The Religion of Peace VIII - The Saudi Arabian Borat

Borat: Would you, as a human being, be willing to shake hands with a Jew? (Saudi Iqra TV about the Arab public's attitudes toward Jews)

Reporter Asks Strangers if they'd Shake Hands With a Jew

http://www.memritv.org/view.asp?P1=275

The Palestinianization of Europe

FP: You have introduced a new concept: "Palestinianism." What does it mean exactly?

Bat Ye'or: I think that it is, precisely, "Palestinianism" which is at the root of Europe's decadence. It is an ideology based on a replacement theology whereby Palestine replaces Israel. As it has been conceived and instigated together by European and Arab intellectuals and politicians, it combines the worst of both cultures. For the Arab and Muslim world, Palestinianism embodies the ideology and aims of jihad against a rebellious dhimmi people. It is therefore based on a Muslim culture and theology that deny territorial independence and sovereignty to any non-Muslim people.

Palestinianism opposes Israel on two main points: 1) Jews being a dhimmi people cannot rule Muslims ¨C even less liberate and govern their country, especially if it has been formerly conquered and colonized by jihad -- such as Israel, Spain, the Balkans, Hungary and parts of Europe. Jews must be brought under the yoke of Islam. And this, of course, applies to Christians as well; both must be reduced to submission and dhimmitude. 2) Muslim doctrine rejects the Bible, it does not accept that it is the history of the people of Israel and the source of Christianity. Muslims believe that the biblical narrative, as it is transcribed in the Koran, is the story of the Muslim people and of Muslim prophets. For this reason, they deny the historical patrimony and ancestry of Jews and Christians in the Holy Land. For them, both Testaments have an Islamic source and describe an Islamic history since the people in the Bible and Jesus himself (Isa) were Muslims. Judaism and Christianity are seen as falsification of Islam. This is the inner core of the ideology -- even a doctrine -- of Palestinianism and of its war against Israel.

The European trend has added to it traditional Christian antisemitism which condemns the Jews to perpetual exile till they convert. The Palestinian war against Israel, strongly encouraged by many in Europe, came as a magnificent opportunity to continue and maintain the culture of hate and denigration against the Jews -- now the state of Israel -- and by lending a moral and political support to a second Holocaust. Europe has been the biggest supporter and subsidizer for the Palestinians as well as their ideological teachers.

FP: Europe has been Palestinianized hasn't it? What have the consequences been to Europe?

Bat Ye'or: The consequences for Europe are manifold, profound and it seems irreversible. Palestinianism has been the most effective tool to divide, weaken and destroy the West. But this process could only happen because an institutional apparatus, the European Community (EC) -- which in 1993 became the European Union -- could impose Palestinianism over all its member-states as a common foreign policy.

While in the Arab and Muslim world Palestinianism was the jihadist tool to eradicate the independence and freedom of the Jewish dhimmi people, in Europe it assumes another signification. The EC unofficial support for the Arab League jihad to destroy Israel restores a culture of hate that is self-destructive for Europe itself. Whatever Europeans may believe today, their whole spiritual and humanistic culture come from the biblical prophets, from the liberation of the Hebrews from slavery, and the promotion of human equality and dignity, from the salvific virtue of humility, self-criticism and the asking of forgiveness, from the praise of peace and the separation of religion from the state, and so on¡­and on. All Christian feasts are Christianized Jewish feasts; Jewish holy books are Christian holy books.

Joining the jihadist camp involves the suppression of those links that structure and support Christianity, thereby weakening it, and leaving it ready to fall apart. And hate destroys its bearer more than its victim. It means to adhere to the jihadist ideology that seeks to impose a totalitarian Islamic rule over the world, a view that does not conceive of human plurality in equality, or accept criticism, or freedom of expression and opinion. It means that Christianity as much as Judaism, as religions and civilizations, are denied and deserve to be destroyed.

Palestinianism endeavors to suppress the links between Christianity and Judaism because it professes that Christianity was born from Islam, from a Jesus who was a Muslim prophet -- the Koranic Isa -- and very different from the Jewish Jesus described by the four evangelists -- themselves nurtured by the First Testament and not the Koran. In Europe, the theological replacement of Judaism triggered by Palestinianism, affects also politics. Except for derogatory comments, the media avoids mentioning Israel as if already it didn't exist, thus suppressing it by a silent boycott. Another European trend consists in imposing a strict historical similarity and equivalence between Israel and the Arabs and Palestinians, whereas there are none.

Since Palestinianism is now the foremost ideology of Europe, it has determined European support for jihadist tactics. And jihad is not like any war, it represents a whole theological war corpus, with its holy strategy and ritual tactics. Europe justified the PLO aim to destroy Israel from the 1970s, its abductions and killings of civilians, its air piracy, kidnapping and terrorism, blaming the victims instead of the perpetrators. In order to justify these crimes that are so contrary to humanist values and moral, Europe had to demonize Israel, to paint it as the biggest enemy of peace and has therefore rejuvenated its passionate love to hate Israel, vilifying it with its own crimes.

That's not all. Most Europeans do not agree with such policy. Many denounced it and fought against it. Hence through a coordinate campaign monitored by the networks of the European Union bodies, a system linking politics to markets, culture, universities, media and opinion makers, has spread its totalitarian grip over the member-states in order to impose a despicable culture of lies and denial that support Europe's pro-Palestinian foreign policy.

More>

Harvard: How the Media Partnered with Hezbollah

"Enhanced" plumes of smoke and cloned buildings in Beirut, by Al-Reuters (Adnan Hajj fauxtography incident)

The Media as a Weapon in Asymmetrical Conflict - Full Report in PDF Form

O que é Guerra Assimétrica?

“Thinking” like a real leftist

1. You have to be against capital punishment, but support abortion on demand.
   
2. You have to believe that businesses create oppression and governments create prosperity.
   
3. You have to believe that guns in the hands of law-abiding people are more of a threat than Nuclear weapons technology in the hands of Chinese and North Korean communists or islamists.
   
4. You have to believe that there was no art before Federal funding.
   
5. You have to believe that global temperatures are less affected by cyclical documented changes in the earth's climate and more affected by soccer moms driving SUV's.
   
6. You have to believe that gender roles are artificial but being homosexual is natural.
   
7. You have to believe that the AIDS virus is spread by a lack of federal funding.
   
8. You have to believe that the same teacher who can't teach fourth graders how to read is somehow qualified to teach those same kids about sex.
   
9. You have to believe that hunters don't care about nature, but loony activists who have never been outside of big cities do.
   
10. You have to believe that self-esteem is more important than actually doing something to earn it.
    
11. You have to believe the NRA is bad because it supports certain parts of the Constitution, while the ACLU is good because it supports certain parts of the Constitution.
    
12. You have to believe that taxes are too low, but ATM fees are too high.
    
13. You have to believe that Margaret Sanger and Gloria Steinem are more important to American history than Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Edison, and A.G. Bell
    
14. You have to believe that standardized tests are racist, but racial quotas and set-asides are not.
    
15. You have to believe that Hillary Clinton is normal and is a very nice person.
    
16. You have to believe that the only reason socialism hasn't worked anywhere it's been tried is because the right people haven't been In charge.
    
17. You have to believe that homosexual parades displaying drag, transvestites, and bestiality should be constitutionally protected, but displaying a nativity scene in public during Christmas should be illegal.
    
18. You have to believe that this message is a part of a vast right wing conspiracy.
    
19. You have to believe that it's okay to give Federal workers off on Christmas Day but it's not okay to say "Merry Christmas."
    
20. You have to believe that not doing anything (or surrender) is the best way to prevent another terrorist attack.

Note: only to be taken as a joke, but nobody can stop you from thinking otherwise.

The Media's War on Israel

By Mitchell Bard

When Israel retaliated against Hezbollah during last summer’s war, it was forced to fight two battles: one against the Lebanon-based terrorist organization, and one against a hopelessly biased global media. The first serious study of the media’s behavior throughout the conflict has confirmed this impression.

The study, released in February and titled “The Israeli-Hezbollah War of 2006: The Media As A Weapon in Asymmetrical Conflict" (pdf.), was written not by a partisan watchdog organization that would be expected to arrive at these conclusions; rather, it was produced by a respected journalist, Marvin Kalb, a senior fellow at Harvard’s Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy.

In meticulous fashion, Kalb details how the press allowed itself to be manipulated by Hezbollah. He also records the mistakes made by Israel in trying to manage coverage, points out several of the outright distortions that were widely reported, and analyzes the impact of the digital media and the fundamental disadvantage a democracy such as Israel faces in a public relations battle with a non-democratic state or terrorist organization.

As Kalb observes, Israel is automatically at a disadvantage in any conflict because it is an open society. “During the war,” Kalb notes in the study, “no Hezbollah secrets were disclosed, but in Israel secrets were leaked, rumors spread like wildfire, leaders felt obliged to issue hortatory appeals often based on incomplete knowledge, and journalists were driven by the fire of competition to publish and broadcast unsubstantiated information.” He adds that Hezbollah was able to control how it was portrayed to the world and could therefore depict itself as “a selfless movement touched by God and blessed by a religious fervor and determination to resist the enemy, the infidel, and ultimately achieve a ‘divine victory,’ no matter the cost.” (Of course, no mention was made of Hezbollah’s dependence on Iran and Syria.)

Perhaps the most serious charge made by the media throughout the war was that Israel was indiscriminately targeting civilians. Groups such as Human Rights Watch made the allegation, which was then publicized uncritically by reporters. Although Israel underscored that it was Hezbollah that was using civilians as shields, the media relied on the allegations of Kenneth Roth, the executive director of HRW, who charged, falsely, that Israel’s military showed “disturbing disregard for the lives of Lebanese civilians.”

Kalb notes that reporters should have been aware that Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, had said before the war that Hezbollah fighters “live in their [civilians’] houses, in their schools, in their churches, in their fields, in their farms and in their factories.” Early in the war, indeed, reporters did note that Hezbollah started the war and casualties were a consequence of the fighting, “but after the first week such references were either dropped or downplayed, leaving the widespread impression that Israel was a loose cannon shooting at anything that moved.”

Kalb produces statistics that clearly show the anti-Israel bias of the Arab press. To be sure, it is not surprising that 78 percent of the stories on Al-Jazeera would label Israel as the “aggressor.” Western news services, however, would be expected to show some semblance of balance. Such was not the case. For example, the BBC ran 117 stories on the war, 38 percent of which depicted Israel as the aggressor. Only 4 percent of BBC reports placed the blame for the conflict on Hezbollah. Most media stories drew a disturbing moral equivalence between the warring sides, suggesting that Israel and Hezbollah were equally to blame.

In Kalb's assessment, American network coverage of the war was more intense than at any time since the 1991 attempted coup against Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev. Of these stories, however, more than half focused on Israeli attacks against Lebanon. With the exception of Fox News, Kalb writes, “negative-sounding judgments of Israel’s attacks and counter-attacks permeated most network coverage.” Similarly, he reports that Israel was depicted as the aggressor nearly twice as often in the headlines of the New York Times and Washington Post and three times as often in photos.

Israel was repeatedly criticized for alleged attacks on UN troops in Lebanon. Meanwhile, Kalb notes that the “impartial” UNIFIL web site published information about Israeli troop movements while no such information was posted regarding Hezbollah’s military activities. Kalb also reiterates what media watchdogs knew all along, but journalists rarely admitted: that the media’s access to stories in Lebanon was strictly controlled by Hezbollah:

Foreign correspondents were warned, on entry to the tour [of a southern Beirut suburb], that they could not wander off on their own or ask questions of any residents. They could only take pictures of sites approved by their Hezbollah minders. Violations, they were told, would be treated harshly. Cameras would be confiscated, film or tape destroyed, and offending reporters never again allowed access to Hezbollah officials or Hezbollah-controlled areas. Kalb compared the terms to that of the Soviet era and said that only CNN’s Anderson Cooper described the ground rules that Hezbollah imposed to try to control the story. Kalb says “all of the other reporters followed the Hezbollah script: Israel, in a cruel, heartless display of power, bombed innocent civilians. Casualties were high. Devastation was everywhere. So spoke the Hezbollah spokesman; so wrote many in the foreign press corps.

Cameramen didn’t need permission to film devastation, but they were warned against taking pictures of Hezbollah terrorists. “The rarest picture of all,” Kalb observes, “was that of a Hezbollah guerilla. It was as if the war on the Hezbollah side was being fought by ghosts.” The Herald Sun of Australia also published equally rare photos showing Hezbollah preparing to fire rockets from civilian neighborhoods, the type of visual evidence that, if widely disseminated, could have quickly discredited the inaccurate reports of Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International.

Reporters always want more access to the war and the decision makers involved, so it is not surprising that many complained about restrictions placed on them by Israel. Kalb reports, however, that reports were filled with interviews with Israeli troops, generals and officials and that “the depth and breadth of the coverage seemed to belie the common complaints about access.” By contrast, he notes, “Hezbollah provided only limited access to the battle field, full access to an occasional guided tour, and encouraged visiting journalists to check its own television network, Al-Manar, for reports and information about the war.” Kalb adds, “Al-Manar was to Hezbollah what Pravda was to the Soviet Union.”

The discovery of doctored photos used by major media during the war was a major embarrassment and Kalb skewers the press for its misuse of photographs. In addition to several frequently cited examples, he mentions a photo of a southern suburb of Beirut that appeared in the New York Times that the Times' Jerusalem bureau chief Steve Erlanger later admitted was out of context. The Times used a satellite photo showing the destruction of a Beirut neighborhood that gave the impression of massive devastation throughout the city, but a larger photo of Beirut would have shown that the rest of Beirut was undamaged.

Nothing in Kalb’s report will come as any surprise to media critics or Israel’s supporters. What is shocking is that these well-documented abuses have continued for so long without the media itself taking corrective measures. The report should be required reading for journalism schools, not to mention working reporters. The serious maladies Kalb describes must be fixed if the media is to expect the public to have any confidence in its reporting.

How Media Coverage Favored Hezbollah - A Harvard University study reveals a frightening bias.

Harvard: How the Media Partnered With Hezbollah - LGF
______________________________________________
Media Bias Against Israel

www.honestreporting.com

http://www.deolhonamidia.org.br/

Bias (Mídia sem Máscara)

Norman Finkelstein

Norman Finkelstein: Profile

Norman Finkelstein's Fraudulent Scholarship

What Lies Beyond Chutzpah?
Norman Finkelstein's World
Norman Finkelstein's Obscenities
Finkelstein Hits New Low
'Contradictions, Lies, and Exaggerations' in Number Killed in 'Jewish Holocaust'
Norman Finkelstein, Benny Morris and Peace not Apartheid
Finkelstein and the YCIAS: Misusing Yale, Abusing Students
Why is the University of California Press Publishing Bigotry?
DeNial at DePaul: The Thomas Klocek Affair
Would the Political Science Department Invite David Duke? [on Norman Finkelstein at Penn]
DePaul U Confronts Amerikan "Empire"
DePaul University’s Moment of Truth

Noam Chomsky’s disciple Norman G. Finkelstein dismisses the Holocaust as an extortion racket against Germany, says that Jews run America, compares Israelis with Nazis, justifies al-Qaeda, champions Hezbollah, speaks alongside Hamas supporters and gives interviews to Lebanese Holocaust deniers.

The Norman Finkelstein Affair

By Steven Plaut

Academic hiring and promotion processes are mysterious procedures poorly understood by the public. While supposedly designed to ensure quality control and the maintenance of standards of scholarship, in fact they are all too often subordinated to intentional subversion, including when this is done out of political ideology.

The most notorious example in recent days of corruption of the promotion process has been the attempt by radical leftist faculty members at DePaul University to obtain tenure for the pseudo-scholar and Holocaust trivializer Norman Finkelstein. The Finkelstein affair is unusual in that the politicization has been exposed so thoroughly in the media and is now so obvious and explicit. In part, this has been thanks to the fact that Finkelstein himself, or his close followers, have published the supposedly classified secret documents related to his promotion on the web. How can it be that someone like Finkelstein was hired in the first place, especially by an institution with ties to the church and committed to Catholic ethical standards? Ironically, the answer was provided inadvertently by Finkelstein and his followers when they publicized (probably illegally) these key documents related to his tenure bid. These documents show how easy it is for extremists with no scholarly credentials to recruit on their behalf respected academics who share their political agenda.

Finkelstein, the assistant professor in political science at DePaul University best known for his cheerleading the Hizbollah and his endless smearing of Holocaust survivors, has a completely empty record of academic publication. He has never produced a single paper published in a refereed scholarly journal. Instead, he turns out one anti-Semitic book after another, as well as hate screeds for propaganda magazines and web sites. His "books" are published by firms making editorial decisions based on commercial considerations rather than the quality of their scholarship.

Finkelstein's long history of Jew-baiting is by now well known, as is his history of vulgarity and juvenile smear mongering. Finkelstein has proclaimed Holocaust denier David Irving (who insists there were no gas chambers at Auschwitz) a great historian. Finkelstein's personal web site is a collection of bigotries, including death threats and pornographic cartoons, as well as countless smug smears against all Holocaust survivors. Finkelstein's "books" have been dismissed as pseudo-scholarship by nearly every serious historian to review them. He has used his position at DePaul University in Chicago to promote his open celebration of Middle East terrorism. He maintains the most intimate ties with Holocaust Deniers and he is himself considered by the Anti-Defamation League, the Simon Wiesenthal Center, and many others to be a Holocaust Denier.

It would be hard to find a more illuminating lesson about the dark side of campus hiring and promotion than the Finkelstein affair. From the classified documents that Finkelstein himself has illicitly (and probably illegally) published about his promotion, anyone can see the obvious political forces at work. Finkelstein was hired in the first place because his crude anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism endeared him to academic radicals generally and to those who dominate the political science department at DePaul in particular. Despite the fact that Finkelstein's antics have served to make DePaul into something of an international laughingstock of higher education, the political science department recommended granting Finkelstein tenure by a vote of 9 to 3. Were Finkelstein pro-Israel, he would not have stood a chance of getting tenure with his existing "academic record."

The syllabi of Finkelstein's courses have appeared on the web and they consist of nothing more than one-sided political indoctrination. Naturally, his courses are popular among his students, who just happen to be the radical and jihadi DePaul students, not driven away by his in-classroom harangues. The politically conscripted tenure committee at DePaul lauded his "teaching popularity" on such a basis. Even more amazingly, it cited Finkelstein's frequent anti-Semitic speeches and racist public incitements, including his famous collaborations with the Hizbollah and with neo-Nazi organizations, as valuable "service to the university."

To achieve their goal, his political science comrades saw to it that only two outside "experts" wrote letters of evaluation for Finkelstein's tenure consideration. These two happen to share Finkelstein’s anti-Israel and anti-Semitic agendas. The first was John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago, whose tract written with Stephen Walt maintaining that the American media and America’s foreign policy is controlled by a Jewish cabal has made him infamous. His assault on Israel and American Jews has made him a propaganda favorite of radical Islamic groups like CAIR, and he makes no secret either of his antipathy for Israel nor his desire to see America weakened and "deterred."

The second academic reference for Finkelstein was provided by Professor Ian Lustick, of the University of Pennsylvania, who has hosted Finkelstein several times at Penn, is a far leftist, anti-America and unabashedly anti-Israel. He earned some notoriety for his expressing regret that America did not lose more soldiers in the campaign to topple the Taliban in Afghanistan. Lustick likes to describe America's foreign policy as being under the control of a "cabal" (his word); writing in the anti-American, anti-Israel magazine, The Nation, a magazine hostile to America and Israel and sympathetic to radical Islamicists, wrote:

"This campaign for an invasion of Iraq is thus aptly understood as a supply-side war because it is not driven by a particular threat, a particularly accentuated threat or a "demand" for war associated with the struggle against Al Qaeda, but because of the combination of an enormous supply of military power and political capital and the proximity to the highest echelons of the American government of a small cabal long ago committed to just this sort of war."

His deconstruction of terrorism runs like this:

"Lustick dismisses the concept of terrorism as a valid conceptual term.
Instead, he embraces what he terms an 'extensive', as opposed to an 'intensive',
definition of terrorism that is not bound by any limiting 'conditions'. This, he claims, enables one to classify activities as 'terrorist' if they encompass any violent 'actions and threats' by governmental militaries and even 'tax collectors', as well as insurgents."

Lustick was an instrumental player in getting a pro-Israel professor at Penn, Francisco Gil-White, fired. Gil-White did not benefit from the same mass political conscription on his behalf that Finkelstein enjoys. Lustick is an advocate on behalf of, and evidently sees himself a member of, the "New Historian" group of pseudo-academics who rewrite Middle East history from the Arab point of view. He has close ties the with Michael Lerner, editor of the radical magazine Tikkun, and is active in several anti-Israel leftist groups.

DePaul's recruitment of Lustick and Mearsheimer to "evaluate" Finkelstein's "scholarship" is a bit like asking Hezbollah imam, Hassan Nasrallah, to evaluate Noam Chomsky's service to America.

But Lustick and Mearsheimer have not been the only professors to supply academic support services on behalf of Norman Finkelstein. The moment news came out that the Dean at DePaul was seeking to deny Finkelstein tenure, an outpouring of support for Finkelstein's "scholarship" took place from tenured radicals and academic jihadi. The Middle East Studies Association (MESA) which is boycotting a scholarship program designed to train American students in Arabic to help their country’s defense publicly endorsed Finkelstein's tenure bid. Legions of other political extremists, from DePaul's Palestinian radicals to Professor Peter N. Kirstein who regards America as a terrorist state, to journalist Robert Fisk (who holds identical views), joined in support of Finkelstein’s tenure.

In the midst of the Ward Churchill affair a couple of years back, one of the key questions the media failed to raise was how a charlatan like Churchill could have been hired and promoted at a major university in the first place. After all, his "academic record" was little more than a joke, a collection of shallow anti-American hate propaganda tracts. He was a notorious liar, faking his Indian ethnicity, and had been involved in academic fraud. So how on earth could a serious university have hired him?

These mysteries are explainable only by understanding how academic hiring and promotion take place, and how that process may be subverted and corrupted. This process is largely unknown to the general public and even to students and alumni. In far too many schools, the process is easily subordinated to political agendas. In all cases, the outward appearance of the de jure hiring and promotion procedures work pretty much in a similar manner. The academic records of faculty members are reviewed, evaluations from outside experts are solicited. The publication and teaching records of the candidate are critically examined. Campus promotion committees and other university officials form an opinion and make recommendations.

All very nice, on paper.

The problem is that the system lends itself to easy manipulation, especially by those operating on behalf of a political agenda. Every stage of the faculty evaluation process can be twisted and perverted by those seeking to hire or promote someone out of a sense of personal or political solidarity. This subversion may be the greatest open secret in all of academia. My guess is that in any honest survey of professors, nearly every one could attest to knowing of such cases. The result of this subversion of academic hiring and promotion is that hundreds, and probably thousands, of faculty members with ludicrous and embarrassingly insipid academic records have been hired and tenured by the university system as acts of political and personal solidarity.

Occasionally, university insiders rebel against the attempt to impose upon them politicized hiring decisions, sometimes with the help of outraged alumni. The prospective hiring last year of Juan Cole by Yale University was regarded by many as a done deal until pressures forced the university to take a clear and unbiased look at his real academic record. At the University of Colorado, Interim Chancellor Phil DiStefano recently issued a notice of intent to dismiss Churchill from his faculty position there, defying the massive leftist public campaign on Churchill's behalf. Some other less-publicized rebellions have similarly blocked attempts at politicized hiring and promotion.

Two things are certain. Not a single one of the academics raving about Finkelstein's remarkable "scholarship" would be supporting him if it were not for his hatred of Israel and America -- in short his political credentials as a member in good standing of the academic left.

Essays on the History of the Land of Israel

Political Mythology
· The History and Meaning of the words "Palestine" and "Palestinians", which means "Sea Invader"
· Politically motivated mythology of "Palestine"
· Myths of the Middle East
· More Myths of the Middle East
· A Photographic Tour of the Holy Land 1831-1910

14th-19th Jewish Semi-Autonomy, Migration and Expulsions
·A History of the Jews, a list of expulsions for 2000 years
·Rise of European Nationalism: Expulsion from Spain to Chmielnicki massacres
·Messianic hope and rise of Shabbetai Zvi and his conversion to Islam 1626-1676
·Awakening in the Christian world in support of a Jewish Restoration 1830-1930

1850-1920 Restoration of the Jewish Homeland and Arab-Jewish cooperation
·Descriptive Geography and Brief Historical Sketch of Palestine, 1850
·Ottoman Rule Map (Eve of W.W.I), 1516 to 1917
·British Mandate Map 1920-1946
·British Administrative Division Map 1922 - 1946
·Palestine was inhabited by a mixed population
·Palestine, a land virtually laid waste with little population
·Bareness and oppression of Palestine due to feudal system of taxes by absentee Arab Landowners
·Joint Arab-Jewish agreement on Jewish Homeland, between Emir Feisal Husseini and Dr. Weizmann, January 3, 1918
·Jewish proposal for Jewish Homeland, presented to the Paris Peace Conference, 1919
·Feisal-Frankfurter Correspondence, further to Arab proposal for Jewish Homeland, March 3, 1919

1920-1948 The British Mandate for Palestine
·Document: An Interim Report on the Civil Administration of Palestine to the League of Nations, June 1921, on the condition of Palestine
·Evidence of Haj Amin al-Husseini Before the Royal Commission in 1937 stating Jewish land was legally purchased from Arabs
·The Myth of Palestinian Nationalism, narrowly defined, anti-Semitism
·Arabs in, Jews out: Britain's role in trying to create an artificial Arab majority in Palestine 1920-1948
·British Plans against France, and against the Jews in 1915
·Britain, Haj Husseini and the Arab Riots of 1920
·British Efforts Against the Nascent Israeli State, in 1948
·The proposed partition of Western Palestine in 1938 & The British Policy of Appeasement
·The Struma & The unmitigated policy of the British against Jewish refugees fleeing Hitler's war against them
·Britain's Partition Map 1946
·U.N. Partition Plan Map 1947
·Document: Official British Police Report Regarding Jews' Appeal to Arabs to NOT leave Haifa in 1948
·The Arab Invasion of 1948

1948 Arab and Jewish refugees
·Palestinian Refugees, invited to leave in 1948
·How many Palestinians Refugees? inflating the numbers
·Arab-Jewish Refugees, the other Middle Eastern Refugee problem
·Exchange of Populations
·Why are Palestinian Refugees treated differently than all other refugees in the world?
·Legal Background to the "Palestinian Right of Return"

1948-1967 Early Israeli History
·Armistice Agreements Map 1949
·Fedayeen Raids Map 1951 - 1956
·The Sinai Campaign Map 1956
·Palestinian Refugees, unlike other refugees in the world, were denied resettlement opportunities, for political reasons
·A collection of historical quotations relating to the Arab refugees
·History of Jordan, Jordan as Palestine & Two states for two people, Jordan must contribute
·The Communist - atheist - anti-religious roots of Israeli's political "Left"

1967-1984 Later Israeli History
·Position of Arab Forces Map 1967
·Six Day War Map - June 1967
·Cease Fire Lines Map 1967
·Discrediting Jewish Refugees from Arab Countries, Official Arab "Invitation" for Jews to return, 1970-1977
·"Palestinian" as an Arab ethnic group is a modern political creation since 1967
·Palestinians only one politicized segment of the larger problem of state-less, citizenship-less migrant workers of the Middle East
·Who are the Palestinians?
·Record of the United Nations, why is it so anti-Israel
·Jewish Settlements are Legal according to International Law
·Egyptian Attack Map 1973
·Syrian Attack Map 1973

1984-2000 The Olso Years and the rise of Arabic-Islamic Nationalism
·The First Oslo Agreements, 1993-1995
·U.S. House of Representatives: Task Force on Terrorism, 1996
·Al Aksa Tunnel Riots of 1996
·Corruption within the Palestinian Authority, 1997; PLO has $10b in assets
·U.S. House of Representatives: The Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction Challenge - Myths and Reality, 1998
·Peace with Jordan
·The Wye Agreement - November 1998
·Sharm Agreement, 50% Withdrawal, 1999
·Israeli Withdrawal from Lebanon, May 2000
·Proposed 80% Withdrawal, May 2000
·Proposed 95% Withdrawal, July 2000
·Israel's Compromise on it's "Red Lines", Camp David II
·Proposal for dividing Jerusalem, Camp David II, Taba
·Relative sizes of areas in Middle East
·Israel size comparison maps
·Graphs of Increase in Terror and Crime since Oslo
·Arafat’s Strategy: Lebanonization and Entanglement
·The rise of Israel's Oriental Jews (Sefardim), Israel's shift away from secularism

Arabic settlement policy in the West Bank and Gaza
·The West Bank population under Jordanian rule 1948-1967
·Draft Report of Arab Settlement Activity in the West Bank (261 settlements since 1950)
·Illegal Arab immigration into "Palestine" - part of Oslo
·Arab Population in the West Bank & Gaza - THE MILLION-AND-A-HALF PERSON GAP

2000-present The Multi-Media War
·Erasing Jewish History, Destruction of the Temple Mount
·The Main Reason for the Present Middle East Conflict: ISLAM not "The Territories"
·Who Started the Al Aksa Intifada? List of events of Temple Mount Destruction in June, until Ariel Sharon's visit in September
·"How PA Violence was planned", Report by Palestinian Media Watch
·Palestinian Authority Communications Minister says Al Aksa Intifada was planned since July (for six months)
·Breakdown of casualties during the Palestinian-Israeli conflict
·"Palestinians" killing "Palestinians"
·Who killed Muhammad al-Dura?
·I am a Jew. I am a poet. I am heartbroken
·Document: Israeli Government White Paper on PA/PLO non-compliance
·Document: Israel's Preliminary Report To the Mitchell Inquiry
·Journalists describe constant Palestinian intimidation
·Why Israel Newspapers are the most anti-Israel in the world
·History of Israel's Broadcasting Authority: a Politically Left-leaning (Relativistic, Revisionist) ·Ideological Entity
·Media Bias: CNN and others are misreporting the news
·CNN, BBC and others in fierce competition for lucrative, emerging Middle Eastern Markets

Muftism, Nazism, Communism and Traditional Anti-Semitism give birth to Islamism, 1917-present
·The new Arab "identity" derives from the impact of the West in the last fifty years
·Wahhabism, the Saudi Arabia-based puritanical heresy at the base of Islamism
·Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem
·Muftism and Nazism: World War II Collaboration Documents
·Bosnian Moslems recruited the Nazi SS by Yasser Arafat's 'Uncle'
·Turning the West Bank into another "Bosnia" (Photo Album)
·The Farhud, the Mufti inspired Krystallnacht in Iraq, 1941
·A "Fatwa " Issued by Haj Amin al-Husseini in Iraq, pro-Nazi coup May, 1941
·The Syrian-Iraqi Baath party and its Nazi beginnings
·The Roots of Muslim Rage: Why so many Muslims deeply resent the West, and why their bitterness will not easily be mollified
·The history of the PLO and the International Legitimization of Terrorism
·History of Fedayeen, PLO, Fatah, PFLP, PFLP-GC, DFLP, etc Militant Palestinian Groups
·Saddam Hussein, nephew of Khayrallah Tulfah, of the 1941 Pro-Nazi coup in Iraq
·Hitler and the Arabs, How could they have missed it?
·A technique of propaganda called "Turnspeak"
·Arafat's use of "Turnspeak" to say Israel causes terrorism
·Yasser Arafat's Biography
·Yasser Arafat worthy successor to Haj Muhammad Amin al Husseini
·Yassir Arafat, 1929-2004
·Islamic Sermons on Temple Mount by the grandson of the Haj Amin al-Husseini, 2000

As esquerdas anti-semitas

Artigo antigo publicado no Diário de Notícias de Portugal. Apesar do leve ranço politicamente correto – que não permite defender Israel e os EUA sem antes lembrar que esses países (ao contrário dos alinhados com a estupidez esquerdista ou islâmica) são falíveis e, a alguma altura cometem ou podem cometer “excessos condenáveis” ou erros. Ainda assim o artigo consegue passar longe da estupidez rasteira dominante no Brasil, na Europa e na esquerda americana.


Por Vasco Graça Moura

"No conflito palestiniano, os pós-soviéticos não se impressionam com a perda de vidas civis causada pelo terrorismo em Israel (e ainda menos com os sucessivos genocídios que têm vitimado milhões de seres humanos em África)."

Assiste-se a um inacreditável branqueamento do terrorismo. Logo a seguir ao 11 de Setembro, as esquerdas pós-soviéticas esfalfaram-se a explicar o baixíssimo nível de desenvolvimento das sociedades onde campeia o fanatismo islâmico, o que, como não podia deixar de ser, era da responsabilidade do Ocidente

Disseram lamentar a chacina, mas no íntimo rejubilaram. O poderio norte-americano, a democracia representativa, a civilização ocidental, tudo isso era posto em causa por uma horda suicida. Não faltaram os malabarismos intelectuais repugnantemente apologéticos.

No conflito palestiniano, os pós-soviéticos não se impressionam com a perda de vidas civis causada pelo terrorismo em Israel (e ainda menos com os sucessivos genocídios que têm vitimado milhões de seres humanos em África).

É característica do terrorismo a componente civil da acção violenta e a sua ocultação na sociedade, para tentar impedir uma repressão ou para engendrar dramáticos argumentos invocando as vítimas civis quando ela ocorre, porque tudo se faz para que assim seja.

É verdade que, da parte de Israel, há excessos condenáveis nessa repressão. Mas os pós-soviéticos descontextualizam tudo. Não perdoam a Israel que seja um Estado de Direito e lute firmemente pela sobrevivência. Escamoteiam sempre os termos periclitantes dessa sobrevivência. Omitem que, desde há décadas, se deve ao mundo árabe uma tremenda sucessão de ataques, tanto militares como terroristas, com vista à aniquilação de Israel, e que os radicais islâmicos e palestinianos nunca aceitarão a existência do estado judeu.

Nunca lhes fizeram mossa as actividades do Hamas e do Hezbollah, nem o não desarmamento deste no Líbano (contrariando a decisão da ONU), nem a colaboração da Síria e do Irão no sustento logístico e na operacionalidade da organização.

Não se preocupam com o facto de o Hezbollah não bombardear unidades militares, mas sim as populações. Aí, calam-se circunspectamente.

Formalistas sempre que lhes convém, angelizam o terrorismo. Exaltam o processo das eleições na Palestina, mas não falam na responsabilidade do eleitorado que colocou um grupo terrorista no poder, nas relações desse grupo com o Hezbollah, a Síria e o Irão, nos propósitos explícitos e irrenunciados da fundação do Hezbollah e do Hamas para o extermínio de Israel, na impossibilidade de tomar a sério as suas propostas. Ainda no sábado era noticiado que o Hamas tinha proposto, quanto a Gaza, um cessar-fogo condicionado, mas que dois grupos militares o não aceitavam…

Francisco José Viegas resume lapidarmente a posição dos pós-soviéticos: "Sim, dois estados soberanos. Desde que 1) Israel esteja disponível para ser alvo permanente do Hamas e do Hezzbollah e, 2) que o outro Estado soberano seja uma plataforma para que outros Estados soberanos ataquem Israel sempre que quiserem".

Na sua batota totalitária, desceram tão baixo que até já nem acham que a religião seja o ópio do povo! Tudo serve, desde que aponte a Israel e aos EUA. Nesse caso, centenas ou milhares de mortos já não têm importância nenhuma.

Criticam a UE pela sua passividade, quando se alguma crítica há a fazer-lhe é a de ela ter andado a alimentar, pela ajuda humanitária, algumas das molas reais do conflito e algumas das corrupções mais devastadoras de que há memória na Palestina.

E nutrem um ódio étnico e torpe contra os judeus. Lenine falava na "canalha bundista" e entusiasmou-se com a teorização de Estaline sobre o Bund judaico fundado em 1897.

A acção de Estaline culminou numa repressão feroz contra os Judeus, considerados "o inimigo principal" a seguir a 1945, já depois de conhecido o genocídio nazi. Laurent Rucker fala no seu "anti-semitismo obsessivo" e Pierre-André Taguieff destaca o fenómeno paradoxal e soviético que levava à prática do anti-semitismo e, ao mesmo tempo, à denúncia deste e do racismo…

A absoluta falta de escrúpulos do sinistro ditador levou-o a apoiar a fundação de Israel em 1948. Não por ter mudado subitamente de ideias, mas para desestabilizar a Inglaterra e os EUA, colhendo dividendos para a URSS pela perturbação que contava provocar no mundo árabe. Mas, em 1951, já acusava Israel de conluio com o imperialismo.

Os pós-soviéticos, que nem sequer criticam o negacionismo dos nazis iranianos, mantiveram-se reverentemente impregnados até à medula desse anti-semitismo atávico. Mas indignam-se virtuosamente contra o racismo e a xenofobia.

Fact and Fantasy in the Holy Land

by Samuel Katz*

Early History
Continuous Jewish Presence in the Holy Land
Awakening in the Christian world in support of a Jewish Restoration 1830-1930
Arab Claims to Palestine
Joint Arab-Jewish agreement on Jewish Homeland, between Emir Feisal Husseini and Dr. Weizmann, January 3, 1918
Jewish proposal for Jewish Homeland, presented to the Paris Peace Conference, 1919
Feisal-Frankfurter Correspondence, further to Arab proposal for Jewish Homeland, March 3, 1919
American Proposal for Jewish Homeland, January 21, 1919
Preamble to the League of Nations Mandate, 1922

Later History
British Plans against France, and against the Jews in 1915
Britain, Haj Husseini and the Arab Riots of 1920
British Efforts Against the Nascent Israeli State, in 1948
The Origin of the Dispute: Israel attacked before there were Refugees & before any "Occupied Territories" in 1948
Arab Refugees, and the "Right of Return"
The War before the Six Day War in 1967
Black September, The PLO's attempt to take over Jordan in 1970
Modern Arab Propaganda has incorporated Soviet Propaganda originally used to suppress dissident Soviet Jews
Modern Arab Propaganda has incorporated Nazi Propaganda
The 1973 Yom Kippur War, a study in Soviet Era Politics
Peace Agreement with Egypt & Begin's plan for Palestinian Autonomy in 1979
Israel's Invasion of Lebanon in 1982, Operation Peace for the Galilee; the routing of the PLO; Its rift with Syria & Creation of PLFP; Islamic control of Lebanon; Emergence of Hamas and first Suicide Bombers
The history of the PLO and the International Legitimization of Terrorism

Other
The myth of "Palestinian" Nationalism and the reality of Arabic-Islamic Nationalism
Bibliography and Source Documents related to Palestinian-Israeli conflict

*During British Mandate rule, he was a member of the high command of the Irgun Zvai Leumi under the leadership of Menachem Begin. Katz was elected a member of the first Knesset of Israel, and, after the Six Day War, he became one of the leaders of the Land of Israel movement. After the victory of the Likud party in the 1977 election, Samuel Katz joined the new government as adviser to Prime Minister Begin. He has since served as a columnist of Maariv and the Jerusalem Post.

Spain's Feminized War on Terror

In what has been called the best book on Spanish bullfighting in the English language, Ernest Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon (1932) analyzes the metaphysics of the sport that Spaniards call tauromaquia. And what he tells us is that bullfighting is not primarily a contest between a man and a bull. Much rather, it is the embodiment of a more fundamental struggle that involves man's conquest of his own fear. Thus the contest is not really about the matador triumphing over the bull, but over himself

Lately, however, some Spanish bullfighters appear to have succumbed to their own fear. Indeed, an increasing number of them have been engaging in a scandalous practice known as ‘shaving', in which the horns of the bull are illegally altered by sawing off a few centimeters. As a result, the bull loses its ability to coordinate its movements, and the bullfight is tilted decisively in favor of the matador. Post-modern Spanish bullfighting is therefore degenerating into a rigged spectacle that critics say has very little in common with the ‘heroic' sport that Hemingway once knew.

In many ways, the feminization of bullfighting reflects the broader changes taking place in Spanish society as a whole. And nowhere is this more evident than in the anti-terrorism policies of Spanish Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, a self-proclaimed feminist who lately has committed a number of blunders so outrageous that Spaniards of all political leanings now fear that he has made Spain more, not less, vulnerable to terrorism.

For many Spaniards, including his supporters, Zapatero is an accidental political leader who was thrust into the prime minister's office by the Islamic terrorists who set off a series of train bombs in Madrid that killed 191 people only three days before the 2004 general elections. Although the incumbent Popular Party (PP) was widely expected to win another term in office, Zapatero benefited from the hysteria fomented by Spain's left-leaning mass media in the hours before voters went to the polls. With the aid of a motley hodge-podge of leftist and nationalist parties, Zapatero, who failed to win an absolute majority, was able to cobble together a coalition government. Thus Zapatero, who is dogmatically attached to the ideas of the European left, is beholden to the extreme left in order to remain in power.

Setbacks on the International Arena

A few days after taking office, Zapatero withdrew the 1,300 Spanish troops that were deployed to Iraq by the previous government of José Maria Aznar. Opponents of the withdrawal accused Zapatero, who broke his own campaign pledge that Spanish troops would remain in Iraq until the United Nations voted on the matter later that summer, of naively thinking that the Al-Qaeda terrorist problem exists only because of the war in Iraq. And although it is true that a majority of Spaniards opposed the intervention in Iraq, many also believed that Zapatero's precipitous action smacked of appeasement that not only weakened Spanish national security, but also destroyed the international credibility and stature that Spain had built up during the Aznar government.

Although the withdrawal of Spanish troops from Iraq did not make much of a strategic difference in terms of the war effort, the move sent a symbolic message that represented a major victory for Al-Qaeda. Because what Zapatero did not seem to understand was that Islamic radicals still consider four-fifths of Spain to be Muslim land (Stop the Occupation of... Spain?) that must be liberated from the Spanish infidels who drove out the Moors in what is known as the Reconquista (711-1492). Thus by appearing to give in to the demands of medieval-minded Islamic extremists, Zapatero reinforced the perception that it is the terrorists, not the government, that sets the agenda in Spain.

Confirming the growing suspicion that Zapatero's post-modern approach to fighting terrorism lacks a basis in reality, he told TIME Magazine in September 2004 that ‘sexual equality is a lot more effective against terrorism than military strength'. At the same time, he announced an ill-defined initiative he calls the ‘Alliance of Civilizations', which borrows heavily from the ‘Dialogue of Civilizations' concept promoted by Islamic radicals in Iran during the 1990s; in its essence, the initiative calls on the West to negotiate a truce with Islamic terrorists, and on terms set by the latter.

Indeed, Zapatero seems to believe that multilateral group therapy is the best way to work out his differences with the Islamic extremists who want to take over his country. But the prime minister's initiative has been widely criticized in Spain and elsewhere because of its failure to comprehend that Al-Qaeda and other Islamic extremists are at war not just with Spain or other individual states, but with the very ideals of Western society...and especially with hyper-secularists like Zapatero himself.

But now that Zapatero has had three years in office to test his feminist approach to fighting terrorism, has it brought any tangible benefits for Spain? A Google-search on Zapatero will show that he is almost universally held up as the epitome of a post-modern appeaser. Even those on the political left in a Europe that is awash with like-minded equivocators have expressed serious doubts about the wisdom and efficacy of Zapatero's anti-terrorist policies.

But what do the terrorists think? They seem to understand Zapatero better than Zapatero understands himself. Indeed, in March 2007, Al-Qaeda launched new threats against Spain, this time over its military deployment in Afghanistan. In a video, a hooded man said the presence of Spanish troops in Afghanistan "exposes Spain again to threats" unless they withdraw their troops from the country. "The Spanish people have been tricked by a socialist government which withdrew troops from Iraq and sent 600 to Afghanistan," the man proclaimed. So much for Zapatero's truce with Islam.

The irony, however, is that Zapatero, who is deathly afraid of the domestic political fallout of military casualties abroad, has placed so many restrictions on Spain's presence in Afghanistan that in the over three years that they have been there, Spanish troops have almost never left their bases (which, not surprisingly, are located in the most pacific region of Afghanistan). In fact, as everyone familiar with the embarrassing reality knows, Spanish troops do not serve any meaningful purpose in Afghanistan because they focus all of their efforts on keeping out of harm's way. Indeed, Zapatero has so neutered the Spanish military of its original purpose that it now has more in common with Spain's post-modern bullfighters than it does with its NATO allies.

In any case, most Spaniards now fear that Zapatero's appeasement tactics have left Spain dangerously susceptible to terrorist intimidation and coercion. Indeed, polls show that many voters believe Spain is much more of a target for terrorists today than before. In fact, Zapatero's ruling Socialist Party has fallen behind the opposition PP for the first time in 18 months in opinion polls.

Setbacks on the Domestic Front

Notwithstanding the embarrassing setbacks for Spain on the international arena, however, Spaniards have reserved their fiercest criticism of Zapatero due to his domestic anti-terrorism policies.

And critics across the political spectrum say that nowhere has the prime minister erred as much as when, in June 2006, he agreed to begin a dialogue with ETA, the Basque separatist group, without first requiring that the group disarm. ETA, which is listed as a terrorist organization by both the European Union and the United States, has killed almost 900 people over the past four decades in its quest for an independent Basque state in seven parts of northern Spain and southwest France.

To initiate his dialogue with ETA, however, Zapatero pulled out of an agreement that he himself had proposed in 2000 with the PP not to talk with ETA unless it agreed to disarm. ‘Any normal person understands you can't negotiate with someone whose negotiating weapon is as powerful and hard to argue with as a pistol,' PP leader Mariano Rajoy said at the time. The PP also opposed any talks with Batasuna, the outlawed political front of ETA.

This split between Spain's two main political parties had the effect of limiting public support for a negotiated settlement; it also left the PP positioned to gain politically should the peace process break down. Zapatero, on the other hand, made the peace process the centerpiece of his political agenda in the hopes that a resolution to the Basque conflict would help him secure an easy re-election victory in early 2008. This highly risky proposition, however, also made him acutely vulnerable to intimidation from ETA.

Indeed, during the final months of 2006, ETA began complaining that the peace process had stalled because Madrid was refusing to make preliminary concessions. For example, ETA has long demanded that more than 400 of its prisoners, who are being held in locations across Spain, be moved closer to the Basque region. ETA has also insisted that the government stop arresting ETA suspects and that it legalize Batasuna.

Undeterred, Zapatero said at a year-end news conference on December 29 that his peace initiative was making progress. "Are we better off now with a permanent cease-fire, or when we had bombs, car bombs and explosions?" he asked. "This time next year, we will be better off than we are today."

The very next morning, ETA set off a powerful car bomb at Madrid's Barajas International Airport, killing two people and bringing to a dramatic end nine months of a so-called ‘permanent cease-fire'. The bombing caught Zapatero completely by surprise and shattered his attempt to solve the 40-year Basque conflict through dialogue. It also sent hundreds of thousands of Spaniards onto the streets in rallies to protest the attack and left a reeling Zapatero fighting for his political future.

The attack has produced a profound split within Spain: on the one hand, there are those on the left who remain open to the idea of re-establishing a form of dialogue with ETA in the future; on the other hand, there are those on the right who believe that ETA must be forced into an unconditional surrender.

But by far the most controversial decision Zapatero has made since taking office was to convert the prison sentence of Iñaki de Juana Chaos, a high-profile member of ETA, to house arrest. De Juana began a hunger strike in November 2006 to protest a second jail sentence, which he received for ‘inciting terrorism' (he had already completed an 18-year term for the murder of 25 people). In March 2007, when de Juana was reportedly near death after more than 100 days without eating, Zapatero agreed to transfer de Juana to his home in the Basque Country, where he will finish his sentence.

The popular outcry was immediate, with spontaneous anti-government demonstrations held across Spain. In response to the criticism, however, the Zapatero government justified its decision with an incredible statement that encapsulates the moral confusion of the post-modern mindset:

"One of the differences between terrorists and us is that for us, life is important, no matter whether the person is a terrorist or not, and this is where our moral legitimacy derives," said Interior Minister Alfredo Rubalcaba.

Many Spaniards argue that it was not morals that guided the decision, but weakness and deception. Indeed, critics of the government say that although the Madrid bombing was to have brought an end to the fledgling peace process, it did not, in fact, diminish Zapatero's willingness to negotiate with terrorists. Some believe he still hopes that a resolution to the Basque conflict will earn him another term. Others argue that Zapatero allowed himself to be blackmailed by ETA, and that he caved in to that blackmail.

Whatever the rationale behind Zapatero's decision to free de Juana, it has dramatically divided Spain in a way not seen since the 1936-1939 Spanish Civil War. And that, say critics, is precisely the problem. Because when Spain is divided, terrorists are strengthened.

Indeed, in Zapatero's Spain, the terrorists seem to have more influence than the government. And like Spain's post-modern bullfighters, Zapatero has been conquered by his own fear...his fear of opinion polls. The terrorists, in any case, have taken notice. Many Spaniards now fear it's only a matter of time until they strike again.

Myths & Facts Online

Preface
Israel’s Roots
The Mandatory Period
Partition
The War of 1948
The Road to Suez
The 1967 Six-Day War
Between the Wars
The War of Attrition, 1967-1970
The 1973 Yom Kippur War
Boundaries
Israel and Lebanon
The Gulf War
The United Nations
The Refugees
The Treatment of Jews in Arab/Islamic Countries
Human Rights in Arab Countries
Human Rights in Israel and the Territories
The Palestinian Uprisings
Jerusalem
U.S. Middle East Policy
The Peace Process
Settlements
The Arms Balance
The Media
Canada-Israel Relations
Online Exclusives
Arab/Muslim Attitudes Toward Israel
Index of Myths
Key Documents
Vital Statistics
______________________________________
Rewriting History in Textbooks (1993)

Executive Summary
Outright ErrorsIslamic Tolerance
The Holocaust
Apologists for Authoritarianism
Jewish Invaders
Spontaneous Combustion
Refugees and Revisionism
Searching for Terrorists
The Heroic Intifada
War Erupts
Israel as the Obstacle to Peace
Conclusion
What Can Be Done?
Bibliography

Global Warming Swindle

By Thomas Sowell

Britain's Channel 4 has produced a devastating documentary titled "The Great Global Warming Swindle". It has apparently not been broadcast by any of the networks in the United States. But, fortunately, it is available on the Internet.

Distinguished scientists specializing in climate and climate-related fields talk in plain English and present readily understood graphs showing what a crock the current global warming hysteria is.

These include scientists from MIT and top-tier universities in a number of countries. Some of these are scientists whose names were paraded on some of the global warming publications that are being promoted in the media -- but who state plainly that they neither wrote those publications nor approved them.

One scientist threatened to sue unless his name was removed.

While the public has been led to believe that "all" the leading scientists buy the global warming hysteria and the political agenda that goes with it, in fact the official reports from the United Nations or the National Academy of Sciences are written by bureaucrats -- and then garnished with the names of leading scientists who were "consulted," but whose contrary conclusions have been ignored.

There is no question that the globe is warming but it has warmed and cooled before, and is not as warm today as it was some centuries ago, before there were any automobiles and before there was as much burning of fossil fuels as today.

None of the dire things predicted today happened then.

The British documentary goes into some of the many factors that have caused the earth to warm and cool for centuries, including changes in activities on the sun, 93 million miles away and wholly beyond the jurisdiction of the Kyoto treaty.

According to these climate scientists, human activities have very little effect on the climate, compared to many other factors, from volcanoes to clouds.

These climate scientists likewise debunk the mathematical models that have been used to hype global warming hysteria, even though hard evidence stretching back over centuries contradicts these models.

What is even scarier than seeing how easily the public, the media, and the politicians have been manipulated and stampeded, is discovering how much effort has been put into silencing scientists who dare to say that the emperor has no clothes.

Academics who jump on the global warming bandwagon are far more likely to get big research grants than those who express doubts -- and research is the lifeblood of an academic career at leading universities.

Environmental movements around the world are committed to global warming hysteria and nowhere more so than on college and university campuses, where they can harass those who say otherwise. One of the scientists interviewed on the British documentary reported getting death threats.

In politics, even conservative Republicans seem to have taken the view that, if you can't lick 'em, join 'em. So have big corporations, which have joined the stampede.

This only enables the green crusaders to declare at every opportunity that "everybody" believes the global warming scenario, except for a scattered few "deniers" who are likened to Holocaust deniers.

The difference is that we have the hardest and most painful evidence that there was a Holocaust. But, for the global warming scenario that is causing such hysteria, we have only a movie made by a politician and mathematical models whose results change drastically when you change a few of the arbitrarily selected variables.

No one denies that temperatures are about a degree warmer than they were a century ago.

What the climate scientists in the British documentary deny is that you can mindlessly extrapolate that, or that we are headed for a climate catastrophe if we don't take drastic steps that could cause an economic catastrophe.

"Global warming" is just the latest in a long line of hysterical crusades to which we seem to be increasingly susceptible.

Jean-François Revel

Europe's Anti-American Obsession

What picture of American society is likely to be imprinted on the consciousness of average Europeans? Given what they read or hear every day from intellectuals and politicians, they can hardly have any choice in the unpleasant particulars, especially if they happen to be French. The picture repeatedly sketched for them is as follows:


American society is entirely ruled by money. No other value, whether familial, moral, religious, civic, cultural, professional, or ethical has any potency in itself. Everything in America is a commodity, regarded and used exclusively for its material value. A person is judged solely by the worth of his bank account. Every U.S. President has been in the pockets of the oil companies, the military-industrial complex, the agricultural lobby, or the financial manipulators of Wall Street. America is the "jungle" par excellence of out-of-control, "savage" capitalism, where the rich are always becoming richer and fewer, while the poor are becoming poorer and more numerous. Poverty is the dominant social reality in America. Hordes of famished indigents are everywhere, while luxurious chauffeured limousines with darkened windows glide through the urban wilderness.

Poverty and inequality like this should cause Europeans to cringe in horror, especially since (we have it on good authority) there is no safety net in America, no unemployment benefits, no retirement, no assistance for the destitute--not the slightest bit of social solidarity. In the U.S. "only the most fortunate have the right to medical care and to grow old with dignity," as one writer recently put it in Libération. University courses are reserved only for those who can pay, which partly explains the "low level of education" in the benighted USA. Europeans firmly believe these sorts of caricatures--because they are repeated every day by the elites.

Another distinctive feature of the United States: the pandemic violence. Everywhere you go, violence reigns, with uniquely high levels of delinquency and criminality and a feverish state of near-open revolt in the ghettos. This last is the inevitable result of the deep-rooted racism of American society, which sets ethnic "communities" against one another, and ethnic minorities as a whole against the oppressive white majority. And the unpardonable cowardice and venality that has prevented American leaders from banning the sale of firearms results in regular bloodbaths in which teenagers mercilessly gun down their teachers and fellow students in the classroom. Criticisms of the U.S. system of law bounce back and forth between the idea that it is paralyzed by legalism and the claim that the nation is a lawless jungle.

Yet another universally held conviction is that these social ills are unlikely to ever be cured since Americans make it a point of honor to elect only mental defectives as Presidents. From the Missouri tie salesman Harry Truman to the Texas cretin George W. Bush, not to mention the peanut farmer Jimmy Carter and the B-movie actor Ronald Reagan, the White House offers us a gallery of nincompoops. Only John F. Kennedy, in the eyes of the French, rose a little above this undistinguished bunch, probably because he had the merit of having married someone of French extraction; naturally, this union could not fail to raise President Kennedy's intelligence to at least average level--but doubtless still too high for his fellow citizens, who never forgave him and ended up assassinating him.

In any case, everyone knows that the USA is a democracy only in appearance: In the 1950s, the real face of the American political system was revealed during the McCarthy episode, which remains the truest revelation of the inner essence of the regime created by the Constitution of the United States. It is forgotten that the House Committee on Un-American Activities was originally created in 1937 to combat the Ku Klux Klan, which was considered an anti-American organization because it rejected the Constitutional contract that lies at the heart of the American system.

In 2002, France experienced the humiliation of seeing a demagogic populist of the extreme right take second place behind Jacques Chirac, thus going on to a runoff. What was the reaction from E.U. deputy and professor Olivier Duhamel, one of France's leading commentators? "Now we are catching up with the degenerate democracies of the type of the United States." Strangely, it is always America that is described as degenerate and "fascist," while it is solely in Europe that actual dictatorships and totalitarian regimes spring up.

The verdict delivered in Europe against U.S. foreign policy (particularly by France, which wields the loudest bullhorn on this subject) is a curious one. It alternates between criticizing the Americans for being too aggressive ("unilateralism") and being too withdrawn ("isolationism"). When former French foreign minister Hubert Védrine deplores America's "unilateralism" for causing the U.S.--how dreadful!--to "base her decisions on her own worldview and on the defense of her own interests," we should note that this is an excellent definition of the "independent" foreign policy so forcefully espoused by General de Gaulle, and adhered to by his French successors since then. Meanwhile, all across Europe, foreign policy intellectuals make ritual denunciations of American "arrogance." The very wealth of the U.S., they insist, disqualifies her from speaking in the name of human rights.

Many Europeans sneer that America, a society still in a primitive state, ruled by violence and criminality, couldn't possibly have a mature culture. American literature and cinema is said to be an arid desert, devoid of original talent or great creators. They apparently never heard of Poe, Melville, Hawthorne, Henry James, Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, or Scott Fitzgerald. Piercing analysts like Theodore Dreiser, Upton Sinclair, Sinclair Lewis, Frank Norris, John Steinbeck, John Dos Passos, and Tom Wolfe are conveniently ignored. And never mind that American film and television are far more willing to confront sensitive social or political issues than are European productions.

On the whole, American society is sweepingly condemned as practically the worst association of human beings in history. Fresh evidence can do nothing to dispel such views, which, filled with distortion as they are, reflect little on the true strengths and failures of American society. But they tell us a great deal about the psychological problems of those Europeans who proffer the criticisms.

I watched the United States from France and Italy during the 1950s and '60s, and formed my opinion about it through the filter of the European press--which means my opinion was unfavorable. Europeans at this time saw America as the land of McCarthyism and the execution of the Rosenbergs (who we then believed innocent), of racism and the Korean War, and a stranglehold on Europe itself. Then Vietnam became the principal reason to hate America. Even during this period when Europeans completely relied on the United States to protect them against Soviet imperialism, anti-Americanism was almost as virulent as it is today.

For European leftists and the majority of intellectuals--who were likely to adhere to communist ideas--anti-Americanism was rational. This crowd identified America with capitalism, and capitalism with evil. What was less rational was their wholesale swallowing of the most flagrant and stupid lies about American society and foreign policy, with a concomitant flight from accurate knowledge of the political systems that the U.S. was battling.

A third of a century later, we witnessed something similar. After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the vast majority of French people expressed sympathy with the U.S. But there were plenty who didn't. On September 16, delegates from the Confédération Générale du Travail, the communist trade union, booed a speaker who called for three minutes of silence in memory of the murdered Americans. Followers of Jean-Marie Le Pen on Europe's extreme right celebrated with champagne in offices of the National Front as they watched televised images of the Twin Towers collapsing. So gathered together under the banner of anti-Americanism were all manner of ideological partisans.

A nadir of intellectual incoherence was achieved. After the first gushings of emotion and crocodile condolences, the murderous assaults were depicted as a justified retaliation for evil done by the United States. It's not so surprising that this was a reaction in many Third World countries. Here we see the habitual escape hatch of societies suffering from chronic failure, societies that have completely messed up their evolution toward democracy and economic growth: Instead of looking to their own incompetence and corruption as the cause, they finger the West in general and the United States in particular. And, after a discreet pause of a few days, claims of American culpability also surfaced in Europe in the press, among intellectuals, and among politicians of the Left and the Right--in France above all.

Declarations multiplied demanding that the U.S. not launch a war against terrorism. A gang of suicidal fanatics, indoctrinated, trained, and financed by a powerful and rich multinational terrorist organization, had murdered more than 3,000 Americans, yet it was the victim who was almost immediately called the aggressor. Shouldn't we ask about the "root causes" that had pushed the terrorists toward their destructive acts? Wasn't the United States in part responsible for what had happened?

Obsessed by their hatred, and floundering in illogicality, Europe's anti-American dupes completely forget that when the U.S. acts against terrorists in her own self-interest, she is also acting in the interest of Europeans, and in the interest of many other countries threatened, or already subverted, by terrorism.

Today's anti-American disinformation is not the result of pardonable, correctable mistakes, but of a profound psychological need to make the U.S. the villain responsible for others' failures.

Take crime, a subject Europeans love to whip the United States over, while closing their eyes to their own rapidly rising crime levels. The fact is that during the final 15 years of the twentieth century, crime diminished dramatically in the United States. In New York City, Rudolph Giuliani cut crime by half in five years. In Europe, disorder has skyrocketed. In France, crime and delinquency doubled between 1985 and 1998, and has galloped ahead even faster since then.

Giuliani was mocked in certain French newspapers as "Giussolini." But after having refused for decades to even recognize the existence of a crime problem in their country, French Leftists have finally confessed their "naïve optimism" and leniency toward antisocial behavior. To finally acknowledge 20 years of error is impressive. Yet the minister of justice, Marylise Lebranchu, insisted on doing so with the haughty proclamation that, nonetheless, "The government has no desire to copy the American model." One has one's pride and one's scruples, after all. Overwhelmed by their failure to combat the steadily climbing disorder, and unable to hide from the obvious forever, French authorities in 2001 were forced to sheepishly adopt many American methods of crime fighting. Here and elsewhere, anti-Americanism simply served to cover government incompetence, ideological backwardness, and social disorder.

For skeptics of democratic capitalism, the United States is, quite simply, the enemy. For many years, and still today, a principal function of anti-Americanism has been to discredit the nation that stands as the supreme alternative to socialism. More recently, Islamists, anti-modern Greens, and others have taken to pillorying the U.S. for the same reason. To travesty the United States as a repressive, unjust, racist society is a way of proclaiming: Look what happens when modern democratic capitalism is implemented!

This is the message of critics not only in Europe, but also in the United States itself, where anti-Americanism continues to prosper among university, journalistic, and literary elites. But in Europe, these ideological reasons for blaming America first are multiplied by simple jealousy of American power. The current American "hyperpower" is the direct consequence of European powerlessness, both past and present. The United States fills a void caused by our inadequacies in capability, thinking, and will to act.

Americans might ask themselves what interest the United States could have in plunging into the bloody quagmire of the Balkans, that centuries-old masterpiece of Europe's matchless ingenuity. But Europe found herself incapable of bringing order by herself to this murderous chaos of her own making. So it devolved upon the United States to take charge of operations in Bosnia, Kosovo, and Macedonia. The Europeans thanked the Americans afterwards by calling them imperialists--although they quake with fright and accuse the Americans of being cowardly isolationists the moment they make the slightest mention of bringing their soldiers home.

Certainly America, like all societies, has many defects and deserves criticism. But the intentional ignoring of facts begins with sociological preconceptions of the U.S.--the alleged absence of social protection, the notorious "poverty line," the supposed unemployment level. The fact that unemployment in the U.S. fell to below 5 percent in the 1990s, whereas in France it shot up to 12 percent, implied nothing good about America according to our commentators, who reassured us with the myth of America's omnipresent minimum-wage jobs!

At the advent of America's 2001 economic slowdown, French newspapers ran gleeful headlines announcing "The End of Full Employment in the USA." At the same time, the French government was frenetically heaping praise on itself for reducing unemployment levels to 8.7 percent--almost twice the American level (not counting the tens of thousands of the effectively unemployed who in France are artificially excluded from the statistics). By September 2001, unemployment in France had already climbed back to over 9 percent.

"The End of the American Economic Dream" was Le Monde's headline when there was a pause of the practically uninterrupted 17-year period of U.S. economic growth from 1983 to 2000. In truth, the U.S. has led a technological revolution without precedent, creating tens of millions of jobs while absorbing a tremendous population increase (from 248 million in 1990 to 281 million in 2000). All this was but a "dream"? Americans are regularly reproached for wanting to "impose their economic and social model" on others. But whenever there is an economic slowdown, other countries anxiously await an American-led "recovery."

While the U.S. is vilified and blamed, its financial and military aid is universally desired. America is the sole power at once capable of saving Mexico from economic collapse (in 1995), dissuading communist China from attacking Taiwan (repeatedly), mediating between India and Pakistan in the matter of Kashmir, and working with some chance of success toward the reunification of the two Koreas under a democratic regime. When the European Union sent a delegation, headed by the Swedish prime minister, to Pyongyang in May 2001, the delegation could find nothing better to do than grovel before Kim Jong Il, the criminal chief of one of the last totalitarian jails on the planet.

The fundamental role of anti-Americanism in Europe in general, and particularly among those on the Left, is to absolve themselves of their own moral failings and intellectual errors by heaping them onto the monster scapegoat, the United States of America. For stupidity and bloodshed to vanish from Europe, the U.S. must be identified as the singular threat to democracy (contrary to every lesson of actual history). Thus, during the Cold War, it was dogma among Europeans from Sweden to Sicily, from Athens to Paris, that the "imperialistic" power was America, even though it was the USSR that annexed Eastern Europe, made satellites out of several African countries, and invaded Afghanistan, even though it was the People's Republic of China that marched into Tibet, attacked South Korea, and subjugated three Indochinese countries. A similar dynamic applies today in the war on terror.

One example of how little credit the U.S. is allowed by the rest of the world is the way the belief spread, and was quickly accepted as fact, that the United States was bent on imposing censorship after September 11.

The Qatar-based television network Al-Jazeera, and subsequently CNN, had aired a statement by Osama bin Laden in which he gloated over the thousands killed and called for further massacres. According to both American and French terror experts, the tirade may have contained coded messages to "sleepers" in the United States or in Europe relating to projected terrorist attacks. It seemed prudent for the U.S. administration and Congress to appeal to television and radio managers not to broadcast such communiqués.

Such steps ought to have been understood as legitimate cautionary measures. Instead, a chorus of imprecations was raised around the world. America had imposed censorship, suppressed freedom of the press, violated the First Amendment. The feverish Le Monde headline "Propaganda Rages in the American Media" (October 3, 2001) was typical.

The legions of Muslims living in countries that have never known democracy or the slightest whiff of media freedom apparently felt well qualified to defend these liberties against the only country on the planet where they have never been suppressed. As for the French, they have evidently already forgotten how radio and television were subject to vigilant censorship by the state during the Algerian War, and that scarcely a week went by without a police raid on some newspaper office or other to seize printed material that might "undermine the army's morale."

Other measures adopted after September 11 to thwart terrorist attacks (similar to those taken in Europe, by the way) raised protests on both sides of the Atlantic. Surveillance of suspects, access to e-mail and bank accounts, giving police the right to open car trunks--were denounced as "totalitarian" by the French League of Human Rights, as well as American civil liberties organizations. Of course, the measures were designed precisely to protect democracy from its totalitarian enemies.

After the 1998 terrorist attacks on U.S. embassies in Africa, Congress set up a National Commission on Terrorism (NCT) to redefine anti-terrorist policy. The commission's report emphasized that "the threat of attacks causing massive loss of human life within our borders continues to grow." On the report's cover was a photo of the Twin Towers, as if by premonition. Predictably, a swarm of leagues, associations, and organizations leapt to block any countermeasures on the grounds that they would "mortally endanger" civil liberties. A group representing Arab-Americans bewailed a "return to the darkest days of McCarthyism." The civil rights chief in the Clinton administration deplored that Americans of Arab origin were unjustly fingered by the commission--though there is not a single mention of Arab-Americans in the NCT report. The resistance was so noisy that the bill which would have mandated certain security measures was effectively buried, never to become law--with results we all know.

The fact that defenders of human rights and liberty wouldn't take into account the right to national defense meant that sensible, foresighted warnings were dismissed as the racist ravings of hawkish fanatics. How did this ingenious propensity for suicide entitle Europeans to brandish slogans denouncing a supposed evaporation of American liberties? Why is the USA casually accused of "fascism," when it is a land that has never known a dictator over the course of two centuries, while Europe has been busy making troops of them?

The American military operation in Afghanistan, the first major response to September 11, was derided as a specimen of aggressive unilateralism by global elites, as if no prior event could explain this "imperialistic" reflex. Europeans--governments and the public--had generally showed unqualified solidarity with the United States right after September 11. But important minorities--in the parties of the Left, the Greens in particular, the enemies of globalization, and a near majority among European intellectuals--were quick to exhibit their old fixations. Hostilities really began, they say, only with the American retaliation. The initial aggression was simply dismissed by large numbers of people.

A group of 113 French intellectuals launched an appeal against the "imperial crusade" in Afghanistan: "In the name of the law and morality of the jungle" (not because 3,000 people had been murdered), "the Western armada administers its divine justice." Of course, if any parties in this entire affair believed themselves to be divine, it was the Islamists--the kind that murders thousands of innocent civilians in the name of Allah, or the kind that, in Nigeria and Sudan, massacres Christians for being unwilling to submit to sharia. In two months alone, several hundred Nigerian Christians were exterminated by Muslims. Our 113 intellectuals had nothing to say about it.

In the best cases, the Ameriphobes put the jihadists and those who would resist them on an equal plane, not pronouncing in favor of either. Hundreds of thousands of pacifists demonstrated on October 14, 2001 brandishing banners: "No to Terrorism. No to War." Which is about as intelligent as: "No to Illness. No to Medicine." We have seen this before. In 1939, when the Nazi armies were only months from occupying Paris, French communists, fixated on the alleged evils of capitalism, exhorted armaments workers to sabotage their factories and soldiers to desert their regiments.

Today's unilateralist pacifists condemned the American counterattack against the Taliban in Afghanistan precisely because it was a counterattack. The United States, they said, had given in to base desires for revenge and launched an air assault that would lead inevitably to the deaths of Afghan civilians. What they should have done was negotiate a political solution. Well, of course! Democracies always refuse to negotiate; only sanguinary fanatics are eager to compromise.

The pacifists deliberately ignored that the purpose of the American reaction was not revenge but defense--the squelching of future terrorism. Was it the fault of the United States if Afghanistan was where the jihadists' mastermind was hiding? The intervention in Afghanistan, despite all the precautions taken, could not be without danger to civilians; but when the conflict had first begun on 9/11, it was in New York, not Kabul, that thousands of civilian lives were lost. It seems that for some humanitarians, civilian casualties are indeed acceptable--if they are American.

To avoid being transformed into "aggressors," the Americans would have had to abstain from any retaliation whatsoever against the international terror networks. It wasn't the Afghan people who were targeted, but the Taliban's military installations. Yet after a few days, all we heard was incessant talk of U.S. air attacks and Afghan civilian casualties. The statistics so loudly trumpeted by Europeans were provided by--the Taliban themselves.

And why wasn't it made clear that the United States had been, from 1980 to 2001, the principal supplier of humanitarian aid to Afghanistan and that 80 percent of the aid distributed by private charities within the framework of the World Food Program was paid for by Americans? Because to concede as much would have called for a modicum of intellectual integrity.

The real cause of September 11 unquestionably lies in the resentment against the United States, which grew apace after the collapse of the USSR, and America's emergence as the "sole global superpower." This resentment is particularly marked in the Islamic lands, where the existence of Israel, which is blamed on America, is an important motivator. But the resentment is also more quietly present over the entire planet. In some European capitals, the sense of grievance has been raised to the status of an idée fixe, virtually the guiding principle of foreign policy. Thus the
U.S. is charged with all the evils, real or imagined, that afflict humanity, from the falling price of beef in France to AIDS in Africa and global warming everywhere. The result is a widespread refusal to accept responsibility for one's own actions.

As for the American "hyperpower" that causes Europeans so many sleepless nights, they should look to their own history and ask how far they themselves are responsible for that predominance. For it was they who made the twentieth century into the grimmest in history. It was they who brought about the two apocalypses of the World Wars and invented the two most absurd and criminal political regimes ever inflicted on the human race. If Western Europe in 1945 and Eastern Europe in 1990 were ruined, whose fault was it? American "unilateralism" is the consequence--not the cause--of the diminished power of the other nations. Yet it has become habitual to turn the situation around and constantly indict the United States. Is it surprising when such an atmosphere of accumulated hate ends in pushing fanatics to compensate for their failures by engaging in carnage?

The refrain of German Greens, French organizations like ATTAC, magazines like Politis, Latin American intellectuals, and African editorial writers is that anti-American terrorism can be explained--indeed justified--on the grounds of the "growing poverty" caused by global capitalism, whose forces are orchestrated by the United States. The radical Left in the United States has also made this its rallying cry. The Italian Nobel laureate and novelist Dario Fo, a literary non-entity, put it bluntly: "What are 20,000 deaths [sic] in New York compared with the millions caused every year by the big speculators?"

Of course, the Muslim world includes countries that are among the wealthiest on the planet (especially Saudi Arabia, which finances al-Qaeda and other Islamist organizations). Islamic terrorism is the offspring of religious fanaticism; it has nothing to do with poverty; and it cannot possibly lead to any improvement in the lot of backward societies. Islamists utterly reject all measures that might contribute to improvement: democracy, pluralism, intellectual freedom and critical thought, equality for women, and openness to other cultures.

In the two months after 9/11, the phobias and fallacies of traditional anti-Americanism massively intensified. The clumsiest of them was an attempt to justify Islamist terrorism by claiming that America has long been hostile to Islam. The United States' actions historically have been far less damaging to Muslims than those of Britain, France, or Russia. These European powers have conquered Muslim countries, occupied and indeed oppressed them over decades and even centuries. Americans have never colonized a Muslim nation. Americans evince no hostility toward Islam as such today; on the contrary, their interventions in Somalia, Bosnia, and Kosovo, as well as the pressure exerted on the Macedonian government, were designed to defend Muslim minorities. And the U.S.-led coalition that removed the Iraqi army from Kuwait during the first Gulf War acted to defend a small Muslim country against a secular dictator who had used chemical weapons against Muslim Shiites in the south and Muslim Kurds in the north.

Another myth strenuously maintained since 9/11 is that of a moderate and tolerant Islam. The dominant idea in the Muslims' worldview, in truth, is that all humanity must obey the rules of their religion, whereas they owe no respect to the religions of others. Indeed, showing such respect would make them apostates meriting instant execution. Anxious to show tolerance, the Pope encouraged the erection of a mosque in Rome, the city where Saint Peter is buried. No Christian church could be built in Mecca, or anywhere in Saudi Arabia, for that would profane the land of Mohammed. There is no ambiguity about al-Qaeda-style intentions: It is quite simply to convert the whole of humanity to Islam by force. Murder and mayhem is justified in the eyes of the terrorists because it strikes at the infidels who refuse to embrace Islam. We deceive ourselves if we think we can negotiate with the al-Qaeda fanatics and their ilk.

The day after 9/11, Le Parisien-Aujourd'hui published an account of the jubilant atmosphere the previous evening in the eighteenth arrondissement of Paris, home to a large Muslim community. "Bin Laden will nail all of you!" was among the more moderate remarks hurled at passersby who didn't appear to be North African. Or: "I'm going to celebrate big time tonight! Those guys were real heroes. That'll teach those American bastards--and all you French are next!" Snippets of this sort were ignored by almost all media.

A spokesman for British Muslims named al-Misri likewise called the attacks on the World Trade Center acts of "legitimate self-defense." Another spiritual authority, Omar Bakri Mohammed, launched a fatwa commanding the assassination of the president of Pakistan because the latter had sided with President Bush against bin Laden. "Islam will Dominate the World" was the slogan on signs held aloft by Islamist demonstrators of British nationality as they marched in October 2001 north of London. Meanwhile, there was not the slightest whisper of protest from all those "moderate" Muslims in Britain or France supposedly opposed to this sort of extremism. The notion that the "immense majority" of Muslims settled in Europe are peacefully inclined must be viewed for what it is: a mirage.

Western Europe's antagonism was hardly limited to its Muslim communities. Stunned by the magnitude of the 9/11 crimes and reduced to silence by the wave of solidarity with the U.S., even most long-time America-haters were quiet for a few days. But for a few days only.

The day after 9/11, the editor of Le Monde, Jean-Marie Colombani, ran the famous "We Are All Americans" editorial. Hostile reactions to the piece and the headline were numerous and immediate, both among readers of Le Monde and on the editorial board. This stemmed from the Left's disinclination, even right after the massacres in New York and Washington, to renounce its demonized image of the United States, an image that it needs all the more since socialism has ended in shipwreck.

Shortly after 9/11 a French spokesman for the activist group ATTAC quoted the adage: "He who sows the wind shall reap the whirlwind." French prime minister Lionel Jospin seemed to be pointing in this direction when he asked, "What lesson are the Americans going to draw from what has happened?" The lesson, Jospin indicated, should be for the U.S. to moderate her unilateralism. For Cardinal Karl Lehmann, president of the German Bishops' Conference, the lesson to be drawn from terrorism was that "the West must not seek to dominate the rest of the world."
Soon, many European elites insinuated that the jihadist attacks had some moral justification. These anti-American views began to circulate well before the campaign to dislodge the Taliban kicked off on October 7. The bombing which became the most frequently invoked reason to take sides against the U.S. had not yet even begun.

One of the most dishonest objections raised against the campaign in Afghanistan was that Americans had made use of mujahedin during the Afghans' war of resistance against the USSR. What was so reprehensible about Ronald Reagan accepting the services of all those willing to oppose the Soviet Union? Was it necessary to wait until all Afghans and Saudis had read Montesquieu and converted to Christianity? Imagine what it would have meant for India, Pakistan, and the Gulf countries--for all of us--if the Soviets had been able to achieve a permanent takeover of Afghanistan. There would have been no Gorbachev, no glasnost, and no perestroika. Coming from the Europeans, who at the time of the Soviet Afghan invasion quivered with cowardice and debated only if they should or shouldn't participate in the Moscow Olympics, this critique has something, one might say, backward about it.

Tens of millions of immigrants have streamed into the United States. If the picture of America drawn by the European press is accurate, then those immigrants from all parts of the world were deluded fools. Why choose the American capitalist jungle with all its evils, rather than the lands of peace, plenty, and liberty they came from? Why didn't they write their families and friends basking in the paradises of Ukraine, Calabria, and Greece warning them of the perils of poverty, precariousness, and oppression in America?

The success and originality of American integration stem precisely from the fact that immigrants' descendants can perpetuate their ancestral cultures while thinking of themselves as Americans in the fullest sense, sharing basic ideals across racial and ethnic barriers. In France, the characteristic attitude of newcomers from North Africa, Turkey, and sub-Saharan Africa is predominantly one of alienation, confrontation, rejection, and hatred.

As immigration trends suggest, anti-Americanism is not deeply rooted as a popular prejudice. In Europe, anti-Americanism is much more a hobgoblin of the political, cultural, and religious elites. According to a SOFRES survey of May 2000, only 10 percent of French feel dislike for the U.S. After September 11, according to another poll, 52 percent of French people interviewed said they had always felt warmly toward the U.S., against 32 percent who said the opposite. Historian Michel Winock concludes that "anti-Americanism is not an attitude of the average French person; it is typical of a certain segment of the elites."

The great irony of this anti-American obsession is that it aggravates the evil that it aims to extirpate, namely the go it-alone impulse famously ascribed to the U.S. By criticizing the Americans whatever they do, on every occasion--even when they are completely right--Europeans (we are not alone in this, but we lead the dance) compel Americans to disregard our objections--even when we are right. The American reflex, conditioned by the constant avalanche of anathemas coming at them, causes them to keep thinking: "They're always blaming us, so why consult them at all? We already know they'll vilify us."

And so America's enemies and allies alike, valuing animosity toward the U.S. over influence on her, condemn themselves to impotence. In the process they strengthen the American superpower.

Jean-Francois Revel[RIP] is the author of How Democracies Perish, The Totalitarian Temptation, Without Marx or Jesus, and Anti-Americanism.