How Mideast War Is Waged On TV And The Web

It's no secret that the global clash of civilizations is being fought to the death on a screen near you. There is a hot frontier in today's global clash of civilization -- the mass media, and especially the Internet, where even poor terrorists can loom large in providing training, recruitment and operational guidance. After decades of relative silence, scholars, journalists, and military experts alarmed by jihadist media tactics came together to discuss how to fight on this 21st century front.

Participants of the 7th Annual Herzliya Conference on the Balance of Israel's National Security, entitled "The Media as a Theater of War, the Blogosphere, and the Global Battle for Civil Society," examined the national security lessons for Israel and the West to be gained from recent incidents of the use and misuse of the media in war.

Initiated by noted historian Boston University Professor Richard Landes, the conference attracted hundreds of visitors to the Daniel Hotel in Herzliya last week. Landes, a medievalist by training, has turned his attention in recent years to analyzing how the media is serving as a modern battlefield in the clash of civilizations, playing an influential role in the global battle for "civil society," in his scholarly work, the Augean Stables blog, and the media conference, considered the largest such gathering since CAMERA launched the first "media and mideast" conference back in 1989.

"The main theme of this conference is that reality bites, and it bites with sound bites and megabytes," Landes told Israel Insider. "The conference capitalized on the sense of urgency so many of us feel around addressing the problem of how the media portrays Israel and also how Israel and the advocacy community can use the media to good effect," he said.

"The attitude until now has been to be as conciliatory as possible," regarding accusations made against Israel in the media, "which is the Oslo method." The conciliatory view, as in Oslo, marginalized the assertive view. "What I think needs to happen is that we need to play 'tough cop-nice cop' and not undermine each other."

For some others, the conference represented a "coming out party" for a group of under-recognized but influential Middle East media experts, wrote Ami Isseroff, a blogger-participant from ZioNation.

These scholars, journalists, and PR experts "have been laboring to bring people the truth about what is happening in the Middle East, including the inconvenient bits left out by the 'mainstream' media," said Isseroff.

Incidents in which stories were faked and then distributed by the mainstream Western media, such as the infamous Qana incident, were exposed by online watchdogs as pro-jihad propaganda.

Mark Regev, the Foreign Ministry spokesman, added that Israeli spokesmen could do a better job of selling Israel's case by avoiding speaking what he called "American English." He argued that using terminology that is largely associated with the Bush Administration automatically aligns much of the world against Israel.

Instead, Regev suggested enlarging Israel's support base by speaking the language of "international legitimacy."

One focal point of the conference was the notorious distortion of the death of Muhammed Al-Dura, a Palestinian boy who was caught in the gunfire between Israeli soldiers and Palestinian gunmen and became a pivotal symbol of "martyrdom."

Despite expert examination which showed that video of the incident had been faked by French and Palestinian cameramen to make it look as if the Israeli soldiers shot the boy, most of the mainstream media reported the fabrication as truth -- Israel never even contested the frame-up.

Nidra Poller, the noted journalist and Paris Editor of Pajamas Media, explained that in producing an episode where Jews were falsely portrayed as wanting the blood of children, the jihad media and its Western distributors have created a modern day blood libel.

Media expert Itamar Marcus, director of Palestinian Media Watch, showed how the boy's death was used as a propaganda tool to entice other Palestinian children to martyrdom.

A television commercial targeting children showed a photo of Al-Dura and quoted him as saying, "I wave my hand to you, not in parting, but to tell you to follow me as martyrs."

Another video clip showed by Marcus exhorts a small Palestinian child to massacre.

The popular show for preschool-age children features a small yellow hatchling bird who tells a young girl that if someone were to cut down his tree he would, "Call the whole world and make a riot! I'll bring AK-47s and the whole world. I'll commit a massacre in front of the house."

Despite the shock in the audience, many of the seasoned experts such as Dr. Raanan Gissin, strategic consultant and former advisor to Ariel Sharon, Jonathan Davis, a veteran of the IDF Spokesperson's Unit, Joe Hyams of Honest Reporting, Foreign Ministry spokesman Mark Regev, Israel Insider publisher Reuven Koret, and renowned "national pacifier" Nachman Shai (so named for his cool and reassuring demeanor as IDF spokesman during nightly SCUD attacks in the first Gulf War), appearing on a panel about the second Lebanon War, observed that what they were seeing has been going on for years.

Koret, who coined and popularized the term "Hezbollywood," spoke about the way Hezbollah exploited civilian deaths in Qana during this year's Lebanon war: "Bloggers did what the mainstream media and the Israeli government did not do: show that reports of a massacre were untrue, that deaths were exaggerated, and that the aftermath was crudely staged."

Blogs, such as Richard North's EU Referendum which did in-depth analysis based on photographs of the incident, investigated the role of a supposed "rescue worker" -- 'Green Helmet' as the man came to be known -- who played the role of director and lead actor in the staging.

Bloggers discovered that 'Green Helmet', who had posed as a rescue worker in the 1996 Qana incident, holding up a dead baby, was busy -- while wearing the same headgear -- performing a similar role in the 2006 Qana episode: North documented that he was shown holding the same dead infant in at least eight different locations, directing photographers to be sure that the media was there to snap photos as he displayed the body -- in one case tossing it into the air -- for all to see.

"Keep on filming!" he screamed at the photographers (many of whom were from mainstream media organizations), who complied without question or protest. "Better images must be shot!"

Israeli Insider

A Terrible Silence

The record, says Irwin Cotler, is shameful.In 1948, chastened by the abject failure of the international community to prevent Hitler's mass murder of the Jews, the United Nations adopted the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. This imposed a responsibility among the signatories to punish not only the crime of genocide but also "conspiracy to commit genocide" and "direct and public incitement to genocide."

If the title was a mite unwieldy, there was an easier way to remember the law: It was, in short, the "Never Again" convention. But it has proved to be the most criminal of dead letters, and its easy-to-remember nickname the most despicable of misnomers.

"On no occasion has the UN acted to prevent a genocide," says Cotler, the former Canadian minister of justice and attorney general, a generally calm man whose voice rises involuntarily at the outrageous ineptitude. "Regrettably, we've had genocide again and again," he rails. "Either action has come too late or there has been no intervention at all."

Darfur, he elaborates, "is a genocide in the making. The media is still using the 2002 figure of 200,000 dead. Actually, 450,000 have already died. The media is still reporting 2.5 million displaced people. It's 4 million according to the UN's former humanitarian aid coordinator. There are mass atrocities - mass rape, forced expulsions, the bombing and burning of villages. In 2005, the UN passed a resolution banning Sudanese offensive flights. It has not been enforced. In August, the Security Council mandated the establishment of a multi-national protection force. It has not been established.

"In Darfur, the world knows and it is not acting. In Rwanda, the world knew and didn't act and 800,000 people were killed."

And then we come to Iran, which, incidentally, signed on to that "Never Again" convention in 1949 and ratified it in 1956.

"Ahmadinejad's genocidal criminality is as clear and compelling as any I've ever seen," says Cotler, who then delivers a sentence he has plainly polished many times over, and one that is all the more powerful for it: "This is advocacy of the most horrific of crimes, genocide; embedded in the most virulent of hatreds, anti-Semitism; propelled by a publicly avowed intent to acquire nuclear weapons for that purpose, and dramatized by the parading in the streets of Teheran of Shihab-3 missiles draped in the emblem "Wipe Israel Off the Map."

The remedies are ready. In the face of such blatant culpability, the worldwide purported commitment to humane values and the rule of law has provided no shortage of avenues designed to avert genocide and bring its would-be perpetrators to justice.

Cotler recites them with weary familiarity: punishment via that "Never Again" convention, which enables the UN to impose all manner of sanctions on the Iranian regime; debate and action initiated personally by the UN secretary-general, who has the UN Charter-enshrined authority to refer any matter that threatens international peace and security to the Security Council; UN or state-initiated referrals to the International Court of Justice (as employed over Israel's West Bank security barrier); criminal prosecution of Ahmadinejad at the International Criminal Court; all the way down to the immediate placing of Ahmadinejad and other suspects on watch lists that would bar their entry to concerned countries.

The route to genocide prevention is clearly signposted and wide open. But where is the will to follow it?

COTLER IS a frequent visitor to Israel and one of the driving forces behind a group - including fellow law professor Alan Dershowitz - now bidding to galvanize legal measures against Ahmadinejad's genocidal plans for the Jewish state.

He says firmly that his home nation intends to take action. "I have spoken to the Canadian foreign minister and the prime minister. They are looking to exercise one of the remedies. They said to me that they will."

He has been in discussion with members of the US Senate Judiciary Committee. He has held talks with the Hungarian government, which is looking into the matter, and with the Argentineans, who just weeks ago issued arrest warrants for former Iranian president Hashemi Rafsanjani and other Iranian officials found responsible for masterminding the bombing of the AMIA Jewish community center building in Buenos Aires in 1994. And he has, he says, "high hopes that Germany" - which should, of course, know best of all about the need for action - "will either go it alone or at the helm of the European Union from January 1." He has written to the new UN Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon, who branded Ahmadinejad's statements unacceptable on the very day he was sworn in.

But what, you may ask, of Israel, the nation so explicitly and relentlessly targeted? Cotler has been meeting with the Israeli government, too. He held talks here back in September.

"I don't know why Israel isn't acting," he sighs. "Israel could and should exercise some of these remedies, particularly since it is the threatened party, although international peace and security are threatened too."

Presumably - though Cotler does not say this - Israel's defeatist ambivalence about invoking the mechanisms of international law is a factor.

And it may be, Cotler allows, that Israel doesn't want to take the lead - doesn't want this turned into a head-to-head, wants the rest of the international community to internalize the full, wide, terrifying scale of the threat and address it. "But at the very least," he says, "Israel should be pressing other nations to act responsibly."

Because the sorry, demonstrable fact is that nations don't recognize, don't even know of, their obligations.
In 2004, when he was minister of justice, Cotler vouchsafes, "I can tell you that three [fellow] justice ministers in the G8 were truly unaware of the genocide-by-attrition taking place in Darfur.

"People live in bubbles. We have to bring this to their attention and sound the alarm."

Last June, the Iranians sent a delegation to the first meeting of the new (and obsessively Israel-bashing) UN Human Rights Council in Geneva that included a Teheran prosecutor named Saeed Mortazavi.

Mortazavi has been implicated in the illegal arrest, torture and murder of Iranian-Canadian photojournalist Zahra Kazemi. Canada asked that he be arrested. Mortazavi didn't hang around to see whether the Swiss would take action. He fled Geneva.

"This shows what you can do if the will is there," says Cotler.

Three months later, by contrast, terrorist-training, would-be Israel-eliminating Mahmoud Ahmadinejad flew to the United States. No watch list entry prevented his admission. No indictment for inciting and conspiring to commit genocide awaited him. He was free to pontificate duplicitously about how to achieve "peace, tranquility and well-being for all" in a world beset by "military domination… and the spread of terrorism" to a rapt audience at the General Assembly of United Nations - a body ostensibly dedicated to prohibiting the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state. The irony was evidently lost on his hosts. It was probably not lost on Ahmadinejad.

Iran's recent Holocaust denial shindig prompted vast waves of outraged spluttering. Cotler isn't complaining. But why, he wonders, when so much concern is rightly directed at the misrepresentation of a past genocide, is so little devoted to preventing a new one? Neither the United Nations Security Council, nor the General Assembly, he notes, has ever so much as debated the Iranian president's avowed intent to destroy the Jewish state.

Ahmadinejad has laughed off his UN hosts' belated, anemic anti-nuclear sanctions package, swaggering that nothing and nobody is going to stop Iran's power drive. Why would he think any differently, when "never again" has become an empty slogan?

Jerusalem Post

'Flood Chasers' Throng To Judean Desert

Ofer Ben Asher, of Tel Aviv, is one of the most veteran "flood chasers" in Israel. Since 1991 he has been going to the Judean desert regularly whenever there is a flood.

Yesterday we met him on the bank of Arugot River. "Once we were completely alone, we used to call the Israel Nature and National Parks Protection Authority (INNPPa), find where the flow began and take off," he says.

Flood chasing has become much more sophisticated since then. Yesterday Ben Asher started out by checking the cloud radar on the Internet and looking up weather forecasts.

"When you see the rain front reaching the Hebron and Jerusalem area, it's time to be on your way," he says.

Ben Asher was not alone. The Judean Desert was teeming with hikers who came to see the floods, an activity that has taken off recently.

"People are looking for thrills. An ordinary hike no longer excites them, they need a thrill, and floods are a thrill," says Ein Gedi Field School director Kitri Maoz.

Amir Balaban, the director of the bird watching station of the Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel(SPNI) in Jerusalem and a veteran flood chaser says: "On such a day the desert changes completely. If you go out to the desert today you're in for a treat."

Balaban does not like the term flood chaser. "These are not hurricanes, after all," he says. "Seeing a flood is like seeing an iceberg avalanche in Patagonia, only you don't have to travel across half the world. It's an hour from Jerusalem."

Dozens of vehicles crowd in the Judean Desert's paths. The most popular spots were the large rivers crossing the Dead Sea road - Og, Dragot, Arugot, Hever and Ze'elim. Also, one must not miss the waterfalls of Hatzatzon, Salvadora and Kedem rivers.

Yesterday was a perfect day for floods, there was sufficient rain for water to flow in most river beds, but without flooding roads or endangering cars.

One of the most popular spots is on the upper Dragot river, dubbed Mashash-Murbat river. Several waterfalls flow furiously from the brown water, forming a series of pools among the rocks.

Yedidia Hefetz, a guide in the Kfar Etzion Field School, arrives with a group of guides. He swiftly takes his clothes off and dives into one of the small pools. "After five minutes it's not cold," he tries to persuade his friends to join him.

Shuki Alpert is the uncrowned leader of a group of some 20 accessorized jeep owners from Holon. He won the title by virtue of his special hot chocolate recipe, which he brews on every trip. "We go according to the weatherpeople and our gut feeling. When there's a rain forecast we drop everything and come," he says.

"When it rains in the desert, adults turn into children. "Rain, rain, come, come," they sing at the top of their voices. Not far from them stands Ilil, a State Prosecution attorney, in her lawyer's garb. "I had a court hearing this morning, I finished it and came for the important stuff," she says.

Haaretz

U.S. Admits Arafat Murdered American Officials

After 33 years of secrecy, the U.S. State Department has finally declassified a document admitting it knew the late Yasser Arafat, chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, plotted and supervised the murders of two U.S. diplomats in Sudan in 1973, a cover-up first exposed by WND in January 2001.

The document, released earlier this year, with no fanfare, makes it clear the Khartoum operation "was planned and carried out with the full knowledge and personal approval" of Arafat, a frequent visitor to the White House throughout the 1990s who died in 2004.

In the attack March 1, 1973, eight members of the Black September terrorist organization, part of Arafat's Fatah faction of the PLO, stormed the Saudi embassy in Khartoum on Arafat's orders, taking U.S. Ambassador Cleo Noel, diplomat Charge d'Affaires George Curtis Moore and others hostage, and one day later, killing Noel, Moore and Belgian diplomat Guy Eid.

The admission comes 33 years after James J. Welsh, then the National Security Agency's Palestinian analyst, saw a communication intercepted from Arafat to his terrorist commandos in Sudan.

Within minutes, Welsh told WND, the director of the NSA was notified and the decision was made to send a rare "FLASH" message – the highest priority – to the U.S. Embassy in Khartoum via the State Department.

But the message didn't reach the embassy in time. Somewhere between the NSA and the State Department, someone decided the warning was too vague. The alert was downgraded in urgency.

The next day, eight members of Black September, part of Arafat's Fatah organization, stormed the Saudi embassy in Khartoum, took Noel, Moore and others hostage. A day later, on March 2, 1973, Noel, Moore and Eid were machine-gunned to death – all, Welsh had insisted for years, on the direct orders of Arafat.

Welsh, who left the Navy and NSA in 1974, spoke to WND about the incident in 2001 after years of attempting to get answers from his own agency and the State Department. He became particularly troubled about the cover-up of Arafat's role in the murders of American officials when President Clinton invited the PLO leader to the White House for direct negotiations on the Middle East.

Ever since, he had been on a personal one-man mission to uncover the tape recordings and transcripts of those intercepts between Arafat and Fatah leader Salah Khalaf, also known as Abu-Iyad, in Beirut and Khalil al-Wazir in Khartoum.

"I have decided that my oaths of secrecy must give way to my sense of right and wrong," he told WND. "I was particularly outraged as I had spent four years following these individuals and, at the moment of our greatest intelligence coup against them, an uninformed GS level had pooh-poohed our work and cost the lives of two U.S. diplomats," he recalls.

Welsh has continued to research the Arafat murders continually and stumbled upon the 2006 State Department document during a routine Internet search.

The document goes on to say that Fatah leaders never expected their hostage-taking to result in the freeing of the captives. A primary goal of the attack, it says, "was to strike at the United States because of its efforts to achieve a Middle East peace settlement which many Arabs believe would be inimical to Palestinian interests."

The report also said the Khartoum operation demonstrated the ability of the Black September organization to strike where least expected and warned the U.S. was at risk of future attacks from the group and its Fatah allies.

Welsh believes the initial cover-up of the communications breakdown and the role of Arafat was launched to prevent embarrassment to the State Department and White House. President Nixon, he points out, was in the death throes of the Watergate scandal at the time. The last thing he needed, Welsh speculates, was an international scandal to deal with on the front page of the Washington Post.

Later, after Nixon was gone, Welsh believes the whole matter of the Arafat tapes was kept quiet to protect the future viability of signals intelligence intercepts of this kind. And, finally, he said, the cover-up persisted to foster Arafat's role as a "peacemaker" and leader of the Palestinian cause.

Back in 1973, Welsh had received spontaneous transcripts of the dialogue between Arafat and his subordinates. But, under NSA protocol, he was not permitted to keep copies. Under normal procedure, he expected copies of the final transcripts and tapes to arrive on his desk for further analysis. They never came.

"Things were recorded but never arrived at my desk," he recalls. "I know they were recorded because I was receiving simultaneous reports from a collection site. The warning I drafted for the State Department was based on those reports."

After the deadly attack in Khartoum, Arafat ordered the eight gunmen to surrender peacefully to the Sudanese authorities. Two were released for "lack of evidence." Later, in June 1973, the other six were found guilty of murdering the three diplomats. They were sentenced to life imprisonment and released 24 hours later to the PLO.

Before surrendering, the Khartoum terrorists demanded the release of Sirhan Bishara Sirhan, the convicted assassin of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, as well as others being held in Israeli and European prisons. Nixon refused to negotiate.

WND
12-28-2006

Olmert Dismantles Checkpoints As Qassams Strike

Israel will ease restrictions on Palestinian travel in the West Bank and cargo transfers to and from Gaza, an effort by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to boost moderate President Mahmoud Abbas in his bitter struggle with the militant Islamic Hamas.

On Monday, Olmert approved streamlining checkpoints and removing some Judea and Samaria (West Bank) roadblocks "to strengthen moderate (Palestinian) elements," according to a statement from Olmert's office. Olmert has already pledged to pump $100 million in frozen tax money into Abbas' coffers and indicated he might release some Palestinian prisoners.

In another development Monday, Jordan invited Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh of Hamas for talks in Amman, the Jordanian capital. Palestinian government spokesman Ghazi Hamad said Haniyeh was expected to go to Jordan this week, and Abbas would also attend. Jordan's government confirmed it invited the two but gave no date for a meeting.

Talks between Haniyeh and Abbas of the moderate Fatah over a joint government have broken down, and there have been clashes between armed forces loyal to the rival movements. Jordan has offered to mediate in the past.

Israeli Deputy Defense Minister Ephraim Sneh said inspections would be eased at 16 West Bank checkpoints, and 27 unmanned roadblocks would be removed. Also, crossings for people and cargo between Gaza and Israel would be upgraded "in order to accelerate the economy in Gaza to lessen the poverty and despair."

Olmert singled out Abbas as a Palestinian leader who is interested in peace with Israel -- a clear contrast to Hamas, which rejects the existence of a Jewish state in an Islamic Middle East and has rebuffed international demands to renounce violence. Hamas controls the Palestinian government.

On Saturday, Olmert and Abbas had a summit meeting, the first since last year. Abbas brought up the issues of prisoners and roadblocks -- among the highest priorities for his people. Delivering on those two items would serve Olmert's interests in boosting Abbas, but they would also cause him considerable political trouble at home.

For six months, Hamas-linked gunmen have been holding an Israeli soldier they captured in a cross-border raid. Up to now, Olmert has said he would not free any of the estimated 8,000 prisoners Israel is holding until the captured solider is freed. His apparent change of heart has drawn fire from the father of the soldier and hardline opponents in parliament, but more importantly, from members of his own Cabinet.

Removing roadblocks has also stirred opposition. Only a fraction of the more than 400 permanent barriers in the West Bank would be taken down, but the Israeli army commander in the West Bank, Brig. Gen. Yair Naveh, warned in a closed meeting that even that would aid Palestinian militants in attacking Israelis, according to security officials.

The statement from Olmert's office said in the first stage, the checkpoints would be expanded and services extended to cut down on waiting time for Palestinians. Later, some roadblocks would be lifted.

"We must consider easing roadblocks in places where this does not pose a danger," Defense Minister Amir Peretz told reporters.

Palestinians welcomed the decision. Although hundreds of roadblocks will remain, "we still consider this a step in lifting the internal closure in the West Bank," said Saeb Erekat, a top Abbas aide.

Trouble was also brewing on the Gaza front, with militants firing rockets at Israel every day despite a cease-fire.

Five rockets exploded harmlessly in Israel on Monday, and two mortar shells landed near an army base at the vital Karni cargo crossing between Israel and Gaza, the military said. Israel on Monday instructed its U.N. ambassador to lodge a complaint with the Security Council over the rocket fire, a government statement said.

Hardline politicians have been clamoring for Israeli retaliation for the rocket launching, but so far Olmert has held firm in his decision not to respond to the provocations.

Israel Insider
12.27.2006

Glad Tidings Of Peace Processes

You have to wonder what thoughts passed through the minds of Bethlehem's Christians as Palestinian Authority Chairman and Fatah commander Mahmoud Abbas appeared at the Church of the Nativity for Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve.

On April 2, 2002, as IDF forces swept into Bethlehem to root out the terrorists who had taken control of the city, between 150 and 180 Fatah terrorists under Yasser Arafat's command shot their way into the Church of the Nativity. For the next 39 days they held the sacred site and some 150 clergymen hostage.

Three weeks into the siege, three Armenian monks escaped from the church through a side entrance and revealed what was happening inside. Friar Narkiss Koraskian told reporters: "They stole everything. They stole our prayer books and four crosses. They didn't leave anything."

When the siege ended, the released hostages told of frequent beatings of clergymen. The terrorists, they told The Washington Times, "ate like greedy monsters," gorging themselves on food and slurping down beer, wine and Johnny Walker scotch they stole from the rectory as their hostages went hungry.

CATHOLIC priests said that the terrorists used their bibles as toilet paper. Franciscan priest Nicholas Marques from Mexico reported: "Palestinians took candelabra, icons and anything that looked like gold." Thirteen of the ring-leaders of the siege were deported to Cyprus and then dispersed to European countries. Twenty-six were sent to Gaza.

Bethlehem's Christians could not hide their relief at the expulsions. They spoke of a "reign of terror," of rape, murder and extortion that the men had waged against them over the previous two years. Helen, a Christian woman, told The Washington Times, "Finally the Christians can breathe freely. We are so delighted that these criminals who have intimidated us for such a long time are going away."

On Saturday night, as part of his massive effort to "strengthen" Abbas, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert agreed to convene a joint committee to discuss the return of these terrorists to the city.

Speaking of his good friend Mahmoud on Sunday afternoon to a Kadima audience in Ashkelon, Olmert allowed that "Abu Mazen [Abbas] is an adversary." But, he explained, he is an enemy Olmert can do business with.

IT IS TRUE that business sometimes can be done with enemies. But what business can Olmert do with Abbas? And how does any of this business advance Israel's national interests?

At the cabinet meeting Sunday, Shin Bet Director Yuval Diskin embraced Olmert's decision to "strengthen" Abbas, by, among other things, giving him $100m. and agreeing to release terrorists from Israeli prisons even without receiving so much as a sign of life from IDF Cpl. Gilad Shalit, who has been held hostage by Abbas's underlings and their Hamas pals in Gaza for the past six months.

Diskin warned the ministers that if elections were held today in the PA, Hamas would win hands down. Not only would they retain their control over the PA government, they would no doubt rout Abbas himself and take over his presidency.

In light of the Palestinians' apparent satisfaction with their lot at being governed by genocidal jihadists from Hamas as opposed to corrupt genocidal jihadists from Fatah like the ones who took over the Church of the Nativity, the government believes that it needs to make the PA irrelevant - a mere school district - as one government official put it. In the meantime, the real power will be placed in the hands of the Fatah-controlled PLO.

There are of course, two problems with this. First, that "mere school district" will be armed to the teeth and controlled by an Iranian- (and Saudi-) trained, funded and armed regime that is overwhelmingly popular among its "students." This little backwater will continue to serve as a nexus for global jihad that is little different from Somalia.

Hamas has made clear that it will fight to the last man to protect its regime. Yet in the interest of "strengthening Abbas," Israel is doing nothing to weaken Hamas either militarily or politically.

THE SECOND problem with the "school district" strategy is that the edifice of power the Olmert government seeks to replace the PA with has no interest in making peace with Israel. To the contrary, far from seeking to transform the PA into a liberal, pacific democracy committed to peaceful coexistence with Israel (or for that matter, just freeing Shalit from captivity), Abbas seeks to strengthen the terrorist character of Palestinian society.

Abbas's demands of Olmert make this fact perfectly clear.

If Abbas were interested in peace he would not be demanding that Israel release terrorists from prison; stop arresting wanted terrorists; make it easier for terrorists to operate in Judea and Samaria by suspending IDF counterterror operations and taking down roadblocks; bring more terrorists into the areas from Jordan; arm terrorists through Egypt; and give him money to pay the salaries of terrorists.

If Abbas wanted peace he would be asking the IDF to escalate its fight against the terrorists. He would prefer that they rot in jail and not be released to enjoy the freedom to kill again.

In other words, if Abbas were interested in peace he would be doing precisely the opposite of what he is doing.

THERE ARE three reasons why Olmert and his government are acting as they are. First, they are doubtless bowing to pressure from the Bush administration. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice stated several times over the past week alone that the US has decided that its interest is advanced by Israel giving things to Abbas. But is US pressure a reasonable justification for Olmert's treatment of Abbas?

Olmert justifies his refusal to negotiate with Syrian dictator and Iranian toadie Bashar Assad by noting that the Bush administration strenuously objects to holding such talks. Yet this is a flimsy excuse for not negotiating with Syria. Even if the US were pressuring Israel to negotiate with Syria it would make no sense to engage Assad because Israel has absolutely nothing to gain from doing so.

As is the case with Abbas, by holding talks with Syria Israel would be conferring unwarranted legitimacy on Assad while receiving nothing of value in return. If Syria agreed to the handover of IDF hostages Eldad Regev and Ehud Goldwasser and to ending Syrian sponsorship of Palestinian terror groups and Hizbullah in return for negotiations with Israel, it might make sense to confer such legitimacy on Assad even if the US objected. But Assad will do no such thing, and so there is nothing to be gained from talking to him.

So too, were Abbas to agree to fork over Shalit and end Fatah terrorism and indeed cooperate with the IDF in fighting Hamas and Islamic Jihad, there would be something to be gained by meeting with him - regardless of the US's position.

Although US pressure is real, it would be relatively easy to brush off simply by publicly pointing out the obvious. Aside from Washington's carping, Olmert's decision to "strengthen" Abbas stems from the fact that his government has no strategic vision whatsoever. Cast adrift, Olmert is moved by the prevailing winds.

FOR THE PAST two weeks or so, since Assad began chirping about his wish to negotiate, the leftist-controlled Israeli media has been excoriating Olmert for bowing to Washington by refusing to meet with Assad. The weekend papers were full of condemnations by the chief diplomatic commentators in the major papers demanding that Olmert give the Golan Heights to Assad regardless of what the fuddy duddies in Washington think.

And so, Saturday night's kissy-kissy meeting with Abbas was aimed, among other things, at shutting them up. And it worked quite nicely. Both Ma'ariv and Yediot Ahronot merrily proclaimed in their Sunday editions that Abbas was a stand-in for Assad - but he'd do for now.

Finally, it is impossible to ignore the contribution the apparent stupidity of Israel's leaders made to Olmert's decision to embrace Abbas.

Sunday morning, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni exposed this idiocy when she asked Diskin whether he thought that Hamas was strong enough to stop the rocket attacks on Sderot and the Western Negev. In response, Diskin gently pointed out that Hamas is a terror group that is dedicated to destroying Israel, and so while it could stop the rockets, it has no interest in doing so.

GEE, HOW COME she didn't think of that? But then Diskin inanely opined that if Israel responds to the rocket attacks on Sderot's kindergartens, elementary schools and apartment blocks, Hamas will get really mad at us for breaching the cease-fire that only the IDF upholds and will continue to attack us.

In light of his schoolhouse analysis, Diskin concluded that there's nothing we can do except pretend that the terrorists will change their minds about attacking us after we reward them for doing so by giving them money to pay themselves, bullets and rifles to shoot us with, send their terrorist buddies home from prison to join them in attacking us, and maintain the imaginary ceasefire to enable them to shoot at us with impunity.

In the meantime, while Olmert is planning to spring terrorists from prison next week in honor of the Islamic holiday, Gaza's Christians were too terrified to go to their Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve. So the mass was cancelled.

And in Bethlehem, as the dwindling Christian population reeled with the news that their tormentors may soon return to rape, murder and extort them again, Manger Square stood near-empty on Christmas.

But at least the peace process is getting back on track.

Jerusalem Post
12.26.2006

It's About Ideology, Stupid

The newest buzzword in Middle East diplomacy is "strengthening the moderates." This is an expression that continuously rolls off the tongues of both world and Israeli leaders these days. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert uses this phrase repeatedly and heard it often on his visit two weeks ago to Rome and Berlin, and in his meetings last week with the visiting prime ministers from Britain and Norway.

The question is how to do it. How do you prop up the moderates? On Saturday night, Olmert gave his answer: by providing the moderates with money. And he is not alone in the belief that this is the way to help combat Islamic extremists.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who spoke at his press conference with Olmert in Jerusalem last week about providing funds to Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas, was asked whether this was not tantamount to buying votes - paying the Arab street to vote for the good guy. The British prime minister gave a long-winded reply that could not be interpreted as an unequivocal no.

The West, he said, had the right to support financially those who shared its principles. This argument takes on added weight in light of the fact that with Iran successfully smuggling hundreds of millions of dollars to Hamas - some estimate the sum to be $250 million - those being hurt by the world's financial siege of the PA are the moderates, who are not seeing this Iranian money.

Now this is about to change. The money that Israel freed up Saturday night is intended to prop up Abbas. It will go to him directly, and there is little real fear - because of the intra-Palestinian fighting - that he will then pass this money on to Hamas. This money is clearly meant to buy him support on the Palestinian street.

The problem with this approach, however, is that it underestimates the strength of religion and ideology in the society, and reduces everything to shekels and agarot. It is a throwback to the Shimon Peres way of thinking of the early 1990s, that if you just improved the Palestinian economic situation, peace would spring up along with the next branch of McDonalds.

While few dispute that destitution nurtures terrorism, alleviating the poverty will not necessarily dry up the reservoir of terrorists. Remember that those who brought down the World Trade Center were not destitute refugees in rags.

If this summer's war in Lebanon taught Israel anything, it is that our conflict is as much an ideological/religious one as it is territorial. Hizbullah had no legitimate territorial claim on Israel, yet it provoked a war.

The same holds true in Gaza. Israel has left Gaza completely, yet the rockets continue to fall. It's not only territorial, not even mostly territorial, but largely ideological and religious.

And for whatever reason - and they are myriad - an extreme ideology is on the ascent from Afghanistan to the Sudan. And it is an ideology that is more attractive to the masses - or so it now seems - than the stodgy, bland, often corrupt alternatives offered up by the Arab "moderates."

While Egypt's Hosni Mubarak was critical of Hizbullah this summer, his people loved what they achieved. While King Abdullah is concerned about what Hamas represents, what the organization stands for has an appeal for a significant number of Jordanians.

While the war in Lebanon won Hizbullah the admiration of the Arab masses, it divided those masses to a large degree from their "moderate" regimes - at least in Jordan and Egypt.

Which doesn't mean that Saturday night's decision to try and prop up the moderates in the PA was wrong. Just that it should be done with eyes wide-open, fully aware that in this part of the world - where religion and ideology have such a powerful pull - money isn't everything, and throwing money at the problem won't necessarily solve it.

Jerusalem Post
12.25.2006

Privatizing The War Of Ideas

The domestic and international debate about the Palestinians has become thoroughly detached from reality. On the one hand there are the friendlies. These include the Olmert government, the Israeli media, the Bush administration and some European governments. The friendlies say that the "moderate" Palestinian Authority Chairman and Fatah terror organization commander Mahmoud Abbas is the key to peace. Everything must be done they say, to strengthen Abbas against the Hamas terror organization, which they oppose.

But if this week's bloody battles between Fatah and Hamas terrorists in Gaza showed anything, they showed that Abbas is anything but weak. When he wishes to confront Hamas, he is more than capable of doing so. The reason that peace has eluded us is not because Abbas is weak but because he doesn't want peace with Israel. He will battle Hamas to enhance his power but not to secure chances of peace with Israel. Far from the key to ending the Palestinian jihad against Israel, Abbas is part of the problem.

Pitted against the friendlies, are the unfriendlies. These include people like EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana, UN officials, the European press and Ha'aretz columnists. Although members of this group adore Abbas, they object to the friendlies' refusal to accept Hamas's rise to power in the PA.

The unfriendlies call for Israel to negotiate with Hamas on the basis of Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh's offer for a cease-fire with Israel in exchange for an Israeli retreat to the 1949 armistice lines. If Israel refuses to accept Hamas's offer, this camp warns, it is liable to find itself facing Al-Qaida rather than Hamas in the future, and that, they claim, would be much worse.

As Johann Hari, from Britain's Independent put it this week, "Every time the Israeli government rejects a Palestinian leader because he is too hard-line, they do not get a cuddly Gandhian moderate in his place. They get somebody more hard-line still."

Hari, who went on to advocate that Israel recognize Hamas and give it Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem, wrote these lines after he visited with Al-Qaida terrorists in Gaza and described how these jihadists are terrorizing Gazans into accepting Taliban-like repression of women and modernity.

Both the friendlies and the unfriendlies share a fundamental assumption and acceptance of Palestinian jihadism. They assume that Palestinian society will never be anything but a jihadist society and that the only change it will undergo will be one of further radicalization. By limiting their argument to whether Israel should either give its land to Fatah or Hamas, they accept as legitimate the view that for the Palestinians all roads lead inevitably to Osama bin Laden and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. For both groups, the goal of diplomacy is to arrest, not reverse this trend. And both believe Israel should be willing to pay whatever is necessary to appease those who hate it less, or face those who hate it more.

Although Hari clearly shares this defeatist view, he inadvertently demonstrated that it is wrong and counterproductive. Hari quoted 29-year-old Basa Abu-Jased, whose Internet caf in Gaza's Jabalya refugee camp was firebombed by jihadists. Abu-Jased expressed his despair and frustration at the emerging Islamist state in Gaza, saying, "Of course women are frightened now. [Even as a man] I am really frightened! I used to sit on the street and talk to women. Now I won't do it. You don't know what's going to happen."

What Abu-Jased and his friends need most desperately is for someone to offer them the opportunity to support something other than competing terrorist organizations. But no one gives them this opportunity.

In the interest of "strengthening" Abbas, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert refuses to take any actions to defend southern Israel from Kassam rocket attacks. Olmert cannot imagine a "peace" policy that doesn't involve Israeli land transfers to terrorists and so is incapable of conceiving of a policy other than the current failed one of embracing the fantasy of Abbas as the key to utopia.

ISRAEL, OF course, has options other than surrendering to either Hamas or Fatah. It could defeat them. A policy aimed at victory would be based first of all on a recognition that today there is no power structure in the PA, including the PA militias, that is not a terrorist organization. It would similarly recognize that there is no such thing as a good terrorist organization. Consequently, a strategy for winning would recognize that Israel must launch a concerted campaign aimed at defeating and dismantling the PA as a whole.

A policy for victory would also start from a recognition that the common thread joining all the Palestinian terror factions together is jihad. In light of the ideological nature of their common war against Israel, a campaign based on military might alone cannot bring about any long-term sociological or political change in Palestinian society. Unless the ideology of jihad is defeated, a new crop of jihadists will rise up to replace the current one.

Since jihadist ideology is what makes the Palestinian war against the Jews intractable and vests it with its central importance to the global jihad, the defeat of this ideology in the marketplace of ideas will go a long way towards defeating the global jihad as a whole. And the ideology of jihad is far from indestructible.

With its call for genocide of Jews and subjugation of all other non-Muslims, and with its demand that Muslims live under a literal interpretation of Shariah law which enslaves women and abolishes the very notion of human freedom - jihad is an inhuman ideology. It is inherently unattractive to people who sanctify life rather than death. So central to a strategy for beating the Palestinian jihad would be an Israeli ideological assault on jihad.

The unattractiveness of the notion of jihad is most apparent to the jihadists themselves. This is why they spend billions of dollars on a never-ending stream of propaganda aimed at brainwashing as many people as possible. The aim of the jihadist mosques, television and radio stations and Internet sites is twofold. First they work to indoctrinate and mobilize supporters. Second they serve to demonize anyone who fights them - be that George W. Bush, Tony Blair, Salman Rushdie, or Israel.

The Olmert government's inability to recognize the actual state of Palestinian society and act accordingly has two major sources. First, the government is incompetent. As with the Palestinians, so with Iran, Syria, and Hizbullah. The Olmert government is simply incapable of conceptualizing policies capable of defending Israel.

Yet, aside from the specific incompetence of the Olmert government, in its inability to contend with the ideological nature of the war being waged against Israel, the Israeli government is little different from Western governments from Washington to Brussels. Six years after the Palestinians launched their jihad, and five years after the jihadist attacks on the US, the governments of the free world remain deeply hesitant about engaging in a true ideological struggle with jihad.

It is not merely that fearing accusations of racism, the leaders of the world's democracies are averse to noting the monstrous nature of an ideology that marginalizes life and embraces death. Terrified of being falsely labeled fascists, Western leaders, held intellectually hostage by the multicultural police, refuse to assert what ought to be obvious: Liberal, free societies, which uphold human freedom and sanctify life, are superior to jihadist societies that do the opposite. Not only must the free world win the war against the global jihad, we deserve to win it, because we are the good guys and our enemies are the bad guys.

If our leaders are incapable of conceiving a policy for victory or of explaining to either themselves or to our enemies why we must win and they must lose, is there any reason to hope that we can survive, let alone emerge victorious in this war?

THIS WEEK we received a clear sign that indeed, we can win. On Tuesday, Likud leader Binyamin Netanyahu embraced an initiative launched last Thursday by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. Led by former UN ambassador and Netanyahu adviser Dore Gold, the JCPA launched an effort to have Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad indicted under the Genocide Convention and tried as a war criminal at the Hague for his calls to annihilate Israel. This campaign is the first constructive Israeli public relations campaign against Iran. If backed by mass protests of Jews in Israel and in international capitals calling for the overthrow of the genocidal mullahs in Teheran, this initiative could form the basis for an effective Israeli political campaign against Teheran. And it is a completely private initiative.

What the JCPA's campaign shows us clearly is that just as private groups can wage political war against Iran even if Olmert is too incompetent to do so himself, so too, private groups and individuals can wage an ideological war against the ideology of jihad far more effectively than our governments can. For while the Olmert government and its Western counterparts are at the mercy of the multicultural commissars, private citizens are under no such constraints. And Israelis are better positioned than any Western society to launch such a war.

Tens of thousands of anti-jihadists Israelis - both Jewish and Arab - are completely fluent in Arabic, contemporary culture and the Internet. A private initiative to operate hundreds of Arabic language websites with anti-jihadist, liberal, pro-American and (dare we say) Zionist messages would constitute a serious challenge to jihadist predominance over Palestinian and pan-Arab consciousness.

Philanthropists in Israel and worldwide should have no difficulty investing a few million dollars for a project that would do nothing more than state the patently obvious: The path of jihad is immoral, inhuman and no fun at all while the path of human freedom is moral, just and can be highly enjoyable.

After Netanyahu presented the JCPA initiative to indict Ahmadinejad to foreign ambassadors, Defense Minister Amir Peretz was asked if he agrees that Ahmadinejad is a war criminal. Peretz did agree. Although he hadn't considered the issue himself, Peretz could not possibly have opposed what is obviously true and obviously an Israeli interest.

So too, were Olmert asked whether he agrees that Zionism and the notion of human freedom it embodies are superior to the notion of jihad, no doubt, Abbas's most enthusiastic champion would say yes. This is so not simply because Zionism is objectively better than jihad. It is so because it would be politically foolish for Olmert to say otherwise.

Although the dangers our world presents us with mount by the day, much of the power to surmount those dangers lies in our hands as citizens of Israel and of free societies more generally. By acting privately, we can force our leaders to defend us publicly and to adopt policies based on reality that see victory rather than surrender as our best option moving forward.

Jerusalem Post
12.24.2006

Jews Responsible For War

British writer David Irving wasted no time Friday offending Jews and black people at a news conference, a day after his return from Austria where he was imprisoned for denying the Holocaust.

At a news conference in London, Irving endorsed actor Mel Gibson's drunken comments earlier this year that Jews were responsible for all modern wars. He also referred to his success as an author in the 1970s by talking about how be used cash to buy a Rolls-Royce - the color of which he described by using a racial slur against blacks.

Irving, 68, was sentenced to three years in prison for his views on the Holocaust. Vienna's highest court on Wednesday granted Irving's appeal to convert two-thirds of his sentence into probation. Authorities deported him to Britain and banned him indefinitely from Austria.

Asked Friday if he was anti-Semitic, Irving said: "No, I like to think I am not."

But then he said: "In many respects Mel Gibson was right."

"They (Jews) should ask themselves the question, 'Why have they been so hated for 3,000 years that there has been pogrom after pogrom in country after country?' and it's the one question they seem to be very shy of," Irving said.

Irving told reporters that he had done research on the Holocaust that other historians had not, but acknowledged he had been mistaken on the subject in the past.

"My books will be the ones that survive into the next century," he said.

He said sales from his book on World War II German Gen. Erwin Rommel enabled him to walk into a car showroom with a paper bag stuffed with cash to buy a "(racial slur) brown" Rolls-Royce.

Y Net News
12.23.2006

Our Nuke Plan An Inspiration

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Thursday mocked the United States and its allies for trying to stop Iran 's nuclear program which he said had become a source of inspiration for other nations.

Britain's UN Ambassador Emyr Jones Parry said on Wednesday he expected the UN Security Council to vote this week on a resolution imposing sanctions on Iran for failing to heed calls it halt sensitive nuclear fuel production work.

Iran says its nuclear program will only be used for peaceful aims, such as electricity generation, and not to make bombs as United States and its European allies fear.

Ahmadinejad said Western efforts to deflect Iran from its goal were fruitless.

"America and some European countries know well that they are incapable of doing anything against the Iranian nation," he told crowds during a speech in western Iran.

"They think the Iranian nation will wait for their permission to make progress but they should know that the Iranian nation has chosen the path of greatness of honor," the official IRNA news agency reported.

The president reiterated a prediction that Iran would announce it had become a full member of the nuclear energy club during celebrations to mark the anniversary of the 1979 Islamic revolution in February.

'We'll soon become an example for other nations'

He said Western efforts to rein in Iran's nuclear plans were motivated by fear that others would follow Tehran's example.

"Iran's independence, prosperity and progress will soon become an example for other nations," he said.

"The bullying powers are also afraid that the Iranian nation's progress will raise the expectations of other nations, pushing them to stand up to these powers," he added.
Iran's Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki struck a more conciliatory tone in Tehran, stressing that Iran wanted to return to negotiations over its nuclear program.

"We believe it is possible to build a bridge between the two sides such that Iran can have its rights (to nuclear energy) and any question or ambiguity (about its program) can be removed," he said.

"We have to repeat that the language of threat has lost its usefulness and negotiation is the best way to find a possible solution," he told a joint news conference with visiting Pakistani Foreign Minister Kursheed Mehmood Kasuri.

Y Net News
12.22.2006

Ehud Barak Poised For Labor Chair

While former prime minister Ehud Barak has made no official announcement that he intends to run for the chairmanship of the Labor Party, sources close to Barak reported Thursday that he has been coalescing support for a campaign.

Meanwhile, Labor's current chair, Defense Minister Amir Peretz, held his first reelection rally at the Labor headquarters on Wednesday evening. Peretz entered the room to the strains of the Yoram Gaon song "They won't beat me so easily," Army Radio reported.

Existing tension between Barak and Peretz escalated in November after Peretz resisted pressure by Labor party players to appoint Barak to the cabinet post vacated by Ophir Paz-Pines.

National Infrastructure Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer told The Jerusalem Post at the time that he supported adding Barak to the cabinet, as the move would, in his words, " help stabilize the party and delay adding further shock to the party."

"But everything depends on there being dialogue between Barak and Amir Peretz and at this point, there is no trust between them," Ben-Eliezer continued.

When questioned about opposition to Barak within Labor's ranks, former MK and Barak's personal friend Weizman Shiri told Army Radio that Barak hadn't changed. "The new Barak is just like the old Barak," Shiri said. "The [Labor] old guard will be the first to stand by him," he added.

Shiri said he thought it was extremely likely that Barak would run for Labor chair.

Jerusalem Post
12.21.2006

Israeli Device Detects Lethal Homemade Explosives

In the era of global terrorism, one of the main problems facing security forces has been the inability to detect homemade bombs.

Richard Reid, the "Shoe Bomber", tried to blow up an American Airlines flight from Paris to Miami using a peroxide-based explosive Triacetone Triperoxide (TATP) hidden in his shoe but was fortunately stopped on board before detonating the explosive. Less fortunately, improvised explosive devices (IEDs) containing TATP have been used in many terrorist attacks worldwide including the 2005 attack on the London public transport system, the 2004 Madrid train bombings and dozens of suicide bombings in Israel.

Until now, TATP-based bombs - which are 80% as powerful as TNT - have been virtually impossible to identify, as they do not contain nitro groups, are colorless, and have a density and appearance similar to sugar. What makes the situation more severe is that these kinds of bombs can be concocted at home from materials that are easily obtained in large quantities from supermarkets, hardware and drugstores, making them the explosive of choice for terrorists worldwide.

That's why the announcement by Tel-Aviv based company Acro that they've completed production of a peroxide-based explosives tester which can quickly and positively identify TATP explosives has been met with enthusiasm by government security bodies throughout the world.

According to the inventor of the device and Acro's scientific adviser Ehud Keinan, the handheld, disposable ACRO-PET provide a viable method of combating the TATP threat and is designed for any kind of security agent - from soldiers in Iraq to airport security people.

"It's for anybody who finds suspicious powder and goes 'what is that?' - whether it's policemen or soldiers - it may not happen every day, but it does happen frequently," Keinan told ISRAEL21c.

The ACRO-PET is the culmination of over 20 years of research by Keinan, an associate professor at the Technion in Haifa, and a former professor at the Scripps Research Institute in California. The origins of that research sound like something out of a spy novel, as Keinan recounts it.

"About 20 years ago, I got a late night call from someone in the Israeli secret service - the Shabak - who asked me to help in a national effort to combat a new phenomenon in terrorism, improvised explosives. At that time TATP was very new - the first known incident was a bombing by Palestinian terrorists against Israelis at Beit Hadas in Hebron in 1980," Keinan said.

Following that call, Keinan took on the project and since then has worked in a very secretive capacity with both Israeli and American security organizations including the, IDF, Israel Police FBI, CIA and Department of Homeland Security in an effort to develop a device that could test for TATP.

"I received a patent on the technology developed at the Technion for a tester. It's not a detector - but when you have a material on a surface that's suspect, you can verify immediately whether the substance is TATP," said Keinan.

According to the researcher, the cloak around the project has been gradually unveiled - intentionally.

"Until two years ago, everything we did was highly classified. But then a decision was taken to go public with part of the program. The terrorists had all the information anyway, and on the other hand, if we released information to the media, it would help in the effort to increase public attention and pressure from politicians to do something and allocating funds towards fighting terror in this way. That was considered more important than preventing the terrorists from getting the information."

As part of the more open disclosure policy, Keinan decided to launch a private company in order to commercialize his research and he founded Acro in February. He immediately tapped Yami Tarsi, to be president & CEO. Tarsi has nineteen years of expertise gained as a physicist and a further 15 years as CEO of various companies in the aerospace and high tech sectors.

"I was approached by Keinan who offered me the challenging job of setting up a company based on his inventions, Tarsi told ISRAEL21c."And we've succeeded in turning his technology into a commercial product. In a nutshell, the PET is a hand held disposable device which IDs peroxide-based explosives such as PATP."

"Most systems in the world today are based on identifying regular explosives containing nitrites - they usually do a special analysis looking for a chemical signature," explained Tarsi. "However TATP doesn't contain any nitrites, therefore it's not detectable by any commercial equipment. Thus it's on the top of the list of concerns of authorities responsible for protecting civilian populations."

According to both Keinan and Tarsi, research is underway at Acro to develop another version of the ACRO-PET based on the same technology which will be a detector - or sniffer- that searches out the TATP substance.

But for now, the first shipments of the ACRO-Pet are being sent for evaluation in the US and Europe by such bodies as the US Department of Homeland Security.

"It's now being sent to various organizations around the world to be tested and get responses. We're ready to ship several thousand units for use as soon as we get the OK," said Keinan.

Added Tarsi: "Our approach is based on good relations with authorities in the leading counter-terror countries in the world - countries with the highest concern about anti-terror activities - it goes beyond geography."

"These countries are highly regulated- and we wouldn't be able to sell any of these devices without it going through a certification process. We're in the stage of sending out kits for them to test. It's taking place within weeks."

Tarsi said that his dream is to see the ACRO-PET in every police car in the US, and in every army platoon.

"It should be standard equipment - at least one soldier should be equipped so when in Iraq, there's a search going on, and they come across some unidentifiable material, they'll be able to know in 20 seconds if it's dangerous," he said.

With its main offices in Nevada, and a subsidiary in Ramat Gan called AcroSec, Acro - whose advisory board includes former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak - is poised to aggressively enter the market of explosives detection and identification.

"As part of out eventual growth, we want to become an important supplier in the field. We're already looking to buy or join a venture with another type of technology in that field in or order to be able to provide a wider range of solutions to authorities," said Tarsi, adding that they're in an advanced stage of negotiations with one company.

"There's a story that goes around about a customs officer in the south of France who was celebrating because he thought he had uncovered a 1kg. bag of heroin. An hour later, the bag exploded in his face," said Tarsi. "Even if it does half of what I'm telling, the PET is way better than what is available now."

Israel 21st Century
12.19.2006

Israeli Gene Discovery Offers Hungry A Chance

An ancient strain of wild wheat found growing in Israel has enabled a team of Israeli and American scientists to boost the protein, zinc and iron content in modern wheat, an accomplishment that could help supply more nutritious food to millions of people worldwide.

The team of researchers from the University of Haifa, University of California, Davis, and the US Department of Agriculture identified a gene found growing in the Israeli wild wheat that raises the grain's nutritional content. Using conventional breeding techniques the researchers, who published their results in the journal Science, introduced this gene, (GPC-B1), to cultivated wheat varieties dramatically improving the nutritional value of the grain.

Wild emmer wheat was first harvested on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea 10,000 years ago by Stone Age man, who used it to bake bread. Gradually, over the centuries, as wheat became domesticated the gene that enhances the protein, zinc and iron value in the grain, became non-functional.

Annual wheat production is an estimated 620 million tons of grain worldwide. It is one of the major crops feeding the world's population. It provides about 20 percent of all calories consumed. The World Health Organization estimates that more than two billion people get too little zinc and iron in their diet, and more than 160-million children under the age of five lack an adequate protein supply.

"Even small increases in wheat's nutritional value may help decrease deficiencies in protein and key micronutrients," said Prof. Jorge Dubcovsky, a geneticist and wheat breeder and the leader of this research group in a news release.

Wild emmer wheat was first discovered in Israel about 100 years ago by a scientist called Aaron Aaronsohn, who found the plant growing wild near the Sea of Galilee and along the Mediterranean coastal plain. Even then, Aaronsohn recognized that this new wild wheat could be used to revolutionize modern cultivation.

Some 60 years on, according to the San Francisco Chronicle, plant scientist Moshe Feldman, of the Weizmann Institute found the same wild wheat at Stone Age villages along Israel's northern coast. He sent samples to the US.

In 1997, Dubcovsky, who is based at University of California, Davis, put together a team to research the genetic qualities of wild and domesticated wheat strains.

In the journal Science, the US-Israeli team described how they cloned GPC-B1 from the wild wheat and then cross-bred it back into new wheat strains without the need for controversial genetic modification.

GPC-B1 does not alter the taste or composition of the grain, according to Dubcovsky. It does, however, make the grain mature more quickly while also boosting its protein and micro-nutrient content by between 10 to 15 percent in the wheat varieties studied so far.

To prove that all these effects were produced by this gene, the researchers created genetically modified wheat lines with reduced levels of the GPC gene using a technique called RNA interference.

Dubcovsky said the research team was surprised to find that all cultivated pasta and bread wheat varieties analyzed so far have a nonfunctional copy of GPC-B1, suggesting that this gene was lost during the domestication of wheat.

"The reintroduction of the functional gene from the wild species into commercial wheat varieties has the potential to increase the nutritional value of a large proportion of our current cultivated wheat varieties," said Dubcovsky. "Furthermore, this discovery provides a clear example of the value and importance of conserving the wild germplasm - the source of genetic diversity - of our crop species."

"What this gene does is it uses better what is in the plant already, so rather than leave the protein and the zinc and iron in the straw, we've moved a little bit more into the grain," Dubcovsky added.

According to the Chronicle report, the scientists now plan to distribute the seeds freely to farmers throughout the world through international public seed agencies. India, China, Argentina and Canada have already launched projects the make the new wheat available.

This research was supported by the National Research Initiative of USDA's Cooperative State Research, Education and Extension Service, and by BARD, the United States-Israel Binational Agricultural Research and Development Fund.

In a related development, researchers at the Institute of Evolution at the University of Haifa led by Prof. Eviatar Nevo, have announced that they are working to improve strains of cultivated grains by using genes from wild strains. The goal of the research is to create stronger, higher quality strains of wheat, barley and other grains.

Nevo, like Dubcovsky, believes that domestication over the centuries has led to a genetic erosion of today's grains, and an increased susceptibility to disease, drought, and salt.

"The Institute of Evolution at the University of Haifa houses the largest gene banks for common wheat, barley, oats and lettuce that have been genetically and agriculturally analyzed," says Nevo. "These gene pools contain many genes that are resistant to ecological forces such as drought or salt and genes resistant to viruses, bacteria and fungi. The Institute of Evolution is concentrating on mapping the genes essential for survival, cloning them and transferring them to cultivated grains, which will create disease-resistant agricultural strains."

According to Nevo, modern technological methods enable discovery of genes in wild plants that have tremendous commercial potential, an agricultural revolution based on genetics not on agricultural technology.

"We are in an era of population explosion, and must find ways to increase world food production. Genetic enhancements will enable strengthening cultivated plants such as wheat and barley and expanding food production and quality," said Nevo.

Israel 21st Century
12.18.2006

Abbas Calls For Elections

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said Saturday he has decided to call presidential and parliamentary elections at the earliest possible date.

He made the dramatic announcement in a major policy speech at his West Bank headquarters.

Analysis: Same old Fatah means victory for Hamas
"I ... decided to call for early presidential and parliament elections," Abbas said to a standing ovation. "Let us return to the people, to hear their word, and let them be the judge."

"I will look into and have discussed with the Central Election Committee at the soonest possible way to start preparing for this matter," he said.

The Hamas government quickly denounced the decision as "coup" against the will of the Palestinian people, and Hamas leaders, including Foreign Minister Mahmoud Zahar, called on Abbas to resign.

Abbas aide Yasser Abed Rabbo says the date for early elections will be set within a week, and that vote would be held within three months.

Abbas also slammed Hamas and its policies in Gaza, specifically the firing of Kassam rockets into Israel.

"Gaza is free of occupation, but there are no investors and no prosperity," he said. "We dreamed that [Gaza] would prosper and dozens of investors from all over the world came to Gaza. Nothing has come to fruition.

"We decided it was better to fire rockets. Israel left, said goodbye, and instead of [Gaza] remaining calm and flourishing, there are those that still prefer to fire rockets."

Abbas also claimed he has the right to dismiss the Hamas-led government, but stopped short of saying he would do so.

"The dismissal of the government is not like Mahmoud Zahar said, a recipe for civil war," he said, referring to the Hamas foreign minister. "They don't scare us," he said.

Abbas also accused armed Hamas supporters of destroying and looting the Palestinian-controlled Rafah border terminal in an incident earlier this week.

"This chaos ... and sabotage led to the obstruction of the crossing," Abbas said at his West Bank headquarters.

While Abbas is not expected to set a date for a vote, he plans to convene the Central Election Commission in coming days to hear how much time it would need to prepare for elections, said a top Abbas aide, Saeb Erekat.

A call for elections, without a specific date, would leave open the door for another attempt to reach agreement with Hamas on a joint government with Abbas' Fatah Party. Coalition talks broke down last month, and the deadlock triggered several days of deadly fighting in Gaza earlier this week.

Hamas vehemently opposes new elections, saying it amounts to a coup attempt. Its leaders said they would boycott the speech at Abbas' West Bank headquarters in protest. Parliament elections were held less than a year ago, and Hamas won by a landslide, trouncing Fatah.

On Friday, Hamas accused an Abbas ally, Gaza strongman Mohammed Dahlan, of being behind an attempt to kill Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh of Hamas. In the incident, shots were fired at Haniyeh's entourage late Thursday, killing one of the bodyguards who had ringed the prime minister to try to shield him.

In the funeral for the bodyguard, a top Hamas legislator made veiled assassination threats against Dahlan, who has denied involvement.

Independent experts have said Abbas would be on shaky legal ground in calling early elections.

They said the Basic Law, which acts as a constitution, doesn't give him the authority to disband the legislature.

Abbas aides say he has ways around the legal hurdles, by either calling a referendum on whether to hold elections, or by invoking superior powers as leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization.

Jerusalem Post
12.17.2006

Why Deny The Holocaust?

There is something terribly confusing about Iran's penchant for denying the Holocaust. Given Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's stated desire to see Israel wiped off the map, it would seem more reasonable for Iran to be celebrating the Holocaust than denying it.

But Ahmadinejad is slicker than that. He embraces not the Holocaust but the nation that pulled it off. In his August missive to German Chancellor Angela Merkel, he referred to the German nation as "a great contributor to progress in science, philosophy, literature, the arts and politics" who have had a "positive influence in international relations and the promotion of peace." These lines of course are open to interpretation. He could be referring to Goethe and Schiller and he could be referring to Heidegger and Goebbels.

So why is the guy who is gunning for a new Holocaust belittling the last one?

First of all, by doing so he empowers those Germans and friends of Germany who carried it out. By denying the Holocaust Ahmadinejad turns the Nazis into victims and so provides a space for them to express themselves after a 60-year silence. Indeed, in Germany neo-Nazism is a burgeoning political and social force that proudly parades its links to Iran.

The German fascist party NPD's followers demonstrated in support of Iran at the World Cup in Germany last spring. This week, Der Spiegel reported that attacks against Jewish children have increased markedly in recent years. Jewish children and their non-Jewish friends have been humiliated in anti-Semitic rituals unheard of since the Nazi era. "Jew" has become one of the most prevalent derogatory terms in use in Germany today.

Iran's adoption of Holocaust denial as an official, defiant policy gives legitimacy to this striking phenomenon. This is especially the case since Iran is blaming the Jews for silencing these poor fascists. In his same letter to Merkel Ahmadinejad wrote, "The perpetual claimants against the great people of Germany are the bullying Zionists that funded the Al Quds Occupying Regime with the force of bayonets in the Middle East."

Ahmadinejad of course does not limit his efforts to the Nazis. He is also setting the cognitive conditions for the annihilation of Israel for the international Left by presenting Israel's existence as a direct result of the Holocaust. As Iran's Foreign Minister Manoucher Mottaki said this week, "If the official version of the Holocaust is thrown into doubt, then the identity and nature of Israel will be thrown into doubt."

In short, Iran views Holocaust denial as a strategic propaganda tool. By downgrading the Holocaust, Iran mobilizes supporters and paralyzes potential opponents. Its coupling of the last Holocaust with the one it signals daily it intends to carry out wins it support among the Nazis and the Sunnis alike. Its presentation of the Holocaust as a myth used to exploit Muslims wins its support in the international Left which increasingly views Israel as an illegitimate state. So by denying the Holocaust Iran raises its leadership profile both regionally and globally.

Indeed, even if the Left doesn't buy into Holocaust denial, it can still agree with Iran's conclusion that Israel has no right to exist. As Mottaki explained, "If during this [Holocaust denial conference] it is proved that the Holocaust was a historical reality, then what is the reason for the Muslim people of the region and the Palestinians having to pay the cost of the Nazis' crimes?"

So from Mottaki's perspective, Israel is illegitimate whether the Holocaust happened or not. In making this point, Mottaki closed the gap between Iran and a loud chorus of voices in both Europe and the US who claim that Israel was established only because of European guilt over the Holocaust and consequently the Jewish state has no inherent legitimacy. This is a view that even Jewish leftists like Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen and New York University Professor Tony Judt have expressed.

Inevitably, those who hold this view come to believe that Israel has no right to defend itself. After all, if Israel is but an illegal European colony on stolen Arab lands, then any act of self-defense that Israel takes is by definition an act of aggression. So from this perspective, all Israel can do is give away land and accept that it must pay for all the pathologies of the Arab world.

THE VIEW that every problem in the region is somehow or other bound up in Israel's stubborn refusal to disappear is clearly reflected also in the policy prescriptions of the Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group, in former president Jimmy Carter's anti-Semitic attacks against Israel and in the position paper authored by professors Steve Walt and John Mearsheimer about the so-called "Israel Lobby" (which is due to be published as a full-length book ahead of the 2008 presidential elections).

And so, by framing its Holocaust denial around an interpretation of the Arab world's war against Israel propounded by radical leftists and foreign policy "realists" of the soft-Right, the Iranians enable them to find a comfort level with what Iran is doing today. This comfort was displayed by the new US Defense Secretary Robert Gates in his Senate confirmation hearing where he justified Iran's nuclear weapons program by claiming that it was a deterrent measure in response to the fact that Pakistan, Russia, the US and Israel all have nuclear weapons. Gates of course served on the Baker-Hamilton commission and no doubt supports its recommendation that Israel be forced to give the Golan Heights to Syria and Judea and Samaria to Hamas.

Not only does Iran's Holocaust denial attract potential supporters, it also confuses and so neutralizes potential opponents who neither like nor dislike Jews and are too confused to understand the threat Iran poses to the US.

Although it has not for a moment desisted from its calls of "Death to America," its vision of a world without America or its threats to attack Europe, Iran has made Israel the focus of its propaganda. In so doing it has provided cover for "realists" like Mearsheimer, Walt and James Baker who claim that the war is really just between Israel and the Muslims and that the only reason that the US finds itself caught in the middle is because of its support for Israel. That support, in turn, is the result of Jewish subversion of Washington through the so-called all powerful "Israel lobby," which Carter claims, as he sells his latest screed, no politician will risk bucking up against.

This view, now emerging into the mainstream political debate in the US, has already won the debate in most of Europe. There the view is that European Muslims are only attacking their non-Muslim countrymen because states like the US and Micronesia have yet to abandon Israel.

FOR MERKEL, the centerpiece of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's trip to Germany Tuesday was her furious denunciation of the Iranian conference. "I would like to make it clear that we reject with all our strength the conference taking place in Iran…. Germany will never accept this and will act against [Holocaust denial] with all the means that we have."

Merkel's breathless furor is an example of the final problem that Ahmadinejad has created for his opponents by adopting Holocaust denial as a central plank of Iran's foreign policy. Bluntly stated, he gives people a way to be perceived as being against Iran without actually doing anything to stop Iran from getting nuclear weapons.

Merkel and her fellow Germans have spent an inordinate amount of time over the past three years condemning the Nazi Holocaust. This week they even organized a special Holocaust-condemning conference in response to the Iranian Holocaust-denying conference.

Yet over the same time period, they have conducted negotiations with Teheran as part of the EU-3 that have enabled Iran to continue its nuclear progress; obstructed US efforts to levy sanctions on Iran; and maintained active trade relations with Iran. Merkel's government has continued the practice of providing loan guarantees to German firms doing business with Iran. In 2005, German-Iranian trade stood at about $5 billion.

Now, after three years of disastrous negotiations with the mullahs, Germany has finally come around to supporting the European draft sanctions resolution against Iran being debated in the UN Security Council. The problem is that the proposed sanctions are so weak that they will have no impact on Iran's ability to move on with its nuclear bomb program.

The obvious fact that the sanctions will have no impact on Iran has not made a dent in Merkel's refusal to support military action against Iran under any circumstances - a refusal she reiterated while standing next to Israel's prime minister on Tuesday.

Olmert was apparently too busy admitting that Israel has nuclear weapons only to take back his admission hours later, absurdly praising Russian President Vladimir Putin for his opposition to the "nuclearization of Iran" which Putin is actively promoting, and promising to give Judea and Samaria to Holocaust denier Mahmoud Abbas to take issue with Merkel's statement. And that is a pity, because by taking issue with it, he would have gone far towards destroying the effectiveness of Iran's Holocaust denial strategy.

Were Israel to base its diplomatic, military, informational and economic policies on a single-minded commitment to prevent Iran from achieving nuclear capabilities, it would succeed. Unfortunately, under the Olmert government Israel is doing nothing of the kind on any level.

On the public diplomacy level, were Israel to take concerted action against Iran's Holocaust denial program, it could destroy the program and so enact a positive change in the public discourse on Iran. Merkel's stated refusal to support military action against Iran's nuclear facilities was an ideal opportunity to launch such action. If Olmert had reacted in disgust to Merkel's statement and announced that it was unacceptable, he would have stood the Iranians' propaganda on its head.

Imagine what the impact would have been if Olmert had rejoined, "Excuse me, but it is quite possible that at the end of the day a military strike against Iran will be the only way to prevent Iran from acquiring atomic bombs and so committing another Holocaust. Given this, your blanket opposition to the notion of military strikes constitutes Germany's effective acceptance of another Holocaust. Shame on you, Angie. Shame on Germany."

Such a statement would have changed the entire dynamic of the international discourse on Iran.

If we are willing to do what is necessary, Israel can prevent the next Holocaust. It is unforgivable that Olmert and his ministers are not doing what needs to be done.

Jerusalem Post
12.16.2006

A Solomonic Compromise

Not surprisingly, in his final case - on the legitimacy of targeted assassinations - Aharon Barak arrived at just the sort of Solomonic compromise for which he is famous.

According to the unanimous panel's ruling, Israel may preemptively target and kill terrorists, but it may not kill former terrorists as punishment for past deeds. Before conducting an assassination, though, the military must establish by conclusive evidence that the target is involved in a terrorist plot or plots, and it must show that it could not arrest the target without substantial risk to the lives of Israel soldiers. These are the precisely the factors that I outlined in my book Preemption, that any moral government, committed to the rule of law, must satisfy before engaging in any sort of preventive or preemptive action.

Further, if any innocent civilians are killed in the operation - as they sometimes, tragically are - Israel is bound to compensate their families. And finally, the court reaffirmed proportionality as the guiding principle behind any such assassination, as it is the centerpiece of the rules of engagement in all civilized nations.

The Supreme Court, and Barak in particular, have come in for undeserved criticism from the right for many of the justice's most famous opinions. In 1999, the court issued its famous ruling outlawing any and all coercive interrogation techniques, and in 2004 the court ruled that Israel has a right to a security fence, but that its route must take into account the rights of Palestinians. But the court showed in this case what its supporters knew all along - that the driving force behind those opinions was a respect for democracy, human rights and accountability, rather than any dogmatic political ideology.

No democracy, despite what it might publicly profess, can forgo a policy of killing those who it is reasonably certain are trying, and have the capacity, to kill its own citizens. The stakes are simply too high to rely on after-the-event criminal sanctions. And indeed, as former president Bill Clinton has acknowledged, even though America officially opposes targeted assassinations against terrorists, the CIA and Defense Department were hard at work during his administration trying to hunt down and kill Osama bin Laden and his ilk.

On the other hand, once a person is no longer implicated in a terrorist plot, the Israeli Supreme Court held that he or she is no longer subject to assassination. Punishing people for what they have done is a matter left exclusively to the criminal justice system. This finding accords with the Geneva Conventions, which, as the court noted, instructs that "[c]ivilians shall enjoy the protection afforded by this section, unless and for such time as they take a direct part in hostilities." Once that time has ended, so too has the threat to Israeli civilians. No matter how justly a person deserves retribution, only a court may mete out sanctions.

And in the end, it is precisely the power of courts and the rule of law in Israel that is so eloquently demonstrated by this opinion. Where else but in Israel are issues of national security debated in open court sessions, and then explained to the public in written opinions? Barak's final ruling is a testament to his own career, his court, and to the best in human rights laws worldwide.

Jerusalem Post
12.15.2006

The Butcher, The Baker, The Candlestick Maker

The wise men and woman of the Iraq Study Group have come forward with their recommendations. The findings of this group of erudite, experienced, senior thinkers, jurists, advisors and policy makers leaves me just plain dumbfounded.

I am reminded of a popular olde-English nursery rhyme.
Rub-a-dub-dub
Three men in a tub;
And who do you think they be?
The butcher, the baker,
The candlestick maker;
They all jumped out of a rotten potato,
Turn 'em out, knaves all three!

It perplexes me how ten serious American leaders signed off on this preposterous plan to solve the problem of Iraq. Where are they living? Better yet, what are they smoking? These ideas are not half-baked. They're baked!

The situation certainly is rotten in the state of Iraq, but golly Jim, Lee, Sandra, Vernon -- where did you come up with this prescription for remedying the situation. How can you conclude that the ills of Iraq can be cured by the witch doctors of the Middle East?

Suggesting that the United States expand training teams from 2,000 - 3,000 personnel to 10,000 - 20,000 is a good idea, even if it was a waste of time to form a committee to come up with that simple suggestion. As a matter of fact, most of the good suggestions and recommendations written up in the report have been around for some time.

But talking to Iran and Syria? How can the United States talk to either about anything, let alone about Iraq? Both Iran and Syria are deeply committed to defeating the United States in Iraq! Iran and Syria are the major sponsors of the insurrection against the United States! These two rogue nations should be spoken to only on one of two conditions. Only after they give up their mission to vanquish the United States in Iraq. Or only after they are defeated.

Iran and Syria are a big part of the problem, not the solution. Those who say you make peace with your enemies not with your friends simply do not understand the situation. Iran and Syria have no intention of making peace. They want to destabilize Iraq. Iran and Syria want to take advantage of the turmoil in Iraq to twist and turn the dagger in the back of the United States and to distort and destroy U.S. policy. And they want to use the situation in Iraq to further fuel the internal disputes between Muslims, specifically, between Shiite and Sunni Muslims.

And what about this ridiculous notion that Israel is intertwined with the Iraqi conflict?

To suggest that if the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians were resolved then the situation in Iraq would be easier to control is not only myopic, it is downright irresponsible. There are no dots to connect. This bi-partisan group of respected Americans has either sold out or bought into the conspiracy theory that purports that the problem in the Middle East is Israel.

The problem is not Israel.

The problem is Iraq. Even if there were no Israel, Muslims would still be killing other Muslims there.

The problem is Syria. Syria needs to butt out. Syria needs to be removed from the business of Lebanon and Syria needs to be kept out of Iraq.

And the problem is Iran. Iran needs to be removed from the business of Lebanon and Iran needs to be kept out of Iraq.

So if Syria should be kept out and Iran should be kept out, why does the eminent United States of America deserve to meddle in Iraqi affairs? Because the United States has no hidden agenda. The United States has nothing to gain and only the lives of too many military personnel to lose. Because the United States if fighting for freedom and democracy. And the people of Iraq deserve freedom and democracy.

Syria was very happy with the report. This report is the support Syria needs to pressure Israel to give them the Golan Heights. The committee reports calls for this explicitly. Syria may claim to help the United States in Iraq in exchange for the Golan but the reality is that Syria will not live up to the deal. To entertain the idea of trusting Syria is laughable and ludicrous.

And speaking of baked -- You know who else was happy with the report? Jimmy Carter, the ex-President who presided so brilliant over the Iranian takeover of the US Embassy more than a quarter century ago. He may be humming a different tune:

The Queen of Hearts,
She made some tarts,
All on a summer's day;
The Knave of hearts,
He stole those tarts,
And took them clean away.
The King of Hearts
Called for the tarts,
And beat the knave full sore;
The Knave of hearts
Brought back the tarts,
And vowed he'd steal no more.

Enough said.

By Micah D. Halpern
12.12.2006

Copyright © 1996-2005 Christian Action for Israel

IsraelElectric - World's 1st Sabbath-Observant

Israel’s Electric Company is working toward becoming the world’s first Sabbath-observant national electric company.

A meeting last week between Infrastructures Minister Binyamin Ben Eliezer, Israel Electric Company CEO Uri Ben-Nun and Minister for Religious Affairs Yitzchak Cohen (Shas) determined that the company would be made to operate in an automated manner on the Sabbath.

Due to a Halakhic (Jewish legal) ruling by the late hareidi-religious sage Rabbi Avraham Yeshayahu Karelitz (the “Chazon Ish”), many hareidi Jews use private or neighborhood-wide generators to avoid using electricity produced by Jews working on the Sabbath.

On the other hand, the widely-relied upon rationale for using the Jewish-produced electricity on the Sabbath is that it is produced to operate hospitals and save lives, and therefore the resulting electricity can be used by all.

Nevertheless, the entire town of Kiryat Sefer, in Samaria, just across the Green Line from Modiin, uses a large generator on the Sabbath. Smaller generators can be found in Jerusalem neighborhoods, Bnei Brak, Elad and Beit Shemesh. The generators are said to represent a safety hazard.

The automation will cost $10 million a year, and those processes that cannot be automated will be performed by 150 non-Jewish employees to be hired. By solving the problem of the hazardous generators, Infrastructure Ministry officials feel, they will also alleviate the problem of too few non-Jewish workers hired by a state company.

Ben-Eliezer says the cost of the project would be completely recovered by virtue of the electricity to be consumed by the public that currently relies on their private Sabbath generators.

The changes will be implemented in the next six months.

Arutz Sheva
12.13.2006

Hi-Tech Personal ID At Checkpoints

Jews of Judea/Samaria will receive a secret code easing their passage through checkpoints. Drivers of borrowed cars will have to wait in line for full inspection, together with potential terrorists.

With the ongoing construction of the partition wall alongside or atop the Green Line (separating Judea and Samaria from the rest of Israel), a new feature of life for many of the 250,000 residents of Yesha has become the passage through border-like checkpoint crossings as they travel to Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and the like.

When traffic is heavy, or when the security checks of Arab residents of the Palestinian Authority are tighter than usual, many maddening minutes are added to the daily commute. A more significant issue, however, is the danger involved in waiting in line with people who are suspected of having terrorist intentions.

A partial solution to these problems is about to go into effect in at least one checkpoint. However, while alleviating some problems, it may make another one worse.

The new system will work as follows: Eligible residents must register themselves and their cars with the army. As they arrive at a checkpoint, they must dial a toll-free number, enter their secret code, and then, assuming the system recognizes them, sail through the checkpoint undisturbed. Families must register all potential drivers of their car as such.

The new system will be implemented first, as of Dec. 31, at the Eliyahu Crossing, east of Kfar Saba, near Kokhav Yair and the Arab city of Kalkilye.

A potential problem with the new technology, some residents fear, is that Jewish drivers who cannot pass through the automated checkpoint for whatever reason will have to wait on line together with Arab cars that are being checked for potential terrorist intentions - thus endangering themselves and their passengers. Blocked drivers can include those who have no working cell phone on them, or who are driving a rented or borrowed car.

The army has informed all local security coordinators of the impending change, and has invited them to participate in a short course explaining its various details.

Arutz Sheva
12.11.06