The new anti-Semitism

In the early 1940s, genocidal anti-Semitism expressed itself in the Holocaust: 6 million Jews rounded up and exterminated.
In 1948, genocidal anti-Semitism took the form of five Arab armies attempting to drive Israeli Jews into the sea.
In 1967, a second conventional war was led by Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Iraq. The "Voice of the Arabs" radio station declared the goal: "extermination" of Israel. Ahmed Shuqayri, the first leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization, added: "We shall destroy Israel and its inhabitants."
Since the collapse of the Camp David talks in 2000 -- when Yasser Arafat turned down an independent Palestinian state on 93 percent of the West Bank and Gaza -- radical anti-Semitism has taken the form of suicide bombings in Israel's streets, shops and restaurants.
Former Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Abu Mazen said this month many of those responsible believed "after the killing of 1,000 Israelis in the Intifada, Israel would collapse." Well, about 1,000 Israelis have been slaughtered, but Israel has not collapsed. Instead, the Israelis are demonstrating terrorism can be defeated.
So genocidal anti-Semitism is taking another form. This week, the New York Times gave Michael Tarazi, an American lawyer who advises the Palestine Liberation Organization, space on its Op-Ed Page to make this audacious argument: Having failed to eradicate Israel with tanks and terrorism, Palestinian leaders are now "being forced to consider a one-state solution."
Yes, "forced" to consider demanding a "right" to flood Israel with people who hate Israelis, people loyal to such terrorist organization such as Hamas, and who want to replace Israel with a radical Islamist state.
And if Israelis refuse to willingly become a despised minority in their own country, ruled by people who have waged genocidal campaigns against them, that will demonstrate, Mr. Tarazi declares, "Christians and Muslims, the millions of Palestinians under occupation are not welcome in the Jewish state." "Not welcome." Imagine that. The nerve. The chutzpah.
As Mr. Tarazi well knows but neglects to mention, there is only one Jewish state on the planet. It's about the size of New Jersey. By contrast, there are 22 Arab nations and more than 50 predominantly Muslim countries, covering an area larger than the United States and Europe combined.
In these lands, Jews are, to varying degrees, conspicuously unwelcome. In Jordan, a relatively liberal country that has diplomatic relations with Israel, Jews are denied citizenship. In Saudi Arabia, no synagogue or church may be built.
Mr. Tarazi forgets to note, too, that half of Israel's Jews have their roots in such places as Egypt, Yemen, Iraq and Iran -- but that after intense persecution they fled what had been their families' homes for centuries. Similarly, Christians have fled Syrian-controlled Lebanon and from Bethlehem and Nazareth since those cities came under Yasser Arafat's control.
Nor does Mr. Tarazi appear to recall that almost 15 percent of Israel's citizens are Muslims. They enjoy more rights and freedoms than Muslims elsewhere in the Middle East -- including the right to free speech, to vote and to worship as they choose. You do not see graffiti on mosques in Israel.
Israeli Arabs have been elected to Israel's parliament and serve on its supreme court. The CNN cameraman recently taken hostage in Gaza is an Israeli citizen. That was not mentioned in much of the coverage because it was thought that those who took him captive might not know, and it would go better for him if they didn't. Israeli Muslim Bedouins and Druze even serve in Israel's armed forces -- and many have given their lives to defend their country.
But Mr. Tarazi believes he can convince "the international community" that if Israelis are unwilling to open their doors to millions of people who have been indoctrinated to believe butchering Jews is a form of "martyrdom," it is the Israelis who are the bigots and oppressors.
If I'm wrong about this, there's a simple way for Mr. Tarazi to prove it. Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has pledged to remove all Jewish settlements from Gaza. Mr. Tarazi should tell him not to bother. Mr. Tarazi should advise the Palestinian Authority to "welcome" the Jews living in the Gaza -- and the West Bank, as well.
If and when a Palestinian state is created, those Jews would comprise only a small percentage of the population -- much smaller than Muslims in Israel. This way, Mr. Tarazi could show he sincerely wants to see "all faiths and ethnicities live together as equals."
But Mr. Tarazi is not sincere. He wants Gaza and the West Bank judenrein. And eventually he wants what is now Israel to become "jew-free" as well -- by whatever means. He really isn't choosy.
In 2004, this is the form genocidal anti-Semitism takes. In the long run, anti-Semites seek a world free of Jews. In the short run, a world free of a Jewish state will do.
If they can disguise such extremism as a fight against bigotry, a "struggle for equal citizenship" and against "apartheid," and if they can push such boldly Orwellian propaganda on the pages of the New York Times, they would be crazy not to.
But people such as Mr. Tarazi are not crazy. They know exactly what they are doing. They just hope people like you won't be able to figure it out until it's too late.

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Islamic Europe?

SELDOM HAS THE COURSE of European history been changed by a non-politician's throwaway remark in a German-language newspaper on a Wednesday in the dead of the summer doldrums. But on July 28, Princeton historian Bernard Lewis told the conservative Hamburg-based daily Die Welt that Europe would be Islamic by the end of this century 'at the very latest,' and continental politics has not been the same since.

Days before the third anniversary of 9/11, Frits Bolkestein of the Netherlands, the outgoing European Union competition commissioner, caused an uproar when he mentioned Lewis's remark in the course of an address at the opening of courses at the University of Leiden. Bolkestein warned that the E.U. will 'implode' if it expands too quickly. It was a timely topic.

A few days from now, the E.U. commissioner for expansion, G�nter Verheugen of Germany, will issue a report on whether to open negotiations with Turkey on E.U. membership. It is expected to be positive. The full commission must vote on the report in December, after which a decade of talks is envisioned. But since the Verheugen report is likely to be positive, and since the commission is expected to rubber-stamp the report's recommendations, and since no candidate state that has begun E.U. accession negotiations has ever been rejected, the process has the look of a fait accompli. Thanks to . . . what? . . . G�nter Verheugen's mood, the peoples of Europe are about to see their fate yoked irrevocably to that of the Islamic world.

Indeed, the need to forge a solemn bond with Islamic secularism of the sort that Turkey enjoyed after Kemal Atat�rk came to power is the reason most often given for the indispensability of Turkish accession.

Bolkestein was thus addressing a continent-wide discomfiture. His speech was long. It was no rant. Alluding to the E.U.'s aspiration to become a multinational state, he drew listeners' attention to the fate of the most recent European power with that aspiration, the Austro-Hungarian empire just over a century ago. Austrians were culturally confident (Liszt, Richard Strauss, Brahms, Mahler, and Wagner were working in Vienna). They were prosperous and proud. The problem was that there were only 8 million of them, and expanding their country's frontiers brought them face to face with an energetic pan-Slavic movement. Once the Empire absorbed 20 million Slavs, it faced difficult compromises between allowing the new subjects to rule themselves and preserving its own culture. Rather like the E.U., the Empire was past the point of no return before it realized it was going anywhere in particular.

Bolkestein asked what lessons Europeans ought to draw from this history, as they consider welcoming Turkey. He then addressed two specific problems. First, that there was no logical end in sight to European expansion--once the E.U. accepts Turkey, it will have no principled reason to reject the considerably more European countries of Ukraine and Belarus. Europe is thus adding instability that it has neither the financial means nor the cultural solidarity to master. The second problem, Bolkestein warned, is that immigration is turning the E.U. into 'an Austro-Hungarian empire on a grand scale.' He alluded to certain great cities that will soon be minority-European--two of the most important of which, Amsterdam and Rotterdam, are in his own country--and warned that the (projected) addition of 83 million Muslim Turks would further the Islamization of Europe. It was this part of his speech--in which he referred to Lewis's projections--that made headlines around the world: 'Current trends allow only one conclusion,' Bolkestein said. 'The USA will remain the only superpower. China is becoming an economic giant. Europe is being Islamicized.'

A kind of chain reaction ensued. Two days after Bolkestein spoke, the Financial Times printed a letter that Franz Fischler of Austria, the outgoing E.U. commissioner for agriculture, had sent privately to his fellow commissioners. Fischler complained that Turkey was "far more oriental than European" and, worse, that "there remain doubts as to Turkey's long-term secular and democratic credentials. There could . . . be a fundamentalist backlash."

Europe's reaction was a collective So now you tell us! Taken together, Bolkestein's and Fischler's remarks seemed symptomatic of the political correctness that suffuses the issue of Turkish accession. A majority of the European parliament is anti-accession, the various national parliaments are against it, and the national populations are overwhelmingly opposed. It is the European Commission that has been driving the process--and now two prominent members of that very body, on the eve of leaving their political careers behind them, were saying it was all a big mistake that nobody dared to talk about. (Perhaps the only thing that infuriates the European man-in-the-street more than such bureaucratic shiftiness is the United States' bafflingly consistent support for Turkish E.U. membership.)

WHAT IS FASCINATING about the Lewis interview that gave rise to this round of European soul-searching is that it was not meant to be specifically about Europe. His interlocutor asked Lewis about developments in the Iraq war, the evolution of the Palestine question, the hopes for liberal democracy in Iran, and the prospects for defeating al Qaeda. (On this last subject, Lewis provided an unsettling answer:

"It's a long process and the outcome is by no means certain," he said. "It works similarly to communism, which appealed to unhappy people in the West because it seemed to give them unambiguous answers. Radical Islam has the same force of attraction.") He was equally engaging when he described the European Union's break with the United States in terms of a "community of envy." ("Understandably, Europeans harbor some reservations about an America that has outstripped them. That's why Europeans can well understand the Muslims, who have similar feelings.")

But Europe's own Islamic future came up only incidentally. Asked whether the E.U. could serve as a global counterweight to the United States, Lewis replied simply: "No." He saw only three countries as potential "global" players: definitely China and India, and possibly a revivified Russia. "Europe," he said, "will be part of the Arabic west, of the Maghreb." What seems to have infuriated European listeners is that Lewis did not assert this as a risqué or contrarian proposition. He just said it, as if it were something that every politically neutral and intellectually honest person takes for granted.

Is it? Bolkestein said he did not know whether things would turn out as Lewis predicted. ("But if he is right," Bolkestein added, "the liberation of Vienna [from Turkish armies] in 1683 will have been in vain.") Bassam Tibi, a Syrian immigrant who is the most prominent moderate Muslim in Germany, seemed to agree with Lewis's diagnosis, even while rejecting his emphasis. "Either Islam gets Europeanized, or Europe gets Islamized," Tibi wrote in Welt am Sonntag. Having spent much of the past decade arguing for the construction of sensible Islamic institutions in Europe, Tibi seemed to warn that Europe did not have the ability to reject Islam, or the opportunity to steer it. "The problem is not whether the majority of Europeans is Islamic," he added, "but rather which Islam--sharia Islam or Euro-Islam--is to dominate in Europe."

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Egypt hotel bombers 'aided by woman suicide backpacker'

A female suicide bomber is believed to have taken part in the terrorist attack on the Red Sea hotel in which at least 31 people died, Israeli and Egyptian military officials said last night.

The woman, whose decapitated body was found at the back of the hotel, is thought to have been acting with two other suspected terrorists who rammed explosive-laden cars into the front of the Hilton hotel in the Sinai resort of Taba on Thursday night.

Gilad Shemesh, an Israeli army officer at the scene, told The Sunday Telegraph: "Our soldiers were shown a body by the Egyptians. It was a woman. Her head had been blown off.

"They said they were convinced she was a suicide bomber who had probably carried the explosives in a backpack."

An Israeli army captain with almost 20 years' experience of dealing with terrorist attacks pointed to the spot near the hotel's pool where the woman's body was found, along with several victims.

"It is impossible that those victims could have been killed by the two car-bomb blasts at the front of the hotel," he said. "It is clear to me that it was a suicide bomber - but the Egyptians don't want to talk about it officially."

Israeli and Egyptian officials are investigating who was behind the attack and a simultaneous strike on the Moon Island Village campsite at Ras a Satan, 30 miles to the south, which killed two Israeli tourists in their 20s.

On Friday, Maj Gen Aharon Ze'evi, Israel's military intelligence director, said al-Qaeda was the likely perpetrator. However, the terrorist organisation is not known to use women in its suicide operations. Palestinian terror groups, including Hamas, have recently started using female suicide bombers.

Egyptian police said that they had arrested "dozens" of Bedouin men suspected of helping to supply explosives to the bombers. Officers believe the attackers had originally planned to bomb three hotels but did not reach all of their targets.

Israeli officials said yesterday that they had received four pieces of information about possible terror attacks on the Sinai peninsula before the bombings. Three were linked to militant Palestinian groups and one to a global Islamic group.

Avi Dichter, the head of Israel's Shin Bet security service, who visited the hotel with Egyptian officials yesterday, criticised Israeli political leaders for not acting firmly enough on the information.

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Mossad makes Al-Qaeda its top target

THE ISRAELI government has ordered Mossad, the foreign intelligence service, to make the hunt for Al-Qaeda terrorists its main priority after last week’s Red Sea attacks that killed at least 33 people, most of them Israeli tourists.

Egyptian officials said yesterday they had detained dozens of bedouin tribesmen on suspicion of supplying the explosives for the blasts at the Taba Hilton and at a bungalow beach camp 35 miles down the coast.

As rescuers pulled more bodies from the wreckage of the hotel, Dan Arditi, Israel’s counterterrorism chief, urged tourists still in Egypt to come home, warning that the attacks on Thursday “don’t lessen, even in the slightest, the risk that this will happen again”.

The order to Mossad to turn its attention from Palestinian groups to Al-Qaeda was given by Ariel Sharon, the prime minister, after Israeli intelligence sources said the size of the blasts suggested they were the work of Osama Bin Laden’s network rather than Palestinian suicide bombers.

Confirmation may be provided by fingerprints taken from bomb fragments and DNA obtained from the remains of the suspected bombers.

Arditi had urged Israelis on September 9 to avoid the area because of indications of an imminent terrorist attack. His warning appeared on the front pages of the country’s main newspapers on the eve of the Jewish new year.

“This time Al-Qaeda hit our back yard,” said a security source. “If we don’t focus on them, next time it will be Tel Aviv. After four years of intifada we’ve succeeded in containing the Palestinian terror, but now we’re facing a much more ruthless enemy we can’t ignore any more.”

It is not the first time Al-Qaeda has gone after an Israeli target, or that Sharon’s government has vowed to take it on. The group claimed responsibility for the car bombing in November 2002 of an Israeli-owned hotel in the Kenyan port of Mombasa that killed 14 people, including three Israelis.

After that attack Sharon summoned Meir Dagan, the head of Mossad, and ordered agents living undercover in Saudi Arabia and Yemen to hunt down those responsible. Almost two years later the perpetrators remain at large — a reflection, according to the security source, of the agency’s concentration on combating Palestinian operations.

When Mossad was presented with a list of priorities for the current year, Al-Qaeda was not on it. Its main efforts were instead to be directed at Iran’s nuclear ambitions and the activities of Palestinian terrorist groups in Lebanon and Syria.

Israeli intelligence sources said they believed the Taba attack had been masterminded by Ayman al-Zawahiri, the Egyptian doctor regarded as Bin Laden’s deputy. In a statement broadcast this month on the Al-Jazeera satellite television channel, al-Zawahiri threatened to focus Al-Qaeda’s efforts more intensely on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

Nothing is known about how Mossad will carry out its mission, especially against al-Zawahiri, who is believed to be in hiding near the border of Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Intelligence sources said this weekend the organisation — which has no more than 150 agents operating all over the world — would not try to compete with America’s CIA.

It would instead focus on Turkey and Thailand. “We’ll co-ordinate with the local security services, but our main aim will be to protect Israeli tourists in these two locations,” said one intelligence source.

The agency would then work in a more systematic way, by listing top Al-Qaeda activists and trying to kill them in the same way they have done over the past 40 years in operations against various terrorist groups. “To hit an Al-Qaeda leader either in Saudi Arabia, Europe, or even Tehran is less difficult than to act in Damascus,” said one intelligence source. “It’s all a matter of priorities.”

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Arutz Sheva: Egyptians Looted the Dead Bodies

Dr. Yehuda Hiss, acting director of Israel's National Forensic Institute in Abu Kabir, called upon Egypt to release each body as it is identified. "In mass-casualty incidents around the world," he said last night, "the general practice is that no bodies are released for burial until all are identified. In Israel we release each body as it is identified. I hope that my Egyptian colleagues will come towards us in this matter and will release the bodies that are identified, as this is the most humanitarian thing that can be done."

Based on the events of the past 60 hours, however, it is not certain that Egypt meets Israel's standards for proper respect for the dead - and for the living as well. Yehuda Meshi-Zahav, head of the Zaka volunteer organization that engages in collecting body parts after mass-casualty incidents of this nature, reports that the Egyptians are apparently more interested in looting than in rescuing the wounded and extricating the dead. Meshi-Zahav, who has been in Taba for the past two days, said last night that he saw Egyptians looting the hotel in Taba, and even the dead bodies, even before evacuation of the wounded had been completed - and certainly while people were trapped, dead or alive, under the rubble.

Many other Israelis on the scene confirmed these reports. They said that as they went through the rooms looking for survivors, they saw that drawers and closets had already been opened and stripped of their valuables, with the cheaper items left lying on the floor. Bodies emptied of their wallets and jewelry made the identification process even more difficult than it already was. A Channel Two television crew told of a female body that was brought for identification with a watch on her hand - and that by the end of the identification, the watch was no longer there.

Arab affairs expert Dr. Guy Bechor of the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya explained to Arutz-7 today: "For us, human life is the most important value. It's obvious in everything, for instance in the fact that people crowded the border with Egypt this morning in a desperate effort to get in and help possibly save a life. First we save lives, then we ask questions. But for Egypt, it's different: more important than human life are the external issues: How will it look? Are we giving up on our sovereignty by allowing Israeli forces in to help? Will the other Arab nations accuse us of cooperating with Israel? Etc... It takes much time for the orders to filter down. In Egypt, things work in a pyramid, from top down, and not one stage can be skipped. So they finally let us come in - but after a day or a day and a half. We live in the Middle East; this is Taba, not Eilat, and we have to recognize the rules."

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Over 40,000 Visit Hebron During Succot Holiday

During the Succot holiday, over 40,000 people visited Hebron, praying at Ma'arat HaMachpela and touring the Jewish neighborhoods in the city. On Sunday and Monday all of Ma'arat HaMachpela was open to Jewish visitors, including Ohel Yitzhak - the Isaac Hall. The entire building was packed with worshipers. At times, over 3,000 people filled the huge structure atop the Caves of Machpelah. Others stood in line outside, waiting to enter the building. Monday's events included the semi-annual Hebron music festival, which included the best of Hassidic music in Israel today. Over 10,000 people sang and danced to the tunes of Haim David, Soul Farm, Amiram Dvir, and many others, who sweetened the Succot celebrations with their lively music.

Some 20,000 people participated in the annual Sukkot holiday Jerusalem Parade Monday, starting from the Yad Kennedy memorial in southern Jerusalem and stretching 9 miles towards the city center. About 12,000 participated last year, according to city officials. Included in the march was an estimated 4,000 Evangelical Christians from 80 nations.

Tens of thousands of people - 35,000, according to ISRAEL RADIO - participated in the semi-annual Birkat Cohanim ceremony at the Western Wall plaza Sunday. The event takes place twice each year, on the 3rd or 4th day of the Sukkot and Pesach holidays. It features special holiday prayers in which up to hundreds of Cohanim - descendants of Aaron the Priest - jointly blessing the congregants. At the same time, dozens of religious Jews visited the Temple Mount.

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israelinsider: Views: A proud Israeli Bedouin questions American-Jewish apathy

Two years ago, a few proud Bedouin Israeli citizens like myself asked: what is our position and status in the State of Israel in the midst of its current situation? After all, Bedouins are part of Israel's success story. During current times, when Israel is being attacked and accused of being a racist state, an 'aggressor and an oppressor', we decided that the smallest and probably most effective thing we could do is to spread our story as part of Israeli society.

I, Ishmael Khaldi, am Israeli. I served with the IDF, with the Israel police, and with the Israeli Defense Ministry. In the last year, I have lost two Bedouin friends on army duty (God bless their memory) defending the State of Israel. My friends and family feel that we have a common destiny with the Jewish people in Israel: our grandparents created this land with Jewish immigrants who arrived during the 1920s, '30s and '40s to build a democracy.

Because of this connection to the State of Israel, I cannot stand on the sidelines during Israel's time of need. I feel that I must speak up and be heard.

I recently returned from a two-month campus speaking tour in North America, mostly organized by Hasbara Fellowships. This was the fourth tour I had done over the past year. I've traveled the United States coast to coast (of course, being a Bedouin nomad, I mainly took Greyhound!) and flew for a ten day tour across Canada.

The tour was certainly miraculous - a Bedouin shepherd who had never been to any major city before, all of sudden found himself in downtown Manhattan! It proved to be one of the most adventurous, challenging and enriching experiences of my life.

I came to the U.S. and Canada to speak on college campuses about Israel, as one who certainly holds a perspective that is rarely heard - a proud Israeli that is not Jewish. I came to share one man's tale of Israel's culture, society and politics from the perspective of a Bedouin minority in the Jewish State.

Arriving in North America, committed to defending Israel from the poisonous venom of hatred and attacks that I had heard much about, I expected to see the same commitment on campuses among the Jewish students. Unfortunately, this wasn't the case.

I had heard much about the struggle of pro-Israel student activists, attempting to counter the unbalanced, biased and false accusations made against Israel. I had not come to North America to preach that Israel was perfect. As all Israelis know, Israel has problems like all nations of the world. Still, many students tried to stop me from speaking. There were even students who had the audacity to compare me to Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda minister, making false claims that I was doing the same for Israel.

The United States has always been described as being the 'land of the free' and a home for free speech. How can New Hampshire's slogan read, "live free or die" if the student union is allowed to ban me from telling a cultural story? I can't believe that the hatred for Israel is so strong that student governments are able to defy their own dignity as free American citizens, in order that the truth about Israel should remain a secret.

The deep-seated hatred manifested itself clearly throughout the country with the many loaded questions asked by anti-Israel students. For example, a Muslim student at Rutgers University completely ignored the fact that Israel is a free state and asked, "how could you support a Hebrew state if you're not Jewish?" Another questioner asked, "don't you think that if Israel didn't exist, then the Palestinians wouldn't have any problems?"

In Milwaukee, I was asked "how many Palestinian old men and women have you humiliated while serving in the Israeli police?" How can such a question be asked? Only if the truth were known, that Israeli soldiers have on many occasions helped Palestinians.

The situation I encountered on many of the campuses in North America and Canada was horrifying. I was not as shocked by the Arab questioners as I was with the personal threats, and the severe apathy of the majority of Jewish students.

In my years of speaking to people, I've never received threats or personal attacks like I did speaking on campuses. There were threatening incidents at both the University of Florida and at California State University. Both were chilling. The crowd in Florida was one full of anger and hatred, yet I had to stand before them unsure of the enemy who had sent threats earlier that day. In California I spoke facing a young student who wore a T-shirt with a swastika on it, chewing on a piece of paper as some sort of protest against my talk.

Even more upsetting, I expected to see many more Jewish students aware of the situation in Israel, but that wasn't the case. I expected the Jewish students to realize that the situation was not only affecting Israel and Israelis, but Jews all over the world.

On the other hand, the Arab students and their supporters knew almost all the last minute news clips from the Middle East. How can Israel's voice be heard if the Jewish students don't have the facts or the knowledge to speak up? I don't take the mass of Jewish students to task for not agreeing with all of Israel's policies, but I do take them to task for not caring about Israel or what happens there. It is the apathy which allows the anti-Israel propaganda to strengthen itself more and more over time.

As a personal aside, sixty years after the horrors of the Holocaust, Israel is going through one of the most critical times in its history. More than 60 years after my grandparents joined their destiny to that of the Jews coming to the Land of Israel, I feel that history is somehow moving backwards. Antisemitism and hatred towards Israel is soaring. Comparing me, a Muslim Bedouin who supports Israel, to the Nazis is just another clear piece of evidence.

And yet, 60 years after the horrors of the Holocaust, I felt that on campus, the Jewish voice is silent. Where are the Jewish students fighting back? My commitment in these crucial days, while Israel is struggling for its right to exist, is to continue the heritage of my grandparents and to stand together to fight for the State of Israel.

History will not tolerate us if we keep our voice silent. We must roll up our sleeves once again to build a better future for Israel and all of its loyal citizens. Israel's right to exist is my right and my people's right, just as Israel's destiny is our destiny.

But just as history demands for me to fight for Israel, history also will not tolerate a generation of Jews who don't care.

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High Church hypocrisy and other humiliations

In his speech to the U.N. General Assembly last week, President George W. Bush mentioned with disfavor Israel's 'humiliations' of Palestinians. The irony of the president's misplaced concern (though the speech contained other passages reflecting this country's friendship with Israel) was highlighted when, a day later, a female Palestinian suicide bomber was halted at a checkpoint near a Jerusalem bus stop.

Just before border guards were about to 'humiliate' her by asking questions or searching her bag, the woman exploded her bomb, killing two soldiers.

For all of the outcry about Israeli behavior, few noted that this attempt to question the woman saved the lives of dozens of innocents who might have perished had the soldiers failed to prevent her from boarding a bus.

But the president isn't the only one who has been misled on this issue. Some churches are using the concern about Palestinian sensibilities to push an agenda of anti-Zionism.

Following the outcry about the recent vote by the Presbyterian Church USA to endorse divestment of Israel to express their condemnation of Israeli measures of self-defense, it wasn't clear whether other mainline liberal churches would follow suit -- or listen to the better angels of their nature and refrain from such despicable behavior.

But the Presbyterians' high-church Episcopal cousins seem ready to follow in their footsteps.

The decision to recommend a divestment of Israel was announced last week in Jerusalem by representatives of the church's 75 million adherents. They did so after a ten-day tour of the country which included a meeting with arch-terrorist Yasser Arafat in his Ramallah lair but no meetings with Israeli officials other than one with an Arab member of the Knesset who actually opposes the country's continued status as a Jewish state.

They seem particularly unwilling to listen to any evidence -- such as the thousands of dead, wounded and maimed Israelis over the course of the last four years of Palestinian terrorism -- that would justify any measures of Israeli self-defense. They seem especially irate about Israeli moves, such as checkpoints and the erection of a security fence, which hamper the ability of Palestinian killers to move to their targets with impunity.

The motive of the Anglicans (known in this country as the Episcopal church), they say, is to bring an end to the conflict between Israel and Palestinians. But given the nature of their proposed solution, the only thing they seem to really want to end is Israel's existence.

They intend to follow up on this initiative with the Episcopal Church USA.

Given the incendiary nature of many anti-Israel statements made by local and national Episcopal leaders, the chances of this step being adopted must be assessed as good.

It is interesting to note that although the call for divestment from companies that do business with Israel is making progress among church groups just as it seemed to fading on college campuses. That a sector of our society can be found to be more hostile to Israel than American universities really says something about the current state of the Protestant church.

As in the case of the Presbyterians, the drift of Episcopal activists toward support for anti-Israel measures is not necessarily reflected by the general membership of the church. Most ordinary American Episcopalians, like their Presbyterian counterparts, will soon wake up to discover that their representatives have signed on to a measure that obligates them to wage economic warfare on the Jewish state. This will be a surprise to most of them, but that will not make the problem any less serious.

Divestment is just the latest tactic adopted by those who excuse Palestinian terror. They are motivated not by a real concern for the plight of Palestinians, who, it should be remembered, would be living in their own sovereign state by now had their leaders accepted Israel's offers of peace. Instead, the embrace of divestment will send an unmistakable signal that the Palestinian war to exterminate Israel via terror is justified.

This is an act of such blatant immorality so as to render the church unqualified to speak with any moral authority on any topic, even the very real suffering of the Palestinians.

Though American Jews have invested decades of effort in interfaith dialogue with these churches, the Episcopalians and any who would follow them should understand that they cannot continue on this path and still pretend to maintain a friendship with the Jewish community.

The message that they must receive from every sector of responsible Jewish opinion must be clear: Divestment in Israel isn't merely wrong. It is a declaration of war on the Jewish people."

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Iraqi arrested in Nashville for terror

The F.B.I. says it has foiled a terrorist plot in Nashville by arresting a man who bought automatic weapons at a local Krispy Kreme donut shop on Thompson Lane.

33-year-old Ahmed Hassan Al-Uqaily was caught Thursday after buying machine guns, handguns, ammunition and hand grenades from an undercover agent.

He told investigators he was angry with the Jewish community, but as far as Channel 4 knows, there was not a specific target.

Channel 4 News’ Susan Harding reported that Al-Uqaily has lived in Nashville since 1991 and lived at at least four different addresses. His name has often appeared in the media over the last few months as an outspoken critic of the war in Iraq.

Federal authorities said Friday they arrested Al-Uqaily during a sting operation set up after he made threats about "going Jihad."

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Palestinian who allegedly sold land to Jews killed

Gunmen belonging to Fatah's armed wing, Aksa Martyrs Brigades, on Wednesday night shot and killed a Palestinian who had been suspected of selling land to Jews.

Sources in Ramallah said three gunmen stormed a local hospital and kidnapped Sami Burnat, 51, a resident of Balin village west of the city.

The kidnappers took Burnat to a nearby field, where they sprayed him with bullets, killing him instantly, the sources added.

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EU diplomat admits success of Israel wall

The EU's representative in the Middle East has conceded that the controversial wall being built by Israel in the West Bank has stopped Palestinian extremists from carrying out suicide attacks in Israel.

His comments, made in an interview with Financial Times Deutschland, make him the first high-level EU diplomat to publicly say that the barrier has fulfilled its aim.

'The barrier has drastically sunk the number of attacks', said the Belgian diplomat.

However, although he admitted that the number of attacks has fallen, he told FT Deutschland that it does not mean that he finds the wall good."

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Saddam paid off French leaders

Saddam Hussein used a U.N. humanitarian program to pay $1.78 billion to French government officials, businessmen and journalists in a bid to have sanctions removed and U.S. policies opposed, according to a CIA report made public yesterday.
The cash was part of $10.9 billion secretly skimmed from the U.N. oil-for-food program, which was used by Iraq to buy military goods, according to a 1,000-page report by the CIA-led Iraqi Survey Group.
According to a section of the report on Iraqi weapons procurement, the survey group identified long-standing ties between Saddam and the French government. One 1992 Iraqi intelligence service report revealed that Iraq's ambassador to France paid $1 million to the French Socialist Party in 1988.
The CIA report stated that the Iraqi ambassador was instructed to 'utilize [the $1 million] to remind French Defense Minister Pierre Joxe indirectly about Iraq's previous positions toward France, in general, and the French Socialist party, in particular.'
In the late 1990s, Iraq also used an oil-purchasing voucher system through the U.N. oil-for-food program, which began in 1996 and ended in 2003, to influence the French to oppose U.S. initiatives at the United Nations and to work to lift sanctions, the report stated.
The Iraqi Intelligence Service paid off French nationals by dispensing vouchers that allowed the holders to make hundreds of thousands of dollars in commissions by selling them to oil buyers.
The payoffs help explain why the French government, along with Russia and China, opposed U.S. efforts in the United Nations in the months leading up to the March 2003 invasion, U.S. officials said.
Iraqi intelligence agents also targeted French President Jacques Chirac, by giving gifts to a spokesman, two of his aides and two French businessmen, the report said.
One Iraqi intelligence report stated that a French politician assured Saddam in a letter that France would use its veto in the U.N. Security Council against any U.S. effort to attack Iraq. "

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