Levitt Letter Extra News

By Monisha Bansal
www.cnsnews.com

The Saudi government has not only broken its promise and failed to eliminate anti-western rhetoric from its public school textbooks, some Saudi-funded schools on U.S. soil continue to incite violence, a Persian Gulf watchdog group alleged Wednesday.

One of those schools — The Islamic Saudi Academy — is located in Alexandria, Va., a short drive from the nation’s capital, according to the Institute for Gulf Affairs in a report that it released in conjunction with the human rights group, Freedom House.

“They are telling Saudi students and American students of the Academy that you must hate Christians and Jews and consider them enemies until the Day of Judgment and at the end of time,” said Ali Al-Ahmed, director of the Institute for Gulf Affairs. “This is very dangerous because this is how you get a terrorist at the end of the day.”

In November, Ahmed Omar Abu Ali, a valedictorian at the Islamic Saudi Academy and member of al Qaeda, was found guilty of plotting to kill President George W. Bush, Al-Ahmed said.

Ali was raised in Falls Church, Va., but was arrested in Saudi Arabia in 2003 while attending college in Medina. He was transported back to the U.S., last year, convicted in U.S. District Court in Alexandria in November and sentenced in March to 30 years in prison.

Al-Ahmed said students like Ahmed Omar Abu Ali are similar to a deadly weapon. “It is more dangerous than planting a bomb, because a bomb will go off and have short impact, but to have these students graduating every year with these ideas is a lifetime effect,” he said.

In 2002, just months after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on New York City and the Pentagon, (15 of the 19 hijackers who participated in the attacks were from Saudi Arabia) Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud Al-Faisal declared that “our schools and our faith teach peace and tolerance.”

“There is no room in our schools for hatred, for intolerance or for anti-western thinking,” Al-Faisal added.

In March of this year, the Saudi government stated that it had removed all of the content from its public school textbooks that disparaged other religions. But on Monday, the Saudi Embassy in Washington, D.C., backed away from that statement while responding to the Institute for Gulf Affairs and Freedom House study. The embassy explained that the changes required more time.

“Overhauling an educational system is a massive undertaking. There are hundreds of books that are being revised to comply with the new requirements, and the process remains ongoing,” said Saudi Ambassador Prince Turki Al-Faisal.

He added that “the Saudi government has worked diligently during the last five years to overhaul its education system, which includes textbooks, teacher training, and the introduction of new teaching methods.”

“The objective of the educational system,” the prince added, “is to fight intolerance and to prepare Saudi youth with the skills and knowledge to compete in the global economy.”

According to the Institute for Gulf Affairs and Freedom House report, current Saudi textbooks obtained by the Institute indicate that intolerance is still being taught.

“These books continue to reflect a curriculum that inculcates religious hatred toward those who do not follow Wahhabi teachings,” the report stated. Wahhabism is a fundamentalist sect of Sunni Islam dominant in Saudi Arabia and Qatar.

“When the current school year ends, thousands more will graduate from Saudi public schools steeped in the belief that those of differing religious faiths are morally inferior and even evil,” the report alleged. “Their texts will have taught them that peaceful coexistence with so-called ‘infidels’ is unattainable and that violence to spread Islam is not only permissible, but an obligation.”

“There is a lot of misinformation and disinformation about others in these textbooks. These textbooks groom a child to be a terrorist,” Al-Ahmed added.

With about five million children in Saudi public schools instructed each year in Islamic studies from Ministry of Education textbooks, and many more outside of Saudi Arabia, Al-Ahmed told Cybercast News Service that the threat “is more dangerous than the Chernobyl reactor.”

“If even 1 percent takes this to heart, you will have a lot more terrorists than just the 15 (Saudis) that we saw on September 11,” Al-Ahmed said. He alleged that Saudi schools are graduating 1,000 terrorists each year.

“Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden understands this well,” Al-Ahmed asserted. “In his April 23, 2006, audiotape, he railed against those who would interfere with school curricula.”

The Islamic Saudi Academy is funded by the Saudi government and according to the report uses the same textbooks as those in Saudi Arabia to teach Islamic Studies courses. The Academy did not return phone calls made Wednesday seeking comment for this article.

by Daniel Pipes
www.frontpagemagazine.com

The illegal immigration of non-Western peoples, I predict, will become an all-consuming issue in every Western country.

As Western birth rates plummet, as communication and transportation networks improve, and as radical Islam increasingly rears its aggressive head, Europeans, Americans, and others worry about their economic standards and the continuity of their cultures. After ignoring this issue for decades, reactions in Europe especially have sharpened of late.

• The French lower house of parliament passed a tough new immigration law.
• Austria’s interior minister, Liese Prokop, asserted publicly that 45 percent of her country’s Muslim immigrants “cannot be integrated,” and admonished them to “choose another country” in which to live.
• The Dutch minister of immigration, Rita Verdonk, withdrew citizenship from Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Muslim-born immigrant who became renowned as a critic of Islam.

But the most dramatic, agonizing, and consequential developments for immigration to the West are taking place along the remote west coast of Africa. It has emerged as a main springboard for would-be emigrants to access the riches of Spain and then all Europe.

West Africa’s role is a new one. Until late 2005, emigrants gravitated to Morocco, in part because, separated by the Straits of Gibraltar, it is a mere eight miles [13 km] away from Europe. Also, they could easily sneak into the Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla. At worst, they could reach the Canary Islands, a Spanish territory 70 miles [110 km] off the coast of West Africa. Any of these served equally well as a gateway to all Europe.

But no longer: under intense Spanish and EU pressure, Moroccan authorities cracked down hard on illegals to the point of dumping them without provisions in the desert. The same forbidding inhospitality reigns in the Western Sahara, a territory to Morocco’s south fully under its control. Meanwhile, the European Maritime Border Guard Corps patrols the Mediterranean Sea with increasing efficiency.

That made Mauritania, south of the Moroccan-ruled areas and one of the poorest, most isolated countries in the world, the new transit point of choice. Africans and other would-be European migrants, especially South Asians, began turning up in large numbers. Nuadibu (population: 90,000) found itself hosting more than 10,000 transients in early 2006. Under pressure from Spain, the Mauritanians also cracked down.

Ever resourceful, migrants repaired further south, now to Senegal. The Canaries run takes less than a day from Morocco but 3 days from Mauritania and 7-10 days from Senegal. Notoriously rough seas off West Africa can easily overwhelm the open wooden fishing boats and their single outboard engines as they cover the 900 miles [1,400 km].

Manuel Pombo, Spanish ambassador-at-large for humanitarian issues, reports that up to 40 per cent of those attempting to reach the Canaries die en route. Ahmedou Ould Haye, head of the Red Crescent in Mauritania, calls it “collective suicide.” Another observer sadly predicts, “Three months or so later, some of these sorry vessels may creep into the Caribbean — as ghost ships, or worse.”

These gruesome odds notwithstanding, the waves of immigration keep growing, in good part because once they land on Spanish territory their reception is so accommodating and very few illegals are ever deported. (A head of emergency services in the Canaries, Gerardo Garcia, compared landing there to going on holiday.) On May 18, a record 656 persons landed in the Canaries, or one-seventh of the total number of arrivals in all of 2005. “It is almost like an invasion,” lamented a volunteer in the Canaries.

Hoping to stem the immigration tide at its source through deportation agreements, Spanish diplomatic delegations offer West African countries financial aid in exchange. But African governments resist these, appreciating the remittances from Europe as much as they dislike the bad publicity of large-scale expulsions. These palliatives cannot possibly solve the tensions as have-nots try to crash the haves’ party.

Rickard Sandell of the Royal Elcano Institute in Madrid predicts that the migration now underway could signal the prospect of an African “mass exodus” and armed conflict. What one sees today “is only the beginning of an immigration phenomenon that could evolve into one of the largest in history…the mass assault on Spain’s African border may just be a first warning of what to expect of the future.”

Thus begins the first chapter of what promises to be a long and terrible story.

www.omegaletter.com

Appeasement: “the making of concessions to an aggressor in order to avoid war.”

The most celebrated case of appeasement in modern history was the Chamberlain/Deladrier compact with Adolph Hitler.

British PM Neville Chamberlain went with French leader Eduard Deladrier to meet with Adolph Hitler in Munich. At that meeting, Hitler assured the British and French leaders that war could be avoided if they would sign off on Germany’s annexation of Czechoslovakia.

Undeterred by the fact that Czechoslovakia was an independent state that wasn’t theirs to give, they agreed to trade Czechoslovakia’s freedom for their own.

Returning from Munich, waving a worthless piece of paper bearing Hitler’s signature, Neville Chamberlain breathlessly pronounced; “My good friends, for the second time in our history, a British Prime Minister has returned from Germany bringing peace with honor. I believe it is peace for our time… Go home and get a nice quiet sleep.”

One year later, Britain’s nice quiet sleep was interrupted by the sound of Nazi jackboots marching into Poland…

The WWII troika of appeasers, Britain, France and Germany, have proved George Bernard Shaw’s observation that, ‘the one thing man learns from history is that man learns nothing from history.

I have a friend in a 12-step program who is forever repeating one-liners he hears at meetings. One always stuck with me: “the definition of insanity is doing the same things over and over again, thinking this time, they will turn out differently. A variation I’ve heard since is comparing it to renting a movie over and over again, hoping this time it will have a happy ending.

Both sound about as nuts as the idea that, this time, appeasing a fascist dictator with a fanatical obsession for war will work better today that it did in 1938.

There is little doubt that the leaders of the so-called EU Three are as aware of the historical uselessness of appeasing a dictator as was Winston Churchill, who likened appeasement to ‘feeding a crocodile in the hope he will eat you last.’

The US State Department has signed on to the Appeasement Brigade, offering Iran a series of incentives to drop their quest for nuclear power. This, despite the fact that Iranian officials have gleefully observed that they are indebted to the Europeans and their supporters for “buying time” for the regime in Tehran, allowing it to bring its so-called “nuclear power” program to fruition.

Appeasement has a long tradition among US liberals, but when it infects conservatives (as it has), the prognosis could be fatal.

Jimmy Carter’s diplomatic efforts including negotiating a peace deal between Egypt and Israel in 1977. To do so, he met all of Egypt’s demands, including forcing Israel to give back all the territory it captured from Egypt except the Gaza Strip.

Carter used the ‘carrot and stick’ method. To get Israel to give back the Sinai, Carter linked it to continued US foreign aid to Israel. To get Egypt to sign the peace treaty, he made Egypt the second largest recipient of US foreign aid in the world, after Israel. Israel got nothing it didn’t already have but an essentially meaningless piece of paper. The Carter deal created a new foreign policy term, that of ‘cold’ peace’ to describe the subsequent state of Israeli-Egyptian relations. It was, and remains, a sham.

The Clinton administration launched the ‘land for peace’ initiative between Israel and the Palestinians with the signing of the 1993 Oslo Agreement. The ‘land for peace’ initiative was a textbook example of appeasement in action.

To appease the Palestinian uprising, Clinton convinced Israel to accept Yasser Arafat as a ‘peace partner’. As with Egypt, Israel got nothing it didn’t already have, Arafat got whatever he wanted. By 1998, the Clinton administration had brokered a deal whereby Israel would give up virtually all of the 1967 territory in exchange for peace with a Palestinian state.

For most of its first term, the Bush administration resisted calls from the Left to appease the various threats facing the United States. The Left rushed to appease Saddam Hussein, the French, the Germans and the UN. They resisted any effort to deal with the threats, calling instead for more diplomacy, more appeasement, more negotiations.

It didn’t avoid war anymore than Chamberlain’s Munich Pact did. It only stalled it for awhile to allow Hitler to get stronger. In Iraq’s case, the delay gave Saddam time to recruit, equip and train his feyadeen insurgency movement. And instead of the war ending in April, 2003, it was only just beginning.

The ‘carrot and stick’ offer being made to Iran will go down in history (if there is anyone left to write it) as one of the most egregious appeasement efforts in modern history. The ‘carrot’ is nuclear power for a regime dedicated to a nuclear weapon. The ’stick’ is no nuclear power for a regime that already has it.

Winston Churchill was one of the most eminently quotable politicians in modern history. His comment about the crocodile is timeless. So was his admonition to the British Parliament in opposition to the parliamentary appeasers 70 years ago.

“You must look at the facts… for the facts are looking at you.”

SPIEGEL Interview with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

“We Are Determined”

In an interview with SPIEGEL, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad discusses the Holocaust, the future of the state of Israel, mistakes made by the United States in Iraq and Tehran’s nuclear conflict with the West.

SPIEGEL: Mr. President, you are a soccer fan and you like to play soccer. Will you be sitting in the stadium in Nuremberg on June 11, when the Iranian national team plays against Mexico in Germany?

Ahmadinejad: It depends. Naturally, I’ll be watching the game in any case. I don’t know yet whether I’ll be at home in front of the television set or somewhere else. My decision depends upon a number of things.

SPIEGEL: For example?

Ahmadinejad: How much time I have, how the state of various relationships are going, whether I feel like it and a number of other things.

SPIEGEL: There was great indignation in Germany when it became known that you might be coming to the soccer world championship. Did that surprise you?

Ahmadinejad: No, that’s not important. I didn’t even understand how that came about. It also had no meaning for me. I don’t know what all the excitement is about.

SPIEGEL: It concerned your remarks about the Holocaust. It was inevitable that the Iranian president’s denial of the systematic murder of the Jews by the Germans would trigger outrage.

Ahmadinejad: I don’t exactly understand the connection.

SPIEGEL: First you make your remarks about the Holocaust. Then comes the news that you may travel to Germany — this causes an uproar. So you were surprised after all?

Ahmadinejad: No, not at all, because the network of Zionism is very active around the world, in Europe too. So I wasn’t surprised. We were addressing the German people. We have nothing to do with Zionists.

SPIEGEL: Denying the Holocaust is punishable in Germany. Are you indifferent when confronted with so much outrage?

Ahmadinejad: I know that DER SPIEGEL is a respected magazine. But I don’t know whether it is possible for you to publish the truth about the Holocaust. Are you permitted to write everything about it?

SPIEGEL: Of course we are entitled to write about the findings of the past 60 years’ historical research. In our view there is no doubt that the Germans — unfortunately — bear the guilt for the murder of 6 million Jews.

Ahmadinejad: Well, then we have stirred up a very concrete discussion. We are posing two very clear questions. The first is: Did the Holocaust actually take place? You answer this question in the affirmative. So, the second question is: Whose fault was it? The answer to that has to be found in Europe and not in Palestine. It is perfectly clear: If the Holocaust took place in Europe, one also has to find the answer to it in Europe.

On the other hand, if the Holocaust didn’t take place, why then did this regime of occupation …

SPIEGEL: … You mean the state of Israel…

Ahmadinejad: … come about? Why do the European countries commit themselves to defending this regime? Permit me to make one more point. We are of the opinion that, if an historical occurrence conforms to the truth, this truth will be revealed all the more clearly if there is more research into it and more discussion about it.

SPIEGEL: That has long since happened in Germany.

Ahmadinejad: We don’t want to confirm or deny the Holocaust. We oppose every type of crime against any people. But we want to know whether this crime actually took place or not. If it did, then those who bear the responsibility for it have to be punished, and not the Palestinians. Why isn’t research into a deed that occurred 60 years ago permitted? After all, other historical occurrences, some of which lie several thousand years in the past, are open to research, and even the governments support this.

SPIEGEL: Mr. President, with all due respect, the Holocaust occurred, there were concentration camps, there are dossiers on the extermination of the Jews, there has been a great deal of research, and there is neither the slightest doubt about the Holocaust nor about the fact — we greatly regret this — that the Germans are responsible for it. If we may now add one remark: the fate of the Palestinians is an entirely different issue, and this brings us into the present.

Ahmadinejad: No, no, the roots of the Palestinian conflict must be sought in history. The Holocaust and Palestine are directly connected with one another. And if the Holocaust actually occurred, then you should permit impartial groups from the whole world to research this. Why do you restrict the research to a certain group? Of course, I don’t mean you, but rather the European governments.

SPIEGEL: Are you still saying that the Holocaust is just “a myth?”

Ahmadinejad: I will only accept something as truth if I am actually convinced of it.

SPIEGEL: Even though no Western scholars harbor any doubt about the Holocaust?

Ahmadinejad: But there are two opinions on this in Europe. One group of scholars or persons, most of them politically motivated, say the Holocaust occurred. Then there is the group of scholars who represent the opposite position and have therefore been imprisoned for the most part. Hence, an impartial group has to come together to investigate and to render an opinion on this very important subject, because the clarification of this issue will contribute to the solution of global problems. Under the pretext of the Holocaust, a very strong polarization has taken place in the world and fronts have been formed. It would therefore be very good if an international and impartial group looked into the matter in order to clarify it once and for all. Normally, governments promote and support the work of researchers on historical events and do not put them in prison.

SPIEGEL: Who is that supposed to be? Which researchers do you mean?

Ahmadinejad: You would know this better than I; you have the list. There are people from England, from Germany, France and from Australia.

SPIEGEL: You presumably mean, for example, the Englishman David Irving, the German-Canadian Ernst Zündel, who is on trial in Mannheim, and the Frenchman Georges Theil, all of whom deny the Holocaust.

Ahmadinejad: The mere fact that my comments have caused such strong protests, although I’m not a European, and also the fact that I have been compared with certain persons in German history indicates how charged with conflict the atmosphere for research is in your country. Here in Iran you needn’t worry.

SPIEGEL: Well, we are conducting this historical debate with you for a very timely purpose. Are you questioning Israel’s right to exist?

Ahmadinejad: Look here, my views are quite clear. We are saying that if the Holocaust occurred, then Europe must draw the consequences and that it is not Palestine that should pay the price for it. If it did not occur, then the Jews have to go back to where they came from. I believe that the German people today are also prisoners of the Holocaust. Sixty million people died in the Second World War. World War II was a gigantic crime. We condemn it all. We are against bloodshed, regardless of whether a crime was committed against a Muslim or against a Christian or a Jew. But the question is: Why among these 60 million victims are only the Jews the center of attention?

SPIEGEL: That’s just not the case. All peoples mourn the victims claimed by the Second World War, Germans and Russians and Poles and others as well. Yet, we as Germans cannot absolve ourselves of a special guilt, namely for the systematic murder of the Jews. But perhaps we should now move on to the next subject.

Ahmadinejad: No, I have a question for you. What kind of a role did today’s youth play in World War II?

SPIEGEL: None.

Ahmadinejad: Why should they have feelings of guilt toward Zionists? Why should the costs of the Zionists be paid out of their pockets? If people committed crimes in the past, then they would have to have been tried 60 years ago. End of story! Why must the German people be humiliated today because a group of people committed crimes in the name of the Germans during the course of history?

SPIEGEL: The German people today can’t do anything about it. But there is a sort of collective shame for those deeds done in the German name by our fathers or grandfathers.

Ahmadinejad: How can a person who wasn’t even alive at the time be held legally responsible?

SPIEGEL: Not legally but morally.

Ahmadinejad: Why is such a burden heaped on the German people? The German people of today bear no guilt. Why are the German people not permitted the right to defend themselves? Why are the crimes of one group emphasized so greatly, instead of highlighting the great German cultural heritage? Why should the Germans not have the right to express their opinion freely?

SPIEGEL: Mr. President, we are well aware that German history is not made up of only the 12 years of the Third Reich. Nevertheless, we have to accept that horrible crimes have been committed in the German name. We also own up to this, and it is a great achievement of the Germans in post-war history that they have grappled critically with their past.

Ahmadinejad: Are you also prepared to tell that to the German people?

SPIEGEL: Oh yes, we do that.

Ahmadinejad: Then would you also permit an impartial group to ask the German people whether it shares your opinion? No people accepts its own humiliation.

SPIEGEL: All questions are allowed in our country. But of course there are right-wing radicals in Germany who are not only anti-Semitic, but xenophobic as well, and we do indeed consider them a threat.

Ahmadinejad: Let me ask you one thing: How much longer can this go on? How much longer do you think the German people have to accept being taken hostage by the Zionists? When will that end — in 20, 50, 1,000 years?

SPIEGEL: We can only speak for ourselves. DER SPIEGEL is nobody’s hostage; SPIEGEL does not deal only with Germany’s past and the Germans’ crimes. We’re not Israel’s uncritical ally in the Palestian conflict. But we want to make one thing very clear: We are critical, we are independent, but we won’t simply stand by without protest when the existential right of the state of Israel, where many Holocaust survivors live, is being questioned.

Ahmadinejad: Precisely that is our point. Why should you feel obliged to the Zionists? If there really had been a Holocaust, Israel ought to be located in Europe, not in Palestine.

SPIEGEL: Do you want to resettle a whole people 60 years after the end of the war?

Ahmadinejad: Five million Palestinians have not had a home for 60 years. It is amazing really: You have been paying reparations for the Holocaust for 60 years and will have to keep paying up for another 100 years. Why then is the fate of the Palestinians no issue here?

SPIEGEL: The Europeans support the Palestinians in many ways. After all, we also have an historic responsibility to help bring peace to this region finally. But don’t you share that responsibility?

Ahmadinejad: Yes, but aggression, occupation and a repetition of the Holocaust won’t bring peace. What we want is a sustainable peace. This means that we have to tackle the root of the problem. I am pleased to note that you are honest people and admit that you are obliged to support the Zionists.

SPIEGEL: That’s not what we said, Mr. President.

Ahmadinejad: You said Israelis.

SPIEGEL: Mr. President, we’re talking about the Holocaust because we want to talk about the possible nuclear armament of Iran — which is why the West sees you as a threat.

Ahmadinejad: Some groups in the West enjoy calling things or people a threat. Of course you’re free to make your own judgment.

SPIEGEL: The key question is: Do you want nuclear weapons for your country?

Ahmadinejad: Allow me to encourage a discussion on the following question: How long do you think the world can be governed by the rhetoric of a handful of Western powers? Whenever they hold something against someone, they start spreading propaganda and lies, defamation and blackmail. How much longer can that go on?

SPIEGEL: We’re here to find out the truth. The head of state of a neighboring country, for example, told SPIEGEL: “They are very keen on building the bomb.” Is that true?

Ahmadinejad: You see, we conduct our discussions with you and the European governments on an entirely different, higher level. In our view, the legal system whereby a handful of countries force their will on the rest of the world is discriminatory and unstable. One-hundred and thirty-nine countries, including us, are members of the International Atomic Energy Authority (IAEA) in Vienna. Both the statutes of IAEA and the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty as well as all security agreements grant the member countries the right to produce nuclear fuel for peaceful purposes. That is the legitimate legal right of any people. Beyond this, however, IAEA was also established to promote the disarmament of those powers that already possessed nuclear weapons. And now look at what’s happening today: Iran has had an excellent cooperation with IAEA. We have had more than 2,000 inspections of our plants, and the inspectors have obtained more than 1,000 pages of documentation from us. Their cameras are installed in our nuclear centers. IAEA has emphasized in all its reports that there are no indications of any irregularities in Iran. That is one side of this matter.

SPIEGEL: IAEA doesn’t quite share your view of this matter.

Ahmadinejad: But the other side is that there are a number of countries that possess both nuclear energy and nuclear weapons. They use their atomic weapons to threaten other peoples. And it is these powers who say that they are worried about Iran deviating from the path of peaceful use of atomic energy. We say that these powers are free to monitor us if they are worried. But what these powers say is that the Iranians must not complete the nuclear fuel cycle because deviation from peaceful use might then be possible. What we say is that these countries themselves have long deviated from peaceful usage. These powers have no right to talk to us in this manner. This order is unjust and unsustainable.

SPIEGEL: But, Mr. President, the key question is: How dangerous will this world become if even more countries become nuclear powers — if a country like Iran, whose president makes threats, builds the bomb in a crisis-ridden region?

Ahmadinejad: We’re fundamentally opposed to the expansion of nucleaar-weapons arsenals. This is why we have proposed the formation of an unbiased organization and the disarmament of the nuclear powers. We don’t need any weapons. We’re a civilized, cultured people, and our history shows that we have never attacked another country.

SPIEGEL: Iran doesn’t need the bomb that it wants to build?

Ahmadinejad: It’s interesting to note that European nations wanted to allow the shah’s dictatorship the use of nuclear technology. That was a dangerous regime. Yet those nations were willing to supply it with nuclear technology. Ever since the Islamic Republic has existed, however, these powers have been opposed to it. I stress once again, we don’t need any nuclear weapons.

We stand by our statements because we’re honest and act legally. We’re no fraudsters. We only want to claim our legitimate right. Incidentally, I never threatened anyone — that, too, is part of the propaganda machine that you’ve got running against me.

SPIEGEL: If this were so, shouldn’t you be making an effort to ensure that no one need fear your producing nuclear weapons that you might use against Israel, thus possibly unleashing a world war? You’re sitting on a tinderbox, Mr. President.

Ahmadinejad: Allow me to say two things. No people in the region are afraid of us. And no one should instill fear in these peoples. We believe that if the United States and these two or three European countries did not interfere, the peoples in this region would live peacefully together as they did in the thousands of years before. In 1980, it was also the nations of Europe and the United States that encouraged Saddam Hussein to attack us.

Our stance with respect to Palestine is clear. We say: Allow those to whom this country belongs to express their opinion. Let Jews, Christians and Muslims say what they think. The opponents of this proposal prefer war and threaten the region. Why are the United States and these two or three European nations opposed to this? I believe that those who imprison Holocaust researchers prefer war to peace. Our stance is democratic and peaceful.

SPIEGEL: The Palestinians have long gone a step further than you and recognize Israel as a fact, while you still wish to erase it from the map. The Palestinians are ready to accept a two-state solution while you deny Israel its right to existence.

Ahmadinejad: You’re wrong. You saw that the Palestinian people elected Hamas in free elections. We argue that neither you nor we should claim to speak for the Palestian people. The Palestinians themselves should say what they want. In Europe it is customary to call a referendum on any issue. We should also give the Palestinians the opportunity to express their opinion.

SPIEGEL: The Palestinians have the right to their own state, but in our view the Israelis naturally have the same right.

Ahmadinejad: Where did the Israelis come from?

SPIEGEL: Well, if we tried to work out where people have come from, the Europeans would have to return to east Africa where all humans originated.

Ahmadinejad: We’re not talking about the Europeans; we’re talking about the Palestinians. The Palestinians were there, in Palestine. Now 5 million of them have become refugees. Don’t they have a right to live?

SPIEGEL: Mr. President, doesn’t there come a time when one should accept that the world is the way it is and that we must accept the status quo? The war against Iraq has put Iran in a favorable position. The United States has suffered a de facto defeat in Iraq. Isn’t it now time for Iran to become a constructive power of peace in the Middle East? Which would mean giving up its nuclear plans and inflammatory talk?

Ahmadinejad: I’m wondering why you’re adopting and fanatically defending the stance of the European politicians. You’re a magazine, not a government. Saying that we should accept the world as it is would mean that the winners of World War II would remain the victorious powers for another 1,000 years and that the German people would be humiliated for another 1,000 years. Do you think that is the correct logic?

SPIEGEL: No, that’s not the right logic, nor is it true. The Germans have played a modest, but important role in post-war developments. They do not feel as though they have been humiliated and dishonored since 1945. We are too self-confident for that. But today we want to talk about Iran’s current mission.

Ahmadinejad: Then we would accept that Palestinians are killed every day, that they die in terrorist attacks, and that houses are being destroyed. But let me say something about Iraq. We have always favored peace and security in the region. For eight years, the Western countries provided arms to Saddam in the war against us, including chemical weapons, and gave him political support. We were against Saddam and suffered severely because of him, so we’re happy that he has been toppled. But we don’t accept a whole country being swallowed under the pretext of wanting to topple Saddam. More than 100,000 Iraqis have lost their lives under the rule of the occupying forces. Fortunately, the Germans haven’t been involved in this. We want security in Iraq.

SPIEGEL: But, Mr. President, who is swallowing Iraq? The United States has practically lost this war. By cooperating constructively, Iran might help the Americans consider their retreat from the country.

Ahmadinejad: This is very interesting: The Americans occupy the country, kill people, sell the oil and when they have lost, they blame others. We have very close ties to the Iraqi people. Many people on both sides of the border are related. We have lived side by side for thousands of years. Our holy pilgrimage sites are located in Iraq. Just like Iran, Iraq used to be a center of civilization.

SPIEGEL: What are you trying to say?

Ahmadinejad: We have always said that we support the popularly elected government of Iraq. But in my view the Americans are doing a bad job. They have sent us messages several times asking us for help and cooperation. They have said that we should talk together about Iraq. We publicly accepted this offer, although our people do not trust the Americans. But America has responded negatively and insulted us. Even now we’re contributing to security in Iraq. We will hold talks only if the Americans change their behavior.

SPIEGEL: Do you enjoy provoking the Americans and the rest of the world now and then?

Ahmadinejad: No, I’m not insulting anyone. The letter that I wrote to Mr. Bush was polite.

SPIEGEL: We don’t mean insult, but provoke.

Ahmadinejad: No, we feel animosity toward no one. We’re concerned about the American soldiers who die in Iraq. Why do they have to die there? This war makes no sense. Why is there war when there is reason as well?

SPIEGEL: Is your letter to the president also a gesture toward the Americans that you wish to enter into direct negotiations?

Ahmadinejad: We clearly stated our position in this letter on how we view the problems in the world. Some powers have befouled the political atmosphere in the world because they consider lies and fraud to be legitimate. In our view that is very bad. We believe that all people deserve respect. Relationships have to be regulated on the basis of justice. When justice reigns, peace reigns. Unjust conditions aren’t sustainable, even if Ahmadinejad does not criticize them.

SPIEGEL: This letter to the American president includes a passage about Sept. 11, 2001. The quote: “How could such an operation be planned and implemented without the coordination with secret and security services or without the far-reaching infiltration of these services?” Your statements always include so many innuendos. What is that supposed to mean? Did the CIA help Mohammed Atta and the other 18 terrorists conduct their attacks?

Ahmadinejad: No, that’s not what I meant. We think that they should just say who is to blame. They should not use Sept. 11 as an excuse to launch a military attack against the Middle East. They should take those who are responsible for the attacks to court. We’re not opposed to that; we condemned the attacks. We condemn any attack against innocent people.

SPIEGEL: In this letter you also write that Western liberalism has failed. What makes you say that?

Ahmadinejad: You see, for example you have a thousand definitions of the Palestian problem and you offer all sorts of different definitions of democracy in its various forms. It does not make sense that a phenomenon depends on the opinions of many individuals who are free to interpret the phenomenon as they wish. You can’t solve the problems of the world that way. We need a new approach. Of course we want the free will of the people to reign, but we need sustainable principles that enjoy universal acceptance — such as justice. Iran and the West agree on this.

SPIEGEL: What role can Europe play in the resolution of the nuclear conflict, and what do you expect of Germany?

Ahmadinejad: We have always cultivated good relations with Europe, especially with Germany. Our two peoples like each other. We’re eager to deepen this relationship.

Europe has made three mistakes with respect to our people. The first mistake was to support the shah’s government. This has left our people disappointed and discontent. However, by offering asylum to Imam Khomeini, France earned a special position that it lost again later. The second mistake was to support Saddam in his war against us. The truth is that our people expected Europe to be on our side, not against us. The third mistake was Europe’s stance on the nuclear issue. Europe will be the big loser and will achieve nothing. We don’t want to see that happen.

SPIEGEL: What will happen now in the conflict between the West and Iran?

Ahmadinejad: We understand the Americans’ logic. They suffered damage as a result of the victory of the Islamic Revolution. But we’re puzzled why some European countries are opposed to us. I sent out a message on the nuclear issue, asking why the Europeans were translating the Americans’ words for us. After all, they know that our actions are aimed toward peace. By siding with Iran, the Europeans would serve their own and our interests. But they will suffer only damage if they oppose us. For our people is strong and determined.

The Europeans risk losing their position in the Middle East entirely, and they are ruining their reputation in other parts of the world. The others will think that the Europeans aren’t capable of solving problems.

SPIEGEL: Mr. President, we thank you for this interview.

Interview conducted by Stefan Aust, Gerhard Spörl and Dieter Bednarz in Tehran.

By Dennis Prager
www.JewishWorldReview.com

Professor Noam Chomsky recently went to Lebanon to speak at the headquarters of Hezbollah. As described by the BBC, not a media friend of Israel, “Hezbollah’s political rhetoric has centered on calls for the destruction of the state of Israel,” and Hezbollah has been “synonymous with terror, suicide bombings and kidnappings.” The terror group’s views on the need to annihilate the Jewish state are identical to those of Hamas and Iranian leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Chomsky announced his support for Hezbollah and its need to be militarily strong.

Also last week, an ultra-Orthodox rabbi from Vienna, a member of a [tiny and powerless] Jewish sect [that has been condemned by the entire fervently-religious world] called Neturei Karta, went to Stockholm to meet with a Palestinian Hamas official to help raise funds for Hamas. Hamas is, of course, dedicated to annihilating Israel, as is Neturei Karta, an Orthodox Jewish fringe group that believes no Jewish state should exist unless founded by God. It therefore supports Palestinian and other Muslim groups that murder Jews in Israel.

In March, a group of five Neturei Karta rabbis from Britain and the United States went to Tehran to lend their support to the Iranian regime in its calls for the annihilation of Israel. The group said nothing about the Iranian regime’s repeated denials that there was a Holocaust.

This week, the University of California at Irvine Muslim Student Union is sponsoring a series of lectures under the heading, “Holocaust in the Holy Land” and “Israel: The Fourth Reich.” Featuring activists committed to Israel’s destruction, its lead speaker is a Jew named Norman Finkelstein, a professor who devotes his life to attacking Jewish communities and Israel. Also appearing is Rabbi Yisroel Dovid Weiss from the above-mentioned Neturei Karta.

Tony Judt, a widely published New York University professor, recently wrote that “Israel, in short, is an anachronism,” and should therefore cease to exist. The Jews of Israel should live under Arab/Muslim rule. Note that of all the countries of the world, Judt — who the Jewish newspaper The Forward identified as “raised in the heavily Jewish East End section of London by a mother whose parents had immigrated from Russia and a Belgian father who descended from a line of Lithuanian rabbis” — has advocated the disappearance of one country, the Jewish one. Why, for example, does Judt not write that Pakistan, a Muslim state carved out of India, is an “anachronism”?

Jews siding with the Jews’ enemies or even actually fomenting Jew-hatred has a history that long predates Chomsky, Finkelstein, leftist Jewish professors and the Neturei Karta. Karl Marx, though baptized a Christian, was the grandson of two Orthodox rabbis but wrote one of the most anti-Semitic tracts of the 19th century, “On the Jewish Question.” In it he wrote, among other anti-Semitic charges, that “Money is the jealous god of Israel, beside which no other god may exist.”

How is one to explain these Jews who work to hurt Jews?

I think the primary explanations are psychological. As I wrote in a previous column, it is almost impossible to overstate the pathological effects of thousands of years of murder of Jews — culminating in the Nazi Holocaust, when nearly all Jews on the European continent were murdered — have had on most Jews.

It is not coincidental that Norman Finkelstein’s parents went through the Holocaust or that Yisroel Dovid Weiss’s grandparents were murdered in the Holocaust. But even Jews who lost no relatives in the Holocaust fear another outbreak of anti-Jewish violence, and given the Nazi-like anti-Semitism in the Muslim world today, that is not exactly paranoia.

One way to deal with this is to side with the enemy. Consciously or not, the Jew who sides with those dedicated to murdering Jews feels that he will be spared. He becomes the “good Jew” in the anti-Semites’ eyes. How else to explain the visit of a Jew named Noam Chomsky to Lebanon to support Hezbollah or the fact that Chomsky wrote the foreword to a French book denying the Holocaust? How else to explain Norman Finkelstein telling cheering German audiences that the Jewish state is morally the same as the Nazis? How else to explain rabbis visiting Tehran to extol the Holocaust-denying regime of the Islamic Republic of Iran that seeks to exterminate Israel?

The other psychological explanation is related. The Jew — specifically the radical Jew — who sympathizes with Jew-haters wishes to announce to the world that he is not really like other Jews. While the other Jews are moored in provincial Jewish ethnic or religious identity, he is a world citizen who no more identifies with the Jews’ fate than with the fate of Iroquois Indians.

The prevalence of Jew-hating Jews would be no more than an interesting study of psychopathology were it not for one additional fact: All these [born-] Jews (except for the fringe Neturei Karta rabbis) also hate America. And they do the same damage to this country — aiding the enemies of America just as they do the enemies of the Jews.

By Caroline B. Glick
Jerusalem Post

You have to give them credit. The Palestinians outdid themselves this week. In the framework of the maelstrom over the presumed financial crisis of the Hamas-led PA, the supposedly “moderate” Fatah organization, led by supposedly “moderate” PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas, decided to threaten America and Europe. In a leaflet published by Fatah’s Aksa Martyrs Brigades in Gaza, the group announced, “We won’t remain idle in the face of the siege imposed on the Palestinian people by Israel, the US and other countries.” They went on to threaten, “We will strike at the economic and civilian interests of these countries, here and abroad.”

On Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, the announcement was greeted by many with contempt and anger. This, of course, is a remarkable combination the week before a scheduled vote on legislation that would bar all direct and indirect US assistance to the PA.

Since 1994, the PA has always been supposedly on the brink of a financial and humanitarian catastrophe. But what is interesting about the current financial crisis is Abbas’s behavior. In a departure from his normal diffidence, this week Fatah leader Abbas did not try to soften the impression that his underlings sought to make on the West. Rather, he strengthened it.

In a speech before the European Parliament in Strasbourg, Abbas warned that if the EU did not renew its underwriting of the PA’s budget “there will be an explosion of anger, and this would lead to a chaotic situation of which we cannot foresee the results.” Translated into regular English, Abbas told his European audience: “Your money or your life.”

Yet even as he was directly blackmailing the Europeans, Abbas didn’t forget his manners. In a style that befits Yasser Arafat’s deputy of some 40 years, Abbas provided his victims with the opportunity to feel good about giving in to his threats. If you give me your protection money, he said, you will be able to wrap yourselves in the robes of the saviors of the poor, popular Palestinian people by preventing a “humanitarian disaster.”

And so, from the editorial board of Ha’aretz to the continental press, all the enlightened humanitarians now express their deep concern for the fate of the PA’s 165,000 employees who have not received salaries for nearly two whole months. Human rights organizations from the UN to Amnesty International have expressed their deep-seated fears for the fate of the poor Palestinians who haven’t been paid.

The thing of it is that for all of their shrieks and whines, there has never been a group of more self-sufficient people on the verge of a humanitarian disaster than the Palestinians. They’re swimming in money. If the PA suffers from a “humanitarian disaster” it will be wholly and completely self-induced. Since its establishment in 1994, the PA has received more aid per capita than any other group of people in the world has ever received — more than the victims of genocide in Sudan or Rwanda, more that the victims of the tsunami in Asia, more than the Iraqis or the Afghans — more than anyone. As the researcher Arlene Kushner pointed out in an article published this week by Ynet those miserable unpaid PA employees include some 4,000 Palestinian terrorists who Abbas placed on the PA payroll. Terrorists sitting in Israeli prisons get $4 million a month. Several million more go to paying the families of dead terrorists. Kushner quoted former PA and Fatah strongman Muhammad Dahlan admitting that of the $10 billion in international aid that the Palestinians have received over the past 12 years, some $5b. has gone missing.

Abbas, who politely warns against “explosions,” himself controls up to $1b. that he prefers not to use to save his people from that “humanitarian disaster” he’s so bent out of shape about. As Kushner reminds us, in 2002, Salam Fayyad, who then served as the PA’s finance minister, set up the Palestinian Investment Fund (PIF) in an attempt to prevent Arafat from absconding with all the PA’s money. At least $700m. should still be deposited in the PIF which had been valued at $1b. in recent months.

Abbas, who bemoans the poor Palestinian doctors and teachers that have not received their March salaries, decided last summer — against the expressed warnings of the International Monetary Fund — to give significant pay increases to the PA’s employees. Civil servants were given raises of some 15-20 percent and militia members were given raises of 30%-40%. Kushner notes that at the time of Arafat’s death in November 2004, his grieving widow Suha refused to unplug his respirator until Abbas and then PA prime minister Ahmed Qurei agreed to her demands for a significant cut of her husband’s personal wealth which was assessed at some $3.1b. Apparently it hasn’t occurred to anyone that Arafat might have liked to use that money to avert a “humanitarian disaster” among his beloved people.

EVEN WITHOUT Kushner’s data, the Palestinians themselves demonstrated this week their contempt for the West and its “humanitarians” who concern themselves with the Palestinians’ dire financial straits. On Wednesday, the PA deployed its newest 3,000-man militia. The militia, comprised mainly of Hamas terror operatives and operatives from the Popular Resistance Committees made up of Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Fatah terrorists, made its first appearance in Gaza. Its troops were all decked out in new uniforms and shiny rifles.

Perhaps all 3,000 are volunteers. Perhaps the men paid for their own uniforms and weapons. If there are Palestinian patients dying because their hospitals can’t afford to maintain dialysis equipment, maybe the PA should be asking the new Hamas militia for a loan or a contribution.

If the deployment of its newest army weren’t enough to send a clear signal of its sentiments to its deeply concerned donors, the Hamas-led PA appointed Popular Resistance Committees commander Jamal Abu Samadana to command the new force. Samadana also commanded the terror attack against US Embassy personnel in Gaza in October 2003.

While the Palestinians’ supporters in Europe and Israel still refuse to acknowledge what the Palestinians are clearly signaling with their newest armed force, Arafat’s former paymaster Fuad Shubaki, now in Israeli custody, openly admits that under Arafat the PA siphoned off millions of dollars from the tax revenues that Israel transferred to it and millions more in international assistance to fund terrorist cells and operations.

These Israeli leftists and Europeans unabashedly describe themselves as humanitarians and urge the payment of salaries of people whose job it is to kill them. For their part, the Palestinians couldn’t be any clearer. As a spokesman for Fatah’s Abu Rish brigades (also commanded by Abu Samadana) put it this week, if the money doesn’t start flowing again, the Palestinians will open a “new intifada,” which will be a “merciless intifada that will destroy everything.”

PERHAPS THE most distinguishing group characteristic of the Palestinians is the fact that no matter what they do or say, they never have to pay a price for the choices they make. In spite of their blackmail, threats and corruption, their war for the annihilation of Israel, and perhaps above all, their mocking contempt for the collective honor of Israel and the West, the Palestinians’ victims line up to support them in their “just struggle against the illegal Zionist occupation.”

This fact was made breathtakingly clear at the end of April when, in a move that can be likened to a metaphorical rape of the concept of “international law,” Amnesty International published a statement defining as a breach of the Fourth Geneva Convention the US, Israeli and EU decision to abide by their laws (and international law forbidding aid to terror organizations) and end assistance to the Hamas-led PA. Not surprisingly, Amnesty cited no clause in the Convention that supports the preposterous claim that the contracting parties to the convention are obligated — or even permitted — to fund terrorist organizations. What is notable here is that Amnesty has determined a new standard that claims that taking steps to force the PA to be responsible for its actions is an offense against the law of nations.

Not to be outdone by Amnesty, the EU is fervently brainstorming to find a way to finance the Hamas-led PA’s budget in spite of the fact that its own laws prohibit financing Hamas. In the wake of Abbas’s “explosion” speech, the EU’s External Affairs Commissioner Benita Ferrero-Waldner said, “We are well aware of the urgency of the situation in the Palestinian territories. We have to get the parameters right and then we have to get the donors and the partners to accept what we will set up.”

For its part, what most concerns the World Bank these days is that the US and Israel might place sanctions on companies or agencies that continue to do business with the PA. Because of this, the bank is demanding that Israel and the US provide “explicit assurances” that they will not impose sanctions on such companies or agencies.

In truth, as far as Israel is concerned the World Bank and the EU have little to worry about. In the aftermath of last week’s meeting of the so-called Quartet, where it was agreed that the EU would formulate a way to bypass European and US laws prohibiting the transfer of monies to Hamas, both Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni and Defense Minister Amir Peretz announced varying degrees of willingness to resume tax revenue transfers to the PA in some form of “humanitarian assistance,” to the PA.

Although on Sunday the government did not vote to resume such financial transfers that amount to some $50m. per month, members of Congress have reported that Israeli officials were encouraging them to water down their draft legislation that will place a total ban on direct and indirect assistance to the PA. These Israeli government officials maintain that Israel is interested in the transfer of “humanitarian aid,” in the hopes of averting that much feared “humanitarian disaster.” Many members of Congress and senators who have received such entreaties from Israeli officials and been urged to support Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s plan to withdraw from Judea and Samaria and parts of Jerusalem are puzzled by what they view as an Israeli attempt to finance and surrender to Hamas.

In a lecture last week in New York sponsored by the Zionist Organization of America, former IDF chief of general staff Lt. Gen. (res.) Moshe Ya’alon explained that Israel suffers from a weak national leadership. In his words, “We don’t need Chamberlains, we need Churchills.” Ya’alon further explained that Israelis had been manipulated by Palestinian lies that have caused us “to ignore reality.”

As the members of Congress listen to Olmert address them next Wednesday; and as they vote on the proposed ban on aid to the Hamas-led PA, they would do well to keep Ya’alon’s message in mind and not fall into the same trap.

Why is America so delicate with the enemy?
By Shelby Steele.

There is something rather odd in the way America has come to fight its wars since World War II.

For one thing, it is now unimaginable that we would use anything approaching the full measure of our military power (the nuclear option aside) in the wars we fight. And this seems only reasonable given the relative weakness of our Third World enemies in Vietnam and in the Middle East. But the fact is that we lost in Vietnam, and today, despite our vast power, we are only slogging along—if admirably—in Iraq against a hit-and-run insurgency that cannot stop us even as we seem unable to stop it. Yet no one—including, very likely, the insurgents themselves–believes that America lacks the raw power to defeat this insurgency if it wants to. So clearly it is America that determines the scale of this war. It is America, in fact, that fights so as to make a little room for an insurgency.

Certainly since Vietnam, America has increasingly practiced a policy of minimalism and restraint in war. And now this unacknowledged policy, which always makes a space for the enemy, has us in another long and rather passionless war against a weak enemy.

Why this new minimalism in war?

It began, I believe, in a late-20th-century event that transformed the world more profoundly than the collapse of communism: the world-wide collapse of white supremacy as a source of moral authority, political legitimacy and even sovereignty. This idea had organized the entire world, divided up its resources, imposed the nation-state system across the globe, and delivered the majority of the world’s population into servitude and oppression. After World War II, revolutions across the globe, from India to Algeria and from Indonesia to the American civil rights revolution, defeated the authority inherent in white supremacy, if not the idea itself. And this defeat exacted a price: the West was left stigmatized by its sins. Today, the white West—like Germany after the Nazi defeat—lives in a kind of secular penitence in which the slightest echo of past sins brings down withering condemnation. There is now a cloud over white skin where there once was unquestioned authority.

I call this white guilt not because it is guilt of conscience but because people stigmatized with moral crimes—here racism and imperialism—lack moral authority and so act guiltily whether they feel guilt or not.

They struggle, above all else, to dissociate themselves from the past sins they are stigmatized with. When they behave in ways that invoke the memory of those sins, they must labor to prove that they have not relapsed into their group’s former sinfulness. So when America—the greatest embodiment of Western power—goes to war in Third World Iraq, it must also labor to dissociate that action from the great Western sin of imperialism. Thus, in Iraq we are in two wars, one against an insurgency and another against the past—two fronts, two victories to win, one military, the other a victory of dissociation.

The collapse of white supremacy—and the resulting white guilt—introduced a new mechanism of power into the world: stigmatization with the evil of the Western past. And this stigmatization is power because it affects the terms of legitimacy for Western nations and for their actions in the world. In Iraq, America is fighting as much for the legitimacy of its war effort as for victory in war. In fact, legitimacy may be the more important goal. If a military victory makes us look like an imperialist nation bent on occupying and raping the resources of a poor brown nation, then victory would mean less because it would have no legitimacy. Europe would scorn. Conversely, if America suffered a military loss in Iraq but in so doing dispelled the imperialist stigma, the loss would be seen as a necessary sacrifice made to restore our nation’s legitimacy. Europe’s halls of internationalism would suddenly open to us.

Because dissociation from the racist and imperialist stigma is so tied to legitimacy in this age of white guilt, America’s act of going to war can have legitimacy only if it seems to be an act of social work—something that uplifts and transforms the poor brown nation (thus dissociating us from the white exploitations of old). So our war effort in Iraq is shrouded in a new language of social work in which democracy is cast as an instrument of social transformation bringing new institutions, new relations between men and women, new ideas of individual autonomy, new and more open forms of education, new ways of overcoming poverty—war as the Great Society.

This does not mean that President Bush is insincere in his desire to bring democracy to Iraq, nor is it to say that democracy won’t ultimately be socially transformative in Iraq. It’s just that today the United States cannot go to war in the Third World simply to defeat a dangerous enemy.

White guilt makes our Third World enemies into colored victims, people whose problems—even the tyrannies they live under—were created by the historical disruptions and injustices of the white West. We must “understand” and pity our enemy even as we fight him. And, though Islamic extremism is one of the most pernicious forms of evil opportunism that has ever existed, we have felt compelled to fight it with an almost managerial minimalism that shows us to be beyond the passions of war—and thus well dissociated from the avariciousness of the white supremacist past.

Anti-Americanism, whether in Europe or on the American left, works by the mechanism of white guilt. It stigmatizes America with all the imperialistic and racist ugliness of the white Western past so that America becomes a kind of straw man, a construct of Western sin. (The Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo prisons were the focus of such stigmatization campaigns.) Once the stigma is in place, one need only be anti-American in order to be “good,” in order to have an automatic moral legitimacy and power in relation to America. (People as seemingly disparate as President Jacques Chirac and the Rev. Al Sharpton are devoted pursuers of the moral high ground to be had in anti-Americanism.) This formula is the most dependable source of power for today’s international left. Virtue and power by mere anti-Americanism. And it is all the more appealing since, unlike real virtues, it requires no sacrifice or effort—only outrage at every slight echo of the imperialist past.

Today words like “power” and “victory” are so stigmatized with Western sin that, in many quarters, it is politically incorrect even to utter them. For the West, “might” can never be right. And victory, when won by the West against a Third World enemy, is always oppression. But, in reality, military victory is also the victory of one idea and the defeat of another. Only American victory in Iraq defeats the idea of Islamic extremism. But in today’s atmosphere of Western contrition, it is impolitic to say so.

America and the broader West are now going through a rather tender era, a time when Western societies have very little defense against the moral accusations that come from their own left wings and from those vast stretches of nonwhite humanity that were once so disregarded.

Europeans are utterly confounded by the swelling Muslim populations in their midst. America has run from its own mounting immigration problem for decades, and even today, after finally taking up the issue, our government seems entirely flummoxed. White guilt is a vacuum of moral authority visited on the present by the shames of the past. In the abstract it seems a slight thing, almost irrelevant, an unconvincing proposition. Yet a society as enormously powerful as America lacks the authority to ask its most brilliant, wealthy and superbly educated minority students to compete freely for college admission with poor whites who lack all these things. Just can’t do it.

Whether the problem is race relations, education, immigration or war, white guilt imposes so much minimalism and restraint that our worst problems tend to linger and deepen. Our leaders work within a double bind. If they do what is truly necessary to solve a problem—win a war, fix immigration—they lose legitimacy.

To maintain their legitimacy, they practice the minimalism that makes problems linger. What but minimalism is left when you are running from stigmatization as a “unilateralist cowboy”? And where is the will to truly regulate the southern border when those who ask for this are slimed as bigots? This is how white guilt defines what is possible in America. You go at a problem until you meet stigmatization, then you retreat into minimalism.

Possibly white guilt’s worst effect is that it does not permit whites—and nonwhites—to appreciate something extraordinary: the fact that whites in America, and even elsewhere in the West, have achieved a truly remarkable moral transformation. One is forbidden to speak thus, but it is simply true. There are no serious advocates of white supremacy in America today, because whites see this idea as morally repugnant. If there is still the odd white bigot out there surviving past his time, there are millions of whites who only feel goodwill toward minorities.

This is a fact that must be integrated into our public life—absorbed as new history—so that America can once again feel the moral authority to seriously tackle its most profound problems. Then, if we decide to go to war, it can be with enough ferocity to win.

By Jonathan Gurwitz
www.jewishdworldreview.com

Shortly after Hamas scored its electoral triumph in Palestinian elections in January, its official Web site carried a video message from a pair of suicide terrorists. Palestinian Media Watch offers a transcription:

“My message to the loathed Jews is that there is no god but Allah, we will chase you everywhere! We are a nation that drinks blood, and we know that there is no blood better than the blood of Jews. We will not leave you alone until we have quenched our thirst with your blood, and our children’s thirst with your blood. We will not leave until you leave the Muslim countries.

“In the name of Allah, we will destroy you, blow you up, take revenge against you, purify the land of you, pigs that have defiled our country.”

Last month, a terrorist from Islamic Jihad made good on the threat. Brave soldier that he was, he took the fight against the Zionist occupation to Tel Aviv, where he detonated his bomb among a group of families waiting in line at a fast-food stand. Nine people died; scores more were injured.

Hamas, of course, approved of the attack on falafel- and shwarma-eating civilians. A spokesman called the bloodshed a legitimate act of self-defense.

Among Israel’s initial responses was the decision to revoke the residency cards of three Hamas members of the Palestinian parliament who live in East Jerusalem. The English language daily Arab News carried a charming story that displays the political and moral asymmetries between Israel and its neighbors striving to destroy it.

“The Hamas MPs,” the Arab News reported, “plan to appeal to Israel’s Supreme Court against Israel’s decision to revoke their residency rights, the Palestinian justice minister said.”

That’s a delicious irony. The justice minister of a government committed to the destruction of Israel appealing to Israel’s high court to protect its representatives from the legal consequences of a lethal attack his government endorsed.

Hamas may have won elections. And those elections may have been legitimate.

But it does not follow that Hamas represents responsible, legitimate leadership. And it certainly does not follow that the international community is somehow obligated to finance a Hamas government when that government has reneged on the most basic pledges of its predecessors.

To overvalue those pledges — signed by Yasser Arafat on the White House lawn — does a disservice to Hamas in one respect. Arafat, from the very beginning of the so-called peace process with Israel, said two different things to two different audiences.

Speaking to the West, Arafat employed words of pragmatism and peace. But speaking in Arabic to the Arab world, he employed words of terror and unremitting violence.

Hamas leaders, unlike Arafat, have the virtue of being multilingually honest.

The imperative of governing has not moderated Hamas’ commitment to terrorism, contrary to the expectations of some wishful thinkers. Western donors are understandably turning off the aid spigot and, true to form, Islamists swimming in oil profits aren’t picking up the tab for Hamas governance.

PLO militia members who face being cut from the government payroll are getting itchy trigger fingers. And, as usual, the Palestinian people are the losers.

“There are no words to adequately condemn the despicable attack in Tel Aviv,” wrote Nazir Majali, an Arab commentator, in the Israeli daily Haaretz. “Not only because it is contrary to the interests of the Palestinian people and not only because it serves the interests of the many warmongers in our region. But rather, most importantly because of the philosophy that is behind it, a philosophy that is destroying the Palestinian people. It is a philosophy of death … a mendacious philosophy, which is fulfilled as if in the name of G-d and Islam. A racist philosophy that is based on the cruel principle of killing Jews because they are Jews.”

When a Hamas spokesman can utter words even remotely similar to those of Majali, the group will have earned the international legitimacy its leaders so desperately crave.

By Barry Rubin
www.jpost.com

At last, the ideal slogan for the Hamas government has been given us by one of the group’s main leaders, Mahmoud Zahar, buried in a speech he gave at a rally in Damascus.

“Palestine in its entirety is our land,” he explained. Not much new there.

But then he continued with a marvelous turn of phrase that explains the Hamas government and strategy, as well as the limits of its phantom “moderation”: “This does not mean that if they [Israel] withdraw from any inch of land, we will refrain from spreading our rule over it. ‘Every inch of land, without relinquishing an inch.’ This is our goal and our motto. We will never give it up.”

Those who don’t get the point might consider the pristine irony of the following transposition.

In late April, Palestinian police near the Israel-Gaza Strip border got into a battle with gunmen in two cars trying to cross the border for a terrorist operation. Three police and two gunmen were wounded and thee terrorists arrested.

The terrorists shooting at Palestinian police and trying to murder Israeli civilians were members of the Popular Resistance Committees.

WHAT A coincidence. For that organization is headed by Jamal Abu Samhadana, who is also the man chosen by the Hamas government to run all the Palestinian security forces. In other words, the terrorists and police firing at each other — the regime supposedly maintaining a cease-fire and the terrorists breaking it — are all part of one big happy family.

And even there it does not end.

For the same Popular Resistance Committees is the group that three years ago deliberately attacked a US diplomatic convoy in the Gaza Strip (which was there to interview Palestinians for scholarships) killing three American security officers. The US government demanded that the Palestinian Authority arrest and punish those responsible for the terrorist attack, but it never even tried. Here’s a crime solver’s‚ tip for Palestinian Authority detectives. If you want to track down the main culprit, take a look in the Ministry of Interior office.

Finally, after an April 18 terrorist attack in Tel Aviv, in which nine people were killed and about 60 wounded, Hamas and PA officials publicly endorsed the murders. The situation makes the PA the only open and direct terrorism-sponsoring regime in the world.

By showing its true face Hamas is sabotaging its own public relations campaign. For example, the Washington Post and New York Times, which have tried desperately at times in editorials to find some way to declare Hamas moderate, condemned it.

In the Post’s words, “Hamas chose to side with the suicide bombers” and “put [itself] on record as an outlaw.” The only way the Times could salvage its world view was to call the behavior of Hamas “not just immoral, but stupid as well,” because it delayed the creation of a Palestinian state.

It has to be understood, however, that Hamas’s goal is not to raise Palestinian living standards or create an independent state, but to fulfill the kind of program presented by Zahar. Even the Europeans have had to acknowledge this reality far more than might have been expected.

With the exception of a small grant promised by Russia, no European state is funding the PA. Japan has also cut off aid.

While Hamas has been trying to raise money, the effort has been a miserable failure so far. Only about $100 million has been pledged by Qatar and Iran. That’s not $100 million a month, mind you, but the total, enough to fund only about three weeks’ payroll for the PA.

Undoubtedly there will be more money, raised with official support in Saudi Arabia, for example, but the international Muslim support for the Hamas regime has not been impressive and Arab banks are said to be reluctant to handle PA business lest they face American retaliation.

IN TERMS of domestic Palestinian politics, tensions between Hamas and Fatah are rising. The Hamas regime can avoid problems pretty easily on this front, but the price will be doing very little. For instance, it cannot fire any of the estimated 60,000 employees of the security forces since they are virtually all Fatah supporters. The same applies to the media and all other institutions the PA controls, which in some cases have been grabbed by Fatah and PA leader Mahmoud Abbas despite the complaints of the Hamas-dominated parliament.

This is part of the logic of Abu Samhadana’s appointment. His group seems to be a coalition of Hamas and Fatah gunmen, and it is no doubt hoped that he will persuade the latter to accept Hamas leadership. That ploy will not work, though.

In addition, Hamas can pretend to be a non-terrorist group observing a cease-fire while financing and helping both the Committees and Islamic Jihad to carry out terrorist attacks.

It would be nice to say no one would be stupid enough to fall for this type of transparent trick. There are still plenty of Western politicians and intellectuals who belie that hope, but far less — and certainly far fewer national leaders — than there might be had Hamas taken lessons from Yasser Arafat on the cultivation of useful idiots.

We already knew there was little likelihood of Hamas changing its ways. Now we know it is not very good at even appearing to moderate.