Levitt Letter Extra News

LONDON – The settlements are a territorial issue that can be resolved in negotiations with the Palestinians, but the Palestinian refusal to recognize Israel as the national home of the Jewish people is the core problem preventing a peace agreement, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told British Prime Minister Gordon Brown in their talks on Tuesday, in part of an effort to reframe how world leaders view the conflict.

The settlements are not the cause of the Israeli-Arab conflict, but the result of it, Netanyahu told Brown, pointing out that the conflict long predated the settlements.

Netanyahu, in a briefing with Israeli reporters following his meeting with Brown, said this was a message that he would bring with him to Berlin and his talks with German Chancellor Angela Merkel as well, and a “truth” that his government would repeat until it started to “trickle down.”

Netanyahu’s comments came just hours before Wednesday morning’s meeting in his London hotel, the Intercontinental, with U.S. Mideast envoy George Mitchell during which the settlements, much more than Palestinian recognition of Israel as a Jewish homeland, are expected to be the focus of discussion.

“What we are trying to achieve with the U.S.,” Netanyahu said at his press conference with Brown, “is to find a bridging formula to enable us to launch the process, but enable those [Jewish] residents [of Judea and Samaria to] continue to lead normal lives.”

There were 250,000 Jews beyond the Green Line who “have children who go to school, they need classrooms, kindergartens, they need a place to house families,” the prime minister said.

“This is very different from grabbing land. I made clear that we are not going to expropriate new land.”

He was, however, extremely careful about divulging any details about the emerging “bridging formula,” with one senior source in his office saying that the talks were at an extremely delicate stage, and any leak could torpedo progress.

Netanyahu stressed in his press conference that Jerusalem was not to be lumped together with the settlements.

“I made it clear in my conversations with President Obama in Washington that Jerusalem is the sovereign capital of Israel, and we accept no limitations on our sovereignty,” he said.

The question of settlements, as well as Palestinian recognition of a Jewish state and the demilitarization arrangements for a future Palestinian state needed to be dealt with in negotiations, Netanyahu said.

“Jerusalem is the united capital of the Jewish people,” and has been that way for 3,000 years, he said.

The prime minister, whom Brown called a “courageous leader” when he opened the press conference, said that courageous leadership was now needed from the Palestinians.

“We are working hard to advance a peace process that will lead to an actual peace result,” Netanyahu said, in a jab at previous diplomatic processes that led nowhere.

“We hope to move forward in the weeks and months ahead, and we are not waiting, we have already moved,” he said.

He noted that in his first four months of power, his government had removed 147 checkpoints and roadblocks, extended operating hours at the Allenby Bridge between Israel and Jordan, and removed bureaucratic barriers to Palestinian economic activity.

Likewise, he said, he had called for the establishment of a demilitarized Palestinian state next to a Jewish state.

“It wasn’t easy, but this is what we have done in this short period of time,” he said.

He said that Israel expected similar movement from the Palestinian Authority, but instead has been met by additional conditions to negotiations, and problematic rhetoric at the recent Fatah convention in Bethlehem. According to Netanyahu, the Palestinians have not moved forward, but rather backward.

“There has to be not merely a partner on the other side, but a courageous partner, who can show fortitude and leadership,” he said.

“They have to say unequivocally, it [the conflict] is over. We are going to make real peace, a final peace, a peace that will end all claims to further conflict,” he said.

Netanyahu said a number of bilateral issues came up in his talks with Brown, including the need for British legislation that would put an end to efforts to charge IDF officers for war crimes in Britain, as well as what could be done to stem the wave of “boycott Israel” calls inside the country.

As Netanyahu was meeting with Brown at 10 Downing Street, a small group of vocal protesters outside shouted epithets at Netanyahu and Israel, with one holding up a sign reading that boycotting Israel was “kosher.”

Netanyahu would not say whether he discussed with Brown the British government funding of nongovernmental organizations, such as Breaking the Silence, that are very critical of Israeli government positions, saying only that he felt such intervention was inappropriate.

He said he did not, however, know of any proposed Knesset legislation to ban foreign government support for these organizations.

Netanyahu also said nothing about kidnapped soldier Gilad Schalit, and when asked what he though of Scotland’s release of the terrorist responsible for the Lockerbie terrorist attack that killed 270 people, he chose his words very carefully and would say only that the issue was “complex” and “complicated.”

Following his meeting with Mitchell in London on Wednesday, Netanyahu will fly to Germany for a day of talks there. He is scheduled to return to Israel early on Friday morning. Schalit is expected to be a major topic of conversation in Berlin.

By Phyllis Chesler, pajamasmedia.com

Fathima Rifqa Bary, the Muslim teenager who converted to Christianity at least four years ago but who only recently ran away, has been taken away from the two good Samaritan Christian pastors who took her in and is now in state custody in Florida. On Friday, a judge will decide whether her case should be heard in Florida or in Ohio. Her parents have “lawyered” up, her father Mohamed Bary, a jeweler, insists that he never threatened to kill her, that he wants her to come home. The mainstream media is getting nervous. What if they believe what Rifqa says and they end up sued? Or worse?

After all, the Columbus police have challenged the girl’s claim that she is in danger. Sgt Jerry Cupp, chief of the Columbus police missing person’s bureau, has said that “Mohamed Bary comes across to me as a loving, caring, worried father about the whereabouts and the health of his daughter.”

So much for Ohio. But allow me to point out that for weeks, Mohammed Shafi and his second wife, Rona Amir Mohammed, wept, mourned, and generally carried on about the deaths of their three daughters and of Mohammed’s first wife–until the police arrested both Mohammed and Rona, along with one of their sons, for having been behind these heinous, heartless, murders.

Now, Florida Imam Hatim Hamidullah, with the Islamic Society of Central Florida, has informed us that the Muslim faith does not call for a father to hurt his child, should she convert to another religion.

“It is not Islam for the father to bring harm upon his blood daughter or any other human being because of anger,” he said. “Our position is to exhaust all measures that would bring peace and harmony back to the family,” Hamidullah said. “Being angry and threatening the life of someone is not one of those methods.”

Someone has got to explain the technique of taqiyya (the high Islamic Art of disinformation) to the Ohio police, to the judiciary in both Ohio and Florida, and to the mainstream media.

A Muslim is a human being who, like all other human beings, will lie to save his life. In addition, a Muslim might also lie to save his…honor. No Muslim is going to tell the world that “Oh yes, by the way, some Muslims (either due to their non-religious ethno-national-cultural traditions, their misinterpretation of the Koran–or to their very clear understanding of what the Koran says about apostates), might actually kill another Muslim. Or one of their own women. Or, for that matter, infidels in general.”

Thus, the attacks on 9/11 were really not Muslim or even Saudi “operations.” True, most of the hijackers were Arab Muslims from Saudi Arabia but that is entirely beside the point. These attacks were, rather, undertaken by a) Muslims who hijacked an otherwise “peaceful” religion; b) in fact, the attacks were an “anti-Islamic” operation undertaken specifically to give “peaceful” Islam a bad name; c) everyone knows that 9/11 was an inside CIA and Zionist plot meant to justify America’s attack on al-Qaeda/Afghanistan/Iraq.

This is taqiyya in action.

Therefore, when an honor killing of a daughter, wife, or female cousin occurs in the West, Muslim leaders almost immediately insist that the crime has absolutely nothing to do with Islam or with the Koran; that the murderer is just one more domestically violent man, just like the violent men who exist everywhere, even in the West.

This is not true.

According to my study, published in Middle East Quarterly, it is true: Most Muslims do not kill their female family members; but some Muslims do. Or rather: So far, the honor killings that we know about in the West, including in North America, have been committed mainly by Muslims. Muslim girls and women are killed when their actions are perceived as “too Western,” “too independent,” “too assimilated.” Honor murders are undertaken by the entire family whose ability to totally control their women has failed and therefore, whose honor has been compromised and must be avenged.

Only blood will do.

Teenage girls in America and in Canada have been killed by their fathers for refusing to wear hijab; for having friends, both girls and boys, who are not Muslims; for having actual boyfriends; for refusing to marry their first cousins back in the Old Country; for wanting to choose their own husbands; for wanting to attend college; for wanting to assimilate into the West. Often, Muslim girls are kept in line by death-threats and by routine, normalized beatings. They are also kept in line when even one other Muslim girl or woman is honor murdered. These murders are meant to keep Muslim women cowed, careful, grateful to be allowed to live.

Honor killings are primarily Muslim-on-Muslim crimes.

In 2008, poor Amina and Sarah Said, teenagers both, were honor murdered in Dallas by their father Yaser Said, (with their mother Tissie’s complicity). They were beaten, threatened, and also sexually abused by their father. What was their ultimate sin? They had finally fled Yaser’s tyranny at home–and they fled with Christian boyfriends. They did not convert to Christianity but, who knows? They might have ended up marrying a Christian. This is also shameful, forbidden. Their mother, a Christian convert to Islam, lured them back home with promises of reconciliation; within the hour both girls were murdered. Yaser has never been found.

All the above teenage “crimes” are not as important as converting to another religion, away from Islam. A boyfriend is bad enough. Another God? Unthinkable. Shameful. Christianity and Judaism are seen, at best, as lesser, earlier, failed religions which should have embraced Islam as the more “perfect” and perfected religion but which refused to do so. The serious persecution of Christians and Jews in Muslim lands is known.

Fathima Rifqa Bary apparently converted to Christianity more than four years ago. If so, it is impossible for the Pastors, Beverly and Blake Lorenz to have “kidnapped” or “influenced” her. According to one media report,

“Rifqa, a high school junior in well-off suburban New Albany, had been questioning her faith for several months, her father said. She attended church with friends from school and later attended services at another church, Xenos Christian Fellowship, a megachurch that emphasizes small groups meeting at home….After Rifqa proselytized with a Bible at school, Mohamed Bary said, the family asked her to stop because it wasn’t an appropriate activity in school. They also told her she had an obligation to study her original faith first, before choosing another.”

One wonders whether or not such an obligation to study Islam might not be considered a life-long obligation. All Muslims, even parents, have an obligation to kill any Muslim who converts to another religion. This is why many Muslim apostates write under pseudonyms.

Now, if Rifqa’s family were an assimilated, anti-religious or non-religious Muslim family with many non-Muslim friends, relatives, and business colleagues–perhaps with family members who themselves had converted to another religion–it might be a different matter. That does not seem to be the case here.

Religious freedom and religious tolerance are Western values. Such tolerance does not exist in Muslim countries, certainly not today. Also, no matter where a Muslim might have grown up, Islamic identity today, even among second and third generation immigrants, but especially among first generation and recent immigrants, (which the Barys are), is increasingly a globalized identity, and one which is highly radical.

One hopes that the Florida judge will seriously consider the information about how Muslims utilize taqiyya, treat apostates, as well as Christians in the Middle East and Asia, and why Muslims honor murder their daughters and female relatives. Based on such information, perhaps the judge will not return Rifqa to Ohio. If she or he does, one hopes that the Ohio judge will never return Rifqa to the custody of her parents.

We should trust what Rifqa says, and consider placing her in the equivalent of a federal witness protection program until she is an adult. Even then, she will never, ever be safe.

By Tovah Lazaroff, www.JPost.com

Shlomo Slonim, 81, lays a stone on his mother's grave, which is just one in a number of rows of graves from Hebron massacre. Photo: Tovah Lazaroff

On his freckled forehead, one can still see the scar from the knife wound Shlomo Slonim sustained 80 years ago, when an Arab stabbed him as he huddled in his mother’s arms in their Hebron home.

“It’s not the only wound I have,” Slonim told The Jerusalem Post on Sunday. He opened up the palm of his hand to show scars on the insides of his fingers.

“There is one that I cannot bend,” said the 81-year-old, who was dressed in black slacks and a light blue, short-sleeved, button-down shirt.

He wore glasses and a knitted kippa and spoke calmly as he stood in the Hebron cemetery, at the end of a small ceremony marking the Hebrew anniversary of the 1929 massacre of 67 Jewish residents of that city by an Arab mob.

Slonim recounted the details of that fateful day, when he was only a year old. He has no memory of the events, of course, but he has heard the story so many times that he told it as if he were recalling his own experiences.

It was Shabbat morning when an Arab mob armed with knives filled the streets and burst into Jewish homes, Slonim said.

Dozens of Jews, he said, had gathered in his parents’ home for safety. His father, Eliezer Dan Slonim, 29, had been the director of the Anglo-Palestine Bank and a representative of the Jewish community in the Hebron Municipality.

Given the good relationship he enjoyed with his Arab neighbors, local Jews believed they would be safe in his home, said Slonim.

They were wrong. As the Arabs came to the home, the people inside tried to bar the door with their bodies, but they couldn’t hold back the mob, he said.

After bursting in, the Arabs killed 24 people with knives and machetes. Among them were Slonim’s father, his mother, Hannah, 24, and her parents who were visiting for Shabbat. They also fatally wounded his older brother, who was only four. He succumbed to his wounds several days later in Jerusalem and was buried there.

The lone survivor of his immediate family, Slonim comes as often as he can to the cemetery to visit his parents’ graves, which are among the many graves of massacre victims marked by a long row of small headstones.

As is customary in Jewish tradition, he placed a small stone on each grave on Sunday.

The massacre destroyed the Hebron Jewish community, whose roots go back to biblical times, even though there were other periods when Jews were chased out of the city.

Some Jews tried to return to Hebron after the massacre, but the British removed them in 1936.

It was only in 1979 that Jews returned to live in Hebron. While those Jews who came saw themselves as the spiritual descendents of the former community, very few of the survivors or their descendents were among them.

Slonim said that he had thought about returning, but did not want to live among people who had killed his family.

“I would never know if the Arab I passed in the street had a hand in their murder,” he said.

Slonim was not the only survivor to return Sunday to the cemetery for the ceremony organized by the Jewish community of Hebron. Yankele Hillel, 81, said that an Arab neighbor had saved him and his mother.

One woman, Menuha, said that her great-grandmother, for whom she was named, had survived because she hid behind a closet.

Among those who arrived at the cemetery was Rabbi Moshe Levinger, who in 1968 brought Jews back to Hebron to celebrate Pessah. They moved into rooms in a local hotel and refused to leave until a compromise was brokered, which led to the creation of the nearby settlement of Kiryat Arba.

Levinger came to the cemetery in a wheelchair on Sunday, hours after he had been released from the hospital. He was inspired, he said, by the spirit of the holy ones who were buried there.

A national ceremony in honor of the victims will be held next month.

By Nidal al-Mughrabi

GAZA (Reuters) — Israeli warplanes bombed a tunnel under the Gaza Strip’s border with Egypt Monday, August 10, the first such attack in almost two months, the Israeli military said.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the raid, in which there were no reported casualties, was in response to firing from Gaza and that Israel would respond to every shooting.

“We aren’t ready to accept rocket fire at our communities,” he said at a meeting in southern Israel with former Jewish settlers Israel removed from Gaza under a 2005 pullout.

“Our enemies should know this is our policy. We aren’t ready to absorb rocket fire on our settlements.”

Witnesses and officials of the Islamist group Hamas which rules the enclave confirmed the pre-dawn strike.

Gaza’s smuggling tunnels, which still number in the hundreds despite air attacks and an Egyptian crackdown in which some have been blown up or flooded, are a frequent target of Israeli retaliation for attacks by Gaza’s armed Palestinian groups.

The raid was Israel’s first aerial bombardment of the Gaza Strip since June 18.

The aircraft had targeted a tunnel under the border at Rafah which was suspected of being used to smuggle explosives into Gaza from Egypt, an Israeli military spokeswoman said.

ROCKETS AND MORTARS

Sunday, two mortar rounds were fired at Israel’s fortified Erez border crossing as medical patients going for treatment in Israel were being ferried out by ambulance.

The rounds exploded about 300 meters from the Erez wall in Palestinian territory but no one was hurt.

On the day before, a rocket fired from Gaza exploded in open ground on the Israeli side of the border.

Some smaller Gaza militant groups say Hamas has been trying to stop them firing rockets and mortars at Israel, which controls the delivery of fuel and food aid to the 1.5 million Palestinians living in the enclave.

Hamas wants Israel to lift its blockade and open the border crossings. Israel says Hamas must first release captured Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, whom it has held for three years.

Israel launched a ground and air offensive in Gaza in December in which some 1,400 Palestinians were killed. Israel said it was a response to daily rocket fire by Gaza militants directed at southern Israeli towns.

Thirteen Israelis were killed in the 22-day conflict.

Israel has frequently attacked tunnels it says are used to bring in weapons or materials to build weapons, though such raids have been fewer in the past couple of months.

The spokeswoman said some 240 rockets had been fired by Gaza fighters since the end of the offensive on January 18.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei

James Hider, Richard Beeston, and Michael Evans   www.TimesOnline.co.uk

Iran has perfected the technology to create and detonate a nuclear warhead and is merely awaiting the word from its Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, to produce its first bomb, Western intelligence sources have told The Times.

The sources said that Iran completed a research program to create weaponized uranium in the summer of 2003 and that it could feasibly make a bomb within a year of an order from its Supreme Leader.

A U.S. National Intelligence Estimate two years ago concluded that Iran had ended its nuclear arms research program in 2003 because of the threat from the American invasion of Iraq. But intelligence sources have told The Times that Tehran had halted the research because it had achieved its aim — to find a way of detonating a warhead that could be launched on its long-range Shehab-3 missiles.

They said that, should Ayatollah Khamenei approve the building of a nuclear device, it would take six months to enrich enough uranium and another six months to assemble the warhead. The Iranian Defense Ministry has been running a covert nuclear research department for years, employing hundreds of scientists, researchers, and metallurgists in a multibillion-dollar program to develop nuclear technology alongside the civilian nuclear program.

“The main thing (in 2003) was the lack of fissile material, so it was best to slow it down,” the sources said. “We think that the leader himself decided back then (to halt the program), after the good results.”

Iran’s scientists have been trying to master a method of detonating a bomb known as the “multipoint initiation system” — wrapping highly enriched uranium in high explosives and then detonating it. The sources said that the Iranian Defense Ministry had used a secret internal agency called Amad (“Supply” in Farsi), led by Mohsin Fakhri Zadeh, a physics professor and senior member of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Council.

The system operates by creating a series of explosive grooves on a metal hemisphere covering the uranium, which links explosives-filled holes opening onto a layer of high explosives enveloping the uranium. By detonating the explosives at either pole at the same time, the method ensures simultaneous impact around the sphere to achieve critical density.

“If the Supreme Leader takes the decision (to build a bomb), we assess they have to enrich low-enriched uranium to highly-enriched uranium at the Natanz plant, which could take six months, depending on how many centrifuges are operating. We don’t know if the decision was made yet,” said the intelligence sources, adding that Iran could have created smaller, secret facilities, other than those at the heavily guarded bunker at Natanz to develop materials for a first bomb. Inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency only keep tabs on fissile material produced at monitored sites and not the number of centrifuges that Iran has built.

Washington has given Iran until next month to open talks on resolving the nuclear crisis, although hopes of any constructive engagement have dimmed since the regime’s crackdown on pro-reformist protesters after June’s disputed presidential elections.

Ehud Barak, Israel’s Defense Minister, last week reiterated that a military strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities was still an option, should the talks fail. Israeli officials estimate that a raid on Natanz and a nuclear facility at Arak, in central Iran, would set Iran’s nuclear program back by two to three years.

An Israeli official said that Iran had poured billions of dollars over three decades into a two-pronged “master plan” to build a nuclear bomb. He said that Iran had enriched 1,010kg of uranium to 3.9 per cent, which would be sufficient for 30kg of highly enriched uranium at 95 per cent. About 30kg is needed to build one bomb.

British intelligence services are familiar with the secret information about Iran’s experiments, sources at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office said. Although British agencies did not have their own “independent evidence” that Iran had successfully tested the explosive component of a nuclear warhead, they said there was no reason to doubt the assessment.

If Iran’s leader does decide to build a bomb, he will have two choices, intelligence sources said. One would be to take the high-risk approach of kicking out the international inspectors and making a sprint to complete Iran’s first bomb, as the country weathered international sanctions or possible air strikes in the ensuing crisis. The other would be to covertly develop the materials needed for an arsenal in secret desert facilities.

Last week, during a series of high-level U.S. visits to Israel, officials outlined Washington’s plans to step up sanctions on Iran, should Tehran fail to agree on talks. Robert Gates, the Defense Secretary, and General James Jones, the National Security Adviser, said that Iran had until the end of next month, when the UN General Assembly is to meet, to make a positive move towards engagement.

If Tehran fails to respond, Washington aims to build a tough international coalition to impose harsh sanctions focusing on petroleum products — an area where Iran is particularly vulnerable because it sends almost all of its crude abroad for refinement.

Experts believe that the unrest of the summer will make Iran particularly vulnerable to sanctions. They would also hit the Revolutionary Guards Council, which finances its operations by running a huge conglomerate of international companies, rather than drawing directly from state coffers.