A Jew in Baghdad

Jonathan D. Zagdanski, 1st Lieutenant U.S. Army, JewishTimes, Sept. 11, 2003 

I recently returned from Baghdad, Iraq, where I served as an Infantry Platoon Leader of 26 men during nearly 6 months of combat operations. We were part of the 3rd Infantry Division, the unit that led the invasion into Iraq and subsequently captured Baghdad. Our political and military leaders told us before the invasion that we were key players in the War on Terrorism.  However, as a Jew and an American having fought the war, I came to realize that we are not just fighting terrorism. Rather, we are engaged in a war against something much more fundamental.

Also see: To be a Jew in Baghdad, By Orly Halperin: In 2004 Baghdad's last Jews struggle to survive.  Recall the gruesome video footage, March, 2004 when four bodyguards of the US-based Blackwater Security Consulting Company were attacked while driving through Fallujah -- two of the men who were mutilated, dragged through the streets, then hung from the town's bridge and burned while crowds cheered.

Rumors filtered back to Baghdad that the security guards had dual citizenship: American and Israeli. One source with contacts in Fallujah says that this was partially true. Israeli passports were found on two of the security professionals, he says, those whose bodies were mutilated and hung. The Israelis, he said, had their appendages cut off and their bodies cut up while they were still alive. Then fuel was poured over them and they were lit ablaze.

Whether the two men were Israeli or not, the underlying belief held by the average Iraqi is clear - there is no place for Jews or Israelis in Iraq.

Shortly after we breached the city limits of Baghdad on that fateful day of April 9th, it was obvious that the Iraqi Army was not going to fight us in the city. The U.S. Military was caught by surprise at the lack of opposition and was rather unprepared to transition to nation building so rapidly. Thus, Military commanders hastily assigned each Platoon Leader, including myself, a section of Baghdad to oversee. The neighborhood under my control was roughly 3 square miles in northwest Baghdad with approximately three thousand Iraqi citizens, most of who were Shia Muslims.

See also, The Ungovernable Shiites, By Steven Vincent, April 08, 2004, " . . . examining their teachings and iconography . . .  severed heads, amputated hands, Arabic letters dripping blood — and that's what found in mosques."

My initial  responsibilities was to find heavy  conventional weapons and  ammunitions, arrest looters, identify  destroyed power lines, and restore  order in the neighborhood by  conducting day and night street  patrols. This was a very difficult task but it gave me the opportunity to interact with many Iraqis during these unstable times.

While patrolling the streets of Baghdad, I often got involved in political conversations with secular, educated, and “moderate” Iraqis about the war against Iraq, Israel, the Jews and America. To my surprise, most of them held wildly irrational beliefs about the world.  For example, most of them would swear that Ariel Sharon pressured a reluctant President Bush to go to war against Iraq. Moreover, that the CIA put Saddam Hussein, a CIA agent, in power to allow U.S. forces to take Iraqi oil and impoverish Iraq.  Finally, they were convinced that the CIA is an organization controlled by the Mossad and that powerful Zionists dominate Washington D.C.!  In fact, most Arabs in the world believe these absurdities. These beliefs are the product of years of intense brainwashing by their education system, mass media, and political and religious leaders. These beliefs turn educated, intelligent Arab family men into hijackers that slam passenger planes into buildings and homicide bombers that murder as many Jews as possible on Israeli buses.

PAC Comment:  Unfortunately, these insane beliefs are also held right here among U.S. Moslems.  But it goes beyond just holding insane beliefs.  We are infiltrated by radical Islamist terrorists and terrorist sponsors who intend to melt into Western societies for the long fight ahead -- the jihad.

• CAIR, the "mainstream" Muslim organization, established by Hamas leader, supported financially by the UAE stands “on the wrong side in the war on terrorism.”  It's yet another player in the international terror network.

   

   

  • The executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), Nihad Awad, participated in a three-day summit of U.S.-based Hamas members and supporters in 1993, FBI Special Agent Laura Burns testified in a Dallas courtroom August 2, 2007.  CAIR and five of its officials are unindicted co-conspirators in the terror support trial of the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development.  (Investor's Business Daily weighs in.)  Holy Land Trial Ends in Mistrial.

   

  • CAIR throws its support behind Dr. Esam Omeish, a leader of Muslim Brotherhood front group, who resigned from the Virginia Commission on Immigration after being exposed.

   

  • Federal prosecutors: CAIR is part of a covert Muslim Brotherhood effort in the U.S while the  Muslim American Society (MAS) was "founded as the overt arm of the Muslim Brotherhood in the United States."

   

  • CAIR's uses $50 million in Saudi funding to promote the ideas advanced by those such as Dr. Ahmad Al-Akhras who is also Vice Chair of CAIR-National.

   

  • CAIR’s usual response any time authorities detain or question Muslims or Arab nationals in the US who are suspected of potential terrorism planning came about when two young Saudi nationals, Mana Saleh Almanajam, 23, and Shaker Mohsen Alsidran, 20, both of Tampa, boarded a Florida high school bus with local students one morning.

   

  • April 2004: A member of CAIR's national staff, Randall Todd "Ismail" Royer, pleads guilty for conspiring to train on American soil for a "violent jihad."  Another CAIR figure, Bassem Khafagi, arrested in 2003 while serving as the group's director of community relations.

  • Radical Islamic front group CAIR is doing a full court press to push through the construction of a huge mosque in the Orland Park suburb of Chicago—and anyone who protests is being labeled a “racist” and a “bigot, even though,  the nearby Bridgeview mosque openly supports and raises money for Hamas and Islamic Jihad.

  • February 2006: Nihad Awad, the Executive Director of the national CAIR headquarters goes to bat for the release of convicted terrorist Sami Al-Arian .  Also speaking: Eric Erfan Vickers, the former Executive Director of the American Muslim Council (AMC). Vickers resigned from his position at AMC, after he was exposed for calling the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster “an act of divine retribution against Israel.”

  • CAIR's strategy of falsely claiming "persecution" (2005 Report,  2004 Report) and silencing the press.  When disingenuous CAIR officials like Ibrahim Hooper are quoted directly, their own defensive, evasive words make them look worse than any “basher” ever could.  Unfortunate truth: in 2005, of the 1,314 verified offenses motivated by religious bias, 69% were anti-Jewish, while 11% were anti-Islamic

  • Lead the witch-hunt against  Daniel Pipes nomination to The U.S. Institute of Peace

  • Web of connections among the leadership of CAIR, the Islamic Association of Palestine, and Hamas

• The Arab Lobby Network

• Legal jihad - manipulating democratic court systems to abolish public discourse critical of Islam, and establish principles of Sharia, Islamic law. A long list of targets include Mark Steyn, Dr. Rachel Ehrenfeld, Orianna Fallaci.  Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams: sharia should become a part of "plural jurisdiction" in Britain!!

• September 2007, Chicago: The annual meeting of  the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA).  One seminar: How to properly beat a woman.  How its membership thinks.  ISNA (along with CAIR - see above)  named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the terror support trial of the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development.

• Muslim community closes ranks against their own moderates -- right here in the U.S. though?

• Sheik al Sahlani, leader of a large New York mosque, joins the new Iranian president (and a US-based Saudi political science prof.) in disputing the Holocaust, saying it “has been exaggerated.”  “The numbers, the reasons, we have to study more.”

• The 6 imams complaints on being removed from U.S. Airways flt 300 are out of line.  Here's hoping that the those Muslim groups disingenuously expressing outrage will be ignored. The imams legal representation is CAIR.   Keith Ellison, D-Minn., the first Muslim member of Congress immediately steps in to pressure US Airways and the local airport to change security policies.  Ellison's links to a radical Islamic school of thought that requires loyalty to the Quran over the U.S. Constitution.

• Bridges TV, American-Islamic TV channel -- October, 2006 -- religious programming that praises martyrdom, tells Muslims they have a duty increase their numbers to 50% of the population from 2%,  that Islamic law be implemented in American courts.

• July 28, 2005: Steven Emerson -- This morning a group of American Islamic leaders held a press conference to announce a fatwa, or Islamic religious ruling, against “terrorism and extremism.” An organization called the Fiqh Council of North America (FCNA) issued the fatwa, and the Council on American - Islamic Relations (CAIR) organized the press conference, stating that several major U.S. Muslim groups endorsed the fatwa. In fact, the fatwa is bogus.  Two of the signers: Fawaz Damra (Imam of Ohio’s largest mosque deported Jan '07), Muzammil Siddiqi.  Judea Pearl: AN AMERICAN FATWA AGAINST TERRORISM FALLS SHORT. CAIR smears Emerson.

• Experts have been surprised to discover that the typical recruit to Al Qaeda is Western educated and has a wealthy, professional background.  Dr Marc Sageman, a forensic psychiatrist who conducted the study: “The common stereotype is that terrorism is a product of poor, desperate, naive, single young men from Third World countries, vulnerable to brainwashing and recruitment into terror.  However, his study showed that three-quarters of the Al Qaeda members were from upper middle-class homes and many were married with children; 60 were college educated, often in Europe or the United States.

• Though the Saudi-funded Muslim Students’ Association promotes itself as a benevolent, non-political entity devoted to the simple virtue of celebrating Islam and providing college students a healthy venue to develop their faith and engage in philanthropy,  there is overwhelming evidence that it is an overtly political organization seeking to create a single Muslim voice on U.S. campuses— espousing Wahhabism, anti-Americanism, and anti-Semitism,  expressing solidarity with militant Islamist ideologies, sometimes with criminal results.  The MSA is is a Pro-Terror Organization.

  • MSA sponsors the Islamic supremacist group Al-Muhajiroun at Queensborough Community College: “We reject the U.N., reject America, reject all law and order. Don’t lobby Congress or protest because we don’t recognize Congress! The only relationship you should have with America is to topple it!” Its convention to celebrate the third anniversary of the September 11 attacks titled: “The Choice is in Your Hands: Either You’re with the Muslims or with the Infidels.”  A strident NY based offshoot calls itself The Islamic Thinkers Society.

  • Following the deaths of more than 350 people - at least half of them children - who are so far known to have died in Beslan, Russia,  Omar Bakri Mohammed, al-Muhajiroun's spiritual leader says that holding women and children hostage would be a reasonable course of action for a Muslim who has suffered under British rule.

  • Novermber 2004: Northeastern Illinois University branch of MSA hosts an event  paying tribute to the “spiritual leader” of Hamas, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin—personally responsible for the murders of hundreds of innocent men, women, and children who was killed by Israel in March. CANCELLED.

  • Former president of the Muslim Students' Association at Montgomery College and elementary school teacher, Ali Asad Chandia is accused of providing material support to Lashkar-e-Taiba, a U.S.-designated terrorist group, and serving as the personal assistant to Ali al-Timimi, the convicted spiritual leader of another terrorist group dubbed the “Virginia Jihad network” by federal prosecutors.

• Dr. Ahmad Dewidar, imam of the Islamic Society of Mid-Manhattan and lecturer at Manhattan University: “The Zionist community numbers only 3 million, but they control the government, the politics, the economy, and the media in the U.S.”

• A Fifth Column in the Prisons?: Imam Umar Abdul-Jalil, head of Islamic chaplains in the New York City Department of Correction, one of NYC's most prominent Islamic leaders:  the “greatest terrorists in the world occupy the White House,” Jews control the media, and Muslims are being tortured in Manhattan jails.  Report: Islamists in U.S. Prisons Pose Threat - Jerry Seper (Washington Times) Islamic extremists in U.S. prisons have taken advantage of a lack of religious monitoring to embrace violent interpretations of the Koran, posing a threat to national security, a study conducted for the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee said Tuesday.

• Saudis control most of the Muslim organizations in the U.S -- 80% of the mortgages on mosques in the U.S. are paid for by the Wahhabist Saudis.    Saudi Hate Ideology Fills US Mosques.  A network of Saudi front groups -- embedded deep within our system of higher education, including many of our most prestigious universities -- is using vast infusions of money to turn the American educational system against US support for Israel and in favor of the Saudi vision of a global Muslim state in which not only Jews, but Christians and all infidels will have subordinate status to the followers of the “true faith.” [See this JTA investigation.]  At the same time they look to affect American policy in the Middle East and public opinion in the US in a way to aid their Wahhabist goals and undermine America’s efforts to prosecute the War On Terror.   Lee Kaplan, FrontPageMagazine.com, April 5, 2004.  The U.S. government should stop giving "religious visas" to foreign Muslim preachers from radical Muslim countries.  Rachel Ehrenfeld on the widespread Saudi investments in the United States.

• October 18, 2007: U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom recommends shutting down the Saudi funded Islamic Saudi Academy, a private school serving nearly 1,000 students in grades K-12 at two campuses in northern Virginia’s Fairfax County concerned that the school is fostering radical Islam.

• August 5, 2004: Two leaders of Albany, New York mosque arrested in a sting operation (conducted after finding information in a vacated terrorist training camp in Iraq) for helping a government agent they believed was a terrorist interested in purchasing a shoulder-launched missile

• June 2, 2004 - federal agents raid the Northern Virginia offices of WAMY - the World Assembly of Muslim Youth: see this excerpt from a songbook from WAMY’s US summer camp for Muslim kids, a cheery little campfire tune for budding jihadis.

• Time Magazine profiles a major Chicago Mosque, the Mosque Foundation which is under a large-scale terror Investigation.  See "Hard-liners Won Battle For Bridgeview Mosque" the Chicago Tribune Story that lays out the connections between: Sheik Jamal, Sami Al-Arian, Saudi Arabia (North American Islamic Trust), the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, suicide bombing and money.  The U.S. branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, the Muslim American Society, behind Minnesota airport taxi controversy.

• August 11, 2004: Tariq Isa, 55, a Palestinian-American, the third leader of the Mosque of the Martyr Izzedine Al-Qassam on West 63rd Street on Chicago’s South Side arrested on drug peddling charges -- with distributing almost 1.73 million tablets of pseudoephedrine, a chemical essential to manufacturing the illegal stimulant methamphetamine -- likely in order to fund terrorism.  See Chicago Tribune story too.  September 4, 2005 Update: Tariq Isa pleads guilty

• Asra Q. Nomani, a Muslim in West Virginia, describes the takeover of her mosque by radical Islamists—and the total lack of concern from “mainstream” Islamic groups like ISNA and CAIR.

• Islamic Society of Boston and their connections to extremists. January 2007 Update. May 2007 Update.

• July 29, 2005: The new imam of the Dar al-Hijrah mosque in Falls Church Virginia rejects any call to reform Islam. And he’s a fan of Hamas.

• Gilbert T. Sewell of the American Textbook Council, a non-profit that reviews history textbooks, recently submitted a report that reviewed the teaching of Islam in most of our children’s history textbooks. He discovered that sections concerning Islam in books distributed by the main U.S. publishers/providers have been sanitized. In general, current or past events about Islam are not reported accurately for the sake of “political correctness.”

• UC Berkeley Lecturer Hatem Bazian calls for an intifada in the United States.  [More on the scary transformation of Berkeley Ca., from the birthplace of the Free Speech movement to an epicenter of hatred, anti-Semitism, and jihad ideology.

• February 2006: Ilan Halimi,  23-year-old French Jew, kidnapped, tortured by a Muslim gang for 24 days found by a passerby stumbling in a field south of Paris. Handcuffed, naked, with four-fifths of his body covered with bruises, stab wounds and serious burns, Ilan died in the ambulance on the way to the hospital.  January 2004, a Saudi national, Muhammad Ali Al-Ayed, pleaded guilty to killing, and nearly decapitating, his Jewish friend.  They met while studying at Houston Community College.

• Andrew C. McCarthy, May 13, 2004, NRO: As an assistant U.S. attorney, time and time again I heard it over the last decade, from ordinary Muslims we reached out to for help.  "I'd like to help the government," they would say, "but I can't." Repeatedly they'd tell us that the militant factions dominated their communities.  This is no small matter.   [T]he more insular and dominated communities become, the more they are likely to breed the attitudes and pathologies that lead to terrorist plots and suicide bombings.

• The Muslim Student Union (MSU) of University of California-Irvine asks graduating Muslim students to to show their support for terrorism, murder and Islamist tyranny by wearing green sashes bearing the word “shahada,” the Arabic word for "martyrdom.” The Muslim world refers to a suicide bomber who kills innocent civilians in Israel as a “shahid.” Pilots and their cohorts who fly airplanes into skyscrapers are also celebrated for their “martyrdom.”  Hate Fest May 15-18, 2006.

• A group preparing to build the largest mosque in the Northeast, has long-standing ties to a suicide-bomber-advocate Egyptian cleric and to American Muslim Council leader Abdurahman Alamoudi sentenced to 23 years in prison for terrorist financing.  Alamoudi, a pillar of the U.S. Muslim community, whose influence once reached the highest levels of the U.S. government, pleaded guilty to illegally moving cash from Libya and admitted that he was involved in an elaborate Libyan plot to assassinate Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah.  Arnaud de Borchgrave: Alamoudi, a U.S. citizen, the most respected member of the Muslim community in Washington, D.C., with easy access to the White House and Congress in the 1990s, is but the tip of the proverbial iceberg.

• Salam Al-Marayati, executive director of the Muslim Public Affairs Council tells radio station KCRW, within hours of the September 11 mass murder: “If we’re going to look at suspects we should look to the groups that benefit the most from these kinds of incidents, and I think we should put the state of Israel on the suspect list because I think this diverts attention from what’s happening in the Palestinian territories so that they can go on with their aggression and occupation and apartheid policies.”  Former head of the Islamic Center in Washington DC, Muhammad Al-Asi, accuses the US government of carrying out the September 11 attacks.

• Onetime largest U.S. Muslim charity, The Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development, and seven of its officers (including Ghassan Elashi, founder of Texas CAIR chapter -- convicted April 2005, sentenced October 2006) named in a 42-count federal indictment charging conspiracy, tax evasion, money laundering, and providing help to a terrorist organization. The foundation provided more than $12.4 million to individuals and organizations linked to Hamas.  The Saudi government, our supposed ally, has in reality been the Holy Land Foundation's partner in crime.

  • Beyond "just" financing terrorism under the guise of charity,  Hamas supporters in Louisiana, Illinois, and Virginia involved in a fifteen-year conspiracy in an OPERATIONAL ROLE for preparation for actual terrorist attacks.

  • December 2004:  The Quranic Literacy Institute of suburban Oak Lawn, IL, Texas-based Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development, the Islamic Association for Palestine and alleged Hamas fund-raiser Mohammed Salah ordered to pay $156 million to the parents of an American teenager, David Boim, killed by terrorists outside Jerusalem.

  • Islamic Charity Leaders Get 65-Year Jail Terms
    U.S. District Judge Jorge Solis on Wednesday handed down 65-year prison sentences to two founders of the Dallas-based Holy Land Foundation, a U.S. Islamic charity convicted of illegally funneling $12.4 million to the Palestinian militant group Hamas. A grand jury convicted five of its leaders for conspiracy to support a foreign terrorist organization, money laundering, tax fraud and other charges. "These sentences should serve as a strong warning to anyone who knowingly provides financial support to terrorists under the guise of humanitarian relief," said David Kris, Assistant Attorney General for National Security. (Reuters) [Courtesy -- Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Daily Alert, May 28, 2009]

• Fourteen miles from the U.S. Capitol in  Springfield, Virginia, a basement-run Muslim "think-tank" -- UASR -- with alleged ties to Hamas and al Qaeda is a crucial link in the planning of any future terrorist attacks against the United States.

• Fall 2004:  Dearborn, Michigan and North Texas Muslims honor Iranian leader Ayatollah Khomeini as a great Islamic visionary."  Khomeini: “Those who know nothing of Islam pretend that Islam counsels against war. Those [who say this] are witless. Islam says: Kill all the unbelievers just as they would kill you all! Does this mean that Muslims should sit back until they are devoured by [the unbelievers]? Islam says: Kill them, put them to the sword and scatter [their armies]...."  The list of speakers at the Irving event included some of North Texas’ best-known mainstream Islamic figures. Dearborn Muslims support for Hizballah.

• The American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) of Michigan, headed by “former” Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) terrorist, Imad Hamad.  ADC is one of the most anti-Israel, anti-Semitic organizations in America, today. And one of the most anti-American. While we are fighting terrorists within and abroad, the Saudi-funded ADC is the modern-day equivalent of the German-American Bund.

• The American, Adam Yahiye Gadahn, who was named as one of seven Al Qaeda monsters sought by the FBI was recruited to radical Islam and attended the Islamic Society of Orange County— was taught Islam by Muzammil Siddiqi, a radical Wahhabist, who is on record threatening the United States and supporting terrorist groups.  A California woman, Saraah Olson, reveals to ABC News that she unknowingly married Muslim extremist, Hisham Diab, who helped set up one of the first al Qaeda sleeper cells out of their Orange County apartment complex.  She watched as her then-husband and his group transformed local teen Adam Gadahn into an America-hating fanatic.

• Tariq Ramadan, the charismatic Islamist has achieved star status in French-speaking Europe.  He sees the West in decline and advocates that Islam enter and overcome the spiritual void left by Judaism and Christianity, no longer enduring modernity, but Islamicizing it.  He is adept at the taqiyya, or the art of dissimulation, a typical Islamic practice on enemy soil.   Until his visa was revoked -- despite the efforts of the coalition to defend Ramadan -- Ramadan was planning to teach at University of Notre Dame in Indiana.  (Daniel Pipes has more on Ramadan.)  Another such character: Arab European League leader Abou Jahjah, a raving Jew-hater and Islamic supremacist, eloquent, charismatic and Hollywood handsome.

• The Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, welcomed to City Hall the Qatari divine Dr Yusuf al-Qaradawi, according to the MCB “an Islamic scholar held in great respect throughout the Islamic world”.  Basing his teaching on Islam’s holiest texts, Dr al-Qaradawi has urged his fellow Muslims to beat their wives; to use child suicide bombers to kill female and infant civilians; to destroy Israel and to murder Jews, homosexuals and British servicemen; and to colonise, desecrate and usurp Christian Rome.  Al-Qaradawi's role helping incite  the "Cartoon Intifada" -- how did the Jews get dragged into that one?  For more on Qaradawi see: The Triumph of the East.  And his links to Caribou Coffee.  Livingston on al-Qaradawi  following the 7/7/05 London bombings. Hear Yusuf al-Qaradawi for yourself.

• The Mufti of Australia Calls for Jihad -- "Don't be surprised if one day you hear the Muezzin calling for prayer and saying 'Allahu Akbar' (God is great) from the top of the White House. Sept. 11 is God's work against oppressors."

• Saudi-funded, al-Qaeda-linked  -- the Budapest Islamic community's Dar-Assalam mosque "spiritual leader" arrested planning to bomb the city's Jewish museum.

• Broadcaster Aminul Hoque spent three months gauging the mood of young Muslims on the streets of Britain: "Most worryingly, my research opened up my eyes to the fact that people whom I know very well - friends, family, colleagues - possess opinions that are enough to send shivers down the spines of most people. These are ordinary people who have well-paid jobs, are educated and seem very pleasant in conversation."  London Times, July 12, 2004: Hundreds of young Britons are believed to have attended Afghan training camps, MI5, the British Security Service, will deploy agents around Britain in cities where it is feared that extremists are radicalizing Muslim youth fearing that the main terrorist danger comes not from abroad but from within the UK. [See An American in London by Carol Gould -- a grim assessment of anti Americanism and anti Semitism -- not from Britain's Muslims either.]

• Former imam of the Finsbury Park Mosque in north London, Abu Hamza al-Masri arrested May, 2004 after US authorities charged him with trying to establish a terrorist training camp in the western state of Oregon, involvement in hostage-taking in Yemen and funding terrorism training in Afghanistan -- October, 2004 charged by British police  with encouraging followers to murder Jews and other non-Muslims. The trial of this "Hate Filled Bigot".

• The Netherlands, November 2, 2004, Theo van Gogh brutally murdered: he angered Muslims with a film -- the movie "Submission," made with Somali-born Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a member of the Dutch parliament -- that said Islam encouraged violence against women. A man with Dutch and Moroccan nationality was arrested for the killing, and suspected of Islamic extremist motives.  De Telegraaf newspaper:  lenient immigration policies had turned an open society into a “resentful and intolerant” one.  Afraid of being called racist, we have been so tolerant with regard to these religious fascists that they have been allowed to merrily undermine the roots of our freedom.”   Muslims are a majority among children under 14 in the Netherlands' four largest cities.

• The elephant in the room that politicians would like to ignore: Islamist extremists in democratic countries who become citizens of European countries, hold EU passports, and are protected by laws that guarantee freedom of speech and assembly.  A growing group of Europeans who found a home in Islam and then veered into extremism is raising concerns among antiterrorism officials that the new recruits could provide foreign-born Islamic militants with invisibility and cover, by escaping the scrutiny often reserved for young men of Arab descent. Islam is Europe's fastest-growing religion, and many experts believe that the number of converts has grown since Sept. 11, 2001. A report by France's domestic intelligence agency, published by Le Figaro, estimated last year that there were 30,000 to 50,000 converts in France. French scholar Antoine Sfeir said some converts saw the current wave of Islamic terrorism as "a kind of combat against the rich, powerful, by the poor men of the planet."  [Courtesy -- Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Daily Alert, July 20, 2004]

• Europe's Threat to the West, Daniel Pipes, New York Sun, May 18, 2004:  Islamist terrorists are not dumb; they note this special attention and now recruit intensively from citizens of the 27 countries – mostly European – who, thanks to the Visa Waiver Program, can enter America for 90 days without a visa.

• Not reassuring: the government may have let him go, but there's good reason that Brandon Mayfield of Beaverton, Ore. was arrested in connection with the Madrid March 1, 2004 bombings.

• Remember "unfairly-persecuted" software engineer Maher “Mike” Hawash of the Portland 7?  Well, he's sentenced to seven years in prison.

• Relatives of marine, Cpl. Wassef Ali Hassoun charged with desertion attempting to counter fundamentalist Sunni Muslim criticism accusing Hassoun’s family of being “American agents and collaborators.” issued a statement saying he was forced to go to the United States and join the Marines.

And the worst of it is that  multiculturalists are abetting the problem by intimidating and squashing those who speak up.

We are not at war against Terrorism; we are at war against an ideology. I consider this ideology to be the product of a dangerous mental disease. It is a disease that has infected millions of Arabs into believing that by destroying the enemy – the Jew, the State of Israel and the “Great Satan” America – past Arab pride and glory would be restored. This mental illness is  slowly but deliberately plunging the  world into World War III.

In the 30’s, a similar disease threw the world into World War II. It was a disease that infected millions of Germans into believing that by obliterating the Jews and conquering non-Arian nations, Germany would attain unsurpassed glory and freedom. Fortunately, America and its allies mustered all their efforts, resources and determination to crush and eradicate the German disease.

Unlike the Germans during WWII, the Arab world is fighting a multidimensional war against America and Israel. First, Arab nations are using the United Nations as a powerful tool to discredit Israel and the United States. Second, oil producing Arab nations use oil as a means to pressure the United States and Europe to adopt biased foreign policies against Israel. In addition, oil is used to deter many nations from trading with Israel. Third, Arab governments ensure that Arab children are fed anti-Semitic and anti-American material in their schools thereby assuring a constant supply of future terrorists. Fourth, Arab public relation spreads lies and twisted facts to Western media thereby fueling anti-Semitic and anti-Israeli sentiment in the West.  Finally, Either, Arab nations  promote, finance or condone  terrorist activity and organizations. 

Unfortunately, most of us in America and Israel believe that we are at war against terrorism. We therefore concentrate all our attention and effort against terrorism only. To do so is to wear blinders and not grasp the big picture. To worsen matters, we commit troops and equipment to fight the enemy precisely where he wants to fight - that is in his backyard using guerrilla tactics. We fail to understand that terrorism is only one of the many weapons used by our enemies. Every American and every Jew is under attack in some shape or form. It does not take a gun or a bomb to be under attack. A negative and biased article about Israel in the New York Times is a bomb directed against the Jewish community. We must fight back! Every one of us has the ability and the weaponry to contribute to the war effort. One does not need to join the U.S. Army and patrol downtown Baghdad in 120-degree weather. We can fight with our computers, our telephone, our money, our time, and our voice.  Inaction is not an alternative. Should we decide not to fight, our enemies will bring the battle to us, as they have done on September 11th and as they do daily in Israel. We have paid too often with our blood the price of passiveness and nonresistance. 

It is time to stand up, fight and shout “NEVER AGAIN!”  May God help us.

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Sudden Jihad Syndrome

INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY, February 16, 2007

Terror: It looks like the Muslim teen who opened fire on shoppers in a Salt Lake City mall is yet another case of "sudden jihad syndrome," a condition in which normal-appearing American Muslims abruptly turn violent.

Taken together, this and other cases add up to an invisible jihad inside America. But don't tell that to the FBI. The politically correct bureau does everything it can to avoid recognizing the obvious Islamic factor in these heinous crimes.

Sulejman Talovic, an 18-year-old Bosnian Muslim immigrant, was loaded with enough ammo to "inexplicably" kill dozens of victims — and he would have, if an alert off-duty cop hadn't returned fire and stopped him. Talovic still managed to methodically murder five and wound four others with a shotgun.

Witnesses say it was an act of coldblooded violence aimed at random victims — something otherwise known as terrorism. According to the Salt Lake Tribune, Talovic attended Friday prayers at a mosque about a block from the mall.

Yet the FBI saw no religious motive, and quickly ruled out terrorism. Nor could it find anything to indicate terrorism in several other Muslim-tied cases since 9/11, including:

• A 30-year-old Muslim man, Naveed Afzal Haq, who went on a shooting rampage at a Jewish community center in Seattle, announcing "I'm a Muslim-American; I'm angry at Israel."

• An Egyptian national, Hesham Mohamed Hadayet, who shot two and wounded three at an Israeli airline ticket counter at LAX.

• A bearded 21-year-old student, Joel Hinrichs, who blew himself up with a backpack filled with TATP (the explosive of choice in the Mideast) outside a packed Oklahoma University football stadium not long after he started attending the local mosque.

• A 23-year-old student, Mohammed Ali Alayed, who slashed the throat of his Jewish friend in Houston after apparently undergoing a religious awakening (he went to a local mosque afterward).

• The D.C. snipers — John Muhammad and Lee Malvo, both black Muslim converts — who picked off 13 people in the suburbs around the Beltway as part of what Muhammad described as a "prolonged terror campaign against America" around the first anniversary of 9/11, which he had praised.

• Omeed Aziz Popal of Fremont, Calif., who police said hit and killed a bicyclist there then took his SUV on a hit-and-run spree in San Francisco, mowing down pedestrians at crosswalks and on sidewalks before police caught up with him, whereupon the Muslim called himself a "terrorist."

• A 22-year-old Muslim, Ismail Yassin Mohamed, who stole a car in Minneapolis and rammed it into other cars before stealing a van and doing the same, injuring drivers and pedestrians, while repeatedly yelling, "Die, die, die, kill, kill, kill" — all, he said, on orders from "Allah."

• A 22-year-old Iranian honors student, Mohammed Reza Taheri-azar, who deliberately rammed his SUV into a crowd at the University of North Carolina to "punish the government of the United States" for invading Iraq and other Muslim nations.

Described by other students as "kind and gentle," Taheri-azar was a student council president and a member of the National Honor Society in high school. He told the judge he was "thankful you're here to learn more about the will of Allah."

He wrote a letter to a TV station citing Quranic verses justifying his attacks and told a detective that Muslims "all over the world are being killed, and now it is the people in the United States' turn to be killed."

This is not terrorism, the FBI said. Just some nutty kid. In all these cases, the feds' first reaction was to shrug. They said the perps were lone individuals who just went ballistic after having a bad day, as if anyone could have done such crimes.

But they weren't just anyone. They were all young Muslim men. Of course, the FBI can't treat all law-abiding young Muslim men as potential killers. But neither should the agency ignore this trend.

We're likely to see more of these seemingly random domestic attacks. They may seem isolated, but all have radical Islam at their nexus. They're not "senseless" or "utterly inexplicable" or "impossible to rationalize," as the media intone. They are purposeful. These men act as conscripts called up for a mission, sick as it is.

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Ohio Cleric Arrested; Terror Link Is Cited, New York Times, January 14, 2004, By ERIC LICHTBLAU

WASHINGTON, Jan. 13 — A leading Islamic cleric who runs Ohio's largest mosque was arrested Tuesday on charges that he concealed his ties to terrorist causes when applying for citizenship to the United States a decade ago.

The cleric, Fawaz Mohammed Damra, has been an outspoken figure who represented Muslims in Cleveland in interfaith gatherings after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, but was also forced to apologize for anti-Semitic and incendiary statements he made years earlier.

In an indictment unsealed Tuesday, Mr. Damrah, who officials said is a Palestinian by birth, is accused of lying to immigration officials about his association with terrorist groups when he applied for American citizenship in 1993. He also denied engaging in religious persecution "when in fact he had previously incited and/or assisted others, including terrorist organizations, that advocated the persecution of Jews and others by means of violent terrorist attacks," the indictment said.

Mr. Damrah pleaded not guilty in federal court in Cleveland and was released on bond. Officials declined to discuss the evidence in any detail. He faces up to five years in prison and possible deportation if convicted.

The F.B.I. questioned Mr. Damrah, 41, after the 1993 World Trade Center bombing about his association with a Brooklyn mosque where several of the plotters gathered, and he has also associated with prominent Islamic figures like Sami Al-Arian, the former Florida professor who was indicted last year [his brother-in-law was in on it too] on charges of supporting terrorism [that he used an Islamic charity and academic think tank at the University of South Florida as fund-raising covers for Palestinian Islamic Jihad.]

Update 9/16/04: Prelude to terror: How Damra misled FBI -- Speaking in English, he often preached interfaith brotherhood, befriending leaders of Cleveland's large and powerful Jewish community. He taught scores of college students about the beauty and peace of Islam, and he settled into a tidy suburban development in Strongsville where he and his wife are raising three daughters.

Speaking in Arabic, Damra once preached to those who meant harm to the United States and later, while in Cleveland, raised money for groups that recruited and paid for suicide bombers to kill Israelis.

Update 6/9/04: Federal judge has rules that a terrorist group’s manifesto and other items seized by the FBI in a search of an Islamic cleric’s home were taken in an illegal search and cannot be used at his trial.

Update 3/18/05: Federal prosecutors are clear to begin deportation proceedings against the leader of Ohio’s largest mosque after an appeals court upheld his conviction.

Update January 2007:  Damra deported

Update September 2007:  New imam of the Cleveland Islamic Center, Ahmed Alzaree -- Jew hater.

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Menaced by polysemites

MARK STEYN, Jerusalem Post, Nov. 26, 2003

The other day, a producer called me up and asked if I wanted to take part in a discussion about an American cartoon strip - to wit, B.C. by Johnny Hart, which has been running in a gazillion newspapers around the world for as long as I can remember.

I usually check in with it a couple of times a decade while waiting at the gate for a delayed flight, and am happy to find it refreshingly unchanged. It's set in a modified caveman era, which is to say that, like The Flintstones, its characters enjoy certain accoutrements not necessarily consistent with the time period.

On this particular day's strip, Johnny Hart shows us the caveman walking up a hill at night - there is a crescent moon in the sky - and heading for a wooden outhouse, with a crescent moon on the door, as outhouses traditionally have, at least in America. My own outhouse in New Hampshire certainly did, before it was dashed to smithereens in a hurricane.

Anyway, we next see a sound effect - "SLAM" - to indicate, presumably, the closing of the outhouse door. The final frame shows a speech bubble coming from within the outhouse with the words: "Is it just me, or does it stink in here?" The Council on American-Islamic Relations [CAIR] decided this was not an outhouse joke, but an Islamophobic slur disguised as an outhouse joke.

A reader in the Washington Post had noticed the six crescent moons in the strip, and suggested this indicated the real target of the gag. Cair drew attention to the fact that the sound effect of the alleged door slamming was stacked vertically, in a pillar-like shape, and thus could reasonably be read as "SLAM" contained within the overall shape of the letter "I" - or "ISLAM".

"Hmm," I said, thoughtfully, to the producer. "It's true that it's very hard to slam an outhouse door from the inside, what with the lack of space and so forth. Difficult to get back far enough to give it a loud enough slam to justify a sound effect. Unless there's a strong wind to whip it shut," I added, recalling my hurricane. "And even then, one would be more concerned to latch it carefully lest another gust blow it open again."

"That's Marshall Blonsky's line," said the producer, a little impatiently. Blonsky is professor of semiotics at the New School in New York and had apparently got to my penetrating insight ahead of me: "You don't slam an outhouse door." Professor Blonsky argues that the cartoon is indisputably constructed "in a polysemic fashion."

"I hadn't thought of that," I said.

"How about this?" said the producer. "If it's really just a sound effect, how come there's no exclamation?"

In the end, I declined the invitation. Although I agreed of course that Islamophobic cartooning was the most pressing issue of the week, in my usual shallow way I'd become distracted by some of the day's more trivial stories - the 11 Hindus burnt alive by a Muslim gang in Bangladesh, the 13 Christian churches torched by Muslim rioters in the Nigerian town of Kazaure, and the 27 Turks and Britons murdered by Muslim terrorists in Istanbul.

No dead Jews in that particular day's headlines, but otherwise a good haul of Hindus, Christians and, of course, Muslims.

EVERY SOCIETY has its ugly side: in America, the problem is stone-age cartoons; in Nigeria, it's stone-age - or stoning age - reality.  [PAC Comment: The governor of Zamfara State in Nigeria has ordered the demolition of all churches in the state, in accordance with Islamic shari’a law. Foreign groups including Saudi, Sudanese, Syrian, and Palestinian representatives have been aiding the institutionalization of Islamic law.  But, it's spread beyond Nigeria; see,  Sharia on the Old Continent.]   But one can't help noticing that polysemic cartooning seems a notably ineffective way of stirring up anti-Muslim feeling, at least when one looks at preliminary statistics for Muslims murdered in America this Ramadan, compared with Muslims murdered in, say, Saudi Arabia and Turkey.

My advice would be to go for the direct approach, like Sheikh Anwar al-Badawi, the A-list imam who does the Thought For The Day slot on Qatar TV: "O God, destroy the usurper Jews and the vile Christians." Nothing very polysemic about that.

Nothing very polysemic about CAIR, either. America's most prominent mainstream Muslim lobby group, it has organized rallies that managed to climax with the singing of "No to the Jews, descendants of the apes." Its chairman, Omar Ahmad, has said that "Islam isn't in America to be equal to any other faith, but to become dominant."

The Koran "should be the highest authority in America, and Islam the only accepted religion on Earth." But its supply of White House invites and presidential photo-ops never seems to dry up, and its willingness to see offence everywhere is treated respectfully by the media.

Meanwhile, while Islamic lobby groups and the most distinguished semiotics professors in America are analyzing Johnny Hart's outhouse joke, the European Union's Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia has decided to shelve its report on the rise of anti-Semitism on the Continent. The problem is that the survey had found that "many anti-Semitic incidents were carried out by Muslim and pro-Palestinian groups," and so a "political decision" was taken not to publish it because of "fears that it would increase hostility towards Muslims."

Let's go back over that slowly and try not to get a headache: the EU's main concern about an actual epidemic of hate crimes against Jews is that it could provoke a hypothetical epidemic of hate crimes against Muslims.

You couldn't ask for a better illustration of the uselessness of these thought-police bodies: they're fine for chastising insufficiently guilt-ridden whites in an ongoing reverse-minstrel show of cultural self-abasement, but they don't have the stomach for confronting real racism. A tolerant society is so reluctant to appear intolerant, it would rather tolerate intolerance.

The writer is senior contributing editor for Hollinger Inc.

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Jews out of Palestine

Amnon Rubinstein, Haaretz, Wed., November 26, 2003 Kislev 1, 5764

According to Jewish philosopher Emil Fackenheim, Jew hatred has three stages. In the first stage, the message is you can't live among us as Jews; in the second, it's you can't live among us; and in the third, it's you can't live. The first stage is coerced conversion, the second is expulsion and the third is destruction.

The message of the fourth stage is you can't live in your own country. In the 1930s, the streets of Germany filled with two kinds of graffiti: "Jews Out" and "Jews to Palestine." The call of the new anti-Semitism of our age is "Jews out of Palestine." It characterized not only the traditional Israel haters but also - and mostly - circles dubbed the left nowadays, in Israel, Europe and among "liberal" Americans.

The absurd thing is that negating Israel's right to exist, which provides the intellectual backing for the threats of its destruction, is being done in the name of the most supreme doctrines of human rights and equality. In other words, all nations have the right to self-determination - except the Jews. There is no substantial difference between that and the first stage of traditional anti-Semitism according to Fackenheim: "You can't live among us as a member of the family of nations."

The fact that the extremist intellectual left is now carrying the banner once hefted by the fascist right in Europe is as traumatic for many contemporary Jews as it was in the late 19th century. True, there are no pogroms and no Dreyfus trial, but the chief rabbi of France, Joseph Sitruk, goes on radio to tell Jews to avoid wearing a skullcap in public - a call that should have shocked the most secular Jews to their core. The European Social Forum, meanwhile, invites anti-Semitic Muslim intellectual Tarek Ramadan to join its ranks, and the left in general inspires only deep disappointment when it does not demonstrate alongside Jews who are afraid to wear a skullcap and are killed at prayers in synagogues.

Those not tainted with fashionable academic ignorance who read Moshe Lilienblum and Yehuda Pinsker nowadays cannot help but feel deep identification with those two writers. It's not only Jews who are hurt by the combination of extremist Muslims and anti-Semitic leftists. The French press - including the media very critical of Israel - was shocked by what has happened. On November 18, Le Monde justifiably praised the rapid response by President Jacques Chirac, who called a special session of his cabinet after arsonists struck a Jewish school in Paris on November 15. The newspaper warns of the combination of violent Islamic anti-Semitism and traditional French anti-Semitism. Le Figaro, on November 17, drew a connection between the events in Istanbul and Paris and the public opinion poll in which Europeans ranked Israel as the leading country endangering world peace. The newspaper added that the greatest success of the new anti-Semitism is its very banalization.

Gerard Dupuy, writing in Liberation on November 17, opens an editorial on the Turkish bombings with this stunning statement: "In 2003, a person can be killed simply for being Jewish - in Istanbul, Jerba, and Casablanca." He adds that anyone trying to explain the anti-Semitism, if not justify it, in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is making a moral mistake, because it is a murderous trend, rooted in Muslim society, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is just an excuse for it. French-Jewish jurist Robert Badinter, a former justice minister and now a socialist senator, was bitter in an interview with a Catholic publication about how the new anti-Semitism is guised in anti-Zionism. And German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder announced a special session of the European Council on Peace and Security to discuss the issue of the new anti-Semitism in the spring.

Maybe those same Israeli leftists who dismiss the charges about signs of the new anti-Semitism should read these articles that appeared overseas.
 

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Disney Images Used by PA TV Again to Glorify Murder of Jews - Itamar Marcus and Barbara Crook
PA (Fatah) TV is using Mickey and Minnie Mouse, Winnie the Pooh and Piglet to create a Disney-like backdrop to teach children to glorify mass murderer Dalal Mughrabi, who participated in the murders of 12 children and 25 adults in a 1978 bus attack in Israel. A Ramadan children's program, a TV quiz show, this week idolized the female terrorist as the "beloved bride, daughter of Jaffa, jasmine flower." In May 2007, the Hamas TV network used a Mickey Mouse character to teach children to seek world Islamic domination. (Palestinian Media Watch)

[Courtesy -- Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Daily Alert, September 10, 2008]

How to Get the World to Hate Israel - Richard L. Cravatts
How would you go about making the world hate Israel? Even after 60 years of its existence, you question the fundamental right of Israel to even exist and regularly, though falsely, condemn it for being created "illegally." You make "Palestinianism" into a virtual cult. Of all the 100 million refugees who were dispersed around the globe and were re-assimilated since World War II, you chose only the Palestinians to languish, as if in amber, in barbaric refugee camps where their lives are used as political fodder to denounce the existence of an Israel that supposedly has deprived them of a home.
    You inculcate Palestinian children, nearly from birth, with seething, blind, unrelenting, and obsessive hatred of Jews and the "Zionist regime," so that kindergartners graduate with blood-soaked hands while toting plastic AK 47s and dedicate their lives to jihad. (History News Network)

[Courtesy -- Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Daily Alert, August 5, 2008]

Hamas' Christian Convert: I've Left a Society that Sanctifies Terror - Avi Issacharoff
Masab, son of West Bank Hamas leader and MP Sheikh Hassan Yousef, has become a Christian. He says, "You Jews should be aware: You will never, but never have peace with Hamas. Islam, as the ideology that guides them, will not allow them to achieve a peace agreement with the Jews. They believe that tradition says that the Prophet Mohammed fought against the Jews and that therefore they must continue to fight them to the death." "An entire society sanctifies death and the suicide terrorists. In Palestinian culture a suicide terrorist becomes a hero, a martyr. Sheikhs tell their students about the 'heroism of the shaheeds.'" (Ha'aretz)

[Courtesy -- Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Daily Alert, July 31, 2008]

Terror's Predictable Spontaneity - Gerald M. Steinberg
The constant pattern for over sixty years has been that whenever violent attacks against Israelis were contained on one front, another front was immediately opened, often involving a different form of violence. When the suicide bombing campaign was halted by Operation Defensive Shield and the construction of a security barrier, the rocket barrages started from Gaza. Now the shaky cease-fire in Gaza is the signal for a new and different form of violence against Israeli civilians.
    Palestinians have been raised on the armed struggle, and many are capable of acting on their own, with whatever weapons are most readily available. The steady flow of incitement in the media plays a central role in this process, including Palestinian television programming preaching the virtues of martyrdom and the glory of fighting the Zionist enemy. As a result, the isolated action may appear to be spontaneous, but the foundation and preparations are never far away. (Jerusalem Post)

Palestinian Terrorism as a Natural Act - Bradley Burston
On a quiet morning in Jerusalem, a man behind the wheel of a bulldozer has taken it upon himself to kill Jews. Women and children and the elderly and the infirm. What's a decent person to think when Palestinian groups fall over one another trying to claim the bulldozer attack? And when one of the groups is the Fatah Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade?
    What is it that Palestinians really want? I no longer believe that it's as simple as wanting statehood. This is what I don't yet want to admit: that for all these years, what a critical mass of Palestinians want most, perhaps even more than statehood, may be nothing more than seeing Jews dead and gone. (Ha'aretz)

Israeli Mother Saves Baby, Killed Seconds Later in Palestinian Terror Attack - Abe Selig, Shelly Paz, and Jenna Stark (Jerusalem Post)
    Seconds before being crushed to death by a bulldozer driven by a Palestinian, Batsheva Unterman succeeded in unbuckling her 5-month-old baby from the car-seat and passing her out through the window to safety.
    "Just as I took the baby out, he reversed on top of the car. The baby is okay, but not the mother," said Jeremy Aronson, the man who helped save the baby.

Virgins of Paradise Music Video Returns to PA TV - Itamar Marcus and Barbara Crook (Palestinian Media Watch)
    A music video depicting a martyr for Allah being greeted in Paradise by the Dark Eyed Maidens (Virgins) has returned to PA television.
    The clip portrays a woman being shot in the back by Israeli soldiers, who is immediately transported to Paradise where she joins other maidens wearing identical long white gowns, all joyously dancing.
    The next scenes depict her male friend being shot by Israeli soldiers and transported to heaven, where all the "Maidens" greet him.
    It was broadcast several times a day during the PA terror war (2000-2005).

[Courtesy -- [Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Daily Alert, December 21, 2007]

Day after Annapolis:Palestinian Authority TV shows"Palestine" map erasing Israel. 

Just a day after Israeli and Palestinian leaders at the Annapolis peace conference pledged to negotiate a peace treaty by the end of 2008, Mahmoud Abbas’s Palestinian Authority continues to paint a picture for its people of a world without Israel.

An information clip produced by the Palestinian Authority Central Bureau of Statistics and rebroadcast today on Abbas-controlled Palestinian television, shows a map in which Israel is painted in the colors of the Palestinian flag, symbolizing Israel turned into a Palestinian state.
The description of all of the state of Israel as "Palestine" is not coincidental, and is part of a formal, systematic educational approach throughout the Palestinian Authority. This uniform message of a world without Israel is repeated in school books, children's programs, crossword puzzles, video clips, formal symbols, school and street names, etc. The picture painted for the Palestinian population, both verbally and visually, is of a world without Israel.
The fact that this campaign continues before the ink on the Annapolis agreement is even dry appears to contradict the central promise of the Palestinians at the Annapolis conference: that Israel has a right to exist.

Palestinians Are Trapped by Their Own Culture

By Irshad Manji, Los Angeles Times, September 1, 2004

Tuesday's simultaneous bus bombings in Israel, carried out at a time when the Sharon government insists on withdrawing from Gaza, raises a basic question: Why is peaceful coexistence taking so long in the Holy Land? It's because there isn't only one occupation of the Palestinian territories. There are two.

The first is a military occupation by the Israel Defense Forces, and the distress that it's inflicting can't be denied. Neither can the resentment fueled by Israel's security barrier, a combination of fences and walls that turns some Arab villages into holding pens.

But in the spirit of honesty, liberals like me need to deal with a second occupation — the ideological occupation of the Palestinian people by their own leadership, their own culture. Over the last six decades, several offers for an independent state of Palestine have been floated by the British, the Israelis, the Americans and the U.N. — Palestinian leaders have rejected every proposal. Worse, they have never consulted the Palestinian people before saying no.

Which brings me to the bigger problem of Palestinian culture — a popular culture of incitement that doesn't exist in Israel. Already I can hear the cries of "racism!" As a Muslim woman, however, I don't feel the need to toe any tribal line. I also don't give up hope, for cultures can and do evolve; they are, after all, the handiwork of human beings, not of God. To question a particular aspect of Palestinian culture, then, is nothing more than an expression of faith that more humane choices can be made.

Let me illustrate. In June 2003, a survey by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press found that most Palestinians could not envision a way for their rights to be protected as long as Israel existed. By contrast, the survey found that, among Arab citizens of Israel, a solid majority felt the opposite. Of the Arab Israelis surveyed, 62% said it would be possible for both groups to have their rights protected. What accounts for this difference in attitude?

Posters of shaheeds — martyrs — plaster the buildings of the West Bank and Gaza. Billboards proclaim their undying honor. Adolescents make up rap tunes to them while expressing hope that one day they will imitate the self-immolators. Even a soccer tournament on Palestinian Children's Day is named for a suicide bomber.

I'm not implying that Israeli government policies are blameless. Far from it. For example, the government of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon refuses to arrest the criminals who set up illegal outposts in the West Bank. Such willful negligence will only feed extremism on both sides.

But let's not lose sight of the larger reality. After the Aqaba peace summit in June 2003, both the Israeli and Palestinian prime ministers encountered protests. Hard-line Israelis resorted to demonstrating and jeering. Hard-line Palestinians resorted to blowing up buses and the people in them. That's a life-and-death difference in choices.

Many of my fellow liberals would argue that choices don't exist for Palestinians — they're economically impoverished and desperate. Not according to Mohammed Hindi, the top Gaza leader of Islamic Jihad. His response was part of a longer interview I conducted with him in Gaza — on camera and before the construction of Israel's security barrier.

"What's the difference," I asked, "between 'suicide' and 'martyrdom,' as you folks now call it?"

"Suicide," he replied, "is done out of despair. But most of our martyrs were very successful in their earthly lives."

Hindi's answer floored me. By his own admission, what drives so many of today's suicide bombers isn't that which the material world has failed to deliver to them, but something besides — perhaps the Koran's promises for the afterlife or, perhaps more precisely, Palestinian culture's ideological exploitation of the Koran's promise of paradise.

This much is clear: We liberals need to be asking as many tough questions of Palestinian officials as of Israeli ones. Until we do, we'll always reduce Palestinians to the status of mere victims. And that does nothing to recognize their dignity. Or their capacity for making ethically — and ideologically — sounder choices.

Irshad Manji is host of TV Ontario's "Big Ideas" and the author of "The Trouble With Islam: A Muslim's Call for Reform in Her Faith" (St. Martin's Press, 2004).
 

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Palestinian death cult

Mark Steyn, Jerusalem Post, Oct 8, 2003

One of the most enduring vignettes of the Great War is the story of its first Christmas December 1914 when Germans and British put up banners to wish the other the season's greetings, sang "Silent Night" in both languages, and eventually scrambled up from their opposing trenches to play a Christmas Day football match in No Man's Land and share German beer and English plum jam. After Christmas, they went back to killing each other.

The many films, books, and plays inspired by that No Man's Land truce are all convinced of the story's central truth that our common humanity transcends the temporary hell of war. When the politicians and generals have done with us, those who are left will live in peace, playing footsie, singing songs, as they did for a moment in the midst of carnage.

Now cross to Haifa on Saturday, when 19 diners were killed in a busy restaurant by a 23-year-old female suicide-bomber, her hair attractively tied in a western-style ponytail, to judge from the detached head she left as her calling card. Try to find the common humanity between the participants in this war. Try to imagine the two sides kicking a ball around, swapping songs. The only place in the modern Middle East where Arabs and Jews coexist is in Israel, especially in Haifa. The restaurant young Hanadi Jaradat blew apart had been owned by an Arab family and a Jewish family for 40 years. It would be interesting to know whether it was targeted for that very reason, in the same way that, in Northern Ireland, the IRA took to killing the caterers and cleaners who worked at army bases. But the intifada is too primal for anything that thought out. It's more likely that once Miss Jaradat had slipped into Israel proper through a gap in the unfinished security fence the European Union and Colin Powell so deplore any target would do. She was busting to blow.

The Palestinian death cult negates all the assumptions of western sentimental pacifism: If only the vengeful old generals got out of the way, there'd be no war. But such common humanity as one can find on the West Bank resides, if only in their cynicism, in the leadership: old Arafat may shower glory and honor on his youthful martyrs but he's human enough to keep his own kid in Paris, well away from the suicide-bomber belts. It's hard to picture Saeb Erekat or Hanan Ashrawi or any of the other aging terror apologists who hog the airwaves at CNN and the BBC celebrating the death of their own loved ones the way Miss Jaradat's brother did. "We are receiving congratulations from people," said Thaher Jaradat. "Why should we cry? It is like her wedding day, the happiest day for her."

I spent a short time on the West Bank earlier this spring. I would have spent longer, but to be honest it creeped me out, and I was happy to scram across the Allenby Bridge and on through Jordan to Iraq. Say what you like about the Sunni Triangle and RPG Alley, but I never once felt I was in a wholly diseased environment. On the West Bank, almost all the humdrum transactions of daily life take place in a culture that glorifies depravity: you walk down a street named after a suicide bomber to drop your child in a school that celebrates suicide-bombing and then pick up some groceries in a corner store whose walls are plastered with portraits of suicide bombers.  [PAC Comment: It's not just a Palestinian Death Cult, It's an Islamic Death Cult.]

Nothing good grows in toxic soil. You cannot have a real peace with such people; you cannot even have the cold peace that exists between Israel and Jordan, where King Abdullah, host of the Arab-American-Israeli summit at the start of the road map, did not dare display the flag of the Zionist Entity, lest it provoke his subjects.

The problem is not the security fence, but the psychological fence a chasm really that separates a sizable proportion of the Palestinian population from all Jews.

AT THE time of that summit, I supported the road map because it seemed to me the best thing to be done was to thrust a state upon the Palestinians as quickly as possible. The present neither-one-thing-nor-the-other Palestinian Authority gives Arafat and company all the advantages of controlling their own territory with none of the responsibilities. Its anomalous status enshrines the Palestinians' victim status and means Israel gets a far worse press internationally than if it were dealing with a sovereign state.

But the main reason for conjuring up a Palestinian state would be to call their bluff. For six decades, nothing the Palestinians have done has made sense if the objective is to secure a state of their own. But, if the objective is to kill Jews, it all makes perfect sense. That's why, in West Bank towns, you see no evidence of nationalist fervor, only of Jew-killing fervor.

The Arab League's decision three decades ago to anoint a murder organization as the sole legitimate repository of Palestinian aspirations was perhaps the critical move in the terrorist annexation of whatever legitimacy this cause once had.

Today Arafat is received by the UN as a head of state, subsidized by the EU and, under Oslo, physically installed in a pseudo-presidential compound. Yet he shows absolutely no desire to run anything other than a murder operation. Ten years ago, the Palestinian Authority was given powers that fell somewhere between those of the Province of Quebec and the Irish Free State. In 1922 in Dublin, the shrewder chaps recognized that the dynamic in the situation would only move one way: once you proved you could run an all-but-fully-independent state, the all-buts would quickly fade away, as one by one they all did. Not in the Palestinian Authority. Arafat is a head of state in no hurry to get a state to head: having to attend to trade and highways and so forth only cuts into his core business. That may be all the more reason to burden him with it.

But the bloody toll of Saturday's bombing reminds us that there's another consideration. Before the Iraq war, I didn't give a hoot about WMD or any of the other lines peddled by Blair and Bush when they were auditioning justifications at the UN. The only reason for getting rid of Saddam was that America couldn't afford not to get rid of him: it was necessary to prick the Middle Eastern terrorist bubble, of which he was the most successful manifestation. There's a similar calculation to be made here: if America is serious about confronting Middle Eastern terrorism, it's hard to see what possible interest it has in rewarding the Arafat squat with nationhood.

Indeed, just as toppling Saddam pour encourager les autres is all the reason you need, so the fact that the sewer regimes of Araby use the Palestinian question as a catch-all excuse for their own failures ought to be the only reason you need for not buying into it. The Palestinian Authority is part of America's war on terror in exactly the way Saddam was: whether or not there are any specific links to al-Qaida is irrelevant; it's part of the same murky waters.

Unfortunately, few members of the Bush administration and no members of the British government recognize that.

So there will be more suicide bombings, and more condemnations of Israel's fence.

The writer is senior contributing editor for Hollinger Inc.

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From PLO Terrorist to Lover of Zion

Israel National News, Jan 27, 2004

“He neither sleeps nor slumbers, the Guardian of Israel,” sang former PLO terrorist Walid Shoebat before a crowd of students – many of them Jewish – at the University of Toronto last week.

In stark contrast to the PLO songs he recited growing up, with words like, “Sharpen my bones into swords and make my flesh into Molotov cocktails,” Shoebat, now 44, sings a very different tune.

Walid Shoebat’s visit to the University of Toronto, together with Israel National Radio’s Tovia Singer, was but the latest of the former terrorist’s endeavors on behalf his latest cause: Israel and the Jewish people. Shoebat has related his extraordinary journey over the airwaves and before audiences across North America, encouraging people to “wake up and smell the hummus” before Islam succeeds in implementing its program of global Jihad.

Born in 1960 to an Arab Muslim father and an American Christian mother, Walid grew up mainly in the village of Beit Sahour, near Bethlehem. His parents met while his father was studying in the United States, married, and returned to Jordanian-controlled Beit Sahour the year Walid was born. Once there, his father confiscated his mother's passport and prevented her from leaving. After a brief stint in Saudi Arabia, the Shoebats moved to Jericho, where the young Walid was enrolled in a Jordanian-run school.

“The first thing we learned growing up was to hate Jews,” Walid recalled. “I’ll never forgot the first song I learned in school, ‘Arabs our beloved and Jews our dogs.’ I used to wonder at that time who the Jews were, but repeated the words with the rest of the kids without any knowledge of the meaning.”

Soon after the Six-Day-War his father transferred him to a school in Bethlehem “where I grew in the faith of Islam, in which I was fed the idea that one day a fulfillment of an ancient prophecy by the Muslim prophet Mohammed would come to pass,” recalled Shoebat. “The prophecy foretold a battle in which the Holy Land would be recaptured and the elimination of the Jews would take place in a massive slaughter. ‘The day of judgment shall not come to pass until a tribe of Muslims defeat a tribe of Jews,’ it said, ‘in Jerusalem and the surrounding nations’.”

It was not long before Walid’s education led him to get involved in various terrorist activities. He routinely stirred up riots and lynch mobs, throwing firebombs and rocks at soldiers and pelting Jewish worshippers at the Western Wall. He even beat an Israeli soldier, with the intent to kill, but the soldier escaped at the last second.

He was a student of mob psychology, able to stir up a crowd of people, turning them into a bloodthirsty mob. “When I saw the Ramallah lynching [of two IDF reservists in the first days of the Oslo War –ed.],” said Shoebat, “I knew exactly how these people were feeling inside of them as they did this. Praising Allah…all those people screaming Allahu Akhbar together – you feel this indescribable ecstasy where you literally want to lunge at anyone called a Jew.”

It wasn’t long before Shoebat was initiated into Yassir Arafat’s Fatah terror group. “I was recruited by a guy named Mahmoud Abu-Amr, from Jerusalem,” he recalled. “I met up with him on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem where he gave me a very sophisticated explosive device he had assembled.” The bomb – an explosive charge hidden in a loaf of bread – was intended for the Bank Leumi branch in Bethlehem. “We smuggled it from the Temple Mount,” said Shoebat, “I was walking – on the Temple Mount – with explosives and a timer in my hand. We walked to the walls and escaped so as to avoid the checkpoints. I went to the bus station and took a bus to Bethlehem, fully ready to give my life if I had to.” Even then, though, he had a pang of uncertainty. “At the last minute I saw some children walking around near the bank and decided ‘this is ridiculous’ and threw it on a rooftop nearby.”

Shoebat says he was not motivated by nationalism or the desire for self-determination as much as he was by his Islamic education. “I was not only a terrorist, but I was terrorized by my beliefs,” Shoebat recalled, “since I had to gain enough merit and good deeds to go to heaven but never was sure if my good deeds would outweigh my bad deeds in the scale when I would be judged by God, it was taught to us that to die fighting the Jews [would] ease Allah's anger towards my sin and I [would] be secured a good spot in heaven with beautiful wide eyed women to fulfill my most intimate desires, so either way [through actual attacks on Jews, or if I were to be killed in the attempt –ed.] I would win – terror was the only way.”

At age 18, after spending several months in Israeli prisons, Shoebat went to study in the United States becoming an activist in Chicago and fund-raising for the PLO. “Even living in America – a civilized society, if you will – I still had not changed my mind one bit about Israel and the Jews.”

The transformation came in 1993, when a newly married Shoebat tried to convert his Catholic wife to Islam. “I claimed that the Jews had corrupted the Bible and were prophet-killers,” Shoebat said. His wife asked him to prove his claims to her so a determined Shoebat purchased his first Bible in order to show his wife the contradictions and corruptions introduced to it by the Jews.

“In 1993 I asked the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob to reveal to me whether the Bible was indeed corrupted as I was taught or if it were the truth and the Koran was the false document,” Shoebat said. Through parallel study of the Bible and the Koran he soon came to a logical crossroads: “Either the Jews had indeed changed the scripture – because how could God be on the side of evil people, or the Koran was false, and I was the evil one,” Shoebat recalled. “I then decided to examine the history from both sides – to weigh each sides. It was then that I began to see the spiritual link between the Jewish people and their land.”

Slowly a change overcame the veteran Jihadist. “After reading the Hebrew Bible, about all of the righteous wars of Israel – from biblical times until the present – it dawned on me,” said Shoebat. “How could it be that Allah is the true God if the Six-Day-War in 1967 resulted the greatest victory for the Jews since Joshua’s encirclement of Jericho. What’s more is that Israel’s victory – unlike Muslim conquests full of rape, pillaging and massacre – brought freedom for all peoples and religions. Everyone [his fellow Arabs living in Jericho at the time –ed.] saw and everyone remembers this but unfortunately people today deny the truth of what they.”

Shoebat decided at that point to turn away from the path of terrorism and Jihad. “I woke up my wife and said ‘Maria – I think I was wrong to try to convert you to Islam.’”

He embarked on a path of reconciliation – experiencing deep regret for his past actions as well as anger toward those who indoctrinated him to carry them out. “I deeply wish to be granted forgiveness from the soldier who I almost killed,” Shoebat said on Tovia Singer's radio show. He said he remembered hearing a second soldier call him ‘Amnon’. “I would beg Amnon to please understand that I underwent an educational occupation of hatred which brainwashed my mind to hate Jews. We were taught it since we were children and I did not know any better.”

Determined to let his people know what he knows, he soon began speaking to Muslim groups – demanding that they confront what Islam either always was – or has become. When confronted with what has become somewhat of a mantra since September 11th – that “true Islam is a religion of peace,” Shoebat responds, “I grew up there – I was there at the mosques, the ummahs and the religious schools. I know what is still being taught today in the textbooks and by the religious leaders – so my challenge to those who claim Islam is not the religion of terror we see today, is what have you done to stand against it and say ‘this is wrong’?”

“What the West does not understand about Islam,” Shoebat said on Tovia Singer’s radio broadcast, “is that Jihad has stages. If Muslims have the upper hand then Jihad is waged by force. If Muslim’s don’t have the upper hand then Jihad is waged through financial and political means. Since Muslims do not have the upper hand in America or Europe, they talk about peace while supporting Hamas and Hizballah. The whole idea of Islam being a peaceful religion emanates from that silent stage of Jihad."

The Imam (Islamic cleric) of Orange County, California, a guest on Singer’s radio show as well, took issue with Shoebat’s claims, saying that ‘Jihad’ represents an inner struggle and not the genocidal slaughter of infidels called for by Osama bin Ladin. Shoebat unblinkingly refuted the cleric’c claims, reciting verse after verse of Koranic scripture in its original Arabic and translating into English. “There are over one hundred quotes by Mohammad regarding Jihad – I could recite each one of them but we would be here all day. Every single one refers specifically to Jihad by the sword, by killing, by taking no prisoners – with only one quote referring to an internal struggle – called for by Mohammad after the complete conquest and occupation of Arabia.” He said that such claims were typical of the Islamic leadership in America, and are consumed eagerly by western audiences who do not want to believe that one of the major world religions poses such a danger to humanity.

Asked whether he believes that Musims in America truly adhere to the program of Jihad he described, Shoebat qualified his statements saying, “Afghans in the U.S. and Iranians who left Iran are predominately peaceful people. The Arabic speaking communities in America, however, do indeed support Osama bin Ladin and Hamas.” He cites a direct correlation between adherence to Islam and support of terrorism. “The less they know about Islam the more peaceful they are,” he said.

“There are those that reject many of the classical sources and truly focus on the peaceful verses of the Koran, seeking to twist the verses because they truly do not want to engage in violence,” said Shoebat, “but if those preachers would debate Osama bin Ladin, bin Ladin would clearly win because the words of the Koran are on his side.”

Shoebat, himself an evangelical Christian says it is unfortunate that Christian Arabs in Israel choose a theology of Jew hatred as well, even while experiencing persecution and intimidation by the Muslim majority. “The Christian Arabs in Israel get their education from their leaders and the Catholic church,” laments Shoebat. “They pretty much adhere to the Replacement Theology – that God replaced Israel with the Catholic church. They have also come up with a new Liberation Theology, co-opted by the Palestinian movement.”

Although Shoebat pulls no punches, his transformation has not been easy. “I was branded a traitor by my father and my family,” he said, “they say that I have betrayed the cause, the religion, the culture – everything.” Shoebat believes his treatment by his family is indicative of Islam’s fatal flaw. “If Islam truly were a peaceful religion then my family might consider me a nut case, but my own brother would not threaten to kill me, my family would not have confiscated my land and demanded I come back to Bethlehem and declare that ‘there is no god but Allah and Muhammad is his prophet.’ If I don’t believe in Islam anymore why should I declare such a thing? The fact is that Mohammed clearly demanded that one who changes his faith must be killed. What part of 'kill' is not understood by those who claim Islam is a religion of peace? Is it any wonder why I have to live in hiding and be so careful even though I live in a free society here in America?”

Soeobat insists, however, that his pursuit of truth has been worthwhile and sees it as his mission to be a voice of true peace. "I come to you out of love for your people and your Bible, to say my people are wrong,” he told a group of Jewish students in Berkeley, “the Arabs and Muslims are wrong.”

Although he feels it is of utmost importance to speak to Jewish groups – to warn them not to relinquish parts of the Land of Israel to Islamic terrorists – his true goals lies with his own people. “My dream is to go to the prisons where I used to be – Ramallah prison, Muskavit prison – whatever prison – to go there and say ‘hey, there is a different way you can live from the way Yassir Arafat and Ahmed Yassin are brainwashing you to believe.’ I want to debate them and tell them why there are not 72 virgins or any of this other garbage that is being taught in their schools.”

In his appearances at mosques, synagogues and on radio talk shows, Shoebat is more than willing to take questions from Jews, Arabs and Islamists alike. One student at the University of Toronto asked Shoebat what he recommends Israel do to put an end to the Jihad being waged against her.

“Most Jews believe in a two-state solution,” answered Shoebat, “I do not believe in this. A Palestinian state will concoct its own rules and laws to continue the killing of Jews.” He suggested instead that Israel, “Wake up and smell the Hummus. We must return to the status quo – the occupation. There were jobs, people went to work and supported their families, and whoever got involved with terrorism was exiled or imprisoned – like any modern country in the world. I think Israel should stand strong and fight – dismantle Hamas and take away all the weapons, the way it used to be. The introduction of weapons into Palestinian society by Israel [under the Oslo accords, Israel gave assault rifles to Arafat’s ‘police force’ –ed.] was a disaster and they must be confiscated.”

Answering another question about life in Yesha (Judea, Samaria and Gaza) before the 1967 war, Shoebat described what life was like in Jericho at the time:

“We did not particularly mind Jordanian rule. The teaching of the destruction of Israel was a definite part of the curriculum, but we considered ourselves Jordanian until the Jews returned to Jerusalem. Then all of the sudden we were Palestinians – they removed the star from the Jordanian flag and all of the sudden we had a Palestinian flag.”

Shoebat feels very strongly that the ongoing war against Israel has nothing to do with an Arab desire for a Palestinian state. “Never in history was there a Palestinian state,” said Shoebat, “we never wanted a Palestinian state – even today the Palestinians do not want a Palestinian state…”

“Then what do they want?” asked Tovia Singer.

“They want the destruction of the Jews, period,” Shoebat said. “It’s a religious holy war. It’s in the culture, the tradition. Arafat is a chip off the same block as Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden, Ahmed Yassin – they are all birds of a feather, they have small differences but are birds of a feather.”

Asked by Singer what his message to the Jewish people today is, Shoebat thought for a moment and responded: “Your God is an awesome God and your land and your people are awesome. Hold tight and be strong. Do not be weakened by the nations of the world and all those trying to weaken you and take your land.”

As an afterthought, but said with a sense of great urgency, the former terrorist turned lover of Zion implored the Nation of Israel, “Please take back the holy Temple Mount.”

Walid Shoebat can be contacted at: theone@mail.com

A short video of Walid Soebat describing his journey from PLO terrorist to lover of Zion can be viewed through the following links:
Small Size 19mb
Larger Size 39mb

Israel National Radio's Tovia Singer together with Walid Shoebat ,before a live audience at the University of Toronto, can be heard at the following links:
Part One
Part Two
 

On Thursday March 25 2004, former PLO terrorist Walid Shoebat mesmerized a Wesleyan University audience.

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Arafat must be stopped

Mortimer B. Zuckerman,  Editor-in-Chief, U.S. News, Editorial 9/29/03

There will never be peace in the Middle East while Yasser Arafat does his bloody work. It is understandable that Israel should now be considering whether to tolerate his presence on the West Bank. His influence is wholly destructive and a betrayal of the best aspirations of the Palestinians. It took this wretched man just 100 days to torpedo the hope of President Bush that the Palestinians could be served by a new leader. Now he has personally appointed a new prime minister--clearly to serve under him, not next to him.

Israeli intelligence, using sources and intercepts, has concluded that Arafat is a central factor in the resumption and escalation of terrorist acts that blew up the peace process. The bus bombing in Jerusalem that killed 23, including six children, is exactly parallel to what he did on unleashing the intifada to destroy the Camp David Accords. Four months into the intifada, on Feb. 12, 2001, Arafat thought the Israelis had not suffered enough casualties. He asked a group of Palestinian senior officials, "Why don't the Israelis have more dead?" Then he added, "You know what you have to do." Arafat's statement marked the beginning of the suicide bombing onslaught. It was his way of passing on the order to kill. After Mahmoud Abbas was appointed prime minister, Arafat let it be known he wanted the terrorism continued. A case in point: After the cease-fire was declared in late June, Zakariya al-Zubaydi, the brigade commander of Islamic Jihad in Jenin, issued a leaflet opposing it. Days later, his fighters carried out the first major violation of the truce by killing an Israeli in the West Bank. Arafat responded with a public order for the arrest of Zubaydi and his gang, but he privately approved paying him $10,000.

Hired guns. This is why since the cease-fire was officially announced on June 29, 2003, there have been no fewer than 240 terrorist attacks on Israelis, an average of three per day. As long as these attacks lead to the death of "only one or two people," they don't appear in the world's media. Large amounts of cash were transferred to incentivize terrorism. Iran was especially active, using Hizballah in Lebanon to transfer funds to Islamic Jihad, Hamas, and other Fatah militant groups. Unfortunately, it took a mega-attack like Jerusalem to break into the news media of the western world, but the Israelis knew what was happening.

All this is of a piece with Arafat's rejections of every opportunity to make a peace agreement. His commitment is not to the coexistence of two states living side by side in peace. He has never dropped the mentality of the "national liberation organization"--formed before Israel was in the West Bank. Its purpose is to liberate all the land of Israel from the Jews. Arafat is a part of the refugee community of 1948, those who are emotionally and ideologically incapable of compromise because of what they believe is the historical injustice of the founding of Israel. The Washington Post summed it up in an editorial: "It is obvious that he will never renounce violence against Israel or agree to a final peace settlement with a Jewish state."

Arafat has violated every agreement he has made to date--an experience long shared by Arab leaders who also have stopped trusting him. But it has taken the world a long time to wake up to the reality that Arafat is not just a terrorist--he has never doffed his military uniform--but one of the inventors of modern terrorism. He has been sedulous in spreading the notion that it is all Israel's fault. When I met with him at his request two years ago, he even had the nerve to tell me that the terrorist bombing of a discotheque on the Tel Aviv beach that killed 21 youngsters was an Israeli sting operation organized to inspire sympathy for Israel around the world. This is on a par with the Islamic fundamentalist line that 9/11 was the work of Mossad. The reality of Arafat as terrorist is written in a terrible record. He formed the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade because his experience has taught him that far from marginalizing him, terrorism pays. Let the record show: By November of 1974, Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organization had carried out the massacre of Israel's Olympic athletes, plane hijackings, letter bombs, the assassination of an American ambassador and Jordan's prime minister, the slaughter of 21 Israeli schoolchildren at Maalot, and the killing of 52 Israelis--mainly women and children--in Kiryat Shmona. Yet November 1974 was the month in which he was invited to address the United Nations General Assembly, virtually unanimously. "Asking Arafat to give up terrorism," explains Bernard Lewis, the dean of Middle East scholars, "is like asking Tiger Woods to give up golf."

Neither Abbas nor his replacement nor any moderate is strong enough to sideline Arafat or to dismantle the terrorist cells of Hamas and the other extremists. Arafat's "replacement" is little more than a participant in a game of musical chairs, with Arafat in charge of turning the music on and off. All that the puppets can do is to blame Israel and, with the support of their European cohorts, especially France, demand that Washington pressure Israel.

The cease-fire was a fake. A key leader of Islamic Jihad, Muhammed Shehadeh, stated, "We have an agreement and understandings [with the Palestine Authority] that there would be no arrests of activists or raids on Islamic Jihad offices and institutions or confiscation of our money." The result of repeated, frenzied Arab murders of Jewish civilians, of course, is that Israel retaliates as a measure of self-defense, then Hamas and company argue that they were just retaliating for Israel's prior assassination of elite terrorists, and the credulous world, especially the Europeans, starts saying Israel should show restraint. This is to imagine there is no difference between law violation and law enforcement, as if there is equivalence between the inexcusable violence of murderers who target innocents, especially children, and the indispensable violence of lawful authorities.

Murder. This is not the "cycle of violence" that the media keep mentioning, only the continuous and gratuitous murder of Jews. The Palestinian militants' hatred of the Jews is open, unapologetic, and unrivaled on the world stage since the Third Reich. How then can Israel confront the terrorists when it is often considered the villain for defending itself by using helicopter gunships against terrorist leaders, or by striking at a "terrorist family circle" by demolishing a home? That happens to be one of the few effective means of deterrence. When I was last in Israel, the father of a young Arab, carrying 18 kilos of explosives on his body, called the Israelis to alert them of the impending suicide attack, in order to prevent his home from being blown up by Israel.

Until 9/11, Americans had difficulty understanding a type of religious fanaticism that is both new and deadly. Here was a religious community whose leaders preach that the conflict with America (the "Great Satan") and Israel (the "Little Satan") is part of Islam's war against the nonbelievers, and that killing them is Allah's will. America is a religiously tolerant, pluralistic society. We find it hard to believe that people become suicide bombers because of religious principles, and we are having our difficulties confronting this kind of terrorism. How can a small country like Israel fight such a war, which has no defined rules of engagement, where the enemy uses suicide bombers and roadside ambushes of civilians, where a terrorist who has just killed innocents is a legitimate hero, and where a mother can be so proud of her "martyred" child that she can urge her other children to join him as suicide murderers? Any doubts that the joys are not shared will be eliminated by watching the street celebrations that follow successful bombings, including 9/11 here in America.  [PAC Comment: To get an idea what this means browse Little Green Footballs.}

This is the Palestinian export to the world: suicide terrorism. Suicide terrorism cannot be appeased but must be defeated and destroyed. The Israelis understand that terrorism involves the collaboration between the bomber and his controller; the suicide terrorist is the last link and thus potentially unstoppable. But those behind him can be deterred by inflicting unacceptable damage on them through targeted killings and by occupying their sanctuaries. This toughness is the most effective policy in the short run, even if it causes more grievances in the long run.

Terrorism has to stop first. Until it ends, the Israelis will not negotiate seriously. It is absolutely hopeless to assume that the Palestinians will do this on their own. They will continue to kill Israelis and blame Israel for it.

So just what more can Israel do? The talk of "removing" Arafat has produced lament from the usual quarters--who have no solution, except to ask the Israelis somehow to put up with the death and destruction he invokes. The Israelis have shown forbearance. They could have killed him long ago (with the same justification that we would have had in killing Osama bin Laden). Confining him even more in Ramallah is one possibility. Moving him to Gaza is another. Forcing him out, as the United States recently did with the leader of Liberia and formerly did with the leaders of Haiti and the Philippines, is something that must be considered if nothing else succeeds. He would still be a menace, but he would be away from the West Bank.

Second, Israelis should complete the construction of an elaborate fence to separate the two populations of Palestinians and Israelis, in order to protect the Israeli civilians from suicide murderers. This is both morally and strategically correct and deserves American support and understanding, given the hopelessness of thinking that the Palestinians will ever suppress their own terrorist activities. This is the only sure way to take terrorism against innocent Israeli civilians off the table. Until that occurs, nothing serious will happen with the peace process. Otherwise, we will be continuing decades of pretense and fantasy.

There was a moment of clarity that cut through this. President Bush in a speech on the Middle East on June 24, 2002, made two things clear: One was that Arafat and his gang of thugs tainted by terrorism must go; the second was that the obstacle to a Palestinian state is not Israel but Palestinian tyranny, corruption, and terrorism, and until that is ended, there will be no progress to a Palestinian state and no American support for it. Both of these principles were undermined by the road map, but they should return as America's posture on a darkened landscape.

Browse through an archive of columns by Mortimer B. Zuckerman.

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Road map rubble

Arnold Beichman, THE WASHINGTON TIMES, September 24, 2003

    In a recent column, the wise and often erudite essayist William F. Buckley discussed the Israeli-Palestinian crisis on which he pronounced this verdict: "Mr. Bush's road map has evolved as a great fiasco." But I sought in vain an answer to an obvious question:

    Why has this road map and all other past "road maps" evolved as great fiascoes?

    From Richard Nixon to Gerald Ford, to Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and George Bush, father and son, there have been fiascoes galore. Lots of warm handshakes on the White House lawn, broad, triumphant smiles on all sides. Camp David agreements, the 1993 Oslo accords, all great TV ops for American presidents, Israeli prime ministers and the omnipresent, long-lived Yasser Arafat, a Selig with bombs, wearing his black-and-white kaffiyah and the biggest grin of all

    And promises, promises, pledges, guarantees, billions and billions of U.S. dollars. Hamas and Hizballah and their subsystems go right on with their suicide bombers, surviving Israeli counterattacks and so-called assassinations. Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas arrives on the scene and 100 days later he is an ex-prime minister.

    What happened to those hopeful words uttered by President Bush after his meeting July 25 with Prime Minister Abbas? "We had a good meeting today about the way forward on the road map to Middle Eastern peace. Prime Minister Abbas and I share a common goal: peace in the Holy Land between two free and secure states, Palestine and Israel ...

    "Prime Minister Abbas committed to a complete end to violence and terrorism, and he recognized that terror against Israelis, wherever they might be, is a dangerous obstacle to the achievement of a Palestinian state."

    What Mr. Buckley doesn't seem to understand is that no matter what Israel gives or pledges to give, there will be no peace now or in the foreseeable future because neither Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Egypt or, most visibly, Osama bin Laden will permit Israel, a democratic, modern state to exist. In other words, "peace negotiations" are not about giving up the Settlements or some other fictitious issue. They are about Israel's existence.

    Does Mr. Buckley think Israel is against peace and the Arabs are for peace? Gulf war III now under way in Iraq is an Arab war to prevent another democracy from being created in the Middle East, and worst of all a Muslim democracy.

    This half-century war, nominally in the cause of a Palestinian state, has poisoned the political atmosphere in this country so we have a new and respectable kind of anti-Semitism using code words like "neo-cons," "Likudniks," or "ex-Trotskyites" as part of the vocabulary.

    Otherwise intelligent American politicians like Howard Dean, the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination, nonchalantly announces in a Santa Fe coffeehouse: "It's not our place to take sides" in the Middle East conflict. We shouldn't take sides in a war between a democracy, the only real democracy in the Middle East, against a terrorist conspiracy? Later, Mr. Dean told The Washington Post that notwithstanding Israel's "special relationship with the United States," America must "take an evenhanded role," if it is to be "in the middle of the negotiations."

    Is Israel to become Czechoslovakia 1938? Are we supposed to chuckle as we recall Abraham Lincoln's fable about the loving wife who, watching her husband locked in deadly embrace with a bear, shouted at both — "Go to it, husband; go to it, bear."

    How about not taking sides in Europe when Adolf Hitler threatened Britain so as to have been "in the middle of the negotiations"? Should Franklin Roosevelt have been cheering both sides, "Go to it, Adolf; go to it, Winston"? Not taking sides in favor of the Soviet captive nations in Eastern Europe? Not taking sides in favor of Poland's Solidarity and Lech Walesa against the Kremlin? Not taking sides between democratic Taiwan and Communist China?

    Of course, it is our place to take sides. America, historically, has always been a "take sides" country. In the interest of maintaining "an evenhanded role," should America not have taken sides in 1991 when Kuwait was invaded by Iraq? Should America have allowed Saddam Hussein to overrun Kuwait and then become master of the Middle East, including its oil riches?

    On Sunday, June 7, 1981, at precisely 6:37 p.m., nine Israeli jets destroyed an almost-completed Iraqi 75-megawatt, $275 million nuclear reactor at Osirak, 12 miles east of Baghdad. With that pre-emptive strike Israel helped make possible the U.S.-U.N. victory in 1991 over Saddam Hussein. Would the U.S.-U.N. coalition forces have dared go to war against a dictator flushed with weapons of mass destruction? Would the coalition 10 years later have risked megadeaths on behalf of the kingdom of Kuwait? Had Saddam used atomic weapons, would the Bush administration have dared use a retaliatory atomic response against the Iraqi people?

    Had Israel adopted the Howard Dean policy of neutralism and allowed Osirak to come onstream, had Israel not taken sides against a dictator, the Middle East might have by now have been Armageddon minus the promised aftermath of 1,000 years of peace and plenty. Remember the 5,000 Kurds gassed to death by Saddam Hussein.

    And now that it is reported (the Guardian, Sept. 18) that Saudi Arabia is considering acquisition of nuclear weapons from Pakistan, and with global concern over Iran's suspect nuclear program the danger in the Middle East goes far beyond Israeli settlements in Gaza. Does Howard Dean understand this?

    Howard Dean may be a front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination (and it would serve the Democratic Party right if he did win the nomination) but his declamations in a Santa Fe coffee shop have demonstrated a shallowness, a thoughtlessness that might have qualified him for the Vermont governorship but which surely disqualifies him as a candidate for the American presidency.
    
    Arnold Beichman, a Hoover Institution research fellow, is a columnist for The Washington Times.
 

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