skip to main |
skip to sidebar
1:41 PM
Reut R. Cohen
From Haaretz:By Barak Ravid
Haaretz | Tuesday, November 25, 2008
Shas is launching a campaign to seek compensation for Jewish refugees who came to Israel from Arab states. The campaign, part of the ultra-Orthodox party's election platform, counters Palestinian demands for the right of return of their refugees.
"Israel must state that no peace agreement would be implemented without solving the problem of the Jews from Middle Eastern states, with an emphasis on restituting their property, which is estimated at hundreds of millions of dollars," Religious Affairs Minister Yitzhak Cohen, of Shas, said Monday at Bar-Ilan University.
Part of Shas' plan consists of tracking down and registering Jewish property in Arab states, as a basis for future negotiations or agreements regarding the compensation for the Jewish refugees.
Cohen told Haaretz Monday that there are some 850,000 Jewish refugees from Arab states, most of whom are living in Israel.
"It must be proclaimed that any system of compensating Palestinian refugees as part of a peace agreement will include a parallel one to compensate the Jewish refugees," he said.
The issue was raised in Israel's negotiations with the Palestinian Authority during Prime Minister Ehud Barak's term, including at the Camp David conference in July 2000. Today Pensioners Affairs Minister Rafi Eitan (Pensioners Party) is in charge of the issue.
Cohen's move is meant to appeal to Shas' voters, most of whom have their origins or ancestry in Muslim lands, ahead of the elections. He outlined the party's plan in his address yesterday, beginning with the need to define the refugee problem as a multi-national issue, one that affected hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees from North Africa and the Persian Gulf.
"The uprooted Jews' problem is equal to, if not greater than, the Palestinian refugees' problem," Cohen said.
Israel will make it clear in negotiations with the Palestinians and in international forums that "a just solution to the refugee problem," as defined in UN Security Council Resolution 194, includes the Jewish refugees as well, he said.
Cohen suggests that the Foreign Ministry start a public campaign in the UN and European countries.
"Since 1947, the Security Council has adopted 126 resolutions regarding the Palestinian refugees, but passed no resolution about the Jews from Arab states, although their numbers are similar," he said.
"The international community assisted the Palestinian refugees with billions of dollars, while the Jews from Arab states received no help or compensation."
In April of this year, the U.S. House of Representatives adopted a resolution conditioning any help or compensation for Palestinian refugees on similar help or compensation to Jews from Arab states.
9:10 AM
Reut R. Cohen
From the Investigative Project on Terror:DALLAS – A jury convicted five former officials at the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development (HLF) on all counts in the Hamas-support case after 8 days of deliberations.
The men, Shukri Abu-Baker, Ghassan Elashi, Mohamed El-Mezain, Mufid Abdulqader and Abdelrahman Odeh, could face up to 20 years in prison for their convictions on conspiracy counts, including conspiring to provide material support to terrorists. The verdicts, read Monday afternoon, ended a two-year saga in what is considered the largest terror financing case since the 9/11 attacks.
In the original trial last year, jurors acquitted El-Mezain on 31 of the 32 counts against him, but could not reach unanimous verdicts on any other counts, prompting a mistrial.
Prosecutors made a series of significant adjustments, from dropping 29 counts each against defendants Mufid Abdulqader and Abdelrahman Odeh, to adding new witnesses who could put the charity support in context. In addition, jurors in this trial saw three exhibits Israeli military officials seized from the Palestinian Authority which showed the PA also considered HLF to be a Hamas financer and that an HLF-supported charity committee was controlled by Hamas.
The result was a much more streamlined case that followed a logical narrative, said Peter Margulies, a law professor at Roger Williams University in Rhode Island. Seeing the Palestinian Authority reach the same conclusion as the U.S. government had to have helped, he said.
In addition, prosecutors provided summary exhibits that served as "a road map" to the case and had to help jurors deliberate, Margulies said. "The jury was able to look at the evidence and get past the perceived biases of any of the witnesses and see the evidence as a whole."
That evidence made clear that the defendants knew where the money raised in the U.S. was going despite legal prohibitions against support for Hamas.
The verdict was hailed by M. Zuhdi Jasser, founder of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy. Prosecutors prevailed because they were able to "connect the ideology of political Islam and the overriding mission of Islamist organizations like the HLF to their desire to contribute to the efforts of terror groups, like Hamas," he said. "When this connection is made we will see the return of a guilty verdict. In future [terrorism financing] cases DOJ will not only have to connect the financial dots but [will have] to demonstrate an overarching common Islamist mission."
Prosecutors say HLF was part of a Palestine Committee – a conglomerate of U.S. based Muslim organizations and individuals committed to helping Hamas financially and politically. HLF was its fundraising arm, a designation formalized by Hamas deputy political director Mousa Abu Marzook in 1994. Support for Hamas became illegal with a 1995 executive order by President Bill Clinton and subsequent congressional action.
Defense attorneys say the men were simply providing desperately needed charity to Palestinians living under Israeli occupation. HLF routed millions of dollars through a series of Palestinian charities known as zakat committees. While Hamas was designated as a terrorist organization by the U.S. Treasury, those zakat committees never were. That, defense attorneys argued, meant donations to them did not violate the law.
"This is one of the most significant victories the Justice Department has won in the war on terror," said Andrew McCarthy, who prosecuted blind cleric Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman and 11 others for conspiring to blow up a series of New York landmarks. "Financing is the life-blood of jihadist organizations like Hamas. With the assistance of willing co-conspirators, they conceal their activities and use the Muslim obligation of charitable giving to mask support that is actually channeled to their murderous agenda. Today's verdicts say, loudly and clearly, that Americans aren't fooled and won't tolerate it. As a former federal prosecutor, I am especially proud of the assistant U.S. attorneys who persevered through some real travails in securing justice for the American people."
Journalist Douglas Farah studied the HLF evidence on behalf of the Nine Eleven Finding Answers (NEFA) Foundation and was the first to identify the significance of a Muslim Brotherhood memorandum outlining the group's ambitions in America. He said Monday's verdict has implications for unindicted co-conspirators in the case – most notably the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) - because it validates what already was "a clear public record of why these groups were founded and how."
The Muslim Brotherhood memo called for "a kind of grand jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and ‘sabotaging' its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God's religion is made victorious over all other religions."
CAIR is listed as a member of the Brotherhood's Palestine Committee and founders Omar Ahmad and Nihad Awad are included on a telephone list of committee members. CAIR has not refuted the evidence, Farah said. Government officials ought to study that evidence to realize CAIR is not what it presents itself as.
"The main currency CAIR and these groups have is their access," he said. "The time is now, with full justification and with a full public record - not a whispering campaign, not innuendo – for the government to now say without hesitation: you don't have access here. We don't want to deal with you."
After the verdicts were read, jurors were asked to determine whether convictions for money laundering meant HLF assets should be forfeited to the government, the Dallas Morning News reported.
11:25 AM
Reut R. Cohen
The following is an excerpt from my article for Pajama's Media about the Muslim Students Association:The Muslim Students Association enjoys the support of many university administrators despite disturbing activities.
The Investigative Project on Terrorism (IPT), a non-profit research organization founded by Steve Emerson, published a letter on the IPT website which was written by a Muslim Students Association (MSA) member. The letter urges Muslims not to vote in elections this November. While an overwhelming number of Muslim-Americans supported Barack Obama, the MSA student suggested that both candidates are “kafir” and “poisonous.”
Farhad Akbari, the San Diego student, writes:Whether you vote for the white kafir or the half-black kafir, they will kill our brothers and sisters. They will subjugate our brothers and sisters. And they will certainly support Israel in killing our brothers and sisters. There is no “lesser of two evils” here. They are both greater evils. The lesser evil is avoiding the situation, as both are equally poisonous to the cause of Islam. … Brothers and sisters, I have one thing to say: DON’T VOTE.
IPT accurately points out that these radical views are not anomalies, and are pervasive among various MSA chapters....
Read my full report here.
8:58 AM
Reut R. Cohen
This is a 30-minute preview of the new documentary "The Third Jihad" which focuses on homegrown radicalism and terrorism.
Dr. Zuhdi Jasser was involved in the creation of this documentary. He is a Syrian-American who formed the American Islamic Forum for Democracy. He argues that Muslims must take a stance against all terrorism carried out in the name of the Islamic religion. Jasser also believes that Muslims need to distance themselves from violent hadiths, suras and other passages in Islamic texts.
I have heard Jasser speak on several occasions. In one talk, Jasser spoke about the treatment of minorities under radical Islamic government in Syria. My mother is half Syrian. Several of my mother's relatives were killed in Syria. Jasser is one of the few Americans I know who recognizes that Jews suffered under Syrian and Islamic governments. Jasser opposes any imposition of shar'ia law.
10:38 AM
Reut R. Cohen
Today we honor the men and women who have defended our nation and kept us free.
I want to thank anyone who has served in the military for their service.
10:34 AM
Reut R. Cohen
The following article is from Reuters and was written by Peter Graff. It notes how the population of Jews in Iraq has been totally decimated.BAGHDAD (Reuters) - One of the last eight Jews in Baghdad, a portly retired accountant, erupts in a bellyful of laughter when asked why he never married.
"I was a playboy. Don't write that!" he jokes, grinning. "How old do you think I am? Wrong. I'm 65! Don't write that! Write that I am 55!"
His government ID proves his age, and on the back it says, unmistakably: "Religion: Jewish."
He has made contact with a reporter, not because he wants to tell the story of his persecuted community, but because he wants to complain about the landlord who is raising his rent.
"Because we are Jewish he knows we can do nothing. He isn't afraid because he knows we have no tribe here. Don't use my name."
Once one of the largest Jewish communities in the Middle East, Baghdad Jews have now nearly vanished while the country has been consumed by sectarian war.
Speaking in fluent English, the ex-accountant launches into a description of the Baghdad of his youth, one of the Muslim world's most cosmopolitan cities.
He recites the names of legendary social clubs where Jews, Christians and Muslims mingled in better days, with music and whisky and parties that ran through the night.
"So many people -- Muslim people -- say if the Jewish people come back it will be nicer," he says.
His family have left. Some are in London, some in the United States. His father was offered a chance to move to Canada, but turned it down because he wanted to die and be buried in Iraq.
The ex-accountant himself stayed, but if he can sell his father's house -- now a ruin bombed out in the Iran war in the 1980s -- he will finally leave.
"I want to sell the house and go. I like Iraq, but I am fed up. We had very nice times in Iraq, but now we don't like it."
Iraq's Jewish community dates from biblical times. According to Charles Tripp's History of Iraq, the country was home to 117,000 Jews in 1947.
Under Ottoman rule, well into the first half of the 20th century, Jews made up about a fifth of the population of the capital. Some of the villas in neighborhoods along the Tigris still have six-pointed stars of David in their stucco.
How many Jews are there now?
"We know them all," says the ex-accountant, counting.
There's the ex-accountant himself, plus the nephew with whom he shares a rented house in Baghdad's central Karrada district. There's the man who lives near them, the man who leads the community, the very old woman, the male doctor and the female dentist. And the man whose brother was a goldsmith.
The goldsmith married the dentist a few years ago. A few months later, he was abducted by gunmen.
"They came to his house and took him. He disappeared. They left his car, they left his mobile. They just took him."
So that leaves eight. Eight Jews left.
The synagogue in central Baghdad has been boarded up since 2003. The ex-accountant occasionally runs into some of the other Jews on the street, but confesses he isn't much for religion.
"We don't know how to pray," he says. "Hebrew books we have everywhere in the synagogue, but we don't know how to read it. Some words I know. The important one is Adonai. Adonai is God. We believe in God."
In the old days, Jews were an integral part of Iraqi life. A relative of the ex-accountant was finance minister decades ago. But beginning in the late 1940s, successive Arab governments accused Baghdad's Jews of supporting Zionism.
Some were jailed, others were barred from government posts, and thousands upon thousands left for Israel or the West.
By the time of Saddam Hussein's fall, the ex-accountant estimates there were only a few dozen Jews left. Western organizations came and evacuated most of the rest.
"A woman called Rachel, she came here took some of them to the Jewish community in London, I think," he said.
In 2003, he went to the Green Zone to meet a cousin who was born in the United States and had come to Iraq to work for the U.S.-run administration. The American woman was shocked when her mother put them in touch.
"She said: incredible! You are still here? She did not know she had a cousin in Iraq," he said.
Apart from his quarrel with his landlord, the ex-accountant says he has had few problems with the neighbors, most of whom don't know he is Jewish, some of whom don't care.
"Somebody says 'You are Christian', I don't say anything. Somebody says 'You are Muslim', I don't say anything. I think most people think we are Christian because they don't know there are still Jews in Iraq."
(Editing by Matthew Jones)
Also See:
- 1,000,000 Middle Eastern Jews
- The Persecution of Jews in Syria
- The Persecution of Jews in Iraq
10:22 AM
Reut R. Cohen
I would hope that most Muslims would want to distance themselves from a hate-monger and terrorist supporter like imam Amir Abdel Malik Ali.
Amir-Abdel Malik-Ali (also known as Abdul Malik Ali and Abd Al-Malik) is a convert to Islam and an imam associated with the Masjid Al Islam mosque in Oakland. A graduate of San Francisco State University and a former Nation of Islam member, he is a frequent guest lecturer at Muslim Student Union and Muslim Students Association events. A passionate supporter of Hamas and Hezbollah, he helped organize a July 1999 rally in San Francisco at which Imam Abdul-Alim Musa proudly displayed a cashier's check made out to "Hamas, Palestine." Malik-Ali endorses suicide bombings as a legitimate "resistance" tactic: "Palestinian mothers are supporting their children who are suicide bombers, saying, 'Go honey, go!' That ain't suicide; that's martyrdom."
