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They Weren’t Goths Or Loners
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The two teenagers who killed 13 people and themselves at suburban Denver’s Columbine High School 10 years ago next week weren’t in the “Trenchcoat Mafia,” disaffected videogamers who wore cowboy dusters. The killings ignited a national debate over bullying, but the record now shows Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold hadn’t been bullied — in fact, they had bragged in diaries about picking on freshmen and “fags.”

Their rampage put schools on alert for “enemies lists” made by troubled students, but the enemies on their list had graduated from Columbine a year earlier. Contrary to early reports, Harris and Klebold weren’t on antidepressant medication and didn’t target jocks, blacks or Christians, police now say, citing the killers’ journals and witness accounts. That story about a student being shot in the head after she said she believed in God? Never happened, the FBI says now.

In fact, the pair’s suicidal attack was planned as a grand — if badly implemented — terrorist bombing that quickly devolved into a 49-minute shooting rampage when the bombs Harris built fizzled.

By CAMERA staff

Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America, www.camera.org

 

In the January 25th episode of CBS’s 60 Minutes entitled “Is Peace Out of Reach,” correspondent Bob Simon teamed up with Palestinian politician and partisan Mustafa Barghouti to promote the Palestinian view of the Arab-Israeli conflict, heaping blame on Israel and exculpating the Palestinians for the absence of peace. In a caricature of Israeli villainy and Palestinian victimhood Simon presented a simple fable: a two-state solution, the key to peace, is thwarted by stubborn Israeli settlers.

 

Palestinian speakers were joined by a like-minded Israeli critic, while an Israeli settler leader whose views represent neither the Israeli mainstream, the Israeli government nor even most settlers was cast as the primary obstacle to peace. But the program itself was much more lopsided than even the imbalance of speakers indicates, since correspondent Bob Simon — whose voice dominates the segment — clearly and continuously joined the “blame Israel” chorus.

 

While echoing Palestinian talking points and repeating without challenge anti-Israel propaganda — including the slur that Israel practices apartheid and that settlements are like “crusader fortresses”— Simon overlooked recent history and even heckled an Israeli soldier as if in a schoolyard argument. (“Have you lost your voice?” he contemptuously asked an Israeli soldier who was seemingly not authorized or prepared to speak with the press.)

 

Simon laid down his distorted storyline at the outset of the segment, declaring: “a lasting peace really depends on the West Bank, where Palestinians had hoped to create their state.”

 

Actually, most Israelis would say — given recent experience with peacemaking attempts — that “lasting peace really depends” on Palestinians accepting Israel as a legitimate and permanent neighbor and not continuing to hope for and seek Israel’s elimination from the region. But this view held by Israelis was absent from the program.

 

Nor, in this vein, was there any mention that Palestinians were offered the two-state solution sixty years ago, and again eight years ago when they not only rejected the Camp David/Taba peace offer, but chose a terror war against Israel instead. Had they accepted the offer, Palestinians would have a state, settlements deep inside the West Bank would be gone, and, the hope was, Palestinian terrorism would have ceased. Instead, the eruption of unprecedented Palestinian terrorism prompted Israeli defensive measures that altered the face of the West Bank.

 

None of this crucial information appeared in the segment.

 

Simon also failed to remind viewers of the other recent Israeli effort to reduce violence and enhance peace — the withdrawal from the Gaza Strip. Israel removed every citizen and dismantled every settlement and got, in return, not peace but more rockets and mortars than ever.

 

Does Simon think Israel is required to undertake withdrawal from areas close to Israel’s major cities and congested heartland without considering the possibility of more violent aggression against its people?

 

Why does he ignore reasonable Israeli concerns that if it withdrew from the West Bank “Hamas would take over the institutions and apparatuses of the Palestinian Authority within days”?

 

Does Simon think recent history is irrelevant? Does he think omitting essential facts (and substituting a fable) is ethical journalism?

 

BLAMELESS PALESTINIANS

 

Just as Simon ignored Israel’s offer to dismantle settlements and create a Palestinian state, he also ignored the violence that followed Palestinian rejection of the offer. The words “terror,” “terrorism” or “terrorist” do not appear even once in the transcript of the segment. Nor do the words “violence,” “war,” “gunmen,” “militants,” “attacker,” or “suicide bombers.”

 

The one reference to guns during the 60 Minutes segment, in fact, was Simon’s assertion that “the Israelis,” as opposed to the Palestinians, “have the guns.” The one reference to “security” was Mustafa Barghouti’s claim that most Israeli checkpoints cannot be justified by security concerns.

 

Although Simon ignored Palestinian violence against Israel, he nonetheless faulted Israeli response to the violence. Stripped of its context, Israel’s attempts to protect its civilians were framed as gratuitously causing inconvenience, oppression, and “humiliation” to Palestinians.

 

The security barrier (which Simon absurdly says Israel refers to as a “wall”) was said to “appropriate” land and “separat[e] farmers from their land.” But its essential purpose, to protect Israelis and prevent suicide bombers from reaching their targets, was ignored. Likewise, Simon described checkpoints as “humiliating,” and allowed Barghouti to allege that they primarily exist “to block the movement of people from one place to another,” but failed to reference the number of Palestinian attacks they’ve prevented, and failed to mention that, like the barrier, most checkpoints didn’t exist before the Palestinians initiated their war of terror in late 2000.

 

Moreover, the checkpoints continue to serve the purpose for which they’re intended, foiling infiltrations and terrorist attacks.CAMERA recently examined incidents at the Hawara checkpoint over the course of one month, October 2008.

• On October 5, a Palestinian was stopped carrying a suspicious parcel containing two pipe bombs;
• On October 12, a female soldier prevented an attack when she discovered nine pipe bombs in the bags of three Palestinian traveling companions;
• On the following day, soldiers stopped a man who was trying to cross the checkpoint with explosive devices. He was shot and lightly wounded as he tried to escape in a get-away car;
• On October 15, soldiers confiscated a 10 cm knife from a man trying to pass through the checkpoint;
• A week later on October 22, the checkpoint was temporarily closed as a 17-year-old youth was detained with several firebombs and an explosive device.
• On October 25, a Palestinian youth was taken for questioning after soldiers found a pipe bomb in his bag.)

Evidently for Simon it’s not “humiliating” for Israel to have to be on guard constantly against Palestinians with bombs and kives trying to kill men, women and children.

 

IN NABLUS, TOO, ONLY ISRAELIS TO BLAME

Simon seemed to relish in particular a segment focused on Israel’s periodic military requisitioning of a Palestinian home for apparent surveillance use in Nablus. The Nassif home is set on the heights overlooking the town and provides a unique vantage from which Israel can monitor ongoing terrorist efforts in the district. Casting the military use of the private home of the Nassif’s as an outrage, the CBS correspondent did almost nothing to present the Israeli position, saying only that “an army spokesperson told us the army uses the Nassif’s house for important surveillance operations.”

 

There was not a word in the segment to indicate the gravity of what Israel faces in maintaining the relative quiet that has prevailed since it was compelled to counter the terrorist upsurge after the collapse of the Camp David talks. For Israel Nablus remains a hotbed of terrorist efforts and the central district of the West Bank from which attempted attacks on Israel emanate.

 

According to the Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center, in 2007 “the Hamas networks in Samaria, especially in the Nablus region, were defined by the Israel Security Agency as dangerous and working avidly to rehabilitate themselves after the damage done by Operation Defensive Shield. In 2007 a series of counter-terrorist activities was directed against the networks including the detention of many operatives, some of them senior.” (See, e.g.,  here, here and here.)

 

The terrorist activity and murder of hundreds of Israelis in 2001-2003 has been dramatically diminished through a combination of the security barrier and intense, round-the-clock vigilance inside the West Bank.

 

Because much of Nablus lies in a valley, Israel can survey the camps, casbah and city below from strategic hills, and this surveillance sometimes entails using private homes that provide the best vantage point. IDF soldiers are instructed not to harm anyone or to damage property.

 

Even the BBC, which is not generally regarded as sympathetic to Israel, alerted its readers to Israel’s position in a more journalistically responsible manner. In a piece about the house, a reporter notes:

 

Over the last six years, the Israeli army has made frequent incursions into the city, to arrest and kill militants. When it does, the soldiers often return to bang on Mr Nasif’s door. …

 

Nablus does have a history of militancy. In the past, perpetrators of bombings in which Israeli civilians were killed, came from the city.

 

Although those attacks have dramatically decreased in number over recent years, the army says that does not mean attacks are not still being planned. That is why it says it needs to keep on making its raids into Nablus.

 

In other words, unlike 60 Minutes, the BBC acknowledges that the murder of Israeli civilians, and Israel’s attempts to act against potential killers, is an essential part of the story.

 

JERUSALEM ARABS

 

As with his discussion of the West Bank, Simon grossly misled viewers regarding Palestinians in Jerusalem:

 

The army is evicting Arabs from their homes in East Jerusalem, which Palestinians hoped to make their capital. Outraged, Arabs tried to save their homes, but the Israelis have the guns. Israel demolished more than 100 Arab homes in the past year, ruling they’d been illegally built. Arabs say this is just another tactic to drive them out.

 

“Drive them out”? Under Israeli control, the Arab population of Jerusalem has increased dramatically, and in fact grew substantially faster than the Jewish population of Jerusalem.

 

Additionally, Israel also demolishes illegal Jewish structures in Jerusalem. Does this mean it is trying to “drive out” Jews from Jerusalem? And Palestinians themselves have demolished illegal homes under their control. Would CBS take seriously allegations that the Palestinian Authority is trying to “drive out” Palestinians from Gaza because it has demolished illegal building there — which it has?

 

ECHOING FALSE PALESTINIAN CLAIMS

 

Simon’s use of loaded, anti-Israel language was uninhibited. Here is one typical statement by the correspondent:

 

Palestinians had hoped to establish their state here on the West Bank, an area the size of Delaware. But Israelis have sliced it up with scores of settlements and hundreds of miles of new highways that only settlers can use. Palestinians have to drive or ride on the older roads. When they want to travel from one town to another, they have to submit to humiliating delays at checkpoints and roadblocks. There are more than 600 of them on the West Bank.

 

In just this few seconds of monologue:

• Simon falsely asserted that there are “hundreds of miles of new highways that only settlers can use.” In fact, all Israelis, whether Jewish or Arab, Christian or Muslim, can use Israel’s bypass roads, as can West Bank Palestinians who are believed to pose no threat to commuters.
• He claimed absurdly that Israelis were preventing a Palestinian state because they “sliced … up” the West Bank (in fact, as mentioned above, the lack of a Palestinian state is not because Israel “sliced up” — as Bob Simon and pro-Palestinian activists describe it — the West Bank, but because they rejected a state, started a terror war, and used territory abandoned by Israel as a base for deadly attacks).
• He also relayed unfiltered the Palestinian view of checkpoints as “humiliating” while ignoring the fact that Palestinians’ violent rejection of a state prompted most of the checkpoints.

 

THE CAST OF CHARACTERS

 

Mustapha Barghouti was quoted and paraphrased more than any other guest and given an unchallenged platform to level a variety of extreme charges. Referring to him only as a “former candidate for Palestinian president” Simon gave no hint that he is a long-time partisan whose statements are often patently false and propagandistic – notwithstanding his role as a PA legislator.

 

* Commenting on the death of arch-terrorist George Habash, founder of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and mastermind of bombings and hijackings, the Lod Airport massacre and the Entebbe hijacking, Barghouti praised the PFLP leader who, he said, left a legacy of “loyalty to the Palestinian cause in a very principled manner – honest, clean politics and great devotion to the Palestinian cause and to humanity.” (Jerusalem Post Jan 29, 2008)

 

* On Dec 30, as the Gaza conflict erupted, he stated on CNN that not a “single” Israeli had been killed since Dec 27, when in fact four had been killed.

 

* On CNN, he charged that Israel had broken the June 2008 ceasefire, when the Palestinians had broken it repeatedly with the firing of rockets, mortars, and light arms and with attempted infiltrations aimed at abducting Israelis.

 

* Barghouti’s lies sometimes catch up with him as, for example, when the San Francisco Chronicle had to correct an absurd allegation he made that Israel’s security barrier “was claiming 58% of the West Bank.”

 

Barghouti and Simon together dramatically lament that Barghouti cannot “ever” enter Jerusalem, implying he’s barred because he moved away from the city. Unmentioned was the fact that Barghouti has been arrested several times for violating agreements not to engage in political electioneering in Jerusalem without a permit, and according to London’s Independent (Jan. 8, 2005), he has deliberately “sought confrontations with the security forces as a tactic to gain badly needed publicity.” Moreover, after an arrest in January 2006, he was ordered by Jerusalem police to stay out of Jerusalem for the next 30 days (Jerusalem Post, Jan. 4, 2006) — not as Simon claims “forever.” Apparently, the story is more complicated than the 60 Minutes host implies.

 

The Nassif family is granted almost as much time as Barghouti to give their view of events at their home overlooking Nablus, a sharp contrast with the ultra-brief, paraphrased Israeli comment that “important surveillance operations” occur from the house.

 

Daniella Weiss, resident of the West Bank, is presented as a counterweight to Barghouti and voice for the settlement movement. Yet she represents the most extreme position of Israeli settler opinion, has sparred with settler leadership, and advocates for illegal settler outposts – all of which are not positions of the vast majority of Israelis and Israeli settlers. Casting her comments as representative produces a highly distorted picture of settlements, ignoring the relevant legal, historical, and religious issues.

 

Meron Benvenisti is identified as a supposedly “moderate” Israeli; but his stated views are far from moderate. He claims Israelis are not actually victims of Arab violence, but that “Jewish immigrants settled on the lands of Arab natives, met with violent resistance, and responded as if they were the victims and the natives the aggressors” (The Nation, June 18, 2007). In the August 7, 2003 Ha’aretz, he wrote: “… the basic story here is not one of two national movements that are confronting each other; the basic story is that of natives and settlers.” (Like Hamas extremists, he uses “settlers” here to refer to all Israelis, not just those living in the West Bank.)

 

He even claims Israel is worse in some respects than apartheid South Africa and he argues for a single bi-national state over the entirety of Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza Strip — a proposal far outside the Israeli political mainstream.

 

Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni is very briefly interviewed, representing the official voice of Israel. She is only quoted discussing the possible need to remove settlements. If she commented on the need for checkpoints and other security measures or other context, it didn’t make it on the air.

 

Never is there a good time for shoddy reporting, but today when Israel is under intense political pressure and Jews around the world are encountering heightened anti-Semitism, Simon’s biased, inaccurate blast at Israel is especially reprehensible and deserving of public protest.

 

 

 

——————————————————————————–

 

Transcript:

 

CBS 60 Minutes, January 25, 2009

BOB SIMON, co-host:

 

Getting a peace deal in the Middle East is such a priority to President Obama that his first foreign calls on his first day in office were to Arab and Israeli leaders. And on day two, the president made former Senator George Mitchell his special envoy for Middle East peace. Mr. Obama wants to shore up the cease-fire in Gaza, but a lasting peace really depends on the West Bank, where Palestinians had hoped to create their state. The problem is, even before Israel invaded Gaza, a growing number of Israelis and Palestinians had concluded that peace between them was no longer possible, that history had passed it by.

 

(Map of area)

 

SIMON: (Voiceover) For peace to have a chance, Israel would have to withdraw from the West Bank, which would then become the Palestinian state. It’s known as the two-state solution. But while negotiations have been going on for 15 years, hundreds of thousands of Jewish settlers have moved in to occupy the West Bank. Palestinians say they can’t have a state with Israeli settlers all over it, which the settlers say is precisely the idea.

 

(Workers in field)

 

SIMON: (Voiceover) Daniella Weiss moved from Israel to the West Bank 33 years ago. She has been the mayor of a large settlement.

 

Mayor DANIELLA WEISS: I think that settlements prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state in the land of Israel. This is the goal, and this is the reality.

 

(Man and son working in field; government officials; desert; doctor caring for patient)

 

SIMON: (Voiceover) Though settlers and Palestinians don’t agree on anything, most do agree now that a peace deal has been overtaken by events. Dr. Mustafa Barghouti is a former candidate for Palestinian president.

 

Dr. MUSTAFA BARGHOUTI: While my heart still wants to believe that the two-state solution is possible, my brain keeps telling me the opposite because of what I see in terms of the building of settlements. So in a way, these settlers are destroying the potential peace for both people that would have been created if we had two-state solution.

 

(Tanks; wounded; men carrying children; fire and smoke)

 

SIMON: (Voiceover) And he told us Israel’s invasion of Gaza, all the death and destruction, convinces him that Israel does not want a two-state solution.

 

Dr. BARGHOUTI: I am very worried that what Israel has done has furthered us much further from the possibility of two-state solution.

 

(Sheep herder and sheep; aerial view of settlement; highways; men in car; man riding donkey; women and children walking; woman’s credentials being checked by soldier; people waiting at checkpoint)

 

SIMON: (Voiceover) Palestinians had hoped to establish their state here on the West Bank, an area the size of Delaware. But Israelis have sliced it up with scores of settlements and hundreds of miles of new highways that only settlers can use. Palestinians have to drive or ride on the older roads. When they want to travel from one town to another, they have to submit to humiliating delays at checkpoints and roadblocks. There are more than 600 of them on the West Bank.

 

Why do the Israelies have so many checkpoints?

 

Dr. BARGHOUTI: I think the main goal is to fragment the West Bank. Maybe a little bit of them can be justified because they say it’s for security. But I think the vast majority of them are basically to block the movement of people from one place to another.

 

(Building; photo of young Barghouti with siblings; photo of Barghouti as a doctor; town; Barghouti working on computer)

 

SIMON: (Voiceover) Here’s how they block Dr. Barghouti. He was born in Jerusalem, grew up in Jerusalem, and worked in a hospital there for 14 years. Four years ago, he moved to a town just 10 miles away. But now, because he no longer lives in Jerusalem, he can’t get back in, ever.

 

Now, wait a minute. You cannot go to Jerusalem?

 

Dr. BARGHOUTI: At all.

 

SIMON: Can’t you get a permit to go?

 

Dr. BARGHOUTI: I asked for a permit to go to Jerusalem during the last year–the last two years about 16 times, and 16 times they were rejected. Like most Palestinians, I don’t have a permit to go to the city I was born in, to the city I used to work in, to the city where my sister lives.

 

(Aerial view of settlements; Simon riding in helicopter; house)

 

SIMON: (Voiceover) Here’s what he’s up against–scores of Israeli settlements dominating the lowlands like crusader fortresses. Many are little cities, and none of them existed 40 years ago. The Israelis always take the high ground, sometimes the hills, sometimes the homes. And sometimes, Arabs are occupied inside their own homes. This house, for example, the highest house on the highest hill overlooking the town of Nablus. We learned that Israeli soldiers often corral the four families who live here and take over the house to monitor movement down below.

 

We’re going into an apartment owned by a Mr. Nassif here in Nablus. We understand that Israeli soldiers came in this morning, and without any notice, without any invitation, came into the apartment and have been there ever since.

 

Mr. ABDUL NASSIF: We cannot speak with you. There are soldiers.

 

SIMON: There are soldiers?

 

Mr. NASSIF: Yes.

 

SIMON: What are they doing here?

 

Mr. NASSIF: We are in prison here.

 

SIMON: Well, what’s happening?

 

Mr. NASSIF: They are keeping us here, and the soldiers are upstairs. We cannot move, we cannot speak with you.

 

SIMON: You can’t leave the house?

 

Mr. NASSIF: No.

 

SIMON: They told you that?

 

Mr. NASSIF: Yes. I can’t leave.

 

SIMON: How long are they going to stay?

 

Mr. NASSIF: I don’t know.

 

SIMON: Are they paying you any money?

 

Mr. NASSIF: You are kidding.

 

SIMON: I’m kidding.

 

(Nassif talking with Simon)

 

SIMON: (Voiceover) Abdul Nassif, a bank manager, said he had to get to his bank to open the safe but that soldiers won’t let him go. He told us, when the soldiers come, they wake everybody up and herd them into a kitchen for hours while soldiers sleep in their bedrooms. They can’t leave or use the phone or let us in. He sent us downstairs to see if his brother would open the door so we could ask the soldiers why they keep taking over this house.

 

Unidentified Man #1: You want to come?

 

SIMON: Yes. Just open the door and then…

 

Man #1: The soldiers close the door from the keys. They take the keys.

 

(House; Simon talking to house occupants through gate; occupants and soldiers inside house)

 

SIMON: (Voiceover) So we left, and that night, so did the soldiers. But when we returned two days later, the soldiers were back for more surveillance. This time, they kept the women under house arrest, but let the men go to work and the children go to school. When the children returned, we caught a glimpse of two armed soldiers at the top of the stairs. Then, more children came home, but the soldiers wouldn’t open the door again.

 

Unidentified Man #2: They say if you don’t go back behind the wall, the children will not enter the house.

 

SIMON: But this is where the children live.

 

Unidentified Soldier: Yeah, but you need to go away from the door so I can let the children come in, OK?

 

SIMON: Who are you?

 

Man #2: He’s a commander here.

 

SIMON: He’s a commander here?

 

Man #2: Yeah.

 

SIMON: Can we talk to you?

 

Soldier: No.

 

SIMON: But we are talking to you now. Why don’t you tell us what you’re doing here? Have you lost your voice?

 

Well, they’ve closed the door now. They’ve closed the window. So I guess, if the children are going to get home, we have to–we have to leave, so that’s what we’ll do.

 

An army spokesperson told us the army uses the Nassifs’ house for important surveillance operations. The Nassifs told us the soldiers usually stay for a day or two, always coming and going in the middle of the night. When they do go, the Nassifs never know when they’ll be occupied again. It could be tomorrow, next week or next month. The only certainty, they say, is that the soldiers will be back.

 

(Men talking and walking on streets; building under construction; aerial view of settlement; workers; Israelis; man praying; women; children playing)

 

SIMON: (Voiceover) Another crippling reality on the West Bank is high unemployment, now about 20 percent. So some Palestinians can only find jobs building Israeli settlements. They’re so ashamed to work here that they asked us not to show their faces. The settlers now number about 280,000, and as they keep moving in, their population keeps growing about 5 percent every year But the two and a half million Arabs have their strategy, too. They’re growing bigger families.

 

Demographers predict that within 10 years, Arabs will outnumber Jews in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza. Without a separate Palestinian state, the Israelis would have three options, none of them good. They could try ethnic cleansing, drive the Palestinians out of the West Bank. They could give the Palestinians the vote. That would be the democratic option, but it would mean the end of the Jewish state. Or they could inflict apartheid, have the minority Israelis rule the majority Palestinians. But apartheid regimes don’t have a very long life.

 

Dr. BARGHOUTI: Unfortunately, and I have to say to you that apartheid is already in place.

 

SIMON: Apartheid is already in place?

 

Dr. BARGHOUTI: Absolutely.

 

(Aerial view of wall; soldiers at checkpoint; fountain; rocky, arid ground; Israelis at cafe; Meron Benvenisti walking with Simon)

 

SIMON: (Voiceover) Apartheid? Israel is building what it calls a security wall between the West Bank and Israel. The Palestinians are furious because it appropriates 8 percent of the West Bank. Not only that, it weaves its way through Palestinian farms, separating farmers from their land. They have to wait at gates for soldiers to let them in. Settlers get a lot more water than Palestinians, which is why settlements are green and Arab areas are not. Moderate Israelis who deplore the occupation used to believe passionately in a two-state solution. No longer. Meron Benvenisti used to be deputy mayor of Jerusalem.

 

Israeli leaders and Palestinian leaders are negotiating a two-state solution. What do you think the prospects are?

 

Mr. MERON BENVENISTI: Prospects are nil. The geopolitical condition that’s been created in ‘67 is irreversible, cannot be changed. You cannot unscramble that egg.

 

SIMON: Does this mean that the settlers have won?

 

Mr. BENVENISTI: Yes.

 

SIMON: And the settlers will remain forever and ever?

 

Mr. BENVENISTI: I don’t know forever and ever, but they will remain and will flourish.

 

Mayor WEISS: The settlers, the attitude that I present here, this is the heart, this is the pulse. This is the past, present and future of the Jewish nation.

 

SIMON: So you’re saying basically that you and your fellow settlers are immovable?

 

Mayor WEISS: I say that we and the settlers here are immovable. We will stay here forever.

 

(Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni at events)

 

SIMON: (Voiceover) But one very important Israeli says she intends to move them out. She’s foreign minister Tzipi Livni, a candidate to become prime minister in elections next month. She’s also Israel’s chief negotiator with the Palestinians, and she told us peace is unthinkable with the settlers where they are.

 

Can you really imagine evacuating the tens of thousands of settlers who say they will not leave?

 

Ms. TZIPI LIVNI: It’s not going to be easy, but this is the only solution.

 

SIMON: But you know that there are settlers who say, `We will fight. We will not leave. We will fight.’

 

Ms. LIVNI: So this is the responsibility of the government, of the police to stop them, as simple as that. Israel is a state of law and order.

 

(Riot; soldiers patrolling)

 

SIMON: (Voiceover) And disorder. Here’s what happened three years ago when the army evicted just nine families from a West Bank settlement called Amona. It was chaos, the first time since the creation of the state that Jews were in pitched battle against Jews. To Israelis of all stripes, it was not a pretty picture, and it made the government loathe to try again. Officials fear that more battles to empty settlements could rip Israel apart. They’re afraid that religious officers in the army, and there are an increasing number of them, would disobey any order to evict settlers.

 

Mayor WEISS: There will be a mutiny in the army.

 

SIMON: A mutiny in the army?

 

Mayor WEISS: I think a mutiny against such an illegal order will make our army only stronger.

 

(House being demolished; soldiers battling civilians; building being demolished)

 

SIMON: (Voiceover) The army is evicting Arabs from their homes in East Jerusalem, which Palestinians hoped to make their capital. Outraged, Arabs tried to save their homes, but the Israelis have the guns. Israel demolished more than 100 Arab homes in the past year, ruling they’d been illegally built. Arabs say this is just another tactic to drive them out. But officials say they also knock down unauthorized Jewish buildings on the West Bank. They’re put up by youngsters, the next generation’s campaign to populate the land. Daniella Weiss told us they will not be stopped.

 

The army tore this down this morning…

 

Mayor WEISS: Yes.

 

SMITH: …and now you’re rebuilding it.

 

Mayor WEISS: Yes, and we will have the upper hand, I have no doubt.

 

SIMON: But the army will tear it down again.

 

Mayor WEISS: So we will rebuild it. The experience shows that the world belongs to those who are stubborn, and we are very stubborn.

 

(Men building dwelling; aerial view of countryside)

 

SIMON: (Voiceover) Stubborn, she says, because they were ordered to populate this land by no less an authority than God.

 

Mayor WEISS: This is the mission of our generation. The most important point is this, to hold strong to the soil of the holy land

 

 

By Joseph Klein
www.FrontPageMagazine.com

Israel once again is taking a risk for peace by planning to halt its Gaza offensive, even without any corresponding ceasefire commitment from Hamas. Israel is doing so on the basis of assurances presumably provided by the United States and Egypt to take effective measures to stop the arms smuggling into Gaza. Moreover, Israel is not withdrawing its troops right way. While the rocket attacks against the Israeli civilian population have considerably diminished since the start of Israel’s military campaign, Israel reserves the right to resume military action if the rocket launchings from Gaza do not stop completely.

Whether Israel is making a wise choice remains to be seen. Apparently Israel wanted to establish the facts on the ground as the basis for extracting its minimum conditions and not risk any softening of U.S. support with the change of administrations.

The cowardly Hamas leaders who reside comfortably in exile in Lebanon and Syria vow to fight on. They are the war criminals who sacrifice their own children to kill as many Jews as possible. Here are the words of the enemy Israel faces on its doorstep:

“The Palestinian woman bids her son farewell, and says to him: ‘Son, go and don’t be a coward. Go, and fight the Jews.’ He bids her farewell and carries out a martyrdom operation. What did this Palestinian woman say when she was asked for her opinion, after the martyrdom of her son? She said: ‘My son is my own flesh and blood. I love my son, but my love for Allah and His Messenger is greater than my love for my son’…Oh Allah, vanquish the Jews and their supporters. Oh Allah, vanquish the Americans and their supporters. Oh Allah, count their numbers, and kill them all, down to the very last one.”**

Undoubtedly, with the help of United Nations officials and an obliging mainstream media that publishes sensational photographs of human suffering in Gaza without asking what lies behind it, Hamas will continue to manipulate public opinion by painting Israel as the ruthless aggressor who must leave Gaza immediately without any conditions. That would give Hamas the kind of propaganda victory which Hezbollah enjoyed after Israel simply took the UN’s terms for ending the 2006 Lebanon war. Israel must not make that mistake again by worrying about false public impressions of its military tactics.

Of course, the truth is that Israel’s air force has pinpointed its targets as much as feasible in order to avoid civilian casualties. Its ground troops have turned away from potential enemy targets when they believed that civilian lives would be unnecessarily jeopardized. However, Israel cannot allow its soldiers to be fired on at will by Hamas terrorists who violate the basic laws of war by using civilians as human shields. Nor can Israel allow its own civilians to remain as sitting ducks for Hamas rocket attacks. As General Patton once said, “To halt under fire and not fire back is suicide.”

The UN General Assembly President, Miguel d´Escoto Brockmann of Nicaragua, has accused Israel of being “in contempt of international law and the United Nations”. In one sense, he is right but for the wrong reasons. Israel does have contempt for the United Nations’ one-sided response to its conflict with the Palestinian terrorists and it correctly ignores the UN’s resolutions when they are in contempt of the UN Charter by denying a member state the right to defend itself.

The General Assembly President has questioned Israel’s claim of self-defense under Article 51 of the UN Charter. He stated that if Israel’s right ever existed at all, it would last only “until the Security Council has taken measures necessary to maintain international peace and security”. Of course, the Security Council took no such measures to ensure the end of rocket attacks and arms smuggling that triggered the conflict in the first place. Israel instead is expected to rely on diplomatic double-talk for its protection.

Oblivious to the fact that Israel unilaterally exited Gaza in 2005 to give peace a chance, which the ruling Hamas government has torpedoed altogether, Brockmann still brands Israel as the occupying power in Gaza. He has taken the side of the Hamas terrorists in demanding an immediate ceasefire and the complete re-opening of the border crossings with Gaza for all purposes without any pre-conditions. That would amount to national suicide for Israel since Hamas will be free to import more sophisticated arms for use against Israel and to send to Israel its homicidal bombers.

The realities on the ground have enabled Israel to reach the point of deciding to suspend combat, not the empty words from hypocrites like Brockmann who like to play the role of moralizer and peacemaker but are no more than shills for the terrorists.

It is time to place the spotlight of moral condemnation solely where it belongs – on Hamas and its fellow Islamic terrorist organizations. In her incisive interview with FrontPage Magazine published on January 16, 2009, terrorist expert and author Brigitte Gabriel explained how she is attempting to do just that. As she said, “Even the Nazis did not turn their own children into human bombs, and then rejoice at their deaths as well the deaths of their victims.” That is why her organization ACT! for America has launched a petition to the UN which calls for Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon “to end the UN’s silence and initiate a thorough UN investigation” into Hamas’s abuse of children in Gaza.

Many more actions like this are necessary even though it is easy to get discouraged when one sees the tide of uninformed international opinion turn so decisively against Israel with the help of so many influential voices. While the effort to counter with the truth sometimes feels like plugging holes in a very leaky dike, it must be done again and again in order not to let evil prevail.

By Albert Mohler
President, The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary

Just in time for Christmas and Easter, the major news media regularly present magazine cover stories and prime-time television events that focus on the historical questions concerning the birth of Jesus Christ and the theological issues central to Christianity.

Like clockwork, the programs and articles appear — often following a predictable pattern. A question related to a Christian claim is raised and a panel of experts is asked to respond. This panel most often ranges across the theological spectrum, providing the appearance (and sometimes the reality) of a fair consideration. These are secular news magazines and networks, after all. The supposed interest of the media lies in the current relevance of the issues and the impact of these beliefs upon the world. We should not expect the secular media to serve as evangelists for the Christian Gospel. We are right to expect that the media should be fair in their consideration of these subjects.

Fairness does not mean that evangelicals should not expect to see non-evangelical and non-Christian viewpoints expressed. Liberal theologians and biblical scholars are to be expected among the sources cited or consulted. Fairness does suggest that the orthodox position and a representation of evangelical conviction should be present as well.

For the past two years, CNN has presented a major news production as “CNN Presents: After Jesus.” Narrated by actor Liam Neeson, the special program was described as an investigation of “how the earliest Christians spread their message, despite infighting over the faith and violent persecution by Rome.”

From the CNN Pressroom release:

Immediately following Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection, the first Christians were challenged to define their faith. Two of Jesus’ disciples – Peter, who preached that the followers of Jesus had to be Jewish, and Paul who argued that this new faith must be available to all – would emerge as Christianity’s first and most influential leaders. Their eventual consensus, that Christianity would be available to all through conversion, and their missionary zeal throughout the Roman Empire, helped the new faith to spread rapidly. But Christianity’s growing power was also a threat to the empire, so the Romans killed Peter and Paul and other early leaders. Christians were so brutally persecuted that Christianity’s survival was repeatedly in danger. That Christianity eventually became the world’s largest religion is perhaps the faith’s second biggest miracle.

In all, that paragraph is a good summary of the facts and the central question — how did Christianity grow from a band of frightened followers of Jesus into a world-changing force?

CNN described its program as “the story behind the greatest story ever told.” Mark Nelson of CNN explained: “The fundamental themes of challenge and resolution, power and struggle that we explore continue to be relevant in modern times.” So far, so good.

The teaser is found in this paragraph:

In telling this remarkable tale, viewers may be surprised to learn that followers of some early branches of Christianity believed in more than one god; that there were many more Gospels than those included in the New Testament; and that Christmas was originally a springtime celebration. There was also a group of Christians – the Gnostics – who believed that man’s existence on Earth was a mistake and that salvation required a mystical experience of self-discovery and self-realization. They wrote their own Gospels, and their power struggle with the orthodox Christians was a threat to the new faith.

That paragraph should stand as a reminder that theology and scholarship are not well reduced to press releases. In this case the teaser is indeed a tease.

The related press materials available at CNN’s Web site were a source of evangelical concern. The panelists chosen by CNN did not include an evangelical theologian, historian, or New Testament scholar. The network claimed to have consulted “the most renowned authorities on the ancient church,” but no evangelical scholar appeared. Given the issues and questions covered by the program, a fair observer would wonder about the absence of any scholar like Darrell Bock, D. A. Carson, or Bishop N. T. Wright — all of whom have internationally established reputations for scholarship in these areas — and with extensive published engagement with these issues. None is a stranger to the media.

Instead, the authorities featured on the program included, among others, figures like Amy-Jill Levine, a Jewish scholar of the New Testament who teaches at Vanderbilt Divinity School; Judith Lieu, who teaches New Testament at King’s College London; Rabbi Richard Freund of the Greenberg Center for Judaic Studies at the University of Hartford; and Marvin Meyer, a specialist on Gnostic texts who teaches at Chapman University.

Most notable among the panelists was Bart Ehrman, a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who has published several books that cast doubt upon the New Testament canon and reject Christian orthodoxy. Ehrman, a former evangelical, often appears in the media as an opponent of evangelical faith. Yet, to his credit, Ehrman often criticizes the worst arguments of the skeptics as well.

Why no evangelical scholar? Only CNN can answer that question.

Nevertheless, when the entire program is reviewed, I would judge the project to be more evenhanded and responsible than I had first expected. My main criticisms would have to do with some of the claims made in the program and especially with the teasers used for the program as a whole and its individual segments.

The production was visually engaging, fast-paced, and respectful in tone. Liam Neeson brought his vocal skills and theatrical experience to the narration.

The program began with good historical background material. The context of the Roman Empire in the first century, the political unrest and Messianic expectation of Jerusalem, and so on. The problems emerge when the program explains Jesus and His mission. As Neeson narrates:

Into this powder keg walks Jesus of Nazareth. His protests against the Romans make Him a popular hero. To some, He is the Messiah. But to the Romans, He is political trouble. So they crucify Him.

This is just not an accurate representation of the events and the New Testament Texts. Where in the New Testament is Jesus portrayed as leading “protests against the Romans?” Nowhere. The program blames the Romans alone for the crucifixion of Jesus, studiously avoiding any suggestion that the Jews rejected Jesus and demanded His crucifixion. The program is left with an account that is politically correct but demonstrates little resemblance to the New Testament. Pilate, you might remember, is presented in the New Testament as very reluctant to crucify Jesus. Political correctness simply trumped historical accuracy.

The program’s treatment of the earliest experiences of the church and the first Christians contains much good and even fascinating material.

So the problem is not in the belief that Jesus is the Messiah. The problem is when the belief is moving from Messiah to a kind of deified Messiah and as this begins to be understood by the Jews, then opposition to this movement is no longer a political thing. It’s a very strong religious thing.

The problem with this statement is the fact that it presses the recognition of the deity of Christ to a later development after The Resurrection. The New Testament claims that it was Jesus’ claims to deity that were, at least in part, what led some Jews to demand His crucifixion.

Neeson does a good job of explaining the transformation of Saul, the persecutor of the Church, into Paul, the Apostle to the gentiles. “Saul of Tarsus, who never met Jesus in the flesh, never traveled or supped with Him, and who wanted to kill His followers, becomes the greatest defender of the Jesus faith, known to the world by the Greek version of his name, Paul.” Further: “People listened to Paul because he was the perfect man for the job, able to speak to both Jews and gentiles in their own languages.”

The program also provided a rather fair explanation of the roles played by the Apostles James, Peter, and Paul. The Jerusalem Council is presented as the “first Apostolic Council” and Professor Levine rightly explains:

Paul argues that the Holy Spirit had descended upon the gentiles apart from the Law of Moses. Therefore, there was no reason to insist that those gentiles be converted first to Judaism in order to be a member of the Church, and James, the brother of Jesus, presiding over this Jerusalem Council, agrees with Paul.

Levine, a Jewish professor of New Testament studies, also offers keen insight into the mission of the Apostle Paul:

I can picture him just trying to convert the entire Praetorian Guard. The early Christians, particularly the Evangelists, the Apostles, were politically problematic. They were proclaiming a son of God, a god from God, a savior, but those happened to be titles that the Roman Emperor arrogated to himself.

The program presents the next great crisis of the faith as the deaths of James, Peter, and Paul. This argument has significant theological and historical merit. Interestingly, the program assumes the traditional (but non-scriptural) explanations of the deaths of James and Peter. It is clear from the New Testament that James was executed in Jerusalem and that Peter was martyred as well, most likely in Rome. However, the specifics ascribed in the program to the martyrdom of James are from only two historical sources (Josephus and Hegesippus as cited by Eusebius), and the upside-down crucifixion of Peter is likewise attributed only to later tradition.

What makes these observations relevant is the fact that so many authorities seem willing to accept such details on scant evidence when they often cast doubt upon the much more substantial evidence offered in the New Testament Text.

The program also did well in describing the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem (the great crisis of Judaism) and the rise of Roman persecution of the Christians.

The portion of the program perhaps most vulnerable to controversy had to do with the emergence of the four Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) as the authoritative historical texts concerning the life and ministry of Jesus.

Neeson points to the controversies in this statement: “At the end of the first century, Christian leaders decided they needed a new holy scripture. They started writing down what Jesus had said and done. And now Christianity would take a new direction, a religion based on the word of the written gospels, a religion that would guide them far into an uncertain future.”

Further:

The core of Christian belief is the story of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection, as told in the four gospels, the books of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, named after the evangelists said to have written them.

At this point Bart Ehrman appears to make this claim:

I think most people imagine that after Jesus died, the Church just emerged suddenly and that you had Christians confessing the Nicene Creed, reading the canon of the 27 books of the New Testament, and that it was all in place right after Jesus’ death. And, in fact, it took centuries for these things to fall into place.

Fair enough. It did take centuries for all that to “fall into place.” But the insinuation of the program is that Christianity was in tremendous flux at this time. Interestingly, the authorities cited in the program take the view that the Gospels were all written before the end of the first century — a fact well established in modern scholarship but denied by many liberal scholars just a few decades ago.

The program then turned to the conflict of early Christianity with Gnosticism. Neeson dramatically narrated that “By the start of the second century, Christianity was at a crossroads.”

Further:

After the crucifixion of Jesus, around 30 A.D., the New Testament recounts how the faith He started took on a new life. Inspired by the leadership of the Apostles Peter and Paul, the message of the resurrected Jesus spread into the heart of the Roman Empire. But success brought persecution and death. As Christianity’s early leaders began to die out, it was critical to keep the story of Jesus alive. So, they compiled sacred books about His life, what we know today as the New Testament. But to the south, in the desert sands of Egypt, a group of Christian monks and mystics were writing their own gospels with a very different version of the life of Jesus, one that launched a battle for the very heart of Christianity. Of all the threats to Christianity over the past 2,000 years, perhaps the greatest came in 1945, near the village of Nag Hammadi in southern Egypt, where the waters of the Nile dry up into desert sands.

This is hyperbole made for television. The Christian faith was hardly shaken by the discovery of Gnostic texts at Nag Hammadi. Gnosticism is a perennial heresy and a powerful competitor to orthodox Christianity in the early centuries of the Church. But the undeniable fact, left unacknowledged by many current controversialists and popularizers, is that the Church effectively denounced the Gnostics and their texts.

The program presented the core beliefs of the Gnostics fairly well. Professor Meyer explained:

The word “Gnostic” comes from the Greek “gnosis,” which means knowledge, but it’s not the kind of knowledge that you simply get out of books, but, rather, it is mystical knowledge. It is insight into the true nature of — of who you are, and what is your relationship to God, and is there an essence, a spark, a bit of the light of God within your own self.

Neeson rightly commented: “The Gnostic message was very seductive: a mix of Greek philosophy, Egyptian religion, and Eastern mysticism, all very contemporary in its spirituality.”

Meyer pointed right to the key distinction between the canonical Gospels and the Gnostic texts:

The New Testament Gospels are gospels of the cross. The Gnostic gospels are gospels of wisdom. The New Testament Gospels care about salvation from sin. The Gnostic gospels care about salvation from ignorance. The New Testament Gospels look to stimulate faith. The Gnostic gospels look to stimulate knowledge and insight.

That statement is worth filing away for future use. He got it just right.

The program was less sure-footed when it tried to present Gnostic variants as more friendly to feminist concerns. Meyer claimed: “It was the Gnostics that thought that the role of the female as an image and the role of women within the Church should be advanced, so that God is not only male; God is also female. There are not only male leaders; there are female leaders. There are not only male priests; there are female priests. And, in this way, there is a kind of gender balance found in these texts.”

Well, as long as you look at the texts that fit that characterization. Neeson quickly commented: “That balance is not found in the Gnostic gospel of Thomas, where Peter asks Jesus to send Mary Magdalene on her way, for women aren’t worthy of apostolic life.” Ehrman further explains: “And Jesus replies, “Leave her alone, for I shall make her a male, for every woman who becomes a male will enter the kingdom of God.” That statement will not go over well where feminist theologians gather. It is also a rejection of New Testament Christianity. As Ehrman notes, “This isn’t a very liberating view of women, and not one I think that people probably want to latch on to today.”

The panelists helpfully rejected the most hysterical suggestions of recent days, including the claim popularized by The DaVinci Code that Jesus married Mary Magdalene and had children with her. Further, Neeson also noted: “Perhaps the biggest problem with the Gnostic gospels is that they were written decades, and even centuries, after the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. For some historians, that passage of time raises serious questions of authenticity.” Indeed.

In the end, the program was more fair than the advertising materials would have indicated. The most ideological portion of the program came when claims were presented to the effect that early Christianity was “completely egalitarian.” This is irresponsible. It is not true to the Gospels, much less to the remainder of the New Testament. The program insinuated or claimed that the development of Church offices, the restriction of the teaching office to men, and the development of the New Testament canon were basically due to political concerns rather than theological imperatives.

Finally, the program attempted to explain the transformation of Christianity from a movement oppressed to the point of martyrdom by Rome into a faith officially recognized by the Emperor. In the course of this consideration, the program turned to the Council of Nicea, called by the authority of Emperor Constantine in 325. The program got the theological judgment right, but confused the context.

Neeson explained:

In the year 325 AD, Constantine called the world’s bishops to the small town of Nicea outside the imperial city of Byzantium to grapple with the essence of Christian belief. . . . And the heart of the Nicene Creed and Christian faith is the Jesus was both God and man.

Ehrman commented:

The Council of Nicea was not called in order to decide whether Jesus was divine. It was called in order to decide in what way is Jesus divine. Is Jesus a secondary deity, a subordinate deity or, in fact, is He equal with God the Father. And the side that won out was the side that declared that Jesus was equal with God the Father, that He had always been God.

Further:

Constantine declared Christianity a legal religion and he stopped the persecution. But it’s not correct to say that Constantine made Christianity the official Roman religion. In fact, he didn’t make it the official religion. He did make it a favored religion and he started giving lands to Christian bishops and supplying funds for the building of churches and so forth. This made it a very popular thing to become a Christian, especially to become a Christian leader. So from going from being a persecuted small sect, it turned into an important religion that was favored by the emperor.

The program concluded by repeating the current claim that early Christianity was a diversity of belief systems and conceptions of the faith. The point of all that was made clear by Meyer’s claim: “The struggle regarding orthodoxy and heresy never comes to an end and these battles about truth and inclusion and exclusion are with us to the present day.”

To this day, yes. But this does not mean that there is no recognized orthodoxy – no standard and classical expression of the Christian faith. That standard was already in view when Jude instructed the Church to contend for the faith – the faith once for all delivered to the Church.

Programs like “After Jesus” can cause some Christians to wonder about the very foundations of the faith. But, in the beginning and in the end, the Church must learn to trust the New Testament as the only authority for defining Christian faith and practice. The discovery and publication of “other gospels” should only serve to remind Christians of how thankful we must be for the four New Testament Gospels given by divine inspiration to the Church.

Christians should not be shaken by the recognition that centuries of development stand between, for example, the end of Jesus’ earthly ministry and the adoption of the Nicene Creed, along with the canonization of the New Testament. The orthodox faith was already defended and the truth about Jesus Christ was already confessed long before the Council of Nicea. Indeed, even as the New Testament books were already recognized, the true Gospel was already defended.

Christianity has nothing to fear from an honest investigation of the facts. Next time, let’s hope that CNN invites some Evangelical scholars to join their team of authorities.

But remember this – it is not the job of CNN to defend the Christian faith and share the Gospel of Jesus Christ. That is the job of the Church. Let’s get to it.

By Aviel Schneider, Israel Today

Manipulation of a willing Arab and international media has long been a powerful tool in the hands of the Palestinians.

�The recent exposure of a media lie about the 12-year-old Palestinian boy Mohammed al-Dura needs to be studied by the foreign media,� says the head of Israel�s Government Press Office Danny Siemen. �The Palestinians use media manipulation as a strategic weapon to counter Israel�s military superiority and have been very successful in it.�

Al-Dura was back in the news after the French Court of Appeals overturned a lower court decision that found media critic Philippe Karsenty guilty of libel against the France 2 TV station and its Jerusalem correspondent Charles Enderlin. Karsenty accused them of deliberately misleading the world about the death of al-Dura at the start of the second Palestinian intifada (uprising) in Gaza in 2000.

�The verdict means France 2 broadcast a fake news report and that al-Dura�s shooting was a staged hoax,� Karsenty said.

Al-Dura became a �martyr� and enduring symbol of the Palestinian cause in TV footage broadcast around the world. The pictures of the boy and his father cowering helplessly in the crossfire of an Israeli-Palestinian gun battle threw Israel�s image into the gutter.

During the trial, France 2 was ordered to release the entire 27-minute video, in contrast to the 31 seconds shown at the time. In the last scene showing father and son, one can see that Mohammed is moving and undeniably alive.

Karsenty was suspicious about the original report which showed Mohammed in the arms of his father, the victim of �Israeli� fire. �Mohammed is dead, his father seriously wounded,� the report said.

�The pathologist indeed did a postmortem examination of a dead boy at 12 noon. But Mohammed al-Dura was supposedly shot at 3 p.m.!� Karsenty said. �The pictures taken in the morgue are totally different than pictures of Mohammed al-Dura. It is ridiculous.�

American professor Richard Landes examined the al-Dura case along with ballistics experts and dubbed it Pallywood.

�Palestinian cameramen and photographers work for foreign news networks and edit pictures with the aim of blackmailing Israel in the eyes of the world,� Siemen said.

This manipulation of the news influences the international community and has limited Israel in its war against Palestinian terror since the first intifada erupted in 1987. The fear of international condemnation paralyzes Israel and prevents it from taking effective action.

During the Second Lebanon War in the summer of 2006, the international media condemned Israel for the so-called �massacre� in the South Lebanese village of Kana (57 dead, including 21 children). The Israeli army determined that this was fabricated because the building collapsed seven hours after the air force bombed the area, giving civilians plenty of time to get out. The building wasn�t even directly hit, and some observers suggest that Hizbollah collected bodies of people killed in the war from a morgue, put them in the building and blew it up.

A few weeks earlier, in June 2006, pictures shocked the world when an Israeli shell was blamed for the killing of a Palestinian family of seven on a Gaza beach. But the footage appeared to be staged because no crater caused by a shell was seen in the area.

This year, a Palestinian mother and her four children were killed in Gaza, ostensibly by an Israeli tank shell. An army investigation determined that the shell hit two Hamas terrorists, and the blast from explosives they were carrying blew up the house.

In all of these cases, the damage to Israel had already been done by the time the truth came out. In fact, the truth is rarely reported because by then it�s �old news.�

�Israel is quickly blamed for the deaths of Palestinians,� said Siemen. �The foreign media do not verify the news and rely almost exclusively on Palestinian journalists with an agenda. Without a doubt, Palestinian journalists are using the foreign media in their struggle against Israel.�

ENDURING SYMBOL: From paintings to postage stamps, al-Dura is an enduring symbol of the Palestinian cause

Carter’s Recycled Rationales for Killing Jews

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 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.

By Paul Sperry, Investor’s Business Daily

Maintaining a high level of vigilance against a patient, stateless and often invisible enemy hiding behind a religion isn’t easy, especially in politically-correct Washington. One tireless watchdog is Rep. Sue Myrick, R-N.C., who has founded the House Anti-Terrorism/Jihad Caucus to educate fellow lawmakers and Americans about militant Islam’s long-term threat. The diminutive yet feisty Myrick, a former Charlotte mayor and now deputy Republican whip, sat down with IBD to discuss the zeitgeist inside official Washington concerning the war on Islamic terror.

IBD: What persuaded you to start the Anti-Terrorism/Jihad Caucus, and what do you hope to accomplish?

Myrick: I decided to start the caucus out of a deep frustration, because President Bush does not talk to the American people about the long-term threat of radical Islamofascism infiltration in America. Since 9/11, I’ve tried to get the president and several members of his administration to talk to the American people about the dangerous enemy that we’re facing. I took them all the materials I could find about what we did during World War II that were used to unite the American people. Everyone I spoke to said, “We do not want to frighten the American people.”

I waited for someone else to start to educate the people; however, it did not seem to be happening. At that point, I sought to become educated on the matter. What I have learned is quite disturbing. I decided that if members of Congress were informed, they would have an opportunity to educate people in their districts. So I started the caucus and brought in three other co-chairs � Bud Cramer (D-Ala.), Kay Granger (R-Texas) and Jane Harman (D-Calif.).

We hope to start a dialogue with America. Until, and unless, we understand what we are fighting, we have no chance. We must inform the people, since it is evident they will have to protect their national sovereignty, because the government is not doing it.

IBD: How many members are in the caucus?

Myrick: We have 118 members � both Democrats and Republicans. The threat we face from radical Islamofascists is not a partisan issue. This is a matter that affects all Americans, regardless of political, social, economic, or any other affiliations.

IBD: Should Americans be concerned about recently declassified documents detailing a secret plot by Islamist groups in
this country, tied to the dangerous Muslim Brotherhood, to take over America from within, to Islamize our society?

Myrick: Americans must be concerned � alarmed. That is what I am referring to when I say that the administration has not explained who we are fighting and where we are fighting them. “We’re fighting them over there so we don’t have to fight them over here” is not the whole story. It is amazing that we actually have the enemy’s playbook, yet for some reason we don’t want to seriously confront the threat we are facing.

The radical Islamofascists have told us how they intend to infiltrate all areas of our society and use the freedoms that are guaranteed under our Constitution to eventually Islamize our country, eliminate our Constitution, and enact sharia law. I know that it sounds a bit fanatical, but it’s true.

In 1998, Osama bin Laden declared war on the U.S. What did we do? Nothing. Then he attacked again and again around the world before finally striking inside the U.S. Yet, rather than confront the threat head-on and declare war on radical Islamofascists, we seek to placate the threat at home by saying radicals have hijacked Islam.

IBD: Are there any Muslim groups with which federal or other government officials � as well as businesses and nonprofits � should think twice about doing outreach or interfaith activities?

Myrick: I know of some Muslim nongovernmental organizations that are doing good things, such as the Islamic Supreme Council of America, the American Islamic Congress, and the American Islamic Forum for Democracy. However, groups such as Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), and others have a proven record of senior officials being indicted and either imprisoned or deported from the U.S. Just to name a few: Ghassan Elashi, a founding board member of CAIR, is serving 80 months in prison; Randall “Ismail” Royer, the communications director for CAIR, is serving 20 years in prison; and Bassam Khafagi, the director of CAIR’s community relations, has been arrested and deported. There was a lot of evidence presented at the recent Holy Land Foundation trial, which exposed CAIR, ISNA and others as front groups for the Muslim Brotherhood.

IBD: What about Congress � does it have a formal vetting process for screening radical Muslims? Those invited to pray or speak at the Capitol, or who may try to otherwise visit or use Capitol facilities?

Myrick: To my knowledge, there is not a formal vetting process. Members of Congress invite religious leaders to pray. Back in the 1990s, Siraj Wahhaj became the first Muslim chaplain to give the opening prayer to Congress. Siraj Wahhaj was also an unindicted co-conspirator in the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993.

There is a policy that members of Congress can reserve rooms for speakers, events, etc., within the Capitol complex, and there is not much oversight as to who can be present at such events. Remember, these are public buildings, paid for by American taxpayers. It is the people’s house.

IBD: During WWII, Uncle Sam plastered public places with propaganda posters of the enemy, commissioning artists to paint frightening impressions. The campaign rallied the American people against a common enemy. Yet in this war, the U.S. government hasn’t even issued a wanted poster of Osama bin Laden. Why do you think that is?

Myrick: For one, we are too politically correct today. “We don’t want to frighten the American people.”

IBD: We often hear that Islam is a “religion of peace” and “tolerance,” and that jihadists have “hijacked” or “perverted” a “great religion.” Is this accurate, that nothing in Islam promotes or condones violent jihad against infidels? Or does such rhetoric simply play into the Islamists’ hands in their attempts to sugarcoat the threat, and confuse Americans?

Myrick: There are definitely passages in the Koran that promote or condone violent jihad. However, you can also find passages in the Bible which promote violence. I think that the president is failing the American people by sugarcoating the problem we are facing and only making things worse for the future. We should explore every means of encouraging moderate Muslims to speak out against the radicals. There are many who want to, and do � such as Sheikh (Muhammad Hisham) Kabbani (of the Islamic Supreme Council of America) and Zainab al-Suwaij (of the American Islamic Congress) and Dr. Zuhdi Jasser (of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy). But they do not get the media attention.

IBD: Many Islamists are well spoken, and seem skilled at manipulating not only our media but also our laws. If they can use our constitutional freedoms against us to block due scrutiny, what chance do we have of marginalizing them?

Myrick: Over the last 25 years, there has been a concerted effort on the part of radical Islamists to infiltrate our major institutions in America. They have done that by funding professors’ projects in our colleges and universities. Then, they influence what is taught by making the program dependent on their yearly donations. Several classes have graduated and are now in the media, the judicial system, teaching in our schools and colleges, various branches of our government, even in our military. They are masterful at manipulating minds to fit their purposes.

IBD: How can they be exposed?

Myrick: We need to shed the veil of political correctness that shields government officials from speaking out against them. Until we do that, we do not have a chance of marginalizing them. As soon as someone broaches the idea that the Koran has violent passages, they get shot down as Islamophobes and racists. Rather than debate these points, groups like CAIR seek to silence the debate. The American people deserve to see and hear the debate, but most people in positions of influence are afraid to say anything.

IBD: Jihad watchers have warned about “sharia creep” in schools and local governments. We see sharia being practiced in some parts of Europe; could it happen here?

Myrick: I believe sharia could easily be practiced here. If a local community becomes infiltrated by extremists who run the town or village operations, then it could easily be implemented in this country. Unchallenged, it will happen.

IBD: The FBI director says the bureau can find no evidence of sleeper cells inside the U.S. How confident are you that the 9/11 cells were the last?

Myrick: From the information that I have heard reported publicly, there are sleeper cells inside the U.S. . . . Hezbollah sleeper cells, al-Qaeda sleeper cells, maybe others.

IBD: How worried are you about “virtual jihad” � the use of al-Qaeda-inspired Web sites to motivate homegrown terrorists?

Myrick: I’m very worried about it, but again, we have certain freedoms in this country. We have a lot of freedom to express ourselves, more than in any other country in the world. People go pretty far in the statements they use to criticize the U.S. That’s legal, as well it should be. But the risk of motivating Americans to engage in jihad through the Web is a very serious problem that our Congress and administration should address immediately. We face an ironic dilemma in that our freedom could very well cost us our freedoms.

IBD: Christian prison chaplains warn that Muslim chaplains are converting inmates to Islam by the cellblock. Are the Justice Department and the Federal Bureau of Prisons doing enough to monitor this situation?

Myrick: They are aware of it and are supposedly monitoring it. Also, I have read that Abdurahman Alamoudi, founder of the American Muslim Council, placed Muslim chaplains throughout our military. He is now in jail on charges of terrorism. The chaplains, to my knowledge, are still in their current positions. Go figure.

Copyright 2000-2007 Investor’s Business Daily, Inc.

www.FoxNews.com

If you were a terrorist, how would you attack?

That’s the question a New York Times blogger posed on the newspaper’s website.

Steven D. Levitt, in a controversial posting on the paper’s Freakonomics blog, has invited fellow bloggers to submit their worst-case scenarios for a terrorist attack.

The blogosphere is buzzing about whether the posting will prompt officials to stay ever-alert, as Levitt intends, or whether it could lead to a catalog of ideas that could encourage new attacks.

� SPEAKOUT! If You Were a Terrorist …
Levitt, in his blog, writes that posting ideas for terrorist attacks “could be a form of public service: I presume that a lot more folks who oppose and fight terror read this blog than actual terrorists. So by getting these ideas out in the open, it gives terror fighters a chance to consider and plan for these scenarios before they occur.”

He also offers one idea that his father gave to him:

“… to arm 20 terrorists with rifles and cars, and arrange to have them begin shooting randomly at pre-set times all across the country. Big cities, little cities, suburbs, etc. Have them move around a lot. No one will know when and where the next attack will be. The chaos would be unbelievable. …”

But some of the hundreds of comments Levitt has received think the blog is anything but a “public service.” They question the rationale behind it and suggest that Levitt’s invitation could become a warehouse full of ideas for terrorists.

“Please, please remove this how-to guide for terrorists from the Web,” J. Foster writes. “Of course, there�s all sorts of information already out there, but suggesting more ideas to terrorists is extremely irresponsible. Stupid, in fact. Why on earth would you think this is a good thing to do? What purpose does it serve?”

“You have got to be kidding me,” submits Bob Carson. “Ideas for terrorists? Think you are being cute? Clever? You are an idiot.”

By Jonathan Tobin, The Jerusalem Post

Critics of religion like to claim that the source of most of the world’s ills can be traced to believers who wage wars in the name of their distorted, fanatic faiths. Indeed, in the past year this thesis has led to a spate of new books advocating atheism and deriding religion.

Needless to say, critics of this trend have pointed out that the vast majority of the deaths incurred by conflicts in history’s bloodiest century – the 20th – were caused by fanatical non-believers in traditional faiths in the name of their Communist, Maoist and Nazi faiths.

But it must be admitted that violent religious extremists are, at this moment in time, the primary threat to the peace of the world. The only problem with this unpleasant fact is that the opprobrium rightly aimed at the perpetrators of this faith-based violence cannot be neatly distributed across the board to practitioners of the three major monotheistic religions.

Though present-day Jews and Christians are not all saints, there is no getting around the fact that neither of those religions has sprouted a contemporary movement aimed at world domination to be achieved by terror and war. That honor is reserved for the Muslim faith, among whose adherents Islamist terror movements have found a home in the mainstream of its culture.

NOT ALL Muslims are Islamists. Most American Muslims are nothing of the kind. But the notion that supporters of al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad and other assorted anti-Western and anti-Jewish terror movements are a tiny minority in the Arab and Muslim world is a delusion.

However, in this age of political correctness to single out one group for the sins of a large number of its members is considered unfair and perhaps even racist. So, instead, we are asked to pretend that there is an intrinsic connection, or even symmetry, between Christian, Jewish and Muslim extremists.

That was exactly the premise of a widely heralded three-part series on CNN last week. Titled God’s Holy Warriors and fronted by famed international correspondent Christiane Amanpour, it was a triptych across the globe to highlight the danger from Jewish, Muslim and Christian extremists, who are all given the same treatment and air-time in the guise of even-handedness.

Thus, by its very structure of equating the three different situations, the series was nothing short of a brazen lie.

Though all parts of the series were problematic, the first, devoted to the threat from extremist Jewish settlers and the entire network of support for the State of Israel in the US, was as classic an example of a dishonest piece of biased programming as anything that has been broadcast on a major network.

Though a tiny fraction of the settlement movement, which itself commands the support of only a fraction of Israelis, has committed isolated acts of violence, the notion that this group is in any way analogous to al-Qaeda is nothing short of bizarre. If anything, Jewish settlers and ordinary Israelis living inside the pre-1967 borders have themselves been the victims of the intolerance, fanaticism and violence of their Muslim neighbors.

That the broadcasts’ view of international law on the question of the legality of the Jewish presence in the territories is one-sided is an understatement. A strong case can be made that the Jews living in those places have every right to do so. Moreover, the idea that their living in these places constitutes the primary obstacle to peace in the Middle East is nothing short of fantastic, especially given the events of the past several years, which have shown how uninterested the Palestinians are in peace with Israel, no matter where its borders are.

Even worse, the show seemingly accepts the discredited canard of Israeli and American Jewish control of American foreign policy put forth by such risible figures as former president Jimmy Carter and academic John Mearsheimer, whose views were treated with respect rather than journalistic skepticism.

As such, the worldwide news network lent itself to a line of argument that has rightly been termed a modern intellectual justification for anti-Semitism.

EXTREMIST MUSLIMS are a genuine threat to both peace and the West; while most settlers are no threat to anyone and are, if anything, among the primary victims of Muslim terror.

As for Evangelical Christians, who were the targets of Amanpour’s third program, most American Jews may disagree with most of their political positions but, to date, they have launched no terror attacks, nor do they plan any. Any analogy between them and Islamists is the figment of Amanpour’s fevered imagination. If anything, their main sin, in the eyes of many Western apologists for the Islamists, seems to be their support for Jewish victims of Arab terror.

CNN cannot be allowed to get away with this sort of despicable bias. Decent persons of all faiths need to speak out against this network and make sure that it, and its arrogant star Amanpour, are made to hear of our outrage at every possible opportunity and in every way possible, including the use of economic leverage by both sponsors and viewers.