Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Tuesday, August 17, 2004

5 Palestinians killed in IAF missile strike on Hamas house

Five Palestinians were killed shortly after midnight Wednesday when IAF helicopters fired a missile at the Gaza City house of a Hamas member.

Hospital officials said seven people were wounded, four critically. Palestinians said the house is in the Shajaiyeh neighborhood of Gaza City, a stronghold of Islamic militants, and belonged to Hamas member Ahmed Jabari. Residents said several men were in the first floor apartment at the time of the explosion.

Hospital officials said all the dead were adults. Two were Hamas members and another was with Islamic Jihad. The others were not immediately identified.

Dozens of Hamas members gathered at Gaza City's Shifa Hospital, where the dead and wounded were taken.

Many al-Qaeda camp graduates live freely in Canada

"A lot" of Canadians trained at al-Qaeda camps in Afghanistan and some still live freely in Canada, Abdurahman Khadr testified at a court hearing at which he revealed chilling new details about Canadian terror suspects and his father's ties to Osama bin Laden's training camps.

Mr. Khadr, a 21-year-old Toronto man who underwent weapons and explosives training at four camps in Afghanistan, said in testimony made public yesterday that he had given CIA agents the names of several Canadians who trained at camps such as Khalden.

"I know a lot of people that are living in the West and are living in Canada, and that live their everyday life now and are not under arrest or anything, that have been to Khalden," Mr. Khadr testified at a July 13 hearing in Montreal.

"I had a lot of friends that were Canadians that came to Afghanistan and went to training," Mr. Khadr said. "Some of them are dead now and some of them are back in Canada and some of them are under arrest."

His contention that graduates of the Afghan camps are living normal lives in Canada comes as U.S. officials are concerned that al-Qaeda might try to use Canada as a staging ground for a terrorist strike some time before November's presidential election.

How PLO suppresses the news (Jeff Jacoby)

How PLO suppresses the news
TWO DAYS after the liberation of Baghdad, a senior news executive at CNN disclosed that his network had for years been sanitizing its reports from Iraq. In an op-ed column titled "The news we kept to ourselves," Jordan Eason confessed that CNN routinely chose not to report on the atrocities committed by Saddam Hussein's regime. To have revealed the truth, he wrote, "would have jeopardized the lives of Iraqis, particularly those on our Baghdad staff."

Suppressing news by threatening reporters with violence or death is one of the dirty little secrets of Middle East journalism. In his 1989 memoir "From Beirut to Jerusalem," Thomas Friedman wrote that "physical intimidation" was a major impediment to honest reporting from Beirut during the years when southern Lebanon was in the grip of Yasser Arafat's PLO.

Arafat's "security forces have made more than 30 arrests of journalists and editors," the Columbia Journalism Review noted in 1996.

On Sept. 11, 2001, Americans were shocked by footage of Palestinians dancing in the streets to celebrate the terrorist attacks on the United States. But those scenes disappeared from the airwaves soon after -- not because they weren't newsworthy, but because the Palestinian Authority gave orders to suppress them.

An Associated Press cameraman was summoned to a PA security office and warned not to release the material he had filmed. A top aide to Arafat told the AP's Jerusalem bureau that if the footage were aired, "we cannot guarantee the life" of the cameraman. Other news outlets were likewise ordered not to use any images of the 9/11 revelry. Most of them caved, and the images dried up.

In June, Abu Toameh reported in The Jerusalem Post that the Al Aksa Martyrs Brigade, an armed wing of the PLO's Fatah faction, admitted responsibility for a beating that left an Agence France Press photographer with two broken arms. In July, the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate -- an Arafat front group -- warned that any reporter caught covering clashes between rival groups in Gaza would be punished severely. Just last week, armed gunmen threatened to attack journalists working for Arab satellite stations unless they stopped covering the turmoil in the Palestinian Authority.

Israel develops Web scanner that can detect terror content

Engineering faculty researchers at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev reported yesterday that they have developed a system that can identify 95 percent of Internet pages with terrorism-related content.
The experimental system, which is being developed to detect information regarding terror activity automatically, was designed by Dr. Mark Last of the Department of Systems Information Engineering at BGU, and Prof. Abraham Kandel of the National Institute for Systems Test and Productivity, in the United States.

The system is based on the recognition of patterns in texts with terror content, based on examples from existing Internet sites. It uses these patterns to identify 'hits' by surfers on other sites with similar characteristics, in order to locate users affiliated with terror organizations and new sites set up by terrorist elements, among other things.

According to Last, the development has great importance in view of the considerable use of the Internet in coordinating and orchestrating terror acts.

'The lack of ability to enforce limitations on Internet users allows terror organizations to set up Internet sites that spread incitement, raise money in support of terror and find new supporters for their causes,' Last said."

Arab states, Israel to attend UN forum on nuclear-free zone

The UN nuclear agency will next year host a conference, including Israel and Arab states, to discuss steps to make the Middle East into a zone free of nuclear weapons, the head of the UN watchdog said Sunday.
As Israel is the only Middle Eastern country believed to have nuclear weapons, the talks would effectively boil down to what the Israeli government would require to abandon the nuclear option. Israel has never confirmed nor denied having the nuclear bomb.

Speaking after talks with Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohamed ElBaradei, said the conference would be held in January and representatives of regional states and the UN Security Council would attend.

'The agency will hold a forum, in which Israel, Arab countries and Middle Eastern countries, will participate,' ElBaradei told reporters. 'This would be the first opportunity to start a dialogue about the conditions and steps that should be needed to establish a nuclear free zone in the Middle East.'

ElBaradei said that during his visit to Israel last month, the Israeli government repeatedly raised concerns about Iran's own nuclear program.
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Israeli court expels ISM pro-terror activist

The Tel Aviv District Court ordered a pro-Palestinian American activist deported from the country Monday, the latest move against a foreign group opposing Israeli military activity in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

A Tel Aviv District Court judge ordered Adam Wilson, a 28-year-old union organizer from New Orleans, Louisiana, to leave Israel by Tuesday.

Wilson is affiliated with the International Solidarity Movement, a Palestinian-sponsored group in the forefront of protests against IDF military operations and the security fence Israel is building.

ISM activists have sometimes disrupted IDF operations by placing themselves between soldiers and Palestinians.

World War IV, by Norman Podhoretz

World War IV: How It Started, What It Means, and Why We Have to Win by Norman Podhoretz

My hope is that telling the story from this perspective and in these ways will demonstrate that the road we have taken since 9/11 is the only safe course for us to follow. As we proceed along this course, questions will inevitably arise as to whether this or that move was necessary or right; and such questions will breed hesitations and even demands that we withdraw from the field. Some of this happened even in World War II, perhaps the most popular war the United States has ever fought, and much more of it in World War III (that is, the cold war); and now it is happening again, notably with respect to Iraq.

But as I will attempt to show, we are only in the very early stages of what promises to be a very long war, and Iraq is only the second front to have been opened in that war: the second scene, so to speak, of the first act of a five-act play. In World War II and then in World War III, we persisted in spite of impatience, discouragement, and opposition for as long as it took to win, and this is exactly what we have been called upon to do today in World War IV.

For today, no less than in those titanic conflicts, we are up against a truly malignant force in radical Islamism and in the states breeding, sheltering, or financing its terrorist armory. This new enemy has already attacked us on our own soil—a feat neither Nazi Germany nor Soviet Russia ever managed to pull off—and openly announces his intention to hit us again, only this time with weapons of infinitely greater and deadlier power than those used on 9/11. His objective is not merely to murder as many of us as possible and to conquer our land. Like the Nazis and Communists before him, he is dedicated to the destruction of everything good for which America stands. It is this, then, that (to paraphrase George W. Bush and a long string of his predecessors, Republican and Democratic alike) we in our turn, no less than the "greatest generation" of the 1940’s and its spiritual progeny of the 1950’s and after, have a responsibility to uphold and are privileged to defend.

Olympic, Judo committees avoid dealing with Iran

International sports committees will believe whatever makes their jobs easier.

Yahoo! Sports - Olympics - Judo: Tehran Defiant as Israel Urges Penalty: "Judo: Tehran Defiant as Israel Urges Penalty

ATHENS (Reuters) - Judo's governing body failed to reach a decision on Monday about punishing Iran for its refusal to compete against Israel at the Athens Olympics.

Israel's top judo official had said Iran should be penalized but Tehran remained defiant in the face of accusations that its political boycott was a challenge to Olympic ideals.

International Judo Federation spokesman Michel Brousse said an emergency IJF executive board meeting, following an inconclusive session on Sunday, had been postponed because some executive committee members were unable to attend.

He could not say when it might now take place.

But the IJF would set up a committee, he said, to examine why Iran's world champion Arash Miresmaeili failed to fight Israeli Ehud Vaks in the 66 kg first round on Sunday.

Before the meeting, Israeli judo chief Eddy Koaz said: 'I think the IJF must stand and say that we cannot involve politics in sport and I think also they must punish them, because it is not the first time that they (Iran) have done this.

'We cannot let them just do it because if they do it and nothing happens, other countries will do it again.'"

Ground Zero, August 2004 - combination of five pictures.

Arafat 'heaped cash' on cronies - Times of London

THE Palestinian leader, Yasser Arafat, has enriched a privileged inner circle of cronies and salted away billions of dollars in secret bank accounts, according to his former treasurer.

Jaweed Al-Ghussein, 74, described last week how, during his 12 years as chairman of the Palestine National Fund, the financial arm of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, he gave Arafat a monthly cheque for $10.25m — amounting to $123m (£67m) every year.

He was told the money was being spent on the Palestinian movement’s paramilitaries and on families who had lost “martyrs” in the struggle.

He was troubled by Arafat’s fondness for a system of patronage whereby he would hand bodyguards wads of cash from a briefcase he kept in his office and instruct them to take it to individuals he had decided to help. Each day the briefcase would be refilled from bank accounts that Arafat controlled.

Al-Ghussein, who resigned in protest at Arafat’s financial practices in 1996, has urged his former friend to let a new leader take over the Palestinian Authority.

The Key to Jihadist Ideology and Strategy

The Key to Jihadist Ideology and Strategy

When trying to explain the Islamists' global campaign of mass murder, both liberals and conservatives, despite their fierce mutual disagreements, make the same underlying mistake. People on the anti-war left believe that Al Qaeda attacked us because we're imperialist, or because we're racist, or because we don't do enough for Third-World hunger (yes, there are people who actually believe the hunger argument; most of them are Episcopalians). By contrast, many people on the pro-war right, especially President Bush, believe that the Islamists hate us for our freedoms, opportunities, and overall success as a society. In other words, the left believes that the Islamists hate us for our sins, and the right believes that they hate us for our virtues. Both sides commit the same narcissistic fallacy of thinking that the Islamist holy war against the West revolves solely around ourselves, around the moral drama of our goodness or our wickedness, rather than having something to do with Islam itself.

Terror group threatens Dutch

Terror group threatens Dutch with 'Islamic earthquake':
AMSTERDAM — Muslim extremists have threatened an "Islamic earthquake" and "nights of bloodshed" in the Netherlands unless Dutch troops are withdrawn from Iraq. The warning came a day after a Dutch soldier was shot dead in southern Iraq.

"We address this message to all crusader countries plotting against the Muslims, and which are sending forces to Iraq and Afghanistan, especially Italy and the Netherlands," organisation al-Tawhid wa al-Jihad said on an website on Sunday.

Al-Tawhid wa al-Jihad is said to be group connected to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the reputed leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq.

"Expect a hell that will turn your nights into bloodbaths," warned the statement posted on an Islamic website and addressed "to the European countries.... to the Dutch government and people."

The group warned the Netherlands that the statement was "a final message that we are sending to you, and it is a simple message, namely the pullout of Dutch forces from Iraq."

"Or else, your fate will be similar to the fate of Italy and other states," which have been the target of deadly terror attacks, it said.

MEMRI: Blood Libel in Egyptian Government Weekly Magazine

I guess that we can't expect normal human behavior for $2 billion a year.
Egyptian Government Weekly Magazine on 'The Jews Slaughtering Non-Jews, Draining their Blood, and Using it for Talmudic Religious Rituals': "

Hussam Wahba, a columnist for the religious Egyptian weekly magazine 'Aqidati, [1] published by the Al-Tahrir foundation which is linked to the ruling National Democratic Party , wrote an article based upon blood libels and accusing Judaism of promoting ritual murder"

Details on Olympic Judo fiasco

The Globe and Mail

Worth reading.

Report: U.S. pension funds indirectly support terror

A report shows U.S. pension funds indirectly support terror

NEW YORK (Reuters) - U.S. public pension funds indirectly support terrorists by investing billions of dollars in companies that do business in nations that sponsor terrorism, a think-tank said in a report on Thursday.

"Let's not mince words, this enables terror by propping up and providing life blood to these terror-sponsoring regimes," Frank Gaffney, president of the Center for Security Policy, told reporters in a conference call unveiling the 111-page report.

Gaffney later told Reuters in a telephone interview he hopes the report will help launch a divestment movement similar to the one directed against South Africa's apartheid regime.

"I'm looking for tools that can help win the war on terror," Gaffney said. "We ought to give it a chance to work against people who are trying to kill us."

The biggest public pension funds currently have $188 billion invested in companies doing business in Iran, Libya, North Korea, Sudan, Syria, and Iraq when ruled by Saddam Hussein, the report said.

The six nations are on the U.S. State Department's list of states that are believed to sponsor terrorism. Cuba is also on the list. Iraq would be removed from the list when the new government officially denounces terrorism, a State Department spokesman said.

The pension systems generally held 15 to 23 percent of their assets in companies allegedly doing business in the six nations, the report said.

It said the largest public pension fund, Calpers, the California Public Employees Retirement System, has over $17 billion invested in 201 companies doing business in countries the United States accuses of sponsoring terrorism.