20061127

Author, Robert Spencer, Interviewed by C-Span's Brian Lamb

"Islam: What the West Needs to Know"
Interview video and transcript from C-Span's Q&A with Brian Lamb.

The Revolution WILL Be Televised

Michael Novak's great article in the Weekly Standard is intended about Iraq, but also applies to the Arabs' exploitation of the Palestinians as a device to discredit Israel toward galvanizing external, international pressure issue to force debilitating Israeli concessions.

Today, the purpose of war is sharply political, not military; psychological, not physical. The main purpose of war is to dominate the way the enemy imagines and thinks about the war. Warfare is not, these days, won on a grand field of battle. Nor is it won by the force that wins series after series of military victories. Nor is triumph assured by killing far higher numbers of the enemy.

The physical side of warfare no longer holds precedence. The primary battlefield today lies in the minds of opposing publics.

The main strategic aim of war today is to dominate the mind of the enemy's public, and then ultimately to dominate the mind of that public's leaders.

20061122

On Thanksgiving, What Is America to You?

This November, we Americans give thanks for our society - as we pre-occupy ourselves with consumerist, not moral principles. Jewish defense leaders' yahrtzeits are commemorated this month (Rabbi Meir Kahane, Irv Rubin and Earl Krugel) with no substantive outcry from the Jewish community about the conspiracies behind their killers and their weak prosecution.

If there’s anything the JDL can teach the Jewish community, it’s the principle that Jews must stand up for other Jews. Unfortunately, this has not been the case with Irv Rubin and Earl Krugel, whose deaths are being largely disregarded
because of their unpopular politics. Perhaps it’s time to right that wrong. - Cinnamon Stillwell http://www.theconservativevoice.com/articles/article.html?id=10562

And this week, Jewish-American Jonathan Pollard commences an unprecedented 22nd year of ethnically-prejudiced over-imprisonment - while American Jewry continues to delude themselves with what great pursuers of justice we are.

Let's consider the question posed in the anthem attributed to Frank Sinatra, "What is America to Me?" (aka, "The House I Live In") composed by Earl Robinson (music) and Lewis Allen (aka Abel Meeropol) (lyrics).

Socially-responsible Abel Meeropol personally adopted the orphaned sons of executed Jewish-Americans, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. His song has been recorded by a slew of artists, including Frank Sinatra, Mahalia Jackson, Paul Robeson, Sonny Rollins, and Josh White. Sinatra's version is the most famous, as it was used in a short film he starred in with the same in 1945. When Meeropol saw the film, he became enraged when he learned they deleted the second stanza of his song, which he felt was crucial to the meaning. He had to be removed from the theater. With it's message of racial harmony, the second stanza was deemed too controversial for the film. Listen to the recording from the link below- here are all the lyrics, including the omitted verses :

"The House I Live In"

"What is America to me? A name, a map, or a flag I see; A certain word, democracy. What is America to me?

The house I live in, A plot of earth, a street, The grocer and the butcher, Or the people that I meet; The children in the playground, The faces that I see, All races and religions, That's America to me.

The place I work in, The worker by my side, The little town or city Where my people lived and died. The howdy and the handshake, The air and feeling free, And the right to speak my mind out, That's America to me.

The things I see about me, The big things and the small, The little corner newsstand, And the house a mile tall; The wedding and the churchyard, The laughter and the tears, And the dream that's been a growing For a hundred-fifty years.

The town I live in, The street, the house, the room, The pavement of the city, And the garden all in bloom; The church, the school, the clubhouse, The million lights I see, But especially the people; That's America to me."

Lyrics omitted from Sinatra's short movie:

"The house I live in, My neighbors white and black, The people who just came here, Or from generations back;
The town hall and the soapbox, The torch of liberty, A home for all God's children; That's America to me.

The words of old Abe Lincoln, Of Jefferson and Paine, Of Washington and Jackson, And the tasks that still remain;
The little bridge at Concord, Where Freedom's fight began, Our Gettysburg and Midway, And the story of Bataan.

The house I live in, The goodness everywhere, A land of wealth and beauty, With enough for all to share;
A house that we call Freedom, A home of Liberty, And it belongs to fighting people, That's America to me!"
http://www.songfacts.com/detail.php?id=2306


"The House I Live In" performed by Earl Robinson


Click to Listen to 1945 Recording


20061120

Videos of UJC General Assembly Presentations


Videos of UJC's General Assembly, Zionist-related presentations:
Benjamin Netanyahu, Former Prime Minister of Israel; Bernard-Henri Levy, Author;
Fareed Zakaria, Editor, Newsweek International;
Zeev Bielski, Chairman of the Executive, Jewish Agency for Israel;
Galia Maor, President and CEO, Bank Leumi;
Panel Discussion - "Invest in Israel"; Tzipi Livni, Israeli Foreign Minister
Ehud Olmert, Israeli Prime Minister

Can the West defeat the Islamist threat? Here are ten reasons why NOT!"

Prof. David Selbourne of Oxford, England- from the London Times (truncated):

1. The extent of political division in the non-Muslim world about what is afoot.

2. The strengths of the world community of Muslims are being underestimated, and the nature of Islam misunderstood. It is neither a “religion of peace” nor a “religion hijacked” or “perverted” by “the few”... It is a transnational political and ethical movement that believes that it holds the solution to mankind’s problems. It therefore holds that it is in mankind’s own interests to be subdued under Islam’s rule. Such belief therefore makes an absurdity of the project to “democratise” Muslim nations in the West’s interests, an inversion that Islam cannot accept and, in its own terms, rightly so. It renders naive, too, the distinction between the military and political wings of Islamic movements...

3. The low level of Western leadership, in particular in the United States.

4. The contribution to the disarray of Western policy-making being made by the egotistical competitiveness, and in some cases hysterics, of “experts” and commentators on Islam.

5. The confusion of “progressives” about the Islamic advance- misunderstand(ing) the inner strength of Islam’s revival, which is owed not to victimhood but to advancing confidence in its own belief system.

6. The vicarious satisfaction felt by many non-Muslims at America’s reverses. Others believe their refusal of support for the war with Islam, if there is such a war, is a righteous one. But the consequences are the same: Islam’s advance is being borne along by Muslims and non-Muslims together.

7. The moral poverty of the West’s, and especially America’s, own value system. Doctrines of market freedom, free choice and competition — or “freedom ’n’ liberty” — are no match for the ethics of Islam and Sharia, like them or not.

8. The skilful use being made of the media and of the world wide web in the service both of the “electronic jihad” and the bamboozling of Western opinion by Muslim spokesmen.

9. The West’s dependency on the material resources of Arab and Muslim countries.

10. The West is convinced that its notions of technology-driven modernity and market-driven prog- ress are innately superior to the ideals of “backward” Islam. This is an old delusion. In 1899, Winston Churchill asserted that there was “no stronger retrograde force in the world” than Islam.

David Selbourne is the author of "The Losing Battle with Islam"

20061119

The Losing Battle With Islam

David Selbourne opines in the current edition of The Spectator (UK): "Learning from Islam’s Advance"

With the US heading towards a painful defeat in Iraq, the Taleban reconstituted, Iran proceeding on its nuclear path, the ‘democratisation’ of Islamic states a no-hoper, and the liberties taken by Muslims of the diaspora on the increase, Islam nevertheless continues to be misperceived.

In this battle of arms, ideals and ideas, Islam is sustained by faith in its own divinely inspired righteousness and truth. However, non-Muslims are not up against a ‘religion’ narrowly understood but a this-worldly political cause; even the wearing of the veil in the Muslim diaspora is a political gesture. Indeed, Islam’s ambition — enjoined throughout the Koran — is to establish its political and ethical dominion over the globe...

But Islam's swift progress is easily explained. For the West - but not China or India - is as politically and ideologically weak as the world of Islam is strong. The West is handicapped by many factors: its over-benign liberalism, the lost moral status of the Christian faith, the vacillations of judiciaries and the incoherence of their judgments, political and military hesitations over strategy and tactics, poor intelligence (in both senses), and the complicities of the 'left'...

In addition, most Western governments appear to have forgotten simple political truths which the Islamic challenge should have reinforced. Among these truths is that the principles of the free society require toleration of the tolerant, but demand that intolerance be shown towards those who not only reject such free society's values but look forward to the day when they are brought down.


http://www.spectator.co.uk/archive/features/26132/learning-from-islams-advance.thtml

David Selbourne is the author of "The Losing Battle with Islam." His perspectives have been featured in two UK periodicals recently (and commented on in JihadWatch and elsewhere).

20061117

Reuters Self-Exposed - Self-Incriminating Photo Eludes Doctoring

Reuters Arab photographer admits purveying known stolen goods
Police confiscate over 150 digital cameras, laptops and plasma screens from store owned by Ahmed Shanti, a Reuters' cameraman in Qalqilya. Electronics stolen from residential homes near Tel Aviv.

In all police seized some 50 laptop computers, 48 digital cameras, 40 video cameras, 20 PDA's, 20 mobile phones and 20 plasma television screens.

20061113

Journalist Hamid Mir Enquiry

A skeptic has challenged the credibility of alleged 'exposer' of Osama - Hamid Mir- recently promoted at America's Truth Forum Symposium in Las Vegas. Both Atlas Shrugs and Jihad Watch (forum posting below) elaborate on an allegation about providing an unwitting soap-box for al-Qaeda-approved messenger.

"He lost all credibility with me (attendee & JihadWatch poster) well before he said that Hezb'Allah was disarmed after the Israel/Islamic conflict this past summer. He was on a mission and when Janet over at Frontpage Mag sent me this gem, it all made sense;

I just had a conversation with a Muslim reformist and author/publisher from Pakistan (MuslimWorldToday?) who is threatened by fatwas by the likes of Al Qaeda. Heconfirmed that non-Muslim journalists have been able to interview Osama when Osama wanted to convey a particular message to the West. However, he stated thatno Muslim reporter can reach OBL unless he agrees with his jihadist mission to establish the worldwide Caliphate. According to my well-respected source, AQ hasintelligence (often dating back to a person's youth) on all Muslims in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Bangladesh, India, Malaysia and Indonesia who are active in any field. It is therefore impossible to survive, let alone live, in Osama's territory if you are an active Muslim and don't agree with the jihad. In other words, it is impossible to hide from AQ in that region.

Furthermore,according to this Pakistani publisher who lives on the West Coast, Hamid Mir was on an Al Qaeda-sanctioned mission to the West. He maintains that AQ provides tickets, photographers, bodyguards, etc. for its operatives to come to America and talk to the public.
The PTF (Symposium) was used for their purposes and ultimately gave him a legitimate forum to further the deception of the West.

Hamid will now be able to return home and report on his mission. His photographer will provide proof of a successful mission that included the Hamid's participation in a forum composed of many of the prominent
anti-jihadists in America today. "

Israel’s destruction near - Ahmadinejad

From YnetNews.com in Israel: According to the Iranian media Monday, Iranian President Mahoud Ahmadinejad declared that Israel was destined to ‘disappearance and destruction’ at a council meeting with Iranian ministers.

“The western powers created the Zionist regime in order to expand their control of the area. This regime massacres Palestinians everyday, but since this regime is against nature, we will soon witness its disappearance and destruction,” Ahmadinejad said. (AFP)

20061109

'Never Again' or 'Ever Again'?

'Ignoring the Wickedness Which Targets Jewish People' Nov 09, '06/ 18 Cheshvan 5767

This Veterans' Day/Armistice Day week also commemorates a noteworthy synchronicity. It's also the anniversary of the Nazi's Kristallnacht (the night of the broken-glass) by Germans against their Jewish citizens. And it marks the 16th memorial (by the Hebrew calendar) of the assassination of Rabbi Meir Kahane, founder of the Jewish Defense League and Israeli member of Knesset from the movement he founded, Kach.

Following a speech he gave at New York City's Mariott Hotel on November 5, 1990, Rabbi Kahane was assassinated by a militant Islamist, radicalized here by mosques in the USA.

14 years prior to the west's alarming assassination of Theo van Gogh by a jihadi on the streets of Amsterdam, Rabbi Kahane's prophetic message to defend Jews from Islamism was so uncomfortable to humanistically-inclined Jewish and Israeli leadership, that they intentionally marginalized him and his political party, Kach.

The NYPD and the FBI demonstrated similar reverse-bigotry against Rabbi Kahane, complicitly minimizing the investigating his assassination by Egyptian-born, El Sayyid Nosair- attributing it to racism, instead of investigating the jihadist conspiracy Nosair was involved in. From Wikipedia:
Dozens of Arabic bomb-making manuals and documents related to terrorist plots were found in Nosair's New Jersey apartment, also Army Special Warfare Center manuals from Fort Bragg, North Carolina, secret memos linked to Joint Chiefs of Staff, tapes of the Blind Sheik threatening "high world buildings," and 1440 rounds of ammunition. (Lance 2004 26). Osama bin-Laden contributed approximately $20,000 towards his defense.

According to the Pittsburgh Tribune Review, "In taped messages made before killing Kahane, Nosair urged others to launch a jihad....
 
"Remember ye brothers that God the Almighty commanded us to fight," he said, according to a federal transcript of the tape. 'Without fighting there will not be justice on earth...We cannot establish God’s rules on earth except by fighting.'"[1]

Defended by attorney William Kuntsler, Nosair was convicted as part of the trial of the "Blind Sheik"
Omar Abdel-Rahman. Both received life sentences for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing conspiracy, in Nosair's case life plus 15 years imprisonment.
Moreover, complicity towards immorality against Judaism, as both Kristallnacht and Kahane's marginalization synchronicitly illustrate, can result in an ironic, karmic boomerang.
In a nutshell, the FBI was not only taken off Rabbi Kahane's case, but all Islamic "infiltrating" was halted. President Clinton ordered the CIA, and the CIA then demanded that the FBI cease and desist. The Congress also put the squeeze on the FBI. Why? The true motives are anyone's guess. However, from 1990 until the 1993 first World Trade Center bombing, these groups were not monitored. ...One needn't be a cynic or a conspiracy theorist to make one salient observation: Kahane's murder (that of an often-maligned rabbi, deemed a "radical" and a "racist"), and the lack of a proper investigation into its cause, was of very little import to most. This was especially the case in the non-Jewish communities, and, to a certain extent, in the Jewish communities both in the US and in Israel.Imagine that. It took fifteen years, and thousands of deaths, to finally point out what should have been obvious to all. That is, that the opening shot fired by the Islamic jihadis on US soil was Rabbi Kahane's assassination, and that the jihad is ongoing - with no end in sight. (3)

Had the government pursued the inciters behind El Nosair, in addition to averting the 1993 WTC bombing, they could also have deported Imam Gulshair Shukrijumah. This would have averted his son, Adnan's, ability to implement al-Qaeda's "American Hiroshima," which today threatens the entire world.

Linked is a spiritual speech about Kahane's philosophy and its political ramifications about Israel and Jews. Walter Bingham on Arutz Sheva Radio (Kahane segment begins 24 minutes into the audio program).

http://www.israelnationalradio.com/Asx/walter.asx

http://www.kahane.org/
(3)-
http://www.militantislammonitor.org/article/id/1301

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/news.php3?id=115187

20061108

"Obsession" Finally Airs on Fox News - Still Enlightening, One Year Later

Melanie Phillips' review:
This is a film about fanaticism. It does not make easy viewing. It destroys
the fiction that Islamic terror is the product of ‘grievances’ about specific
conflicts. It demonstrates beyond a shadow of a doubt that it is instead the
product of fanatical, hysterical, paranoid, medieval hatred, bigotry and
power-mania. What it shows above all is that we are up against an ideology which
turns millions towards madness and savagery – but we are totally failing to
combat that ideology. Indeed, we don’t even recognise it for what it is. This
film goes a long way towards opening our eyes.

20061107

American conciliation-seekers stunned / disillusioned encountering conflicting, Islamist world view.

Could the West evolve to "Two worlds, too far apart to bridge," quickly enough to defeat the "One world, indivisible, under Allah" political movement?

The article by Walter Ruby, in NY's 'Jewish Week', depicts a conciliation turned actualization by participants in an Evening of Dialogue (on 28 Oct) between NY's prominent Imam Omar Abu Namous (of NY's Islamic Cultural Center), Rabbi Marc Schneier of the New York Synagogue, and moderator Mr. Joel Cohen.
"To the evident mystification of the audience, Abu Namous asserted that “the Arabs never rejected independence or sovereignty for Israel in 1948,” and that the Arab states did nothing to pressure Jews from Arab countries to leave for Israel.

Several congregants said afterward that the dialogue left them more pessimistic than before about hopes for Jewish-Muslim reconciliation. “The imam’s words left me feeling that we are even farther apart than I had imagined,” said one woman, “so far apart that we really have nothing to say to each other.”...

Rabbi Schneier said he came away “concerned, frustrated and deeply disturbed by [Abu Namous’] misinformation and misinterpretation of the facts about Israel … He is more extreme in his views than I had understood.”

But he insisted the dialogue was worthwhile. “I could have gotten someone else if I wanted a polite dog-and-pony show, but it seemed to me important for our people to hear what the head of the most prominent mosque in New York City is thinking.”

http://www.thejewishweek.com/news/newscontent.php3?artid=13219&print=yes

20061102

British Parliament reports sharp rise in antisemitism. What responsiblity does the media bear?

Britain's The Independent's cover-story by known anti-Zionist, Robert Fisk, is an example of how the media has fueled anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism in Britain and western Europe.

Today, even Parliament had to confront it. We feature it and further background articles on the subject.

Report on BBC Anti-Israel Bias to be released
The BBC will appeal to Britain’s High Court to avoid publication of a report that may demonstrate the news agency’s bias against Israel.

Journalist, Tom Gross, comments on the BBC's complicity in distorting British attitudes
INTRODUCTION : This article, “Living in a Bubble,” concerns the BBC’s Mideast coverage. It was written in June 2004, but most of the points it makes remain as relevant and pressing as they were then. In the course of it I also argue that to understand the BBC’s coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it has to be placed in a wider political and historical context, including:
  • The BBC’s coverage of America, Communism and the Cold War.

  • The BBC’s non-coverage of discrimination against women and gays in the Arab world.

  • The BBC’s lack of proper coverage of the fact Arab militias are responsible for what
    is currently the world’s worst human rights abuse, in the Darfur region of Sudan.

  • The BBC’s lack of concern about other conflicts and disputed territories, such as the “Occupied West Bank of the Sahara” i.e. the 25-year Arab occupation of the Western Sahara (a territory bigger than Britain) which
    has been flooded with Arab settlers by the Moroccan government.

  • The BBC’s eulogizing of Yasser Arafat, whom it described, at the height of his terror
    campaign against Israeli civilians in 2002, as “the stuff of legends”.

  • The BBC’s vast worldwide influence, broadcasting as it does in 43 languages.

http://www.tomgrossmedia.com/mideastdispatches/archives/000767.html

"The UK Media and Anti-Semitism" - Honest Reporting UK

http://www.honestreporting.com/SSI/printVersion.asp?site=www.honestreporting.co.uk&title=The%20UK%20Media%20and%20Anti-Semitism&url=The_UK_Media_and_Anti-Semitism.asp&teaser=An+All%2DParliamentary+Inquiry+on+Anti%2DSemitism+in+the+UK+publishes+its+report%2E&PageURL=/HRUK/articles/critiques/The_UK_Media_and_Anti-Semitism.xml

We are biased, admit the stars of BBC News

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/text/print.html?in_article_id=411846&in_page_id=1770