AFSI Honors Shmuel Katz
Herbert Zweibon

From the EditoR
Rael Isaac

Something is Rotten in the State of Europe
Excerpts from an interview with Robert Wistrich by Manfred Gerstenfeld

France and Anti-Semitism: Le Chambon’s Challenge Today
Pierre Sauvage

A Proud Israeli Bedouin Questions American-Jewish Apathy
Ishmael Khaldi

Déjà vu in Spades
Norman Berdichevsky

The Hebron Market
Elyakim Haetzni

In Memoriam—Edward McAteer

Questions For The President
Ruth King

Reserve the date: December 5th
AFSI National Conference
Islam’s War Against Israel and America
Marriott Marquis Hotel in New York City

Herbert Zweibon

Shmuel Katz, who celebrates his 90th birthday in December, was the inspiration for the establishment of Americans for a Safe Israel thirty-three years ago.

Underground leader, member of the first Knesset, publisher, historian, biographer, essayist, Shmuel Katz is above all the most trenchant political thinker modern Israel has produced. His career has also been marked by a selfless political integrity. Indifferent to person advantage, Katz has sought only the good of Israel and the Jewish people.

In 1936, at the age of 22, Katz came to Palestine from South Africa, and retains to this day the accent of his native land. A disciple (as he would remain throughout his life) of Zionist leader Ze'ev Jabotinsky, at his request Katz went to London in 1940 to start and edit a Zionist weekly. After the war he returned to Palestine where he rejoined the underground Irgun Zvai Leumi, becoming a member of its high command under Menachem Begin. With Israel's independence, Katz became a Knesset member for Begin's Herut Party, but left after a single term, unhappy with Begin's failure, as he saw it, to reach out beyond his narrow constituency. Katz abandoned party politics to run a publishing house for many years.

In 1977 when Begin finally upset the Labor Party's long monopoly on power, Katz returned briefly to public life, initially as Begin's personal representative to the United States. When Begin disavowed his commitment to put Katz in charge of Israeli information abroad (Katz had seized on the opportunity to transform Israel's miserable efforts in this area) and threw aside his ideological principles to achieve a paper peace with Anwar Sadat, Katz resigned. To the astonishment of Begin, who tried to buy him off with an offer he was convinced could not be refused -- the high prestige post of UN ambassador -- Katz refused.

Katz is best known as a writer and almost all his books are landmarks in their own way. Days of Fire remains the best book about the Irgun. Battleground is the best single history of the Arab-Israel conflict over Palestine. Less well known but equally trenchant, The Hollow Peace is a devastating account of how Begin, beginning with his unaccountable decision to install Labor leader Moshe Dayan (whose failures in 1973 had discredited him with the Israeli public) as his Foreign Minister, squandered the opportunity to implement Jabotinsky's vision. Lone Wolf is the definitive biography of Jabotinsky.

But above all Shmuel Katz is a prophet in his own time. When Katz was only 22, Jabotinsky said of his articles: "I must very earnestly congratulate you on the perfect clarity, the forcible simplicity, the sachlichkeit [matter of fact, to the point] with which you present the most complicated situations." To this day, Katz in his essays has continued to lay out, with that same perfect clarity, the situation confronting Israel, the consequences of the actions her leaders take, and the alternative path that should be taken. Katz saw the opportunities her victory in the Six Day War opened for Israel. He became a leader of the Land of Israel Movement which recognized that Israel could be a geopolitical factor in the region, with the historic heartland of Judea and Samaria restored to the Jewish people, strategic depth and oil from the Sinai, the high ground on the Golan Heights a deterrent to Syria.

Like prophets generally, Katz has been ignored, sidelined, heard by many, hearkened to by few. History will pay tribute to his prescience. We, his disciples in Americans for a Safe Israel, are proud to pay tribute to him now.

From the Editor
 
Presbyterians for Terror

Fresh from their General Assembly’s calling for divestment from Israel, a delegation of 24 leaders of the U.S. Presbyterian Church met with Hezbollah leaders in Lebanon (the meeting was broadcast Oct. 17 on Al Manar, Hezbollah's television network). Presbyterian elder Ronald Stone, who identified himself as representing the East Liberty Presbyterian Church in Pittsburgh, declared: "As an elder of our church, I'd like to say that according to my recent experience, relations and conversations with Islamic leaders are a lot easier than dealings and dialogue with Jewish leaders." He went on to praise Hezbollah: "We treasure the precious words of Hezbollah and your expression of goodwill toward the American people."
Since the "precious words of Hezbollah" consist of non-stop anti-Semitic and anti-U.S. incitement, one can only wonder at the moral miasma into which some of our mainline religious denominations have sunk.

Poisoning the Medical Well

HonestReporting.com notes that the demonization of Israel is seeping into mainstream medical journals. In its Oct. 16 issue, The British Medical Journal, described by the Financial Times as "one of the world's top four general medical journals," ran an article "Palestine: The Assault on Health and Other War Crimes" which likens the Israel Defense Forces to the 9/11 terror hijackers. There is not a hint that Palestinian Arab terror and corruption have contributed to the parlous condition of the health system in the PA-controlled areas.

Also, the June 2004 issue of Diabetes Voice, a publication of the International Diabetes Federation, ran a vicious anti-Israel screed that had little or nothing to do with diabetes.

The New WMD

London-based Islamic cleric Abu Hamza al-Masri urges Muslim women to become weapons of mass destruction by breeding children to become suicide bombers. In his new book Terror Tracker, British investigative journalist Neil Doyle, who penetrated the Finsbury mosque, reports on the dozens of recordings he obtained and turned over to the British authorities (who have finally arrested the cleric). In one lecture Abu Hamza praised a suicide-bomber mother who had made a video with her son prior to his blowing himself (and Israeli civilians) up and in it urges other mothers to follow her example in urging their sons to be suicide bombers. Said Abu Hamza to his flock: "These are the women of mass destruction to the kuffar [unbelievers]....This kind of woman, when they miss their killed children...become more happy...they want to sacrifice even more.”

Monitoring Anti-Semitism

President Bush has signed into law the Global Anti-Semitism Awareness Act which requires the State Department annually to rate countries on their treatment of Jews. Introduced by Democrat Tom Lantos, the only Holocaust survivor in the U.S. Congress, the bill was supported by more than 100 prominent Americans, including former Republican Vice-Presidential nominee Jack Kemp and former UN Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick, who wrote in a letter to the State Department: "The fight against anti-Semitism deserves specific, focused attention." The State Department had objected that the legislation was unnecessary since the department already compiles annual reports on human rights and religious freedom. Given that this is the first year the State Department has so much as noticed that there is a problem with religious freedom in Saudi Arabia, this objection is laughable.

Under terms of the law, the State Department is not only to document physical violence against Jews but anti-Jewish propaganda. The State Department can start with a nakedly anti-Semitic film broadcast in October on both French and German television by the Franco-German (taxpayer funded) channel Arte. Armand Laferrere, a Protestant former adviser to the French Interior Ministry, wrote a blistering report on the film: "After watching the whole abomination, I wrote to Mr. Clement [the TV executive who broadcast it] to tell him that, had Hitler won the war, the French would have enjoyed exactly the kind of television that he had provided us....I apologize to the Jewish people. I feel hurt in my flesh by the despicable Jerome Clement, by the French ministries of Culture and of Foreign Affairs who made me pay for this cloaca of a movie, and for the general apathy that surrounded this scandal. I am deeply sorry about the behaviour of my country, France -- my only country, which I have always loved dearly and cannot support today."

Meanwhile, at Duke...

The State Department, alas, need go no farther than some of our elite campuses to document vicious anti-Jewish propaganda. Duke University played host in October to a conference of the Palestine Solidarity Movement. A graduate of Duke, a long time contributor, wrote to Duke President Richard Brodhead "Palestine Solidarity is nothing but a euphemism for 'let's support the murder of Jews and the destruction of the State of Israel'....[M]ore important than the silliness of your talk about 'suppression' of speech is the actual, and scary, 'notion' most likely to be created by your willingness to host the conference (even with your wink wink, assertion that you 'deplore violence in the Middle East'), viz., the notion that it is a 'legitimate function of the university' to supply a platform for, and to support, the proponents of terrorism/murder... I obviously cannot stop you, but I will not support you. I will contribute no more to Duke."

Rivlin Breaks with Sharon

Following are excerpts from a letter Knesset Speaker Reuven Rivlin, long a stalwart supporter of Ariel Sharon, sent to all members of the Likud Central Committee urging them to take the party’s leadership away from him.

"This week I received a copy of the 'disengagement law’ that is being prepared to us in the Ministry of Justice. I read it and was disgusted."

"No one should delude himself: this is only the beginning."

"This disengagement law will one day apply (even if not by the Likud government but instead by the government that will come in its place, and will rely on the precedent) to the expanses of Judea, the Land of Benjamin, the entire Shomron, and yes--also Jerusalem."

"Those who proclaim themselves 'occupier' of the Katif Bloc will not be able to stop the retreat there."
"It is hard to believe, but all this is about to be carried out by the Likud, by the national movement..."
"What will we tell the public next time we seek their trust?"
“Will we tell them...that we erred the entire way?"
“That we are 'occupiers' in our land?"
"What is the national camp without loyalty to the Land of Israel?"
"We must search our souls."
"The time has come to take charge. "
"The time has come to return to the path we were taught..."

Excerpts from an interview with Robert Wistrich by Manfred Gerstenfeld

Robert Wistrich:

"The growth of the European Union and the extension of a democratic consensus based on antifascism and antiracism should have created the best of all possible worlds for Jews….What more could Jews have asked for than a fully democratic Europe?— especially those Jews interested in integrating into a peaceful, prosperous, and cosmopolitan civilization with special concern for its minorities....

"The reality in the first four years of the new millennium, however, turned out to be much more complex. Anti-Semitism, under the mask of anti-Zionism and in its own right, resurfaced with a vengeance in a supranational, multicultural, pluralistic, antiracist Europe. There is a general consensus among researchers that not since 1945 has there been such a level of concern, anxiety, even depression among Europe's Jews and communities as we witness today. The dream-Europe of the new millennium is already beginning to look like a fading mirage....

"Today we see that the Jews' situation in many European countries has worsened. In France this has happened despite the legal apparatus, and more recently the government's publicly stated 'zero tolerance' for anti-Semitic acts and its readiness to crack down on them. The authorities no longer deny the reality of anti-Semitism as they did two years ago. The first six months of 2004 show the situation has worsened substantially compared to 2003. Three-quarters of all racist acts in France are, in fact, directed against Jews.

"Thus even when state officials become more determined to be proactive in the fight against anti-Semitism, the results on the ground are questionable. In France the anti-Semitic demon is out of the bottle. It escaped some time ago, and the government cannot put it back again. Something similar is happening in Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Austria, Sweden, and even in Britain the mood is ugly....

"Anti-Semitism is a primary symptom of social pathology. Every society that becomes seriously infected by it is receiving a wakeup call about its social, cultural, and political health.

"However, one of the problems is that in today's Europe there is no agreement, neither among the political elites, the media, or the academy about what constitutes anti-Semitism. This makes it much harder, even for well-intentioned people, to come to grips with its root causes.

"The media, politicians, and society in general systematically castigate, reproach, heavily criticize, and even demonize Israel. They paint a negative and stereotypical picture of the Jewish state, especially on television and in the press. So, too, in academic institutions, the churches, the trade unions, and among the so-called chattering classes. All these sectors transmit anti-Israeli hostility on a daily basis.

"There is an obstinate and willful European refusal to put the Israeli responses to acts of terrorism in proper context. If these attacks occurred systematically in Europe, they would produce far more draconian responses as a result of public pressure. But at the present time, Europe has barely had a glimpse of the kind of merciless terror against innocent civilians that Israel has had to face for years. Madrid was the exception and it produced a knee-jerk reaction of appeasing the terrorists. But that would not work in the long run. For now, Europe prefers to single out Israel, to pretend that if only the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was resolved on Arab terms, terror would fade away….

"This is not merely double standards, hypocrisy, or blindness to the real problems that face Europe in terms of its own declining population and creeping weakness. It is a deep pathology - a suicidal syndrome.

"Part of the intense European hostility toward Israel is related to the EU's difficult relationship with the U.S. in recent years. The antagonism has become increasingly clear since the beginning of the second intifada, followed by 9/11 and, above all, the war in Iraq.

"There is a growing gulf between Europe and America on major issues of international policy. Israel is very much at its center as an important bone of contention between the two major constituents of the West. Europe has been making a geopolitical strategic choice that its undeclared alliance with the Arab world necessitates an anti-American, pro-Palestinian, anti-Israeli position. This is accompanied by a general tendency, domestically, to favor Muslim over Jewish communities wherever electoral and political considerations are involved. The different American position is viewed as an obstacle to Europe's ambitions and plans as a would-be Great Power. American support for Israel, deplored by so many Europeans, is often blamed on Zionist machinations.

"This leads to anti-Semitic claims that the Zionist/Jewish lobby has a fatal grip over American foreign policy that precludes a common Western position. In Europe, a softer version of the Muslim-Arab conspiracy theory that the Jews control America—also an old Nazi slogan—is now widespread.

"European policy toward the Arab world is de facto appeasement. In some respects it reminds one of the 1930s. European Jews find themselves again caught in a very sensitive and potentially dangerous situation. If they support Israel in this constellation of European appeasement of the Arab world--and Muslims in general—they are increasingly treated as 'warmongers' going against the political consensus. These are not only far-Left and far-Right accusations but also mainstream ones. They revive the old, seemingly unresolved question mark about the 'dual loyalties' of Jews.

"Some of the more articulate European Jewish intellectuals and journalists, who care about Israel, openly refer to a sense of isolation that they did not feel five years ago. It is transparently evident in many public debates that if one takes a position even mildly supportive of Israel's right to exist as an independent state, one is seen—even by some mainstream European media—as morally beyond the pale. That is a rather shocking development....

"In most European countries, serious discussion of Islamic Judeophobia is rare and risks the instant countercharge of 'Islamophobia.' All researchers know that in several West European countries, young radicalized Muslims are the major perpetrators of anti-Semitic acts. This is the case not only in France but also in Belgium, the Netherlands, Sweden, and increasingly in Great Britain. In the UK there is open and often violently expressed anti-Semitism in parts of the Asian-Muslim community—mainly among those from Pakistan….Muslim anger creates a climate of hostile anti-Israel opinion that is backed by the very influential liberal mainstream and left-wing media. There is, moreover, much sympathy for the Palestinians who are presented as the ’absolute victims’ of Israeli injustice. Irrespective of the facts, the liberal mainstream's response to events in the Middle East will be in accordance with that a priori determination.

"Europeans are not entirely blind to the dangers emanating from the radical Muslim world—for example, Iran's feverish program for nuclear armament. After a lot of prompting and pressure, they have outlawed some terrorist organizations. They do crack down on terror cells linked to Al-Qaeda. There are limits to the convergence between Europe and the Arab world. Europe, however, still believes that a forceful policy toward Islamic radicalism is mistaken. Even the reassertion of its own cultural values has become problematic, as if Europeans had to renounce their own core identity out of some misplaced idea of political correctness....

"In the West, educated Arabs who live with all the accoutrements of freedom of expression are reluctant to call into question the flawed assumptions about Israel. They will privately acknowledge the grave faults of Arab regimes, for instance, the lack of freedom and democracy. But greater fairness and objectivity about Israel is lacking even among more sophisticated Arab and Muslim intellectuals in the West. There is a deadening conformity and lack of courage to break with the majority when it comes to Zionism and Israel.

"The main sources of Islamist anti-Semitism in Germany are different from those in France. The majority of the Muslims in the Federal Republic are from Turkey. One Turkish fundamentalist organization, Mili Gürüs, is, however, becoming increasingly infected by anti-Westernism, fundamentalism, and anti-Semitism. Since far-Right radicalism in Germany is still quite a significant factor, the balance of anti-Semitism is different….

"A new German nationalism and national consciousness have been emerging since reunification. This seems to involve playing down the concept of Germans as major perpetrators of genocide, and pushing away the constant reminder that Jews were prime victims of the Germans. We have seen a sharp shift in the last four years toward the proposition that the Germans themselves were the victims of World War II. I believe that this concept has a great future before it. Its long-term implications extend far beyond the Jews. All of Europe should ponder this shift.

"One serious problem for Jews and Israelis is that part of the slowly gestating European identity is being forged against the United States. This is accompanied by defamation of Israel, which is a convenient and relatively easy target for unanimous condemnation. It is also a cheap and cowardly way of gaining favor in the Arab world, which Europe sees, economically and politically, as a major strategic partner for the future. Such a Euroarabian identity is dangerous for the Jewish people. Here I agree with Bat Ye'or's argument that Europe has been engaged in a self-inflicted capitulation to Islamist demands in the name of a misconceived multiculturalism.

"All this reflects the denial by Europe of the core values of its own civilization. Despite the problematic nature of the term, these are 'Judeo-Christian' values, based on the Ten Commandments, a Covenantal concept of democracy, the rule of law, human equality, and the central importance of freedom. These values, rooted in biblical morality, are being drowned in a morass of relativism, nihilistic trendiness, and self-abasing masochism when faced by Islamist totalitarianism….

"Europe prides itself on having learned the lessons of fascism, Nazism, the Holocaust, totalitarian Communism, and white-settler colonialism, which were all products of its civilization. It also claims to have overcome the anti-Semitic virus, but unfortunately, this is not true. That ancient plague has come back to haunt all of us.

"In today's Europe a Jew wearing any visible manifestation of his Jewish identity such as a caftan, a skullcap, or even a Star of David becomes a potential target for vilification or aggression in the street, in the metro, and in schools. Jews in Europe now face an unprecedented level of personal and communal insecurity. That represents an ugly stain on Europe's record only sixty years after the greatest crime in human history was perpetrated on its soil by millions of willing Europeans."

Robert S. Wistrich is professor of Modern European and Jewish History at the Hebrew University. Manfred Gerstenfeld will be publishing an extended version of this interview in a forthcoming book. A longer version of the above interview was published by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs.

Pierre Sauvage

As the Holocaust loomed, a few Jews made their way to the area of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon in the mountains of south-central France, 350 miles south of Paris. And the peasants and villagers took in the Jews who came. And the Jews kept coming. And the people kept taking them in. In this one speck of France that never ceased to be free, 5,000 Jews found shelter, at one time or another—among 5,000 Christians.

It was thus in Le Chambon that French president Jacques Chirac chose recently to deliver a major address calling upon the French to react against the rising anti-Semitism and intolerance in their country. His starting point was this “place steeped in history and emotion.”

"Here," Chirac said, "in adversity, the soul of the nation manifested itself. Here was the embodiment of our country's conscience. Le Chambon-sur-Lignon is a place of memory. A place of resistance. A place symbolizing a France true to her principles, faithful to her heritage, true to her genius.

"On this high plateau, with its harsh winters, in solitude, sometimes in poverty, often in adversity, women and men have long upheld the values that unite us. In what was one of the most deprived areas of our country, standing up to all the dangers, they chose courage, generosity and dignity. They chose tolerance, solidarity and fraternity. They chose the humanist principles that unite our national community and serve as the basis of our collective destiny—the principles that make France what she is.”

I am a Jew born and sheltered in Le Chambon during the Nazi occupation. As the president of the Los Angeles-based Chambon Foundation, I have long been seeking French support to establish a museum in Le Chambon dedicated to the area’s conspiracy of goodness. I was thus gratified by a French president’s belated tribute to Le Chambon. But I was also disturbed by it: it now seems like the challenge of Le Chambon’s history to France risks being buried under praise instead of neglect.

The road toward public recognition has been a long one. It took more than thirty years for a handful of former refugees from the area to place a plaque, opposite the village’s Protestant temple, proclaiming that “the memory of the righteous shall be everlasting.” It was in 1979 that the late American philosophy professor Philip Hallie published his pioneering study of Le Chambon, Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed. It was in 1982 that I myself returned to Le Chambon to gather the last testimony of the village’s "righteous" in what became in 1989 my feature documentary film Weapons of the Spirit, first broadcast on PBS in 1990 but aired on French television only in 1998—in the middle of the night.

Indeed, less than a month prior to Chirac’s visit, without evoking much national interest in France, there were a hundred of us former refugees who responded to the joint invitation of the Chambon Foundation and the mayor of the village to make a pilgrimage for a sometimes emotional “Liberation Reunion.” The event also included a well-attended conference featuring major participants from those times and leading historians of the war years in France. I had sought a videotaped message of greeting from President Chirac, but he decided instead to come in person shortly after our gathering.

The area of Le Chambon was an old Huguenot stronghold in historically Catholic (and now largely secular) France. Once, Protestant temples had been destroyed, the people's rights abolished, men deported to slave on galleys, women interned in towers where they scraped messages for future generations: Resist.” Once, itinerant preachers had risked their lives reading psalms from the Old Testament and identifying with the biblical journey to the Promised Land.

During World War II, the collaborationist Vichy government willingly joined in Nazi policies, ultimately contributing to the Final Solution more than 75,000 Jews, including 10,000 children. For the people of Le Chambon, nothing that occurred then seemed had seemed entirely unfamiliar; in every challenge there had been an echo of their forefathers' struggle and faith in the face of religious intolerance.

In France today, it is “humanist principles” and “the values of the Republic” that are nearly sanctified. Communautarisme—which roughly translates as ethnocentrism—is widely viewed as challenging the very essence of French national identity. French officials focus on upholding the militant French-style secularism known as laïcité, responding to the Islamic threat by banning conspicuous religious symbols in French public schools.

In his speech in Le Chambon, Chirac made no reference to the Hebrew Bible or to the New Testament, to faith or the power of religious convictions. He touched only lightly on the “Protestant Mountain’s” once determined particularism. He urged his compatriots “always to carry [their national] heritage with pride.” But had the people of Le Chambon not been motivated to resist the Holocaust by more than mere Frenchness?

If this issue matters to me, it’s in part because I was raised without any “narrow” sense of community. My parents, ardent secularists, went so far as to hide from me until I was 18 that they were Jewish—that I was Jewish. Instead, although my mother was in reality a Polish Jew and my father had been born of immigrant Jews, they successfully transmitted to me their love of French culture and, for a long time, their deeply anti-communautariste and vigorously anti-religious sentiments.

Everything changed when I returned to Le Chambon in 1982 with a film crew to gather the last testimony of the village’s righteous in what became my documentary film, Weapons of the Spirit. Until then, I had viewed religion as a source of conflict and ignorance, religious people as by definition bigoted and fundamentally stupid. It was only in editing my footage, as a result of watching the rescuers’ testimony again and again, that I began to decipher the explosive content of what they had to say. It did not make me religious, but it made my children Jews.

When I pressed Henri and Emma Héritier with regard to the risks they had taken in sheltering Jews, Madame Héritier would provide only a short, definitive response coupled with an eloquent shrug of her shoulder: “We were used to it.” Georgette Barraud had mainly this to say: “It happened so naturally. We can’t understand the fuss.”

As I recounted to Bill Moyers in an interview that followed the broadcasts of Weapons of the Spirit on PBS, I was once visiting Le Chambon with an American cousin when we ran into Marie Brottes, who for her part had helped the Jews in large measure because they were “the people of God.” Barely after being introduced, the two women hugged each other like sisters meeting after years of separation. My cousin later explained why the tears had come to her eyes: “It was like hugging a tree.”

What gave these people such solidity? What was it specifically that these peasants were so used to? And how could their actions have seemed so natural to them when the area of Le Chambon is one of only two communities in all of Nazi-occupied Europe to have been honored collectively as Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem, the Israeli memorial to the Holocaust?

Given the very purpose of Chirac’s call to arms against intolerance, why wasn’t it imperative to begin acknowledging—especially in Le Chambon—the good that can be derived too from religious faith and identity? Couldn’t a better understanding of religion’s successes help in confronting its excesses? As paradoxical as it may seem to some, might there not be buried in Europe’s Christian roots a needed antidote to contemporary antisemitism? If we are to become like trees ourselves, do we not need roots? Even if we are no longer religious, is it not a source of strength to identify and accept what remains in us of our ancestors?

It may be understandable that on the eve of Bastille Day, Chirac chose to end his address in Le Chambon by recalling that France has inscribed on the front of her public edifices the historic call to Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. But it was not the motto of the Republic that the President could read on the Protestant temple, across the street, that he declined to visit. It was a religious admonition: “Love One Another.”

Emmy-winning documentary filmmaker Pierre Sauvage is president of the Los Angeles-based Chambon Foundation (www.chambon.org). This article was published (with variations) in the Paris daily Le Figaro and in the Jewish newspaper the Forward.

Ishmael Khaldi

Two years ago, a few proud Bedouin Israeli citizens like myself asked: what is our position and status in the State of Israel in the midst of its current situation? After all, Bedouins are part of Israel's success story. During current times, when Israel is being attacked and accused of being a racist state, an 'aggressor and an oppressor', we decided that the smallest and probably most effective thing we could do is to spread our story as part of Israeli society.

I, Ishmael Khaldi, am Israeli. I served with the IDF, with the Israel police, and with the Israeli Defense Ministry. In the last year, I have lost two Bedouin friends on army duty (God bless their memory) defending the State of Israel. My friends and family feel that we have a common destiny with the Jewish people in Israel: our grandparents created this land with Jewish immigrants who arrived during the 1920s, '30s and '40s to build a democracy.

Because of this connection to the State of Israel, I cannot stand on the sidelines during Israel's time of need. I feel that I must speak up and be heard.

I recently returned from a two-month campus speaking tour in North America, mostly organized by Hasbara Fellowships. This was the fourth tour I had done over the past year. I've traveled the United States coast to coast (of course, being a Bedouin nomad, I mainly took Greyhound!) and flew for a ten day tour across Canada.

The tour was certainly miraculous—a Bedouin shepherd who had never been to any major city before, all of a sudden found himself in downtown Manhattan! It proved to be one of the most adventurous, challenging and enriching experiences of my life.

I came to the U.S. and Canada to speak on college campuses about Israel, as one who certainly holds a perspective that is rarely heard—a proud Israeli that is not Jewish. I came to share one man's tale of Israel's culture, society and politics from the perspective of a Bedouin minority in the Jewish State.

Arriving in North America, committed to defending Israel from the poisonous venom of hatred and attacks that I had heard much about, I expected to see the same commitment on campuses among the Jewish students. Unfortunately, this wasn't the case.

I had heard much about the struggle of pro-Israel student activists, attempting to counter the unbalanced, biased and false accusations made against Israel. I had not come to North America to preach that Israel was perfect. As all Israelis know, Israel has problems like all nations of the world. Still, many students tried to stop me from speaking. There were even students who had the audacity to compare me to Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda minister, making false claims that I was doing the same for Israel.

The United States has always been described as being the 'land of the free' and a home for free speech. How can New Hampshire's slogan read, "live free or die" if the student union is allowed to ban me from telling a cultural story? I can't believe that the hatred for Israel is so strong that student governments are able to defy their own dignity as free American citizens, in order that the truth about Israel should remain a secret.

The deep-seated hatred manifested itself clearly throughout the country with the many loaded questions asked by anti-Israel students. For example, a Muslim student at Rutgers University completely ignored the fact that Israel is a free state and asked, "how could you support a Hebrew state if you're not Jewish?" Another questioner asked, "don't you think that if Israel didn't exist, then the Palestinians wouldn't have any problems?"

In Milwaukee, I was asked "how many Palestinian old men and women have you humiliated while serving in the Israeli police?" How can such a question be asked? If the truth were only known, Israeli soldiers have on many occasions helped Palestinians.

The situation I encountered on many of the campuses in North America and Canada was horrifying. I was not as shocked by the Arab questioners as I was with the personal threats, and the severe apathy of the majority of Jewish students.

In my years of speaking to people, I've never received threats or personal attacks like I did speaking on campuses. There were threatening incidents at both the University of Florida and at California State University. Both were chilling. The crowd in Florida was full of anger and hatred, yet I had to stand before them unsure of the enemy who had sent threats earlier that day. In California I spoke facing a young student who wore a T-shirt with a swastika on it, chewing on a piece of paper as some sort of protest against my talk.

Even more upsetting, I expected to see many more Jewish students aware of the situation in Israel, but that wasn't the case. I expected the Jewish students to realize that the situation was not only affecting Israel and Israelis, but Jews all over the world.

On the other hand, the Arab students and their supporters knew almost all the last minute news clips from the Middle East. How can Israel's voice be heard if the Jewish students don't have the facts or the knowledge to speak up? I don't take the mass of Jewish students to task for not agreeing with all of Israel's policies, but I do take them to task for not caring about Israel or what happens there. It is the apathy which allows the anti-Israel propaganda to strengthen itself more and more over time.

As a personal aside, sixty years after the horrors of the Holocaust, Israel is going through one of the most critical times in its history. More than 60 years after my grandparents joined their destiny to that of the Jews coming to the Land of Israel, I feel that history is somehow moving backwards. Anti-Semitism and hatred towards Israel is soaring. Comparing me, a Muslim Bedouin who supports Israel, to the Nazis is just another clear piece of evidence.

And yet, 60 years after the horrors of the Holocaust, I felt that on campus, the Jewish voice is silent. Where are the Jewish students fighting back? My commitment in these crucial days, while Israel is struggling for its right to exist, is to continue the heritage of my grandparents and to stand together to fight for the State of Israel.

History will not tolerate us if we keep our voice silent. We must roll up our sleeves once again to build a better future for Israel and all of its loyal citizens. Israel's right to exist is my right and my people's right, just as Israel's destiny is our destiny.

But just as history demands for me to fight for Israel, history also will not tolerate a generation of Jews who don't care.

Ishmael Khaldi is a Bedouin citizen of Israel. This article appeared in web.israelinsider.com

Norman Berdichevsky

I was born and grew up in the Melrose-Morrisania and Grand Concourse section of the Bronx that in my post-World War II childhood was among the most densely populated Jewish neighborhoods of the largest Jewish city in the world. A look at the school photographs taken at graduation from P.S. 90 and Junior High School 22 reveals more than 90 per cent and 80 per cent Jewish names respectively. I went on to Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan where perhaps “only 65 per cent” were Jewish.

Being Jewish in the most Jewish neighborhood in the most Jewish city in the world, I spent a young childhood free from the complexes, persecutions and humiliations of three thousand years agonizing over Jewish identity. Unlimited opportunity beckoned whether we chose college or started our working life after graduation. My friend Ralph (whose grandfather had been a rabbi in Greece) even became a hero in the New York Police Department, first by becoming the youngest Captain and then by winning the highest award for valor. No anti-Semitic ghosts, specters or evil demons from the European past threatened our sleep.

Although my father never preached Zionism, he had a deep admiration for Israel. A memory that stands out is attending a soccer match at the Polo Grounds in Manhattan in 1956 on Israel’s eighth anniversary to see a top Israeli club play a major European team. I will never forget the expression on my father's face on hearing both the Star Spangled Banner and Hatikva played. It was the one occasion when I remember him--a henpecked husband who had fought in the Red Army in 1920 against the Polish invasion, a foreign war with no meaning for him, and who was too old for World War II—standing proud and tall. His look was one I would later see again on the faces of Holocaust survivors at celebrations of Israel's Independence Day.

Yet as I grew older I began to feel outrage at the deafening silence to the key question "Why the Holocaust?" Feelings of helplessness burned within me. I could not escape the conclusion that somehow my parents and indeed their entire generation had been tested and failed miserably in confronting the worldwide horror of anti-Semitism. How could they have remained so passive? In my mind, only two of my relatives stood out as exceptions: my Uncle Max, who came back from participation in the Battle of the Bulge and General Patton’s Third Army with a captured German helmet and a distant cousin Aaron who was among the founders of Kibbutz Yagur and had helped bring refugees to Palestine from the displaced persons camps in Germany. I became convinced that the success of Zionism had been achieved by the dedication of a gifted minority of idealists who had refused to listen to conventional wisdom. They had achieved their goal through a total renunciation of the Diaspora mode of existence that had set the scene for the Holocaust.

But I now stand in the shoes of my parents. For thirty years I have witnessed the growing ostracism and return to pariah status of “The Jews,” as defined by Hitler and Goebbels, abandoned by all those who at one time embraced the Jews as “allies” in all sorts of “progressive causes”.

A considerable number of academics and media pundits would like to rewrite history, much as Stalin’s staff of photographers who skillfully subtracted purged Bolshevik leaders. The biggest myth of all is that Israel is the product of “Western Imperialism.” The major Arab armies who invaded the nascent Jewish state were British led, equipped, trained and supplied. The Syrian army was French-equipped. The Israelis depended on smuggled weapons from the West and Soviet and Czech weapons. On January 7, 1949, the Israeli air-force consisting of former Luftwaffe Messerschmidt fighters (transferred secretly from Czech bases to Israel) shot down five British-piloted Spitfires flying for the Egyptian air-force over the Sinai desert causing a major diplomatic embarrassment for the British government.

What is so shocking is that hardly any "progressive" critic of Israel is even aware that in 1947-49 Israel’s struggle was endorsed by the entirety of what was then called “enlightened public opinion,” above all by the political far left. The most famous and colorful personality of the Spanish Republic, the Basque delegate to the Cortes (Spanish Parliament), Dolores Ibarruri, who had gone into exile in the Soviet Union, issued a proclamation in 1948 saluting the new State of Israel and comparing the invading Arab armies to the Fascist uprising that had destroyed the Republic. Just a few months earlier, the hero of the American Left, the great Afro-American folk singer, Paul Robeson had sung in a gala concert in Moscow and electrified the crowd with his rendition of the Yiddish Partisan Fighters Song. Andrei Gromyko, at the UN, asserted the right of “the Jews of the whole world to the creation of a state of their own.” Taking (as always) their lead from Moscow, the (hitherto anti-Zionist) Palestinian communist organizations merged their separate Arab and Jewish divisions in October, 1948 giving unconditional support to the war effort and urging the Israel Defense Forces to “drive on toward the Suez Canal and hand British Imperialism a stinging defeat”!

In the vote on partition in the UN, apart from the states with large Muslim minorities (like Yugoslavia and Ethiopia), the Arabs managed only to wheedle a few abstentions out of the most corrupt non-Muslim states. These included Cuba and Mexico eager to demonstrate their independence of U.S. influence and Latin American countries whose regimes had been pro-Axis until the final days of World War II such as Argentina and Chile.

And where are we today? Today we have pseudo-sophisticated media, especially in Europe, pandering to old repressed envy and hatred, countless U.N. votes damning Israel (while that same U.N. ignores gruesome atrocities in Africa and elsewhere) and notorious conferences spouting resolutions condemning Jews or Israel for the evils of our time: all this makes the “genteel” prejudices of “polite society” that had been the target of Elia Kazan’s 1947 film against anti-Semitism, A Gentlemen’s Agreement, appear prehistoric by comparison.

At the Islamic conference in October 2003 in Malaysia, Prime Minister Matathir received a standing ovation when he warned leaders of dozens of Muslim states of a Jewish plot to control the world. He even held the Jews responsible for the [to him, corrupt] notions of democracy and human rights. In the 1950s Mad Magazine would have rejected such a scenario as too absurd for the pages of Mad.

Deja vu? Déjà vu in spades! Have we regressed to 1933? George Orwell wrote in 1944: "However true the scapegoat theory may be in general terms, it does not explain why the Jews rather than some other minority group are picked on, nor does it make clear what they are the scapegoat for." Mark Twain had put it succinctly almost a hundred years earlier when he said that the worst thing that could be said about the Jews is that they too are part of the human race. I used to think that such aphorisms had entered into the general psyche after 1945. I now know that this was too optimistic.

It long ago dawned on me how unfair I had been towards my parents. I now marvel at their courage for having carried on and had children in hopes of a better world. If there is anything to be learned or gained by their trauma, it is a better understanding of their dilemma. What then can we do? We must carry a torch and illuminate our surroundings with the same zeal as Zola, the defenders of the Warsaw Ghetto, the judges at Nuremberg, the rescuers at Entebbe, and politicians who will not play political games to excuse or “explain” anti-Semites by cloaking their hatred under the guise of progressive causes. This is the vow I made last Yom Kippur. It is a vow I cannot break.

Norman Berdichevsky is a geographer, writer, and translator.

Elyakim Haetzni

Editor’s Note: Hebron is the burial place of the patriarchs and the first capital of the Davidic Kingdom.

Member of the Knesset for Meretz Zahava Galon asked why Jewish trespassers have not been expelled from the Arab wholesale market in Hebron. The deputy defense minister answered that the present sensitive situation in Hebron does not permit it, for the moment.

To those who are upset at the fact that Arabs have been displaced from their property, I say:

The market was part of the Avraham Avinu [Our Father Abraham] Quarter until the 1929 pogrom. I took a blood sample from this event, in the form of a memorandum presented to the British high commissioner by Hebron’s community. The Rabbis Meir Kastel, 68 years old, and Tzvi Drabkin, 70 years old, and five young men were robbed, castrated, tortured and murdered; the baker, Noah Immerman was roasted alive in an oven; Rabbi Yaâkov Orlanski HaCohen was found praying—they took his brain from his skull and crushed his wife’s intestines; the pharmacist Ben-Tzion Gershon, lame, unable to move, who served in Hebron for 40 years, kindly assisting many Arabs, was killed, his nose and fingers cut off while his daughter was raped, then murdered with awful torture. The teacher Dubkinov and Yitzhak Abushdid were strangled with a rope; six synagogues, including 64 Torah scrolls, many of them ancient, from the Spanish exile, were stolen and desecrated.

In response, the remainder of the community was expelled "for their own safety," and the murderers inherited from them. After the Jordanian occupation, King Hussein built a vegetable market on part of the quarter and rented it to the Hebron municipality which then rented it to wholesalers. When Israel liberated Hebron, it was discovered that the Jewish property, including the market, was still registered in the name of its Jewish owners. It was transferred to the Custodian for Enemy Property (Israel). But the Israeli military government did not return the property to its owners, continuing to rent it to Arabs.

The Jews who returned to the old Jewish quarter were forced to pass through the crowded wholesale market, leading to many incidents. In any case, as the city grew, the area was no longer appropriate for a market and the wholesalers turned to the mayor to find a more suitable site. However, he refused, in order to prevent Jewish return to the area.

In the meantime, Hebron Arabs went back to murdering Jews. Yeshiva student Aharon Gross was stabbed to death opposite the wholesale market. Other murders, including the Baruch Goldstein carnage [of Arabs], forced the government to close the market. The Israeli custodian did not renew the lease with the city and the wholesalers found another location, much more appropriate. Two intifadas left scars, and most terribly, the murder of infant Shalhevet Pass, next to the wall of the wholesale market.

This is the key to much friction between Hebron’s Jews and the Israeli government, which has been afraid to “openly and rightfully” claim, as Herzl said, that which was stolen from them, fearing what the world and the left would say. So it was that Hebron’s Jewish community, which just as any other living, healthy organism expects to grow and develop, was left to act for itself, by itself.

So it was that the ruins of the Avraham Avinu synagogue (originally built by Spanish exiles) were renovated only after demonstrations; so it was that the ancient Jewish cemetery was restored to the community only after scandals; so too did Jews return to pray at the Maarat HaMachpela only after sit-down strikes; so too was the return to Beit Hadassah achieved only after women stole into the basement, followed by a terror gang’s murder of six men who had come on Sabbath eve to say Kiddush for the besieged women.

After Arab rights to the empty wholesale market expired, families who had waited much too long due to government refusal to allow new construction, transformed the buildings into livable apartments. During a Supreme Court hearing, initiated by the Hebron municipality, the State argued that the Hebron municipality had no rights to the site and that the only title-holder was the Israeli Custodian for Abandoned Property, which issued an eviction order against the Jewish residents of the market! The order was appealed to a committee which, by majority vote, upheld the decision to expel the Jews. One of the judges accepted the settlers’ claims and another recommended that the custodian rent the property to its present inhabitants. A request was forwarded, but is still pending. Where is the logic and justice in this?

Two questions remain: To the Arabs: When you transformed the Jewish Quarter with blood and fire into an Arab market, there wasn’t a conqueror, refugees, or a Jewish state. So, why did you do this?

And to Knesset member Galon: Thousands of eviction orders against Arabs in Yesha and Israel have been issued and not implemented. Why does only the wholesale market keep you awake at night?

Elyakim Haetzni is an attorney living in Kiryat Arba. This appeared in Yediot Achronot on October 16, 2004

Ruth King

By the time this goes to print, voters will have chosen a president but some things will not change. We will still be at war against Islamic terror. We will still be confronting international anti-Semitism. We will still be threatened by enemies within our borders. We will still remain Israel’s only friend in the Diaspora. The Europeans will still try to appease the Arabs by harassing Israel. Iran and Syria will rattle sabers and provide safe havens for terrorists. The UN will continue to blame Israel.

Here are a dozen questions that concerned Americans should ask of the incoming administration:

1. How forcefully do you expect to enforce immigration laws so that our borders are sealed to terrorists?

2. Will you restructure the Department of Transportation and its guidelines so that realistic profiling protects citizens who travel?

3. Will you enforce the Patriot Act and continue to monitor charities, fraternal organizations and religious institutions which fund and abet terrorism?

4. How actively will you enforce the Global Anti-Semitism Review Act of 2004 requiring the State Department to monitor global anti-Semitism and rate countries annually on their treatment of Jews? Will you include those states which use the word Israel rather than Jew in their racist incitements to violence? States such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt?

5. Do you see Israel as our most loyal ally in the war against global terrorism?

6. If your answer to the above is yes, will you continue to share intelligence and technology with Israel, and veto all United Nations resolutions designed to weaken and discourage Israel?

7. Do you recognize that all plans which call for territorial concessions by Israel have only escalated tensions and terrorism in the area? If so, are you willing to scuttle the "road map" or any plans which call for territorial concessions by Israel in exchange for meaningless promises by Arab adversaries?

8. Will you consider the outlines of the Palestine Mandate to formulate future policy for a solution to the Jewish Palestine-Arab Palestine conflict?

9. Are you willing to concede that a two state solution in Palestine is not strategically or geographically viable and will only hasten the destruction of Israel and embolden terrorists?

10. Do you believe that the root cause of the Israel-Arab conflict is Jewish control of an area of roughly 2200 square miles, or that the real cause is the ongoing Jihad against Israel?

11. How would you define a Jihad? (see the October Outpost for John Quincy Adam's definition)

12. What are your concrete plans to achieve energy independence from OPEC?

In Memoriam—Edward McAteer

Ed McAteer played a leading role in founding the Religious Right movement and the Moral Majority during the 1970s, took a key role in introducing evangelicals to Ronald Reagan in 1980 and remained a leading figure in the Religious Right over the years.

McAteer, who was 78, died Oct. 5 in Memphis, Tenn. He was one of the strongest and most resolute supporters of the state of Israel. Throughout his life, in sickness and and in health, he never veered from his advocacy of Jewish historical and religious rights in the land of Israel.

He was featured in a 60 Minutes segment on Zion's Christian Soldiers and, in 2001, was mentioned for the post of U.S. ambassador to Israel.

AFSI, Israel, and the Jewish people of the whole world have lost a noble friend. We extend our deepest condolences to his wife Faye, and family. R.I.P.

No to Another Terror State Joseph Farah

From the Editor Rael Jean Isaac

On Jihad Against Israel by Hugh Fitzgerald

How Strong Is The Arab Claim? by L. Auster

John Quincy Adam on Jihad by Andrew Bostum

Two Speeches by Ruth King

Our Partial War by Rachel Neuwirth

Herbert Zweibon has turned over this page to the following article by Joseph Farah because it focuses on an important initiative that AFSI has worked for and endorses.

Joseph Farah

Collectively, we don't often get a chance to sound off in a meaningful way on the major issues of the day.
I don't know about you, but those public-opinion pollsters never call me.
But there is an opportunity right now to weigh in on one of the greatest and most important issues of our time – whether the world should create a Palestinian Arab state.
A group called Global Israel Alliance (www.globalisraelalliance.com) is attempting to mobilize opposition to this misguided plan now, prior to the November elections. If the turnout is high enough, the organizers believe it might help reverse U.S. support for the so-called Mideast "roadmap."
What's wrong with the idea of creating a Palestinian Arab state?
There are many reasons to oppose the creation of what would certainly be another breeding ground and support base for Islamic terrorism. But I want to focus on just one.
One of the great untold stories of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is that the Palestinian Authority's official policy is to demand all Jews get out of the country they are attempting to create.
In any other part of the world, this kind of racist, anti-Semitic effort at ethnically cleansing a region would be roundly condemned by all civilized people. Yet, because most people simply don't understand the clear, official plan by the Arab leaders to force out all Jews from the new Palestinian state, Arafat retains a degree of sympathy, even political support, from much of the world.
Think about what I am saying: It is the official policy of the Palestinian Authority that all Jews must get off the land! Why is the United States supporting the creation of a new, racist, anti-Semitic hate state? Why is the civilized world viewing this as a prescription for peace in the region?
Is there any other place in the world where that kind of official policy of racism and ethnic cleansing is tolerated – even condoned?
Why are the rules different in the Middle East? Why are the rules different for Arabs? Why are the rules different for Muslims?
Would America consider it acceptable if the new Iraqi government said the few Jews remaining in Iraq would have to leave? Would America consider it acceptable if the new Iraqi governing council said Christians would have to go?
Of course not. So why – even before a Palestinian state is created – do we accept as a fait accompli that Jews should be forced off their land in the coming state of Palestine?
Why are U.S. tax dollars supporting the racist, anti-Semitic entity known as the Palestinian Authority?
While the Arabs do not even believe Jews have the right to live in the Palestinian state, the Israelis, on the other hand, offer full citizenship rights to Arabs in the Jewish state.
What a contrast!
In fact, as I have said many times, nowhere in the Middle East do Arabs experience more freedom than in Israel.
So, sound off. Participate in the referendum. Make your voice heard.
There's still time to stop the creation of another terror state in the Middle East.

Joseph Farah is founder and editor of WorldnetDaily in which this appeared on September 22, 2004.

Hugh Fitzgerald

The relentless Jihad against Israel -- against, rather, any Infidel sovereign state within the Dar al-Islam -- always included imposition of the Shari'a as part of its intended goal. Imposition of the Shari'a was, in fact, demanded as early as 1920 by a group of Arab notables in the former Ottoman territories that were quite properly assigned to Mandatory Palestine (i.e. all of Western Palestine, while Eastern Palestine went to form part of the Emirate of Transjordan).
Nor was there any doubt that this was a Jihad directed at Infidels throughout the Mandatory period; curiously, it was some British officers, rather than the Palestinian Jews, who recognized the Islamic grounds for opposition to the Jews and the restoration of a Jewish Commonwealth. It is also true that a few Israelis, early in the history of the state, had the wit to recognize the problem. One of these was Dr. A. Carlebach, whose analysis published in Ma'ariv (Oct. 7, 1955) would have been lost to history, one suspects, but for the fact that it is reprinted, amusingly and quite uncomprehendingly, in Edward Said's preposterous The Question of Palestine. Fortunately for us, Said often provides quotes from various European and Zionist sources that are so deadly, so convincing, particularly in the light of all we have learned about Islam over the past few years, that as a work of propaganda it no longer serves its purpose. Here is what Said quoted from Carlebach, and what Said obviously thought was self-evidently absurd, but we read it now with quite a different frame of mind:
"These Arab Islamic countries do not suffer from poverty, or disease, or illiteracy, or exploitation; they only suffer from the worst of all plagues: Islam. Wherever Islamic psychology rules, there is the inevitable rule of despotism and criminal aggression. The danger lies in Islamic psychology, which cannot integrate itself into the world of efficiency and progress, that lives in a world of illusion, perturbed by attacks of inferiority complexes and megalomania, lost in dreams of the holy sword. The danger stems from the totalitarian conception of the world, the passion for murder deeply rooted in their blood, from the lack of logic, the easily inflamed brains, the boasting, and above all: the blasphemous disregard for all that is sacred to the civilized world...their reactions -- to anything -- have nothing to do with good sense.
“They are all emotion, unbalanced, instantaneous, senseless. It is always the lunatic that speaks from their throat. You can talk 'business' with everyone, and even with the devil. But not with Allah...This is what every grain in this country shouts. There were many great cultures here, and invaders of all kinds. All of them -- even the Crusaders -- left signs of culture and blossoming. But on the path of Islam, even the trees have died.
"We pile sin upon crime when we distort the picture and reduce the discussion to a conflict of borders between Israel and her neighbors. First of all, it is not the truth. The heart of the conflict is not the question of the borders; it is the question of Muslim psychology.....Moreover, to present the problem as a conflict between two similar parts is to provide the Arabs with the weapon of a claim that is not theirs. If the discussion with them is truly a political one, then it can be seen from both sides. Then we appear as those who came to a country that was entirely Arab, and we conquered and implanted ourselves as an alien body among them, and we loaded them with refugees and constitute a military danger for them, etc. etc...one can justify this or that side -- and such a presentation, sophisticated and political, of the problem is understandable for European minds -- at our expense.
“The Arabs raise claims that make sense to the Western understanding of simple legal dispute. But in reality, who knows better than us that such is not the source of their hostile stand? All those political and social concepts are never theirs. Occupation by force of arms, in their own eyes, in the eyes of Islam, is not at all associated with injustice. To the contrary, it constitutes a certificate and demonstration of authentic ownership. The sorrow for the refugees, for the expropriated brothers, has no room in their thinking. Allah expelled, Allah will care. Never has a Muslim politician been moved by such things (unless, indeed, the catastrophe endangered his personal status). If there were no refugees and no conquest, they would oppose us just the same."
Now when Said put this into his little work of propaganda, back in 1979, the invented "Palestinian people" and their "legitimate rights" were in full swing. In 1979, the front of dhimmis, those islamochristians such as Hanan Ashrawi, were already in evidence, on campuses, before church groups, disguising the nature of the Jihad against Israel which cannot be assuaged, cannot be sated, and is not a matter of borders.
But something has changed: other Muslim attacks, in America, in Russia, in Europe, and other Muslim cries against Infidels, and other Muslim behavior, including the demand that European peoples yield to Muslim demands, have caused many, and should cause many more, to read the words written above, with a new understanding and a new appreciation.
Hoist by his own petard, is Edward Said -- he bothered to quote just a bit too much, and nowadays we do not scorn those he assumed we would scorn, but see the truth of their remarks, and the scorn of the good and intelligent reader is reserved for Said's own text. Quite something.

This article by Hugh Fitzgerald, a frequent contributor to Outpost, was posted on JihadWatch.
   

Rael Jean Isaac
 
Stahl-gate
With all the focus on the bogus documents on Rather's 60 Minutes segment, another media scandal has gone all but unnoticed: Leslie Stahl's report which portrayed AIPAC as the conduit of Pentagon secrets to Israel. As Joel Mowbray has pointed out in "The Spies Who Aren't" (FrontPageMagazine.com, Sept. 17), the whole story is essentially a smear (a policy paper, resembling an op-ed, containing no sources or methods, simply advocating tougher diplomacy in dealing with Iran was apparently mishandled by Larry Franklin, a low-level Iran analyst at the Pentagon). The damage caused by this story will remain long after the story has dissolved: many in the public will believe that Jewish officials in the Pentagon are disloyal (never mind that Franklin is a Catholic) and AIPAC is a transmission belt for spies.
It is the more remarkable that Stahl (and the liberal 60 Minutes) would lend herself to this particular kind of canard. Historically the supposedly nefarious Jewish lobby has been the whipping boy of the far right. Indeed Mowbray reports that one of those purportedly interviewed for hours by the FBI in connection with this case is "Stephen Green...a free-lance writer on a two-decade long quest to prove that Paul Wolfowitz, Doug Feith, and other Jews are actually embedded Israeli spies". In promoting this spurious case, Stahl and 60 Minutes have allied themselves with the anti-Semitic far right with results that may be with us long after the Burkett memos are forgotten.

Reagan vs. Bush
President Bush makes no secret of his admiration for Ronald Reagan. When it came to the Soviet Union Reagan was unwilling to tolerate the endless pursuit of failed policies and embarked on radically new ones, even if they affronted the conventional wisdom. Reagan turned his back on detente, on the notion that the Soviet Communist empire must be accommodated and at best contained. To the surprise not only of pundits but most of his own administration, the evil empire (the very term sent frissons of horror through the media and academic establishment) collapsed.
The war on terror (really against Islamic jihad) has clearly made President Bush rethink long accepted policies on the Middle East -- but has not affected his policy on Israel. The pursuit of failed policies continues, the notion that "territories for peace" will produce peace remains unchallenged. In his UN speech on September 24 the President promised a return to the "roadmap," the most recent variation on the inevitably failed theme. Why can the President not say that the first order of business is for the Arabs to show their willingness to live in peace with Israel? That the first order of business is to put an end to the Arab refugee issue by resettling the so-called refugees in Arab states? Now there's a way to shake up business as usual in the Middle East.

Dan Rather Peres
While it is hard, outside of the realm of psychosis, to compete with Shimon Peres in embracing delusions, Dan Rather is coming close. After the documents on Bush's National Guard service had been exposed as crude computer forgeries, he told Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post that if they proved to be false he wanted to be the one to break the story and subsequently, after being forced to apologize for the documents on-air, told a Texas newspaper that he still believed them to be real. Actually one of Peres' silly aphorisms, newly come to light, could be invoked here. In a new book in honor of the late General Benny Peled, the general quotes Peres saying: "A lie is like a half a brick. It flies further."

Spain Promotes Eurabia
Bat Yeor, the famed historian of dhimmitude, has coined the term Eurabia to describe what she asserts is a decision arrived at decades ago by European leaders to throw in their lot with the Arabs in order to achieve greater influence in the world. In the most recent manifestation of this mindset, the new Spanish prime minister Jose Zapatero (brought to power by Arab terror, as the Madrid train bombings persuaded voters to choose the candidate promising to take Spanish troops out of Iraq) has called for "an alliance of cultures" rather than a war on terror. Zapatero says he has asked UN Secretary General Kofi Annan to set up a group to study the creation of "an alliance of civilizations" which would "have as its fundamental objective to deepen political, cultural and education relations between those who represent the so-called Western world and, in this historic moment, the area of Arab and Muslim countries." And what would be on the first item on the agenda of this "alliance of civilizations"? Zapatero says "the international community must combat terrorism rationally by dealing with its roots in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict."
Translation: The "alliance of civilizations" will devote itself to extirpating the Jewish state.

Lawrence Auster

There is a myth hanging over all discussion of the Palestinian problem: the myth that this land was "Arab" land taken from its native inhabitants by invading Jews. Whatever may be the correct solution, let's get a few things straight:
As a strictly legal matter, the Jews didn't take Palestine from the Arabs; they took it from the British, who exercised sovereign authority in Palestine under a League of Nations mandate for thirty years prior to Israel's declaration of independence in 1948. And the British don't want it back.
If you consider the British illegitimate usurpers, fine. In that case, this territory is not Arab land but Turkish land, a province of the Ottoman Empire for hundreds of years until the British wrested it from them during the Great War in 1917. And the Turks don't want it back.
If you look back earlier in history than the Ottoman Turks, who took over Palestine in 1517, you find it under the sovereignty of yet another empire not indigenous to Palestine: the Mamluks, who were Turkish and Circassian slave-soldiers headquartered in Egypt. And the Mamluks don't even exist any more, so they can't want it back.
So, going back 800 years, there's no particularly clear chain of title that makes Israel's title to the land inferior to that of any of the previous owners. Who were, continuing backward:
The Mamluks, already mentioned, who in 1250 took Palestine over from:
The Ayyubi dynasty, the descendants of Saladin, the Kurdish Muslim leader who in 1187 took Jerusalem and most of Palestine from:
The European Christian Crusaders, who in 1099 conquered Palestine from:
The Seljuk Turks, who ruled Palestine in the name of:
The Abbasid Caliphate of Baghdad, which in 750 took over the sovereignty of the entire Near East from:
The Umayyad Caliphate of Damascus, which in 661 inherited control of the Islamic lands from:
The Arabs of Arabia, who in the first flush of Islamic expansion conquered Palestine in 638 from:
The Byzantines, who (nice people - perhaps it should go to them?) didn't conquer the Levant, but, upon the division of the Roman Empire in 395, inherited Palestine from:
The Romans, who in 63 B.C. took it over from:
The last Jewish kingdom, which during the Maccabean rebellion from 168 to 140 B.C. won control of the land from:
The Hellenistic Greeks, who under Alexander the Great in 333 B.C. conquered the Near East from:
The Persian empire, which under Cyrus the Great in 639 B.C. freed Jerusalem and Judah from:
The Babylonian empire, which under Nebuchadnezzar in 586 B.C. took Jerusalem and Judah from:
The Jews, meaning the people of the Kingdom of Judah, who, in their earlier incarnation as the Israelites, seized the land in the 12th and 13th centuries B.C. from:
The Canaanites, who had inhabited the land for thousands of years before they were dispossessed by the Israelites.

As the foregoing suggests, any Arab claim to sovereignty based on inherited historical control will not stand up. Arabs are not native to Palestine, but are native to Arabia, which is called Arab-ia for the breathtakingly simple reason that it is the historic home of the Arabs. The territories comprising all other "Arab" states outside the Arabian peninsula including Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt, Tunisia, and Algeria, as well as the entity now formally under the Palestinian Authority were originally non-Arab nations that were conquered by the Muslim Arabs when they spread out from the Arabian peninsula in the first great wave of jihad in the 7th century, defeating, mass-murdering, enslaving, dispossessing, converting, or reducing to the lowly status of dhimmitude millions of Christians and Jews and destroying their ancient and flourishing civilizations. Prior to being Christian, of course, these lands had even more ancient histories. Pharaonic Egypt, for example, was not an Arab country through its 3000 year history.
The recent assertion by the Palestinian Arabs that they are descended from the ancient Canaanites whom the ancient Hebrews displaced is absurd in light of the archeological evidence. There is no record of the Canaanites surviving their destruction in ancient times. History records literally hundreds of ancient peoples that no longer exist. The Arab claim to be descended from Canaanites is an invention that came after the 1964 founding of the Palestine Liberation Organization, the same crew who today deny that there was ever a Jewish temple in Jerusalem. Prior to 1964 there was no "Palestinian" people and no "Palestinian" claim to Palestine; the Arab nations who sought to overrun and destroy Israel in 1948 planned to divide up the territory amongst themselves. Let us also remember that prior to the founding of the state of Israel in 1948, the name "Palestinian" referred to the Jews of Palestine.
In any case, today's "Palestine," meaning the West Bank and Gaza, is, like most of the world, inhabited by people who are not descendants of the first human society to inhabit that territory. This is true not only of recently settled countries like the United States and Argentina, where European settlers took the land from the indigenous inhabitants several hundred years ago, but also of ancient nations like Japan, whose current Mongoloid inhabitants displaced a primitive people, the Ainu, aeons ago. Major “native” tribes of South Africa, like the Zulu, are actually invaders from the north who arrived in the 17th century. One could go on and on.
The only nations that have perfect continuity between their earliest known human inhabitants and their populations of the present day are Iceland, parts of China, and a few Pacific islands. History is very sketchy in regard to the genealogies of ancient peoples. The upshot is that “aboriginalism”, the proposition that the closest descendants of the original inhabitants of a territory are the rightful owners, is not tenable in the real world. It is not clear that it would be a desirable idea, even if it were tenable. Would human civilization really be better off if there had been no China, no Japan, no Greece, no Rome, no France, no England, no Ireland, no United States?
Back to the Arabs.
I have no problem recognizing the legitimacy of the Arab’s tenure in Palestine when they had it, from 638 to 1099, a period of 461 years out of a history lasting 5,000 years. They took Palestine by military conquest, and they lost it by conquest, to the Christian Crusaders in 1099.
Of course, military occupation by itself does not determine which party rightly has sovereignty in a given territory. Can it not be said that the Arabs have sovereign rights, if not to all of Israel, then at least to the West Bank, by virtue of their majority residency in that region from the early Middle Ages to the present?
To answer that question, let's look again at the historical record. Prior to 1947, as we've discussed, Palestine was administered by the British under the Palestine Mandate, the ultimate purpose of which, according to the Balfour Declaration, was the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine. In 1924 the British divided the Palestine Mandate into an Arabs-only territory east of the Jordan, which became the Kingdom of Trans-Jordan, and a greatly reduced Palestine Mandate territory west of the Jordan, which was inhabited by both Arabs and Jews.
Given the fact that the Jews and Arabs were unable to coexist in one state, there had to be two states. At the same time, there were no natural borders separating the two peoples, in the way that, for example, the Brenner Pass has historically marked the division between Latin and Germanic Europe. Since the Jewish population was concentrated near the coast, the Jewish state had to start at the coast and go some distance inland. Exactly where it should have stopped, and where the Arab state should have begun, was a practical question that could have been settled in any number of peaceful ways, almost all of which the Jews would have accepted. The Jews’ willingness to compromise on territory was demonstrated not only by their acquiescence in the UN’s 1947 partition plan, which gave them a state with squiggly indefensible borders, but even by their earlier acceptance of the 1937 Peel Commission partition plan, which gave them nothing more than a part of the Galilee and a tiny strip along the coast. Yet the Arab nations, refusing to accept any Jewish sovereignty in Palestine even if it was the size of a postage stamp, unanimously rejected the 1937 Peel plan and nine years later they violently rejected the UN's partition plan as well. When the Arabs resorted to arms in order to wipe out the Jews and destroy the Jewish state, they accepted the verdict of arms. They lost that verdict in 1948, and they lost it again in 1967, when Jordan, which had annexed the West Bank in 1948 (without any objections from Palestinian Arabs that their sovereign nationhood was being violated), attacked Israel from the West Bank during the Six Day War despite Israel's urgent pleas that it stay out of the conflict. Israel in self-defense then captured the West Bank. The Arabs thus have no grounds to complain either about Israel's existence (achieved in '48) or about its expanded sovereignty from the river to the sea (achieved in '67).

The Arabs have roiled the world for decades with their furious protest that their land has been "stolen" from them. One might take seriously such a statement if it came from a pacifist people such as the Tibetans, who had quietly inhabited their land for ages before it was seized by the Communist Chinese in 1950. The claim is laughable coming from the Arabs, who in the early Middle Ages conquered and reduced to slavery and penury ancient peoples and civilizations stretching from the borders of Persia to the Atlantic; who in 1947 rejected an Arab state in Palestine alongside a Jewish state and sought to obliterate the nascent Jewish state; who never called for a distinct Palestinian Arab state until the creation of the terrorist PLO in 1964, sixteen years after the founding of the state of Israel; and who to this moment continue to seek Israel's destruction, an object that would be enormously advanced by the creation of the Arab state they demand. The Arab claim to sovereign rights west of the Jordan is only humored today because of a fatal combination of world need for Arab oil, leftist Political Correctness that has cast the Israelis as "oppressors," and, of course, good old Jew-hatred.

Lawrence Auster is the author of Erasing America. This appeared in FrontPageMag.com on August 30.

Andrew Bostom, M.D.

As this country's leaders struggle to come to grips with Islamic jihad -- still reluctant to use the term, they prefer the nebulous “war on terror”-- it is important to note that an early U.S. President possessed a remarkably clear understanding of the challenge posed by Islam to Western civilization.
I have reviewed little known essays dealing with this subject by John Quincy Adams, written after his Presidency and before his election to Congress in 1830 (Chapters X-XIV, pp. 267-402, in The American Annual Register for 1827-28-29, New York 1830). The contributions of the second Adams, thus far less recognized than those of his father John Adams, particularly in shaping U.S. foreign policy, are being rediscovered. In 1949 the distinguished Yale diplomatic historian Samuel Flagg Bemis wrote:
“Adams grasped the essentials of American policy and the position of the United States in the world more surely than any other man of his time. He availed himself of matchless opportunities to advance the continental future of his country and the fundamental principles for which it stood in the world….Even if John Quincy Adams was not to have another great career, as a crusader against the expansion of slavery, [his] first and mighty achievement, of no less than continental proportions, in laying the foundations of American foreign policy, would have been great enough for one lifetime.”

In an era untouched by cultural relativism, Adams, convinced of the truth and moral superiority of Christianity, had no hesitation in drawing a harsh contrast between Jesus and Christianity, and Muhammad and Islam.
“And he [Jesus] declared, that the enjoyment of felicity in the world hereafter, would be reward of the practice of benevolence here. His whole law was resolvable into the precept of love; peace on earth – good will toward man…On the Christian system of morals, man is an immortal spirit, confined for a short space of time, in an earthly tabernacle. Kindness to his fellow mortals embraces the whole compass of his duties upon earth, and the whole promise of happiness to his spirit hereafter. THE ESSENCE OF THIS DOCTRINE IS, TO EXALT THE SPIRITUAL OVER THE BRUTAL PART OF HIS NATURE [Capitals in original].”
Of Muhammad and Islam, he writes:
“Adopting from the sublime conception of the Mosaic law, the doctrine of one omnipotent God; he connected indissolubly with it, the audacious falsehood, that he was himself his prophet and apostle. Adopting from the new Revelation of Jesus, the faith and hope of immortal life, and of future retribution, he humbled it to the dust by adapting all the rewards and sanctions of his religion to the gratification of the sexual passion. He poisoned the sources of human felicity at the fountain, by degrading the condition of the female sex, and the allowance of polygamy; and he declared undistinguishing and exterminating war, as a part of his religion, against all the rest of mankind. THE ESSENCE OF HIS DOCTRINE WAS VIOLENCE AND LUST; TO EXALT THE BRUTAL OVER THE SPIRITUAL PART OF HUMAN NATURE (Capitals in original)...Between these two religions, thus contrasted in their characters, a war of twelve hundred years has already raged. The war is yet flagrant...While the merciless and dissolute dogmas of the false prophet shall furnish motives to human action, there can never be peace upon earth, and good will towards men.”
Adams concluded solemnly,
“As the essential principle of his [Muhammad’s] faith is the subjugation of others by the sword; it is only by force, that his false doctrines can be dispelled, and his power annihilated.”
John Quincy Adams lucidly described the permanent Islamic institutions of jihad war and dhimmitude. Regarding jihad, Adams observes,
“…he [Muhammad] declared undistinguishing and exterminating war, as a part of his religion, against all the rest of mankind…The precept of the Koran is, perpetual war against all who deny, that Mahomet is the prophet of God… the faithful follower of the prophet, may submit to the imperious necessities of defeat: but the command to propagate the Moslem creed by the sword is always obligatory, when it can be made effective.”
And Adams captured the essential condition imposed upon the non-Muslim dhimmi “tributaries” subjugated by jihad, with this laconic statement,
“The vanquished may purchase their lives, by the payment of tribute.”

Adams also reported on the religiously rooted pattern of bad faith in negotiations -- the false promises of "peace," the saying of one thing in the language of "foreigners," another in Arabic -- that Israel has belatedly discovered, at great cost, and the rest of the world has yet to confront. Writes Adams: “..The commands of the prophet may be performed alike, by fraud, or by force. Of Mahometan good faith, we have had memorable examples ourselves. When our gallant [Stephen] Decatur had chastised the pirate of Algiers, till he was ready to renounce his claim of tribute from the United States, he signed a treaty to that effect: but the treaty was drawn up in the Arabic language, as well as in our own; and our negotiators, unacquainted with the language of the Koran, signed the copies of the treaty, in both languages, not imagining that there was any difference between them."
Adams continues:
"Within a year the Dey [Muslim ruler of Algiers] demands, under penalty of the renewal of the war, an indemnity in money for the frigate taken by Decatur; our Consul demands the foundation of this pretension; and the Arabic copy of the treaty, signed by himself is produced, with an article stipulating the indemnity, foisted into it, in direct opposition to the treaty as it had been concluded. The arrival of Chauncey, with a squadron before Algiers, silenced the fraudulent claim of the Dey, and he signed a new treaty in which it was abandoned; but he disdained to conceal his intentions; my power, said he, has been wrested from my hands; draw ye the treaty at your pleasure, and I will sign it; but beware of the moment, when I shall recover my power, for with that moment, your treaty shall be waste paper. He avowed what they always practiced, and would without scruple have practiced himself. Such is the spirit, which governs the hearts of men, to whom treachery and violence are taught as principles of religion."

Adams assails the subterfuges of the Ottoman Sultan in his dealings with Russia. The Sultan, he writes, prepared for war while pretending, so as to gain time, peaceful intentions. He had the Ottoman Grand Vizier send a letter to the Russian Prime Minister declaring "the Sublime Porte has at all times no other desire or wish than to preserve peace and good understanding" while at the same time another state paper was issued, addressed by the Sultan to his own subjects--this was the Hatti Sheriff of the 20th of December, sent to the Pashas of all the provinces, calling on all the faithful Mussulmen of the empire to come forth and 'fight for their religion, and their country, against the infidel despisers of the Prophet. The comparison of these two documents with each other, will afford the most perfect illustration of the Ottoman faith, as well as of their temper towards Russia."
Adams continues:
“The Hatti Sheriff commenced...'It is well known (said the Sultan) to almost every person, that if the Mussulmen naturally hate the infidels, the infidels, on their part, are the enemies of the Mussulmen: that Russia, more especially bears a particular hatred to Islamism, and that she is the principal enemy of the Sublime Porte.' This appeal to the natural hatred of the Mussulmen towards the infidels, is in just accordance with the precepts of the Koran. The document does not attempt to disguise it, nor even pretend that the enmity of those whom it styles the infidels, is any other than the necessary consequence of the hatred borne by the Mussulmen to them--the paragraph itself, is a forcible example of the contrasted character of the two religions. The fundamental doctrine of the Christian religion, is the extirpation of hatred from the human heart. It forbids the exercise of it even towards enemies. There is no denomination of Christians, which denies or misunderstands this doctrine....The unqualified acknowledgement of a duty does not, indeed, suffice to insure its performance. Hatred is yet a passion, but too powerful upon the hearts of Christians. Yet they cannot indulge it, except by the sacrifice of their principles and the conscious violation of their duties. No state paper from a Christian hand, could, without trampling the precepts of its Lord and Master, have commenced by an open proclamation of hatred to any portion of the human race. The Ottoman lays it down as the foundation of his discourse.”

Adams notes that the Sultan's pronouncement to his subjects continued:
“...all infidels are but one nation...This war must be considered purely a religious and national war. Let all the faithful, rich or poor, great or little, know, that to fight is a duty with us; let them then refrain from thinking of arrears, or of pay of any kind; far from such considerations, let us sacrifice our property and our persons; let us execute zealously the duties which the honor of Islamism imposes on us -- let us unite our efforts, and labor, body and soul, for the support of religion, until the day of judgment. Mussulmen have no other means of working out salvation in this world and the next.”
But then, writes Adams, when the Russians got wind of this declaration "summoning the whole Ottoman nation to arms against Russia, the Sultan now thinks proper to say, that it was only a proclamation which the Sublime Porte, for certain reasons, circulated in its states; an internal transaction, of which the Sublime Porte alone knows the motives, and that the language held by a government to its own subjects cannot be a ground for another government to pick a quarrel with it...that if Russia had conceived suspicions, from the Sultan's address to his subjects, she might have applied amicably to the Porte to ascertain the truth and clear up her doubts.”
An early anti-imperialist, Adams was a strong advocate for the liberation of Greek Christians, like Christians in the Balkans and the Black Sea lands of Russia, then suffering under the strictures of dhimmitude within the Ottoman Empire. Wrote Adams:
“Those provinces are the abode of ten millions of human beings, two thirds of whom are Christians, groaning under the intolerable oppression of less than three millions of Turks. Those provinces are in some of the fairest regions of the earth. They were Christian countries, subdued during the conquering period of the Mahometan imposture, by the ruthless scymetar [sic] of the Ottoman race; and under their iron yoke, have been gradually dwindling in population, and sinking into barbarism. The time of their redemption is at hand.”
Adams assails the phony “moral equivalence” the Western powers, above all England, applied to the Islamic Ottomans and their victims (shades of the approach of modern Western statesmen to the multitude of conflicts on what Samuel Huntington aptly termed, “Islam’s bloody borders”) and the moral cowardice that put the status quo above liberty. Writes Adams:
“In the king's [George IV] speech, at the opening of the session of Parliament, on the 29th of January, he said that, 'for several years a contest had been carried on between the Ottoman Porte, and the inhabitants of the Greek provinces and islands, which had been marked on each side, by excesses revolting to humanity.' Still more extraordinary was it to the ears of Christendom to hear a British king, in a speech to his parliament, style the execrable and sanguinary head of the Ottoman race, his ancient ally; and denominate a splendid victory, achieved under the command of a British admiral, in the strict and faithful execution of his instructions, an untoward event. But the last member of the paragraph from his majesty's speech...to those accustomed to the mystifications of royal speeches and diplomatic defiances, explained these apparent disparates. He declares the great objects to which all his efforts have been directed, and of which...he will never lose sight, are the termination of the contest between the hostile parties; the permanent settlement of their future relations to each other, and maintenance of the repose of Europe, upon the basis on which it has rested since the last general peace.”
In all the documents “issuing from the profound and magnanimous policy of the British warrior statesman,” writes Adams,
“nothing is more remarkable than the more than stoical apathy with which they regard the cause, for which the Greeks are contending; the more than epicurean indifference with which they witness the martyrdom of a whole people, perishing in the recovery of their religion and liberty.”
Given the global struggle with jihad terror, perhaps it is time for John Quincy Adams remarkable series of essays to be read by contemporary U.S. diplomats and politicians, and heeded.

Andrew G. Bostom, MD, MS has written extensively on jihad, and is the editor of a forthcoming collection of classical essays and primary source documents entitled, The Legacy of Jihad.

Ruth King

On November 10th, 2001, two months after the terrorist attacks on America, President Bush addressed the United Nations. His words soared with eloquence and resolve.
“And the people of my country will remember those who have plotted against us. We are learning their names. We are coming to know their faces. There is no corner of the earth distant or dark enough to protect them. However long it takes, their hour of justice will come.
“This threat cannot be ignored. This threat cannot be appeased. Civilization, itself, the civilization we share, is threatened. History will record our response, and judge or justify every nation in this hall. For every regime that sponsors terror, there is a price to be paid. And it will be paid. The allies of terror are equally guilty of murder and equally accountable to justice.”
He then challenged the United Nations:
“And, finally, this struggle is a defining moment for the United Nations, itself. And the world needs its principled leadership. It undermines the credibility of this great institution, for example, when the Commission on Human Rights offers seats to the world's most persistent violators of human rights. The United Nations depends, above all, on its moral authority -- and that authority must be preserved.”
Three years and two wars and thousands of victims of terrorism later -- in Indonesia, Madrid, Turkey, Russia, Israel -- the United Nations has not a shred of the “moral authority” which President Bush evoked in 2001.The UN has sidestepped virtually every binding resolution on Iraq, ignored genocides in Rwanda and Sudan, ignored its responsibility to isolate and punish states that harbor terrorists, squandered and misappropriated millions in humanitarian funds. Steeped in corruption, it continues to focus one half of its entire agenda on excoriating Israel. As Andrew C. McCarthy has written in National Review Online (September 16), “the risible, anachronistic, dysfunctional and quite likely criminal enterprise known as the United Nations is an international calamity that is doing far more harm than good.”
Nonetheless, in September, President Bush went to the belly of this beast to promote and defend his mission in Iraq. Assembled were the usual cast of despots and their emissaries, the sullen and spiteful representatives of "old" Europe who have derided and thwarted our war against terrorism, the assorted enablers of militant Islam’s agenda, and, of course, Kofi Annan, the Secretary General, who only days earlier had called our mission in Iraq “illegal.” And as Victor Davis Hanson has pointed out in the Wall Street Journal, the President "offered not blood and iron -- other than an obligatory 'the proper response is not to retreat but to prevail' -- but Wilsonian idealism, concrete help for the dispossessed, and candor about past sins. The president wished to convey a new multilateralist creed that would have made a John Kerry or Madeleine Albright proud.”
Also the President described terrorists as “enemies of freedom,” a naive euphemism. Fidel Castro and several of the dictators of Eastern Europe can be called enemies of freedom. Barbaric Islamic terrorists and their supporters stretch the definition of "evil.”
But it was worse than that. In this UN speech, the President, rather than confronting the jackals, joined them. Incredibly he excoriated Israel, the only country, apart from the Sudan, criticized in his speech. Much of what makes the UN so morally odious is its obsession with using Israel as international whipping boy. And now President Bush applies the whip himself? Israel, said the President, "should impose a settlements freeze, dismantle unauthorized outposts, end the daily humiliation of the Palestinian people, and avoid any actions that prejudice final negotiations.”
It is especially unseemly for the President to make this statement at the United Nations. The President could indeed have properly mentioned Israel -- to praise it for its exemplary restraint even in the face of threats and attacks. To praise it for its protection of the rights of its Arab citizens. Mr. Bush defends the Patriot Act and all efforts to interrogate and search possible suspects. Why then does he call Israel’s necessary security measures “humiliating?” Is it worse to be questioned and searched than to feel a terrible fear every single time your child rides a bus, or you or a family member goes to a movie or pizzeria or a cafe?
What the President did was to pander to the Arab and Moslem enemies of America who insist that the Arab-Israel conflict is the “root cause” of Islamic terrorism even though the President knows that Islamic terrorists (who beheaded a second American hostage even as the President made his speech) are faith driven barbarians for whom Israel is merely a rehearsal stage for the greater Jihad. On November 8th, 2001, in a speech to firemen, policemen and postal workers in Atlanta, Georgia, President Bush had said:
“We are the target of enemies who boast they want to kill, kill all Americans, kill all Jews and kill all Christians.”
At the U.N. on November 10th, 2001 the President had said,
“…. there is no such thing as a good terrorist. No national aspiration, no remembered wrong can ever justify the deliberate murder of the innocent. Any government that rejects this principle, trying to pick and choose its terrorist friends, will know the consequence.”
I like George Bush. I want him to succeed. But America and Israel deserve more from him than was given at that sorry speech on September 21,2004.

Rachel Neuwirth

Claims that America is engaged in a total war against terrorism are greatly exaggerated. President Bush cannot selectively fight some terrorists, while ignoring or even supporting other kinds of terrorists, and still claim to be fighting a War on Terror. Bush cannot declare that we oppose all who practice terrorism, including all their supporters, in theory, and then employ a double standard in practice. We cannot say that the 9/11 bombers are terrorists, but that those who blow up buses in Israel are not terrorists because they are engaged in a political process, as was claimed by Secretary of State Colin Powell. This double standard has been a long-term element in U.S. policy, and is not limited to the current Bush Administration and the equivocation in its so-called war on terror.
President Bush is seeking Osama bin Laden, dead or alive. But at the same time President Bush is protecting Yasser Arafat, the father of modern terrorism, by demanding that Israel not harm him or even exile him. On 9/11 bin Laden caused the death of 3,000 Americans plus the wounding of many more. Since the Oslo Accords of 1993, Arafat has killed about 1,300 Israelis and wounded upwards of 7,000. In proportion to population, this is the U.S. equivalent of 70,000 dead and 380,000 wounded, many of those horribly so.
And yet Arafat’s Palestinian Authority receives some $200 million in American aid annually plus the promise of another Arab state at Israel’s expense, if only Arafat pretends to favor peace for a short while. This appeasement of terrorism harms America's national security as well as being wrong in principle.
American double standards are clearly revealed in the history of Yasser Arafat and his consistent coddling by U.S. officials, which began in the 1960s.
Arafat officially began his terror career in 1959 when he formed the Fatah organization, with its "constitution" explicitly calling for the destruction of Israel. In 1968, he succeeded in taking over the Palestine Liberation Organization, an organization set up by the League of Arab States, whose "covenant" also declared the destruction of Israel to be its goal. These declarations of total war were made years prior to the 1967 Six-Day War and Israel’s acquiring those territories now in dispute. During the 1960s he was already hijacking airliners. In 1970 he tried to seize control over Jordan and was only driven back after a bloodbath known as Black September, in which thousands were slaughtered. He then moved to Lebanon where he instigated a long civil war in which over 100,000 were killed in a country of only about three million. His thugs attacked residential neighborhoods using women and children as human shields, a tactic he used later in his intifada against Israel. Lebanese Christians suffered greatly and many were forced to flee to other countries.
Forcible U.S. opposition to Arafat’s crimes was notably absent, but when Israel responded to cross border attacks with a counteroffensive against the PLO and Syrian occupiers of Lebanon, the U.S. suddenly found its voice and demanded an Israeli withdrawal. The U.S. intervened to rescue Arafat when Israel was close to defeating him, bringing him to safety in Tunisia, where he continued his war of terror against Israel.

In 1972, Arafat’s PLO slaughtered 11 Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics, marring international games dedicated to world peace, without generating an adequately forceful response from the U.S. Perhaps Arafat was becoming confident about U.S. tolerance towards terror, because in 1973 he got away with the kidnap-murder of two American diplomats in Khartoum, Sudan. Ambassador Cleo Noel and George Curtis Moore were murdered on direct orders from Arafat. The CIA even taped Arafat giving the order to his thugs. Yet the U.S. did nothing, not even publicly fingering Arafat for this act of aggression against the United States, carried out on the grounds of a supposedly sacrosanct diplomatic mission.
In 1978, Jimmy Carter's administration began writing speeches for Arafat to give, containing expressions such as ‘no more terrorism’ and ‘peace with Israel,’ in return promising U.S. recognition for the PLO. Even then, it took Arafat ten years before he reluctantly muttered the soothing words demanded of him by the State Department. Immediately, the U.S. began pressuring Israel to begin negotiations with the PLO.
During the Clinton years Arafat was the most frequent foreign guest at the White House and received some $100 million in annual aid, even while he continued his terror campaign against Israel. He received the Nobel Peace Prize for simply signing his name to the Oslo Accords -- after which he violated every one of its provisions, and launched a massive new terrorist intifada. George W. Bush stopped the visits, but doubled the aid to $200 million, again sending mixed signals.
About a year ago three American representatives were slaughtered in Gaza by terrorists linked to Arafat. They were traveling to a refugee camp to recruit candidates for an education program in the U.S., an act of American generosity. Under U.S. pressure Arafat went though the motions of looking for the killers but refused genuine cooperation with U.S. authorities. Arafat has won out again. He defied the U.S., allowed the killers to go free, and suffered no reprisals at all from the U.S. -- not even a cut-off of aid. His popularity among his depraved followers has been boosted by his success in committing aggression against the U.S. and getting away with it.

According to a news report in WorldNetDaily, the FBI is finally opening an investigation into the 1973 case of Arafat’s killing of American diplomats. Will Arafat be tried for killing these two Americans? Don’t bet on it, because he has already killed over 100 Americans with impunity, many of them American Jews visiting Israel.
Continuing U.S. funding of Arafat alone makes a mockery of Bush’s claims to be fighting terrorism. But there are many more instances of hypocrisy. A few examples:
The Saudis have long supported terrorism by their funding of madrassas, which are Islamic schools that teach an extreme form of Islam. They also funded terrorist cells in other countries. Egypt, too, supports terrorism, but mainly against Israel. Egypt has long been complicit in allowing Arab terrorists to smuggle weapons into Gaza via tunnels between the Egyptian side of the boundary into the Gaza side. This violates Egypt's peace treaty with Israel, which has enabled Egypt to receive about $2 billion in annual military and economic aid, along with U.S. weapons and training since 1978. There are U.S. personnel in the Sinai to monitor Egyptian compliance with the peace treaty. How come these American monitors are blind to these flagrant violations by Egypt? Meanwhile, the government-controlled Egyptian media spews a constant torrent of anti-Israeli, anti-Jewish and even anti-American invective with impunity while Egypt continues to receive billions in U.S. aid.
Egyptian dictator Gamal Abdul Nasser, during the 1960s, used poison gas in Yemen in his attempt to expand his power in the region. The U.S. was busy courting him and other dictators as part of our cold war policies, and it was easy to ignore flagrant human rights violations. (We also largely ignored Saddam’s gassing of the Iraqi Kurds in the 1980s.)

In our so-called war on terror we also lack the intellectual honesty to even name the enemy, although there are small signs that this may finally be changing. The enemy is not terror, but those who practice terror: the Jihadists and Islamic extremists.
Why does the U.S. refuse to seek a U.N. declaration against Islamic terrorism? The likely reason is that it would be opposed in the U.N. by the large Islamic block and their supporters. If so, it is still worthwhile to expose the U.N. for its moral bankruptcy. But the State Department prefers to perpetuate its pretense of the U.N.’s moral credibility.
We also fail in other respects. First, we have not properly defined what we stand for. The Islamic enemy cites examples of Western decadence as justification for their ‘holy war.’ Simply saying that we stand for ‘freedom’ and ‘free enterprise’ has limited value because for many religious Muslims those terms may seem foreign. It suggests that we are simply imposing our system upon them by force.
Surely the U.S. information agencies can do a better job of communicating the alternative that America's principles of freedom, openness, the rule of law, respect for human rights, equality, and tolerance present to the peoples of the Islamic world, and their manifest superiority to the hatred, intolerance, lawlessness and cruelty of the Islamist fanatics.
In addition, we have failed to cultivate responsible Islamic clerics and intellectuals. There are Muslims who understand very well the sickness that prevails in so many Islamic societies. It is their voices that need to be heard, boldly challenging the extremists on a religious basis, point for point. They must show the way out of this dead end and back towards an enlightened form of Islam. Such actually existed for a time centuries ago, when there was true creativity and a lively interchange of ideas across different cultures. Once Muslims hear from devout and learned men and women of their own faith that human rights, the rule of law, and respect for other religions and cultures are not incompatible with their Islamic heritage, most will eventually reject the teaching of the hatemongers among them. Why not use our information forums and financial resources to help the courageous and lonely Muslim moderates to get an enlightened message to their own people?
However, our own leaders act as if they are unaware of this battle of ideas, and instead allow the extremists to have access to the highest levels of our government. Grover Norquist is a conservative activist who used to be involved in economic issues, but recently has been using his influence to help Muslims with radical and even pro-terrorist ties to gain access to high Administration officials. This in turn has allowed the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) to help place Islamists among those selecting clerics for Muslim inmates in our prisons and soldiers in our military and to demand all manner of rights and concessions for Muslims in America while playing the role of victims of discrimination.
The final question is what have we gained by compromising on terrorism in the interest of expediency, by weakening our loyal ally, Israel, while pandering to Israel’s Arab enemies? Except for Israel, how many countries in the world can we count as true and staunch allies? When Tony Blair leaves power, Britain may become like Germany. The same is true for allies such as Italy and Australia, where the current political leadership faces strong public opposition to support of the war in Iraq.
Defending ourselves effectively requires moral clarity. We can at least draw the boundary line between civilized conduct and outright barbarism, and insist that others observe this basic standard. We must reject the thinking expressed by the unfortunate words of our very own Secretary of State, Colin Powell, that “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.” We must be consistent, even if it is embarrassing to ourselves at times. By being honest we will astonish our enemies, amaze our friends, and win grudging respect for our integrity. We can then speak more effectively and directly to the peoples of the world and over the heads of their governments and a biased media.
Even if it is beyond our power to be the world’s policeman, the United States, as a superpower, is more free than other nations to speak the truth without having to fear reprisals from powers stronger than ourselves. Unless we do so, we will have seriously compromised our self-declared “war on terror.”

Rachel Neuwirth is a California based writer.