Zionist Conspiracy

1.
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2006/09/the_new_antisemitism.html

September 28, 2006
The New Anti-Semitism
By Victor Davis Hanson

Hating Jews, on racial as well as religious grounds, is as old as the
Roman destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem. Later in Europe,
pogroms and the Holocaust were the natural devolution of that elemental
venom.

Anti-Semitism, after World War II, often avoided the burning crosses and
Nazi ranting. It often appeared as a more subtle animosity, fueled by envy
of successful Jews in the West. "The good people, the nice people" often
were the culprits, according to a character in the 1947 film "Gentleman's
Agreement," which dealt with the American aristocracy's social shunning of
Jews.

A recent third type of anti-Jewish odium is something different. It is a
strange mixture of violent hatred by radical Islamists and the more or
less indifference to it by Westerners.

Those who randomly shoot Jews for being Jews - whether at a Jewish center
in Seattle or at synagogues in Istanbul - are for the large part Muslim
zealots. Most in the West explain away the violence. They chalk it up to
anger over the endless tit-for-tat in the Middle East. Yet privately they
know that we do not see violent Jews shooting Muslims in the United States
or Europe.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad promises to wipe Israel "off the
map." He seems eager for the requisite nuclear weapons to finish off what
an Iranian mullah has called a "one-bomb state" - meaning Israel's
destruction would only require one nuclear weapon. Iran's theocracy
intends to turn the idea of a Jewish state on its head. Instead of Israel
being a safe haven for Jews in their historical birthplace, the Iranians
apparently find that concentration only too convenient for their own final
nuclear solution.

In response, here at home the Council on Foreign Relations rewards the
Iranian president with an invitation to speak to its membership. At the
podium of that hallowed chamber, Ahmadinejad, who questions whether the
Holocaust ever took place, basically dismissed a firsthand witness of
Dachau by asking whether he really could be that old.

The state-run, and thus government-authorized, newspapers of the Middle
East, slander Jews in barbaric fashion. "Mein Kampf" (translated, of
course, as "Jihadi") sells briskly in the region. Hamas and Hezbollah
militias on parade emulate the style of brownshirts. In response, much of
the Western public snoozes. They are far more worried over whether a
Danish cartoonist has caricatured Islam, or if the pope has been rude to
Muslims when quoting an obscure 600-year-old Byzantine dialogue.

In the last two decades, radical Islamic terrorists have bombed and
murdered thousands inside Europe and the United States. Their state
supporters in the Middle East have raked in billions in petro-windfall
profits from energy-hungry Western economies. For many in Europe and the
United States, supporting Israel - the Middle East's only stable democracy
- or even its allies in the West has become viewed as both dangerous and
costly.

In addition, Israel is no longer weak but proud and ready to defend
itself. So when its terrorist enemies like Hezbollah and Hamas brilliantly
married their own fascist creed with popular leftwing multiculturalism in
the West, there was an eerie union: yet another supposed third-world
victim of a Western oppressor thinking it could earn a pass for its
murderous agenda.

We're accustomed to associating hatred of Jews with the ridiculed
Neanderthal Right of those in sheets and jackboots. But this new venom, at
least in its Western form, is mostly a leftwing, and often an academic,
enterprise. It's also far more insidious, given the left's moral
pretensions and its influence in the prestigious media and universities.
We see the unfortunate results in frequent anti-Israeli demonstrations on
campuses that conflate Israel with Nazis, while the media have published
fraudulent pictures and slanted events in southern Lebanon.

The renewed hatred of Jews in the Middle East - and the indifference to it
in the West - is a sort of "post anti-Semitism." Islamic zealots supply
the old venomous hatred, while affluent and timid Westerners provide the
new necessary indifference - if punctuated by the occasional off-the-cuff
Amen in the manner of a Louis Farrakhan or Mel Gibson outburst.

The dangers of this post anti-Semitism is not just that Jews are shot in
Europe and the United States - or that a drunken celebrity or demagogue
mouths off. Instead, ever so insidiously, radical Islam's hatred of Jews
is becoming normalized.

The result is that the world's politicians and media are talking seriously
with those who not merely want back the West Bank, but rather want an end
to Israel altogether and everyone inside it.

Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover
Institution, Stanford University, and author, most recently, of "A War
Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian
War." You can reach him by e-mailing author@victorhanson.com.
(C) 2006 Tribune Media Services, Inc.

2.
http://www.jewishpress.com/page.do/19532/Henry_Siegman%2C_Pro%2DPalestinian_Propagandist.html
The Siegman Disease
Henry Siegman, Pro-Palestinian Propagandist
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
By: Gilead Ini
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Shortly after Israel launched its campaign to stop Hizbullah's rocket
attacks and rescue kidnapped Israeli soldiers in Lebanon, criticism rang
out from the usual sources. Some Arab leaders, journalists in the
reflexively anti-Israel portion of the British press, and American pundits
like Noam Chomsky and Pat Buchanan all lambasted the Jewish state. Of
course, those condemnations are to be expected.

But it may have come as a surprise to some when, even as Katyusha rockets
were falling on Israeli towns and cities, a former head of the American
Jewish Congress also leveled sharp criticism at Israel. In fact, Henry
Siegman's attacks on Israel are no less predictable than those coming from
the rest of the anti-Israel crowd.

Siegman was until recently a "Mideast expert" at the Council on Foreign
Relations. His "expertise" has often appeared in the Los Angeles Times,
International Herald Tribune, New York Review of Books, and other major
media outlets.

An examination of his body of work, however, reveals it to be little more
than thinly veiled propaganda promoting the Palestinian perspective on the
conflict with Israel.

Siegman's commentary echoes the most extreme themes of the Palestinian
narrative, with the writer heaping shrill criticism on Israel while
excusing Palestinian rejectionism . even when this requires repeatedly
ignoring, fabricating and misrepresenting facts and routinely
contradicting earlier assertions.

Errors, Errors Everywhere

Perhaps the greatest repudiation of Siegman's credibility as an "expert"
is his propensity for error.

A forgiving observer might excuse blunders in predicting events . for
example his reference, not long before Israel announced its intention to
withdraw from the Gaza Strip, to an Israeli "plan" to make sure "Gaza
remain[s] in Israeli hands"; or his insistence after Ariel Sharon
announced the Gaza disengagement plan that the prime minister "has
probably come around to the position that he must kill the idea"; or his
claim, only nine days before Hizbullah's July 12, 2006 cross-border
kidnapping raid . an attack undoubtedly spurred in part by the success of
a similar Hizbullah raid in 2000 . that Israel's release of hundreds of
Arab prisoners in exchange for the Israelis captured in 2000 "did not
cause Israel in the long run any harm."

The Middle East, after all, is a volatile region, and accurate predictions
are not always so easy.

But there is no such excuse for Siegman's all too common errors of fact.

Last June, for example, Siegman outrageously claimed that "since Israel's
disengagement from Gaza last year ... Palestinian civilians have been
killed by Israeli artillery and air strikes virtually on a daily basis."

Even according to figures published by the partisan Palestinian Red
Crescent Society (PRCS), on most days since the Israeli withdrawal no
Palestinians at all were killed . neither Palestinian civilians, nor
Palestinian combatants; not by Israeli air strikes or artillery and not by
Israeli gunfire; not even in "work accidents" or internecine Palestinian
fighting (all of which seem to be included in the PRCS figures). The
specific incidents described by Siegman (Palestinian civilians killed by
Israeli artillery or air strikes), then, were extremely infrequent.

A careful look at March, April, and May 2006, the three months immediately
prior to the publication of Siegman's column, is revealing. According to
Associated Press dispatches from those months, Palestinian civilians died
as a result of Israeli artillery or air strikes on just one day in March,
four days in April and two days in May. Yes, the inadvertent deaths of
civilians are regrettable. But no serious analyst could argue that seven
days out of 92 constitutes "virtually ... a daily basis."

The allegation of wanton Israeli killing of Palestinians was, however, the
message Siegman evidently sought to convey . whether the facts pertained
or not.

Again disregarding the facts, Siegman downplayed Palestinian violence
when, in September 2002, he criticized Israel for not responding
positively to "six weeks of Palestinian quiet" that had supposedly just
passed, and for appointing Effie Eitam, a pro-settlement politician, as
minister of national infrastructure during this so-called period of quiet.

But on the very day Eitam was appointed, Sept. 18, 2002, the charred body
of an Israeli citizen was found. A day earlier, Palestinians had shot him
in the head, set his body on fire, and left it in a neighborhood dump. Two
other Israelis were killed that day, one when Palestinians opened fire on
an Israeli car and one during a suicide bombing at a bus stop. A couple of
weeks earlier, an Israeli was killed when a 100 kg bomb was detonated
under an IDF tank and another was killed when a Palestinian gunman opened
fire from a crowded school at Israeli troops.

That same day, a Palestinian van carrying 1,350 pounds of explosives was
stopped in northern Israel before it could be detonated. Two weeks before
that, a soldier was shot dead by a Palestinian sniper. Ten days earlier, a
Palestinian terrorist murdered an Israeli woman and injured her husband.

In fact, one can search as far as two years earlier, to the onset of
Palestinian violence in September 2000, and not find even one month
without multiple, fatal Palestinian suicide bombings, shootings or other
attacks. So much for "six weeks of Palestinian quiet."

Siegman again whitewashed Palestinian violence and misled readers when he
wrote of "revelations by Israel's most senior intelligence and security
officials that the intifada of September 2000 was not planned by [Yasir]
Arafat, but a spontaneous eruption of Palestinian anger ...."

The assertion is beside the point. Even if Arafat did not directly plan
the violence, there is overwhelming consensus, ignored by Siegman, that
Arafat allowed, encouraged and even directed the continuation of the
violence.

It is also intellectually dishonest to cite a source that is persuasively
contradicted by many others . and never mention those others. Siegman
quotes Ami Ayalon, a former Israeli intelligence chief, who has said he
believed the intifada was "a spontaneous eruption." But he conceals from
readers the long list of high ranking officials who have indicated the
violence was indeed planned: Amos Gilad, former head of the research
division at Military Intelligence; Amos Malka, the IDF chief of
intelligence under Ehud Barak; former Israeli army spokesman Lt. Col.
Olivier Rafowicz; Mamdouh Nofal, a former advisor to Arafat; former
Palestinian communications minister Imad Faluji; and others.

(The list of errors goes on. For a more comprehensive look at Siegman's
distortions, see the article "Henry Siegman's Expertise: Bashing Israel at
Every Turn" at CAMERA's website, www.camera.org.)

Demonizing Israel

Siegman's frequent factual errors do not, alone, make him a propagandist.
But as the above examples make apparent, the distortions invariably tilt
in the direction of portraying Israel negatively and are routinely
accompanied by the harshest of anti-Israel rhetoric.

The language used by Siegman in discussing the Arab-Israeli conflict is
revealing.

Often, there is little difference between his rhetoric and that of the
most extreme anti-Israel activists.

Repeatedly, Siegman invokes language associated with apartheid South
Africa to describe the Jewish state. The country wants "enclaves
resembling Bantustans ... in which the Palestinians would be consigned,"
he once said.

It is "precisely South Africa's 'disengagement' that defined its racist
regime," he argued, adding that Israel "persists in following the South
African model ...."

Siegman has actually implied parallels between Israeli "evil" and Nazi
Germany. Israel's policies seem "too unjust, too evil, to be true,
particularly for a Jewish state that considers its very existence a living
reproach to the German people, and to the world, for the injustices and
suffering inflicted on the Jewish people," he stated.

On numerous occasions, Siegman even accused the country's leaders of
conduct compatible with Protocols of the Elders of Zion conspiracies:
Ariel Sharon and his aide "knew they had the administration and both
houses of Congress so completely in their pocket," he wrote in a 2004
column. Ever intent on promoting this canard of Israeli control over the
United States government, Siegman repeated the reference to Sharon having
the American government "in his pocket" in two other columns that year.
And in yet another column, he explained that this is made possible because
Sharon so successfully "manipulates Washington."

Again borrowing language from Israel's detractors, Siegman occasionally
describes Israel's security barrier, which is a metal fence along over 95
percent of its length, as a "wall." In Siegman's eyes, Israeli settlers
are characterized by "murderous rage." Israel's occupation inflicts
"unspeakable cruelty." The country's military operation in Gaza in
response to a Hamas kidnapping "targeted only the civilian population."
And the Orthodox Jewish community, both in the United States and Israel,
is ideologically in lockstep with Yitzhak Rabin's assassin.

Hypocrisy and Double Standards

Siegman seems to shift his demands of Israel as necessary to enable
continued criticism of the country. These relentless attacks on Israel,
meanwhile, stand in striking contrast to the gentle treatment accorded
Palestinians and their leaders.

In1997, Siegman called for a negotiated peace that would leave
Palestinians with the Gaza Strip and "most of the West Bank." Israel could
keep settlement blocks along the Green Line, and the "demilitarized"
Palestinian state would be "constrained in its sovereignty" so that
Israel's security needs would be met.

In late 2000, after Arafat rejected a peace offer at Camp David that
closely matched Siegman's proposals, and with Palestinian riots turning
deadly, Siegman then argued "there is no compelling reason why Israel
cannot unilaterally withdraw to the borders proposed by Ehud Barak ...
leaving Palestinians with more than 90 percent of the West Bank."

"Israel," he repeated a week later, "must withdraw its forces from the
West Bank and Gaza, as near as possible to the borders that Mr. Barak
offered to withdraw to at the Camp David meeting. The withdrawal should
include isolated Jewish settlements in the West Bank ..."

Siegman's opinions suddenly changed, though, when it seemed Israel might
actually make a unilateral move from the West Bank. While criticizing
Israel's unilateral withdrawal from Gaza, Siegman described Israel's
security fence . which lies on that roughly 10 percent of West Bank land
he had earlier agreed Israel should keep . as being built on "stolen"
Palestinian land.

"Palestinians will not settle for less than a state that is fully within
the pre-1967 borders," he emphatically and approvingly noted.

His self-contradiction hardly ends there. Speaking about Sharon's
coalition partners in 2003, Siegman questioned "how a government comprised
of religious and xenophobic nationalist elements can conduct ...
negotiation[s]."

He slammed "most Israelis" for accepting government coalition partners
that he claims "call for ... thinly disguised ethnic cleansing,"

He's even claimed that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Foreign Minister
Tzipi Livni's insistence that Hamas end terror and recognize Israel is
inappropriate since Olmert's and Livni's parents were founders of the
Irgun movement in British Mandate Palestine, which had killed civilians
during the tumultuous pre-1948 years.

But when it comes to Hamas, an organization whose xenophobia-driven
terrorism has targeted and killed hundreds of civilians in recent years,
and whose calls for ethnic cleansing and murder are not "thinly
disguised," or disguised at all, Siegman is hardly so concerned.

On the contrary, he lauded Hamas's "refusal to play by Israel's old
rules," while suggesting people should "not look at Hamas's rhetoric ...
[but] look at what it does." Providing an example of what Hamas does,
Siegman noted: "In spite of Hamas's refusal to change its theological
rejection of Israel, Ismail Haniyeh, prime minister in the Hamas led
government, ordered his ministers to seek practical cooperation with their
Israel counterparts."

(Although Siegman celebrated this supposed Hamas concession, he lamented
in the same article that "Israel's 'concessions,' such as the withdrawal
from Gaza and isolated West Bank settlements, are intended to serve narrow
Israeli interests.")

He defended the Palestinians after they elected Hamas, a murderous and
anti-Semitic terror group, to head the Palestinian Authority, arguing:
"Even hard-liners know that Hamas won the elections not because of their
uncompromising ideology but because they ran on a moderate platform of
clean government and better services."

(He contradicted himself later in the article, claiming it was Sharon's
"unilateralism" that "prepared the ground for [the] Hamas victory.)

By contrast, after Sharon won the Israeli elections in 2001, Siegman wrote
that although at one time people had "insisted [Sharon's views] ... do not
reflect the views and values of most Israelis," such a distinction
"becomes impossible to sustain" in light of Sharon's electoral victory.

And while constantly excoriaing Israel for not negotiating with or
offering concessions to the Palestinians, he excused the Palestinian
intransigence at Camp David by explaining that Arafat "tried to persuade
Clinton that this was not the right time for a negotiation process that
would entail Palestinian compromises ...."

(Siegman presumably feels it is always the right time for Israel to
compromise, even when the country is facing an onslaught of terrorism and
even after Palestinians elect a government committed to Israel's
destruction.)

Siegman's long list of factual errors, his intemperate anti-Israel
rhetoric, his indulgent if not sycophantic stance toward Hamas, and his
endless self-contradiction lead one to wonder why mainstream news
organizations have so frequently turned to this erstwhile Council on
Foreign Relations "expert."

Gilead Ini is a senior research analyst at the Committee for Accuracy in
Middle East Reporting (CAMERA), a research and membership organization
devoted to promoting accurate and balanced coverage of Israel and the
Middle East.

(Editor's Note: For more on Henry Siegman, see this week's Media Monitor
column, page 13.)

3. More on Israel's Judicial Tyranny
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1159193330663&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull

4. Wall St Journal on Yom Kippur:
September 29, 2006

HOUSES OF WORSHIP
A Sacred Sacrifice
By LUCETTE LAGNADO
September 29, 2006; Page W13

Some of my Jewish friends will approach Yom Kippur next week a bit as if
they were running in a marathon. Once a year, they gear up for the big
race: an all-day service at synagogue along with a fast that calls for no
food or water for more than 24 hours.

Even among the most secular of Jews, fasting on the Day of Atonement is
one religious tradition that has somehow managed to survive. It is as if
this fast were a bridge linking old-world religion with New Age devotion
to health and fitness: Even those who lack religious fervor will approach
the prospect of not eating or drinking once a year as a kind of extreme
work-out -- a treadmill of the soul.

But of course for many Jews fasting has a profound religious meaning. This
was certainly true in my own immigrant Orthodox home, where early on I was
made conscious of the sacred nature of fasting. And not simply on Yom
Kippur -- but on at least a half-dozen other occasions during the year.

Judaism is not an ascetic religion. On the contrary, "it celebrates the
senses," remarks Rabbi Gerald Skolnik of the Forest Hills Jewish Center, a
Conservative synagogue in Queens, N.Y. Fasting as an act of self-denial,
he notes, is "a relative rarity" in the Jewish calendar. Those fasts that
are mandated -- and Yom Kippur is the most important -- are "a legitimate
Jewish expression of atonement."

During the days leading up to Yom Kippur, a person is supposed to reach
out to friends or to family members that they may have offended the
previous year and ask for forgiveness. But the fast itself concerns a
person's relationship with God. "Denying basic human needs helps a person
to do a true accounting of their soul," explains Rabbi Rafael Konikov of
Chabad of Southampton Jewish Center in Long Island, N.Y.

Not everyone is required to fast: The sick are exempted, as are pregnant
women and young children. I remember that, as a child, I wanted to fast.
The ritual was a kind of status symbol, the passport to adulthood that I
and my young friends craved. Yom Kippur meant an extra prayer -- not to
God but to my family. May I please go without food and water for one more
hour? I would beg. I couldn't wait for the day when I'd be old enough to
fast.

I had a perfect role model: My Egyptian-born mother, who approached
fasting with a passion and abandon that I haven't seen before or since.
Even when there wasn't an official fast on the horizon, she would
sometimes make one up. That was not uncommon among Jews of the Middle
East, where faith was tinged with a sense of mysticism. Some great rabbis
the world over and even ordinary folks, fasted on certain weekdays,
believing it led to a greater state of holiness. One Jewish tradition has
it that you can change the outcome of a bad dream by fasting. The illness
of a loved one is another occasion: When I became grievously sick at 16,
my mother fasted regularly, as if God would listen more closely anytime
she made a plea on an empty stomach.

My mother taught me to regard every fast, even the ones that were not
biblically mandated, as sacred. The Fast of Tammuz. The Fast of
Lamentations. The Fast of Esther. The Fast of Tevet. Even the relatively
minor Fast of Gedalia, which comes one day after the celebration of the
Jewish new year.

My mother had a special passion for the Fast of the First Born. Held the
day before Passover, it recalls God's final plague against the Egyptians,
his decree that the Angel of Death go from house to house and slay all of
their first-born children. The fast, which is only observed by the
first-born in a family, is a way of expressing gratitude to God for saving
the Jewish children from this fate. "There's a little bit of 'There but
for the grace of God go I'" to the ritual, says Rabbi Skolnik.

Of course every fast must end at some point, and the ending is part of the
ritual and its meaning. Rabbi Marc Schneier of New York notes that "Yom
Kippur has become a social fast," attractive to people almost as much for
the lavish food served at its conclusion as for the actual atonement. But
the joyful party atmosphere is firmly grounded in faith, he says: "It is a
celebration of God's inscribing us in the Book of Life."

One or two hours before the end of Yom Kippur, my mother and I would sneak
away from synagogue and head home. She would stand in the kitchen
squeezing lemons into a large bowl and then adding spoonfuls of sugar and
fresh mint leaves. Her task completed, she placed the pitcher in the
refrigerator. Then she would take me by the hand and together we would
walk back to synagogue. I longed for a glass of the lemonade right then,
but she shook her head. Our traditional treat would be waiting for us when
the fast was over.

On this coming Yom Kippur Day, as I fast, I will try to approach it with
my mother's old passion. I'll picture that chilled glass of lemonade
waiting for me in the refrigerator, the intense rush and euphoria that
comes with finishing a fast and taking that first sip -- cold and tart,
delicious and rejuvenating -- marking the end of atonement, the return to
life, to celebration.

Ms. Lagnado, a Journal reporter, is the author of "The Man in the White
Sharkskin Suit," a memoir to be published in 2007 by Ecco/HarperCollins.

URL for this article:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB115950164398477775.html

5. Ivory SLime:
http://www.jewishsf.com/content/2-0-/module/displaystory/story_id/30449/format/html/displaystory.html

# posted by Steven Plaut : 4:21 AM

1. Baruch Kimmerling, a fourth rate anti-Zionist sociologist from the
Hebrew University, has a malicious Op-Ed smearing Bernard Lewis, who is a
first-rate world-class Middle East scholar:
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/766430.html

2. Tikkun Magazine's pro-LSD anti-Israel New Age Pseudo-Rabbi publisher,
Mikey Lerner, has a new cause for all caring and loving Jews interested in
peace and environmnetalism = it is to kill Alan Dershowitz.

To Kill an Alan Dershowitz
By Alan M. Dershowitz
FrontPageMagazine.com September 27, 2006

Last month I wrote an article called .Norman Finkelstein.s Obscenities,. a
response to Finkelstein.s latest screed, .Should Alan Dershowitz Target
Himself for Assassination?. As the title of the article suggests,
Finkelstein puts forward in his article what he believes to be a
justification for my assassination as a war criminal, based on my support
for Israel.

Nor was this the only obscenity in the article. Not by a long shot. As I
wrote in my article, Finkelstein piece was accompanied by a:

cartoon drawn by .Latuff., a frequent accomplice of Finkelstein. The
cartoon portrayed me as masturbating in rapturous joy while viewing images
of dead Lebanese civilians on a TV set labeled .Israel peep show,. with a
Jewish Star of David prominently featured.

I found out recently that Rabbi Michael Lerner, founder and editor of
Tikkun magazine, has been circulating the Finkelstein article from his
Tikkun e-mail account and under Tikkun letterhead. Lerner apparently
didn.t have the stomach to attach the cartoon, despite the fact that the
inspiration for the disgusting cartoon comes directly from what
Finkelstein writes in the article circulated by Rabbi Lerner, as I showed
in my previous article:

The cartoon aptly represents the content of Finkelstein.s piece, which
accuses me of being a .moral pervert. who .missed the climactic scene of
his little peep show.. He also claims quite absurdly that I .sanction mass
murder. and .the extermination of the Lebanese people.. (I.m surprised he
hasn.t accused me of kicking of puppy dogs, scowling at little children,
and parking in handicapped spaces.)

This is from a rabbi who modestly purports to devote himself .to peace,
justice, non-violence, generosity, caring, love and compassion.. This is
a rabbi who purports to observe the Jewish commandments against evil words
(.lashon harah.) and bearing false witness. This is a man who ardently
opposes Israel.s targeted assassination of Hamas leaders, but who
apparently has no qualms about the assassination of pro-Israel academics.
That.s a rather peculiar definition of .peace, justice, and non-violence.
Rabbi Lerner is employing.

This is not the first time that Lerner has served as a megaphone for
Finkelstein.s hate speech. Lerner published an article-length version of
one of Finkelstein.s screeds in Tikkun, complete with Finkelstein.s
hateful thesis: .Alongside Israel [American Jewish elites] are the main
fomenters of anti-Semitism in the world today. They need to be stopped..
(Finkelstein had previously called American Jews .parasites..) In the
same book that Lerner was promoting, Finkelstein invoked some of the most
crass anti-Semitic caricatures found in contemporary America, .Should
people like Abraham Foxman, Edgar Bronfman, and Rabbi Israel Singer [who
are prominent Jewish leaders] get a free ride because they resemble
stereotypes straight out of Der Sturmer?. Can you imagine a professor
issuing a similar description of a woman or a Muslim, or describing the
Pope according to an anti-Catholic stereotype? Can you imagine Tikkun
publishing an author who falsely described Rabbi Lerner as resembling a
stereotype .straight out of Der Sturmer.?

Lerner tried to weasel out of what he had done by saying the he forwarded
the Finkelstein article because I had called him .an anti-Semitic rabbi.
in one of my books. (What I actually wrote is that .even a rabbi can
support anti-Semitic actions. . as Lerner did when he supported divestment
from Israel and only Israel . which is quite different from calling him
.an anti-Semitic rabbi,. but never mind.) As a defense lawyer, I would
recommend to Lerner that he would be better situated to defend against
those charges if he didn.t so eagerly associate with anti-Semites and
publish Jew-hating rants.

Through his nefarious association with Norman Finkelstein, who is a
genuine Jew-hater, Michael Lerner has forever disqualified himself from
being taken seriously on matters of Jewish concern, the Jewish community,
or Israel.

Alan Dershowitz is a professor of law at Harvard. His most recent book is
Preemption: A Knife that Cuts Both Ways (Norton, 2006).

3. Auto-defeat:
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1159193323181&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull

4. NK stands for Neo-Kapos:
http://www.nkusa.org/activities/demonstrations/2006Sept21.cfm

5. A Worm in the Big Apple

By BRIAN C. ANDERSON
September 22, 2006; Page W13

Hear the phrase "human-rights violator" and one usually thinks of Slobodan
Milosevic or some other thuggish despot. In New York City these days,
though, the phrase might apply to an advertising executive whose firm
hasn't hired enough African-American managers or to the makers of an
"insensitive" video game.

For this astonishing development, blame New York's Commission on Human
Rights, an agency that investigates and prosecutes violations of the
city's very liberal civil-rights laws. Such laws target not only racial
and religious discrimination but bias against women, the elderly, the
disabled, noncitizens, gays, ex-cons, the transgendered, victims of
domestic violence and other protected classes. And of course the
commission interprets "discrimination" in the most extraordinary ways.

The half-century-old commission began with a push from New York mayor
Robert Wagner Jr., who, at a time of little federal or state civil-rights
enforcement, believed that a permanent city agency was needed to fight
local racial and religious bigotry. For some years -- especially after
gaining extensive new powers during the mid-1960s -- it energetically
monitored discrimination in employment, public accommodations and housing.
By the late '90s, it had nearly faded away. The vast majority of the
several hundred or so cases that it heard each year had wound up dismissed
either because they were groundless or because the plaintiff didn't show
after filing a complaint. Most of the rest were settled for derisory sums.

But shortly after taking office in 2002, Mayor Michael Bloomberg boosted
the commission's investigative and legal staff to 28 from 11 and tasked
former city prosecutor Patricia Gatling with transforming the agency into
a muscular law-enforcement office. Under Ms. Gatling, the commission has
dramatically increased the percentage of cases in which it finds probable
cause for prosecution and hiked both the number of cases settled and the
average cash settlement. Each city borough now boasts a commission office
staffed with -- as the agency's 2005 annual report has it -- "a dedicated
team of Human Rights Specialists." Ready to serve your every human-rights
need!

It's easier to find discrimination if you've got an expansive notion of
it, of course, and the current commission has expanded its definition to
the point of absurdity. Ask New York's advertising firms. In early
September, the commission trumpeted that it had reached agreements with
several top agencies, forcing them to recruit and promote more blacks. The
companies, seeking to avoid fines of up to $250,000 and litigation, will
set numerical goals -- quotas -- for increasing black representation,
establish "diversity boards" and submit to three years of monitoring.

Naturally, the commission offers zero evidence that racism is to blame for
minority "under-representation" in advertising firms. An advertising
executive quoted in the New York Times gives a far more plausible
explanation: "Minorities are targeted broadly by everyone: Wall Street,
Fortune 100 companies. Your top minority students have lots of
opportunities outside advertising." The notion that New York advertisers
are bigots who won't voluntarily hire and advance qualified blacks is
preposterous in this day and age. It's the commission's retrograde
racial-preference mandate that's truly racist, since it likely will
require the ad firms to hire certain job candidates -- and reject others
-- simply because of their skin color.

The threat of a commission investigation a while back was sufficient to
get Take-Two Interactive Software, makers of the video game Grand Theft
Auto, to promise to remove an instruction -- "Kill the Haitians" -- from
one version of the game. "I believe that this New York City-based company
has gained a greater appreciation for the diversity which makes this city
great," Mr. Bloomberg announced. You don't have to be a fan of Grand Theft
Auto to find in such intimidation less protection of a human right than
violation of the First Amendment.

The Commission on Human Rights doesn't just do law enforcement. It also
seeks to educate the public by issuing ginned-up reports. A recent one was
especially implausible. One remarkable thing about New York after 9/11 is
how tolerant the city has been of its own Muslim community after fanatics,
acting in Islam's name, destroyed the World Trade Center and killed
thousands of innocent people. Read "Discrimination Against Muslims, Arabs,
and South Asians in New York City Since 9/11," however, and you'd almost
think the real victims of 9/11 are Gotham's Muslims, 69% of whom, the
report reveals gravely, "believed they were the victim of one or more
incidents of discrimination or bias related harassment" in the years since
the attack. What's needed to end this injustice? You guessed it: lots more
government activity, including the hiring of more Muslims for
"public-service positions."

There are human-rights commissions in other cities -- like San Francisco
and Seattle -- but New York's, under Mayor Bloomberg, has taken its
mandate into new reaches of nanny-state bullying. What is more, the
commission is unneeded. All sorts of antidiscrimination mandates are
embedded within government statutes, programs and agencies -- think only
of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission -- and the private tort bar
stands ready to punish true instances of harm.

As it is, New York's Commission on Human Rights itself does harm: forcing
private firms into quota programs, threatening free speech and issuing
nonsensical surveys that purport to find racism and bigotry where none
exists. By doing so, the commission damages the harmonious "One City" it
claims to desire and, just as important, trivializes the idea of human
rights.

Mr. Anderson is senior editor of City Journal and author of "South Park
Conservatives."

6. Olmert's Wonderland:
http://israelnn.com/article.php3?id=6569

7. Idea for Court reform that should be tried in Israel:
September 27, 2006

The Threat to Judicial Independence

By SANDRA DAY O'CONNOR
September 27, 2006; Page A18

In November, South Dakotans will vote on a state constitutional amendment
being advocated by a national group called "JAIL 4 Judges." If the
amendment passes, it would eliminate judicial immunity, and enable a
special grand jury to censure judges for their official legal
determinations. Although the amendment's supporters claim they seek a
"judicial accountability initiative law" (JAIL), they aspire to something
far more sinister -- judicial intimidation. Indeed, the national Web site
of JAIL 4 Judges boasts with striking candor that the organization "has
that intimidation factor flowing through the judicial system."

It is tempting to dismiss this proposed amendment as merely an isolated
bout of anti-judge angst. But while the JAIL 4 Judges initiative is
unusually venomous, it is far from alone in expressing skepticism of the
judiciary. In addition to South Dakota, this election cycle has witnessed
efforts in at least three other states that are designed to rein in judges
who have supposedly "run amok."

Not to be completely outdone, Congress also has engaged in recent efforts
to police the judiciary. Seeking to constrain the legal sources that are
available to judges, some members of Congress have advocated measures that
would forbid judges from citing foreign law when they are interpreting the
Constitution. In addition, bills have been introduced in both houses of
Congress supporting the creation of an inspector general to investigate
and monitor the federal bench. Finally, the House of Representatives
passed legislation over the summer that would prohibit the Supreme Court
from considering whether the Pledge of Allegiance's inclusion of the words
"under God" violates the First Amendment.

# posted by Steven Plaut : 2:49 AM

1. Shana Tova!

2. Why did Israel lose the last war? Because of thinking like this:
Deputy-General Guy of the Givati Brigades currently patrolling southern
Lebanon said Friday morning that even if Hizbullah leader Sheik Hassan
Nasrallah attends the Hizbullah victory rally later that day, the IDF will
not attempt to assassinate him.

3. The Judicial Left suffers yet another defeat.

Fifteen year old Jewish girl, victim of Israeli judicial persecution for
expressing her views, at last released from prison:
http://israelnn.com/news.php3?id=112321

4. WSJ Editorial:
September 19, 2006

Benedict the Brave
September 19, 2006; Page A20

It's a familiar spectacle: furious demands for an apology, threats, riots,
violence. Anything can trigger so-called Muslim fury: a novel by a
British-Indian writer, newspaper cartoons in a small Nordic country or,
this past week, a talk on theology by the head of the Roman Catholic
Church.

In a lecture on "Faith and Reason" at the University of Regensburg in
Germany, Benedict XVI cited one of the last emperors of Byzantium, Manuel
II Paleologus. Stressing the 14th-century emperor's "startling
brusqueness," the pope quoted him as saying: "Show me just what Mohammed
brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and
inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he
preached."

Taken alone, these are strong words. However, the pope didn't endorse the
comment that he twice emphasized was not his own. No matter. As with
Salman Rushdie's "Satanic Verses," which millions of outraged Muslims
didn't bother to read (including Ayatollah Khomeini, who put the bounty on
the novelist's life), what Benedict XVI meant or even said isn't the
issue. Once again, many Muslim leaders are inciting their faithful against
perceived slights and trying to proscribe how free societies discuss one
of the world's major religions.

Several Iraqi terrorist groups called for attacks on the Vatican. A cleric
linked to Somalia's ruling Islamist movement urged Muslims to "hunt down"
and kill the pope. In an apparently linked attack Sunday in Mogadishu, a
nun was gunned down in a children's hospital. Pakistan's parliament
unanimously adopted a resolution condemning the pontiff and demanding an
apology.

Under pressure and no doubt to stop any further violence, the pope on
Sunday did so. "I am deeply sorry for the reactions in some countries to a
few passages of my address . . . which were considered offensive to the
sensibility of Muslims," he told pilgrims at his Castelgandolfo summer
residence. The quote doesn't "in any way express my personal thought. I
hope this serves to appease hearts."

It was a gracious gesture on the pope's part, especially because his
original argument deserves to be heard, not least by Muslims. The
offending quotation was a small part in a chain of argument that led to
his main thesis about the close relationship between reason and belief.
Without the right balance between the two, the pontiff said, mankind is
condemned to the "pathologies and life-threatening diseases associated
with religion and reason" -- in short, political and religious fanaticism.

In Christianity, God is inseparable from reason. "In the beginning was the
Word," the pope quotes from the Gospel according to John. "God acts with
logos. Logos means both reason and word," he explained. "The inner
rapprochement between Biblical faith and Greek philosophical inquiry was
an event of decisive importance not only from the standpoint of history of
religions, but also from that of world history. . . . This convergence,
with the subsequent addition of the Roman heritage, created Europe."

The question raised by the pope is whether this convergence has taken
place in Islam as well. He quotes the Lebanese Catholic theologist
Theodore Khoury, who said that "for Muslim teaching, God is absolutely
transcendent, his will is not bound up with any of our categories." If
this is true, can there be dialogue at all between Islam and the West? For
the pope, the precondition for any meaningful interfaith discussions is a
religion tempered by reason: "It is to this great logos, to this breadth
of reason, that we invite our partners in the dialogue of cultures," he
concluded.

This is not an invitation to the usual feel-good interfaith round-tables.
It is a request for dialogue with one condition -- that everyone at the
table reject the irrationality of religiously motivated violence. The pope
isn't condemning Islam; he is inviting it to join rather than reject the
modern world.

By their reaction to the pope's speech, some Muslim leaders showed again
that Islam has a problem with modernity that is going to have to be solved
by a debate within Islam. The day Muslims condemn Islamic terror with the
same vehemence they condemn those who criticize Islam, an attempt at
dialogue -- and at improving relations between the Western and Islamic
worlds -- can begin.

URL for this article:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB115862615497066989.html

5. Just in time for the Days of Awe - Judgment Day Arrives:
Olmert's popularity plunges; Netanyahu back in the lead
By AP AND JPOST STAFF
Polls released on Thursday morning showed that public support for Prime
Minister Ehud Olmert has plunged since the war in Lebanon was drawing to
an end.

One poll conducted by Dahaf and published in Yediot Ahronot found that
only 7% said that the prime minister was the most worthy figure to head
the government.

Likud leader Binyamin Netanyahu lead the pack, with a 27% approval rating,
followed by Avigdor Liberman with 15%, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni who
received 14%, Vice Premier Shimon Peres 12%, Transportation Minister Shaul
Mofaz 5% and former prime minister Ehud Barak with only 3% of the vote.
Closing the list is Defense Minister Amir Peretz, who until not long ago
had aspirations to become premier, but now has to settle for only a 1%
approval rating.

The Dahaf poll of 499 people had margin of error of 4.5%.

68 percent of those interviewed were unhappy with Olmert's performance,
compared to 40 percent in a poll on August 11 - days before a cease-fire
was declared.

The poll also found that if an election were held today, Netanyahu's Likud
party would win 24 of 120 parliament seats, compared to just 16 for
Kadima, which currently holds 29 seats.

# posted by Steven Plaut : 6:13 AM

1. Remember the Poster Girl of the Israeli Left? Tali Fahima, arrested
for assisting her Paletsinian terrorist "boyfriend" plan some terror attacks?
Here is the original story:
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/article.php3?id=4042

Well, since then Tali has become the heroine of Israel's Leftists for the
Destruction of Israel. She has also been rotting in prison.

And she just got turned down for parole.
Take a look here:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20060913/wl_mideast_afp/mideastconflictisrael_060913183645
The parole committee refused to release Tali Fahima, who has already
served two thirds of her sentence, on grounds she had been "insolent"
towards prison wardens, a source in the judiciary said.

She was arrested in May 2004 at a checkpoint near the northern West
Bank city of Jenin after having spent time with Zakaria Zubeidi, the local
head of the radical Al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades and one of Israel's most
wanted men.

Fahima was charged with a variety of offences and placed in administrative
detention that September, becoming the first Israeli Jew to be detained on
allegations of collaboration with Palestinian terrorists.

She was jailed in December for collaborating with Palestinian militants,
under a plea bargain, which meant she dodged the most serious charges
levelled against her.

So let us get this straight. Nadia Matar was persecuted and prosecuted
although eventually got the charges dismissed for supposedly "insulting a
public official". But Tali the Terrorhoid insults her prison wardens and
gets a tap on the wrist, with her plea bargain standing firmly in place?

Here is an idea - why not write the Attorney General and suggest that her
plea bargain be revoked and overturned and that instead she be assigned to
an official firing squad?

2. http://www.allheadlinenews.com/articles/7004843361
Syria Says US Behind Attack On Own Embassy

September 13, 2006 6:03 a.m. EST

Ryan R. Jones - All Headline News Middle East Correspondent
Jerusalem, Israel (AHN) - Senior Syrian government official have accused
the US of being behind Tuesday's assault on its own embassy in downtown
Damascus.

A Baath party official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, told
WorldNetDaily, "We in the government are 100 percent sure America was
behind this attack, which is not the same as other attacks by Islamic
groups."

He explained, "Only the Americans can succeed in carrying out an attack
just 200 meters from President [Bashar] Assad's residence in the most
heavily guarded section of Syria."

The official charged that Washington had orchestrated the attack to "prove
Syria is filled with terrorists and to put us in a weak position" in order
to extract political concessions. Following the attack, Bush
administration officials said they hoped the incident had convinced
Damascus of the dangers of Islamic terror and the need to cooperate with
the West against the phenomenon.

3. Great article:
http://www.hirhome.com/israel/leaders3.htm

4. Cage them:
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=24414

5. Moonbette of the year:
http://www.jewishindy.com/print.php?sid=5999

6. A True Loss:
Report: Italian writer Oriana Fallaci has died
Journalist know for her abrasive interviews, provocative stances as 76
The Associated Press

Updated: 3:07 a.m. ET Sept. 15, 2006
ROME - Veteran journalist and writer Oriana Fallaci, a former war
correspondent best known for her abrasive interviews and provocative
stances, has died, Italian news reports said Friday. She was 76.

Fallaci, who had been diagnosed with cancer years ago, died in a Florence
hospital, the Italian agencies ANSA and Apcom said. The reports said that
she had been hospitalized for days.

Fallaci, a former Resistance fighter and war corespondent who was hardly
seen in public, had lived in New York for years.

During her journalistic career she became known for uncompromising
interviews with such world leaders as former U.S. Secretary of State Henry
Kissinger and the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.

Her recent publications . including the best-selling book .The Rage and
The Pride,. which came out weeks after the Sept. 11, 2001 . drew
accusations of inciting hatred against Muslims.

2006 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be
published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14845775/

7. Indictment Against Terrorist in Be.er Sheva Court
15:21 Sep 14, '06 / 21 Elul 5766

(IsraelNN.com) The Be.er Sheva District Court on Thursday handed down an
indictment against Majed Kambo, suspected of belonging to the Popular
Resistance Front terror organization, planning terror attacks, and
engaging in clashes with soldiers and civilians.

He was not on the faculty of Ben Gurion University in political science.

8. The Chamishite Conspiracy Nut of Brigham Young U has been suspended:
http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2006/09/345818.shtml

9. Will you be going to see this?
http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2006/09/345739.shtml

# posted by Steven Plaut : 2:35 AM

Subject: Your Cluenessness Quotient

Are you a Clueless Defeatist?

Take the Quiz and Grade Yourself!! Compute your Cluelessness
Quotient!

prepared by Steven Plaut

There is some confusion these days over who exactly is *really* in favor
of peace, who is still clueless, who is a defeatist, and who has failed to
learn anything at all about the Middle East conflict over the past 20 years.

In order to assist in making sense of things and separating the
sensible folks from the truly God-awful foolish, we have constructed a
little self-quiz for you to test your own political orientation.

Start with a grade of zero. Then for each question, add a point if you
agree with the statement, but do not add one if you disagree.

All set? Here goes.

1. I think it is more important that Palestinians driving about not be
inconvenienced at checkpoints than it is for Palestinian terrorists to be
apprehended.

Agree - Add 1 to score Disagree - Add 0 to score

2. I think that Israeli military units should risk the lives of their
men in battle rather than obliterate with artillery buildings or villages
from which katyusha rockets are fired into Israel.

Agree - Add 1 to score Disagree - Add 0 to score

3. I think the proper Israeli response to al-Qassam rockets being fired
into Sderot in the Negev is to conduct talks with the Hamas.

Agree - Add 1 to score Disagree � Add 0 to score

4. I think that conducting talks with the Hezbollah and the Hamas
serves Israel's national interest, even if the talks do not produce
agreements. It lowers tensions and is helpful psychologically.

Agree - Add 1 to score Disagree � Add 0 to score

5. I think Israel should just defuse the conflict with the Hezbollah by
turning over to Lebanon the Shabaa Farm.

Agree - Add 1 to score Disagree � Add 0 to score

6. I prefer to get Israel's captive soldiers released by exchanging
them for terrorists Israel is holding in its prisons rather than through
armed conflict.

Agree - Add 1 to score Disagree � Add 0 to score

7. Palestinian terrorism is caused by the socioeconomic problems of the
Palestinian civilian population.

Agree - Add 1 to score Disagree � Add 0 to score

8. There are no military solutions to the problem of terrorism.

Agree - Add 1 to score Disagree � Add 0 to score

9. Because the Hamas won the Palestinian election, the Hamas is now the
legitimate representation of the Palestinians and Israel must conduct talks
with it.

Agree - Add 1 to score Disagree � Add 0 to score

10. Israel should neutralize Syria as a belligerent by returning the Golan
Heights to it.

Agree - Add 1 to score Disagree � Add 0 to score

11. Israel should not use cluster bombs or any other weapon against the
Hezbollah if they can cause civilian injuries.

Agree - Add 1 to score Disagree � Add 0 to score

12. Targeted assassinations by Israel simply enrage the Arabs and cause
terrorism to increase.

Agree - Add 1 to score Disagree � Add 0 to score

13. Israeli Arab Knesset Members are simply patriots interested in
Israel adopting a more flexible policy position.

Agree - Add 1 to score Disagree � Add 0 to score

14. Capital punishment does not deter terrorism or violent crime.

Agree - Add 1 to score Disagree � Add 0 to score

15. *Betselem* and Human Rights Watch are neutral and objective watchdogs
who care about human rights for all.

Agree - Add 1 to score Disagree � Add 0 to
score

16. All disparities in income between demographic or ethnic groups in
Israel (and in general) are because of discrimination.

Agree - Add 1 to score Disagree � Add 0 to
score

17. Reconstructionism is a *bona fide* branch of Judaism.

Agree - Add 1 to score Disagree � Add 0 to
score

18. Israel needs a strong Histadrut (trade union federation) to keep the
economy healthy.

Agree - Add 1 to score Disagree � Add 0 to
score

19. "Judicial Activism" is the way to make Israel more democratic and
tolerant.

Agree - Add 1 to score Disagree � Add 0 to
score

20. Settlers are evil people who torment and assault Palestinians.

Agree - Add 1 to score Disagree � Add 0 to score

****

Ok, now add up your score. Here are the results:

a. If you scored zero, then you are a reactionary unprogressive neocon and
possibly even a Zionist. Welcome to our club! No admission dues charged.

b. If you scored 1-4, there is yet hope for you and you may yet achieve
sufficient enlightenment to join the club in section "a" above.

c. If you scored 5-9, you may have spent the past few years on some other
planet and cut off from news sources and from the terrestrial reality. We
are hoping you will yet recover.

d. If you scored 10-14, it may be due to the fact that you have been
reading The Nation, Haaretz and Tikkun while doing much more than taking one
toke over the line.

e. A score of 15-19, then you must be a member of al-Qaeda or at least a
serious potential recruit.

f. A perfect score of 20. You must be a faculty member in one of the
departments of the humanities or the soft social sciences at Tel Aviv
University.

2. Ivy League Toxins:
http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=16997

3. With the Conservative Synagogue movement about to go bonkers on gay
"marriage", worth reading this:
http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=15431

4. Pork in the Galilee
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1157913624169&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull

5. Resuscitating the Right:
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1157913624780&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull

6. Dying for Spin:
http://haaretz.com/hasen/spages/762448.html

7. Campus War:
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=24351

8. The Left joins the Jihad:
http://www.spectator.org/dsp_article.asp?art_id=10320

9. Ottelenghi on the war:
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=MjFjNzM2NWFmZDA5NjU4YjA2YTJhOGFkMTZjYThkNjU

10. Beware the Chamishite Conspiracy Nuts:
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=ZWFkZjBhZThjMjQxY2RlN2EwZGYxNGU4N2YzMTlkZjU=

# posted by Steven Plaut : 5:12 AM

1. Syrian Regime fights Syrian Regime Terror

So let us see if we have this straight. The Syrian Baath regime fights
and prevents a terror attack on the US Embassy in Syriaa that was launched
by terrorists from the Syrian Baath regime, and now of course expects
perqs from the US.

And who was on the spot to watch the whole thing? Meeting face to face
with Asad just as the terror attack on the Embassy was going down?
Why, none other than Knesset Member Azmi Bishara, head of the fascist
BALAD party of Arab jihadniki. Bishara, who has a long record of calling
for Israel's annihilation and endorsing terror attacks, was in Syria once
again illegally.

Yes, this is the same Bishara that the leftist Israeli Attorney General
has repeatedly decline dto prosecute for treason.

2. Please open the following web page and look at the heading at the top
of the page:

http://www.normanfinkelstein.com/article.php?pg=11&ar=510

Yes, that is right. Norman Finkelstein, the mentor of Ben Gurion
University lecturer Neve Gordon, is claiming that photos of Jews
murdered at Auschwitz were in fact forgeries by Jews!!!

Neve Gordon compared Finkelstein ethically to the Prophets from the Bible!

3. Important piece - see original URL for photos:
http://frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=24377
The ISM-Terror Connection
By Lee Kaplan and StoptheISM.com
FrontPageMagazine.com September 13, 2006

As a front group for Palestinian terrorists, the International Solidarity
Movement (ISM) sends young people from all over the world to the training
fields of the West Bank and Gaza to learn from terrorists and to aid them
logistically. Stop the ISM has now obtained photographs of ISM leaders and
organizers holding AK-47 assault rifles. The images show some of the ISM
women disguised as Jews living in the West Bank and in the company of an
Al Aksa Martyrs Brigade terrorist.

One of our volunteers in the United Kingdom for Stop the ISM managed to
infiltrate the ISM late last June in the Holy Land where the ISM operates
in direct support of terrorists. Our volunteer (who prefers to remain
anonymous to avoid retaliatory attacks) has had prior experience going
undercover for the police in the UK. The photos and intelligence he
brought back are proving invaluable to intelligence agencies watching the
ISM and have been in official hands for over a month prior to this
publication.

Unfortunately, neither U.S. Homeland Security nor the Israeli security
agencies have to date regarded the ISM as a serious threat. Some of these
ISM people in these photos managed to escape; nevertheless, arrests have
been made, and more are forthcoming.

In April 2003, Israel's Ministry of Foreign Affairs reported that "ISM
members take an active part in illegal and violent actions against IDF
soldiers. At times, their activity in Judea, Samaria and the Gaza Strip is
under the auspices of Palestinian terrorist organizations." The ISM always
tries to maintain the veneer of a .peace group.; however, ISM founders
Adam Shapiro and his wife, Huwaida Arraf, and Norcal ISM.s leader Paul
LaRudee, a man who Stop the ISM recently succeeded in getting deported
from Israel as a security threat, began revealing their true colors
recently by going to Lebanon to act as .human shields. for the Hezbollah.

Up to now, the ISM has been permitted to use our colleges and universities
to find recruits to send to the Middle East to interfere with Israeli
soldiers and border police. For example, every Friday, the ISM organizes
riots in the West Bank. ISM members openly boast about having been
arrested for vandalizing and destroying Israeli security fences and
equipment. In March 2003, fugitive Islamic Jihad terrorist Shadi Sukiya
was arrested in a house the ISM rented in Jenin. Two suicide bombers from
the UK met with the ISM in Gaza before blowing up Mike.s Place, a bar in
Tel Aviv, killing three people and wounding more than fifty in the
process.

Here at home, ISM appears to blatantly violate 18 USC Code 2339a, a
statute banning going overseas to aid terrorist groups. The government has
also failed to enforce felony passport laws that are continually being
violated by ISM activists. This allows the ISM to function across
international boundaries. Rico Statutes in the US are routinely violated
too through a campus network. Emiliano, an American ISM activist in these
photos, was sent to the West Bank with money given to him by New York ISM
as a .grant.. That means a conspiratorial subversive group is paying to
send subversives to riot in an allied country in this War on Terror. When
I called the San Francisco office of the FBI three times to alert them
about information in this article, I was disconnected twice and the third
time given a voice recorder for the duty agent. Nobody called back.

Our Stop the ISM volunteer arrived at Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv two
months ago where he was immediately recruited by an ISM activist named
Emiliano, who was there from the United States. A young man like our
volunteer, Emiliano approached our man on arrival at the airport and asked
where he was going. When our volunteer replied, .Jerusalem,. Emiliano
joined him on a bus and struck up a conversation with him, recommending a
youth hostel in the Israeli capital near the Damascus Gate. Destination:
The Faisal Youth Hostel in East Jerusalem.

ISM activist Joseph Smith, alias Joseph Carr, has called the Faisal Youth
Hostel .ISM headquarters. in Jerusalem. Carr was involved in the death of
Rachel Corrie. Smith/Carr tours US colleges to drum up new ISM recruits.
Two of his acolytes with the ISM from St. Louis, Missouri -- Magan Wiles
and Jennifer Presson -- are also under scrutiny by the Israeli security
services.

Wiles and Presson were both recruited in a Social Justice Studies class by
St. Louis University professor Mark Chmiel. Chmiel encourages his students
as part of his courses to conduct what he calls .insertions. to aid
Palestinian irredentists. (He also has a previous arrest record.)

Magan Wiles Joseph Smith a.k.a. Joe Carr Mark Chmiel

The FBI knowingly fails to act in the United States when the ISM breaks US
anti-terrorism laws by fundraising for organizations linked to terrorism
and even commits passport violations by teaching its members to create
false identities to elude the Israeli border control. Many ISM activists
deported from Israel have simply changed their identity to get back into
the country illegally and to try to wreak havoc. Yearly conferences are
held on American campuses to recruit and train new ISM members. ISM
recruits even within Israel.s borders.

Changing identities and countries of origin on passports are normal
procedures for the most hardcore ISM .activists.. This is something taught
at training sessions even at American universities despite US passport
laws making such actions a felony, such as 18 USC 1542. The Diplomatic
Security Service in the U.S., responsible for enforcing this law, has done
nothing about it.

The Faisal Youth Hostel, meanwhile, is managed by the main lead trainer
for many ISM .volunteers,. Hisham Jam Joun, a .former. PFLP terrorist
wounded while fighting Israelis in Lebanon over a decade ago. While
Israel.s Interior Ministry is responsible for closing down such a place,
including another youth hostel next door frequented by the ISM called the
Hebron Youth Hostel, it has taken no action against this hostel.

Once he arrived at the Faisal Youth Hostel, our volunteer was greeted and
brought upstairs immediately to meet some friendly faces -- leaders of the
ISM in the West Bank. These people included Gabi and Dave, both from
Ireland. Gabi is Swedish with an Irish passport and her husband Dave is an
Irish national. ISM activists use Irish passports frequently to enter
Israel, sometimes under assumed names. Patrick O.Connor, an Irishman and
an ISM-New York leader and organizer, has also used a U.S. passport with
the name Patrick Connors. Brian Malovany, an acolyte of Paul LaRudee.s, is
a US citizen and ISM trainer who uses an Irish passport obtained by using
his grandmother.s Irish ancestry.

Also properly introduced to our infiltrator were Camille, a Danish
volunteer, and Alan, from Scotland. All were affiliated with the ISM and
have passed back and forth from the West Bank to Israel. Miliano made
clear he is an American of Mexican heritage. Two other Americans joined
this entourage. One was an African-American named Jonathon M. K. Amayo
from the Los Angeles area in California and his girlfriend from Los
Angeles. Gabi was clearly in charge of the group our infiltrator attended.
Alan is from Scotland and entered Israel through Jordan, a tactic the ISM
is using more frequently since border checks used at Ben Gurion airport in
Tel Aviv tend to be strict. Only recently did the Israeli border control
begin noting in computers if someone had already been turned away
elsewhere.

ISMers relaxing in a Jerusalem bar. The individual (far left) with his
face cut off was from Italy. To the right is Emiliano from the U.S. and
then (in the middle) an unknown ISM activist from Sweden. All boasted of
taking part in weekly riots in Bi.lin in the West Bank -- orchestrated in
the mosques every Friday by ISM anarchist activists and their Palestinian
handlers. Emiliano traveled to the West Bank on a .grant. from ISM-New
York.

On his second day at the Faisal Youth Hostel, our infiltrator was invited
to accompany the ISM members to the Jericho Prison in the West Bank. The
Jericho Prison was involved in a recent military incursion conducted by
the Israeli army to arrest the murderers of Israel.s tourism minister,
Rab.aam Zevi, who was murdered by members of the PFLP.

From left to right, Alan, the ISMer from Scotland (in baseball cap), an
unknown Arab man, Camille, the ISMer from Denmark, David, an ISM leader
from Ireland and ISM pack leader, Gabi, a Swede who resides in Cork,
Ireland. The women are disguised as Orthodox Jewish women, even though
neither are Jewish. Later joined by Emiliano, they encouraged our
infiltrator to join the ISM at the Faisal Youth Hostel. Behind Alan
wrapped in white cloth is an arms cache containing deadly Ak-47 assault
rifles.

Israel had an agreement allowing the Palestinian Authority to imprison the
killers. However, with the Hamas election win, the PA administration made
it clear it would not keep the killers jailed. Israeli troops in a combat
operation took the killers into custody for incarceration in Israel. A
special side note here is the fact that Neta Golan, one of the founders of
the ISM, actually went to the battle scene and interfered with the Israeli
soldiers. Golan, an Israeli anarchist, was arrested for approximately the
20th time by Israeli security forces on that occasion, yet she has never
been prosecuted or jailed long-term. She resides most of the time in
Ramallah among PLO terrorists. This is just another example of the
incompetence of Israel.s Interior Ministry in protecting the soldiers,
border policemen and ultimately the civilian population of Israel.

According to our volunteer.s report, he was greeted warmly at the prison
entrance by a guard and some other Arabs who took him and his ISM pals on
a tour of the prison.

In the middle is Stop the ISM.s volunteer whose face is hidden for
security reasons. To his left is a PA policeman or guard at the prison. To
the right is a man who has identified himself as a member of the al Aksa
Martyrs Brigade. Since a known terrorist is giving tours of a Palestinian
government .prison. in the West Bank, the link between the PA and
terrorists become obvious.

Our volunteer was escorted around the prison after by a man who stated he
was a member of the Al Aksa Martyrs Brigade. During the visit, this man
also showed our volunteer a bullet wound on his left wrist and leg (from
the same bullet), the result of a battle with IDF forces.

David (far left) and Camille (far right) both sport AK-47.s as a
Palestinian police official looks on laughing. Our volunteer (seated,
center) was asked to pose with them.

According to our volunteer, .Knowing the situation I was in, I wanted a
picture of me with them, so I asked for a picture next to a Palestinian
policeman who was present. I sat next to him, and the next thing I knew
there were between four to six AK-47 assault rifles in the room being
passed about for us to have photographs with. The guns were on the bed
under the white cover behind Alan..

Our volunteer was encouraged to join the other ISM activists as they all
posed with the AK-47 machine guns next to the Al Aksa Martyrs Brigade
terrorist.

Lest the ISM try to claim the individuals with guns and other ISMers in
these photos are not with the ISM, its own website features Dave from
Ireland and Julie Presson (alias Anna), mentioning they were .wounded. by
rubber bullets fired by Israeli Border Police during the weekly Bi.lin
village riot last August 25th. Magan Wiles was also .wounded. at the riot.
Besides the photo plainly showing Dave and .Anna,. the ISM web page
describes in detail all of their wounds and arrests:

Under Injuries and Arrests:

Dave from Ireland suffered beatings and a rubber bullet wound to the back.
Anna from US suffered injuries on her hand as well as 2 rubber bullets,
one in the back and hip.
Magan from US suffered harsh beatings with the baton, including one to her
head, resulting in a concussion.
(Emiliano was also listed among ISM injured in Bi.lin at a more recent
demo, though not on the ISM website).

According to Stop the ISM.s volunteer, .The ISM are sending young people
from all over the world to the training fields of the West Bank and Gaza
to learn from terrorists. In my view that makes the ISM and its leadership
a supporter of terrorism...President Bush said .either you are with us or
with the terrorists.. What better proof is there than what can be seen in
these photos?.

Gabi laughs it up while Alan, the other ISM volunteer who works at the
Faisal Youth Hostel, smiles with his machine gun. To the far right is the
al Aksa Martyrs Brigade terrorist overseeing the festivities. Real .peace
activists. don.t pose with machine guns in the company of terrorists, but
the ISM does. The above photo was shot at the Jericho Prison in the West
Bank.

He continued, .After posing with the machine guns and terrorists, we were
given a tour of the prison to see what it was like. I spied on one wall a
photo of Osama bin Laden, where one might see a pinup picture of a movie
star in the West. We than left the prison and went into Jericho and then
got a taxi and bus back to the Faisal Youth Hostel. On the way to the
prison in the taxi I had to take everyone.s passports to show the Israeli
border guards at the checkpoint for leaving Israel. I noticed Gabi.s
passport was a photocopy..

ISM activists are instructed to photocopy their passports because if
detained by police they can try to escape in the confusion generated
during .direct action. demonstrations. Sadly, the Israeli Interior
Ministry is even too lazy to insist that original passports must be
presented to police. Magan Wiles was arrested at the Bi.lin riot and
released despite the fact she did not have even a photocopied passport on
her.

He continued, .When I got back to the Hostel I got washed up and changed
and went with Alan, Milliano, the Italian guy and the Swedish guy to watch
the England football game against Portugal as photographed in the bar
scene..

.After the game we went back to the Hostel. I was showing a few people my
photos of the day and I showed the Swedish guy some, who then told a
red-haired woman who had just arrived about the photos. Apparently this
woman was a bigger fish in the ISM, because they went out of the room and
I know they where talking about us the photos to Hisham Jam Joun. I went
and took the memory chip out of my camera just in case they tried forcing
me to give them my pictures.. He continued, .They then sat us down and
told us we had to delete the pictures. Alan and Dave deleted theirs in
front of them and I just sat there with my arms folded..

The next day our infiltrator and an Italian from the hostel went to
Hebron, when our reporter .bumped into an Israeli-Arab Christian who
invited me to stay with him and his family in the north of the country for
a few days.. He accepted the offer and left the hostel -- and the ISM --
behind him.

The revelations of this article should serve as a wakeup call to the
Interior Ministry in Israel and the Department of Homeland Security here
in the United States. Our volunteer told me that guns were brought out of
the cache by the Palestinians present and that the ISM .peace activists.
were laughing and anxious to hold them. Do the hardcore ISM activists in
the West Bank undergo weapons training by the PLO and Hamas? One e-mail
sent to our volunteer by Dave from the West Bank contained an ominous
sentence in it: .Palestinians are growing tired of nonviolent resistance..
Non-violent resistance? Israel has experienced over 25,000 terrorist
attacks on its civilians since year 2000. Is the next intifada soon to
commence? If so, what will be the ISM's role in it?

Due to the bureaucratic delays of Israel.s intelligence services, Gabi and
Camille managed to get

out of Israel before being apprehended. Both are no doubt recruiting other
ISM activists back home in Ireland and Denmark, respectively. However,
thanks to our volunteer and Stop the ISM.s team efforts, Dave from Ireland
and Alan from Scotland are both currently in Israeli custody.

Huwaida Arraf, an ISM founder was recorded at two national conferences on
two occasions admitting the ISM works with terrorist groups like Islamic
Jihad, the PFLP and Hamas. She even wrote to the Washington Post admitting
as much. Paul LaRudee was deported after it was determined he changed his
name to defraud Israeli border authorities to meet and work with groups
that even he says might be affiliated with Hamas, he just .doesn.t ask
these things..

All these groups should be investigated -- perhaps even by Congress -- and
every college administrator in the country should read this article before
allowing the ISM to stage another conference on a US campus. Spread the
word.

3. Get yours:
http://www.cafepress.com/rightwingstuff/1635767
http://www.cafepress.com/rightwingstuff/1665939
http://www.cafepress.com/rightwingstuff/1288231
http://www.cafepress.com/rightwingstuff/1195594
http://www.cafepress.com/rightwingstuff/1359561

# posted by Steven Plaut : 10:35 AM

1. This is an extremely important case. The anti-democratic attempt to
use the courts to suppress free speech failed here:

Court Nullifies AGs Indictment Against Nadia Matar
Sunday, September 10, 2006 / 17 Elul 5766

The indictment against Nadia Matar for her fiery letter to Disengagement
Authority chief Yonatan Bassi has been expunged, implicitly citing
politics in the original decision to indict Matar.

The indictment against Women in Green chief Matar claimed that she had
violated the ban on "insulting a public servant" when she compared Bassi
to the Judenrat by agreeing to take part in the expulsion of Jews from
their homes in Gush Katif and Shomron.

.On September 19, 2004," the indictment states, "the accused faxed a
letter to Disengagement Authority chief Yonatan Bassi at his home stating,
inter alia: ..All your declarations won.t help, Yonatan. The truth is that
you are the modern version of the Judenrat, and truly a much more terrible
version, because during the Holocaust, the task was forced upon the Jewish
leadership by the Nazis, and it is very difficult for us today to judge
them. Today, there is nobody standing with a gun to your head focing you
to collaborate with the deportation of the Jews of Gush Katif and northern
Samaria.. .

Israel's Attorney General, as head of the State Prosecutor's office, is
assigned the power to decide whether or not an indictment is lodged
against an accused citizen. After the text of the letter was widely
publicized in the media, AG Menachem Mazuz announced that Matar would be
indicted.

Indictment - Null and Void
Jerusalem Magistrates Court Justice David Mintz ordered the indictment
expunged Sunday, explaining, .I am relying, in my decision, on the
statement of the Attorney General himself, who said, .Criminal law cannot
be the answer to all the ills of Israeli society.. Unrestrained criticism
is, to our sorrow, a day-to-day part of the Israeli reality. Any time we
are dealing with freedom of speech, criminal law does not present the
correct and effective tool. I am therefore ordering the erasing of the
charge..

Matar received vocal support from Nobel Prize Laureate Professor Yisrael
Aumann, and 2,146 people re-sent copies of her letter with their names
affixed to the bottom . daring the Attorney General to file indictments
against them as well.

Representing Matar was prominent attorney Yoram Sheftel. In his opening
statement in the trial (the full text of which can be read by clicking
here), Sheftel summed up his approach: that the prosecution was engaging
in "selective law enforcement founded on invalid political considerations
and/or on cowardice."

Sheftel's Speech
Sheftel went on to present an exhaustive list of public figures, such as
Shas Party leader Rabbi Ovadia Yosef and Meretz chairman Yossi Beilin, as
well as left-wing activists, whose inflammatory statements the Attorney
General has declined to prosecute.

.It is inconceivable," Sheftel said, "that the Court, after becoming aware
of the facts that I will list, will leave in place the charge sheet, which
would completely undermine the trust of the public, or at last of the
decisive majority of the public, in the authorities entrusted with the
enforcement of the law..

Sheftel cited dozens of statements by the first President of the State of
Israel, Chaim Weizmann, and the first Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion,
calling Revisionist Zionist leader Ze'ev Jabotinsky a "Hitlerist" and
.Vladimir Hitler,. as well as terming Menachem Begin "the embodiment of
the worst of Nazism."

.My client did not say: .Yonatan Basi is a Hitlerist. - but Chaim Weizmann
did use that language,. Sheftel said.

A petition filed against MK Beilin for his signing of the private Geneva
Initiative with the PLO, Sheftel said, fit exactly with Israel.s legal
description of treason, which is: .An action to remove sovereign territory
of the State of Israel from its bounds - the punishment for which is the
death penalty..

.The Attorney General said, .This is not the criminal field that is
suitable for such treatment.[and is] subject to public debate.. The
Disengagement, that is, the deportation, wasn't 'subject to public
debate?'. Sheftel asked. .The same State Attorney's office that does not
file charges against Yossi Beilin for genuine traitorous activity, in
cooperation with hostile elements, files charges against Nadia Matar..

.Incidentally, right now, the Prime Minister's daughter, before the
cameras of the foreign press, close to the Chief of Staff's house (where
she invited them), calls the IDF Chief of Staff a 'murderer.' The Chief of
Staff is a public servant. Was an investigation opened for this? Will she
be put on trial?.

Matar herself took the stand in the course of the trial, stating: .This
comes at a time when... members of Peace Now are spying and informing on
behalf of the Arab enemy. At this time, Knesset Members and left-wing
public figures are shaking the bloodstained hands of Hamas members. At
this time, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert admits that he is prepared to repeat
the crime of handing weapons, ammunition and pieces of the homeland to the
Arab enemy. All these people are not being brought to justice for their
treasonous and criminal words and deeds.

.But we, the Jews, who dare to criticize the crime of expulsion of Jews
and abandoning of our land to the Arab . we are chased and trampled, with
pogroms perpetrated against us, as in Amona, and put us on trial..

'Kapo' is Not Strong Enough
.Just so it is clear to all,. Matar declared. .You can't frighten us! We
will not be silenced! I do not take back a single word of the letter I
sent Yonatan Bassi. On the contrary, it is now clear how much pain and
suffering this man, together with all the rest of the expulsion criminals,
caused to our expelled brothers in particular, and to all citizens of
Israel in general. The word Judenrat is much too moderate. The word has
not yet been invented to describe the monstrosity of the Jews who caused
so much damage to their fellow Jews. The words kapo, traitor or
collaborator are also too moderate..

.Even if I have to sit in prison for these words, I will continue to cry
out these words: The Land of Israel belongs to the nation of Israel in
accordance with the Torah of Israel, and anyone who lends a hand to hand
over parts of our homeland and expel Jews . from the Prime Minister, to
the ministers and IDF officers, down to junior clerks like Yonatan Bassi .
must be put on trial for betrayal of Zionism and Judaism, for
collaborating with the Arab enemy . which continues in the way of the
Nazis, to murder and destroy the Jews..

Speaking with Arutz-7 following the verdict, Matar said she is very happy
to see that the court .finally realizes that the prosecution sometimes
includes politics in its decision to hand down indictments. It was a big
blow to the prosecution..

Attorney Sheftel expressed reserved optimism: .This was the lowest court
of the land, dealing with less important cases, so the decision definitely
does not hold the power of precedent that a Supreme Court decision would.
However, to the best of my knowledge, it was the first time an Israeli
court has nullified charges against a criminal defendant implicitly due to
the fact that it actually accepted the argument that the charges were
brought because of political considerations..

The prosecution now has 45 days to appeal the case to the district court.
Matar and Sheftel are considering suing the prosecution to cover legal
expenses.

2. The NEXT Israeli Surrender:
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=24344

3. Professor of blurring:
http://frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=24276y

4. A very funny story (Ted Hayes is a convert to Judaism by the way):
http://la.indymedia.org/news/2006/09/177883.php

5. The Moonbats are really upset by this:
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3301443,00.html

6. Israel's Galilee offers world's first pomegranate wine
http://www.israel21c.org/bin/en.jsp?enZone=Culture&enDisplay=view&enPage=BlankPage&enDispWhat=object&enDispWho=Articles^l1419
Pomegranates are one of Israel's oldest indigenous fruit species, and were
mentioned in the Bible's praises of the land 3,500 years ago. Today,
pomegranates are the 'in' fruit, both a result of numerous recent studies
showing their health benefits, and because of their unique tangy flavor.
The Nachmias family in the Upper Galilee has created a tastier and
healthier pomegranate, and have launched the Rimon Winery, home of the
first pomegranate wine fit to be sold to international wine connoisseurs.

7. The Return of Fascism
http://www.townhall.com/columnists/BillOReilly/2006/09/09/the_return_of_lethal_fascism

8. Film About Muslim Response to 9-11 Attacks Released
09:52 Sep 12, '06 / 19 Elul 5766

(IsraelNN.com) The Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) has
released a full-length documentary film depicting the reaction of the Arab
and Muslim world to the attacks of September 11, 2001.

The film is available for viewing free of charge, over the Internet.

The film depicts widespread support for the attacks throughout Arab and
Muslim media outlets throughout the Middle East. It can be viewed by going
to the MEMRIfilms.org web site.

9. PC Perfidy:
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1157913606853&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull

10. More judicial assault on Israeli democracy:
http://israelnn.com/news.php3?id=111855 and
http://israelnn.com/news.php3?id=111856

11. Will Zinn now be recruited by Tel Aviv University?
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=24355

12, The REAL Axis of Evil:
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=24331

13. The Presbyterian Church continues its self-destruction into lunacy.
After boycotting Israel for defending itself from Islamofascist terror,
now comes:
Anything Goes

By HEATHER WILHELM
September 8, 2006; Page W13

Presbyterians in America aren't known for preaching fire and brimstone.
"No frenzy, no fanaticism, no skirmishing," Mark Twain wrote of his
mild-mannered denomination in 1866. "You never see any of us Presbyterians
getting in a sweat about religion and trying to massacre the neighbors."

Now, however -- five years after 9/11 -- the publishing arm of the
Presbyterian Church has decided to heat up the brimstone a notch,
releasing its very own 9/11 conspiracy theory: "Christian Faith and the
Truth Behind 9/11: A Call to Reflection and Action."

Written by David Griffin and put out by Westminster John Knox Press, a
division of the Presbyterian Publishing Corp., the book argues that 9/11
was a highly orchestrated Bush administration sham. The collapse of the
World Trade Center -- which, the book says, was brought on by controlled
demolitions, not Islamic hijackers -- was merely a "false flag" operation,
designed to spur wars in the Middle East. The goal: an all-powerful
American global empire....
The old adage that "if you don't stand for something, you'll fall for
anything" seems to apply to the Presbyterian leadership. Whether the
parishioners will put up with this sort of moral confusion in the long
term remains to be seen. Talks of splits in the PCUSA have circulated for
years. According to the Presbyterian Layman, a publication unaffiliated
with the church, PCUSA has been losing, on average, about 49,000 members a
year. If such a rate continues, "the PCUSA will have zero members by the
year 2053." Mr. Griffin, and the leadership's "open-mindedness," may be
hastening its demise.
(from WSJ)

# posted by Steven Plaut : 1:51 AM

1. I consulted again with the policy advisor I sometimes quote and we
came up with a new policy original for the Olmert government, one no
government of Israel has yet had the courage to try:

"And 'Hamas' will never more be heard in your land, nor plunder and
destruction in your lands, rather your walls will be called Salvation and
your gates Glory."
Isaiah 50: 18

2. Conspiracist Nazis:
http://www.jewishsf.com/content/2-0-/module/displaystory/story_id/30233/format/html/displaystory.html
http://www.jewishsf.com/content/2-0-/module/displaystory/story_id/30232/format/html/displaystory.html
http://www.jewishsf.com/content/2-0-/module/displaystory/story_id/30234/format/html/displaystory.html

http://www.jewishsf.com/content/2-0-/module/displaystory/story_id/30263/format/html/displaystory.html
and their fellow travellers:
http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/2006/09/australian-dutch-and-belgian-tv.html

3. You mean they have not done so already?
Note by Tom Gross]

AL-QAEDA CALL ON HERSH, GALLOWAY & FISK

In a much underreported segment of the most recent al-Qaeda video,
released on September 2, 2006, Osama bin Laden's second-in-command, Ayman
al-Zawahiri, together with an American member of al-Qaeda, call on The
New Yorker's Seymour Hersh, the British MP George Galloway (who also
writes for The Guardian) and Robert Fisk of the Independent to "come over
to the side of truth."

Adam Yehiye Gadahn, an American convert to Islam who is now a senior
member of al-Qaeda, calls on "investigative journalists like Seymour
Hersh to reveal the extent of... the cowardice of the [American] regime."

In a later section of the 48-minute video Gadahn says: "As for those
who have expressed their respect and admiration for Islam, and
acknowledged that it is the truth, and demonstrated their support and
sympathy
for the Muslims and their causes . like George Galloway, Robert Fisk and
countless others . I say to them: isn't it time you stopped sitting on
the fence and came over to the side of truth?" (i.e. converted to
Islam).

This is not the first time Robert Fisk has been mentioned in an
al-Qaeda video. For more, please see "Osama Bin Laden praises Robert Fisk
(&
other items)" (Nov. 4, 2004)
www.tomgrossmedia.com/mideastdispatches/archives/000056.html.

AL-QAEDA TERRORIST HAS JEWISH ROOTS

Adam Yehiye Gadahn, the American convert to Islam who starred in the
video released by al-Qaeda's deputy leader Ayman al-Zawahri, is of Jewish
ancestry, and is originally from Orange County, California. Wearing a
white robe and turban, and speaking in both English and Arabic, he urged
Americans to convert to Islam. Gadahn said that those working for
President Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair are invited to
embrace
Islam, but they "should hurry."

He was born Adam Pearlman on September 1, 1978, the grandson of a
prominent Jewish surgeon and the son of the musician Phil Pearlman, who
converted to Christianity and changed his name to Gadahn.

In 1995, Gadahn posted an essay on the USC website describing his
conversion, it was titled "Becoming a Muslim." According to his family,
Gadahn moved to Pakistan in 1998 where he married an Afghan.

This is Gadahn's second appearance in an al-Qaeda video. In a video
marking the one-year anniversary of the July 7, 2005 London transport
bombs, Gadahn urged Muslims not to "shed tears" for Westerners killed in
al-Qaeda attacks. He is wanted by the FBI in connection with possible
terrorist threats against the United States. The FBI believes he attended
al-Qaeda training camps in Pakistan and served as an al-Qaeda
translator and English-language spokesman.

The reason I mention that Gadahn is of Jewish origin is that the public
and journalists on this list should be aware of the phenomena of a few
psychologically disturbed Jews or people of Jewish origin, who are
making it their goal to attack Israel, the West and fellow Jews.

These often highly intelligent Jews and former Jews at work in media
and academia are often used to justify anti-Semitic opinions by others.
It is important to realize that just because they are of Jewish origin,
they do not represent other Jews.

For example, discussing the Parliamentary All-Party Enquiry on
Anti-Semitism
in the UK (see yesterday's dispatch titled "Pinocchio, Tom Sawyer and
Heidi convert to Islam in Turkey"), the flagship BBC program "Today"
yesterday invited on as their leading guest commentator a well know
leftist Jewish extremist, Professor Steven Rose, to denounce his fellow
Jews
for causing anti-Semitism. For more, see
adloyada.typepad.com/adloyada/2006/09/bbc_calls_in_th.html and
normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2006/09/for_the_love_of.html.

The other BBC guest expert on anti-Semitism was Inayat Bunglawala. For
more on him, see: "Reuters employee issues 'Zionist pig' death threat,"
(May 30, 2006),
www.tomgrossmedia.com/mideastdispatches/archives/000733.html.

There are a number of prominent self-hating Israelis too. See, for
example:
electronicintifada.net/v2/article5656.shtml.

4. Suing Khatami:
http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/060909/nysa018.html?.v=24

5. News from Iran
http://myrightword.blogspot.com/2006/09/fate-of-holocaust-denier.html

6. Latest from the Israeli Profs for the Annihilation of Israel:
http://www.palestinecampaign.org/events.asp?d=y&id=1897
Palestine Solidarity Campaign announcing a conference in Trinity College,
Dublin "to theorise what Edward Said called .the question of Palestine.".
12 & 13th September 2006
Speakers include:
Ilan Pappe, University of Haifa
Ronit Lentin, Trinity College Dublin, the organizer of this conference.

PALESTINE AS .STATE OF EXCEPTION.:
A GLOBAL PARADIGM

INSTITUTE OF INTERNATIONAL INTEGRATION STUDIES
TRINITY COLLEGE DUBLIN
Venue:Trinity College Dublin, IIIS Seminar Room, C6.002, Level 6, Arts
Building.

This conference aims to theorise what Edward Said called .the question of
Palestine. in the context of globalisation. An inter-disciplinary group of
Palestinian, Israeli, British, American and Irish scholars will explore
and debate the ways in which the Palestinian experience of being governed
under a .state of exception. may be theorised as paradigmatic for new
forms of global governance.The state of exception is characterised, among
other things, by the law being suspended in the .military order. issued by
the executive arm of government, often bypassing the legislature. Through
the continuing existence of a series of emergency laws, the Israeli state
regulates the lives of both its Palestinian citizens and of the
Palestinians in the occupied territories, making Palestine, not only
Palestinians under occupation, the global state of exception par
excellence.

The conference is part of the IIIS Global Networks project. Themes
discussed will include the .Palestinisation. of ethnic and racial
conflicts, the globalisation of the conflict, the theorisation of
Palestine as a .state of exception. and the centrality of the memory of
the 1948 Nakba (catastrophe) to the contemporary understanding of the
conflict.

Speakers: David Theo Goldberg, University of California, Irvine; Gargi
Bhattacharyya, University of Birmingham; Ghada Karmi, Palestine /
University of Exeter; Hunaida Ghanem, Palestine / Harvard University; Raef
Zreik, Palestine / Harvard Law School; Ilan Pappe, University of Haifa;
Laleh Khalili, SOAS; Bobby Sayyid, Leeds University; Conor McCarthy,
Dublin City University; Ronit Lentin, Trinity College Dublin.

The conference will include the showing of Ayelet Bechar.s documentary
film Just Married (Israel: Channel 8, 2005) and documentary coverage of
the checkpoint regime by Tamar Goldschmidt, Machsanmillim, Jerusalem.
Full details or from
Dr Ronit Lentin
Department of Sociology

Tel: 00 353 1 608 2744

7. General Gershon Hacohen is head of all army training colleges and was
personally in charge of the expulsion of Jews from the Gaza Strip. He
appeared on Channel 10 a few days ago and said this:

"What happened a year ago (the Gush Katif expulsion) was a crime, and I
was unfortunately a part of that crime against the Jewish people. What is
happening here now, the second Lebanese War, is the collective punishment
we have received for what happened a year ago in Gaza."

# posted by Steven Plaut : 2:39 AM