Tuesday, August 29, 2006

Press Coverage of Israel in 1967

There is an interesting piece over at Bookworm Room on how the press covered the 1967 war, and anti-Israel propaganda from Russia, who before Iran took over was the sugar daddy for Islamic terror organizations. Quoting a chunk of it would not do it justice, and I would feel like a thief if I reprinted the entire post. You would do better to go and read it on your own.

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Sunday, August 27, 2006

Muslims Murdering Muslims

I was led to this one by Israel Matzav. According to Salim Mansur at the Toronto Sun:
Karbala is a necessary reminder of Muslims being unequalled tormentors and killers of Muslims. Saddam Hussein as the ruling tyrant in Baghdad was only the most recent incarnation of an Arab Macbeth and the Mongol Genghis Khan rolled into one megalomaniacal killer.

It also illuminates the sheer hypocrisy of Arabs and Muslims who selectively and for political purposes rage against the United States and Israel (and not, for instance, against Russia or China despite the brutal suppression of their respective Muslim minorities) for Arab-Muslim casualties in conflicts that have been, almost without exception, precipitated by Arab-Muslim dictators and demagogues.

[ . . . ]

There has been no organized protest within the Arab-Muslim world or in the West against the daily toll of Iraqi deaths due to this hate-driven insurgency.

Nor is Iraq the only place where Muslim violence against Muslims rages unabated. There is Darfur in Sudan, Somalia, Afghanistan, Kashmir, Algeria until recently, and hotspots in Iran, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Indonesia and Nigeria, Uzbekistan, Palestine, Morocco, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Lebanon.

How, then, might we explain why Muslim deaths seem only to matter to Arabs and Muslims -- and to apologists of Arab-Muslim politics in the West -- when they occur as a result of conflicts with the U.S. or Israel?

In witnessing worldwide protests over Lebanese deaths resulting from the recent Hezbollah-Israeli fighting, we might conclude it is politically acceptable when Muslims murder untold numbers of Muslims, but entirely unacceptable when they are collateral casualties of Israeli bombings.

This is the Orwellian reality of much of the Arab-Muslim world today, where Muslim and non-Muslim lives are too often seen as readily and contemptuously disposable -- except when they become handy tools of propaganda against Jews, Hindus and Americans.
It certainly gives one pause, doesn't it?

On a related note, Elder of Ziyon has been performing a public service by keeping a running tally of Palestinians who have been murdered by other Palestinians or have died in "work accidents" during the current Israeli incursion. You won't read about any of these deaths in the American mainstream media. Since there is no propaganda value for the Palestinians in these deaths, they don't count.

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Shelby Steele on Islamic Anti-Semitism

I originally found the link at Dinocrat. Shelby Steele wrote it for OpinionJournal where I would strongly urge you to head right now and read the entire editorial.
From nations on the verge of nuclear weapons to isolated individuals--take the recent Seattle shootings--Islamic militancy grounded in hatred of Israel and America has become the Muslim world's most animating idea. Why?

I don't believe it is because of the reasons usually cited--Israeli and American "outrages." No doubt Israel and America have made mistakes in the Middle East. Certainly, Israel was born at the price of considerable dislocation and suffering on the part of the Palestinians. And yes, there will never be a satisfying answer for this. Yet every Israeli land-for-peace gesture has been met with a return volley of suicide bombers and rockets. Palestinians have balked every time their longed-for nationhood has come within grasp. They have seemed to prefer the aggrieved dignity of their resentments to the challenges of nationhood. And Hezbollah launched the current war from territory Israel had relinquished six years earlier.

If this war makes anything clear, it is that Israel can do nothing to appease the Muslim animus against her. And now much of the West is in a similar position, living in a state of ever-heightening security against the constant threat of violence from Islamic extremists. So here, from the Muslim world, comes an unappeasable hatred that seems to exist for its own sake, a hatred with very little actual reference to those it claims to hate. Even the fighting of Islamic terrorist groups is oddly self-referential, fighting not for territory or treasure but for the fighting itself. Standing today in the rubble of Lebanon, having not taken a single inch of Israeli territory, Hezbollah claims a galvanizing victory.

All this follows the familiar pattern of a very old vice: anti-Semitism. The anti-Semite is always drawn to the hatred of Jews by his own unacknowledged inadequacy. As Sartre says in his great essay on the subject, the anti-Semite "is a man who is afraid. Not of Jews of course, but of himself." By hating Jews, he asserts that his own group represents the kind of human being that God truly wants. His group is God's archetype, the only authentic humanity, already complete and superior. No striving or self-reflection is necessary. If Jews are superior in some ways, it is only out of their alienated striving, their exile from God's grace. For the anti-Semite, hating and fighting Jews is both self-affirmation and a way of doing God's work.

So the anti-Semite comes to a chilling place: He easily joins himself to evil in order to serve God. Fighting and even killing Jews brings the world closer to God's intended human hierarchy. For Nazis, the "final solution" was an act of self-realization and a fulfillment of God's will. At the center of today's militant Islamic identity there is a passion to annihilate rather than contain Israel. And today this identity applies the anti-Semitic model of hatred to a vastly larger group--the infidel. If the infidel is not yet the object of that pristine hatred reserved for Jews, he is not far behind. Bombings in London, Madrid and Mumbai; riots in Paris; murders in Amsterdam; and of course 9/11--all these follow the formula of anti-Semitism: murder of a hated enemy as self-realization and service to God.

Hatred and murder are self-realization because they impart grandeur to Islamic extremists--the sense of being God's chosen warrior in God's great cause. Hatred delivers the extremist to a greatness that compensates for his ineffectuality in the world. Jews and infidels are irrelevant except that they offer occasion to hate and, thus, to experience grandiosity. This is why Hezbollah--Party of God--can take no territory and still claim to have won. The grandiosity is in the hating and fighting, not the victory.
I repeat, read the whole thing!

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Saturday, August 26, 2006

Is Anyone Surprised by This?

According to this report from the Associated Press,
Iran's hard-line president on Saturday inaugurated a heavy-water production plant, a facility the West fears will be used to develop a nuclear bomb, as Tehran remained defiant ahead of a U.N. deadline that could lead to sanctions.
But don't worry, because,
The U.N. has called on Tehran to stop the separate process of uranium enrichment — which also can be used to create nuclear weapons — by Thursday or face economic and political sanctions.
In addition,
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad declared that his nation's nuclear program poses no threat to other nations, even
Israel, "which is a definite enemy."

Ahmadinejad said in a speech that Iran would never abandon what he once again called its purely peaceful nuclear program.

"There is no discussion of nuclear weapons," he said. "We are not a threat to anybody even the Zionist regime, which is a definite enemy for the people of the region."
Sanctions? They've worked so well in the past. The assurances of a madman? Sure puts my heart at ease.

However,
A senior Israeli lawmaker warned in a statement that the plant inauguration marks "another leap in Iran's advance toward a nuclear bomb."

Israeli legislator Ephraim Sneh of the Labor Party, a partner in the ruling coalition, said that the Jewish state must "prepare itself militarily." Ahmadinejad last year called for Israel to be "wiped off the map."

The spent fuel from a heavy-water reactor can be reprocessed to extract plutonium for use in a bomb.
Gee Whiz, don't those Israelis ever think of anyone but themselves? I'm sure there is a statement coming soon from some "human rights" group condemning Israel for trying to interfere with Iran's unalienable right to destroy the "zionist entity" with nuclear weapons. And besides,
Vice President Gholamreza Aghazadeh, who also heads the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, said the heavy-water facility will be used to treat and diagnose
AIDS and cancer, and for other medicine and agricultural purposes.
From news reports coming out of Iran, we know that the Iranians have been extremely concerned with AIDS and cancer.
Ahmadinejad has openly stated his desire to see Israel "wiped off the map," and has warned the West that if it does not eliminate the Israeli "cancer" by absorbing the nation's six million Jews, the Muslim world will deal with the problem in its own manner.
OK, so there's room for interpretation there. On the other hand, that was last year's Ahmadinejad. But I'm sure French diplomacy will help to solve this seeming intractable problem. After all, it's been so effective so far in slowing down the Iranian push to build nuclear weapons.

Joining the French in their reliance of the diplomacy that has shown so much promise is columnist Trudy Rubin. As she tells us,
Iran's top nuclear negotiator, Ali Larijani, said yesterday that Tehran was ready to enter "serious negotiations," but he left opaque what that meant. Given the options, why not test Iran's bona fides?
Why not indeed? Maybe becuase the Iranians have used these years of meaningless negotiations as a Trojan Horse to lull the craven appeasers in the West into thinking that the Iranians have been negotiating in good faith? Maybe because the Iranians know Trudy Rubin and French better than Rubin and the French know the Iranians? Maybe because if we don't acknowledge the Iranian threat we don't have to deal with it? We can, as Ms. Rubin does, go on blaming the U.S. and Israel for Iranian sins.
But the administration constantly dropped hints about the need for a new regime in Tehran. U.S. support for Israel's bombing campaign in Lebanon looked like a dry run for a possible U.S. attack on Iran. So why be surprised that Iran stirs up problems in Iraq or arms its Lebanese proxy, Hezbollah?
There go those nasty Israelis stirring up more trouble in the Middle East by defending themselves again! How dare they worry the Iranians like that!

When in doubt, blame the Jews, the World's oldest scapegoats rather than face the real problem. I can't wait to see how Rubin and the French blame Israel when the Iranians attempt to nuke Tel Aviv.

Actually, yes I can.

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Friday, August 25, 2006

More Islamic Turnspeak

The Detroit News ran this editorial comment by Imad Hamad, regional director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. In this piece, Hamad relies on the current favorite propaganda technique of jihadists: turnspeak, defined as:
where you attack someone and then turn it around 180 degrees and claim they attacked you. Because the truth is the exact opposite of the information being disseminated it is psychologically difficult to counter and leads to confusion.

Turnspeak leads to psychological confusion and a feeling of being "burned-out" or "overwhelmed" with too much information, effectively creating a blanket of "white noise" which makes clarity difficult to achieve.

[ . . . ]

The Arab claim that Jews are "Nazis" is not without motive. They are trying to obscure their own close connection with the Nazis. During World War II leading Muslims including Haj Amin al-Husseini worked for the Nazis in Germany and called for a intifada against Britain. Haji Amin al-Husseini was the grand mufti of Jerusalem, as well as Yasser Arafat's close relative and mentor
In his piece, Hamad claims,
As Americans, we take pride in our Constitution and our right to freely debate the policies of our government on both the domestic and international level. This right is what separates us from many other undemocratic countries in the world. However, a disturbing trend has emerged over the years and an ideology has manifested, which somehow mandates that, when it comes to Israel, it is not only unacceptable to criticize, but it is reprehensible.

The disturbing fact is that people who are justifiably critical of Israel immediately become targets of harassment.

Although the Arab-Israeli conflict has been a subject of debate for almost 60 years, this conflict, in the past month, has taken a drastic and dramatic turn and called into question our precious freedom of expression here in the United States.

It is most disappointing to witness the labeling of efforts to oppose the war against Lebanon as unpatriotic, anti-Semitic and divisive among fellow Arab and Jewish Americans in Metro Detroit. It is a true shame that differing opinions and voices continue to face attempts at censorship and are judged based on their alignment with Israel and with the administration's policies.
To anyone who has been paying attention and is honest, this claim is the purest bunk. In fact, the opposite is true. It is Muslims who are harrassing critics of Islam. But by using his best Turnspeak, Mr. Hamad hopes we will forget a lot of very recent history. Some of it is so recent it can still be referred to as current events. Hamad still thinks he can obscure the facts. But let's examine the facts of some recent episodes of Islamic harrassment.

Remember Michael Graham? He was fired last year from radio station WMAL due to pressure from CAIR after he called Islam a "terrorist organization".

National Review and Boeing were both targets of Islamic harrassment when CAIR demanded that National Review stop selling books that CAIR found offensive. Boeing succumbed to the harrassment and dropped ads from The National Review.

Thomas Klocek, part time adjunct professor in DePaul’s School of New Learning, was fired from DePaul University for daring to argue with Muslim students on the Palestinian issue.
He is guilty of a thought-crime, challenging the pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel mindset which has come to dominate the DePaul campus

Klocek’s challenge to this new campus orthodoxy occurred in a cafeteria during a student activities fair last September. For 15-20 minutes, Klocek, who is Catholic, not Jewish, confronted a group of 8 students manning two tables for the groups Students for Justice in Palestine, and United Muslims Moving Ahead. Klocek says he argued that the materials the groups were disseminating were one-sided. On this, he is indisputably correct. Neither group pretends to provide balanced information on the Israeli Palestinian conflict. That of course, is perfectly understandable and acceptable. These are advocacy groups.

Klocek says the discussion was heated at times, and he admits to raising his voice. He says he told the students that Palestinians were Arabs who lived in the West Bank and Gaza – that they had no unique national historical identity. He challenged one student’s assertion that Israel was behaving like the Nazis. He stated that while most Muslims were not terrorists, pretty much all terrorists these days were Muslim. This statement had originally been made by the manager of an Arab news channel, and had recently been quoted in the Chicago Sun Times. It has the incidental merit of being true.

Clearly, the students were not used to such a challenge. DePaul in fact has gone out of its way in recent years to make the campus dialogue “safe” for Muslim and Arab students. The University administration warned the campus community after the September 11th attacks that offensive speech hostile to Muslims would not be tolerated.

[ . . . ]

For his behavior in this brief debate with the students, Klocek, a popular long-time DePaul professor, has lost his job, his health benefits, and has been smeared and humiliated by the University administration.

It has gotten so bad that Klocek has even been told not to pray at the campus chapel, which he formerly did regularly during his DePaul teaching stint. Such is the retribution of a Catholic University for a professor who has taken the risk of challenging the established mindset at DePaul on the subject of Israel and the Palestinians.


When Nolan Finley, editor at the Detroit News wrote a column local Muslims found offensive, someone tried to get the Michigan House to pass a resolution condemning him for expressing his opinion. From the Arab American News:
CAAO president Abed Hammoud said, "We support Resolution 214 and thank the representatives for their action on this very important issue," Hammoud also praised the AAJA for their position on the Finley issue. He encouraged other organizations to follow suit.

Dawud Walid, Director of CAIR Michigan said, “Mr. Finley broke the golden rule: treat others as he would like to be treated. He would not want his racial group called blood-thirsty people. His comments show a lack of prudence and human sensitivity. CAIR-MI affirms Resolution 214.”

The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC-MI) issued a statement which "calls on all community members and concerned citizens to contact their State Representatives and encourage them to support House Resolution 214."

The AAJA is a non-profit membership organization with approximately 2,000 members with 19 chapters across the U.S. and Asia. The Association is based in San Francisco.
Finley's column is sadly no longer available on the Detroit News website, but is reprinted at least partially here. It seems that freedom of speech does not apply to critics of Islam, only to critics from Islam. And by that same twist, it's not harrassment if Muslims have you fired from your job, or use the government to shut you up. It's only harrassment if Jews write negative things about what you say. Notice also, that there is never an attempt by the Muslim voices to answer the charges made against them. There is only outrage, namecalling, and threats.

These incidents of harrassment by Muslims in the United States are the ones I could think of quickly. There have been international incidents too. Does anyone recall a small outpouring of outrage due to some Danish cartoons? How about the murder of Theo Van Gogh over a movie he made? And now his partner in the making of the movie, Ayaan Hirsi Ali has been forced to live under 24 hour protection. And then there's Salman Rushdie. To be fair, these are not really incidents of harrassment. They go miles beyond mere harrassment. The murder and mayhem created by Muslims is inexcusable. So why do so many in the West keep pandering to these murderers? Why do they accept the Muslim propaganda, when by merely reading the daily news anyone can see that Imad Hamad and his associates are liars?

Useful idiots in the West either accept Turnspeak or truly don't get it. Either way, the rest of us have to fight back.

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Tuesday, August 22, 2006

The Press vs. Israel

Nidra Poller has an excellent article on the propensity of the gullible world-wide press to blame Israel for everything that goes wrong in the Middle East. This, plus the fact that they always give the benefit of the doubt to Hamas, or Hezbollah, or Fatah, or whichever Muslim terrorist group is claiming that Israel has commited a "crime against humanity" for defending itself makes one wonder if the press isn't made up almost totally of shills for the Jew-haters. Recalling the incident on the Gaza beach where seven members of a Muslim family were killed, Poller writes:
Two days after the incident, though, ample information, leaked to and posted on reputable websites, suggested that the Palestinian-supplied video “proving” Israel’s responsibility for the deaths and injuries had been manipulated—a shot of an Israeli Defense Forces gunboat, filmed earlier that day, spliced in to give the impression that it was firing directly at the beach, the scene of Huda finding her father’s body apparently staged. Data on the six shells fired from an Israeli gunboat that afternoon showed that the soldiers had aimed at a Qassam rocket-launching site at least 800 feet from the sunbathers. And so on.

But even after the IDF made the results of its investigation public at a press conference at the Defense Ministry in Tel Aviv, Western journalists maintained a climate of artificial doubt—balancing, even overshadowing, the government report with a reiteration of the Hamas narrative, now dressed up in pseudoscientific trappings supplied by a Human Rights Watch “expert,” Mark Garlasco.

Why is a lone investigator, working for a nongovernmental organization, more reliable than General Meir Kalifi’s investigating commission? What impartial agency has verified the data presented by Human Rights Watch and its self-designated expert? Hamas has an agenda. HRW has an agenda. But what is the agenda of the free press in our own democratic countries?

Rational examination of the evidence shifts the burden of doubt to the Hamas (and HRW) version of the incident. Israeli officials have now released ample details to support their conclusions. Hospital reports testify that one of the wounded had shrapnel removed by Palestinian doctors before her transfer to an Israeli hospital—medically inexplicable treatment that might have been about getting rid of any proof that Palestinian ordnance had caused the explosion. Close scrutiny of outtakes from the original video reveals a mixture of staging and real-time filming. Interviewed by Süddeutsche Zeitung, the Palestinian cameraman who filmed the explosion delivers a garbled story that unravels under questioning.

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Slanted Headline?

The headline from the AP article, printed in the Detroit Free Press, reads: More than 80 are killed in clashes with Taliban. By now we should know that to get the whole truth of the headline (or at least as much as the AP is willing to print) we must read the article. In this case the reader is rewarded with the facts:
Afghan and NATO troops used rockets, planes and artillery in battles with Taliban insurgents over the weekend in Afghanistan's south, leaving 71 militants and five Afghan soldiers dead in one of the bloodiest clashes since the 2001 U.S.-led invasion.
That doesn't sound so bad does it? 71 fewer Taliban murderers walking the Earth is a postive development in my book. So why does the headline make this episode sound so ominous?

Obviously the headline writer wants us to be upset at the continuation of violence in Afghanistan. This writer wants us to ignore the fact that every time the Taliban meet American or coalition forces in open battle, the Taliban get slaughtered. In order to bring peace to Afghanistan, one of two things must happen. The Taliban must agree to stop their murderous ways, and that's going to be a long shot, or the Taliban must be destroyed, also a longshot, but not quite as improbable. So, if the headline writer is really interested in peace, shouldn't the bias be in favor of the Afghan and NATO troops?

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Monday, August 21, 2006

Do We Believe in Ourselves?

Reading Livy's history of Rome, I'm struck with the attitude that Livy gives the early Romans, an attitude that I'm sure he shared. The Romans, as they conquered the Italian peninusula over the course of many years and many generations, believed that they were entitled to it. They had faith in their strength and their right to conquer others. They saw themselves as the rightful rulers of those around them. Later, they carried this attitude to a large portion of Europe, Northern Africa, and parts of Asia. They believed that they had something special to offer those cities and populations that they conquered. Their competitors may have thought the same of themselves, but they couldn't stand up to Rome's might. And Rome did have something to offer the world. We benefit today from Roman jurisprudence, philosophers, political ideas, and translations of Greek literature that carried it past the twilight of Greece so that at least some of it survives to this day.

Other conquerers also believed they had a right to rule. Genghis Khan believed. The Western imperialists whom so many in the West now despised, believed in themselves and their mission to bring their civilization to those whom they veiwed as backward and in need of the civilizing influence. As they gradually stopped believing in this mission, they packed up and left the countries they had conquered.

Today, it is the Muslims who believe that they have the right and the perscription to fix what ails our world. It doesn't matter to them that part of what ails our world springs directly from Islam. It doesn't matter to them that every Muslim nation is technologically backward compared to Western nations, nor that those Muslims who are pushing the hardest for the worldwide Ummah, are trying to send us all back to the seventh century. They don't care that they can't even build the weapons that they are using to promote jihad. They have to buy their cell phones and other bomb making equipment from the West. They don't care that even among Muslims, many would just like to get on with their lives. They don't care that rather than take responsibility for the problems in the Muslim world, they scapegoat the West and the Jews. In fact, the scapegoating actually feeds into their superiority complex. Islam can't do anything bad, all of the ills of Islam must come from the outside. Other totalitarians, like Nazis, Communists, Fascists held similiar beliefs.

On the other hand, it appears that we in the West have given up. This thriving civilization that was built and defended over centuries by our ancestors means nothing to us. Muslims are willing to sacrifice themselves and their children while we are in distress if our favorite TV show is interrupted. Ever since 9/11, we in the West have been apologizing for every Islamic attack against us. In the mean time, Islamic leaders proclaim that theirs is a religion of peace, the terrorists are misusing Islam, and if we try and battle the terrorists, we will only create more terrorists. And some idiots accept that.

I keep thinking that with each new episode of intolerance or violence, the West will finally admit that it has to battle the Islamic jihad. And I'm disappointed every time. The cartoon jihad didn't do it. The bus attacks in London didn't do it. Terror cells broken up in Great Britian and Canada haven't done it. The attack by Hezbollah on Israel hasn't done it. The Western press went out of its way and continues to go out of its way to present Lebanon as the victim of Israel, rather than the victim of Hezbollah, as they truly are. The Western press seems to be suicidal.

These words of Ben Stein expressing the same sentiment, are haunting in their truthfulness.
And that’s the essence. The other side considers it a privilege to fight and die for its beliefs. Those on the other side cannot wait to line up to blow themselves up for their vision of heaven. On our side, it’s: “Let the other poor sap do it. I’ve got to make money.” How can we fight this fight with the brightest and best educated rushing off and working night and day to do private equity deals and derivatives trading? How can we fight this fight with the ruling class absent by its own sweet leave?

I keep thinking, again, that if Israel, with its back to the sea, cannot muster the will to fight in a big way, then the fat, faraway U.S.A. will never be able to do it. I keep saying this and it terrifies me.

We’re in a war with people who want to kill us all and wreck our civilization. They’re taking it very seriously. We, on the other hand, are worrying about leveraged buyouts and special dividends and how much junk debt the newly formed private entity can support before we sell it to the ultimate sucker, the public shareholder.

We’re worrying whether Hollywood will forgive Mel Gibson and what the next move is for big homes in East Hampton. We’re rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. The terrorists are the iceberg.

WHAT stands between us and the iceberg are the miraculously brave men and women of the armed forces. They’re heroes and saints as far as I’m concerned. But can they do it without the rest of us? Can they do it while we’re all working on our tans and trying to have our taxes lowered again? How can we leave them out there all alone to die for us when we treat the war to save civilization as something we can just wish away?

If we don’t win this war against the terrorists, there’s not going to be business as usual ever again. If the terrorists get to their goal, there’s not going to be a stock exchange or hedge funds or Bain Capital or the Carlyle Group or even Goldman Sachs. If the terrorists get their way — and so far, they’re getting their way — there’s not going to be business, period.

Everyone with the really big money at stake is — again — bidding for the best deck chairs as the iceberg looms, not so far, any longer, under the surface, and very large and very cold and very solid.
Read the whole thing. It's sobering.

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Sunday, August 20, 2006

Riding on a Plane with Mohammed

I flew home the other day from NYC by way of JFK airport. Checking in, while confusing, was also fascinating. There must have been travelers from half of the countries on Earth in that terminal. A lot of international flights left from the one I was in. Trying to find my way to the correct counter check-in counter, I spoke to other confused travelers with myriad accents. I felt like an airport tourist.

After finally finding the correct line to wait in, I waited. The airport was using those new check-in computers to begin the process. Once you gave the computer your information, you waited for the check-in guy to call your name and give you your luggage tags. I waited some more. The check-in guy continued to call names. I paid no attention, until he called, "Mohammed ---- " Then I took notice. I looked at the young fellow who answered to that name. He looked to be somewhere in his late teens or early twenties. I immediately began to wonder, will he be heading to Dearborn, Michigan . . . on the same flight that I was heading home on?

If so, there wasn't much I could do, but I did scrutinize him. Did he look nervous? No. Angry? No. Determined? Only as determined as the rest of us were to get home. I looked at his baggage. He had three huge suitcases on one of those airport carts. You don't carry that much baggage if you are going to destroy the plane you're on - unless it's a clever ruse to get a bomb past security. There was plenty of room in all that luggage. It would be x-rayed though. And he didn't appear to be anxious in any of the ways described in the latest articles on spotting potential terrorists. So I continued on my way, getting checked in, and then choking down a crappy lunch before heading to my gate. (The food at Detroit Metro Airport has JFK food beat by a mile. Detroit has real restaurants and fast food joints, while at JFK, all you have is fast food. To be in New York and to only have those crappy choices is absurd. The JFK officials should check out Detroit and make some changes).

I didn't see Mohammed again until I was at the baggage claim at Detroit Metro. He had already gathered his bags and was meeting his ride. I wasn't sure how I missed seeing him on my flight, but somehow I did. Since I had already decided he wasn't a terrorist I didn't give it much thought.

You may ask though, don't I feel like a racist? or an islamophobe? Absolutely not. I know that not all Muslims are terrorists. It is a fact that every plane that has been hijacked or blown up, and every foiled attempt at the same has come from the Muslim community. Call me names if you wish, but as long as the Muslim community does nothing to help with the terrorist problem, and continues to make up lame excuses for terrorists coming out of their mosques, I will always be on my guard at airports.

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Saturday, August 19, 2006

Bringing Jews and Arabs Together

Thanks to the obnoxious comments of Andrew Young, there is now something that Jews and Arabs can agree upon. The former Wal-Mart spokesman joined Mel Gibson, and Cynthia McKinney in the High-Profile-Jew-Haters Club. In Young's case, though, he's expanded his hatred to Arabs and Koreans.
Young was asked about whether he was concerned that Wal-Mart causes smaller, mom-and-pop stores to close.

"Well, I think they should; they ran the mom-and-pop stores out of my neighborhood," the paper quoted Young as saying. "But you see, those are the people who have been overcharging us, selling us stale bread and bad meat and wilted vegetables. And they sold out and moved to Florida. I think they've ripped off our communities enough. First it was Jews, then it was Koreans and now it's Arabs; very few black people own these stores."
And now, to no one's surprise, Mr. Young is being denounced by Jewish, Arab, and Korean groups.

So, for a brief, shining moment, Arabs and Jews are on the same side of an issue. I know it's not much, but the fact that Jews and Arabs can agree on anything is a step in the right direction. For that I want to thank Mr. Young for publicly demonstrating his vile hatred, a hatred that Debbie Schlussel warned us about back in March.
. . . Now, there's Young--another reason why Wal-Mart is a poor choice as cause-celebre for conservatives. Andrew Young was forced to resign as Jimmy Carter's U.N. Ambassador in 1979 because he met with the P.L.O. and, through his actions, legitimized the group. The P.L.O. was a designated terrorist entity at the time and U.S. officials were forbidden with meeting with the group.

But Young didn't stop there. He predicted that his meeting with the Palestinian terrorists would create "the constituency for the Palestinians." It became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Many believe--with good reason--that Young met with these terrorists because of his hatred of Jews and his desire to further break down the disintegrating relationship between American Blacks and Jews.

Young became a defender and lionizer of Palestinian terrorists who brutally murdered U.S. officials (including the then-highest ranking Black diplomat George Curtis Moore--so bludgeoned that authorities could not differentiate him on sight from the White diplomat the Palestinians also tortured to death). But, also, Young's meeting became the prominent first step down the slippery legitimacy slope for what is now the HAMAS terror nation-state.

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Thursday, August 17, 2006

No Sense of Relief Here

The other day, two alleged junior jihadis were released from police custody. According to this article in the Detroit Free Press
"They could have been any one of our brothers, our husbands, our fathers," said Delia Hadhad, 23, of Dearborn and a friend of the Houssaiky family. "I understand the American people are scared, but at the same time, you can't terrorize people inside your own country. We're citizens, too ... we have a right to run businesses, to live our lives."

Abulhassan and Houssaiky said they were trying to do just that.

"There was never any question that we were innocent -- we knew all our friends and family knew we were innocent," Abulhassan said.

Last week, in the early morning hours of Aug. 8, the two American-born friends left Dearborn for a summer road trip to buy hundreds of cell phones that they planned to resell for a profit. It's a common practice among Arab-American businessmen to load up on particular products and resell them to distributors, gas stations, and stores.

"We were definitely very surprised," Abulhassan said Tuesday of the arrest. "They told us it was just a misdemeanor and that we'd be out in the morning."

But two days later, they were charged with two counts of terrorism under Ohio laws that had just gone into effect months earlier.

Police were suspicious, said Washington County Prosecutor James Schneider, because in their vehicle was a security guide for Royal Jordanian Airlines that contained information on passenger lists. Houssaiky's mother, Nada Houssaiky, works in the airline industry.

But police were worried that the cell phones the men were buying could be sent overseas to detonate bombs. In recent years, some terrorists have set off explosives using cell phones. Meanwhile, in Caro, three Arab-American men from Texas -- brothers Adham Othman, 21, of Dallas and Louai Othman, 23, of Mesquite, and their cousin Awad Muhareb, 18, also of Mesquite -- remained locked in Tuscola County jail. The men had photos of the Mackinac Bridge and 1,000 cell phones.

But their attorney, Nabih Ayad, said they were merely trying to earn some money -- like the Dearborn men -- and were just taking tourist photos of the bridge.
This is quite a sympathetic overview of the situation. Haven't we had trouble with other Muslim "tourists" taking photos of targets.

The Detroit News, on the other hand, offers this take on the release of the Dearbornstan Two:
Local authorities here dropped felony terrorism charges against Houssaiky and his friend Osama Abulhassan allowing the American-born Arab men to return to Dearborn with their families.

The case remains under investigation, officials said, and both men still could face indictment if additional evidence surfaces. The FBI has been apprised of the case, but has not opened an investigation, according to an agency spokesman in Cincinnati.

For a week, the men, who bought disposable cell phones that were feared to be part of a terror plot, were jailed together and kept away from other inmates in the Washington County Jail. They were confident they would eventually be exonerated but were uncertain how long it would take.

"We just want to make sure our family and friends stick with us," Abulhassan said after an emotional hug with his father, Sobih Abulhassan. "We'll get our reputations back."

Both men checked their anger and largely declined to elaborate on their week behind bars. Abulhassan said it was obvious that the sheriff's deputy who arrested them did so only because they are of Arab descent. (obviously, what other reason could there be for arresting Muslims? inner-jihad perhaps?-H)

In jail, "they weren't treating us well. claim torture, that's what the jihad manual says to do-H) But after a couple days, they told us, 'We found out you're good guys,' " Houssaiky said.

Abulhassan, 20, and Houssaiky were standout students and athletes at Fordson High School. They are college students who looked to make money reselling the popular TracFones purchased in several states, including Ohio.

They found themselves in jail Aug. 8 after a Radio Shack clerk reported their cell phone purchases to police and said the men were acting suspiciously. The FBI had issued a warning this summer alerting law enforcement to be on the lookout for consumers making large purchases of cell phones.

Their arrest stunned friends and former teachers. Their fathers noted that no one who knows them doubted their innocence. Even so, the charges -- filed by an assistant prosecutor while her boss was on vacation last week -- hurt, the family said.

"It's disappointing when you consider a place your home, and they take that from you," Diana Houssaiky said of the incident. "They tried to make it sound like you wanted to destroy it."

Perhaps it was inevitable that two young Arabic men with $10,837 in cash and an interest in cell phones said to be used to trigger bombs were bound to attract attention in a small southeastern Ohio town that is 98 percent white and where American flags line the street. (or anywhere else in the country these days-H

After a deputy pulled them over for not using their turn signal, he found airline information in their car that authorities regarded as ominous.

What they didn't understand is that Nada Houssaiky, Ali's mother, works in customer service for Aircraft Service International Group at Detroit Metropolitan Airport. What the deputy saw in her car was her training manual, she said. (I certainly believe that-H)

"It was a nightmare," Nada Houssaiky said of the ordeal.

Washington County Prosecutor James Schneider disputed that account, saying that papers in the glove box included detailed airline information, including how to remotely check baggage.(Hmm, obviously an "Islamophobe"-H)


He added that Nada Houssaiky has not cooperated with his office in the investigation.(Is that what the advisor at CAIR advised?-H)

Schneider let the two men go after checking with the FBI.

"We couldn't make the tie-in" to terrorism, he said.

Both men must return to court here Sept. 1 on a misdemeanor charge of falsification. Authorities said the men gave two accounts of why they purchased the phones.

"I have a feeling it had to do more with a language barrier than anything else," said Dennis Sipe, Houssaiky's attorney.(that accursed language barrier! How many young peaceful Muslims has it driven to violence?!-H)
While not the damning indictment it could have been, it does bring up some important points that the Free Press ignored. Either way, I hope somebody is keeping their eye on these two.

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Friday, August 11, 2006

Feeding the Inner "Islamophobe"

I flew home from Salt Lake City last week. Two of the security workers at the Salt Lake City airport were Muslim women. I'm assuming they were Muslims because they were both wearing hajibs. This caused various thoughts to run through my mind, none of which I thought would be offensive, but I'm sure CAIR would disagree; as if I care. My first thought was that their husbands (or whoever is in charge in their households) must be quite assimilated in order to let these women work outside of the home. Then there was a bit of unease, a tad of resentment, a touch of distrust. Why do we need so much security at airports these days again? Rosicrucians? Druids? Juggaloes? Oh yeah, that small minority of extremists who have hijacked the noble Religion of Peace.

I did try to not prejudge these women. After all, even though the overwhelming majority of terrorists are Muslim, some Muslims are not terrorists. There are even some who are on our side and really do not support terrorism. They could have been two of them. But then . . . as Debbie Schlussel reports:
Dearbornistan Terrorist/Football Player Ali Houssaiky's mother not only works for Aircraft Services International Group (ASIG) at Detroit Metro Airport, but she has a job that allows her access to plenty of sensitive passenger flight information on international and domestic flights, sources at Detroit's Metro Airport tell DebbieSchlussel.com.

The sources say Houssaiky's mother, Nada M. Houssaiky, age 42, "loads the manifests" for flights for Royal Jordanian Airline, USA 3000 (a lowcost airline to Florida), and many other airlines at Metro Detroit airport. What that means is that Houssaiky is a hired contractor who acts as a ticket/gate agent for several airlines at both Detroit Metro Airport's McNamara and Berry Terminals. She checks in all passengers, "loading" them onto the flight manifests.
and
The sources say it is extremely suspicious that Houssaiky's son says he got the manifests and security checkpoint info from his mother, as the source says that is all confidential information not allowed off airport premises.

So, since her son has been charged with two counts involving terrorism, why is Nada M. Houssaiky still working at Detroit Metro Airport?
Then there is the current big airplane terrorist bust that also, strangely enough involves a small minority of extremists hijacking a noble Religion of Peace.

As if that weren't enough, even though it doesn't involve airplanes, there was this incident which, just like the junior jihadis from Dearbornstan, has Michigan (my home state) connections.
Around 1:00am August 11th the three men purchased cell phones from the Wal-Mart store on M-81 near the corner of M-24 in Caro. Wal-Mart places a limit on the number of cell phones that can be purchased at once, that number is three. The three men allegedly bought 80 by purchasing them three at time so that an alert wouldn't be triggered by the cash register. They also paid cash.

An alert clerk grew suspicious and called Tuscola County central dispatch. The Caro Police Department sent a unit and stopped the rented van on M-81 just east of Caro. The suspects were headed towards Bad Axe on M-81 where there is another Super Wal-Mart.

The three men are described as being of Palestinian descent but live in Texas. Police say the three, ages 19, 22, and 23 appear to be naturalized citizens.

One man was driving while the other two were in the back opening the phone packages with box cutters throwing the phones in one box, batteries in another and the packaging and phone charger in another container. The suspects had 1000 other cell phones in the van. There was also a bag of receipts showing that someone was in Wisconsin the day before.

The phones were Nokia TracFones selling for $20 at Wal-Mart. For your twenty dollars you receive a phone charger and 40 minutes of airtime. The phones do not have to be registered with a name. Also discovered was a laptop with store addresses and store logos.

Tim Nausler with the Michigan State Police bomb squad says this has all the tell tale signs of using cell phones to detonate bombs. He says you need two phones to detonate a bomb one to be with the explosive and the other to make the call to that phone. In some instances he says you can detonate with one phone using the alarm clock function.

The TracFones are a nationwide prepaid wireless phone service and are even offered with international long distance. These phones according to www.tracfone.com don't even have coverage in the Thumb area where they were purchased.

The men have been "cooperative, upfront, not hiding" anything according to police. They also told officers they get stopped frequently and say they buy the phones for $20 and sell them elsewhere for $38. They sell them without the packaging or charger.

The Caro Police Department, the FBI and the Homeland Security Terrorism Taskforce are involved in the case.
It seems the small minority of extremists trying to hijack a noble Religion of Peace have been extremely busy this past week. Because of this increase of activity (or arrests) I don't feel bad about my discomfort at the Muslim women working security at an airport.

A phobia is an irrational fear. At this point, it would be irrational not to fear Muslims. With all due respect, and I do apologize to the Muslims who are being hurt in body and reputation by Islamic terrorism, they will have to prove to me that they are on our side before I trust them.

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Saturday, August 05, 2006

The War Against Israel

As always, Melanie Phillips is on top of the situation and lays it out correctly for even the dimmist among us.
If, heaven forbid, this does turn into a second Holocaust, we can now discern the key difference from the first one. This time the Jews will be blamed for their own destruction. And this time, the political left and the media will have blood on their hands. Indeed, they already do. The lies, libels and distortions, the selective reporting and omissions, the egregious double standards, the moral inversion which turns jihadi murderers into resistance fighters and their victims into war criminals, the willingess to report Hezbollah propaganda as the truth while disparaging Israeli statements as lies (when they are even reported at all), not to mention the ancient canards against the Jews now being blurted out everywhere from California to Canary Wharf – all are not only creating a lethal climate of increasingly hysterical hatred against Israel and the Jews, but are also egging on the terror-puppeteers of the jihad and recruiting yet more to the cause of murdering Jews and waging holy war against the west.

Yes, you really need to read the whole thing. She tells the truth, not "her version of the truth", but the truth, you know, that thing, that if you're paying attention, you can see with your own two eyes.

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Friday, August 04, 2006

Mel Gibson and Hezbollah

Mel Gibson has been roundly and rightly comdemned for his stupid, drunken, anti-semitic remarks. It seems as if every commentator in every newspaper, on every talk radio station, on every TV news show has made it a point to belittle the now humbled Mel Gibson. But then I read this editorial in Thursday's edition of the Salt Lake Tribune.
Like the movies he makes, the words Mel Gibson slurred last week, and the words he has released to the media in subsequent days, are no more than brief glimpses into a person's soul. Whether any such glimpse translates into some larger, even artistic, statement, depends on how common it is to the overall human experience.
And, in trying to shift attention from his own misdeeds by erupting in a categorical - and, in this case, totally irrelevant - condemnation of some other group of human beings, the movie star staggered into an all-too-common moral failing.
It's not my fault. It's theirs.
So far, so good. You've already read Gibson's comments so I'm not going to repeat them. Somehow though, the writer loses the focus of the argument and ends up here:
Just as many people, some of them Jewish, are heard to dismiss all Muslims as terrorists who place no value in human life and who should have just shrugged off the West's gift of a sliver of centuries-old Arab territory to the Jews of the world as their new homeland.
This dehumanizing of The Other, whether in drunken words or published textbooks, is both cause and result of Hezbollah striking at Israel and Israel striking back, both sides armed with moral equivalency meters that say, basically, "He hit me first."
From blasting Mel Gibson for a horrific case of Foot-in-Mouth we've gone to the old game of moral equivalency between Israel and Hezbollah with a bit of blame-the-Jews thrown in for good measure. If Mel Gibson's comments are evil, why aren't the actions of Hezbollah even more evil? Why is there a rush to condemn Gibson, but no rush to condemn Hezbollah? Oh,wait, I know! It's because "many people, some of them Jewish" say bad things about Muslims. So there is a moral equivalency between Jews who say bad things about Muslims and Muslims who say bad things about Jews. But are Jews trying, in word and in deed to remove any Muslim countries from the map? Are Jews murdering Muslims in the streets of the United States and Europe as Muslims are doing to Jews? Shouldn't we look at the "root cause" of Jews saying bad things about Muslims? Haven't I, just like the Salt Lake Tribune, forgotten all about Mel Gibson?

In today's Salt Lake Tribune, they ran another editorial on the Israel/Lebanon War offering these "words of wisdom":
If you are an American of a certain age, you may remember a quaint institution called "shuttle diplomacy." Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, or one of his successors, would flit from one Middle East capital to another, trying to arrange a cease-fire or a peace agreement.
You also may have noticed that Condoleezza Rice has not played that role during the war in Lebanon. Why is that?
The reason is that the Bush administration has abandoned America's traditional role as an "honest broker" in the Middle East. Instead of trying to play the Israeli-Arab conflict down the middle, it has thrown its entire weight behind Israel, giving it carte blanche in its war in Lebanon. In the process, it is destroying any shred of credibility it had with Arab and other Muslim states as a neutral arbiter.
We believe that is a mistake. Because if you want to solve problems in the world, you have to be able to talk to both sides. For that to happen, you must have at least a modicum of trust from both sides.
You also must have two sides who are willing to sit down and negotiate honestly. If one has been paying attention, one may have noticed that Hezbollah and Hamas have never wanted to negotiate honestly. But it gets worse:
But the world is more complicated than that. Yes, Hamas and Hezbollah are terrorist outfits, but they also are political parties with charitable wings that have won legitimacy in democratic elections the Bush administration encouraged. And both grew up as responses to Israeli aggression. At least that's the way the many Arabs and other Muslims see them.
There's that darn Israeli aggression again. Any time Jews try to defend themselves, they are guilty of aggression. Didn't you know that's the only reason the Nazis attacked the Warsaw ghetto, that accursed Jewish aggression? When will we learn?

Hamas and Hezbollah are also given a pass, being the result of "Israeli aggression" and all. And both organizations also have charitable wings. This apparently negates all of their terrorist activities. They have after all, built schools and hospitals . . . and have used them to store weapons and as firing positions, something the Israelis have scrupulously avoided, but when you're playing the moral equivalency game, actual morals count for much less than the equivalency part.

I wonder: if the Salvation Army, a well-known Christian charitable organization, had an armed militant wing, would they be given the same consideration Hamas and Hezbollah are given from many in the MSM? If the Jewish National Fund called for the destruction of a Muslim country, attacked it regularly with rocket fire, and murdered some of its citizens, would the country in question be blamed for its aggression when it fought back? Would we be encouraged to look for those elusive "root causes" for the hatred?

I'm not going to accuse the Salt Lake Tribune or anyone else of anti-semitism. I don't think most of them hate Jews. I do think they are afflicted with a moral confusion that distorts their world view. They are drawn to victims or to those who present themselves as victims. They distrust the successful, whether a person or a country. They are especially offended by Jews, (and blacks, but that's a whole different issue) who have historically been victims and are expected to continue as victims, but have had the chutzpah to become wealthy and successful.

I'd like to state as a Jew, that victimhood is not for me. Go find another sucker. Also, Israel is right. Hamas and Hezbollah are not only wrong, but are vicious, immoral terrorist organizations. Israel should be given carte blanche to destroy both organizations, the SL Trib and MSM be damned.

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Tuesday, August 01, 2006

A Great Way to Support Israel

The extremely generous Elder of Ziyon is doubling the amount he was previously willing to match for people who donated to Israeli charities. I've already donated, but if my wife approves, maybe I will throw in a few more dollars. With Israel battling various terrorists from Hamas and Hezbollah, totalitarian theocracies; Syria and Iran, and the twisted terror supporters at the U.N., the E.U, and in the majority of the MSM, now is the time to continue to walk the walk by parting with the cash for Israeli charities. Support the good guys. Go to Elder of Ziyon and give 'till it hurts Hezbollah!

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