29-Dec-10: Five questions prompted by a cartoon, several riots and a thwarted massacre

Moslems react to Danish cartoons - London, 2006 (Daily Mail UK)

Quoted in today's New York Times, the prime minister of Denmark says today's events "must not lead us to change our open society and our values, especially democracy and free speech.”

Today's events, you ask? We think they show how the tentacles extend deep into the Scandinavian heartland:

• Five men were arrested today in the suburbs of Copenhagen and in Stockholm on suspicion of plotting an attack on the offices of a newspaper in the Danish capital. 
• Their plan, simply stated, was to "kill as many people as possible". This, according to the head of the Danish security service.
• There's little doubt they had the means. Found in their apartment were "at least one machine gun with a silencer, live ammunition and plastic strips that can be used as handcuffs" according to the Danish authorities.
• The plan was to replicate the Mumbai massacre of 2008 that resulted in the murders of 163 people, acording to th police.
• The Copenhagen massacre was to happen on or before New Year’s Day - this coming weekend. 
• This would be yet another act of revenge for the publishing of certain cartoons in the Danish newspaper in 2005... and by far not the first such act. Two Danish diplomatic missions were torched, a boycott of Danish goods was carried out in several countries, and a large number of violent protests took places in cities around the world among other reactions at the time. Then in 2009, two men from Chicago were arrested in a plot to attack employees of the newspaper. In January 2010, a Somalian man equipped with an ax and a knife was apprehended before he was able to enter the home of a cartoonist in the Danish town of Aarhus. And in September this year, Danish police arrested a man following the explosion at a Copenhagen hotel of a letter bomb that officials said was most likely intended for the same newspaper.
• Security forces had been tracking this group for months and say there may still be further arrests.
• Three of the men arrested hold Swedish citizenship.
• A fourth, aged 26 and living in Copenhagen on a residency permit had been admitted to Denmark in 2000 as an asylum seeker from Iraq when (by our calculation) he must have been 16.
• All five are Moslems, which is by no means incidental to the story. To think otherwise is to be impossibly politically correct. (Nearly 4% of Danes are Moslems. No one suggests that all, most or many are terrorists.) They were part of “a militant Islamist group with links to international terrorist networks”, the chief of Danish security is quoted as saying.
• "A serious terror crime in Denmark has been thwarted through an efficient and close cooperation" between the security forces says this report.

In light of the above, we have some questions.

1. If this was an act of terror, as everyone - including the headline writers and the police - is saying, why are these Moslem men, all of them members of a so-called militant Islamist group acting in the name of their religion, not called terrorists in today's newspaper reports? [It happens that we blogged about this question just yesterday: 28-Dec-10: How the militants, fighters, insurgents and freedom fighters turn into terrorists] Terrorists is precisely what they are, assuming the charges prove to be true.
2. As the plot here involved religiously inspired acts of violent hatred, is the religious leadership of the institutions to which the five men were connected being asked to explain itself?
3. Should it bother us that one of the plotters (at least) was there because he had gotten political asylum ten years ago? And should we be troubled that, having imbibed the best that Scandinavia can offer, he responded by preparing to massacre his neighbours?
4. Is the essence of this frightening story really the struggle to defend free speech and liberal values, as the Danish prime minister said today? Or (which we believe) is it actually about the enormous life-and-death risks of hosting a militant minority within a democracy-minded, mild-mannered and liberal majority society while growing to understand (slowly, ever so slowly) that the hate-based values being incubated in their midst are not growing more moderate but rather are becoming sharper, more brazen, more toxic and more deadly with time?
5. Reuters reported today that Syria was actively involved four years ago (when the cartoons story was still fresh) in encouraging attacks on European embassies in Damascus, according to a senior U.S. diplomat quoted in leaked cables. The embassies of Denmark and Norway were both burned down in those Syrian "protests". Reuters reports that the instructions for the riots came directly from Syrian Prime Minister Naji al-Otari, who directed mosque preachers to deliver "hard-hitting" sermons at weekly prayers. In the face of unrelenting violence, is anyone looking into what Scandinavian imams are preaching to their flocks? Or does it not matter?

28-Dec-10: How the militants, fighters, insurgents and freedom fighters turn into terrorists

The Guardian, one of the world's towering superpowers of political correctness, carried a little-noticed story this past Sunday about a disturbing turn of events emanating from our neighbourhood:

"Intelligence services throughout the Middle East and Europe are scrambling to track down more than two dozen fighters linked to al-Qaida who have recently left their base in southern Lebanon. The missing men are thought to have gone to Europe by a newly established route through Syria, Turkey and the Balkans, and multiple intelligence sources in Lebanon warn that the group appears to be operational and could be planning attacks in Europe in the holiday season... "We have received warnings of a significant militant plot in Europe during the holidays and we have been warned about these missing fighters from Lebanon"...

If you follow the link and view the article as published, you may notice that the word terror appears exactly once - in the headline: European terror attack feared as al-Qaida fighters disappear from base in Lebanon.

In the body of the article, these Al Qaida individuals are called "fighters", "missing men", "group", "militants" and even "a disparate group of freelance fighters and jihadists" which comes close to the heart of the matter. Not once are they called terrorists.

So what is it about the jihadists that causes this odd metamorphosis? So long as they remain in the Middle East - in Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Iran, Syria, and especially in the towns and villages controlled by the Palestinian Authority, by Hamas and by Hizbollah - these men, women and children are routinely described by the kind of circumlocution that is on display in the Guardian.

But once they execute their satanic plans in Europe, North America and elsewhere, or even do no more than threaten, they undergo reclassification - as terrorists.

What is it about otherwise intelligent and sober editors and journalists that prevents them from applying to the executors of acts of terror - the jihadists and the child-killers and the murderous Islamicists and the homicidal/suicidal/genocidal human-bombs - the simple English-language name that most fits them: terrorists?

Could it be that it depends on the religion or nationality of the intended victims?

We are the parents of a fifteen year-old daughter murdered by the terrorists, and we are sickened and alarmed by the repeated use in various news media of circumlocutions and double-speak about the practitioners of terror. Terrorist acts are too often called "revenge bombings" and  "revenge attacks", which is half-way towards explaining and justifying acts of unfathomable hatred. Innocent people murdered by the terrorists are too often said to have been "caught in the crossfire". [This month alone, you can see examples in the Financial Times,  Business Week, NPR, Washington Post and many other places.] But the reality is terrorists fully intend to harm, maim, terrorize and kill - indiscriminately. There is no crossfire with terrorists. There are no innocent victims. The more casualties the better. We are all in their crosshairs.

Not everyone sees it our way. Speaking at a conference in Washington in May 2010, the head of the US National Security Council’s Counterterrorism and Homeland Security adviser said [according to this Arab News report] the Obama Administration will no longer tolerate use of the terms “Islamist” and “jihadist”. “Jihad" he explained, "is a holy struggle, a legitimate tenet of Islam, meaning to purity oneself or one’s community." His chief executive, President Obama, says he knows America is "at war" but it's a war against "terrorism" and not against any particular religious segment. He feels it is

"absolutely important now for the overwhelming majority of the American people to hang on to that thing that is best in us – a belief in religious tolerance, clarity about who our enemies are... We have to make sure that we don't start turning on each other... If we’re going to successfully reduce the terrorist threat, then we need all the allies we can get."

Not surprising, then, that much of the world is still struggling to understand what motivates "homegrown Muslim plotters who are European citizens" like those arrested this week in the UK (London, Cardiff, Stoke-on-Trent and Birmingham - at least five of them of Bangladeshi origin) and accused of "plotting to carry out a terrorist attack" [to quote the Christian Science Monitor].

There are sane voices in the world of ideas - like the Washington Institute for Near East Policy - who argue that, rather than avoid mention of the religious motivation behind the terrorism of al-Qaeda et al, the Obama administration should sharpen the distinction between Islam and the political ideology they call radical Islamism. But they're not being heard.

The religious motivations of Islamic terrorists are clear. To ignore them is not only self-deluding but likely to produce bad outcomes where it counts - in law enforcement, in the courts, in government.

This has real and practical life-and-death importance. There has been a wave of warnings from intelligence agencies since October 2010 about terror attacks that are coming to European cities. A British university graduate called Taimur Abdulwahab al-Abdaly carried out a mostly-ineffective bombing in Stockholm this month - so the Swedes at least know there is some basis to the stories. The Italians too: in Rome, a bomb was found on a train last week. In the Netherlands, the authorities arrested 12 Somali men two days ago on suspicion of preparing a terrorist attack on the port of Rotterdam, Europe's largest. The list goes on. It will surely get longer.

Simple good sense dictates that it's time to draw a tight connection between the terrorists and the terrorism. It can't be that these people are militants, fighters and insurgents so long as they operate in the Middle East, but then turn into perpetrators of terror only when they arrive in London or Mumbai. When civilized societies fight them by putting police onto the streets and in the airports and train stations and shopping precincts, it's nice to have "all the allies we can get", as the US president says. But it's even more important to have a clear-eyed, concrete sense of who these terrorists are and what makes them tick, tick, tick.

25-Dec-10: 30 rockets this week... so far

Far, far from the attentions of the analysts and the reporters and the photographers and the editors and sub-editors, some 30 rockets and mortars were fired into Israel from Gaza in this past week. 

The intentions of the jihad-minded terrorists are to wreak injury and damage, and very fortunately those intentions were barely fulfilled: a teenage girl was injured Tuesday in a Qassam rocket attack on Kibbutz Zikim in the Ashkelon Beach area (don't feel bad if you were not aware - almost no one is, thanks to the minimalistic reportage). That missile exploded in an open field near a kindergarten, causing two other people to be treated for shock and damaging a number of buildings in the area.

The outcome could easily have been unthinkably worse. The jihadists aim to sow fear and insecurity. And in this they succeeded this week, as they always do.


Traveling outside of Israel this has meant we have not been updating this blog as often as circumstances justify. Hope to get back on track in the next day or two.

11-Dec-10: Are the Gazan terrorists raising the stakes?

It's Saturday night, and this report is just in (source):

Two Palestinian militants were killed and an Israel Defense Forces soldier was moderately wounded on Saturday evening in an exchange of fire on Israel's border with the Gaza Strip. The exchange of fire was prompted by an attempt by Palestinian militants to infiltrate into Israel from Gaza. During the infiltration attempt, mortars were fired towards Israel from Gaza. The wounded IDF soldier was transported to a hospital by helicopter.

And this:

An IDF soldier sustained serious wounds and two Palestinian terrorists were killed during an incident near the Gaza border late Saturday evening. The incident began shortly after 9 pm, when soldiers manning an IDF observation spotted to suspicious figures approaching the security fence, apparently on their hands and knees. IDF tanks opened fire and killed the terrorists. Later, as soldiers were preparing to comb an area inside Palestinian territory, terrorists fired a number of rounds at them, apparently with assault rifles. One soldier was moderately wounded in the incident. He was airlifted to the Soroka Medical Center in Beersheba. Earlier Saturday, a Qassam rocket was fired from the Strip towards the western Negev region. There were no reports of injury or damage. The "Color Red" alert system, which warns residents of incoming rockets, was activated.

11-Dec-10: Incoming rockets attack Israeli communities - again

Homes in Ashkelon, unfortunately within firing range of the jihadists

It's been an unpleasant week for Israelis who live within firing range of the Gazan thugs.

This past Monday (as we reported earlier), a rocket from jihadist Gaza crashed into one of the southern Israel communities located just south of the coastal city of Ashkelon. The Abu Ali Mustapha Brigades wing of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a terrorist splinter faction that claims alliegance to Mahmoud Abbas and his Fatah/PLO, claimed responsibility according to this Palestinian Arab newsagency report. They said it was to mark the anniversary of the PFLP's establishment. For the practitioners of terror, any excuse will do when there are journalists nearby.

On Wednesday night, five more rockets were fired from Hamas-controlled Gaza into southern Israel. An Israeli civilian was injured in the barrage and airlifted to hospital in Beersheba. A kibbutz home was damaged. Residents throughout southern Israel were told to enter bomb shelters on Wednesday night - which along with the hope of scoring civilian injuries or deaths is exactly what Palestinian-Arab terrorism aims to achieve.

"The threat in the area is constant and growing," read a statement issued Thursday by several southern Israeli regional councils.

200 Gazan-Palestinian-Arab rockets have crashed into Israel so far this year.

11-Dec-10: Should this man have been given a public platform?

Atwan: Self-described "highly respected author"

We wrote a week ago (4-Dec-10: Should this man be accorded the respect due to an objective, professional journalist?) about Abdel al-Bari Atwan, a London-based media figure. We wondered whether the appalling statements attributed to him over the years meant that he was "simply the innocent victim of some atrocious misquoting?"

We think we now have the answer. It's "no".

Atwan was invited to speak at the London School of Economics on "How much influence does the Zionist lobby exert in the US and UK?" The invitation came from the LSE's Palestine Society, and the meeting - which took place this past Monday - was chaired by Professor Martha Mundy, a noted supporter of an academic boycott against Israeli institutions of higher education and against Israeli academics. Some of Atwan's comments are in this article and here.  Demonstrating the demagoguery that has characterized other public pronouncements by him, Atwan pointed at several members of his audience and shouted 'You bombed Gaza' to each one, according to media reports.

Asked by one of the LSE students present to condemn Hamas which engineered and executed the massacre in a central Jerusalem restaurant that took the lives of 15 innocent people including our teenage daughter, Atwan - a self-described "highly respected author" - said: "Would you want me to condemn those who are resisting the occupation?"

The correct answer of course was "Yes, if by resistance you mean the cold-blooded, deliberate and enthusiastic murder of innocent people."

Atwan is a classic exponent of foaming-at-the-mouth hate-speech delivered under the rather thin guise of political commentary. We are left wondering why a respected academic institution like the LSE would give the man a public platform.

9-Dec-10: Can we risk freeing terrorists?

Frimet Roth's op-ed below appears in today's Jerusalem Post print and online editions.

The rise and fall of the Gaza blockade

By FRIMET ROTH

09-Dec-2010      

This month, we learned that the closure will, for all intents and purposes, expire. And nobody, not even Schalit activists, has uttered a syllable of protest.

Last week, 21 aid groups launched a high-profile PR attack entitled “Dashed Hopes” directed at the blockade of Gaza. Aside from the disproportionate focus on a problem far overshadowed by starving populations elsewhere, the illustrated nine-page document suffered from a glaring omission: mention of Gilad Schalit.

The Gaza blockade was born exactly one year after Schalit’s capture by Hamas militants. It was imposed in response to Hamas’s political takeover of Gaza in June 2007.

However, it soon acquired an intrinsic connection to the campaign to free Schalit even though its full potential as leverage was never tapped.

Israelis march to highlight the need to free Gilad Schalit,
hostage of the Hamas regime in Gaza

In February 2009, it was still a nominal bargaining chip in Israel’s dealings with Hamas. Eli Yishai, then deputy prime minister, stated: “Israel is facing a serious humanitarian crisis and it is called Gilad Schalit and... until he is returned home, not only will we not allow more cargo to reach the residents of Gaza, we will even diminish it.”

In June 2009, US Middle East envoy George Mitchell advised a reversal of that policy, but Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu refused.

In July 2009, leaders of the campaign to free Schalit demonstrated at the Erez crossing, blocking the passage of food and medicine to the Gaza Strip.

When the government announced an easing of the blockade after the Mavi Marmara flotilla affair, Noam Schalit railed at Netanyahu: “And where is Gilad in this whole story?”

YET THIS month we learned that the blockade will, for all intents and purposes, expire. And nobody, not even Schalit activists, has uttered a syllable of protest.

This may be the natural outcome of years of brainwashing. We have been bombarded, by the media and by some politicians, with the message that Schalit must be freed “at any price.”

No number of convicted terrorists is too high and no risk of future deaths is too grave.

“Yes, at any price” wrote Haaretz columnist Yoel Marcus in June 2008.

“Gilad Schalit must be released at any cost,” chimed in his colleague Gideon Levy in December 2009.

In December 2008, Defense Minister Ehud Barak said, “We may have to make tough decisions on that matter [the release of prisoners with blood on their hand] as well.” Journalist Eitan Haber has been a particularly staunch advocate of a mass prisoner release. In July 2010, he wrote: “The people who were once celebrated IDF generals... and later became prime ministers – freed many more terrorists in prisoner swaps than our ‘civilian’ prime ministers... Maybe they attributed supreme value to comradeship, and the notion that ‘Israel will do everything.’”

In March 2009, a Dahaf public opinion poll showed that 69% favored releasing hundreds of Palestinian prisoners if it would bring Gilad home.

This month, in an interview with the Associated Press, Maj.-Gen. Eitan Dangot – a key policy maker in relation to the Palestinian areas – unveiled upcoming stages in the termination of the blockade.

Come spring, he promised, Israel will open the gates of Gaza to textiles, furniture and agriculture as well as allowing more exports.

The interview covered various details of the new policy and the rationale behind it. Yet Dangot failed to mention Gilad Schalit even once. He made no demand for his release or even for a first Red Cross visit.

The idea that Gazans are suffering a “humanitarian crisis” has long been popular in anti-Israel circles. But as Dangot knows full well, photographs of well-stocked Gazan shops, the grand openings of a new mall and of an Olympic-sized pool have put the lie to that. Recent critiques of the blockade do not speak of a humanitarian crisis.

Instead, they hunt for ills they can pin on the blockade. A November Huffington Post piece bemoaned “creeping restrictions on women’s freedom imposed by Hamas,” and the “the erosion of women’s freedoms compounded by their lack of participation in politics.”

But the bloggers concluded that this is Israel’s fault: “The blockade... is hampering women’s efforts to... advance gender equality.”

With similarly baffling illogic, in an October 2010 Haaretz column, Amira Hass dismissed as an “apocryphal legend” the fact that the blockade was imposed in reaction to Hamas’ rise to power and to its terror attacks. “Go back and open Gaza’s gates” she urges.

THE TRUTH is that the Left is banging on open doors. Policy-makers led by Dangot are doing a fine job of eliminating the blockade – and very transparently too. They are confident the media will gloss over the news, and that the public will remain apathetic.

Why have the attempts to free Schalit failed?

The major error has been to navigate only one course toward Gilad’s freedom: haggling over the list of terrorists to be released. The blockade, even when still officially in effect and defended by our government, was never strictly enforced. Supplies were routinely allowed into Gaza. Thousands of ill Gazans and their companions were admitted to Israel for medical treatment.

And if Schalit’s own government is happy to make unilateral concessions to his captors, why should foreigners, humanitarian organizations or the UN agonize over him?

But if Dangot expected kudos for shrinking the blockade, he must be disappointed. Following his interview, EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton had a litany of complaints about the matter. “Gaza remains a source of great concern for me... we think that what’s happened with Gaza is unsatisfactory,” she concluded on behalf of all EU foreign ministers.

Ashton made no reference to Gilad Schalit.

The very next day, Lynn Pascoe, chief UN political affairs official, joined the chorus. His monthly briefing to the Security Council stated that the priority of the UN is still “the rebuilding of a viable Gazan economy,” and that the process would begin with “the resumption of exports, free movement of people into and out of Gaza, the return of the Palestinian Authority to the crossing... [and] the timely entry of construction material.”

Pascoe did not utter the name Gilad Schalit.

One week later, “Dashed Hopes” made headlines.

According to most sources, Hamas is refusing to free Schalit because Israel is digging in its heels over the release of 15 Palestinian prisoners. One of those is Ahlam Tamimi. She is serving 16 consecutive life sentences for her role in the 2001 terror bombing of Jerusalem’s Sbarro restaurant. Fifteen civilians died, eight of them children, one of them my daughter Malki.

“I’m not sorry for what I did,” Tamimi said two years ago from her cell. “We’ll become free from the occupation, and then I will be free from prison.”

The Gaza blockade is a worthy alternative to the dangerous option that Israel is pursuing. We must protest the opening of our borders with Gaza, or our children could soon face a free Tamimi again.

Can we risk that?

The writer is a freelancer in Jerusalem. Her daughter Malki was murdered at 15 in the Sbarro restaurant bombing (2001). She and her husband founded the Malki Foundation which provides concrete support for Israeli families of all faiths for home care of a special-needs child.

7-Dec-10: Look, up in the sky -- no, don't bother

You would have to search hard to find any news channel covering the fact that a Qassam rocket fired by the jihadists of Gaza exploded in the fields just south of Ashkelon yesterday (Monday). Ynet mentions it but it's buried deep inside the site. Fortunately, no injuries or damage were reported but this, of course, was not the intention of the rocket-firing thugs.

Since we're speaking of the intentions of the terrorists, it's timely to mention that the terrorist forces of Hezbollah, arrayed right across Israel's tense border with Lebanon as we write this, are now reliably thought to be equipped with 40,000 to 50,000 rockets and missiles. This report says they can now easily hit Tel-Aviv. In effect this means they can choose to hit any target within Israel.

A WikiLeaks piece from yesterday says Bashir al-Assad, the Syrian president, was "reprimanded" by US officials for supplying deadly weaponry to the Shiite terror group Hezbollah a week after assuring them he would not. (Oh the shock/horror!) In February 2010, Hillary Clinton, the US Secretary of State, wrote to the Syrian:

"In our meetings last week it was stated that Syria is not transferring any 'new' missiles to Lebanese Hezbollah... We are aware, however, of current Syrian efforts to supply Hezbollah with ballistic missiles. I must stress that this activity is of deep concern to my government, and we strongly caution you against such a serious escalation."

Despite this "deep concern", Syria's foreign ministry promptly rejected the allegations and now, 9 months later, Pentagon officials say the flow of deadly weapons to Hezbollah is continuing with no signs of restraint from any quarter.

How does all of this square with the Obama administration's special efforts to engage Hezbollah and the Syrian regime as part of the president's attempts to foster a wider peace in the Middle East? A syndicated article from AFP yesterday offers an answer, under a telling headline: "Cables reveal US flailing as arms traffic cop".

So when does US policy stop being termed flailing and starts being called failing? Which it certainly is.

No one likes being wrong. But here's the point. If you're sitting in Washington and you're wrong, life goes on. On the other if, like us, you sit and live and work in Jerusalem or Herzliya, and the US is wrong in how it sizes up Syria and its grotesquely-over-armed Hezbollah proxies, then it's we who pay a steep price. As the New York Times notes:

Israeli officials told American officials in November 2009 that if war broke out, they assumed that Hezbollah would try to launch 400 to 600 rockets at day and sustain the attacks for at least two months.

But it's actually a good deal worse:

Break the Silence on Syria's Nuclear Program - Graham Allison and Olli Heinonen (Wall Street Journal): The U.S. has joined other major powers in a dangerous conspiracy of silence on Syria's nuclear program. Syria foreswore nuclear weapons when it ratified the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty in 1969... yet Syria was able to secretly buy a nuclear reactor from North Korea. If Israel had not bombed the Al-Kibar reactor site in September 2007, it would be producing plutonium by now for Syria's first nuclear bomb. Since November 2008, nine IAEA reports (the latest released last month) have documented Syria's noncompliance with its requests for more details about its nuclear program.

And now this:

Possible Syrian Nuke Facility Identified by Satellite - Yaakov Katz
A compound in western Syria with buildings and hundreds of missile-shaped items has been identified as functionally related to a nuclear reactor Israel destroyed northeast of Damascus in 2007. Satellite footage of the site in Masyaf was obtained by the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security. Several years ago, a military base near Masyaf was mentioned as a possible hiding place for weapons of mass destruction that Saddam Hussein might have sent to Syria before the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. ISIS head David Albright told the Jerusalem Post on Thursday that the site could be a military storage facility. "We have identified one site and learned the approximate locations of three other sites as well," Albright said. (Jerusalem Post)

The frightening thing is, as the torrent of Wikileaks demonstrates, that politicians in all the relevant places including Washington almost certainly know this even if we did not. And yet this awareness does not translate into effective action.

The price of inaction and going round in circles keeps rising. And meanwhile the steady drumbeat of falling rockets on Israeli soil goes entirely un-noticed.

4-Dec-10: Should this man be accorded the respect due to an objective, professional journalist?

Is Abdel al-Bari Atwan the kind of person who should be given
public platforms in highly prominent settings?  

As newspaper editors go, Abdel al-Bari Atwan gets more than the average amount of prominence.

Given the nature of his political views, he gets a surprisingly respectable degree of respect from such mainstream media channels as NPR, Sky News, CNN and the BBC (who call him Abdel-Bari Atwan) which have hosted him frequently and which, for reasons which can only leave us wondering, present him as an objective observer on events in this part of the world.

Given what is known about him from the public record (see an earlier blog article of ours: 16-Mar-08: The unindicted co-conspirators), this might be surprising.

Mr. Atwan edits a London-based Arabic-language newspaper called Al-Quds Al-Arabi. The paper takes a robustly nationalistic Arab line and has several notable scoops to its name. In August 1996, it was the first to publish a fatwa, or declaration of war, "Against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places." The author was Osama bin Laden.

In October 2003, after Atwan wrote that the hatred directed towards the United States by the Arab world is the fault of the United States itself, a US-based, Yemenite journalist and liberal columnist called Munir Al-Mawari who writes for another London Arabic-language daily Al-Sharq Al-Awsat, made some interesting observations:

"The Abd Al-Bari Atwan [appearing] on CNN is completely different from the Abd Al-Bari Atwan on the Al-Jazeera network or in his Al-Quds Al-Arabi daily. On CNN, Atwan speaks solemnly and with total composure, presenting rational and balanced views. This is in complete contrast with his fuming appearances on Al-Jazeera and in Al-Quds Al-Arabi, in which he whips up the emotions of multitudes of viewers and readers."

We have been pondering those two faces of Atwan since learning that he is going to be honored by being invited to lecture publicly at the London School of Economics this coming Monday. (Source: "Terror supporting' Arabic-daily editor to speak at LSE")

The honor extended to this rather edgy journalist has aroused some controvery. Indeed, on his own personal website (the one where he describes himself as a "highly respected author" - and he would certainly know), Atwan claims at least some the uglier quotations attributed to him are false:

"I did not say any of the things listed on the Wikipedia site... They are false allegations, part of a smear campaign against me".

So in the interests of an open public record, and in the hope that someone attending the Atwan lecture in London might get the great man to go on the record and actually repudiate them, here are some Atwan statements that can be found in various online locations.

On one hand:

"I do not endorse or in any way support al-Qa'ida's agenda… I utterly condemn the attacks on innocent citizens in the West".
[Source: The Secret History of Al-Qa'ida, Abdel Bari Atwan, Abacus (2006), ISBN 978-0-34-912035-5, p1]

On the other:

"The events of 11 September will be remembered as the end of the US empire. This is because all empires collapse when they pursue the arrogance of power."
Source: BBC

Sadam Hussein (who murdered countless numbers of Arabs and Iraqi Kurds) should be honored for preserving "the unity of Iraq, its Arab and Islamic identity and the coexistence of its different communities". Source: Africa News, December 31, 2006

In the case of war, Iran will retaliate against its Arab neighbors, American bases in the Gulf and "Allah willing, it will attack Israel, as well... If the Iranian missiles strike Israel, by Allah, I will go to Trafalgar Square and dance with delight."
Source: Wikipedia, referring to an interview in Arabic on Lebanese ANB television station, June 27, 2007 (also referred to in this Jerusalem Post article). The actual video clip (in Arabic with English subtitles) can be seen here. (Keep in mind that Atwan explicitly denies he said what is recorded in this video. They are "false allegations, part of a smear campaign".)

Atwan said the March 2008 point-blank, cold-blooded shooting-massacre by a Palestinian Arab gunman of eight unarmed high school students, most of them aged 15 or 16, at Jerusalem's Mercaz HaRav yeshiva "was justified." Their school is to blame, Atwan claims, by "hatching Israeli extremists and fundamentalists". Atwan says the celebrations in Gaza that followed the massacre symbolized "the courage of the Palestinian nation." Source: The Jerusalem Post

Depending on where you stand, justifying a terrorist massacre is not the worst of crimes. On the other hand, given what is at stake when it comes to defeating the practitioners of terror and their supporters, is  Abdel al-Bari Atwan the kind of person who should be given public platforms in highly prominent settings?

Or is Abdel al-Bari Atwan simply the innocent victim of some atrocious misquoting?

2-Dec-10: It's hot, and especially on the Hamas border

On yet another day of unseasonable heat as well as truly tragic news from Israel, there are all-too-familiar reports of an attempt by Gazan terrorists early this morning to penetrate the Israel/Gaza border and carry out another attack on Israelis.

Ynet says IDF aircraft and tanks fired on several Palestinian Gazan Arabs trying to cross the border near Kibbutz Kfar Aza around dawn. Kfar Aza, a sun-drenched, almost idyllic kibbutz community created in 1951 by Jewish immigrants from Egypt and from the Moroccan community of Tangiers, is ten kilometers south of Sderot, and unbearably close to the viper's nest on the far side of the border with Hamas-controlled Gaza. In May 2008, rocket and mortar fire from the Gazan terrorists crashed into Kfar Aza and killed Jimmy Kedoshim while he was tending his garden. A champion paraglider, Jimmy turned his love for parachuting and aerial photography into a business. A photo he took of his community from the air, showing its proximity to the misery of Gaza, is above - source here.)

According to Haaretz, the terrorists were laying explosives intended to injure or kill Israelis.

The IDF alert system was triggered and a co-ordinated operation of the Paratroop Brigade, the Armored Corps, the Engineering Corps and the Air Force responded. The terrorist gunmen were shot before they managed to open fire. Weapons found on their bodies are being analyzed. The men's identities are still not published, but it's a safe bet that photographs of wailing relatives and angry pall-bearers will be on the news-wires before the day is out.

People often observe the disproportionate numbers of dead and injured on the two sides of the Gazan border. Why is Gazan terrorist activity not producing more Israeli victims? Because Israeli defence forces are constantly on the alert. It's not because the jihadists of Gaza have seen the light, but because they are foiled most of the time. Sadly they are not foiled all the time.

Friday morning UPDATE: The terrorists were sent by Islamic Jihad, according to this Palestinian Arab source which quotes a spokesman for the jihadist saying the two were "planting explosive charges in the eastern area in case Israel carried out any attack." The semi-official Egyptian news agency Al-Ahram writes this morning that the would-be killers were eliminated by what it terms "Israeli occupation forces", making you wonder which territory these Israelis, firing from the Sderot area inside the the 1967 "Green Line" are occupying - not that it matters much to such demagogues for whom Israelis are by definition occupiers.