Senders of Islam movie ‘Obsession’ tied to Jewish charity

Tampabay.com
September 26, 2008

A nonprofit group that has shipped out 28-million copies of a controversial film on radical Islam refuses to reveal the source of its funding, but numerous ties connect it to a well-known Jewish education group that vehemently denies any involvement with the film.

The backing for Obsession: Radical Islam’s War with the West and the intent of its distributor, the Clarion Fund, has been the subject of speculation since the DVDs were distributed beginning Sept. 14.

Clarion Fund, which was incorporated in 2006, distributed Obsession in 14 states, including the key presidential battlegrounds of Florida, Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania. The DVDs were distributed by mail and as an advertising supplement in 58 Sunday newspapers, including the St. Petersburg Times.

“We don’t have to say who its directors are or give financial information until Nov. 6, 2008,” said Clarion spokesperson Gregory Ross.

Not good enough, says the Council on American Islamic Relations, which filed a complaint Tuesday with the Federal Election Commission.

“American voters deserve to know whether they are targets of a multimillion-dollar campaign funded and directed by a foreign group seeking to whip up anti-Muslim hysteria as a way to influence the outcome of our presidential election,” Nihad Awad, executive director of CAIR, said in a statement.

There are a number of connections between the Clarion Fund and a well-known organization called Aish HaTorah, an international charity founded in Israel in the 1970s.

Ronn Torossian, spokesman for Aish HaTorah, said that his group would in “no way be involved with Clarion Fund or Obsession because Aish HaTorah is a charity and must remain apolitical.”

Ross, the Clarion spokesman, was listed as an Aish HaTorah international fundraiser on a federal election donation form in June 2007.

Elke Bronstein is the name written on the mail permit for the bulk mailing of Obsession DVDs in mid September from Freeport, N.Y. Reached on her cell phone, Bronstein said she worked for Clarion, but would not provide more information.

The receptionist at Aish HaTorah in New York said Bronstein worked for Aish Discovery, which produces high-tech programs and films for Aish HaTorah. Torossian said Bronstein could easily have separate jobs.

“What? You’re going to find four, five or six people who work for Clarion and Aish and claim a worldwide conspiracy? I don’t think so,” he said.

Clarion’s address, according to Manhattan directory assistance, is the same address as Aish HaTorah International, a fundraising arm of Aish HaTorah. The Clarion Fund and Aish HaTorah International are also connected to a group called HonestReporting, which produced Obsession. Honest­Reporting’s 2006 tax return uses the same address.

“It’s news to me,” Torossian said.

Two of the three Clarion Fund directors at the time of its incorporation in November 2006 appeared as Aish employees on Aish Web sites at the same time. The third appeared on the Aish executive committee. Torossian said the overlap meant nothing.

Aish HaTorah’s main purpose is to “broaden the knowledge of individuals to their Jewish heritage.” Barbara Walters, Steven Spielberg and Bill Clinton have praised the charity.

A June 15, 2001, article in the Jerusalem Post said that Aish HaTorah provided $150,000 in “seed money” to create an organization called Media Watch International that took over HonestReporting, the group that made Obsession four years later.

“This is true,” said Torossian, “but that association ended” before Obsession was made.

The Aish Web site offers information on Jewish heritage and religious issues, as well as links to numerous videos on Mideast politics. One of the links is to Obsession.

“Aish also tells about a woman meeting Paul McCartney. Does that mean we’re connected to him?” Torossian asked.

Washington tax attorney Marc Owens, who was IRS director of the Exempt Organizations Division for 10 years, says that if IRS investigates and finds a link between the film and Aish, it will ask: Was the film designed or distributed to have an impact on the election? Is this film an inflammatory hate message instead of a charitable, educational message?

“If the answer is ‘yes’ to either question,” said Owens, “the involved charities could lose their tax-exempt status.”

Despite a disclaimer by the filmmakers that Obsession does not represent all Muslims, the 2005 film has been criticized for unfairly portraying the religion as violent.

In the film, men in traditional Middle Eastern dress burn an American flag. The planes fly into the twin towers. Peaceful scenes of Muslims at market and prayer are interspersed with violent scenes and commentators critical of Islam.

Clarion disputes there is any political motivation for distributing the film now. However, about a week ago, a Clarion Web site linked the film to the presidential candidates.

“McCain’s policies seek to confront radical Islamic extremism and terrorism and roll it back while Obama’s, although intending to do the same, could make it worse,” said the site. This statement was later removed.

“We are not telling people who to vote for,” Ross, the Clarion spokesman, said in an Associated Press story. “We’re just saying no matter who gets in office, the American people should know radical Islam is a real threat to America.”

It is not clear who paid for the extensive mailing of the DVD from Freeport, N.Y. The permit number belongs to Clarion Fund, but Clarion Fund had no money in its bulk-mail account, according to postal administrators.

“The bulk mailing of this was made possible by a third party, other than Clarion,” said U.S. Postal Inspector Debbie Waller. “We’re looking into it.”

http://www.tampabay.com/news/politics/national/article827910.ece

Contact Meg Laughlin at mlaughlin@sptimes.com.

Senders of Islam movie ‘Obsession’ tied to Jewish charity

Muslim Children Gassed at Dayton Mosque After “Obsession” DVD Hits Ohio

TIU

Daily Kos

American troops land in Israel

Israel Today
September 28, 2008

For the first time ever American soldiers have been deployed to Israel on a permanent basis to man a new early-warning radar system.

Defense News reported that 120 US military technicians and advisers will be based permanently in Israel to operate the FBX-T radar system, which should give Israel advanced warning of any Iranian missile attack.

The radar and its operating crew arrived in Israel aboard more than a dozen US European Command (EUCOM) aircraft last Sunday.

The deployment is believed to be part of the Bush Administration’s compensation to Israel for not backing an Israeli military strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities.

According to reports last week, Israel wanted to attack Iran as early as May of this year, but was denied the needed support from Washington. The Bush White House also reportedly turned down a later request for a flight corridor through Iraqi airspace.

The US did, however, approve the recent sale of 1,000 advance bunker-buster bombs to Israel, which will significantly improve the ability of the Israeli air force to carry out a successful raid on Iranian targets.

This article can be fount at Israel today
And here’s the above-mentioned Defense News article:

U.S. deploys radar, troops to Israel
Defense News
September 26, 2008

US European Command (EUCOM) has deployed to Israel a high-powered X-band radar and the supporting people and equipment needed for coordinated defense against Iranian missile attack, marking the first permanent US military presence on Israeli soil.

More than a dozen aircraft, including C-5s and C-17s, helped with the Sept. 21 delivery of the AN/TPY-2 Transportable Radar Surveillance/Forward Based X-band Transportable (FBX-T), its ancillary components and some 120 EUCOM personnel to Israel’s Nevatim Air Base southeast of Beersheba, said sources here and in Stuttgart, Germany.

Among the US personnel is at least one representative from the Missile Defense Agency (MDA), though officials said the agency had little to no say in the deployment decision. MDA involvement has been confined to providing equipment and advice on technical aspects of its deployment, one official said.

The Raytheon-built FBX-T system is the same phased-array radar that was deployed to northern Japan with the US Pacific Air Forces (PACAF) in 2006. The high-powered, high-frequency, transportable X-band radar is designed to detect and track ballistic missiles soon after launch.

Its ancillary gear included cooling systems, generators, perimeter defense weaponry, logistics supplies and dozens of technicians, maintenance specialists and security forces to operate and defend the US installation.

EUCOM has repeatedly deployed troops and Patriot air defense batteries for joint exercises and Iraq-related wartime contingencies, but has never before permanently deployed troops on Israeli soil.

A EUCOM spokesman declined to comment. MDA officials referred to the US State Department, which did not provide comment by press time.

An Israeli military spokesman said the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) enjoys longstanding strategic cooperation with all branches of the US military.

“This cooperation is varied and comes in multiple forms, and it is not our practice to discuss details of our bilateral activities,” he said.

Nevertheless, in previous interviews, US and Israeli officials confirmed that the X-band deployment plan was approved in July, first by Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, and his Israeli counterpart, Lt. Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi; and then by US Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak.

Shaving minutes from reaction time

The radar will be linked to the US Joint Tactical Ground Station (JTAGS), which receives and processes threat data transmitted by US Defense Support System satellites. According to US and Israeli sources, JTAGS will remain in Europe, but its essential cueing data will stream into the forward-deployed X-band radar, where it instantaneously shares information with Israel’s Arrow Weapon System.

Once operational, the combined US and Israeli system is expected to double or even triple the range at which Israel can detect, track and ultimately intercept Iranian missiles, according to Lt. Gen. Henry Obering, director of the Pentagon’s Missile Defense Agency.

During a visit to Israel in early August, Obering said the X-Band radar could add precious minutes to the time in which Israel has to respond to incoming missile attacks.

“The missile threat from Iran is very real, and we must stay ahead of the threat … that’s why we’re working so hard with all our allies to put the most optimized, effective, anti-missile capabilities in place,” Obering said.

“In the context of Israel, if we can take the radar out here and tie it into the Arrow Weapon System, they’ll be able to launch that interceptor way before they could with an autonomous system,” he added.

Ilan Biton, a brigadier general in the Israel Air Force (IAF) reserves and former commander of the nation’s air defense forces, could not comment on the latest developments associated with the X-band radar. However, he said that an IAF air defense brigade established during his 2003-2006 tenure has continuously demonstrated its ability to interoperate well with American forces.

“We advanced tremendously on multiple levels and have developed very impressive cooperation,” Biton said at a Sept. 22 conference in Herzliya. Referring to bilateral Juniper Cobra air defense exercises and the 2003 deployment of Patriot batteries prior to the US-led invasion of Iraq, Biton noted: “At the human level, we’ve developed a common language and at the technical level, we’ve put in place the interfaces that allow our systems to speak to one another.”

The end result, according to Biton, is a combined ability “to manage battles, execute debriefs and implement corrections, all in real time.”

Twin Messages

As US public affairs officers last week mulled whether to publicly disclose the Israel deployment, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, at a U.N. General Assembly meeting in New York, continued to defend his country’s nuclear enrichment and missile development program.

“Iran’s [nuclear] activities are peaceful,” Ahmadinejad said Sept. 23, adding that in Israel, “the Zionist regime is on a definite slope to collapse.”

A US government source said the X-band deployment and other bilateral alliance-bolstering activities send parallel messages: “First, we want to put Iran on notice that we’re bolstering our capabilities throughout the region, and especially in Israel. But just as important, we’re telling the Israelis, ‘Calm down; behave. We’re doing all we can to stand by your side and strengthen defenses, because at this time, we don’t want you rushing into the military option.’”

But in Israel, frustration is mounting at what is roundly perceived as a lack of international resolve to halt Iran’s nuclear weapons drive. At a Sept. 21 meeting of the Israeli Cabinet, an Israeli military intelligence officer reported that Iran is accelerating the pace at which it enriches uranium, and that Tehran already possesses possibly half of the fissionable material needed to produce its first nuclear warhead.

Reflecting Israeli concern about the ineffectiveness of sanctions against Tehran, Brig. Gen. Yossi Baidatz, head of Military Intelligence’s research department, reported: “The international front against Iran is weak and not consolidated, and isn’t putting enough pressure on the regime to stop enriching uranium.”

According to selected excerpts from the briefing released by the Israeli Prime Minister’s office, Baidatz warned that Iran is “galloping toward a nuclear bomb.” He added, “The sanctions have very little influence and are far from bringing to bear a critical mass of pressure on Iran.”

Vago Muradian contributed to this report from Washington, Barbara Opall-Rome from Tel Aviv.  

This article can be found at Defense News

American troops land in Israel

Israel Shamir exposed! A fake or a plant?

UK IndyMedia
April 26th, 2005

Israel Shamir, the “Israeli-Jewish” enemy of Zionism (and now of Judaism too) has a secret identity which he won’t deny or speak about. He just smears his critics. Here is photgraphic evidence that Shamir, the darling of White Supremacists, the BNP and other racists is a Swedish bloke called Joram Jermas.

The man known as Israel Shamir

For twenty years the Jewish Israeli journalist Israel Shamir has been living a double life as a Swede called Jöran Jermas. Official files show Shamir’s own picture and Siberian place and date of birth (11 June 1947) on the Swedish man’s passport. It’s not another of Israel (Adam) Shamir’s many pen names; it’s a completely different identity. None of this appears in the résumée promoted on his website as The Shamir Legend: so where does legend end and mythology begin?

It was a simple enough question – “Who are you?” But for once the voluble Shamir fell silent when he saw our evidence. From Arizona his publisher Carol Adler at Dandelion Books said “I have not yet heard back from him; I emailed him; I know he is aware you copied me on your correspondence to him.”

A brand new ‘super-dissident’ essayist was launched into cyberspace four years ago: it was a linguistic adventure too, it being his first work in English. The obscure middle-aged Russian translator became an instant celebrity, feted as a straight-talking Jewish Israeli whistle-blower. He was rewarded with international speaking tours, books about the Palestine conflict and positions on committees.

Shamir now says he quit Judaism some time ago and joined the orthodox Christian Church of the Holy Land. He writes that he grew disgusted not just with Zionism but with what he now considers the racist and predatory nature of the Jewish faith itself. Jews tricked the Romans into crucifying Jesus Christ, he reasons, and so Jews today can be called “Christ-killers” – which he does in his writings.

Today a number of Palestine campaigns in Europe and the US commend Shamir’s website and circulate his material. That’s how I came across his recent essay, ‘Tsunami in Gaza’. Nor was I alone. Internet fans of the American white-supremacist, David Duke, were urged to read the “very brave Israeli writer, the intrepid Israel Shamir” and to note “the depth of anti-gentile feeling in the Jewish faith” to which his essay testifies. In the UK, the British National Party endorses Shamir’s views online.

‘Tsunami in Gaza’ expands on an Israeli press report of orthodox Jews rushing to Thailand hoping to give Jewish corpses a religious burial. However, Shamir’s essay makes a shocking new claim (which he doesn’t substantiate); that the Thai government agreed to delay mass burials just to please the Jews, and so exposed countless Thai survivors and rescuers to greater risk of deadly epidemics. How did a small army of journalists miss that one? Nonetheless, this is all ‘evidence’ of Judaism’s wilful inhumanity and “nasty exclusiveness”.

“In face of the huge tragedy in South East Asia, this insistence of `not being counted among the goyim’ is especially offensive, bordering on denial of our common humanity. What is so bad about Thais, French, Chinese and other people who found their death in the catastrophe that you can’t leave your dead lying next to them?

“Personally,” a British supporter of the Palestinians wrote to me, “I didn’t find Shamir’s article anti-Jewish but certainly I did find it anti-Israel or anti-Zionist. I presumed he was Jewish himself so unless we follow the tortured example of the Zionists’ thinking and consider him a ‘self-hating Jew’, then how can he be anti-semitic? (sic)”

Israel Shamir is equally comfortable with overtly anti-Jewish and White supremacist groups among his fan-base: “It is not White Racist Supremacism oppressing Palestinians,” he writes. “If I were a Palestinian, the White Nationalists would be my legitimate allies.” In his view they have “a common enemy”, the Jews. If you’re intrigued to learn, for example, “Why Zionism is Racism but anti-semitism is not” then Shamir’s website is the place for you. Judaism is behind it all – and they’re all in it together. It’s the Jews’ fault Americans are dying in Iraq: their fault a hundred thousand Iraqis have been slaughtered. This is all hidden from us because Jews also run the media.

On the Shamir website is one apparently critical item – “The Shamir Legend” by Ratibor Petrushkin – Shamir’s former colleague at the far-right Russian weekly Zavtra. It starts well enough, mentioning 27 reasons why Shamir cannot really exist. Disappointingly it fails to outline a single one of them. Instead it copies a 560-word tribute from another Shamir website, the “First unofficial Russian site of Israel Shamir”, and then simply clears him of all 27 charges (whatever they were).

According to the authorised legend, Shamir was born in Novosibirsk in Soviet Siberia, the great-grandson of a rabbi. He was a brilliant student and a radical Russian writer. He migrated to Israel in 1969 and fought in the 1973 war. He spurned a career in law to become a journalist, spending time in the Far East and London. By 1980 he was back in Israel writing for papers and producing a book. He returned to the Soviet Union in 1989 and reported on its collapse until 1993 when he set up his present home in Jaffa.

Such is the legend. However, Israel Shamir first appeared on the Swedish census in 1984 (when the legend has him in Israel). In 1989 he wrote from his Stockholm address trying to sell the original Himmler’s war service diary to the Holocaust revisionist, David Irving. Shamir said he was acting for unnamed Russian businessmen. It fell through, but the correspondence is still on Irving’s website.

Publicly available Swedish government files show Shamir later became a citizen and is still registered as living in Stockholm, with his second wife – not in Jaffa. His first wife and their two sons also live in Stockholm. In 2001 Israel Shamir changed his name to Jöran Jermas. He was already a Swedish citizen, now he had the name to go with it. Finally, the National Passport Registry has provided a copy of Jöran Jermas’ passport file. It contains Israel Shamir’s photograph and his place and date of birth. We copied the file to Mr Shamir and his American publisher. We invited him to comment on this evidence, to explain it or denounce it – but he has said nothing.

By contrast his fellow Swede, the Palestine-born activist Ammar Makboul, was happy to speak about Israel Shamir: “Refuting one type of scapegoating with another is to substitute the demand for freedom, human rights and a just peace, with racist conspiracy theories. And that’s the reason that we cannot accept Shamir as part of the Palestinian solidarity movement.” The Palestine Solidarity Association in Sweden has shunned Shamir’s latest collection of essays and sales are low. In October Shamir’s “L’autre Visage d’Israel” (Israel’s Other Face) was de-published by Balland/Blanche in France. They removed it from bookstores and stripped it from public libraries less than a fortnight after going on sale.

One puzzle has been solved, but questions remain: “Who is “Israel Shamir”? Is he “Jöran Jermas”? Or are they both fictional? What about his other aliases, “Vassili Krasevsky” and “Robert David” (inter alia?)? More important still, whoever he is, what’s his game?”

© 2005 Manfred Ropschitz

Manfred Ropschitz is a journalist and broadcaster based in the UK. He’s an anti-Zionist Jew, the son of a Polish Holocaust survivor and an active supporter of Palestinian rights since the late 1970’s.

manfred ropschitz

Please also checkout Israel Shamir on 9/11: “The Panamanians

http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2005/04/309818.html

Israel Shamir exposed! A fake or a plant?

Is Internet2 here?

Internet2.org
September 19th, 2008

Internet2 is a network that was “designed to provide next-generation production services as well as a platform for the development of new networking ideas and protocols. With community control of the fundamental networking infrastructure, the Internet2 Network provides the necessary scalability for member institutions to efficiently provision resources to address bandwidth-intensive requirements of their campuses such as, collaborative applications, distributed research experiments, grid-based data analysis and social networking.”

Does this mean the end of “Internet1″ — and its associated freedoms of communication and expression — is on the horizon…?

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) startup was transmitted in EVO the 10th of September. For the world wide LHC first beam event that took place at CERN, in Geneva, Switzerland, we provided the live videos in EVO.

We would like to apologize to all the users that have faced some problems to connect to EVO the 10th of September. Our web server have been under attack at that time. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Despite of those inconvenience EVO broke lot of records! Read Bellow:

1250 sites connected on the same meeting.
250 sites connected at the same time in a single meeting.
More than 6500 connections on the First LHC Beam meeting.
2500 users registered in 2 days (even if the registration have been stopped for 5 hours).

http://evo-wiki.cern.ch/twiki/bin/view/EVOPublic/CERNFirstBeamDay

LHC progress report, week 1

Geneva, 18 September 2008. After a spectacular start on 10 September, the LHC enjoyed a mixed first week of commissioning with beam. To get beams around the ring in both directions on the first day exceeded all expectations, and the success continued through the night, with several hundred orbits being achieved.

The next step in the commissioning process is to bring in the radio-frequency (RF) system that keeps the beams bunched, rather than spreading out around the ring, and will eventually accelerate them to 7 TeV. The RF system works by ‘capturing’ the beam, speeding up the slower moving particles and slowing down the faster ones so that the beam remains bunched into fine threads about 11 cm long. Without it, the beam quickly dissipates and cannot be used for physics.

On Thursday night, 11 September, beam two, the anti-clockwise beam, was captured and circulated for over half an hour before being safely extracted from the LHC. The next step is to repeat the process for beam one, and that is set to begin this week.

The intervening time has been spent recovering cryogenic conditions after the failure of a power transformer on one of the surface points of the LHC switched off the main compressors of the cryogenics for two sectors of the machine. The transformer, weighing 30 tonnes and with a rating of 12 MVA, was exchanged over the weekend. During this process, the cryogenics system was put into a standby mode with the two sectors kept at around 4.5 K. Since the beginning of the week the cryogenics team have been busy re-cooling the magnets and preparing for operation with beam, which is currently forecast for today. The next stage of the commissioning will be single turn studies using beam one, followed by RF capture and circulating beam in both rings.

The LHC is on course for first collisions in a matter of weeks. Next update 24 September at the latest.

http://lhc-first-beam.web.cern.ch/lhc-first-beam/News/lhc_080918.html

Is Internet2 here?

Disguised as Clark Kent: Jews, Comics, and the Creation of the Superhero

The Jewish Daily Forward
March 19, 2008

The history of comics has been big recently, and there’ve been a number of books and articles about it. Because so many Jews were there at the creation of both the comic book and the great superheroes who served as the main attraction, you have to ask the obvious question: What, if anything, does it mean that the industry was so heavily populated by Jews?

Your answer to this will depend on what you think “comic books” really do. In “Disguised as Clark Kent: Jews, Comics and the Creation of the Superhero,” Danny Fingeroth seems to assume that the most important comics tell tales of superheroes. He is mostly interested in what he calls “The Golden Age” — from 1938 until the end of the Second World War — when caped crusaders and men of steel patrolled the streets of Gotham City and the skies of Metropolis. Fingeroth, a former comics editor at Marvel, also gives due attention to the “Silver Age” of the 1960s and beyond — the heyday of oddball heroes, like Spider-Man and The Fantastic Four. Unfortunately, the narrative he constructs leads him to breeze over what happened to the comics between the golden and the silver ages, to the fact that after the war, comic book buyers got bored with the squeaky-clean defenders of the innocent. They were more interested in Wonder Woman’s breasts.

As David Hajdu points out in “The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic Book Scare and How It Changed America,” overt sex sold, horror reigned and the villains stole the stage from the superheroes. Magazines suddenly sported racy titles, like “Crime SuspenStories,” “My Secret Life” and “The Crypt of Terror.” These, too, were created by Jews. As far as Hajdu is concerned, you need to look at the whole industry — at both “Superman” and “The Crypt of Terror” — to understand what the comics mean. Hajdu demonstrates that the comics’ particular meanings and their particular forms of Jewishness cannot be divorced from their specific — and distinct — histories.

Fingeroth admits that it’s “hard to tell” where the comics themselves are properly Jewish. It probably is. Superman presents a relatively easy case: Jules Feiffer has argued that the Man of Steel really came “from the planet Poland,” while Gerard Jones, in his excellent 2004 book “Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters, and the Birth of the Comic Book,” suggested that Superman quite literally embodies the Jewish immigrant’s dilemma (he has to pretend he fits in, while knowing that he has special, unseen and potentially unappreciated powers). The “secret” of Superman’s success also rests on the fact that his is the dilemma of every geeky and not-so-geeky kid. A hero on the inside, he’s prime bully bait on the outside. So Superman’s dual identity fits a number of important bills. DC Comics, Superman’s publisher, profited from all of them.

But what about Batman? Hardly an immigrant and definitely not Jewish. And the rest of that alliterative and hardy crew of caped and costumed heroes who bashed the bad guys all through the early 1940s? Again, hard to tell. Nevertheless, Fingeroth wants to tell. The trouble is that he has to hyperextend in order to tease out what he calls “shreds of Jewish meaning” from the superhero comics. Unfortunately, that’s all they are: shreds.

According to Fingeroth, some heroes are stand-ins for Moses, some for survivors. Because comics script writers were ambivalent about not being professionals themselves, they created heroes who were established professionals in their day jobs. (Sorry, Mom.) You get the idea. Perhaps the oddest of Fingeroth’s claims is that Captain America’s writers were particularly Jewish in that they wanted every story to be “universal.”

In “The Ten-Cent Plague,” Hajdu makes the interesting case that postwar comics were the first shot in a coming youth revolt. By the early 1950s, cities were banning comics. Prodded by their parents, kids were burning them. The Senate was investigating them. Hajdu indicates that the sex and mayhem stories that caused such a ruckus represented the flip side of the superheroes’ adventures. He suggests that we see them as expressions of a particularly Jewish — though likely unconscious — mistrust of assimilation, of its enforced conventions and unavoidable authority. So if DC’s Superman appealed to the nerd in all of us, the sleazy comics peddled by companies like EC spoke to an inchoate but increasingly independent youth culture.

This new buying public of rebels without a cause — the same kids who would turn Elvis into a superhero of a different kind — scared the daylights out of their parents. Even though there was no overt proof, psychologists, politicians and the chief crime fighter in the land, J. Edgar Hoover, claimed that reading comics led directly to juvenile delinquency. In 1954, psychologist Frederic Wertham published his most famous work, “Seduction of the Innocent,” which made it sound as if he wanted to protect our children from the pernicious influence of the comics. But Hajdu makes an excellent case that the anti-comics brigades wanted protection from our children. The seduced, it seems, resembled other paranoid fantasies of the Cold War: all those fifth-columnists in the State Department and the communist dupes in the schools, those invasive germs in the kitchen and the brainwashed automatons lurking in the streets.

While Hajdu explicitly refuses to draw a parallel between McCarthyism and the attacks on the comics industry, they are linked by a common fear of contagion and subversion. And, though Hajdu won’t go this far, it would be fair to guess that there was more than a touch of latent antisemitism in the comic book affair. The Catholic Church, the American Legion, towns without many Jews and towns with too many Jews all ganged up on the comics. Jewish comics editors and publishers like Bill Gaines (hopped up on amphetamines and aggression) came up before televised committees of such manifestly upright, proudly non-Jewish lawmakers as Estes Kefauver and Robert C. Hendrickson (and, as Michael Chabon shows in “Kavalier and Clay,” the Jews did not come out so well). In an era when the most famous American traitors were a pair of down-at-the-heel communist Jews, it’s hard to imagine that the great comics scare was not a sideshow in the even greater Red Scare.

Hajdu’s book winds up in the mid-1950s with the exemplary case of EC’s Mad magazine. Mad’s caustically anarchic humor — sometimes gross, and often puerile — matched up Jewish snarkiness with adolescent rebellion. It was a hit. Having incurred the anger of the powers that were, EC turned Mad into a “real” magazine, upped its price and found a different distributor. EC and Mad lived to fight another day.

In the glory days of the depression and World War II, millions of people read about Superman, Batman and the scores of other superheroes who rode in on their cape-tails. Though a lot fewer people now buy comics, Fingeroth is right to say that these heroes still saturate our culture — if mostly at the movies. In the final chapter of “The Ten-Cent Plague,” R. Crumb is quoted as saying that he never got over “Mad.” We have never gotten over Superman, either.

For better and for worse, the comics, cranky and grandiose as they frequently are, really do express the various fantasies of American Jews. What’s more — and this is absolutely critical to their success — they seem to reflect the fantasies of everyone else. Of course Jews and non-Jews sometimes dream of different things, but that might be the most important point. The comics can mean so much because they can skillfully coordinate so many dreams.

The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America
By David Hajdu
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 448 pages, $26.

David Kaufmann, cultural critic for the Forward, teaches English at George Mason University.

This article can be found at http://www.forward.com/articles/12974/

Disguised as Clark Kent: Jews, Comics, and the Creation of the Superhero

Israelis suspected in pre-9/11 stock-shorting spree

TBR News
April 15, 2003

Between August 26 and September 11, 2001, a group of speculators, identified by the American Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) as Israeli citizens, sold “short” a list of 38 stocks that could reasonably be expected to fall in value as a result of the pending attacks. These speculators operated out of the Toronto, Canada and Frankfurt, Germany, stock exchanges and their profits were specifically stated to be “in the millions of dollars.”

Short selling of stocks involves the opportunity to gain large profits by passing shares to a friendly third party, then buying them back when the price falls. Historically, if this precedes a traumatic event, it is an indication of foreknowledge. It is widely known that the CIA uses the Promis software to routinely monitor stock trades as a possible warning sign of a terrorist attack or suspicious economic behavior. A week after the Sept.11 attacks, the London Times reported that the CIA had asked regulators for the Financial Services Authority in London to investigate the suspicious sales of millions of shares of stock just prior to the terrorist acts. It was hoped the business paper trail might lead to the terrorists.

Lynne Howard, a spokeswoman for the Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE), stated that information about who made the trades was available immediately. “We would have been aware of any unusual activity right away. It would have been triggered by any unusual volume. There is an automated system called ‘blue sheeting,’ or the CBOE Market Surveillance System, that everyone in the business knows about. It provides information on the trades — the name and even the Social Security number on an account — and these surveillance systems are set up specifically to look into insider trading. The system would look at the volume, and then a real person would take over and review it, going back in time and looking at other unusual activity.”

Howard continued, “The system is so smart that even if there is a news event that triggers a market event it can go back in time, and even the parameters can be changed depending on what is being looked at. It’s a very clever system and it is instantaneous. Even with the system, though, we have very experienced and savvy staff in our market-regulations area who are always looking for things that might be unusual. They’re trained to put the pieces of the puzzle together. Even if it’s offshore, it might take a little longer, but all offshore accounts have to go through US member firms — members of the CBOE — and it is easily and quickly identifiable who made the trades. The member firm that made the trades has to have identifiable information about the client under the ‘Know Your Customer’ regulations (and we share all information with the Securities and Exchange Commission.)”

Given all of this, at a minimum, the CBOE and government regulators who are conducting the secret investigations have known for some time who made the options puts on a total of 38 stocks that might reasonably be anticipated to have a sharp drop in value because of an attack similar to the 9/11 episode. The silence from the investigating camps could mean several things: either terrorists are responsible for the puts on the listed stocks or others besides terrorists had foreknowledge of the attack and used this knowledge to reap a nice financial harvest from the tragedy.

Adam Hamilton of Zeal LLC, a North Dakota-based private consulting company that publishes research on markets worldwide, stated that “I heard that $22 million in profits was made on these put options…”

Federal investigators are continuing to be so closed-mouthed about these stock trades, and it is clear that a much wider net has been cast, apparently looking for bigger international fish involved in dubious financial activity relating to the 9/11 attacks on the world stock markets.

Just a month after the attacks the SEC sent out a list of stocks to various securities firms around the world looking for information. The list includes stocks of American, United, Continental, Northwest, Southwest and US Airways airlines, as well as Martin, Boeing, Lockheed Martin Corp., AIG, American Express Corp, American International Group, AMR Corporation, Axa SA, Bank of America Corp, Bank of New York Corp, Bank One Corp, Cigna Group, CNA Financial, Carnival Corp, Chubb Group, John Hancock Financial Services, Hercules Inc, L-3 Communications Holdings, Inc., LTV Corporation, Marsh & McLennan Cos. Inc., MetLife, Progressive Corp., General Motors, Raytheon, W.R. Grace, Royal Caribbean Cruises, Ltd., Lone Star Technologies, American Express, the Citigroup Inc. ,Royal & Sun Alliance, Lehman Brothers Holdings, Inc., Vornado Reality Trust, Morgan Stanley, Dean Witter & Co., XL Capital Ltd., and Bear Stearns.

The Times said market regulators in Germany, Japan and the US all had received information concerning the short selling of insurance, airlines and arms companies stock, all of which fell sharply in the wake of the attacks.

City of London broker and analyst Richard Crossley noted that someone sold shares in unusually large quantities beginning three weeks before the assault on the WTC and Pentagon.

He said he took this as evidence that someone had insider foreknowledge of the attacks.

“What is more awful than he should aim a stiletto blow at the heart of Western financial markets?” he added. “But to profit from it? Words fail me.”

The US Government also admitted it was investigating short selling, which evinced a compellingly strong foreknowledge of the coming Arab attack.

There was unusually heavy trading in airline and insurance stocks several days before Sept.11, which essentially bet on a drop in the worth of the stocks.

It was reported by the Interdisciplinary Center, a counter-terrorism think tank involving former Israeli intelligence officers, that insiders made nearly $16 million profit by short selling shares in American and United Airlines, the two airlines that suffered hijacking, and the investment firm of Morgan Stanley, which occupied 22 floors of the WTC.

Apparently none of the suspicious transactions could be traced to bin Laden because this news item quietly dropped from sight, leaving many people wondering if it tracked back to American firms or intelligence agencies.

Most of these transactions were handled primarily by Deutsche Bank-A.B.Brown, a firm which until 1998 was chaired by A. B.”Buzzy” Krongard, who later became executive director of the CIA.

More serious was an article in the Sept. 28, 2001 edition of the Washington Post stating that officials with the instant messaging firm of Odigo in New York confirmed that two employees in Israel received text messages warning of an attack on the WTC two hours before the planes crashed into the buildings! [LINK]

The firm’s vice president of sales and marketing, Alex Diamandis said it was possible that the warning was sent to other Odigo members, but they had not received any reports of such.

The day after, the Jerusalem Post claimed two Israelis died on the hijacked airplanes and that 4,000 were missing at the WTC.

A week later, a Beirut television station reported that 4,000 Israeli employees of the WTC were absent the day of the attack.

This information spread across the Internet but was quickly branded a hoax.

On Sept. 19, the Washington Post reported about 113 Israelis were missing at the WTC and the next day, President Bush noted more than 130 Israelis were victims.

Finally, on Sept. 22, the New York Times stated “There were, in fact, only three Israelis who had been confirmed as dead: two on the planes and another who had been visiting the towers on business and who was identified and buried.”

Investigators from numerous government agencies are part of a clandestine but official effort to resolve the market manipulations. There has been a great deal of talk about the insider trading of American stocks by certain Israeli groups both in Canada and Germany between August 26 and the Sept.11 attacks on the WTC and the Pentagon.

Government investigators have maintained a diplomatic silence about a Department of Justice (DOJ) probe of possible profiteering by interested parties with advance knowledge of the attack.

On Sept. 6, 2001, the Thursday before the tragedy, 2,075 put options were made on United Airlines and on Sept. 10, the day before the attacks, 2,282 put options were recorded for American Airlines. Given the prices at the time, this could have yielded speculators between $2 million and $4 million in profit.

The matter still is under investigation and none of the government investigating bodies –including the FBI, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and DOJ — are speaking to reporters about insider trading. Even so, suspicion of insider trading to profit from the Sept. 11 attacks is not limited to US regulators. Investigations were initiated in a number of places including Japan, Germany, the United Kingdom, France, Luxembourg, Hong Kong, Switzerland and Spain. As in the United States, all are treating these inquiries as if they were state secrets.
This article can be found at http://tbrnews.org/Archives/a048.htm

 Israelis suspected in pre-9/11 stock-shorting spree

Zionism morphes into newspeak

The Jewish Daily Forward
Wed. Jun 27, 2007

There is a Jewish conspiracy at work. It is not the one portrayed in the pernicious “Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” It is not Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s Holocaust hoax, or a Zionist plot to undermine Islam. Nor is it Jewish control of the media or the world economy as Jihadists, Ku Klux Klanners, neo-Nazi skinheads and Mel Gibson conjure up for themselves. It is not even the so-called apartheid security wall that so inflames Britain’s self-righteous, hypocritical, antisemitic academics and labor unions.

No, the only real Jewish conspiracy is the one aimed at undermining the future existence of Israel, and, consequently, the survival of the Jewish people worldwide. Iran, Holocaust deniers, the British left and all the rest of the mosquitoes carrying the antisemite bacillus are child’s play compared to this threat.

There is a Jewish conspiracy to prevent massive immigration of North American Jews to Israel.
The plot began when the word Zionism was hijacked by the professional Jewish and Israeli world and applied to every possible Jewish enterprise other than aliyah. Need a term for Jewish education in the Diaspora? Why not use Zionism? Need a word for patriotic Israeli spirit? Zionism. Need a word for Jews who contribute money, use Israel as a booster program for Jewish identity, or even just for tourism? Call all that Zionism, too. Nice, concise and misleading.

In a way exceeding the machinations of George Orwell, the word Zionism has morphed into newspeak to the point of losing its core meaning and providing an umbrella for any old thing that functionaries, bureaucrats, fundraisers and Jewish identity wonks can use to make a living. Having obfuscated the term’s meaning, the conspirators have set about suppressing the notion of aliyah.

What are the motivations? On the North American side it is simply to prevent the kinder from considering aliyah as an option and threatening the vitality of golden Diaspora. Birthright participants can see Israel as a museum, a Holocaust memorial, a refugee absorption center, the home of soldier-heroes and a catalyst for Jewish identity. They can meet generals, prime ministers and suffering Ethiopian immigrants.

But God forbid, don’t let them meet with people exactly like their parents who actually moved to and live in the real Israel, because they might get some ideas.

Israelis have preferred taking in American Jewish money over taking in large numbers of strong competitors laden with human and financial capital. The vested interests here are fully aware that many patterns of behavior would be very difficult to maintain if another half-million North American Jews made aliyah.

How would Moshe Safdie’s backward, environmentally unsound plan for developing West Jerusalem even emerge from committee? How would the Orthodox establishment hamstring conversion processes? How could politicians behave corruptly, impervious to notions of accountability? How could the education system continue to teach rote knowledge and base admission to university on psychometric puzzles, rather than on the skills of independent thinking, broad horizons and competent writing skills? How could the World Zionist Organization have its annual meeting and dream up all kinds of fatuous programs but not once mention aliyah?

Aliyah is the Occam’s Razor for so many problems, and yet it is the only solution not considered for any of them.

The Reform movement decries the conditions of its members in Israel? Send money, but sending more members, forget it. North American Jews have identity problems? Invest billions in convoluted educational programs that lead nowhere, but don’t give every American Jew a direct link to an actual cousin who lives in an actual Jewish state.

Jerusalem Day is conducted under the cloud of a lost Jewish majority in the city? Disenfranchise the Arabs of East Jerusalem, but don’t change the balance by actually getting more Jews here. Ahmadinejad denies the Holocaust and says it was an excuse to create Israel? Hold conferences, speak indignantly, give him attention he doesn’t deserve, but don’t disabuse him and make his claims irrelevant by proving that masses of Jews want to live in Israel by choice, and not only as refugees.

When the history of Zionism is written, it will become clear that post-Zionism started when the word “Zionism” became an instrument of this conspiracy.

Unless organizations dedicated to — and only to — aliyah garner the lion’s share of Jewish philanthropy in place of expenditures on Jewish identity fetishes and continued waving at post-Zionist windmills, these philanthropic efforts will fail every cost-effectiveness test one can imagine. Unless young Jewish minds in North America are exposed to the idea that aliyah is a realistic option that can ensure the future of Israel and the Jewish people everywhere, the next century will find the Ahmadinejads, Ismael Haniyehs and Ken Livingstones of the world wondering why they worked so hard when the Jewish conspiracy succeeded beyond their wildest dreams.

And no one will be left to read the Book of Lamentations.

David Chinitz, a senior lecturer at the Hebrew University-Hadassah School of Public Health in Jerusalem, made aliyah from Washington in 1981.

URL:The Jewish Daily Forward

Zionism morphes into newspeak

A disavowal of racism and of those advocating racist solutions

This website and its associated websites categorically reject any and all forms of racism. Further, this website and associated sites will consider those advocating racism or racist policies as agents provocateurs working in the interest of criminal Zionism.

It’s well-known by now that a strategy of divide-and-conquer has been one of the criminal network’s chief, and perhaps most effective, means of maintaining control.By creating artificial divisions — such as Christian vs. Muslim (the neo-conservative “Clash of Civilizations” fantasy) and black vs. white, especially in the US — the criminals have historically eluded, and continue to elude, punishment for their crimes.

This website and associated websites, therefore, categorically reject racism and are not opposed to any particular group of people on the basis of race.

Rather, this site stands against the criminal ideology and practices of world Zionism and its advocates, whatever their background.

To borrow a phrase from Daryl Bradford Smith [LINK], whose general approach to the issue this site endorses: “We don’t oppose any particular ethnic community, we oppose criminals.”

Anyone promoting racism or racist policies, therefore, or seen to be inciting violence against particular ethnic groups, will be viewed by this and associate websites as agents provocateurs actively working to destroy the cohesion of the growing anti-Zionist movement by attempting to turn natural allies against one another.

It’s a time-worn tactic, but one against which we must remain vigilant.

A disavowal of racism and of those advocating racist solutions

Lest we forget (The price of Israel, 1953-2002)

Americans for Middle East Understanding (AMEU)
November, 2006The Israeli lobby in Washington has successfully influenced the US Congress to give billions of non-repayable dollars each year to Israel on the premise that Israel’s loyalty and strategic importance to the United States make it an ally worthy of such unprecedented consideration.

Is it?

Israeli actions over the past 53 years involving US interests in the Middle East seriously challenge the “strategic asset” premise of the Israeli lobby. Some of these actions are compiled in the list that follows:

September 1953: Israel illegally begins to divert the waters of the Jordan River. President Eisenhower, enraged, suspends all economic aid to Israel and prepares to remove the tax-deductible status of the United Jewish Appeal and of other Zionist organizations in the United States.

October 1953: Israel raids the West Bank village of Kibya, killing 53 Palestinian civilians. The Eisenhower administration calls the raid “shocking” and confirms the suspension of aid to Israel.

July 1954: Israeli agents firebomb American and British cultural centers in Egypt, making it look like the work of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood in order to sabotage US-Egyptian relations.

October 1956: Israel secretly joins with England and France in a colonial style attack on Egypt’s Suez Canal. Calling the invasion a dangerous threat to international order, President Eisenhower forces Israel to relinquish most of the land it had seized.

1965: 206 pounds of weapons grade uranium disappear from the Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation plant in Pennsylvania. Plant president is Zalmon Shapiro, a former sales agent for the Israel Defense Ministry. CIA Director Richard Helms later charges that Israel stole the uranium.

June 1967: Israel bombs, napalms and torpedoes the USS Liberty, killing 34 Americans, wounding 171 others, and nearly sinking the lightly armed intelligence ship. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Thomas Moorer, charges that the attack “could not possibly have been a case of mistaken identity.”

June 1967: Against US wishes, Israel seizes and occupies Syria’s Golan Heights.

June 1968: Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir rejects US Secretary of State William Rogers’ Peace Plan that would have required Israel to withdraw from the occupied territories; she calls upon Jews everywhere to denounce the plan.

March 1978: Israel invades Lebanon, illegally using US cluster bombs and other US weapons given to Israel for defensive purposes only.

1979: Israel frustrates US sponsored Camp David Accords by building new settlements on the West Bank. President Carter complains to American Jewish leaders that, by acting in a “completely irresponsible way,” Israel’s Prime Minister Begin continues “to disavow the basic principles of the accords.”

1979: Israel sells US airplane tires and other military supplies to Iran, against US policy, at a time when US diplomats are being held hostage in Teheran.

July 1980: Israel annexes East Jerusalem in defiance of US wishes and world opinion.

July 1981: Illegally using US cluster bombs and other equipment, Israel bombs P.L.O. sites in Beirut, with great loss of civilian life.

December 1981: Israel annexes Syria’s Golan Heights in violation of the Geneva Convention and in defiance of US wishes.

June 1982: Israel invades Lebanon a second time, again using US cluster bombs and other US weapons. President Reagan calls for a halt of all shipments of cluster bomb shells to Israel.

September 1982: Abetted by Israeli forces under the control of Defense Minister Ariel Sharon, Lebanese militiamen massacre hundreds of Palestinians in Beirut’s Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. President Reagan is “horrified” and summons the Israeli ambassador to demand Israel’s immediate withdrawal from Beirut.

September 1982: Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin rejects President Reagan’s Peace Plan for the occupied territories.

January March 1983: Israeli army “harasses” US Marines in Lebanon. Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger confirms Marine commandant’s report that “Israeli troops are deliberately threatening the lives of American military personnel . . . replete with verbal degradation of the officers, their uniforms and country.”

March 1985: Israeli lobby in Washington pressures the US Congress to turn down a $1.6 billion arms sale to Jordan, costing the US thousands of jobs, quite apart from the financial loss to American industry. Jordan gives the contract to Russia. A frustrated King Hussein complains: “The US is not free to move except within the limits of what AIPAC, the Zionists and the State of Israel determine for it.”

October 1985: Israeli lobby blocks $4 billion aircraft sale to Saudi Arabia. The sale, strongly backed by the Reagan administration, costs US over 350,000 jobs, with steep financial losses to American industry. Saudi Arabia awards contract to England.

November 1985: Jonathan Jay Pollard, an American recruited by Israel, is arrested for passing highly classified intelligence to Israel. US officials call the operation but “one link in an organized and well financed Israeli espionage ring operating within the United States.” State Department contacts reveal that top Israeli defense officials “traded stolen US intelligence documents to Soviet military intelligence agents in return for assurances of greater emigration of Soviet Jews.”

December 1985: US Customs in three states raid factories suspected of illegally selling electroplating technology to Israel. Richard Smyth, a NATO consultant and former US exporter, is indicted on charges of illegally exporting to Israel 800 krytron devices for triggering nuclear explosions.

April 1986: US authorities arrest 17 persons, including a retired Israeli General, Avraham Bar Am, for plotting to sell more than $2 billion of advanced US weaponry to Iran (much of it already in Israel). General Bar Am, claiming to have had Israeli Government approval, threatens to name names at the highest levels. US Attorney General of New York calls the plot “mind-boggling in scope.”

July 1986: Assistant Secretary of State Richard Murphy informs the Israeli ambassador that a US investigation is under way of eight Israeli representatives in the US accused of plotting the illegal export of technology used in making cluster bombs. Indictments against the eight are later dropped in exchange for an Israeli promise to cooperate in the case.

January 1987: Israeli Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin visits South Africa to discuss joint nuclear weapons testing. Israel admits that, in violation of a US Senate anti apartheid bill, it has arms sales contracts with South Africa worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Rep. John Conyers calls for Congressional hearings on Israel South Africa nuclear testing.

November 1987: The Iran Contra scandal reveals that it was Israel that had first proposed the trade to Iran of US arms for hostages. The scandal becomes the subject of the Tower Commission Report, Senate and House investigations, and the Walsh criminal prosecution inquiries.

April 1988: Testifying before US Subcommittee on Narcotics, Terrorism and International Operations, Jose Blandon, a former intelligence aide to Panama’s General Noriega, reveals that Israel used $20 million of US aid to ship arms via Panama to Nicaraguan Contras. The empty planes then smuggled cocaine via Panama into the United States. Pilot tells ABC reporter Richard Threlkeld that Israel was his primary employer. The arms for drugs network is said to be led by Mike Harari, Noriega’s close aide and bodyguard, who was also a high officer in the Israeli secret services and chief coordinator of Israel’s military and commercial business in Panama.

June 1988: Mubarak Awad, a Palestinian-American advocate of nonviolence, is deported by Israel. The White House denounces the action, saying, “We think it is unjustifiable to deny Mr. Awad the right to stay and live in Jerusalem, where he was born.”

June 1988: Amnesty International accuses Israel of throwing deadly, US-made gas canisters inside hospitals, mosques, and private homes. The Pennsylvania manufacturer, a major defense corporation, suspends future shipments of tear gas to Israel.

November 1989: According to the Israeli paper Ma’ariv, US officials claim Israel Aircraft Industries was involved in attempts to smuggle US missile navigation equipment to South Africa in violation of US law.

December 1989: While the US was imposing economic sanctions on Iran, Israel purchased $36 million of Iranian oil in order to encourage Iran to help free three Israeli hostages in Lebanon.

March 1990: Israel requests more than $1 billion in loans, gifts, and donations from American Jews and the US government to pay for resettling Soviet Jews in occupied territories. President Bush responds, “My position is that the foreign policy of the US says we do not believe there should be new settlements in the West Bank or East Jerusalem.”

June 1990: Officials in the Bush administration and in Congress say that Israel has emerged as a leading supplier of advanced military technology to China, despite the expressed opposition of the US to Israeli-Chinese military cooperation.

September 1990: Israeli Foreign Minister David Levy asks the Bush administration to forgive Israel’s $4.5 billion military debt and dramatically increase military aid. Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Arens expresses concern over expected $20 billion in US arms sales to Saudi Arabia and asks for an additional $1 billion in military aid to Israel. Facing rising congressional opposition, the White House backs off from a plan to sell Saudi Arabia over $20 billion in military hardware. The Bush Sr. administration promises to deliver additional F-15 fighters and Patriot missiles to Israel, but defers action on Israel’s request for more than $1 billion in new military aid. Arens questions the US commitment to maintain Israel’s military advantage in the Middle East.

October 1990: “Aliya cabinet” chair Ariel Sharon encourages increase in settlement of Soviet Jews in East Jerusalem, despite his government’s assurances to the US that it would not do so. Bush sends personal letter to Prime Minister Shamir urging Israel not to pursue East Jerusalem housing. Shamir rejects appeal.

November 1990: In his new autobiography, former President Reagan says Israel was the instigator and prime mover in the Iran-Contra affair and that then-Prime Minister Shimon Peres “was behind the proposal.”

January 1991: White House criticizes Israeli ambassador Zalman Shoval for complaining that the US had not moved forward on $400 million in loan guarantees and that Israel “had not received one cent in aid” from allies to compensate for missile damage in the Gulf War. US says comments are “outrageous and outside the bounds of acceptable behavior.”

February 1991: Hours after long-disputed $400 million loan guarantees to Israel are approved, Israeli officials say the amount is grossly insufficient. Next day, Israel formally requests $1 billion in emergency military assistance to cover costs stemming from the Gulf War.

March 1991: Israeli government rejects President Bush’s call for solution to Arab-Israeli conflict that includes trading land for peace. In a report to Congress, US State Department says Soviet Jewish immigrants are settling in the occupied territories at a higher rate than the Israeli government claims. During tour of West Bank settlements, Housing Minister Sharon says construction of 13,000 housing units in occupied territories had been approved for next two years. Plans contradict statement by Prime Minister Shamir, who told President Bush that the Israeli government had not approved such plans.

April 1991: Prime Minister Shamir and several members of his cabinet reject US Secretary of State Baker’s suggestion that Israel curtail expansion of Jewish settlements in the occupied territories as gesture for peace. US calls new Jewish settlement of Revava “an obstacle” to peace and questions Israel’s timing, with Secretary Baker due to arrive in Israel in two days. Hours before Baker arrives, eight Israeli families complete move to new settlement of Talmon Bet. US ambassador to Israel William Brown files an official protest with the Israeli government about establishment and/or expansion of settlements in the West Bank. Housing Minister Sharon says Israel has no intention of meeting US demands to slow or stop settlements. Secretary Baker, in a news conference before leaving Israel, says Israel failed to give responses he needed to put together a peace conference.

May 1991: Israeli ambassador to US Zalman Shoval says his country will soon request $10 billion in loan guarantees from Washington to aid in settling Soviet Jewish immigrants in Israel. Secretary Baker calls continued building of Israeli settlements “largest obstacle” to convening proposed Middle East peace conference.

May 1991: President Bush unveils proposal for arms control in Middle East. US administration confirms that Israel, which has not signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, has objected to provision on nuclear weapons.

June 1991: Prime Minister Shamir rejects President Bush’s call for Israeli acceptance of a greater United Nations’ role in proposed Arab-Israeli peace talks.

July 1991: Israeli Housing Minister Sharon inaugurates the new Israeli settlement of Mevo Dotan in the West Bank one day after President Bush describes Israeli settlements as “counterproductive.”

September 1991: President Bush asks Congress to delay considering Israeli loan guarantee request for 120 days. Ignoring pleas of US administration, Israel formally submits its request. Prime Minister Shamir says US has a “moral obligation” to provide Israel with loan guarantees, and that Israel would continue to build settlements in the occupied territories.

October 1991: The Washington Post reports that President Bush waived US-mandated sanctions against Israel after US intelligence determined that Israel had exported missile components to South Africa.

November 1991: Hours after concluding bilateral talks with Syria, Israel inaugurates Qela’, a new settlement in the Golan Heights. Secretary of State Baker calls the action “provocative.”

February 1992: Secretary of State Baker says US will not provide loan guarantees to Israel unless it ceases its settlement activity. President Bush threatens to veto any loan guarantees to Israel without a freeze on Israel’s settlement activity. March 1992: US administration confirms it has begun investigating intelligence reports that Israel supplied China with technical data from US Patriot missile system.

April 1992: State Department Inspector issues report that the department has failed to heed intelligence reports that an important US ally — widely understood to be Israel — was making unauthorized transfers of US military technology to China, South Africa, Chile, and Ethiopia.

May 1992: Wall Street Journal cites Israeli press reports that US officials have placed Israel on list of 20 nations carrying out espionage against US companies.

June 1992: US Defense Department says Israel has rejected a US request to question former General Rami Dotan, who is at center of arms procurement scandal involving US contractors.

July 1992: General Electric Company pleads guilty to fraud and corrupt business practices in connection with its sale of military jet engines to Israel. A GE manager had conspired with Israeli Gen. Rami Dotan to divert $27 million in US military aid with fraudulent vouchers. US Justice and Defense Departments do not believe that Dotan was acting in his own interest, implying that the government of Israel may be implicated in the fraud, which would constitute a default on Israel’s aid agreements with the US.

June 1993: US House of Representatives passes bill authorizing $80 million per year to Israel for refugee settlement; bill passes despite $10 billion in US loan guarantees to Israel and against evidence from Israeli economists that Israel no longer needs US aid.

October 1993: CIA informs Senate Government Affairs Committee that Israel has been providing China for over a decade with “several billion dollars” worth of advanced military technology. Israeli Prime Minister Rabin admits Israel has sold arms to China.

November 1993: CIA Director James Woolsey makes first public US acknowledgement that “Israel is generally regarded as having some kind of nuclear capability.”

December 1993: Time magazine reports convicted spy Jonathan Pollard passed a National Security Agency listing of foreign intelligence frequencies to Israel that later was received by Soviets, ruining several billion dollars of work and compromising lives of US informants. December 1994: Los Angeles Times reports Israel has given China information on US military technology to help in joint Israeli-Chinese development of a fighter jet. January 1995: When Egypt threatens not to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty because Israel will not sign, the US says it will not pressure Israel to sign.

July 1995: US Ambassador to Israel Martin Indyk demands Israel abolish import barriers that discriminate against US imports.

November 1995: Israel grants citizenship to American spy Jonathan Pollard.

April 1996: Using US-supplied shells, Israel kills 106 unarmed civilians who had taken refuge in a UN peace-keeping compound in Qana, southern Lebanon. UN investigators, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch condemn the shelling as premeditated. The UN Security Council calls on Israel to pay reparations. Resolution is vetoed by the United States.

June 1996: US State Department hands Israeli defense officials classified CIA report alleging Israel has given China US military avionics, including advanced radar-detection system and electronic warfare equipment.

December 1996: Israeli cabinet reinstates large subsidies, including tax breaks and business grants, for West Bank settlers. US says the move is “troubling” and “clearly complicates the peace process.” Israeli government rejects President Clinton’s criticism of the settlements and vows to strengthen them.

February 1997: FBI announces that David Tenenbaum, a mechanical engineer working for the US army, has admitted that for the past 10 years he has “inadvertently” passed on classified military information to Israeli officials.

March 1997: US presses Israel to delay building new settlement of Har Homa near Bethlehem. Prime Minister Netanyahu says international opposition “will just strengthen my resolve.”

June 1997: US investigators report that two Hasidic Jews from New York, suspected of laundering huge quantities of drug money for a Colombian drug cartel, recently purchased millions of dollars worth of land near the settlements of Mahseya and Zanoah.

September 1997: Jewish settlers in Hebron stone Palestinian laborers working on a US-financed project to renovate the town’s main street. David Muirhead, the American overseeing the project, says the Israeli police beat him, threw him into a van, and detained him until the US Consulate intervened. US State Department calls the incident “simply unacceptable.”

September 1997: Secretary of State Albright says Israel’s decision to expand Efrat settlement “is not at all helpful” to the peace process. Prime Minister Netanyahu says he will continue to expand settlements.

May 1998: 13 years after denying he was not its spy, Israel officially recognizes Pollard as its agent in hopes of negotiating his release.

June 1998: Secretary of State Albright phones Prime Minister Netanyahu to condemn his plan to extend Jerusalem’s municipal boundaries and to move Jews into East Jerusalem, particularly in the area adjacent to Bethlehem. Ignoring US protests, Israel’s cabinet unanimously approves plan to extend Jerusalem’s municipal authority.

August 1998: Secretary Albright tells Prime Minister Netanyahu that the freeze in the peace process due to the settlement policy is harming US interests in the Middle East and affecting the US ability to forge a coalition against Iraq.

September 1998: Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad reports that the Israeli airliner that crashed in Amsterdam in 1992 was not carrying “gifts and perfume,” as the Israelis claimed, but three of the four chemicals used to make sarin nerve gas. According to the plane’s cargo manifest, the chemicals were sent from a US factory in Pennsylvania to the top secret Israeli Institute for Biological Research.

November 1998: Israeli Foreign Minister Sharon urges Jewish settlers to “grab” West Bank land so it does not fall under Palestinian control in any final peace settlement.

May 1999: US denounces Israel’s decision to annex more land to the Ma’ale Adumim settlement.

June 1999: The Israeli company Orlil is reported to have stolen US night-vision equipment purchased for the Israeli Defense Forces and to have sold it to “Far Eastern” countries.

April 2001: Prime Minister Sharon announces plans to build 708 new housing units in the Jewish settlements of Ma’ale Adumim and Alfe Menashe. US State Department criticizes the move as “provocative.”

May 2001: The Mitchell Committee (headed by former US Senator George Mitchell) concludes that Jewish settlements are a barrier to peace. Prime Minister Sharon vows to continue expanding the settlements.

May 2001: US is voted off the United Nations Commission on Human Rights for the first time since the committee’s establishment in 1947. The Financial Times of London suggests that Washington, by vetoing UN resolutions alleging Israeli human rights abuses, showed its inability to work impartially in the area of human rights. Secretary of State Colin Powell suggests the vote was because “we left a little blood on the floor” in votes involving the Palestinians.

September 2001: Six days after the 9/11 terrorist attacks on America, Secretary of State Powell, when asked why America is hated in the Arab and Muslim world, acknowledges that the deep resentment and anger toward the United States is due to the Palestinian crisis.

November 2001: Secretary of State Colin Powell calls on Israel to halt all settlement building which he says “cripples chances for real peace and security.” Benny Elon, a right-wing minister in the Sharon government, says the settlers aren’t worried. “America has a special talent for seeing things in the short term,” he says, explaining that what Powell said he said only to get Arab support for America’s anti-terrorism coalition against Afghanistan.

March 2002: UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan calls for immediate withdrawal of Israeli tanks from Palestinian refugee camps, citing large numbers of Palestinians reported dead or injured. US State Dept. says the United States has contacted Israel to “urge that utmost restraint be exercised in order to avoid harm to the civilian population.”

April 2002: President Bush repeatedly demands an immediate halt to Israel’s military invasion of the West Bank. Prime Minister Sharon rebuffs the President’s withdrawal demands, saying the United States and other nations should not “put any pressure upon us.”
This article can be found at ameu.org

Lest we forget (The price of Israel, 1953-2002)

Archaeologist claims to find lost Khazar capital

The Associated Press
September 21, 2008MOSCOW – A Russian archaeologist says he has found the lost capital of the Khazars, a powerful nation that adopted Judaism as its official religion more than 1,000 years ago, only to disappear leaving little trace of its culture.

Dmitry Vasilyev, a professor at Astrakhan State University, said his nine-year excavation near the Caspian Sea has finally unearthed the foundations of a triangular fortress of flamed brick, along with modest yurt-shaped dwellings, and he believes these are part of what was once Itil, the Khazar capital.

By law Khazars could use flamed bricks only in the capital, Vasilyev said. The general location of the city on the Silk Road was confirmed in medieval chronicles by Arab, Jewish and European authors.

“The discovery of the capital of Eastern Europe’s first feudal state is of great significance,” he told The Associated Press. “We should view it as part of Russian history.”

Kevin Brook, the American author of “The Jews of Khazaria,” e-mailed Wednesday that he has followed the Itil dig over the years, and even though it has yielded no Jewish artifacts, “Now I’m as confident as the archaeological team is that they’ve truly found the long-lost city.”

Ruling nomadic tribe

The Khazars were a Turkic tribe that roamed the steppes from Northern China to the Black Sea. Between the 7th and 10th centuries they conquered huge swaths of what is now southern Russia and Ukraine, the Caucasus Mountains and Central Asia as far as the Aral Sea.

Itil, about 800 miles south of Moscow, had a population of up to 60,000 and occupied 0.8 square miles of marshy plains southwest of the Russian Caspian Sea port of Astrakhan, Vasilyev said.

It lay at a major junction of the Silk Road, the trade route between Europe and China, which “helped Khazars amass giant profits,” he said.

The Khazar empire was once a regional superpower, and Vasilyev said his team has found “luxurious collections” of well-preserved ceramics that help identify cultural ties of the Khazar state with Europe, the Byzantine Empire and even Northern Africa. They also found armor, wooden kitchenware, glass lamps and cups, jewelry and vessels for transporting precious balms dating back to the eighth and ninth centuries, he said.

‘We know almost nothing’

But a scholar in Israel, while calling the excavations interesting, said the challenge was to find Khazar inscriptions.

“If they found a few buildings, or remains of buildings, that’s interesting but does not make a big difference,” said Dr. Simon Kraiz, an expert on Eastern European Jewry at Haifa University. “If they found Khazar writings, that would be very important.”

Vasilyev says no Jewish artifacts have been found at the site, and in general, most of what is known about the Khazars comes from chroniclers from other, sometimes competing cultures and empires.

“We know a lot about them, and yet we know almost nothing: Jews wrote about them, and so did Russians, Georgians, and Armenians, to name a few,” said Kraiz. “But from the Khazars themselves we have nearly nothing.”

‘Russia is a successor’

The Khazars’ ruling dynasty and nobility converted to Judaism sometime in the 8th or 9th centuries. Vasilyev said the limited number of Jewish religious artifacts such as mezuzas and Stars of David found at other Khazar sites prove that ordinary Khazars preferred traditional beliefs such as shamanism, or newly introduced religions including Islam.

Yevgeny Satanovsky, director of the Middle Eastern Institute in Moscow, said he believes the Khazar elite chose Judaism out of political expediency — to remain independent of neighboring Muslim and Christian states. “They embraced Judaism because they wanted to remain neutral, like Switzerland these days,” he said.

In particular, he said, the Khazars opposed the Arab advance into the Caucasus Mountains and were instrumental in containing a Muslim push toward eastern Europe. He compared their role in eastern Europe to that of the French knights who defeated Arab forces at the Battle of Tours in France in 732.

The Khazars succeeded in holding off the Arabs, but a young, expanding Russian state vanquished the Khazar empire in the late 10th century. Medieval Russian epic poems mention Russian warriors fighting the “Jewish Giant.”

“In many ways, Russia is a successor of the Khazar state,” Vasilyev said.

Traces of conquest

He said his dig revealed traces of a large fire that was probably caused by the Russian conquest. He said Itil was rebuilt following the fall of the Khazar empire, when ethnic Khazars were slowly assimilated by Turkic-speaking tribes, Tatars and Mongols, who inhabited the city until it was flooded by the rising Caspian Sea around the 14th century.

The study of the Khazar empire was discouraged in the Soviet Union. The dictator Josef Stalin, in particular, detested the idea that a Jewish empire had come before Russia’s own. He ordered references to Khazar history removed from textbooks because they “disproved his theory of Russian statehood,” Satanovsky said.

Only now are Russian scholars free to explore Khazar culture. The Itil excavations have been sponsored by the Russian-Jewish Congress, a nonprofit organization that supports cultural projects in Russia.

“Khazar studies are just beginning,” Satanovsky said.
URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26809309/

Archaeologist claims to find lost Khazar capital