Levitt Letter Extra News

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.