Religion, Nationalism, and Terror

What is Zion if not the Temple Mount? - Haaretz - Israel News
And what is Zion if not the Temple Mount, the Mount of Olives and the Old City?” Conceding Jerusalem and its holy places, many fine people already understood then, is neither legitimate nor moral. Such a decision cannot be binding on the State of Israel or the Jewish people.

Belief and the Ballot - TIME

Being in opposition allows the PJD to build its base without appearing to be doing the monarchy’s bidding. It may be true that the Moroccan regime has postponed constitutional reform that would signal clear commitment to democratization. Nonetheless, its strategy of accommodating, rather than attacking, political Islam should be closely followed throughout the Middle East and the West.

Gideon Levy, ethnographer of despair and rage, Haaretz
“For the first time in my life I see my mother suffering and I can’t help her. For 46 years, from the time I was born, such a thing never happened - that I couldn’t help my mother,” says the son sadly, after he tried in vain to take his mother from their home in east Barta’a to the government hospital in Jenin, a 20-minute drive during ordinary times, which haven’t been ordinary for a long time.

It’s possible that it was his mother’s time to die in any case, but why did it have to be such a humiliating death, on the floor of a van at the checkpoint? How many more such articles will still be written, and how many times will the Israel Defense Forces explain that “humanitarian cases” are allowed to pass through the checkpoint, an explanation that repeatedly contrasts with reality? On Monday three weeks ago, Kamela Kabha, 78, died that way at the Reihan (Barta’a) checkpoint, while her son Tawfik pleaded for her life.

Persuade the people - Haaretz

…so long as Israel keeps raising the separation wall and the Palestinians keep getting poorer - all the debates about principles for a peace agreement are pretty worthless

The Bush administration’s efforts to blame its problems in Iraq are ludicrous. But the Islamic Republic of Iran does deserve harsh criticism for its bigotry and human rights abuses. Middle East experts who condemn the demonization of Muslims in the West should also condemn the demonization of Westerners by Muslims.

For Iran’s Shiites, a Celebration of Faith and Waiting - New York Times
And there was the booth set up to warn people about “Satan worshipers.” There was a Jewish star at the entrance, posted atop a replica of what was supposed to be the Washington Monument which also was described as a satanic symbol because it is shaped as an obelisk.

There was also a movie concerning “perverted cults,” which focused on the Bahai faith.

Turkey is clearly an important example of moderate and democratic Islamism. As such, it needs to be studied carefully.

Turkish elections bring Arab silence - Haaretz
While Arab opposition parties, civil society and democracy activists cheered the news from Turkey, there was official silence from Arab governments, as if the elections had occurred on another planet. Unlike the front-page headlines in independent media, the state-controlled media in many Arab countries either ignored, delayed or relegated the Turkish elections’ story to internal pages or the tail end of their regular news.

By the third or fourth day, these media pundits went out of their way to tell their respective audiences how different the situation in Turkey was from that of Arab countries. Some played up the chronic Kurdish, Armenian and Cypriot problems as if to dampen any Arab joy for their northern neighbor.

A meeting at Qalandiyah - Haaretz 

The Web site Mahsanmilim - Reports from the West Bank (www.mahsanmilim.com) - grew from a 31-second video clip in which Palestinian teacher and poet Hatem Hushi stands next to the Ofer Blockade, a roadblock erected by the Israel Defense Forces on Al-Khader Road, at the entrance to Bethlehem. He stands in front of the camera reciting a poem, in Hebrew, that speaks of his longing for the city of Holon (tinyurl.com/2awa3t). When he finishes the last line of the poem, he smiles self-consciously, and the clip ends.

“There is something in that scene that is so absolute. It sheds light on everything, unravels everything,” says Aya Kaniuk. She and Tamar Goldschmidt, who filmed the scene, have been running the site for about two years.

“It was at one of the blockades. Hatem was carrying a cane, and he suddenly came up to us and said, ‘I am the only Palestinian poet who writes in Hebrew.’ He wanted to read us a poem, a love poem to Holon. Later, we discovered he was a cancer patient, and he was on his way to chemotherapy treatment. But he didn’t want to talk about the fact that, because of the blockade, he couldn’t get to his treatments. He wrote a poem and presented it to the outside world.”

The clip about Hatem Hushi is only one of the films, pictures, and texts that comprise the Mahsanmilim (word warehouse) site. It is one of the most interesting political sites in Israel. There are provocative scenes, like the one documenting soldiers abusing peddlers in Qalandiyah (tinyurl.com/32xsba) or the young girl bursting into tears in front of a soldier at the Hawara checkpoint (tinyurl.com/2eugss). But the site does not promote sensational documentation of one type of event or another.

Tony Perkins managed Woody Jenkins Senate campaign in 1996, MMA, 8/29/2007

….while managing Republican state representative Louis E. “Woody” Jenkins’ 1996 campaign for the U.S. Senate, Perkins paid $82,500 to use former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke’s phone bank for Jenkins’ run-off election with Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-LA). Jenkins was later fined $3,000 for “knowingly and willfully fil[ing] false disclosure reports showing Courtney Communications as the vendor.”

Tony Perkins, the president of the Family Research Council…

The Boston Herald reported in an October 16, 2006, article, “In 2001, [Perkins] gave a speech at a meeting of the Council of Conservative Citizens, which the Southern Poverty Law Center [SPLC] considers a hate group.” Indeed, a Fall 2004 article in the SPLC’s Intelligence Report asserted that Perkins “spoke to the Louisiana Council of Conservative Citizens on May 19, 2001,” during his tenure as a Louisiana state legislator. The SPLC characterizes the CCC as a “white nationalist” organization, and has reported that the group is “the reincarnation of the racist White Citizens Councils of the 1950s and 1960s.” The CCC declares in its statement of principles:

We also oppose all efforts to mix the races of mankind, to promote non-white races over the European-American people through so-called “affirmative action” and similar measures, to destroy or denigrate the European-American heritage, including the heritage of the Southern people, and to force the integration of the races.

Le Monde.fr, 30 août 2007

Le Hezbollah lance une campagne contre l’organisation Human Rights Watch

Mouna Naïm

LE MONDE | 29.08.07 | 15h00, Article paru dans l’édition du 30.08.07

Le Hezbollah a lancé, mardi 28 août, une virulente campagne contre l’association de défense des droits de l’homme Human Rights Watch (HRW), en prévision du rapport de 120 pages qu’elle doit publier sur les violations, par le Parti de Dieu, des lois de la guerre lors du conflit qui l’a opposé à l’armée israélienne pendant l’été 2006. Un autre rapport, début septembre, concernera les violations commises par Israël. La campagne a été lancée par la chaîne de télévision Al-Manar, du Hezbollah, à quarante-huit heures d’une conférence de presse que HRW entend tenir à Beyrouth. “Cette conférence (…) affaiblit le sentiment national et constitue une incitation contre les droits de la résistance (le Hezbollah)“, a annoncé Al-Manar. “Des organisations estudiantines, des associations de la société civile ainsi que les familles des martyrs, des blessés et des personnes lésées (par la guerre) vont organiser une protestation” pour empêcher la tenue de la conférence, a ajouté la chaîne, qui a ouvert son bulletin d’informations de la soirée sur cette affaire.

Versant dans un anti-américanisme et un antisémitisme primaires, la chaîne a qualifié HRW d’“association américaine greffée de juifs”.

Turk With Islamic Ties Is Elected President - New York Times, 8/29/2007
Ali Murat Yel, chairman of the sociology department at Fatih University in Istanbul, said the selection of Mr. Gul was comparable in significance to an African-American being elected president in the United States.

“It’s a very important turning point,” Mr. Yel said. “Those people who are the peasants and farmers and petty bourgeoisie always had republican values imposed on them. Now they are rising against it. They are saying, ‘Hey, we are here, and we want our own way.’ ”

Though Turkey’s secular establishment has taken pains to portray Mr. Gul and his close ally, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, as inseparable from their Islamic pasts, their supporters argue they have changed dramatically since the early 1990s, when they were members of the overtly Islamic Welfare Party.

“They can sit on the same table as some people who drink alcohol and they drink their Coke, and they would be able to talk to them,” Mr. Yel said. “They have come to terms with the reality of this country.”

Sale is a legal fiction that allows the land to be farmed and the produce sold to Jews during the sabbatical year
The beginning of the Jewish sabbatical year is just two weeks away, but the kashrut certification bureaucrats are breaking new records for the absurd: Kashrut supervisors from the Chief Rabbinate are forcing Israeli Arabs to sign a document that gives the Israel Lands Administration and the Chief Rabbinate the right to sell the land to a non-Jew as a condition for continued kosher certification for their produce. If they refuse to sign, they were told that the wholesalers to whom they sell their goods will also lose their kashrut certification.

Hass on Gaza, Haaretz, 8/29/2007
The shortage of raw materials has halted 95 percent of all construction, which is valued at $160 million. About 85 percent of all industry is closed down temporarily and 70,000 workers have been laid off.

Los Angeles Times: Not so fast, Christian soldiers

Last week, after an investigation spurred by the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, the Pentagon abruptly announced that it would not be delivering “freedom packages” to our soldiers in Iraq, as it had originally intended.

What were the packages to contain? Not body armor or home-baked cookies. Rather, they held Bibles, proselytizing material in English and Arabic and the apocalyptic computer game “Left Behind: Eternal Forces” (derived from the series of post-Rapture novels), in which “soldiers for Christ” hunt down enemies who look suspiciously like U.N. peacekeepers.

Dougherty, Zealous for Zion, American Conservative, Aug. 27, 2007.

Tonight, Christians United for Israel will hold a celebration to supercharge thousands of Christian Zionists as they prepare to meet their senators and congressmen the next day on Capitol Hill.

In February 2006, televangelist John Hagee founded CUFI to “respond instantly to Washington with our concerns about Israel,” telling reporters to “think of CUFI as a Christian version of AIPAC [American Israel Public Affairs Committee].” In just over a year, Hagee, with help from charismatic pastors, is turning CUFI into the largest grassroots Christian political organization in the country. The second annual summit in Washington grew from just over 3,000 attendees last year to 4,500 this July.