From the Editor

Carter for Hamas

Jimmy Carter, crowned by the media (and himself) as this country’s highest representative of virtue, whose true guiding moral principle is hatred of Israel, now champions Hamas. In a June 19 speech in Ireland to (what else?) the eighth annual Forum on Human Rights, Carter declared that the Bush administration’s actions to sideline the terrorist organization are “criminal.”

Sustainable Development, UN Style

Given the UN’s inversions of reality, Francis Nhema, the new chairman of the UN Commission on Sustainable Development, is a perfect fit for the job. In 2003 Nhema (also Zimbabwe’s Minister of Environment) seized the highly productive Nyananda farm in northern Zimbabwe after its rightful owner Chris Shepherd and his family were run off the farm by Mugabe’s goon squads. Under Shepherd a prosperous cattle ranch and high grade tobacco and corn producer, under Nhema the farm produces – nothing. The London Times of June 27 reports: “’This year there is nothing,’ said a former farm security guard, who asked to remain anonymous. ‘There is a small patch of soy beans. The rest is weeds. The whole 1,000 hectares are weeds.’”

Note: In the first week of July Zimbabwe went into total meltdown. Writer and dispossessed farmer Cathy Buckle, who has remained in the farming village of Marondera, describes the goon squads the government sent forth with a new mission: forcing shop owners and businesses to cut their prices by 50%. Those who refused were arrested, their goods seized, their premises trashed. The end result is empty shelves since no one can refill them only to sell below cost.

Sy Hersh, Again

Backed by The New Yorker and its ludicrous fact checking, Sy Hersh has been untouchable. Until now. For once there has been real fact-checking, this time by Lebanese journalists. Journalist Tom Gross quotes an article in Haaretz about these enterprising souls: “Sharp-eyed reporters in Beirut read Pulitzer Prize winner Seymour Hersh’s article in astonishment, so obviously were Hersh’s allegations about the Bush administration’s cooperation with Al Qaeda-linked groups in Lebanon untrue.”

The Lebanese reporters dug up the behind-the-scene details of Hersh’s shoddy modus operandi. “Hersh said he heard the story from Robert Fisk, the bureau chief of The Independent’s Beirut office. But Hersh did not check out the story himself. For his part, Fisk said he heard the unconfirmed report from Alastair Crooke, a former British intelligence agent and the founding director and Middle East representative of the Conflicts Forum….Crooke, who gained his reputation through his involvement in the conflict in northern Ireland, does not know Arabic. When Lebanese journalists spoke to Crooke about the report, they said he told them only that he had heard it ‘from all kinds of people.’”

And this hearsay piled upon hearsay passes the “fact-checkers” at The New Yorker.

British Boycotts

Kudos to Leo McKinstry for his “Shame on the Left and its Vicious Hatred of Israel.” McKinstry cites Pamela Hardyment, a member of the National Union of Journalists, explaining her support for the boycott-Israel resolution. “Israel,” she said, is “a wonderful Nazi-like killing machine backed by the world’s richest Jews.” With a glancing reference to the “so-called Holocaust” she declaimed “Shame on all Jews, may your lives be cursed.”

The best riposte to the assorted U.K. boycotters (this one on the belatedly-rescinded college professor union boycott) came from Bryan Reuben, a Professor Emeritus of Chemical Technology, published in the London Times:

“Sir, In the early 1920s Johannes Stark and the Nobel Laureate Philipp Lenard declared that all science is racially dependent, and that relativity must be rejected because of its non-Aryan and theoretical origins. Because Einstein was a Jew, they led a campaign to boycott him, to prevent him lecturing and to avoid references to his work in the literature.

“The University and College Union has distinguished antecedents.”

It’s the Oppression, Stupid

Pundits and politicians struggle to understand how doctors could become mass murderers. Our thanks to Prof Joakim Isaacs who has written from Jerusalem with the explanation. Clearly, he observes, these doctors have suffered such oppression from the British National Health service that in their desperation they have turned to terror. He adds a plea for physicians around the world to organize a boycott of the United Kingdom medical establishment.

Ehrenfeld Victorious

Rachel Ehrenfeld has scored an important victory for freedom of speech in the face of Moslem attempts to stifle it. Lee Kaplan reports in Frontpage (June 14) that the U.S. Second District Court of Appeals in New York has overturned a lower court ruling which had refused to overrule a default judgment for libel against Ehrenfeld obtained by Saudi billionaire Khaled bin Mahfouz in a British court and valid for collection in the United States.

Ehrenfeld’s book Funding Evil had described Saudi financing of global jihad, including Mahfouz’s role. Mahfouz sued in the United Kingdom primarily because he knew Ehrenfeld did not have funds for an international lawsuit. The book was published in the U.S. with the 24 copies sold in the United Kingdom all bought over the internet. Nevertheless the British court gave the Saudi billionaire a $120,000 default judgment. The U.S. District Court has now ruled this unenforceable in the United States, because it is contrary to the free speech protections of U.S. citizens. As the Court itself noted, the judgment has implications going far beyond this individual case.

The UN Human Wrongs Council

This is Melanie Phillips’ apt term for the UN Human Rights Council. To quote Phillips, “In a world where human rights have emerged as the new secular religion of our time, Israel, portrayed as a meta-rights violator, emerged as the new anti-Christ of the international arena. And as if this were not enough, the council has now institutionalized forever the Alice in Wonderland condemnatory process and the corresponding drumbeats of indictment. It has institutionalized the condemnation of Israel as a standing item on the council agenda and institutionalized the mandate of the special investigator on ‘Israeli violations of the principles and bases of international law’ in the Palestinian territories—its only indefinite, open-ended and one-sided investigative mandate.” Phillips notes that “the systematic malice towards Israel displayed by the UN is only exceeded as a scandal by the silence of the so-called civilized world in the face of it.”

Kosovo

Will Gaza prove to be a dress rehearsal for Kosovo? Will Kosovo be riven by militias and warlords, an incubator and exporter of jihadists, its non-Moslem population forced to flee? If President Bush has his way, the answer may well be yes. Although this unilateral decision-making runs contrary to the agreement under terms of which the UN sits in Kosovo, President Bush, visiting Albania in June, announced: “Sooner rather than later you’ve got to say ‘Enough’s enough. Kosovo’s independent.”
Why is the Bush administration handing another victory to terrorism, this time the terrorists of the Kosovo Liberation Army? Why does the U.S. want another Moslem state in the Balkans? Michael Djordjevich, president of the Studenica foundation promoting education in Serbia, warns: “Bosnia is a failed state; Albania is simply incapable of democracy and multiculturalism; Kosovo is a foreign policy disaster in waiting. Instead of building a strategic position in this important region of the world around the Serbs and the Greeks…we have in effect traded them for Bosnian, Albanian and Kosovo Muslims.”