Original articles on Israel and related issues written by Steven Plaut, a professor at an Israeli university.
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Sunday, February 29, 2004
Dan Pipes now reports that Barry Chamish has cancelled his plans to appear
as the Israeli speaker at a Nazi Holocaust Denial conference in
Sacramento (http://www.danielpipes.org/blog/189). This rare demonstration
of good sense on Chamish's part is welcome.
Meanwhile, Chamish discovers that Peres is a spy for the Jesuits.
http://www.conspiracyplanet.com/channel.cfm?channelid=38&contentid=889
Not clear if he thinks the Jesuits run the Council on Foreign Relations,
are run by them, or both are run by the UFOs.
Chamish, in his own words:
"Peres, educated in his youth at a Jesuit school in Poland, is the
highest ranking operative run by the Jesuits in Israel and his task is
spreading chaos ending with national destruction. The destruction of the
Jews is a primary goal of the Jesuits and I am presenting proof of this
assertion through a book that collected the facts brilliantly but missed
the most obvious conclusions. I speak of "Unholy Trinity" by Mark Aarons
and John Loftus."
Note, the Chamish piece shares the same page with Neturei Karta "Rabbi"
and other conspiracy nuts.
I am a little offended though. As you may recall, Chamish once
circulated a "discovery" scoop of his that I am in fact an agent in Israel
for the Federal
Reserve Bank, this on the basis of the fact that back in the 80s I was
once a visiting scholar at the Fed and as such worked on some nefarious
projects, such as a research paper comparing water policy in Israel and
California. From this we learn that the Fed has agents (not just bank
examiners), and some are in
Israel, and I want to know why I have never gotten paid these many years.
But beyond this
prime example of the uncanny detective powers of Chamish and his research
credibility, I want to know why he has not declared me to be a Jesuit
also. After all, last fall I gave some lectures at a university in
Lisbon, whose
economics department is housed in a lovely old Jesuit building. Right
next to an old Jesuit Chapel. And I went to grad school with a Jesuit
priest doing a PhD in Econ (Really!) and had coffee with him several
times. Should not that entitle me to be a Jesuit agent in Israel as well?
Thursday, February 26, 2004
The Left's Anti-Semitic Chic
By George Will
Washingtonpost.com | February 26, 2004
It used to be said that anti-Catholicism was the anti-Semitism of the
intellectuals. Today anti-Semitism is the anti-Semitism of the
intellectuals.
Not all intellectuals, of course. And the seepage of this ancient poison
into the intelligentsia -- always so militantly modern -- is much more
pronounced in Europe than here. But as anti-Semitism migrates across the
political spectrum from right to left, it infects the intelligentsia,
which has leaned left for two centuries.
Here the term intellectual is used loosely, to denote not only people who
think about ideas -- about thinking -- but also people who think they do.
The term anti-Semitism is used to denote people who dislike Jews. These
people include those who say: We do not dislike Jews, we only dislike
Zionists -- although to live in Israel is to endorse the Zionist
enterprise, and all Jews are implicated, as sympathizers, in the crime
that is Israel.
Today's release of Mel Gibson's movie "The Passion of the Christ" has
catalyzed fears of resurgent anti-Semitism. Some critics say the movie
portrays the governor of Judea -- Pontius Pilate, the Roman prefect
responsible for the crucifixion -- as more benign and less in control than
he actually was, and ascribes too much power and malignity to Jerusalem's
Jewish elite. Jon Meacham's deeply informed cover story "Who Killed
Jesus?" in the Feb. 16 Newsweek renders this measured judgment: The movie
implies more blame for the Jewish religious leaders of Judea of that time
than sound scholarship suggests. However, Meacham rightly refrains from
discerning disreputable intentions in Gibson's presentation of matters
about which scholars, too, must speculate, and do disagree. Besides, this
being a healthy nation, Americans are unlikely to be swayed by the movie's
misreading, as Meacham delicately suggests, of the actions of a few Jews
2,000 years ago.
Fears about the movie's exacerbating religiously motivated anti-Semitism
are missing the larger menace -- the upsurge of political anti-Semitism.
Like traditional anti-Semitism, but with secular sources and motives, the
political version, which condemns Jews as a social element, is becoming
mainstream, and chic among political and cultural elites, mostly in
Europe. Consider:
A cartoon in a mainstream Italian newspaper depicts the infant Jesus in a
manger, menaced by an Israeli tank and saying, "Don't tell me they want to
kill me again." This expresses animus against Israel rather than twisted
Christian zeal.
The European Union has suppressed a study it commissioned, because the
study blamed the upsurge in anti-Jewish acts on European Muslims -- and
the European left.
Nineteen percent of Germans believe what a best-selling German book
asserts: The CIA and Israel's Mossad organized the Sept. 11 attacks.
On French television, a comedian wearing a Jewish skullcap gives a Nazi
salute while yelling, "Isra-Heil!"
If Israel is not the Great Satan, it is allied with him -- America.
European anti-American demonstrations often include Israel's blue and
white flag with a swastika replacing the star of David, and signs
perpetuating the myth, concocted by Palestinians and cooperative Western
journalists, of an Israeli massacre in Jenin: "1943: Warsaw / 2002:
Jenin."
Omer Bartov, a historian at Brown University, writes in the New Republic
that much of what Hitler said "can be found today in innumerable places:
on Internet sites, propaganda brochures, political speeches, protest
placards, academic publications, religious sermons, you name it."
The appallingly brief eclipse of anti-Semitism after Auschwitz
demonstrates how beguiling is the simplicity of pure stupidity. All of the
left's prescriptions for curing what ails society -- socialism, communism,
psychoanalysis, "progressive" education, etc. -- have been discarded, so
now the left is reduced to adapting that hardy perennial of the right,
anti-Semitism. This is a new twist to the left's recipe for salvation
through elimination: All will be well if we eliminate capitalists, or
private property, or the ruling class, or "special interests," or
neuroses, or inhibitions. Now, let's try eliminating a people, starting
with their nation, which is obnoxiously pro-American and insufferably
Spartan.
Europe's susceptibility to political lunacy, and the Arab world's
addiction to it, is not news. And the paranoid style is a political
constant. Those who believe a conspiracy assassinated President Kennedy
say: Proof of the conspiracy's diabolical subtlety is that no evidence of
it remains. Today's anti-Semites say: Proof of the Jews' potent menace is
that there are so few of them -- just 13 million of the planet's 6 billion
people -- yet they cause so many political, economic and cultural ills.
Gosh. Imagine if they were, say, 1 percent of Earth's population: 63
million.
De-fund Middle East studies
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
DANIEL PIPES Feb. 24, 2004
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
US government financial support for teaching exotic languages and cultural
skills has failed.
Here's a prime example, one which involves me personally, of how the
radical Left and the Islamists, those new best friends, readily deceive.
It has to do with a proposed piece of US legislation passed by the House
of Representatives, the "International Studies in Higher Education Act of
2003" (known familiarly as H.R. 3077), and waiting action by the Senate.
H.R. 3077 calls for the creation of an advisory board to review the way in
which roughly US$100 million in taxpayer money is spent annually on area
studies (including Middle East studies) at the university level.
This board is needed for two reasons: Middle East studies are a failed
field, and the academics who consume these funds also happen to allocate
them a classic case of unaccountability.
The purpose of this subsidy, which Congress increased by 26 percent after
9/11, is to help the US government with exotic language and cultural
skills. Yet many universities reject this role, dismissing it as training
spies.
Martin Kramer pointed to the need for Congressional intervention in his
2001 book, Ivory Towers on Sand. Stanley Kurtz picked up the idea and made
it happen in Washington, testifying at a key House hearing in June 2003.
My role in promoting this advisory board? Writing one favorable sentence
on it eight months ago, based on an expectation that the board would
create some accountability and help Congress carry out its own intent.
While hoping the Senate passes H.R. 3077, I have otherwise done nothing to
praise or lobby for this bill.
Well, that's the record. But why should mere facts get in the way?
Seemingly convinced that turning H.R. 3077 into my personal initiative
will help defeat it in the Senate, leftist and Islamist organizations have
imaginatively puffed up my role.
THE AMERICAN Civil Liberties Union accuses me of "enlisting the aid of the
government" to impose my views on academia.
The American-Arab Anti Discrimination Committee titles its alert "Academic
Freedom Under Attack by Pipes and Big Brother."
The Council on American-Islamic Relations states that I am "actively
pushing" for the advisory board.
This deception prompted campus newspapers (e.g., at Columbia, CUNY,
Swarthmore, Yale) to link me to the bill, as have city newspapers
(Berkshire Eagle, Oregonian), websites, and listservs.
What these folks missed is my skepticism about the advisory board's
potential to make a major difference. It is important symbolically and it
can throw light on problems. But odds are it won't be able thoroughly to
solve them.
I say this because unlike comparable federal boards, this one has only
advisory, not supervisory powers. It also has limited authority, being
specifically prohibited from considering curricula. Professors can teach
politically one-sided courses, for example, without funding consequences.
More broadly, such federal boards generally do too little. I have sat on
two other ones and find them cumbersome bureaucratic mechanisms with
limited impact.
Will a new board improve things? Sure. But Congress should consider more
drastic solutions. One would be to revoke post-9/11's $20 million annual
supplement for area studies at universities, using this money instead to
establish national resource centers to focus on the global war on terror.
They would usefully combine area expertise with a focus on militant Islam.
A second solution would zero-out all government allocations for area
studies. This step would barely affect the study of foreign cultures at
universities, as the $100 million in federal money amounts to just 10
percent of the budget at most major centers, funds those centers could
undoubtedly raise from private sources. But doing this would send the
salutary message that the US taxpayer no longer wishes to pay for
substandard work.
Either step would encourage younger scholars to retool in an effort to
regain public trust and reopen the public purse.
If the advisory board is not the ideal solution, it is the best to be
hoped for at the moment, given the power of the higher education lobby.
I am ready to give H.R. 3077 a chance. But should the board not come into
existence or fail to make a difference, I'll advocate the better solution:
defunding, and work to spread these ideas among the public and in
Congress.
My opponents will then learn what happens when I truly am "actively
pushing" for Congress to adopt a measure.
The writer is director of the middle east forum and author of Miniatures.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
This article can also be read at
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=1077608443246
By George Will
Washingtonpost.com | February 26, 2004
It used to be said that anti-Catholicism was the anti-Semitism of the
intellectuals. Today anti-Semitism is the anti-Semitism of the
intellectuals.
Not all intellectuals, of course. And the seepage of this ancient poison
into the intelligentsia -- always so militantly modern -- is much more
pronounced in Europe than here. But as anti-Semitism migrates across the
political spectrum from right to left, it infects the intelligentsia,
which has leaned left for two centuries.
Here the term intellectual is used loosely, to denote not only people who
think about ideas -- about thinking -- but also people who think they do.
The term anti-Semitism is used to denote people who dislike Jews. These
people include those who say: We do not dislike Jews, we only dislike
Zionists -- although to live in Israel is to endorse the Zionist
enterprise, and all Jews are implicated, as sympathizers, in the crime
that is Israel.
Today's release of Mel Gibson's movie "The Passion of the Christ" has
catalyzed fears of resurgent anti-Semitism. Some critics say the movie
portrays the governor of Judea -- Pontius Pilate, the Roman prefect
responsible for the crucifixion -- as more benign and less in control than
he actually was, and ascribes too much power and malignity to Jerusalem's
Jewish elite. Jon Meacham's deeply informed cover story "Who Killed
Jesus?" in the Feb. 16 Newsweek renders this measured judgment: The movie
implies more blame for the Jewish religious leaders of Judea of that time
than sound scholarship suggests. However, Meacham rightly refrains from
discerning disreputable intentions in Gibson's presentation of matters
about which scholars, too, must speculate, and do disagree. Besides, this
being a healthy nation, Americans are unlikely to be swayed by the movie's
misreading, as Meacham delicately suggests, of the actions of a few Jews
2,000 years ago.
Fears about the movie's exacerbating religiously motivated anti-Semitism
are missing the larger menace -- the upsurge of political anti-Semitism.
Like traditional anti-Semitism, but with secular sources and motives, the
political version, which condemns Jews as a social element, is becoming
mainstream, and chic among political and cultural elites, mostly in
Europe. Consider:
A cartoon in a mainstream Italian newspaper depicts the infant Jesus in a
manger, menaced by an Israeli tank and saying, "Don't tell me they want to
kill me again." This expresses animus against Israel rather than twisted
Christian zeal.
The European Union has suppressed a study it commissioned, because the
study blamed the upsurge in anti-Jewish acts on European Muslims -- and
the European left.
Nineteen percent of Germans believe what a best-selling German book
asserts: The CIA and Israel's Mossad organized the Sept. 11 attacks.
On French television, a comedian wearing a Jewish skullcap gives a Nazi
salute while yelling, "Isra-Heil!"
If Israel is not the Great Satan, it is allied with him -- America.
European anti-American demonstrations often include Israel's blue and
white flag with a swastika replacing the star of David, and signs
perpetuating the myth, concocted by Palestinians and cooperative Western
journalists, of an Israeli massacre in Jenin: "1943: Warsaw / 2002:
Jenin."
Omer Bartov, a historian at Brown University, writes in the New Republic
that much of what Hitler said "can be found today in innumerable places:
on Internet sites, propaganda brochures, political speeches, protest
placards, academic publications, religious sermons, you name it."
The appallingly brief eclipse of anti-Semitism after Auschwitz
demonstrates how beguiling is the simplicity of pure stupidity. All of the
left's prescriptions for curing what ails society -- socialism, communism,
psychoanalysis, "progressive" education, etc. -- have been discarded, so
now the left is reduced to adapting that hardy perennial of the right,
anti-Semitism. This is a new twist to the left's recipe for salvation
through elimination: All will be well if we eliminate capitalists, or
private property, or the ruling class, or "special interests," or
neuroses, or inhibitions. Now, let's try eliminating a people, starting
with their nation, which is obnoxiously pro-American and insufferably
Spartan.
Europe's susceptibility to political lunacy, and the Arab world's
addiction to it, is not news. And the paranoid style is a political
constant. Those who believe a conspiracy assassinated President Kennedy
say: Proof of the conspiracy's diabolical subtlety is that no evidence of
it remains. Today's anti-Semites say: Proof of the Jews' potent menace is
that there are so few of them -- just 13 million of the planet's 6 billion
people -- yet they cause so many political, economic and cultural ills.
Gosh. Imagine if they were, say, 1 percent of Earth's population: 63
million.
De-fund Middle East studies
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
DANIEL PIPES Feb. 24, 2004
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
US government financial support for teaching exotic languages and cultural
skills has failed.
Here's a prime example, one which involves me personally, of how the
radical Left and the Islamists, those new best friends, readily deceive.
It has to do with a proposed piece of US legislation passed by the House
of Representatives, the "International Studies in Higher Education Act of
2003" (known familiarly as H.R. 3077), and waiting action by the Senate.
H.R. 3077 calls for the creation of an advisory board to review the way in
which roughly US$100 million in taxpayer money is spent annually on area
studies (including Middle East studies) at the university level.
This board is needed for two reasons: Middle East studies are a failed
field, and the academics who consume these funds also happen to allocate
them a classic case of unaccountability.
The purpose of this subsidy, which Congress increased by 26 percent after
9/11, is to help the US government with exotic language and cultural
skills. Yet many universities reject this role, dismissing it as training
spies.
Martin Kramer pointed to the need for Congressional intervention in his
2001 book, Ivory Towers on Sand. Stanley Kurtz picked up the idea and made
it happen in Washington, testifying at a key House hearing in June 2003.
My role in promoting this advisory board? Writing one favorable sentence
on it eight months ago, based on an expectation that the board would
create some accountability and help Congress carry out its own intent.
While hoping the Senate passes H.R. 3077, I have otherwise done nothing to
praise or lobby for this bill.
Well, that's the record. But why should mere facts get in the way?
Seemingly convinced that turning H.R. 3077 into my personal initiative
will help defeat it in the Senate, leftist and Islamist organizations have
imaginatively puffed up my role.
THE AMERICAN Civil Liberties Union accuses me of "enlisting the aid of the
government" to impose my views on academia.
The American-Arab Anti Discrimination Committee titles its alert "Academic
Freedom Under Attack by Pipes and Big Brother."
The Council on American-Islamic Relations states that I am "actively
pushing" for the advisory board.
This deception prompted campus newspapers (e.g., at Columbia, CUNY,
Swarthmore, Yale) to link me to the bill, as have city newspapers
(Berkshire Eagle, Oregonian), websites, and listservs.
What these folks missed is my skepticism about the advisory board's
potential to make a major difference. It is important symbolically and it
can throw light on problems. But odds are it won't be able thoroughly to
solve them.
I say this because unlike comparable federal boards, this one has only
advisory, not supervisory powers. It also has limited authority, being
specifically prohibited from considering curricula. Professors can teach
politically one-sided courses, for example, without funding consequences.
More broadly, such federal boards generally do too little. I have sat on
two other ones and find them cumbersome bureaucratic mechanisms with
limited impact.
Will a new board improve things? Sure. But Congress should consider more
drastic solutions. One would be to revoke post-9/11's $20 million annual
supplement for area studies at universities, using this money instead to
establish national resource centers to focus on the global war on terror.
They would usefully combine area expertise with a focus on militant Islam.
A second solution would zero-out all government allocations for area
studies. This step would barely affect the study of foreign cultures at
universities, as the $100 million in federal money amounts to just 10
percent of the budget at most major centers, funds those centers could
undoubtedly raise from private sources. But doing this would send the
salutary message that the US taxpayer no longer wishes to pay for
substandard work.
Either step would encourage younger scholars to retool in an effort to
regain public trust and reopen the public purse.
If the advisory board is not the ideal solution, it is the best to be
hoped for at the moment, given the power of the higher education lobby.
I am ready to give H.R. 3077 a chance. But should the board not come into
existence or fail to make a difference, I'll advocate the better solution:
defunding, and work to spread these ideas among the public and in
Congress.
My opponents will then learn what happens when I truly am "actively
pushing" for Congress to adopt a measure.
The writer is director of the middle east forum and author of Miniatures.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
This article can also be read at
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=1077608443246
Sunday, February 22, 2004
The following are the basic principles upon which all public debate must
be conducted if you wish to be a true progressive leftist and politically
correct:
1. Leftists should be free to call everyone else nasty names, but no one
should be permitted to call leftists back nasty names.
2. For a leftist to call someone nasty names shows social concern and
awareness. For someone to call a leftist a nasty name back is immature and
impolite and avoiding the issues.
3. Leftists need never document their claims.
4. Whenever a leftist is presented with documentation of facts that
contradict the leftist's theology, the leftist must insist that no facts
have been presented at all.
5. No scientific sources that presents facts contradicting leftist
theology are admissable.
6. All arguments may be settled by telling a non-leftist that he reminds
you of Rush Limbaugh.
7. Never ever take an economics course.
8. Never recognize the fact that every idea of Marx's was debunked over
150 years ago. Never read any social science written since Marx. Never
admit that you know that Marx was a racist and anti-Semite.
9. Never visit the library.
10. Never study statistics or public policy analysis.
11. Insist that you truly believe 10% of humans are gay and that gay
people are not abnormal.
12. Always say "people of color" so everyone will know you care.
13. Recycle.
14. Pretend that you do not care about material things, but never sell
your VCR or cellular phone or condo.
15. Never admit that life ever involves tradeoffs. After all, when there
are tradeoffs it is harder to feel righteous.
16. Always support proposals that make real problems of the world worse as
long as they make you feel caring and righteous.
17. Never admit that anything could be positive about the United States.
18. Always insist that there are few world problems that could not be
improved through the destruction of Israel.
19. Always insist that you have no idea what political correctness is.
20. Always use the female pronouns half the time or more. That way
everyone will know you are egalitarian.
21. Insist that you are more caring and compassionate than anyone else.
22. Remember, you would rather that poor people in the Third World starve,
rather than that they should embrace capitalism and live like you do.
23. Other people must always be required to relinquish their material
things so that you may feel idealistic.
24. Your property is scared; other people's property is to be used for
social engineering and doing good.
1. Reality Imitates Parody:
http://chronwatch.com/content/contentDisplay.asp?aid=6061
2. Hours after Ariel Sharon announces that he will be tearing down
portions
of the Israeli "Security Wall" to make the anti-Semites happy, and to make
it just a bit easier for Palestinian nazis to mass murder Jews, yet
another bus is blown up in Jerusalem, the same Jerusalem the
Islamofascists pretend is holy to them. I guess they did not
take Arik's goodwill offer in the way he intended.
Meanwhile, Israeli leftists are
out demanding that no security fence be erected at all lest it make it
hard for
Palestinians to murder Israeli children. And teams of Israeli leftists
are in the Hague to lend support to the anti-Semites there trying to
"indict" Israel for trying to protect those children. Finally, every day
new Israeli leftists are making hajj to the mass murderer of children, Naif
Hawatme, from the Popular Democratic Front for the Liberation of
Palestine, because he claims he seeks a new "front" that will combine Israeli
leftists and Arab fascists. He is the man who ordered the mass murder of
children in Maalot in 1974. The Left likes him because he pretends to
speak about the need for "two states for two peoples". The only problem
is that the two peoples he has in mind are the Palestinian people an dthe
Jordanian people (neither of course really being a "people" at all).
3. Highlights from Ariel Sharon's Career
Many out there are amazed to discover that Ariel Sharon the Prime Minister
is just another visionless Israeli demagogue.
But anyone who followed his career in the past would not be so surprised.
To raise the national spirits, I am here posting sections from my very
first newspaper article about Ariel Sharon, printed in the Jerusalem Post
on Oct 16 1984. Sharon at the time was the Minister of Industry and Trade
in the Shamir Incompetocracy:
Toilet Economics
By Steven Plaut
Readers with a highly developed sense of delicacy are warned not to read
this commentary. We will be dealing with a HIGHLY indelicate subject. We
will be discussing a central concern of the latest version of the
governments economic policy.
It seems the major issue for that policy is the matter of those large
round ceramic household fixtures through which water passes intermittently
and which back in kindergarten days we used to call Happy Johnnies. There,
I have said it. Yes, the government of Israel has decided to fight the
continuing deterioration of our economy by crusading against imported
Happy Johnnies.
In recent days Ariel Sharon on behalf of the government announced that he
was totally banning all imports of Happy Johnnies and 54 other items for a
period of six months. These items were enumerated in what was called a
"list of luxury goods". Now THINK about that for a moment. Happy Johnnies
are LUXURY goods?
The fact that Ariel Sharon so regards them says volumes about his own
lifestyle and perhaps his early toilet training. It is one thing to fight
foreign reserve losses by prohibiting shaving cream imports, ALSO on the
list of prohibited items. After all, what is wrong with Jews growing
beards? But Happy Johnnies? That is really hitting the public below the
belt!
In fairness, one should point out that it was only imports of CERAMIC
Johnnies that were prohibited. No one said anything about, say, wooden
ones. But I, for one, am opposed to those. After all, how would it be if
Israel became known as the Birch John Society? Ariel Sharon gets a grade
for his polices of 00!!
History has tended to attach labels to the economic programs of various
administrations. Roosevelt had his "New Deal". Johnson had the "Great
Society". Aridor had "Correct Economics". Well, Ariel Sharon will go down
in the history books as the father of Toilet Economics.
Friday, February 20, 2004
http://frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=12276
PLO Propaganda Film "Jenin, Jenin"
By Lee Kaplan
FrontPageMagazine.com | February 20, 2004
From San Francisco State to Columbia University, "Palestinian film
festivals" are becoming one of the major propaganda venues for those
seeking to dismantle Israel.[1]
The most widely seen of these films is "Jenin, Jenin," shot by an
Israeli-Arab actor named Mohammed Bakri. "Jenin, Jenin" purports to be a
documentary on the aftermath of the Jenin battle between the Israel
Defense Forces and PLO terrorists that took place in `Jenin in 2002. The
film has become standard fare at such screenings. There's one major
problem: the film is a fraud.
A common misrepresentation used by the Palestinians is that Jenin is a
"refugee camp." It is, in fact, a city. And its casbah has been a hiding
and breeding ground for terrorists whose goal is to murder Israelis. Even
the Palestine Authority Police was afraid to enter it.
Besides various armed individual terrorists, such as members of Islamic
Jihad, the PFLP and Hamas, the area housed many of the bomb making
factories where suicide bombers obtained their lethal cargos. In April,
2002 one suicide bomber from Jenin blew up a hotel in Netanya where
Israelis were celebrating Passover, killing 29 Israelis -- including many
Holocaust survivors -- and maiming many more.[2] Up to that point, the
West Bank and Jenin were not occupied and Israel had withdrawn all troops
as a demonstration of goodwill. Following this incident, the IDF went into
Jenin to close down the bomb factories.
But to an uninformed audience (the kind the Palestinians prefer), Jenin
would appear to be a place where simple Arabs live, some even in tents.
The film instructs viewers that these noble "natives" are besieged by
Jews, who want to deprive them of their homeland. The Passover Massacre
isn't mentioned at all, just that the Jews won't let the Arabs live in
peace, and for some unknown reason attacked them. It should be noted the
word "Jew" is used consistently throughout this film, rather than
"Israeli" or the euphemism "Zionist." The reason is that the word "Jew"
will elicit a more violent response from the rest of the Arab world where
this film is screened -- thus earning Bakri a fortune.
The film opens with a shot of an elderly Arab man in a hospital with a
bandaged hand and foot. He claims the Israeli soldiers held out his hand
then shot it. When he protested, they shot him in the foot. The old man,
however, is lying. He was treated by an IDF doctor in Jenin, and the old
man's wounds were not bullet wounds, nor were they caused by activities in
any way related to the battle. They weren't even inflicted by Israeli
soldiers. It is, in short, a staged scene. The entire film consists of
Palestinians claiming events and atrocities that did not occur.
For example, multiple claims are made of F-16's attacking the city and of
killing thousands of people. But no F-16's or jet fighter aircraft
attacked Jenin. In fact, the Israeli government, eager to avoid civilian
casualties, insisted that the IDF use young infantry soldiers in
house-to-house fighting instead -- to avoid the risk of bombing the city
by air. This is a job one F-16 could have done. Instead, young men risked
their lives to destroy the bomb factories. The result? Twenty-three
Israeli boys died in close hand-to-hand combat.
Another "eyewitness" describes the carnage as worse than Vietnam. Hardly.
Despite claims that there was "not a single person in the camp who did not
suffer," aerial photographs show the combat zone where the bomb factories
were destroyed as roughly the size of a football field -- a very small
section of Jenin.
Another interview subject is a ten-year-old girl who tells the filmmakers
she wants to "go home, but the "Jews won't let her." She is referring to a
once Palestinian area inside Israel's 1948 borders. Obviously, she was not
alive in 1948 (nor, most likely, were her parents). In what sense was a
village two generations removed her "home"?
But the tour de force performance is done by Dr. Abu Rali of the hospital
in Jenin. Interviewed on camera, he claims the Israelis "attacked the
hospital and completely destroyed its west wing with F-16's."[3] As
mentioned, no F-16's were used to attack Jenin. But of even more interest
is the fact that the hospital in Jenin has no west wing, nor was any part
of the hospital building attacked or destroyed during the battle; Bakri's
film shows no such damage post-battle.
The good doctor further accuses the Israelis of cutting off water and
electricity to the hospital when the IDF brought water in for the hospital
and even set up a portable generator to assure the hospital had
electricity. What he doesn't say on film is that he rejected the blood
supplies the IDF brought in from Israel on the grounds that he refused to
mix "Jewish blood" with "Arab blood." The Israelis to solve the impasse
actually had to import blood from Jordan to supply the hospital.[4]
Numerous "eyewitnesses" then tell tales of women being raped, of parents
being stripped naked and summarily executed, and then having their
children executed. They say that Israeli soldiers went into kitchens and
urinated into cooking pots (a terrible insult in the Arab world); another
claims the Israelis "did not leave one building standing." (A mere 99.9
percent of the city of Jenin remained.)[5]
Of course, attacking President Bush and America is de rigueur. One
"witness" states that President Bush, through Israel, has killed "hundreds
of millions of Arabs." Other than such first person accounts, the only
other actual battle footage in the film shows Israeli tanks guarding
captured terrorists at the close of the battle. Another Palestinian then
claims, minutes after the footage ends, that his people were all run over
and crushed by the tanks, "killing thousands."
The Palestinian Authority's official death toll from the Jenin battle was
56, of whom 48 were armed combatants.[6] In their own media, the
Palestinians claim the battle was a great example of their bravery against
the Jews. But in the Western world, they suffered a massacre.
This film makes its way around the Arab world inciting hatred against Jews
and Israel. Rather than promoting peace, it merely serves to intensify the
conflict. That is the real goal of "Jenin, Jenin": to slander Israel in
the eyes of the international community, to isolate and weaken her, and
ultimately to destroy the Jewish minority in the Middle East. To that end,
the film is now being widely circulated on American campuses. And by
inflaming its uneducated viewers, it may one day succeed in achieving its
goal.
ENDNOTES:
1. http://www.dafka.org/NewsGen.asp?S=4&PageID=57
2. http://209.157.64.200/focus/f-news/893012/posts
3. http://www.israelnationalnews.com/article.php3?id=2240
4. http://www.snopes.com/inboxer/outrage/blood.htm
5. http://www.mfa.gov.il/mfa/go.asp?MFAH0ll60
6. http://www.rense.com/general24/dt.htm
2. From Middle East Quarterly:
Review of: Searching Jenin: Eyewitness Accounts of the Israeli
Invasion, edited by Ramzy Baroud, Cune Press, Seattle, 2003, no price
stated.
Reviewed by Steven Plaut
Imagine if someone were to publish a book about how Germans were
brutalized and terrorized by American racist GIs who unjustly occupied
their country in 1945 for no reason at all besides anti-German bigotry.
Imagine that this same book never quite got around to mentioning that the
brutal Americans had occupied Germany only after Nazi Germany launched
World War II, which produced 55 million deaths. Imagine that this book
ignored Auschwitz and Dachau.
Well, if you can imagine such a book, then you are only partly on
your way to understand Searching Jenin, a vile shallow propaganda screed
that makes the PLOs Covenant look like a masterpiece in cool impartial
analysis. The book is published by Cune Press, a small propaganda outfit
based in Seattle that produces the sorts of Far Left anti-American and
pro-Arab books of which Osama bin Laden would approve, and with a special
interest in printing sycophantic volumes about Syria.
Following the waves of suicide bombings in Israel and especially the
Netanya Passover Seder massacre, Israel at long last launched Operation
Defensive Wall in 2002. As part of that military operation Israeli forces
entered the towns of the West Bank and Gaza to flush out terrorists. In
most cases the operations went smoothly and with few casualties to either
side, other than to the terrorists being hunted down and killed or
captured. In Jenin, whence many of the suicide bombers had come, the
fighting was more severe and a relatively large number of Israeli troops
were killed there in an ambush in an alley.
After the battle of Jenin, the Arab propaganda machine went into high
gear and issued bloodcurdling reports of mass atrocities by Israeli troops
against Arab civilians in Jenin. The Arabs and their amen choruses
referred to the events in Jenin as downright genocidal . The same people
who cheer every time an Arab terrorist perpetrates a war crime suddenly
denounced Israels incursion in Jenin as a war crime. Many in the Western
media repeated these allegations credulously. Eventually a UN
investigation reported what everyone in Israel already knew: There were
no mass killings at all of Arab civilians in Jenin. Shimon Peres himself,
hardly an Israeli rightwing settler, confirmed that - at most 20 - Jenin
civilians had died in the house-to-house fighting, far less than in the
single Netanya suicide bombing that had triggered the incursion in the
first place.
But Israel-bashing propagandists have never let facts get in their
way. A series of books and a movie came out, repeating the medieval blood
libels about the Israeli war crimes during the incursion into Jenin. In
Jenin Jenin by Israeli film producer Muhammed Bakhri, Arab witnesses
describe how Israel destroyed a hospital wing that had never in fact
existed. Another Arab describes how Israeli troops simply walked up to
him and shot him in the leg for no reason, while the film ignored the
Israeli MD who had treated the same Arab at the end of the battle when he
had no bullet wounds. And so on.
Searching Jenin is an even more pathetic and a less believable
hodgepodge of anti-Israel testimonies by alleged residents of Jenin than
Bakhris documentary. The book is written by Arab propagandist Ramzy
Baroud, contains a foreword by the Khmer Rouges apologist Noam Chomsky and
a jacket endorsement by professional Arab propagandist James Zogby. On
the back cover is an endorsement by Norman G. Finkelstein, where he
demands to know What exactly happened in Jenin?, this from the very same
historian whose research is routinely cited by Neonazis and Holocaust
Deniers to prove that there was never any Holocaust of the Jews and that
all Jews claiming to be Holocaust survivors are lying thieves.
As one would expect from this genre of propaganda, one never learns in
the book why Israel launched Operation Defensive Wall in the first place,
although if you search very carefully with a magnifying glass in the
chronology contained in one section, you can find the odd mention of a
handful of Palestinian suicide bombings. You will of course never hear
how the UNs own investigators proved there was no massacre at all in
Jenin. You will never hear about how so many Israeli troops were killed
there because they were risking their lives NOT to harm any innocent
Palestinians. And you will never learn that Jenin was crawling with mass
murdering terrorists and those who had organized suicide bombings against
Jewish civilians.
The book begins by telling us the tragic saga of photojournalist
Mahfouz Abu Turk, who - Baroud insists - mysteriously disappeared in the
middle of the Jenin battle, implying that he was murdered by the rampaging
Israelis. Only in the appendix will you discover that Abu Turk is alive
and well, was never injured, and I guess disappeared only in the sense
that Baroud did not know where he was for a few hours.
I suspect Barouds next project is to prove that the brutal Americans
attacked the innocent al-Qaida and Taliban in Afghanistan for absolutely
no reason at all except their racism and blind aggression.
3. Unilateral Frogs:
http://frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=12250
Thursday, February 19, 2004
ZOA suing State Dept: http://www.zoa.org/pressrel2004/20040210b.htm
Nice Piece on Michael Freund:
http://jewishpress.com/news_article.asp?article=3411
Thomas Friedman - Jewish Uncle Tom:
http://jewishpress.com/news_article.asp?article=3412
The Magazine that Out-Tikkuns even Tikkun:
http://jewishpress.com/news_article.asp?article=3405
Lying Frenchmen: http://frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=12247
Microsoft Mucks up Mideast:
http://frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=12228
Oy, the racism: http://www.dailyorange.com/news/609194.html?mkey=278497
Wednesday, February 18, 2004
Subject: The Girl from Transylvania
http://jewishpress.com/news_article.asp?article=3407
The Girl From Transylvania
By Steven Plaut
?You will never see your land of Israel, your precious Jerusalem, your
Carmel, your Galilee. It will never happen. You will never leave Romania.?
The Securitate agent glared at her in anger.
The Romanian Securitate was the feared secret police, the foundation block
of the totalitarian regime imposed on Transylvania by Stalin, and it
controlled Romania until the fall of the dictator Nicolae Ceausescu. Years
later, after Russia itself had junked its rusty communist regime, the
methods and secrets of the Securitate would be exposed, its files opened
and scrutinized. There were files on millions of ordinary Romanian
citizens. More than 700,000 people had been employed as informants.
?You will tell us everything you know about the Zionist underground in
Romania. You will tell us the names. Or you will never see the sun again.?
She was born Magdalena Fisher in 1920 inside Hungary, but while she was
still a toddler her parents moved to the Transylvanian town of Brasov.
Hungarian Jews, including those in Transylvania, were a heterogeneous lot.
They ranged from the ultra-Orthodox in their black coats to the modernist
secularists. Large numbers belonged to the ?Neolog? movement, something
roughly analogous to the Reform and Conservative movements in the United
States.
While Jews had been murdered and brutalized by the Romanian fascists during
World War II, especially those from the Iron Guard, most survived the
Holocaust years. Jews from the northern part of Transylvania had been
deported to the death camps by the Hungarian fascists. But Brasov was in
southern Transylvania and most of its Jews had survived the war.
Transylvania: The name conjures up late-night horror movies and Count
Dracula. But in fact Transylvania had been a center of culture, including
Jewish culture, for centuries. The first Jews had settled there in Roman
times. The Khazars probably had contact and influence with Transylvanian Jews.
Transylvania became a multicultural wonderland, a mix of Magyars,
Romanians, Vlachs, Tartars, Gypsies, Swabian Germans, and Jews. Many of the
Transylvanian Jews were Magyarized, migrants from other Hungarian areas,
while others were German-speaking, and there were also communities of
Sephardim mixed among them.
World War I found Hungary still under the Habsburg rule, and so on the
losing side of the war. The Trianon Treaty of 1920, which officially ended
the war, stripped Hungary of many of its territories and awarded
Transylvania to Romania. It remained an enclave of predominantly Hungarian
speakers within the Romanian state. The resentment at this played a role in
Hungary aligning itself with Hitler in World War II.
A Leader Of Betar
Magdalena?s father was a Czech-born engineer who worked with the sugar
factories concentrated in Brasov. They were modern Jews, Neologs. The
Jewish day school went only up to the fourth grade, after which she
attended Catholic school, excused from the religion classes, and with
classes in Judaism with the local rabbi, Dr. Deutsch, after school. She was
an only child. Her classmates would argue over what they were ? Hungarians,
Romanians, Transylvanians, Magyars ? but for her the question was easy. She
was a Jew.
Her father, one of the early leaders of the Betar movement of Transylvania,
raised her not only as a Jew, but as a militant Zionist. In 1923, the
mainstream Zionist movement had been split when Vladimir Jabotinsky
resigned from the Zionist Federation, which was dominated by socialists
seeking to create a Jewish state through cooperation with the Arabs.
Jabotinsky was a skeptic and a realist. He correctly expected the Arabs to
oppose any form of Jewish sovereignty and concluded that the Jewish state
must be created through uprising and armed struggle by the Jews. He
expounded his views in his most famous essay, ?The Iron Wall.?
Jabotinsky had set up his own dissident Zionist movement outside the
Zionist Federation. He named it Betar, a play on words. Betar had been one
of the last holdouts in the Bar Kochba revolt against Rome, but it was also
the acronym for Brit Trumpeldor, the Covenant of Joseph Trumpeldor, named
for the martyred hero of the Zionist militias in the Ottoman Galilee.
Jabotinsky called his movement ?Revisionist Zionism? ? revisionist in the
sense that it wanted some revisions in the British Mandate for Palestine,
such as restoration of Transjordan, which had been stripped away from what
Jabotinsky regarded as the Jewish homeland. Betar grew to a mass movement
in Eastern Europe. Its Romanian headquarters were in Bucharest. Brasov in
Transylvania had a large chapter. Its members leafleted, organized,
lectured, published, harangued.
From the time she was in high school, Magdalena was one of the central
leaders in Betar in her town. It was one of the high points in her life
when Jabotinsky himself came to Romania. She and the other leaders met him
in Bucharest. Asher Diament, the chairman of Betar in Braslov, introduced
her to Jabotinsky as the most effective leader in the local chapter, the
leader who ?works with her heart,? and her face beamed with pride.
Before World War II, Romania had the third largest Jewish population in
Europe, after the Soviet Union and Poland. At the start of the war, the
Romanian government, headed by Ion Gigurtu, introduced draconian
anti-Jewish legislature, which was openly inspired by the Nazi Nuremberg
Laws. Antonescu, who followed Gigurtu as leader of the nation, created the
?Legionnaire State? in coalition with the Iron Guard. Many Jews sought ways
to escape to Palestine.
She continued her Zionist work at the university in Bucharest, until all
Jewish students were expelled in 1943. Jews were also being barred from a
long list of professions in Romania. In June of 1941, the Iasi pogrom had
taken place. After false rumors that the local Iasi Jews were collaborating
with Soviet paratroopers, the Romanian police had carried out a massacre of
Jews, the worst in Romania during the war.
Meanwhile, Jabotinsky had died in the United States and was buried in the
Catskills. (Jabotinsky?s remains would not be moved to Mount Herzl in
Jerusalem until after David Ben Gurion, Israel?s first prime minister and a
bitter opponent of Revisionist Zionism, left office.)
The war ended when Romania was liberated by the Red Army, but in a wink of
an eye the Soviets had imposed a totalitarian communist regime on the
country. The Romanian king was forced to resign. The Romanian communist
party, which had perhaps a few hundred members before the war, was
installed as the single political party, with a monopoly on the state.
Industry was nationalized, agriculture collectivized, rival parties banned,
gulag camps set up.
Magdalena had not planned to marry until she reached Israel, but she met
Ladislau (Laszlo) Rosenberg, an engineering student. He was a member of the
rival socialist Zionist movement, a cause of some early ideological debates
between them, but she agreed to his proposal of marriage anyway. Some of
her Betar comrades were displeased, preferring that she had chosen an
ideologically purer mate. Together they dreamed of moving to Israel
Communist Harassment
Ironically, the Zionist movements had been legal in fascist Romania during
World War II. Now the communist regime banned them altogether. She
continued her work with Betar. She ran the local Keren Kayemet fund. She
was the liaison of the movement for ?Aliya Bet,? the illegal smuggling of
Jews out of Europe and into Palestine in defiance of the British White
Paper and its restrictions on entry of Jews into the Jewish homeland.
She would get a call late at night that several spaces on a ship had come
open. People chosen for the ordeal had to leave before dawn the next
morning, leaving behind everything except a small handbag.
The passage was dangerous. Even if they reached the ships safely, there was
no guarantee ? several had already sunk en route to Palestine, their human
cargos drowning. She sent out not only Betar activists, but any Jew
prepared to go. Her goal was to send one more Jew to Israel, and one more,
and then one more.
The very first time the Securitate confronted her, she and Ladislau were at
home. The agent barged in and informed her that she would have to report to
Securitate headquarters the next day. But he began the interrogation in
their home. We understand there are Zionist organizations that operate in
Brasov, he said, reciting the names of all the movements except Betar.
She smelled a rat. Yes, she said, those are all Zionist organizations, but
you left out one, an organization named Betar. The Securitate man grinned.
?You are a very lucky young woman,? he said. ?Had you not volunteered the
name of Betar, you would already be under arrest and would never have been
heard from again.?
The interrogations at Securitate headquarters took place about once a month
for the next two years. We demand the names of the Zionist leaders, they
would repeat. She would give them names, lots of names, but only those of
local Zionists who had already left Romania and were in Israel. As for
those left behind, she would sigh and complain to the interrogators about
how selfish it had been of those leaders to just abandon the simple folks
left behind, people with no leaders at all.
She risked her life by refusing to name the actual leaders still operating
in the Zionist underground. One day the interrogators demanded that she
tell them everything she knew about Moshe Fogel, one of the local Betar
leaders. The Securitate claimed he was planning to blow up a local factory.
We have a problem, she said. You see, every Jew has two names ? one modern
or ordinary, in Hungarian or Romanian, and one Jewish name. If you do not
believe me, just go to the synagogue and ask the people there if this is
so. I am afraid I only know people by their Jewish names and so, alas, I do
not know whom you are talking about.
The Securitate interrogators were not amused. When she denied she knew what
?Irgun Zvai Leumi? (the name of the Betar militia in Palestine) meant,
their anger grew. She had said it so convincingly that even her husband
momentarily thought it was true. If you tell Fogel we asked about him, you
will be imprisoned, they threatened. The next day, Ladislau met Fogel in an
alley and warned him of the investigation.
You will never be allowed to leave Romania, they promised. Emigration of
Jews from Romania had begun, allowed in trickles, mainly people with
immediate relatives abroad. She corresponded with those Betar leaders from
her town now in Israel. Her mother managed to get an exit visa and was
already living in Israel. They had hoped this would be a sufficient ?family
reunification? basis for obtaining a visa, but the regime was being
vindictive with those who had been Zionist activists.
Home At Last
For eleven years Magdalena and her husband waited. They sang songs of the
Jewish homeland from their small apartment on Stalin Street. They dreamed
of setting up house some place in the Land of Israel. She learned that one
of the leaders from Romanian Betar was now in Australia. He had gone there
to settle the affairs of an aunt who had died, then stayed on, and she
asked him to file an affidavit to sponsor their immigration to Australia.
It worked.
They got papers to allow them to leave Romania, to go to Australia. They
left for Austria as if they were en route to Australia, and the first thing
they did in Vienna was to contact the Jewish Agency, in charge of
immigration to Israel. It was 1960. We want to go home, they announced.
They were moved to the port in Italy from which they would embark. They
could not believe their eyes. An indescribably lovely white ship was
waiting for them ? a ship called the Theodore Herzl, no less. They were on
their way home at last.
On the ship, they were ?processed? by the absorption bureaucrats. The
clerks were sending everyone to the depressed Negev town of Dimona. They
had had their share of experiences with bureaucrats before. Ladislau wanted
to set up his own factory using some of his know-how, and Dimona obviously
was not the place. Diament, the Betar commander from Transylvania, invited
them to live in Tel Aviv near him. When the ship landed in Haifa, they
looked up at the green mountain. By hook or by crook, they swore, we will
live in this lovely town.
They agreed to forgo the nearly-free housing offered them in Dimona. They
decided to pay their own way and live in Haifa. They set up a small
furniture workshop, in which they both worked 16-hour days. They never had
any children. Israel was their family and Haifa was their home. The Carmel,
about which they had sung in the Transylvanian underground, was now theirs.
***************
Israel is a country of modest apartments and simple ordinary doors, behind
which quietly live the most extraordinary of people. She bites her lip in
pain as she limps across the floor. Ladislau died many years ago, and she
lives alone, 83 years old, with a helper from Romania. She has been
handicapped since a careless bus driver last year started the engine while
she was only half on board, knocking her down and breaking her thigh.
But she is as energetic and optimistic as she had been back in Transylvania
as a young girl. She lives every single moment that the state of Israel
lives; she celebrates every moment of triumph and she suffers from every
moment of tragedy.
There is only one thing I do not understand, my dear next-door neighbor,
she says to me as I make notes for this article. The Chanukah candles are
still flickering as we chat.
I am just an ordinary person, a girl from Transylvania, a Jew and a Zionist
who loves all Jews and who loves her land and her country with all her
heart ? a simple Jewish woman whose life is of no interest. Why on earth do
you think my story is worth telling?
Steven Plaut is a professor at Haifa University. His book ?The Scout? is
available at Amazon.com. He can be reached at steven_plaut@yahoo.com.
***
Personal Request from Plaut-Listers:
If you found the previous story moving, please take a moment and send a
picture postcard from wherever you are to Mrs. Rosenberg, at
Magdalena Rosenberg,
49 David Pinski Street, Haifa 34354 Israel. She is alone in
the world, no kids or grandchildren, no siblings, and now has been maimed
by a reckless Egged bus driver. In the postcard, tell her you read her
story and were moved and inspired by it, and that you wish her good
health. Do NOT offer her
money as she is very proud and would be offended. You get 13 mitzvah
points if you send one off. Many thanks. She reads Hebrew, English,
German, Hungarian and Romanian.
1. When Ariel Sharon and his people signed the insane "hostage exchange"
recently,
according to which Israel put some 450 murderers back on the streets in
order to procure the bodies of three POWs who had been murdered by the
Hizbollah and one civilian whom the Hizbollah was holding ever since he
entered Lebanon illegally and with forged papers, I opposed the deal and
denounced the moronic politicians who forged it. At the time it appeared
that the live civilian was merely a common criminal, possible a drug
runner.
In recent days, bits and pieces of a new picture are emerging. I
emphasize that I have no inside information and am just forming this
impression from gleanings from the press (for example, in Hebrew:
http://nfc.msn.co.il/archive/001-D-40565-00.html?tag=14-05-19&au=True), it
is sounding like the citizen
Tannebaum, who forced Israel's hand into releasing the 450 murderers, may
have entered Lebanon seeking to sell Israeli intelligence secrets to the
Hizbollah terrorists. I have no independent source that confirms this and
am only repeating what the press is winking and implying. If I am wrong,
I will later issue an apology. If this impression is right, the decision
by Sharon to capitulate to the Hizbollah and buy back Tannenbaum for
hundreds of released terrorists is a hundred times even stupider than I
previously painted.
2. Protecting Undiversity at the University:
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=12209
3. Crackpot who Claims Israel Blew up Convicted of Tax Fraud
Man Who Alleged that Israel and Others Orchestrated 9-11 Convicted of
Trumped-Up Tax Charges!
(Manchester, NH) From 1996 through 2002, Steven A. Swan of Manchester, New
Hampshire was a follower and promoter of the income tax theories of
nationally-known income tax protester Irwin Schiff. In January of 2002,
15-20 armed I.R.S. Special Agents executed a search warrant at Swan's home
and informed him that he was the target of a criminal investigation by the
Justice Department for alleged violations of the internal revenue laws. In
March of 2003, Swan was indicted by a federal grand jury on 18 felony
counts. Swan has pleaded "not guilty" to all of the charges against him
and he intends to represent himself at trial, which is scheduled to
commence on February 3, 2004 in Concord, New Hampshire.
After reviewing some of his writings prior to the I.R.S. raid on his home,
Swan finally "realized" why he was being prosecuted. Within the months
after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, Swan widely distributed his
belief that the Israeli Mossad and members of the Bush Administration who
place Israel's interests above those of the United States (e.g., Richard
Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Armitage, Eliot Abrahms, Douglas Feith,
David Frum, Ari Fleischer, CIA Director George Tenet, FBI Director Louis
Freeh, ) orchestrated or assisted in orchestrating the September 11th
terrorist attacks and its subsequent cover-up as a way to drag the United
States into wars with all of Israel's enemies.
On Friday, February 6th, Swan's trial began in Concord, New Hampshire.
Swan was defending himself at trial, without a lawyer. On Thursday,
February 12th, the jury found Swan guilty of all 18 felony charges. Swan
is free on personal recognizance bail until his sentencing on May 19,
2004. He expects to receive a sentence of between 5 and 8 years in federal
prison.
His crackpot "theories" are being promoted by the Indymedia network of web
sites for leftist fascists. Can Barry Chamish's "theories "be far behind?
4. This is NOT a spoof: A synagogue in Westwood, California, is offering
a course in Torah-learning which centers around themes presented on The
Simpsons. The Simpsons from Sinai: A New Look at God, Judaism and the
Torah will "have students watch one episode each evening and then discuss
its theological components."
http://www.jewsweek.com/bin/en.jsp?enPage=BlankPage&enDisplay=view&enDispWhat=ob
5. Thought this was amusing:
http://www.andante.com/article/article.cfm?id=23120
Monday, February 16, 2004
1. Pre-Purim Spoof:
A Passionate Plea to the Citizens and Legislators of the Great State of
Massachusetts
Forwarded to the world by Steven Plaut
The great state of Massachusetts has decided to approve the
official acknowledgement of gay marriage, and henceforth there will
be no difference in the state between marriage of two members of the
same gender and two members of opposite genders. Having taken this first
step in the
direction of enlightenment and toleration, we think the Massachusetts
legislature did not go far enough. There are other oppressed minorities in
America in need of recognition and sympathy, including other groups
stigmatized by bigots as practicing abnormal sexual habits. The time has
come for the people and leaders of Massacusetts to recognize these other
non-traditional families and relationships.
It would be sending the right signal to Vermont, Hawaii and other
progressive states and groups of people.
We represent the members of the last sexually-repressed sexual
minority in America, the necrophiliacs. We are mad and we are tired of
being victimized and discriminated against. Necrophilia activist groups
have been spouting up all over, and signal the emergence of the last great
oppressed sexual minority from the closet. And the time has come for the
marriage reform movement to welcome us into your hearts and scout troops.
"Why should not we be free to marry whom we choose?" asks our
spokesperson Roger Mortis, who heads a necrophilia encounter group in
Tombstone, Arizona. "Remember there was a sorry time in America when
cross-racial marriage was illegal? After all, who are we hurting? And
besides, who says people have to live in old-fashioned Ozzie and Harriet
traditional family structures, with their rigid role models? Who says a
person's lover must be ALIVE?"
We necrophiliacs are demanding that our freedom to choose our own
partners be recognized in law. In particular, we object to that part of
the marriage vow that states, Until death do us part. What kind of
bigotry is THAT?
Our leading militant activist group, PROP UP, has been lobbying for
necrophiliac marriage to be recognized in all states. In particular, we
necrophiliacs demand to have our rights recognized in all that is involved
in pensions, insurance, and employee benefits. "How come Social Security
only grants benefits to insure SURVIVORS? What kind of arbitrary
discrimination is that?", asks Mortis. "And you should have seen the
problems I had when I tried to take my partner with me on a plane to Club
Med. I was told I had to leave behind
my girlfriend Christine - I actually call her Corpus Christie - and so I
told the snooty ticket agent, 'Over My Dead Body.'"
We necrophiliacs claim we are victims of long-time prejudice and
misinformation. We are often called nasty names and regarded as
mentally unstable. But who is to say what is normal? The fight against
necrophobia has been adopted by all politically correct movements and
progressive individuals.
Since necrophilia activism has emerged on the American scene, many of
us are coming out of the closet, or - as we prefer - out of the morgue.
Including some Hollywood celebrities.
Meanwhile, necrophilia activists have been approaching various
religious communities with the request that their rights be recognized.
Already radical Unitarians agree to officiate at necrophiliac marriage
ceremonies. The Episcopalians will debate later this month whether
necrophiliacs, or those romantically involved with the Life-Challenged -
as many prefer to be
known, can serve as Church ministers. We also expect the PC branch of
the Reform Synagogue movement to join in and to officiate at marriage
ceremonies for the unliving, as well as some more radical Jewish groups.
When asked how such a position could be advocated in light of traditional
Jewish opposition to such abominations, Rabbi Michael Moonbeam, author of
the scholarly Tikkun Guide to Great LSD Trips in the Bible (it explains
the REAL meaning of that Biblical story about how Moses DROPPED two
tablets), has observed, "Since when does being a good Rabbi have anything
to do with Judaism?"
Meanwhile, assorted services and institutions are cropping up to serve
this
long-neglected community. Some lawyers are now offering a package deal
in which they do probate for clients and get a marriage license at the
same
time. Assorted Las Vegas chapels have cropped up to perform necrophiliac
weddings. At one we visited, background muzak for the guests played the
old Beach Boys hit, the Monster Mash "It was the mash, it was the monster
mash, it was the mash, it was a graveyard smash." Another chapel
specialized
in conducting the ceremony in a hearse, with theme song taken from the old
Mister Ed show: "A hearse is a hearse, of corpse of corpse, and you can
get hitched in a hearse, of corpse."
Other cultural impacts of necrophiliacs are being felt, along with a
revival of 1960's rock and roll music, specially adopted for those with
romantic ties to the Non-Living. "Each night I ask the stars up above, why
must I be a cadaver in love," or "Yummy yummy yummy I'm in love with a
mummy," and an entirely new meaning for the song "Roll over Beethoven and
give Tchaikovsky the news."
Necrophiliacs have become welcome guests on all the popular TV chat
shows. We have also taken on the medical and psychological communities.
"Who are they to prejudge us?" says Mortis indignantly. Necrophiliac
activists have adopted a different use of the term "straight" and use it
to describe those who have relations with the living. So for a
necrophiliac,
a regular homosexual is called "straight gay" and a heterosexual is
"straight straight." We have also been lobbying the medical research
community to change its priorities. "After all," says Mortis, "they are
spending hundreds of billions on finding a cure for AIDS, but hardly
a dime for finding a cure for rigor mortis." The most outrageous
insult to our pride was from Hillary Clinton and the reps at the
International Women's Conference in Beijing a few years back, where they
proclaimed the official existence of five genders. Necrophiliacs claim
they are the sixth gender and they are tired of being overlooked.
For now, insists Mortis, I will just live a quiet life with my
partner, and in order to keep a bit of her presence with me wherever I go,
I
intend to keep a stiff upper lip.
We therefore demand that the State of Masschusetts end its intolerable
bias and bigotry and recognize necro-marriages at ONCE.
Thank you.
Posted on behalf of the Organization G.H.O.U.L.S., = Generosity and
Heartfelt Openmindedness for Un-Living Sex
2. COURT ORDERS MERETZ ACTIVISTS TO PAY LAND-OF-ISRAEL DEMONSTRATORS
THEY ASSAULTED
Susie Dym, spokesperson -- CITIES OF ISRAEL (Mattot Arim)
sddym@bezeqint.net
Three Meretz activists were ordered by a Haifa court to pay damages of
75,000 NIS to two Land of Israel activists, Dr. Eli Buchinder and Dr.
Renen
Adar, whom they assaulted in the course of a Haifa streetcorner vigil
being
held by the latter in support of Israel's Yesha communities.
The three Meretz activists, clothed in Meretz T-shirts, attacked
Buchbinder
and broke his jaw.
Buchbinder was hospitalized for a week and suffered
permanent jaw damage requiring surgical intervention. Dr. Adar, who
witnessed the attack, ran after the three, who had fled to a cafe
populated
by other Meretz activists, and tried to photograph them. The three
assailants then turned on Dr. Adar, beating him and kicking him in an
attempt to dissuade him from photographing them.
[Summarized from a Hebrew language report distributed by Aviad Visoly of
Haifa's Land of Israel headquarters.]
3. Subject: Can't He Just Make It Float Away or Something?
Uri Geller bitter over anti-Semitic graffitiUri Geller has spoken of the
"bitter feeling" he experienced after seeing anti-Semitic graffiti daubed
outside his British home.
The Israeli star who has lived in the village of Sonning, Berkshire, for
20 years, was out walking his dog along a towpath along the river Thames
earlier this week when he saw racists had sprayed the word "Jew" on his
fence.
4. While he and his Meretz comrades did more than their fair share to
stoke
world anti-Semitism, here is a fine piece by ex-Meretz cabinet minister
Amnon Rubinstein:
Worse than anti-Semitism
By Amnon Rubinstein
In November 2003, Neil Mackay, one of the editors of the Scottish Sunday
Herald, published an article in which he recycled claims made in some Arab
circles - that Mossad agents in the United States knew in advance of the
terror plot to attack the Twin Towers, and did nothing to prevent it. Up
to now this insane accusation was limited to extremist Arab propagandists
and neo-Nazis. The Glasgow newspaper found it proper to repeat this
canard, without citing its source, as an expression of faith in its
accuracy.
The article shocked Labor MP Jim Murphy and Lord Greville Janner, Jewish
leaders who protested, asking the paper's editor to print a correction.
The editor refused, saying the report was based on verified sources. In
his letter to Lord Janner, the editor asked him not to fall into the trap
of Ariel Sharon, by condemning everyone who disagrees with him as an
anti-Semite, even though Janner's letter contained no such accusation.
As an example of Mackay's self righteousness, the paper's editor cited
articles Mackay had written condemning anti-Semitism. He failed to
mention, for some reason, that some of his best friends are Jews. The
simplest way to answer the editor of the Sunday Herald is for the State of
Israel to sue the paper for libel, which the Foreign Ministry is now
considering.
But the problem is that the article in the Scottish newspaper is only one
extreme example of the wild and hysterical attacks on Israel, and not only
because of the occupation and the settlements. In such attacks, Israel is
portrayed virulently, as a monstrous country capable not only of harming
Palestinians, but of not preventing mass murder in New York if it serves
its base interests.
Anyone who knows Israel even a little knows that of course the country is
nothing how it is reported in some important newspapers, and that such
lies contravene every rule of journalism. The reports in these papers
ignore the complexities of its society and present Israel as a caricature
- the same as appears in the Arab press, where every Israeli is a monster
stomping on an unfortunate Arab.
Things reached the point where, during a conference on anti-Semitism
organized by Minister Natan Sharansky two weeks ago, a Jewish delegate
from Sweden expressed satisfaction over the incident in which the Israeli
ambassador in Sweden damaged an exhibit he interpreted as praising the
woman suicide bomber of Haifa's Maxim restaurant. He was pleased, he said,
because through it many Swedes heard for the first time about terror
against Israeli civilians.
Is there anti-Semitism in all of this? Anti-Semitism certainly aids
writing villainously against Israel, but it doesn't explain everything.
Something more serious may be afoot. Traditional anti-Semitism did not
accept Jews in Christian society, but it usually did not negate their
right, at least in principle, to separate existence. Before Kristallnacht
- the night of broken glass in Germany - even the Nazis preached "Jews to
Palestine."
The anti-Semitic tone of newspapers like the Sunday Herald negates the
Jewish right to separate existence by delegitimizing the State of Israel,
which is described - also with the assistance of Israeli academics - as a
Nazi apartheid state.
The logical conclusion of the Sunday Herald's libelous article is that a
democratic country that knows about a plan to commit mass murder in New
York and does nothing to prevent it has no right at all to exist. This is
worse than anti-Semitism.
This is negating the right of the Jewish people to self-determination.
When such views are accompanied by a rise in anti-Semitism, it takes us
back as Jews to dark days.
5. From the mother of democracies:
Jews targeted in UK
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/02/15/njew15.xml&sShe
t=/news/2004/02/15/ixhome.html
Prominent Jews in Britain are being targeted in a wave of anti-Semitic
harassment by far-Right and Islamic fundamentalist organisations.
6. Help Berkeley?
http://frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=12197
and
http://frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=12198
7. http://frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=12194
You Want Us to Do What?
By Tony Stevens
FrontPageMagazine.com | February 16, 2004
Everyones had a professor they know to be extremely liberal or
conservative. Some professors simply wear their political beliefs on their
sleeves without even knowing it. Usually their political views dont make
their way into the classroom. However, if it happens, it should be done in
such a way that would not be construed as an attempt at the political
indoctrination of the students in the class. Of course, sometimes those
political biases inappropriately make their way into the classroom, as has
recently occurred at my school, California University of Pennsylvania,
near Pittsburgh.
Im a public relations student at Cal U and am attending with the ultimate
goal of working in the motor sports industry after I graduate. Like other
majors, there are a number of required courses for PR majors to complete
in order to graduate. Included in the lineup of required courses for PR
students is one called PR Cases and Problems, which I enrolled in this
semester. It meets once a week on Wednesday nights with Dr. Dencil Backus.
While the first class seemed fair enough--Dr. Backus seemed to be one of
those professors that would make us work hard--he made a few comments in
class that simply oozed with hate for those on the Right, the military,
and big business. As long as these comments didnt seep into the course
work, I just chose to treat them with a grain of salt. But in subsequent
classes, the professors political views have seeped into the course work
in a manner that I feel is inappropriate.
The second class saw the State of the Union address become a topic of
discussion, with Dr. Backus going off on a tangent about how much he
despised President Bush and how he was the biggest liar weve ever had as a
president. Dr. Backus then proceeded to say how Bush lied about the war on
terror, everything in Iraq, and other things that Im sure I probably
missed. I spoke up and disagreed, telling him I would bring evidence to
support my arguments. I thought no more of it except to print out my stack
of stuff and bring it to him the next class.
During the third class we discussed our assignments and assorted other
coursework. But as class was winding up, Dr. Backus distributed a two-page
email he had received concerning the far Left group MoveOn.orgs political
commercial contest and their issues with CBS, which couldnt run the
contest winner during the Super Bowl because MoveOn.org missed CBS
deadline for purchasing airtime. After distributing the e-mail to the
class, Dr. Backus asked if anyone knew was familiar with the situation. I
was the only one.
Dr. Backus also asked if anyone had seen the commercial and, again, I was
the only one. I mentioned that I thought the commercial was silly and why
I felt that way. The professor and I debated the commercials merits, or
lack thereof, only when he insisted I say what was on my mind.
After our exchange on the subject, Dr. Backus told the class that our new
assignment was to design a campaign around MoveOn.orgs commercial and how
the organization might be able to convince CBS (and probably anyone else)
to air its message. I told Dr. Backus that since I was not a supporter of
MoveOn.orgs agenda, I instead wanted to design a campaign that was
anti-MoveOn.org, one that was more in step with my beliefs. Dr. Backus
refused, saying words to the effect of "Well, guess what, you just
failed."
He then seemed to briefly consider canceling the assignment, but decided
to proceed with it over my objections and continued to refuse to allow me
to turn in the assignment as I saw fit to complete it. He then explained
the assignment again, dismissed the class, and asked to speak with me
following class. Now, during the entire course of study in the PR field at
this university, it is branded onto your brain that if you dont agree or
have a moral conflict with an assignment in the real world, that youve got
a few options that include quitting, asking to be reassigned, doing the
work, or simply being fired.
During the course of our after-class conversation, Dr. Backus stated that
he didnt want everything in the class becoming a clash of ideas
culminating in an incident like the one wed just had. I agreed. He then
went on to say that its real damned easy to speak up against a job in
college, but not when it affects the food on the table and a family in the
real world. I said that yes, he was right, but just because it was harder
doesnt mean I havent done it before. Ive left various jobs, volunteer
groups, etc. because of things that were going on that seriously
conflicted with my values and what I believed was right. He had no
response for that except, Well, its real damned easy here. Real damned
easy.
I personally feel that my proposal isn't a very hard one to accept. Its
the same assignment, just coming from the opposite side of the fence. Ive
interpreted his response(s) to my suggestion as one that says I will have
to live with him pushing only his political agenda. Dr. Backus mentioned
that he doesn't want every class to become something where there's a
commotion over content, but I have a feeling it will become so because
this professor is pretty open about his agenda. His office door is
plastered w/ Anti-Bush bumper stickers and the like, which in itself is
fine because it's his office and he can say what he wants there. However,
when he begins bringing that agenda into the classroom, I have a huge
problem with it.
Approximately three months of this class remain before the semester is
over. The said assignment is going to be handed in from the opposite side
of the fence approximately two hours after this article is penned.
Whether Dr. Backus will choose to allow and accept such an assignment, or
impose only his political worldview on the class has yet to be seen.
However, if hes like many other liberals in the World of Academia, I have
a feeling that this incident is far from over. Only time will tell.
Sunday, February 15, 2004
1.
1. I have been reading an interesting article,
Still Losing the Race? by John H. McWhorter
in the February issue of Commentary. It is quite a good piece and
definitely worth reading. It concerns the assaults by the liberal media
on black conservatives, and is written by a very eloquent Berkeley black
professor of linguistics.
McWhorter describes how those black intellectuals who defy the
accepted doctrines of the organized black community, who oppose things the
establishment thinks are good for blacks, like affirmative action quotas
and endless welfare expenditure increases, are dismissed by the media as
Uncle Toms and Rent-a Blacks who serve the racist enemies of blacks.
Black conservatives who challenge the truisms of the black community
generally find they are unable to get a slot in major magazines or Op-Ed
pages to express their opinions. The uniform permissible expression of
black opinion in the liberal media is the promotion of self-interest as
understood by the black establishment.
None of this is new. But what occurred to me is how diametrically
OPPOSITE the Jewish community, including the Israeli Jewish community, is
from the black community in the United States. Whereas the liberal
establishment and its captive media are of the opinion that only
leftist-liberal blacks, spouting quotas and preferences and the terms of
black self-interest as understood by that establishment are legitimate,
while all others are rent a blacks to use McWhorters term, among Jews the
situation is the exact opposite.
In recent years, the only Jews and the only Israelis regarded as
legitimate by the Western media are the leftist rent a Jews, serving the
enemies of their people. Jewish intellectuals are guaranteed prominent
coverage and Op-Ed banner headlines, as long as they are promoting the
interests of the enemies of their people. Those actually promoting the
self-defense and self-interest of Jews are denied access to the media.
An Amos Oz endorsing return of Israel to its pre-1967 Auschwitz borders is
guaranteed the top slot on the NY Times Op-Ed. Michael Lerner, a Rent a
Jew of the Marxist anti-Semitic Left, or a Henry Siegler or a Leonard
Fein, are all guaranteed prominence at papers like the LA Times and get
celebrity coverage from the rest of the media even when they actually do
not represent even some legitimate sub-school of Judaism. The worst
anti-Semites among Israels tenured traitors are guaranteed celebrity
treatment and media celebration, just as long as they come out as
justifying Palestinian terror, unconditional Israeli capitulation, and the
refusal by leftists in Israel to serve in the military. Only Jews
promoting the agenda of the enemies of Jews, never Jews promoting the Jews
own self-interest, are acceptable in the liberal establishment Op-Ed
pages.
In short, those blacks who challenge the perceived self-interest of
the black community as understood by its leaders, are delegitimized and
demonized, dismissed as rent a blacks. Those rent-a-Jews, Uncle Tomming
it up for the anti-Jewish Left, who spend their careers apologizing for
and justifying anti-Semites and terrorists, are guaranteed to be hailed as
courageous and moral, as the only true representatives of Jewry and Jewish
ethics.
2. Angelo Codevilla is one of the great minds in contemporary America:
from CLAREMONT REVIEW OF BOOKS -- Winter 2003
Angelo Codevilla is a visiting professor of
politics at Princeton University, a fellow of its
Madison Institute, a professor of international
relations at Boston University, and a senior fellow
of the Claremont Institute.
VICTORY WATCH
NO VICTORY, NO PEACE
by Angelo M. Codevilla
I fear that we shall crawl out on a limb to reap
the odium and practical disadvantages of our
course, from which a11 countries will then hasten
to profit. Such is internationalism today. Why, oh
why do we disregard the experience and facts of
history which stare us in the face?
--Joseph C. Grew
U.S. ambassador to Japan, 1937
IN OCTOBER 2003, HAVING OCCUPIED Afghanistan and Iraq, imprisoned
some 2,000 foreigners, refocused U.S. law enforcement,
reorganized the U.S. government, and made "security specialist"
the biggest new endeavor in America, President Bush claimed that
"the world is more peaceful and more free under my leadership and
America more secure."
In 1966, Daniel Boorstin's The Image: A Guide To The Pseudo Event
In America, showed that advertising by government as well as
business aims to counter reality. If the toilet tissue really
were "soft," there would be no need for an ad campaign to
persuade us that it is. Russians knew when their government
trumpeted good harvests that they had better hoard potatoes. By
the same token, if contemporary Americans felt victorious and at
peace, claiming credit for that feeling would be superfluous.
Since reality tells us otherwise, such claims recall Groucho
Marx's story of the husband caught in flagrante: "Who you gonna
believe, me or your own eyes?" In short, as 2004 loomed, there
was no peace from terror, and no prospect of any, because there
was no victory.
On October 16, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld secretly asked
his top lieutenants to think about why. The questions were not
well thought out. The most specific, how America could cause
Islamic schools to turn out more moderates and fewer extremists,
recalled the foolishness of the CIA's corrupt, counterproductive,
covert cultural activities of the 1950s. No one could imagine why
any Muslim should accept American atheists as arbiters of what is
and is not properly Islamic. Rumsfeld's main request, for better
"metrics" of success, was reminiscent of Robert McNamara's effort
quantitatively to define victory in Vietnam in terms of
operations successfully carried out. Nevertheless, Rumsfeld's
questions properly pointed to the heart of the matter: Why have
all our massive efforts not produced better results? What else
can we do?
Why Isn't It Working?
THE ROOT OF RUMSFELD'S FRUSTRAtion was that the Bush team--though
pulled in different directions by its principals' conflicting
priorities--had ended up doing pretty much all the things that
all its members had wanted.
The Doves, Secretary of State Colin Powell and CIA Director
George Tenet, plus Tom Ridge and the FBI, had argued for waging
"the war" with a combination of foreign diplomacy and domestic
security. They got their way. Bush put his heart and soul not
only into wooing the U.N. and "the Europeans" but also into
securing help from Arab states such as Syria and Saudi Arabia.
Bush even incurred serious political costs at home by publicly
hiding information detrimental to the Saudis. He angered his own
supporters by financing Yasser Arafat and the Palestinian
Authority, while shielding it from Israel's wrath. Yet none of
this brought solidarity with America. Syria mocked us, and
ostentatiously helped Iraqi fellow-Ba'athists kill Americans.
Saudi Arabia continued to be the mainstay of Arab
anti-Americanism. The P.A. showed that all Bush's words and money
were unable to shake its status as the focus of anti-Western
jihad. As for the U.N. and "the Europeans," nothing dispelled the
impression that they were circling the Bush team like vultures
eager for it to stumble. Nor did the billions of dollars, the
legislation and regulations devoted to "homeland security," the
captives "brought to justice" for association with terrorists,
bring any more solace. The Bush team knew that for every captive,
many more enemies of America were laughing proudly at the fact
that they were the reason why every day at airports, a million
Americans were taking off their shoes and being frisked.
At the same time, Paul Wolfowitz and Donald Rumsfeld himself, the
advocates of offense, of "regime change," also had gotten their
way They had thought that rolling into Kabul and setting up
command posts in Saddam Hussein's palaces would ignite a
democratic revolution in the Middle East, which would make
terrorism impossible. They turned out to be mistaken as well.
The reason why operations, each arguably successful in itself and
all together covering much of the spectrum of the possible, had
brought America no closer to peace is that war does not consist
of operations any more than love consists of intercourse. In both
cases, all depends on your intentions and on having the proper
object. Always, the proper question is what ends do the means
serve, and how appropriately do they serve them? What do your
operations actually do? In war, the question that gives meaning
to all operations is who is the enemy whose death gives us peace?
Never, ever, had the Bush team dealt with this question. Here was
the root of the Bush team's problems, the reason why it had done
a lot, done it wrong, and wound up worse off than before.
Doing "the war" right would have meant not bothering much with
al-Qaeda. Evidence of its central role in anti-American terror
was always weak, and came from Arab sources that do not wish
America well. Most of all, because neither it nor any other
organization is the source of hate and contempt for America,
wiping it out does America little good. What then is the source
of anti-American terror what leads people to think that fighting
America is profitable and has a future? The answer, as New York
Times columnist Thomas Friedman learned from this series of
essays, and as the Bush team had yet to grasp fully is that 98
percent of terrorism is what regimes want to happen or let
happen.
It's The Regime, Stupid!
REGIMES, AS SERIOUS PEOPLE KNOW, ARE a lot more than governments.
They are the priorities, standards, ways of life, embodied by the
most prominent persons in the land, and very much by their
henchmen. For our purposes, the question is: who makes
antiAmerican violence the standard for others; who are the people
whose deaths would diminish it?
By that standard, the Taliban regime was of scarce relevance. The
Taliban, like other Afghans, know little and care less about what
happens on the other side of the mountain, much less the ocean.
Yet the Taliban had developed a symbiotic relationship with a
group of Arabs who, with Saudi money, had partially financed them
and helped them against their domestic enemies. In return, the
Taliban provided these "Afghan Arabs" a base for intrigues they
carried on with the regimes and intelligence services of
their homelands. Only in this third-hand way were the Taliban
part of America's terrorist problem. Once America helped other
Afghans sweep the Taliban away, the Afghan tribes realigned with
little bloodshed and virtually annihilated the "Afghan Arabs."
Al-Qaeda then became scattered individuals, whose importance
depended exclusively on the Arab regimes that continued to use
them, and others.
These Arab regimes, and nothing else, are the entities that gave
and give people the means and above all the hope of success that
make antiAmerican terrorists.
That is why invading Iraq was, potentially, so very useful in
convincing those inclined to fight America that there is no
future in doing so. But what, in the way that the Bush team
fought this battle, convinced America's enemies of the opposite?
What did the Bush team do that made these regimes less afraid of
us than before; that tilted the balance of fear against us more
than ever?
In a nutshell, the Bush team mistook Saddam Hussein's top echelon
for the regime itself. Second, it proved unwilling to help Iraqi
enemies of the regime pull it up by the roots, or even to allow
them to do it, Third, unpardonably, it placed the U.S. armed
forces and America's Iraqi collaborators in the deadly position
of static defense-sitting on bayonets pondering the Marine "Small
Wars Manual" while being shot at. All this, combined with dovish
diplomacy vis-a-vis the rest of the Arab world, told enemy
regimes that, once again, America would let a battle won turn
into a war lost.
As previously explained in these pages, the dictatorial regimes
of the Arab world consist of some 2,000 men, while the Saudi
regime is perhaps twice that size. In such places, where regimes
exist by brutalizing opponents, changes in regime necessarily
involve the bloody settling of bloody scores. Unless and until
the "outs" brutalize at least this number of "ins," the regime
has not really changed. In such places, "who rules" really means
who brutalizes whom unto death or submission. Vengeance, a human
drive everywhere, is especially compelling in the Arab world. The
Eumenides is not part of Arab literature. Hence the dream of many
Americans -- Norman Podhoretz expressed it in the Fall 2002 issue
of this publication -- of a gentle imperialism that would hold Iraq
together, spreading liberal democracy from it to the rest of the
Middle East, is impossible. Most impossible was it in Iraq
because its unusual racial and religious divisions further
complicate the previous regime's unusual brutalities.
In sum, around the world, as in Iraq, being pro-American was
likelier to get you killed than was being part of an
anti-American network. Hence, in the third year of the War on
Terrorism, America found itself on the short end of the balance
of fear. Turning that balance to the enemy's disfavor is the
primordial task of our war.
Our War
NO ONE SHOULD DECLARE WAR WITH out being clear against whom it is
being declared: who the enemy is whose demise will give us peace.
In October 2003, mortar shells fell into the Baghdad compound of
the Coalition Provisional Authority, giving U.S. bureaucrats an
epiphany. Reversing a decade's worth of CIA judgments, they
concluded that elements of Saddam's regime were working together
with religious extremists. That was equivalent in perspicacity to
cruise ship passengers noticing humidity in the ocean. Saddam's
political victory in the Gulf War had consisted precisely of
using enmity to America to transcend the many divisions among
Arabs, indeed Muslims, and of putting himself at the head of that
enmity. Hence his regime, which lived by quotidian, bloody
persecution of Islam, became the vanguard of what Saddam
effectively defined as the new defining element of Islam;
anti-American action,
The spreading sense throughout the Islamic world that
anti-American action was good and safe, and that opposing it was
bad and dangerous, became a mortal threat to America. This deadly
phenomenon took on a life of its own. Like any disease not
countered in its early stages, countering it would require ever
more radical exertions.
Beginning right after the Gulf War, Saddam's intelligence service
put him at the head of otherwise disparate elements. The Soviet
Union had left behind a network of mostly secular, nationalist
terrorist groups. Iraq's and Syria's Ba'ath parties were parts of
that network, as were the P.A. and its various offshoots, e.g.,
the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. These were
headquartered either in Damascus or Baghdad. But third-world
nationalism made sympathy with all the above politically
significant from Morocco to Pakistan. In most cases these
elements were wellconnected with the secular governments of the
Islamic world. They had pressured those governments to support
Saddam against America. On the religious side of the Islamic
world's greatest divide were the Islamists-everywhere except in
Iran (and for other reasons in Jordan and Morocco) enemies of
their governments as well as of the West. The number of Islamist
organizations vas legion, including both Sunni and Shi a. Then
there was the divide between the groups that were sponsored by
well-financed Saudi Wahabis and the rest of Islam.
The great event of the 1990s was that violence against Israel and
America-correctly perceived as successful-went a long way toward
effacing the differences amongst the Islamic world's activists.
Daily veneration of the Palestinian struggle, daily rituals of
hate against the West, Jews, Israel (and the American devils
behind it), brightened millions of miserable Iives. Images of
Israel being bloodied, and of America being bloodied, and of
Muslim potentates safely offering their observations on the
carnage, became a paradigm for a generation of Muslims. Any
regime that, assuming it had been inclined to do so, put
restrictions on anti-American, or antiIsraeli speech or action
did so at its own peril.
America's war would have to consist of reversing that paradigm.
Victory for America would be on the way when Muslims around the
world would see every evening on the news those to whom they had
looked up being tried, discredited, and executed by Muslims for
crimes against Muslims, when television audiences would gasp at
crowds of Iraqis and Syrians physically dismembering the Baathist
thugs who had slaughtered the party's political enemies, when
Arab news magazines would detail the corrupt, un-Islamic lives of
the entire Saudi royal family, when good Muslims, victims of the
Wahabi heresy, would detail how the heretics had defiled Islam.
What a paradigm-shift it would be were Palestinian members of
families victimized by Arab thugs publicly to take vengeance on
their tormentors. Such events would change the Muslim world's
agenda and place regimes that advocated or allowed anti-American
propaganda, the organizations or "charities" that have produced
anti-American terrorism, at peril.
To produce such results, America's operations of war would have
to destroy regimes-not build nations nor export democracy.
Whereas doing away with Saddam Hussein in 1991 might well have
convinced the Muslim world that antiAmericanism had no future, by
2003 evidence that worldwide Muslim elements were helping an
Iraqi "resistance" to bleed America, even as the supposedly
united efforts of Islam were bleeding Israel, was energizing
terrorists. By this time, nothing less than the bloody demise of
the most egregious anti-American regimes would convince the
others not to foster or allow terrorism. Only this would give us
peace.
What Is To Be Done?
IN SHORT, THE REGIMES WHOSE DEATH would give us peace have
enemies who are eager to kill them. U.S. forces cannot possibly
police foreign lands, much less force gentler, kinder ways upon
them. Experience in Iraq should have made this plain. Only
locals, not foreigners, can do that. Their methods are unlikely
to be kind and gentle. Democracy may not be part of their agenda,
and liberalism surely will not be. That is their business. It is
enough for our peace that there be people who have their own
reasons for destroying the people and culture -the regimes-that
are the effective causes of violence against us. U.S. military
operations can and should make it possible for them to do it.
In Iraq, the U.S. government should do in 2003-04 what it should
have done in earlier years. Having destroyed Saddam's main
armies, Americans should arm the 80% Shi'ite and Kurdish parts of
the population, and wish them well. Most surely, they would
destroy the remnants of the Ba'athist regimes. Though they have
more detailed knowledge than we possibly could have of who is
who, they would be far less careful than we of killing only the
strictly guilty.
It is no business of America's whether the people who live
between the Persian Gulf and the Black Sea decide that there
shall be an Iraq or not. We should have learned from experience
in Bosnia that crafting the fiction of a state that does not
exist in the hearts and minds of its supposed members-who think
themselves not Bosnians but rather Muslims, Croats, and Serbs -is
an expensive way of gratifying folks in the State Department who
should know better. Nor should Americans care that the Saudi
royal family and Sunni Arabs in the Gulf would not like an
independent or semi-independent group of 15 million Shi'ites near
the head of the Gulf because they might ally with Shi'ite Iran.
Being Arabs, they probably would not. But whether or not they did
would be no problem of America's.
America's interest would be secured by the fact that the regime's
anti-American priorities would die with its members. The foreign
Islamic fighters would die in ways even more discouraging to
anyone inclined to follow in their footsteps.
All too hazily, in 2003 the Bush team perceived that Yasser
Arafat's P.A. somehow energized all Muslim terrorism. But Bush
sought to remove this regime as a negative factor by negotiating
some kind of accord between it and Israel. Wrong. The P.A.
regime's interest is entirely incompatible with peace, because
the regime lives not by serving its people but-on the contrary-by
serving as a part of a broader Arab and Muslim anti-Westernism.
The only way to remove it as a major energizer of that movement
is to do away with it, as a way of crushing that movement.
Destroying the P.A. is easier done than said. The regime lives
physically by daily infusions of cash from American and European
sources that can be cut off in an instant, as well as by
communications, electricity, and other utilities that Israel can
cut off almost as quickly. Moreover, its leaders are mostly
marked men under Israeli surveillance. Perhaps more important,
they have lots of Arab enemies who have saved up much vengeance
for them. If Americans and Israelis decide to eliminate the
regime's main force, to make clear that death and destruction is
to be the lot of anyone who even looks like he might follow the
old regime, its enemies are more than likely to finish the job.
This is not to say that a generation of Palestinian young people
schooled in a culture of death would learn new ways instantly.
But regimes are all about a complex of incentives-moral, social,
and material. Surely, though liberal democracy would likely not
reign among Palestinians any more than love for Jews, undoing the
regime that waged the Arab-Israeli conflict would remove the drug
that has done so much to stimulate a generation of antiAmerican
terrorism.
THE SAUDI REGIME IS THE NURSERY OF the Wahabi heresy that for two
centuries has vied for leadership of Islam. It is also the source
of the billions of dollars by which, since the 1970s, the Wahabis
have spread their influence farther than ever before.
Anti-American terror would hardly be conceivable without
widespread Wahabi influence. The Bush team's belief that the
Saudi regime is anything other than an enemy (indeed the reason
why Bush excluded the Saudis from the list of those to whom he
those to whom he proposed freedom in lieu of stability) is based
on the supposition that the regime can control Wahabism. But the
regime is Wahabism's enabler and full partner. There is no way to
stop anti-Western terror so long as Wahabism is prestigious,
secure in its base, and wealthy. There is no way to make it
otherwise except to undo the Saudi regime.
At the end of 2003, some kind of insurgency was under way in
Saudi Arabia. The only certain things about it were that it
involved some members of the regime against others, and that it
involved Wahabism. It was also certain that there were countless
Muslims, in and outside the Arabian Peninsula, who wished that at
the end of the day the Saudi oil fields would no longer be
providing the means by which the Wahabis had troubled the life of
Islam, even more than that of America. All this is to say that
the necessary undoing of the Saudi regime would not be difficult,
and that there was no shortage of Muslims who would approach with
alacrity cleansing the peninsula of the peculiarly Saudi
combination of heresy and fraud. This cleansing was likely to
happen without American involvement. Indeed, only the Bush team's
illusion that it may be possible to save the regime as a vehicle
for democracy was likely to stand in the way of this healthy
development.
Our Peace
AMERICANS, NO LESS THAN FOREIGNERS, ARE the only ones who can
determine the character of their regime, the way they live. Only
we can determine what kind of peace will be ours -- what we will
put up with and what not.
The titles of America's first post-September 11 operation,
"Enduring Freedom," as well as of its first major piece of
legislation, the "Patriot Act," suggest Boorstin's The Image as
well as any of George Bush's speeches. As I've argued previously,
attacking Afghanistan was not calculated to preserve any of
America's freedoms, while the Patriot Act's criminalization of
association with any entity declared "terrorist" by executive
action seems, on its face, not patriotism but rather a
double-violation of the United States Constitution. Since the Act
did not bite and the invasion of Afghanistan produced exciting TV
images, and "the war" was at its beginning, the public found no
reason to question the reality behind the titles.
That is, until after the invasion of Iraq. Then Americans there
began dying in noticeable numbers without any prospect that the
dying would stop. The ease with which irregulars carried out
their attacks on Americans and their collaborators in Iraq
reminded Americans of how easily terrorists could cause havoc on
American streets, and of the fact that neither the Bush team's
homeland security nor any number of "patriot acts" could stop it.
Once again, it became clear that there is no such thing as a
phony war, a war with limited liability. Once blood is spilled,
the previously existing order, the previous peace, is broken
forever. What peace will prevail in the end depends on who, by
killing and willingness to be killed, can force the other to
accept his version.
And so, after the invasion of Iraq had raised the stakes, the
American people were closer to realizing that what they wanted
out of the war was a certain kind of peace, and that to get it
they needed a certain kind of victory. This would involve
identifying their enemies and doing away with them. Otherwise,
there would never be peace.
Beginning just after September 11, I have sought to show that
America's peace depends on America's victory, and to show that
the path to victory is the destruction of the main regimes
without which terrorism would not exist, pour encourager les
autres. The obstacles to our peace, our victory, flow not from
the strength or cleverness of our enemies, but rather from the
tendency of America's leaders to deal with images rather than
with reality.
3. Kerry with Hanoi Jane:
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20040211-123002-8027r.htm
4. We are everywhere:
Adopted Name - Real Jewish Name
Joey Adams ..................Joseph Abramowitz
Eddie Albert .................Eddie Heimberger
Woody Allen..................Allen Konigsberg
Lauren Bacall ................Joan Perske
Jack Benny ..................Benny Kubelsky
Milton Berle .................Milton Berlinger
Ernest Borgnine............Effron Borgnine
George Burns ...............Nathan Birnbaum
Joan Blondell................Rosebud Blustein
Joyce Brothers ..............Joyce Bauer
Mel Brooks ...................Melvin Kaminsky
Joey Bishop ..................Joey Gottlieb
Charles Bronson ...........Charles Buchinsky
Rona Barrett .................Rona Burnstein
Cyd Charisse ..... .........Tula Finklea
Tony Curtis ....................Bernie Schwartz (daughter is Jamie Lee
Curtis)
Joan Crawford ...............Lucille Le Sueur
Dyan Cannon ...............Samile Friesen
Kirk Douglas ................Isadore Demsky (son is Michael Douglas)
Bob Dylan ....................Robert Zimmerman
Rodney Dangerfield.............Jacob Cohen
Douglas Fairbanks,Jr..! .......Douglas Ullman
Joel Grey ........................Joel Katz (father of Jennifer Grey)
Elliott Gould .................Elliott Goldstein
Zsa Zsa Gabor ...............Sara Gabor
John Garfield ...............Jules Garfinkle
Judy Garland ...............Frances Gumm
Paulette Goddard .........Paulette Levy
Eydie Gorme.................Edith Gormezano
Cary Grant ...................Larry Leach
Lorne Green ................Chaim Leibowiz
Judy Holliday ..............Judith Tuvin
Leslie Howard .............Leslie Stainer
Buddy Hackett ............Leonard Hacker
Jill St. John .................Jill Oppenheim
Danny Kaye.................David Kominsky
Alan King ....................Irwin Kniberg
Larry King....................Larry Zeiger
Tina Louise..................Tina Blacker
Ann Landers................Esther Friedman (sister of Abigail Van Buren)
Dorothy Lamour ..........Dorothy Kaumeyer
Michael Landon ...........Mike Orowitz
Steve Lawrence ...........Sidney Leibowitz
Hal Linden...................Hal Lipshitz
Jerry Lewis .................Joseph Levitch
Karl Malden ................Aiden Sekulovitch
Ethel Merman ..............Ethel Zimmerman
Jan Murray .................Murray Janofsky
Walter Matthau ...........Walter Matasschanskayasky
Lilly Palmer .................Maria Peiser
Jan Pierce....................Pincus Perelmuth
Roberta Peters..............Roberta Peterman
Eleanor Parker..............Ellen Friedlob
Joan Rlvers ...................Joan Molinsky
Tony Randall .................Sidney Rosenberg
Edward G. Robinson .....Emanuel Goldenberg
Dinah Shore ...................Fanny Rose
Shelly Winters ..............Shirley Schrift
Gene Wilder...................Jerome Silberman
Dennis Kovler................Dennis Kovler
More Jewish Stars Over Hollywood
There are hundreds of other Jews in Hollywood "stardom" - far too numerous
to list them all here.
However the following are Jews whom many think are Gentiles:
Ed Asner, Bea Arthur, Gene Barry, Richard Benjamin, Kevin Costner, Lee J.
Cobb, Joan Collins, Richard Dreyfus, Ted Danson, Peter Falk (Columbo),
Eddie Fisher, Harrison Ford, Richard Gere, Betty Grable, Sharon Gless,
Steven Segall, Dustin Hoffman, Monty Hall, Amy Irving, Jack Klugman,
Leonard Nimoy, Ken Olin, Ron Perlman, George Segel, William Shatner, Peter
Strauss, RodSteiger, Jane Seymour, Barbara Walters, Debra Winger, and
Bruce Willis.
The following are "half-Jewish",
Joan Collins, Goldie Hawn, Paul Newman, Robert DeNiro and Geraldo Rivera.
5. In case you were unable to open the photo of teh Palestinian children
crowding the terrorists firing on Israelis, try:
http://www.haaretz.co.il/hasite/images/printed/P120204/a.0.1202.20.2.9.jpg
6. Chutzpah in Gaza:
www.thejewishweek.com/top/editletcontent.php3?artid=3273
7. You know how everyone whines that Israel is being insensitive when it
searches PLO "ambulances"? Well:
Red Crescent nurse caught aiding terror
JPost.com Staff The Jerusalem Post Feb. 12, 2004
Israel News : Jerusalem Post Internet Edition
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=1076559706716
Security forces have arrested a nurse with the Palestinian Red Crescent
organization on suspicion of helping terrorists hiding out in Yasser
Arafat's Ramallah Mukata headquarters to organize attacks against
Israelis.
The woman, arrested Wednesday, was identified as Sadah Said Ahmed
Abdullah, 27, from Ramallah, Israel Radio reported.
She is divorced, the mother of a child, and is a Jerusalem resident.
During her interrogation, she reportedly admitted helping a senior Fatah
Tanzim fugitive and known murderer, Khaled Jamal Shuwish, plan terrorist
attacks for the past few months.
Shuwish is known to be hiding at the Mukata.
Abdullah was Shuwish's go-between with Hizbullah contacts in Lebanon, who
were financing and planning attacks against Israeli targets, according to
Israel Radio.
She reportedly told interrogators that Shawaish was planning a suicide
bombing against Israelis in the near future.
Israeli security sources said that other Tanzim members were similarly
planning attacks, using Arafat's headquarters as their base of operations.
The sources said that the Tanzim is preparing terrorist cells with
Hizbullah and Iranian financing.
8. Cal Thomas: The Gaza Capitulation:
http://www.washtimes.com/commentary/20040214-112850-5661r.htm