“The Economist”: Israel in top 5 emerging markets

Israel has risen 12 places to become the world 36th largest economy.
by Zeev Klein

In its latest emerging markets survey, “The Economist” notes that Israel has been one of the five fastest growing emerging markets in the past 20 years. Israel has risen 12 spaces from the world’s 48th biggest economy in 1980-84 to 36th biggest economy in 2001-05. “The Economist” ranked economies by size on the basis of their five-year average GDP in current dollars, and compared the rankings of 1980-84 with 2001-05.

“The Economist’s” report is a shot in the arm for Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, Minister of Finance Abraham Hirchson, and Governor of the Bank of Israel Prof. Stanley Fischer, given that, since 1980, the country has undergone two intifadas, the effects of two wars in Iraq and two wars in Lebanon - the only one of the 28 emerging economies to have such an experience.

The four fastest climbing countries are in Asia: Singapore rose 20 places from the world’s 59th largest economy in 1980-84 to 39th in 2001-05; Taiwan rose 14 places from 32nd place to 18; South Korea rose 12 places from 23rd place to 11th; and Hong Kong also rose 12 places from 42nd place to 30th. Israel climb matched those of South Korea and Hong Kong.

“The Economist” notes that China has risen only four notches to become the world’s sixth largest economy - but even in the early 1980s it was already the world's tenth-biggest economy in current dollars. India, perhaps surprisingly, has barely budged as the world’s 12th largest economy. Several oil producers have fallen down the rankings, despite the increase in oil prices towards the end of the period covered: Venezuela has fallen 12 place from 25th place in 1980-84 to 37th place in 2001-05; Iran has fallen 16 place from 17th place to 33rd; Nigeria has fallen 16 places from 33rd place to 49th, and Saudi Arabia has fallen to 15th place from 22nd.

Why is the guy who is gunning for a new Holocaust belittling the last one?

By Caroline B. Glick
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com

There is something terribly confusing about Iran's penchant for denying the Holocaust. Given Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's stated desire to see Israel wiped off the map, it would seem more reasonable for Iran to be celebrating the Holocaust than denying it.

But Ahmadinejad is slicker than that. He embraces not the Holocaust but the nation that pulled it off. In his August missive to German Chancellor Angela Merkel, he referred to the German nation as "a great contributor to progress in science, philosophy, literature, the arts and politics who have had a "positive influence in international relations and the promotion of peace." These lines of course are open to interpretation. He could be referring to Goethe and Schiller and he could be referring to Heidegger and Goebbels.
So why is the guy who is gunning for a new Holocaust belittling the last one? First of all, by doing so he empowers those Germans and friends of Germany who carried it out. By denying the Holocaust Ahmadinejad turns the Nazis into victims and so provides a space for them to express themselves after a sixty year silence. Indeed, in Germany neo-Nazism is a burgeoning political and social force that proudly parades its links to Iran.

The German fascist party NPD's followers demonstrated in support of Iran at the World Cup in Germany last spring. This week, Der Spiegel reported that attacks against Jewish children have increased markedly in recent years. Jewish children and their non-Jewish friends have been humiliated in anti-Semitic rituals unheard of since the Nazi era. "Jew" has become one of the most prevalent derogatory terms in use in Germany today.

Iran's adoption of Holocaust denial as an official, defiant policy gives legitimacy to this striking phenomenon. This is especially the case since Iran is blaming the Jews for silencing these poor fascists. In his same letter to Merkel Ahmadinejad wrote, "The perpetual claimants against the great people of Germany are the bullying Zionists that funded the Al Quds Occupying Regime with the force of bayonets in the Middle East."Ahmadinejad of course does not limit his efforts to the Nazis. He is also setting the cognitive conditions for the annihilation of Israel for the international Left by presenting Israel's existence as a direct result of the Holocaust. As Iran's Foreign Minister Manoucher Mottaki said this week, "If the official version of the Holocaust is thrown into doubt, then the identity and nature of Israel will be thrown into doubt."

In short, Iran views Holocaust denial as a strategic propaganda tool. By downgrading the Holocaust, Iran mobilizes supporters and paralyzes potential opponents. Its coupling of the last Holocaust with the one it signals daily it intends to carry out, wins it support among the Nazis and the Sunnis alike. Its presentation of the Holocaust as a myth used to exploit Muslims wins its support in the international Left which increasingly views Israel as an illegitimate state. So by denying the Holocaust Iran raises its leadership profile both regionally and globally. Indeed, even if the Left doesn't buy into Holocaust denial, it can still agree with Iran's conclusion that Israel has no right to exist. As Mottaki explained, "If during this [Holocaust denial conference] it is proved that the Holocaust was a historical reality, then what is the reason for the Muslim people of the region and the Palestinians having to pay the cost of the Nazis' crimes?"

So from Mottaki's perspective, Israel is illegitimate whether the Holocaust happened or not. In making this point, Mottaki closed the gap between Iran and a loud chorus of voices in both Europe and the US who claim that Israel was established only because of European guilt over the Holocaust and consequently the Jewish state has no inherent legitimacy. This is a view that even Jewish leftists like Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen and New York University Professor Tony Judt have expressed.
Inevitably, those who hold this view come to believe that Israel has no right to defend itself. After all, if Israel is but an illegal European colony on stolen Arab lands, then any act of self-defense that Israel takes is by definition an act of aggression. So from this perspective, all Israel can do is give away land an accept that it must pay for all the pathologies of the Arab world.

The view that every problem in the region is somehow or another bound up in Israel's stubborn refusal to disappear is clearly reflected also in the policy prescriptions of the Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group, in former president Jimmy Carter's anti-Semitic attacks against Israel and in the position paper authored by professors Steve Walt and John Mearshimer about the so-called "Israel Lobby," (which is due to be published as a full-length book ahead of the 2008 presidential elections).
And so, by framing its Holocaust denial around an interpretation of the Arab world's war against Israel propounded by radical leftists and foreign policy "realists" of the soft-Right, the Iranians enable them to find a comfort level with what Iran is doing today. This comfort was displayed by the new US Defense Secretary Robert Gates in his Senate confirmation hearing where he justified Iran's nuclear weapons program by claiming that it was a deterrent measure in response to the fact that Pakistan, Russia, the US, and Israel all have nuclear weapons. Gates of course served on the Baker-Hamilton commission and no doubt supports its recommendation that Israel be forced to give the Golan Heights to Syria and Judea and Samaria to Hamas.

Not only does Iran's Holocaust denial attract potential supporters, it also confuses and so neutralizes potential opponents who neither like nor dislike Jews and are too confused to understand the threat Iran poses to the US.
Although it has not for a moment desisted from its calls of "Death to America," its vision of a world without America or its threats to attack Europe, Iran has made Israel the focus of its propaganda. In so doing it has provided cover for "realists" like Mearshimer, Walt and James Baker who claim that the war is really just between Israel and the Muslims and that the only reason that the US finds itself caught in the middle is because of its support for Israel. That support, in turn, is the result of Jewish subversion of Washington through the so-called all powerful "Israel lobby," which Carter claims as he sells his latest screed no politician will risk bucking up against.

This view, now emerging into the mainstream political debate in the US has already won the debate in most of Europe. There the view is that European Muslims are only attacking their non-Muslim countrymen because states like the US and Micronesia have yet to abandon Israel.
For Merkel, the centerpiece of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's trip to Germany Tuesday was her furious denunciation of the Iranian conference. "I would like to make it clear that we reject with all our strength the conference taking place in Iran….Germany will never accept this and will act against [Holocaust denial] with all the means that we have." The Germans even organized a conference of their own in Berlin this week where everyone indignantly expressed their indignation at Iran. Merkel's breathless furor is an example of the final problem that Ahmadinejad has created for his opponents by adopting Holocaust denial as a central plank of Iran's foreign policy. Bluntly stated, he gives people a way to be perceived as being against Iran without actually doing anything to stop Iran from getting nuclear weapons.

Merkel and her fellow Germans have spent an inordinate amount of time over the past three years condemning the Nazi Holocaust. This week they even organized a special Holocaust condemning conference in response to the Iranian Holocaust denying conference.
Yet over the same time period, they have conducted negotiations with Teheran as part of the EU-3 that have enabled Iran to continue its nuclear progress; obstructed US efforts to levy sanctions on Iran; and maintained active trade relations with Iran. Merkel's government has continued the practice of providing loan guarantees to German firms doing business with Iran. In 2005, German-Iranian trade stood at about $5 billion. Now, after three years of disastrous negotiations with the mullahs, Germany has finally come around to supporting the European draft sanctions resolution against Iran being debated in the UN Security Council. The problem is that the proposed sanctions are so weak that they will have no impact on Iran's ability to move on with its nuclear bomb program.

The obvious fact that the sanctions will have no impact on Iran has not made a dent in Merkel's refusal to support military action against Iran under any circumstances - a refusal she reiterated while standing next to Israel's Prime Minister on Tuesday.
Olmert was apparently too busy admitting that Israel has nuclear weapons only to take back his admission hours later, absurdly praising Russian President Vladimir for his opposition to the "nuclearlization of Iran" which Putin is actively promoting, and promising to give Judea and Samaria to Holocaust denier Mahmoud Abbas to take issue with Merkel's statement. And that is a pity, because by taking issue with it, he would have gone far towards destroying the effectiveness of Iran's Holocaust denial strategy. Were Israel to base its diplomatic, military, informational, and economic policies on a single-minded commitment to prevent Iran from achieving nuclear capabilities, it would succeed. Unfortunately, under the Olmert government Israel is doing nothing of the kind on any level.

On the public diplomacy level, were Israel to take concerted action against Iran's Holocaust denial program, it could destroy the program and so enact a positive change in the public discourse on Iran. Merkel's stated refusal to support military action against Iran's nuclear facilities was an ideal opportunity to launch such action. If Olmert had reacted in disgust to Merkel's statement and announced that it was unacceptable, he would have stood the Iranians' propaganda on its head.
Imagine what the impact would have been if Olmert had rejoined, "Excuse me, but it is quite possible that at the end of the day a military strike against Iran will be the only way to prevent Iran from acquiring atomic bombs and so committing another Holocaust. Given this, your blanket opposition to the notion of military strikes constitutes Germany's effective acceptance of another Holocaust. Shame on you Angie. Shame on Germany."
Such a statement would have changed the entire dynamic of the international discourse on Iran.

If we are willing to do what is necessary, Israel can prevent the next Holocaust. It is unforgivable that Olmert and his ministers are not doing what needs to be done.

Jimmy Carter: “I oppose a Palestinian State”

Jimmy Carter: “I oppose a Palestinian State”
By Jeff Ballabon

This was Carter, THEN:

"… I am opposed to an independent Palestinian state, because in my
own judgement and in the judgement of many leaders in the Middle
East, including Arab leaders, this would be a destabilizing factor in
the Middle East and would certainly not serve the United States
interests. (Jimmy Carter at the United Jewish Appeal National Young
Leadership Conference, February 25, 1980)."

"…we oppose the creation of an independent Palestinian state. The
United States, as all of you know, has a warm and unique relationship
of friendship with Israel that is morally right. It is compatible
with our deepest religious convictions, and it is right in terms of
America’s own strategic interests. We are committed to Israel’s
security, prosperity, and future as a land that has so much to offer
to the world. A strong Israel and a strong Egypt serve our own
security interests.We are committed to Israel’s right to live in
peace with all its neighbors, within secure and recognized borders,
free from terrorism. We are committed to a Jerusalem that will
forever remain undivided with free access to all faiths to the holy
places. Nothing will deflect us from these fundamental principles and
committments. (Source: First anniversary of the Egyptian-Israeli
Peace Treaty / White House joint conference, March 23, 1980)."

What has changed in the last 25 years? Not Israel’s 1948
independence. Not the 1967 war. Not the cynical, ignominous treatment
of Arab refugees by the Arab world.

So why, 25 years later, is Israel’s right to exist a matter of
debate, while Palestine’s right to exist is presumed by everyone from
the United Nations to Jimmy Carter to George Bush to Ehud Olmert?

Why, when the Palestinian leaderships - PA and Hamas - the first
imposed and the second popularly elected, demonstrate that their
chief characteristics are, respectively, corrupt thuggery and bloody
holy war, why then is endless-concession-making, negotiating,
retreating, disengaging, humanitarian-aid-giving, appeasing Israel
viewed as the “destabilizing factor?”

Did a massive land-grab by Israel precede Carter’s new book? On the
contrary: a massive land-surrender preceded the book. And, in fact,
when it retreats, morally, intellectually, politically, physically,
Israel does become the destabilizing factor - or at least surrenders
its role as the stabilizer of the world’s most volatile region.

What has changed is Israel’s own resolve. Why should anyone else
fight to support a nation whose political elite takes every
opportunity and advantage we give it and squanders it? Why should
anyone else fight for a nation which sacrifices its soldiers rather
than vanquishes its enemy? Why should anyone else fight for a nation
which has ceased believing in itself? Which cravenly begs forgiveness
on the rare occasions it actually defends its citizens? Why should
anyone fight for a Jewish homeland which seems bent on denying its
Jewishness? Why should anyone care about a state which retreats from
its victories? Which sheds its democratic veneer to brutalize and
displace its most patriotic and committed citizens, its idealists,
its pioneers? Why should anyone care for an Israel that is willing,
even eager, in its quest for a “secular revolution” to declare that
the Jewish heritage is an albatross, that Judea and Samaria are a
burden, and that Jerusalem is negotiable? That the State of Israel
is, in fact, seeking to disengage from the Holy Land?

The turning point, perhaps the catalyst, was Oslo; the Bill Clinton/
Ehud Barak plan to (in Clinton negotiator Dennis Ross’ terminology)
dispense with the “mythologies” in order to negotiate. How very
modern and enlightened and liberal and civilized. And how very
destructive and foolish and deadly. The ideas, the principles, the
vision, the morals, the truths which they disdain as mythologies were
and are the very heart of Israel’s national aspiration. It was the
vision that kept Jews alive through millenia of diaspora and
dispersion, crusade, expulsion, forced conversion, blood libel and
pogrom, and, finally, Holocaust And the heart may be romanticized as
the seat of emotion, but only the hopelessly deluded excises it and
thinks the body will survive. Only the deluded excises the heart. Or
the suicidal.

What has changed, in consequence, is the resolve of Israel’s enemies
as well. And, because they are not burdened by the selfish inanity of
modern liberalism, they have not lost their willingness to suffer and
to sacrifice. The suicides they are committing are anything but
deluded; their terror is a winning strategy. Rather than eliciting
disgust and fury, rather than being condemned as unutterably
barbaric, the use of civilians as targets, children as bombs and
grandmothers as bunkers has even brought them the sympathies of the
deluded West. Not only in the corridors of the UN or the salons of
Europe - but even in those enlightened liberal precincts in Israel
where the stubborn, unruly Jewish “mythologies” have long since been
relegated, surrendered, sublimated to an oh-so-superior modern
Israeli multicultural consciousness.

[UPDATE: New ending added on December 4]

In the end, what is most frustrating is also that which is the
greatest cause for hope. Israel, but for its recent governments’
moral blindness and appetite for appeasement, really is in a position
of strength. Its military still is excellent, its weapons still
superior, its citizens still doughty.

It lacks just one element to recapture the momentum in its struggle
against its enemies and that is resolve. And, as we witnessed this
summer, even that resolve is just a moment away, waiting for the
right leadership with a bold message.

This summer, Olmert hampered and ultimately reined in the IDF. But
before he did so, when Israel first seemed poised to respond with
force, Israeli morale skyrocketed.

Was it a successful “peace” negotiation? Diplomatic recognition by a
heretofor implacable enemy? A truce with Hamas? Quite the contrary:
it was an uninstigated assault by Hizballah. Israeli soldiers were
kidnapped. Rockets came raining down on major population centers. 1
million Israelis had to live in bomb shelters. A war was being waged
in the North and the South and terror activity was up in the West.

But morale was higher than at any time since before Oslo. The
knowledge that it was embarking on a mission, no matter how perilous,
to defend the homeland, unified and electrified the nation.
“Finally!” declared pundits on the Israeli Right and Left. Record
numbers of citizen-reservists showed up to fight, far more than the
IDF had even called. It was a return to moral clarity.

But it was short-lived. Within days, hope was turned to despair as
Israel’s apologetic, retreat-oriented, pretentiously post-
ideological, post-moral government, defeated the Israeli people and
the IDF. And today, Israeli morale is at an all time low.

Even before Iran’s nuclear threat, the question more and more of
Israel’s friends have been asking is “Will Israel still exist in ten
years?”

If Israel’s leaders continue to travel the path of Oslo, of phony
peace processes, of concession and retreat and halfhearted military
objectives, surely not. For Israel will never appease its enemies. It
will vanquish them or it will die.

“If you will it,” said Herzl, “it is no dream.”

“If you will it…” today, as then, it remains the only question.

Beware of 57-year old grandma terrorists

It seems that the terrorist era has entered a new phase. A 57-year old Palestenian woman has blown herself up in an attempt to kill Israeli soldiers. You can read the original story here.

Reuters reports: "The armed wing of the governing Hamas movement took responsibility for the attempted suicide bombing and identified the woman as Fatima al-Nejar. Her family said she had nine children and nearly 30 grandchildren. She is the first known Palestinian grandmother to attempt a suicide bombing against Israelis.

"I'm very proud of what she did. Allahu akbar (God is great)," said one of her sons, Fuad, 31.

On a Hamas-released video, the woman read a statement saying she wanted to dedicate her death to Palestinians held in Israeli jails and to Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh of Hamas.

She wore a black suicide belt and had an M-16 assault rifle slung over her neck. "I offer myself as a sacrifice to God and to the homeland," she said.""

In the past terrorists have used children and older people simply as human shields.
But now it seems the game has changed. The shields are no longer shields only, they are now being trained to be assault weapons in the arsenals of Islamofascist's war against Israel and humanity.

Islamic children are trained to hate and kill Jews from the time they are young. Watch this disturbing video:



Now, with the suicide death of Fatima al-Nejar, older people take their own place in the terrorist hall of shame.

Politicians continue to use the term radical Islam. I have been using it myself. But I'm beginning to wonder: are there any other forms of Islam? Where are the "moderate" Islamic teachers who denounce the suicide bombings and fascist propaganda coming out of the Middle East? When you see a grandmother of 30 children becoming a suicide bomber, what will cross your mind next time you find yourself at a busy mall or an airport with some older Arab lady nearby.

Now, the amazing thing is this: when we warn others of the dangers of Islamofascists, they act like their feelings are so hurt by our warnings.

Enough games, I say! These perverts laugh at the civilized world when we talk about everyone having the right to speak and worship. They have become such professional manipulators of our democratic system and way of life.

Now hear this: beware of older Islamic ladies! We already know what they may be up to.


Georg P. Bakalov

‘Inspector Borat’ looking for Jew hatred in all the wrong places

by Charles Krauthammer

"Borat" is many things: a sidesplitting triumph of slapstick and scatology, a runaway moneymaker and budding franchise, the worst thing to happen to Kazakhstan since the Mongol hordes, and, as columnist David Brooks astutely points out, a supreme display of elite snobbery reveling in the humiliation of the hoaxed hillbilly.

But it is one thing more, something Brooks alluded to in passing but that requires at least one elaboration: an unintentionally revealing demonstration of the unfortunate attitude many have toward working-class American Christians, especially evangelicals.

You know the shtick. Borat goes around America making anti-Semitic remarks in order to elicit a nodding anti-Semitic response. And with enough liquor and cajoling, he succeeds. In the most notorious such scene (on "Da Ali G Show," where the character was born), Borat sings "Throw the Jew Down the Well" in an Arizona bar as the local rubes join in.

Sacha Baron Cohen, the creator of Borat, revealed his purpose for doing that in a rare out-of-character interview he granted Rolling Stone in part to counter charges that he was promoting anti-Semitism. On the face of it, this would be odd, given that Cohen is himself a Sabbath-observing Jew. His defense is that he is using Borat's anti-Semitism as a "tool" to expose it in others. And that his Arizona bar stunt revealed, if not anti-Semitism, then "indifference" to anti-Semitism. And that, he maintains, was the path to the Holocaust.

Whoaaaa. Does he really believe such rubbish? Can a man that smart (Cambridge, investment banker and now brilliant filmmaker) really believe that indifference to anti-Semitism and the road to the Holocaust are to be found in a country-and-western bar in Tucson?

Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world.

With anti-Semitism reemerging in Europe and rampant in the Islamic world; with Iran acquiring the ultimate weapon of genocide and proclaiming its intention to wipe out the world's largest Jewish community (Israel); with America and, in particular, its Christian evangelicals the only remaining Gentile constituency anywhere willing to defend that besieged Jewish outpost — is the American heartland really the locus of anti-Semitism? Is this the one place to go to find it?

In Venezuela, Hugo Chavez says that the "descendants of the same ones that crucified Christ" have "taken possession of all the wealth in the world." Just this month, Tehran hosted an international festival of Holocaust cartoons featuring enough hooked noses and horns to give Goebbels a posthumous smile. Throughout the Islamic world, newspapers and television, schoolbooks and sermons are filled with the most vile anti-Semitism.

Baron Cohen could easily have found what he seeks closer to home. He is, after all, from Europe, where synagogues are torched and cemeteries desecrated in a revival of anti-Semitism — not "indifference" to but active — unseen since the Holocaust. Where a Jew is singled out for torture and death by French-African thugs. Where a leading Norwegian intellectual — et tu, Norway? — mocks "God's Chosen People" ("We laugh at this people's capriciousness and weep at its misdeeds") and calls for the destruction of Israel, the "state founded . . . on the ruins of an archaic national and warlike religion."

Yet, amid this gathering darkness, an alarming number of liberal Jews are seized with the notion that the real threat lurks deep in the hearts of American Protestants, most specifically Southern evangelicals. Some fear that their children are going to be converted; others, that below the surface lies a pogrom waiting to happen; still others, that the evangelicals will take power in Washington and enact their own sharia law.

This is all quite crazy. America is the most welcoming, religiously tolerant, philo-Semitic country in the world. No nation since Cyrus the Great's Persia has done more for the Jews. And its reward is to be exposed as latently anti-Semitic by an itinerant Jew looking for laughs and, he solemnly assures us, for the path to the Holocaust?

Look. Harry Truman used to tell derisive Jewish jokes. Richard Nixon said nasty things about Jews in government and elsewhere. Who cares? Truman and Nixon were the two greatest friends of the Jews in the entire postwar period: Truman secured them a refuge in the state of Israel, and Nixon saved it from extinction during the Yom Kippur War.

It is very hard to be a Jew today, particularly in Baron Cohen's Europe, where Jew-baiting is once again becoming acceptable. But it is a sign of the disorientation of a distressed and confused people that we should find it so difficult to distinguish our friends from our enemies.

original article published at: http://jewishworldreview.com/cols/krauthammer112406.php3

Against all odds: Iraqi women's participation in the nation building process

This is an incredible report by Manal Omar, the Regional Director for Women for Women International (www.womenforwomen.org). Ms. Omar speaks about the many challenges and victories of Iraqi women in securing their rights, highlighting the clear decline in the status of women's rights since 2003. She based her talk on the findings of a household survery conducted in May 2004 and observation and fieldwork in Iraq since July 2003, including direct contact with the female leadership and women's organizations in Iraq.

Has Condi Rice not seen videos like this?

MY TAKE: Condi Rise is one sharp lady. She has been a lifelong
student of Russia, which is of course great. However, I'm a little
concerned that she compares the USSR and the Communist ideology to
the modern Islamofascists. I also think we have to be positive and
work to offer a better future to the Arabs, whether the Palestinian
Arabs or any other Arab people. But let's not forget some of the
radicals who flew those plane on 9/11 were university students!

I've always said it: a hungry evil man, when he gets his belly full,
is a full evil man. Likewise, an uneducated Islamofascist, when he
gets educated (a very stretchy idea in and of itself), simply becomes
an educated Islamofascist. Cal Thomas points out well the level of
indoctrination the Palestinians take their kids through. Watch this
YouTube video from my "Islam" playlist on YouTube:



Condi comes clean on her Middle East views
By Cal Thomas

QUESTION: You're all over the conservative Jewish blogs for remarks you made recently on the Palestinian state, your commitment to it, living side by side with Israel, and that's been the policy of the Administration since day one.


SECRETARY RICE: Yes.


QUESTION: I'd like to know what evidence you have — I read, and I know you do and a lot more than I do, the sermons, the editorials in the Middle East, the right of return idea, which a lot of people think is just basically overwhelming for a Jewish population with millions and millions of Arabs in the so-called Diaspora. What evidence do you have that teaching their schoolchildren at the ages of four and five to be martyrs, to show up in their little uniforms with plastic guns and their headbands, textbooks one grenade plus two grenades equals, you know, three grenades — what evidence do you have out there that if they had an independent state that they would lay down their arms and not complete the mission of killing the Jews and throwing them out?


SECRETARY RICE: Well, you can look at any opinion poll in the Palestinian territories and 70 percent of the people will say they're perfectly ready to live side by side with Israel because they just want to live in peace. And when it comes right down to it, yeah, there are plenty of extremists in the Palestinian territories who are not going to be easily dealt with. They have to be dealt with — Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in the Palestinian territories — they're terrorists and they have to be dealt with as terrorists.


But the great majority of Palestinian people — this is — I've been with these people. The great majority of people, they just want a better life. This is an educated population. I mean, they have a kind of culture of education and a culture of civil society. I just don't believe mothers want their children to grow up to be suicide bombers. I think the mothers want their children to grow up to go to university. And if you can create the right conditions, that's what people are going to do.


QUESTION: Do you think this or do you know this?


SECRETARY RICE: Well, I think I know it.


QUESTION: You think you know it?


SECRETARY RICE: I think I know it.


QUESTION: Is it because — do you think you know it because you want to believe it or do you think you know it because of conversations with tens, scores, hundreds

SECRETARY RICE: Well, lots of conversations with Palestinians. But also it's — look, if human beings don't want a better future, don't want their children to grow up in peace and have opportunities, then none of this is going to work anyway. But I really believe that the people of the Middle East — not the extremists — want the same things that everyone else wants. I haven't seen a society yet where it wasn't true. Let me put it that way. I haven't seen a society yet where ordinary people, given an opportunity, wouldn't opt for a better life and for peace.


QUESTION: But then you have this incredible religious component which says, you know, your guarantee for heaven is if you blow somebody up.


SECRETARY RICE: Yeah, except for those leaders who don't seem to be so anxious to lead the surge and go to paradise.


QUESTION: Oh, of course they don't. No, they have plenty of recruits.


SECRETARY RICE: Yeah, they do have plenty of recruits. But the ideology, that kind of ideology of hatred and hopelessness does not have a chance against an ideology of hope and a better future. We just have to realize that because of the way that the politics of the Middle East has developed for the last 60 years, that ideology of hope and a better future has not been there.


I don't believe that most people in the Middle East really want to blow themselves up and believe in this ideology any more than most Russians actually wanted to believe in international communism. There are always extremists who are going to do that. There are always ideologues who are going to believe and they are always going to recruit from a pool of disaffected people. So you both have to lessen the pool of disaffected people, give them alternatives, and people choose other paths. I just don't see a society yet where that hasn't been the case.

The Dark Ages — live from the Middle East!

The Dark Ages — live from the Middle East!

By Victor Davis Hanson

The most frightening aspect of the present war is how easily our pre-modern enemies from the Middle East have brought a stunned postmodern world back into the Dark Ages.Students of history are sickened when they read of the long-ago, gruesome practice of beheading. How brutal were those societies that chopped off the heads of Cicero, Sir Thomas More and Marie Antoinette. And how lucky we thought we were to have evolved from such elemental barbarity.

Twenty-four hundred years ago, Socrates was executed for unpopular speech. The 18th-century European Enlightenment gave people freedom to express views formerly censored by clerics and the state. Just imagine what life was like once upon a time when no one could write music, compose fiction or paint without court or church approval? Ancient Greek literary characters, from Lysistrata to Antigone, reflected the struggle for sexual equality. The subsequent notion that women could vote, divorce, dress or marry as they pleased was a millennia-long struggle.

It is almost surreal now to read about the elemental hatred of Jews in the Spanish Inquisition, 19th-century Russian pogroms or the Holocaust. Yet here we are revisiting the old horrors of the savage past.

Beheading? As we saw with Nick Berg and Daniel Pearl, our Neanderthal enemies in the Middle East have resurrected that ancient barbarity — and married it with 21st-century technology to beam the resulting gore instantaneously onto our computer screens. Xerxes and Attila, who stuck their victims' heads on poles for public display, would've been thrilled by such a gruesome show.

Who would have thought centuries after the Enlightenment that sophisticated Europeans — in fear of radical Islamists — would be afraid to write a novel, put on an opera, draw a cartoon, film a documentary or have their pope discuss comparative theology? The astonishing fact is not just that millions of women worldwide in 2006 are still veiled from head-to-toe, trapped in arranged marriages, subject to polygamy, honor killings and forced circumcision, or are without the right to vote or appear alone in public. What is more baffling is that in the West, liberal Europeans are often wary of protecting female citizens from the excesses of Sharia law — sometimes even fearful of asking women to unveil their faces for purposes of simple identification and official conversation.

Who these days is shocked that Israel is hated by Arab nations and threatened with annihilation by radical Iran? Instead, the surprise is that even in places like Paris or Seattle, Jews are singled out and killed for the apparent crime of being Jewish. Since Sept. 11, the West has fought enemies who are determined to bring back the nightmarish world that we thought was long past. And there are lessons Westerners can learn from radical Islamists' ghastly efforts.

First, the Western liberal tradition is fragile and can still disappear. Just because we have sophisticated cell phones, CAT scanners and jets does not ensure that we are permanently civilized or safe. Technology used by the civilized for positive purposes can easily be manipulated by barbarians for destruction.

Second, the Enlightenment is not always lost on the battlefield. It can be surrendered through either fear or indifference as well. Westerners fearful of terrorist reprisals themselves shut down a production of a Mozart opera in Berlin deemed offensive to Muslims. Few came to the aid of a Salman Rushdie or Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh when their unpopular expression earned death threats from Islamists. Van Gogh, of course, was ultimately killed.

The Goths and Vandals did not sack Rome solely through the power of their hordes; they also relied on the paralysis of Roman elites who no longer knew what it was to be Roman — much less whether it was any better than the alternative.

Third, civilization is forfeited with a whimper, not a bang. Insidiously, we have allowed radical Islamists to redefine the primordial into the not-so-bad. Perhaps women in head-to-toe burkas in Europe prefer them? Maybe that crass German opera was just too over the top after all? Aren't both parties equally to blame in the Palestinian, Iraqi and Afghan wars?

To grasp the flavor of our own Civil War, impersonators now don period dress and reconstruct the battles of Shiloh or Gettysburg. But we need no so such historical reenactment of the Dark Ages. You see, they are back with us — live almost daily from the Middle East.

Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and military historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University

originally published by http://www.JewishWorldReview.com 

MY TAKE:

Did you know that at the time of the Inquisition, one of the greatest, most cruel persecutors of the Jews was in fact a man with Jewish bloodline. Call it perversion, hating yourself, whatever, the fact is that there are people who will come out against well being of the very people they came from. It all depends on where is your identity really. Some of the greatest America haters are brainwashed socialist, ultra-liberal Americans.

Say a prayer for Soros! Wth all the money he has, he could be doing good instead of mad things.

* * * * * *

George Soros Takes Aim at Israel

Billionaire investor George Soros is leading a move to stitch together an American Jewish political lobby that is "anti-Israel,” according to a column in the Jerusalem Post.

Soros, who spent millions attempting to defeat President Bush in 2004, is one of a "tiny minority of American Jews” who have played a role in undermining support for Israel in the Democratic Party, and they now seek "to undermine Israel’s position in the U.S. in general,” Caroline Glick writes in the Post.

Soros has invited another American Jewish billionaire, Peter Lewis, along with "North American Jewish plutocrats” like Charles and Edgar Bronfman, to join forces with him and leftist Jewish American organizations – including American Friends of Peace Now, the Israel Policy Forum and Brit Tzedek v’Shalom – to construct a political lobby that will weaken the influence of the pro-Israel lobby.

"Many of the individuals and organizations associated with the initiative have actively worked to undermine Israel,” Glick writes.

"Soros caused a storm in 2003 when, during a fund-raising conference for Israel, he alleged that Israel was partially responsible for the rise in anti-Semitic violence in Europe because of its harsh response to Palestinian terrorism.”

Glick also points out that in November 2005, the leaders of the Israel Policy Forum met with Condoleezza Rice and urged her to dismiss Israel's security concerns regarding two of the Gaza Strip's border crossing points. As a result, Rice pressured Israel to make dangerous concessions to the Palestinians.

And after Hamas' electoral victory in January, American Friends of Peace Now, Israel Policy Forum and Brit Tzedek v'Shalom worked to shield the Hamas-led Palestinian Authority from Congressional sanctions.

Together they worked to torpedo the Palestinian Anti-Terror Act, which enjoyed overwhelming support in the Congress and was designed to update American policy toward the Palestinian Authority in the wake of Hamas' ascendance to power.

Among its provisions, the bill called for an immediate end to U.S. assistance to nongovernmental and U.N. organizations operating in the PA that had connections to terrorist organizations.

Due to the lobbying efforts of the "Jewish leftists,” the Palestinian Anti-Terror Act was eventually scuttled, Glick notes, adding:

"Soros would like to institutionalize the ad-hoc coalition's success in undermining the Palestinian Anti-Terror Act in a new lobby.

"While its Jewish founders insist that they are pro-Israel, the fact of the matter is that they are about to establish an American Jewish anti-Israel lobby.”

this was originally published at foxnews.com, sorry I forgot to copy the url

The U.S. administration funding Abbas and his army...again?

Dear Lord, are you all hearing this? What's going on? The U.S.
administration funding Abbas and his army...again?

As reported by Caroline B. Glick

History's dangerous repetition

By Caroline B. Glick

It would seem that Karl Marx got things backwards. History does not
repeat itself first as tragedy and then as farce. Rather, it repeats
itself first as farce and second as tragedy. This, perhaps more than
anything else is the conclusion one should reach from North Korea's
nuclear test on Columbus Day.

It was the Clinton administration, which back in the Roaring '90s
began the policy of appeasing North Korea. Throughout the decade the
US wined and dined the North Korean Stalinists who always responded
by pocketing US concessions and escalating their nuclear and
ballistic missile activities and threats against the US and its Asian
allies.

The farce was then US secretary of state Madeleine Albright's visit
to Pyongyang in late October 2000, two weeks before the US
presidential elections. There, after the North Koreans tested the
Taepo-Dong 1 ballistic missile off the coast of Japan in 1998 and
refused to end either their missile programs or missile exports to
Iran, Albright tripped the night fantastic with Kim Jong-Il. Her
buffoonery was a perfect capstone to eight years of the Clinton
administration's addiction to ceremony over substance.

While America's tone towards North Korea chilled under the Bush
administration, there was little substantive change in its policies.

Secretary of state Colin Powell met with his North Korean counterpart
Pak Nam Sun and to this day US attempts to strike a deal with
Pyongyang have not ended. And now, Pyongyang, with its medium- and
long-range ballistic missiles, has tested a nuclear bomb.


THERE IS of course also North Korea's ally Iran. Toward Iran, too,
the substance of the Bush administration policies is little different
from that of his predecessor. Like North Korea, the Iranians respond
to US attempts at appeasement by escalating their rhetoric and
redoubling their offensive military build-ups of missiles and nuclear
capabilities.

The great shift, then which occurred under the Bush administration, a
shift for which President George W. Bush has been pilloried by his
political rivals, has been rhetorical.

While hypocritical, the division between rhetoric and substance has
something to recommend it. The benefit of the current US position
toward North Korea and Iran is that the rhetoric has left open the
possibility that the policy itself will finally be suited to reality.
Today, unlike the situation in the 1990s, the American public is at
least aware that these states are a threat to US national security
interests.

In the aftermath of North Korea's nuclear bomb test, the US can
support military actions by Japan and South Korea against North
Korea; build up its missile shield; and perhaps end its 14 year self-
imposed moratorium on nuclear testing and so revamp its nuclear arsenal.

Were the Bush administration to change its policy tomorrow regarding
Iran — begin shaming Europe into ending its appeasement, and
threatening Russia with trade sanctions if Moscow continues
supporting Iran, Syria and Hizbullah, while building up its military
options to strike at Iran's nuclear installations — the American
public would understand why the policy change was necessary. Indeed,
such a move could even help the Republican Party in the upcoming
elections.


DISTURBINGLY, WHILE Bush has paved the way rhetorically for a shift
in policy toward North Korea and Iran, he has done no such thing in
the US's relations with the terror-ruled Palestinian Authority. And
as is the case with Iran and North Korea, the stubborn and ill-
considered continuation of the Clinton administration's appeasement
policy toward the PA during the Bush years has only exacerbated and
escalated the threat posed by the PA to US national security
interests and to the national security of US allies — first and
foremost, of Israel.

In the 1990s, the father of modern terrorism, Yasser Arafat, was the
most frequent foreign visitor at the White House. The head of the PLO
was the object of adoration by the Clintonites. It didn't matter to
them that Arafat never revoked the PLO Charter calling for Israel's
destruction. It didn't matter that he indoctrinated a generation of
Palestinian children to become suicide bombers in jihad against the
Jews. It didn't matter that he used billions of dollars of American
and European taxpayer money to build the largest terror army in the
world. Arafat showed up at signing ceremonies. He was the poster
child of appeasement.

The Clinton administration tied itself to a policy toward the
Palestinians which, like its policies toward North Korea and Iran,
opened it to ever escalating blackmail. As the terror threat
emanating from the PA-ruled areas rose, empowering Arafat became the
obsession of the Clinton White House. He was showered with money,
guns and love. No Israeli security consideration could hold a candle
to the need to strengthen Arafat.

From bombing to bombing, Arafat was enriched and empowered. Israel's
security became the main obstacle to the signing ceremonies.

After seven years, the myth of Arafat the peacemaker exploded in the
faces of more than a thousand Israelis who would be killed over the
next six years of the Palestinian jihad. But the myth of the PA endured.

For the past six years, each bombing, every clear indication that the
PA itself is a terrorist entity is met by more breathless US
protestations of support for Palestinian empowerment and statehood.
The fact that the last six years have left the State Department
unfazed was made absolutely clear during Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice's visit last week.

Since Arafat appointed Mahmoud Abbas, his deputy of 40 years, PA
prime minister in 2003, the US has upheld Abbas as a man of peace, a
moderate and a respectable leader that the Bush administration wishes
to strengthen. To this end, the Bush administration has overlooked
Abbas's clear support for terrorism. It has excused his constant
appeals to merge his Fatah terror group with Hamas and Islamic Jihad.
It has ignored the fact that his Fatah terror group has committed
more acts of terror than Hamas and that Fatah's involvement in terror
and the sophistication of its attacks has only increased since Abbas
replaced Arafat after the latter's death in November 2004.

During her visit last week, at Abbas's request, Rice was scheduled to
meet with Fatah commander Hussein a-Sheikh in the American Consulate-
General in Jerusalem. The meeting was cancelled at the last minute
when Israeli activists demanded that Sheikh, who was directly
responsible for the murder of dozens of Israelis and several American
nationals, be arrested by Israel police upon arrival at the
consulate. Yet, Rice still met with other Fatah leaders, like
Muhammad Dahlan who has been directly implicated in the murder of
Israelis in terror attacks perpetrated by men under his command.


EVEN MORE disturbingly, Rice has officially sanctioned a policy put
together by US Army Lt.-Gen. Keith Dayton to expand by up to 70
percent Abbas's presidential guard and personal army, Force 17. The
administration wishes to raise some $20 million to fund the training
and arming and expansion of Abbas's army from 3,500 to 6,000
soldiers. This move comes after the US transferred 3,000 rifles and 1
million bullets to Force 17 in June. Yet Force 17 is a terrorist army
led by terrorists.

Right after he received the weapons shipment, Abbas appointed Mahmoud
Damra commander of the force. Damra, who like many of the Force 17
officers and soldiers, doubles as a Fatah terrorist, was wanted by
Israel due to his direct involvement in the terrorist murder of at
least 15 Israelis. One of his deputies claimed that the US rifles
were immediately used to attack a bus carrying Israeli school girls
in Judea.

Israel arrested Damra at a checkpoint shortly after he received
Abbas's appointment. The US immediately began pressuring Israel to
release him.

In addition to Damra's direct involvement in Fatah terror, he also
has close ties with Iran and Hizbullah. In 2002, Arafat reportedly
appointed him Force 17's liaison officer to Iran and Hizbullah
forces. The fact that Abbas appointed Damra Force 17's overall
commander just weeks before Fatah and Hamas began Iran's proxy war
against Israel by attacking the IDF position at Kerem Shalom and
kidnapping Cpl. Gilad Shalit, should say something about Abbas's
intentions. Yet, last week, Rice couldn't praise Abbas enough.

North Korea's nuclear test and Iran's nuclear intimidation show us
what happens when failed policies are not abandoned. Due in part to
its continued US-backed legitimacy, the PA is used by Pakistan as an
excuse for terror sponsorship and nuclear proliferation and by
jihadists throughout the world as justification for attacks on
Western and Jewish targets.

No doubt the North Korean nuclear test is a turning point in this
world war.

The question is whether it will force the US to finally part with
appeasement, or whether Rice will convince President Bush to take his
chances by repeating history a third and fourth time.

***

Caroline B. Glick is the senior Middle East Fellow at the Center for
Security Policy in Washington, DC and the deputy managing editor of
The Jerusalem Post.

Islamofascisim in your face!

Click here to watch islamofascism in action!



Today I discovered this video at Glenn Beck's web site. It's hard to believe there are people who can be so deceived, so full of hate and so narrow minded. It's hard for us who live in developed democracies to even comprehend such fundamentalistic, hateful worldview.

Seems like these radical Muslim ideologists are so brainwashed, they can never be part of a reasonable dialogue or seeking solutions for peaceful coexistence.

Seeing this video may help people understand little better Bono's appeal to coexist. I believe what the man is trying to say is: "Look, you may never embrace my faith and I may never embrace yours, but can we please not KILL EACH OTHER at least!"

I mean honestly, when you hear this preacher endorsing anti-semitism and the persecution of the Jews throughout history, how can you not see this is indeed an "islamofascist" agenda?! When president Bush used the term recently, people were going nuts, and yet, just listen and watch to this video.

I can't believe how this preacher actually endorses the Holocaust, saying it was because of the Jewish people and then he says "what they did to them was wrong".

Hello there, Mr. Palestinian islamofascist ideologist! Do you think we're so STUPID! You can talk this trash to you brainwashed flock, but do you think we can't see through your cheap populist maneuvering. The guy knows that for political reasons he can't say the Holocaust was good, so he throws is one totally fake "what the Germans did to them was wrong" and then shortly thereafter repudiates his one statement by saying the Jews deserved all this. What a wicked weasel!

And if it wasn't for the fact he's preaching to a bunch of dysfunctional, hateful losers, who obviously are full of hate just like him, then I suppose their agenda wouldn't have much advancement.

But yes, indeed! Just like the Communists and every other tyranny, they always succeed because the majority of people are just like what Jesus called them: sheep. The majority of those people are stupid like sheep and they are methodically brainwashed every Sunday or Friday, or whenever they have their services, listening to little Adolf Hitlers just like this one.

Still not clear where is the "Beast" in the Middle East?

A voice of reason to the Muslim world?

Dr. Wafa Sultan is a largely unknown Syrian-American psychiatrist living outside Los Angeles, nursing a deep anger and despair about her fellow Muslims.

Thanks to an unusually blunt and provocative interview on Al Jazeera television on Feb. 21, she is an international sensation, hailed as a fresh voice of reason by some, and by others as a heretic and infidel who deserves to die.
In the interview, which has been viewed on the Internet more than a million times and has reached the e-mail of hundreds of thousands around the world, Dr. Sultan bitterly criticized the Muslim clerics, holy warriors and political leaders who she believes have distorted the teachings of Muhammad and the Koran for 14 centuries.
She said the world's Muslims, whom she compares unfavorably with the Jews, have descended into a vortex of self-pity and violence.

Dr. Sultan said the world was not witnessing a clash of religions or cultures, but a battle between modernity and barbarism, a battle that the forces of violent, reactionary Islam are destined to lose.
In response, clerics throughout the Muslim world have condemned her, and her telephone answering machine has filled with dark threats. But Islamic reformers have praised her for saying out loud, in Arabic and on the most widely seen television network in the Arab world, what few Muslims dare to say even in private.
"I believe our people are hostages to our own beliefs and teachings," she said in an interview this week in her home in a Los Angeles suburb.

Dr. Sultan, who is 47, wears a prim sweater and skirt, with fleece-lined slippers and heavy stockings. Her eyes and hair are jet black and her modest manner belies her intense words: "Knowledge has released me from this backward thinking. Somebody has to help free the Muslim people from these wrong beliefs."
Perhaps her most provocative words on Al Jazeera were those comparing how the Jews and Muslims have reacted to adversity. Speaking of the Holocaust, she said, "The Jews have come from the tragedy and forced the world to respect them, with their knowledge, not with their terror; with their work, not with their crying and yelling."
She went on, "We have not seen a single Jew blow himself up in a German restaurant. We have not seen a single Jew destroy a church. We have not seen a single Jew protest by killing people."
She concluded, "Only the Muslims defend their beliefs by burning down churches, killing people and destroying embassies. This path will not yield any results. The Muslims must ask themselves what they can do for humankind, before they demand that humankind respect them."

Her views caught the ear of the American Jewish Congress, which has invited her to speak in May at a conference in Israel. "We have been discussing with her the importance of her message and trying to devise the right venue for her to address Jewish leaders," said Neil B. Goldstein, executive director of the organization.
She is probably more welcome in Tel Aviv than she would be in Damascus. Shortly after the broadcast, clerics in Syria denounced her as an infidel. One said she had done Islam more damage than the Danish cartoons mocking the Prophet Muhammad, a wire service reported.

DR. SULTAN is "working on a book that — if it is published — it's going to turn the Islamic world upside down."
"I have reached the point that doesn't allow any U-turn. I have no choice. I am questioning every single teaching of our holy book."

The working title is, "The Escaped Prisoner: When God Is a Monster."

Dr. Sultan grew up in a large traditional Muslim family in Banias, Syria, a small city on the Mediterranean about a two-hour drive north of Beirut. Her father was a grain trader and a devout Muslim, and she followed the faith's strictures into adulthood.

But, she said, her life changed in 1979 when she was a medical student at the University of Aleppo, in northern Syria. At that time, the radical Muslim Brotherhood was using terrorism to try to undermine the government of President Hafez al-Assad . Gunmen of the Muslim Brotherhood burst into a classroom at the university and killed her professor as she watched, she said.
"They shot hundreds of bullets into him, shouting, 'God is great!' " she said. "At that point, I lost my trust in their god and began to question all our teachings. It was the turning point of my life, and it has led me to this present point. I had to leave. I had to look for another god."

She and her husband, who now goes by the Americanized name of David, laid plans to leave for the United States. Their visas finally came in 1989, and the Sultans and their two children (they have since had a third) settled in with friends in Cerritos, Calif., a prosperous bedroom community on the edge of Los Angeles County.
After a succession of jobs and struggles with language, Dr. Sultan has completed her American medical licensing, with the exception of a hospital residency program, which she hopes to do within a year. David operates an automotive-smog-check station. They bought a home in the Los Angeles area and put their children through local public schools. All are now American citizens.

BUT even as she settled into a comfortable middle-class American life, Dr. Sultan's anger burned within. She took to writing, first for herself, then for an Islamic reform Web site called Annaqed (The Critic), run by a Syrian expatriate in Phoenix.
An angry essay on that site by Dr. Sultan about the Muslim Brotherhood caught the attention of Al Jazeera, which invited her to debate an Algerian cleric on the air last July.

In the debate, she questioned the religious teachings that prompt young people to commit suicide in the name of God. "Why does a young Muslim man, in the prime of life, with a full life ahead, go and blow himself up?" she asked. "In our countries, religion is the sole source of education and is the only spring from which that terrorist drank until his thirst was quenched."
Her remarks set off debates around the globe and her name began appearing in Arabic newspapers and Web sites. But her fame grew exponentially when she appeared on Al Jazeera again on Feb. 21, an appearance that was translated and widely distributed by the Middle East Media Research Institute, known as Memri.

Memri said the clip of her February appearance had been viewed more than a million times.

"The clash we are witnessing around the world is not a clash of religions or a clash of civilizations," Dr. Sultan said. "It is a clash between two opposites, between two eras. It is a clash between a mentality that belongs to the Middle Ages and another mentality that belongs to the 21st century. It is a clash between civilization and backwardness, between the civilized and the primitive, between barbarity and rationality."

She said she no longer practiced Islam. "I am a secular human being," she said.
The other guest on the program, identified as an Egyptian professor of religious studies, Dr. Ibrahim al-Khouli, asked, "Are you a heretic?" He then said there was no point in rebuking or debating her, because she had blasphemed against Islam, the Prophet Muhammad and the Koran.

Dr. Sultan said she took those words as a formal fatwa, a religious condemnation. Since then, she said, she has received numerous death threats on her answering machine and by e-mail.
One message said: "Oh, you are still alive? Wait and see." She received an e-mail message the other day, in Arabic, that said, "If someone were to kill you, it would be me."

Dr. Sultan said her mother, who still lives in Syria, is afraid to contact her directly, speaking only through a sister who lives in Qatar. She said she worried more about the safety of family members here and in Syria than she did for her own.
"I have no fear," she said. "I believe in my message. It is like a million-mile journey, and I believe I have walked the first and hardest 10 miles."

article reprint from http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/11/international/middleeast/11sultan.html?ei=5090&en=d13886daba5e586f&ex=1299733200&partner=rssus&pagewanted=print

On 9/11, an ecumenical reality check

Ira Rifkin is a Baltimore Jewish Times columnist.

In January 1985, the Los Angeles newspaper I worked for assigned me to the religion beat. My first story was a feature on what was then a new phenomenon in Southern California, a fully licensed Muslim parochial school.

About 35 youngsters attended South Pasadena's New Horizon Preschool and Kindergarten. It was the first of its kind in Los Angeles County and it operated under the auspices of the Islamic Center of Southern California, then as now one of this nation's preeminent Muslim institutions. New Horizon's purpose, I was told, was "to teach the values of Islam to the new generation."


New Horizon, which now has grown considerably over the past two decades and now has several branches, was my introduction to Islam and to Muslims. Since then I've spent considerable professional time exploring the American Muslim community. I've also sought out participation in Jewish-Muslim interfaith activities; I've broken bread with Muslims at their homes and at mine, and at the White House at official presidential Ramadan break-the-fast events.

I fully embraced, even relished, these opportunities. Information and dialogue, I believed, could lower if not eliminate the barriers of suspicion that kept Muslims and Jews from understanding each others' hopes and fears. We live in the United States, not the Middle East, I told myself. Here, reason might prevail.

Sadly, I no longer have much faith in that coming to pass. Five years after the Twin Towers crashed and the Pentagon burned I find myself profoundly soured on the idea that the two communities can ever work together to defuse the disharmony between them. Certainly not for the foreseeable future. Perhaps never.

Jews are certainly not without blame. We have our hotheads and hardheads, Islamophobes and uncompromising irredentists. The difference between us and them, however, is that the majority in our camp, both in America and Israel, have long been willing to compromise.

That is not the case among the majority of Muslims, whose leading mainstream organizations, in the United States as well, insist that all Palestinians living outside the Jewish state's 1948 borders have a right to return to resettle in Israel. That's a recipe for Israel's demographic eradication and they know it.

The more time I spend with Muslims, the more I must conclude that, as a group, their worldview and that of most Jews are in such profound conflict as to render real dialogue virtually meaningless at this time. This is most true for Muslims from Middle East nations. But it extends as well to Muslims from south and east Asia, from elsewhere, and for African-American Muslims.

That's because a prime tenet of Islam is the uumah, the notion that there is an essential unity among all believers, regardless of where they live, and that it transcends nationality, race and ethnicity. Religious solidarity comes first. Islam is the primary social identity. This helps explain why American Caucasian converts to Islam with no direct link to Middle East tensions tend to adopt anti-Israel and even anti-Jewish attitudes.

There is no dialogue today; there is only contentious debate. Certainly, great differences divided Jews and Muslims prior to 9/11. But the events of that day, and of the years since, up to and including the Hezbollah-Israel conflict, have only deepened the mistrust and anger between us and them.

Jews are equated with Israel, Israel is equated with the United States; the absurdly mismanaged war in Iraq and the global conflict against "terrorism" are conflated in Muslim minds. Somehow, Jews — described in the Qur'an, Islam's scriptural text, as the "descendants of apes and pigs" — are deemed to stand behind it all, to have instigated a war against all of Islam that America is perceived to be fighting on behalf of Zionism; the Jews.

The question of Israel is no longer one of conflicting national narratives standing in the way of compromise. Islamists — those Muslims whose politics flow directly from their theology — have made this a religious war.

This Muslim animosity has gone beyond anti-Zionism. Anti-Semitism festers within the Muslim community like no other. For Islamists, the fight against Israel has become part of what the writer Yossi Klein Halevi calls the "theology of genocide." Jews must be eliminated solely because they are Jews. To call this Islamofascism, as President George W. Bush has done, is to underscore the ideology's extremist religious core.

The charter of the Islamic Resistance Movement, better known as Hamas, states the conflict's religious nature in no uncertain terms: "…The land of Palestine is an Islamic Waqf [endowment] consecrated for future Moslem generations until Judgment Day. It, or any part of it, should not be squandered: it, or any part of it, should not be given up."

This religious anti-Semitism may be seen in America as well.

At a pro-Hezbollah August rally in Washington sponsored by leading American Muslim activist groups, the crowd, extolling Hezbollah's leader, chanted: "Nasrallah, Nasrallah; the martyr is the beloved of Allah; the Zionists are the enemy of Allah." Across the continent in San Francisco, at another pro-Hezbollah demonstration that same day, participants carried signs reading: "Nazi kikes out of Lebanon."

Osama bin Laden paid little lip service to Israel and the Palestinian cause prior to 9/11. His main beef then was against "crusader" troops — meaning the American military — stationed in Saudi Arabia — and Washington's propping up of the corrupt monarchy in Riyadh. Sure, he mentioned lands once ruled by Muslims lost to non-Muslim rule as being an affront to Muslim pride. But it was Andalusia — the Arab term for Spain when it was under Muslim rule — that he lamented over.

Only later did he add the Palestinian cause to his list of grievances against the West. What better way to rally Muslims made nervous by his audacious attack to his side? In doing so, he made war against Israel in the name of Islam, jihad, a top priority. Today, Iran, a nation in which Islamist ideology holds sway and that appears hell-bent on acquiring nuclear weapons, competes with Al Qaeda for the honor of murdering Jews.

In 1999, Salam al-Marayati, the Iraqi-born executive director of the Los Angeles-based Muslim Public Affairs Council, was bounced from a Clinton-era White House anti-terrorism panel after Jewish groups claimed he was sympathetic to terrorists; he had justified Palestinian attacks by saying Israel's "brutal occupation" was the root cause of the violence.

Mr. al-Marayati, one of America's leading Muslim political activists, was someone I met through my connection with New Horizons. I had come, I thought, to know him well, and had even edited some of his earliest opinion columns written for U.S. newspapers that urged understanding and acceptance of the American Muslim community.

In response to his dismissal from the terrorism panel, I published an op-ed in the New York Jewish Week and elsewhere arguing that it was preposterous for Jews to expect Arab- or Muslim-Americans to espouse a pro-Israel line and still retain the respect of their community. American Jews, I wrote, were better off building bridges to up-and-coming Arab and Muslim activists. Help Muslims gain a political toehold in America and they will not soon forget the favor, I said.

I would never write that column today, certainly not after Mr. al-Marayati suggested immediately after 9/11 that Israel was behind the attack in an effort to turn America against the Arab world. If anything, today I'd weigh in against helping Muslims navigate the American political system.

Yet despite all I've said here, I continue to second guess myself. I fear being blinded by anger. I mourn the loss of compassion for dead children no matter whom their parents were. I question whether I have adopted simplistic and even bigoted thinking.

Or worse, that I might stereotype all Muslims as ordinary Germans came to stereotype Jews, and in doing so lose all touch with my reason and humanity.

Is it an accident that 9/11 coincides with the Jewish calendar's most intense period? From Tisha b'Av, when we mourn the multitude of Jewish tragedies, we move to Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, to repentance and forgiveness for ourselves and for others. What timing!

Stripped of all theology, Judaism for me comes down to a simple article of faith: What is today need not be tomorrow; the possibility of a better day is always there. This is the messianic principle at its most basic, a heartfelt prayer of hope that the process is indeed intelligently designed.

Five years after the Twin Towers crashed and the Pentagon burned, I struggle to remember this simple formula in the face of building evidence that a better day may be a long way off. It gets harder by the day.

Original source: http://www.jewishworldreview.com/0906/911_reality_check.php3

Al-Jazeera Airs 'Previously Unshown' Bin Laden Tape

Video Shows Bin Laden Meeting 9/11 Hijackers

CAIRO, Egypt — Al-Jazeera aired on Thursday what it called previously unshown footage in which Al Qaeda chief Usama bin Laden is seen meeting with some of the Sept. 11 hijackers.

The station did not say how it obtained the video, which was produced by As-Sahab, Al Qaeda's media branch.

The video showed bin Laden sitting with his former lieutenant Mohammed Atef and Ramzi Binalshibh, another suspected planner of the Sept. 11, 2001, suicide hijackings.

Atef, also known as Abu Hafs al-Masri, was killed by a U.S. airstrike in Afghanistan in 2001. Binalshibh was captured four years ago in Pakistan and is currently in U.S. custody, and this week U.S. President George W. Bush announced plans to put him on military trial.

In the video, Bin Laden was wearing a dark robe and white head gear walking outdoors in a mountainous area. He smiled as he received several of what the tape said was several of the Sept. 11 hijackers.

The "Peaceful" Muslim demonstration in London

Radical Muslims are very outspoken as to what drives them in their fanatical religioius ideology. Here are some recent photos from London, forwarded from pastor Nikolai Stefanov's friend.

When was the last time Western TV networks allowed you to see THIS on your screen?

And before any of you jumps, let me say this: no, I don't think ALL Muslims are like that. However, why is it so hard for so many people in the West to reazlize there are MANY Muslims who are JUST LIKE THAT. And these are not good news for any normal person.

Click on the pictures for bigger size. For the full photoset, please visit this Flickr address and View as slideshow

Israel protests against India's "Hitler" eatery

The restaurant, which opened last week, was promoted with posters of the Fuehrer and Nazi swastikas, infuriating India's small Jewish population and sparking outrage in the community around the world.

"We hope the Indian authorities will ensure that Hitler being such a mass murderer did not get any rehabilitation," Daniel Zohar Zonshine, Israel's consul-general in Mumbai, told Reuters.

The multi-cuisine restaurant, which also has a lounge to smoke the exotic Indian water pipe or the "hookah", used publicity material on billboards featuring a red swastika carved in the name of the eatery.

Its owners, who removed a huge poster of Hitler initially installed at the entrance, have said they chose the German leader's name to stand out among hundreds of restaurants.

But India's remaining Jews -- most migrated to Israel and the West over the years -- say they could consider legal action.

Zonshine said he hoped the restaurant's owners would realise the hurt their action had caused to Jews.

"There is a limit to a gimmick. In India, we believe, if something like this hurts the sentiments of a community, it can be treated as a criminal offence," he said.

Authorities in Navi Mumbai, a Mumbai suburb, were not available for comment.

Navi Mumbai police chief Ramrao Wagh said he was yet to receive any complaint against the restaurant.

"In any case, I don't think any action is legally feasible," he told Reuters.

The restaurant's owners have said they were neither promoting Hitler nor the Nazi ideology, but would not change the restaurant's name.

They have said they would open two more branches in Mumbai with the same name by October.

original source: http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20060823/od_uk_nm/oukoe_uk_india_israel_hitler

Who are Hezbollah?

By Kathryn Westcott
BBC News Online

Hezbollah - or Party of God - emerged in Lebanon in the early 1980s and became the region's leading radical Islamic movement, determined to drive Israeli troops from Lebanon.

In May 2000 - due partly to the success of the party's military arm - one of its main aims was achieved. Israel's battered and bruised army was forced to end its two-decade occupation of the south.

Hezbollah now serves as an inspiration to Palestinian factions fighting to liberate occupied territory.

Palestinian demonstrators
Hezbollah has embraced the Palestinian cause
The party, in turn, has embraced the Palestinian cause and has said publicly that it is ready to open a second front against Israel in support of the intifada.

Hezbollah was conceived in 1982 by a group of clerics after the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. It was formed primarily to offer resistance to the Israeli occupation.

Inspired by the success of the Iranian Revolution, the party also dreamt of transforming Lebanon's multi-confessional state into an Iranian-style Islamic state. Although this idea was abandoned and the party today is a well-structured political organisation with members of parliament.

Terror

Hezbollah's political rhetoric has centred on calls for the destruction of the state of Israel. Its definition of Israeli occupation has also encompassed the idea that the whole of Palestine is occupied Muslim land and it has argued that Israel has no right to exist.

Hezbollah's spiritual head Sheikh Fadlallah is close to Iran

The party was long supported by Iran, which provided it with arms and money.

In its early days, Hezbollah was close to a contingent of some 2000 Iranian Revolutionary guards, based in Lebanon's Bekaa Valley, which had been sent to Lebanon in 1982 to aid the resistance against Israel.

As Hezbollah escalated its guerrilla attacks on Israeli targets in southern Lebanon, its military aid from Iran increased.

The movement also adopted the tactic of taking Western hostages, through a number of freelance hostage taking cells: The Revolutionary Justice Organisation and the Organisation of the Oppressed Earth, which seized Terry Waite.

For many years, Hezbollah was synonymous with terror, suicide bombings and kidnappings. In 1983, militants who went on to join Hezbollah ranks carried out a suicide bombing attack that killed 241 US marines in Beirut.


Passionate and demanding

The party has operated with neighbouring Syria's blessing - with the guerrilla war against being a card for Damascus to play in its own confrontation with Israel over the occupation of the Golan Heights.

Over the two decades, Hezbollah evolved into a movement with thousands of trained guerrillas, members of parliament and a dynamic welfare programme benefiting thousands of Lebanese.

Hezbollah fighters
Hezbollah proved to be a formidable fighting force
It was passionate, demanding of its members and devoted to furthering an Islamic way of life.

In the early days, its leaders imposed strict codes of Islamic behaviour on towns and villages in the south - a move that was not universally popular with the region's citizens.

But, despite the early history of coercion, the party emphasises that its Islamic vision should not be interpreted as an intention to impose an Islamic society on the Lebanese.


Political moves

In recent years, Hezbollah has won considerable backing within Lebanon. Its social services programme was popular with the Shia community.

The group's successful hit-and-run guerrilla war on Israel's much-vaunted army assured it some support and a lot or respect from other religious communities.

While, the US listed the group as a terrorist organisation, the government in Beirut declared it a national resistance movement.

Its popularity with the Shia community - which makes up almost 40% of Lebanon's three million people - was confirmed in the 1992 parliamentary elections when Hezbollah led a successful campaign and won eight seats in parliament.

But it is not popular with all of Lebanon's different communities - the Christians, for example, have accuse it of trying to destabilise the country.

Was Saddam Regime a Broker for Terror Alliances?

by Ray Robison


Newly declassified documents captured by U.S. forces indicate that Saddam Hussein's inner circle not only actively reached out to the Taliban rulers of Afghanistan and terror-based jihadists in the region, but also hosted discussions with a known Al Qaeda operative about creating jihad training "centers," possibly in Baghdad.

Ray Robison, a former member of the CIA-directed Iraq Survey Group (ISG), supervised a group of linguists to analyze, archive and exploit the hundreds of captured documents and materials of Saddam's regime.

This is the final installment in a three-part series concerning a notebook kept by an Iraqi Intelligence Service (IIS) agent called Khaled Abd El Majid, and covers events taking place in 1999. The translation is provided by Robison's associate, known here as “Sammi.”

The first two translations from this notebook detailed an agreement between members of the Saddam regime and the Taliban to establish diplomatic and intelligence based cooperation. This final translation further advances the link between the Saddam regime and world-wide Islamic Jihad terrorism.

The relationship between the Taliban and Saddam appears to have been mediated by a Pakistani named Maulana Fazlur Rahman. Another document captured in Afghanistan and written by an Al Qaeda operative confirms the relationship between the Maulana and Saddam. The translation provided here includes an early 1999 meeting between the director of the IIS and the Maulana.

Another notebook entry records a meeting with Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, an Afghani Islamic Jihadist and leader of the Islamic Party in Afghanistan. Hekmatyar made news recently with the BBC article Afghan Rebel’s pledge to al-Qaeda that reports on a video statement from Hekmatyar in which he states he will fight alongside A Qaeda. In this translation, Hekmatyar makes specific requests for a “center” in Baghdad and/or Tajikistan.

A third meeting involves an Islamist representing Bangladesh that we believe to be Fazlur Rahman Khalil. Another page of the notebook indicates Khalil is coming or came to Iraq. Khalil is a Taliban/Al Qaeda associate who signed the 1998 fatwa from Usama bin Laden declaring war on the United States.

Editor's notes: "Sammi" puts translation clarifications in parenthesis. Robison (RR) uses parenthesis for clarification and bold-face type for emphasis.

Translation:

Translation for ISGP-2003-0001412 follows (PDF):

Page 70, Left Side:

Saturday 3/20 at 11:45

Met with him Mr. MS4 (translator’s note: MS4 is the code name for the high ranking IIS official).

1. Intelligence and security cooperation.

2. Mr. MS4 informed him that the Iraqi president and Iraqi leadership are interested in him.

3. “We are ready to help you in any country and against your enemies”. (translator’s note: most probably this is MS4)

4. Fadlul Haq - The governor of Peshawar that was assassinated.

(translator’s note: points 5 and 6 are direct quotes from the Afghani)

5. “We are facing a vicious international plot against the Islamic Party and cannot find any country to help us at the time being”.

6. “Iran helped us at the beginning and we brought 2,000 fighters but things changed at the time being. Also the Russians called to help but we do not trust them. Moscow and Iran want the war to drag on.” (RR: this is probably the Taliban vs. Northern Alliance conflict). This is why he is coming to Baghdad for help. Asked Baghdad to help open a center in Tajikistan or in Baghdad and they will bring them (translator’s note: not clear what them refers to) in through Iran or Northern Iraq.

He asked for help in printing Afghani money in Baghdad or help in printing it in Moscow.

Page 69, Right Side:

Stinger missiles have a range of 5 kilometers. (translator’s note: there is only this one sentence on this page)

Page 69, Left Side:

Meeting of MS4 with 6951 on 4/10 at 8 p.m. in room 710.

He (6951) inquired about our relation with Usama (bin Laden).

(translator’s note: The Iraqi answer is not reported.).

He (6951) proposed to the Taliban to form a front with Iraq, Libya and Sudan.

He met some of them in Hajj (Translator’s note: Pilgrimage to Mecca in Saudi Arabia, it is one of the five pillars of Islam) and he came to the conclusion that they do not know anything about Foreign Relations.

The Taliban defense minister is Abdul Razzak (unclear) Association of Muslim Clerics.

They openly claim that they are against America.

He said that he was ready to build relations between the Taliban and Iraq.

(translator’s note: meeting continues on both sides of page 68/76, with questions about Pakistani politics and the other Islamic parties.) The Iraqi official says, “I suggest that the parties come closer together because that means power to Islam against the American and Zionist policies”.

Page 39, Left Side:

Meeting with an Islamist leader from Bangladesh. He promises support to Iraq. He says: “Let them know that I made Bangladesh a second country to Mr. President and we have 125 million (people).” (RR: Although no name is given for this meeting, it is important to note Fazlur Rahman Khalil, noted for meeting with Iraqi officials in the previous article, signed the 1998 fatwa as “Fazlur Rahman, Amir of the Jihad Movement in Bangladesh”. This is a strong indication that this meeting is with Khalil or his representative.)

Page 27, Left side:

(translator’s note: contains notes with information on prior meetings recorded in the notebook.)

The mentioned person (Translator’s note: Fazlur Rahman) arrived to the country on 11/27/1999 and he was hosted in Al Rachid Hotel suite number 526. He will leave on 12/1/1999.

(translator’s comment: note No. 1 in a list of notes.)

He visited Iraq on the beginning of April 1999 and the ex-director of the intelligence, may God rest his soul, instructed him to mediate between the Taliban and the leader of the Afghani Islamic party, Hekmatyar following the request for mediation done by Hekmatyar to the leadership of Iraq during a visit when they met us on 3/19/1999.

End Translation

Analysis:

Because Arabic writing is right to left, the pages in this notebook go in reverse chronological order. The note on page 27 indicates that Hekmatyar met with the IIS on March 19, 1999. The translation of page 70 is dated March 20 and it refers to someone from the Islamic Party, which is Hekmatyar’s group. Therefore it makes sense that the meeting on page 70 is with Hekmatyar.

The note on page 27 also says the meeting was with the director if the IIS, so we believe MS4 is his code-name. It appears that Hekmatyar, a jihadist leader warring with the Taliban for control of Afghanistan at the time, asked Baghdad “to help open a center in Tajikistan or in Baghdad and they will bring them (translator’s note: not clear what them refers to) in through Iran or Northern Iraq.” There is a strong indication that this requested “center” is a jihadist training camp.

From a US Department of State report Patterns of Global Terrorism, 1996:

Gulbuddin Hekmatyar … maintained training and indoctrination facilities in Afghanistan, mainly for non-Afghans. They continue to provide logistic support and training facilities to Islamic extremists despite military losses in the past year. Individuals who trained in these camps were involved in insurgencies in … Tajikistan…

It looks very much like Hekmatyar, a long-time jihad leader and recently self-identified Al Qaeda associate, is asking the Saddam regime for a jihad training camp in Tajikistan and/or Baghdad.

Page 27 tells us that the Maulana Fazlur Rahman was meeting with the IIS Director in early April. The meeting on page 69 fits the time frame, has the code for the IIS director, and the guest speaks for the Taliban indicating that “6951” is the Maulana. According to these notes, the Maulana “proposed to the Taliban to form a front with Iraq, Libya and Sudan.” He also enquires about the IIS relationship to Usama bin Laden.

In researching the Maulana, a third document has been found that demonstrated the relationship between Saddam and the Maulana. The document which appears to be an IIS memo also mentions a relationship with Hekmatyar. There is no government authentication of the document. Because this document matches closely with what we find in the IIS agent notebook we will reference it so that the reader may decide.

The article entitled Exclusive: Saddam Possessed WMD’s, Had Extensive Terror Ties states:

A senior government official who is not a political appointee provided CNSNews.com with copies of the 42 pages of Iraqi Intelligence Service documents. The originals, some of which were hand-written and others typed, are in Arabic. CNSNews.com had the papers translated into English by two individuals separately and independent of each other.

The CNS report includes a translation of a memo from the IIS to Saddam. The memo is dated January 25, 1993. The subject is IIS influence with two groups: the JUI, led by Maulana Fazlur Rahman; and, the Afghani Islamic Party led by Hekmatyar. These are the same two men meeting with the IIS in Baghdad in 1999, according to the notebook.

The document states that the Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam (JUI) depended upon Pakistani support as well as foreign help from Iraq and Libya. It also mentions that the secretary general of the JUI has had a good relationship with the IIS since 1981, and that he is “ready for any mission”.

The IIS document reported on by CNS News also states that the Islamic Party of Hekmatyar relies on Iraqi funding. It says the relationship has existed since 1989 and has improved under Hekmatyar’s leadership. Although this document has not yet been validated by the U.S, government, we can see very specific information, not publicly available before 2004, that matches what we find in the IIS notebook. It indicates a long history of Saddam regime support to Islamic jihad groups, and that the IIS considers them organizations that will take on missions for Iraq’s interests.

Epilogue:

Let’s review what we have learned from the IIS notebook.

• We learned that in 1999 the IIS met with three significant leaders of Islamic jhad from Afghanistan: a warlord and Islamic jihadist; an Al Qaeda leader; and, a man known as the “Father of the Taliban.”

• The Saddam regime and Taliban leadership agreed to diplomatic ties and a secret intelligence service relationship. They discussed security cooperation with Hekmatyar’s Islamic Jihad group. The Taliban representative also agreed to support the Saddam regime in Pakistan’s North-West Frontier, a region sympathetic to and actively involved with the Taliban, Al Qaeda, and the world-wide Islamic jihad movement. An Islamist, most likely the Al Qaeda and Taliban affiliated Fazlur Rahman Khalil, promised the support of Bangladesh.

• We see a request to the Saddam regime for a training center in Baghdad or Tajikistan from a jihad leader accused by the U.S. State Department during the Clinton Administration of running Islamic extremist training camps.

• There is a discussion about transporting something into these centers, including a discussion that appears to mention surface-to-air missiles.

• And, we have numerous statements of Islamic fidelity between Afghani jihad leaders and the Saddam regime, with many statements of mutual animosity towards the United States and intent to cooperate.

This notebook thus provides significant evidence that the Saddam regime collaborated with and supported Islamic jihad elements in Afghanistan at a time when the Taliban and Al Qaeda were attacking United States citizens and their interests and plotting the 9/11 attacks.

In this notebook, we see a Saddam Hussein actively seeking to expand his sphere of influence in a region at the heart of the world-wide Islamic jihad movement.

This now-public relationship between Maulana Fazlur Rahman and Saddam Hussein deserves great scrutiny.

As we researched the Maulana, a picture came into focus that our team was not looking to find: The Maulana is a senior leader of an affiliation of Pakistani groups supportive of Islamic jihad. These groups include the JUI and the Jamaat Islami (JI). The JUI provided direct support to both the planner and paymaster of the 9/11 attacks. The Pakistani government accused the JI of working with Al Qaeda. The Maulana mediated an intelligence pact between the IIS and the Taliban.

Clearly, this evidence indicates that the Maulana was in a position to procure assistance from Iraq for the 9/11 attacks.

Dr. Laurie Mylroie, an expert on Iraq, testified in front of the 9/11 commission in 2003:

After al Qaeda moved to Afghanistan, Iraqi intelligence became deeply involved with it, probably, with the full agreement of Usama bin Ladin. Al Qaeda provided the ideology, foot soldiers, and a cover for the terrorist attacks; Iraqi intelligence provided the direction, training, and expertise…

This notebook demonstrates that Islamic jihad leaders in Afghanistan were seeking IIS assistance and Saddam was giving them that assistance.

The author welcomes your comment on the translation and analysis of this document. You can contact Ray Robison by emailing him at: saddamdossier@gmail.com.