Levitt Letter Extra News

By Nile Gardiner, www.humanevents.com

Few countries in modern times could claim the title “warrior nation.” The United States and Great Britain definitely can, and Israel certainly qualifies for this distinction too. This is the 60th anniversary of Israel’s founding and a reminder of the heroism of the Israeli people. This tiny nation of just 7 million has fought seven wars and survived in the face of insurmountable odds, international hostility and massive intimidation, a tribute to the strength of the human spirit and the willingness of Israelis to fight to defend their freedom.

Six decades on from its establishment, Israel continues to fight for its very existence, and remains the most persecuted nation in the history of the United Nations. The UN has left no stone unturned in its hounding of Israel, a relentless display of hatred and prejudice that shames the world body. Despite being the freest, most democratic country in the Middle East, Israel is the whipping boy for the UN’s Human Rights Council, a discredited basket case of an organization that boasts some of the world’s worst human rights offenders as members, including China, Saudi Arabia, Cuba, Russia and Egypt. Roughly three quarters of the HRC’s resolutions in its first year were aimed at Israel, while brutal dictatorships such as Zimbabwe, North Korea, Burma and Sudan barely merited a mention.

Needless to say, the United Nations has remained silent in the face of Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s threats to wipe Israel “off the map”, much as the League of Nations dithered in the shadow of Nazi Germany just two generations ago. Iran’s dictator doesn’t mince his words when referring to Israel, calling it a “filthy entity” that “will sooner or later fall” in a speech this January, as well as “a dirty microbe” and “a savage animal” at a rally in February.

There are distinct echoes of the heated discussions in Europe and the United States over the intentions of Adolf Hitler in the mid to late 1930s in today’s debate over Iran. Then as now, there was a constant barrage of calls from political elites on both sides of the Atlantic for direct talks with a totalitarian regime and illusory hopes of reaching out to “moderates” within the government, a general downplaying of the threat level, widespread inaction and hand-wringing, and staggering complacency over levels of defense spending.

The brutal lessons of 20th Century history taught that there can be no negotiation with this sort of brutal dictatorship, and it would be a huge strategic error for the West to do so. There will be endless debate in international policy circles over Tehran’s nuclear intentions, but the essential fact remains that the free world is faced with a fundamentally evil and barbaric regime with a track record of backing international terrorism, repressing its own people, issuing genocidal threats against its neighbors, and of enabling the killing of Allied forces in Iraq.

It is imperative that the United States and Great Britain, Israel’s two main allies, remain united in defending Israel in the face of Iranian aggression. Iran poses the most significant threat to Israel’s security since its founding, as well as the biggest state-based threat to the West of our generation. As Israeli President Shimon Peres warned earlier this year, “a nuclear armed Iran will be a nightmare for the world.”

As the world’s largest sponsor of international terror, and a dangerous rogue regime hell-bent on acquiring nuclear weapons capability, Iran must be stopped. The Jerusalem Post reported just yesterday that the latest Israeli intelligence assessment is that “the Islamic Republic will master centrifuge technology and be able to begin enriching uranium on a military scale this year. According to the new timeline, Iran could have a nuclear weapon by the middle of next year.” This is several years ahead of the flawed assessment of the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), and gives added urgency to the debate over the Iranian nuclear issue.

Every effort must be made to increase the pressure on Tehran through Security Council and European economic, military and political sanctions, including a ban on investment in Iranian liquefied natural gas operations. In particular, extensive pressure must be applied on Switzerland to halt a $30 billion contract between Zurich-based contractor EGL and the National Iranian Gas Export Company.

At the same time, Washington and London must make preparations for the possible use of force against Iran’s nuclear facilities if the sanctions route fails. In addition, the U.S. and UK must be prepared to retaliate against Iranian aggression in Iraq, with Tehran continuing to wage a proxy war against Coalition and Iraqi forces. As General Petraeus made clear in his recent testimony before Congress, Iran is actively supplying mortars, rockets and explosives to Shiite militia groups in Iraq. It has also been revealed by Coalition spokesmen in the last few days that the elite Quds force of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard has been using Hizbollah guerillas to train Iraqi militias at a training camp at Jalil Azad near Tehran.

As tensions with Iran escalate, and as the stakes are dramatically raised, Britain and the United States should support the admission of Israel into NATO, offering a collective security guarantee in the face of Tehran’s saber-rattling. Israel, which spends nearly 10 percent of its GDP on defense (in contrast to the NATO average of 2.1 percent), would be a major net asset to the Alliance, possessing a first rate army, air force and navy, as well as outstanding intelligence and special forces capability. There is likely to be strong initial opposition to the move by some European countries, including France and Belgium, but it is a debate that NATO should have sooner rather than later.

The next few years will be a critical time for Israel, as it faces the prospect of the rise of a nuclear Iran that has pledged its destruction. If Israel is to survive another 60 years it is imperative that the West confronts the gathering storm and stands up to the biggest threat to international security since the end of the Cold War.

The United States, Great Britain and their allies must reject the illusory promise of “peace in our time” conjured by advocates of an appeasement approach towards the Mullahs of Iran, and ensure the world does not face a totalitarian Islamist regime armed with nuclear weapons. The freedom that Israel currently enjoys was secured through the sacrifice of her soldiers through several wars in the Middle East, as well as the earlier sacrifice of American and British troops in World War Two. It is the same liberty that we cherish today in the West, freedom that must be fought for and defended.

www.honestreporting.com

As Israel gears up to celebrate, the demonization campaign prepares to escalate.

As the 60th anniversary of Israel’s independence approaches, so the campaign of demonization against her is likely to escalate. After all, what better way to delegitimize Israel than to claim that the state was born in sin, attributing criminal charges to those who fought to create a democratic home for the Jewish people after 2000 years of exile.

As part of this campaign, anti-Israel activists are placing opinion pieces in local newspapers. An unpleasant preview of what is to come has arrived in the pages of the Charlotte Observer and Bangor Daily News.

Writing in the Charlotte Observer, Edith Garwood makes a number of claims including:

• “The indigenous Arabs — Muslim, Christian, secular — were systematically driven out of areas desired for a new Jewish state.”
• “Archives show armed Jewish militias expelled Arabs using home demolitions, massacres, rape, beatings, bombings and widespread threats of terror.”
• “The Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory, rocket fire into Israel, illegal settlement growth, checkpoints, suicide bombers, the crippled Palestinian economy, The Wall, and the lack of adequate access to medicine, food and clean water require attention, but are only outgrowths of the root problem — the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.”

Garwood concludes by calling for the recognition of the Palestinian “Right of Return” - a call for the end of Israel as a Jewish state.

Meanwhile, Bill Slavick launches an attack on US aid and support for Israel in the Bangor Daily News: “no good has come of it for 60 years except to assist Israel in becoming the bully of the block and giving us trouble.”

Again employing the inflammatory and inaccurate charge of “ethnic cleansing”, Slavick lists a litany of supposed Israeli criminal acts including:

• The “slaughter” of Palestinian civilians at Kibya in 1953.
• The “deliberate bombing” of the USS Liberty in 1967.
• The Jonathan Pollard spy affair.
• Selling arms to the South African apartheid regime.
• Abetting the 1982 Lebanese militia massacres in Sabra and Shatila.

It is, of course, all too easy to put together a long list of charges and claims without providing any details, context or explanation. The average reader will be unable to make any sense of the content without resorting to extensive research.

Ultimately, however, Slavick’s polemic is aimed at the close and valued friendship between Israel and the US, as Slavick directly connects the USS Cole and September 11 attacks to US support for Israel.

Please be on the lookout for more opinion pieces leading up to Israel’s 60th anniversary celebrations and send in your comments. Remind the editors that in her 60th year, there is a vibrant, democratic, and dynamic Israel that also deserves op-ed space in response to the negative diatribes that have appeared in many papers.

COMPARE AND CONTRAST

It isn’t all bad news however. In sharp contrast to the local titles above, Rocky Mountain News Editor John Temple does take a look at Israel’s life beyond the headlines:

The land of Israel that I found on a spring break visit this year was bursting with energy, in the midst of a boom only licked by the currents that are dragging down the U.S. economy.

Headlines from the region are usually of Gaza and rockets — of conflict. And, of course, that story deserves attention. But there are so many other stories, a few of which I would like to share with you today.

In this Israel, the spring air is rich with the sweet scent of the first blossoming fruit trees.

In this Israel, the streets of Jerusalem are mobbed with young and old, many in outlandish costumes, laughing and dancing, celebrating Purim, a holiday of revelry and abandon. The holiday’s story of Jewish survival is as real today as it was more than 2,000 years ago.

In this Israel, yes, the apartments have “safe rooms,” but they also have outdoor terraces abounding with flowers.

By Allan Little, www.bbc.co.uk

Nominations for the 2008 Nobel Peace Prize closed on February 1, and among the entrants is a 98-year-old Briton, Sir Nicholas Winton, known as the “British Schindler,” who transported 700 Jewish children to the UK before WWII.

Photo: Sir Nicholas was nominated for the prize by the Czech government.

In a school room in southern Bohemia, a class of teenagers sit mesmerised by a film about a young Englishman who came to their country a long time ago and did something so remarkable - brave as well as honourable - that 70 years later they petitioned the authorities to rename their school.

It is, now, the Sir Nicholas Winton School.

In the spring of 1939, the young Nicholas Winton cancelled a skiing holiday in Switzerland and, at the urging of a friend, went to Prague instead.

The city was full of people who had fled their homes in the wake of the Nazi occupation of the Sudetenland.

Nicholas Winton was particularly shocked by the condition of the children: many of them he found living in squalid - and freezing - refugee camps.

He resolved to do something about it.

With a group of others he drew up a list of children whose parents would agree to send them to Britain until the emergency - however long it was to last - was over.

When his list was complete there were 5,000 names on it.

He lobbied the Home Office in London. They said he could bring as many children as he liked, provided he could find foster families for them, and provided they went home when it was safe to do so.

The Winton group then advertised for families. “It wasn’t the ideal way to place children,” he told me, 70 years later.

“But if someone wrote to say they could take, say, a girl aged seven, then we sent some pictures of girls aged seven and said ‘choose one’.

“Not ideal, but it did work and it was quick.”

Father’s tears

He then organised a series of closed trains to take the children from Prague directly to Liverpool Street station in London.

Alicie Klimova was 11 in 1939. She took me back to the platform at Prague’s Masaryk Station, where she last saw her parents two months before the outbreak of war.

Photo: Alicie Klimova was on one of the Winton trains to England

“The platform was full of children and parents” she said. “My parents did their best to keep on smiling, telling me it was so exciting that I was going to England.

“But at midnight when the train pulled out, my father couldn’t hold back his tears.

“I said ‘Daddy don’t cry - you’ll disgrace me!’ Of course I had no idea that we would never see each other again”.

When Alicie went back to Prague in 1945 she found that both her parents had died in Auschwitz.

Lost contact

The transports continued through the summer of 1939. The last one was due to leave on 1 September - the day war broke out.

There were 250 children on board, but the train never left the station. Most of them died in the Holocaust.

For 50 years Nicholas Winton, of Maidenhead in Berkshire, lost contact with the 670 children he had brought to Britain - and whose lives he had saved.

When he married he didn’t even tell his wife what he had done.

Then, when he was almost 80, some of his children began to get in touch. He found that the original group had grown to more than 5,000.

“Normally events that happened a long time ago diminish in importance as time goes on,” Sir Nicholas told me.

“This story is the opposite - it keeps on growing, because there are more and more people. They keep breeding, you see!”

A New Biography Seeks to Understand the Man Who Hid Anne Frank
By Cnaan Liphshiz, www.Haaretz.com

The man who hid Anne Frank would probably have had reservations about a revealing new biography of his life that is scheduled to hit the stands on Sunday, some 17 years after his death. A private, humble, religious man, Victor Kugler might have objected to being exposed as an illegitimate child.

But Rick Kardonne, compiling editor of the first English-language book on Kugler’s life, The Man Who Hid Anne Frank (Gefen Publishing House, 2008), told Anglo File during a visit to Tel Aviv on Wednesday that he thought the revelation about Kugler’s familial situation was central to understanding what made this devout Lutheran inclined to take such enormous risks.

In 1942-44, Kugler helped conceal eight Jews, including Anne Frank, in a sealed annex in an Amsterdam office. Kugler, a Sudeten German who moved to Holland in 1920, was the office’s deputy manager, working under Otto Frank - Anne’s father.

In the world-famous diary published after her death, 13-year-old Anne Frank referred to Kugler as “Mr. Kraler.” He was eventually arrested by the Gestapo and sent to forced labor in eastern Holland. He escaped weeks before the Allies liberated The Netherlands. In 1955, he relocated to Canada, where he died at the age of 81. All the people he risked his life to save died in the Holocaust except for Otto Frank.

“Victor grew up in the Sudetenland, an extremely conservative region where children who were born out of wedlock often suffered social ostracism,” Kardonne explained. “This was probably the reason for his later sympathy to Jews, who were the prime object of hostility in the very region where it would have been expressed towards him.”

In the book, Kardonne wrote that this could well explain many important aspects of Kugler’s adult personality, such as his reluctance to reveal his early life to anybody and his extreme humility and reticence.

Kardonne, a seasoned Canadian journalist, took over the biography from a Jewish resident of Toronto named Eda Shapiro, who had interviewed Kugler, but then died in 1992, before she could write a book about him. In Shapiro’s notes, Kardonne made an important find: a letter from a woman from Minnesota who, in researching Kugler’s past, had come across evidence that he was born out of wedlock.

“Victor Kugler’s birth certificate only lists his mother’s name - Emilia Kugler - because Victor was born out of wedlock,” the letter said. Research on Kugler’s early life confirmed these assertions.

Was this the reason for Kugler’s warm feelings toward Anne Frank, who spent her early teens in fear of the society in which she had been raised? Kardonne thinks that it is possible, but there is no way of knowing for certain.

“Even in those early minutes of our acquaintance, I was struck by her large, dark brown eyes; those probing, searching, questioning eyes,” Kugler told Eda Shapiro of his first encounter with Anne, when she was four years old - long before the family went into hiding.

Another, later, memory pertains to Anne’s school years: “One punishment she received was to write an essay entitled ‘Chatterbox.’ Obviously this punishment didn’t work, for it was soon followed by a second assignment, entitled ‘Incurable Chatterbox.’ Most of the time, Anne was cheerful, friendly, and brimming over with fun and laughter.”

To prevent the authorities from confiscating Otto Frank’s business - which sold a jelling agent used in jam-making - Kugler assumed nominal ownership for the duration of the war. When Frank returned from the concentration camps, Kugler gave him the business and stayed on as an employee.

Eventually, the financial woes of post-war Europe drove Kugler and his Dutch wife to move to Toronto, where he worked as an insurance salesman. But Kugler’s connection with the Jewish community did not end there.

In his extensive research, Kardonne found that Kugler made many Jewish friends in Toronto. “His post-war connection with Jews was probably both because of his personal sympathy and because by that time, the story of his bravery was beginning to come out,” Kardonne said.

In 1973, Kugler was recognized by Yad Vashem as a Righteous among the Nations. He also received other honorary titles and awards for his heroism, and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation produced a documentary on his life.

Commenting on the book, Dutch Ambassador to Israel Michiel den Hond told Anglo File: “It is harsh reality that in some years, there will be no survivors left who can give evidence about the war and the atrocities of the Holocaust.” Therefore, he said, “it is all the more important that books like this continue to be written and given the necessary attention and respect, as priceless tools for passing on the memory of this history, which has affected so many people, to future generations.”

Kardonne quoted Eda Shapiro in the book as having said: “I realized that this book … is not only about one of the people who hid Anne Frank. It is also about a Righteous Gentile. Indeed, in my opinion, this book records part of the chronicle of a whole nation of Righteous Gentiles - the Dutch people.”

By Hillel Fendel, www.IsraelNN.com

Fidel Castro has stepped down after nearly a half-century as leader of Cuba. His anti-Israel stance, both diplomatically and militarily, was pronounced.

Castro, 81, seized national power in 1959, aided by his brother and designated successor, Raul, aged 76. Already then, his Nazi-like tactics were noticed by many of the estimated 20,000 Jews then in Cuba.

In college in the 1940s, he was said to have walked around the campus with a copy of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf under his arm. His first attempt at seizing power, in July 1953, was an attack on an isolated outpost of the Cuban army, in which 100 people were killed. It was reminiscent of Hitler’s attack on the War Ministry in Munich in 1924, both were seemingly amateurish, and both made their perpetrators national figures.

When he finally took over Cuba several years later, Castro stabilized his rule by summary executions and eliminations, and with a total take-over of the media. In addition, he created the Nazi-like Committees for the Defense of the Revolution, assigned to spy on and control neighborhood residents, as well as the Young Pioneers, in imitation of the infamous Hitler Youth.

Though the Cuban Jewish community numbered as high as 30,000 in the 1950’s, by 1967 only about 2,000 were left. This number has now dwindled to well under 1,000.

Anti-Israel
Castro led Cuba along a clearly anti-Israel path, both diplomatically and militarily. After the Six-Day War in 1967, Cuba’s ambassador in the United Nations called it an “armed aggression against the Arab people… by a most treacherous… surprise attack in the Nazi manner.”

A year earlier, the Tri-Continental Conference in Havana, featuring revolutionaries and terrorists from around the world, passed a resolution calling for the breaking of all treaties with Israel and for its expulsion from all international organizations. Later in 1966, Castro opened more than a dozen guerrilla training camps under the direction of a KGB officer, in which budding Palestinian terrorists were trained.

In October 1973, during the Yom Kippur war, not only did Castro break diplomatic relations with Israel, but he deployed thousands of Cuban soldiers, including helicopter pilots and tank crews, to fight alongside the Syrians. The next year, Castro gave the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) an expropriated Jewish community center in Havana - and awarded the visiting Yasser Arafat with Cuba’s highest award, the Bay of Pigs Medal.

Evidence of Cuban training of Palestinian terrorists continued to surface throughout the 1970’s and the ensuing decades. In 1975, Cuba sided with the UN majority that called Zionism “a form of racism” - and in 1991, when the UN finally repealed the resolution, Cuba voted against the repeal.

In 1982, it was the Cuban Embassy in Beirut that served as Arafat’s headquarters during Israel’s Peace for Galilee War in southern Lebanon.

By Mark Levitt

Behold, I will make Jerusalem a cup of trembling unto all the people round about, when they shall be in the siege both against Judah [and] against Jerusalem. And in that day will I make Jerusalem a burdensome stone for all people: all that burden themselves with it shall be cut in pieces, though all the people of the earth be gathered together against it. Zechariah 12:2-3

Does it fulfill prophecy when a recent American president, a professed believer, carries a vendetta against Israel?

The slide show presentation at www.terrorismawareness.org/jimmy-carters-war by David Horowitz and based on the pamphlet by Jacob Laksin reviews and refutes the most persistent claims of anti-Semites and anti-Zionists who openly seek Israel’s destruction. How can a man so educated and influential fall for such propaganda—hook, line and sinker? It must be the work of the devil. Please see the presentation in its entirety as you will benefit from its visuals and maps. In case you can’t, we’ve posted its transcription below.

False Accusations

According to former president Jimmy Carter, Israel is the problem.
But: Israel is one-sixth of one-percent of the landmass of the Middle East. Israel’s population is two percent of the total population of the Middle East.

According to Jimmy Carter, the problem is that Israel seeks the “control and colonization of Palestinian land.” This statement is false.

The disputed land in the Middle East did not belong to the Arabs. For 400 years, it was ruled by the Turks. It was part of the Ottoman Empire (1553-1922). The European powers created Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Jordan and Israel out of the ruins of the empire once ruled by the Ottoman Turks.

The Palestine Mandate was a British controlled portion of the Ottoman Empire. When Israel was created in 1948, the words ‘Palestine’ and ‘Palestinian’ did not refer to an Arab people or an Arab nation. The word Palestine is derived from the word “Philistine.” After conquering the land of Israel, the Romans renamed it after the biblical enemies of the Jews, the “Philistines,” who were not Arabs, but Greeks. The British violated the Mandate and, instead of giving it to the Jews, in 1922 gave 80% of it to the Hashemite Arabs. This later became Jordan.

According to former President Jimmy Carter, Israel is an apartheid state. This statement is false.

Israel is not an “apartheid state.” More than one million Arabs living in Israel enjoy the benefits and equal rights of the only free and democratic society in the Middle East. Israeli Arabs have more freedoms and civil rights than Arabs living in any Arab country.

According to Jimmy Carter, the security fence that Israel has built to keep terrorists out is a prison. This statement is false.

Israel’s security fence was not built to keep Palestinians in. It was built to keep Palestinian terrorists out. Since it was built, Israel’s security fence has reduced Palestinian attacks by 90%. This short segment of concrete wall [pictured] prevented Palestinian snipers from shooting at Israeli civilians. The fence Jimmy Carter wants Israel to take down is a humanitarian structure that has saved countless innocent lives.

According to Jimmy Carter, Israel has occupied Arab land in order to colonize it. This statement is false.

Every inch of territory that Israel’s armies have occupied was first used by the Arab states to conduct wars of aggression. The stated goal of these wars was to destroy Israel and push the Jews into the sea (in 1948, 1967, 1973, 2001 and 2006).

To prevent more attacks, Israeli troops occupied the West Bank and Gaza in 1967, and Southern Lebanon in 1982. After the 1993 Oslo Peace Accords, Israel withdrew most of its military from the West Bank. Without a peace agreement, Israel unilaterally and completely withdrew its troops from Southern Lebanon in 2000 and from Gaza in 2005.

Each time Israel withdrew its troops, the Palestinians responded by launching terrorist attacks on Israeli citizens. On Israel’s towns. On Israel’s schools. All these attempts to destroy Israel have been launched from the West Bank, Gaza, and Southern Lebanon.

Why is Jimmy Carter attacking the victims in the Middle East and making the tasks of the aggressors easier? In conducting his propaganda war against Israel, Jimmy Carter’s hands are not clean. Jimmy Carter has been receiving money from Arab patrons for years. The very Arabs who want to see Israel destroyed.

The Jimmy Carter Center is funded by tens of millions of dollars from Arab states that persecute women, homosexuals, and Christians, and want to see Israel destroyed. In 1993 Saudi King Fahd gave the Carter Center $7.6 million. He has given many more millions since then. The King’s high-living, Israel-hating nephew, Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal, has donated at least $5 million to the Jimmy Carter Center. Mayor Rudy Giuliani returned Prince Alwaleed’s gift. Jimmy Carter did not. And Carter has received million- dollar gifts from ten of Osama Bin Laden’s brothers, and from the Saudi Fund.

Jimmy Carter has also taken money from the United Arab Emirates, like Saudi Arabia, a rigid Islamic state run by dictators whose courts consider homosexuality a capital crime and regard women as a gender which should neither be seen nor heard. After receiving their money, Carter called the United Arab Emirates an “almost completely open and free society.” Having taken the Saudis’ money, Jimmy Carter claims that Saudi Arabia’s rulers are “moderate.”

In fact Saudi Arabia’s rulers

• fund the Islamist Jihadists against the West,
• deny women the right to appear in public “uncovered,”
• or drive a car,
• are among the leading funders of suicide bombers in Israel,
• are financial supporters of Hamas, whose charter calls for the destruction of Israel and for world domination by radical Islam.

Defending Palestinian Terror

Jimmy Carter claims that he opposes terrorism. But only “after international laws and the goals of the Roadmap to Peace are accepted by Israel.” In other words, terrorist attacks are okay until Israel receives a seal of approval from Jimmy Carter.

In a 2007 interview on Al-Jazeera TV, Jimmy Carter declared that Palestinian missiles – all of which are fired at random into Israeli cities, towns and schools – should not be equated with terrorism.

Jimmy Carter and Yasser Arafat

No Arab leader benefited more from Carter’s support than the late Yasser Arafat. President Carter worked to legitimize Arafat’s organization, Fatah, despite its terrorist agendas.

“Yasser Arafat has generally taken a more moderate line.” — Jimmy Carter, 1985

“He’s explored all the possibilities to make progress toward a total peace settlement.” — Jimmy Carter on Yasser Arafat, 1990

“He has done everything possible…to promote the peace process.” – Jimmy Carter on Yasser Arafat, 1990

“Peace for us means the destruction of Israel.” — Yasser Arafat, 1980

“Martyrs, martyrs, martyrs…we want a million martyrs to march on Jerusalem.” — Yasser Arafat, 2002

Jimmy Carter’s Troubling Record on Peace

Jimmy Carter won a Nobel Peace prize — for attacking his own President in a time of war. Jimmy Carter’s attacks on Israel are also not made in a political vacuum.

“Israel must be wiped off the map.” — Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, 2005

“If they (Jews) all gather in Israel, it will save us the trouble of going after them worldwide.”
– Hassan Nasrallah, leader of Hezbollah, 2002

“Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it.”
– Hamas Charter [in 2007 Hamas became the government of Gaza]

In the war against terror in the Middle East, former president Jimmy Carter has taken sides.  Disgracefully, he has taken the wrong side.

By Jeffrey Goldberg, www.nytimes.com

One day in Damascus not long ago, I visited the under-stocked gift shop of the Sheraton Hotel, looking for something to read. There wasn’t much: pre-owned Grishams, a hagiography of former Syrian president Hafez al-Assad, an early Bill O’Reilly (go figure) and a paperback copy of “The International Jew,” published in 2000 in Beirut. “The International Jew” is a collection of columns exposing the putative role of Jews in such fields as international finance, world governance and bootlegging. “Wherever the seat of power may be, thither they swarm obsequiously,” the book states. These columns, which are based on the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” — they are a plagiary of a forgery, in other words — were first published in Henry Ford’s Dearborn Independent more than 80 years ago.

Next to “The International Jew” was a copy of “The Bible Came From Arabia,” a piece of twaddle that suggests the Jews are not Jews and Israel isn’t Israel. And then there was a pamphlet called “Secrets of the Talmud.” Not knowing these secrets (I was raised Reform), I started reading. The Talmud apparently teaches Jews how best to demolish the world economy and gives Jews the right to take non-Jewish women as slaves and rape them.

The anti-Semitic worldview, generally speaking, is fantastically stupid. If its propagandists actually understood the chosen people, they would know, for instance, that no one, not the chief of Mossad, not even the president of Hadassah, could persuade 4,000 Jews to stay home from the World Trade Center on Sept. 11. (“And why should I listen to you?” would have been the near-universal rebuttal to the call.) Anti-Semitic conspiracy literature not only posits crude and senseless ideas, but also tends to be riddled with typos, repetitions and gross errors of grammar, and for this and other reasons I occasionally have trouble taking it seriously.

The German scholar Matthias Küntzel tells us this is a mistake. He takes anti-Semitism, and in particular its most potent current strain, Muslim anti-Semitism, very seriously indeed. His bracing, even startling, book, “Jihad and Jew-Hatred” (translated by Colin Meade), reminds us that it is perilous to ignore idiotic ideas if these idiotic ideas are broadly, and fervently, believed. And across the Muslim world, the very worst ideas about Jews — intricate, outlandish conspiracy theories about their malevolent and absolute power over world affairs — have become scandalously ubiquitous. Hezbollah and Hamas, to name two prominent examples, understand the world largely through the prism of Jewish power. Hezbollah officials employ language that shamelessly echoes Nazi propaganda, describing Jews as parasites and tumors and prescribing the murder of Jews as a kind of chemotherapy.

The question is not only why, of course, but how: how did these ideas, especially those that portray Jews as all-powerful, work their way into modern-day Islamist discourse? The notion of the Jew as malevolently omnipotent is not a traditional Muslim notion. Jews do not come off well in the Koran — they connive and scheme and reject the message of the Prophet Mohammed — but they are shown to be, above all else, defeated. Mohammed, we read, conquered the Jews in battle and set them wandering. In subsequent centuries Jews lived among Muslims, and it is true that their experience was generally healthier than that of their brethren in Christendom, but only so long as they knew their place; they were ruled and taxed as second-class citizens and were often debased by statute. In the Jim Crow Middle East, no one believed the Jews were in control.

Obviously, then, these modern-day ideas about Jewish power were imported from Europe, and Küntzel makes a bold and consequential argument: the dissemination of European models of anti-Semitism among Muslims was not haphazard, but an actual project of the Nazi Party, meant to turn Muslims against Jews and Zionism. He says that in the years before World War II, two Muslim leaders in particular willingly and knowingly carried Nazi ideology directly to the Muslim masses. They were Haj Amin al-Husseini, the mufti of Jerusalem, and the Egyptian proto-Islamist Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood. The story of the mufti is a familiar one: he was the leader of the Arabs in Palestine, and Palestine’s leading anti-Jewish agitator. He eventually embraced the Nazis and spent most of the war in Berlin, recruiting Bosnian Muslims for the SS and agitating for the harshest possible measures against Jews. Küntzel writes that the mufti became upset with Himmler in 1943, when he sought to trade 5,000 Jewish children for 20,000 German prisoners. Himmler came around to the mufti’s thinking, and the children were gassed.

Hassan al-Banna did not embrace Nazism in the same uncomplicated manner, but through the 1930s, his movement, aided by the Germans, led the drive against not only political Zionism but Jews in general. “This burgeoning Islamist movement was subsidized with German funds,” Küntzel writes. “These contributions enabled the Muslim Brotherhood to set up a printing plant with 24 employees and use the most up-to-date propaganda methods.” The Muslim Brotherhood, Küntzel goes on, was a crucial distributor of Arabic translations of “Mein Kampf” and the “Protocols.” Across the Arab world, he states, Nazi methods and ideology whipped up anti-Zionist fervor, and the effects of this concerted campaign are still being felt today.

Küntzel marshals impressive evidence to back his case, but he sometimes oversimplifies. One doesn’t have to be soft on Germany to believe it was organic Muslim ideas as well as Nazi ideas that led to the spread of anti-Semitism in the Middle East. In his effort to blame Germany for Muslim anti-Semitism, he overreaches. “While Khomeini was certainly not an acolyte of Hitler, it is not unreasonable to suppose that his anti-Jewish outlook … had been shaped during the 1930s,” Küntzel says, citing, in a footnote, an article he himself wrote. He also oversimplifies the Israeli-Arab conflict. Jews today have actual power in the Middle East, and Israel is not innocent of excess and cruelty.

Still, Küntzel is right to state that we are witnessing a terrible explosion of anti-Jewish hatred in the Middle East, and he is right to be shocked. His invaluable contribution, in fact, is his capacity to be shocked by the rhetoric of hate and by its consequences. The former Hamas leader Abdel Aziz Rantisi once told me that “the question is not what the Germans did to the Jews, but what the Jews did to the Germans.” The Jews, he said, deserved their punishment. Küntzel argues that we should see men like Rantisi for what they are: heirs to the mufti, and heirs to the Nazis.

By Rachel Neuwirth, www.americanthinker.com

The entire body of the Jewish people today — in Israel, in Europe, in America, in Australia and New Zealand, and throughout the world — is in grave danger. Our very existence as a people and as a faith is in jeopardy. The threat to our survival has two components to it: the external siege being waged against Israel and the Jewish people throughout the world by the international jihadist movement, its sympathizers and appeasers; and the internal siege that we Jews, both in Israel and in the Diaspora, including the United States, are waging against ourselves.

We will look first at the external siege — war that is being waged against us. It has its military, diplomatic, and ideological-propaganda aspects.

Military threat

On the “military” front (if that is the right word for the front of violence and terror) we have been under constant assault since the signing of the Oslo accords between Israel and the PLO in 1993.

During the past fourteen and a half years the Palestinian Arab terrorists have murdered over 1,800 Israelis, two thirds of them civilians. This is more than the total number of Israelis murdered by the Palestinian Arabs in the forty-four years preceding the “peace accords.” Many of the killers have been members of the Palestinian Arab “police force” established with Israel ’s consent in Gaza, Judea and Samaria under the Oslo accords. Indeed, Palestinian “police” have murdered three Israelis just over the past month.

For the past seven years, Israeli towns and villages near the border with Gaza have been subjected to rocket attacks; during the past two years, the city of Sderot, with a population of some 23,000, has been bombarded with rockets nearly every day. Its residents have about twenty seconds whenever a warning siren sounds to duck into a shelter. The missiles have killed some people; many more have been wounded; and thousands, including Sderot’s children, have suffered shock and trauma.

Egypt, supposedly at peace with Israel, has enabled the Hamas terrorists who control Gaza to move vast amounts of armaments, money and soldiers into this territory, and to transform themselves from a guerilla force into an army able to fight Israel on NEAR equal terms. The Israelis have even captured on videotape Egyptian “border guards” helping to smuggle in terrorists.

Then there are the Hezbollah terrorists in Lebanon, who killed about 140 Israeli soldiers and 43 civilians in 2006, many of them with long range rockets that struck deep inside the Galilee, including Israel ’s third largest city, Haifa. Hezbollah recently struck again with rockets at kibbutz Shlomi. Since the 2006 Lebanon war, Hezbollah has completely rearmed, and now has missiles that can strike at the heart of Tel Aviv.

Standing behind Hezbollah are Syria and Iran. Both of these hateful regimes make no bones about their desire to destroy Israel. Both are armed with chemical and biological weapons, missiles that can reach every inch of Israeli territory, the most advanced fighter jets, and numerous other ultramodern weapons. Both regimes are working at break-neck speed to develop nuclear weapons. This has been thoroughly documented, despite the attempts of the recent “National Intelligence Estimate” to deny this reality.

Threat of violence
The campaign of violence against Jews has been extended to the Diaspora. There has been a massive increase in anti-Semitic incidents throughout Europe. In London, Paris, and Brussels, Jews are routinely assaulted on the street and on public transportation facilities. Many synagogues have been vandalized, and some burned to the ground. Desecrations of Jewish cemeteries are so common that they have ceased to be news. In “peaceful” Switzerland, a rabbi was gunned down recently in the street simply because he was wearing traditional Jewish garb.

Nor should we American Jews think that we have been immune to the spreading hatred. According to FBI statistics, of some 1,500 hate crimes connected with the religion of the victims last year, over 1,000 were directed at Jews — more than five times the number of crimes directed at the next most vulnerable group, Muslims, and more than ten times the number of hate crimes directed against Christians. On March 1, 1994, a Lebanese Muslim murdered a Jewish boy and seriously injured several others on the Brooklyn Bridge, simply because they were Jews. On July 4, 2002, at the El Al terminal of Los Angeles Airport, two Jews were killed and four wounded by an Egyptian gunman, simply because they were Jews seeking to board a plane for Israel. On July 28, 2007 an Arab Muslim man walked into a Jewish center in Seattle, murdered a Jewish woman and injured five other women simply because they were Jews.

Even more troubling, perhaps, is the strange insensitivity often displayed by our own government toward many of these hate crimes. For example, the FBI described the murder of the Jewish boy on the Brooklyn Bridge as a case of “road rage,” even when the political and religious motives of the assassin were attested to by many witnesses. And when the Egyptian, Muslim fundamentalist gunman mowed down Jews at the Los Angeles El Al terminal, the FBI investigating officer asserted, “there is no evidence that this was terrorism.”

Diplomatic threat
On the diplomatic front, Israel has been under relentless pressure from the international community, including, sad to say, our own beloved United States, to make unilateral concessions to the Palestinian terrorists that place Israel in deadly peril. The so-called “Quartet” of great powers, consisting of the United States, the European Community, the United Nations, and Russia, has bludgeoned Israel into accepting the so-called “Road Map” plan, which requires Israel to withdraw more or less to its June 4, 1967 borders. The late Israeli Foreign Minister, Abba Eban, once aptly called these lines “the Auschwitz frontiers.”

Pressure to implement the “road map” has continued relentlessly through the Annapolis conference last month and during President Bush’s recent visit to Israel . The United States has also put relentless pressure on Israel to withdraw security checkpoints that are vital to preventing the movement of terrorists and their weapons into Israel, to end all construction of Jewish housing outside the 1967 borders, including those neighborhoods of Jerusalem outside of this “green line,” to acquiesce in the partition of Jerusalem, and to evacuate Jewish residents from the so-called “unauthorized settlements” or “illegal outposts” — many of them on land legally owned by Jews, in some cases owned by Jews for decades.

The Palestinian Arab leadership, for its part, has demanded that Israel accept within its borders all four million Arabs who claim that they are descended from refugees who left Israel sixty years ago, during her War of Independence. They also want Israel to evict the roughly 450,000 Jews who live in areas outside the 1967 lines, which would require Israel to resettle these unfortunate people, too, within its now-truncated territory. Obviously, Israel could not survive the importation of millions of Arabs who have been taught to hate her from birth. But it also would be very difficult to absorb half a million Jews forced from their homes. They would have good reason to hate their own country.

Yet the United States has given Israel little encouragement to resist these demands of the Palestinian Arabs.

Propaganda threat
But by far the most insidious and dangerous front in the war against Israel is the propaganda war. In the Arab countries and Iran, this takes the form of the crudest lies and stereotypes derived from Nazi propaganda and the notorious anti-Semitic forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. But it is also being waged in a more subtle way by the media throughout Europe, the United States, and even within Israel itself; and by the academic and educational establishments of all of these countries as well. The Western media and academic “experts” portray Israel as a Western colonial implant into the Middle East that has uprooted and dispossessed the “indigenous” Arab population and stolen their land. Israelis are portrayed as religious fanatics intent on seizing other people’s land in order to fulfill Biblical promises.

Nor should we overlook that the hate propaganda and libels directed against Israel are directed against the Jews of the Diaspora as well, especially American Jews. Professors Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer and former President Jimmy Carter claim that American Jews exert excessive power over American foreign policy; that they use this power on behalf of a foreign country, Israel, to the disadvantage and injury of the United States; and that we silence anyone who criticizes Israel with threats, unfair criticism or dismissal from their jobs.

All of these allegations, both those against Israel itself and those against its Jewish supporters in the United States and elsewhere, are lies. But through constant repetition, they have been bought into by hundreds of millions of people throughout the world, including Europe, the United States, and saddest of all, within Israel itself. This is the ultimate fulfillment of Hitler’s observation in Mein Kampf that the bigger the lie is, if it is repeated often enough, the more likely it is to be believed.

Internal threat
But it is we Jews’ siege of ourselves from within our own communities that presents the gravest danger to our survival as a people and as a faith community: our self-doubts; our demoralization; our loss of confidence in the righteousness of our own cause; our lack of unity; the loss of our religious beliefs, and of what is an essential part of our religion, our mission as a people.

Because so many of us have lost faith in the righteousness of our own struggle for survival, and have accepted the lies of our enemies, the government and people of Israel have been increasingly yielding to the demands of our enemies and false friends without even putting up a struggle. In order to survive, we must win a victory over the sickness of our enemies; but before we can do that, we must heal ourselves.

For some Jews, their psychological sickness has progressed to the point of outright identification with the enemies of our people, and active participation in their ideological, propaganda and political assault on us. These Jews have actively taken sides with the enemy, at least on the level of ideology, communications and propaganda — perhaps in the belief that “if you can’t beat them, join them.” These Jews constitute an internal Jewish fifth column that threatens us more severely than all our external enemies combined. The anti-Israel and anti-Jewish Jews among us are like a dagger pointed directly at the heart of Israel and the Jewish people.

Thousands of Jewish journalists, academics, filmmakers, artists and “intellectuals” in the United States, Canada, Europe, and within Israel itself have actively participated in the campaign of vilification and lies against Israel. There is even a “minyan” of Jewish reporters working for the notorious al-Qaeda mouthpiece al-Jazeera. These Jewish haters of Zion have a greater impact and credibility than any other group of anti-Israel propagandists. Who, after all, would believe that Jews would lie about their own people and institutions? And their impact is greatest on their fellow Jews, of course; they have sapped the will of Israelis to resist the demands of their enemies, and the will of the American and other Diaspora Jews to stand behind Israel, by persuading them that Israel ’s cause is not just.

But our internal propagandist fifth column, disastrous though its impact has been on our morale, is only one of the negative influences contributing to the collapse of the Jewish will to resist the relentless pressure of our enemies.

A tremendous, and humanly understandable, war-weariness has gripped Israelis. Prime Minister Olmert gave voice to this terrible war fatigue when he said,

“We are tired of fighting, we are tired of being courageous, we are tired of winning, we are tired of defeating our enemies, we want to we will be able to live in an entirely different environment of relations with our enemies.”

We must remember that a man or woman struggling to walk to safety through numbing cold may become very tired indeed, to the point of wishing to lie down in the snow and fall asleep. But then he or she will not wake up.

Loss of faith in God and in the truths of our religion is yet another reason for our spreading defeatism and our failure to resist the assault on us as Jews. It is our religion that teaches us that we are a distinct people with a land of our own. It is our religion that teaches us that we have a unique destiny, and that we must survive as a people if we are to fulfill our mission to be “a light unto the nations.” Once we forget our faith, the temptation to assimilate into our environment completely and forget about what happens to our fellow Jews becomes very great.

And for us, the Jews of the golden American Diaspora, our very comfort, prosperity and seeming security have concealed the common danger from us — much as they concealed from the Jews of Germany and elsewhere in Europe the grave danger that they faced from Nazism, until it was too late to do anything. They think, “What has all this got to do with me? I am leading a perfectly contented and prosperous life here in America with my family. I am very comfortable. Why should I care about what is happening to other Jewish people 6,000 miles away?”

The answer to this understandable human reaction is the answer that Mordecai sent to Esther when she expressed her fear of approaching King Ahasuerus to appeal for the life of her fellow Jews: “Do not imagine that you, of all the Jews, will escape with your life by being in the king’s palace. On the contrary . . .you and your father’s house will perish.” (Esther 4:12). If Israel should fall, do not imagine that we American Jews shall escape persecution by enemies who see our vulnerability.

Our lethargy and indifference are grave mistakes that will come back to haunt us. While World War II was going on, few Jews in America even knew about, or much less reacted to, the genocide being committed against our brethren in Europe, even though the essential facts about their fate were known to American Jewish leaders as early as 1942. It was only after the war ended and photographs of the bodies of the victims appeared in the newspapers that the enormity of what had happened began to sink in with American Jews. Serious discussion and study of the Holocaust did not even begin among us until the 1960s.

This time, we will not have the luxury of a slow response to the dangers facing not only the Jews of Israel, but also ourselves.

Nor should Christians and other non-Jews in America and throughout the Western world be indifferent to what is happening. The international jihad waged by the radical Islamists targets not only Jews, but all Christians (referred to by the jihadis as “Crusaders”) and all of Western civilization as well. The Jews are the first on the list of groups targeted for extinction by the radical jihadis, but they are by no means the last on this list. In our vulnerability to the poisonous ideological winds sweeping in from the Middle East and South Asia, we Jews are the proverbial “canary in the coal mine” — the first to suffer the lethal effects of the poison, but not the last.

news.yahoo.com

Israeli Public Security Minister Avi Dichter has cancelled a trip to Britain over concerns he could be arrested on war crimes allegations, his spokesman said.

“Minister Dichter has cancelled this trip following threats of him being arrested in Great Britain. This is an intolerable situation,” Barak Sari said.

Israeli Public Security Minister Avi Dichter, seen here in 2003, has cancelled a trip to Britain over concerns he could be arrested on war crimes allegations. (AFP/File/Yoav Lemmer)

Dichter was due to travel to Britain to participate in an “after Annapolis” conference to focus on the aftermath of the November U.S. conference at which Israeli-Palestinian peace talks were revived.

But he cancelled the trip on the recommendation of the foreign ministry, which said it was possible that a leftist organization could file a complaint against him that could lead to an arrest warrant.

As head of Israel’s Shin Beth internal intelligence agency, Dichter was involved in the 2002 Israeli attack in Gaza in which an Israeli warplane dropped a one-tonne bomb on the house of the head of Hamas’s military wing, Salah Shehade, killing him, his bodyguard and 15 civilians, many of them children.

Britain allows legal investigations against foreign nationals provided that the defendant’s own country is unwilling or unable to handle such complaints.

In May 2006 the Israeli army scrapped plans to send one of its generals to a course at a British military academy over fears he could be arrested on war crimes allegations.

In September 2005, a retired Israeli general, Doron Almog, refused to leave a plane at London’s Heathrow airport after learning a warrant had been issued for his arrest over his time commanding troops in the Gaza Strip.

By Phyllis Chesler, www.FrontPageMagazine.com

Once upon a time, I only read and wrote for the most radical, left, and feminist media on the face of the earth. Reluctantly, suspiciously, I read just one establishment, “grown up” paper: The New York Times. After all, it was my hometown paper and being as provincial as most Manhattanites, I somehow still believed (you learn this from the drinking water) that the Times covered issues in an objective, sophisticated, and leading-edge way.

I still subscribe to, and read the Times, but never first and sometimes not at all (I love how they cover weddings and usually check their obituaries). But duty calls and, as a culture warrior on the front lines, so to speak, I have to read the Times.

But now, I first read The New York Sun, Wall Street Journal, The New York Post, The Weekly Standard, The New Republic, Commentary, Middle East Quarterly, the American Jewish media, the online Israeli and Middle Eastern papers and then check about twenty five other Internet websites beginning with FrontPage and Pajamas Media in order to steel myself for the ordeal of reading The Paper of Record–yes, the same paper which buried news of the Holocaust on its back pages; the one which today, chooses, positions, and captions photos in such a way that over time, its readers have come to believe that Israel is really an “apartheid” nation state and that every single Palestinian, including the suicide killers, their handlers, and their billionaire funders are barefoot, unarmed, and innocent victims of Israeli and Jewish aggression.

Just the other day—on precisely August 11, 2007—what fresh outrage blinded me and caused me to reach for my blood pressure medication? There, right on the front page of the Saturday Times was a photo four columns wide and five inches high. It was not about the American miners who were, at the time, heartstoppingly, tragically trapped in Utah.

It showed us a lonely man (Camus’s existential stranger-hero, perhaps Kafka’s lonely civilian facing a nameless bureaucracy) on a long, long road surrounded by a high wall. The article was captioned: “A Segregated Road in an Already Divided Land.” One more time, the Israeli attempt to defend itself from terrorist attacks by building a security wall and, incredibly, in this instance, to allow the West Bank Palestinians (those who do not make up the 1.2 million who live in Israel proper as Israeli citizens) to travel from Ramallah to Bethlehem without checkpoints, without being stopped, without having to deal with Israeli soldiers.

One might think that congratulations were in order. Nope. In fact, the pull quote read: “A Lack of Exits Will Keep Palestinians Out of Jerusalem.” I do not recall any similar pull quotes about how Jews or Christians are not allowed to practice their religions in Saudi Arabia or Pakistan or even at their own holiest sites in Muslim-held territory. And, as Paul Berman has brilliantly pointed out, the Times has glamorized fascism in its overly gushing reviews of the work of Tariq Ramadan, the grandson of the founder of The Muslim Brotherhood, who now teaches at Oxford University and is published by their distinguished press.

When Islamic jihad intensified against Israel in 2000, I began meticulously to document such media biases. I wrote articles, delivered speeches, lost old friends and colleagues, but made new ones for doing so. I counted myself one lucky woman when HonestReporting, Camera, and Memri emerged to do just this, both systematically and splendidly. Let me note that because the Times is still so large, it can afford to throw bones, offer scraps, to cover their considerable moral nakedness.

Thus, the paper has also published inspired, “corrective” reportage by Nicholas Kristof, Christopher Caldwell, and David Brooks–even occasionally by Thomas Friedman on the subjects of Islamic gender and religious apartheid and about the Middle East. And, let me admit: I still read their Sunday Book Review which, although it chose not to review my last two books, (a “first” for me, but a very educational experience), still remains essential reading. But, the book reviews in the New York Sun, Wall Street Journal, and Weekly Standard are now also essential reading.

Here’s the problem: Despite all the ongoing critiques, the Times remains a major cultural gatekeeper. If a film, opera, ballet, concert, or book is reviewed in its pages–the work exists. Otherwise, the work and its creator are rendered almost invisible. A good review in the Times (and I have had two front page Sunday book reviews, appeared on the cover of their magazine, been interviewed and published in their pages hundreds of times), inevitably leads to book sales, lecture and media requests, larger publishing advances, and invitations to much-talked about parties. It does more than that: It ensures that your ideas are made available to a large number of people.

If this is true about culture, imagine the influence the Times wields by its coverage of war, politics, foreign policy, or the U.S. presidency.

I don’t think the bias or the influence of the mainstream media will change any time soon. And, it may get a lot worse with the increasing Saudi purchase of shares in American media.

However, there is cause for hope. I am banking on the Internet to effectively compete with such mainstream media. Most people under 30 turn to the Internet for their news, not to hard copy newspapers—or so my son and various polls tell me. This, more than the cancellation of subscriptions by irate readers, is probably the primary reason that circulation has fallen at the Paper of Record.

And now, having gotten this off my chest, I am ready to face the Paper of Record for today.
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Dr. Phyllis Chesler is the well known author of classic works, including the bestseller Women and Madness (1972) and The New Anti-Semitism (2003). She has just published The Death of Feminism: What’s Next in the Struggle for Women’s Freedom (Palgrave Macmillan), as well as an updated and revised edition of Women and Madness. She is an Emerita Professor of psychology and women’s studies, the co-founder of the Association for Women in Psychology (1969) and the National Women’s Health Network (1974). She is currently on the Board of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East and lives in New York City. Her website is www.phyllis-chesler.com.