Jewish GI finally will get his due as hero
by Lisa Hoffman, Scripps Howard, September 22, 2005
http://www.dispatch.com/national-story.php?story=dispatch/2005/09/22/20050922-A1-04.html&chck=t
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WASHINGTON -- He's 77 now, with kidneys half gone, a handful of implanted stents
keeping his heart ticking, bad arthritis and an old war injury that's left his
right leg all but unusable.
But this week, former Army Cpl. Tibor Rubin will marshal every ounce of his
remaining strength for a cross-country trip to take a permanent place in the
history of his adopted country.
Rubin and his wife, Yvonne, will fly this week from Garden Grove, Calif., to
Washington. At the White House on Friday, the Hungarian immigrant and death-camp
survivor will finally receive America's thanks for his extraordinary acts of
bravery and devotion that saved the lives of dozens of his fellow GIs during the
Korean War.
In an East Room ceremony -- delayed for more than 50 years at least partly
because of the anti-Semitism of one of Rubin's sergeants -- President Bush will
drape the nation's highest award, the Medal of Honor, around Rubin's neck.
"If I don't die first," Rubin quipped, breaking into a peal of the cackling
laugh that has carried him, time and time again, through some of the worst that
life can bring.
Born to a shoemaker in a Hungarian village of 120 Jewish families, he was
rounded up at 13 and sent to the Mauthausen death camp in Austria. His mother
and 10-year-old sister died in an Auschwitz gas chamber; his father, a World War
I hero in the Hungarian army, was killed at Buchenwald.
Rubin survived the horror for two years, until May 5, 1945, when U.S. soldiers
liberated him and 70 other Jews. In 1948, he worked his way to New York City,
where he labored as a shoemaker, then a butcher's assistant. In 1950, though not
a U.S. citizen and barely conversant in English, he enlisted in the Army as a
way to pay back the country that rescued him.
Within months, he was on the front lines in Korea, a 20-year-old private first
class in I Company, 3rd Battalion, 8th Cavalry Regiment, 1st Cavalry Division.
His first act of bravery came soon, when his sergeant assigned him to hold a
hill so that his battalion could withdraw to safety.
Single-handedly, for 24 hours, he fought off wave after wave of enemy soldiers.
He ran around and around the crest of the hill, rolling hand grenades down it
and firing from different directions so the North Koreans would think they were
attling more than just one man.
After the battle, scores of the dead and dying littered the hill. Rubin vomited
at the sight of the lives he had taken. "Tibor, you just earned your first Medal
of Honor," Rubin recalls his captain saying.
"I didn't know what the hell he was talking about," Rubin said. "I'll never be
be proud of" the carnage that war makes men commit.
In another battle, Rubin volunteered to man his battalion's last remaining
machine gun, at which three other gunners had died, and protected his unit from
surging Chinese soldiers.
Later, he disobeyed his sergeant's orders to leave a wounded GI behind, crawling
several hundred yards under sniper fire to help his shrapnel-filled buddy. He
"saved my life by carrying me to safety," then-Cpl. Leonard Hamm wrote in a
nomination of Rubin for the Medal of Honor. Rubin himself was wounded twice.
In the end, although two unit commanders recommended him three times for the
Medal of Honor, the first sergeant in charge of Rubin's unit never prepared the
papers. A halfdozen of Rubin's fellow GIs later signed affidavits stating that
the virulently anti-Semitic sergeant snubbed Rubin because he was a Jew.
Perhaps Rubin's greatest heroism came during the 21/2 years he spent in Chinese
prisonerof-war camps. Nursing a broken leg when overrun by the enemy, he was one
of hundreds of U.S. soldiers forced to march for days through freezing weather
to a camp they called "Death Valley."
There, and in a second camp in which he was held, Rubin used what he had learned
about survival from the Holocaust. For his fellow prisoners, all near
starvation, he made soup from grass and picked wild plants for their medicinal
and nutrient qualities. He nursed many through sickness and infections. He
stayed up all one night picking lice off a soldier too weak to lift his hand.
And from the filthy latrines he plucked maggots, which he placed in soldiers'
festering wounds to eat the gangrene growing there.
"This, I am sure, not only saved my left arm -- which I have full use of today
-- but also my life," former Sgt. Leo Cormier, a fellow POW, wrote.
Over and over, Rubin risked certain death by sneaking out at night and stealing
food from the Chinese captors.
Carl McClendon recalled Rubin saying, "We will go home. . . . Our troops will
liberate us, your family is waiting for you. Please don't give up."
In the end, Rubin is credited with saving the lives of at least 30 POWs.
Now a corporal, he took his two Purple Hearts, the only decorations he was
awarded, and went to California. There he married a Dutch Holocaust survivor and
raised two children, one of whom served in the Air Force.
Rubin worked as a butcher, then as a presser in a clothes factory, then as a
liquor-store clerk, before his medical conditions worsened and he was granted
100 percent medical disability. He and his wife make do on that monthly stipend
and their Social Security checks. Even so, Rubin has scraped together $4,000
every Thanksgiving for years to buy gifts for patients in veterans hospitals.
Now, the extra $1,027 a month that all living Medal of Honor winners receive
will be most welcome, he said.
It was not until 1985, after he showed up at a convention of former POWs, that
an effort began to bring Rubin his due. Several ex-POWs, who had thought Rubin
was dead, recommended him for the Medal of Honor.
In 2001, Congress told the armed services to review the cases of some Jewish
veterans to see if anti-Semitism had robbed the worthy of the highest combat
honor. The cases of 138 decorated Jewish soldiers are being considered, but
Rubin is the first to be chosen. He is the 15 th Jewish Medal of Honor winner
since the Civil War, and the first Jewish Korean War soldier to be so honored.
When Rubin performed his uncommon acts of courage, "I was just a shmuck, a
little greenhorn," he said. "Now I'm a 'sir.' This only can happen in America."
Thursday, September 22, 2005
Monday, September 19, 2005
Fox News, Now 5.46% Saudi
BAD NEWS DEPARTMENT Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal purchases 5.46% of FoxNEWS
In the runup to the announcement that Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal purchased 5.46% of FoxNEWS, how many viewers had noticed a decided softening of its dealing with terrorists (ism)? I had.
FOX News: Fair and Balanced Minus 5.46%?
By Debbie Schlussel
September 19, 2005
Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal announced that he has acquired 5.46% of News Corporation, the Rupert Murdoch company that owns and operates FOX News Channel, the New York Post, and several FOX stations around the country.
Prince Alwaleed, nephew of the late Saudi King Fahd, is the cretin who--just after 9/11--visited the World Trade Center remains. He offered then-New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani a $10 million check for relief efforts, but then released a statement full of moral equivocations--rationalizing the murder of 3,000 innocent Americans and blaming U.S. foreign policy and "suggesting" it be changed.
Giuliani promptly returned the check with a statement: "There is no moral equivalent for this attack. The people who did it lost any right to ask for justification when they slaughtered . . . innocent people ... Not only are those statements wrong, they're part of the problem."
Saudi Prince: Tried to Bribe Giuliani,
Now Owns 5.46% of FOX News' Owner
Shortly thereafter, the Napoleonic Prince, who is affected by a strange tick, was also featured on a post-9/11 "60 Minutes" report that was even more offensive--filled with attacks on Giuliani, the U.S., and Israel.
Now, the Prince is one of the largest shareholders in New Corp, and said he may acquire even more shares. Will this affect FOX News' editorial content in favor of his radical views?
Hopefully not. But . . . I report, you decide.
Janet Lehr
IsraelLives
israellives@gmail.com
In the runup to the announcement that Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal purchased 5.46% of FoxNEWS, how many viewers had noticed a decided softening of its dealing with terrorists (ism)? I had.
FOX News: Fair and Balanced Minus 5.46%?
By Debbie Schlussel
September 19, 2005
Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal announced that he has acquired 5.46% of News Corporation, the Rupert Murdoch company that owns and operates FOX News Channel, the New York Post, and several FOX stations around the country.
Prince Alwaleed, nephew of the late Saudi King Fahd, is the cretin who--just after 9/11--visited the World Trade Center remains. He offered then-New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani a $10 million check for relief efforts, but then released a statement full of moral equivocations--rationalizing the murder of 3,000 innocent Americans and blaming U.S. foreign policy and "suggesting" it be changed.
Giuliani promptly returned the check with a statement: "There is no moral equivalent for this attack. The people who did it lost any right to ask for justification when they slaughtered . . . innocent people ... Not only are those statements wrong, they're part of the problem."
Saudi Prince: Tried to Bribe Giuliani,
Now Owns 5.46% of FOX News' Owner
Shortly thereafter, the Napoleonic Prince, who is affected by a strange tick, was also featured on a post-9/11 "60 Minutes" report that was even more offensive--filled with attacks on Giuliani, the U.S., and Israel.
Now, the Prince is one of the largest shareholders in New Corp, and said he may acquire even more shares. Will this affect FOX News' editorial content in favor of his radical views?
Hopefully not. But . . . I report, you decide.
Janet Lehr
IsraelLives
israellives@gmail.com
Friday, September 16, 2005
Frontpage Magazine Interview of Jack Wheeler
FRONTPAGE MAGAZINE INTERVIEW OF JACK WHEELER
A Free Article from Guest Author
By Jamie Glazov
Wednesday, September 14, 2005
[Last week, Frontpage Magazine published an interview with Jack Wheeler, conducted by managing editor Dr. Jamie Glazov . Here is the entire interview.]
Frontpage Interview’s guest today [September 8, 2005] is Jack Wheeler, the publisher and editor of To The Point, a geopolitical intelligence subscription website at www.tothepointnews.com. He has been called the “Indiana Jones of the Right” by the Washington Post, the “creator of the Reagan Doctrine” which dismantled the Soviet Union by the Wall Street Journal, and he holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Southern California with a specialty in Aristotle. He is the owner of Wheeler Expeditions, leading numerous expeditions to Tibet, Mongolia, the Sahara, Himalayas, the Amazon, 21 expeditions to the North Pole, and is listed in the Guinness Book of World Records for the first free fall parachute jump onto the North Pole.
FP: Dr. Wheeler, welcome to Frontpage Interview.
Wheeler: It is a pleasure to be with you, Jamie.
FP: We are in a war against Islamic Jihadism. Define your view of the enemy. Who are the jihadists and what do they really want? Do you see Islamism as being a cousin of Fascism and Communism?
Wheeler: You just made the right start. We are not in a war on “terrorism” and the enemy is not “terrorists,” but as you say, Islamic Jihadism. We should call this The War on Jihadism. The crux understanding of Jihadism, or Moslem Terrorism, is that it is a form of envious rage.
All three of the great barbarisms of modern times have been pathologies of envy. Nazism, preaching race-envy toward “rich exploitative Jews”; Communism preaching class-envy toward “rich exploitative capitalists”; Jihadism preaching culture-envy toward “rich exploitative America/Israel/the West.”
A clear example is the Nazi-type hatred Arabs have for Israel. The root cause of the Arab-Israeli conflict is envy. The Jews created a civilization out of the wilderness and a garden out of the desert, while the Arabs – even with their centibillions of petrodollars -- continued to mire themselves in medieval tyranny and poverty.
Israel is a fount of creativity and achievement, a bastion of Western Civilization built by scratch out of a desiccated wasteland, sparsely populated by Arab nomads herding sheep, goats, and camels. And that is why the descendants of those nomads hate and envy it so much.
It is also why they hate America so much. Jihadis do not hate America for its vices but for its virtues, for its freedom, its prosperity, for its cultural success. Just as Nazis hate Jews for their success, just as Marxists hate capitalists for their success, so Jihadis hate America, Western Civilization, Judaism and Christianity for their success.
Jihadism, Nazism, and Communism are all totalitarian ideologies masochistically obsessed with destroying what they are envious of. Jihadists may claim their goal is a Salafist Caliphate, just as the Nazis claimed about a 1,000 year Reich, and the Communists a New Socialist Man. These are utopian pretexts to hide the fundamental goal of annihilating the object of their hate.
That’s always the pathology of envy: the willingness to destroy yourself as long as who you are envious of is destroyed as well. The suicide bomber is an ultimate expression of envy.
FP: In terms of this expression of envy, it appears to make sense why the suicide bomber is its ultimate expression. And it begins to make sense why the Left today embraces the suicide bomber. The Left and Islamic terror are both inspired by the same impulse. Can you discuss this a bit – the common ground of the radical Left and Islamism?
Wheeler: They are both expressions of apocalyptic totalitarianism. Marx and Mohammed are ideological brothers. More than that, they are metaphysical brothers. Their fundamental bond is a denial of the Law of Non-Contradiction. [As defined by Aristotle: “It is impossible for the same attribute at once to belong and not to belong to the same thing and in the same relation.” Met. 1005b20]
That reality is contradictory is the basic tenet of Dialectical Materialism – the philosophy of Marx, Engels, and Lenin – and of philosophical Islam, for which it is blasphemous to claim Allah is subject to the Law of Non-Contradiction as that would limit and bind him in the chains of logic.
If reality is contradictory and logic is an illusion, then you are left with only one way to resolve conflicts and disagreements: violently. For Moslems and Marxists, change in the world consists of contradictory opposing forces – exploiters and exploited, believers and infidels – overcoming or being overcome.
Thus Marx claimed that “revolutionary terrorism” was “the only means of shortening the lethal death agony of the old society and the bloody birth of the new,” and Mohammed commanded his followers to spread Islam by the sword.
The fanatical followers of Marx and Mohammed, like those of Hitler, dream of the purifying fire of revolutionary justice, that once the evil scum of the world – the infidel, the heretic, the Jew, the rich, the bourgeois, the exploiter, the follower of Satan – are blown up by martyrs, burned at the stake, put to the sword, gassed in ovens, starved to death in the Gulag, or shot and heaped in mass graves, the world will be saved and there will be heaven on earth for all those who believe and obey.
FP: It is clear you do not think the Liberal-Left is equipped to defeat our enemy. Tell us the flaws and weaknesses you see in the left-liberal vision of our conflict.
Wheeler: Just as the totalitarian left is motivated by envy, the liberal left is motivated by the fear of being envied. It is a very ancient and primitive fear, exactly the same as a primitive tribesman’s fear of envious Black Magic or a peasant villager’s fear of the envious Evil Eye.
People in our society who are susceptible to this fear – such as heirs who inherited rather than earning their wealth and Hollywood celebrities who do so little to earn their millions – become liberals as a psychological strategy to avoid being envied. Liberalism is a not a political philosophy. It is the politicalization of envy-appeasement.
Thus liberals are masochists as well – for the more one fears being envied, the more one is driven to masochistic self-humiliation in attempts at envy appeasement. Liberals have a compulsion to apologize to those that envy them, apologize for being white, for being male, for being successful, for the success of their country, their culture, their civilization. This renders liberals incapable of passionately defending America.
FP: What will it take to win this war?
Wheeler: The same way we won the Cold War, a Reagan Doctrine strategy that identifies the weaknesses and vulnerabilities of the enemy, then attacks those vulnerabilities every which way you can.
When the Reagan Doctrine was launched in the early 1980s, it seemed inconceivable that the Soviet Union would ever collapse, much less quickly, within 8 short years.
But our analysis showed that the structure of the Soviet Empire, including the Soviet Union itself, was brittle. A brittle physical structure, like a water glass, can be unchanging and unyielding -- but if the right stress is placed upon it, it doesn’t slowly give or crumble, it shatters. One minute it looks like it always has, the next moment it’s in pieces. Social structures can be brittle in the same way -- which is why the result of the stress placed upon it by the Reagan Doctrine was that the Soviet Union shattered virtually overnight.
The phenomenon of Jihadism is not a social structure -- it is a psychological structure; it is not located in any physical or geographical space, but in certain people’s minds. It is thus not a political or social or economic event, it is a mental event. If we want to get rid of it, we must understand and dissect it as such.
Moslem Terrorism or Jihadism is something which the 19th century British scholar Charles Mackay would have recognized as a “moral epidemic.” In 1841, he wrote a history of such epidemics entitled Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. What all such mass delusions have in common is an incredibly intense psychological energy that is impervious to reason, reality, and morality.
That is the strength of these mass frenzies. Their weakness is that the energy, however intense, is inherently unstable -- in fact, the more intense, the more unstable. There is thus a fragility to them. They spring into a roaring existence, wreak their havoc, then vanish. They are ephemeral.
What feeds their energy is irrational hope, hope oblivious to danger and fact, hope that drives the absolute conviction that prices of tulips and South Sea islands and dotcom stocks will forever rise, that driving a plane into a building will cause the disintegration of the richest economy the world has ever known, that blowing yourself up to kill a few soldiers will defeat the most powerful military force in history.
Appeals to reason and morality or attempts to negotiate are useless in dealing with a delusionary frenzy. There is only one way to reach the frenzy’s tipping point, where its unstable energy tips over and rapidly dissipates and dissolves. That way is: The loss of hope.
This loss will come with the rejection of Moslem envy. Such rejection then enables us to target their numerous Achilles Heels. One, for example, is women’s rights. It needs to be stated publicly by public figures for consumption in Moslem media: We just don’t care that men having more rights than women is sanctioned by Allah in the Koran, any more than we care that slavery is so sanctioned. If slavery and lack of women’s rights is sanctioned by Allah in the Koran, then too bad for Allah.
We need to go on the moral offensive. The moral currency of Islam is debased. It is infected with a moral virus that has rendered it a morally inferior religion. It no longer deserves our respect and if Moslems want our respect back they must earn it by disinfecting their religion of moral poison.
We also need to target Saudi Wahhabism as the financial locus of world Jihadism. This means shutting down by whatever methods necessary Saudi funding of Wahhabi mosques, madressahs, and terrorist training centers all over the world (80% of all mosques in the US, for example, are Wahhabi). It also means portraying in every possible public forum Wahhabism as an Islamic heresy, a blasphemous perversion of Islam that calls all non-Wahhabi Moslems infidels. It’s the Saudis who’ve got to change, not us.
And of course a necessary condition for winning this war is regime change in Iran. As my friend Michael Ledeen says, peace in Iraq requires regime change in Iran. If the CIA had any competence at all, it would have fomented a democratic revolution in Iran years ago.
It is completely unimportant that Jihadists or their Moslem sympathizers and apologists “understand” us. What is important is that they be afraid of us. That they have a conviction that if they attack us we will hunt them down and kill them dead. That they know we are the folks that obliterated Hiroshima and Nagasaki and Dresden with no regrets and we will do the same to Mecca and Medina if necessary. That we have nothing but contempt for them and they have no hope of defeating us.
Jihadism is an unstable, fragile frenzy. Once the Jihadis lose hope, the frenzy destabilizes, and this war is quickly won.
FP: Dr. Wheeler, of course your analysis is very shrewd and appropriate but I think it is important to stress that we did have regrets about what happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki and Dresden. Those were the lesser of two evils; they were decisions we had to make, but we still regretted them because, as a moral civilization, we always regret the loss of civilian life. It is disingenuous and counterproductive talk about doing similar things to Mecca and Medina.
With all due respect, Dr. Wheeler, we are at war with radical Islam, not with all Muslims. Talk like this gives bin Laden and al Zarqawi exactly what they want: a war between civilizations. The terror masters want us to alienate ourselves from all Muslims and to make them see us as their enemies. We must be shrewd and prudent and understand that millions of Muslims are also our allies in this terror war. We do not need to insult and alienate potential Muslim allies and Muslim victims of Islamism by threatening their sacred places.
In any case, in reaction to the reports of Al Qaeda’s nukes being buried secretly in the U.S., you have discussed that the U.S. has a nuke buried secretly in Mecca. This sounds a little strange to me. What exactly are you talking about?
Wheeler: No pro-American thought it weird during the Cold War that we had nukes aimed at Moscow in response to the Soviets aiming them at us. It’s what prevented the Cold War from becoming nuclear hot. The threat to nuke Mecca may be the one reason we haven’t had another 9/11 or worse.
As Mecca is of ultimate value to the Jihadis, targeting Mecca is an ultimate deterrent for us. Whether the story that some Pentagon friends of mine hinted at -- that a W-80 warhead is already buried in Mecca equipped to recognize a unique signal generator from a satellite for detonation – is true or if it’s Psy-Ops, I don’t know. The important thing is that the Jihadis don’t know either. There’s a discussion of this with a picture of a W-80 in the Mad in Mecca article (October 5, 2004) in To The Point.
FP: Well, what can I say. First, again, I do not think that targeting Mecca and all the innocent Muslims there is a smart or humane way for us to fight Islamist terror – to say the least. Again, if anything, it will demonize us in the eyes of all Muslims and engender what bin Laden and al Zarwai really want. Also, what would make us think that the Jihadists care about Mecca and their sacred places anyway? These are not people influenced by mutually assured destruction like the Soviets were. These are people that seek death. They long for the other world, their happiest thought is this entire world blowing up and them going out right along with it.
Wheeler: The problem is that Jihadism is hard-wired into Islam’s founding document, the Koran – and so is anything else you want. The Koran is the most incoherent religious text ever put down on paper. That’s because it is not a book – it is a chant. It is not meant to be pondered and thought about. It is not meant to be read at all. It is meant to be chanted in a language – Classical Arabic – un-understood by most of the world’s Moslems as is Latin by almost all Christians, in order to put believers into an unthinking, unreflective trance.
The Koran was composed haphazardly at the end of the seventh century (two to three generations after Mohammed supposedly lived), as was the entire religion of Islam, to provide a religious rationale for the Arab Conquest and the continued rule of Arabs over conquered non-Arabs. The only way to forestall argument over the Koran’s innumerable obscurities and contradictions was to claim every word was that of God Himself, so to question any of it was blasphemy.
Thus “moderate” Moslems cite Suras that state, “Let there be no compulsion in religion” (2:256), while the Jihadis cite Suras commanding, “When you encounter the unbelievers, strike off their heads” (47:4). The crux problem is that both are true since Islamic reality is contradictory. The moderates stress their suras and ignore the Jihadis’ but can’t say Allah is wrong when he preaches violence.
Resolution of this problem is the Moslems’ job, not ours. Transforming Islam into an actual “religion of peace” has been achieved philosophically by Sufi imams such as Shaykh Hishan Kabbani. Sufism interprets the Koran metaphorically, and teaches that the path to Islamic enlightenment is not through compulsion of any kind, but through a personal ecstatic experience of the Divine.
We often hear calls for an Islamic Reformation. This was attempted 100 years ago by the Young Turks in Central Asia, who called it Jadidism, advocating a new (jadid in Turkic), flexible, and dynamic Islam.
Instead of treating the words of Mohammed as sacred petrified fossils, the Jadidists considered them as guides to the future, asking themselves not what Mohammed said centuries ago in the context of his day, but what he would say now if Allah brought him back to earth today. The Jadidists wanted Islam to embrace and flourish in the modern world. Tragically, the Jadidists were crushed by the Soviets in the 1920s, and their revival is to be encouraged.
But neither the Sufis and Jadidists can be encouraged unless something is done about the Wahhabis, the financiers of radical Islam.
The Wahhabis revile both the Sufis and Jadidists as heretics who should be killed – and they have the Saudi billions to spread what we should be calling a perversion of Islam. You are certainly right, Jamie, to point out that most Moslems are not radical crazies, that we are at war with the latter not the former, whom we need not demonize.
Most Moslems are human beings first. However much they see their personal identity suffused with Islam, they want the same things as everyone else: a peaceful and productive life, safety and happiness for their children. Were most Germans under Hitler, Japanese under Tojo, Russians under Stalin? Probably – and irrelevantly. It was not our job to “reach out to them.” It was our job to defeat their rulers and true believers, to render them no longer capable of being a threat to us.
This is why shutting down Wahhabi financing of radical Islam is a necessary condition to winning the War of Jihadism. The Sufis, Jadidists, and moderate Moslems in general cannot compete with Saudi Wahhabi billions which is washing over world Islam like last December’s tsunami over Phuket.
But until this is done, we have to buy time, and that is what the threat to nuke Mecca is doing. The Jihadis may think it is glorious to die for their religion, but not at the cost of the extinction of their religion, or rather its physical focus and center.
I personally suspect that the claim of a W-80 nuke buried at Mecca is Psy-Ops, that it’s a “useful fiction” which has in fact caused the Jihadis to hold off on another 9/11-type attack on America. I also have no doubt – and the Jihadis have no doubt either – that should another attack of this magnitude or worse – such as the nuking of an American city – take place, Americans will overwhelmingly demand and support making Mecca a radioactive hole in the ground.
And they won’t feel sorry about doing so, any more than over Hiroshima. Every action-adventure movie always ends with the audience applauding when the bad guys are wasted. Only liberals in the audience later feel guilty over their doing so.
It’s always regrettable when horrific violence is required to defend yourself from aggression. You always wish there might have been a better and more peaceful way. But there wasn’t with the Imperial Japanese nor with the Nazis and there may not be with the Jihadis.
It turns out there was with the Soviets. The Cold War ended peacefully with the implosion of Soviet Communism. Let’s all hope we effect a similar implosion of Moslem Jihadism.
FP: Yes, let’s hope for that. Dr. Wheeler much of what you say is wise and profound. We live in a very frightening age with a very frightening and evil enemy. I have no easy answers here and yes, we may have to take very drastic measures to try to stop a WMD attack on us by Jihadists.
But, once again, I would just like to reiterate that the talk of attacking Islamic holy sites is extremely counter-productive, as it alienates so many innocent people, many of whom are our allies. It also doesn’t necessarily do any good with fanatics running a death-cult ideology. Moreover, as scholar Robert Spencer has pointed out in a profound piece he wrote recently, actually doing it would suffice in what the abolition of the caliphate accomplished: the opposite of what was intended in the first place. In other words, it will simply give the Jihadists a greater grievance and cause to rally around and breath more life into their agendas.
Wheeler: I of course disagree with Spencer, who's a good guy, but has a problem claiming Attaturk's abolishment of the caliphate in the 1920s (which is only relevant to the Sunnis anyway) is the cause of Jihadism today -- namely, the more than half-century gap between the two.
FP: Well, this is a whole new debate and perhaps we can continue it in another forum.
Jack Wheeler, it was a pleasure speaking with you today. Thank you for joining Frontpage and we hope to see you again soon.
Wheeler: Thanks Jamie, I'm looking forward to continuing, as this was a genuine pleasure for me.
A Free Article from Guest Author
By Jamie Glazov
Wednesday, September 14, 2005
[Last week, Frontpage Magazine published an interview with Jack Wheeler, conducted by managing editor Dr. Jamie Glazov . Here is the entire interview.]
Frontpage Interview’s guest today [September 8, 2005] is Jack Wheeler, the publisher and editor of To The Point, a geopolitical intelligence subscription website at www.tothepointnews.com. He has been called the “Indiana Jones of the Right” by the Washington Post, the “creator of the Reagan Doctrine” which dismantled the Soviet Union by the Wall Street Journal, and he holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Southern California with a specialty in Aristotle. He is the owner of Wheeler Expeditions, leading numerous expeditions to Tibet, Mongolia, the Sahara, Himalayas, the Amazon, 21 expeditions to the North Pole, and is listed in the Guinness Book of World Records for the first free fall parachute jump onto the North Pole.
FP: Dr. Wheeler, welcome to Frontpage Interview.
Wheeler: It is a pleasure to be with you, Jamie.
FP: We are in a war against Islamic Jihadism. Define your view of the enemy. Who are the jihadists and what do they really want? Do you see Islamism as being a cousin of Fascism and Communism?
Wheeler: You just made the right start. We are not in a war on “terrorism” and the enemy is not “terrorists,” but as you say, Islamic Jihadism. We should call this The War on Jihadism. The crux understanding of Jihadism, or Moslem Terrorism, is that it is a form of envious rage.
All three of the great barbarisms of modern times have been pathologies of envy. Nazism, preaching race-envy toward “rich exploitative Jews”; Communism preaching class-envy toward “rich exploitative capitalists”; Jihadism preaching culture-envy toward “rich exploitative America/Israel/the West.”
A clear example is the Nazi-type hatred Arabs have for Israel. The root cause of the Arab-Israeli conflict is envy. The Jews created a civilization out of the wilderness and a garden out of the desert, while the Arabs – even with their centibillions of petrodollars -- continued to mire themselves in medieval tyranny and poverty.
Israel is a fount of creativity and achievement, a bastion of Western Civilization built by scratch out of a desiccated wasteland, sparsely populated by Arab nomads herding sheep, goats, and camels. And that is why the descendants of those nomads hate and envy it so much.
It is also why they hate America so much. Jihadis do not hate America for its vices but for its virtues, for its freedom, its prosperity, for its cultural success. Just as Nazis hate Jews for their success, just as Marxists hate capitalists for their success, so Jihadis hate America, Western Civilization, Judaism and Christianity for their success.
Jihadism, Nazism, and Communism are all totalitarian ideologies masochistically obsessed with destroying what they are envious of. Jihadists may claim their goal is a Salafist Caliphate, just as the Nazis claimed about a 1,000 year Reich, and the Communists a New Socialist Man. These are utopian pretexts to hide the fundamental goal of annihilating the object of their hate.
That’s always the pathology of envy: the willingness to destroy yourself as long as who you are envious of is destroyed as well. The suicide bomber is an ultimate expression of envy.
FP: In terms of this expression of envy, it appears to make sense why the suicide bomber is its ultimate expression. And it begins to make sense why the Left today embraces the suicide bomber. The Left and Islamic terror are both inspired by the same impulse. Can you discuss this a bit – the common ground of the radical Left and Islamism?
Wheeler: They are both expressions of apocalyptic totalitarianism. Marx and Mohammed are ideological brothers. More than that, they are metaphysical brothers. Their fundamental bond is a denial of the Law of Non-Contradiction. [As defined by Aristotle: “It is impossible for the same attribute at once to belong and not to belong to the same thing and in the same relation.” Met. 1005b20]
That reality is contradictory is the basic tenet of Dialectical Materialism – the philosophy of Marx, Engels, and Lenin – and of philosophical Islam, for which it is blasphemous to claim Allah is subject to the Law of Non-Contradiction as that would limit and bind him in the chains of logic.
If reality is contradictory and logic is an illusion, then you are left with only one way to resolve conflicts and disagreements: violently. For Moslems and Marxists, change in the world consists of contradictory opposing forces – exploiters and exploited, believers and infidels – overcoming or being overcome.
Thus Marx claimed that “revolutionary terrorism” was “the only means of shortening the lethal death agony of the old society and the bloody birth of the new,” and Mohammed commanded his followers to spread Islam by the sword.
The fanatical followers of Marx and Mohammed, like those of Hitler, dream of the purifying fire of revolutionary justice, that once the evil scum of the world – the infidel, the heretic, the Jew, the rich, the bourgeois, the exploiter, the follower of Satan – are blown up by martyrs, burned at the stake, put to the sword, gassed in ovens, starved to death in the Gulag, or shot and heaped in mass graves, the world will be saved and there will be heaven on earth for all those who believe and obey.
FP: It is clear you do not think the Liberal-Left is equipped to defeat our enemy. Tell us the flaws and weaknesses you see in the left-liberal vision of our conflict.
Wheeler: Just as the totalitarian left is motivated by envy, the liberal left is motivated by the fear of being envied. It is a very ancient and primitive fear, exactly the same as a primitive tribesman’s fear of envious Black Magic or a peasant villager’s fear of the envious Evil Eye.
People in our society who are susceptible to this fear – such as heirs who inherited rather than earning their wealth and Hollywood celebrities who do so little to earn their millions – become liberals as a psychological strategy to avoid being envied. Liberalism is a not a political philosophy. It is the politicalization of envy-appeasement.
Thus liberals are masochists as well – for the more one fears being envied, the more one is driven to masochistic self-humiliation in attempts at envy appeasement. Liberals have a compulsion to apologize to those that envy them, apologize for being white, for being male, for being successful, for the success of their country, their culture, their civilization. This renders liberals incapable of passionately defending America.
FP: What will it take to win this war?
Wheeler: The same way we won the Cold War, a Reagan Doctrine strategy that identifies the weaknesses and vulnerabilities of the enemy, then attacks those vulnerabilities every which way you can.
When the Reagan Doctrine was launched in the early 1980s, it seemed inconceivable that the Soviet Union would ever collapse, much less quickly, within 8 short years.
But our analysis showed that the structure of the Soviet Empire, including the Soviet Union itself, was brittle. A brittle physical structure, like a water glass, can be unchanging and unyielding -- but if the right stress is placed upon it, it doesn’t slowly give or crumble, it shatters. One minute it looks like it always has, the next moment it’s in pieces. Social structures can be brittle in the same way -- which is why the result of the stress placed upon it by the Reagan Doctrine was that the Soviet Union shattered virtually overnight.
The phenomenon of Jihadism is not a social structure -- it is a psychological structure; it is not located in any physical or geographical space, but in certain people’s minds. It is thus not a political or social or economic event, it is a mental event. If we want to get rid of it, we must understand and dissect it as such.
Moslem Terrorism or Jihadism is something which the 19th century British scholar Charles Mackay would have recognized as a “moral epidemic.” In 1841, he wrote a history of such epidemics entitled Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. What all such mass delusions have in common is an incredibly intense psychological energy that is impervious to reason, reality, and morality.
That is the strength of these mass frenzies. Their weakness is that the energy, however intense, is inherently unstable -- in fact, the more intense, the more unstable. There is thus a fragility to them. They spring into a roaring existence, wreak their havoc, then vanish. They are ephemeral.
What feeds their energy is irrational hope, hope oblivious to danger and fact, hope that drives the absolute conviction that prices of tulips and South Sea islands and dotcom stocks will forever rise, that driving a plane into a building will cause the disintegration of the richest economy the world has ever known, that blowing yourself up to kill a few soldiers will defeat the most powerful military force in history.
Appeals to reason and morality or attempts to negotiate are useless in dealing with a delusionary frenzy. There is only one way to reach the frenzy’s tipping point, where its unstable energy tips over and rapidly dissipates and dissolves. That way is: The loss of hope.
This loss will come with the rejection of Moslem envy. Such rejection then enables us to target their numerous Achilles Heels. One, for example, is women’s rights. It needs to be stated publicly by public figures for consumption in Moslem media: We just don’t care that men having more rights than women is sanctioned by Allah in the Koran, any more than we care that slavery is so sanctioned. If slavery and lack of women’s rights is sanctioned by Allah in the Koran, then too bad for Allah.
We need to go on the moral offensive. The moral currency of Islam is debased. It is infected with a moral virus that has rendered it a morally inferior religion. It no longer deserves our respect and if Moslems want our respect back they must earn it by disinfecting their religion of moral poison.
We also need to target Saudi Wahhabism as the financial locus of world Jihadism. This means shutting down by whatever methods necessary Saudi funding of Wahhabi mosques, madressahs, and terrorist training centers all over the world (80% of all mosques in the US, for example, are Wahhabi). It also means portraying in every possible public forum Wahhabism as an Islamic heresy, a blasphemous perversion of Islam that calls all non-Wahhabi Moslems infidels. It’s the Saudis who’ve got to change, not us.
And of course a necessary condition for winning this war is regime change in Iran. As my friend Michael Ledeen says, peace in Iraq requires regime change in Iran. If the CIA had any competence at all, it would have fomented a democratic revolution in Iran years ago.
It is completely unimportant that Jihadists or their Moslem sympathizers and apologists “understand” us. What is important is that they be afraid of us. That they have a conviction that if they attack us we will hunt them down and kill them dead. That they know we are the folks that obliterated Hiroshima and Nagasaki and Dresden with no regrets and we will do the same to Mecca and Medina if necessary. That we have nothing but contempt for them and they have no hope of defeating us.
Jihadism is an unstable, fragile frenzy. Once the Jihadis lose hope, the frenzy destabilizes, and this war is quickly won.
FP: Dr. Wheeler, of course your analysis is very shrewd and appropriate but I think it is important to stress that we did have regrets about what happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki and Dresden. Those were the lesser of two evils; they were decisions we had to make, but we still regretted them because, as a moral civilization, we always regret the loss of civilian life. It is disingenuous and counterproductive talk about doing similar things to Mecca and Medina.
With all due respect, Dr. Wheeler, we are at war with radical Islam, not with all Muslims. Talk like this gives bin Laden and al Zarqawi exactly what they want: a war between civilizations. The terror masters want us to alienate ourselves from all Muslims and to make them see us as their enemies. We must be shrewd and prudent and understand that millions of Muslims are also our allies in this terror war. We do not need to insult and alienate potential Muslim allies and Muslim victims of Islamism by threatening their sacred places.
In any case, in reaction to the reports of Al Qaeda’s nukes being buried secretly in the U.S., you have discussed that the U.S. has a nuke buried secretly in Mecca. This sounds a little strange to me. What exactly are you talking about?
Wheeler: No pro-American thought it weird during the Cold War that we had nukes aimed at Moscow in response to the Soviets aiming them at us. It’s what prevented the Cold War from becoming nuclear hot. The threat to nuke Mecca may be the one reason we haven’t had another 9/11 or worse.
As Mecca is of ultimate value to the Jihadis, targeting Mecca is an ultimate deterrent for us. Whether the story that some Pentagon friends of mine hinted at -- that a W-80 warhead is already buried in Mecca equipped to recognize a unique signal generator from a satellite for detonation – is true or if it’s Psy-Ops, I don’t know. The important thing is that the Jihadis don’t know either. There’s a discussion of this with a picture of a W-80 in the Mad in Mecca article (October 5, 2004) in To The Point.
FP: Well, what can I say. First, again, I do not think that targeting Mecca and all the innocent Muslims there is a smart or humane way for us to fight Islamist terror – to say the least. Again, if anything, it will demonize us in the eyes of all Muslims and engender what bin Laden and al Zarwai really want. Also, what would make us think that the Jihadists care about Mecca and their sacred places anyway? These are not people influenced by mutually assured destruction like the Soviets were. These are people that seek death. They long for the other world, their happiest thought is this entire world blowing up and them going out right along with it.
Wheeler: The problem is that Jihadism is hard-wired into Islam’s founding document, the Koran – and so is anything else you want. The Koran is the most incoherent religious text ever put down on paper. That’s because it is not a book – it is a chant. It is not meant to be pondered and thought about. It is not meant to be read at all. It is meant to be chanted in a language – Classical Arabic – un-understood by most of the world’s Moslems as is Latin by almost all Christians, in order to put believers into an unthinking, unreflective trance.
The Koran was composed haphazardly at the end of the seventh century (two to three generations after Mohammed supposedly lived), as was the entire religion of Islam, to provide a religious rationale for the Arab Conquest and the continued rule of Arabs over conquered non-Arabs. The only way to forestall argument over the Koran’s innumerable obscurities and contradictions was to claim every word was that of God Himself, so to question any of it was blasphemy.
Thus “moderate” Moslems cite Suras that state, “Let there be no compulsion in religion” (2:256), while the Jihadis cite Suras commanding, “When you encounter the unbelievers, strike off their heads” (47:4). The crux problem is that both are true since Islamic reality is contradictory. The moderates stress their suras and ignore the Jihadis’ but can’t say Allah is wrong when he preaches violence.
Resolution of this problem is the Moslems’ job, not ours. Transforming Islam into an actual “religion of peace” has been achieved philosophically by Sufi imams such as Shaykh Hishan Kabbani. Sufism interprets the Koran metaphorically, and teaches that the path to Islamic enlightenment is not through compulsion of any kind, but through a personal ecstatic experience of the Divine.
We often hear calls for an Islamic Reformation. This was attempted 100 years ago by the Young Turks in Central Asia, who called it Jadidism, advocating a new (jadid in Turkic), flexible, and dynamic Islam.
Instead of treating the words of Mohammed as sacred petrified fossils, the Jadidists considered them as guides to the future, asking themselves not what Mohammed said centuries ago in the context of his day, but what he would say now if Allah brought him back to earth today. The Jadidists wanted Islam to embrace and flourish in the modern world. Tragically, the Jadidists were crushed by the Soviets in the 1920s, and their revival is to be encouraged.
But neither the Sufis and Jadidists can be encouraged unless something is done about the Wahhabis, the financiers of radical Islam.
The Wahhabis revile both the Sufis and Jadidists as heretics who should be killed – and they have the Saudi billions to spread what we should be calling a perversion of Islam. You are certainly right, Jamie, to point out that most Moslems are not radical crazies, that we are at war with the latter not the former, whom we need not demonize.
Most Moslems are human beings first. However much they see their personal identity suffused with Islam, they want the same things as everyone else: a peaceful and productive life, safety and happiness for their children. Were most Germans under Hitler, Japanese under Tojo, Russians under Stalin? Probably – and irrelevantly. It was not our job to “reach out to them.” It was our job to defeat their rulers and true believers, to render them no longer capable of being a threat to us.
This is why shutting down Wahhabi financing of radical Islam is a necessary condition to winning the War of Jihadism. The Sufis, Jadidists, and moderate Moslems in general cannot compete with Saudi Wahhabi billions which is washing over world Islam like last December’s tsunami over Phuket.
But until this is done, we have to buy time, and that is what the threat to nuke Mecca is doing. The Jihadis may think it is glorious to die for their religion, but not at the cost of the extinction of their religion, or rather its physical focus and center.
I personally suspect that the claim of a W-80 nuke buried at Mecca is Psy-Ops, that it’s a “useful fiction” which has in fact caused the Jihadis to hold off on another 9/11-type attack on America. I also have no doubt – and the Jihadis have no doubt either – that should another attack of this magnitude or worse – such as the nuking of an American city – take place, Americans will overwhelmingly demand and support making Mecca a radioactive hole in the ground.
And they won’t feel sorry about doing so, any more than over Hiroshima. Every action-adventure movie always ends with the audience applauding when the bad guys are wasted. Only liberals in the audience later feel guilty over their doing so.
It’s always regrettable when horrific violence is required to defend yourself from aggression. You always wish there might have been a better and more peaceful way. But there wasn’t with the Imperial Japanese nor with the Nazis and there may not be with the Jihadis.
It turns out there was with the Soviets. The Cold War ended peacefully with the implosion of Soviet Communism. Let’s all hope we effect a similar implosion of Moslem Jihadism.
FP: Yes, let’s hope for that. Dr. Wheeler much of what you say is wise and profound. We live in a very frightening age with a very frightening and evil enemy. I have no easy answers here and yes, we may have to take very drastic measures to try to stop a WMD attack on us by Jihadists.
But, once again, I would just like to reiterate that the talk of attacking Islamic holy sites is extremely counter-productive, as it alienates so many innocent people, many of whom are our allies. It also doesn’t necessarily do any good with fanatics running a death-cult ideology. Moreover, as scholar Robert Spencer has pointed out in a profound piece he wrote recently, actually doing it would suffice in what the abolition of the caliphate accomplished: the opposite of what was intended in the first place. In other words, it will simply give the Jihadists a greater grievance and cause to rally around and breath more life into their agendas.
Wheeler: I of course disagree with Spencer, who's a good guy, but has a problem claiming Attaturk's abolishment of the caliphate in the 1920s (which is only relevant to the Sunnis anyway) is the cause of Jihadism today -- namely, the more than half-century gap between the two.
FP: Well, this is a whole new debate and perhaps we can continue it in another forum.
Jack Wheeler, it was a pleasure speaking with you today. Thank you for joining Frontpage and we hope to see you again soon.
Wheeler: Thanks Jamie, I'm looking forward to continuing, as this was a genuine pleasure for me.
Wednesday, September 14, 2005
Sunset in Israel
The Sun Is Setting…
From: Shifra Shomron, 18, former Neve Dekalim resident, now living in
Nitzan. E-mail: shomron@email.com
Sunset, and I let out the sigh I have been holding in all day.
Sunset. Dull streaks of red, orange and yellow stream across the
western horizon. Quick moving lights flicker as cars dash hither and
thither on the busy road below. A young child whoops gleefully as his
bicycle rides over a balloon bursting it with a loud boom!
I see the dull streams of faded color yet I do not see the
glowing sun. I feel the tired, gentle breeze yet I do not feel the
mind-clearing, hair-blowing rush of fresh cool air. And I do not see
the sea.
Once again I uselessly ask myself: what am I doing here? And,
even if given all the grains of sand and all the hour glasses in the
world, one will always reach the same painful and bewildering answer:
the government of Israel banished me from my home, destroyed it and
gave the land to the worst of my foes.
Alas! Alas for my beautiful Gush Katif that I knew and loved.
At this hour I should be standing in my garden; my feet ankle deep in
the lush dark-green grass, the sun a crimson orb sinking in the blue
blue Mediterranean sea, the sky splashed with deep purples and bright
reds and vivid pinks, my left hand resting on the rough bark of the
sturdy tree beside me while it's many leaves dance merrily over my
head under the summer sky, children cheerfully calling to each other
as they play… a peaceful tranquility as the sun sinks, the stars shine
and a plover trills sharply…
And where I am now, a thick layer of dust covers the closely set,
identical, small pre-fab houses and the sinking sun is hidden by a
ridge of dirt. The lights of the nearby cities to the south and to
the north are cold and numerous; they need to take the place of the stars.
Sunset. A time to reflect upon the day. To reflect upon the
hours of National Service I served at a nearby elementary school and
at a local `club' for children. Instead, unbidden, pictures rise
before me of Neve Dekalim as a sea of hundreds of smashed houses in
the midst of golden sand dunes; of Arabs capering with glee and
brandishing guns and grenades as they burn, demolish and defile the
many synagogues that the Israeli government decided NOT to have the
Israeli Defense Forces destroy; of the Rav at the nearby elementary
school tearing his shirt in mourning ; and of the small plastic bottle
full of golden grains of sand from Neve Dekalim's sand dunes that my
brother and I collected an hour before our exile. That precious
bottle of sand, pictures and mortar pieces are the only tangible
things I have from the Gush. But memories – so vivid that they are
almost tangible – engulf me and threaten to choke me as they are so
sweet and yet so painful. So soothing and yet so frightening. So
personal and yet …so national.
Sunset. The time of reflecting as the day is drawing to its end.
And in the month of reflecting, Elul, as the year is drawing to its
end. And what does the future hold? How long will my family be in
the Nitzan Caravilla site between Ashkelon and Ashdod? How soon till
we find a permanent home where we once again merge ideology and
purpose with our day-to-day life? How soon until the dust rises?
From: Shifra Shomron, 18, former Neve Dekalim resident, now living in
Nitzan. E-mail: shomron@email.com
From: Shifra Shomron, 18, former Neve Dekalim resident, now living in
Nitzan. E-mail: shomron@email.com
Sunset, and I let out the sigh I have been holding in all day.
Sunset. Dull streaks of red, orange and yellow stream across the
western horizon. Quick moving lights flicker as cars dash hither and
thither on the busy road below. A young child whoops gleefully as his
bicycle rides over a balloon bursting it with a loud boom!
I see the dull streams of faded color yet I do not see the
glowing sun. I feel the tired, gentle breeze yet I do not feel the
mind-clearing, hair-blowing rush of fresh cool air. And I do not see
the sea.
Once again I uselessly ask myself: what am I doing here? And,
even if given all the grains of sand and all the hour glasses in the
world, one will always reach the same painful and bewildering answer:
the government of Israel banished me from my home, destroyed it and
gave the land to the worst of my foes.
Alas! Alas for my beautiful Gush Katif that I knew and loved.
At this hour I should be standing in my garden; my feet ankle deep in
the lush dark-green grass, the sun a crimson orb sinking in the blue
blue Mediterranean sea, the sky splashed with deep purples and bright
reds and vivid pinks, my left hand resting on the rough bark of the
sturdy tree beside me while it's many leaves dance merrily over my
head under the summer sky, children cheerfully calling to each other
as they play… a peaceful tranquility as the sun sinks, the stars shine
and a plover trills sharply…
And where I am now, a thick layer of dust covers the closely set,
identical, small pre-fab houses and the sinking sun is hidden by a
ridge of dirt. The lights of the nearby cities to the south and to
the north are cold and numerous; they need to take the place of the stars.
Sunset. A time to reflect upon the day. To reflect upon the
hours of National Service I served at a nearby elementary school and
at a local `club' for children. Instead, unbidden, pictures rise
before me of Neve Dekalim as a sea of hundreds of smashed houses in
the midst of golden sand dunes; of Arabs capering with glee and
brandishing guns and grenades as they burn, demolish and defile the
many synagogues that the Israeli government decided NOT to have the
Israeli Defense Forces destroy; of the Rav at the nearby elementary
school tearing his shirt in mourning ; and of the small plastic bottle
full of golden grains of sand from Neve Dekalim's sand dunes that my
brother and I collected an hour before our exile. That precious
bottle of sand, pictures and mortar pieces are the only tangible
things I have from the Gush. But memories – so vivid that they are
almost tangible – engulf me and threaten to choke me as they are so
sweet and yet so painful. So soothing and yet so frightening. So
personal and yet …so national.
Sunset. The time of reflecting as the day is drawing to its end.
And in the month of reflecting, Elul, as the year is drawing to its
end. And what does the future hold? How long will my family be in
the Nitzan Caravilla site between Ashkelon and Ashdod? How soon till
we find a permanent home where we once again merge ideology and
purpose with our day-to-day life? How soon until the dust rises?
From: Shifra Shomron, 18, former Neve Dekalim resident, now living in
Nitzan. E-mail: shomron@email.com
Sunday, September 11, 2005
Leaders Lead, President Bush!
Leaders lead, President Bush.
You stand stage center, you can not help but be planning how you will be remembered, how you will be rated. Will you stand among the demi-G-ds of history, the great leaders who dealt with their times with foresight?
Some would say that you are handicapped by being a lame duck President with no future capital to expend. I would say that in ways of greatness, term limits have freed you absolutely from the necessity of playing the political game.
President Bush, are you with Israel and the Jewish people, or are you not with us? You can make a clear statement independent of the State Department, independent of anyone or anything by simply telling the truth. Israel is a nation among the nations of the world.
Israel made an immediate response in the immediate aftermath of Katrina’s devastating impact. Israel offered to send a plane loaded with food, baby formula and perhaps most precious, technical help. Israel made this offer with compassion, as one sister nation to another.
Now two weeks later, the Department of State in its official releases detailing offers of aid, fails to mention Israel as it lists donors of aid to the victims of Katrina’s rage.
President Bush, by pandering to the urging of the Department of State to omit the name of Israel when acknowledging aid from Arab States, lest they be offended by the coupling of their names with that of Israel, you further the process of dhiminization in the United States, you diminish youself.
President Bush, you are slipping backwards on the ladder of great leaders, but you are still in control. Exercise that control by instructing your minions at the State Department that Israel is always to be accorded full respect; and while we are at it authorize the building in Jerusalem of the US Embassy in Israel – Congress passes the appropriation every single year.
Janet Lehr
Israel Lives
janetlehr@mindspring.com
State Dept. drops Israel from Hurricane relief credits
WORLD TRIBUNE.COM
The United States has avoided any mention of Israeli participation in
the international aid effort for the victims of Hurricane Katrina.
In a briefing on Sept. 6, State Department spokesman Sean McCormack focused on Arab offers of assistance to the United States. [...]
[..]Officials acknowledged that Israel was one of the first countries
to offer to send military and civilian teams to New Orleans. But they
said the administration, which has highlighted offers of aid from
Islamic governments as well as American Arab and Muslim groups, asked Israel to postpone sending aid until a later stage.
The new Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy Karen Hughes has been tasked with the presenting an image of a benign America
sensitive to the Arab and Muslim world, U.S. officials said.
[..]In three briefings over the last four days, senior State Department officials made no mention of Israel's offer to help Katrina victims. The last briefing was on Wednesday by State Department executive secretary Harry Thomas, who reported offers from Britain, Germany and Russia.
But on late Wednesday, the State Department issued a report that
cited Israeli aid to Katrina victims. The report said Israel has sent
tents, first aid kits and baby formula to the United States.
"Russia, China, Spain and Israel sent planes loaded with MREs
[meals-ready-to-eat], relief supplies, tents, water purification units, kitchen units and medical supplies," the report said.
The administration's response was said to have alarmed Israeli
diplomats, concerned that their country was being marginalized in
U.S. foreign policy. Officials said the Bush administration, preoccupied by Katrina, has delayed meetings to discuss Israel's request for $2.2 billion in military and civilian assistance in connection with the withdrawal from the Gaza Strip and northern West Bank. The administration has asked Congress for another $51.8 billion for recovery efforts.
"The Secretary [of State Condoleezza Rice] has instructed ambassadors and chiefs of mission to speak to the foreign governments at the highest level," Thomas said, "to go back in to them, thank them for their offers, tell them yes, we want your offer today or [b] we're still evaluating your offer and [c] yes, we may take your offer later as these needs become greater but we want other things."
An Israeli military delegation has postponed its departure to the
United States until Thursday. A military statement said the delegation, carrying humanitarian and medical aid from Israel to New Orleans, would also include Foreign Ministry and Health Ministry.
"The delegation will transport aid equipment including 80 tons of
food, disposable diapers, beds, blankets, generators and additional
equipment which were donated from different governmental
institutions, civilian institutions and the IDF," the statement said.
"The contents of the shipment were chosen in accordance with the U.S. government."
Officials said the Bush administration delayed accepting Israel's immediate offer to help the hurricane victims. They said the administration was concerned that such a move would deter Arab and Islamic countries from offering assistance.
"At one point, the administration signaled that it would accept Israeli help, but preferred that it be as part of a mission organized by the American Jewish community," an official said. "There appeared to a problem with having the Israeli flag in a foreign rescue mission in the United States."
Janet Lehr
IsraelLives
janetlehr@mindspring.com
You stand stage center, you can not help but be planning how you will be remembered, how you will be rated. Will you stand among the demi-G-ds of history, the great leaders who dealt with their times with foresight?
Some would say that you are handicapped by being a lame duck President with no future capital to expend. I would say that in ways of greatness, term limits have freed you absolutely from the necessity of playing the political game.
President Bush, are you with Israel and the Jewish people, or are you not with us? You can make a clear statement independent of the State Department, independent of anyone or anything by simply telling the truth. Israel is a nation among the nations of the world.
Israel made an immediate response in the immediate aftermath of Katrina’s devastating impact. Israel offered to send a plane loaded with food, baby formula and perhaps most precious, technical help. Israel made this offer with compassion, as one sister nation to another.
Now two weeks later, the Department of State in its official releases detailing offers of aid, fails to mention Israel as it lists donors of aid to the victims of Katrina’s rage.
President Bush, by pandering to the urging of the Department of State to omit the name of Israel when acknowledging aid from Arab States, lest they be offended by the coupling of their names with that of Israel, you further the process of dhiminization in the United States, you diminish youself.
President Bush, you are slipping backwards on the ladder of great leaders, but you are still in control. Exercise that control by instructing your minions at the State Department that Israel is always to be accorded full respect; and while we are at it authorize the building in Jerusalem of the US Embassy in Israel – Congress passes the appropriation every single year.
Janet Lehr
Israel Lives
janetlehr@mindspring.com
State Dept. drops Israel from Hurricane relief credits
WORLD TRIBUNE.COM
The United States has avoided any mention of Israeli participation in
the international aid effort for the victims of Hurricane Katrina.
In a briefing on Sept. 6, State Department spokesman Sean McCormack focused on Arab offers of assistance to the United States. [...]
[..]Officials acknowledged that Israel was one of the first countries
to offer to send military and civilian teams to New Orleans. But they
said the administration, which has highlighted offers of aid from
Islamic governments as well as American Arab and Muslim groups, asked Israel to postpone sending aid until a later stage.
The new Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy Karen Hughes has been tasked with the presenting an image of a benign America
sensitive to the Arab and Muslim world, U.S. officials said.
[..]In three briefings over the last four days, senior State Department officials made no mention of Israel's offer to help Katrina victims. The last briefing was on Wednesday by State Department executive secretary Harry Thomas, who reported offers from Britain, Germany and Russia.
But on late Wednesday, the State Department issued a report that
cited Israeli aid to Katrina victims. The report said Israel has sent
tents, first aid kits and baby formula to the United States.
"Russia, China, Spain and Israel sent planes loaded with MREs
[meals-ready-to-eat], relief supplies, tents, water purification units, kitchen units and medical supplies," the report said.
The administration's response was said to have alarmed Israeli
diplomats, concerned that their country was being marginalized in
U.S. foreign policy. Officials said the Bush administration, preoccupied by Katrina, has delayed meetings to discuss Israel's request for $2.2 billion in military and civilian assistance in connection with the withdrawal from the Gaza Strip and northern West Bank. The administration has asked Congress for another $51.8 billion for recovery efforts.
"The Secretary [of State Condoleezza Rice] has instructed ambassadors and chiefs of mission to speak to the foreign governments at the highest level," Thomas said, "to go back in to them, thank them for their offers, tell them yes, we want your offer today or [b] we're still evaluating your offer and [c] yes, we may take your offer later as these needs become greater but we want other things."
An Israeli military delegation has postponed its departure to the
United States until Thursday. A military statement said the delegation, carrying humanitarian and medical aid from Israel to New Orleans, would also include Foreign Ministry and Health Ministry.
"The delegation will transport aid equipment including 80 tons of
food, disposable diapers, beds, blankets, generators and additional
equipment which were donated from different governmental
institutions, civilian institutions and the IDF," the statement said.
"The contents of the shipment were chosen in accordance with the U.S. government."
Officials said the Bush administration delayed accepting Israel's immediate offer to help the hurricane victims. They said the administration was concerned that such a move would deter Arab and Islamic countries from offering assistance.
"At one point, the administration signaled that it would accept Israeli help, but preferred that it be as part of a mission organized by the American Jewish community," an official said. "There appeared to a problem with having the Israeli flag in a foreign rescue mission in the United States."
Janet Lehr
IsraelLives
janetlehr@mindspring.com
Wednesday, September 07, 2005
The Dream Speech
WOULDN'T IT BE GREAT TO TURN ON THE TV AND HEAR ANY U.S. PRESIDENT,
DEMOCRAT OR REPUBLICAN GIVE THE FOLLOWING SPEECH?
My Fellow Americans: As you all know, the defeat of Iraq regime has been
completed.
Since congress does not want to spend any more money on this war, our
mission in Iraq is complete.
This morning I gave the order for a complete removal of all American
forces from Iraq. This action will be complete within 30 days. It is now
to begin the reckoning.
Before me, I have two lists. One list contains the names of countries
which have stood by our side during the Iraq conflict. This list is short.
The United Kingdom, Spain, Bulgaria, Australia, and Poland are some of the
countries listed there.
The other list contains everyone not on the first list. Most of the
world's nations are on that list. My press secretary will be distributing
copies of both lists later this evening.
Let me start by saying that effective immediately, foreign aid to those
nations on List 2 ceases immediately and indefinitely. The money saved
during the first year alone will pretty much pay for the costs of the
Iraqi war.
The American people are no longer going to pour money into third world
Hell-holes and watch those government leaders grow fat on corruption.
Need help with a famine? Wrestling with an epidemic? Call France.
In the future, together with Congress, I will work to redirect this money
toward solving the vexing social problems we still have at home. On that
note, a word to terrorist organizations. Screw with us and we will hunt
you down and eliminate you and all your friends from the face of the
earth.
Thirsting for a gutsy country to terrorize? Try France, or maybe China.
I am ordering the immediate severing of diplomatic relations with France,
Germany, and Russia. Thanks for all your help, comrades. We are retiring
from NATO as well. Bon chance, mes amis.
I have instructed the Mayor of New York City to begin towing the many UN
diplomatic vehicles located in Manhattan with more than two unpaid parking
tickets to sites where those vehicles will be stripped, shredded and
crushed. I don't care about whatever treaty pertains to this. You creeps
have tens of thousands of unpaid tickets. Pay those tickets tomorrow or
watch your precious Benzes, Beamers and limos be turned over to some of
the finest chop shops in the world. I love New York
A special note to our neighbors. Canada is on List 2. Since we are likely
to be seeing a lot more of each other, you folks might want to try not
pissing us off for a change.
Mexico is also on List 2. President Fox and his entire corrupt government
really needs an attitude adjustment. I will have a couple extra tank and
infantry divisions sitting around. Guess where I am going to put em? Yep,
border security. So start doing something with your oil.
Oh, by the way, the United States is abrogating the NAFTA
treaty - starting now.
We are tired of the one-way highway. Immediately, we'll be drilling for
oil in Alaska- which will take care of this country's oil needs for
decades to come. If you're an environmentalist who opposes this decision,
I refer you to List 2 above: pick a country and move there. They care.
It is time for Americato focus on its own welfare and its own citizens.
Some will accuse us of isolationism. I answer them by saying, "darn
tootin."
Nearly a century of trying to help folks live a decent life around the
world has only earned us the undying enmity of just about everyone on the
planet. It is time to eliminate hunger in America. It is time to eliminate
homelessness in America. To the nations on List 1, a final thought.
Thanks guys. We owe you and we won't forget.
To the nations on List 2, a final thought: You might want to learn to
speak Arabic.
God bless America . Thank you and good night.
If you can read this, thank a teacher. If you are reading it in English,
thank a soldier.
DEMOCRAT OR REPUBLICAN GIVE THE FOLLOWING SPEECH?
My Fellow Americans: As you all know, the defeat of Iraq regime has been
completed.
Since congress does not want to spend any more money on this war, our
mission in Iraq is complete.
This morning I gave the order for a complete removal of all American
forces from Iraq. This action will be complete within 30 days. It is now
to begin the reckoning.
Before me, I have two lists. One list contains the names of countries
which have stood by our side during the Iraq conflict. This list is short.
The United Kingdom, Spain, Bulgaria, Australia, and Poland are some of the
countries listed there.
The other list contains everyone not on the first list. Most of the
world's nations are on that list. My press secretary will be distributing
copies of both lists later this evening.
Let me start by saying that effective immediately, foreign aid to those
nations on List 2 ceases immediately and indefinitely. The money saved
during the first year alone will pretty much pay for the costs of the
Iraqi war.
The American people are no longer going to pour money into third world
Hell-holes and watch those government leaders grow fat on corruption.
Need help with a famine? Wrestling with an epidemic? Call France.
In the future, together with Congress, I will work to redirect this money
toward solving the vexing social problems we still have at home. On that
note, a word to terrorist organizations. Screw with us and we will hunt
you down and eliminate you and all your friends from the face of the
earth.
Thirsting for a gutsy country to terrorize? Try France, or maybe China.
I am ordering the immediate severing of diplomatic relations with France,
Germany, and Russia. Thanks for all your help, comrades. We are retiring
from NATO as well. Bon chance, mes amis.
I have instructed the Mayor of New York City to begin towing the many UN
diplomatic vehicles located in Manhattan with more than two unpaid parking
tickets to sites where those vehicles will be stripped, shredded and
crushed. I don't care about whatever treaty pertains to this. You creeps
have tens of thousands of unpaid tickets. Pay those tickets tomorrow or
watch your precious Benzes, Beamers and limos be turned over to some of
the finest chop shops in the world. I love New York
A special note to our neighbors. Canada is on List 2. Since we are likely
to be seeing a lot more of each other, you folks might want to try not
pissing us off for a change.
Mexico is also on List 2. President Fox and his entire corrupt government
really needs an attitude adjustment. I will have a couple extra tank and
infantry divisions sitting around. Guess where I am going to put em? Yep,
border security. So start doing something with your oil.
Oh, by the way, the United States is abrogating the NAFTA
treaty - starting now.
We are tired of the one-way highway. Immediately, we'll be drilling for
oil in Alaska- which will take care of this country's oil needs for
decades to come. If you're an environmentalist who opposes this decision,
I refer you to List 2 above: pick a country and move there. They care.
It is time for Americato focus on its own welfare and its own citizens.
Some will accuse us of isolationism. I answer them by saying, "darn
tootin."
Nearly a century of trying to help folks live a decent life around the
world has only earned us the undying enmity of just about everyone on the
planet. It is time to eliminate hunger in America. It is time to eliminate
homelessness in America. To the nations on List 1, a final thought.
Thanks guys. We owe you and we won't forget.
To the nations on List 2, a final thought: You might want to learn to
speak Arabic.
God bless America . Thank you and good night.
If you can read this, thank a teacher. If you are reading it in English,
thank a soldier.
Friday, September 02, 2005
Palestinian Authority Assets Frozen
Friends,
America is sending billions the way of the Palestinian Authority,
who has done nothing to curb terror. Now, in what has to be
the most interesting and wonderful development ever,
a Rhode Island lawyer who
won a 116 million dollar judgement against the PA in
a Federal court while representing the children of a
couple murdered by the Palestinian Authority, has been able
to FREEZE all the Palestinian Authority's assets in the U.S.,
including the money the present administration is now dying to
throw into their corrupt, terrorist-supporting coffers.
America, America. Gotta love her.
Naomi
==========================================
The Boston Globe
Palestinian Authority's US assets are frozen
By Farah Stockman, Globe Staff | August 30, 2005
http://tinyurl.com/bccwn
WASHINGTON -- A Rhode Island lawyer trying to collect
a $116 million terrorism judgment against the
Palestinian Authority has obtained a court-ordered
freeze on all its US-based assets, severely limiting
most Palestinian economic and diplomatic activities in
the United States at a critical moment for the
fledgling government.
The frozen assets include US holdings in a $1.3
billion Palestinian investment fund meant to finance
economic development as well as bank accounts used to
pay Palestinian representatives in Washington,
according to lawyers and court documents filed in
Rhode Island, Washington, D.C., and New York. Also
frozen are about $30 million in assets from the
Palestinian Monetary Authority, the Palestinian
equivalent of the US Federal Reserve.
Providence attorney David Strachman, who is
representing the orphaned children of a couple killed
in Israel by Palestinian militants, has also initiated
a court action to seize and sell the Palestinian-owned
building in New York that serves as the Palestine
Liberation Organization observer mission to the United
Nations.
The aggressive collection effort comes as the
Palestinian Authority is struggling to create economic
opportunity and set up a viable government. Now,
Palestinian officials say, the unpaid claim in the
Rhode Island court, resulting from a 2004 ruling,
threatens to complicate their efforts to become a
credible emerging state.
But Strachman said if the Palestinian government wants
to show the world that it is turning over a new leaf,
it must obey the court's judgment.
''If you are a responsible party or entity or
political organization, at the end of the day, you pay
your judgment," Strachman said in a telephone
interview from Israel, where he was on vacation.
''They have very brazenly refused to pay."
The case puts the Bush administration in the delicate
position of giving financial aid and political support
to an entity that has refused to obey a US federal
court order to pay terrorism victims.
The case has created such a problem for Palestinians
that Salam Fayyad, the Palestinian finance minister,
recently asked Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice for
advice, according to a Palestinian official who asked
not to be identified. The State Department could not
confirm Fayyad's request last night.
The Justice Department told a court in New York that
it will submit next month the US government's position
about the PLO mission in New York, but it is unclear
how much help the Bush administration can or will
offer.
''For the administration, it's difficult," said one
Palestinian official speaking from Gaza, who asked not
to be identified because of the sensitivity of the
case. ''Right now, they are trying to figure out a
creative way to deal with it without embarrassing
anyone."
Palestinian officials have refused to pay the claim,
arguing that doing so would be a politically dangerous
admission of responsibility for terrorist acts by
militants that the Palestinian Authority contends it
does not control. Three officials interviewed by
telephone from Gaza and the West Bank say they fear
setting a precedent that would spur an avalanche of
lawsuits that could bankrupt the new government. At
least four other lawsuits involving deaths of US
citizens in Palestinian attacks are pending in US
courts.
But Strachman said that the Palestinians have billions
in overseas banks, and that they are exaggerating the
hardships that would be caused by paying the judgment.
The case is the first to result in a financial
judgment under a 1991 antiterrorism law that allows US
citizens to sue foreign organizations in civil court
for terrorism. It stems from the 1996 murders of
Brooklyn-born Yaron Ungar, a US citizen, and his
pregnant Israeli wife, Efrat, whose car was sprayed
with bullets by Hamas militants. Those convicted of
the crime were found to be carrying uniforms issued by
the Palestinian Authority, according to Strachman, who
was appointed by an Israeli court to represent the
couple's relatives.
In 2000, he filed a civil suit in Rhode Island, his
home state. He sued Hamas, as well as then-Palestinian
leader Yasser Arafat, the Palestinian Authority, which
Arafat headed, and the PLO on the grounds that they
had encouraged Hamas. Arafat hired Ramsey Clark, the
former attorney general, who argued that the
Palestinian Authority is a sovereign state, and
deserved immunity from prosecution granted to most
countries.
Last year, the court ruled that Palestine is not a
state, and that Hamas, the PLO, and the Palestinian
Authority owed the Ungars $116 million. In March, a
federal appeals court upheld the verdict.
In April, Strachman obtained a court order to freeze
all the Palestinian government's assets in the United
States, the first step to collecting by force. Since
then, Strachman has been sending the court order to
every US financial institution where the Palestinians
might hold funds. Court proceedings are pending across
the country to determine if the frozen assets truly
belong to the Palestinian Authority or the PLO and
should be handed over.
Since Arafat's death last year, a more politically
savvy generation of Palestinian leaders has stepped up
the legal battle for release of the assets, using more
traditional arguments. Lawyers are arguing in a New
York court that the Bank of New York should release
$30 million in assets on the grounds that the
Palestinian Monetary Authority is an independent
entity. In another action, lawyers are using a UN
agreement with the United States to fight the move to
sell the PLO mission.
But the largely unpublicized court fight for the
assets has taken a major toll, Palestinians say.
George T. Abed, the governor of the Palestinian
Monetary Authority, wrote in an affidavit to the court
in June that the freezing of Palestinian Monetary
Authority assets had forced a halt of all Palestinian
dollar transactions through the United States and
could ''cause a banking crisis in the Palestinian
territories with possible fallout elsewhere in the
region." The Monetary Authority provides financial
backing for banks in Palestinian territory.
The unpaid claim has also brought a diplomatic price.
It has frustrated Palestinian efforts to send a new
ambassador to Washington because the envoy would have
no functioning bank account, according to two of the
Palestinian officials based in the West Bank.
Staff at the PLO mission in Washington have not been
paid for three months, according to Said Hamad, a
senior member of the PLO mission in Washington.
''Unless the mission is able to use these funds, . . .
it will be necessary to close the mission with
attendant injuries to Palestine and its people and
negative consequences to peace in the Middle East,"
Clark's legal team wrote in a motion earlier this
month.
Court documents show that the Bank of New York has
halted money transfers to Palestinian missions in
Ukraine, Guinea, Indonesia, Pakistan, the Ivory Coast,
China, Bulgaria, Norway, Pakistan, and Colombia, as
well as New York, because of the court order.
The case could also hamper US government aid. Last
month, the US government's Overseas Private Investment
Corporation voted to contribute $110 million to a
project that would give loan guarantees to small
businesses in Gaza. But the Palestinian Investment
Fund -- whose US assets have been frozen by the court
order -- is required to make a substantial
contribution of its money as a condition for launching
the project.
A State Department official who asked not to be
identified said the lawsuit had not yet prevented US
aid from flowing to the Palestinians, but that he did
not know whether it would be an obstacle.
Representative Anthony Weiner, a New York Democrat who
is also running for mayor in New York City, has called
for the US government to halt aid to the Palestinian
Authority until the claim is paid. ''If they wish to
continue receiving checks from the US government, the
Palestinian Authority needs to pay the Ungar family
what they are owed," Weiner said in a statement last
week. ''We must make sure this ruling is enforced to
make sure that there is accountability."
Palestinians say that Strachman is going after the
very funds that have recently been made public in
celebrated reforms meant to curb corruption and
terrorism funding. But Strachman and his legal team
say they should stop making excuses and pay.
''We're looking for money," said Robert Tolchin, a New
York-based lawyer working with Strachman. ''If you
create a cost for doing wrong, people will be
motivated to stop doing wrong."
America is sending billions the way of the Palestinian Authority,
who has done nothing to curb terror. Now, in what has to be
the most interesting and wonderful development ever,
a Rhode Island lawyer who
won a 116 million dollar judgement against the PA in
a Federal court while representing the children of a
couple murdered by the Palestinian Authority, has been able
to FREEZE all the Palestinian Authority's assets in the U.S.,
including the money the present administration is now dying to
throw into their corrupt, terrorist-supporting coffers.
America, America. Gotta love her.
Naomi
==========================================
The Boston Globe
Palestinian Authority's US assets are frozen
By Farah Stockman, Globe Staff | August 30, 2005
http://tinyurl.com/bccwn
WASHINGTON -- A Rhode Island lawyer trying to collect
a $116 million terrorism judgment against the
Palestinian Authority has obtained a court-ordered
freeze on all its US-based assets, severely limiting
most Palestinian economic and diplomatic activities in
the United States at a critical moment for the
fledgling government.
The frozen assets include US holdings in a $1.3
billion Palestinian investment fund meant to finance
economic development as well as bank accounts used to
pay Palestinian representatives in Washington,
according to lawyers and court documents filed in
Rhode Island, Washington, D.C., and New York. Also
frozen are about $30 million in assets from the
Palestinian Monetary Authority, the Palestinian
equivalent of the US Federal Reserve.
Providence attorney David Strachman, who is
representing the orphaned children of a couple killed
in Israel by Palestinian militants, has also initiated
a court action to seize and sell the Palestinian-owned
building in New York that serves as the Palestine
Liberation Organization observer mission to the United
Nations.
The aggressive collection effort comes as the
Palestinian Authority is struggling to create economic
opportunity and set up a viable government. Now,
Palestinian officials say, the unpaid claim in the
Rhode Island court, resulting from a 2004 ruling,
threatens to complicate their efforts to become a
credible emerging state.
But Strachman said if the Palestinian government wants
to show the world that it is turning over a new leaf,
it must obey the court's judgment.
''If you are a responsible party or entity or
political organization, at the end of the day, you pay
your judgment," Strachman said in a telephone
interview from Israel, where he was on vacation.
''They have very brazenly refused to pay."
The case puts the Bush administration in the delicate
position of giving financial aid and political support
to an entity that has refused to obey a US federal
court order to pay terrorism victims.
The case has created such a problem for Palestinians
that Salam Fayyad, the Palestinian finance minister,
recently asked Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice for
advice, according to a Palestinian official who asked
not to be identified. The State Department could not
confirm Fayyad's request last night.
The Justice Department told a court in New York that
it will submit next month the US government's position
about the PLO mission in New York, but it is unclear
how much help the Bush administration can or will
offer.
''For the administration, it's difficult," said one
Palestinian official speaking from Gaza, who asked not
to be identified because of the sensitivity of the
case. ''Right now, they are trying to figure out a
creative way to deal with it without embarrassing
anyone."
Palestinian officials have refused to pay the claim,
arguing that doing so would be a politically dangerous
admission of responsibility for terrorist acts by
militants that the Palestinian Authority contends it
does not control. Three officials interviewed by
telephone from Gaza and the West Bank say they fear
setting a precedent that would spur an avalanche of
lawsuits that could bankrupt the new government. At
least four other lawsuits involving deaths of US
citizens in Palestinian attacks are pending in US
courts.
But Strachman said that the Palestinians have billions
in overseas banks, and that they are exaggerating the
hardships that would be caused by paying the judgment.
The case is the first to result in a financial
judgment under a 1991 antiterrorism law that allows US
citizens to sue foreign organizations in civil court
for terrorism. It stems from the 1996 murders of
Brooklyn-born Yaron Ungar, a US citizen, and his
pregnant Israeli wife, Efrat, whose car was sprayed
with bullets by Hamas militants. Those convicted of
the crime were found to be carrying uniforms issued by
the Palestinian Authority, according to Strachman, who
was appointed by an Israeli court to represent the
couple's relatives.
In 2000, he filed a civil suit in Rhode Island, his
home state. He sued Hamas, as well as then-Palestinian
leader Yasser Arafat, the Palestinian Authority, which
Arafat headed, and the PLO on the grounds that they
had encouraged Hamas. Arafat hired Ramsey Clark, the
former attorney general, who argued that the
Palestinian Authority is a sovereign state, and
deserved immunity from prosecution granted to most
countries.
Last year, the court ruled that Palestine is not a
state, and that Hamas, the PLO, and the Palestinian
Authority owed the Ungars $116 million. In March, a
federal appeals court upheld the verdict.
In April, Strachman obtained a court order to freeze
all the Palestinian government's assets in the United
States, the first step to collecting by force. Since
then, Strachman has been sending the court order to
every US financial institution where the Palestinians
might hold funds. Court proceedings are pending across
the country to determine if the frozen assets truly
belong to the Palestinian Authority or the PLO and
should be handed over.
Since Arafat's death last year, a more politically
savvy generation of Palestinian leaders has stepped up
the legal battle for release of the assets, using more
traditional arguments. Lawyers are arguing in a New
York court that the Bank of New York should release
$30 million in assets on the grounds that the
Palestinian Monetary Authority is an independent
entity. In another action, lawyers are using a UN
agreement with the United States to fight the move to
sell the PLO mission.
But the largely unpublicized court fight for the
assets has taken a major toll, Palestinians say.
George T. Abed, the governor of the Palestinian
Monetary Authority, wrote in an affidavit to the court
in June that the freezing of Palestinian Monetary
Authority assets had forced a halt of all Palestinian
dollar transactions through the United States and
could ''cause a banking crisis in the Palestinian
territories with possible fallout elsewhere in the
region." The Monetary Authority provides financial
backing for banks in Palestinian territory.
The unpaid claim has also brought a diplomatic price.
It has frustrated Palestinian efforts to send a new
ambassador to Washington because the envoy would have
no functioning bank account, according to two of the
Palestinian officials based in the West Bank.
Staff at the PLO mission in Washington have not been
paid for three months, according to Said Hamad, a
senior member of the PLO mission in Washington.
''Unless the mission is able to use these funds, . . .
it will be necessary to close the mission with
attendant injuries to Palestine and its people and
negative consequences to peace in the Middle East,"
Clark's legal team wrote in a motion earlier this
month.
Court documents show that the Bank of New York has
halted money transfers to Palestinian missions in
Ukraine, Guinea, Indonesia, Pakistan, the Ivory Coast,
China, Bulgaria, Norway, Pakistan, and Colombia, as
well as New York, because of the court order.
The case could also hamper US government aid. Last
month, the US government's Overseas Private Investment
Corporation voted to contribute $110 million to a
project that would give loan guarantees to small
businesses in Gaza. But the Palestinian Investment
Fund -- whose US assets have been frozen by the court
order -- is required to make a substantial
contribution of its money as a condition for launching
the project.
A State Department official who asked not to be
identified said the lawsuit had not yet prevented US
aid from flowing to the Palestinians, but that he did
not know whether it would be an obstacle.
Representative Anthony Weiner, a New York Democrat who
is also running for mayor in New York City, has called
for the US government to halt aid to the Palestinian
Authority until the claim is paid. ''If they wish to
continue receiving checks from the US government, the
Palestinian Authority needs to pay the Ungar family
what they are owed," Weiner said in a statement last
week. ''We must make sure this ruling is enforced to
make sure that there is accountability."
Palestinians say that Strachman is going after the
very funds that have recently been made public in
celebrated reforms meant to curb corruption and
terrorism funding. But Strachman and his legal team
say they should stop making excuses and pay.
''We're looking for money," said Robert Tolchin, a New
York-based lawyer working with Strachman. ''If you
create a cost for doing wrong, people will be
motivated to stop doing wrong."
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