Published in American Spectator July/August 2004

by Rael Jean Isaac

Character assassination. A simplistic moral universe in which the U.S. is the villain and Israel the only country yet more villainous. Anonymous sources that cannot be checked. Dark charges based on a crazy patchwork of suppositions. Far-out conspiracy theories. Con men as sources. Reputable sources misquoted. These constitute the decades-long MO of Seymour Hersh, the man now serving as star investigative reporter of the New Yorker.

Donald Rumsfeld is the target of Hersh’s most recent venture into character assassination. In the New Yorker of May 24, 2004 Hersh seeks to pin the abuse of prisoners in Abu Ghraib directly on the Defense Secretary. Typical of Hersh, there is a lot more charge than substance. Supposedly, Rumsfeld approved a secret Pentagon program that “encouraged physical coercion and sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners” and then, along with Stephen Cambone, Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence, expanded the scope of the program “bringing its unconventional methods to Abu Ghraib.”

Had Rumsfeld endorsed “sexual humiliation” of prisoners? Does the secret program Hersh describes exist at all? The Pentagon promptly declared the article’s charges “outlandish, conspiratorial and filled with error and anonymous conjecture.” Given that Hersh’s sources are anonymous (a “former high level intelligence official” here, a “Pentagon consultant” there), what he says is impossible to evaluate. But given Hersh’s track record, the highest order of skepticism is warranted.

Did Hersh think his article could unseat the Defense Secretary? He has had success in this line before. In March 2003 Richard Perle resigned as chairman of the Defense Policy Board after a firestorm of publicity concerning supposed ethics violations which Hersh had launched in The New Yorker. Again, the article was short on facts, long on sinister speculation. Indeed its only substantive “fact” was that Perle met with two Saudi businessmen to discuss Iraq: Adnan Kashoggi, the longtime arms dealer and middleman, and Iraqi born Harb Saleh al-Zuhair. Kashoggi had arranged the meeting at the request of al-Zuhair, who claimed to have come from Iraq with a negotiating offer from Saddam. All three agree that the only topic discussed at the meeting was Iraq.

This did not stop Hersh from declaring that Perle’s “real” motive in meeting with the two Saudis was to obtain investment in Trireme, a venture capital company focusing on technology, goods and services useful for homeland security, in which Perle is a partner. Hersh suggests Perle’s hawkishness on Iraq stemmed from his business interests. Hersh writes: “’If there is no war, he [Kashoggi] told me, ‘why is there a need for security?’” Apparently Kashoggi had never heard of 9/11. Hersh hauls in Saudi Prince Bandar who had nothing to do with the meeting but states flatly: “I believe the Iraqi events are irrelevant. A business meeting took place.”

Like previous (and subsequent) victims, Perle could only explode in unavailing wrath. Asked what element of Hersh’s story was true, Perle told the New York Sun, “It’s all lies from beginning to end.” On CNN Perle called Hersh “the closest thing American journalism has to a terrorist.” A few years earlier, The New Yorker (May 22, 2000) devoted almost its entire issue to a Hersh story that rehashed ten year old allegations (exhaustively investigated by the army and found to be without merit) that during the first Gulf War General Barry McCaffrey had commanded troops who opened fire on unarmed Iraqis. Defending himself in the Wall Street Journal, McCaffrey wrote that Hersh had told people he had contacted that he intended “to bury” McCaffrey. But McCaffrey, like Perle, ran into the problem that self-defense inevitably sounds self-serving.

Hersh’s most unforgivable exercise in character assassination was in his 1983 anti-Kissinger book The Price of Power. While the book was intended to be a hatchet job on Kissinger (who called Hersh’s allegations about him “slimy lies”), the chief victim turned out to be India’s former Prime Minister Morarji Desai. Hersh quoted anonymous intelligence officials “recalling” Desai had been paid $20,000 yearly as a CIA informer during the Johnson administration. Desai, 87 years old, reacted in outrage, calling it a “sheer mad story” and brought a libel suit seeking $50 million in damages. By the time the suit went to a Chicago jury in 1989, Desai was 93 and too ill to come to the US. Kissinger testified on Desai’s behalf, flatly contradicting Hersh’s report in the book that he had been delighted to have someone of Desai’s stature on the payroll and had playfully chastised CIA officials elsewhere for failing to recruit Cabinet-level informers. He also testified that to his knowledge Desai had no connection to the CIA and that former CIA director Richard Helms had told him he would be on “safe ground” in testifying that Desai was not a paid CIA informant.

Nonetheless Desai lost. He could not prove that no one in the CIA had told Hersh that he was on the payroll because the judge ruled that Hersh need not identify his sources and Desai’s attorney was prevented from questioning anyone in the CIA’s employ. Hersh never even took the stand. Hersh’s lawyer announced that the outcome proved “that even a person as prominent as Morarji Desai cannot intimidate an American journalist entitled to his First Amendment protections.” What the case really showed was that as long as he did not need to reveal his sources, an irresponsible journalist could label any public figure a CIA agent with impunity.

Who are Hersh’s sources? Much of the time, given his massive use of unnamed individuals, it is impossible to say. Are they reputable people? Disgruntled individuals with an axe to grind? Figments of his imagination? Who knows? However, when Hersh does identify his sources they can be evaluated and he has a record of being taken in by conmen. (“Wanting to believe” is perhaps more accurate than “taken in”– conmen provide the sensational material on which Hersh thrives.) Hersh’s The Samson Option (1991) rests squarely on the fantasies of one Ari Ben Menashe. The theme of the book is that Israel, impelled by the megalomania of its leaders, built the Bomb, deceiving the United States (with the help of disloyal Jews) until the wicked deed was done. But apart from the conspiratorial anti-Semitic tone of the book, it had nothing to offer that was not already well-established – except for the “revelations” of Ben Menashe. Hersh identifies him as a former Israeli intelligence expert who served as adviser to Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir on intelligence affairs (both untrue). Among Ben Menashe’s more sensational revelations, Hersh reports that Prime Minister Shamir personally authorized purloined U.S. intelligence obtained through Jonathan Pollard to be “sanitized, retyped and turned over to Soviet intelligence officials” as part of Israel’s ongoing exchange of intelligence with the Soviets on U.S. weapons systems. (How this squares with another of Ben Menashe’s “disclosures,” that Israel was using its stolen U.S. intelligence to target the Soviet Union which “was always Israel’s primary nuclear target” is not explained.)

In fact Ben Menashe is a notorious tale-spinner who currently, in a scenario beyond the imagination of the most far-out screenwriter, serves as chief witness in Robert Mugabe’s farcical treason trial of the leader of the chief opposition party in Zimbabwe. Among fantasies too numerous to count (he was Israel’s top spy, a commander of the Entebbe operation, planted a homing device in the Iraqi nuclear reactor at Osirak, declined an offer to become head of the Mossad) Ben Menashe claimed to have been with the first George Bush in Paris in October 1980 arranging for Iran to hold the hostages until after the Presidential election – this on dates when Secret Service logs show Bush engaged in a large number of appearances in the United States.) Newsweek’s John Barry, who looked into Ben Menashe’s claims, declared on CNN “If you were talking about the American civil war, he would tell you he was the guy who planned Lee’s campaign.”

Terrorism expert Steven Emerson, who described all this and more in a 1991 op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, reports that Hersh was warned in advance about Ben Menashe but refused to listen. Emerson himself warned him. Hersh was also warned by Peter Hounam, the chief investigative reporter for the London Sunday Times “Insight” team who had broken the story of the Vanunu affair, with documentation on Israel’s Dimona reactor. Ben Menashe had claimed a leading role in luring Vanunu back to Israel and Hounam offered to let Hersh go through his personal files on the Vanunu affair which showed that none of Ben Menashe’s claims held up. Hersh was not interested. (Much later even Hersh would admit that Ben Menashe “lies like people breathe.”)

It turned out that Hersh was doubly conned. Emerson writes that after Ben Menashe was publicly exposed, Hersh issued a six page statement insisting he had “documentation” from “a private detective” confirming part of Ben Menashe’s story. A few days later the Sunday Times revealed the “private detective” was actually Joe Flynn, a well known British hoaxer, who admitted he had deceived Hersh for money (almost 1300 English pounds delivered by Hersh’s British publisher). “I am a conman,” Flynn told the Times.

But Hersh’s best-known romance with a conman came several years later, when he was working on a Kennedy book eventually published in 1997 as The Dark Side of Camelot. Hersh fell for a stash of phony documents peddled by one Lawrence S. Cusack (who went to prison in 1999 for defrauding more than 100 investors of $7 million in a scheme to sell them). Hersh assiduously wooed Cusack who claimed to have found in the files of his late father, a prominent lawyer, papers that included a contract in which Marilyn Monroe promised to keep silent about their affair in return for $600,000 and documentation linking Kennedy directly to mobster Sam Giancana. Amusingly, in one of his letters to Cusack Hersh wrote “We got along so well at that dinner Tuesday night because, I like to think, we are all what we seem to be.” Again, there was the same pattern of refusing to credit the warning signs, however glaring. In National Review, journalist John Miller observed that Hersh came up “with desperate rationalizations for skeptics who wondered why documents containing ZIP codes were dated before ZIP codes even existed.”

While Hersh pulled down a huge contract with ABC for a Kennedy documentary based on the documents, it fell apart when ABC concluded they were phony. In 1999 Hersh wound up on the stand as a prosecution witness and had to undergo a highly embarrassing three hour grilling by Cusack’s lawyer. Hersh was asked to explain a letter he had sent to Cusack claiming he had not only independently confirmed that Cusack’s father had known Kennedy through an interview with Kennedy’s secretary Evelyn Lincoln, but had also “independently confirmed some of the most interesting materials” in the papers. “Here is where I absolutely misstated things” an embarrassed Hersh testified. (Hersh has a pattern of claiming to “corroborate” material that defies corroboration. In The Samson Option he says that “Ben Menashe’s account might seem almost too startling to be believed, had it not been subsequently amplified by a second Israeli, who cannot be named.”)

Cusack was exposed in time to spare Hersh the embarrassment of basing yet another book on the breathless recitation of a conman’s revelations. Instead Hersh provided what long-time Kennedy associate Theodore Sorenson described as “a pathetic collection of wild stories.” Even Thomas Powers, a friendly reviewer in The New York Times, described The Dark Side of Camelot as a “file cabinet,” holding up “in strict chronological order just about every report, claim, rumor or telltale clue” of everything the Kennedys and their friends would wish to keep secret. Notice the absence of the word “fact” in this list of the file cabinet’s contents.

The Dark Side of Camelot illustrates something else about Hersh’s use of sources: reputable sources tend to be misquoted or selectively expurgated if they do not forward Hersh’s personal agenda. The book claimed that Ted Kennedy paid off county chairmen in the West Virginia primary, among them Charles Peters, now publisher of Washington Monthly. Barbara Comstock, in National Review online, writes that Peters says Hersh interviewed him five times but simply ignored his claims that the payoffs did not happen. In The Samson Option Hersh cites Israeli scientist and government adviser Yuval Ne’eman as having told him that in the Yom Kippur War of 1973 Israel went on nuclear alert twice. I asked Ne’eman about this in 1992, not long after the book was published. Ne’eman said he had spoken to Hersh and told him the United States – not Israel – went on nuclear alert twice during that war. Also in The Samson Option Hersh repeatedly cites former Israeli Defense Forces major Seth Mintz as source for the charge that Israel deliberately sank the USS Liberty during the 1967 war. On the contrary, Mintz says that the Israelis concluded the Liberty was an enemy ship masquerading as an American vessel after the U.S. embassy, twice queried, denied there was any American ship in the area.

Columnist John Lofton quotes Hersh in a 1984 interview with the University of Chicago magazine: “I‘m not interested in history because I’m trying to change things.” This may explain Hersh’s contempt for mere historical truth. In The Samson Option Hersh writes that the famed U.S. airlift to Israel during the Yom Kippur War was only undertaken because Israel blackmailed President Nixon, threatening to use its atomic arsenal if supplies were not sent immediately. There is no evidence for this and Hersh does not even pretend to offer any. Veteran foreign correspondent Russ Braley wrote to Richard Nixon in retirement and asked if there was any truth in what Hersh wrote. In a letter dated January 22, 1992 Nixon replied: “The story has no foundation whatever.” In the Nov. 12, 2001 New Yorker Hersh described an October 20 raid on Taliban leader Mullah Omar’s compound as “a near disaster,” claiming twelve special forces were injured, three seriously. Gen. Tommy Franks said no one was wounded. Hersh claimed 16 AC-130 planes were used in the mission. The Air Force only has 21 and the large, heavily armed planes are not flown in groups. Journalist John Miller challenged Hersh: “Would 16 of them lead a relatively small special-forces operation in Afghanistan?” Undisturbed, Hersh said he might have “misheard.”

In his 1986 book The Target is Destroyed, on the Soviet downing of Korean civilian airliner KAL 007, Hersh gets the entire story wrong. His thesis is that the Soviets had made an honest mistake, confusing the Boeing 747 with the RC-135, a U.S. reconnaissance aircraft. U.S. officials “rushed to judgment” because “strong hostility to communism had led them to misread the intelligence.” The “real story,” said Hersh, was not the fate of the plane but the “politically corrupt” use of intelligence by the U.S. In 1991 Izvestiya took advantage of its new freedom to investigate the case and interviewed Lt. Col. Gennadi Osipovich, the Soviet fighter pilot who shot down KAL 007. Osipovich said that he had been ordered to state on television that the Boeing had been flying with its lights out, and that it ignored warning tracer shots and a radio message before he destroyed it, all of which was untrue. He also indignantly rejected the suggestion that he had mistaken the plane for an RC-135. To be sure, Hersh could not have obtained the true story in 1984. But if his anti-American ideological blinkers had not been firmly in place, he would have been less confident in his simplistic thesis that bad American anti-Communism led to the U.S. “lying” about the incident, misrepresenting an innocent, if tragic, Soviet mistake.

In an interview with The Progressive Hersh declared that “If the standard for being fired was being wrong on a story, I would have been fired long ago.” And that is the real question: why has Hersh, who should long since have been banished to supermarket tabloids, instead attained what People magazine, in a fawning piece, called “a kind of mythic status as a journalist.” The answer clearly lies in Hersh’s long history of visceral anti-Americanism, which resonates with the journalistic elite. Hersh is a product of the “Movement” of the 1960s, which saw the American government as the focus of world evil. Hersh had his start with Dispatch News Service, a Movement outfit founded in 1969 as an “alternative” news agency to disseminate anti-Vietnam war stories to the mainstream press. A source called Hersh with a tip on what became known as the My Lai massacre. The army was in the process of court-martialing Lt. William Calley and investigating 36 others for their part in the shootings of civilians, and Hersh pursued the story, which Dispatch then distributed. Typically, Hersh insisted that My Lai was not an isolated instance: the true villain, he wrote, was “the Army as an institution.”

My Lai turned Hersh overnight into what A.M. Rosenthal, then New York Times managing editor, called “the hottest piece of journalistic property in the United States.” The Times hired him and he remained there from 1972 to1979. He wrote a series of stories attacking the CIA for covert actions abroad and for spying on domestic groups (the material, which had been assembled by the CIA itself and turned over to the Congressional committee with oversight of the CIA, was leaked to Hersh by CIA head William Colby). In the anti-establishment atmosphere of the period, Hersh’s stories had a major impact, playing an important role in launching Congressional investigations by both houses of Congress into the CIA. The upshot of the “reforms” Congress enacted was to seriously compromise our intelligence capabilities, setting up a firewall between the FBI and CIA, the piper being paid on 9/11. It is significant that Rosenthal would say that a number of Hersh’s stories would not have been publishable under the standards he demanded of Times reporters a few years later.

In 1979, his last year at the Times, Hersh went to Vietnam, one of a few selected American journalists the Communists permitted entry. He wrote a series of six articles in which he exhibited none of the critical zeal with which he challenged U.S. government claims. Hersh reported that the boat people were those who had cooperated with the Americans during the war and could not acclimatize; the New Economic Zones were cultural and social success stories (they were actually concentration camps for political undesirables); the “reeducation camps,” what they purported to be and not the brutal places they in fact were.

Hersh is an ideological yellow journalist. With his tenacity, lack of scruples, narrow vision and white hats versus black hats view of the world, he might have been a successful police reporter – particularly in the earlier journalistic world of Chicago (Hersh’s home town) described by Ben Hecht, where letting the facts interfere with a sensational story was a mark against you. But Hersh is unable to handle complicated material, unable to understand or analyze policy issues. He never seems to have heard of standards of evidence. Unable or unwilling to sift out the wildest, most absurd allegations, he tosses them into the pot, as long as they contribute to his being able to say “the target is destroyed.”
The real issue is not Hersh but his standing among journalists. Hersh has won over a dozen major journalism awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, four George Polk awards, and this year’s National Magazine Award.. How could such dreadful stuff be so well rewarded? There is no worse indictment of the shoddy standards of American journalism and the political bias of its elite than the flood of awards its standard bearers have bestowed on Seymour Hersh.

Caroline Glick Jerusalem Post -- Jul. 16, 2004

On June 30, the Council for the Protection of Journalists penned a letter to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon protesting a missile attack the previous night on an office building in Gaza. According to the CPJ, whose honorary chairman is Walter Cronkite, the building housed the offices of several foreign press organizations, including the BBC and MBC.

According to the IDF and to the Government Press Office, the building in question also housed offices of Hizbullah's Al Manar television and operated as a Hamas communication center. Through it, Hamas maintained constant communications with terrorists, disseminated propaganda and claimed responsibility for attacks like the one the organization had carried out the previous day – the murder of 4 year old Afik Zahavi and 49 year old Mordechai Yosepov by Kassam rockets in Sderot. This fact was ignored by the CPJ.

In its penultimate paragraph, the letter stated, "CPJ reminds you that media offices are civilian facilities and are protected from attack under international humanitarian law unless they are used for military purposes. The IDF has not provided any compelling evidence that the office was used in this manner. The attack on the building was also disproportionate to any perceived threat and reckless in endangering civilians – in this case the many journalists who work there."

The letter by the CPJ followed a similar protest launched by the Foreign Press Association in Israel.

The fact that Hamas and Hizbullah cohabit a building used by media organizations and hide their operations behind journalistic cover is nothing new. It is standard fare for terrorists, both in the Palestinian population centers and in Iraq, to disguise themselves as journalists and to use journalistic cover to travel freely.

Before his arrest by the IDF, Hassam Yusuf, the Hamas commander in Judea and Samaria, sat in a Ramallah office bearing the sign, "Nur Press Office." When last fall the US began pressuring Syrian dictator Bashar Assad to close the terrorist headquarters in Damascus, Assad claimed that they were not headquarters, but press offices.

At the beginning of the month, Agence France Presse photographer Mohammed Abed took a picture of two Palestinian terrorists in ski caps assembling a bomb in Rafah refugee camp. The photograph was shot from a distance of less than a meter. How was he allowed to get so close? In Iraq there have been several instances of reporters arriving at the scene of terror attacks against coalition forces before the attacks take place. They have admitted that they were tipped off by the terrorists in order to enable them to take real time footage of dying Americans.

While Israel was roundly criticized for firing three missiles into the "press" headquarters of Hamas and Hizbullah, neither the CPJ nor the Foreign Press Association issued any condemnatory statement against the Palestinian Authority for the attack on New York Times bureau chief James Bennet in Gaza in May. When AFP photographer Jamal Arouri had both his arms broken by the Aksa Martyr Brigades earlier in the year to prevent him from working, neither organization launched a protest.

A Washington Post article about the US Army's fight against the Sadr army in southern Iraq this past spring includes a revealing line. In a fight in Najaf, US forces fought terrorists in a pitched battle that lasted six hours in order to prevent the enemy from taking hold of a burning Humvee. As one of the officers put it, "We weren't going to let them dance on it for the news. Even with all the guys they lost that day, that still would have given them a victory."

All the above vignettes point to the fact that the ability to harness the media and to control the images of the war is one of the chief components of the terrorist war doctrine. The enemy hides behind press credentials in order to gain operational cover. It stage-manages terrorist theater by giving "scoops" of attacks to fellow travelers with cameras, tape recorders and notepads. It reenacts battlefield defeats as victories before the cameras. It uses its video footage of its own atrocities to both frighten its foes and encourage its sympathizers.

In the strategic use of the media to advance their war aims, the terrorists are assisted by Western press agencies. "Reporters" from Al Manar, Al Jazeera, Hamas and Al Qaida websites and other propaganda organs are viewed as "colleagues" rather than agents of jihad and participants in the war.

From all of this it is clear that one of the greatest challenges to democracies in fighting and winning the war is finding adequate answers to the question of how to conduct an informational warfare campaign that is integrally linked to the battlefield and diplomatic aspects of the war.

The US military rediscovered one of the most potent weapons against terrorist media warfare in the planning stages of Operation Iraqi Freedom. The decision to integrate or embed journalists with US forces was a monumental achievement. In so doing, the US reinstated a long tradition of battlefield reporting that had been nearly snuffed out in the aftermath of the Vietnam War.

Having reporters with the troops enables the military to get out the story from the perspective of its own personnel in real time. When I was in Iraq with the US Army's 3rd Infantry Division the necessity of the embed program was constantly in evidence. This was perhaps most starkly brought to my attention with the American seizure of Baghdad airport.

As I phoned into Israel Channel 2 news to report that I was at the airport, I was told by the television producer on the other end of the line that I must be mistaken because the Iraqi "Information" Minister had just said that there were no US forces at Baghdad Airport.

So embedding journalists with combat units is exceedingly important. But as the war moves on and mutates into increasingly ugly and sophisticated forms of made-for-TV barbarism it is clearly is not sufficient. Additional methods of fighting terrorist propaganda must also be found. One of these methods is to refuse to accord journalistic privileges automatically to anyone claiming to be a member of the press. The Iraqi Provisional Governing Authority recognized this when its members last year banned Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiya satellite stations from broadcasting in Iraq. News organizations should be judged by the impact of their reports and the content as well as by their legitimacy. If they are actively pursuing the cause of the enemy, they should be unmasked as the enemy. And this should be done without apology.

One of the advantages of the terrorists over the democracies they fight is that they have no compunction about lying. So it was in the case of the US air strike against a terrorist drop-off point on the Syrian-Iraqi border: before US officials in Baghdad had information about the raid, Arab "journalists" were reporting that US forces had bombed a wedding party.

In Israel's case, the first blood libel of the Palestinian terrorist war – the allegation that the IDF had killed 12 year-old Muhammed al-Dura in October 2000, was created as a result of the slowness of the IDF's ability to check the facts of the case. By the time the IDF had proved irrefutably that al-Dura had been killed by Palestinian forces, weeks had passed and the blood libel had circulated all over the Arab world.

To solve this problem, a policy must be adopted of never providing the terrorists with the moral high ground. On a strategic level, this requires never accepting blame for anything until all the facts have been unearthed. It is better to deny – indeed, it is possible to deny because, as a rule, the IDF does not target civilians – than to allow that the allegations may or may not be true. If, after the fact, it works out that civilians were killed, an explanation of the deaths can be given in a full context. The terrorists must never be granted a monopoly on telling the story.

On a tactical level, it means that democratic armies must integrate the informational warfare component into all their operational plans. This may involve becoming more flexible about exposing intelligence information. This may involve bringing army photographers with troops in every operation in order to take control of the visual image emanating from battle scenes.

While not according rights to terrorists and their media helpers, democratic armies must protect journalists who are actually doing their job. Reports have surfaced again and again of reporters from the US funded Al Hurra news network being physically attacked and harassed by terrorists and their supporters. This must not be allowed to continue. While reporting in war zones always involves risk, democratic forces must do everything they can to provide a modicum of safety for legitimate reporters.

The informational component of terrorist-warfare doctrine is one of the most unique aspects of the present war. The proliferation of news sources through the internet and satellite television combined with the post-nationalist, post-modernist preferences of large swathes of the Western media elites have made the necessity of integrating informational warfare components into every stage of battle planning, fighting and post-combat debriefings and overall strategic planning absolutely essential. Getting the story out is now of equal if not greater importance than defeating enemy forces in any particular engagement. Because without the story, the battlefield victory will eventually become a strategic defeat.

This article can also be read at http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=1089955401580&p=1006953079897

Copyright 1995-2004 The Jerusalem Post - http://www.jpost.com/

By Bat Ye’or

FrontPageMagazine.com | July 2, 2004

The following presentation by Bat Ye'or was delivered at a seminar in the French Senate in Paris three weeks ago - The Editors.

*
Allow me first to make a preliminary observation about the title of this session: the ‘return of the spirit of Munich’ – a title which I find somewhat optimistic. At Munich, in 1938, France and England, exhausted by the death toll of the Great War, abandoned Czechoslovakia to the Nazi beast, in the hope that by doing so they would avoid another conflict. The “spirit of Munich” thus refers to a policy of states and of peoples who refuse to confront a threat, and attempt to obtain peace and security through conciliation and appeasement, or even, for some, an active collaboration with the criminals.

For my own part, I would say that we have gone beyond the spirit of Munich, and the present situation should be seen not in the context of the Second World War, but in the present jihadist context.

In fact, for the past 30 years France and Europe are living in a situation of passive self-defense against terrorism. This began with Palestinian terrorism, then Islamic terrorism, not to speak of the local European terrorism, including the IRA in Great Britain, ETA in Spain, the Baader-Meinhof group in Germany, the Red Brigades in Italy.

One need only look at our cities, airports, and streets, at the schools with their security guards, even the systems of public transportation, not to mention the embassies, and the synagogues – to see the whole astonishing array of police and security services. The fact that the authorities everywhere refuse to name the evil does not negate that evil. Yet we know perfectly well that we have been under threat for a long time; one has only to open one’s eyes and our authorities know it better than any of us, because it is they who have ordered these very security measures.

In his book, La Vie Quotidienne dans l’Europe Médiévale sous Domination Arabe (Daily Life in Medieval Europe under the Arab Domination), published in 1978, Charles-Emmanuel Dufourq, a French specialist on Andalusia (Islamic Spain) and the Maghreb, described under the subheading “Une grande Peur” (“A great Fear”) the conditions of life for the indigenous non-Muslim peoples in the Andalusian countryside. (1) Today, Europe itself is living with this Great Fear.

At Munich war had not yet been declared. Today the war is everywhere. And yet the European Union and the states which comprise it, have denied that war’s reality, right up to the terrorist attack in Madrid of March 11, 2004. If there is a danger as Europe proclaims urbi et orbi, that danger can only come from America and Israel. What should one understand? For can anyone seriously maintain that it is the American and Israeli forces that threaten us in Europe? No, what must be understood is that American and Israeli policies of resistance to jihadist terror provoke reprisals against a Europe that has long ago ceased to defend itself. So that peace can prevail throughout the world, those two countries, America and Israel, need only adopt the European strategy of constant surrender, based on the denial of aggression. How simple it all is…

This strategy is less worthy than even Munich’s connivance and cowardice. At Munich there was some sort of future contemplated, even if war, or peace, were to determine the future. There was a choice. In the present situation there is no choice, for we deny the reality of the jihad danger. The only danger comes, allegedly, from the United States and Israel. We conduct a propaganda campaign in the media against these two countries, before entering into a yet more aggressive phase; it’s so much easier, so much less dangerous…And we conduct this campaign with the weapons of cowardice: defamation, misinformation, the corruption of venal politicians.

In the time of Munich, one could envisage that there would be battles that might be won. There was at least the Maginot Line for defense. In Europe today, dominated by the spirit of dhimmitude – the condition of submission of Jews and Christians under Muslim domination – there is no conceivable battle. Submission, without a fight, has already taken place. A machinery that has made Europe the new continent of dhimmitude was put into motion more than 30 years ago at the instigation of France.

A wide-ranging policy was then first sketched out, a symbiosis of Europe with the Muslim Arab countries, that would endow Europe – and especially France, the project’s prime mover – with a weight and a prestige to rival that of the United States (2). This policy was undertaken quite discreetly, outside of official treaties, under the innocent-sounding name of the Euro-Arab Dialogue. An association of European parliamentarians from the European Economic Community (EEC) was created in 1974 in Paris: the Parliamentary Association for Euro-Arab Cooperation. It was entrusted with managing all of the aspects of Euro-Arab relations – financial, political, economic, cultural, and those pertaining to immigration. This organization functioned under the auspices of the European heads of government and their foreign ministers, working in close association with their Arab counterparts, and with the representatives of the European Commission, and the Arab League.

This strategy, the goal of which was the creation of a pan-Mediterranean Euro-Arab entity, permitting the free circulation both of men and of goods, also determined the immigration policy with regard to Arabs in the European Community (EC). And, for the past 30 years, it also established the relevant cultural policies in the schools and universities of the EC. Since the first Cairo meeting of the Euro-Arab Dialogue in 1975, attended by the ministers and heads of state both from European and Arab countries and by representatives of the EC and the Arab League, agreements have been concluded concerning the diffusion and the promotion in Europe of Islam, of the Arabic language and culture, through the creation of Arab cultural centers in European cities. Other accords soon followed, all intended to ensure a cultural, economic, political Euro-Arab symbiosis. These far ranging efforts involved the universities and the media (both written and audio-visual), and even included the transfer of technologies, including nuclear technology. Finally a Euro-Arab associative diplomacy was promoted in international forums, especially at the United Nations.

The Arabs set the conditions for this association: 1) a European policy that would be independent from, and opposed to that of the United States; 2) the recognition by Europe of a “Palestinian people,” and the creation of a “Palestinian” state; 3) European support for the PLO; 4) the designation of Arafat as the sole and exclusive representative of that “Palestinian people”; 5) the de-legitimizing of the State of Israel, both historically and politically, its shrinking into non viable borders, and the Arabization of Jerusalem. From this sprang the hidden European war against Israel, through economic boycotts, and in some cases academic boycotts as well, through deliberate vilification, and the spreading of both anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism.

During the past three decades a considerable number of non-official agreements between the countries of the CEE (subsequently the EU) on the one hand, and the countries of the Arab League on the other, determined the evolution of Europe in its current political and cultural aspects. I will cite here only four of them: 1) it was understood that those Europeans who would be dealing with Arab immigrants would undergo special sensitivity training, in order to better appreciate their customs, their moeurs; 2) the Arab immigrants would remain under the control and the laws of their countries of origin; 3) history textbooks in Europe would be rewritten by joint teams of European and Arab historians – naturally the Battles of Poitiers and Lepanto, or the Spanish Reconquista did not possess the same significance on both Mediterranean littorals; 4) the teaching of the Arabic language and of Arab and Islamic culture were to be taught, in the schools and universities of Europe, by Arab teachers experienced in teaching Europeans.

The Situation Today

On the political front, Europe has tied its destiny to the Arab countries, and thus become involved in the logic of jihad against Israel and the United States. How could Europe denounce the culture of jihadic venom which exudes from its allies, while for so many years it did everything to activate the jihad by hiding and justifying it by claiming that the real danger comes not from the jihadists, themselves, but from those who resist the Arab jihadist, the very allies that Europe serves at every international gathering, and in the European media.

On the cultural front, there has been a complete re-writing of history, which was first undertaken during the 1970s in European universities. This process was ratified by the parliamentary assembly of the Council of Europe in September 1991, at its meeting devoted to “The Contribution of the Islamic civilization to European culture.” It was reaffirmed by President Jacques Chirac in his address of April 8, 1996 in Cairo, and reinforced by Romano Prodi, president of the European Commission, through the creation of a ‘Foundation on the Dialogue of Cultures and Civilizations’ that was to control everything that was said, written and taught on the new continent of Eurabia, which encompass Europe and the Arab countries.

The dhimmitude of Europe began with the subversion of its culture and its values, with the destruction of its history and its replacement by an Islamic vision of that history, supported by the romantic myth of Andalusia. Eurabia adopted the Islamic conception of history, in which Islam is defined as a liberating force, a force for peace, and the jihad is regarded a ‘just war’. Those who resist the jihad, like the Israelis and the Americans, are the guilty ones, rather than those who wage it. It is this policy that has inculcated in us, the Europeans, the spirit of dhimmitude that blinds us, that instills in us a hatred for our own values, and the wish to destroy our own origins and our own history. “The greatest intellectual swindle would be to allow Europe to continue to believe that it derives from a Judeo-Christian tradition. That is a complete lie,” Tariq Ramadan has stated (3). And thus we despise George Bush because he still believes in that tradition. What simpletons those Americans…

The spirit of dhimmitude is not merely that of submission without fighting, not even a surrender. It is also the denial of one’s own humiliation through this process of integrating values that lead to our own destruction; it is the ideological mercenaries offering themselves up for service in the jihad; it is the traditional tribute paid by their own hand, and with humiliation, by the European dhimmis, in order to obtain a false security; it is the betrayal of one’s own people. The non-Muslim protected dhimmi under Islamic rule could obtain an ephemeral and delusive security through services rendered to the Muslim oppressor, and through servility and flattery. And that is precisely the situation in Europe today.

Dhimmitude is not only a set of abstract laws inscribed in the shari’a, it is also a complex set of behaviors developed over time by the dhimmis themselves, as a way both to adapt to, and to survive, oppression, humiliation, insecurity. This has produced a particular mentality as well as social and political behaviors essential to the survival of peoples who, in a certain sense, would always remain hostages to the Islamic system.

The dhimmis are inferior beings who undergo humiliations and aggressions in silence. Their aggressors, meanwhile, enjoy an impunity that only increases their hatred and their feeling of superiority, guaranteed by the protection of the law. The culture of dhimmitude which is expanding throughout Europe is that of hate, of crimes against non-Muslims that go unpunished, a culture which is imported from the Arab countries along with “Palestinianism,” the new European subculture that has been raised to the level of a European Union cult, and its exalted war banner against Israel.

At Munich, in 1938, France had not renounced its own culture, its own history becoming German; it has not proclaimed that the source of her own culture was the German civilization. The spirit of dhimmitude which today blinds Europe springs not from a situation imposed from without, but from a choice made freely, and systematically carried out, in its political dimensions, over the course of the last 30 years.

The well-known scholar of Islam, William Montgomery Watt, described the disappearance of the Christian world from the countries which had been Islamized, in his book The Majesty that was Islam (1974): “There was nothing dramatic about what happened; it was a gentle death, a phasing out.”(4) But Montgomery Watt was wrong; in fact, the long death-throes of Christianity under Islam were extremely painful and tragic, as can be seen even in the 20th century, with the genocide of the Armenians, and the Lebanese Christians’ resistance in the 1970s-1980s, and for the last decades the genocide in the Sudan, and finally the relentless Arab jihad against Israel, which is only one of the examples of the age-old struggle by people devoted to fighting for freedom against dhimmitude, for the dignity of man against the slavery of oppression and hate. But that observation by Montgomery Watt – about the “gentle death, the phasing out” applies perfectly to Europe today.

Notes:

1) Charles-Emmanuel Dufourq, La Vie Quotidienne dans l’Europe Médiévale sous Domination Arabe, Hachette, Paris, 1978; this book examines the Arab conquest and colonization of Andalusia — see chapter 1, “Les Jours de Razzia et d’Invasion”. I am grateful to Dr Andrew Bostom, for having brought to my attention the works of Charles-Emmanuel Dufourcq, some of which will be included in his forthcoming compendium of essays and documents, The Legacy of Jihad, New York, Prometheus Books, 2005.

2) Pierre Lyautey (the nephew of Marshall Lyautey): “) « Le nouveau rôle de la France en Orient », Comptes rendu des séances de l’Académie des Sciences d’Outre-Mer, 4 mai 1962, p.176, voir aussi Jacques Frémeaux, Le monde arabe et la sécurité de la France depuis 1958, PUF, Paris 1995.

3) Tariq Ramadan, “Critique des (nouveaux) intellectuels communautaires”, Oumma.com, 3 October 2003.

4) William Montgomery Watt, The Majesty that Was Islam. The Islamic World, 66-1100. London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1974, p. 257.

* Bat Ye’or has written articles and scholarly studies since 1971 on the situation of Jews and Christians under Islam. Her books in French have been translated into English (www.dhimmi.org / www.dhimmitude.org). This presentation – translated from the French – was given at a seminar organized by the B’nai B’rith (Europe) in the French Senate (Palais du Luxembourg, Paris), on the theme: “La démocratie à l’épreuve de la menace islamiste” (“Democracy faced with the Islamist menace”), in two sessions: “Les Islamistes et leur alliés” (“The Islamists and their allies”); “Vers un retour à l’esprit de Munich” (“Toward a return to the spirit of Munich”). Her next book covers this subject in depth: Eurabia. The Euro-Arab Axis (Cranbury, NJ., Associated University Presses, 2005). This recent presentation, “Beyond Munich – The Spirit of Eurabia,” along with many other pieces by Bat Ye’or and others, will appear in the essay collection, The Myth of Islamic Tolerance (forthcoming from Prometheus Books), edited by Robert Spencer.

Solidarity With Terror
By Lee Kaplan
FrontPageMagazine.com | July 2, 2004

This June I attended a “training session” of the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), an organization of volunteers whose purpose is to obstruct Israeli defense forces attempting to protect the civilian population from terrorist acts. The ISM was set up by the Palestinians after Arafat broke off the Oslo peace talks and launched the second intifada. Its organizers were Ghassan Andoni, a physics professor from Bir Zeit University in the West Bank, and Palestinian activists George Rishmawi and George Qassis. The idea was to bring in international volunteers, mostly radical students from the United States, Canada and Europe, as “nonviolent peace activists” who would interfere with the Israeli army’s anti-terrorist operations. If the volunteers were injured or arrested, the international repercussions would be detrimental to Israel, a propaganda win for the PLO. The operation costs the Palestine Authority very little since many of the radical volunteers pay their own transportation costs and live in the homes of Palestinians during their stays in the Middle East.

The ISM made international headlines when one of its activists, Rachel Corrie, a college radical from Olympia, Washington, was killed while attempting to block an Israeli bulldozer. The bulldozer was attempting to destroy tunnels from the Gaza strip through which the terrorists imported weapons and explosives. Corrie became a martyr to the cause, and inspiration to other radicals to follow.

Adam Shapiro and Huwaida Arraf of the ISM

The most visible American figure in the International Solidarity Movement is Adam Shapiro, a Brooklyn Jew and college radical,who became a human shield for Yasser Arafat when the Israeli army surrounded Arafat’s Ramallah compound following the massacre of 30 Israelis – some of them Holocaust survivors -- at a Passover seder, shortly after the Intifada was launched. When I interviewed him last year, Shapiro told me point blank that he does not consider himself a Jew. He is married to Huwaida Arraf, a Palestinian-American activist from Michigan whose father holds Israeli citizenship. They have become the spokespeople for the ISM in the United States. In articles on the ISM website where they discuss their goals of dismantling Israel by supporting Palestinian terrorists they use euphemisms such as “legitimate resistance” or support for “legitimate armed struggle” while claiming that they are nonviolent. The ISM uses as its motto “by any means necessary.”

Such means include the hiding of terrorists like Shadi Sukiya, who was arrested in an ISM office in the West Bank. An arms cache was also found in an ISM office. Two suicide bombers gained entry for their murderous agendas under the auspices of the ISM. These Pakistani Muslims from Great Britain entered Israel through Jordan as clients of the Alternative Tourism Group, an operation set up by Andoni to aid ISM volunteers coming to Israel. They then met with the ISM at their offices for an entire day in Gaza before proceeding on to Tel Aviv where they bombed a popular beach bar, Mike’s Place, killing three people.

In the last three years the ISM has developed an extensive presence in the United States, while operating under several organizational names to avoid unwanted scrutiny of its operations. One of these entities, Al Awda (the Return in Arabic), is also known as the Palestine Right to Return to Return Coalition (PRRC). It is led by Mazen Qumsiyeh, a Yale geneticist. There are Al Awda chapters all over the United States, particularly in the vicinities of U.S. college campuses. Other ISM groups under the name SUSTAIN (Stop U.S. Taxpayer Assistance to Israel Now) operate in Los Angeles and New York. In New Jersey, the ISM supporters call themselves Palsolidarity. When the volunteers go to the Middle East to aid the PLO they go under the umbrella name of the International Solidarity Movement. When they hold events in the U.S. and Canada they call themselves the Palestine Solidarity Movement.

The party line, however, is always the same. The right of so-called Palestinian refugees to return to Israel is “unconditional” and Israel itself must become “Palestine.” The number of actual refugees from that part of the former Ottoman empire where Israel was established in 1948 was 600,000, most of whom are no longer alive. The number of refugees the Palestine Authority now recognizes is close to 5 million. The population of Israel is 6 million, including 1 million Israeli Arabs. The math is simple and the desired result: the liquidation of the Jewish state.

At the Palestine Solidarity Conference held at Ohio State last year, Adam Shapiro told me that the ISM has Palestinian “handlers,” or undercover supervisors at all demonstrations against Israel. These supervisors direct attacks against the separation fence that is being built to keep suicide bombers and armed terrorists from infiltrating into Israel and other targets. One of the handlers leading the current attacks on the security fence at the start of this summer’s campaign is a veteran of the Marxist terrorist group PLFP named Hisham Jam Joun. The ISM website, www.palsolidarity.org , openly proclaims that the organization is “Palestinian-led.”

I signed up for the ISM training session, after seeing their Internet announcement calling for volunteers for their new campaign, which they called “Freedom Summer 2004,” after the nonviolent campaign of the civil rights movement in the American south in the 1960’s. There were similar announcements on local websites run by the ISM all over the United States.

The phone number I dialed put me in touch with Paul LaRudee, a 68 year-old retired Berkeley professor who, along with his Lebanese wife, has been a leader of the ISM movement in the Bay Area. LaRudee assured me that they welcomed everybody, no matter how old or inexperienced. “Most of our volunteers are in their sixties,” he said. I was advised if I wanted to train with the ISM I needed to attend an orientation lecture at The New College of San Francisco which was being given by an Arab-American named Jess Ghannam, a psychoanalyst and professor at the University of California Medical School.

Ghannam’s lecture was a two hour diatribe, reviewing the history of the Middle East. It was so pathologically anti-Israel that it even reversed the famous slogan of the PLO, originating with Arafat’s uncle the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem that the goal of Palestinian liberation was to “drive the Jews into the sea.” In Ghannam’s version it was the Jews who intended to drive the Arabs into the sea, though how this could be done with 200 million people he failed to explain.

Ghannam concluded his lecture by telling a story about an Israeli soldier who asked him for his ID card when he was at a checkpoint in the West Bank. The young soldier noticed that Ghannam was from the San Francisco Bay Area and, being friendly, mentioned he’d gone to Mt.Tamalpais High School near Ghannam’s home. “Imagine!” Ghannam said indignantly, “This soldier, a Jew born in the United States, had the nerve to ask me for my ID on my land!” Yet Ghannam had told us in the beginning of the lecture that he was also born in the United States.

The following Saturday morning, June 12th, I arrived for my actual training. The session was held at 2263 Mission Street in San Francisco, a ratty storefront theater in a rundown area of the city that had a folding grid gate barring the entrance from the public.

About ten of us showed up, counting both volunteers and trainers. Before we were allowed to enter the storefront, however, we had to go through a simulated interrogation by an “Israeli border guard” impersonated by a woman named Jamie, who was a social worker for the city of San Francisco.

Jamie took her role very seriously. We learned later that she was an ISM veteran, having been a volunteer in Israel two years earlier as a member of San Francisco’s Jews For A Free Palestine (JFFP) and would be going again this summer.

Jamie went through my belongings and, on finding my notes from the ISM orientation lecture, asked me why I an Arabic name like Jess Ghannam appeared in my notebook.. Playing the game, I replied that I thought Jess was a Christian name and that I had no idea that Ghannam was an Arab. She asked me what hotel I was staying at in Israel, to which I replied the Sheraton. She allowed me to pass inside, and then turned to the next signup.

After everyone passed through the interrogation ritual, the gate was secured with a big padlock so nobody could get in or out. We were told we were in there for the entire day with just a brief break for lunch, a potluck meal which we had all been asked to contribute to.

Now that we had entered “Israel,” Jamie continued with the instruction. She had us form a circle and then led a discussion of the “border checkpoint” we’d just been through. I was told I did the right thing to get past the guard by lying that I had not realized Ghannam was an Arabic name and making up the hotel, since I would be actually staying with Palestinians. In other words, the ISM training session began with the idea of breaking the law to enter a democratic country by deceiving its border guards. In fact, everything we were instructed to do in the course of our training while we were in Israel would involve some form of breaking Israeli law.

Jamie then handed out ISM training manuals, big thick white notebooks containing eight sections, a text designed for would be infiltrators and subversives. Inside were articles authored by radical groups like the War Resisters League, Act Up, Direct Action and a several “anti-global” organizations. There were also internal ISM documents. They contained valuable information on how to disrupt the Israeli law enforcement and defense officials as effectively as possible. Jamie admonished us, “You see what it might be like when you try to enter Israel. Don’t bring your manuals with you!”

We then introduced ourselves. The first in the circle to do so was Mahera, a Palestinian-American woman in her late twenties who we were told would also be training us.

Mahera told everyone she works for the San Francisco office of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC). I learned later that our orientation lecturer, Jess Ghannam, was on the Board of Directors of the San Francisco chapter of the same organization, which bills itself as a non-profit civil rights advocacy group for Muslims and Arab-Americans. Glancing through my manual I noticed it referred us to “the ADC reader.”

Many will be familiar with the ADC through its communications director, Hussein Ibish, who frequently appears on television talk shows, and promotes the ADC as a civil rights organization for Muslim-Americans in no way involved with aiding Middle East terrorism.

As Adam Shapiro had informed me earlier, the group was told that the ISM is a Palestinian-led movement and that we were under the leadership of the Palestinians who had professional handlers to oversee what we would be doing. Once we were in the West Bank there would be veteran ISM leaders to guide us, but that the Palestinian handlers had ultimate control.

The first woman in the circle identified herself as Barbara Miles, who said her maiden name was Zakasia and that she was Lebanese-American. Barbara described how she had visited Syria to support of the regime there. She asked if having “Syria” stamped on her passport would prevent her from getting into Israel. “Get a new passport,” Jamie advised. “It’s easy.”

Ian Trenallio

The next to introduce himself was Ian Trenallio who was from Lake Tahoe and wore a T-shirt that said “anti-hate, anti-capitalist, anti-Zionist.” Ian told us he formerly had lived in San Pablo, a suburb of Berkeley. He had recently been to Tijuana, he said, to protest economic globalization and now he wanted to “help the Palestinians.” “Don’t say to the border guard you are there to help the Palestinians!” Jamie interjected. “The goal is to have the Israeli guards think you are a tourist. The Israeli economy is hurting because the war has killed tourism and we want to take advantage of that.”

By Lee Kaplan
FrontPageMagazine.com | July 2, 2004

Next to contribute was Christina Cruz, an Argentine national who was a student in the U.S. She expressed concern that she would have to go into to debt to join “Freedom Summer.” She wanted to “help” people and further the cause of human rights. It was still hard for me to understand the equation – helping terrorists and human rights.

Because of my interest in pro-Palestinian bias of university faculties, I was especially interested in the next volunteer. Scott identified himself as Jewish and even claimed to have family in Israel. He said he was a supporter of Israel until he attended classes in Middle East Studies at Stanford University. “I used to support Israel until I took some classes with Joel Beinin who set me straight,” he volunteered. Beinin is a former president of the Middle East Studies Association and a self-proclaimed Marxist and supporter of the Palestinian struggle to liberate Israel by dismantling the Jewish state.

The next speaker was Jeff who said he’d been to Israel before but was now looking forward to go there to “stir things up.” He was a Bay Area radical involved in environmental issues. He was followed by Ken, a semi-retired consultant for the Food and Drug Administration who introduced himself as someone who was sick and tired of what the “Zionists” had been doing and wasn’t afraid to do something about it “even if the CIA is after me.”

Nui

Nui introduced herself by explaining she was part Lebanese and part Thai-Chinese. She was going to help the Palestinians and “find her roots.” No one asked her to explain this.

Meredith (right)

Next came Meredith, who said she was going to Palestine to assert herself as “a queer Jewish woman.” She quickly explained that she was really only half-Jewish, and that by helping the Palestinians she was asserting her identity. She was evidently oblivious to fate of gays living in the Moslem world.

Arlene, a 62 year-old Jewish woman from Oakland, was more vocal than the others. She told us that she had a lifetime of activism. “During the Vietnam War I went to visit and support the ‘comrades’ who told me to go back home and fight the war against America from here for them.” She told us that she was estranged from her parents and had used the excuse of their funeral to get into Israel the last time she was there. Despite her age she was ready to do things to attack the Israeli soldiers such as throwing tear gas canisters back at them during riots and putting sugar in the gas tanks of their security vehicles. She lamented a loose bladder due to her age but vowed it would not stop her from “helping” the Palestinians with all the other ISM volunteers. She also expressed grief for the Israeli execution of Sheik Yassin, the former head of Hamas who was responsible for the murders of over 350 people inside Israel including some American citizens. “We’re going to win,” she glowed. “Like Dr. Ghannam said at the lecture the other day, the demographics are on our side.”

Once the introductions were complete, Jamie shared with us the experiences and methods used by previous ISM volunteers to fool the Israeli border police. “Make a reservation in a hotel in Israel even if you don’t use it.” “Bring guidebooks for Israel that look dog eared.” “Give them the name of a hostel if you are young enough, these will fool the border guards.”

She continued, “If you use the name of someone in Israel as being the reason for your visit, they will call that person. Make certain you have a story thought out who that person is.” If that person were an Israeli leftist, the task was a lot easier. Mary Erwin, another trainer from Oakland, interjected at this point that our allies from the Israeli anarchist and communist movements were ready to lie to the border guards when called on the phone. They were available to verify false stories given to the border guards in order to get the ISM volunteers into Israel. She offered to provide us with the names and numbers of leftists in Israel who would say they knew us.

“If the border guards become suspicious, an Israeli contact will be set up to lie and say you are visiting them,” Mary summarized. She mentioned the leftist Israeli group B’tselem as providing such false witnesses. B’tselem is one of the most active leftist groups in Israel working to aid the PLO. Among its leaders is Anat Biletzski, the former head of Israel’s Communist Party.

Once we were inside Israel we were told we could make our way to the West Bank even though we were also informed that to go there is illegal. Jamie told us to email ourselves instructions so we would not need our manuals. We were assured the “ISM corps” was working on legal proposals to challenge the Israeli government at every turn if illegal entrants were discovered. “We are asking also if people are willing to resist if they are caught and told they will be deported.” Anything to be a nuisance and break the law was the goal.

We were also given alternative ways to get into Israel besides through Ben Gurion Airport. “You can take a taxi from Amman in Jordan to the Allenby Bridge (Jordan’s border entry). Even if you are turned back from that entry, you can go to the other border crossing because they usually don’t know you were turned away from another one first,” Jamie counseled. “Rehearse your story,” she continued. “They will interrogate you also when you leave. If they interrogate you, you can miss your plane. Don’t buy anything because it will give them things to look through.”

As for luggage, she told us if could pass as students we should just use a backpack. “A duffel bag on wheels does well at the airport. Remember that Israel needs tourists. Their economy is in shambles and they are anxious for tourism. And they are not organized.”

“Most of all, be patient. If they ask you questions such as ‘What are you doing here? Don’t you know there’s a war?’ you should reply, ‘I thought it was better now.’ Or say, ‘I had my ticket for a long time and my Israeli friends said I should come.’ If you are Jewish, know your Hebrew name if they ask you what it is. Know your story. Wear your Star of David especially if you are Jewish.”

We were told once we were on the West Bank and under the Palestine Authority we were to attend another mandatory two-day training session where we would be assigned to “affinity groups.” She then began making a bulletin board of how we were to function by setting up rules. The first rule was “Confidentiality.” Volunteers would be assigned to unknown affinity groups where they would function as teams to disrupt the Israel soldiers in military zones.

We were then instructed to say to the media if we were interviewed: “We support the Palestinian right to resist the occupation provided by international law.” If the interview were more extensive, we were told to say: “We call for an immediate end to occupation and immediate compliance and implementation of all relevant UN resolutions.” Apparently to the ISM, international law is whatever they want it to be, since their agenda is to break laws to enter a democratic country in order to further violate its laws.

Brian Malovany

When one of the trainees asked if we as ISM volunteers favored a two-state solution to secure peace, Brian Malovany, another senior trainer from Oakland who had just joined us explained, “The idea of a two-state solution is pretty much dead.” This was an interesting dismissal of all the peace plans ever proposed by the United Nations, the United States, or the official negotiating parties of the Palestinians themselves. “There can only be one state called Palestine,” explained Molvany echoing the line of Hamas and other terrorist organizations. “And the Right of Return is non-negotiable. If people ask you about a two-state solution just tell them it’s a human rights issue. Whatever you do though, do not dictate to the Palestinians what they should not do.”

In other words, if the Palestinians shoot at Israeli soldiers don’t tell them it is wrong to do so. Apparently being non-violent peace activists only applies to the end of dismantling Israel and providing cover for the people who will commit the violent acts.

I asked Molvany, “But what if we see kids throwing stones at tanks or putting themselves in danger. Shouldn’t we tell them not to and urge them to stay away?”

Brian Malovany responded: “We can’t tell kids not to throw stones! It’s not our place to tell them what to do.” Obviously the same rule applied to suicide bombers as we were advised that we might be used as human shields inside houses slated for demolition by the Israeli army because they were used as bomb making factories.

During the lunch break I looked at my manual and found this ISM wisdom:

“Some pacifists are uncomfortable with property damage. For myself...I see it as a great tool.”

“[Some] settle for tactical nonviolence, but given the right historical circumstance, armed struggle would be justified...”

“When VIOLENCE is mentioned, say RESISTANCE or RESISTANCE TO INJUSTICE.”

“When TERRORISM is mentioned, emphasize STATE TERRORISM.”

“Instead of OCCUPATION say MILITARY OCCUPATION to make people think the occupation is a MILITARY DICTATORSHIP.” The only military dictator in Israel and the West Bank is Yasser Arafat. The page this appeared on was supplied by the Muslim Public Affairs Council, yet another purportedly Muslim “civil rights group” like the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee.

The most cynical section of the manual was the last chapter written by Paul LaRudee, the Northern California ISM leader who provided my first contact over the phone: “You may well hear Palestinians talking ‘about the Jews’ when they really mean ‘Israelis’ or ‘the Israeli army’ or the ‘Israeli government.’ It is useful to remember the context; talk about “the Jews” is not the indication of bigotry that it would be in the United States or Europe.”

LaRudee also provided this whopper for “queer activists” who want to go on the Freedom Summer 2004 tour: “Palestinian society is as diverse in attitudes about gender and sexuality as is U.S. society.” In fact, over 100 homosexuals who had lived under the Palestine Authority recently took refuge in Israel for fear of being killed.

Apparently the ISM doesn’t care what they say as long as they get anyone over there to make trouble and risk their lives for the cause. Now I understood the recruitment of Meredith. To these radicals the strategy is to tie any cause, any idea, any gender, environmental or social issue to the destruction of Israel.

After lunch, we were given the activities schedule for the “Freedom Summer” anti-Israel campaign (see the ISM website for details). It included marching onto an Israeli army base to free captured terrorists and trying to tear down the security fence. Violent attacks by the “nonviolent” ISM had already begun when we met. Every member of our group knew that what they were really being asked to do was illegal. They just didn’t care.

Or perhaps it’s that radicals don’t fear the Israeli police in the same way they don’t fear the police in the U.S. because they know in a democracy they will be treated fairly. That might explain why they weren’t training for sit-ins in Tiananmen Square or in Teheran where the authorities might kill them. As if conceding the point, the ISM manual stressed that the volunteers were not in any real danger from Israeli security forces and advised them to inconvenience and disobey them in every way possible. The manual also advised those who were arrested to contact the Bay Area chapter of the National Lawyer’s Guild, an organization created by the American Communist Party with a half century of legal experience in supporting Communist and totalitarian causes.

After the break we were told how to deal with Israeli soldiers. If advised to leave an area designated a closed military zone where the IDF is fighting terrorists, we were told to demand their orders in writing. “The soldiers can only detain you. They have to call the border police to arrest you,” counseled Jamie.

A list of instructions was given on how to deal with possible arrests since we would be doing our best to break the law. If a Palestinian was arrested for something serious like throwing a Molotov cocktail, we were told to show “prison solidarity” with him. We were told that international demonstrators usually get released quickly by the police once they reach the police station. But if we refused to leave without our Palestinian companion, the police might release him also just to get rid of all of us.

“Carry only a photocopy of your passport if they ask to see yours. If they hold it, you have to remain like they tell you. But if it’s a photocopy you can escape while they are busy handling other demonstrators. If the soldiers tell you to back up ten feet, back up only five.” Anything and everything to interfere with the soldiers trying to do their jobs was our goal.

Jamie told us a story of how 100 “internationals” had surrounded six Israeli soldiers and besieged them at a roadblock set up to prevent suicide bombers from getting into Israel. The soldiers, all young boys and conscripts in the Israeli army, tried to control the mob until they ran out of non-lethal weapons and were forced to withdraw. The trainers all snickered at the story.

Not once all day, in any way, did members of our group – trainers or trainees – express a negative word about suicide bombings, or the shooting of women and children by Palestinian terrorists. But we were told repeatedly not to tell the Palestinians how to “resist.”

At the conclusion of our session, Jamie used her training as a social worker to prepare us to deal with long term trauma once we returned to the Bay Area. I thought it was an interesting lesson for people going to the Middle East to engage in “nonviolent” activities for peace. “Be ready for lots of violence,” she said.

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Lee Kaplan is a contributing editor to Frontpagemag.com.

http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/Printer&cid=1087290138035&p=1006953079865

To fester no longer

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SHMUEL KATZ Jun. 15, 2004

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Throughout the public discussion on Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's disengagement plan for the Gaza district and the expulsion of Jews from their homes, not the least distressing feature is the delusions with which he and his supporters have tried to feed the public.

They have put forward the completely unfounded presumption that if the Jews don't accept the plan President George W. Bush will go back on his "guarantee" to oppose the "right of return" of the so-called refugees.

No such threat has been heard from Washington; nor could it be, for Bush gave no such guarantee. What Bush wrote in his letter to Sharon was a carefully drafted text designed to avoid an explicit rejection of the idea of a return of the refugees.

"It seems clear" he wrote "that a fair solution to the refugee issue should be found through a Palestinian State rather than in Israel." Far from being a guarantee about anything at all, it could be read as an argument for creating a Palestinian state.

There is another lesson for Israel here. Israel should not allow itself to be moved to make concessions in any field on the strength of even a promised presidential quid pro quo. It has been bitten time and again.

When, in 1974, after months of resistance by prime minister Yitzhak Rabin to secretary of state Henry Kissinger's demand that Israel give up the strategic Mitla and Gidi passes in Sinai, Rabin acquiesced, and got two promises in return. One, that the US would not carry on any negotiations with the PLO except with Israel's consent; the other, that a new aircraft being planned (it became the F15) would be sold to Israel exclusively. Neither promise was kept.

Two years later Jimmy Carter was elected president and he, in spite of considerable senatorial opposition, insisted on Saudi Arabia also having the F15 (or Israel wouldn't get it either).

Carter tempered this breach of the commitment by excluding from the Saudi package an enhancement tank (for increased range) which had actually been created by Israel. As for not talking to the PLO, the Carter Administration interpreted this to mean that they could do so, provided Israel was not told about it.

Even had Bush made such a definite promise in his letter to Sharon, were it later to be broken by the president, he could explain it by the plea of rebus sic stantibus (which means, in effect, that circumstances have changed). Sharon (and any other prime minister of Israel) should have enough savvy to understand that for a world power dealing with worldwide interests one of a host of circumstances can change at any time.

In fact, the Reagan administration actually apologized to Israel for the breach of an undertaking and explained the lapse by rebus sic stantibus.

What, then, were the circumstances that had changed? War had broken out – between the Soviet Union and Afghanistan! Go know.

The essential fact here is not whether President Bush will withhold support for the Arabs' absurd and monstrous claim "for return of the refugees," but that, manifestly, Israel will on no account agree to it. Israel knows – and the US knows just as well – that, as President Gamal Nasser of Egypt in 1967 succinctly and optimistically put it, "Return of the refugees means the end of Israel."

Nor would the problem of the "refugees" be solved by planning to dump them on a Palestinian state as a home for them. Even if a Palestinian state were established it would not be able to cope with the problem.

What President Bush calls a "fair solution" requires first of all, pragmatically and morally, an answer to the question: Where did the problem come from, who was to blame for its creation? The answer is, after all, unequivocal: the Arab states, who in 1948 criminally and without any provocation invaded the by-then-sovereign state of Israel with the intent of destroying it and killing as many Jews as possible.

They then compounded their crime by calling on the Arabs living in the area of impending military action to evacuate temporarily (and then come back in a few weeks to inherit the Jews' property). They compounded their crime still further by callously deciding that those who had been left homeless should now remain homeless and wait for Israel to take them back.

In practice, then they washed their hands of the problem. The UN established the camps and the problem, now 56 years old, has grown year by year to its present proportions.

Now, if the Western nations seriously mean the near future to become an era of reform they must determine to press the Arab states, even now, to make redress. The Arab states should get together and plan the details for putting an end to the problem of the refugees that they brought about – by providing land within their tremendous domain.

The movement of the "refugees" from their present dwellings would mean a relocation from one Arab neighborhood to another. Jordan (eastern Palestine), about four times the size of Israel, is the nearest possible destination. It is also the most logical, for the source of most of its population is in western Palestine. It has in fact always been a Palestinian state.

However, there are other possibilities within the Arab area on which the Arab states and the refugees themselves would decide.

The idea has been touched upon in the past – for its innate justice and in recollection of the tremendously successful relocation of millions of real refugees after World War II. But it has been swept aside as a solution because of the Arabs' notion that Israel can somehow be forced to take them (and encompass its destruction).

The American president and the other statesmen in the west should tell the Arabs unequivocally that this is not going to happen, the refugee problem should be taken out of the context of the conflict between them and Israel, and it is in their own interest to treat it for what it really is – a "family problem" of the Arab nation.

The writer, who co-founded the Herut Party with Menachem Begin and was a member of the first Knesset, is a biographer and essayist.

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JERUSALEM POST May 17th, 2004

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EVELYN GORDON May. 17, 2004

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Were it not so reminiscent of the anti-Semitic canard about Jews ruling the world, the idea would be laughable: that 200,000 settlers – more than half of them children – dictate policy, and Israel's 6.5 million other citizens are helpless against them. Yet a surprising number of opinion leaders have made this claim since the Likud rejected Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's disengagement plan.

"Once again, it has become clear that the settlers set Israel's agenda," declared a Haaretz editorial. The nation is in "shock," wrote columnist and historian Meron Benvenisti, over "the power of a few thousand settlers to force their will on millions of people." Added columnist Amir Oren, "With all due respect to both National Security Councils [Israeli and American], and one could also add the United Nations Security Council, the only place where decisions are made is the Yesha Council of settlements."

Nor is this idea confined to the far Left. Likud cabinet minister Tzipi Livni said after the referendum that her party had been taken over by "alien elements." And columnist Ari Shavit, a usually thoughtful centrist, penned a lengthy rant declaring that settlers would come to regret their "stranglehold on the government's neck" and "the violent act [they] perpetrated against middle-of-the-road Israelis" in the referendum because now "the majority understands that the relationship between it and the minority tyrannizing it is one of ruler and subject Because after the disengagement referendum, one thing is clear: It is either the Israelis or the settlers."

No one would deny that the settlers waged an energetic and effective campaign. On top of the standard posters and brochures, thousands of them volunteered their time to meet personally with tens of thousands of Likud members and explain their objections to disengagement. In short, they did exactly what concerned citizens in a democracy are supposed to do – they tried to persuade the public. And had disengagement supporters invested one-tenth that effort, the referendum's outcome might have been different. That they did not is hardly the settlers' fault.

But for all their efforts, the settlers did not hold a gun to anyone's head. If their campaign succeeded, the reason lies not in their magical powers of persuasion but in the disengagement plan itself.

First, it must be remembered that 925,000 people – almost every third Israeli voter – cast their ballot for Likud just a year ago, when Likud – and Sharon – ran against Labor's proposal for a unilateral withdrawal from Gaza, arguing that it would endanger Israel's security by rewarding, and therefore encouraging, terrorism. It is hardly surprising that 60,000 of those people – the approximate number that voted against disengagement in the referendum – still believe what they believed last year, despite the prime minister's change of heart. And this is especially true given that Sharon never explained his U-turn. Instead, he arrogantly demanded that voters trust him without explanation.

SECOND, GEOGRAPHY played a role. While narrow majorities approved the plan in some northern and central cities, in the south – a Likud bastion – overwhelming majorities voted against: 86 percent in Netivot, for instance, and 69 percent in Sderot, Ofakim, and Ashkelon. The reason is simple. Currently, settlers in Gaza endure daily barrages of gunfire, mortar shells, rockets, and bombs, since they are the most accessible targets. But withdrawal would make the Negev the new front line, with many southern towns in easy shelling distance of northern Gaza. And while many settlers chose to live at the front and are willing to accept the consequences, Negev residents did not and are not. As Sderot Mayor Eli Moyal said, "I am not prepared to sacrifice my citizens for Sharon."

Finally, there were the details of the plan. Mina Tzemach, one of Israel's premier pollsters, repeatedly surveyed Likud members before the referendum. Afterward, she reported an interesting discovery: The more people knew about the plan, the less they liked it. And indeed, reasons for skepticism abounded.

Bret Stephens argued in this paper, for instance, that the plan was about improving security, not about improving Israel's image. But the plan itself said otherwise – twice.

"The disengagement move will obviate the claims about Israel with regard to its responsibility for the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip," it declared. And later: "Upon completion of the move there will be no basis for the claim that the Gaza Strip is occupied territory."

Yet the plan also stated that Israel would continue to control Gaza's airspace, seacoast, and land borders, this being necessary to prevent the export of suicide terrorists and the import of long-range weapons that could devastate southern Israel. But as long as nothing and no one can enter or leave Gaza without Israel's consent, the world is rather unlikely to declare Israel's responsibility ended.

Moreover, while many Israelis like the idea of complete separation from the Palestinians, the plan provided no such thing. It expressly promised that Palestinians from Gaza would continue to work in Israel, while Israel would continue to supply Gaza with water, electricity, gas, and fuel.

Then there was the pledge of foreign "advice, aid, and instruction" for the Palestinian security forces, even though the last few years have proven that such assistance is far more likely to be employed against Israel than against the suicide bombers. Or the decision to give the settlements' physical assets to the Palestinians without financial compensation – merely reserving "the right to ask for consideration" of their economic value under any future peace deal, even though, with the assets already handed over, Israel would have no recourse should the Palestinians refuse.

And this is without even mentioning the plan's security drawbacks, ranging from proving that terrorism pays to forfeiting on-the-spot intelligence capabilities.

Despite their impressive campaign, defeating the plan was never in the settlers' power. Only the plan itself could do that.

The writer is a veteran journalist and commentator.

It's America's War
From the May 24, 2004 issue: But too many Democrats think it's Bush's war.
by David Gelernter
05/24/2004, Volume 009, Issue 35

THESE ARE TIMES when President Bush and Defense Secretary Rumsfeld could probably use some encouragement. They should ponder a short note by Anthony Eden to Winston Churchill. It was May 1941 and World War II was going badly. Churchill was Britain's Bush and Rumsfeld, prime minister and minister of defense. Eden was his foreign secretary and friend. There had been disasters in Greece and Crete, a discouraging naval battle with the warship Bismarck, and hard fighting in Iraq, where the British were battling Nazi-backed Rashid Ali and Luftwaffe bombers that were helping him out. "My dear Winston," Eden wrote, "This is a bad day; but tomorrow Baghdad will be entered, Bismarck sunk. On some day the war will be won, and you will have done more than any other man in history to win it."

By "tomorrow" he meant "soon"; his predictions all came true. But for now, it is indeed a bad day.

Too many Democrats and some Republicans are acting as if Abu Ghraib means that the Bush administration is in trouble. They are wrong. It means that America is in trouble. And when America is in trouble, every public official is required to help.

The bestial murder of Nicholas Berg has nothing to do with Abu Ghraib. Absolute evil is self-seeding; nothing causes it any more than we cause rats to spawn or the black plague to blossom. But certain conditions help it thrive--such as the worldwide seething toxic stink of America Hatred, or the ongoing struggle by so many thinkers (especially Europeans) to legitimize terrorism (all those torn-to-pieces Israeli innocents dismissed with a shrug or a smirk). Perhaps the murder of Berg--9/11 compressed into one single act, a black hole of infinite wickedness--will at last bring American moral showboating to an end. We all love to tell the world how much we care. It's so easy, so cheap. Perhaps we will now get serious.

Because of Abu Ghraib, America is (temporarily!) down and out and getting kicked in the head by every two-bit moralizing moron in the universe, while her thoughtful Euro-friends twist the knife by informing us that hundreds of dead American soldiers might just as well have stayed home; America's rule is no better than Saddam's. We need to hear from America's political leaders, loud and clear: "Yes, we abominate the Abu Ghraib crimes but will not accept your forgetting what America has paid to liberate Iraq, will not allow foreign nations to slander the United States, will not permit you to forget what we and the British have accomplished: a world without Saddam Hussein; a vastly safer, profoundly better world. And no one will be allowed to dishonor American soldiers and this nation by telling us 'you're just as bad as Saddam'; that lie will never go unchallenged."

We need to hear those things especially from Democrats. For the world to know that this nation is united, Democrats have to speak. They haven't. The message has not been delivered.

Let's go back a few weeks. What were we thinking? Maybe the war in Iraq was a mistake, or maybe it was fought the wrong way (I didn't think so, but many serious and discouraged Americans did)--but we all knew this for sure: Thanks to American and British sacrifice in money and blood, Saddam was gone and Iraq was on the road to being free, and we could all be proud of that. A blood-black stain on mankind's honor had been washed away.

Then some photographs appeared, and the world saw ugly crimes--crimes of the sort Americans particularly hate, bullying crimes of the strong against the weak. Of course it was right to denounce the criminals and demand investigations and accountability. Such sentiments were easy to express (how many people are in favor of prisoner abuse?), but public officials did need to express them. So far so good.

But there was something else these officials needed to express. "We will not tolerate the world's using the crimes at Abu Ghraib to smear America, or belittle the price we have paid in Iraq." In the prevailing climate of moral showboating, those sentiments were hard to express; and almost no one bothered.

The moment we saw those pictures we knew (every last American knew) that the punch in the gut is on the way. People who never cared a damn what Saddam did to his prisoners would be choking back tears of outrage. Americans hold themselves to a higher moral standard, of course. But most Americans suspected that the world's reaction had as much to do with America Hatred as it did with moral standards. We knew that people would forget what we have achieved in Iraq, and what it has cost us in arms and legs and eyes and blood. We knew our enemies would light into America and do their best to turn the world against us and against our troops--whom we had seen risking their lives to liberate Iraq and make it safe--not to mention the civilians who hazarded life and limb to get clean water flowing, oil pumping, power on, schools open, streets policed, the economy inching forward, and democracy coming steadily closer. We could all anticipate headlines like the one that appeared in the May 8 Irish Times: "The shaming of America. George Bush's boast of shutting down Saddam Hussein's torture chambers in Iraq rings hollow now." We knew our enemies would use those photos to smear our whole Army, our whole Iraq campaign, our whole nation. Much of the world (after all) operates on America Hate the way a car runs on gas or a tick on blood.

"The shaming of America. George Bush's boast of shutting down Saddam Hussein's torture chambers in Iraq rings hollow now." The hell it does. Anyone who equates Saddam's bloody decades of torture and mass murder to the crimes at Abu Ghraib is the same kind of fool who once preached the moral equivalence of America and Soviet Russia, or of America in Vietnam and Hitlerism. Imbecility is eternal, perpetually reincarnated.

And it's hardly irrelevant that the Army did discover and announce the crimes itself. No one had to order any generals to investigate and prosecute the criminals. That was already happening. No cover-up; no chance of the criminals escaping. The military's record in recent years suggests that the opposite danger is more acute: Innocent soldiers might be punished because of a runaway public relations steamroller. Remember Tailhook and the naval careers it destroyed to make ideologues happy?

Think back to 9/11--America was in trouble; possibly official malfeasance was a factor, no one knew; but we did know that it was the duty of every U.S. public leader to speak for America, right away. (As someone shouted during the parliamentary hour-of-crisis debate that led to Churchill's promotion to the premiership: Speak for England!) And U.S. public leaders, Republican and Democrat, did speak for America. The country was proud to see Gephardt and Daschle roaming around with Lott and Hastert. The Democrats had lost the White House, but rose to the occasion. The world noticed; the nation was grateful.

When Abu Ghraib broke, America was in trouble again. Once again she needed all her government officials to do their duty, all public persons to stand up and defend her. But last week was no 9/11. The Democrats did not rise. They sunk. No one blamed them for condemning the criminals and demanding investigations. But we needed to hear more, and we didn't. Senator Tom Daschle said, "I think that is inexcusable. It's an outrage. It's wrong." And Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi said, "We must have a full investigation to get to the bottom of this outrage." And Senator Carl Levin said, "The actions of these individuals have jeopardized members of the Armed Services in the conduct of their mission, and have jeopardized the security of this country." Which was all true. But it was not enough. And there was worse. Ted Kennedy, echoing America Hatred at its ugliest, said that "Saddam's torture chambers have reopened under new management, U.S. management." The world noticed; the nation was quietly heartbroken.

Republican smugness is not in order. It is a moment for Republicans to ask themselves: Have we ever, at any moment in recent decades, let the nation down like this?

I don't think so. But if somebody knows differently, tell me. (No crackpots, please.) This is not a time for party preening. It is one of the sadder moments in American history.

But as Anthony Eden reminds us: "Some day the war will be won."

THE PRESSURE on Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is fierce, because Abu Ghraib hit at a moment when many people were certain that the Iraq war had bogged down. And it had bogged down. It is in the nature of wars that they bog down occasionally. But that is no reason to sack the man who has run this stupendously complex, difficult operation with (on the whole) amazing success and integrity. Perhaps Rumsfeld and other Bush officials did not make quite clear enough beforehand that war is no picnic. But many Americans had already heard rumors to that effect. And the record will show that the secretary has in fact admitted (possibly under oath) that he is not perfect. Republicans who hint around that the defense secretary may indeed have to be cut up and thrown to the dogs are doing the nation no service.

Churchill got into parliamentary trouble repeatedly during the Second World War, but thank God the House of Commons did not sack him. In the Second World War, Britain did not merely bog down, she lost--early and often. If 1940 and '41 had their awful moments, 1942 started out worse. In January the House took up a no-confidence motion that could have deposed Churchill--British troops were reeling before the Japanese advance, and worse was to come. Before long Singapore fell, "the greatest disaster in British military history," Churchill called it; 130,000 British and Allied troops were taken prisoner. And later the same year Rommel captured the Libyan port of Tobruk: A British garrison of 35,000 men surrendered to a smaller Axis force. "One of the heaviest blows I can recall during the war," Churchill said. On such occasions Britain was discouraged, disheartened, humiliated. Yet somehow Parliament managed to restrain itself and not axe Churchill.

Churchill is one of history's greatest leaders, almost certainly its greatest minister of defense and a genius writer and orator. So far as we know, Bush is no Churchill and neither is Rumsfeld; they haven't been tried as Churchill was. But until a bona fide American Churchill comes along, they are doing fine.

David Gelernter is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard.

© Copyright 2004, News Corporation, Weekly Standard, All Rights Reserved.

May 10, 2004, 9:10 a.m.
London’s Jihadists
The U.K. must crack down on resident Islamists.

By Rachel Ehrenfeld

While the world is busy denouncing the United States for the deplorable behavior of a few soldiers, it is oblivious to growing incitement by Islamist clerics against America and the West. Calling for jihad earlier this month in London, Sheikh Omar Bakri Mohammad told his disciples: "All Muslims of the West will be obliged to become his sword" in a new battle. At the same time, another Islamist, Imam Sheikh Abu Hamza al-Masri, is preaching in London that "it's okay to kill [those who] work against Islam, by slitting their throats, or by shooting them."

Such incitement is prohibited by law in the U.K. Under the heading of "Inciting Terrorism Overseas," section 59 1(a), the Terrorism Act of 2000 clearly states that "a person commits an offence if he incites another person to commit an act of terrorism wholly or partly outside the United Kingdom." Needless to say, such an act would also constitute an offense if committed in England. Yet these imams and their ilk are free to call for murder with impunity.

The British allowance of this "free speech" has already resulted in a suicide-bombing attack — in April 2003 in Tel Aviv — that cost the lives of three Israelis and wounded more than 50. According to the prosecution attorney at the Old Bailey last week, this attack was planned by Hamas, which recruited British citizens Asif Muhammad Hanif and Omar Khan Sharif, whose family members are on trial in London for failing to inform the U.K. authorities. Considering this, and the fact that British law enforcement is busy exposing terrorist plots and arresting members of al Qaeda and other Islamist cells, while British soldiers are dying in Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.K.'s reluctance to go after advocates of terrorism is puzzling.

This disregard for the law extends to written incitement in the form of magazines and websites, originating from England, calling for jihad. Although Hamas was finally outlawed in the U.K. in September 2003, its publication, Filisteen Almuslima (Muslim Palestine), continued to be published in and distributed from London to the Middle East, Europe, and the U.S. In fact, the cover of that September issue carried the horrifying picture of the bloody casualties from a dissevered bus in Jerusalem, as well as the glorified image of the suicide bomber who murdered 23 innocent civilians, many of them babies, and wounded 136.

Inside, the magazine praises and justifies the terrorist attack against Israelis and glorifies the terrorist, Raid Misk, as a heroic role model for potential suicide bombers against oppressors of Islam everywhere. It quotes the Koranic verse that, according to Hamas, gives Islamic religious justification for suicide bombings: "Among the believers, there are men who have been true to their covenant with Allah: Some of them [have already fulfilled their vows and] found their death [in battle]; and some still wait [their turn]. However, they have not in any way broken [their vows]" (Sura 33, verse 23).

And Filisteen Almuslima is not the only Islamist magazine published in and distributed from England, inciting hate, spreading anti-Western, anti-American, anti-Semitic messages, with pro-jihad, pro-terrorist propaganda and calls for suicide bombings.

Al-Sunnah, another Islamist fundamentalist magazine published in the U.K., called in February 2003 for suicide operations against the United States, saying, "There is no other way for the youth of this nation [Islam] other than suicide operations."

Risalat al-Ikhwan (Message of the Brotherhood) is also a London publication with Muslim subscribers worldwide. This magazine serves as center stage for spreading radical Islamist ideology in the best tradition of the Muslim Brotherhood. This Egyptian terrorist organization was outlawed by Gamal Abd al-Nasser in the 1950s, and despite its influence on Hamas and other internationally outlawed terrorist organizations, it is still out in the open in Western countries.

In October 2003, Risalat al-Ikhwan called for: "Active resistance (muqaawamah) to the occupation and the use of any available means to resist it are a religious Moslem duty, a national duty and a natural right anchored in both international law and the United Nations Charter." More of this can be found on Hamas's website.

Judging by the opposition Prime Minister Blair is facing, it seems that these publications influence, among others, former British diplomats, 50 of whom sent him a letter on April 26, 2004, protesting his support of U.S. Middle East policy, stating: "To describe the resistance [in Iraq] as led by terrorists, fanatics and foreigners is neither convincing nor helpful." These diplomats, in the tradition of Islamist-Arab propaganda, continue to argue, like Lakhdar Brahimi, that Israel is the cause — that it has for "decades poisoned relations between the West and the Islamic and Arab worlds." It is not surprising, therefore, that the resignation of Liberal Democrat MP Jenny Tonge was not required after she condoned Palestinian suicide bombings, stating in parliament, "I would be a suicide bomber in Israel."

A police source in London, when asked why this incitement is allowed, responded that law-enforcement officials are "unhappy with the situation," but that they are unable to prosecute the instigators because "our hands are tied. It's a political decision." Political leaders ought to heed the warning sirens before the terrorists strike — as promised.

— Rachel Ehrenfeld, author of Funding Evil; How Terrorism is Financed — and How to Stop It, is director of the New York-based American Center for Democracy.

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Crusaders vs. jihadists

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Posted: May 1, 2004
1:00 a.m. Eastern

By Robert Spencer

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© 2004 WorldNetDaily.com

The University of the Incarnate Word, a Christian school in San Antonio, Texas, has scrapped its nickname, "Crusaders," and the accompanying mascot. The university's website has a long and involved explanation for the change, encompassing the history of the Crusades and more. This history, rather predictably, doesn't mention the 450 years of jihad that had overwhelmed Christian lands in the Middle East and North Africa before any Crusade was contemplated.

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But ultimately the Crusader name goes down the memory hole at Incarnate Word in an effort to be "culturally and spiritually sensitive" and to avoid litigation.

The site explains: "One of the main reasons for the change, besides the desire to be more culturally and spiritually sensitive, is to avert the potential for future litigation for discrimination and/or harassment. The U.S. Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division has repeatedly ruled that harassment is itself discrimination. Numerous federal and state rulings have cited the 'Hostile Public Accommodations Environment' Harassment Law relative to American Indian mascots and nicknames. The Public Accommodations Law is a civil-rights law requiring officials to refrain from offending anyone based on race, religion gender or sexual orientation."

Certainly UIW has every reason to avoid litigation, but it's ironic that they are scrapping the "Crusader" name in an effort to be sensitive at a time when the historical enemies of the Crusaders, the warriors of jihad (mujahedeen), are pressing forward aggressively all over the world — with little concern for the sensitivities of their historical and present-day non-Muslim victims.

In Britain last week, for example, a group of mujahedeen got involved in sports, but they weren't playing the game. Ten suspected Islamic terrorists were arrested just before they had planned to blow themselves amid a crowd of nearly 70,000 people at a soccer game between two popular teams, Manchester United and Liverpool. The terrorists had bought tickets for various spots around the stadium so they could cause the greatest possible amount of chaos and carnage.

Here in the United States, meanwhile, a trial date of Nov. 3 has been set for Hemant Lakhani, who was arrested in August. The indictment against him says, according to CNN, that he tried to sell shoulder-fired surface-to-air missiles to terrorists groups, explaining that they "'could be used most effectively in terrorist attacks against commercial aircraft in the United States if 10 to 15 commercial aircraft were shot down simultaneously at different locations throughout the country.' According to federal prosecutors, he boasted of sales to terrorist groups and thought he had struck a deal to sell a missile to a Somali group seeking to launch a 'jihad' against a U.S. commercial airline."

Also last week, a jihadist attack on the U.S. Embassy and other targets in Amman, Jordan, was foiled. The plot involved the unleashing of poison chemicals that would have killed upwards of 80,000 people. According to the New York Post, "The authorities said a group of 10 suspects planned to pack the truck bombs with deadly cocktails of 71 lethal chemicals – including blistering agents, nerve gas and choking agents – and then simultaneously crash them into their targets."

Meanwhile, the radical Muslim group known as the Al Haramain Brigades claimed responsibility for last week's successful attack in Riyadh. A statement from the group said that they, not al-Qaida, did the job – al-Qaida, they explained, was busy battling "Crusaders."

Haven't they heard? There are no Crusaders. We're too sensitive for that now. But all the sensitivity displayed by Christian schools and all the statements from American Muslim advocacy groups explaining that jihad doesn't mean what the mujahedeen around the world say it means, have not stopped or even slowed these jihadist activities. One might expect a school with the nickname Crusaders to wear the sobriquet proudly, as an emblem of their determination to resist the worldwide jihad that is advancing both by force of arms and by subversion from within.

No such luck at UIW. I think the rush of schools like UIW to disavow any connection to Crusaders is part of a larger tendency to remain in denial about the jihad aggression that threatens so many in the world today and manifests an acceptance of the Islamic view of history (which has been aggressively thrust upon the West in recent decades) that blames (contrary to fact) the origin of conflict between Muslims and Christians upon the Crusaders.

The University of the Incarnate Word is searching for a new nickname now. One person posted a suggestion to the Jihad Watch website: "Lemmings."

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Robert Spencer is the director of Jihad Watch and the author of "Onward Muslim Soldiers: How Jihad Still Threatens America and the West" (Regnery Publishing), and "Islam Unveiled: Disturbing Questions About the World's Fastest Growing Faith (Encounter Books).

Signs of the times

The Washington Times
www.washingtontimes.com

Published April 26, 2004

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"I think that we do have to take very seriously the thought that the terrorists might have learned, we hope, the wrong lesson from Spain," said National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice this week. "I think we also have to take seriously that they might try during the cycle leading up to the election to do something."
This is not just speculation. There are numerous signs that something is in the offing. British investigators, combing through evidence seized following the March 11 Madrid train bombings, uncovered a plot by jihad terrorists to level Chicago's Sears Tower with a dirty bomb. Last Friday, Homeland Security Department and FBI officials, according to ABC News, "held a rare secure conference call with police in dozens of major cities."
The next day they sent out "a classified bulletin ? warning that groups affiliated with al Qaeda might be planning attacks in the U.S. on the scale seen in Madrid last month." Officials are tight-lipped and details are sketchy, but it does seem that "police were told to be on the lookout for surveillance of landmarks, and for suspicious items left in malls, subway stations or other large gatherings."
Meanwhile, there have been some curious incidents:
m On Sunday, a group of heavily armed pirates attacked a tugboat off the Philippine coast. According to Straits Times, they fled with "stolen gear and the captain, an engineer and a crane operator as hostages." But no one has heard anything from them since -- no demand for ransom, nothing. What does this have to do with a threat to the United States? Perhaps nothing. But there has been a noticeable rise in such incidents in that area in the past year.
Rohan Gunaratna, author of "Inside Al-Qaeda," says, "It's possible these could be rehearsals. The maritime domain is the least policed environment and terrorist groups here have shown an interest." James Copinger-Symes, managing director of the British maritime security company Hudson Trident, notes that the targets are ever more frequently not harmless tugboats but chemical and oil tankers, suggesting "terrorist targeting and build-up." Investigators also have found that the al Qaeda bombing of the USS Cole in 2000 may have been planned -- and practiced -- in Malaysia.
m In Oakland, some rocket launchers and semiautomatic assault rifles seem to have gone missing. On Saturday, federal, state and local officials converged on a warehouse near Oakland International Airport. As usual, they had little to say, except that the missing materiel and resulting search "was not related to terrorism," according to the Associated Press. But U.S. Magistrate Edward Chen revealed that the search was for "a bunch of devices for rockets that could be launched from military vehicles and [for] some M-16s."
OK, let me get this straight: Federal, state and local officials are searching for rocket launchers, and it has nothing to do with terrorism? Maybe the postman or garbage man picked up a few crates of stray rocket launchers by mistake while on his daily rounds?
m On Tuesday, Italian authorities revealed that earlier in the week they seized 8,000 Kalashnikov rifles and other weapons that were on their way to the United States. Labeled as "common guns," they were actually, according to a Reuters report, "assault rifles and longer-range combat arms." Maybe this was a simple mistake. But with the weapons valued at six million euros, such an error would be unfathomable, unpardonable carelessness. Was it an attempt to elude regulations covering importation of military-grade weaponry?
m Los Angeles International Airport officials evacuated a terminal last Friday after finding what a policeman described as "a cell phone with wires protruding from it." An overreaction? Maybe -- but remember, the March 11 Madrid train bombs seem to have been set off by cell phones.
The Los Angeles incident was not isolated: On April 7, the south terminal of Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport was evacuated after what officials described as a "military flare containing a highly flammable substance" was discovered in an airport bathroom. Said an FBI statement, "This device could have caused very serious injury to anyone handling or tampering with the device."
It's impossible to tell what these incidents would have amounted to -- just as it was impossible to foresee September 11 from the increase in jihadist chatter and activity in the months preceding it. But they certainly indicate that Miss Rice's warnings are well-founded. If the media and the September 11 commission would turn their attention from whom to blame for the last attack to how to prevent the next one, we might have a fighting chance to keep it from happening.

Robert Spencer is the director of Jihad Watch and the author of "Onward Muslim Soldiers: How Jihad Still Threatens America and the West" and "Islam Unveiled: Disturbing Questions About the World's Fastest Growing Faith."

Copyright © 2004 News World Communications, Inc. All rights reserved.

April 21, 2004
Andalusian Myth, Eurabian Reality
Inventing the past, and denying the present. A Jihad Watch EXCLUSIVE essay by Bat Ye'or and Andrew G. Bostom:

On Sunday, April 18, 2004, this revealing exchange took place between outgoing Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar, and interviewer Chris Wallace of FoxNews:
Chris Wallace: “In the apartment that was blown up, police found a videotape in which the bombers referred to Spain as Andalusia, what it was called by the Muslim Moors before they were driven out in 1492.”

Jose Maria Aznar (through the translator): “So this means that Iraq, for them, was just a pretext. In the eyes of Islamic terrorism, it looks at the West, and Spain is a very special part of this parcel, because they feel that to recover Spain is to get back some of their territory.”

Islamic scholar Mordechai Nisan recently discussed the contention by the founder of the Institute of Islamic Education, M. Amir Ali, that Medieval Spain had actually been "liberated" by Muslim forces, who "deposed its tyrants". Nisan extrapolated this ahistorical narrative line, and pondered:

"Reflecting on March 11, as Muslim terrorism killed 200 and wounded 1,400 in Madrid, one wonders whether one day this event will also not be commemorated as a liberating moment. "

Events surrounding the completion of the new Granada Mosque, which was marked by celebratory announcements July 10, 2003 of a “…return of Islam to Spain”, were also consistent with Nisan's dark musings. At a conference entitled “Islam in Europe” that accompanied the opening of the mosque, disconcerting statements were made by European Muslim leaders. Specifically, the keynote speaker at this conference, Umar Ibrahim Vadillo, a Spanish Muslim leader, encouraged Muslims to cause an economic collapse of Western economies (by ceasing to use Western currencies, and switching to gold dinars), while the German Muslim leader Abu Bakr Rieger told Muslim attendees to avoid adapting their Islamic religious practices to accommodate European (i.e., Western Enlightenment?) values.

Shortly after this event, a Wall Street Journal editorialist in a grossly distorted encomium to Muslim Spain, mentioned the “pan-confessional humanism” of Andalusian Islam, and even asserted: "one could argue that the oft-bewailed missing ‘reformation’ of Islam was under way there until it was aborted by the Inquisition."

María Rosa Menocal, Yale Professor of Spanish and Portuguese, in her 2002 hagiography of Muslim Spain, The Ornament of the World, has further maintained that "the new Islamic polity not only allowed Jews and Christians to survive, but following Qur’anic mandate, by and large protected them."

We believe that reiterating these ahistorical, roseate claims about Muslim Spain abets the contemporary Islamist agenda, and retards the evolution of a liberal, reformed “Euro-Islam” fully compatible with post-Enlightenment Western values.

Iberia (Spain) was conquered in 710-716 AD by Arab tribes originating from northern, central and southern Arabia. Massive Berber and Arab immigration, and the colonization of the Iberian peninsula, followed the conquest. Most churches were converted into mosques. Although the conquest had been planned and conducted jointly with a strong faction of royal Iberian Christian dissidents, including a bishop, it proceeded as a classical jihad with massive pillages, enslavement, deportations and killings.

Toledo, which had first submitted to the Arabs in 711 or 712, revolted in 713. The town was punished by pillage and all the notables had their throats cut. In 730, the Cerdagne (in Septimania, near Barcelona) was ravaged and a bishop burned alive. In the regions under stable Islamic control, Jews and Christians were tolerated as dhimmis - like elsewhere in other Islamic lands - and could not build new churches or synagogues nor restore the old ones. Segregated in special quarters, they had to wear discriminatory clothing. Subjected to heavy taxes, the Christian peasantry formed a servile class attached to the Arab domains; many abandoned their land and fled to the towns. Harsh reprisals with mutilations and crucifixions* would sanction the Mozarab (Christian dhimmis) calls for help from the Christian kings. Moreover, if one dhimmi harmed a Muslim, the whole community would lose its status of protection, leaving it open to pillage, enslavement and arbitrary killing.

By the end of the eighth century, the rulers of North Africa and of Andalusia had introduced Malikism, one of the most rigorous schools of Islamic jurisprudence, and subsequently repressed the other Muslim schools of law. Three quarters of a century ago, at a time when political correctness was not dominating historical publication and discourse, Evariste Lévi-Provençal, the pre-eminent scholar of Andalusia, wrote: "The Muslim Andalusian state thus appears from its earliest origins as the defender and champion of a jealous orthodoxy, more and more ossified in a blind respect for a rigid doctrine, suspecting and condemning in advance the least effort of rational speculation."

The humiliating status imposed on the dhimmis and the confiscation of their land provoked many revolts, punished by massacres, as in Toledo (761, 784-86, 797). After another Toledan revolt in 806, seven hundred inhabitants were executed. Insurrections erupted in Saragossa from 781 to 881, Cordova (805), Merida (805-813, 828 and the following year, and later in 868), and yet again in Toledo (811-819); the insurgents were crucified, as prescribed in Qur’an 5:33*.

The revolt in Cordova of 818 was crushed by three days of massacres and pillage, with 300 notables crucified and 20 000 families expelled. Feuding was endemic in the Andalusian cities between the different sectors of the population: Arab and Berber colonizers, Iberian Muslim converts (Muwalladun) and Christian dhimmis (Mozarabs). There were rarely periods of peace in the Amirate of Cordova (756-912), nor later.

Al-Andalus represented the land of jihad par excellence. Every year, sometimes twice a year, raiding expeditions were sent to ravage the Christian Spanish kingdoms to the north, the Basque regions, or France and the Rhone valley, bringing back booty and slaves. Andalusian corsairs attacked and invaded along the Sicilian and Italian coasts, even as far as the Aegean Islands, looting and burning as they went. Thousands of people were deported to slavery in Andalusia, where the caliph kept a militia of tens of thousand of Christian slaves brought from all parts of Christian Europe (the Saqaliba), and a harem filled with captured Christian women. Society was sharply divided along ethnic and religious lines, with the Arab tribes at the top of the hierarchy, followed by the Berbers who were never recognized as equals, despite their Islamization; lower in the scale came the mullawadun converts and, at the very bottom, the dhimmi Christians and Jews.

The Andalusian Maliki jurist Ibn Abdun (d. 1134) offered these telling legal opinions regarding Jews and Christians in Seville around 1100 C.E.: "No…Jew or Christian may be allowed to wear the dress of an aristocrat, nor of a jurist, nor of a wealthy individual; on the contrary they must be detested and avoided. It is forbidden to [greet] them with the [expression], ‘Peace be upon you’. In effect, ‘Satan has gained possession of them, and caused them to forget God’s warning. They are the confederates of Satan’s party; Satan’s confederates will surely be the losers!’ (Qur’an 58:19 [modern Dawood translation]). A distinctive