Tuesday, March 28, 2006

Saudi ambassador: Osirak bombing was a good thing

How funny is this?

Israel’s 1981 attack on Iraq’s nuclear reactor was “probably” fortunate, Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to Washington said.

Asked March 23 whether Saudis now welcomed the attack on the Osirak nuclear reactor, given Iraq’s subsequent aggression against Kuwait, Turki al-Faisal answered, “Probably, yes.” Faisal appeared caught off guard by the question, which came when he called on Israel to disarm to create a nuclear-free Middle East.

I'm sure that the clarifications and corrections are imminent...

Hamas: Let the world destroy Israel for us

Hamas has out-Arafated Arafat.

They realize that they do not have to lie. All they have to do is make sure that their spokesmen wear suits, use the word "peace" incessantly when even they will admit that their idea of peace means that Israel doesn't exist, and let the world do what it does best: pressure the Jewish state to make more and more concessions.

Of course, terror apologists like AFP are more than happy to play along, with headlines like:

Hamas ready for international Mideast peace push

...when even in the contents of the article it says

Hamas government was ready to talk to the international community to end the Middle East conflict but would not change its hardline stance on Israel.

But that is enough to call it a "peace push!"

And as AFP goes, so goes Europe.

When one side makes its red lines clear to begin with, the international community has no choice but to pressure the side that really has none.

Feds stop Israeli company purchase

Checkpoint, the Israeli company that makes the most popular firewall product worldwide, has been effectively stopped from buying an American company, Sourcefire. Sourcefire creates Snort, an open-source intrusion detection software, as well as some commercial products that build on Snort.

It was done by the same government panel that approved the Dubai ports deal.

Forbes reported in early March:

The company was told U.S. officials feared the transaction could endanger some of the government's most sensitive computer systems.

The objections by the FBI and Pentagon were partly over specialized intrusion detection software known as "Snort," which guards some classified U.S. military and intelligence computers.

The contrast between the administration's handling of the $6.8 billion Dubai ports deal and the Israeli company's $225 million technology purchase offers an uncommon glimpse into the U.S. government's choices to permit some deals but raise deep security concerns over others.

The 45-day investigation into the Israeli deal still under way is only the 26th ever conducted in 1,600 business transactions reviewed by the Committee on Foreign Investments in the United States. The panel, facing criticism by Congress about its scrutiny of the ports deal, judges the security risks of foreign companies buying or investing in American industry.

In private meetings between the panel and Check Point, officials from the FBI and Defense Department objected forcefully to permitting any foreign company to acquire some sensitive Sourcefire technology for preventing hacker break-ins and monitoring data traffic, an executive familiar with the discussions told The Associated Press. This executive spoke on condition of anonymity because government negotiations are supposed to remain confidential.

William Reinsch, a former senior U.S. official who participated in reviews under President Clinton, said the Israeli sale involves more dire security issues than the administration's recent approval for a Dubai-owned company to take over significant operations at six major American ports.

"This raises a lot more important issues," said Reinsch, a former Commerce Department undersecretary. "The most important case is where we're making an irrevocable technology transfer to a foreign party. Port operations raise security issues, but the ports are still in the United States."

Many things do not make sense about this:

Snort is open-source, meaning that the technology is completely open and transparent to the world. There is no additonal security risk to having Israel own the rights to the code that is already publicly known, even if the government is heavily using Snort. (The feds could take the open-source Snort and build new versions based on that, rather than use the new ones thast Checkpoint would come out with.)
The government already uses Checkpoint firewall software, and that in theory is far more problematic than intrusion detection software. For years, people who distrust Jews have spread rumors that Checkpoint put backdoors into the firewall software so they can break into computers at will. Of course it is untrue (the downside of having something like that discovered is so much worse than any perceived benefit as to make the idea ridiculous.)

Anyway, firewall software is in the critical path of data; intrusion detection systems are not. If the Israelis can be trusted with firewall code, there is no additional risk for IDS.
Anyone who thinks that trusting Arabs who support terror with port security makes more sense than trusting Israelis with perceived data security is insane.

So what's going on? Was it an overreaction to the criticism over Dubai? Was it latent anti-semitism in the FBI and Pentagon? Was it a complete misunderstanding of technology?

This is a bit troubling.

Pakistani military: Al Qaeda works with Jews and Hindus

In an astonishing display of how ingrained the Jew-hatred is in the real Muslim world, the Pakistani military dropped pamphlets on villages near the Afghan border, telling residents not to cooperate with "foreign terrorists" because they work together with Jews and Hindus. Knowing full well that the residents hate Jews and Hindus with a passion, they figure a little bigotry can be a useful tool.

And, of course, everyone knows that the Jews and Hindus are the real terrorists and that true Muslims are incapable of hurting a fly. I mean, duh.

TANK, Pakistan - Pakistan’s military airdropped pamphlets this week over towns in restive tribal regions near the Afghan border urging tribesmen to shun ”foreign terrorists”, saying they were part of a Hindu and Jewish plot.

The pamphlets were dropped over Wana, the main town in South Waziristan, and Miranshah in North Waziristan as part of a campaign to win support among tribesmen who have shown sympathy for both Taleban and remnants of Al Qaeda living among them.

A Reuters reporter in Tank, a town close to the boundary with the semi-autonomous tribal agency of South Waziristan, obtained one of the pamphlets, bearing the sign-off “Well Wishers, Pakistan’s Armed Forces”.

Titled “Warning”, the pamphlets said the foreign militants were fighting against Pakistan in connivance with “Jews and Hindus”, a term that would play on traditional prejudices among the region’s Muslim conservatives. (Notice that Reuters doesn't describe them as "militants" or "hardliners" or "bigots," but just as "conservatives.")

“This war is against foreign terrorists and their harbourers who are fighting shoulder-to-shoulder with Jews and Hindus against the state of Pakistan,” it added.

I'm bored. Let's protest cartoons! (Insane Muslim Protesters of the Day)

Today, in Bangladesh...

That's right, folks, they are stil protesting the cartoons. And not only in Bangladesh, but in Pakistan too (from a rally yesterday)....

Unfortunately, I can't find any truly bizarre signs or banners this time. But as long as they are enjoying themselves....

The Caliphate and the Moderates

One of the things that all radical Islamists have in common is the desire to establish a worldwide Muslim Caliphate - literally, the desire to take over the world. As much as they enjoy saying that the Jews are the leaders in their desire for world domination, they actually are working towards that very goal themselves.

Here is an example from Arutz Sheva:

Sheikh Ismail Nawahda, preaching to Moslem masses on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem on Friday, has brought it out into the open: the call to restore the Moslem Khalifate, or, "Genuine Islamic Rule."

A plan for the "Return of the Khalifate" was published secretly in 2002 by a group called "The Guiding Helper Foundation." The group explained that it wished to "give direction to the educated Muslim populace in its increasing interest in the establishment of Islam as a practical system of rule."

This past Friday, Feb. 24, however, the plan went public. Sheikh Nawahda called publicly for the renewal of the Islamic Khalifate, which would "unite all the Moslems in the world against the infidels."

The Khalifate system features a leader, known as a Khalif, who heads worldwide Islam. Assisted by a ten-man council, his decisions are totally binding on all Moslems.

According to the Foundation's vision of the Khalifate, significant punishment can only be meted out for 14 crimes, including "accusing a chaste person of fornication," "not performing the formal prayer," and "not fasting during Ramadan."

The Foundation recommends working to restore the Moslem dictatorship using a system of small groups around the world. The purpose is so that the "enemies of Islam" who "will definitely try to stop us" will have a "much harder task, if not impossible, if they are faced with a myriad of small groups of differing locations, ethnicities," etc. This method also "ensures that if one group... is found and cut off, other similar groups will remain undetected."

It would be easy to dismiss one tiny splinter group with wild desires. But this is the desire of Al-Qaeda, Hamas and all the other offspring of the Muslim Brotherhood. This is the desire of Iran's madman Ahmadenijad.

It is also the desire of Hizb ut Tahrir:

Its aim is to resume the Islamic way of life and to convey the Islamic da’wah to the world. This objective means bringing the Muslims back to living an Islamic way of life in Dar al-Islam and in an Islamic society such that all of life’s affairs in society are administered according to the Shari’ah rules, and the viewpoint in it is the halal and the haram under the shade of the Islamic State, which is the Khilafah State. That state is the one in which Muslims appoint a Khaleefah and give him the bay’ah to listen and obey on condition that he rules according to the Book of Allah (swt) and the Sunnah of the Messenger of Allah (saw) and on condition that he conveys Islam as a message to the world through da’wah and jihad.

Hizb is very interesting. It is not directly linked with terror, but it has been remarkably efficient at gaining political power throughout Asia even with its extremist goals. Its own documents say exactly how they plan to take over the world:

[T]he Party defined its method of work into three stages:

* The First Stage: The stage of culturing to produce people who believe in the idea and the method of the Party, so that they form the Party group.
* The Second Stage: The stage of interaction with the Ummah, to let the Ummah embrace and carry Islam, so that the Ummah takes it up as its issue, and thus works to establish it in the affairs of life.
* The Third Stage: The stage of establishing government, implementing Islam generally and comprehensively, and carrying it as a message to the world.

Their three stages are described in Russia with a bit more alarm:

In what may presage a broader Russian crackdown against Islamist groups, a regional Federal Security Service, or FSB, head says that Islamic extremists in have moved from the "first" to the "second" level of activity, one level short in the Federal Security Service's classification of the point at which such groups will organize "mass disorders" and try to "seize power."

On March 2, Aleksandr Krivyakov, the chief of the Chelyabinsk oblast FSB, told the Interfax news agency that there now existed "definite preconditions for the manifestation of extremism on an ethno-confessional basis" among "persons who profess Islam" in that predominantly Russian region.

He told the Russian news agency that "it is well known that the expansion of Wahhabism in Russia is taking place stage by stage, according to a definite plan. We already over the course of several years have noted cases of distribution in the region of literature and leaflets of Wahhabi content."

"At the present time," Krivyakov continued, "the second stage of this so-called expansion is taking place: the formation of missionary groups among the members of which is being disseminated an anti-government ideology."

And unless something is done and done quickly, he insisted, these Islamist radicals will move to the final, third stage in which there will be "a sharpening of inter-ethnic and inter-confessional relations," "the activization of national radicals," and even "the organization of mass disorders and the seizure of power."

Three years ago, FSB analysts first began to talk about what they called the "three-stage process" of the Islamist threat to the Russian Federation. At that time, these analysts and others close to them in Moscow said that they had learned of this plan from captured Wahhabist documents.

So even though the UPI story quoted above tries to downplay the threat, it appears that the Russian intelligence was right, and it is reasonable to think that it is a major goal of the export of Wahhabism that fuels Islamic studies worldwide, through Saudi money today.

An interesting manifestation of how Hizb ut Tahrir works was revealed this week with the story of the Muslim girl in England who sued to be allowed to wear her Islamic dress in public school:

A YOUNG Muslim girl yesterday failed in her two-year legal battle to force every school in Britain to allow pupils to decide their own dress code according to their religious belief.

Britain’s highest court ruled to uphold the right of all schools to set uniform rules provided that they consult their local community.

The Law Lords ruled that the human rights of Shabina Begum had not been breached when her school refused to allow her to wear a full-length Islamic dress to class and that Denbigh High School had not acted unlawfully.

A little research in this story finds that the group behind the young woman was none other than Hizb ut Tahrir:

THE image of a pious girl wrenched from her studies for refusing to bare her ankles in school was severely damaged when it emerged that she had taken advice from the radical Muslim group Hizb ut-Tahrir.

The group, which campaigns for Britain to be subjected to Islamic rule, confirmed yesterday that it had counselled Shabina Begum to insist on wearing a full-length jilbab in lessons.

The extremist party, which Tony Blair wants to ban in response to the London bombings, insisted that it had nothing to do with her legal battle. Shabina was just turning 14 when her brother, then a 19-year-old university student, and another man took her, wearing the jilbab, to school on the first day of term in 2002.

(When I first saw a blurb about the girl, I was sympathetic to her. Only after reading much deeper into the news stories does one see that the public school already allows a Muslim dress uniform that was agreed on by British Muslims a few years ago, and that 80% of her classmates are Muslim. The goal was not modesty - the girl has a very public press conference and is strikingly pretty - the goal is subjugating others under a strict interpretation of Islam.)

This certainly sounds like the strategy of using small groups simultaneously to pressure the world to adapt Islamic law is in place. Whether it is directed centrally or uses a more amorphous structure is not important - the point is that there is a fairly large worldwide movement today, aiming at subjecting all of us to Islamic law. It is highly motivated and it is as active in the West as it is in the East and Third World. The battles between Shiites, Sunnis and Salafists are nothing compared to the desire to subjugate the West and re-establish the Caliphate.

Now the question is, exactly how large is this movement? I think the answer to the question can be found out by asking so-called Muslim "moderates" whether they want to see the establishment of a caliphate and to put the world under Shari'a. Since Islam is not as easily open to interpretation as other major religions, then if this is a central ideal of Islam it would be difficult to find even the most liberal believing Muslim to say publicly that this is not a desirable goal. The impression one gets is that at the very least, they believe that Shari'a is a fair and just system of law for all peoples.

And if even the most liberal Muslim shares the same fundamental goals as Hizb ut Tahrir, then we have a much larger problem than just a few "extremists."

For those covering the effort of anti-Israel academics to demonize the Jewish state in the American academy, things don't get more dramatic than the scandal at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government. It turns out that the Kennedy School's academic dean, Stephen Walt, whose shoddiness and biases in a paper he co-wrote called "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy" ignited the scandal, holds a chair called the Robert and Renee Belfer professorship in international affairs. When we called Mr. Belfer to get his reaction, he clammed up tighter than a conch in a mudslide. But the skivvy around New York, where Mr. Belfer lives, is that the billionaire former Enron director, who has been generous to Jewish causes, was so infuriated and mortified by what Dean Walt was doing that he asked that Dean Walt not use the title of the Belfer professorship in promoting the article. As our Meghan Clyne reports elsewhere on the page, the Harvard and Kennedy School logos were promptly removed from the version of the paper that is posted on the university's Web site.

Call it the Belfer Declaration. It may not be much in and of itself, but if it turns out to be the start of an honest investigation into what is happening at the Kennedy School and at Harvard, it will be an important step indeed. Nor was it the only step in recent days. On Monday, Marvin Kalb of the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy, who we had feared was too reticent, issued a blunt statement making clear Dean Walt's paper isn't up to the Kennedy School's standards for scholarship, a statement that was all the more courageous for the fact that the Shorenstein Center is part of the Kennedy School at which Dean Walt presides. Alan Dershowitz of the Law School and Ruth Wisse of Harvard's faculty of arts and sciences have shown similar forthrightness, as has Mortimer Zuckerman, who is a former chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations and who funds the Zuckerman Fellows at the Kennedy School. He voiced his own horror at Dean Walt's demagoguery.

Another donor who is on the spot is Leslie Wexner, the Ohio-based billionaire whose empire includes the Victoria's Secret chain. If this editorial weren't headlined "The Belfer Declaration" it might have been headlined "Where's Wexner?" For Mr. Wexner is a member of the Kennedy School visiting committee, a formal oversight body, and he funds fellowships for up to ten Israeli students a year at the Kennedy School. If he wants to send Israelis to a school where the academic dean asserts that "Viewed objectively, Israel's past and present conduct offers no moral basis for privileging it over the Palestinians," he could save himself some money and simply bus the Israeli graduate students over to Ramallah to attend Bir Zeit University, which is dominated by Hamas. Unlike Mr. Zuckerman, however, Mr. Wexner hasn't come forth with a public statement.

Also on the spot at the moment are members of Congress, which the Robert and Renee Belfer professor of international relations has said is subject to the "stranglehold" of the "Israel Lobby." Rep. Eliot Engel, a Democrat who represents the Bronx and who was accused in the dean's paper of acting on the lobby's behalf in pursuing a free Lebanon and Syria, rose to the occasion, denouncing the paper as "anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist drivel." But where is Senator Kennedy, the Democrat of Massachusetts for whose brother the late president the Kennedy School of Government is named? No profile in courage from him. He's been declining to comment on the matter for days, since we first asked him about it last week. And to judge from his remarks on the war in Iraq in recent months, he may already be lost to the cause of democracy and American ideals in the Middle East.

It's enough to make one wonder whether Harvard just ought to change the name to the Joseph P. Kennedy School of Government, after the 35th president's father, who, as FDR's envoy in London, plumped for appeasing Hitler. It is certainly true that the more one looks into the matter, the more the problems at the Kennedy School appear to reach well beyond a logo on one working paper or even one daffy dean with an exaggerated view of the influence of Jewish influence in Washington. There were warnings, including an article issued in May 2005 in the student newspaper at the Kennedy School, the Citizen. Its writer, Robert Berman, said that the school's Middle East Initiative "has been sponsoring and promoting numerous events at KSG that are highly biased, factually inaccurate, and inflammatory." He noted that the initiative's director, Hilary Rantisi, was listed as a participant on a panel organized by the Palestinian Solidarity Committee to "discuss" the decision to divest from Israel.

Ms. Rantisi is quoted in a press release from Dubai welcoming the minister of finance of the United Arab Emirates, Khalfan Bin khirbash, to a Kennedy School advisory committee. If America doesn't trust the UAE - a nation that Israelis are formally banned from entering - to operate its ports, why should its government officials be trusted to advise Harvard's Kennedy School? The Kennedy School is running an executive education program for UAE officials; the school's Web site says "the Kennedy School has developed a relationship with the federal government of the United Arab Emirates to train its mid and senior level officials on issues of innovation, leadership, efficiency, and effectiveness in the public sector." What's the Kennedy School doing, teaching UAE bureaucrats to be more efficient in barring Israeli passport holders from entering their country? Where are Senators Clinton and Schumer and the rest of the anti-Dubai crowd?

Ms. Rantisi, who, bear in mind, is the director of the Kennedy School's Middle East Initiative, is co-editor of a book, "Our Story: The Palestinians," published under the auspices of the Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center in Jerusalem. Sabeel, according to the Non-Governmental Organizations Monitor of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, "is active in promoting an extreme anti-Israel agenda." It further notes that Sabeel, where Ms. Rantisi used to work, "employs classical antisemitic theological themes," citing a Jews-Killed-Jesus-type message that the organization issued for Easter, saying, "It seems to many of us that Jesus is on the cross again with thousands of crucified Palestinians operating around him. The Israeli government crucifixion system is operating daily."

In other words, the problem at the Kennedy School extends far beyond the Belfer professor. It will require a sustained effort by Harvard's donors, students, alumni and faculty to turn this situation around. Columbia University has become known derisively as Bir Zeit on the Hudson. For a while it looked like Harvard might avoid a Columbia-scale scandal, partly because Lawrence Summers chose early in his tenure as president of Harvard to confront actions that he stated were anti-Semitic if not in intent then at least in effect. Since then, of course, Mr. Summers has been driven from office, at least partly, we believe, in retribution for that stand, and today it must be said that the outcome of the struggle at Harvard is by no means assured. If those like the Belfers, Mr. Wexner, Senators Kennedy and Schumer, and scores of others with roots or a stake at Harvard aren't careful, the Kennedy School will become known as Bir Zeit on the Charles.

Prince Charles and the Terror Sheikh

Prince Charles is in Egypt to accept an honorary degree from Al Azhar University. While there, Charles addressed terror:

REFLECTING on how a terrorist outrage shattered his own life as a young man, the Prince of Wales spoke last night of his “heavy heart” at the death and destruction he sees in the world as he called for a greater tolerance between faiths.
Arriving in Egypt at the start of only his second official overseas tour with the Duchess of Cornwall, the Prince spoke of how the murder of his mentor Earl Mountbatten, who was blown up while out fishing with his family in Ireland, had given him a personal insight into the impact of terrorism.

“I find my heart is incredibly heavy from all the destruction and death that occurs,” he said. “I know so well from having experienced the horror of terrorism myself, in losing my beloved great-uncle Lord Mountbatten back in 1979 when he was blown up in a terrorist bomb. I do have some understanding I think, a little, of what people go through with these horrors.”

He and his wife listened to the a sheikh at the university speaking. The speaker was in fact it is Grand Imam of Al-Azhar Sheikh Mohamed Sayed Tantawi:

That name may sound familiar. As Robert Spencer points out:

George W. Bush knows that Islam is a religion of peace because Sheikh Muhammad Sayyid Tantawi said so. Two months after the September 11 terrorist attacks, the President told the United Nations that Tantawi, "the Sheikh of Al-Azhar University, the world's oldest Islamic institution of higher learning, declared that terrorism is a disease, and that Islam prohibits killing innocent civilians."

But Tantawi seemed to change his mind shortly thereafter. Spencer mentions the MEMRI report about Tantawi, quoting an Al-Azhar website:

The great Imam of AlAzhar Sheikh Muhammad Sayyed Tantawi, demanded that the Palestinian people, of all factions, intensify the martyrdom operations [i.e. suicide attacks] against the Zionist enemy, and described the martyrdom operations as the highest form of Jihad operations. He says that the young people executing them have sold Allah the most precious thing of all."

"[Sheikh Tantawi] emphasized that every martyrdom operation against any Israeli, including children, women, and teenagers, is a legitimate act according to [Islamic] religious law, and an Islamic commandment, until the people of Palestine regain their land and cause the cruel Israeli aggression to retreat…"

So Prince Charles is happily accepting a doctorate from someone who explicitly advocates and praises the murder of innocents, and also praising his brand of Islam.

And as far as I can tell not a single UK newspaper has bothered pointing out this fact.

European dance magazine supports suicide bombers

From YNet:

The world of dance is in an uproar: British magazine Dance Europe was accused last week by the London Jewish Chronicle of politicization and racism after the magazine refused to publish an article on Israeli dance troupe Dance Drama, whose choreographer is Sally-Anne Friedland.

Several weeks ago journalist Stephanie Freid approached the editors of Dance Europe about writing a piece on Dance Drama. Freid notes that after interrogating her about Dance Drama’s views on the occupation, editor Emma Manning “told me they had allowed an Israeli advertisement once, but only with a disclaimer saying it disapproved of the occupation.”
Manning told the Jewish Chronicle that “as an editor, I am entitled to choose what to print.” The magazine’s head of advertising, Naresh Kaul, was even more explicit: “We are opposed to the occupation. If any company in Israel cooperates with us by adding a disclaimer saying it is opposed to the occupation, settlements and everything else, we will cooperate with them.”
The list of artists and troupes that appears in Dance Europe makes no mention of Israel. Under “Palestine”it lists the El-Funoun dance troupe from Ramallah. In response to a question from the Jewish Chronicle about whether the Palestinian troupe was required to condemn suicide bombings, Kaul stated that “there’s a reason for people to become suicide bombers. Their land has been occupied.”

This season's Top 10 Conspiracies in the Arab and Iranian Press (NY Sun)

From the New York Sun's "MEMRI Report" (Steven Stalinsky):

10) "Israeli security organizations are in efforts to spread flagrancy and corruption among young [Iranians] to harm the Islamic establishment" and Israel has been behind the smuggling of liquor into Iran, the Islamic Republic News Agency quoted an Iranian police commander, Colonel Hossein Abdi, as saying on January 31. A Syrian government daily, Teshreen, on January 8 quoted the Iranian foreign minister condemning an unnamed Zionist company "that published certain cards insulting Muslims and their religious traditions in Iran."

9) "The U.S. propagates a long-term plan for conflict with Muslims. The plan designates no countries, cultures, [or] history ... It is war against some unidentifiable mass entity, where the only visible landmarks are vital ports and strategic natural resources," the Syrian minister of expatriates, Bouthaina Shabban, wrote in a February 22 column in the London Arabic daily Al-Sharq Al-Awsat.

8) America instructed some Muslim countries to "eliminate" verses from the Koran, Ayatollah Nuri Hamadani told elite members of the Iranian military, according to a Tehran Iranian Labor News report released the first week of January.

7) An article in the Egyptian government Al-Ahram Weekly of March 2-8 by Khaled Amayrch reported on Israeli religious political party platforms for dealing with the Palestinian Arabs: "enslavement whereby non-Jews living under Jewish law are forced to become 'water carries and wood hewers,' expulsion, or outright extermination."

6) Turkish Muslims discovered America, according to documents presented by a Turkish professor, Ruat Sezgin, who founded and chairs the Institute for the History of Arabic-Islamic Science, at the Association of Written Heritage office in Tehran on February 5.

5) "British Hand Behind Ahvaz bombings," a headline published by the Mehr News Agency on January 26 read. Iran's foreign minister expressed the same sentiment when speaking to Al-Jazeera on January 25; in a January 26 interview with the network, Iran's interior minister claimed America, Britain, and Israel were behind a series of plane crashes in Iran.

4) The Mossad has planned terror attacks in Lebanon, the January 31 edition of Teshreen quoted President Lahoud of Lebanon as saying, while a Qatari daily, Al-Raia, on January 26 quoted a former Syrian defense minister, Mustafa Tlas, as saying Israel assassinated a former Lebanese prime minister, Rafik Hariri.

3) Small teams of CIA-sponsored militias are behind all the kidnapping and killing of foreigners in Iraq, Firas Al-Atraqchi wrote in an extensive report in the Al-Ahram Weekly of February 9-15. It included a picture of a kidnapped Christian Science Monitor reporter, Jill Carroll.

2) "The Jewish Walt Disney Company" created the Tom and Jerry cartoon to improve the image of Jews, because Jews were called "Dirty Mice" in Europe, an Iranian government adviser, Hasan Bolkhari, said February 19 on Iranian TV Channel 4.

1) Israel created the avian flu virus in order to damage "genes carried only by Arabs," a January 31 column by Abd Al-Rahman Ghunwym in a Syrian government daily, Al-Thawra, said. Another possibility given was that the virus was created to attack "the yellow race - especially in China and Vietnam" that are "rising powers" threatening "American hegemony over the world."

One more "Lobby" paragraph - Israel the root of all terror

As I go through the larger paper demonizing the omnipotent, omnipresent and omniscient Israel Lobby that has the academics from Harvard and Chicago so frightened, I came across this classic:

More importantly, saying that Israel and the United States are united by a shared terrorist threat has the causal relationship backwards: rather, the United States has a terrorism problem in good part because it is so closely allied with Israel, not the other way around. U.S. support for Israel is not the only source of anti‐American terrorism, but it is an important one, and it makes winning the war on terror more difficult. There is no question, for example, that many al Qaeda leaders, including bin Laden, are motivated by Israel’s presence in Jerusalem and the plight of the Palestinians. According to the U.S. 9/11 Commission, bin Laden explicitly sought to punish the United States for its policies in the Middle East, including its support for Israel, and he even tried to time the attacks to highlight this issue.

First of all, the statement "Israel and the United States are united by a shared terrorist threat" is not showing a causal relationship. It shows something that the two have in common. It is interesting that the academics do not seem to know what the word "causal" means.

But I suppose they had to resort to such sophistry because of the point they were really trying to make: "The United States has a terrorism problem in good part because it is so closely allied with Israel." They then qualify that absurd statement a bit: "U.S. support for Israel is not the only source of anti‐American terrorism, but it is an important one, and it makes winning the war on terror more difficult." And then the home run: "There is no question, for example, that many al Qaeda leaders, including bin Laden, are motivated by Israel’s presence in Jerusalem and the plight of the Palestinians."

Notice the implication of that sentence, which clearly means to say that Israel is the primary motivation of Bin Laden and "many al Qaeda leaders." The authors are careful not to say that explicitly, because Bin Laden's own words show that his fatwa was mostly a reaction to US troops on holy Muslim lands, and his Zionist rhetoric was clearly just to pump up the fatwa.

Then the authors engage in the same sort of deception that occurs throughout the paper: "According to the U.S. 9/11 Commission, bin Laden explicitly sought to punish the United States for its policies in the Middle East, including its support for Israel, and he even tried to time the attacks to highlight this issue."

Now, what percentage of Bin Laden's actions were motivated by Israel and what part from other factors ("its (unnamed) policies in the Middle East")?

Reading this paragraph shows that the authors are trying hard to imply that Israel is the major reason for Arab terror, (notice "in good part") even as each individual sentence is technically accurate (except for the causal part.) It of course does the authors no good to mention that Muslim terror attacks in London, Madrid and Bali, which were the most similar attacks to 9/11, clearly had no Israel component. That would undermine their relentless attempts to demonize Israel.

Notice also that Saudi Arabia, which hosted the US troops that Bin Laden was so upset about, is also a terror target to al Qaeda. The authors' contention that being more pro-Arab would reduce terror against the US is utterly incompatible with the fact that terrorists target Arabs themselves. If being Arab cannot inoculate you from terror, how can being a more pro-Arab "crusader" help you?

Beyond that, there is the subtext that if there is a terror attack, it must be the West's fault. This is the typical academic Left's bigotry against Arabs, for like little children, they cannot be held responsible for their actions, and their attacks follow a logic that always leads back to the evil white Christian or Jew.

This is only one paragraph of a paper filled with such illogical premises, subtexts and implications. When you start off with the "fact" that Israel is a liability to the US, it is easy to find "proofs." (It is stated as a fact in the very first endnote.) It is especially easy when you decide to ignore any evidence that might disprove your premise.

This is today's Harvard.

Fisking the Harvard Elite

The American Thinker does a masterful job at exposing the fallacies in the article "The Israel Lobby" mentioned in my previous blog entry.

As one reads the article itself, with its ominous constant repetition of the dangers of "The Lobby" (they might as well just say "The Elders"), it brings home a point that we can learn from.

People who hate Israel (and Jews, however nicely they want to pretend it isn't at all about Jews) are not necessarily stupid or backwards. They are not all crazy rioting Arabs or white-hooded cross-burning Klansmen.

As much as we would like to pretend that knowledge and intelligence can inoculate people from prejudice and bigotry, it simply isn't true. If a person has an irrational fear or hatred, they can marshal tons of "evidence" to prove their point. Such evidence may be laughable coming from a garden-variety racist but from an academic it can have the veneer of respectability, almost as if their hate is a scientific theory and can be proven true.

Even hard scientists, with checks and balances built into the scientific method, can fall prey to bias. How much more so the hundreds of academics, who believe in their own intelligence so much so that they cannot look objectively at their own biases, who go through life with the fear and respect of their students giving them nothing but positive feedback - how easy it is for them to believe that their own ugly biases are really Truth, and they have no problem finding like-minded colleagues who can reinforce their beliefs. They pretend to look at all sides of an issue but they know the answer before they even start.

Being intellectual has nothing to do with being intellectually honest.

The article has this amazing paragraph:

One might argue that Israel and the Lobby have not had much influence on policy towards Iran, because the US has its own reasons for keeping Iran from going nuclear. There is some truth in this, but Iran’s nuclear ambitions do not pose a direct threat to the US. If Washington could live with a nuclear Soviet Union, a nuclear China or even a nuclear North Korea, it can live with a nuclear Iran. And that is why the Lobby must keep up constant pressure on politicians to confront Tehran. Iran and the US would hardly be allies if the Lobby did not exist, but US policy would be more temperate and preventive war would not be a serious option.

When the irrational hatred of all things Zionist extend to the argument that an Iranian nuclear weapon is not something for the US to worry about, presumably because only Israel would be annihilated, we have left the realm of facts and figures and into the world of fantasy and wishful thinking, of reckless disregard for facts to advance a tendentious argument. No amount of footnotes or sources or nuclear fallout could persuade these authors that they are wrong, because they are so utterly convinced that they are right, and objectivity has disappeared long, long ago along with their ability to think critically.

The idiots at Harvard and the lessons of Denmark

The New York Sun publishes extracts of "a paper issued this month by the Harvard University Kennedy School of Government in its 'Faculty Research Working Papers Series' and written by two American professors, Stephen M. Walt and John Mearsheimer."

"The combination of unwavering U.S. support for Israel and the related effort to spread democracy throughout the region has inflamed Arab and Islamic opinion and jeopardized U.S. security. ... Why has the United States been willing to set aside its own security in order to advance the interests of another state?... The explanation lies in the unmatched power of the Israel Lobby. Were it not for the Lobby's ability to manipulate the American political system, the relationship between Israel and the United States would be far less intimate than it is today.... AIPAC, which is a de facto agent for a foreign government, has a stranglehold on the U.S. Congress.... manipulating the media... Pressure from Israel and the Lobby was not the only factor behind the U.S. decision to attack Iraq in March 2003, but it was a critical element....the United States has a terrorism problem in good part because it is so closely allied with Israel...Viewed objectively, Israel's past and present conduct offers no moral basis for privileging it over the Palestinians...Israel and its American supporters want the United States to deal with any and all threats to Israel's security. If their efforts to shape U.S. policy succeed, ...Israel gets a free hand with the Palestinians, and the United States does most of the fighting, dying, rebuilding, and paying."

Others have written very good rebuttals of the paper, which is more in line with neo-Nazi and modern Iranian thought than reality.

I would like to mention one one minor point that easily destroys the entire premise of the paper, that if the US would stop supporting Israel then the world's Arabs and Muslims would have no problem with America.

Denmark.

Was there any European country that was more sympathetic to Palestinian Arabs than Denmark? Was there any Western nation that allowed Muslims more freedom within its borders? If there was, it wasn't by much.

And yet a single set of cartoons in a small Danish newspaper caused the entire Muslim world to rise up and unify behind utter vilification and hate towards the entire nation of Denmark and all of Scandanavia, including serious death threats and actual deaths, that continues to this day.

Now, imagine that the US had adopted the strategy advocated by the authors of this paper. The Muslim logic of Jyllands-Posten is that an entire nation is responsible for the blasphemy of a single act by a private institution. Is it conceivable by anyone, from a typical red-state redneck all the way down to Harvard intellectuals, that the Muslim attitudes towards the US would moderate in the least as long as US newspapers and Hollywood studios and book publishers remain independent? Is it possible that in a nation of 300 million people who treasure freedom that none of them will do something that upsets the Muslim world to the point of riots? Or would the authors also advocate that the US shut down the Washington Times and the New York Post because their existence (like Israel's) could cause Arabs and Muslims to seethe?

The US, as the leader of the free world, stands for everything that Islamists are against, and no amount of support for Arabs (such as billions in aid given every year) will change that fact one bit.

The dhimmified attitude of academia may or may not be related to the funding that it receives from those who advocate terrorism, but it is clear that there is no relationship between the ability to write papers and intelligence. To even consider that the foreign policy of our nation be held hostage to a large group of fundamentally irrational people who hate us is the height of stupidity, notwithstanding that those who espouse such views can also write in multisyllabic words.

The latest from Iran's IRNA

I have found that Iran's Islamic Republic News Agency is a very accurate mirror of what the leadership of Iran is thinking, and as such it is a valuable tool to see if there are any changes in Iran's attitudes and methods in its quest to destroy Israel and the US.

As usual, there are still articles quoting "scholars" that the US and Israel is the source of all evil. These sorts of article, usually quoting Lebanese and Indian "scholars", have been a staple at IRNA. Even so, apparently it is OK to speak to Satan when it is convenient.

Islamic supremacism is still there but there is an interesting nod towards multiculturalism, in speaking a bit less of Islam and more of "divine religions" which include Christianity, Judaism and Zoroastrianism as being implacably opposed to the West. As Muslims are wont to do, they promote "dialogue" as a means to spread their message and to ignore the ideas of the supposed partners in conversation.

This means that they are positioning themselves not only as the center of Islam, but as the center of all "divine religions." Clearly they are trying to broaden their appeal beyond the Islamic world in their attempt to dominate the world.

They remain completely intractable on nuclear technology even as they pretend that it is only for peaceful purposes.

So in most cases there haven't been any real changes but even the small differences need to be watched carefully.

The pain of the Iranian journalist

From IranMania.com:

Iran News - Iran finishes in 2nd place in Berlin showcase: "LONDON, March 13 (IranMania) - The Iranian pavilion finished in second place at the International Tourism Exchange, which was held from March 8 to 12 in Berlin, IRNA reported.

Oman and the United Arab Emirates finished in third and fourth places respectively, while the Zionist regime finished in first place. "

Can you imagine how hard it was for the reporter to have to write those words?

(In the interests of accuracy, Israel came in first and Iran second only in the Middle East category of the competition.)