Saturday, November 20, 2010

President Obama and the Bulletproof Suit

When newly inaugurated President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama stepped out of the presidential limo to stroll down the parade route amongst a throng of well-wishers, there was an assumed collective gasp of surprise for many who witnessed this. In truth, while this was indeed a bold gesture for the first African-American President of the United States, Mr. Obama was wearing special bulletproof clothing crafted by "high-security fashion tailor" Miguel Caballero.

"Miguel" who?

In 1992, University of the Andes students Jose Miguel Caballero and John Murphy created the first of their fashion-conscious bulletproof and "stab-proof" clothing line some say as a response to the high casualties created by the Medellin drug cartel wars, which were at their peak. While the young entrepreneurs have strongly denied all accusations of exploiting the drug war violence, they opened their first clothing store dubbed "Miguel Caballero" in Medellin. In 1996, there were 30,000 violent deaths in Colombia.

Miguel Caballero opened their second store in Mexico City, Mexico. Some have said that it was a response to current drug cartel wars in that country. Additional stores have opened in Guatemala City, Johannesburg and London.

About Miguel Caballero clothing

Note that the exact details of President Obama's Miguel Caballero bullet resistant clothing are secret. While high-security clothing has traditionally been made from Kevlar, a bulky Teflon derivative, Miguel Caballero clothing materials are of a thinner and more flexible weave of materials with a more fashion-conscious emphasis. Caballero not only makes bullet resistant suits, they make bullet and stab-resistant biker leather jackets, tuxedo shirts, women's ski parkas, t-shirts lined with body armor and even bullet resistant underwear that would fit under a monk's robe. Sadly, they also make bulletproof jackets for children. And Miguel Caballero once specially crafted an armored kimono for actor Steven Seagal.

Besides Seagal and President Obama, Caballero has made specialized high-security fashions for controversial Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez and Colombia's President Alvaro Uribe.

The clothing is sold at three tiers of security certified by the U.S. National Institute of Justice, the evaluation agency of the Department of Justice. Clothing prices typically range from a few hundred dollars to about $7000.

When requested, Miguel Caballero clients have "tested" the clothing by having a salesperson fire a weapon at them.

Caballero has a group of clients whose lives have been saved by the bullet resistant clothing. This group has been dubbed "The Survivors Club."

4 Common Myths about the War on Terrorism

by Reese Erlich
CommonDreams.org
Friday, November 19, 2010

I'm finishing up a 25-city book tour that took me from New York and Chicago to Elizabethtown, PA, and Spearfish, SD. I met with college students, farmers and laid-off workers. Most people in the US now oppose the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, but I found a lot of confusion about the War on Terrorism. [1]

Here are four of the more commonly asked questions:
1. Isn't it true that while not all Muslims are terrorists, all terrorists are Muslims?

Well, just asking the question reveals a lot about how those in power have manipulated our concept of terrorism.

To begin, I point out that plenty of non-Muslims have carried out terrorist acts. Here's a partial list.

* Timothy McVeigh was convicted of detonating a truck bomb in front of the Oklahoma City federal building in 1995, which resulted in 168 deaths. He was Catholic.
* In 1994 Baruch Goldstein, a Jewish-American Israeli settler in the West Bank city of Hebron opened fire on Muslim worshippers, killing 29 and wounding 150. He died at the scene, and his grave later became a pilgrimage site for extremists in Israel.
* Murderers of abortion doctors in the US frequently carry out their crimes in the name of evangelical Christianity.
* In 2010, in a protest against federal government policies, Joseph Stack flew a plane into an Austin building housing IRS offices. He came from a Christian background and ranted against all religion.

I understand if you didn't think of those examples right away. We've been conditioned to think of terrorists as foreigners, or people trained by foreigners, preferably dark skinned people with a grudge against the West. But a white guy with a bomb trying to kill civilians for political purposes is still a terrorist.

Targeting civilians with political violence is terrorism, whether carried out by individuals, groups or governments. But the US government and major media have so distorted the word that virtually anyone who uses violence to oppose US policy is branded a terrorist. Conversely, anyone using violence against civilians to support US policy is a freedom fighter.
2. Yeah, but didn't Arabs and Muslims initiate the use of terrorism?

Actually, no.

Zionists fighting in Palestine prior to the formation of Israel pioneered many modern day terrorist tactics. In 1947 an extremist Zionist group called Lechi, also known as the Stern Gang, was the first to use letter bombs. It mailed them to British Cabinet members.

The Stern Gang assassinated major British diplomats and the chief UN mediator trying to negotiate a two-state solution in 1948 Palestine. The Irgun, another Zionist extremist group, planted bombs in Arab East Jerusalem, seeking to kill civilians and drive Palestinians out. Arab insurgent groups also planted bombs intended to kill civilians and used other terror tactics against Jews.

In 1954 Israel became the first country to hijack an airplane for political purposes. It seized a Syrian civilian plane in a failed effort to trade hostages for Mossad intelligence agents captured by the Syrians.

Nor did Muslims originate suicide bombings. That dubious honor belongs to the Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka, who were Hindus.
3. Others may engage in terrorism, but isn't Arab and Muslim terrorism a serious threat to US national security?

Some extremists acting in the name of Islam do pose a threat to American civilians. The perpetrators of such crimes should be arrested, given fair trials and, if found guilty, severely punished. Muslims and everyone else around the world would cooperate with such police action. After all, extremist groups have killed far more Muslims than Christians or Jews.

But isn't that rather naïve to think police action can dismantle al Qaeda? After all, didn't the US have to invade Afghanistan to put al Qaeda on the run?

It wasn't necessary to invade and permanently occupy Afghanistan to rout al Qaeda. The few hundred members of al Qaeda living in Afghanistan fled the country and set up shop in Pakistan. Today, autonomous cells operate in Yemen and other countries. And, after nine years on the most wanted list, the US has still not managed to capture Osama bin Laden or other top leaders.

Fighting extremist groups such as al Qaeda requires both political and armed action. Undercut their base politically and isolate them among their followers. Turncoats and local officials will help capture the leaders.

But US military actions have had the opposite effect. The US occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan, and the covert war in Pakistan, help recruit angry young men to the extremist cause.

Instead of narrowing the target to the small number of extremist groups, US leaders intentionally expand the enemies list. They lump together al Qaeda with Hamas in Palestine and Hezbollah in Lebanon. We are told that they are all part of a worldwide terrorist network.

In fact, groups such as Hezbollah and Hamas have significant bases of support, and have won free and fair elections, while also maintaining armed wings. They consider themselves national liberation movements opposing foreign occupiers.

If I lived in Lebanon or Palestine, I would never vote for such groups. They represent a conservative, religious trend that opposes real freedom in their countries. For the same reasons, I would never vote for Israel's religious parties. But just as Israel's religious extremists are part of that country's political reality, so Hamas and Hezbollah must be treated a serious political players - not marginalized as "terrorists."
4. So why is the US fighting in so many countries?

Under the guise of combating terrorism, the US has expanded its fleets of aircraft carriers, battle ships, and fighter-bombers - armaments particularly ill-suited to fight terrorist cells. But they do allow the US empire to forcibly expand around the globe, helping guarantee profits for US corporations. Oil pipeline and drilling companies got lucrative contracts in Iraq; US oil companies are preparing for a bonanza if Iraq finally privatizes its oil industry.

Over the past nine years, the US has built over a dozen new military bases throughout the Middle East and Asia. The US has over 750 military bases at home and around the world.

But the empire is in decline. The current wars have cost over a trillion dollars, and the meter is still running. A significant part of the current economic crisis, with 9.5% unemployment, flows from never-ending spending on war. A majority of Americans have come to oppose the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. People in the Middle East and in the US will eventually force a withdrawal of US troops and an end to the wars.

The US will never win the War on Terrorism. The term will simply fade into the history books, along with the empire itself.

Information cited in this article comes from freelance foreign correspondent Reese Erlich's new book "Conversations with Terrorists: Middle East Leaders on Politics, Violence and Empire [1]." His national book tour takes him to Miami on Nov. 19-20. For details, see www.reeseerlich.com.

Reese Erlich is a freelance journalists and foreign correspondent. He is the author of several books, including his most recent, Conversations with Terrorists: Middle East Leaders on Politics, Violence and Empire [1]. Previous books include, The Iran Agenda: The Real Story of U.S. Policy and the Middle East Crisis [2], Dateline Havana: The Real Story of US Policy and the Future of Cuba [3], and with Norman Solomon, Target Iraq: What the News Media Didn't Tell You. [4]

16 of the Dumbest Things Americans Believe -- And the Right-Wing Lies Behind Them

We’ve gone beyond Stephen Colbert's' truthiness' into a 'truth-be-damned' environment.

AlterNet / By Sarah Seltzer
November 13, 2010

Americans are often misinformed, occasionally downright dumb, and easily misled by juicy-sounding rumors. But while the right wing is taking full advantage of this reality, the Left worries that calling out lies is "rude."

Remember when Congressman Joe Wilson stood up during Obama’s State of the Union address and shouted “You lie”? He was chastised soundly by the pundit class. But mostly he drew heat for being impolite, and was compared to Kanye West and other famous interrupters.

Revisiting Wilson's foolish tirade underscores the state of our upside-down political world. Wilson shouted “you lie” in the face of truth, but President Obama is hesitant to speak up when he’s being slandered with bald, glaring untruths. The dark irony will continue as the Republicans take over the House this winter and the rumors and insinuations from extremist right-wing pundits keep circulating. It feels like no one with a loud enough megaphone has the courage to call a spade a spade, or more accurately a lie a lie.

We’ve gone far beyond Stephen Colbert’s “truthiness” into a more “truth-be-damned” environment; what Rick Perlstein described in the Daily Beast as a “mendocracy. As in, rule by liars.”

Here are some examples of recent ways we have made inroads in ignorance:

* Polling data during and after last week’s midterm elections suggested that many Americans genuinely believe President Obama has raised their taxes -- even though the reality is that our president actually lowered them for most of us. This means that people trust pundits like Rush Limbaugh, a major force behind spreading that lie, over the numbers on their own tax returns.
* Another recent phenomenon? Half of new Congressmen don’t believe in the reality of global warming. It’s not that they don’t just disagree on the source or the severity of the problem. They flat out don’t think the world is getting warmer--despite the evidence outside their windows.
* The new Congress will probably try to restore millions of dollars of funding for scientifically inaccurate, largely disastrous abstinence-only curriculum in schools, many of which have been shown to spread lies like "condoms don't work" and "abortion causes cancer."
* News outlets picked up a wildly inflated and completely outlandish claim from an Indian blog that Obama’s trip abroad cost $200 million a day--and listeners have swallowed it. (In this case, the White House flat-out denied it.)

The scary thing is, these kinds of rumors have a way of taking root in the popular consciousness. Just as the election season began heating up earlier this year, Newsweek published a list of “Dumb Things Americans Believe.” While some of them are garden-variety lunacy, a surprising number are lies that were fed to Americans by our leaders on the far-Right. This demonstrates that media-fed lies can easily become ingrained in the collective memory if they’re not countered quickly and surely. Newsweek’s list included the following 12 statistics taken from recent and semi-recent polls and surveys. The first half are directly related to right-wing rumormongering.

* Nearly one-fifth of Americans think Obama is a Muslim. Thanks, Fox news, for acting like this was a matter of opinion, not fact.
* 25 percent of Americans don’t believe in Darwin’s theory of evolution while less than 40 percent do. Consider the fact that several of our newly elected officials, specifically newly elected Kansas Governor Sam Brownback, share that belief.
* Earlier this year, nearly 40 percent of Americans still believed the Sarah Palin-supported lie about "death panels" being included in health care reform.
* As of just a few years ago, about half of Americans still suspected a connection between Saddam Hussein and the attacks of September 11, a lie that was reinforced by none other than Dick Cheney.
* While a hefty amount of this demonstrable cluelessness gets better as the respondents get younger, all is not well in the below-30 demographic. A majority of “young Americans” cannot identify Iraq or Afghanistan--the places their peers are fighting and dying--on a map.
* Two out of five Americans, despite the whole separation of church and state being a foundation of our democracy thing, think teachers should be able to lead prayer in classrooms. So it seems those right-wingers clamoring to tear down the wall between church and state aren’t the only ones who don’t know their constitutional principles.
* Many Americans still believe in witchcraft, ESP and other supernatural phenomena. Does that explain why Christine O’Donnell was so quick to deny her “dabbling”?
* Speaking of antiquated religious beliefs, about a decade ago, 20 percent of Americans still believed that the sun revolves around the earth. That's just sad, considering that even the Vatican has let Galileo off the hook for being right.
* Only about half of Americans realize that Judaism is the oldest of the three monotheistic religions. Other examples of wild misunderstanding about religion and the separation of church and state can be found in this fall’s Pew survey on Americans’ religious knowledge.
* This one made a huge splash when it appeared. In 2006 more Americans were able to name two of the “seven dwarves” than two of the Supreme Court justices. And that was before Kagan and Sotomayor showed up. To be fair, Happy and Sleepy are easy to remember.
* More Americans can identify the Three Stooges than the three branches of government--you know, the ones who are jockeying over our welfare.

So what to do in a political and cultural landscape in which well-told lies have more validity than fact-based truth? Perlstein explained how this environment gets created by explaining what happened on Election Day this year:

“...by a two-to-one margin likely voters thought their taxes had gone up, when, for almost all of them, they had actually gone down. Republican politicians, and conservative commentators, told them Barack Obama was a tax-mad lunatic. They lied. The mainstream media did not do their job and correct them. The White House was too polite—"civil," just like Obama promised—to say much. So people believed the lie.”

We’ve entered a bizzarro world in which calling out lies is considered rude, says Perlstein, so liars are allowed to sit tight and dominate the discourse. This gels with Bill Maher’s critique of the Rally for Sanity, that calling for “balance for balance’s sake” ignores two important aspects of news reporting: facts and evidence.

Blaming Americans for being ignorant unwashed masses--or taking potshots at an education system that doesn’t teach critical thinking-- would be the easy answer to this conundrum.

But the reality is that if messaging has such a big effect on Americans, then messaging matters. Folks on our end have to counter the lies with well-told, unabashed unironic, truth-telling. And we have to demand that our media, and our politicians, call out the other side. As Perlstein notes, “When one side breaks the social contract, and the other side makes a virtue of never calling them out on it, the liar always wins. When it becomes 'uncivil' to call out liars, lying becomes free.”

Even worse, once lies begin to spread, they become more than rumors--they become permanent beliefs.
Sarah Seltzer is an associate editor at Alternet, an RH Reality Check staff writer and a freelance journalist based in New York City. Her work can be found at www.sarahmseltzer.com.

Tawdry Scandal Distracting AIPAC from its Usual Task of Standing in the Way of Peace

The latest AIPAC scandal has not found its way into the mainstream media, although the Jewish media has done a great job in highlighting this very explosive story. (LATE UPDATE: The Washington Post is now reporting on the story).

The good news is that it doesn't much matter whether the New York Times runs the story or not. The Rosen vs. AIPAC case is grinding its way through the courts and could well destroy the lobby without ever making its way on to the front page. AIPAC is under siege, and is spending millions to stay alive. But that won't be easy — even if Steve Rosen ultimately accepts a payoff from the organization and refrains from telling what he knows.

There is no need to recapitulate the story here. Nathan Guttman in the Forward explains it well. The bottom line is that Steve Rosen, AIPAC's former #2 guy, who was indicted under the Espionage Act and then fired, is now suing the organization for $20 million.

Ironically, the organization spent $4.5 million to save their former employee from imprisonment (and more money than that to save itself). In the end, the government dropped the case probably because it believed it would not prevail in court, especially with AIPAC's buddies in Congress breathing down the Justice Department's neck.

Nonetheless, Rosen, off the legal hook, was furious. How could AIPAC have fired him when, in the end, the government couldn't prove its case? His life was in tatters thanks to being terminated, in his opinion, without cause.

AIPAC argues it had cause. In fact, in a 2008 New York Times story, it stated that Rosen was fired because his behavior "did not comport with standards that AIPAC expects of its employees."

But Rosen maintains that everything he did, or was accused of doing, was standard operating procedure for AIPAC. It fired him not because he did anything of which AIPAC disapproved, but as a peace offering to the government: Take Rosen and leave us alone.

I doubt there is a single person who knows Rosen and/or AIPAC who does not believe Rosen is telling the truth about simply doing his job. I know Rosen and I know AIPAC. And if there is any daylight between the two, I have never seen it.

Unfortunately for AIPAC, Rosen has 180 documents which could prove that Howard Kohr, AIPAC's executive director, and probably the AIPAC board as well, knew exactly what Rosen was doing. Worse, Rosen is now in court demanding that AIPAC pay him $20 million or he will release everything he has.

The ugliest aspect of the case so far is that AIPAC has decided to win by destroying Rosen personally. I have no use for the guy and consider him to have been, in his time, instrumental in helping to destroy Israel's chances at achieving peace with the Palestinians. Rosen was so effective as a peace-wrecker that in 1992 Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin himself told AIPAC to fire Rosen. He didn't want Rosen to be in a position to thwart Israel's efforts to make peace with its neighbors. In the years since, he has been a key advocate of war with Iraq and, even now despite his disgrace, is an agitator for war with Iran. He is also an extreme Islamophobe, now teamed with Daniel Pipes at his anti-Muslim hate organization.

Nonetheless, I think AIPAC's game here is pretty despicable. Desperate that its true modus operandi not be revealed, AIPAC has set out to silence Rosen by exposing his sexual activities. (Rosen notes, in response, that Howard Kohr is no choir boy either.) This is causing great merriment throughout Washington, but the merriment should not just be over the "dirty parts."

There is great cause for celebration in AIPAC's fight to stave off extinction because a bleeding, flailing AIPAC is far less dangerous than an AIPAC riding high (which is where it usually rides).

Here is what AIPAC would like to be devoting its energies and financial resources to right now. One, making sure that President Obama is unable to pressure Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu to freeze settlements and move to final status negotiations. And, two, boxing the president in so that he has no choice but to either strike Iran's nuclear facilities or, more likely, let Israel do it. In fact, it is already planning its huge spring "policy conference," slated to be devoted to warmongering over Iran followed by congressional passage of AIPAC-drafted Iran-must-be-stopped resolutions.

These are immense undertakings and they take lots of money and lots of time.

But, thanks to Rosen, AIPAC is spending $10 million of its donors' money on legal fees. Its top people are working with lawyers virtually nonstop. And the whole place is in the grips of fear — fear that one former employee who has the goods on AIPAC will bring the whole house down.

Fighting for its life was not what AIPAC expected to be doing in 2011. But that is precisely what it will be doing, taking precious time away from its regular agenda.

At long last, AIPAC, in its own way, is giving peace a chance. Congress may just have to start figuring out the Middle East on its own.

By MJ Rosenberg | Sourced from Foreign Policy Matters

Posted at November 19, 2010, 1:49 pm

Friday, November 19, 2010

How the US and Israel Hope to Destroy Hezbollah

Attacking Nasrallah

By FRANKLIN LAMB
CounterPunch
November 19 - 21, 2010

Beirut

"I’ve got these [expletive deleted] just where we want them Maura! Watch the 1000 slow cuts as we shred Hezbollah--who do they think they are? And we’ll do it by using 1757 and this time we’re going all the way. I told Israel to stay out of Lebanon because the IDF can’t defeat Hezbollah plus the whole region would burn. I will handle this and it will be my Christmas present to Lebanon.”

So, reportedly, said Jeffrey Feltman in conversation with his former office staffer, now US Ambassador to Lebanon, Maura Connelly during October 17, 2010 visit with MP Walid Jumblatt at his Clemenceau residence. On December 12, 2008, Naharnet.com reported that “Former US Ambassador Jeffrey Feltman presented Prime Minister Fuad Siniora with what the American diplomat described as his personal Christmas present to Lebanon. Mr. Feltman assured PM Siniora that he will force Israel out of Ghajar village before the end of 2008.”

As it turned out, Prime Minister Fuad Siniora and Lebanon never did receive Feltman’s promised 2008 Christmas present and Israel has its tanks and troops in Lebanon’s Ghajar village even as pressure mounts for ending its four-year illegal occupation of North Ghajar which, in violation of UNSCR 1701, Israel invaded in July 2006 and from which it has refused to withdraw. Feltman is now again assuring his Lebanese allies that he’s Santa Claus and Hezbollah’s head will adorn his sleigh during his Christmas eve rounds. The reason for his optimism is that US and Israel are quietly confident that they can achieve with UNSCR 1757 what was intended but fell short with UNSCR 1559, stripping Lebanon’s Resistance of its defensive weapons. On November 11th, Vice Premier and Regional Development Minister Silvan Shalom predicted that “a Special Tribunal for Leban (STL) indictment against Hezbollah will lead to the implementation of Resolution 1559 and the forced disarming of the Party as well as the collapse of the effort at a Syrian-Lebanese-Iranian-Turkish alliance.”

The US-Israel plan includes the expectation that members of Hezbollah, possibly even Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah, will be indicted, tried and convicted, in absentia of course, of involvement in the February 14, 2005 murder of Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri. The US State Department Office of the Legal Adviser has proudly assured the White House that because its office insisted back in 2005 that the Special Tribunal for Lebanon be established under Chapter 7 of the UN Charter, anyone who the STL convicts will face sure UN sanctions. Chapter Seven allows for the use of unlimited international armed force to implement any verdict that the STL hands down. Washington and Tel Aviv intend that those convicted will not escape the full power of the United Nations system anymore than others earlier, including former Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic.

Israel, serial violator of international law including more than 60 UN Resolutions is also busy boastlng that international law supports the Tribunal and that high priced law firms around the world can be hired if necessary to back up the legal work of the STL office of the Prosecution, led by Daniel Bellemare of Canada. Within hours of Israel instructing Secretary of State Clinton, not to worry, that there is no way for the STL to be stopped or its final judgment sidetracked and all the US has to do is fund it, the White House announced an additional $ 10 million for the Tribunal and got the UK to pony up another $ 1.8 million. More cash is expected from France. Today the STL is flush with cash and it will likely remain so.

Based on interviews with two former staff members of the Office of the STL prosecution, as well as numerous public statements by US officials, there are reasons to take seriously the "all the way" intensions of Jeffrey Feltman and Silvan Shalom. Their governments assert the that STL is legitimate under both international law, given that it was established in accordance with a U.N. Security Council resolution issued under Chapter 7, and also under Lebanon's legal and constitutional principles contrary to what is being claimed by Hezbollah and STL's adversaries in Lebanon.

In addition, the US State Department points out that the preamble to the Lebanese constitution provides that "Lebanon is a founding and active member of the United Nations Organization and abides by its covenants and by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The Government shall embody these principles in all fields and areas without exception." Moreover, the Charter of the United Nations obliges U.N. member states to "accept and carry out the decisions of the (U.N.) Security Council." According to one State Department lawyer, “If the STL indicts and convicts one member of Hezbollah we win. A driver, a boy scout, we don’t care. The Security Council can do a dozen things to topple Hezbollah. For example, can you imagine the effect of Iranian style sanctions if applied against Lebanon until the killers are handed over? The Lebanese only care about money and with all those sects hating each other anyhow, the country will quickly implode in recriminations and civil war if they’re forced to diet a bit…And very tough sanctions against Syria? The US and Israel will only have to collect the pieces and do what should have been done half a century ago and that was to install governments that understand regional and international realities.”

Efforts by Hezbollah and Syria to derail the STL are viewed in Tel Aviv and Washington as futile, because Lebanon is thought to have nothing to say about the STL. It is created by the UNSC and nothing the Lebanese Parliament, Cabinet or people do will affect it. The only reason Lebanon is in the picture at all is that it is the crime scene. And it happens to harbor some suspects. Apart from that Lebanon is essentially irrelevant to the STL work.

Following the STL indictments, assuming they include Hezbollah, Washington sources expect that the Israel lobby will launch an international media campaign of defamation against Hezbollah, Syria and Iran and they will be joined by the US government and some of its European allies. The objective will be to essentially unite the world against the presumed Shia killers of the Sunni Prime Minister. More than a dozen US-Israel projects that failed in Lebanon over the past decade, from an airbase in Kleiat to street battles to cutting optic telecommunication lines may come back into play when stamped with the imprimatur of international law and full UN Security Council legitimacy.

The coming media campaign will employ especially sharp personal attacks on Hassan Nasrallah.

Hezbollah’s assessment

On November 11, 2010 Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah discussed the Special Tribunal at a neighborhood Martyr’s day gathering in South Beirut. He told his audience that Hezbollah knows the US-Israel strategy, which he explained is:

“Let's accuse Shiite men of assassinating the most important Sunnite leader and consequently issue an indictment in this regard. We will call on the Lebanese government which had signed an agreement with us to arrest these men. The latter would set to arrest them and dispatch army troops and security forces which would be engaged in a clash with the Resistance.”

Nasrallah continued,

"Primarily this is the plot. It is not important for the Americans, the Israelis and the sponsors of the STL what would happen or what might happen in Lebanon. Lebanon in itself is not important, neither is martyr PM Rafiq Hariri, the Sunnites, the Shiites, the Muslims, the Christians, the Future Movement, March 14 Bloc nor March 8 Bloc. What is important is Israel, and Israel's interest is that the Resistance be hit, eliminated, isolated, besieged, weakened, snatched away from its popular environment and its image be distorted. Its morals, belief and will must be harmed and consequently, it would be ready to be hit or to surrender to this plot.”

Hezbollah MP Nawaf Mousawi, one of the most sought after Hezbollah officials for discussions by visiting American and foreign delegations, advised the media a short time later that: “The Resistance party is prepared for all scenarios”, adding that "nothing would surprise Hezbollah.... Hezbollah has prepared a series of responses. Every option corresponds to a specific scenario. Thus if things are positive, we’re ready. But if things are negative and the efforts failed in reaching a solution to the crisis, we’re also ready. In brief, we’re ready to face all options.”

Franklin Lamb is doing research in Lebanon and can be reached at fplamb@gmail.com

Israel's War Against the Dead

Mamilla Cemetery and the Simon Wiesenthal Center

By LAWRENCE SWAIM
CounterPunch
November 19 - 21, 2010

In June, 2005, the Simon Wiesenthal Center of Los Angeles began construction in Jerusalem of an ambitious new facility. This project was variously referred to by Rabbi Marvin Hier, the founder and “dean” of the SWC, as the “Center for Human Dignity,” the “Center for Human Dignity—Jerusalem” and most pretentiously, the “Center for Human Dignity—Museum of Tolerance.” (Ground-breaking on the construction site had occurred in 2004, giving Arnold Schwarzenegger an opportunity to fly to Israel for one of his many photo ops with Rabbi Heir.) This sprawling structure was to be built on a parking lot that was supposedly adjacent to a historic Muslim ceremony; but which actually turned out to be directly on top of a part of it.

The cemetery, called the Mamilla Cemetary (Ma’Man Allah in Arabic), was an extremely old Muslim burial ground that was once the most important in Palestine, and in the Middle East generally. The Center for Constitutional Rights in New York, in a petition to the UN and other international organizations to stop construction of the Wiesenthal Museum, wrote as follows: “The Mamilla Cemetery is an ancient Muslim burial ground and holy site believed to date back to the 7th century, when companions of the Prophet Muhammad were reputedly buried there. Numerous saints of the Sufi faith and thousands of other officials, scholar, notables and Jerusalemite families have been buried in the cemetery over the last 1000 years. The Muslim Supreme Council declared the cemetery a historical site in 1927, and the British Mandate authorities pronounced it an antiquities site in 1944. It was an active burial ground until 1948.”

“After the new State of Israel seized the western part of Jerusalem in 1948, the cemetery fell under Israeli control, and like other Islamic endowment properties, or waqf, Mamilla Cemetery was taken over by the Custodian for Absentee Property. Since then, Muslim authorities have not been allowed to maintain the cemetery.” At that time, in 1948, the Israeli Religious Affairs Ministry itself acknowledged Mamilla “to be one of the most prominent Muslim cemeteries, where seventy thousand Muslim warriors of [Saladin’s] armies are interred along with many Muslim scholars.” It added: “Israel will always know to protect and respect this site.”

But that is not what happened.

In the early 1980s, Muslims became aware that the cemetery was being encroached on and human remains were being disinterred, and protested to the United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). In 1984 Israel responded to that protest by stating flatly that “no project exists for the de-consecration of the site and that on the contrary the site and its tombs are to be safeguarded.” In fact even as Israel said this, however, it was engaged in parceling off pieces of the cemetery for various kinds of private developments, even as they assured UNESCO that they were protecting it.

Sadly, Palestinians had no legal instrument by which they could stop this. Although Mamilla cemetery in on a list of “Special Antiquities Sites,” it is not protected as a religious site. All of the cemeteries in Israel that are protected as religious sites are Jewish. (The Israeli government designates 137 holy sites that receive such protection, but all are Jewish, a fact that the US State Department’s International Religious Freedom Report of 2009 protested against.) Furthermore successive governments have sought to obliterate reminders of Palestinian culture in Jerusalem; successive governments parceled out sections of Mamilla for buildings, then for the construction of the parking lot mentioned above—and in 1992, the site was transferred to the Jerusalem municipality. At one point the government built a park over a part of the cemetery, which they named Independence Park, a reference to the founding of Israel in 1948 (and a clear attempt to provoke and humiliate Palestinians).

This is completely unlike the treatment meted out to Jewish cemeteries. On the Mount of the Olives, for example, the Jewish cemetery has been lavishly refurbished and even expanded, and finally transformed into a “heritage site.” On the other hand, Israel’s Muslim cemeteries have been allowed to fade into disuse, and are even destroyed when the government thinks it can get away with it. The 900-year-old Hittin mosque built by Saladin in the Galilee region has been deliberately fenced off and allowed to go to ruin. According to Bethlehem-based journalist Jonathan Cook, some mosques are used by rural Jewish communities as animal sheds. “And yet more,” he writes, “have been converted into discos, bars or nightclubs, including the Dahir al-Umar mosque—now the Dona Rosa restaurant—in the former Palestinian village of Ayn Hawd.”

Meron Benvenisti, a former Deputy Mayor of Jerusalem who wrote Sacred Landscape: Buried History of the Holy Land Since 1948, has been vocal in pointing out that Muslim groups, contrary to what the Simon Wiesenthal camp is saying, pleaded over the years to be allowed to officially refurbish and keep up their sacred sites and cemeteries, but were never allowed to do so. Many important Islamic sites, he has written, have been “turned into dumps, parking lots, roads and construction sites.”

The Israeli government has recently added Ibrahimi and Bilal Bin Abi Rabah Mosques to the Jewish heritage list, which means they are not protected as religious sites. This means that the Israeli government could easily sell off, close or develop the sites, just as it has the Mamilla site, which is also on the heritage list but not protected as a religious site.

On a tour of East Jerusalem in late summer 2010, activist and author Phillip Weiss wrote on his website Mondoweiss:

Maybe the most pitiable sight I saw yesterday, inside the West Bank but close to the north Jerusalem colonies of Ramot and Ramat Shlomo, [was] the hilltop tomb of the prophet Samuel, which is worshiped by Jews and Muslims. The tomb is both a mosque with a minaret and a Jewish place of worship. Well when we visited, busloads of Jewish schoolchildren were arriving and Israeli soldiers were in the tomb davening and Hasidic boys were descending, too.

But next door it was a different story:

The door is chained, pigeons fly into the outer rooms, the Palestinian who runs a store there told us that the authorities had shut down the minaret. There are no Palestinian worshipers.

Weiss points out that this is an Israeli National Park in the West Bank, which is supposedly Palestinian land and supposedly—if there were actually ever to be a two-state solution—the future site of a Palestinian state. But being under the authority of the Israeli army, the Jewish site is protected as a religious site, whereas the Muslim worship facility next to the tomb of the prophet Samuel has been closed down. It is hard not to conclude that the closing and degradation of Muslim religious sites is a deliberate and coordinated policy of the Israeli government to humiliate Palestinian Muslims, an extension of the slow ethnic cleansing currently underway in the occupied territories. The message seems to be, “If you don’t like what we’re doing to Muslim holy sites, why don’t you leave?”

The Simon Wiesenthal Center similarly claims that Mamilla deserves no protection as a religious site, citing the fact that in 1964 the government set up a Muslim trust and that the head of that council “deconsecrated” Mamilla—and supposedly declared it no longer sacred ground, thus opening it up to partial development. But the person in question was apparently a government plant brought in to give political cover to those anxious to make money by developing the cemetery. (The bogus 1964 proclamation was aggressively overturned—or ruled “void”—by the Shari’a Court of Appeals in Israel, which found the sanctity of cemeteries to be “eternal” in Islam.) Certainly one person—especially one who in 1964 had been given no authority by Muslims to represent them—cannot speak for the many families whose ancestors are buried in Mamilla. Although some tombstones appeared to have been replaced in recent years, individual attempts at upkeep haven’t been as successful as organized efforts by a Muslim trust would be.

In Death in Jerusalem, Noga Tarnopolsky writes of her friend Sari Nusseibeh, a philosopher and university president, who located the tomb of two illustrious ancestors in the Mamilla cemetery: “Nusseibeh then contacted a friend working at the Ministry for Religious Affairs and requested permission to place a plaque on the crypt. ‘I thought it was important to commemorate this, and to tell people that in the case of a family like mine, we are not claiming roots here in the abstract or national sense, but in the familial sense, which is a much closer thing,’ he said.”

“Nusseibeh secured permission and affixed a stone plaque explaining that the tomb belonged to Islam’s Kabrkabiyyan period and contained the remains of one Prince Iddaghji and a certain Judge Nusseibeh. The next day it was removed by municipal workers, who claimed sole jurisdiction over the entire park.” This was despite the permission he had supposedly gotten from the Ministry for Religious Affairs. This could stand as a paradigm interaction of Israel and its Palestinian citizens. One can jump through all the hoops, do all the paperwork required, but if you are Palestinian you can be ignored and shut down at any moment, simply because you do not have the right religion. And your attorney will be able to do nothing for you, because in Israel the legal system is completely skewed against Palestinians.

Thus the location for SWC’s “Museum of Tolerance” had already been contested ground for some time before 2004, and in the opinion of most Palestinians a prime example of Israel’s swaggering and increasingly aggressive religious intolerance. Even the design for the new structure—by the internationally-known architect Frank Gehry—seems to have pleased nobody. (Gehry claims that it represents a bowl of fruit, a strange idea that got little traction in Jerusalem.)[i] Meron Benvenisti complained about its “geometric forms that can’t be any more dissonant to the environment in which it is planned to put this alien object.” Noga Tarnopolsky characterized its design as “the image of a supernatural edifice resembling nothing so much as a crab in the process of hatching a sapphire spider with huge, glassy eyes. It is neither beautiful nor ugly; it is striking and odd.” The management of the Vad Yashem Holocaust memorial were unhappy about the competition in Holocaust tourism (there’s a great comic novel in there somewhere), and the people of Jerusalem, perhaps wary of busloads of ecstatic tourists from southern California, were generally mystified by Heir’s grandiose ideas.

The “Museum of Tolerance” was built on a parking lot that was supposed to be adjacent to Mamilla cemetery. In reality it was built over part of it. This fact became painfully clear to the Wiesenthal Center as workmen began to encounter human remains. (Laying electrical cables and sewer lines probably resulted in digging deeper than had been required for building the parking lot.) At first the presence of human remains was kept secret by the SWC, but it couldn’t have surprised many people in Jerusalem, since they knew that the government had been parceling off the cemetery for some time. What the government had chosen to ignore was how resentful of this Palestinians had become over the years, especially those families with ancestors buried in Mamilla.

Reports vary, but the Wiesenthal Center workers apparently encountered remains of about two hundred people; and a decision was supposedly made to take the remains to another Muslim cemetery and re-inter them there. (What really happened can’t be confirmed because the Wiesenthal Center won’t reveal where they were taken.) The centuries-old remains have been the main sticking point for Hier and the SWC, the seriousness of which can be inferred from their insistence that they “respectfully” re-interred the bones. (If that is true, why won’t they allow journalists to take photos of their final resting place?) If the Wiesenthal Center is simply building something on a parking lot, why were they engaged in digging up human remains? And if the claims of local Muslim families were all lies, why was the Wiesenthal Center, by its own admission, re-interring those same human remains in another Muslim cemetery?

In fact, Hier and the Wiesenthal Center had known for a very long time that they were building their “Center for Human Dignity—Museum of Tolerance.” on top of an historic Muslim cemetery. During the building of the original parking lot back in the 1960, hundreds of graves were disinterred, which caused anguished protests by Muslims; the same thing happened in 1984, when they appealed to UNESCO. Furthermore, as early as 1993 the municipal authorities offered the SWC the parking lot for the building of the project. Both Teddy Kollek and Ehud Olmert had encouraged the Simon Wiesenthal Center to build the current or similar projects at precisely this site, and they above all were in a position to know that the parking lot had been built over part of Mamilla Cemetery. Therefore Kollek, Ehud Olmert and Rabbi Hier knew exactly what lay under the parking lot. In fact, the case can be made that Hier wanted to build on a Muslim cemetery, especially given his apocalyptic ideas about the inevitability of religious war between Muslims and Jews. What could be better for fund-raising than a nice little religious war, with the frenetic Hier leading his faithful troops into the fray?

In 2005, Gideon Suleimani, a Palestinian archeologist, personally warned representatives of the SWC that the area was an antiquities site; at Seleimani’s request, the Israeli Antiquities Authority (IAA) dug test trenches, and it was revealed that hundreds of graves—as many as four layers of graves—were located under the parking lot. One has the sense that Suleimani thought that he could get the Wiesenthal Center to back off if only he could appeal to their common humanity. If so, he didn’t know the group he was dealing with—the SWC continued, in spite of being so advised; and when reports surfaced of their digging up remains and carrying them away surreptitiously in boxes, several Palestinian families in the area decided to act.

The Israeli Antiquities Authority (IAA) then moved to investigate further. Suleimani, who was the Chief Excavator on the project, found that there were “at least 2000 graves,” on at least four levels, with exhumed remains dating back to the 12th century, and the lowest level dating back to the 11th century. But, as Suleimann later testified in an Affidavit, people from the Simon Wiesenthal Center began to put pressure on the IAA, as did interested politicians who were invested in getting the construction done. For their part the IAA, according to Suleimani, tried to get him to stop his excavating and to alter his report. Suleimani also said that “representatives of the SWC started coming by on a daily basis, pressing for the excavation to progress quickly, to prevent the Muslims from stopping the project,” not to mention entrepreneurs whose connection to the site was unclear, but who were now threatening to sue the Israeli Antiquities Authority.

In 2006 a lawsuit was filed that resulted in a court order that temporarily stopped construction. But the pressures were growing on the government. The Israeli Antiquities Authority decided, while defending against the lawsuit, to suppress the evidence their Chief Excavator Gideon Suleimani had uncovered. The High Court of Israel never found out that there were around 2,000 graves under the parking lot, going down four levels, the lowest level of graves dating back to the 11th century. They did not find out about it because the IAA suppressed the evidence that Seluimani collected, and that the IAA had asked him to collect. In an equally cynical move, the IAA apparently lied (according to affidavits by Suleimani) about his finding that only about ten percent of the excavations had been done, instead claiming that ninety percent was done.

What caused these criminal misrepresentations to the High Court, the first of which was suppression of evidence, and the second of which was perjury? For one thing, the Simon Wiesenthal Center had arranged to pay the workers doing the excavation, perhaps a violation of the law, but one that gave the SWC greater leverage over facts on the ground. Secondly, there is some evidence that the “Museum of Tolerance” was part of a larger deal which may not have been strictly legitimate (since it may have involved patronage from politicians). Thirdly, why did the IAA falsify the report they had initiated, and what did they receive in return from the Simon Wiesenthal Center? This critical piece of information can’t be determined until the principals to the controversy can be examined under oath. But given the value of the land involved it is hard to believe that they acted alone, or that they decided to suppress evidence on their own volition.

The High Court allowed construction to continue in October, 2008. Efforts were made to appeal this, since the Israel Antiquities Authority had repressed the only evidence that really counts in this case, which was testimony (and evidence) of the Chief Excavator assigned by the IAA itself, Gideon Suleimani. Despite the suppression of everything he had to say and all the evidence he had obtained, the court refused to open the case again, and insisted that construction must proceed. Exhumation of human remains resumed, and there was nothing that could be done about it. This constituted the exhaustion of appeals within the Israeli system of justice, and made the later appeal to the United Nations inevitable.

Contrary to what the IAA had told the High Court, ninety percent of the area intended for the Wiesenthal Center project still had to be dug up. The Israeli Antiquities Authority claimed that the disinterring of human remains occurring after October, 2008, involved manual removal after documentation so that the remains could be re-interred, but both the Simon Wiesenthal Center and the IAA have engaged in extreme secrecy, and it is impossible to say exactly what they did with the remains. (Needless to say, they refused to consult with appropriate Muslim authorities.) It was reported by the Palestinian News Network that during one week in 2009, some 300 Muslim graves were opened up, and the remains dumped into a mass grave. It is impossible to confirm this, but one can imagine how such reports affect the Palestinians that read them. The apparent collusion of the IAA and the Simon Wiesenthal group, and the extreme secrecy with which they operated—not to mention Rabbi Hier’s violent rhetorical attacks on any who oppose their projects as terrorists, anti-Semites, and “Islamists”—have for the time being removed hope for resolution using any of the instruments of Israeli civil society.

Therefore on 10 February 2010, in New York, Jerusalem, Geneva and Los Angeles, a petition was filed with several United Nations agencies to stop desecration of Mamilla Cemetary by Israeli authorities and the Simon Wiesenthal Center. (Press conferences were held in Geneva, Jersalem and Los Angeles.) The UN agencies to whom this was appealed were the UN Special Rapporteurs on Freedom of Religion and Belief and on Contemporary Forms of Racism; the Independent Expert on Culture; the High Commissioner for Human Rights; and the Director General of UNESCO, the agency that was involved in investigations of previous desecrations of Mamilla Cemetary in 1984. The Petition was filed on behalf of some 60 Palestinians from 15 Jerusalem families whose ancestors, going back to the 12th century, are buried in the cemetery. The filing was done by the Center for Constitutional Rights located in New York, which has made information about the campaign to save Mamilla available at www.mamillacampaign.org.

The press release accompanying the filing said as follows:

“This will be the first known time Palestinian individuals have taken collective action against Israel to bring such an issue before a UN forum and comes after all remedies in Israel were exhausted. The families, NGOs, and attorneys argue the desecration of the cemetery violates international conventions protecting cultural heritage, the manifestation of religious beliefs, and the right to family.” Maria LaHood, a Senior Attorney as CCR, added: “Left with no recourse in Israel, families of people buried in Mamilla cemetery have come together to petition the United Nations to safeguard their international human rights to be free from discrimination, to manifest religious beliefs, and to have their cultural heritage protected. We call on the international community to denounce this shameful desecration of a historic Muslim cemetery in Jerusalem.”

The Center for Constitutional Rights was found in 1966 by lawyers involved in the civil rights movement in the US, and is “committed to the creative use of law as a positive force for social change.” In the international arena, the CCR sees itself as “dedicated to advancing and protecting the rights guaranteed by the United States Constitution and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.” Predictably, the Simon Wiesenthal Center sees the Petition filed by the Center for Constitutional Rights as a scheme to overthrown the authority of the Jewish state, in the same way that the Goldstone Report is seen by them as an unfair use of international law to attack and destroy Israel.

In 2009, in the New York Sun and the Jewish press, the Simon Wiesenthal Center presented “evidence” (in the form of a story from the Palestine Post of 1945) that the Supreme Muslim Council of Jerusalem was planning a business center on the site of the Mamilla Cemetary in 1945. The Palestine Post (precursor to the Jerusalem Post) was violently Labor-Zionist in its politics, and in 1945 was not the best source for anything going on within the Palestinian community, nor the best advocate for its interests. Furthermore, the nominal head of the Muslim Council at that time was the notorious Mohammad Amin al-Husayni, who although out of the country in 1945 was still the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem; and who, besides being one of the worst anti-Semites of the 20th century, was also an enthusiastic propagandist for Hitler and the Nazis. Furthermore, the entire Muslim Council in Jerusalem at that time was rife with cronyism, corruption, and the infighting of various Jerusalem families.

Although it is somewhat dangerous to generalize, it could be said that Al-Husayni and Jerusalem’s Muslim Council in 1945 represented a snapshot of exactly what a great many secular Arab nationalists (not to mention the later Islamic Revival throughout Muslim-majority countries) aimed to get rid of—not merely cronyism, greed and class oppression but also, in the case of Al-Husaybi, European-style fascism and anti-Semitism. The fact that neither Arab nationalism nor the Islamic Revival was entirely successful in doing so does not change the fact that Al-Husayni and the Muslim Council of 1945 engaged in behavior that the best Arab thinkers were irrevocably opposed to. It was for precisely this reason that the Palestinian Liberation Organization was careful to sideline al-Husayni and to downplay his influence in the years before his death in 1974.

In any case, neither al-Husayni nor the Muslim Council of 1945 are authoritative guides to the important cultural and political decisions that face Israel/Palestine in 2010, if for no other reason than that both Palestinian and Jewish communities today are entirely different than they were in 1945, as are their leaders. Sadly but not unsurprisingly, that is difficult for Rabbi Hier and the Simon Wiesenthal Center to accept. For them, there are only “the Palestinians,” much as Christians once referred to that mysterious entity known as “the Jews,” who were supposedly the enemy of Christendom; in the same way, Hier sees all Palestinians as enemies of Israeli Jews.

But Hier’s rhetoric is the self-delusion of the bully, who projects his own bad conscience onto his weaker victim. In reality, there is no they in those organizations and individuals who seek to defend Mamilla Cemetary, but Muslims, Christians and Jews of many different temperaments and affiliations who share an interest in preserving one of the most important and compelling religious sites of the Middle East. But Mamilla Cemetery is also a dispute in which a dominant group of people have the power to hurt and humiliate another and weaker group of people, whose religious sites furthermore receive no protection from the government. And the most dangerous thing in the world is unlimited executive power over aggrieved but powerless people, with the impunity to hurt them and get away with it.

* * *

The Simon Wiesenthal Center is an extreme rightwing Jewish organization, tinged by neo-fascism and with many of the characteristics of a hate organization. It is based almost completely on a vulgarized, pervasive form of religious nationalism. Its vision for Israel is consistent with the neo-fascist Jabotinsky tendency within Zionism that was modeled on Italian fascism, and it also promotes the Likudnik doctrine that Judaism itself has no practical or demographic existence separate from Israel. The SWC supports the neo-con belief in permanent war in the Middle East, and it engages in the vigorous dissemination of religious bigotry against Muslims in the US. It portrays anti-Semitism as worse than it is, partly for fund-raising purposes and partly to establish an imagined victim status. It similarly uses the Holocaust both to discourage criticism of Israel and to justify Israel’s own violence, aggressively insisting that every criticism of Israel is really aimed at destroying the Jewish people. Above all, the SWC is a dangerous cultural force that seeks religious war as the standard for religious authenticity.

What kind of people make up the “400,000 member-families” the SWC claims as supporters in southern California and the US? If the SWC does indeed have that many families that contribute annually, that makes it very much a mass organization, which means that it must be taken seriously. One has the sense that Hier’s followers are primarily lower (and middle) middle-class people, perhaps small businesspersons and conservative professionals who reject Judaism’s traditional concern for social justice, whose level of cultural literacy is not particularly high, and who are attracted to the us-against-them aggression of religious nationalism. The frenetic and frequently duplicitous advocacy emanating from the Simon Wiesenthal Center has a pronounced middlebrow flavor—that is, it is pretentious, self-congratulatory and sometimes unintentionally funny. (Last year an e-mailed Passover invitation to SWC members billed Rabbis Marvin Hier and Abraham Cooper as “featured Scholars-in-Residence at the Arizona Biltmore Hotel and Spa.”) Above all, the “member-families” of the Simon Wiesenthal Center are incessantly indoctrinated with the idea that Israel—and the Center itself—never make mistakes and are never at fault, because criticisms of them are invariably the work of anti-Semites.

The Wiesenthal Center’s exaggerations and fabrications regarding anti-Semitism and anti-Israeli attitudes are well-known. The SWC claimed that the 2002 World Social Forum in Mumbai was ‘hi-jacked by anti-Israel and anti-American forces.’ This was completely untrue, as Jewish peace activist Cecilie Surasky, who was in attendance, later testified. (The SWC also claimed in the Jerusalem Post to be ‘the only Jewish NGO’ at Mumbai, whereas in reality there were several, including Jewish Voice for Peace, with which Surasky is affiliated.) The Wiesenthal Center also engaged off a strenuous campaign to portray Hugo Chavez as an anti-Semite, which they attempted to do by strategically doctoring a quote by Chavez. This interventionist attitude shouldn’t surprise us—the Wiesenthal Center once presented Jeanne Kilpatrick, a US diplomatic defender of the murderous Pinochet regime in Chile, with its Humanitarian of the Year Award. (They also honored such noted humanitarians as Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and Robert Murdoch.)

The Wiesenthal Center also has the unenviable distinction of involvement in one of the worst journalistic blunders of modern times. In the late spring of 2006, Douglas Kelly, editor of the National Post, a Canadian newspaper, became aware of an item in a column by Iranian exile Amir Taheri, indicating that the Iranian Parliament might require Jews to wear yellow stars. A Post editor contacted the Simon Wiesenthal Center, thinking it was a legitimate human rights agency. Both Rabbi Marvin Hier and Rabbi Abraham Cooper of the SWC excitedly insisted to anybody that would listen, both verbally and in an email to the Post, that the tale was “absolutely true.” The Post went ahead with the story on Page One, but Taheri was a neo-con plant, and the story was a fabrication.

Within days, Post editor Kelly was obliged to make a long and detailed apology to his readers. He referred directly to the Post’s contact with both Cooper and Hier at the Wiesenthal Center, mentioning pointedly that they had both, on separate occasions, confirmed the story. The implication of having been consciously betrayed by the Wiesenthal Center was quite clear. For Hier and Cooper, however, it was a big victory—they’d been able to place a great piece of propaganda on Page One of a large daily newspaper, while managing to make the connection between Nazis and Iranians, a staple theme of the SWC.

The Wiesenthal Center is silent on the rise of fascism in Israel in 2010, probably because the Center’s own tactics are borrowed from classical fascism, such as their tireless dissemination of religious bigotry. Their more overt activity in this area involves their promotion and showing of the violently anti-Muslim film The Third Jihad, which was a project of the Clarion Fund, a shadowy rightwing Zionist operation that produced Obsession: Radical Islam’s War with the West. According to recent investigative reporting by Pam Martens appearing in Counterpunch, the Clarion Fund’s main financial supporters—Donor Capital Fund and Donors Trust—are managed by people who have a long association with Charles G. Koch, billionaire donor to the Tea Party.

The Simon Wiesenthal Center also cooperated with Aish HaTorah, a extremist rightwing Jewish group that Atlantic Magazine’s pro-Israel pundit Jeffrey Goldberg has referred to as “just about the most fundamentalist movement in Judaism today,”[ii] a group that has strong ties to the racist settlers in Israel’s occupied territories. Before the election of 2008, the Clarion Fund functioned as a loosely-constituted front group in America for Aish HaTorah, whose operatives had produced a film in 2003 alleging Palestinian incitement against Israel and Jews. Then, in the heady post-9/11 atmosphere, the Clarion Fund went ahead to produce Obsession, and then The Third Jihad, both wildly inflammatory propaganda films that were supposedly about a minority of “radical” Muslims, but which made fantastic allegations about mainstream Muslims organizations in the US such as the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), alleging them to be part of a hostile international plot to infiltrate and take over America.

In the spring of 2009, the Clarion Fund released The Third Jihad, with the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles enthusiastically opting to sponsor its West Coast premiere on May 17th, 2009, thereby making it a major event in their spring calendar. The Wiesenthal premiere was co-sponsored by the American Freedom Alliance, an unsavory far-right group that was unabashedly Islamophobic and pro-torture (books by John Yoo and Marc Thiessen were on sale at their website). The Washington D.C. opening of The Third Jihad, which occurred at the same time as the SWC event in Los Angeles, was co-sponsored by the International Free Press Society, another unsavory rightwing group, this one authentically neo-fascist. Two months before the Washington Premiere, the IFPS had been involved in publicizing and promoting Geert Wilders, the well-known Dutch neo-fascist with links to several far-right parties in Europe.

The climax of The Third Jihad was a supposed Federal Bureau of Investigation discovery of a subversive document—a “Grand Jihad Manifesto”—outlining a Muslim plot to take over America. Why the FBI wasn’t out making arrests, if the plot violated any laws, was left unanswered. The document was depicted as being so sensitive it couldn’t be released to the general public, perhaps because it would demoralize the nation. (Or perhaps, on the other hand, it really doesn’t exist.) “The 15-page document outlines goals and strategies for the infiltration and domination of America from within,” The Third Jihad insists. “Among the strategies discussed is the establishment of ‘moderate’ groups, mosques and Islamic centers across North America in an effort to strategically position Islam so that it might weaken western culture and promote the implementation of Sharia Law.” (The resemblance of the alleged secret “Grand Jihad Manifesto” to the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” was not lost on Jewish progressives.)

The Wiesenthal Center’s cooperation with Aish HaTorah, the group behind the Clarion Fund, is problematical for other reasons. Experts on cults suggest that Aish HaTorah has either become a cult or developed profoundly cult-like behavior. Some information about these concerns—including the first-person account of a Jewish mother whose son was indoctrinated—appears on the website of the Ross A. Rick Institute, which monitors cult behavior. Ross writes that cult-like Orthodox Jewish groups like “Aish HaTorah and Ohr Somayach have generated serious and repeated complaints from Jewish families, including Orthodox Jewish families….Aish/Ohr has repeatedly been accused of ‘brainwashing’ American Jewish tourists in Israel. These are typically young people that started out on vacation and were instead sucked into Aish/Ohr. These recruits then often gave up school, work, previously set goals and relationships to study at times for years with Aish/Ohr and stayed in Israel.”

Ross continues: “Recruiting was often done at the Western Wall and began with a simple invitation to a dinner or ‘Shabbat.’ Families should be aware of all this before sending their kids to Israel for any programs or vacations….Some of the most hateful and nasty emails I have ever received from any group mentioned on the Ross Institute database have been from Aish and Ohr participants, which have denounced other Jews (e.g. Reform and Conservative) and have expressed often extreme, bigoted and even violent sentiments.” Like many cults, Aish HaTorah uses various excerpts from holy books to rationalize coercive or violent behavior by leaders.

At present Aish HaTorah is also little more than an extension of the worldwide Israeli propaganda effort. People associated with Aish Hatorah devised the Hasbara Fellowships, which invite (or lure) young people to Israel, indoctrinate them, and send them back to fight “the enemies of Israel.” Honest Reporting, which claims to be the world’s largest pro-Israel media organization, is also a product of Aish HaTorah—its claimed 150,000 members worldwide that report on journalism they believe to be “anti-Israel.” Aish HaTorah is also known to partner with a national US Jewish fraternity to run a three-week tour of Israel trip for their undergraduate members, who then receive “education” from the group. Aish HaTorah runs a plethora of groups and seminars that purport to teach “core values” of Judaism, but which actually teach a fanatical, apocalyptic version of rightwing religious Zionism. For its leaders, the final goal of life is the death or defeat of Palestinians and Arabs. In some interviews, Aish HaTorah participants have made statements that suggest that they believe that it is God’s will that the Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem be destroyed—an eventuality that would, of course, spark a major religious conflagration.

It is this background of incessant Islamophobia and extremely aggressive religious nationalism that must be kept in mind when considering the Wiesenthal Center’s motivation for building the “Center for Human Dignity—Museum of Tolerance.” Rabbi Hier and the SWC knew very well about the bodies buried under the parking lot at Mamilla Cemetery in Jerusalem. They had reportedly contemplated buying the site since at least 1993; they have been repeatedly warned that the site was built over a historic Muslim cemetery; and they have repeatedly refused suggestions of both Muslims and Jews to build somewhere else. Leaders of the Simon Wiesenthal Center cannot say that they did not know the potential for conflict in their choice. At its core the conflict over Mamilla Cemetery is, besides its potential for sparking religious conflict, one more attempt by rightwing Zionists to redefine Judaism as a religion that can somehow redeem the Holocaust by hurting and humiliating Palestinians.

Words like “Tolerance” and “Dignity” from the liberal and social-democratic past of European Jewry are gleefully flaunted by the SWC, but are used in the same way that Stalinists used words such as “democratic“ or “liberation,” to disguise the real nature of Stalinism. There is nothing “ironic” about the use of such words, as many liberal and religious-liberty groups believe, because this use of language it is a ploy, a part of SWC strategy; it serves the main function of deliberate Orwellian language, which is to communicate contempt for logic and to distract with its absurdity. Finally, it is an expression of raw illegitimate power, saying in effect to the Palestinians: “We control everything, even language. If we say that black is white, we will force you to accept it, because we have the power to humiliate and kill you.” Finally, like most extremist rightwing movements, people in the leadership of the Wiesenthal Center will lie and misrepresent things anytime they think they can get away with it.

The Mamilla Cemetery site was chosen for a reason. The Simon Wiesenthal Center’s real objective in building the “Center for Human Dignity—Museum of Tolerance” in Jerusalem is almost surely to ignite religious conflict, and ultimately religious war in the region. It is this pathological aggression that makes the Simon Wiesenthal Center, and its fundamentalist allies like Aish HaTorah, so dangerous. The fight over Mamilla Cemetery is a dispute in which Rabbi Hier, the very incarnation of the charismatic but morally corrupt religious fanatic, seeks to invent a new Judaism that, like medieval Christianity, defines itself by its ability to wound and torment the underdog. As American neo-conservatives made clear in their famous letter to Netanyahu in 1996, the American empire they seek depends on a state of permanent war in the Middle East. By all appearances, the Simon Wiesenthal Center aspires to be a pivotal part of this approaching religious war.

Lawrence Swaim is executive director of the Interfaith Freedom Foundation.

Notes.

[i] Gehry latter pulled out of the project. In November, 2010, Jewish Voice for Peace announced that Gehry had joined a group of theatre professionals and people in the arts that were boycotting the Ariel performance center in the West Bank.

[ii] Ben Harris, “Rabbi Noah Wienberg, Founder of Aish HaTorah, Dies,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, 6 Feb. 2009.

(This article is based on a column written for InFocus News, the national Muslim newspaper.)

U.S. Should Push for Democracy in Egypt

James M. Dorsey
World Politics Review
19 Nov 2010

Human rights were glaringly absent from U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's agenda when she recently met with Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit ahead of Egypt's Nov. 28 parliamentary elections. The silence is noteworthy, given Cairo's suppression of the political opposition in advance of the elections as well as its overall dismal human rights record.

The Obama administration fears that Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak will respond to criticism by withdrawing both political support for the stumbling Israeli-Palestinian peace process and logistical support for U.S. military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. The administration is also concerned that criticism would boost the Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt's popular Islamist opposition group. Finally, should Egypt simply reject the criticism, it could paint President Barack Obama as too weak to influence one of the United States' closest allies and a major recipient of U.S. aid.

Apparently testing the waters, State Department spokesman P. J. Crowley called on Egypt in a written statement to allow peaceful political gatherings and open media coverage, and to admit international election observers. Egypt immediately rejected the call, saying it has a system of judges and other safeguards in place to monitor the fairness of the elections and that the government has issued guidelines for free and fair media coverage of the campaign.

To be sure, repression of the opposition, intimidation and control of the media, and electoral restrictions virtually guarantee that Mubarak's ruling National Democratic Party will win the elections. But for the U.S., the long-term risks of being perceived as perpetuating authoritarian rule in Egypt and elsewhere in the Arab world may well outweigh the short-term benefits of turning a blind eye to flagrant human-rights violations and measures that stymie democratic development.

The Obama administration's concerns appear rooted more in a long-standing U.S. reluctance to rock the boat in a volatile, geostrategically crucial part of the world than in a realistic cost-benefit analysis. In fact, the United States may have more leverage than administration officials assume.

Egypt has a vested interest in continued support of U.S. policy in the greater Middle East. And by backtracking on support for either the Israeli-Palestinian peace process or logistical and intelligence assistance for U.S. military operations in the region, Egypt would risk the disfavor of the U.S. Congress, which signs off on Egypt's substantial annual aid package. The Egyptian government uses much of that aid to strengthen its domestic security and its ability to confront domestic popular movements. Jeopardizing Washington's largesse could spark concern in the Egyptian military over the future of its prerogatives, at a time when speculation about who will succeed Mubarak is already raising concerns over continuity in Cairo. The Egyptians are also unlikely to risk their success earlier this year in getting USAID to fund only nongovernmental organizations that are officially recognized and authorized by the government, ensuring that Cairo controls all U.S. democracy and human-rights assistance to Egyptian NGOs.

Fears that Egypt's Islamists would benefit from a U.S. focus on democracy and human rights, though valid, are also exaggerated. Electoral conditions for the Muslim Brotherhood have significantly deteriorated since the 2005 elections. Egypt's state of emergency has been extended, and constitutional amendments were enacted to eliminate full judicial supervision of elections and outlaw political activity involving a "religious point of reference." U.S. criticism of such authoritarian measures would indeed echo and bolster the Brotherhood's own denunciations of the regime. Moreover, the Islamists would probably perform well in a more open electoral environment that was not designed to stymie the regime's opponents. But the Brotherhood has been substantially weakened, with many of its leaders in prison, one-quarter of its candidates barred from standing as candidates and its main electoral slogan -- "Islam is the solution" -- declared illegal. So U.S. pressure on Cairo is unlikely to result in any immediate gains.

In the Obama administration's calculations, this month's elections are likely to be of only moderate importance. Looming large in the background are Egypt's presidential elections scheduled for next year, which could potentially change the country's political landscape. Speculation is rife about whether Mubarak, who is 82 and ailing, will run for a sixth six-year term or whether he will instead push his son Gamal or his intelligence chief Omar Sulaiman into office. If Mubarak does opt for re-election, few believe that he would be able to serve another full term.

Despite the dynastic stigma that Gamal Mubarak would bear in the event he did emerge as Egypt's next head of state, his presidency would constitute a break in Egypt's post-revolution tradition of having military leaders run the government. Some officials fear that a focus on democracy and human rights now would complicate things later for Gamal, who would not enjoy the kind of support from the military that his father has.

Yet, that may be one reason why this is the right time to criticize Egypt's human rights record and its stifling of democracy. By publicly focusing on the issue, Obama would shape debate in Egypt prior to a changing of the guard along the Nile, encouraging democracy and human-rights activists and altering a widespread perception in Egypt and the rest of the Arab world that the United States favors authoritarian rule.

Instead of invoking threats or sanctions if Egypt fails to clean up its act, Obama could avoid setting himself up for failure as well as criticism that he is unable to impose his will by taking a page from former President George W. Bush's playbook. By positioning his statements as a policy goal to be achieved over time, Obama, like Bush, would shape debate in Egypt, encourage activists and influence perceptions of the United States -- all of which would serve long-term U.S. interests.

All in all, the United States has more to gain by nudging the Egyptian and Arab debate toward an embrace of democracy and human rights -- and more to lose by maintaining a policy that so far has primarily identified Washington with repressive, corrupt regimes, significantly tarnishing its image.

James M. Dorsey, a former Wall Street Journal foreign correspondent, writes about ethnic and religious conflict.

The Last Crusade

By Gerald Flurry
theTrumpet.com - Understand Your World
From the January 2011 Trumpet Print Edition »

Most people think the crusades for Jerusalem are a thing of the past—over forever. They are wrong. Preparations are being made for a final crusade, and it will be the bloodiest of all! The exceedingly good news is this: The world will never again see a bloody crusade for Jerusalem. And nothing is more important than your understanding why!

The Crusades were a series of Roman Catholic “holy” wars to wrest control of the Holy Land from Muslims. They produced some of the bloodiest battles in history.

Did you ever wonder how the Catholics reconcile that “holy” slaughter with the Bible, which states, “Thou shalt not kill”? Or how they can read the Sermon on the Mount and still lead the religious world in spilling rivers of blood?

They are called the Christian Crusades. That label itself is a deception. They were primarily Catholic Crusades. Other Christian religions have their problems, but let’s not blame them for what the Catholics did—and will do.

This last crusade is not just about the evils of Catholicism; it’s also about evils of other nations and religions. Some background will help us understand.

Pope Urban II

In a.d. 622, Catholics fought and were defeated in a crusade against the Persians and the Jews. Some 60,000 Catholics were killed, and 35,000 enslaved. The fall of Jerusalem left the Catholic world shocked and mourning.

This war left Catholics bitter against the Jews for the role they played in the war. Much anti-Semitism began because of it.

Some historians consider this the First Crusade. But the Crusades we best remember came later, beginning in the 11th century.

Pope Urban ii unleashed a savage Catholic army and started these later Crusades. This “righteous” army marched 3,000 miles to conquer the Holy Land.

Here is an excerpt from the book Crusades, by Terry Jones and Alan Ereira, which became a bbc television series: “By summoning an army under the banner of the Cross, the pope was extending the church’s mantle over all Christendom. This was the idea at the very heart of the revolutionary papacy; in place of separate local churches at the center of discreet communities, there was to be one overarching church, ruled by one overarching pope. The Crusade was to be its expression and its instrument” (emphasis mine throughout).

They state that this thinking was at the heart of the papacy. The popes wanted to rule any church called Christian. Through the Holy Roman Empire, they also tried repeatedly to rule most of the world. They have succeeded six times and are about to succeed again, for the last time, according to Bible prophecy. (Request our free booklet Germany and the Holy Roman Empire.)

The Protestant churches are prophesied to be brought back into the Catholic Church (Isaiah 47). Mostly this will be done through bloodshed. Remember, this wish to rule all Christianity is at “the very heart of the revolutionary papacy.” That means this philosophy has motivated them for nearly 2,000 years. And they still believe violent and bloody crusades are righteous. Have they ever truly repented of this condemning history? The answer is no.

History proves the Catholic Church to be one of the most militant institutions ever. Catholic leaders do not believe in a democratic philosophy. They have often “converted” people by the sword. And yet, this world seems unwilling to hold them accountable for their war crimes.

Modern historians have shown how closely they worked with the Nazis. It was through the Catholic Church that most of the leading Nazis escaped after World War ii. We have shown in past articles how well documented that history is; no one should doubt it. (Read The Unholy Trinity by Mark Aarons and John Loftus, available at bookstores.)

Doesn’t that crime reveal that the Catholics were deeply involved with the Nazi war machine?

This subject is too important to let our emotions stand in the way, because the worst is yet to come!

The last crusade will be the supreme inquisition of all history. It is time we understood the bloody history of the Crusades and let it be a warning!

The world seems almost unaware of these monstrous crimes.

The Jones and Ereira book continues, “Urban’s army would also rescue Jerusalem, the spiritual (and therefore the physical) center of the universe. He hoped that the redeemed Jerusalem would be directly ruled by the church.

“Every man who enrolled for the struggle must mark himself out by wearing a cross and, most important, vow to continue on his way until he reached Jerusalem.

“Urban’s method of raising this army was completely original; as well as pay, he could offer paradise—anyone who took part had all their sins forgiven. ‘Whoever for devotion alone, not to gain honor or money, goes to Jerusalem to liberate the church of God can substitute this journey for all penance.’”

Any Bible student ought to know that only God can offer paradise and forgive sins. But that is the big problem with most Christians: They don’t believe and obey the Bible!

The whole world, including the religious world, is deceived (Revelation 12:9). Enormous problems like the Crusades will continue until we confront our own deception.

Jones and Ereira conclude, “By saying that carrying out a military/political enterprise would make you a better person, wiping out past sins, Urban had invented a way by which every person could internalize papal policy. Fighting in the pope’s cause was not only an obligation, it made you righteous. With that one idea, mass political action was launched. With that one idea, ideology was born. With that one idea, the Crusade was set in motion. Urban did not understand what he had done.”

This pope certainly did not know what he had done. What he began led to a number of indescribably brutal wars between Catholics and Muslims.

The real tragedy is that the world, like Pope Urban, still doesn’t understand what he did, and what the Catholic Church continues to do. Their real beliefs surface when they gain power. Today, they are building the greatest power they have ever had. If you understand their history, their future is very predictable—far more than most historians believe. Add Bible prophecy to that equation and you will see that this world faces a frightening specter.

Thankfully, all of that trouble is a sign tied directly to an imminent paradise that will unite all religious and secular movements forever! Our free literature will prove that statement to any person who wants to understand.

Fighting on Both Sides

The Crusades created rivers of blood. And it was all done in the name of God. Of course, the Muslims responded with massive slaughters against the Crusaders, also in the name of God. Does it make any sense for God to be fighting on both sides? Or are these warring factions just giving our God of love a bloody reputation?

Jerusalem is considered a holy place by both religions. It is indeed considered the “center of the universe” to Catholics. They believe conquering Jerusalem makes them righteous. That has been their ideology from the beginning. It is still true today. The fruits are there to prove it. The Bible says that “by their fruits you shall know them.” They believe in war as an instrument to achieve their religious goals.

“The following morning the Crusaders re-entered the al-Aqsa Mosque and slaughtered every Muslim sheltering there. No one knows how many died; the Muslim chronicler reports 70,000. One of the Crusaders reports picking his way through a mess of blood and bodies more than knee-deep” (ibid.). This is only one episode of many. People around the world have seen pictures of this very mosque.

How many Muslims still remember the history of this mosque being knee-deep in Arab blood? And all of this savagery supposedly made Catholics righteous! A warrior who burned Arab babies in the Crusade was considered worthy to gain glory for all eternity! Does this really make sense to a sound mind?

“But killing, the pope now declared, need not be a sin after all. It depended on who you killed. In fact, if you killed the enemies of Christ, killing did not require penance—it was the penance. Holy slaughter could be as effective a devotional activity as prayer, or fasting, or pilgrimage …” (ibid.).

The pope said, “Now we are proposing that you should fight wars which contain the glorious reward of martyrdom, in which you can gain the title of present and eternal glory ….”

“The pope had also pointed out the importance of rescuing Jerusalem from the infidel. He seems to have suggested that ‘rescue’ meant ‘seize and keep’” (ibid.).

The pope also said, “Take the road to the Holy Sepulcher, rescue that land from a dreadful race and rule over it yourselves.”

Muslim and Jewish inhabitants of Jerusalem were slaughtered like pigs. And all of this was done by Catholics who presumably became more righteous in the process.

Were these killers true Christians? A true Christian is one who follows Christ. If we look in the Gospels, Christ tells us to love our enemies, even die for them—not kill them!

The memory of such horrendous massacres still lives in the minds of many Arabs.

Those memories have provoked Arabs and Jews to massacre Catholics throughout history in a similar manner—all in the name of religion.

King Peter’s Crusade

King Peter launched his crusade from the little Mediterranean island of Cyprus, which was captured by Catholic Crusaders during the Third Crusade. Here is what Steven Runciman wrote about King Peter’s Crusade in A History of the Crusades: “King Peter arrived at Rhodes early in the month, and on the 25th the whole Cypriot fleet sailed into the harbor, 108 vessels in all, galleys, transports, merchant ships and light skiffs. With the great galleys of the Venetians and those provided by the Hospital, the armada numbered 165 ships. They carried a full complement of men, with ample horses, provisions and arms. Not since the Third Crusade had a proportionate expedition set out for the Holy War ….

“During the Friday night there was a fierce Muslim counterattack through one of the southern gates, which the Christians in their excitement had burned down. It was beaten off; and by the Saturday afternoon, all Alexandria was in the Crusaders’ hands.

“The victory was celebrated with unparalleled savagery. Two and a half centuries of holy warfare had taught the Crusaders nothing of humanity. The massacres were only equaled by those of Jerusalem in 1099 and Constantinople in 1204. The Muslims had not been so ferocious at Antioch or at Acre. Alexandria’s wealth had been phenomenal; and the victors were maddened at the sight of so much booty. They spared no one. The native Christians and the Jews suffered as much as the Muslims; and even the European merchants settled in the city saw their factories and storehouses ruthlessly looted. Mosques and tombs were raided and their ornaments stolen or destroyed; churches too were sacked, though a gallant crippled Coptic lady managed to save some of the treasures of her sect at the sacrifice of her private fortune. Houses were entered, and householders who did not immediately hand over all their possessions were slaughtered with their families. Some 5,000 prisoners, Christians and Jews as well as Muslims, were taken to be sold as slaves. A long line of horses, asses and camels carried the loot to the ships in the harbor and there having performed their task were killed. The whole city stank with the odor of human and animal corpses.”

This author said, “The Crusades were the pope’s work.” The Crusade philosophy has made Catholic popes the bloodiest religious leaders ever!

Still, most people try to hide from this frightening reality. That is the main reason why the worst Catholic crusade is yet to come. Mankind refuses to believe the truth and believe God.

The world so quickly forgets. And because they do, the massive bloodshed continues. The Catholics did these appalling, despicable deeds before the world. But has anyone heard them repent before the world?

There is good news: Over a hundred Bible prophecies tell us that Jesus Christ will personally stop the next crusade! Sadly, however, that will only occur after the worst suffering ever on this Earth (Daniel 12:1; Matthew 24:21-22).

Cyprus

More than one crusade has been launched from Cyprus. Will we see the last crusade launched from there as well? Is history about to repeat itself?

Turkey, just north of Cyprus, has been a strong member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (nato) for many years. Yet, a German-led European Union has rejected it from joining the EU—even though it has been applying since 1963, when there were only six members! Twenty-one new countries have joined since then. But that number is about to be reduced dramatically.

Why has the EU consistently rejected Turkey? Is it because Turkey is predominantly Islamic?

The EU is prophesied to be ultimately comprised of 10 kings ruling 10 nations, or groups of nations, dominated by Catholicism. Already the EU is being called the Holy Roman Empire. It has traditionally been the enemy of the Muslims.

Cyprus is now a member of the EU. Are European leaders already thinking about Cyprus as a launching pad from which to protect their Jerusalem interests?

You can be certain that they are thinking about how to protect the holy places in and around Jerusalem. The Europeans have thought like this for almost 2,000 years!

There is a real crisis in Cyprus today. Some people fear a war between Greece and Turkey, who share the rule of this island. Greece became the 10th member state of the EU in 1981, and Russia has already sold missiles to Greece, whose intention is to bully Turkey with them.

At a conference in Cyprus in July 2001, Dr. Osman Metin Ozturk explained that while EU membership of Cyprus would support the interests of Greece and the EU, it would stall U.S. and nato interests.

Back in 1998, before Cyprus became an EU member, Christopher Lockwood, the Daily Telegraph’s diplomatic editor in Nicosia, wrote, “The EU has maneuvered itself into a position where it may soon have to take a bitterly divided island, with a propensity for violence and even war, into its bosom.

“It has poisoned relations with Turkey, a crucial nato ally; made a solution to the Cyprus problem harder to achieve than ever …” (March 30, 1998).

Today, Turkey is allying itself with Iran.

Why would Europe risk such serious problems, even warfare, over this tiny island?

Even the people building the EU don’t fully understand what is happening. There is a spirit and force behind these events that the world does not see. “And I saw one of his heads as it were wounded to death; and his deadly wound was healed: and all the world wondered after the beast. And they worshipped the dragon which gave power unto the beast: and they worshipped the beast, saying, Who is like unto the beast? who is able to make war with him? And there was given unto him a mouth speaking great things and blasphemies; and power was given unto him to continue forty and two months” (Revelation 13:3-5).

If people truly understood what is happening in Europe, they would be trembling in fear.

Is there a final crusade planned to be launched into the Middle East from Cyprus? Is that why the EU was willing to take a dangerously divided little island as a member? It would not be the first crusade launched from Cyprus!

According to biblical prophecy, the European beast power will hold power for 3½ years, and then Christ will destroy that evil empire forever! We are entering the worst times ever, but they will lead into the best news we could ever receive!

The King of the South

One of the main tourist attractions in Jordan is the Crusader castles. The Catholics built most of them to war against the Muslims and control Jerusalem. These castles are stark reminders of the bloody past—and a far bloodier future!

The Jews have Jerusalem now. But not for long. Both Muslims and Catholics have designs for Jerusalem. These two great powers are about to clash again—go head to head in the final crusade over Jerusalem!

In 1997, Iran conducted major war games code-named “Road to Jerusalem.” Between 150,000 and 500,000 soldiers participated. Iran pours vast resources into supporting the terrorist groups bordering the Jewish state. Hamas and Hezbollah strongholds to Israel’s west and north are awash in Iranian money and weapons. Israeli sources recently revealed that Egyptian efforts to prevent aid from reaching Hamas in the Gaza Strip have broken down, and that Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps has smuggled “record funds” to the radical Palestinian group. Iran and Syria have provided Hezbollah tens of thousands of rockets and missiles. Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps has stepped up its training of Hezbollah’s soldiers. It has built a set of underground tunnels and an underground telecommunications network for the terrorist group.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad personally visited southern Lebanon in October. He was welcomed like a superstar—“showered with rice and rose petals by tens of thousands of Hezbollah supporters who lined the streets and waved Iranian flags as his motorcade made its way from the airport to the presidential palace,” the Sydney Morning Herald reported (Oct. 13, 2010). Speaking to a raucously supportive crowd just two miles from Israel’s border, he said, “The whole world knows that the Zionists are going to disappear. The occupying Zionists today have no choice but to accept reality and go back to their countries of origin.” He called Lebanon the “focus point of resistance” against the Jews and stressed Iran’s commitment to “full liberation of occupied territory in Lebanon, Syria and Palestine.”

What could be more provocative? Iran is advertising its strategy to the world. It knows that conquering Jerusalem would help it unite the Arab world. Few people understand this Muslim passion for Jerusalem and its holy sites! These are the kind of passions that cause war!

Iran will lead what the Bible calls “the king of the south” (Daniel 11:40). This power will be comprised of the radical Islamic movement. Iran is working fiercely to lead this radically militant religion.

Iran has virtually destroyed the peace process single-handedly. But still, the world continues to talk about peace. Iran and radical Islam don’t want peace, and words won’t deter them.

This past September, one day after Israeli and Palestinian leaders agreed to resume talks on a U.S.-backed peace deal, Ahmadinejad urged Palestinians not to abandon their armed struggle against the Jews.

The occasion was Quds Day—or Jerusalem Day—Iran’s annual display of support for the Palestinian cause and the “liberation of Jerusalem.” Started in 1979 by Ayatollah Khomeini, Jerusalem Day is an occasion for Iran and its supporters to denounce Israel and call for its destruction, praise terrorism and condemn the peace process.

This past year, Ahmadinejad emphasized the global significance of the festival. The Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center reported that “according to Ahmadinejad, the issue of Jerusalem is not limited to one geographic area; it is not just a Palestinian issue and it is, in fact, ‘even greater than the issue of Islam.’”

Joseph de Courcy once wrote in the Islamic Affairs Analyst, “Subscribers should be in absolutely no doubt about this. From Iran’s support for subversion in Bahrain, through its improving ties with Egypt, its support for Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Islamist revolutionaries in Khartoum, to its close strategic alliance with Moscow, everything has the same ultimate purpose: the liberation of Jerusalem from under the Zionist yoke.”

The U.S. has tried to isolate Iran. Almost no other nation supports America. This attempt has failed. The U.S. is fighting against Bible prophecy.

Iran is about to have nuclear bombs. Its leaders believe America can be neutralized by terrorism—perhaps nuclear terrorism.

“We know but one word: struggle, struggle. Jihad, jihad, jihad,” Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat said in 1996. “When we stop our intifada, when we stop our revolution, we go to the greater jihad, the jihad of the independent Palestinian state with its capital Jerusalem.”

Jihad is the Arab cry for holy war. They will get their war. But it will not be holy. It will lead to the worst suffering this planet has ever experienced!

Final Crusade Prophesied

“And at the time of the end shall the king of the south push at him: and the king of the north shall come against him like a whirlwind, with chariots, and with horsemen, and with many ships [perhaps from Cyprus]; and he shall enter into the countries, and shall overflow and pass over” (Daniel 11:40). This king of the south is the Iran-led radical Muslims. They are strong and are pushing others around in the Middle East.

Soon they will push at the king of the north, the so-called Holy Roman Empire—the same religious power that was behind the Crusades. And that push will surely revolve around Jerusalem.

Just 20 years ago, nobody could have even imagined two world powers coming out of the Middle East and Europe. But God knew exactly what would happen. Nobody but God could have inspired these prophecies. Everybody can see these two great powers today.

Just look at what is happening in Europe—and has been for years. Pope John Paul ii worked feverishly to revive the Holy Roman Empire. Twenty-nine years ago, in Spain, Nov. 9, 1981, he said this: “It can be said that the European identity is not understandable without Christianity and that it is precisely in Christianity that are found those common roots by which the Continent has seen its civilization mature: its culture, its dynamism, its activity, its capacity for constructive expansion in other continents as well; in a word, all that makes up its glory. …

“Find yourself again. Be yourself. Discover your origins, revive your roots. Return to those authentic values which made your history a glorious one and your presence so beneficent in the other continents.”

During the Inquisition, over 50 million innocent people were killed in the name of “Christianity”! That’s right—50 million! Was that history glorious? And you can add many millions more as victims of the Holy Roman Empire. “Discover your origins, revive your roots. Return to those authentic values which made your history a glorious one”? Those “origins” and “roots” and that “history” caused many millions of people to die!

In Revelation 17, God paints a vivid picture of a great church as a lavishly dressed harlot, holding sway over the nations. God sees things as they truly are! Let’s look at God’s view: “And I saw the woman drunken with the blood of the saints, and with the blood of the martyrs of Jesus: and when I saw her, I wondered with great admiration” (Revelation 17:6). God sees this lady “drunken” on the blood of the saints! Is killing God’s saints “glorious”?

The Holy Roman Empire will come at the king of the south like a whirlwind. Will there be a surprise attack from Cyprus? Will we see the final crusade launched from there? A whirlwind comes suddenly. So it doesn’t appear the attack will be launched from Western Europe.

We must understand the Holy Roman Empire and the Crusades to understand the Catholics’ passion for Jerusalem. They have a long history of spilling rivers of blood over Jerusalem.

Notice what their first action is after they are victorious. “He shall enter also into the glorious land, and many countries shall be overthrown: but these shall escape out of his hand, even Edom, and Moab, and the chief of the children of Ammon” (Daniel 11:41). This army “enters” into the glorious land, or the Holy Land. The Hebrew indicates this is a peaceful entry—not forced.

The Jews appear to invite them in as peacekeepers. But this leads to a great double-cross, prophesied in Ezekiel chapter 23. (Request our free booklet Ezekiel: The End-Time Prophet.)

The Jews should remember the history of the violence and bloodshed by the Crusaders. Then perhaps they would choose differently.

“He shall stretch forth his hand also upon the countries: and the land of Egypt shall not escape. But he shall have power over the treasures of gold and of silver, and over all the precious things of Egypt: and the Libyans and the Ethiopians shall be at his steps” (Daniel 11:42-43). Many other countries are going to fall to this great power too.

Twice it mentions that Egypt will not escape. For over three decades, Egypt has been the most moderate nation in the Middle East. Iran has pushed Egypt toward its own radical camp. That is because Egypt fears terrorism and its own radical Muslims. We have seen that happen before our eyes, just as God prophesied it would!

The Good News

At that point in prophecy, the Holy Roman Empire will face disaster. “But tidings out of the east and out of the north shall trouble him: therefore he shall go forth with great fury to destroy, and utterly to make away many” (verse 44). The Russians and Chinese will prepare for war with Europe. The Europeans will see it happening and strike first. They will, however, be defeated.

“And he shall plant the tabernacles of his palace between the seas in the glorious holy mountain; yet he shall come to his end, and none shall help him” (verse 45). Notice, the religious leader will move his headquarters to Jerusalem—and not just for protection. He could go to many other cities that would be safer. But this will be a religious act of faith. The Vatican considers Jerusalem to be its most holy place on Earth—the “center of the universe.” Still, he will come to a most ignominious end. Nobody will be there to help him.

There should be no chapter break between Daniel 11 and 12. The story flow continues, illustrating that this religious war will trigger a nuclear World War iii.

“And at that time shall Michael stand up, the great prince which standeth for the children of thy people: and there shall be a time of trouble, such as never was since there was a nation even to that same time: and at that time thy people shall be delivered, every one that shall be found written in the book” (Daniel 12:1). There has never before been trouble like this. God promises to protect His people physically. Otherwise, they would perish in a nuclear nightmare.

As bad as this news is, it leads to the best news this world has ever heard! “And from the time that the daily sacrifice shall be taken away, and the abomination that maketh desolate set up, there shall be a thousand two hundred and ninety days” (verse 11). The daily sacrifice is referring to God’s work. That work will be taken away—removed when God takes His people to a place of protection (Matthew 24:15-16; Luke 21:20-21). That must happen because the abomination of desolation, or the king of the north, is going to conquer America and Britain. But when that happens, you will be able to start counting days to the return of Jesus Christ (Daniel 12:12). He will end these “holy wars” forever.

Any child should understand that the fruits of these “holy wars” have been diabolical! There is no excuse for America and Britain not knowing the truth. God has been sending His message in power for over 70 years! They have rejected it repeatedly. That is why they now must suffer so intensely. Finally, God will get their attention and lead them to peace, full joy and abundance. •


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