"Does anybody see what I see?"
OK, first, no I am not THAT arrogant. This is a quote from one of my favorite movies of all time. 1776, Peter Sherman's Pullitzer and Tony Award winning play turned into a wonderful movie starring William Daniels as John Adams. (It also starred a young Ken Howard as TJ, Blythe Danner as his wife, William DaSilva as Ben Franklin, and in the biggest show stopping tune, John Cullum as Edward Rutledge, the South Carolina representative largely responsible for eliminating Jefferson's anti slavery clause. The song - 'Molasses, to rum to slaves' ) .
Adams asks this question rhetorically, alone in the bell tower of Independence Hall as he thinks about all he has done and his vision for the new nation.
However, it does apply to today's post.
It was one year and one week ago that 2 Israeli soldiers were kidnapped by armed forces of Hezbollah. Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev were taken from their base inside Israel as they slept. In addition, of course, one week earlier, Gilad Shalit was kidnapped in the Gaza strip by Hamas.
I debated writing a post about this incident, but events of the last week sort of dictated that I must.
In the last week, as a way to prop up the Fatah government in the West Bank, and the Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, Israel has released almost 200 hundred convicted terrorists.
A few things: Israel's criminal justice system is much like our own, or England's. i.e It uses a system of common law and codified criminal law.
So, those caught in the act, etc are not thrown in some dungeon somewhere, but tried in a court with representation provided if need be.
That is not the point (although it is a minor one).
Here is the point. Israeli jails are regularly visited by all manner of international watchdog groups from Amnesty International to the International Red Cross.
The American Prisoners in Guantanomo are regularly visited by the Red Cross. Despite protestations from the left, they are treated better than our general prison population here in the states. Yet we here a constant drumbeat about this.
Meanwhile, despite protestations from all manner of governments, international aid organizations, etc, Hassan Nasrallah and Hezbollah will not allow the Red Cross to even confirm that the 2 soldiers are alive.
Both boys families, one with his newlywed, remain totally unsure of whether their sons, husbands, fathers, are alive or dead, or if alive, what condition they are.
This is simply unprecedented.
Gilad Shalit was seen in very bad condition, either starving, or beaten, in a video released by Hamas recently so at least his family knows he is alive, although clearly not well.
However, Hamas also refuses to allow the Red Cross or anyone else to confirm his condition.
Meanwhile, the Israelis release criminals to prop up Abbas.
The American left complains about Guantonomo.
Why is no one saying anything.
This is emblematic of the differences of the 2 sides of this conflict.
There is death and horror on both sides. However one side, the Israelis, consistently and without fail, does everything to act as humanely and morally as possible.
The jihadists, just the opposite.
Why can't everyone see this? I simply don't understand.
Why is everyone afraid to say there is evil when there is evil?
Is it unreasonable to think, that if Goldwasser and Regev are alive they are thinking....
"Is anybody there? Does anybody care?"
Friday, July 20, 2007
Wednesday, July 18, 2007
Iranian Terror and the Exporting of the Islamic Revolution
The following is an op ed piece by Senator Joseph Lieberman, Independent/Democratic Senator from Connecticut.
The Iranian Revolutionary Council has sought to export it's Islamist Revolution since the days of the Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979. It started with Lebanon and the support of Hezbollah through their proxies in Syria. Here, Lieberman expounds on it furtherance:
BY JOSEPH LIEBERMAN
Friday, July 6, 2007 12:01 a.m. EDT
Earlier this week, the U.S. military made public new and disturbing information about the proxy war that Iran is waging against American soldiers and our allies in Iraq. According to Brig. Gen. Kevin Bergner, the U.S. military spokesman in Baghdad, the Iranian government has been using the Lebanese terrorist group Hezbollah to train and organize Iraqi extremists, who are responsible in turn for the murder of American service members. Gen. Bergner also revealed that the Quds Force--a special unit of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps whose mission is to finance, arm and equip foreign Islamist terrorist movements--has taken groups of up to 60 Iraqi insurgents at a time and brought them to three camps near Tehran, where they have received instruction in the use of mortars, rockets, improvised explosive devices and other deadly tools of guerrilla warfare that they use against our troops. Iran has also funded its Iraqi proxies generously, to the tune of $3 million a month. Based on the interrogation of captured extremist leaders--including a 24-year veteran of Hezbollah, apparently dispatched to Iraq by his patrons in Tehran--Gen. Bergner also reported on Monday that the U.S. military has concluded that "the senior leadership" in Iran is aware of these terrorist activities. He said it is "hard to imagine" Ayatollah Ali Khamenei--Iran's supreme leader--does not know of them.
These latest revelations should be a painful wakeup call to the American people, and to the U.S. Congress. They also expand on a steady stream of public statements over the past six months by David Petraeus, the commanding general of our coalition in Iraq, as well as other senior American military and civilian officials about Iran's hostile and violent role in Iraq. In February, for instance, the U.S. military stated that forensic evidence has implicated Iran in the death of at least 170 U.S. soldiers. Iran's actions in Iraq fit a larger pattern of expansionist, extremist behavior across the Middle East today. In addition to sponsoring insurgents in Iraq, Tehran is training, funding and equipping radical Islamist groups in Lebanon, Palestine and Afghanistan--where the Taliban now appear to be receiving Iranian help in their war against the government of President Hamid Karzai and its NATO defenders. While some will no doubt claim that Iran is only attacking U.S. soldiers in Iraq because they are deployed there--and that the solution, therefore, is to withdraw them--Iran's parallel proxy attacks against moderate Palestinians, Afghans and Lebanese directly rebut such claims.
Iran is acting aggressively and consistently to undermine moderate regimes in the Middle East, establish itself as the dominant regional power and reshape the region in its own ideological image. The involvement of Hezbollah in Iraq, just revealed by Gen. Bergner, illustrates precisely how interconnected are the different threats and challenges we face in the region. The fanatical government of Iran is the common denominator that links them together. No responsible leader in Washington desires conflict with Iran. But every leader has a responsibility to acknowledge the evidence that the U.S. military has now put before us: The Iranian government, by its actions, has all but declared war on us and our allies in the Middle East. America now has a solemn responsibility to utilize the instruments of our national power to convince Tehran to change its behavior, including the immediate cessation of its training and equipping extremists who are killing our troops. Most of this work must be done by our diplomats, military and intelligence operatives in the field. But Iran's increasingly brazen behavior also presents a test of our political leadership here at home. When Congress reconvenes next week, all of us who are privileged to serve there should set aside whatever partisan or ideological differences divide us to send a clear, strong and unified message to Tehran that it must stop everything it is doing to bring about the death of American service members in Iraq. It is of course everyone's hope that diplomacy alone can achieve this goal. Iran's activities inside Iraq were the central issue raised by the U.S. ambassador to Iraq in his historic meeting with Iranian representatives in Baghdad this May. However, as Gen. Bergner said on Monday, "There does not seem to be any follow-through on the commitments that Iran has made to work with Iraq in addressing the destabilizing security issues here." The fact is, any diplomacy with Iran is more likely to be effective if it is backed by a credible threat of force--credible in the dual sense that we mean it, and the Iranians believe it.
Our objective here is deterrence. The fanatical regime in Tehran has concluded that it can use proxies to strike at us and our friends in Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon and Palestine without fear of retaliation. It is time to restore that fear, and to inject greater doubt into the decision-making of Iranian leaders about the risks they are now running. I hope the new revelations about Iran's behavior will also temper the enthusiasm of some of those in Congress who are advocating the immediate withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq. Iran's purpose in sponsoring attacks on American soldiers, after all, is clear: It hopes to push the U.S. out of Iraq and Afghanistan, so that its proxies can then dominate these states. Tehran knows that an American retreat under fire would send an unmistakable message throughout the region that Iran is on the rise and America is on the run. That would be a disaster for the region and the U.S. The threat posed by Iran to our soldiers' lives, our security as a nation and our allies in the Middle East is a truth that cannot be wished or waved away. It must be confronted head-on. The regime in Iran is betting that our political disunity in Washington will constrain us in responding to its attacks. For the sake of our nation's security, we must unite and prove them wrong.
Mr. Lieberman is an Independent Democratic senator from Connecticut.
The Iranian Revolutionary Council has sought to export it's Islamist Revolution since the days of the Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979. It started with Lebanon and the support of Hezbollah through their proxies in Syria. Here, Lieberman expounds on it furtherance:
BY JOSEPH LIEBERMAN
Friday, July 6, 2007 12:01 a.m. EDT
Earlier this week, the U.S. military made public new and disturbing information about the proxy war that Iran is waging against American soldiers and our allies in Iraq. According to Brig. Gen. Kevin Bergner, the U.S. military spokesman in Baghdad, the Iranian government has been using the Lebanese terrorist group Hezbollah to train and organize Iraqi extremists, who are responsible in turn for the murder of American service members. Gen. Bergner also revealed that the Quds Force--a special unit of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps whose mission is to finance, arm and equip foreign Islamist terrorist movements--has taken groups of up to 60 Iraqi insurgents at a time and brought them to three camps near Tehran, where they have received instruction in the use of mortars, rockets, improvised explosive devices and other deadly tools of guerrilla warfare that they use against our troops. Iran has also funded its Iraqi proxies generously, to the tune of $3 million a month. Based on the interrogation of captured extremist leaders--including a 24-year veteran of Hezbollah, apparently dispatched to Iraq by his patrons in Tehran--Gen. Bergner also reported on Monday that the U.S. military has concluded that "the senior leadership" in Iran is aware of these terrorist activities. He said it is "hard to imagine" Ayatollah Ali Khamenei--Iran's supreme leader--does not know of them.
These latest revelations should be a painful wakeup call to the American people, and to the U.S. Congress. They also expand on a steady stream of public statements over the past six months by David Petraeus, the commanding general of our coalition in Iraq, as well as other senior American military and civilian officials about Iran's hostile and violent role in Iraq. In February, for instance, the U.S. military stated that forensic evidence has implicated Iran in the death of at least 170 U.S. soldiers. Iran's actions in Iraq fit a larger pattern of expansionist, extremist behavior across the Middle East today. In addition to sponsoring insurgents in Iraq, Tehran is training, funding and equipping radical Islamist groups in Lebanon, Palestine and Afghanistan--where the Taliban now appear to be receiving Iranian help in their war against the government of President Hamid Karzai and its NATO defenders. While some will no doubt claim that Iran is only attacking U.S. soldiers in Iraq because they are deployed there--and that the solution, therefore, is to withdraw them--Iran's parallel proxy attacks against moderate Palestinians, Afghans and Lebanese directly rebut such claims.
Iran is acting aggressively and consistently to undermine moderate regimes in the Middle East, establish itself as the dominant regional power and reshape the region in its own ideological image. The involvement of Hezbollah in Iraq, just revealed by Gen. Bergner, illustrates precisely how interconnected are the different threats and challenges we face in the region. The fanatical government of Iran is the common denominator that links them together. No responsible leader in Washington desires conflict with Iran. But every leader has a responsibility to acknowledge the evidence that the U.S. military has now put before us: The Iranian government, by its actions, has all but declared war on us and our allies in the Middle East. America now has a solemn responsibility to utilize the instruments of our national power to convince Tehran to change its behavior, including the immediate cessation of its training and equipping extremists who are killing our troops. Most of this work must be done by our diplomats, military and intelligence operatives in the field. But Iran's increasingly brazen behavior also presents a test of our political leadership here at home. When Congress reconvenes next week, all of us who are privileged to serve there should set aside whatever partisan or ideological differences divide us to send a clear, strong and unified message to Tehran that it must stop everything it is doing to bring about the death of American service members in Iraq. It is of course everyone's hope that diplomacy alone can achieve this goal. Iran's activities inside Iraq were the central issue raised by the U.S. ambassador to Iraq in his historic meeting with Iranian representatives in Baghdad this May. However, as Gen. Bergner said on Monday, "There does not seem to be any follow-through on the commitments that Iran has made to work with Iraq in addressing the destabilizing security issues here." The fact is, any diplomacy with Iran is more likely to be effective if it is backed by a credible threat of force--credible in the dual sense that we mean it, and the Iranians believe it.
Our objective here is deterrence. The fanatical regime in Tehran has concluded that it can use proxies to strike at us and our friends in Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon and Palestine without fear of retaliation. It is time to restore that fear, and to inject greater doubt into the decision-making of Iranian leaders about the risks they are now running. I hope the new revelations about Iran's behavior will also temper the enthusiasm of some of those in Congress who are advocating the immediate withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq. Iran's purpose in sponsoring attacks on American soldiers, after all, is clear: It hopes to push the U.S. out of Iraq and Afghanistan, so that its proxies can then dominate these states. Tehran knows that an American retreat under fire would send an unmistakable message throughout the region that Iran is on the rise and America is on the run. That would be a disaster for the region and the U.S. The threat posed by Iran to our soldiers' lives, our security as a nation and our allies in the Middle East is a truth that cannot be wished or waved away. It must be confronted head-on. The regime in Iran is betting that our political disunity in Washington will constrain us in responding to its attacks. For the sake of our nation's security, we must unite and prove them wrong.
Mr. Lieberman is an Independent Democratic senator from Connecticut.
The Continuation of an Archeologic Disaster
The Wall Street Journal
July 18, 2007
COMMENTARY
Biblical Destruction
By HERSHEL SHANKS
July 18, 2007; Page A14
Within the last few days, a trench two-feet deep -- starting from the northern end of the platform where Jerusalem's Dome of the Rock sits -- has begun working its way toward the southern end of the Temple Mount. The work is being done without any regard for the archaeological information or treasures that may lie below. Destruction is particularly great in places where bedrock is no deeper than the trench. Some of the digging is being done with mechanical equipment, instead of by hand as a professional archaeological excavation would be conducted.
I don't know who are worse: the Muslim religious authorities digging up Jerusalem's Temple Mount, or the Israeli authorities who are allowing it to happen.
That the Waqf, the Muslim religious trust that serves as custodian of the site, should wish to install new electric and telephone lines is understandable -- provided that the necessary trench is first dug as a professional archaeological excavation. That is the required procedure everywhere in Israel before work can be undertaken at sites with archaeological significance. At the Temple Mount, even more care is required. This is the holiest site in the world to Jews, where the deeply religious fear to tread lest they step on the Holy of Holies: Solomon's Temple and the Second Temple built by Herod the Great once stood on this site. The site is sacred to Muslims as well: Known in Arabic as the Haram al-Sharif, the Noble Sanctuary, it is presently graced with the magnificent Dome of the Rock and Al-Aqsa Mosque.
The Waqf is not acting illegally. According to one report, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has quietly granted permission for this destructive dig (otherwise the excavation would be a clear violation of Israeli law). The Israel Antiquities Authority, when queried about the matter, replied: "No comment." So the dig is proceeding without interference from Israeli authorities. Perhaps their attitude is a product of fear; otherwise, it is inexplicable. Significant remains -- pottery, tesserae from ancient mosaics, tiles and even architectural fragments -- have already been observed in the soil from the excavated part of the trench.
As they have in the past, Palestinian leaders claim that neither Solomon's Temple nor Herod's Temple ever existed on the site. In a recent interview, Palestinian Justice Minister Taysir Tamimi stated: "About these so-called two temples, they never existed, certainly not on the Haram al-Sharif."
The Waqf has a long history of ignoring Israel's antiquities laws, and Israel has a long history of ignoring these violations. As early as 1970, the Waqf excavated a pit without supervision that exposed a 16-foot-long, six-foot-thick wall that scholars believe may well be the eastern wall of the Herodian Temple complex. An inspector from the antiquities department saw it and composed a handwritten report (still unpublished) before the wall was dismantled, destroyed and covered up.
Presiding over a lawsuit against Israel's government and the Waqf to prevent such depredations, Israel's Supreme Court found in 1993 that the Waqf had violated Israel's antiquities laws on 35 occasions, many involving irreversible destruction of important archaeological remains. The court declined to enter an injunction, however, expressing its confidence that in the future Israeli authorities would correct their past errors. This confidence has proved unfounded.
In 1999, to accommodate a major expansion of an underground mosque into what is known popularly as Solomon's Stables in the southeastern part of the Temple Mount, the Waqf dug an enormous stairway down to the mosque. Hundreds of truckloads of archaeologically rich dirt were dug with mechanical equipment and then dumped into the adjacent Kidron Valley. When archaeology student Zachi Zweig began to explore the mounds of dirt for antiquities, he was arrested at the behest of the Israel Antiquities Authority -- for excavating without a permit.
For over two years Prof. Gabriel Barkay of Bar Ilan University (together with Mr. Zweig) has been engaged in a major sifting operation of this dirt, after he obtained a permit from the Antiquities Authority. Finds have included thousands of artifacts from all periods going back more than 3,000 years. They include a seal impression of a probable brother of someone mentioned in the Bible, Babylonian arrowheads dating to the destruction of Jerusalem in the 6th century B.C. (as well as other arrowheads from battles on the Temple Mount), thousands of coins (many dating to the Great Revolt against Rome), beautiful jewelry and even an ancient Egyptian scarab.
Protests against these Waqf excavations have been lodged by prominent Israelis from every point on the political spectrum, including from the late mayor Teddy Kollek, author Amos Oz, archaeologists Ephraim Stern (currently head of Israel's Archaeological Council), Ehud Netzer (who recently discovered the tomb of Herod the Great), Eilat Mazar (who is excavating what may be King David's palace in Jerusalem), Prof. Barkay (who, in a long career, discovered the oldest Biblical text, dating to about 600 B.C.) and the nonpolitical Committee for the Prevention of the Destruction of Antiquities on the Temple Mount -- all to no effect.
The international community must be mobilized to stop this demolition of history. While the Waqf would never allow a professional archaeological dig on the site, its own destructive excavations continue unabated.
Mr. Shanks is editor of Biblical Archaeology Review and author of the forthcoming "Jerusalem's Temple Mount -- From Solomon to the Golden Dome".
Copyright 2007 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved
July 18, 2007
COMMENTARY
Biblical Destruction
By HERSHEL SHANKS
July 18, 2007; Page A14
Within the last few days, a trench two-feet deep -- starting from the northern end of the platform where Jerusalem's Dome of the Rock sits -- has begun working its way toward the southern end of the Temple Mount. The work is being done without any regard for the archaeological information or treasures that may lie below. Destruction is particularly great in places where bedrock is no deeper than the trench. Some of the digging is being done with mechanical equipment, instead of by hand as a professional archaeological excavation would be conducted.
I don't know who are worse: the Muslim religious authorities digging up Jerusalem's Temple Mount, or the Israeli authorities who are allowing it to happen.
That the Waqf, the Muslim religious trust that serves as custodian of the site, should wish to install new electric and telephone lines is understandable -- provided that the necessary trench is first dug as a professional archaeological excavation. That is the required procedure everywhere in Israel before work can be undertaken at sites with archaeological significance. At the Temple Mount, even more care is required. This is the holiest site in the world to Jews, where the deeply religious fear to tread lest they step on the Holy of Holies: Solomon's Temple and the Second Temple built by Herod the Great once stood on this site. The site is sacred to Muslims as well: Known in Arabic as the Haram al-Sharif, the Noble Sanctuary, it is presently graced with the magnificent Dome of the Rock and Al-Aqsa Mosque.
The Waqf is not acting illegally. According to one report, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has quietly granted permission for this destructive dig (otherwise the excavation would be a clear violation of Israeli law). The Israel Antiquities Authority, when queried about the matter, replied: "No comment." So the dig is proceeding without interference from Israeli authorities. Perhaps their attitude is a product of fear; otherwise, it is inexplicable. Significant remains -- pottery, tesserae from ancient mosaics, tiles and even architectural fragments -- have already been observed in the soil from the excavated part of the trench.
As they have in the past, Palestinian leaders claim that neither Solomon's Temple nor Herod's Temple ever existed on the site. In a recent interview, Palestinian Justice Minister Taysir Tamimi stated: "About these so-called two temples, they never existed, certainly not on the Haram al-Sharif."
The Waqf has a long history of ignoring Israel's antiquities laws, and Israel has a long history of ignoring these violations. As early as 1970, the Waqf excavated a pit without supervision that exposed a 16-foot-long, six-foot-thick wall that scholars believe may well be the eastern wall of the Herodian Temple complex. An inspector from the antiquities department saw it and composed a handwritten report (still unpublished) before the wall was dismantled, destroyed and covered up.
Presiding over a lawsuit against Israel's government and the Waqf to prevent such depredations, Israel's Supreme Court found in 1993 that the Waqf had violated Israel's antiquities laws on 35 occasions, many involving irreversible destruction of important archaeological remains. The court declined to enter an injunction, however, expressing its confidence that in the future Israeli authorities would correct their past errors. This confidence has proved unfounded.
In 1999, to accommodate a major expansion of an underground mosque into what is known popularly as Solomon's Stables in the southeastern part of the Temple Mount, the Waqf dug an enormous stairway down to the mosque. Hundreds of truckloads of archaeologically rich dirt were dug with mechanical equipment and then dumped into the adjacent Kidron Valley. When archaeology student Zachi Zweig began to explore the mounds of dirt for antiquities, he was arrested at the behest of the Israel Antiquities Authority -- for excavating without a permit.
For over two years Prof. Gabriel Barkay of Bar Ilan University (together with Mr. Zweig) has been engaged in a major sifting operation of this dirt, after he obtained a permit from the Antiquities Authority. Finds have included thousands of artifacts from all periods going back more than 3,000 years. They include a seal impression of a probable brother of someone mentioned in the Bible, Babylonian arrowheads dating to the destruction of Jerusalem in the 6th century B.C. (as well as other arrowheads from battles on the Temple Mount), thousands of coins (many dating to the Great Revolt against Rome), beautiful jewelry and even an ancient Egyptian scarab.
Protests against these Waqf excavations have been lodged by prominent Israelis from every point on the political spectrum, including from the late mayor Teddy Kollek, author Amos Oz, archaeologists Ephraim Stern (currently head of Israel's Archaeological Council), Ehud Netzer (who recently discovered the tomb of Herod the Great), Eilat Mazar (who is excavating what may be King David's palace in Jerusalem), Prof. Barkay (who, in a long career, discovered the oldest Biblical text, dating to about 600 B.C.) and the nonpolitical Committee for the Prevention of the Destruction of Antiquities on the Temple Mount -- all to no effect.
The international community must be mobilized to stop this demolition of history. While the Waqf would never allow a professional archaeological dig on the site, its own destructive excavations continue unabated.
Mr. Shanks is editor of Biblical Archaeology Review and author of the forthcoming "Jerusalem's Temple Mount -- From Solomon to the Golden Dome".
Copyright 2007 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Just when you thought it was safe for your kids to watch Al Aqsa TV....
With the death of Farfour the Mouse, the Mickey look alike (see "The "murder" of Farfur the mouse. (for those who continue to doubt) ) , the so called Palestinians lost their most effective teacher of murder, otherwise known as Jihad, to the kindergarten set.
Not to allow a good opportunity to corrupt minds and expand the cult of death, AL Aqsa TV unveiled it's latest creation this week:
Nahoul the Bee is the latest creation.
The clips of Nahoul are available on the MEMRI web site.
Here is a transcript of the little bee introducing the tikes to the joys of mass murder and blowing themselves up:
Saraa, child host: Who are you, and where did you come from?
Nahoul the Bee: I am Nahoul.
Saraa: Nahoul who?
Nahoul: I'm Nahoul, Farfour's cousin.
Saraa: What do you want?
Nahoul: I want to continue the path of my cousin Farfour.
Saraa: How do you want to do this?
Nahoul: I want to be in every episode with you on the Pioneers of Tomorrow show, just like Farfour. I want to continue in the path of Farfour – the path of Islam, of heroism, of martyrdom, and of the mujahideen. Me and my friends will follow in the footsteps of Farfour. We will take revenge upon the enemies of Allah, the killer of the prophets and of the innocent children, until we liberate Al-Aqsa from their impurity. We place our trust in Allah.
Saraa: Welcome, Nahoul...
Any questions?
Not to allow a good opportunity to corrupt minds and expand the cult of death, AL Aqsa TV unveiled it's latest creation this week:
Nahoul the Bee is the latest creation.
The clips of Nahoul are available on the MEMRI web site.
Here is a transcript of the little bee introducing the tikes to the joys of mass murder and blowing themselves up:
Saraa, child host: Who are you, and where did you come from?
Nahoul the Bee: I am Nahoul.
Saraa: Nahoul who?
Nahoul: I'm Nahoul, Farfour's cousin.
Saraa: What do you want?
Nahoul: I want to continue the path of my cousin Farfour.
Saraa: How do you want to do this?
Nahoul: I want to be in every episode with you on the Pioneers of Tomorrow show, just like Farfour. I want to continue in the path of Farfour – the path of Islam, of heroism, of martyrdom, and of the mujahideen. Me and my friends will follow in the footsteps of Farfour. We will take revenge upon the enemies of Allah, the killer of the prophets and of the innocent children, until we liberate Al-Aqsa from their impurity. We place our trust in Allah.
Saraa: Welcome, Nahoul...
Any questions?
Finally admitted: The Truth of Arafat
In Israel, it has been generally accepted that Yasser Arafat died from AIDS. It was known that Arafat was a pedophile and homosexual (his "wife" Suha has lived alone in Paris for years).
But yesterday on Al Manar Television Ahmad Jibril, Secretary-General of the PFLP General Command,a man who had worked with Arafat for 40 years, admitted what was already known.
That the reason that there was never an investigation into Arafat's death, despite the absurd claims that the Israeli's poisoned him, is that the French Medical Examiners had told Abu Mazen, Mahmoud Abbas, that Arafat died of AIDS.
Of course, the so called Palestinians, and in particular the remnants of Fatah, Arafat's party and the leaders of the PLO, did not want this publicly known, so they quietly dropped any claims of Israeli complicity.
The video of the interview can be seen on the MEMRI site. Simply enter Jibril's name in the search.
But yesterday on Al Manar Television Ahmad Jibril, Secretary-General of the PFLP General Command,a man who had worked with Arafat for 40 years, admitted what was already known.
That the reason that there was never an investigation into Arafat's death, despite the absurd claims that the Israeli's poisoned him, is that the French Medical Examiners had told Abu Mazen, Mahmoud Abbas, that Arafat died of AIDS.
Of course, the so called Palestinians, and in particular the remnants of Fatah, Arafat's party and the leaders of the PLO, did not want this publicly known, so they quietly dropped any claims of Israeli complicity.
The video of the interview can be seen on the MEMRI site. Simply enter Jibril's name in the search.
Funny how these things work
Just yesterday, I posted about the usually ignored fact of the difference between what Muslim leaders generally talk about in Arabic, Farsi, etc, vs. what they say in English.
No more striking example of this occurred yesterday in the LA Times. Hamas leader Mousa abu Marzouk was granted space to write an op ed piece.
Now, over and above the immorality of giving newspaper space to someone like this, (would the Times have given space to Goebbels, or Pol Pot, etc/), was the absolute absurdity of what he had to say.
Even in trying to present his moderate message in English, Marzouk continued to present the falsifications, obfuscations and outright outrageous claims that highlite the Arab world's campaign against Israel.
If you go to Youtube and enter Hamas as a search, look for videos by "ezbesh", It is entitled "No Peace, no recognition...."
In the video, Marzouk clearly outlines the strategy that was originally put forth by Yasser Arafat. That the Arabs needed to engage in negotiation, systematically taking land, piece by piece until Israel was no more.
He says clearly the statement that is constantly repeated in Arabic all over the Arab world "From the River to the Sea". This means from the Jordan to the Mediterranean, i.e. NO ISRAEL. What it means is that the Arabs will retake all the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, thus eliminating Israel through a combination of negotiation, terror, and war.
I plead with you to look at the video. The matter of fact way, even when the Arabic interview presses him about compromise, that he discusses this, will shock those of you who still don't see.
I reprint the op ed piece here with trepidation. Why?
Well simply this. Most people have a great deal of difficulty dealing with lies, particularly lies in print. If it is written, there must be some truth to it.
So, for example, he uses a famous quote from David Ben Gurion that has been bastardized since it was uttered. Purposely cut off and mistranslated from Hebrew, the Arab world took a statement that was universally pro Arabist (Ben Gurion firmly believed in both the Jewish nature of Israel AND the full rights of it's Arab citizens which they have).
The quote ACTUALLY IS: “We do not wish, we do not need to expel Arabs and take their place … All our aspiration is built on the assumption that there is enough room in the country for ourselves and the Arabs.”
Just as Walt and Merscheimer, in their famous paper last year misquoted, Marzouk lists the quote thusly: “we must expel the Arabs and take their places.”
This is but one of the reasons that I tell you to beware of what you read and see.
In addition, conveniently I have just recently done a post on the Declaration of Independence. In it, I quote from Jefferson's, original draft which included an explicit call about slavery. Unfortunately, and to the shame of the US, the Southern bloc, first passed a motion that the vote on Independence had to be unanimous, and then, forced the editing of that passage. Of course, slavery was a worldwide phenomena at that time, but it was the US's shame for 75 more years.
However, Marzouk compares our declaration to the Hamas charter, claiming, essentially, that it is not applicable in it's call for the violent end to Israel.
What he, of course, fails to mention, is that the US, repealed the offending sections of the Constitution, fought a war over slavery, and has struggled to make it right for over a century.
Hamas, of course, has done nothing of the kind, and continues, each and every day, to call for the destruction of Israel, as the video clearly shows.
He starts the piece with the discussion of the release of British Journalist Alan Johnson. He takes credit for this.
Funny, but he does not accept the blame for the Hamas faction who TOOK Johnson hostage and held him for months, nor does he ever mention that this could never, would never happen in Israel.
No matter how anti Israel a reporter is, their safety is guaranteed. In fact, Johnson himself is perhaps the most consistently pro Palestinian, anti Israeli western Journalist working today, and yet it was Hamas own men that took him.
There are several other ridiculous claims:
* Hamas "resistance" is justified under the Fourth Geneva Convention.
However, even Human Rights Watch, an organization not regarded as friendly towards Israel, clearly stated: "Hamas has repeatedly failed to respect a fundamental rule of international humanitarian law by attacking civilians and civilian objects."
*Hamas deserves a place at the international negotiating table.
This, despite the Hamas Charter which states: "There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad. Initiatives, proposals and international conferences are all a waste of time and vain endeavors."
Of course, Marzoulk conveniently, as in the calls for the destruction of Israel, never discusses this portion, nor why it has never been repealed.
*Israel is guilty of "foundational crimes of murder and ethnic cleansing by means of which Israel took our towns and villages, our farms and orchards, and made us a nation of refugees."
This is so outrageous that it simply makes me ill. As in the Ben Gurion quote, Israel, unlike the Arab nations that forcibly expelled Jews when the UN declared the partition, encouraged Arabs to remain. They retain full citizenship and rights and of course, as I have stated, Arabic is even an official language of Israel. You won't find Hebrew anywhere in the Arab world.
Marzouk also conveniently forgets that the 1948 war was the direct result of an Arab invasion and rejection of the UN Partition Plan, which Israel accepted (as they have accepted EVERY compromise solution since). Had the Arabs also accepted this, there would never have been a so called Palestinian refugee problem.
Of course, more egregiously, Israel specifically requested that Arabs remain, and the it has been shown repeatedly, that many of the Arabs that left, did so because of the calls of the Arab leaders of the countries that unilaterally attacked Israel to leave, so that they would not be in the way of the rampaging Arab armies.
*Israeli leaders made "repeated calls for the destruction of Palestine's non-Jewish inhabitants".
There has never been any official, unofficial, off the cuff, or any other Israeli policy of this nature in nearly 60 years of statehood. The existence of a million-strong Arab minority living as citizens in Israel is testament to the utter absurdity of Marzouk's statement. Moreover, while Marzouk makes false claims regarding non-existent Israeli policies, he attempts to distance Hamas from its own charter, which clearly lays out the organization's murderous and anti-Semitic discourse.
Almost incredibly, he ends the op ed by saying he does not concern himself with recognizing Israel, that it exists. Hmmm, since it is this very recognition that Israel seeks, if it is so unimportant, why not just do it.
He then talks of a child victim of Israel's recent forays into Gaza. Now, aside from the fact that this injury most likely was caused by Hamas own artillery, he fails, conveniently, to discuss the several hundred murders of his own Gazans committed by Hamas in just the last few weeks alone.
Marzouk's false claims, when properly deconstructed, demonstrate the danger of granting Hamas access to the mainstream media. Hamas clearly recognizes the value of reaching a Western audience. Editors and publishers must not allow their publications to be exploited by a terrorist organization that speaks in two voices - a "moderate" one for the West and its true, extremist voice which is often unheard except in the Arab media.
So read this, and as your eyes start to water from the smell of the feces, you will know why I get so worked up.
As I once said "Shining light on the lies":
Hamas' stand
An official of the movement describes its goals for all of Palestine.
By Mousa Abu Marzook, MOUSA ABU MARZOOK is the deputy of the political bureau of Hamas, the Islamic Resistance Movement.
July 10, 2007
Damascus, Syria — HAMAS' RESCUE of a BBC journalist from his captors in Gaza last week was surely cause for rejoicing. But I want to be clear about one thing: We did not deliver up Alan Johnston as some obsequious boon to Western powers.
It was done as part of our effort to secure Gaza from the lawlessness of militias and violence, no matter what the source. Gaza will be calm and under the rule of law — a place where all journalists, foreigners and guests of the Palestinian people will be treated with dignity. Hamas has never supported attacks on Westerners, as even our harshest critics will concede; our struggle has always been focused on the occupier and our legal resistance to it — a right of occupied people that is explicitly supported by the Fourth Geneva Convention.
Yet our movement is continually linked by President Bush and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to ideologies that they know full well we do not follow, such as the agenda of Al Qaeda and its adherents. But we are not part of a broader war. Our resistance struggle is no one's proxy, although we welcome the support of people everywhere for justice in Palestine.
The American efforts to negate the will of the Palestinian electorate by destroying our fledgling government have not succeeded — rather, the U.S.-assisted Fatah coup has only multiplied the problems of Washington's "two-state solution."
Mr. Bush has for the moment found a pliant friend in Abu Mazen, a "moderate" in the American view but one who cannot seriously expect to command confidence in the streets of Gaza or the West Bank after having taken American arms and Israeli support to depose the elected government by force. We deplore the current prognosticating over "Fatah-land" versus "Hamastan." In the end, there can be only one Palestinian state.
But what of the characterization by the West of our movement as beyond the pale of civilized discourse? Our "militant" stance cannot by itself be the disqualifying factor, as many armed struggles have historically resulted in a place at the table of nations. Nor can any deny the reasonableness of our fight against the occupation and the right of Palestinians to have dignity, justice and self-rule.
Yet in my many years of keeping an open mind to all sides of the Palestine question — including those I spent in an American prison, awaiting Israeli "justice" — I am forever asked to concede the recognition of Israel's putative "right to exist" as a necessary precondition to discussing grievances, and to renounce positions found in the Islamic Resistance Movement's charter of 1988, an essentially revolutionary document born of the intolerable conditions under occupation more than 20 years ago.
The sticking point of "recognition" has been used as a litmus test to judge Palestinians. Yet as I have said before, a state may have a right to exist, but not absolutely at the expense of other states, or more important, at the expense of millions of human individuals and their rights to justice. Why should anyone concede Israel's "right" to exist, when it has never even acknowledged the foundational crimes of murder and ethnic cleansing by means of which Israel took our towns and villages, our farms and orchards, and made us a nation of refugees?
Why should any Palestinian "recognize" the monstrous crime carried out by Israel's founders and continued by its deformed modern apartheid state, while he or she lives 10 to a room in a cinderblock, tin-roof United Nations hut? These are not abstract questions, and it is not rejectionist simply because we have refused to abandon the victims of 1948 and their descendants.
As for the 1988 charter, if every state or movement were to be judged solely by its foundational, revolutionary documents or the ideas of its progenitors, there would be a good deal to answer for on all sides. The American Declaration of Independence, with its self-evident truth of equality, simply did not countenance (at least, not in the minds of most of its illustrious signatories) any such status for the 700,000 African slaves at that time; nor did the Constitution avoid codifying slavery as an institution, counting "other persons" as three-fifths of a man. Israel, which has never formally adopted a constitution of its own but rather operates through the slow accretion of Basic Laws, declares itself explicitly to be a state for the Jews, conferring privileged status based on faith in a land where millions of occupants are Arabs, Muslims and Christians.
The writings of Israel's "founders" — from Herzl to Jabotinsky to Ben Gurion — make repeated calls for the destruction of Palestine's non-Jewish inhabitants: "We must expel the Arabs and take their places." A number of political parties today control blocs in the Israeli Knesset, while advocating for the expulsion of Arab citizens from Israel and the rest of Palestine, envisioning a single Jewish state from the Jordan to the sea. Yet I hear no clamor in the international community for Israel to repudiate these words as a necessary precondition for any discourse whatsoever. The double standard, as always, is in effect for Palestinians.
I, for one, do not trouble myself over "recognizing" Israel's right to exist — this is not, after all, an epistemological problem; Israel does exist, as any Rafah boy in a hospital bed, with IDF shrapnel in his torso, can tell you. This dance of mutual rejection is a mere distraction when so many are dying or have lived as prisoners for two generations in refugee camps. As I write these words, Israeli forays into Gaza have killed another 15 people, including a child. Who but a Jacobin dares to discuss the "rights" of nations in the face of such relentless state violence against an occupied population?
I look forward to the day when Israel can say to me, and millions of other Palestinians: "Here, here is your family's house by the sea, here are your lemon trees, the olive grove your father tended: Come home and be whole again." Then we can speak of a future together.
No more striking example of this occurred yesterday in the LA Times. Hamas leader Mousa abu Marzouk was granted space to write an op ed piece.
Now, over and above the immorality of giving newspaper space to someone like this, (would the Times have given space to Goebbels, or Pol Pot, etc/), was the absolute absurdity of what he had to say.
Even in trying to present his moderate message in English, Marzouk continued to present the falsifications, obfuscations and outright outrageous claims that highlite the Arab world's campaign against Israel.
If you go to Youtube and enter Hamas as a search, look for videos by "ezbesh", It is entitled "No Peace, no recognition...."
In the video, Marzouk clearly outlines the strategy that was originally put forth by Yasser Arafat. That the Arabs needed to engage in negotiation, systematically taking land, piece by piece until Israel was no more.
He says clearly the statement that is constantly repeated in Arabic all over the Arab world "From the River to the Sea". This means from the Jordan to the Mediterranean, i.e. NO ISRAEL. What it means is that the Arabs will retake all the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, thus eliminating Israel through a combination of negotiation, terror, and war.
I plead with you to look at the video. The matter of fact way, even when the Arabic interview presses him about compromise, that he discusses this, will shock those of you who still don't see.
I reprint the op ed piece here with trepidation. Why?
Well simply this. Most people have a great deal of difficulty dealing with lies, particularly lies in print. If it is written, there must be some truth to it.
So, for example, he uses a famous quote from David Ben Gurion that has been bastardized since it was uttered. Purposely cut off and mistranslated from Hebrew, the Arab world took a statement that was universally pro Arabist (Ben Gurion firmly believed in both the Jewish nature of Israel AND the full rights of it's Arab citizens which they have).
The quote ACTUALLY IS: “We do not wish, we do not need to expel Arabs and take their place … All our aspiration is built on the assumption that there is enough room in the country for ourselves and the Arabs.”
Just as Walt and Merscheimer, in their famous paper last year misquoted, Marzouk lists the quote thusly: “we must expel the Arabs and take their places.”
This is but one of the reasons that I tell you to beware of what you read and see.
In addition, conveniently I have just recently done a post on the Declaration of Independence. In it, I quote from Jefferson's, original draft which included an explicit call about slavery. Unfortunately, and to the shame of the US, the Southern bloc, first passed a motion that the vote on Independence had to be unanimous, and then, forced the editing of that passage. Of course, slavery was a worldwide phenomena at that time, but it was the US's shame for 75 more years.
However, Marzouk compares our declaration to the Hamas charter, claiming, essentially, that it is not applicable in it's call for the violent end to Israel.
What he, of course, fails to mention, is that the US, repealed the offending sections of the Constitution, fought a war over slavery, and has struggled to make it right for over a century.
Hamas, of course, has done nothing of the kind, and continues, each and every day, to call for the destruction of Israel, as the video clearly shows.
He starts the piece with the discussion of the release of British Journalist Alan Johnson. He takes credit for this.
Funny, but he does not accept the blame for the Hamas faction who TOOK Johnson hostage and held him for months, nor does he ever mention that this could never, would never happen in Israel.
No matter how anti Israel a reporter is, their safety is guaranteed. In fact, Johnson himself is perhaps the most consistently pro Palestinian, anti Israeli western Journalist working today, and yet it was Hamas own men that took him.
There are several other ridiculous claims:
* Hamas "resistance" is justified under the Fourth Geneva Convention.
However, even Human Rights Watch, an organization not regarded as friendly towards Israel, clearly stated: "Hamas has repeatedly failed to respect a fundamental rule of international humanitarian law by attacking civilians and civilian objects."
*Hamas deserves a place at the international negotiating table.
This, despite the Hamas Charter which states: "There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad. Initiatives, proposals and international conferences are all a waste of time and vain endeavors."
Of course, Marzoulk conveniently, as in the calls for the destruction of Israel, never discusses this portion, nor why it has never been repealed.
*Israel is guilty of "foundational crimes of murder and ethnic cleansing by means of which Israel took our towns and villages, our farms and orchards, and made us a nation of refugees."
This is so outrageous that it simply makes me ill. As in the Ben Gurion quote, Israel, unlike the Arab nations that forcibly expelled Jews when the UN declared the partition, encouraged Arabs to remain. They retain full citizenship and rights and of course, as I have stated, Arabic is even an official language of Israel. You won't find Hebrew anywhere in the Arab world.
Marzouk also conveniently forgets that the 1948 war was the direct result of an Arab invasion and rejection of the UN Partition Plan, which Israel accepted (as they have accepted EVERY compromise solution since). Had the Arabs also accepted this, there would never have been a so called Palestinian refugee problem.
Of course, more egregiously, Israel specifically requested that Arabs remain, and the it has been shown repeatedly, that many of the Arabs that left, did so because of the calls of the Arab leaders of the countries that unilaterally attacked Israel to leave, so that they would not be in the way of the rampaging Arab armies.
*Israeli leaders made "repeated calls for the destruction of Palestine's non-Jewish inhabitants".
There has never been any official, unofficial, off the cuff, or any other Israeli policy of this nature in nearly 60 years of statehood. The existence of a million-strong Arab minority living as citizens in Israel is testament to the utter absurdity of Marzouk's statement. Moreover, while Marzouk makes false claims regarding non-existent Israeli policies, he attempts to distance Hamas from its own charter, which clearly lays out the organization's murderous and anti-Semitic discourse.
Almost incredibly, he ends the op ed by saying he does not concern himself with recognizing Israel, that it exists. Hmmm, since it is this very recognition that Israel seeks, if it is so unimportant, why not just do it.
He then talks of a child victim of Israel's recent forays into Gaza. Now, aside from the fact that this injury most likely was caused by Hamas own artillery, he fails, conveniently, to discuss the several hundred murders of his own Gazans committed by Hamas in just the last few weeks alone.
Marzouk's false claims, when properly deconstructed, demonstrate the danger of granting Hamas access to the mainstream media. Hamas clearly recognizes the value of reaching a Western audience. Editors and publishers must not allow their publications to be exploited by a terrorist organization that speaks in two voices - a "moderate" one for the West and its true, extremist voice which is often unheard except in the Arab media.
So read this, and as your eyes start to water from the smell of the feces, you will know why I get so worked up.
As I once said "Shining light on the lies":
Hamas' stand
An official of the movement describes its goals for all of Palestine.
By Mousa Abu Marzook, MOUSA ABU MARZOOK is the deputy of the political bureau of Hamas, the Islamic Resistance Movement.
July 10, 2007
Damascus, Syria — HAMAS' RESCUE of a BBC journalist from his captors in Gaza last week was surely cause for rejoicing. But I want to be clear about one thing: We did not deliver up Alan Johnston as some obsequious boon to Western powers.
It was done as part of our effort to secure Gaza from the lawlessness of militias and violence, no matter what the source. Gaza will be calm and under the rule of law — a place where all journalists, foreigners and guests of the Palestinian people will be treated with dignity. Hamas has never supported attacks on Westerners, as even our harshest critics will concede; our struggle has always been focused on the occupier and our legal resistance to it — a right of occupied people that is explicitly supported by the Fourth Geneva Convention.
Yet our movement is continually linked by President Bush and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to ideologies that they know full well we do not follow, such as the agenda of Al Qaeda and its adherents. But we are not part of a broader war. Our resistance struggle is no one's proxy, although we welcome the support of people everywhere for justice in Palestine.
The American efforts to negate the will of the Palestinian electorate by destroying our fledgling government have not succeeded — rather, the U.S.-assisted Fatah coup has only multiplied the problems of Washington's "two-state solution."
Mr. Bush has for the moment found a pliant friend in Abu Mazen, a "moderate" in the American view but one who cannot seriously expect to command confidence in the streets of Gaza or the West Bank after having taken American arms and Israeli support to depose the elected government by force. We deplore the current prognosticating over "Fatah-land" versus "Hamastan." In the end, there can be only one Palestinian state.
But what of the characterization by the West of our movement as beyond the pale of civilized discourse? Our "militant" stance cannot by itself be the disqualifying factor, as many armed struggles have historically resulted in a place at the table of nations. Nor can any deny the reasonableness of our fight against the occupation and the right of Palestinians to have dignity, justice and self-rule.
Yet in my many years of keeping an open mind to all sides of the Palestine question — including those I spent in an American prison, awaiting Israeli "justice" — I am forever asked to concede the recognition of Israel's putative "right to exist" as a necessary precondition to discussing grievances, and to renounce positions found in the Islamic Resistance Movement's charter of 1988, an essentially revolutionary document born of the intolerable conditions under occupation more than 20 years ago.
The sticking point of "recognition" has been used as a litmus test to judge Palestinians. Yet as I have said before, a state may have a right to exist, but not absolutely at the expense of other states, or more important, at the expense of millions of human individuals and their rights to justice. Why should anyone concede Israel's "right" to exist, when it has never even acknowledged the foundational crimes of murder and ethnic cleansing by means of which Israel took our towns and villages, our farms and orchards, and made us a nation of refugees?
Why should any Palestinian "recognize" the monstrous crime carried out by Israel's founders and continued by its deformed modern apartheid state, while he or she lives 10 to a room in a cinderblock, tin-roof United Nations hut? These are not abstract questions, and it is not rejectionist simply because we have refused to abandon the victims of 1948 and their descendants.
As for the 1988 charter, if every state or movement were to be judged solely by its foundational, revolutionary documents or the ideas of its progenitors, there would be a good deal to answer for on all sides. The American Declaration of Independence, with its self-evident truth of equality, simply did not countenance (at least, not in the minds of most of its illustrious signatories) any such status for the 700,000 African slaves at that time; nor did the Constitution avoid codifying slavery as an institution, counting "other persons" as three-fifths of a man. Israel, which has never formally adopted a constitution of its own but rather operates through the slow accretion of Basic Laws, declares itself explicitly to be a state for the Jews, conferring privileged status based on faith in a land where millions of occupants are Arabs, Muslims and Christians.
The writings of Israel's "founders" — from Herzl to Jabotinsky to Ben Gurion — make repeated calls for the destruction of Palestine's non-Jewish inhabitants: "We must expel the Arabs and take their places." A number of political parties today control blocs in the Israeli Knesset, while advocating for the expulsion of Arab citizens from Israel and the rest of Palestine, envisioning a single Jewish state from the Jordan to the sea. Yet I hear no clamor in the international community for Israel to repudiate these words as a necessary precondition for any discourse whatsoever. The double standard, as always, is in effect for Palestinians.
I, for one, do not trouble myself over "recognizing" Israel's right to exist — this is not, after all, an epistemological problem; Israel does exist, as any Rafah boy in a hospital bed, with IDF shrapnel in his torso, can tell you. This dance of mutual rejection is a mere distraction when so many are dying or have lived as prisoners for two generations in refugee camps. As I write these words, Israeli forays into Gaza have killed another 15 people, including a child. Who but a Jacobin dares to discuss the "rights" of nations in the face of such relentless state violence against an occupied population?
I look forward to the day when Israel can say to me, and millions of other Palestinians: "Here, here is your family's house by the sea, here are your lemon trees, the olive grove your father tended: Come home and be whole again." Then we can speak of a future together.
Tuesday, July 10, 2007
The Big Guns
As some of you know, I frequently talk about the difference between what is written and spoken by various Islamic and Mid East leaders in English, versus in Farsi, or Arabic, or other native tongues.
One of the almost, sickeningly so, refreshing things about Ahmadinejad of Iran, Moqtada Sadr in Iraq, Hassan Nasrallah in Lebanon, and of course, Hamas in Israel, is that they are less politically sensitive.
So, Ahmadinejad can come out and advertise to the world his Holocaust denial conference, and his intention to "wipe Israel off the map".
Hamas, no matter how gently they are nudged, refuses to back away from their official policy of an Islamic state in "Palestine" killing all the Jews.
But, generally, the "suits" don't allow these feelings to be revealed.
They count on Western ignorance of Arabic and the lack of attendance at mosques or Madrasses.
However, there was once a very significant slip.
It is printed below:
"The Palestinian people does not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel for our Arab unity. In reality today there is no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese. Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people, since Arab national interests demand that we posit the existence of a distinct 'Palestinian people' to oppose Zionism.
"For tactical reasons, Jordan, which is a sovereign state with defined borders, cannot raise claims to Haifa and Jaffa. While as a Palestinian, I can undoubtedly demand Haifa, Jaffa, Beer-Sheva and Jerusalem. However, the moment we reclaim our right to all of Palestine, we will not wait even a minute to unite Palestine and Jordan." (PLO executive committee member Zahir Muhsein, March 31, 1977, interview with the Dutch newspaper Trouw.)
One of the almost, sickeningly so, refreshing things about Ahmadinejad of Iran, Moqtada Sadr in Iraq, Hassan Nasrallah in Lebanon, and of course, Hamas in Israel, is that they are less politically sensitive.
So, Ahmadinejad can come out and advertise to the world his Holocaust denial conference, and his intention to "wipe Israel off the map".
Hamas, no matter how gently they are nudged, refuses to back away from their official policy of an Islamic state in "Palestine" killing all the Jews.
But, generally, the "suits" don't allow these feelings to be revealed.
They count on Western ignorance of Arabic and the lack of attendance at mosques or Madrasses.
However, there was once a very significant slip.
It is printed below:
"The Palestinian people does not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel for our Arab unity. In reality today there is no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese. Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people, since Arab national interests demand that we posit the existence of a distinct 'Palestinian people' to oppose Zionism.
"For tactical reasons, Jordan, which is a sovereign state with defined borders, cannot raise claims to Haifa and Jaffa. While as a Palestinian, I can undoubtedly demand Haifa, Jaffa, Beer-Sheva and Jerusalem. However, the moment we reclaim our right to all of Palestine, we will not wait even a minute to unite Palestine and Jordan." (PLO executive committee member Zahir Muhsein, March 31, 1977, interview with the Dutch newspaper Trouw.)
More on the British Bombings - an English author in USA Today
USA Today -
Britian's war against . . . well, you know
Terrorists targeting the West populate a virulent strain of Islam. Skirting that unfortunate truth — as the new prime minister seems apt to do — will only prolong the battle and embolden the enemy.
By Melanie Phillips
Britain is now fighting a war it dares not name. The recent failed car bomb attacks on a London nightclub and Glasgow airport demonstrated once again that Britain is a principal target for al-Qaeda. But even now, the British response is dangerously confused.
(Photo -- On alert: Police patrol Waterloo railway station in London last week in the wake of failed car bomb attacks. Britain has arrested eight people. / By Peter Macdiarmid, Getty Images)
After eight people in the medical profession were arrested over these attacks, there was widespread shock that those who cure should also want to kill. This naive and ahistorical reaction demonstrated yet again the extraordinary state of denial about the Islamist jihad. After all, Osama bin Laden's sidekick, Ayman al-Zawahri, is a doctor. So are other Islamist terrorists, including Mahmoud Zahar, the Hamas strongman in Gaza.
But because the deeply empirical British do not understand how religious fanaticism twists the human mind, they tell themselves that Islamic terrorism must be driven by rational grievances such as deprivation, "Islamophobia" or British foreign policy.
Many continue to believe that Britain is a target because of its involvement in Iraq. While the war is undoubtedly used to whip up hysteria in the Muslim world, the irrationality of believing that it is the cause of Islamic terror is clearly demonstrated by the fact that British Muslims who have been jailed for terrorist offenses were recruited even before 9/11. Al-Qaeda is also heavily engaged in places such as Indonesia or Africa, which have no connection to Iraq or the Middle East.
A global target
In Britain, all these grievance excuses are wearing very thin, thanks to the recent emergence of former jihadists who have renounced their extremism.
Ed Husain, in his book The Islamist, and another former radical, Hassan Butt, have made the case that the doctrines to which they once subscribed are rooted in nothing other than a fanatical desire to Islamize the world.
But while these courageous people are telling Britain that, far from being motivated by despair, Islamist terrorists kill as an act of religious exultation, the new prime minister, Gordon Brown, has banned his ministers from using the word "Muslim" — and presumably "Islamic" or "Islamist" — in connection with the terrorist crisis. He has also put an end to the phrase "war on terror."
Accordingly, in her statement to Parliament about the attacks, the new home secretary, Jacqui Smith, referred to them as "criminal" acts rather than Islamic terrorism and talked about "communities" that are involved rather than Muslims.
For those in the coalition of the willing who have been nervous about how Brown's leadership will differ from that of Tony Blair, such a signal is deeply alarming. How can Brown talk about winning a battle of ideas — when he is not even prepared to name the central idea that is driving the terrorism?
This is a disastrous misjudgment, and not merely because a society cannot possibly defend itself against a threat it is not even willing to identify. More seriously still, it means the British government is pandering to the refusal by most British Muslims to acknowledge that Islamist terrorism is rooted in their religion and that this is a problem with which they must themselves deal.
Because it is not enough for them to condemn terrorism. They must also repudiate, publicly and authoritatively, those parts of their religion that mandate hatred of the unbeliever and holy war. The Brown government's censorship of language lets them off that crucial hook and, by signaling its own moral and intellectual weakness, emboldens the radicals.
Softening in the USA
Brown's failure of nerve is being reflected in the USA, too.
Despite President Bush's aggressive rhetoric about the "war on terror," he has in fact fluctuated wildly over identifying religious fanaticism as the central driver of the problem. After 9/11, he said "Islam is peace." And although for a period he started referring to "Islamic extremism" and even "Islamo-fascism," he recently sounded a full retreat when he appointed an American special envoy to the deeply Islamist and anti-western Organization of the Islamic Conference. With such an instinct on both sides of the Atlantic to appease Islamist fanaticism, the "war on terror" becomes an empty sound bite as the West advertises its weakness to the enemy.
Undoubtedly, the latest attacks upon Britain were designed to test the will of the new British prime minister. His censorship of the language, however, was far from the only indication of a disturbing weakening of that will. For he has brought into his government a string of people who were opposed to the Iraq war, thus signaling a distancing from the United States — and opening up an exceptionally dangerous crack in what should be a staunchly united alliance in time of war.
Such new ministers include Foreign Secretary David Miliband, who blamed Israel in last year's Lebanon war; the new higher education minister, John Denham, who resigned from the Blair administration over Iraq; and most startling of all, the new second in command at the Foreign Office, Sir Mark Malloch Brown, a former United Nations official who has downplayed the U.N. "oil for food" scandal and condemned the United States over the Iraq war.
Britain has never been in a more dangerous position — not just because of terrorism but because, faced with an enemy whose platform is the decadence and weakness of the West, it is going out of its way to prove the terrorists right.
Melanie Phillips is a columnist for the Daily Mail in London and author of Londonistan.
Britian's war against . . . well, you know
Terrorists targeting the West populate a virulent strain of Islam. Skirting that unfortunate truth — as the new prime minister seems apt to do — will only prolong the battle and embolden the enemy.
By Melanie Phillips
Britain is now fighting a war it dares not name. The recent failed car bomb attacks on a London nightclub and Glasgow airport demonstrated once again that Britain is a principal target for al-Qaeda. But even now, the British response is dangerously confused.
(Photo -- On alert: Police patrol Waterloo railway station in London last week in the wake of failed car bomb attacks. Britain has arrested eight people. / By Peter Macdiarmid, Getty Images)
After eight people in the medical profession were arrested over these attacks, there was widespread shock that those who cure should also want to kill. This naive and ahistorical reaction demonstrated yet again the extraordinary state of denial about the Islamist jihad. After all, Osama bin Laden's sidekick, Ayman al-Zawahri, is a doctor. So are other Islamist terrorists, including Mahmoud Zahar, the Hamas strongman in Gaza.
But because the deeply empirical British do not understand how religious fanaticism twists the human mind, they tell themselves that Islamic terrorism must be driven by rational grievances such as deprivation, "Islamophobia" or British foreign policy.
Many continue to believe that Britain is a target because of its involvement in Iraq. While the war is undoubtedly used to whip up hysteria in the Muslim world, the irrationality of believing that it is the cause of Islamic terror is clearly demonstrated by the fact that British Muslims who have been jailed for terrorist offenses were recruited even before 9/11. Al-Qaeda is also heavily engaged in places such as Indonesia or Africa, which have no connection to Iraq or the Middle East.
A global target
In Britain, all these grievance excuses are wearing very thin, thanks to the recent emergence of former jihadists who have renounced their extremism.
Ed Husain, in his book The Islamist, and another former radical, Hassan Butt, have made the case that the doctrines to which they once subscribed are rooted in nothing other than a fanatical desire to Islamize the world.
But while these courageous people are telling Britain that, far from being motivated by despair, Islamist terrorists kill as an act of religious exultation, the new prime minister, Gordon Brown, has banned his ministers from using the word "Muslim" — and presumably "Islamic" or "Islamist" — in connection with the terrorist crisis. He has also put an end to the phrase "war on terror."
Accordingly, in her statement to Parliament about the attacks, the new home secretary, Jacqui Smith, referred to them as "criminal" acts rather than Islamic terrorism and talked about "communities" that are involved rather than Muslims.
For those in the coalition of the willing who have been nervous about how Brown's leadership will differ from that of Tony Blair, such a signal is deeply alarming. How can Brown talk about winning a battle of ideas — when he is not even prepared to name the central idea that is driving the terrorism?
This is a disastrous misjudgment, and not merely because a society cannot possibly defend itself against a threat it is not even willing to identify. More seriously still, it means the British government is pandering to the refusal by most British Muslims to acknowledge that Islamist terrorism is rooted in their religion and that this is a problem with which they must themselves deal.
Because it is not enough for them to condemn terrorism. They must also repudiate, publicly and authoritatively, those parts of their religion that mandate hatred of the unbeliever and holy war. The Brown government's censorship of language lets them off that crucial hook and, by signaling its own moral and intellectual weakness, emboldens the radicals.
Softening in the USA
Brown's failure of nerve is being reflected in the USA, too.
Despite President Bush's aggressive rhetoric about the "war on terror," he has in fact fluctuated wildly over identifying religious fanaticism as the central driver of the problem. After 9/11, he said "Islam is peace." And although for a period he started referring to "Islamic extremism" and even "Islamo-fascism," he recently sounded a full retreat when he appointed an American special envoy to the deeply Islamist and anti-western Organization of the Islamic Conference. With such an instinct on both sides of the Atlantic to appease Islamist fanaticism, the "war on terror" becomes an empty sound bite as the West advertises its weakness to the enemy.
Undoubtedly, the latest attacks upon Britain were designed to test the will of the new British prime minister. His censorship of the language, however, was far from the only indication of a disturbing weakening of that will. For he has brought into his government a string of people who were opposed to the Iraq war, thus signaling a distancing from the United States — and opening up an exceptionally dangerous crack in what should be a staunchly united alliance in time of war.
Such new ministers include Foreign Secretary David Miliband, who blamed Israel in last year's Lebanon war; the new higher education minister, John Denham, who resigned from the Blair administration over Iraq; and most startling of all, the new second in command at the Foreign Office, Sir Mark Malloch Brown, a former United Nations official who has downplayed the U.N. "oil for food" scandal and condemned the United States over the Iraq war.
Britain has never been in a more dangerous position — not just because of terrorism but because, faced with an enemy whose platform is the decadence and weakness of the West, it is going out of its way to prove the terrorists right.
Melanie Phillips is a columnist for the Daily Mail in London and author of Londonistan.
Mideast Peace - a "Lofty" proposal
Many people have given up hope that there will ever be peace in the Middle East. 2000 years of history would seem to indicate they are right.
I think there are, however, some very basic steps that can be taken to assure it.
However, these steps cannot be accomplished without real commitment and political courage the likes of which we have never seen. So perhaps I am not optimistic either!!
I will outline this over several posts. Please leave comments as we go.
First:
Fundamental reformation of the UN.
Most do not realize but the Palestinian question is held to separate rules and regulations than EVERY other refugee situation in the world.
First, the Palestinian's are given a different definition of refugee than any other people in the world. There is a specific legal definition of what constitutes a refugee. First generation of peoples forcibly removed. They are required to be absorbed by the new country in all succeeding generations.
The so called Palestinians have been given an exception to this. That is why they now claim several million refugees. There is a special definition for them that allows them to be refugees in perpetuity. This must be changed.
Interesting since in 1948, when the supposed "refugee crisis" occurred, 450,000 Jews were forcibly ejected from all of the Arab countries. Because they were absorbed by Israel, they are not considered refugees.
The 250,000 Palestinians, most of whom left voluntarily have never been absorbed, and worse, have purposely been claimed by the Arab world to distract from other issues.
There are approximately 9 agencies at the UN dealing with refugees. But 5 of them deal with the so called Palestinians alone.
These agencies are rife with corruption and are manned by the so called Palestinians themselves. Money is stolen, misdirected, etc.
This must stop. If Darfur, Somalia, Kurdistan, etc don't get their "own" agency, these people should not either.
They should be put in the same organizations as the rest of the world so these agencies are not co-opted by the likes of Hamas.
Next, the US needs to exert it's influence. Real influence. The US pays most of the cost of the UN. It should DEMAND that arms such as the Human Rights commission stop issuing resolutions condemning Israel to the exclusion of EVERY OTHER COUNTRY in the world.
Until the conversation becomes real, and civil, it cannot move forward.
In addition, the UN must assure that the schools that they are operating in the "territories" are not teaching the hate filled rhetoric and the way of the Shahid that they are currently. New textbooks must be used that conform with international educational standards.
In addition, the fact that the various agencies, particularly the United Nations Relief Works Agency (UNRWA and one of those agencies that despite it's name is devoted solely to so called Palestinians) are manned by the terrorists themselves, effectively means that the UN is funding terror itself.
This must stop. Aid dollars must be monitored by independent auditors, such as those from IMF or the world bank - to ensure that aid Money is used for aid.
Finally, if the UN establishes peace keeping forces, they must not be like the one currently in Southern Lebanon, which the UN itself has recenlty admitted has allowed Hezbollah to be fully rearmed by Syria.
Next: Who should be involved?
I think there are, however, some very basic steps that can be taken to assure it.
However, these steps cannot be accomplished without real commitment and political courage the likes of which we have never seen. So perhaps I am not optimistic either!!
I will outline this over several posts. Please leave comments as we go.
First:
Fundamental reformation of the UN.
Most do not realize but the Palestinian question is held to separate rules and regulations than EVERY other refugee situation in the world.
First, the Palestinian's are given a different definition of refugee than any other people in the world. There is a specific legal definition of what constitutes a refugee. First generation of peoples forcibly removed. They are required to be absorbed by the new country in all succeeding generations.
The so called Palestinians have been given an exception to this. That is why they now claim several million refugees. There is a special definition for them that allows them to be refugees in perpetuity. This must be changed.
Interesting since in 1948, when the supposed "refugee crisis" occurred, 450,000 Jews were forcibly ejected from all of the Arab countries. Because they were absorbed by Israel, they are not considered refugees.
The 250,000 Palestinians, most of whom left voluntarily have never been absorbed, and worse, have purposely been claimed by the Arab world to distract from other issues.
There are approximately 9 agencies at the UN dealing with refugees. But 5 of them deal with the so called Palestinians alone.
These agencies are rife with corruption and are manned by the so called Palestinians themselves. Money is stolen, misdirected, etc.
This must stop. If Darfur, Somalia, Kurdistan, etc don't get their "own" agency, these people should not either.
They should be put in the same organizations as the rest of the world so these agencies are not co-opted by the likes of Hamas.
Next, the US needs to exert it's influence. Real influence. The US pays most of the cost of the UN. It should DEMAND that arms such as the Human Rights commission stop issuing resolutions condemning Israel to the exclusion of EVERY OTHER COUNTRY in the world.
Until the conversation becomes real, and civil, it cannot move forward.
In addition, the UN must assure that the schools that they are operating in the "territories" are not teaching the hate filled rhetoric and the way of the Shahid that they are currently. New textbooks must be used that conform with international educational standards.
In addition, the fact that the various agencies, particularly the United Nations Relief Works Agency (UNRWA and one of those agencies that despite it's name is devoted solely to so called Palestinians) are manned by the terrorists themselves, effectively means that the UN is funding terror itself.
This must stop. Aid dollars must be monitored by independent auditors, such as those from IMF or the world bank - to ensure that aid Money is used for aid.
Finally, if the UN establishes peace keeping forces, they must not be like the one currently in Southern Lebanon, which the UN itself has recenlty admitted has allowed Hezbollah to be fully rearmed by Syria.
Next: Who should be involved?
Islam... A religion of peace??
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Islam... A religion of peace??
It is mine, and the Muslim worlds own, belief that Islam is now controlled by the Wahabbist strain, which preaches Sharia law, and intolerance of all other religions. In addition, it preaches the glory of Shahid, or martyrdom and the glory of death.
Last week, there were bombings in Great Britain. As a result there were adds taken out by certain Muslims around Britain, purportedly condemning these attacks.
Fussy held these out as "proof" that Islam is a religion of peace.
I continue to point her to the OFFICIAL publications of the Islamic governments.
They make it clear, and it is preached every day in mosques and schools all over Islam, the hatred and intolerance of all others.
It is taught to children from their youngest days, in the Madrassas, the Islamic schools.
Worse, it is illegal to denounce Islam as your religion and punishable by death to practice any other religion.
How any one cannot simply read these documents, the constitutions, and charters of all of these nations and organizations are publicly available, I don't know.
But, interestingly 2 NY papers had articles about this issue just today.
They are printed below:
The New York Sun
July 9, 2007 edition
Questioning Whether Islam Is Religion of Peace
By YOUSSEF IBRAHIM
July 9, 2007
The latest batch of attacks by Islamic terrorists raised fresh concerns among Muslims over what they fear may be "heinous attempts" to link terror with Islam.
British Muslims, who number 1.6 million, are reportedly funding advertising campaigns across Britain that proclaim Islam is "the religion of peace" — in the process also implicitly warning fellow Britons against criticizing their faith.
Yet a year ago, a weighty Muslim writer and pundit, Abdelrahman Al Rashed, manager of the pan-Arab TV network Al-Arabiya Television, famously launched a stormy debate when he opined, "While all Muslims are not terrorists, all terrorists are now Muslims."
Ever since, the question among Muslim scholars and activists is precisely how much of the terror inspired by Islam is due to the faith itself — and how much is due to the way it is being preached.
Clearly, the issue is enormously delicate, fraught with the pitfalls of prejudice and all sorts of other sensitivities.
But as hundreds of thousands of people from New York to Baghdad are butchered under Islam's banners, failing to tackle it head-on is unacceptable.
Reasonable Muslims now agree that when a religion veers so far off course, it loses immunity to inquisition. "We ought to go through very serious questioning and soul-searching," a founder of the Muslim Public Affairs Council, Dr. Maher Hathout, wrote on "The American Muslim" Web site Thursday. "How did we, as a group, fail to nip this ugly phenomenon in the bud?" he asks. "How did we indulge in the luxury of theoretical debates, and craft all kinds of euphemisms to let this go on, spill out, and grow?"
The bare facts are there for all to see: Over the past 40 years or so, Islam's millions of fanatical preachers and political operatives have represented the religion as one of an "oppressed" people, victimized for centuries by the multiple ogres of Christianity, Judaism, and secularism. Listen to many preachers, read several interpretations of the Muslim holy book, or go to a variety of madrassas from Pakistan to Saudi Arabia, and you will quickly learn that Islam's central value, bar none, is jihad.
Far from a religion of peace, these clerics have "weaponized" Islam's text and the Koran into a war manifesto against even fellow Muslims — as between Shiites and Sunnis.
Raising the bar further, most Muslim scholarship of today maintains the refrain that Islam is not meant to be another religion, but the most definitive of God's revelations to man. As Muslim children are told daily, the Prophet Muhammad is not only the last of God's prophets, but the most authoritative.
Thus, it follows that Muslims merit greater privilege. A Muslim, for example, may take any number of non-Muslim wives, but the reverse is illegal. Abandoning Islam is punishable by jail or death. No other religion is acceptable.
The next step in such a logical progression is clearly the necessity to force others to submit. Islam has become imbued with a kind of droit du seigneur — the extrajudicial, absolute rights of a lord of the manor — which cannot be argued with.
Saudis, for example — and this includes their most moderate and modernized leaders — feel it is perfectly natural to fund the building of hundreds of mosques in Europe, from London to Cologne, but cannot find a shred of logic in allowing the construction of a single church or Buddhist temple in Saudi Arabia, even though millions of Christian and Asian expatriates work there.
The scholarly journeys down such roads have served to legitimize the excessive aggression in hundreds of the religious edicts issued weekly by both legitimate and rogue Muslim scholars — including the charlatans of Al Qaeda, who decree that killing infidels is a Muslim duty.
A Saudi expert on Islamic movements, Mshari Al Zaydi, who is the opinion page editor of the Saudi daily Asharq Al-Awsat, went to the heart of the matter in a remarkable essay a few days ago, in which he pointedly noted that Saudi religious leaders have never issued an outright renunciation of the religious thinking of Osama bin Laden.
The most the Saudi religious establishment has done, Mr. Zaydi wrote, is to "mildly state that Mr. bin Laden was simply an 'erroneous mujtahid,'" — a term referring to those qualified to issue juridical opinions and edicts such as fatwas — "as though this man was not responsible for setting the Muslim world ablaze, taking it back centuries and much farther than its original backwardness." In Egypt, Jordan, and Morocco, the Muslim Brotherhood contests for power based on a single slogan: "Islam is the solution." Could it be that their version of Islam is also the problem?
ISLAM'S PROBLEM
WE MUST STOP DENYING OUR RELIGION'S ROLE IN VIOLENCE
By IRSHAD MANJI
NY POST
Mohammed Bouyeri
Mohammed BouyeriStory Bottom
July 8, 2007 -- LAST week, two very different Brits had their say about the latest terrorist plots in their country. Prime Minister Gordon Brown told the nation that "we have got to separate those great moderate members of our community from a few extremists who wish to practice violence and inflict maximum loss of life in the interests of a perversion of their religion." By contrast, a former jihadist from Manchester wrote that the "real engine of our violence" is "Islamic theology."
Months ago, this young man informed me that as a militant he raised most of his war chest not from obscenely rich Saudis, but from middle-class Muslim dentists living in the United Kingdom. There's sobering lesson here for the new prime minister.
So far, those arrested in connection to the car bombs are, by and large, medical professionals. The seeming paradox of the privileged seeking to avenge grievance has many champions of compassion scratching their heads. Aren't Muslim martyrs supposed to be poor, disenfranchised, and resentful about both?
WE should have been stripped of that breezy simplification by now. The 9/11 hijackers came from means. Mohamed Atta, their ringleader, earned an engineering degree. He then moved to the West, pursuing his post-graduate studies in Germany. No servile goat-herder, that one.
In 2003, I interviewed Mohammad Al Hindi, the political leader of Islamic Jihad in Gaza. A physician himself, Dr. Al Hindi explained the difference between suicide and martyrdom. "Suicide is done out of despair," the good doctor diagnosed. "But most of our martyrs today were very successful in their earthly lives."
In short, it's not what the material world fails to deliver that drives suicide bombers. It's something else. And, time and again, the very people committing these acts have articulated what that something else is: their religion.
Note: do NOT click the "back" button on your browser.
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Islam... A religion of peace??
It is mine, and the Muslim worlds own, belief that Islam is now controlled by the Wahabbist strain, which preaches Sharia law, and intolerance of all other religions. In addition, it preaches the glory of Shahid, or martyrdom and the glory of death.
Last week, there were bombings in Great Britain. As a result there were adds taken out by certain Muslims around Britain, purportedly condemning these attacks.
Fussy held these out as "proof" that Islam is a religion of peace.
I continue to point her to the OFFICIAL publications of the Islamic governments.
They make it clear, and it is preached every day in mosques and schools all over Islam, the hatred and intolerance of all others.
It is taught to children from their youngest days, in the Madrassas, the Islamic schools.
Worse, it is illegal to denounce Islam as your religion and punishable by death to practice any other religion.
How any one cannot simply read these documents, the constitutions, and charters of all of these nations and organizations are publicly available, I don't know.
But, interestingly 2 NY papers had articles about this issue just today.
They are printed below:
The New York Sun
July 9, 2007 edition
Questioning Whether Islam Is Religion of Peace
By YOUSSEF IBRAHIM
July 9, 2007
The latest batch of attacks by Islamic terrorists raised fresh concerns among Muslims over what they fear may be "heinous attempts" to link terror with Islam.
British Muslims, who number 1.6 million, are reportedly funding advertising campaigns across Britain that proclaim Islam is "the religion of peace" — in the process also implicitly warning fellow Britons against criticizing their faith.
Yet a year ago, a weighty Muslim writer and pundit, Abdelrahman Al Rashed, manager of the pan-Arab TV network Al-Arabiya Television, famously launched a stormy debate when he opined, "While all Muslims are not terrorists, all terrorists are now Muslims."
Ever since, the question among Muslim scholars and activists is precisely how much of the terror inspired by Islam is due to the faith itself — and how much is due to the way it is being preached.
Clearly, the issue is enormously delicate, fraught with the pitfalls of prejudice and all sorts of other sensitivities.
But as hundreds of thousands of people from New York to Baghdad are butchered under Islam's banners, failing to tackle it head-on is unacceptable.
Reasonable Muslims now agree that when a religion veers so far off course, it loses immunity to inquisition. "We ought to go through very serious questioning and soul-searching," a founder of the Muslim Public Affairs Council, Dr. Maher Hathout, wrote on "The American Muslim" Web site Thursday. "How did we, as a group, fail to nip this ugly phenomenon in the bud?" he asks. "How did we indulge in the luxury of theoretical debates, and craft all kinds of euphemisms to let this go on, spill out, and grow?"
The bare facts are there for all to see: Over the past 40 years or so, Islam's millions of fanatical preachers and political operatives have represented the religion as one of an "oppressed" people, victimized for centuries by the multiple ogres of Christianity, Judaism, and secularism. Listen to many preachers, read several interpretations of the Muslim holy book, or go to a variety of madrassas from Pakistan to Saudi Arabia, and you will quickly learn that Islam's central value, bar none, is jihad.
Far from a religion of peace, these clerics have "weaponized" Islam's text and the Koran into a war manifesto against even fellow Muslims — as between Shiites and Sunnis.
Raising the bar further, most Muslim scholarship of today maintains the refrain that Islam is not meant to be another religion, but the most definitive of God's revelations to man. As Muslim children are told daily, the Prophet Muhammad is not only the last of God's prophets, but the most authoritative.
Thus, it follows that Muslims merit greater privilege. A Muslim, for example, may take any number of non-Muslim wives, but the reverse is illegal. Abandoning Islam is punishable by jail or death. No other religion is acceptable.
The next step in such a logical progression is clearly the necessity to force others to submit. Islam has become imbued with a kind of droit du seigneur — the extrajudicial, absolute rights of a lord of the manor — which cannot be argued with.
Saudis, for example — and this includes their most moderate and modernized leaders — feel it is perfectly natural to fund the building of hundreds of mosques in Europe, from London to Cologne, but cannot find a shred of logic in allowing the construction of a single church or Buddhist temple in Saudi Arabia, even though millions of Christian and Asian expatriates work there.
The scholarly journeys down such roads have served to legitimize the excessive aggression in hundreds of the religious edicts issued weekly by both legitimate and rogue Muslim scholars — including the charlatans of Al Qaeda, who decree that killing infidels is a Muslim duty.
A Saudi expert on Islamic movements, Mshari Al Zaydi, who is the opinion page editor of the Saudi daily Asharq Al-Awsat, went to the heart of the matter in a remarkable essay a few days ago, in which he pointedly noted that Saudi religious leaders have never issued an outright renunciation of the religious thinking of Osama bin Laden.
The most the Saudi religious establishment has done, Mr. Zaydi wrote, is to "mildly state that Mr. bin Laden was simply an 'erroneous mujtahid,'" — a term referring to those qualified to issue juridical opinions and edicts such as fatwas — "as though this man was not responsible for setting the Muslim world ablaze, taking it back centuries and much farther than its original backwardness." In Egypt, Jordan, and Morocco, the Muslim Brotherhood contests for power based on a single slogan: "Islam is the solution." Could it be that their version of Islam is also the problem?
ISLAM'S PROBLEM
WE MUST STOP DENYING OUR RELIGION'S ROLE IN VIOLENCE
By IRSHAD MANJI
NY POST
Mohammed Bouyeri
Mohammed BouyeriStory Bottom
July 8, 2007 -- LAST week, two very different Brits had their say about the latest terrorist plots in their country. Prime Minister Gordon Brown told the nation that "we have got to separate those great moderate members of our community from a few extremists who wish to practice violence and inflict maximum loss of life in the interests of a perversion of their religion." By contrast, a former jihadist from Manchester wrote that the "real engine of our violence" is "Islamic theology."
Months ago, this young man informed me that as a militant he raised most of his war chest not from obscenely rich Saudis, but from middle-class Muslim dentists living in the United Kingdom. There's sobering lesson here for the new prime minister.
So far, those arrested in connection to the car bombs are, by and large, medical professionals. The seeming paradox of the privileged seeking to avenge grievance has many champions of compassion scratching their heads. Aren't Muslim martyrs supposed to be poor, disenfranchised, and resentful about both?
WE should have been stripped of that breezy simplification by now. The 9/11 hijackers came from means. Mohamed Atta, their ringleader, earned an engineering degree. He then moved to the West, pursuing his post-graduate studies in Germany. No servile goat-herder, that one.
In 2003, I interviewed Mohammad Al Hindi, the political leader of Islamic Jihad in Gaza. A physician himself, Dr. Al Hindi explained the difference between suicide and martyrdom. "Suicide is done out of despair," the good doctor diagnosed. "But most of our martyrs today were very successful in their earthly lives."
In short, it's not what the material world fails to deliver that drives suicide bombers. It's something else. And, time and again, the very people committing these acts have articulated what that something else is: their religion.
Note: do NOT click the "back" button on your browser.
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Shhhhhh.... don't tell!!!! or... The myth of Hamastan
Abba Eban, former president of Israel once said about the so called Palestinians "They never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity".
As you know from an earlier post, I had hopes for the new government that Mahmoud Abbas installed, thinking he was finally going to confront Hamas and his own Al Aqsa Martyr's Brigade.
There is a dirty little secret that the world does not want anyone to know.
Israel, even in the midst of this constant war provides all of the basic services to the so called Palestinians, and in the territories.
Water, power, gas, etc. In addition, they collect the requisite taxes on these and things like sales taxes, import duties, etc.
The Palestinian Authority has no capacity for this, even more than a decade after it's establishment under the so Oslo accords. So Israel collects the taxes and transfers them to the Palestinian authority.
Now, this is one of the Orwellian facets of this conflict. That's right, the Israelis have turned over hundreds of millions of dollars in order for them to buy the weapons used to kill Israelis!!
After Hamas won the elections last year, the Israelis said that they would not turn the money over to Hamas. They refused to recognize a government with them involved.
So, after the split the last few weeks, a decision was made to try and prop up Abbas and the new government. The tax money, well over $100 million dollars was turned over to Abbas.
It was thought, and written in virtually every media outlet, that the so called Palestinians were now living as two separate entities, or would be.
It made sense. The Gazans are largely Egyptian, as Gaza was an Egyptian territory, certainly from 1948 to 1967. The West Bank residents are Jordanian.
So, the split seemed somewhat natural.
In addition those of us willing to speak honestly over the years, have always maintained that there could never be a bifurcated Palestinian state divided geographically by Israel. It just simply could not work geographically.
So, what is the first thing that Abbas does when he receives the money from Israel? He pays the Palestinian Authority employees in Gaza!!! Whether they are Hamas operatives or Fatah, does not matter.
By paying them off, Abbas is doing a number of things that immediately both destroy his credibility, YET AGAIN, as a "partner for peace". He shows that he does not have the guts to truly isolate Hamas. He holds out this olive branch to them.
He also, and perhaps more dangerously to Israel, gives Hamas the opportunity to continue to spend it's money on the bombs, missiles and other weapons they use to kill Israelis rather than having to pay civil employees.
Once again, they have not failed to miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.
As you know from an earlier post, I had hopes for the new government that Mahmoud Abbas installed, thinking he was finally going to confront Hamas and his own Al Aqsa Martyr's Brigade.
There is a dirty little secret that the world does not want anyone to know.
Israel, even in the midst of this constant war provides all of the basic services to the so called Palestinians, and in the territories.
Water, power, gas, etc. In addition, they collect the requisite taxes on these and things like sales taxes, import duties, etc.
The Palestinian Authority has no capacity for this, even more than a decade after it's establishment under the so Oslo accords. So Israel collects the taxes and transfers them to the Palestinian authority.
Now, this is one of the Orwellian facets of this conflict. That's right, the Israelis have turned over hundreds of millions of dollars in order for them to buy the weapons used to kill Israelis!!
After Hamas won the elections last year, the Israelis said that they would not turn the money over to Hamas. They refused to recognize a government with them involved.
So, after the split the last few weeks, a decision was made to try and prop up Abbas and the new government. The tax money, well over $100 million dollars was turned over to Abbas.
It was thought, and written in virtually every media outlet, that the so called Palestinians were now living as two separate entities, or would be.
It made sense. The Gazans are largely Egyptian, as Gaza was an Egyptian territory, certainly from 1948 to 1967. The West Bank residents are Jordanian.
So, the split seemed somewhat natural.
In addition those of us willing to speak honestly over the years, have always maintained that there could never be a bifurcated Palestinian state divided geographically by Israel. It just simply could not work geographically.
So, what is the first thing that Abbas does when he receives the money from Israel? He pays the Palestinian Authority employees in Gaza!!! Whether they are Hamas operatives or Fatah, does not matter.
By paying them off, Abbas is doing a number of things that immediately both destroy his credibility, YET AGAIN, as a "partner for peace". He shows that he does not have the guts to truly isolate Hamas. He holds out this olive branch to them.
He also, and perhaps more dangerously to Israel, gives Hamas the opportunity to continue to spend it's money on the bombs, missiles and other weapons they use to kill Israelis rather than having to pay civil employees.
Once again, they have not failed to miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.
A special ride..
As you might have guessed from looking at my profile pics, I am something of an avid bike rider. My friends and I will generally go out early every Sunday morning and ride 60 or so miles around Westchester county, through beautiful horse country.
As much as I love it, I am usually up for a change of scenery.
This Independence Day, a friend of one of my co-riders suggested doing a special "patriotic" ride in the city (NYC).
There are several interesting phenomena when it comes to NY'ers.
First, Manhattanites virtually NEVER venture into the other boroughs (Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, the Bronx). Oh, maybe to see a Mets or Yankees game, but then they just hop the subway, or take a cab or limo and get deposited right at the stadiums.
Those in the outer boroughs usually only come into Manhattan for work, when the population of the little island swells from a few hundred thousand into the millions. Or they may come in for the wonderful cultural events.
Throughout the city, there are amazing sites that often go ignored. Hundreds of parks, public art, historic sites, etc.
What is generally not known, because Americans, no different from NY'ers really know little of their own history, are the many incredibly historically significant landmarks.
Manhattan was the site of the largest riots in American history, the draft riots of the civil war which led federal troops to fire artillery into lower Manhattan.
And so much more.
But, this Wednesday, we decided to do a ride to see some of the Revolutionary sites, with others sprinkled in.
We started on 89th St. and Riverside drive looking at the soldiers and sailors monument. An enormous rotunda and sculpture that stands at the entrance to Riverside Park commemorating all the NY'ers who have died in all of the Wars in this country.
We then rode up Riverside Drive (for those wondering, the river is the Hudson river, itself an historic site) to Grants tomb. Dedicated to the memory of Ulysses S. Grant and the basis for the trivia question "Who is buried in Grant's tomb"? Not Grant himself, who is interred at Arlington National in Washington, but his wife).
The tomb covers an entire city block and during the drug days of the 1970' and 80's was the a notorious crack den.
It has been lovingly restored and now stands as a true monument. We discussed also Fort Tryon, now site of the "Cloisters" a branch of the Metropolitan Museum and some of it's medieval collection.
It was named for the British Governor of NY. IT was the site of the Battle of Fort Washington, it's original name in which American troops faced the Hessian mercenaries hired by the British.
It was part of the fall of NY (more below) but was also the site of the death of the first "American" woman to be wounded in battle. Margaret Corbin.
Next we headed back down, took a brief stop at the statue of Eleanor Roosevelt at the 79th St. entrance to Riverside park and made our way onto the fabulous new West Side Greenway/Bike and Pedestrian path.
100 or so blocks later and we were at Ground Zero which was teeming, even at 9 in the morning on this day.
For those who have not been, it still takes ones breath away, reverberating in deep sadness. Just a pit, with fencing and construction cranes around, if you listen closely, you can hear the screams of the victims.
Next we proceeded all the way south, to Battery Park. As the name implies, the Park was the site of original cannon batteries and was part of the escape of American troops from the victorious British.
We circled around and stood in the southern tip of Battery Park City and gazed at Governeurs, Ellis and Liberty Islands. These you probably know the significance of. Lady Liberty, a gift from the French, who were instrumental in helping America become free, has inscribed on her tablet the date, July 4th 1776.
We then headed up to the world financial center, opposite ground zero to read the dedication and information on the construction of the new liberty tower.
This building is a magnificent piece of architecture whose centerpiece is an incredible atrium known as the Wintergarden. It was destroyed on 9/11, not by the falling of the towers, but by the bodies of those who chose to jump from the Trade Center rather than die in an inferno. They came crashing through this totally glass building.
We crossed the island towards city hall and then mounted the Brooklyn Bridge stopping at the center supports to read the history of this magnificent structure.
We then headed to the Brooklyn side. Originally named Breuklyn by the Dutch, it became Brookland under the English and is now a bastardization of the 2 names.
Circling under the bridge we came to the Fulton Ferry port. The ferry landing here was used by Washington and his troops to escape to the island of Manhattan, crossing the East river under cover of the night to escape the advancing British troops as the Battle of Brooklyn Heights, also known as the Battle of Long Island, was lost.
Because of the fame of this event, when Ferry service was created between Brooklyn and Manhattan, Robert Fulton chose this spot to begin with his new "steam" ferries.
The real significance of the Battle of Brooklyn was the loss of NY which than stayed in British hands for the duration of the war. It is also noted for the execution of Nathan Hale ("I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country" ).
After the siege of Boston, the British had retreated to Nova Scotia, Long Island and established headquarters at New Dorp on Staten Island.
After being pushed back and then retreating to the southern tip of Manhattan, Washington then escaped across the Hudson to New Jersey for the famous Winter in Trenton and the eventual crossing of the Delaware.
Finally, we headed through the historic Brooklyn neighborhoods, Brooklyn Heights, Park Slope, Cobble Hill and headed towards Prospect Park, Brooklyn's answer to Central Park in Manhattan.
The entrance to Prospect Park is Grand Army Plaza, designed to look like the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. It is the center point of many of the famed Brooklyn Avenues that you may have heard of - Flatbush, Ocean Parkway, [image].
The Arch was designed by John Duncan, who would go on to design Grant's tomb. The cornerstone was laid by famed Civil War General William Tecumseh Sherman, unfortunately largely forgotten, but one of the true heroes of the civil war.
The arc, and the statues were originally designed as a memorial for the defenders of the union in the civil war, and is now considered the most successful entryway to a public park in the world.
Finally, we headed back through Brooklyn, making a brief stop at the other side of Prospect park to see the large bas relief and free sculpture of the Marquise de Lafayette, the Frenchman so critical to helping us achieve independence.
From there we went through the Financial District, past the New York Stock exchange on Wall Street to stop and look at the large sculpture of George Washington, on the steps of Federal Hall, where Washington took the oath of office.
As a point of history - for those that don't know, during revolutionary days, New York was really a secondary city, never more than the fourth largest, behind Philadelphia, Boston, Richmond etc.
It was only after the civil war that it exploded, and not until then that the southern tip, where Washington had made his escape, became anything more than "country side".
As much as I love it, I am usually up for a change of scenery.
This Independence Day, a friend of one of my co-riders suggested doing a special "patriotic" ride in the city (NYC).
There are several interesting phenomena when it comes to NY'ers.
First, Manhattanites virtually NEVER venture into the other boroughs (Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, the Bronx). Oh, maybe to see a Mets or Yankees game, but then they just hop the subway, or take a cab or limo and get deposited right at the stadiums.
Those in the outer boroughs usually only come into Manhattan for work, when the population of the little island swells from a few hundred thousand into the millions. Or they may come in for the wonderful cultural events.
Throughout the city, there are amazing sites that often go ignored. Hundreds of parks, public art, historic sites, etc.
What is generally not known, because Americans, no different from NY'ers really know little of their own history, are the many incredibly historically significant landmarks.
Manhattan was the site of the largest riots in American history, the draft riots of the civil war which led federal troops to fire artillery into lower Manhattan.
And so much more.
But, this Wednesday, we decided to do a ride to see some of the Revolutionary sites, with others sprinkled in.
We started on 89th St. and Riverside drive looking at the soldiers and sailors monument. An enormous rotunda and sculpture that stands at the entrance to Riverside Park commemorating all the NY'ers who have died in all of the Wars in this country.
We then rode up Riverside Drive (for those wondering, the river is the Hudson river, itself an historic site) to Grants tomb. Dedicated to the memory of Ulysses S. Grant and the basis for the trivia question "Who is buried in Grant's tomb"? Not Grant himself, who is interred at Arlington National in Washington, but his wife).
The tomb covers an entire city block and during the drug days of the 1970' and 80's was the a notorious crack den.
It has been lovingly restored and now stands as a true monument. We discussed also Fort Tryon, now site of the "Cloisters" a branch of the Metropolitan Museum and some of it's medieval collection.
It was named for the British Governor of NY. IT was the site of the Battle of Fort Washington, it's original name in which American troops faced the Hessian mercenaries hired by the British.
It was part of the fall of NY (more below) but was also the site of the death of the first "American" woman to be wounded in battle. Margaret Corbin.
Next we headed back down, took a brief stop at the statue of Eleanor Roosevelt at the 79th St. entrance to Riverside park and made our way onto the fabulous new West Side Greenway/Bike and Pedestrian path.
100 or so blocks later and we were at Ground Zero which was teeming, even at 9 in the morning on this day.
For those who have not been, it still takes ones breath away, reverberating in deep sadness. Just a pit, with fencing and construction cranes around, if you listen closely, you can hear the screams of the victims.
Next we proceeded all the way south, to Battery Park. As the name implies, the Park was the site of original cannon batteries and was part of the escape of American troops from the victorious British.
We circled around and stood in the southern tip of Battery Park City and gazed at Governeurs, Ellis and Liberty Islands. These you probably know the significance of. Lady Liberty, a gift from the French, who were instrumental in helping America become free, has inscribed on her tablet the date, July 4th 1776.
We then headed up to the world financial center, opposite ground zero to read the dedication and information on the construction of the new liberty tower.
This building is a magnificent piece of architecture whose centerpiece is an incredible atrium known as the Wintergarden. It was destroyed on 9/11, not by the falling of the towers, but by the bodies of those who chose to jump from the Trade Center rather than die in an inferno. They came crashing through this totally glass building.
We crossed the island towards city hall and then mounted the Brooklyn Bridge stopping at the center supports to read the history of this magnificent structure.
We then headed to the Brooklyn side. Originally named Breuklyn by the Dutch, it became Brookland under the English and is now a bastardization of the 2 names.
Circling under the bridge we came to the Fulton Ferry port. The ferry landing here was used by Washington and his troops to escape to the island of Manhattan, crossing the East river under cover of the night to escape the advancing British troops as the Battle of Brooklyn Heights, also known as the Battle of Long Island, was lost.
Because of the fame of this event, when Ferry service was created between Brooklyn and Manhattan, Robert Fulton chose this spot to begin with his new "steam" ferries.
The real significance of the Battle of Brooklyn was the loss of NY which than stayed in British hands for the duration of the war. It is also noted for the execution of Nathan Hale ("I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country" ).
After the siege of Boston, the British had retreated to Nova Scotia, Long Island and established headquarters at New Dorp on Staten Island.
After being pushed back and then retreating to the southern tip of Manhattan, Washington then escaped across the Hudson to New Jersey for the famous Winter in Trenton and the eventual crossing of the Delaware.
Finally, we headed through the historic Brooklyn neighborhoods, Brooklyn Heights, Park Slope, Cobble Hill and headed towards Prospect Park, Brooklyn's answer to Central Park in Manhattan.
The entrance to Prospect Park is Grand Army Plaza, designed to look like the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. It is the center point of many of the famed Brooklyn Avenues that you may have heard of - Flatbush, Ocean Parkway, [image].
The Arch was designed by John Duncan, who would go on to design Grant's tomb. The cornerstone was laid by famed Civil War General William Tecumseh Sherman, unfortunately largely forgotten, but one of the true heroes of the civil war.
The arc, and the statues were originally designed as a memorial for the defenders of the union in the civil war, and is now considered the most successful entryway to a public park in the world.
Finally, we headed back through Brooklyn, making a brief stop at the other side of Prospect park to see the large bas relief and free sculpture of the Marquise de Lafayette, the Frenchman so critical to helping us achieve independence.
From there we went through the Financial District, past the New York Stock exchange on Wall Street to stop and look at the large sculpture of George Washington, on the steps of Federal Hall, where Washington took the oath of office.
As a point of history - for those that don't know, during revolutionary days, New York was really a secondary city, never more than the fourth largest, behind Philadelphia, Boston, Richmond etc.
It was only after the civil war that it exploded, and not until then that the southern tip, where Washington had made his escape, became anything more than "country side".
Independence day
Some may wonder what the real significance of July 4th, or Independence day is to the world, let alone the United States.
The 18th century was known as the Age of Revolutions, and for good reason. It was ended, really, with the Russian Revolution, but there were revolutions throughout the Western World, indicating the ascendancy of the believers in Natural Law and the ascension of the promoters of this humanistic view, the "philosophes".
For the first time in history, there was talk among intellectuals of "human rights". Not the way we now know them but that mankind had certain rights which could not be proscribed by legislatures, let alone kings.
More directly the entire concept of "divine rule" of a monarch was thrown into dispute and the idea that G*d had granted to man certain rights and that there were also natural laws or "laws of nature" that had to be obeyed were new and revolutionary.
These ideas had been fomenting and had been written about all over the world. They can be seen in the writings of Locke and Rousseau. Jefferson himself had written down many of the same ideas in his Consitution of the state of Virginia and Adams had copied them for Massachusetts.
But what separates the American Revolution was the writing of Thomas Jefferson.
The Declaration of Independence, heavily edited by John Adams and Benjamin Franklin and truncated by the Continental Congress in Philadelphia, is considered by most historians to be the pre-eminent document of the "Age of Enlightenment".
It is brilliant in it's simplicity and it's execution.
"We hold these truths to be self evident..."
No need for discussion, all intelligent gentleman now understand that these truths are, and of right , ought to be, shared by all (white men, of course).
"...that all men are created equal"
No longer were there serfs and a monarch, but rather gentleman, all of whom had a right to express their opinions.
"...that they are endowed by their creator with rights..."
Rights are divinely granted but of this earth.
Below are the words that this country was founded upon.
Go to UShistory dot org to also read Jefferson's original version, his draft. You will see how the beauty was crafted, and the parts that, had they been allowed to remain, would have changed history.
Most important among these edits was the dis inclusion of the following passages dealing with slavery. In order to ensure a unanimous vote, the bloc of Southern States demanded it's removal:
[COLOR red]he has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating
it's most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of
a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying
them to slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable
death in their transportations thither. this piratical warfare,
the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian
king of Great Britain. determined to keep open a market where MEN
should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for
suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain
determining to keep open a market where MEN should be bought & sold
this excrable commerce ^ and that this assemblage of horrors might
want no fact of distiguished die[/COLOR]
Read it, and appreciate it again, and the men and women who have died to protect these words and what they mean.
Now the text of the Declaration:
[COLOR purple][SIZE 5]IN CONGRESS, JULY 4, 1776
The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America[/SIZE]
[SIZE 4]When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. — Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.
He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.
He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.
He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.
He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their Public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.
He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.
He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected, whereby the Legislative Powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.
He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.
He has obstructed the Administration of Justice by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary Powers.
He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.
He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people and eat out their substance.
He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.
He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil Power.
He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:
For quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:
For protecting them, by a mock Trial from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:
For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:
For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:
For depriving us in many cases, of the benefit of Trial by Jury:
For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences:
For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies
For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:
For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.
He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.
He has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.
He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation, and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & Perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.
He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their Country, to become the executioners of their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands.
He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.
In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.
Nor have We been wanting in attentions to our British brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our Separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.
We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these united Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States, that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. — And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.[/SIZE][/COLOR]
The 18th century was known as the Age of Revolutions, and for good reason. It was ended, really, with the Russian Revolution, but there were revolutions throughout the Western World, indicating the ascendancy of the believers in Natural Law and the ascension of the promoters of this humanistic view, the "philosophes".
For the first time in history, there was talk among intellectuals of "human rights". Not the way we now know them but that mankind had certain rights which could not be proscribed by legislatures, let alone kings.
More directly the entire concept of "divine rule" of a monarch was thrown into dispute and the idea that G*d had granted to man certain rights and that there were also natural laws or "laws of nature" that had to be obeyed were new and revolutionary.
These ideas had been fomenting and had been written about all over the world. They can be seen in the writings of Locke and Rousseau. Jefferson himself had written down many of the same ideas in his Consitution of the state of Virginia and Adams had copied them for Massachusetts.
But what separates the American Revolution was the writing of Thomas Jefferson.
The Declaration of Independence, heavily edited by John Adams and Benjamin Franklin and truncated by the Continental Congress in Philadelphia, is considered by most historians to be the pre-eminent document of the "Age of Enlightenment".
It is brilliant in it's simplicity and it's execution.
"We hold these truths to be self evident..."
No need for discussion, all intelligent gentleman now understand that these truths are, and of right , ought to be, shared by all (white men, of course).
"...that all men are created equal"
No longer were there serfs and a monarch, but rather gentleman, all of whom had a right to express their opinions.
"...that they are endowed by their creator with rights..."
Rights are divinely granted but of this earth.
Below are the words that this country was founded upon.
Go to UShistory dot org to also read Jefferson's original version, his draft. You will see how the beauty was crafted, and the parts that, had they been allowed to remain, would have changed history.
Most important among these edits was the dis inclusion of the following passages dealing with slavery. In order to ensure a unanimous vote, the bloc of Southern States demanded it's removal:
[COLOR red]he has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating
it's most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of
a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying
them to slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable
death in their transportations thither. this piratical warfare,
the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian
king of Great Britain. determined to keep open a market where MEN
should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for
suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain
determining to keep open a market where MEN should be bought & sold
this excrable commerce ^ and that this assemblage of horrors might
want no fact of distiguished die[/COLOR]
Read it, and appreciate it again, and the men and women who have died to protect these words and what they mean.
Now the text of the Declaration:
[COLOR purple][SIZE 5]IN CONGRESS, JULY 4, 1776
The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America[/SIZE]
[SIZE 4]When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. — Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.
He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.
He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.
He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.
He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their Public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.
He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.
He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected, whereby the Legislative Powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.
He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.
He has obstructed the Administration of Justice by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary Powers.
He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.
He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people and eat out their substance.
He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.
He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil Power.
He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:
For quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:
For protecting them, by a mock Trial from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:
For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:
For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:
For depriving us in many cases, of the benefit of Trial by Jury:
For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences:
For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies
For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:
For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.
He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.
He has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.
He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation, and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & Perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.
He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their Country, to become the executioners of their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands.
He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.
In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.
Nor have We been wanting in attentions to our British brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our Separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.
We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these united Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States, that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. — And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.[/SIZE][/COLOR]
Some resources
I frequently get asked for resources to study the issues that I discuss in the blog. As you know, the site does not allow posting of web addresses so just do a web search for any of the organizations or authors I list below.
By far the best research on the history of Islam is Barnard Lewis. Professor Emeritus at Princeton University, Lewis is generally considered the world's leading expert on Islam and the Islamic Empires of the past.
One of his books "What Went Wrong" is a very good starting point for anyone wanting to understand the Muslim mindset from a geopolitical standpoint.
It is a short paperback and reads easily. Not like a textbook, but more like popular history.
I would also suggest looking up Daniel Pipes. Pipes writes regularly in many newspapers around the country, particularly the NY Sun, and was one of the early voices warning, not about Islam as he points out, but about what he calls "Islamofacism".
Hillel Halkin is another Israeli that writes regularly for the NY Sun and in the Jerusalem Post.
Michael Oren wrote the definitive book on the 6 day war: "Six Days of War - The Making of the Modern Middle East". He had access to Arab leaders that was unprecedented and it is a magnificent history of the region post WWII and the results of the war up until about 2000.
It was on the NY Times bestseller list for more than a year.
There is a woman in Israel, that writes a regular e-mail column that is fairly well known, Naomi Regan. She is VERY right wing, more so than I, but will give a good perspective on the Israeli view of many issues.
If you do a search for "The Middle East Times" it is an Arab paper that usually once a week will do a roundup of the editorials in many of the Arab world's papers.
Al Ahram is a paper published in Egypt that is an official organ of the government that will give it's views.
You can also, of course, go to the web site of Al Manar or Al Jazeera television stations. Both have online versions.
There are many organizations whose sole function is to root out the falsehoods that are printed in virtually every one of these papers, or on Arab TV.
These are MEMRI, Honest Reporting, Palestinian Media Watch, CAMERA, etc.
Frequently, they will also post videos of the type of incendiary speeches I have discussed with the translation in Arabic.
These are important, because what happens is that the politicians in these lands are famous for saying one thing in English, another in Arabic.
Yasser Arafat was truly famous for this.
The Israeli papers all have English language web sites as well. The Jerusalem Post, Yediot Aharonot and Haaretz.
For inside information of terrorism and developments in the region check out Debka. It is not as "inside" as it once was, but at one time, there were rumours that the people that wrote it were Mossad agents!
Please feel free to contact me here or via e-mail with any questions. I frequently engage in e-mail exchanges with my readers.
Thanks again for tuning in.
By far the best research on the history of Islam is Barnard Lewis. Professor Emeritus at Princeton University, Lewis is generally considered the world's leading expert on Islam and the Islamic Empires of the past.
One of his books "What Went Wrong" is a very good starting point for anyone wanting to understand the Muslim mindset from a geopolitical standpoint.
It is a short paperback and reads easily. Not like a textbook, but more like popular history.
I would also suggest looking up Daniel Pipes. Pipes writes regularly in many newspapers around the country, particularly the NY Sun, and was one of the early voices warning, not about Islam as he points out, but about what he calls "Islamofacism".
Hillel Halkin is another Israeli that writes regularly for the NY Sun and in the Jerusalem Post.
Michael Oren wrote the definitive book on the 6 day war: "Six Days of War - The Making of the Modern Middle East". He had access to Arab leaders that was unprecedented and it is a magnificent history of the region post WWII and the results of the war up until about 2000.
It was on the NY Times bestseller list for more than a year.
There is a woman in Israel, that writes a regular e-mail column that is fairly well known, Naomi Regan. She is VERY right wing, more so than I, but will give a good perspective on the Israeli view of many issues.
If you do a search for "The Middle East Times" it is an Arab paper that usually once a week will do a roundup of the editorials in many of the Arab world's papers.
Al Ahram is a paper published in Egypt that is an official organ of the government that will give it's views.
You can also, of course, go to the web site of Al Manar or Al Jazeera television stations. Both have online versions.
There are many organizations whose sole function is to root out the falsehoods that are printed in virtually every one of these papers, or on Arab TV.
These are MEMRI, Honest Reporting, Palestinian Media Watch, CAMERA, etc.
Frequently, they will also post videos of the type of incendiary speeches I have discussed with the translation in Arabic.
These are important, because what happens is that the politicians in these lands are famous for saying one thing in English, another in Arabic.
Yasser Arafat was truly famous for this.
The Israeli papers all have English language web sites as well. The Jerusalem Post, Yediot Aharonot and Haaretz.
For inside information of terrorism and developments in the region check out Debka. It is not as "inside" as it once was, but at one time, there were rumours that the people that wrote it were Mossad agents!
Please feel free to contact me here or via e-mail with any questions. I frequently engage in e-mail exchanges with my readers.
Thanks again for tuning in.
Monday, July 2, 2007
The "murder" of Farfur the mouse. (for those who continue to doubt)
During the spring, Palestinian Media Watch uncovered the most popular children's program currently being broadcast on Palestinian Authority Television.
It centered around a Mouse that was a Mickey Mouse lookalike, although he was named "Farfur".
He preached Jihad, and death to the Jews and Israel.
There was an uproar when this was revealed.
Everyone from all the Presidential candidates to the Disney company and Walt Disney's granddaughter complained.
Mahmoud Abbas said he would remove the show.
Of course, this never happened. And the show remained on.
Two weeks ago, when the Palestinian broadcast facilities were damaged in the fighting the show went off the air briefly.
It came back on last week with an even more shocking episode. What follows is the report from Palestinian media watch.
Videos of Farfur can be found on Youtube. The report:
Palestinian Media Watch Bulletin - July 1, 2007
Hamas TV Mickey Mouse beaten to death by Israeli - becomes
Martyr in final episode
by Itamar Marcus and Barbara Crook
The Hamas satellite TV channel has responded to the
international controversy over its hatred-spouting Mickey
Mouse clone by having the character beaten to death by an
Israeli and becoming a Shahid, martyr for Allah.
Al-Aqsa TV broadcast Friday the final episode of the children's program Tomorrow's Pioneers, starring Farfur, the Mickey Mouse lookalike whose teachings about world Islamic domination, violence and hatred outraged the world after PMW made them public in May.
Without apparent regard for the sensitivities of their child viewers, the show's creators killed off the character in a particularly violent way that allowed them to continue the show's rabidly anti-Israel messages.
In this last episode, the squeaky-voiced Farfur receives land documents from his grandfather. The episode ends when an Israeli investigator tries to force Farfur to give up the key and the papers that his grandfather had given him. When Farfur refuses, the Israeli continues his brutal attack and beats Farfur to death.
Although Farfur's death is not shown to the child viewers, the hostess of the show, Saraa', sadly announces his death to the children:
"Yes, our children friends, we lost our dearest friend, Farfur. Farfur turned to a Martyr while protecting his land. He turned into a Martyr at the hands of the criminals, and murderers, the murderers of the innocent children."
PMW reported the existence of the Mickey Mouse knockoff and his hateful messages in May, prompting worldwide outrage.
The New York Daily News dubbed the character "Terror Mouse, "while Walt Disney's daughter Diane described it as "pure evil."
Despite promises by the PA that the show would be suspended immediately, it remained on the air for another week, and was then suspended during the violence in Gaza. This final episode, which includes the killing of Farfur by Israel, enabled Hamas to remove the program while continuing its
hate messages.
For those that continue to doubt the official policies of these nations, I say, open your eyes. Learn Arabic, read the papers, watch Arab language television (if your lucky you might catch a repeat of the highest rated program in the history of Egyptian state Television, A dramatization of "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion", including the showing of the bloodletting of an Arabic boy for the purposes of making Matzoh.)
It centered around a Mouse that was a Mickey Mouse lookalike, although he was named "Farfur".
He preached Jihad, and death to the Jews and Israel.
There was an uproar when this was revealed.
Everyone from all the Presidential candidates to the Disney company and Walt Disney's granddaughter complained.
Mahmoud Abbas said he would remove the show.
Of course, this never happened. And the show remained on.
Two weeks ago, when the Palestinian broadcast facilities were damaged in the fighting the show went off the air briefly.
It came back on last week with an even more shocking episode. What follows is the report from Palestinian media watch.
Videos of Farfur can be found on Youtube. The report:
Hamas TV Mickey Mouse beaten to death by Israeli - becomes
Martyr in final episode
by Itamar Marcus and Barbara Crook
The Hamas satellite TV channel has responded to the
international controversy over its hatred-spouting Mickey
Mouse clone by having the character beaten to death by an
Israeli and becoming a Shahid, martyr for Allah.
Al-Aqsa TV broadcast Friday the final episode of the children's program Tomorrow's Pioneers, starring Farfur, the Mickey Mouse lookalike whose teachings about world Islamic domination, violence and hatred outraged the world after PMW made them public in May.
Without apparent regard for the sensitivities of their child viewers, the show's creators killed off the character in a particularly violent way that allowed them to continue the show's rabidly anti-Israel messages.
In this last episode, the squeaky-voiced Farfur receives land documents from his grandfather. The episode ends when an Israeli investigator tries to force Farfur to give up the key and the papers that his grandfather had given him. When Farfur refuses, the Israeli continues his brutal attack and beats Farfur to death.
Although Farfur's death is not shown to the child viewers, the hostess of the show, Saraa', sadly announces his death to the children:
"Yes, our children friends, we lost our dearest friend, Farfur. Farfur turned to a Martyr while protecting his land. He turned into a Martyr at the hands of the criminals, and murderers, the murderers of the innocent children."
PMW reported the existence of the Mickey Mouse knockoff and his hateful messages in May, prompting worldwide outrage.
The New York Daily News dubbed the character "Terror Mouse, "while Walt Disney's daughter Diane described it as "pure evil."
Despite promises by the PA that the show would be suspended immediately, it remained on the air for another week, and was then suspended during the violence in Gaza. This final episode, which includes the killing of Farfur by Israel, enabled Hamas to remove the program while continuing its
hate messages.
For those that continue to doubt the official policies of these nations, I say, open your eyes. Learn Arabic, read the papers, watch Arab language television (if your lucky you might catch a repeat of the highest rated program in the history of Egyptian state Television, A dramatization of "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion", including the showing of the bloodletting of an Arabic boy for the purposes of making Matzoh.)
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