by David Bedein
Jerusalem - For the first time since the genesis of Middle East peace negotiations, more than 30 years ago, the government of Israel has placed the cessation of official Arab incitement to murder Jews as a condition for the continuation of Middle East peace negotiations.
As Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared after last week’s government weekly cabinet meeting, “It is not only missiles and rockets that endanger security and push peace further off. Words can also be dangerous.”
Referring to recent ceremonies held by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas in honor of Palestinian terrorists who had murdered Jews. Mr. Netanyahu observed that “Sadly, there has been a retreat in this area in recent months, both within the Palestinian Authority and by its leaders. Whoever sponsors and supports naming a square in Ramallah after a terrorist who murdered dozens of Israelis on the coastal road - encourages terrorism. Whoever declares those responsible for the murder of the late Rabbi Meir Hai, father to seven children, as holy martyrs - pushes peace further away.”
Mr. Netanyahu also made reference to the new Palestinian curriculum, which represents the first official curriculum since the Third Reich to inculcate war against the Jews.
In Mr. Netanyahu’s words, “incitement continues in the Palestinian media and education system; in its official media outlets and in the schools under its supervision. These serious actions represent a harsh violation of the Palestinians’ international obligation to prevent incitement. I say to the chairman of the Palestinian Authority: Stop the incitement. This is not how peace is made. Peace is made by educating towards reconciliation, by encouraging good neighborly relations and by developing mutual respect. Therefore, the cessation of Palestinian incitement is a necessary condition, not for entering into discussions, but so that we may complete them in a way that will bring about genuine peace between our two peoples.”
While Israeli concern over incitement is not new, the fact that Israel has conditioned the cessation of incitement as a condition for continuing Middle East negotiations is unprecedented.
View this story in the Philadelphia Bulletin
View this story at Israel Behind the News
Sunday, January 17, 2010
The Philadelphia Bulletin: Iranian General Threatens Revenge against America
by David Bedein
Iranian Brigadier General Mohammad Reza Naqdi said Wednesday that Tehran will take revenge on the U.S. for its involvement in recent events, including the assassination of a renowned nuclear scientist and university professor, according to Iranian government news agencies.
“People are angry at those who staged the scene of recent events and terror attacks, but revenge should be taken from the U.S. itself for these crimes and, God willing, this will happen,” Mr. Naqdi said, addressing a gathering of commanders in Tehran.
Referring to the assassination of the Iranian university professor and nuclear scientist, Masoud Ali Mohammadi, he said the attack proved that the West is opposed to the production and development of sciences and technology in Iran.
“The terror attack against martyr Ali Mohammadi showed that the Democrats ruling the White House have reached a dead-end and are staging a scenario which (Former U.S. President Jimmy) Carter performed 30 years ago,” Mr. Naqdi said.
Iran has been presenting what it refers to as “documents proving West’s interference in Tehran’s affairs and its role in stoking the unrests” which allege “Western powers had played a direct role in the unrests.”
On Aug. 1, Iran launched the trials of a large number of dissidents, who it has accused of being agents, with certain foreign countries, which “contributed a role in fomenting unrest,” according to an Iranian government press release.
View this story in the Philadelphia Bulletin
View this story at Israel Behind the News
Iranian Brigadier General Mohammad Reza Naqdi said Wednesday that Tehran will take revenge on the U.S. for its involvement in recent events, including the assassination of a renowned nuclear scientist and university professor, according to Iranian government news agencies.
“People are angry at those who staged the scene of recent events and terror attacks, but revenge should be taken from the U.S. itself for these crimes and, God willing, this will happen,” Mr. Naqdi said, addressing a gathering of commanders in Tehran.
Referring to the assassination of the Iranian university professor and nuclear scientist, Masoud Ali Mohammadi, he said the attack proved that the West is opposed to the production and development of sciences and technology in Iran.
“The terror attack against martyr Ali Mohammadi showed that the Democrats ruling the White House have reached a dead-end and are staging a scenario which (Former U.S. President Jimmy) Carter performed 30 years ago,” Mr. Naqdi said.
Iran has been presenting what it refers to as “documents proving West’s interference in Tehran’s affairs and its role in stoking the unrests” which allege “Western powers had played a direct role in the unrests.”
On Aug. 1, Iran launched the trials of a large number of dissidents, who it has accused of being agents, with certain foreign countries, which “contributed a role in fomenting unrest,” according to an Iranian government press release.
View this story in the Philadelphia Bulletin
View this story at Israel Behind the News
The Philadelphia Bulletin: Head of Israel's Islamic Movement Sentenced
by David Bedein
JERUSALEM - SHEIKH RAED SALAH, THE LEADER OF THE ISRAEL ISLAMIC MOVEMENT’S NORTHERN CHAPTER, DID NOT STOP SMILING YESTERDAY, EVEN WHEN HE HEARD THE SENTENCE SENDING HIM TO NINE MONTHS IMPRISONMENT.
MR. SALAH STOOD TRIAL IN THE JERUSALEM MAGISTRATES COURT AND WAS CONVICTED OF ASSAULTING A POLICE OFFICER AND TAKING PART IN A RIOT. IN THE INDICTMENT, IT WAS ARGUED THAT, IN FEBRUARY 2007, MR. SALAH LED A RIOT NEAR THE TEMPLE MOUNT TO PROTEST THE RENOVATION WORK ON THE MUGHRABI GATE BRIDGE - ONE OF THE ENTRANCES TO THE TEMPLE MOUNT. IN THE COURSE OF THE RIOT, MR. SALAH CAME UP TO ONE OF THE POLICE OFFICERS, SPAT IN HIS FACE AND SAID, “YOU ARE RACISTS AND MURDERERS, YOU HAVE NO HONOR.”
“THE DEFENDANT’S ACTIONS EXPRESS HATRED AND CONTEMPT FOR THE PEOPLE IN UNIFORM WHO REPRESENT THE RULE OF LAW,” STATED JUDGE YITZHAK SHIMONI IN THE RULING, WHILE SENTENCING MR. SALAH TO NINE MONTHS IN PRISON AND A SIX-MONTH SUSPENDED SENTENCE, AS WELL AS REQUIRING HIM TO COMPENSATE THE POLICEMAN IN THE SUM OF CLOSE TO (U.S.) $2,000.
“DURING THE POLICE OFFICER’S TESTIMONY, THE DEFENDANT LAUGHED, LEAVING A VERY NEGATIVE IMPRESSION ON ME,” HE ADDED, AND RULED THAT MR. SALAH WOULD BEGIN TO SERVE HIS SENTENCE ON FEB. 28. MR. SALAH’S DEFENSE ATTORNEY KHALED AZBARGA SAID THAT THEY INTENDED TO APPEAL.
WHILE MR. SALAH HEARD HIS SENTENCE, OUTSIDE THE COURTROOM WERE DOZENS OF HIS SUPPORTERS. WHEN HE CAME OUT, THEY GATHERED AROUND HIM AND SHOUTED: “WITH OUR SPIRIT AND BLOOD WE WILL REDEEM THE EL-AQSA MOSQUE.”
MR. SALAH ENCOURAGED HIS SUPPORTERS, SAYING: “THE COURT’S RULING DOESN’T FRIGHTEN US.”
ISRAEL MEMBER OF KNESSET MOHAMMED BARAKEH ALSO CAME TO SUPPORT THE LEADER OF THE NORTHERN CHAPTER: HE LAUGHED OUT LOUD AND SAID (CONGRATULATIONS) TO MR. SALAH.
“THE COURT’S RULING IS POLITICAL TERRORISM AND LEGAL TERRORISM AGAINST AN ARAB LEADER,” SOURCES IN THE ISRAELI ARAB SUPREME MONITORING COMMITTEE SAID YESTERDAY.
THE ISRAEL ISLAMIC MOVEMENT ALSO REACTED DISMISSIVELY TO THE RULING: “WE DIDN’T EXPECT JUSTICE FROM THE COURT,” WHEREAS THE BALAD POLITICAL PARTY ANNOUNCED THAT IT WAS SIDING WITH MR. SALAH “IN THE BATTLE AGAINST POLITICAL PERSECUTION AND AGAINST THE ISRAELI OCCUPATION MEASURES IN JERUSALEM.”
ISRAEL PUBLIC SECURITY MINISTER YITZHAK AHARONOVICH SAID YESTERDAY: “I ATTRIBUTE GREAT IMPORTANCE TO THE RULING. WE WILL NOT PERMIT ANYONE TO TERRORIZE THE LAW ENFORCEMENT AGENCIES.”
MR. SALAH HAS ALREADY SPENT TIME IN PRISON. THE COURT SENTENCED HIM TO THREE AND A HALF YEARS IMPRISONMENT AFTER HE WAS CONVICTED IN A PLEA BARGAIN AGREEMENT OF CONTACT WITH A FOREIGN AGENT AND PROVIDING SERVICE TO AN UNLAWFUL ORGANIZATION. JUST THREE MONTHS AGO, HE WAS INVOLVED IN AN ATTEMPT TO PROVOKE A NEW WAVE OF RIOTS ON THE TEMPLE MOUNT BUT FAILED DUE TO THE LOW RESPONSE OF THE PALESTINIAN PUBLIC.
View this story in the Philadelphia Bulletin
View this story at Israel Behind the News
JERUSALEM - SHEIKH RAED SALAH, THE LEADER OF THE ISRAEL ISLAMIC MOVEMENT’S NORTHERN CHAPTER, DID NOT STOP SMILING YESTERDAY, EVEN WHEN HE HEARD THE SENTENCE SENDING HIM TO NINE MONTHS IMPRISONMENT.
MR. SALAH STOOD TRIAL IN THE JERUSALEM MAGISTRATES COURT AND WAS CONVICTED OF ASSAULTING A POLICE OFFICER AND TAKING PART IN A RIOT. IN THE INDICTMENT, IT WAS ARGUED THAT, IN FEBRUARY 2007, MR. SALAH LED A RIOT NEAR THE TEMPLE MOUNT TO PROTEST THE RENOVATION WORK ON THE MUGHRABI GATE BRIDGE - ONE OF THE ENTRANCES TO THE TEMPLE MOUNT. IN THE COURSE OF THE RIOT, MR. SALAH CAME UP TO ONE OF THE POLICE OFFICERS, SPAT IN HIS FACE AND SAID, “YOU ARE RACISTS AND MURDERERS, YOU HAVE NO HONOR.”
“THE DEFENDANT’S ACTIONS EXPRESS HATRED AND CONTEMPT FOR THE PEOPLE IN UNIFORM WHO REPRESENT THE RULE OF LAW,” STATED JUDGE YITZHAK SHIMONI IN THE RULING, WHILE SENTENCING MR. SALAH TO NINE MONTHS IN PRISON AND A SIX-MONTH SUSPENDED SENTENCE, AS WELL AS REQUIRING HIM TO COMPENSATE THE POLICEMAN IN THE SUM OF CLOSE TO (U.S.) $2,000.
“DURING THE POLICE OFFICER’S TESTIMONY, THE DEFENDANT LAUGHED, LEAVING A VERY NEGATIVE IMPRESSION ON ME,” HE ADDED, AND RULED THAT MR. SALAH WOULD BEGIN TO SERVE HIS SENTENCE ON FEB. 28. MR. SALAH’S DEFENSE ATTORNEY KHALED AZBARGA SAID THAT THEY INTENDED TO APPEAL.
WHILE MR. SALAH HEARD HIS SENTENCE, OUTSIDE THE COURTROOM WERE DOZENS OF HIS SUPPORTERS. WHEN HE CAME OUT, THEY GATHERED AROUND HIM AND SHOUTED: “WITH OUR SPIRIT AND BLOOD WE WILL REDEEM THE EL-AQSA MOSQUE.”
MR. SALAH ENCOURAGED HIS SUPPORTERS, SAYING: “THE COURT’S RULING DOESN’T FRIGHTEN US.”
ISRAEL MEMBER OF KNESSET MOHAMMED BARAKEH ALSO CAME TO SUPPORT THE LEADER OF THE NORTHERN CHAPTER: HE LAUGHED OUT LOUD AND SAID (CONGRATULATIONS) TO MR. SALAH.
“THE COURT’S RULING IS POLITICAL TERRORISM AND LEGAL TERRORISM AGAINST AN ARAB LEADER,” SOURCES IN THE ISRAELI ARAB SUPREME MONITORING COMMITTEE SAID YESTERDAY.
THE ISRAEL ISLAMIC MOVEMENT ALSO REACTED DISMISSIVELY TO THE RULING: “WE DIDN’T EXPECT JUSTICE FROM THE COURT,” WHEREAS THE BALAD POLITICAL PARTY ANNOUNCED THAT IT WAS SIDING WITH MR. SALAH “IN THE BATTLE AGAINST POLITICAL PERSECUTION AND AGAINST THE ISRAELI OCCUPATION MEASURES IN JERUSALEM.”
ISRAEL PUBLIC SECURITY MINISTER YITZHAK AHARONOVICH SAID YESTERDAY: “I ATTRIBUTE GREAT IMPORTANCE TO THE RULING. WE WILL NOT PERMIT ANYONE TO TERRORIZE THE LAW ENFORCEMENT AGENCIES.”
MR. SALAH HAS ALREADY SPENT TIME IN PRISON. THE COURT SENTENCED HIM TO THREE AND A HALF YEARS IMPRISONMENT AFTER HE WAS CONVICTED IN A PLEA BARGAIN AGREEMENT OF CONTACT WITH A FOREIGN AGENT AND PROVIDING SERVICE TO AN UNLAWFUL ORGANIZATION. JUST THREE MONTHS AGO, HE WAS INVOLVED IN AN ATTEMPT TO PROVOKE A NEW WAVE OF RIOTS ON THE TEMPLE MOUNT BUT FAILED DUE TO THE LOW RESPONSE OF THE PALESTINIAN PUBLIC.
View this story in the Philadelphia Bulletin
View this story at Israel Behind the News
One Year After His Inauguration : Does President Obama Seek a Weak Israel?
by Allen Z Hertz
United States President Barack Obama’s June 4th Cairo speech to the Muslim World sought the appearance of even-handedness in discussing the long-standing dispute between Israel and its Arab neighbours. But, read with an eye to the moral context, the Cairo speech was arguably profoundly anti-Israel. This bias was camouflaged by a dramatic reference to the Holocaust and by other acknowledgements of Jewish suffering over the centuries. Obama was likely advised that such sentiments would resonate with USA Jews. However, Israelis were too canny to be fooled by the Cairo speech, after which public opinion polls there saw his approval rate drop like a stone.
White House speech writer Ben Rhodes has said that the Cairo speech showed “frankly, just how he [Obama] personally views the conflict.” Rhodes also said that Obama mulled over every line, every word of the speech. This is significant, because with respect to Israel, the Cairo speech was marked by dissimulation and implication that tended to morally condemn the Jewish State, while largely validating the narrative of Arabs and Muslims.
The meaning of “dissimulation” includes speech calculated to cause belief in something which the speaker has not literally said. Is dissimulation dishonest? An answer depends on the context, but honest or not, dissimulation has always been one of the main elements of statecraft. Obama established his credentials as dissimulator no later than the race for the Democratic nomination. Then, his campaign staff publically acknowledged the dissimulation in his earlier promise that “Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel, and it must remain undivided.”
In Cairo, key dissimulation lay in the phrase: “America’s strong bonds with Israel are well known. This bond is unbreakable.” These exact words were cynically chosen to elicit belief that Obama was expressing approval for current ties with Israel and promising future support. But, linguistically those two sentences neither said that he approved of those “strong bonds” nor offered a promise for the future. They were merely a bare statement of fact, presumably resting on Israel’s popularity with the USA public and in Congress. By contrast, there was both approval and a promise in the pledge that: “America will not turn our backs on the legitimate Palestinian aspiration for dignity, opportunity, and a state of their own.”
Dissimulation with respect to USA support for Israel was corroborated by a later Cairo passage, where Obama threatened change by saying: “America will align our policies with those who pursue peace.” And, who will be deemed to “pursue peace” must naturally be understood within the moral parameters of “just how he personally views the conflict.” The highly conditional nature of Obama’s support for Israel was again revealed in his September 23rd UN General Assembly speech, where he implied that the USA’s “unwavering commitment” to Israel would have to be paid for by concessions to fulfill “legitimate claims and rights of the Palestinians.”
In Cairo, dissimulation was also salient with regard to Jerusalem, in relation to which Obama implied that Israel has failed to accommodate the needs of Muslims and Christians. The Cairo speech specifically spoke about working for the day when Jerusalem would be “a place for all of the children of Abraham to mingle peacefully together as in the story of Isra.” Here, Obama cynically calculated that non-Muslims would perceive this passage as an anodyne ecumenical reference, while Muslims would understand the Isra story as relating to the Prophet Muhammad’s alleged trip to Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa mosque. There, the hadith says that Muhammad was validated as God’s final messenger by his prophetic predecessors, including Moses and Jesus. Thus, for Muslims, the Isra story points to their claim to Jerusalem and their belief that Islam is superior to Judaism and Christianity.
For two centuries, the political and legal doctrine of the self-determination of Peoples has been an engine of world history. The Cairo speech significantly referred to the Palestinian People at least five times without offering a hint that Arabs living around the Jordan River did not generally self-identify as a distinct Palestinian People until the mid 20th century. By contrast, the Cairo speech referred only once to the very ancient Jewish People not as proud bearer of rights but in its Diaspora persona as victim. Otherwise, Obama used “Israelis” or words that implied an “Israeli People.” Obama’s terminology thus favoured the Palestinian People and implicitly challenged Israel’s legitimacy by ignoring its key political and legal claim to embody the self-determination of the Jewish People, whose subjective-objective national identity reaches back more than three millennia. This glaring omission was implicitly acknowledged in the General Assembly speech, where Obama included one reference to Israel as “a Jewish state.”
In Cairo, Obama had nothing to say about close to 1400 years of Arab and Muslim discrimination against Jews including periodic maltreatment of Jews around the Jordan River. By contrast, he repeatedly implied that Israel is responsible for Palestinian suffering from 1948 to the present. Thus, he referred to Palestinian refugees, failures in economic and social development, “daily humiliations... that come with occupation” and a so-called “humanitarian crisis” in Gaza. Evidently, how Obama “personally views the conflict” is deeply flawed. For example, would the Middle East have had any Jewish (850,000) or Arab (726,000) refugees had Arabs locally and generally followed the Jews in embracing the 1947 UN General Assembly resolution calling for peaceful creation of two new States, the one Jewish and the other Arab?
Similarly, the Cairo speech falsely implied that Israel has been the obstacle to a two-States solution. Thus, Obama said nothing about Prime Minister Sharon’s unilateral withdrawal from Gaza in 2005. And, he was silent about Yasser Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas’s failure to accept far-reaching two-States offers by Prime Ministers Barak and Olmert, in 2000 and 2008 respectively. This goes to the crux of the long-standing dispute. Since the 1937 Peel Report, first Zionists and then Israel governments have repeatedly worked for partition. By contrast, Arabs locally and generally have largely rejected the principle of a Jewish State, i.e. the idea of having there an independent country to embody the self-determination of the Jewish People.
In Cairo, Obama deliberately chose to ground rights in mere suffering. This was curious, because as a lawyer Obama had to know volenti non fit injuria the Common Law principle that the plaintiff cannot recover damages to the extent that he himself has caused the harm. Moreover, plaintiffs are required to take timely steps to mitigate their losses, no matter how caused. But, the Cairo speech never asked to what extent Palestinian suffering might be the result of their own bad choices, including their share of responsibility for starting the 1948 war, which was a self-proclaimed Arab attempt to exterminate Jews living between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.
The Cairo speech repeatedly drew from familiar arguments of Israel’s enemies. First, though there is now no independent State called “Palestine,” the question was begged by present-tense references to Palestine that also appeared in his General Assembly speech. Second, the Cairo speech slandered Israel by seeming to compare the suffering of Palestinians with that of Black people in the USA. Third, this invidious comparison was reinforced by a gratuitous reference to “segregation” which seemed to slyly point to the canard that Israel is an apartheid State. Fourth was an inappropriate nod to White South Africa and other instances where indigenous Peoples offered “resistance” to colonial rule. Fifth was the implication that Palestinian suffering can be equated with the Holocaust, which is a grotesque and wildly inaccurate comparison that is close kin to the calumny that Israel behaves like Nazi Germany. Finally, the Cairo speech misrepresented the murder of six million Jews as the ideological basis for Israel’s creation.
As a lawyer, Obama had to know that Israel validates itself, not by the Holocaust, but by virtue of the political and legal doctrines of aboriginal rights and the self-determination of Peoples. Aboriginal rights are normally minority rights. Thus, the Jewish People claimed its right to its homeland in the same way as do the Inuit and First Nations in Canada. And, the Jewish People invoked its self-determination right exactly as does the Arab People, whose self-determination is already expressed in the 21 countries that explicitly self-identify as Arab.
The Cairo speech pandered to Arab and Muslim prejudice by ignoring the presence since pre-Biblical times of large numbers of Jews in the Middle East, including some who in each and every century lived on their ancestral lands around the Jordan River. There, of all extant Peoples, the Jewish People has the strongest claim to be aboriginal. For this reason, two decades before the Holocaust, the aboriginal rights of the Jewish People were explicitly embedded in international law by declarations, treaties and enactments from 1917 to 1922, when the League of Nations created a “national home for the Jewish People” between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. Within a larger global and Middle Eastern framework, justice was done because simultaneously there was the creation or recognition of several new Arab States that were freed from Turkish rule and placed on the road to eventual independence, as was the “national home for the Jewish People.”
By ignoring the Jewish People’s aboriginal and self-determination rights, the Cairo speech could only point to an end to reciprocal suffering as a rationale for terminating Palestinian violence which was dignified as "resistance." By relying on this slender reed, Obama probably diminished prospects for peace. Thus, the Cairo speech alienated most Israelis and failed to provide Arabs and Muslims with an ideological foundation for a peaceful process to respectfully reconcile the prior rights of the Jewish People with the subsequent rights of the newly-emerged Palestinian People. The latter evidently now has rights to claim self-determination and territory, but these claims do not automatically cancel the Jewish People’s prior rights, which notably include the right of Jews not to be killed by their Arab neighbours.
Though repeated lip service was paid to Israel’s right to exist, the Cairo speech painted a moral picture that seemed to argue the contrary. Saying “threatening Israel with destruction is deeply wrong” was probably calculated to resonate with USA Jews who are grateful for Israel’s survival. By contrast, most Israelis have the commonsense to understand that their country deserves much more than mere survival. They know that Israel urgently needs the rights normally enjoyed by other countries, and that Israel must be judged according to the standards regularly applied to other States in the same or similar circumstances.
Obama’s existential focus was too starkly minimalist to accommodate Israel within the world of States, where each country is driven to advance its own economic and political interests. Given the USA’s touted “strong bonds” with Israel, Obama ought to have said less about a “right to exist” and more about USA help in advancing any number of Israeli aims. The real news here is that Obama perhaps intends to sell Israel short. This recalls national security adviser James Jones’s earlier quip that the new USA administration was not about to “throw Israel under a bus.”
The structure of the Cairo speech implausibly suggested that Iran’s race to develop nuclear weapons is today less “a major source of tension” than “the situation between Israelis, Palestinians and the Arab World.” In discussing this Iranian nuclear threat, Obama seemed to signal that he might be willing to break with a decades-old understanding that the USA would refrain from publically addressing whether or not Israel has nuclear weapons. The implication here was that Obama would perhaps be ready to make Israel’s denuclearization part of a broader deal, embracing Iran and other States in the region.
At Cairo and in the General Assembly, was Obama challenging Israel’s ideological foundations and security interests? An answer can perhaps be found in his special focus on Palestinian suffering. This disturbingly recalls the exaggerated concern for Czechoslovakia’s three million Sudeten Germans that was the moral trigger for the 1938 Munich crisis. Then, myopia on the part of British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain rapidly led to the destruction of interwar Czechoslovakia, which was the only democracy in Eastern Europe.
With Europeans appearing as themselves and Palestinians as Sudeten Germans, does President Obama cast himself as Chamberlain? At Munich, the British Prime Minister earned obloquy by being eager to appease at the expense of “people of whom we know nothing.” While irresponsibly failing to face the question of Hitler’s ultimate aims, Chamberlain recklessly sought safety by catering to German demands. The General Assembly speech announced that Obama is searching for a general Middle East settlement. Is this a context in which he will betray Israel’s vital interests to the advantage of 21st century Hitlers played by Iran's leaders with the help of proxies like Syria, Hezbollah and Hamas?
A careful reading of Obama’s remarks in Cairo and at the General Assembly suggests that Obama may believe that a weaker Israel now suits the interests of the USA. If so, he should tell the American people why, instead of offering a fabric of dissimulation and implication. And, friends of the Jewish State should see Obama’s moral condemnation of Israel as a flashing red light that warns of the possibility of betrayal just as Czechoslovakia was pressured to accept an unsafe peace that was prelude to disaster.
Allen Z. Hertz was formerly senior advisor in the Privy Council Office serving Canada's Prime Minister and the federal cabinet. Earlier he worked in Canada’s Department of Foreign Affairs and taught history and law at universities in New York, Montreal, Toronto, and Hong Kong.
United States President Barack Obama’s June 4th Cairo speech to the Muslim World sought the appearance of even-handedness in discussing the long-standing dispute between Israel and its Arab neighbours. But, read with an eye to the moral context, the Cairo speech was arguably profoundly anti-Israel. This bias was camouflaged by a dramatic reference to the Holocaust and by other acknowledgements of Jewish suffering over the centuries. Obama was likely advised that such sentiments would resonate with USA Jews. However, Israelis were too canny to be fooled by the Cairo speech, after which public opinion polls there saw his approval rate drop like a stone.
White House speech writer Ben Rhodes has said that the Cairo speech showed “frankly, just how he [Obama] personally views the conflict.” Rhodes also said that Obama mulled over every line, every word of the speech. This is significant, because with respect to Israel, the Cairo speech was marked by dissimulation and implication that tended to morally condemn the Jewish State, while largely validating the narrative of Arabs and Muslims.
The meaning of “dissimulation” includes speech calculated to cause belief in something which the speaker has not literally said. Is dissimulation dishonest? An answer depends on the context, but honest or not, dissimulation has always been one of the main elements of statecraft. Obama established his credentials as dissimulator no later than the race for the Democratic nomination. Then, his campaign staff publically acknowledged the dissimulation in his earlier promise that “Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel, and it must remain undivided.”
In Cairo, key dissimulation lay in the phrase: “America’s strong bonds with Israel are well known. This bond is unbreakable.” These exact words were cynically chosen to elicit belief that Obama was expressing approval for current ties with Israel and promising future support. But, linguistically those two sentences neither said that he approved of those “strong bonds” nor offered a promise for the future. They were merely a bare statement of fact, presumably resting on Israel’s popularity with the USA public and in Congress. By contrast, there was both approval and a promise in the pledge that: “America will not turn our backs on the legitimate Palestinian aspiration for dignity, opportunity, and a state of their own.”
Dissimulation with respect to USA support for Israel was corroborated by a later Cairo passage, where Obama threatened change by saying: “America will align our policies with those who pursue peace.” And, who will be deemed to “pursue peace” must naturally be understood within the moral parameters of “just how he personally views the conflict.” The highly conditional nature of Obama’s support for Israel was again revealed in his September 23rd UN General Assembly speech, where he implied that the USA’s “unwavering commitment” to Israel would have to be paid for by concessions to fulfill “legitimate claims and rights of the Palestinians.”
In Cairo, dissimulation was also salient with regard to Jerusalem, in relation to which Obama implied that Israel has failed to accommodate the needs of Muslims and Christians. The Cairo speech specifically spoke about working for the day when Jerusalem would be “a place for all of the children of Abraham to mingle peacefully together as in the story of Isra.” Here, Obama cynically calculated that non-Muslims would perceive this passage as an anodyne ecumenical reference, while Muslims would understand the Isra story as relating to the Prophet Muhammad’s alleged trip to Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa mosque. There, the hadith says that Muhammad was validated as God’s final messenger by his prophetic predecessors, including Moses and Jesus. Thus, for Muslims, the Isra story points to their claim to Jerusalem and their belief that Islam is superior to Judaism and Christianity.
For two centuries, the political and legal doctrine of the self-determination of Peoples has been an engine of world history. The Cairo speech significantly referred to the Palestinian People at least five times without offering a hint that Arabs living around the Jordan River did not generally self-identify as a distinct Palestinian People until the mid 20th century. By contrast, the Cairo speech referred only once to the very ancient Jewish People not as proud bearer of rights but in its Diaspora persona as victim. Otherwise, Obama used “Israelis” or words that implied an “Israeli People.” Obama’s terminology thus favoured the Palestinian People and implicitly challenged Israel’s legitimacy by ignoring its key political and legal claim to embody the self-determination of the Jewish People, whose subjective-objective national identity reaches back more than three millennia. This glaring omission was implicitly acknowledged in the General Assembly speech, where Obama included one reference to Israel as “a Jewish state.”
In Cairo, Obama had nothing to say about close to 1400 years of Arab and Muslim discrimination against Jews including periodic maltreatment of Jews around the Jordan River. By contrast, he repeatedly implied that Israel is responsible for Palestinian suffering from 1948 to the present. Thus, he referred to Palestinian refugees, failures in economic and social development, “daily humiliations... that come with occupation” and a so-called “humanitarian crisis” in Gaza. Evidently, how Obama “personally views the conflict” is deeply flawed. For example, would the Middle East have had any Jewish (850,000) or Arab (726,000) refugees had Arabs locally and generally followed the Jews in embracing the 1947 UN General Assembly resolution calling for peaceful creation of two new States, the one Jewish and the other Arab?
Similarly, the Cairo speech falsely implied that Israel has been the obstacle to a two-States solution. Thus, Obama said nothing about Prime Minister Sharon’s unilateral withdrawal from Gaza in 2005. And, he was silent about Yasser Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas’s failure to accept far-reaching two-States offers by Prime Ministers Barak and Olmert, in 2000 and 2008 respectively. This goes to the crux of the long-standing dispute. Since the 1937 Peel Report, first Zionists and then Israel governments have repeatedly worked for partition. By contrast, Arabs locally and generally have largely rejected the principle of a Jewish State, i.e. the idea of having there an independent country to embody the self-determination of the Jewish People.
In Cairo, Obama deliberately chose to ground rights in mere suffering. This was curious, because as a lawyer Obama had to know volenti non fit injuria the Common Law principle that the plaintiff cannot recover damages to the extent that he himself has caused the harm. Moreover, plaintiffs are required to take timely steps to mitigate their losses, no matter how caused. But, the Cairo speech never asked to what extent Palestinian suffering might be the result of their own bad choices, including their share of responsibility for starting the 1948 war, which was a self-proclaimed Arab attempt to exterminate Jews living between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.
The Cairo speech repeatedly drew from familiar arguments of Israel’s enemies. First, though there is now no independent State called “Palestine,” the question was begged by present-tense references to Palestine that also appeared in his General Assembly speech. Second, the Cairo speech slandered Israel by seeming to compare the suffering of Palestinians with that of Black people in the USA. Third, this invidious comparison was reinforced by a gratuitous reference to “segregation” which seemed to slyly point to the canard that Israel is an apartheid State. Fourth was an inappropriate nod to White South Africa and other instances where indigenous Peoples offered “resistance” to colonial rule. Fifth was the implication that Palestinian suffering can be equated with the Holocaust, which is a grotesque and wildly inaccurate comparison that is close kin to the calumny that Israel behaves like Nazi Germany. Finally, the Cairo speech misrepresented the murder of six million Jews as the ideological basis for Israel’s creation.
As a lawyer, Obama had to know that Israel validates itself, not by the Holocaust, but by virtue of the political and legal doctrines of aboriginal rights and the self-determination of Peoples. Aboriginal rights are normally minority rights. Thus, the Jewish People claimed its right to its homeland in the same way as do the Inuit and First Nations in Canada. And, the Jewish People invoked its self-determination right exactly as does the Arab People, whose self-determination is already expressed in the 21 countries that explicitly self-identify as Arab.
The Cairo speech pandered to Arab and Muslim prejudice by ignoring the presence since pre-Biblical times of large numbers of Jews in the Middle East, including some who in each and every century lived on their ancestral lands around the Jordan River. There, of all extant Peoples, the Jewish People has the strongest claim to be aboriginal. For this reason, two decades before the Holocaust, the aboriginal rights of the Jewish People were explicitly embedded in international law by declarations, treaties and enactments from 1917 to 1922, when the League of Nations created a “national home for the Jewish People” between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. Within a larger global and Middle Eastern framework, justice was done because simultaneously there was the creation or recognition of several new Arab States that were freed from Turkish rule and placed on the road to eventual independence, as was the “national home for the Jewish People.”
By ignoring the Jewish People’s aboriginal and self-determination rights, the Cairo speech could only point to an end to reciprocal suffering as a rationale for terminating Palestinian violence which was dignified as "resistance." By relying on this slender reed, Obama probably diminished prospects for peace. Thus, the Cairo speech alienated most Israelis and failed to provide Arabs and Muslims with an ideological foundation for a peaceful process to respectfully reconcile the prior rights of the Jewish People with the subsequent rights of the newly-emerged Palestinian People. The latter evidently now has rights to claim self-determination and territory, but these claims do not automatically cancel the Jewish People’s prior rights, which notably include the right of Jews not to be killed by their Arab neighbours.
Though repeated lip service was paid to Israel’s right to exist, the Cairo speech painted a moral picture that seemed to argue the contrary. Saying “threatening Israel with destruction is deeply wrong” was probably calculated to resonate with USA Jews who are grateful for Israel’s survival. By contrast, most Israelis have the commonsense to understand that their country deserves much more than mere survival. They know that Israel urgently needs the rights normally enjoyed by other countries, and that Israel must be judged according to the standards regularly applied to other States in the same or similar circumstances.
Obama’s existential focus was too starkly minimalist to accommodate Israel within the world of States, where each country is driven to advance its own economic and political interests. Given the USA’s touted “strong bonds” with Israel, Obama ought to have said less about a “right to exist” and more about USA help in advancing any number of Israeli aims. The real news here is that Obama perhaps intends to sell Israel short. This recalls national security adviser James Jones’s earlier quip that the new USA administration was not about to “throw Israel under a bus.”
The structure of the Cairo speech implausibly suggested that Iran’s race to develop nuclear weapons is today less “a major source of tension” than “the situation between Israelis, Palestinians and the Arab World.” In discussing this Iranian nuclear threat, Obama seemed to signal that he might be willing to break with a decades-old understanding that the USA would refrain from publically addressing whether or not Israel has nuclear weapons. The implication here was that Obama would perhaps be ready to make Israel’s denuclearization part of a broader deal, embracing Iran and other States in the region.
At Cairo and in the General Assembly, was Obama challenging Israel’s ideological foundations and security interests? An answer can perhaps be found in his special focus on Palestinian suffering. This disturbingly recalls the exaggerated concern for Czechoslovakia’s three million Sudeten Germans that was the moral trigger for the 1938 Munich crisis. Then, myopia on the part of British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain rapidly led to the destruction of interwar Czechoslovakia, which was the only democracy in Eastern Europe.
With Europeans appearing as themselves and Palestinians as Sudeten Germans, does President Obama cast himself as Chamberlain? At Munich, the British Prime Minister earned obloquy by being eager to appease at the expense of “people of whom we know nothing.” While irresponsibly failing to face the question of Hitler’s ultimate aims, Chamberlain recklessly sought safety by catering to German demands. The General Assembly speech announced that Obama is searching for a general Middle East settlement. Is this a context in which he will betray Israel’s vital interests to the advantage of 21st century Hitlers played by Iran's leaders with the help of proxies like Syria, Hezbollah and Hamas?
A careful reading of Obama’s remarks in Cairo and at the General Assembly suggests that Obama may believe that a weaker Israel now suits the interests of the USA. If so, he should tell the American people why, instead of offering a fabric of dissimulation and implication. And, friends of the Jewish State should see Obama’s moral condemnation of Israel as a flashing red light that warns of the possibility of betrayal just as Czechoslovakia was pressured to accept an unsafe peace that was prelude to disaster.
Allen Z. Hertz was formerly senior advisor in the Privy Council Office serving Canada's Prime Minister and the federal cabinet. Earlier he worked in Canada’s Department of Foreign Affairs and taught history and law at universities in New York, Montreal, Toronto, and Hong Kong.
Israel and the illusion of international justice
By Gerald Steinberg and Anne Herzberg, NGOMonitor.com
As originally appearing in Haaretz
Speaking at a legal conference on January 4, former Supreme Court president Aharon Barak suggested that Israel would benefit from participation in bodies such as the International Criminal Court in order to fight for "its positions and justice." In endorsing Barak's recommendation, a Haaretz editorial ("Join the Court," January 6) contended that such participation would "place Israel on the side of the enlightened nations." Similarly, the argument goes, Israel erred in refusing to cooperate with the UN Human Rights Council's Goldstone Commission and the International Court of Justice proceedings on the security barrier.
While surely well-intentioned, in practice this line of thinking is pure folly. The dominance of nondemocratic and Islamic nations in international organs, and the increasing politicization of these bodies, virtually guarantees that no justice will be done when it comes to Israel or even NATO countries. In such morally corrupt frameworks, international law and human rights have become political weapons, disconnected from legitimate judicial processes and legal systems in democratic societies.
The ICJ's handling of the 2004 case regarding Israel's security barrier is a telling example. The suit was initiated by the UN General Assembly at the behest of the Arab League and the Organization of the Islamic Conference. European-funded advocacy groups such as B'Tselem, aided by NGO superpowers Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, were central to this effort.
Legal scholars sharply criticized the court for accepting a predetermined political mandate from the UN and for its breach of procedural protocols in deliberations on the matter. The ICJ's resulting advisory opinion negated Israel's right of self-defense and displayed an utter lack of sympathy for terror victims. Its simplistic and troubling legal analysis clearly reflected the influence of the Arab League and politicized NGOs. Hardly an independent judicial inquiry, this distorted proceeding encouraged subversion of the rule of law, rather than its enforcement, by allowing for political manipulation of the judicial process.
Similar problems plague the ICC. Calls for the creation of an ICC were first made in the late 1980s by Caribbean and Latin American countries seeking international support in trying drug traffickers, and were bolstered by the establishment of the International Criminal Tribunals for Yugoslavia and Rwanda in the mid-1990s. Following a massive push by NGOs, the ICC statute was finalized in Rome in 1998, covering the crimes of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes, and the court began operations in 2002.
Some complain that the ICC in practice has become an "African court" that lets Western democracies off the hook, but this claim is unjustified. Although NGOs pressed for the ICC to have wide-ranging jurisdiction, it was intended to be a court of last resort for the very worst crimes, adjudicating only those cases that could not be fairly tried in national courts due to the lack of a competent judiciary.
From the beginning, Israel strongly backed the idea of an international court based on the Nuremberg precedent. But, as happened with other international legal bodies, the ICC process was co-opted by nondemocratic forces. Arab and Islamic regimes succeeding in changing the court's statute at the last minute to define Israeli settlement activity as an international crime while omitting terrorism as an offense. This overt politicization of the court forced Israel to withdraw its support.
Following the Gaza war, the PLO pressured ICC prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo to open a case against Israel, even though "Palestine" is not a state and doing so would be a gross violation of the court's treaty. Moreno-Ocampo has admitted to working closely with the Arab League in this process. The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, funded primarily by European governments, is also deeply involved in this one-sided effort, as are Amnesty and HRW.
These same Arab League members have hypocritically and repeatedly offered shelter to indicted war criminal Omar Bashir of Sudan, refusing to hand him over to the court to stand trial. Thus the countries that dominate the UN system use their power to control and manipulate its institutions for their own interests - not in pursuit of universal justice.
The careful balance that Justice Barak developed in Israeli jurisprudence in weighing human rights claims against security needs receives no respect from the Arab League and its NGO allies, whose political demands international institutions are unable or unwilling to resist. Barak's wishful thinking to the contrary, it would have made no difference if Israel had participated in the ICJ case or even the Goldstone mission. The record clearly indicates that any information provided by Israel would have been twisted and discounted to fit predetermined conclusions. Claims that Israeli cooperation could have changed the outcome have no basis.
Refusing to be a party to this sort of legal travesty does not mean Israel is insensitive to international law or human rights, or that the Jewish state does not wish to be a member of the international community. Nor should this principled position be used to claim that Israel is trying to shield itself from critical inquiry - far from it. Israel's Supreme Court is a leading adherent and innovator of international law and is a major proponent of human rights.
To suggest that Israel could exert any influence on bodies where nondemocratic regimes wield excessive power, however, is a pipe dream that has no connection to today's unfortunate reality.
Gerald Steinberg is a professor of political science at Bar Ilan University and president of NGO Monitor; Anne Herzberg is NGO Monitor's legal advisor
As originally appearing in Haaretz
Speaking at a legal conference on January 4, former Supreme Court president Aharon Barak suggested that Israel would benefit from participation in bodies such as the International Criminal Court in order to fight for "its positions and justice." In endorsing Barak's recommendation, a Haaretz editorial ("Join the Court," January 6) contended that such participation would "place Israel on the side of the enlightened nations." Similarly, the argument goes, Israel erred in refusing to cooperate with the UN Human Rights Council's Goldstone Commission and the International Court of Justice proceedings on the security barrier.
While surely well-intentioned, in practice this line of thinking is pure folly. The dominance of nondemocratic and Islamic nations in international organs, and the increasing politicization of these bodies, virtually guarantees that no justice will be done when it comes to Israel or even NATO countries. In such morally corrupt frameworks, international law and human rights have become political weapons, disconnected from legitimate judicial processes and legal systems in democratic societies.
The ICJ's handling of the 2004 case regarding Israel's security barrier is a telling example. The suit was initiated by the UN General Assembly at the behest of the Arab League and the Organization of the Islamic Conference. European-funded advocacy groups such as B'Tselem, aided by NGO superpowers Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, were central to this effort.
Legal scholars sharply criticized the court for accepting a predetermined political mandate from the UN and for its breach of procedural protocols in deliberations on the matter. The ICJ's resulting advisory opinion negated Israel's right of self-defense and displayed an utter lack of sympathy for terror victims. Its simplistic and troubling legal analysis clearly reflected the influence of the Arab League and politicized NGOs. Hardly an independent judicial inquiry, this distorted proceeding encouraged subversion of the rule of law, rather than its enforcement, by allowing for political manipulation of the judicial process.
Similar problems plague the ICC. Calls for the creation of an ICC were first made in the late 1980s by Caribbean and Latin American countries seeking international support in trying drug traffickers, and were bolstered by the establishment of the International Criminal Tribunals for Yugoslavia and Rwanda in the mid-1990s. Following a massive push by NGOs, the ICC statute was finalized in Rome in 1998, covering the crimes of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes, and the court began operations in 2002.
Some complain that the ICC in practice has become an "African court" that lets Western democracies off the hook, but this claim is unjustified. Although NGOs pressed for the ICC to have wide-ranging jurisdiction, it was intended to be a court of last resort for the very worst crimes, adjudicating only those cases that could not be fairly tried in national courts due to the lack of a competent judiciary.
From the beginning, Israel strongly backed the idea of an international court based on the Nuremberg precedent. But, as happened with other international legal bodies, the ICC process was co-opted by nondemocratic forces. Arab and Islamic regimes succeeding in changing the court's statute at the last minute to define Israeli settlement activity as an international crime while omitting terrorism as an offense. This overt politicization of the court forced Israel to withdraw its support.
Following the Gaza war, the PLO pressured ICC prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo to open a case against Israel, even though "Palestine" is not a state and doing so would be a gross violation of the court's treaty. Moreno-Ocampo has admitted to working closely with the Arab League in this process. The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, funded primarily by European governments, is also deeply involved in this one-sided effort, as are Amnesty and HRW.
These same Arab League members have hypocritically and repeatedly offered shelter to indicted war criminal Omar Bashir of Sudan, refusing to hand him over to the court to stand trial. Thus the countries that dominate the UN system use their power to control and manipulate its institutions for their own interests - not in pursuit of universal justice.
The careful balance that Justice Barak developed in Israeli jurisprudence in weighing human rights claims against security needs receives no respect from the Arab League and its NGO allies, whose political demands international institutions are unable or unwilling to resist. Barak's wishful thinking to the contrary, it would have made no difference if Israel had participated in the ICJ case or even the Goldstone mission. The record clearly indicates that any information provided by Israel would have been twisted and discounted to fit predetermined conclusions. Claims that Israeli cooperation could have changed the outcome have no basis.
Refusing to be a party to this sort of legal travesty does not mean Israel is insensitive to international law or human rights, or that the Jewish state does not wish to be a member of the international community. Nor should this principled position be used to claim that Israel is trying to shield itself from critical inquiry - far from it. Israel's Supreme Court is a leading adherent and innovator of international law and is a major proponent of human rights.
To suggest that Israel could exert any influence on bodies where nondemocratic regimes wield excessive power, however, is a pipe dream that has no connection to today's unfortunate reality.
Gerald Steinberg is a professor of political science at Bar Ilan University and president of NGO Monitor; Anne Herzberg is NGO Monitor's legal advisor
Israel Wants End To Incitement As Part Of Peace Process
Israel Wants End To Incitement As Part Of Peace Process
by David Bedein
For the first time since the genesis of Middle East peace negotiations, more than 30 years ago, the government of Israel has placed the cessation of official Arab incitement to murder Jews as a condition for the continuation of Middle East peace negotiations.
As Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared after last week’s government weekly cabinet meeting, “It is not only missiles and rockets that endanger security and push peace further off. Words can also be dangerous.”
Referring to recent ceremonies held by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas in honor of Palestinian terrorists who had murdered Jews. Mr. Netanyahu observed that “Sadly, there has been a retreat in this area in recent months, both within the Palestinian Authority and by its leaders. Whoever sponsors and supports naming a square in Ramallah after a terrorist who murdered dozens of Israelis on the coastal road - encourages terrorism. Whoever declares those responsible for the murder of the late Rabbi Meir Hai, father to seven children, as holy martyrs - pushes peace further away.”
Mr. Netanyahu also made reference to the new Palestinian curriculum, which represents the first official curriculum since the Third Reich to inculcate war against the Jews.
In Mr. Netanyahu’s words,
While Israeli concern over incitement is not new, the fact that Israel has conditioned the cessation of incitement as a condition for continuing Middle East negotiations is unprecedented.
by David Bedein
For the first time since the genesis of Middle East peace negotiations, more than 30 years ago, the government of Israel has placed the cessation of official Arab incitement to murder Jews as a condition for the continuation of Middle East peace negotiations.
As Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared after last week’s government weekly cabinet meeting, “It is not only missiles and rockets that endanger security and push peace further off. Words can also be dangerous.”
Referring to recent ceremonies held by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas in honor of Palestinian terrorists who had murdered Jews. Mr. Netanyahu observed that “Sadly, there has been a retreat in this area in recent months, both within the Palestinian Authority and by its leaders. Whoever sponsors and supports naming a square in Ramallah after a terrorist who murdered dozens of Israelis on the coastal road - encourages terrorism. Whoever declares those responsible for the murder of the late Rabbi Meir Hai, father to seven children, as holy martyrs - pushes peace further away.”
Mr. Netanyahu also made reference to the new Palestinian curriculum, which represents the first official curriculum since the Third Reich to inculcate war against the Jews.
In Mr. Netanyahu’s words,
“incitement continues in the Palestinian media and education system; in its official media outlets and in the schools under its supervision. These serious actions represent a harsh violation of the Palestinians’ international obligation to prevent incitement. I say to the chairman of the Palestinian Authority: Stop the incitement. This is not how peace is made. Peace is made by educating towards reconciliation, by encouraging good neighborly relations and by developing mutual respect. Therefore, the cessation of Palestinian incitement is a necessary condition, not for entering into discussions, but so that we may complete them in a way that will bring about genuine peace between our two peoples.”
While Israeli concern over incitement is not new, the fact that Israel has conditioned the cessation of incitement as a condition for continuing Middle East negotiations is unprecedented.
Al QAIDA TARGETS UNRWA REFUGEE CAMPS
As published in the Winnipeg Jewish Report
by David Bedein
Jerusalem, Israel; A report, issued by the Washington-based Jamestown Foundation, shows that Al Qaida and its allies are bolstering efforts to infiltrate Palestinian refugee camps in the Gaza Strip, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria run by The United Nations Relief and Works Agency,[UNRWA].
UNWRA operates 59 refugee camps for Palestinian Arab 1948 refugees and their descendents
UNRWA is supported by direct contributions from 38 nations around the world under the framework of the the Refugee Working Group, [RWG] chaired by Canada.
Canada provides 11% of the UNRWA budget. The United States provides 31% of the UNRWA budget.
What may cause some concern among donor nations is that Al Qaida appears to have been targeting UNRWA Palestinian refugee camps for indoctrination and recruitment.
That concern stems from strict laws in the US, Canada and other donor nations which forbid financial donations to refugee camps that have become terror bases.
The Jamestown Foundation report documents how the Al Qaida-aligned Fatah Al Islam was recruiting cells in such UNRWA Lebanese camps as Bidawi and Burj Al Shamali.
"If training and organization become available to these young people they have the potential to become a threat to not only the countries in which they reside, but to the region as a whole," the report said.
The report documents that increasing Al Qaida presence has threatened the Western and United Nations presence in Arab states. Jamestown said Palestinians were undergoing radicalization and adopting the Al Qaida doctrine of jihad, or holy war.
In 2009, Al Qaida chief Osama Bin Laden addressed the Palestinians at least three times and appealed for their participation in his Islamist war against the West. Bin Laden has urged Palestinians to fight the United States in Iraq before moving on to Israel.
"They should hasten to take their positions among the ranks of the holy warriors in Iraq, and through support and trust in Allah," Bin Laden said in a recent message.
"The third phase is the emergence of the Salafi-Jihadi ideology as the primary ideology for Palestinian youth in the camps," the report said. "This phase is occurring now, as individuals and small groups are increasingly turning to Salafist militancy."
The biggest target of Al Qaida has been the UNRWA Palestinian refugee camp of Ein Hilwe. Ein Hilwe, the largest of the UNRWA Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon, was said to harbor several Al Qaida figures, including Ahmed Abdul Karim Al Saadi, Haitham Abdul Karim Al Saadi and Saleh Qiblawi. Haitham was identified as a deputy of the late Al Qaida network chief in Iraq, Abu Mussib Al Zarqawi.
In Syria, Palestinian followers of Al Qaida clashed with Syrian security forces in October 2008. The unrest was said to have taken place in Syria's largest UNRWA refugee camp, Yarmouk.
"When Syria became a transit point for Syrian and Arab fighters aiming to take up jihad against Americans between 2003 and 2007, there were several cases of young fighters passing through Yarmouk camp," the report said.
The Jamestown Foundation also reported an Al Qaida presence in Jordan's UNRWA Baqaa refugee camp. The UNRWA camp in Irbid, located near the Syrian border, was also deemed an Al Qaida stronghold.
"The ties between the Salafi-Jihadis across the Levant region show that some young men in the UNRWA refugee camps are inspired and influenced by the late Abu Mussib Al Zarqawi's ambition of creating a Levantine Salafi-Jihadi movement," the report said.
by David Bedein
Jerusalem, Israel; A report, issued by the Washington-based Jamestown Foundation, shows that Al Qaida and its allies are bolstering efforts to infiltrate Palestinian refugee camps in the Gaza Strip, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria run by The United Nations Relief and Works Agency,[UNRWA].
UNWRA operates 59 refugee camps for Palestinian Arab 1948 refugees and their descendents
UNRWA is supported by direct contributions from 38 nations around the world under the framework of the the Refugee Working Group, [RWG] chaired by Canada.
Canada provides 11% of the UNRWA budget. The United States provides 31% of the UNRWA budget.
What may cause some concern among donor nations is that Al Qaida appears to have been targeting UNRWA Palestinian refugee camps for indoctrination and recruitment.
That concern stems from strict laws in the US, Canada and other donor nations which forbid financial donations to refugee camps that have become terror bases.
The Jamestown Foundation report documents how the Al Qaida-aligned Fatah Al Islam was recruiting cells in such UNRWA Lebanese camps as Bidawi and Burj Al Shamali.
"If training and organization become available to these young people they have the potential to become a threat to not only the countries in which they reside, but to the region as a whole," the report said.
The report documents that increasing Al Qaida presence has threatened the Western and United Nations presence in Arab states. Jamestown said Palestinians were undergoing radicalization and adopting the Al Qaida doctrine of jihad, or holy war.
In 2009, Al Qaida chief Osama Bin Laden addressed the Palestinians at least three times and appealed for their participation in his Islamist war against the West. Bin Laden has urged Palestinians to fight the United States in Iraq before moving on to Israel.
"They should hasten to take their positions among the ranks of the holy warriors in Iraq, and through support and trust in Allah," Bin Laden said in a recent message.
"The third phase is the emergence of the Salafi-Jihadi ideology as the primary ideology for Palestinian youth in the camps," the report said. "This phase is occurring now, as individuals and small groups are increasingly turning to Salafist militancy."
The biggest target of Al Qaida has been the UNRWA Palestinian refugee camp of Ein Hilwe. Ein Hilwe, the largest of the UNRWA Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon, was said to harbor several Al Qaida figures, including Ahmed Abdul Karim Al Saadi, Haitham Abdul Karim Al Saadi and Saleh Qiblawi. Haitham was identified as a deputy of the late Al Qaida network chief in Iraq, Abu Mussib Al Zarqawi.
In Syria, Palestinian followers of Al Qaida clashed with Syrian security forces in October 2008. The unrest was said to have taken place in Syria's largest UNRWA refugee camp, Yarmouk.
"When Syria became a transit point for Syrian and Arab fighters aiming to take up jihad against Americans between 2003 and 2007, there were several cases of young fighters passing through Yarmouk camp," the report said.
The Jamestown Foundation also reported an Al Qaida presence in Jordan's UNRWA Baqaa refugee camp. The UNRWA camp in Irbid, located near the Syrian border, was also deemed an Al Qaida stronghold.
"The ties between the Salafi-Jihadis across the Levant region show that some young men in the UNRWA refugee camps are inspired and influenced by the late Abu Mussib Al Zarqawi's ambition of creating a Levantine Salafi-Jihadi movement," the report said.
A Jewish and Democratic One-State Solution
This article originally appeared on the blog a Crazy Nation, and was reprinted in the Jerusalem Post
Jan. 12, 2010
by Joshua Reback, THE JERUSALEM POST
It's difficult to write this without being framed as some sort of fanatic. Either I should fall on the Left that advocates a binational state, or on the Right that can only see things through the lens of "Greater Israel." Both of these labels are presumptuous and have precluded debate about this issue. However, there is a way to reconcile these "extremes" and provide a reason to trend away from the two-state plan.
The Obama administration is trying to torpedo renewed discussion of this idea with a strained attempt to force two-state negotiations, while continuing the Bush administration's policy of building the PA's security apparatus. But an Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank in any capacity would contract the country's defensive posture and invite encroachment from Syria, with no guarantees the already extant terrorist groups in the area would not grow and infiltrate a Palestinian state's security forces.
At this point, annexing the West Bank (without the Gaza Strip) would not hinder Jews' clear majority in a unified state. That does not imply that absorbing the territory immediately would resolve a plethora of security, social and religious issues. But to give the vote to everyone in the West Bank would create both a Jewish and democratic state from the Jordan to the Mediterranean, sans Gaza. The question then becomes how the Jewish population intends to preserve that majority.
BUT BEFORE that can be answered, we need to remember why we should be concerned about it in the first place. This is a question that is seldom addressed, and its answers are seldom clarified by commentators. It was cited ad nauseam in the lead-up to the disengagement five years ago, but I am not so sure observers really understood why this issue was so important to Israelis.
Jews would instinctively bring up domestic security concerns. Israelis are especially cognizant of the pogroms in Europe and especially the Arab riots in 1929, 1936-39 and the two intifadas. Annexation evokes fears of anti-Semitic sabotage and civil war or pogroms if the government ever fell into the hands of a hostile Arab majority. This is a concern that no one can simply alleviate. Jewish sovereignty and qualitative ability to defend the Jewish world from attack are among the dozens of conceptual underpinnings of the entire Zionist movement. It is what justified one of the first global, collective gestures of affirmative action in modern history - the creation of an ethnically based country, the Jewish State of Israel.
The moderate approach in Israeli politics regarding a one-state solution would be to both annex the West Bank and push off the idea of official "binationalism." Such a state would have to remain a Jewish state, with a Jewish symbol on its flag - like an Islamic crescent adorns the Turkish or Pakistani banners - and maintain a Jewish majority (not plurality) in its territory.
This brings the whole debate back to the "big blue elephant" in the room - the need to increase Jewish immigration and the natural birth rate of Israeli Jews. These are not policies that Western democracies are expected to implement. But Western states do not exist for the sake of ethnic preservation against global instances of oppression, whether it be in Europe or the Arab world.
These policies are not radical to Israelis, and they are not radical to certain other ethnic states. And given the willingness to discuss population exchange and mass eviction during peace negotiations, they are not all too awkward to the likes of the Western powers, either.
Few Israeli politicians suggest this, because it assumes too many developments. Recently, Likud MK Tzipi Hotovely alluded to it when she fielded the idea of giving citizenship to Palestinians. There seems to be no guarantee that a renewed push for aliya and reversal of yerida would bear fruit, or that Jewish families would decide to have more children.
BUT GLOBAL Jewish leadership has fought against such pessimism. Tens of millions of dollars are already spent every year on all forms of Jewish outreach - religious, cultural and political. Activists the world over urge the end of assimilation and absorption of mixed families into the greater Jewish community. The push is for far bigger and far more Jewish families by leaders and organizations everywhere. The State of Israel, the strongest Jewish organization in the world, should coordinate all of these efforts, stress the importance of the Land of Israel to all streams of Judaism and emphasize the centrality of the state to the modern Jewish world.
It is possible to enhance Israel's Jewish, democratic and defensive characteristics simultaneously. Israel's Jewish character and the preservation of minorities' rights and needs are reconcilable. It is a mixture of idealism and practicality, yet an objective approach, politically satiable and the optimal one to take.
The writer is a graduate of Rutgers University with a BA in Middle Eastern studies. He is currently a student at Yeshivat Hamivtar in Efrat.
Jan. 12, 2010
by Joshua Reback, THE JERUSALEM POST
It's difficult to write this without being framed as some sort of fanatic. Either I should fall on the Left that advocates a binational state, or on the Right that can only see things through the lens of "Greater Israel." Both of these labels are presumptuous and have precluded debate about this issue. However, there is a way to reconcile these "extremes" and provide a reason to trend away from the two-state plan.
The Obama administration is trying to torpedo renewed discussion of this idea with a strained attempt to force two-state negotiations, while continuing the Bush administration's policy of building the PA's security apparatus. But an Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank in any capacity would contract the country's defensive posture and invite encroachment from Syria, with no guarantees the already extant terrorist groups in the area would not grow and infiltrate a Palestinian state's security forces.
At this point, annexing the West Bank (without the Gaza Strip) would not hinder Jews' clear majority in a unified state. That does not imply that absorbing the territory immediately would resolve a plethora of security, social and religious issues. But to give the vote to everyone in the West Bank would create both a Jewish and democratic state from the Jordan to the Mediterranean, sans Gaza. The question then becomes how the Jewish population intends to preserve that majority.
BUT BEFORE that can be answered, we need to remember why we should be concerned about it in the first place. This is a question that is seldom addressed, and its answers are seldom clarified by commentators. It was cited ad nauseam in the lead-up to the disengagement five years ago, but I am not so sure observers really understood why this issue was so important to Israelis.
Jews would instinctively bring up domestic security concerns. Israelis are especially cognizant of the pogroms in Europe and especially the Arab riots in 1929, 1936-39 and the two intifadas. Annexation evokes fears of anti-Semitic sabotage and civil war or pogroms if the government ever fell into the hands of a hostile Arab majority. This is a concern that no one can simply alleviate. Jewish sovereignty and qualitative ability to defend the Jewish world from attack are among the dozens of conceptual underpinnings of the entire Zionist movement. It is what justified one of the first global, collective gestures of affirmative action in modern history - the creation of an ethnically based country, the Jewish State of Israel.
The moderate approach in Israeli politics regarding a one-state solution would be to both annex the West Bank and push off the idea of official "binationalism." Such a state would have to remain a Jewish state, with a Jewish symbol on its flag - like an Islamic crescent adorns the Turkish or Pakistani banners - and maintain a Jewish majority (not plurality) in its territory.
This brings the whole debate back to the "big blue elephant" in the room - the need to increase Jewish immigration and the natural birth rate of Israeli Jews. These are not policies that Western democracies are expected to implement. But Western states do not exist for the sake of ethnic preservation against global instances of oppression, whether it be in Europe or the Arab world.
These policies are not radical to Israelis, and they are not radical to certain other ethnic states. And given the willingness to discuss population exchange and mass eviction during peace negotiations, they are not all too awkward to the likes of the Western powers, either.
Few Israeli politicians suggest this, because it assumes too many developments. Recently, Likud MK Tzipi Hotovely alluded to it when she fielded the idea of giving citizenship to Palestinians. There seems to be no guarantee that a renewed push for aliya and reversal of yerida would bear fruit, or that Jewish families would decide to have more children.
BUT GLOBAL Jewish leadership has fought against such pessimism. Tens of millions of dollars are already spent every year on all forms of Jewish outreach - religious, cultural and political. Activists the world over urge the end of assimilation and absorption of mixed families into the greater Jewish community. The push is for far bigger and far more Jewish families by leaders and organizations everywhere. The State of Israel, the strongest Jewish organization in the world, should coordinate all of these efforts, stress the importance of the Land of Israel to all streams of Judaism and emphasize the centrality of the state to the modern Jewish world.
It is possible to enhance Israel's Jewish, democratic and defensive characteristics simultaneously. Israel's Jewish character and the preservation of minorities' rights and needs are reconcilable. It is a mixture of idealism and practicality, yet an objective approach, politically satiable and the optimal one to take.
The writer is a graduate of Rutgers University with a BA in Middle Eastern studies. He is currently a student at Yeshivat Hamivtar in Efrat.
CANADA ELECTS TO DEFUND UNRWA AND APPLY FUNDS TO PA JUSTICE SYSTEM
CANADA ELECTS TO DEFUND UNRWA AND APPLY FUNDS TO PA JUSTICE SYSTEM
By Rhonda Spivak
Canada advised the Palestinian Authority on January 9th, that it will be re-directing funds given to "general operatiing expenses" of the PA Treasury towards specific projects in the area of justice and policing, according to Minister Victor Toews, President of Canada's Treasury Board.
Canadian aid will be redirected "to specific projects in the Palestinian Authority that will ensure accountability and foster democracy in the PA," he said.
Toews said that on January 9, he met with PA Minister of Planning and Administrative Development Ali al-Jarbawi in Ramallah, and funding to UNWRA was discussed. UNWRA is the UN agency that runs Palestinian refugee camps in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria. Until now, Canada has provided UNWRA with 11 percent of its budget, $15 million (Canadian) annually. Canada's funding of UNWRA, while still continuing to be $15 million annually has been specifically earmarked for "food security."
Toews also met with PA Justice Minister Ali Khashan and Attorney-General Ahmed al-Mughani.
He said that in the past, Canada aid earmarked for UNWRA "went into a general operating fund" in the PA Treasury and although Jarbawi had asked that this situation continue, the practice made it "difficult" for Canada to monitor how the funds were being used. Toews said Jarbawi had asked that the money be given "directly' to the PA Treasury but Toews refused the request.
Vic Toews meeting with Palestinian
officials in Ramallah
When asked whether Canada had concerns that UNWRA funds were being administered by Hamas operatives, Toews responded, "Canada has made a $300m. commitment over five years to the Palestinian Authority, but we want to put that money only into programs that are consistent with Canadian values. We are going to focus directing our funds on institution-building in the PA, such as building a proper functioning justice system. We need to insure that [the PA has] less wide discretion and the funds are being directed to specific projects."
Toews added, "I told him [Jarbawi] that our [Canada's] paramount concern is the security of Israel."
Toews, who is a former director of the Constitutional Law Branch at Manitoba's Department of Justice, said, "We are going to allocate money to training Palestinian prosecutors, and towards the Office of the Attorney-General, and the Public Prosecution Office. If we train people properly we will have the emergence of proper institutions necessary for a state."
"It is obviously more difficult to monitor the use of money sent into general funds than specific projects."
"Overall, Canada is not reducing the amount of money given to the PA, but it is now being redirected in accordance with Canadian values," he said.
Toews added, "Canada has pledged $20m. towards training prosecutors, judges and police and building up the Palestinian judicial sector by building courthouses in Ramallah, Hebron and Tulkarm. But more important than building the courthouses is training the people... A fair and effective system of criminal justice with an efficient and independent Prosecutions Office and Attorney-General's Office is integral to the process, and to securing long-term peace and stability in the Middle East."
Toews indicated that he met with PA officials on behalf of Canada's minister of international development, Beverley Oda, who is in charge of the Canadian International Development Agency.
Regarding the PA's police force that is being trained by US Lt.-Gen. Keith Dayton in Jordan, Toews said, "Canada has the largest contingency under Gen. Dayton. We have 18 officers, and the United States only has 10."
After noting that he had spoken to a Royal Canadian Mounted Police officer from Halifax, Nova Scotia, and others, Toews said, "A full third of Palestinian Authority police have no training whatsoever."
Toews, who also visited Jordan during his trip, said he met with Jordanian Prime Minister Samir Rifai, the kingdom's finance and planning ministers as well as the head of its Atomic Energy Commission, "because Jordan is looking to produce nuclear energy for desalination."
Vic Toews meeting with US Lt.-Gen.
Keith Dayton
"They don't have water or energy that other Arab states have. We had very good discussions. Our Canadian technology, CANDU reactors are not conducive to the development of weapons grade uranium. I met with an expert... at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem who assured me that this was the case. I wanted to verify it myself."
Toews was in Israel on behalf of the Canadian government to participate in the second annual Manitoba-Israel Water Symposium hosted by the Jewish National Fund-Keren Kayemet LeYisrael.
Rhonda Spivak, an attorney and a writer, is a member of the Canadian and Israel Bar Associations, now editing the Winnipeg Jewish Report at http://winnipegjewishreport.com/
By Rhonda Spivak
Canada advised the Palestinian Authority on January 9th, that it will be re-directing funds given to "general operatiing expenses" of the PA Treasury towards specific projects in the area of justice and policing, according to Minister Victor Toews, President of Canada's Treasury Board.
Canadian aid will be redirected "to specific projects in the Palestinian Authority that will ensure accountability and foster democracy in the PA," he said.
Toews said that on January 9, he met with PA Minister of Planning and Administrative Development Ali al-Jarbawi in Ramallah, and funding to UNWRA was discussed. UNWRA is the UN agency that runs Palestinian refugee camps in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria. Until now, Canada has provided UNWRA with 11 percent of its budget, $15 million (Canadian) annually. Canada's funding of UNWRA, while still continuing to be $15 million annually has been specifically earmarked for "food security."
Toews also met with PA Justice Minister Ali Khashan and Attorney-General Ahmed al-Mughani.
He said that in the past, Canada aid earmarked for UNWRA "went into a general operating fund" in the PA Treasury and although Jarbawi had asked that this situation continue, the practice made it "difficult" for Canada to monitor how the funds were being used. Toews said Jarbawi had asked that the money be given "directly' to the PA Treasury but Toews refused the request.
Vic Toews meeting with Palestinian
officials in Ramallah
When asked whether Canada had concerns that UNWRA funds were being administered by Hamas operatives, Toews responded, "Canada has made a $300m. commitment over five years to the Palestinian Authority, but we want to put that money only into programs that are consistent with Canadian values. We are going to focus directing our funds on institution-building in the PA, such as building a proper functioning justice system. We need to insure that [the PA has] less wide discretion and the funds are being directed to specific projects."
Toews added, "I told him [Jarbawi] that our [Canada's] paramount concern is the security of Israel."
Toews, who is a former director of the Constitutional Law Branch at Manitoba's Department of Justice, said, "We are going to allocate money to training Palestinian prosecutors, and towards the Office of the Attorney-General, and the Public Prosecution Office. If we train people properly we will have the emergence of proper institutions necessary for a state."
"It is obviously more difficult to monitor the use of money sent into general funds than specific projects."
"Overall, Canada is not reducing the amount of money given to the PA, but it is now being redirected in accordance with Canadian values," he said.
Toews added, "Canada has pledged $20m. towards training prosecutors, judges and police and building up the Palestinian judicial sector by building courthouses in Ramallah, Hebron and Tulkarm. But more important than building the courthouses is training the people... A fair and effective system of criminal justice with an efficient and independent Prosecutions Office and Attorney-General's Office is integral to the process, and to securing long-term peace and stability in the Middle East."
Toews indicated that he met with PA officials on behalf of Canada's minister of international development, Beverley Oda, who is in charge of the Canadian International Development Agency.
Regarding the PA's police force that is being trained by US Lt.-Gen. Keith Dayton in Jordan, Toews said, "Canada has the largest contingency under Gen. Dayton. We have 18 officers, and the United States only has 10."
After noting that he had spoken to a Royal Canadian Mounted Police officer from Halifax, Nova Scotia, and others, Toews said, "A full third of Palestinian Authority police have no training whatsoever."
Toews, who also visited Jordan during his trip, said he met with Jordanian Prime Minister Samir Rifai, the kingdom's finance and planning ministers as well as the head of its Atomic Energy Commission, "because Jordan is looking to produce nuclear energy for desalination."
Vic Toews meeting with US Lt.-Gen.
Keith Dayton
"They don't have water or energy that other Arab states have. We had very good discussions. Our Canadian technology, CANDU reactors are not conducive to the development of weapons grade uranium. I met with an expert... at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem who assured me that this was the case. I wanted to verify it myself."
Toews was in Israel on behalf of the Canadian government to participate in the second annual Manitoba-Israel Water Symposium hosted by the Jewish National Fund-Keren Kayemet LeYisrael.
Rhonda Spivak, an attorney and a writer, is a member of the Canadian and Israel Bar Associations, now editing the Winnipeg Jewish Report at http://winnipegjewishreport.com/
Steven Emerson: Combating Radical Islam - Defeating Jihadist Terrorism
by George Michael
Middle East Quarterly, Winter 2010, pp. 15-25
On Christmas afternoon in 1992, Steven Emerson, then a staff reporter for CNN, noticed a large group of men in traditional Arab clothes congregating outside the Oklahoma City Convention Center. At first, he thought they were extras for a movie-until he remembered the date. So, he explored a bit; inside, he discovered a conference sponsored by the Muslim Arab Youth Association. The vitriol of the speakers, replete with hateful rhetoric against Jews, Israel, and America mixed with exhortations of violence toward these enemies, alarmed him. Spontaneous shouts of "Kill the Jews" and "Destroy the West" came from the audience throughout the event.[1]
Steven Emerson has emerged as a powerful independent force, working with U.S. security services while also carrying out investigations on his own in areas beyond their reach.
Worried by what he had witnessed, Emerson notified a contact in the FBI, only to be told that the agency knew nothing about the conference and also lacked a mandate to investigate it because no criminal activity had occurred or was imminent.[2] This experience indelibly impressed him, leaving a sense of government weakness and suggesting the need for a private agency to explore the threat of radical Islam within the United States.
On graduation from Brown University, Emerson (b. 1954) went to work as an analyst on the staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He served as an international investigator and helped shape the aid package to Israel and Egypt following the Camp David accords in 1978. He honed his skills while working for the committee until 1982, during which time he developed an abiding interest in Middle Eastern affairs.
In 1986, he joined U.S. News & World Report where he worked as a national security correspondent. During this time, he authored two books: Secret Warriors: Inside the Covert Military Operations of the Reagan Era[3] and The Fall of Pan Am 103: Inside the Lockerbie Investigation.[4] In Secret Warriors, Emerson argued that technical breakdowns, bureaucratic disarray, presidential interference, and professional jealousy contributed to the inertia of America's elite forces.[5] This perception may have played a large role in convincing him that government alone is inadequate to the challenges of modern terrorism. In The Fall of Pan Am 103, he promoted the theory-then held by the U.S. government-that Iran was responsible for the bombing of the flight over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988.
Since that early experience in Oklahoma, Emerson has emerged as a powerful independent force who works with U.S. security services but carries out investigations on his own in areas beyond their reach. He does not take any funds from the government. In 1995, he established his own think tank, the Investigative Project on Terrorism (IPT), which has since conducted investigations into many Islamist and terrorist groups and individuals. The IPT has stirred up more hornets' nests than many government agencies. Its acute focus has allowed it to hone in on targets that broader agencies missed. Emerson's initiative has paid off handsomely.
New Nongovernmental Agencies Emerge
The Islamist campaign to implement Shari'a law presents a grave challenge to the United States and all Western countries. And while a security apparatus has arisen to defend against these threats, several nongovernmental bodies have emerged as critical adjuncts in the effort to identify those who work within the law to change the Western way of life.
Compared to Western Europe, the United States has an unusual approach to domestic political extremism. Since 1976, the FBI has officially conducted surveillance of extremist and potentially violent groups under the attorney general's guidelines, established after revelations of misconduct and abuses arising from the COINTELPRO initiative, a secret program through which the FBI disrupted both far-left and far-right groups.[6] However, the extremely well-coordinated attacks of 9/11 exposed gaping holes in the area of human intelligence and impelled the government to reexamine and recalibrate this policy.[7]
In response, the FBI relaxed its guidelines for investigations of religious extremists, and the federal government now allows information to be shared between intelligence and law enforcement agencies. Moreover, to augment their investigatory functions, the authorities increasingly rely on recently created, private monitoring groups, including JihadWatch.com and the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI).[8] Their efforts are complemented by think tanks such as the Middle East Forum and publications such as the Middle East Review of International Affairs.
Operating in a decentralized fashion, private entities can be more flexible and effective than government agencies in providing time-sensitive and actionable intelligence resources. For example, MEMRI releases high-quality, up-to-date information and translations about radical organizations, frequently before such intelligence is processed by government.[9]
Emerson's IPT has established itself as the most effective nongovernmental organization (NGO) monitoring Islamic radicalism. It is the only private entity in the United States that conducts undercover research into the activities of Islamist groups. To preserve its independence, IPT accepts no funds from the U.S. government or donors outside the United States.
Emerson's IPT focuses primarily on U.S.-based Islamist groups, some working in legal ways to undermine American society, others with links to terrorist organizations overseas. Along the way, he has created an unparalleled undercover investigative apparatus. According to Rep. Sue Myrick (Republican of North Carolina), cofounder of the bipartisan Congressional Anti-Terrorism Caucus, "The Investigative Project is the only one out there who is really doing substantial research into what is going on in the world and here in America. They are actually researching... they are verifying how these [jihadist] movements are taking place.... I don't know of anyone else who is doing the same thing."[10]
Emerson has returned the compliment: "Congressmen like Frank Wolf, Pete Hoekstra, and Sue Myrick have shown a backbone that is unparalleled in Congress in courageously tackling the Muslim Brotherhood, CAIR [Council on American Islamic Relations], and other Islamist groups, and radical Islamic groups. So it shows there are brave Congressmen as well."[11] Like Emerson, Myrick focuses less on outright terrorism than the infiltration of American institutions by Islamists.[12] Alliances like this lend strength to Emerson's own efforts. The task of exposing and combating Islamist organizations and individuals takes place in a highly political context and requires high-level lobbying and juristic skills.
Exposing Islamists in America
Emerson undertook effective investigations on his own before he started the IPT. Most notable was his 1994 documentary Jihad in America, which raised awareness of the threat of radical Islam in the United States. The film focused on a Palestinian, Abdullah Azzam, who founded the Arab Fighters Service Bureau in Afghanistan to recruit and train thousands of mostly Arab jihadists. Osama bin Laden, a protégé of Azzam's, cofounded the bureau and later transformed it into Al-Qaeda. The bureau's North American office, the Al-Khifa Refugee Center in the Al-Farooq Mosque in Brooklyn, soon became the hub of a network that included outposts in Atlanta, Chicago, Connecticut, and New Jersey.[13] Interestingly, while in Pakistan and Afghanistan for several months in 1993, shooting the documentary, Emerson befriended Azzam's son Hodeyfa.
After Azzam's assassination in Pakistan in 1989,[14] the blind Egyptian sheikh, Omar Abdel Rahman, emerged as the spiritual leader of the international jihadist wing of the bureau. In 1990, Abdel Rahman, who had been expelled from Egypt, was allowed to emigrate from Afghanistan to the United States despite having been named on the State Department's terrorist watch list; he settled in the New York city area. Soon, a circle of Islamists congregated at his Al-Salaam Mosque in Jersey City. In 1990, one of his followers, Egyptian-born El Sayyid Nosair, assassinated Rabbi Meir Kahane, the Israeli politician and founder of the Jewish Defense League.[15] A few years later, other Abdel Rahman followers linked up with Ramzi Yousef, the mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, which killed six persons and wounded 1,042 others.[16] Emerson's work in uncovering and exposing this network complemented the efforts of official agencies operating under greater constraints.
The Charity Networks
Since August 1994, Emerson has testified before or informally briefed the United States Congress hundreds of times.[17] His efforts appear to have had an influence on lawmakers. The videotape of his first documentary, Jihad in America, was distributed to all 535 members of Congress and, according to Rep. Chris Smith (Republican of New Jersey), it played a significant role in persuading them to pass the USA Patriot Act in the fall of 2001.[18] In 2002, he published a book entitled American Jihad: The Terrorists Living Among Us,[19] in which he traced the development of radical Islam in the United States. He also testified before the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States (the 9/11 Commission) in July 2003.[20]
In later testimony before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee on November 8, 2005, he charged that Saudi Arabia had funded a vast network of charities and religious organizations that had ties to terrorist groups, including Al-Qaeda and Hamas.[21] This testimony prompted Treasury and National Security Council investigations into the labyrinth of radical Islamic charities operating in the United States. According to federal officials, these investigations led to an effort within the agencies to shut down some of the charities but nothing was done; the Clinton administration lacked the political will to close down the charities. Only after the 9-11 attacks did that will emerge and efforts to shut down the charitable fronts succeed.[22]
Emerson has focused primarily on the fundraising activities of mainstream Muslim groups and their links to the more radical organizations for which they serve as fronts. As he has observed, one of the most important activities carried out by Islamist groups in the United States has been the establishment of nonprofit, tax-deductible organizations to establish zones of legitimacy within which fundraising, recruitment, and even terrorist planning can occur.[23] Using a technique first developed in the Middle East, these groups often provide American Muslims with much-needed social services such as education, nutrition, and health care so as to win over and manipulate them.[24] This activity is usually justified by reference to the religious duty of paying zakat (the Islamic alms tax).[25] This practice creates substantial good will and much social capital for those Islamist groups who choose to employ it as a cover for collecting monies destined for jihadist groups.
According to one CIA study, one-fifth of all Islamic NGOs worldwide have been unwittingly infiltrated by Islamist terrorist groups.[26] As Emerson has pointed out, some of the religious and charitable organizations have mixed legitimate activities with illegitimate, thus betraying the true aims of the donations.[27] Investigators who seek to reveal this duplicity run a serious risk of being condemned as bigots who find wrongdoing in a meritorious religious activity that has close parallels to Jewish and Christian charities.
Hamas and Hezb’Allah Networks
Overall, the IPT, with its access to information and intelligence to which the government is not privy, has been instrumental in shutting down more than a dozen Islamic charitable terrorist and nonviolent front-groups since 2001.[28]
Hamas, the Palestinian Islamic Resistance Movement, a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, offers one notable example of an organization involved in both terrorism and social services. According to Emerson, Hamas developed the most sophisticated infrastructure of all the Islamist groups operating in the United States.[29] During the early 1990s, the group worked out of an office in Springfield, Virginia, opened by Musa Abu Marzouk. In 1981, Abu Marzouk helped create the Islamic Association of Palestine (IAP), which served as the primary voice for Hamas in the United States. IAP participants were later among the founding members of CAIR.[30] IAP's primary activity consisted of annual conferences, which hosted various Islamist luminaries who often gave incendiary speeches.[31]
In 1980, Abu Marzouk became founding president of the United Association for Studies and Research (UASR), which some sources indicate acted as the Hamas political command in the United States.[32] He went on to found additional groups in the United States, all of them closely associated with Hamas. For example, UASR and IAP were joined by the Holy Land Foundation (HLF), which Abu Marzouk himself designated as the primary source of donations for charitable work in the Palestinian territories.[33] In 2001, Abu Marzouk voluntarily shut down his office after its director, Ahmed Yousef, was forced to flee the United States where he had resided illegally for twenty years. Yousef now serves as a spokesman for Hamas in Gaza.[34] Abu Marzouk also returned to Gaza where he is now the deputy chairman of Hamas's political bureau, but in 2004 he was indicted in his absence for coordinating and financing the work of Hamas.[35]
The FBI suspects that Hamas may also have established for-profit corporations in the United States. On September 5, 2001, it executed a search warrant against the InfoCom Corporation, an Internet service provider based in Richardson, Texas, suspected of ties to Hamas.[36] The authorities indicted its officials and subsequently convicted them of channeling funds to the Palestinian group.[37] Law enforcement officials commented on background that Emerson's organization, with vast archives on the activities of Hamas front groups in the United States, had an instrumental role in prosecuting and convicting the Holy Land Foundation, a trial that resulted in sweeping convictions for all defendants in 2008.[38]
And the beat goes on: In 2007, the IPT broadcast video tapes on its website showing Esam Omeish railing against Israel and advocating jihad. As a result, Omeish was forced to resign from his appointment by Virginian governor Tim Kaine to the state's Commission on Immigration.[39] In 2009, the IPT exposed the links between Viva Palestina USA and Hamas. Its report on the group laid bare its membership, activities, and motives and was provided to federal authorities for further investigation.[40]
Sami al-Arian and Palestinian Islamic Jihad
Emerson was the first investigator to link a former professor at the University of South Florida, Sami al-Arian, to Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), an organization designated as a foreign terrorist organization by the U.S. State Department.[41] He exposed Arian's ties to the Islamic Jihad in his 1994 documentary Jihad in America and continued to write and testify about Arian's links to the group throughout the rest of the decade. Arian has helped create several Islamist associations. One of these, the Islamic Concern Project (later called the Islamic Committee for Palestine), allegedly raised money for Palestinian Islamic Jihad and brought Islamist leaders to the United States.[42] In Jihad in America, Emerson called the Islamic Committee for Palestine the "primary support group in the United States for Islamic Jihad."
Emerson revealed that Arian was running an organization that was in effect the American branch of Palestinian Islamic Jihad.[43] In February 2003, federal law enforcement agents arrested Arian for alleged fundraising and material support activities on behalf of terrorist organizations, including Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad.[44] In December 2005, Arian was acquitted of many serious charges against him, but the jury deadlocked on nine counts. He pleaded guilty to a single count of conspiracy to provide services to the Palestinian Islamic Jihad and agreed to be deported after serving the balance of a 57-month sentence.
According to Bill West, the supervisory special agent of the Immigration and Naturalization Service's Miami Special Investigations Section (and now a consultant to the IPT), Emerson's "outstanding and continued original investigative journalism" of Arian and his PIJ connections "was the catalyst that resulted in the launching of the federal criminal investigation against Al-Arian and his cohorts."[45]
CAIR, MPAC, and AMC
Emerson's detailed investigations into CAIR have generated consequences for this Islamist group in Congress. For example, in December 2006, following an appeal by "CAIR Watch" founder Joe Kaufman, Sen. Barbara Boxer (Democrat of California) rescinded an award to CAIR official Basim Elkarra, stating that she was uncomfortable with many of CAIR's positions.[46] Not long after, Emerson disclosed Rep. Bill Pascrell's (Democrat of New Jersey) role in sponsoring a CAIR forum to be held in a Capitol facility. The Republican Party House Conference objected to this use by CAIR, whose members the Republican Party had labeled as "terror apologists."[47] It was also Emerson who discerned that CAIR had effectively been founded by Hamas.[48]
He has long sought to expose CAIR's leading officials who have previously expressed extremist views and been linked to militant activities. One of these is Ghassan Elashi, founder of the Texas branch of CAIR, who has been sentenced to more than six years in prison for numerous offences, including money-laundering for Hamas.[49] In 2007, CAIR was designated an un-indicted co-conspirator in the trial of the officials operating the Holy Land Foundation, who were accused and later convicted of laundering money for Hamas.[50] In the trial, FBI agent Lara Burns testified that CAIR serves as a front for Hamas. In January 2009, Emerson revealed that the FBI was severing its contacts with CAIR due to its ties with Hamas.[51]
Emerson has released documents and tapes showing that leaders of the Muslim Public Affairs Committee (MPAC) have defended Hezb’Allah, excused Hamas terror attacks, compared the United States to Al-Qaeda, urged Muslims not to cooperate if FBI agents approach them, and issued demonstrably anti-Semitic and anti-American statements.[52] In return, MPAC tried to demonize Emerson. At a conference held in late 2004, it displayed a poster called "The Faces that Are Always Talking about Terrorism," which included pictures of Osama bin Laden, Daniel Pipes, Pat Robertson, Donald Rumsfeld, and Steven Emerson.[53] The implication was that Emerson, et al., were as nefarious as bin Laden.
In December 2004, MPAC again focused on Emerson in a report entitled Counterproductive Counterterrorism: How Anti-Islamic Rhetoric Is Impeding America's Homeland Security. It pointed out that several key public officials, including former national security advisor, Gen. Brent Scowcroft, had praised the efforts of MPAC in working with government officials to combat terrorism in America.[54] Emerson countered, saying MPAC has deceived public officials into believing the group is "moderate" while at the same time defending Hezb’Allah and Hamas and rationalizing radical Islam.
The American Muslim Council (AMC) may have been Emerson's most dramatic exposé so far. He took issue with an invitation that President Bill Clinton extended in 1996 to Abdurahman Alamoudi, a prominent Muslim-American leader and the executive director of the AMC. The meeting between the president and Alamoudi was to take place in the White House. Clinton administration officials, including Clinton himself, Vice President Al Gore and National Security Advisor Anthony Lake, met with Alamoudi along with twenty-three Muslim and Arab leaders.[55] According to Emerson, AMC had significant ties to Hamas and was a defender of Hamas leader Musa Abu Marzouk.[56] Because of the notoriety Alamoudi received from the exposure by Emerson, the Clintons and President Bush returned Alamoudi's campaign contributions.[57] This is an excellent example of how someone coming from outside the compliant structures of government can make an impact in political circles.
But the matter went even further. Emerson recorded a speech in which Alamoudi voiced support for both Hezb’Allah and Hamas.[58] Emerson also obtained a recording of Alamoudi calling for bombings in the United States, a tape that was introduced at Alamoudi's detention hearing and credited with the decision to keep him in jail rather than let him out on bail.[59] In October 2003, Alamoudi was then indicted on charges that he had illegally accepted $340,000 from the Libyan government for his efforts to persuade the U.S. government to lift sanctions against the Mu'ammar al-Qadhafi regime.[60] Then, in 2004, Alamoudi was arrested and convicted of conspiring with two Al-Qaeda members to assassinate King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia.[61] In October, 2004, he pled guilty and was sentenced to twenty-three years in prison. Treasury documents list him as a longtime courier for Al-Qaeda and Hamas.[62]
The Investigative Project on Terrorism
Emerson founded the Investigative Project on Terrorism in 1995 and currently serves as its executive director; this think tank and archive maintains the world's largest collection of nongovernmental data on radical Islamic groups, including more than four million documents, thousands of hours of clandestine video and audio recordings made at radical Islamic conferences, training sessions, fundraising activities, and assorted gatherings; and tens of thousands of original terrorist manuals and periodicals.[63] The IPT has also compiled a database of thousands of known or suspected terrorists as well as dossiers on radical groups.[64]
The IPT website offers a comprehensive counter-Islamist source of information, with government documents, proprietary information, and breaking stories.[65] The IPT also employs analysts to collect and interpret data and sends associates to listen to speeches by Islamist leaders. To inform interested parties of its work, it mails out daily updates. Emerson also contributes to the Counterterrorism Blog website, which posts articles and information relating to radical Islam, terrorism, and nonviolent Islamist threats.
The IPT receives information from a variety of sources, including many not available to government agencies. The archive holds the trial exhibits from the first WorldTradeCenter bombing case, which include numerous records on Muslim terrorists in the Middle East and elsewhere. Emerson and his staff meticulously copied the documents, which were all publicly available and obtained from the court and prosecutors. After reviewing the records, Emerson concluded that these various Islamist groups were coordinating their activities in a worldwide network.[66]
The IPT, acting as a nongovernmental agency, assists, without fee, numerous government offices and agencies, in part because constitutional limitations tie the hands of federal and state security services. Due to a strong civil liberties tradition rooted in the First Amendment, the U.S. government lacks the authority to disband extremist groups or proscribe extremist speech. While the IPT does not possess any governmental powers or authority, it has the ability, like the media, to shine a light on the activities of Islamist groups, gatherings, and officials. Emerson often quotes Justice Louis Brandeis's dictum that "sunshine is the law's best disinfectant."
The constraints imposed on government agencies investigating terrorist threats created space for Emerson's Investigative Project. Since the mid-1970s, federal authorities have been hampered in their efforts to monitor political extremism, largely due to the legacy of the secret FBI project designated COINTELPRO.[67] Negative publicity surrounding that program led the Justice Department to change FBI law enforcement and investigative methods to de-politicize the FBI. The Levi guidelines, adopted in April 1976, require evidence of a criminal predicate or a reasonable suspicion before commencing investigation of a dissident group.[68] These changes had dramatic consequences, not least that the number of domestic intelligence cases dropped from 1,454 in 1975 to only 95 in 1977.[69] Nothing in the guidelines, however, precludes the FBI from opening an investigation based on information received from a private group. NGOs such as the IPT and individuals such as Shannen Rossmiller[70] have done much to fill the void. For its part, the IPT monitors not only radical Islamic groups in America advocating violent jihad but also those employing nonviolent or "stealth" jihad.
Conclusion
Emerson believes that the Islamist movement in the West continues to strengthen, in large part due to what he refers to as the "cultural jihad," which provides a congenial environment in which Islamists can flourish. He cites survey data indicating that many Muslim communities in the West sympathize with aspects of the Islamist worldview. These cultural jihadists in turn give moral support to the terrorists.[71] In Globalized Islam: The Search for a New Ummah, the French scholar Olivier Roy argues that Muslims in the West often experience a trauma of "deterritorialization" because they feel estranged from their native lands. To overcome anomie and alienation, young Muslims find solace in a new, purified Islam and attach themselves to a "virtual ummah [Islamic nation]" built by them on the Internet.[72] This pool of mostly young, alienated, Muslim men provides a reservoir from which Islamists can recruit in the West.
In Emerson's opinion, the November 2, 2004 murder of Theo van Gogh by Mohammed Bouyeri[73] was a watershed event that inspired Europeans to reevaluate the viability of the multicultural model, seeing that it results not in peaceful coexistence but rather in separatism and cultural jihadism, threatening the social fabric of Western Europe. He warns that moderates have little influence in Muslim communities in the West.[74] Although the Muslim underclass in the United States is smaller than in Europe, Emerson finds substantial alienation in the Muslim-American community. He sees groups such as CAIR, MPAC, the Islamic Society of North America, and the Muslim American Society as agents that exacerbate this tendency. What is more, he notes, Islamist schools in the United States are often funded by Wahhabi sources promoting an extremist variant of Islam.[75]
Emerson has not gone unnoticed by Al-Qaeda. In September 2006, a leading public representative of the organization-American-born Adam Gadahn, who has adopted the Muslim name of Azzam al-Amriki-mentioned Emerson and several other Americans in a public videotape.[76] The video begins with an introduction by bin Laden's lieutenant, Ayman al-Zawahiri, who refers to Gadahn as a "brother" and "a perceptive person who wants to lead his people out of darkness into the light."[77] Then Gadahn invites Emerson and the others to Islam:
If the Zionist crusader missionaries of hate and counter-Islam consultants like Daniel Pipes, Robert Spencer, Michael Scheuer, Steven Emerson, and yes, even the crusader-in-chief, George W. Bush were to abandon their unbelief and repent and enter into the light of Islam and turn their swords against the enemies of God, it would be accepted of them and they would be our brothers of Islam.[78]
Emerson and his colleagues remain unimpressed and continue their work.
George Michael is associate professor of political science and administration of justice at the University of Virginia's College at Wise. He is the author most recently of Willis Carto and the American Far Right (University Press of Florida, 2008), and Theology of Hate: A History of the WorldChurch of the Creator (University Press of Florida, 2009).
Citations
[1] Steven Emerson, American Jihad: The Terrorists Living Among Us (New York: Free Press, 2002), p. 6.
[2] Ibid., pp. 5-25.
[3] New York: Putnam Adult, 1988.
[4] With Brian Duffy, New York: Penguin Group, 1990.
[5] See also Steven Emerson, "Stymied Warriors," The New York Times Magazine, Nov. 13, 1988; Beau Grosscup, The Newest Explosions of Terrorism: Latest Sites of Terrorism in the 1990s and Beyond (Far Hills, N.J.: New Horizon Press, 1998), p. 405.
[6] James Kirkpatrick Davis, Spying on America: The FBI's Domestic Counterintelligence Program (Westport: Praeger, 1992), pp. 25-159.
[7] Los Angeles Times, Dec. 1, 2001.
[8] See "Why Jihad Watch?" JihadWatch, accessed Oct. 1, 2009; "About Us," Middle East Media Research Institute, accessed Oct. 1, 2009; "About the Project," Terrorism Awareness Project, accessed Oct. 1, 2009.
[9] John Robb, Brave New War: The Next Stage of Terrorism and the End of Globalization (Hoboken, N.J.: John Wiley and Sons, Inc., 2007), pp. 89-91.
[10] "About the Investigative Project," The Investigative Project on Terrorism, accessed Oct. 1, 2009.
[11] Jamie Glazov, "The-Islamist Lobby in the House: An Interview with Steven Emerson," FrontPageMagazine.com, Aug. 4, 2009.
[12] Sue Myrick, "War at Home: When Will We Open Our Eyes?" editorial, Feb, 5, 2008, accessed 11/29/09
[13] Peter L. Bergen, Holy War, Inc.: Inside the Secret World of Osama bin Laden (New York: The Free Press, 2001), p. 133.
[14] "Who Killed Abdullah Azzam?" Time, Nov. 24, 1989.
[15] United States of America, Appellee, v. Omar Ahmad Ali Abdel Rahman, United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, New York, Aug. 16, 1999.
[16] Simon Reeve, The New Jackals: Ramzi Yousef, Osama bin Laden and the Future of Terrorism (Boston: Northeaster Press, 1999), p. 15.
[17] "Testimony," The Investigative Project, accessed Oct. 1, 2009.
[18] John Mintz, "The Man Who Gives Terrorism a Name," The Washington Post, Nov. 14, 2001.
[19] New York: Free Press, 2003.
[20] The 9/11 Commission Report (New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company, 2004), p. 441.
[21] Steven Emerson, "Saudi Arabia: Friend or Foe in the War on Terror," testimony before the United States Senate Judiciary Committee, Washington, D.C., Nov. 8, 2005.
[22] E-mail correspondence with Steven Emerson, Nov. 19, 2009.
[23] Emerson, American Jihad, p. 37; Rohan Gunaratna, Inside Al Qaeda: Global Network of Terror (New York: ColumbiaUniversity Press, 2002), p. 5.
[24] Gunaratna, Inside Al Qaeda, p. 6.
[25] See Raymond Ibrahim, "The Dark Side of Zakat: Muslim 'Charity' in Context," Pajamas Media, 11/15/09
[26] Ibid.
[27] Steven Emerson, "How to Really Fight Terrorism," The Wall Street Journal, Aug. 24, 1998.
[28] WTHR- NBC (Indianapolis), Nov. 10, 2003.
[29] Emerson, American Jihad, p. 80.
[30] Daniel Pipes and Sharon Chadha, "CAIR: Islamists Fooling the Establishment," Middle East Quarterly, Spring 2006, pp. 3-20.
[31] Emerson, American Jihad, pp. 93-8; Harvey Kushner with Bart Davis, Holy War on the Home Front: The Secret Islamic Terror Network in the United States (New York: Sentinel, 2004), pp. 22-4.
[32] Emerson, American Jihad, pp. 84-5; Kushner, Holy War on the Home Front, pp. 109-12.
[33] "HLF Officials Convicted on All Counts," IPT News, The Investigative Project, Nov. 24, 2008.
[34] FrontPageMagazine.com, Feb. 9, 2008; The Christian Science Monitor, Jan. 2, 2009.
[35] United States of America v. Mohammed Abu Marzook, et. al., United States District Court, Northern District of Illinois, Eastern Division, no. 03 CR 978.
[36] Emerson, American Jihad, pp. 103-4; The Dallas Morning News, July 15, 2007.
[37] Associated Press, Apr. 13, 2005.
[38] The New York Times, Nov. 24, 2008.
[39] Associated Press, Sept. 27, 2007.
[40] "Viva Palestina: An IPT Investigative Report," Investigative Project on Terrorism, accessed Nov. 17, 2009.
[41] "Foreign Terrorist Organizations," U.S. Department of State, Washington, D.C., Apr. 8, 2008.
[42] Emerson, American Jihad, pp. 111-6; Kushner, Holy War on the Home Front, p. 52.
[43] "Target Terrorism," CBS 48 Hours, Jan. 30, 2002.
[44] "ADL Commends Law Enforcement for Arrests of Suspected Terrorist Supporters," Anti-Defamation League, Feb. 20, 2003.
[45] E-mail correspondence with Bill West, chief, Special Investigations Section, Immigration and Naturalization Service, Miami (Fla.) District Office, Nov. 19, 2009.
[46] Newsweek, Dec. 29, 2006.
[47] Steven Emerson, "One Muslim Advocacy Group's Not-So-Secret Terrorist Ties," New Republic Online, 3/28/07
[48] Emerson, American Jihad, pp. 197-203.
[49] Steven Emerson, "Kicking a CAIR Extremist off the Human Relations Commission," FrontPageMagazine.com, Nov. 6, 2006.
[50] United States of America v. Holy Land Foundation, U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas, Dallas Division, Appendix A, CR no. 3:04-CR-240-G.
[51] IPT News, Jan. 29, 2009; FoxNews.com, Jan. 20, 2009.
[52] Steven Emerson, "Threatened by the Jihad," FrontPageMagazine.com, Mar. 14, 2007; Daniel Pipes, "MPAC, CAIR, and Praising Osama bin Laden," FrontPageMagazine.com, June 1, 2007.
[53] Daniel Pipes, "MPAC on Steven Emerson and Me," Daniel Pipes Blog, July 12, 2004.
[54] Counterproductive Counterterrorism: How Anti-Islamic Rhetoric Is Impeding America's Homeland Security (Washington, D.C.: Muslim Public Affairs Council, 2004), p. 4.
[55] "Profile: American Muslim Council (AMC)," Center for Grassroots Oversight, accessed July 7, 2009; Steven Emerson, "Friends of Hamas in the White House," The Wall Street Journal, Mar. 13, 1996.
[56] Emerson, "Friends of Hamas in the White House."
[57] The New York Times, Oct. 26, 2000.
[58] "Target Terrorism," CBS 48 Hours, Jan. 30, 2002.
[59] "Declaration in Support of Detention," United States of America v. Abdurahman Muhammad Alamoudi, U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, Alexandria Division, no. 03-1009M, Sept. 30, 2003.
[60] David Frum & Richard Perle, End to Evil: How to Win War on Terror (NY: Random House, 2003), p. 83.
[61] The Washington Post, Oct. 16, 2004.
[62] United States of America v. Abdurahman Muhammad Alamoudi.
[63] Steven Emerson, Jihad Incorporated: A Guide to Militant Islam in the US (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 2006), p. 15.
[64] Steven Emerson, "DOJ Oversight: Preserving Our Freedoms while Defending against Terrorism," testimony before the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary, Washington, D.C., Dec. 4, 2001; idem, American Jihad, p. 14.
[65] The Investigative Project on Terrorism, accessed July 7, 2009.
[66] Emerson, American Jihad, pp. 20-1.
[67] Davis, Spying on America, pp. 25-159.
[68] "The Federal Bureau of Investigation's Compliance with the Attorney General's Investigative Guidelines," (Redacted), Special Report, Office of the Inspector General, Washington, D.C., Sept. 2005.
[69] Davis, Spying on America, p. 176.
[70] See Shannen Rossmiller, "My Cyber Counter-jihad," Middle East Quarterly, Summer 2007, pp. 43-8.
[71] Steven Emerson, "Jihadism: Where Is It At in 2006?" Sydney Papers, The Sydney (Aus.) Institute, Autumn 2006, pp. 63-71.
[72] Olivier Roy, Globalized Islam: The Search for a New Ummah (New York: ColumbiaUniversity Press, 2004), pp. 272-5.
[73] BBC News, Nov. 2, 2004; USA Today, Nov. 2, 2004; The New York Times, Nov. 10, 2004.
[74] "Radical Islamism in Europe," interview with Irshad Manji, Steven Emerson, and Gilles Kepel, Aspen Institute, Washington, D.C., Dec. 2004.
[75] "A Special Interview with Steve Emerson," The Journal of Counterterrorism and Homeland Security International, June 2006; Roy, Globalized Islam, pp. 234-43; on U.K. schools and radicalism, see "Music, Chess, and Other Sins," Middle East Quarterly, Summer 2009, pp. 78-82.
[76] Associated Press, May 27, 2004; Fox News, Oct. 29, 2004; Annette Stark, "Peace, Love, Death Metal," Los AngelesCity Beat, Sept. 9, 2004.
[77] Raffi Khatchadourian, "Azzam the American," The New Yorker, Jan. 22, 2007.
[78] Beila Rabinowitz, "What Al Qaeda's Call for Pipes, Spencer, Emerson, and Scheuer to Convert to Islam Means," PipeLineNews.org, Sept. 19, 2006.
Related Topics: Counter-terrorism | George Michael | Winter 2010 MEQ
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Middle East Quarterly, Winter 2010, pp. 15-25
On Christmas afternoon in 1992, Steven Emerson, then a staff reporter for CNN, noticed a large group of men in traditional Arab clothes congregating outside the Oklahoma City Convention Center. At first, he thought they were extras for a movie-until he remembered the date. So, he explored a bit; inside, he discovered a conference sponsored by the Muslim Arab Youth Association. The vitriol of the speakers, replete with hateful rhetoric against Jews, Israel, and America mixed with exhortations of violence toward these enemies, alarmed him. Spontaneous shouts of "Kill the Jews" and "Destroy the West" came from the audience throughout the event.[1]
Steven Emerson has emerged as a powerful independent force, working with U.S. security services while also carrying out investigations on his own in areas beyond their reach.
Worried by what he had witnessed, Emerson notified a contact in the FBI, only to be told that the agency knew nothing about the conference and also lacked a mandate to investigate it because no criminal activity had occurred or was imminent.[2] This experience indelibly impressed him, leaving a sense of government weakness and suggesting the need for a private agency to explore the threat of radical Islam within the United States.
On graduation from Brown University, Emerson (b. 1954) went to work as an analyst on the staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He served as an international investigator and helped shape the aid package to Israel and Egypt following the Camp David accords in 1978. He honed his skills while working for the committee until 1982, during which time he developed an abiding interest in Middle Eastern affairs.
In 1986, he joined U.S. News & World Report where he worked as a national security correspondent. During this time, he authored two books: Secret Warriors: Inside the Covert Military Operations of the Reagan Era[3] and The Fall of Pan Am 103: Inside the Lockerbie Investigation.[4] In Secret Warriors, Emerson argued that technical breakdowns, bureaucratic disarray, presidential interference, and professional jealousy contributed to the inertia of America's elite forces.[5] This perception may have played a large role in convincing him that government alone is inadequate to the challenges of modern terrorism. In The Fall of Pan Am 103, he promoted the theory-then held by the U.S. government-that Iran was responsible for the bombing of the flight over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988.
Since that early experience in Oklahoma, Emerson has emerged as a powerful independent force who works with U.S. security services but carries out investigations on his own in areas beyond their reach. He does not take any funds from the government. In 1995, he established his own think tank, the Investigative Project on Terrorism (IPT), which has since conducted investigations into many Islamist and terrorist groups and individuals. The IPT has stirred up more hornets' nests than many government agencies. Its acute focus has allowed it to hone in on targets that broader agencies missed. Emerson's initiative has paid off handsomely.
New Nongovernmental Agencies Emerge
The Islamist campaign to implement Shari'a law presents a grave challenge to the United States and all Western countries. And while a security apparatus has arisen to defend against these threats, several nongovernmental bodies have emerged as critical adjuncts in the effort to identify those who work within the law to change the Western way of life.
Compared to Western Europe, the United States has an unusual approach to domestic political extremism. Since 1976, the FBI has officially conducted surveillance of extremist and potentially violent groups under the attorney general's guidelines, established after revelations of misconduct and abuses arising from the COINTELPRO initiative, a secret program through which the FBI disrupted both far-left and far-right groups.[6] However, the extremely well-coordinated attacks of 9/11 exposed gaping holes in the area of human intelligence and impelled the government to reexamine and recalibrate this policy.[7]
In response, the FBI relaxed its guidelines for investigations of religious extremists, and the federal government now allows information to be shared between intelligence and law enforcement agencies. Moreover, to augment their investigatory functions, the authorities increasingly rely on recently created, private monitoring groups, including JihadWatch.com and the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI).[8] Their efforts are complemented by think tanks such as the Middle East Forum and publications such as the Middle East Review of International Affairs.
Operating in a decentralized fashion, private entities can be more flexible and effective than government agencies in providing time-sensitive and actionable intelligence resources. For example, MEMRI releases high-quality, up-to-date information and translations about radical organizations, frequently before such intelligence is processed by government.[9]
Emerson's IPT has established itself as the most effective nongovernmental organization (NGO) monitoring Islamic radicalism. It is the only private entity in the United States that conducts undercover research into the activities of Islamist groups. To preserve its independence, IPT accepts no funds from the U.S. government or donors outside the United States.
Emerson's IPT focuses primarily on U.S.-based Islamist groups, some working in legal ways to undermine American society, others with links to terrorist organizations overseas. Along the way, he has created an unparalleled undercover investigative apparatus. According to Rep. Sue Myrick (Republican of North Carolina), cofounder of the bipartisan Congressional Anti-Terrorism Caucus, "The Investigative Project is the only one out there who is really doing substantial research into what is going on in the world and here in America. They are actually researching... they are verifying how these [jihadist] movements are taking place.... I don't know of anyone else who is doing the same thing."[10]
Emerson has returned the compliment: "Congressmen like Frank Wolf, Pete Hoekstra, and Sue Myrick have shown a backbone that is unparalleled in Congress in courageously tackling the Muslim Brotherhood, CAIR [Council on American Islamic Relations], and other Islamist groups, and radical Islamic groups. So it shows there are brave Congressmen as well."[11] Like Emerson, Myrick focuses less on outright terrorism than the infiltration of American institutions by Islamists.[12] Alliances like this lend strength to Emerson's own efforts. The task of exposing and combating Islamist organizations and individuals takes place in a highly political context and requires high-level lobbying and juristic skills.
Exposing Islamists in America
Emerson undertook effective investigations on his own before he started the IPT. Most notable was his 1994 documentary Jihad in America, which raised awareness of the threat of radical Islam in the United States. The film focused on a Palestinian, Abdullah Azzam, who founded the Arab Fighters Service Bureau in Afghanistan to recruit and train thousands of mostly Arab jihadists. Osama bin Laden, a protégé of Azzam's, cofounded the bureau and later transformed it into Al-Qaeda. The bureau's North American office, the Al-Khifa Refugee Center in the Al-Farooq Mosque in Brooklyn, soon became the hub of a network that included outposts in Atlanta, Chicago, Connecticut, and New Jersey.[13] Interestingly, while in Pakistan and Afghanistan for several months in 1993, shooting the documentary, Emerson befriended Azzam's son Hodeyfa.
After Azzam's assassination in Pakistan in 1989,[14] the blind Egyptian sheikh, Omar Abdel Rahman, emerged as the spiritual leader of the international jihadist wing of the bureau. In 1990, Abdel Rahman, who had been expelled from Egypt, was allowed to emigrate from Afghanistan to the United States despite having been named on the State Department's terrorist watch list; he settled in the New York city area. Soon, a circle of Islamists congregated at his Al-Salaam Mosque in Jersey City. In 1990, one of his followers, Egyptian-born El Sayyid Nosair, assassinated Rabbi Meir Kahane, the Israeli politician and founder of the Jewish Defense League.[15] A few years later, other Abdel Rahman followers linked up with Ramzi Yousef, the mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, which killed six persons and wounded 1,042 others.[16] Emerson's work in uncovering and exposing this network complemented the efforts of official agencies operating under greater constraints.
The Charity Networks
Since August 1994, Emerson has testified before or informally briefed the United States Congress hundreds of times.[17] His efforts appear to have had an influence on lawmakers. The videotape of his first documentary, Jihad in America, was distributed to all 535 members of Congress and, according to Rep. Chris Smith (Republican of New Jersey), it played a significant role in persuading them to pass the USA Patriot Act in the fall of 2001.[18] In 2002, he published a book entitled American Jihad: The Terrorists Living Among Us,[19] in which he traced the development of radical Islam in the United States. He also testified before the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States (the 9/11 Commission) in July 2003.[20]
In later testimony before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee on November 8, 2005, he charged that Saudi Arabia had funded a vast network of charities and religious organizations that had ties to terrorist groups, including Al-Qaeda and Hamas.[21] This testimony prompted Treasury and National Security Council investigations into the labyrinth of radical Islamic charities operating in the United States. According to federal officials, these investigations led to an effort within the agencies to shut down some of the charities but nothing was done; the Clinton administration lacked the political will to close down the charities. Only after the 9-11 attacks did that will emerge and efforts to shut down the charitable fronts succeed.[22]
Emerson has focused primarily on the fundraising activities of mainstream Muslim groups and their links to the more radical organizations for which they serve as fronts. As he has observed, one of the most important activities carried out by Islamist groups in the United States has been the establishment of nonprofit, tax-deductible organizations to establish zones of legitimacy within which fundraising, recruitment, and even terrorist planning can occur.[23] Using a technique first developed in the Middle East, these groups often provide American Muslims with much-needed social services such as education, nutrition, and health care so as to win over and manipulate them.[24] This activity is usually justified by reference to the religious duty of paying zakat (the Islamic alms tax).[25] This practice creates substantial good will and much social capital for those Islamist groups who choose to employ it as a cover for collecting monies destined for jihadist groups.
According to one CIA study, one-fifth of all Islamic NGOs worldwide have been unwittingly infiltrated by Islamist terrorist groups.[26] As Emerson has pointed out, some of the religious and charitable organizations have mixed legitimate activities with illegitimate, thus betraying the true aims of the donations.[27] Investigators who seek to reveal this duplicity run a serious risk of being condemned as bigots who find wrongdoing in a meritorious religious activity that has close parallels to Jewish and Christian charities.
Hamas and Hezb’Allah Networks
Overall, the IPT, with its access to information and intelligence to which the government is not privy, has been instrumental in shutting down more than a dozen Islamic charitable terrorist and nonviolent front-groups since 2001.[28]
Hamas, the Palestinian Islamic Resistance Movement, a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, offers one notable example of an organization involved in both terrorism and social services. According to Emerson, Hamas developed the most sophisticated infrastructure of all the Islamist groups operating in the United States.[29] During the early 1990s, the group worked out of an office in Springfield, Virginia, opened by Musa Abu Marzouk. In 1981, Abu Marzouk helped create the Islamic Association of Palestine (IAP), which served as the primary voice for Hamas in the United States. IAP participants were later among the founding members of CAIR.[30] IAP's primary activity consisted of annual conferences, which hosted various Islamist luminaries who often gave incendiary speeches.[31]
In 1980, Abu Marzouk became founding president of the United Association for Studies and Research (UASR), which some sources indicate acted as the Hamas political command in the United States.[32] He went on to found additional groups in the United States, all of them closely associated with Hamas. For example, UASR and IAP were joined by the Holy Land Foundation (HLF), which Abu Marzouk himself designated as the primary source of donations for charitable work in the Palestinian territories.[33] In 2001, Abu Marzouk voluntarily shut down his office after its director, Ahmed Yousef, was forced to flee the United States where he had resided illegally for twenty years. Yousef now serves as a spokesman for Hamas in Gaza.[34] Abu Marzouk also returned to Gaza where he is now the deputy chairman of Hamas's political bureau, but in 2004 he was indicted in his absence for coordinating and financing the work of Hamas.[35]
The FBI suspects that Hamas may also have established for-profit corporations in the United States. On September 5, 2001, it executed a search warrant against the InfoCom Corporation, an Internet service provider based in Richardson, Texas, suspected of ties to Hamas.[36] The authorities indicted its officials and subsequently convicted them of channeling funds to the Palestinian group.[37] Law enforcement officials commented on background that Emerson's organization, with vast archives on the activities of Hamas front groups in the United States, had an instrumental role in prosecuting and convicting the Holy Land Foundation, a trial that resulted in sweeping convictions for all defendants in 2008.[38]
And the beat goes on: In 2007, the IPT broadcast video tapes on its website showing Esam Omeish railing against Israel and advocating jihad. As a result, Omeish was forced to resign from his appointment by Virginian governor Tim Kaine to the state's Commission on Immigration.[39] In 2009, the IPT exposed the links between Viva Palestina USA and Hamas. Its report on the group laid bare its membership, activities, and motives and was provided to federal authorities for further investigation.[40]
Sami al-Arian and Palestinian Islamic Jihad
Emerson was the first investigator to link a former professor at the University of South Florida, Sami al-Arian, to Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), an organization designated as a foreign terrorist organization by the U.S. State Department.[41] He exposed Arian's ties to the Islamic Jihad in his 1994 documentary Jihad in America and continued to write and testify about Arian's links to the group throughout the rest of the decade. Arian has helped create several Islamist associations. One of these, the Islamic Concern Project (later called the Islamic Committee for Palestine), allegedly raised money for Palestinian Islamic Jihad and brought Islamist leaders to the United States.[42] In Jihad in America, Emerson called the Islamic Committee for Palestine the "primary support group in the United States for Islamic Jihad."
Emerson revealed that Arian was running an organization that was in effect the American branch of Palestinian Islamic Jihad.[43] In February 2003, federal law enforcement agents arrested Arian for alleged fundraising and material support activities on behalf of terrorist organizations, including Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad.[44] In December 2005, Arian was acquitted of many serious charges against him, but the jury deadlocked on nine counts. He pleaded guilty to a single count of conspiracy to provide services to the Palestinian Islamic Jihad and agreed to be deported after serving the balance of a 57-month sentence.
According to Bill West, the supervisory special agent of the Immigration and Naturalization Service's Miami Special Investigations Section (and now a consultant to the IPT), Emerson's "outstanding and continued original investigative journalism" of Arian and his PIJ connections "was the catalyst that resulted in the launching of the federal criminal investigation against Al-Arian and his cohorts."[45]
CAIR, MPAC, and AMC
Emerson's detailed investigations into CAIR have generated consequences for this Islamist group in Congress. For example, in December 2006, following an appeal by "CAIR Watch" founder Joe Kaufman, Sen. Barbara Boxer (Democrat of California) rescinded an award to CAIR official Basim Elkarra, stating that she was uncomfortable with many of CAIR's positions.[46] Not long after, Emerson disclosed Rep. Bill Pascrell's (Democrat of New Jersey) role in sponsoring a CAIR forum to be held in a Capitol facility. The Republican Party House Conference objected to this use by CAIR, whose members the Republican Party had labeled as "terror apologists."[47] It was also Emerson who discerned that CAIR had effectively been founded by Hamas.[48]
He has long sought to expose CAIR's leading officials who have previously expressed extremist views and been linked to militant activities. One of these is Ghassan Elashi, founder of the Texas branch of CAIR, who has been sentenced to more than six years in prison for numerous offences, including money-laundering for Hamas.[49] In 2007, CAIR was designated an un-indicted co-conspirator in the trial of the officials operating the Holy Land Foundation, who were accused and later convicted of laundering money for Hamas.[50] In the trial, FBI agent Lara Burns testified that CAIR serves as a front for Hamas. In January 2009, Emerson revealed that the FBI was severing its contacts with CAIR due to its ties with Hamas.[51]
Emerson has released documents and tapes showing that leaders of the Muslim Public Affairs Committee (MPAC) have defended Hezb’Allah, excused Hamas terror attacks, compared the United States to Al-Qaeda, urged Muslims not to cooperate if FBI agents approach them, and issued demonstrably anti-Semitic and anti-American statements.[52] In return, MPAC tried to demonize Emerson. At a conference held in late 2004, it displayed a poster called "The Faces that Are Always Talking about Terrorism," which included pictures of Osama bin Laden, Daniel Pipes, Pat Robertson, Donald Rumsfeld, and Steven Emerson.[53] The implication was that Emerson, et al., were as nefarious as bin Laden.
In December 2004, MPAC again focused on Emerson in a report entitled Counterproductive Counterterrorism: How Anti-Islamic Rhetoric Is Impeding America's Homeland Security. It pointed out that several key public officials, including former national security advisor, Gen. Brent Scowcroft, had praised the efforts of MPAC in working with government officials to combat terrorism in America.[54] Emerson countered, saying MPAC has deceived public officials into believing the group is "moderate" while at the same time defending Hezb’Allah and Hamas and rationalizing radical Islam.
The American Muslim Council (AMC) may have been Emerson's most dramatic exposé so far. He took issue with an invitation that President Bill Clinton extended in 1996 to Abdurahman Alamoudi, a prominent Muslim-American leader and the executive director of the AMC. The meeting between the president and Alamoudi was to take place in the White House. Clinton administration officials, including Clinton himself, Vice President Al Gore and National Security Advisor Anthony Lake, met with Alamoudi along with twenty-three Muslim and Arab leaders.[55] According to Emerson, AMC had significant ties to Hamas and was a defender of Hamas leader Musa Abu Marzouk.[56] Because of the notoriety Alamoudi received from the exposure by Emerson, the Clintons and President Bush returned Alamoudi's campaign contributions.[57] This is an excellent example of how someone coming from outside the compliant structures of government can make an impact in political circles.
But the matter went even further. Emerson recorded a speech in which Alamoudi voiced support for both Hezb’Allah and Hamas.[58] Emerson also obtained a recording of Alamoudi calling for bombings in the United States, a tape that was introduced at Alamoudi's detention hearing and credited with the decision to keep him in jail rather than let him out on bail.[59] In October 2003, Alamoudi was then indicted on charges that he had illegally accepted $340,000 from the Libyan government for his efforts to persuade the U.S. government to lift sanctions against the Mu'ammar al-Qadhafi regime.[60] Then, in 2004, Alamoudi was arrested and convicted of conspiring with two Al-Qaeda members to assassinate King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia.[61] In October, 2004, he pled guilty and was sentenced to twenty-three years in prison. Treasury documents list him as a longtime courier for Al-Qaeda and Hamas.[62]
The Investigative Project on Terrorism
Emerson founded the Investigative Project on Terrorism in 1995 and currently serves as its executive director; this think tank and archive maintains the world's largest collection of nongovernmental data on radical Islamic groups, including more than four million documents, thousands of hours of clandestine video and audio recordings made at radical Islamic conferences, training sessions, fundraising activities, and assorted gatherings; and tens of thousands of original terrorist manuals and periodicals.[63] The IPT has also compiled a database of thousands of known or suspected terrorists as well as dossiers on radical groups.[64]
The IPT website offers a comprehensive counter-Islamist source of information, with government documents, proprietary information, and breaking stories.[65] The IPT also employs analysts to collect and interpret data and sends associates to listen to speeches by Islamist leaders. To inform interested parties of its work, it mails out daily updates. Emerson also contributes to the Counterterrorism Blog website, which posts articles and information relating to radical Islam, terrorism, and nonviolent Islamist threats.
The IPT receives information from a variety of sources, including many not available to government agencies. The archive holds the trial exhibits from the first WorldTradeCenter bombing case, which include numerous records on Muslim terrorists in the Middle East and elsewhere. Emerson and his staff meticulously copied the documents, which were all publicly available and obtained from the court and prosecutors. After reviewing the records, Emerson concluded that these various Islamist groups were coordinating their activities in a worldwide network.[66]
The IPT, acting as a nongovernmental agency, assists, without fee, numerous government offices and agencies, in part because constitutional limitations tie the hands of federal and state security services. Due to a strong civil liberties tradition rooted in the First Amendment, the U.S. government lacks the authority to disband extremist groups or proscribe extremist speech. While the IPT does not possess any governmental powers or authority, it has the ability, like the media, to shine a light on the activities of Islamist groups, gatherings, and officials. Emerson often quotes Justice Louis Brandeis's dictum that "sunshine is the law's best disinfectant."
The constraints imposed on government agencies investigating terrorist threats created space for Emerson's Investigative Project. Since the mid-1970s, federal authorities have been hampered in their efforts to monitor political extremism, largely due to the legacy of the secret FBI project designated COINTELPRO.[67] Negative publicity surrounding that program led the Justice Department to change FBI law enforcement and investigative methods to de-politicize the FBI. The Levi guidelines, adopted in April 1976, require evidence of a criminal predicate or a reasonable suspicion before commencing investigation of a dissident group.[68] These changes had dramatic consequences, not least that the number of domestic intelligence cases dropped from 1,454 in 1975 to only 95 in 1977.[69] Nothing in the guidelines, however, precludes the FBI from opening an investigation based on information received from a private group. NGOs such as the IPT and individuals such as Shannen Rossmiller[70] have done much to fill the void. For its part, the IPT monitors not only radical Islamic groups in America advocating violent jihad but also those employing nonviolent or "stealth" jihad.
Conclusion
Emerson believes that the Islamist movement in the West continues to strengthen, in large part due to what he refers to as the "cultural jihad," which provides a congenial environment in which Islamists can flourish. He cites survey data indicating that many Muslim communities in the West sympathize with aspects of the Islamist worldview. These cultural jihadists in turn give moral support to the terrorists.[71] In Globalized Islam: The Search for a New Ummah, the French scholar Olivier Roy argues that Muslims in the West often experience a trauma of "deterritorialization" because they feel estranged from their native lands. To overcome anomie and alienation, young Muslims find solace in a new, purified Islam and attach themselves to a "virtual ummah [Islamic nation]" built by them on the Internet.[72] This pool of mostly young, alienated, Muslim men provides a reservoir from which Islamists can recruit in the West.
In Emerson's opinion, the November 2, 2004 murder of Theo van Gogh by Mohammed Bouyeri[73] was a watershed event that inspired Europeans to reevaluate the viability of the multicultural model, seeing that it results not in peaceful coexistence but rather in separatism and cultural jihadism, threatening the social fabric of Western Europe. He warns that moderates have little influence in Muslim communities in the West.[74] Although the Muslim underclass in the United States is smaller than in Europe, Emerson finds substantial alienation in the Muslim-American community. He sees groups such as CAIR, MPAC, the Islamic Society of North America, and the Muslim American Society as agents that exacerbate this tendency. What is more, he notes, Islamist schools in the United States are often funded by Wahhabi sources promoting an extremist variant of Islam.[75]
Emerson has not gone unnoticed by Al-Qaeda. In September 2006, a leading public representative of the organization-American-born Adam Gadahn, who has adopted the Muslim name of Azzam al-Amriki-mentioned Emerson and several other Americans in a public videotape.[76] The video begins with an introduction by bin Laden's lieutenant, Ayman al-Zawahiri, who refers to Gadahn as a "brother" and "a perceptive person who wants to lead his people out of darkness into the light."[77] Then Gadahn invites Emerson and the others to Islam:
If the Zionist crusader missionaries of hate and counter-Islam consultants like Daniel Pipes, Robert Spencer, Michael Scheuer, Steven Emerson, and yes, even the crusader-in-chief, George W. Bush were to abandon their unbelief and repent and enter into the light of Islam and turn their swords against the enemies of God, it would be accepted of them and they would be our brothers of Islam.[78]
Emerson and his colleagues remain unimpressed and continue their work.
George Michael is associate professor of political science and administration of justice at the University of Virginia's College at Wise. He is the author most recently of Willis Carto and the American Far Right (University Press of Florida, 2008), and Theology of Hate: A History of the WorldChurch of the Creator (University Press of Florida, 2009).
Citations
[1] Steven Emerson, American Jihad: The Terrorists Living Among Us (New York: Free Press, 2002), p. 6.
[2] Ibid., pp. 5-25.
[3] New York: Putnam Adult, 1988.
[4] With Brian Duffy, New York: Penguin Group, 1990.
[5] See also Steven Emerson, "Stymied Warriors," The New York Times Magazine, Nov. 13, 1988; Beau Grosscup, The Newest Explosions of Terrorism: Latest Sites of Terrorism in the 1990s and Beyond (Far Hills, N.J.: New Horizon Press, 1998), p. 405.
[6] James Kirkpatrick Davis, Spying on America: The FBI's Domestic Counterintelligence Program (Westport: Praeger, 1992), pp. 25-159.
[7] Los Angeles Times, Dec. 1, 2001.
[8] See "Why Jihad Watch?" JihadWatch, accessed Oct. 1, 2009; "About Us," Middle East Media Research Institute, accessed Oct. 1, 2009; "About the Project," Terrorism Awareness Project, accessed Oct. 1, 2009.
[9] John Robb, Brave New War: The Next Stage of Terrorism and the End of Globalization (Hoboken, N.J.: John Wiley and Sons, Inc., 2007), pp. 89-91.
[10] "About the Investigative Project," The Investigative Project on Terrorism, accessed Oct. 1, 2009.
[11] Jamie Glazov, "The-Islamist Lobby in the House: An Interview with Steven Emerson," FrontPageMagazine.com, Aug. 4, 2009.
[12] Sue Myrick, "War at Home: When Will We Open Our Eyes?" editorial, Feb, 5, 2008, accessed 11/29/09
[13] Peter L. Bergen, Holy War, Inc.: Inside the Secret World of Osama bin Laden (New York: The Free Press, 2001), p. 133.
[14] "Who Killed Abdullah Azzam?" Time, Nov. 24, 1989.
[15] United States of America, Appellee, v. Omar Ahmad Ali Abdel Rahman, United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, New York, Aug. 16, 1999.
[16] Simon Reeve, The New Jackals: Ramzi Yousef, Osama bin Laden and the Future of Terrorism (Boston: Northeaster Press, 1999), p. 15.
[17] "Testimony," The Investigative Project, accessed Oct. 1, 2009.
[18] John Mintz, "The Man Who Gives Terrorism a Name," The Washington Post, Nov. 14, 2001.
[19] New York: Free Press, 2003.
[20] The 9/11 Commission Report (New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company, 2004), p. 441.
[21] Steven Emerson, "Saudi Arabia: Friend or Foe in the War on Terror," testimony before the United States Senate Judiciary Committee, Washington, D.C., Nov. 8, 2005.
[22] E-mail correspondence with Steven Emerson, Nov. 19, 2009.
[23] Emerson, American Jihad, p. 37; Rohan Gunaratna, Inside Al Qaeda: Global Network of Terror (New York: ColumbiaUniversity Press, 2002), p. 5.
[24] Gunaratna, Inside Al Qaeda, p. 6.
[25] See Raymond Ibrahim, "The Dark Side of Zakat: Muslim 'Charity' in Context," Pajamas Media, 11/15/09
[26] Ibid.
[27] Steven Emerson, "How to Really Fight Terrorism," The Wall Street Journal, Aug. 24, 1998.
[28] WTHR- NBC (Indianapolis), Nov. 10, 2003.
[29] Emerson, American Jihad, p. 80.
[30] Daniel Pipes and Sharon Chadha, "CAIR: Islamists Fooling the Establishment," Middle East Quarterly, Spring 2006, pp. 3-20.
[31] Emerson, American Jihad, pp. 93-8; Harvey Kushner with Bart Davis, Holy War on the Home Front: The Secret Islamic Terror Network in the United States (New York: Sentinel, 2004), pp. 22-4.
[32] Emerson, American Jihad, pp. 84-5; Kushner, Holy War on the Home Front, pp. 109-12.
[33] "HLF Officials Convicted on All Counts," IPT News, The Investigative Project, Nov. 24, 2008.
[34] FrontPageMagazine.com, Feb. 9, 2008; The Christian Science Monitor, Jan. 2, 2009.
[35] United States of America v. Mohammed Abu Marzook, et. al., United States District Court, Northern District of Illinois, Eastern Division, no. 03 CR 978.
[36] Emerson, American Jihad, pp. 103-4; The Dallas Morning News, July 15, 2007.
[37] Associated Press, Apr. 13, 2005.
[38] The New York Times, Nov. 24, 2008.
[39] Associated Press, Sept. 27, 2007.
[40] "Viva Palestina: An IPT Investigative Report," Investigative Project on Terrorism, accessed Nov. 17, 2009.
[41] "Foreign Terrorist Organizations," U.S. Department of State, Washington, D.C., Apr. 8, 2008.
[42] Emerson, American Jihad, pp. 111-6; Kushner, Holy War on the Home Front, p. 52.
[43] "Target Terrorism," CBS 48 Hours, Jan. 30, 2002.
[44] "ADL Commends Law Enforcement for Arrests of Suspected Terrorist Supporters," Anti-Defamation League, Feb. 20, 2003.
[45] E-mail correspondence with Bill West, chief, Special Investigations Section, Immigration and Naturalization Service, Miami (Fla.) District Office, Nov. 19, 2009.
[46] Newsweek, Dec. 29, 2006.
[47] Steven Emerson, "One Muslim Advocacy Group's Not-So-Secret Terrorist Ties," New Republic Online, 3/28/07
[48] Emerson, American Jihad, pp. 197-203.
[49] Steven Emerson, "Kicking a CAIR Extremist off the Human Relations Commission," FrontPageMagazine.com, Nov. 6, 2006.
[50] United States of America v. Holy Land Foundation, U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas, Dallas Division, Appendix A, CR no. 3:04-CR-240-G.
[51] IPT News, Jan. 29, 2009; FoxNews.com, Jan. 20, 2009.
[52] Steven Emerson, "Threatened by the Jihad," FrontPageMagazine.com, Mar. 14, 2007; Daniel Pipes, "MPAC, CAIR, and Praising Osama bin Laden," FrontPageMagazine.com, June 1, 2007.
[53] Daniel Pipes, "MPAC on Steven Emerson and Me," Daniel Pipes Blog, July 12, 2004.
[54] Counterproductive Counterterrorism: How Anti-Islamic Rhetoric Is Impeding America's Homeland Security (Washington, D.C.: Muslim Public Affairs Council, 2004), p. 4.
[55] "Profile: American Muslim Council (AMC)," Center for Grassroots Oversight, accessed July 7, 2009; Steven Emerson, "Friends of Hamas in the White House," The Wall Street Journal, Mar. 13, 1996.
[56] Emerson, "Friends of Hamas in the White House."
[57] The New York Times, Oct. 26, 2000.
[58] "Target Terrorism," CBS 48 Hours, Jan. 30, 2002.
[59] "Declaration in Support of Detention," United States of America v. Abdurahman Muhammad Alamoudi, U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, Alexandria Division, no. 03-1009M, Sept. 30, 2003.
[60] David Frum & Richard Perle, End to Evil: How to Win War on Terror (NY: Random House, 2003), p. 83.
[61] The Washington Post, Oct. 16, 2004.
[62] United States of America v. Abdurahman Muhammad Alamoudi.
[63] Steven Emerson, Jihad Incorporated: A Guide to Militant Islam in the US (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 2006), p. 15.
[64] Steven Emerson, "DOJ Oversight: Preserving Our Freedoms while Defending against Terrorism," testimony before the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary, Washington, D.C., Dec. 4, 2001; idem, American Jihad, p. 14.
[65] The Investigative Project on Terrorism, accessed July 7, 2009.
[66] Emerson, American Jihad, pp. 20-1.
[67] Davis, Spying on America, pp. 25-159.
[68] "The Federal Bureau of Investigation's Compliance with the Attorney General's Investigative Guidelines," (Redacted), Special Report, Office of the Inspector General, Washington, D.C., Sept. 2005.
[69] Davis, Spying on America, p. 176.
[70] See Shannen Rossmiller, "My Cyber Counter-jihad," Middle East Quarterly, Summer 2007, pp. 43-8.
[71] Steven Emerson, "Jihadism: Where Is It At in 2006?" Sydney Papers, The Sydney (Aus.) Institute, Autumn 2006, pp. 63-71.
[72] Olivier Roy, Globalized Islam: The Search for a New Ummah (New York: ColumbiaUniversity Press, 2004), pp. 272-5.
[73] BBC News, Nov. 2, 2004; USA Today, Nov. 2, 2004; The New York Times, Nov. 10, 2004.
[74] "Radical Islamism in Europe," interview with Irshad Manji, Steven Emerson, and Gilles Kepel, Aspen Institute, Washington, D.C., Dec. 2004.
[75] "A Special Interview with Steve Emerson," The Journal of Counterterrorism and Homeland Security International, June 2006; Roy, Globalized Islam, pp. 234-43; on U.K. schools and radicalism, see "Music, Chess, and Other Sins," Middle East Quarterly, Summer 2009, pp. 78-82.
[76] Associated Press, May 27, 2004; Fox News, Oct. 29, 2004; Annette Stark, "Peace, Love, Death Metal," Los AngelesCity Beat, Sept. 9, 2004.
[77] Raffi Khatchadourian, "Azzam the American," The New Yorker, Jan. 22, 2007.
[78] Beila Rabinowitz, "What Al Qaeda's Call for Pipes, Spencer, Emerson, and Scheuer to Convert to Islam Means," PipeLineNews.org, Sept. 19, 2006.
Related Topics: Counter-terrorism | George Michael | Winter 2010 MEQ
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Friday, January 15, 2010
Israel Not the Cause of Gazans' Woe
Many Palestinians in Gaza, no matter their religious affiliation or political bent, are living in squalor and growing ignorance. Thousands are trying to flee.
Gaza has never been a prosperous enclave; the 140-square-mile territory has always been a poor, dependent state. But for Hamas, the radical Islamic terrorist group that seized control of Gaza in 2007, the long-term pursuit of a political impossibility trumps even the slightest concern for the the group's 1.5 million "constituents."
Residents of this territory have been subjects of other states - Turkey, Great Britain, Egypt, Israel - for half a millennium. But all the while, during both prosperous and desperate times, they struggled to ensure their children’s education. As a result, Palestinians have been among the best educated people in the world. Literacy rates, even for girls, have hovered around 99 percent. By comparison, in Iran, perhaps the Palestinians' biggest defenders now, and Israel's greatest enemy, UNICEF reports that only 77 percent of the population can read and write. Even Israel's literacy rate is lower: 97.1 percent.
But now, for the first time in the modern era, Gazans as young as 9, 10, 11 are being put to work in ever larger numbers, forgoing school. "Learning achievement has declined along with primary school enrollment," UNICEF reports.
Much of the world blames Israel. During its invasion of Gaza last January, Israeli troops were said to have damaged or destroyed nearly half of the territory's schools along with much of the remaining infrastructure.
The condemnation of Israel continues to this day in the United Nations and elsewhere.
Still, most of the people behind the continuing reproval take little note of Hamas' own campaign of terror in the previous months, lobbing hundreds of missiles toward Israeli population centers. No matter. That's a debate for another day. The point is, a year has passed.
What political concessions has Hamas offered that might have enabled it to make repairs, improve the lot of its people? None. The United Nations reported this fall that one in five Gazans now live in what it called "abject poverty." That is why, it is claimed, many parents are no longer sending their children to school. They need the pennies their children can earn at menial jobs to buy food.
Their chieftains don't seem to care. I have interviewed the leaders of Hamas many times over the years, and all of them offered one consistent refrain, time and time again: We are patient. Our resistance will continue as long as it takes - even centuries - until we reach our goal, full control of Palestine.
Of course, that includes the state of Israel. One of them, Ismail Abu Shenab, now deceased, once told me: "There are plenty of open areas in the United States that could absorb the Jews."
Even Shenaeb, zealot that he was, must have known that nothing like that was going to happen even in his grandchildren's lifetimes - if ever. But he and all his colleagues, then and now, pursued that ludicrous goal in exclusion of all else, and now it is leading to the social destruction of their own people.
Israel and Egypt have locked the gates to Gaza. Israel's closure is more understandable than Egypt's, given that Cairo pretends to be the Palestinian's greatest friend and protector. In any case, it's impossible to know just how many Gazans endorse Hamas' chimerical, single-minded, objective.
The majority of Gazans I have met want to live peaceful lives and provide for their children. Sure, all of them would love to turn the clock back to 1967, before Israel won control of Gaza. That's why most of them still choose to live in decades-old refugee camps, to show that they refuse to accept the current state of affairs.
But now a growing number - half the population, according to recent polls - is trying to get out of Gaza, escape from Hamas control and the deprivation that comes from its rule. In one famous case early this month, a healthy man joined the thousands who are fleeing to Egypt and Israel with bribes and fake medical reports, by pretending to be dying of cancer. He didn't get away with it.
Now, a year after the Israeli invasion of Gaza, it's time to stop blaming Israel for the desperate plight of Gaza's people. Without question, it's Hamas' fault.
(from The Sacramento BEE)
====
Joel Brinkley, visiting Hearst Professional in Residence
joel.brinkley@stanford.edu
Joel Brinkley is the Visiting Hearst Professional in Residence. Brinkley joined the Department of Communication in the fall of 2006 after a 23-year career with The New York Times. There, he served as a reporter, editor and Pulitzer Prize winning foreign correspondent.
At Stanford, Brinkley writes a nationally syndicated op-ed column on foreign policy that appears in about 50 newspapers and Websites in the United States and around the world each week. His areas of research include American foreign policy and the future of the nation’s newspaper industry. He is also under contract to write a book about modern-day Cambodia.
Brinkley is a native of Washington D.C., and a graduate of The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He began his journalism career at the Associated Press and over the following years worked for the Richmond (Va.) News Leader and the Louisville Courier Journal before joining the Times in 1983.
At The New York Times, Brinkley served as Washington correspondent, White House correspondent and chief of the Times Bureau in Jerusalem, Israel. He spent more than 10 years in editing positions including Projects Editor in Washington, Political Editor in New York and Investigations Editor in Washington following the September 11 attacks. He served as political writer in Baghdad during the fall of 2003. He also covered technology issues including the Microsoft anti-trust trial and was serving as foreign-policy correspondent when he left the Times in June 2006.
Over the last 26 years Brinkley has reported from 46 states and more than 50 foreign countries. He has won more than a dozen national reporting and writing awards. He won the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting in 1980 and was twice a finalist for an investigative reporting Pulitzer in the following years. He was a director of the Fund for Investigative Journalism from 2001 to 2006.
Mr. Brinkley is the author of three books and is at work on a fourth: The Circus Master's Mission, a novel published by Random House in 1989; Defining Vision: The Battle for the Future of Television, published by Harcourt Brace in 1998; and U.S. vs. Microsoft: The Inside Story of the Landmark Case (with Steve Lohr) published by McGraw Hill in 2001. He has contributed to several other books, including the chapter on George W. Bush in The American Presidency, published by Houghton Mifflin in 2004. He is writing the Cambodia book for Public Affairs Books.
Gaza has never been a prosperous enclave; the 140-square-mile territory has always been a poor, dependent state. But for Hamas, the radical Islamic terrorist group that seized control of Gaza in 2007, the long-term pursuit of a political impossibility trumps even the slightest concern for the the group's 1.5 million "constituents."
Residents of this territory have been subjects of other states - Turkey, Great Britain, Egypt, Israel - for half a millennium. But all the while, during both prosperous and desperate times, they struggled to ensure their children’s education. As a result, Palestinians have been among the best educated people in the world. Literacy rates, even for girls, have hovered around 99 percent. By comparison, in Iran, perhaps the Palestinians' biggest defenders now, and Israel's greatest enemy, UNICEF reports that only 77 percent of the population can read and write. Even Israel's literacy rate is lower: 97.1 percent.
But now, for the first time in the modern era, Gazans as young as 9, 10, 11 are being put to work in ever larger numbers, forgoing school. "Learning achievement has declined along with primary school enrollment," UNICEF reports.
Much of the world blames Israel. During its invasion of Gaza last January, Israeli troops were said to have damaged or destroyed nearly half of the territory's schools along with much of the remaining infrastructure.
The condemnation of Israel continues to this day in the United Nations and elsewhere.
Still, most of the people behind the continuing reproval take little note of Hamas' own campaign of terror in the previous months, lobbing hundreds of missiles toward Israeli population centers. No matter. That's a debate for another day. The point is, a year has passed.
What political concessions has Hamas offered that might have enabled it to make repairs, improve the lot of its people? None. The United Nations reported this fall that one in five Gazans now live in what it called "abject poverty." That is why, it is claimed, many parents are no longer sending their children to school. They need the pennies their children can earn at menial jobs to buy food.
Their chieftains don't seem to care. I have interviewed the leaders of Hamas many times over the years, and all of them offered one consistent refrain, time and time again: We are patient. Our resistance will continue as long as it takes - even centuries - until we reach our goal, full control of Palestine.
Of course, that includes the state of Israel. One of them, Ismail Abu Shenab, now deceased, once told me: "There are plenty of open areas in the United States that could absorb the Jews."
Even Shenaeb, zealot that he was, must have known that nothing like that was going to happen even in his grandchildren's lifetimes - if ever. But he and all his colleagues, then and now, pursued that ludicrous goal in exclusion of all else, and now it is leading to the social destruction of their own people.
Israel and Egypt have locked the gates to Gaza. Israel's closure is more understandable than Egypt's, given that Cairo pretends to be the Palestinian's greatest friend and protector. In any case, it's impossible to know just how many Gazans endorse Hamas' chimerical, single-minded, objective.
The majority of Gazans I have met want to live peaceful lives and provide for their children. Sure, all of them would love to turn the clock back to 1967, before Israel won control of Gaza. That's why most of them still choose to live in decades-old refugee camps, to show that they refuse to accept the current state of affairs.
But now a growing number - half the population, according to recent polls - is trying to get out of Gaza, escape from Hamas control and the deprivation that comes from its rule. In one famous case early this month, a healthy man joined the thousands who are fleeing to Egypt and Israel with bribes and fake medical reports, by pretending to be dying of cancer. He didn't get away with it.
Now, a year after the Israeli invasion of Gaza, it's time to stop blaming Israel for the desperate plight of Gaza's people. Without question, it's Hamas' fault.
(from The Sacramento BEE)
====
Joel Brinkley, visiting Hearst Professional in Residence
joel.brinkley@stanford.edu
Joel Brinkley is the Visiting Hearst Professional in Residence. Brinkley joined the Department of Communication in the fall of 2006 after a 23-year career with The New York Times. There, he served as a reporter, editor and Pulitzer Prize winning foreign correspondent.
At Stanford, Brinkley writes a nationally syndicated op-ed column on foreign policy that appears in about 50 newspapers and Websites in the United States and around the world each week. His areas of research include American foreign policy and the future of the nation’s newspaper industry. He is also under contract to write a book about modern-day Cambodia.
Brinkley is a native of Washington D.C., and a graduate of The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He began his journalism career at the Associated Press and over the following years worked for the Richmond (Va.) News Leader and the Louisville Courier Journal before joining the Times in 1983.
At The New York Times, Brinkley served as Washington correspondent, White House correspondent and chief of the Times Bureau in Jerusalem, Israel. He spent more than 10 years in editing positions including Projects Editor in Washington, Political Editor in New York and Investigations Editor in Washington following the September 11 attacks. He served as political writer in Baghdad during the fall of 2003. He also covered technology issues including the Microsoft anti-trust trial and was serving as foreign-policy correspondent when he left the Times in June 2006.
Over the last 26 years Brinkley has reported from 46 states and more than 50 foreign countries. He has won more than a dozen national reporting and writing awards. He won the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting in 1980 and was twice a finalist for an investigative reporting Pulitzer in the following years. He was a director of the Fund for Investigative Journalism from 2001 to 2006.
Mr. Brinkley is the author of three books and is at work on a fourth: The Circus Master's Mission, a novel published by Random House in 1989; Defining Vision: The Battle for the Future of Television, published by Harcourt Brace in 1998; and U.S. vs. Microsoft: The Inside Story of the Landmark Case (with Steve Lohr) published by McGraw Hill in 2001. He has contributed to several other books, including the chapter on George W. Bush in The American Presidency, published by Houghton Mifflin in 2004. He is writing the Cambodia book for Public Affairs Books.
Tuesday, January 12, 2010
The Philadelphia Bulletin: Jewish Group From India Plans To Immigrate To Israel
Jerusalem - With an arduous journey ahead, 7,232 members of the Bnei Menashe population, who live in northeastern India, will be immigrating to Israel.
The Bnei Menashe believe they are an offshoot of the Jewish people.
According to the tradition that is handed down to the community’s younger generations, they are the descendants of the tribe of Menashe, one of the 10 tribes that were exiled from Israel at the end of the First Temple period.
The Shavei Yisrael organization, which has been working among the Bnei Menashe community in India, established centers over the past decade for the study of Hebrew and Judaism for them in order to help them strengthen their Jewish identity and assist those who wished to immigrate to Israel.
This is a very organized group with approximately 50 synagogues and an umbrella organization that unites all the communities. Shavei Yisrael, with its director, Michael Freund, has been working with the Israeli government for several years as well in order to persuade it to bring all the Bnei Menashe here. Individuals from the Bnei Menashe community began to immigrate to Israel as early as 1982.
By 2003, approximately 1,250 members of the community entered the country on tourist visas provided by the Ministry of the Interior and in small groups.
In March 2005, Israel’s Chief Rabbi Shlomo Amar recognized the Bnei Menashe community’s connection to the Torah and to the people of Israel, and decided “they must be helped to return to the homeland of the Jewish people.”
Incidentally, the matter of the Bnei Menashe entered Israeli public discourse in 1996, when members of the community sent an emotional letter asking for help to the prime minister at the time, Benjamin Netanyahu. The one who opened the letter and took the matter under his responsibility was an adviser in the Prime Minister’s Bureau by the name of Michael Freund, an immigrant from the U.S., who later took the matter on as a personal project.
View the original story at The Philadelphia Bulletin: Jewish Group From India Plans To Immigrate To Israel
The Bnei Menashe believe they are an offshoot of the Jewish people.
According to the tradition that is handed down to the community’s younger generations, they are the descendants of the tribe of Menashe, one of the 10 tribes that were exiled from Israel at the end of the First Temple period.
The Shavei Yisrael organization, which has been working among the Bnei Menashe community in India, established centers over the past decade for the study of Hebrew and Judaism for them in order to help them strengthen their Jewish identity and assist those who wished to immigrate to Israel.
This is a very organized group with approximately 50 synagogues and an umbrella organization that unites all the communities. Shavei Yisrael, with its director, Michael Freund, has been working with the Israeli government for several years as well in order to persuade it to bring all the Bnei Menashe here. Individuals from the Bnei Menashe community began to immigrate to Israel as early as 1982.
By 2003, approximately 1,250 members of the community entered the country on tourist visas provided by the Ministry of the Interior and in small groups.
In March 2005, Israel’s Chief Rabbi Shlomo Amar recognized the Bnei Menashe community’s connection to the Torah and to the people of Israel, and decided “they must be helped to return to the homeland of the Jewish people.”
Incidentally, the matter of the Bnei Menashe entered Israeli public discourse in 1996, when members of the community sent an emotional letter asking for help to the prime minister at the time, Benjamin Netanyahu. The one who opened the letter and took the matter under his responsibility was an adviser in the Prime Minister’s Bureau by the name of Michael Freund, an immigrant from the U.S., who later took the matter on as a personal project.
View the original story at The Philadelphia Bulletin: Jewish Group From India Plans To Immigrate To Israel
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