Now to achieve integrity. As the story unfolds, it appears that Peace Now has been caught in an outright deception in their continued attempt to create a national hysteria, nation embarrassment and indignation, as well as national shame. Furthermore, Peace Now, discovered to be mainly financed by anti-Israel European governments, actively works to give the terrorist enemies of Israel legitimate reasons to inflame and fuel their anti-Israel anger.
They enjoy feeding reports of any new Israeli land developments to the proper Palestinian factions all of which control Gazan missile launching sites. Being professional "tattletales", Peace Now feels that they are proudly acting as "moral" agents who just happen to also publish fabricated and highly deceptive reports. How many Israelis are now dead, wounded or maimed for life because of Peace Now's moral agenda? It is often apparent that Peace Now cares less about dead Israelis and more about promoting their pseudo-morality even if its outcome risks destroying the Jewish State.
Peace Now followers live with their own "ardent" religious belief that it is better to be a dead Jew than to live with any type of a moral angst. In the case of Israeli West Bank towns, there will be a thorough published report with revealed sources documenting legal land deeds which will likely leave one with no valid "grounds" for moral angst. We would all like "peace" to come "now". But, we want a peace to be a peace that contains wholeness and not a peace that threatens to leave the world in pieces. _____________________________________________
Daryl Temkin, Ph.D. is the director of the Israel Education Institute which is devoted to teaching history and contemporary issues of Israel to Jews and Non-Jews throughout the world. He can be reached at: DT@Israel-Institute.com. This weekly column is published in Shalom LA, Israel-Jewish Life, and also appears in various North American and European publications, web magazines, and blogs. Requests for publishing this or other writingsby Dr. Temkin can be sent to: Publishing@Israel-Institute.com. For speaking engagements and lecture dates, contact: DarylTemkin@Israel-Institute.com. For Membership and Donor Leadership to the IsraelInstitute, contact: Membership@Israel-Institute.com. Daryl Temkin, Ph.D. Israel Institute ----------------------------------------------------------email: daryltemkinphd@gmail.com phone: 310.508.0950 web: http://israel-institute.org/ Forward emailIsrael Institute 1227 Smithwood Dr Los Angeles CA 90035
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