tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-179093892024-03-16T03:16:30.407-04:00Free Thought ManifestoThis is the point from which I could never return,
And if I back down now then forever I burn.
This is the point from which I could never retreat,
Cause If I turn back now there can never be peace.
This is the point from which I will die and succeed,
Living the struggle, I know I'm alive when I bleed.
From now on it can never be the same as before,
Cause the place I'm from doesn't exist anymore
[Immortal Technique]CavalierZeehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15921393075475481352noreply@blogger.comBlogger16348125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17909389.post-39844035548244737322015-05-22T18:00:00.000-04:002015-05-22T18:00:04.624-04:00Control<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="300" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/yAA5KDosaCE" width="400"></iframe><br />
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<span style="color: blue;"><b>Starring:</b><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span><i>Ray Liotta, Willem Dafoe, Michelle Rodriguez, Kathleen Robertson, Polly Walker, Stephen Rea</i></span>CavalierZeehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15921393075475481352noreply@blogger.com12tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17909389.post-19418594955003283012015-05-15T18:00:00.000-04:002015-05-15T18:00:01.949-04:00Shade<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="300" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/LoH5I2RfKJk" width="400"></iframe><br />
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<span style="color: blue;"><b>Starring:</b><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span><i>Stuart Townsend, Sylvester Stallone, Melanie Griffith, Jamie Foxx, Thandie Newton,</i></span><br />
<span style="color: blue;"><i>Gabriel Byrne, Roger Guenveur Smith, Bo Hopkins</i></span><br />
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<br />CavalierZeehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15921393075475481352noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17909389.post-10523042668873918842015-05-08T18:00:00.000-04:002015-05-08T18:00:00.314-04:00Green Street Hooligans<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="300" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/nJNLlviIH5s" width="400"></iframe><br />
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<span style="color: blue;"><b>Starring:</b><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span><i>Elijah Wood, Charlie Hunnam, Claire Forlani</i></span>CavalierZeehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15921393075475481352noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17909389.post-35447995323493233362015-05-01T18:00:00.001-04:002015-05-01T18:00:03.760-04:00Zulu<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="300" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/gpSI3pq-fVc" width="400"></iframe><br />
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<span style="color: blue;"><b>Starring:</b> <i>Stanley Baker, Michael Caine, Jack Hawkins, Ulla Jacobsson, James Booth, Nigel Green</i></span>CavalierZeehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15921393075475481352noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17909389.post-53420808526528235262015-04-24T18:00:00.001-04:002015-04-24T18:00:00.167-04:00Raising Helen<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="300" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/XYrlCWUH7sI" width="400"></iframe><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><b>Starring:</b><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span><i>Kate Hudson, John Corbett, Joan Cusack, Hayden Panettiere, Spencer Breslin, </i></span><i style="color: blue; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">Abigail Breslin, Helen Mirren, Felicity Huffman</i>CavalierZeehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15921393075475481352noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17909389.post-27001505170063543672015-04-17T18:00:00.001-04:002015-04-17T18:00:05.639-04:00Penelope<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="300" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/vhM6saBCEsw" width="400"></iframe><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><b>Starring:</b><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span><i>Christina Ricci, James McAvoy, Catherine O'Hara, Peter Dinklage, Richard E. Grant, </i></span><span style="color: blue; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><i>Reese Witherspoon.</i></span>CavalierZeehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15921393075475481352noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17909389.post-26282618237702001462015-04-10T18:00:00.000-04:002015-04-10T18:00:04.472-04:00The Secret Agent<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="300" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/6P7mzWQszlk" width="400"></iframe><br />
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<span style="color: blue;"><b>Starring:</b> <i>David Suchet, Cheryl Campbell, Peter Capaldi</i></span>CavalierZeehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15921393075475481352noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17909389.post-62889751067246991952015-04-03T18:00:00.000-04:002015-04-03T18:00:00.253-04:00The Four Feathers<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="300" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/1R7n8B8KkZE" width="400"></iframe><br />
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<span style="color: blue;"><b>Starring:</b><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span><i>Beau Bridges, Jane Seymour</i></span>CavalierZeehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15921393075475481352noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17909389.post-11675723438097441642015-03-27T18:00:00.000-04:002015-03-27T18:00:01.940-04:00David Copperfield<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="300" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/CohXIMqkZXI" width="400"></iframe><br />
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<span style="color: blue;"><b>Starring:</b><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="font-style: italic; white-space: pre;"> </span></span><span style="color: blue; font-style: italic;">Hugh Dancy, Sally Field, Michael Richards, Eileen Atkins, Anthony Andrews</span>CavalierZeehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15921393075475481352noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17909389.post-7067871410283397922015-03-20T18:00:00.000-04:002015-03-20T18:00:04.594-04:00The Count Of Monte Cristo<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="300" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/dOv_BSPOfew" width="400"></iframe><br />
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<span style="color: blue;"><b>Starring:</b><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span><i>Jim Caviezel, Guy Pearce, Richard Harris, James Frain, Dagmara Dominczyk, Luis Guzmán</i></span>CavalierZeehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15921393075475481352noreply@blogger.com26tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17909389.post-67571219269304722822015-03-13T18:00:00.000-04:002015-03-13T18:00:01.253-04:00A Tale Of Two Cities<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="300" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/2pO2DnAMzos" width="400"></iframe><br />
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<span style="color: blue;"><b>Starring:</b><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span><i>Chris Sarandon, Alice Krige</i></span>CavalierZeehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15921393075475481352noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17909389.post-83182365533119944842015-03-06T18:00:00.000-05:002015-03-06T18:00:00.152-05:00The Brotherhood Of The Bell<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="300" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/H57JthB_KVc" width="400"></iframe><br />
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<span style="color: blue;"><b>Starring: </b><i>Glenn Ford, Will Geer, Robert Pine, Dabney Coleman.</i></span>CavalierZeehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15921393075475481352noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17909389.post-11491903951614112762015-02-27T18:00:00.000-05:002015-02-27T18:00:03.710-05:00Levity<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="300" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/amsRN--9V30" width="400"></iframe><br />
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><b>Starring:</b><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span><i>Billy Bob Thornton, Morgan Freeman, Holly Hunter, Kirsten Dunst</i></span>CavalierZeehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15921393075475481352noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17909389.post-40119479661753882652015-02-20T18:00:00.000-05:002015-02-20T18:00:01.686-05:00The Red Baron<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="300" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/KEhpMWk3MSY" width="400"></iframe><br />
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<span style="color: blue;"><b>Starring:</b><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span><i>Matthias Schweighöfer, Joseph Fiennes, Til Schweiger, Lena Headey</i></span>CavalierZeehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15921393075475481352noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17909389.post-70554592894604061222015-02-13T18:00:00.000-05:002015-02-13T18:00:01.668-05:00Jude<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="300" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/D7nOLjNsqRU" width="400"></iframe><br />
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<span style="color: blue;"><b>Starring:</b><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span><i>Christopher Eccleston, Kate Winslet</i></span>CavalierZeehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15921393075475481352noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17909389.post-76935260421484324042015-02-11T00:00:00.001-05:002015-02-11T00:00:04.119-05:00The Cost Of US Wars Since 9/11: $1.6 Trillion<img src="http://www.motherjones.com/files/imagecache/top-of-content-main/october14marines_0.jpg" height="224" width="400" /><br />
<i>Marine Infantry Officer Course students stand by before a helicopter drill in Arizona. US Marine Corps photo by Cpl. James Marchetti</i><br />
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The cost of US war-making in the 13 years since the September 11 terrorist attacks reached a whopping $1.6 trillion in 2014, according to a <a href="http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/RL33110.pdf" style="border-bottom-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); border-bottom-style: dotted; border-bottom-width: 1px; color: black; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">recent report</a> by the Congressional Research Service (CRS).</div>
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The $1.6 trillion in war spending over that time span includes the cost of military operations, the training of security forces in Afghanistan and Iraq, weapons maintenance, base support, reconstruction, embassy maintenance, foreign aid, and veterans' medical care, as well as war-related intelligence operations not tracked by the Pentagon. <b><a href="http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/RL33110.pdf">The report</a></b> tracks expenses through September, the end of the government's 2014 fiscal year. </div>
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The key factor determining the cost of war during a given period over the last 13 years has been the number of US troops deployed, according to the report. The number of troops in Afghanistan peaked in 2011, when 100,000 Americans were stationed there. The number of US armed forces in Iraq reached a high of about <a href="http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/R40682.pdf" style="border-bottom-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); border-bottom-style: dotted; border-bottom-width: 1px; color: black; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">170,000</a> in 2007.</div>
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Although Congress enacted across-the-board spending cuts in March 2013, the Pentagon's war-making money was left untouched. The minimal cuts, known as sequestration, came from the Defense Department's regular peacetime budget. The Pentagon gets a <a href="https://www.nationalpriorities.org/blog/2014/03/06/pentagons-phony-budget-war/" style="border-bottom-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); border-bottom-style: dotted; border-bottom-width: 1px; color: black; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">separate</a> budget for fighting wars.</div>
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In the spending bill that Congress approved earlier this month, lawmakers doled out $73.7 billion for war-related activities in 2015—<a href="http://crfb.org/blogs/budget-gimmicks-cromnibus-bill" style="border-bottom-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); border-bottom-style: dotted; border-bottom-width: 1px; color: black; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">$2.3 billion</a> more than President Barack Obama had requested. As <em>Mother Jones</em>' Dave Gilson <a href="http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/12/pentagon-budget-deal-charts-cuts" style="border-bottom-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); border-bottom-style: dotted; border-bottom-width: 1px; color: black; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">reported</a> last year, US military spending is on pace to taper far less dramatically in the wake of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars than it did after the end of the Vietnam War or the Cold War.</div>
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Other reports have estimated the cost of US wars since 9/11 to be far higher than $1.6 trillion. A <a href="http://costsofwar.org/sites/default/files/articles/20/attachments/Costs%20of%20War%20Summary%20Crawford%20June%202014.pdf" style="border-bottom-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); border-bottom-style: dotted; border-bottom-width: 1px; color: black; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">report</a> by Neta Crawford, a political science professor at Boston University, estimated the total cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—as well as post-2001 assistance to Pakistan—to be roughly $4.4 trillion. The CRS estimate is lower because it <a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-12-19/wars-cost-to-the-u-s-since-the-sept-11-attacks-1-6-trillion.html" style="border-bottom-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); border-bottom-style: dotted; border-bottom-width: 1px; color: black; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">does not include</a> additional costs including the lifetime price of health care for disabled veterans and interest on the national debt.</div>
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<em>Chart by <a href="http://www.motherjones.com/authors/aj-vicens" style="border-bottom-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); border-bottom-style: dotted; border-bottom-width: 1px; color: black; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">AJ Vicens</a>.</em></div>
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<em><b><span style="color: blue; font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Source: <a href="http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2014/12/crs-report-war-spending-trillion">MotherJones</a></span></b></em></div>
<br />CavalierZeehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15921393075475481352noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17909389.post-67614449687804982015-02-10T00:00:00.000-05:002015-02-10T00:00:11.831-05:00US: Terrorism Prosecutions Often An Illusion<div style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #505050; font-family: 'PT Sans'; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 27.8999996185303px; margin-bottom: 20px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="color: #42210b; font-family: Georgia, serif; line-height: 22.75px;">The </span><a href="https://www.hrw.org/united-states" style="color: #3399cc; font-family: Georgia, serif; line-height: 22.75px;">US</a><span style="color: #42210b; font-family: Georgia, serif; line-height: 22.75px;"> Justice Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) have targeted American Muslims in abusive counterterrorism “sting operations” based on religious and ethnic identity, Human Rights Watch and Columbia Law School’s Human Rights Institute said in a report released today. Many of the more than 500 terrorism-related cases prosecuted in US federal courts since September 11, 2001, have alienated the very communities that can help prevent terrorist crimes.</span><br />
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<span style="color: #42210b; font-family: Georgia, serif; line-height: 22.75px;">The 214-page report, </span><a href="http://hrw.org/node/126101" style="color: #3399cc; font-family: Georgia, serif; line-height: 22.75px;">“Illusion of Justice: Human Rights Abuses in US Terrorism Prosecutions,”</a><span style="color: #42210b; font-family: Georgia, serif; line-height: 22.75px;">examines 27 federal terrorism cases from initiation of the investigations to sentencing and post-conviction conditions of confinement. It documents the significant human cost of certain counterterrorism practices, such as overly aggressive sting operations and unnecessarily restrictive conditions of confinement.</span><br />
<span style="color: #42210b; font-family: Georgia, serif; line-height: 22.75px;">“Americans have been told that their government is keeping them safe by preventing and prosecuting terrorism inside the US,” said </span><a href="http://www.hrw.org/bios/andrea-prasow" style="color: #3399cc; font-family: Georgia, serif; line-height: 22.75px;">Andrea Prasow</a><span style="color: #42210b; font-family: Georgia, serif; line-height: 22.75px;">, deputy Washington director at Human Rights Watch and one of the authors of the report. “But take a closer look and you realize that many of these people would never have committed a crime if not for law enforcement encouraging, pressuring, and sometimes paying them to commit terrorist acts.”</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #42210b; font-family: Georgia, serif; line-height: 22.75px;">Many prosecutions have properly targeted individuals engaged in planning or financing terror attacks, the groups found. But many others have targeted people who do not appear to have been involved in terrorist plotting or financing at the time the government began to investigate them. And many of the cases involve due process violations and abusive conditions of confinement that have resulted in excessively long prison sentences.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #42210b; font-family: Georgia, serif; line-height: 22.75px;">The report is based on more than 215 interviews with people charged with or convicted of terrorism-related crimes, members of their families and their communities, criminal defense attorneys, judges, current and former federal prosecutors, government officials, academics, and other experts.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #42210b; font-family: Georgia, serif; line-height: 22.75px;">In some cases the FBI may have created terrorists out of law-abiding individuals by suggesting the idea of taking terrorist action or encouraging the target to act. Multiple studies have found that nearly 50 percent of the federal counterterrorism convictions since September 11, 2001, resulted from informant-based cases. Almost 30 percent were sting operations in which the informant played an active role in the underlying plot.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #42210b; font-family: Georgia, serif; line-height: 22.75px;">In the case of the “Newburgh Four,” for example, who were accused of planning to blow up synagogues and attack a US military base, a judge said the government “came up with the crime, provided the means, and removed all relevant obstacles,” and had, in the process, made a terrorist out of a man “whose buffoonery is positively Shakespearean in scope.”</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #42210b; font-family: Georgia, serif; line-height: 22.75px;">The FBI often targeted particularly vulnerable people, including those with intellectual and mental disabilities and the indigent. The government, often acting through informants, then actively developed the plot, persuading and sometimes pressuring the targets to participate, and provided the resources to carry it out.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #42210b; font-family: Georgia, serif; line-height: 22.75px;">“The US government should stop treating American Muslims as terrorists-in-waiting,” Prasow said. “The bar on entrapment in US law is so high that it’s almost impossible for a terrorism suspect to prove. Add that to law enforcement preying on the particularly vulnerable, such as those with mental or intellectual disabilities, and the very poor, and you have a recipe for rampant human rights abuses.”</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #42210b; font-family: Georgia, serif; line-height: 22.75px;">Rezwan Ferdaus, for example, pled guilty to attempting to blow up a federal building and was sentenced to 17 years in prison. Although an FBI agent even told Ferdaus’ father that his son “obviously” had mental health problems, the FBI targeted him for a sting operation, sending an informant into Ferdaus’ mosque. Together, the FBI informant and Ferdaus devised a plan to attack the Pentagon and US Capitol, with the FBI providing fake weaponry and funding Ferdaus’ travel. Yet Ferdaus was mentally and physically deteriorating as the fake plot unfolded, suffering depression and seizures so bad his father quit his job to care for him.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #42210b; font-family: Georgia, serif; line-height: 22.75px;">The US has also made overly broad use of material support charges, punishing behavior that did not demonstrate an intent to support terrorism. The courts have accepted prosecutorial tactics that may violate fair trial rights, such as introducing evidence obtained by coercion, classified evidence that cannot be fairly contested, and inflammatory evidence about terrorism in which defendants played no part – and asserting government secrecy claims to limit challenges to surveillance warrants.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #42210b; font-family: Georgia, serif; line-height: 22.75px;">Ahmed Omar Abu Ali is a US citizen who alleged that he was whipped and threatened with amputation while detained without charge in Saudi Arabia – after a roundup following the 2003 bombings of Western compounds in the Saudi capital of Riyadh – until he provided a confession to Saudi interrogators that he says was false. Later, when Ali went to trial in Virginia, the judge rejected Ali’s claims of torture and admitted his confession into evidence. He was convicted of conspiracy, providing material support to terrorists, and conspiracy to assassinate the president. He received a life sentence, which he is serving in solitary confinement at the federal supermax prison in Florence, Colorado.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #42210b; font-family: Georgia, serif; line-height: 22.75px;">The US has in terrorism cases used harsh and at times abusive conditions of confinement, which often appear excessive in relation to the security risk posed. This includes prolonged solitary confinement and severe restrictions on communicating in pretrial detention, possibly impeding defendants’ ability to assist in their own defense and contributing to their decisions to plead guilty. Judges have imposed excessively lengthy sentences, and some prisoners suffer draconian conditions post-conviction, including prolonged solitary confinement and severe restrictions on contact with families or others, sometimes without explanation or recourse.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #42210b; font-family: Georgia, serif; line-height: 22.75px;">Nine months after his arrest on charges of material support for terrorism and while he was refusing a plea deal, Uzair Paracha was moved to a harsh regime of solitary confinement. Special Administrative Measures (SAMs) – national security restrictions on his contact with others – permitted Paracha to speak only to prison guards.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #42210b; font-family: Georgia, serif; line-height: 22.75px;">“You could spend days to weeks without uttering anything significant beyond ‘Please cut my lights,’ ‘Can I get a legal call/toilet paper/a razor,’ etc., or just thanking them for shutting our light,” he wrote to the report’s researchers. After he was convicted, the SAMs were modified to permit him to communicate with other inmates. “I faced the harshest part of the SAMs while I was innocent in the eyes of American law,” he wrote.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #42210b; font-family: Georgia, serif; line-height: 22.75px;">These abuses have had an adverse impact on American Muslim communities. The government’s tactics to seek out terrorism suspects, at times before the target has demonstrated any intention to use violence, has undercut parallel efforts to build relationships with American Muslim community leaders and groups that may be critical sources of information to prevent terrorist attacks.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #42210b; font-family: Georgia, serif; line-height: 22.75px;">In some communities, these practices have deterred interaction with law enforcement. Some Muslim community members said that fears of government surveillance and informant infiltration have meant they must watch what they say, to whom, and how often they attend services.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #42210b; font-family: Georgia, serif; line-height: 22.75px;">“Far from protecting Americans, including American Muslims, from the threat of terrorism, the policies documented in this report have diverted law enforcement from pursuing real threats,” Prasow said. “It is possible to protect people’s rights and also prosecute terrorists, which increases the chances of catching genuine criminals.”</span><br />
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</span> <span style="background-color: white; line-height: 22.75px;"><b><span style="color: blue; font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Source: <i><a href="http://www.hrw.org/news/2014/07/21/us-terrorism-prosecutions-often-illusion">Human Rights Watch</a></i></span></b></span><br />
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<b><span style="color: #990000; font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Terrorist Plots Hatched By The F.B.I.</span></b><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; line-height: 22.0049991607666px;">THE United States has been narrowly saved from lethal terrorist plots in recent years — or so it has seemed. A would-be suicide bomber was intercepted on his way to the Capitol; a scheme to bomb synagogues and shoot Stinger missiles at military aircraft was developed by men in Newburgh, N.Y.; and a fanciful idea to fly explosive-laden model planes into the Pentagon and the Capitol was hatched in Massachusetts.</span><br />
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But all these dramas were facilitated by the F.B.I., whose undercover agents and informers posed as terrorists offering a dummy missile, fake C-4 explosives, a disarmed suicide vest and rudimentary training. Suspects naïvely played their parts until they were arrested.</div>
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When an Oregon college student, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/28/us/28portland.html?pagewanted=all" style="color: #666699;">Mohamed Osman Mohamud</a>, thought of using a car bomb to attack a festive Christmas-tree lighting ceremony in Portland, the F.B.I. provided a van loaded with six 55-gallon drums of “inert material,” harmless blasting caps, a detonator cord and a gallon of diesel fuel to make the van smell flammable. An undercover F.B.I. agent even did the driving, with Mr. Mohamud in the passenger seat. To trigger the bomb the student punched a number into a cellphone and got no boom, only a bust.</div>
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This is legal, but is it legitimate? Without the F.B.I., would the culprits commit violence on their own? Is cultivating potential terrorists the best use of the manpower designed to find the real ones? Judging by their official answers, the F.B.I. and the Justice Department are sure of themselves — too sure, perhaps.</div>
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Carefully orchestrated sting operations usually hold up in court. Defendants invariably claim entrapment and almost always lose, because the law requires that they show no predisposition to commit the crime, even when induced by government agents. To underscore their predisposition, many suspects are “warned about the seriousness of their plots and given opportunities to back out,” said Dean Boyd, a Justice Department spokesman. But not always, recorded conversations show. Sometimes they are coaxed to continue.</div>
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Undercover operations, long practiced by the F.B.I., have become a mainstay of counterterrorism, and they have changed in response to the post-9/11 focus on prevention. “Prior to 9/11 it would be very unusual for the F.B.I. to present a crime opportunity that wasn’t in the scope of the activities that a person was already involved in,” said Mike German of the American Civil Liberties Union, a lawyer and former F.B.I. agent who infiltrated white supremacist groups. An alleged drug dealer would be set up to sell drugs to an undercover agent, an arms trafficker to sell weapons. That still happens routinely, but less so in counterterrorism, and for good reason.</div>
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“There isn’t a business of terrorism in the United States, thank God,” a former federal prosecutor, David Raskin, explained.</div>
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“You’re not going to be able to go to a street corner and find somebody who’s already blown something up,” he said. Therefore, the usual goal is not “to find somebody who’s already engaged in terrorism but find somebody who would jump at the opportunity if a real terrorist showed up in town.”</div>
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And that’s the gray area. Who is susceptible? Anyone who plays along with the agents, apparently. Once the snare is set, law enforcement sees no choice. “Ignoring such threats is not an option,” Mr. Boyd argued, “given the possibility that the suspect could act alone at any time or find someone else willing to help him.”</div>
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Typically, the stings initially target suspects for pure speech — comments to an informer outside a mosque, angry postings on Web sites, e-mails with radicals overseas — then woo them into relationships with informers, who are often convicted felons working in exchange for leniency, or with F.B.I. agents posing as members of Al Qaeda or other groups.</div>
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Some targets have previous involvement in more than idle talk: for example, Waad Ramadan Alwan, an Iraqi in Kentucky, whose fingerprints were found on an unexploded roadside bomb near Bayji, Iraq, and <a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-02-06/chicago-cabbie-khan-pleads-guilty-to-one-count-of-supporting-al-qaeda-ally.html" style="color: #666699;">Raja Khan of Chicago</a>, who had sent funds to an Al Qaeda leader in Pakistan.</div>
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But others seem ambivalent, incompetent and adrift, like hapless wannabes looking for a cause that the informer or undercover agent skillfully helps them find. Take the Stinger missile defendant James Cromitie, a low-level drug dealer with a criminal record that included no violence or hate crime, despite his rants against Jews. “He was searching for answers within his Islamic faith,” said his lawyer, Clinton W. Calhoun III, who has appealed his conviction. “And this informant, I think, twisted that search in a really pretty awful way, sort of misdirected Cromitie in his search and turned him towards violence.”</div>
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THE informer, Shahed Hussain, had been charged with fraud, but avoided prison and deportation by working undercover in another investigation. He was being paid by the F.B.I. to pose as a wealthy Pakistani with ties to Jaish-e-Mohammed, a terrorist group that Mr. Cromitie apparently had never heard of before they met by chance in the parking lot of a mosque.</div>
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“Brother, did you ever try to do anything for the cause of Islam?” Mr. Hussain asked at one point.</div>
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“O.K., brother,” Mr. Cromitie replied warily, “where you going with this, brother?”</div>
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Two days later, the informer told him, “Allah has more work for you to do,” and added, “Revelation is going to come in your dreams that you have to do this thing, O.K.?” About 15 minutes later, Mr. Hussain proposed the idea of using missiles, saying he could get them in a container from China. Mr. Cromitie laughed.</div>
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Reading hundreds of pages of transcripts of the recorded conversations is like looking at the inkblots of a Rorschach test. Patterns of willingness and hesitation overlap and merge. “I don’t want anyone to get hurt,” Mr. Cromitie said, and then explained that he meant women and children. “I don’t care if it’s a whole synagogue of men.” It took 11 months of meandering discussion and a promise of $250,000 to lead him, with three co-conspirators he recruited, to plant fake bombs at two Riverdale synagogues.</div>
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“Only the government could have made a ‘terrorist’ out of Mr. Cromitie, whose buffoonery is positively Shakespearean in its scope,” said Judge Colleen McMahon, sentencing him to 25 years. She branded it a “fantasy terror operation” but called his attempt “beyond despicable” and rejected his claim of entrapment.</div>
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The judge’s statement was unusual, but Mr. Cromitie’s characteristics were not. His incompetence and ambivalence could be found among other aspiring terrorists whose grandiose plans were nurtured by law enforcement. They included men who wanted to attack fuel lines at Kennedy International Airport; destroy the Sears Tower (now Willis Tower) in Chicago; carry out a suicide bombing near Tampa Bay, Fla., and bomb subways in New York and Washington. Of the 22 most frightening plans for attacks since 9/11 on American soil, 14 were developed in sting operations.</div>
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Another New York City subway plot, which recently went to trial, needed no help from government. Nor did a bombing attempt in Times Square, the abortive underwear bombing in a jetliner over Detroit, a planned attack on Fort Dix, N.J., and several smaller efforts. Some threats are real, others less so. In terrorism, it’s not easy to tell the difference.</div>
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<nyt_author_id></nyt_author_id></div>
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><b><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/29/opinion/sunday/terrorist-plots-helped-along-by-the-fbi.html?pagewanted=all">David K. Shipler</a></b> is the author of “Rights at Risk: The Limits of Liberty in Modern America.”</span></div>
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CavalierZeehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15921393075475481352noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17909389.post-18638875520572555632015-02-09T00:00:00.000-05:002015-02-09T00:00:07.445-05:00Terrorism and The Other Religions<div style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #242424; font-family: segui-webfont, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 21px; max-width: 505px; padding: 0px 0px 21px; vertical-align: baseline;">
Contrary to what is alleged by bigots like Bill Maher, Muslims are not more violent than people of other religions. Murder rates in most of the Muslim world are very low compared to the United States.</div>
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As for political violence, people of Christian heritage in the twentieth century polished off tens of millions of people in the two world wars and colonial repression. This massive carnage did not occur because European Christians are worse than or different from other human beings, but because they were the first to industrialize war and pursue a national model. Sometimes it is argued that they did not act in the name of religion but of nationalism. But, really, how naive. Religion and nationalism are closely intertwined. The British monarch is the head of the Church of England, and that still meant something in the first half of the twentieth century, at least. The Swedish church is a national church. Spain? Was it really unconnected to Catholicism? Did the Church and Francisco Franco’s feelings toward it play no role in the Civil War? And what’s sauce for the goose: much Muslim violence is driven by forms of modern nationalism, too.</div>
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I don’t figure that Muslims killed more than a 2 million people or so in political violence in the entire twentieth century, and that mainly in the Iran-Iraq War 1980-1988 and the Soviet and post-Soviet wars in Afghanistan, for which Europeans bear some blame.</div>
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Compare that to the Christian European tally of, oh, lets say 100 million (16 million in WW I, 60 million in WW II– though some of those were attributable to Buddhists in Asia– and millions more in colonial wars.)</div>
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Belgium– yes, the Belgium of strawberry beer and quaint Gravensteen castle– conquered the Congo and is <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/08/30/daily/leopold-book-review.html" style="border-bottom-style: dotted; border-width: 0px 0px 1px; color: #1f3163; cursor: pointer; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">estimated to have killed off half of its inhabitants over time, some 8 million people at least</a>.</div>
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Or, between 1916-1930 Tsarist Russian and then Soviet forces — facing the revolt of Central Asians trying to throw off Christian (and then Marxist), European rule — <a href="http://vlib.iue.it/carrie/texts/carrie_books/paksoy-6/cae12.html" style="border-bottom-style: dotted; border-width: 0px 0px 1px; color: #1f3163; cursor: pointer; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Russian forces killed an estimated 1.5 million people.</a> Two boys brought up in or born in one of those territories (Kyrgyzstan) just killed 4 people and wounded others critically. That is horrible, but no one, whether in Russia or in Europe or in North America has the slightest idea that Central Asians were mass-murdered during WW I and before and after, and looted of much of their wealth. Russia when it brutally conquered and ruled the Caucasus and Central Asia was an Eastern Orthodox, Christian empire (and seems to be reemerging as one!).</div>
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Then, between half a million and a million Algerians died in that country’s war of independence from France, 1954-1962, at a time when the population was only 11 million!</div>
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I could go on and on. Everywhere you dig in European colonialism in Afro-Asia, there are bodies. Lots of bodies.</div>
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Now that I think of it, maybe 100 million people killed by people of European Christian heritage in the twentieth century is an underestimate.</div>
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As for religious terrorism, that too is universal. Admittedly, some groups deploy terrorism as a tactic more at some times than others. Zionists in British Mandate Palestine were active terrorists in the 1940s, from a British point of view, and in the period 1965-1980, the FBI considered the Jewish Defense League among the most active US terrorist groups. (Members at one point plotted to assassinate Rep. Dareell Issa (R-CA) because of his Lebanese heritage.) Now that Jewish nationalsts are largely getting their way, terrorism has declined among them. But it would likely reemerge if they stopped getting their way. In fact, one of the arguments Israeli politicians give for allowing Israeli squatters to keep the Palestinian land in the West Bank that they have usurped is that attempting to move them back out would produce violence. I.e., the settlers not only actually terrorize the Palestinians, but they form a terrorism threat for Israel proper (as the late prime minister Yitzhak Rabin discovered).</div>
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Even more recently, it is difficult for me to see much of a difference between Tamerlan Tsarnaev and <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/jewish-killer-attacked-mosque-last-year-evidence-is-mounting-that-baruch-goldstein-was-known-to-be-dangerous-well-before-the-massacre-writes-sarah-helm-1426229.html" style="border-bottom-style: dotted; border-width: 0px 0px 1px; color: #1f3163; cursor: pointer; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Baruch Goldstein</a>, perpetrator of the Hebron massacre.</div>
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Or there was the <a href="http://www.indianexpress.com/news/after-ajmer-blast-five-accused-met-to-discuss-dud-bomb/1084181/" style="border-bottom-style: dotted; border-width: 0px 0px 1px; color: #1f3163; cursor: pointer; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">cold-blooded bombing of the Ajmer shrine in India by Bhavesh Patel</a> and a gang of Hindu nationalists. Chillingly, they were disturbed when a second bomb they had set did not go off, so that they did not wreak as much havoc as they would have liked. Ajmer is an ecumenical Sufi shrine also visited by Hindus, and these bigots wanted to stop such open-minded sharing of spiritual spaces because they hate Muslims.</div>
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Buddhists have committed a lot of terrorism and other violence as well. Many in the Zen orders in Japan supported militarism in the first half of the twentieth century, for which their leaders later apologized. And, you had Inoue Shiro’s assassination campaign in 1930s Japan. Nowadays militant Buddhist monks in Burma/ Myanmar are urging on an <a href="http://www.hrw.org/news/2013/04/22/burma-end-ethnic-cleansing-rohingya-muslims" style="border-bottom-style: dotted; border-width: 0px 0px 1px; color: #1f3163; cursor: pointer; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">ethnic cleansing campaign against the Rohingya</a>.</div>
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As for Christianity, the <a href="http://www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/ps/2012/03/186734.htm" style="border-bottom-style: dotted; border-width: 0px 0px 1px; color: #1f3163; cursor: pointer; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda initiated hostilities</a>that displaced two million people. Although it is an African cult, it is Christian in origin and the result of Western Christian missionaries preaching in Africa. If Saudi Wahhabi preachers can be in part blamed for the Taliban, why do Christian missionaries skate when we consider the blowback from their pupils?</div>
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Despite the very large number of European Muslims, in <a href="http://www.loonwatch.com/2011/11/updated-europol-data-less-than-1-of-terrorist-attacks-by-muslims/" style="border-bottom-style: dotted; border-width: 0px 0px 1px; color: #1f3163; cursor: pointer; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">2007-2009 less than 1 percent of terrorist acts in that continent were committed by people from that community.</a></div>
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Terrorism is a tactic of extremists within each religion, and within secular religions of Marxism or nationalism. No religion, including Islam, preaches indiscriminate violence against innocents.</div>
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It takes a peculiar sort of blindness to see Christians of European heritage as “nice” and Muslims and inherently violent, given the twentieth century death toll I mentioned above. Human beings are human beings and the species is too young and too interconnected to have differentiated much from group to group. People resort to violence out of ambition or grievance, and the more powerful they are, the more violence they seem to commit. The good news is that the number of wars is declining over time, and World War II, the biggest charnel house in history, hasn’t been repeated.</div>
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<b><span style="color: #990000;">By <i><a href="http://www.juancole.com/2013/04/terrorism-other-religions.html">Juan Cole</a></i></span></b></div>
CavalierZeehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15921393075475481352noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17909389.post-13803314395943267852015-02-08T00:00:00.001-05:002015-02-08T00:00:03.894-05:00Comparing Israel To ISIS<img src="http://i57.tinypic.com/33bifls.png" height="270" width="400" /><br />
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #990000; font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><i>"{ISIS'] quest for an ethnically pure Sunni state mirrors the quest for a Jewish state eventually carved out of Palestine in 1948. Its tactics are much like those of the Jewish guerrillas who used violence, terrorism, foreign fighters, clandestine arms shipments and foreign money, along with horrific ethnic cleansing and the massacre of hundreds of Arab civilians, to create Israel," </i></span></span></blockquote>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: blue; font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><b>[Chris Hedges]</b></span></span>CavalierZeehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15921393075475481352noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17909389.post-80918853686745134182015-02-07T00:00:00.001-05:002015-02-07T00:00:07.968-05:00Sisi Plotted Army Rule Even While Mubarak Was In Power<img alt="Egypt's new leader Abdulfattah el-Sisi" src="http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/02927/AL-SISI_2927241b.jpg" height="249" width="400" /><br />
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Egypt’s new strongman drew up a blueprint for the army to seize power in case of a revolution against ex-president Hosni Mubarak as long ago as 2010, senior advisers have revealed.</div>
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<span style="line-height: 1.48em;">The advisers have told</span><span style="line-height: 1.48em;"> </span><i style="line-height: 1.48em;"><a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/africaandindianocean/egypt/10866943/How-Sisi-plotted-to-save-army-rule-even-while-Hosni-Mubarak-was-in-power.html"><b>The Telegraph</b></a></i><span style="line-height: 1.48em;"> </span><span style="line-height: 1.48em;">he had already been identified by the army’s top brass before the 2011 revolution as its coming man, at a time when splits were growing between the military and the family of the 82-year-old Mr Mubarak.</span></div>
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In late 2010, when the then General Sisi was head of military intelligence, he was asked by his then bosses, who had already decided he should be the next minister of defence under any political settlement, to prepare a study of Egypt's political future.</div>
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He predicted that Mr Mubarak would try to pass on the country’s leadership to his son, Gamal, possibly as early as the following May, and that this could cause popular unrest. The report recommended the army should be prepared to move in to ensure stability - and preserve its own central role in the state.</div>
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<span style="color: #282828;">As it turned out, events moved faster than anyone expected, with the uprising in Tunisia triggering street protests in Cairo in January 2011. Within a week, the army had enacted the plan Mr Sisi recommended, putting troops on the streets and saying it stood with the Egyptian people - making clear that </span><b><span style="color: red;">Mr Mubarak and his sons were expendable, but the army was not</span></b><span style="color: #282828;">.</span></div>
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Mr Mubarak was duly forced to resign on February 11.</div>
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The revelations about the army’s role at the time of his downfall are causing many of the revolutionaries to question whether the Tahrir Square protests brought down anything more than the figurehead of the old regime.</div>
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<i><span style="color: red;">“When the revolution of January 25 exploded, the army already had plans to deploy,”</span></i><span style="color: #282828;"> said Hassan Nafaa, a prominent political scientist who was briefed personally on his report by the then General Sisi.</span></div>
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<span style="color: red;">“I came to the conclusion that the army took advantage of the revolution to get rid of Mr Mubarak’s scheme of succession - maybe also that they had to sacrifice Mubarak, rather than the regime itself.”</span></blockquote>
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<span style="line-height: 1.48em;">Mr Sisi was seen as Mr Morsi’s choice because of his well-documented religious piety. No Brotherhood supporter could have risen so high in the army, but a thesis that Mr Sisi wrote in 2006 while on secondment to the US War College contained strongly Islamist themes, arguing that the ideal state was a pan-Islamic Caliphate, rather than a Western-style democracy.</span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 1.48em;">Hassan Nafaa wondered whether Mr Sisi realised that the revolution had given people, particularly the young, a voice that they would not now give up. Mr Sisi would be mistaken if he thought that he could simply restore an unquestioned old-style regime. </span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 1.48em;"><i><span style="color: red;">“If he doesn’t take this into consideration, he isn’t convinced that Egypt has absolutely changed - that it will never be the same as it was before - he will fail,”</span></i><span style="color: #282828;"> said Mr Nafaa.</span></span></div>
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CavalierZeehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15921393075475481352noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17909389.post-81647363625876616782015-02-06T18:00:00.001-05:002015-02-06T18:00:06.149-05:00Night That Panicked America<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="300" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/ZJ6Ipwx86oU" width="400"></iframe><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px;">The Night That Panicked America is an American made-for-television movie that was originally broadcast on the ABC network on October 31, 1975. The movie dramatizes events surrounding Orson Welles' famous - and infamous - War of the Worlds radio broadcast (based on the novel of the same name by English author H.G. Wells) of October 30, 1938, which had led some Americans to believe that an invasion of Martians was occurring in New Jersey.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px;">The Night That Panicked America tells the story of the 1938 broadcast from the point of view of Welles and his associates as they create the broadcast live, as well as from the points of view of a number of different fictional American families, in a variety of locations and from a variety of social classes, who listened to the broadcast and believed the imaginary Martian invasion was actually occurring, with some people even committing suicide.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px;">The movie starred, among others, Michael Constantine, Meredith Baxter-Birney, Tom Bosley, Eileen Brennan, Vic Morrow, Will Geer, and John Ritter. Paul Shenar played Orson Welles.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px;">Some local stations in various areas of the United States have annually rebroadcast this made-for-TV movie on October 30, the anniversary of the original radio broadcast or on October 31, which is Halloween. The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction praised the film's recreation of events in the radio studio, but was unimpressed by its depiction of the resulting panic, calling it "a routine disaster movie with hackneyed characters reacting in predictable ways."</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px;">The film has never been issued on home video in any format.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px;">The Welles broadcast and the reaction to it had earlier been dramatized in The Night America Trembled, a live presentation that aired on Studio One (September 9, 1957). The cast of this top-rated TV recreation of Welles' radio broadcast included Alexander Scourby, Ed Asner and Warren Oates. James Coburn made his television debut, and John Astin appeared uncredited as a reporter. In one of his earliest acting roles, Warren Beatty appeared in the bit part of a card-playing college student.</span><br />
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<span style="color: #990000;"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 17px;"><b>Starring:</b> </span><span style="font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><span style="line-height: 17px;"><i>Paul Shenar</i></span></span></span>CavalierZeehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15921393075475481352noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17909389.post-77290342840338040692015-02-06T00:00:00.001-05:002015-02-06T00:00:10.039-05:00Muslims Who Sacrificed Themselves To Save WWII Jews<img src="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-apps/imrs.php?src=http://img.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/noorstamp.jpg&w=1484" height="400" width="399" /><br />
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><span style="color: blue;"><b>Noor Inayat Khan</b></span><span style="color: #333333;"> <span style="line-height: 1.8em;">was recruited by Churchill’s elite Special Operations Executive (SOE) to work in Paris as a wireless operator. Her clandestine efforts supported the French Underground as England prepared for the D-Day invasions. Among SOE agents, the wireless operator had the most dangerous job of all, because the occupation authorities were skilled at tracking their signals. The average survival time for a Resistance telegrapher in Paris was about six weeks.</span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Khan’s service continued from June 1943 until her capture and arrest by the Gestapo in October. Her amazing life and eventual murder in Germany’s Dachau prison camp in September 1944 are the focus of <a href="http://www.enemyofthereich.com/" style="border-bottom-color: rgb(212, 212, 212); border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-width: 1px; color: #2e6d9d; text-decoration: none; zoom: 1;">a PBS film</a> I co-produced that is airing this week. In researching her story, I came across quite a number of other Muslims who bravely served the Allied cause — and sometimes made the ultimate sacrifice. History is rich with examples of their daring heroism and split-second decisions that helped defeat the Nazis.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><span style="color: blue;"><b>Behic Erkin, the Turkish ambassador in Paris</b></span><span style="color: #333333;">, provided citizenship papers and passports to thousands of Jews (many with only distant claims to Turkish connections) and arranged their evacuation by rail across Europe. One fateful day, Necdet Kent, the Turkish consul-general in Marseille, stymied the shipment of 80 Turkish Jews to Germany by forcing his way onto a train bearing them to their likely death and arranging for their return, unharmed, to France.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><b><span style="color: blue;">Abdol-Hossein Sardari</span><span style="color: #333333;"> </span><span style="color: blue;">used his position at the Iranian consulate in Paris</span></b><span style="color: #333333;"> to help thousands of Jews evade Nazi capture. Later dubbed the Iranian Schindler, he convinced the occupying Germans that Iranians were Aryans and that the Jews of Iran had been Iranian since the days of Cyrus the Great — and, therefore, should not be persecuted. Then he issued hundreds of Iranian passports to non-Iranian Jews and saved their lives.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><span style="color: blue;"><b>Ahmed Somia, the Tunisian co-director of the French Muslim Hospital outside Paris</b></span><span style="color: #333333;">, organized weapon caches, facilitated Resistance radio transmissions, treated wounded Resistance fighters, and helped save many downed U.S. and British pilots by hiding them in fake T.B. wards where Gestapo and French gendarmes feared to go.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><span style="color: #333333;">Khan was posthumously decorated with the highest British and French civilian and military honors, </span><span style="color: #990000;">but so were other Muslims, including standout heroes among the 2.5 million British Indian troops fighting Axis forces around the globe. In this largest volunteer army in recorded history, Muslims (roughly one-third of the force) played prominent roles.</span><span style="color: #333333;"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><span style="color: #333333;">In a letter to President Roosevelt during the war, Churchill pointed out that </span><span style="color: #990000;">Muslim soldiers were providing “the main army elements on which we [the British] must rely for the immediate fighting.” </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><span style="color: #333333;">In 1944-45, the French Army of Africa, joined to de Gaulle’s Free French Forces, was expanded to 260,000 men, </span><span style="color: #990000;">of whom 50 percent were North African, the great majority being Muslim, while another substantial group were Senegalese Muslim riflemen</span><span style="color: #333333;">. These forces invaded Italy and helped liberate southern France.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><span style="color: #333333;"> </span><span style="line-height: 1.8em;"><span style="color: #990000;">Eastern Europe offered more examples: </span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><span style="color: #333333; line-height: 1.8em;">In the Balkans, for instance, only 200 Jews lived in </span><span style="line-height: 1.8em;"><span style="color: blue;">Albania</span></span><span style="color: #333333; line-height: 1.8em;"> before WWII. Yet by war’s end, almost 2,000 Jews lived in the country, because so many had fled Greece, Austria and other locations in Europe to take shelter there among the predominantly Muslim population,</span><span style="color: #333333; line-height: 1.8em;"> </span><a href="http://unitedwithisrael.org/albanian-muslims-rescued-jewish-lives-from-nazis/" style="border-bottom-color: rgb(212, 212, 212); border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-width: 1px; color: #2e6d9d; line-height: 1.8em; text-decoration: none; zoom: 1;">which hid and protected them</a><span style="color: #333333; line-height: 1.8em;">.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">As Cole wrote elsewhere, <a href="http://www.juancole.com/2014/06/remembering-muslim-fought.html" style="border-bottom-color: rgb(212, 212, 212); border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-width: 1px; color: #2e6d9d; text-decoration: none; zoom: 1;">commemorating</a> the 70th anniversary of D-Day: </span></div>
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<span style="color: #990000; font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">“While a few Muslims did support the Axis, out of resentment of Western colonialism and hopes that the rise of an alternative power center would aid their quest for independence, they were tiny in their numbers compared to the Muslims who not just supported the Allies… but actively fought on their behalf.”</span></blockquote>
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><b><span style="line-height: 1.8em;">By </span><a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2014/09/08/meet-the-muslims-who-sacrificed-themselves-to-save-jews-and-fight-nazis-in-world-war-ii/" style="line-height: 1.8em;">Michael Wolfe</a></b></span></div>
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<span style="color: #990000;"><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif; line-height: 32.4000015258789px;"><b><u>Arab Rescue Efforts During The Holocaust</u></b></span></span></div>
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<span class="mw-headline" id="Si_Ali_Sakkat"><span style="color: blue; font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif; font-size: small;">Si Ali Sakkat</span></span></h3>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">During his career Si Ali Sakkat held positions of a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minister_(government)" style="background: none; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none;" title="Minister (government)">government minister</a> and mayor of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunis" style="background: none; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none;" title="Tunis">Tunis</a>. By 1940 Si Ali Sakkat was enjoying retirement on his farm at the base of Jebel Zaghouan. There was a <a class="mw-redirect" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forced_labor_camp" style="background: none; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none;" title="Forced labor camp">forced labor camp</a> for the Jews not far away from Sakkat's farm. Jews from the camp were put to work repairing an airfield, which was regularly bombed by Allies. Arabs saw how <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germans" style="background: none; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none;" title="Germans">Germans</a> who ran the camp beat Jews on a regular basis. One night, during an especially heavy battle, sixty Jewish laborers were able to escape. The first structure they encountered was the wall of Sakkat's farm. They knocked on the gate, and were allowed shelter and food. They were also allowed to stay until the liberation of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunisia" style="background: none; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none;" title="Tunisia">Tunisia</a> by Allied forces.</span></div>
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<span class="mw-headline" id="Khaled_Abdul-Wahab"><span style="color: blue; font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif; font-size: small;">Khaled Abdul-Wahab</span></span></h3>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Main article: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khaled_Abdul-Wahab" style="background: none; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none;" title="Khaled Abdul-Wahab">Khaled Abdul-Wahab</a></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Abdul-Wahab was a son of a well-known Tunisian historian. He was 32 years old when the Germans occupied Tunisia. He was an <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlocutor_(politics)" style="background: none; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none;" title="Interlocutor (politics)">interlocutor</a> between the Nazis and the population of the coastal town of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahdia" style="background: none; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none;" title="Mahdia">Mahdia</a>. When he overheard German officers planning to rape a local Jewish woman, Odette Boukhris, he hid the woman and her family, along with about two dozen more Jewish families, at his farm outside of town. The families stayed there for four months, until the occupation ended. Abdul-Wahab is sometimes called the Arab <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oskar_Schindler" style="background: none; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none;" title="Oskar Schindler">Oskar Schindler</a>. In 2009 two trees were dedicated to honor his bravery. One tree was planted in Adas Israel Garden of the Righteous in Washington, D.C., the other was planted in the Garden of the Righteous Worldwide. His daughter Faiza attended the ceremony in Milan.</span></div>
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<span class="mw-headline" id="Shaykh_Taieb_el-Okbi"><span style="color: blue; font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif; font-size: small;">Shaykh Taieb el-Okbi</span></span></h3>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Taieb el-Okbi was a member of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algeria" style="background: none; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none;" title="Algeria">Algerian</a> Islah (Reform) Party, and a friend of the prominent Algerian reformist <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abdelhamid_Ben_Badis" style="background: none; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none;" title="Abdelhamid Ben Badis">Abdelhamid Ben Badis</a>, who was tolerant to different religions and cultures. Ben Badis founded and directed the Algerian League of Muslims and Jews. He died before <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vichy" style="background: none; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none;" title="Vichy">Vichy</a> forces occupied Algeria, but Taieb el-Okbi took his place. Taieb el-Okbi discovered that the leaders of the pro-fascist group the Légion Français des Combattants were planning a Jewish <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pogrom" style="background: none; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none;" title="Pogrom">pogrom</a>. He did everything he could to prevent it and ordered Muslims not to attack Jews. His actions were compared to French archbishops <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jules-G%C3%A9raud_Sali%C3%A8ge" style="background: none; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none;" title="Jules-Géraud Saliège">Jules-Géraud Saliège</a> and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre-Marie_Gerlier" style="background: none; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none;" title="Pierre-Marie Gerlier">Pierre-Marie Gerlier</a>, both of whom saved some Jews in <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/France" style="background: none; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none;" title="France">France</a>.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #990000;"><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif; line-height: 22.3999996185303px;"><b><u>Muslim Rescue Efforts In Europe</u></b></span></span></div>
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<span class="mw-headline" id="Refik_Veseli"><span style="color: blue; font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif; font-size: small;">Refik Veseli</span></span></h3>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Most of the 2,000 Jews of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albania" style="background: none; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none;" title="Albania">Albania</a> were sheltered by the mostly Muslim population. Refik Veseli, a 17 year old Muslim boy, took in the family of Mosa and Gabriela Mandil, including their five year old son Gavra and his sister Irena, then refugees from <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belgrade" style="background: none; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none;" title="Belgrade">Belgrade</a> but originally from <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novi_Sad" style="background: none; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none;" title="Novi Sad">Novi Sad</a>, for whom he had been working as an apprentice in their <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tirana" style="background: none; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none;" title="Tirana">Tirana</a> photographic shop. When the Germans took over from the Italians, he took them, and another Jewish family by night on long journey to his family village at Kruja, where they were protected by his parents for the war's duration, some 9 months later, even against <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enver_Hoxha" style="background: none; color: #0b0080; text-decoration: none;" title="Enver Hoxha">Enver Hoxha</a>'s partisans. His example inspired his whole village to risk their lives in order to protect Jews. On receiving Gavra Mandil's request for them to be recognized as righteous, the authorities of Yad Vashem inscribed both Refka and Drita Veseli in 1988 among the Righteous. The story became better know after Albania's surviving Jewish community was allowed to perform aliyah in the 1990s, and many survivors told how their Albanian hosts vied for the privilege of offering sanctuary, on the grounds that it was an Islamic ethical obligation. Since that date, a further 50 Albanians have been registered among the ranks of the Righteous.</span></div>
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<b><span style="color: #990000; font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Source: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_rescue_efforts_during_the_Holocaust"><i>Wikipedia</i></a></span></b></div>
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<span style="color: #990000; font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 25px;"><b><u>“Les Hommes Libres” (“Free Men”)</u></b></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">An unlikely savior of Jews during the Nazi occupation of France: the rector of a Paris mosque.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Muslims, it seems, rescued Jews from the Nazis.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">“Les Hommes Libres” (“Free Men”) is a tale of courage not found in French textbooks. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">According to the story, Si Kaddour Benghabrit, the founder and rector of the Grand Mosque of Paris, provided refuge and certificates of Muslim identity to a small number of Jews to allow them to evade arrest and deportation.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">In the early 1940s France was home to a large population of North Africans, including thousands of Sephardic Jews. The Jews spoke Arabic and shared many of the same traditions and everyday habits as the Arabs. Neither Muslims nor Jews ate pork. Both Muslim and Jewish men were circumcised. Muslim and Jewish names were often similar.</span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 1.467em;"><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">The most graphic account was given by Albert Assouline, a North African Jew who escaped from a German prison camp. He claimed that: </span></span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 1.467em;"><span style="color: blue; font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">more than 1,700 resistance fighters — including Jews but also a lesser number of Muslims and Christians — found refuge in the mosque’s underground caverns, and that the rector provided many Jews with certificates of Muslim identity.</span></span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">In his 2006 book, <b><span style="color: #990000;">“Among the Righteous,”</span></b> Robert Satloff, director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, uncovered stories of Arabs who saved Jews during the Holocaust, and included a chapter on the Grand Mosque. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Dalil Boubakeur, the current rector, confirmed to him that: </span></div>
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">some Jews — up to 100 perhaps — were given Muslim identity papers by the mosque, without specifying a number. Mr. Boubakeur said individual Muslims brought Jews they knew to the mosque for help.</span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Mr. Boubakeur showed Mr. Satloff a copy of a typewritten 1940 Foreign Ministry document from the French Archives. It stated that:</span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 1.467em;"><span style="color: blue; font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">the occupation authorities suspected mosque personnel of delivering false Muslim identity papers to Jews.<i> “The imam was summoned, in a threatening manner, to put an end to all such practices,”</i> the document said.</span></span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Mr. Satloff said in a telephone interview: “One has to separate the myth from the fact. The number of Jews protected by the mosque was probably in the dozens, not the hundreds. But it is a story that carries a powerful political message and deserves to be told.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">A 1991 television documentary <b><span style="color: #990000;">“Une Résistance Oubliée: La Mosquée de Paris” (“A Forgotten Resistance: The Mosque of Paris”)</span></b> by Derri Berkani , and a children’s book <b><span style="color: #990000;">“The Grand Mosque of Paris: A Story of How Muslims Saved Jews During the Holocaust,”</span></b> published in 2007, also explore the events.</span></div>
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<b style="line-height: 1.467em;"><span style="color: blue; font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Source: <i><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/04/movies/how-a-paris-mosque-sheltered-jews-in-the-holocaust.html?pagewanted=all">The New York Times</a></i></span></b></div>
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<b style="color: #990000; line-height: 22.3999996185303px;"><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><u>Albanian Muslims Rescued Jewish Lives From Nazis</u></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">In 1934, American Ambassador to Albania Herman Bernstein proclaimed, “There is no trace of any discrimination against Jews in Albania, because Albania happens to be one of the rare lands in Europe today where religious prejudice and hate do not exist, even though Albanians are divided into three faiths.” <span style="font-weight: 600;">Indeed, as Jews across Europe were being massacred en masse as part of the Nazi final solution, one country in Europe didn’t have a negative Jewish growth rate</span> and that country, Albania, had a Muslim majority.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Prior to WWII, only 200 Jews lived in Albania, yet <span style="font-weight: 600;">by the end of the war, about 2,000 Jews lived within the country because so many Jews fled Greece, Austria, and other locations in Europe to take shelter there.</span> Other Jews, such as Albert Einstein, used Albania in order to pass on to other countries. Immigration officials in Albania permitted Jews to enter even if they didn’t have the proper paperwork and when the Nazis took over, the local inhabitants protected the Jews who lived within their country, providing them with paperwork stating that the Jews were Albanian Muslims. As a result, the Jews who fled to Albania were spared the horrors that the rest of the Jews of Europe endured.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Indeed, the Albanian Muslims have an honor code known as besa, meaning to keep the promise, which mandates hospitality and protection of guests as if they are members of ones own family. Because of this Albanian honor code, many of the Albanians who saved Jewish lives during the Holocaust often don’t feel that what they did was particularly extraordinary, for they assert that any one in their culture would do the same. Yet, the reality is that other peoples in Europe did not live by the besa code, thus preventing what happened in Albania from happening elsewhere. <span style="font-weight: 600;">The Albanian Muslims truly live by the Quranic principle, which is also cited in the Talmud, “If one saved a life, it would be as if he saved all humanity.”</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Yet, Albanian Muslims living within Albania were not the only Albanians to help save Jewish lives. <span style="font-weight: 600;">Dervis and Servet Korkut, who were Albanian Muslims that hid the Sarajevo Hagaddah from the Nazis, also saved the life of Mira Papos.</span> When Mira’s parents were murdered by the Nazis, Mira escaped to the forests and joined the partisans. After the partisans suffered some horrendous defeats, they ordered Mira and the other young children to return to Sarajevo, which Mira viewed to be a death sentence. However, she also understood that remaining in the forests without assistance would also lead to death.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">So, when she returned to Sarajevo, she met someone who worked with her father and begged him for help. He brought her to Dervis Korkut, who immediately took her into his home. Even though Nazis lived nearby, no one suspected them because they dressed Mira in traditional Muslim clothes, gave her a Muslim name, and told people that she was hired to take care of their baby. She was instructed not to speak to people outside the family, so she wouldn’t be detected as non-Albanian. Thanks to them, she survived the war. <span style="font-weight: 600;">The Korkut family lived by the besa code and thus took it upon themselves to save Mira, in addition to one of the oldest Hagaddah prayer books in Europe. </span>This demonstrates the marvelous ethics demonstrated by the Albanian people.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif; font-weight: 600;">To watch a documentary on Albanians saving Jews during the Holocaust, see below!</span></div>
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<b><span style="color: blue; font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Source: <i><a href="http://unitedwithisrael.org/albanian-muslims-rescued-jewish-lives-from-nazis/">United With Israel</a></i></span></b></div>
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<b style="line-height: 23.4720001220703px;"><span style="color: #990000; font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><u>The "Righteous Muslim" Exhibition</u></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 28px;">The Righteous Muslim Exhibition, launched at the Board of Deputies of British Jews in Bloomsbury, will feature photographs of 70 Muslims who hid Jews from the Nazis, alongside their stories and detailing their acts of heroism.</span><br style="line-height: 28px;" /><br style="line-height: 28px;" /><span style="line-height: 28px;">These 70 Muslims were recently </span><a href="http://www.yadvashem.org/yv/en/righteous/stories/muslim_rescuers.asp" style="border: 0px; color: blue; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 28px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">added to Yad Vashem's list</a><span style="line-height: 28px;"> of "righteous among the nations" detailing those who risked their lives to protect Jews.</span></span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 28px;"><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Among those listed in the Righteous Among the Nations are Muslims from Albania, Bosnia and Turkey.</span></span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 28px;"><b><span style="color: blue; font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Source: <i><a href="http://www.jpost.com/Jewish-World/Jewish-Features/Exhibit-honors-Muslims-who-saved-Jews-from-Holocaust-310447">The Jerusalem Post</a></i></span></b></span></div>
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CavalierZeehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15921393075475481352noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17909389.post-42339612671127173452015-02-05T00:00:00.001-05:002015-02-05T00:00:05.394-05:00What Is Behind Europe's Rising Islamophobia?<img src="http://www.occupy.com/sites/default/files/394923.jpg" height="292" width="400" /><br />
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Recent arson attacks on mosques in Germany and Sweden, along with the emergence of a movement called the "Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the Occident," prompted German Chancellor Angela Merkel to deliver a "never again" New Year's message to her compatriots in anticipation of Monday's demonstrations in Dresden. Warning against supporting PEGIDA, she <a href="http://www.worldbulletin.net/world/152070/muslims-to-protest-anti-islam-group-in-germany" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #03497e; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_hplink">said</a> "their hearts are cold, often full of prejudice and even hate."</div>
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What is behind this most recent aggressive burst of anti-Islamic sentiment? How should we view it?</div>
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The landmass of the Occident spans the territory of many countries; its meaning becomes apparent only in juxtaposition to its counterpart, the Orient. It has more frequently perished in countless texts, speeches and films than all actually existing empires throughout human history combined. In short: The Occident is a fiction -- and that quality has always made it a powerful canvas for the projection of human fears and desires.</div>
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The Occident lies towards the Western sunset. Its lands are those of nightfall: heavy, full of melancholy, straining for the final rays of daylight, and hesitantly expecting the pale light of the rising moon. During the Middle Ages, stone-carved creatures of the imagination flanked the walls of Europe's cathedrals and conjured up images of nightly evils: When night falls, darkness envelops the souls of men and threatens them with extinction. The hour of sunset signals the advent of corporeal and spiritual danger. It takes tremendous power to hold demons at bay and to weather the temptations of the night. Two paradigms thus help to map the terrain of the Occident: the fear of darkness, and the belief in the divine light.</div>
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Christian churches are built with East-facing chancel windows; on Easter Sunday, the first daylight enters through the colored glass and bathes the barren nave in celebratory light. The organ intones, and the church bells ring out: He Has Risen. Indeed, the liturgy of Easter Sunday presents us with the most condensed enactment of the Occidental yearning for light, for another day, and for triumph over the demons of darkness. <em style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Ex oriente lux</em> -- the sun rises in the East. That's why Europeans have always looked longingly beyond their horizon: Towards the East, towards Jerusalem.</div>
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The Occident became conscious of itself as a unified entity when Jerusalem fell to Islamic conquest. The longing for Jerusalem was thus also a longing for order and unity at home: One emperor, one pope, one center and one horizon that provided order to the world. At that time, the Occident was still being formed from the rubble of the Roman Empire, and forged during the tumultuous centuries of the migration of the peoples. "Alemannic" -- which is the etymological ancestor of the term "German" in romance languages -- simply means "all men." The longing for Jerusalem unified the Occident's diverse cultures for the first time.</div>
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Once again, we can look towards medieval cathedrals for architectural indicators of shared cultural sentiments: The domes of Europe's great cathedrals were shaped to resemble the imagined cityscape of worldly Jerusalem; their spires pointed towards heavenly Jerusalem. Christianity became the unifying identity of the Occident.</div>
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<span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><b><span style="color: #990000; font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">THE OCCIDENT NEEDS THE ORIENT</span></b></span></div>
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But unity remained fragile. New dangers lurked nearby, especially at the borders. From the South, Muslim armies threatened the continent. From the North, Normans invaded. Later came the Huns, then the Turks (whose conquest was only stopped at the gates of Vienna). Southern Spain remained in Muslim hands for centuries. Rome, the <em style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">caput mundi</em>, continued to be an attractive target for invaders from the Orient. The Occidental fears became manifest -- sometimes obsessively so -- in fears of Islam. For centuries, the religious competitor to the East robbed European emperors and popes of their sleep. Over time, Islamophobia became part of the collective consciousness of the Occident.</div>
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What is feared today is not the loss of any particular country to foreign conquest, but the loss of an imagined entity that binds us together. The Occident is a central piece of our mental maps and our cultural inventory. That's one reason why seemingly everyone from "the Old World" has at least an instinctual opinion about it. People harbor within themselves a sense of shared meaning -- the semantic sediments of the Occident.</blockquote>
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When those opinions are voiced, they often fall short by the standards of reason and academic science. They are instead informed, in a very visceral sense, by fears of decline and by memories of cultural blossoming. Those fears culminate in the belief that our cathedrals will eventually turn into mosques, that their bells will fall silent and will be replaced by the cries of the muezzin. But fears lead to hyperbole. Let us remember that foreign conquests have failed for many centuries (and not for lack of trying!), and thus proclaim with conviction that danger can be averted again.</blockquote>
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<b>Fear of decline, and the celebration of an imagined unity:</b> Those are the parameters that govern contemporary discourses about the Occident -- not as arguments but as discursive foundations. </blockquote>
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Indeed, the Occident is as much a fiction as the Orient. Both terms reflect the wishes, dreams and aspirations of our forefathers. They were shaped in earlier epochs over the course of generations and centuries.</div>
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The history of the Occident is not unlike the history of a cathedral: Every generation has tinkered with the structure and amended it. The foundations were set down during the time of Charlemagne, the aisles were added during Romanticism, a new spire was built during the Gothic period, ornate chapels appeared during the Baroque era. When fire struck, it was rebuilt. It had to be: <b>How could a city exist without its central reference point?</b></div>
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<b>The time of dusk:</b> Fever, madness, gloriole, hyperbole. Death appears imminent until the rise of dawn. In old hymns, sleep is recast as the antechamber of death. No wonder, then, that religious pathologies and political and religious ideologies have repeatedly swept across the continent. Their danger remains acute. But to the arsonists I say: The Occident has never been able to sustain itself. It always required the light of the Orient as inspiration and external reference point.</div>
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<span style="color: blue;"><b><i>"The Occident has never been able to sustain itself. It always required the light of the Orient as inspiration and external reference point."</i></b></span></blockquote>
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During the Middle Ages, a veritable cult developed around the "three wise men" who came from the Orient and whose earthly remains are said to be contained in relics at the cathedral in Cologne. <em style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Ex oriente lux</em> -- or, as the gospel of Matthew puts it: "We have His star when it rose, and have come to worship Him." In old paintings, the three wise men resemble representatives from late antiquity's three known continents: One European, one African, one Asian.</div>
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Thinkers like Erasmus of Rotterdam turned Christian traditions into undogmatic humanism, bent on eradicating the denominational borders within Christianity. Their effort proved to be a quick flicker: The fanaticism of the Reformation and fights over the correct interpretation of Christian dogma put an end to it. The Occident descended into centuries of spiritual and intellectual darkness. At the end of the 20th century, and after two World Wars, it is in the process of reinventing itself.</blockquote>
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As Christianity teaches us, the dead have a way of rising again. Today's discussions remind us that the Occident is not finished yet. </div>
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But we must not fool ourselves: The legacy of the term is a double-edged sword that can mean nothing and everything at the same time. It was born of emotion and shaped by the highs and lows of history. It is useless as an analytical reference point and cannot supply answers to concrete political questions.</blockquote>
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Both the community of Christendom and the unity of the Occident were political ideas. The cost of their realization was paid in blood. But what is the Occident today? It is the community of peoples who have sustained the term in their collective consciousness and have continually amended its meaning.</blockquote>
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The Occident extends beyond Christendom and beyond Europe. The term only works if avoids self-enclosure and remains perpetually open towards the outside -- towards the Orient, Africa and Asia -- as indeed it used to be. Its contemporary potential lies in continuing the work of Erasmus of Rotterdam: The formulation of global, humanistic and inclusive ethics.</div>
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;"><i><a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alexander-gorlach/europe-rising-islamophobia_b_6414264.html"><b>Alexander Görlach</b></a></i></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: blue; font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;"><b>Founder and publisher of The European</b></span></span></div>
CavalierZeehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15921393075475481352noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17909389.post-2684663628191270972015-02-04T00:00:00.000-05:002015-02-04T00:00:08.552-05:00The Myth and The American Jewish Community<div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 12px; line-height: 16.7999992370605px;">
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Until the 1930s, a sizeable portion of the U.S. Jewish community was skeptical, at best, about the Zionist project. America was their promised land. Knowledge of the Holocaust gave a great boost to support for a Jewish state. But once that state was established in 1948, the passion for Israel subsided here. In the 1950s, when sociologists asked Jews what made them different from gentiles, the answers they got rarely mentioned any special affinity for the state or land of Israel. In fact, most people said that there was no special value or belief or behavior that made them different from their gentile neighbors. The only thing that made them different was that their friends were Jews. Being Jewish was mainly a social thing. Jews hung out with other Jews.</div>
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These Jews did not complain a whole lot about anti-semitism either. Many of them had experienced significant anti-semitism in the pre-World War II days. They knew it was still around. But they knew that things were far better than they had been, and they looked forward to even more social acceptance in the future. So it made sense to overlook the vestiges of anti-semitism, to assume it would keep on diminishing until it gradually disappeared.</div>
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When did Jews begin to tell the myth of Israel that prevails today? This is a rare situation where a historian of religions can point to a very precise time, in fact a precise week, when a new story became the official story of a community. It was the second week of June, 1967, when Israel and its Arab neighbors fought a six-day war. Jews flocked to their synagogues, not only to pray for Israel, but to inaugurate (though they did not know it) a new form of Judaism based on their new official story. America’s most eminent historian of Judaism, Rabbi Jacob Neusner, has called this new form “the Judaism of Holocaust and Redemption.” The “Holocaust” part represent the belief that anti-semitism is an eternal threat to Jews everyone. The “Redemption” part represents the twin beliefs that Jews have a special relationship with the land of Israel and that only in Israel can they hope to be safe, redeemed from that eternal threat.</div>
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These beliefs, and the myth built upon them, were certainly not totally new. All of the elements had been around for a long time. Yet those elements had not been fused so tightly into a single integrated myth. Nor had they been so central in American Jewish life before the six-day war. Every history of American Jewish life describes this dramatic change. So far, there is no commonly accepted theory to explain why it happened. So I want to offer my own theory.</div>
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Several factors came together in June, 1967. One was a kind of emptiness in American Jewish life, a sense that no one quite knew what special values Jews were supposed to hold just because they were Jews. For most of them it was just a matter of socializing with other Jews. Perhaps there was an unconscious sense that Judaism ought to mean something more than that.</div>
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Of course, 1967 was a time when many people in the U.S. were beginning to explore new possibilities for meaning and identity. Issues of individual and group identity became more urgent than before. Our whole society was entering a brief era when everything seemed open to question. Remember, June, 1967, wasn’t only the time of the six-day war. It was also the beginning of San Francisco’s summer of love. For many Americans, it was a time of cultural confusion, a time when U.S. society seemed to be falling apart. In such a time, it is quite common that individuals and groups will seize upon one particular story that gives them a highly structured sense of meaning. If the story seems to answer their questions and make sense out of confusing times, they will cling to it tightly, no matter what happens.</div>
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For Jews, the question of ethnic identity was especially acute. African-Americans were asserting their right to equality more powerfully than ever before. Some Jews had expressed their Jewish identity by working with the civil rights movement. By 1967, many of these Jews were disturbed, or even scared, by the rise of the black power movement. They were no longer sure that the cause of racial justice had any place for white people. Yet they could see that it was becoming acceptable in liberal circles to assert one’s ethnic identity. African-Americans, Latinos, Asians, and native Americans were all standing up as oppressed people demanding their rights.</div>
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This placed the Jews in a real quandary. As white people, they could easily be classed with the oppressors. When tensions broke out in inner city ghettos, individual Jews were sometimes identified as oppressors. This was an uncomfortable feeling, of course, especially for the many Jews who genuinely sympathized with the cause of people of color.</div>
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At the same time, the growing antiwar movement was raising another very disturbing question: Perhaps the United States itself was not a force for freedom, but rather a force for oppression, in Vietnam. If the U.S. was the oppressor in Vietnam, this would make all Jews, along with all other Americans, oppressors as well. By 1967, a new story was emerging to shape the experience of all Americans as they watched the events of the day unfold. This story said that every person was either with the oppressors or the oppressed. In Camus’ terms, everyone was either an executioner or a victim. It was the most fundamental moral choice, and no one could avoid making it. So how could Jews be sure that, when oppression arose, they were on the right side? How could they be sure they were victims and not executioners?</div>
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One possibility was to depict themselves as perpetual victims of anti-semitism. However, American Jews did not want to believe that they would always be threatened by anti-semitism simply because they lived in the diaspora. They hoped that anti-semitism was gradually fading away, allowing them to live fully and freely as Americans. How could they feel fully accepted, yet still count themselves among the oppressed?</div>
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The events of June, 1967, solved that problem. For Jews around the world, and here in the U.S., there was no doubt that the Arabs were the aggressors and Israel the victim. By picturing Israel as a small, weak, victimized nation, and then identifying themselves with Israel, Jews could feel certain that they were among the oppressed. They could see the U.S. as a place where Jews were increasingly accepted, but still view themselves as victims of persecution. So American Jews “discovered” a special, almost mystical tie between every Jew and the holy land. If they were tied to Israel, and Israel was being persecuted, they were being persecuted. So they could not be among the persecutors. There could be no doubt about which side of the moral divide they were on. That question was laid to rest.</div>
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<span style="color: #333333;">Six days later, however, a new problem had emerged. The Israeli army had proven itself superior in every way to the Egyptians, Jordanians, and Syrians combined. Israel now possessed not only Jerusalem, but all of the West Bank and Gaza. In the Jewish community, it seemed obvious that this was something to celebrate. Few people consciously addressed the problem, but it was obvious if you stopped to think about it. </span><b><span style="color: red;">How could such a triumphant military power call itself a small, weak victim? If Israel was so powerful, could Jews still be sure they were on the side of the oppressed?</span></b></div>
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This problem was especially acute for American Jews, who could not express their tie with Israel in political terms. Politically, they wanted to be 100% American. They had to express their Jewishness as a religious or cultural identity. So they had to make support for the political state of Israel a religious or cultural value. For virtually all of them, that meant making support for Israel a moral and ethical value. They could not celebrate Jewish power and military victory as good in and of itself. They had to give it an ethical meaning.</div>
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Power could have an ethical meaning as long as it was used only to fight oppression. Jews could give Israel’s power a moral value as long as they viewed Israel as a victim of aggression. They could celebrate Israel’s military victory as long as they believed it a justified and necessary act of self-defense. By identifying with Israel, they could participate in that act of power and feel perfectly moral at the same time.</div>
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Identifying with Israel meant making Zionism the center of Jewish life. Few American Jews became Zionists in the full sense, since that would require actually moving to Israel. For most, Zionism meant simply supporting both the concept and the reality of the Jewish state. It meant equating the fate of Israel with the fate of every Jew, everywhere.</div>
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It is no coincidence that, just when American Jews “discovered” their unbreakable bond with Israel, they also “discovered” the unique importance of the Nazi Holocaust in every Jew’s life. Until 1967, Jews did not talk a great deal about the Holocaust. But the six-day war catapulted the memory of the Holocaust into the center of Jewish life. The Holocaust was offered as crucial proof that anti-semitism is indeed eternal, that Jews are indeed perpetually threatened by irrational hatred and oppression. This, in turn, became the supposed proof that all Arabs were motivated by the same hatred that had moved the Nazis to their murderous project.</div>
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Once this premise was accepted, there could be no doubt that Israel’s military victory was a necessary act of self-defense, and therefore absolutely morally justified. This is why the Holocaust and Israel were linked so closely in what Neusner calls “the Judaism of Holocaust and Redemption.” The memory of the Holocaust provided the crucial link between the perception of Jews as oppressed victims and the sense of pride in Israel’s achievements and its power.</div>
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Most Jews still do not have to live differently from their gentile neighbors, because too much difference might make them potential targets of stigma, discrimination, and oppression. Yet in order to sustain their new-found form of Judaism, Jews must exaggerate or overestimate their own experience of anti-semitism. Many seem eager to trade stories of anti-semitism and hear their leaders do the same, as if they enjoy hearing bad news. That is how they convince themselves that Israel’s motives are always pure and innocent, which means that Jewish power is always morally justified—even when the facts on the ground (or, more precisely, viewed on television) seem to raise troubling questions about the morality of Israeli policies.</div>
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Within the terms of the dominant doctrine, every threat must be countered. Fighting back is a way to prove both that Jews are being victimized and that Jews have power. Since Israel has the most powerful military in the Middle East, when it responds to threat it usually uses major force. Naturally, this evokes angry, sometimes violent, responses. Jews take those responses as proof of threat and reason for even more forceful response. Military conflict serves as a kind of ritual performance, a way to act out their beliefs and confirm their basic premise that Jews, the perpetual victims, always use their power in a morally justified cause.</div>
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Tragically, this performance is a ritual sacrifice in which far too many real people die. Most of them are Arabs. Some are Jews. This hardly makes Israel more secure. On the contrary, it perpetuates the physical facts of insecurity. Here in the U.S., as well as in Israel, it also perpetuates and exacerbates the psychological facts of fear, anxiety, and defensiveness in Jewish life. It demands a sense of perpetual victimhood. It creates a culture of victimization. This is a high price to pay.</div>
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Yet many Jews have been, and still are, willing to pay that price. Perhaps this tells us that human beings find security not in physical safety, nor in freedom from fear, but in beliefs that offer a firmly fixed, immutable, unquestioned sense of meaning and identity. As long as “the Judaism of Holocaust and Redemption” gives them meaning and identity, Jews will cling to it and repeat its ritual performances, regardless of the price.</div>
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Since the early years of the 21<sup>st</sup> century, a steadily growing number of Jews have been questioning—and some overtly rejecting—the myth of Israel’s insecurity with all that it entails. Whether this trend will continue, and if so how rapidly it will accelerate, is the great question for the American Jewish community.</div>
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<i><b><span style="color: blue; font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><a href="https://chernus.wordpress.com/the-myth-of-israels-insecurity/the-myth-and-the-american-jewish-community/">Ira Chernus</a></span></b></i></div>
CavalierZeehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15921393075475481352noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17909389.post-10812268687825018322015-02-03T00:00:00.000-05:002015-02-03T00:00:09.581-05:00Three Myths Of Israel's Insecurity<img src="http://blackathlete.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/zionism.jpg" height="400" width="295" /><br />
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<b><span style="color: #990000;">Why They Must Be Debunked </span></b><br />
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Here are the Three Sacred Commandments for Americans who shape the public conversation on Israel:</div>
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1. For politicians, especially at the federal level: As soon as you say the word “Israel,” you must also say the word “security” and promise that the United States will always, always, always be committed to Israel’s security. If you occasionally label an action by the Israeli government “unhelpful,” you must immediately reaffirm the eternal U.S. commitment to Israel’s security.</div>
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2. For TV talking heads and op-ed pundits: If you criticize any policies or actions of the Israeli government, you must immediately add that Israel does, of course, have very real and serious security needs that have to be addressed.</div>
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3. For journalists covering the Israel-Palestine conflict for major American news outlets: You must live in Jewish Jerusalem or in Tel Aviv and take only occasional day trips into the Occupied Territories. So your reporting must inevitably be slanted toward the perspective of the Jews you live among. And you must indicate in every report that Jewish Israeli life is dominated by anxiety about security.</div>
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U.S. opinion-shapers have obeyed the Three Commandments scrupulously for decades. As a result, they’ve created an indelible image of Israel as a deeply insecure nation. That image is a major, if often overlooked, factor that has shaped and continues to shape Washington’s policies in the Middle East and especially the longstanding American tilt toward Israel.</div>
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It’s often said that the number one factor in that tilt is the power of the right-wing “pro-Israel” (more accurately, “pro-Israeli-government”) lobby. That lobby certainly is a <a href="http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n06/john-mearsheimer/the-israel-lobby" style="color: #9b3921; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">skillful, well-oiled machine</a>. It uses every trick in the PR book to promote the myth of Israel as a brave little nation constantly forced to fight for its life against enemies all around who are eager to destroy it, a Jewish David withstanding the Arab Goliath. The lobby justifies everything Israel does to the Palestinians -- military occupation, economic strangulation, expanding settlements, confiscating land, demolishing homes, imprisoning children -- as perhaps unfortunate but absolutely necessary for Israel’s self-defense.</div>
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No matter how slick any lobby is, however, it can’t succeed without a substantial level of public support. (How powerful would the National Rifle Association be without the millions of Americans who truly love their guns?) Along with its other sources of power and influence, the right-wing Israel lobby needs a large majority of the U.S. public to believe in the myth of Israel’s insecurity as the God’s honest truth. </div>
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Ironically, that myth gets plenty of criticism and questioning in the Israeli press from writers like (to cite just some recent examples)<a href="http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/opinion/israel-is-confusing-victimhood-with-foreign-policy-1.354141" style="color: #9b3921; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"> Merav Michaeli</a> and <a href="http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/opinion/israel-s-diplomatic-fiasco-is-serious-as-a-military-blunder-1.348501" style="color: #9b3921; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">Doron Rosenblum</a> in the liberal newspaper <em>Haaretz</em>, and even <a href="http://www.jpost.com/Magazine/Opinion/Article.aspx?id=212614" style="color: #9b3921; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">Alon Ben-Meir</a> in the more conservative <em>Jerusalem Post</em>. In the United States, though, the myth of insecurity is the taken-for-granted lens through which the public views everything about the Israel-Palestine conflict. Like the air we breathe, it’s a view so pervasive that we hardly notice it.</div>
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Nor do we notice how reflexively most Americans accept the claim of self-defense as justification for everything Israel does, no matter how outrageous. That reflex goes far to explain why, in the latest <a href="http://www.gallup.com/poll/146408/americans-maintain-broad-support-israel.aspx" style="color: #9b3921; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">Gallup poll matchup</a> (“Do you sympathize more with Israel or the Palestinians?”), Israel won by a nearly 4 to 1 margin. And the pro-Israeli sentiment <a href="http://www.theisraelproject.org/site/apps/nlnet/content2.aspx?c=hsJPK0PIJpH&b=3587015&ct=9341049&notoc=1" style="color: #9b3921; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">just keeps growing</a>.</div>
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Our politicians, pundits, and correspondents breathe the same air in the same unthinking fashion, and so they hesitate to put much pressure on Israel to change its ways. As it happens, without such pressure, no Israeli government is likely to make the compromises needed for a just and lasting peace in the region. Instead, Israel will keep up its <a href="http://blog.thejerusalemfund.org/2011/04/twitter-timeline-revealing-context-in.html" style="color: #9b3921; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">attacks on Gaza</a>. In addition, if the Palestinians declare themselves an independent state come September, as many<a href="http://www.thejc.com/news/israel-news/47859/israel-fears-obamas-wrath-un" style="color: #9b3921; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"> reports indicate</a> might happen, Israel will feel free to quash that state <a href="http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20110329/wl_mideast_afp/israelpalestiniansdiplomacyun_20110329160410" style="color: #9b3921; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">by any means necessary</a> -- but only if Washington goes on giving it the old wink and nod.</div>
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If American attitudes and so policies are ever to change, one necessary (though not in itself sufficient) step is to confront and debunk the myth of Israel’s insecurity.</div>
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<strong>Three Myths in One</strong></div>
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Israel actually promotes three separate myths of insecurity, although its PR machine weaves them into a single tightly knit fabric. To grasp the reality behind it, the three strands have to be teased apart and examined separately.</div>
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<em>Myth Number 1: Israel’s existence is threatened by the ever-present possibility of military attack.</em> In fact, there’s no chance that any of Israel’s neighbors will start a war to wipe out Israel. They know their history. Despite its size, ever since its war of independence in 1948, the Israeli military has been a better equipped, better trained, more effective, and in virtually every case a successful fighting force. It clearly remains the <a href="http://www.globalfirepower.com/" style="color: #9b3921; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">strongest military power</a> in the Middle East.</div>
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According to the authoritative volume,<em> </em><a href="http://www.iiss.org/publications/military-balance/the-military-balance-2011/" style="color: #9b3921; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"><em>The Military Balance 2011</em></a>, Israel still maintains a decisive edge over any of its neighbors. While the Israeli government constantly sounds alarms about imagined Iranian nuclear weapons -- though its intelligence services now suggest Iran won’t have even one before <a href="http://www.voanews.com/english/news/Israel-Iran-Cannot-Produce-Nuclear-Bomb-before-2015-113078339.html" style="color: #9b3921; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">2015 at the earliest</a> -- Israel remains the region’s only nuclear power for the foreseeable future. It possesses up to 200 nukes, in addition to “a significant number” of precision-guided 1,000 kg conventional bombs.</div>
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To deliver its most powerful weapons, Israel can rely on its 100 land-based missile launchers, 200 aircraft armed with cruise missiles, and (according to “repeated press reports”) cruise-missile-armed submarines. The subs are key, of course, since they ensure that no future blow delivered to Israel would ever lack payback.</div>
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Israel spends far more on its military than any of the neighbors it claims to fear, largely because it gets more military aid from the U.S. than any other Mideast nation -- <a href="http://aidtoisrael.org/index.html" style="color: #9b3921; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">$3 billion</a> a year is the official figure, although no one is likely to know the full amount.</div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Times New Roman', helvetica, arial; font-size: 16px; line-height: 20.7999992370605px;">The Obama administration has continued a long tradition of guaranteeing Israel’s massive military superiority in the region. Israel will, for example, be the first foreign country to get the U.S.’s most advanced fighter jet, the F-35 joint strike fighter. In fact, Defense Minister Ehud Barak recently complained that 20 of the promised planes aren’t enough, though he</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Times New Roman', helvetica, arial; font-size: 16px; line-height: 20.7999992370605px;"> </span><a href="http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/news/barak-israel-needs-20-billion-in-new-defense-aid-1.348003" style="color: #9b3921; font-family: 'Times New Roman', helvetica, arial; font-size: 16px; line-height: 20.7999992370605px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">admitted</a><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Times New Roman', helvetica, arial; font-size: 16px; line-height: 20.7999992370605px;"> </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Times New Roman', helvetica, arial; font-size: 16px; line-height: 20.7999992370605px;">that his country “faces no imminent threat” that would justify upping the numbers. Israel is also beginning to deploy its</span><a href="http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/news/as-war-fears-mount-iron-dome-production-speeds-up-1.355627" style="color: #9b3921; font-family: 'Times New Roman', helvetica, arial; font-size: 16px; line-height: 20.7999992370605px; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">Iron Dome</a><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Times New Roman', helvetica, arial; font-size: 16px; line-height: 20.7999992370605px;"> </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Times New Roman', helvetica, arial; font-size: 16px; line-height: 20.7999992370605px;">mobile air-defense system, with the U.S. funding at least half its cost.</span><br />
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In sum, none of the nations that Israel casts as a threat to its very existence can pose an existential military danger. Of course, that doesn’t mean all Jewish Israelis are safe from harm, which brings us to...</div>
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<em>Myth Number 2: The personal safety of every Jewish Israeli is threatened daily by the possibility of violent attack.</em> In fact, according to Israeli government statistics, since the beginning of 2009 only one Israeli civilian (and two non-Israelis)<a href="http://www.mfa.gov.il/MFA/Terrorism-+Obstacle+to+Peace/Palestinian+terror+since+2000/Victims+of+Palestinian+Violence+and+Terrorism+sinc.htm" style="color: #9b3921; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">have been killed</a> by politically motivated attacks inside the green line (Israel’s pre-1967 border). Israelis who live inside that line go about their daily lives <a href="http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2015602,00.html" style="color: #9b3921; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">virtually free</a> from such worry.</div>
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As a result, the insecurity myth has come to focus on rockets -- the real ones launched from Gaza and the imaginary ones that supposedly could be launched from a future Palestinian state in the West Bank. Purveyors of the insecurity myth, including the American media, portray such rocket attacks as bolts from the blue, with no other motive than an irrational desire to kill and maim innocent Jews. As it happens, most of the rockets from Gaza have been fired <a href="http://www.alternativenews.org/english/index.php/topics/11-aic-projects/3441-israels-military-escalation-in-gaza" style="color: #9b3921; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">in response</a> to Israeli attacks that often broke ceasefires declared by the Palestinians. </div>
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Those rockets are part of an ongoing war in which each side uses the best weapons it has. The Palestinians, of course, have access to none of the high-tech Israeli guidance systems. Their weaponry tends to be crude and often homemade. They shoot their rockets, most of them unguided, and let them fall where they may (which means the vast majority harm no one).</div>
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Israel’s weapons actually do far more harm. Operation Cast Lead, the Israeli assault on Gaza that began at the end of 2008, killed <a href="http://www.btselem.org/english/press_releases/20090909.asp" style="color: #9b3921; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">far more civilians</a> than all the rockets Palestinians have ever launched at Israel. Despite (or perhaps because of) its grievous losses, the Hamas government in Gaza has generally tried to <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/14/world/middleeast/14briefs-Gaza.html" style="color: #9b3921; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">minimize</a>the rocket fire. When Hamas calls for all factions in Gaza to observe a ceasefire, however, the Israelis often <a href="http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/idf-strikes-kill-five-in-gaza-as-barrage-of-mortars-hits-israel-1.354827" style="color: #9b3921; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">ramp up</a> their attacks.</div>
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Jewish civilians do run some risk when they live in the West Bank settlements. In the most recent horrific incident, a Jewish family of five was slaughtered at the Itamar settlement. In response, Israeli Vice Premier Moshe Yaalon <a href="http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/thousands-turn-out-in-jerusalem-for-funerals-of-itamar-terror-victims-1.348895" style="color: #9b3921; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">showed clearly</a>how the deaths of individual settlers are woven into the myth of Israel’s “existential insecurity.” “This murder,” he declared, “reminds everyone that the struggle and conflict is not about Israel’s borders or about independence of a repressed nation but a struggle for our existence.”</div>
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The logic of the myth goes back to the premise of the earliest Zionists: All gentiles are implacably and eternally anti-semitic. By this logic, any attack on one Jew, no matter how random, becomes evidence that all Jews are permanently threatened with extinction.</div>
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Most Zionists have been unable to see that once they founded a state committed to regional military superiority, they were bound to be on the receiving as well as the giving end of acts of war. It is the absence of peace far more than the presence of anti-semitism that renders Israelis who live near Gaza or in the West Bank insecure.</div>
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However, according to the myth, it’s not only physical violence that threatens Israel’s existence. In the last two years, right-wing Israelis and their supporters in the U.S. have learned to lie awake at night worrying about another threat...</div>
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<em>Myth Number 3: Israel’s existence is threatened by worldwide efforts to delegitimize the Jewish state.</em> Early in 2010, Military Intelligence Chief Amos Yadlin <a href="http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1143681.html" style="color: #9b3921; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">told the Knesset</a>, Israel’s parliament, that the country was not “suffering from terror or from an immediate military threat” -- only to warn of a new peril: “The Palestinian Authority is encouraging the international arena to challenge Israel’s legitimacy.”</div>
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The “delegitimization” alarm was first <a href="http://original.antiwar.com/chernus/2010/01/20/israel-finds-a-new-way-to-play-the-victim/" style="color: #9b3921; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">sounded</a> by an influential Israeli think tank and then spread like wildfire through the nation’s political and media ranks.</div>
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There are shreds of truth in it. There have always been people who saw the Jewish state, imposed on indigenous Palestinians, as illegitimate. Until recently, however, Israelis seemed to pay them little heed. Now, they are deemed an “existential threat,” as Yadlin explained, only because the old claims of “existential threat” via violence have grown unbelievable even to the Israeli military (though not to the government’s American supporters). </div>
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It’s also true that challenges to Israel’s legitimacy are growing rapidly around the world and that the specter of becoming a “pariah state” does pose a danger. The head of that think tank got it half-right when he warned that Israel’s “survival and prosperity” depend on its relations with the world, “all of which rely on its legitimacy.” Survival? No. After all, being a pariah state doesn’t have to be existence threatening, as North Korea and Burma have proved.</div>
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But prosperity? That’s at least possible. When the Israelis complain about “delegitimization,” they focus most on the <a href="http://www.bdsmovement.net/" style="color: #9b3921; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">boycott/divestment/sanctions (BDS) movement</a>, which aims not to eliminate the state of Israel, but to use economic pressure to end Israel’s occupation and economic strangulation of Palestinian lands. (Nor is there any real evidence to back up <a href="http://www.haaretz.com/news/mi-chief-israel-s-success-battling-terror-has-turned-world-against-us-1.265720" style="color: #9b3921; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">the charge</a> that this is some vast conspiracy coordinated by the Palestinian Authority.)</div>
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Were Israel to start behaving by accepted international moral norms, the BDS movement would fade from the scene quickly enough, ending the crisis of “delegitimization” -- just as the rockets from Gaza might well cease. But here’s the reality of this moment: The only genuine threat to Israel’s security comes from its own oppressive policies, which are the fuel propelling the BDS movement.</div>
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So far, however, “effects on the Israeli economy are marginal,” <a href="http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4029865,00.html" style="color: #9b3921; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">according to</a> a popular Israeli newspaper. The BDS campaign, it reports, “has been far more damaging when it comes to the negative image that it spreads.” A growing number of foreign governments are criticizing Israel, and some <a href="http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/uruguay-joins-south-american-nations-in-recognizing-palestinian-statehood-1.349480" style="color: #9b3921; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">already recognize</a> an actual Palestinian state. In diplomatic terms, Israel’s legitimacy rests on the good will of its sole dependable ally, the United States.</div>
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More than any military need, that political need offers the U.S. powerful leverage in moving toward a settlement of the Israeli/Palestinian crisis. The triple-stranded myth of Israel’s insecurity, however, makes the use of such leverage virtually impossible for Washington. Israel’s president <a href="http://www.jpost.com/Headlines/Article.aspx?id=171135" style="color: #9b3921; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">put</a> his country’s needs plainly in March 2010: "[Israel] must forge good relations with other countries, primarily the United States, so as to guarantee political support in a time of need.” So far, the U.S. has continued to offer its strong support, even though President Obama <a href="http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Article.aspx?id=211477" style="color: #9b3921; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">knows</a>, as he recently told American Jewish leaders, that “Israel is the stronger party here, militarily, culturally, and politically. And Israel needs to create the context for [peace] to happen.”</div>
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But what if the American public knew the facts that Obama acknowledged? What if every solemn reference to Israel’s “security needs” were greeted not with nodding heads, but with the eye-rolling skepticism it deserves? What if Israel’s endless excesses and excuses -- its claims that the occupation of the West Bank and the economic strangulation of Gaza are necessary “for the sake of security” -- were regularly scoffed at by most Americans?</div>
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It’s hard to imagine the Obama administration, or any American administration, keeping up a pro-Israel tilt in the face of such public scorn.</div>
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<em><span style="color: blue; font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><a href="http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175380/tomgram%3A_ira_chernus,_the_great_israeli_security_scam/"><b>Ira Chernus</b></a></span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Times New Roman', helvetica, arial;"> </span><span style="color: blue; font-family: 'Times New Roman', helvetica, arial;">is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Read more of his writings on Israel, Palestine, and the U.S. </span></em><a href="http://chernus.wordpress.com/" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', helvetica, arial; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"><em><span style="color: blue;">on his blog</span></em></a><em style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', helvetica, arial;"><span style="color: blue;">.</span><span style="color: #333333;"> </span></em></div>
CavalierZeehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15921393075475481352noreply@blogger.com0