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De Omnibus Dubitandum

The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it. - Karl Marx

October 23, 2009 - Friday 

Israel demands law of war be revised to allow massacres of defenseless populations

Israel wants law of war changed after damning UN Gaza report

10.20.2009 | Yahoo News
JERUSALEM (AFP) – Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu instructed his government on Tuesday to draw up proposals to amend the international laws of war after a damning UN report on its war in Gaza.
The security cabinet did not, however, discuss calls made by ministers for an internal investigation into the 22-day offensive at the turn of the year that killed some 1,400 Palestinians and 13 Israelis, an official told AFP.
“The prime minister instructed the relevant government bodies to examine a worldwide campaign to amend the international laws of war to adapt them to the spread of global terrorism,” his office said in a statement.
Israel was dealt a heavy diplomatic blow with the adoption by the UN Human Rights Council of the report that accused both Israel and the Hamas rulers of the Gaza Strip of war crimes.
Israel’s closest allies, the United States, Britain and France urged it to investigate war crime allegations raised by the fact-finding missions headed by Richard Goldstone, a former international war crimes prosecutor.
Defence Minister Ehud Barak backed Netanyahu’s call for a diplomatic campaign, saying that Israel should propose changes in the international laws of war “in order to facilitate the war on terrorism,” an official quoted him as saying.
“It is in the interest of anyone fighting terrorism. We must give the IDF (Israeli army) the full backing to have the freedom of action,” Barak said.
Netanyahu dismissed the Goldstone report on the Gaza war and vowed that Israel would not give up its right of self-defence.
“We are struggling to delegitimise the ongoing attempts to delegitimise Israel… We must persistently fight this lie, which is being spread by the Goldstone report,” Netanyahu was quoted as saying.
“I want to make it clear: no one will weaken our ability and right to defend our children, citizens and communities.”
Goldstone, the respected South African jurist who led the UN fact-finding team, recommended that the conclusions of the report be forwarded to the prosecutor at the International Criminal Court at The Hague if the two sides fail to conduct credible investigations into the conflict within six months.
Israel has slammed it as a “diplomatic farce” and warned that it risked sinking the stalled Middle East peace process.
Goldstone, who has faced a storm of personal attacks inside Israel since the report’s publication, dismissed the argument and urged the Jewish state to comply with the recommendation to investigate the war.
“It’s a shallow, utterly false allegation,” Goldstone said during a meeting with a group of rabbis in the United States, remarks aired on Monday by Israeli public radio.
“What peace process are they talking about? There isn’t one. The Israeli foreign minister doesn’t want one,” Goldstone said, referring to ultra-nationalist Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman.
October 23, 2009 - Friday 
Israeli Arab Schools Get Only Half the Funding of Their Jewish Counterparts
by via counterpunch
Monday Oct 19th, 2009 12:02 PM
Educating children in a conflict zone is no simple matter. More often than not, those responsible for the curricula succumb to the masters of war and adopt a pedagogical approach that exacerbates rather than diffuses strife. Israel, unfortunately, is no exception.
Consider the way Jewish and Palestinian children are educated. Segregation in the classroom is the rule so that Jewish and Palestinian children only rarely mix. This strict segregation exists despite the fact that the Palestinians are citizens of Israel, comprising 19.5 percent of Israel's population--around 1.37 million people--and 25 percent of all school children. Unlike the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories, these Palestinians vote and pay taxes like Jewish citizens.

Notwithstanding their incorporation into the citizen body, Palestinian citizens do not enjoy full equality. In comparison to their Jewish counterparts, Arab schools receive half the per capita budget. It is therefore not very surprising that Palestinian students have the highest dropout rates and lowest achievement levels in the country.

Equality in education is reserved to the uniformity of the school curriculum, particularly the texts dedicated to teaching the history of the Israeli state. The existing history textbooks adopt the Zionist historical narrative, erasing all trace of the Palestinian nakba (Arabic for "catastrophe", referring to the events of 1948, when approximately 750,000 Palestinians out of a population of 900,000 either fled or were expelled from their homes). Furthermore, these textbooks emphasise the significance of the Land of Israel for Jews and attempt to prove that the State of Israel could only have been created in historical Palestine, while simultaneously portraying the connection between the Arabs and Palestine as purely incidental. Along similar lines, the study of literature in the Arab schools is oriented toward Zionist portrayals and is conspicuously lacking in any patriotic or nationalistic Palestinian sentiments.

It is, no doubt, a truism that public schools in modern liberal democracies inculcate their students with the dominant national worldview. In the US, for example, children still recite the pledge of allegiance and in France children sing La Marseillaise. But while the public schools in these democracies are today more willing to provide students with a multicultural curriculum that includes the historical narratives of those who have been oppressed and marginalised over the centuries, Israel is arguably becoming less tolerant to any pedagogy that challenges the dominant Zionist national narrative.

This increasing intolerance does not bode well for the future of the Israeli-Palestinian relationship. It has therefore become more urgent than ever to consider alternative educational models.

Since educating for tolerant thinking within a conflict zone is no easy task, there are very few such projects in Israel. The bilingual Arab-Jewish Hagar School in Beer-Sheba is the only one of its kind in Israel's southern region--a region that is home to over half a million people, 25 percent of whom are Palestinian citizens. While Hagar is a public school supported by the Ministry of Education, it is also the exception that proves the rule.

Hagar's uniqueness stems from the fact that it has created a venue in which Jewish and Arab children not only mix (each ethnic group makes up 50 percent of the student body) but learn together in an atmosphere of mutual respect. Currently 67 children, nursery through first grade, attend this bi-lingual school, whose commitment to equality informs every aspect of its educational agenda.

To ensure that Hebrew and Arabic are awarded equal status, for example, two teachers, one Jewish and the other Arab, are present in every classroom. By creating a bilingual space that encourages direct contact with the heritage and customs of the different cultures, Hagar promotes tolerance, while being sensitive to nurture the personal identity of each child and each tradition. Thus, by the time the children are old enough to learn that there are two conflicting national narratives, both of which will be taught, they already have the necessary emotional and intellectual tools to deal with conflict through dialogue.

Hagar is an educational island that is expanding against all odds. Indeed, the school's achievements within the current political context--especially following the assault on Gaza and the sporadic missile attacks on Beer-Sheba--are astonishing. But ongoing local support and international financial assistance are necessary to guarantee the future success of this educational space--a space that is actively translating a pedagogy of mutual respect into practice within a conflict zone.

Catherine Rottenberg is a founding member of Hagar and sits on its pedagogic committee.

Neve Gordon is chair of the department of politics and government at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and author of Israel’s Occupation (University of California Press, 2008).

Distributed by Common Ground News Service.
October 22, 2009 - Thursday 
Goldstone challenges US to spell out Gaza war report flaws
DUBAI — The author of a UN report accusing Israel and the Palestinian Hamas group of war crimes in the Gaza conflict challenged the United States on Thursday to justify its charge that the findings were flawed.
"I have yet to hear from the (Barack) Obama administration what the flaws in the report that they have identified are," South African former international war crimes prosecutor Richard Goldstone told Al-Jazeera television.
"I would be happy to respond to them, if and when I know what they are," added the jurist who led a fact-finding mission on the 22-day conflict that erupted on December 27, 2008.
"The Obama administration joined our recommendation calling for full and good-faith investigations, both in Israel and in Gaza, but said that the report was flawed," he said.
Some 25 of the UN Human Rights Council's 47 members, led by Arab and African states, voted for a resolution endorsing the report last week. Six others, including the United States, voted against, while 16 either abstained or did not vote.
"I've no doubt, many of the critics -- the overwhelming majority of critics -- have not read the report," he said, adding that the criticism had become personal.
Goldstone concluded that both Israel and Gaza's Hamas rulers committed war crimes and possible crimes against humanity during the conflict that Israel launched in response to rocket fire from the territory.
He recommended that the findings be referred to the International Criminal Court prosecutor in The Hague, if Israel and Hamas fail to conduct credible investigations within six months.
October 12, 2009 - Monday 

Rattling the Cage: Our exclusive right to self-defense

10.08.2009 | The Jerusalem Post
By LARRY DERFNER
Virtually all of Israel is now speaking in one voice against the Goldstone report, against any attempt to blame us over the war in Gaza. We’ve honed our message to a sharp point and, inspired by Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s performance at the UN, we’re delivering it with just the right tone of outrage:
How dare anyone deny us the right to self-defense! How dare anyone deny us the right to fight back against terrorism!
Very nice. Puts everyone else on the defensive. The right to self-defense is up there with motherhood and apple pie - who’s going to come out against it, especially for us, for Israel, for the Jews, for the people of the Holocaust?
The right to self-defense - perfect.
But I’d like to ask: Do the Palestinians also have the right to self-defense?
We probably wouldn’t admit it out loud, but in our heads we would say - again, in one voice - “No!”
This is the Israeli notion of a fair deal: We’re entitled to do whatever the hell we want to the Palestinians because, by definition, whatever we do to them is self-defense. They, however, are not entitled to lift a finger against us because, by definition, whatever they do to us is terrorism.
That’s the way it’s always been, that’s the way it was in Operation Cast Lead.
AND THERE are no limits on our right to self-defense. There is no such thing as “disproportionate.” We can blockade Gaza, we can answer Kassams with F-16s and Apaches, we can take 100 eyes for an eye.
We can deliberately destroy thousands of Gazan homes, the Gazan parliament, the Ministry of Justice, the Ministry of Interior, courthouses, the only Gazan flour plant, the main poultry farm, a sewage treatment plant, water wells and God knows what else.
Deliberately.
After all, we’re acting in self-defense. By definition.
And what right do the Palestinians have to defend themselves against this?
None.
Why? Because we’re better than them. Because we’re a democracy and they’re a bunch of Islamo-fascists. Because ours is a culture of life and theirs is a culture of death. Because they’re out to destroy us and all we are saying is give peace a chance.
One look at the ruins of Gaza ought to make that plain enough.
Here is our idea of the “laws of war”: When Israeli bulldozers rolled across the border into Gazan villages and flattened house after house so Hamas wouldn’t have them for cover after the IDF pulled out, that was self-defense. But if a Palestinian boy who’d lived in one of those houses threw a stone at one of the bulldozers, that was terrorism.
The Goldstones of the world call this hypocrisy, a double standard. How dare they! Around here, we call it moral clarity.
October 12, 2009 - Monday 

12th graders tell Netanyahu: We refuse to serve in IDF

10.12.2009 | Haaretz
Dozens of graduating high school seniors signed a letter on Monday declaring their refusal to enlist in the Israel Defense Forces.
The missive, which was addressed to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Defense Minister Ehud Barak, and IDF Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi, stated that the reason for their refusal to serve stems from the belief that “there is no military solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”
“We hereby announce our refusal to take part in the military apparatus,” read the letter which was signed by 88 youths. “We do not see a military solution as the proper solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”
“We are not evading the duty to contribute to society and we are not breaking Israeli law, but rather it is our war for human rights which is an act of preserving Israel’s democratic character,” the high school seniors wrote.
The four youths who presented the letter to the press said they intend to refuse military conscription and that they are ready to serve time in military prison.
The youths said other signatories chose to gain an exemption from the army through other means without refusing.
October 12, 2009 - Monday 

Israel rejects findings of UN report on Gaza incursion

(CNN) -- Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in a Monday speech at the opening session of the Knesset, slammed a United Nations report critical of Israel's tactics during its offensive into Gaza.
In his speech Monday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called the report an
In his speech Monday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called the report an "absurd claim."
The report, released last month, accused Israel of committing "actions amounting to war crimes, possibly crimes against humanity" during its military incursion into Gaza from December 27 to January 18. The report also accused Hamas of war crimes.
Netanyahu told lawmakers, "We will not agree to a situation where the [Israel Defense Forces] commanders and soldiers will be treated as war criminals after valorously defending the citizens of Israel against a loathsome enemy."
The prime minster's remarks followed a speech Sunday by Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas, who defended a controversial decision to defer action on the United Nations report. Abbas has been the target of Palestinian anger following the decision to postpone a vote on a draft resolution endorsing the report, effectively halting any possible action against Israel -- or Hamas, a Palestinian Islamic fundamentalist organization -- for six months.
Abbas said the additional time was needed to gather the necessary support for the resolution.
Richard Goldstone, the South African judge who headed the U.N. investigation into the Israeli incursion, demanded that someone be held responsible for crimes committed during it.
Netanyahu on Monday dismissed the report outright.

"The government and the people of Israel totally, utterly reject this absurd claim," he said.

Israeli President Shimon Peres, also addressing lawmakers, called the Goldstone report "one-sided" and said it "will not determine our fate."
"Out of the 26 suggestions that the [Goldstone] Commission made, none deal with how to fight terrorism," Peres said. "The Goldstone Commission Report says that the Palestinians have the right 'to forceful resistance based on the right of self-determination.' What is 'the right to forceful resistance?' To fire on civilians?"
There is an ongoing dispute about the number of people killed in the three-week military offensive, which Israel called Operation Cast Lead.
The Gaza-based Palestinian Center for Human Rights put the death toll at 1,419 and said that 1,167 of those were "noncombatants."

The Israeli military released its own figures earlier this year, saying that 1,166 people were killed and that 60 percent of those were "terror operatives."

October 2, 2009 - Friday 
First Published 2009-09-08, Last Updated 2009-09-08 11:21:39
The Guardian Shows its Mettle
 
The fear of being labelled anti-Semitic is for most journalists a powerful deterrent to engaging in strong criticism of Israel. Think, for example, how deterred Western journalists would be from following up a story that implicated the Venezuelan state in the trafficking of peasants’ organs, even if Hugo Chavez expressed outrage at the suggestion, notes Jonathan Cook.
 
A brief correspondence with the editor of Comment is Free
Liberal journalists in our mainstream media are always outraged at any suggestion that their reports or views are in any way influenced by the threat of retaliation from powerful interests. Students of the media are taught that in Western democracies journalists on serious newspapers seek the truth and, except in the case of the odd bad apple, refuse to submit to intimidation. Israel offers a particularly interesting test case in this regard.
In reality, the fear of being labelled anti-Semitic is for most journalists a powerful deterrent to engaging in strong criticism of Israel. Israel and its supporters are only too aware of the power they have, which is why, when mainstream publications step out of line by raising issues Israel would rather were not examined, it leaps on them, flinging about the charge recklessly. The orchestrated fury that greeted the Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet’s article in August 2009 about the Israeli army’s possible involvement in organ theft was intended precisely to remind other media not to make a similar mistake themselves.
The proper lesson for journalists to draw from the row over the Swedish newspaper’s story was that, when one writes critically about Israel, one should make sure to investigate the topic thoroughly, have a firm grasp of the evidence and not push the argument beyond the limits of what can reasonably be inferred. Those are worthy principles for any journalist to follow (and ones that in this case Aftonbladet forgot to abide by), even if they are more exacting requirements than those expected when writing about most other countries. Think, for example, how deterred Western journalists would be from following up a story that implicated the Venezuelan state in the trafficking of peasants’ organs, even if Hugo Chavez expressed outrage at the suggestion.
Unfortunately, however, the actual lesson of the Aftonbladet affair, the one apparently intended for and digested by our media, is to keep quiet about issues that Israel might get angry about.
A week after I submitted a commentary on the Aftonbladet story to the Guardian’s Comment is Free website (the article can be found here), its executive editor Georgina Henry rejected it. Her reasoning, at least to a former Guardian journalist like myself who worked many years on the paper’s foreign desk, seemed more than strange and did not to accord with the newspaper’s usual criteria for assessing either a news story or an opinion piece. Brian Whitaker, who had first received the piece and is the paper’s former Middle East editor, clearly like it and told me “we’re minded to use it”. But suggesting doubts about whether his own judgment would accord with that of the site’s executives, he warned that the issue was “a hot potato” and a decision would have to wait because “a couple of people are on holiday”.
Baffled by the reasoning provided by Henry in her rejection email, I engaged her in correspondence. Her initial willingness to respond looks generous but actually is driven, I suspect, by the need to persuade me, a former Guardian journalist, and herself that she is doing a reasonable thing in refusing my article. My polite but irritating suggestions that her own words imply that she is rejecting the piece not on its merits but out of fear of the expected backlash, as well as my requests that she explain which facts in the story need “100% independent verification” (a very unusual demand of an opinion piece), quickly lead her to shut down the debate.
The correspondence offers, I think, some interesting insights into the self-delusions of many of our leading liberal journalists, who desperately need to believe that they are, as they claim, fearless in their pursuit of truth.
The entire correspondence took place over 90 minutes on the evening of September 3.
Georgina Henry: “Sorry about [the] delay getting back to you on this. I'm sorry, but I'm not going to use this on Comment is free - i'm reluctant to run what perhaps would be better done as straight news rather than comment, which our own middle east correspondent hasn't checked out, on an issue as sensitive and as disputed as this. We've also, as you know, run comment from Seth Freedman on the original report by the Swedish newspaper, so we've already had a full debate on the site. Sorry not to be more helpful.”
Note already here, and later in her correspondence, her references to CiF’s inclusion of a piece by Seth Freedman on the organ theft row (which can be found here). This is intended as pre-emptory and decisive proof that she is not “scared” of the Israel lobby and potential threats of anti-Semitism. Her implication is that she and CiF took a brave decision in publishing Freedman’s article – or possibly any article on the issue. But objectively it was the easiest option for them to take. Publishing a piece by a Jew living in Israel, one who regularly points out that he served in the Israeli army, saying that the Swedish report was nonsense and poor journalism but that the Israeli leadership’s accusations of anti-Semitism were misjudged and counter-productive is hardly a daring or bold position to take.
Jonathan Cook: “Obviously you're not going to be swayed from your decision but the reasoning you've provided seems very strange indeed. In Seth Freedman's earlier piece, and in the debate among CiF readers, there was absolutely no discussion of the evidence of possible involvement in Palestinian organ theft of Prof Yehuda Hiss [Israel’s chief pathologist] - the important contribution to this debate provided by my piece. As for this being better done as a news report, how would this be possible? The ‘news’ linking organ theft to Hiss is several years old (even if it was widely ignored at the time) and would be of absolutely no interest to a news editor now. Also, linking Hiss to the story requires speculation, even if of the informed variety, that, while being acceptable in commentary, is hardly the staple of the news pages.
“As for the topic being disputed and sensitive, well that's precisely the point, isn't it? I'm trying to clarify the issues in dispute. By ‘sensitive’, I assume you mean that the sensitivities of Israel requiring us to keep this debate closed trump the senstitivities of the Palestinian families who are still waiting nearly two decades on for answers about what happened to their loved ones. It was ever thus.”
Georgina Henry: “It's a sensitive issue, because it requires 100 per cent satisfaction at our end that it will stand up to scrutiny. You will be the first to accept that anything you write will be combed through minutely by Israel supporters for evidence of bias and/or anti-semitism. For that reason, everything about this story would have to be independently checked by a Guardian reporter and I don't have the resources on Cif to do that. I can, as I said, put you in touch with Rory McCarthy, our correspondent in Jerusalem, via the news desk.
“Please don't jump to other conclusions like the worst of the conspiracy theorists on the threads on the I/P articles we carry. I hardly think you can accuse the Guardian or Comment is free of shying away from controversy.”
In fact, I most certainly could make such an accusation but let’s save that for another day and argument. Interesting that Henry now appears to be suggesting that she is doing this for my benefit as anything I write will be scrutinised by Israel’s supporters. Why is she more worried about my reputation than I am? In addition, her comments again suggest that her reasoning is being dictated by fears of the expected backlash.
Jonathan Cook: “On the issue of scrutiny, that was why I included the links to the articles published in the Israeli media. Yehuda Hiss' involvement in organ theft is beyond dispute, even if it was given minimal coverage at the time. Interestingly, although it was reported by Haaretz and others, Israel National News - the settlers' news service - gave it the most prominent coverage because Hiss was regarded as having violated the sanctity of the Jewish body, as far as religious Jews are concerned, in having removed organs from Jews before their burial.
“CiF's motto is "Facts are sacred, comment is free". That's why I stuck very strictly to the reported facts, easily verifiable by reading the links from Israeli sources, and made the most cautious speculation possible: that there are reasonable questions about what happened to the bodies when they were autopsied; that the [Palestinian] families deserve answers; but that they won't get them because of the relations of power under occupation. (Incidentally, and not a little ironically, I also tried to make the point that we journalists often fail in our duty to the Palestinians to investigate their claims, in this and other cases, because we are more worried about Israel's response than their rights).
“Also, I think the suggestion that I am arguing that there is any kind of conspiracy going on here unfounded and inappropriate. In my view, what's going on here is that CiF is taking the easy option, avoiding getting caught up in a row that has already engulfed another newspaper, and choosing to turn a blind eye to an issue of Palestinian human rights. That was doubtless the reason why Netanyahu and Lieberman leapt on Aftonbladet in the first place.”
Georgina Henry: “your view's wrong, actually. If i was trying to avoid the row, I wouldn't have run Seth's piece. No matter though - like so many people I deal with through Cif you've made your mind up about my motives and it's not worth corresponding further with you.
“The reality is that on this story I want independent verification by a Guardian reporter of what you've written and I don't, on Cif, have the resources for that. I still believe that it is better handled by news, so by all means contact the foreign news desk.”
She closes down further debate but not before salving her conscience by reviving a suggestion that I had already argued was not feasible: rewriting the piece as a news report. The verification argument is a red herring too.
Jonathan Cook: “I haven't made up my mind: you've told me yourself. This piece will be intensely scrutinised (because of Israel's intimidating lobby) and you therefore need a standard of proof - 100% independent verification, as you say - before publishing my informed commentary on this issue. If such standards were applied to other issues on CiF, nothing would get published at all on the site. There can be only one reasonable inference from your remarks: that you think this story is too hot to handle. If you can offer any other reasonable interpretation, I'd be delighted to hear it.
“You could instead have told me what facts still need verifying despite the links from established Israeli sources I supplied. I could then see whether it is possible to provide satisfactory proof. Certainly, I'm struggling to work out what the problem is myself. It is reported all over the Israeli media that Hiss admitted organ theft on a massive scale, and that he was Abu Kabir's pathologist through the 1990s. The army admitted to Aftonbladet, and no one has claimed otherwise in all the row about the story, that it carried out many autopsies on Palestinians in the early 1990s. It is widely reported in the Israeli media that all such autopsies are carried out at Abu Kabir, where Hiss was the pathologist (Rory can confirm this last point in a minute for you). The rest of it is educated and informed speculation and opinion, which by definition cannot be verified.
“Also, it should be pointed out that, even regarding the ‘facts’ included in this piece, it is not necessary that they be proved beyond any doubt. I am relying on credible reports from established Israeli sources about what they say happened in a police investigation. (The kind of evidence Guardian journalists use every day in writing their reports, by the way.) In the extremely unilkely event that any of those reports turned out all these years later to be wrong, that would not damage either my or CiF's reputation. We would still have made a reasonable argument - that the families' plausible claims need investigating - in good faith based on the available credible evidence.
“My problem with your response so far is that you are applying an unreasonable threshold of proof on this issue - one that could never be reached by a piece of commentary.”
Henry did not reply again. Paradoxically, a short time later, the Forward, American Jewry’s establishment newspaper, published a commentary piece confirming all the facts that Henry believed needed verifying.
Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. His latest books are “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East” (Pluto Press) and “Disappearing Palestine: Israel's Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books). His website is www.jkcook.net.
September 28, 2009 - Monday 

Netanyahu's speech / Cheapening the Holocaust

09.25.2009 | Haaretz
By Gideon Levy
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu cheapened the memory of the Holocaust in his speech to the United Nations General Assembly on Thursday. He did so twice. Once, when he brandished proof of the very existence of the Holocaust, as if it needed any, and again when he compared Hamas to the Nazis.
If Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad denies the Holocaust, Netanyahu cheapens it. Is there a need of proof, 60 years later? Or, the world might think, is the denier right?
And it is doubtful that any historian of stature would buy the comparison the prime minister made between Hamas and the Nazis, or between the London Blitz and the Qassam rockets on Sderot. In the Blitz, 400 German bombers and 600 fighter planes killed 43,000 people and destroyed more than one million homes. Hamas’ Qassams, perhaps the most primitive weapon in the world, have killed 18 people in eight years. Yes, they sowed great terror - but a Blitz?
And if we can compare a poorly equipped terrorist organization to the horrific Nazi killing machine, why should others not compare the Nazis’ behavior to that of Israel Defense Forces soldiers? In both cases, the comparison is baseless and infuriating.
Netanyahu began the speech as if he were chairman of the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial - Holocaust, Holocaust, Holocaust; his family and his wife’s family. Then he spoke in Shimon Peres’ terms, proposing a “rosy future” to humanity.
No less demagogic was his attack on the Iranian regime. They shoot demonstrators there, he protested vehemently. As if they don’t do that in our Bil’in and Na’alin.
Then came the kicker: Operation Cast Lead was a pinpoint attack. Israel telephoned thousands of people to tell them to leave their homes. Where to, Mr. Prime Minister? Into the sea? He said the IDF, which killed nearly 1,400 Palestinians, mostly civilians, exhibited unprecedented restraint.
Moving on: We made peace with every Arab leader who wanted to, the premier said. What about Syrian President Bashar Assad, who has been knocking on doors for years, claiming he wants peace? No one has opened the doors.
Talk of security and victims may still have buyers among the WIZO women of America, but that’s it. For a regional power that has almost every weapon in the world in its arsenal and is fighting primitive terror organizations, it is a bit difficult to be taken seriously when talking about security, especially when said security is only for Israelis.
Then came our ancient right to the land and the unavoidable Biblical verses, in English and the original Hebrew, that always end the performance on such occasions - though Netanyahu, unlike his predecessors, did not pull out a skullcap at this crucial moment.
That moment was supposed to move his listeners, but it left me, at least, unmoved by a propagandist prime minister. Hallelujah was heard last night only in Ramat Gan Stadium, at the Leonard Cohen concert.
September 26, 2009 - Saturday 
New Rule: If America can't get its act together, it must lose the bald eagle as our symbol and replace it with the YouTube video of the puppy that can't get up. As long as we're pathetic, we might as well act like it's cute. I don't care about the president's birth certificate, I do want to know what happened to "Yes we can." Can we get out of Iraq? No. Afghanistan? No. Fix health care? No. Close Gitmo? No. Cap-and-trade carbon emissions? No. The Obamas have been in Washington for ten months and it seems like the only thing they've gotten is a dog.

Well, I hate to be a nudge, but why has America become a nation that can't make anything bad end, like wars, farm subsidies, our oil addiction, the drug war, useless weapons programs - oh, and there's still 60,000 troops in Germany - and can't make anything good start, like health care reform, immigration reform, rebuilding infrastructure. Even when we address something, the plan can never start until years down the road. Congress's climate change bill mandates a 17% cut in greenhouse gas emissions... by 2020! Fellas, slow down, where's the fire? Oh yeah, it's where I live, engulfing the entire western part of the United States!
We might pass new mileage standards, but even if we do, they wouldn't start until 2016. In that year, our cars of the future will glide along at a breathtaking 35 miles-per-gallon. My goodness, is that even humanly possible? Cars that get 35 miles-per-gallon in just six years? Get your head out of the clouds, you socialist dreamer! "What do we want!? A small improvement! When do we want it!? 2016!"

When it's something for us personally, like a laxative, it has to start working now. My TV remote has a button on it now called "On Demand". You get your ass on my TV screen right now, Jon Cryer, and make me laugh. Now! But when it's something for the survival of the species as a whole, we phase that in slowly.

Folks, we don't need more efficient cars. We need something to replace cars. That's what's wrong with these piddly, too-little-too-late half-measures that pass for "reform" these days. They're not reform, they're just putting off actually solving anything to a later day, when we might by some miracle have, a) leaders with balls, and b) a general populace who can think again. Barack Obama has said, "If we were starting from scratch, then a single-payer system would probably make sense." So let's start from scratch.

Even if they pass the shitty Max Baucus health care bill, it doesn't kick in for 4 years, during which time 175,000 people will die because they're not covered, and about three million will go bankrupt from hospital bills. We have a pretty good idea of the Republican plan for the next three years: Don't let Obama do anything. What kills me is that that's the Democrats' plan, too.

We weren't always like this. Inert. In 1965, Lyndon Johnson signed Medicare into law and 11 months later seniors were receiving benefits. During World War II, virtually overnight FDR had auto companies making tanks and planes only. In one eight year period, America went from JFK's ridiculous dream of landing a man on the moon, to actually landing a man on the moon.

This generation has had eight years to build something at Ground Zero. An office building, a museum, an outlet mall, I don't care anymore. I'm tempted to say that, symbolically, all America can do lately is keep digging a hole, but Ground Zero doesn't represent a hole. It is a hole. America: Home of the Freedom Pit. Ironically, it's spitting distance from Wall Street, where they knock down buildings a different way - through foreclosure.

That's the ultimate sign of our lethargy: millions thrown out of their homes, tossed out of work, lost their life savings, retirements postponed - and they just take it. 30% interest on credit cards? It's a good thing the Supreme Court legalized sodomy a few years ago.

Why can't we get off our back? Is it something in the food? Actually, yes. I found out something interesting researching last week's editorial on how we should be taxing the unhealthy things Americans put into their bodies, like sodas and junk foods and gerbils. Did you know that we eat the same high-fat, high-carb, sugar-laden shit that's served in prisons and in religious cults to keep the subjects in a zombie-like state of lethargic compliance? Why haven't Americans arisen en masse to demand a strong public option? Because "The Bachelor" is on. We're tired and our brain stems hurt from washing down French fries with McDonald's orange drink.

The research is in: high-fat diets makes you lazy and stupid. Rats on an American diet weren't motivated to navigate their maze and once in the maze they made more mistakes. And, instead of exercising on their wheel, they just used it to hang clothes on. Of course we can't ban assault rifles - we're the first generation too lazy to make its own coffee. We're the generation that invented the soft chocolate chip cookie: like a cookie, only not so exhausting to chew. I ask you, if the food we're eating in America isn't making us stupid, how come the people in Carl's Jr. ads never think to put a napkin over their pants?


Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bill-maher/new-rule-if-america-cant_b_299383.html
September 24, 2009 - Thursday 
The Military Religious Freedom Foundation was founded in 2005 by Mikey Weinstein, a U.S. Air Force Academy graduate and Reagan administration White House counsel, after the harassment his own sons faced as Jewish cadets at the academy led him to discover that the fundamentalist Christian takeover of the Air Force Academy was far from an isolated problem.
It was a militarywide issue that needed to be confronted head on. But it quickly became apparent that MRFF's initial mission of protecting the rights of our men and women in uniform was only addressing part of the problem.
The evangelizing and proselytizing of Iraqi and Afghan Muslims by private religious organizations and U.S. military personnel also had to be exposed and stopped -- particularly the materials and media available via the Internet and television that could be used by Islamic extremists as propaganda for recruiting purposes.
When MRFF began exposing some of what we were finding on the Internet, Weinstein was contacted by two Bush administration national security officials, one civilian and one military, who confirmed that the kind of stuff we were exposing was, in fact, being used as fodder for propaganda, and they urged him to not stop what MRFF was doing.
The most astounding thing, as you'll see in the list below, is that it's not the private religious organizations that are most at fault in spreading the crusader message, but the U.S. military.
Top Ten Ways to Convince the Muslims We're On a Crusade
10. Have top U.S. military officers, Defense Department officials and politicians say we're in a religious war.
As many will remember, we couldn't have gotten off to a better start on winning hearts and minds when Lt. Gen. William "Jerry" Boykin, on his speaking tour of churches in 2003, publicly and in uniform proclaimed that the so-called war on terror was really a fight between Satan and Christians.
He made comments like, "We in the Army of God, in the House of God, the Kingdom of God have been raised for such a time as this," saying that George W. Bush, who had ignorantly called the war a crusade, was "in the White House because God put him there," and referring to the capture of Somali warlord Osman Atto, said, "I knew that my God was bigger than his. I knew that my God was a real God, and his was an idol."
Speaking at a Rotary Club meeting in his hometown of Concord, N.C., in December 2006, one of Boykin's supporters, former Rep. Robin Hayes, R-N.C., pronounced that stability in Iraq ultimately depended on "spreading the message of Jesus Christ, the message of peace on earth, good will towards men. ... Everything depends on everyone learning about the birth of the savior."
While few are as overt in their comments as Boykin and Hayes, plenty of other representatives of our government have made it clear that they view the United States as a Christian nation and the war on terror as a spiritual battle, promoting the specious notion that victory in Iraq and Afghanistan is somehow necessary to preserve our own religious freedom here in America.
Rep. Trent Franks, R-Ariz., in his remarks on the passage of H.R. 847, a 2007 resolution "recognizing the importance of Christmas and the Christian faith,'' said that "... American men and women in uniform are fighting a battle across the world so that all Americans might continue to freely exercise their faith ..."
The most recent Secretary of the Army, Pete Geren, in his commencement address at last year's West Point graduation, invoked the words of Thomas Jefferson, saying that Jefferson would understand the threat we face today -- tyranny in the name of religion. Geren quoted a few words from Jefferson's Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, and then he said: "Two hundred years after Thomas Jefferson penned these words, your sons and daughters are fighting to protect our citizens and people around the world from zealots who would restrain, molest, burden and cause to suffer those who do not share their religious beliefs, deny us, whom they call infidels, our unalienable rights -- life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."
Neither Franks or Geren, nor anyone else who has suggested the war in Iraq is essential to the protection of the religious freedom of "our citizens," has offered any explanation of how the outcome of this war could possibly affect the free exercise of religion by Americans.
While none were as widely publicized as those of Boykin, all of these statements, and many others like them, can easily be found on the Internet. Hayes' Rotary Club meeting remarks, for example, after being published in a few North Carolina newspapers, were reported on the blog B, and quickly spread through the blogosphere, turning a speech at a local Rotary Club meeting into a national story.
Retired Air Force Lt. Col. Rick Francona, when asked on MSNBC, "What's your reaction when you hear those words coming from a congressman," explained why comments like these were such a problem:
"Well, it's not helpful if this stuff gets back to the Iraqis, and of course in the days of the Internet and the blogosphere out there it's likely that it could. And you know our troops have enough problems over there just doing their jobs. Having to defend what a U.S. congressman might say, because you know, when you bring up the idea of proselytizing Christianity, to a lot of Muslims, that's very offensive. And if we can keep religion out of what we're trying to do over there, which is very difficult, it would be a lot easier for our troops. ... When you've got a congressman saying that the country -- they're not going to solve their problems until they follow the ways of the savior, it becomes very difficult for the troops to defend those remarks. ... If you're trying to be a unit trainer to, say, an Iraqi battalion, and the battalion religious adviser, the imam, would come in and say look what a congressman said, it just takes away from what we're trying to do." 
9. Have top U.S. military officers appear in a video showing just how Christian the Pentagon is.
In addition to inadvertently providing propaganda material to our enemies, public endorsements of Christianity by U.S. military leaders can also cause concern among our Muslim allies.
When Air Force Maj. Gen. Pete Sutton decided in 2004 to appear in uniform at the Pentagon in the Campus Crusade for Christ's Christian Embassy promotional video, a video full of government officials and high-ranking military officers saying things like, "we're the aroma of Jesus Christ," he probably didn't give any thought to the potential ramifications of publicly endorsing this fundamentalist religious organization.
But, not long after appearing in this video, Sutton was assigned to the U.S. European Command in Ankara, Turkey, as chief of the office of defense cooperation. Here's what happened, according to the Department of Defense Inspector General's report on the Christian Embassy video investigation:
"Maj. Gen. Sutton testified that while in Turkey in his current duty position, his Turkish driver approached him with an article in the Turkish newspaper Sabah. That article featured a photograph of Maj. Gen. Sutton in uniform and described him as a member of a radical fundamentalist sect. The article in the online edition of Sabah also included still photographs taken from the Christian Embassy video.
"Maj. Gen. Sutton's duties in Ankara included establishing good relations with his counterparts on the Turkish general staff. Maj. Gen. Sutton testified that Turkey is a predominantly Muslim nation, with religious matters being kept strictly separate from matters of state. He said that when the article was published in Sabah, it caused his Turkish counterparts concern, and a number of Turkish general officers asked him to explain his participation in the video."
In addition to the Christian Embassy video, MRFF has uncovered a slew of other videos of uniformed military personnel endorsing fundamentalist Christian organizations and military ministries, many of which have missions that include proselytizing Muslims. These videos are easily found on the Internet, providing plenty of potential propaganda material for recruiting by Islamic extremists. 
8. Plant crosses in Muslim lands and make sure they're big enough to be visible from really far away.
Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf recounted in his autobiography, It Doesn't Take a Hero, in 1990, when U.S. troops were deployed to Saudi Arabia for Operation Desert Shield, an attempt by a Christian missionary organization to use the military to proselytize Saudi Muslims led the Pentagon to issue strict guidelines on religious activities and displays of religion in the region.
It was left to the discretion of individual company commanders to determine how visible religious services should be, depending on their location's proximity to Saudi populations, and, in some cases, decisions not to display crucifixes or other religious symbols were made.
There were a few complaints about these decisions, but the majority of the troops complied, understanding that these decisions were being made for their own security. According to Schwarzkopf, even his request that chaplains refrain from wearing crosses on their uniforms was received an unexpectedly positive reaction, with the chaplains not only agreeing with the policy, but going a step further by calling themselves "morale officers" rather than chaplains.
But now, in Iraq and Afghanistan, Schwarzkopf's commonsense policies and priority of keeping the troops safe have been replaced by a flaunting of Christianity in these Muslim lands by troops and chaplains who feel that nothing comes before their right to exercise their religion, even if it means putting the safety of their fellow troops at risk.
Numerous reports and photos received by MRFF, like the one below, as well as photos posted on official military Web sites, show conspicuously displayed Christian symbols, such as large crosses, being erected on and around our military bases in Iraq and Afghanistan.
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These large Christian murals were painted on the outside of the T-barriers surrounding the chapel on Forward Operating Base Warhorse in Iraq. In addition to being a highly visible display of Christianity to Iraqis on the base, these photos were posted on an official military Web site.
It is even more important that the Army regulation prohibiting displays of any particular religion on the grounds of an Army chapel, a regulation that protects the religious freedom of our soldiers by keeping chapels neutral and open to soldiers of all faiths, be strictly enforced on our bases in Iraq and Afghanistan.
But, as these and other photos collected by MRFF clearly show, violations of this regulation that probably wouldn't be tolerated on bases in the U.S. are not only tolerated but promoted on our bases in Muslim countries.
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7. Paint crosses and Christian messages on military vehicles and drive them through Iraq.
For those Iraqis who may not see the overt displays of Christianity on and near our military bases in their country, there have been plenty of mobile Christian messages painted on tanks and other U.S. vehicles that patrol their streets.
The title of Jeff Sharlet's May 2009 Harper's magazine cover story, "Jesus Killed Mohammed: The Crusade for a Christian military," actually comes from one such vehicular message. "Jesus killed Mohammed" was painted in large red Arabic lettering on a Bradley Fighting Vehicle, drawing fire from nearly every doorway as it was driven through Samarra.
Other vehicles have sported everything from the Islamic crescent overlaid with the internationally recognized red circle and slash "No" sign to crosses hanging from gun barrels. The photo of the tank named "New Testament" was actually released by a military public relations office.
new testament 1
cross tank
apocalypse tank
6. Make sure that our Christian soldiers and chaplains see the war as a way to fulfill the 'great commission.'
Iraq is crawling with missionaries and evangelists, civilian and military, who show little or no regard for laws or military regulations. Why? Because, in their opinion, the "great Commission" from Matthew 28:19 -- "Go and make disciples of all nations" -- trumps all man-made laws. It's hard to find a military ministry whose mission statement doesn't, in one way or another, include fulfilling the great commission.
Campus Crusade for Christ's Military Ministry, for example, whose goal is to transform our enlisted trainees and future officers into "government-paid missionaries for Christ," is present at all of our military's largest basic training facilities, as well as the military service academies and ROTC programs.
The "vision" of another organization, Military Missions Network, is "An expanding global network of kingdom-minded movements of evangelism and discipleship reaching the world through the military of the world."
Organizations like CCC's Military Ministry could not succeed in their goals without the sanction and aid of the military commanders who allow them to conduct their recruiting activities on their installations. And there is no shortage of military officers who not only condone but participate in and promote, these activities.
The Officers' Christian Fellowship, an organization of more than 15,000 officers and operating on virtually every U.S. military installation worldwide, which has frequently stated its mission to "create a spiritually transformed U.S. military, with ambassadors for Christ in uniform, empowered by the Holy Spirit," has partnered with Military Ministry.
Describing the duties of a CCC Military Ministry position at Lackland Air Force Base and Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, for example, the organization's Web site stated:
"Responsibilities include working with chaplains and military personnel to bring lost soldiers closer to Christ, build them in their faith and send them out into the world as government-paid missionaries."
Similar statements can be found for each of the Military Ministry's many divisions, like this one from their Valor ministry, which targets future officers in ROTC:
"The Valor ROTC cadet and midshipman ministry reaches our future military leaders at their initial entry points on college campuses, helps them grow in their faith, then sends them to their first duty assignments throughout the world as 'government-paid missionaries for Christ.' "
Scott Blum, a former CCC program director at the Air Force Academy, said in a promotional video filmed at the academy that CCC's purpose is to "make Jesus Christ the issue at the academy" and for the cadets to be "government-paid missionaries" by the time they leave.
A Military Ministry instruction manual uncovered by MRFF in 2007 couldn't be more clear that CCC's mission is not simply to provide Bible studies to allow Christians in the military to exercise their religion. The manual states flat out:
"We should never be satisfied with just having Bible studies of like-minded believers. We need to take seriously the great commission."
MRFF found all of the above quotes, as well as the video filmed at the Air Force Academy, on the Internet, which of course means that any Islamic extremist looking for recruiting tools could also find this proof that our military is being groomed to be a force of crusaders. 
5. Post on the Internet photos of U.S. soldiers with their rifles and Bibles.
Turning our military into missionaries and crusaders naturally requires a good degree of indoctrination, and Military Ministry knows how to indoctrinate. Basic training installations and the military service academies are what they call "gateways" -- the places that young and vulnerable military personnel pass through early in their careers. The following explanation of its gateway strategy appeared on Military Ministry Web site in 2002:
"Young recruits are under great pressure as they enter the military at their initial training gateways. The demands of drill instructors push recruits and new cadets to the edge. This is why they are most open to the 'good news.' We target specific locations, like Lackland AFB and Fort Jackson [in South Carolina], where large numbers of military members transition early in their career. These sites are excellent locations to pursue our strategic goals."
Retired Army Maj. Gen. Bob Dees, the executive director of CCC's Military Ministry, said in the October 2005 issue of the organization's Life and Leadership newsletter:
"We must pursue our particular means for transforming the nation -- through the military. And the military may well be the most influential way to affect that spiritual superstructure. Militaries exercise, generally speaking, the most intensive and purposeful indoctrination program of citizens ..."
The indoctrination of basic trainees at Fort Jackson, the Army's largest basic-training installation, is a program called "God's Basic Training," in which the recruits are taught that "The Military = 'God's Ministers' " and that one of their responsibilities is "To punish those who do evil" as "God's servant, an angel of wrath."
Until being exposed by MRFF and taken down, the Fort Jackson CCC Military Ministry had a Web site containing not only its Bible-study materials, but numerous photos of trainees posing with their rifles and Bibles. This was not only allowed by battalion commander Lt. Col. Snodgrass, but there was a photo on the site of Snodgrass posing with the Military Ministry director and battalion chaplain.
This is from one of the group photos that were on the Fort Jackson Military Ministry Web site:
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Obviously, no explanation is necessary to see the propaganda value of photos like this. 
4. Invite virulently anti-Muslim speakers to lecture at our military colleges and service academies.
In June 2007, Brigitte Gabriel, founder of the American Congress for Truth and author of Because They Hate, delivered one of her typical anti-Muslim lectures at the Joint Forces Staff College.
In February 2008, Walid Shoebat, along with his fellow self-proclaimed ex-terrorists-turned-fundamentalist-Christians, appeared at the Air Force Academy's 50th annual academy assembly.
Gabriel's JFSC lecture, including the following quotes from the question-and-answer segment, was broadcast to the world on C-SPAN.
In answer to the question, "Should we resist Muslims who want to seek political office in this nation," Gabriel replied:
"Absolutely. If a Muslim who has -- who is -- a practicing Muslim who believes the word of the Quran to be the word of Allah, who abides by Islam, who goes to mosque and prays every Friday, who prays five times a day -- this practicing Muslim, who believes in the teachings of the Quran, cannot be a loyal citizen to the United States of America."
As part of her answer to this same question, Gabriel asserted that a Muslim's oath of office is meaningless:
"A Muslim is allowed to lie under any situation to make Islam, or for the benefit of Islam in the long run. A Muslim sworn to office can lay his hand on the Quran and say 'I swear that I'm telling the truth and nothing but the truth,' fully knowing that he is lying because the same Quran that he is swearing on justifies his lying in order to advance the cause of Islam.
"What is worrisome about that is when we are faced with war and a Muslim political official in office has to make a decision either in the interest of the United States, which is considered infidel according to the teachings of Islam, and our Constitution is uncompatible [sic] with Islam -- not compatible -- that Muslim in office will always have his loyalty to Islam."
Here's what Gabriel had to say about terrorists entering the U.S. from Mexico:
"Those al-Qaida members and Hezbollah members who are coming into the United States, they are immediately going from the Mexican border into the major cities where there is large Islamic concentration in the United States, such as 'Dearbornistan' Michigan ..."
And, on the Islamic community in the U.S. and racial profiling:
"We need to see more patriotism and less terrorism, and especially on the part of the Islamic community in this country, who are good at nothing but complaining about every single thing instead of standing up and working with us in fighting the enemy in our country."
Just as outrageous as Gabriel's JFSC lecture was the appearance of the "three ex-terrorists" at the Air Force Academy as featured speakers discussing "Dismantling Terrorism: Developing Actionable Solutions for Today's Plague of Violence." Shoebat, Zachariah Anani and Kamal Saleem are the three members of this traveling anti-Muslim sideshow. Their claims about their exploits as Muslim terrorists have long been questioned by academics and terrorism experts who have found a plethora of unlikelihoods and outright impossibilities in their stories.
Shoebat has also spoken at Tim LaHaye's Pre-Trib [Pre-Tribulation] Research Center conferences and John Hagee's Christians United for Israel events. Anani is a Lebanese-born Canadian citizen who claims to have killed 223 people while a Muslim terrorist. Saleem, under his real name, Khodor Shami, worked for Pat Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network for 16 years, was hired by James Dobson's Focus on the Family in 2003, and founded Koome Ministries in 2006 to "expose the true agenda of [Muslims] who would deceive our nation and the free nations of the world."
Gabriel's anti-Muslim screed at the JFSC eventually ended up on YouTube, and articles about the ex-terrorists' Air Force Academy presentation, which included things like Shoebat's pronouncement that converting Muslims to Christianity was a good way to defeat terrorism, also ended up online, providing plenty of proof that the U.S. military's training includes teaching cadets, officers and senior NCOs that Islam is evil and must be stopped. 
3. Have a Christian TV network broadcast to the world that the military is helping missionaries convert Muslims.
Travel the Road, a popular Christian reality TV series that airs on the Trinity Broadcasting Network, follows the travels of Will Decker and Tim Scott, two "extreme" missionaries who travel to remote, and often dangerous, parts of the world to fulfill their two-part mission to: 1. "Vigorously spread the gospel to people who are either cut off from active mission work, or have never heard the gospel," and 2. "Produce dynamic media content to display the life of missions, and thus, through these episodic series electrify a new generation to accomplish the great commission."
Season two of the series ended with three episodes filmed in Afghanistan. To film these episodes with the aid and participation of the Army, the TV show missionaries were permitted to be embedded with U.S. troops as "journalists." They stayed on U.S. military bases, traveled with a public-affairs unit and accompanied and filmed troops on patrols -- all for the purposes of evangelizing Afghan Muslims and producing a television show promoting Christianity.
The Department of Defense Public Affairs regulations violated by the military in its participation and assistance in producing this program are staggering, not to mention the regulations governing embedded journalists, the laws of Afghanistan and other military violations documented in the content of the program, which included an outrageous violation of the CENTCOM's General Order 1-A, which prohibits any proselytizing in the Middle Eastern theater of operations.
In complete disregard of this bedrock standing order, the Army facilitated the evangelizing of Afghans, which included the distribution of New Testaments in the Dari language, one of the two official languages of Afghanistan.
According to ABC News Nightline, which did a segment on the missionaries after MRFF exposed that the Army had allowed them to be embedded, "Decker and Scott said the military was aware of the purpose of their trip." In the interview Scott stated, "They knew what we were doing. We told them that we were born-again Christians, we're here doing ministry, we shoot for this TV station, and we want to embed and see what it was like."
As these video clips from the program show, the missionaries were able to just waltz into Afghanistan, without any of the advance approval and planning required for embedded journalists, and, within two days, be embedded with an Army unit. 
....
Although the Army's participation in the Travel the Road program, which, according to a Travel the Road publication, is viewed by more than 3 million people worldwide, is the most incredible example of the stupidity of broadcasting to the world that the U.S. military was aiding missionaries who were trying to convert Muslims, it is far from the only example.
On Sept. 10, 2008, the Discovery Channel's Military Channel aired a two-hour program, "God's Soldier." Filmed at Forward Operating Base McHenry in Hawijah, Iraq, the program's credits say it was "produced with the full co-operation of the 2nd Infantry 27th Battalion 'Wolfhounds.' "
The co-producer of "God's Soldier" was Jerusalem Productions, a British production company whose "primary aim is to increase understanding and knowledge of the Christian religion and to promote Christian values, via the broadcast media, to as wide an audience as possible."
Bible-verse text captions appearing between segments of this two-hour program, which focused on a evangelical Christian chaplain, Capt. Charles Popov, included, "I did not come to bring peace, but the sword," and, "Put on the full armor of God so that when the day of evil comes, you may stand your ground."
This was one of Popov's prayers in a scene in which he was blessing a group of soldiers about to go out on a patrol:
"I pray that you would give them the ability to exterminate the enemy and to accomplish the task that they're been sent forth by God and country to do. In Christ's name I pray. Amen."
That prayer is followed by a scene in which Popov, sounding an awful lot like CCC Bible study, says to the soldiers:
"Every soldier should know Romans 13, that the government is set up by God, and the magistrate, or the one who wields the sword -- you have not swords but 50 cals and [unintelligible] like that -- does not yield it in vain, because the magistrate has been called, as you, to execute wrath upon those who do evil."
The scene that tops them all, however, is one in which Popov is setting up a nativity pageant for Christmas -- using the unit's Iraqi interpreters to play some of the roles. Popov describes this as some sort of cultural exchange, with U.S. troops recognizing Ramadan, and Muslim interpreters, in turn, celebrating Christmas.
The stupidity of this is astounding. The U.S. soldiers participating in a Muslim religious observance are not risking death by doing so, but the Muslims, in a country where many consider converting to Christianity a death-penalty offense, are.
Broadcasting to the world via the Discovery Channel that Army personnel were putting Muslims in a Christmas pageant is absolute insanity and couldn't be a better recruiting tool for Islamic extremists. 
2. Make sure Bibles and evangelizing materials sent to Muslim lands have official U.S. military emblems on them.
What better way to say to Muslims that the U.S. military is officially Christian than to have official U.S. military emblems stamped on hundreds of thousands of Bibles floating around Iraq and Afghanistan?
Over the past few years, MRFF has amassed quite a collection of military Bibles -- some produced by private organizations, and others officially authorized by the military -- prominently sporting the seals of the various branches of the military and other official military emblems.
The latest addition to the collection is a photo from an officer serving in Iraq, who e-mailed this photo of a Bible being distributed in Iraq with both the Multi-National Corps -- Iraq and I Corps seals imprinted on its cover.
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And, it isn't just Bibles. Chief Warrant Officer Rene Llanos of the 101st Airborne Division, referring to a special military edition of a Bible study daily devotional published and donated by Bible Pathways Ministries, told Mission Network News that "the soldiers who are patrolling and walking the streets are taking along this copy, and they're using it to minister to the local residents," and that his "division is also getting ready to head toward Afghanistan, so there will be copies heading out with the soldiers."
Just like the many civilian missionaries who see the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as a window of opportunity to evangelize Muslims, Llanos said, "The soldiers are being placed in strategic places with a purpose. They're continuing to spread the Word."
This daily devotional being used by the 101st Airborne Division "to minister to the local residents," has military branch seals on its cover, giving the impression that it is an official military publication. And, while these logos are sometimes used without permission, and may have been on this particular book, the Iraqis and Afghans don't know that.
Then there are the Bibles sporting the military logos that actually were produced with the permission of the Pentagon, one of them designed by Pentagon chaplains. Revival Fires Ministries, "at the request of the chief chaplains of the Pentagon," has been shipping these Bibles to Iraq via military airlift since 2003, and, according to a ministry press release, this "full Bible is designed and authorized by the chief chaplains of the Pentagon."
The poster boy for promoting these Bibles is Navy chaplain Lt. Cmdr. Brian K. Waite, who has appeared in uniform at three of the annual camp meetings of Revival Fires founder Cecil Todd, and endorses the ministry, also in uniform, on the Web sites of Todd and his son, evangelist Tim Todd.
Just before becoming a Navy chaplain, Waite wrote a virulently anti-Muslim book in which he held that Islam itself is responsible for terrorism, and compared Islam, which he doesn't even consider a real religion, to Nazism.
Not long after his book came out, it was revealed that he had plagiarized much of the book and fabricated some of the endorsements on its cover. Not only does Cecil Todd clearly hold the same anti-Muslim views expressed by Waite, but so does Tim Todd. In fact, Waite's photo and endorsement of those Pentagon-endorsed military Bibles appeared right next to the following statement on Tim Todd's Web site:
"We must let the Muslims, the Hare Krishna's, the Hindu's, the Buddhist's and all other cults and false religions know, 'You are welcome to live in America ... but this is a Christian nation ... this is God's country! If you don't like our emphasis on Christ, prayer and the Holy Bible, you are free to leave anytime!'"
1. Send lots of Bibles in Arabic, Dari and Pashtu languages to convert the Muslims.
Worse than any English-language Bibles, even those stamped with official U.S. military emblems, are the countless thousands of Arabic, Dari and Pashtu Bibles making it into Iraq and Afghanistan, often with the help of U.S. military personnel.
In his autobiography, It Doesn't Take a Hero, Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf recounted his run-in with Franklin Graham's organization, Samaritan's Purse -- an incident that made it clear that the Saudis' fears and complaints of Christian evangelizing were not unfounded. While some of the Saudis' fears, the general explained, had resulted from Iraqi propaganda about American troops disrespecting Islamic shrines, the attempt by Samaritan's Purse to get U.S. troops to distribute tens of thousands of Arabic-language New Testaments to Muslims was real:
"The Saudi concern about religious pollution seemed overblown to me but understandable, and on a few occasions I agreed they really did have a gripe. There was a fundamentalist Christian group in North Carolina called Samaritan's Purse that had the bright idea of sending unsolicited copies of the New Testament in Arabic to our troops. A little note with each book read: 'Enclosed is a copy of the New Testament in the Arab language. You may want to get a Saudi friend to help you to read it.' One day Khalid* handed me a copy. 'What is this all about?' he asked mildly. This time he didn't need to protest -- he knew how dismayed I'd be."
*King Fahd appointed Lt. Gen. Khalid Bin Sultan al-Saud as commander of Saudi Arabia's air defense forces as Schwarzkopf's counterpart.
This was the incident that, as mentioned above, led to the implementation of strict guidelines on religious activities of military personnel. As also mentioned above, the adherence to and enforcement of regulations clearly aren't what they were back then.
Converting Iraqis and Afghans is a pet project of numerous private organizations (some with the help of the military), as well as military personnel and military organizations. Some missionaries even take jobs with DoD contractors to gain access to Iraqis.
All have found ways to circumvent the prohibitions on sending religious materials contrary to Islam into the region. There are literally thousands of people involved, and hundreds of thousands of Arabic and other native-language Bibles, tracts, videos and audiocassettes have made it into Iraq and Afghanistan, along with Christian comic books, coloring books and other materials to evangelize Muslim children.
A recent Al-Jazeera English news report showed U.S. troops at Bagram airfield in Afghanistan discussing the distribution of Dari and Pashtu Bibles to the locals, a blatant violation of CENTCOM's General Order 1-A. The report showed stacks of these Bibles on the floor, so they were undeniably there, despite the regulations prohibiting the shipping to Iraq or Afghanistan of any bulk religious materials contrary to Islam.
In the Spring 2004 issue of Gatherings, the newsletter of the International Ministerial Fellowship, Army chaplain Capt. Steve Mickel described the evangelizing he was doing while passing out food in the predominantly Sunni village of Ad Dawr:
"I am able to give them tracts on how to be saved, printed in Arabic. I wish I had enough Arabic Bibles to give them as well. The issue of mailing Arabic Bibles into Iraq from the U.S. is difficult (given the current postal regulations prohibiting all religious materials contrary to Islam, except for personal use of the soldiers). But the hunger for the word of God in Iraq is very great, as I have witnessed firsthand."
Obviously, by citing the regulation prohibiting the materials he was passing out as something that was hindering his proselytizing, Mickel was admitting that he knew he was violating regulations.
Another Army chaplain, Lt. Col. Lyn Brown, in an article titled "Kingdom Building in Combat Boots," stated:
"But the most amazing thing is that I was constantly led to stop and talk with Iraqis working at the coalition provisional authority. I learned their names, became a part of their lives, and shared Jesus Christ by distributing DVDs and Arabic Bibles."
The private organizations sending Bibles in Arabic and other native languages into Iraq and Afghanistan are too many to count, and many boast of the help they get from military personnel to distribute these Bibles. Here are a few quotes from some of these organizations:
"OnlyOneCross.com recently sent a case of Arabic Bibles to a Brother who is working in a detention center in Iraq."
The Salvation Evangelistic Association, which has soldiers in Iraq that their ministry converted at Fort Leonard Wood, in Missouri, now has these soldiers distributing the Arabic Bibles for them:
"Many young men in training at Fort Leonard Wood were converted to Christ. The Lord led us on to preaching in Army camps in the U.S., Korea and the Philippines. We are now supplying Arabic Bibles for distribution by our troops in Iraq."
But, topping the stupidity list, is a lieutenant colonel who was being so stupid that a missionary had to tell him that he was putting his troops and other people in danger. The missionary was from Liberty Baptist Tabernacle, which had already shipped 20,000 Arabic "soul-winning booklets" into Iraq, with more on the way. This officer, who knew the missionary from the States, went to his hotel and offered to use his troops to protect the people who were attempting to convert the Muslims.
This is from the insane story of what this genius of an officer did to meet with the missionary, copied from the ministry's Web site:
"On another note, a dear Christian friend, that I had met some 10 years prior, who was a deacon of an independent Baptist church in Missouri was also in Iraq. I was totally unaware of this. He was in the Missouri National Guard and holds the rank of Lieutenant Colonial. Col. Koontze immediately contacted me when he found out I was in-country. He was made aware of my being in Baghdad by a pastor friend of his that he had spoken with in the States.
"Through his command intelligence office, he located the hotel I was staying at. When he came to the hotel, I was sitting outside with the other pastors on the hotel's terrace, waiting for Robert Lewis [Global Resource Group-Director], who was going to meet with us that afternoon. Col. Koontze must have had 15-20 soldiers with him; they literally blocked off the entire city block with tanks and humvees to secure the area. He then walked into the lobby asking if anyone could tell him where Pastor Furse was. As he was saying those words, he spotted me and immediately said, 'It's good to see you again Bro. Furse.'
"At first, I did not recognize him, until he took his helmet off. We spoke for about 20 minutes at one of the tables on the terrace of the hotel; all the while the tanks and humvees were being lined up and down the main street in front of the hotel. After renewing acquaintances, I had to tell him that it would probably be best if he and his unit left as soon as possible.
"The Iraqi people in the hotel and those on the street were to say the least, very concerned. I did not want to bring that much attention to the hotel; for fear that terrorists would target the area as well [over the previous four or five days, we had heard sporadic AK-47 gunfire going off just blocks away from the hotel]. Col. Koontze agreed fully with me on that assessment and ordered his unit to leave quietly and as quickly as possible."
There are also videos, like the one below from Soldiers Bible Ministry of a chaplain admitting that Swahili-language Bibles are being sent in to Iraq to evangelize the Ugandan workers employed by the U.S. military. In this video, Army chaplain Capt. Chris Rusack boasts about managing to get the Swahili Bibles into Iraq, in spite of the regulations prohibiting this. Referring to this shipment of Bibles, Rusack said:
"Actually, they're in Baghdad right now. Somehow, the enemy tried to get 'em hung up there. There was a threat they were gonna get shipped back to the States and all that. We prayed, and they're gonna be picked up in a couple of days. God raised someone up right there in Baghdad that's gonna go -- a Christian colonel that's stationed there in Baghdad, and he's gonna go and get the Bibles ..."
 
....
In April, Soldiers Bible Ministry entered into an official partnership with an organization called Heart of God International Ministries. To announce this partnership, Heart of God sent out an e-mail about Soldiers Bible Ministry, featuring the Swahili Bible story as an example of the "supernatural things God is doing in Iraq."
"Right now there are about 200 men from Uganda protecting 100 U.S. Army soldiers in Iraq near Babylon. These men from Uganda have been having dreams, and these dreams have been of Jesus Christ as the messiah, which led them to begin asking questions about Christ to the chaplain. Many of these former Muslims have come to Christ."
The e-mail ended with this fundraising pitch for Soldiers Bible Ministry:
"The signs of the times are all around us ... Jesus, the messiah, is coming back soon. It is our responsibility to make sure every man, woman and child has had the opportunity to meet the Lord Jesus Christ. Seize every opportunity to share the good news ... seize this opportunity to put the word of God into the hands of U.S. troops and allied forces."
In spite of their blatant violations of military regulations, Soldiers Bible Ministry is heartily endorsed on their Web site by none other than the Army's chief of chaplains, Maj. Gen. Douglas Carver: "Thanks so much for your invaluable ministry of the word to our Soldiers."
In addition to Bibles, other Arabic-language Christian books are being shipped into Iraq and Afghanistan for distribution by our troops. The January 2009 newsletter of Worldwide Military Baptist Missions, for example, included these images of their English-Arabic proselytizing materials.
Photobucket
This is from the caption for these photos:
"In 2008, we shipped over 226,000 gospel tracts, 21,000 Bibles, New Testaments and gospels of John (to include English-Arabic ones!) and 404 'discipleship kits' to service members & churches for use in war zones, on ships and near military bases around the world."
And, last, but certainly not least, there is Jim Ammerman, a retired Army colonel and conspiracy theorist who heads a Department of Defense-authorized military chaplain-endorsing agency called the Chaplaincy of Full Gospel Churches, which endorses 270 military chaplains and chaplain candidates.
MRFF has demanded, for a number of reasons, that the DoD investigate CFGC and revoke Ammerman's endorsing authority, as I wrote in a recent post titled "MRFF Demands DoD Revoke Authority of Chaplain Endorser Who Suggested Democrats Should Be Executed."
Among the reasons for MRFF's demands is that Ammerman, working with an organization called the International Missions Network Center, set up a network of 40 of his chaplains serving in Iraq to receive and distribute Arabic Bibles in order to "establish a wedge for the kingdom of God in the Middle East, directly affecting the Islamic world," as he said in one of the CFGC's newsletters, and which IMNC called the "true reconstruction" of Iraq.
August 31, 2009 - Monday 
http://www.aftonbladet.se/kultur/article5691805.ab

Publicerad: 2009-08-26

"Our sons are plundered of their organs"

[Photo: Young Palestinian men throwing stones and bottles at Israeli
soldiers in the northern West Bank. In this area, Bilal Achmed Ghanan was
shot to death and cut up in a hospital. "Our sons are being used as organ
reserves," claim the Palestinians. Foto: Donald Boström ]

[Photo: Bilal Achmed Ghanan, 19, was shot and taken away by Israeli
soldiers. The body was returned stitched together from the belly to the
neck. Foto: Donald Boström]

[Photo: Levy Izhak Rosenbaum being led away by FBI agents. Rosenbaum is
alleged to have functioned as a middleman in the illegal organ trafficking
scheme. Foto: AP]


Palestinians accuse the Israel Defense Forces of taking organs from their
victims.

Donald Boström writes about an international organ trafficking scandal - and
about the time he saw the cut-up dead body of a nineteen-year old
Palestinian.

You could call me a "matchmaker", said Levy Izhak Rosenbaum, from Brooklyn,
USA, in a secret recording with an FBI-agent whom he believed to be a
client. Ten days later, at the end of July this year, Rosenbaum was arrested
and a vast, Sopranos-like, imbroglio of money-laundering and illegal
organ-trade was revealed in New Jersey: Rabbis, politicians and trusted
civil servants had for years bin involved in money laundering and illegal
organ-trade.

Rosenbaum's matchmaking had nothing to do with romance. It was all about
buying and selling kidneys from Israel on the black market. Rosenbaum says
that he buys the kidneys for 10 000 dollars, from poor people. He then
proceeds to sell the organs to desperate patients in the States for 160 000
dollars.

The accusations have shaken the American transplantation business. If they
are true it means that organ trafficking is documented for the first time in
the US, experts tell the New Jersey Real-Time News.

On the question of how many organs he has sold Rosenbaum replies: "Quite a
lot. And I have never failed," he boasts. The business has been running for
quite some time.

Francis Delmonici, professor of transplant surgery at Harvard and member of
the National Kidney Foundation's Board of Directors, tells the same
newspaper that organ-trafficking, similar to the one reported from Israel,
is carried out in other places of the world as well. 5 - 6 000 operations a
year, about ten per cent of the world's kidney transplants are carried out
illegally, according to Delmonici.

Countries suspected of these activities are Pakistan, the Philippines and
China, where the organs are allegedly taken from executed prisoners. But
Palestinians also harbor strong suspicions that young men have been siezed,
and made to serve as organ reserve, just as in China and Pakistan, before
being killed - a very serious accusation, with enough question marks to
motivate the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to start an investigation
about possible war crimes.

Israel has repeatedly been under fire for its unethical ways of dealing with
organs and transplants. France was among the countries that ceased organ
collaboration with Israel in the nineties. Jerusalem Post wrote that "the
rest of the European countries are expected to follow France's example
shortly."

Half of the kidneys transplanted to Israelis since the beginning of the
2000s have been bought illegally from Turkey, Eastern Europe or Latin
America. Israeli health authorities have full knowledge of this business but
do nothing to stop it. At a conference in 2003 it was shown that Israel is
the only western country with a medical profession that doesn't condemn the
illegal organ trade. The country takes no legal measures against doctors
participating in the illegal business - on the contrary, chief medical
officers of Israel's big hospitals are involved in most of the illegal
transplants, according to Dagens Nyheter (December 5, -03).

In the summer of 1992, Ehud Olmert, then minister of health, tried to
address the issue of organ shortage by launching a big campaign aimed at
having the Israeli public register for postmortal organ donation. Half a
million pamphlets were spread in local newspapers. Ehud Olmert himself was
the first person to sign up.

A couple of weeks later the Jerusalem Post reported that the campaign was a
success. No fewer than 35 000 people had signed up. Prior to the campaign it
would have been 500 in a normal month. In the same article, however, Judy
Siegel, the reporter, wrote that the gap between supply and demand was still
large. 500 people were in line for kidney transplant, but only 124
transplants could be performed. Of 45 people in need of a new liver only
three could be operated on in Israel.

While the campaign was running, young Palestinian men started to disappear
from villages in the West Bank and Gaza. After five days Israeli soldiers
would bring them back dead, with their bodies ripped open.

Talk of the bodies terrified the population of the occupied territories.
There were rumors of a dramatic increase of young men disappearing, with
ensuing nightly funerals of autopsied bodies.

I was in the area at the time, working on a book. On several occasions I was
approached by UN staff concerned about the developments. The persons
contacting me said that organ theft definitely occurred but that they were
prevented from doing anything about it. On an assignment from a broadcasting
network I then travelled around interviewing a great number of Palestininan
families in the West Bank and Gaza - meeting parents who told of how their
sons had been deprived of organs before being killed. One example that I
encountered on this eerie trip was the young stone-thrower Bilal Achmed
Ghanan.

It was close to midnight when the motor roar from an Israeli military column
sounded from the outskirts of Imatin, a small village in the northern parts
of the West Bank. The two thousand inhabitants were awake. They were still,
waiting, like silent shadows in the dark, some lying upon roofs, others
hiding behind curtains, walls, or trees that provided protection during the
curfew but still offered a full view toward what would become the grave for
the first martyr of the village. The military had interrupted the
electricity and the area was now a closed-off military zone - not even a cat
could move outdoors without risking its life. The overpowering silence of
the dark night was only interrupted by quiet sobbing. I don't remember if
our shivering was due to the cold or to the tension. Five days earlier, on
May 13, 1992, an Israeli special force had used the village's carpentry
workshop for an ambush. The person they were assigned to put out of action
was Bilal Achmed Ghanan, one of the stone-throwing Palestinian youngsters
who made life difficult for the Israeli soldiers.

As one of the leading stone-throwers Bilal Ghanan had been wanted by the
military for a couple of years. Together with other stone-throwing boys he
hid in the Nablus mountains, with no roof over his head. Getting caught
meant torture and death for these boys - they had to stay in the mountains
at all costs.

On May 13 Bilal made an exception, when for some reason, he walked
unprotected by the carpentry workshop. Not even Talal, his older brother,
knows why he took this risk. Maybe the boys were out of food and needed to
restock.

Everything went according to plan for the Israeli special force. The
soldiers stubbed their cigarettes, put away their cans of Coca-Cola, and
calmly aimed through the broken window. When Bilal was close enough they
needed only to pull the triggers. The first shot hit him in the chest.
According to villagers who witnessed the incident he was subsequently shot
with one bullet in each leg. Two soldiers then ran down from the carpentry
workshop and shot Bilal once in the stomach. Finally, they grabbed him by
his feet and dragged him up the twenty stone steps of the workshop stair.
Villagers say that people from both the UN and the Red Crescent were close
by, heard the discharge and came to look for wounded people in need of care.
Some arguing took place as to who should take care of the victim.
Discussions ended with Israeli soldiers loading the badly wounded Bilal in a
jeep and driving him to the outskirts of the village, where a military
helicopter waited. The boy was flown to a destination unknown to his family.
Five days later he came back, dead and wrapped in green hospital fabric.

A villager recognized Captain Yahya, the leader of the military column who
had transported Bilal from the postmortem center Abu Kabir, outside of Tel
Aviv, to the place for his final rest. "Captain Yahya is the worst of them
all," the villager whispered in my ear. After Yahya had unloaded the body
and changed the green fabric for a light cotton one, some male relatives of
the victim were chosen by the soldiers to do the job of digging and mixing
cement.

Together with the sharp noises from the shovels we could hear laughter from
the soldiers who, as they waited to go home, exchanged some jokes. As Bilal
was put in the grave his chest was uncovered. Suddenly it became clear to
the few people present just what kind of abuse the boy had been exposed to.
Bilal was not by far the first young Palestinian to be buried with a slit
from his abdomen up to his chin.

The families in the West Bank and in Gaza felt that they knew exactly what
had happened: "Our sons are used as involuntary organ donors," relatives of
Khaled from Nablus told me, as did the mother of Raed from Jenin and the
uncles of Machmod and Nafes from Gaza, who had all disappeared for a number
of days only to return at night, dead and autopsied.

- Why are they keeping the bodies for up to five days before they let us
bury them? What happened to the bodies during that time? Why are they
performing autopsy, against our will, when the cause of death is obvious?
Why are the bodies returned at night? Why is it done with a military escort?
Why is the area closed off during the funeral? Why is the electricity
interrupted? Nafe's uncle was upset and he had a lot of questions.

The relatives of the dead Palestinians no longer harbored any doubts as to
the reasons for the killings, but the spokesperson for the Israeli army
claimed that the allegations of organ theft were lies. All the Palestinian
victims go through autopsy on a routine basis, he said. Bilal Achmed Ghanem
was one of 133 Palestinians killed in various ways that year. According to
the Palestinian statistics the causes of death were: shot in the street,
explosion, tear gas, deliberately run over, hanged in prison, shot in
school, killed at home etcetera. The 133 people killed were between four
months to 88 years old. Only half of them, 69 victims, went through
postmortem examination. The routine autopsy of killed Palestinians - of
which the army spokesperson was talking - has no bearing on the reality in
the occupied territories. The questions remain.

We know that Israel has a great need for organs, that there is a vast and
illegal trade of organs which has been running for many years now, that the
authorities are aware of it and that doctors in managing positions at the
big hospitals participate, as well as civil servants at various levels. We
also know that young Palestinian men disappeared, that they were brought
back after five days, at night, under tremendous secrecy, stitched back
together after having been cut from abdomen to chin.

It's time to bring clarity to this macabre business, to shed light on what
is going on and what has taken place in the territories occupied by Israel
since the Intifada began.

Donald Boström

Translation from swedish: Henrik Karlsson
August 31, 2009 - Monday 
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/08/31/gordon
Israel and Academic Freedom
August 31, 2009

Neve Gordon has no illusions about the ability of Palestinian terrorists
to harm Israelis. In 1986, while serving as a paratrooper on Israel's
border with Lebanon, he suffered severe injuries from hand grenades and
bullets.

These days, Gordon is under a very different kind of attack -- one that
he and other Israeli academics say endangers the state of academic
freedom in their country. Gordon is the chair of politics at Ben-Gurion
University. He earned his Ph.D. at the University of Notre Dame and
publishes widely in Israel and the United States -- with much of his
writing critical of his country's government. Ten days ago, he published
an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times in which he called Israel an
"apartheid state" and called for an international boycott of Israel to
push the creation of a Palestinian state.

Reaction was immediate and intense -- donors (many of them American)
threatened to stop giving to Ben-Gurion, Israeli political leaders lined
up to condemn Gordon, and his university's leaders expressed disgust
with the piece, with comments suggesting he might want to work
elsewhere. Gordon has tenure, which is Israel is roughly equivalent to
what it is in the United States, and his university acknowledges that he
can't be fired over the op-ed.

But in a move that stunned and outraged many Israeli academics
(including many who disagree with Gordon's analysis), the university
also said it was looking for legal ways to discipline him. Scholars like
Gordon have long criticized Israel's policies -- from their home
country, the United States and elsewhere -- without being disciplined,
so the reaction to this essay is seen as significant far beyond Gordon's
op-ed.

"The infliction of such sanctions is a declaration of war on freedom of
speech and academic freedom. It will have very grave consequences for
the Israeli academic community and will harm greatly its international
reputation," says a petition being circulated by professors at Hebrew
University of Jerusalem, Tel-Aviv University and the University of Haifa.

In the United States, the Middle East Studies Association (which has in
the past sent letters protesting the treatment of scholars in Egypt,
Iran, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and areas controlled by the Palestinian
Authority, among others) last week sent a letter to Ben-Gurion
University, saying: "In refusing to reiterate the university’s
obligation to protect Dr. Gordon’s professional and civil freedoms and
in failing to clarify that it will not be blackmailed into suspending
the freedoms of particular faculty members that some donors do not like,
your administration has given a green light to those attacking him and
in some cases threatening his physical safety."

In interviews, both Gordon and his university's president said that
their views were being distorted -- but they have very different views
of the controversy and its implications.

Gordon and His Op-Ed

Gordon is currently on a trip to the United States, doing research for
his next book (on homeland security issues) and preparing to speak later
this week in Toronto at the annual meeting of the American Political
Science Association. He said in an interview that he didn't always
believe in a boycott, and that he came to this view gradually, based on
his research and his interactions with Palestinians.

"Growing up, I was never aware of the Palestinian narrative of these
issues," he said. But now he is. He came first to believe that Israel's
occupation of the West Bank and its objections to the creation of
Palestinian state there and in Gaza were both morally wrong and
destructive to Israel. This view shows up in his political writing and
his scholarly work. His most recent book is Israel's Occupation,
published last year by the University of California Press.

The argument in the op-ed is about what to do about the occupation.
Gordon writes that he has come to the view that the Israeli public will
shift its views only if faced with tough outside pressure. "It is
therefore clear to me that the only way to counter the apartheid trend
in Israel is through massive international pressure. The words and
condemnations from the Obama administration and the European Union have
yielded no results, not even a settlement freeze, let alone a decision
to withdraw from the occupied territories," he writes.

Specifically, Gordon endorsed the Bilboa Initiative, which calls for a
boycott conducted in a "gradual, sustainable manner that is sensitive to
context and capacity." Expanding on what this means in the interview,
Gordon said that it would start with a boycott of products produced by
Israeli entities in the West Bank, and might expand to companies that
help with occupation, gradually growing to hit more of Israeli society,
but with time for the sanctions to have an impact.

Boycotts are extremely sensitive in Israeli higher education because
British and some American academics have been pushing for boycotts of
Israel academe -- a push that has been widely condemned by American
academics as antithetical to academic freedom. Gordon said the boycott
he supports is institutional, not individual, and that he would not
support an action that cut off ties between individual academics. Gordon
also noted that boycotts are a non-violent way to take a stand.

But he said it was reasonable to ask American and other academics (not
at the first stage of the boycott, but eventually) to at the very least
demand, for example, that conferences in Israel include some
acknowledgment of the moral issues associated with governing
Palestinians against their will.

Many boycott critics say that such actions would hold Israel to a higher
standard than other countries because American academics, for example,
regularly work in countries in the Middle East that deny basic rights to
women, for example. But Gordon said he believes this ignores the ability
of academics to turn down such work. He said he was recently invited to
give a talk at a university in Kazakhstan, with a nice stipend, all
expenses paid -- and he turned it down based on the country's political
and human rights records. "The fact that someone offers you a fat check
doesn't mean you have to go there," he said.

Gordon said he has not heard directly from his university's senior
administrators, but that he has been approached by faculty members who
were urged to persuade him to consider quitting -- which he has no
intention of doing.

Ben-Gurion University has been "a wonderful academic home" for his work,
Gordon said. He has worked there for 10 years and has "wonderful
colleagues and students." In the past, when his critical writings have
come to the attention of donors or government officials, Gordon said
that the response has always been what he would expect: University
leaders said that they disagreed with him, but that Gordon spoke for
himself and had the right to do so.

"The issue is not about whether they disagree with me," he said. "One of
the jobs of the university president is raising money, and she has to
cater to the people that provide the money, so a strong letter of
condemnation of my views would have been fine with me. But there's a
difference between saying you disagree with me, and threatening me."

Until now, Gordon said, he would have said that academic freedom in
Israel was strong (except for Israeli controls on West Bank higher
education), but in his opinion something has changed. "I think the
reaction from my university should be a red flag for people," he said.

The Reaction

It didn't take long for Gordon's piece to attract an audience in the
United States -- particularly of those who are supporters of Israel. The
Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that the country's consul-general in
Los Angeles fired off a memo to the university saying: "Since the
article was published, I've been contacted by people who care for
Israel; some of them are benefactors of Ben-Gurion University.... They
were unanimous in threatening to withhold their donations to your
institution. My attempt to explain that one bad apple would affect
hundreds of researchers turned out to be futile."

Israel's education minister, Gideon Sa'ar, called the Gordon article
"repugnant and deplorable."

But amid all the condemnations were also statements from university
leaders suggesting that Gordon should look for another job and might
face sanctions for what wrote. Rivka Carmi, president of the university,
gave a statement to Israeli journalists in which she said: "This vile
and audacious criticism of the state of Israel damages the excellent
academic work being done in Israel and its universities.... Academics
with such feelings about their country are welcome to look for another
home, whether personal or professional."

Amos Drory, vice president for external affairs of the university, sent
out e-mail messages to complaining donors in which he said: "While the
university recognizes the importance of the principle of academic
freedom, it feels that Gordon's call for a boycott will cause direct
harm to BGU -- and all Israeli universities -- and to Israeli society as
a whole. The university is currently exploring the legal options
available to take disciplinary action."

Carmi, in an interview, insisted that the controversy and the
university's response did not endanger professors' rights.

"I have to make it very clear that this is not about academic freedom,"
she said. "The freedom to research, to teach, to debate on issues within
the framework of academia" is protected, she said. But Gordon "created a
new reality" when he published his views, with his university
identification.

"Hundreds and hundreds" of people have sent her e-mails, not only
expressing outrage at Gordon's views, but with many of them saying they
believed his views represented those of the university.

Asked about Gordon's strong reputation as a researcher and teacher,
Carmi said that -- since she is a medical researcher and he is a
political scientist -- she wasn't in a position to judge.

She said that she agreed that the tenure system would make it impossible
to fire Gordon, but said that she didn't view the possibility of
disciplinary action as violating the principles of academic freedom. She
stressed that an academic boycott of Israel universities would hurt
those institutions, and that a broader boycott of the country would
similarly do so.

"This is the first time we are encountering such a situation so we are
looking into something that has never happened before, but this is going
to affect the university," she said.

Repeating her view that this dispute isn't about academic freedom, she
said the real question is: "If somebody damages or hurts the university
in a certain way, what does it mean?"
— Scott Jaschik
August 30, 2009 - Sunday 

Israel Turns Up The Heat To Evict Bedouin From Desert Lands

Army’s West Bank tactics imported to Negev

By Jonathan Cook

Go To Original

The inhabitants of the Bedouin village of Amra have good reason to fear that the harsh tactics used by the Israeli army against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank have been imported to their small corner of Israel’s Negev desert.

Over the summer, the Tarabin tribe, all of them Israeli citizens, have had the sole access road to their homes sealed off, while the dirt track they must use instead is regularly blocked by temporary checkpoints at which their papers and vehicles are inspected at length.

Coils of razor wire encircle much of the village, and children as young as eight have been arrested in a series of night-time raids.

“Four-fifths of our youngsters now have files with the police and our drivers are being repeatedly fined for supposed traffic violations,” said Tulab Tarabin, one of Amra’s 400 Bedouin inhabitants. “Every time we are stopped, the police ask us: ‘Why don’t you leave?’”

Lawyers and human rights activists say a campaign of pressure is being organised against the Tarabin at the behest of a nearby Jewish community, Omer, which is determined to build a neighbourhood for Israeli army officers on the tribe’s land.

“The policy in Israel is that when Jews need land, the Bedouin must move – no matter how long they have been living in their homes or whether their communities predate Israel’s creation,” said Morad al Sana, a lawyer with the Adalah legal centre for Israel’s Arab minority. “The Tarabin’s crime is that they refuse to budge.”

The 180,000 Bedouin in the Negev have never been welcome, says Oren Yiftachel, a geographer at Ben Gurion University of the Negev in Beersheva. They are descendants of a few thousand who managed to avoid expulsion from the southern semi-desert region during the 1948 war that founded Israel.

Many of the surviving Bedouin, including the Tarabin, were forcibly relocated from their extensive ancestral lands in the 1950s to an area close to the Negev’s main city, Beersheva, Prof Yiftachel said. Israel declared the Bedouin lands as “state land” and established a series of overcrowded “townships” to house the tribes instead.

“The stated goal is one of ‘Judaisation’,..” Prof Yiftachel added, referring to a long-standing policy of concentrating the rural Bedouin into urban reservations to free up land for Jewish settlement. About half of the Negev’s Bedouin, some 90,000, have refused to move.

According to a recent report from the Association of Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI), the townships have “continuously ranked as the poorest, least developed and most crime-ridden towns in Israel”.

The refuseniks, such as the Tarabin, have faced unrelenting pressure to leave their 45 rural communities, none of which is recognised by the state. The villagers endure “third world conditions”, according to ACRI.

“The unrecognised villages are denied basic services to their homes, including water and electricity, and the villages themselves have no master plans,” Mr al Sana said.

As a result, he added, the villagers are forced to live in tin shacks and tents because concrete homes are invariably destroyed by the authorities. In the past two years, several shacks as well as the local kindergarten in Amra have been demolished.

The stark contrast between the dusty encampment of Amra and the green lawns and smart villas of Omer, only a stone’s throw away and the country’s third wealthiest community, is unsettling even for some of Omer’s 7,000 residents.

One, Yitzhak Nevo, a philosophy professor at Ben Gurion University and a leading activist with Dukium, a Negev coexistence group, said that, although the lands on which the Tarabin live fall under Omer’s jurisdiction, the Bedouin have been entirely excluded. “Even though they live within Omer’s municipal limits, their children get no education from us; our health clinic does not treat them; they are not hooked up to our water or electricity supplies and their refuse is not collected.”

He said Amra had been treated as nothing more than an eyesore until the mid-1990s when the powerful mayor, Pinhas Badash, decided that the Tarabin were both harming property values and obstructing the town’s expansion plans.

As Omer’s new neighbourhoods reached the limits of Amra, Mr Badash stepped up the pressure on the villagers to leave. A few years ago he pushed through the building of a new community for the Tarabin away from Omer. Two-thirds of the tribe relocated, while the remainder fought the attempted eviction through the courts.

“It was a very dirty business in which those in the tribe who left first were offered cheap land on which to build while the rest were threatened that they would be offered nothing,” Mr al Sana said.

Amra’s remaining Bedouin have found themselves surrounded by a tall wire fence to separate them from Omer. Two gates, ordered by the courts to ensure the Bedouin continued to have road access through the town, were sealed this year.

Since the beginning of the summer police patrol Amra’s side of the fence around the clock and the Tarabin report that a private security firm chases off any of them found inside Omer.

Nissim Nir, a spokesman for Mr Badash, denied that the Tarabin were being hounded. Omer made a generous offer to relocate them from their “illegal” site, he said.

Recently Mr Badash announced that thousands of acres around Omer would be forested with the intention of stopping the Bedouin from returning to the area once they had been evicted.

Mr Tarabin, 33, accused the police of being little more than hired hands carrying out Mr Badash’s plan.

“We are being suffocated. There are night-time searches of our homes using bogus pretexts, and arrests of young children. We are photographed and questioned as we go about our business. At the roadblocks they endlessly check cars entering and leaving, and fines are issued. No one visits us unless they have to, and we stay home unless we have to leave.”

He added: “Why is it so impossible for Omer to imagine allowing us to be a neighbourhood of the town?”

A report by Human Rights Watch last year severely criticised Israel’s treatment of the Bedouin.
August 30, 2009 - Sunday 
Zionism: An “Abnormal” Nationalism

By M. Shahid Alam
The ultimate goal…is, in time, to take over the Land of Israel and to restore to the Jews the political independence they have been deprived of for these two thousand years…The Jews will yet arise and, arms in hand (if need be), declare that they are the masters of their ancient homeland.
— Vladimir Dubnow, 1882
August 26, 2009 "Dissident Voice" --  - Zionism is best described as an abnormal nationalism. This singular fact has engendered a history of deepening conflicts between Israel — leading an alliance of Western states — and the Islamicate more generally.
Jewish ‘nationalism’ was abnormal for two reasons. It was homeless: it did not possess a homeland. The Jews of Europe were not a majority in, or even exercised control over, any territory that could become the basis of a Jewish state. We do not know of another nationalist movement in recent memory that started with such a land deficit — that is, without a homeland.
Arguably, Jewish nationalism was without a nation too. The Jews were a religious aggregate, consisting of communities, scattered across many regions and countries, some only tenuously connected to others, but who shared the religious traditions derived from, or an identity connected to, Judaism. Over the centuries, Jews had been taught that a divinely appointed Messiah would restore them to Zion; but such a Messiah never appeared; or when he did, his failure to deliver ‘proved’ that he was false. Indeed, while the Jews prayed for the appearance of the Messiah, they had no notion about when this might happen. In addition, since the nineteenth century, Reform Jews have interpreted their chosenness metaphorically. Max Nordau complained bitterly that for the Reform Jew, “the word Zion had just as little meaning as the word dispersion…He denies that there is a Jewish people and that he is a member of it.”
Since Zionism was a nationalism without a homeland or a nation, its protagonists would have to create both. To compensate for the first deficit, the Zionists would have to acquire a homeland: they would have to expropriate territory that belonged to another people. In other words, a homeless nationalism, of necessity, is a charter for conquest and — if it is exclusionary — for ethnic cleansing. At the same time, the Zionists would have to start creating a Jewish nation out of the heterogeneous Jewish colons they would assemble in their newly minted homeland. At the least, they would have to create a nucleus of Jews who were willing to settle in Palestine and committed to creating the infrastructure of a Jewish society and state in Palestine. For many years, this nucleus would be small, since, Jews, overwhelmingly, preferred assimilation and revolution in Europe to colonizing Palestine.
A Jewish nation would begin to grow around this small nucleus only if the Zionists could demonstrate that their scheme was not a chimera. The passage of the Zionist plan — from chimera to reality — would be delivered by three events: imposition of tight immigration restrictions in most Western countries starting in the 1900s, the Balfour Declaration of 1917, and the rise to power of the Nazis in 1933. As a result, when European Jews began fleeing Nazi persecution, most of them had nowhere to go to but Palestine.
In their bid to create a Jewish state in Palestine, the Zionists could not stop at half-measures. They could not — and did not wish to — introduce Jews as only one element in the demography of the conquered territory. The Zionists sought to establish a Jewish state in Palestine; this had always been their goal. Officially, they never acknowledge that the creation of a Jewish state would have to be preceded, accompanied, or followed by ethnic cleansing. Nevertheless, it is clear from the record now available that Zionists wanted nothing less than to make Palestine “as Jewish as England is English.” If the Palestinians could not be bribed to leave, they would have to be forced out.
The Zionists were determined to reenact in the middle of the twentieth century the exclusive settler colonialism of an earlier epoch. They were determined to repeat the supremacist history of the white colons in the Americas and Oceania. By the measure of any historical epoch, much less that of an age of decolonization, the Zionist project was radical in the fate it had planned for the Palestinians: their complete or near-complete displacement from Palestine. A project so daring, so radical, so anachronistic could only emerge from unlimited hubris, deep racial contempt for the Palestinians, and a conviction that the ‘primitive’ Palestinians would prove to be utterly lacking in the capacity to resist their own dispossession.
The Zionists faced another challenge. They had to convince Jews that they are a nation, a Jewish nation, who deserved more than any nation in the world — because of the much greater antiquity of Jews — to have their own state, a Jewish state in Palestine. It was the duty of Jews, therefore, to work for the creation of this Jewish state by supporting the Zionists, and, most importantly, by emigrating to Palestine. Most Jews in the developed Western countries had little interest in becoming Jewish pioneers in Palestine; their lives had improved greatly in the previous two or three generations and they did not anticipate any serious threats from anti-Semitism. The Jews in Eastern Europe did face serious threats to their lives and property from anti-Semites, but they too greatly preferred moving to safer and more prosperous countries in Western Europe, the Americas, South Africa, and Australia. Persuading Jews to move to Palestine was proving to be a far more difficult task than opening up Palestine to unlimited Jewish colonization. Zionism needed a stronger boost from anti-Semites than they had provided until the early 1930s.
The Zionists always understood that their movement would have to be driven by Jewish fears of anti-Semitism. They were also quite sanguine that there would be no paucity of such assistance, especially from anti-Semites in Eastern Europe. Indeed, now that the Zionists had announced a political program to rid Europe of its Jews, would the anti-Semites retreat just when some Jews were implicitly asking for their assistance in their own evacuation from Europe? This was a match made in heaven for the anti-Semites. Once the Zionists had also brought the anti-Semites in messianic camouflage — the Christian Zionists — on board, this alliance became more broad-based and more enduring. Together, by creating and continuing to support Israel, these allies would lay the foundations of a deepening conflict against the Islamicate.
Zionism was a grave assault on the history of the global resistance to imperialism that unfolded even as Jewish colons in Palestine laid the foundations of their colonial settler state. The Zionists sought to abolish the ground realities in the Middle East established by Islam over the previous thirteen hundred years. They sought to overturn the demography of Palestine, to insert a European presence in the heart of the Islamicate, and to serve as the forward base for Western powers intent on dominating the Middle East. The Zionists could succeed only by combining the forces of the Christian and Jewish West in an assault that would almost certainly be seen as a new, latter-day Crusade to marginalize the Islamicate peoples in the Middle East.
It was delusional to assume that the Zionist challenge to the Islamicate would go unanswered. The Zionists had succeeded in imposing their Jewish state on the Islamicate because of the luck of timing — in addition to all the other factors that had favored them. The Islamicate was at its weakest in the decades following the destruction of the Ottoman Empire; even a greatly weakened Ottoman Empire had resisted for more than two decades Zionist pressures to grant them a charter to create a Jewish state in Palestine. The first wave of Arab resistance against Israel — led by secular nationalists from the nascent bourgeoisie classes — lacked the structures to wage a people’s war. Taking advantage of this Arab weakness, Israel quickly dismantled the Arab nationalist movement, whose ruling classes began making compromises with Israel and its Western allies. This setback to the resistance was temporary.
The Arab nationalist resistance would slowly be replaced by another that would draw upon Islamic roots; this return to indigenous ideas and structures would lay the foundations of a resistance that would be broader, deeper, many-layered, and more resilient than the one it would replace. The overarching ambitions of Israel — to establish its hegemony over the central lands of the Islamicate — would guarantee the emergence of this new response. The quick collapse of the Arab nationalist resistance in the face of Israeli victories ensured that the deeper Islamicate response would emerge sooner rather than later. As a result, Israel today confronts — now in alliance with Arab rulers — the entire Islamicate, a great mass of humanity, which is determined to overthrow this alliance. If one recalls that the Islamicate is now a global community, enjoying demographic dominance in a region that stretches from Mauritania to Mindanao — and now counts more than a billion and a half people, whose growth rate exceeds that of any other collectivity — one can easily begin to comprehend the eventual scale of this Islamicate resistance against the Zionist imposition.
In the era preceding the rise of the Nazis, the Zionist idea — even from a Jewish standpoint — was an affront to more than two millennia of their own history. Jews had started migrating to the farthest points in the Mediterranean long before the second destruction of the Temple, where they settled down and converted many local peoples to the Jewish faith. Over time, conversions to Judaism established Jewish communities farther afield — beyond the Mediterranean world. In the 1890s, however, a small but determined cabal of European Jews proposed a plan to abrogate the history of global Jewish communities extending over millennia. They were determined to accomplish what the worst anti-Semites had failed to do: to empty Europe and the Middle East of their Jewish population and transport them to Palestine, a land to which they had a spiritual connection — just as Muslims in Bangladesh, Bosnia, and Burkina Faso are connected to Mecca and Medina — but to which their racial or historical connections were nonexistent or tenuous at best. Was the persecution of Jews in Europe before the 1890s sufficient cause to justify such a radical reordering of the human geography of the world’s Jewish populations?
A more ominous implication flowed from another peculiarity of Zionism. Unlike other white settlers, the Jewish colons lacked a natural mother country, a Jewish state that could support their colonization of Palestine. In the face of this deficiency, the career of any settler colonialism would have ended prematurely. Instead, because of the manner in which this deficit was overcome, the Zionists acquired the financial, political, and military support of much of the Western world. This was not the result of a conspiracy, but flowed from the peculiar position that Jews — at the end of the nineteenth century — had come to occupy in the imagination, geography, economy, and the polities of the Western world.
The Zionists drew their primary support from the Western Jews, many of whom by the middle of the nineteenth century were members of the most influential segments of Western societies. Over time, as Western Jews gravitated to Zionism, their awesome financial and intellectual assets would become available to the Jewish colons in Palestine. The Jewish colons drew their leadership — in the areas of politics, the economy, industry, civilian and military technology, organization, propaganda, and science — from the pool of Europe’s best. It can scarcely be doubted that the Jewish colons brought overwhelming advantages to their contest against the Palestinians and the neighboring Arabs. No other colonists, contemporaneous with the Zionists or in the nineteenth century, brought the same advantages to their enterprise vis-à-vis the natives.
Pro-Zionist Western Jews would make a more critical contribution to the long-term success of Zionism. They would mobilize their resources — as well-placed members of the financial, intellectual, and cultural elites of Western societies — to make the case for Zionism, to silence criticism of Israel, and generate domestic political pressures to secure the support of Western powers for Israel. In other words, the Zionist ability to recruit Western allies depended critically upon the peculiar position that Jews held in the imagination, prejudices, history, geography, economy, and politics of Western societies.
The Jews have always had a ‘special’ relationship with the Christian West; they were special even as objects of Christian hatred. Judaism has always occupied the unenviable position of being a parent religion that was overtaken by a heresy. For many centuries, the Christians regarded the Jews, hitherto God’s ‘chosen people,’ with disdain for rejecting Jesus. Nevertheless, they incorporated the Jewish scriptures into their own religious canon. This tension lies at the heart of Western ambivalence toward Jews; it is also one of the chief sources of the enduring hatred that Christians have directed toward the Jews.
In addition, starting in the fifteenth century, the Protestants entered into a new relationship with Judaism and Jews. In many ways, the Protestants drew inspiration from the Hebrew bible, began to read its words literally, and paid greater attention to its prophesies about end times. The theology of the English Puritans, in particular, assigned a special role to the Jews in their eschatology. The Jews would have to gather in Jerusalem before the Second Coming of Jesus; later, this theology was taken up by the English Evangelicals who carried it to the United States. Over time, with the growing successes of (Jewish) Zionism, the Evangelicals slowly became its most ardent supporters in the United States. The obverse of the Evangelical’s Zionism is a virulent hatred of Islam and Muslims.
Most importantly, however, it was the entry of Jews into mainstream European society — mostly during the nineteenth century — that paved the way for Zionist influence over the politics of several key Western states. The Zionists very deftly used the Jewish presence in the ranks of European elites to set up a competition among the great Western powers — especially Britain, Germany, and France — to gain Jewish support in their wars with each other, and to undermine the radical movements in Europe that were also dominated by Jews. Starting with World War II, the pro-Zionist Jews would slowly build a network of organizations, develop their rhetoric, and take leadership positions in important sectors of American civil society until they had gained the ability to define the parameters within which the United States could operate in the Middle East.
Serendipitously, it appears, pro-Zionist Jews also found, ready at hand, a rich assortment of negative energies in the West that they could harness to their own project. The convergence of their interests with that of the anti-Semites was perhaps the most propitious. The anti-Semites wanted the Jews out of Europe, and so did the Zionists. Anti-Semitism would also become the chief facilitator of the Jewish nationalism that the Zionists sought to create. In addition, the Zionists could muster support for their project by appealing to Western religious bigotry against Muslims as well as their racist bias against the Arabs as ‘inferior’ non-whites.
The Zionists would also argue that their project was closely aligned with the strategic interests of Western powers in the Middle East. This claim had lost its validity by the end of the nineteenth century, when Britain was firmly established in Egypt and it was the dominant power in the Indian Ocean. Indeed, the insertion of an exclusionary Jewish colonial settler state into the Islamicate geographical matrix was certain to provoke waves of resistance from the Muslim peoples. Western interests in the Islamicate were not positively aligned with the Zionist project. Yet, once Israel had been created, it would provoke anti-Western feelings in the Middle East, which, conveniently, the Zionists would deepen and offer as the rationale for supporting and arming Israel to protect Western interests against Arab and, later, Islamicate threats.
Israel was the product of a partnership that seems unlikely at first blush, between Western Jews and the Christian West. It is the powerful alchemy of the Zionist idea that produced and sustained this partnership. The Zionist project to create a Jewish state in Palestine possessed the power to convert two historical antagonists, Jews and Gentiles, into allies united in a common imperialist enterprise against the Islamicate. At different times, the Zionists have harnessed all the negative energies of the West — its imperialism, anti-Semitism, Crusading zeal, anti-Islamic bigotry, and racism — and focused them on a new project, the creation of a surrogate Western state in the Islamicate heartland. At the same time, the West could derive considerable satisfaction from the success of the Zionist project. Western societies could take ownership of, and revel in, the triumphs of this colonial state as their own; they could congratulate themselves for helping ‘save’ the Jewish people; they could feel they had made adequate amends for their history of anti-Semitism; they could feel they had finally paid back the Arabs and Turks for their conquests of Christian lands. Israel possessed a marvelous capacity to feed several of the West’s egotistical needs.
As a vehicle for facilitating Jewish entry into the stage of world history, the Zionist project was a stroke of brilliance. Since the Jews were influential, but without a state of their own, the Zionists were going to leverage Western power in their cause. As the Zionist plan would unfold, inflicting pain on the Islamicate, evoking Islamicate anger against the West and Jews, the complementarities between the two ancient adversaries would deepen, and, over time, new commonalities would be discovered or created between these two antagonist strains of Western history. In the United States, the Zionist movement would encourage Evangelical Christians — who looked upon the birth of Israel as the fulfillment of end-time prophecies — to become fanatic partisans of Israel. The West had hitherto traced its central ideas and institutions to Rome and Athens; in the wake of Zionist successes, it would be repackaged as a Judeo-Christian civilization, drawing its core principles, its inspiration from the Old Testament. This reframing would not only underscore the Jewish roots of the Western world: it would also make a point of emphasizing that Islam is the outsider, the eternal adversary opposed to both.
Zionism owes its success solely to this unlikely partnership. The Zionists could not have created a Jewish state in Palestine by bribing the Ottomans into granting them a charter to colonize Palestine. Despite his offers of loans, investments, technology, and diplomatic expertise, Theodore Herzl was repeatedly rebuffed by the Ottoman Sultan. It is even less likely that the Zionists, at any time, could have mobilized a Jewish army to invade and occupy Palestine, against Ottoman and Arab opposition. The Zionist partnership with the West was indispensable for the creation of a Jewish state.
This partnership was also fateful. It produced a powerful new dialectic, which has encouraged Israel — as the political center of the Jewish diaspora and the chief outpost of the West in the heart of the Islamic world — to become ever more aggressive in its designs against the Islamicate. In turn, a fragmented, weak and humiliated Islamicate, more resentful and determined after every defeat at the hands of Israel, has been driven to embrace increasingly radical ideas and methods to recover its dignity, wholeness, and power, and to seek to attain this recovery on the strength of Islamic ideas. This destabilizing dialectic has now brought the West itself into a direct confrontation against the Islamicate. This is the tragedy of Israel. It is a tragedy whose ominous consequences, including those that have yet to unfold, were contained in the very idea of an exclusive Jewish state in Palestine.

M. Shahid Alam is professor of economics at Northeastern University. This is an excerpt from his forthcoming book, Israeli Exceptionalism: The Destabilizing Logic of Zionism (Palgrave Macmillan, November 2009). He may be contacted at: alqalam02760@yahoo.com. Read other articles by M. Shahid, or visit M. Shahid's website.

August 30, 2009 - Sunday 
Devout Christian kidnaps 11-year-old Jaycee Lee Dugard and turns her into sex slave
August 30, 4:20 AM
Michael Rosch
The Examiner
 
Phillip Garrido and his wife kidnapped 11-year-old Jaycee Lee Dugard in 1991, imprisoned her in the backyard where he raped her repeatedly and had 2 children with her (now 11 and 15 years old) who were also imprisoned for their whole lives...and he loves Jesus, which actually relates to how Garrido was caught:

The case broke after Garrido was spotted Tuesday with two children as he tried to enter the University of California, Berkeley, campus to hand out religious literature. Officers said he was acting suspiciously toward the children. They questioned him and did a background check, determined that he was a parolee and informed his parole officer.
People who knew Garrido said he became increasingly fanatic about his religious beliefs in recent years, sometimes breaking out into song and claiming that God spoke to him through a box.
In April 2008, Garrido registered a corporation called Gods Desire at his home address, according to the California Secretary of State. During recent visits to the showroom, Garrido would talk about quitting the printing business to preach full time and gave the impression he was setting up a church, Allen said.
This guy was so devout that the people who knew him thought he was going to start his own church. He even has–err, I mean had a blog where he discussed Jesus. Did religion cause Garrido to commit these horrible acts? Doubtful. He was probably just an unstable lunatic. But over the course of the 18 years he held Jaycee and their children in captivity, the people around Garrido pretty much knew he was a lunatic. They just seem to have interpreted the signs of insanity as religious devotion. This is not surprising because remarkably, insanity and religious devotion look nearly identical as Sam Harris once pointed out:
“George Bush says he speaks to god every day, and christians love him for it. If George Bush said he spoke to god through his hair dryer, they would think he was mad. I fail to see how the addition of a hair dryer makes it any more absurd.”
Phillip Garrido is a kidnapper, a child rapist, and a Heaven-bound Jesus-lover. At least that's according to the common evangelical view that says a person is saved not through good works here on Earth but merely by accepting Jesus as their lord and savior. Of course, when incidents like this occur, suddenly the predator "isn't a true Christian." But those who will say this will happily state that they too continue to sin even though they've been saved and that all sins are treated as equally bad to their god. So that excuse is rather inconsistent with their own position. If all sins are equal and they can continue to commit sins themselves, on what basis can they profess to know that individuals like Garrido were not "true Christians," especially when the Bible explicitly says that it's not for them to judge others when they are sinners themselves? It's a Catch 22. Evangelicals want to be able to say they've been saved without having to prove they've lived a morally superior life, and that in turn opens the door to Heaven so wide that even some of the worst monsters in human history can be argued to have gone to Heaven.
Another quote that comes to mind in times like this is by Steven Weinberg:
“With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.”
Now while this seems like more of a case of an already evil person who just happened to be freakishly religious, it still answers the age-old question of whether religion makes one a good person. The answer is a resounding no.
Andrew

Andrew Austin


Last Updated: 5/22/2009

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