Israel Shamir: Springtime for Russia

by Israel Shamir
shamir@home.se
(Excerpts)

With an Afterword by Michael A. Hoffman II

This is the time for good news.  In London,  Palestinian Solidarity dismissed a motion by Jewish activists to ban Deir Yassin Remembered (DYR), the most dynamic and non-apologetic of Palestinophile bodies,  because of (among other sins) their association with me. On Saturday March 10th at the Palestine Solidarity Campaign Annual General Meeting, two motions were proposed by Tony Greenstein and Roland Rance, both extremely long and explicit, demanding from friends of Palestine that they make the “fight against antisemitism and Holocaust denial” their main agenda. Chutzpah is an understatement for such impudence.

These guys are so dishonest that I was not at all astonished when Greenstein was outed as a credit card fraudster.  Greenstein had besmirched DYR, DYR Chairman Prof Dan McGowan, the British Director of DYR, Paul Eisen and our friend Gilad Atzmon in the Guardian in a piece called The seamy side of solidarity,  and had attacked me in a long text called Anti-Semitism is no response to Zionism.  They tried to stop DYR, though DYR provides scholarships to Palestinian children, brings awareness to masses and commemorates  Palestinian struggle and suffering. They were answered by Paul Eisen, Ramzy Baroud and Gilad.

Both motions were voted down by an astounding absolute majority - 95%, reported Mary Rizzo’s blog. The British friends of Palestine decided in favor of freedom of thought and in favor of pluralism, and rejected the Procrustean bed of narrow social analysis forced by the Jewish activists.

If accepted, the motion would have delegitimized not only Gilad or Paul Eisen or myself, but  Michael Neumann and Jimmy Carter and Walt and Mearsheimer as well. Anybody referring to the Israel Lobby would have been deemed an antisemite and banned. It would have made obligatory  belief in the Jewish antizionist myth of creation: only Imperialism is guilty, while Jewish Lobby is an invention of antisemites, a view beautifully deconstructed by M. Ahmad. Preoccupation with holocaust would have become a duty for any friend of Palestine. But those who wish Palestine to be free, want to be free themselves: free to read, write and say whatever is their wont. And so to protect this sweet  freedom they rejected the Jewish diktat.

This is a small thing compared to the wonders of nature, or even compared with some major fights people have elsewhere; but do not pooh-pooh it -- this was an important battle and a great victory, albeit on our turf...For many long years, they’ve gotten whatever they wanted. Right-wing Jews attacked Ken Livingstone and Jimmy Carter for their “antisemitism,”  while left-wing Jews attacked my friends and me for the same reason and with the same viciousness. One could not mouth the word “Jew” without worshipful admiration and still retain one’s place in society.

Scared by this onslaught, timid allies would opt out, partake in the ostracism themselves, stop answering letters, join in condemnation. Websites, let alone printed media,  wouldn’t publish my essays, conference organizers would disinvite. Like the leather-coated Commissars of the dreaded CHEKA (early Soviet secret police), Jewish activists would barge into any discussion enforcing their one and only true discourse, and folks would stand at attention. Only the strongest in spirit, the most determined and the most freedom-loving withstood their swarm assault. Is the London vote a harbinger of change? Could it be that the long winter of our discontent is finally over?

It is possible, for this is the prevailing wind from the East. Despite its own wonderful civilization and creature comforts, the West has always taken its better and more profound ideas from the East, be it Christianity from Palestine or Socialism from Russia. And now Russia offers Volya, unlimited and untranslatable Russian freedom, as its antidote to the war on liberties otherwise known as the “war on terror.”

Russia is unbelievably free, or rather full of volya: one may smoke in a restaurant or in a pub, one does not have to brace a seatbelt, even parking is free if available. More importantly, one may say and write and publish practically anything at all. Beside all the freedoms available in the West, Russians may be gays or sneer at gays, bewail the holocaust or regret it was over too soon, be feminists or bait them, love Israel or call for its speedy dissolution. Yes, every liberal and Jewish-owned newspaper in the West bemoans the lack of freedom in Russia under the ‘bloody KGB dictator Putin’ (or in Venezuela under the bloody dictator Chavez...whoever they do not like is always a bloody dictator, isn't he?), but Russians are free from political correctness and Jew-worship, that annoying features of the post-war West.

Recently a group of Russian writers visited Israel and met there with their readers: there are more than a million Russian-speaking Israelis. The readers did not beat around the bush and demanded from the authors that they swear allegiance to the ruling ideology:  condemn Iran, glorify Israel, this fortress of democracy in the Middle East,  denounce the Russian supply of weapons to Arabs, and slam  Russian antisemitism. Jews usually feel like creditors, and easily come up with demands.

A Western visitor would deliver the goods, though he would probably complain to his spouse afterwards. Denial of omnipresent and eternal antisemitism is not better than denial of the holocaust. But Russia is free, and when readers asked the Russian writer Maria Arbatova to tell them how she suffers from antisemitism and how dreadful life in Russia is under Putin’s dictatorship, she demurred.

Forget it, she said. Moscow today is like the Paris of the 1960s: we have more events in a day than you have in a month. Today, glorious Moscow is a world center. As for you, we are tired of you, and the Arabs are tired of you and of your demands. This failed Western project has outlived its usefulness. If my children were to even think of moving to Israel, I’d tell them: over my dead body! Russia never had antisemitism. I never experienced it in the whole of my fifty years of life. You say Jews could not find a job? It happened once to my Jewish mother that she was rejected, but she immediately found another, better job by using her family connections.

This was the answer a prominent Russian liberal writer gave to the Israeli readers. Far from being a Russian nationalist, the leading feminist writer Maria Arbatova’s grandfather was an important Jewish leader, and her great-grandfather was a founder of the Zionist movement in Tsarist Russia. But her reply was universal and paradigmatic. In the West, Tony Judt in the U.S. and Harold Pinter in Britain could say that -- maybe Philip Weiss.

Others are still frightened. But the words that the German bishops mouthed (about Ramallah resembling the Warsaw ghetto under the Nazis) and then repented, can be easily said in free Russia, by descendents of Jews, or by anybody. The mystic charm of Jews has worn off in Russia, where Political Correctness is unheard of, and where the churches are full and people bless each other with “Christ is Risen”.  Instead of intimidating and offending Jews, as American multicultural theory would have it, so many of my Moscow Jewish friends consider themselves ‘just Russians’ despite having a Jewish parent or two, and with an intermarriage rate of about 80%, Russian Jewry is a thing of the past. Many of them had been misled by Zionist propaganda, but they had enough time to recognize it and regret their haste.

Israel did much to disabuse them: Even very wealthy Russian Jews found themselves less than welcome in their “historical homeland”: The oligarch Gusinsky is under police investigation, and whenever he comes from his Spanish home he is taken straight to police HQ; one of the richest Russian Jews, Gaidamak, had his bank account sequestered.  Less prominent Russians were mistreated and exploited by established Israeli old-timers and their progeny, just as exiles from Morocco were mistreated and exploited some forty years ago. Hardly any of them carved out a career worth mentioning.

The eternal war proposed and advanced by Israeli leaders has little appeal for them; Hizbullah missiles taught them that Israel is not immune and invulnerable anymore, and a forthcoming Israeli offensive against Syria or Iran may cause many casualties among Israeli civilians. Corrupt even by Middle Eastern standards, prejudiced to the point of jaundice, Israel is probably the least attractive place for the upward-mobile and dynamic.

As the result, tens of thousands of Russian Israelis trek back to Russia and find their real country and their real home there in their native land. The Zionist idea had romantic appeal, but such things do not last. In the 1970s, I met in Tanzania with some American Blacks who moved to Africa on a wave of romantic search for their roots. The experience rarely lasted more than five years tops. During that time, they came to recognize that they are Americans for better or for worse, while Africans are organized into many nations and tribes, none of which they could  fit into. You can’t “come back” after two hundred, let alone two thousand, years.

Russian scientist Dan Axelrod from St Petersburg told me of his Israeli relatives who would dearly love to return to that city and buy back the apartments they sold some ten years ago, in Yeltsin’s days. The only thing that stops them is the sad fact that these apartments’ value has increased tenfold since then.  Axelrod has no worries of this sort: this son of Jewish parents is a regular church-goer, observes strict Orthodox Lent, is married to a Russian woman, baptized their children and loves his country Russia. It seems Russia has found an answer to the Jewish Question: neither  by German fury nor American submission, but through assimilation in Christian love. This Russian model is the only one that can work, and it will eventually work in Palestine, too.

HOFFMAN’S AFTERWORD: Mr. Shamir pens a needed corrective, although his relentlessly upbeat take on contemporary Russia and its Prime Minister Vladimir Putin smacks more of utopian enthusiasm than of the prudence and wariness of the true Russian Orthodox. This writer agrees generally that Putin has worked something remarkable in modern history, having taken his nation back from predatory capitalists, often Zionists, who, in the 1990s had snatchedits great material prizes, like Yukos Oil, after the heirs of the Judaic-Bolsheviks had dumped them in the wake of the collapse of their Marxism-Leninist model.

Shamir is correct to extol what Putin has accomplished and what Russia can represent in the world if it can restore itself after 70 years of Communism. Contemporary Russia is certainly not the wicked force that the Protestant fundamentalists like John Hagee and the rabbinically-allied Catholic Fatima apparitionists like Fr. Gruner portray it. But neither has it arrived at the point yet of any kind of Christian restoration, not by a long shot, and Shamir’s utopian enthusiasm, like so many of his other pronouncements (as for example concerning the Kabbalah) is painted in broad and sloppy generalities that fail to take into account important details.

First of all, by the most critical datum of all --demographics -- Russia is dying. It has a dwindling population of some 145 million, with a life expectancy for Russian males about equal to that of Zimbabwe, 58 years (the lowest in the western world). Alcoholism, AIDS and tuberculosis are epidemic. In the Russian east, vast stretches of farmland and villages are empty, and the teeming hundreds of millions in nearby China covet, with lebensraum-shimmering eyes, that beckoning void.

Shamir’s Russian Orthodox Church bears the same relationship to Christianity as does the modernist Vatican, past grandmasters of the same masonic chess game that Skull-and-Bones Bush plays. The new “Panzer Pope” Benedict XVI is set to legislate on behalf of the Latin language, Gregorian chant and the old rite of Mass, but behind that incensed smokescreen lies Benedict’s theology of the Talmud and his scurrilous status as protector of clerical child molestation-enablers like Cardinals Mahoney, Law and Murphy-O’Connor and Bishops Sylstad and Driscoll, to name but a few of the prelates who knowingly promoted and shielded serial child rapists for years.

Shamir fails to note that the modern Russian Orthodox Church enjoys full membership in the masonic World Council of Churches and is as much a player in the Cryptocracy’s planetary imperium as the Vatican. Moreover, Shamir does not mention the horrors Putin’s military has visited upon Chechnya. The loss of Chechen life cannot be ignored or whitewashed. Putin is not all sweetness and light and it is folly to portray any politician, East or West, in such a light.

Nevertheless, we must acknowledge that Putin has managed to do in Russia, what Huey Long and Fr. Coughlin, Charles Lindbergh and Robert LaFollette, never could achieve in America, the populist defeat of the Judaic-masonic ruling class. Putin has won a battle however, not the war itself, which is on-going.

Shamir’s essay is a useful wake-up call to those terminally blind, American apple pie conservatives who continue to believe, against all evidence, that the U.S. government is God’s chosen vehicle for good in the world and that America is the last biblical haven on earth.

What is still great about America is the love and expectation of freedom that lives in the hearts of its more worthy citizens, imbued as they still are with the Spirit of 1776; as well as, legally, the last vestiges of the freedom the Founders bequeathed to us that has not yet been voided by our higher courts’ perennial “nibbling,” using the “teeth” of the Talmud’s judicial principle of “precedent.” Hence, a vestige of the Spirit of ‘76 still echoes here in the United States, based on a rule of law that goes back to Anglo-Saxon Common Law, which in turn is based on the Bible. It is a unique and precious heritage -- extinguished in Britain, it continues to flicker faintly in America.

Russia does not have that legacy. Its legacy is rule by a strongman. When the strongman is a wise nationalist, like Putin has been domestically in some respects, the people benefit. But if he is succeeded by another and different strongman, a 21st century version of Ivan the Terrible or Stalin, then the Russian people will go quickly into captivity again. The heritage of Magna Carta and the U.S. Constitution, by which the ruler is made subservient to the law, is absent in Russia, even as a principle. Whereas it is on the wane in America only due to a treasonous hoax, the rule of law having been severely weakened at the federal level in the name of military necessity, public safety and national security, those ancient alibis of the tyrant.

By all means let us see what there is to celebrate in the land of Dostoyevsky and Tchaikovsky and let us commemorate the defeat, for the time being, of the Zionist-Russian billionaires who, had it not be for Mr. Putin and his circle, would have reduced Russia to a state of serfdom such as the one in which Americans now find themselves, hostage as we are to war-Zionism. But Russia has not yet moved off life support, and until it can revive its people, through the family, its future as a superpower alternative to the U.S.A., is very much in doubt.

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Judaism Diary: Track Progress on Hoffman's New Book

ANNOUNCING HOFFMAN'S "JUDAISM DIARY"

Michael A. Hoffman II has been at work writing a new book on Judaism. In conjunction with his work on the book, he has created a new, online diary/notebook, serving as a regular means for keeping interested persons apprised of his progress as he researches and writes it, including exciting "sneak peak" previews of what will be in this much anticipated sequel to his now out-of-print classic, "Judaism's Strange Gods."

We think you will find Hoffman's "Judaism" diary/notebook intriguing and indisepensable:

JUDAISM DIARY is available when you click on this link

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AIPAC Israeli Lobby Preps US Politicians for More War

Israel lobby's summit included 'adoration for Cheney'
03/16/2007 @ 10:10 am Filed by Mike Sheehan
http://rawstory.com/news/2007/Israel_lobbys_summit_included_adoration_for_0316.html

America's powerful Israel lobby, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), held a recent summit that featured moments described by one writer as "surreal," "energized" and even "circuslike."

"AIPAC's three-day summit included fiery evangelical oratory, adoration for Dick Cheney -- and new plans for going after Iran," reports Gregory Levey for Salon. "Amid an energized and at times almost circuslike atmosphere," Levey writes, "just about everyone in attendance shared two main preoccupations: the 2008 U.S. presidential election and confronting Iran.

The "evangelical Christian community" made a strong showing at the summit, says Levey. "For those feeling apocalyptic about the turmoil in the Middle East," he remarks, "pastor John Hagee was there to greet them. Of the many prominent speakers at the conference, Hagee got one of the most enthusiastic receptions."

According to Levey, Hagee proclaimed that "the sleeping giant of Christian Zionism has awoken!" to a mostly Jewish, "electrified" crowd that "roared in support, pounding on the tables." Hagee, Levey continues, described the United Nations as a "political brothel, and asserted that Israel must never give up land."

AIPAC, writes Levey, "has been highly successful in building strong relationships with both U.S. political parties." He notes that the 2007 conference featured a Who's Who of Americans: "Everyone from Vice President Dick Cheney to Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama (and other 2008 presidential contenders), as well as former CIA director James Woolsey ... Leaders from Congress were there, as were numerous officials from the State Department and White House."

Levey notes that a bipartisan spirit permeated the conference. "Even if Democrats and Republicans bicker on every other issue," he writes, "AIPAC leaders seemed constantly eager to stress that one thing on which the parties can come together is unswerving devotion to Israel." To that end, both House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) made appearances.

Pelosi was booed by some in attendance after she criticized the Bush troop 'surge' plan, reports Levey, but Boehner received a standing ovation upon saying, "Who does not believe that failure in Iraq is not a direct threat to the state of Israel? The consequences of failure in Iraq are so ominous for the United States you can't even begin to think about it."

Cheney's presence yielded a rousing, warm reaction, says Levey. "When Cheney first appeared on the stage on Monday morning," he writes, "the crowd immediately rose to its feet and filled the room with loud applause, which continued intermittently through his predictably hawkish speech."

"It seemed a remarkable contrast to the currently dismal public opinion polls regarding Bush and Cheney," concludes Levy, who quoted a nearby AIPAC delegate among the cheering throng as saying, "This has got to be the last crowd that still greets him this way."

Excerpts from the exclusive Salon article:

When the thousands of lobbyists descended on Capitol Hill, they were greeted by nearly every U.S. senator and more than half the members of the House of Representatives -- approximately 500 meetings were held between AIPAC representatives and members of Congress on Tuesday alone. In addition to pushing for the sanctions plan, the goal was to showcase the strength of AIPAC and establish more ties for future communication and lobbying.

The AIPAC activists were aided in their mission by some members of Congress themselves, who advised them how to reach out to their colleagues. "Our commitment to Israel defines us as a nation," said Republican Norm Coleman of Minnesota, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, adding that the AIPAC lobbyists "help make sure that we don't forget."

Following the dinner, Clinton and Obama held competing dessert receptions in the conference center -- in rooms about 25 yards apart -- both eager to highlight their pro-Israel credentials. Debates ensued over which one to attend. "I can't decide," one AIPAC delegate said. "I'd really like to see Obama in person, but Hillary is better for Israel."

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30 months in prison for German scientist who "denied the 'Holocaust"

On March 15 the German court in Mannheim issued its verdict on former Max Planck Institute chemist Germar Rudolf for the "crime" of "Holocaust denial."

Rudolf was found guilty and sentenced to: 30 months' imprisonment; a fine of $28,770; and the confiscation and burning of all copies of his book, "Vorlesungen ueber den 'Holocaust" ("Studies on the 'Holocaust").

You can read Germar's banned revisionist history book online, free of charge, here.

(The German authorities consider it a crime to offer Germar's book on the Internet and for this heretical act of digitial promotion of a book, the American producer of this blog, Michael A. Hoffman II, is subject to arrest and imprisonment should he visit Germany).

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Violent Assault on Judaic Man Celebrated by Zionists

EDITOR'S NOTE: Yehuda Meshi-Zahav, the Zionist who beat anti-Zionist Moshe Arye Freedman and broke his glasses, has been rewarded by the rabbis of the synagogue with the honor of a public reading of the Mishnah.

First, we publish the report of the assault from the Jerusalem Post, and then the very revealing gloating over it as expressed by a Judaic blog. Please keep in mind that the treatment meted out to the victim in this case, Moshe Arye Freedman, is nothing compared with how Judaic zealots have assaulted WWII revisionist scholars at IHR headquarters in Torrance, California in the 1980s (their entire book stock was burned to the ground by arsonists in 1984) and who nearly kicked to death Prof. Robert Faurisson in France.

If anyone other than a Zionist had assaulted Mr. Freedman in Poland, it would have made world headlines as an "anti-semitic outrage." However, nary a word of protest or publicity (much less outrage) was emitted in the pages of the New York Times and similar liberal Zionist organs. Therefore we conclude that "anti-semitic violence" when perpetrated by Zionists is permissible. You can beat a Judaic male and be honored for it by a synagogue if you beat him for the sake of the Zionist cause!

FROM THE JERUSALEM POST, MARCH 12:

Yehuda Meshi-Zahav, chairman of ZAKA and former operations officer for the Ultra-Orthodox community, hit the Jewish man who kissed Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, it was reported on Monday. The violent incident occurred last Friday in Poland during a mass visit of Orthodox Jews to the country in order to honor Hassidic Rabbi Elimelech of Lizhensk.

When the visitors arrived at Lizhensk on Friday morning, they heard that Moshe Arye Freedman, a member of the fanatic anti-Israel group Neturei Karta, was present as well. Freedman recently made headlines when he was photographed kissing Ahmadinejad during the Holocaust denial conference in Teheran three months ago. Meshi-Zahav, along with another ZAKA member, quickly located Freedman and set upon him, punching the man, kicking him and breaking his glasses.

The fight was dispersed when local police arrived at the scene.

As an act of appreciation, Meshi-Zahav was called up to read the Torah in synagogue. (End quote).

FROM "JEWISH STUDENT'S BLOG"

The following candid revelation concerning the authentic violent nature of Judaism is from the Zionist blog:
http://jewishstudent.blogspot.com/2007/03/kul-hakavod-to-occasional-violence.html

(Read it at the preceding URL before it is removed). We reprint the commentary here. Note the colorful language used to describe the Judaic victim of the Zionist assault: "bastard...scumbag...lowest of the low." The New York media are forever calling on the Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation to "renounce violence." Will the Zionists follow their own advice? Not likely. Zionism was founded upon and is sutained by violence. Israelis perpetrate the right kind of violence --holy violence. As they themselves admit: " ...we have no obligation to be civilized."

Kul HaKavod to Occasional Violence

Neturei Karta (NK) mascot gets socked, and as Ezzie Holy Hyrax says, he deserved it!

http://jewishstudent.blogspot.com/2007/03/kul-hakavod-to-occasional-violence.html

March 14, 2007

Already there are those around the j-blogsphere who "don't condone violence" (said in a very self-important voice) and condemn the brutality of breaking a guy's glasses. Sheesh, when did the j-blogsphere become so politically correct? And how can any feeling Jew say with certainty that they wouldn't react the same way? If someone spit at your mother, would you not strike back? If someone defiled the name of someone dear to you, would your emotions not cloud your otherwise civil and diplomatic response?

Moshe Aryeh Freidman is the lowest of the low, a bastard in every sense of the word, and a personal enemy of any person who loves the Jews. Of course hitting a guy is a barbaric way to disagree with his politics, but nevertheless, it's refreshing, because it means somebody cares. It's good to know that some peoples are more than talking heads who spew opinions and agendas without the honesty and bravery that it takes to act on it.

This story is a classic example of a kanai (zealot). I can picture the scenario in my mind: Meshi-Zahav heard that the scumbag was in town and his blood started to boil. He didn't organize a protest, he didn't issue a press release condemning NK, he just found the man and pounded him. What can I say, it makes me smile. For the record, I am the opposite of a violent or physical person--I couldn't even watch a boxing match if you paid me. But I still smile.

That the shul would give him an aliyah in appreciation is indeed funny, but if you think about it, the Torah named an entire parsha in appreciation of Pinchas. We all know Judaism isn't violent, but it also isn't pacifist, and sometimes it's necessary to do things the old fashioned way. You beat a guy who doesn't give his wife a get, for example. Somebody try and tell me that's too harsh! When confronted with absolute rishus, as is the case with NK, we have no obligation to be civilized. When I hear that someone out there is strong enough to act on his feelings of love for the Jews and hate for its true enemies, I think 'kul hakavod'.

(End quote)

Controversial rabbi attacked by Hassidim in Poland

Original article: www.ejpress.org/article/15220

By Mike Urbaniak Updated: 19/Mar/2007 07:59

WARSAW (EJP)--- Polish police were forced to step in after a controversial Austrian rabbi was attacked by a group of ultra-Orthodox Jews at the burial place of a renowned rabbi.

Moishe Friedman, who gained infamy after attending a Holocaust denial conference in the Iranian capital Tehran last December, was lucky to escape without serious injuries after the assault in the Polish town of Lezajsk.

The attack occurred when, during a private trip to Poland on March 9, Friedman visited the grave of the famous rabbi Elimelech of Lezajsk.

At the time the Jewish cemetery in Lezajsk was full of rabbi Elimelech's faithful followers from around the world who had come on their annual visit to pray and pay respect to the founder of their sect.

Police said they heard cries for help and on arrival at the cemetery they saw a large group of Chassidim (ultra-Orthodox Jews) beating and kicking another Jew who was laying on the ground.

Infamous victim

A police spokesman said officers stopped the group and took Friedman to the local police station. While an investigation has been launched no witnesses have been willing to testify.

After the incident, a number of Chassidim returned to the cemetery to continue their prayers and police escorted rabbi Friedman to the outskirts of town

Local authorities later discovered that the victim was Friedman who became infamous after his participation in the international conference on the Holocaust, which was organized by president of Iran Mahmud Ahmedinejad. Friedman, along with others so called "scientists" Holocaust deniers, starting one of the biggest scandals in the Jewish world lately.

Friedman was expelled from his own synagogue in Vienna and denied to access to any other synagogue in Europe. Many Jews refuse even to call him a rabbi.

Asked by Polish daily "Dziennik", what he thinks about the whole situation, Chief Rabbi of Poland,Michael Schudrich said: "If I'd have been there, I would have behaved exactly like the Chassidim".

Also see: "Four Cheers for Meshi-Zahav"
http://zioncon.blogspot.com/2007/03/four-cheers-for-meshi-zahav.html

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"Women’s Minyan" in St. Louis, MO

"Women’s Minyan" by Naomi Ragen, now being performed in St. Louis, Missouri, is the longest-running play ever to be presented at the Habimah Theatre of Tel Aviv. It premiered in Israel in 2002 and is still running.

The play is based on the true story of an ultra-Orthodox Judaic woman, the wife of a rabbi and mother of 12, who left her home after being attacked by her husband. When she attempted to return to see her children, the community's "modesty squad" tried in vain to force her to go back. Her friend with whom she was staying was physically attacked, her arm and leg broken. The rabbi's wife is punished by being cut off from her children. Despite a great deal of publicity, the woman still has not been allowed to see her children. The case is pending review in the Israeli Supreme Court.

The play runs March 15 – April 1, 2007 at the New Jewish Theatre in St. Louis, MO with performances on Wednesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays at 8 PM, and Sundays at 2 PM and 7:30 PM. This is its second American production.

The New Jewish Theatre performs in the Wolfson Studio Theatre of the Jewish Community Center (JCC) in Creve Coeur, 2 Millstone Campus Dr. (off of Schuetz at Lindbergh). Individual tickets are available by calling the box office at 314-442-3283 or in the Cultural Arts office of the JCC. Tickets are $18 - $25 for the production. For more information go to www.newjewishtheatre.org

For further reference:

http://stlouis.ujcfedweb.org/content_display.html?ArticleID=211603

"The Women's Minyan" is available in print from Amazon.com:

http://www.amazon.com/Womens-Minyan-Naomi-Ragen/dp/1592641563/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/104-5421219-4259102?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1173965077&sr=1-1

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Orthodox Rabbis Assault Christians in Israeli state

Messianic Jew attacked, wrongly arrested

by Erin Roach

Baptist Press | Mar 14, 2007

BEER SHEVA, Israel (BP)--The arrest of a Messianic Jewish evangelist in Israel reflects the strife that often confronts Messianic Jews despite Israel’s guarantees of religious liberty and without any repercussion from law enforcement officials, the leader of a Messianic congregation told Baptist Press. Messianic evangelist Eddie Beckford was arrested outside his business, the Chess and Bible Shop in Arad, after a mob of ultra-Orthodox Haradim Jews surrounded his van in the parking lot and beat him Feb. 25.

“In general over the years here in the south in the Negev, in Arad and in Beer Sheva, there has been some form of harassment or persecution,” Howard Bass, leader of the Nahalat Yeshua congregation in Beer Sheva, said.

Groups of ultra-Orthodox Jews seem to have a difficult time accepting the fact that some Jews would believe that Jesus is the Messiah and that they would want to evangelize other Jews, Bass said. So those anti-Messianic groups work to stop the people they consider “missionaries” through various degrees of persecution. “In Arad, for instance, for almost three years they have been hounding the believers there at their services, in front of their homes,” Bass, an American Jew with Israeli citizenship, said.

Beckford’s arrest followed a call to police when the confrontation with the ultra-Orthodox mob broke out. The Haradim complained that Beckford attacked them, according to an e-mail from Beckford’s wife Lura. “[The police] blame us for the disturbances the Haredim cause,” Lura Beckford wrote in a message posted at israelprayer.com. “They tell us, ‘If you weren’t here, we wouldn’t have to deal with this trouble.’

“So, they arrested Eddie and put him in leg irons and took him to jail. They completely ignored the Bedouin’s testimony that Eddie did nothing and the Haredim attacked him. He spent the night in a small filthy cell with five other men, and in the middle of the night they transferred him to another filthy cell,” Lura added. Beckford, an American, was arraigned before a judge in Beer Sheva Feb. 28 and was offered a plea bargain of spending 45 days in jail or agreeing not to return to Arad for 45 days. He chose to stay with friends outside Arad rather than serve a prison sentence, and his wife was trying to retrieve his identification card which was confiscated by police in Arad.

“This is a culmination of a week of horror as far as the Haredim are concerned. Just this week, ‘A’ was harassed by them four different times. They blocked his car and pounded on it, etc. ‘R’ has been harassed while walking her child from school by these grown men,” Lura wrote, using initials in place of names. “She and I have been harassed several times in public areas while walking. All of us have put in complaints with the police on assault charges.

“I had the privilege of being hit by the chief rabbi of Arad. Why? Just because I believe in Y’shua as the Savior of the Jewish people and the world,” she wrote. “‘S,’ a visiting friend of ours, has been terribly harassed while giving out literature, including being beaten and spit upon. All this because we have committed the crime of being believers.”

Beckford’s arrest preceded the introduction of a bill by an Orthodox political party seeking to sentence proselytizers in Israel to one year in prison. “Whether it’s Christians coming from abroad or Jewish converts working in Israel, they all have the same agenda -- to destroy every trace and memory of the people of Israel, and they plan to do this by converting Jews,” the proposal by the Shas group said, according to ynetnews.com March 14. “These bodies are operating mainly among the Jewish population which is under physical, social and spiritual distress.”

In early February, a religious freedom lawsuit was filed on behalf of Nahalat Yeshua against the chief rabbi of Beer Sheva and Yad L’Achim, a group that is a main source of persecution toward Messianic Jews. Though it took more than a year to file, the lawsuit stems from a violent demonstration that took place at the congregation on Christmas Eve in 2005.

“In Beer Sheva eight years ago, there was a massive demonstration against our congregation on the Shabbat, on a Saturday, which prevented us from having a service,” Bass recounted to BP. “That time we didn’t take any legal action because we’re supposed to be expecting things like this on the one hand and also the amount of violence wasn’t excessive enough to where we thought we should do something. “Just before Christmas, we had another fairly large demonstration, and this time it was much more aggressive and violent and we did feel that something ought to be done about it,” Bass said.

The case essentially is about standing up for the right for Jews in Israel to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, Bass said, though it is not meant in any way to be construed against the state of Israel or against the Jewish people as a whole. “It is not to be used in any way to foment or promote anti-Israel or anti-Jewish actions or reactions. It is already known through the Scriptures that Israel at present is opposed to the good news of God, so we are not out to make them an enemy,” Bass emphasized. “Nor is our legal action intended to be used by any other minority or religious groups in Israel to encourage or affirm anti-Israel or anti-Jewish sentiment.”

From the defendants’ point of view, Bass said, they did nothing wrong when they demonstrated at the Messianic congregation’s service, even though they were required by law to ask permission from the police for such a large gathering.

“They’re claiming that they were simply exercising their freedom of religion in the same way that we’re claiming to be,” Bass said. “Therefore they’re guilty of nothing.” Launching a religious freedom lawsuit of this sort is challenging in Israel, Bass said, because the Messianic Jews essentially are standing up for something that is contrary to the religion of the state.

“We understand what we’re doing is very serious, and we just have to trust the Lord that He’s going to help us through it in a way that Jesus will be honored in the manner that we handle it and in the consequences,” Bass said. “So we don’t quite know yet what that’s going to be.”

Jim Sibley, director of the Pasche Institute for Jewish Studies at Criswell College in Dallas, told Baptist Press the word needs to get out about the harassment of Messianic Jews in Israel. “It really is intolerable, and I think a lot more attention needs to be given to it,” Sibley said. “That’s the only way that the Israeli government is going to really do anything to protect the rights of believers.” Sibley noted that the persecution is not coming from the Israeli government. “It’s coming from the ultra-Orthodox communities, and the problem is that the local police are not really taking action to protect believers or to prosecute those who are causing the trouble,” he said. “They’re kind of standing by and letting it happen. So the national government needs to know that the United States is growing increasingly aware of the problem and is anxious about it.”

***

How the New York Times Misreports Conflict in the Mideast

"Israel-Palestine On Record." Available for pre-order by clicking here.

A detailed indictment of the New York Times' coverage of Israel-Palestine.

In this scathing analysis of Israel-Palestine coverage in the US media, Howard Friel and Richard Falk reveal the persistent ways the New York Times has ignored principles of international law in order to shield its readers from Israel's lawlessness. While the Times publishes dozens of front-page stories and extensive commentary on the killings of Israelis, it publishes very few such stories on the killings of Palestinians, and mostly ignores the extensive documentation of massive violations of Palestinian human rights by the government of Israel.

Furthermore, the Times regularly ignores or under-reports a multitude of critical legal issues pertaining to Israel's policies, including Israel's expropriation and settlement of Palestinian land, the two-tier system of laws based on national origin evocative of South Africa's apartheid regime, the demolition of Palestinian homes, and use of deadly force against Palestinians. These journalistic practices have not only shielded the extent of Israel's transgressions from the American electorate, which is Israel's main source of financial and military support, it has severely diminished our understanding of the Middle East and of US foreign policy in general.

About the Authors
Howard Friel is founder and president of Differentiated Information, an information-services company. Richard Falk was Professor of International Law Emeritus at Princeton University and since 2002 is Visiting Professor of Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

***

U.S. Military Upholds Censorship of Photos from Afghanistan

U.S. Military Defends Deleting AP Images from Afghanistan

Editor & Publisher | March 10, 2007

ISLAMABAD-- The U.S. military asserted that an American soldier was justified in erasing journalists’ footage of the aftermath of a suicide bombing and shooting in Afghanistan last week, saying publication could have compromised a military investigation and led to false public conclusions.

The comments came March 9 in response to an Associated Press protest that a U.S. soldier had forced two freelance journalists working for the U.S.-based news agency to delete photos and video at the scene of violence March 4 in Barikaw, eastern Afghanistan. At least eight Afghans were killed and 34 wounded.

“Investigative integrity is one circumstance when civil and military authorities will reluctantly exercise the right to control what a journalist is permitted to document,” Col. Victor Petrenko, chief of staff to the top U.S. commander in eastern Afghanistan, said in a letter March 9.

He added that photographs or video taken by “untrained people” might “capture visual details that are not as they originally were.”

The Associated Press disputed the assertions.

“That is not a reasonable justification for erasing images from our cameras,” said AP Executive Editor Kathleen Carroll in New York. “AP’s journalists in Afghanistan are trained, accredited professionals working at an appropriate distance from the bombing scene. In democratic societies, legitimate journalists are allowed to work without having their equipment seized and their images deleted.”

Afghan witnesses and gunshot victims said U.S. forces fired on civilians in cars and on foot along at least a 6-mile stretch of road from Barikaw following the suicide attack against the Marine convoy. The U.S. military said insurgents also fired on American forces during the attack. One Marine was wounded.

A U.S. soldier deleted the AP journalists’ footage that showed a civilian four-wheel drive vehicle in which three Afghans were shot to death about 100 yards from the suicide bombing. The journalists had met requests from the military to not move any closer to the bomb site.

Other Afghan journalists said the military also deleted their footage.

Petrenko said that if people who are not part of the investigation entered such a “secured area,” they could disturb evidence and other clues, “potentially fouling the conclusions of the investigation.”

Petrenko said that taking pictures could also misrepresent what had happened in the incident.

“When untrained people take photographs or video, there is a very real risk that the images or videography will capture visual details that are not as they originally were,” he said. “If such visual media are subsequently used as part of the public record to document an event like this, then public conclusions about such a serious event can be falsely made.”

The AP also raised concerns about the military’s efforts to restrict its coverage of the Feb. 15 crash of a U.S. helicopter in southern Zabul province in which eight soldiers were killed and 14 wounded. Two AP journalists and their vehicle were searched extensively in an effort to prevent footage of the wreckage getting out.

Petrenko justified that action on the grounds of “operational security” exercised when “equipment, aircraft or component parts are classified.”

He maintained that the U.S. military had no intention of curbing freedom of the press in Afghanistan.

“We are completely committed to a free and independent press, and we hope that we can help encourage this tradition in places where new and free governments are taking root,” Petrenko said.

“It so happens that on these two recent occasions, military operational or security requirements were compelling interests that overrode the otherwise protected rights of the press.”

***

HOFFMAN'S AFTERWORD: In Big Brother's ominous Newspeak jargon, the U.S. government is "completely committed" to a free press, but must, of necessity, censor photos of U.S. war crimes. What hypocrisy! We are to perenially view "Holocaust" atrocity photos of what the Allies say the "evil Germans" supposedly did--and don't ask any questions! That would be "anti-semitic." But the U.S. government carefully stage-manages and censors its own crime scenes in Afghanistan and "patriotic" Americans must approve. "Holocaust" propaganda is insincere. It does not teach other goverments not to cover-up massacres and war crimes. In fact, the biggest purveyors of WWII "Holocaust" propaganda, the US and the Israelis, are the biggest war criminals, hypocrites and cover-up artists. Coincidence?

***

What Did Israel Know in Advance of the 9/11 Attacks?

A CounterPunch.org Special Investigation

High-Fivers and Art Student Spies
What Did Israel Know in Advance of the 9/11 Attacks?

By Christopher Ketcham | March 7, 2007

On the afternoon of September 11, 2001, an FBI bulletin known as a BOLO - "be on lookout" -- was issued with regard to three suspicious men who that morning were seen leaving the New Jersey waterfront minutes after the first plane hit World Trade Center 1. Law enforcement officers across the New York-New Jersey area were warned in the radio dispatch to watch for a "vehicle possibly related to New York terrorist attack":

White, 2000 Chevrolet van with 'Urban Moving Systems' sign on back seen at Liberty State Park, Jersey City, NJ, at the time of first impact of jetliner into World Trade Center Three individuals with van were seen celebrating after initial impact and subsequent explosion. FBI Newark Field Office requests that, if the van is located, hold for prints and detain individuals.

At 3:56 p.m., twenty-five minutes after the issuance of the FBI BOLO, officers with the East Rutherford Police Department stopped the commercial moving van through a trace on the plates. According to the police report, Officer Scott DeCarlo and Sgt. Dennis Rivelli approached the stopped van, demanding that the driver exit the vehicle. The driver, 23-year-old Sivan Kurzberg, refused and "was asked several more times [but] appeared to be fumbling with a black leather fanny pouch type of bag". With guns drawn, the police then "physically removed" Kurzberg, while four other men - two more men had apparently joined the group since the morning - were also removed from the van, handcuffed, placed on the grass median and read their Miranda rights.

They had not been told the reasons for their arrest. Yet, according to DeCarlo's report, "this officer was told without question by the driver [Sivan Kurzberg],'We are Israeli. We are not your problem.Your problems are our problems. The Palestinians are the problem.'" Another of the five Israelis, again without prompting, told Officer DeCarlo - falsely - that "we were on the West Side Highway in New York City during the incident". From inside the vehicle the officers, who were quickly joined by agents from the FBI, retrieved multiple passports and $4,700 in cash stuffed in a sock.

According to New Jersey's Bergen Record, which on September 12 reported the arrest of the five Israelis, an investigator high up in the Bergen County law enforcement hierarchy stated that officers had also discovered in the vehicle "maps of the city with certain places highlighted. It looked like they're hooked in with this", the source told the Record, referring to the 9/11 attacks. "It looked like they knew what was going to happen when they were at Liberty State Park."

The five men were indeed Israeli citizens. They claimed to be in the country working as movers for Urban Moving Systems Inc., which maintained a warehouse and office in Weehawken, New Jersey. They were held for 71 days in a federal detention center in Brooklyn, New York, during which time they were repeatedly interrogated by FBI and CIA counterterrorism teams, who referred to the men as the "high-fivers" for their celebratory behavior on the New Jersey waterfront. Some were placed in solitary confinement for at least forty days; some were given as many as seven liedetector tests. One of the Israelis, Paul Kurzberg, brother of Sivan, refused to take a lie-detector test for ten weeks. Then he failed it.

Meanwhile, two days after the men were picked up, the owner of Urban Moving Systems, Dominik Suter, a 31- year-old Israeli national, abandoned his business and fled the United States for Israel. Suter's departure was abrupt, leaving behind coffee cups, sandwiches, cell phones and computers strewn on office tables and thousands of dollars of goods in storage. Suter was later placed on the same FBI suspect list as 9/11 lead hijacker Mohammed Atta and other hijackers and suspected al-Qaeda sympathizers, suggesting that U.S. authorities felt Suter may have known something about the attacks. The suspicion, as the investigation unfolded, was that the men working for Urban Moving Systems were spies. Who exactly was handling them, and who or what they were targeting, was as yet uncertain.

It was New York's venerable Jewish weekly The Forward that broke this story in the spring of 2002, after months of footwork. The Forward reported that the FBI had finally concluded that at least two of the men were agents working for the Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency, and that Urban Moving Systems, the ostensible employer of the five Israelis, was a front operation. Two former CIA officers confirmed this to me, noting that movers' vans are a common intelligence cover. The Forward also noted that the Israeli government itself admitted that the men were spies.

A "former high-ranking American intelligence official", who said he was "regularly briefed on the investigation by two separate law enforcement officials", told reporter Marc Perelman that after American authorities confronted Jerusalem at the end of 2001, the Israeli government "acknowledged the operation and apologized for not coordinating it with Washington". Today, Perelman stands by his reporting. I asked him if his sources in the Mossad denied the story. "Nobody stopped talking to me", he said.

In June 2002, ABC News' 20/20 followed up with its own investigation into the matter, coming to the same conclusion as The Forward. Vincent Cannistraro, former chief of operations for counterterrorism with the CIA, told 20/20 that some of the names of the five men appeared as hits in searches of an FBI national intelligence database. Cannistraro told me that the question that most troubled FBI agents in the weeks and months after 9/11 was whether the Israelis had arrived at the site of their "celebration" with foreknowledge of the attack to come.

From the beginning, "the FBI investigation operated on the premise that the Israelis had foreknowledge", according to Cannistraro. A second former CIA counterterrorism officer who closely followed the case, but who spoke on condition of anonymity, told me that investigators were pursuing two theories. "One story was that [the Israelis] appeared at Liberty State Park very quickly after the first plane hit. The other was that they were at the park location already". Either way, investigators wanted to know exactly what the men were expecting when they got there.

Before such issues had been fully explored, however, the investigation was shut down. Following what ABC News reported were "high-level negotiations between Israeli and U.S. government officials", a settlement was reached in the case of the five Urban Moving Systems suspects. Intense political pressure apparently had been brought to bear. The reputable Israeli daily Ha'aretz reported that by the last week of October 2001, some six weeks after the men had been detained, Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage and two unidentified "prominent New York congressmen" were lobbying heavily for their release.

According to a source at ABC News close to the 20/20 report, high-profile criminal lawyer Alan Dershowitz also stepped in as a negotiator on behalf of the men to smooth out differences with the U.S. government. (Dershowitz declined to comment for this article.) And so, at the end of November 2001, for reasons that only noted they had been working in the country illegally as movers, in violation of their visas, the men were flown home to Israel.

Today, the crucial questions raised by this matter remain unanswered. There is sufficient reason - from news reports, statements by former intelligence officials, an array of circumstantial evidence, and the reported acknowledgment by the Israeli government - to believe that in the months before 9/11, Israel was running an active spy network inside the United States, with Muslim extremists as the target. Given Israel's concerns about Islamic terrorism as well as its long history of spying on U.S. soil, this does not come entirely as a shock. What's incendiary is the idea - supported, though not proven, by several pieces of evidence - that the Israelis did learn something about 9/11 in advance but failed to share all of what they knew with American officials. The questions are disturbing enough to warrant a Congressional investigation.

Yet none of this information found its way into Congress's joint committee report on the attacks, and it was not even tangentially referenced in the nearly 600 pages of the 9/11 Commission's final report. Nor would a single major media outlet track the revelations of The Forward and ABC News to investigate further. "There weren't even stories saying it was bullshit", says The Forward's Perelman. "Honestly, I was surprised". Instead, the story disappeared into the welter of anti-Israel 9/11 conspiracy theories.

It's no small boon to the U.S. government that the story of 9/11-related Israeli espionage has been thus relegated: the story doesn't fit in the clean lines of the official narrative of the attacks. It brings up concerns not only about Israel's obligation not to spy inside the borders of the United States, its major benefactor, but about its possible failure to have provided the U.S. adequate warning of an impending devastating attack on American soil. Furthermore, the available evidence undermines the carefully cultivated image of sanctity that defines the U.S.- Israel relationship. These are all factors that help explain the story's disappearance, and they are compelling reasons to revisit it now.

Torpedoing the FBI Probe

All five future hijackers of American Airlines Flight 77, which rammed the Pentagon, maintained addresses or were active within a six-mile radius of towns associated with the Israelis employed at Urban Moving Systems. Hudson and Bergen counties, the areas where the Israelis were allegedly conducting surveillance, were a central staging ground for the hijackers of Flight 77 and their fellow al-Qaeda operatives. Mohammed Atta maintained a mail-drop address and visited friends in northern New Jersey; his contacts there included Hani Hanjour, the suicide pilot for Flight 77, and Majed Moqed, one of the strongmen who backed Hanjour in the seizing of the plane. Could the Israelis, with or without knowledge of the terrorists' plans, have been tracking the men who were soon to hijack Flight 77?

In public statements, both the Israeli government and the FBI have denied that the Urban Moving Systems men were involved in an intelligence operation in the United States. "No evidence recovered suggested any of these Israelis had prior knowledge of the 9/11 attack, and these Israelis are not suspected of working for Mossad", FBI spokesman Jim Margolin told me. (The Israeli embassy did not respond to questions for this article.) According to the source at ABC News, FBI investigators chafed at the denials from their higher-ups. "There is a lot of frustration inside the bureau about this case", the source told me. "They feel the higher echelons torpedoed the investigation into the Israeli New Jersey cell. Leads were not fully investigated".

Among those lost leads was the figure of Dominik Suter, whom the U.S. authorities apparently never attempted to contact. Intelligence expert and author James Bamford told me there was similar frustration within the CIA: "People I've talked to at the CIA were outraged at what was going on. They thought it was outrageous that there hadn't been a real investigation, that the facts were hanging out there without any conclusion."

However, what was "absolutely certain", according to Vincent Cannistraro, was that the five Israelis formed part of a surveillance network in the New York- New Jersey area. The network's purpose was to track radical Islamic extremists and/or supporters of militant Palestinian groups like Hamas and Islamic Jihad. The former CIA counterterrorism officer who spoke anonymously told me that FBI investigators determined that the suspect Israelis were serving as Arabic-speaking linguists "running technical operations" in northern New Jersey's extensive Muslim communities. The former CIA officer said the operations included taps on telephones, placement of microphones in rooms and mobile surveillance. The source at ABC News agreed: "Our conclusion was that they were Arab linguists involved in monitoring operations, i.e., electronic surveillance. People at FBI concur with this". The ABC News source added, "What we heard was that the Israelis may have picked up chatter that something was going to happen on the morning of 9/11".

The former CIA counterterrorism officer told me: "There was no question but that [the order to close down the investigation] came from the White House. It was immediately assumed at CIA headquarters that this basically was going to be a cover-up so that the Israelis would not be implicated in any way in 9/11. Bear in mind that this was a political issue, not a law enforcement or intelligence issue. If somebody says we don't want the Israelis implicated in this - we know that they've been spying the hell out of us, we know that they possibly had information in advance of the attacks, but this would be a political nightmare to deal with."

The Israeli "Art Student" Spies

There is a second piece of evidence that suggests Israeli operatives were spying on al-Qaeda in the United States. It is writ in the peculiar tale of the Israeli "art students", detailed by this reporter for Salon.com in 2002, following the leaking of an internal memo circulated by the Drug Enforcement Administration's Office of Security Programs. The June 2001 memo, issued three months before the 9/11 attacks, reported that more than 120 young Israeli citizens, posing as art students and peddling cheap paintings, had been repeatedly - and seemingly inexplicably - attempting to penetrate DEA offices and other law enforcement and Defense Department offices across the country.

The DEA report stated that the Israelis may have been engaged in "an organized intelligence gathering activity", but to what end, U.S. investigators, in June 2001, could not determine. The memo briefly floated the possibility that the Israelis were engaged in trafficking the drug ecstasy. According to the memo, "the most activity [was] reported in the state of Florida" during the first half of 2001, where the town of Hollywood appeared to be "a central point for these individuals with several having addresses in this area".

In retrospect, the fact that a large number of "art students" operated out of Hollywood is intriguing, to say the least. During 2001, the city, just north of Miami, was a hotbed of al-Qaeda activity and served as one of the chief staging grounds for the hijacking of the World Trade Center planes and the Pennsylvania plane; it was home to fifteen of the nineteen future hijackers, nine in Hollywood and six in the surrounding area. Among the 120 suspected Israeli spies posing as art students, more than thirty lived in the Hollywood area, ten in Hollywood proper. As noted in the DEA report, many of these young men and women had training as intelligence and electronic intercept officers in the Israeli military - training and experience far beyond the compulsory service mandated by Israeli law. Their "traveling in the U.S. selling art seem[ed] not to fit their background", according to the DEA report.

One "art student" was a former Israeli military intelligence officer named Hanan Serfaty, who rented two Hollywood apartments close to the mail drop and apartment of Mohammed Atta and four other hijackers. Serfaty was moving large amounts of cash: he carried bank slips showing more than $100,000 deposited from December 2000 through the first quarter of 2001; other bank slips showed withdrawals for about $80,000 during the same period. Serfaty's apartments, serving as crash pads for at least two other "art students", were located at 4220 Sheridan Street and 701 South 21st Avenue. Lead hijacker Mohammed Atta's mail drop was at 3389 Sheridan Street--approximately 2,700 feet from Serfaty's Sheridan Street apartment. Both Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi, the suicide pilot on United Airlines Flight 175, which smashed into World Trade Center 2, lived in a rented apartment at 1818 Jackson Street, some 1,800 feet from Serfaty's South 21st Avenue apartment.

In fact, an improbable series of coincidences emerges from a close reading of the 2001 DEA memo, the 9/11 Commission's staff statements and final report, FBI and Justice Department watch lists, hijacker timelines compiled by major media and statements by local, state and federal law enforcement personnel. In at least six urban centers, suspected Israeli spies and 9/11 hijackers and/or al-Qaedaconnected suspects lived and operated near one another, in some cases less than half a mile apart, for various periods during 200001 in the run-up to the attacks. In addition to northern New Jersey and Hollywood, Florida, these centers included Arlington and Fredericksburg, Virginia; Atlanta; Oklahoma City; Los Angeles; and San Diego.

Israeli "art students" also lived close to terror suspects in and around Dallas, Texas. A 25-year-old "art student" named Michael Calmanovic, arrested and questioned by Texas-based DEA officers in April 2001, maintained a mail drop at 3575 North Beltline Road, less than a thousand feet from the 4045 North Beltline Road apartment of Ahmed Khalefa, an FBI terror suspect. Dallas and its environs, especially the town of Richardson, Texas, throbbed with "art student" activity.

Richardson is notable as the home of the Holy Land Foundation, an Islamic charity designated as a terrorist funder by the European Union and U.S. government in December 2001. Sources in 2002 told The Forward, in a report unrelated to the question of the "art students", that "Israeli intelligence played a key role in helping the Bush administration to crack down on Islamic charities suspected of funneling money to terrorist groups, most notably the Richardson, Texas-based Holy Land Foundation, last December [2001]". It's plausible that the intelligence prompting the shutdown of the Holy Land Foundation came from "art student" spies in the Richardson area.

Others among the "art students" had specific backgrounds in electronic surveillance or military intelligence, or were associated with Israeli wiretapping and surveillance firms, which prompted further concerns among U.S. investigators. DEA agents described Michael Calmanovic, for example, as "a recently discharged electronic intercept operator for the Israeli military". Lior Baram, questioned near Hollywood, Fla., in January 2001, said he had served two years in Israeli intelligence "working with classified information". Hanan Serfaty, who maintained the Hollywood apartments near Atta and his cohorts, served in the Israeli military between the ages of 18 and 21. Serfaty refused to disclose his activities between the ages of 21 and 24, including his activities since arriving in the U.S.A. in 2000. The French daily Le Monde meanwhile reported that six "art students" were apparently using cell phones that had been purchased by a former Israeli vice consul in the U.S.A.

Suspected Israeli spy Tomer Ben Dor, questioned at Dallas-Fort Worth Airport in May 2001, worked for the Israeli wiretapping and electronic eavesdropping company NICE Systems Ltd. (NICE Systems' American subsidiary, NICE Systems Inc., is located in Rutherford, New Jersey, not far from the East Rutherford site where the five Israeli "movers" were arrested on the afternoon of September 11.) Ben Dor carried in his luggage a print-out of a computer file that referred to "DEA Groups". How he acquired information about so-called "DEA Groups" - via, for example, his own employment with an Israeli wiretapping company - was never determined, according to DEA documents.

"Art student" Michal Gal, arrested by DEA investigators in Irving, Texas, in the spring of 2001, was released on a $10,000 cash bond posted by Ophir Baer, an employee of the Israeli telecommunications software company Amdocs Inc., which provides phone-billing technology to clients that include some of the largest phone companies in the United States as well as U.S. government agencies. Amdocs, whose executive board has been heavily stocked with retired and current members of the Israeli government and military, has been investigated at least twice in the last decade by U.S. authorities on charges of espionage-related leaks of data that the company assured was secure. (The company strenuously denies any wrong-doing.)

According to the former CIA counterterrorism officer with knowledge of investigations into 9/11-related Israeli espionage, when law enforcement officials examined the "art students" phenomenon, they came to the tentative conclusion that "the Israelis likely had a huge spy operation in the U.S. and that they had succeeded in identifying a number of the hijackers". The German daily Die Zeit reached the same conclusion in 2002, reporting that "Mossad agents in the U.S. were in all probability surveilling at least four of the 19 hijackers".

The Fox News Channel also reported that U.S. investigators suspected that Israelis were spying on Muslim militants in the United States. "There is no indication that the Israelis were involved in the 9/11 attacks, but investigators suspect that the Israelis may have gathered intelligence about the attacks in advance, and not shared it", Fox correspondent Carl Cameron reported in a December 2001 series that was the first major exposé of allegations of 9/11-related Israeli espionage. "A highly placed investigator said there are 'tie-ins'. But when asked for details, he flatly refused to describe them, saying, 'evidence linking these Israelis to 9/11 is classified. I cannot tell you about evidence that has been gathered. It's classified information.'"

One element of the allegations has never been clearly understood: if the "art students" were indeed spies targeting Muslim extremists that included al-Qaeda, why would they also be surveilling DEA agents in such a compromising manner? Why, in other words, would foreign spies bumble into federal offices by the scores and risk exposing their operation? An explanation is that a number of the art students were, in fact, young Israelis engaged in a mere art scam and unknowingly provided cover for real spies. Investigative journalist John Sugg, who as senior editor for the Creative Loafing newspaper chain reported on the "art students" in 2002, told me that investigators he spoke to within FBI felt the "art student" ring functioned as a wide-ranging cover that was counterintuitive in its obviousness.

DEA investigators, for example, uncovered evidence connecting the Israeli "art students" to known ecstasy trafficking operations in New York and Florida. This was, according to Sugg, planted information. "The explanation was that when our FBI guys started getting interested in these folks [the art students] - when they got too close to what the real purpose was - the Israelis threw in an ecstasy angle", Sugg told me. "The argument being that if our guys thought the Israelis were involved in a smuggling ring, then they wouldn't see the real purpose of the operation". Sugg, who is writing a book that explores the tale of the "art students", told me that several sources within the FBI, and at least one source formerly with Israeli intelligence, suggested that "the bumbling aspect of the art student thing was intentional."

When I reported on the matter for Salon.com in 2002, a veteran U.S. intelligence operative with experience subcontracting both for the CIA and the NSA suggested a similar possibility. "It was a noisy operation", the veteran intelligence operative said. The operative referred me to the film Victor, Victoria. "It was about a woman playing a man playing a woman. Perhaps you should think about this from that aspect and ask yourself if you wanted to have something that was in your face, that didn't make sense, that couldn't possibly be them". The intelligence operative added, "Think of it this way: how could the experts think this could actually be something of any value? Wouldn't they dismiss what they were seeing?" U.S. and Israeli officials, dismissing charges of espionage as an "urban myth", have publicly claimed that the Israeli "art students" were guilty only of working on U.S. soil without proper credentials.

The stern denials issued by the Justice Department were widely publicized in the Washington Post and elsewhere, and the endnote from officialdom and in establishment media by the spring of 2002 was that the "art students" had been rounded up and deported simply because of harmless visa violations. The FBI, for its part, refused to confirm or deny the "art students" espionage story. "Regarding FBI investigations into Israeli art students", spokesman Jim Margolin told me, "the FBI cannot comment on any of those investigations."

As with the New Jersey Israelis, the investigation into the Israeli "art students" appears to have been halted by orders from on high. The veteran CIA/NSA intelligence operative told me in 2002 that there was "a great press to discredit the story, discredit the connections, prevent [investigators] from going any further. People were told to stand down. You name the agency, they were told to stand down". The operative added, "People who were perceived to be gumshoes on [this matter] suddenly found themselves hammered from all different directions. The interest from the middle bureaucracy was not that there had been a security breach but that someone had bothered to investigate the breach. That was where the terror was".

Choking off the press coverage

There was similar pressure brought against the media venues that ventured to report out the allegations of 9/11- related Israeli espionage. A former ABC News employee high up in the network newsroom told me that when ABC News ran its June 2002 exposé on the celebratory New Jersey Israelis, "Enormous pressure was brought to bear by pro-Israeli organizations"--and this pressure began months before the piece was even close to airing. The source said that ABC News colleagues wondered, "how they [the pro-Israel organizations] found out we were doing the story. Pro- Israeli people were calling the president of ABC News. Barbara Walters was getting bombarded by calls. The story was a hard sell but ABC News came through the management insulated [reporters] from the pressure".

The experience of Carl Cameron, chief Washington correspondent at Fox News Channel and the first mainstream U.S. reporter to present the allegations of Israeli surveillance of the 9/11 hijackers, was perhaps more typical, both in its particulars and aftermath. The attack against Cameron and Fox News was spearheaded by a pro-Israel lobby group called the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA), which operated in tandem with the two most highly visible powerhouse Israel lobbyists, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (itself currently embroiled in a spy scandal connected to the Defense Department and Israeli Embassy). "CAMERA pep- pered the shit out of us", Carl Cameron told me in 2002, referring to an e-mail bombardment that eventually crashed the Fox News.com servers.

Cameron himself received 700 pages of almost identical e-mail messages from hundreds of citizens (though he suspected these were spam identities). CAMERA spokesman Alex Safian later told me that Cameron's upbringing in Iran, where his father traveled as an archeologist, had rendered the reporter "very sympathetic to the Arab side". Safian added, "I think Cameron, personally, has a thing about Israel"--coded language implying that Cameron was an anti-Semite. Cameron was outraged at the accusation.

According to a source at Fox News Channel, the president of the ADL, Abraham Foxman, telephoned executives at Fox News' parent, News Corp., to demand a sit-down in the wake of the Cameron reportage. The source said that Foxman told the News Corp. executives, "Look, you guys have generally been pretty fair to Israel. What are you doing putting this stuff out there? You're killing us". The Fox News source continued, "As good old boys will do over coffee in Manhattan, it was like, well, what can we do about this? Finally, Fox News said, 'Stop the e-mailing. Stop slamming us. Stop being in our face, and we'll stop being in your face--by way of taking our story down off the web. We will not retract it; we will not disavow it; we stand by it. But we will at least take it off the web.'" Following this meeting, within four days of the posting of Cameron's series on Fox News.com, the transcripts disappeared, replaced by the message, "This story no longer exists".

What did Mossad know and tell the U.S.?

Whether or not Israeli spies had detailed foreknowledge of the 9/11 attacks, the Israeli authorities knew enough to warn the U.S. government in the summer of 2001 that an attack was on the horizon. The British Sunday Telegraph reported on September 16, 2001, that two senior agents with the Mossad were dispatched to Washington in August 2001 "to alert the CIA and FBI to the existence of a cell of as many as 200 terrorists said to be preparing a big operation". The Telegraph quoted a "senior Israeli security official" as saying the Mossad experts had "no specific information about what was being planned". Still, the official told the Telegraph, the Mossad contacts had "linked the plot to Osama bin Laden".

Likewise, Die Zeit correspondent Oliver Schröm reported that on August 23, 2001, the Mossad "handed its American counterpart a list of names of terrorists who were staying in the U.S. and were presumably planning to launch an attack in the foreseeable future". Fox News' Carl Cameron, in May 2002, also reported warnings by Israel: "Based on its own intelligence, the Israeli government provided 'general' information to the United States in the second week of August that an al-Qaeda attack was imminent". The U.S. government later claimed these warnings were not specific enough to allow any mitigating action to be taken. Mossad expert Gordon Thomas, author of Gideon's Spies, says German intelligence sources told him that as late as August 2001 Israeli spies in the United States had made surveillance contacts with "known supporters of bin Laden in the U.S.A. It was those surveillance contacts that later raised the question: how much prior knowledge did Mossad have and at what stage?"

According to Die Zeit, the Mossad did provide the U.S. government with the names of suspected terrorists Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, who would eventually hijack the Pentagon plane. It is worth noting that Mihdhar and Hazmi were among the hijackers who operated in close proximity to Israeli "art students" in Hollywood, Florida, and to the Urban Moving Systems Israelis in northern New Jersey. Moreover, Hazmi and at least three "art students" visited Oklahoma City on almost the same dates, from April 1 through April 4, 2001. On August 24, 2001, a day after the Mossad's briefing, Mihdhar and Hazmi were placed by the CIA on a terrorist watch list; additionally, it was only after the Mossad warning, as reported by Die Zeit, that the CIA, on August 27, informed the FBI of the presence of the two terrorists. But by then the cell was already in hiding, preparing for attack.

The CIA, along with the 9/11 Commission in its adoption of the CIA story, claims that Mihdhar and Hazmi were placed on the watch list solely due to the agency's own efforts, with no help from Mossad. Their explanation of how the pair came to be placed on the watch list, however, is far from credible and may have served as a cover story to obscure the Mossad briefing [See Ketcham's sidebar story -- "The Kuala Lumpur Deceit"]. This brings up the possibility that the CIA may have known about the existence of the alleged Israeli agents and their mission, but sought, naturally, to keep it quiet. A second, more troubling scenario, is that the CIA may have subcontracted to Mossad, given that the agency was both prohibited by law from conducting intelligence operations on U.S. soil, and lacked a pool of competent Arabic-fluent field officers.

In such a scenario, the CIA would either have worked actively with the Israelis or quietly abetted an independent operation on U.S. soil. In his 9/11 investigative book, The Looming Tower, author Lawrence Wright notes that FBI counterterrorism agents, infuriated at the CIA's failure to fully share information about Mihdhar and Hazmi, speculated that "the agency was shielding Mihdhar and Hazmi because it hoped to recruit them". The two al-Qaeda men, Wright notes, "must have seemed like attractive opportunities; however, once they entered the United States they were the province of the FBI..."

Wright further observes that the CIA's reticence to share its information was due to a fear "that prosecutions resulting from specific intelligence might compromise its relationship with foreign services". When in the spring of 2002 the scenario of CIA's domestic subcontracting to foreign intelligence was posed to the veteran CIA/NSA intelligence operative, with whom I spoke extensively, the operative didn't reject it out of hand. The operative noted that in recent years the CIA's human intelligence assets, known as "humint" - spooks on the ground who conduct surveillances, make contacts, and infiltrate the enemy - had been "eviscerated" in favor of the NSA's far less perilous "sigint", or signals intelligence program, the remote interception of electronic communications.

As a result, "U.S. intelligence finds itself going back to sources that you may not necessarily like to go back to, but are required to", the veteran intelligence operative said. "We don't like the fact, but our humint structures are gone. Israeli intel's humint is as strong as ever. If you have an intel gap, those gaps are not closed overnight. It takes years and years of diligent work, a high degree of security, talented and dedicated people, willing management and a steady hand. It is not a fun business, and it's certainly not one without its dangers. If you lose that capability, well organizations find themselves having to make a pact with the devil. The problem [in U.S. intel] is very great".

If such an understanding did exist between CIA and Mossad with regard to al-Qaeda's U.S. operatives, the complicity would explain a number of oddities: it would explain the CIA's nearly incoherent, and perhaps purposely deceptive, reconstruction of events as to how Mihdhar and Hazmi joined the watch list; it might even explain the apparent brazenness of the Israeli New Jersey cell celebrating on the morning of 9/11 (protected under the CIA wing, they were free to behave as they pleased). It would also explain the assertion in one of the leading Israeli dailies, Yedioth Ahronoth, that in the months prior to 9/11, when the Israeli "art students" were being identified and rounded up, the CIA "actively promoted their expulsion". The implication in the Yedioth Ahronoth article was that the CIA was simply being careless, not trying to spirit the Israelis safely out of the country. At this point we cannot be certain.

Israeli spying against the U.S. is of course hotly denied by both governments. In 2002, responding to my own questions about the "art students", Israeli embassy spokesman Mark Regev issued a blanket denial. "Israel does not spy on the United States", Regev told me. The pronouncements from officialdom are strictly pro forma, as it is no secret that spying by Israel on the United States has been wide-ranging and unabashed.

A 1996 General Accounting Office report, for example, found that Israel "conducts the most aggressive espionage operation against the United States of any U.S. ally". More recently, a former intelligence official told the Los Angeles Times in 2004 that "[t]here is a huge, aggressive, ongoing set of Israeli activities directed against the United States". It is also routine that Israeli spying is ignored or downplayed by the U.S. government (the case of convicted spy Jonathan Pollard, sentenced to life in prison in 1986, is a dramatic exception).

According to the American Prospect, over the last 20 years at least six sealed indictments have been issued against individuals allegedly spying "on Israel's behalf", but the cases were resolved "through diplomatic and intelligence channels" rather than a public airing in the courts. Career Justice Department and intelligence officials who track Israeli espionage told the Prospect of "long-standing frustration among investigators and prosecutors who feel that cases that could have been made successfully against Israeli spies were never brought to trial, or that the investigations were shut down prematurely".

The Questions That Await Answers

Remarkably, the Urban Moving Systems Israelis, when interrogated by the FBI, explained their motives for "celebration" on the New Jersey waterfront a celebration that consisted of cheering, smiling, shooting film with still and video cameras and, according to the FBI, "high-fiving" - in the Machiavellian light of geopolitics. "Their explanation of why they were happy", FBI spokesman Margolin told me, "was that the United States would now have to commit itself to fighting [Middle East] terrorism, that Americans would have an understanding and empathy for Israel's circumstances, and that the attacks were ultimately a good thing for Israel". When reporters on the morning of 9/11 asked former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu about the effect the attacks would have on Israeli- American relations, he responded with a similar gut analysis: "It's very good", he remarked. Then he amended the statement: "Well, not very good, but it will generate immediate sympathy [for Israel from Americans]".

What is perhaps most damning is that the Israelis' celebration on the New Jersey waterfront occurred in the first sixteen minutes after the initial crash, when no one was aware this was a terrorist attack. In other words, from the time the first plane hit the north tower, at 8:46 a.m., to the time the second plane hit the south tower, at 9:02 a.m., the overwhelming assumption of news outlets and government officials was that the plane's impact was simply a terrible accident. It was only after the second plane hit that suspicions were aroused. Yet if the men were cheering for political reasons, as they reportedly told the FBI, they obviously believed they were witnessing a terrorist act, and not an accident.

After returning safely to Israel in the late autumn of 2001, three of the five New Jersey Israelis spoke on a national talk show that winter. Oded Ellner, who on the afternoon of September 11 had, like his compatriots, protested to arresting officer Sgt. Dennis Rivelli that "we're Israeli", admitted to the interviewer: "We are coming from a country that experiences terror daily. Our purpose was to document the event". By his own admission, then, Ellner stood on the New Jersey waterfront documenting with film and video a terrorist act before anyone knew it was a terrorist act.

One obvious question among many comes to mind: If these men were trained as professional spies, why did they exhibit such outright oafishness at the moment of truth on the waterfront? The ABC network source close to the 20/20 report noted one of the more disturbing explanations proffered by counterintelligence investigators at the FBI: "The Israelis felt that in some way their intelligence had worked out - i.e., they were celebrating their own acumen and ability as intelligence agents".

The questions abound: Did the Urban Moving Systems Israelis, ready to "document the event", arrive at the waterfront before the first plane came in from the north? And if they arrived right after, why did they believe it was a terrorist attack? What about the strange tale of the "art students"? Could they have been mere hustlers, as they claimed, who ended up repeatedly crossing paths with federal agents and living next door to most of the 9/11 hijackers by coincidence? Did the Israeli authorities find out more about the impending attacks than they shared with their U.S. counterparts? Or did the Israeli spies on the ground only intercept vague chatter that, in their view, did not warrant breaking cover to share the information?

On the other hand, did the U.S. government receive more advance information about the attacks from Israeli authorities than it is willing to admit? What about the 9/11 Commission's eliding of reported Israeli warnings that may have led to the watch- listing of Mihdhar and Hazmi? Were the Israeli warnings purposely washed from the historical record? Did the CIA know more about pre-9/11 Israeli spying than it has admitted?

The unfortunate fact is that the truth may never be uncovered, not by officialdom, and certainly not by a passive press. James Bamford, who in a coup of reporting during the 1980s revealed the inner workings of the NSA in "The Puzzle Palace," points to the "key problem": "The Israelis were all sent out of the country", he says. "There's no nexus left. The FBI just can't go knocking on doors in Israel. They need to work with the State Department. They need letters rogatory, where you ask a government of a foreign country to get answers from citizens in that country".

The Israeli government will not likely comply. So any investigation "is now that much more complicated", says Bamford. He recalls a story he produced for ABC News concerning two murder suspects -- U.S. citizens - who fled to Israel and fought extradition for ten years. "The Israelis did nothing about it until I went to Israel, knocking on doors, and finally found the two suspects. I think it'd be a great idea to go over and knock on their doors", says Bamford.

The suspects are gone. The trail is cold. Yet many of the key facts and promising leads sit freely on the web, in the archives, safe in the news-morgues at 20/20 and The Forward and Die Zeit. An investigator close to the matter says it reminds him of the Antonioni film "Blow-Up", a movie about a photographer who discovers the evidence of a covered-up murder hidden before his very eyes in the frame of an enlarged photograph. It's a mystery that no one appears eager to solve.

Christopher Ketcham is a freelance journalist who has written for Harper's and Salon. Many of his writings, including his groundbreaking story on the Israeli art students, can be read on his website www.christopherketcham.com. He can be reached at: cketcham99@mindspring.com

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While 'Holocaust'-denial is banned, Jesus Christ-denial is promoted

'Holocaust'-denial is a grave sin in America, but Jesus Christ-denial is promoted by Google, L.A. Times and NewsweekSmall print at the bottom of the ad reads "Ads by Goooooogle"
and links to Google

Google* will not transmit, advertise or broadcast any book, movie or DVD that argues that the Nazi execution gas chambers never existed. On Feb. 22, 2006 Google even banned a revisionist video of Charles Provan stating that the homicidal gas chambers existed but that Judaics operated them. But Google gets paid to promote the notion that Jesus never existed.

Now you know what is truly sacred in our society. The holy gas chambers of Auschwitz are protected from critical scrutiny, while it's open season on Jesus Christ.

*Likewise, the L.A. Times and Newsweek will not review any book, movie or DVD that doubts that Nazi execution gas chambers existed, much less give favorable publicity to such skepticism. The preceding Google advertisement is all over the web. We found it on display on the morning of March 7, 2007 at www.aldaily.com

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Purim Shriners

Ultra-Orthodox Hasidic Khazars celebrating Purim at a synagogue in Jerusalem today.

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"Amazing Grace" Movie Makes Hero out of Oppressor of White Slaves

CLICK HERE FOR COLUMN

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16 Afghan Civilians Die in Massacre by U.S. Troops: Photos of Carnage Deleted

Attributing the deaths of civilians shot by the military to being “caught in a crossfire” and then interfering with press coverage and photographs of the carnage is a time-tested Israeli tactic. To see our forces adopt these despicable methods contributes to the drastic erosion of America’s image in the Age of Bush. We are making enemies and it seems we are doing it intentionally. The U.S. government desperately needs another terror attack on American soil so that in its wake they can justify a virtual police state, with vastly expanded "anti-terror" powers, all for the "safety of the American people." Bush sends marines 8,000 miles across the globe to slaughter Islamic innocents, hoping their relatives and friends will attack American innocents on our shores. The federal government's ultimate goal is a dictatorship in the U.S. in the name of "security" against the blowback we deliberately provoke.
Afghan mourners protest slaughter by American troops

From wire services | March 4, 2007

KABUL, Afghanistan, March 4 — American troops opened fire on a highway filled with civilian cars and bystanders in Nangarhar province in eastern Afghaistan Sunday, March 4, American and Afghan officials said, in an incident that the Americans said left 16 civilians dead and 24 wounded as they fled the scene of a suicide car bombing in eastern Afghanistan. One American was also wounded.

The shooting set off demonstrations, with local people blocking the highway, the main road east from the town of Jalalabad to the border with Pakistan.

Afghan witnesses and some authorities said American troops shot indiscriminately shooting at civilian vehicles in anger after the explosion.

Wounded survivors interviewed in the hospital by news agencies said the only shooting came from the American troops. A hospital official, who asked not to be named, said all the wounded were suffering from bullet wounds and not shrapnel from the bomb explosion.

Hundreds of Afghans blocked the road and threw rocks at police officers in protest afterward, with some demonstrators shouting “Death to America! Death to Karzai,” a reference to President Hamid Karzai, The Associated Press reported.

The shooting is a setback for American forces in Afghanistan, who have been working to contain the continuing insurgent attacks, in particular roadside bombs and suicide attacks, and win the support of the people with reconstruction and development projects. Deadly riots shook Kabul last May after American troops were involved in a fatal car crash and then opened fire on a crowd of civilians.

Among the dead this morning were a woman and two children in their early teens, said Dr. Ajmal Pardez, the provincial director of health, speaking by telephone from the Jalalabad city hospital. He said the hospital received 10 dead and 25 wounded people from the incident, with four people in critical condition, he said.

After the suicide attack, the American soldiers treated every car and person along the highway as a potential attacker, though none of the people showed hostile intent, Muhammad Khan Katawazi, the district chief of Shinwar, told The Associated Press.

“They were firing everywhere, and they even opened fire on 14 to 15 vehicles passing on the highway,” said Tur Gul, 38, who was standing on the roadside by a gas station and was shot twice in his right hand. “They opened fire on everybody, the ones inside the vehicles and the ones on foot.”

Some of the wounded interviewed by The Associated Press said the soldiers opened fire indiscriminately on passing cars and pedestrians on the busy main road.

“When we parked our vehicle, when they passed us, they opened fire on our vehicle,” said 15-year-old Mohammad Ishaq, who was hit by two bullets, in his left arm and his right ear. “It was a convoy of three American Humvees. All three Humvees were firing.”

U.S. SOLDIER ORDERS PHOTOS OF CARNAGE DELETED - REPORTERS THREATENED

Journalists covering the aftermath of the shooting said U.S. troops deleted their photos and video and warned them not to publish or air any images of U.S. troops or a car where three Afghan civilians were shot to death. A photographer working for The Associated Press (AP) and a cameraman working for AP Television News said a U.S. soldier deleted their photos and video showing a four-wheel drive vehicle in which three people were shot to death about 100 yards from the suicide bombing.

The photographer, Rahmat Gul, said witnesses at the scene told him the three had been shot to death by U.S. forces fleeing the attack. The two AP journalists arrived at the site about a half hour after the shootings. "When I went near the four-wheel drive...I started taking pictures," Gul said. "Two soldiers with a translator came and said, 'Why are you taking pictures? You don't have permission.'" It wasn't clear why the accredited journalists would need permission to take photos of a civilian car on a public highway. Gul said the U.S. troops took his camera and deleted his photos.

The journalists then came across another American soldier, showed their identification cards, and he agreed that they could take pictures. "The same soldier who took my camera came again and deleted my photos," Gul said. "The soldier was very angry ... I told him, 'They gave us permission,' but he didn't listen." Gul's new photos were also deleted, and the American, speaking through a translator, warned him that he did not want to see any AP photos published anywhere. The American also raised his fist in anger as if he were going to hit him, but he did not strike, Gul said.

Lt. Col. David Accetta, a U.S. military spokesman, said he did not have any confirmed reports that coalition forces "have been involved in confiscating cameras or deleting images." Khanwali Kamran, a reporter for the Afghan channel Ariana Television, was in a small group of journalists working alongside Gul. Kamran said the American soldiers also deleted his footage. "They warned me that if it is aired, then, 'You will face problems,'" Kamran said. Taqiullah Taqi, a reporter for Afghanistan's largest television station, Tolo TV, said Americans were using abusive language.

"According to the translator, they said, 'Delete them, or we will delete you,'" Taqi said.

A freelance cameraman for AP Television News said that about 100 yards from the carnage, a U.S. officer told him that he could not go any closer to the scene but that he could shoot footage. The cameraman asked not to be named for his own safety. "Then I started filming the suicide attack site, where there was a body and U.S. soldiers, and farther away, there was a four-wheel drive vehicle in which three people were shot to death," he said.

As he was filming, he said, a U.S. soldier and translator "ordered us not to move." The cameraman said they were very angry and deleted any footage that included the Americans, as well as part of an interview from a demonstration. Hundreds of Afghans had gathered to protest the violence.

Reporters Without Borders condemned the actions of the U.S. forces, saying they dealt with the press poorly. "Why did the soldiers do it if they don't have anything to hide? said Jean-Francois Julliard, a spokesman for the Paris-based Reporters Without Borders.

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Boycott the Discovery Channel

BOYCOTT THE DISCOVERY CHANNEL FOR ISRAELI SNAKE OIL 'DOCUMENTARY' ON JESUS

by Michael A. Hoffman II

Simcha Jacobovici, "The Orthodox Jewish director of a new documentary ("The Lost Tomb of Jesus") about Jesus’ purported burial chamber is beating back a flurry of attacks...His Christian critics...say that they...take the documentary as a direct challenge to their faith.

"Chief among these critics is Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League, which defends the rights of Catholics. But even Donohue, who in past years has accused the 'secular Jews' in Hollywood of pursuing an anti-Christian agenda, left Jacobovici's religion out of his critique. 'There's no question that there is an animus in Hollywood toward Christianity,' Donohue said. But, he added, Jacobovici's Judaism doesn't factor into this particular case."

--Forward (Zionist newspaper), March 1, 2007

HOFFMAN's COMMENT: Orthodox rabbinic tradition teaches that Jesus did not rise from the dead. Jacobovici is an Orthodox Judaic, but William Donohue believes "Judaism doesn't factor into this particular case"?

Here we see the impact of right wing Orthodox Rabbis like Meyer Schiller, Yehuda Levin and Daniel Lapin, who have convinced "Christian leaders" like Donohue that Talmudists are on the same page as Christian conservatives in the struggle for cultural and family values. They promote this lie even though their religion teaches that Christ's remains are very much on earth -- the very point the huckster Jacobovici is making with his "Lost Tomb of Jesus" snake oil, a film perfectly consonant with Jacobovici's Orthodox Judaic upbringing.

But, hush, we dare not mention that truth.

Yet, if we are not going to arm ourselves with the truth, how are we going to win this battle against those who seek to ritually murder the reputation of Jesus Christ before 1.4 billion potential viewers of the Discovery Channel?

Please boycott the Discovery Channel, including Animal Planet, Discovery Health, Discovery Kids, Travel Channel, TLC and Military Channel and let their their executives (David Zaslov and Mark Hollinger) know why you are doing so.

You can send Discovery Channel an e-mail through an electronic form here:
http://extweb.discovery.com/viewerrelations

Or better yet, protest by telephone (please keep your conversation civil and legal): 240-662-2000

Discovery Communications, Inc. ownership consists of four shareholders: Discovery Holding Company (NASDAQ: DISCA, DISCB), Cox Communications, Inc., Advance/Newhouse Communications and John S. Hendricks, the Company’s Founder and Chairman.

Please also boycott Discovery Channel advertisers, Cox Communications and Advance/Newhouse Communications.

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