"Vanguardia's correspondent in Tel Aviv said the Mossad operation consisted of two agents unknown to each other separately infiltrating FARC.
The pair managed to penetrate the Marxist guerrilla group so effectively that they ultimately controlled what FARC did or didn't know, the Catalan newspaper said.
The Israeli and U.S. secret services used unmanned spy drones to locate the camp where the hostage were held, Vanguardia said."
Former British diplomat Peter Hain urges South Africa to cut electricity to Zimbabwe:
"Electricity supplies from South Africa, which have been going in for many years now, should be cut off. And that would hit the regime more than anything else because the people can hardly suffer any more than they have been already," he said.Power reductions are only "collective punishment" when Israel does it.
June 26, 2008, 11:10 AM (GMT+02:00)
Olli Heinonen led nuclear watchdog inspection in Syria
DEBKAfile’s military and intelligence sources report that the three-man International Atomic Energy Agency team which inspected the El Kibar site bombed by Israel last September, returned to Vienna Wednesday, June 25, with soil and building materials samples gathered secretly without Syrian knowledge. From the Syrians they received different samples said to have been collected at a site which they insisted was a military facility under construction.
During their four days in the country, Olli Heinonen, IAEA deputy director and leading negotiator with the Iranian authorities, and his team interviewed Syrian army officers and men presented by Damascus as having been employed at the facility. They denied it was a nuclear reactor and possessing nuclear credentials themselves. But, according to DEBKAfile’s intelligence sources, the inspectors countered with their own list of officers, scientists and technicians – not only Syrians, but also Iranians and North Koreans employed in building the facility.
The Syrian side denied this and refused the inspectors permission to interview people on their list.
Last week, British, German and Israeli publications released new information from Israeli intelligence sources according to which the El Kibar reactor was intended to be a component of Iran’s nuclear program. Iran’s use of plutonium in its weapons projects was to be concealed by having it produced in Syria.
Wednesday, June 25, the London daily, the Guardian, quoted an adviser to Israel's national security council as saying: "The Iranians were involved in the Syrian programme. The idea was that the Syrians produce plutonium and the Iranians get their share. Syria had no reprocessing facility for the spent fuel. It's not deduction alone that brings almost everyone to think that the link exists" – implying that Israel had evidence.
DEBKAfile adds: War tensions between Israel and Iran have shot up in the last few days on the strength of reported Israeli preparations for an attack on Iran’s nuclear installations. By linking Syria’s destroyed reactor to Iran’s nuclear program, Israeli officials were saying in effect that the attack on an Iranian nuclear installation had already taken place …in Syria.
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A recent report I wrote for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty details this flow. In July 2007, for example, Al Qaeda released more than 450 statements, books, articles, magazines, audio recordings, short videos of attacks and longer films. These products reach the world through a network of quasi-official online production and distribution entities, like Al Sahab, which releases statements by Osama bin Laden.
But the Qaeda media nexus, as advanced as it is, is old hat. If Web 1.0 was about creating the snazziest official Web resources and Web 2.0 is about letting users run wild with self-created content and interactivity, Al Qaeda and its affiliates are stuck in 1.0."
Mr. McCain advocates eliminating the multibillion-dollar annual government subsidies that domestic ethanol has long enjoyed. As a free trade advocate, he also opposes the 54-cent-a-gallon tariff that the United States slaps on imports of ethanol made from sugar cane, which packs more of an energy punch than corn-based ethanol and is cheaper to produce.
“We made a series of mistakes by not adopting a sustainable energy policy, one of which is the subsidies for corn ethanol, which I warned in Iowa were going to destroy the market” and contribute to inflation, Mr. McCain said this month in an interview with a Brazilian newspaper, O Estado de São Paulo. “Besides, it is wrong,” he added, to tax Brazilian-made sugar cane ethanol, “which is much more efficient than corn ethanol.”
Mr. Obama, in contrast, favors the subsidies, some of which end up in the hands of the same oil companies he says should be subjected to a windfall profits tax. In the name of helping the United States build “energy independence,” he also supports the tariff, which some economists say may well be illegal under the World Trade Organization’s rules but which his advisers say is not."
"Many economists, consumer advocates, environmental experts and tax groups have been critical of corn ethanol programs as a boondoggle that benefits agribusiness conglomerates more than small farmers. Those complaints have intensified recently as corn prices have risen sharply in tandem with oil prices and corn normally used for food stock has been diverted to ethanol production.
“If you want to take some of the pressure off this market, the obvious thing to do is lower that tariff and let some Brazilian ethanol come in,” said C. Ford Runge, an economist specializing in commodities and trade policy at the Center for International Food and Agricultural Policy at the University of Minnesota. “But one of the fundamental reasons biofuels policy is so out of whack with markets and reality is that interest group politics have been so dominant in the construction of the subsidies that support it.”
"Corn ethanol generates less than two units of energy for every unit of energy used to produce it, while the energy ratio for sugar cane is more than 8 to 1. With lower production costs and cheaper land prices in the tropical countries where it is grown, sugar cane is a more efficient source."
Yey, New York Times!!!
“Everything was absolutely ideal on the day I bombed the Pentagon.”
This excerpt from William Ayers’ memoir appeared in the New York Times on Sept. 11, 2001 — the day al-Qaeda terrorists crashed hijacked planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Ayers, once a leader in the Weather Underground — the group that declared “war” on the U.S. government in 1970 — told the Times, “I don’t regret setting bombs,” and, “I feel we didn’t do enough.”
Ayers recently reappeared in the news because Politico.com reported Friday that Barack Obama has loose ties to him. Ayers, now a professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago, is apparently a left-wing institution in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood, and Obama visited Ayers’ home as a rite of passage when launching his political career in the mid-1990s. The two also served on the board of the charitable Woods Fund of Chicago, which gave money to Northwestern University Law School’s Children and Family Justice Center, where Ayers’ wife (and former Weather Underground compatriot who glorified violence) Bernardine Dohrn is the director.
I don’t think Obama supports domestic terrorism, and I’m sure he can offer eloquent explanations for why he shouldn’t suffer any guilt by association. The Hillary Clinton campaign, however, did try to score a few political points, meekly linking to the Politico story on the campaign website’s blog. The campaign probably couldn’t be more aggressive without calling attention to how Bill Clinton pardoned Puerto Rican separatist terrorists — perceived to be a way to gain support for Hillary’s Senate bid from left-wing Puerto Ricans in New York.
What fascinates me is how light the baggage is when one travels from violent radicalism to liberalism. Chicago activist Sam Ackerman told Politico’s reporter that Ayers “is one of my heroes in life.” Cass Sunstein, a first-rank liberal intellectual, said, “I feel very uncomfortable with their past, but neither of them is thought of as horrible types now — so far as most of us know, they are legitimate members of the community.”
Why, exactly, can Ayers and Dohrn be seen as “legitimate members of the community”? How is it that they get prestigious university jobs when even the whisper of neocon tendencies is toxic in academia?
The question of why Ayers isn’t in jail is moot; he was never prosecuted for the Weather Underground’s bombing campaign. Still, Ayers is unrepentant about his years spent waging war against the United States. “Kill all the rich people. Break up their cars and apartments. Bring the revolution home, kill your parents, that’s where it’s really at,” Ayers was widely quoted as saying at the time.
Ayers is merely symptomatic. Academia, the arts, even business have readmitted one former (and a few not-so-former) violent radical after another. Thomas W. Jones, a leader in the armed takeover of Cornell University’s student union in 1969, rose to the top of Citigroup and once ran TIAA-CREF, the pension fund of some of the very academics he threatened.
Hillary Clinton had her own brush with violent radical leftists during her years at Yale Law. The New Haven, Conn., trial of Black Panthers — racist paramilitary criminals who had murdered police and civilians in cold blood — was a cause celebre for The Yale Review of Law and Social Action, the journal she helped edit. According to some accounts, Clinton volunteered to monitor the trial to aid Black Panther leader Bobby Seale’s defense, and one of Seale’s lawyers, a major radical, was sufficiently impressed to offer her an internship.
I don’t think such associations should necessarily cost people their careers or place in polite society, particularly if some sort of contrition is involved. But shouldn’t this baggage cost something?
Why is it only conservative “cranks” who think it’s relevant that Obama’s campaign headquarters in Houston had a Che Guevara-emblazoned Cuban flag hanging on the wall? Indeed, why is love of Che still radically chic at all? A murderer who believed that “the U.S. is the great enemy of mankind” shouldn’t be anyone’s hero, never mind a logo for a line of baby clothes. Why are Fidel Castro’s apologists progressive and enlightened but apologists for Augusto Pinochet frightening and authoritarian? Why was Sen. Trent Lott’s kindness to former segregationist Sen. Strom Thurmond a scandal but Obama’s acquaintance with an unrepentant terrorist a triviality?
I have my own answers to these questions. But I’m interested in theirs. In the weeks to come, maybe reporters can resist the temptation to repeat health care questions for the billionth time and instead ask America’s foremost liberal representatives why being a radical means never having to say you’re sorry.
— Jonah Goldberg is the author of Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning.
"Barack Obama's path to strengthening ties with the Jewish community is severely blocked when appointing an anti-Israel figure like David Bonior. While in Congress, Bonior refused to stand by Israel after repeated terrorist attacks, was known as a stalwart opponent to Israel, and is now a representative for Barack Obama. Bonior's appointment is the latest in a series that raises serious questions and doubts about Barack Obama's positions and judgments on the Middle East."
During his Congressional career, David Bonior repeatedly opposed pro-Israel legislation. In 1997, David Bonior was one of 15 Congressmen who signed a letter asking then-President Clinton to pressure Israelis into making concessions to the Palestinians. In 2002, David Bonior was one of only 21 Congressmen who opposed H.R. 392, which publicly affirmed Congress's support of Israel's right to self-defense and called for the dismantling of the Palestinian terrorist infrastructure.[2] In 1990, David Bonior was one of only 34 Congressman to vote against a measure naming Jerusalem as the united capital of Israel.[3] In 1989, Bonior was one of six House members to vote against a bill that prevented US funds from going to UN entities that granted the PLO membership.[4] Throughout his career, Bonior repeatedly opposed US aid to Israel and supported arms sales to Arab states opposed to Israel's existence.
"The appointment of yet another anti-Israel advisor like David Bonior to represent Barack Obama speaks volumes to the Jewish community. The pattern including Tony McPeak, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and Robert Malley continues with this appointment. It's no wonder the Jewish community remains deeply skeptical and troubled by Barack Obama."
[1] Jonathan Tobin, Jewish World Review, 7/12/99.
[2] H.R. 392, "Expressing Solidarity with Israel in its Fight against Terrorism", May 2002, 352-21 (29 voting present).
[3] H.R. 290, "In support of a unified Jerusalem", Apr. 1990, 378-34 (6 voting present).
[4] H.R. 2145, "Prohibiting US Contributions to the United Nations Under Certain Condititons", May 1989, 396-6 (11 voting present).
In Video Statement, Senator Obama Inexplicably Pledges to Unilaterally Jeopardize American Military Superiority
When you find yourself in a hole, just keep digging.
That appears to be the logic of Senator Barack Obama, who already finds himself in the proverbial hole on defense and national security issues. At this pace, he’ll reach China by November.
In a strange video address intended to somehow reassure American voters regarding his military bona fides, Senator Obama ends up doing just the opposite.
Among other things, he promises to cut “tens of billions of dollars” from the military budget, at a time when our armed forces are already stretched and in need of new weapon technologies and armor; to “cut investments in unproven missile defense systems,” which in reality have already proven remarkably effective; that he “will not weaponize space” even though other nations such as China do exactly that; to terminate the Iraq war just as the surge proves itself remarkably successful; and he rails against what he calls “unnecessary” military spending. He concludes by promising to remove our inter-continental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) from what he calls a “hair-trigger alert,” embarrassing himself via his ignorance regarding our deliberate targeting and launch protocol.
Most alarmingly, however, Senator Obama literally promises to “slow development of future combat systems.”
Think about the frightening implications of this pledge for a moment.
Future combat systems are the cornerstone of American military modernization and superiority. As America fights the war on terror and deters potential military aggression by rogue nations cross the world, advanced combat systems provide us with better equipment, unmatched situational awareness and communication systems that result in American battlefield domination. Other ascendant nations such as China and Russia seek to match our prowess, but we continue to outpace them...
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Republican Jewish Coalition | 50 F Street, NW | Suite 100 | Washington | DC | 20001 |
Where's actor Bill Murray when you really need him?
On Monday, the International Atomic Energy Agency released yet another report expressing alarm over Iran's lack of cooperation and candor on its nuclear programs. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice immediately warned that Iran could face more sanctions, while the European Union's Javier Solana announced another trip to Tehran to see if another dozen or so carrots might induce Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to stop enriching uranium.
![[Condoleezza Rice]](http://s.wsj.net/public/resources/images/HC-GE264_Rice_20051017161231.gif)
For a better flavor of this latest exercise in "Groundhog Day" diplomacy, type the words "Rice" and "Iran" into Google's search engine. Here's what we found among the first 10 results:
- "Rice: Iran must halt nuclear program" – February 9, 2005.
- "Rice on Iran: 'We can't let this continue'" – April 12, 2006.
- "Rice: Iran 'lying' about nuke program" – October 11, 2007.
And so on. These rebukes have often coincided with the IAEA's quarterly reports about its dealings with Iran, which have, without exception, stressed that Tehran has failed to be fully forthcoming about its nuclear programs. Monday's report makes for especially bracing reading: Though it has not yet been publicly released, we have obtained a copy available here.
According to the report, not only have the Iranians continued to enrich uranium (in flat contravention of three allegedly binding Security Council resolutions), they are adding thousands of new centrifuges. Some of these are of a more powerful and efficient second-generation type.
More worrying is what the IAEA delicately calls the "possible military dimensions" of Iran's programs. Given that Iran insists its nuclear drive is for peaceful purposes only, it's interesting to note "the fact that substantial parts of the centrifuge components were manufactured in the workshops of the Defense Industries Organization."
Also interesting is what the report describes as "the development of high voltage detonator firing equipment and exploding bridgewire (EBW) detonators including, inter alia, the simultaneous firing of multiple EBW detonators, an underground testing arrangement . . . and the testing of at least one full scale hemispherical, converging, explosively driven shock system that could be applicable to an implosion-type nuclear device." If there's an innocent explanation for this kind of work, we'd love to hear it.
The report notes in an annex that some of these weaponization experiments took place in 2004. This means the Iranians continued to work on weaponization well after the December U.S. National Intelligence Estimate claimed they had abandoned them. That estimate has already been discredited for suggesting that uranium enrichment and ballistic-missile development fall outside the definition of a "nuclear weapons program." But now it seems this U.S. intelligence "consensus" was wrong even on its own misleadingly narrow terms.
Where do we go from here? If this really were Groundhog Day, we would at least learn something from the previous, persistent failures. Even Mr. Murray's character changed his ways. But Iranian leaders have had six years to develop their nuclear programs since they were exposed in 2002, and the progress they have made has been formidable.
That period has also included years of negotiations with Europe and Russia, in which the Iranians have been offered progressively more generous incentives to suspend their enrichment. It hasn't happened. Nor will it ever as long as the worst the international community can do is impose a set of weak sanctions while offering ever-sweeter incentives for Iran to behave. Even assuming there's a package the West could offer Iran that it would accept, the logic of the current diplomacy gives the mullahs every incentive to continue to play for time.
As for the U.S., Secretary Rice's threat of still-more sanctions will be seen in Tehran for the diplomatic evasion it is. The last set of sanctions took months to pass and were watered down to nothing much. The Administration would do better to withdraw from this international charade and consider means by which the mullahs might be persuaded that their regime's survival is better assured by not having nuclear weapons. A month-long naval blockade of Iran's imports of refined gasoline – which accounts for nearly half of its domestic consumption – could clarify for the Iranians just how unacceptable their nuclear program is to the civilized world.
It might also have a clarifying effect on the U.S. political debate. Both John McCain and Barack Obama have declared that Iran cannot be allowed to become a nuclear power, and we're reasonably confident Mr. McCain means it. As for Mr. Obama, who has spoken of the need for "tough diplomacy," now is the time to find out what he really means by "tough."
Sunday night, May 11, the Israeli army was poised to strike Hizballah. The Shiite militia was winding up its takeover of West Beirut and battling pro-government forces in the North. When he opened the regular cabinet meeting Sunday, May 11, prime minister Ehud Olmert had already received the go-ahead from Washington for a military strike to halt the Hizballah advance. The message said that President George W. Bush would not call off his visit to Israel to attend its 60th anniversary celebrations and would arrive as planned Wednesday, May 14 - even if the Israeli army was still fighting in Lebanon and Hizballah struck back against Tel Aviv and Ben-Gurion airport.
American intelligence estimated that Hizballah was capable of retaliating against northern Israel at the rate of 600 missiles a day.
Olmert, defense minister Ehud Barak and foreign minister Tzipi Lvini, the only ministers in the picture, decided not to intervene in Lebanon’s civil conflict. Iran’s surrogate army consequently waltzed unchecked to its second victory in two years over the United States and Israel.
DEBKAfile’s US and military sources disclose the arguments Washington marshaled to persuade Israel to go ahead: Hizballah, after its electronic trackers had learned from the Israel army’s communication and telephone networks that not a single troop or tank was on the move, took the calculated risk of transferring more than 5,000 armed men from the South to secure the capture of West Beirut.
This presented a rare moment to take Hizballah by surprise, Washington maintained. The plan outlined in Washington was for the Israeli Air force to bombard Hizballah’s positions in the South, the West and southern Beirut. This would give the pro-government Christian, Sunni and Druze forces the opening for a counter-attack. Israeli tanks would simultaneously drive into the South and head towards Beirut in two columns.
1. The western column would take the Tyre-Sidon-Damour-Beirut coastal highway.
2. The eastern column would press north through Nabatiya, Jezzine, Ain Zchalta and Alei.
Sunday night, Olmert called Lebanese prime minister Fouad Siniora and his allies, the Sunni majority leader Saad Hariri, head of the mainline Druze party Walid Jumblatt and Christian Phalanges chief Samir Geagea and informed them there would be no Israeli strike against Hizballah. Jerusalem would not come to their aid.
According to American sources, the pro-Western front in Beirut collapsed then and there, leaving Hizballah a free path to victory. The recriminations from Washington sharpened day by day and peaked with President Bush’s arrival in Israel.
"It is a place of secrets that Iran loves to boast about, clouding the effort’s real status and making Western analysts all the more eager for solid details and clues. Tehran insists that its plans are peaceful. But Washington and its allies see a looming threat.
The sprawling site, known as Natanz, made headlines recently because Iran is testing a new generation of centrifuges there that spin faster and, in theory, can more rapidly turn natural uranium into fuel for reactors or nuclear arms. The new machines are also meant to be more reliable than their forerunners, which often failed catastrophically.
On April 8, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad visited the desert site, and Iran released 48 photographs of the tour, providing the first significant look inside the atomic riddle."
Indeed, when NYU professor Tony Judt’s lecture at the Polish Consulate in New York was canceled in 2006 by the consul general, because Poland did not subscribe to Judt’s view of a one-state solution for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a group of intellectuals rushed to his defense.
In a widely-publicized petition, they asserted that "We are united in believing that a climate of intimidation is inconsistent with fundamental principles of debate in a democracy. The Polish Consulate is not obliged to promote free speech. But the rules of the game in America oblige citizens to encourage rather than stifle debate.”
Let’s set aside the absurdity of the entire effort. After all, Judt had given countless lectures before that October date, not to mention his articles on the subject in the New York Review of Books and elsewhere. None of his defenders could cite a second instance of ”intimidation,” nor, for that matter, would they be able to cite an instance since then, either. In fact, Judt’s meeting was moved to a different venue in New York and that was that.
But there’s another side to the coin. While Judt and his erstwhile supporters, joined by Jimmy Carter, Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, have been making their case about their inability to be heard – ironically, in think tanks, universities and media outlets only too happy to have them speak out about how they cannot speak out – some are trying to silence a very different viewpoint.
On behalf of AJC, I do a weekly national 60-second radio spot. The time is purchased as any advertisement would be. For the past nearly seven years, it has been broadcast across the United States on the CBS radio network, on hundreds of stations, without incident.
Earlier this year, we expanded the reach by adding in the New York area WQXR, a popular classical music station owned by the New York Times.
For the week of March 31, here was the text to be aired:
Fifteen seconds. Imagine you had fifteen seconds to find shelter from an incoming missile. Fifteen seconds to locate your children, help an elderly relative, assist a disabled person to find shelter.
That's all the residents of Sderot and neighboring Israeli towns have.
Day or night, the sirens go on. Fifteen seconds later, the missiles, fired from Hamas-controlled Gaza, hit. They could hit a home, a school, a hospital. Their aim is to kill and wound and demoralize.
Imagine yourself in that situation.
The sirens blast. 15, 14, 13, 12, 11, 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. The time to seek shelter has ended. The missiles hit.
This is what Israelis experience daily. But, amazingly, they refuse to be cowed. Help us help those Israelis. Visit ajc.org.
The spot was broadcast several times, as is customary, on the CBS radio network, but WQXR refused to do so.
Here’s the written explanation from Tom Bartunek, president of New York Times Radio and general manager of WQXR:
”In my judgement several elements of this spot are outside our bounds of acceptability. First, the opening line— `Imagine you had fifteen seconds to find shelter from an oncoming missile’—does not make clear that the potential target of the missile is not our listening area, and as a consequence, runs the risk of raising anxiety in a misleading way. Second, the description of the missiles as arriving `day or night’ and `daily’ is also subject to challenge as being misleading, at least to the degree that reasonable people might be troubled by the absence of any acknowledgement of reciprocal Israeli military actions. Finally, in my judgement the `countdown’ device and the general tone of the message do not meet our guidelines for decorum.”
Stunning, above all, is the reference to "the absence of any acknowledgement of reciprocal Israeli military actions.”
In other words, according to Bartunek’s logic, the only way to broadcast the plight of Sderot’s residents over the airwaves is to equate Israel’s right of self-defense with Hamas’s and Islamic Jihad’s right to strike Israel at will.
Notice I didn’t say ”day or night” or ”daily” this time, because that might be construed as ”misleading.” Next time I’m in Sderot, I’ll be sure to let its residents know they have less to worry about than they thought because, according to some in the United States, their attackers keep banker’s hours. Meanwhile, Bartunek ought to read about the situation in Sderot in the April 5 front-page article in the paper that owns his station.
In a subsequent phone conversation with one of my AJC colleagues, Bartunek went further. He explained that the radio station does not run ads with sirens or gun shots, neither of which was included in our spots, nor does it carry spots about ”hemorrhoid cream or sexual potency pills.”
Well, that certainly helps clarify matters about rejecting a spot that sought to draw attention to innocent people under rocket attack who might need understanding and support.
I can only imagine what would have been the response had we done a spot during the London blitz. Would it have been turned down as well, perhaps on the grounds that we failed to refer to reciprocal British military actions against Nazi Germany?
Lest anyone think this was an isolated incident, a similar incident occurred with the same station in 2001, leading us to cancel our contract. We had resumed years later in the mistaken belief that things would be different.
Here’s the 2001 text:
No one is born hating, but too many are taught to hate.
One thing we've learned since September 11th is that in some unexpected places, children are taught to hate us.
Recently, The New York Times (October 19, 2001) reported that in Saudi Arabia, tenth graders are warned of "the dangers of having Christian and Jewish friends," and in Pakistan, a million children attending religious schools are taught to "distrust and even hate the United States." (October 14, 2001)
Our planet is increasingly crowded – six billion people practicing hundreds of faiths and identifying with countless ethnic backgrounds.
Either we all learn to respect one another, or else we'll be doomed to more deadly acts inspired by blind hatred.
Our government needs to begin addressing this pressing challenge abroad, starting with those nations ostensibly close to our own.
Meanwhile, here at home, let's continue to show the world what mutual respect and understanding are really all about.
At the time, two months after the September 11th attacks, the WQXR station manager cited the third paragraph as particularly objectionable. When we noted that the quotes were taken from the New York Times—again, the newspaper which owns the radio station—we were told that the language did not meet the station’s standards. And, yes, we were lumped in then, too, with hemorrhoids.
The suppressing of our message doesn’t end with the New York Times-owned station.
A week before the most recent incident with WQXR, I recorded another spot. It ran without any problem on CBS nationwide and, interestingly, WQXR broadcast it as well. But this time Bloomberg radio, a financial news station in New York, refused. AJC began airing the weekly spots on Bloomberg in January. (By the way, though the station carries his name, I am certain that Mayor Michael Bloomberg was unaware of the decision made by station officials.)
Here’s the full message:
No one is born hating. Children are taught to hate.
AJC has sponsored studies of textbooks in Egypt, Iran, and Saudi Arabia. In Saudi Arabia, for example, children are taught to hate people of other faiths. This teaching, we found, permeates the schools.
Now we've released a study on Palestinian textbooks. Once again, the picture isn't pretty. The textbooks largely fail to recognize Israel. Israeli cities are described as Palestinian.
Jewish holy places are presented as Muslim holy places taken over by the Jews—odd, considering that Judaism preceded Islam by more than 1,500 years.
As early as the seventh grade, Palestinian children are taught to demonize the 'other,' meaning the Jew. And no, there's no comparable negative teaching in Israeli schools about Arab or Islamic societies.
For those who pray for peace, it begins with children. They should be taught respect for others, not contempt. That's how peace begins.
Everything written in this spot was verifiable. It was drawn, as noted, from a new study of Palestinian textbooks in which AJC was involved. Precisely because we knew this study, like its three predecessors, would be scrutinized microscopically by those seeking to discredit it, every translation from Arabic was reviewed by top experts in the field to ensure total accuracy. And the study itself, available at www.ajc.org, reflects context, nuance, and precision of language.
Yet, all this wasn’t good enough for the station, which, without putting anything down on paper, asserted that there were some questions about what was being said.
Actually, a few days later, the New York Times had a front-page story on anti-Semitism, not anti-Israelism, in Gaza and made essentially the same point that schools are a key transmission belt for such hatred and incitement.
We canceled our contract with Bloomberg. Our right to express our point of view – with an ironclad commitment in our texts to responsible messaging – was being stifled by those who, for whatever political or commercial reasons, were unwilling to allow us that right.
I wonder if some of those same academic and cultural leading lights – from the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Israel and Norway – who rushed to Judt’s side might be similarly disposed to support ”the rules of the game in America” for us as well.
After all, fair’s fair, isn’t it?
If Only Mugabe Were White-Kristof-NYT
My response on Kristof's blog copied below. By the way, without taking anything away on the Mugabe issue in this Op-Ed, what type of op-editorialist dolt would think that $5 Million could buy off a megalomaniac dictator who has undoubtedly stolen one hundred times that amount in his years of rule?
“Quote from Kristof's op-ed: 'Mozambique, South Africa and Congo will also cut off the electricity they provide to Zimbabwe.'
Hmmm… Interesting that when you make this statement in your Op-Ed, you don’t rail about this constituting collective punishment of Zimbabwe’s populace, as you would (and have) when Israel threatens to do the same to Gaza, whose leadership sponsors the firing of rockets at Israeli towns WITH THE INTENTION of killing civilians. Hamas, of course, was truly democratically elected to lead the Gazans, unlike Mugabe, making the justice of such electricity cutoffs all-the-more justified in Gaza.
What say you, Mr. Kristof, about this apparent double standard? RAB"