Religion, Nationalism, and Terror

Inside Pastor John Hagee’s 2008 Washington Summit - a JewsOnFirst.org video, August 15, 2008

Iran and the End Times at Pastor John Hagee’s 2008 Washington Summit
JewsOnFirst.org reporters’ video from inside and outside the July 2008 summit of Hagee’s Christians United for Israel

When John Hagee’s organization, Christians United for Israel (CUFI) held its July 2008 summit at the Washington DC Convention Center, JewsOnFirst.org reporters were inside and outside. This video shows some of what we saw and heard, despite CUFI’s extraordinary efforts to shield the meeting from public scrutiny.

BBC NEWS, Guide: Gaza under blockade, August 11, 2008

For the past year, Gaza’s 1.5m people have been relying on, on average, less than a fifth of the volume of imported supplies they received in December 2005. Some weeks significantly less than that has arrived.

Only basic humanitarian items have been allowed in, and virtually no exports permitted, paralysing the economy. Reduced fuel supplies and lack of spare parts have had heavy knock-on impacts on sewage treatment, waste collection, water supply and medical facilities.

In the wake of the Hamas takeover, Israel said it would allow only basic humanitarian supplies into the Strip. No specific list of what is and is not classed as humanitarian exists, although aid agencies say permitted items generally fall into four categories - human food, animal food, groceries (cleaning products, nappies etc) and medicines.

In September 2007, the Israeli government declared the Strip a “hostile entity” in response to continued rocket attacks on southern Israel, and said it would start cutting fuel imports. Israel maintains the blockade has at no point caused a humanitarian crisis - but in early 2008, a group of aid agencies described the situation as exactly that, and the worst situation in the strip since Israel occupied it in 1967.

Richard Silverstein, Mahmoud Darwish, Palestine’s Greatest Poet, Dies | Tikun Olam, August 10, 2008

My Mother

I long for my mother’s bread
My mother’s coffee
Her touch
Childhood memories grow up in me
Day after day
I must be worth my life
At the hour of my death
Worth the tears of my mother.

And if I come back one day
Take me as a veil to your eyelashes
Cover my bones with the grass
Blessed by your footsteps
Bind us together
With a lock of your hair
With a thread that trails from the back of your dress
I might become immortal
Become a God
If I touch the depths of your heart.

If I come back
Use me as wood to feed your fire
As the clothesline on the roof of your house
Without your blessing
I am too weak to stand.

I am old
Give me back the star maps of childhood
So that I
Along with the swallows
Can chart the path
Back to your waiting nest.

Nicholas D. Kristof, Make Diplomacy, Not War, NYTimes.com, August 10, 2008

Iraq and Afghanistan are the messes getting attention today, but they are only symptoms of a much broader cancer in American foreign policy.

A few glimpses of this larger affliction:

¶The United States has more musicians in its military bands than it has diplomats.

¶This year alone, the United States Army will add about 7,000 soldiers to its total; that’s more people than in the entire American Foreign Service.

¶More than 1,000 American diplomatic positions are vacant because the Foreign Service is so short-staffed, but a myopic Congress is refusing to finance even modest new hiring. Some 1,100 could be hired for the cost of a single C-17 military cargo plane.

In short, the United States is hugely overinvesting in military tools and underinvesting in diplomatic tools. The result is a lopsided foreign policy that antagonizes the rest of the world and is ineffective in tackling many modern problems.

Gershom Gorenberg, Waltz With Unbearable Memory | The American Prospect, August 7, 2008

In his new documentary Waltz With Bashir, filmmaker Ari Folman explores his own inability to recall the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon as a means of considering how nations go to war, and how we judge what leaders do.

The tank rumbles north into Lebanon. The Israeli commander and another crew member are standing, their heads out of the hatches, singing boisterously. They’re young men out on a road trip. Then the commander goes silent, hit by a bullet, and he dies inside the tank, as his stunned soldiers forget their training and what they are supposed to do next. A missile strikes the tank; flames blossom from it; the young men, naked of weapons, are running, zigzagging through bullets. Only one survives, finds shelter, and watches as the rest of his unit retreats. And this is only the outset of the journey from childhood toward the inferno.Young soldiers lie on a beach, terrified, firing madly, perforating an approaching car with bullets. At last it stops. When they approach it, they find the corpses of a Lebanese family inside. And this, too, is but the beginning of the journey toward Beirut, toward events too awful to remember or to leave forgotten.

These scenes — rendered in dark, realistic animation — are from Waltz With Bashir, a documentary about Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon that is deservedly Israel’s most talked-about film this year. The movie recounts director Ari Folman’s effort to restore his own lost memory of his service in Lebanon, especially of the days when he was deployed in Beirut on the outskirts of the Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps, where Israel’s Christian Lebanese allies were massacring Palestinians.

The Atomic Bombing of Nagasaki, August 9, 1945, The Manhattan Project’s Interactive History

As with the estimates of deaths at Hiroshima, it will never be known for certain how many people died as a result of the atomic attack on Nagasaki. The best estimate is 40,000 people died initially, with 60,000 more injured. By January 1946, the number of deaths probably approached 70,000, with perhaps ultimately twice that number dead total within five years. For those areas of Nagasaki affected by the explosion, the death rate was comparable to that at Hiroshima.

Gideon Levy, Twilight Zone / Free passage, Haaretz, August 7, 2008

She walks from the pool to the stylish portico of the Bethlehem Intercontinental, a bikini showing beneath shorts and a revealing shirt. There’s an anklet on her leg, her hair is dyed a reddish brown, and she’s holding a French Gauloise cigarette and a red cell phone. She has come for a weekend at the Intercontinental, for a wedding: When you drink you don’t drive, so she stayed at the luxurious hotel, five stars at $130 a night, which was bustling with vacationers - Israeli Arabs from Haifa.

She is not allowed to be in Bethlehem, where we met her; she is not allowed to visit Ramallah, where she has been living for years; she is not allowed to travel to the beach in Tel Aviv, as she does several times a week during the summer; and she is not allowed to go to Jerusalem for entertainment or work purposes, yet is there almost every day. She is in the north, but her heart and her family are in the south. A native of Rafah, she arrived 16 years ago to study at Bir Zeit University and has been stuck in Ramallah ever since, far from her loving family. She carries a “Gaza ID card” and despises the whole idea of it. It is supposed to be impossible for her to live in the West Bank and travel in Israel. At any given moment, at any checkpoint, she is liable to find herself expelled back to Rafah. That’s how it’s been for all these years.

Courageous and determined, she has built a full life for herself, between the checkpoints. “Anyone who was born near the sea can’t live without it,” she told me when we sat over coffee in the lobby of the Intercontinental. Her “passport,” she wrote me a few days ago, cost her $300 and was worth it: Elegant and confident, with her Giorgio Armani sunglasses, she passes through all the checkpoints.

Areej Hijazi lives without borders. But her longings for her parents, her siblings and her relatives, and for her childhood landscapes in Rafah, repeatedly arouse in her a sadness that is reflected in her eyes.

A few days ago she sent me an e-mail on behalf of a group of Gazans who are stuck in Ramallah: “As for Gaza, it is a one-way ticket; we can go back there without ever dreaming of coming back to the West Bank! … We missed the opportunity to have a normal life that all people around us simply had and still have, just because we hold [a] so-called Gaza ID (by the way I am sick of this term); to visit your family on holidays and school vacations, to attend your siblings’, cousins’, friends’ weddings or graduations, to welcome new members into your family or bid a warm farewell to those who leave, to grow up around your beloved ones, to have your family around you in your wedding or to make your parents, while getting old, happy to see their grandchildren, to benefit from a scholarship abroad and to advance your career, to enjoy times with your parents that you simply didn’t enjoy as a rebellious teenager before you left your family home … to have your mom around you when you’re heartbroken, to complain to your father about how crazy the world is getting, to share with your sister your love stories or to chat with her about life and men and success and failure, to visit your school or to pass by those places where you had crazy childhood encounters.

“Now comes the fun part. I have what my friends call ‘the checkpoint syndrome’ - you know, those times when you feel helpless and hopeless, and where all becomes meaningless, due to pure personal reasons sometimes. I go to one of the Jerusalem checkpoints and try to pass. Why, I don’t know. It could be that at those times you need to do something crazy to regain some of your internal balance, and in my case the craziest thing ever is to challenge the so-called ‘Israeli security and checkpoints system.’ Success is 100 percent: Each time I tried to pass, I passed not only to Jerusalem, but also to Tel Aviv, Jaffa, Haifa and Nazareth. My passport was my curly hair and the Giorgio Armani sunglasses that I bought only for the checkpoints, and guess what? I believe the $300 investment was worth it. It is so funny that I cannot see my family in Gaza for years, while I spend most of the summer swimming in Tel Aviv or having fun in Jerusalem. What a brilliant security system!

Avi Issacharoff, The land of unchecked settler harassment, Haaretz, August 7, 2008

The carcass of a butchered donkey is still lying in the olive grove of the Sufan family. Every single week since mid-June, the family, whose home is on the southern edge of the village of Burin, near Nablus, has suffered harassment by settlers living in outposts near the settlement of Yitzhar.

The mother, Hinan (Umm Ayman), says she has filed an endless number of complaints with the police, “but everything is kalam fadi (empty talk). They do nothing, and they do not even compensate us.”

On June 16, Musa’ab, the son, took the sheep herd out with his neighbor Munir and his brother Bashir in the hills surrounding the family home. “At some point,” Munir recalls, “we saw a car heading our way from the direction of Yitzhar. Two settlers stepped out of the car, and the vehicle continued on its way, went around a bend and disappeared. But then we saw that eight more settlers were walking toward us, and some had knives in their hands. They set sheafs of wheat on fire and moved closer to the home of Umm Ayman and threw stones at the house. We ran away with our sheep but left the Sufan family’s donkey behind. One of the settlers took a knife and stabbed the donkey over and over until he killed him. We filed a complaint with the police, who came and took photographs of the site.”

Umm Ayman’s home is now surrounded by burned-out hills, the result of repeated arson by settlers. The family home looks like a semi-fortified outpost. The windows in the upper floor are covered with metal nets, to keep stones out, and the windows in the lower level are protected by heavy metal shutters.

Political suicide, Palestinian style, The Daily Star, August 2008

It is painful watching events in Gaza and the West Bank unfold, as Fatah and Hamas battle it out like a bunch of armed neighborhood gangs. The mood among Palestinians throughout the world is one of despair and gloom, tinged with embarrassment and occasional shame.

Arab and others supporters of the Palestinian cause throw their hands up in the air in bewilderment. It will not be surprising to see some friends of Palestine quietly walk away, mumbling that if the Palestinians wish to kill each other and destroy their own society, they are free to do so. The world will easily forget about them.

These are grim days for the Palestinians, but not unusual ones for the Arab world as a whole. The sight of clan-based political groups in Gaza killing each other is familiar in many parts of the Middle East, sadly. That does not make it any better. It simply is a sign that national dysfunctionality expressed in internecine political violence is a regional Arab ailment, not a peculiarly Palestinian one.

The Palestinians, especially their political leaders, must assume most of the blame for this round of fighting, which is absolutely incomprehensible at a time when economic pressures and sanctions have reduced Gaza not just to a prison-like encampment, but to a ward of paupers. Israel and other enemies of the Palestinians will be pleased to see them fighting each other. We will hear another chorus from the skinheads and racists in the world who will point to this round of fighting as proof that Israel withdrew from Gaza and all it got in return were rockets fired at it and hooligans running the show inside. They will be right, but superficially.

The rockets fired at Gaza are to be seen in the context of a war that still rages between Israelis and Palestinians, now more or less quiet due to a cease-fire between Hamas and Israel. The fighting among the Palestinians is not so easy to understand. It is also not the first time that Palestinians have quarreled or fought each other. They did it in the 1940s, in the 1980s in refugee camps in Lebanon, and now they are doing it again in their squeezed little landscape in Gaza.

This is the latest and most troubling example of how a once grand and noble Palestinian national liberation movement has allowed itself to degenerate into ineptitude. The consequences of the fighting are unlikely to increase the chance of liberating Palestine, forcing Israel to negotiate an honorable and fair peace, or providing Palestinians opportunities to live more secure, stable and prosperous lives. All that will emerge from this is the functional equivalent of a child taking over a tree house, and claiming that as a great victory.

The Atomic Bombing of Hiroshima, August 6, 1945, Manhattan Project

In the early morning hours of August 6, 1945, a B-29 bomber named Enola Gay took off from the island of Tinian and headed north by northwest toward Japan. The bomber’s primary target was the city of Hiroshima, located on the deltas of southwestern Honshu Island facing the Inland Sea. Hiroshima had a civilian population of almost 300,000 and was an important military center, containing about 43,000 soldiers.

The bomber, piloted by the commander of the 509th Composite Group, Colonel Paul Tibbets, flew at low altitude on automatic pilot before climbing to 31,000 feet as it neared the target area. At approximately 8:15 a.m. Hiroshima time the Enola Gay released “Little Boy,” its 9,700-pound uranium bomb, over the city. Tibbets immediately dove away to avoid the anticipated shock wave. Forty-three seconds later, a huge explosion lit the morning sky as Little Boy detonated 1,900 feet above the city, directly over a parade field where soldiers of the Japanese Second Army were doing calisthenics. Though already eleven and a half miles away, the Enola Gay was rocked by the blast. At first, Tibbets thought he was taking flak. After a second shock wave (reflected from the ground) hit the plane, the crew looked back at Hiroshima. “The city was hidden by that awful cloud . . . boiling up, mushrooming, terrible and incredibly tall,” Tibbets recalled. The yield of the explosion was later estimated at 15 kilotons (the equivalent of 15,000 tons of TNT).

On the ground moments before the blast it was a calm and sunny Monday morning. An air raid alert from earlier that morning had been called off after only a solitary aircraft was seen (the weather plane), and by 8:15 the city was alive with activity — soldiers doing their morning calisthenics, commuters on foot or on bicycles, groups of women and children working outside to clear firebreaks. Those closest to the explosion died instantly,Victim of atomic attack with the pattern of her clothing burned into her back. their bodies turned to black char. Nearby birds burst into flames in mid-air, and dry, combustible materials such as paper instantly ignited as far away as 6,400 feet from ground zero. The white light acted as a giant flashbulb, burning the dark patterns of clothing onto skin (right) and the shadows of bodies onto walls. Survivors outdoors close to the blast generally describe a literally blinding light combined with a sudden and overwhelming wave of heat. (The effects of radiation are usually not immediately apparent.) The blast wave followed almost instantly for those close-in, often knocking them from their feet. Those that were indoors were usually spared the flash burns, but flying glass from broken windows filled most rooms, and all but the very strongest structures collapsed. One boy was blown through the windows of his house and across the street as the house collapsed behind him. Within minutes 9 out of 10 people half a mile or less from ground zero were dead….

No one will ever know for certain how many died as a result of the attack on Hiroshima. Some 70,000 people probably died as a result of initial blast, heat, and radiation effects. This included about twenty American airmen being held as prisoners in the city. By the end of 1945, because of the lingering effects of radioactive fallout and other after effects, the Hiroshima death toll was probably over 100,000. The five-year death total may have reached or even exceeded 200,000, as cancer and other long-term effects took hold.

People For the American Way, The Good Book Taught Wrong: `Bible History’ Classes in Florida Public Schools, 2000

A number of school districts appear to assume that only Christian students would take the “Bible History” courses. A review of the instructional materials suggests an assumption by these school districts that the teachers and students are of the same (Christian) faith, with the Bible approached accordingly, rather than in an objective and secular manner.

One of the most striking examples is from the Columbia County school district, where students at Columbia High School are asked the following exam question:

“If you had a Jewish friend who wanted to know if Jesus might be the expectant [sic] Messiah, which book [of the Gospels] would you give him?”

Similar examples exist in other school districts:

“Compose an explanation of who Jesus is for someone who has never heard of Him.”
(Final exam question at Madison County High School, Madison County)

“Why is it hard for a non-Christian to understand things about God?”
(Exam question concerning I Corinthians used at both Vanguard High School in Marion County and Williston High School in Levy County)

“What is Jesus Christ’s relationship to God, to creation, and to you?”
(Question asked of students at Niceville High School in Okaloosa County; emphasis added.)

“Who, according to Jesus, is the father of the Jews? The devil.”
(Lesson used in Levy County on John 8)

Mohammed Omer, Truth and Consequences Under the Israeli Occupation, The nation, July 31, 2008

This summer, at age 24, I was honored to learn that I had become the youngest journalist to receive the Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism, named for the famed American war reporter and awarded to journalists who counter propaganda with the truth. Although Israel has sealed Gaza’s 1.5 million Palestinians in what many now call the world’s largest open-air prison, Dutch MP Hans Van Baalen lobbied the Israeli government to let me leave Gaza to receive my award in person. Upon my return from London, I was surrounded by Israeli security officers. I was stripped naked at gunpoint, interrogated, kicked and beaten for more than four hours. At one point I fainted and then awakened to fingernails gouging at the flesh beneath my eyes. An officer crushed my neck beneath his boot and pressed my chest into the floor. Others took turns kicking and pinching me, laughing all the while. They dragged me by my feet, sweeping my head through my own vomit. I lost consciousness. I was told later that they transferred me to a hospital only when they thought I might die.

Today, I have difficulty breathing. I have abrasions and scratches on my chest and neck. My hands don’t function well; typing is difficult. My doctor informed me that due to nerve damage from one kick, I may be unable to father children and will need to have an operation.

Israeli attacks on journalists are not new; nor are they rare. In April, Reuters cameraman Fadel Shana was killed by fire from an Israeli tank. He was in a car, clearly marked as press. According to Amnesty International, “Fadel Shana appears to have been killed deliberately although he was a civilian taking no part in attacks on Israel’s forces.”

Reporters Without Borders has condemned the Israeli military’s widespread “abusive behavior” of Palestinian journalists. And the Committee to Protect Journalists reports that journalists covering Israeli military actions in the West Bank and Gaza “contend with perennial abuses at the hands of Israeli forces.” In 2007 alone, Israeli soldiers shot photographers from Agence France-Presse, Al-Ayyam newspaper and Al-Aqsa TV. The television cameraman, Imad Ghanem, fell to the ground when wounded. Israeli forces then shot him twice more in the legs. Both of his legs have been amputated.

Al Jazeera English - Middle East - Exiled Egyptian activist sentenced, August 3, 2008

Exiled Egyptian activist sentenced

Ibrahim wanted to return to Egypt but only with assurances he would not be arrested

Saad Eddin Ibrahim, an outspoken critic of the Egyptian government, has been sentenced to two years in prison.

The sociologist and human rights activist was convicted for “tarnishing Egypt’s reputation,” the country’s official MENA news agency said.

Shady Talaat, Ibrahim’s laywer, said the ruling by a Cairo court was flawed and that he would use his right to appeal.

Ibrahim was granted bail of 10,000 Egyptian pounds ($1,890).

Ibrahim, who has been living in Qatar since June 2007, says he fears arrest if he returns to Egypt.

The case is among a series of lawsuits filed by members and loyalists of Egypt’s ruling National Democratic Party (NDP) against government critics.

Accusations

Prosecuting lawyers Abul Naga al-Mehrezi and Hossam Salim took the case against Ibrahim to court and accused him of defaming the country after a series of articles and speeches on citizenship and democracy in which he criticised the Egyptian government.

Ibrahim said last month he wanted to return from exile, but only after assurances he would not be arrested.

According to the Egyptian independent daily Al-Masri Al-Youm, Ibrahim had written to the foreign ministry asking for guarantees that he would not be held on arrival.

The 69-year old went into exile citing a climate prejudicial to political opposition and human rights.

A vocal critic of Hosni Mubarak, the Egyptian president, Ibrahim was quoted in the Washington Post last year as saying he preferred to remain outside Egypt for fear of being arrested “or worse”.

After meeting George Bush, the US president, in June last year in Prague he was called a “dissident” by the US leader.

Ibrahim, who founded the Ibn Khaldoun Centre for Development Studies, was sentenced in 2001 to seven years for, again, “tarnishing Egypt’s reputation,” before being freed on appeal after spending 10 months behind bars.

Asner’s narrative in this 16-minute video–posted on July 18, 2008 by “JewsOnFirst.org, the Jewish Response to attacks on the First Amendment”–is not perfect. But the video does provide a revealing view of Hagee’s worldview. He declares, for example, that the Antichrist “will be partly Jewish, as was Adolf Hitler and as was Karl Marx.” Hagee also says that the Antichrist will be a homosexual. In a 1997 sermon, he declares that America is controlled by “an unseen hand.” He goes on to explain that the US is controlled by the Federal Reserve System, which is in turn controlled by “a group of class-A stockholders, among them mostly Europeans, the Rothschilds, and David Rockefeller.”

I received a message saying “This site has been temporarily disabled” when I tried to access http://www.jewsonfirst.org/ at 4:15 on Aug. 2, 2008. But the video is still accessible by clicking here.

Right Wing Watch - Best of the Blog, July 25, 2008

DeLay: God Created America To Propagate Christianity (7/25)

Earlier this month, we noted that former House Speaker Tom DeLay had joined one of his “closest friends,” Rick Scarborough of Vision America, for Sunday services at Scarborough’s Texas church. Now, Vision America has helpfully posted the audio of DeLay’s rambling sermon on its website in which he explains that “America was created by God to spread the Gospel; to spread the word of Jesus Christ and to propagate Christianity”: I know that America was created by God and it was created by God, not for wealth, personal wealth. It wasn’t created by God so that we would have the resources that we now have. It wasn’t even created by God to have the freedom that we have now. America was created by God to spread the Gospel; to spread the word of Jesus Christ and to propagate Christianity. And the reason I know that is because my entire political career is exhibited by that. The Lord walked with me … I came to Christ in the first year in Congress and now I’ve been walking with the Lord [and] he has trained me and showed me why he created this nation: to spread the Gospel.

Listen: http://www.rightwingwatch.org/2008/07/delay_god_creat.html