Our World: Laura Bush's embrace of tyranny

Caroline Glick , Oct. 29, 2007

Laura Bush’s October 2007 “Breast Cancer Awareness” tour of the Middle East (Story Here)

Women and Islam - Cathy Young
Using the language of tolerance to justify oppressive practices is a grotesque perversion of liberalism. The veiling debate is a case in point. No amount of rhetorical sleight of hand can disguise the fact that the full-face veil makes women, literally, faceless. Some Muslim women in the West may choose this garb (which is not mandated in the Koran), but their explanations often reveal an internalized misogynistic view of women as creatures whose very existence is a sexual provocation to men. What's more, their choice helps legitimize a custom that is imposed on millions of women around the world who have no choice. Perhaps, as some say, women are the key to Islam's modernization. The West cannot impose its own solutions from the outside - but, at the very least, it can honestly confront the problem. (Boston Globe)

Clothes Aren't the Issue - Asra Q. Nomani
The notion of using physical punishment as a "disciplinary action," especially for "controlling or mastering women" or others who "enjoy being beaten," is common throughout the Muslim world. As long as the beating of women is acceptable in Islam, the problem of suicide bombers, jihadists and others who espouse violence will not go away. The writer is the author of Standing Alone: An American Woman's Struggle for the Soul of Islam. (Washington Post)
 

[Courtesy -- Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Daily Alert, Oct 27, 2006]

"Temporary Marriage" in Islamic Iran - Lily Mazahery (Jerusalem Post)
    Iran's new Islamic-guided government has established a system of legalized prostitution, through the practice of "sigheh" or "temporary marriages," by which a mullah arranges a "legal union" between a man and a girl (some as young as nine years old) for a fee.
    The so-called marriage can last anywhere from one hour to 99 years.
    Under this system, men are free to enter into as many temporary marriages as they so desire, without having any legal obligation or responsibility toward the women and children that they "marry," only to use as sexual objects and slaves.

[Courtesy -- Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Daily Alert, Jan 19, 2007]

The Brownshirts of Our Time
Phyllis Chesler, FrontPageMagazine.com,  November 19, 2003

On Saturday evening, November 8, 2003, the eve of Kristallnacht, I addressed a woman's "networking" conference of mainly African-American and Hispanic-American womanists and feminists at Barnard College. The conference was described as a grassroots, multi-cultural, multi-generational and multi-disciplinary organization for women in the arts. Indeed, the women seemed to range in age from 20-65 and were dressed in corporate business suits, ever-colorful African/ethnic attire, youthful jeans.

Booths were arranged in a semi-circle--it was as if the panels and performances were taking place in an African marketplace. Scented candles, beaded drums, sleek handbags, photographs, Citi-banking for women consultants, African skirts, all vied for my attention. In addition to my son, who had driven me there, and myself, there were a handful of white people, including a photographer from whom I bought two prints and a psychologist who identified herself to me as an admirer and as someone who had suffered a brain injury in an car accident.

The conference was closed to men--but one of the organizers made a split second decision to allow my adult son in and seated him by himself at the very back of the room on a chair set apart. Growing up in a feminist household, he was used to this. Privately, we both sighed and wondered when feminist men would finally be welcome at a feminist conference. 

I doubt that the organizers of this conference knew anything of my background but they were more than welcoming. They had real class and great soul. For example, when I'd explained that I was just in the midst of both a major move into Manhattan and a book tour, one organizer said: "We understand what it's like when a woman is jammed up doing too much. We'll love you anyway. You can let us know at the last minute." She was so damn upbeat and understanding that I decided I'd come no matter what.

In retrospect, I realized that I should have known what was coming; perhaps I chose not to know.

A few days before the conference I had the following conversation with one of the organizers. She asked me what my most recent book was and I told her it was The New Anti-Semitism. I explained that Jew-hatred was a form of racism--only it was not being treated as such by anti-racist "politically correct" people. The organizer did not say: "I don't agree with you" nor did she say: "This won't play well to our constituency." She only said: "We need you to explain the ways in which women sabotage each other and remain divided so that we can understand and overcome it in order to come together. We need you to talk about your book Woman's Inhumanity to Woman. Your speech will precede our big Unity panel."

When I arrived, performers were rapping and singing and dancing and the energy was fabulous. They were running late and I waited patiently and happily. I whispered to my son: "There's still a whole world out there. And in ways, it's quite wonderful. Perhaps I have become too obsessed with The Jewish Cause, with Israel. Maybe I need to remember that I am also connected to more than one issue."

I had been asked to talk about what women can do, psychologically and ethically, in order to enact sisterhood and to work in productive, even radical ways. As I spoke, the women in the audience sighed, cheered, applauded, nodded in agreement, laughed, groaned, nudged each other--it was a half hour of good vibes.

And then my first questioner blew it all to Hell. All it took was The Question and it only required one Questioner. I could not see who was speaking. A disembodied voice demanded to know where I stood on the question of the women of Palestine. Her tone was forceful, hostile, relentless, and prepared. I could have said: "The organizers have specifically asked me not to address such questions." I did not say that. I could also have said: "I am concerned with the women of Palestine but I am also concerned with the women of Rwanda, Bosnia, Guatemala, who have all been gang-raped by soldiers who used rape as a weapon of war; I am concerned with the poverty and homelessness of women right here in America; I am concerned with the women of Israel who are being blown up in buses, at cafes, in their own bedrooms." I did not say this.

Instead, I took a deep breath and said that I did not respect people who hijacked airplanes or hijacked conferences or who, at this very moment, were trying to hijack this lecture. I pointed out that the subject of my talk was not Israel or Palestine. I did not want us to lose our focus. She grew even more hostile and demanding. "Tell this audience what you said on WBAI. I heard you on that program." Clearly, she wanted to "unmask" me before this audience as a Jew-lover and an Israel-defender.  

I took the question head-on. "If you're really asking about apartheid, let me talk about it. Contrary to myth and propaganda, Israel is not an apartheid state. The largest practioner of apartheid in the world is Islam which practices both gender and religious apartheid. In terms of gender apartheid, Palestinian women--and all women who live under Islam--are oppressed by "honor" killings, in which girls and women who are raped are then killed by family members for the sake of restoring the family "honor;" forced veiling, segregation, stonings to death for alleged adultery, seclusion/sequestration, female genital mutilation, polygamy, outright slavery, sexual slavery. Women have few civil, legal, or human rights under Islam."

[PAC Comment: Souad, a Palestinian, was indoctrinated at an early age that "Jews are pigs." It took her longer to learn who the real animals were: her father, who beat her every day; her brother, who set her alight when she became pregnant; her mother, who smothered several of her sisters at birth. Souad's story goes some way to explaining why many Palestinians regard everyday life so cheaply that they are prepared to blow themselves up to make a political point. Much of the world sees Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation of the West Bank as a desperate act by an oppressed people. Yet the reality is that of a people oppressed not so much by Israel as by each other.  Better not be Gay either. What kind of religion creates people who would commit crimes like this?

Further See: Refugee Who Became Dutch MP Defies Islam with Film about Koran
Mrs. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who has risen from Somali asylum seeker to Dutch MP in 12 years, produced a film broadcast on Dutch television Sunday that highlights the continued oppression of Muslim women in Europe. Ali, 34, denounced the country's 30-year experiment with multiculturalism - including 700 Islamic clubs funded by the taxpayer - as a disastrous error born of "misplaced guilt."
    Ali has become immensely popular among the ordinary Dutch, who have been shocked by the sudden emergence of large Muslim enclaves in their cities - often with ties to militant anti-Western groups. A parliamentary report this year found that more than 70% of Dutch-born Muslims were bringing in spouses from their home countries, perpetuating a separatist subculture. (Telegraph-UK) [Courtesy -- Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Daily Alert, August 31, 2004]  Nov 2, 2004, Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh who made the move shot dead.

Mrs. Ali, August 2005: It is apparent on reading the Koran and the traditional writings that Muhammad’s life not only provides rules for the daily lives of Muslims; it also demonstrates the means by which his values can be imposed. Muhammad himself constructed the House of Islam using military tactics that included mass killing, torture, targeted assassination, lying and the indiscriminate destruction of productive goods. This may be embarrassing to moderate Muslims, but the propaganda produced by modern terrorists constantly quotes Muhammad’s deeds and edicts to justify their actions and to call on other Muslims to support their cause.

Chesler: "What kind of culture produces human bombs, glorifies mass murderers, and supports humiliation-based revenge?

According to Minnesota based psychoanalyst and Arabist, Dr. Nancy Kobrin, it is a culture in which shame and honor play decisive roles and in which the debasement of women is paramount. In an utterly fascinating and as-yet unpublished book, which I will be introducing, the Sheik's New Clothes: the Psychoanalytic Roots of Islamic Suicide Terrorism, Kobrin, and her Israeli co-author, counter-terrorism expert Yoram Schweitzer, describe barbarous family and clan dynamics in which children, both boys and girls, are routinely orally and anally raped by male relatives; infant males are sometimes sadistically over-stimulated by being masturbated; boys between the ages of 7-12 are publicly and traumatically circumcised; many girls are clitoridectomized; and women are seen as the source of all shame and dishonor and treated accordingly: very, very badly."

Somalia-born supermodel and best-selling author Waris Dirie, who has campaigned to end the disfiguring practice of ritual genital mutilation (which she suffered at age five in her homeland) estimates one in every three African families living in Europe is secretly carrying out the ritual on their daughters.]

I continued; "Islam also specializes in religious apartheid as well. All non-Muslims (Christians, including Maronites and Melkites, Greek Orthodox, Catholics and Protestants, Jews, Assyrians, Hindus, Zoroastrians, animists) have historically been viewed and treated as subhumans who must either convert to Islam or be mercilessly taxed, beaten, jailed, murdered, or exiled. The latest al-Queda attack in Saudi Arabia was primarily directed against Lebanese Christians and Americans."

I continued. "Today, the entire Middle East is judenrein, there are no Jews left in 22 Arab countries. And, the Arab leadership has backed the PLO strategy in which the 23rd state remains under constant and perilous siege. Historically in general, but specifically since 1958-1956, Arab Jews were forced to flee Arab Islamic lands. Most are living in Israel, the only Middle Eastern state in which Jews are allowed to live. Jews cannot become citizens of Jordan, Egypt, or Saudi Arabia, for example and yet no one accuses those nations of apartheid.

I said that Israel was not an apartheid state. I talked about real gender and religious Apartheid, as practiced by Muslims. I told the truth. Clearly, they had not heard it before. The audience collectively gasped. Then, people went a little crazy.

Someone muttered darkly, coarsely, in a near-growl: "What about the checkpoints? What about the fence?" As if checkpoints and fences are the same as being killed by your brother or father or, most recently, in Ramallah, in the Rofayda Qaoud case, by your mother (!) for the crime of having been raped--in the Qaoud case, both raped and impregnated by your mother's two sons. I asked the audience if they thought that being detained at a checkpoint was really the same as having your clitoris sliced off, the same as being stoned to death for alleged adultery. The only response I got was from the first questioner who demanded that I denounce Ariel Sharon--but not Yasir Arafat--as a murderer.  

I absolutely refused to do so.

The lightning rod of "Palestine" was enough to turn a very friendly audience quite hostile and a bit unhinged. Two or three women proceeded to ask aggressive questions in which they tried to get me to say that I had somehow "disrespected" poor women in my remarks; I had said nothing of the sort.

As I left the podium, a young African-American woman stopped me to say that I'd "hurt" her by how I had "disrespected" a "brown" woman. "What brown woman?" I asked. "Your first questioner was a brown woman" she said "and so are Palestinian women." I said: "Jewish women, especially in Israel also come in many colors including brown and black." She stopped me. "But you're a white Jew." As if this was proof of a crime.

I did not bother to tell her that without my glasses I could not see the face or color of a questioner so far away, that my answer to the question would have been the same no matter what color the questioner happened to be.

As I was trying to leave, one woman, who said her name was "Lupe," (she was dressed in a button-festooned serape, and had a cross tattooed between her eyebrows), and who loped after me, and continued to demand that I deal with the Palestine question. She kept trying to get at me physically. One of the organizers kept putting her own body between Lupe and me. Lupe behaved like a trained operative, her rage was legitimized, empowered, by her politics.

The three young African-American women who had invited me were VERY supportive of me, they hugged me and thanked me for coming and looked rather embarrassed about what had happened.

What's important is this: Not one of them tried to stop what was happening, not one stood up and said: "Something good has just turned ugly and we must not permit this to happen." Thus, the "good" people did nothing to disperse the hostility or to address the issues. Perhaps they were simply unprepared on the issues; perhaps they agreed with the view that Israel is an apartheid state and that anyone who would dare defend it was supposed to be treated as a traitor and enemy. Perhaps they simply lacked the courage to stand up to the fundamentalists in their midst.

Afterwards, my son told me that he was on his feet the minute The Questioner spoke and although I could not see him either, I was glad to know that he was in the room. Things could easily have turned much uglier. (By the way: Talk about gender apartheid! The conference confined him to his men-only single chair section).

It seemed that The Questioner had at least one, and possibly two henchwoman with her. Clearly, she wanted to "get" the pro-Israel white Jew.

I couldn't help reflecting on my life's work against racism. For example, in 1963, I joined The Northern Student Movement and tutored Harlem students. This was the Northern branch of the civil rights movement. In the late 1960s, I was involved with both the Young Lords and the Black Panthers. I marched outside the Women's House of Detention when they jailed Angela Davis. I was involved in the Inez Garcia case and have written extensively about the cases of both Joanne Little and Yvonne Wanrow, two women of color who, like Garcia, had killed (white) men in self-defense. In the mid-70s, I interviewed Jews from India, Iran, Afghanistan, and North Africa, and Jews who had fled Arab lands about "cultural" or "ethnic" racism in Israel. By the early 1970s, I also began organizing against Jew-hatred on the left and among feminists in America. Over the years, I have lectured on the complexities of both racism and sexism in the Caribbean, Europe, the Middle East, and in Japan. 

For nearly 30 years, I taught working-class and students of color at a public university. I admired and loved them and was sometimes able to help them in ways that changed their views and their lives. 

Here's what's sad. Clearly, my speech touched hearts and minds; there was room for common ground and for civilized discourse. But not once the word "Palestine" was uttered, not when "Palestine" is seen as a symbol for every downtrodden group of color who are "resisting" the racist-imperialist American and Zionist Empires. Once the "Palestine" litmus test of political respectability was raised, everyone responded on cue, as if programmed and brainwashed. It immediately became a "white" versus "brown" thing, an "oppressed" versus an "oppressor" thing.  

These are the Brownshirts of our time. The fact that they are women of color, womanists/feminists is all the more chilling and tragic. And unbelievable. And to me: Practically unbearable.

Afterwards, my son, ever-wise, said: "Well mom, you have your answer. The Jew-haters will never allow you into their wider, wonderful world. You can't go back."

Phyllis Chesler, Ph.D, is the author of twelve books, including the international bestseller WOMEN AND MADNESS. Her most recent book is The New Anti-Semitism: The Current Crisis and What We Must Do About It.
 

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Pedagogy of hate

Itamar Marcus and Barbara Crook, Jerusalem Post, Jan. 4, 2004

If you want to know what's really at the heart of the Palestinian conflict with Israel, don't ask politicians or diplomats. Go to Palestinian children.

Unlike the rest of the world, they've been paying close attention to what their leaders and educators [and parents] have been teaching. And they are ready to practice what they've been taught.

For instance, children interviewed on PA TV last week state without reservation that Israel has no right to exist, and that the goal for which they're willing to sacrifice their lives is Israel's destruction.

"They [the Jews] came to take Palestine, that is, Tel Aviv, Jaffa, Haifa, Acre, Ramle. All these cities belong to Palestine," one youth explains in a December 25 broadcast, echoing years of standard Palestinian Authority indoctrination.

And because he is convinced that Israel has no right to exist: "We hope, hope, hope and I emphasize these things, that the Arab countries and the foreign countries – all the countries of the world – will support the Palestinians and will expel the Israelis.

"We must expel all Israelis from Palestine. Because Israel – there is nothing called 'Israel' in the world. The Israelis [came] from Holland, America, Iran."

The children are seen promising they will keep fighting, generation after generation, until they liberate Palestine.

Furthermore, they say they don't fear death in the struggle because it is shahada – death for Allah. "Even if all the Palestinian children, Palestinian youth, Palestinian women, and Palestinian men die, we will not surrender!"

None of this is surprising to anyone who has been paying attention to what does on in the PA educational system. Israel is erased from PA maps, schoolbooks and historians deny Israel's right to exist, and educators at all levels teach that Israel is a foreign colonial implant.

Despite PA claims to the contrary, its textbooks continue to delegitimize Israel and dismiss it as a foreign occupier: "Palestine faced the British occupation after the First World War in 1917, and the Israeli occupation in 1948."

Children are taught that all of Israel is part of Palestine. For example, "Among the famous rocks of southern Palestine are the rocks of Beersheba and the Negev..."

About Palestine's water sources, children are taught: "The most important is the Sea of Galilee."

SUCH MESSAGES of delegitimization have been affirmed by Prime Minister Ahmed Qurei. He is on record as rejecting the idea of Israel as a Jewish state. "President Bush said that Israel is a Jewish state, which is a cause for our concern. This should not have been said," he told Al-Nahar and Al-Hayat Al-Jadida on June 15, 2003.

PA-affiliated historians appear on educational TV to reinforce this message. On December 28 Dr. Isam Sisalem reiterated what he has said on numerous broadcasts. Jews "have no history or connection to this land" and are nothing but a "cancer" planted by Britain to control the Middle East.

In the same educational broadcast last week, another historian resurrected The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the infamous anti-Semitic forgery, citing it as one of the foundations of the First Zionist Congress in 1897.

"The Zionist movement began at the Basel Congress to plan the exploitation of the powers' struggle, and the struggle of Europe over the Middle East," said Dr. Riad Al-Astal, a history lecturer at Al-Azhar University in Gaza.

Consequently, when we view children on PA TV who say they want to destroy Israel, to liberate Tel Aviv, Jaffa, Haifa, Acre, and Ramle, and to expel the Jews, we are seeing children who are accurately regurgitating the sentiments inculcated and reinforced throughout PA society.

Indeed, years of anti-Israel indoctrination have been alarmingly effective in teaching Palestinian youth that the Jews have no link to Israel, that Israel has no right to exist and that the overriding goal of the next generation – even at the cost of their lives – should be to eliminate Israel.

The essence of the conflict is Israel's very right to exist – not the question of borders or refugees. Peace negotiations that do not address the PA's system of indoctrination will be short-term paper agreements doomed to failure.

Palestinian children have already figured this out. Perhaps the rest of us need to stay after school.

Marcus is founder and director of Palestinian Media Watch. Crook is PMW's North American representative.

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Politically Incorrect Historian: Benny Morris' transformation highlights chilling truths about the conflict

Jonathan Tobin, Jan. 26, 2004 / 3 Shevat, 5764, Jewish World Review

If war is the "continuation of politics ... by other means," as German strategist Karl von Clausewitz famously wrote, then it must be said with equal certainty that the study of history in our day has become another form of warfare. No conflict better exemplifies this maxim than that between Arabs and Israelis. For the last 55 years and more, Zionist and anti-Zionist historians have waged war in the pages of their books.

Pro-Israel writers look to the past to justify by legal, historic and moral grounds the rebirth of Jewish sovereignty over the ancient homeland of the Jewish people.

At the same time, Arab writers as well as an international brigade of Jew-haters have done their best to depict the creation of the State of Israel as a crime.

But the genre of historical writing that has done the most damage to Israel's image has not been the hatred-filled screeds coming out of the dubious academic institutions of Cairo and Damascus. It has been the work of Jews who have come to doubt the justice of Israel's cause that has emboldened its enemies the most. In the last 20 years, the rise of a new group of Israeli historians, known as "revisionists," has engendered a bitter debate about Israel's origins and policies.

No person is as closely identified with this term as Benny Morris, a one-time journalist, prolific author and currently a professor of history at Ben-Gurion University. In a number of works on the origin of the Palestinian refugee issue and Israel's War of Independence, Morris has earned a reputation as someone with little patience for the stained-glass version of the Zionist narrative. His research attempted to debunk the notion that all Arab refugees fled the territory that would become the Jewish state on their own, and that the conduct of Israel's soldiers and leaders was spotless.

Morris' work was greeted with dismay by many friends of Israel, who rightly worried that his version of history portrays the Jewish state as being born in sin.

The author reinforced his image as an icon of the Israeli left with his own anti-establishment behavior. In the late 1980s, Morris was briefly jailed when he refused to do his Israeli army reserve duty in the territories because he opposed Israel's presence there.

But ever since the Palestinian Authority rejected Israel's peace offer at the July 2000 Camp David summit and answered it with a terrorist war of attrition, Morris has begun to make statements that have lost him his fans on the left.

The culmination of this process came when the Israeli daily Ha'aretz published a lengthy interview with the writer on Jan. 9. In it, Morris told journalist Ari Shavit — himself a highly partisan star of the Israeli left — that while his work uncovering Israeli wrongdoing would continue, he was no longer a supporter of peace efforts with the Palestinians.

Indeed, Morris shocked Shavit by asserting that Israel's first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion — whom Morris has roundly criticized as responsible for some of the suffering of Palestinian Arabs — probably made a mistake by not completely expelling all of them from the West Bank during the fighting in 1948 and 1949.

"A society that aims to kill you forces you to destroy it," Morris said. Even more significantly, Morris pointed that all of the bad deeds which he is prepared to blame on Israelis do not amount to much when compared to the atrocities carried out elsewhere, as well as to the attempts of the Arabs to destroy Israel.

"When you take into account that there was a bloody civil war here and that we lost 1 percent of the population, you find that we [Israel] behaved very well," Morris told a dumfounded Shavit.

Morris is, of course, right. While we can debate some of the conclusions he draws from his research — and historians such as the redoubtable Efraim Karsh have placed many of them in doubt — the notion of the 1948 Israelis as morally perfect was always absurd. Wars are not moral events. Terrible things are sometimes done even in the name of righteous causes.

Much as Americans were once raised on such tame historical fare as Parson Weems' life of George Washington that portrayed the first president as a secular saint, Jews were fed much of the same about Israel's founders. But just as it does not undermine the legitimacy of the American republic to learn that Washington wasn't perfect, it won't kill us to learn the same about Ben-Gurion. Even more importantly, Morris' statements highlight the fact that Israel's democratic leaders did not act in a vacuum. They were locked in a war of survival that they'd tried to avoid via compromise against a foe whose purpose was the annihilation of the Jewish population.

Unlike many of his revisionist colleagues, Morris's hard look at Israelis of the past has not blinded him to the crimes of the Arabs during Israel's wars or to their current intentions. And that last point is what has so infuriated Morris' old friends. He is very clear in saying that Arafat has rejected peace with Israel on any terms.

"They want it all," Morris said. "Lod and Acre and Jaffa."

As for the Oslo process, Morris is now as cynical about it as he is about the War of Independence: "Oslo was a deception. Arafat did not change for the worse. Arafat simply defrauded us. ... He wants to send us back to Europe, to the sea we came from. ... They can't tolerate the existence of a Jewish state."

Concerning the Palestinians themselves, whatever wrongs they may have suffered, Morris doesn't sugarcoat their motives likening their widespread support for terror and the destruction of Israel to the actions of a "serial killer."

"Zionism was not a mistake. The desire to establish a Jewish state here was a legitimate one, a positive one. But given the character of Islam and given the character of the Arab nation, it was a mistake to think it would be possible to establish a tranquil state here," Morris noted.

Unfortunately, the trouble with being so clear-eyed about both the past and present is that it can leave you with little hope for the future. Morris sees no chance for peace in our generation against a foe he doesn't hesitate to describe as "barbaric." Israel and the West have no choice, he says, but to fight back in a clash of civilizations.

Israelis have no alternative, Morris said, but "to be vigilant, to defend the country as far as is possible. ... In the end, what will decide their readiness to accept us will be force alone."

The same chilling conclusion applies to America's struggle against Islamic terror.

If the study of history can teach us anything, it must be to be honest with ourselves. From the sound of it, ex-peacenik Benny Morris has learned his lesson.

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Suicide Bomb Survivors Face Worlds Blown Apart
Thousands of Wounded Israelis and Families Endure Years of Recover

By Keith B. Richburg, Washington Post Foreign Service, January 31, 2004; Page A15

JERUSALEM -- Alona Shaportova immigrated here from Ukraine with her parents when she was 10. Soon she was speaking Hebrew, English and some Arabic, as well as Russian.

Ask Alona how old she is today and she hesitates, and begins to count out loud, "One, two, three, four" until she gets to 17. She looks to her mother for verification and gets a nod of approval.

Counting is a chore for Alona, reading is impossible, and she can manage only slowly to write her name. Two years ago, Alona and a friend were at Tel Aviv's popular seaside Dolphinarium discotheque when a Palestinian wearing explosives and copper ball bearings blew himself up outside, killing 21 people, mostly teenagers, and wounding 100 others.

Alona was among the most critically injured. When five ball bearings smashed into her head and face, her left eye was shattered, the teeth on the left side of her mouth were knocked out and the left side of her brain was torn away, leaving her paralyzed on the right side and mentally impaired for good.

The blond-haired, blue-eyed girl, who once thought of becoming a model, now has a plastic prosthetic and a mop of curls that artfully cover the missing part of her head.

For thousands of Israeli families like the Shaportovas, the suicide bombings of the last three years have been a life-shattering, life-altering experience. The attacks make headlines with the numbers killed -- about 500 Israelis and foreigners have been killed in suicide attacks on civilians since the beginning of the current Palestinian uprising in September 2000. But for all those killed, there are many, many more left alive but burned, maimed, scarred, blinded, paralyzed, hearing-impaired, missing limbs and often requiring long-term care.

A case-by-case review of Israeli government records indicates more than 3,000 people have been injured in suicide bombings, not counting other types of attacks.

Their suffering is often intensified by the rudimentary and ruthless technology of the bombmakers; the explosives are wrapped with screws and ball bearings, causing multiple lacerations and punctures for those in the blast vicinity.

Some Israelis are still hospitalized from wounds sustained in suicide attacks months, even years ago; many more require repeated hospital visits and follow-up operations. Dozens are unable to work. And families have been forced to alter their lives to care for a wounded family member.

Alona's mother, Irina, says caring for her daughter has become her full-time job. She needs to help her daughter get dressed, takes her to a special school and shuttles her constantly to the hospital for care and rehabilitation therapy. "I'm really stressed by all of this," said Irina, who quit working after her daughter was injured. "I have no choice. I have only one daughter."

The Israeli government's national insurance institute has a mandate to provide financial assistance to anyone deemed a victim of a hostile act, meaning either war or terrorism. Medical care is free, including transportation to and from the hospitals, and the injured person receives a monthly stipend based on salary, or, in the case of the unemployed, the average government bureaucrat's salary.

Those found by an independent panel to be severely and permanently disabled continue to get a monthly payment for life, while those less disabled lose their stipends and receive a one-time grant.

The financial support is supplemented by private groups such as the One Family Fund, created three years ago to support and provide psychological counseling to victims. The fund provides cash to affected families until government compensation arrives, and it sponsors workshops and "healing retreats."

Yet victims and their family members say they sometimes feel their suffering is forgotten after the initial horror of a suicide attack has faded.

"As time goes by, the support and help gets less and less," said Mally Nissim, whose 16-year-old daughter, Adi Huja, was badly injured in the suicide bombing of Jerusalem's Cafe Rimon on Dec. 1, 2001. "The whole situation has been going on for two years. My heart is ripped up. I can hardly take it. The atmosphere at home is bad. Everybody is irritable and yelling. Tempers are raised."

She added: "When I hear about an attack, I feel sorry for the injured. It tears families apart."

Adi is a beautiful girl with light hair and olive skin. The only evidence of the severity of her wounds is that she walks with a crutch.

Seated on the living room couch, she pulls off her thick-soled sneakers and rolls up the legs of her khaki trousers to show what is left of her mangled legs. Both are riddled with wounds from ankle to hip -- huge craters, small holes, discolored black.

Her right foot stays in one position; the ankle was filled with screws. In all, 100 pieces of metal sliced through her body, mostly screws and bolts. Some of her wounds became infected by rat poison packed in the bomb, doctors told her.

Adi has endured 26 operations, and she will have more. She was hospitalized for half a year and in a wheelchair for one year. There are still seven or eight bolts in her body.

"The doctors said I'll be able to walk and run," she said, "but it will take time."

Adi and her mother are full of praise for the doctors who saved Adi's legs. For the bombers, there is only hate.

"I hate them and their entire families," Adi said bitterly, "and I wish them to go through exactly what I went through. They have no heart."

The Weapons Instructor

In a bed at a rehabilitation center outside Tel Aviv, American-born Steve Averbach, 37, counts the sum total of his progress since a suicide bomber on Jerusalem's No. 6 bus shattered his world eight months ago.

He can wiggle his toes a little, and he can flex his left foot. He can move his left thumb and index finger. There is a little movement in his left elbow, and there's some sensation in the hand. That is all, but that is progress for a man who was told he would likely never move his limbs again, after a ball bearing from the bomber's explosive vest hit his spinal cord and lodged in the back of his neck.

Before the bombing, Averbach, who moved to Israel from New Jersey at age 18, was a healthy, high-powered, active man, the father of four children. He was known as "Steve Guns" to many Israelis because of his role as the premier weapons instructor in the country.

All of Averbach's training kicked in on May 18, 2003, when he boarded the bus in the French Hill neighborhood and the driver stopped to pick up one last passenger: a man dressed in the garb of a religious Jew. "He wasn't Jewish," Averbach recalled. "He was Arabic."

Averbach immediately grabbed for his gun and spun around to fire. "I was known to be able to draw my gun in .85 of a second," he said. But the bomber already had his hand on the triggering device. "I was in mid-spin when the bomb went off," Averbach said. "It doesn't matter how fast you are -- the guy with his finger on the trigger is going to win." Averbach's gun never cleared his holster.

Averbach retains his good humor, even as he lies on his back and his mother, Maida, gives him water from a small plastic container with a straw. "I had been involved in four or five bus bombings," Averbach said. "This time I just showed up 10 minutes early."

"The thing I say to myself is, next time I will be faster," he said. "I can't lay back and say to myself, 'I'm sorry about what happened.' "

His mother, a nurse, said that since her son's injury she has viewed the horrific scenes of bus bombings differently.

"When I hear the phrase 'non-life-threatening injury,' I always wonder what's the implication of that," she said. "The people who die die. But the survivors, and how they have to cope, and their families -- you never hear about that. The psychological implications, the emotional implications, the financial implications -- it goes on and on."

The Bus Driver

Not all victims of suicide attacks are Jewish. Sometimes the shrapnel finds someone like Yasser Hirbawi, an Israeli Arab who lives in East Jerusalem.

In August, Hirbawi was driving a bus for a tourism company when he stopped next to public bus No. 2, which had a bomber on board. Hirbawi felt the blast, which hurled him down the front steps of his bus, and brought the vehicle's small, mounted television set crashing down on his head and back.

"I started rolling down the stairs leading to the doors," he said, sitting in his family's hillside home. "That was a good thing, because when I was down there, I was saved from the shrapnel that was flying around." He was knocked unconscious, but survived with a slipped disc and half hearing loss in each ear.

"I still suffer from pain, especially when I bend down," Hirbawi said. "Tying my shoes is something I cannot do. If I bend down, it takes me five minutes to get back up. I also can't put any stress on my right leg."

Hirbawi, 40, is under doctor's orders not to work. As an Israeli citizen and a victim of terrorism, he qualifies for financial compensation. But he hadn't received any, he said, and has survived -- taking care of his wife and six children -- only with the help of his brother, who owns a grocery store.

The reason, he believes, is because he is an Arab, not Jew.

"I tell you the truth, if I had been Jewish, I would be getting everything I am owed from the national insurance," Hirbawi said. "A Jew doesn't have to wait six months. Unfortunately, we have to wait. We are discriminated against. They don't treat everyone equally here."

Hirbawi is angry. His family has lived in Jerusalem for generations. He said he had never run afoul of the law. "I live in Jerusalem, I pay my taxes and everything," he said. "I was wounded just like any other person, just like the Jews.

"The bomb," he added, "did not discriminate between Jews and Arabs."

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Israeli Pathologist Faces Grisly Task After Bombings

GREG MYRE, The New York Times, February 24, 2004
 

JAFFA, Israel, Feb. 23 — After the suicide bombing on Sunday, the flesh and the bones were collected from the bus and the street, and delivered here to Israel's lone forensic center. As always, Dr. Jehuda Hiss, the director, carried out his grim duty of piecing together the broken bodies and tending to the raw emotions of the living.

The Palestinian who blew himself up on a Jerusalem bus had a relatively small explosive, yet it tore apart some bodies so completely that it was not clear how many people had been killed. The police announced seven dead, plus the bomber. But when Dr. Hiss and his team had developed genetic profiles on the remains, they discovered an eighth.

"This person must have been sitting next to the bomber," Dr. Hiss, Israel's chief pathologist for 16 years, said in his matter-of-fact tone. "We could not have identified him without DNA tests."

Israel has seen more than 100 suicide bombings in three years, accounting for roughly half of the more than 900 Israelis killed in the violence. The country has developed a vast response network in which Dr. Hiss plays a unique role. All the dead are brought here to the National Center of Forensic Medicine. He has missed only one bombing, while traveling in the United States, and has been intimately involved in dealing with the dismembered victims and the shattered families in every other attack.

After the dead are identified, Dr. Hiss's job is tougher still. He informs the relatives, who can be angry and irrational in their grief.

"With bombings, it is necessary to do this because someone leaves home at 8 a.m. and is killed a half-hour later," he said. "The families want to know if they suffered. They want to know exactly how they died. I'm always surprised that they ask so many detailed questions."

The families wait, sometimes through the night, at the center, which was not built for the crowds of 200 or more that descend after major attacks. The relatives once spilled out onto the grounds. Today, a center for families has been built next to the morgue, easing the crowding, if not the trauma.

The most awkward moment comes when families ask to see the victim. "I say it is better to remember them when they were living," Dr. Hiss said.

About a quarter of the families insist. "I explain it's only part of the body. Still, they will hug a foot if that is all there is," he said.

He used to reject such requests, but psychologists recommended otherwise. "The families want to touch the body one last time to prepare for the separation. If they don't see them, it is like a virtual death. They are right to ask for this," he said.

The attack on Sunday sent the staff into overdrive to identify the dead. Biblical imperative demands the work be both swift and thorough. Jewish law calls for the whole body to be buried, preferably on the day of death, yet it can take days or even weeks to identify all the smaller remains. In some cases, an uncomfortable compromise is struck. The larger body parts are buried quickly and the smaller pieces later when DNA tests have confirmed the identity.

Unlike forensic pathologists who labor in isolation, Dr. Hiss, 57, often seems at the center of the Middle East dramas.

Consider just one day, Jan. 29.

For Dr. Hiss, it began in an airport hangar in Cologne, Germany, where he was part of the Israeli delegation handling a prisoner swap with Hizballah and the repatriation of the remains of three Israeli soldiers killed three years earlier.

The team set up three tents in the hangar, and working beneath the wings of the planes, had just two hours to make a positive identification using X-rays, fingerprints and dental records.

As this process began, a Palestinian suicide bomber struck in Jerusalem, killing 11 people.

In Germany, Dr. Hiss confirmed that the remains belonged to the Israeli soldiers, permitting the prisoner exchange to go forward. The Israeli plane returned home at 7 p.m., and within 30 minutes, he was back in his forensic institute, identifying bomb victims. Amid such turmoil, mistakes happen.

This tumultuous day included Israel's return of 60 dead Lebanese, most killed in fighting with Israel years ago. But in one case, Israel turned over the wrong body, and the family complained. The forensic center has located the body in question.

"We delivered the wrong body, and it's a major disaster," Dr. Hiss said.

After bombings, the dozens of wounded are delivered to local hospitals, and that is where families begin the search for loved ones. If they are not found among the wounded, the families face the prospect of traveling to the forensic institute here in Jaffa, just south of Tel Aviv.

Because Israel is so small, it has always made do with just one such institute, and everyone who dies unexpectedly is examined here.

Few Israelis refer to the institute by its formal name. Most call it Abu Kabir, a reference to the wealthy family that lived on the grounds until the Middle East war that erupted in 1948 at Israel's founding.

On the Palestinian side, where more than 2,600 have been killed in the past three years, the dead are delivered to morgues at local hospitals, and there is no central forensic institute.

"This is not traditional, straightforward, forensic medicine," Dr. Yoram Blachar, head of the Israel Medical Association, said of the Israeli center. "The suicide bombings are very emotional and upsetting. The families have extreme reactions and have to be treated in a most sensitive manner."

"The institute plays a major role after every terror attack," he said.

While the forensic center is praised for its work after bombings, Dr. Hiss has been involved in controversies related to other cases, including allegations that the institute removed organs from corpses without permission from the families. The issue is enormously sensitive because of Judaism's emphasis on burying the whole body.

Government inquiries have not resulted in any charges against Dr. Hiss. But in December the Israeli attorney general recommended disciplinary action. The issue is still under consideration, and no sanctions have been imposed so far.

Dr. Hiss was born in Poland just after World War II and arrived in Israel at age 10. His medical training has taken him to Italy, Austria, Britain and the United States.

His office walls are mostly bare, except for a slate of black wood featuring 24 types of bullets. The most prominent book on his desk is "Gunshot Wounds." Within arm's reach is a plastic container of ball bearings a bombmaker packed into an explosive to make it more lethal.

Faced with this relentless stream of death, Dr. Hiss says he copes without any special means.

"As soon as I leave the premises, I really don't think about it," he said. "I keep myself busy, and I never discuss my work with my family.

"I've been asked many times if I need psychological support, but I don't."

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Why the West should care about Israel's survival

Dallas Brodie, Thursday, February 12, 2004, The Vancouver Sun

After listening patiently to a lecture by Natan Sharansky, Israel's minister for Jerusalem and diaspora affairs in Jerusalem last month, I asked him: "Why should the West care about whether Israel survives as a country?"

He fell silent for a moment and someone asked him -- half jokingly -- whether he would rather take a different question. He replied "No, I'll answer this."

He said to me: "If you truly believe in the principles of human rights and democracy then you must support Israel because it stands as a tiny island in an exceedingly dangerous sea of totalitarianism with all the challenges of waging war as a democracy."

Indeed. Mr. Sharansky comes by his fear of totalitarianism honestly. In the 1970s, he first came to the world's attention as a leading human rights advocate and dissident in the former Soviet Union. Sharansky ultimately emerged as the leading spokesman for Soviet Jews who wished to immigrate to Israel.

In 1977, he was arrested by the KGB on trumped-up charges of spying for the U.S. He was tried and sentenced to 13 years in a Siberian gulag. Although the Soviets had hoped this would be the end of him, it had quite the opposite effect -- much as did the imprisoning of Nelson Mandela in South Africa. Sharansky became known around the world as a victim and a symbol of Soviet repression. Finally, in 1986 he was released and he left immediately for Israel.

For Sharansky and an estimated 700,000 Jews who have since arrived in Israel from the former Soviet Union, Israel stands for democracy, human rights and freedom from a tyrannical state.

But why should we here in Canada care about Israel's survival even if what Sharansky says is true? He lived under a repressive regime -- we do not. He is a Jew -- most of us are not. Israel is far away from here and its collapse would not affect us -- or would it?

With regard to the first two points, the answer is obvious. We don't have to have experienced tyranny to know of the hardships it visits on its citizens. And since when do we only care about people who share our ethnicity and religious beliefs?

On purely ethical and moral grounds, we should support any country that is dedicated to democratic principles. It is the only position that is consistent with our own national ideals.

It is the final point that is not so easily answered because the impact of Israel's collapse would not be immediately apparent to non-Jews, just as the impact of Afghanistan's descent into hell in the 1990s was not immediately apparent to the Western world.

But there is no question that Israel sits on the front line against despotism, Islamic fundamentalism and terror in the Middle East. As such, it plays a crucial role in the ongoing war against terror.

Essentially what Sharansky is saying is that the West must pick a side. Either we believe in democracy and human rights or we do not. It's as simple as that.

For too long, we've supported the tyranny of certain regimes for the sake of geo-political stability, but as the terrorists' attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, showed us, such stability only gives us a false sense of security.

So we, in the West, have to make a commitment to encouraging democracy in the Middle East. Israel is the only democracy there at the moment. Afghanistan and Iraq are lurching awkwardly in that direction.

Whether we agree with the way successive Israeli governments have handled the Palestinian question should be irrelevant to our support of Israel's existence. Many countries have policies with which we disagree, but we do not call into question their very nationhood.

Many Westerners have fallen into the fashionable trend of bashing Israel without having the slightest clue what they are talking about. I cannot count the times I've listened to someone gratuitously bash Israel and then, incredibly, admit they "don't know much about it."

I can only assume that many of these people have just blindly accepted the propaganda against Israel and are ignorant of the fact they are lending their support to Islamic fundamentalists who never accepted Israel's right to exist, or even the "infidels" right.

As Hussein Massawi, a former leader of the terrorist organization Hizballah put it so eloquently, "We are not fighting so that you will offer us something. We are fighting to eliminate you."

That includes all infidels -- Christians, Jews and liberal Muslims in the U.S., Canada, Britain and Australia.

Tiny Israel -- a country of six million people -- stands alone in the Middle East as the only democracy and the only jurisdiction with a commitment to human rights and the rule of law even though it's in a constant state of war.

Israel's struggle to survive in the Middle East is also a battle to maintain our own way of life -- "live and let live."

Dallas Brodie is a former lawyer and a graduate of Princeton University. She hosts "Straight Talk" on CiTR 101.9FM on Mondays from 5 to 6 p.m.

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Daughter of the Enlightenment

Christopher Caldwell, New York Times Magazine, April 3, 2005