Whining, Lying Palestinian Complains

An amazing fact: every time the Palestinians accuse Israel of something, you can always translate it is "You are not letting us kill you as easily as we want to!"

This one is classic. Israel opens the crossings as it promised, and he is saying because Palestinian terrorists can't walk into Israel without being checked, Israel is violating its agreements!

Ya gotta love the accusation about the x-ray machine "used to check metal objects." Those wily Jews are always inventing something, aren't they?

Palestinian officials Sunday accused Israel of tightening security instead of easing it at the Erez crossing point between Gaza and the Jewish state.

Palestinian Chief of Passages Salim Abu Safiya told reporters that while Israel tells the media it had opened the Erez crossing and allowed Palestinian workers to enter Israel, it was tightening security checks and making the crossing terminal a nightmare for those workers.

Israel had said it was easing its security measures on the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, allowng 207 workers and 95 businessmen to enter Israel Sunday.

But Abu Safiya described the Israeli security measures as arbitrary and tough, forcing the workers to go through very complicated security measures by forcing them into x-ray machines that are only used to check metal objects, not human beings.

He warned the x-ray machines cause serious diseases if humans pass through them.

The Palestinian official accused Israel of not showing any signs of commitment to the cease-fire agreement reached in Sharm el-Sheikh last week, which included an Israeli declaration to open the border crossings and remove check-points.

Read More

A short break

I probably won't be able to post anything until Monday.

But feel free to carry on without me, with comments, voting on the poll, and tagboard messages!

Read More

PA TV: Goal is Israel's Destruction (IMRA)

Something to keep in mind during all of the optimism. But I suppose that a promise that "Our kids will destroy your kids" is considered "moderate."

The Palestinian Authority, in its Arabic messages to its people, has always
denied Israel's right to exist and has often presented the peace process as
a tactic leading to Israel's destruction.

This goal was repeated Friday, on the Palestinian Authority television, in
the official sermon. Senior religious figure, Ibrahim Mudyris, explained
that the limitation of the diplomatic process is that it can only achieve
the 1967 borders, and that at a latest stage the Palestinian Authority will
achieve its goal, the destruction of Israel: "the way Muhammad returned
there as a conqueror".

The following is the text of the Friday sermon, February 4, 2005:

Preacher- Ibrahim Mudyris:

"We do not love any land more than the land of Palestine. Had the Jews not
expelled us from it with their plains, their tanks, their weapons, their
treachery around us, we would never leave you, Oh Palestine". (Quotes
Muhammad who promised he would return to Mecca as a conqueror).
"We tell you Palestine, we shall return to you, by Allah's will, We shall
return to every village, every town, and every grain of earth which was
quenched by the blood of our grandparents and the sweat of our fathers and
mothers. We shall return, we shall return. Our willingness to return to the
1967 borders does not mean that we have given up on the land of Palestine.
No! We ask you: Do we have the right to the 1967 borders? We have the
right. Therefore, we shall realize this right with any mean it takes. We
might be able to use diplomacy in order to return to the 1967 borders, but
we shall not be able to use diplomacy in order to return to the 1948
borders. No one on this earth recognizes [our right to] the 1948 borders
[before Israel's existence]. Therefore, we shall return to the 1967
borders, but it does not mean that we have given up on Jerusalem and Haifa,
Jaffa, Lod, Ramla, Natanyah [Al-Zuhour] and Tel Aviv [Tel Al-Rabia]. Never.

We shall return to every village we had been expelled from, by Allah's
will. Why? All the international laws deny the Palestinians their real
borders. We might agree, but in the name of Allah, our grandfathers' blood
demands that we return to them [the borders]. Your father's blood was shed
there, at the villages, at Ashqelon, at Ashdod, at Hirbia [a village
between Gaza and Ashqelon, where Kibbutz Zikim is located today] and at
others places, hundreds of villages and towns. [Their blood] demands it
from us, and it shall curse anyone who will concede a grain of earth of
those villages. Our approval to return to the 1967 borders is not a
concession for our other rights. No!... this generation might not achieve
this stage, but generations will come, and the land of Palestine... will
demand that the Palestinians will return the way Muhammad returned there,
as a conqueror".

Read More

Denying Terrorism, by Daniel Pipes

Denying Terrorism By Daniel Pipes, February 8, 2005

New York Sun*

February 8, 2005
http://www.danielpipes.org/article/2396
* Cross-posted with permission

Editor's note: Readers may also be interested in New Jersey: An Islamic Murder of Coptic Christians?.

Anyone following the investigation into the mid-January slaughter of the Armanious family (husband, wife, two young daughters), Copts living in Jersey City, N.J., knows who the presumptive suspects are: Islamists furious at a Christian Egyptian immigrant who dares engage in Internet polemics against Islam and who attempts to convert Muslims to Christianity.

The authorities, however, have blinded themselves to the extensive circumstantial evidence, insisting that "no facts at this point" substantiate a religious motive for the murders.

Somehow, the prosecutor missed that all four members of this quiet family were savagely executed in the ritualistic Islamist way (multiple knife attacks and near-beheading); that Jersey City has a record of Islamist activism and jihadi violence, and that an Islamist Web site, carried multiple threats against Hossam Armanious with postings such as: "We are going to track you down like a chicken and kill you."

Law enforcement seems more concerned to avoid an anti-Muslim backlash than to find the culprits.

This attitude of denial fits an all-too-common pattern. I previously documented a reluctance in nearby New York City to see as terrorism the 1994 Brooklyn Bridge ("road rage" was the FBI's preferred description) and the 1997 Empire State Building shootings ("many, many enemies in his mind," said Rudolph Giuliani). And the July 2002 LAX murders were initially dismissed as "a work dispute" and the October 2002 rampage of the Beltway snipers went unexplained, leaving the press to ascribe it to such factors as a "stormy [family] relationship."

These instances are part of a yet-larger pattern.

• The 1990 murder of Rabbi Meir Kahane by the Islamist El Sayyid Nosair was initially ascribed by the police to "a prescription drug for or consistent with depression."

• The 1999 crash of EgyptAir 990, killing 217 - by a co-pilot not supposed to be near the aircraft's controls at that time who repeated 11 times "I rely on God" as he wrenched the plane down - went unexplained by the National Transportation Safety Board.

• The 2002 purposeful crash of a small plane into a Tampa high-rise by bin Laden-sympathizer Charles Bishara Bishop went unexplained; the family chimed in by blaming the acne drug Accutane.

• The 2003 murder and near-decapitation in Houston of an Israeli by a former Saudi friend who had newly become an Islamist found the police unable to discern "any evidence" that the crime had anything to do with religion.

Nor is this a problem unique to American authorities.

• The 1993 attack on foreign guests dining at the Semiramis Hotel in Cairo, killing five, accompanied by the Islamist cry "Allahu Akbar," inspired the Egyptian government to dismiss the killer as insane.

• The 2000 attack on a bus of visibly Jewish schoolchildren near Paris by a hammer-wielding North African yelling "You're not in Tel-Aviv!" prompted police to describe the assault as the result of a traffic incident.

• The 2003 fire that gutted the Merkaz HaTorah Jewish secondary school in a Paris suburb, requiring 100 firefighters to douse the flames, was described by the French minister of the interior as being merely of "criminal origin."

• The 2004 murder of a Hasidic Jew with no criminal record as he walked an Antwerp street near a predominantly Muslim area left the Belgian authorities stumped: "There are no signs that racism was involved."

I have cited 13 cases here and provide information on further incidents on my weblog. Why this repeated unease acknowledging Islamist terrorism by the authorities, why the shameful denial?

And for that matter, why a similar unwillingness to face facts about right-wing extremists, as in the 2002 murder by a cursing skinhead of a Hasidic Jew outside a kosher pizzeria in Toronto, which the police did not find to rate as a hate crime? Because terrorism has much greater implications than prescription drugs going awry, road rage, lunatics acting berserk, or freak industrial accidents. Those can be shrugged off. Islamist terrorism, in contrast, requires an analysis of jihadi motives and a focus on Muslims, steps highly unwelcome to authorities.

And so, police, prosecutors, and politicians shy away from stark realities in favor of soothing and inaccurate bromides. This ostrich-like behavior carries heavy costs; those who refuse to recognize the enemy cannot defeat him. To pretend terrorism is not occurring nearly guarantees that it will recur.

Read More

MEMRI: Saudi TV continues to demonize Christians, Jews

MEMRI emphasizes that this broadcast came a couple of days before Saudi Arabia's "anti-terrorism" conference. But calls to kill Jews and Christians via Jihad isn't terror - it is only a religious obligation, that should be protected by Freedom of Religion!

Saudi Preacher Musa Al-Qarni: 'The Jews and Christians are Allah's Enemies... We Ask Allah to Strengthen the Jihad Fighters in Iraq'

'The Jews and Christians are Allah's Enemies'

Al-Qarni: "The uproar and the chaos that we see today in the human race – the killing, the acts of aggression, the rape, the robbery, and the disgrace of honor – what causes this is that the banners which are hoisted high are those of the Jews, the Christians, and other religions and faiths, and not the banner of 'There is no God but Allah and Muhammad is Allah's Messenger.'

"Let's have a look at what is written in the Koran. What position must we adopt towards Allah's enemies? Is it the position we have adopted? First of all, we must be aware of the fact that at present we see that [the West] doesn't want us even to say the words 'Allah's enemies.' They don't want us to say that the Jews and the Christians are Allah's enemies. They don't want us to say that the Jews and the Christians are the enemies of the Muslims and the enemies of Islam.

"This is fixed and established in the Koran and in the tradition…

"If this is so, if this is something fixed, how is it that we find in the things that we say, among our children, our own flesh and blood, among Muslims, people who are in denial of these things, who deny that there is a great enmity between Muslims and non-Muslims? It is true that we say that Islam's fundamental approach is that of mercy, and that the fundamental principle of Islam is [that it is a] mercy for human beings. But [it is for] he who submits to Allah's religion and extends his hand to allow Allah's religion to spread all over the earth and to make Allah's word supreme – it is toward him that religion is merciful. However, whoever fights against Allah's religion, and fights those who love Allah, distorts the image of Islam and the Muslims and does so much to weaken Islam…

"Let's take a real-life example. Today, the Jews are occupying the Muslims' lands, raping their women, killing their children, and destroying their houses – are these acts being perpetrated by the Muslims or by the Jews?"

Interviewer: "By the Jews, as anyone with eyes can see. This is clear to the entire world…"

Al-Qarni: "OK, and we see that at present anyone who speaks about the Jews is accused of antisemitism, and people are brought to trial for this. OK. Are the Jews not making great efforts to make us quote the Koranic verses proving that they are enemies of the revelation and showing their base character, their lowly character traits, [relating] what they did to the prophets and messengers and their long history of acts of treachery, deceit, conspiracy and treason? They are making great efforts in this…"

'The Terrorists are These Jews and Christians'

Interviewer: "You shouldn't blame them for this. We are the ones to blame if we agree to change the Koran and the tradition to suit them."

Al-Qarni: "The terrorists are these Jews and Christians who implement these policies through the use of force, repression, and tyranny, and to this end make use of planes, tanks, and all manner of deadly weapons."

Interviewer: "Aisha's second question [is about whether] Islam spread by the sword. They always say that Islam spread by the sword. How should we respond to them?"

Al-Qarni: "First of all, we ask by what means is the freedom that the U.S. wants spread? The freedom that it wants now to market?"

Interviewer: "Through missiles and bombs…"

Al-Qarni: "Through B-50s, bombs that the international community has forbidden, hundred of thousands of armed soldiers – this is how freedom has spread."

Interviewer: "And we don't see any freedom. All we see afterwards is subjugation…"

Al-Qarni: "At any rate, if we return to our discussion of the heart of the matter… First of all, we must realize that Allah obligated us to disseminate this religion all over the globe. And first, it should be spread through outreach and calling people to Allah's word, through pleasing words, gently, and through good deeds. Through letting people hear Allah's words and showing them Islam. However, if we run up against someone who opposes this path and attempts to obstruct the spread of the upright religion and the light, and to obstruct their reaching others – in this case it is a duty to fight such a person. And Allah said: 'Fight them until there is no more strife and Allah's religion reigns supreme.'

"We don't agree with those who disavow this completely and say that the religion [of Islam] doesn't use the sword. No. Islam uses the sword when there is no other alternative. Therefore wisdom, as the religious authorities say, consists in utilizing each thing in its proper place. If there is need for the sword, then it is wise to use the sword, and if the occasion requires kind words and outreach, then it is wise to utilize them."

'We Ask Allah to Strengthen … the Jihad Fighters in Iraq … Against Their Enemies the Jews and the Christians'

"We ask Allah to strengthen the spirits of the Jihad fighters in Iraq, and to help them against their enemies, the Jews and the Christians.

"Likewise, I emphasize that the Jihad that the Muslims are fighting in Iraq in order to repel the enemy aggressor, the Jews and the Christians, who are attacking land and honor – I emphasize that this Jihad is legitimate Jihad, Jihad for Allah's sake, and it is considered defense of Muslim countries, their lands and their honor. The doubts that are raised against this Jihad are not correct and are out of place." [5]

---

[1] http://www.ctic.org.sa/

[2] http://www.ctic.org.sa/thems.asp

[3] http://switch3.castup.net/cunet/gm.asp?ClipMediaID=50067&ak=null

[4] To view another clip on Musa Al-Qarni, visit http://memritv.org/Search.asp?ACT=S9&P1=339

[5] Iqra TV (Saudi Arabia), February 3, 2005.

Read More

Accusers of IDF captain: We lied - he didn't shoot the Arab girl point blank

The soldiers who slimed the IDF captain did more damage to the IDF reputation than anybody. Shame on these losers.

Accuser of 'Confirmed Kill' IDF Captain: We Lied

Captain "R." is on his way to aquittal following a major breakthrough in the trial of the IDF commander accused of intentionally killing an Arab girl.

The prosecution's key witness admitted Sunday to having lied during the investigation.

Two soldiers in R.'s unit had testified that he carried out a point-blank "confirmed-kill" of 13-year-old Arab girl Iman al Hams, who had entered a closed military zone adjacent to the Girit IDF position last October. R. testified that though he and his soldiers had opened fire on someone they assumed to be a terrorist based on intelligence information and the fact that the girl threw a bag toward them - he denied confirming the kill at close range.

Three weeks ago, one of the accusing soldiers admitted that he had not actually seen the shooting, contradicting previous testimony he had given. Now, Lieutenant S., who had been on lookout duty during the incident and subsequently accused R. of shooting the girl at close range admitted during his cross-examination by defense attorney Elad Eisenberg, that he and his fellow soldiers had been lying all along.

Eisenberg asked S. whether it was accurate that following R.'s suspension, S. had bragged to his fellow soldiers, saying, "We managed to get rid of the company commander."

S. answered: "Not exactly. I said it humorously. Most of the soldiers in the company didn't care about the girl who was killed. Many people did it in order ... to get rid of the company commander."

Eisenberg said: "Did what?"

S. answered: "Lied during the investigations."

Eisenberg then accused S. of lying to investigators when he told them that he saw R. confirm the kill by firing two individual bullets, followed by a burst of fire toward the girl.

Repeating the question of whether or not he told the truth, S. said his words were not "intentionally," false, then argued that they were not meant "maliciously" and finally admitted: "I didn't exactly lie ... I said an untruth."

Following the development, the defense requested that the prosecution withdraw the indictment altogether, but the request has been declined so far.

The judge, Lt.-Col. Aharon Mishnayot ordered R., who has been confined to his army base - released, that his weapons be returned to him, and that he be reinstated into the Givati Brigade. "It is an inarguable fact that the dramatic development with regard to the testimony of Lieutenant S., who admitted flat-out that he did not tell the truth during the military police investigation, significantly undermines at least the value of this witness's testimony," Mishnayot said.

R. was in good spirits upon his release. "I have missed my job and my unit, and am happy that in the end justice is being brought to light - what you saw today speaks for itself." R.

Though the story was reported widely in the world press, including headlines such as "IDF Captain Shoots 13-year-old 20 Times," the fact that the facts of the case have been increasingly challenged has been virtually ignored. Already in October, IDF Chief of Staff Lt.-Gen. Moshe Yaalon told the cabinet that the girl had been dispatched by terrorists as a decoy in order to draw out soldiers and turn them into targets for terrorist snipers. Yaalon also explained that the girl was in a closed military area. In addition, the girl reportedly threw a bag at the soldiers - a suspicious move, under the circumstances, even though the bag was later found to contain only schoolbooks and no explosives.

Read More

More on Columbia professor's anti-Israel bias

Kudos the the New York Sun for bringing Massad's teachings to light outside his insular world where he can bully his students.

Bias of Massad Is Being Noted in His Classes
Crisis At Columbia

BY JACOB GERSHMAN - Staff Reporter of the Sun
February 7, 2005

Here's a quiz.

Israel is: a) a Jewish supremacist state, b) the worst human-rights abuser in the Middle East, c) a major factor preventing the democratization of the Arab region, or d) all of the above.

If you answered "d," you would fit right in at a core-curriculum course at Columbia University taught by an assistant professor of modern Arab politics, Joseph Massad, who is a rising star of the university's Department of Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures.

Mr. Massad, author of the forthcoming book "The Persistence of the Palestinian Question," is best known as one of the Columbia scholars whose alleged mistreatment of Jewish students is at the center of a campus controversy that has attracted national attention from Jewish and academic leaders.

Though the dispute has focused on allegations of intimidation and harassment of students, the more common criticism brought up by students of Mr. Massad has to do not with the appropriateness of his conduct, but with the quality and content of his teaching.

Students of his say he is relentless in his condemnations of Israel and America, even in a course he taught in the fall called Topics in Asian Civilization, in which Israel, at least according to the syllabus, plays only a minor role.

Mr. Massad is not without his admirers. For some Columbia undergraduates, Mr. Massad's political convictions are his primary appeal.

"Many students take offense at the very quality that makes Massad such a brilliant academic and honest, effective teacher," one anonymous student posted on a Web site that collects reviews of Columbia professors and courses. "He neither claims nor supports purported academic 'objectivity.' He holds an intellectual conviction and offers rational, clear, and cogent arguments."

For other students, like sophomore Bari Weiss, taking one of his courses can be "suffocating."

In the fall semester, she was a student in Topics in Asian Civilization. Mr. Massad taught the second half and was responsible for covering a history of the Middle East from the beginnings of Islam to 20th-century Arab nationalism.

"The course was supposed to be all about the Middle East," Ms. Weiss said. "The amount of time he spent talking about Zionism or the Jewish nation or Jewish culture was inappropriate."

In previous semesters, Mr. Massad taught a seminar course on the Middle East conflict, but "under the duress of coercion and intimidation" he chose not to teach it this academic year, he wrote on his university Web site. One student who took the course in 2002, Deena Shanker, said Mr. Massad told her to leave the class if she persisted in denying that Israel committed atrocities against Palestinians. Mr. Massad, who refuses to speak to The New York Sun, has denied mistreating any students and has accused his critics of trying to censor his political views.

According to three students' course notes from Topics in Asian Civilization, including ones Ms. Weiss took, Mr. Massad in his lectures repeatedly likened Israel to apartheid South Africa, dismissed its legitimacy as a Jewish state, and almost never addressed human rights abuses in countries such as Iraq, Iran, and Syria. The other two students whose notes were obtained by the Sun did not want their names to be used in this article.

"I was shocked knowing what was going on in the Middle East and the egregious human-rights violations that the professor either glossed over them or ignored them completely," Ms. Weiss, 20, said. She is one of the students who have pressed Columbia to investigate the conduct of professors in the Middle East studies department.

"In nearly all of his lectures, professor Massad found a way to denounce Israel and the West," Ms. Weiss, who received an "A" for the course, said.

"We were not presented with any material that argued that Zionism is not racist," she said.

Read More

Excusing Terror

I happened upon this essay, written in the month after 9/11, by what appears to be a fairly liberal professor (I saw other articles by Walzer highly critical of the current administration.) The Left needs far more voices like this one.

What is sad is that all of the arguments he brings here used to justify terror are applied, successfully, to Palestinian terror. After all, the only reason why Palestinians remain front and center on the world stage is because of the success of their terror campaigns over the decades - otherwise, far more deserving but quieter peoples would be getting their own states.

Excusing Terror
The Politics of Ideological Apology
By Michael Walzer
Issue Date: 10.22.01

Even before September 11, hardly anyone was advocating terrorism--not even those who regularly practice and support it. The practice is indefensible now that it has been recognized, like rape or murder, as an attack upon the innocent. The victims of a terrorist attack are ordinary men and women, eternal bystanders. There is no special reason for targeting them. The attack is launched indiscriminately against the entire class. Terrorists are like killers on a rampage, except that their rampage is purposeful and programmatic. It aims at a general vulnerability. Kill these people in order to terrify those. A relatively small number of dead victims makes for a very large number of living and frightened hostages.

This is the ramifying evil of terrorism: not just the killing of innocent people but also the intrusion of fear into everyday life, the violation of private purposes, the insecurity of public spaces, the endless coerciveness of precaution. A crime wave might produce similar effects, but no one plans a crime wave; it is the work of a thousand decision makers, each one independent of the others, brought together only by the invisible hand. Terrorism is the work of visible hands--an organizational project, a strategic choice, a conspiracy to murder and intimidate. No wonder the conspirators have difficulty justifying in public the strategy that they have chosen.

But when moral justification is ruled out, the way is opened for ideological apology. In parts of the European and American left, there has long existed a political culture of excuses focused defensively on one or another of the older terrorist organizations: the IRA, FLN, PLO, and so on. The arguments are familiar enough, and their repetition in the days since September 11 is no surprise. Still, it is important to look at them closely and reject them explicitly.

The first excuse is that terror is a last resort. The image is of oppressed and embittered people who have run out of options. They have tried every legitimate form of political action, exhausted every possibility, failed everywhere, until no alternative remains but the evil of terrorism. They must be terrorists or do nothing at all. The easy response is that, given this description, they should do nothing at all. But that doesn't engage the excuse.

It is not so easy to reach the last resort. To get there, one must indeed try everything (which is a lot of things)--and not just once, as if a political party or movement might organize a single demonstration, fail to win immediate victory, and claim that it is now justified in moving on to murder. Politics is an art of repetition. Activists learn by doing the same thing over and over again. It is by no means clear when they run out of options. The same argument applies to state officials who claim that they have tried everything and are now compelled to kill hostages or bomb peasant villages. What exactly did they try when they were trying everything?

Could anyone come up with a plausible list? "Last resort" has only a notional finality. The resort to terror is not last in an actual series of actions; it islast only for the sake of the excuse. Actually, most terrorists recommend terror as a first resort; they are for it from the beginning.

The second excuse is that they are weak and can't do anything else. But two different kinds of weakness are commonly confused here: the weakness of the terrorist organization vis-à-vis its enemy and its weakness vis-à-vis its own people. It is the second type--the inability of the organization to mobilize its own people--that makes terrorism the option and effectively rules out all the others: political action, nonviolent resistance, general strikes, mass demonstrations. The terrorists are weak not because they represent the weak but precisely because they don't--because they have been unable to draw the weak into a sustained oppositional politics. They act without the organized political support of their own people. They may express the anger and resentment of some of those people, even a lot of them. But they have not been authorized to do that, and they have made no attempt to win any such authorization. They act tyrannically and, if they win, will rule in the same way.

The third excuse holds that terrorism is neither the last resort nor the only possible resort, but the universal resort. Everybody does it; that's what politics (or state politics) really is; it's the only thing that works. This argument has the same logic as the maxim "All's fair in love and war." Love is always fraudulent, war is always murderous, and politics always requires terror. In fact, the world the terrorists create has its entrances and exits; we don't always live there. If we want to understand the choice of terror, we have to imagine what must often occur (although we have no satisfactory record of this): A group of men and women, officials or activists, sits around a table and argues about whether or not to adopt a terrorist strategy. Later on, the litany of excuses obscures the argument. But at the time, around the table, it would have been of no use for defenders of terrorism to say, "Everybody does it," because they were face-to-face with people proposing to do something else. Terrorism commonly has its origins in arguments of this sort. Its first victims are the terrorists' former colleagues, the ones who said no to terrorism. What reason can we have for equating these two groups?

The fourth excuse plays on the notion of innocence. Of course, it is wrong to kill the innocent, but these victims aren't entirely innocent. They are the beneficiaries of oppression; they enjoy its tainted fruits. And so, while their murder isn't justifiable, it is ... understandable. What else could they expect? Well, the children among them, and even the adults, have every right to expect a long life like anyone else who isn't actively engaged in war or enslavement or ethnic cleansing or brutal political repression. This is called noncombatant immunity, the crucial principle not only of war but of any decent politics. Those who give it up for a moment of schadenfreude are not simply making excuses for terrorism; they have joined the ranks of terror's supporters.

The last excuse is the claim that all the obvious and conventionally endorsed responses to terror are somehow worse than terrorism itself. Any coercive political or military action is denounced as revenge, the end of civil liberty, the beginning of fascism. The only morally permitted response is to reconsider the policies that the terrorists claim to be attacking. Here, terrorism is viewed from the side of the victims as a kind of moral prompting: Oh, we should have thought of that!

I have heard all these excuses in the past few days--often expressed along with great indignation at the chorus of national unity and determination. But the last two have been the most common. We bomb Iraq, we support the Israelis, and we are the allies of repressive Arab regimes like Saudi Arabia and Egypt. What else can we expect? Leave aside the exaggerated and distorted descriptions of American wickedness that underpin these excuses. There is a lot to criticize in our country's foreign policy over the past decades. Many of us on the American liberal-left have spent the bulk of our political lives opposing the use of violence by the U.S. government (though I and most of my friends supported the Gulf War, which ranks high in the standard version of the fourth excuse). As Americans, we have our own brutalities to answer for--as well as the brutalities of other states that we have armed and funded. None of this, however, excuses terrorism; none of it even makes terrorism morally understandable. Maybe psychologists have something to say on behalf of understanding. But the only political response to ideological fanatics and suicidal holy warriors is implacable opposition.

Read More

The Revolving Door Returns

Israeli security officials said on Saturday that it appears the Palestinian Authority is continuing with the same 'revolving door' policy from the past when it would arrest suspects involved in terror against Israel but release them shortly after.

'It is a shame that PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas has not yet acted on the ground to disarm terror organizations and crackdown on terror,' a security official said.

Palestinian security forces on Saturday briefly arrested three leaders of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which claimed responsibility for a recent attack that lightly wounded two Israeli soldiers.

The arrests marked the first such detentions since Mahmoud Abbas was elected Palestinian Authority chairman last month; however, the three were released five hours after they were arrested, party members said.

Read More

Your tax dollars at work - hundreds of PA "policemen" involved in terror

This is who we are giving $350 million to. And I have yet to read anything that would stop this from happening again - except the empty promises of terrorists..

At least 600 members of various Palestinian Authority security services have been killed since the beginning of the intifada more than four years ago, most of them while participating in violence against Israel, a senior PA security official revealed Sunday.

The official told The Jerusalem Post that dozens of PA policemen and security agents had also been arrested by the IDF during the same period for their involvement, both directly and indirectly, in armed attacks against Israel.

According to the official, most of the security personnel killed by the IDF had joined various armed militias in the West Bank and Gaza Strip shortly after the violence erupted in September 2000. He said, however, that many others were killed in Israeli raids on PA security installations or during clashes with gunmen and were not involved with any militia.

The majority of the policemen chose to join Fatah's armed wing, the Aksa Martyrs Brigades, while only a few preferred Hamas and Islamic Jihad militias, he added.

"Most of these men doubled as security officers and members of armed groups," the official admitted. "The fact that they had received paramilitary training as policemen was an asset because they were able to implement the tactics they learned in the fighting with the Israeli army."

Many PA policemen and security agents were trained by Egyptian, Jordanian and American security experts; others had attended military academies in former Eastern Bloc countries and the former Soviet Union before and after the signing of the Oslo Accords.

The policemen who also "moonlighted" as militiamen came mainly from the General Intelligence Force, the Preventative Security Service and the National Security Force.

The official said the best example was that of Youssef Kabaha, nicknamed Abu Jandal, who served as the commander of the armed militias in the Jenin refugee camp during Operation Defensive Shield in April 2002.

Abu Jandal, a lieutenant-general with the National Security Force in the West Bank, played a major role in organizing the gunmen who fought against the IDF in the camp. He was killed during the clashes.

Abu Jandal's friends said that although he was on the PA's payroll, he also served as commander of the armed wing of Islamic Jihad in the Jenin refugee camp.

Another famous case is that of Jihad al-Amarin, founder of the "suicide division" in the Aksa Martyrs Brigades in the Gaza Strip. Amarin, from the Zaitoun neighborhood in Gaza City, was a senior officer with the National Security Force.

He was killed in an IAF missile attack on his car in July 2002. His nephew, Wael al-Nammara, 33, who was also killed in the attack, was, in addition to his membership in the Aksa Martyrs Brigades, a senior officer with the Preventative Security Service.

The Preventative Security Service in the Gaza Strip has also been boasting that two of its officers were involved in attacks on the IDF over the past four years.

In the first case, Baha Abu al-Said, who was also a member of the Aksa Martyrs Brigades, led a group of gunmen that infiltrated an IDF outpost, killing three soldiers.

His colleague in the same security force, Yasser Khatib, was the commander of the Aksa Martyrs Brigades in Rafah before he was killed by the IDF last year. Khatib was accused of carrying out several attacks on IDF bases and settlements.

Khaled Shawish, one of the commanders of the Aksa Martyrs Brigades in the West Bank who spent the last three years hiding in the Mukata "presidential" compound in Ramallah, was also a senior officer with the National Security Force.

Read More

Israel Considering Releasing Murderers - What has happened to the Jewish state?

I can understand Palestinians making absurd demands; this is all they do. But why the hell is Israel considering caving to them? Is Israel so starved for peace that she will throw all caution to the wind for a pipe-dream? Have Abbas' cosmetic and quickly reversible moves impressed Israelis that much? Has Israel decided that a few mortars every day or so is an acceptable level of violence? What have the Palestinians done in the past month that make them so respectable after four years of non-stop murdering?

And Israel is now treating the Jews who arguably love the Land of Israel more than anyone else as the enemy, while Holocaust-deniers are friends. There is a growing divide between Israel and Jews - it is still small enough that is can be papered over in the diaspora but everything is pointing to Israel going away from its founding principles and towards becoming just another secular state that relies on others for her security. To say that this is scary is an understatement.

The sensitive issue of releasing Arab terrorists will be decided by a joint committee. PA terrorist organizations warn that a compromise on the issue will result in a renewal of attacks on Israel.

The committee is to convene after the summit in Sharm a-Sheikh on Tuesday.

Israel has informed the PA that it would agree to release 500 terrorist prisoners as soon as an agreement is reached, and 400 more three months from now. The Palestinian Authority continues to demand that Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorists, and even murderers, be included in these numbers. PA negotiators say that no ceasefire can be implemented until Israel agrees to this condition.

However, it all depends on President Moshe Katzav. No prisoners can be released before completing their sentence without a presidential pardon – and Katzav informed Prime Minister Sharon on Friday that he opposes giving it to terrorists who murdered Israelis. He says, though, that he will address each case on its own merits.

Opinions within the security cabinet on the release of terrorist murderers differ widely. Labor's Chaim Ramon is in favor, and Shimon Peres feels that Israel's long-standing position against the release is "outdated." Defense Minister Sha'ul Mofaz and IDF Chief of Staff Lt.-Gen. Moshe Yaalon lean towards favoring the release, while Finance Minister Binyamin Netanyahu objects to the release of murderers. Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom says that the release of any Hamas prisoners at all will "damage our explanatory efforts abroad" to have Hamas outlawed as a terrorist organization. Prime Minister Sharon is said to favor the release of terrorists with blood on their hands, but only at a later date; at present, he sides with GSS head Avi Dichter's position against releasing murderers.

Read More

Columbia U. continues pro-terror antics

BY SOL STERN and FRED SIEGEL - Special to the Sun
February 4, 2005

You might think that Columbia University would be on its best academic behavior on the issue of the Middle East conflict these days. After all, several professors in the Department of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures, known as MEALAC, are credibly accused of anti-Semitism and intimidating pro-Israel students. The university's president, Lee Bollinger, has appointed a committee to look into the charges. But even with the media spotlight on, Columbia apparently can't help itself.

Last Monday night we attended a university panel on the Middle East conflict titled "One State or Two? Alternative Proposals for Middle East Peace." Even the panel's title was a giveaway that we were in for more anti-Israel bias on campus. The "one state" solution is a euphemism for the destruction of the Jewish state - a trope of the most extreme rejectionist elements within the Palestinian movement and their allies in Syria and Iran. Terrorist groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah want to create an Islamic Republic in place of Israel. A few splinter Marxist groups such as the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, founded by George Habash, offer the Jews a solution that's far more "progressive." They murder innocents merely to replace Israel with a "secular democratic" Palestine.

The scene at Columbia, with Spartacists handing out literature outside the packed auditorium and proponents of Palestinian military victory in the vast majority, was wildly at odds with the hopeful development on the ground, where Messrs. Sharon and Abbas are now scheduled to meet. One of the panelists was Mark Cohen, a Princeton historian of medieval Islam. He gave a measured scholarly presentation on the subject of Arab Muslim anti-Semitism, insisting that attacks on Jews in the Koran had little to do with hostility to Jews. It's a debatable proposition. But professor Cohen never even engaged the issue at hand. He largely served as a prop for the ranting to follow.

Rashid Khalidi, a Columbia professor whose recent book argues that Yasser Arafat was right to reject the best peace deal he had ever been offered, opening the way to four years of bloodshed, presented a tendentious argument for a one-state solution that strained to stay within the bounds of reasoned discourse.

Then Joseph Massad took the floor, and the floodgates of hatred opened wide. Mr. Massad is one of the MEALAC professors accused of demanding of one Israeli student, "How many Palestinians did you kill today?" At the forum, he used the phrase "racist Israeli state" more than two dozen times. He used seemingly universalist language of anti-racism to drive a fascist argument. Mr. Massad is so extreme that he argued that Arafat was in effect an Israeli collaborator for even talking about compromise.

Whatever can be said of this rant, its "academic" content was hard to discern. But to judge by the applause he received, Mr. Massad was the star of the evening. Obviously, Mr. Massad, an acolyte of the dear departed George Habash, isn't worried about President Bollinger's panel, which includes three professors who have signed petitions demanding that all universities divest from Israel.

The final act of hatred came from the Israeli quisling "historian" Ilan Pappe, who has stated openly that his so-called scholarly work is an attempt to create a counter narrative to official Zionist historiography and to undermine the international legitimacy of the state of Israel. He bizarrely insisted that the destruction of Israel would pave the way for enhanced rights for women, and the feminist students in the audience cheered.

Instead of providing an alternative to hatred and extremism from both sides, this panel was a hate-fest masquerading as academic discourse. And this was no aberration attributable only to one misguided student group. In addition to Qanun, a Columbia Law School student group, the panel was cosponsored by the university chaplain, the Student Senate, and two of Columbia's most prestigious academic affiliates: the Middle East Institute, headed by professor Khalidi, and the School of International and Public Affairs. SIPA's dean, Lisa Anderson, was appointed by Mr. Bollinger to the committee looking into the charges against professor Massad - whose dissertation adviser she was.

Coming away from Monday night's hate panel and then looking at this tangled web of conflicts of interest within the university, we realized that the issue of misconduct in the classroom by one or two professors, important though it is, is dwarfed by a more fundamental question: How did a great institution of higher learning allow itself to be transformed into a platform for vicious political propaganda and hate speech directed against one country, Israel?

Surely one crucial moment in this transformation was Columbia's decision to raise $4 million - including a contribution from the United Arab Emirates - to create the Edward Said endowed chair in Arab studies, and then to give the prize to professor Khalidi. We don't doubt that Mr. Khalidi has academic credentials. Compared to professors Massad and Pappe, he is a model of decorum and moderation. But when Columbia academic officials made this choice they knew they were getting a Palestinian political activist. From 1976 to 1982, Mr. Khalidi was a director in Beirut of the official Palestinian press agency, WAFA. Later he served on the PLO "guidance committee" at the Madrid peace conference.

In bringing professor Khalidi to Morningside Heights from the University of Chicago, Columbia also got itself a twofer of Palestinian activism and advocacy. Mr. Khalidi's wife, Mona, who also served in Beirut as chief editor of the English section of the WAFA press agency, was hired as dean of foreign students at Columbia's SIPA, working under Dean Anderson. In Chicago, the Khalidis founded the Arab American Action Network, and Mona Khalidi served as its president. A big farewell dinner was held in their honor by AAAN with a commemorative book filled with testimonials from their friends and political allies. These included the left wing anti-war group Not In My Name, the Electronic Intifada, and the ex-Weatherman domestic terrorists Bernadine Dohrn and Bill Ayers. (There were also testimonials from then-state Senator Barack Obama and the mayor of Chicago.)

The message sent by Columbia University officials by this choice was that they were determined to honor the memory of Edward Said by continuing to have radical Palestinian activism on campus. That's what they now have in spades. The question is whether it's now possible within the university's public space to even make an argument for the only democratic country in the Middle East.

Read More