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Just over a year ago, CAMERA published a detailed critique of The Encyclopedia of Race and Racism article about Zionism. The entry was written by Noel Ignatiev, a radical professor and activist whose "credentials" on the topic include polemics posted on fringe Web sites, describing Palestinians who murder Jews as "patriots," calling Israel "Hitlerite," and insisting that Zionism is racist and Israel should be eliminated. Late last week, the publisher of the encyclopedia informed CAMERA that the article will be eliminated, in line with the recommendations of an independent review produced by a board of historians, economists, sociologists, cultural anthropologists and biologists from academic institutions in the U.S. and abroad.
It was a victory for Guardian and al Jazeera spin when some other, ostensibly objective media organizations were swayed by the advocacy journalism associated with the publication of the so-called "Palestine Papers."
Saree Makdisi, a radical UCLA professor, vilifies Palestinian negotiators as too moderate by falsely charging that the leaked "Palestine Papers" reveal that they agreed to cede West Bank settlements.
In one of the documents publicized by al Jazeera and the Guardian, a Palestinian official describes Binyamin Netanyahu's acceptace of two states as "earth shattering."
Palestinians may not have described this Israeli move as "earth shattering," but the Palestinian leaked documents show what is still an Israeli concession: A promised construction freeze in the highly strategic E-1 region between Jerusalem and Ma'aleh Adumim.
Israeli police arrested four members of a 13-member cell of Palestinians suspected of shootings, rape and murder. Kay Wilson, the other hiker and a survivor of the attack that killed her American friend, is hailed as a hero by the Shin Bet.
National Public Radio's January 20 "Morning Edition" presented a segment entitled "Israeli Settlements Divide Palestinian Village" by Lourdes Garcia-Navarro. The totally one-sided report offers classic NPR bias: A human interest story focused entirely on Palestinian grievances and devoid of essential facts and context.
Benjamin Kerstein picks apart Time's latest anti-Israel thesis ("Israel�s Lurch to the Right Scares Some Conservatives"), which suggests that democracy in Israel is in danger, a view shared by many at Ha'aretz.
In 2008, Richard Falk began a six-year term as the UN Human Rights Council's permanent investigator on "Israel's violations of the principles of international law"-- a position that itself is a manifestation of clear bias, as it is meant to investigate only Israeli actions and not Palestinian ones. Now the person who holds this position is exposed as a truther who believes that the U.S. government, and not Al Qaeda, was responsible for the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center. It is not surprising that these lunatic fringe views are expressed by one who has expressed similar fringe views about Israel, for example, comparing them to Nazis.
In the New York Times' feature this week on Turkey's Foreign Minister ("Turkey's Role in Middle East is Bolstered by Vision of Foreign Minister"), Ahmet Davutoglu insists that he did all he could to convince the IHH to cancel the departure of the Mavi Marmara, and reporter James Traub doesn't contradict him.
Iranian Book Celebrating Suicide Bombers Found in Arizona Desert By William La Jeunesse
| FoxNews.com
EXCLUSIVE: A book celebrating suicide bombers has been found in the Arizona desert just north of the U.S.- Mexican border, authorities tell Fox News.
The book, "In Memory of Our Martyrs," was spotted Tuesday by a U.S. Border Patrol agent out of the Casa Grande substation who was patrolling a route known for smuggling illegal immigrants and drugs.
Published in Iran, it consists of short biographies of Islamic suicide bombers and other Islamic militants who died carrying out attacks.
According to internal U.S. Customs and Border Protection documents, "The book also includes letters from suicide attackers to their families, as well as some of their last wills and testaments." Each biographical page contains "the terrorist's name, date of death, and how they died."
Agents also say that the book appears to have been exposed to weather in the desert "for at least several days or weeks."
Authorities told Fox News that there were no people in the area at the time the book was found, and no arrests have been made in connection with it.
"At this time, DHS does not have any credible information on terrorist groups operating along the Southwest border," a Department of Homeland Security official said in a statement. "We work closely with our partners in the law enforcement and intelligence communities and as a matter of due diligence and law enforcement best practice, report anything found, no matter how significant or insignificant it may seem."
Statements from U.S. officials, including FBI director Robert Mueller, have raised serious concerns in recent years over "OTMs" -- or illegal immigrants other than Mexicans -- who have crossed the southwest border at alarming rates.
Mueller testified before the House Appropriations Committee in March 2005 that "there are individuals from countries with known Al Qaeda connections who are changing their Islamic surnames to Hispanic-sounding names and obtaining false Hispanic identities, learning to speak Spanish and pretending to be Hispanic."
Just last year, the Department of Homeland Security had in custody thousands of detainees from Afghanistan, Egypt, Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Yemen. U.S. Border Patrol statistics indicate that there were 108,025 OTMs detained in 2006, compared to 165,178 in 2005 and 44,614 in 2004.
Authorities would not release a picture of the book to Fox News, or reveal how long they believe it was lying in the desert. Immigration officials have previously discovered items along the U.S.-Mexico border from Middle Eastern origin, including Iranian currency in Zapata, Texas, and a jacket found in Jim Hogg County, Texas, that was covered in patches including an Arabic military badge that illustrates an airplane flying into a tower.
Some belief systems, as Jared Loughner demonstrated, are beyond politics and logic. Everyone seems to agree that Loughner, who went on a shooting rampage in Tucson, Arizona, wounding Representative Gabrielle Giffords and killing bystanders, was an unfortunate schizophrenicOn what must have been a pleasant autumn evening, a group of moderately educated young people met and discussed favorably the following propositions: suffering from incoherent ideation. But what if there was a whole Loughnerism movement? What if they taught this sort of thinking at universities, and it was believed by respectable people?
The Red Cross is a bad organization because it is neutral. Neutral organizations are bad.
The UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights is a sexist document.
The Middle East peace process is bad for the Arab Palestinians.
Foreign aid is bad for the Palestinians.
The sure path to liberation of the Catholic Philippines and gay people is to join the cause of Muslim extremism and wipe out Jewish self- determination.Only Zionism stands in the way of liberation of these oppressed peoples.
Bad people are always white and probably Zionist. Good people are colored and are therefore oppressed.
This meeting did not take place in the closed ward of a mental institution or in Kim Il Sung University in PyongYang, People's Republic of Korea, but in an American University campus financed by the state of California. The attendees were undergraduates and graduate students, America's leaders of tomorrow. A partial transcript is here: BDS to Destroy Israel.
The "teach-in" was sponsored by an improbable coalition of Muslims, Filipino Catholics and gay people. A partial list of sponsors:
Al Awda – The Palestine Right to Return Coalition, American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), Anak Bayan East Bay, Arab Resource and Organizing Center (AROC), BAYAN USA, The Bay Area Campaign to End Israeli Apartheid (BACEIA), General Union of Palestine Students SFSU (GUPS), Justice for Palestinians San Jose, NorCal Friends of Sabeel, Muslim Student Association Berkeley (MSA), Queers Undermining Israeli Terrorism (QUIT), San Francisco Women in Black, Seventh Native American Generation (SNAG), Students for Justice in Palestine Berkley (SJP), United States Palestinian Communities Network (USPCN)
A very broad coalition supports this sort of Loughnerism. Perhaps Laughner's only misfortune is that he did not focus on "Zionists" – he could have had massive support. The Quakers ("Friends") of course were (nonviolently) in favor of genocide and the Hamas, against the peace process and the Red Cross. BAYAN, in case you are wondering, is a Filipino organization, reputedly a communist front, possibly associated with Filipino Muslims.. Evidently, they convinced themselves that Teddy Roosevelt was a Zionist, that the Spanish monarchy was Jewish or Zionist, and that it is the Jews ("Zionists") (who else?) who are responsible for the current ills of their homeland.
Zionism is the national liberation movement of the Jews. If the students meant to give the Jews a different horizon for national liberation, they did not say so. Filipino nationalism and Arab Palestinian are good according to the students, Jewish nationalism is evil, because, one supposes, Jews are supposed to be evil. They all seemed to agree, as usual, that thrashing the Kikes would save their cause:
… the center of all our work has to be fighting against Zionism – …. The end goal is the end to Zionism that should be the end goal. And unless that is the focus and center of your activism and organizing when it comes to Palestine and joint struggle and solidarity then there's a problem, because that really is the key to ending, or the goal to liberation also of Palestinians is the ending of Zionism…
If you aren't interested in whacking the Jews, these people don't want your help.
That was the comparatively coherent part. It unmasks the various sponsors (including the Quakers, who may as well remove their pacifist masks) for what they are. It shows, for any who may have doubted, what the struggle is about: genocide and hate mongering. Here is a bit more:
There's sort of a power solidarity and joint struggle and I'm going to explain them both how I see it. Power dynamics is central to these different definitions I want to talk about when it comes to solidarity. The first one which I call Power Solidarity is folks who have a lot of power in society in terms of class, race, gender and sexuality. So, for example, a heterosexual white male, upper class white male is someone who has power in our society. And a lot of folks who fit those identities are in solidarity with the Palestinian people. And then I see something called Joint Struggle. Joint Struggle are folks on race, class, gender and sexuality who experience a lot of struggle depending on how they identify. And the term Joint is key here. They struggle jointly with the Palestinian people. Because the Palestinian people suffer according to race, class, gender and sexuality . The problem area is in this power solidarity, is folks who have a lot of power who tend to not have a justice centered approach to solidarity. So, in other words, they take up space from those who've experienced the most injustice…
…The Peace Process isn't trying to come up with a just answer to the Palestinian cause or what's going on…
…Humanitarianism is the prevalent ideology of NGO's, organizations like the Red Cross. And these organizations make little distinction between the oppressor and the oppressed. Red Cross in its mission statement says its impartial, neutral and independent irrespective of the people involved and the situation on the ground…
…the UN Declaration of Human Rights instead of granting a right for sexual freedom actually has language that does the opposite…
These young people, and their holier-than-thou Quaker sponsors, are against the peace process, humanitarianism, the Red Cross and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. If you're wondering about the connection between Catholics in the Philippines and Muslims in Gaza, here are some attempts to explain it:
…I would like more folks to start speaking of solidarity in terms of joint struggle especially folks in this room, is a lot of different communities, here we have Anak Bayan, SJP who are folks from communities of color who experience different types of injustices similar to that of Palestinians and that's why we're joint struggle with each other….
...The first thing is that in addition to a common shared struggle. Another thing I want to focus on – is there is a common enemy. Right? So, in the Philippines… So, common struggle and a common enemy. So, I want to talk a little bit first about the common enemy. Who is the common enemy and how do we identify who this is, right. And how we look at it, is to ask the questions "why". Why is the United States funding the Philippine military to advance its agenda in the Philippines? Why is the United States funding Israel to advance its agenda in the Middle East? So, just to back up real quick – a lot of it is deeply rooted on the geo-political perspective of the United States, right…
Barack Obama to the contrary notwithstanding, the U.S. is "white." White is bad. The Jews ("Zionists) must be part of the evil plot, right? Where do gay people and Quakers fit in? It doesn't matter, right? It makes no difference that the young people in this auditorium never saw Hamas leader Ismail Hanniyeh, who is white, or his Jewish Ethiopian victims. Logic is bourgeois, facts are for pedants, right? The important thing is for American students in an American University who never did any useful work and never suffered in any way to rail against white oppression, right? The struggle is the important thing, right?
It is hard to understand why gay people and Filipino activists, possibly communists, would believe that their own cause could somehow be bettered by "ending Zionism" and furthering the advance of radical Islamism - but it seems that they do.
Young people, who have mostly never seen a real live Zionist, never lived in a Muslim country and have little background information about the Philippines or the Middle East, might accept these doctrines as valid. The reasoning behind them is no better or worse than that of Pohl Pot or Ulrike Meinhoff or Mao Tse Tung, but those doctrines were after all believed by millions, and they got "results." Pohl Pot killed three million people in Cambodia. Ulrike Meinhof left a trail of victims and a cult of people who justified her "ideology," Mao Tse Tung killed about 20 billion in China.
Next to these masters, Jared Loughner, who killed a small number of people in Arizona, was a pathetic failure. It was not his fault. He was not more illogical than the successful ideologists. He didn't understand how to market his product and make it chic. He did not target "Zionists." Therefore he was disowned and derided as insane. If Loughner had killed a respectable number of people, and if he had been backed by petrodollar-funded public relations, he would no doubt be written up by Time magazine as an anti-Zionist hero. At the very least, he would be given a column somewhere.
The gathering at Berkeley was a "teach in" in which the young attendees absorbed a way of thinking and a set of doctrines that would otherwise be the subject of psychiatric analysis. When one person thinks this way, he is isolated as a psychopath. When groups of people think this way, they have an "ideology." It is organized and funded. The "ideology" of the teach-in will not be confined to eccentric student groups. Graduate students grow into professors, journalists and officials. Professors write texts. Officials make policy. Journalists determine how you perceive reality. Today's student yahoo yelling incoherently about oppression is tomorrow's authoritative opinion maker and policy maker.
What do these groups and their members have in common? The world is full of Jared Loughners. The do not really have a coherent picture of geography or politics. They hate. They fear. But some are more coherent than others. They can provide a voice, organize a demonstration, get weapons. Groups like these provide a warm home for the Jared Loughners of the world.
The Loughnerization of thought processes about Israel has been going on for years. It did not begin just now in Berkeley. The teach-in in Berkeley may be viewed as a dress rehearsal for the special meeting of the U.N. General Assembly that will be held in September 2011 in New York, to commemorate the Durban "anti-Racism" conference. The Berkeley Loughnerites and many others will no doubt send delegations as well. If not, they will be there in spirit, right? All the big names in Middle East Loughnerism will probably be there, including Muammar Ghaddafi of Libya and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian Jared Loughner. Think of the possibilities. Imagine if Loughner had an atom bomb instead of a lousy Glock!
'E. J'lem Arabs would prefer Israel over Palestinian state' By MELANIE LIDMAN
According to recent poll of over 1,000 Arabs residents, only a quarter said would probably move to "Palestine"; 54% said they would stay in Israel.
In the case of a final peace agreement that established a Palestinian state, more Arab residents of east Jerusalem would prefer to be Israeli than Palestinian, according to a study released Wednesday by Pechter Middle East Polls.
The poll surveyed over 1,000 Arab residents of east Jerusalem, focusing on questions about quality of life and personal identity choices in the case of a two-state peace agreement.
According to the poll, if their neighborhood became part of Israel, only a quarter of residents said would probably move to "Palestine," whereas 54 percent said they would probably want to stay in Israel. If a neighborhood became part of Palestine, 40% said they would probably try to move to Israel, while 37% would probably stay in Palestine.
The reasons that many east Jerusalem residents want to stay Israeli are economic: access to better jobs, smaller classes for their children, and better healthcare, according to the poll.
The 270,000 Arab residents of east Jerusalem have Israeli (blue) identity cards and can vote in local elections, and are eligible for the same services as Israelis, including health care, education, unemployment and pensions.
Many of Jerusalem's Arabs are middle-class compared to their counterparts in the West Bank and Gaza, with 44% reporting incomes of over NIS 4,500 a month.
The biggest concerns of east Jerusalem residents should their neighborhood become Palestinian are losing access to Al-Aksa Mosque, losing access to employment in west Jerusalem, lack of freedom of movement in Israel, and having to switch from Israeli health funds to Palestinian healthcare.
Residents were also worried, if their neighborhood were to become Israeli, about losing access to Aksa Mosque, discrimination against Arabs, and losing access to land or friends in West Bank.
Many of the residents polled expressed pessimism for the future of a peaceful Jerusalem. Almost half of the respondents said believed that some groups would continue the armed struggle even if there were a final peace agreement, and 63.5% said a new intifada is likely or somewhat likely if current peace efforts collapse.
The study was supervised and designed by former state department Middle East researcher David Pollock and Pechter Polls founder Adam Pechter, who has conducted polls across the Middle East, including Jordan, Egypt,and Iraq.
The east Jerusalem poll was co-sponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations.
A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort. ~Herm Albright~
Israel should not be fearing world opinion. Israel should be making the world fear (respect) her!!! And remember, it is the rich oil cartels who rule the world, NOT the Zionists!! Mech'el B. Samberg
Just over a year ago, CAMERA published a detailed critique of The Encyclopedia of Race and Racism article about Zionism. The entry was written by Noel Ignatiev, a radical professor and activist whose "credentials" on the topic include polemics posted on fringe Web sites, describing Palestinians who murder Jews as "patriots," calling Israel "Hitlerite," and insisting that Zionism is racist and Israel should be eliminated. Late last week, the publisher of the encyclopedia informed CAMERA that the article will be eliminated, in line with the recommendations of an independent review produced by a board of historians, economists, sociologists, cultural anthropologists and biologists from academic institutions in the U.S. and abroad. 
It was a victory for Guardian and al Jazeera spin when some other, ostensibly objective media organizations were swayed by the advocacy journalism associated with the publication of the so-called "Palestine Papers." 
Saree Makdisi, a radical UCLA professor, vilifies Palestinian negotiators as too moderate by falsely charging that the leaked "Palestine Papers" reveal that they agreed to cede West Bank settlements.
Israeli police arrested four members of a 13-member cell of Palestinians suspected of shootings, rape and murder. Kay Wilson, the other hiker and a survivor of the attack that killed her American friend, is hailed as a hero by the Shin Bet.
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