Rethinking Islam from Pakistan to Texas
Scholars emphasize viewing Islam in historical, political context
By Ryan Z. Cortazar
FAS Communications
http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/2007/03.01/03-islam.html


Two Harvard professors are spearheading a new initiative aimed at
defeating "a clash of ignorances," a clash, they affirm, that
perpetuates misunderstanding, prejudice, and fear between Muslim and
Western societies. Fueled by widespread global illiteracy about the
nature of Islam and Muslim civilizations, this clash has dangerous
implications for nations that are increasingly becoming multireligious
and multicultural in character. Traversing the world from Texas to
Pakistan and Boston to Kenya, Ali Asani and his colleague Diane L.
Moore are helping secondary school teachers recontextualize Islam and
provide new interpretations and understandings of the religion to
teens throughout the world.

"By empowering secondary school teachers with new insights into the
nature of religion in general, and Islam in particular, we aim to cure
the emerging generation of the cultural myopia that afflicts much the
world's current views on Islam and the cultures of the peoples that
practice it," said Asani, professor of the practice of Indo-Muslim
languages and cultures at the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Moore is
professor of the practice in religion and secondary education at the
Divinity School.

Central to the program is Asani's cultural studies approach. Instead
of viewing Islam merely through doctrinal texts, devotional practices,
or interpretations of the Koran, Asani stresses the importance of
drawing from a deeper well of historical, political, and economic
contexts to understand how Islam developed in the Arabian peninsula
and spread throughout the world, adapting to indigenous customs and
cultures.

He points to the currently limited approach to Islamic studies as a
reason for common misunderstandings. "Among the world's great
religions, Islam is often seen as the exception, especially in terms
of scriptural interpretations," Asani asserted. "People cull the Koran
for inflammatory passages and immediately proclaim Islam a violent
religion and the source of terrorist violence, but the same doesn't
happen with similar bloody passages in the New Testament or Torah
because we understand these religions as phenomena occurring in a
broader culture. The idea that Muslims commit violence solely because
of their religion strips them of their history, their cultural,
political, and historical contexts, and ultimately leads to their
dehumanization. Part of this project is to help understand how
religion functions in Muslim societies and how it does not function.
Everything that happens in a Muslim majority society or that a Muslim
does cannot be naively attributed to Islam."

To this end, Asani has created a set of educational modules intended
to provoke new and innovative understandings of the religion. Starting
with lessons on the life of Muhammad and leading into Islamic
Modernism and its struggle to adapt to growing Western and
international influences, Asani provides teachers with readings,
contextual sketches, and discussion questions to lead groups
throughout the process. While Asani communicates with the teachers via
Internet message boards and visits each of the four international
sites to give lectures and elucidate readings through cultural and
artistic artifacts, the bulk of the study is done through independent
discussion groups moderated by the teachers themselves in a program
that typically lasts six months.

At the end of the program, Asani and Moore facilitate discussion among
teachers on how to craft their own curricula on the study of Islam and
Muslim societies that emphasize the new cultural framework as well as
a pedagogical approach that stresses educational independence and a
breakdown of the traditional teacher-student construction in order to
encourage a more free-flowing dialogue.

"In order for this system to really thrive, it must be a multilevel
conversation with students voicing their own insights alongside those
of the teacher," Asani said. "If this program is to have any success
on the future world's understanding of Islam, we must encourage the
next generations to engage in critical thinking on this topic to
stimulate conversation, not suppress it."

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Profiles
in Courage
By Imam Ghayth Nur Kashif
Muslim Pioneer


[Author's Note: History will record that one of the greatest
transitions or "transformations" of a cultural or ethnic group---from
a parochial or isolationist orientation to the broader ummah world
view of the Qur'an---occurred here in America with the spectacular
evolution of the indigenous Muslim community.

The Climactic period of this evolution has been amply emphasized in
current Islamic literature. Missing from this literature, however, has
been any serious historical or objective documentation of the earlier
phases of the community, which, if carefully studied, might give the
serious Islamic student and/or scholar greater appreciation and
insight into these modern phenomena of conversion.

By recounting and analyzing the actual sociological constraints and
underpinning, one might discover those inherent and latent seeds of
otherwise Qur'anic influences that ultimately paved the way for a
rapid and smooth transformation. Thus the following article focuses
upon those aspects which bore the "seeds" through layers of darkness
until Allah, in His Mercy and Wisdom, brought them to fruition.]


On the night of December 7, 1941, most Americans were huddled in their
living rooms listening to the news bulletins declaring that the
Japanese had at­tacked Pearl Harbor. The mood of the entire country
was grim. Not only were the Western Powers already locked in a violent
struggle among themselves, but on this night the Japanese had done the
unthinkable: they dared to challenge the military might of the United
States.

This fateful night, placed against the backdrop of ram­pant racism,
lynching, and mob violence against non-white
minorities-instantaneously inflamed the climate, not only with
increased racial hostility, but also with overt religious bigotry. But
also on this night, in a store-front building in mid-town Washington,
DC, three score or more black men and women were seated quietly
listening to a small, neatly dressed man, known only as Mr. "Bogan" or
Mr. "Rasoul." This mild-mannered stranger pointedly told them that the
days of white supremacy would only come to an end with the acceptance
of Al-Islam as their religion. While most of them had already accepted
his leadership and had renounced their previous faiths, he was warning
them to expect greater persecution for the sake of their newly found
faith.

The precedent had been set. Less than two years earlier, several
members of this same group had borne the brunt of harassment and
hostility from the local authorities when they withdrew their children
from the public schools and subsequently established the "University
of Islam" within the "Temple of Islam," as the Mosque was known at
that time.  An even *earlier precedent had, in fact, been set in
Detroit, Michigan; some eight years  prior when several Muslim parents
(inspired by the example of Sister Clara Muhammad, who earlier removed
her children from Detroit's public schools), were arrested on *charges
of "contributing to the delinquency of minors (keeping their children
out of the public schools)."

THE ELDERS

According to the early Washington Muslim pioneers, their actions were
immediately countered by the truant officers of the DC public school
system, who filed charges with the District Juvenile Court. The cases
were processed for hearing and resulted in trials that led to the
jailing of several Muslim parents. Among them, Brother Hasan Sharif
and his wife Aquillah were made the prime "example" by the courts.
Although Sister Aquillah was pregnant at the time, she was made to
serve seven months in a women's federal prison in Virginia.

Brother Hasan served ten months in Lorton Reformatory, also in
Virginia. The Muslims continued to resist efforts to force them to
return their children to the public schools and many more were
arrested in the course of time. Some Muslims served local jail terms
that varied from a few days to -several weeks, while others served
longer terms. One of the teachers, Sister Nancy, who was also the
Mosque secretary, became ill with pneumonia after her arrest and died
in the old Women's Gallinger prison hospital.

As Mr. Bogan had warned, scores more would eventually be jailed, not
only on charges of truancy violations but the more serious charge of
opposition to the draft and war effort.  Federal authorities had, in
fact, long contemplated some form of legal containment of this
movement since the early 1930s, when it surfaced in Detroit and
subsequently appeared in Chicago, Illinois, led by a former
sharecropper named Elijah Pool, the husband of Sister Clara. The
movement was initially met with mockery and was considered a
pseudo-cult with "Islamic and Qur'anic trappings."

The authorities, however underestimated the ultimate influence of the
Qur'an on the direction and philosophy of the movement over time.
Despite the fact that these authorities concluded that the Islamic
world would not recognize this group as an authentic Muslim body, they
were faced with the fact that more and more African-Americans
Christians were abandoning Christianity for what they considered to be
the Islamic religion.

In addiction to this, they had become aware that this movement was
following the honored tradition in Islam of establishing an
independent school system following the organization of a Masjid or
Mosque.  They had, in fact, set in motion efforts to destroy the whole
movement and had begun to concentrate on the leadership. Actually, Mr.
Began and Mr. Rasoul were aliases for Elijah, who became widely known
in later years as the Honorable Elijah Muhammad. At the time he was,
in fact, staying one step ahead of federal authorities that were
seek­ing to arrest him on charges of sedition, draft evasion, and
truancy laws.

In the summer of 1942 the federal authorities achieved their
objective, arresting Elijah Muhammad in Washington, DC. After failing,
however, to connect him with Japan's war efforts or other sedition,
they charged him with draft evasion (though he was 45, well over draft
age at the time). They sentenced him to five years in Lorton
Reformatory, where some of his followers had been sent earlier.Along
with him the government ar­rested scores of Muslims of draft age,
leaving most of the Muslim households without male support. Despite
this, the at­tempts to keep the school going while avoiding more and
more arrests continued for the next three years.

  [History will record that Elijah Muhammad's incarceration at Lorton
spawned today's rapid and continuous conversions of inmates to Islam.
This fact is fully documented in US Penal literature]

THE SCHOOL

"The curriculum," as recalled in the Muhammad University' of Islam
yearbook (1970 Washington, DC), "consisted of arithmetic, reading,
spelling, handwriting, physiology, and physical exercises." "Actually
we taught all of the basic academic elementary courses," says Sister
Hadiah, whose father, Brother Vincent, was one of the first to be
arrested. "Our children were all below 10 years of age. Our Islamic
teaching consisted mostly of reading copies of pages of the Our'an
that the Honorable Elijah Muhammad had left with us. We could not find
Our'ans at the time, so we duplicated the pages we had and used them
to teach to the children. One of the favorite pas­sages we used was
Luqman's advice to his son," she said. She ultimately spent week in
the local DC jail herself.

Continued harassment from federal authorities and the lack of
qualified teachers, however, forced the struggling Muslim community to
curtail its efforts. When Elijah Muhammad was released from prison in
1946, the parents and laborers (as the workers were called) decided to
discontinue their efforts to establish a school until a future time.
Many of the children were sent back to the public schools, although a
few of the parents continued to defy the authorities for much longer.

It was some 17 years later when the opportunity arose again for the
Muslims to reestablish an independent school. By this time the
community had grown considerably and had educational pursuits and
economic prowess wide. Local and national media had begun to publish
frequent reports of the Muslim activity, and although most such
reports branded them as "black supremacist," considerable credit was
given to their positive achievements.

The Muslims took this climate into account immediately after the
erection of Muhammad Mosque No. 4 (Now known as Masjid Muhammad in
1960. From that time until 1962 the Muslims carried out an intensive
dawah (call to Islam) campaign, coupled with a strong public relations
effort to defuse lingering hostility from government authorities.

In the fall of 1962 this effort was further rewarded by a transitional
development, which brought one of the community's most prominent
spokesmen to Washington.  Malcolm X (Malik El-Shabazz) was appointed
by the Hon. Elijah Muhammad to replace outgoing Imam (Minister) Lucius
Bey, whose excellent leadership and civic diplomacy had help produce a
positive climate, whereby the community was inspired to erect a Mosque
in mid-town DC. [The Mosque, initially called a "Temple) has the
distinction of being the first Islamic structure build in America from
the ground up by indigenous Muslims.  It was to be listed somewhat
later as a Muslim "tourist" attraction within the inner city for
capital city visitors.]

Malcolm was elated by the ongoing efforts and suggested that a weekend
Islamic educational program should be started as soon as possible.
Shortly thereafter the parents and officials came together and began
what was known as the "Saturday School," or "Saturday Youth program,"
which con­centrated on fundamental academic and Islamic studies for
both children and adults. This group began laying the foundation for a
permanent school. They had the assistance and support of many of the
elders who had suffered imprisonment for this very cause. The effort
had total community involvement.

In the fall of 1963 Elijah Muhammad selected Dr. Abdulalim Shabazz,
head of the Department of Mathematics at Atlanta University  to assume
leadership of the mosque. He further developed the ongoing program and
prepared the community for the support of a full-time school, a major
responsibility that was to come later.

In 1967 Elijah Muhammad suggested that the school should become a
full-time institution immediately and in earnest. This suggestion was
heeded promptly, and within two weeks nearly all of the Muslim parents
had requested transfers for their children from the public school. The
demonstrable act of faith and courage meant that the children would
begin classes, grades one through twelve, in the local mosque-the only
facility available at the time.

It would be difficult to imagine the faith and spirit of sacrifice the
parents were being asked to make, and which they chose to make without
hesitation. Unlike the previous government harassments of the elders,
the federal government and local officials took a "wait-and-see"
attitude. There were even some who gave en­couragement to the effort
in reconnection given the insurmountable problems of the public school
system.

Of the scores of children who transferred to the Muslim school there
were three students entering the twelfth grade at their respective
schools. One of these students, Sister Juanita Rashid, says, "Yes, it
was traumatic. I was a straight-A honor student and this was my last
year.  I was worried about the facilities and so forth."
Nevertheless, Sister Juanita chose to accept the decision of her
parents. " I understood what it was all about," she said. "My father
(Paul Rashid) was one of those jailed along with the elders in the
1940s. He was only 18 years old at the time."

Having gone on to become a public relations specialist for NBC, Sister
Juanita recalls the positive results of her parents' decision.
"Actually I did have individualized instructions; it was like having a
private tutor, and as you know, our instruction were more advanced
than the public schools at that time. We were taught advanced
calculus, for instance."   Sister Juanita and two other twelfth
graders, Brother Kermit and Sister Edwina, became the school's first
graduates the next year.  Rul-Aref  and Alif Ahmad Kashif, the authors
children, were also among the early graduates of t his "University of
Islam," and the subsequent (re-named) Clara Muhammad School.

The list of such early graudates and  alumnis will be chronoliged in
follow up historical renderings in the near future. Many such students
have returned to the school as full and/or art time instructors.

To compensate for the lack of facilities and instructors, the school
operated an advanced "no-frills" curriculum. The basic citywide
curriculum  was followed; however, more theoretical emphasis was used
to balance out the shortfall in physical materials. Furthermore, the
students were offered at least one year of advanced classes vis-?-vis
the public school grade placements. Students were drilled in
step-by-step fundamentals so that they would be able to quickly grasp
supplementary materials should they have to re-transfer again to the
public schools at some point in the future. Along with the core
academic courses, the school taught Spanish and Qur'anic Arabic, as
well as Islamic Studies.  The teaching philosophy was one of
accelerated instructions:

"We must get away from the old kindergarten way of letting our
children play and lay around for months, studying the alphabet.  We
must use the faster method of advanced education in order to begin
qualifying our children.  We are at the door of an advanced change of
civilizations, and in order to compete we must qualify ourselves.  We
cannot do this in integrated schools. We must do this alone, declared
  Elijah Muhammad in 1970.

This was the philosophy that lay behind all of the teaching
methodology. There was no kindergarten. "As soon as it was felt that
the kindergard aged child could handle the material, they entered the
first grade. Some of the children started a 4 ? years," recalls Sister
Hafeeza Kashif, one of the early "founding members" and first/second
grade instructor whose services along with Sister Mildred Omar and
others spanned  more than half-a-century.

{Along with Sister Kashif and Sister Omar, other early
"pioneers/founders," administrators and teachers included Biseemah
Bey, Hanna Muhmud, Delores Hameed, Portia Pasha, Dorothy Wedad, Hadiah
Muhammad;  Carl 4x, Leroy X, Elinor Rashid, Emerson Brandon, Nafeeesa
Mahdi, Doris 2X, Johnny Kareem and several others. [Many "full" family
names which were unavailable at the time of this early documentation,
but will be obtained in an expanded history of these courageous
pioneers]. (many others whose names are  not listed here also ranked
among these pioneers.)

Meanwhile It should be noted that the district's school board did not
resist the establishment of the Muslim school, as was the case for the
earlier pioneers mentioned above. This writer, also one of the early
"founders," held early discussions with several DC school board
officials regarding these matters and help to negotiate the board's
shift to a more accommodating stance. Following such discussions, it
was recommended to the school that the curriculum be modeled after the
DC Ammadon School's program, which was considered the best in the city.

While the school board did not concede to accredit the school at that
time, they determined that its establishment was worthwhile and
offered assistance with standardized testing procedures for the
students. They joined with school officials in establishing such
testing procedures.  In every case it was found that the Muslim
children scored significantly high on the California Achievement Test
(recognized at the best in the country at that time) and ranked first
or near the very top among the local schools in "discipline."  Over
the next five years, school enrollment continued to rise, and this
school complemented the growing number of such Muslim schools around
the country.  At this time the school was, as stated, the subject of
us radio and television specials, which highlighted the academic and
disciplinary achievements of the fledging institution.

  By 1975 the school had developed a four-bus transportation system and
had added two college level tutorial classes (engineering and
architecture). The buses transported the boys and girl students to
school at different hours (Boys in the morning and girls in the
evening). The time spends otherwise by the students involved off
school grounds educational activities (library activity, school trips,
etc). The students went to school all year long, except two weeks in
February, and two weeks in August.

THE TRANSFORMATION

As fate would have it, Elijah Muhammad returned to Allah on February
24, 1976. His passing ushered in a new era that would attempt to build
upon the community's practical achievements and transcend its
parochial nature. The community transformed its ideals to exalt the
principle of inclusion of all mankind in the universality of Al-Islam,
and it declared Prophet Muhammad ibn Abdullah (saaw) categorically as
Allah's final Messenger to all mankind.

This latter development fell on the shoulders of Imam Warith Deen
Mohammed, who immediately began to reor­ganize the Muslim schools,
naming them " Sister Clara Muhammad" schools. As he had begun to
introduce the community to traditional Islamic standards, he
emphasized the need  to upgrade the Arabic and Islamic Studies classes
in keeping with such traditions.

Nationally the school system underwent a series of changes designed to
update curriculum, increase fiscal responsibility and improve facilities.

This process eventually required the downsizing of some schools and
closing of some facilities. A brief casualty of this refinement, the
Washington school also closed its door for "re-tooling" and re-opened
on a full-time basis in 1980. Meanwhile the believers ---relying upon
the experiences of the elders---maintained smaller independent school
facilities and encouraged "home schooling."

The Bilalian center spearheaded by the elders and others served this
purpose well. Finally, in 1980 the Clara Muhammad School reopened in a
separate facility at 1851 9th Street, not far from tile site of the
original Masjid where the pioneers had made their stand. Later the
school re-located in a former District School building, also within
blocks of the Masjid. It is now located .in Southeast Washington and
provides the continuing quality education envisioned for Muslims in
the entire Metropolitan area.

The new generation of teachers and students continue to draw strength
from the legacy of the Pioneers----truly they are most deserving as
"Profiles in Courage." They have left us an honorable legacy to uphold
--30-

Note: The above material is soon to be expanded in depth including in
upcoming literary anthrological works of the author. Consequently,
while the sharing of above copyright material, with due credit by
recipients (after query) is permitted, the distribution of copyright
material for projected commercial use, in part or whole, (without
written consent of author) abridges legal rights).

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"Civilian" Soldiers denied Army benefits

http://www.thenation.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20070730&s=truthdig2
http://tinyurl.com/3d8gzw


"Helms, 31, a civilian counterintelligence expert with the Army's
902nd Military Intelligence Group, had been sent to Iraq in 2004 to
help fill a critical intelligence gap in the area known as the Sunni
Triangle. While in Iraq, he lived with soldiers and ate military
rations, took fire from mortar rounds and small arms, and clocked
hundreds of miles manning a machine gun on the back of a Humvee.
Nevertheless, his status as an Army civilian would leave him stranded
in the aftermath of the June 16, 2004, attack, when the bomb hit his
Humvee so hard it blew his M-60 off its turret. In the months that
followed, Helms recalled, he was denied vital care for his wounds --
ranging from shrapnel in his left arm to traumatic brain injury.
Forced to rely on federal workers' compensation and turned away from
regular care at Walter Reed Army Medical Center and other military
hospitals, Helms has faced years of frustration grappling with
bureaucracies unprepared to help a government civilian wounded in combat.

"I did not have an 'accident' while working. I was subjected
to an offensive attack by an enemy of the U.S. government
who attempted to kill me," said Helms, now a counterintelligence
agent at the 902nd's Fort Knox, Ky., field office. "Why am I under

workers' comp if workers' comp does not recognize a combat injury?"
As the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan strain the U.S. military, the
Pentagon is sending civilian workers such as Helms into war zones to
provide critical support to the troops, raising questions about their
status and treatment." Ann Tyson

.. Answers?

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Mr Nashiri said he made up stories to satisfy his captors


Terror suspect 'tortured by US'
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/6511921.stm


A Saudi man held in US custody for five years has told a military
hearing he was tortured into confessing a role in the bombing of the
USS Cole in 2000.

Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, 41, said he had faced years of torture after
his arrest in 2002, a Pentagon transcript from the closed-door hearing
said.

Mr Nashiri said he made up stories to satisfy his captors, the
transcript said, but gave no details of torture.

He was among 14 "high-value" detainees moved to Guantanamo Bay in
September.

   One time they tortured me one way, and another time they tortured me
in a different way

Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri transcript


Key US terror suspects
The 14 men were previously held in secret CIA prisons but are now
being detained in a maximum security wing in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

The US has accused Mr Nashiri of being the leader of al-Qaeda's
operations in the Gulf at the time of the attack in Yemen, which
killed 17 US sailors and almost sunk the warship.

He was tried in absentia in a Yemeni court in September 2004 and
sentenced to death.

Interrogators 'happy'

Mr Nashiri's testimony was given at a military tribunal held at
Guantanamo to determine his status as an "enemy combatant" on 14
March, AFP news agency reports.

"From the time I was arrested five years ago, they have been torturing
me," the transcript of his hearing read.

"It happened during interviews. One time they tortured me one way, and
another time they tortured me in a different way.

According to his testimony he eventually "confessed" to playing a key
role in the bombing of the USS Cole.

"I just said those things to make the people happy," the transcript read.

"They were very happy when I told them those things."

Among the apparent confessions contained in the transcript, Mr Nashiri
told his interrogators that he met al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden
several times and received significant amounts of money from him.

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MEPs STAND UP FOR THE IMMEDIATE RELEASE OF 45 PALESTINIAN MPs
IN ISRAELI JAIL

LUISA MORGANTINI, Vice President of the European Parliament
Brussels
luisa.morgantini @ europarl.europa.eu


45 Members of the European Parliament, from different political
groups, have decided to express their solidarity towards the 45
Palestinian colleagues imprisoned by Israel, and called for their
immediate and unconditional release.

All the 45 MEPs stood up symbolically in the plenary, right before the
beginning of the debate with Mr. Solana on the situation on the Middle
East, representing the 45 Members of the Palestinian Legislative
Council detained in the Israeli jails in a clear violation of the
international legality .

"Each of us, MEPs, is deeply concerned about the imprisonment of the
President and of 1/3 of the Members of the Palestinian Legislative
Council, democratically and legitimately elected by the Palestinian
people", MEPs said in their declaration.

Through this initiative, MEPs want to strongly condemn these arrests
by the Israeli Army, but also remind the anniversary of the beginning
of the Israeli military occupation in the Palestinian territories,
which is during 40 years exactly today.

"We are deeply worried not only for the plight of the 45 members of
the Palestinian Legislative Council but also for the near 11000
Palestinian political prisoners currently imprisoned by the Israeli
Army, without a true process and often brutally abducted by the
Israeli soldiers.

They have to be released and, at the same time, also the Israeli
soldier Gilad Shalit must be freed by the Palestinian group that
kidnapped him in Gaza Strip, as a change of prisoners- affirms Luisa
Morgantini, one of the 45 MEPs participating to this initiative.

"40 years of military occupation are enough: now it's urgent to
implement a political solution of the conflict, based on "two People
and two States" and   it's necessary that the Palestinian Legislative
Council could continue its activity, instead of preventing its work
because of the check points, the arrests, the summary killings kept on
by the current Israeli policy of military occupation", concluded Luisa
Morgantini.

MEPs participating to the initiative:

Adamou Adamos,  Andria Alfonso, Aubert Marie-Hélène, Auken Margarete,
Beer Angelika,  Brepoels Frieda,  Bourzai Bernadette, Bowis John,
Carnero Gonzàlez Carlos, Cohn-Bendit Daniel, Davies Chris, De Brún
Bairbre, De Keyser Véronique, Demetriou Panayiotis, De Rossa
Proinsias, Evans Jill, Flautre Hélène, Gottardi Donata, Guerreiro
Pedro, Hammerstein Mintz David, Isler-Béguin Marie-Anne, Kasoulides
Ioannis , Kratsa-Tsagaropoulou Rodi, Locatelli Pia Elda, Lucas
Caroline, Madeira Jamila, Matsakis Marios, McMillan-Scott Edward,
Menendez Del Valle Emilio, Meyer Pleite Willy, Morgantini Luisa,
Napoletano Pasqualina, Patrie Béatrice, Portas Miguel,  Purvis John,
Resetarits Karin, Romeva i Rueda Raül, Roure Martine, Saïfi Tokia,
Savi Toomas, Sudre Margie, Svensson Eva-Britt, Toussas Georgios,
Triantaphyllides Kyriacos, Wurtz Francis.

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The Handwriting on the Wall Is Written in Blood
By Scott Galindez
Monday 28 May 2007
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/052807Y.shtml


"I think the handwriting is on the wall that we are going in a
different direction in the fall."

"We can no longer support an endless occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan."

     The quotes above are not from anti-war Democrats. No, it's not
Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) or Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Nebraska). These quotes
come from Senators Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) and Jeff Sessions
(R-Alabama).

     Is this just another fake moving of the goal posts? Or is it a
sign of a major sea change to come from the Republicans in Congress?
We have been hearing for months that many Republicans are only giving
the "surge" until September, and then they will be looking for a "new
strategy." I have to ask, Senator McConnell, if the handwriting is on
the wall, then why wait until September? How many more American troops
and Iraqis will die for a policy that you already know is failed?

     This Memorial Day, nearly 1,000 more families will be visiting the
graves of American soldiers killed in Iraq than a year ago. With death
tolls over 100 for the last few months, I have to ask if over 400 new
lives should be sacrificed, if the handwriting is already on the wall?

     The handwriting that is on the wall is being written in the blood
on the hands of those who continue to support funding for this war.

     If Senator McConnell thinks the handwriting is already on the
wall, why didn't he support an override of the president's veto of the
Iraq supplemental, which included a timeline for withdrawal from Iraq?

     If Senator Sessions believes that we cannot support an endless
occupation, then why doesn't he support timelines for withdrawal?

     When Senator McConnell next speaks to the troops or the families
of those serving in Iraq, I challenge him to explain to them why the
direction is not changing today, and why their loved ones should fight
between now and September.

     While many Americans are frustrated that the Democrats have not
done more, the bottom line is that the Republicans in Congress have
blocked every attempt to force Bush's hand. The Democrats should not
be let off the hook, but the recent votes have shown that if they had
the power, they would end the war. It is the Republicans who are
voting against their conscience to support the president - not to
support the troops.


     Scott Galindez is the DC Bureau Chief of Truthout.

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Debate on Iran border wall disallowed
By Amanullah Kasi
http://www.dawn.com/cgi-bin/dina.pl?file=top8.htm&date=20070527


QUETTA, May 26: Balochistan Assembly Deputy Speaker Mohammad Aslam
Bhootani on Saturday did not allow debate on an adjournment motion
tabled by the Leader of the Opposition, Kachkol Ali, about
construction a wall by Iran along the border with Pakistan.

While disposing of the motion, he said the wall had been constructed
inside Iran and it was an international matter.

The deputy speaker, who was presiding over the proceedings, stated
that though the people living on both sides of the border were
culturally the same, the matter was not of an urgent nature and it was
outside the purview of the provincial government.

Speaking on the admissibility of the motion, the opposition leader
said the Baloch lived on both sides of the border and the wall would
create problems for the natives of areas adjacent to it.

He said the governments of the two countries had not taken the Baloch
into confidence on the construction of the wall.

Chief Minister Jam Mohammad Yousuf informed the house that the
provincial police chief had told him that four people had been killed
in crossfire in Shahbaz Town in the morning over an enmity between the
Hamidzai and Ghaibzai tribes.

Speaking on a point of order raised by Abdur Rahim Ziaratwal of the
Pukhtunkhwa Milli Awami Party, the chief minister said initials
reports received by police showed that the clash was the result of a
feud between the two clans of the Achakzai tribe.

Majid Khan Achakzai of the PMAP asked the chief minister how he could
term the incident crossfire between the groups just 20 minutes after
its occurrence without any arrest having been made.

The speaker disposed of an adjournment motion of Jan Mohammad Buledi
when Finance Minister Syed Ehsan Shah assured the house that the Rs600
million allocated for the people affected by the Mirani Dam would be
distributed once the survey of the date trees was completed by the
Water and Power Development Authority and Nespak. He said the payment
had been delayed because the affected people were demanding Rs20,000
per tree lost, while Wapda was ready to pay Rs3,000.

The mover alleged that the government neither paid compensation to the
victims nor taken any step for their rehabilitation. He said the funds
released for the purpose had been deposited in a private bank.

The chair admitted an adjournment motion tabled by Dr Shama Ishaq
about denial of admission to the Balochistan University of Information
Technology and Management Sciences to local students. Members from
both the opposition and treasury benches supported the motion.

The speaker formed a committee comprising Ministers Abdur Rehman
Jamali and Maulana Faizullah and MPAs Kachkol Ali and Mr Ziaratwal on
a proposal of the chief minister to investigate the contents of the
written answer to a question by the agriculture department.

Gwadar Development Authority Minister Sher Jan Baloch informed the
house in reply to a question that no-objection certificates had been
issued to 57 private firms for resorts and housing, commercial and
industrial units in the district during the past three years.

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The Arab-Jewish Agreement
James J. Zogby
June 05, 2007
http://www.tompaine.com/articles/2007/06/05/the_arabjewish_agreement.php


In the flush of excitement that greeted the 2002 release of the Geneva
Agreements (a framework for Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiated by
leading, though "unofficial," Israelis and Palestinians), the Arab
American Institute (AAI) and Americans for Peace Now (APN) polled Arab
Americans and American Jews to test their support for the terms of the
agreement. We found that not only did both communities demonstrate
significant support for a resolution to the conflict along the lines
of the Geneva Agreements, they also agreed on a host of other issues
related to U.S. Middle East policy.

Five years later our two groups undertook a follow-up survey. We
commissioned Zogby International (ZI) and, during the week of May 22,
2007, we polled 501 Arab Americans and an identical number of American
Jews. We found that, despite the violence and pain that bloodied the
Middle East during the intervening years, the two communities still
show significant agreement on almost every issue central to
Arab-Israeli peace and U.S. policy in the region.

Strong majorities of both Arab Americans and American Jews still
support the two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Both want an end to the 40 years of occupation of the West Bank and
the Gaza Strip (two-thirds of American Jews and 89 percent of Arab
Americans). Over 80 percent of both Arab Americans and American Jews
agree that the U.S. should support negotiations between Israel and
Syria, and over three-quarters of both communities favor a diplomatic
approach over a military confrontation with Iran.

Furthermore, 80 percent of both communities agree with the finding of
the Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group that "The United States will not
be able to achieve goals in the Middle East unless the United States
deals directly with the Arab-Israeli conflict" and 70 percent of
American Jews and 82 percent of Arab Americans support the 2002 Arab
League Peace Initiative as the "basis for negotiations."

What is striking about the results is the depth of the agreement. In
many instances, the responses given by the two groups are near
identical or, at least, within the margin of error of each other.

Strong majorities of both communities rate the Clinton
Administration's handling of the Arab-Israeli conflict as effective,
while only an identical 20 percent of each rate Bush's efforts as
effective. And almost two-thirds of Arab Americans and American Jews
say they would be more likely to support a 2008 presidential candidate
who promised to "take an active role in the Israeli-Palestinian peace
process," with nearly 60 percent of each community saying that they
would be more likely to support a candidate who supported the
Israeli-Syrian peace negotiations. Ninety percent of Arab Americans
and American Jews agree that it is important for their two communities
to work together to support a Middle East peace where "Palestinians
and Israelis each have the right to live in an independent state of
their own."

In fact, there were only a few areas of disagreement. When asked how
the Bush Administration should pursue Arab-Israeli peace, two thirds
of Arab Americans agree that the President should "steer a middle
course" between the Israelis and the Palestinians. American Jews, on
the other hand, are divided, with 44 percent saying the Administration
should support Israel and 40 percent saying "steer a middle course."

Both communities strongly support the statement "Israelis have a right
to live in a secure and independent state of their own" (98 percent of
American Jews and 88 percent of Arab Americans); and the statement
"Palestinians have the right to live in a secure and independent state
of their own" (90 percent of American Jews, 96 percent of Arab
Americans). But they don't think that about each other. Only 34
percent of American Jews believe that Arab Americans support the
Israeli right noted above, while a significantly higher 60 percent of
Arab Americans believe American Jews support the Palestinian right.

It can be hoped that when the results of this AAI/APN poll become
better known in both communities, they can provide the impetus for
joint action in support of mutually shared goals. Aside from providing
the basis for better understanding and joint action, the poll
demonstrates the fallacy, fostered by groups like AIPAC (the
pro-Israel lobby) and believed by too many politicians, that Arab
Americans and American Jews are poles apart in their views of Middle
East peace. They are not.

Forty years into the occupation, both communities are saying "enough."
They want the violence and occupation to end. They want a
comprehensive Middle East peace, and they want the kind of U.S.
leadership that will work to make that peace a reality.


Dr. James J. Zogby is president of the Arab American Institute.

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A nation imprisoned
John Pilger
Mail&Guardian, UK


Israel is destroying any notion of a state of
Palestine and is imprisoning an entire nation. That is
clear from the latest attacks on Gaza.

The attacks, reported on Britain's Channel 4 News,
were "targeting key militants of Hamas" and the "Hamas
infrastructure". The BBC described a "clash" between
the same militants and Israeli F-16 aircraft.

In one "clash", the car of "militants" was blown to
pieces by a missile from a fighter-bomber. In my
experience, all Gaza's people are militant in
resisting their jailer and tormentor. And the "Hamas
infrastructure" was the headquarters of the party that
won last year's democratic elections in Palestine.

"Some say," said the Channel 4 reporter, that "Hamas
has courted this [attack] ..." Perhaps he was
referring to the rockets fired at Israel from Gaza,
which killed one person. Under international law an
occupied people has the right to use arms against the
occupier's forces.

The Channel 4 reporter referred to an "endless war".
There is no war; there is resistance to an enduring,
illegal occupation by the world's fourth largest
military power. In the past six years alone, wrote the
historian Ilan Pappé, Israeli forces have killed more
than 4 000 Palestinians, half of them children.

According to documents obtained by United Press
International, the Israelis once secretly funded Hamas
as "a direct attempt to divide and dilute support for
a strong, secular PLO by using a competing religious
alternative", in the words of a former CIA official.

Today, Israel and the US openly back Hamas's rival,
Fatah, with bribes of millions of dollars. Israel
recently secretly allowed 500 Fatah fighters to cross
into Gaza from Egypt, another American client. The aim
is to undermine the elected Palestinian government and
ignite a civil war.

In response, the Palestinians forged a unity
government of both Hamas and Fatah. The latest attacks
aim to destroy this.

The Israeli plan for Palestine, wrote the Palestinian
academic Karma Nabulsi, is "a Hobbesian vision of an
anarchic society: truncated, violent, powerless,
destroyed, cowed, ruled by disparate militias, gangs,
religious ideologues and extremists, broken up into
ethnic and religious tribalism and co-opted
collaborationists. Look to the Iraq of today . . ."

On May 19 The Guardian received this letter from Omar
Jabary al-Sarafeh, a Ramallah resident: "Land, water
and air are under constant sight of a sophisticated
military surveillance system that makes Gaza like The
Truman Show," he wrote. "The Gaza strip needs to be
shown as what it is . . . an Israeli laboratory backed
by the international community where human beings are
used as rabbits to test the most dramatic and perverse
practices of economic suffocation and starvation."

Israeli journalist Gideon Levy has described the
starvation sweeping Gaza's more than a million and a
quarter inhabitants and the "thousands of wounded,
disabled and shell-shocked people unable to receive
any treatment . . . The shadows of human beings roam
the ruins . . . They only know the [Israeli army] will
return and they know what this will mean for them:
more imprisonment in their homes for weeks, more death
and destruction in monstrous proportions."

Whenever I am in Gaza I am consumed by a melancholia,
as if I am a trespasser in a secret place of mourning.
Skeins of smoke from wood fires hang over the same
Mediterranean Sea that free peoples know, but not
here. Along beaches that tourists would regard as
picturesque trudge the incarcerated of Gaza; marching
at the water's edge, through lapping sewage. The water
and power are cut off, again, when the generators are
bombed, again. Murals on walls pockmarked by bullets
commemorate the dead, such as the family of 18 men,
women and children who "clashed" with a 200kg
American/Israeli bomb, dropped on their block of flats
as they slept. Presumably, they were militants.

More than 40% of Gaza's people are children under 15.
Reporting on a four-year field study in occupied
Palestine for the British Medical Journal, Derek
Summerfield wrote that "two-thirds of the 621 children
killed at checkpoints, in the street, on the way to
school, in their homes, died from small arms fire,
directed in over half of cases to the head, neck and
chest — the sniper's wound".

Khalid Dahlan, a psychiatrist who heads a children's
community health project in Gaza, told me his latest
survey revealed that 99,4% of the children studied
suffer trauma. More than 99% of their homes were
bombarded; 97,5% were exposed to teargas; 96,6%
witnessed shootings; 95,8% witnessed bombardment and
funerals; almost a quarter saw family members injured
or killed.

Before he died, Edward Said bitterly reproached
foreign journalists for "stripping the context of
Palestinian violence, the response of a desperate and
horribly oppressed people, and the terrible suffering
from which it arises".

Research by the Glasgow University Media Group shows
that only 9% of young people interviewed in the United
Kingdom know the Israelis are the occupying force and
the illegal settlers are Jewish; many believe them to
be Palestinian. Broadcasters use words such as
"terrorism" and "murder" to describe the deaths of
Israelis, almost never Palestinians.

No mention is made of the thousands of Palestinians
abducted by Israel, many of whom will not see their
families for years. In Jerusalem, the Foreign Press
Association documents the shooting and intimidation of
its members by Israeli soldiers. In one eight-month
period, the Israelis wounded eight journalists,
including CNN's Jerusalem bureau chief. The FPA
complained in each case. There was no satisfactory
reply.

In Western journalism on Israel, especially in the US,
Hamas is dismissed as a "terrorist group sworn to
Israel's destruction". This suppresses the truth: that
Israel is bent on Palestine's destruction.

Hamas's long-standing proposals for a 10-year
ceasefire are ignored, along with its recent
ideological shift amounting to a historic acceptance
of Israeli sovereignty. "The [Hamas] charter is not
the Quran," said a senior Hamas official, Mohammed
Ghazal. "Historically, we believe all Palestine
belongs to Palestinians, but we're talking now about
reality, about political solutions ... If Israel
reached a stage where it was able to talk to Hamas, I
don't think there would be a problem of negotiating
with the Israelis [for a solution]."

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I Hate You, You Hate Me...We're A Happy Family
By Jayne Gardener


Hate. A simple four letter word that packs a painful punch. No one
wants to be accused of it and yet those of us who understand the truth
of the Jewish supremacist agenda or who speak honestly about
black/white race issues are constantly and falsely being accused of it.

Why does everyone seem to think that exposing the Jewish supremacist
agenda is all about hate? Is hate the only motivation for exposing
their treachery? Or could it be that we are motivated by love? Love
for our white European, Christian heritage and our traditional
Christian values.........you know, the ones that built western
civilization and made it the greatest civilization known to man?

For 3,000 years Jewish supremacists have worked to destroy every
culture they have lived in from within by forcing their sick
anti-Gentile, anti-Christian and anti-family values on the rest of us.
They literally want to destroy the traditional family unit; destroy
the very building block of strong societies. If that isn't hate, what is?

The Jewish inspired wide open immigration policies and miscegenation
were brought about for one reason and one reason only. To dilute our
DNA and eventually eradicate it from this earth. If the shoe were on
the other foot and we were doing our damndest to dilute and eliminate
Jewish DNA you know full well that the screams of anti-semitism would
be akin to the shot heard 'round the world.

Our Zionist masters not only encourage abortion, they are
disproportionately represented among the movers and shakers in the
abortion industry. Do they hate us so much that they not only
encourage us to kill our unborn children but they are noticeably
recognizable among the names of the doctors who perform such
procedures at a rate of close to a million a year? Would you call this
love?

In their eyes, the institution of marriage is something to be mocked
and ridiculed and destroyed by both the homosexual activists and the
"bats in the belfry" gender feminists who have done more damage to
women and children than any other group in the name of "liberating us"
from male oppression. Who is more oppressed, a woman who stays home to
take care of her home and children and is on her own schedule doing
her work and being answerable to no one, or a woman who must be at a
certain place at a certain time and doing a specific job for a given
period of time at the behest of someone else? Brainwashing women to
leave the home for the workplace and abandon their children in the
process is not love, it is hate.

Jewish supremacists control the wealth and the dissemination of news
so that we never clue into what they are about until it's too late and
there is no turning back. Most media venues are owned and controlled
by Jewish interests and they control what we see and hear. They are
responsible for the lop-sided, unfair coverage of black/white
relations and the subterfuge that does its level best to disguise the
Jewish supremacist raison d'etre. The final result is that we only
know what they want us to know and you can be damned sure they are not
going to let us in on the dirty little secret they keep to themselves
or the perfidy of the state of Israel.

They control academia and develop a curriculum that keeps the majority
ill-educated and malleable so that any agenda can be forced upon them
without even knowing it's happening. They turn our children into good
little marionettes of the Zionist puppet masters who challenge their
parents' more conservative views and take up the banner for
multiculturalism, social justice and white race genocide.

Over the years they have been pretty successful at driving the
majority religion out of our schools and out of the public square.
Screaming "separation of church and state" they push their sick ,
Zionist agenda knowing full well that the framers of the constitution
never imagined that somewhere down the road someone would believe that
religion must be kept out of government at all costs. That document,
one of the most amazing documents ever written, has been so misused
and twisted over the years that it has little or no meaning in this
modern age. "Interpretation" of the constitution in this day and time
is so far removed from the intent of the founding fathers as to be
laughable.

If the historical revisionists are right (and I believe that many
certainly make good points), the Jewish supremacists may well have
pulled off the scam of the century. They exploit the tragic deaths of
their own for financial gain and to garner unfailing support for their
Jewish state of Israel. They pulled the United States into almost
every war in the 20th century to serve their needs and desires at
great consequence to the US and then have no shame in accepting
American money to the tune of about 15 million dollars a day. Oh, the
chutzpah!

The largely Jewish Communist regime in the former Soviet Union and
Eastern European countries unleashed horrors upon people that no human
being should be forced to endure. But to add insult to injury the Jews
are never taken to task for their role in the slaughter of the Czar's
entire family or for the millions of Christians and others who died
under Communist rule, either by outright murder or government
sponsored famine that wiped out untold millions in the Ukraine alone.
Can anyone take an honest look at that period of history and not claim
it was motivated by greed and yes, hate?

No one was ever legally held responsible for the atrocities that took
place in the Gulags of the Soviet Union and yet Jews such as Simon
Wiesenthal devoted his entire life to tracking down elderly camp
guards. Am I to turn a blind eye to the horrors of the Communist
regime and continue to let the Jewish liars manipulate me into buying
into the collective guilt and sorrow over the Jewish treatment at the
hands of the nazis? Even the Jews don't really care about the victims
of the Holocaust, they are just a means to an end, a way to garner
blind support for their Jewish state in the middle east and to keep
the money rolling in. Is this motivated by hate? You bet it is.

They use the tragedy of the "Holocaust" to keep the money flowing and
to make anyone who dares to criticise their little Jewish utopia feels
like a monster. God forbid anyone should speak up about their racist,
apartheid policies and their terrorist actions against a largely
unarmed Palestinian population. If the egregious behavior of the IDF
and the Israeli settlers in the occupied territories doesn't
constitute hate, what does?

So, in closing, let me remind you that those of us who speak out about
the treachery and disloyalty of the Jews are not motivated by hate but
by love of our own people and heritage and a desire to hold onto the
world as it used to be before Jewish supremacist perfidy began to
destroy it.

I don't hate them but I believe I have ample evidence to demonstrate
their hate for me. I think their hatred of Gentiles and Christians
oozes from their pores and consumes their every waking thought. It is
in their mother's milk, suckled into them from birth. Their hatred
pours forth from their sacred Babylonian Talmud and continues to this day.

They are the haters, that is obvious. And I will continue to expose
that hatred as long as I draw breath.

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Dracula in Teramo

Our friend, the Italian professor Claudio Moffa, made a daring attempt
to bring the well-known French revisionist Robert Faurisson to give a
lecture in the Teramo University. He was attacked in media, and
eventually the university rector locked out the university to save the
students from this lecture. Here are two materials pertaining this
visit: a piece in the Guardian, and a text written for us by a
participant of the event, Daniele Scalea.


A step too far?
John Hooper
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/john_hooper/2007/05/a_step_too_far.html


Should Holocaust deniers be prevented from airing their views? And, if
so, how far is it right to go in stopping them? The questions arise
because of what happened over here on Thursday night in the central
Italian university city of Teramo.

Robert Faurisson, a retired academic who has been convicted five times
in his native France for denying crimes against humanity, had been
invited by a member of the staff to give a lecture. His host is one
Claudio Moffa, a professor who run the university's master's programme
in Middle Eastern studies.

Moffa was asked by the university authorities to think again. He
refused. So the rector, Mauro Mattioli, decided the only thing left
was to temporarily shut down the university, which he did.

He said his decision was forced on him by security considerations. In
a statement, the university authorities spoke of a "climate of tension
that could endanger the safety of students".

Indeed, when Faurisson tried earlier today to speak at a hotel, there
were scuffles with protesters and the event was cancelled. However, it
is also worth noting that the rector had been given a clear indication
by Italy's centre-left government of what was expected of him.

In a letter quoted by La Repubblica, the higher education minister,
Fabio Mussi, said "inviting to an Italian campus a figure ... who
denies the gravity of the Shoah has no academic merit, but merely
bears witness to a mediocre provocation".

For professor Moffa, on the other hand, it is a question of academic
and intellectual freedom. His website vaunts a declaration of support
for his initiative, signed by more than 20 other Italian academics.

The professor claims that he is not himself a Holocaust denier. But
his most recent relevant posting to the site is entitled "Why
Faurisson and the 'deniers' convince me more and more".

Picking up on the prison sentence given to David Irving and the
various penalties inflicted on his guest, he poses the following
question: "Why is ... judicial harassment that smacks of manic
obsession necessary if the arguments of Faurisson and Co are indeed
'unfounded'?"

Answers anyone?



Faurisson attacked by Zionist paramilitaries in Italy

By Daniele Scalea



Claudio Moffa, the professor of Afro-Asian history at the Università
degli Studi of Teramo (Italy) organizes a master's degree named after
former ENI's manager Enrico Mattei and dedicated to the Middle East.
This year master's lessons took also a taboo theme in European
countries: mythologization of the Holocaust and its exploitation by US
and Israeli ruling classes for political and financial purposes. Level
of master's lecturers and participants is high and their cultural
background really various: among others, we could cite Moffa himself,
Franco Cardini (famous historian), Massimo Fini (well-known journalist
and philosopher), Tiberio Graziani (University of Perugia), Maurizio
Blondet (journalist and essayist), Fabio Alberti (manager of a
humanitarian NGO working in Iraq and Palestine), Vittorio Dan Segre
(professor and former Israeli diplomat), Domenico Losurdo (philosophy
professor), Israel Shamir (world-wide well-known reporter and
essayist), Giulio Andreotti (former Italian premier), Samir al-Kassir
(Syrian ambassador) and Abolfazl Zohrevand (Iranian ambassador). On
the wave of master's great success and considering students' interest,
Claudio Moffa also decided to invite Robert Faurisson, a controversial
French professor who denied that Nazi persecution of Jews during the
Second World War reached the quantitative and qualitative levels
described by mainstream historiography. According to him, German
leaders never ordered a genocide, homicidal gas chamber didn't exist
and the number of Jewish victims is very much lower than six millions.

Because of his theories Faurisson was removed from his chair, deprived
of pension, criminally prosecuted and subjected to some physical
aggressions: nevertheless 78 years-old professor is still fighting for
freedom of research in Europe. It's important to say that neither
Faurisson nor Moffa have neo-Nazi affections: on the contrary, Claudio
Moffa during his youth was active in a far leftist organization.

Invitation of Faurisson caused a lot of complains by Zionist movements
and individuals, which yet had seen the Enrico Mattei master's program
as "unfriendly" towards Israel. A number of Jewish personalities have
signed a petition against freedom of speech, writing that nobody
researching the Holocaust could go beyond some "unquestionable facts"
(which obviously must be decided by the same petitioners!) and asking
academic and political authorities to ban the event. Professor Moffa
defended his initiative promoting a counter-petition in favour of
freedom of speech, opinion and research (undersigned by hundreds of
academicians, students, journalists and common people) and publicly
inviting some of the critics to a cross-examination of Faurisson's
lecture - but they all have refused.

Italian mainstream media, especially two Italian newspapers
(post-communist "L'Unità" and " la Repubblica", the latter owned by a
Jewish billionaire), began an aggressive campaign against professors
Moffa and Faurisson; moreover, some extremist Zionist organizations,
such as the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, publicly asked the University of
Teramo to forbid Faurisson's lecture. Just a few days before the
event, in face of Moffa's refusal of cancel the lecture, University's
Chancellor decided to close all buildings and rooms connected to
Political Science Department. Even the Italian minister of university
and research Fabio Mussi took side against Faurisson's lecture, but
Claudio Moffa courageously didn't surrender and moved the event into a
hotel in Teramo.

May 18th, professor Faurisson arrived at Teramo and, before the
lecture, he gave a press conference in front of the hotel. But, just a
few minutes after the end of the press conference, a small group of
Zionist hooligans tried to attack the elderly French researcher. He
was saved by the promptly reaction of professor Moffa and other
onlookers. After that, Zionist riff-raff engaged in a brawl with some
onlookers and policemen, injuring vice-chief constable Gennaro Capasso
(a clavicle's fracture for him). Teramo's Chief Constable, rather than
defend some quiet citizens from just 50 criminals, obliged Moffa and
Faurisson to cancel the lecture and leave the county under escort.

But who were the attackers? They are some middle-aged Jews from Rome,
members of the LED, (Lega Ebraica di Difesa), Italian branch of the
J.D.L. ("Jewish Defense League") founded by the late Rabbi Meir
Kahane. That organization supply paramilitary training to his members
(some even volunteer in Tsahal, the Israeli army) and "guard" Jewish
areas in Rome. LED actions are not only "defensive": often they
physically attacked persons whose only "fault" is to have criticized
Israeli politics. For example, in 1992 LED paramilitaries (armed with
iron bars and revolvers) assaulted the office of a small right-wing
political party, the Movimento Politico, literally destroying both
office and party. In 1995 LED members attacked supporters of a Jesi
basketball team who had insulted a Jewish player. In 1996, after
absolution of an elderly former SS officer, Jewish paramilitaries
surrounded the Military Tribunal of Rome, taking in hostage judges and
attorneys until Italian Minister of Justice, with an unconstitutional
decision, cancelled tribunal's sentence and ordered to re-arrest the
accused. From 2002, LED has being responsible for a number of
aggressions against leftist pro-Palestine militants. All those crimes
remained unpunished. LED is not isolated among Italian Jews: Riccardo
Pacifici, alleged leader of LED, is vice-president of Rome's Jewish
community. The day after aggression, interviewed by an Italian
newspaper, he not only refused to condemn the violence but also asked
for removal of professor Moffa from his chair. In response, Claudio
Moffa has started to organize the next year master's program.
Moreover, it has been constituted a "Committee Against Repression of
Freedom of Speech and Thinking" which is promoting a new appeal (see
appendix).



Daniele Scalea



References:



http://www.mastermatteimedioriente.it/  Site of the Master "Enrico
Mattei per il Medio Oriente"

Dagoberto Husayn Bellucci, La Jewish Defense League, "Rinascita", 28
giugno 2006

Maurizio Blondet, C'è uno squadrismo kosher, "Effedieffe Giornale
Online", 21 maggio 2007

Giuseppe Caporale, Proteste e schiaffi per Faurisson, "la Repubblica
", 19 maggio 2007

(Editorial), Il giorno di Faurisson: scontri, disordini, insulti,
feriti, " PrimaDaNoi.it", 19 maggio 2007

Ellezeta, Faurisson e Moffa aggrediti da ebrei venuti da Roma, "
viaroma100.net", 19 maggio 2007



Appendix:

Appeal "The Denied Speech"

Friday 18th May in Teramo professor Robert Faurisson, who had been
prevented to give a lecture inside University where he had been
invited by professor Claudio Moffa, has been attacked in the
city-centre by a group of thugs. Whatever are the views of professor
Faurisson, it's inconceivable that a group of people, using aggression
and threat, can prevent someone else to enjoy the right of speech
sanctioned by Constitution and Universal Declaration of Human Rights,
as inconceivable are pressures exerted on University Minister to
obtain the "expulsion" of professor Claudio Moffa from Teramo University.

If, even without knowing or sharing views of the so-called
"negationists", you think that anyone mustn't be prosecuted or put in
jail or violently prevented from speech for his or her opinions -
regardless of what they are - if you still believe to article 21 and
article 33 of Italian Constitution and to the Universal Declaration of
Human Rights, if you think that it's unfair to demand for expulsion
from University of a professor who was not even involved in the
"negationist" controversy; please sign this declaration.

Consider it a sign of courage, a gesture of courtesy and political
intelligence: let us drop political purity, the demand to avoid
"contamination" by others' thought. The imminent risk for every
Italian and European citizens of any political belief is a general
gagging and the creation of a horrific totalitarian system which, for
its dimension and its hypocritical image of "democracy", is without
precedent in history. Let's sign against the integrated and
single-minded mass-media, against the gagging laws that destroy Europe
of bourgeois and socialist liberties, against gagging of teaching (at
any level), against fundamentalism, against idiocy and seedy
opportunism spreading both on the Right and the Left among political
and intellectual classes.

Viva la liberte!

Italian Committee against Repression of Freedom of Speech and Thinking

In order to sign please write to pepperosci @ alice.it .

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Martin: Paul's 9/11 explanation deserves to be debated
By Roland S. Martin
CNN
http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/05/18/martin/index.html


(CNN) -- Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani was declared the winner
of Tuesday's Republican presidential debate in South Carolina, largely
for his smack down of Texas Rep. Ron Paul, who suggested that
America's foreign policy contributed to the destruction on September
11, 2001.

Paul, who is more of a libertarian than a Republican, was trying to
offer some perspective on the pitfalls of an interventionist policy by
the American government in the affairs of the Middle East and other
countries.

"Have you ever read about the reasons they attacked us? They attack us
because we've been over there. We've been bombing Iraq for 10 years,"
he said.

That set Giuliani off.

"That's really an extraordinary statement," said Giuliani. "As someone
who lived through the attack of September 11, that we invited the
attack because we were attacking Iraq; I don't think I've ever heard
that before and I've heard some pretty absurd explanations for
September 11."

As the crowd applauded wildly, Giuliani demanded that Paul retract his
statements.

Paul tried to explain the process known as "blowback" -- which is the
result of someone else's action coming back to afflict you -- but the
audience drowned him out as the other candidates tried to pounce on him.

After watching all the network pundits laud Giuliani, it struck me
that they must be the most clueless folks in the world.

First, Giuliani must be an idiot to not have heard Paul's rationale
before. That issue has been raised countless times in the last six
years by any number of experts.

Second, when we finish with our emotional response, it would behoove
us to actually think about what Paul said and make the effort to
understand his rationale.

Granted, Americans were severely damaged by the hijacking of U.S.
planes, and it has resulted in a worldwide fight against terror. Was
it proper for the United States to respond to the attack? Of course!
But should we, as a matter of policy, and moral decency, learn to
think and comprehend that our actions in one part of the world could
very well come back to hurt us, or, as Paul would say, blow back in
our face? Absolutely. His real problem wasn't his analysis, but how it
came out of his mouth.

What has been overlooked is that Paul based his position on the
effects of the 1953 ouster by the CIA of Iranian Prime Minister
Mohammad Mossadegh.

An excellent account of this story is revealed in Stephen Kinzer's
alarming and revealing book, "Overthrow: America's Century of Regime
Change from Hawaii to Iraq," where he writes that Iran was
establishing a government close to a democracy. But Mossadegh wasn't
happy that the profit from the country's primary resource -- oil --
was not staying in the country.

Instead, the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (now known British Petroleum,
or BP) was getting 93 percent of the profits. Mossadegh didn't like
that, and wanted a 50-50 split. Kinzer writes that that didn't sit too
well with the British government, but it didn't want to use force to
protect its interests. But their biggest friend, the United States,
didn't mind, and sought to undermine Mossadegh's tenure as president.
After all kinds of measures that disrupted the nation, a coup was
financed and led by President Dwight Eisenhower's CIA, and the Shah of
Iran was installed as the leader. We trained his goon squads, thus
angering generations of Iranians for meddling in that nation's affairs.

As Paul noted, what happened in 1953 had a direct relationship to the
takeover of the U.S. Embassy in 1979. We viewed that as terrorists who
dared attack America. They saw it as ending years of oppression at the
hands of the ruthless U.S.-backed Shah regime.

As Americans, we believe in forgiving and forgetting, and are terrible
at understanding how history affects us today. We are arrogant in not
recognizing that when we benefit, someone else may suffer. That will
lead to resentment and anger, and if suppressed, will boil over one day.

Does that provide a moral justification for what the terrorists did on
September 11?

Of course not. But we should at least attempt to understand why.

Think about it. Do we have the moral justification to explain the
killings of more than 100,000 Iraqis as a result of this war? Can we
defend the efforts to overthrow other governments whose actions we
perceived would jeopardize American business interests?

The debate format didn't give Paul the time to explain all of this.
But I'm confident this is what he was saying. And yes, we need to
understand history and how it plays a vital role in determining
matters today.

At some point we have to accept the reality that playing big brother
to the world -- and yes, sometimes acting as a bully by wrongly
asserting our military might -- means that Americans alive at the time
may not feel the effects of our foreign policy, but their innocent
children will.

Even the Bible says that the children will pay for the sins of their
fathers.


Roland S. Martin is a CNN contributor and a talk-show host for WVON-AM
in Chicago.

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To comment and support Dr. Assaf, click on his blog entry:
http://www.arabisto.com/p_blogEntry.cfm?blogEntryID=688


Abby's dream, my catastrophe
Aref Assaf, PhD
July 23, 2007

The article below is a quick response to an piece headlined, "Our
dream will bring us to another land" by an American citizen named
Abigail Leichman. In her article, Abby, who is a staff writer for the
Bergen Record and often writes about food, etiquettes, and home
decorating interests, is offering her good byes as she prepares to
return to her "biblical homeland", Israel. She also writes for Jewish
papers about Israel and other Jewish matters. In fact, she wrote a
rather two-part non descript articles about the recent 'real estate
fair" held in Teaneck to sell American Jews lands to build more
settlements in Israel. Could it be that Abby was influenced by this
event? The organizer's flyer proclaimed: "Come learn how you, a group
of friends, or even a community can own a home and strengthen the
Zionist dream."

I was very much involved in exposing the supposedly secretive
gathering and followed that by having a letter published on the subject.

My response to this article was very spontaneous because Abby's words
exposed old wounds and shattered dreams. This was a very painful
letter to write but it needed to be said. More than anything else, I
hope Abby will read my words.

I urge you to first read the article then read my short response which
I sent to the Bergen Record as a rebuttal. Much more can and should be
said but to render my response publishable, I had to keep it short. AA


Bergen Record
To the Editor
Dear Editor:
Re: Our dream will bring us to another land

I wish I can turn into piece of garment in Abby Leichman's luggage who
is preparing to go `home' to Israel. Even though I was born in
Palestine and was nurtured by its dry sun and arid soil, I am unable
to join Abby in her journey simply because I am not Jewish. Abby, who
admits to not being "fluent in the local language or culture", and was
probably born in New Jersey, will be welcomed with open arms by other
foreign settlers. While Abby will automatically receive Israeli
citizenship, I will be denied that privilege and, if not thrown back
onto the next departing plane, I  may be issued a temporary tourist
visa to my homeland. What a tragedy that so painfully encapsulates but
never honestly conveys the very essence of the Palestinian people's
plight.

The supposedly heartwarming story may solicit compassion and `good
wishes' from some readers. Yet it is the tragic destiny of the other
unmentioned side, the Palestinian Arabs who understandably will not
throw the red carpet for Abby. I wish Abby told the readers that her
going home to Israel will mean Palestinians will have lost more of
their lands and groves. This is the area occupied by Israel since
1967. As part of a final peaceful resolution between the Palestinians
and the Jews, this parcel of historic Palestine, the West Bank and
Gaza, is supposed to become the future Palestine state which our
President has envisioned since 2002.

I have no issue with Abby living in Tel Aviv or Beersheba. In fact,
most Palestinians have accepted the two- state solution by ceding 78%
of historic Palestine to Israel and asking for the remainder to be
their future Palestine state. I do, however, have a major issue with
her joining the over 400,000 other settlers who, because of
ideological or monetary incentives, choose to live in stolen lands
belonging to the Palestinians. These lands, through
government-authorized confiscations and illegal and counterfeit
purchases, will be where Abby will build her home. Abby did not share
with us this  little secret. Abby's new home will mean that
Palestinians will be squeezed even more into their suffocating
enclaves, surrounded by barbed wire, massive walls, and hundreds of
checkpoints. Abby may never experience being stopped by an Israeli
solder at these checkpoints, deep into the occupied West Bank, because
in fact these structures primarily separate Palestinians from other
Palestinians, separate Palestinians from their fields, from their
places of worship and their schools.

Dear Abby, you tell us that you are returning to your ancestral home
to build a nation. But what about my ancestral home in Palestine, and
what about  the thriving nation you will have destroyed? What about my
parents' little village of Allar which you have wiped off the face of
the earth in 1948,  rendering its 450 inhabitants refugees for over
five decades? My parents still hold the key to their now non-existent
homestead but which remains vividly alive in their dreams and prayers.

It pains me, Abby that you make no mention of the Palestinian people
on whose corpses you will be stomping, and  whose hundreds of villages
which you have destroyed and turned into Jewish-only towns and cities.
These people deserve a home too, Abby - don't they? What gives you
more right to my home? Has God turned into a real estate broker? Will
you ask yourself about the fate of he original owners of the land?
Should they forget about their land, homes, and dreams so that you may
have  guilt-free peace of mind and a conscience devoid of doubts? Will
you ask yourself how the Palestinians will feed their children since
you have uprooted thousands of their centuries-old olive trees? How
will they learn since you have destroyed their schools? How will they
treat their sick since you have demolished their hospitals?

Abby, the Palestinians will not share your worry about who will cut
their hair or whether milk will be sold in bottles or plastics bags.
Their worries are more basic than that: they worry about their next
meal; they worry if they will survive another 1000 lbs. bomb thrown at
their apartment. They worry about such things as being able to pass a
checkpoint to make it in time to deliver a baby or receive a blood
transfusion or to farm their fields. I am sure all these matters were
left out from your glossy sales brochure as they somehow
metaphysically never existed and if they do, they should not matter to
you.

Please, Abby, let the world know that your new home will be in an
exclusive settlement built only for the Jews, and Americans of
different faiths may not live there. Please tell the world that the
roads you will travel to Jerusalem or Tel Aviv were built for Jews
only and no Arab cars are permitted on them. You will know an
Arab-owned car because your government issues color- coded licenses
plates and Arabs will have their 'unique' colors.  Remember the
fifties and early sixties in America, when you will see a sign"
"Whites Only". We have long since overcame such illegal and moral
repugnant discriminatory polices. In Israel, discrimination against
Arabs is legal because your Supreme Court said so recently and because
your Prime Minister once described our people as crushable grasshoppers.
Please tell the world that the water with which you will quench your
thirst and cleanse your body will be stolen from Arab-owned lands from
which  over 90% of the water is diverted to Israel. Arabs, you should
know,  aren't even be allowed to dig for water on their own property.
Please tell the world about the wild pigs your government lets loose
into our felids to destroy their crops and to insult their religious
sentiments. Please tell the world about the more than 13,000 Arab
homes that since 1967 your Israeli government destroyed-often with a
moment's notice.

Abby, please tell the world how and why your Israeli soldiers, armed
with American-made weapons, shot dead my unarmed eleven-year brother
with an M-16 rifle's bullet which pierced through his young head. How
can you console and comfort my parents who were never allowed to see
their fallen son or even to bury his young shattered remains? Will you
endeavor to find the killers and bring them to justice? Will you help
my parents bring their great loss to a closure?

Abby, before you pack up your belongings, I pray you will unpack your
heart and let in your conscience. Should you decide to stay here in
America, I do hope our path will cross. I suspect that our meeting
will be most revealing because you will finally come face to face with
the other side of your dream-and my catastrophe.

Abby, please tell the world the missing chapter of your saga:
Palestinians will cease to dream of their own home as you begin to
celebrate your homecoming. Please tell the world - for you may never
have inner peace until you do.

Aref Assaf, PhD
Denville, NJ

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Secret memo shows Israel knew Six Day War was illegal
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article2584164.ece


A senior legal official who secretly warned the government of Israel
after the Six Day War of 1967 that it would be illegal to build Jewish
settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories has said, for the
first time, that he still believes that he was right.

The declaration by Theodor Meron, the Israeli Foreign Ministry's legal
adviser at the time and today one of the world's leading international
jurists, is a serious blow to Israel's persistent argument that the
settlements do not violate international law, particularly as Israel
prepares to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the war in June 1967.

The legal opinion, a copy of which has been obtained by The
Independent, was marked "Top Secret" and "Extremely Urgent" and
reached the unequivocal conclusion, in the words of its author's
summary, "that civilian settlement in the administered territories
contravenes the explicit provisions of the Fourth Geneva Convention."

Judge Meron, president of the International Criminal Tribunal for the
former Yugoslavia until 2005, said that, after 40 years of Jewish
settlement growth in the West Bank - one of the main problems to be
solved in any peace deal: "I believe that I would have given the same
opinion today."

Judge Meron, a holocaust survivor, also sheds new light on the
aftermath of the 1967 war by disclosing that the Foreign Minister,
Abba Eban, was "sympathetic" to his view that civilian settlement
would directly conflict with the Hague and Geneva conventions
governing the conduct of occupying powers.

Despite the legal opinion, which was forwarded to Levi Eshkol, the
Prime Minister, but not made public at the time, the Labour cabinet
progressively sanctioned settlements. This paved the way to growth
which has resulted in at least 240,000 Jewish settlers in the West
Bank today.

Judge Meron, 76, is now an appeal judge at the Tribunal. Speaking
about his 1967 opinion for the first time, he also tells tomorrow's
Independent Magazine: "It's obvious to me that the fact that
settlements were established and the pace of the establishment of the
settlements made peacemaking much more difficult."

Blaming restrictions on Palestinian movement for the devasatation of
the Palestinian economy, the World Bank earlier this month
acknowledged Israeli security concerns but added that many of the
restrictions were aimed at "enhancing the free movement of settlers
and the physical and economic expansion of the settlements at the
expense of the Palestinian population." The settlements and their
"jurisdictions" effectively control about 40 per cent of the area of
the West Bank.

The argument that the settlements are illegal, stated in successive UN
resolutions, and by the International Court of Justice advisory
opinion condemning the separation barrier in 2004, is reinforced by
such an authoritative source. It strengthens the political case in any
"final status" negotiations on borders with the Palestinians for
genuinely equitable land swaps of Israeli territory to a future
Palestinian state if Israel is to retain settlement blocks.

Prime Minister Ariel Sharon secured a promise in 2004 from President
George Bush that large Israeli "population centres" in the West Bank
could remain in Israel in any such negotiations. In a subsequent
letter to the Palestinians, the President promised that final borders
had to be subject to agreement by negotiation.

Judge Meron's memorandum was obtained from the Israel State Archives.
His subsequent defence of it amounts to a direct challenge to Israel's
continuing contention that the Geneva Convention's provisions on
settling people in occupied territory did not apply to the West Bank
because its annexation by Jordan between 1949 and 1967 had been
unilateral.

The memorandum was written in September 1967 as the Eshkol government
was already considering Jewish settlements in the West Bank and the
Golan Heights, seized from Syria during the Six Day War. It says that
the international community had already rejected the "argument that
the West Bank is not 'normal occupied territory'."

It pointed out that the British ambassador to the United Nations, Lord
Caradon, had already asserted that Israel's position was that of an
occupier. It added that a decree from the army command saying that
military courts would "fulfil Geneva provisions" indicated that Israel
thought so too.

Judge Meron also says in his interview that such an argument would not
in any case have applied to the Golan Heights which had been
undisputed as sovereign Syrian territory prior to the Six Day War.

While the Olmert government has so far rejected calls for peace
negotiations by Syria's President Bashir Assad, it has been weighing a
welter of internal advice proposing that it explores talks seeking an
end to Syrian support for Hizbollah and Hamas in return for restoring
the Golan Heights to Syria.

The memorandum, details of which were published by the Israeli writer
Gershom Gorenberg last year, also says settlements built on private
land would explicitly contravene the 1907 Hague Convention.

The only implicit acknowledgement of the Meron memorandum - which Mr
Gorenberg established also went to Moshe Dayan, the triumphant Defence
Minister during the Six Day War - was that one of the first West Bank
settlements, Kfar Etzion, was initially called a "military outpost"
although it was already, in effect, a civilian settlement. The
memorandum said there was no legal prohibition against military posts
in occupied territory.

Ehud Olmert fought the Israeli election last year on a programme of
unilateral withdrawal from parts of the West Bank - usually thought to
mean dismantling settlements east of the separation barrier, which
cuts deep into the West Bank in places. But this strategy was
abandoned after the Lebanon war.

Mark Regev, the foreign ministry spokesman, said yesterday: "We do not
accept that the West Bank is occupied in the classic sense." He added
that it was not sovereign Jordanian territory before 1967 and it had
not enjoyed legal status since the British mandate, which had the
remit, underpinned by the League of Nations, of establishing a Jewish
national home.

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Australian government's "terrorist" case against Dr Haneef unravels
By Mike Head
20 July 2007
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2007/jul2007/hane-j20.shtml


In a serious blow to the Howard government's scare-mongering campaign,
Stephen Keim QC, the barrister for detained Indian Muslim doctor
Mohamed Haneef, has leaked a revealing transcript of his client's
initial police interview and called on the government to release any
undisclosed information it has on the case.

Keim's action is another sign that the Howard government's efforts to
whip up new fears of terrorism by connecting the young man to the
recent failed bombings in London and Glasgow have begun to unravel in
the face of growing public disquiet over the indefinite detention of
the 27-year-old doctor.

The released transcript directly contradicts several key police and
government allegations that were broadcast throughout the media over
the past three weeks in a bid to link Haneef to those arrested in
Britain. It exposes police claims that Haneef had lived with two of
the arrested men, who are his second cousins, and had no explanation
for seeking to fly to India on a one-way ticket.

Australian Broadcasting Corporation radio's "AM" program this morning
reported the collapse of the centrepiece of the police-government
campaign, that Haneef's former mobile phone SIM card was found in the
jeep that was rammed into the Glasgow Airport terminal. British and
Australian sources told an "AM" reporter that the card was found,
eight hours after the Glasgow incident, hundreds of kilometres away in
Liverpool. The card was in one of two mobile phones seized in the
apartment of one of Haneef's cousins, Sabeel Ahmed, who has not been
accused of any direct involvement in the bombings.

Reflecting the mounting opposition, leading lawyers have strongly
defended Keim's courageous stand in declaring that he was the source
of the leaked transcript, potentially risking his career. The
barrister, a widely respected figure in the legal profession,
challenged the government to arrest him after Prime Minister John
Howard, Attorney-General Philip Ruddock and Australian Federal Police
(AFP) Commissioner Mick Keelty made threats of legal action to punish
whoever leaked the document.

Keim said his handing of the 142-page transcript to a journalist was
completely legal and ethical, and necessary to counter the
government's own systematic leaking of prejudicial material calculated
to skew public opinion against Haneef. His statement exposed the
methods of deceptive media leaks that the government and its security
agencies have employed, not just against Haneef but every individual
charged with terrorist offences over the past five years.

"My client has been subject to a barrage of leaks," Keim told
reporters. In a media statement, he said "an aggressive campaign of
leaking, selectively and misleadingly, from the same document and
other allegedly secret documentation held by law-enforcement agencies
had been perpetrated in recent weeks. These leaks could only have been
motivated by a desire by those perpetrating them to suggest to the
Australian public that the case against Dr Haneef was stronger than
the Australian Federal Police, through their counsel, the commonwealth
DPP, had been able to put before the court."

Ruddock has threatened to pursue charges of contempt of court or
breaches of professional ethics against Keim, and declared that the
transcript's release could delay Haneef's trial, extending his
detention. Keim responded: "I challenge the Prime Minister, his
ministers, Mr Keelty and the police to produce the legal basis which
would make anything I've done illegal. They know where I am. If they
think I've done anything wrong, they can come and take me away."


What the transcript shows

The released transcript of the July 3 AFP interview reveals at least
three crucial false statements in the subsequent police court
affidavit. According to the affidavit, Haneef "had no explanation as
to why he did not have a return ticket" from India to Australia.

In reality, Haneef told the police his father-in-law had booked and
paid for a one-way ticket to India scheduled for July 2 "because I
didn't have any money". He explained that the sole purpose of his trip
was to see his wife, Firtous Arshiya, and new-born daughter, after
they were re-admitted to hospital following an urgent Caesarean birth
on June 26. The doctor said his employer, the Gold Coast Hospital,
could confirm that he had wanted to leave earlier but could not
organise another doctor to cover his absence.

The affidavit also states that Haneef told police he lived in Britain
with his two cousins, and that in an on-line conversation with his
cousin Sabeel just before the bombing bids he had not mentioned the
recent birth of his daughter. Haneef actually told police he had not
lived with his cousins, and that his conversation with Sabeel had been
solely about the birth of his child.

The full transcript shows that despite a marathon six-hour questioning
of Haneef—who willingly answered all questions and did not request
legal advice—two senior AFP agents came up with nothing. Most of the
interview consisted of Haneef giving the police every conceivable
piece of information about his life and his personal affairs,
including the names of all his relatives, details of his email
addresses, Internet account, computer, car, bank accounts, finances
and places of worship.

Throughout the interview, Haneef repeatedly denied any knowledge of
the London and Glasgow attacks, or any involvement in terrorism. He
told AFP agent Adam Simms he had never had firearms, explosives or
terrorist training and denied he had ever been asked "to take part in
jihad or anything that could be considered similar to jihad".

Haneef volunteered the information that he had left his SIM card
behind in Britain with Sabeel. He explained that after being told that
British police wished to ask him about the card, far from absconding
he had tried four times to phone a British police officer, Tony
Webster. Haneef said he feared he was being "framed". When he gave the
card to his cousin, more than a year earlier, it had only one month's
worth of use left, on a pre-paid plan.


Lawyers and judges speak out

Last Monday, a magistrate granted bail to Haneef after he had been
detained for police questioning without trial for nearly two weeks,
then charged with "recklessly" providing support to a terrorist
organisation. The only police evidence cited was that, before he left
Britain more than a year ago, the young doctor gave his nearly-used
SIM card to Sabeel Ahmed, who has not even been charged with
membership of a terrorist group.

Before Haneef could be released, the government effectively overturned
the court ruling by ordering that he be kept indefinitely in
immigration detention. Without any notice or hearing, Immigration
Minister Kevin Andrews revoked his visa on "bad character" grounds,
declaring that he was "reasonably suspected" of "association" with a
terrorist organisation. Haneef's lawyers have filed an appeal against
that decision in the Federal Court, but in the meantime the Queensland
state Labor government has declared that the young doctor will be
treated "as a terrorist" in jail, subjected to solitary confinement
for 23 hours a day.

The Howard government's actions, followed by its threats against Keim,
have clearly generated public suspicion, as well as outrage in the
legal profession and sections of the judiciary. Lawyers' groups have
sprung to the barrister's defence. Sean Reidy, chairman of the
criminal law section of the Queensland Law Society, said Keim acted
lawfully. He added that the legal fraternity was "monitoring the case
closely," Keim was a lawyer of the "highest integrity" and the
government attack appeared to be "vicious and personal".

"You have to have a great deal of concern for the administration of
justice when in high-profile cases lawyers are being personally
attacked. This is exactly what happened in the Tampa case," Reidy
said, referring to 2001, when the government denounced lawyers for
attempting to help refugees legally challenge their forced removal to
the remote Pacific island of Nauru.

Australian Bar Association president Stephen Estcourt SC said
thousands of lawyers were deeply concerned at the government's
handling of the case. "The disquiet is pretty universal," he said.
"The cancellation of Dr Haneef's visa following so closely on the
granting of bail is a cynical exercise and constitutes an assault on
the rule of law." Estcourt said he was also concerned by Ruddock's
comments about a possible tightening of the laws to make it harder for
judges and magistrates to use their discretion in bail cases. He said
this indicated that Ruddock believed he could simply frame new laws to
overcome independent-minded judicial officers.

The Australian Lawyers Alliance (ALA), representing 1,500 lawyers,
said the government's treatment of Haneef was "deplorable". ALA
national director and Perth barrister, Tom Percy, said: "When the
government is able to usurp the decision of a magistrate, the rule of
law no longer applies". Prominent Melbourne barrister, Robert Richter
QC, accused the government of "terrorising" the legal system.

Concern among judges became apparent on Wednesday during an urgent
directions hearing in Brisbane of Haneef's appeal against the visa
cancellation. Federal Court judge Jeffrey Spender described as
"absolutely astounding" the government's argument that an association
of any kind with criminals—even "a cup of coffee, a picnic with the
kids"—was enough for a non-citizen to fail the Migration Act's
character test.

"I have been associated with persons involved in criminal activity. I
have defended them, charged with murder. Unfortunately I wouldn't pass
the character test on your statement," the judge said to Roger
Derrington, SC, representing the immigration minister.

Justice Spender also said that the visa cancellation's timing was
"curious". "There is room for the view that this was an act of
circumventing the inconvenience of having him on bail," he said. One
of the grounds for the appeal is that the minister's purpose in
cancelling the visa was to allow Haneef to be detained when he had
been granted bail, and that that was an "improper purpose".

The previous day, Victorian Supreme Court justice Bernard Bongiorno
warned about the dangers of sacrificing the presumption of innocence
for "political expediency". He declared that "the whole foundation of
our criminal justice system" could be at risk.

Bongiorno granted bail to two accused members of the separatist
Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). He expressed doubt that they
would be convicted under the anti-terrorism laws for fund-raising for
the LTTE, given that the organisation was not listed in Australia or
Sri Lanka as a terrorist organisation. The two leading members of the
Tamil community in Melbourne had been denied bail since their arrests
on May 1. Following Justice Bongiorno's ruling, a magistrate granted
bail to another Tamil man who was extradited from Sydney on similar
charges last month.


Broader concerns

Widespread public concern in India about Haneef's treatment has forced
Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to intervene, making a statement
expressing the hope that Australia would extend "all the facilities"
to Haneef. The Indian government had earlier summoned Australia's
envoy to the foreign ministry in New Delhi to demand that Haneef be
treated "fairly and justly under Australian law".

In Brisbane, where Haneef is detained, Muslim leaders said Muslims
were being targetted in the wake of his arrest. Dr Mohamad Abdalla
told the Murdoch-owned Courier-Mail many believed that if Haneef were
not a Muslim, the anti-terrorism laws would not have applied to him.
"Muslims are feeling now, many of them, particularly the vulnerable
ones, who is going to be next?" he said. "Since the issue of Haneef
started, people have been meeting every night until 10, 11 o'clock,
discussing what they can do. How they can respond?"

Murdoch's outlets, which have vociferously fuelled all the allegations
made by the government and its police agencies in the "war on terror"
since 2001, have intervened prominently in the Haneef case, including
by obtaining and publishing the police interview transcript. Behind
these actions are concerns, spelt out in an Australian editorial on
July 18, that the handling of the case is seriously discrediting the
entire framework of the anti-terrorist laws.

While defending the visa cancellation, the editorial said the
government's problem was that growing numbers of people no longer
trusted it. "Without a speedy explanation by the government of exactly
why he must remain in custody, Dr Haneef will continue to be martyred
by the same anti-Howard forces who managed to turn David Hicks from a
confessed terror trainee into the focus of widespread, and politically
costly, public sympathy".

In other words, Haneef's persecution is now compounding the damage to
the government's credibility caused by its complicity in the five-year
detention of Hicks in Guantánamo Bay, before he pled guilty to a
dubious minor charge in order to get back to Australia. Far from being
concerned about legal rights and civil liberties, the Murdoch stable
is alarmed that the government's ability to trample over these basic
rights has become compromised.

The Australian's legal affairs writer, Chris Merritt, elaborated these
concerns, writing: "The great lesson from the fiasco in Guantánamo Bay
was that the legal response to terrorism will fail utterly unless it
wins public acceptance. The only reason David Hicks is serving a
trifling sentence in Adelaide—instead of rotting in Cuba—is because
the Australian public lost faith in the US military commission
process... Instead of speculating about what sort of punishment could
be meted out to this lawyer [Stephen Keim], those responsible for the
war on terror should remember the great lesson from the Hicks case:
the court of public opinion can sometimes be far more powerful than a
court of law."

Letters to newspapers indicate that broad layers of people are now
disgusted not only with the Howard government, but the Labor Party as
well for its "in-principle" endorsement of every action taken against
Haneef. Labor leader Kevin Rudd's support for the government's conduct
is entirely in line with Labor's six-year record of backing the
so-called "war on terror" and voting for every piece of anti-terrorism
legislation.

Occupying office in every state and territory, Labor's partnership has
been crucial in handing constitutional powers to the federal
government to impose its laws, and in passing legislation that has
either matched or exceeded the federal measures. The state Labor
government in Queensland has had no qualms in consigning Haneef to
solitary confinement "as a terrorist".

Since 2001, there has been complete bipartisan agreement between the
Howard government and the Labor "opposition" on boosting the powers of
the police, intelligence and military apparatus as public opposition
deepens to militarism, worsening social inequality and the assault on
basic legal and democratic rights.

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Why Our Government Supports Israel, and Why We Shouldn't
John Spritzler - spritzler@...
Somerville Divestment Project
www.divestmentproject.org


      As most Americans know very well, the United States is not really
a democracy. What is less obvious is how that explains why our
government supports Israel.

       In America, money is power. A tiny plutocracy of billionaires,
with a corporate and government elite, controls every important
institution; our government, the major political parties, the
corporations and mass media, even the big labor unions. Their values
of inequality and top-down control, and what they do to stay in power
and control us, like pitting people against each other and waging wars
based on lies, fly in the face of the values of equality and democracy
and concern for one another that most ordinary Americans share.

          Virtually all of our politicians and mass media support
Israel because Israel helps America's rulers control both Americans
and people in the Middle East. Israel does this by fomenting religious
war in the Middle East pitting Jews against non-Jews, and enlisting
U.S. support in that war.

    What Israel Does

          In 1947 Jewish leaders in Palestine formed an army and
violently drove out 85% of the non-Jews living in what became the
Jewish state of Israel in 1948. It was ethnic cleansing, pure and
simpleâ€"a war crime, and apartheid worse even than that of South
Africa. Jewish leaders said that Jews needed a state in Palestine
where the sovereign authority would not be everybody who lived there
but "the Jewish people" only, and where the population would have to
be at least 80% Jewish even though Jews were only 38% of the
population at the time.  Jewish leaders did everything they could to
make ordinary Jews, who had recently arrived from Europe after
surviving the Holocaust, believe that the Arabs were out to kill them
all, when in fact what Arabs objected to was not the presence of Jews
but the aim of Jewish leaders to drive non-Jews out of their own
country. Israel refuses to let the millions of Palestinian refugees
return to their homes or to compensate them for their stolen property.

        Israel ethnically cleansed more land of Palestinians in
1967, discriminates in law against the few who remained inside what
became Israel, and uses the anger of Palestinians at all of this, and
their resistance to it, to keep Jews perpetually fearful of Arabs and
obedient to the wealthy Jewish elite in Israel. At the same time, the
Israeli government continues the crime of ethnic cleansing in the name
of "security." Result: Extreme misery for Palestinians, and less
security for Jews in Israel , while economic inequality among Jews in
Israel soars, and the Israeli upper class is more in control and
richer than ever.

    How Israel Strengthens America's Rulers

     Ruling elites in all nations know that the key to controlling
their own people is to make them fear an external enemy. This is a
time-proven way to get people to accept abuses from their own rulers
that they would never otherwise tolerate, like NAFTA, unaffordable
health care, MCAS shoved down our children's throats, tax cuts for the
rich, vanishing pensions, and a military-industrial complex scam that
funnels trillions of dollars from our pockets into those of the
corporate elite.

          The War on Terror (WoT) is the latest way that U.S. and other
world elites make their people so frightened of and angry at an
external enemy that they will accept being dominated undemocratically
by their own rulers. That's why virtually all of our politicians and
mass media support the WoT, even if they argue the details (attack
Iraq or Iran?) The WoT is the only excuse our rulers have for denying
us the Peace Dividend everybody expected when the Cold War ended, or
for spying on our phone calls to scare us into obedience.

          The heart of the WoT storyline is that Arabs and Muslims are
violent anti-Semites who want to kill people like us out of pure
hatred. The story would be far less persuasive without Israel
fomenting Arab/Muslim anger at itself, and our mass media hiding the
fact of ethnic cleansing to reinforce the lie that Arab/Muslim anger
stems from anti-Semitism.

          The War on Terror disguises the reality of the class war by
making it seem a religious war: Arab/Muslim ruling elites in the
Middle East are strengthened too by Israel's ethnic cleansing, because
it directs the anger of their own people at Israel and away from their
own Arab/Muslim dictators. Israel's ethnic cleansing harms ordinary
people of all religions in both the Middle East and in the United
States, and strengthens anti-democratic rulers. That's why our
government supports Israel, and why WE shouldn't.

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Six months after attending a controversial Tehran conference, a
Canadian professor charges the media and his own university with
ignorance and intolerance.


The Explanation We Never Heard
By Shiraz Dossa
Literary Review of Canada
Volume 15, Number 5
June 2007, Pages 3-4
http://lrc.reviewcanada.ca/index.php?page=the-explanation-we-never-heard


It would be a shocking event in any university. It was doubly so in a
university that takes pride in its "Catholic character." Last
December, St. Francis Xavier University in Antigonish, Nova Scotia,
authorized a small Spanish Inquisition of its own to denounce a St. FX
Muslim professor. It was launched by two Jewish professors and the
Christian chair of the political science department (Michael Steinitz,
Samuel Kalman and Yvon Grenier). My sin: I attended a conference in a
Muslim nation on the Holocaust entitled The Review of the Holocaust:
Global Vision. It took place in Tehran, Iran, in December 2006, and it
was widely - and erroneously - described in the western media as a
"Holocaust-denial conference."

I have never denied the Holocaust, only noted its propaganda power.
Yet my university tolerated this assault on me. I was stunned by the
university's illiteracy and bias. I was appalled by President Sean
Riley's attack on my reputation and his spurious comments on the
conference. In his December 13, 2006, statement he insinuated that the
"conference" was bogus and that it revealed a "deplorable
anti-Semitism"� that the "St. FX community"� found "deeply abhorrent"
and contrary to its "traditions."� Riley left little doubt that I was
guilty of sullying my school's reputation. St. FX in effect
sanctioned a crusade against a Muslim Holocaust scholar, who also
happens to be an outspoken critic of Israel's brutality in occupied
Palestine.

What follows is my view of the events of last December, and my
interpretation of the responses to them in the media and at my university.

Two Fallacies
The anti-intellectual storm at St. FX was driven by two fallacies
pushed by the media and the literati. The first is that Iran's
president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has dismissed the Holocaust as a
"myth" and threatened to "wipe Israel off the map."� In fact,
Ahmadinejad has not denied the Holocaust or proposed Israel's
liquidation; he has never done so in any of his speeches on the
subject (all delivered in Farsi/Persian). As an Iran specialist, I
can attest that both accusations are false. U.S. Iran experts such as
Juan Cole and UK journalists such as Jonathan Steele have come to the
same conclusion.1

As Cole correctly notes, Ahmadinejad was quoting the Ayatollah
Khomeini in the specific speech under discussion: what he said was
that "the occupation regime over Jerusalem should vanish from the page
of time."2 No state action is envisaged in this lament; it denotes a
spiritual wish, whereas the erroneous translation, "wipe Israel off
the map" suggests a military threat.

There is a huge chasm between the correct and the incorrect
translations. The notion that Iran can "wipe out"� U.S.-backed,
nuclear-armed Israel is ludicrous.

What Ahmadinejad has questioned is the mythologizing, the
sacralization, of the Holocaust and the "Zionist regime's"� continued
killing of Palestinians and Muslims. He has even raised doubts about
the scale of the Holocaust. His rhetoric has been excessive and
provocative. And he does not really care what we in the West think
about Iran or Muslims; he does not kowtow to western or Israeli
diktat. Such questioning and criticism are not new: Jewish scholars
such as Adi Ophir, Ilan Pappe, Boas Evron, Tom Segev and Uri Davis
have been doing it for two decades. None of this is Holocaust denial.

The second western fallacy is that the event was a Holocaust-denial
conference because of the presence of a few notorious western
Christian deniers/skeptics, a couple of a neo-Nazi stripe. It was
nothing of the sort.

It was a Global South conference convened to devise an
intellectual/political response to western-Israeli intervention in
Muslim affairs. Holocaust deniers/skeptics were a fringe, a marginal
few at the conference. The majority of the papers focused on the use
and abuse of the Holocaust in Arab, Muslim, Israeli and western
politics, a serious and worthy subject for international academic
discussion.

Out of the 33 conference paper givers, 27 were not Holocaust deniers,
but were university professors and social science researchers from
Iran, Jordan, Algeria, India, Morocco, Bahrain, Tunisia, Malaysia,
Indonesia and Syria. In attendance were five rabbis (anti-Zionist
rabbis, to be sure) who agreed with Rabbi Dovid Weiss of New York that
Israel's occupation policy was "evil"� and un-Jewish, and the
Holocaust could never justify it - but who insisted, like me, that the
Holocaust was a reality. None of us knew that a few deniers/skeptics
would be in attendance. This is not at all unusual in the Islamic
world. In southern conferences, one rarely knows who will be appearing
until one gets there.

The Iranian Institute of Political and International Studies (IPIS),
an elite school of advanced politics and policy studies that offers MA
and PhD programs, sponsored the Iran conference. It was not sponsored
by the Iranian president Dr. Ahmadinejad; he did not attend or
participate in the conference. It was not a Holocaust-denial
conference by any stretch. That's all false.

President Riley and his supporters at St. FX bought the denial fallacy
that had been concocted by the Simon Wiesenthal Center and the Jewish
Defense League, and peddled by media outlets such as The Globe and
Mail. On December 11, 2006, the Simon Wiesenthal Center sent out a
condemning press release about "Iran's Holocaust Denial Conference" to
news media in the U.S. and Canada.3 It was the Zionists and the
neo-Nazis who, for very different, self-serving reasons, depicted it
as a Holocaust-denial conference and sold it to willing, anti-Iranian
Islamophobes.

Comparative Appearances
Coincidentally, on December 11, 2006, Secretary of State Condoleezza
Rice officially welcomed Israel's Deputy Prime Minister, Avigdor
Lieberman, to Washington on behalf of the U.S. government. Lieberman
also met Senator Hillary Clinton and ex-President Bill Clinton. The
Americans were not at all troubled by their guest's stance on the
Palestinians. Avigdor Lieberman is committed to ridding Israel of its
Arabs - in effect, to ethnic cleansing. In the Israeli media
(Ha'aretz), he has openly been labelled a racist and a fascist. U.S.
critics have called him the Israeli David Duke.

Canada silently acquiesced in Lieberman's inclusion in the Israeli
cabinet. And in January 2007 Peter MacKay addressed the Herzliya
Conference in Israel affirming Canada's attachment to "freedom and
democracy," "values" that "make Canada and Israel so close."� He was
there in his official capacity as Canada's foreign minister. MacKay
refused to meet with the leaders of the new elected Palestinian
government (Hamas). The government of Canada is not concerned that an
anti-Arab ethnic cleanser is Israel's deputy prime minister. Canadians
do hypocrisy rather well.

Consider also, in this connection, an event held at St. FX in
September 2006, just three months before the Tehran conference. St. FX
and the Religious Studies Department hosted a conference on
Catholic-Jewish dialogue. One of the invited speakers was Rabbi
Richard Rubenstein, a "distinguished"� academic, according to his
hosts. He did little to advance the Catholic-Jewish dialogue.

Instead, he launched a vicious attack on Islam, its Prophet and
Muslims in the West as a fifth column corroding Christian civilization
from within. The good rabbi declared that "genocide"� and the "murder"
of non-Muslims lay at the heart of Islam. Rubenstein seemed to believe
his views would be well received. And apparently they were - by the
largely Catholic-Christian audience.

St. FX chancellor Bishop Raymond Lahey and I were on the response
panel; I condemned Rubenstein's anti-Muslim tirade and his labelling
of Islam as "Islamo-Fascism," which in my view is as offensive, racist
and false as denying the Holocaust. Bishop Lahey, in his comment, said
nothing about Rubenstein's anti-Islamism. This was a St. Francis
Xavier University conference that occurred with the blessing of
university president Riley and university chancellor Bishop Lahey, and
St. FX provided a public platform to an anti-Muslim, anti-Iranian
racist rabbi. My point in making the comparison is that this was still
a scholarly, enlightening conference although tainted by Rubenstein's
hate-speech. So was the Iran conference on the Holocaust, although
tainted by the presence of a few western, Christian Holocaust
deniers.

Islamophobia

So how and why did this attack on my reputation occur?

The Globe and Mail fired the initial shot in its editorial on December
13, 2006. It was followed by a declaration of war on me by its
"pundits"� John Ibbitson and Rex Murphy, dilettantes extraordinaire on
the Holocaust and the Middle East. Neither of these journalists has
credibility in either field. Ibbitson hectored me in his usual CNN
mode, got most things wrong and casually libelled me in the process.4
Since 9/11, he hasn't let up on Islam or Muslims. Murphy, in his
column "Eichmann in Tehran,"� displayed his cerebral deficits and his
ignorance of Islam, Iran and Hannah Arendt with enviable facility.5

Like Ibbitson, Murphy impresses those intellectually just a cut above
the Trailer Park Boys. It is worth noting that these Christian boys
have unlimited latitude in The Globe and Mail to trash Muslims even as
they defend "civilization,"� Israel and Jews.

My university joined the assault on me forthwith. Chancellor Lahey
assured The Globe and Mail's readers, in his letter to the editor on
December 14, 2006, that the conference and my attendance were
"contrary"� to the "[promotion of] truth"� and indeed "œworthy of
contempt."� It is significant that Riley and Lahey have no scholarly
expertise on Islam, Iran or the Holocaust either. I believe they
wanted to assure the white, mainstream Canadian community, including
Canadian Jews, that "Catholic"� St. FX was on their side, and this
desire far outweighed their obligation to defend academic freedom.
Since I was in Iran as a Holocaust expert, and not representing St. FX
or Catholics, I found this a bizarre response. Are Riley and Lahey at
the helm of a university committed to the academic freedom of
its entire faculty, which includes Muslims? Or is St. FX's hyped
"inclusiveness"� only for Christians and Jews? I have been a St. FX
professor for 18  years, a full professor since 1996.

Was it an accident that I was swarmed "by petition" by Jewish and
Christian professors, with the blessing of St. FX's Catholic leaders?
The petition oddly defended my "academic freedom to espouse any views
that he pleases," but then negated my right to do so by being
"profoundly embarrassed by his participation in the Holocaust-denial
conference held in Tehran." It garnered a fair number of signatures
from current and retired professors - about 24 percent of the total
faculty at St. FX. But surely these righteous folks are not racist?
Surely this could not happen at St. FX, a Catholic institution with
its Coady International Institute tradition of decency? It is crucial
to stress that many townspeople were incensed by St. FX's behaviour,
among them Miles Tompkins, a direct descendant of Coady's founder,
J.J. Tompkins, and of Moses Coady. In a letter to the local paper,
The Casket, on March 21, he chastised St. FX's conduct and also noted
that my "political science department's response was an embarrassment
to the University."

Was this then an un-Christian lapse, an un-Catholic aberration? It
would seem not. We tend to forget that Catholic anti-Semitism has
always had two strands, anti-Muslim and anti-Jewish. The anti-Jewish
strand has been dominant in western culture for several centuries. In
the post-Holocaust period, however, the anti-Muslim strand, which
survived the Crusades, got a new lease on life and quickly superseded
anti-Jewish anti-Semitism for obvious reasons. As a result, Muslims
now bear the brunt of western anti-Semitism and Islamophobia is de
rigueur in the liberal Christian West, in support of our war on the
"Axis of Evil," including Iran. The anti-Iranian, anti-Muslim current
at St. FX is not accidental; it is the distilled voice of Canadian
Islamophobia in these times.

Final Thoughts

Universities are places of discontent; they provoke disputes, they
offer critiques of conventional and, often, false views. A university
that tailors its teaching and research to the prejudices of its alumni
or corporate backers is a travesty. Academic freedom is not
conditional on the approval of the university or of university
colleagues. Nor is the reputation of the university as an institution
tied to the scholarly focus of its faculty or to the controversial
subjects that faculty may pursue in their field of expertise.

Iran's elites have protected Jews since Cyrus ruled West Asia.
Anti-Semitism is a Euro-American problem, not an Islamic one. Iranian
opposition to Israel and its wars on Muslims/Palestinians is ethical
and political; it has absolutely nothing to do with hating Jews qua
Jews. It is a great pity that Sean Riley and Bishop Lahey ignored St.
FX's motto, an injunction to first ascertain Quaecumque Sunt Vera,
Whatsoever Things Are True, and instead tolerated the assault by St.
FX's ignorant crusaders on the reputation of their Muslim colleague.

I would be remiss if I failed to note that two St. FX officials
behaved honourably, with the kind of Catholic decency that befits our
university, throughout the course of this episode of academic
McCarthyism. Academic Vice-President Dr. Mary McGillivray and the Dean
of Arts, Dr. Steven Baldner, tackled the controversy with integrity
and respect for the liberal values that St. FX symbolizes. As well,
the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) strongly
supported my academic freedom. In his letter to The Globe and Mail on
December 14, 2006 (which the paper did not print), Executive Director
Jim Turk stated that "academic freedom is to protect the right of
academic staff to speak the truth as they see it without repression
from their institution, the state, religious authorities, special
interest groups or anyone else."

Notes
1. Jonathan Steele, "If Iran Is Ready to Talk, The US Must Do So
Unconditionally," The Guardian, June 2, 2006, and "Lost in
Translation," The Guardian, June 14, 2006.
2. Juan Cole, "Hitchens the Hacker; And, Hitchens the Orientalist"
And, "We Don't Want Your Stinking War!",-- "Informed Consent," May 3,
2006 www.juancole.com/2006/05/hitchens-hacker-and-hitchens.html
3. Simon Wiesenthal Center, "Holocaust Survivors in Three Cities
Across North America Join Together to Confront Iran's Conference of
Holocaust Deniers and Revisionists,"� News Release, December 11, 2006.
4. John Ibbitson, "Even a Scholar's Academic Freedom Has Its Limits in
Canada,"� Globe and Mail, December 14, 2006, page A7.
5. Rex Murphy, "Eichmann in Tehran: Horror Revisited,"� Globe and Mail,
December 16, 2006, page A31.
6. Canadian Association of University Teachers, "Statement on the
Controversy over Professor Shiraz Dossa," News Release, December 14,
2006 www.caut.ca/en/news/comms/20061214dossa.asp


E-mail comments to review@....

Shiraz Dossa teaches political theory and comparative politics (Iran,
Lebanon, Israel, India) at St. Francis Xavier University. In his book
The Public Realm and the Public Self: The Political Theory of Hannah
Arendt (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1989) and in his articles,
his focus has been the Holocaust and its legacy, Auschwitz and
Christian conscience, Zionism and Palestinians, and Islam and the West.

===


Literary Review of Canada
June 2007 Issue
http://lrc.reviewcanada.ca/


When Shiraz Dossa, a professor of political science at St. Francis
Xavier University in Nova Scotia, got in touch with us back in April,
we felt some shock, followed by acute curiosity. This gentleman had
been the brief centre of feverish media attention last December, when
he surfaced in Tehran as the only Canadian attending what was being
called a "Holocaust-denial conference", supposedly organized at the
behest of Dr. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad himself and including among its
attendees a number of notorious Holocaust deniers or sceptics, such as
David Duke.

Four months later, Professor Dossa wanted to tell his version of the
story, including the real purpose of the conference (not Holocaust
denial), who organized it (not Dr. Ahmadinejad), who attended, and
what he thought and felt about the all-out attack on him back home in
Canada, particularly from The Globe and Mail and from his own
university, St. FX. At the LRC we read his manuscript, which seemed to
us a serious exploration of the right of academic freedom in Canada
and who gets to exercise that right. After rigorous fact-checking that
went on for a number of weeks, we agreed that the essay was ready for
publication.

Academic freedom, like all freedom of speech issues, calls on
thoughtful citizens to broaden their horizons. It's never individuals
who are voicing mainstream or non-controversial thoughts - ideas we
can all agree with - who find themselves on the wrong side of academic
freedom debates. It is always individuals who are raising
uncomfortable ideas that the majority would rather not hear who end up
excoriated or denigrated in the media and who are left twisting in the
wind by the institutions within which they work. Reading Shiraz
Dossa's essay gives us all the opportunity to confront some important
and controversial ideas that go to the heart of our identity as a
multicultural nation.

We hope you agree.

Bronwyn Drainie
Editor

===

ACADEMIC CONTROVERSY: Professor who attended Holocaust conference
blasts critics as Islamophobes
MICHAEL VALPY
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20070528.DOSSA28/TPStory/Na
tional


A Canadian political scientist excoriated for attending what was
widely labelled a Holocaust-denial conference in Tehran has retaliated
with a blistering published attack on his university president and his
colleagues for being illiterate Islamophobes.

Writing in the influential Literary Review of Canada, Shiraz Dossa, a
tenured professor at Nova Scotia's St. Francis Xavier University, said
that his academic integrity and academic freedom were grossly impugned
by the university administration, an assault on his reputation that he
said has yet to be remedied.

He accused the president and chancellor of authorizing a "small
Spanish Inquisition" to denounce him - a campaign he said was
initiated by two Jewish professors and the Christian chair of the
political science department.

Prof. Dossa also wrote that the attack on his reputation was launched
by The Globe and Mail's editorial board and by columnists John
Ibbitson and Rex Murphy, whom he described as being "intellectually
just a cut above the Trailer Park Boys" and ignorant of the Middle East.

James Turk, executive director of the Canadian Association of
University Teachers, likened the treatment of Prof. Dossa to the 1950s
McCarthy period in the United States when academics and others were
subjected to intense pressure not to attend events that were unpopular.

This is the first time Prof. Dossa has spoken out since the storm
erupted over his attendance at the Tehran conference in mid-December.

His two-page essay appears in the issue of the LRC that will be posted
today on its website, http://www.reviewcanada.ca. Although the monthly
publication's circulation is small, it is widely read in the academic,
journalistic, political and public-service communities.

In an interview, Prof. Dossa said he wrote the essay because he wanted
to set the record straight and because he still hasn't received an
apology from either St. FX president Sean Riley or chancellor Raymond
Lahey, the Roman Catholic bishop of Antigonish where the university is
located. He also said he has refused to speak to his department chair,
Prof. Yvon Grenier, since December.

He wrote that the university administration uncritically accepted the
Holocaust-denial label "concocted by the Simon Wiesenthal Center [a
Zionist Jewish supremacist organization] and the [U.S. terrorist]
Jewish Defence League and peddled by media outlets such as The Globe
and Mail."

Prof. Dossa, a Muslim, teaches political theory and comparative
politics at St. FX. His focus as a scholar has been on the Holocaust
and its aftermath. He abruptly dismisses any suggestion that he is a
Holocaust denier. Rather, he said, his interest has been in what use
of the Holocaust has been made to promote Zionism - the right of Jews
to a national homeland - and to support the Israeli occupation of
Palestinian territory.

In both his essay and in a telephone conversation, he makes a
compelling case for why he attended the two-day Tehran conference,
titled "The Review of the Holocaust: Global Vision."

It was a conference for scholars in the global South, said Prof.
Dossa, who wanted to examine the Holocaust and its significance
unrestrained by the lenses through which it is viewed by the West, and
"to devise an intellectual [and] political response to Western-Israeli
intervention in Muslim affairs."

The global South generally refers to the nations of Africa, Central
and Latin America and most of Asia.

He wrote in the LRC: "I was appalled by president Sean Riley's attack
on my reputation and his spurious comments on the conference. In his
Dec, 13, 2006, statement, he insinuated that the conference was bogus
and that it revealed a 'deplorable anti-Semitism' that the 'St. FX
community' found 'deeply abhorrent' and contrary to its 'traditions.'
Riley left little doubt that I was guilty of sullying my school's
reputation.

"Riley and Lahey have no scholastic expertise on Islam, Iran or the
Holocaust. ... I believe they wanted to assure the white, mainstream
Canadian community, including Canadian Jews, that 'Catholic' St. FX
was on their side and that this desire far outweighed their obligation
to defend academic freedom.

"Are Riley and Lahey at the helm of a university committed to the
academic freedom of its entire faculty, which includes Muslims? Or is
St. FX's hyped 'inclusiveness' only for Christians and Jews?"

The conference became controversial the moment it was announced by
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and Prof. Dossa readily
concedes that the President's rhetoric about the Holocaust -
particularly his questioning of its scale - "has been excessive and
provocative."

The conference was organized by the Iranian Foreign Ministry's
Institute of Political and International Studies, which is respected
internationally and has run United Nations conferences in the past.
More than 1,200 people attended.

There were 44 speakers and 33 papers presented - five of which were
given by notorious Western Holocaust deniers.

The other presenters were scholars examining the Holocaust from a
global South perspective.

Prof. Dossa said the presenters, himself included, were invited, but
he said he had no idea in advance that Holocaust deniers were on the
list. He said that, until his arrival in Tehran, he did not see an
agenda, something he said is not uncommon for global South conferences.

He described the presentations by the Holocaust deniers as absurd. At
the session Prof. Dossa attended where one of the Holocaust deniers
spoke, the presentation was torn to shreds afterward by the largely
Iranian audience.

He said he would not have attended a conference entirely of Holocaust
deniers because it would have held no scholarly or intellectual
interest for him. But a conference with five Holocaust deniers was of
academic interest for him to see what kind of reception they'd be given.

James Turk of CAUT said: "In this case, there was an aggressive
attempt based on very little information to denigrate Prof. Dossa and
to vilify him."

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Darfur, the new American-French Protectorate
By Abu Iskandar as-Sudani.

Translated by Muhammad Abu Nasr from Al-Hadaf
Damascus


Intro to the translation by FAV editors:

Most everything that has appeared in English about the situation in
Darfur, the Sudan - indeed particularly in "progressive" publications
in English – for the last year or so has related one basic "story."

According to this story the Sudanese government, using armed
militiamen, has been massacring Black African Muslim peasants in
Darfur, trying to drive them out of the country because of their race.
  This story has been presented as a humanitarian and political crisis
that requires urgent intervention by the "great powers."

Indeed, the position taken by many confused "leftwing" publications
has been that the US government is "not doing enough" to impose
"civilization" on the Sudan.  These publications, dazzled by the talk
about a 'humanitarian disaster' and horrified by the talk of "racist
genocide" have thus turned themselves into cheerleaders for further
imperialist expansion.

As people familiar with the situation in the Sudan are aware, the
reality is markedly different from the propaganda version of "racist
genocide" presented by the western media.

But the vast gulf between reality, on the one hand, and the specter of
"racist genocide" conjured up by the western media, on the other, is
not a matter of simple ignorance or misinterpretation of data.  The
disconnect between western media myth and the reality on the ground is
what we have seen when the west grabs hold of an issue to make use of
it for its own ends.

What are those imperialist aims in the Sudan and how does the "racist
genocide" story serve them?

Fundamentally, the situation in Darfur cannot be viewed separately
from the unfolding Zio-American plan to break-up the Arab states along
the lines of the strategy for a "Greater Middle East," in which
imperialism and Zionism latch onto sectarian, ethnic, and other
sub-national identities to try to change forever the Arab identity of
the region and to fragment and weaken the Arab states which have now
outlived their purpose, as far as imperialism and Zionism are concerned.

In 1916, British and French imperialism drew up the notorious
Sykes-Picot agreement, dividing the Arab Nation into the small states
that we know today, and making room for a Jewish Zionist colony in
Palestine as an obstacle to any Arab effort at genuine
self-determination and unity.

Today, a new Sykes-Picot arrangement is being devised for the whole
region under the signboard of the "Greater Middle East" strategy.  A
decentralized, federal Iraq made up of three distinct entities –
Kurdish, Sunni Arab, and Shi`i Arab – is one link in that chain.
Driving a wedge along sectarian lines between the Maronites in Lebanon
and the Sunni, Shi`i, Druze and other groups in that state and between
Lebanon and Syria are another link in that chain.  Attempts to incite
violence between Muslims and Copts in Egypt, and between Arabs and
Berbers in North Africa follow the same pattern of "divide and
conquer" which is the essence of the American "Greater Middle East"
strategy that masquerades as a drive for "humanitarianism" and
"democracy."

Far from solving problems, this approach is a formula for disaster for
the local people, for once governments are organized along sectarian
lines, it's only a matter of time before tensions explode over shares
and prerogatives – as they did in Lebanon in the mid-1970s.

But if ethnic and sectarian divisions spell disaster for the people
concerned, they are a time-tested arrangement guaranteed to facilitate
imperialist and Zionist domination and "management" of the region.

We oppose the strategy for a "Greater Middle East" because it is
clearly a Zio-American imperialist plan for hegemony in the Arab
Region that is based on two pillars:

1) A cultural pillar: changing the identity of the region from
Arab-Islamic into a mosaic of mutually exclusive mini-identities, and

2) A geopolitical pillar, breaking up Arab states, especially the
larger ones, into mini-fragments to ensure that "Israel" dominates the
region as the "biggest fish" in the "Middle Eastern" pond.

In the Sudan, as in Iraq, imperialism and Zionism are deliberately
playing the "minorities" card to achieve this goal. And not only in
Sudan and Iraq! The rest of the Arab World is supposed to follow.
Yugoslavia in Europe was just a rehearsal for what will come in the
Arab World.  And just as there were some fools in the Arab world who
actually thought America loved the Muslims in Bosnia, so today there
are confused and deluded people who imagine that America and the
Zionists are now concerned over a "humanitarian disaster" in Darfur –
a "disaster" it turns out, which very largely is a product of their
propaganda!

As is evident from the following article taken from the Palestinian
magazine al-Hadaf, the ethnic and tribal makeup of Darfur is
bewildering and many local and regional forces have had a hand in
creating the situation that is now the subject of international
"concern."  But the principal contradiction is that between
Zio-imperialism on the one hand and the people of the Arab region on
the other, as the one strives to divide and conquer, while the other
struggles for its self-determination, unity, and integrity.

===

Text of the translation:

For a long time the talk of war in the Sudan has related to the long
struggle in the south of the country, a struggle that many thought was
without end.  But just as a formula for ending that conflict by
peaceful means seemed at hand, there was a sudden and dramatic
escalation in the events in Darfur – in the west of the country this
time – according to the saying, `one war breeds another.'  Quickly, as
a result of massive and very controversial US and European media
coverage, Darfur became the background and focus of increasingly
inflammatory statements in Europe and America in which western leaders
expressed their "outrage" over the inhuman situation in the area and
over the great danger that they said threatened millions of Sudanese
refugees.

Darfur: history, location, and climate.

Darfur is located in the southwest of the Arab region of the Sudan.
Its history has been much like that of other regions in central
Africa.  Numerous kingdoms and sultanates arose there over a period of
some 5,000 years.  Eventually a series of Arab and Islamic kingdoms
took shape there, the most prominent being the Sultanate of Darfur,
the foundations of which were laid by Sultan Sulayman I (1445-1475
CE).  After him came a succession of leaders until in 1640 Sultan
Sulayman Sulun, the most outstanding of the Darfur Sultans, came to
the throne.  Sulayman Sulun was steeped in Arab and Islamic culture
and during his rule the Arab and Islamic identity of Darfur deepened
as trade and educational exchange with the rest of the Arab world
expanded and interpersonal connections between Darfur and the
surrounding Arab and Islamic cultural centers in the Hijaz, Egypt,
Syria, and Arab North Africa expanded.  This era was discussed by the
Arab historian Muhammad ibn `Umar at-Tunisi (1789-1857) in his book
"Tashhidh al-Adhhan bi-Sirat Bilad al-`Arab wa-as-Sudan.")

Like all the Arab regions, Darfur was a stage on which colonialist
powers battled each other as they swept over northern Africa,
particularly after the Turks were able to occupy the area under the
Albanian Khedive Isma`il of Egypt in October 1874, whose army then
occupied al-Fashir, the capital of Darfur.  Far from bringing
stability to the area, the arrival of the invaders only aroused the
hostility of the native population and the Darfur people played an
active role in the resistance to the Turks and British as part of the
revolution of the Mahdi, Muhammad Ahmad.  `Abdallah at-Ta`ishi, the
Mahdi's "Khalifah" or successor, who took over as leader of the
independent Sudan when the Mahdi died in June 1885, was a native of
Darfur.  In the last years of the nineteenth century as imperialism
was completing its division of the world, the British returned to
seize control over the Upper Nile by conquering the Sudan and killing
the Khalifah `Abdallah in battle in 1899.  The British occupied Darfur
by fire and sword and the region became another province of the
colonial Sudan until independence was proclaimed in the Sudan on 1
January 1956.

Military geography: the Darfur battleground.

The stage on which the struggle in Darfur is taking place is
characterized by the following:

1.      Natural conditions.  There are four main factors at work.

a.       Topography.  The soil throughout most of Darfur is sandy.
There are deserts in the north of Darfur.  In the center and south are
lowlands, with the Jabal Marrah mountain peaks in the west of Darfur
standing out more than 10 thousand feet high as a major elevated
landmark in the region's topography.

b.      Water Resources.  There are no rivers in northern Darfur, only
in the central and southern parts of the region, and most of them in
the south.  There one also finds numerous wide dry riverbeds that fill
with water during the rainy season.

c.       Vegetation.  Grassy lowlands and grazing areas are located in
the central part of Darfur.  The south of Darfur has heavy year-round
jungle and thick undergrowth.

d.      Climate.  The average temperature is high in northern Darfur,
moderate in the south, and lower than average in the Jabal Marrah area
in the west of the region.  Similarly there is little or no rainfall
in northern Darfur.  But the average amount of rainfall increases as
we head to the south, where the rainy season accounts for six months
of every year.

                      2. Social features.  The social makeup is
extremely complex.  The population of Darfur is about 6 million
people.  They have a high birthrate due to extensive practice of
polygamy among the various tribes of the region.  The following
characteristics may be observed among the residents of Darfur:

Ethnicity.  There are 95 major and minor tribes in Darfur, among them
23 main large tribes, the rest being small.  There is considerable
intermixing and intermarriage among the region's tribes.  It is
therefore difficult to point to any specific ethnic features unique to
the different tribes, other than some superficial differences.

Religion.  One hundred percent of the residents of Darfur are Sunni
Muslims.  The an-Najati Sufi order is widespread among the residents
of Darfur.  The tribes in the region who are of "African" origin are
considered the more zealous in their practice of Islam than the other,
"non-African" tribes.

Language.  The residents of Darfur can be divided into two groups
linguistically.  About 50 percent of the tribes speak Arabic as their
mother tongue.  The other 50 percent speak regional dialects, but at
the same time use Arabic as a second language.  On that basis, these
tribes are considered "African."  The residents of Darfur who speak
Arabic as their mother tongue are concentrated in the interior areas
of Darfur.  The tribes that speak Arabic as their second language are
to be found in the border regions adjacent to Chad and the Central
African Republic.

3.      Economic characteristics. There are two types of natural
resource in Darfur.  Surface resources, which is to say agricultural
crops and animals and the vast pasturelands that extend throughout the
lowlands of the area.  The second type of resources are those buried
underground, specifically oil, iron, and copper – the fourth largest
deposit of copper in the world – in addition to deposits of
high-purity uranium, of which it recently was learned that they
represent one of the three largest such deposits on earth.  Because of
the weakness of development in the region, it has remained largely
without an infrastructure, a factor inhibiting its integration into
the economy of the Sudan.  Economic activity is therefore of a rural
character, as a result of which 85 percent of the population are
either nomadic herdsmen or rural farmers.

4.      Political characteristics.  On the basis of the current
federal administrative division of the Sudan, the Region of Darfur is
currently made up of three states (Wilayat): North Darfur, West
Darfur, and South Darfur. Each of the three Darfur states has its own
Legislative Assembly and its own Governor with a cabinet of state
ministers.  These officials constitute the executive authority in each
state.  Thus the status of each of these three states is the same as
that of all the 26 states making up the different regions of the
Sudan.  They enjoy a large degree of self rule, functioning as mini
governments.  They are tied to the Federal Government in al-Khartoum
on the basis of the Law of Federal Rule, whose provisions distinguish
between the executive authority of the states, the legislative
authority of the states, and the matters covered by the sovereignty of
the Federal Government.  Each state, in turn, is divided into three
administrative districts (Muhafazat).  Thus, speaking of Darfur's
internal borders, the region lies adjacent to the Bahr al-Ghazal in
the southern Sudan, to North and South Kurdufan in the central Sudan,
and to the Northern Region.  The states of Darfur have international
borders with Libya, Chad, and the Central African Republic.

A study of the modern history of the area reveals that political
activity in Darfur began as a part of the Sudanese patriotic movement
in the time of the struggle against the British colonialists.  There
were various Sudanese political parties represented in Darfur,
specifically: the al-Ummah Party, led by Sadiq al-Mahdi which had the
support of about 70 percent of the region's population; the Islamic
Movement, which claimed 20 percent of the people as supporters.  Ten
percent of the region's population supported the regional Darfur
Struggle Front, which appeared in 1964 as a political movement led by
Ahmad Ibrahim Durayj with a program that consisted of economic and
social development for the region.  Later, Durayj joined the al-Ummah
Party and became the leader of the parliamentary opposition bloc led
by the al-Ummah Party during the second period of democracy during the
second half of the 1960s.  The population of Darfur remained heavily
influenced by the al-Ummah Party and the Islamic Movement.  Durayj has
now returned to political life once again, founding a political
organization that he calls the Sudanese Democratic Federal Coalition
which proclaims four political goals: Ending the civil war;
Establishment of a federal or confederative political system in the
country; Abiding by the principle of non-discrimination among
citizens; Separation of religious from political institutions.
Durayj, however, rejects the idea of self-determination for the region
because that would threaten the unity of the Sudan, and he also
rejects the use of military means to solve the crisis, regarding that
as ineffective.

Causes of Conflict in Darfur.

The natural and human environment in Darfur is characterized by a
group of factors that act as active instigators of conflict in the region.

1.      Natural instigators.  The elevated region of Jabal Marrah,
which is characterized by hard-to-travel, rough, rocky heights and is
covered by thick trees and brush, presents an ideal natural
environment for the establishment of guerrilla bases.  Also conducive
to this is the fact that Jabal Marrah is well watered and offers fruit
and vegetables year round.  In addition, the residents of Jabal Marrah
are entirely of the al-Fur tribe, so that every guerrilla movement
that gains the support of the clans of the al-Fur will have ready
permission to set up bases in this strategic area.  This is what the
Sudanese Liberation Army movement, most of whose members are of the
al-Fur tribe, has done.  In addition in the south of Darfur are the
thick jungles and undergrowth, the rivers and deep, rocky riverbeds
where every guerrilla movement can find ample room to maneuver and
move about.  Northern Darfur is taken up with desert, which greatly
facilitates maneuver and rapid movement. Rebel movements in Darfur
have used four-wheel drive Landcruisers to get around and the desert
areas have greatly helped them advance and move around quickly,
penetrating deep into the interior of the region from the north,
allowing them to go around and then mount surprise attacks on targets
from the east – the direction from which no one expects attacks to come.

2.      Economic instigators.  The weak economic development and lack
of infrastructure of the area, as well as the dependence of the vast
majority of the population on agriculture and herding for their
livelihood have resulted in the virtual economic isolation of the
region and its non-integration into the Sudanese economy.  The lack of
infrastructure means that normal economic ties with the rest of the
country are weak, but at the same time smuggling along the borders is
very widespread and has facilitated a rise in corruption, chaos, and
confusion, all of which further drains the resources of the region.

3.      Social instigators.  The complex ethnic and tribal makeup of
the area, in which half the residents are herdsmen and the other half
farmers, means that clashes can easily and frequently break out and
then quickly turn into tribal feuds which political movements rush to
take advantage of, mobilizing and politicizing the clashes.  Another
social factor that promotes conflict are the nomadic tribes that cross
unchecked over the borders between the Sudan, Libya, Chad, and the
Central Africa Republic.  This has greatly promoted a lack of social
order and control as members of rebel political groups move about with
consummate ease between the Sudan and the other countries in the area.
  In addition, members of the tribes that regularly cross the borders
from the neighboring countries can readily take part in fighting
inside the Sudan.

4.      Political instigators.  Numerous factors can be cited here,
including the lack of authority in the region due to its vast expanses
and remoteness from the capital and the central government and the
fact that it is wide open to influxes from neighboring countries.  To
that can be added the fact that for many years the central government
has been preoccupied with the civil war in the south of the country.
All these factors combined to prevent the central government from
extending its control over the region.  As a result, for the past 50
years, Darfur has been a refuge for armed movements active in the
neighboring countries, in particular Chadian groups.  Chadian
President Hissen Habré formed his army in Darfur, launched his
movement there, and went on to seize power in Chad.  Current Chadian
President Idriss Déby did the same thing, beginning with the forming
of an armed movement on Darfur territory.  As a result, every regime
in Chad keeps its eyes wide open to the possibility of a threat to its
authority arising on the territory of Darfur.  With respect to the
administrative political system,  Jaafar an-Numayri's decision to
dissolve the system of local rule by tribal leaders, and replace it
with a civil system, had negative results.  The tribal rulers were not
ready, at that time at least, to set up a civil system.  It was not
possible to organize herdsmen in trade unions or in the Councils of
the Union of the Working People.  As a result, the system of tribal
control broke apart to be replaced by chaos and total disorder in
social life.  Furthermore, Sudanese political parties have tended to
mobilize tribal and ethnic groups, drawing strength from their tribal
leaders as they seek to settle political scores and feuds with the
civil and military rulers of the country.  As a result, negative types
of divisive mobilization have spread throughout the region at the
expense of the interests of the Sudan as a whole, and this in turn has
reinforced feelings of political marginalization in Darfur.  For their
part, various Sudanese regimes have also committed errors that pushed
matters to the brink of disaster in the region.  Numerous arbitrary
decrees have been taken in al-Khartoum and then imposed on the people
of Darfur by brute force, in particular in the drawing of the
boundaries of the districts and states within Darfur and in the
appointment of officials – none of which was done in consultation with
local popular figures.  The division of Darfur itself into three
states was one such arbitrary decision that split up several tribes
into different states.  As a result, the Fur tribe, the largest in the
region, raised the banner of rebellion against the activities of
central government.

5.      Military and Security Instigators.  One of the most important
of these factors has been the spilling over of armed conflicts from
bordering countries into Darfur.  The escalation of the civil war in
Chad, for example, led to the spread of weapons in large quantities in
Darfur. Chadian militamen and individuals fled across the border into
Darfur to use its territory as fixed bases for launching attacks back
into Chad and as a staging area where they could maneuver and carry
out attacks from advantageous directions.  Chadian rebels also fought
one another, settling political and military scores on the territory
of Darfur. Darfur was also an operational area for the Islamic
Brigades, a force of some five brigades set up by Libya during the
time of its war with Chad, and which received support from the
Sudanese government of Sadiq al-Mahdi.  When the Libyan war with Chad
ended, the Brigades – most of whom were recruited from Darfur – and
their military equipment and armaments remained in Darfur.  Along
similar lines, when the regime of Ange-Félix Patassé collapsed at the
end of the civil war in the Central African Republic in March 2003,
all the armed forces of the regime fled to Darfur with their arms and
military equipment.  Not to be out done, a succession of Sudanese
governments in al-Khartoum recruited and armed their own tribal
militias in various parts of the region.  The government of Sadiq
al-Mahdi created the al-Maraheel militia out of loyalists to its
regime in the south of Darfur, a force of about 70,000 fighters, and
equipped them with arms and materiel.  The current government created
and supported the Peoples Defense Forces in Darfur, a militia of about
100,000 fighters.  The Arab tribes in Darfur created the Janjawid
militias – totaling some 70,000 fighters.  Against the backdrop of all
this militarization, Darfur became a hotbed for foreign forces, a
regular landing strip for foreign military transport planes of
mysterious origin, and a warren for foreign organizations operating
under the cover of "humanitarian aid agencies."

The Dynamics of the Struggle in Darfur.

Between the year 1956, when the Sudan gained its independence, and the
year 2000 about 48 armed conflicts were fought in Darfur; sort of
small civil wars.  The largest of those conflicts, in terms of
intensity and the number of casualties, took place from 1980 until
2000.  Those conflicts can be described as:

1.      Arab-Arab tribal conflicts, the most prominent of which was
that between the Bani Hulbah and the ar-Ruzayqan in 1982.

2.      Arab-African tribal conflicts.  Five such conflicts took
place, the most prominent among them being the feud between the al-Fur
tribe and a group of Arab tribes in 1987.

3.      African-African tribal conflicts.  About eight such conflicts
took place, and these were the most violent of the conflicts in the
province in terms of intensity and number of casualties.

4.      One conflict that was exceptional in which one Arab tribe and
one African tribe joined forces against another tribe.  This took
place in 1983 when the Arab az-Ziyadiyah tribe joined with the African
al-Barti tribe in a war against the al-Kababish Arabs.

It is noteworthy that about 80 percent of the conflicts took place in
southern Darfur and the intensity and casualty figures in those
conflicts increased during the annual dry seasons as the herding
tribes from the north of Darfur moved south to the greener areas in
the south, raiding the agricultural areas and seizing access to water.

The role of the Popular Movement for the Liberation of the Sudan led
by John Garang.

From the beginning, Garang and his movement sought to benefit from the
crisis in Darfur by transferring their struggle from the south towards
the north of the country.  Garang's first attempts in this direction
took place in 1991 when Garang teamed up with Dawud Yahya Bulad, one
of the scions of the Sultans of the al-Fur tribe, to put together a
military campaign massing 10,000 fighters who marched from the south
of the Sudan north along the border with the Central African Republic
and Chad in a drive to reach the Jabal Marrah area where they would
build base areas and launch a guerrilla war in the western part of the
Sudan.  Sudanese government forces, however, intercepted the fighters
in southern Darfur before they could reach Jabal Marrah, and
completely wiped them out, crushing the force and killing their
commander, Dawud Yahya Bulad.  Garang continued his attempts, however,
managing to unite again with elements in the al-Fur tribe who formed
the Sudan Liberation Army which is considered a carbon copy of
Garang's Popular Movement for the Liberation of the Sudan in terms of
their armament, internal order, program, and slogans.  Garang has been
seen on Jabal Marrah among the Sudan Liberation Army soldiers dozens
of times.  Garang's helicopter has been observed taking off from areas
under his control in the south of the Sudan and landing in areas
controlled by the Sudan Liberation Army in the Jabal al-Marrah
mountains.  The last such flight was observed on 21 March 2005, that
is, after the peace agreement – proving that Garang's movement,
despite the negotiations and agreements, is continuing to pursue its
own hidden agenda.

Besides Garang and his movement, the dynamics of the conflict in the
area involve the negative activities of the militias that were formed
in Darfur.  Although successive Sudanese governments created these
loyalist militias with the aim of keeping peace and order in the
province, the leaders of these groups have used their forces to pursue
other aims, employing them in tribal feuds, in plundering smaller
tribes, in seizing control of fertile lands and water sources, all in
a region that is largely outside the control of the central
government, turning Darfur into a zone of indiscriminate violence.

External foreign involvement in the region has remained one of the
main factors behind the dynamic of conflict in Darfur.  A state like
"Israel" could not find a better place than Darfur in which to operate
and spread its poison.  It has not been slow or hesitant to exploit
the opportunities presented by the situation in the province.  The
Zionists provided military training on their bases in Eritrea.  They
have strengthened their relations and ties with the Chadian regime,
making use of them for direct transport of weapons into Darfur.

The United States had been using the problem of the southern Sudan as
an excuse to bring pressure on the country.  But as soon as a peace
agreement between the government in al-Khartoum and Garang's movement
began to crystallize, the US surprised everyone by effortlessly
transferring its concerns from the south to Darfur as it continued its
practice of pressuring the Sudanese regime.  Many believe that the
transfer of America's focus from the south to Darfur was caused by the
fact that the conflict in the south appeared to have reached a
stalemate, with a local balance of power – or balance of violence.  In
that situation if the US had persisted along its accustomed course, it
might even have found itself obtaining results that were the opposite
of what it wanted.  Washington therefore had to look for some new
spark that could ignite flames of conflict in the Sudan, and it found
the object of its desires in the Darfur problem.  That way the
Americans could continue doing what they had got used to doing, only
now with a new vantage point and with new sharper and more modern tools.

It is clear that there is an "Israeli" – American – West European
accord at work in Darfur with the aim of rescuing the plan for
splitting up the Sudan and restructuring it within the framework of
the new so-called "Greater Middle East" strategy which would give the
American Administration and "Israel" control of the agricultural,
petroleum, and mineral resources of the country and facilitating their
plunder of its uranium deposits, while leaving some crumbs to keep
their friends Britain and France happy – countries that have grown
very agreeable to America's plans throughout the Arab Region and Africa.

Finally, it should be observed that all the international powers have
become embroiled in the Darfur conflict.  "Israel" and the United
States have become active on the ground in the region.  None of this
would have happened if the Sudanese government had not followed the
strategy of trying to hide the conflict, not recognizing the
ramifications of the symbols and practices of violence in the region.
  It would also not have happened if the opposition parties had not
recruited tribal and ethnic groups in Darfur for use in settling their
scores.

It appears that the latest UN Security Council resolutions have placed
Darfur entirely under international tutelage, whether the Sudanese
parties like it or not.  Darfur is on the verge of becoming an
American-French protectorate – run from behind the scenes by the
hidden hands of "Israel," which has opened offices for itself in the
refugee camps in Chad, and whose cabinet held a special session solely
to deal with a discussion of the Darfur crisis.  All this is going on
at a time when many people in the Arab world are just now wondering,
"where is that Darfur place, anyway?"

===

5 Truths About Darfur
By Emily Wax - waxe @ washpost.com
The Washington Post's East Africa bureau chief


KOU KOU ANGARANA, Chad

Heard all you need to know about Darfur? Think again. Three years
after a government-backed militia began fighting rebels and residents
in this region of western Sudan, much of the conventional wisdom
surrounding the conflict -- including the religious, ethnic and
economic factors that drive it -- fails to match the realities on the
ground. Tens of thousands have died and some 2.5 million have been
displaced, with no end to the conflict in sight. Here are five truths
to challenge the most common misconceptions about Darfur:

1-  NEARLY EVERYONE IS MUSLIM

Early in the conflict, I was traveling through the desert expanses of
rebel-held Darfur when, amid decapitated huts and dead livestock, our
SUV roared up to an abandoned green and white mosque, riddled with
bullets, its windows shattered.

In my travels, I've seen destroyed mosques all over Darfur. The few
men left in the villages shared the same story: As government Antonov
jets dropped bombs, Janjaweed militia members rode in on horseback and
attacked the town's mosque -- usually the largest structure in town.
The strange thing, they said, was that the attackers were Muslim, too.
Darfur is home to some of Sudan's most devout Muslims, in a country
where 65 percent of the population practices Islam, the official state
religion.

A long-running but recently pacified war between Sudan's north and
south did have religious undertones, with the Islamic Arab-dominated
government fighting southern Christian and animist African rebels over
political power, oil and, in part, religion.

"But it's totally different in Darfur," said Mathina Mydin, a
Malaysian nurse who worked in a clinic on the outskirts of Nyala, the
capital of South Darfur. "As a Muslim myself, I wanted to bring the
sides together under Islam. But I quickly realized this war had
nothing to do with religion."

2-  EVERYONE IS BLACK

Although the conflict has also been framed as a battle between Arabs
and black Africans, everyone in Darfur appears dark-skinned, at least
by the usual American standards. The true division in Darfur is
between ethnic groups, split between herders and farmers. Each tribe
gives itself the label of "African" or "Arab" based on what language
its members speak and whether they work the soil or herd livestock.
Also, if they attain a certain level of wealth, they call themselves Arab.

Sudan melds African and Arab identities. As Arabs began to dominate
the government in the past century and gave jobs to members of Arab
tribes, being Arab became a political advantage; some tribes adopted
that label regardless of their ethnic affiliation. More recently,
rebels have described themselves as Africans fighting an Arab
government. Ethnic slurs used by both sides in recent atrocities have
riven communities that once lived together and intermarried.

"Black Americans who come to Darfur always say, 'So where are the
Arabs? Why do all these people look black?' " said Mahjoub Mohamed
Saleh, editor of Sudan's independent Al-Ayam newspaper. "The bottom
line is that tribes have intermarried forever in Darfur. Men even have
one so-called Arab wife and one so-called African. Tribes started
labeling themselves this way several decades ago for political
reasons. Who knows what the real bloodlines are in Darfur?"

3-  IT'S ALL ABOUT POLITICS

Although analysts have emphasized the racial and ethnic aspects of the
conflict in Darfur, a long-running political battle between Sudanese
President Omar Hassan Bashir and radical Islamic cleric Hassan
al-Turabi may be more relevant.

A charismatic college professor and former speaker of parliament,
Turabi has long been one of Bashir's main political rivals and an
influential figure in Sudan. He has been fingered as an extremist;
before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks Turabi often referred to Osama bin
Laden as a hero. More recently, the United Nations and human rights
experts have accused Turabi of backing one of Darfur's key rebel
groups, the Justice and Equality Movement, in which some of his top
former students are leaders.

Because of his clashes with Bashir, Turabi is usually under house
arrest and holds forth in his spacious Khartoum villa for small crowds
of followers and journalists. But diplomats say he still mentors
rebels seeking to overthrow the government.

"Darfur is simply the battlefield for a power struggle over Khartoum,"
said Ghazi Suleiman, a Sudanese human rights lawyer. "That's why the
government hit back so hard. They saw Turabi's hand, and they want to
stay in control of Sudan at any cost."

4-  THIS CONFLICT IS INTERNATIONAL

China and Chad have played key roles in the Darfur conflict.
In 1990, Chad's Idriss Deby came to power by launching a military
blitzkrieg from Darfur and overthrowing President Hissan Habre. Deby
hails from the elite Zaghawa tribe, which makes up one of the Darfur
rebel groups trying to topple the government. So when the conflict
broke out, Deby had to decide whether to support Sudan or his tribe.
He eventually chose his tribe.

Now the Sudanese rebels have bases in Chad; I interviewed them in
towns full of Darfurians who tried to escape the fighting. Meanwhile,
Khartoum is accused of supporting Chad's anti-Deby rebels, who have a
military camp in West Darfur. (Sudan's government denies the
allegations.) Last week, bands of Chadian rebels nearly took over the
capital, N'Djamena. When captured, some of the rebels were carrying
Sudanese identification.

Meanwhile, Sudan is China's fourth-biggest supplier of imported oil,
and that relationship carries benefits. China, which holds veto power
in the U.N. Security Council, has said it will stand by Sudan against
U.S. efforts to slap sanctions on the country and in the battle to
force Sudan to replace the African Union peacekeepers with a larger
U.N. presence. China has built highways and factories in Khartoum,
even erecting the Friendship Conference Hall, the city's largest
public meeting place.


5-  THE "GENOCIDE" LABEL MADE IT WORSE

Many of the world's governments have drawn the line at labeling Darfur
as genocide. Some call the conflict a case of ethnic cleansing, and
others have described it as a government going too far in trying to
put down a rebellion.

But in September 2004, then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell
referred to the conflict as a "genocide." Rather than spurring greater
international action, that label only seems to have strengthened
Sudan's rebels; they believe they don't need to negotiate with the
government and think they will have U.S. support when they commit
attacks. Peace talks have broken down seven times, partly because the
rebel groups have walked out of negotiations. And Sudan's government
has used the genocide label to market itself in the Middle East as
another victim of America's anti-Arab and anti-Islamic policies.

Perhaps most counterproductive, the United States has failed to follow
up with meaningful action. "The word 'genocide' was not an action
word; it was a responsibility word," Charles R. Snyder, the State
Department's senior representative on Sudan, told me in late 2004.
"There was an ethical and moral obligation, and saying it underscored
how seriously we took this." The Bush administration's recent idea of
sending several hundred NATO advisers to support African Union
peacekeepers falls short of what many advocates had hoped for.

"We called it a genocide and then we wine and dine the architects of
the conflict by working with them on counterterrorism and on peace in
the south," said Ted Dagne, an Africa expert for the Congressional
Research Service. "I wish I knew a way to improve the situation there.
But it's only getting worse."

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FUND-RAISING OFFICES IN DEARBORN RAIDED ON SUSPICION OF TERRORIST TIES
NIRAJ WARIKOO
Detroit Free Press
7/24/07
http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070724/NEWS02/70724034/1001/NE\
WS


Federal agents are raiding today the Dearborn offices of two charities
suspected of having ties to terrorist groups in the Middle East.

A Dearborn police officer guarded the entrance to the office of the
Goodwill Charitable Organization, a fund-raising office established by
the Martyrs Foundation in Dearborn, on Warren Avenue, tucked between a
grocery store and an import store.

The charity is not affiliated with Goodwill Industries, said Christine
Bragale, spokeswoman for Goodwill Industries International.

Goodwill Industries International has sent the Muslim charity a letter
in the past to get it to stop using the Goodwill name, Bragale said.

In Dearborn, several uniformed and plainclothes law enforcement
officials shuttled in and out of the office, while bystanders and
neighbors stood by watching.

The Treasury said in a news release that it "targeted Hizballah's
support network by designating the Iran-based Martyrs Foundation,
including its U.S. branch, and the finance firm Al-Qard al-Hassan."

The government also has frozen the assets of the Goodwill Charitable
Organization, according to the news release.

"We will continue to target those who form the financial backbone of
Hizballah, Hamas, PIJ and other terrorist groups that are attempting
to destabilize Lebanon and target innocent civilians," said Stuart
Levey, under secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, [and
apparently, a Zionist Jew disloyal to the United States Constitution
-WVNS] in the news release. "We will not allow organizations that
support terrorism to raise money in the United States or to evade our
measures and continue to operate simply by changing their names."

A search warrant was executed at the Goodwill Charitable Organization
office, according to Imad Hamad, regional director of the
American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee.

According to the Treasury, the Martyrs Foundation "channels financial
support from Iran to several terrorist organizations'' including
"Hizballah, Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ)."

Federal agents are also raiding the Al-Mabarrat Charitable
Organization, which has a Dearborn office on Schaefer Road, north of
Warren Avenue.

Agents with the FBI, IRS, and the U.S. Secret Service were seen
hauling away files and placing them into a van outside the office.
Al-Mabarrat, whose headquarters is based in Lebanon, has held
fund-raisers in metro Detroit in recent years.

Also, the FBI is holding a meeting this afternoon with Muslim leaders
at the Islamic House of Wisdom in Dearborn Heights to discuss the
raids, according to Dawud Walid, head of the Michigan branch of the
Council on American Islamic Relations.

The meeting will include Imam Mohammed Elahi, who heads the mosque,
and Walid.

A man who answered the phone at Al-Mabarrat said he could not comment.

On tax records, Goodwill Charitable Organization Inc. lists its
address at a location on Michigan Avenue in Dearborn. No one from the
charity could be reached at the site and nearby businesses said they
were unaware of the charity.

According to tax records, Goodwill Charitable Organization received
$167,628 in contributions in 2005, and $202,500 in 2004. Leaders of
the group could not be reached for comment.

Hamad said that the allegations are just allegations for now, and that
the groups should have their due process.

The Treasury Department's designation means that the government has
frozen the groups' assets and prohibited any transactions with them by
people in the United States.


Contact NIRAJ WARIKOO at nwarikoo @ freepress.com or 248-351-2998.

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The Browns have been holed up, refusing to pay the IRS or go to
prison. It's a battle that might end in bloodshed.


New Hampshire couple evade death and taxes
By Erika Hayasaki, Times Staff Writer
July 20, 2007
http://www.latimes. com/news/ la-na-taxevaders 20jul20,0,
778390.story? coll=la-tot- topstories&track=ntothtml


Plainfield, N.H. — SHE sits on the lookout in a lawn chair on their
front porch, her forehead glossy with sweat, Bible next to her left
foot, wind chimes clinking at her back. Her husband of 24 years is by
her side, German shepherd at his knee, handgun tucked beneath the belt
on his jeans.

High in these humid hills, Ed and Elaine Brown have been holed up in
their home for six months, refusing to serve a five-year prison
sentence for tax evasion. They all but dared law officials to come and
get them. This, they say, is a fight they're ready to die for.

"Show me the law!" says Ed, a trim 64-year-old with a silver mustache,
whose forehead crinkles when he gets heated. The Browns stopped paying
income taxes in 1996. They say the Constitution and Supreme Court
decisions support their claims that ordinary labor cannot be taxed.
But a judge ruled against them in January, convicting the Browns of
conspiring to evade paying taxes on $1.9 million in income from
Elaine's dentistry practice.

Now, the Browns say they're in a battle for freedom, and it just might
end in bloodshed right here, in a towering turreted house with
8-inch-thick concrete walls and an American flag fluttering over the
double-car garage. They have garnered national support, with blogs
devoted to news about the standoff and supporters regularly showing up
on the couple's doorstep with groceries.

Government and law officials have cut off power, Internet, house
phone, cellphone, television and mail service to the couple's 110-acre
compound. But their house is equipped with solar panels, a watchtower,
a satellite dish and a stockpile of food.

"We are self-sustained like a ship," Ed says. "We don't need power
from the shore to run the ship."

FBI agents are trying to avoid a deadly shootout reminiscent of Waco,
Texas, or Ruby Ridge, Idaho. They have tried negotiating, waiting,
begging.

"We are proceeding carefully to make sure no one gets hurt," says U.S.
Marshal Stephen Monier, the lead officer handling the siege. "We are
aware that there are guns in there."

Monier says the couple broke the law and should turn themselves in
peacefully. "They have been tried and convicted and sentenced."

But the Browns aren't budging.

"You remember that little gentleman in China, Tiananmen Square?" Ed
says, peering through his sunglasses. "He was the same as we are. You
can scare me, you can kill me, but you can't intimidate me."

"We're fighting for you, your country," adds Elaine, 66, a calm woman
with short, wavy dark hair. "This isn't just taxes."

"There's no more America," Ed says. "It's already gone."

"I'll die fighting, rather than live in slavery," Elaine says. "I'll
tell you that."

THE mountain air outside the Browns' home is hot and thick with flies.
On the shaded front porch overlooking a small duck pond, a visitor in
a straw hat — who drove his pickup truck for two days from Texas to
meet the Browns — eats grapes out of a paper bag and flips through an
issue of Shotgun News magazine. He introduces himself as Doug. His
last name is Tibbetts, he says, "like that guy who dropped the bomb on
Hiroshima."

Another guest, who refuses to give his name and makes it a point to
tell everyone he is armed, drove here from Massachusetts. He talks
about illegal immigration and government corruption in a slow deep
drip of a voice that seems to irritate Ed, who frequently cuts him off.

The government, Ed says, is at a point of "communism in its purist form."

Elaine nods.

"It's not communism though," says the Massachusetts man. "It's
totalitarianism. "

"It's Marxism," interjects Tibbetts, 60.

"No, no, no, guys, guys, don't give me that," says Ed, raising his
voice. "I've done 15 years of research here."

Since the standoff began, the Browns' home has turned into a commune
for anti-government activists. Admirers from across the country make
their way to the secluded home on Center of Town Road in Plainfield,
population 2,200, in a state where license plates carry the motto
"Live Free or Die."

To get to the Browns' house, travelers ascend along a jagged gravel
and dirt road, stopping at a silver sign nailed to a tree trunk on the
couple's property, which warns: "If not friendly, Go, Go Away!" Unable
to telephone the Browns and notify them of their arrival, some
visitors proceed slowly down the long driveway or attach small flags
to their trucks to show that they've come in peace.

The guests often come bearing gifts: hamburger buns, ginger ale,
cellphones with prepaid minutes, gun ammunition. Someone gave the
Browns their German shepherd, named Zoey. The visitors pitch tents in
the Browns' yard or sleep inside the house. Some bring laptops from
which they manage the Browns' blog and MySpace page, both created by
volunteers.

Shaun Kranish, 21, of Rockford, Ill., read about the Browns online
earlier this year. In March, he drove to New Hampshire and spent a few
nights at their home talking about politics and freedom. A gun rights
advocate, he started a website, MaketheStand. com, devoted to the
couple's battle. He has solicited rechargeable flashlights and candles
for the Browns and helped promote concerts supporting them.

People back the Browns, he says, because they are standing against
everything that is wrong with government.

"It's about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, " Kranish says. "It's
about the truth about the 9/11 attacks…. They're saying, 'We're not
going to be a part of it; we're not going to fund it.' "

There are 250,000 to 500,000 people in the United States who are tax
protesters, says JJ MacNab, a financial analyst who has written a book
on the issue and testified before Congress on behalf of law enforcement.

Some, she says, are elderly, uneducated or disenfranchised people who
buy into tax evasion scams. Others are disgruntled — sometimes
dangerous — citizens who believe the wording of tax laws does not make
them liable to pay.

"The tax laws are almost 100 years old, and no one has ever won," she
says. "Thousands and thousands of people have challenged them. It's a
constant flow of the same tired arguments over and over."

MacNab says the Internet has connected Iraq war veterans, college
students, minorities and women to the tax protest movement, which was
once associated mostly with white supremacists and militia groups that
held meetings at local diners.

Supporters have hailed the Browns as heroes, akin to Gandhi and the
Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., which has made law enforcement officials
cautious about turning them into martyrs.

"There are lots of people that want it to be over," says Stephen
Halleran, Plainfield's town administrator. "They feel Ed and Elaine
need to play by the same rules as the rest of us."

Halleran says the Browns have always had strong beliefs, but they
haven't been considered dangerous until now.

Residents are anxious, he says, because of the steady stream of
out-of-towners — white supremacists, anarchists and other activists —
roaming through Plainfield and showing up at community meetings.
Neighbors with children worry about what could happen if the standoff
ends in gunfire.

MacNab, who has studied tax protesters since 1997, says some
supporters of the Browns have compiled a list of enemies — including
judges and journalists — and their families. People have warned that
if the couple die, retaliatory killings will follow.

MacNab has little faith the Browns will turn themselves in without a
fight.

"I think there's going to be death and violence," she says. "I don't
see it happening another way."

THE way the Browns see it, they skirted a bloodbath on June 7.

That was the day their compound was surrounded by armed officers,
armored vehicles, state police cruisers, trucks and roadblocks. Law
officials say the showing of force was intended for surveillance of
the compound while its agents seized Elaine's dental practice a town
away. A houseguest of the Browns noticed the convoy while walking Zoey.

The Browns believe that a confrontation between the houseguest and law
enforcement helped them avert an attack.

"Whenever we go into the vicinity, we go in a manner to ensure the
community is protected and the officers are protected," says Monier,
the marshal. He added that law enforcement conducted surveillance on
the Brown compound "from time to time."

Elaine doesn't buy it: "We know they were on their way in to kill us
that day."

Two weeks later, Randy Weaver, whose wife and child were killed in
Ruby Ridge 15 years ago, held a news conference at the Browns' home,
in which he vowed to stand with them.

"What makes people willing to put their lives on the line?" said
Weaver, holding up a picture of his late son for reporters. "They'll
take so much B.S. from the so-called government, the de facto
government, that they just say, Back off. This is just what has
happened right here."

It was the Ruby Ridge siege, along with his brewing anger over paying
taxes, that inspired Ed to rebel.

In 1992, U.S. marshals converged on Weaver's remote mountain cabin to
arrest him on a federal weapons trafficking charge. A marshal shot and
killed Weaver's teenage son. In another gun battle a marshal was
killed. The next day, an FBI sharpshooter shot Weaver, then fatally
shot his wife, Vicki, as she was holding the couple's baby girl.

A year later, Branch Davidian leader David Koresh and his followers
were engaged in a 51-day standoff with federal agents surrounding
their compound in Waco, Texas.

Ed watched it all on television.

Federal agents were trying to carry out search and arrest warrants
against Koresh because of reports that his group was stockpiling
illegal weapons. In a shootout, four agents were killed and 20 others
injured. The siege ended with a raging fire. When it was over, 82
Branch Davidian members were dead.

"I was calling him the Waco wacko at the time," says Ed, "and I said,
'Wait a minute, they're planning to go in and kill these people.' You
can't do that. Now they lost me. Now I was angry."

The events at Ruby Ridge and Waco energized conspiracy theorists and
anti-government activists, including the bomber of the Oklahoma City
federal building, Timothy J. McVeigh.

Ed focused his fury on the Internal Revenue Service.

"It affected so many people," he says. "The IRS is the most brutal,
ruthless organization out of all there is."


INSIDE their home, Elaine boils hot dogs over a gas stove. Sunlight
shines through windows offering the only light. The dim kitchen is
cooler than outside. The shelves are lined with plastic containers of
dry beans, bottles of hot sauce, bags of potato chips, a can of
Folgers coffee, a watermelon. A bouquet of pink and blue daisies sits
on the table, near a copy of the local newspaper featuring an article
about the Browns.

There is a rumble in the driveway. Zoey begins to bark. Everyone runs
to the front window.

"Check the side door!" Ed yells to Elaine.

It's just a visitor with a flag on his truck. He stopped by to tell
the Browns that he, too, has stopped paying taxes.

"You must understand," says Ed, sitting in his rocking chair, "this is
personal for each and every one of us."

He brings up how law officials have bullied him and harassed his wife.
He becomes flustered when he recalls his wife being handcuffed when
she was arrested for tax evasion.

"This is American, what he's talking," Tibbetts says. "This is what
made America. Not sitting back and getting abused. Standing up for
what's right. Standing up for what God gave you."

Elaine offers Tibbetts another hot dog.

"There's two freight trains going just like this toward each other,"
Ed says. "So you better take a side, buddy, because when they hit,
it's going to be hellacious.

"And," he says, "it all could start right here."

*********************************************************************

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Is The US Preparing To Attack Pakistan?
By Eric Margolis
The Sun, Canada
http://countercurrents.org/margolis260707.htm


The Bush Administration may be preparing to lash out at old ally
Pakistan, which Washington now blames for its humiliating failures to
crush al-Qaida, capture its elusive leaders, or defeat Taliban
resistance forces in Afghanistan.

One is immediately reminded of the Vietnam War when the Pentagon,
unable to defeat North Vietnamese Army and Viet Cong forces, urged
invasion of Cambodia.

Sources in Washington say the Pentagon is drawing up plans to attack
Pakistan's "autonomous" tribal region bordering Afghanistan. Limited
"hot pursuit" ground incursions by US forces based in Afghanistan,
intensive air attacks, and special forces raids into Pakistan's
autonomous tribal region are being evaluated.

This weekend, the US national intelligence chief and other
intelligence spokesmen confirmed that strikes against "terrorist
targets" in Pakistan's tribal belt are increasingly possible. These
warnings were designed to both further pressure Pakistan's beleaguered
strongman, President Pervez Musharraf into sending more troops to the
tribal areas to fight his own people, and to prepare US public opinion
for a possible widening of the Afghanistan war into Pakistan.

Pakistan's 27,200 sq km tribal belt, officially known as the Federal
Autonomous Tribal Area, or FATA, is home to 3.3 million Pashtun
tribesmen. It has become a safe haven for al-Qaida, Taliban, other
Afghan resistance groups, and a hotbed of anti-American activity,
thanks mostly to the US-led occupation of Afghanistan which drove many
militants across the border into Pakistan. Osama bin Laden is very
likely sheltered in this region, as US intelligence claims.

I spent a remarkable time in this wild, medieval region during the
1980's and 90's, traveling alone where even Pakistani government
officials dared not go, visiting the tribes of Waziristan, Orakzai,
Khyber, Chitral, and Kurram, and meeting their chiefs, called "maliks."

These tribal belts are always referred to as "lawless." Pashtun
tribesmen could shoot you if they didn't like your looks. Rudyard
Kipling warned British Imperial soldiers over a century ago, when
fighting cruel, ferocious Pashtun warriors of the Afridi clan, if they
fell wounded, "save your last bullet for yourself."

But there is law: the traditional Pashtun tribal code, Pashtunwali,
that strictly governs behavior and personal honor. Protecting guests
was sacred. I was captivated by this majestic mountain region and
wrote of it extensively in my book, "War at the Top of the World."

The 40 million Pashtun – called "Pathan" by the British – are the
world's largest tribal group. Imperial Britain divided them by an
artificial border, the Durand Line, which went on to become, like so
many other British colonial boundaries, today's Afghanistan-Pakistan
border. When Pakistan was created in 1947, the Pashtun were split
between that new nation and Afghanistan.

Pakistan's Pashtun number 28–30 million, plus an additional 2.5
million refugees from Afghanistan. Pashtuns, one of the British Indian
Army's famed "martial races," occupy many senior positions in
Pakistan's military, intelligence service and bureaucracy, and
naturally have much sympathy for their embattled tribal cousins in
Afghanistan. The 15 million Pashtun of Afghanistan form that nation's
largest ethnic group and just under half the population.

The tribal agency's Pashtun reluctantly joined newly-created Pakistan
in 1947 under express constitutional guarantee of total autonomy and a
ban on Pakistani troops ever entering there.

But under intense US pressure, President Pervez Musharraf violated
Pakistan's constitution by sending 80,000 federal troops to fight the
region's tribes, killing 3,000 of them. In best British imperial
tradition, Washington pays Musharraf $100 million monthly to rent his
sepoys (native soldiers) to fight Pashtun tribesmen. As a result,
Pakistan is fast edging towards civil war, as the bloody siege of
Islamabad's Red Mosque and a current wave of bombings across the
nation show.

The anti-Communist Taliban movement is part of the Pashtun people.
Taliban fighters move across the artificial Pakistan-Afghanistan
border, to borrow a Maoism, like fish through the sea. Osama bin Laden
is a hero in the region, and likely shelters there.

The US just increased its reward for bin Laden to $50 million and
plans to shower $750 million on the tribal region in an effort to buy
loyalty. Bush/Cheney & Co. do not understand that while they can rent
President Musharraf's government in Islamabad, many Pashtun value
personal honor far more than money, and cannot be bought. That is
likely why bin Laden has not yet been betrayed.

Any US attack on Pakistan would be a catastrophic mistake. First, air
and ground assaults will succeed only in widening the anti-US war and
merging it with Afghanistan's resistance to western occupation. US
forces are already too over-stretched to get involved in yet another
little war.

Second, Pakistan's army officers who refuse to be bought may resist a
US attack on their homeland, and overthrow the man who allowed it,
Gen. Musharraf. A US attack would sharply raise the threat of anti-US
extremists seizing control of strategic Pakistan and marginalize those
seeking return to democratic government.

Third, a US attack on the tribal areas could re-ignite the old
irredentist movement to reunite Pashtun parts of Pakistan and
Afghanistan into an independent state, "Pashtunistan." That could
begin unraveling fragile Pakistan, leaving its nuclear arsenal up for
grabs, and India tempted to intervene.

The US military has grown used to attacking small, weak nations like
Grenada, Panama, and Iraq. Pakistan, with 163 million people, and a
poorly equipped but very tough 550,000-man army, will offer no easy
victories. Those Bush Administration officials who foolishly advocate
attacking Pakistan are playing with fire.


Eric Margolis, contributing foreign editor for Sun National Media
Canada, is the author of War at the Top of the World. Visit his
website http://www.ericmargolis.com/

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An interesting example of conservation as imperialism - WVNS


SUDAN
And finding a paradise not yet lost
Jul 26th 2007
The Economist
http://economist.com/world/africa/displaystory.cfm?story_id=9557886


IN MANY respects, south Sudan is already its own country. It issues
its own visas, decides most its own policies and mishandles its own
budget.

Of course, tricky deals over the ownership of oil and the Nile waters
must be negotiated before full independence. And there is always a
small chance that the Sudan People's Liberation Movement (SPLM), which
runs the south, may do well enough in elections for all of Sudan (due
to be held in 2009) to alter the shape of Sudanese politics overall,
the north included. But as things stand, almost all southerners
believe that, after a referendum promised by the central government in
Khartoum, south Sudan will become a sovereign country by 2011.

That raises new questions. For one thing, what would the new country
be called? The betting is on New Sudan, the name favoured by John
Garang, the SPLM's charismatic leader killed in a helicopter crash in
2005. But establishing the new country's identity will be harder. Even
SPLM zealots accept that the largely Christian and animist south
cannot define itself just negatively, in opposition to the Muslim north.

Many leading lights in the south Sudanese government, including the
president, Salva Kiir, want the new country, whatever it is called, to
become part of east Africa rather than a southern spin-off from the
rest of Sudan, which is mainly Arab and Muslim and looks more to the
Arab world. South Sudan's economy would tilt to the south and east.

Most trade goes via Uganda. In Juba, the southern capital, the
most-used mobile-phone network operates from Uganda with a Ugandan
code and Ugandan local rates, while calls to Khartoum are deemed
international. There is also talk (in South African and German
circles, among others) of building a railway from Juba, south Sudan's
capital, to Gulu in Uganda, to connect with the main east-African
network. Most of south Sudan's diplomatic links are through Kenya.
Some schools are already replacing Arabic with English.

Another new way to nudge south Sudan into east Africa is through
wildlife and tourism, especially after a recent discovery that south
Sudan's wild game is far more abundant than had previously been
reckoned. Earlier this year, the Wildlife Conservation Society, an
American outfit, uncovered one of the world's biggest animal
migrations in south Sudan. Conservationists flying low over uncharted
territory discovered a vast array of wildlife, especially in Boma,
along the border with Ethiopia. Paul Elkan, the Kenya-based Wildlife
Conservation Society's main man for south Sudan, says the scale of
migration may exceed that of Tanzania's Serengeti.

"It is a paradise not yet lost," says an ecstatic Mr Kiir, who has
already signed agreements with the conservationists. An immediate goal
is to limit the destruction caused by the oil business. Thanks to
graft and negligence, Chinese and other contractors have installed
massive and polluting infrastructure across the south with no
environmental oversight.

In the long run, Mr Kiir hopes to set up a national parks system to
protect the Boma migration, improve land management and provide jobs
for former fighters as rangers and guides. A grander hope is that it
could bolster New Sudan's new identity--and its claim to be part of
east Africa.

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STEVEN EMERSON'S DISTURBING TRACK RECORD
Ahmed Rehab
Media Monitors Network
http://usa.mediamonitors.net/content/view/full/42070


"It is an unfortunate consequence of post 9/11 life in America, where
fear-mongering is a reality, that notorious career Islamophobes, such
as this individual, are subjected to little scrutiny and virtually no
credibility tests - even as mainstream Muslim leaders with established
track records are readily second-guessed."


In his latest anti-CAIR attack, Steven Emerson once again unleashes
one of his trademark tirades designed to stifle free and open debate
(The New Republic Online, 03/28/2008). This time, his wrath is focused
against The New York Times. Its crime? Offering two sides of the story
in its recent coverage of the "mounting criticism" against the
nation's largest Muslim civil rights organization, CAIR.

Emerson conveniently fails to disclose to his readers that the
relentless source of this "mounting criticism" is non-other than
Emerson himself and his merry band of collaborators. But like all
professional propagandists, Emerson aspires to be detective,
prosecutor, judge, and jury.

It should come as no surprise that Emerson bears a severe aversion to
common standards of professional journalism like those displayed by
Neil MacFarquhar of The New York Times. After all, Emerson is not a
professional journalist but an agenda-driven demagogue on a mission.
Masquerading as an Islam/terrorism expert, his apparent lifelong goal
is to banish Muslim Americans from American civil life. He recently
went after the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC); now it is CAIR.
Going many years back, his track record is fraught with
well-documented anti-Muslim bias.

Unlike neutral journalists, he is not remotely concerned with facts;
rather, he prefers proselytizing his narrow agenda wherever and
whenever it is feasible to do so. His modus operandi is not to inform,
but to brainwash.

Free speech and open debate provide the most serious obstacles to
professional propagandists. It is then no wonder then that Emerson
balks at the notion that there are two sides to a story; the only
noteworthy side, in his view, is his own.

For the Emersons of this world, suspicion raised against Muslims and
their organizations is synonymous with a guilty conviction;
demonstrating actual wrongdoing is unnecessary overhead. "More than
one [government official in Washington] described the standards used
by critics to link CAIR to terrorism as akin to McCarthyism,
essentially guilt by association," reports MacFarquhar in the said New
York Times piece to the obvious chagrin of Emerson who, dismayed with
the message, turns his wrath on the messenger.

"Of all the groups, there is probably more suspicion about CAIR, but
when you ask people for cold hard facts, you get blank stares," said
Michael Rolince, a retired F.B.I. counterterrorism official. (The New
York Times, March 14, 2007)

In Emerson's prejudiced world view, anti-Muslim smear campaigns should
not be up for scrutiny, they should simply be furthered along by
mainstream newspapers like the compliant propaganda outlets he wishes
them to be. (I presume Emerson highly approves of The Washington Times)

It is an unfortunate consequence of post 9/11 life in America, where
fear-mongering is a reality, that notorious career Islamophobes, such
as this individual, are subjected to little scrutiny and virtually no
credibility tests - even as mainstream Muslim leaders with established
track records are readily second-guessed.

The irony is that while many of the Muslim organizations that evoke
the wrath of henchmen like Emerson offer total transparency, the
henchmen themselves flourish in relative obscurity, refusing to
publicize their sources of funding and the nature of their operations.

Emerson may counter in typical fashion that CAIR is deflecting
accusations by raising concerns about their sources. Not true: CAIR
has directly addressed the preposterous accusations in an extensive
response document available online at www.cair.com/urbanlegends.pdf;
Emerson will have to try harder to duck the credibility question which
is quite a relevant question for concerned Americans to be asking:

Can Steven Emerson and his ilk be trusted as credible sources of
information on Islam and Muslims? Who is Steven Emerson?

A self-anointed "terrorism expert" whose rhetoric is characterized by
charged terminology and a dislike for open debate, Emerson harbors a
longstanding track record of anti-Muslim and anti-Arab bigotry.

In March of 1995, Emerson told The Jewish Monthly, "nearly all
(emphasis added) of the Islamic organizations in the United States
that define themselves as religiously or culturally Muslim in
character have, today, been totally captured or dominated by radical
fundamentalist elements..."

Ironically, it took Emerson no more than a few days to demonstrate to
the world why his credibility and integrity as an "observer of trends"
should never be taken for granted – especially when they relate to
Muslims.

In April of 1995, Emerson confidently asserted on a live broadcast of
CBS News that the Oklahoma City bombing – then breaking news – showed
"a Middle Eastern trait" because it was carried out "with the intent
to inflict as many casualties as possible."

"Oklahoma City, I can tell you, is probably considered one of the
largest centers of Islamic radical activity outside the Middle East,"
Emerson explained with an enthusiasm bordering on elation.

While Emerson preoccupied himself with indulging his knack for
conjecture, real detectives worked calmly and professionally to reveal
that, contrary to Emerson's "expert perceptions", Timothy McVeigh and
company were behind the bombings. Emerson's incompetence was duly
exposed; CBS decided not to renew his contract and blacklisted him for
five years.

Then again, Emerson's aversion to facts and affinity for bias are not
breaking news.

A New York Times review of Emerson's 1991 book Terrorist said the book
was "marred by factual errors . . . and by a pervasive anti-Arab and
anti-Palestinian bias."

His 1994 controversial film Jihad in America caused veteran reporter
Robert Friedman to accuse Emerson of "creating mass hysteria against
American Arabs" (The Nation, 5/15/95).

John F. Sugg, then of the Tampa Bay Weekly Planet, revealed in a 1999
article that Emerson's priority is "not so much news as it is an
unrelenting attack against Arabs and Muslims."

"He's made his life's work discrediting Arab American and Muslim
groups," James Zogby, president of the Arab American Institute, told
The Washington Post in 2001.

Smear campaigns are not unusual for Steven Emerson; they seem to be
his way of expressing disgruntlement with an opposing view.

"He has been run out of many respectable newsrooms. His response was
the smear job. When The Washington Post shunned him, he branded the
paper `pro-Hamas.' When the Miami Herald strafed Emerson's shoddy
claims, he wrote the city's Jewish leaders claiming the paper's
reporter `was nothing short of racist,' Sugg wrote (Alternet,
06/12/2003).

So what explains Emerson's anti-Muslim and anti-Arab spin?

The Wall Street Journal provided us with one answer 16 years ago: "Mr.
Emerson's prime role is to whitewash Israeli governments and revile
their critics," wrote Alexander Cockburn.

For whom does Emerson work? Does he represent the interests of
Americans, or the interests of a foreign state at the expense of our
nation's own community relations?

Emerson, who has close ties to the Israeli Mossad according to The
Jerusalem Post (9/17/1994), has yet to disclose key facts regarding
his activities, including his source of funding. While he criticizes
Muslim-American organizations that disclose their operating and
financial details, Emerson shrouds his own in guarded secrecy.

Vince Cannistraro, a former Chief of Operations and Analysis at the
CIA's Counterterrorism Center said of Emerson's closest associates
Steve Pomerantz, Oliver Revell and Yigal Carmon: "They're
Israeli-funded. How do I know that? Because they tried to recruit me."

Of Emerson himself, Cannistraro says, "word has got around on what he
(Emerson) is, that he's a paid polemicist, not a journalist" (Weekly
Planet, May 1998); he characterizes him as "dishonest" and "Joseph
McCarthy-like" (The Forward, 1/26/96).

Journalist Jane Hunter calls Emerson's brand of journalism "nimble in
its treatment of facts, often credulous of intelligence sources, and
almost invariably supportive of the Israeli government" (EXTRA! ,
October/November 1992).

It seems that in his latest attempt at fueling anti-Muslim hysteria,
Emerson is banking on America's short term memory. I am sorry to
disappoint him.

References:

- "Muslim activist takes on his group's critics
by Noreen Ahmed-Ullah
Chicago Tribune, March 25, 2007
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/
chi-0703250249mar25,1,457420.story?
ctrack=1&cset=true
http://www.cairchicago.org/inthenews.php?
file=ct_03252007
http://tinyurl.com/yr2kfj


- "One Muslim advocacy group's not-so-secret terrorist ties"
by Steven Emerson
The New Republic, March 28, 2007
http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=w070326&s=emerson032807
http://tinyurl.com/3anws4


- "Scrutiny Increases for a Group Advocating for Muslims in U.S."
by Neil MacFarquhar
The New York Times, March 14, 2007
http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=
F30714F93A550C778DDDAA0894DF404482
http://tinyurl.com/2q8nw9


- "A Hezbollah apologist wins an award for tolerance."
by Steven Emerson
The New Republic, August 31, 2006
https://ssl.tnr.com/p/docsub.mhtml?i=w060828&s=emerson083106
http://tinyurl.com/3a23ms


- "MPAC Exposes Steve Emerson's Self-Serving Distortions"
Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC), January 28, 2004
http://www.mpac.org/article.php?id=167


- "COUNTERPRODUCTIVE COUNTERTERRORISM: How Anti-Islamic Rhetoric is
Impeding America's Homeland Security
Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC), December 2004
http://www.mpac.org/publications/
counterproductive-counterterrorism/
counterproductive-counterterrorism.pdf
http://tinyurl.com/2kmhqd


- "Steven Emerson's Crusade"
by John F. Sugg
Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR) - Extra! January/February 1999
http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=1443


- "Why is a journalist pushing questionable stories from behind the
scenes?"
by John F. Sugg
http://www.fair.org/extra/9901/emerson.html


- "Tonight on 60 Minutes: Terrorist Chicken Laundering"
by John Sugg
Creative Loafing (Atlanta), June 12, 2003
http://www.alternet.org/story/16163/


- "Who is Steven Emerson?"
The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR)
http://www.cair-net.org/html/emerson.htm


- "DE-MYSTIFYING "URBAN LEGENDS" ABOUT CAIR"
The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR)
http://www.cair.com/urbanlegends.pdf

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Turkish Officials: Troops Enter Iraq
By SELCAN HACAOGLU
Associated Press Writer
Wed Jun 6, 2007
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/T/TURKEY_IRAQ?SITE=NYSTA


Turkey (AP) -- Turkish troops crossed into northern Iraq early
Wednesday to chase Kurdish guerrillas who attack Turkey from bases
there, three Turkish security officials said. Turkey's foreign
minister denied its troops had entered Iraq.

The senior security officials, speaking on condition of anonymity
because they were not authorized to speak to the media, characterized
the raid as a "hot pursuit" raid that was limited in scope. They told
The Associated Press it did not constitute the kind of large incursion
that Turkish leaders have been discussing in recent weeks.

One official said several thousand troops went less than two miles
inside Iraq and were still there in late afternoon. "It is a hot
pursuit, not an incursion," one official said.

Another official said by telephone it was "not a major offensive and
the number of troops is not in the tens of thousands." He also said
the Turkish troops went into a remote, mountainous area.

A third official, based in the border region, said 600 commandos
entered Iraq, and were backed up by several thousand troops along the
border. He said the commandos raided Iraqi territory across from the
Turkish border town of Cukurca before dawn after rebels opened fire
from Iraqi soil on Turkish patrols.

The official said the commandos returned to their bases in Turkey
later in the day. There was no immediate explanation for the
conflicting accounts of the officials.

All three officials are based in southeast Turkey, where the military
has been battling separatist Kurdish rebels since they took up arms in
1984.

The officials stood by their statements despite denials from Turkish
and Iraqi officials.

Turkey's private NTV television quoted Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul
as saying reports of a cross-border operation were false.

"There is no such thing, no entry to another country. If such a thing
happens, then we would announce it," Gul said. "We are in a war with
terror, we will do whatever is necessary to fight terrorism."

Several military officials at the Pentagon said they have seen nothing
Wednesday that would confirm the reports of Turkish troops crossing
the border into Iraq.

One military official said that small numbers of Turkish forces
periodically move in and out of Iraq doing counterinsurgency
operations, but not thousands at one time. The officials requested
anonymity because of the sensitivity of the information.

While the U.S. has about 16,500 troops in northern Iraq, most of them
are not right along the border. Many of those are training teams
working with the Iraqi border patrols.

The White House said there has been "no new activity" in northern Iraq
to justify the press reports. Gordon Johndroe, a spokesman for the
White House's National Security Council, said that U.S. officials in
the region have confirmed that the activity is a continuation of
Turkey's years-long campaign against the Kurdish PKK guerrillas of
Kurdistan Workers' Party.

"The Turkish government reports no new incursions into northern Iraq,"
Johndroe said. "U.S. officials on the ground confirm no new activity."

Johndroe said Washington remains "concerned about the PKK and the use
of Iraq as a safe haven."

Lt. Col. Christopher Garver, a military spokesman in Baghdad, said he
could not confirm any Turkish troops were in Iraq but "we are looking
into it and obviously we are very concerned."

The last major Turkish incursion into northern Iraq was in 1997, when
about 50,000 troops were sent to the region.

The officials did not say where the Turkish force was operating in
northern Iraq, nor did they say how long they would be there. Both
officials are involved in anti-rebel operations, though they did not
disclose whether they participated in the planning of the operation on
Wednesday.

The officials said any confrontation with Iraqi Kurdish groups, who
have warned against a Turkish incursion, could trigger a larger
cross-border operation. The Turkish military has asked the government
in Ankara to approve such an incursion, but the government has not
given formal approval.

An official at military headquarters in Ankara declined to confirm or
deny the report that Turkish troops had entered Iraq.

Turkish authorities rarely acknowledge such military operations, which
were more frequent before the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Earlier Wednesday, reports of an incursion circulated on some media
outlets, including Turkey's private Cihan news agency.

The Turkish military said rebels across the border in Iraq opened fire
Wednesday on a Turkish military outpost in the province of Hakkari,
which borders both Iraq and Iran. It said there were no casualties.

Turkey has been building up its military forces on the Iraqi border
recently, amid debate among political and military leaders about
whether to attack separatist rebels of the PKK. The rebels stage raids
in southeast Turkey after crossing over from hideouts in Iraq.

Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari said the government has not seen
any major operations along the border.

"There has been intermittent shelling, for instance, attacks, certain
violations, minor violations on the border which we have documented
and reported back to the Turkish side, but honestly we haven't seen
any major operations along the border," Zebari told The Associated
Press in a telephone interview.

"We are aware of this Turkish troops buildup on the border and the
Iraqi government position has been that we will not accept or tolerate
any military incursion into Iraqi territories," he said.

During major incursions in the 1990s, fighting occurred on a front
stretching more than 100 miles, mostly in rugged terrain where
communications were difficult and the Turkish Kurds were already
entrenched in the mountains.


Associated Press writers Jennifer Loven in Rostock, Germany, and
Lolita C. Baldor in Washington contributed to this report.

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How Truth Slips Down the Memory Hole
By John Pilger
July 25, 2007
http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2007-07/25pilger.cfm


One of the leaders of demonstrations in Gaza calling for the release
of the BBC reporter Alan Johnston was a Palestinian news cameraman,
Imad Ghanem. On 5 July, he was shot by Israeli soldiers as he filmed
them invading Gaza. A Reuters video shows bullets hitting his body as
he lay on the ground. An ambulance trying to reach him was also
attacked. The Israelis described him as a "legitimate target". The
International Federation of Journalists called the shooting "a vicious
and brutal example of deliberate targeting of a journalist". At the
age of 21, he has had both legs amputated. Dr David Halpin, a British
trauma surgeon who works with Palestinian children, emailed the BBC's
Middle East editor, Jeremy Bowen. "The BBC should report the alleged
details about the shooting," he wrote. "It should honour Alan
[Johnston] as a journalist by reporting the facts, uncomfortable as
they might be to Israel." He received no reply. The atrocity was
reported in two sentences on the BBC online. Along with 11 Palestinian
civilians killed by the Israelis on the same day, Alan Johnston's now
legless champion slipped into what George Orwell in Nineteen
Eighty-Four called the memory hole. (It was Winston Smith's job at the
Ministry of Truth to make disappear all facts embarrassing to Big
Brother.)

While Alan Johnston was being held, I was asked by the BBC World
Service if I would say a few words of support for him. I readily
agreed, and suggested I also mention the thousands of Palestinians
abducted and held hostage. The answer was a polite no; and all the
other hostages remained in the memory hole. Or, as Harold Pinter wrote
of such unmentionables: "It never happened. Nothing ever happened . .
. It didn't matter. It was of no interest." The media wailing over the
BBC's royal photo-shoot fiasco and assorted misdemeanours provide the
perfect straw man. They complement a self-serving BBC internal inquiry
into news bias, which dutifully supplied the right-wing Daily Mail
with hoary grist that the corporation is a left-wing plot. Such
shenanigans would be funny were it not for the true story behind the
facade of elite propaganda that presents humanity as useful or
expendable, worthy or unworthy, and the Middle East as the
Anglo-American crime that never happened, didn't matter, was of no
interest.

The other day, I turned on the BBC's Radio 4 and heard a cut-glass
voice announce a programme about Iraqi interpreters working for "the
British coalition forces" and warning that "listeners might find
certain descriptions of violence disturbing". Not a word referred to
those of "us" directly and ultimately responsible for the violence.
The programme was called Face the Facts. Is satire that dead? Not yet.
The Murdoch columnist David Aaronovitch, a warmonger, is to interview
Blair in the BBC's "major retrospective" of the sociopath's rule.

Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four lexicon of opposites pervades almost
everything we see, hear and read now. The invaders and destroyers are
"the British coalition forces", surely as benign as that British
institution, St John Ambulance, who are "bringing democracy" to Iraq.
BBC television describes Israel as having "two hostile Palestinian
entities on its borders", neatly inverting the truth that Israel is
actually inside Palestinian borders. A study by Glasgow University
says that young British viewers of TV news believe Israelis illegally
colonising Palestinian land are Palestinians: the victims are the
invaders.

"The great crimes against most of humanity", wrote the American
cultural critic James Petras, "are justified by a corrosive debasement
of language and thought . . . [that] have fabricated a linguistic
world of terror, of demons and saviours, of axes of good and evil, of
euphemisms" designed to disguise a state terror that is "a gross
perversion" of democracy, liberation, reform, justice. In his
reinauguration speech, George Bush mentioned all these words, whose
meaning, for him, is the dictionary opposite. It is 80 years since
Edward Bernays, the father of public relations, predicted a pervasive
"invisible government" of corporate spin, suppression and silence as
the true ruling power in the United States. That is true today on both
sides of the Atlantic. How else could America and Britain go on such a
spree of death and mayhem on the basis of stupendous lies about
non-existent weapons of mass destruction, even a "mushroom cloud over
New York"? When the BBC radio reporter Andrew Gilligan reported the
truth, he was pilloried and sacked along with the BBC's director
general, while Blair, the proven liar, was protected by the liberal
wing of the media and given a standing ovation in parliament. The same
is happening again over Iran, distracted, it is hoped, by spin that
the new Foreign Secretary David Miliband is a "sceptic" about the
crime in Iraq when, in fact, he has been an accomplice, and by
unctuous Kennedy-quoting Foreign Office propaganda about Miliband's
"new world order".

"What do you think of Iran's complicity in attacks on British soldiers
in Basra?" Miliband was asked by the Financial Times. Miliband: "Well,
I think that any evidence of Iranian engagement there is to be
deplored. I think that we need regional players to be supporting
stability, not fomenting discord, never mind death . . ."

FT: "Just to be clear, there is evidence?"

Miliband: "Well no, I chose my words carefully . . ."

The coming war on Iran, including the possibility of a nuclear attack,
has already begun as a war by journalism. Count the number of times
"nuclear weapons programme" and "nuclear threat" are spoken and
written, yet neither exists, says the International Atomic Energy
Agency. On 21 June, the New York Times went further and advertised an
"urgent" poll, headed: "Should we bomb Iran?" The questions beneath
referred to Iran being "a greater threat than Saddam Hussein" and
asked: "Who should undertake military action against Iran first . . .
?" The choice was "US. Israel. Neither country". So tick your
favourite bombers.

The last British war to be fought without censorship and "embedded"
journalists was the Crimea a century and a half ago. The bloodbath of
the First World War and the Cold War might never have happened without
their unpaid (and paid) propagandists. Today's invisible government is
no less served, especially by those who censor by omission. The craven
liberal campaign against the first real hope for the poor of Venezuela
is a striking example.

However, there are major differences. Official disinformation now is
often aimed at a critical public intelligence, a growing awareness in
spite of the media. This "threat" from a public often held in contempt
has been met by the insidious transfer of much of journalism to public
relations. Some years ago, PR Week estimated that the amount of
"PR-generated material" in the media is "50 per cent in a broadsheet
newspaper in every section apart from sport. In the local press and
the mid-market and tabloid nationals, the figure would undoubtedly be
higher. Music and fashion journalists and PRs work hand in hand in the
editorial process . . . PRs provide fodder, but the clever
high-powered ones do a lot of the journalists' thinking for them."

This is known today as "perception management". The most powerful are
not the Max Cliffords but huge corporations such as Hill & Knowlton,
which "sold" the slaughter known as the first Gulf war, and the Sawyer
Miller Group, which sold hated, pro-Washington regimes in Colombia and
Bolivia and whose operatives included Mark Malloch Brown, the new
Foreign Office minister, currently being spun as anti-Washington.
Hundreds of millions of dollars go to corporations spinning the
carnage in Iraq as a sectarian war and covering up the truth: that an
atrocious invasion is pinned down by a successful resistance while the
oil is looted.

The other major difference today is the abdication of cultural forces
that once provided dissent outside journalism. Their silence has been
devastating. "For almost the first time in two centuries," wrote the
literary and cultural critic Terry Eagleton, "there is no eminent
British poet, playwright or novelist prepared to question the
foundations of the western way of life." The lone, honourable
exception is Harold Pinter. Eagleton listed writers and playwrights
who once promised dissent and satire and instead became rich
celebrities, ending the legacy of Shelley and Blake, Carlyle and
Ruskin, Morris and Wilde, Wells and Shaw.

He singled out Martin Amis, a writer given tombstones of column inches
in which to air his pretensions, along with his attacks on Muslims.
The following is from a recent article by Amis:

Tony strolled over [to me] and said, "What have you been up to today?"
"I've been feeling protective of my prime minister, since you ask."

For some reason our acquaintanceship, at least on my part, is becoming
mildly but deplorably flirtatious. What these elite, embedded voices
share is their participation in an essentially class war, the long war
of the rich against the poor. That they play their part in a
broadcasting studio or in the clubbable pages of the review sections
and that they think of themselves as liberals or conservatives is
neither here nor there. They belong to the same crusade, waging the
same battle for their enduring privilege.

In The Serpent, Marc Karlin's dreamlike film about Rupert Murdoch, the
narrator describes how easily Murdochism came to dominate the media
and coerce the industry's liberal elite. There are clips from a
keynote address that Murdoch gave at the Edinburgh Television
Festival. The camera pans across the audience of TV executives, who
listen in respectful silence as Murdoch flagellates them for
suppressing the true voice of the people. They then applaud him. "This
is the silence of the democrats," says the voice-over, "and the Dark
Prince could bath in their silence."

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Why ?
Layla Anwar, An Arab Woman Blues - Reflections in a sealed bottle...
July 30, 2007


Yes why?
What for?
What does it say about you? What does it say about your countries?
What does it say about your institutions? What does it say about your
governments, your "culture", your "civilization", your history, your
"progress", your "values", your concepts...?

Have you ever stopped and pondered these questions? Have you ever
stopped and asked yourselves ; how come?

How come we are so advanced, how come we are so democratic, how come
we are so great, how come we are so free...And how come we allow so
much murder, oppression, abuse, go unaccounted for ?

Have you ever asked yourself this question ?

I was just listening to the BBC World radio. A report from Oxfam - and
in your eyes that makes it credible - over 70 % of us Iraqis, no
longer have access to clean drinking water.

I say no longer have because I remember not so long ago, one could
turn on the tap and drink. As simple as that.

The report goes on to say that over 50% of Iraqis are under nourished
and 1 out of 3 is literally starving. And that 50% live in abject
poverty. 50% !!!

Again, I remember a time, even during the "civilized" sanctions that
your countries imposed upon us, everyone had to eat. Not much, but
there was food.

The Iraqi government had developed a system of rationing that, to this
day, still leaves your top U.N reps in awe.

When I mention that in my posts, I am accused of waging a war of
disinformation, psy-ops and being a paid agent.

Now you listen to me and you get off your butts and read. Educate
yourselves, oh great people of the West.

A few years back, you could not even locate Iraq on a map . Now you
have all suddenly become experts on Her.

Prior to your liberation, there was no starvation in Iraq. Prior to
your liberation, there was no abject poverty, the kind we witness
today. Prior to your liberation, kids did not stutter out fear. Prior
to your liberation, they went to free schools, learned, grew up and
became full functioning adults, with degrees, diplomas and expertise.
No, we did not have learning impediments before your liberation.
Today 92 % of Iraqi children suffer from it. Today, 99% of Iraqi
children are traumatized for life.

So I ask you again - Why ?

What have Iraqis done to you? Did they invade you? Did they steal your
homes? Did they imprison you? Did they torture you? Did they rape you?
Did they occupy your lands?

Of course, some of you will come and present me with your usual
condescending, paternalistic, patronizing lists of political theories,
attempting to explain the inexplicable.

Save your time and energy. I know all about your theories. I know all
about your theories of imperialism, neo-cons, zionists...I also know
all about your handy explanations regarding oil, cartels, monopolies,
globalization...

None of that satisfies me. I still need to know why?

Why us? why Iraq? why this? why now?

If you fail to answer that question, then you would have not learned
one single thing about yourselves.
And I say yourselves, because your governments are a reflection of who
you are, your aspirations, your mindsets, your thinking, your
illusions...You are part of it and it is part of you.

And all I can see right now are nothing but murderous thoughts - yours.

A few days ago, I was reading an article about a french film producer
called Alain Tasma who has just finished directing a film on the
Rwandan Genocide.

During "Operation Turquoise", between 700'000 and 900'000 Rwandans
perished.

None of you, not one single one of you, had any objections to call it
a Genocide.
It was a given, it was accepted, it was fact. And rightly so, because
it was a genocide.

But when it comes to Iraq, all sorts of counter figures pop up. All
kinds of other statistics are put forward to try to prove "well, yes
but"...

Again my question is why?
Why did you accept it without questions in the case of Rwanda, why did
you accept it with no questions in the case of the Holocaust, why is
it when it comes to Arab and Arab Muslims in particular, it becomes a
topic for debate and nit picking? And it refers to Genocide.

Can you answer this question?

Why is it that what happened over 60 years ago in your lands, still
makes you grovel in mortification and supplications of forgiveness but
when it comes to us, you have so many "red flags"?
Your phrases are almost always qualified with a "yes but..."

What does that tell me about you? It tells me exactly what I said
earlier on, you and your governments are one and the same.

And you will come and say "yes but... I did not vote", "yes but, I
sent an email", "yes but....yes but...yes but..."

I don't care for your "yes buts". I truly don't.
And that applies to all of you. All of you whose goverments have a
finger in the Iraqi pie.

If you had really wanted, you could have easily gone out en masse, in
front of your government's offices...
If only 5 million of you, not more, only 5 million, had done that and
had thrown your passports in a huge bonfire in front of your White
house, 10 Downing sreet or wherever the hell you happen to be, then I
am sure, we would not be experiencing what we are experiencing now.

There are also mass pickets, sit ins, huge demonstrations, strikes...

There are ways, many ways. You just need to get your "creativity"
going. Or maybe you are just creative in killing us?

I don't care much for your opinions and comments anymore. Actually I
don't give a damn.

All I know is that you have participated directly or indirectly in the
crime. That is all I know.

But there is still a little hope left.
Go and sit with yourself for a little while and ask yourself why and
then ask yourself what am I supposed to do next?
I can assure you, answers will come to you.

For those of you who prefer to sit and engage in quid pro quos of ifs
and buts, then I can already tell you in advance, you are a hopeless
case. And I will not even bother to ask why.


Painting : Iraqi female artist, Afifa Laabi.

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Gary Rosenblatt of The New York Jewish Week starkly frames the issue
of Harvard Professor Noah Feldman's erasure from the ranks of
graduates of Brookline's Maimonides School.

What Feldman's essay points up is that intermarriage is the
irreconcilable issue for those who argue that American and Jewish
values are compatible. "We've sold a lot of Jews a bill of goods when
we've told them there are no contradictions between being a good Jew
and an American," noted Jonathan Sarna, a professor of American Jewish
history at Brandeis University. "In America you are taught you can
marry anyone you fall in love with, but Judaism argues that we are a
minority culture and will only survive if Jews marry other Jews."

Rosenblatt's analysis probably applies even more strongly to Zionism
than to Orthodox Judaism. American and Zionist values are simply
completely contradictory in many serious ways, and when someone claims
that America and Israel share the same values, many Americans and
non-Americans become very uncomfortable.

There is a fundamental disconnect between American principles and
fundamental beliefs of Zionists and many if not most Jewish Americans.

===

Some Background on The Maimonides School and Noah Feldman

Joseph Soloveitchik, who founded Maimonides School was intensely
racist, and the school has followed his tradition slavishly. A Hebrew
language circle in which I took part asked me to videotape a series of
Motza'ei Shabbat lectures given by Rabbi Schacter at the Maimonides
School. Schacter used to be the Dean of the School's Rabbi Joseph B.
Soloveitchik Institute.

Schacter misrepresented the history of Jewish and Christian attitudes
toward Jerusalem, but when he started to discuss Muslim attitudes he
turned viciously racist and spewed lots of essentialist primordialist
nonsense.  He claimed that Muslims and Arabs were completely
hypocritical liars to feign interest in Jerusalem now that it was once
again rightfully in Jewish possession. Eventually, he made me stop
recording because he did not want any electronic record of the talk.

Despite Schacter's claims Muslims have esteemed Jerusalem intensely
since it first came under Islamic rule, and the city was an
intellectual, spiritual and pilgramage center for the whole Muslim
world. In contrast, since the 10th century at least (probably earlier)
Jerusalem has had much more importance for Jews as a spiritual concept
than as a physical place.

Vilna was the Jerusalem of Lithuania. Thessalonika was la chica
Yerushalayim. Amsterdam was the Jerusalem of the North. While for
Palestinians there is only one Jerusalem, it probably would not be
hard to come up with 50-100 cities that Jews called Jerusalem over the
last millennium.

I could write a few interesting chapters on some of the most
interesting of these "Jerusalems."

The actual physical Jerusalem became, especially for ethnic
Ashkenazim, sort of a dumping ground for trouble-makers or eccentrics
and not a place of tremendous emotional significance or attachment. A
young woman, the Virgin of Ludmir, is getting uppity and trying to
play the role of a Tzaddik or Rebbe. The community sends her to
Jerusalem in Palestine, and for the most part no one hears of her again.

As for Noah Feldman, he was a junior Harvard fellow and has a D.Phil.
(Oxon) in Islamic Thought. The Bush administration sent Feldman to
Iraq in the early days of the occupation.  He was to oversee the
proper incorporation of Islamic principles into the Iraqi
constitution.  He was to take into account the Shiite and Sunni
sectarian differences. I doubt that many Iraqis considered such issues
so important before Feldman (and thus the Bush administration) told
Iraqis that the differences were so critical. Feldman only lasted in
Iraq for about a month.  He needed an Iraqi Arabic phrase book to get
around. He probably bears some responsibility for subsequent sectarian
carnage.

Joachim Martillo - thorsprovoni @ aol.com

===

Orthodox Paradox
By NOAH FELDMAN
July 22, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/22/magazine/22yeshiva-t.html?ex=1186027200&en=427\
7230fa9e0780a&ei=5070


A number of years ago, I went to my 10th high-school reunion, in the
backyard of the one classmate whose parents had a pool. Lots of my
classmates were there. Almost all were married, and many already had
kids. This was not as unusual as it might seem, since I went to a
yeshiva day school, and nearly everyone remained Orthodox. I brought
my girlfriend. At the end, we all crowded into a big group photo, shot
by the school photographer, who had taken our pictures from first
grade through graduation. When the alumni newsletter came around a few
months later, I happened to notice the photo. I looked, then looked
again. My girlfriend and I were nowhere to be found.

I didn't want to seem paranoid, especially in front of my girlfriend,
to whom I was by that time engaged. So I called my oldest school
friend, who appeared in the photo, and asked for her explanation.
"You're kidding, right?" she said. My fiancée was Korean-American. Her
presence implied the prospect of something that from the standpoint of
Orthodox Jewish law could not be recognized: marriage to someone who
was not Jewish. That hint was reason enough to keep us out.

Not long after, I bumped into the photographer, in synagogue, on Yom
Kippur. When I walked over to him, his pained expression told me what
I already knew. "It wasn't me," he said. I believed him.

Since then I have occasionally been in contact with the school's
alumni director, who has known me since I was a child. I say "in
contact," but that implies mutuality where none exists. What I really
mean is that in the nine years since the reunion I have sent him
several updates about my life, for inclusion in the "Mazal Tov"
section of the newsletter. I sent him news of my marriage. When our
son was born, I asked him to report that happy event. The most recent
news was the birth of our daughter this winter. Nothing doing. None of
my reports made it into print.

It would be more dramatic if I had been excommunicated like Baruch
Spinoza, in a ceremony complete with black candles and a ban on all
social contact, a rite whose solemnity reflected the seriousness of
its consequences. But in the modern world, the formal communal ban is
an anachronism. Many of my closest relationships are still with people
who remain in the Orthodox fold. As best I know, no one, not even the
rabbis at my old school who disapprove of my most important life
decisions, would go so far as to refuse to shake my hand. What remains
of the old technique of excommunication is simply nonrecognition in
the school's formal publications, where my classmates' growing
families and considerable accomplishments are joyfully celebrated.

The yeshiva where I studied considers itself modern Orthodox, not
ultra-Orthodox. We followed a rigorous secular curriculum alongside
traditional Talmud and Bible study. Our advanced Talmud and Hebrew
classes were interspersed with advanced-placement courses in French
literature and European political history, all skillfully coordinated
to prime us for the Ivy League.

To try to be at once a Lithuanian yeshiva and a New England prep
school: that was the unspoken motto of the Maimonides School of
Brookline, Mass., where I studied for 12 years.

That aspiration is not without its difficulties. My own personal
lesson in nonrecognition is just one small symptom of the challenge of
reconciling the vastly disparate values of tradition and modernity —
of Slobodka and St. Paul's. In premodern Europe, where the state gave
the Jewish community the power to enforce its own rules of membership
through coercive force, excommunication literally divested its victim
of his legal personality, of his rights and standing in the community.
The modern liberal state, though, neither polices nor delegates the
power to police religious membership; that is now a social matter, not
a legal one. Today a religious community that seeks to preserve its
traditional structure must maintain its boundaries using whatever
independent means it can muster — right down to the selective editing
of alumni newsletters.

Despite my intimate understanding of the mind-set that requires such
careful attention to who is in and who is out, I am still somehow
taken by surprise each time I am confronted with my old school's
inability to treat me like any other graduate. I have tried in my own
imperfect way to live up to values that the school taught me,
expressing my respect and love for the wisdom of the tradition while
trying to reconcile Jewish faith with scholarship and engagement in
the public sphere. As a result, I have not felt myself to have
rejected my upbringing, even when some others imagine me to have done
so by virtue of my marriage.

Some part of me still expects — against the judgment of experience —
that the individual human beings who make up the institution and
community where I spent so many years of my life will put our
longstanding friendships ahead of the imperative to define boundaries.
The school did educate me and influence me deeply. What I learned
there informs every part of my inner life. In the sense of shared
history and formation, I remain of the community even while no longer
fully in the community.

If this is dissonance, it is at least dissonance that the modern
Orthodox should be able to understand: the desire to inhabit multiple
worlds simultaneously and to defy contradiction with coexistence.
After all, the school's attempt to bring the ideals of Orthodox
Judaism into dialogue with a certain slice of late-20th-century
American life was in many ways fantastically rich and productive. For
those of us willing to accept a bit of both worlds, I would say, it
almost worked.

Fitting In

Since the birth of modern Orthodox Judaism in 19th-century Germany, a
central goal of the movement has been to normalize the observance of
traditional Jewish law — to make it possible to follow all 613
biblical commandments assiduously while still participating in the
reality of the modern world. You must strive to be, as a poet of the
time put it, "a Jew in the home and a man in the street." Even as we
students of the Maimonides School spent half of every school day
immersed in what was unabashedly a medieval curriculum, our aim was to
seem to outsiders — and to ourselves — like reasonable, mainstream
people, not fanatics or cult members.

This ambition is best exemplified today by Senator Joe Lieberman. His
run for the vice presidency in 2000 put the "modern" in modern
Orthodox, demonstrating that an Orthodox Jewish candidate could be
accepted by America at large as essentially a regular guy. (Some of
this, of course, was simply the result of ignorance. As John Breaux,
then a senator from Louisiana, so memorably put it with regard to
Lieberman during the 2000 campaign, "I don't think American voters
care where a man goes to church on Sunday.") Whatever concerns
Lieberman's Jewish identity may have raised in the heartland seem to
have been moderated, rather than stoked, by the fact that his chosen
Jewish denomination was Orthodox — that he seemed to really and truly
believe in something. His Orthodoxy elicited none of the
half-whispered attacks that Mitt Romney's Mormonism has already
prompted in this electoral cycle, none of the dark hints that it was,
in some basic sense, weird.

Lieberman's overt normalcy really is remarkable. Though modern
Orthodox Jews do not typically wear the long beards, side curls and
black, nostalgic Old World garments favored by the ultra-Orthodox, the
men do wear beneath their clothes a small fringed prayer shawl every
bit as outré as the sacred undergarments worn by Mormons. Morning
prayers are accompanied by the daily donning of phylacteries, which,
though painless, resemble in their leather-strappy way the cinched
cilice worn by the initiates of Opus Dei and so lasciviously depicted
in "The Da Vinci Code." Food restrictions are tight: a committed
modern Orthodox observer would not drink wine with non-Jews and would
have trouble finding anything to eat in a nonkosher restaurant other
than undressed cold greens (assuming, of course, that the salad was
prepared with a kosher knife).

The dietary laws of kashrut are designed to differentiate and distance
the observant person from the rest of the world. When followed
precisely, as I learned growing up, they accomplish exactly that.
Every bite requires categorization into permitted and prohibited, milk
or meat. To follow these laws, to analyze each ingredient in each food
that comes into your purview, is to construct the world in terms of
the rules borne by those who keep kosher. The category of the unkosher
comes unconsciously to apply not only to foods that fall outside the
rules but also to the people who eat that food — which is to say,
almost everyone in the world, whether Jewish or not. You cannot easily
break bread with them, but that is not all. You cannot, in a deeper
sense, participate with them in the common human activity of restoring
the body through food.

And yet the Maimonides School, by juxtaposing traditional and secular
curricula, gave me a feeling of being connected to the broader world.
Line by line we burrowed into the old texts in their original Hebrew
and Aramaic. The poetry of the Prophets sang in our ears. After years
of this, I found I could recite the better part of the Hebrew Bible
from memory.

Among other things, this meant that when I encountered the writings of
the Puritans who founded the Massachusetts Bay Colony, I felt
immediate kinship. They read those same exact texts again and again —
often in Hebrew — searching for clues about their own errand into the
American wilderness.

In our literature classes we would glimpse Homer's wine-dark sea, then
move to a different classroom and dive headlong into the sea of the
Talmud. Here the pleasure of legal-intellectual argument had no
stopping place, no end. A problem in Talmud study is never answered,
it is only deepened. The Bible prohibits work on the Sabbath. But what
is work? The rabbis began with 39 categories, each of which called for
its own classification into as many as 39 further subcategories. Then
came the problem of intention: What state of mind is required for
"work" to have occurred? You might perform an act of work
absent-mindedly, having forgotten that it was the Sabbath, or
ignorantly, not knowing that action constituted work. You might
perform an action with the goal of achieving some permissible outcome
— but that result might inevitably entail some prohibited work's
taking place. Learning this sort of reasoning as a child prepared me
well, as it has countless others, for the ways of American law.

Beyond the complementarities of Jewish learning and secular knowledge,
our remarkable teachers also offered access to a wider world. Even
among the rabbis there was a smattering of Ph.D.'s and near-doctorates
to give us a taste of a critical-academic approach to knowledge, not
just a religious one. And the teachers of the secular subjects were
fantastic. One of the best taught me eighth-grade English when he was
barely out of college himself, before he became a poet, a professor
and an important queer theorist. Given Orthodoxy's condemnation of
homosexuality, he must have made it onto the faculty through the sheer
cluelessness of the administration. Lord only knows what teachers like
him, visitors from the real world, made of our quirky ways. (In the
book of poems about his teaching years, we students are decorously
transformed into Italian-Americans.)

In allowing us, intentionally or not, to see the world and the Torah
as profoundly interconnected, the school was faithful to the doctrines
of its eponym, the great medieval Jewish legalist and philosopher
Moses Maimonides. Easily the most extraordinary figure in
post-biblical Jewish history, Maimonides taught that accurate
knowledge of the world — physical and metaphysical — was, alongside
studying, obeying and understanding the commandments, the one route to
the ultimate summum bonum of knowing God. A life lived by these
precepts can be both noble and beautiful, and I believe the best and
wisest of my classmates and teachers come very close indeed to
achieving it.

The Dynamics of Prohibition

For many of us, the consilience of faith and modernity that sometimes
appears within the reach of modern Orthodoxy is a tantalizing
prospect. But it can be undermined by the fragile fault lines between
the moral substructures of the two worldviews, which can widen into
deep ruptures on important matters of life and love.

One time at Maimonides a local physician — a well-known figure in the
community who later died tragically young — addressed a school
assembly on the topic of the challenges that a modern Orthodox
professional may face. The doctor addressed the Talmudic dictum that
the saving of a life trumps the Sabbath. He explained that in its
purest form, this principle applies only to the life of a Jew. The
rabbis of the Talmud, however, were unprepared to allow the life of a
non-Jew to be extinguished because of the no-work commandment, and so
they ruled that the Sabbath could be violated to save the life of a
non-Jew out of concern for maintaining peaceful relations between the
Jewish and non-Jewish communities.

Depending on how you look at it, this ruling is either an example of
outrageously particularist religious thinking, because in principle it
values Jewish life more than non-Jewish life, or an instance of
laudable universalism, because in practice it treats all lives
equally. The physician quite reasonably opted for the latter
explanation. And he added that he himself would never distinguish
Jewish from non-Jewish patients: a human being was a human being.

This appealing sentiment did not go unchallenged. One of my teachers
rose to suggest that the doctor's attitude was putting him in danger
of violating the Torah. The teacher reported that he had himself heard
from his own rabbi, a leading modern-Orthodox Talmudist associated
with Yeshiva University, that in violating the Sabbath to treat a
non-Jew, intention was absolutely crucial. If you intended to save the
patient's life so as to facilitate good relations between Jews and
non-Jews, your actions were permissible. But if, to the contrary, you
intended to save the patient out of universal morality, then you were
in fact guilty of violating the Sabbath, because the motive for acting
was not the motive on the basis of which the rabbis allowed the
Sabbath violation to occur.

Later, in class, the teacher apologized to us students for what he
said to the doctor. His comments, he said, were inappropriate — not
because they were wrongheaded, but because non-Jews were present in
the audience when he made them. The double standard of Jews and
non-Jews, in other words, was for him truly irreducible: it was not
just about noting that only Jewish lives merited violation of the
Sabbath, but also about keeping the secret of why non-Jewish lives
might be saved. To accept this version of the tradition would be to
accept that the modern Orthodox project of engagement with the world
could not proceed in good faith.

Nothing in the subculture of modern Orthodoxy, however, brought out
the tensions between tradition and modernity more vividly for a young
man than the question of our relationship to sex. Modernity, and maybe
the state-mandated curriculum (I have never checked), called for a day
of sex ed in seventh grade. I have the feeling that the content of our
sex-ed class was the same as those held in public schools in
Massachusetts around the same time, with the notable exception that
none of us would have occasion to deploy even the most minimal
elements of the lesson plan in the foreseeable future. After the
scientific bits of the lesson were over, the rabbi who was head of the
school came in to the classroom to follow up with some indication of
the Jewish-law perspective on these questions. It amounted to a
blanket prohibition on the activities to which we had just been
introduced. After marriage, some rather limited subset of them might
become permissible — but only in the two weeks of the month that
followed the two weeks of ritual abstinence occasioned by menstruation.

After that memorable disquisition, the question of relations between
the sexes went essentially unmentioned again in our formal education.
We were periodically admonished that boys and girls must not touch one
another, even accidentally. Several of the most attractive girls were
singled out for uncomfortable closed-door sessions in which they were
instructed that their manner of dress, which already met the school's
standards for modesty, must be made more modest still so as not to
distract the males around them.

Whatever their disjuncture with American culture of the 1980s, the
erotics of prohibition were real to us. Once, I was called on the
carpet after an anonymous informant told the administration that I had
been seen holding a girl's hand somewhere in Brookline one Sunday
afternoon. The rabbi insinuated that if the girl and I were holding
hands today, premarital sex must surely be right around the corner.

My Talmud teacher — the one who took the physician to task — handed me
four tightly packed columns of closely reasoned rabbinic Hebrew, a
responsum by the pre-eminent Orthodox decisor, Rabbi Moshe Feinstein,
"in the matter of a young man whose heart lures him to enter into
bonds of affection with a young woman not for purposes of marriage."
Rabbi Feinstein's legal judgment with respect to romantic love among
persons too young to marry was definitive. He prohibited it
absolutely, in part on the ground that it would inevitably lead to
nonprocreative seminal emissions, whether intentional or unintentional.

What Feinstein lacked in romantic imagination was more than made up
for by Moses Maimonides, who understood the soul pretty well. He once
characterized the true love of God as all-consuming — "as though one
had contracted the sickness of love." Feinstein's opinion directed my
attention to a passage in Maimonides's legal writings prohibiting
various sorts of contact with women. The most evocative bit runs as
follows: "Even to smell the perfume upon her is prohibited." I have
never been able to escape the feeling that this is a covert love poem
enmeshed in the 14-volume web of dos and don'ts that is Maimonides's
Code of Law. Perfume has not smelled the same to me since.

Difference and Reconciliation

I have spent much of my own professional life focusing on the
predicament of faith communities that strive to be modern while
simultaneously cleaving to tradition. Consider the situation of those
Christian evangelicals who want to participate actively in mainstream
politics yet are committed to a biblical literalism that leads them to
oppose stem-cell research and advocate intelligent design in the
classroom. To some secularists, the evangelicals' predicament seems
absurd and their political movement dangerously anti-intellectual. As
it happens, I favor financing stem-cell research and oppose the
teaching of intelligent design or creationism as a "scientific"
doctrine in public schools. Yet I nonetheless feel some sympathy for
the evangelicals' sure-to-fail attempts to stand in the way of the
progress of science, and not just because I respect their concern that
we consider the ethical implications of our technological prowess.

Perhaps I feel sympathy because I can recall the agonies suffered by
my head of school when he stopped by our biology class to discuss the
problem of creation. Following the best modern Orthodox doctrine, he
pointed out that Genesis could be understood allegorically, and that
the length of a day might be numbered in billions of years considering
that the sun, by which our time is reckoned, was not created until the
fourth such "day." Not for him the embarrassing claim, heard sometimes
among the ultra-Orthodox, that dinosaur fossils were embedded by God
within the earth at the moment of creation in order to test our faith
in biblical inerrancy. Natural selection was for him a scientific fact
to be respected like the laws of physics — guided by God but
effectuated though the workings of the natural order. Yet even he
could not leave the classroom without a final caveat. "The truth is,"
he said, "despite what I have just told you, I still have a hard time
believing that man could be descended from monkeys."

This same grappling with tension — and the same failure to resolve it
perfectly — can be found among the many Muslims who embrace both basic
liberal democratic values and orthodox Islamic faith. The literature
of democratic Islam, like that of modern Orthodox Judaism, may be read
as an embodiment of dialectical struggle, the unwillingness to ignore
contemporary reality in constant interplay with the weight of
tradition taken by them as authentic and divinely inspired. The imams
I have met over the years seem, on the whole, no less sincere than the
rabbis who taught me. Their commitment to their faith and to the legal
tradition that comes with it seems just as heartfelt. Liberal Muslims
may even have their own Joe Lieberman in the Minnesota congressman
Keith Ellison, the first Muslim elected to the U.S. Congress.

The themes of difference and reconciliation that have preoccupied so
much of my own thinking are nowhere more stark than in trying to make
sense of the problem of marriage — which is also, for me, the most
personal aspect of coming to terms with modern Orthodoxy. Although
Jews of many denominations are uncomfortable with marriage between
Jews and people of other religions, modern Orthodox condemnation is
especially definitive.

The reason for the resistance to such marriages derives from Jewish
law but also from the challenge of defining the borders of the modern
Orthodox community in the liberal modern state. Ultra-Orthodox Judaism
addresses the boundary problem with methods like exclusionary group
living and deciding business disputes through privately constituted
Jewish-law tribunals. For modern Orthodox Jews, who embrace
citizenship and participate in the larger political community, the
relationship to the liberal state is more ambivalent. The solution
adopted has been to insist on the coherence of the religious community
as a social community, not a political community. It is defined not so
much by what people believe or say they believe (it is much safer not
to ask) as by what they do.

Marriage is the most obvious public practice about which information
is readily available. When combined with the traditional Jewish
concern for continuity and self-preservation — itself only intensified
by the memory of the Holocaust — marriage becomes the sine qua non of
social membership in the modern Orthodox community. Marrying a Jewish
but actively nonobservant spouse would in most cases make continued
belonging difficult. Gay Orthodox Jews find themselves marginalized
not only because of their forbidden sexual orientation but also
because within the tradition they cannot marry the partners whom they
might otherwise choose. For those who choose to marry spouses of
another faith, maintaining membership would become all but impossible.

Us and Them

In a few cases, modern Orthodoxy's line-drawing has been implicated in
some truly horrifying events. Yigal Amir, the assassin of Yitzhak
Rabin, was a modern Orthodox Jew who believed that Rabin's peace
efforts put him into the Talmudic category of one who may be freely
executed because he is in the act of killing Jews. In 1994, Dr. Baruch
Goldstein massacred 29 worshipers in the mosque atop the Tomb of the
Patriarchs in Hebron. An American-born physician, Goldstein attended a
prominent modern Orthodox Jewish day school in Brooklyn. (In a classic
modern Orthodox twist, the same distinguished school has also produced
two Nobel Prize winners.)

Because of the proximity of Goldstein's background and mine, the
details of his reasoning have haunted me. Goldstein committed his
terrorist act on Purim, the holiday commemorating the victory of the
Jews over Haman, traditionally said to be a descendant of the
Amalekites. The previous Sabbath, he sat in synagogue and heard the
special additional Torah portion for the day, which includes the
famous injunction in the Book of Deuteronomy to remember what the
Amalekites did to the Israelites on their way out of Egypt and to
erase the memory of Amalek from beneath the heavens.

This commandment was followed by a further reading from the Book of
Samuel. It details the first intentional and explicit genocide
depicted in the Western canon: God's directive to King Saul to kill
every living Amalekite — man, woman and child, and even the sheep and
cattle. Saul fell short. He left the Amalekite king alive and spared
the sheep. As a punishment for the incompleteness of the slaughter,
God took the kingdom from him and his heirs and gave it to David. I
can remember this portion verbatim. That Saturday, like Goldstein, I
was in synagogue, too.

Of course as a matter of Jewish law, the literal force of the biblical
command of genocide does not apply today. The rabbis of the Talmud, in
another of their universalizing legal rulings, held that because of
the Assyrian King Sennacherib's policy of population movement at the
time of the First Temple, it was no longer possible to ascertain who
was by descent an Amalekite. But as a schoolboy I was taught that the
story of Amalek was about not just historical occurrence but cyclical
recurrence: "In every generation, they rise up against us to destroy
us, but the Holy One, blessed be He, saves us from their hands." The
Jews' enemies today are the Amalekites of old. The inquisitors, the
Cossacks — Amalekites. Hitler was an Amalekite, too.

To Goldstein, the Palestinians were Amalekites. Like a Puritan seeking
the contemporary type of the biblical archetype, he applied
Deuteronomy and Samuel to the world before him. Commanded to settle
the land, he settled it. Commanded to slaughter the Amalekites without
mercy or compassion, he slew them. Goldstein could see difference as
well as similarity. According to one newspaper account, when he was
serving in the Israeli military, he refused to treat non-Jewish
patients. And his actions were not met by universal condemnation: his
gravestone describes him as a saint and a martyr of the Jewish people,
"Clean of hands and pure of heart."

It would be a mistake to blame messianic modern Orthodoxy for
ultranationalist terror. But when the evil comes from within your own
midst, the soul searching needs to be especially intense. After the
Hebron massacre, my own teacher, the late Israeli scholar and poet
Ezra Fleischer — himself a paragon of modern Orthodox commitment —
said that the innocent blood of the Palestinian worshipers dripped
through the stones and formed tears in the eyes of the Patriarchs
buried below.

Lives of Contradiction

Recently I saw my oldest school friend again, and recalling the tale
of the reunion photograph, we shared a laugh over my continuing status
as persona non grata. She remarked that she had never even considered
sending in her news to our alumni newsletter. "But why not?" I asked.
Her answer was illuminating. As someone who never took steps that
would have led to her public exclusion, she felt that the school and
the community of which it was a part always sought to claim her — a
situation that had its own costs for her sense of autonomy.

For me, having exercised my choices differently, there is no such
risk. With no danger of feeling owned, I haven't lost the wish to be
treated like any other old member. From the standpoint of the
religious community, of course, the preservation of collective mores
requires sanctioning someone who chooses a different way of living.
But I still have my own inward sense of unalienated connection to my
past. In synagogue on Purim with my children reading the Book of
Esther, the beloved ancient phrases give me a sense of joy that not
even Baruch Goldstein can completely take away.

It is more than a little strange, feeling fully engaged with a way of
seeing the world but also, at the same time, feeling so far from it. I
was discussing it just the other day with my best friend — who,
naturally, went to Maimonides, too. The topic was whether we would be
the same people, in essence, had we remained completely within the
bosom of modern Orthodoxy. He didn't think so. Our life choices are
constitutive of who we are, and so different life choices would have
made us into different people — not unrecognizably different, but
palpably, measurably so.

I accepted his point as true — but for some reason I resisted the
conclusion. Couldn't the contradictory world from which we sprang be
just as rich and productive as the contradictory life we actually
live? Would it really, truly, have made all that much difference?
Isn't everyone's life a mass of contradictions? My best friend just
laughed.


Noah Feldman, a contributing writer for the magazine, is a law
professor at Harvard University and adjunct senior fellow at the
Council on Foreign Relations.

===

Noah Feldman's intimate critique in the Times seen as raising the
question of how to deal with Jews who marry out


Modern Orthodoxy Under Attack
Gary Rosenblatt
07/27/1997
http://www.thejewishweek.com/news/newscontent.php3?artid=14347


However tempting, it would be a mistake to dismiss Harvard Law
professor Noah Feldman's personal and pointed critique of Modern
Orthodoxy in The New York Times Magazine last Sunday ("Orthodox
Paradox") as merely The Big Kvetch.

His essay, sure to provide fodder for numerous sermons this Shabbat,
is a long and bitter complaint that despite his numerous and
remarkable professional accomplishments, he has been snubbed by the
Brookline, Mass., yeshiva high school from which he graduated with
honors in the 1980s.

Despite the fact that Feldman was valedictorian of his class at
Harvard, a Rhodes Scholar and Truman Scholar who completed his
doctorate at Oxford in record time and went on to help craft the Iraqi
constitution, he and his then-girlfriend were literally cropped out of
a reunion picture of Maimonides School graduates published in the
alumni newsletter some years ago, and none of the personal updates he
has sent in since have been published. Why? Because the girlfriend —
now wife — is Korean-American. Not Jewish.

And Feldman, who aptly describes the yeshiva's goals of "reconciling
the vastly disparate values of tradition and modernity" as seeking to
combine "Slobodka and St. Paul's," maintains that he has been rejected
by his community despite the fact that he has "tried in my own
imperfect way to live up to values that the school taught me,
expressing my respect and love for the wisdom of the tradition while
trying to reconcile Jewish faith with scholarship and engagement in
the public sphere."

Poor Noah, one may think on first read. How primitive and unfair for
his former yeshiva to refuse to publicly acknowledge his successes.

But as one continues to read Feldman's essay, we see that it is he who
is unfair in expecting to be lauded by a community whose values he has
rejected and in crafting an intellectually dishonest case for himself.

Still, the implicit and more lasting question raised by the essay is
how should the Jewish community in general, and the Orthodox community
in particular, deal with Jews who have married out?

Sending a message to our children that we deeply value in-marriage for
social, religious and communal reasons is all well and good, but what
do we do after the fact, once they've chosen a non-Jewish partner and
conversion is not a part of the conversation?

Unfair Arguments

As for Feldman's arguments, in insisting that Maimonides himself, the
12th century rabbinic scholar and philosopher, believed that knowing
the world was the best way to know God, he ignores the fact that it
was Maimonides who codified Jewish law, established the 13 principles
of faith, and insisted on adherence to halacha.

Feldman then goes on at some length to cite Jewish law's tensions over
violating the Sabbath to save the life of a non-Jew. But he fails to
mention that the dispute is Talmudic, not practical; no Modern
Orthodox doctor would hesitate to treat a non-Jew on the Sabbath.

Perhaps most upsetting, and unjust, the only allegedly Modern Orthodox
Jews Feldman describes in his essay besides Sen. Joseph Lieberman are
Yigal Amir, the assassin of Yitzchak Rabin, and Baruch Goldstein, the
American-born physician who murdered 29 Arabs in Hebron in 1994. The
two are cited as examples of men who took Jewish imperatives to their
logical conclusion by committing murder.

"That's like judging the peacock by its feces," noted Rabbi Saul
Berman, a scholar and former head of Edah, an organization that
promoted Modern Orthodox values.

Indeed, no serious Modern Orthodox Jew is unaware of the tensions
between upholding the Torah law and recognizing the values and
benefits of Western democratic ideals. Rabbi Berman credits Feldman
with pointing out the need to explore such tensions, which when
unrecognized or out of balance can produce an Amir of Goldstein, "but
it's not fair to judge the system" by such aberrations, he maintains.

Psychic Pain

In the end, Feldman's essay is less about Modern Orthodoxy than about
his own psychic pain over being rejected. He wants it all: to be
embraced if not applauded by the Jewish community whose values he has
discarded by marrying out.

As Rabbi Jacob J. Schacter, senior scholar at Yeshiva University's
Center for the Jewish Future, noted in a letter sent to The Times,
"fealty to Jewish tradition requires more than a `mind-set' expressing
`respect and love' for its teachings; it presupposes certain
fundamental normative behaviors. America is a country of choices, but
choices have consequences and not every choice is equal. It is
unrealistic for Mr. Feldman to expect to maintain good standing in a
community whose core foundational behavioral — as well as value —
system he has chosen to reject."

Judaism is not alone in this attitude. Witness, for example, the
Catholic Church's discomfort with former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, a
divorced Catholic who favors abortion rights, or any religious faith's
attitudes toward members who publicly violate its tenets.

But Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, author and television personality ("Shalom
in the Home"), cautions against alienating some of our best and
brightest Jews who marry out. Rabbi Boteach has been a friend of
Feldman's since he served as a rabbi at Oxford University where
Feldman studied for two years in the early 1990s. In an essay in the
Jerusalem Post this week, Rabbi Boteach says that in addition to the
"ethical and humanitarian considerations" regarding ostracizing those
who intermarry, the approach is ineffective, with intermarriage rates
so high.

He argues that the community has a far better chance of winning over
the non-Jewish spouse and the Jewish partner through welcoming
behavior rather than shunning the couple.

This inreach vs. outreach debate has been part of the American Jewish
landscape for a number of years, but there are those who suggest a
more nuanced approach.

"There is a difference between a personal and a communal response to
intermarrieds," noted one Jewish educator who knows Feldman from
Maimonides School. It's one thing, he said, to have a personal
relationship (and one wonders if Feldman would have felt less hurt if
someone from the alumni office had explained the decision not to print
his picture). "But for the school not to crow about a graduate who
married out — how could he think otherwise?"

Cropping Feldman and his wife out of the photo was "unconscionable,"
according to Steven Bayme, national director of contemporary Jewish
life at the American Jewish Committee and a graduate of Maimonides
School. But he noted that even Feldman acknowledged every minority
group requires boundaries to maintain and preserve its own identity
and that marrying out is viewed with disfavor by every denomination of
Judaism.

"The price for the individual may be tragic," Bayme said, "but the
loss is far more destructive for the community in terms of cultural
distinctions and communal cohesion if you remove the boundaries."

Irreconcilable Issue

What Feldman's essay points up is that intermarriage is the
irreconcilable issue for those who argue that American and Jewish
values are compatible. "We've sold a lot of Jews a bill of goods when
we've told them there are no contradictions between being a good Jew
and an American," noted Jonathan Sarna, a professor of American Jewish
history at Brandeis University. "In America you are taught you can
marry anyone you fall in love with, but Judaism argues that we are a
minority culture and will only survive if Jews marry other Jews."

Sarna chairs an American Jewish Committee task force on attitudes
toward non-Jews in the community, and asserts that with an estimated
1.7 million non-Jews living in Jewish households — to put it another
way, about 23 percent of those living in Jewish households are not
Jewish — this is "a very important debate" for the community to engage in.

Citing the "magnitude" of the issue and the "bitterness that drips
out" of Feldman's essay, Sarna suggests that perhaps it is time for
the community to reconsider ways to draw people in rather than ignore
or shun them, especially when there are indications that many non-Jews
are supportive of raising their children as Jews.

Others would argue that the community already has tilted so far toward
outreach and acceptance of non-Jews that there is little incentive
left for them to convert to Judaism.

What Noah Feldman has done, consciously or not, is raise some
important issues, less about his old yeshiva and Modern Orthodoxy per
se than about dealing with Jews who do not see marrying out as leaving
the fold.

Conversion is the most obvious and desired solution, but for those who
eschew that option, we need to explore ways to encourage their
positive exposure to Jewish life.

Feldman would argue that just because he intermarried does not mean he
chose to separate himself from his heritage. But being Jewish means
not only incorporating the values and traditions, but also remaining
part of a community.

For all of Feldman's candor in the essay, he has nothing to say about
where he fits into the community, if at all; whether he wanted his
wife to convert; whether they are raising their children as Jews or
not; or his feelings about all this. He only owes us such information
if he wants our understanding and empathy, which clearly he does.

He does owe Modern Orthodoxy an apology for pinning it with his anger
over rejection, knowing full well the rules of engagement. But we in
turn owe him a sense of gratitude for a wake-up call, however
unpleasant, about the need to struggle more deeply and honestly with
the moral and religious tensions and contradictions in Modern
Orthodoxy that can never be reconciled, and about learning how to deal
more sensitively with those on the outside who may be calling out — in
anger and loneliness — for a way back in.

E-mail: Gary @ jewishweek.org

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HEALTH ACTIVISTS LOOK TO RELIGION TO MAKE THE CASE AGAINST FEMALE
GENITAL MUTILATION -
Associated Press
http://news.bostonherald.com/international/africa/view.bg?articleid=1002763


Trying to stop a bloody ritual undergone by millions of Muslim women
in sub-Saharan Africa and the Arab world, health activists are trying
a new appeal - they're citing the Quran.

"The guiding factor is always Islam," says 34-year-old Maryam Sheikh
Abdi, who grew up in a region of northeast Kenya where 98 percent of
girls are believed to undergo the procedure, a genital mutilation
sometimes called female circumcision. Women believe "the pain, the
problems, the bleeding _ they are all God's will."

Health activists, finding that focusing on women's rights isn't
working to persuade Muslims to stop performing the ritual, are
increasingly using theology to make the case that "the cut" has
nothing to do with religion. Abdi, who speaks about female genital
mutilation on behalf of the U.S.-based Population Council, said
invoking Islam penetrates years of cultural indoctrination.

"Women don't have to torture themselves. Islam does not require them
to do it," said Abdi, who underwent the procedure when she was 6 and
was a college student by the time she realized it was not necessary
from a religious viewpoint. . .

Late last year, the top cleric in Egypt _ where the practice is
pervasive and many believe it is required by Islam _ spoke out against
it, saying circumcision was not mentioned in the Quran, the Muslim
holy book, or in the Sunna, the sayings and deeds of Muhammad _ the
two main sources of Islamic practice.

"In Islam, circumcision is for men only," Mohammed Sayed Tantawi said.
"From a religious point of view, I don't find anything that says that
circumcision is a must" for women.

Laws against female genital mutilation exist in many of the regions
where it is practiced, but poor enforcement and lack of publicity can
hinder the laws, human rights groups and women activists say. They say
laws aren't effective unless those who practice and require the
tradition are first made aware of its physical and mental damage.

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EUROPEAN UNION OFFICIAL SAYS WAR CRIMES MAY HAVE BEEN COMMITTED BY
FORCES IN SOMALIA
Chris Tomlinson
Associated Press
http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/world/20070406-0615-somalia-warcrimes.html


NAIROBI, Kenya – Ethiopian and Somali forces may have committed war
crimes in battles against insurgents and European Union countries
could be considered complicit if they do nothing to stop them,
according to an EU email obtained by The Associated Press on Friday.
The warning, by a senior security official, came in an urgent e-mail
to Eric van der Linden, the EU ambassador based in Nairobi.

"I need to advise you that there are strong grounds to believe that
the Ethiopian government and the transitional federal government of
Somalia and the African Union (peacekeeping) Force Commander, possibly
also including the African Union Head of Mission and other African
Union officials have through commission or omission violated the Rome
Statute of the International Criminal Court," the e-mail said.
EU officials, speaking on condition they not be named because a legal
matter was involved, confirmed the e-mail's authenticity.

The author, whose name was blanked out on the copy obtained by the AP
but whose senior position was apparent from the text, went on to
detail the exact statutes that were violated. They included
intentionally directing attacks against civilians and ordering the
displacement of civilians for reasons related to the conflict.

"In regard to the above mentioned potential violations of
international law there arise urgent questions of responsibility and
potential complicity in the commission of war crimes by the European
Commission and its partners," the e-mail continued. The European
Commission has been a major financial backer of the Somali government
and the African Union peacekeeping mission, which is currently made up
of only Ugandan troops.

The e-mail was sent April 2, following four days of the heaviest
fighting in Somalia in 15 years. On the day after the e-mail was
written, the European Union issued a statement calling for an end to
the fighting.

"We are deeply concerned about the humanitarian impact of the conflict
in Mogadishu and the indiscriminate shelling of heavily populated
areas," the EU statement said on April 3. Such a statement could
absolve the EU from failing to act to stop the alleged war crimes.

In the Somali capital, Mogadishu, residents were still burying bodies
from last week's fighting, which killed hundreds of people. Aid
organizations said it was the worst in 15 years. A fragile five day
cease-fire was still holding but residents were fleeing, fearing new
clashes between Somali government forces, their Ethiopian backers and
Islamic insurgents.

Richard Hands, deputy head of delegation for the EU in Kenya and
Somalia, said the e-mail was a routine review of the potential for war
crimes in conflict areas where the EU is working.

"These allegations are, of course, taken seriously and we are looking
into it," he said. "The European Union takes international
humanitarian law very seriously and are always aware in situations
where it is working."

The priority in Somalia is reconciliation that is inclusive and
genuine, he added.

Somali officials were unreachable for comment.

The e-mail comes just days before the EU was expected to release $20
million for the African peacekeeping force and could lead to its
suspension, a Western diplomat said on condition of anonymity because
he was not authorized to speak to the press.

The United States is also a major financial support of the Somali
government and the peacekeepers, pledging more than $120 million.

Solomon Abebe, spokesman for the Ethiopian ministry of foreign affairs
called the allegations a "fabrication."

"The international community, everybody knows that this is false," he
said.

But European diplomats said they were concerned.

"We are looking at this from a legal point of view at the Ministry of
Foreign Affairs in Stockholm," said Jens Orlander, the Swedish special
envoy for Somalia based in Nairobi, Kenya.

The European Union has no mechanism for investigating and prosecuting
war crimes in Somalia, that would fall on the International Criminal
Court.

One Somali human rights group, which asked not to be identified for
fear of retribution, said it was gathering evidence of war crimes in
Somalia for submission to the International Criminal Court for
possible future prosecutions.

Somali President Abdullahi Yusuf and his cabinet ministers have
repeated called for civilians to leave their homes because insurgents
have fired mortars at Ethiopian and government troops from densely
populated neighborhoods.

The U.N. refugee agency says some 124,000 people have fled Mogadishu
since the beginning of February. In the last six days 73,000 have fled
for safety.

New York-based Human Rights Watch called Friday for all sides to end
indiscriminate attacks against civilians.

"Civilians in Mogadishu are paying an intolerable price for the
failure of all sides to abide by the rules of warfare," said Georgette
Gagnon, deputy Africa director of Human Rights Watch.

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Trial of Comrade Ahmad Saadat, General Secretary of the
Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, postponed until 1 August.

The Zionist court in the Ofer occupation prison to the west of
Ramallah postponed the trial of the General Secretary of the Popular
Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Comrade Ahmad Saadat, until
the 1st of August, resolving to hold a number of sessions to hear
testimony on the first, fifth, and eighth of August.

The General Secretary refused to stand before the judges during the
session, or to state his name, or in any way recognize the legality
of the court, describing it as devoid of all jurisdiction and merely
one more feature of the occupation.

Demonstrators before the prison where Ahmad Saadat's trial was held
described the trial as illegal, lacking the most basic criteria of
objectivity and justice.

Comrade Khalidah Jarrar, Member of the Political Bureau of the
Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, delivered a speech to
the demonstrators in which she said that "this trial is illegal and
is based on "Israeli" orders. By means of these orders they try to
pass judgment on the Palestinian militants on the basis of testimony
of witnesses, attempting to convict them in an unjust court." She
demanded that the occupation be put on trial, rather than
Palestinian fighters.

For her part, the militant Abla Saadat, the wife of Comrade Ahmad
Saadat, stressed that agreements on prisoner exchanges with the
occupation must be put to good use, demanding that such agreements
cover the largest possible number of prisoners being held in Zionist
jails.

Announcement posted on the PFLP website at 9:19 p.m., Palestine
Time, Sunday, 29 July 2007.

Arabic original at:
http://www.pflp. ps/index. php?action= Details&id= 1199

==

Israeli Settlers Set Fire to Olive Orchards
http://www.palestine-info.com/en/default.aspx?xyz=U6Qq7k%2bcOd87MDI46m9rUxJEpMO%\
2bi1s7VHlu9hpiCXPL370UK8s4j5q0ddt0VSBbBgHscN%2fVmX9vF%2bO5%2bENsirjpMD9XLFdUR%2f\
5f0VwzWBCfIwefmdsGDJ3%2fuJeRPk9Fy2kVPFs4a%2fA%3d


NABLUS, (PIC)-- A number of Zionist settlers from the Yitzhar
settlement on Saturday started fire in thousands of fruitful olive
trees in the Palestinian village of Einbos, southeast of Nablus city,
for the second time in a week.

Villagers reported that more than 2,000 olive trees were burnt in the
incident, noting that the fire spread quickly due to the exceptionally
high temperatures.

They also said that fire brigades could not control the fire because
it covered vast areas of land and was spreading rapidly.
Zionist settlers from the same settlement last week set fire to
hundreds of cultivated dunums in the same village.

In a separate incident in Ya'bad village, west of Jenin city, an IOF
jeep hit a Palestinian child who was standing in front of his home
shortly before midnight Friday.

Eyewitnesses affirmed that the jeep deliberately hit Adnan Masoud Abu
Bakir, 13, who was bruised all over his body

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