IT’S OFFICIAL: ‘Al-Qaeda’ spokesman Adam Gadahn (a.k.a. Pearlman) is scion of Jewish ADL

Even the (Jewish-run) mainstream media now admits that ‘Adam Ghadan’ — an ‘Al-Qaeda’ spokesman known for making absurd calls-to-arms against ‘infidels’ and ‘Zio-Crusaders’ — is, in fact, the grandson of a prominent board member of the Jewish Anti-Defamation League:
The Los Angeles Times: ‘Gadahn’s grandfather was Dr. Carl K. Pearlman, a well-known Orange County urologist who died in 1998.’

Haaretz: ‘Gadahn’s grandfather was well-known urologist Carl Pearlman, an active member of the Jewish community in Orange County California.’

The Orange County Register (2006): Carl Pearlman’s activism included ‘serving as the first local chairman of the Bonds for Israel campaign and then as chairman of the United Jewish Welfare Fund. He was on the board of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL)…’

For the complete text of these articles (along with one from CNN that neglects to mention the name ‘Pearlman’ once), READ MORE.

American Al-Qaeda member Adam Gadahn tells of Jewish roots in video
The Los Angeles Times
June 14, 2009

Adam Gadahn, a Southern California-raised man self-described as American Al-Qaeda has released a new video in which he talks about his Jewish ancestry.

Gadahn, known as “Azzam the American”, lived in Garden Grove in the 1990s after growing up on a goat farm in rural Riverside County. The FBI said he converted to Islam as a youth, left the United States around 1998 and later was associated with senior Al Qaeda lieutenant Abu Zubaida in Pakistan and attended training camps in Afghanistan.

In the new video, obtained by CNN, Gadahn talks about his background. “Let me here tell you something about myself and my biography, in which there is a benefit and a lesson,” Gadahn said. “Your speaker has Jews in his ancestry, the last of whom was his grandfather.”

Gadahn’s grandfather was Dr. Carl K. Pearlman, a well-known Orange County urologist who died in 1998. Pearlman, who was Jewish, received a community-service award in 1985 from the Orange County chapter of the National Conference of Christians and Jews, which has since changed its name to the National Conference for Community and Justice, for his work in the expansion of St. Joseph Hospital in Orange.

In the video, Gadahn refers to his grandfather, saying he was “a zealous supporter of the usurper entity, and a prominent member of a number of Zionist hate organizations. … He used to repeat to me what he claimed are the virtues of this entity and encouraged me to visit it, specifically the city of Tel Aviv, where relatives of ours live,” he said.

The above article can be found at: http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2009/06/american-al-qaeda-adam-gadahn-talks-about-jewish-southern-california-roots-in-new-video.html
Also:

American Al-Qaida member acknowledges his Jewish roots
Haaretz (Israel)
June 14, 2009

An American Al-Qaida member has for the first time acknowledged his Jewish ancestry, in an official video message released over the weekend by the international terrorist network.

Adam Yahiye Gadahn — who also goes by the name Azzam the American — declared his roots in a video which surfaced on Saturday, using the opportunity to urge Muslims to use “our weapons, funds and Jihad against the Jews and their allies everywhere.”

“Let me here tell you something about myself and my biography, in which there is a benefit and a lesson,” Gadahn says in the video, speaking in Arabic with English subtitles. “Your speaker has Jews in his ancestry, the last of whom was his grandfather.”

Gadahn, 30, was raised in rural California and converted to Islam in the mid-1990s, when he moved to Pakistan and joined Al-Qaida. In 2006, the United States has charged him with treason and with providing material support to Al-Qaida. The FBI has placed him on its most wanted list and is offering a $1 million reward for his capture.

In the video, Gadahn describes his grandfather as a “Zionist” and “zealous supporter of the usurper entity, and a prominent member of a number of Zionist hate organizations… He used to repeat to me what he claimed are the virtues of this entity and encouraged me to visit [Israel], specifically the city of Tel Aviv, where relatives of ours live.”

Gadahn’s grandfather was well-known urologist Carl Pearlman, an active member of the Jewish community in Orange County California.

Gadahn says that despite his grandfather’s attempt to impart the ideology, he could never embrace “the Jews’ rape of Muslim Palestine.”

How can a person with an ounce of self-respect possibly stand in the ranks of criminals and killers who have no morals, no mercy, no humanity and indeed, no honor?” Gadahn says of Zionism. “Isn’t it shameful enough for a person to carry the citizenship of America, the symbol of oppression and tyranny and advocate of terror in the world?”

Although Gadahn’s Jewish roots have been reported before in the media, terrorism analyst Laura Mansfield told CNN that this was the first official acknowledgement. According to Mansfield, the video was probably taped in spring, prior to U.S. President Barack Obama’s address to the Muslim world in Cairo

The above article can be found at: http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1092707.html
Here’s another article on the same subject by CNN, which, while neglecting to mention the name ‘Pearlman’ once, provides what now unfortunately passes for ‘analysis’:

American al-Qaeda member acknowledges Jewish ancestry
CNN
June 13, 2009

In a new anti-Israel, anti-U.S. video, an American al Qaeda member makes reference to his Jewish ancestry for the first time in an official al-Qaeda message.

In the video, Adam Yahiye Gadahn, also known as Azzam the American, discusses his roots as he castigates U.S. policies and deplores Israel’s offensive in Gaza that started in late December 2008 and continued into January. [This is an obvious device aimed at associating sympathy for the besieged Palestinians with the evil ‘Al-Qaeda,’ perpetrators of the heinous 9/11 attacks, in the bemused mind of the average American -- 800]

“Let me here tell you something about myself and my biography, in which there is a benefit and a lesson,” Gadahn says, as he elicits support from his fellow Muslims for “our weapons, funds and Jihad against the Jews and their allies everywhere.”

“Your speaker has Jews in his ancestry, the last of whom was his grandfather,” he says.

Growing up in rural California, Gadahn embraced Islam in the mid-1990s, moved to Pakistan and has appeared in al Qaeda videos before.

He was indicted in the United States in 2006 on charges of treason and material support to al-Qaeda, according to the FBI. Gadahn is on the FBI’s Most Wanted List, with a reward of up to $1 million leading to his capture. FBI records show Gadahn’s date of birth as September 1, 1978.

The video — in which Gadahn speaks Arabic, with English subtitles — surfaced on Saturday. This account is based on an English transcript provided by As-Sahab Media, the media production company used by al Qaeda.

Gadahn’s Jewish ancestry has been reported in the news media. But terrorism analyst Laura Mansfield says it is the first time Gadahn acknowledged his Jewish ancestry in an official al Qaeda message.

Gadahn says his grandfather was a “Zionist” and “a zealous supporter of the usurper entity, and a prominent member of a number of Zionist hate organizations.”

“He used to repeat to me what he claimed are the virtues of this entity and encouraged me to visit it, specifically the city of Tel Aviv, where relatives of ours live,” says Gadahn, referring to Israel.

He says his grandfather gave him a book by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called “A Place Among the Nations” — in which the “rabid Zionist” sets out “feeble arguments and unmasked lies to justify the Jews’ rape of Muslim Palestine.”

But Gadahn says that despite his youth at the time, he didn’t heed his grandfather’s words.

“How can a person with an ounce of self-respect possibly stand in the ranks of criminals and killers who have no morals, no mercy, no humanity and indeed, no honor?” he says in reference to Zionists and Israel.

“Isn’t it shameful enough for a person to carry the citizenship of America, the symbol of oppression and tyranny and advocate of terror in the world?”

Mansfield thinks the video may have been made between late April and mid-May, before President Obama’s speech in Cairo, Egypt, addressing U.S. relations with Muslims.

Gadahn notes Obama’s inauguration, Netanyahu’s election in February, and Obama’s speech in Turkey in April.

Specifically mentioning the Gaza offensive and citing other hot spots such as Iraq, Afghanistan, Chechnya and Somalia, where the “Zio-Crusader alliance” is fighting his “brothers,” he says “this open-faced aggression” comes as Obama has risen to power. [By stressing the notion of a ‘Zio-Crusader alliance,’ Gadahn -- in actuality a Mossad operative -- is simply trying to make Al-Qaeda appear as a common enemy to both Christians and Jews, thus cementing the unholy alliance between badly misled ‘Christian Zionists’ and Israel -- 800]

He scorns Obama’s statements in his inaugural address and in Turkey that America isn’t and won’t be at war with Islam, and “other deceptive, false and sugarcoated words of endearment and respect.” He says Obama’s language is similar to words Netanyahu uttered in the Knesset in 1996.

Gadahn also backs the idea of targeting “Zio-Crusader” interests anywhere in the world, not just “within Palestine.”

The above article can be found at: http://edition.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/meast/06/13/american.qaeda.message/
Finally, note this September 2006 article from the Orange County Register — the first of three parts — which explicitly states that Dr. Carl K. Pearlman was not only ‘active in the Jewish community,’ but a card-carrying board member of the Jewish ADL:

Radical conversion
The Orange County Register
September 24, 2006

SANTA ANA — When Dr. Donald Martin took over as chief of the urology department at Orange County General Hospital in 1969, he felt lucky.

He inherited the job from Dr. Carl K. Pearlman, then 60, a highly respected doctor who was gracious and generous to a young man of 39.

Martin came to know Pearlman as a good doctor, a social activist, and a mentor to many young men training in medicine. So he wasn’t surprised in the mid-1990s when Pearlman told him he was taking in his grandson.

“Carl was very sweet,” Martin recalled. “He said, ‘He’s having some problems, so I’ll take him under my roof, under my wing.’”

Pearlman died in 1998, and Martin didn’t think about his friend’s confidence until six years later.

That’s when, in May 2004, U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft announced that Pearlman’s grandson, Adam Yahiye Gadahn, was part of a group of Islamic fundamentalists being sought by the FBI for questioning because of ties to al-Qaida. Gadahn was “armed and dangerous,” the FBI said.

Martin was astonished to learn that a young man related to Pearlman, a Jew who won a humanitarian award for promoting peace among religions, could be part of one of the fiercest anti-Semitic terror organizations in the world. A family known for its love of social tolerance, education and the arts suddenly had to answer for violence-spewing videos featuring Gadahn, now known as “Azzam the American,” an angry and articulate voice calling for the streets of his own country “to run red with blood.”

“I often think of how heartbroken he’d be,” Martin said of his old friend. “To have this happen to him would have been very painful. It’s unbelievable.” The three generations of Pearlmans — Carl Pearlman, his son, Phil, and grandson, Adam — were intelligent men who lived their lives according to their deeply held convictions. They loved music, were described as leaders, and all sought change in the world.

But the similarities end there. Because father to son, there was not only rebellion against the elder, as might be expected, but an extreme reaction to birthright and, ultimately, the rejection of traditional society.

Carl Pearlman, a leading Orange County doctor who championed new medical technologies, had a son who changed his name to Seth Gadahn and opted to live off the land.

Seth Gadahn’s son, Adam, home-schooled in the family’s wooden shack and raised in rural isolation, moved away from his family as a teenager and settled into his grandfather’s Santa Ana home, discovering the Internet and Islam. He converted at a Garden Grove mosque in 1995 and fell in with a group of Islamic fundamentalists.

Adam Gadahn was described as a quiet and shy boy who came from a good family. Now 28, he’s ranting righteously as propaganda minister for Osama bin Laden.

Like many life stories with such contrasts, Adam Gadahn’s is marked by a quest for meaning and, at least in the beginning, hope.

Urban pioneers

Carl Pearlman, his wife, Agnes, and two small children arrived in Santa Ana in 1948 from the East Coast.

They were urban pioneers in Orange County, then a sleepy agricultural area defined by its fruit groves and pretty, pristine beaches. They took part in the activities cherished by the millions who were moving to California — a life lived outdoors, including swimming in a backyard pool, golf and bike riding.

But the Pearlmans pushed this utopian new lifestyle further than most, and were bent on improving the common good, whether through arts education, helping the poor or promoting good health.

This lifestyle extended from the Orange County coast to the California mountains. From the early 1950s, the Pearlmans were some of the first board members of what was then called the Idyllwild School of Music and the Arts, a summer academy in a small, picturesque town in the San Jacinto Mountains. There, in 1957, the family built a cabin designed by John Lautner, an early disciple of Frank Lloyd Wright’s and an important contemporary architect.

Lautner believed that human spaces must intersect with nature, and is known for landmarks from Los Angeles to Palm Springs. Now showcased as “the Pearlman cabin” among Lautner’s body of work, it is “a cross between a log cabin and a treehouse,” as one Lautner book says, a circular building that lies open to a beautiful, panoramic view of snow-capped Tahquitz Peak.

Agnes Pearlman was a fine pianist, and her baby grand piano commands a presence in front of the huge windows, signifying the importance of music to the family. Carl Pearlman played the violin, practicing daily until the age of 88. Their children, Phil and his sister Nancy, took part in the programs at the Idyllwild school, a 250-acre campus just down the road from the Pearlman cabin.

From the start, the school attracted legendary artists. Ansel Adams taught photography classes to kids and their parents from 1958 to 1960, and Meredith Willson was guest composer in 1949, writing parts of “The Music Man” there. Pete Seeger, guitar in hand, often led singalongs around the evening campfires after his folk music classes from 1957 to 1963.

Agnes Pearlman, now 83 and still living in the family’s modest Santa Ana home, remains connected to the school, which has become the Idyllwild Arts Academy, a private college-preparatory and prestigious year-round boarding school. Most recently, she sent money to the school for its Hurricane Katrina relief effort.

A musical background

The passion for music was also reflected in Santa Ana, and Carl Pearlman was proud to say that the Orange County Philharmonic Society was started in his living room in the early 1950s. Nancy and Phil both graduated from Brickerward Preparatory, a now-defunct Orange County school that stressed arts education.

The Pearlmans held lively musical evenings for their friends, Carl on violin and Agnes on piano, sitting on a platform in their large living room.

They played classical music — Vivaldi, Schubert, Dvorak — but would finish with Carl’s favorites, Rodgers and Hammerstein show tunes. Carl’s partner, Dr. J. Bernard Miller, loved these evenings and said he always requested the song “Mame” from the musical of the same name.

The couple’s children inherited this love of music, a passion that seems coupled with a sense of leadership. While attending UC Irvine in the mid-1960s, Phil Pearlman brought the latest bands to campus, and friends thought he would become a music promoter.

A guitar player, Phil Pearlman started a psychedelic band called Beat of the Earth, and its 1967 recording is a cult favorite often bootlegged by aficionados. Original recordings command $400 to $500.

Reflected in the third generation, Adam Gadahn had his own passion for music. It played out in a rebellious teenage phase as a love for demonic heavy metal, and he once wrote for a death-metal online magazine called Xenocide.

In a separate essay he penned about becoming a Muslim, Adam Gadahn told of his brief obsession with the genre, which he said “rightfully” alarmed his family.

Now, the boy who grew up with his grandfather’s classical music and his father’s 1960s sounds probably doesn’t listen to music at all.

Osama bin Laden considers music “the flute of the devil” and covers his ears when he hears it, according to “The Looming Tower,” a book about the al-Qaida leader by Lawrence Wright.

A doctor and duffer

Ever the doctor, Carl Pearlman also loved golf and would practice it as diligently as his daily violin, using a driving net in the back yard.

Warm and funny, he loved to tell jokes while with patients, at presentations for colleagues and when lecturing during 20 years of volunteer teaching at UC Irvine.

“As doctors, you’ll learn to deal with adversity, frustration, setbacks and even catastrophe,” Pearlman told his students. “But enough about golf.”

Carl Pearlman was a leader in the early medical associations and hospitals that sprouted up around the county’s growing population in the 1950s and ’60s. During his 50-year career, he was chief of staff at Orange County General Hospital, chief of staff at Santa Ana Community Hospital (now Western Medical Center) and chairman of the first expansion fund for St. Joseph Hospital.

“He had an outstanding reputation when he was in practice,” said Dr. Frank Amato, a former president of the Orange County Medical Association. “He was a good physician.”

He was an activist in the early medical community, opposed to hospitals operating for profit and disgusted that the county facility was “nothing but a poor farm” when he arrived in 1949. Carl Pearlman offered his services for free when the parents of one of his patients, a 17-year-old Villa Park girl, couldn’t afford a kidney transplant for their daughter in 1969.

Pearlman’s friend, Dr. Donald Martin, was on the team of this historic local event, the county’s first kidney transplant. Colleagues remember Pearlman as a champion of new medical technologies and one of the few doctors who were not threatened when the University of California system decided to create a teaching hospital in Orange County in the late 1960s, Martin said.

Community leader

Pearlman’s activism included devoting time to the YMCA, serving as the first local chairman of the Bonds for Israel campaign and then as chairman of the United Jewish Welfare Fund.

He was on the board of the Anti-Defamation League [!!!] and in 1985 was honored with a humanitarian award by the Orange County chapter of the National Conference of Christians and Jews, now called the National Conference for Community and Justice.

Pearlman’s friends said he didn’t practice his religion by, say, belonging to a synagogue, and Agnes Pearlman came from a Christian background.

Holidays were social times, and Pearlman’s partner, Miller, remembers the Pearlmans’ annual Christmas party as one to look forward to every year. Their children were raised to think freely about religion, and Nancy Pearlman has said they were agnostics.

Although Pearlman’s colleagues described him as “completely secular,” they also recalled that he was a supporter of Israel, which was created just about the time the Pearlmans moved to their home in Santa Ana’s Floral Park neighborhood.

“In our conversations, he had a very strong feeling for Israel,” said Dr. Mel Singer, a pediatric cardiologist in Orange. “He felt very sincerely and deeply that he wanted that country to survive and make peace with the Arab nations around it.”

A grandson’s conversion

By the mid-1990s, about the time Pearlman took his grandson into his home, the doctor was already joking about his death. He was adamant that he didn’t want a service but that he wanted to be buried in Riverside National Cemetery, so the family could wave at him as they drove to the cabin in Idyllwild.

He probably knew of Adam Gadahn’s conversion to Islam, which occurred in 1995. But it’s not known how the grandfather felt about Adam’s new beliefs. Family members declined to comment for this story, although Nancy Pearlman confirmed most details.

Adam Gadahn had already taken one trip to Pakistan by the time of his grandfather’s death on Oct. 18, 1998, at the age of 90. He returned to the United States and was with the family when his grandfather died. Soon thereafter, he left for Pakistan. It’s believed he has never returned to America.

On the third anniversary of 9/11 in 2004, Adam Gadahn, his face partly covered in a black scarf, warned America and Britain via video that it was time for “either pragmatic surrender or a protracted, painful war.”

“We love peace, but peace on our terms, peace laid down by Islam, not the so-called peace of occupiers and dictators,” said Gadahn, punctuating his words with a finger pointed at the camera and adding that the followers of Osama bin Laden “love nothing better than the heat of battle, the echo of explosions and slitting the throats of the infidels.” [Does anyone take this stuff seriously? -- 800]

Fiery speech from the grandson of a man who left behind a legacy built on justice, tolerance and helping the oppressed. In a little red notebook he always carried with him, Pearlman also left behind some of his favorite sayings, quotes that reinforced his beliefs. Among those is this one by Benjamin Franklin:

“There never was a good war or a bad peace.”

Source material
The Orange County Register reported this story through source interviews, public records, historical archives and Internet sites. Any material previously published is attributed. Although Adam Yahiye Gadahn’s family declined interviews, his aunt, Nancy Pearlman, confirmed many details for this series.
Sources: Amanda Spake, Adam Ruelas, Dr. Donald Martin, Dr. J. Bernard Miller, Dr. Mel Singer, Dr. Frank Amato, Glen Pritzker, Haitham Bundakji, Harold Copus, Jon Konrath, Michael Rowe, Nancy Lund, Patrick Lundborg, Ryan Olson, Saraah Olson, Steven Rowe, Rita Katz.
Public records: California Department of Consumer Affairs, California secretary of state, Orange County criminal records, Riverside County criminal records, Los Angeles County criminal records, Los Angeles County voter registration, Orange County voter registration, Riverside County voter registration, Los Angeles County property records, Orange County property records, Riverside County property records, UC Irvine registrar
Historical archives: Idyllwild Arts Academy Museum, Idyllwild Town Crier, Orange County Medical Association, Philharmonic Society of Orange County, Santa Ana Public Library, Orange County Register archives, UC Irvine special collections
Books: “Terrorist Hunter” by Anonymous (Rita Katz), “John Lautner,” by Barbara-Ann Campbell-Lange, “The Architecture of John Lautner,” by Alan Hess and photographs by Alan Weintraub, “The Dream Endures” by Kevin Starr, “The Looming Tower,” by Lawrence Wright

The above article, along with parts two and three, can be found at: http://www.ocregister.com/ocregister/news/local/article_1285930.php

NYT: Israeli spy in Lebanon is cousin of alleged 9/11 hijacker

Lebanese in Shock over Arrest of an Accused Spy
The New York Times
February 19, 2009

MARAJ, Lebanon — For 25 years, Ali al-Jarrah [cousin of alleged 9/11 hijacker Ziad al-Jarrah] managed to live on both sides of the bitterest divide running through this region. To friends and neighbors, he was an earnest supporter of the Palestinian cause, an affable, white-haired family man who worked as an administrator at a nearby school.

To Israel, he appears to have been a valued spy, sending reports and taking clandestine photographs of Palestinian groups and Hezbollah since 1983.

Now he sits in a Lebanese prison cell, accused by the authorities of betraying his country to an enemy state. Months after his arrest, his friends and former colleagues are still in shock over the extent of his deceptions: the carefully disguised trips abroad, the unexplained cash, the secret second wife.

Lebanese investigators say he has confessed to a career of espionage spectacular in its scope and longevity, a real-life John le Carre novel. Many intelligence agents are said to operate in the civil chaos of Lebanon, but Mr. Jarrah’s arrest has shed a rare light onto a world of spying and subversion that usually persists in secret.

Mr. Jarrah’s first wife maintains that he was tortured, and is innocent; requests to interview him were denied.

From his home in this Bekaa Valley village, Mr. Jarrah, 50, traveled often to Syria and to south Lebanon, where he photographed roads and convoys that might have been used to transport weapons to Hezbollah, the Shiite militant group, investigators say. He spoke with his handlers by satellite phone, receiving “dead drops” of money, cameras and listening devices. Occasionally, on the pretext of a business trip, he traveled to Belgium and Italy, received an Israeli passport, and flew to Israel, where he was debriefed at length, investigators say.

At the start of the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah, Israeli officials called Mr. Jarrah to reassure him that his village would be spared and that he should stay at home, investigators said.

He was finally arrested last July by Hezbollah, which now has perhaps the most powerful intelligence apparatus in this country. It handed him to the Lebanese military — along with his brother Yusuf, who is accused of helping him spy [Is the entire al-Jarrah family involved with Israeli intelligence? -- 800] — and he awaits trial by a military court.

Several current and former military officials agreed to provide details about his case on condition of anonymity, saying they were not authorized to discuss it before the trial began. Their accounts tallied with details provided by Mr. Jarrah’s relatives and former colleagues.

It is not the family’s first brush with notoriety. One of Mr. Jarrah’s cousins, Ziad al-Jarrah, was among the 19 hijackers who carried out the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, though the men were 20 years apart in age and do not appear to have known each other well.

Mark Regev, a spokesman for Israel’s prime minister, Ehud Olmert, declined to discuss Mr. Jarrah’s situation, saying, “It is not our practice to publicly talk about any such allegations in this case or in any case.”

Villagers here seemed incredulous that a man they knew all their lives could have taken money to spy for a country that they regard with unmixed hatred and disgust.

Many maintained his innocence. But Raja Mosleh, the Palestinian doctor who was his partner for years in a school and health clinic near here, did not.

“I never suspected him before,” Dr. Mosleh said. “But now, after linking all the incidents together, I feel he’s 100 percent guilty.”

“He used to talk about the Palestinian cause all the time, how he supported the cause, he supported the people, he liked everybody — this son of a dog,” Dr. Mosleh added, his voice thick with contempt.

Mr. Jarrah would often borrow money to buy cigarettes, apparently posing as a man of limited means. Investigators say he received more than $300,000 for his work from Israel.

Only recently did he begin to spend in ways that raised questions. About six years ago, neighbors said, he built a three-story villa with a terra-cotta roof that is by far the grandest house in this modest village of low concrete dwellings. Outside is a small roofed archway and a heavy iron gate, and on a recent day a German shepherd stood guard.

Dr. Mosleh asked him where he got the money, and Mr. Jarrah said he got help from a daughter living in Brazil. It is a natural excuse in Lebanon, where a large portion of the population receives remittances from relatives abroad.

Mr. Jarrah also had a secret second wife, according to investigators and his former colleagues. Unlike his first wife, Maryam Shmouri al-Jarrah, who lived in relative grandeur with their five children in Maraj, the second wife lived in a cheap apartment in the town of Masnaa, near the Syrian border. This apparently allowed Mr. Jarrah to travel near the border in the unremarkable guise of a local working-class man.

Mr. Jarrah has said he was recruited in 1983 — a year after Israel began a major invasion of Lebanon — by Israeli officers who had imprisoned him, according to investigators. He was offered regular payments in exchange for information about Palestinian militants and Syrian troop movements, they said.

After Israel withdrew from Lebanon in 2000, thousands of Lebanese from the occupied zone in the south were tried and sentenced — mostly to light prison terms — for collaborating with Israel.

Far from the border, a different class of collaborators, rooted in their communities, persisted. A few have been caught and sentenced.

Mr. Jarrah’s motives remain a mystery. He said he tried to stop, but the Israelis would not let him, investigators said.

It all came to an end last summer. He went on a trip to Syria in July, and when he returned he said he had been briefly detained by the Syrian police, his first wife said. He seemed very uneasy, not his usual self, she said.

He left the house that night, saying he was going to Beirut, and never returned, Mrs. Jarrah said. Only three months later did she get a call from the Lebanese Army saying it had taken custody of him.

A few weeks ago, Mrs. Jarrah said, she was allowed to see him. He looked terrible, exhausted, she said.

Lebanese security forces released a photograph of Mr. Jarrah, taken before his arrest. In it, he appears against a blue and white backdrop, dressed in a formal dark shirt, wearing an enigmatic smile.
The above article can be found at: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/19/world/middleeast/19lebanon.html

Also, for a 2002 New York Times article that lets slip a further connection between the alleged 9/11 hijackers and Israeli intelligence, see “Nick Berg: Mossad operator with ties to 9/11?”

Israeli “telecom” front ops penetrate Montreal metro

The “mainstream” (i.e., Zionist-controlled) media can no longer be trusted to provide anything in the way of truthful news reporting. Under such circumstances, all genuine investigative journalism must inevitably fall to independent researchers and/or concerned citizens.

“Montreal: The Next Terrorist Target?” is an excellent example of just the sort of independent research/activism needed to implicate the Zionist crime network now at work in our major cities. In this obscure-but-excellent 2007 documentary, 9/11 truther Micheal Pengue asks all the right questions and quickly connects the dots, revealing the long reach of Israeli intelligence — by way of now-familiar Mossad telecom front companies Comverse, Verint and Odigo — into his home city of Montreal.

Download it here , watch it, then pass it along to every thinking person you know (especially Canadians!).

The hour-long film reveals how, in 2003, Montreal municipal officials awarded telecommunications firm Verint the contract to provide video surveillance of Montreal’s mass transit system. Although officials at first deny the existence of the contract — documented evidence for which is provided by the filmmaker — they later admit that Verint was, in fact, given a contract to install hundreds of surveillance cameras throughout the Montreal metro system.

The documentary then points out Verint’s intimate relationship to other “multinational” telecoms, known to be fronts for Israeli intelligence. Along with Verint itself, these include Verint’s parent-company Comverse (the founder of which, Jacob Alexander, is a former Israeli intelligence officer), Amdocs and Odigo — names which should now be familiar to all serious 9/11 researchers.

Drawing on the infamous 2001 Fox News report on Israeli spying on the U.S. , Pengue goes on to explain these companies’ dubious connections to both 9/11 and the 7/7 attacks in London. (For further information on the links between Israeli intelligence — and its fleet of “telecom” fronts — to both false-flag operations, see Victor Thorn’s “9/11 Evil: Israel’s Central Role in the Sept. 11 Attacks”.)

The information and analysis provided in this well-sourced documentary constitute further evidence implicating the Zionist crime network and revealing the long reach of its global espionage operations. But it also raises a more immediate concern — are the same forces at work in the mass transit system of your city?

“Montreal: The Next Terrorist Target?” by Micheal Pengue — download it here , watch it, then pass it on to every thinking person you know.

Israeli “telecom” front ops penetrate Montreal metro

Nick Berg: Mossad operator with 9/11 connections?

In April 2004, US civilian contractor Nicholas Berg was allegedly executed by al-Qaeda terrorists in Iraq. Although the fact was largely ignored at the time, it is notable that Berg — a Jewish-American telecommunications expert with likely ties to the Israeli Mossad — also seems to have had a connection with alleged 9/11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui.

“Mr. Berg’s e-mail password was obtained by an associate of Zacarias Moussaoui,” the New York Times reported in the wake of Berg’s death. “FBI agents interviewed Mr. Berg in 2002 and came away convinced that he had either shared the password with someone who passed it on to Mr. Moussaoui or that the password had been stolen from him.”

The following is the complete text of that article:

Tracing a Civilian’s Path to Gruesome Fate in Iraq
The New York Times
May 26, 2004
by James Dao

Nicholas F. Berg had a distinctive strategy for soliciting work for his communications tower company: conduct free spot inspections, then offer to fix any problems. Where others went sightseeing, he went climbing and inspecting. Where others wrote postcards, he inventoried towers, from Texas to Africa.

Late last year, Mr. Berg, 26, had turned his sights on Iraq. An adventurous entrepreneur and religious Jew, Mr. Berg had a passionate belief in capitalism’s power to transform poor nations. He really believed, friends and relatives said, that he could help rebuild that war-shattered country one radio tower at time.

It was a vision that almost immediately aroused suspicions. In January, the Iraqi police, thinking Mr. Berg might be an Iranian spy, briefly detained him while he was touring towers near the south-central city of Diwaniya.

“Isn’t this starting to read like a mystery novel,” he wrote to his friends and family following his Diwaniya adventure.

Two months later, Mr. Berg would not be so lucky. Late on the evening of March 24, the Iraqi police in Mosul, apparently thinking Mr. Berg a spy, a smuggler or a terrorist, detained him while he was traveling to visit two business contacts.

This time, he remained in an Iraqi jail for 13 days while the Federal Bureau of Investigation checked and checked his story. When he was released on April 6 — one day after his family filed suit demanding his release — Iraq was being swept by insurgent violence singling out foreign contractors.

On April 10, the day Mr. Berg planned to return home, he disappeared. On May 8, American troops found his body near a highway overpass in Baghdad. The Central Intelligence Agency has said Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian militant with ties to Al Qaeda, is probably the man seen beheading Mr. Berg in a ghastly videotape.

Mr. Berg’s detention in Mosul has raised sharp questions about whether American officials did enough to get him released as quickly as they could have. Mr. Berg’s family contends he had planned to leave Iraq on March 30, which might have enabled him to avoid the anti-Western kidnappings and killings of April.

“Were it not for Nick’s detention, I would have had him in my arms again,” Mr. Berg’s father, Michael, wrote in a letter in support of a demonstration by an antiwar group last week. In the letter, Mr. Berg blamed the Bush administration more than terrorists for his son’s death.

But the many unexplained details of Mr. Berg’s final days, combined with the uncommon details of his unconventional life, have also prompted furious speculation on the Internet and talk radio about Mr. Berg himself. Some have argued that he was a spy for Israel or the CIA, or that the video of his murder was staged by pro-American forces to arouse anger toward Iraqi insurgents. Some have asserted that he had ties to the very Qaeda militants who are believed to be responsible for his death.

He was, after all, traveling alone, without a translator or a bodyguard, in a lawless land whose language he barely understood. He carried books about Iran and kept a detailed inventory of Iraqi communications towers. He was shown in the beheading video wearing orange clothing, which, to some, looked like the jumpsuits worn by prisoners held by the American military.

Adding to the mystery, both the Iraqi police and the American military deny responsibility for Mr. Berg’s detention. The Iraqi police contend they promptly turned Mr. Berg over to the American military, an assertion Mr. Berg later confirmed in e-mail home. But American officials assert he remained in the custody of Iraqi police for the entire 13 days.

American law enforcement and intelligence officials have strenuously rejected the conspiracy theories. Mr. Berg was detained because his activities seemed suspicious, and once those suspicions were dispelled, he was released, they said. They are convinced, they said, that Mr. Berg was just a freelancing businessman with a high tolerance for risk, whose naïveté and idealism blinded him to Iraq’s treacherous corners.

“He was in the wrong place at the wrong time,” an FBI official said.

To Mr. Berg’s friends and family, there was nothing odd or mysterious about his wanderings in Iraq. He was just being Nick: a bright, fearless, iconoclastic man who saw himself as a modern-day Prometheus, bringing progress to a downtrodden nation. And like Prometheus, his friends say, he was punished for his good deeds.

“I’m sure that throughout the entire ordeal, he felt no fear,” a close friend, Luke Lorenz, said of Mr. Berg’s final hours. “I doubt that he thought they would hurt him. He really believed in the goodness of people. That if they took the time, they’d like him.”

“When I see him sitting there in the video, it doesn’t seem any different than when I’d see him anywhere else,” Mr. Lorenz, 28, said. “Taking it all in.”

Mr. Berg, the youngest of three children, grew up in a comfortable community of split-level houses in West Whiteland Township, Pa., a suburb of Philadelphia.

By high school, he was a prolific inventor. Among his favorite gadgets was the “truth detector,” a palm-size box wrapped in duct tape that flashed lights when its wires were attached to a finger.

One summer, the police detained Mr. Berg and some friends, suspecting they had used the device to open garage doors. Mr. Berg became so animated in explaining his invention that a police officer put him in handcuffs until a detective checked out his story, friends recalled.

When he was a teenager, a teacher gave him an old bike. He proceeded to strip away all but the 10th gear — the hardest. He christened the bike Ulysses and crisscrossed the steep hills of Pennsylvania and New York, riding as far as Georgia one summer.

“He didn’t do much to fix it,” Mr. Lorenz said, “as if he wanted to make things harder for himself.”

He attended Cornell University, distinguishing himself in engineering courses, a faculty adviser said. But his defining semester came in a small Ugandan village, where he spent the spring of 1998 in an exchange program. There he was exposed to poverty he had never imagined, friends said. He turned his inventiveness to good use, fashioning a brick-making machine to help villagers stabilize mud huts. In letters, he described schemes to help the Ugandans market mushrooms and make bricks from indigenous materials.

“He was shaken by his experience,” a friend, James Wakefield, 52, said. “He had nothing but a pair of pants, a shirt and boots when he came home. He gave away his clothing.”

Friends say Mr. Berg’s Africa experience made him impatient with traditional academics. He left Cornell at the end of 1998, despite being on the dean’s list and having only one year left, school officials said.

He spent the next two years searching for ways to transform his Africa ideas into a practical plan, studying at Drexel University and the University of Pennsylvania before transferring to the University of Oklahoma in Norman in the fall of 1999.

In Oklahoma’s construction science program, he began testing designs for paper bricks that snapped together like Lego blocks, believing they could be manufactured inexpensively in undeveloped countries.

“He didn’t seem willing to sit around and wait to be spoon-fed stuff,” said William W. McManus, an associate professor of construction science at Oklahoma. “He was always pushing on his own.”

In Oklahoma, Mr. Berg’s e-mail password was obtained by an associate of Zacarias Moussaoui. Mr. Moussaoui, who is awaiting trial on charges of assisting the Sept. 11 plot, attended flight school in Norman in 2001, but it is not clear that he ever met Mr. Berg.

FBI agents interviewed Mr. Berg in 2002 and came away convinced that he had either shared the password with someone who passed it on to Mr. Moussaoui or that the password had been stolen from him. The FBI cleared Mr. Berg of having links to terrorist groups, officials said.

In Oklahoma, Mr. Berg also began learning about communications towers. As a youth he had loved climbing; he built a three-story tree-house in his backyard and in college was an avid rock climber. In 2000, he quit his studies in Norman and for more than a year wandered across Oklahoma and Texas working as a freelance contractor replacing lights, painting girders and fixing cables hundreds of feet above the ground.

By 2002, he had returned to the Philadelphia area and formed his own tower company, Prometheus Methods Tower Service, using as a motto, “Man is more than fire tamed.” Through cold calls and free spot inspections, he had built a client list of 50 companies by 2003.

Jay Shur, of WCHE-AM in West Chester, Pa., received one of those cold calls and was surprised by Mr. Berg’s youth when they met. “I thought he would have been a little bit older,” Mr. Shur said. “He knew exactly what to do, when to take charge.”

As his business grew, Mr. Berg began plotting ways to resume his work in developing nations. With the help of the American Jewish World Service, he visited Kenya for two weeks in March 2003, working on water projects and pledging to return in the summer of 2004.

But it was Iraq that loomed large in Mr. Berg’s imagination. While traveling to Kenya, he wrote e-mail fondly describing some Texans “rushing toward the action” in Baghdad as the American-led invasion was getting under way, even as other Westerners were fleeing with “sweaty hands.”

Back in Pennsylvania, Mr. Berg defended the invasion, arguing that it had ousted a brutal dictator. And he argued that Americans had a moral obligation to help rebuild the shattered country. In part, friends said, he saw a business opportunity. In December 2003 he attended a convention in Virginia on rebuilding Iraq. Government officials and private contractors at the convention encouraged businesses to join in the reconstruction.

But his feelings were heavily influenced by his Judaism and his moral beliefs, friends said. Mr. Berg was raised in a secular Jewish household but became increasingly religious after college, studying the Torah and learning to keep kosher. He seemed particularly attracted to the Hebrew concept of tikkun olam — healing the world through social action.

“He went to Iraq to see if he could combine his professional skill with his desire to heal the world,” said Ruth W. Messinger, the former Manhattan borough president who leads the American Jewish World Service.

His views differed sharply from those of many of his friends and his father, a retired high school teacher who actively opposed the war. But though his parents and friends warned him of the dangers of Iraq, they were not surprised when he decided to go.

“Nick was real good at recognizing physical danger; it’s part of the job,” Scott Hollinger, the foreman for Prometheus Methods, said. “He didn’t do too well at recognizing human danger because he never thought anybody was going to hurt him.”

In late December, he flew to Israel and crossed by land into Iraq via Jordan. For the next month, Mr. Berg operated in Iraq much the same as he did in the United States: touring the countryside, usually by taxi, inspecting towers and building a database, he told friends.

One trip took him to Abu Ghraib, the neighborhood outside Baghdad that is now famous for its prison complex. Another took him north to Mosul. He also made contact with an Iraqi businessman, Aziz al-Taee, who had lived in Philadelphia for 20 years before returning to Baghdad after the fall of Saddam Hussein.

Mr. Taee, who owned electronic equipment stores in Philadelphia, pleaded guilty in 1994 to selling plastic vials that were used by crack dealers. Mr. Berg told friends that he found Mr. Taee “very competent” and that the two planned to create a company called Babylon Towers.

“The fact alone that he and I are just now sitting in a free and open Internet shop is unbelievable to most Iraqis,” Mr. Berg wrote to friends in January.

Mr. Berg went home in February but returned to Iraq in March, expressing confidence about getting work from the Harris Corporation, a company based in Florida that had a $96 million contract to rebuild Iraq’s media industry. Jan Bosman, the regional program manager in the north for the Iraqi Media Network, said Mr. Berg went to his office in Mosul in late March looking for work. Mr. Bosman said Mr. Berg seemed casual about the security situation in the country, traveling by taxi and staying in local hotels.

On March 24, while traveling to meet some business contacts, Mr. Berg was stopped at an Iraqi checkpoint near Mosul. “We were afraid for his life,” the police chief, Mohammad Barhawi, said in an interview. “And we had suspicions about him. So we turned him over to the coalition forces.”

Mr. Barhawi said the Iraqi police took Mr. Berg to its headquarters and handed him over immediately to coalition forces in an operations room inside the same compound, where the American military police have a liaison office.

He asserted that Mr. Berg was in Iraqi hands for “minutes,” but American officials contend that Mr. Berg remained in Iraqi police custody the entire time he was detained.

During his detention, Mr. Berg was interviewed three times by FBI agents who asked whether he had ever built a pipe bomb, what he was doing in Iraq, why he had gone to Iran, Mr. Berg told friends and his family later. He had never been to Iran but was carrying a book about Iran and some Farsi language materials, he wrote.

Mr. Berg also told friends that while he was in jail, other prisoners chanted “Isralein,” apparently believing he was an Israeli. (He had an Israeli stamp in his passport.) American soldiers ordered the Iraqi guards to put him in a separate cell near political and war criminals from India, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iran, Mr. Berg wrote.

By then, Mr. Berg’s parents, who had expected their son to return home on March 30, had become frantic. They contacted the State Department and were interviewed by the FBI, which corroborated Mr. Berg’s statements in Iraq. The FBI then recommended that Mr. Berg be released, FBI officials said.

But when Mr. Berg was not immediately released, his parents filed a lawsuit on April 5, asserting that the American military was violating their son’s civil rights. He was released the next day, April 6.

Mr. Berg’s family contends that the swift release of Mr. Berg after the filing of the lawsuit proved that the American military had controlled their son’s detention all along.

Upon his release, Mr. Berg sent e-mail saying he planned to catch a flight home from Jordan on April 10. He disappeared soon after that.

The next time Mr. Berg was seen publicly was on the grisly video showing his beheading. On the video, a masked man refers to the humiliation of Muslim prisoners at Abu Ghraib, prompting some to speculate that Mr. Berg was dressed in orange to simulate Muslim prisoners held there and at Guantanamo Bay.

Though Mr. Berg’s Moussaoui connection has fueled speculation that FBI agents would not allow him to be released out of concern that he had links to terrorists, officials in Washington deny that.

“What was this guy doing there in the first place?” an FB.I official said. “It’s not as if Iraq suddenly turned hostile.”

Such comments anger Mr. Berg’s friends, who say he went to Iraq in part because he thought American officials and corporate leaders wanted American entrepreneurs to help rebuild the country.

“They can keep looking for a conspiracy, but they won’t find anything at all,” said Douglas Strickland, 25, a close friend.

Mr. Strickland and other friends have created a Web site devoted to Mr. Berg’s memory, www.nickberg.org, and are raising money for a memorial fund to support the kind of work he did overseas.

Last week, Mr. Strickland and a friend cleaned out Mr. Berg’s one-bedroom apartment in West Chester, Pa. They found electronic devices, handwritten notebooks, prototype bricks, maps of the Middle East and Africa, and an American flag made of red and white duct tape on blue cloth. On the wall was a Calvin and Hobbes cartoon that struck Mr. Strickland as typically Nick.

In it, Calvin and his stuffed tiger, Hobbes, are surveying a field of virgin snow. “It’s like having a big white sheet of paper to draw on!” Hobbes says. “It’s a magical world, Hobbes ol’ buddy,” Calvin replies. “Let’s go exploring.”
This article was reported by James Dao, Richard Lezin Jones, Christine Hauser aizd Eric Lichtblau and was written by Mr. Dao.

This article can still be found at The New York Times

The following analysis (found at Arabnews), contains some interesting additional information — and asks the right questions — about Berg’s ambiguous loyalties and background:

The Unexamined Life of Nicholas Berg
Arab News
May 21 2004
by Sarah Whalen

New Orleans, Louisiana — Nicholas Berg died horribly in Iraq. Why?

His killers don’t say. They complain, but not about Berg.

Of all Iraq’s hostages, only Berg was decapitated.

And very inexpertly.

Suspects have already been rounded up.

One wonders how, since all five were masked and unidentifiable.

Why would the infamous, already-photographed Zarqawi hide?

Although CIA voice analysts claim Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi decapitated Berg, European intelligence sources doubt it. Zarqawi, a skilled poisoner, “is more sophisticated than that,” said one expert. And would the one-legged Zarqawi be less nimble than Berg’s executioner on tape?

All Berg’s killers possessed military bearing, which could have been learned in terrorist camps. Or in more formal military settings. And the notorious website could be set up by anyone.

We must therefore look carefully at Berg before killing, torturing, or jailing anyone in his name.

US Secretary of State Collin Powell complains of muted Middle Eastern reaction to the beheading. But condemnation requires a measure of certainty missing here.

Who was Berg?

Neocon? Nincompoop?

Radio tower guy? Communications spy?

Berg, a neo-con “believer,” had no military service, despite his strapping, muscular physique and shaved head.

Unmarried and full of male friends, Berg attended four universities without graduating. He repaired communications equipment and climbed radio towers obsessively. In Ghana, Berg taught those Bush fondly calls “brown people” to make bricks — which in the Third World is like bringing coals to Newcastle.

In his Baghdad hotel room, Berg read espionage novels.

Perhaps Berg finally found his calling.

How might he have taken that particular road? Berg’s friend, Aaron Spool, says two years ago, Berg started taking synagogue classes. Berg’s family claims he was recruited for Iraq by the US Chamber of Commerce. But he set off for…Israel.

Why?

Spool avers Berg “visited” Israel on his way to Iraq to “study Hebrew.” Berg brought a yarmulke (Jewish skullcap) and a tallis (fringed prayer shawl) into Iraq — an odd wardrobe choice to carry into a country purportedly besieged by crazed Islamic jihadists. Spool says Berg “wasn’t foolish. He would not have bandied about the fact that he was Jewish.”

Oh. That explains the clothing!

And Berg’s passport, stamped in Israel. Usually, passengers traveling on decline the stamp, which can cause exclusion elsewhere in the Middle East.

What did Berg do in Israel and Iraq?

We need to know. As Jack London, CEO of US Department of Defense civilian contractor CACI International, Inc., declared: “Getting in and out of Iraq is not willy-nilly. People just don’t go in there, go to the hotel, open their suitcase, set up shop and go over to the Coalition Provisional Authority and try to cut a contract.”

But isn’t this what Berg supposedly did?

Or did he have a secret contract?

While Berg told his family he’d struggled to make money, friends said Berg made $70,000 his first month there, and considered sailing the Turkish coast before returning home.

When he returned to Iraq again, Berg expected contracts worth $20,000 a month for “radio” work. But was he being paid for something else?

Berg complained to US officials their detention cost him “thousands of dollars.”

When arrested, Berg was carrying a laptop, cash, his Israel-stamped passport, a Qur’an, and “anti-Semitic literature” in Arabic — a language that Berg could neither read, nor write, nor speak.

Were these books for Berg’s erudition? Or for planting at the scene of some catastrophe, as the Mossad is sometimes accused of doing by anti-Zionist groups to falsely implicate Muslims?

When released, Berg spurned US consular officials’ offers of money, plane ticket, and official airport escort. One cryptically remarked: Berg “didn’t want us. He said, ‘You don’t understand these people like I do. You’re here for a reason and so am I.’”

What reason? Dead men don’t talk. But their friends do. Berg’s friends said Iraqi authorities suspected he was “an Israeli spy.”

Imagine!

The US admits Berg was arrested for “suspicious activities” and using “false identification.” Iraqi police claim Berg had “no identification.” And Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmett says US military police “monitored” Berg.

“Monitored” is significant. CACI’s Jack London announced Rumsfeld’s Abu Ghraib testimony “cleared up an important point: As stated, CACI employees are monitored and are under the supervision of US Army personnel.” DOD “monitoring” is “in CACI’s services contract with the U.S. military.”

Was Berg, whom the FBI in Iraq questioned three times because of his “ties” to alleged 9/11 terrorist Moussaoui in Oklahoma, a CACI contractor or Israeli-based subcontractor? This would explain why occupation authorities released and allowed Berg to remain in Iraq.

Did Berg, the “radio guy,” work with CACI’s famous “interlocked” telecommunications services integrated with “key CACI technologies, including information assurance, modeling and simulation, and web-enabling,” as CACI’s corporate literature states?

What about GlobalNet, recently “awarded an exclusive contract for worldwide termination of voice and data mobile satellite telecommunications traffic originating in Iraq?” Its press release laments the “dangers of sending…workers into the war-torn nation to install telecommunications towers.”

Berg’s specialty.

GlobalNet seeks “an exclusive arrangement for worldwide termination of voice and data mobile satellite telecommunications originating in Iran and Israel.”

According to TIME magazine, Berg was rumored to work “for a telecom firm with ties to Israel.”

How involved is Israel in Iraq?

Answer first questions first, before avenging Berg.
There is also some interesting analysis on the strange circumstances of Berg’s execution (minus any Mossad references) at:
http://www.brushtail.com.au/nick_berg_hypothesis.html
and
http://www.aztlan.net/berg_abu_ghraib_video.htm
Nick Berg: Mossad operator with 9/11 connections?

Jewish press: too few Jews to pray on 9/11

In the wake of 9/11, an interesting story appeared in the Jewish online press that appeared to offer an explanation for the low Jewish turnout on the morning of the attacks.“In a small, makeshift synagogue not far from the Twin Towers, Jewish professionals regularly meet early each morning for daily prayer services. Usually there is no problem rounding up a minyan (quorum of ten men required to pray) and the cramped quarters often overflow with worshipers,” according to a September 2002 article published in Jewish website jewsweek.com. “But on the morning of September 11th, there was an uncommon dearth of available men.”

The story first appeared on September 11, 2002 on Jewish website jewsweek.com, under the name “The Miracle Minyan.” Although that story no longer appears to be available, the same article resurfaced later under the title “Waiting for the Tenth Man.”

The following includes the entire text of that article (which can also still be found on beliefnet.com HERE ):

“Waiting for the Tenth Man”
A strange old man’s slowness inadvertently saves nine others on September 11th

Excerpted with permission from “Small Miracles for the Jewish Heart” by Yitta Halberstam and Judith Leventhal
In a small, makeshift synagogue not far from the Twin Towers, Orthodox Jewish professionals regularly meet early each morning for daily prayer services. Usually there is no problem rounding up a minyan (quorum of ten men required to pray) and the cramped quarters often overflow with worshipers.

But on the morning of September 11th, there was an uncommon dearth of available men. Perhaps they had decided to remain that morning at their resident shuls for the important selichos services that precede the High Holidays. Or, perhaps, they were participating in the shloshim (one month anniversary) memorial services for the Jews who had been killed in the Grand Canyon helicopter crash.

Two hundred men who worked in the World Trade Center, were, in fact, late to work that morning because of their participation in the shloshim service. But whatever the reason, the congregants were faced with a problem: only nine men were present, and time was marching on. These were serious men, professionals, and all had to be at their desks at the World Trade Center well before 9:00 a.m.

“What should we do?” they asked each other, impatiently tapping their wrist watches, as they paced the floors. “This situation hasn’t happened in ages! Where is everybody?”

“I’m sure a tenth man will come along soon,” someone else soothed. “We have to be patient.”

The men waited, restless and tense. Some of them were already running late. Finally, when they had all but given up and were going to resort to individual prayer (instead of the preferred communal one), an old man whom nobody had ever seen before shuffled in the door.

“Did you daven (pray) yet?” he asked, looking at he group.

“No, sir!” one shouted jubilantly. “We’ve been waiting for you!”

“Wonderful,” the elderly man responded. “I have to say kaddish (a special prayer recited on the yahrzeit, the anniversary of a close family member’s death) for my father and I have to daven before the omed (lead the prayer services). I’m so glad that you didn’t start yet.”

Under normal circumstances, the men would have asked the gentleman polite questions: what was his name, where was he from, how did he come to their obscure shul? By now, however, they were frantic to start and decided to bypass protocol. They hastily handed the man a siddur (prayer book), hoping he would prove himself to be the Speedy Gonzales of daveners (prayers).

The old man proved to be anything but.

He seemed to rifle the pages of the siddur in agonizingly slow motion. Indeed, every gesture and movement that the man made seemed deliberately unhurried, protracted, and prolonged. The worshipers were respectful but definitely on shpilkes (pins and needles) to get to work.

“Oy!” someone smacked his forehead in frustration. “Are we going to be late!”

That’s when they heard the first explosion: the horrible blast that would forever shake their souls. They ran outside and saw the smoke, the chaos, the screaming crowds, the apocalypse that lay before them.

It should have been us. After the initial shock and horror, consciousness dawned on them quickly. They realized they had been rescued from the jaws of death. Each and every one of them worked in the Twin Towers. Each and every one of them was supposed to be there before nine. Had it not been for the elderly man and his slow-motion schacharis (morning services), they probably would have been killed.

They turned to thank him, this mystery man who had saved their lives. They wanted to hug him in effusive gratitude and find out his name and where he had come from on that fateful morning.

But they’ll never know the answers to these questions that nag at them to this day-when they turned around to embrace him, the man was gone, his identity forever a mystery.

Copyright (c) 2002 by Yitta Halberstam Mendlebaum and Judith Leventhal. Used with permission of Adams Media Corporation.
An extract of the same story can also still be found on Jewish news website Shmais News Service HERE [LINK], although the complete article appears to be unavailable.
Notably, the Grand Canyon helicopter crash referred to in the article’s second paragraph — which happened exactly one month prior to 9/11 and reportedly claimed the lives of five prominent Jewish New York residents — was heavily covered in the media at the time.

Here’s the LA Times story on the crash from August 11, 2002 (which can be found here ):

Helicopter Crash Kills 6 After Grand Canyon Tour
By Eric Malnic and Tom Gorman
August 11, 2001

The pilot and five passengers were killed Friday afternoon when a helicopter crashed while returning from a tourist flight over the Grand Canyon.

A 23-year-old woman survived the crash. She was listed in critical condition after being airlifted to the University Medical Center in Las Vegas with burns over 80% of her body.

The passengers were family members from the New York City area vacationing here together, according to sources close to the investigation.

They were staying at an upscale Las Vegas Strip hotel, sources said, and had signed on for a three-hour, $317-per-person tour featuring a champagne picnic along the Colorado River.

The helicopter, a Eurocopter AS350, crashed at 2:30 p.m. into a ridgeline above the Arizona high desert, about 60 miles east of Las Vegas.

Little remained of the aircraft. Some wreckage was strewn more than 50 feet across the rise, on land governed by the federal Bureau of Land Management outside the Grand Canyon National Park.

The first helicopters to reach the scene were from the same tour company, following the same flight pattern. They were ordered away so emergency aircraft could approach, said Bert Byers, spokesman for the Lake Mead National Recreation Area.

Friday evening, the National Transportation Safety Board was preparing to send crash investigators to the scene from Los Angeles. They are expected to take over the investigation today, an NTSB spokesman said.

There were no immediate clues to the cause of the crash, one of several in and around the Grand Canyon in recent years.

“We have no idea what went wrong,” said Laura Brown, public relations chief for the Federal Aviation Administration in Washington.

The helicopter was operated by Papillon Grand Canyon Helicopters, which is headquartered in Arizona but flies more than a dozen tours daily from McCarran International Airport in Las Vegas.

Company officials declined comment Friday afternoon. Family and friends of the victims were sequestered inside the company’s airport offices, at the south end of the Strip, and were comforted later in the day by an Orthodox rabbi.

“They are in an incredible state of shock,” Rabbi Felipe Goodman, of Temple Beth Sholom of Las Vegas, told Associated Press. “They’re trying to put together and see what’s next.”

Five helicopter companies operate tours out of McCarran airport, collectively offering about 90 tours daily over the Grand Canyon, said airport spokeswoman Hilarie Grey.

The Grand Canyon and the desert around it have been the site of multiple helicopter and fixed-wing plane crashes over the years.

Because of the danger of flying below or at the level of the canyon rim, and because of protests from environmentalists about disruptions to the canyon’s quiet, the federal government in 1987 banned flights below the rim and restricted planes to certain corridors. Restrictions have been added since then.

In 1986, a sightseeing airplane and a helicopter collided several hundred feet below the canyon’s lower north rim, killing all 20 on board the plane and the five in the helicopter.

Most of the deadly accidents have involved small sightseeing airplanes. Among them: one in 1995 that killed eight of 10 people aboard, a 1992 crash that killed all 10 aboard, one in 1991 that killed all seven on board and one in 1989 that killed 10 and injured 11.

The most recent helicopter crash occurred in 1999, killing the pilot and injuring a second person, also a pilot. There were no tourists aboard.

About 750,000 tourists take about 50,000 flights over the park each year, officials estimate. Travel experts consider the Grand Canyon the helicopter tour capital of the country, feeding a $100-million-plus industry.

On its Web site, Papillon boasts it is the world’s largest helicopter sightseeing company. Its largest helicopter, the one that crashed Friday, has a glass floor. The Web site notes, too, that should a helicopter engine fail, “the rotor blades will continue to turn at normal operating speeds, allowing the pilot to make a fully controlled landing.”

Gorman reported from Las Vegas and Malnic from Los Angeles. Times researcher John Jackson also contributed to this story.
Coverage of the same story by the New York Times can be found here

Jewish press: too few Jews to pray on 9/11