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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.
-
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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|
U.S. Muslim activist indicted on 18 counts
of illegal dealings with Libya
By CURT ANDERSON, Associated Press,
Published 4:03PM, October 23rd, 2003
WASHINGTON (AP) - A prominent U.S.
Muslim activist was charged Thursday in an 18-count indictment with
devising an illegal scheme to obtain money from Libya and with
attempting to conceal his financial dealings from the government.
The charges, brought by a grand jury in
Alexandria, Va., carry a maximum sentence of 105 years in prison for
Abdurahman M. Alamoudi, 51, a founder of
the
American Muslim Council and related
American Muslim Foundation.
A federal affidavit contends that
Alamoudi also was involved in numerous groups with financial links to
the
Hamas and al-Qaida terrorist organizations - including one founded
by a relative of Osama bin Laden.
The indictment accuses Alamoudi of
engaging in illegal financial transactions with Libya, most notably
once in August when he received a briefcase containing $340,000 in
cash from the Libyan-controlled Islamic Call Society. The indictment
says that Alamoudi hoped to funnel that money through Saudi Arabia to
the United States and evade currency reporting requirements.
"Those who cozy up with state
sponsors
of terrorism will not be tolerated," said U.S. Attorney Paul McNulty
of Virginia's eastern district.
Alamoudi, who remains jailed without
bond, also is charged with money laundering, misuse of a passport,
failure to report foreign bank accounts and making false statements in
his application to become a naturalized U.S. citizen.
The affidavit, filed by Immigration
and Customs Enforcement agent Brett Gentrup, suggests that Alamoudi
[former
White House Guest]
was a key player in a complex web of organizations that appeared to be
raising money for Muslim charities but actually funded terrorist
groups.
"These layered transactions were
designed to both disguise the true origin and end destination of the
funds and render it exceedingly difficult and confusing for any
prospective investigation by law enforcement authorities," Gentrup
says in the affidavit.
One such organization, the Happy
Hearts Trust, allegedly transferred tens of thousands of dollars
to two organizations long suspected of helping fund Hamas's attacks
against Israel. One of these, the West Bank-based Humanitarian
Relief Organization, has been closed in the past by Israel on
suspicion of providing money to militants.
The other, Jordan-based Humanitarian
Appeal International, has been tied by the FBI to both Hamas and
the Holy Land Relief Foundation for Relief and Development -
which has been designated a terrorist organization by the United
States.
In addition, Alamoudi is listed as vice
president of an organization in Falls Church, Va., called the
Taibah International Aid Association. A director of that
organization is Abdullah A. bin Laden, nephew of al-Qaida leader bin
Laden, according to the affidavit.
The documents do not further describe
the nephew. His uncle, bin Laden, comes from a large, wealthy Saudi
family, many of whom have sought to distance themselves from the
terrorist leader.
TIAA is a non-profit U.S. organization
with offices in Bosnia, Albania and Russia that has been under federal
investigation for links to other terrorist financing groups, the
affidavit says.
Officials found seven U.S.-designated
terrorist groups among the names and numbers in al-Amoudi's
confiscated Palm Pilot.
The government also found an
unsigned document in Arabic during a search of al-Amoudi's office in
Virginia that makes numerous references to Hamas and discusses
"execution of operations against the Israelis to delay the peace
process."
|
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.
[Courtesy --
Conference of Presidents of Major
American Jewish Organizations
by the
Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs,
Daily Alert,
July 3, 2008]
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.
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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PAC
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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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|
ONE ARAB'S APOLOGY
EMILIO KARIM DABUL , New York Post, September 12, 2006
WELL, here it is, five years late, but here
just the same: an apology from an Arab-American for 9/11. No, I
didn't help organize the killers or contribute in any way to their
terrible cause. However, I was one of millions of Arab-Americans
who did the unspeakable on 9/11: nothing.
The only time I raised my voice in protest
against these men who killed thousands of innocents in the name of
Allah was behind closed doors, among the safety of friends and
family. I did at one point write a very vitriolic essay condemning
their actions, but fear of becoming another Salman Rushdie kept me
from ever trying to publish it.
Well, I'm sick of saying the truth only in
private - that Arabs around the world, including Arab-Americans
like myself, need to start holding our own culture accountable for
the insane, violent actions that our extremists have perpetrated
on the world at large.
Yes, our extremists and our culture.
Every single 9/11 hijacker was Arab and a
Muslim. The apologists (including President Bush) tried to
reassure us that 9/11 had nothing to do with Islam, but was a
twisting of a great and noble religion. With all due respect, read
the Koran, Mr. President. There's enough there for someone of
extreme tendencies to find their way to a global jihad.
There's also enough there for someone of a
different mindset to find a path to enlightenment and peace.
Still, Rushdie had it right back in 2001: This does have to do
with Islam. A Christian who bombs an abortion clinic in the name
of God is still a Christian, at least in his interpretation, and
saying otherwise doesn't negate the fact that he has spent a
goodly amount of time figuring out his version of the one true and
right thing to do.
The men who killed 3,000 of our citizens on
9/11 in all likelihood died saying prayers to Allah, and that by
itself is one of the most horrific things to me about that day.
And, while my grandparents never waged a
jihad, their attitudes toward Jews weren't that much different
than Mohammed Atta's. No, they didn't support the Holocaust, but
they did believe that Jews were trouble in many different ways,
and those sorts of beliefs were passed on to me before I'd ever
actually met a Jew.
I'm sorry for that, for ever believing that
anything that my grandparents or other relatives had to say about
Jews or Israel, for that matter, had any real resemblance to
truth. It took me years to realize that I'd been conned into
believing the generalizations and stereotypes that millions around
the Arab world buy into: that Jews, America and Israel are our
main problem.
One look at the average Arab regime should
alert us to the fact that the problem, dear Achmed, lies not
overseas or next door in Tel Aviv, but in the brutal, corrupt
despots that we have bred from country to country in the Mideast,
across the span of history. That history and its corresponding
economic devastation is the main reason I reside on New York
City's West Bank - New Jersey - not the one near Jerusalem. On my
worst day, I'm happy about that fact. I'd rather be here than
there, and experience the freedom and boundless opportunities that
were mostly unknown to so many generations of my family in the
Mideast.
For as long as I live, the image of those
towers falling, as I watched in horror and disbelief from the
corner of 40th and Fifth, will be for me my Pearl Harbor, for in
that instant I recognized that not only was our city under attack
- so was our freedom.
It still is. And will continue to be for
years to come. And the threat is not from within, but from Islamic
fascists who desperately want to destroy the freedom and
opportunities that millions the world over still seek.
Five years after that awful day, it's time
for all Arab-Americans, and Arabs around the world, to protest
against Islamic fascism, to raise our voices - and, where
necessary, our arms - against these tyrants until their plague of
terror has been driven from the face of the earth forever.
Emilio Karim Dabul is a
freelance writer and PR consultant living in New Jersey.
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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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