As Israeli Jewish terrorist attacks on mosques in occupied Palestine are assuming a phenomenal frequency.

Indeed, with the Israeli government and security establishment doing next to nothing to put an end to this wanton and unprovoked terror, a huge fire is being started in the region.

In religious wars, all sides are usually variably culpable and blamable. However, in the occupied Palestinian territories, Jewish fanatics bear nearly 100% of the blame.

Their attacks against mosques are not provoked by similar Palestinian attacks against Jewish religious places. In fact, Jewish terror groups readily admit that arson attacks against mosques are meant to embarrass the Israeli occupation army.

The attacks are perpetrated under the slogan "Price Tag" every time the Israeli army moves to dismantle a Jewish settlement outpost.

So why is it that the Palestinians and their places of worship are attacked, not the Israeli army?

Well, it takes a thoroughly sick mind to rationalize, even glamorize such attacks, but the Israeli settler camp never faces a shortage of virulence, mental depravity and mental sickness.

We are talking after all about the worst of the worst that racist, Talmudic Judaism could breed, people who view the rest of mankind as subhuman.

The practical implications of such a venomous ideology are enormous and absolutely nefarious. If non-Jews are subhuman, then their lives must be worthless, have no sanctity and expendable.

Think not I am making an exaggeration as it is difficult to exaggerate the evilness of these racist thugs who spend a lifetime demonizing and dehumanizing humanity as they celebrate their Chosen-people or Master-race status.

Unfortunately, the Israeli government and security establishment are giving these criminal-minded thugs a free rein to gang up on virtually unprotected Palestinian civilians, torch mosques and churches and vandalize olive groves throughout occupied Palestine.

It is very hard to buy the Israeli government's argument that these terrorists are a marginal group. But even if they were a marginal group, this wouldn't minimize the gravity of their terrorist actions.

The Nazi Hitler Youth was once viewed as a marginal group. However, the world saw what that "marginal" group was able to do during Kristalnacht in November, 1938.

Hence, the question begs itself whether the Israeli government should wait until the so-called hill-top "troublemakers" morph into a Jewish Hitler Youth.

Unfortunately, the Israeli government, the most fascist ever, can't be given the benefit of the doubt.

In the final analysis, the suspected connivance and obvious leniency with which the Netanyahu government treats these despicable criminals, along with the mind-boggling reluctance to prosecute them raise many hard questions about the nature of that government.

One Israeli writer, when asked recently why the government didn't exercise its legal authority to arrest and try Jewish terrorists who attack Muslim and Christian holy place, said a venomous snake wouldn't bit its own tail.

There is another worrying dimension to this obscenity, namely the virtually complete absence of real condemnations of these terrorist acts by Jewish leaders in Israel and abroad.

Jewish leaders in Europe and North America wouldn't wait a minute to condemn the slightest anti-Semitic attack on Jewish targets, even if this target happened to be a lone Jewish grave in an isolated village in Eastern Europe .

Even remarks or even slip-of-the-tongue jokes are castigated and people are made to pay a price.

However, when fellow Jews carry out outrageous acts of terror, arson and vandalism against mosques and churches, we see that these same Jewish leaders become speechless as if the acts of terror took place in a different galaxy.

The Jewish leadership must realize that the orphans of Kahana and thuggish terrorists of Gush Emunim are more than trouble makers. They are in fact criminal fire-starters whose pyromania could burn Jews as well as non-Jews.

Hence, Jewish leaders must have the necessary courage and rectitude to admit that Jewish terrorism is a two-lane street and that Muslims won't stand idle if their peaceable holy places continue to be torched and vandalized in the most blatant and unprovoked manner.

Of course, it would be naïve to expect verbal condemnations by Jewish leaders to stem the tide of Jewish settler terror against Muslim and Christian holy places.

However, this is the very least Jewish leaders should and can do to exonerate themselves from the ostensibly logical Charge that these leaders adopt a duplicitous attitude toward Jewish terror in Palestine by denouncing it when speaking to a non-Jewish audience while praising it privately.

Finally, the Palestinians themselves must not entrust the task of protecting mosques and Churches to Israel . The Palestinian Authority (PA) must deploy armed guards in the vicinity of mosques in order to protect them from Jewish terror. Crying out for help won't help very much. We have to do our own duty first and none would blame us for doing what anyone else would if they were in our shoes.

* Khalid Amayreh a journalist based in the Occupied Palestinian town of Dura. He obtained his MA in journalism from the University of Southern Illinois in 1983.

Part I

On 12 December 2011 hundreds of Israeli settler fanatics besieged a West Bank IDF army base. They destroyed equipment, set fires, and even stoned the base soldiers. This was the second such attack in a month. The cause? Anger over the army's dismantlement of a small number of isolated, unauthorized settler outposts. The Chief of the Central Command of the Israel "Defense" Forces, Major General Avi Misrahi, is quoted as saying "I have not seen such hatred of Jews towards soldiers during my 30 years of service." He must not have been looking.

This was not an exceptional event. The subsequent indignation over the attack expressed by Prime Minister Netanyahu ("red lines have been crossed") was, as Alex Fishman writing in Yedioth Ahronoth put it, staged hypocrisy. The Prime Minister is certainly aware that for some time there has been on-going skirmishing between the settlers and government security forces. Right wing settlers regularly throw rocks and fire bombs at police and army vehicles and "physical altercations" between settlers and Israeli police and soldiers are "almost routine." This is so despite the fact that the government, both Prime Minister and Knesset, "either tacitly or openly" support the settlers. Then why the hatred and why the attacks?

At this stage the battle is over strategy. The Israeli government wants to gobble up all of Palestine in an orderly step by step fashion. In part, this is to avoid too much international criticism at any particular stage of the process. On the other hand, the settlers don't give a damn about international opinion – no more than does al-Qaeda, to which they have an unsavory resemblance. Led "by fundamentalist religious leaders who do not recognize the state of Israel and its laws," they are driven by religious fanaticism and have no respect for governments or their agents. It is their ideological conviction that all of Palestine (including, by the way, Jordan) must be Jewish as soon as possible. The authorities sometime get in the way of this goal and that has led the settlers to, as Fishman puts it, "terrorize not only the Palestinian population but also the police and the army."

Prime Minister Netanyahu, belatedly noticing an erosion of government authority, has begun to set rules against settler violence when it is directed toward the IDF and police (but not toward the Palestinians). The New York Times reports that from now on such "radical Israelis" attacking soldiers or policemen will be treated just like "Palestinian militants." That is they will be "detained for long periods without charge and tried in military courts."

Alas, this new toughness won't work. For years Israeli governments have looked the other way as thousands of armed religious fanatics organized themselves and got stronger and more self-assured. Now, as Adam Keller of Gush Shalom tells us, "the Golem has turned on its creator." These are the people who assassinated Yitzhak Rabin. What makes Netanyahu believe that Israel's present army, police and courts which, reminiscent of the Weimar Republic, regularly show sympathy and leniency toward these criminals, are going to change their attitude on his orders? When a military reporter asked a brigade commander if he was prepared to act toward settler hostility in the same manner as he would Palestinian hostility, he answered "you would not expect me to open fire on a Jew...I am certain you didn't mean that."

The reporter would have gotten a very different answer if she had asked the fanatic settlers about how far they were willing to go. Anshel Pfeffer writing in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz notes that "the only red line that has yet to be crossed is a scenario in which an Israeli citizen [belonging to] the extreme settler right would open fire on IDF soldiers. There are those in Israel's security forces who fear that day is not so distant."

Netanyahu's apparent change of heart comes too late. What we have here is incipient civil war. Any really serious effort to stop these fanatics will result in their turning their weapons on those who represent the government. What you sow is what you reap.

Part II

This climate of internecine hostility contaminates the Jewish diaspora as well. There is no rock throwing or armed men threatening violence, but the hatred is there. Jewish critics of Israeli behavior are categorized as "Israel-haters" or, alternatively, "self-hating Jews." This is often expressed with the same vehemence displayed by Israel's settler fanatics. And, indeed, those pointing fingers in the U.S. are often supporters of the extremists on the West Bank.

Last week Howard Gutman, the U.S. Ambassador to Belgium, addressed "a group of European Jewish lawyers gathered...to discuss anti-Semitism" Gutman told them that there was now two different kinds of anti-Semitism: a "classic" type that is "directed against Jews for being Jews" and "a newer form" that is a product of "the Israeli-Arab conflict and can therefore be mitigated by reducing Israeli-Palestinian tensions." This is actually a conclusion that was reached by Israel's Defense Ministry as early as 1994. No matter, when Gutman's statement became public "the long knives" came out "for another Jewish liberal who committed the sin of stating the uncomfortably obvious truth about a causal relation between Israeli policy and Muslim anti-Semitism."

The Republican Jewish Coalition's Executive Director Matthew Brooks called Gutman's revelation "outrageous" and one that "makes excuses for anti-Semitic hatred and bigotry." Senator Joe Lieberman called Gutman's remarks "inexcusable" and Representative Gary Ackerman of New York suggested that Gutman himself might be anti-Semitic.

Again, the charge of anti-Semitism can be and frequently is leveled against fellow Jews who are critical of Israel. The logic goes something like this: Judaism and Israel are one and the same. Ergo if you are critical of Israeli behavior you are critical of Jewish behavior and that makes you an anti-Semite. Very neat. Of course, the whole train of thought rests on the false assumption that Israel and Judaism are two sides of the same coin.

Despite the viral reaction, Jewish criticism of Israel is growing quickly and this creates a frustrating dilemma for the Zionists. The pro-Israeli blogger Steven Plaut describes this situation in catastrophic terms. "Jewish anti-Semitism is all around us, part of the political air we breathe, a modern disease. In the twenty-first century the world is experiencing an explosion of it, a virtual plague."

Part III

None of this Zionist extremism can be dismissed as a passing phenomenon. It has been with us too long. In fact it has been with us since 1917 and the Balfour Declaration. That is when a certain segment of European Jewry began its obsessive drive to create and maintain a state for one group only. It was then, and continues to be an inherently racist project. Ideologies, like Zionism, that support such projects usually reject all opposition. And opposition from erstwhile members of the in-group is the very worst because it exposes the false nature of claims of ethnic, religious or racial solidarity.

When and if Israeli society comes to its senses and decides to rid itself of the Occupied Territories the settler fanatics will resist "fanatically," and the civil war that is now incipient will release its full potential violence. When and if that happens there will be repercussions for U.S. and European Jews and they too may well entail violence. It would seem that the people chosen to be a "light unto the nations" have only managed to create another badly flawed nation state–one with a preference for apartheid policies. Zionism said "let modern Israel be" and, pop, the light went out.

* Lawrence Davidson is professor of history at West Chester University. He is the author of numerous books, including Islamic Fundamentalism and America's Palestine: Popular and Official Perceptions from Balfour to Israeli Statehood.

By Mohamed Khodr* | Sabbah Report | www.sabbah.biz

"A shocking crime was committed on the unscrupulous initiative of few individuals, with the blessing of more, and amid the passive acquiescence of all."
-Tacitus, First Century Historian and Senator in the Roman Empire

• No, America, you are not the land of the free, home of the brave.

• You are not the greatest nation on earth.

• You are not the superpower you proclaim.

• You are not the beacon of freedom, equality, and liberty to all.

• You are not the Promised Land.

• You are not the democracy of the First Amendment where there is Freedom of Speech, of the Press, of Religion, of freedom to petition and assemble.

• Your President is not the leader of the free world.

• You do not have a government of the people, by the people, and for the people.

Thus, what will history record of whom and what you are?

What you are in essence and action is a nation of ignorant cowards, SLAVES, to be exact, to the very nation you created and continue to pay for with your tax dollars, weapons, and the lives of your sons and daughters-Israel.

What you are is a nation of fools according to Israel, "detached from reality"; "delusional", and full of "illusions"; in other words a nation of mental defects who are unaware of who's the real boss of this nation and your supposedly elected government.

It's Israel, Stupid.

But your arrogance and conceit of greatness, of a democracy, of a representative government, a nation where the people freely choose their President and Congressional Representatives, a nation of "American Exceptionalism", blinds you to the reality that you neither control, own, nor create your own destiny.

Who does? It's the little nation from afar-Israel.

No candidate or politician can ever hope to be elected without the obligatory visit to Yad Vashem (Holocaust Memorial in Israel) while being forced to wear the mind numbing Yarmulke, and the obligatory pandering and shameful visit and speech to the true altar of "your" government-AIPAC. They've been Washington's real power and policy makers for decades.

As Early as 1957:

"I am aware how almost impossible it is in this country to carry out a foreign policy [in the Middle East] not approved by the Jews... terrific control the Jews have over the news media and the barrage the Jews have built up on congressmen ... I am very much concerned over the fact that the Jewish influence here is completely dominating the scene and making it almost impossible to get congress to do anything they don't approve of. The Israeli embassy is practically dictating to the congress through influential Jewish people in the country"

–Secretary of State John Foster Dulles in February, 1957 quoted on p.99 of "Fallen Pillars" by Donald Neff

You think you have freedom of speech? Then why are you and your government so cowardly intimidated and silent to even mention Israel, Jews, or Judaism, in political or personal debates or conversations? Your knees tremble when these issues come up and you lose your vocal cords while your heart rate and blood pressure rise and your visit to the restroom becomes imperative.

You think you have freedom of the press? You know, the press that's owned, controlled, and run by Jews. Why is there not one single American Jew, Christian, Muslim or person of any faith on television criticizing Israel? Why? They will lose their jobs a la Helen Thomas, Rick Sanchez, Octavia Nasr, and many, many others, not to mention the many politicians who lost their jobs for daring to speak out against Israel. Try to submit an op-ed to the major papers critical of our government's Israeli formulated foreign policy in the Middle East.

Do you wonder why Islam and Sharia Law, two unknown subjects to Americans, have become the hysteria du jour and who's behind it? It's to distract your short attention span away from the control, theft of money, weapons, spying, and wars you pay and die for Israel's security.

Who do you think wants to push Muslims and Christians into a World War III?

Do you honestly think your government represents you? Once they arrive in Congress your representatives are immediately welcomed by an army of AIPAC minions to brainwash them and let them know not to ever cross Israel and always vote for anything AIPAC sends. Most of the Legislative Staff in Congress is Jewish. Do you ever wonder why our Congress cuts meals to our children while sending billions to Israel with overwhelming bipartisan support? Look up the Congressional votes on resolutions supportive of Israel. It's a shocking embarrassment.

For Congressional Votes and Support of Israel visit: http://thomas.loc.gov/

Do you think you have freedom of religion? Who do you think is behind the push that you, yes you Christians, can't celebrate Christmas, not even mentioning it by name instead having to use "holiday"? Who's against school prayers, no displays of Nativity Scene, no courses on world religions, and no school prayers?

It's not the Muslims.

Many Israeli TV Shows mock and use blasphemous remarks against Jesus and the Virgin Mary, yet not ONE Single Christian church, seminary, university, media outlet, organization, or person has ever gone on TV or wrote an Op-ed to a paper condemning our "closes ally" for this filth.

Imagine if this was on Iranian TV?

See the Videos and judge for yourself, then ask yourself, why are you so cowardly not to respond to this visual and literal neo crucifixion of Christ?

From the Israeli Children TV show "Toffee VeHa-Gorillah" a Girl in Bikini makes fun with a monkey of how Jesus Christ, a Nazi, was Crucified and how all Christians are an Evil People.

Video link: http://sabbah.in/l6Hj8h

Israeli TV Show Blaspheme Jesus and Virgin Mary:

Video link: http://youtu.be/qtVpHUjwQSA

Monkey Christ:

Video link: http://youtu.be/-zUvFaW3WY0

Jews and Hasidic Gentiles-United to Save America (JAHG-USA)
http://www.noahide.com/yeshu.htm

"Jesus a false Prophet...with an evil agenda".

However, slam views Jesus, peace be upon him, as the true Messiah, born through a miracle from the Virgin Mary, peace be upon her, and performed miracles during his life

How can Israeli Jews feel such supremacy and the freedom to blaspheme Jesus, the Virgin Mary, peace be upon them both, and all Non-Jews?

Here's a Rabbinical explanation?

"Goyim were born only to serve us. Without that, they have no place in the world – only to serve the People of Israel,"

According to Rabbi Yosef, the lives of non-Jews in Israel are safeguarded by divinity, to prevent losses to Jews.

"In Israel, death has no dominion over them... With gentiles, it will be like any person – they need to die, but [God] will give them longevity. Why? Imagine that one's donkey would die, they'd lose their money....This is his servant... That's why he gets a long life, to work well for this Jew."

"Why are gentiles needed? They will work, they will plow, they will reap. We will sit like an effendi and eat....That is why gentiles were created."

– Jerusalem Post; "Yosef: Gentiles exist only to serve Jews"; October 25, 2010

Only Israel can slap America's Presidents, Congress, and the American people over and over and over while they all keep turning the other cheek over and over.

What hold do these Zionists have on our government, our minds, souls, freedoms, and courage to speak and act that we in this alleged superpower are so intimidated, so afraid, so cowardly to even raise a whisper in public about the historical costs to our lives, wealth, worldwide credibility, and our very humanity, by a people we saved in Europe, a people whom we against all divine and human laws gifted a foreign land to them, a nation that wouldn't exist without our recognition, support, and protection, a nation that commits genocide in our name and with our tax dollars?

Supporting Israel means supporting genocides against innocent civilians, ethnic cleansing, an expansionist military policy that's based on stealing more land and expelling more people, destroying villages by the hundreds, demolishing tens of thousands of homes, imprisoning hundreds of thousands of people over decades without the rule of law, allowing torture as policy, shooting children in classrooms, stealing drinking and irrigating water for settler swimming pools, building illegal settlements on hilltops, allowing racist settlers free reign to kill, burn, beat, and terrorize families, destroying electrical and water plants, hospitals, schools, churches, mosques, ambulances, and littering lands with cluster bombs to kill and mutilate children.

It means never holding Israel accountable for violating hundreds of U.N. Resolutions due to our, yes you America, vetoes.

It means being subservient to a rogue, terrorist, racist, murderous state whom we have elevated and put on a pedestal for our idolatrous worship.

Here's the nation we support:

"It is the duty of the [Israeli] leadership to explain to the public a number of truths. One truth is that there is no Zionism, no settlement, and no Jewish state without evacuating Arabs, and without expropriating lands and their fencing off."
– Yesha'ayahu Ben-Porat, Yedi'ot Aharonot 07/14/1972

Such is our support of Israel against the hapless long suffering Palestinians who by the millions have lived for decades as refugees in squalor camps and impoverished lives because of Israel's founding, a founding America created. They are homeless and stateless and America is too cowardly and fearful of Israel and organized Jewry to even cast a symbolic vote to support a Palestinian state for the stateless.

Israel has made fools of us, our government, our religions, our beliefs, and everything Americans have come to value about themselves and their country.

America, your new Manifest Destiny, is to serve Israel and only Israel, so help you God.

And so continues the illegal occupations of America and Palestine.

* Mohamed Khodr is a political activist who frequently writes on the plight of Palestinians living under the brutal occupation of Israel, U.S. Foreign Policy, Islam, and Arab politics.

WARNING: STRONG LANGUAGE

By Mantiq al-Tayr * | Sabbah Report | www.sabbah.biz

1. Something else bothered Orlich. Yee mentioned he had studied in Damascus. Orlich wondered about a man who would go to Syria - a state sponsor of terrorism - to find God.

Maj. Jason Orlich

Why not put together a huge bullshit-filled KKK-like anti-Muslim briefing up on the internet? Oh, and make sure to put your name and military rank on it so that the whole world will know, as I demonstrated last week in my most recent post, that the US government is rife with anti-Muslim bigots. (Go here for the downloadable power point presentation and go here to see it in html format.)

You can read about this guy's antics in the links below, but for your amusement, I have also drawn a few quotes from the relevant articles:

Of course the quality of language work at Guantamo was always superb as we can see from this article on how totally fucked up the government's case was:

Another accusation, that he distributed radical literature to the detainees, was based on an erroneous translation of an Islamic symbol in Ottoman-style calligraphy.

Later on in the same expose of government malfeasance we read of more great language work being done:

Airman Al Halabi's lawyers also made a charge of misconduct after a government translator contacted them to say that one of the prosecutors, Capt. Dennis Kaw, had discouraged her from alerting the court when she found a mistake in her translation of the Syrian government's letter. Captain Kaw had insisted, rather improbably, that the Syrian government had given Airman Al Halabi permission in the letter to travel not only to Syria but also to Qatar; instead, the relevant word meant "the homeland."

And read this:

As recently as a week ago, reports suggested that at least 17 prisoners at Guantánamo Bay have been subjected to the program. But Maj. Jason Orlich, a creator of Guantánamo Bay's "incentives" program that uses long-term sleep deprivation as a punishment for those who misbehave or fail to cooperate, testified that nearly all of the 350 to 400 prisoners held in two Guantánamo Bay prison camps were subject to the program, which entails waking the prisoners, shackling them, and moving them to a different cell along with all their belongings. Maj. Orlich was reluctant to specify the frequency of the moves, but testified that three-hour intervals "would not be abnormal."

Maj. Orlich also revealed that the Frequent Flyer Program was Standard Operating Procedure (SOP), although it did not appear in writing in the SOPs of that time-begging the question of what other detainee treatment policies were omitted from the written records. According to Maj. Orlich, Guantánamo Bay leadership was aware that the Frequent Flyer Program was in use, and the program was a routine included in what the military calls its "daily synchronization matrix." Maj. Orlich also said that the Frequent Flyer Program was ongoing at the time of his departure from Guantánamo Bay in April 2005, and he had never heard of any order to stop the program. This is despite previous government claims that the program had been discontinued in March 2004.

And here are some excerpts from the extremely bigoted and ignorant slide show this guy has put up on the web apparently subsequent to his tour in Guantanomo. I wonder if he gives this briefing to other people in the military and the US government. On the first slide of his presentation he mentions his PACOM affiliation. Maybe you all investigative journalists out there could ask PACOM if this means that they endorse his presentation.

You know it's gonna be good when it starts off with a quote from the fraud Walid Shoebat which I will spare you. Note to Shas Party members: the headlines in bold are mine, not from the presentation by Maj. Jason Orlich – though I can understand why people could get that confused. The quotes from the slide show are in italics.

Also, the author of the presentation states:

This brief is based upon Extensive Research, Islamic texts, history, and lessons learned at JTF GTMO

So let's take a look at some of the fruits of this extensive foray into Islamic texts.

Yahweh be good, Allah be bad:

Yahweh = Allah

* Yahweh is a loving Father, who, along with the Son and the Holy Spirit, is One God.

* To Muslims, the concept of a triune God is a blasphemy.

"They do blaspheme who say God is one of three...,for there is no God except one God." Surah 5:73

. . .

God." Surah 8:30 * Allah of Islam is frightening.

"It is God whom ye should more justly fear, if you believe." Surah 9:13

Muslims are Moonies:

2 Different Spiritual Worlds

Yahweh and Allah

* Before Islam came into existence, the Sabbeans in Arabia worshipped the moon-god Allah who was married to the sun-goddess.

* Common practice to use the name of the moon-god in personal names in Muhammad's tribe.

* Allah was a pagan deity in pre-Islamic times.

* An Allah idol was set up at the Kabah along with all the other idols of the time.

* The pagans prayed towards Mecca and the Kabah because that is where their gods were stationed.

* The idol of their moon god, Allah, was at Mecca, they prayed towards Mecca.

* The worship of the moon-god extended far beyond Allah-worship in Arabia. The entire fertile crescent was involved in moon-worship.

* The early success Islam had amongst Arab groups that had traditionally worshipped Allah, the moon-god.

* The use of the crescent moon as the symbol of Islam, and which appears on dozens of flags of Islamic nations in Asia and Africa, and surmounts minerets and mosque roofs, is a throwback to the days when Allah was worshipped as the moon-god in Mecca.

Moohammad he a bad man and Khadijah, she be a bad girl getting her daddy drunk and all.

Genesis of the Islamic Faith

570 C.E. Muhammad born in Mecca

– Both parents died before Muhammad was 6

Abandoned by Mother, Amina, and passed around, rejected and possibly abused by 2 men (Ishaq 71, 72)

– Muhammad was raised by his Grandfather Abd al-Muttalib who almost

Sacrificed Muhammad's Father Abd-Allah in the Ka'aba while praying to Allah and

Practicing divination. (Tab VI 2,5)

– He also liked to constantly stroke/pet Muhammad. After his Grandfather's death, his Uncle Abu Talib raised him. (Ishaq 73)

-Muhammad became a trade agent for a rich female merchant named Khadijah who was 40 years old.

Khadijah who was 15 years his senior invited Muhammad and his uncles to her home. She got her father so drunk that he married them. Her Father later regretted marrying them. His sons, Al-Qasim, Al-Tayyib and Al-Tahir died in infancy; He had Fatima (wife of Ali) and 2 other daughters. (Tab VI 49)

Mongol invaders good, resistance to them very very bad and Ibn Taymiyya is a hadith.

Ibn Taymiya and NO TOLERANCE

PRINCIPLE: MUSLIMS SHOULD RESIST, FIGHT AND OVERTURN ANY ISLAMIC GOVERNMENT THAT DOESN'T GOVERN THE LAND ACCORDING TO THE ISLAMIC LAW ONLY!

PRINCIPLE: MUSLIMS SHOULD ENFORCE JIHAD ON ANYBODY WHOSE BELIEFS DIFFER FROM ISLAM, ESPECIALLY JEWS AND CHRISTIANS.

1263 A.D. – Born in Syrian town of Haran

Fought Mongolian invaders of Syria (1299-1303) and taught that Mongolians

were not true Muslims and that fellow countrymen should not submit to their authority.

Declared that anyone who submitted to Mongolians, helped them or dealt with
them was an infidel.

Taymiya acted as if he were a military leader, declaring the Muslims to be
infidels and attacking them.

Taymiya established the mind-set of NO TOLERANCE and refinforced principles that were practiced centuries earlier in the times of Muhammad.

REMEMBER: Today's terrorism is a result of this mindset and Taymiya is one of most widely read Hadiths.

2. Yes, it's already video time. Now the first video below is one that I found on Rick B's site http://ww3zionism.blogspot.com/ Check his site out.

And no doubt many of you have seen it. But I'm linking to it because:

A. It is very well done. I take my hat off to the people at the Onion. They are superb.

B. Listen to the little girl's Arabic at near the end of the video. Shows you what happens when David Gaubatz types are teaching people Arabic.

C. It is short, so Shas Party and Tea Party members can follow it.

Video link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5CqpEacxdS0

And now for some serious study of the gifts that Yahweh er, Allah, has bestowed upon us. Kind of makes you all want to shout out in unison الحمد لله doesn’t it?

Video link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mezDRxqI7x0

As we all know from Peter King’s (Asshole, New York) inquisition, Shakira law made it to Nashville. Maybe that’s not so bad after all.

Video link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lTdV6dn_3_0

نشكر الله

* Mantiq al-Tayr is a blogger who is attempting to wake up other American citizens to the true dangers and challenges which face their country and is devoted to justice for the Palestinian people. Truth is his objective, satire is his tool. He also enjoys reading the Qur'an from time to time. See his website.

By Jonathan Cook * | Sabbah Report | www.sabbah.biz

Jews must not rent homes to "gentiles". That was the religious decree issued this week by at least 50 of Israel's leading rabbis, many of them employed by the state as municipal religious leaders. Jews should first warn, then "ostracize" fellow Jews who fail to heed the directive, the rabbis declared.

The decree is the latest in a wave of racist pronouncements from some of Israel's most influential rabbis.

In October, Shmuel Eliyahu, the chief rabbi of Safed, delivered a ruling, signed by 17 other rabbis in the city, telling Jewish residents not to sell or rent property to members of the country's Palestinian Arab minority, who make up a fifth of the population.

His followers turned words into deeds by attacking Arab students in the city and threatening to burn down the homes of Jewish landlords renting to the students.

Similar edicts have recently been backed by dozens of rabbis in Tel Aviv and nearby Bnei Brak, a suburb of 150,000 mostly ultra-Orthodox Jews. They have threatened to "expose" any Jews who rent to "foreigners" – in this case, a reference to migrant workers and African refugees who are crowded into neglected neighbourhoods in the centre of the country.

After many weeks of silence on these declarations, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu was finally forced to issue a condemnation yesterday, describing the rabbis' call as undemocratic and contradicting the bible, which, he said, called for Jews to "love the stranger".

Nonetheless, racism in Israel is increasingly enjoying high-level sanction among the most influential sectors of the religious establishment.

The latest ruling was signed by Shlomo Aviner, a spiritual leader of Israel's national-religious camp; Yosef Elyashiv, a senior ultra-Orthodox rabbi; and Avigdor Neventzal, rabbi of Jerusalem's Old City.

Its sentiments have also been echoed by Ovadia Yosef, a former chief rabbi of Israel and the spiritual leader of Shas, an important political and religious party in Mr Netanyahu's government. "Selling to [non-Jews], even for a lot of money, is not allowed. We won't let them take control of us here," Mr Yosef said recently.

Two months ago, Mr Yosef explained the logic behind his views and those of like-minded rabbis.

"Goyim [non-Jews – gentiles] were born only to serve us." Explaining why God allowed non-Jews long lives, he added: "Imagine that your donkey would die, you'd lose your income. [The donkey] is your servant... That's why he [the gentile] gets a long life, to work well for the Jew."

Mr Yosef's remarks against "gentiles" were greeted with respectful silence by Israeli officials and most of the media...

The rabbis' use of theology to support racial discrimination is being applied to more than just housing.

This summer, Yosef Elitzur and Yitzhak Shapira, who head an influential seminary in the West Bank settlement of Yitzhar, published The King's Torah, a 230-page guide to how Jews should treat non-Jews.

The two rabbis concluded that Jews were obligated to kill anyone who posed a danger, immediate or potential, to the Jewish people, and implied that all Palestinians were to be considered a threat. On these grounds, the pair justified killing Palestinian civilians and even their babies.

Last month Mr Shapira also backed the use of Palestinians as human shields, a war crime under the Fourth Geneva Convention, and a practice that Israel's Supreme Court has outlawed.

The King's Torah, far from being condemned by moderate rabbis, has been greeted with a general silence and enthusiastic support from a number of notable religious leaders.

Arik Ascherman, head of Rabbis for Human Rights in Israel, said the growing extremism of the Orthodox religious establishment in Israel reflected the increasingly right-wing atmosphere in Israel that made the expression of ultra-nationalist views permissible.

In the current climate, he said, moderate rabbis were reluctant to speak out against their colleagues. Many of these rabbis belong to the Conservative or Reform streams of Judaism, which are not officially recognized in Israel.

"The religious sanction being given to the political right by these rabbis is dangerous. It makes their opinions seem more acceptable," he said.

That is being reflected in public surveys, in which many Israeli Jews express support for anti-Arab views. A poll by the Israeli Democracy Institute published last week showed that 46 per cent of the country's Jews did not want to live near Arab citizens, and 39 per cent felt the same about foreign workers.

Even more, 53 per cent, wanted Arab citizens to be encouraged to leave Israel and half believed Arabs should not have equal rights with Jews. Among the religious public, racist sentiments were more popular.

Israeli prosecutors, meanwhile, have turned a blind eye to the refusal of several prominent endorsers of The King's Torah to obey a summons calling them for investigation. "Our holy Torah is not a subject for investigation or trial by flesh and blood," the rabbis said.

In all, the rabbinical establishment is growing increasingly bold in promoting its vision of a Jewish state run according to holy law, according to Zvi Barel, a commentator with the daily newspaper Haaretz.

"They and their supporters are transforming zealous fundamentalism and the shameful The King's Torah into the mainstream," Mr Barel wrote recently.

The general trend towards extremism has not happened by chance, said Sefi Rachelevsky, a prominent Israeli writer critical of the Orthodox rabbinate. Israel's public coffers pay the salaries of some of the most extremist rabbis, and the education system regularly falls under the political control of religious parties like Shas.

Mr Shapira, who advocates killing non-Jewish babies, receives large sums from the education ministry for his yeshiva – a seminary where he spreads his message of hate. Religious students also receive extra subsidies unavailable to normal students to encourage their attendance at such yeshivas.

The rabbis exert their influence on the youngest and most impressionable too. When the new school year started in September, 52 per cent of Jewish children in first grade attended a strictly religious school.

Pupils in some of the most religious schools, Mr Rachlevsky pointed out, are taught that Jews sit above nature, which comprises four categories: "inanimate", "vegetable", "animal" and "speakers" – or non-Jews, who are considered no more than talking animals.

* Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. His latest books are "Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East" and "Disappearing Palestine: Israel's Experiments in Human Despair".

(The National)

By Neve Gordon * | Sabbah Report | www.sabbah.biz

Despite the fact that it was the seventh demolition since last July, this time the destruction of the Bedouin village of Al-Arakib in the Israeli Negev was different. The difference is not because the homeless residents had to deal this time with the harsh desert winter; nor in the fact that the bulldozers began razing the homes just minutes before the 40 children left for school, thus engraving another violent scene in their memory. Rather, the demolition was different because this time Christian evangelists from the United States and England were involved.

I know this for a fact because right next to the demolished homes, the Jewish National Fund (JNF) put up a big sign that reads:

"GOD-TV FOREST, a generous donation by God-TV made 1,000,000 tree saplings available to be planted in the land of Israel and also provided for the creation of water projects throughout the Negev."

GOD-TV justifies this contribution by citing the book of Isaiah:

"I will turn the desert into pools of water and the parched ground into springs."

The JNF's objective, however, is not altruistic, but rather to plant a pine or eucalyptus forest on the desert land so that the Bedouins cannot return to their ancestral homes. The practice of planting forests in an attempt to Judaize more territory is by no means new. Right after Israel's establishment in 1948, the JNF planted millions of trees to cover up the remains of Palestinian villages that had been destroyed during or after the war. The objective was to help ensure that the 750,000 Palestinian residents who either fled or were expelled during the war would never return to their villages and to suppress the fact that they had been the rightful owners of the land before the State of Israel was created. Scores of Palestinian villages disappeared from the landscape in this way, and the grounds were converted into picnic parks, thus helping engender a national amnesia regarding the Palestinian Nakba.

For several years, I thought this practice had been discontinued, but thanks to the JNF's new bedfellows and the generous donation of Rory and Wendy Alec, who established the international evangelical television channel GOD-TV, within the next few months a million saplings will be planted on land belonging to uprooted Bedouins.

God-TV can afford such lavish gifts, since it boasts a viewership of nearly half a billion people, with 20 million in the United States and 14 million in Britain. The television channel regularly features evangelical leaders such as Joyce Meyer, Creflo Dollar, Benny Hinn, Kenneth Copeland and John Hagee, at least some of whom espouse Christian Dispensationalism and believe that all Jews must convert to Christianity before the "Second Coming".

The viewers are asked to open their wallets in order to "sow a seed for God". In this case, the donations seem to have actually been allocated toward sowing seeds, but these seeds are ones of hate and strife. They are antithetical to Isaiah's prophecy about the people beating their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning hooks. Indeed, if Isaiah were alive today, he would probably be among the first to lie in front of the bulldozers in an effort to stop the destruction of the Bedouin homes.

* Neve Gordon is the author of Israel's Occupation and can be contacted through his website www.israelsoccupation.info

Stability and peace in the Middle East are unattainable without first deconstructing the settler-colonial attitude upon which Israel is founded.

By Bassem Hassan * | Sabbah Report | www.sabbah.biz

Recent plans by the Israeli government and the Knesset to amend existing laws concerning citizenship rights in Israel have generated waves of criticism in liberal circles, including Israeli ones. The proposed amendments would institutionalise a loyalty oath to Israel as a "Jewish state" and would allow residential communities to bar families that "disrupt" their "social-cultural fabric" from residing there. As refreshing as these critical reactions have been (after all it is good to know that there are still some liberals out there who are willing to defend the ideals of democracy and equality rather than justifying violations of human rights -- especially those of Arabs and Muslims -- as a lesser evil, as several leading liberals became accustomed to in the last few years), the views expressed still suffer a major shortcoming.

Liberal critics of these plans stopped short of pointing out the real issue at hand, namely Zionism. In other words, they focussed on the effect rather than the cause. This is typical of liberal critics of the Israeli state who do not mind objecting to some of its policies -- for instance, house demolition and the construction of new settlements -- but that always shy away from critiquing the ideology that underpins them. For Western liberals, Zionism is the ideology and national liberation movement of the Jews who were persecuted in Europe for centuries, and as such should be immune to critique. While opposition to anti-Semitism is the only honourable position any decent person should adopt in the face of racism against Jews, it should not make one overlook the racist character of Zionism itself.

The racist and colonialist characteristics of Zionism were quite evident since its inception as an organised political movement in the late 19th century. In his attempt to sell the idea of a Jewish state in Palestine to the colonialist powers of the day, Theodor Herzl explained that such a state would constitute part of Europe's "wall of defence against Asia; [it] would serve as an outpost of civilisation against barbarism". But he was quick to add that the Zionists would take any country the European colonial powers would agree to give them. Notice that this was almost half a century before the heinous crimes of the Nazis against the European Jewry. Needless to say, the opinion of the indigenous people of whichever country the colonial powers would choose to allocate to the Zionists was of no significance to the latter. For whether it would have fallen on Palestine, Argentina or Uganda -- just to mention a few countries that were considered as a home for such a state -- it would have been considered a "land without a people for a people without a land."

Of course, the Zionists were aware of the presence of people in Palestine. However, to them, these people, unlike the Jews of Europe, were not developed and civilised enough to be treated as a nation worthy of a state. The fact that this attitude was the zeitgeist of 19th century Europe does not make it less racist or acceptable. Even when the European empires started to show signs of fatigue due to the resistance of colonised peoples and internal opposition, Zionist leaders remained staunch supporters of colonialism. As Jabotinsky put it, they had the "unshakable resolve to keep the whole Mediterranean in European hands... [F]or the West has represented a more superior culture than the East in the last thousand years... and we today are the most prominent and loyal bearers of this culture." Golda Meir's infamous denial of the existence of the Palestinians is in essence just another expression of this logic. The Oslo Process -- which entailed some level of recognition by Israel of the Palestinians -- did not lead to a major change in this respect as the continuous dehumanisation of the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza at the hands of Israeli soldiers and settlers testifies.

These soon-to-be-implemented laws should be read in conjunction with the Israeli government's insistence that the Palestinians recognise Israel as a Jewish state and the frequent warnings made by Israeli politicians and scholars of the demographic threat presented by the Arabs of 1948. Considering a sizeable portion of the citizenry an existential threat would seem quite absurd to anyone who believes in democracy, but not for Zionists (including liberal Zionists) who believe that being the state of the Jews not that of all its citizens is the raison d'être of Israel. Thus those Arabs who managed to stay in the land on which the Israeli state was established in 1948 -- following the ethnic cleansing of the majority of the indigenous population -- were placed under martial law for almost two decades. Terminating this state, shortly before the Israeli attack on Egypt, Syria and Jordan in June 1967, did not mean that the life of the Arab community returned to normality. Over the years the Knesset made series of laws that were designed to forestall its cultural and economic development. Land confiscation, demolition of villages and denials of building permits are just some of the mechanisms employed to accomplish this goal. Persecution of leaders and massacres (eg Kafir Qassem) are also among the methods used to eliminate the "threat" of the Arab community.

The strategy -- if there ever was anything that merits this description -- of the Palestinian national liberation movement since the 1960s played into the hands of the Zionists and contributed to keeping the Arabs of 1948 off the radar. Until the Arab defeat in June 1967, the Palestinians had pinned their hopes on the armies of the Arab states to liberate Palestine. Following the battle of Al-Karama the fedayeen became the locus of hope. In both cases liberation was pursued through military efforts originating from outside historic Palestine; and throughout this period the "Palestine Question" pertained only to the segment of the population that was expelled from Palestine in 1948. Rarely, if ever, was anything mentioned about those who remained. Starting as early as 1974 and culminating in the Oslo Process, the transformation of the Palestine Liberation Organisation from a liberation movement into a bureaucracy interested in ruling a state on any part of Palestine -- no matter how small -- the Israelis were willing to withdraw from, seemed to have sealed the fate of the Arabs of 1948 for good.

Yet they proved to be as resilient as the cacti growing on the ruins of the 400 or so Arab villages destroyed in 1948, indicating their sites and serving as a living testimony of the crimes committed against the Arabs of Palestine. Of no less importance is the fact that this community's presence in the heart of the Israeli state exposes the flawed logic upon which the Oslo Process is based -- logic aptly described by the late Baruch Kimmerling as "separatist". A few years ago, Martin van Creveld, the celebrated Israeli military historian, succinctly summarised this logic. The solution to the conflict as envisioned by him took the form of a wall that separated the Israelis from the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. The wall was to be "so tall that even birds cannot fly over it... And then of course if anybody tries to climb over the wall, we kill him." This is the essence of the Oslo Process in a nutshell. Far from being about peace, coexistence and justice, the Oslo Process is about a less costly form of control that provides the Zionist project with a lifeline.

However, confining a segment of the Palestinian people to Bantustans in the West Bank and Gaza, aka the "Palestinian state", and dispersing another segment all over the world, will not solve the problem of the Israeli state. And its leaders know that, hence their pressure to secure Palestinian recognition of what they claim to be the Jewish character of the state and their latest systematic onslaught on the Arabs of 1948. Meanwhile, the same leaders never get tired of referring to their state as the only democracy in the region. Chutzpa!

Binyamin Netanyahu and company's pursuit of a final and complete victory over the indigenous people of Palestine will most likely backfire. It will certainly draw attention to the plight of the Arabs of 1948 and their struggles, and might rekindle debates over Zionism. This might explain why some hawkish figures warned of the loyalty oath law's potential negative consequences on their state's image. It remains to be seen whether the Palestinians and the Arabs in general will take advantage of this opportunity to expose the real face of Zionism, or whether they will persist in chasing a mirage.

As for Israel's liberal friends who support a two-state solution to "save Israel from itself", if sincere they would start advising their friends to de-Zionise their institutions and laws. For without such a move the Israeli polity will continue to be nothing but a Herrenvolk democracy and an apartheid system. This is no recipe for peace. On the contrary, it is a cause for conflict.

* The writer is a lecturer of political science at the British University in Cairo.

(Al-Ahram Weekly)

By Jonathan Cook * | Sabbah Report | www.sabbah.biz

Safed chief rabbi, Shmuel Eliyahu

The tranquility of Safed, a small Israeli city nestled high in the hills of the Upper Galilee close to the Lebanese border, is not usually disturbed except by the occasional pilgrimage by Madonna or other famous devotees of the Jewish mystical teachings of Kabbalah.

But in the past few weeks, Safed – one of Judaism's four holy cities – has been making headlines of a very different kind. Gideon Levy, a columnist for the Israeli daily Ha'aretz, last week declared it "the most racist city in the country".

The unflattering, and hotly contested, epithet follows an edict from Safed's senior rabbis ordering residents not to sell or rent homes to "non-Jews" – a reference to the country's Palestinian Arab citizens, who comprise a fifth of Israel's population.

At an emergency meeting, called last month to discuss the dangers of "assimilation" caused by Arab men dating Jewish women, the 18 rabbis warned that Safed was facing an "Arab takeover". Jewish residents were told to inform on neighbours who try to sell or rent to Arabs.

The number of Arabs in the city, though low, has been steadily rising as Safed Academic College has expanded. There are now some 1,300 Arab students enrolled at the school.

The rabbis' statements have provoked a series of riots by local religious Jews, in which several Arab homes have been attacked to chants of "Death to the Arabs". In one recent incident, three Arab students were beaten as shots were fired.

So far three Jewish youths, including an off-duty policeman, have been charged with participating in the violence. The policeman is accused of firing his gun.

The anti-Arab campaign escalated last week as posters were plastered across the city threatening to burn down the home of an elderly Jew if he did not stop renting to Arab students.

The owner, 89-year-old Eli Zvieli, said the posters appeared after he received phone threats and visits from several rabbis warning him to change his mind.

Jamil Khalaili, 20, a physiotherapy student at the college who rents an apartment with a friend in a Jewish neighbourhood, said the atmosphere in Safed was rapidly deteriorating.

"We're being treated like criminals, like we're trying to steal their homes," he said. "It's got the point where many of my friends are wondering whether to leave. I want to study here but not if it costs me my life."

Leading the opposition to the presence of Arab students in the city is Safed's chief rabbi, Shmuel Eliyahu, who is employed by the municipality as head of its religious council.

"When a non-Jew moves in, residents begin to worry about their children, about their daughters. Many Arab students have been known to date Jewish girls," he told Israel National News, the main news agency of the settlement movement.

The 18 rabbis issued their joint statement after learning of the city's plan to build a medical school, which is expected to draw Arab students from across the Galilee.

They urged Jewish residents to shun a "neighbour or acquaintance" who rents to Arabs. "Refrain from doing business with him, deny him the right to read from the Torah, and similarly ostracize him until he renounces this harmful deed," it read.

Infamous rabbi, Ovadia Yosef

They have been given backing by a former chief rabbi, Ovadia Yosef, who used a recent sermon to tell his followers that "selling to [non-Jews], even for a lot of money, is not allowed. We won't let them take control of us here."

Similar anti-Arab sentiments have been heard in two other Jewish cities in the Galilee, Karmiel and Upper Nazareth. Both were established decades ago as part of a government "Judaisation" programme to settle more Jews in the country's most heavily Arab-populated region.

In Karmiel, 30 kilometres west of Safed, advertisements in local newspapers have been promoting a special email address for residents to inform on neighbours planning to sell homes to Arabs. According to Ynet, a popular news website, the email account is overseen by officials for Oren Milstein, the city's deputy mayor until he was fired last week.

Adi Eldar, the mayor, said Mr Milstein had "damaged the city's image" after he gave a newspaper interview in which he boasted that he had prevented the sale of 30 homes to Arab families.

Mr Milstein's replacement as deputy mayor, Rina Greenberg, is a member of the far-right Yisrael Beiteinu party of Avigdor Lieberman, Israel's foreign minister, who advocates ridding the country of many of its Arab citizens.

Meanwhile, the mayor of Upper Nazareth, Shimon Gapso, who is also allied Yisrael Beiteinu, has announced plans to build a new neighbourhood for 3,000 religious Jews to halt what he called the city's "demographic deterioration".

Hundreds of Arab families from neighbouring Nazareth have relocated to the Jewish city to escape overcrowding. Today, one in eight of Upper Nazareth's 42,000-strong population is Arab.

In August, Mr Gapso said he felt "as happy as if I had a new baby" at the news that 15 extremist families from the former Gaza settlement of Gush Katif were establishing a Jewish seminary in his city.

Hatia Chomsky-Porat, who leads Galilee activists for Sikkuy, a group advocating better relations between Jews and Arabs, said: "The political atmosphere is growing darker all the time. Racism among Jews is entirely mainstream now."

In Safed, the Arab student body, heavily outnumbered by nearly 40,000 Jewish residents, has tried to keep a low profile. However, one small act of defiance appears to have further contributed to Jewish residents' fears of a "takeover".

Inhabitants awoke recently to find a Palestinian flag draped on the top of a renovated mosque – one of the many old stone buildings in Safed that attest to the city's habitation long before Israel's establishment.

In 1948, when Jewish forces captured the town, Safed was a mixed city of 10,000 Palestinians and 2,000 Jews. All the Palestinian inhabitants were expelled, including a 13-year-old Mahmoud Abbas, now the president of the Palestinian Authority.

Mr Khaliali said the city's history appeared still to haunt many of its Jewish residents, who expressed fears that Arab students were there to reclaim refugee property as the vanguard of a movement for the Palestinian right of return.

It is not the first time Mr Eliyahu, the son of a former chief rabbi of Israel, has been accused of inciting against the city's Arab population.

In 2002, during a wave of suicide attacks at the start of the second intifada, he called on Safed college to expel all Arab students.

Two years later he launched a campaign against intermarriage, accusing Arab men of waging "another form of war" against Jewish women by "seducing" them.

He narrowly avoided prosecution for incitement in 2006 after he agreed to retract his earlier statements.

The Religious Action Centre, a group of Reform movement Jews, and several Arab MPs have demanded that Yehuda Weinstein, the attorney-general, investigate Mr Eliyahu and the other rabbis for incitement to violence.

* Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. His latest books are "Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East" and "Disappearing Palestine: Israel's Experiments in Human Despair".

(The National)

By Khalid Amayreh * in occupied East Jerusalem | Sabbah Report | www.sabbah.biz

A major Jewish religious figure in Israel has likened non-Jews to donkeys and beasts of burden, saying the main reason for their very existence is to serve Jews.

Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, spiritual mentor of the religious fundamentalist party, Shas, which represents Middle Eastern Jews, reportedly said during a Sabbath homily earlier this week that "the sole purpose of non-Jews is to serve Jews."

Yosef is considered a major religious leader in Israel who enjoys the allegiance of hundreds of thousands of followers.

Shas is a chief coalition partner in the current Israeli government,

Yosef, also a former Chief Rabbi of Israel, was quoted by the right-wing newspaper, the Jerusalem Post, as saying that the basic function of a goy, a derogatory word for a gentile, was to serve Jews.

"Non-Jews were born only to serve us. Without that, they have no place in the world-only to serve the People of Israel," Yosef said in his weekly Saturday night sermon which was devoted to laws regarding actions non-Jews are permitted to perform on the Sabbath.

Yosef also reportedly said that the lives of non-Jews in Israel are preserved by God in order to prevent losses to Jews.

Yosef, widely considered a prominent Torah sage and authority on the interpretation of Talmud, a basic Jewish scripture, held a comparison between animals of burden and non-Jews.

"In Israel, death has no dominion over them...With gentiles, it will be like any person-They need to die, but God will give them longevity. Why? Imagine that one's donkey would die, they'd lose their money."

"This is his servant...That's why he gets a long life, to work well for this Jew."

Yosef further elucidated his ideas about the servitude of gentiles to Jews, asking "why are gentiles needed? They will work, they will plow, they will reap; and we will sit like an effendi and eat."

"That is why gentiles were created."

The concept of gentiles being infra-human beings or quasi-animals is well-established in Orthodox Judaism.

For example, rabbis affiliated with the Chabad movement, a supremacist but influential Jewish sect, teach openly that at the spiritual level, non-Jews have the status of animals.

Abraham Kook, the religious mentor of the settler movement, was quoted as saying that the difference between a Jew and a gentile was greater and deeper than the difference between humans and animals.

"The difference between a Jewish soul and souls of non-Jews - all of them in all different levels - is greater and deeper than the difference between a human soul and the souls of cattle."

Some of Kook's manifestly racist ideas are taught in the Talmudic college, Merkaz H'arav, in Jerusalem. The college is named after Kook.

In his book, Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight of Three Thousand Years, the late Israeli writer and intellectual Israel Shahak argued that whenever Orthodox rabbis use the word "human," they normally didn't refer to all humans, but only to Jews, since non-Jews are not considered humans according to Halacha of Jewish law.

A few years ago, a member of the Israeli Knesset, castigated Israeli soldiers for "treating human beings as if they were Arabs." The Knesset member, Aryeh Eldad, was commenting on the evacuation by the Israeli army of a settler outpost in the West Bank.

Faced with the negative effect of certain Biblical and Talmudic teachings on inter-religious relations, some Christian leaders in Europe have called on the Jewish religious establishment to reform the traditional Halacha perceptions of non-Jews.

However, while the Reform and Conservative sects of Judaism, have related positively to such calls, most Orthodox Jews have totally rejected the calls, arguing that the Bible is God's word which can't be altered under any circumstances.

The Bible says that non-Jews living under Jewish rule must serve as "water carriers and wood hewers" for the master race.

In Joshua (9:27), we read " That day, Joshua made the Gibeonites woodcutters and water carriers for the community and for the altar of the Lord at the Place the Lord would choose. And that is what they are to this days."

Elsewhere in the Bible, Israelites are strongly urged to treat "strangers living in your midst" humanely "because you yourselves were strangers in Egypt."

* Khalid Amayreh a journalist based in the Occupied Palestinian town of Dura. He obtained his MA in journalism from the University of Southern Illinois in 1983.

Vitriolic racism and hatred has become the Israeli norm

By Omar Radwan | Sabbah Report | www.sabbah.biz

Israel appears to be awash with Jewish hate preachers. In the past, rabbis who issued racist edicts or offensive remarks about Palestinians or non-Jews were generally dismissed as radicals and extremists who were no more than a trifling annoyance to be ignored in the hope that they would simply go away. However, it is now clear that ignoring this problem has only made it worse. In the current climate in Israel, extremist hate preaching has apparently become the norm and it is being embraced, not just on the extreme political right but also by a disturbing number of Israelis in general, be they preachers, politicians, settlers or simply ordinary citizens. Hate-filled Israelis have become emboldened over the years by the knowledge that they can say and do almost anything without fear, knowing that they will not be condemned or, if they are, that nothing will come of it. That is due to the widespread support for their views across Israeli society as well as their religious leaders and the political elite.

What is particularly disturbing is that leading Israeli rabbis, who are meant to be the spiritual and moral guides of the Jewish people, are actually encouraging racism, physical violence and even the killing of Palestinians.

It is no longer shocking to read headlines such as "Leading rabbi encourages IDF soldiers to use Palestinian human shields". This particular headline relates to Rabbi Yitzhak Shapira, who taught his students that "according to true Jewish values, your lives come before those of the enemy, whether he is a soldier or a civilian under protection. Therefore, you are forbidden from endangering your own life for the sake of the enemy, not even for a civilian." This sort of teaching, no doubt, goes some way towards explaining why the number of cases in which Palestinian children are being used as human shields by Israeli forces is increasing.

Vicious levels of discrimination against non-Jews have now escalated to the point that when Israelis of a more reasonable persuasion do something as simple as, for example, rent a property to an Arab, rabbis are now calling for them to be shunned and boycotted by their own Jewish communities. A recent report in Haaretz quoted a letter signed by a group of 18 prominent rabbis, including the Chief Rabbi of Safed, who wrote that renting properties to Arabs would deflate the value of Jewish homes and, "The neighbours and acquaintances [of a Jew who sells or rents to an Arab] must distance themselves from the Jew, refrain from doing business with him, deny him the right to read from the Torah, and similarly [ostracize] him until he goes back on this harmful deed".

It is not just Muslims who are on the receiving end of this campaign of hatred; even Christians in the region have long been subjected to disturbing and widespread campaigns of abuse from Israeli Jews. "I hate to say it", said Roman Catholic Father Massimo Pazzini of the Church of the Flagellation on the Via Dolorosa, "but we've grown accustomed to this. Jewish religious fanatics spitting at Christian priests and nuns has become a tradition."

The term "hate preacher" has often been used in the Western media about Muslims but it seems more appropriate to describe some of the Israeli rabbis for their recent statements and guidance.

Rabbi Ovadia Yosef

In the run-up to the latest round of Israeli-Palestinian "peace negotiations" Rabbi Ovadia Yosef wished that "all the nasty people who hate Israel, like Abu Mazen [Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas], vanish from our world". He went on to say, "May God strike them down with the plague along with all the nasty Palestinians who persecute Israel."

Although his statement was immediately condemned by America it did not come as a surprise to people who were already familiar with his 2001 call for the annihilation of Arabs, at which point he also said it was forbidden to be merciful to them.

Rabbi Yitzhak Shapiro

In his controversial book The King's Torah, Rabbi Yitzhak Shapiro sanctioned the murder by Jews of non-Jews, including babies and children, who may pose an actual or potential threat to Jews or to Israel.

"It is permissible to kill the Righteous among non-Jews even if they are not responsible for the threatening situation," he wrote. "If we kill a Gentile who has sinned or has violated one of the seven commandments because we care about the commandments there is nothing wrong with the murder."

This edict was seemingly made in response to the arrest of a Jewish terrorist who confessed to murdering two Palestinian shepherds in the West Bank, and was thus used to justify the killings.

Mordechai Eliyahu

According to a report by Khalid Amayreh in November 2009, "During the Israeli onslaught against Gaza earlier this year, Mordecahi Elyahu, one of the leading rabbinic figures in Israel, urged the army not to refrain from killing enemy children in order to save the lives of Israeli soldiers. He had even petitioned the Israeli government to carry out a series of carpet bombing of Palestinian population centres in Gaza. 'If they don't stop after we kill 100,' said the rabbi, 'then we must kill a thousand. And if they do not stop after we kill a thousand, then we must kill 10,000. If they still don't stop, we must kill 100,000, even a million. Whatever it takes to stop them'."

According to Eliyahu's obituary in the Daily Telegraph in June this year

Rabbi Eliyahu wrote to Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to say that, according to Jewish war ethics, an entire city (he referred to Gaza City) holds collective responsibility for the immoral behaviour of individuals.

Thus, he continued, there was no moral prohibition against the indiscriminate killing of Palestinian civilians during a potential massive military offensive in Gaza aimed at stopping the rocket attacks. He ended his letter quoting from the Psalms: "I will pursue my enemies and apprehend them and I will not desist until I have eradicated them."

He extended his hatred to those individuals worldwide who even show the slightest incidental support for Palestinians and said of the hundreds of thousands killed in 2004 by the Asian tsunami "those who died were paying for their governments' support of the Palestinians."

With statements such as these it is paradoxical Muslim preachers such as Dr Zakir Naik and Sheik Yusuf Al-Qaradawi, whose views are very moderate in comparison, are labelled as extremists. Although for years now Muslim leaders have (often undeservedly) been vilified as the most hate-filled preachers in the world, that title is now surely more deserved by Israeli rabbis such as those mentioned above.

By any means necessary, no matter how immoral, or corrupt.

It is strange for the spiritual leaders of a "chosen" people who stake their claim to the "holy" land use methods to achieve their goals that are decidedly "unholy". One recent ruling by Rabbi Ari Schvat, for example, gave "his blessing to female agents of Israel's foreign secret service, Mossad, who may be required to have sex with the enemy in so-called 'honey-pot' missions against terrorists." While there is apparently no limit on Jewish men using sex in an effort to infiltrate the enemy, he did make a few remarks about Jewish female 'honey-pots' stating, "If it is necessary to use a married woman, it would be best [for] her husband to divorce her... After the [sex] act, he would be entitled to bring her back." He also added, "Naturally, a job of that sort could be given to a woman who in any event is licentious in her ways." So, not only are these rabbis genocidal, but sexist as well.

That such comments are not causing moral outrage amongst conservative Jews in Israel and, indeed, in Jewish communities worldwide, is worrying. The concept of a woman defiling herself and committing any act of lewdness or adultery is something alien to most religions but the fact that Jewish women are being given the green light by Israel's rabbis to use such lascivious means to achieve the goals of Mossad demonstrates further that Israel really does not have any moral line across which it will not go.

The standard response to an article like this is to condemn it as "anti-Semitic". That is neither the intention nor, it is contended, the result; the statements quoted have been issued or uttered by rabbis and well-publicised. Some may even be directly responsible for the subsequent killings of innocent Palestinian civilians. Instead of lining up to shoot the messenger, detractors should pause instead and really consider what these rabbis have said; and then decide whether reporting anti-Gentile statements made by rabbis really does qualify as anti-Semitism. There are many Jews and rabbis in congregations all over the world who are desperate for peace in the Holy Land and are striving to stand up for the common humanity of us all, regardless of our faith background.

According to New York-based Rabbi Yisroel Dovid Weiss, rabbis like those quoted above "do not and cannot represent Judaism or the Torah," Indeed, Rabbi Weiss goes one step further: "The Zionist State of 'Israel', which is a rebellion against the Almighty, cannot represent the Torah or world Jewry true to the Torah." Referring to Rabbi Ovadia Yusef in particular, Rabbi Weiss added: "This rabbi is a member of Sephardic Jewry, Jews from Arab countries. If he would only look back at his own community's history, he would realize that Jews can, and did, live peacefully with Arabs, for many centuries. When Jews were persecuted, killed and expelled in other parts of the world, the Arab countries provided a safe haven and welcomed Jews with open arms. In Palestine as well, Jews enjoyed this hospitality when Palestinians and Jews co-existed in harmony for many generations, as is well-documented in Jewish books of that era. It was only Zionism, with its theft and oppression of the Palestinian people, that put an end to this co-existence." (http://www.nkusa.org/activities/Statements/20100819.cfm)

Racism and extremist preachers must be challenged, not least when they ply their wares in volatile areas like the Holy Land, where words can and all too often lead to murderous acts. People of faith and good faith must stand up to incitement to hatred; it would be refreshing to hear more leading rabbis condemning the hate preachers in Israel. Their silence is deafening.

Religion And Democracy Are Incompatible, This Is Why We Learn History

By Gordon Duff* | Sabbah Report | www.sabbah.biz

"As more and more devout rural congregations across America were organized as political pressure groups, it didn't take long for extremist doctrines to be imposed and for cheap, dirty politics to move onto the pulpit."

Where to we start? Do we try to clear up the mythologies, alright we can simply call them lies, about the "founding fathers?" Hey, they were atheists! These were men from "The Age of Reason." This meant they rejected all religion as superstition. All this talk about Jefferson or Franklin being "theists" or trying to negotiate and "lawyer" some religion into the Constitution through the "back door" is simply pandering.

Divide and Conquer

All the talk about the constitution, federalism and America founded as a Christian state is a phony hustle, meant to play on one religion hating another. As more and more devout rural congregations across America were organized as political pressure groups, it didn't take long for extremist doctrines to be imposed and for cheap, dirty politics to move onto the pulpit.

Fear and hate have always been great political tools. Richard Nixon helped hone these failings with the help of a young and bellicose Donald Rumsfeld and his "sidekick" Dick Cheney. The "dynamic duo" of the Watergate years became the cheerleaders for the post 9/11 phobias. Where Nixon used class envy to divide and conquer, the new game is religious hate.

It was easy to take this model global. What had been a ploy to steal an election by Nixon became a political movement under Reagan and eventually a tool of global mayhem and endless wars. Now it appears Israel has taken the helm with the total failure of any American political movement to remain out of Zionist political control.

I have spent many meetings with Arabs and Israelis, chaired a few. They are cordial, productive and never demonstrate any of the conflicts spoken of in the press. People are people, business is business and intelligent and decent people of all religions hate the ignorant and destructive.

This is reality.

WRD's, Weapons of Religious Destruction

Religion and religious wars had destroyed Europe as religion and religious wars are destroying the world today. In America, in France, they saw it, pushed out the churches and the monarchs. What we forget, what we lie about, is that established churches were part of a monarchical system. The French Revolution was a revolution against, not just the monarchy but the Catholic Church which had impoverished the nation for centuries and led a holocaust of murder.

Religion had impeded civilization, science and human values and is doing so today more than ever. Religion used to be flat earth. Today it is "clean coal" and tax cuts for billionaires. Religious beliefs that used to follow "stupid" now chase bucks.

You don't have to burn a Koran or hunt down Afghan villagers for sport to be a religious nutcase.

Do we want to talk about the ethical argument? "Why do you go to church?"

"Without the bible, I wouldn't know how to act, I would blaspheme, kill, have sex with children, steal....treat homosexuals with dignity, love all humans equally...."

If I've heard this once, I have heard it a thousand times. Whenever a sex criminal that preys on children is caught, one of the first things logged into evidence is a bible. It is always "dog-eared"....well used with lots of underlining.

We learn history for a reason, or we used to. The French turned their churches into public toilets, barns, smashed statues, took the endless church lands in a frenzy of anger. The people of France lived like animals for centuries because of religion. Every state with an established church was the same, intolerance, brutality, massive taxation and it didn't stop in the Middle Ages. Over 50,000 people have come forward in the small nation of Ireland, sexually abused by the Church. The Church ran the schools, it ran public welfare organizations, even ran much of the government and everything it touched was stained with violence, injustice and bigotry.

Religion and Superstition

Americans have no idea how few people in Western Europe are Christians. A good guess is 10 to 15%. All they have to do is look around them, every day, and see where history took place. Religion was a nightmare for Europe, a holocaust that lasted centuries. Their rejection of religion is them saying, "never again."

With so much of the world's religious disruption supposedly about the hatred between Judaism and Islam, lets get real here. Most Israelis are atheists, most Jews are atheists. We all know this and, frankly, this is what I like most about Jews, what I respect most. These are educated people, scientists, thinkers. If they can't see it, touch it or prove it scientifically, legally, rationally, they don't believe it. You don't get all those Nobel Prizes for talking to dead people and howling at the moon.

The issues between Israel and others, more the United States than any Muslim country, even Iran, is about money, always has been. Jews were persecuted for two reasons, one tied to religious mythology written into what some call "gospels." A couple of minor points, it is impossible to prove in the remotest way that Jews were ever in Egypt for a minute and it is also even more impossible to learn anything about Christ, whether he was real or not or what he taught from reading gospels written for a "pagan" emperor, Constantine, and gleaned, edited and debauched by the Catholic Church.

This was 2000 years ago, Constantine was a monster, the church was corrupt and the Romans had become the most corrupt people on earth. Saying anything else is silly.

The other reason Jews were persecuted was because of money. There is history here, available to all. Learn it. It is still going on. You will ask yourself, "Why didn't they teach me this at school?" Europe depended on money for wars. Europe was in the business of murdering itself. We called this "feudalism." It was the 'dark ages.' People wore armor and beat each other to death with hammers for amusement. This was not a time to be proud of and certainly not a period to learn from.

Then again, Christianity, or what passed for it, had a few minor faults. The religion that Constantine personally designed, the one we have today, is a real piece of work. Talk about fear of burning Korans. The real fear is examining the roots of Christianity, how the Roman Empire excised everything of value and recreated a hierarchical religion of idolators and feudal warlords under the guise of Bishops, Cardinals and Popes.

These people burned every courageous and decent human they could get their hands on, burned them alive, and did so for centuries. These were the Christians. Religious conclaves that defined Christianity and selected which works were included in the bible were little more than political caucuses and the bible was seen as a party platform.

Would you believe anything they told you? The French and America's founding fathers knew better. Studies of early Christian history clearly show that a fabricated pagan religion repackaged to look something like Christianity, we will never know for sure, killed off the real followers of Christ. The original Christians were hunted down like animals and killed, hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions.

They were called "heretics."

The real Christians weren't into money and power enough for the Romans and had to go. A church run by money hungry "bishops" and backed by military enforcers killed off Christianity.

Christians were hunted down and slaughtered until the 14th century with the last of them chased into the Pyrenees and burned alive by the hundreds. This is the not so secret history of Christianity. Next time you are in Southern France, drive the "Cathar Trail" and follow the last vestiges of Christianity as it fled the politicized state religion. If you want to be a Christian, learn about your religion, the real Christianity and who the real martyrs were.

Louis XIV, the "Sun King" worked hard to erase the last vestige of Christianity from history. It threatened his personal divinity.

This is why we learn history.

Today's Circus

Today's "flavor or the month" is Koran burning. Nobody would care, you can burn pretty-much anything you want, here in the US, flags, bibles, anything. The ACLU tells us that burning a Koran is a First Amendment right. Tell me this, why is this such a big deal? A Koran is not a holy book to a backwoods preacher in Florida, it is only paper. We know what is going on, an idiot, and we have millions of them in America, is screaming for attention.

The only reason he is getting attention is because the media needs something to talk about. Nobody is invading Iran, there is a news blackout on Gaza and Israel and nobody cares about Afghanistan. We tried to get some news recently out of WikiLeaks. When that didn't work, poor Julian Assange was accused of rape, in Sweden no less. Think about it. If you can sell that one, you can sell anything.

Oh, I forgot, Pakistan is giving billions of dollars to the Taliban. Last week, the Taliban was making billions selling drugs. Now we hear they get it from Pakistan.

Does Pakistan have billions to give? I have been there. Pakistan is broke. Anything left lying around is stolen by politicians, they would take food out of a rat's mouth. Money from Pakistan? Tell me another one.

What, exactly, would the "Taliban" do with money? There are no stores. They can't travel. They must be using it on the internet. Have we checked to see if the Taliban is buying everything with Paypal?

With their billions of dollars of aid from Pakistan, what is it that the Taliban buys? Do Taliban own things? An AK 47 costs $50 bucks. Since America "misplaced" 250,000 of them a couple of years ago, the only place you can sell one is at a gun show. Everyone in Afghanistan is given one, nearly at birth. A can opener is harder to find and more expensive.

Everyone else in the world has one.

Do this, go to an ATM, take out a few hundred dollars, if you still have that much, and head off into the most remote area you can still afford to drive to. Get out of the car, walk into the woods, desert, mountains. Take the money out of your pocket and try to spend it.

Welcome to Afghanistan.

Some Things Don't Make Any Sense

Let's take a minute to discuss Islam and terrorism. There wasn't any terrorism until the Palestine stuff. It started with the Jews against the British. This is history, lied about, suppressed but more than available. If Muslims were going to be angry at the west, it would have been about Britain, France and, later on, the United States, putting the "stooge" governments in place that enslaved them for decades.

They had been enslaved by the Turks for centuries anyway. If you don't know what that is about, rent Lawrence of Arabia. It is a great film, David Lean was a super director. It is history in a movie, watered down but somewhere to start from.

Learn history, please. Ignorance is embarrassing.

Those governments that Israel loves telling the world are corrupt dictatorships were put in power by us. They are as much our creation as Israel. We did it all. Do you think Jordan or Saudi Arabia were created by a "people's" revolt or Islamic fundamentalists?

There is one of those, it is Iran and nobody, not Russia, not China, certainly not America or Israel wants them around. Why? Is it because they have crazy Islamic laws?

Hey, they cut people's heads off every day in Saudi Arabia and nothing is said. If Iran threatens to stone someone, it hits the papers around the world. The whole thing is a game. Iran stones people, Israel blows up hospitals full of sick people, Americans shoot people in Afghanistan just to watch them bleed.

They world is screwed up. Funny thing, we hear all this but nobody ever threatens to fix any of it, they just love bitching about it.

What Are They Hiding?

Is this because two million Americans are sleeping in cars tonight because they have no homes? Two million Americans are sleeping in prison cells tonight also. Why is that? Why so many? For those of you living in America, have you noticed how short tempered people are getting? Some think it is the anger and alienation Americans feel during elections when faced with the prospect of voting for candidates everyone hates.

Hey, this is how democracy works, live with it or change it.

Why are people angry? Is it because they are broke, busted, no money, facing homelessness, starvation, no future?

Is the freakish sideshow, the religion game, hating homosexuals, burning Korans, imaginary terrorists, and the big spending Taliban, all entertainment to keep people from noticing that there is a real war.

There is real terrorism. Terrorism is stealing the future. The tool wasn't bombs, it isn't bombs, it isn't guns or extremists. The real terrorists own the newspapers, the television networks, the banks, the insurance companies, the hospitals, not just in America but all over the world. They are the phone company, the internet, the oil companies.

The real terrorism is corporate culture and organized crime. If you wonder why there are no candidates that talk about the real issues, why nothing is made in America, why corporations pay no taxes, why we fight war after war for no reason, the answer is simple.

Our government, along with Britain, Germany, Italy and so many others, are owned by corporations, banks, all slaves to a real international conspiracy that we call the "world economy." Al Capone would be ashamed of what we have done. Who pulls the strings?

Figure it out for yourself. It isn't hard. The first step is to turn off the television, the radio and to stop reading newspapers. Then check your internet habits. Are you reading websites like Newsmax or WorldNetDaily or FamilySecurityMatters?

Then, even your attempts to get around corporate brainwashing have been hijacked.

You won't find the truth in a church, mosque or synagogue. You won't find it easily. It won't make you feel better. The truth is a process of admitting that everything you have learned may be and probably is a lie. 95% of the great mysteries of life I have solved have been me buying in on delusion, accepting one cartoon reality for another.

How do we fix this? This is me trying.

* Gordon Duff is senior editor of Veterans Today.

By Max Blumenthal* | Sabbah Report | www.sabbah.biz

A rabbinical guidebook for killing non-Jews has sparked an uproar in Israel and exposed the power a bunch of genocidal theocrats wield over the government.

When I went into the Jewish religious book emporium, Pomeranz, in central Jerusalem to inquire about the availability of a book called Torat Ha'Melech, or the King's Torah, a commotion immediately ensued. "Are you sure you want it?" the owner, M. Pomeranz, asked me half-jokingly. "The Shabak [Israel's internal security service] is going to want a word with you if you do." As customers stopped browsing and began to stare in my direction, Pomeranz pointed to a security camera affixed to a wall. "See that?" he told me. "It goes straight to the Shabak!"

As soon as it was published late last year,Torat Ha'Melech sparked a national uproar. The controversy began when an Israeli tabloid panned the book's contents as "230 pages on the laws concerning the killing of non-Jews, a kind of guidebook for anyone who ponders the question of if and when it is permissible to take the life of a non-Jew." According to the book's author, Rabbi Yitzhak Shapira, "Non-Jews are "uncompassionate by nature" and should be killed in order to "curb their evil inclinations." "If we kill a gentile who has has violated one of the seven commandments... there is nothing wrong with the murder," Shapira insisted. Citing Jewish law as his source (or at least a very selective interpretation of it) he declared: "There is justification for killing babies if it is clear that they will grow up to harm us, and in such a situation they may be harmed deliberately, and not only during combat with adults."

In January, Shapira was briefly detained by the Israeli police, while two leading rabbis who endorsed the book, Dov Lior and Yaakov Yosef, were summoned to interrogations by the Shabak. However, the rabbis refused to appear at the interrogations, essentially thumbing their noses at the state and its laws. And the government did nothing. The episode raised grave questions about the willingness of the Israeli government to confront the ferociously racist swathe of the country's rabbinate. "Something like this has never happened before, even though it seems as if everything possible has already happened," Israeli commentator Yossi Sarid remarked with astonishment. "Two rabbis [were] summoned to a police investigation, and announc[ed] that they will not go. Even settlers are kind enough to turn up."

In response to the rabbis' public rebuke of the state's legal system, the Israeli Attorney General and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu kept silent. Indeed, since the publication of Torat Ha'Melech, Netanyahu has strenuously avoided criticizing its contents or the author's leading supporters. Like so many prime ministers before him, he has been cowed into submission by Israel's religious nationalist community. But Netanyahu appears to be particularly impotent. His weakness stems from the fact that the religious nationalist right figures prominently in his governing coalition and comprises a substantial portion of his political base. For Netanyahu, a confrontation with the rabid rabbis could amount to political suicide, or could force him into an alliance with centrist forces who do not share his commitment to the settlement enterprise in the West Bank.

On August 18, a pantheon of Israel's top fundamentalist rabbis flaunted their political power during an ad hoc congress they convened at Jerusalem's Ramada Renaissance hotel. Before an audience of 250 supporters including the far-right Israeli Knesset member Michael Ben-Ari, the rabbis declared in the name of the Holy Torah that would not submit to any attempt by the government to regulate their political activities -- even and especially if those activities included inciting terrorist attacks against non-Jews. As one wizened rabbi after another rose up to inveigh against the government's investigation of Torat Ha'Melech until his voice grew hoarse, the gathering degenerated into calls for murdering not just non-Jews, but secular Jews as well.

Watch the video (article continues below):

Video link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7t_LxpCY2G8

"The obligation to sacrifice your life is above all others when fighting those who wish to destroy the authority of the Torah," bellowed Rabbi Yehoshua Shapira, head of the yeshiva in the Tel Aviv suburb of Ramat Gan. "It is not only true against non-Jews who are trying to destroy it but against Jewish people from any side."

The government-funded terror academy

The disturbing philosophy expressed in Torat Ha'Melech emerged from the fevered atmosphere of a settlement called Yitzhar located in the northern West Bank near the Palestinian city of Nablus. Shapira leads the settlement's Od Yosef Chai yeshiva, holding sway over a small army of fanatics who are eager to lash out at the Palestinians tending to their crops and livestock in the valleys below them. One of Shapira's followers, an American immigrant named Jack Teitel, has confessed to murdering two innocent Palestinians and attempting to the kill the liberal Israeli historian Ze'ev Sternhell with a mail bomb. Teitel is suspected of many more murders, including an attack on a Tel Aviv gay community center.

Despite its apparent role as a terror training institute, Od Yosef Chai has raked in nearly fifty thousand dollars from the Israeli Ministry of Social Affairs since 2007, while the Ministry of Education has pumped over 250 thousand dollars into the yeshiva's coffers between 2006 and 2007. The yeshiva has also benefited handsomely from donations from a tax-exempt American non-profit called the Central Fund of Israel. Located inside the Marcus Brothers Textiles store in midtown Manhattan, the Central Fund transferred at least thirty thousand to Od Yosef Chai between 2007 and 2008.

Though he does not name "the enemy" in the pages of his book, Shapira's longstanding connection to terrorist attacks against Palestinian civilians exposes the true identity of his targets. In 2006, Shapira was briefly held by Israeli police for urging his supporters to murder all Palestinians over the age of 13. Two years later, according to the Israeli daily Haaretz, he signed a rabbinical letter in support of Israeli Jews who had brutally assaulted two Arab youths on the country's Holocaust Remembrance Day. That same year, Shapira was arrested under suspicion that he helped orchestrate a rocket attack against a Palestinian village near Nablus. Though he was released, Shapira's name arose in connection with another act of terror, when in January, the Israeli police raided his settlement seeking the vandals who set fire to a nearby mosque. After arresting ten settlers, the Shabak held five of Shapira's confederates under suspicion of arson.

Friends in high places

Rabbi Dov Lior

Lior's enthusiasm for Shapira's tract stems from his own eliminationist attitude toward non-Jews. For example, while Lior served as the IDF's top rabbi, he instructed soldiers: "There is no such thing as civilians in wartime... A thousand non-Jewish lives are not worth a Jew's fingernail!" Indeed, there are only a few non-Jews whose lives Lior would demand to be spared. They are captured Palestinian militants who, as he once suggested, could be used as subjects for live human medical experiments.

Otherwise, Lior appears content to watch Palestinians perish as they did at the muzzle of Dr. Baruch Goldstein's machine gun in 1994. Goldstein, who massacred 29 Palestinians and wounded 150 in a shooting spree while they prayed in Hebron's Cave of the Patriarchs mosque, was a compatriot and neighbor of Lior in the settlement of Kiryat Arba. At Goldstein's funeral, Lior celebrated the massacre as an act carried out "to sanctify the holy name of God." He then extolled Goldstein as "a righteous man." Thanks to Lior's efforts, a shrine to Goldstein was constructed in center of Kiryat Arba so that locals could celebrate the killer's deeds and pass his legacy down to future generations.

IDF chief rabbi, Brigadier General Avichai Ronski

Rabbi Yaakov Yosef

Yaakov Yosef has brought his influence to bear in defense of Torat Ha'Melech, insisting at the August 18 convention in Jerusalem that the book was no different than the Hagadah that all Jews read from on the holiday of Passover. The Hagadah contains passages about killing non-Jews and so does the Bible, Yosef reminded his audience. "Does anyone want to change the Bible?" he asked.

Bibi buckles

Only days before direct negotiations in Washington between Israel and the Palestinian Authority planned for early September, Yaakov Yosef's 89-year-old father, Ovadiah delivered his weekly sermon. With characteristic vitriol, he declared: "All these evil people should perish from this world... God should strike them with a plague, them and these Palestinians."

The remarks have sparked an international furor and earned a stern rebuke from Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat. "While the PLO is ready to resume negotiations in seriousness and good faith," Erekat remarked, "a member of the Israeli government is calling for our destruction."

Palestinian Israeli member of Knesset Jamal Zehalka subsequently demanded that the Israeli Attorney General Yehuda Weinstein put Yosef on trial for incitement. "If, heaven forbid, a Muslim spiritual leader were to make anti-Jewish comments of this sort," Zehalka said, "he would be arrested immediately."

Here was a perfect opportunity for Netanyahu to demonstrate sincerity about negotiations by shedding an extremist ally in the name of securing peace. All he had to do was forcefully reject Yosef's genocidal comments -- a feat made all the easier by the White House's condemnation of the rabbi. But the Israeli Prime Minister ducked for political cover instead, issuing a canned statement instead of a condemnation. "Rabbi Ovadiah Yosef's remarks do not reflect Netanyahu's views," the statement read, "nor do they reflect the position of the Israeli government."

By refusing to cut Yosef loose, his party remains a central actor in the Israeli government. Thus the statement by Netanyahu was not only weak. It was false.

* Max Blumenthal is one of the most constantly cited young liberal journalists in America and is regularly featured on the Rachel Maddow Show, Democracy Now!, and Countdown with Keith Olbermann. His articles and video documentaries have appeared in The Daily Beast, The Nation, The Huffington Post, Salon.com, Al Jazeera English, and many other publications. Contact him at maxblumenthal3000@yahoo.com.

Source: www.alternet.org

By Gus Bridi - www.zeropartypolitics.com

"There should be no mosque near Ground Zero in New York so long as there are no churches or synagogues in Saudi Arabia. The time for double standards that allow Islamists to behave aggressively toward us while they demand our weakness and submission is over."- Newt Gingrich

Has Lebanon officially become more tolerant and progressive than the United States?

Let's talk about Lebanon's Ground Zero and you can decide for yourself.

One must first understand what "Ground Zero" means to most Lebanese.

In a country with about the same land mass as Los Angeles County which has been at war off and on for nearly four decades, "Ground Zero" for the Lebanese is arguably their entire country-and at the center of their Ground Zero is downtown Beirut, captured and occupied by the Israeli Defense Force in 1982 and which was almost entirely reduced to rubble from Muslim West Beirut to Christian East Beirut, and all points in between.

Once upon a time not too long ago, there was scarcely a building left standing or unscarred by shrapnel in all of Beirut. I know, because I was in Beirut in 1991, and witnessed first hand a city once described as "the Paris of the Middle East" reduced to ruins, pock marked with unexploded munitions and a haphazard "network" of open sewers.

Miraculously, Beirut was rebuilt and reclaimed its prominence. It once again became the jewel of the Arab world, remarkably able to bridge the ancient mystique of the east with the modern allure of the west.

Upon the first completion of its "rebuilding" process however--after 15 years and tens of billions of dollars spent on reconstructing Lebanon and its Ground Zero from rubble to splendor, Israel did what Israel does...

In July and August of 2006, Israel again followed through on its promise to "bomb Lebanon back into the Stone Age," and in so doing displaced 1,000,000 Lebanese civilians (nearly a quarter of the country's population), completely destroyed the country's infrastructure (again), its only airport, at least 64 bridges, leveled entire buildings and neighborhoods to rubble (again), including the country's largest milk factory, a food factory, two pharmaceutical plants, water treatment centers, power plants, grain silos, a Greek Orthodox Church, several mosques, and a handful of hospitals (in a country which only had a handful of hospitals to begin with).

Over 1,200 hundred Lebanese civilians were killed and over 5,000 wounded.

Israel routinely talks about "proportionality" when comparing their "terrorism deaths" to American 9/11 deaths. In order to shock the sensibilities of a gullible American public, they portray a figure "in American terms," by multiplying their dead by a number which reflects their population in comparison to the American population.

Well, what's good for the Israeli goose is good for the Lebanese gander. I will play their game: 1,200 dead Lebanese civilians are the "proportional equivalent" to 90,000 American dead when accounting for the two countries' population differences. Therefore, according to Israeli goose math, that's the equivalent of roughly thirty 9/11's Israel exacted on Lebanon in July and August 2006 over the course of 34 days-nearly one 9/11 a day for an entire month without relent.

Incidentally, July and August of 2006 only tell a small part of the story when it comes to Israeli aggression against Lebanon. There have been decades of invasion, devastation, and occupation which predated 2006. Several thousands of Lebanese have been killed at the hands of the Israeli Defense Force. Tens of billions of dollars of damage have been levied on the Lebanese infrastructure and private and public property courtesy of the IDF over the course of decades.

"Ground Zero" for Lebanon is an ever expanding, never ending, open wound that never heals.

So what now Newt?

Should you expect the Lebanese to allow a synagogue to be built on their Ground Zero, in the aftermath of a 9/11 that occurred 5 years after ours and which, "proportionately" speaking, was 30 times the size of ours?

Well guess what you hateful, misguided, twit?

THEY DID.

In the process of re-building Beirut yet again, in 2008, renovations began and have now been completed on the Maghen Abraham Synagogue located in the middle of newly renovated downtown Beirut in an area known as the "Solidere" which has become the focal point and showcase of Lebanon's rebirth.

This isn't some hole in the wall, nondescript, "excuse me" synagogue hidden out of view so as to not "offend" Lebanese non-Jews-this is an elaborate, ornate, beautifully designed, cathedral-style house of worship built for a Lebanese Jewish population that totals less than 500 in a country of more than 4,000,000 (in stark contrast to the eight million American Muslims living in the United States).

And wait until you hear Hezbollah's response to the building of this Ground Zero Synagogue.

(To those expecting a Newt Gingrich equivalent response, prepare to be woefully disappointed).

Courtesy of Hassan Nasrallah himself: "We respect Judaism, just as we respect Christianity. Our only problem is with Israel."

Did you hear that Newt (and the rest of you idiots)?

An Arab democracy, with a Muslim Prime Minister and a Christian President, allowed the building of a synagogue, squarely in the center of their "Ground Zero" in the heart and pride of downtown Beirut which used to be a dumping ground for Israeli military ordinances.

An Arab democracy allowed this, without so much as a protest being made by its citizens, or allegations by politicians that this was sacrilege, or hateful commentary by the media that the Jewish faith was barbaric, or any of the other stupidity I have seen and heard plastered all over American television, talk radio, and internet-blogs regarding a certain "Ground Zero Mosque" and the Islamic faith.

Regardless of whether you perceive Israel to be justified in perpetrating the devastation it did on Lebanon is irrelevant. The purpose of this article is not to debate that. What cannot be debated, is that Israel (a Jewish State, flying a Jewish flag) unleashed hell on Lebanon for 34 straight days in July and August of 2006 (and for decades prior in its wars against Lebanon). Regardless of whether or not you feel Israel had a right to do that, you cannot deny that Lebanese civilians harbored, and continue to harbor, a very real resentment against the government of Israel-this Jewish state-for those actions and the devestation those actions caused.

Yet these very Lebanese, who are so quickly labeled as "blood thirsty terrorists" by Newt Gingrich and his army of xenophobic morons, were able to draw a distinction between the Jews "flying those planes" in July and August of 2006 working at the behest of the Israeli government, and the Jews whom are citizens of Lebanon who had no connection with those attacks.

Lebanon rebuilt that Ground Zero Synagogue for its Jews.

Not for Israel. Not for the world's Jewry. Not as a monument to mark a "Jewish victory" over Lebanon.

Lebanon rebuilt that Ground Zero Synagogue because its Jews lived in that neighborhood and they had every right to build a house of worship in a place they called home.

For crying out loud, Hassan Nassrallah and Hezbollah can even draw the distinction between a Lebanese Jew and an Israeli soldier who happens to be a Jew. So how is it that Americans can't distinguish between American Muslims who were victims of 9/11 and Saudi Muslims who were the perpetrators of 9/11?

Thank you Mr. Gingrich for allowing Hassan Nasrallah and Hezbollah to outclass you and the Republican Party (and you Democrats aren't too far behind--yes Harry Reid, I'm talking to you). When the former Republican Speaker of the House and the current Democratic Senate Majority Leader start sounding less tolerant and less reasonable than a "terrorist," we need to start sounding the alarm bells.

What a sad state of affairs for America.

By Alan Hart* | Sabbah Report | www.sabbah.biz

I have written and often say that very many if not most Jews do not want to know the truth of history as it relates to the making and sustaining of the conflict in and over Palestine that became Israel. (An essential element of the truth being that Israel was created, mainly, by Zionist terrorism and ethnic cleansing).

Because I am a goy, a non-Jew, (actually a blonde, blue-eyed Englishman of advancing years), that may strike some readers as a very presumptuous statement for me to make. How can I possibly know for sure that at least some if not many Jews don't want to know truth of history? It's a fair question and my answer to it, quoted below, is in the now published Volume 3 of the American edition of my book, Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews.

After my dear wife, my best friend in the world, for more than 40 years, is my Jewish accountant. I'll call him M. He is very orthodox in the practise of his religion and strictly kosher, but not a zealot. He lives in London and over the years he has travelled with me on a number of foreign assignments. Shortly before Golda Meir died, and as a way of saying thanks to M for his friendship, I invited him to travel with me and sit in on my last conversation with her. I imagined she would not object and she didn't. Our conversation lasted nearly five hours. When it ended, I asked Mother Israel if I could take a photograph of her and M. In the tiny back garden of her small home in Tel Aviv, M put his arm around her shoulder (she didn't object to that either) and I took several pictures. It was, as I knew it would be, one of the proudest moments in M's life. One of the pictures was given pride of place in M's home, and he subsequently told me that younger visitors would look at the photograph, point at the old lady, and ask, "Who's that, your grandmother?"

Over time and privately M came to loathe what Israel has become but he won't read my book. He doesn't want to know the truth of history. Shortly before the publication of the original UK Volume One, I said to him the following. "Like most Jews everywhere, you believe that Israel went to war in 1967 either because the Arabs attacked first or were about to attack. What if I can prove to you, using only Israeli sources, that what you believe is Zionist propaganda nonsense and that it was a war of Israeli aggression?" After a long pause, M replied, "If what I believe about that war is not true, everything crumbles."

I chose not to add to my friend's agony by asking him what "everything crumbles" really meant or at least symbolizes; but over the several years since that conversation took place, and quietly in my own mind, I've been trying to work it out for myself.

What, actually, would "crumble" in those Jews, sadly most Jews, who don't want to know the truth of history but by some miracle were confronted with it?

The short answer is their sense of victimhood, the impulse to see enemies everywhere who are committed to exterminating Jews.

Though constantly reinforced by Zionist propaganda since the creation of Israel, and currently by Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, this impulse is, of course, the product of persecution and pogroms on and off down the centuries and which climaxed with the obscenity of the Nazi holocaust.

On 14 November 2009, in a comment on a Truthout post by Ira Cherna headlined "Israel's Pathology", Monty Renot wrote:

"I have thought, for a while now, that in the aftermath of the Nazi extermination during World War II, many Jews (and I speak as a Jew) entered into a mass state of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) from which they've never emerged or recovered - like a nightmare trance in which they are stuck. The symptoms are, and have been, so unmistakably evident, especially in right-wing religious groups such as Meir Kahana's Kach, whose slogan was 'Never Again' and whose vow was to 'hit 'em back 10 times as hard as they hit us.'"

What Renot called this "hypervigilant state, so typical of PTSD," reveals that those who are still stuck in the nightmare trance believe that the threat to them (annihilation) is ever present and always will be; and any sign or omen that the worst was about to occur again "is magnified by the residual paranoia into 'Uh-oh, here we go again!', accompanied by a tightening of the emotional armoring and a heightened readiness to go into pre-emptive battle in order to forestall the worst from happening."

In his analysis, Cherna asked how it can be that pathological feelings of fear, weakness and victimization "are comforting" to very many Israelis (and, I add, very many other Jews)

He answers: "For starters, they automatically put Jews on the side of innocence. Who can blame the weak victim for the violence? All the trouble, it seems, is started by the other side... And if all the trouble is started by the other side, then all the fault must lie with the other side. Weakness and victimization seem to prove that 'We're moral.' Obviously, it's our enemies who are immoral and thus to blame for all our problems. So Israelis have no reason even to consider changing any of their policies or behaviors."

Cherna believes, as I do, that as long as this pathology dominates Israeli political life, it's hard to see what Barack Obama or anyone else can do to move the Israelis toward a just peace, one that would be acceptable to the vast majority of Palestinians ("who need no special mental condition to feel victimized; all they have to do is look out the window at the Israeli military patrols passing by.")

The answer to my headline question seems to be, "Yes, Jews (most of them) do need to feel persecuted. The question arising is what if anything can be done, and by whom, to cure the sickness of traumatized Israeli and other Jewish minds?In theory

I can think of two possible ingredients for a cure.

One would be a New Covenant, not between the Jews and their God but between the Jews and the Gentiles. For their part of the deal the Gentiles would commit to slaying the monster of anti-Semitism. An undertaking to let the monster die in its sleep would not be good enough. There would have to be evidence that the stake was being driven into its heart. For their part the Jews of the world would commit to making common cause with rational Israelis for the purpose of making a real and lasting peace on the basis of an acceptable amount of justice for the Palestinians and security for all (Arabs and Jews).

The other would be an explicit declaration by all Palestinian institutions, organizations and groups, endorsed by all Arab and other Muslim governments, to the effect that whether it be in a genuine and viable two-state or a one-state solution, the security and political and human rights of all Jews (in the one or two states) will be absolutely guaranteed.

Beyond that I have no answers to the question of what can be done and by whom to cure the sickness of traumatized and brainwashed Israeli and other Jewish minds. Do others have answers?

* Alan Hart is a former ITN and BBC Panorama foreign correspondent who covered wars and conflicts wherever they were taking place in the world and specialized in the Middle East. Author of Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews. He blogs on www.alanhart.net and tweets on www.twitter.com/alanauthor

Newsweek writer and CNN host Fareed Zakaria has returned an award he received in 2005 from the infamous Anti-Defamation League over the Jewish group's opposition towards the Ground Zero mosque.

Zakaria explained his decision in his column saying:

Does Foxman believe that bigotry is OK if people think they're victims? Does the anguish of Palestinians, then, entitle them to be anti-Semitic?

Following is his letter to Foxman:

Dear Mr. Foxman,

Five years ago, the ADL honored me with its Hubert Humphrey First Amendment Freedoms Prize. I was delighted and moved to have been chosen for it in good measure because of the high esteem in which I hold the ADL. I have always been impressed by the fact that your mission is broad – “to put an end forever to unjust and unfair discrimination against and ridicule of any sect or body of citizens” – and you have interpreted it broadly over the decades. You have fought discrimination against all religions, races, and creeds and have built a well-deserved reputation.

That is why I was stunned at your decision to publicly side with those urging the relocation of the planned Islamic center in lower Manhattan. You are choosing to use your immense prestige to take a side that is utterly opposed to the animating purpose of your organization. Your own statements subsequently, asserting that we must honor the feelings of victims even if irrational or bigoted, made matters worse.

This is not the place to debate the press release or your statements. Many have done this and I have written about it in Newsweek and on my television show – both of which will be out over the weekend. The purpose of this letter is more straightforward. I cannot in good conscience hold onto the award or the honorarium that came with it and am returning both. I hope that it might add to the many voices that have urged you to reconsider and reverse your position on this issue. This decision will haunt the ADL for years if not decades to come. Whether or not the center is built, what is at stake here is the integrity of the ADL and its fidelity to its mission. Admitting an error is a small price to pay to regain your reputation.

In the next week's Newsweek, Zakaria argues in favor of building the Ground Zero mosque, writing:

The debate over whether an Islamic center should be built a few blocks from the World Trade Center has ignored a fundamental point. If there is going to be a reformist movement in Islam, it is going to emerge from places like the proposed institute. We should be encouraging groups like the one behind this project, not demonizing them. Were this mosque being built in a foreign city, chances are that the U.S. government would be funding it.

The man spearheading the center, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, is a moderate Muslim clergyman. He has said one or two things about American foreign policy that strike me as overly critical —but it’s stuff you could read on The Huffington Post any day. On Islam, his main subject, Rauf’s views are clear: he routinely denounces all terrorism—as he did again last week, publicly. He speaks of the need for Muslims to live peacefully with all other religions. He emphasizes the commonalities among all faiths. He advocates equal rights for women, and argues against laws that in any way punish non-Muslims. His last book, What’s Right With Islam Is What’s Right With America, argues that the United States is actually the ideal Islamic society because it encourages diversity and promotes freedom for individuals and for all religions. His vision of Islam is bin Laden’s nightmare.

The move by the journalist obviously enraged the Defamation Anti-Defamation nutcases, so much so that they released a statement making them look even worse than the monsters they already have shown themselves to be:

"I am not only saddened but stunned and somewhat speechless by your decision to return the ADL Hubert H. Humphrey First Amendment Freedoms Prize you accepted in 2005," Abraham H. Foxman, ADL National Director, wrote in a letter responding to Mr. Zakaria.

"As someone I greatly respect for engaging in discussion and dialogue with an open mind, I would have expected you to reach out to me before coming to judgment," Mr. Foxman added.

Mr. Foxman said he hoped that Mr. Zakaria "will come to see that ADL acted appropriately" and would reclaim the award bestowed upon him.
Foxman said in a letter to Zakaria. "As someone I greatly respect for engaging in discussion and dialogue with an open mind I would have expected you to reach out to me before coming to judgment.

"ADL acted appropriately"...? Can't expect anything less from sick people like Foxman.