Research and Information Network (RAIN) Newsletter

Action Alert: Al-Arian Collapses on 23rd Day of Hunger Strike

2007-02-17T10:31:00.000+02:00

my occupied territory February 15, 2007

Dr. Sami Al-Arian, the political prisoner who is being unlawfully detained by the US government, has collapsed in prison in Virginia and was subsequently transferred to a medical facility in North Carolina. Just this week, I wrote about the hunger strike that Al-Arian began about 23 days ago in protest of his continued detention despite a plea agreement with prosecutors. Read my last post to find out more about the broadcast interview with Al-Arian and the details of his case.

More importantly, national Muslim organizations such as MAS and CAIR have called on all people of conscience to fax letters to the judge in charge of Sami's case. Please see the links to the action alerts below and consider taking a few minutes to type up a letter and fax it to the judge. The least we can do is speak out against this injustice.

From MAS Freedom Foundation:
WASHINGTON, DC - Feb. 15, 2007 (MASNET) Due to the severe health concerns of Dr. Sami Al-Arian, who collapsed on the twenty-third day of his Hunger Strike for Justice, the Muslim American Society (MAS) Freedom Foundation has organized an emergency fax campaign to Judge Gerald Lee of the Virginia Eastern District Court.

Dr. Sami Al-Arian embarked upon a hunger strike to protest his legal treatment, incarceration, and current eighteen month jail sentence for his refusal to testify testifying before a grand jury. This verdict was rendered against him despite a plea agreement he had with the government, which included a no-cooperation clause.

Given the fact that sending letters to Judge Gerald Lee will take a long period of time, MAS Freedom Foundation is urging individuals to send faxes directly to Judge Lee's chambers today. Additionally, everyone is encouraged to contact at least 10 other individuals and request that they send faxes and contact others as well. Please be polite and respectful when writing to Judge Gerald Lee. Send your fax to the Honorable Judge Gerald Lee at: (703) 299-3339. Below is a sample fax highlighting key points to address.
SAMPLE FAX:
To the Honorable Judge Gerald Lee

Your Honor, Dr. Sami Al-Arian is currently on a hunger strike in federal detention to protest his treatment by U.S. authorities. Family members have reported that Dr. Al-Arian collapsed on the twenty-third day of his fast and has been moved from Virginia to a medial facility in North Carolina. He began his hunger strike more than 3 weeks ago after refusing to testify before a grand jury in Virginia. His attorneys have indicated that an earlier plea agreement freed him from further cooperation and that the government's actions amount to a form of harassment. On humanitarian grounds I respectfully request that Dr. Al-Arian's sentence for civil contempt be removed.NOTE: It is critically important to indicate that you are requesting the removal of the 18 month sentence for civil contempt. Judge Lee only has jurisdiction over the civil contempt portion of Dr. Al-Arian's sentence, thus he cannot release Dr. Al-Arian. However, Judge Lee can remove the 18 month civil contempt sentence making Dr. Al-Arian eligible for release in April. Please don't forget to join MAS Freedom Foundation and thousands across the United States on Wednesday, February 21st as we unite in solidarity with Dr. Al-Arian's Hunger Strike for Justice and for a national press conference in front of the Department of Justice at 11:00am.Please write to the following individuals to ask for an immediate end to Dr. Al-Arian's suffering:

1- Honorable Judge Gerald LeeU.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia401 Courthouse Square, Alexandria, VA 223142- Attorney General Alberto Gonzales Department of Justice U.S. Department of Justice 950 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW Washington, DC 20530-0001Fax Number: 202- 307-6777 BY E-MAIL: E-mails to the Department of Justice, including the Attorney General, may be sent to askdoj@usdoj.gov

3- The Honorable John Conyers, Jr 2426 Rayburn BuildingWashington, DC 20515 202-225-2072 Fax John.conyers@mail.house.gov

4- Senator Patrick Leahy 433 Russell Senate Office BuildingUnited States SenateWashington, DC 20510 (202) 224- 4242 Faxsenator_leahy@leahy.senate.gov

Fact sheet on Sami Al-Arian's caseAction Alert from CAIR http://masnet.org/takeaction.asp?id=4010

www.uruknet.info?p=30682

Palestinian ministers face blanket US ban

2007-02-17T10:30:00.002+02:00

Blow to unity cabinet in run up to three-way talks· Fatah and independents to be treated 'same as Hamas'

Rory McCarthy in Jerusalem
The Guardian Friday February 16, 2007
American officials have told the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, that they will boycott all ministers in a new coalition cabinet unless the government meets international conditions, including recognition of Israel, Palestinian officials said yesterday.

The warning indicates the extent of Washington's unease at the agreement reached in Mecca last week between the rival Palestinian groups, Hamas and Fatah. It comes just before a meeting in Jerusalem on Monday between the US secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, the Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, and Mr Abbas.

The boycott means that any Fatah leaders who join the new government will be shunned by US officials, and suggests that Monday's meeting is unlikely to produce a breakthrough.

However, the US will continue to talk to Mr Abbas and his office, Palestinian officials said. An official told Reuters: "The Americans have informed us that they will be boycotting the new government headed by Hamas. Fatah and independent ministers will be treated the same way Hamas ministers are treated."

Saeb Erekat, a Palestinian negotiator who met US officials last week to prepare for Monday's meeting, said: "The Americans reiterated the position that their relations with the government will depend on the government's compliance with the Quartet's principles."

The so-called Quartet of Middle East negotiators - the EU, US, UN and Russia - has said its boycott of the Palestinian government will only be lifted if the new authority recognises Israel, renounces violence and accepts past peace agreements.

After months of bitter factional fighting on the streets of Gaza, Hamas and Fatah signed an agreement in Mecca last week to form the new coalition cabinet, a step that has been months in the making. Western governments had hoped that Mr Abbas, the Fatah leader, might convince Hamas to accept their conditions. The Mecca agreement fell short of meeting those conditions, though the Palestinians did agree to "respect" previous peace agreements.

Israeli officials were reportedly also angry that Mr Abbas signed up to such a deal. However the Mecca pact represents a return of Saudi Arabia in diplomacy on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The pact, which many Palestinian observers saw as a Saudi endorsement of Hamas's part in the government, reportedly came with a promise of $1bn for the Palestinians from the Saudi government.

Yesterday, Mr Abbas was due to meet Ismail Haniyeh, the Hamas prime minister, in Gaza to draw up the details of the new cabinet, but hurdles have already emerged. On Wednesday, Hamas demanded that its armed force, known as the executive force, should be recognised, that Mr Abbas should lift his objections to the employment of several Hamas figures as senior civil servants, and that he should agree to a candidate for interior minister.

Last night Mr Haniyeh resigned in a procedural move aimed at launching the unity cabinet, officials in his office said.

Although Monday's three-way talks represent a new US effort on the Israeli-Palestinian issue, Israel has made it clear that key issues in the peace process, such as the setting of borders, the future of Jerusalem and the Palestinian refugee question, will not be on the table this time.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,,2014380,00.html

Information Warfare, Psy-ops and the Power of Myth

2007-02-17T10:30:00.001+02:00

By Mike Whitney

"ICH 02/15/07 " --- -

The bombing of the Golden Dome Mosque in Samarra is the cornerstone of Bush’s psychological operations (psy-ops) in Iraq. That’s why it is critical to have an independent investigation and discover who is really responsible. The bombing has been used as a “Pearl Harbor-type” event which has deflected responsibility for the 650,000 Iraqi casualties and more than 3 million refugees. These are the victims of American occupation not civil war.

The bombing was concocted by men who believe that they can control the public through perception management. In practical terms, this means that they create events which can be used to support their far-right doctrine. In this case, the destruction of the mosque has been used to confuse the public about the real origins of the rising sectarian tensions and hostilities. The fighting between Sunni and Shiite is the predictable upshot of random bombings and violence which bears the signature of covert operations carried out by intelligence organizations. Most of the pandemonium in Iraq is the result of counterinsurgency operations (black-ops) on a massive scale not civil war.

The Pentagon’s bold new approach to psychological operations (psy-ops) appears to have derived from the theories of former State Dept official, Philip Zelikow (who also served on the 9-11 Commission) Zelikow is an expert on “the creation and maintenance of ‘public myths’ or ‘public presumptions’. His theory analyzes how consciousness is shaped by “searing events” which take on “transcendent importance” and, therefore, move the public in the direction chosen by the policymakers.

“In the Nov-Dec 1998 issue of Foreign Affairs he (Zelikow) co-authored an article called ‘Catastrophic Terrorism’ in which he speculated that if the 1993 bombing of the World Trade center had succeeded ‘the resulting horror and chaos would have exceeded our ability to describe it. Such an act of catastrophic terrorism would be a watershed event in American history. ‘It could involve loss of life and property unprecedented in peacetime and undermine America’s fundamental sense of security, as did the Soviet bomb test in 1949. The US might respond with draconian measures scaling back civil liberties, allowing wider surveillance of citizens, detention of suspects and use of deadly force. More violence could follow, either future terrorist attacks or US counterattacks. Belatedly, Americans would judge their leaders negligent for not addressing terrorism more urgently”. (Wikipedia)

Zelikow’s article presumes that if one creates their own “searing event” (such as 9-11 or the bombing of the Golden Dome Mosque) they can steer the public in whatever direction they choose. His theory depends entirely on a “state-media nexus” which can be depended on to disseminate propaganda uniformly. There is no more reliable propaganda-system in the world today than the western media.

New Clues in the Bombing

New clues have surfaced in the case of the bombing of the Golden Mosque which suggests that the claims of the Bush administration are false. An article by Marc Santora, (“One Year Later, Golden Mosque still in Ruins”, New York Times) provides eyewitness testimony of what really took place one year ago:

“A caretaker at the shrine described what happened on the day of the attack, insisting on anonymity because he was afraid that talking to an American could get him killed. The general outline of his account was confirmed by American and Iraqi officials.

The night before the explosion, he said, just before the 8 p.m. curfew on Feb. 21, 2006, on the Western calendar, men dressed in commando uniforms like those issued by the Interior Ministry entered the shrine.

The caretaker said he had been beaten, tied up and locked in a room.

Throughout the night, he said, he could hear the sound of drilling as the attackers positioned the explosives, apparently in such a way as to inflict maximum damage on the dome”.(NY Times)

Clearly, if the men were men dressed in “commando uniforms like those issued by the Interior Ministry”, then the logical place to begin an investigation would be the Interior Ministry. But there's never been an investigation and the caretaker has never been asked to testify about what he saw on the night of the bombing. However, if he is telling the truth, we cannot exclude the possibility that paramilitary contractors (mercenaries) or special-ops (intelligence) agents working out of the Interior Ministry may have destroyed the mosque to create the appearance of a nascent civil war.

Isn’t that what Bush wants to divert attention from the occupation and to show that the real conflict is between Shiites and Sunnis?

It's unlikely that the mosque was destroyed by “Sunni insurgents or Al Qaida” as Bush claims. Samarra is predominantly a Sunni city and the Sunnis have nearly as much respect for the mosque as a cultural icon and sacred shrine as the Shiites.

The Times also adds, “What is clear is that the attack was carefully planned and calculated”.

True again. We can see from the extent of the damage that the job was carried out by demolition experts and not merely “insurgents or terrorists” with explosives. Simple forensic tests and soil samples could easily determine the composition of the explosives and point out the real perpetrators.

The Times even provides a motive for the attack: “Bad people used this incident to divide Iraq on a detestable sectarian basis.”

Bingo! The administration has repeatedly used the incident to highlight divisions, incite acrimony, and prolong the occupation.

Finally, the Times notes the similarities between 9-11 and the bombing of the Golden Mosque: “I can describe what was done as exactly like what happened to the World Trade Center.”(NY Times)

In fact, the bombing of the Golden Mosque is a reenactment of September 11. In both cases an independent investigation was intentionally quashed and carefully-prepared narrative was immediately provided. The government’s version of events has been critical in supporting the extremist policies of the Bush administration.

Just as 9-11 has been used to justify the enhanced powers of the “unitary” president, the evisceration of civil liberties, and a permanent state of war; so too, the bombing of the Golden Mosque, has been used to create a fictional narrative of deeply ingrained sectarian animosity that has no historical precedent. Both events need to be exposed by thorough and independent investigations.

The Bush administration has consistently abandoned the limitations of “reality-based” politics. They govern through demagoguery, force and deception. This is no different.

9-11 and the Golden Mosque are the foundation blocks in the Pentagon’s “Strategic Information” program. It is a war that is directed at the American people and it relies heavily on the power of myth.

Forewarned is forearmed.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article17078.htm

This scapegoating is rolling back the gains of anti-racism

2007-02-17T10:29:00.001+02:00

Martin Jacques
Anti-terror stunts and a barrage of propaganda are demonising Muslims and making Islamophobia the acceptable face of racism
The Guardian Thursday February 15, 2007

Predictably enough, the action of the police in last year's Forest Gate raid has been excused with the mildest of rebukes. Out of more than 150 complaints, only a tiny number were upheld. The whole operation, you will recall, was a figment of the security services' imagination. A fortnight ago, there was another spectacular anti-terrorist operation, this time in Birmingham, concerning an alleged plot to kidnap a Muslim member of the armed forces. The pattern of these operations is now well established. The police swoop on an area, make dozens of arrests, accompanied by lurid media reports about the would-be plotters' intentions. There have now been charges, although an innocent party who was arrested and then released has given a disturbing account of his experience in custody. The most alarming example was last summer, when it was alleged there was a plot hatched in Pakistan to blow up as many as 10 aircraft, which resulted in a huge security clampdown at Heathrow and new hand-luggage rules. But, despite a number of charges, a degree of scepticism would be wise, given the experience of cases such as the ricin plot that never was.

Just what are these operations about? You may remember MI5 chief Eliza Manningham-Buller suggested last November that the intelligence services had discovered 30 "plots to kill people and to damage our economy", often with "links back to al-Qaida in Pakistan and through those links al-Qaida gives guidance and training to its largely British foot soldiers here on an extensive and growing scale". The authority for such a statement, I assume, comes from MI5 agents. The quality of such reports, though, must be treated with profound scepticism, dependent as they are on the doubtful calibre and knowledge of these agents and the tendency of such people to live in a semi-fantasy world of endless conspiracy. The fact remains that, notwithstanding the huge security operations and the large numbers arrested, relatively few people have actually been charged. The test of justice is, fortunately, more demanding than the criteria used to justify headlines and political hyperbole.

Of course, we must take terrorist threats seriously - but also the price we pay for these alarums. They magnify our sense of trepidation and persuade people the worst is about to happen: it is under the cloak of such fear that governments on both sides of the Atlantic have been able to impose swingeing restrictions on civil liberties. The fact remains, however, that deaths in the UK from Islamist terrorism have been far fewer than those perpetrated by the IRA. Meanwhile, the price for these constant security operations is paid, above all, by our Muslim communities. Every such operation tars them with the brush of terrorism, an intimation to rest of society that extremism lurks within their ranks.

The scapegoating of the Muslim community has become the stock in trade of politicians, the Conservatives recently accusing the Muslim Council of Britain of separatist tendencies, and New Labour all too frequently indulging in the same kind of refrain - notably during the most disgraceful period of its domestic rule last autumn, when cabinet ministers were falling over themselves to make disparaging remarks about the Muslim community.

The argument typically starts from the global terrorist threat and ends up by suggesting the Muslim community nurtures and sustains such a terrorist mentality by its failure to integrate. Jack Straw squirmed about the veil, Ruth Kelly inveighed against imams, Alan Johnson proposed that faith schools admit up to 25% not of the same faith (patently directed against the Muslim community), and John Reid warned a Muslim audience of "fanatics looking to groom and brainwash [your] children ... for suicide bombing". Amid this panic-inducing rhetoric, there was little acknowledgment that Muslims suffer more discrimination than any other section of society, no recognition that every attack on their community can only intensify that prejudice. Imagine what it feels like to be a Muslim, stalked by a constant sense of distrust and suspicion? As a society we may condemn racism, but when it comes to Muslims, it seems to be somehow acceptable, from the cabinet downwards.

And what is to blame for this failure to integrate? Prejudice, perhaps? Discrimination? Racism? No, according to David Cameron, Ruth Kelly and many others, the cause would appear to be multiculturalism. Pause for a moment and spot the slippage in the argument. It is no longer only about Muslims but all our ethnic minorities. For enshrined in the principle of multiculturalism is the idea that the white community does not insist on the assimilation of ethnic minorities but recognises the importance of pluralism. It is not about separatism but a respect for difference - from colour and dress to customs and religion. The attack on multiculturalism is the thin end of the racism wedge. It seeks to narrow the acceptable boundaries of difference at a time when Britain is becoming ever more diverse and heterogeneous.

None of this is to deny the importance of finding ways of integrating the Muslim community. It is hardly surprising, though, that many young Muslims feel alienated. They face worse discrimination in education and employment than any other ethnic minority, Anglo-American policy in the Middle East has had the effect of demonising the Muslim world, and the Muslim community here finds itself the victim of a barrage of hostile propaganda. A major assault on discrimination involving the government, the media and the Muslim community is long overdue. But while British foreign policy so profoundly discriminates against the Muslim world, and New Labour remains in denial about the connection between domestic Muslim attitudes and its foreign policy, there seems little prospect of making a new start.

Antipathy towards Muslims, meanwhile, threatens to roll back hard-fought anti-racist gains, which, over the decades, have won a degree of respect for ethnic minorities and an acceptance of the principle of difference. These gains have always been fragile. Important ground is now being ceded as Islamophobia becomes the acceptable face of racism and the attack on multiculturalism finds important new recruits.

· Martin Jacques is a visiting research fellow at the Asia Research Centre, London School of Economics.

martinjacques1@aol.com

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,2013207,00.html

Italy orders CIA kidnapping trial

2007-02-17T10:28:00.002+02:00

BBC Friday, 16 February 2007, 12:39 GMT

An Italian judge has ordered 26 US citizens - most of them CIA agents - to stand trial over the kidnap of an Egyptian cleric in Milan in 2003.

Osama Mustafa Hassan was allegedly seized by the CIA and flown to Egypt, where he says he was tortured.

Five Italians were also indicted by the judge, including Italy's ex-military intelligence chief, Nicolo Pollari.

The case would be the first criminal trial over the secret US practice known as "extraordinary rendition".

During rendition, people suspected of involvement in terror activities are taken from one country and flown to another, where many claim they are tortured.

Extradition decision

Most of the indicted US citizens are believed to have returned home from Italy.

The Italian government has yet to decide whether or not it wishes to request their extradition. Those indicted include the former station chief of CIA operations in Milan, Robert Seldon Lady, who says his opposition to the proposal to kidnap the imam was over-ruled.

He is reported to be among those who have returned to the US, leaving behind a villa in Italy which he bought with his life savings.

Mr Pollari, the former head of the Italian secret service, SISMI, had already been removed from his job following a parliamentary inquiry into the claims.

Lawyers say they have compiled thousands of pages of documents and testimony from Italian agents past and present, some of whom have acknowledged working with the US in planning the abduction.

The trial is due to begin on 8 June.

Torture claims

Mr Hassan was released from prison in Egypt only on Sunday.

He says that he was tortured during his four years of detention in Cairo.

He described one form of torture in which he was forced to lie on a wet mattress through which an electric current was passed.

His lawyer has said that he wishes to return to Milan to testify during the trial.

On Wednesday, EU lawmakers endorsed a damning report accusing some member states of turning a blind eye to rendition, naming Italy as one of the countries involved.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/6368269.stm

Holocaust denial writer jailed for five years

2007-02-17T10:28:00.001+02:00

· Extradited German given maximum sentence· Publisher a dangerous agitator, judge says

Kate Connolly in Berlin
The Guardian Friday February 16, 2007
A German neo-Nazi publisher was yesterday sentenced to five years in prison for inciting racial hatred and denying that the Nazis murdered six million Jews.

Ernst Zündel, who was extradited from Canada to face trial in Germany in 2005, received the maximum sentence available for the crime of Holocaust denial after being found guilty on 14 counts.

The prosecutor, Andreas Grossmann, said Zündel's claim that the Holocaust never happened earned him the title of "political conman" and that his views were dangerous to Germans.

"You might as well argue that the sun rises in the west, but you cannot change that the Holocaust has been proven," he said, referring to Zündel's work Did Six Million Really Die? The prosecution accused him of using "pseudo-scientific methods" in an attempt to overturn the accepted facts on the Holocaust.

But campaigners for Zündel, 67, said he was a peaceful advocate of the right to free speech who was being denied that right. His supporters filled the courtroom.

At the close of the trial Zündel - who also wrote The Hitler We Loved and Why, and has described Hitler as "a decent and very peaceful man" - asked the court in Mannheim to set up an international commission of historians to explore the Holocaust. He said he wanted "hard facts" and not just witness statements, and that if the commission could prove Jews were gassed he would "hold a press conference at which I would publicly apologise to Jews, Israelis and the world".

Calling Zündel a "dangerous agitator, a rabble-rouser and haranguer" and an "admirer of Adolf Hitler" with a "deep hate towards everything Jewish", the judge, Ulrich Meinerzhagen, said he was handing down the harshest possible sentence because the state had "the right and the duty to protect the basic principles of the law".

Zündel, who emigrated to Canada in 1958 but was deemed a security threat by the time of his deportation in 2005, had repeated his claims in various publications and on his website. He spent two years in custody in Canada before his extradition to Germany.

The trial was stopped in November 2005 and resumed three months later after the judge complained that Zündel's defence lawyers were deliberately and unnecessarily trying to prolong it. One lawyer was subsequently excluded from the trial for signing her correspondence to Zündel with "Heil Hitler", while another was warned he faced prosecution for quoting from Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf in his address to the court.

Zündel's yearlong trial has turned him into something of a hero among Holocaust deniers in the Arab world. Posters of him appeared at a conference in Tehran last year organised by the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who as well as denying the Holocaust has called for Israel to be wiped off the map.

Germany, which holds the six-month presidency of the EU, is trying to outlaw Holocaust denial and to ban swastikas across member countries. But the proposal is expected to cause heated debate over freedom of speech. Ten European countries and Israel already have laws against Holocaust denial.

Brandeis Donors Exact Revenge For Carter Visit

2007-02-17T10:27:00.001+02:00

Major givers reportedly withholding funds from school, sparking fierce free-speech debate on Massachusetts campus.

Larry Cohler-Esses - Editor At Large

The Jewish Week Friday, February 16, 107

Major donors to Brandeis University have informed the school they will no longer give it money in retaliation for its decision last month to host former President Jimmy Carter, a strong critic of Israel.

The donors have notified the school in writing of their decisions — and specified Carter as the reason, said Stuart Eizenstat, a former aide to Carter during his presidency and a current trustee of Brandeis, one of the nation’s premier Jewish institutions of higher learning.

They are “more than a handful,” he said. “So, this is a concern. There are evidently a fair number of donors who have indicated they will withhold contributions.”

Brandeis history professor Jonathan Sarna, who maintains close ties with the administration, told The Jewish Week, “These were not people who send $5 to the university. These were major donors, and major potential donors.

“I hope they’ll calm down and change their views,” Sarna said.

Sarna indicated he knew the identity of at least one of the benefactors but declined to disclose it. He said only that those now determined to stop contributing include “some enormously wealthy individuals.”

Eizenstat said his information came from discussions Tuesday with university administrators, who did not disclose to him who the donors in question were, or how much was involved.

Kevin Montgomery, a student member of the faculty-student committee that brought Carter to Brandeis, related that the school’s senior vice president for communications, Lorna Miles, told him in a meeting the week before Carter’s appearance that the school had, at that point, already lost $5 million in donations.

Asked to comment, Miles replied, “I have no idea what he’s talking about.”

Miles said that university President Jehuda Reinharz was out of the country and unavailable for comment. The school’s fundraising director, Nancy Winship, was also unavailable, she said.

“I have not heard anything from donors,” said Miles. “I don’t know where Stuart’s information is coming from. I don’t think there is any there there, in your story.”

The apparent donor crisis comes on the heels of a series of Israel-related free speech controversies on the Waltham, Mass., campus, of which Carter’s January appearance is only the latest and most high-profile. Critics of Israel last year protested Reinharz’s removal of an art exhibit from the school library containing anti-Israeli paintings — denounced by some as crude propaganda — by youths from Palestinian refugee camps.

The university got flack from the other side when it awarded an honorary doctorate in June to renowned playwright and frequent Israel critic Tony Kushner, who once referred to Israel’s founding as “a mistake.”

The run-up to Carter’s appearance was also punctuated by acrimony when the former president declined an initial invitation to appear in a debate format with Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz. Instead, Dershowitz appeared only after Carter left the hall.

Yet, the school has also won notice for a course it offers on the Middle East conflict co-taught by Shai Feldman, a prominent Israeli strategic analyst, and Palestinian Khalil Shikaki, a leading West Bank demographer. It also conducts an exchange program with Al Quds University, a Palestinian school in East Jerusalem. The Brandeis student body of about 5,000 is about 50 percent Jewish but also contains a significant population of Muslims.

Nevertheless, the free-speech controversies seemed to pit Brandeis’ commitment to maintaining its status as a top-tier, non-sectarian university —with all the expectations of untrammeled discourse this brings — against its determination to remain, in Reinharz’s words, a school under “continuous sponsorship by the Jewish community.”

The alleged action by some top donors has now sharpened the tensions between those two goals, intensified by the school’s commitment to the ideals of its namesake. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, a founder of American Zionism and one of the judiciary’s fiercest free speech defenders.

“The American Jewish community understands the visit by Carter to Brandeis to be reflecting a heksher” — a stamp of approval — “from the university,” said Sarna, whose field is American Jewish history. “They see it as a statement that Brandeis certifies him as kosher.

“The faculty views it very differently,” he said, “that Brandeis is a forum; that views are uttered in that forum, some of which we agree with and some of which we don’t. But the faculty does not view his appearance as a heksher.

“It’s that gap in perception that seems to require greater dialogue between the two entities so at least one understands the other,” said Sarna.

But the Carter event may have instead opened the door to greater tensions. Emboldened by it, a group of left-wing students are now seeking to bring to campus Norman Finkelstein, a controversial Holocaust scholar who charges that Jewish leaders exploit the tragedy to fend off and silence criticism of Israel for its treatment of the Palestinians. He charges, too, that Jewish organizations have inflated the number of Holocaust survivors to inflate reparations payments.

A group of right-wing students has invited to campus Professor Daniel Pipes, an Arabist and policy analyst who writes often of the security threat he sees to the United States and Europe from Muslim immigrants. Pipes has also founded Campus Watch, a program that seeks to monitor what professors teach in class and publicize those it regards as extremists. This has provoked charges he is a McCarthyist, which he denies.

In a contentious meeting with faculty after the Carter event, Reinharz denounced Finkelstein and Pipes as “weapons of mass destruction,” according to a report in The Justice, the Brandeis campus newspaper. His executive assistant, John Hose, explained, “These are people who tend to inflame passions, whose mission is not so much discussion and education as it is theatre, a show ... If you want serious discussion, there’s lots of resources available for that already at Brandeis.”

At the Feb. 5 meeting, Winship, the school’s chief fundraiser, also alluded to the brewing problem with donors. The e-mails from them “kept coming and coming,” The Justice quoted her as saying. “We’re just trying to repair the damage. The Middle East is just this trigger of emotions for our alumni and for our friends. For the most part, the donors who come to us come through the Jewish door.”

Reinharz sharply criticized the committee that brought Carter to campus for leaving the university with $95,000 in logistical and security costs, according to The Justice.

“Faculty members should not be allowed to invite whoever they want and leave Brandeis with a huge bill,” Reinharz complained, according to the paper.

The school’s budget for 2005, the latest year for which tax records are available, was $265.75 million against revenues of $310 million.

Members of the sponsoring committee protested that Reinharz had earlier assured them money would be no barrier to bringing the first U.S. president to Brandeis since Harry S Truman’s 1957 commencement speech there.

“I think Jehuda [protested the cost] because he wanted to distance himself from Carter,” said Montgomery, the student member of the Carter committee. “I feel this is Jehuda’s attempt to appease the harsh donor critics.”

The Brandeis president did not attend the Carter event, with his office making it known that Reinharz was out of town.

At the faculty meeting, Susan Lanser a professor of English, complained, “I know many, many faculty who do not feel they can speak freely about the Middle East” in public forums. And in an interview with The Jewish Week, Mary Baine Campbell, another English professor, spoke of “the chilling effect of knowing one speaks about things unwelcome by the administration in charge of working conditions and pay. They could be angels. I don’t know. It’s a slightly chilled atmosphere.”

Lanser said the administration’s warnings about donors had reinforced that sense. “I’m not saying that was the intent of the meeting,” she said. “I think Brandeis is committed to open intellectual inquiry. But this issue gets complicated because of the strong feelings of some donors.”

This vexed aftermath contrasted sharply with the widely praised tenor of the event itself. The university audience of almost 2,000 received Carter with notable civility and even gave him several standing ovations. At the same time, student questioners challenged him with tough and critical queries.

The focus of hostility toward Carter — his new book on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — has led to no less than Anti-Defamation League leader Abraham Foxman charging him with “engaging in anti-Semitism.” Many others have echoed this.

The protests start with the book’s title, “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid,” implicitly comparing Israel’s policies towards Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and Gaza to apartheid-era South Africa. The book itself contains gross factual errors, charge critics, and a lopsided bias that lays blame almost exclusively on Israel for the failure to resolve the conflict.

Critics object especially to Carter’s claim that pro-Israel forces in the United States have a disproportionate and stifling impact on public debate of the issue — denounced by Foxman as “the old canard and conspiracy theory of Jewish control of the media, Congress and the U.S. government.”

At the event, Carter defended himself against such charges. Interviews with audience members suggested their ovations stemmed more from respect for Carter’s former office and their acceptance of his basic integrity and good faith than agreement, necessarily, with his views.

“I think everyone was surprised at how well he was received,” said Michael Berenbaum, a Holocaust scholar and historian unaffiliated with Brandeis. “That may be the most important part of the story. Instead of coming as partisans, they listened to Carter attentively, asked tough questions and gave him an audience. The Jewish community may have a more significant generation gap than they understand between what young people are prepared to hear and what older activists are prepared to hear.”

http://www.thejewishweek.com/news/newscontent.php3?artid=13674

Sen. Obama: U.S. must support Israel's right to self defense

2007-02-17T10:26:00.001+02:00

By Shmuel Rosner,

Haaretz Fri., February 16, 2007
WASHINGTON - United States Senator Barack Obama, a Democrat from Illinois who is competing for his party's presidential nomination, told Haaretz on Thursday that the United States should help protect Israel from its "dangerous" enemies.

"My view is that the United States' special relationship with Israel obligates us to be helpful to them in the search for credible partners with whom they can make peace, while also supporting Israel in defending itself against enemies sworn to its destruction," he said.

"Israelis want more than anything to live in peace with their neighbors, but Israel also has real - and very dangerous - enemies," Obama said.

Obama, the first black candidate with a real chance at the Democratic nomination, intends to present his policy regarding Israel soon, and his staff has been drafting a speech on the subject.

In his speech, Obama intends to remove any doubts that the Democratic Party's donors and constituents, many of whom are Jewish, may have about his support for Israel.

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/826665.html

Turkey to send team to check Jerusalem excavations

2007-02-17T10:19:00.001+02:00

By Jonathan Saul

SignOnSanDiego.com REUTERS 6:33 a.m. February 15, 2007

ANKARA Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan said on Thursday Turkey would send a team of experts to Jerusalem to survey archaeological work near the al-Aqsa mosque which has triggered protests across the Muslim world.

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, speaking at the same news conference during a visit to Ankara, said he welcomed the decision, saying: 'We have nothing to hide.'

'The work which is being conducted is being done outside the Temple Mount area. We are very happy to host the prime minister's team and therefore the right and correct and exact story will come out,' Olmert said.

Israel insists the dig poses no threat to sites revered by Muslims. Olmert said he had shown Erdogan photographs of the area, but the Turkish leader said he did not know the area and so was not completely convinced by Olmert's assurances.

Muslim but secular Turkey is one of the few countries in the region to enjoy good ties with both Israel and the Palestinians as well as with Israel's foes Iran and Syria. Ankara is keen to play a more active diplomatic role in the region.

'As a modern Muslim country Turkey can play a role building ties between Israel and Muslim countries that do not have relations with Israel,' Olmert said.

Olmert also reaffirmed his offer of peace to Syria as long as Damascus stopped supporting terror groups.

'We want to make peace with Syria, we are happy to make peace with Syria, but Syria has not stopped supporting the path of terror and instead needs to accept the principles that the international community has set,' Olmert said.

'I have no doubt that under such conditions it will be very easy to speak with Syria.'

Ankara has offered to mediate in fresh talks between Syria and Israel and the issue was again discussed on Thursday.

Talks between Israel and Syria over the Golan Heights, which Israel captured in the 1967 Middle East war, collapsed in 2000 after Damascus insisted on regaining control of all the strategic piece of land.

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has repeatedly signalled an interest in talks since Israel's inconclusive war last year in Lebanon with Syrian-backed Hezbollah guerrillas.

The situation has been complicated by U.S. charges that Syria supports Iraqi insurgents, which Damascus denies, as well as Syria's open sponsorship of Palestinian militants.

http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/world/20070215-0633-turkey-israel-team.html

Professor Francis A. Boyle ---- Bertrand Russell Lectures : Palestinians & Impeachment

2007-02-17T10:15:00.001+02:00

January 9th "Palestinians and International Law "

Mp3 Part 1 http://www.humanities.mcmaster.ca/~peace/Francis_Boyle_Tuesday_1of2_resampled.mp3

Mp3 Part 2 http://www.humanities.mcmaster.ca/~peace/Francis_Boyle_Tuesday_2of2_resampled.mp3

January 10th "The U.S. National Campaign to Impeach President George W. Bush Jr. "

Mp3 Part 1 http://www.humanities.mcmaster.ca/~peace/Francis_Boyle_Wednesday_1of2_resampled.mp3

Mp3 Part 2 http://www.humanities.mcmaster.ca/~peace/Francis_Boyle_Wednesday_2of2_resampled.mp3

The Most Powerful Man in Iraq : Who is Muqtada al-Sadr?

2007-02-17T10:09:00.002+02:00

By PATRICK COCKBURN

Patrick Cockburn is the author of 'The Occupation: War, resistance and daily life in Iraq', a finalist for the National Book Critics' Circle Award for best non-fiction book of 2006.

CounterPunch February 15, 2007

Whatever else the US intended when it invaded Iraq in 2003 it was not to hand power to an Islamic militant in a black turban who denounces Washington and Israel in the same breath. The claim by two American officials yesterday that Muqtada al-Sadr, the radical Shia nationalist cleric, has left for Iran is a measure of how far the US would like to see him out of the Iraqi political scene.

Allegations by US officials in Baghdad have little credibility after almost four years in which they have been repeatedly exposed as untrue. Supporters of Muqtada immediately denied that he was in Iran and either refused to say where he was or asserted that he was in the Shia holy city of Najaf. He has every reason to keep his location a secret, since in the past the US military has said it will either kill or capture him if it can. Two of his most important aides have been killed in mysterious circumstances in the past week.

We may be close to a final confrontation between the US and Muqtada, perhaps the most important political figure in Iraq. The US and Iraqi governments are starting their much-heralded campaign to regain control of Baghdad from the Sunni insurgents and Shia militias, of which the most important is Muqtada's 70,000-strong Mehdi Army. Iraq's borders with Iran have been closed for 72 hours.

Muqtada himself has no doubt that he is under threat. In an interview in January he said: "I have moved my family to a safe place. I have even made a will and I continually move around so they have trouble knowing exactly where I am." He has been trying to avoid becoming a US target. He plays down his own strength. Asked about claims that the army and police are infiltrated by his men, Muqtada said the reverse was true and "it is our militias [that] are swarming with spies. It doesn't take much to infiltrate the army of the people." He denies that the death squads killing Sunni are really members of the Mehdi Army.

Probably, Muqtada and the men around him believe that if he can avoid a direct clash with the US army then he will win in the end. His popularity among the Shia is great. In the past few weeks his men have stopped carrying their weapons so openly in the streets and have closed a number of their offices in Baghdad. But the militiamen are seldom far away. In Sadr City they have only retreated deeper into the vast shanty town of two million people that is the greatest bastion of Sadrist support.

***

The rise of Muqtada has been one of the surprises of the four years since the US invaded. Saddam Hussein must have been astonished as he went to his execution to hear the name: "Muqtada! Muqtada! Muqatada!" shouted by jeering onlookers. Had Saddam realised the potential of this strange, enigmatic young man before the invasion then he would doubtless have killed him, as he did Muqtada's father and two of his brothers eight years ago.

It is difficult to avoid Muqtada's presence in Baghdad. Dressed in his dark clerical robes, he peers menacingly from posters on thousands of walls. His Mehdi Army militiamen control not only Sadr City but much of the capital and southern Iraq. He is an essential prop to the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, in which six ministers belong to his movement.

Yet the source of his power has remained a mystery to the US and many Iraqi politicians. Few men have been so consistently underestimated. He is not a great orator, nor does he have huge charisma. His movement has limited resources. Until recently, his militiamen were unpaid and provided their own weapons. He does not have a powerful foreign backer. In spite of US efforts to link him to Iran and claim that he has fled there, he and his movement have traditionally been suspicious of the Iranians, and they of him.

The real source of his vast influence among the Shia of Iraq - the Sunni see him as orchestrating the death squads that have killed so many of them - is that he promulgates a blend of religion and nationalism that they find deeply attractive. He comes from the deeply revered Sadr clerical family that provided so many martyrs under Saddam Hussein. Some American commanders may wonder if it is wise for the US to pick a fight with a religious leader regarded with cult-like devotion by millions of Shias. They may also reflect that he is not just popular with the poor masses of Shia Iraq - his picture also hangs on the wall in many Iraqi police stations and army barracks. Some of these will be the very people on whom US and Iraqi commanders will rely in order to regain control of Baghdad.

It is impossible to explain Iraq today without understanding the reasons behind the astonishing rise of Muqtada al-Sadr and his movement in less than four years. Muqtada appears to have come from nowhere. In reality, he is heir to a social and political movement with a history that stretches back almost half a century. In addition, he could not have become so powerful so fast had he not come from a family that provided some of the most revered leaders of the Shiah clergy in their long and bitter struggle with Saddam Hussein.

***

The most common poster of the Sadrist movement shows three men in black clerical garb with an Iraqi flag behind them. The first figure is Muqtada himself. The second is of his father, Mohammed Sadiq al-Sadr, assassinated along with two of his sons on the orders of Saddam outside Najaf in January 1999. The third is of Mohammed Baqir al-Sadr, a distant cousin and father-in-law of Muqtada, a revolutionary Shia who was executed together with his sister in 1980. The poster perfectly illustrates the blend of religion and nationalism that has made Sadrism so potent.

The Sadrist movement, of which Muqtada is the current leader, was founded by Mohammed Baqir al-Sadr. It was he who sought to interpret Shia Islam and organise its adherents in the 1950s and 1960s in order to oppose the powerful Iraqi Communist Party and the nationalist Baath Party. He helped to establish the Shia religious party al-Dawa to counter secularism.
At first, Baqir seemed to be leading a doomed attempt to revive Shia Islam to struggle with the problems of the modern age. He moved away from the traditional political quietism of the Hawza, the Shia religious hierarchy in Iraq, towards finding answers to the central questions of political and economic life. Like so many other Shia religious leaders, he did not lack courage. Even when the Baathists were at the height of their power and notorious for their cruelty, Baqir refused to bow to them. In a famous saying he vowed that: "If my little finger were Baathist I would cut it off." Saddam Hussein, particularly frightened of insurgent Islam after the triumph of Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran, struck back. In 1980 he killed Baqir, his sister and hundreds of his followers.

But the Sadrist movement did not die. Iraq's Shia community, 60 per cent of Iraq's population, became increasingly conscious of their identity as Saddam Hussein blundered into the war with Iran and then invaded Kuwait. In 1991 he crushed the great Shia uprising and began to look for a Shia religious leader whom he could co-opt. In a move he would come to regret, he chose Mohammed Sadiq al-Sadr, a pupil and cousin of Baqir and father of Muqtada, for this role.

Paradoxically, given the US allegations yesterday, Saddam's regime was attracted by Sadiq because he was anti-American and distant from Iran. But it swiftly became alarmed when he launched a mass movement aimed at addressing the immediate concerns of the impoverished Shia masses that criticised the old religious hierarchy as remote and cut off from day-to-day life.

A famous story is told of Sadiq illustrating his concern for ordinary Iraqis. A man looking for a religious leader to follow asked each of them the price of tomatoes. Some, more accustomed to being queried about esoteric religious matters, were offended by such a mundane question. The exception was Sadiq, who gave a full response, detailing the prices of different types of tomato. The man departed satisfied, saying he had at last found a religious leader who knew about life as it was really lived by Iraqis. He said: "I choose the one who knows my suffering, who is close to the poor and the disinherited." The latter class of Iraqis was more numerous in Iraq in the 1990s as the economy suffered under the weight of sanctions.

Secularism, discredited by Saddam's failures, was on the retreat and Islam was resurgent. Sadiq spoke for the newly impoverished Shia masses. But his discourse was also patriotic, opposed to foreign interference in Iraq, whether it came from the US or Iran. He called for Sunni and Shia unity. He would often begin his sermons with the refrain: "No, no to America; no, no, to Israel; no, no to the Devil."

His strength was - and this is also true of his son Muqtada - that he expressed the feelings of the Shia poor. A study of Muqtada by the Brussels-based International Crisis Group says: "The relatively well-to-do, urbanised, educated or commercial classes eyed him wearily, viewing his plebeian, militant Shiism as a source of instability and a threat to their interests." Sadiq even called on Saddam himself to repent. He wore the shroud of those who expect to die, and with reason. It became clear to the Iraqi leader that he was a nurturing an increasingly dangerous enemy. He reacted violently, as he invariably did against opponents, and ordered his security men to ambush Sadiq and his sons in their car as they drove through the holy city of Najaf. As news of their death spread, it sparked the most serious riots seen in Iraq between the uprising of 1991 and the invasion of 2003.

***

Muqtada was not necessarily the natural political and religious heir to Sadiq. He was his father's fourth son, and 25 years old when Sadiq was killed (assuming that Muqtada's official birth date of 1974 is correct). He was under surveillance by Saddam's security men - perhaps the most suspicious men on earth - but they concluded he was harmless.

Muqtada had hidden strengths. Most importantly, there was a large constituency of Iraqis waiting to embrace him. In April 2003, as Baghdad fell, he instantly stepped forward to fill a vacuum. Nobody else was offering to lead the young, poorly educated, violent but devout Shia masses. Their ferocious looting of Baghdad was a sign of their rage towards the powers that be. They, like him, were suspicious of the conciliatory Shia religious hierarchy in Najaf and the Iraqi exiles returning from London and New York courtesy of the US army. Muqtada represented those who hated Saddam, and were grateful that he was deposed, but did not want to replace him with a foreign occupation.

Muqtada's influence quickly became apparent. On 11 April, in his first Friday prayer sermon, he called on the faithful to walk as pilgrims to Karbala to commemorate Arba'in, the ritual commemorating 40 days' mourning for the death of Imam Hussein. Absorbed by the fall of Saddam, few observers noted the significance of the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis walking for days to Karbala waving their black and green flags.

Muqtada's followers had already demonstrated a more menacing side to their movement: a willingness to use violence against their enemies, real or imagined. Sayed Majid al-Khoei, a liberal-minded and very able Shia leader, the son of the Grand Ayatollah al-Khoei, had returned early to Najaf. He had offered forgiveness to those officials who had been compelled to cooperate with Saddam Hussein. On 10 April he took Haider al-Killidar, the administrator of the great golden domed shrine of Imam Ali, back to his offices. They were soon trapped by an angry crowd, many of whom were allegedly followers of Muqtada. Shots were fired. Sayed Majid was dragged from the shrine and knifed to death in the street.

The policy of the Shia hierarchy, notably Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, and of the previously exiled religious parties, al-Dawa and SCIRI, was not to oppose the US occupation but to use it to enable the Shia to take power. They pressed the US envoy Paul Bremer to hold elections that the Shia were bound to win.

Muqtada's line was different. He opposed the occupation from the beginning. His father, Sadiq, had blamed the US for sanctions that had brought the Iraqi poor to the edge of starvation. His son was no less hostile. He denounced the members of the Iraqi Governing Council, which the Shia religious parties joined, as pawns of America.

Not all was plain sailing. The Mehdi Army, his militia, was only a shadowy force. The first Sadrist demonstration I attended in October 2003 in the heart of Sadr City was well organised, but only 3,000 people took part. It was easy to underestimate the potential of his movement, which Paul Bremer, the head of the ruling Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), blindly proceeded to do. He toyed with the idea of arresting Muqtada. Meanwhile, the occupation was becoming ever more unpopular. It failed to provide security, economic reconstruction or democratic elections. The 70 per cent of Iraqis who were unemployed before the invasion still had no jobs.

The confrontation with the CPA happened almost by accident. Muqtada delivered a sermon describing the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center in New York as "a miracle and a blessing from God". This was reprinted in the Sadrist newspaper al Hawza. Bremer told one of his staff: "Close down the rag." Within days, Sadr City and the whole of southern Iraq was in flames as the Mehdi Army - armed, enthusiastic but untrained young men - took over the streets.

One of the cities seized by the militiamen was Kufa, on the Euphrates and a short distance from Najaf. Soon Muqtada and his militiamen were being besieged by 2,500 US soldiers. Here I had a nasty brush with the Mehdi Army. The incident helped explain why so many Iraqis are terrified by these black-clad militiamen.

I was sitting in the back of a car wearing a red and white headress, or keffiyeh, primarily so that I wouldn't be recognised as a foreigner in the tough Sunni insurgent towns on the road to Najaf. We stopped at checkpoint manned by the Mehdi Army. The Keffiyeh turned out to be a bad idea. The militiamen recognised me as an obvious Westerner. They started shouting that I was an American. They were clutching their Kalashnikovs and I did not think it would take much for them to kill us all.

Finally they jumped into our car, clutching their weapons, and told us to follow another car full of militiamen to their headquarters in the main mosque in Kufa. Once there they became less aggressive. They offered me a cigarette, and, although I had given up smoking some years before, it seemed unwise to refuse. They leafed through a copy of The New Yorker and muttered "haram (forbidden)" when they saw a cartoon of a woman in a low-cut blouse. All the militiamen came from Sadr City and said that they were quite willing to die for Muqtada.

In a military sense, Muqtada and his militiamen lost their confrontations with the US army in April and again in August 2004. Many Iraqis blamed them for the destruction in Najaf. But at the same time the Sadrists had survived and shown their strength. Muqtada demonstrated he was one of the central figures in Iraqi politics and he had also learned to avoid, if at all possible, direct military conflict with the US.

The following year Muqtada showed his political muscle. While still denouncing the occupation, he took part in the political process. He joined the Shia political front, the United Iraqi Alliance, which triumphed in the general elections in January and December 2005. In the second election he won 32 out of 275 seats in parliament, thus giving him veto power over the choice of prime minister. There are six Sadrist ministers running departments including health and transport. All were soon stocked with supporters of Muqtada.

In 2006, the Mehdi Army extended its grip into most Shia areas in Baghdad. After the attack on the Shia al-Askari shrine on 22 February there were nationwide pogroms of the Sunni. Mixed neighbourhoods began to disappear. Shia who did not like the Mehdi Army welcomed them because they were desperate for armed men from their own community to protect them from death squads and suicide bombers. They were also central to the operation of the death squads killing Sunni where ever they found them.

By now, all Shia gunmen were being called Mehdi Army by the Sunni. Muqtada said, defensively, that many of them were not under his control. This was probably correct but he did not try to rein them in. It was also true, though, that by early 2007 all the Shia militias, whatever they said in public, were intent on taking over Baghdad and driving the Sunni into the south-west quadrant of the city.

Probably it would be wiser for the US to include Muqtada in the political process. He has far more legitimacy among the Shia masses than many of the former exiles whom the US would like to see in power. Accomodating and controlling Muqtada and the great numbers of Iraqis he represents is essential to stabilising Iraq, but instead the US seems intent on trying to marginalise or eliminate him.

Even if they succeed it will do them little good. The Sadrist movement has surived many years of adversity before under Saddam. The Shia masses are not going to allow themselves to be robbed of power which they believe rightly belongs to them. By driving Muqtada into a corner, the US is forcing him to rely more and more on Iran, though it is unlikely that he has fled there.

President Bush shows no sign of learning from his failures in Iraq since 2003. For almost four years he has been fighting the Sunni community. Now, by confronting Muqtada, he is moving towards armed conflict with the Shia as well.

http://www.counterpunch.com/

The Road Map to Despotism

2007-02-17T10:09:00.001+02:00

By Chris Hedges

Truthdig on Feb 11, 2007

Editor's note: Despite spending an estimated $80 million, the government was unable to prove that Dr. Sami Al-Arian was a terrorist, yet he remains in prison and his sentence will likely be extended. Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Chris Hedges warns that the abusive imprisonment of this nonviolent Palestinian dissenter does not bode well for the rest of us.

Professor Sami Al-Arian, whose persecution and show trial are parts of a long string of egregious acts of injustice perpetrated by the Bush administration, has been on a hunger strike since Jan. 22 to protest the prolongation of his imprisonment.

Al-Arian's travels through the halls of American justice, and now the subterranean corridors of the nation's Stygian prison system, reads like a bad rip-off of Kafka. Al-Arian was acquitted on eight of the 17 counts against him by a Florida jury, which deadlocked on the rest. He agreed to plead guilty to one of the remaining charges four months later in exchange for being released and deported. The judge gave Al-Arian as much prison time as possible under a plea deal57 months at his sentencing. He was set to be released this April, something that now appears unlikely.

The trial was a stinging rebuke to the Bush administration's drive to turn the American judicial system into kangaroo courts. Over the six-month trial a parade of 80 witnesses, including 21 from Israel, attempted to brand the Florida professor as a terrorist. The government submitted thousands of documents, phone interceptions and physical surveillance culled from 12 years of investigations. The trial cost taxpayers an estimated $80 million. The 94 charges against Al-Arian and his co-defendants resulted in no convictions. But because Al-Arian has twice refused to testify before a grand jury in Virginia in a case involving a Muslim think tank, he has now been charged with contempt of court. The date of his release could be extended by as much as 18 months.

Al-Arian, who is a diabetic, began a hunger strike in response.

"I believe that freedom and human dignity are more precious than life itself," he said in a telephone interview from Northern Neck Regional Jail in Warsaw, Va. "In, essence I am taking a principled stand that I am willing to endure whatever it takes to win my freedom.

"I am still OK," he said. "I have lost 26 pounds by today. It's definitely not easy, but I am determined to continue. It's not a decision you make haphazardly or something that you take lightly. In the end, you have to make difficult decisions because of the larger cause. I drink four large cups of water a day, about 12 ounces each."

Dr. Al-Arian said he will remain on a hunger strike until the government ends its campaign against him and allows him to return to his wife and children.

The case and continued harassment sets a dangerous precedent for American Muslims, who since 9/11 have been monitored, detained and deported in large numbers. But it bodes ill for the rest of us as well. The new legislation suspending habeas corpus and creating the possibility of legally stripping U.S. citizens of their right to a fair and timely trial is a taste of what awaits us all should we enter a period of instability or national crisis. In many ways the assault against Al-Arian is an assault against the judicial system that lies like a barrier between us and despotism.

"Much of the government's evidence against me were speeches I gave, lectures I presented, articles I wrote, magazines I edited, books I owned, conferences I convened, rallies I attended, interviews I conducted, news I heard and websites no one accessed...In one instance, the evidence consisted of a conversation that one of my co-defendants had with me in his dream," he said. "It was reminiscent of the thought crime of Orwell's 'Nineteen Eighty-Four.' The scary part was not that these were offered into evidence, but that a federal judge admitted them. That's why I am so proud of the jury, who acted as the free people that they were and saw through Big Brother's tactics.

"I've been to nine prisons in nine months," he explained. "I spent the first 23 months in Coleman Federal Penitentiary, where the conditions were Guantanamo-plus, that is they were like those of the detainees in Guantanamo Bay 'plus' one phone call a month and visits with my family behind glass. I was in a nine-foot-by-eight-foot cell, where I was held under 23-hour lockdown. During the first few months, they wouldn't even allow me to exercise unless I was strip-searched, which I refused to submit to, so I was inside 24 hours. During the first month, I was allowed only one 15-minute phone call, and for six months after that I was not allowed to make any calls.

"I was shackled and handcuffed every single time I left my cell for any reason," he said. "When I needed to take my legal papers for meetings with my attorney, the guards would not carry them for me, even though they did for other prisoners. Though I was shackled, they forced me to carry them on my back, as I was bent over. I had to walk like that for half a mile. I should also mention the use of fire alarms in trying to disrupt life. In the Special Housing Unit [SHU], a punitive section of the prison where I was the only pretrial detainee, alarms and emergency sirens would go off 15 to 20 times every single day, at 12 a.m., 2 p.m., any time of the day. It was a deafening noise that would continue for five to 10 minutes. It was clearly deliberate. In the SHU, commissary was almost nonexistent. All they offered was potato chips, whereas in the general compound everything was available. The SHU was designed for disciplinary purposes, not for housing a pretrial detainee.

"Not only did they place me in the SHU, but they imposed additional restrictions on me," he went on. "For instance, everybody else was granted contact visits, while I had to see my family behind glass. They also insisted on strip-searching me before and after these behind-the-glass visits. In May 2003, my wife drove two hours to see me, but they denied her the visit when I would not submit to a strip search."

Al-Arian is a Palestinian. The injustice meted out to him in America is writ large in the Middle East. He has no passport, no home, no country. He must live on the charity of others, stateless, as most Palestinians are, and without the rights of the citizens around him. He once thought America would be his home. He was, before this charade, in the process of gaining citizenship. All this is over. In George Bush's America there is no place for activists or dissidents. And when they finish with those on the margins of our society they will turn, if we let them, on the rest of us.

http://www.truthdig.com/report/print/20070211_the_roadmap_to_despotism/

HRW slams Saudi travel ban on critics

2007-02-17T10:08:00.001+02:00

Middle East Online 2007-02-15

Human Rights Watch urges Saudi King to permit 22 activists to travel to share their vision of Kingdom's future.

DUBAI - Human Rights Watch has urged Saudi Arabia to lift travel bans on prominent critics, saying such restrictions violate international law.

"By imposing travel bans, the Saudi government is restricting the movement of leading intellectuals diminishing their ability to work for a better future for the Saudi people," the rights group wrote in a letter to King Abdullah, according to a statement issued Wednesday.

In the letter sent on February 9, the New York-based watchdog detailed travel bans on 22 activists, including three prominent constitutional reform advocates who were only released from lengthy prison terms in August 2005 following a pardon by King Abdullah.

Ali al-Demaini, Abdullah al-Hamed and Matruk al-Faleh had been serving nine, seven and six years in jail respectively after being arrested in March 2004 along with nine others, on charges of demanding a constitutional monarchy.

One of those held in 2004, Mubarak bin Zuair, was later detained and then banned from travelling after protesting to the media that his father and brother had been jailed for speaking to the media.

HRW said Faleh, a professor of political science, has been unable to take up a sabbatical position in the United States because of the ban and that other academics have lost their jobs because of their outspoken views.

"These travel bans violate international human rights law which guarantees everyone the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country," HRW said.

HRW said that some individuals were told that their ban would last five years, none were told of the reasons and that Saudi courts have refused to hear challenges.

It accused the kingdom of wanting to "punish its critics and to prevent their views from reaching a foreign audience."

"If Saudi Arabia wants to improve its image abroad, it should allow its leading intellectuals to travel abroad and share their visions of the country's future," said Sarah Leah Whitson, HRW Middle East director.

"The Saudi royal family should ask itself how long it wants to continue banning, firing and arresting its critics, and at what cost."

Washington considers key ally Saudi Arabia a "moderate" regime in the region.

http://www.middle-east-online.com/english/?id=19585

Egypt arrests 73 Brotherhood members

2007-02-17T10:05:00.000+02:00

By Heba Saleh in Cairo

The Financial Times Limited 2007 February 15 2007 20:08

The Egyptian authorities on Thursday detained 73 members of the Muslim Brotherhood, the banned group considered the largest opposition force in the country.

The arrests, in Cairo and provinces in the Nile Delta, are the latest in a campaign against the group which appears aimed at preempting its opposition to constitutional amendments that would change the electoral law and ban the establishment of parties based on religion.

Brotherhood officials also say the government wants to prevent them from taking part in elections scheduled for next May for the Shura Council, the upper chamber of parliament.

A security official was quoted as saying those detained on Thursday are accused of belonging to an illegal organisation.

Despite being banned the group operates openly in Egypt and fields candidates who run as independents under the slogan "Islam is the solution."

It surprised the Egyptian authorities in 2005 by capturing twenty percent of the seats in parliament.

But in recent weeks, Egypt president Hosni Mubarak described the organisation as a threat to national security, and the authorities appear determined to prevent it from building on its gains in the parliamentary poll.

Those arrested on Thursday include three former Brotherhood parliamentary candidates and at least four office managers who work for independent deputies representing the group in the assembly.

Almost three hundred members of the Brotherhood have been held since the latest wave of arrests started in December.

Earlier this month, the authorities referred the cases of forty Brotherhood members to a military court a move seen as an escalation of the continuing campaign against the organisation.

They include senior leaders and businessman who face accusations of money laundering. The assets of some 29 people linked to the Brotherhood have been frozen.

Press attacks against the group have also intensified in recent weeks. Newspapers close to the government have accused the organisation of preparing for violence since December when students allied to the group staged a military-style parade on the campus of Al Azhar university. They were protesting against the rigging of student union elections.

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/854e396c-bd2d-11db-b5bd-0000779e2340.html

Catalogue of provocations

2007-02-17T10:04:00.001+02:00

Israel's encroachments upon the Al-Aqsa Mosque have not been sporadic, but, rather, a systematic endeavour

Khaled Amayreh,

Al-Ahram Weekly February 15, 2007

When Israel occupied East Jerusalem in 1967, the Israeli army's chief rabbi, General Shlomo Goren, tried to convince a commander of the conquering forces, Uzi Narkis, to blow up Al-Aqsa Mosque "once and for all". This story was retold by Narkis shortly before his death in 1997 and quoted by Avi Shlaim in his important book, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World.

"There was an atmosphere of spiritual elation. Paratroopers were milling around in a daze. Narkis was standing for a moment on his own, deep in thought, when Goren went up to him and said 'Uzi, this is the time to put a hundred kilogrammes of explosives in the Mosque of Omar, and that's it. We'll get rid of it once and for all.' Narkis said 'Rabbi, stop it.' Goren then said to him, 'Uzi, you'll enter the history books by virtue of this deed.' Narkis replied, 'I have already recorded my name in the pages of the history of Jerusalem.' Goren walked away without saying another word."

Goren re-entered the Haram Al-Sharif esplanade on 15 August 1967, in military uniform along with two-dozen soldiers from the Israeli army, in order to take measurements of its length and width. Afterwards, Goren announced where the Jewish "Second Temple" would be positioned. Two weeks after this incident, the Israeli occupation army seized the key to the Moroccan Gate leading to Al-Aqsa Mosque.

Four days after the seizure of East Jerusalem, Israeli army bulldozers wantonly demolished the Maghariba and Al-Sharaf neighbourhoods, levelling them to the ground. The Palestinian inhabitants of the two neighbourhoods were expelled unceremoniously at gunpoint. At least 135 houses, two mosques, and two religious schools were completely destroyed.

In April 1968, Israel confiscated the Haret Al-Maghariba for "public use" and built on the site a large plaza in front of the so-called "Wailing" or "Western Wall". The Haret Al-Maghariba and the adjacent smaller Haret Al-Sharaf, which was also obliterated, were both Islamic waqf (religious endowment) property dating back to the Kurdish Muslim warrior Salaheddin Al-Ayoubi who defeated the Crusaders and restored Jerusalem to Islam.

On 21 August 1969, an Australian Christian Zionist, bearing the name Michael Dennis Rohan, set fire to the interior of Al-Aqsa Mosque. The fire quickly destroyed the exquisite and ancient minbar, or pulpit, of Salaheddin (a new minbar, a replica of the old one, was put into place 1 February 2007). Rohan claimed he was "the Lord's emissary" and acting upon divine instructions. He said his purpose was to enable the Jews to build a temple in order to hasten the second advent of Jesus. Israeli authorities, who later claimed that Rohan was deranged, hindered efforts to extinguish the fire.

In 1970, Israeli occupation authorities began intensive excavation works directly beneath Al-Aqsa Mosque on the southern and western sides, and in 1977, digging continued and a large tunnel was opened beneath the women's prayer area. In 1979, a new tunnel was dug under the mosque, going east to west.

On 2 March 1982, an armed Jewish terrorist and Talmudic student attacked Al-Aqsa Mosque from Bab Al-Silsila after assaulting Muslim guards. Eventually, he was overpowered.

On 11 April 1982, a Jewish American terrorist, who was also an Israeli soldier, entered the Dome of the Rock and started firing randomly at Muslim worshipers. Dozens of people were killed and injured. The Israeli government subsequently pardoned Allen Goodman, a member of the Jewish Defence League, after he spent but a few years in jail.

On 27 April 1982, Jewish terrorist leader Meir Kahana, along with 100 of his followers, stormed Al-Aqsa Mosque carrying a large diagram of the Second Temple he was planning to build "on the ruins" of Al-Aqsa Mosque.

On 27 January 1984, two waqf guards saw two Jewish terrorists fleeing near the Golden Gate. The two left behind ladders, 13 kilogrammes of explosives, and 21 Israeli- manufactured grenades similar to ones found there previously.

On 29 March 1984, the Archaeological Department of the Israeli Ministry of Religious Affairs dug a tunnel, one metre in length, two metres in width and 10 metres deep near the western part of Al-Aqsa Mosque, endangering the Islamic "Majlis" or council building.

On 1 August 1984, Al-Aqsa security guards discovered another group of Jewish terrorists preparing to blow up the mosque. Sheikh Saadeddin Al-Alami, mufti of Jerusalem, said: "had it not been for the protection of God, the whole mosque would have been completely obliterated.

Also on 1 August 1984, the Jewish terrorist Youssef Zeruya was convicted of plotting to blow up the Dome of the Rock Mosque and sentenced to three years in jail.

On 8 October 1990, Israeli "border police" soldiers murdered as many as 22 Palestinians and injured more than 100 others during a protest triggered by an attempt by Jewish extremists to lay the cornerstone for a Jewish temple in the Haram Al-Sharif plaza. On 19 August 1991, an Israeli judge, Ezra Kama, ruled that the Israeli police, not Palestinians, provoked the violence. The UN also condemned Israel for the carnage.

In September 1996, Israeli occupation authorities opened a large ancient tunnel beneath Haram Al-Sharif, sparking bloody clashes with Palestinian Authority police throughout the West Bank in which 57 Palestinians and 16 Israelis were killed.

In December 1997, Jewish terrorists tried to toss a pig's head into the Haram Al-Sharif compound.

On 28 September 2000, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon -- then opposition leader -- in deliberate provocation led hundreds of Israeli crack police into the Haram Al-Sharif compound in order to "underscore Jewish rights". The next day, Al-Aqsa Intifada broke out.

On 7 February 2007, Israeli bulldozers began digging outside Bab Al-Maghariba (the Moroccan Gate). Israel claimed that it was but repairing an old ramp leading to Al-Aqsa Mosque. Muslim officials contend the digging is part of Israeli designs against the mosque.

Two days later, Israeli occupation authorities prevented Muslims from accessing Al-Aqsa Mosque for the weekly congregational prayer. With effort a few thousand Palestinians entered the mosque where they protested against the provocative excavations. The Israeli police fired tear gas and stunned grenades at the protesters, injuring several of them.

http://www.uruknet.info/?p=m30683&hd=&size=1&l=e

Jerusalem prayers pass peacefully

2007-02-17T10:03:00.001+02:00

BBC Friday, 16 February 2007, 12:11 GMT

Islamic prayers at Jerusalem's holiest site ended peacefully on Friday, a week after clashes between Palestinians and Israeli police.

About 3,000 police were deployed around the Old City of East Jerusalem, and men under 50 were barred from entering the Temple Mount, or Haram al-Sharif.

Palestinians oppose Israeli excavations at the site, the holiest in Judaism and Islam's third holiest shrine.

Muslims say the work threatens holy remains, a charge Israel denies.

Israel says the work is needed to repair a walkway up to the compound. But Palestinian leaders see the work as a huge provocation.

Click for plan of the holy sites : http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/6368073.stm#complex

The start of the work last week sparked angry protests and Muslim leaders around the world have demanded it be halted. Plans for construction work for the walkway have been put off, but preparatory excavations continue.

Jerusalem's Palestinian mufti and officials from Israel's Islamic movement had called for a mass protest ahead of this Friday's prayers.

But the leader of the Islamic movement, Sheikh Raed Salah, remains banned from the site after being arrested during earlier protests.

Israel imposed strict limits on who could enter the compound, with many left praying on the streets outside the Old City, says the BBC's Bethany Bell, in Jerusalem.

Police remained deployed after prayers came to an end as thousands of worshippers began streaming out of the compound, seen as a possible flashpoint.

Contested

On Thursday, Turkey agreed to send an observation team to assess Israel's approach to the excavation work, and Israel has installed web cameras to broadcast the dig online.

The Haram al-Sharif is believed to be where the Prophet Muhammad made an ascent to heaven into the presence of God.

Jews believe the Temple Mount is where Abraham offered his son Isaac as a sacrifice to God and where Solomon built the First Jewish Temple. It is the holiest site in Judaism.

Israel captured East Jerusalem in the 1967 war. Since then, the compound has remained under Muslim jurisdiction in conjunction with neighbouring Jordan.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/6368073.stm

Radio Station Cries 'Enough' -- Won't Quote From Certain News Stories Relying on Unnamed Officials

2007-02-16T16:10:00.001+02:00

By Greg Mitchell

Editor and Publisher Thursday, February 15, 2007

NEW YORK After the latest widely-publicized stories in national newspapers about weapons from Iran allegedly killing Americans in Iraq -- based completely on unnamed sources -- at least one smaller news outlet has had enough of it.

The news director of the public radio station in Santa Fe, New Mexico, has directed his staff to "ignore national stories quoting unnamed sources." He also called on other news outlets to join this policy.

Bill Dupuy sent the following to his news staff.
*

Effectively immediately and until further notice, it is the policy of KSFR's news department to ignore and not repeat any wire service or nationally published story about Iran, China, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia or any other foreign power that quotes an "unnamed" U.S. official.

What we have suspected and talked about at length before is now becoming clear. "High administration officials speaking on the condition of anonymity," "Usually reliable Washington sources," and others of the like were behind the publicity that added credibility to the need to go to war against Afghanistan and Iraq.

Our news department covers local news. But, like local newspapers and others, we occassionally are taken in by national stories that we have no way to verify.

This is a small news department with a small reach. We cannot research these stories ourselves. But we can take steps not to compromise our integrity. We should not dutifully parrot whatever comes out of Washington, on the
wire or by whatever means, no matter how intriguing and urgent it sounds, when the source is unnamed.

I am also calling on our colleagues in other local news departments -- broadcast and print -- to take the same professional approach.

Greg Mitchell (gmitchell@editorandpublisher.com) is editor.

http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003545357

Over 10,400 Palestinians Languishing in Israeli Jails

2007-02-16T16:08:00.001+02:00

Mohammed Mar'i,

Arab News Thursday, 15, February, 2007

RAMALLAH, West Bank, 15 February 2007 The family of Palestinian prisoner Ismail Al-Jamal of West Bank refugee camp of Balata has appealed in a letter to international human rights organizations, especially the International Red Cross, Doctors Without Borders and the Palestinian Ministry of Prisoners Affairs to pressure Israel occupation forces for the release of their son.

The family said that Jamal, who has been sentenced to 10 and half years in jails, suffers from thrombosis and sclerosis of the arteries, after being shot by Israeli forces, during his arrest on Jan. 30, 2004.

Yahya Al-Jamal, brother of Ismail, said that his brother's health is deteriorating since the Israeli prisoners' authority refused his treatment, despite his increasing suffering and his need of an urgent medical operation.

The Palestinian Ministry of Prisoners Affairs revealed in its report on Tuesday that around 10,400 Palestinians, including women and children, are living in inhuman conditions in 30 Israeli jails.

The MPA said that most of prisoners suffer various physical and psychological diseases as a result of the inhuman circumstances and unhealthy conditions.

The MPA report added that 118 female prisoners and 330 children are still under detention in Israeli jails facing daily Israeli torture and hardships.

MPA mentioned that hundreds of children have grown to more than 18 years old inside prisons. It affirmed that at least 1,000 prisoners suffer from chronic diseases like pain of cartilage, cardiac diseases, diabetes and rheumatism, including 150 prisoners in critical cases as a result of cancer, paralysis and kidney failure.

The report stated that the Israeli forces have arrested 600 women and 6,000 children during Al-Aqsa Intifada, which erupted in September 2000. It mentioned that 553 prisoners have been detained before Al-Aqsa Intifada, including 367 who have been detained before the Oslo Accord in 1993.

In a recent development concerning the prisoners exchange deal, spokesman of the Popular Resistance Committees, Abu Mujahid, announced that the new Egyptian offer to release captured Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, in exchange for Palestinian prisoners, would be conducted in three stages. He said "the man (Shalit) will be transported to Egypt before being handed over to Israel when the three stages are completed."

Abu Mujahid said that the factions that captured Shalit had formed a joint intelligence body to deal with the case. He added that the factions adopted an antiquated system for contact between the faction leaders, which cannot be traced by the Israeli intelligence.

He refused to reveal this technique of communication but confirmed that "Shalit is now in good health and treated in a humanitarian way; he is not tortured." He also confirmed that the factions "will keep him until Israel complies with our demands."

Abu Mujahid denied that Shalit was being held at the Islamic University in Gaza, stating that the resistance cannot "hold him in such an open space, where anybody can enter and survey the area."

He clarified that the Egyptian offer comprises "three stages, through which he (Shalit) is going to be sent to Egypt and they will hand him over to Israel, but only after the three stages are completed."

Abu Mujahid said that the factions have not yet confirmed their response to the offer but that the reply "will be made, after we hear the Israeli response."

He blamed the Israeli government for the failure of all the four previous offers and he said, "We prefer not to disclose the details of the offer and not to speak about it, as this may jeopardize the deal." He said the Egyptians are playing an important role in the issue and have put in a lot of effort to arrange the exchange.

http://www.arabnews.com/?page=4&section=0&article=92175&d=15&m=2&y=2007&pix=world.jpg&category=World

Saudi prince to build hotel in Tel Aviv

2007-02-16T09:53:00.001+02:00

Ma'an - 15 / 02 / 2007 Time: 09:25

Saudi Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal is in negotiations to build an eight-storey, 150-room hotel on Tel Aviv's coastline, the Israeli newspaper 'Yedioth Ahranoth' reported in its online edition.

The Israeli paper says that two architects have already started working on the project. One is Bin Talal's private architect, who had worked with him on oriental hotels across the world, Basel al-Beiti. The other is former Tel Aviv Chief City Engineer, Yisrael Gudovich.

The planned project is a joint venture with the Abulafya family in Tel Aviv, the paper says.

Bin Talal is the nephew of the late Saudi King Faisal. He is considered to be extremely wealthy (the paper suggests he is worth $26.4 billion) with an empire that includes holdings in banks, financing and investment firms, hi-tech and communications companies, leading hotels in the United States, Europe and the Arab world, and tourist sites.

http://www.maannews.net/en/index.php?opr=ShowDetails&ID=19556

Arab law student denied entry to Sharon Mall

2007-02-16T09:51:00.001+02:00

By Fadi Eyadat

Haaretz Wed., February 14, 2007

Four law students at the Netanya College were refused entry at the city's Sharon Mall on Tuesday because the security guards identified them as being non-Jewish.

The students were asked to leave after one of them could not produce an identity card, even though his colleagues did present theirs. As they were ordered to leave, a guard sarcastically told them: "Now you have something to do your clerkship about."

The four students said they went to the mall on Tuesday morning, and at the parking lot opened their car trunk for inspection. The guard asked to see identity cards.

"This is the first time that I have been asked to show an identity card at the mall," said Sami Khoury. One of the four, a resident of Haifa, did not have his identity card with him, and consequently the guard prevented them from entering the mall.

Mall secuirty guard, Meir Twito, arrived and explained that because they are members of "minorities," they had to show an identity card.

"I told Twito that this is racism, and that we are being checked because we are Arabs, and he told us to complain - and that 'now you have something to do your clerkship about,'" Khoury said.

The chief of security at the mall, Uri Peled, said that "the matter was being investigated."

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/826170.html

Rashid lawyer claims govt is hiding information

2007-02-16T09:50:00.000+02:00

Pretoria, South Africa

Mail & Guardian 14 February 2007 06:30

Deported Pakistani Khalid Rashid's lawyer on Wednesday claimed he had new information suggesting the South African government is hiding information about the man's whereabouts.

Attorney Zehir Omar, acting for Rashid's family, this week filed an urgent application in the Pretoria High Court, requesting a full bench of the court, headed by Transvaal Judge President Bernard Ngoepe, to accept an affidavit containing the "new facts" before making a final decision in an application about the legality of Rashid's arrest and deportation.

Omar said Rashid's arrest and deportation is a disguised extradition and amounts to a crime against humanity.

The court was supposed to have delivered judgement on Wednesday, but will now hear further legal argument on Thursday afternoon.

In papers filed in the court this week, Rashid's lawyers said that in December last year they received a document compiled by Amnesty International, which suggests that Safety and Security Minister Charles Nqakula knew more about Rashid's whereabouts.

The document contains minutes of the November 2006 meeting of the United Nations's Committee against Torture, held in Geneva.

According to this document, Nqakula had responded to questions about Rashid's whereabouts by saying that "Mr Rashid had been visited in Pakistan, inter alia, by officials from the minister of safety and security. To his knowledge, Mr Rashid was still in Pakistan".

Rashid's lawyers thereafter demanded information on who had visited Rashid, when they did so and the reasons for the "continued concealment" of Rashid's whereabouts. They claim they are still waiting for an answer.

Immigrating officer Joe Swartland in court papers not only denied claims that Rashid had "disappeared", but said suggestions that the conduct of home affairs amounts to a crime against humanity is "defamatory".

"Officials of the government of Pakistan have provided more than ample proof of their receipt of Mr Rashid in Pakistan. Notwithstanding sufficient evidence having been provided in this regard, the applicant persists in his refusal to accept statements made by the officials of the government of Pakistan," he said.

He said the so-called minutes that Omar now tried to place before the court amount to nothing more than hearsay and were therefore denied. -- Sapa

http://www.mg.co.za/articlepage.aspx?area=/breaking_news/breaking_news__national/&articleid=299074

Britain shamed over CIA flights

2007-02-16T09:49:00.003+02:00

Richard Norton-Taylor

The Guardian Thursday February 15, 2007

The European parliament yesterday accused EU governments including Britain, Germany and Italy of turning a blind eye to CIA flights taking terror suspects to countries where they might be tortured.

A report that was adopted by 382 votes to 256, with 74 abstentions, criticises Britain for cooperating with the CIA in sending three UK residents on rendition fights.

It expresses "outrage" at a legal opinion from Michael Wood, former legal adviser to the Foreign Office, who said "receiving or possessing" information extracted under torture did not in itself breach international conventions "in so far as there is no direct participation in the torture".

Claude Moraes, the lone Labour MEP on the committee that drew up the report, said that although there was only circumstantial evidence of British collusion in the CIA practice the European Parliament had "set a line in the sand". He added: "It was a red flag for the future."

Amnesty International's UK campaigns director, Tim Hancock, said the British government should allow an independent investigation. "There is already serious concern at the possible complicity of UK officials in the rendition of two UK residents, Bisher al-Rawi and Jamil el-Banna, from Gambia to Guantanamo Bay," he said. Tory MP Andrew Tyrie, chairman of the all-party parliamentary group on rendition, said countries involved must "come clean on what they know, and fast".

Video : This is War

2007-02-16T09:49:00.001+02:00

"Do it in the name of God"

They have created a wasteland and call it Democracy. ...

Dare we look on our victims?

- Warning -

This video should only be viewed by mature audience

Video 7 Minutes

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article17069.htm

The Ameriya Shelter - St. Valentine's Day Massacre

2007-02-15T15:55:00.001+02:00

Felicity Arbuthnot

URUKNET February 13, 2007

It is sixteen years since the Ameriyah Shelter in west Baghdad was bombed, incinerating all but eight, inside. Figures for the souls lost, still vary from four hundred and five to over twelve hundred, the registration book was incinerated along with those who had sought refuge, women,children, students and on occasion, the very old. The men stayed out to make room for those whom they wished protection - and to rescue others from the ongoing carpet bombing. The Shelter was only used over night.

The shelter had been built to withstand a possible nuclear attack, during the eight year, western driven, Iran-Iraq war. Walls three metres thick with the roof reinforced by the near indestructable steel 'mesh' used to support four or six lane road bridges. The only vulnerable point was the ventilation shaft. Iraq had chosen a Finnish company to build shelters throughout Baghdad, selecting the company because of perceived Finnish neutrality and commercial integrity. The company, reportedly passed the plans to the US prior to the 1991 onslaught.

I visited the Shelter just months after the bombing. We were a group from various countries and arrived in the early, sparkling sunlight. So unscathed was the building from the outside, that we had not realised where we were, talking and laughing under a sky still painted with dawn's translucenct trails and myriad shades of orange and ochre.

Entering, there was a stunned silence. The smell of burning flesh still overwhelmed. I found myself tiptoeing through the blackened interior, under the melted piping, tiptoeing through the screams. There were sooted plastic flowers laid in dark corners, pathetic scraps of bloodied gauze. The only light was from the near perfect spherical entry point of the missiles, illuminating below, the great crater where they fell, the jagged remains of the centimetres thick steel mesh, hanging, a 'surgical strike' indeed, as a knife through butter - against women and children.

The Shelter, as during the Iran-Iraq war and in 1991, had been a safe haven in abnormal times. With electricity bombed, the huge generators allowed the children brief childhood normality: watching television, playing video games, reading, playing, homework - and the bombs could not be heard. The rows of bunk beds were a treat, with a rush to get the top bunk, a joyous eyrie of escape and escapism.

There were two vast floors, the top for sleeping, studying, socialising, sharing meals, the lower had showers, kitchens, a medical centre. When the bombs fell, the heat incinerated those on the top floor - and the vast water tank on the lower floor heated to bursting - boiling those showering, or chatting whilst cooking the evening meal, or those whose ailments were being treated and the medical staff.

The breast high 'scum' on the walls, was the flesh of those who perished. On the upper floor is the seared 'shadow' of a mother, holding her baby. Hiroshima revisited. I could bear the screams no longer and fled out and in to the sunlight. Noticing a small, blackened, brass plaque on the wall, I asked a Jordanian friend what it read. He struggled with the translation for a moment, the: 'It is like when there is a crisis and civilian people try to help ..' 'Civil Defence?' I asked : 'Yes, yes, it says Civil Defence Shelter No:24.'

America had, of course, claimed it was a Command Centre for Saddam Hussein's government. A lie, as ever, of enormity. Further, the U.S. had satellites watching everything (which continued through the embargo years, as now, clearly visible, blinking away like vast stars, floating, rotating.) A consistent comment over numerous interviews in the area and Baghdad, about the Shelter horror, that first vist and over subsequent years, was that for three days before, a satellite had been rotating over the district.Thus it would have recorded women and children entering it at dusk and leaving at dawn. That night there would have been a particular procession and it was the eve of the festival of Eid and with no means of cooking at home for the fast breaking, women took their food to prepare in the kitchens and their festive gifts, to wrap under the lights.

When the fire engines arrived, the rescuers could hear the screams, until they began to fade away - but the great metre thick steel door, with airline type handles to seal it from the inside for safety, was glowing like a furnace, then as it melted, re-sealed itself. Dante, revisited. To have poured water from gaping missile hole in the roof, would have subjected those inside to boiling steam.The fire Chief, the toughest of men, who had seen the unimaginable and directed rescues over many years, faltered as he said, of the remains they finally brought out: 'We thought we were bringing out only children and wondered why they were there alone - then we realised the (adult) bodies had (contracted) to child size with the intensity of the heat.'

Anwar, then eighteen and a student ran to help, with a friend with whom he was staying, nearby. When talking of that night, he too faltered and stilled, then gestured with his hands, saying: 'The peoples, the bodies, they had gone so small - like this ..' There is a haunting tale told by Umm Rheda (mother of Rheda) who left the shelter temporarily to take some preparations home. Whilst she way away, the bombs fell her children were incinerated, with Rheda, her eldest daughter. When all the emergency services experts, the army which was drafted in, had failed to open the door, she begged and screamed to try. It opened: 'Rheda opened it for me',she says.The fire Chief confirmed that Umm Rheda opened the door.

The Shelter, over time, became a shrine, the bereaved, visitors brought momentos, pictures of the dead, the babies, the mischevious, the young mothers, the earnest students, stared from the walls. The floor was cleaned and polished, but the skin, the shadows, the seared walls and the screams remained. Until 2003, this was a unique U.S. wickedness. Another was an early act of their invading troops : to storm it (with their boots on of course) and search this sacred, sobbing site, for weapons. And now courtesy again, of the U.S.A., all Iraq is Al Ameriyah.

Three days before the Shelter bombing, Dick Cheney, now Vice President and General Colin Powell (designated a 'dove' by the George W. Bush Administration) visited the US Air base at Khamis Mushat, Saudia Arabia (slogan: 'bombs are us' and 'we live so others may die.') After a pep talk to troops, they both signed two thousand pound bombs: 'To Saddam with fond regards', wrote Cheney ('A General's War', General Bernard Traynor and Michael Gordon, Little Brown, p.324.)

When the Shelter was bombed, frantic calls followed incase the bombs might have been involved in this massacre. Cheyney's bomb apparently fell on northern Iraq, dropped by a Major Wes Wyrich. What souls Powell's decimated, is seemingly unknown.

The Ameriyah Shelter was bombed on the night of 13th/14th February : the celebration of Eid, St. Valentine's Day and the anniversary of the fire bombing of Dresden. When I put this to a U.S. General and remarked on the 'coincidence', he looked me in the eye and said: 'Kinda neat, eh?'

http://www.uruknet.info/?p=m30603&hd=&size=1&l=e

George Monbiot : The parallel universe of BAE: covert, dangerous and beyond the rule of law

2007-02-15T15:54:00.001+02:00

How long can Britain's biggest arms company run a secret service and trump the armed forces in political influence?

The Guardian Tuesday February 13, 2007

There is a state within a state in the United Kingdom, a small but untouchable domain that appears to be subject to a different set of laws. We have heard quite a bit about it over the past two months, but hardly anyone knows just how far its writ runs. The state is BAE Systems, Britain's biggest arms company. It seems, among other advantages, to be able to run its own secret service.

This week, Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT) hopes to obtain a court order against BAE. The order would allow it to discover how the arms company obtained one of its confidential documents. CAAT instructed its lawyers, Leigh Day & Co, to seek a judicial review of the government's decision to drop the corruption case against BAE, which is alleged to have paid massive bribes to members of the Saudi royal family. Leigh Day sent CAAT an email containing advice on costs and tactics. The email ended up in the hands of the arms company.

How? Correspondence between a plaintiff and his lawyers couldn't be more private. The last people you would show it to are the defendants in the case. But somehow the letter found its way to BAE's offices.

The arms company argues that it was the unwitting and unwilling recipient of the email. So why does it refuse to tell CAAT who sent it? Why, far from assisting CAAT's attempt to explain this mystery, has it threatened the group with costs for seeking to reveal BAE's source?

CAAT has good reason to be suspicious. In 2003, the Sunday Times revealed that BAE had carried out a "widespread spying operation" on its critics. "Bank accounts were accessed, computer files downloaded and private correspondence with members of parliament and ministers secretly copied and passed on." The paper said the arms company made use of a network run by a former consultant for the Ministry of Defence called Evelyn Le Chene. "Le Chene recruited at least half a dozen agents to infiltrate CAAT's headquarters at Finsbury Park, north London, and a number of regional offices." They provided BAE with advanced intelligence on CAAT's campaign against the sale of its Hawk aircraft to the Suharto dictatorship in Indonesia. The arms company also obtained CAAT's membership list, its bank account details, the identity of its donors, its letters to ministers, even the contents of private diaries belonging to its staff.

After the story was published, CAAT asked a team of investigators to examine the messages sent from its offices. They found that one of the group's most senior members of staff, the national campaigns and events coordinator, had sent 181 emails to an unfamiliar address. Many of them contained extremely sensitive information.

The coordinator, Martin Hogbin, denied that he was an agent of Le Chene's. He claimed that the mysterious email address belonged to a former CAAT volunteer, and that he had been sending him this information because he might find it interesting.

The investigators contacted the former volunteer, who told them that he had not received any messages from Hogbin, and did not recognise the address. CAAT took the case to the United Kingdom's Information Commissioner, who found that the email address belonged to "a company with links to Evelyn Le Chene". Both Le Chene and Hogbin refused to assist the investigations. If it was true that Hogbin was working for Le Chene, it would be a tremendous coup for her and her clients. As campaigns and events coordinator, he knew more than anyone else about CAAT's plans. If BAE were to obtain and make use of such intelligence, it could anticipate and outmanoeuvre the Campaign's attempts to expose or embarrass it.

BAE's spying operations represent just one way in which the company looks like a parallel state. It also appears to enjoy crown immunity. Last August, this column suggested that the Saudi corruption case might be dropped, in order to protect a new order for 72 BAE jets. It was not a hard prediction to make - Saudi Arabia had made the new deal conditional on the abandonment of the case. But I could not have guessed that both the attorney general and the prime minister would make such a show of squashing the investigation. They seemed to go out of their way to demonstrate to BAE's clients that they would do whatever it took to protect the new order, even if it meant exposing themselves to allegations of collusion.

The prime minister has never taken such a risk on behalf of one of his departments, let alone his ministers or officials (witness how Lord Levy and Ruth Turner have been left to swing). There are just two friends for whom he will put his legacy on the line: George Bush and BAE.

In 2001, Blair overruled Clare Short and Gordon Brown to grant an export licence for BAE's sale of a military air-traffic control system to one of the world's poorest countries, Tanzania. The World Bank had pointed out that the contract was ridiculously expensive - Tanzania could have bought a better system elsewhere for a quarter of the price. In January the Guardian revealed that BAE Systems allegedly paid a $12m (£6.2m) "commission" to an agent who brokered the deal.

In 2005, Blair made a secret visit to Riyadh to expedite BAE's deal with the Saudi princes. He then sent both John Reid and Des Browne to clinch the order. Ministers in the UK have always acted as unpaid salesmen for the arms companies, but seldom has a prime minister muddied his hands this much. Blair pushed the order through by promising the Saudis that they could have the first 24 planes ahead of schedule. How? By selling them the jets already allotted to the RAF. BAE's interests, in other words, trump the requirements of our own armed forces.

Blair has also broken his government's pledge to publish the report by the National Audit Office on BAE's dealings in Saudi Arabia. It remains the only NAO report never to have been made public. We can only guess why the prime minister needs to protect it.

It could be argued, with some force, that this government has always had a special relationship with big business, rather like its special relationship with George Bush (it gets beaten up and thanks him for it). But the special favours it grants BAE are deeply resented by other corporations. After the suppression of the Saudi case, F&C Asset Management, a very large institutional investor, wrote to the government to complain that its decision undermined the rule of law and the predictability of the investment climate. Hermes, Britain's biggest pension fund, said that it threatened the UK's reputation as a leading financial centre, and the chairman of Anglo-American wrote that the abandonment of the case "damaged the reputation of Britain".

At what point does the government conclude that this company has got out of control? That it presents a danger to national interests, to the reputation of the prime minister, to the privacy and civil liberties of its opponents? Why does it appear to be above the law? For how much longer will it be permitted to run what looks like a parallel secret service? Of all the questions we might ask of our ministers, these are the least likely to be answered.

monbiot.com

Malcolm X's daughter carries on his message

2007-02-15T15:54:00.000+02:00

Muslim News 14-02-2007

By Brad A. Greenberg

NORTHRIDGE - On Feb. 21, 1965, Malcolm X walked onto a stage in New York's Audubon Ballroom to preach his message of African-American freedom by any means necessary.

It was a message he had delivered hundreds of times. But within moments, three members of the Nation of Islam rushed the stage. He was shot 15 times.

"This was not somebody on a grassy knoll," his eldest daughter, Attallah Shabazz, told an audience Monday in Cal State Northridge. "This was in a room like this."

Shabazz spoke to about 250 students and faculty - black and white, Muslim and non-Muslim - about her father's legacy as an African-American and Muslim leader.

"He didn't leave this Earth knowing he would matter 42 years later," she said. "That is a conversation I have with God: That if you live right, you will be remembered."

Shabazz was invited by the Muslim Student Association to highlight Cal State Northridge's events for Black History Month. The event, co-sponsored by the Black Student Union and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, included a screening of the Malcolm X PBS documentary "Make It Plain," followed by a half-hour Q&A with Shabazz.

"A lot of us wonder why a Muslim organization doing an event for Black History Month," association President Zabie Mansoory said in a brief introduction. "An interesting piece of information: 40 percent of Muslims in America are African American."

The film spanned Malcolm's life - from teenage hustler to Nation of Islam spokesman to the movement's antagonist and finally its victim - showing how radical his message was at a time when Martin Luther King Jr. was preaching nonviolence.

Malcolm, whom the film said evaded service in World War II by telling the draft board he wanted to organize black soldiers to kill whites, told African Americans that if they weren't willing to fight for themselves, no one would be.

"Who taught you to hate yourself from the top of your head to the bottom of your feet? ... Who taught you to hate yourself as God created you?" he asks in the beginning of the film.

After a falling out with Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm underwent another transformation in 1964. He had attended hajj, the journey to Mecca that every able Muslim is instructed to do once. And he returned a Sunni Muslim, suddenly able to embrace nonblack Muslims, one of his many legacies.

"Malcolm X is one of my heroes," said Sarah Chaudhry, a 19-year-old Muslim of Pakistani descent. "He was one of us."

http://www.pasadenastarnews.com/news/ci_5216167

http://www.muslimnews.co.uk/news/news.php?article=12349

Long a Target Over Faulty Iraq Intelligence, Ex-CIA Chief Prepares to Return Fire

2007-02-15T15:53:00.001+02:00

By Mark Mazzetti and Julie Bosman

The New York Times Tuesday 13 February 2007

Washington - For the past two years, George J. Tenet has maintained a determined silence even as senior White House officials have laid the blame for the prewar mistakes about Saddam Hussein on him. But now Mr. Tenet, the nation's former spy chief, is preparing to return fire.

Mr. Tenet was awarded a Presidential Medal of Freedom at a grand White House ceremony in December 2004, after stepping down as director of central intelligence, only to have Vice President Dick Cheney appear on "Meet the Press" 21 months later and pin the mistake about the Iraq intelligence squarely on him.

Now, as he races to complete a memoir due out this spring, the talk in Washington has turned to how Mr. Tenet, known for fierce loyalty and political survival instincts that enabled him to weather both Democratic and Republican administrations, will use the book to juggle a host of agendas: polishing his legacy, settling scores and explaining just what he meant when he said it was a "slam dunk" that Mr. Hussein had unconventional weapons.

Of course, Mr. Tenet must finish the book first, which has proved to be something of challenge. The book was supposed to hit shelves last week, but Mr. Tenet was still writing as late as last month. The book has also undergone a slow vetting process at the White House and the C.I.A., which reviewed it to ensure it did not contain classified information.

Friends and former colleagues of Mr. Tenet note that he built his career by making more friends than enemies, and they say he is unlikely to use his book to pick new fights. But some of president Bush's top aides with whom Mr. Tenet clashed in the past, including Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, are said to be targets of criticism.

"George is a born politician and he wants everyone to love him, but in order to sell books he's going to have to throw somebody out of the lifeboat," said a former colleague of Mr. Tenet at the C.I.A., one of several people interviewed for this article who requested anonymity because they did not want to speak on the record until the book was published.

Mr. Tenet is not expected to take on Mr. Bush, with whom he developed a close bond during early morning intelligence briefings in the Oval Office. But Mr. Tenet's friends said he had been surprised when Mr. Cheney and Ms. Rice, appearing on Sunday talk shows last September, fingered him in justifying Mr. Bush's decision to go to war with Iraq.

In the interview on "Meet the Press," Mr. Cheney said: "George Tenet sat in the Oval Office and the president of the United States asked him directly, he said, 'George, how good is the case against Saddam on weapons of mass destruction?' The director of the C.I.A. said, 'It's a slam dunk, Mr. President, it's a slam dunk.'"

Mr. Cheney added, "That was the intelligence that was provided to us at the time, and based upon which we made a choice."

Promotional materials for the book promise that Mr. Tenet will give the "real context" for that episode.

One person who has read early drafts of the book said Mr. Tenet defended himself by carefully parsing the "slam dunk" comment: he said he was not telling Mr. Bush that there was rock-solid evidence that Mr. Hussein had chemical and biological weapons, only that the president could make a "slam dunk" case to the American public about these weapons programs.

David L. Boren, the former chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee and a longtime friend of Mr. Tenet, said it was Mr. Tenet's friends and former C.I.A. colleagues who urged him to write a book to balance the record.

Mr. Boren said that in the weeks before the Iraq war, he warned Mr. Tenet that since he was not a member of Mr. Bush's closest circle of advisers, the White House would make him the scapegoat if things went badly in Iraq.

"I told him they had your name circled if anything goes wrong," recalled Mr. Boren, who is now president of the University of Oklahoma.

Tina Andreadis, a spokeswoman for HarperCollins, declined to discuss the book in detail. People who have read parts of the manuscript said it would span Mr. Tenet's career at the C.I.A., with a particular focus on the agency's warnings about Al Qaeda and operations in Afghanistan after the Sept. 11 attacks.

One publisher who met with Mr. Tenet to discuss publishing the book said he had vowed to defend the assessments of C.I.A. analysts about Iraq.

"He wanted everybody to know that he felt the portrayal was inaccurate," the publisher said. "He defended the agency. He was very emotional. This was not a mea culpa."

Mr. Tenet has been applauded for sounding an early alarm about the threat from Osama bin Laden and his network. Yet his exchanges with the Sept. 11 commission left some commission staff members puzzled about his recollection of details of certain crucial decisions.

"He has a lot to be proud of and a lot he will want to explain," said Philip D. Zelikow, who was executive director of the Sept. 11 commission and more recently a counselor to Ms. Rice. "If he felt that he was constrained in his ability to tell the full story when he was a member of the Clinton or Bush administrations, then people like me should wait patiently and read what he has to say now before offering further judgments."

According to HarperCollins's original news release for the book: "Tenet will offer a gripping narration of the run-up to the war in Iraq. Saddam Hussein's Iraq was an unusual foe: Never before had a rogue nation tried so hard to convince the world that it had WMD."

A string of carefully planned news media appearances to promote the book has been in place for months. HarperCollins has decided to release it on a Monday, rather than a Tuesday, when most books are released, to coincide with a scheduled Sunday evening appearance by Mr. Tenet on "60 Minutes" on CBS.

The Crown Publishing Group first signed a book contract with Mr. Tenet in December 2004 for a reported $4 million, but the contract was dissolved a few months later when Mr. Tenet hedged on a delivery date.

The publisher who met with Mr. Tenet said he had spoken extensively about the toll that the Iraq war had taken on his family, particularly on his son, who was "teased mercilessly" at school. "Other kids would yell, 'Your dad's a murderer!' and that kind of thing," the publisher recalled him saying.

For Mr. Tenet, the downside of waiting so long to emerge with his own account is that other books by journalists and former officials have already shaped public opinion about his role in the Iraq war, and some of Mr. Tenet's friends fear that his account may be arriving too late.

Other allies said that while his book would give a fresh perspective, it would still be one account among many competing interpretations of the events of the past five years.

"Because of the nature of intelligence work, you can never totally set the record straight," said former Senator Bob Kerrey, a member of the Sept. 11 commission who has known Mr. Tenet since the two worked together on the Senate Intelligence Committee. "The record is always going to be a little bit murky."

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/021307D.shtml

Media fall for pro-Israel hate group's "Terror Free Oil"

2007-02-15T15:53:00.000+02:00

Ali Abunimah,

Ali Abunimah is the co-founder of The Electronic Intifada and author of One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse

The Electronic Intifada, 13 February 2007

see photos here : http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article6551.shtml

In recent days, National Public Radio and the BBC have been among the countless media outlets to give prominent publicity to an organization calling itself "Terror Free Oil," (TFO) which claims to have established gasoline filling stations in several US cities, that do not sell oil from the Middle East.

Much of the coverage has read like a press release for the organization, or has treated it as a cute feature story, accepting at face value the claims made by its spokesman. The fundamentally racist nature of the claims TFO makes, and the long history of anti-Muslim statements and activities of its founder have been totally ignored.

The Terror-Free Oil Initiative claims on its website that it is "dedicated to encouraging Americans to buy gasoline that originated from countries that do not export or finance terrorism." It states, "We educate the public by promoting those companies that acquire their crude oil supply from nations outside the Middle East and by exposing those companies that do not."

Yet it does not specify anywhere which countries these are more precisely than the "Middle East," nor how buying oil from them supports terrorism.

The initiative's founders view all the people of the Middle East and their governments as supporters of terrorism. Emphasizing this, the website includes slogans that gas station owners are encouraged to display, such as "Our oil does not come from the Middle East, Your dollars do NOT finance terrorism."

Another, demonstrating the indiscriminate and racially-based nature of the campaign, states "This Gas Station is part of Terror Free Oil Initiative - We do not purchase our oil from countries whose regimes or populations are hostile to the United States."

Non Middle East countries whose "regimes or populations" American nationalists view as hostile to the United States, such as Venezuela are not targeted by the initiative. The TFO logo features the Twin Towers and an outline of the Pentagon with the flight numbers of the aircraft that were crashed into them by hijackers on September 11, 2001.

Other TFO propaganda features the image of Osama Bin Laden with his face crossed out, reinforcing the message that the entire population of the Middle East should be viewed as indistinguishable from Bin Laden. In short, the Terror Free Oil Initiative is as blatantly racist as somebody opening a "Usury Free Bank" and proclaiming "We don't lend Jewish money."

Terror Free Oil's claims are also economic nonsense. It has been forced to admit that its suppliers do in fact buy oil originating in Middle East countries. As oil is a fungible commodity, TFO cannot do anything to reduce income to Middle East oil exporters, unless it reduces the total amount of oil consumed globally.

It takes only moments to discover that TFO spokesman Joe Kaufman is founder of a group called "Americans Against Hate," whose main agenda appears to be support for the Israeli extremist right. Its main product appears to be a relentless stream of statements claiming that mainstream American Muslim organizations are terrorist fronts, and labeling anyone who dares to criticise Israel a "radical Islamist" or supporter of terrorism. The whole "Terror Free Oil Initiative" and website appear to be little more than a ploy to steer people towards Americans Against Hate, whose Coral Springs, Florida mailbox serves as the corporate address for both organizations.

In a January 4 article on the extreme right-wing website Frontpagemag.com, Kaufman claimed that newly elected Minnesota Congressman Keith Ellison "carried much radical Islamist baggage," and he refers to American Muslim groups as "America's live-in enemies." Last December, Kaufman called California Senator Barbara Boxer a "senator for terror" because she bestowed a public service award on a Muslim American community activist who had previously criticized Israeli human rights abuses. Under pressure from Kaufman's organization, Boxer, a staunch supporter of Israel, withdrew the award. ("Sen. Boxer rescinds award to Islamic activist," Los Angeles Times, 6 January 2007).

The "Terror Free Oil" initiative was a successful, headline-grabbing stunt by a group of unabashed racists and demogogues. Would it have succeeded in getting so much benign and uncritical attention if its hateful message had been targeted at any other population?

http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article6551.shtml

Met inquiry into Galloway recommended

2007-02-15T15:52:00.001+02:00

David Leigh and Rob Evans

The Guardian Wednesday February 14, 2007

Allegations that George Galloway may have broken UN sanctions by receiving oil money from Saddam Hussein have been sent to Scotland Yard by the Serious Fraud Office. The office has recommended that police open an investigation, and talks are currently taking place with the Crown Prosecution Service.

After deliberating for a year, the SFO has decided that the Respect MP for Bethnal Green and Bow, who has denied any impropriety, will not be investigated on separate offence of corruption.

To prosecute for sanctions-busting, the police would have to find evidence that Mr Galloway knew that money earned from oil sales was being diverted to pay for his political campaigning. Under the UN sanctions, oil sales were only permitted for approved humanitarian purposes.

Scotland Yard said yesterday: "The Metropolitan police is in discussions with the Crown Prosecution Service and is seeking its advice. We are considering a request to investigate the matter. We are not investigating at this time." A spokesman for Mr Galloway dismissed the move. "This story is so old, so hoary, so repetitive that it could be on the TV programme Life on Mars. George has been exonerated repeatedly. The SFO must have handed a blank sheet of paper to Scotland Yard. It is a waste of public servants' time."

The Volcker report, a 2005 US-backed investigation into abuses of the UN oil-for-food programme, accused Mr Galloway of receiving illicit payments in return for campaigning for the sanctions on Iraq to be lifted. Similar accusations were made by a congressional committee chaired by US Republican senator Norm Coleman.

Mr Galloway was a vocal critic of the sanctions in the 1990s through his campaign, the Mariam Appeal. Large donations came from a Jordanian businessman, Fawaz Zureikat.

The Volcker report said Mr Zureikat was given $740,000 (£380,000) by Taurus Petroleum, an oil company which had acquired Iraqi shipments. He then distributed the cash in several ways, the report said, some of it as a kickback to the Saddam's regime.

He donated $340,000 to the Mariam Appeal, and another $150,000 allegedly went to a bank account controlled by Mr Galloway's then wife, Amineh Abu Zayyad. The Volcker report claimed that Iraq allocated the selling-rights to 18m barrels of oil "to support Mr Galloway's campaign against the sanctions".

Mr Galloway has denied that he asked for these consignments, and says that he never received financial support from Saddam's regime.

He says he did not know whether Mr Zureikat was passing kickbacks to Baghdad or whether the Jordanian businessman's donation to the Mariam Appeal came from oil sales made under the oil-for-food programme.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/oil/story/0,,2012540,00.html

Fatah source: Abbas wants Mohammed Dahlan as deputy PM

2007-02-15T15:52:00.000+02:00

(see also Who is Mohammad Dahlan? below)

By Avi Isscharoff, Haaretz Correspondent

Haaretz 14/02/2007

A senior figure in Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah movement said Wednesday that the Palestinian Authority Chairman wants party strongman Mohammed Dahlan to serve as deputy prime minister in a new unity government headed by Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh of Hamas.

Dahlan, an advisor to late PA chairman Yasser Arafat, is viewed as Fatah's most senior figure in the generally Hamas-dominated Gaza Strip.

Haniyeh said Tuesday that it was "too early to talk about the resignation of the [Hamas-run] Palestinian government" in the context of the Mecca agreement on a Palestinian unity government.

The prime minister was speaking as he arrived at the PLO office in the Gaza Strip, where he was meeting with representatives of other Palestinian factions.

Haniyeh had been slated to submit his resignation on Wednesday, according to a statement made Monday by his political adviser, Ahmed Yusuf.

But Palestinian sources said Haniyeh is worried that Abbas will try to prevent him from being appointed head of the unity government, due to heavy Israeli and American pressure to get the new government to recognize Israel.

It appears that Haniyeh is waiting for Abbas to make an official announcement assigning Haniyeh the task of forming a new government. Abbas is expected to make the announcement Thursday.

Meanwhile, Abbas's adviser, Nabil Amar, said that top European Union officials with whom he met recently in Brussels viewed the Mecca agreement in a positive light but requested more time to examine the new situation.

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=825609&contrassID=1&subContrassID=0&sbSubContrassID=0

ALSO READ....................

Who is Mohammad Dahlan?

Arjan El Fassed,

The Electronic Intifada, 20 December 2006

Some have called Mohammad Dahlan the Palestinian Ahmad Chalabi, because he reportedly negotiated with the US and Israel about taking control of Gaza after the August 2005 disengagement plan. In April 2002 testifying before the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, Defense Minister Benjamin Ben-Eliezer said he had offered control of the Gaza Strip to Dahlan. In exchange, Dahlan, who had control of the most significant military force on the Gaza Strip, would be obligated to ensure complete quiet along the border.[1] He is believed to have drawn up an early agreement at a January 1994 meeting in Rome with senior Israeli military and Shin Bet officials to contain Hamas, and was actively involved in subsequent negotiations with the Israelis.[2]

Today, Dahlan has become the face of one side of Fatah as violence increased between Hamas and Fatah. In the past week he has made his way back into Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas' inner circle. Last week, Hamas accused Dahlan of planning an attempted assassination of prime minister Ismail Haniya of the Hamas movement. Haniya was returning from a Middle East tour which raised badly needed funds for Palestinians under occupation, and obtained a promise from the Syrian government to release all Palestinians in its jails, when chaos ensued. The situation at the Egypt-Gaza border crossing was tense as it had not been open long enough for the thousands of people waiting on both sides to pass. The Israelis closed the border when Haniya first tried to enter as he was bringing in funds, prohibited under the US-led economic and political blockade imposed after Hamas won the parliamentary elections in January.

Dahlan began a tour of Palestinian towns this week to rally support for Fatah, but it was not a spectacular success. On December 17, while Dahlan toured Jenin refugee camp, gunmen fired in the air over his convoy, shouting at him until he made a hasty exit. He blamed Hamas for sparking the killing of three children in Gaza City and said that Hamas "does not have any political program, leaving the Palestinian people in the predicament they have lived through since this government took responsibility."

Meanwhile the United States has accelerated its arms transfers to Fatah, via Israel. Dahlan is now in command of the armed campaign against Hamas from presidential headquarters in Ramallah.

Dahlan was a founding member of Shabiba, the youth association of Fatah. In 1994, Dahlan headed the notorious Preventive Security Forces in Gaza. He is known to have good connections with the Egyptian leadership and the US administration, through his connections with the CIA. Dahlan built up a force of at least 20,000 men and received help from CIA officials to train them. Jibril Rajoub, another Fatah strongman, is Dahlan's sworn rival. Dahlan and Rajoub were both jailed by Israel during the first Intifada. Under Oslo they became heads of the Preventive Security Services in Gaza and the West Bank respectively. At that time they were both viewed as pragmatists, representative of a new generation of Palestinians who could live with Israel.

Both Dahlan and Rajoub were implicated in financial scandals and human rights violations. Dahlan worked together with Israeli authorities to crack down on opposition groups, most notably Hamas, arresting thousands of members. Dahlan was in command when his Preventive Security Forces arbitrary arrest hundreds of Palestinians. The first violent clashes between his forces and demonstrators erupted on November 18, 1994.The toll of at least fifteen dead and hundreds wounded raised troubling questions about his troops.

Throughout the years, Dahlan's forces were involved in acts of violence and intimidation against critics, journalists and members of opposition groups, primarily from Hamas, imprisoning them without formal charges for weeks or months at a time. A number of prisoners died under suspicious circumstances during or after interrogation by Dahlan's forces.[3]

In 1996, Dahlan's troops were involved in mass arbitrary arrests of opponents of Fatah. In the aftermath of the February-March suicide bombings in Israel, an estimated 2,000 people were rounded up, often arbitrarily. Most of those detained were never charged with a criminal offense or put on trial. Torture and ill-treatment by his forces occurred regularly during interrogation and led to a number of deaths.

In 2000, Dahlan participated in the Camp David negotiations and Israeli leaders saw him as someone they could do business with. As head of one of the main Palestinian security organisations, Mr Dahlan also negotiated with Israeli officials to try to arrange a ceasefire several times after the most recent Intifada erupted in September 2000. With the beginning of the second intifada, Dahlan claimed that he was unable to stop the activities of such militant groups as Hamas.

In 2001 he angered the late Palestinian president Yasir Arafat by expressing his dissatisfaction over the lack of a coherent policy during the current uprising. Dahlan resigned in June 2002 over disagreements with Arafat to reform the Palestinian Authority. He attempted to gather support for an electoral challenge to Arafat, but stopped, when the Bush administration demanded a change in PA leadership in July of the same year. Before his resignation from the PA in June 2002, Dahlan was a frequent member on negotiating teams for security issues.

In March and April 2002, Dahlan was one of the "Gang of Five" who lead the PA during the siege of Arafat's headquarters in Ramallah. Although Arafat retained power and named Dahlan as National Security Advisor in July 2002, Dahlan resigned three months later complaining of lack of authority and organization in the Palestinian Authority. Against Arafat's wishes, Mahmoud Abbas, then serving as prime minister, appointed Dahlan as Interior Minister, but when Abbas resigned, Dahlan was left outside the newly formed cabinet.

After being left out of the new Palestinian Authority cabinet, Dahlan began gathering support from low-level Fatah officials and former Preventive Security Service officers in response to a perceived lack of democratic reforms among Fatah leaders.

In 2004, Dahlan was the driving force behind week-long unrests in Gaza following the appointment of Yasser Arafat's nephew Mousa Arafat, widely accused of corruption, as head of Gaza police forces. Some thought this appointmnt was a deliberate step to weaken Dahlan's position before the disengagement process in the Gaza Strip and sparked massive protests.

Dahlan returned to the political forefront and security arena this week. He appeared in a meeting with US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in Jericho, and meetings with the European Union's Javier Solana and the German Foreign Affairs Minister. It seems that for whatever reason, world leaders think Dahlan is the right person for them to deal with.

Arjan El Fassed is a cofounder of The Electronic Intifada

Footnotes

[1] Ha'aretz, Gideon Alon (30 Apr 2002)
[2] Middle East International, 520.
[3] Annual reports of Palestinian Independent Commission for Citizens' Rights (PICCR); various reports from Addameer, PCHR and LAW; Palestinian Self-Rule Areas: Human Rights under the Palestinian Authority, Human Rights Watch (September 1997); Annual reports Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch (1994, 1995, 1996).

http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article6275.shtml

Top US general doubts Iran proof

2007-02-15T15:51:00.001+02:00

BBC Wednesday, 14 February 2007

The most senior US military officer has said there is no proof the Iranian government has directly armed Shia groups fighting in Iraq.

Gen Peter Pace, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, appeared to contradict claims made by US officers in Iraq.

The US presented evidence this week it said proved the "highest levels" of Iran's government were supplying arms used by Shia militants in Iraq.

Gen Pace said all it proved was "things made in Iran" are being used in Iraq.

"We know that the explosively formed projectiles are manufactured in Iran," Gen Pace said while visiting Australia.

"But I would not say by what I know that the Iranian government clearly knows or is complicit."

In the Indonesian capital, Jakarta, Gen Pace repeated his assertions.

"What [the evidence] does say is that things made in Iran are being used in Iraq to kill coalition soldiers."

more http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/6360469.stm

UK protesters try to hurt Israeli flower sales

2007-02-15T15:51:00.000+02:00

ELLIS WEINTRAUB

LAURA RHEINHEIMER,

THE JERUSALEM POST Feb. 13, 2007

To hurt the high-volume sales of Israeli flowers on Valentine's Day in the United Kingdom, three anti-Israel protesters chained themselves to a fence over the weekend outside the distribution site of Carmel-Agrexco in Middlesex. Police arrested them.

The UK-based Boycott Israeli Goods Campaign launched the protest on Saturday as part of a five-day campaign against the sale of Israeli flowers.

According to Abraham Daniel, director of the Flower Growers' Association in Israel, Valentine's Day should bring in NIS 11.5 million in sales. This amounts to 10 percent of the NIS 115m. Israel expects to export to England this year.

The boycott group hopes to diminish these sales, according to group spokesman Tom Hayes. They aim to damage Carmel-Agrexco's reputation, negatively impact profits and lobby supermarkets to not sell Israeli flowers, he said.

No stores have agreed to the boycott yet, Hayes told The Jerusalem Post in a telephone interview. But his group remained in contact with several stores, he added.

Saturday afternoon, some 90 demonstrators blocked trucks from leaving Carmel-Agrexco's Middlesex site. According to Amos Or, Agrexco-UK's general manager, the protest lasted from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. and caused a 30-minute delay.

"It's a small, noisy group, but the police were well prepared," he told the Post. Most of the trucks carried Coral strawberries grown by Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, he added.

But according to Hayes, the protesters stopped operations for the whole afternoon. His said his group opposed all Israeli companies, but had specifically targeted those with farms in the Jordan Valley, believing they exploit cheap Palestinian labor. He said Palestinians could not develop their own farms in the area because of security checkpoints.

Hayes said his group did not distinguish between flowers grown in the Jordan Valley with those grown elsewhere in Israel.

"We are the Boycott Israeli Goods Campaign, so we are against all Israeli flowers," he said.

Hayes said his group was against Agrexco for several reasons: It is partially owned by the Israeli government, it operates farms on settlements in the Jordan Valley "at the Palestinians' expense," and it "profits from the apartheid."

He said he based his information on a recent visit to Israel in which he met with workers in the Jordan Valley.

Daniel said only 1%-2% of the flowers grown in the Jordan Valley were exported.

"Most of the flowers from the Jordan Valley are sold in local markets," he said.

Jordan Valley Regional Council head Dubi Tal said although Palestinians needed permission to enter the area, they were free to work wherever they want. There were "no complaints from outside [organizations] or the Palestinian side," he said. Palestinians were free to establish farms in the valley, he added.

According to B'Tselem spokeswoman Sarit Michaeli, only Palestinians who are prepared to work on a settlement in the Jordan Valley or those who live there may enter the area.

Michaeli said Palestinians from outside the Jordan Valley sometimes encountered problems accessing land they own in the region.

According Atzmon Meltzer, the general manager of a flower distributor called Aviv, the Jordan Valley exports only 5% of Israel's total flower exports. Israel grows most of its flowers in the Arava, around Beersheba, the North and the Jezreel Valley, he said. Aviv and a European company hope to buy Agrexco from the government, he added.

http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1170359844307&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FPrinter

Guantanamo comes to Morocco for film shoot by South African Gavin Hood

2007-02-15T15:48:00.000+02:00

Gavin Hood uses 16th century Marrakesh palace as backdrop for his political film 'Rendition'.

Middle East Online 2007-02-13

RABAT - A 16th century Marrakesh palace has for the past three weeks been transformed into the infamous American prison camp in Guantanamo Bay to set the scene for a movie being shot there, Moroccan media reported on Tuesday.

South African director Gavin Hood is using the castle as a backdrop for his political "Rendition", starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Meryl Streep, Reese Witherspoon and Peter Sarsgaard.

The film tells the tale of a CIA analyst in Cairo who witnesses an unorthodox interrogation of an Egyptian chemical engineer suspected of being a terrorist.

The El Badia palace has, according to a set worker quoted by Moroccan daily Aujord'hui, been completely transformed to resemble Guantanamo, even featuring Moroccans walking around in the American camp's notorious orange jumpsuits.

The Moroccan part of the shoot is scheduled to last for eight weeks, and will include a scene shot in the seaside town of Essaouira, formerly known as Mogador.

Hood will also take his cast to South Africa and the United States to shoot other scenes for the film.

http://www.middle-east-online.com/english/?id=19550

Video : Web of Deceit

2007-02-15T15:47:00.000+02:00

Saddam Hussein - The Trial You'll Never See

Made for European television this film was never broadcast in North America.

Barry Lando and Michel Despratx's documentary

The horrifying truth is the extent to which we in the west have been complicit. Check out Lando's new book "Web of Deceit" and his blog at http://barrylando.com/

Video here http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article17053.htm

Another Case of Injustice

2007-02-12T21:11:00.000+02:00

Judy Andreas

February 11, 2007

I wonder how many Americans are familiar with Sami Al-Arian and the story of injustice that surrounds this man. I wonder how many Americans are aware that Mr. Al-Arian has spent the past four years in prison.

"What has he done?" you ask. I wish I knew the answer. Although Sami Al-Arian was found "not guilty" of the 17 charges against him, the Palestinian Professor and activist remains in jail.

"How could that be?" you ask. I wish I knew the answer. Sami Al-Arian was a computer science professor at the University of South Florida. In addition, he was a leading member of the Muslim Community and a prominent activist. (Oh oh. Did someone say "activist?" )

In February of 2003, Mr. Al-Arian was arrested. He was accused of being a leader of the militant group Palestinian Islamic Jihad. He received a 50-count indictment by the "Justice" (?) Department. The indictment was against Al-Arian and seven other men. They were charged with conspiracy to commit murder, extortion, giving material support to terrorists, perjury, and other offenses.

The trial ended in December of 2005. THE JURY FAILED TO RETURN A SINGLE GUILTY VERDICT. Al -Arian was acquitted on eight of seventeen counts against him and the jury was deadlocked on the rest.

Four months after the verdict, Al-Arian agreed to plead guilty to one of the remaining charges. He did this in exchange for being released and deported. At his sentencing, however, the judge gave him as much prison time as possible under a plea deal - 57 months.

Although the release date was scheduled for April 2007, a little over two weeks ago, a judge found him in contempt. The charge was that he refused, a second time, to testify before a grand jury in Virginia in a case involving a Muslim think tank. Because of this ruling, the date of Mr. Al-Arian's release could now be extended by as much as 18 months. And so, in response, Al-Arian, who is a diabetic, began a hunger strike.

In an interview from Northern Neck Regional Jail in Warsaw, Virginia, Sami Al-Arian stated that he is being held on contempt charges.

On January 22nd, he began his hunger strike. He stated the reason for the strike:

"I believe that freedom and human dignity are more precious than life itself. In essence, I'm taking a principled stand, that I'm willing to endure whatever it takes to win my freedom. I'm also protesting the continuous harassment campaign by the government against me because of my political beliefs. This campaign was supposed to have ended when we concluded the plea deal last year, but unfortunately it hasn't... After two-and-a-half years in pretrial detention with Guantanamo-like conditions, mostly under 23-hour lockdowns, followed by a six-month trial with eighty witnesses, including twenty-one from Israel, thousands of documents, phone interceptions, physical surveillance, websites, hearsay evidence, anything and everything they could think of, preceded by twelve years of investigations, tens of millions of dollars, some even say over $80 million spent on this investigation, with ninety-four charges against me and my co-defendants and with my defense only being four words -- 'I rest my case' -- how did the jury see it? They gave them zero convictions. Unfortunately, however, the judge stopped the deliberations, because of a distressed juror, and they ended up with some hung counts, although they were mostly ten-to-two in my favor. What happened was that the government had the power to retry me on these hung counts. My attorneys had prior commitments and would have left, which meant I probably would have to hire a new legal team and wait perhaps for another year or more for a new trial."
Sami Al-Arian was told that he sponsored a researcher in 1994 and '95 to come to the United States to conduct research and edit a magazine. He was told that he wasn't candid or forthcoming when interviewed by a journalist in November '95.

"I was told that I helped my brother-in-law, Mazen Al-Najiar, to get out of prison when he was detained on secret evidence between '97 and 2000. My main concern with this deal was that the judge got out of hand, because association is constitutionally protected. And everyone kept saying that this was just a face-saving way for the government to end this, and no one was going to object. And, indeed, no one did....Now, they want me to testify before a grand jury in Virginia. We believe that this is either a perjury or contempt trap. Back in August of 2000, I was also subpoenaed before an immigration court, and I was asked if I believe in the freedom of Islam through violence. My answer was one word: no. But this was nonetheless one of the counts against me, which the jury acquitted me of. Now, I have been held in contempt for over a month last year, and then that grand jury expired. Then they reconvened another grand jury this year, and I have been held now in contempt since January 22nd. That's why I'm on a hunger strike."

There is an ongoing investigation of some of the think tanks and charities in Virginia and they want to ask Sami about them. He states that he hasn't had any relationship with any of these since '92 or '93, but he believes that this is just a pretext to hold him either in contempt or charge him with perjury.

" Whatever I say, they are going to tell me that am lying"

Sami has been told that on civil contempt charges, it is really in the hands of the judge who has the power to lift this tomorrow, if he wants to. It is not supposed to be punishment. It's supposed to be coercion. It can go for six months, renewed two more times, which brings it up to eighteen months. And after that, the government can even charge him with criminal contempt. And so, it could go on for years and years.

Al-Arian states "I think it's politically motivated, so this might very well be the case. "

On September 2001, Al-Arian had been invited to be a guest on "The O'Reilly Factor". He was given the impression that the purpose of the interview was to discuss Arab-American reactions to 9/11. After all, Sami Al-Arian was a prominent member of the Muslim community in south Florida as well as a leading Palestinian academic and activist. ( Perhaps Al-Arian was unfamiliar with the tactics of Shill O'Reilly) True to form, O'Reilly used the interview time to accuse Al-Arian of supporting terrorism and concluded by saying "If I was the C.I.A., I'd follow you wherever you went."

The day after the interview, the University of South Florida, where Al-Arian worked, received hundreds of threatening letters and emails. I cannot help but wonder if actual individuals wrote that barrage of letters. Could it be that so many people are fooled by O'Reilly ?

Thirty six hours after the interview, the University put Sami Al-Arian on paid leave. A year and a half later, he was arrested.

The story of Sami Al-Arian is not over. This is a story that extends far beyond the walls of the prison in Virginia. This is a story that touches more than just the lives of the family and community in which Sami Al-Arian resided. This is a story of injustice. This is a story that touches us all.

As you sit down to your dinner tonight, take some time to reflect on what is happening to freedom and dignity in the United States of America.

www.judyandreas.com

- JUDE10901@AOL.COM

www.uruknet.info?p=30564

An explosion of disbelief - fresh doubts over 9/11

2007-02-12T21:10:00.000+02:00

By SUE REID

Daily Mail 9th February 2007

The official story of what happened on 9/11 never fails to shock. Four American airliners are hijacked by Osama Bin Laden's terrorists in an attack on the heart of the Western world on September 11, 2001.

Two are deliberately flown into New York's famous Twin Towers, which collapse. A third rams into the United States defence headquarters at the Pentagon, in Washington D.C.

The last goes down in rural Pennsylvania, 150 miles north of the capital, after a tussle between the hijackers and some of the passengers onboard, whose bravery was recently portrayed in a Hollywood film, United 93.

Nearly 3,000 ordinary, decent Americans die in the attacks, provoking the U.S. President George W. Bush to mount a global war on terror, which leads to the invasion of Iraq, with Britain in tow.

Or that's how the official story goes.

Yet today, more than five years on, this accepted version of what happened on 9/11 is being challenged by a 90-minute internet movie made for £1,500 on a cheap laptop by three young American men. The film is so popular that up to 100 million viewers have watched what is being dubbed the first internet blockbuster.

The movie was shown on television to 50 million people in 12 countries on the fifth anniversary of 9/11 last autumn. More than 100,000 DVDs have been sold and another 50,000 have been given away. In Britain, 491,000 people have clicked on to Google Video to watch it on their computers.

Called Loose Change, the film is a blitz of statistics, photographs pinched from the web, eyewitness accounts and expert testimony, all set to hip-hop music. And it is dramatically changing the way people think about 9/11.

A recent poll by the respected New York Times revealed that three out of four Americans now suspect the U.S. government of not telling the truth about 9/11. This proportion has shot up from a year ago, when half the population said they did not believe the official story of an Al Qaeda attack.

The video claims the Bush administration was, at the very least, criminally negligent in allowing the terrorist attacks to take place. It also makes the startling claim that the U.S. government might have been directly responsible for 9/11 and is now orchestrating a cover-up.

Unsurprisingly, the film's allegations have been denied, even roundly condemned, by White House sources and U.S. intelligence services.

Only this week, the letters page of the Guardian newspaper was full of discourse about Loose Change, which was made by a trio of twentysomethings, including a failed film school student and a disillusioned ex-soldier.

Indeed, the movie's assertions are being explored by a number of commentators in America and Britain - including the former Labour Cabinet Minister Michael Meacher - who are questioning the official account of 9/11.

Mr Meacher, who last year proposed holding a screening of Loose Change at the House of Commons (he later changed his mind), has said of 9/11: "Never in modern history has an event of such cataclysmic significance been shrouded in such mystery. Some of the key facts remain unexplained on any plausible basis."

These words were written in a foreword for Professor David Ray Griffin's bestselling book, The New Pearl Harbour (a pointed reference to the conspiracy theory that President Roosevelt allowed the Japanese to assault the U.S. fleet in 1941, in order to force America into World War II).

Griffin, now nearing retirement, is emeritus professor at the Claremont School of Theology in California and a respected philosopher. While Loose Change is capturing the interest of internet devotees, Professor Griffin's equally contentious theories are receiving standing ovations in book clubs across the U.S.

Together, the book and the movie have raised the question: could the attack be a carbon copy of Operation Northwoods, an aborted plan by President Kennedy to stage terror attacks in America and blame them on Communist Cuba as a pretext for a U.S. invasion to overthrow Fidel Castro?

In other words, on a fateful September morning in 2001, did America fabricate an outrage against civilians to fool the world and provide a pretext for war on Al Qaeda and Iraq?

This, and other deeply disturbing questions, are now being furiously debated on both sides of the Atlantic.

Why were no military aircraft scrambled in time to head off the attacks? Was the collapse of the Twin Towers caused by a careful use of explosives? How could a rookie pilot - as one of the terrorists was - fly a Boeing 757 aircraft so precisely into the Pentagon? And who made millions of dollars by accurately betting that shares in United and American Airlines, owners of the four doomed aircraft, were going to fall on 9/11 as they duly did?

An extremely high volume of bets on the price of shares dropping were placed on these two airline companies, and only these two. In the three days prior to the catastrophe, trade in their shares went up 1,200 per cent.

Initially, like most people in America, Professor Griffin dismissed claims the attacks could have been an inside job.

It was only a year later, when he was writing a special chapter on American imperialism and 9/11 for his latest academic tome, that the professor was sent a 'timeline' on the day's events based entirely on newspaper and television accounts. It was then that he changed his mind.

And one of the most puzzling anomalies that he studied was that none of the hijacked planes was intercepted by fighter jets, even though there was plenty of time to do so and it would have been standard emergency procedure in response to a suspected terrorist attack.

Indeed, it is mandatory procedure in the U.S. if there is any suspicion of an air hijack. In the nine months before 9/11, the procedure had been implemented 67 times in America.

Readers of The New Pearl Harbour and viewers of Loose Change are reminded that it was 7.59am when American Airlines Flight 11 left Boston. Fifteen minutes later, at 8.14am, radio contact between the pilot and air traffic control stopped suddenly, providing the first indication that the plane might have been hijacked.

Flight 11 should have been immediately intercepted by fighter pilots sent up from the nearby McGuire Air Force Base in New Jersey. They could have made the journey to the World Trade Centre in three minutes.

But, surprisingly, F-15 fighter jets were instead ordered out of an airbase 180 miles away at Cape Cod. They appear to have flown so slowly - at 700mph, instead of their top speed of 1,850mph - that they did not arrive in time to stop the second attack, on the South Tower of the World Trade Centre. They were 11 minutes too late.

And this is not the only worrying question. Incredibly, the attack on the Pentagon was not prevented either. The defence headquarters was hit by the hijacked American Airlines Flight 77 at 9.38am. But fighter jets from Andrews Air Force Base, just ten miles from Washington, weren't scrambled to intercept it.

Instead, jets were ordered from Langley Air Force Base in Virginia, 100 miles away. By the time they arrived, Flight 77 had already hit the Pentagon.

So what of the fall of the Twin Towers?

The official version is that the buildings collapsed because their steel columns were melted by the heat from the fuel fires of the two crashed planes.

It is a mantra that has been repeated in White House briefings, official inquiries into 9/11, leaks by the American intelligence services and almost every TV documentary on the attack in the U.S. and Britain.

But, according to the allegations of Loose Change (which are endorsed by Professor Griffin), the science does not stand up. Steel does not begin to melt until it reaches around 2,800 degrees Fahrenheit, but open fires of jet fuel - such as those in the Twin Towers inferno - cannot rise above 1,700 degrees.

Professor Griffin and the makers of Loose Change are convinced the Twin Towers were deliberately blown up.

The film shows clip after clip of the towers coming down in one fell swoop to loud and distinct booms. Were they the sound of detonators being set off?

And the Pentagon attack? The hotly disputed theory of the film and Professor Griffin is that a passenger plane never hit the building at all.

The terrorist pilot, Hani Hanjour, was so slow to learn the fundamentals at flight school that his tutors reported him to the authorities for his incompetence five times.

How could he have guided the huge aircraft in such a complex manoeuvre into the building? And if he did, what happened to the aircraft?

The Loose Change narrator says: "The official explanation is that the intense heat from the jet fuel vapourised the entire plane. Indeed, from the pictures, it seems there was no discernible trace of a fully loaded Boeing 757 at the crash scene.

"But if the fire was hot enough to incinerate a jumbo jet, then how could investigators identify 184 out of 189 dead people found at the defence headquarters?"

Intriguingly, the narrator adds: "The only visible damage to the outer wall of the Pentagon is a single hole no more than 16ft in diameter. But a Boeing 757 is 155ft long, 44ft high, has a 124ft wingspan and weighs almost 100 tons.

"Are we supposed to believe that it disappeared into this hole without leaving any wreckage on the outside? Why is there no damage from the wings or the vertical stabiliser or the engines which would have slammed into the building?

"Remember how big the engines were," the film adds persuasively.

"If six tons of steel and titanium banged into the Pentagon at 530mph, they would bury themselves inside the building, leaving two very distinct imprints. And yet the only damage to the outer wall is this single hole."

And what of the Boeing's 40ft high tail? "Did it obligingly duck before entering the building?" asks Professor Griffin.

So if a commercial aircraft did not hit the building, what did? The wildest of all the theories in Professor Griffin's writings - echoed in Loose Change - is that the Pentagon was attacked by a military missile of some kind. Certainly, several onlookers quoted in the film claim that they saw a tiny aircraft piercing the defence HQ.

Another witness says it made a shrill noise, quite unlike a giant passenger plane.

So if it wasn't hijacked and flown by a terrorist into the Pentagon, what happened to Flight 77, last heard of on its way to Ohio?

No one knows. But one thing is sure, asserts Professor Griffin. Dick Cheney, the U.S. vice- President, and Condoleezza Rice, at the time President Bush's national security adviser, were in the White House bunker as the drama unfolded.

They, and their advisers, knew a hijacked aircraft was heading towards Washington. The obvious target was the White House, not the Pentagon. Yet Cheney and Rice were never evacuated from the White House. Did someone in high places already know that they were safe and that it was the Pentagon that was going to be the target?

Of course, no account of 9/11 by the conspiracy lobby is complete without a minute-by-minute observation of President Bush's behaviour.

He was hundreds of miles away in Florida, about to read a book to primary school children when the worst terrorist attack of the modern age happened.

The President reportedly showed little reaction when an aide told him that the first plane had crashed into the Twin Towers. Why not?

He, apparently, told the school's principal: "A commercial plane has hit the World Trade Centre, but we're going ahead with the reading thing anyway."

Then President Bush, who is also the commander-in-chief of the American military, settled down to recite My Pet Goat to a group of seven-year-olds.

He was interrupted a few minutes later by a whispered message in his ear from an aide that a second aircraft had hit the Twin Towers.

The President's face, captured by photographers at the school, remained completely passive. He showed no sign of emotion.

Now it must have been obvious a terrorist maelstrom was being unleashed on his country. But three days later, back in the American capital, he was a different man. By now he was certain that Osama Bin Laden and his Al Qaeda henchmen were to blame.

Surrounded by the Christian evangelist preacher Billy Graham, a cardinal, a rabbi and an imam, the President delivered a sermon in America's national cathedral in Washington.

The words he uttered are recounted by both Professor Griffin and the makers of Loose Change.

President Bush announced: "Our responsibility to history is already clear: to answer these attacks waged against us by stealth, deceit and murder and rid the world of evil."

The scene had been swiftly set for the West's war on terror.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/worldnews.html?in_article_id=435265&in_page_id=1811

The new Jewish question

2007-02-12T21:09:00.000+02:00

A furious row has been raging in the international Jewish community over the rights and wrongs of criticising Israel. At its centre is a British historian who accuses his fellow Jews in the US of stifling any debate about Israel. His opponents say his views give succour to anti-Semites. One thing's for sure: any appearance of consensus over the Middle East has been shattered.

Gaby Wood

The Observer Sunday February 11, 2007

On 3 October last year, the distinguished British-born historian Tony Judt was preparing for a public lecture when the telephone rang. He was due to give the talk, entitled 'The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy', at the Polish consulate in New York in less than an hour. The caterers were already there. But when he picked up the phone he was informed that his lecture had been suddenly cancelled.

He was also told that Abraham Foxman, the national director of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) was on the phone to the Polish consul. Whether the call from the ADL was the cause of the cancellation would become the subject of heated debate in the days and months to come. Foxman labelled such accusations 'conspiratorial nonsense'; however, the Polish consul, Krzysztof Kasprzyk, later acknowledged that he had been contacted by a number of Jewish groups - including the ADL and the American Jewish Committee (AJC) - who were concerned about Judt's anti-Israel message.

'The phone calls were very elegant but may be interpreted as exercising a delicate pressure,' Kasprzyk said. It didn't take him long to see how it might look for Poland, given its history, to be fostering arguments that in certain spheres of American intellectual life have been conflated with anti-Semitism.

'They do what the more tactful members of the intelligence services used to do in late Communist society,' Tony Judt says of the ADL when I speak to him from his home in New York. 'They point out how foolish it is to associate with the wrong people. So they call up the Poles and they say: Did you know that Judt is a notorious critic of Israel, and therefore shading into or giving comfort to anti-Semites?'

In the New York Jewish press, the episode was dubbed - with a debatable degree of sarcasm - 'l'Affaire Judt'. Certainly, not everyone felt Judt was a latter-day Dreyfus. The New York Review of Books published an open letter to Abraham Foxman in Judt's defence, which was signed by 114 intellectuals, many of whom disagreed with Judt on the Middle East yet felt that his right to free speech had been indefensibly curbed. But Christopher Hitchens, reminiscing about an occasion when a talk of his own was cancelled for similar reasons, cried out: 'What a chance I missed to call attention to myself!' - not the sort of opportunity Hitchens is in the habit of passing up - 'Once again, absolutely conventional attacks on Israeli and US policy are presented as heroically original.'

In the past two weeks, the Judt Affair has entered an entirely new gear. In an essay written by the Holocaust scholar Alvin Rosenfeld and published by the American Jewish Committee, Judt's views - and those of other 'progressive Jews' such as the American playwright Tony Kushner and the British academic Jacqueline Rose - were expressly linked to anti-Semitism. That row was reported in the New York Times, giving it an unprecedented prominence, and since then the story has opened the floodgates of a debate that until now has been shrouded in fear. Americans have long been in the grip of a cultural taboo that is characterised by Judt as follows: 'All Jews are silenced by the requirement to be supportive of Israel, and all non-Jews are silenced by the fear of being thought anti-Semitic, and there is no conversation on the subject.'

Philip Weiss, a bold polemicist whose New York Observer blog, MondoWeiss, has been besieged by posts on the subject since he addressed it last week, has even gone so far as to declare a new movement. His account of it embraces the new forum for dissent, Independent Jewish Voices, which was launched in Britain last week by an eminent group that includes Eric Hobsbawm and Harold Pinter. In launching its manifesto, Independent Jewish Voices has taken the 40th anniversary of the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip as an occasion to create 'a climate and a space in which Jews of different affiliations and persuasions can express their opinions about the actions of the Israeli government without being accused of disloyalty or being dismissed as self-hating.' One of its founding principles is: 'The battle against anti-Semitism is vital and is undermined whenever opposition to Israeli government policies is automatically branded as anti-Semitic.'

'A lot of people, like Tony Judt, have been doing brave work here in the US for a while,' Weiss tells me. 'What has happened specifically is that for once, the mainstream is paying attention.'

He dates the beginning of this back to last March, when an explosive article about the influence of the Israel lobby on American foreign policy, written by two American political scientists, Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, was published in the London Review of Books (having originally been turned down by the Atlantic Monthly). The response to the piece was so overwhelming - and so coloured by accusations of anti-Semitism - that the LRB decided to host a debate on the subject in New York last September. That debate was sold out; Tony Judt, one of the speakers, gave an exceptionally eloquent performance, in the course of which he said it was significant that the event had been hosted by a London publication. Public conversation on the issue had been so absent in America, he suggested, that it could only be opened up by importation.

'When Walt and Mearsheimer were published in London,' Philip Weiss continues, 'I said: something's changing.' Since then, the publication of former president Jimmy Carter's book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, and the attention given to Rosenfeld's accusations in his AJC article, have proved, in Weiss's view, that 'there's no question that something has changed. One of the excitements of what's going on right now is that people who have had feelings about this and have not expressed them are popping up all over. It's personally very stirring to me that this is happening. I can't believe it.'

In fact, the debate is so current that the online magazine Slate has come up with a quiz entitled 'Are You A Liberal Anti-Semite?' (Sample question: 'Which state's offences against humanity bother you most? a) Sudan b) Israel c) Massachusetts'.) One of the prizes is dinner with Tony Judt.

Tony Judt is, in the words of a fellow historian, 'one of our most dazzling public intellectuals'. As a prominent professor at New York University and a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books, the New York Times and The Nation, he has a strong and widely heard voice. His latest book, Postwar - a magnificent, opinionated and vast history of Europe since 1945 - was voted one of the 10 best books of last year by the New York Times. A talented forger of links between thinkers from countries all over the world, Judt worked tirelessly after 1989 to bring together eastern European and American intellectuals, and he solidified these efforts by founding the Remarque Institute at NYU in 1995 to promote the study and discussion of Europe in America. A natural polemicist, he brought with him to New York an Oxbridge tradition more pugnacious than is generally characteristic of American academic life, and found himself - after years spent concentrating on European history - drawn back into an engagement with the Middle East.

In 2003, Judt wrote an articulately provocative piece for the New York Review of Books entitled 'Israel: The Alternative', in which he argued, among other things, that Israel was 'an anachronism' that was 'bad for the Jews' and should be converted into a binational state. The offices of the New York Review were inundated with letters as a result. Last year, Judt wrote an op-ed piece for the New York Times in which he argued that America's fear of anti-Semitism when discussing Israel wrought tremendous damage. As the page was about to go to press, the editor rang him up. 'Just one thing,' he said, 'You are Jewish, aren't you?'

Judt was born in London in 1948. Growing up Jewish in 1950s Britain, as he has said, he came to know a thing or two about anti-Semitism. His mother was from London and his father, who was born in Belgium, had come there as a stateless person. Judt was brought up in what he describes as 'a fairly standard left-wing Jewish secular political environment', but with close links to his Yiddish-speaking grandparents, all of whom were eastern European Jews, from Romania and Russia and Lithuania and Poland. As a teenager, he joined a left-wing Zionist organisation and became very active in the kibbutz movement, living in Israel on and off for a large part of the early 1960s.

'What changed for me,' he says now, 'was that in 1967 I went out as a volunteer at the time of the Six Day War; after the war was finished I volunteered for auxiliary military service and I ended up as a sort of informal translator for other volunteers up on the Golan Heights. And there for the first time I began to see another face of Israel that had been camouflaged from me by my enthusiasm for the idealism of the kibbutz movement.' He became, he recalls, quickly very detached from Israel. 'And in fact when I was a student in Paris I became involved in 1970 with Palestinians and young Israelis, trying to organise groups to talk about peace settlements and ending the conflict.'

Last week, as he looked over the list of signatories of the new British network, Independent Jewish Voices, Judt says he was struck by how many of them are people who have not in the past identified themselves publicly as Jewish. 'Of course they're Jewish,' he clarifies, 'but it was not part of their public identity tag. And now they feel - and I would share this sentiment - a need to say, look: if it helps you understand just how bad things have got in the Middle East, I am willing to act not as a freestanding historian but as a Jew. I don't normally like to act as though being Jewish was who I am, but it's a kind of inverse moral blackmail that forces you to go the other way.'

Speaking from Bloomington, Indiana, where he is a director of Indiana University's Jewish Studies Program, Alvin Rosenfeld tells me that his essay 'does seem to have struck a raw nerve'. 'I've been accused of wanting to shut down debate and stifle free speech,' he says, 'and none of that is true. I stand strongly for vigorous debate and open discussion. What in the past was said behind the hands and on the margins of society has been coming into the mainstream of discourse,' Rosenfeld adds, echoing the sentiments of those he attacks, 'Now one can deal with it. And that's one of the things I set out to do.'

Though Rosenfeld is careful not to say in his essay that anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism are identical, he does state that 'Anti-Zionism is the form that much of today's anti-Semitism takes, so much so that some now see earlier attempts to rid the world of Jews finding a parallel in present-day desires to get rid of the Jewish state.' He labels the work of Judt, Rose, Kushner et al 'This Jewish war against the Jewish state.' I ask him if he would say that an increase in anti-Zionist sentiment might be caused by Israeli policy. 'I doubt it,' he replies. 'As I read these people, it strikes to the heart, not of particular policies, but the idea of a sovereign Jewish state in the Middle East. I think it goes to the question of Israel's origins and essence.'

'Oh that's nuts,' Judt counters, 'I've never said Israel doesn't have a right to exist. I'm not actually sure that anyone in what we would call the respectable political mainstream ever has.'

'He says that,' says Rosenfeld, 'but it's not true. In his writings he calls not for a two-state solution but for the dissolution of the state of Israel and a one-state solution, and everyone knows that in no time at all, were such a scenario to come about, Jews would be a minority within this newly configured state, and would be at the mercy of a population that's not likely to treat them gently. Tony Judt is a kind of political fantasist, it strikes me.'

'The issue is not whether Israel has a right to exist,' Judt says plainly, 'Israel does exist. It exists just like Belgium or Kuwait or any other country which was invented at some point in the past and is now a fact. The question is what kind of a state Israel should be. That's all.'

Anti-Zionism has, like Zionism itself, a long and complicated history. 'The thing that we tend to forget,' Judt explains, 'is that until the Second World War, Zionism was a minority taste even within Jewish political organisations. The main body of European Jews was either apolitical or integrated, and voting within the existing countries they lived in. So to be anti-Zionist, at least until the late 1930s, was to be lined up with most Jews. It would make no sense to think of it as anti-Semitic.

'After the Second World War, for a fairly brief period - from let's say 1945 to about 1953 - the overwhelming majority of Jews who were politically thinking were Zionists, either actively or sympathetically, for the rather obvious reason that Israel was the only hope for Jewish survivors. But then many of them, like Hannah Arendt or Arthur Koestler, both of whom were Zionists at various points, took their distance, on the grounds that it was already clear to them that Israel was going to become the kind of state that as a cosmopolitan Jew they couldn't identify with.

'Ever since then, there has been an unbroken tradition of non-Israeli Jews who regard Israel as either unrelated to their own identity or something of which they sometimes approve, sometimes disapprove, sometimes totally dislike. This range of opinion is not new,' Judt concludes. 'The only thing that's new - and it's a product of the post-Sixties - is the insistence that it's anti-Semitic.'

Judt tells a story about an Israeli journalist who was in Washington in the 1960s. 'The Israeli ambassador was retiring, and the journalist asked him what he thought was his biggest achievement. The ambassador said: "I've succeeded in beginning to convince Americans that anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism." There has been a progressive emergence of a conflation,' Judt explains. 'It didn't just happen naturally. And it was pushed quite actively in the Seventies and Eighties, to the point at which it became so normal in this country that it was for a while the default assumption. It's really only in the last five to eight years that it's started to be questioned.'

The actions of very pro-Israel Jewish organisations - for instance, making carefully placed phone calls relating to certain public speakers - are, Judt believes, now born of panic rather than confidence.

'They've lost control of the debate,' he says. 'For a long time all they had to deal with were people like Norman Finkelstein or Noam Chomsky, who they could dismiss as loonies of the left. Now they're having to face, for want of a better cliché, the mainstream: people like me who have a fairly long established record of being Social Democrats (in the European sense) and certainly not on the crazy left on most issues, saying very critical things about Israel. They're not used to that, so their initial response has been to silence people if they could, and their second response has been to ratchet up the anti-Semitic charge.' Judt thinks it's telling that the New York Times 'is willing to report these issues and let reporters quote both sides. In the past, you would have had silence.'

Whether this will have any effect in Washington is another matter. The political influence of AIPAC (the pro-Israel lobby, American Israel Public Affairs Committee) is as strong as it ever was, and Judt argues that since it's not worth going out on a limb on Israel from Congressmen's point of view, change has to happen at a presidential level. Hillary, he says, 'is pretty gutless on this'; she has already given two gung-ho speeches to AIPAC. It's not a topic Barack Obama has yet picked up on, Judt adds, but Obama was brave enough to oppose the Iraq war from the outset, so it's possible that he would take a courageous stance elsewhere in the Middle East. 'A presidential candidate has to feel that once he or she gets into office - they wouldn't dare open their mouths while they're running for election - they don't stand to lose very much in public opinion if they put pressure on Israel,' Judt says

In Postwar, Judt writes of Europe that 'After 1989, nothing - not the future, not the present and above all not the past - would ever be the same.' Is there a moment like that, I ask him, in this situation? 'I think so,' he replies. 'It's not as tidy a moment as 1989 in Europe. But I think one could say that after the Iraq war, for want of a better defining moment, the American silence on the complexities and disasters of the Middle East was broken. The shell broke and conversation - however uncomfortable, however much slandered - became possible. I'm not sure that will change things in the Middle East, but it's changed the shape of things here. Even five years ago, I don't think it would have looked the way it does now.'

He sounds almost optimistic.

'Well,' he sighs, 'I do my best.'

http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/comment/0,,2010302,00.html

Gideon Levy : Tair's Palestinian peers

2007-02-12T21:08:00.001+02:00

Haaretz Mon., February 12, 2007

A child a week, almost every week. In recent weeks, I again went out to document the circumstances of the killing of several children and teenagers, shot dead by Israel Defense Forces soldiers. A very ill wind is once again blowing in the army and no one is saying anything about it. An army that kills children does not concern the public. No committee of inquiry has been, and none will be, formed to deal with this matter. But the fact that the IDF kills children with such a light hand, and fully supports its soldiers who do so, should trouble us no less than the reserves of war supplies in the North. The ramifications of such behavior are not only moral - ultimately an army's operational capability will be affected when children are the targets in its soldiers' gunsights.

Jamil Jibji, the boy from the Askar camp who loved horses, was shot in the head after soldiers in an armored jeep taunted a group of children who threw rocks at them. He was 14 years old. Jamil was the fourth child to be shot in that area under similar circumstances. Abir, the daughter of Bassam Aramin, a member of the "Combatants for Peace" organization, was leaving her school in Anata when a Border Police patrol jeep turned around near the school - no one knows why - and tossed tear gas grenades, one of which apparently struck her head. She was 11 years old. Taha al-Jawi touched the fence nearby the abandoned airfield at Atarot and in response, soldiers fired at his legs with live ammunition, and apparently left him to bleed to death. He was the eighth child to die in similar circumstances. He was not yet 17 years old.

All of these children were killed in cold blood; they did not pose a threat to anyone's life. With the exception of Jamil's case, the IDF, as usual, did not even bother to open an investigation into these children's circumstances of death. When it doesn't even investigate, it is obvious that the army has no intention of putting an end to the killing of children. Its commanders are not even troubled by this.

The last case, Taha, is perhaps the most egregious of all: The IDF Spokesman's Office defends the decision to open fire with live ammunition against a group of children who perhaps damaged a barbed wire fence, as the IDF claims, or perhaps played soccer near the fence, as the children claim - all in broad daylight. Not a word of sorrow, not a word of condemnation, only absolute backing for live gunfire from a distance at unarmed children, without issuing a prior warning. Taha died from a bullet in his leg. And, according to his friends, he bled for a full hour in a muddy ditch he fell into. The IDF Spokesman's contention that he received immediate medical attention does not reconcile with the fact that Taha was wounded in his leg, an injury, which is only fatal as a result of a prolonged loss of blood. But even if assistance was extended immediately, as the IDF claims, are we willing to accept rules of engagement that permit live gunfire from a distance at unarmed teenagers? Are there no other means of dispersing "suspicious" teenagers, as the IDF Spokesman refers to them? What goes through the mind of a soldier who aims his weapon at such a group and fires live, fatal rounds at them, taking such young lives? And what chilling message is the IDF sending its soldiers when it backs such inhumane action?

These stories, and similar ones, did not raise a stir among us. Some of them were not even reported in the news. The killing of a Palestinian boy or girl does not disturb the Israeli public. The West Bank is quiet, there are almost no terror attacks, attention is turned to other affairs, and under the cover of this false and temporary quiet our soldiers, our best sons, are killing dozens of children and teenagers on a routine basis, out of the sight of the rest of us.

The horrible murder of Tair Rada in Katzrin justifiably shook the country. She was an innocent child, 13 years old, murdered at her school with satanic brutality. What is the difference between the murder of Tair and the killing of Abir, also at the entrance to her school? The difference between Tair and Abir consists of the fact that Abir was Palestinian and Tair was Israeli. Israeli? Taha also carried an Israeli identity card. But he was a Palestinian. Can someone seriously argue that the soldier who aimed at Jamil's head did not intend to kill him? The bereavement is the same bereavement; the horror is the same horror. Just as Tair was the joy of her parents' life, so was Abir - a small girl who wanted to be an engineer when she grew up. But while there are still doubts concerning the identity of Tair's murderer, it is very easy to identify the killers of Taha, Jamil and Abir. We do not even denounce them; they receive automatic immunity, without investigation. "The mark of Cain will not sprout on a soldier who fires at the head of a child, on the mound of dirt by the fence of a refugee camp," Aharon Shabtai wrote once in his poem "Culture."

Thus, our soldiers have killed 815 children and teenagers during the last seven years. The entire array of justifications for killing over 3,000 adults during the same period of time, which is also horrifying in its scope, collapses when it comes to children. Someone should listen to the emotional cry of the bereaved father from Anata, who said he is not going to lose his head because of the fact that he has lost his heart: "I don't want to take revenge. My revenge will be that this 'hero,' who was 'threatened' by my daughter and shot her, will stand trial. They send an 18-year-old boy with an M-16 and tell him that our children are his enemy, and he knows that no one will be brought to trial, and therefore he fires in cold blood and becomes a murderer." He says all this in his fluent Hebrew, which has improved during the course of his lectures throughout Israel about the need for peace.

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=824137

"NYT" Reporter Who Got Iraqi WMDs Wrong Now Highlights Iran Claims

2007-02-12T21:08:00.000+02:00

By Greg Mitchell

Editor & Publisher Saturday 10 February 2007

New York - Saturday's New York Times features an article, posted at the top of its Web site late Friday, that suggests very strongly that Iran is supplying the "deadliest weapon aimed at American troops" in Iraq. The author notes, "Any assertion of an Iranian contribution to attacks on Americans in Iraq is both politically and diplomatically volatile."

What is the source of this volatile information? Nothing less than "civilian and military officials from a broad range of government agencies."

Sound pretty convincing? It may be worth noting that the author is Michael R. Gordon, the same Times reporter who, on his own, or with Judith Miller, wrote some of the key, and badly misleading or downright inaccurate, articles about Iraqi WMDs in the run-up to the 2003 invasion.

Gordon wrote with Miller the paper's most widely criticized - even by the Times itself - WMD story of all, the Sept. 8, 2002, "aluminum tubes" story that proved so influential, especially since the administration trumpeted it on TV talk shows.

When the Times eventually carried an editors' note that admitted some of its Iraq coverage was wrong and/or overblown, it criticized two Miller-Gordon stories, and
noted that the Sept. 8, 2002, article on page one of the newspaper "gave the first detailed account of the aluminum tubes. The article cited unidentified senior administration officials who insisted that the dimensions, specifications and numbers of tubes sought showed that they were intended for a nuclear weapons program."

This, of course, proved bogus.

The Times "mea-culpa" story dryly observed: "The article gave no hint of a debate over the tubes," adding, "The White House did much to increase the impact of The Times article." This was the famous "mushroom cloud" over America article.

Now, more than four years later, Gordon reveals: "The Bush administration is expected to make public this weekend some of what intelligence agencies regard as an increasing body of evidence pointing to an Iranian link, including information gleaned from Iranians and Iraqis captured in recent American raids on an Iranian office in Erbil and another site in Baghdad."

Gordon also wrote, following Secretary of State Colin Powell's crucial, and appallingly wrong, speech to the United Nations in 2003 that helped sell the war, that "it will be difficult for skeptics to argue that Washington's case against Iraq is based on groundless suspicions and not intelligence information."

Today, in contrast to the Times' report, Dafna Linzer in The Washington Post simply notes, "Yesterday, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said serial numbers and markings on some explosives used in Iraq indicate that the material came from Iran, but he offered no evidence."

For some perspective, here is how that "mushroom cloud" Gordon-Miller story of Sept. 8, 2002, opened:

"More than a decade after Saddam Hussein agreed to give up weapons of mass destruction, Iraq has stepped up its quest for nuclear weapons and has embarked on a worldwide hunt for materials to make an atomic bomb, Bush administration officials said today.

"In the last 14 months, Iraq has sought to buy thousands of specially designed aluminum tubes, which American officials believe were intended as components of centrifuges to enrich uranium. American officials said several efforts to arrange the shipment of the aluminum tubes were blocked or intercepted but declined to say, citing the sensitivity of the intelligence, where they came from or how they were stopped.

"The diameter, thickness and other technical specifications of the aluminum tubes had persuaded American intelligence experts that they were meant for Iraq's nuclear program, officials said, and that the latest attempt to ship the material had taken place in recent months.

"The attempted purchases are not the only signs of a renewed Iraqi interest in acquiring nuclear arms. President Hussein has met repeatedly in recent months with Iraq's top nuclear scientists and, according to American intelligence, praised their efforts as part of his campaign against the West.

"Iraq's nuclear program is not Washington's only concern. An Iraqi defector said Mr. Hussein had also heightened his efforts to develop new types of chemical weapons. An Iraqi opposition leader also gave American officials a paper from Iranian intelligence indicating that Mr. Hussein has authorized regional commanders to use chemical and biological weapons to put down any Shiite Muslim resistance that might occur if the United States attacks....

"'The jewel in the crown is nuclear," a senior administration official said. 'The closer he gets to a nuclear capability, the more credible is his threat to use chemical or biological weapons. Nuclear weapons are his hole card. The question is not, why now?' the official added, referring to a potential military campaign to oust Mr. Hussein. 'The question is why waiting is better. The closer Saddam Hussein gets to a nuclear weapon, the harder he will be to deal with.'

"Hard-liners are alarmed that American intelligence underestimated the pace and scale of Iraq's nuclear program before Baghdad's defeat in the gulf war. Conscious of this lapse in the past, they argue that Washington dare not wait until analysts have found hard evidence that Mr. Hussein has acquired a nuclear weapon. The first sign of a 'smoking gun,' they argue, may be a mushroom cloud."

Last month, Byron Calame, public editor at The New York Times, and the paper's Washington bureau chief, Phil Taubman, agreed that Gordon had stepped over the journalistic line in a recent TV appearance by starkly backing the "surge" in Iraq. Gordon had said, "So I think, you know, as a purely personal view, I think it's worth one last effort for sure to try to get this right, because my personal view is we've never really tried to win. We've simply been managing our way to defeat."

--------

The Washington Post joined in on Sunday in trumpeting the Iran weapons charge.

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/021207L.shtml

Queen Rania says Muslim women don't have to wear veils

2007-02-12T21:07:00.002+02:00

Queen of Jordan says wearing veil is free personal choice, main enemy is not extremism, but ignorance.

Middle East Online 2007-02-09,

ROME - Islam does not require women to wear veils, Queen Rania al-Abdullah of Jordan said in an interview published Friday, calling on Muslim moderates to "make their voices be heard."

"Islam neither requires one to be practising, nor to dress in one way or another," the stylish 36-year-old queen told the Italian daily Corriere della Sera during a visit to Rome.

"So imposing the veil on a woman is contrary to the principles of Islam," said Queen Rania, who is in Rome for the launch of a Group of Seven (G7) programme to develop vaccines against diseases that are endemic in poor countries.

"Unfortunately, after all the suspicion weighing on Islam, many people have begun to consider the veil as a political problem, but this is not the case," she told Corriere. "Wearing the veil is a free personal choice."

Queen Rania urged "all moderates to stand up and let their voices be heard."

She added: "Many people are frustrated in the Arab world. Many give in to the anger because they are accused of violence. But instead we should get up, explain who we are and what we believe in.

"Over the last three years, most victims of terrorism have been Muslim. So there's not a war between Muslims and non-Muslims, but between extremists and moderates of all the religions," the queen said.

"What is important is not to live in fear. The most dangerous (thing to do) is to give up and lose hope. The main enemy is not terrorism or extremism, but ignorance," she said.

http://www.middle-east-online.com/english/?id=19501

Australian leader: Al-Qaeda wants Obama

2007-02-12T21:07:00.001+02:00

USA TODAY 2/11/2007

SYDNEY, Australia (AP) Australia's conservative prime minister slammed Barack Obama on Sunday over his opposition to the Iraq war, a day after the first-term U.S. senator announced his intention to run for the White House in 2008.

Obama said Saturday at his campaign kickoff in Springfield, Ill., that one of the country's first priorities should be ending the war in Iraq. He has also introduced a bill in the Senate to prevent President Bush from increasing American troop levels in Iraq and to remove U.S. combat forces from the country by March 31, 2008.

Australian Prime Minister John Howard, a staunch Bush ally who has sent troops to Iraq and faces his own re-election bid later this year, said Obama's proposals would spell disaster for the Middle East.

"I think that will just encourage those who want to completely destabilize and destroy Iraq, and create chaos and a victory for the terrorists to hang on and hope for an Obama victory," Howard said on Nine Network television.

"If I were running al-Qaeda in Iraq, I would put a circle around March 2008 and be praying as many times as possible for a victory, not only for Obama but also for the Democrats."

Howard has defied widespread domestic opposition to the war, keeping about 1,400 Australian troops in and around Iraq, mostly in non-combat roles. He is seeking a fifth term later this year, and recent polls suggest voters are increasingly unhappy about his refusal to set a deadline for withdrawing Australian troops from the Middle East.

"You either rat on the ally or you stay with the ally," he said. "If it's all right for us to go, it's all right for the Americans and the British to go, and if everybody goes, Iraq will descend into total civil war and there'll be a lot of bloodshed."

Just like life under Pinochet

2007-02-12T21:06:00.002+02:00

By Nir Hasson

Haaretz Mon., February 12, 2007

"The Palestinians' lives under the occupation are reminiscent of the lives of Chile's citizens under the dictatorship," says Chilean Judge Juan Guzman, who is visiting Israel, last week. "There, too, people who thought differently were considered enemies: They were imprisoned, tortured and killed. There, too, people couldn't move from place to place, they didn't have freedom and they didn't have equality before the law. But here it's harder. It has been going on for longer," he added.

Guzman, 68, became known at the end of the 1990s as an investigative judge pursuing Augusto Pinochet, Chile's military dictator between 1973 and 1990. Guzman waged a long legal battle against Pinochet. Despite the former dictator's immunity, Guzman succeeded in filing several indictments against him and bringing him to trial. Pinochet's trial was never completed because of his health, and he died two months ago at age 91.

Last week Guzman came to Israel as a guest of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD) and the Alternative Information Center (AIC) to examine indicting Israelis responsible for house demolitions in European courts. Thus far, legal proceedings have been initiated only against military officers. The committee wants to indict civilians as well.

ICAHD has a list of three officials from the Civil Administration, the Jerusalem municipality and the Interior Ministry who ordered the demolition of houses. It is seeking to submit investigation requests against the officials in a European country where the courts have the authority to address international human rights violations. Guzman is slated to give the international seal of approval to the move. If such an investigation is opened, presumably arrest orders will be issued against the three and they will encounter difficulties in visiting Europe.

Guzman's great antagonist, Pinochet, died on December 10, International Human Rights Day. "I did not feel satisfaction, but I wasn't sad either," he says. "Chile lost a historic opportunity to rebuild itself," he says. "After the justice system was destroyed during the 17-year-long dictatorship, this was an opportunity to demonstrate its independence and to prove to Chile and to the entire world that no one is above the law, that even Pinochet can be tried."

Guzman disagrees with the Chilean Supreme Court, which ruled that Pinochet was not mentally able to stand trial. He says Pinochet was lucid until his last day.

Guzman has been a judge for 36 years. In January 1998, when he was serving as a judge in the Supreme Court of Santiago, he was chosen to investigate human rights charges filed against Pinochet and his officers. Guzman received 98 cases involving Pinochet. He traveled throughout Chile and conducted a comprehensive investigation into Pinochet's crimes.

Several months later, Pinochet was arrested in London by order of a Spanish judge, over Spanish citizens killed under the dictatorship. Pinochet returned to Chile a year and five months later, after a British court ruled that because of his poor health, he could not be extradited to Spain. Soon after that, Guzman field his first indictment on charges of responsibility for the "death squad," a secret police unit that murdered 75 regime opponents. Guzman also ordered the house arrest of the former dictator. The decision aroused a storm in Chile: Rightist elements and military officials took Pinochet's side, whereas the left took to the street to celebrate.

"It was no simple matter to bring Pinochet to trial," explains Hebrew University political science professor Mario Sznajder. "For some of the country's inhabitants, Pinochet was considered the nation's savior from the Communists." In addition, Pinochet enjoyed immunity after appointing himself a senator for life, and by virtue of the "amnesty law" he legislated. This law granted "automatic amnesty" to anyone who committed crimes before 1978, but Guzman circumvented this in a sophisticated way.

"I proved the law does not cover disappearances (the fates of more than 1,000 regime opponents are still unknown - N.H.). Thus, as in cases of kidnapping, this is a matter of a crime that did not end in 1978, but rather is ongoing, and until we find out what happened to those people, even if the amnesty law covers part of the crime, it does not cover all of it. The Supreme Court accepted my opinion," Guzman says.

In 2001, the Chilean Supreme Court ordered the proceedings against Pinochet cancelled due to his mental unfitness. Two years later, Guzman came across an interview Pinochet gave a Cuban television station in the United States on the 30th anniversary of the military coup.

"He spoke about 158 different subjects and appeared to be in very good and lucid shape," recalls Guzman. In the wake of the interview, which proved the dictator was fit to stand trial, Guzman reopened the investigation. The Supreme Court again revoked Pinochet's immunity, and Guzman filed another indictment against him, this time for Operation Condor - the South American military regimes' cooperation in persecuting opponents, which resulted in hundreds of murders.

Guzman went to Pinochet's home and interrogated him. "He could tell the difference between good and evil, and he could also tell the difference between what was convenient for him to answer and what was not convenient," relates Guzman. "This time he was less nice to me than he had been the first time. He understood I was prosecuting him. But he did not insult me and he was not aggressive."

Half a year later Guzman succeeded in filing yet another indictment, this time for what was called Operation Colombo, during the course of which 119 Communist activists disappeared. Their bodies were never found. These legal proceedings, like others opened by other investigative judges, were not completed by the time Pinochet died. "These investigations did the country a great favor. They openly showed what had happened during the time of the dictatorship," says Guzman. "Many Chileans did not believe things like that had indeed happened, and thought they were an invention of the Communists. But when the investigations began, they started to believe. I believe that thanks to those investigations, my country will never again fall into a dictatorship. In Spanish we say nunca mas - never again."

Professor Sznajder agrees. "Guzman's importance was that he tried to get to Pinochet, not as a journalist or as a political opponent, but rather by virtue of the authority of democratic law. He contributed to eliminating Chile's black hole, to erasing the second version of what had happened during those years. He touched upon the most painful things, opened wounds, uncovered facts and brought about a change, even if no verdict was obtained."

Guzman has no doubt that like Pinochet's officers and officials, Israeli officers and officials will pay the price of the crimes he believes are being committed against the Palestinians. "If we learn from history, it appears that ultimately those who commit crimes against humanity and violate human rights are judged, whether by a special international court or in a country. Sooner or later, human right violations come to court," he says.

During his trip, Guzman visited two Palestinian families whose homes in Issawiyeh and A-Tur were demolished. One of the families has been living in a tent near the ruins for two weeks.

"I saw them crying. Every home demolition is the demolition of a person's dignity and intimacy, and is prohibited by international law. I have also seen the wall built in occupied territory. I don't understand this, and I don't believe it is connected to security. It isn't logical. I am certain there are other ways to protect the Israelis, and at the same time, the Palestinians must be protected.

"I admire the Jewish people for the suffering it has endured and for its achievements in science, literature and music," he continues. "I identify with the Israelis, but my heart is with the people living under occupation and whose rights are being violated. Israel feels it is the victim of terror, but when you are here, you realize that what the Palestinians are doing is resisting occupation. The Palestinians are the victims, they are being exploited, their homes are being demolished, they are being detained under administrative orders, their property is being damaged, they need permits to move from place to place and their cities are becoming large prisons. There is no doubt they are the victims."

Guzman does not make any commitment that indictments will be filed against those responsible for demolishing homes. "I will study the issue, I will consult and I will see how the process can be advanced," he says, "but there is no doubt that with respect to international law, civilians directly responsible for human rights violations can be indicted, just like soldiers."

Meir Margalit, the field coordinator for ICAHD and the person who invited Guzman to visit Israel, says he has despaired of the Israeli justice system. "We feel we have exhausted the option of an Israeli investigator. Salvation won't come from here, and things are getting worse. Every year, about 400 houses in East Jerusalem and the territories are demolished."

"I am here on a peace mission," says Guzman. "I want my activities to awaken discussion of whether what is happening here is justified. From the Chilean experience, we know activity like this can cease human rights violations. I implore the Israeli government to stop the house demolitions, for the sake of its good reputation and for the sake of the good reputation of the entire human race."

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=824148

Egypt releases 'rendition' cleric

2007-02-12T21:06:00.001+02:00

A Muslim cleric allegedly kidnapped by CIA agents in Italy and handed over to the Egyptian authorities has been released, his lawyer has said.

BBc Monday, 12 February 2007

The cleric, Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr, also known as Abu Omar, has said he was tortured while in detention in Egypt.

His lawyer Montasser al-Zayat confirmed that his client had been released and was now back with his family.

The case was said to be an example of rendition, whereby terror suspects are transferred abroad for questioning.

Washington has acknowledged secret transfers of terrorism suspects to third countries but denies torturing suspects or handing them to countries which do torture.

In January, a court in Milan began a hearing to decide whether to indict 25 alleged CIA agents and several Italians accused of involvement in the 2003 kidnapping.

'Snatched'

Prosecutors have said the cleric was snatched on a Milan street and flown, via Germany, to his native Egypt where he was interrogated.

The cleric has accused Egyptian agents of using electric shocks, beatings and rape threats against him.

He had been initially charged with membership of an illegal organisation but the charges were later dropped. Mr Nasr was briefly released in 2004 but was later detained without charge under the north African country's emergency laws.

Mr al-Zayat said: "I expected that the justifications for his detention are done with. It's no longer a secret."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/6352717.stm

Israel offers 1, 429 Palestinian prisoners' in exchange for captured Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit

2007-02-12T21:05:00.001+02:00

Ma'an News 12 / 02 / 2007 Time: 16:17

Gaza - - Palestinian Legislative Council member, Mohammad Shehab, is confident that Israel will release more than 1000 Palestinian prisoners, in a prisoners swap for captured Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit.

Speaking to Ma'an, Shehab said that Shalit's captors have received a proposal from Egypt, whom Israel choose to negotiate through, offering the release of 1,429 Palestinian prisoners in exchange for the soldier. Shehab said "this came only after the Egyptians made persistent contact and consultation with Israel, who finally made an offer of this number."

Shehab also said "we will stand still until Israelis bow to our demands, Palestinian people have sacrificed hundreds of martyrs since the capture of Shalit, homes were destroyed, people were arrested, we can't release him for nothing."

Shehab viewed the prisoners' exchange deal as intrinsic to the Mecca deal, he said "the Mecca agreement was built on the prisoners' document; this document was behind the agreement. This issue is not only the demand of the prisoners', but the demand of the people."

http://www.maannews.net/en/index.php?opr=ShowDetails&ID=19471

Raed Salah to face incitement probe; cabinet okays continuation of Mugrabi construction

2007-02-12T21:05:00.000+02:00

By Gideon Alon, Yoav Stern and Jonathan Lis

Haaretz Sun., February 11, 2007

Police chief Moshe Karadi yesterday ordered a probe into Islamic Movement leader Sheikh Ra'ad Salah on suspicions of incitement and sedition. This comes due to his recent comments against Israeli rule, security forces and the police, due to excavations under the Mugrabi bridge that began last week.

An overwhelming cabinet majority yesterday approved continuing the construction at the Mugrabi ascent "in the proposed format and as speedily as possible." Only Labor ministers Amir Peretz, Yuli Tamir and Ghaleb Majadele abstained from the vote.

Dozens of Islamic Movement supporters were removed yesterday from the Mugrabi ascent, where they had congregated in the early morning hours. Several prominent members of the Islamic Movement's operative arm, the al-Aqsa Institution, were arrested. A Jerusalem court ordered three members to stay away from the capital for a week. Five members were detained for questioning after arriving to protest outside the Old City's Dung Gate without a permit. Police quickly dispersed the demonstration.

The movement vowed to continue its protest in the coming days. A spokesman for the movement said, "The Israeli government bears responsibility for any violence or bloodshed that occurs here. With this activity, Olmert hopes to cover the affairs in which he is involved."

Jerusalem police continued to be on high alert yesterday. However, protests waned, apparently as demonstrators returned to work, and there was almost no disorderly conduct in the capital yesterday.

Public Security Minister Avi Dichter toured the renovation site near the Western Wall yesterday. Dichter supported the decision to continue the excavation and reconstruction on the site and said that many of the Muslims protesting the works are not aware that the Mugrabi Gate is outside the Temple Mount and the al-Aqsa Mosque.

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said, "We will not allow Khaled Meshal and Ra'ad Salah to dictate to us what to do 20 meters from the Western Wall. Tomorrow they will be telling us what to do at the Jaffa Gate, and then they will dictate what to do in the Mamilla neighborhood. This is our land and our sovereignty. They cannot be allowed to tell us what to do in the Western Wall Plaza."

Olmert added that it is important to strengthen moderates among Israeli Arabs, but said Salah operates according to different standards. If his vision were to come true, Israel would not exist as a Jewish and democratic state, Olmert said. The works are begin carried out in Israeli territory outside the Temple Mount and were coordinated in advance with the relevant parties, including the Palestinian Waqf, and the Jordanian and Egyptian governments, he said.

Dichter revealed that in contradiction to claims by Peretz that he hadn't been informed of the construction work, Peretz had been briefed on the details of the plans. Dichter cited a February 1 meeting in the Defense Minister's Office, during which they reviewed the state of things prior to the excavation. A police officer presented Peretz the planned start date for the work and police projections of likely scenarios.

Strategic Affairs Minister Avigdor Lieberman sharply criticized Peretz. "You are acting irresponsibly. You are not acting like the defense minister in Israel's cabinet, but like a candidate in the primaries. This matter must be removed from politics - stop mumbling and babbling and start working."

Transportation Minister Shaul Mofaz said the Islamic Movement was leading provocative measures that must be curbed immediately. He said law enforcement must resolve the problem. He also called on Olmert and Peretz to renew their dialogue. "The lack of communication between you provides a tailwind to Israel's detractors," Mofaz said.

Absorption Minister Zeev Boim asked Peretz, "I don't understand why you didn't issue a warning. If you thought the works at the Mugrabi Gate constitute an existential threat to Israel, how is it possible that you sufficed with sending Amos Gilad's letter to the Prime Minister's Bureau?"

Olmert himself also expressed wonder at how Peretz only sent him a fax. "I did receive a fax from Amir, but he could have called me and told me his position," Olmert commented.

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/824535.html

Words and Deeds

2007-02-11T18:13:00.003+02:00

Though the end of occupation is indeed a necessity, it won't secure any peace deal. The Palestinian cause is largely about the right of return and a solution to the refugee problem, argues Gilad Atzmon.

Gilad Atzmon was born in Israel and served in the Israeli military. He is the author of two novels: A Guide to the Perplexed and the recently released My One and Only Love. Atzmon is also one of the most accomplished jazz saxophonists in Europe. His recent CD, Exile, was named the year's best jazz CD by the BBC. He now lives in London

Middle East On-Line 2007-02-10, Last Updated 2007-02-10 10:14:36

What matters is what the Palestinians do

David Ben Gurion, the legendary Zionist leader as well as Israel's first Prime Minister, used to say: "What matters is not what the Goyim say, what matters is what the Jews do".

A few days ago a group of Jews who may have been independent at one stage decided to gather and to form a new collective peace-loving humanist synagogue. They call themselves the Independent Jewish Voices (IJV). They are determined to challenge the hegemony of the Board Of Deputies Of British Jews (BOD). I am far from being a supporter of the Board of Deputies, in fact, I despise them. Yet, being a Jew by origin, I have never regarded this body as a representative of either myself or any of my so-called Jewish friends.

Furthermore, being a practicing independent thinker, I regard the BOD as a representation of everything I fight against. Yet, I do acknowledge that this body indeed represents the community of Jews in Britain. I do understand as well that the majority of Jews in Britain and around the world do support Zionism. This is indeed very sad and rather concerning. Yet, far more concerning, is the fact that IJV are not exactly against Israel or Zionism. Like the BOD, they do believe in the right of the Jews to live in peace in Palestine. In their favour it must be said that though they are in favour of the Idea of Jewish state, they want it to be different. They believe in the possibility of morally orientated colonialism in which the colonialists (those who live in Tel Aviv) and the ethnically cleansed (those who live in Gaza, for instance) live in 'peace' side by side.

On the face of it, an internal Jewish dispute between two Zionist synagogues shouldn't really become one of the top priorities of British society. This debate should have taken place on the very yellow pages of the Jewish Chronicle. Yet, the IJV wanted to get the British public on their side. How did they do it? They have peppered their declaration with some humanist post-colonial terminology and planted the word Palestine in every other sentence. It quite important to mention that in the declaration itself the BOD is not mentioned even once. Palestine, on the other hand, is mentioned six times.

Out of the five principles presented by the IJV, three are dedicated to the Israeli-Palestine conflict. The author of the declaration must be aware that the British people are gradually becoming more and more aware of the emerging level of Israeli crimes against the Palestinian population. It is rather crucial to emphasize that while the IJV insists upon conveying an image of commitment to the Palestinian issue, they clearly refrain from any substantial ethical commitment to Palestine, Palestinians or humanism. The IJV do not extend beyond the Israeli Left's Peace-Now rhetoric. Though, they refer to human rights, they clearly refrain from mentioning the Palestinian right of return. They are succumbing to the old leftist Zionist trick; they identify the entire Israeli-Palestinian conflict, as well as its resolution, with the occupation and its demise. This is obviously a lie and the authors of the IJV declaration are fully conscious of this lie. I would like to believe that more than a few of the IJV signatories are not aware of the sophisticated manipulative document they have signed on.

Once again, the truth must be said. The Palestinian cause is largely about the right of return and a solution to the refugee problem. Though the end of occupation is indeed a necessity, it won't secure any peace deal. By avoiding the Palestinian cause, the IJV are guilty of dismissing the elementary rights of Palestinians to live on their own land. The IJV may momentarily score some points by taking the Palestinians for a ride while not committing themselves to their real cause. Unfortunately, such an ethical momentum that could be used as a general awakening for Jews was wasted on another exercise in a left Zionist fig leaf operation.

Learning from the success of Ben Gurion and his version of Zionism, I would like to make a suggestion to my Palestinian brothers and sisters. It really doesn't matter what some Jews say, it matters what the Palestinians do. From the looks of it, the decision to create a Unity Government seems like a positive step forward.

Gilad Atzmon can be reached at: atz@onetel.net.uk

www.gilad.co.uk

http://www.middle-east-online.com/english/?id=19508

The Meanness of Separation : Politics and Apartheid

2007-02-11T18:13:00.001+02:00

By NEWTON GARVER

Newton Garver is SUNY Distinguished Service Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at University at Buffalo. An expanded edition of his book Limits of Power: Some Friendly Reminders (2005) will be published this spring by Center Working Papers.

CounterPunch February 8, 2007

"Now everyone is prouder--and poorer."

--Orhan Pamuk

Jimmy Carter's most recent book, Palestine Peace Not Apartheid, has raised a storm of criticism from the Derschowitz-AIPAC wing of American Judaism, stung by his even-handed recounting of events and conversations, as well as his straightforward presentation of the failure to implement UN Security Council resolutions. From the criticism one might think that in the book Carter places all the blame on the Israelis, but that is far from the case. There is, in fact, at least one point (page 13) where he seems unbalanced in the other direction, citing the rise of Islamic fundamentalism as among continuing impediments to peace. Fair enough. But is not the rise of Jewish fundamentalism also a continuing impediment, responsible for the persistence and intransigence of settlement expansion, the massacre in the mosque in Hebron, and the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin? Of course not every detail can be included. The book is impressive for its plain speaking, its illumination of the big picture, Carter's personal history in the discussions, and its careful attention to accuracy about the facts.

One of the features of Carter's style is to recount sympathetically and without judgment conversations he has had with key figures on all sides to the various controversies. It is this unjudgmental reporting that must be so infuriating to the AIPAC-Derschowitz crowd. One can readily understand that the facts and stories about what has happened and continues to happen in the supposedly Arab land of the West Bank and Gaza are on their face outrageous-unless the victims are themselves to blame for their distress. Carter refrains from expressing outrage, keeping instead his focus on the need for peace and reconciliation. But it is a feature of partisans and their pride in their side to regard evenhanded unjudgmental presentations as themselves intrinsically outrageous.

But what about Carter's opposition between peace and apartheid? Here there perhaps lies a perspective on the world that would be more alarming to world leaders than the even-handedness about Palestine. Does Carter mean to suggest that there can never be peace through apartheid? Is not the idea that you get peace through separation the principle behind a whole host of political sacred cows, including border fences, gated communities, bloated prisons, boycotts and blockades? Does enforced and ideologically buttressed separation lead to the sort of partisan pride that Pamuk has in mind, in the words above that he puts into the mouth of one of the wise minor figures in his recent novel?

Consider our prisons, for example. People are generally sent to prison for offenses against civil order, that is for having upset the peace of our society. One option might be to spend time and money to rehabilitate them, with the underlying thought that punishment is something the offender needs in order to regain his or her place in society (Simone Weil's idea), so that peace is regained by a kind of reconciliation. In practice, however, we lock them up and throw away the key, with the underlying thought that it is separation rather than reconciliation or integration that will bring peace. After all, we are so far superior to those criminals!! Isn't that why politicians support life sentences without the chance of parole, and imprisonment of the world's largest percentage of our own citizens? Has any sheriff or governor in recent history won office by promising to integrate convicted offenders more rapidly into society? One could raise similar questions about each of the other sacred cows mentioned above. And in each case there is partisan pride on at least one side.

The US is not only building a wall to separate us from Mexico but is also maintaining other walls to separate us from Cuba, Iran, Syria, and North Korea, often with the cooperation of wall-builders on the other side. The world might not call it peace, but our politicians think it means peace for ourselves, isolated from the miscreants who disdain our leadership and our good offices. And of course these separations are based on, and in turn reinforce, our sense of being the party of democracy and freedom, much superior to those brutal dictatorships, and better off isolated from them. Peace through apartheid. Just what Carter rules out, by implicit definition it seems, in his title.

Why does Carter disdain peace through separation, so much that he leaves it out of account? Could it be because he addresses this problem, as well as others, with his focus on the needs of government and the requirements of welfare rather than the ideas and tools of politcs?

Government is often confused with politics, but they are worlds apart. The aim of government is stability and prosperity, for which peace and tranquility are very helpful, if not necessary. The aim of politics is control and domination, for which crisis and war are convenient, and sometimes indispensable. Our elections are intensely political, since they concern who will be in power and best able to dominate the affairs of government. Sometimes those in power give us decent government. At other times mediocrity is perpetuated because there is a war, and the emergency powers of the commander-in-chief attracts support that overcomes political opposition. Carl Schmitt, one of the profound thinkers of the twentieth century, pointed out in The Concept of the Political that politics begins with a distinction between friends and enemies-a neglected insight that is confirmed over and over, both domestically and internationally. Politicians in the Middle East know who their enemies are, and they refuse to talk with them, just as Schmitt would expect. So, too, Bush refuses to talk with Iran or Syria, arbitrarily, but definitively, counting them as enemies. As elsewhere, the most successful Israeli and Palestinian politicians are fearmongers, reinforcing the walls of separation. There is little hope for peace along the lines that politics inhabits. Carter, without saying so, seeks to refocus the issues in terms of government and the welfare of people rather than politics, and so he speaks of the requirements of government in Palestine and Israel.

The thing about peace is that no one can be in control, because cooperation is required. Peace is a normal consequence of good government, and it can be achieved through negotiation, when there are legitimate and reliable negotiating partners; but it can no more come through politics than it can be achieved through apartheid.

In the work of Aristotle, politics just means government, but the words diverge sharply in our current discourse. Schmitt has his finger on the pulse of contemporary discourse. Because politics thrives on distinctions between friends and enemies, and enemies (unlike mere adversaries) can never become part of our community, politics entails apartheid. Carter could just as well have called his book, Palestine Peace or Politics. No doubt a different controversy would then have ensued, touching a wider range of issues. Carter's title is better suited to keeping the focus on Palestine. But the close interdependence between apartheid and partisan politics should not be forgotten.

Carter's message is one of hope, not fear, as is characteristic of steps toward peace and prosperity. Such a message goes contrary to partisan politics, as well as to apartheid. In a previous article ("Decider vs. Negotiator," I pointed out that there are many real life circumstances in which nice guys finish first, and meanness leads to impoverishment. In the context of that discussion, apartheid, or enforced and ideologically buttressed separation, together with the partisan politics that supports it, count as one prominent form of meanness, and one cause of the continuing public impoverishment.

http://www.counterpunch.com/garver02092007.html

Elie Wiesel says he escaped kidnap attempt in U.S. hotel

2007-02-11T18:12:00.003+02:00

By Shlomo Shamir,

Haaretz Sat., February 10, 2007

Nobel Peace laureate and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel told Haaretz on Thursday he escaped a kidnap attempt in a San Francisco hotel last week.

Wiesel, 78, whose novels deal with his experience as a Holocaust survivor, said he was grabbed by a stranger in an elevator at the hotel he was staying at for a peace conference and ordered to follow at the risk of violence.

In response, Wiesel called for help and the man fled.

Police asked Wiesel to keep the event under wraps until progress was made in the investigation.

According to San Francisco Police Sgt. Neville Gittens, a man approached
Wiesel, the author of Night, a memoir chronicling his time in a concentration camp, in an elevator and requested an interview with the author on the evening of Feb. 1 at the Argent Hotel.

When Wiesel consented to talk in the hotel's lobby, the man insisted it be done in a hotel room and dragged the 78-year-old off the elevator on the sixth floor, Gittens said. The assailant fled after Wiesel began to scream, and Wiesel went to the lobby and called police.

Gittens said police are investigating the incident as a crime. Wiesel could not be immediately reached for comment at Boston University, where he teaches, or through his institute in New York.

A driver's license in the name of Harry Hunt, a member of a Holocaust denial group, was found in a car parked near the hotel. Hunt has not been located since the event.

A posting on a virulent anti-Semitic Web site Tuesday by a person identifying himself as Eric Hunt claimed responsibility.

"I had planned to bring Wiesel to my hotel room, where he would truthfully answer my questions regarding the fact that his non-fiction Holocaust memoir, 'Night,' is almost entirely fictitious," Hunt wrote on the site. The poster also said "I had been trailing Wiesel for weeks and had hoped to get Wiesel into my custody, with a cornered Wiesel finally forced to state the truth on videotape."

Gittens said investigators were aware of the posting and declined to comment further on the investigation.

The anti-Semitic Web site was disabled late Friday. It is registered to Andrew Winkler in North Sydney, Australia.

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/824083.html

Critic of Islam Finds New Home in U.S.

2007-02-11T18:12:00.001+02:00

By WILLIAM C. MANN

Associated Press Saturday February 10, 2007 7:16 AM

WASHINGTON (AP) - As a child, Ayaan Hirsi Ali fled violence in Somalia with her family. As an adult she fled Kenya to escape an arranged marriage. She left her adopted Holland after she was caught up in political turmoil and had her life threatened. Now Hirsi Ali - a brave critic of Islam to her supporters, a bigot to her critics - has found refuge in the intellectual bastion of leading U.S. conservatives.

Hirsi Ali joined the American Enterprise Institute last September, after a sometimes stormy 14 years in the Netherlands, where she was a member of parliament and became a central figure in two events that jolted the nation.

First, after she wrote a script for a film that depicted naked women with Quranic verses scrawled on their bodies, a Dutch-born Muslim gunned down the filmmaker, Theo van Gogh. A letter threatening Hirsi Ali was left on a knife plunged into van Gogh's chest.

Next, a fight within Hirsi Ali's political party over her Dutch citizenship brought down the government.

These days, Hirsi Ali is promoting her autobiography, ``Infidel.'' It gives a graphic account of how she rejected her faith and the violence she says was inflicted on her in the name of Islam.

``I'm an apostate. That's why the book is called 'Infidel,''' she said in a telephone interview from New York.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations thinks Hirsi Ali's campaign amounts to slander and bigotry.

``We believe that contributes to a growing level of Muslim hatred in America,'' said the council's communications director, Ibrahim Hooper. ``It is unfortunate that she had to bring that kind of hate from Europe to the United States.''

Her new colleagues at the American Enterprise Institute laud Ali Hirsi as a brave voice taking on a taboo subject.

``She's very original, a very courageous thinker, and she has independence of mind,'' said Christina Hoff Sommers, an institute fellow who specializes, among other things, in feminism.

At the institute, Hirsi Ali's studies will involve Islam and women: the relationship between the West and Islam; women's rights in Islam; violence against women propagated by religious and cultural arguments; and Islam in Europe.

Many institute scholars have had a close relationship with the Bush administration. Among its senior fellows are former House Speaker Newt Gingrich; John R. Bolton, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations; and Lynne Cheney, wife of Vice President Dick Cheney.

It may seem like odd company for a woman born in a Mogadishu hospital 37 years ago.

``I've been accused of selling out,'' she said. ``I've been told, 'You're hanging the dirty laundry outside.'''

Ali Hirsi's book provides a graphic account of how her grandmother had her subjected to genital mutilation, sometimes called female circumcision, when she was 5 years old. The practice began in Africa, before Islam, but some African Muslim societies still see it as a requirement of religion.

She also describes a time when she was a teenager in Kenya, a majority Christian country with many Muslim Somali refugees, and a Quran teacher cracked her skull after she challenged his insistence that students write Quranic verses on wooden boards and memorize them.

``I started to call him uncivilized and backward and said he lived in the time of ignorance before Islam had come around and this was an outrageous system,'' she said. The man bashed her head against the wall.

She lied to be accepted as a refugee in Holland, became a Dutch citizen, graduated from prestigious Leiden University and won a seat in the Dutch parliament for a party that was tough on immigration. She became known as a firebrand.

That led to her collaboration with van Gogh on the short television movie, ``Submission.'' In 2004, a man enraged by the movie shot van Gogh seven times and slit his throat on an Amsterdam street, leaving the note threatening Hirsi Ali.

Her lie when she entered the country - she used an assumed name - caught up with her last year. By that time her falsehood was widely known, even to her good friend Rita Verdonk, the immigration minister. Because of a notorious similar case in which Verdonk expelled a young woman, she came under pressure to cancel Hirsi Ali's citizenship. She did, and the six members of the government's smallest coalition party resigned in protest. The government fell, although Verdonk had used a technicality to restore Hirsi Ali's Dutch citizenship.

Considering van Gogh's death, and her continuing outspokenness about Islam, Hirsi Ali said she no longer can feel safe without bodyguards in the presence of even moderate Muslims.

Unlike many world leaders, including Bush, who say Muslim terrorists are distorting the peaceful Islamic religion, Hirsi Ali said the terrorists in large part have truth on their side: The violence is in the Quran and the hadith, the traditions of the Prophet Muhammad, she said.

Islam today, she said, ``is not my grandmother's amulet-wearing, superstitious sort of Islam that is just comforting for the believer.'' Today's Islam sees the world as its enemy, she said. ``And you wage war against your enemies.''

The Council on American-Islamic Relations' Hooper contends that she exaggerates to further her agenda.

``She is just one more Muslim-basher on the lecture circuit,'' he said.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uslatest/story/0,,-6406690,00.html

South African trade union calls for boycott in fresh solidarity declaration

2007-02-11T18:11:00.001+02:00

Worldwide Activism, The Grassroots Palestinian Anti-Apartheid Wall Campaign, February 10th, 2007

The Food and Allied Workers' Union (FAWU) has condemned three major South African food stores - Shoprite Checkers, Pick 'n Pay and Fruit and Veg - for their import of agricultural produce from Israel.

In a press statement released on 23 January the Union state:

"We are appalled at the insensitivity towards the plight of the Palestinian people by the procurement of supplies from an oppressive, apartheid country like Israel. It seems like rubbing salt in the wounds of Palestinians to procure supplies.

Citing the continuing imports of avocado pears from Israel, the press statement goes on to state that:

"We are convinced that the import of these goods are in contravention of the spirit of various International Labour Organisation (ILO) conventions.

"We call on the above retailers to immediately cease importing produce from Israel . Whilst we are glad about the number of locally procured goods, we feel that stores like yourselves could easily procure these "out of season" goods from other countries, even if it means paying a slightly higher price. According to figures quoted by Shoprite Group Managing Director, Brian Weyers, the store imports 1,12% of total imported produce from Israel. Being a relatively small percentage, it should therefore not make a huge difference to import from other countries who do not oppress.

"Retailers such as yourselves should not have to wait for formal trade agreements by e.g. the UN or South African government to behave in a morally acceptable manner by rejecting produce from oppressive countries like Israel. In fact, experience in the apartheid South Africa era should have taught us to set the standard when it comes to condemning racist, oppressive behaviour."

The Call echoes some of the appeals made in recent months from the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), a federation of numerous trade unions and is based in the spirit of the international solidarity which marked global anti-apartheid boycotts and sanctions in the 1970s and 80s.

http://stopthewall.org/worldwideactivism/1400.shtml

FBI Investigation of AIPAC Reportedly Has Been "Expanded"

2007-02-11T18:10:00.003+02:00

by Andrew I. Killgore

Andrew I. Killgore is publisher of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs which is published by the American Educational Trust (AET), a non-profit foundation incorporated in Washington, DC by retired U.S. foreign service officers to provide the American public with balanced and accurate information concerning U.S. relations with Middle Eastern states. He gets featured on Media Monitors Network (MMN) with the courtesy of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.

Media Monitors Network Friday February 09 2007

"Time described the Harman/AIPAC investigation as a "spin-off" of the investigation that led to the charges against Rosen and Weissman, as well as to a 12-and-a-half year prison sentence against Larry Franklin. The former Pentagon Iran specialist pleaded guilty to improper disclosure of classified information about the Middle East to the two AIPAC lobbyists, who in turn were indicted for passing it on to a journalist and to a foreign governmentin the words of Time magazine, "believed to be" Israel."

In 1999 the FBI began an investigation of Steve Rosen, foreign policy director for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), and the Israel lobby's Iran specialist, Keith Weissman. The two AIPAC wheeler-dealers were indicted on Aug. 4, 2005 under the seldom-used Espionage Act. Since then their trial date has been postponed several times, but now seems likely to begin in early 2007 in Alexandria, at the Federal District Court for Eastern Virginia.

Meanwhile, across the Potomoc in Washington, DC, another sensational case involving AIPAC has surfaced. According to the Oct. 20 issue of Time magazine, the Department of Justice and the FBI have an "ongoing" investigation into whether Congresswoman Jane Harman (D-CA) and AIPAC arranged for wealthy donors to lobby House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (also D-CA) on Harman's behalf, and whether in return Harman agreed to help persuade the Bush administration to go lighter on Rosen and Weissman.

Time described the Harman/AIPAC investigation as a "spin-off" of the investigation that led to the charges against Rosen and Weissman, as well as to a 12-and-a-half year prison sentence against Larry Franklin. The former Pentagon Iran specialist pleaded guilty to improper disclosure of classified information about the Middle East to the two AIPAC lobbyists, who in turn were indicted for passing it on to a journalist and to a foreign governmentin the words of Time magazine, "believed to be" Israel.

Relations between the neocon-ish Harman and the House Democratic leader soured when Harman learned that Pelosi planned not to reappoint her to the House Intelligence Committee. As the committee's ranking minority member, Harman stood to become chair if the Democrats won the House in the November elections.

The spurned Harman embarked on an aggressive campaign to persuade Pelosi to reappoint her. According to Time, the alternative LA Weekly reported that Harman "had some major contributors call Pelosi to impress on her the importance of keeping her as head of the House Intelligence Committee. These tactics did not endear Harman to Pelosi."

Among those who called Pelosi on Harman's behalf, according to Time, was billionaire Zionist Haim Saban.

Harman has hired GOP super lawyer Ted Olson, a former solicitor general, because, Olson told Time, "she is not aware of any such [FBI] investigation, does not believe it is occurring and wanted to make sure you and your editors know that as far as she knows, that's not trueNo one from the Justice Department has contacted her."

The New York Times of Oct. 24 and the following day's Washington Post carried articles on the AIPAC/Harman affair, although both denigrated the matter. The Jewish Forward of Oct. 27, however, saying the investigation has been "expanded," described the controversy as "explosive."

http://world.mediamonitors.net/content/view/full/40754/

Hamas deals swift blow to peace deal hopes

2007-02-11T18:10:00.001+02:00

· We will never recognise Israel, says Gaza leader
· Mecca deal brings hostile reaction in Jerusalem

Ian Black, Middle East editor

The Guardian Saturday February 10, 2007

Renewed hopes for a breakthrough in the Middle East peace process suffered an early blow yesterday when the Palestinian movement Hamas pledged it would never recognise Israel, only hours after signing a Saudi-backed national unity agreement to help stave off an incipient civil war.

Nizar Rayyan, a Hamas leader in Gaza, brushed aside any room for ambiguity. He told Reuters: "We will never recognise Israel. There is nothing called Israel, neither in reality nor in the imagination."

This unequivocal language followed overnight celebrations in Gaza and the West Bank, and punctured a rare burst of cautious optimism about Thursday's power-sharing deal between the Islamists of Hamas and the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas.

Arab hopes had focused on ending both the internal crisis and the international boycott in force since Hamas won last year's elections. The consequences have included the siege of Gaza, rocket attacks on Israel, war in Lebanon and hundreds of Palestinians killed by Israelis, as well as nearly 100 victims of internecine fighting. Fifteen Israelis died during the same period. The peace process disappeared and Iranian influence in the region increased.

The Mecca agreement should make it harder for Israel to resist pressure to end the sanctions. Ismail Haniyeh of Hamas will remain prime minister, but Salam Fayyad, admired in the US and Europe, is designated finance minister, a safe pair of hands to administer vital foreign assistance. The interior minister, running the security forces, will be an independent figure in the more moderate new government.

Optimism may be unwarranted because the agreement made no mention of recognising Israel, a requirement demanded by Israel itself and laid down by the Quartet of Middle East peacemakers - the UN, EU, US and Russia - for lifting the sanctions. Mr Abbas had wanted a clear statement that the new government would be "committed" to past peace accords, as a formula offering at least implicit recognition of Israel from Hamas.

But a letter from Mr Abbas called on the Islamist movement to "abide by the interests of the Palestinian people" and "respect international law and agreements signed by the Palestine Liberation Organisation". That includes the 1993 Israeli-PLO Oslo agreement and the 2002 Arab League peace plan. Progress depends on fudges like this being ignored so that Mr Abbas is given a mandate to negotiate with Israel's prime minister, Ehud Olmert, while Hamas leaders look the other way.

Movement also depends on Israel pragmatically ignoring the Hamas presence - effectively accepting that Mr Abbas's deeds matter more than Islamist words.

Tzahi Hanegbi, head of the foreign affairs committee of the Israeli parliament, said Mr Abbas had "awarded a significant victory to Hamas".

"The chance of advancing an effective initiative and an agreement between Israel and the Palestinians has receded."

The US said the terms of the agreement had to be accepted "clearly and credibly" while the EU said it would study it "in a positive but cautious manner". France welcomed it while Britain called the accord "interesting".

Pressure has been mounting in recent weeks for a review of the EU position on sanctions that have caused ordinary Palestinians to suffer while neither weakening nor changing Hamas.

Nabil Amr, an aide to Mr Abbas, told Reuters: "I cannot say, and we don't have great expectations, that this agreement will completely end the siege, but it will pave the way to end it."

Palestinians should quickly feel the benefit of Saudi funding, clearing the way for full salary payments for public sector employees for the first time since Hamas came to power. Israel looks likely to continue withholding tax revenues.

Target Iran: US able to strike in the spring

2007-02-11T18:09:00.001+02:00

Despite denials, Pentagon plans for possible attack on nuclear sites are well advanced

Ewen MacAskill in Washington

The Guardian Saturday February 10, 2007

US preparations for an air strike against Iran are at an advanced stage, in spite of repeated public denials by the Bush administration, according to informed sources in Washington.

The present military build-up in the Gulf would allow the US to mount an attack by the spring. But the sources said that if there was an attack, it was more likely next year, just before Mr Bush leaves office.

Neo-conservatives, particularly at the Washington-based American Enterprise Institute, are urging Mr Bush to open a new front against Iran. So too is the vice-president, Dick Cheney. The state department and the Pentagon are opposed, as are Democratic congressmen and the overwhelming majority of Republicans. The sources said Mr Bush had not yet made a decision. The Bush administration insists the military build-up is not offensive but aimed at containing Iran and forcing it to make diplomatic concessions. The aim is to persuade Tehran to curb its suspect nuclear weapons programme and abandon ambitions for regional expansion.

Robert Gates, the new US defence secretary, said yesterday: "I don't know how many times the president, secretary [of state Condoleezza] Rice and I have had to repeat that we have no intention of attacking Iran."

But Vincent Cannistraro, a Washington-based intelligence analyst, shared the sources' assessment that Pentagon planning was well under way. "Planning is going on, in spite of public disavowals by Gates. Targets have been selected. For a bombing campaign against nuclear sites, it is quite advanced. The military assets to carry this out are being put in place."

He added: "We are planning for war. It is incredibly dangerous."

Deployment

Mr Cannistraro, who worked for the CIA and the National Security Council, stressed that no decision had been made.

Last month Mr Bush ordered a second battle group led by the aircraft carrier USS John Stennis to the Gulf in support of the USS Eisenhower. The USS Stennis is due to arrive within the next 10 days. Extra US Patriot missiles have been sent to the region, as well as more minesweepers, in anticipation of Iranian retaliatory action.

In another sign that preparations are under way, Mr Bush has ordered oil reserves to be stockpiled.

The danger is that the build-up could spark an accidental war. Iranian officials said on Thursday that they had tested missiles capable of hitting warships in the Gulf.

Colonel Sam Gardiner, a former air force officer who has carried out war games with Iran as the target, supported the view that planning for an air strike was under way: "Gates said there is no planning for war. We know this is not true. He possibly meant there is no plan for an immediate strike. It was sloppy wording.

"All the moves being made over the last few weeks are consistent with what you would do if you were going to do an air strike. We have to throw away the notion the US could not do it because it is too tied up in Iraq. It is an air operation."

One of the main driving forces behind war, apart from the vice-president's office, is the AEI, headquarters of the neo-conservatives. A member of the AEI coined the slogan "axis of evil" that originally lumped Iran in with Iraq and North Korea. Its influence on the White House appeared to be in decline last year amid endless bad news from Iraq, for which it had been a cheerleader. But in the face of opposition from Congress, the Pentagon and state department, Mr Bush opted last month for an AEI plan to send more troops to Iraq. Will he support calls from within the AEI for a strike on Iran?

Josh Muravchik, a Middle East specialist at the AEI, is among its most vocal supporters of such a strike.

"I do not think anyone in the US is talking about invasion. We have been chastened by the experience of Iraq, even a hawk like myself." But an air strike was another matter. The danger of Iran having a nuclear weapon "is not just that it might use it out of the blue but as a shield to do all sorts of mischief. I do not believe there will be any way to stop this happening other than physical force."

Mr Bush is part of the American generation that refuses to forgive Iran for the 1979-81 hostage crisis. He leaves office in January 2009 and has said repeatedly that he does not want a legacy in which Iran has achieved superpower status in the region and come close to acquiring a nuclear weapon capability. The logic of this is that if diplomatic efforts fail to persuade Iran to stop uranium enrichment then the only alternative left is to turn to the military.

Mr Muravchik is intent on holding Mr Bush to his word: "The Bush administration have said they would not allow Iran nuclear weapons. That is either bullshit or they mean it as a clear code: we will do it if we have to. I would rather believe it is not hot air."

Other neo-cons elsewhere in Washington are opposed to an air strike but advocate a different form of military action, supporting Iranian armed groups, in particular the Mujahideen-e Khalq (MEK), even though the state department has branded it a terrorist organisation.

Raymond Tanter, founder of the Iran Policy Committee, which includes former officials from the White House, state department and intelligence services, is a leading advocate of support for the MEK. If it comes to an air strike, he favours bunker-busting bombs. "I believe the only way to get at the deeply buried sites at Natanz and Arak is probably to use bunker-buster bombs, some of which are nuclear tipped. I do not believe the US would do that but it has sold them to Israel."

Opposition support

Another neo-conservative, Meyrav Wurmser, director of the centre for Middle East policy at the Hudson Institute, also favours supporting Iranian opposition groups. She is disappointed with the response of the Bush administration so far to Iran and said that if the aim of US policy after 9/11 was to make the Middle East safer for the US, it was not working because the administration had stopped at Iraq. "There is not enough political will for a strike. There seems to be various notions of what the policy should be."

In spite of the president's veto on negotiation with Tehran, the state department has been involved since 2003 in back-channel approaches and meetings involving Iranian officials and members of the Bush administration or individuals close to it. But when last year the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, sent a letter as an overture, the state department dismissed it within hours of its arrival.

Support for negotiations comes from centrist and liberal thinktanks. Afshin Molavi, a fellow of the New America Foundation, said: "To argue diplomacy has not worked is false because it has not been tried. Post-90s and through to today, when Iran has been ready to dance, the US refused, and when the US has been ready to dance, Iran has refused. We are at a stage where Iran is ready to walk across the dance floor and the US is looking away."

He is worried about "a miscalculation that leads to an accidental war".

The catalyst could be Iraq. The Pentagon said yesterday that it had evidence - serial numbers of projectiles as well as explosives - of Iraqi militants' weapons that had come from Iran. In a further sign of the increased tension, Iran's main nuclear negotiator, Ali Larijani, cancelled a visit to Munich for what would have been the first formal meeting with his western counterparts since last year.

If it does come to war, Mr Muravchik said Iran would retaliate, but that on balance it would be worth it to stop a country that he said had "Death to America" as its official slogan.

"We have to gird our loins and prepare to absorb the counter-shock," he said.

War of words

"If Iran escalates its military action in Iraq to the detriment of our troops and/or innocent Iraqi people, we will respond firmly"
George Bush, in an interview with National Public Radio

"The Iranians clearly believe that we are tied down in Iraq, that they have the initiative, that they are in position to press us in many ways. They are doing nothing to be constructive in Iraq at this point"
Robert Gates

"I think it's been pretty well-known that Iran is fishing in troubled waters"
Dick Cheney

"It is absolutely parallel. They're using the same dance steps - demonise the bad guys, the pretext of diplomacy, keep out of negotiations, use proxies. It is Iraq redux"
Philip Giraldi, a former CIA counter- terrorism specialist, in Vanity Fair, on echoes of the run-up to the war in Iraq

"US policymakers and analysts know that the Iranian nation would not let an invasion go without a response. Enemies of the Islamic system fabricated various rumours about death and health to demoralise the Iranian nation, but they did not know that they are not dealing with only one person in Iran. They are facing a nation"
Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei

Robert Fisk: Conspiracy of silence in the Arab world

2007-02-11T18:08:00.003+02:00

Where are the sheikhs when the Iraqi dead are fished out of the Tigris?

Independent 10 February 2007

Could Rifaat al-Assad's day in court be growing closer? Yes, Rifaat - or Uncle Rifaat to President Bashar al-Assad of Syria - the man whose brother Hafez hurled him from Damascus after he tried to use his special forces troops to stage a coup. They were the same special forces who crushed the Islamist rebellion in Hama in February 1982, slaughtering up to - well, a few thousand, according to the regime, at least 10,000 according to Fisk (who was there) and up 20,000 if you believe The New York Times (which I generally don't).

Either way, I've always regarded it as a war crime, along with the massacre of Palestinians in the Sabra and Chatila camps in Beirut by Israel's Lebanese militia allies a few months later. Ariel Sharon, who was held personally responsible by Israel's own court of enquiry, is an unindicted war criminal. So is Rifaat.

That's why the faintest breeze blew through my fax machine this week when I received a letter sent to the UN Secretary General by Malik al-Abdeh, head of the London-based Movement for Justice and Development in Syria. Abdeh left his Syrian town of Zabadani before the Hama massacres - he works now as an IT consultant for a multinational - so he's hardly able to breathe the air of Sister Syria. But then again nor can Rifaat, who languishes - complete with bodyguards - in that nice EU island of refuge called Marbella. And refuge he probably needs. Because Abdeh is asking the UN to institute an enquiry into the Hama bloodbath in the same way that it is powering along with its tribunal into the murder almost two years ago of Lebanese ex-prime minister Rafiq Hariri.

Ouch. In the letter Abdeh describes how "warplanes and tanks levelled whole districts of the city (of Hama) ... the evidence clearly suggests that government forces made no distinction between armed insurgents and unarmed civilians ... the assault on the city represents a clear act of war crimes and murder on a mass scale". The letter has now been passed to the UN's legal head, Nicolas Michel, who is also involved in the Hariri murder case. The sacred name of Rifaat has not been mentioned in the letter but it specifically demands that "those who are responsible should be held accountable and charged...".

Now, of course, there are a few discrepancies in the facts. The Syrians did not use poison gas in Hama, as Abdeh claims. They certainly did level whole areas of the city - they are still level today, although a hotel has been built over one devastated district - and when Rifaat's thugs combed through the ruins later, they executed any civilians who couldn't account for their presence.

But of course, the Hama uprising was also a Sunni Muslim insurrection and the insurgents had murdered entire families of Baath party officials, sometimes by chopping off their heads. In underground tunnels, Muslim girls had exploded themselves among Syrian troops - they were among the Middle East's first suicide bombers although we didn't appreciate that then. And the Americans were not at all unhappy that this Islamist insurgency had been crushed by Uncle Rifaat. Readers will not need any allusion to modern and equally terrible events involving Sunni insurgents to the east of Syria. And since the Americans are getting pretty efficient at killing civilians along with gunmen, I have a dark suspicion that there won't be any great enthusiasm in Washington for a prosecution over Hama.

But still... What strikes me is not so much the force of Abdeh's letter but that it was written at all. When the Hama massacre occurred, neighbouring Arab states were silent. Although the Sunni prelates of the city called for a religious war, their fellow clerics in Damascus - and, indeed, in Beirut - were silent. Just as the imams and scholars of Islam were silent when the Algerians began to slaughter each other in a welter of head-chopping and security force executions in the 1990s.

Just as they are silent now over the mutual killings in Iraq. Sure, the mass killings of Iraq would not have occurred if we hadn't invaded the country. And I do suspect a few "hidden hands" behind the civil conflict in a nation which never before broke apart. In Algeria, the French spent a lot of time in the early 1960s persuading - quite successfully - their FLN and ALN enemies to murder each other. But where are the sheikhs of Al-Azhar and the great Arabian kingdoms when the Iraqi dead are fished out of the Tigris and cut down in their thousands in Baghdad, Kerbala, Baquba? They, too, are silent.

Not a word of criticism. Not a hint of concern. Not a scintilla (an Enoch Powell word, this) of sympathy. An Israeli bombardment of Lebanon? Even an Israeli invasion? That's a war crime - and the Arabs are right, the Israelis do commit war crimes. I saw the evidence of quite a few last summer. But when does Arab blood become less sacred? Why, when it is shed by Arabs. It's not just a failure of self-criticism in the Arab world. In a landscape ruled by monsters whom we in the West have long supported, criticism of any kind is a dodgy undertaking. But can there not be one small sermon of reprobation for what Iraqi Muslims are doing to Iraqi Muslims?

Of course, but the real problem the Arabs now face is that their lands have been overrun and effectively occupied by Western armies. I worked out a few weeks ago that, per head of population - and the world was smaller in the 12th century - there are now about 22 times more Western soldiers in Muslim lands than there were at the time of the Crusades. How do you strike back at these legions and drive them out? Brutally and most terribly, the Iraqis have shown how. I used to say the future of the Bush administration will be decided in Iraq, not in Washington. And this now appears to be true.

So what should we do? Allow the Rifaats of this world to go on enjoying Marbella? And the killers of Hariri go free? And the Arabs remain silent in the face of the shameful atrocities which their brother Muslims have also committed? I'll take a bet that Rifaat will be safe from the UN lads. In Iraq right now, he'd be on "our" side, wouldn't he, battling the Islamic insurgency as he did in Hama? And that, I fear, is the problem. We are all Rifaats now.

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/fisk/article2255669.ece

Charlize angers US

2007-02-11T18:08:00.001+02:00

News24.com 09/02/2007 21:17 - (SA)

Charles Smith,

Beeld

Washington - Charlize Theron has upset Americans with comments made during a CNN interview in which she compared America and Cuba with regards to the restrictions placed on human freedom.

Theron this week made her debut as a movie producer with the movie East of Havana, a documentary film about rap singers in Cuba.

After the interview, newspapers published headlines referring to her as a "dumb blonde" and articles wondered whether she was just another Hollywood left-winger.

The New York Daily News wrote an article with the heading "Just another pretty face".

The article said that it was accepted that Charlize Theron was blonde and that now it had been proven that she was stupid as well.

Most Americans however, felt she had been treated unfairly by journalist Rick Sanchez who refused to let go of the subject while talking about the movie. There were also claims that she was quoted out of context.

Theron was criticised for saying that there was a lack of freedom in America. She said that TV reporters in the US were fired for commenting about the US war, just like rap singers in Cuba had to show their lyrics before they were allowed to perform.

Theron also said she loved America, however, and this is why she lived in the US.

http://www.news24.com/News24/Entertainment/Celebrities/0,9294,2-1225-2108_2067208,00.html

Robert Fisk : Iraqi insurgents offer peace in return for US concessions

2007-02-11T18:07:00.001+02:00

The Independent 02/09/07

For the first time, one of Iraq's principal insurgent groups has set out the terms of a ceasefire that would allow American and British forces to leave the country they invaded almost four years ago.

The present terms would be impossible for any US administration to meet - but the words of Abu Salih Al-Jeelani, one of the military leaders of the Sunni Iraqi Islamic Resistance Movement show that the groups which have taken more than 3,000 American lives are actively discussing the opening of contacts with the occupation army.

Al-Jeelani's group, which also calls itself the "20th Revolution Brigades'', is the military wing of the original insurgent organisation that began its fierce attacks on US forces shortly after the invasion of 2003. The statement is, therefore, of potentially great importance, although it clearly represents only the views of Sunni Muslim fighters.

Shia militias are nowhere mentioned. The demands include the cancellation of the entire Iraqi constitution - almost certainly because the document, in effect, awards oil-bearing areas of Iraq to Shia and Kurds, but not to the minority Sunni community. Yet the Sunnis remain Washington's principal enemies in the Iraqi war.

"Discussions and negotiations are a principle we believe in to overcome the situation in which Iraqi bloodletting continues," al-Jeelani said in a statement that was passed to The Independent. "Should the Americans wish to negotiate their withdrawal from our country and leave our people to live in peace, then we will negotiate subject to specific conditions and circumstances."

Al-Jeelani suggests the United Nations, the Arab League or the Islamic Conference might lead such negotiations and would have to guarantee the security of the participants.

Then come the conditions:

* The release of 5,000 detainees held in Iraqi prisons as "proof of goodwill".

* Recognition "of the legitimacy of the resistance and the legitimacy of its role in representing the will of the Iraqi people".

* An internationally guaranteed timetable for all agreements.

* The negotiations to take place in public.

* The resistance "must be represented by a committee comprising the representatives of all the jihadist brigades".

* The US to be represented by its ambassador in Iraq and the most senior commander.

It is not difficult to see why the Americans would object to those terms. They will not want to talk to men they have been describing as "terrorists" for the past four years. And if they were ever to concede that the "resistance" represented "the will of the Iraqi people" then their support for the elected Iraqi government would have been worthless.

Indeed, the insurgent leader specifically calls for the "dissolution of the present government and the revoking of the spurious elections and the constitution..."

He also insists that all agreements previously entered into by Iraqi authorities or US forces should be declared null and void.

But there are other points which show that considerable discussion must have gone on within the insurgency movement - possibly involving the group's rival, the Iraqi Islamic Army.

They call, for example, for the disbandment of militias and the outlawing of militia organisations - something the US government has been urging the Iraqi Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, to do for months.

The terms also include the legalisation of the old Iraqi army, an "Anglo-American commitment to rebuild Iraq and reconstruct all war damage" - something the occupying powers claim they have been trying to do for a long time - and integrating "resistance fighters" into the recomposed army.

Al-Jeelani described President George Bush's new plans for countering the insurgents as "political chicanery" and added that "on the field of battle, we do not believe that the Americans are able to diminish the capability of the resistance fighters to continue the struggle to liberate Iraq from occupation ...

"The resistance groups are not committing crimes to be granted a pardon by America, we are not looking for pretexts to cease our jihad... we fight for a divine aim and one of our rights is the liberation and independence of our land of Iraq."

There will, the group says, be no negotiations with Mr Maliki's government because they consider it "complicit in the slaughter of Iraqis by militias, the security apparatus and death squads". But they do call for the unity of Iraq and say they "do not recognise the divisions among the Iraqi people".

It is not difficult to guess any American response to those proposals. But FLN [National Liberation Front] contacts with France during the 1954-62 war of independence by Algeria began with such a series of demands - equally impossible to meet but which were eventually developed into real proposals for a French withdrawal.

What is unclear, of course, is the degree to which al-Jeelani's statement represents the collective ideas of the Sunni insurgents. And, ominously, no mention is made of al-Qa'ida.

Morocco hopes to host US African Command

2007-02-11T18:06:00.001+02:00

Middle East Newsline Fri, 09 Feb 2007

RABAT, Morocco [MENL] -- Morocco hopes to host the new U.S. military command planned for Africa.

Officials said the North African kingdom intends to offer a home to the new African Command as part of expanded military cooperation with the United States. They said Morocco represents the most stable country on the African continent.

"We have the infrastructure as well as the society that accepts foreigners," an official said. "It would be a good choice and we hope to discuss this seriously with our friends in Washington."

On Feb. 6, the Defense Department announced a new U.S. Africa Command, known as Africom. The command would coordinate virtually all of the U.S. military and security interests throughout the continent.

http://www.menewsline.com/stories/2007/february/02_09_4.html

Seeing what we want to see in Qaddafi

2007-02-06T20:05:00.000+02:00

Hisham Matar

The International Herald Tribune Published: February 5, 2007

PARIS: Sheep or wolf?

Since 2003, Libyan diplomats have been hard at work convincing the West that Libya is no longer interested in amassing weapons of mass destruction, blowing up Western airplanes or covertly financing armed movements abroad. Presenting this new face has been largely effective: Sanctions, in place since 1982, have been lifted; Libya has been removed from the U.S. roster of terrorist nations; and the list of international trade agreements continues to grow.

As part of this public relations drive, Colonel Muammar el-Qaddafi and his officials have been keen to reassure Libyan critics that it is now safe to return to Libya. Unsurprisingly, the vast majority of the hundreds of thousands of exiled Libyans have not returned. However, one did: Idrees Boufayed, a doctor living and working in Switzerland.

On Sept. 30, 2006, he returned to Libya for the first time in 16 years. And on Nov. 5, he disappeared.

Throughout its 37-year rule, the Qaddafi government has found as many reasons to arrest its citizens as Libyans have found to abandon their country. Thousands of critics of the Qaddafi regime, inside and outside Libya, have either disappeared or been assassinated. My father, the political dissident Jaballa Matar, disappeared from his home in Cairo in March 1990. We still do not know whether he is alive or dead.

Astonishingly, on Dec. 29 — 55 days after his arrest — Boufayed was released. The Libyan authorities offered no explanation for his detention. And Boufayed, who had been a regular contributor to dissident Web sites, has remained uncharacteristically silent ever since. This change in behavior is not unusual: Almost all political dissidents fortunate enough to be released have given up their criticism of the regime. The machinery of Qaddafi's government is as effective as ever.

Now that the United States has incorporated the Libyan regime into its so-called war on terrorism, it is difficult to see what political pressure it can exert on the Libyan government to reform. Western governments have had the power to effect change in Libya only as long as the dictator's government has hungered for the West's acceptance.

The short-sighted paranoia with which the war on terrorism has been managed has weakened any moral advantage the United States might once have had.

The cards surrendered were hugely undervalued: The United States could have compelled the Libyan dictatorship to do much more than just hand over its outdated weapons of mass destruction and compensate the families of the victims of the 1988 bombing of a Pan Am jet over Lockerbie, Scotland, with $2.7 billion — a sum that would be earned back in trade deals during the first week after sanctions were lifted.

Although America has highlighted the issue of human rights in its negotiations with Libya, none of the countries that now profit from a close association with the Libyan leadership has demanded the release, or even the trial, of the silenced political prisoners who crowd Libya's prisons. No country made it a condition in negotiations that Libya investigate the countless cases of the "disappeared." None of them compelled the Qaddafi government even to address the massacre at Abu Salim prison, where, one night in June 1996, more than 1,000 political prisoners were shot and killed. In its 2003 negotiations with Libya, the United States lost a golden opportunity to link the improvement of Libya's dismal human-rights situation to its acceptance into the international community. Indeed, it can be argued that the United States has instead helped worsen human rights in Libya. It has not only defended torture, which has softened the critical gaze on Libya's own practice of torture, but also encouraged the practice by sending Libyans suspected of terrorism to Tripoli for "interrogation."

Furthermore, Qaddafi has used the new panic — that the Islamist bogeyman will imminently shroud the world under his dark beard — as an excuse to silence critics. That tactic has fomented rather than curbed religious extremism in Libya as elsewhere.

The impression that a bloodless battle has been won in Libya rests on an inflated notion of the threat the country, even with its rusty weapons of mass destruction, ever posed to the West. It misreads an act of diplomatic negligence toward the rights of the Libyan people as a victory for world peace.

Qaddafi deserves sole credit for Libya's foreign policy U-turn. He has never found it necessary to devote himself to a single political ideology; his only consistent policy has been to guard his personal political survival. The United States and Britain understand this, but have only exploited it for their own myopic objectives, forgetting that Libya's political development can lie only with its people.

more here http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/02/05/opinion/edmatar.php?page=2

http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/02/05/opinion/edmatar.php

These moderates are in fact fanatics, torturers and killers

2007-02-06T20:01:00.000+02:00

The longer the US and Britain back dictatorial regimes in the Middle East the more explosive the region will become

Mai Yamani

· Mai Yamani is author of Cradle of Islam, and Changed Identities: The Challenge of the New Generation in Saudi Arabia myamani@btinternet.com

The Guardian Tuesday February 6, 2007

Politicians, especially in times of geopolitical deadlock, adopt a word or a concept to sell to the public. In 1973, at the peak of cold-war tensions, the US secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, coined the term "detente". Such words gain a currency and become useful political tools to escape policy quagmires. As the Middle East lurches from crisis to crisis, Tony Blair, George Bush and Condoleezza Rice compulsively repeat the word "moderates" to describe their allies in the region. But the concept of moderate is merely the latest attempt to market a failed policy, while offering a facile hedge against accusations of Islamophobia and anti-Islamic policies.

Western leaders have simply chosen a few Arab rulers they believe are still saleable to western audiences. And, as the word moderate has been repeated by western leaders and echoed in the international media, these rulers have begun to believe their own billing. But who are they, and are they moderate? Their selection has been fluid at the periphery but solid at the core. Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt clearly qualify, whereas Syria, an ally during the 1990-91 Gulf war, was once at the periphery but fell out of step with US interests after 9/11. Likewise, after the death of Arafat and the victory of Hamas, Fatah became moderate, while Iran, moderate under the shah, became "radical" after the 1979 Islamic revolution.

This minuet of political marketing may play well in the west, but not in the Arab world, where the double standards and manipulation are all too plain to see. The Saudi Wahhabis are, after all, fanatics; Egypt's Hosni Mubarak is intolerant of dissent; and Jordan, the state closest to the western ideal, is a marginal player. These countries' appalling human rights records, lack of transparency and repression rank them among the world's least moderate. Is there such a thing as a "moderate public beheading"? For the US and UK governments there clearly is, because all departures from the ideals of liberal democracy and social justice are rooted in "tradition". Hence bribes, beheadings and the oppression of women and minorities are traditional, and because whatever is traditional is not radical, it must be moderate.

Nothing, it seems, is more moderate than inertia. So inertia pays. Egypt has received an average of $1.3bn a year in military aid from the US since 1979, and $815m a year in economic assistance. Saudi Arabia relies on oil revenues and the international legitimacy provided by membership of such moderate bulwarks as the WTO and the IMF.

But at home, all other hallmarks of moderation are missing. Amnesty International describes Saudi Arabia as a country where "there are no political parties, no elections, no independent legislature, no trade unions ... no independent judiciary, no independent human rights organisations. The government allows no international human rights organisations to carry out research in the country ... there is strict censorship of media within the country, and strict control of access to the internet, satellite television and other forms of communication with the outside world."

Likewise, Human Rights Watch's report on Egypt describes Mubarak's government as using a "heavy hand against political dissent in 2006. In April 2006, the government renewed emergency rule for an additional two years, providing a continued basis for arbitrary detention and trials before military and state security courts. Torture at the hands of security forces remains a serious problem." Amnesty's report on Egypt concurred: "Torture continued to be used systematically in detention centres ... Several people died in custody in circumstances suggesting that torture or ill-treatment may have caused or contributed to their deaths."

The use of moderate to describe such leaders is necessary to mask the death of Bush's "freedom agenda" in the Middle East, with its lofty goal of regionwide democratisation. Indeed, Rice's visit to Egypt in January emphasised the word moderate and completely ignored the word democracy.

The moderates are not democrats, but they are politically useful because of what else they are not: they are not Persian and not Shia, not defiant and not able to act independently of the US. They are moderate only because they do not need to be more radical to achieve absolute power. Mubarak already exercises it, and the al-Sauds are satisfied with the current level of fanaticism in the kingdom. Some are armchair jihadis, but their Islamism serves only to prop up their domestic legitimacy.

What the moderates do need is continued western military and financial cover. So they remain ideological stalwarts. If communism was the enemy of the US, then it was their enemy. If Shia Iran is America's enemy today, it is also the enemy of America's moderate allies.

The relationship with the west is a two-way street. The Saudis invest billions in the US, buy weapons they don't need or cannot use, and provide a thriving market for western goods. But, like Mubarak, the Saudi rulers are old and on the defensive against their own people. The more the US shelters them, the more their legitimacy erodes. And the longer Washington and London prolong the state of denial with the help of pithy and amorphous buzzwords, the more explosive the Middle East will become.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,,2006728,00.html

Archbishop in police state warning

2007-02-06T20:00:00.000+02:00

Press Association

Guardian Monday February 5, 2007 6:43 AM

The Archbishop of York has warned that Britain was in danger of "coming close to a police state" in the wake of the arrest of suspected terrorists in Birmingham.

Dr John Sentamu, who fled Uganda in the 1970s, criticised 90-day detention, likening it with his home country under the tyrannical rule of Idi Amin.

"If you detain people, you must have good enough reason for detaining them and have a chance for there being a successful prosecution," he said.

He continued: "The Home Secretary has not produced the evidence that shows that in 90 days you're capable of getting somebody prosecuted.

"Why does he want these days, so the police do what? Gather more evidence? To me that becomes, if you're not very careful, very close to a police state in which they pick you up and then they say later on we'll find evidence against you. That's what happened in Uganda with Idi Amin."

He spoke out in an interview with ITV News as West Midlands Police continued to question nine people arrested in Birmingham over an alleged plot to kidnap and murder a Muslim soldier.

The Archbishop also urged people coming to live in the UK to adopt and "cherish" British values.

The second most senior cleric in the Church of England said: "If you are in Britain and you're British, you should really cherish the traditions that are here.

"In a (democratic) country like this to then say: I am going to kidnap somebody, I'm going to kill somebody, I will blow people up - for whatever ideology that is about - it isn't good citizenship.

"If you don't actually subscribe to the things that make Britain, you're going to be in trouble."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uklatest/story/0,,-6394619,00.html

British Embassy funded study of separation barrier

2007-02-06T19:59:00.002+02:00

By Aluf Benn

Haaretz Tue., February 06, 2007

The British Embassy in Israel is helping to fund research on the enclaves created by the separation barrier around Palestinian villages in the West Bank. The study is being carried out by the non-governmental organization Bimkom - Planners for Planning Rights. Officials from Bimkom say that the embassy contributed about 10,000 pounds sterling for the research and the report on the study, but did not interfere in its content.

A source in Israel's Foreign Ministry yesterday criticized the action. "It is interference by Britain in an internal Israeli matter. How would they react in London if our embassy was to fund research on a British organization that is trying to promote an agenda that is critical of [the government]? This is not acceptable in international relations."

The British Embassy issued the following response: "We recognize Israel's need and right to defend itself, but we believe the route of the separation fence should follow the Green Line. [Our] funding of the research was intended to examine the implications of the current route of the fence on the Palestinian population."

Bimkom's study, which was completed a few months ago, describes the difficulties that the fence causes for Palestinians in the enclaves on either side of the barrier. The authors of the report conclude that in addition to the security aims of the fence, it is also intended to aid the Jewish settlements and permit them to expand at the expense of the quality of life of the Palestinian residents.

British Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett is currently on her first official visit to Israel and the Palestinian Authority. In Israel she will meet with Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, Defense Minister Amir Peretz and the chairman of the opposition, Benjamin Netanyahu. In Ramallah, Beckett will meet with PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas.

In an announcement issued before her trip to "Israel and the Occupied Territories," Beckett said, "I want to see for myself the prospects for moving forward the political process."

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/822205.html

Giuliani joins race for president

2007-02-06T19:59:00.001+02:00

BBC Monday, 5 February 2007, 20:26 GMT

Former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani has officially joined the running for the Republican nomination for the 2008 US presidential election.

The Federal Election Commission said Mr Giuliani had filed a "statement of candidacy" - a one-page form outlining a candidate's wish to seek office.

Mr Giuliani was widely praised for his response to the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York in 2001.

He has remained in the public eye and is known as a moderate Republican.

The so-called statement of candidacy filed on Monday puts Mr Giuliani on the same level, legally, as Republican candidates John McCain and Mitt Romney.

Unlike his main rivals, Mr Giuliani has been ambiguous about whether he would ultimately put himself forward for the Republican nomination.

Mr Giuliani set up an exploratory committee in November last year and said that he was "testing the waters".

Under US law, setting up such a committee allowed Mr Giuliani to travel the country to gauge support for a candidacy without formally declaring himself as a candidate.

'America's mayor'

Correspondents say being mayor, even in a city as big and important as New York, is not commonly regarded as normal preparation for a presidential campaign.

But in the chaos which followed the devastating attacks on the World Trade Center, Mr Giuliani emerged as a defiant and unifying leader, earning him the honorary, but unofficial, title of "America's mayor".

Since then, Mr Giuliani has remained in the public eye and is popular with the American people, particularly Republicans.

However, his relatively moderate views may make it difficult for him to persuade mainstream Republicans that he should be their presidential candidate.

His support for same-sex civil unions and embryonic stem cell research would put him to the left of most of his party members.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/6333437.stm

Israeli minister: Free Barghouti

2007-02-06T19:58:00.000+02:00

Al Jazeera MONDAY, FEBRUARY 05,2007

A senior political ally of the Israeli prime minister has said that Israel should release its most prominent Palestinian prisoner - a man convicted in fatal attacks on Israelis - in a bid to prop up Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president. Gideon Ezra, the environment minister, is the second senior Israeli official to recently advocate the release of Marwan Barghouti of Abbas's Fatah movement.

Barghouti is the most popular leader in the Palestinian territories, and is widely regarded as the only figure able to unify clashing Palestinian factions, rein in militants and get peacemaking with Israel moving again. "If we want to blunt Hamas's capabilities ... and if we ultimately want a civil rather than a religious government like those taking shape across the Arab world, we have to make a contribution," Ezra told Army Radio, in defence of freeing Barghouti. "I think it could definitely help Abu Mazen [Abbas]." Power vacuum Abbas and his Fatah loyalists are engaged in an increasingly deadly power struggle with the ruling Hamas faction, which rejects Israel's right to exist and unseated Fatah in elections last year. The infighting has weakened Abbas as he tries to relaunch long-stalled peace talks with Israel, which considers him a legitimate negotiating alternative to Hamas. Miri Eisin, Ehud Olmert's spokeswoman, said the release of Barghouti - who is serving five life sentences for the murders of four Israelis and a Greek monk - was "not on the agenda". But Ezra, a member of Olmert's Kadima party, said Israel has freed "much worse murderers" in the past. Several weeks ago, the deputy defence minister, Ephraim Sneh of the Labour party, also championed Barghouti's release.

http://english.aljazeera.net/News/Templates/Postings/DetailedPage.aspx?FRAMELESS=false&NRNODEGUID=%7b9900A9A6-4C31-4055-81C8-18759B16CE47%7d&NRORIGINALURL=%2fNR%2fexeres%2f9900A9A6-4C31-4055-81C8-18759B16CE47%2ehtm&NRCACHEHINT=NoModifyGuest

Fitzgerald Targets Cheney in Libby Tapes

2007-02-06T19:56:00.000+02:00

By MATT APUZZO

Associated Press Writer Tuesday February 6, 2007 1:01 AM

WASHINGTON (AP) - Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, in tapes played Monday in the CIA leak trial, pressed Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff on whether Cheney had directed him to leak the identity of a CIA operative to reporters.

The audiotapes showed that Fitzgerald, just two months into his leak investigation, was asking pointed questions about the highest levels of government.

The first 90 minutes of audiotapes, recorded during the 2003 grand jury testimony of top Cheney aide I. Lewis ``Scooter'' Libby, were played for jurors in Libby's perjury and obstruction trial. More than six hours of additional tapes were to be played Tuesday.

Fitzgerald began his questioning by determining what he already knew to be true - that Libby was not the source of syndicated columnist Robert Novak's story revealing that the wife of an outspoken Bush administration critic worked for the CIA.

Almost immediately after that, however, Fitzgerald steered the discussion toward Cheney and how his office responded to the growing criticism from former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who claimed to have led a fact-finding mission that refuted some prewar intelligence on Iraq.

Cheney's former spokeswoman, Cathie Martin, has testified that Cheney's office viewed Wilson's criticism as a direct attack on the president's credibility and was focused on beating it back.

During that effort, Libby said, Cheney mentioned in an offhand way in June 2003 that Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, worked for the CIA. Fitzgerald asked whether Cheney was upset by the apparent ``nepotism'' in the fact Plame may have arranged the trip. Libby said he did not recall.

Fitzgerald, who questioned Libby in a non-confrontational, sometimes even casual manner, also asked whether Cheney expected Libby to share that with reporters, specifically Walter Pincus of The Washington Post. Libby said he did not.

Fitzgerald asked four times and in four different ways whether Libby could be absolutely sure he did not disclose the information to Pincus. Pincus never revealed Plame's identity.

``The vice president obviously thought it was important enough to share with you or interesting enough to color the background, correct?'' Fitzgerald said.

``Yes,'' Libby replied.

Fitzgerald never brought a leak charge. Libby, who is accused of lying about his conversations with reporters regarding Plame, is the only person charged in the case. Fitzgerald believes Libby lied to protect his job and reputation. Fitzgerald has never accused Libby of lying to protect Cheney.

Prosecutors say Libby learned about Plame from Cheney, passed it on to reporters, then concocted a story about learning her identity from NBC reporter Tim Russert. Defense attorneys say Libby forgot the information after hearing it from Cheney and learned it again from Russert as if it were new.

Fitzgerald has presented several witnesses, including former State Department Undersecretary Marc Grossman and CIA official Robert Grenier, who say they spoke to Libby about Plame well before he could have learned about her from Russert. In his grand jury testimony, Libby said he had no recollection of such conversations.

``Do you recall any conversation at any time when Secretary Grossman told you that the former ambassador's wife worked at the CIA?''

``I don't recall,'' Libby said.

``You have no memory of that whatsoever?'' Fitzgerald responded.

``I'm sorry sir, I don't,'' Libby replied.

Jurors followed along in their transcripts as Libby's testimony was played through the court speakers. Libby sat expressionless at the defense table, occasionally following along himself.

It is unusual for the government to make such extensive use of a defendant's taped grand jury testimony. The federal government did so 17 years ago in another high-profile criminal case in Washington, D.C., the drug trial of Washington Mayor Marion Barry.

^---

Associated Press writer Pete Yost contributed to this report.

Muslims hurl stones at J'lem dig underway near Temple Mount

2007-02-06T19:54:00.000+02:00

Haaretz Tue., February 06, 2007

Police on Tuesday arrested four Muslim worshipers who threw stones at an Israel Antiquities Authority excavation underneath Mugrabi gate in Jerusalem's Old City.

The dig as part of a plan to rebuild the Mugrabi bridge walkway planned to run from the Dung gate to the Mugrabi gate, which serves as the primary entrance to the compound referred to by Jews as the Temple Mount and Muslims as al-Haram al-Sherif, the Noble Sanctuary.

The digging will use smaller excavating tools, and will be supervised by a team of archaeologists. The excavations are intended to strengthen the support columns of the Mugrabi bridge.

The four additional columns to be built will be located on the grounds of the "Archaeological Garden" next to the Dung Gate.

The project will replace the temporary wooden bridge built after the collapse of the previous ramp in 2004.

The Islamic Movement announced on Tuesday that it planned to hold a demonstration Friday against the excavations.

MK Talab El-Sana (United Arab List) warned on Tuesday that the excavations are likely to ignite a third intifada, that will include protests and conflict throughout the Arab and Muslim world.

"The Israeli government is again provoking the Muslim world and the Palestinian people, and is not hesitating to ignite the region on behalf of irresponsible decisions," El-Sana said.

According to El-Sana, the government is trying to "deflect attention away from their failures in the war in Lebanon."

Head of the northern branch of the Islamic movement Sheik Ra'ad Salah, and the head of Jerusalem's Supreme Muslim Council Ikrima Sabri called this week for all Muslims in Israel to flock to the Temple Mount complex to prevent Israel from actions that they say are meant to destroy the Mugrabi Gate.

In response, Police on Tuesday decided to restrict access to the Temple Mount and deployed security forces throughout the Old City of Jerusalem. Police fear that violent protest, specifically by members of the Israeli Islamic Movement, may break out in the city and have restricted all men under the age of 45 from Tuesday's prayers at the Al-Aqsa Mosque. All Jews and tourists are also forbidden from the compound as part of the restrictions.

Jerusalem area Archaeologist Yuval Baruch stated that there is no intention to dig underneath the Temple Mount or to cause any damage to the Western Wall of the Mount. A source at the Israel Antiquities Authority stated today that "The incitement occurring in the Muslim world over the excavations is merely an attempt to twist a non-political act into something religious and divisive."

"The excavations are being carried out according to procedure by a team of professional archaeologists and experts," the source added.

Police markedly beefed up their presence Tuesday in Jerusalem's Old City, as tensions rose over Israeli construction work aimed at restoring the pathway leading from the Western Wall to the adjacent Temple Mount, Israel Radio reported.

The bridge is planned to run from the Dung gate to the Mugrabi gate, which serves as the primary entrance to the compound.

The Al-Aqsa and Dome of the Rock mosques sit above the Western Wall in the compound referred to by Jews as the Temple Mount and Muslims as al-Haram al-Sherif, the Noble Sanctuary. The Al-Aqsa Mosque is Islam's third holiest shrine and has been a flashpoint for Israeli-Palestinian fighting in the past.

The digging will use smaller excavating tools, and will be supervised by a team of archaeologists. The excavations are intended to strengthen the support columns of the Mugrabi bridge.

The project, meant to replace the temporary wooden bridge built after the collapse of the previous ramp in 2004, will install four additional support columns on the grounds of the 'Jerusalem Archaeological Park' next to the Dung Gate.

In recent weeks, militant Islamic leaders have warned that the Al-Aqsa Mosque is under threat from Israeli archeological excavation. They have urged followers to mobilize to block Israeli work near the compound.

MK Talab El-Sana (United Arab List) warned on Tuesday that the excavations are likely to ignite a third intifada, which will include protests and conflict throughout the Arab and Muslim world.

"The Israeli government is again provoking the Muslim world and the Palestinian people, and is not hesitating to ignite the region on behalf of irresponsible decisions," El-Sana said.

According to El-Sana, the government is trying to "deflect attention away from their failures in the war in Lebanon."

Head of the northern branch of the Islamic movement Sheik Ra'ad Salah, and the head of Jerusalem's Supreme Muslim Council Ikrima Sabri called this week for all Muslims in Israel to flock to the Temple Mount complex to prevent Israel from actions that they say are meant to destroy the Mugrabi Gate.

Mohammed Hussein, the top Muslim cleric in Jerusalem, told the Gaza Strip radio station of the Hamas militant movement that 'what is happening is an aggression, We call on the Palestinian people to unite and unify the efforts to protect Jerusalem.'

Adnan Husseini, the director of the Islamic Waqf, the trust that oversees that complex, said he was concerned the new walkway could damage the original earthen ramp, which he said was Waqf property and contained ruins of archaeological significance. The new construction constituted a violation of the site, he said.

This is a very dangerous project that will damage things of great historical value in this very sensitive place, Husseini said.

Husseini said he suspected that the excavations around the holy site were attempts to tunnel under it - a common allegation among Muslims, though one never substantiated - and demanded that Israel cease all digs immediately.

We call for an end to all excavations, he said.

Jordan, which has a custodial role over the site, expressed concern about the work there, according to the kingdom's official Petra news agency.

Jordanian government spokesman Nasser Judeh quoted Prime Minister Marouf al-Bakhit as saying that the dig was a big concern to Jordan, its king, people and government, Petra reported.

The site is part of east Jerusalem, which was ruled by Jordan until Israel captured it and the adjacent West Bank in the 1967 Mideast war.

In 1988, the current's king's father, King Hussein, renounced his country's claim to the West Bank, but maintained Jordan's authority to look after the mosques - a custodial role that Israel recognizes.

Jerusalem area Archaeologist Yuval Baruch stated that there is no intention to dig underneath the Temple Mount or to cause any damage to the Western Wall of the Mount. A source at the Israel Antiquities Authority stated today that "The incitement occurring in the Muslim world over the excavations is merely an attempt to twist a non-political act into something religious and divisive."

"The excavations are being carried out according to procedure by a team of professional archaeologists and experts," the source added.

Israeli officials have denied the allegations, saying that the charges are a ploy by Palestinians to help quell Fatah-Hamas infighting.

In a attempt to diffuse tension, Israeli authorities barred Jews and tourists from visiting the Temple Mount on Tuesday. In addition, 2,000 police were deployed in and around the Old City to maintain order, Police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said.

Authorities also limited entry to the compound to Muslim worshippers 45 years of age or older, who carry Israeli identification cards showing them to be residents of the city's eastern half.

Meshal condemns digsThe leader of Hamas Sunday condemned excavations by Israeli archaeologists near the Al-Aqsa mosque and warned they were "playing with fire."

"I have a stern warning for the enemy," Khaled Meshal said at a news conference in the Syrian capital.

"Sharon's desecration of the Aqsa sparked the 2000 uprising. The Israeli leadership must learn from this lesson. We have confidence in our people, its masses, all of its groups and military wings," he added.

The Palestinian uprising erupted in September 2000 after a visit, condemned in the Arab world, by then Israeli opposition leader Ariel Sharon to the mosque compound in East Jerusalem, which Israel occupied and annexed after the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. "Israel knows what its violation of the holy Aqsa will bring. It is playing with fire," Meshal said.

In the 1980s, Israel uncovered a plot by a group of Jews to blow up Al-Aqsa in the hope that a new Jewish temple could be built at the site.

Muslim scholars say the excavations violate Aqsa's sanctity. Israeli officials say the work would not harm the structure of the mosque, which dates from the 7th century.

"We are facing a dangerous action. Jerusalem's Muslim and Christian holy sites are dear to all Palestinians. Israel is trying to take advantage of the Palestinian internal conflict to commit its crimes," Meshal said.

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/822535.html

While Palestinians are distracted by meeting in Mecca, Israeli forces surround Al Aqsa Mosque and conduct excavations

2007-02-06T19:53:00.000+02:00

Maan News Date: 06 / 02 / 2007 Time: 10:00

Jerusalem - Ma'an - The Israeli occupation forces closed the gates to the Al Aqsa Mosque and the old city of Jerusalem and deployed troops intensively in the streets and the area of Magharba (Moroccan or 'Dung') Gate on Tuesday morning.

Ma'an's correspondent reported that the Israeli forces began the operation in the early hours of Tuesday morning, in an attempt to prevent Palestinians from entering the mosque.

The Israeli forces deployed hundreds of policemen and soldiers in the area of the old city and prevented Palestinians from approaching the area or entering the old city, and the students from going to their schools inside the city.

The higher Fatwa Council expressed worries that the Israeli authorities will demolish part of the Magharba gate, taking advantage of the internal strife between Fatah and Hamas and the Palestinian focus on the meeting in Mecca on Tuesday, as a distraction, while they execute plans to bulldoze Palestinian areas in east Jerusalem and continue to judaize Jerusalem.

Palestine Supreme Judge Sheikh Tayseer Tamimi called on Palestinians to go to the mosque in order to protect it from Israeli bulldozers. He also called upon Arab and Muslim countries to immediately move to defend the mosque. He told Al Jazeera satellite channel that the "Israelis are threatening the mosque and endangering it."

Tamimi added that Israel is taking advantage of the internal strife in the Palestinian territories to execute plans in the holy city of Jerusalem.

Israeli bulldozers have started demolishing a wooden fence and two rooms near the Wailing Wall after days of excavating a new tunnel under the holy Al Aqsa Mosque.

Ma'an's reporter said that the Israeli police force was deployed intensively in the old city as a precautionary measure. The Israeli police said that the work is intended to support a stairwell that leads to Al Magharba gate, which was weathered by a snow storm two years ago.

The Israeli forces prevented all Palestinians under the age of 45 from entering the old city or the mosque to avoid any confrontation between angered Palestinians and the Israeli forces. According to the Islamic Waqf administration, two halls beneath the mosque will threaten the mosque's foundations, if they are removed.

Excavation director in the Israeli authority of excavations, told Al Jazeera satellite channel that the excavations are not in the mosque and will not threaten it, he said it is a simple maintenance operation.

Imam of the Al Aqsa Mosque, Dr Yousef Salama, called upon Arabs and Muslims throughout the world to "protect the mosque from the threat to its foundations and Israeli plans to demolish it and build an alleged temple."

Salama warned of the consequences of this act, saying that "almost a billion-and-a-half Muslims in this world are watching Israeli acts and their hearts and eyes are looking at the holy mosque." He condemned Israeli aggressions against the mosque and said that "Israel has decided to demolish the mosque, even the Israeli daily newspaper, Haaretz, said that the settlers finished making a golden lantern in 2001 to put in the temple after it is built on the ruins of the mosque."

Salama added that "the relationship between Muslims and the mosque should be based on a strong faith," he called on Arabs and Muslims to go out into the streets to demonstrate against Israeli acts in the city .

http://www.maannews.net/en/index.php?opr=ShowDetails&ID=19261

Canadian government forming pro-Israel lobby

2007-02-06T19:51:00.000+02:00

Etgar Lefkovits,

THE JERUSALEM POST Feb. 4, 2007

The Canadian government is establishing an "Israel Allies Caucus" this week meant to mobilize support for the State of Israel and promote Judeo-Christian values amid a groundswell of Christian support for Israel around the world.

The launching of the Canadian parliamentary lobby, which is based on the formation of the Knesset's "Christian Allies Caucus" three years ago, comes less than six months after a similar lobby was established in the US Congress.

The establishment of the new pro-Israel lobby will be officially announced in Ottawa on Tuesday in the presence of Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, Canadian and Israeli parliamentarians, including MK Benny Elon (National Union-National Religious Party) MK Orit Noked (Labor) and MK Ran Cohen (Meretz), as well as members of the Canadian-Israel Friendship League.

The event comes at a time of burgeoning relations between Israel and the largely supportive evangelical Christian community around the world.

"The launching of the Canadian Parliamentary Israel Allies Caucus is a sign of things to come," said Josh Reinstein, director of the Knesset's Christian Allies Caucus in an interview from Canada on Sunday.

"We hope that one day every parliament and government around the world will form a sister caucus to the Knesset's Christian Allies Caucus which will mobilize support for Israel around the world and promote Judeo-Christian values."

Over the next six months, similar parliamentary lobbies are expected to be established in the Philippines, South Korea, Malawi, South Africa and Finland.

The increasingly influential Israeli parliamentary lobby, which is currently made up of 12 MKs from seven parties across the political spectrum, has come to epitomize Israel's newfound interest in garnering the support of the Christian world in the 21st century, especially the largely pro-Israel evangelical Christian community around the world, at a time when radical Islam is on the rise.

http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1170359780973&pagename=JPost/JPArticle/Printer

Zafar Bangash : Muslim sectarianism a part of the US agenda

2007-02-05T22:21:00.000+02:00

Zafar Bangash, a free-lance writer for Crescent International.

Media Monitors Network Sunday February 04 2007

"Just as nationalism is alien to the political culture of Islam, so sectarianism is the very antithesis of Muslim unity."

It is difficult to say which is worse: nationalism or sectarianism in the Ummah (Muslim World). The ruling elites in the Muslim world exploit both these weaknesses to advance their own nefarious agendas. Just as nationalism is alien to the political culture of Islam, so sectarianism is the very antithesis of Muslim unity. While most Muslims have little reason to indulge in divisive polemic against fellow Muslims, there are groups within the Ummah whose survival depends on keeping us divided.

Let us consider two recent developments: Hizbullah's successful resistance to zionist aggression in Lebanon last summer and Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmedinejad's standing up to the US. The first elevated Hizbullah leader Shaikh Seyyed Hasan Nasrallah's stature among the Muslim masses, while the second turned Ahmedinejad into a symbol of the courage and defiance so lacking in other Muslim rulers. The popularity of both shot up among Muslims all over the world. Their photographs were prominently displayed in people's homes and in restaurants and coffee shops throughout the Middle East. It did not matter that both are Shi‘a; people instinctively identified with them because their stature and conduct stood in sharp contrast with the spineless cowardice habitually displayed by their own rulers.

These developments clearly alarmed other Muslim rulers and the US, who are struggling to neutralize them. When the two Abdullahs, Saudi and Jordanian, condemned Hizbullah, the Muslim masses reacted angrily and both men had to back down. Their retreat, however, was tactical; aware that the elation at Hizbullah's victory and Ahmedinejad's courage would dissipate in the face of new problems, real or imagined, they waited for an opportune moment to strike back. They did not have to wait long. The US, too, the main loser in these developments, needed to recover lost ground.

In October, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice made a highly publicized trip to the Middle East to rally “moderate regimes” against the “extremists”, meaning Iran, Hizbullah, Hamas and Syria. In December, members of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) met in Bahrain to offer their own pearls of wisdom about confronting extremists. Rice was in the region again in mid-January to mobilize the Arab dinosaurs for a confrontation with the forces of Islam. By this time, events in Iraq, grossly mishandled by the incompetent Iraqi government, were effectively supporting the US effort. “The reality of the current situation is that we are approaching an open Sunni-Shi'ite conflict in the region,” Emad Gad, a specialist in international relations at the government-financed Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies in Cairo, told the New York Times on January 17. “And Egypt will also be a part of it as a part of the Sunni axis. No one will be able to avoid or escape it.” Egypt is not alone in stoking sectarianism; the Saudis are even worse. They fear the growing power of Iran as a threat to their illegitimate rule. Abdul Rahman al-Barak, a Saudi ‘alim close to the ruling family, has described the Shi‘a, whom he referred to by the derogatory term ar-rafideen (the rejectionists), as worse than Jews and Christians.

Members of the GCC also jumped on Rice's anti-Iran bandwagon when their foreign ministers met in Kuwait on January 16. The communiqué they issued must have sounded like music to American ears: “The participants welcomed the commitment by the United States as stated in President Bush's recent speech [January 10] to defend the security of the Gulf, the territorial integrity of Iraq and to ensure a successful, fair and inclusive political process that engages all Iraqi communities and guarantees the stability of the country.” Their concern about inclusiveness would be more convincing had Iraq under Saddam been a model for inclusiveness or if the regimes themselves were so inclined. Their concern is more mundane: to join America's anti-Iran crusade because they fear Iran's growing influence. To undermine Iran, they are willing to resort to crude tactics: fan sectarian tensions by financing it on behalf of the US.

All this is, unfortunately, nothing new; some parts of the Ummah have a long history of falling into the sectarian trap. Soon after the victory of the Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1979, the former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger convened a secret meeting in Cairo to instigate Shi‘a-Sunni conflict by staging an uprising against the regime in either Sudan or Syria. The plan was to embarrass Iran. If Tehran supported the uprising, it would disrupt its relations with these regimes; if it sided with the regimes, Islamic movements worldwide would condemn it for not supporting a part of the Islamic movement. The Syrian Ikhwan were pushed into staging an uprising against the Syrian regime, even though a significant faction, led by Dr. Issam al-Ataar, refused to join this US-engineered conspiracy. Inevitably, Hafez al-Asad brutally crushed the uprising, killing thousands in Hama. As planned, this led to years of virulent anti-Iranian propaganda because of Tehran's good relations with Damascus.

The question now, as history threatens to repeat itself, is whether the Ummah has learnt anything from the tragedy of Hama, or whether it will again fall into the traps being laid to advance Uncle Sam's agenda.

http://world.mediamonitors.net/content/view/full/40608/

Mahathir Mohamad : Bush, Blair 'worse than Saddam'

2007-02-05T22:20:00.000+02:00

News24 05/02/2007 14:02 - (SA)

Kuala Lumpur - Former Malaysian premier Mahathir Mohamad condemned British premier Tony Blair and US President George W Bush as "child killers" and "war criminals" as he launched an anti-war conference on Monday.

Mahathir, who has been nominated by Bosnian civil society groups for the 2007 Nobel peace prize for helping the country after its bloody civil war, said the pair should be put on trial for their military action in Iraq.

"History should remember Blair and Bush as the killer of children or the lying prime minister and president. What Bush and Blair had done is worse than what Saddam had done," he said, referring to hanged Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.

Mahathir also turned his scorn on Australian Prime Minister John Howard, deriding him as the "pocket Bush of the bushlands of Australia".

The 81-year-old firebrand was a strident critic of the West during his two decades in power, and has continued to hit out since stepping down in 2003, seizing on the issue of conflict in the Middle East during his retirement.

War crimes tribunal

Last week he unveiled plans for an unofficial war crimes tribunal to focus on victims of abuse in Iraq, Lebanon and the Palestinian territories, saying that the existing international court at the Hague was biased.

This week's war crimes conference will be attended by some 17 Palestinians, Iraqis and Lebanese, who allege they are the victims of abuse and torture.

Mahathir has said he will also form a new war crimes commission, to be located in Kuala Lumpur, which will investigate their cases and then refer them to the tribunal if warranted.

"We should not hang Blair if the tribunal finds him guilty, but he should always carry the label 'war criminal', 'killer of children', 'liar'." Mahathir said in his speech.

The tribunal will carry no legal authority and is not backed by any government, but Mahathir has said it will ensure that offenders' wrongdoings are recorded in the history books.

http://www.news24.com/News24/World/News/0,,2-10-1462_2064563,00.html

Hillary Vows New Push Against Hate Rhetoric In Palestinian Textbooks

2007-02-05T22:19:00.000+02:00

Tells AIPAC crowd in Manhattan she’ll increase awareness of issue with Senate event next week.

Adam Dickter - Assistant Managing Editor

The Jewish Week Friday, Feb. 2, 1 p.m.

Palestinians have done little to remove hateful rhetoric against Jews and Israel from their schoolbooks despite international attention to the problem, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton told guests at Thursday’s AIPAC Northeast Region dinner.

Before hundreds of Israel supporters and activists at the Marriot Marquis in Manhattan, New York’s junior senator and Democratic presidential hopeful promised to increase awareness of the issue.

“In 1999, I raised the problem of anti-Semitism in Palestinian textbooks,” said Clinton, referring to her efforts as first lady. “Now eight years, later we continue to hear reports that the textbooks have not been changed. I will be doing an event in Washington in the Senate next week to highlight the anti-Semitism and anti-Israel rhetoric that is still part of the curriculum.”

Clinton also made headlines by insisting that “no option can be taken off the table” in thwarting Iran’s attempt to become a nuclear power. “We need to use every tool at our disposal, including diplomatic and economic in addition to the threat and use of military force,” she said.

She also emphasized that the U.S. must continue to demand that Hamas completely renounce violence and recognize Israel before it can be viewed as a legitimate peace partner by the U.S. and Israel.

The event was clearly an important venue for Clinton, who has worked hard to overcome a mixed reputation on Israel since her days as first lady, while earning high marks as a senator.

Clinton was stuck in Washington Thursday awaiting a Senate vote to raise the minimum wage, and was prepared to address the gathering via satellite.

For most of the day it was not known when the votes would be cast. But Clinton said her worries were eased when she received a call from an AIPAC representative informing her that the vote would be at 5:30, allowing her to catch a 7 p.m. shuttle.

“Your intelligence sources are better than anything we have in Washington,” she joked during her 8:30 p.m. address.

http://www.thejewishweek.com/news/newscontent.php3?artid=13617&print=yes

Israel restricts access to al-Aqsa

2007-02-05T22:17:00.000+02:00

Al Jazeera SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 04, 2007

Israeli police and army forces deployed on Sunday around al-Aqsa mosque's compound in occupied Jerusalem in an attempt to prevent wide access to the site. Security forces manned barricades and checked Palestinians' identification, allowing only men over 45 years of age and women near the site.
The Israeli government recently set a date to start demolishing a hill near al-Maghariba gate, one of al-Aqsa's entrances, to build a road for Jewish settlers.

A demonstration was planned for Sunday in the mosque yard after calls by Taysir al-Tamimi, Palestinian chief judge, to protect it from Israeli development plans. He said: "I have appealed to all Palestinians to head on Sunday towards the holy Al-Aqsa mosque to hinder the Israeli order to demolish parts of the western fence of the holy al-Aqsa mosque."

Excavations

"Israel is now carrying out wide excavations under the mosque and is building a synagogue in front of the Dome of the Rock," al-Tamimi said, adding the mosque was seriously threatened and could collapse. Israel occupied and annexed the compound containing the holy sites after the 1967 Arab-Israeli war.

The annexation of the compound is not recognised by international law. The al-Aqsa and Dome of the Rock mosques sit above the Western Wall, Judaism's holiest site. The al-Aqsa mosque is Islam's third holiest shrine. The area is referred to by Muslims as al-Haram al-Sharif and by Jews as the Temple Mount. Al-Tamimi said appeals had been made to Islamic and Arab states, the OIC, the Jerusalem Committee and the Arab League to intervene, but to no effect. "Unfortunately, none [of these nations or bodies] has done anything as it seems that Jerusalem, al-Aqsa mosque and Palestine are not on their agendas." For his part, Khaled Meshaal, the political bureau chief of Hamas, on Sunday condemned excavations by Israeli archaeologists near Jerusalem's al-Aqsa mosque, as Israeli security restricted access to the site. "Israel knows what its violation of the holy Aqsa will bring. It is playing with fire," Khaled Meshaal said on Sunday at a news conference in Syria, where he lives in exile. Inflammatory Meshaal warned that further Israeli threats to the integrity of the mosque would be considered inflammatory. He said: "Sharon's desecration of the Aqsa sparked the 2000 uprising. The Israeli leadership must learn from this lesson. We have confidence in our people, its masses, all of its groups and military wings. "We are facing a dangerous action. Jerusalem's Muslim and Christian holy sites are dear to all Palestinians. Israel is trying to take advantage of the Palestinian internal conflict to commit its crimes." A visit to al-Aqsa mosque compound in September 2000 by Ariel Sharon, then Israel's opposition leader, led to the second Palestinian intifada.

http://english.aljazeera.net/News/Templates/Postings/DetailedPage.aspx?FRAMELESS=false&NRNODEGUID=%7bCA5F37D9-656B-4129-8F48-D702D71E3DA5%7d&NRORIGINALURL=%2fNR%2fexeres%2fCA5F37D9-656B-4129-8F48-D702D71E3DA5%2ehtm&NRCACHEHINT=NoModifyGuest