Anti-semitic studies (Spectator UK)

Anti-Semitic studies
Douglas Davis

Pay attention, Professor. If you support the proposed academic boycott of Israel — and if you are to remain intellectually honest — prepare for a radical lifestyle change. Firstly, unplug your computer. Good. Now switch off your interactive digital television set. Well done. And now throw away your mobile phone. Excellent. You see, Professor, these machines are not only the engine of the globalised, capitalist world but they also depend on technologies that have been produced by Israeli academics in the Zionist entity.

Stop playing with your detached mouse, Professor, and concentrate. I’m afraid you may not use the British Library because it has been computerised by Ex Libris, a Zionist company that was spawned by the odious Hebrew University of Jerusalem. And if, God forbid, you develop problems of the small intestine, you may not pop the Zionist-invented ‘video capsule’, which passes naturally through your body as it monitors this delicate piece of your anatomy. You will, sadly, have to take it up the derrière, Professor. As a matter of principle, of course. But remember: your principle allows your proctologist to keep his hand in.

All this boycotting, you see, is the logical extension of proposed academic sanctions against Israel by some members of your Association of University Teachers (AUT) when they meet in Eastbourne next Wednesday. Just visit the website of Egyptian-born Mona Baker of the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology. She set the standard by firing two Israeli scholars from the boards of her translation journals as a matter of high academic principle.

You will see that Ms Baker’s ambitions do not end with the academic boycott. Her website also includes a section entitled ‘Boycott Israeli Products & Services’, which features dozens of global brands that, inconveniently, are not Israeli at all. The offenders presumably have earned their place in infamy by dealing with the Zionist entity, by being owned by Jews or by having Jews on their boards. They range from Coca-Cola and Nescafé to Johnson & Johnson and Estée Lauder, from Hugo Boss and Ralph Lauren to Selfridges and Marks & Spencer, from Kleenex and Wonderbra to Lancôme and.... All marked for boycott.

Absent from Ms Baker’s list — and here I think I can help — is a set of global companies which are arguably even more culpable because they not only operate in Israel but also do most of their R&D there. IBM and Intel each have three R&D centres in Israel; Microsoft established its first non-American facility there, and Cisco Systems has built its only non-American R&D centre in Israel. Then there is Motorola, which has its largest R&D site in Israel, and News Corp, whose company NDS develops those neat interactive technologies for digital television. There are many more.

The AUT boycott brigade has cause for concern. It knows that these companies are attracted not only by the innate brutality of the expansionist regime but also by the cunning of its university graduates (most of the R&D centres are located on or near Israeli university campuses). Proportionally, the Zionist entity has more university graduates than any other country, while its scientists, engineers and agriculturists publish more professional papers per capita than do their counterparts anywhere else on earth. The result is that Israel has the largest concentration of high-tech companies outside Silicon Valley. But the ultimate sin is that Israel, which came to independence in the process of post-war decolonisation, stubbornly refuses to become a failed state.

So dangerous has the situation become, dear Professor, that when you meet in Eastbourne you will set aside the small matter of your pay deal (which many universities have failed to implement). Instead, you and your fellow intellectual heavyweights will ponder far worthier matters. Like foreign affairs. Of course, you will not have to bother your turbo-charged minds with this week’s Unicef report which shows that half of the women in the Arab world are illiterate and more than ten million children in the region don’t attend school.

The issue that will preoccupy you will be the aggressive imperialist apartheid state: a state that has nurtured the Palestinian universities and colleges in the West Bank; one that offers equal rights — and access to its universities — to all its citizens, regardless of race, religion, ethnicity or sex; and which has educated tens of thousands of Palestinians at Israeli universities (several hundred a year still opt for an Israeli education). It is significant that Omar Barghouti, the Palestinian who is encouraging you and your British comrades to boycott Israel, is a doctoral student at none other than Tel Aviv University.

No, Professor, not all Israeli universities and not all Israeli academics will be boycotted if the AUT motion is passed. Such a proposition was defeated 3–1 at the association’s conference two years ago, and the boycotters are too smart to repeat past mistakes. The new motion, says one of its authors, has been ‘tactically’ amended to get it passed. ‘We’ve got to be a bit more sophisticated,’ she says. And sophisticated they are. They even had a dry run last December, when they met to rehearse their presentations and develop killer responses to potential critics.

Their sleek new motion — which does not involve a single book-burning — envisages sanctions against only the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Tel Aviv University and Haifa University. And there’s more: the boycotters generously offer Israeli academics the opportunity to buy themselves immunity if they are prepared to denounce their country, specifically, ‘conscientious Israeli academics and intellectuals opposed to their state’s colonial and racist policies’. Who could seriously question the integrity of your fellow academic freedom fighters?

But there are, of course, small obstinate obstacles in the way of you visionaries, Professor. Britain’s academic institutions, for example, have not endorsed boycotting Israel’s academic community. Indeed, when the Oxford don Andrew Wilkie told an Israeli PhD applicant that there was ‘no way would I take on somebody who had served in the Israeli army’, he was hauled before the university’s disciplinary body and suspended without pay for two months.

Cambridge University’s Professor Sir Aaron Klug, Nobel laureate and former president of the Royal Society, put me right when I asked him about the possible impact — on Britain no less than on Israel — of such a boycott: ‘How important is the AUT? That’s the question you have to ask.’ He is no supporter of Israel’s Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, and his policies but he does consider that the proposed boycott is ‘ill considered and doesn’t promote anything at all’. The AUT, he says, is out to attack Israel ‘but this is no way to proceed’. Sir Aaron is ‘not one who looks for anti-Semitism around every corner,’ he says, ‘but I do think there’s an element of that here. It does give people who are anti-Semitic the opportunity to express themselves.’

But relax, Professor. The AUT has solemnly concluded that there is a clear distinction between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism. They don’t mind Jews. They just detest the Jewish state.

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Important archaeological relics saved from Wakf Temple Mount garbage

On the grounds of a Jerusalem national park with a view of the Temple Mount, a small group of Israeli archaeologists and volunteers sifting through piles of rubble discarded by Islamic Wakf officials from the Temple Mount into a city garbage dump have recently uncovered a series of history-rich artifacts dating back to the First and Second Temple periods.

The five-month old privately-funded project underway at the site, which is being directed by Bar Ilan University archeology professor Dr. Gabriel Barkay, is being called virtually unprecedented since archaeological excavation has never been permitted on the Temple Mount itself.

Six years ago, following the Islamic Wakf's unilateral construction of a mosque at an underground area of the Temple Mount known as Solomon's Stables, Wakf officials discarded more than 10,000 tons of rubble with history-rich artifacts, at a municipal garbage dump in the Kidron Valley and other locations outside the Old City.

The November 1999 destruction and removal of the antiquities in the wake of the mosque construction was later called "an unprecedented archaeological crime" by the head of Israel's Antiquities Authority, the state-run archaeological body nominally charged with supervision at Judaism's holiest site, as well as by Israel's leading archaeologists.

According to decades-old regulations in place on the Temple Mount, Islamic Wakf official administer the compound, while Jerusalem police are in charge of overall security at the site.
[...]
Starting in November, the archaeologist and a small team, led by his 32-year-old former student Zachi Zweig, transferred 68 truckloads of rubble saturated with archaeological finds from the garbage dump to the Emek Zurim National Park, on the western slopes of Mount Scopus. Using a mechanical sifter, the rubble was then separated into heaps based on size, before being hand-checked for antiquities.

Over the last five months, Zweig a small team of six workers -- and an equal number of daily volunteers -- who have sifted through 15 percent of the rubble to date have uncovered scores of history-rich artifacts, from the First Temple Period until today amidst the rubble, including a large amount of pottery dating from the Bronze Ages through modern times, a large segment of a marble pillar's shaft, and over 100 ancient coins, among them several from the Hasmonean dynasty.

The one meter tall marble column, streaked with purple veins and white spots, is thought to date back to Late Roman or the Byzantine period, Barkay said, and is similar to column shafts near the southern wall of the Temple Mount.

The first coin recovered from the rubble was from the period of the First Revolt against the Romans that preceded the destruction of the Second Temple, he added.

The coin bore the phrase "For the Freedom of Zion," and was particularly meaningful as the Temple Mount was one of the epicenters of the fight against the Romans.

Other finds include a spout of a Hasmonean lamp, an assortment of arrowheads, an ivory comb, a ceramic flask, various first temple figurines, and numerous pottery oil lamps.

The historical project underway is now in danger of going unfinished due to a lack of financial support, with the project director saying that the project will abruptly end in one week unless organizers receive urgent financial backing needed to complete the work.

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20 Israeli companies "most promising": Red Herring

Another truly remarkable accomplishment from a tiny country with constant worries of terror and few natural resources.

No less than 20 of Red Herring's 100 most promising companies in Europe are Israeli.

Israel is the second most highly represented country, with only Britain providing more than a fifth of the companies on the list. Together Israel and Britain are responsible for 53 percent of these promising companies.

Ireland, Finland, France and Germany each have less than 10 names on the list.

Among the 20 Israeli firms are Mellanox Technologies (the mother of InfiniBand technology), Wisair (developer of a ultra-wideband chipset for wireless communications), the biotechnology company D-Pharm, EZChip and Flash Networks.

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Abbas is not serious about peace (IsraelInsider)

Can Abbas tame the lion?
By Micah D. Halpern April 13, 2005

Success or failure. Truth or dare. The future of the Palestinian Authority lies in the hands of one man, President Mahmoud Abbas.

The decisions that Abbas makes will shape the future, long term and short term, of the Palestinian people. The choices are his to make. The commitments are his to undertake.

Some decisions, like cracking down on terror, like taking control, are actually, physically difficult. But Abbas must tame the Palestinian Wild West or it will consume him. And if or when the first democratically elected president of the Palestinian Authority falls, anarchy will set in. And if anarchy enters, any chance of a decent life for the people of Palestine disappears. And when Abbas falls, any chance for rapprochement between the Palestinian Authority and Israel fails. If Abbas is consumed, Palestinian society will never flourish, it will become, instead, a Nicaragua or a Belfast.

How does one tame the lion?

Disarming the gangs of hooligans that roam through the cities and towns, imprisoning, cutting off funds, making it unlawful to incite, all those are obvious ways to recapture control. Physically difficult, but possible.

Convincing the masses of the importance of the mission, that's much, much, more difficult. And the reason it is more difficult is because re-education requires much more than a physical commitment, it requires an emotional commitment. And here, Abbas has failed miserably. Abbas has barely even attempted to re-educate the Palestinian people.

Education, or re-education, is central to the success of President Abbas. It is an essential tool for the implementation of a democratic, economically sound and productive future for his people. And yet, Abbas has not even begun to put in place the easiest of educational reforms. There are concrete actions that take no time to put in place and require no energy to implement. There are actions that take almost no money but which would have serious short and long term impact for the future of the Palestinian people.

All Abbas needs to do, as a first, simple, crucially important step is take one book off the school reading list. If Abbas is really committed to peace with the Israelis, if he is being truthful when he speaks of peace and progress in international diplomatic circles, he will push forward on the process of re-education now. He is already late, any later will be too late. But does he dare?

Israeli Minister Natan Sharansky has just sent an emergency letter to Israel's President Ariel Sharon and to United States President George Bush.

This is his issue:
The official 10th grade Palestinian school curriculum teaches The Protocols Of The Elders Of Zion. The edition used in the schools is published in Syria. The curriculum never mentions that the Protocols are a forgery of the Russian secret police created by the Czar in order to generate the notorious myth that the Jews control the world.

One must ask:
Why teach The Protocols if not to expose the work as a conspiracy theory of Antisemites? In any other context, what is the educational purpose behind teaching The Protocols Of The Elders Of Zion to impressionable 10th graders given today's social and political climate?

In order to perpetuate the myth. We all know the answer. The Protocols Of The Elders Of Zion has not been removed from the Palestinian school curriculum, the book has not been removed from school library shelves, only, ONLY, in order to perpetuate the myth!

The Palestinians continue to teach The Protocols because they are not yet committed to the reforms. And Mahmoud Abbas, as president, is the man responsible for re-educating or not re-educating his people, for implementing reforms or for letting them linger, ignored if not forgotten.

There's more. There are the maps.

In no official Palestinian Authority map is Israel identified. Not just school maps - any and all maps.

It is hard to imagine a civilized, long-term, interaction between peoples, between societies, between countries when the official maps of one of the partners still do not recognize the existence of the other.

Here's even more. Of the 160 schoolbooks the Palestinian Authority uses to teach from, not a single text refers to Israel as an independent state. Shocked? Not any more, I would think.

Yes, Palestinian President Abbas must break the backs of the terrorist thugs who might physically challenge his control over his society. But he must also transform an educational system, he must educate. Future Palestinian leaders should be groomed in schools, not in marauding packs.

One need not teach love, but neither should one perpetuate hatred.

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White House: Democratically-elected Hamas should be respected

I've written before about wishful thinking overtaking common sense in the "peace process." The White House is not immune to this syndrome, as is clear from this exchange with WorldNetDaily. Here, we discover that the last Palestinian elections were "free and fair" and that Hamas members who get elected aren't terrorists:

WND: Scott, on the road map, can you identify even one Palestinian terrorist group that has been disarmed by the Palestinian Authority in accordance with the Bush administration's own road map? And I have a follow-up.

McCLELLAN: I think it's important to look at some of the steps that have been taken. And the president talked about President Abbas the other day in the news conference. We look forward to having President Abbas visit Washington again so the president can talk to him about what we can do to support them in their efforts to move forward on the two-state vision that he outlined. But there have been some steps taken to address the security situation.

It's important that they have a unified security structure. General Ward has been in the region working closely with the Palestinians to help put those security forces in place and have a unified structure to address some of these issues. But the road map is very clear in what it says. We've been very clear in what our views are, as well. And it's important that the parties meet their obligations.

WND: In the event that Hamas, a terrorist organization not yet disarmed by the Palestinian Authority, wins a majority in the legislative PA, will the Bush administration still send $350 million U.S. taxpayer dollars to the PA, or not?

McCLELLAN: Les, it's – the one thing that you see when people have elections that are free and fair is that they tend to choose people who are committed to improving their livelihood, not people who are committed to terrorist acts. And I think if you look back at the previous Palestinian elections, the people that were elected, while they might have been members of Hamas, they were business professionals. They were people that ran on talking about improving the quality of life for the Palestinian people and addressing their economic needs and addressing other needs that are important to them – not terrorists.

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Hamas member's sister hides his gun in her underwear

Troops searching a West Bank house for a wanted Hamas gunman found his sister hording his gun in her underpants, the army said, adding that it would consider renewing strip-searches among Palestinian women when searching and screening for potential terrorists.

The soldiers in the Balata refugee camp, a terrorist hotbed, find the gunman inside his house and ordered him to surrender his weapon. He refused, saying he didn't have it. After questioning, they found the man's sister had hidden it her underwear.

Troops then arrested the Hamas terrorist. They also found a gun holster and bullets inside the building.

An army spokesman said the incident raises serious questions about the need to search Palestinian women, mainly at checkpoints.

“Until now we have gone easy on women,” a spokesman said. “Perhaps we need to reconsider that policy.”

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3 US Muslim brothers guilty of aiding Hamas - one was a founder of CAIR/Texas

Ghassan Elashi is one of the founders of th Texas chapter of the Council of American-Islamic Relations, which puts up a moderate front in the press but which has had numerous terrorist connections.

Three brothers have been found guilty of supporting terrorism in a US court in Dallas, Texas.

The men were charged with passing money to an official in the militant Palestinian group, Hamas.

Ghassan, Basman and Bayan Elashi were tried on 21 counts of conspiracy, money laundering and dealing in the property of a terrorist.

They will be sentenced later, after one of the US government's highest profile terrorism prosecutions.

Ghassan and Bayan Elashi were convicted on all 21 counts, while Basman Elashi was found guilty on three counts.

Prosecutors said the men tried to conceal a $250,000 investment in their computer firm by an alleged official with Hamas, Mousa Abu Marzook.

Ten years ago he was accused of being a terrorist by the US government.

He was deported and is now believed to be living in Syria.

This effectively meant that it would be illegal for anyone to do business with him - something the Elashi brothers have now been found guilty of.

Last year the three, along with two other Elashi brothers, were convicted of making illegal technology shipments to Libya and Syria - countries the US government considers state sponsors of terrorism.

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Not-so-OK Corral

Another classic from Cox and Forkum.

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Israel's hockey team wins tournament!

Hockey? In Israel?

Once upon a time Ephraim Kishon wrote a funny story about an Israeli hockey team that didn't know how to skate.

TEL AVIV - As it turns out, our hot and humid Middle Eastern nation has an ice-hockey team, and not a bad one at that.

At the beginning of the week, Israel won the gold medal at the International Ice Hockey Federation Division II Group B world championships, an achievement that pushed it into Division I, one tier below the top division.

Under the direction of Canadian coach Jean Perron, Israel was able to win four of its five games and tie one.

More impressively, the team won without Israel’s most renowned hockey star, Max Birbraer, who was drafted by the NHL’s New Jersey Devils three years ago.

However, Israel did enjoy the services of the three Eisenman brothers, Alon, Erez and Oren.

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Why is Israel a world pariah?

An excellent article in response to a rabidly anti-semitic crackpot article published in the same newspaper last month. The newspaper, the Baltimore Chronicle and Sentinel, is unabashedly left-wing and critical of Israel, and it is to their credit that they even agreed to publish this response.

by Michael Suedfeld
This is a critical time in Middle East history. Both the Palestinians and Israelis are eyeing painful concessions to achieve lasting peace and no one in the world is more acutely aware of this than Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. The way forward is not through old rhetoric and the dredging of past events but through conciliation and dealing with the hard realities of 2005. Unfortunately, one of those realities is that some people, when presented with the possibility of turning to peace and progress, will be unable to leave their tired views behind.

How else to explain those such as William Hughes who, in this publication last month, went on a vitriolic tirade against Sharon and the nation he heads? Hughes repeated the many mantras of Israel-bashers, relying on falsehoods and half-truths to reach his goal.

It is fruitless to comment directly on such attacks. Those who forward them are on a mission. They want a very public humiliation, if not the outright dissolution, of the Middle East’s sole traditional democracy; the country that ranks highest among Middle East nations when rated for human development[1]; a country that is a world leader in technological, medical and other scientific advances[2]; a country with less than three per cent of the Middle East’s population[3]; a country that is such a minute portion of the Middle East geographically, it can be measured in tenths of a per cent; a country with few natural resources and none of that most precious Middle East commodity--oil.

Rather, I challenge readers to ask themselves: why is Israel a world pariah?

Is it because of its actions? There are numerous areas around the world where the death tolls are hundreds of times higher and where oppression--particularly of women and minorities--is a routine part of daily life, including most, if not all, other Middle East countries.

Is it because of Sharon? Since Yasser Arafat’s death, Sharon has released hundreds of prisoners[4], allowed convicted and exiled Palestinian terrorists to return to their homes[5], strengthened his commitment to removing Gaza settlements, relaxed travel restrictions[6], removed checkpoints and turned over security to Palestinian forces[7]. As for war crimes, if Sharon’s guilty so, too, are numerous world leaders with UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan leading the list. Sharon may have stood by as between 500-1,000 innocents in Sabra and Shatila were murdered by Christian Phalangists (Arabs, not Jews or Israelis), Annan did exactly the same thing in Rwanda (500,000-plus dead[8]), in the former Yugoslavia (more than 100,000 dead[9]), and, today in Sudan (an estimated 300,000 dead[10]).

Is it the media? As the second Intifidah began, there were 350 press organizations with permanent representatives in Israel and another 1,300 arrived shortly after[11]. Those people were there to write “hard” news even if they had to create it. The Jenin refugee camp reporting was one of the great shams of modern journalism, yet people, including Hughes, still cite it as if there were actually a massacre there.[12]

Do we hold Israel to a higher standard than its neighbors? That’s unfair to Israel but more so to Arabs. Lebanese historian Kemal Salibi described it this way: “The liberal tradition in the West tries to impute to the behavior of the native or the underdog an idealist position which is not really there...When it comes to the thinking about Middle East politics, the American liberal mind is often chasing rainbows. They are living in a world of delusion.”[13] Arabs are not children and would be best served if we in the West demanded better from their leaders.

Is Israel perfect? No modern nation is. Israel is, however, home to a kaleidoscope of people from some 100 national backgrounds of diverse races and cultures.[14] The Arab Muslim, Christian and Druze minorities comprise approximately 20 per cent of the population.[15] Druze serve with distinction in the Israeli Defence Forces. There are Arab members of the Knesset[16], Arab members of the courts, including Supreme Court[17] and, in the last two World Cup of Football (soccer) qualifying games, Arab-Israelis scored the tying goals becoming, at least briefly, national heroes.[18] In contrast, Jews can’t even visit countries such as Saudi Arabia.[19]

In short, there is no reason to hate or demean Israel in proportions so out of whack with its actions and significance. At least not for anyone really interested in peace, justice and the other ideals this publication’s operators profess to espouse.

---

REFERENCES:
[1] Human Development Index
[2] Facts about the 100th smallest country
[3] Depending on which countries are included as “Middle East”, there are between 260 million and 300 million Middle East residents; approximately 6 million in Israel.
[4] Israel releases Palestinian prisoners
[5] Deported Palestinians Allowed to Return
[6] Israel to Lift Restrictions in West Bank
[7] Israel returns Tulkarem to Palestinian control
[8] U.N. Panel: Rwanda Death Toll Down
[9] Revised death toll for Bosnian war
[10] Sudan toll underestimated, report says
[11] Ha'aretz: Foreign press ired by government media center cuts
[12] Palestinians confirm no Jenin 'massacre'
[13] "The Middle East"
[14] Brainboost - How many people live in Israel?
[15] World Factbook
[16] Current Knesset Members
[17] First Arab Named To Israeli Supreme Court
[18] Arab soccer players rescue Israeli team, spark hopes for Jewish-Arab reconciliation
[19] Saudi tourism: No Jews please

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Bomb boy may have wanted to go to Israeli prison to pass high school!

You can't make this stuff up.

Hassan may have wanted to be detained by the army in order to do his high-school matriculation exams in an Israeli prison, says his brother Amar.

“There’s a rumor among youngsters that it’s easier to succeed in Israeli jails,” he told Ynet. “Many boys were detained at roadblocks with weapons, in order to do the tests in jail.

Family friends said Hassan’s father was very strict with his son, who was not succeeding in school. Therefore, they estimate, the boy attempted to incriminate himself at the roadblock.

“Hassan thought that now he would be with his friends, who were detained in recent weeks, and that way they could study and succeed together,” one acquaintance said.

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Another innocent Palestinian teenager attacked by IDF. (Well, he was carrying 5 bombs.)

Good to see that Israel can trust Abbas to stop terror!

TEL AVIV - A 15-year-old Palestinian boy carrying five pipe bombs was detained by IDF forces at the Hawara roadblock south of the West Bank town of Nablus.

The boy aroused the troops’ suspicions after approaching the Hawara roadblock wearing a jacket, despite the hot weather.

The soldiers instructed the boy to remove his jacket, at which point he lit a match in an attempt to detonate the explosives, the army said.

However, the soldiers were able to overcome the youngster, who was subsequently taken in for interrogation by security authorities.

Meanwhile, sappers have been dispatched to the scene and are working to neutralize the explosive devices.

A 15-year-old boy was detained at the same checkpoint only three months ago. In that case, the youngster was carrying a bag containing an explosive belt, an improvised weapon, and 20 bullets.

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Palestinian Authority Still Pushing Anti-Semitism in Textbooks, Israeli Minister Says -- 04/11/2005

Who here is surprised to see that Palestinians teach their children Jew-hating lies in their schools?

Anyone?

There has been a decrease in incitement in the Palestinian media, experts say, but according to the Center for the Monitoring of the Impact of Peace (CMIP), there is still no recognition of Israel in the 160 Palestinian textbooks it has reviewed.

In the latest revelation, the CMIP said that a newly published textbook for 10th graders promotes fiction as fact.

The 'Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a fabricated booklet from the early twentieth century, describes an alleged plot by Jewish leaders to take over the world. Historians have debunked it as a political forgery written by Russian Czar Nicholas II's secret police in an attempt to make the Jewish people a scapegoat for the country's problems.

According to the Palestinian textbook, however, the Protocols were among the resolutions adopted by the first Zionist Congress, which convened in Basel, Switzerland, in 1897, with the aim of promoting the establishment of a Jewish homeland.

'There is a group of confidential resolutions adopted by the Congress and known by the name 'The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,' the goal of which was world domination. They were brought to light by Sergey Nilos and translated into Arabic by Muhammad Khalifah Al-Tunisi,' CMIP quoted the textbook as saying.

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Hamas "Morality Police" murder young woman in Gaza

There seem to be way too many Arabs who feel that murdering Jews is moral but a woman walking with her fiance in public is immoral.

A little topsy-turvy, but one gets used to that in the Middle East.

Hamas has begun operating a "vice and virtue commando" in the Gaza Strip to safeguard Islamic values, Palestinian security officials and residents told The Jerusalem Post.

The new force, called the Anti-Corruption Unit, is believed to be behind the gruesome murder over the weekend of Yusra al-Azzami, a 22-year-old university student from the northern Gaza Strip.

Her "crime" was that she was seen in public with her fiance .

Although "honor killings" are not a new phenomenon in Palestinian society, the perpetrators were almost always relatives of the victims. But this is the first time that one of the Palestinian groups has openly acted against a woman suspected of "immoral behavior."

Hamas's "morality" patrolmen first spotted the young couple strolling along the beach in Gaza City, together with Azzami's younger sister. After enjoying the spectacular sunset over the sea, they got into the future husband's car and started driving towards Azzami's home.

According to eyewitness accounts, five masked gunmen who were in another car gave chase, opening fire at Azzami, who was sitting in the front seat next to her fianc . She died instantly.

The fiance and sister were later brutally beaten and moderately injured by the attackers.

The incident took place at a busy intersection in Gaza City.

What happened immediately afterwards left many passersby traumatized.

The assailants dragged the young woman's body out of the car, pouncing upon it mercilessly with clubs and iron bars.

"It was the most horrific crime I've seen in my life," said a university student who witnessed the attack. "What they did to the body while it was lying on the ground was barbaric. This does not represent Islam." The student, who asked not to be named, said he and several other people at the scene were too afraid to interfere. "We waited until the gunmen left the area before we called the police and an ambulance," he added.

The Palestinian Authority police, who have since arrested two suspects, confirmed that the attack was carried out by Hamas vigilantes who have been waging a campaign of intimidation against people exhibiting un-Islamic behavior.

Update: Hamas apologizes for the murder.

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"Soccer-playing Palestinian teenagers" were weapons smugglers

Even al-Ha'aretz admits this now, although their initial article about this ignored the IDF statement that they were smuggling and entirely believed the Palestinian "eyewitnesses" that the teenagers were just innocently playing soccer. But note even here the "newspaper" tries very hard to hedge its bets.

The Gaza command was meanwhile continuing its investigation of the circumstances that led to the shooting of three 14-year-olds from Rafah, on the Philadelphi route. The Israel Defense Forces is almost certain that the youths were somehow involved in smuggling weapons from Egypt. A videotape from the observation post documents them approaching the Egyptian border, far beyond the reach of a kicked football that Palestinian witnesses said they had gone to retrieve.

A squad commander and a sharpshooter from Golani shot them. The members of this division are backing up the soldiers: The rules of engagement in Philadelphi are different because of the weapons-smuggling. In about 40 incidents over the last two months along the Green Line, troops have not fired as Palestinians crossed over. The people who have attempted these crossings, nearly all of them looking for a way to make some money, were arrested on the Israeli side.

The commander of the Palestinian forces inside Gaza, Mussa Arafat, reported - both to Israel and the PA leadership - that the youths were smugglers. But the PA announcements on the subject focused on condemning Israel for shooting youths.

As did al-Ha'aretz and hundreds of newspapers.

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EU actually demands something from PA

The 80 rockets and mortars fired into Jewish communities are of course fine, but the death penalty for Palestinians? That is too much for the EU elite.

Notice also the usual Reuters lies sprinkled around the article.

The dozens of Palestinians sitting on death row can breathe easier since the European Union, the biggest aid donor to the Palestinian territories, raised an uproar over a move by President Mahmoud Abbas to carry out 15 executions.

'We put them on hold after a number of visiting European prime ministers and foreign ministers told Abbas he would risk a freeze in EU reconstruction aid if the executions were carried out,' a senior Palestinian official told Reuters.

Emma Udwin, spokeswoman for EU External Relations Commissioner Benita Ferrero-Waldner, denied any threat to withdraw or suspend aid. 'But we have underlined to them how strongly we are opposed to the death penalty,' she said.

Aides said Abbas was keen not to endanger EU diplomatic and financial support key to Palestinians' hope for reconstruction and eventual statehood on Israeli-occupied land, where they have halted a ruinous uprising and begun an open-ended cease-fire.

But Abbas, a moderate who succeeded the late Yasser Arafat on a platform of peace talks, is also sensitive to a domestic clamor for executions to better rein in murderous armed gangs and deter Palestinians from spying for Israel.

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"Jewish extremists"

A search on news.google.com for the words "Jewish extremists" finds 1750 entries as of Sunday night.

And what extreme thing are these Jews doing? Are they assassinating anybody? Are they exploding bombs? Perhaps they are throwing stones at innocent civilians? Are they preaching for the genocide of entire population groups? Maybe stabbing bystanders? Shooting at soldiers?

Well, from reading the articles it appears that they are trying to peacefully rally in the area of the holiest Jewish site in the world. I have not seen any threats to destroy the Al Aqsa mosque, I have not seen any threats on anyone or anything besides possibly the democratic change of Israel's government. How extreme!

If any Arabs would be acting in exactly the same way, they would be hailed as moderates. Actually, Arabs who deny the Holocaust and support the deaths of Jews are also called moderates.

And the people who name these people "extremists" are not only the usual Israel bashers, but the Israeli government itself.

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More Innocent Palestinian Children

A picture taken at a rally of the Al Aqsa Martyr's Brigades (part of Fatah, which the PA leadership belongs to as well.)

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Israel lets down Jews over Temple Mount

Arabs have used this "reasoning" to get their way many, many times.

"Don't depose Saddam - it will cause the Arab street to get upset!"

No one is saying that the right-wing Israelis who want to protest at their holiest site are going to hurt anyone - they are saying that they'll "provoke" Muslims into bloodshed. Once again, the world regards Muslims and Arabs as people who are somehow not responsible for their actions, who cannot be blamed for their crimes. It is an amazing racism that the liberal world has towards Arabs - they are expected to be treated as if they are wild bears, or people with low IQs - "Don't get too near the cage or you'll upset him!"

This soft bigotry plays well into Arab hands - they can always use their threat of not being able to control their people to get what they want. (Even though they control their people quite well when they want to.)

And you will never see anyone say "Don't pressure Israel - it will make them upset." No, Israelis are expected to be rational human beings who can understand the complexities of the situation, who can separate emotion from logic, who can be spoken to as equals. As opposed to Arabs, who have to be "managed" so they won't do anything rash. So Jewish sensibilities towards the Temple Mount or Hebron or Rachel's Tomb or Joseph's Tomb are downplayed because the Jewish love of these areas is irrational - it is only religious.

What is a shame is that there is an implicit agreement from the current Israeli government that Jews do not have full rights over some parts of Israel, and by extension this makes it appear that Israel's rights over any territory is suspect. As long as the rights of Jews to go wherever they want is not insisted upon, then "competing" rights of Arabs making areas Judenrein will win.

And that means that bigotry and anti-semitism is being approved by the Israeli government and everyone else who thinks that Jews cannot peacefully visit or pray at their simgle holiest site. If Israel doesn't stand up for the rights of Jews, no one else will.

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Win a trip to Israel

Honest Reporting is having an Internet sweepstakes. Grand prize is a trip to Israel; other prizes are an iPod and a necklace.

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Rabid anti-Semite speaks at House of Lords at invitation of Muslim Lord Ahmed

by Stephen Pollard
A TERM has returned to the lexicon of political debate in recent months; a term for which, in a decent world, we should have no need. That term is “anti-Semitism”.

In January, Labour produced two posters. One depicted Michael Howard as a Shylock or Fagin caricature. The other pasted the faces of Mr Howard and Oliver Letwin on to pigs’ bodies. In February, figures showed that anti-Semitic attacks rose to record levels in 2004 — 42 per cent higher than in 2003. Add to this Ken Livingstone’s comparison of a Jewish reporter to a concentration camp guard, and the odour of anti-Semitism is clearly with us once more.

But there is a more astonishing incident which has yet to receive any coverage.

Lord Ahmed, who has been a Labour life peer since 1998, is the first Muslim to have been so honoured. His presence in the House of Lords is symbolically important. His behaviour matters, both in the message it sends to his fellow Muslims and in what it represents to the rest of us.

In May, Lord Ahmed called — at considerable personal risk — for Islamic militants such as Abu Hamza and Omar Bakri to be deported. The risk was real: a fatwa was immediately issued against him.

But his behaviour has not always been so admirable.

On February 23, Lord Ahmed hosted a book launch in the House of Lords for a man going by the name of Israel Shamir. “Israel Shamir” is, in fact, a Swedish-domiciled anti-Semite also known as Jöran Jermas.

The gist of Shamir/Jermas’s speech at the meeting can be gleaned from its title, “Jews and the Empire”. It included observations such as: “All the [political] parties are Zionist-infiltrated.” “Your newspapers belong to Zionists . . . Jews indeed own, control and edit a big share of mass media, this mainstay of Imperial thinking.” “In the Middle East we have just one reason for wars, terror and trouble — and that is Jewish supremacy drive . . . in Iraq, the US and its British dependency continue the same old fight for ensuring Jewish supremacy in the Middle East.” “The Jews like an Empire . . . This love of Empire explains the easiness Jews change their allegiance . . . Simple minds call it ‘treacherous behaviour’, but it is actually love of Empire per se.” “Now, there is a large and thriving Muslim community in England . . . they are now on the side of freedom, against the Empire, and they are not afraid of enforcers of Judaic values, Jewish or Gentile. This community is very important in order to turn the tide.”

Why would Lord Ahmed have hosted such a man in the Lords? It is, of course, possible that Lord Ahmed had no idea that Shamir/Jermas was a rabid anti-Semite. Yet it takes only a quick Google to discover his views and background. He has worked for Zavtra, Russia’s most anti-Semitic publication, and is allied with the Vanguard News Network, set up by an American, Alex Linder — a man so extreme that he was even ostracised by the US neo-Nazi National Alliance.

Indeed, Shamir/Jermas’s own website proudly reprints his views: “Jews asked God to kill, destroy, humiliate, exterminate, defame, starve, impale Christians, to usher in Divine Vengeance and to cover God’s mantle with blood of goyim . . . ” “The Ashkenazi Jews believed that spilled Jewish blood has a magic effect of calling down Divine Vengeance on the heads of the Gentiles . . . The picture of Jews slaughtering children for cultic reasons exerted huge impact on the Christian peoples of Europe.” On and on it goes.

Other figures at the forefront of campaigns against Israel are wise to Shamir/Jermas’s toxic anti-Semitism; Ali Abunimah, for example, who writes for the Electronic Intifada website and Hussein Ibish, press spokesman of the American-Arab Anti Discrimination Committee, gave warning in 2001 that Shamir/Jermas was not anti-Israeli but anti-Semitic. It is surely not unreasonable to expect Lord Ahmed to have exercised a cursory check on his guest.

If, however, Lord Ahmed does feel that he made a mistake in inviting him, he has yet to demonstrate it. Shamir/Jermas’s speech was made nearly two months ago. On learning of its contents, I wrote to Lord Ahmed, asking him two questions. Did he consider the invitation to have been a mistake? Did he condemn the remarks? He did not reply.

Yesterday, I phoned him. When I told him that I planned to write a piece drawing attention to his actions in hosting Shamir/Jermas and that I wanted to give him every opportunity to respond, he replied: “I am not even going to speak with you.” He then put the phone down.

Lord Ahmed’s refusal to condemn the remarks seems to indicate that he sees nothing wrong with inviting such a man to speak, or with the words Shamir/Jermas used.

There is an instructive parallel. Howard Flight was stripped of the Conservative whip for expressing a mild opinion about spending cuts. Lord Ahmed invited a known anti-Semite to speak in the House of Lords, has not uttered a word of criticism since and remains a Labour peer. Before hearing from Lord Ahmed, I also wrote to Lord Grocott, the Labour Chief Whip in the Lords. I asked him if, given Lord Ahmed’s apparent lack of contrition, Lord Grocott considered it appropriate that Lord Ahmed should still hold the Labour whip? No reply.

All Lord Ahmed need do to destroy the notion that he supports Shamir/Jermas’s views is to admit that he made a mistake in inviting him, and to condemn his words.

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Melanie Phillips: British academics against free speech

If anyone had ever told British academics that there would come a time when they would punish colleagues because of the views they held, and would treat them as pariahs and try to destroy their livelihoods in order to intimidate others into toeing the sole approved political line, they would have been incredulous. In the western tradition the universities are, after all, the custodians of free intellectual inquiry and open debate. Censorship, suppression of ideas and intellectual intimidation are associated with totalitarian regimes which attempt to coerce people into the approved way of thinking.

Yet that is what is now happening in British universities -- and the pariah is, of course, Israel. As the Guardian reported yesterday, the Association of University Teachers is about to debate a proposed boycott of Israeli academics who refuse to denounce their government's policies in the occupied territories. But the motion will 'exclude "conscientious Israeli academics and intellectuals opposed to their state's colonial and racist policies".' So in true totalitarian tradition, those who denounce their own will be permitted to have a livelihood. Gee, thanks! To survive in the cradle of free expression, Israelis will have to betray their own people. This is a natural development from the implicit -- and sometimes explicitly stated -- assumption that has been coursing through British intellectual circles in the current hate-fest against Israel, that only those British Jews who denounce Israel's policies can be considered to be British; anyone who supports Israel is guilty of 'dual loyalty'.

This requirement to denounce Israel as the price of continued social acceptance is doubly disgusting. First, it is a profound betrayal of the cardinal principle of intellectual endeavour, which is freedom of speech and debate. And second, it is a monstrous inversion of right and wrong, victim and victimiser which turns Israel, the victim of unbroken annihilatory Arab terror for the past half century, into the regional bully while sanitising Palestinian aggression. Yes, the Palestinians have suffered hardship and restrictions in the last few years; but that is because they have been engaged in a murderous war against Israel which has deliberately targeted innocent civilians and against which Israel, like any other country, has had to defend itself. Before this current intifada started, the Palestinians were living under Palestinian governance. If they genuinely foreswore their war of extermination against Israel, there would be no barrier to their quest for self-government and prosperity. To pretend that their difficulties are caused by the victims of their own aggression is simply Orwellian double-speak.

An unnamed academic defends the boycott in the Guardian story 'as a means of registering my protest against Israelis' lack of respect for human rights and continuing illegal occupation of Palestinian land.' This parrot mindlessly repeats the mantra of the left about the 'illegal occupation' in apparent ignorance of the fact that a) the occupation is perfectly legal under international law as the defensive measure against attack that it was; b) that it is not 'Palestinian land' at all but territory that belonged to the British colonial power until it was illegally occupied by Jordan and Egypt and is now -- since they have washed their hands of it -- most fairly to be described as no-man's land; and c) that parts of these territories, such as Hebron, are the sites of Jewish settlement of great antiquity, predating the Arab colonisation by several centuries but where Jews were massacred and driven out by Arab occupiers. If we're talking colonisation here, the Jews of Palestine were the historic victims.

What is notable about the AUT motion is that it reflects the truly shocking ignorance of the region's history and current political reality, the resulting deep gullibility to propaganda based on lies, and the consequent vicious double standards and prejudice that now characterise British received opinion on the subject of Israel. Yet these are our university teachers, the very people responsible for shaping the assumptions of a society, whose own profound ignorance, prejudice and twisted morality are now on such conspicuous display.

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Another Oslo deja-vu moment: Palestinians ask Israel for free weapons

Amazing how history repeats itself!

Senior officials in the Palestinian Authority have presented a plan to American and Israeli officials for coordinating the disengagement from the Gaza Strip and northern West Bank.

A source involved in the contacts told Haaretz on Wednesday that the plan includes coordinating the handover of overall security responsibility in the areas the Israel Defense Forces leaves to the PA's National Security force; a complete cease-fire during the evacuation process; and a Palestinian commitment to take all necessary steps to prevent shooting at Israeli targets outside the Strip.

However, the Palestinians condition the plan on Israel agreement to it and on Israeli help in equipping the Gazan security forces with weapons and other equipment necessary for upholding law and order in Gaza. They say that during the conflict with the Israelis over the last four years, the PA security services lost their combat capabilities and that the armed organizations have far more weapons than the forces under the authority of the PA.

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Noble Iraqi terrorists are thugs who kill for $50

The true mind of a terrorist revealed.

Yet most of the world still regards Palestinian thugs as somehow more noble than their like-minded Iraqi counterparts.

Iraq's hottest new television program is a reality show. But the players are not there by choice. And they don't win big bucks, a new spouse or a dream job.

Instead, all the characters on "Terrorism in the Hands of Justice" are captured suspected insurgents. And for more than a month, they have been riveting viewers with tales of how they killed, kidnapped, raped or beheaded other Iraqis, usually for a few hundred dollars per victim.

Seated before an Iraqi flag, the dejected and cowed prisoners answer questions from an off-camera inquisitor who mocks their behavior. Some sport bruised faces and black eyes. Far from appearing to be confident heroes battling U.S. occupation, they come across as gangsters.

"I watch the show every night, and I wait for it patiently, because it is very revealing," said Abdul Kareem Abdulla, 42, a Baghdad shop owner. "For the first time, we saw those who claim to be jihadists as simple $50 murderers who would do everything in the name of Islam. Our religion is too lofty, noble and humane to have such thugs and killers. I wish they would hang them now, and in the same place where they did their crimes. They should never be given any mercy."

Broadcast on al-Iraqiya, the state-run network set up by the U.S. occupation authority in 2003, "Terrorism in the Hands of Justice" has become one of most effective arrows in the government's counterinsurgency propaganda quiver.

"It has shown the Iraqi people the reality of those insurgents, [that] they are criminals, killers, murderers, thieves," Interior Minister Falah Naqib said last week.

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US Senate to give Palestinians $200 million - without conditions

Unbelievable. Time to write to your senator.

The Senate will restore a presidential waiver to $200 million in fast-track aid for the Palestinians, meaning the money will be spent without conditions.

The removal of the presidential waiver last month by the U.S. House of Representatives would have made it much harder for President Bush to send funds directly to the Palestinian Authority. JTA has learned that the Senate Appropriations Committee will restore the waiver Wednesday when it refers the request to the full Senate. It will keep in place nonbinding language urging the president to assign the money to projects run by nongovernmental organizations, and requiring two spending reviews in the next six months, but restoring the waiver removes any conditions on the aid.

Bush wants to fast-track the aid to facilitate Palestinian sovereignty after Israel pulls out of the Gaza Strip and part of the West Bank this July.

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Sharon's folly, continued

I know I've covered this before, but the follies of "disengagement" keep adding up and the Bulldozer keeps going ahead.

Sharon says (and maybe thinks) that Bush will support him in keeping Jewish settlements in Judea and Samaria, at least near Jerusalem (another possible retreat for Sharon?) He is apparently hoping that by trading Gaza he can strengthen Israel's hold on the WB.

But Bush is making no such commitment, and anyway the clock is running out on his presidency. Who says the next President will be as sympathetic to Israel as W is?

More troubling is that Israel is not only preparing for rocket attacks on Ashkelon after the Gaza withdrawal - they are expecting it!

And of course Hamas is considering the withdrawal a victory for the intifada and evidence of Jewish weakness.

There are very few reasons being given for this bizarre plan besides those that involve lots of wishful thinking. It didn't work during Oslo and one had to ask why, exactly, people think it is a good idea now to give up the most precious commodity in the Middle East while asking for nothing in return.

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Abbas solves terrorist problem!

Abbas, being the brilliant head-of-pseudo-state that he is, decided that he can get rid of all wanted Palestinian terrorists by just hiring them as trusted employees!

I mean, it isn't as if they've done anything that he disapproves of, right?

Notice also the fractured English in this press release from the Palestinian International Press Center.

GAZA, Palestine, April 4,2005 (IPC+Agencies)---Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) issued Sunday a decree to set up two committees in charge of solving the issue of the wanted people by Israel by recruiting them in the PNA institutions

According the local Al Ayam daily newspaper, the decree gave the committees of officials in Gaza Strip and the West Bank two weeks to resolve the issue of the wanted people.

The statement by presidnet office siad that the wenated people will be no more liable to amy attack or chase up by the israelis.

The president moved to contain the chaotic and lawlessness and place all the security service in the west bank in high alert staring in late Saturday evening.

On the other hand, the interior minister Nasser Yousef announced the appointment of an acting interim national security chief Nidal el-Assouri, a veteran security agent, a day after the former commander Hajj Ismail had quit over the Ramallah incident.

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Shin Bet foils Museum attack

One wonders how much of the current "calm" is from Palestinians really agreeing to halt attacks and how much is from the excellent work of Israeli intelligence.

Security authorities have foiled a plan in February to stage a terror attack at the Armored Corps Museum at Latrun, near the Tel Aviv-Jerusalem Highway.

The story was cleared for publication Monday.

The General Security Service says a Popular Front cell planned to dispatch two suicide bombers and a car bomb to the busy tourist site.

Yousef George Daoud, 27, was arrested in February on suspicion of masterminding the plot, which also included Nadel Mahmed Yousef Abu Alma and Fahmi Basil Avodi, who were detained in January.

Under investigation, the trio admitted they were planning the attack. They picked the site because one of the terrorists was familiar with the area from a former job at the nearby Trappist Monastery.

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US court upholds lawsuit against Hamas; says Palestine is not a state

The United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit rejected the Palestinian Authority's claim that it enjoyed sovereign immunity and upheld a lower court ruling ordering it to pay $116 million to the estate of Hamas terror victim Yaron Ungar.

"The defendants [The PA and the PLO] argue that the state of Palestine exists," wrote the court, "that they constitute core elements of the state and that therefore they are immune from suit. This argument has a quicksilver quality. It is hard to pin down exactly when or how the defendants assert that Palestine achieved statehood...

"We recognize that the status of the Palestinian territories is in many ways sui generis (exceptional). Here, however, the defendants have not carried their burden of showing that Palestine satisfied the requirements for statehood under the applicable principles of international law at any time."

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Hamas increases range, accuracy of Kassams

I'm sure that they are testing the rockets to make sure that they don't accidentally hit schools or synagogues. Those Hamas thugs are so considerate!

Palestinians are performing testing of the Kassam off the coast of the Gaza Strip with the aim of improving the range and accuracy of the rocket, an IDF Operations Branch official told the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee on Monday.

According to Brig.-Gen. Gadi Shamni, head of the IDF operations department and former division commander of the Gaza Strip, the missiles' range has been increased to 9 km. The previous range reported to the committee has been 7 km. He said testing was also being carried out within the strip.

Shamni said the accuracy of the rockets was also being checked by boats deployed to check the nautical landing sites.

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Prime violators hold seats on U.N. rights panel

Freedom House is a human rights organization that actually gets it.

The world's most repressive countries hold more than a quarter of the seats in the Geneva-based U.N. Human Rights Commission and their presence has subverted the panel's mandate, a respected watchdog group reported yesterday.
In its annual report on the world's biggest human-rights abusers, Freedom House lists 18 countries as the 'worst of the worst regimes' and notes that six of them -- China, Cuba, Eritrea, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, and Zimbabwe -- are members of the commission.

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Chief rabbi declares Bnei Menashe from India to be descended from ancient Israelites

Chief Rabbi Shlomo Amar decided on Wednesday to recognize the members of India's Bnei Menashe community as descendants of the ancient Israelites.
Amar also decided to dispatch a team of rabbinical judges to India to convert the community members to Orthodox Jews. Such a conversion will enable their immigration to Israel under the Law of Return, without requiring the Interior Ministry's authorization.

The International Fellowship of Christians & Jews (IFCJ), a group that raises money among evangelical Christians for Jewish causes, has undertaken to finance the process of converting the Bnei Menashe community and bringing them to Israel.

The Bnei Menashe community consists of close to 7,000 members of the Kuki-Chin-Mizo tribe, which lives in northeast India near the border of Myanmar (formally Burma). For generations they kept Jewish traditions, claiming to be descended from the tribe of Menashe, one of the ten lost Israeli tribes that were exiled by the Assyrians in the eighth century B.C.E. and have since disappeared.

At the beginning of the 20th century, the tribe's members converted to Christianity, but about 30 years ago, some of the community began moving back to Judaism and set themselves apart from the rest of the tribe.

A number of researchers who visited the group over the years got the impression that their traditions are authentically Israelite in origin.

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Everyone knows disengagement won't help, no one wants to stop it

Yediot Acharonot (Hebrew) reports:

Right after the Gaza disengagement, according to military assessments, the cessation of terrorist attacks will end.
The theater of operations will be Judea and Samaria.
The threat will entail attacks on major roads, military camps, and settlements.
The main threat will come from mortar and Kassam rocket attacks on Route 6 (Trans-Israel Highway) and on the cities of the coastal plain.
The terrorist organizations have started to order rockets, while Israeli security services unite in an attempt to block the smuggling.

Meanwhile, Ha'aretz reports that the Great White Holocaust-Denying Hope is losing power by the day:

Abbas' ongoing conflict with his prime minister, Ahmed Qureia - first over the composition of the cabinet, and recently over Qureia's aggressive statements against coordinating the disengagement from Gaza with Israel - show that contempt for Abbas' authority has even reached the ranks of the PA.

On Wednesday night, the PA security services did conduct patrols of Ramallah, on Abbas' orders, but they refrained from clashing with or arresting the armed men - and yesterday, the PA agreed that these men would also not be arrested or interfered with in the future. When some of these men later strode boldly through the Muqata's front door, no one laid a finger on them.

Almost three months after taking office, it has become clear that Abbas' influence over the armed men, the security services and the leaders of Fatah's institutions is virtually nonexistent. The gap between his exalted international standing and his ability to impose his authority at home is growing, and it is not clear what will remain of his promises to reform the PA and provide personal security to ordinary Palestinians.

And ABC points out that Abbas' tough words don't even last a day:

Palestinian officials Thursday backed away from a pledge to crack down on gunmen who shot up Mahmoud Abbas' office building, underlining the difficulties authorities face in restoring order in the chaotic West Bank.

The Palestinian leader was in the building but unhurt in the gunfire late Wednesday. He ordered his forces to go after the gunmen, who security officials said had "crossed a red line" by attacking the seat of government. But in the light of day, officials adopted a conciliatory line, and one even admitted they feared coming under armed attack themselves.

Under a compromise, the gunmen will be allowed to rejoin their former units in the security forces.

That "red line" sure moves quick in Ramallah.

So it appears that Israel and the US are relying on a weak, lying terror-supporting weasel to enforce his worthless agreements. It appears that Hamas will (or has) taken over Gaza completely, and has plans to take over the PLO, so the homes built by Israelis who sacrificed so much to build on uninhabited land will end up being used by those who are sworn to kill them.

Is there any advantage to "disengagement"? In real terms, it is unclear. Israel is certainly gaining diplomatically in trying to better relations with other Arab countries. It does not appear to be treated any better in the European press, ironically. But most of the advantages are vapor - Israel is hoping that it will have a stronger hold on the West Bank communities, Israel is hoping that major attacks stay low for a few months after disengagement (no one is realistically thinking that the violence will not return within a couple of years), Israel is hoping that Egypt will help stop smuggling of weapons into Gaza, Israel is hoping that Kassam rockets won't pour into Negev towns, Israel is hoping that Palestinians will reduce their endemic hatred of having Jews owning land in the Middle East.

And the downside of giving in to terror is significant.

Sounds a lot like Oslo, when Israel placed its trust in Arafat. And even then, Israel promised its citizens that if Arafat wouldn't live up to his agreements then Israel would re-occupy. In exchange for empty promises, Israel ended up giving up its legal claim to the territories, implicitly agreeing with the world's assessment of Israel as land thief, not as a legitimate claimant to Judea, Samaria and Gaza. And then as now, Israel trusted an American president (who is personally very fond of the Jewish state) to look out for her interests and back her up if she has to defend herself.

But in a world of geopolitics, it is a bit naive to put your faith in personalities rather than clear, enforceable, bilateral agreements in which the penalty for non-compliance is clear and agreed as well.

It does appear that the current Israeli government has not learned the lessons of Oslo well enough. It does not take a prophet to predict that disaster is looming; all we can hope at this point is that it is only a small disaster or that a miracle occurs.

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Antisemitic nutcase professor in North Carolina

You have to check out this home page. It's got it all...USS Liberty, Rachel Corrie, the fake "We Control America" quote, bizarre conspiracy theories concerning Israel, ISM links, links to Al Jazeera, and much, much more. Not to mention a link to an Introduction to Islam from a website that supports suicide terror.

This is the type of idiot that is teaching at US colleges.

And, as LGF reports, her final exam reeks of bias. Can you imagine a student passing the course if he or she disagrees with this moron's ridiculous conspiracy-minded premises?

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Dubai offended by picture of Jewish kids in school textbook

Once again, we'll see how long it takes NGOs to condemn the bigotry in Dubai....

DUBAI — Education authorities here have promised to review a book taught in an international private school that features a photograph of two Jewish children sporting plaited hair and yarmulke.

Dr Obaid Butti Al Mohiri, the Director of Curriculums Centre at the Ministry of Education, said he would order the withdrawal of the book for primary Class I of the Dubai International School if the complaints raised were found genuine.

Several teachers of the school telephoned Khaleej Times, complaining against the picture, captioned ‘We play together; we stick together’, featured in the book Friends Forever. The teachers said that of all the pictures in the book, the students reacted sharply to only this picture.[...]

When contacted, Dr Mohiri expressed anger that the matter was brought to him. “What should we do when we do not have enough staff to review textbooks in more than 400 schools countrywide?”

Hat tip to Dave at Israellycool.

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Internal Columbia investigation clears Columbia profs; blames Zionist students. NY Times colludes in whitewash.

Isn't it nice to be able to handpick the people who are going to investigate you?

Update: Noted liberal columnist Nat Hentoff wrote an excellent article about the bias that the investigating committee had.

Columbia University, after a months-long investigation, has determined that only a small fraction of complaints from Jewish students against anti-Israel professors constituted intimidation.

The faculty committee appointed by Columbia's president, Lee Bollinger, to investigate a series of student allegations against professors in the Middle Eastern studies department issued a report yesterday largely clearing the accused scholars of blame. At the same time, committee members described a polarized classroom environment in which pro-Israel students disturbed lectures and seminars with inappropriate interruptions.

In an effort to manage favorable coverage of its investigation into the complaints, the university disclosed a summary of the committee's report only to the Columbia Spectator, the campus newspaper, and the New York Times. Those newspapers, sources indicated to The New York Sun last night, made an agreement with the central administration that they would not speak to the students who made the complaints against the professors.

One of the incidents not mentioned by the report involves assistant professor Joseph Massad, who allegedly told a class that it was Israelis - not Germans or Palestinians - who shot to death the Israeli Olympic athletes in the 1972 Munich Massacre, according to one of Mr. Massad's former students.

Mr. Massad's alleged interpretation of events is sharply contradicted by historians, who say the 11 Olympic athletes were murdered by their Palestinian hostage-takers in a botched rescue operation conducted by German authorities. Historians have debated whether some of the athletes died in the crossfire between German police and the kidnappers, but the notion that the athletes were killed by Israeli gunfire has not been given credence.

The committee gently criticized Mr. Massad in its report for purportedly threatening to expel a female Jewish student, Deena Shanker, from his classroom in 2002 when she asked him whether the Israeli military warned Palestinian Arab civilians of the West Bank before launching military strikes there. "That provoked him to start screaming, 'If you're going to deny the atrocities being committed against the Palestinians then you could leave the class,'" Ms. Shanker told the Sun last fall.

Mr. Massad has denied threatening the student, whose account of the incident has been backed by at least one another student, and said he treats his students fairly and with respect.

The committee said Mr. Massad had no real intention of expelling Ms. Shanker from the class, but he lost his temper and "exceeded commonly accepted bounds by conveying that her question merited harsh public criticism."

The committee, however, did not come to a conclusion on guilt in a separate incident involving Mr. Massad. In an incident that occurred in spring 2002, Mr. Massad is alleged to have refused to answer a question posted by a student, Tomy Schoenfeld, at an on-campus lecture until the student, an Israeli army veteran, told the professor how many Palestinians he killed.

The committee reported that although another student corroborated the incident, "It is conceivable that Professor Massad did not know that Mr. Schoenfeld was a student," and said the incident seemed to "fall into a challenging grey zone."

The committee did not investigate issues of professorial bias in the classroom, stating that it "judged that our charge did not encompass the examination of such matters."

On the issue of anti-Semitism, the committee concluded: "We found no evidence of any statements made by the faculty that could reasonably be construed as anti-Semitic. Professor Massad, for one, has been categorical in his classes concerning the unacceptability of anti-semitic views."

The committee made no mention of an article that an Iranian professor at Columbia, Hamid Dabashi wrote for an Egyptian newspaper, Al-Ahram, last fall in which he wrote that Israelis suffer from "a vulgarity of character that is bone-deep and structural to the skeletal vertebrae of its culture."

In an admonishment to students, the committee stated, "There is a thin line between participating fully and enthusiastically in a discussion, and intervening in a fashion which significantly disrupts the class."

The panel also essentially cleared the professors who on April 17, 2002, canceled classes on the day of an anti-Israel rally on campus and encouraged students to attend the demonstration.

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Zionist Cardinal

After years of hearing pro-Palestinian Vatican rhetoric, this is refreshing.

This speech probably dooms his papal chances, but it is still nice to see.

A cardinal considered a candidate to succeed Pope John Paul II delivered a strong message in favor of Jewish settlement in the Holy Land on Wednesday night, rejecting the claim that European Christians' support for the State of Israel is based on Holocaust guilt and saying that all Christians should affirm Zionism as a biblical imperative for the Jewish people.

Archbishop of Vienna Cardinal Christoph Schoenborn, part of a visiting Austrian delegation, made the remarks in an address at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem on the topic of 'God's chosen land.'

After asking, 'What does Eretz Yisrael [the Land of Israel] mean to us,' Schoenborn answered by stressing the doctrinal importance to Christians of not only recognizing Jews' connection to the land, but also ensuring that Christian identification with the Jewish Bible not lead to a 'usurpation' of Jewish uniqueness.

'Only once in human history did God take a country as an inheritance and give it to His chosen people,' Schoenborn said, adding that Pope John Paul II had himself declared the biblical commandment for Jews to live in Israel an everlasting covenant that remained valid today. Christians, Schoenborn said, should rejoice in the return of Jews to the Holy Land as the fulfillment of biblical prophecy.

A Palestinian priest challenged the cardinal on that point, asking how he could preach to his Palestinian congregation that the establishment of the modern Jewish state was not a 'catastrophe,' as they called it, or the result of European powers' guilty conscience following World War II.

Schoenborn responded by saying that "I am myself a refugee" – at the end of World War II, when he was an infant, Schoenborn's parents fled to Austria from Czechoslovakia – and that he felt pained at the unrecognized injustice that thousands of Czechs had suffered. However, he said, both that case and the Arab-Israeli conflict were matters of international law, whereas the chosenness of the Jewish people and their inheritance in the Holy Land were matters of faith that date back to the Bible itself.

Schoenborn also said he hoped the conflict here would be resolved in accordance with international law, and with respect to justice for the Palestinian people. "We are all longing for that solution," he said. "Yet I am not naive. Conflicts are part of [both sides'] love of the land, and always have been... There is no simple solution."

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What are Islamic schools teaching? (Daniel Pipes)

March 29, 2005
http://www.danielpipes.org/article/2489

"Shocked" is how Aisha Sherazi, principal of the Abraar Islamic school in Ottawa, described the reaction of the school's administration and board on learning last week that two of its teachers had incited hatred of Jews.

And "shocked" was how Mumtaz Akhtar, president of the Muslim-Community Council of Ottawa-Gatineau, described his own reaction to the front-page news about the Abraar school.

But they may have been the only two persons on the planet to be "shocked" to learn that teachers at an Islamic school are promoting anti-Semitism or other aspects of the Islamist agenda. The fact is, inquiries into Islamic schools repeatedly discover just such a radical Islamic outlook. Some examples:

• New York City: An investigation by the New York Daily News in 2003 found that books used in the city's Muslim schools "are rife with inaccuracies, sweeping condemnations of Jews and Christians, and triumphalist declarations of Islam's supremacy."

• Los Angeles: The Omar Ibn Khattab Foundation donated 300 Korans (titled The Meaning of the Holy Quran) to the city school district in 2001 that within months had to be pulled from school libraries because of its anti-Semitic commentaries. One footnote reads: "The Jews in their arrogance claimed that all wisdom and all knowledge of Allah was enclosed in their hearts. … Their claim was not only arrogance but blasphemy."

• Ajax, Ontario, 50 kilometers east of Toronto: The Institute of Islamic Learning is a Canadian emulation of the extremist Deobandi madrassahs of Pakistan. It focuses exclusively on religious topics, has students memorize the Koran, demands total segregation from the Canadian milieu, and requires complete gender separation. Former students complained about the school's cult-like devotion to its head, Abdul Majid Khan, and complained that it is a "twisted religion."

Then there are four leading Islamic schools in the Washington, D.C. area:

• The Muslim Community School in Potomac, Md., imbues in its students a sense of alienation from their own country. Seventh-grader Miriam told a Washington Post reporter in 2001, "Being American is just being born in this country." Eighth-grader Ibrahim announced that "Being an American means nothing to me."

• A textbook used at the Islamic Saudi Academy of Alexandria, Va., in 2004, authored and published by the Saudi Ministry of Education, teaches first graders that "all religions, other than Islam, are false, including that of the Jews [and] Christians." An ISA class valedictorian, Ahmed Omar Abu Ali, was recently indicted for plotting to assassinate President Bush.

• The U.S. government revoked the visas in 2004 of sixteen people affiliated with the Institute for Islamic and Arabic Sciences in America, of Fairfax, Va. In the words of the Washington Post, "That decision followed accusations that the institute, a satellite campus of al-Imam Muhammad Ibn Saud Islamic University in Riyadh, was promoting a brand of Islam that critics say is intolerant of other strains of the religion as well as Christianity and Judaism." In addition, the IIASA is under investigation for ties to terrorism.

• The Graduate School of Islamic Social Sciences of Ashburn, Va., referred to as a "purported" educational institution in an affidavit justifying a raid on the school, had its financial records seized in 2002 on suspicions of links to terrorism.

Nor are schools the exception among Islamic institutions in North America. A recent study by Freedom House found a parallel problem of venomous anti-Jewish and anti-Christian materials in U.S. mosques. The most prominent American Muslim organizations, especially the Council on American-Islamic Relations, spew antisemitism and host a neo-Nazi. The same applies in Canada, where the head of the Canadian Islamic Congress, Mohamed Elmasry, publicly endorsed the murder of all Israelis over the age of eighteen.

So long as Muslim leaders simply declare themselves, in the spirit of Capt. Renault in the movie Casablanca "shocked, shocked" whenever news of Islamist supremacism leaks out, this cancer will continue unabated. The Islamic schools, the mosques, and other Muslim organizations like CAIR and CIC will continue their cat-and-mouse game so long as it works.

It won't work only when outside pressure is brought to bear on them by politicians, journalists, researchers, moderate Muslims, and others. They must state clearly and frequently the unacceptability of Islamist venom. Only then will today's fraudulent "shocked" reaction finally become sincere.

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Major Arab vandalism on Temple Mount

The word "Allah" in Arabic hewed into the eastern wall of the Temple Mount

Once again, an egregious example of intolerance from Islam. This story is buried because it only happened to a Jewish holy site - imagine the world outrage if a similar incident happened in Mecca? Wars have been fought over less.

Notice also the absence of any response from the Arab world, the Waqf, and the Palestinian Authority.

The double standard is alive and well, and it is time for Jews to take control over Jewish holy sites. The Waqf has shown itself to be irresponsible time and time again, and Jews will protect Muslim holy sites fat better than any Muslim will protect Jewish holy sites. Some things are more important than the mythical "peace process", and when Jews willingly give up their holiest sites to the control of those who want to destroy them, they are giving up their major claim to the land of Israel.

The word "Allah" in Arabic was found hewn into the eastern wall of Jerusalem's Temple Mount, in one of the worst acts of vandalism at the history-rich site in the last several years, archaeologists and eyewitnesses said Wednesday.

The vandalism was discovered late Tuesday night on a half-meter section of the 2,000 year old wall, which is undergoing repair by a team of Jordanian engineers.

Jerusalem police spokesman Shmuel Ben-Ruby said that police suspect that one of the Arab workers repairing the wall was behind the vandalism, adding that police had opened an investigation into the incident.

"This vandalism, coupled with Israel's lack of archaeological supervision at Judaism's holiest site is simply lawlessness of the first order on the part of the Government," said Temple Mount expert and Hebrew University archaeologist Dr. Eilat Mazar.

Mazar's non-partisan 'Committee Against the Destruction of Antiquities on the Temple Mount,' which has been decrying the lack of archaeological supervision at the site for five years now, launched a complaint with police against the vandalism, which
police said would be removed by mid-morning.

Israel's Antiquities Authority had no immediate comment Wednesday.

According to decades-old arrangements in place at the site, Israel maintains overall security control of the Temple Mount while the Wakf or Islamic Trust is in charge of the day-to-day maintenance of the compound.

In the late 1990's, following the construction of an underground mosque at the site, Islamic Wakf officials dumped more than 12,000 tons of earth, with history-rich artifacts, at a garbage dump outside the Old City, an action which Israeli archaeologists called "an unprecedented archaeological crime."

In contravention of the law, Israeli archaeologists from the Antiquities Authority have not been carrying out supervision for more than four years now at the bitterly contested site due to their concern about renewed Palestinian violence.

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Condoleezza Clinton? (The New York Sun)

For an administration that bills itself as having a groundbreaking new doctrine when it comes to the Middle East, the Bush administration is starting to look a bit too close for our taste to the Clinton administration, at least on the question of Israel's rights in Jerusalem. Reading Secretary of State Rice's comments in an interview Thursday with the Los Angeles Times, we were hard-pressed to tell if it was Ms. Rice or President Clinton.

Here is Ms. Rice, commenting on Israel's plans to add 3,500 housing units in Maale Adumim, a suburb that is four and a half miles east of Jerusalem: "We've noted our concern to the Israelis," she said. "We will continue to note that this is at odds with the - of American policy." She said of Israel's reply to the concerns: "anything that raises the prospect that you're going to have an expansion of settlements in this way, particularly in a sensitive area, is not really a satisfactory response." And here is President Clinton, answering a question in 1997 about Israel's plans to build in the Har Homa area of Jerusalem: "I would have preferred the decision not have been made, because I don't think it builds confidence, I think it builds mistrust. And I wish that it had not been made."

Israel is planning to build houses in a suburb of its capital, a capital that, according to the Jerusalem Embassy Act passed by Congress in 1995 by a vote of 93 to 5 in the Senate and 347 to 37 in the House, "should be recognized as the capital of the State of Israel" and "should remain an undivided city." This decision to build houses in a suburb of the capital is deemed not satisfactory by Ms. Rice. It is deemed by the editorialists of the New York Times to be "a slap in the face of the new Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas" and evidence that "Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of Israel doesn't quite get it yet." The Washington Post used an entire editorial of its own over the weekend to call on President Bush to press Mr. Sharon to freeze the plan.

Meanwhile, the Palestinian Arabs engage in genuine outrage after genuine outrage with hardly a peep out of Ms. Rice or the liberal editorial writers. Mr. Abbas has failed in his obligation to dismantle the terrorist infrastructure. Abu Musab, a leader of the Al Aksa Martyrs Brigade, a Palestinian Arab terrorist group, told the Israeli newspaper Yediot Ahronot, "What's happening now isn't considered a calm. It's merely a warrior's rest." The Palestinians were recently caught smuggling anti-aircraft missiles into Gaza.

Mr. Abbas has announced plans to release from prison Ahmed Saadat and Fuad Shubaki. Mr. Saadat is the leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which our State Department lists as a terrorist group responsible for the assassination in 2001 of Israel's tourism minister and for airline hijackings that have killed at least 20 American citizens. Mr. Shubaki is an aide to Yasser Arafat who documents show made the deal to buy the arms from Iran that Arafat was smuggling in aboard the ship the Karine-A. Mr. Abbas's response when asked by Time magazine who was responsible for the February 25 suicide bombing that killed five Israelis in Tel Aviv: "If you ask me who is responsible, the Israelis are responsible." The Palestinian Authority-controlled press praised the suicide bomber as a martyr.

It is nothing less than warped to look at this situation and see Israeli home-building as the unsatisfactory part of it. There is no question where the logic leads. As Norman Podhoretz writes in the April number of Commentary, the whole world "takes as axiomatic the Arab position that a Palestinian state must be judenrein." Therefore, the 30,000 current residents of Maale Adumim "face the prospect of being dragged out of their homes by the Israeli army and packed off to 'Israel proper.' " As Mr. Podhoretz paraphrases his Israeli daughter telling him indignantly, if any such thing "were to be done to Palestinians, or to anyone else, it would be called 'transfer' or 'ethnic cleansing' and would be condemned as a crime against humanity. But with Jews as the victims, it is being transmuted by a malignant political alchemy into nothing less than an act of justice." Such is the Arab position. Alas, the Bush administration and Ms. Rice, like the Democratic administration that preceded them, do not yet appear to have fully broken free of it.

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Our friends the Saudis

Waiting for the loud denunciations of the Saudis from Human Rights Watch, the UN, the New York Times editorialists....

Saudi religious police have destroyed a clandestine makeshift Hindu temple in an old district of Riyadh and deported three worshippers found there, a newspaper reported yesterday.
Members of the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, or religious police, on Thursday stumbled across a room converted into a temple while raiding a number of apartments suspected of being used to manufacture alcohol and distribute pornographic videos, pan-Arab Al-Hayat said.
"They were surprised to find that one room had been converted into a Hindu temple," the newspaper said.
A caretaker who was found in the worshiping area ignored the religious police orders to stop performing his religious rituals, the paper added.
He was deported along with two other men who arrived on the scene to worship.
All forms of non-Muslim worship are banned in ultraconservative Saudi Arabia, which is home to Islam's holiest shrines.

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Fatah: 'Don’t believe the Jews’

Notice this isn't Hamas or Islamic Jihad talking - it is a member of Abbas' own party, openly advocating terror and Jew-hatred.

But we know that Abbas will crack down on the terrorists in his own organization, right? If we close our eyes and wish real hard, Palestinians will be very happy about disengagement and quietly build a new Hong Kong in Gaza, asking the Israelis to move in and help them build an infrastructure. Everything will be great as long as Israel keeps acting like she needs to give Palestinian terrorists more and more and more to appease them.

And remember, when right-wing Israelis say that the current calm is false, they are hate-mongering; when Palestinians say it; they are just posturing. At no point must you believe it. And when fighting breaks out again, it will be because of an Israeli provocation, and have nothing to do with people like Abu Musab.

GAZA - The current lull in fighting is a false calm, used by terrorists to gather strength ahead of the next round of violence, senior al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades figure Abu-Musab told Ynet Saturday.

“What’s happening now isn’t considered a calm. It’s merely a warrior’s rest,” he says. “When the confrontation renews, we’ll be back with methods and tools never before seen.”

Moreover, the current lull in violence does not signal a genuine chance for peace, as Jews should not be believed, Abu-Musab says.

“In our religion, in the Koran, it says you should not believe the Jews,” he says. “The Jews won’t accept us until we join them, their religion, and until we stop demanding our rights.”

Abu-Musab, who is the Brigades commander in the northern Gaza Strip, also warns that talk by Jewish far right activists regarding attacks on the al-Aqsa mosque, as well settlement expansion, ensure the current lull would not last long.

“It must be clear, every attack or attempt to target al-Aqsa means not only the end of the calm, but a renewed, much more serious eruption (of violence,)” he says."

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Palestinians smuggling anti-aircraft missiles from Egypt

It's beginning to sound alot like Oslo!

Israel's defense minister said Sunday that Palestinian security agents recently smuggled anti-aircraft missiles into the Gaza Strip from Egypt, according to officials a development that would threaten a recent cease-fire between the two sides.

Defense Minister Shaul told a closed Cabinet meeting that Palestinian intelligence agents were involved in bringing the Strella missiles into Gaza through smuggling tunnels under the Egyptian border, participants in the meeting said.

'Last week, several Strellas were smuggled in by Palestinian military intelligence. If the Palestinians don't get a hold of the Strellas, we will,' Mofaz was quoted as saying.

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