Levitt Letter Extra News

By Daniel Pipes, www.JewishWorldReview.com

Startling developments in Gaza highlight the need for a change in Western policy toward this troubled territory of 1.3 million persons.

Gaza’s contemporary history began in 1948, when Egyptian forces overran the British-controlled area and Cairo sponsored the nominal “All-Palestine Government” while de facto ruling the territory as a protectorate. That arrangement ended in 1967, when the Israeli leadership defensively took control of Gaza, reluctantly inheriting a densely populated, poor, and hostile territory.

Nonetheless, for twenty years Gazans largely acquiesced to Israeli rule. Only with the intifada beginning in 1987 did Gazans assert themselves; its violence and political costs convinced Israelis to open a diplomatic process that culminated with the Oslo accords of 1993. The Gaza-Jericho Agreement of 1994 then off-loaded the territory to Yasir Arafat’s Fatah.

Those agreements were supposed to bring stability and prosperity to Gaza. Returning businessmen would jump-start the economy. The Palestinian Authority would repress Islamists and suppress terrorists. Yasir Arafat proclaimed he would “build a Singapore” there, actually an apt comparison, for independent Singapore began inauspiciously in 1965, poor and ethnically conflict-ridden.

Of course, Arafat was no Lee Kuan Yew. Gazan conditions deteriorated and Islamists, far from being shut out, rose to power: Hamas won the 2006 elections and in 2007 seized full control of Gaza. The economy shrunk. Rather than stop terrorism, Fatah joined in. Gazans began launching rockets over the border in 2002, increasing their frequency, range, and deadliness with time, eventually rendering the Israeli town of Sderot nearly uninhabitable.

Faced with a lethal Gaza, the Israeli government of Ehud Olmert decided to isolate it, hoping that economic hardship would cause Gazans to blame Hamas and turn against it. To an extent, the squeeze worked, for Hamas’ popularity did fall. The Israelis also conducted raids against terrorists to stop the rocket attacks. Still, the assaults continued; so, on January 17, the Israelis escalated by cutting fuel deliveries and closing the borders. “As far as I’m concerned,” Olmert announced, “Gaza residents will walk, without gas for their cars, because they have a murderous, terrorist regime that doesn’t let people in southern Israel live in peace.”

That sounded reasonable but the press reported heart-rending stories about Gazans suffering and dying due to the cutoffs that immediately swamped the Israeli position. Appeals and denunciations from around the world demanded that Israelis ease up.

Then, on January 23, Hamas took matters into its own hands with a clever surprise tactic: after months of preparation, it pulled down large segments of the 12-km long, 13-meter high border wall separating Gaza from Egypt, simultaneously winning goodwill from Gazans and dragging Cairo into the picture. Politically, Egyptian authorities had no choice but uneasily to absorb 38 wounded border guards and permit hundreds of thousands of persons temporarily to enter the far northeast of their country.

Israelis had brought themselves to this completely avoidable predicament through incompetence - signing bad agreements, turning Gaza over to the thug Arafat, expelling their own citizens, permitting premature elections, acquiescing to the Hamas conquest, and abandoning control of Gaza’s western border.

What might Western states now do? The border breaching, ironically, offers an opportunity to clean up a mess.

Washington and other capitals should declare the experiment in Gazan self-rule a failure and press President Husni Mubarak of Egypt to help, perhaps providing Gaza with additional land or even annexing it as a province. This would revert to the situation of 1948-67, except this time Cairo would not keep Gaza at arm’s length but take responsibility for it.

Culturally, this connection is a natural: Gazans speak a colloquial Arabic identical to the Egyptians of Sinai, have more family ties to Egypt than to the West Bank, and are economically more tied to Egypt (recall the many smugglers’ tunnels). Further, Hamas derives from an Egyptian organization, the Muslim Brethren. As David Warren of the Ottawa Citizen notes, calling Gazans “Palestinians” is less accurate than politically correct.

Why not formalize the Egyptian connection? Among other benefits, this would (1) end the rocket fire against Israel, (2) expose the superficiality of Palestinian nationalism, an ideology under a century old, and perhaps (3) break the Arab-Israeli logjam.

It’s hard to divine what benefit American taxpayers have received for the US$65 billion they have lavished on Egypt since 1948; but Egypt’s absorbing Gaza might justify their continuing to shell out $1.8 billion a year.

By Rory Kress, Associated Press

Experts have restored a 1,400-year-old glass mosaic glowing in gold, recovered from a site next to the Mediterranean Sea, the Israel Antiquities Authority announced.

The mosaic panel is believed to be the only one in the world, the antiquities authority said, citing the quality of its preservation given its age and its craftsmanship indicating Christian origins.

A glass panel discovered in the ancient ruins of Caesarea in northern Israel, is seen here in an unknown location.
(AP Photo/ Israel Antiquities Authority, Nicky Davidov)

“It’s a unique find, a piece of art,” Joseph Patrich, professor of archaeology at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. “It’s in its original state,” Patrich said, because the panel fell face down, protecting its green, blue, and gold facade from debris and damage.

The mosaic was discovered in 2005 in Caesarea, an ancient city on the Mediterranean coast known for its ancient Roman, Byzantine, and Crusader ruins. During excavation of a palace, the original floor was exposed, revealing the panel lying face down in one of the larger paved mosaics.

Detaching it from the floor in a risky operation, conservationists were then faced with the task of removing centuries of dirt and fire damage left from the destruction of the palace in the late Byzantine Era in late 6th or early 7th century A.D., Patrich said.

The mosaic is particularly important because the small colored tiles forming it feature two styles of tiling: gold glass and the more traditional multicolored, opaque glass commonly associated with mosaics, he said. The tiles depict two motifs: crosses and eight-petaled rosettes.

The owner and origin of the palace in which the panel was found are unclear — all that is known is that the residents were likely Christian, experts said. The original role of the restored panel also remains unknown.

By Jeff Jacoby, The Boston Globe

The “Qatif girl” won a reprieve. Last December, Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah pardoned the young woman, who was sentenced to 200 lashes and six months in prison after she pressed charges against seven men who had raped her and a male acquaintance in 2006. Two weeks earlier, Sudan’s president extended a similar reprieve to Gillian Gibbons, the British teacher convicted of insulting Islam because her 7-year-old students named a teddy bear Muhammad. Gibbons had been sentenced to prison, but government-organized street demonstrators were loudly demanding her execution.

In January 2007, Nazanin Fatehi was released from an Iranian jail after a death sentence against her was revoked. She had originally been convicted of murder for fatally stabbing a man when he and two others attempted to rape her and her niece in a park. (Had she yielded to the rapists, she could have been flogged or stoned for engaging in non-marital sex.)

The sparing of these women was very welcome news, of course, and it was not coincidental that each case had triggered an international furor. But for every “Qatif girl” or Nazanin who is saved, there are far too many other Muslim girls and women for whom deliverance never comes.

No international furor saved Aqsa Parvez, a Toronto teenager, whose father was charged last December with strangling her to death because she refused to wear a hijab. “She just wanted to look like everyone else,” one of Aqsa’s friends told the National Post, “and I guess her dad had a problem with that.”

No reprieve came for Banaz Mahmod, either. She was 20, a Kurdish immigrant to Britain, whose father and uncle had her killed in 2006 after she left an abusive arranged marriage and fell in love with a man not from the family’s village in Kurdistan. Banaz was choked to death with a bootlace, stuffed into a suitcase, and buried in a garden 70 miles away.

More than 25 such “honor killings” have been confirmed in Britain’s Muslim community in recent years. Many more are suspected.

There has been no storm of outrage about the intimidation and murder in Basra, Iraq, of women who wear Western-style clothing. Iraqi police say that more than 40 women have been killed so far this year by Islamists; the bodies are often left in garbage dumps with notes accusing the victims of “un-Islamic behavior.”

By Western standards, the subjugation of women by Muslim fanatics, and the sometimes pathological Islamist obsession with female sexuality, are unthinkable. Time and again they lead to shocking acts of violence and depravity:

In Pakistan, a tribal council ordered a woman to be gang-raped as punishment for her brother’s supposed liaison with a woman from another tribe.

In San Francisco, a young Muslim woman was shot dead after she uncovered her hair and put on makeup in order to be a maid of honor at a friend’s wedding.

In Tehran, a father beheaded his 7-year-old daughter because he suspected that she had been raped; he said he acted “to defend my honor, fame, and dignity.”

In Saudi Arabia, the Islamic police prevented schoolgirls from leaving a burning building because they were not wearing headscarves and abayas [those garbage-bag-like dresses]; 15 of the girls died in the inferno.

The president of Cairo’s Al-Azhar University, a renowned center of Islamic learning, described the proper method of wife-beating in a television interview: “It’s not really beating,” Sheikh Ahmad Al-Tayyeb explained on Egyptian television. “It’s more like punching.”

When the Taliban seized control of Afghanistan in 1996, the repression of women was among their first priorities. They issued a decree forbidding women to leave their homes, with the result that work and schooling for women came to a halt, destroying the country’s healthcare system, civil service, and elementary education.

“Forty percent of the doctors, half of the government workers, and seven out of 10 teachers were women,” Lawrence Wright observed in “The Looming Tower,” his Pulitzer Prize-winning history of al-Qaeda. “Under the Taliban, many of them would become beggars.”

Women are not the only victims of this rampant misogyny. Mohammed Halim, a 46-year-old Afghan schoolteacher, was dragged from his family and horribly murdered last year — disemboweled and then dismembered — for defying orders to stop educating girls.

All these are only examples — the tip of a dreadful iceberg that will never be demolished until Muslims by the millions rise up against it. As for the rest of us, we too have an obligation to raise our voices. It took a worldwide outcry to spare “Qatif girl” and Nazanin. But there are countless others like them, and our silence may seal their fate.

By Chris Brooke, www.DailyMail.co.uk

A shocking sing-along children’s DVD which glorifies suicide bombing is being investigated by anti-terrorist police after being found on sale in one of Britain’s terrorist hotbeds.

The disc - part of an Egyptian-made series - is on sale in West Yorkshire, where three of the July 7 bombers lived, and is aimed at youngsters from the local Muslim community.

Introduced by a cute cartoon chicken, it contains three songs in Arabic which are illustrated with a video story. But any impression of its being an innocent music DVD is immediately dispelled by a song with English subtitles about two children who lose their mother when she blows herself up in a suicide bomb attack.

Appealing to children: The cartoon image appears at the beginning of the DVD

The song, sung as if told by the bomber’s daughter, ends with the young Arabic girl vowing to follow in her mother’s footsteps.

It is believed to have been inspired by Palestinian Reem-al-Reyashi, a 22-year-old mother of two who killed four Israelis when she blew herself up at a Gaza Strip checkpoint on January 14, 2004.

In the DVD an Arab woman is seen playing with her two children. She then makes a bomb out of sticks of dynamite in the bedroom as her young daughter enters. The woman leaves home with dynamite tucked into her dress and blows herself up after being challenged by soldiers leaving her children and husband to learn of her death on TV.

Seemingly innocent: But the film develops an alarming theme.

To the sounds of haunting music there are graveyard scenes, along with pictures of the dead bomber looking serene and dressed in white.

Her daughter finds a stick of dynamite in her mother’s wardrobe. The girl, aged about five or six, turns to the camera with the subtitles: “My love will not be by words. I will follow my mother’s steps.”

The second song, entitled Tear, has a catchy chorus of children chanting a song set to images of women and children crying and flames from explosions.

Over scenes of men fighting and throwing grenades, a young Arab girl sings: “Daddy return to us, We want you beside us, Fear occupied our hearts, And there is no one with us, Oh Allah! You are our Saviour…”

In the third song, Flowers, a group of orphaned children chant a five-minute tribute to Islam and sing about the plight of the Palestinian people.

A copy of the DVD was bought in Bradford. It has been passed to counter-terrorism police who said they were investigating to see if any offences had been committed.

The DVD box lists the distributor as the Abrar Book Shop in Hyde Park, Leeds. The shop is less than half a mile from the flat where the 7/7 bombers assembled their explosives.

Disturbing: A child holds a stick of dynamite in the sing-along DVD for would-be suicide bombers.

Philip Davies, Tory MP for Shipley, who was given the DVD by a local resident, said: “My worry is how many people have had access to this kind of material and how many children may have already been influenced by it.

“It’s outrageous that this kind of material is so readily available in parts of West Yorkshire and it beggars belief that somebody is prepared to proudly proclaim that they distribute this material.

The MP contacted police and was told that the disc had been sold at a mosque in the city. “I thought it was sick and totally and utterly unacceptable,” he said. “It seems to be directed at children and I find it quite disturbing.”

He added: “It strikes me as being incitement to terrorism. I hope that the people that distribute the material will be arrested and charged.”

Mr. Davies said he would be writing to the Home Secretary asking what support the Government was giving to the police to locate and eliminate this kind of material.

The head of West Yorkshire’s counter terrorism unit, Detective Chief Superintendent John Parkinson, said: “The DVD has been initially reviewed and officers are carrying out further inquiries regarding its content to establish whether or not any offences have been committed.”

Yorkshire Muslim peer and shadow communities secretary Sayeeda Warsi said the authorities should not be afraid to come down with the full force of the law on extremists.

“I find it deeply disturbing if this kind of material is available and aimed at children so young,” she said.

“As well as winning over the hearts and minds of our own communities in order to deal with perverted terrorist organisations, we should always stamp down on anything that is nothing short of criminal, using the full force of the law.”

By Shirley Ortega Beamer (a 60 year-old Hispanic woman from Colorado), www.WorldNetDaily.com

Let me give you six biblical reasons for opposing the legalization of illegal aliens:

1. Greed & Envy: Illegal aliens are pouring into the United States because they ”covet thy neighbor’s goods” – God’s 10th Commandment (Ex. 20 and Deut. 5)

Mexicans constitute about 90 percent of the illegal aliens in question. They certainly are not aliens escaping a leftist regime, starvation, political annihilation, or religious persecution. They just want what we have without earning it. They are thieves and lawbreakers who think they are ”entitled” to live like Americans without being Americans.

On the same scale, American businesses are advocating this invasion. These businessmen are greedy vultures willing to eat this country alive just to line their pockets regardless of the long-term consequences to this nation.

2. The United States is a sovereign nation: God Almighty owns all of the land; yet, He recognized the sovereignty of nations and determined where He wanted each of us to be born. The Bible says, ”And He has made from one blood every nation of men to dwell on all the face of the earth, and has determined their preappointed times and the boundaries of their dwellings.” (Acts 17:26)

The United States has laws in place to deny or permit entrance to whomever it pleases. It has the right to physically enforce or bar entry to any invaders to this country. Unfortunately, we have a president and congress who are kowtowing to foreign governments like Mexico’s for their own perverted interests in building a One World Order. Our government officials and illegal aliens are both guilty of lawlessness and God says, ”He who justifies the wicked, and he who condemns the just, Both of them alike are an abomination to the Lord.” (Proverbs 17:15)

3. They are an economic drain: Illegal aliens are a financial drain on this country. They strain our hospitals, welfare system, schools, tax-paid housing, school lunch programs, and jails. Illegal aliens from third-world countries are the major source for the growing infestation of bedbugs and the return of such diseases as tuberculosis and leprosy previously thought eradicated in our country. Few illegals pay taxes or file returns except to get money back through the Earned Income Credit Act even though they haven’t paid a dime into the system. Being a freeloader is wrong, for the Bible says, ”For even when we were with you, this we commanded you, that if any would not work, neither should he eat.” (2 Thess. 3:10)

4. They are a barrier to God’s blessings on this country: The U. S. was formed as a Christian nation and, until recently, staunchly supported Israel. The result was God’s uncommon favor and blessings upon America. We were living testimony of the truth of God’s promise to Abram saying, ”I will bless those who bless you, and I will curse him who curses you; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” (Gen. 12:3) When illegal aliens come here, they bring their religions with them. Some of those do not support Israel.

5. Illegal aliens are rebellious: They thumb their noses at our laws, ordinances, and regulations. Consider the vast number of illegal aliens who drive unabashedly without driver’s licenses, car insurance, license plates, and who don’t even know the rules of the road. They violate local ordinances by renting apartments or houses and sharing them with multiple families. They blatantly use our facilities without paying for them because they don’t want to or have to. God said, ”For rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft, and stubbornness is as iniquity and idolatry.” 1 Samuel 15:23.

6. Mexicans are not the ”New Israel and the U. S. is not their Promised Land”: Church and sympathizers use the analogy that these aliens are like Ruth of the Bible. Ruth was a blessing to Israel; however, these illegal aliens are not a blessing to this country. Ruth was an immigrant who adopted the ways and laws of her new people instead of trying to make that nation like Moab – ”your people shall be my people and your God my God.” (Ruth 1:16)

Americans are repeatedly told that illegals do the jobs that Americans won’t do. What a lie! Politically correct governments and businesses hire illegal aliens instead of Americans for various jobs, including city, county, state, and federal jobs. These ”good folk” simply accept a TIN number instead of a Social Security number and don’t bother to check them out before hiring them.

If illegal aliens want to become Americans, let them go to the back of the line and follow the right procedures for entry. Let them learn the language and make a personal commitment to leave their old country behind them instead of trying to make this country an extension of theirs. As God said, ”And when a stranger dwells with you and wants to keep the Passover to the Lord, let all his males be circumcised, and then let him come near and keep it; and he shall be as a native of the land. For no uncircumcised person shall eat it.” (Exodus 12:48) This Scripture can be symbolically translated to say, he who wants to be an American needs to follow the laws and customs of the land!

By Frank J. Gaffney Jr., www.WashingtonTimes.com

When the history of the George W. Bush administration is written, one of the most important questions to be addressed will surely be: Why did a president who repeatedly talked about the ideology animating our enemies in this “War on Terror” do so little to wage an effective “War of Ideas” against it?

The good news is that historians — and the rest of us — have just been given an insight into that highly consequential disconnect. The bad news is that the incident suggests a problem of such ominous proportions that it raises questions as to whether our government is being rendered incapable of fighting successfully an ideology best described as Islamofascism at home, to say nothing of abroad.

The incident involves the firing last week of the Pentagon’s foremost authority on the Islamofascist theo-political-legal code known as sharia. According to Bill Gertz, The Washington Times’s national security correspondent, Stephen Coughlin, a major in the U.S. Army Reserves who has served as a civilian lawyer to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, fell “afoul of a key aide to [Deputy Secretary of Defense Gordon] England, Hasham Islam.”

Unnamed Pentagon sources told Mr. Gertz that Mr. Islam, employed by the deputy secretary to help with Muslim outreach, “confronted Mr. Coughlin during a meeting several weeks ago when Mr. Islam sought to have Mr. Coughlin soften his views on Islamist extremism.” At issue evidently was Maj. Coughlin’s fastidious chronicling of the true nature and activities of organizations such as the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA). In briefings prepared for the U.S. military, he had concluded that ISNA is one of a number of front organizations for the Muslim Brotherhood — a particularly insidious wing of the Islamofascist movement that shares with its ideological soul mates a commitment to imposing sharia worldwide, albeit putatively through nonviolent means.

Interestingly, the Justice Department arrived at a similar conclusion, as evidenced in its designation of ISNA as an unindicted co-conspirator in the recent trial of the Holy Land Foundation. The latter operated as an Islamist “charity” in Houston until it was shut down by the government after September 11, 2001, and charged with providing funds to Hamas, a Palestinian terrorist organization. While the lengthy proceeding resulted in a mistrial (due, it appears, to misconduct by a self-professed Hamas-sympathizing juror), documents placed in the record by prosecutors are damning with respect to connections between Saudi-financed influence operations like the ISNA and the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) on the one hand and various bad actors around the globe on the other.

Evidently, however, the Islamic Society of North America is one of the organizations with whom Hasham Islam has encouraged Pentagon outreach. When Steve Coughlin refused to modify his assessment of the organization, Mr. Islam reportedly accused him of being “a Christian zealot with a pen.” Such a description calls to mind the terms “racist” and “bigot” used to silence others who have raised alarms about efforts by the Muslim Brotherhood and its fellow travelers to penetrate our government and society.

Thus branded, Maj. Coughlin has become “too hot” for the Joint Chiefs and is now what Mr. Gertz calls “a casualty of the War of Ideas.” Perhaps he will receive its first Purple Heart.

If allowed to stand, the effect of Maj. Coughlin’s dismissal would be a surgical strike on a man who is arguably one of the most knowledgeable opponents of sharia — not only in the Defense Department, but inside the entire U.S. government.

Sadly, it was but the latest of a series of successes for our enemies in the undeclared war against Islamofascism, including the following:

• Karen Hughes, President Bush’s close friend and, until recently, his point-person in the War of Ideas as undersecretary of state for public diplomacy, reportedly considered as her “guru” a professor at Georgetown University whose program is underwritten by a $20 million grant from a Saudi prince.
• Unsurprisingly, Mrs. Hughes’ first public appearance after assuming her responsibilities at State was an address to the annual ISNA conference in 2005. While there, she told the organization’s members she considered them “the front-line in public diplomacy because you are more credible than I am.” Interestingly, a survey of her “frontline” troops found that, by a 3-to-1margin, ISNA’s members believe the U.S. government had advanced knowledge of the September 11, 2001 attacks and allowed them to happen.
• Muslim chaplains and lay leaders for the U.S. military were recruited, trained and credentialed by an organization that the Wall Street Journal described as “part of Saudi Arabia’s state-run university system.” At the time, that institute was operated by Aburahman Alamoudi, the godfather of the Islamist apparatus in America who is now serving a 23-year prison sentence for terrorism financing and related charges.
• FBI personnel continue to receive “sensitivity training” from the Council on American-Islamic Relations, even though the Justice Department has also designated it an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land case.

Many more examples of Islamist penetration and influence operations could be cited. Suffice it to say that, as long as such activities are allowed — and those like Steve Coughlin who challenge them are fired or cowed — neither Mr. Bush nor his successors will be able to properly comprehend, let alone prevail in, the War of Ideas and the larger War for the Free World of which it is a central front.

Frank J. Gaffney Jr. is president of the Center for Security Policy and a columnist for The Washington Times.

By Hal Lindsey, www.WorldNetDaily.com

President Bush made the first trip of his presidency to the Holy Land this week to, as he put it, push for a peace treaty and an independent Palestinian state by the end of his term in office. That leaves just over a year to solve one of the most complex problems in modern history.

In order to accomplish this goal, the president said, ”Israeli and Palestinian negotiation teams will begin discussing ‘core issues’ such as Jerusalem, the Palestinian demand for a ‘right of return’ for alleged Palestinian ‘refugees’ from the 1948 War of Independence, and firm borders for an eventual Palestinian state.”

In 1993, the Palestinian Authority took control of its own educational system as part of the terms of the Oslo Accords. Since that time, Palestinian schoolchildren have been systematically brainwashed into believing that the only possible solution to the ”Jewish Question” in what they believe is their land is the same conclusion reached by the Nazis at the Wannsee Conference. (This was a conference where the so called ”Final Solution to the Jewish Problem” was produced – the annihilation of the Jewish race.)

Arafat had a Pavlovian-type curriculum created that would out-do the Nazis. He educated a self-perpetuating generation of Palestinian children that see the only solution to regaining ‘their land’ is to destroy the State of Israel and annihilate the Jews.

Part of this plan was to set up summer camps run by the PA that teach children (some as young as six) how to use lethal weapons against the Jews.

Only a month ago, Palestinian TV rebroadcast a video made during the 1990s (while the PA was ostensibly still in good-faith negotiations with Israel). It is a children’s play that begins when Israeli soldiers shoot a Palestinian woman in the back.

She then ascends into Islamic paradise where she becomes one of the 72 virgins awaiting the next Palestinian martyr to die in the cause of Allah. The scene cuts to a young Palestinian who is murdered by the Israelis and arrives in Paradise to claim his reward.

Palestinian textbooks deny both the historic and present existence of an Israeli state. Maps of Palestine include all of Israel. Teachers continually glorify suicide bombers and encourage students to follow in their footsteps .

Virtually all PA schools educate their students to believe there is no higher calling in life than to give it up willingly, taking as many Jews with them as possible in the process. And they teach this incitement even while signing countless documents promising to “end incitement” against Israel in the Palestinian school system.

In the Bible, Proverbs 22:6 says, ”train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old, he will not depart from it.” This works for evil as well as for good.

Each of us can attest to the truth of that passage from our own lives. What we learned as children stays with us for life. The fact that racial prejudice still exists in some places in America, even after decades of anti-racial deprogramming, is a testament to that truth.

Now, imagine that you had been educated your entire life by Ku Klux Klansmen. All you ever knew were Klansmen, and all you were ever taught through your entire educational experience was KKK ideology.

Then one day, somebody tells you to ignore (not forget) everything you ever learned about racism and embrace the goals of the NAACP.

I chose that example because it approximates the educational experience of a typical white Southerner of the late 19th and early 20th centuries America. Decades of affirmative action and racial deprogramming have revealed racism for what it is, yet it still remains firmly entrenched within the mindset of some Americans to this day.

One of the most commonly offered observations about Barak Obama is that his viability as a black presidential candidate means ”racism is dead in America.” (If that were true, why would we feel the need to point it out?)

Even decades after Martin Luther King, decades after school integration, and decades after school systems were sanitized of racial references, racism – though nothing like it was in the 1950s - remains alive and well in America.

It is also important to point out that the kind of prejudice Muslims have against the Jews far exceeds anything we understand in America. Their holiest book, the Koran, backs their prejudice against Jews, and their mentors promise lavish rewards from Allah for killing them.

Palestinian children who have been continually shown ”training films” with false images of Israeli soldiers shooting Palestinian women and children in the back will never forget them, or overcome the hatred that experience inculcated in them.

A Palestinian child who started in a PA school in 1993 is now in his mid-teens. Based on the American experience with prejudice, if the PA stopped anti-Israeli incitement today, it would take at least until 2050 for the Palestinians, as a people, to achieve a minimum level of racial tolerance. And as I said, their kind of prejudice exceeds anything we understand. Yet President Bush is demanding that this happen by the end of this year.

No matter whether his time table is being pushed by a lust for a legacy or Saudi backroom threats of OPEC restricting U.S. oil allotments, or both – It ain’t gonna happen!

www.JPost.com

U.S. President George W. Bush visited Yad Vashem before closing the Israeli leg of his Middle East tour.

The national Holocaust remembrance institution was closed to the general public due to the presidential visit, as well as several streets leading to it.

Bush was accompanied by Olmert, Peres, and Yad Vashem chairman Yosef (Tommy) Lapid.

The American president and Israel’s leaders then heard a rabbi chant a special version of El Malei Rahamim [Oh G-d, Full of Mercy], the Jewish prayer for the dead, used on Holocaust remembrance ceremonies.

Wearing a yarmulke, Bush placed a red-white-and-blue wreath on a stone slab that covers ashes of Holocaust victims taken from six extermination camps. He also lit a torch memorializing the victims.

Bush was visibly moved during his hour-long tour of the site, said Yad Vashem’s chairman, Avner Shalev.

“Twice, I saw tears well up in his eyes,” Shalev said.

At one point, Bush viewed aerial photos of the Auschwitz death camp taken during the war by U.S. forces and called Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice over to discuss why the American government under Roosevelt had decided against bombing the site, Shalev said.

Rice explained that at the time the U.S. did not think such a move would halt the extermination of the Jews.

Shalev said on Army Radio that he “reiterated my own explanation: They did not want to deviate from the war’s objective, didn’t want to be seen as if they were fighting for the Jews.”

“Bush then paused for a moment to think, then said to me ‘We should have bombed it,’ ” Shalev added.

In the memorial’s visitors’ book, the president wrote simply, “God bless Israel, George Bush.”

Shalev presented Bush with illustrations of the Bible drawn by the Jewish artist Carol Deutsch, who perished in the Holocaust.

Deutsch created the works while in hiding from the Nazis in Belgium. He was informed upon, and died in 1944 in the Buchenwald camp. After the war, his daughter Ingrid discovered that the Nazis had confiscated their furniture and valuables but had left behind a single item: a meticulously crafted wooden box adorned with a Star of David and a seven-branched menorah, containing a collection of 99 of the artist’s illustrations of biblical scenes.

The originals are on display at Yad Vashem. The memorial recently decided to produce a special series of 500 replicas, the first of which was to be presented to Bush.

Debbie Deutsch-Berman, a Yad Vashem employee whose grandfather was Deutch’s brother, said she was proud that Bush would be given her relative’s artwork.

“These are not just his paintings, they are his legacy, and the fact that they survived shows that as much as our enemies tried to destroy the ideas that these paintings embody, they failed,” she said.

Following his visit to Yad Vashem, Bush visited two of Christianity’s holiest sites. The first was Capernaum, where Jesus of Nazareth made sermon and met five of his apostles, and the second was the Church of the Beatitudes near the Kinneret, on a hilltop where Jesus is believed to have given the Sermon on the Mount, outlining the basic tenets of the Christian faith.

U.S. President George W. Bush rekindles the eternal flame commemorating the six million Jews killed by the Nazis in the Holocaust, in the Hall of Remembrance in the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem, Friday, Jan. 11, 2008. (all photos on this page: AP Photo/Oleg Popov, Pool)

President George W. Bush shakes hands with a member of the choir during a ceremony in the Hall of Remembrance at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum. Bush was misty-eyed during the visit to the memorial, which he said was a “sobering reminder that evil exists and a call that when we find evil we must resist it.”

President George W. Bush lays a wreath in the Hall of Remembrance at Yad Vashem.

George Bush’s signature is seen beneath a line he wrote reading “God bless Israel” in the guest book of the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial.

By Ron Kampeas, www.jta.org

The thorny question of Israel’s West Bank settlements has dogged President Bush’s overarching message during his eight-day tour of the Middle East: Democracies must unite to confront terrorism.

In language that is unusually blunt considering his warm relations with Israel, Bush has made clear his frustration with Israel’s failure so far to deal with outposts, or unauthorized new settlements.

“In terms of outposts, yeah, they ought to go,” the U.S. leader said, standing alongside Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert Wednesday after a day of meetings. “Look, I mean, we’ve been talking about it for four years. The agreement was, get rid of outposts, illegal outposts, and they ought to go.”

In response, settlers said they would expand two existing outposts and pledged to add another. Whether they had done so in the day since Bush made his pledge was not clear, but the president was able to view outposts Thursday on his way to talks with the Palestinian Authority. One, near Beit El, was fronted by a sign — in place long before the Bush visit — that stated: “We have returned to our home established 3,800 years ago.”

Bush needs progress in Israeli-Palestinian peace to nudge forward his twin visions of democratizing the Middle East and diminishing the influence of Iranian theocrats. His sole speech in the region will be in Abu Dhabi Sunday, when he will press his case for greater liberties in the region — in the emirate that faces Iran across the Persian Gulf.

For years Israel, pro-Israel groups and neoconservatives have been telling Bush that promoting stability in the broader Middle East was not necessarily contingent on Israeli-Palestinian peace.

If he ever believed that message, it is clear he is now retreating from it. With just a year left in his presidency, he is eager for a legacy better than the Iraq morass.

Israeli foreign ministry officials said they re-delivered the message in meetings, telling Bush that nudging Arab states toward accommodating Israel was perhaps more achievable in the short term.

But Bush wants the outline of an agreement in hand before he leaves office.

Speaking Thursday in Ramallah, standing alongside Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, Bush was unequivocal: Palestinian independence was not as intractable a goal as some would have it.

“Now, look, there are some in the world who don’t believe in the universality of freedom,” he said. “I understand that. They say, like, freedom is OK for some of us, but maybe not all of us. I understand it, but I reject it. I believe in the universality of freedom.

“I believe, deep in the soul of every man, woman and child on the face of this earth is the desire to live in a free society. And I also believe free societies yield peace. And, therefore, this notion of two states living side by side in peace is based upon the universality of freedom, and if given a chance, the Palestinian people will work for freedom.”

President Bush meets with Palestinian Authority
President Mahmoud Abbas in Ramallah on Jan. 10, 2008.

Later in the day he reiterated that view, summarizing his two days of meetings with Israeli and Palestinian leaders.

“The establishment of the state of Palestine is long overdue,” the U.S. leader said at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem. “A peace agreement should happen and can happen by the end of this year.”

Bush reiterated calls for the parties to adhere to the “road map” peace process he launched in 2003, calling on the Palestinians to stop terrorist attacks and create a secure environment for Israel. And he called on Israel to end settlement expansion and remove illegal outposts.

He said the parties must address all the core issues. On borders, he reiterated one of the principles of his 2004 letter to then-Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, saying “any peace agreement will require mutual adjustment to the 1949 line.” This was widely seen at the time as an acknowledgement that Israel would retain some of the areas beyond the 1967 borders.

At the same time, he said a Palestinian state must be contiguous.

Bush also said the Palestinian refugee issue should be addressed by “new international mechanisms, including compensation.”

Bush said the agreement “must establish Palestine as a homeland to the Palestinian people just as Israel is a homeland to the Jewish people.”

Bush did not let the Palestinians off the hook during his visit. While in Ramallah with Abbas, the president said he understood why Israelis want to keep in place the roadblocks and checkpoints that frustrate Palestinian travel.

“I can understand why the Palestinians are frustrated driving through checkpoints,” he said. “I can also understand that until confidence is gained on both sides, why the Israelis would want there to be a sense of security. In other words, they don’t want a state on their border from which attacks would be launched. I can understand that. Any reasonable person can understand that.”

Abbas, standing beside Bush beneath portraits of himself and his late predecessor, Yasser Arafat, beamed — and understood.

“We are fully satisfied with the outcome that we reached through this visit of Mr. President George Bush,” he said. “All the issues are in agreement. We are agreed on all topics. All topics are clear.”

Bush also urged Israel to clear the way for a Palestinian security force.

“By any obvious measure, the Palestinian security forces are improving,” he said at the news conference in the “Muqata,” the P.A. headquarters leveled by Israel during the second Palestinian intifada from 2000 to 2004 and rebuilt in part with U.S. assistance.

“My message to the Israelis is that they ought to help, not hinder, the modernization of a Palestinian security force,” he said.

Israel has prevented P.A. security forces from receiving some equipment. It wants assurances that the forces is fully professional, noting the involvement in the past of some P.A. troops in attacks on Israel.

Bush’s message on the outposts was a jarring moment in an Israel trip that has otherwise been a love fest between Bush and Olmert. The Israeli prime minister appeared so taken aback that he rushed to say — in Hebrew — how much he trusted Bush and how he would act soon on the settlement issue.

“Thank God I can conduct political negotiations with George Bush at my side as one of my partners,” Olmert said, elevating the U.S. status from arbiter to peace partner. “Thank God we can conduct political negotiations when the largest and most important power in the world, and the most important for us, is headed by such an important friend of Israel.”

JTA Washington bureau chief Ron Kampeas is traveling with the president.

ZLM offers this diet information in the spirit of New Year’s resolutions.

By Courtney Hexam, Chimes staff writer, www.club.calvin.edu

In the beginning, God made. And it was good.

At the beginning of last year’s holiday season, my mother made a pumpkin pie with a can of puréed pumpkin, sweetened condensed milk, heavy cream and a dash or two of Christmas cheer, all of which was served in a frozen-yet-homemade pastry shell and topped with Cool Whip. And it was good.

Actually, it was made by Sara Lee. But it was still good, very, very good.

But is it Christian? Let me rephrase that: is it how our Creator intended?

Before there were Seventh Day Adventists, Catholics, Baptists, Buddhists, Methodists, Muslims, Lutherans, Hindus, Jews or pagans, there was a Creator and his creation. This creation was made in His image (Genesis 1:27).

So how were we created then (“in the beginning”)? Have our eating habits — along with our worldview — gone all wrong?

Our bodies are sacred temples of the Spirit, according to the apostle Paul in 1 Corinthians 3:16-17.

Are we putting the right things in these temples?

Sophomore Hilary Korzon doesn’t think so; according to Korzon, our temples are especially difficult to maintain on Calvin’s campus.

“As Calvin College students we are encouraged, if not required, to experience and delight in God’s beauty through the fine arts,” she says. “We are, however, sent a very different message when we walk into our dining halls.”

Korzon grew up in Ann Arbor where, she says, “Everyone is an organic freak.” She even sees a homeopathic doctor who prescribes herbal remedies instead of drugs.“As Christians and Calvin College students, we realize that our bodies are our temples. Are we respecting God when we fill them with chemicals?”

Though Calvin’s Knollcrest Dining Hall has an organic bar option, says Korzon, there are at most four items
available. Though it is a step in the right direction for her, these attempts seem minute alongside the processed meat, white bread and ever-popular Pepsi machines.

“Calvin College encourages us as students to take back the beauty that has been tainted by our culture,” says Korzon.

“Why is it that our school — that encourages us to see the beauty of God — deprives us of the ability to nourish ourselves with His pure untainted creation?”

Author of “The Hallelujah Diet” and founder of Hallelujah Acres, Rev. George Malkmus, craves the same faith-based diet.

At the age of 42, Malkmus was told he had colon cancer in the form of a baseball size tumor underneath the left side of his rib cage.

“I was devastated,” says Malkmus, whose mother had died from colon cancer. “I asked, ‘Why me Lord?’ I didn’t understand.”

During this time, Malkmus turned to an Evangelist friend who was, according to Malkmus, “one of those ‘health-nuts.’”

“He advised me not to go the medical route of chemotherapy, radiation and surgery, as Mom had gone,” he says, “but to simply change my diet to raw fruits and vegetables and drink lots of carrot juice.”

Malkmus also turned to scripture and research for guidance during this traumatic time and soon developed his own diet, God’s Ultimate Diet or the Hallelujah Diet, based on his friend’s advice.

“I made the diet change over night,” said Malkmus in an interview for ABC Nightline, “and within one year my baseball size tumor had totally disappeared as had all the other physical problems I was experiencing at the time.”

“It simply got smaller and smaller until it was gone,” he says in his article titled “God’s Way to Ultimate Health.” “But that was not all. In less than one year, every physical problem I had been experiencing also disappeared. Such physical problems such as hemorrhoids, hypoglycemia, severe allergies, high blood pressure, fatigue, pimples, colds, flu … even body odor and dandruff were gone! Totally healed!”

At age 72, Malkmus did in fact appear to be in tip-top shape as he bounded on stage before a health seminar and ABC’s cameras.

Nightline reporter Chris Burry asked Malkmus whether he believes his newfound diet cured him. Malkmus answered, “Oh, absolutely.”

The diet, Malkmus acknowledged, is not for everyone. He recommends seeking advice from health professionals before making any of Hallelujah’s dietary changes. He says there is always some risk in making such changes.

His diet is 85 percent raw foods — such as fruits, vegetables, seeds and nuts — and 15 percent cooked — such as baked potatoes, brown rice, steamed vegetables and whole grain pasta.

But what about meat?

According to the same Nightline interview, Malkmus believes that meat consumption was meant to be short-term.

“Just prior to God allowing meat to be consumed in Genesis chapter 9:3,” Malkmus explains, “we see a flood that covered this entire earth. That flood had destroyed all the plant life, and so man could no longer consume the diet God originally had given him. On the arc, they had these clean animals.”

Health experts are still not convinced that man can live on barley and raw foods alone.

Dr. Cheryl Rock, who co-authored a study of breast cancer patients at the University of California-San Diego, found that patients who ate heaping portions of fruits and vegetables did not enjoy better outcomes.

Rock believes the diet is just too extreme and lacking in protein, according to the Nightline interview.

“One would be hard-pressed to defend those claims based on scientific knowledge at this time,” said Rock.

“It would look to me like it would be very risky in terms of meeting all the nutritional needs.”

Malkmus agrees that the diet cannot cure everyone, but he still fully stands by the diet and his Hallelujah product line.

“We have 70 full-time employees,” said Malkmus in an interview with reporter Jane Skinner about Hallelujah Acres, “but it’s really a ministry as far as I’m concerned. We teach health from a biblical perspective. We feel that everybody ought to know that they can have a healthy body and live free of sickness, and they can if they put the proper fuel into their body.”

Despite the frowns from health experts, Malkmus still strongly believes in his Adam-and-Eve-inspired diet and has built Hallelujah Acres, a residential and commercial complex for people on the diet or with health concerns, to encourage it. The complex sits across the street from the Hallelujah company headquarters, which manages Hallelujah business: everything from barley products to cooking classes.

“We’re drinking the same juice and connected to the same Creator,” says Malkmus.

“When we stop putting those bad things in and we start putting the good things in, then the body does the way God designed it to do, and it heals itself. It’s one of the most powerful, wonderful things to observe.”

But is this approach, as Dr. Rock suggests, too extreme?

If humans were meant to only eat raw foods, where would culinary artists use their talents? And why did Jesus choose bread to represent “his body” (Matthew 26:26; Mark 14:22; Luke 22:19)?

Are we to discard all foods apart from barley juice and raw veggies? Are we to forget this year’s Thanksgiving feast and whip up an extra round of carrot juice instead?

This dietary transformation is difficult to imagine for a society so driven by fast foods and five-minute meals, all of which thrive on oils and preservatives.

This transformation is currently decking the halls of Calvin’s Knollcrest East apartments.

The week of October 31st, KE apartments promoted the annual candy consumption of more than 500 trick-or-treaters from the Grand Rapids community, but a week later the KE community promoted a healthier consumption: vegetables.

“One Challenge. One Heart. One Building,” read a flyer fixed to Alpha’s white board. “We will conquer our fears and eat more vegetables this week. Alpha is rewriting History starting tomorrow. We will eat more Green.”

Next to this flyer was a printout of an MSNBC article, “Fight cancer with dark green vegetables,” stressing the disease-fighting power of nutrient-rich leafy greens.

This however was just Alpha’s area of focus. Each apartment building focused on a different area of health, such as the use of a pedometer or focusing on the new MyPyramid.

KE resident director Jay Wise says students often get involved with so much — internships, additional credits, off-campus activities, etc. — that they lose the meaning of wellness: “optimal health and vitality.”

Alpha resident Shona Smith, a biology major with plans for medical school, thinks America could not sustain such a large society without the use of preservatives and mass processing — the same preservatives avoided by organic-eating circles and Hallelujah dieters.

At this point of spiritual and social conflict, should we be accepting the “pattern of this world,” about which the apostle Paul warned the Romans? Is seeking our own “Hallelujah diet” “the renewing of [our] minds” that Paul said would attest to our Creator’s “good, pleasing and perfect will” (Romans 12:2)?

It may have been the case for Rev. Malkmus, but a fast-to-fresh food transformation will not be easy for most.

Even Gandhi, a wealthy and well-educated Indian leader who devoted his life to service through simple living, gradually made his life-changing transformation.

In any case, Paul’s letter to the church of Corinth in 1 Corinthians 10:31 says, “Whether you eat or drink” — whether it’s battered and fried or grown and served — “whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God.”

Indeed, in the beginning, our Creator gave us “every seed-bearing plant,” “every tree that has fruit” and “every green plant” for food (Genesis 1:29-30); but, in the end — and in the Old Testament — the apostle Paul commands us to do all to the glory of our Creator.