Levitt Letter Extra News

By Khaled Abu Toameh, The Jerusalem Post

The corruption case against Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has earned Israel tremendous respect throughout the Arab world, where many have called on their leaders to benefit from Israel’s democratic system and independent judicial system.

Words of praise for Israel are a rare phenomenon in the Arab media. But judging from the reactions of many Arabs to the corruption case, the trend appears to have changed.

Even some Arabs who describe themselves as “sworn enemies of the Zionist entity” have begun singing praise for Israel.

The corruption case against Olmert received wide coverage in the mainstream Arab media, prompting an outcry about the need for transparency and accountability in the Arab world.

“Show me one Arab or Islamic country where a prime minister or a senior government official was ever questioned for financial corruption or bribery,” said a reader who identified himself only as Majed.

Majed, like many others, was responding to a news story on an Arab website about the testimony in court of American philanthropist Morris Talansky, who told police he had given Olmert more than $150,000 in cash over the course of some 14 years.

Another reader, Sami, commented: “The Israeli regime with all its defects is better than all the Arab ‘democracies’ and still changes ministers and governments every few years.”

A Saudi national named Abdel Karim urged his Arab brethren to stop criticizing Israel and learn something about its democracy. “Before we curse Israel, we must learn from the democratic and judicial system in Israel, where no one is above the law,” he wrote.

Khaled, another Saudi national, chimed in: “Although we are talking about Israel, which I have always hated very much, there is still no one above the law there.”

Mahmoud al-Bakili of Yemen posted the following response on one of the websites: “We want this kind of accountability and transparency in the Arab and Islamic world.”

And there was this comment from an Arab who described himself as a Syrian Voice: “Despite my strong hatred for the Zionist regime, I have a lot of admiration and respect for this entity because there is no one above the law. In the Arab world, laws are broken every day and no one seems to care.”

Egyptian writer Abdel Aziz Mahmoud said he doesn’t believe the day will ever come when an Arab leader will be put on trial for sexual harassment or financial corruption.

“I don’t think we will live to see the day when the police interrogate an Arab leader for sexually harassing his secretary or receiving bribes,” he wrote. “Nor will our children and grandchildren live to see that day. What happened in Israel can never happen in any Arab country.”

Some Arabs went as far as condemning the Arab people for failing to rise against their corrupt dictators.

“There is corruption in Israel and the Arab world,” wrote Abu Hadi from Iraq. “But the difference is that the Israelis hold their leaders accountable, while we the Arabs remain silent about corruption.”

Jamal, who described himself as the Madman, wrote that “the reason why Israel has lasted for so long is because of its independent and fair judicial system. I challenge the Arabs to have such an independent judicial system.”

Many of the readers found it quite ironic that Olmert was being questioned because of “only” tens of thousands of dollars he allegedly received from Talansky.

“They say he received something like $3,000 a year,” said Abu Atab from Morocco inaccurately. “This shows that Olmert is a decent man. This is a small sum that any Arab government official would receive on a daily basis as a bribe. Our leaders steal millions of dollars and no one dares to hold them accountable.”

Touching on the same issue, a reader from Algeria posted this comment: “In the Arab world, our leaders don’t accept less than $1 million in bribes; the money must be deposited in secret bank accounts in Switzerland. Olmert is a fool if he took only a small sum.”

Another comment, this time from Ahmed in Jordan, also referred to the alleged amount: “Only a few thousand dollars? What a fool! This is what an Egyptian minister gets in a day or what a Saudi CEO gets in 45 minutes, or a Kuwaiti government official in five minutes. This is what the physician of the emir of Qatar gets every 30 seconds.”

One Arab commentator who identified himself as Jasser Abdel Hamid advised Olmert to seek citizenship of one of the Arab countries. “Why don’t you seek Arab citizenship?” he asked sarcastically. “There you can take as much money as you want. Even if they discover the theft, they will erect a statue for you in a public square.”

The following are more comments that appeared in recent days in the Arab media:

Mohammed in Lebanon: “Can you imagine if there was an investigation against an Arab or Muslim leader? Do you know how much money they would discover?”

Abu Yusef in Egypt: “Unfortunately, this is the real democracy. Our enemies are very good in practicing democracy. In the Arab world, our leaders steal everything and no one ever dares to ask a question.”

Rashid in Saudi Arabia: “Despite all our problems with the Jews, they are much better than us in fighting corruption and revealing the truth.”

Israel Lover in Saudi Arabia: “Israel is a state that deserves to exist. It deserves our profound respect. I wish I were a citizen of this state.”

Hani in Ramallah: “This is democracy at its best! Enough of dictatorship in the Arab world! Let’s learn from the Israeli example. Let’s benefit from Israel’s democracy.”

Rashid Bohairi in Kuwait: “I swear Israel is a state that will succeed. They are prosecuting their prime minister because of tens of thousands of dollars. What about the millions of dollars that Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinian Authority stole? How come the Palestinian people are still hungry?”

Check out the News video from June 2008 to hear Jeff’s response to the following article.

By Christine Wicker, www.DallasNews.com

What Baptist leaders have known for years is finally public: The Southern Baptist Convention is a denomination in decline. Half of the SBC’s 43,000 churches will have shut their doors by 2030 if current trends continue.

And unless God provides a miracle, the trends will continue. They are longstanding and deeply rooted. The denomination’s growth rate has been declining since the 1950s. The conservative/fundamentalist takeover 30 years ago was supposed to turn the trend around; it didn’t make a bit of difference.
Leaders said it did. Reporters and politicians believed it did. But the numbers kept going down until, finally, they have become obvious to everyone.

Evangelical faith has been dropping since 1900, when 42 percent of the U.S. claimed that distinction. Every year, Religious Right Evangelicals, such as those who lead the Southern Baptists, are a smaller proportion of the country. Every year, their core values are violated more flagrantly by the media, scientific discovery, and mainstream behavior. Every election, politicians promise to serve them and then don’t because Evangelicals lack the power to make them.

What all this means is that we were duped. All the hype proclaiming an Evangelical resurgence was merely that – hype, a furious shout from a faith losing its grip, manipulation by a relatively small group of dedicated, focused, political power-seekers.

The long decline of Southern Baptist faith is critical to the entire Evangelical movement because the Southern Baptist Convention, which claims 16 million members, is the biggest Evangelical denomination in the country, almost six times as large as the next biggest predominately-white Evangelical denomination.

The second-largest Evangelical group, the National Association of Evangelicals, has claimed 30 million members. Their churches actually have 7.6 million, tops. Most of those are having the same problems the Baptists are having.

As the true picture of Evangelicals’ problems has developed, panicked leaders are splitting into camps. Some say that the church is lax, soft, sold out. That what’s needed is an even bigger dose of the medicine that the SBC fundamentalist takeover delivered. More authority, more strict interpretations of the Bible, more sermons about sin and suffering and sacrifice, more rigor about who is and who isn’t getting to go to heaven. They argue that Christianity-lite is the problem. Get back to the Bible, they say, which means proclaiming more confidently that the only interpretation is Truth, and anyone who doesn’t agree with it will surely go to hell.

A growing number of dedicated Southern Baptists believe the Bible’s truth is a Calvinist one. They reject the traditional Baptist idea that any human can choose to be saved in favor of predestination, the idea that only those whose names are already written in the Book of the Lamb will go to heaven. Kick out the unregenerates, they say. That will fix the problem.

Still others say the problem is image. Evangelicals have been seen as mean-spirited and narrow. Caring about the environment and giving more attention to the poor and needy will turn it around. Get out of politics, they say. Play down abortion and gay rights. That will fix the problem.

But none of these ideas will halt the increasing irrelevance of evangelical faith to the great majority of the U.S. population. Evangelical faith is being attacked inside and outside its churches by forces that won’t be stopped by new biblical rigor or an image makeover.

I’ll give you just three of those many forces.

One is Alcoholics Anonymous and all its 12-step offspring – the creation of two Christian men who wanted to help alcoholics. They modeled AA on the teachings of Jesus and the ideas of philosopher William James. Instead of asking alcoholics to be saved, they asked them to call on a god of their own understanding. Sometimes leaders illustrated the freedom of that definition by saying, “That door knob over there might be your god.”

They included 12 steps based on Christian principles that are never identified as Christian and include no Bible verses. They eschewed guilt and any talk of sinfulness. Repentance was directed at specific people who had been harmed. There was no doctrine, no institution, no demand for monetary support.
Tens of millions of addicts and other troubled people used this “door knob god” to build new lives. They learned that they didn’t have to read the Bible, attend church or follow a preacher’s rules to engage a divine power that could heal them.

Nothing like that kind of open-ended faith had ever been experienced before. And so the role of the church as interpreter of God’s truth and the Bible as its sole repository lost power with millions.

The second attack came within the Church as American Evangelicals themselves became less willing to proclaim that they are the only ones saved. That idea had seemed reasonable when people lived in fairly homogeneous groups. “The other” was unknown, seemed inferior, and appeared unlikely to have God’s blessing. Since few people had much to do with foreigners – except in times of war, when they were trying to kill them; or from behind a tourist’s camera, when they were making souvenirs of them – “our way is the only way” seemed reasonable.

But international travel, business, and communication have changed that. So have huge waves of immigration. Now “the other” is likely to be your son-in-law or grandchild.

The idea that only one little part of one kind of religion has the only way to God has begun to seem more and more unlikely. It has begun to seem rude. Un-Christian, even. And Evangelicals, who don’t like being boorish any more than anyone else, have become less and less willing to relegate their neighbors to hell.

So we have a completely formless god of great power and instant accessibility romping around, rescuing millions whom everyone else had given up on. Then we have more Christians getting squeamish about proclaiming hegemony over heaven.

And along comes The Pill. It’s merely one of the insidious attacks science has launched against traditional religious faith, but it is surely the most successful. Nothing in history has changed human relations as much as that little white pill.

The curse God laid on Eve wasn’t quite so ironclad anymore. Skip forward a few decades, and couples started delaying marriage until their late 20s, 30s, or even 40s. But that pill meant there was less pressure to abstain from sex until the wedding.

So hardly anyone did. Some single couples who slept together or lived together and simply kept quiet about it kept coming to church, but millions of others slept in Sunday mornings. Evangelical leaders resolutely hewed to the abstinence standard at least formally, resulting in little more than extra hypocrisy.

That didn’t matter much. Hypocrisy has always flourished, and it hasn’t killed the Church yet. But Evangelicals’ failure to grapple with change meant the Church was no help in a world where people were expected to sleep together long before marriage and desperately sought guidance about when and with whom.

Evangelical leaders defend their stance by claiming that God doesn’t change and that neither does sin. But sin does change. Slavery wasn’t sin once. Now it is. Taking a wife and a concubine wasn’t sin once. Now it is.

And God – or our understanding of what God is, which is all we actually have – changes, too. When societies change, their interpretations of God change. Their readings of the Scripture shift. Human understandings are remolded so that faith can remain vital and effective during new times.
Whether Evangelical intransigence is pleasing to God isn’t anything that humans can ever be absolutely sure of. If it is pleasing to him, God may send a great revival that will sweep the country and restore them to their place of predominance.

Such revivals have happened before. They could happen again.

But I’ve named only three of the ways that evangelical faith has come to seem less useful, necessary, and vital to those who might benefit from its teachings. Evangelical faith is failing in so many other ways that a growing number of Christians believe a New Reformation is needed.

If they are correct, the Southern Baptist Convention is unlikely to lead that reformation. Let’s hope it is at least around to participate.

Christine Wicker is the author of “The Fall of the Evangelical Nation: The Surprising Crisis Inside the Church.”

By Ezra HaLevi, www.IsraelNN.com

Violent attacks against Jews in recent weeks have taken place in Los Angeles, England, and New York City. In Ireland, a Jewish man had graffiti daubed on his home reading: “Go Home, Jew.”

A visibly Jewish man was attacked in Los Angeles by two men with shaved heads “who spoke a language not English or Spanish,” according to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), which is publicizing a $30,000 reward offered by the L.A. City Council for information leading to the apprehension of the attackers.

The victim, a 58-year-old, was wearing a yarmulke when he was attacked by the two men, who called him “dirty Jew” and hit him on the side of the head before punching and kicking him once he was down.

L.A. Police report a steep rise in anti-Jewish attacks in the San Fernando Valley, with anti-Semitic vandalism and improvised bombs targeting the Bernard Milken Jewish Community Campus and a private home in West Hills.

German Arab Terrorist Sentenced For Stabbing Rabbi
A German court has sentenced a German Arab Muslim terrorist to three and a half years in prison for trying to murder a local rabbi with a knife.

The court found 23-year-old Sajed Aziz guilty of causing serious injuries in the September attack on Rabbi Zalman Gurevitch. CNN reported that Aziz claimed in court that he had acted in self-defense; that the rabbi had approached him in a “threatening manner.” Aziz was born in Germany to parents from Afghanistan.

The German prosecutors said there was not enough evidence that Aziz intended to murder the rabbi for a manslaughter charge. According to the European Jewish News, two key witnesses in the case, a Jewish man and the woman who had been walking with Rabbi Gurevitch, refused to testify at the trial because they feared for their safety.

Local Jewish officials criticized the light sentence. “After a verdict like this Frankfurt has become more unsafe for Jews,” Moshe Mendelzon, who attended the trial with other Orthodox Jews living in Germany, told the European Jewish News.

Frankfurt Jewish community President Salomon Korn said the sentence “has given a clear message to potential stabbers. I wonder if this would have been the sentence if there had been a religiously tinged attack on a Christian clergyman.”

Aziz was freed on bail until the end of all possible appeal proceedings.

British Jews Targeted by Attacks
Anti-Jewish graffiti covered shops, sidewalks and walls outside four synagogues in the northeast London Clapton Common and Stamford Hill neighborhoods recently.

The 40 slogans said things like “Jihad to Israel” and “Jihad to Tel Aviv.”

David Greenwald, a young member of the Belz synagogue, one of those targeted, told This Is London: “This morning I went to synagogue to pray and saw the writing all over everywhere — walls, shops, traffic lights. Everyone feels scared. Here we do not have any problem with Arabs — there has never been anything like this before, but now we are worried.”
The report quoted another member: “It makes us feel that we are in exile. It could be kids doing it, but even so, it shows something.” The other synagogues were Satmar Beth Hamedrash Yetev Lev, Atereth Zvi Beth Hamedrash, and the Union of Orthodox Hebrew Congregations. A day later more graffiti appeared in Bethnal Green.

Crown Heights (NY) Tensions Simmering After Attack
The Crown Heights Jewish community is still reeling following the attack on 16-year-old Jewish boy Alon Sherman, who was victim of a severe beating followed by the stealing of his bike, wallet, and cell phone.

“We’re having an uptick in anti-Semitism and racism in our community that’s unconscionable and it’s inexcusable,” Barry Sugar of the Jewish Leadership Council told the media. “We are being assaulted and city government is doing little to address our concerns.”

Terrorist Trial in Seattle Federation Attack Continues
The trial of Muslim terrorist Naveed Haq, who killed one woman and injured five others at a local Jewish Federation building, continues as the Pakistani Muslim shooter attempts to convince the jury of an insanity plea.

Dayna Klein, a pregnant Jewish woman who worked at the Federation at the time, took the witness stand and described bring shot in the arm by the terrorist after she called 911. The terrorist shot toward the four-month-pregnant woman’s stomach, but she shielded herself with her arm and the bullet miraculously lodged in her arm, sparing the unborn child.

Klein recalled crawling out of the room she was hiding in once she felt the coast was clear and finding co-worker Layla Bush “lying on her stomach, bleeding from her abdomen.” Klein recalled Bush trying to stop the bleeding from her wound using the baby clothes a fellow worker had bought Klein as a baby gift.

On her way out of the building she passed co-worker Pamela Waechter, shot dead from behind as she tried to escape the terrorist, who was ranting about Jews and Israel.

Haq’s defense lawyers are trying to plead insanity despite evidence of calculated premeditation. Haq bought guns and researched Jewish organizations ahead of the attack. He also, according to Klein, made a statement to the 911 operator when he took the phone away from her. “He began to state that…he would like to talk to [television talk-show host] Larry King and the Jews… [who] need to get out of Lebanon and Iraq,” she said.

Forensic psychologist J. Robert Wheeler testified, for the prosecution, that Haq told him in their interview. “I just got it in my mind to do some political activism, so I just hopped in my truck. I got in my head to do a mission. On my way to the federation I decided I was going to take hostages.”

Haq searched for his target on Google, first searching “AIPAC in Sacramento,” then “future AIPAC events,” “evangelists,” “national evangelical events” and “AIPAC in Seattle,” which brought him eventually to the web site of the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle. He then searched “current Jewish Federation events,” seemingly seeking to carry out a mass-casualty attack. Seeing none in the immediate future, he decided to embark on a three-hour trip to the Federation office.

In Ireland: Go Home, Jew
A Jewish man living in Ireland complained to police of Nazi graffiti on his home.

According to the Irish Independent, Herb Meyer’s home on the Dublin Road in Tuam was spray-painted with swastikas and slogans such as “Go Home, Jew.”

Meyer said he wasn’t aware of many people who even knew he was Jewish, as he does not dress identifiably like a Jew.

According to the Independent, Meyer “and his partner Armida Walsh, a Tuam native,” were intending to move to London to be near relatives, but they may revise their plans due to the attack.

The paper did not elaborate whether the revised plans may involve going to Israel.

By Rami G. Khouri, www.Middle-East-Online.com

The Arab World is fast becoming two Worlds due to oil wealth and other factors largely effected by that distinction.

As oil prices and income to some Arab producers continue to rise, we can witness sharper polarization between the wealthy energy-producing, small population states of the Gulf, and the more populous, energy-importing Arab countries all around it in the Levant region, the Nile Valley, and farther west into North Africa. Any person who travels to such places as Dubai, Doha, Bahrain, Amman, Cairo, Casablanca, and Beirut moves between two very different worlds that are united by investment and labor flows, but are being pushed farther apart in most other spheres of life.

A set of polarizations defining the Arab world today lie along fault lines largely drawn by way of income levels, but also comprising other criteria. The Arab world is steadily disaggregating into two very different sub-worlds, characterized by the following polarizations:

1. Wealth vs. poverty: The continued rise in oil and gas prices has seen the states of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) amass enormous sums of cash income — trillions of dollars in the past decade — which they cannot spend, and may increasingly have trouble investing safely. Per capita real incomes and real purchasing power in the rest of the Arab world remain flat and, in some cases, are even in decline.

2. Growth vs. stagnation: Wealth in the hands of the public and private sectors in the GCC has translated into increasingly ambitious projects in real estate, entertainment, public works, education — even entire new cities conceived and designed from scratch. Some of these novel lifestyle ventures and real estate developments are now being exported to other countries in the form of gated communities and massive shopping complexes that cater primarily to the rich.

Most of the rest of the Arab world finds itself in a situation where macroeconomic growth often registers impressive levels of five to seven percent, yet the fruits of this growth rarely filter down beyond a small elite segment of the population. The vast majority of citizens continues to see family budgets squeezed, as government budgets are pared down and inflation rises steadily.

Demonstrations protesting retail prices and the availability of basic foodstuffs and services are on the rise again throughout the Arab world outside the Gulf.

3. National cohesion vs. fragmentation: Security and material development are fostering a growing sense of national identity and social cohesion in the GCC states, while the rest of the Arab world suffers varying degrees of social fragmentation and national fraying. Countries like Iraq, Palestine, Lebanon, Sudan, Yemen, Somalia, and Algeria already experience varying degrees of national dysfunction.

In some cases, these countries find themselves ruled by multiple authorities and armed forces that coexist uneasily.

4. Pluralism vs. insularity: One of the striking aspects of the GCC states — check out any airport, shopping mall, restaurant, or other prevalent form of public space — is the very rich variety of nationalities that live and work there. Most of the individuals do not mix with each other beyond commercial or service encounters, making a sense of community elusive; yet the sheer variety of nationalities is impressive. The trend in many parts of the rest of the Arab world is in the opposite direction, towards slow separation of diverse populations that traditionally lived together peacefully. In the most extreme cases, ethnic cleansing is practiced.

Vibrant cosmopolitan quarters with a variety of faiths, ethnicities, and nationalities are now restricted to just a few pockets of the Arab world.

5. Order vs. disorder: Wealth and developmental strategies have seen the Gulf countries place a high premium on order and security, with only occasional acts of violence. In many other parts of the Arab world, violence is an increasingly common norm, intermittently expressing itself in recurring warfare.

Militias, private armies, and commercial security firms are among the fastest growing sectors in that part of the Arab world where the state is unable to provide the basic security that citizens expect from it.

6. The rule of law vs. lawlessness: One level below the dichotomy of order vs. disorder is the deeper fact that some Arab societies are governed by the rule of law, while others are sliding into greater lawlessness. This transcends security and warfare, and is reflected in two common phenomena: ordinary citizens’ growing need to pay bribes, commissions, and generous tips to complete basic public sector transactions where these are available; and, growing delinquency in the state’s provision of basic services — security, water, education, telephones, and health care — to all its citizens.

7. Religiosity vs. secularism: Some quarters of the Arab world that enjoy material wellbeing and basic security tend to become more secular; other large segments of the Arab population increasingly turn to religion for the sense of hope and dignity that they do not receive in their status as citizens of a state.

Rami G. Khouri is Editor-at-large of The Daily Star, and Director of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut, in Beirut, Lebanon.