Are the Palestinians Evil

http://cbc.ca/cgi-bin/templates/view.cgi?category=World&story=/news/2002/03/19/mideast_censor020319

(go to link for video clip)

Israeli Army Embarrassed by Video Broadcast

When CBC News spoke with Ismail Hawarjeh at Bethlehem's hospital earlier this month, there was no way to verify the story he told about how his wife had died, until Israel's Channel 2 broacast the tape last weekend.
The Palestinian school administrator said his wife Huda had been killed in their home by an Israeli tank shell during the army's March 8 assault on the Aida refugee camp. The army wouldn't comment and foreign journalists weren't allowed inside the camp.

Israeli soldiers raid the Hawarjeh home on March 8


But Israeli media were allowed to ride along with the soldiers, and they went right into the Hawarjeh home. An Israeli camera recorded the army blowing off the door, and found Huda Hawarjeh bleeding on the floor.

The pictures conformed to Ismail Hawarjeh's story about his wife being hit by shrapnel in the front hallway of the house, and about the Israeli soldiers doing little to help her for an hour while she bled to death in front of her five children.

Finally, the soldiers allowed an ambulance to come to a nearby street, and soldiers helped Hawarjeh carry his wife to it. Doctors tried to revive her at the hospital but couldn't.

Huda Hawarjeh was one of seven people to die in the Bethlehem area that day.

The Israeli army allows the media such close access on the understanding it can embargo anything it doesn't want broadcast.

The tapes of the assault on the Hawarjeh home fell into that category. But Channel 2 broke the embargo anyway.

The army, government and many Israeli citizens didn't like what they saw.

Palestinian girl cries while her mother lies dying on the floor


Channel 2 showed Hawarjeh begging soldiers to allow an ambulance through. The camera captured the terror of the woman's daughter, and her brother's attempt to stop her from showing the soldiers her fear.

After the woman was finally taken out, one of the soldiers looked into the camera and said: "I don't know what we're doing here. Purification, maybe. It's dirty here. I don't know why a good Hebrew boy should be here, so far from his home."

The soldiers tore the home apart, evidently looking for weapons.

Another daughter begged them not to demolish the home's wall. Soldiers commonly smash walls to move into adjacent houses.

Israeli spokesman Ranaan Gissin said the government was disappointed by the decision to air the tapes. "I would have expected a little bit more self-censorship on the part of the Israeli media," he said.

Ma'ariv, Israel's second-biggest newspaper, ran the story on its front page on Monday, under a banner headline that read "Gaffe!"

The army, after trying to suppress distribution of the pictures, admitted the soldiers' actions pushed the boundaries of public acceptance.

"Our action is so difficult to be done that it is to the extremities of acceptance," said Olivier Rafowicz, an Israeli Defence Force spokesman.

He called what happened in the Hawarjeh home "a mistake."

Except for the special case of movies about World War II, it has been a long time since we have seen a major film that shows modern American soldiers fighting hard battles with courage, dignity and a sense of purpose. And now we have two. "Black Hawk Down," directed by the highly-regarded Ridley Scott ("Gladiator"), is set on the chaotic streets of Mogadishu in 1993, and has grossed $110 million since its wide release two months ago. It also snared four Academy Award nominations. "We Were Soldiers," which tells the story of those who fought America's first major battle against the North Vietnamese Army in late 1965, stars Mel Gibson and took in $53 million in its first 17 days.

With the recent box-office success of these two films, one is tempted to conclude that mainstream Hollywood has broken new ground in its depiction of American soldiers at war. The simplicity of the plot lines, and the emphasis on the sheer ferocity of the fighting, overrides the usual political implications and internal conflicts that have so characterized post-World War II movies. As a consequence, at their end a viewer is left with the irrefutable conclusion that these were good men, serving their country at considerable cost. In short, they were every bit as good, as brave, as dedicated and as deserving of praise, as their World War II predecessors.





As mundane as it may sound to those who have served, this concept is fresh ground in Hollywood. But the jury is still out as to whether it constitutes a trend.
It is often said that Hollywood studios will "follow the money" when it comes to choosing film topics, but this is only a partial truism. Collectively, Hollywood is still the most politically correct culture in America, and its decision-makers are highly conscious of the power of a film to shape public opinion. A film topic that goes against the grain of liberal orthodoxy is hard-pressed to find a producer, and especially a studio, with the power to work it through the many-headed Hydra called the development process.

And this is especially true of war movies, for a variety of rather complicated reasons. Without the philosophically conservative Mr. Gibson, or the combination of Oscar-winner Mr. Scott and producer Jerry Bruckheimer ("Top Gun"), it is doubtful that either of these highly successful films would have made it to the marketplace.

Why is it so hard for Hollywood's decision-makers to make films that honor those who have fought in America's wars since World War II? There are a variety of reasons. Some are commercial, but many others are not.

First and foremost, for all its international reach, Hollywood's management culture is largely inbred, and the very notion of voluntary military service is an anomaly to its members. For every person who is hired at a studio or major agency or production office there are probably 10 with the talent and desire to work there. In a business that is intensely relationship-driven, the tendency is to hire those with whom one is most comfortable, both philosophically and in terms of background.

Few in Hollywood's power structure have served in the military, and it is rare to find someone in that culture who truly comprehends either the pride in serving or the sacrifices that attend it. The military is not only foreign to Hollywood's elites; for some, it is viewed with disdain and even fear.

On two different occasions over the past several years I have been offered the same spontaneous comment, one by an Oscar-winning director and another by the head of a major studio. While not definitive of Hollywood's attitudes, it certainly is instructive. "If my son were to tell me that he was going into the military," both of them said, "I would do everything in my power to keep it from happening."





Next, movies need heroes and villains. War movies historically have pitted the good guys (ours) against the bad guys. But except for the old standby topics surrounding World War II, the relative morality that accompanies political correctness leaves no room for such judgments in today's war films.
Rather than externalizing the conflict, the struggle between good and evil in more recent war films has taken place within the American military, usually on issues of corruption or morality. This is especially true with respect to films about the Vietnam War, as for instance "Platoon," "Casualties of War" and "Apocalypse Now." Hollywood was the most virulently antiwar culture in our society during that war, and has been reluctant to show American soldiers fighting, and usually defeating, a determined enemy.

The realities of international marketing also argue against so-called patriotic films. Starting about 10 years ago, the revenue flow from foreign sales became larger than domestic sales. This expanded the appeal of high-action, low-dialogue thrillers, and also caused many studios to shy away from topics that would offend foreign moviegoers by showing Americans as overtly nationalistic or politically insensitive. Last year Disney went very soft on the Japanese in "Pearl Harbor," and even deleted certain scenes from the version shown in Japan rather than risk offending a Japanese audience.

There is also a skeptical unease in Hollywood with topics that might brand a producer or studio as being susceptible to political propaganda. Although one can argue with considerable merit that an unspoken conservative "blacklisting" is alive and well in Hollywood, the culture still resonates with memories of the McCarthy era of 50 years ago.





Further, mainstream America is too often the whipping post in modern films, constituting the "evil" in the traditional Hollywood formula, against which the struggles of "good"--all manner of politically correct agendas--are measured. The much-touted "American Beauty" is the best recent example. Against such a standard, the traditional military, along with its virtues of duty and service to country, is anathema. Witness, for instance, the subtle denigration of its culture in such megahits as "A Few Good Men."
With tens of thousands of scripts registered at the Writer's Guild every year and only some 300 feature films actually being made, it is possible that Hollywood will revert to form once the war on terrorism has abated. But it is also possible that the events of the past six months may help change perceptions there.

For the first time in many years, the country has come to understand that distant and seemingly innocuous events can bring harm to us and to our interests if they are ignored. The average citizen is now following the activities of our military on a daily basis, and has been exposed, however vicariously, to the hardships and sacrifices that characterize military service. And there seems to be, finally, a wide acceptance of the notion that fighting in a far off land at great risk frequently involves courage and even honor. The major networks, losing audiences hand over first in recent years, are set to bring this reality home to TV viewers with several series showing the armed forces in action.

And who knows? Messrs. Gibson and Scott have demonstrated a truth known full well in the hinterlands of America--that the people in this country have always loved their soldiers and their veterans, and will pay to see movies that depict them positively. Their films could not have brought us these reminders at a better time.

Mr. Webb, a Marine combat veteran of Vietnam, is co-producing and writing the film version of his novel "Fields of Fire" with RKO Pictures. His film credits include "Rules of Engagement."

HE sports the modest title of communications director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, a lobby group, but Hussein Ibish is a fast-rising star who appears frequently on top-rated television talk shows, in leading newspapers, at think tanks and in the corridors of power.

Ibish has been appearing with increasing frequency in places like the Los Angeles Times and on The O'Reilly Factor, Nightline, BBC, The Early Show with Bryant Gumble, CNN, MSNBC, All Things Considered, The Evening News with Dan Rather and The Nightly News with Tom Brokaw.

He's appeared at the Woodrow Wilson Center, and his group is often at the White House. Indeed, few people with views as extremist as his have been given as much recogniztion.

Unlike most of today's prominent Muslim spokesmen, the 38-year-old Ibish does not advocate militant Islam. Instead, he pushes a set of far left-wing views.

These start, not surprisingly, with a deep antagonism to the U.S. government. An immigrant from Lebanon, he believes Washington has imperial ambitions in the Middle East. To achieve these, he says, Washington relies extensively on terrorism.

First, it has stiched together a system of puppet rulers who "terrorize the region." Second, it "has the ability to murder and rampage at will" and sometimes does just that - as during its "terrorist" 1986 air strike against Libya.

It gets worse. Ibish has described former Secretary of State Madeline Albright as "vermin." He has compared comments by Colin Powell about Iraqi civilian deaths during the 1991 war to those by Timothy McVeigh about the children he murdered in Oklahoma City.

He may be tough on American diplomats, but for the second-worst mass murderer of the 20th-century, China's Mao Zedong, Ibish shows a touching affection ("The achievements of Mao can hardly be overstated.")

Ibish apologizes for many groups the U.S. government deems terrorist, starting with Osama bin Laden. "I'm skeptical," was his reaction after a federal grand jury indicted bin Laden for bombing two U.S. embassies in East Africa. Ibish dismisses bin Laden as a blowhard who gives "blood-curdling interviews," a guy who "lives in a cave in Afghanistan" and someone seen by Arabs as "a crank and a dangerous fanatic."

The list of apologetics goes on. President Bush calls Hamas "one of the deadliest terrorist organizations in the world today" but our lobbyist friend touts its accomplishments "running hospitals and schools and orphanages."

Ibish's words prompt other comments, too:

* He plays with facts -- at will doubling U.S. governmental aid to Israel or tripling the number of Iraqis killed by the sanctions regime. One exasperated columnist characterizes his writings as "systematic deceit."

* Anyone he dislikes is liable to be compared to Nazis. Officers of the Massachusetts Alcoholic Beverages Control Commission are "stormtroopers." A mild newspaper article about Islam is "genocidal" and "reminiscent of the most bizarre passages of Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf." U.S. sanctions on Iraq are "genocidal."

* He bandies about accusations of espionage for Israel. American journalists he disagrees with are "transparently operating in concert and at the direction of the Israeli government." The Anti-Defamation League is an arm of Israeli intelligence.

* As co-editor, Ibish turned the Graduate Voice at the University of Massachusetts into what one writer calls "such an anti-Semitic rag" that the university chancellor had to establish an anti-Semitism task force to respond to his activities.

* In a bizarre twist, Ibish takes pride in his own immoral lifestyle, advocating "redemption through intoxication." He contends that "Those of us who smoke, drink, speak freely and have unauthorized sex occupy both the intellectually sound position and the moral high ground" compared to the "neo-puritans" who frown on such activities.

* In 1997, while a teaching assistant at the University of Massachusetts, he railed against a university regulation prohibiting sex between employees (like himself) and students, calling this an "all-out assault on f--ing." He especially decried the impact this would have on homosexuals, furious at the exposure this could bring if "you are gay and don't feel comfortable in announcing that fact to a homophobic world."

Anti-American, anti-Semitic, inaccurate and immoral; Hussein Ibish makes for a peculiar choice to serve as the public face of Arab-Americans.

More broadly, the media, think tanks and politicians should consider Ibish's record and close their doors to someone so far removed from the mainstream of the American debate.

E-mail via DanielPipes.org.

An incident last month in the office of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat should forever have a special place in the annals of good government.
Mr. Arafat was having an argument with one of his security chiefs, when the security official banged his fist on the table.
This apparently is not just bad manners, but potentially a shooting offense: Mr. Arafat brandished the pistol that is always at his side and reportedly shouted, "You are a collaborator for Israel and America."
The two were separated before anyone could draw blood. So it goes during WWF pay-per-view specials and high-level deliberations of the Palestinian Authority.
As this incident and many more demonstrate, Mr. Arafat essentially is a gangster who happens to have a large caucus favorable to him at the United Nations.
It's as if felonious rap mogul Suge Knight set up a quasi-government in East L.A., and most Third World governments decided to champion him and condemn the Los Angeles Police Department for cracking down whenever he happened to dangle a rival from a window.
This is what makes Mr. Arafat's rehabilitation by the Bush administration so dismaying. Not only has Mr. Arafat not fulfilled the demands the administration put on him (basically, stopping the terror), the Palestinian leadership is in the midst of an orgiastic frenzy of suicide-murders.
The old trope was that extremists outside of Mr. Arafat's control were responsible for violence. Always dubious, this tissue of a fiction isn't even necessary anymore.
As the New York Times has reported, "Since the beginning of the year, it has been Palestinian militants tied to Yasser Arafat's Fatah faction who have carried out most of the attacks against Israelis."
In fact, Fatah is in a macabre competition with radical Hamas over who can take credit for sponsoring the most suicide-murders.
The Washington Times described a recent ceremony in a Fatah-controlled refugee camp: "A stream of visitors lined up in a narrow hilltop alley to pay their respects and offer their congratulations to the father and brothers of 18-year-old Mohammed Daraghmeh, a Fatah stalwart." Daraghmeh had killed five children and four women — all in day's work for a Palestinian martyr.
Palestinian terrorism, however, is not just hate-induced bloodletting, it is a serious instrument of foreign policy. Klemens von Metternich, no doubt, wouldn't have approved, but terror still has real benefits.
It wears down Israeli will, as the Palestinians hope to prompt the same sort of precipitous Israeli withdrawal that took place in southern Lebanon two years ago.
It divides Israeli society, fracturing Ariel Sharon's coalition on the left (doves who think he's prompting the violence by being too harsh) and on the right (hawks who think he's not being harsh enough).
And it energizes the Palestinians, giving them "victories" of a sort — vile ones, to be sure — to celebrate.
There are only two possible disadvantages to terrorism for the Palestinians: stern Israeli retaliation and the opprobrium of the United States.
But the Bush administration is reducing the force of both of these disincentives by restraining the Israelis and softening its own attitude toward Mr. Arafat — thus, making terrorism an even more attractive proposition for the Palestinians.
The merrymakers at the Hamas and Fatah martyr ceremonies must be grinning and patting themselves on the backs even more than usual.
Yes, the United States will wring pious antiviolence statements from Mr. Arafat, whose other specialty — besides violence — is insincere protestations about his sincerity. But little will change on the ground, as the hitherto intolerable becomes just another aspect of the "peace process."
It would have been inconceivable at the time of the Oslo accords, for instance, that the world would have expected Israel to tolerate a Palestinian army — an increasingly sophisticated one at that — run out of the West Bank. But that is what is now expected of Israel.
Until the Bush administration's latest shift, it would have been inconceivable that Israel would be asked to tolerate daily suicide attacks. Now it's not quite so inconceivable anymore.
All that said, if making Israel uncomfortable for a few months were necessary to the cause of building support for toppling Saddam Hussein, it would be worth it.
But it probably isn't necessary, since Arab governments respect power most of all. If we make it clear we are determined to take care of Saddam with or without their support, most Middle East countries would quietly acquiesce. Instead, the United States is buying into the biggest and most pervasive Arab lie: that nothing ails the Middle East that can't be fixed by neutering Israel.
This is a dishonest dodge. In the West Bank, the problem isn't that a pistol-waving Mr. Arafat can't control the anti-Israeli extremists, but that he can't control himself.
And, with the administration ready to welcome him back into polite company anyway, why should he?

It's a formula that sounds good, as it rings from editorial pages to U.N. conferences: More economic aid equals less world poverty.
It's what some cheerleaders for higher aid keep telling President Bush, who recently announced he would boost U.S. foreign aid spending by $5 billion over three years. And even that's not enough for the United Nations and the World Bank, which are calling for the United States to double the amount of aid it currently gives ($11.5 billion).
But this chorus for ever-higher amounts of aid obscures an inconvenient fact: Merely increasing economic aid to poor countries does virtually nothing to make them richer.
Consider that, since 1945, the United States has given more than $500 billion to less developed countries. Yet the people in many of these countries are no richer today — and in many cases actually are worse off — than they were decades ago.
Case in point: Zambia, an African nation about the size of Texas, has been receiving U.S. foreign aid for the last 44 years ($37 million last year alone). Yet, despite this infusion of funds, its per capita gross domestic product (GDP) fell by $275 between 1964 (Zambia's first year of independence) and 1999. In the 1990s, its economy "grew" at a rate of minus 2 percent. Inflation stands at 27 percent.
Why? Primarily because Zambia, like so many other recipients of U.S. foreign aid, restricts economic freedom for its citizens. Corruption is rampant, and the government imposes a heavy regulatory burden. Acquiring a business license, for example, involves complex procedures and delays that discourage domestic investment.
Aid from other sources fares no better. The World Bank, for example, funneled more than $100 billion to sub-Saharan African countries between 1970 and 1999. Of the 31 for which data are available, 17 saw their per capita GDP decline.
The key to economic growth is freedom, not aid, as shown by the "Index of Economic Freedom," an annual survey measuring economic freedom in 161 countries around the world (co-published by the Heritage Foundation and the Wall Street Journal). Nations rated as having "free" economies in the 2002 Index have an average per capita income of $23,325. Those rated as economically "repressed," such as North Korea, have an average per capita income of only $3,829.
In country after country, the Index proves the folly of giving aid to a government with policies that make it difficult for people to open a business or trade with foreigners. You could increase U.S. foreign aid to an economically repressed country by a factor of 100 and still see its standard of living improve not one iota.
The responsibility for economic growth in the developing world lies largely with the countries themselves, because the main cause of a country's economic growth is its domestic policies, not the amount of foreign aid it receives. Nations with policies that promote economic freedom, such as low trade barriers or high protection of property rights, nearly always grow faster than those without them.
That is why, as President Bush seems to realize, aid should go only to countries with sound economic policies. He wants his $5 billion increase to go to those countries that establish the rule of law, fight corruption and open their markets. The World Bank found that giving a country with good policies in these areas an amount equal to just 1 percent of its GDP prompts growth — but giving aid to countries with weak economic policies causes their economies to shrink.
Here are a couple of suggestions the administration can use to move the debate in the right direction:
• Stress the effectiveness of aid, not the amount. President Bush should encourage other developed countries to consider not how much aid they give, but how they give it. Aid is effective only when it's disbursed to countries with policies that promote economic growth.
c Put economic growth first. Protecting labor rights, strengthening environmental standards and combating income inequality are worthy goals but should take a back seat to promoting growth. Labor rights and environmental protections aren't a prerequisite for development. In fact, the best way to raise labor and environmental standards is to increase economic growth, because wealthier nations tend to have greater environmental protection and labor standards than poorer ones.
It's time to amend our foreign-aid formula so that it encourages governments to expand economic freedom — without which no nation can reduce poverty.

Brett Schaefer is the Jay Kingham fellow in international regulatory affairs and Aaron Schavey is a policy analyst in the Center for International Trade and Economics at the Heritage Foundation.

America has a burning problem with domestic terrorism. Just ask the residents of Vail, Colo., Medford, Ore. or Seattle. They have had property torched by members of the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) and the Earth Liberation Front (ELF). Since 1996, ecoterrorists representing those organizations have committed more than 600 acts of arson and other mayhem and caused over $43 million worth of damage.
It's no wonder that while testifying this week before the Forests and Forest Health subcommittee of the House Resources Committee, James F. Jarbone, the FBI's domestic terrorism section chief, said that, "As far as activity, destruction, and danger to the public, I'd put ELF/ALF at the top of the list." At the top of the committee's list of witnesses was Craig Rosebraugh, the former press officer of the ELF, who appeared at the point of a subpoena. Although Rosebraugh was courageous enough to submit an incendiary manifesto calling for a violent revolution (that was not, incidentally, printed on recycled paper), he took the Fifth Amendment with conviction.
Hopefully, that won't be enough to save him or any of the other ecoterrorists from being jailed for any crimes which they may be convicted of. Some of those crimes can be read in a 47-page year-end report issued by the ELF and ALF, in which they took credit for 67 illegal actions in 2001. Instructions for igniting those actions of arson can be downloaded at ALF's website, which features the manual, "Arson-Around with Auntie ALF: Your guide to putting heat on animal abusers everywhere," and ELF's website, which has the manual "Setting Fires With Electrical Timers."
People have already been burned by their actions. One firefighter was injured while extinguishing the ELF-set fire at a lodge in Vail which caused $12 million worth of damage. ELF's 1998 firebombing of the headquarters of U.S. Forest Industries in Medford caused over $900,000 in damage and forced the company to move its corporate headquarters. Last May, ecoterrorists set fires that destroyed the University of Washington's Center for Urban Horticulture, causing over $5 million in damage, and destroying years of research. It's well past time to put the heat back on the ecoterrorists.

While the nation was having a good laugh at the expense of Florida’s hanging chads and butterfly ballots, Mohammed Atta and Marwan al Shehhi were there, in Florida, learning to drive commercial jetliners [and ram them into the World Trade Center towers]. It will take a novelist to paint that broad canvas properly. It will take some deep political thinking to understand how the lackadaisical attitude toward government and the world helped leave the country so unready for the horror that Atta and Shehhi were preparing.

—Michael Oreskes, New York Times, October 21, 2001

THE SEPTEMBER 11 ATTACKS on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center marked the end of one American era and the beginning of another. Like Pearl Harbor, the September tragedy awakened Americans from insular slumbers and made them aware of a world they could not afford to ignore. Like Franklin Roosevelt, George W. Bush condemned the attacks as acts of war, and mobilized a nation to action. It was a sharp departure from the policy of his predecessor, Bill Clinton, who in characteristic self-absorption had downgraded a series of similar assaults—including one on the World Trade Center itself—to criminal matters involving individuals alone.

The differences between the September 11 attacks and Pearl Harbor were also striking. The latter was a military base situated on an island 3,000 miles distant from the American mainland. New York, on the other hand, is America's greatest population center, the portal through which immigrant generations of all colors and ethnicities come to seek a better life. The World Trade Center is the Wall Street hub of the economy they enter, and its victims were targeted for participating in the most productive, tolerant and generous society human beings have created. In responding to the attacks, President Bush took note of this: "America was targeted for attack," he told Congress on September 20, "because we're the brightest beacon for freedom and opportunity in the world. And no one will keep that light from shining."

In contrast to Pearl Harbor, the assault on the World Trade Center was hardly a "sneak attack" that American intelligence agencies had little idea was coming. Its Twin Towers had already been bombed eight years earlier, and by the same enemy. The terrorists themselves were already familiar to government operatives, their aggressions frequent enough that several commissions had been appointed to investigate. Each had reached the same conclusion. It was not a matter of whether the United States was going to be the target of a major terrorist assault; it was a matter of when.

In fact, the al-Qaeda terrorists responsible for the September 11 attacks had first engaged U.S. troops as early as 1993 in Somalia. The Americans' purpose in being there was humanitarian: to feed the starving citizens of this Muslim land. But these goodwill ambassadors were ambushed by al-Qaeda forces. In a 15-hour battle in Mogadishu, 18 Americans were killed and 80 wounded. A dead U.S. soldier was dragged through the streets in an act calculated to humiliate his comrades and his country. The Americans' offense was not that they had brought food to the hungry. Their crime was who they were—"unbelievers," emissaries of "the Great Satan," in the political religion of the enemy they now faced.

The defeat in Mogadishu was not only a blow to American charity; it was a blow to American power and American prestige. Nonetheless, under the leadership of America's then commander-in-chief, Bill Clinton, there was no military response to the humiliation. The greatest superpower the world had ever seen did nothing. It accepted defeat, and left.

The War

On February 26, 1993, eight months prior to the Mogadishu attack, al-Qaeda terrorists had struck the World Trade Center for the first time. Their truck bomb made a crater six stories deep, killed six people and injured more than a thousand. The planners' intention had been to cause one tower to topple the other and kill tens of thousands of innocent people. It was not only the first major terrorist act ever to take place on U.S. soil, but—in the judgment of a definitive account of the event—"the most ambitious terrorist attack ever attempted, anywhere, ever."

Six Palestinian and Egyptian conspirators responsible for the attack were tried in civil courts and got life sentences like common criminals, but its mastermind escaped. He was identified as Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, an Iraqi Intelligence agent. This was a clear indication to authorities that the atrocity was no mere criminal event, and that it involved more than individual terrorists; it involved hostile terrorist states.

Yet, once again, the Clinton Administration's response was to absorb the injury and accept defeat. The president did not even visit the bomb crater or tend to the victims. Instead, America's commander-in-chief warned against "over-reaction." In doing so, he telegraphed a clear message to his nation's enemies: We are unsure of purpose and unsteady in hand; we are self-indulgent and soft; we will not take risks to defend ourselves; we are vulnerable.

The al-Qaeda terrorists were listening. In a 1998 interview, Osama bin Laden told ABC News reporter John Miller: "We have seen in the last decade the decline of the American government and the weakness of the American soldier who is ready to wage Cold Wars and unprepared to fight long wars. This was proven in Beirut when the Marines fled after two explosions. It also proves they can run in less than 24 hours, and this was also repeated in Somalia. We are ready for all occasions. We rely on Allah."

Among the terrorist entities that supported the al-Qaeda terrorists were Yasser Arafat's Palestine Authority and the Palestine Liberation Organization. The PLO had created the first terrorist training camps, invented suicide bombings and been the chief propaganda machine behind the idea that terrorist armies were really missionaries for "social justice." Yet, among foreign leaders Arafat was Clinton's most frequent White House guest. Far from treating Arafat as an enemy of civilized order and an international pariah, the Clinton Administration was busily cultivating him as a "partner for peace." For many Washington liberals, terrorism was not the instrument of political fanatics and evil men, but was the product of social conditions—poverty, racism and oppression—for which the Western democracies, including Israel were always ultimately to blame.

The idea that terrorism has "root causes" in social conditions whose primary author is the United States is, in fact, an organizing theme of the contemporary political left. "Where is the acknowledgment that this was not a 'cowardly' attack on 'civilization' or 'liberty' or 'humanity' or 'the free world'"—declared the writer Susan Sontag, speaking for this faction—"but an attack on the world's self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions? How many citizens are aware of the ongoing American bombing of Iraq?" (Was Susan Sontag unaware that Iraq was behind the first World Trade Center attack? That Iraq had attempted to swallow Kuwait and was a regional aggressor and sponsor of terror? That Iraq had expelled UN arms inspectors—in violation of the terms of its peace—who were there to prevent it from developing chemical, biological and nuclear weapons? Was she unaware that Iraq was a sponsor of international terror and posed an ongoing threat to others, including the country in which she lived?)

During the Clinton years the idea that America was somehow responsible for global distress had become an all too familiar refrain among leftwing elites. It had particular resonance in the institutions that shaped American culture and policy—universities, the mainstream media and the Oval Office. In March 1998, two months after Monica Lewinsky became a White House thorn and a household name, Clinton embarked on a presidential hand-wringing expedition to Africa. With a large delegation of African-American leaders in tow, the President made a pilgrimage to Uganda to apologize for the crime of American slavery. The apology was offered despite the fact that no slaves had ever been imported to America from Uganda or any East African state; that slavery in Africa preceded any American involvement by a thousand years; that America and Britain were the two powers responsible for ending the slave trade; and that America had abolished slavery a hundred years before—at great human cost—while slavery persisted in Africa without African protest to the present day.

Four months after Clinton left Uganda, al-Qaeda terrorists blew up the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.

Clinton's continuing ambivalence about America's role in the world was highlighted in the wake of September 11, when he suggested that America actually bore some responsibility for the attacks on itself. In November 2001, even as the new Bush administration was launching America's military response, the former president made a speech at Georgetown University in which he admonished citizens who were descended "from various European lineages" that they were "not blameless," and that America's past involvement in slavery should humble them as they confronted their attackers. Characteristically the President took no responsibility for his own failure to protect Americans from the attacks.

The idea that there are "root causes" behind campaigns to murder innocent men, women and children, and terrorize civilian populations was examined shortly after the Trade Center events by a writer in the New York Times. Columnist Edward Rothstein observed that while there was much hand-wringing and many mea culpas on the left after September 11, no one had invoked "root causes" to defend Timothy McVeigh after he blew up the Oklahoma City Federal Building in 1995, killing 187 people. "No one suggested that this act had its 'root causes' in an injustice that needed to be rectified to prevent further terrorism." The silence was maintained even though McVeigh and his collaborators "asserted that their ideas of rights and liberty were being violated and that the only recourse was terror."

The reason no one invoked "root causes" to explain the oklahoma City bombing was simply because Timothy McVeigh was not a leftist. Nor did he claim to be acting in behalf of "social justice"—the historical code for totalitarian causes. In an address to Congress that defined America's response to September 11, President Bush sagaciously observed, "We have seen their kind before. They are the heirs of all the murderous ideologies of the 20th century. By sacrificing human life to serve their radical visions, by abandoning every value except the will to power, they follow in the path of fascism, Nazism and totalitarianism."

Like Islamic radicalism, the totalitarian doctrines of communism and fascism are fundamentalist creeds. "The fundamentalist does not believe [his] ideas have any limits or boundaries,… [therefore] the goals of fundamentalist terror are not to eliminate injustice but to eliminate opposition." That is why the humanitarian nature of America's mission to Mogadishu made no difference to America's al-Qaeda foe. The terrorists' goal was not to alleviate hunger. It was to eliminate America. It was to defeat "The Great Satan."

Totalitarians and fundamentalists share a conviction that is religious and political at the same time. Their mission is social redemption through the power of the state. Using political and military power they intend to create a "new world" in their own image. This revolutionary transformation encompasses all individuals and requires the control of all aspects of human life:

Like fundamentalist terror, totalitarian terror leaves no aspect of life exempt from the battle being waged. The state is felt to be the apotheosis of political and natural law, and it strives to extend that law over all humanity…. No injustices, separately or together, necessarily lead to totalitarianism and no mitigation of injustice, however defined, will eliminate its unwavering beliefs, absolutist control and unbounded ambitions.

In 1998 Osama bin Laden explained his war aims to ABC News: "Allah ordered us in this religion to purify Muslim land of all non-believers." As The New Republic's Peter Beinart commented, bin Laden is not a crusader for social justice but "an ethnic cleanser on a scale far greater than the Hutus and the Serbs, a scale that has only one true Twentieth Century parallel."

In the 1990s America mobilized its military power to go to the rescue of Muslims in the Balkans who were being ethnically cleansed by Serbian communists. This counted for nothing in al-Qaeda's calculations, any more than did America's support for Muslim peasants in Afghanistan fighting for their freedom against the Red Army invaders in the 1980s. The war against radical Islam is not about what America has done, but about what America is. As bin Laden told the world on October 7, the day America began its military response, the war is between those of the faith and those outside the faith, between those who submit to the believers' law and those who are infidels and do not.

While The Clinton Administration Slept

After the first World Trade Center attack, President Clinton vowed there would be vengeance. But like so many of his presidential pronouncements, the strong words were not accompanied by deeds. Nor were they followed by measures necessary to defend the country against the next series of attacks.

After their Mogadishu victory and the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, unsuccessful attempts were made by al-Qaeda groups to blow up the Lincoln and Holland Tunnels and other populated targets, including a massive terrorist incident timed to coincide with the millennium celebrations of January 2000. Another scheme to hijack commercial airliners and use them as "bombs" according to plans close to those eventually used on September 11, was thwarted in the Philippines in 1995. The architect of this effort was the Iraqi intelligence agent Ramzi Yousef.

The following year, a terrorist attack on the Khobar Towers, a U.S. military barracks in Saudia Arabia, killed 19 American soldiers. The White House response was limp, and the case (in the words of FBI director Louis B. Freeh) "remains unresolved." Two years later al-Qaeda agents blew up the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania killing 245 people and injuring 5,000. (One CIA official told a reporter, "Two at once is not twice as hard. It is a hundred times as hard.") On October 12, 2000 the warship USS Cole was bombed while re-fueling in Yemen, yet another Islamic country aligned with the terrorist enemy. Seventeen U.S. sailors were killed and 39 injured.

These were all acts of war, yet of the President and his cabinet refused to recognize them as such.

Why the Clinton Administration Slept

Clinton's second term national security advisor, Sandy Berger, described the official White House position towards these attacks as "a little bit like a Whack-A-Mole game at the circus. They bop up and you whack 'em down, and if they bop up again, you bop 'em back, down again." Like the Administration he represented, the national security advisor lacked a requisite appreciation of the problem. Iraq's dictator was unimpressed by sporadic U.S. strikes against his regime. He remained defiant, expelling UN weapons inspectors, firing at U.S. warplanes and continuing to build his arsenal of mass destruction. But "the Administration held no clear and consistent view of the Iraqi threat and how it intended to address it," observed Washington Post correspondent Jim Hoagland. The disarray that characterized the Clinton security policy flowed from the "Administration's growing inability to tell the world—and itself—the truth." It was the signature problem of the Clinton years.

Underlying the Clinton security failure was the fact that the Administration was made up of people who for twenty-five years had discounted or minimized the totalitarian threat, opposed America's armed presence abroad, and consistently resisted the deployment of America's military forces to halt Communist expansion. National Security Advisor Sandy Berger was himself a veteran of the Sixties "anti-war" movement, which abetted the Communist victories in Vietnam and Cambodia, and created the "Vietnam War syndrome" that made it so difficult afterwards for American Presidents to deploy the nation's military forces.

Berger had also been a member of "Peace Now," the leftist movement seeking to pressure the Israeli government to make concessions to Yasser Arafat's PLO terrorists. Clinton's first National Security Advisor, Anthony Lake was a protégé of Berger, who had introduced him to Clinton. All three had met as activists in the 1972 McGovern presidential campaign whose primary issue was opposition to the Vietnam War based on the view that the "arrogance of American power" was responsible for the conflict rather than Communist aggression.

Anthony Lake's own attitude towards the totalitarian threat in Southeast Asia was displayed in a March 1975 Washington Post article he wrote called, "At Stake in Cambodia: Extending Aid Will Only Prolong the Killing." The prediction contained in Lake's title proved to be exactly wrong. It was not a small mistake for someone who in 1992 would be placed in charge of America's national security apparatus. Lake's article was designed to rally Democrat opposition to a presidential request for emergency aid to the Cambodian regime. The aid was required to contain the threat posed by Communist leader Pol Pot and his insurgent Khmer Rouge forces.

At the time, Republicans warned that if the aid was cut the regime would fall and a "bloodbath" would ensue. This fear was solidly based on reports that had begun accumulating three years earlier concerning "the extraordinary brutality with which the Khmer Rouge were governing the civilian population in areas they controlled." But Anthony Lake and the Democrat-controlled Congress dismissed these warnings as so much "anti-Communist hysteria," and voted to deny the aid.

In his Post article, Lake advised fellow Democrats to view the Khmer Rouge not as a totalitarian force—which it was—but as a coalition embracing "many Khmer nationalists, Communist and non-Communist," who only desired independence. It would be a mistake, he wrote, to alienate Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge lest we "push them further into the arms of their Communist supporters." Lake's myopic left-wing views prevailed among the Democrats, and the following year the new president, Jimmy Carter, rewarded Lake with an appointment as Policy Planning Director of the State Department.

In Cambodia, the termination of U.S. aid led immediately to the collapse of the government allowing the Khmer Rouge to seize power within months of the congressional vote. The victorious revolutionaries proceeded to implement their plans for a new Communist utopia by systematically eliminating their opposition. In the next three years they killed nearly 2 million Cambodians, a campaign universally recognized as one of the worst genocides ever recorded.

The Warnings Ignored

For nearly a decade before the World Trade Center disaster, the Clinton Administration was aware that Americans were increasingly vulnerable to attacks which might involve biological or chemical weapons, or even nuclear devices bought or stolen from broken pieces of the former Soviet Union. This was the insistent message of Republican speeches on the floors of Congress and was reflected in the warnings of several government commissions, and Clinton's own Secretary of Defense, William Cohen.

In July 1999, for example, Cohen wrote an op-ed piece in the Washington Post, predicting a terrorist attack on the American mainland. "In the past year, dozens of threats to use chemical or biological weapons in the United States have turned out to be hoaxes. Someday, one will be real." But the warnings did not produce the requisite action by the commander-in-chief. Meanwhile, the nation's media looked the other way. For example, as the president of the Council on Foreign Relations told the New Yorker's Joe Klein, he "watched carefully to see if anyone followed up on [Cohen's speech]. But none of the television networks and none of the elite press even mentioned it. I was astonished."

The following year, "the National Commission on Terrorism—chaired by former Reagan counter-terrorism head Paul Bremer—issued a report with the eerily foreboding image of the Twin Towers on its cover. A bi-partisan effort led by Jon Kyl and Dianne Feinstein—was made to attach the recommendations of the panel to an intelligence authorization bill." But Senator Patrick Leahy, who had distinguished himself in the 1980s by opposing the government's efforts to halt the Communist offensive in Central America "said he feared a threat to 'civil liberties' in a campaign against terrorism and torpedoed the effort. After the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole, Kyl and Feinstein tried yet again. This time, Leahy was content with emaciating the proposals instead of defeating them outright. The weakened proposals died as the House realized 'it wasn't worth taking up.'"

After the abortive plot to blow up commercial airliners in the Philippines, Vice President Gore was tasked with improving airline security. A commission was formed, but under his leadership it also "focused on civil liberties" and "profiling," liberal obsessions that diluted any effort to strengthen security measures in the face of a threat in which all of the proven terrorists were Muslims from the Middle East and Asia. The commission concluded that, "no profile [of passengers] should contain or be based on … race, religion, or national origin." According to journalist Kevin Cherry, the FAA also decided in 1999 to seal its passenger screening system from law-enforcement databases thus preventing the FBI from notifying airlines that suspected terrorists were on board."

In 1993, the FBI identified three charities connected to the Palestinian terrorist organization Hamas that were being used to finance terrorist activities, sending as much as $20 million a year to America's enemies. According to presidential adviser Dick Morris, "At a White House strategy meeting on April 27, 1995—two weeks after the Oklahoma City bombing—the President was urged to create a 'President's List' of extremist/terrorist groups, their members and donors 'to warn the public against well-intentioned donations which might foster terrorism.' On April 1, 1996, he was again advised to 'prohibit fund-raising by terrorists and identify terrorist organizations.'" Hamas was specifically mentioned.

Inexplicably Clinton ignored these recommendations. Why? FBI agents have stated that they were prevented from opening either criminal or national-security cases because of a fear that it would be seen as 'profiling' Islamic charities. While Clinton was 'politically correct,' Hamas flourished.



In failing to heed the signs that America was at war with a deadly adversary, overcome the ideological obstacles created by the liberal biases of his administration and arouse an uninformed public to concern, it was the commander-in-chief who bore primary responsibility. As one former administration official told reporter Joe Klein "Clinton spent less concentrated attention on national defense than any another President in recent memory." Clinton's political advisor Dick Morris flatly charged, "Clinton's failure to mobilize America to confront foreign terror after the 1993 attack [on the World Trade Center] led directly to the 9/11 disaster." According to Morris "Clinton was removed, uninvolved, and distant where the war on terror was concerned."

Opportunities Missed

By Clinton's own account, Monica Lewinsky was able to visit him privately more than a dozen times in the Oval Office. But according to a USA Today investigative report, the head of the CIA could not get a single private meeting with the President, despite the Trade Center bombing of February 26, 1993 or the killing of 18 American soldiers in Mogadishu on October 3 of the same year. "James Woolsey, Clinton's first CIA director, says he never met privately with Clinton after their initial interview. When a small plane crashed on the White House grounds in 1994, the joke inside the White House was, 'that must be Woolsey, still trying to get an appointment.'"

In 1996, an American Muslim businessman and Clinton supporter named Mansoor Ijaz opened up an unofficial channel between the government of the Sudan and the Clinton Administration. At the same time, "the State Department was describing bin Laden as 'the greatest single financier of terrorist projects in the world' and was accusing the Sudan of harboring terrorists." According to Mansoor, who met with Clinton and Sandy Berger, "President Omar Hassan Ahmed Bashir, who wanted terrorism sanctions against Sudan lifted, offered the arrest and extradition of bin Laden and detailed intelligence data about the global networks constructed by Egypt's Islamic Jihad, Iran's Hezbollah and the Palestinian Hamas. Among the members of these networks were the two hijackers who piloted commercial airliners into the World Trade Center. The silence of the Clinton administration in responding to these offers was deafening."

President Bashir sent key intelligence officials to Washington in February 1966. Again, according to Mansoor, "the Sudanese offered to arrest bin Laden and extradite him to Saudi Arabia or, barring that, to 'baby-sit' him—monitoring all his activities and associates." But the Saudis didn't want him. Instead, in May 1996 "the Sudanese capitulated to US pressure and asked Bin Laden to leave, despite their feeling that he could be monitored better in Sudan than elsewhere. Bin Laden left for Afghanistan, taking with him Ayman Awahiri, considered by the U.S. to be the chief planner of the September 11 attacks…"

One month later, the US military housing complex in Saudi Arabia was blown apart by a 5,000 lb truck bomb. Clinton's failure to grasp the opportunity, concludes Mansoor, "represents one of the most serious foreign policy failures in American history."

According to a London Sunday Times account, based on a Clinton Administration source, responsibility for this decision "went to the very top of the White House. Shortly after the September 11 disaster, "Clinton told a dinner companion that the decision to let bin Laden go was probably 'the biggest mistake of my presidency.'" But according to the Times report, which was based on interviews with intelligence officials, this was only one of three occasions on which the Clinton Administration had the opportunity to seize Bin Laden and failed to do so.

When the president's affair with Monica Lewinsky became public in January 1998, and his adamant denials made it a consuming public preoccupation, Clinton's normal inattention to national security matters became subsumed in a general executive paralysis. In Dick Morris's judgment, the United States was effectively "without a president between January 1998 until April 1999," when the impeachment proceedings concluded with the failure of the Senate to convict. It was in August 1998 that the al-Qaeda truck bombs blew up the embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.

The Failure to Take Security Seriously

Yet this was only half the story. During its eight years, the Clinton Administration was able to focus enough attention on defense matters to hamstring the intelligence services in the name of civil liberties, shrink the U.S. military in the name of economy, and prevent the Pentagon from adopting (and funding) a "two-war" strategy, because "the Cold War was over" and in the White House's judgment there was no requisite military threat in the post-Communist world that might make it necessary for the United States to be able to fight wars on two fronts. Inattention to defense also did not prevent the Clinton Administration from pursuing massive social experiments in the military in the name of gender and diversity reform, which included requiring "consciousness raising" classes for military personnel, rigging physical standards women were unable to meet, and in general undermining the meritocratic benchmarks that are a crucial component of military morale.

While budget cuts forced some military families to go on food stamps, the Pentagon spent enormous sums to re-equip ships and barracks to accommodate co-ed living. All these efforts further reduced the Pentagon's ability to put a fighting force in the field—a glaring national vulnerability dramatized by the war in Kosovo. This diminished the crucial elements of fear and respect for American power in the eyes of adversaries waiting in the wings.

During the Clinton years, the Democrats insistence that American power was somehow the disturber—rather than the enforcer—of international tranquility, prompted the White House to turn to multilateral agencies for leadership, particularly the discredited United Nations. While useful in limited peacekeeping operations, the UN was in large part a collection of theocratic tyrannies and brutal dictatorships which regularly indicted and condemned the world's most tolerant democracies, specifically the United States, England and Israel, while supporting the very states providing safe harbors for America's al-Qaeda enemy. Just prior to the World Trade Center attacks, the UN's "Conference on Racism" engaged in a ritual of America bashing over "reparations" for slavery and support for Israel. The agendas had been set by an Arab coalition led by Iran.

During the 1990s, Bill Clinton's most frequent foreign guest was Yasser Arafat, whose allegiance to Iraq and betrayal of America during the Gulf War could not have been more brazen. Following the defeat of Iraq, a "peace process" was launched in the Arab-Israeli conflict that predictably failed through Arafat's failure to renounce the terrorist option. But why renounce terror if there is no price exacted for practicing it?

Clinton and the Military

It is true that the Clinton White House was able, during its eight-year tenure, to shed some of the Democrats' normal aversion to the use of American military might. (As recently as 1990 only 6 Democratic Senators had voted to authorize the Gulf War against Iraq). But the Clinton deployments of American forces were often non-military in nature: a "democracy building" effort in Haiti that failed; flood relief and "peace keeping" operations that were more appropriately the province of international institutions. Even the conflict Clinton belatedly engaged in the Balkans was officially characterized as a new kind of "humanitarian war," as though the old kinds of war for national interest and self-defense were somehow tainted. While the Serbian dictator Milosevic was toppled, "ethnic cleansing," the casus belli of the Western intervention, continues, except that the Christian Serbs in Kosovo have now become victims of the previously persecuted Albanian Muslims.

Among Clinton's deployments were also half-hearted strikes using cruise missiles against essentially defenseless countries like the Sudan, or the sporadic bombing of Iraq when Saddam violated the terms of the Gulf peace. Clinton's strikes failed in their primary objective—to maintain the UN inspections. On the other hand, a negative result of this "Whack-A-Mole" strategy was the continual antagonizing of Muslim populations throughout the world.

The most notorious of these episodes was undoubtedly Clinton's ill-conceived and ineffectual response to the attacks on the African embassies. At the time, Clinton was preoccupied with preparing his defense before a grand jury convened because of his public lies about the Lewinsky affair. Three days after Lewinsky's grand jury appearance, without consulting the Joint Chiefs of Staff or his national security advisors, Clinton launched cruise missiles into two Islamic countries, which he identified as being allied to the terrorists and their leader Osama bin Laden. One of these missiles hit and destroyed a pharmaceutical factory in the Sudan, killing one individual. Since the factory was the sole plant producing medicines for an impoverished African nation, there were almost certainly a number of collateral deaths.

The incident, which inflamed anti-American passions all over the Islamic world, was—in conception and execution—a perfect reflection of the distorted priorities and reckless attitudes of the Clinton White House. It also reflected the irresponsibility of congressional Democrats who subordinated the safety concerns of their constituents to provide unified support for the presidential misbehavior at home and abroad.

The Partisan Nature of the Security Problem

More than 100 Arabic operatives participated in the attack on the World Trade Center Towers. They did so over a period of several years. They were able to enter the United States with and without passports seemingly at will. They received training in flying commercial airliners at American facilities despite clear indications that some of them might be part of a terrorist campaign. At the same time, Democrats pressed for greater relaxation of immigration policies and resisted scrutiny of foreign nationals on the grounds that to do so constituted "racial profiling." To coordinate their terrorist efforts, the al-Qaeda operatives had to communicate with each other electronically on channels that America's high-tech intelligence agencies normally intercept. One reason they were not detected was that the first line of defense against such attacks was effectively crippled by powerful figures in the Democratic Party who considered the CIA the problem and not America's enemies.

Security controls that would have prevented adversarial agents from even acquiring encryption devices that thwarted American intelligence efforts were casually lifted on orders from the highest levels of government. Alleged abuses by American intelligence operatives became a higher priority than the abuses of the hostile forces they were attempting to contain. Reporter Joe Klein's inquiries led him to conclude "there seems to be near unanimous agreement among experts: in the ten years since the collapse of the Soviet Union [and the eight years of the Clinton presidency, and the seven since the first Al-Qaeda attack on the World Trade Center] almost every aspect of American national-security—from military operations to intelligence gathering, from border control to political leadership—has been marked by … institutional lassitude and bureaucratic arrogance…"

The Democrats’ Anti-Intelligence Bill

The Democrats' cavalier attitude towards American security in the years preceding September 11 was dramatized in a series of annual amendments to cut intelligence funds sight unseen, which was introduced every year of the Clinton Administration (except 200) by Independent Bernie Sanders.

The Sanders amendment was initially proposed in 1993, after the first al-Qaeda attack on the World Trade Center. In that year, the Democrat-controlled House Intelligence Committee had voted to reduce President Clinton's own authorization request for the intelligence agencies by 6.75%. But this was insufficient for Sanders. So he introduced an amendment that required a minimum reduction in financial authorization for each individual intelligence agency of at least 10%.

Sanders refused to even examine the intelligence budget he proposed to cut: "My job is not to go through the intelligence budget. I have not even looked at it." According to Sanders the reasons for reducing the intelligence budget were that "the Soviet Union no longer exists," and that "massive unemployment, that low wages, that homelessness, that hungry children, that the collapse of our educational system is perhaps an equally strong danger to this Nation, or may be a stronger danger for our national security."

Irresponsible? Incomprehensible? Not to between a third and more than half the Democrats in the House who voted in favor of the Sanders amendment over the years. Ninety-seven Democrats in all voted for the Sanders cuts, including House Armed Services Committee chair Ron Dellums and the House Democratic leadership. As the terrorist attacks on America intensified year by year during the 1990s, Sanders steadfastly reintroduced his amendment. In 1995, 1996 and 1997 Barney Frank introduced a similar amendment that would cut the intelligence funds by less, but cut them still. In 1997, 158 Democrats voted for the Frank Amendment. That same year a majority voted for a modified Sanders amendment to cut intelligence funds by 5%.

According to a study made by political consultant Terry Cooper, "Dick Gephardt (D-MO), the House Democratic leader, voted to cut on five of the seven amendments on which he was recorded. He appears to have 'taken a walk' on two other votes. David Bonior (D-MI), the number-two Democratic leader who as Whip enforces the party position, voted for every single one of the ten cutting amendments. Chief Deputy Whips John Lewis (D-GA) and Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) voted to cut intelligence funding every time they voted. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), just elected to replace Bonior as Whip when Bonior leaves early in 2002, voted to cut intelligence funding three times, even though she was a member of the Intelligence Committee and should have known better. Two funding cut amendments got the votes of every single member of the elected House Democratic leadership. In all, members of the House Democratic leadership supported the Saunders' and Frank's funding cut amendments 56.9 percent of the time."

Many of the Democrats whose committee positions give them immense say over our national security likewise voted for most or all of the funding-cut amendments. Ron Dellums (D-CA), the top Democrat on the Armed Services Committee from 1993 through 1997, cast all eight of his votes on funding cut amendments in favor of less intelligence funding. Three persons who chaired or were ranking Democrats on Armed Services subcommittees for part of the 1993-99 period—Pat Schroeder (D-CO), Neil Abercrombie (D-HI) and Marty Meehan (D-MA)—also voted for every fund-cutting amendment that was offered during their tenures. Dave Obey (D-WI), the senior Democrat on the Appropriations Committee that holds the House's keys to the federal checkbook, voted seven out of eight times to reduce intelligence funding.

In 1994, Republican Porter Goss, a former CIA official and member of the House Intelligence Committee, warned that the cuts now proposed in the intelligence budget amounted to 16% of the 1992 budget and were 20% below the 1990 budget. Yet this did not dissuade Dellums, Bonior and 100 or more Democrats from continuing to lay the budgetary ax to America's first line of anti-terrorist defense. Ranking Committee Republican Larry Combest warned that the cuts endangered "critically important and fragile capabilities, such as in the area of human intelligence." In 1998, Osama bin Laden and four radical Islamic groups connected to al-Qaeda issued a fatwa condemning every American man, woman and child, civilian and military included. Sanders responded by enlisting Oregon Democrat Peter DeFazio to author an amendment cutting the intelligence authorization again.

The Republicans and National Security Issues

When Republicans took control of the House in 1994, Republican Floyd Spence, now head of the National Security Committee, expressed his outrage at the Democrats' handiwork in words that were eerily prescient: "We have done to our military and to our intelligence agencies what no foreign power has been able to do. We have been decimating our own defenses….In this day and time you do not have to be a superpower to raise the horrors of mass destruction warfare on people. It could be a Third World country, a rogue nation, or a terrorist group….These weapons of mass destruction are chemical, biological, bacteriological….Anthrax could be released in the air over Washington, DC…. That could happen at any time and people are talking about cutting back on our ability to defend against these things or to prevent them from happening. It is unconscionable to even think about it. It borders on leaving our country defenseless."

Yet the warning signs continued right up to the disaster. Before and after the 1999 Washington Post article by Defense Secretary Cohen, "there was a series of more elaborate reports about grand terrorism, by assorted blue-ribbon task forces, which warned of chemical, biological, and nuclear attacks…" A report by former Senators Hart and Rudman called for a huge "homeland security" campaign that would include—in Joe Klein's summation for the New Yorker—"intensive municipal civil defense and crisis response teams, new anti-terrorist detection technology," and a new cabinet level position of Secretary of Homeland Security, which was instituted by the Bush Administration shortly after the attack.

Klein—a liberal Democrat and former "anti-war" activist—refused to draw the obvious conclusion from these events, and place the responsibility where it belonged—squarely on the shoulders of the Democrats. Instead he wrote: "There can't be much controversy here. Nearly everyone—elected officials, the media, ideologues of every stripe—ignored these reports."

This is a falsehood so self-serving as to be almost understandable. Fortunately there is an extensive public record attesting to the intense and ongoing concern of Republican officials and the conservative media over the nation's security crisis, and their determined if unsuccessful efforts to expose and remedy it. There is an equally extensive public record documenting the Democrats' resistance to strengthening the nation's defenses and the liberal media's efforts to minimize, dismiss and even ridicule attempts by Republicans to do so. The national press's negative treatment of Representative Dan Burton's and Senator Fred Thompson's committee investigations into the efforts by Communist China to influence the 1996 presidential election is a dramatic instance of this pattern, particularly since the liberal media have made campaign finance reform one of their highest priorities.

In fact, the Chinese poured hundreds of thousands of—legal and illegal—dollars into the Clinton-Gore campaigns in 1992 and 1996. The top funder of the 1992 Clinton-Gore campaign was an Arkansas resident and Chinese banker named James Riady, whose relationship with Clinton went back twenty years. Riady is the scion of a multi-billion dollar financial empire whose throne room in Jakarta is adorned with two adjacent portraits of Clinton and Chinese leader, Li Peng, the infamous "butcher of Tiananmen Square." Though based in Indonesia, the Riady empire has billions of dollars invested in China, and is a working economic and political partnership with China's military and intelligence establishments. The Riadys gave $450,000 to Clinton's 1992 presidential campaign and another $600,000 to the Democratic National Committee and Democratic state parties—and that was just the tip of the iceberg in their working partnership with Clinton.

The question that Democratic obstructions prevented the Thompson and Burton committees from answering was whether these payments resulted in the transfer of U.S. weapons technologies to Communist China. China is known to have transferred such sensitive military technologies to Iran, Libya, North Korea and Iraq. Beginning in 1993, the Clinton Administration systematically lifted security controls at the Department of Commerce that had previously prevented the transfer of sensitive missile, satellite and computer technologies to China and other nuclear proliferators. In the beginning of that year, Clinton appointed John Huang, who was an agent of the Riady interests as well as Communist China, to a senior position at Commerce with top security clearance. Clinton later sent Huang to the Democratic National Committee to take charge of fund-raising for his 1996 campaign.

In May 1999, a bi-partisan House committee, headed by Representative Christopher Cox, released a report which was tersely summarized by the Wall Street Journal in these harrowing words: "The espionage inquiry found Beijing has stolen U.S. design data for nearly all elements needed for a major nuclear attack on the U.S., such as advanced warheads, missiles and guidance systems." Among the factors contributing to these unprecedented losses—most of which took place during the Clinton years—the report identified lax security by the Administration.

Two committees of Congress headed by Dan Burton and Fred Thompson attempted to get to the bottom of the matter to see if there was any connection between these problems and the Riady-Huang fund-raising efforts, particularly the illegal contributions by foreign agents of the Chinese military and intelligence establishments. The investigations failed because the Committee Republicans were stonewalled by the Clinton Administration, their Democratic colleagues and the witnesses called. In all, 105 of these witnesses either took the Fifth Amendment or fled the country to avoid cooperating with investigators. They did this not only with the tacit acquiescence of the Clinton Administration, but the active help of Clinton officials.

There are scores of Republican congressmen—leaders of military, intelligence and government oversight committees—who attempted to sound the alarm on this front, and who expressed publicly (and to me, personally) their distress at being unable to reach the broad American electorate with their concerns about these national security issues because of the indifference of the liberal media and the partisan rancor of the Democrats.

In the year prior to the World Trade Center attack, I met in the Capitol with more than a dozen Republican members of the House—including members of the Armed Services Committee—to discuss how the security issue could be brought before the American public. Given the President's talent for political double-talk and the lock-step submission of congressional Democrats to his most reckless agendas, and without the possibility of media support for such an effort, not a single member present thought that raising these issues would go anywhere. Even attempting to raise them, they felt, exposed them to damaging political risks. These risks included attacks by Democrats and liberal journalists who would label them "mean-spirited partisans," "right–wing alarmists," "xenophobes" and, of course, "Clinton bashers."

While the liberal media put up a wall of opposition, journalists in the conservative media worked against the grain to make the issues public. Bill Gertz, Ken Timperlake and William C. Triplett III wrote books (Betrayal and The Year of the Rat) based on military and intelligence sources, and data collected by the Thompson and Burton committees that would have shaken any other administration to its roots, but received little attention outside conservative circles. Other conservative journalists including the Washington Times' Rowan Scarborough and various writers for the Wall Street Journal's editorial pages, the National Review, and the Weekly Standard pursued the story but were also unable to reach a broad enough public to make any impact. The conservative side of the ideological spectrum has no apologies to make for disarming the nation in the face of its security threats. The Democratic Party and its subsidiary institutions, the liberal press and the left-wing academy, do.

The Lobby Against America’s Intelligence Services

One of the obvious causes of the many security lapses preceding the World Trade Center attack was the post-Vietnam crusade against U.S. intelligence and defense agencies dating from the Church Committee reforms in the mid-Seventies and led by "anti-war" Democrats and other partisans of the American left. A summary episode reflecting this mood involved CIA operative Robert Baer, described by national security reporter Thomas Powers as "a 20-year veteran of numerous assignments in Central Asia and the Middle East whose last major job for the agency was an attempt to organize Iraqi opposition to Saddam Hussein in the early 1990s—shuttling between a desk in Langley and contacts on the ground in Jordan, Turkey, and even northern Iraq."

According to Powers, "That assignment came to an abrupt end in March 1995 when Baer, once seen as a rising star of the Directorate of Operations, suddenly found himself 'the subject of an accusatory process.' An agent of the FBI told him he was under investigation for the crime of plotting the assassination of Saddam Hussein. The investigation was ordered by President Clinton's national security adviser, Anthony Lake, who would be nominated to run the [CIA] two years later. [Lake's appointment was successfully resisted by the intelligence community.]…. Eventually, the case against Baer was dismissed …but for Baer the episode was decisive. 'When your own outfit is trying to put you in jail,' he told me, 'it's time to go. Baer's is one of many resignations [in the Directorate of Operations] in recent years…."

Hostility to the CIA during the Clinton years ran so high that intelligence professionals refer to it as the "'Shia' era in the agency," Powers reported. The term referred to the Islamic sect that stresses the sinfulness of its adherents. "We all had to demonstrate our penance," a former CIA chief of station in Jordan told Powers. "Focus groups were organized, we 're-engineered' the relationship of the Directorate of Operations and the Directorate of Intelligence," which meant introducing "uniform career standards" that would apply indiscriminately to analysts and covert operators in the field. This meant high-risk assignments in target countries resulted in no greater advancement up the bureaucratic ladder than sitting at a computer terminal in Langley. "In the re-engineered CIA," comments Powers, "it was possible for Deborah Morris to be appointed the DO's deputy chief for the Near East. [The DO is the department of covert operations.] "She worked her way up in Langley," an operative told Powers. "I don't think she's ever been in the Near East. She's never run an agent, she doesn't know what the Khyber Pass looks like, but she's supposed to be directing operations [in the field]."

The end of the Cold War in 1991 inspired the reformers to close down all the Counterespionage Groups in the CIA because their expertise was no longer "needed." Spies were passé. "The new order of the day was to 'manage intelligence relationships.'" After interviewing many operatives who had left the CIA in disgust during this period, Powers concluded that in the Clinton years the Agency had become more and more risk averse as the result of "years of public criticism, attempts to clean house, the writing and rewriting of rules, …efforts to rein in the Directorate of Operations, … catch-up hiring of women and minorities [and] public hostility that makes it hard to recruit at leading colleges."

A post 9/11 article by Peter Beinart, editor of the liberal New Republic amplified Powers' observations. Beinart speculated that the CIA's lapses may have occurred because of a fundamental mediocrity that had overtaken the institution. This mediocrity was the direct result of the attacks on the Agency (and on America's global purposes) by the political left and the culture of hostility towards the American government that had been successfully implanted in America's elite universities—once the prime recruiting grounds for the intelligence services.

Beinart began with a description of the recent assassination of Abdul Haq in Afghanistan. Haq was potentially the most important leader of the internal opposition to the ruling Taliban. Yet the CIA had failed to provide him with protection. A key element in this disaster was the fact that the CIA did not have a single operative who could communicate with Haq in his native tongue, Dari. Nor did the CIA have a single operative who spoke Pashto, the language of the Taliban, even though al-Qaeda's base had been Afghanistan for years. The problem of reading intercepted intelligence transcripts in Pashto was "solved" by sending the transcripts to Pakistan to be translated by Pakistani intelligence officials—who were also sponsors of the Taliban. Some CIA officials believe it was Pakistani intelligence officials who warned Osama Bin Laden to get out of Khost before U.S. missiles were launched into Afghanistan after the embassy bombings in 1998.

The Abdul Haq assassination exposed the enormous human intelligence gap that had developed within the agency during the post-Vietnam years. As much as 90% of America's intelligence budget was being spent on technology, electronic decryption and eavesdropping systems for the National Security Agency, rather than human intelligence based on agents in the field. Without human language skills much of this information itself remained useless. In September 2001, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence concluded: "At the NSA and CIA, thousands of pieces of data are never analyzed or are analyzed 'after the fact'…. Written materials can sit for months and sometimes years before a linguist with proper security clearance and skills can begin a translation."

According to a 1998 article in The Atlantic Monthly written by a former CIA official, "Not a single Iran-desk chief during the eight years I worked on Iran could speak or read Persian. Not a single Near East Division chief knew Arabic, Persian or Turkish, and only one could get along even in French." These deficiencies become intelligible only when one understands what happened to Middle Eastern studies in American universities in the post-Vietnam decades.

The University Left Against The Nation’s Security

The story of the university left's subversion of the field of Middle Eastern studies is recounted in a recent book by Martin Kramer, editor of the Middle East Quarterly. As a reviewer summarized Kramer's argument, "In the late seventies, the radical students of the 1960s began to enter the professoriate. The way was cleared for them to wrest power from the Middle East studies establishment when Edward Said's Orientalism (1978) crystallized a new understanding of the field." Said was a member of the ruling council of Yasser Arafat's PLO and quickly became one of the most powerful academics in America, eventually heading the Modern Language Association, whose 40,000 members make it the largest professional association of academics. On November 21, 1993, eight months after the World Trade Center bombing, Said wrote an article for the New York Times Sunday Magazine with the revealing title "The Phony Islamic Threat." Said's title summarized the intellectual shift in Middle East studies during the previous decade. The new perspective that came to dominate the field was that perceptions of a terrorist threat from Islamic radicals were expressions of "Euro-centric" or racist attitudes by their Western oppressors.

In his book, Orientalism, Said argued that all previous scholarship on the Middle East was hopelessly biased because it was written by white Europeans and thus "racist." According to Said, "All Western knowledge of the East was intrinsically tainted with imperialism." In one stroke Said thus discredited all previous scholarship in the field, paving the way for its replacement by Marxist radicals like himself. With the help of his left-wing academic allies, Said's extremist viewpoint created the climate and context for a revolution in Middle Eastern studies. This was accelerated by the "multi-culturalist" attitudes of the university and racial preference policies in faculty hiring, which involved the widespread recruitment of political leftists from the Islamic theocracies of the Middle East. Before Said, "3.2% of America's Middle East area specialists had been born in the region. By 1992, the figure was nearly half. This demographic transformation consolidated the conversion of Middle Eastern studies into leftist anti-Americanism."(Emphasis added.)

In a statement issued ten days after the World Trade Center attack, the Middle East Studies Association—the professional organization representing the field—refused to describe the perpetrators of the attack as "terrorists," and preemptively opposed any U.S. military response. Georgetown professor John Esposito, a former president of the Middle East Studies Association and an academic star in the field, made his name after the first World Trade Center attack by following Said's example and disparaging concerns about Islamic terrorism as thinly-veiled anti-Muslim prejudice. He was rewarded by being made a foreign affairs analyst for the Clinton State Department and assigned to its intelligence department.

The language deficiency at the CIA—to which the political takeover of the academic profession greatly contributed—proved crucial at the operational level. But it was only a reflection of the more profound problem that afflicted the intelligence community because of the universities' leftward turn. In Beinart's words, "Today's CIA is a deeply mediocre institution. Its problems aren't legal or financial; they're intellectual. The agency needs a massive infusion of brainpower." How massive an infusion was indicated in an article Beinart cited: "According to a 1992 New York Times story, applicants for the CIA's 'Undergraduate Student Trainee Program' needed only a combined SAT score of 900 and a grade point average of 2.75." This compares to the average requirements for entrance into top ranked schools like Harvard or Princeton, which require SAT scores above 1300 and grade point averages of 4.0. Princeton is one of many elite universities that because of political pressure from the left officially refuse to allow the CIA to recruit students on their campuses and have refused to do so for more than a decade.

The only places the CIA can recruit its missing brainpower—"the only institutions able to supply the world-class linguists, biologists, and computer scientists it currently lacks—are America's universities." But the universities have long since become the political base of a left that has not given up its fantasies of social revolution and is deeply antagonistic to America and its purposes. The root cause of the nation's security problem is that, beginning in the 1960s the political left aimed a dagger at the heart of America's security system, and from a vantage of great power in the universities, the media and the Democratic Party were able to press the blade home for three decades prior to the World Trade Center disaster.

The main reason the CIA no longer recruits agents from top-ranked schools is because it can't. "The men and women who teach today's college students view the CIA with suspicion, if not disdain," as Beinart put it. The formulation is, in fact, too mild. The left hates the CIA and regards it as an enemy of all that is humane and decent. To make their case, academic leftists drill the nation's elite youth in a litany of "crimes" alleged to have been carried out by the CIA since the late 1940s—the rigging of the Italian and French elections of 1948 against popular Communist parties (whose aim, unmentioned in this academic literature was to incorporate Western Europe into Stalin's satellite system), the overthrow of Mossadegh in Iran in 1951 (whom they fail to identify as a Soviet asset who would have delivered Iranian oil reserves to Stalin), the overthrow of the Arbenz regime in Guatemala (whom the left portrays as a Democrat but who was in fact a Communist fellow-traveler who chose to spend his exile years as a privileged guest in Castro's police state), the "Bay of Pigs" (which was the CIA's failed effort to overthrow the most oppressive Communist regime in the hemisphere), and the "Phoenix Program" in Vietnam (which was an attempt to prevent a Communist front set up by the Hanoi dictatorship from overthrowing the Saigon government and establishing a Communist police state in the South.)

In the perverse view of the academic left, the CIA is an agency of torture, death and oppression for innocent masses all over the world that otherwise would be "liberated" by progressive totalitarian forces. Utilizing the powerful resources of the academy, the left has created a vast propaganda apparatus to establish what is essentially the view of the CIA held by America's fiercest enemies. The anti-American propaganda is itself disseminated under the imprint of America's most prestigious university presses including Harvard, California, Duke, and Princeton.

University administrations have caved in to these leftists so consistently as to leave themselves little room for maneuver. "When the president of the Rochester Institute of Technology took a brief leave to work for the CIA in 1991," recalls Beinart, "many students and faculty demanded that he resign. Last year, when the government tried to establish a program under which college students would receive free language instruction in return for pursuing a career in intelligence, the University of Michigan refused. As assistant professor Carol Bardenstein told Time, "We didn't want our students to be known as spies in training." (Apparently she would prefer them to be helpless targets-in-waiting.) For caving in to these pressures, the president of Michigan, Claude Bollinger, was rewarded by being appointed president of Columbia University shortly after the September 11 bombing.

As Beinart points out, there can be reasonable concerns about the proper functions of a university and the appropriate relationship of government agencies to private institutions of learning (although the University of Michigan is a state-financed school). "But most of the squeamishness about training, and encouraging students to work for the CIA doesn't have anything to do with the mission of the academy; it has to do with ideological hostility to the instruments of American power." This ideology is enforced by political correctness in the university hiring process, a bias that virtually excludes conservative academics from obtaining positions at most schools. At Ivy League schools, for example, a study by the Luntz Companies showed that only 3% of the professors identify themselves as Republicans and the overwhelming majority have views well to the left of the American center.

Congressman Dellums and The Democrats’ Fifth Column Caucus

Given the role of universities in shaping the "liberal" culture, the same powerful anti-American, anti-military, anti-CIA sentiments have prevailed in the left-wing of the Democratic Party for the last thirty years. The size of this group can be partially gauged by the 58 congressional Democrats who describe themselves as members of its "Progressive [socialist] Caucus." But its actual influence is far greater.

No political career symbolizes the Democrats' acceptance of radical ideas better than the 27-year tenure of congressman Ron Dellums who came to the House in the 1970s as the first Sixties' radical to penetrate the political mainstream, and was able—with the encouragement and cooperation of his colleagues—to establish himself as a power player on both the Armed Services and Intelligence committees overseeing the nation's security policy.

A Berkeley leftist with vigorously expressed left-wing agendas, Dellums was an ardent admirer of Fidel Castro's Marxist dictatorship and a relentless opponent of American military power. On his election to Congress in 1970, Dellums went out of his way to announce his radical commitments and pledged to remain faithful to his anti-American roots. "I am not going to back

THE MOVEMENT TO GRANT AMNESTY TO ILLEGAL ALIENS is afoot once more, despite the fact that most Americans oppose it. That’s why its supporters don’t call it "amnesty" at all, but "regularization" or some such euphemism. Amnesty can be approved by various sneaky methods, in order to avoid real debate on the issue - something amnesty-backers desperately wish to avoid. Amnesty could be attached as a "rider" on a popular bill, pushed through at an odd time in the legislative calendar or approved in such a manner as not to reveal who was really for it and who wasn’t. Amnesty could also be approved by including it in a "temporary" worker program to "solve" a non-existent labor shortage, or in the form of yet another extension of the 245(i) amnesty-for-sale measure, recently approved by the House (by only one vote) but not yet by the Senate.

Any way you cut it, though, amnesty is a bad deal for the U.S.A. Consider a few reasons:

1. AN AMNESTY ENCOURAGES MORE ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION

Both common sense and experience tell you that. The approval of any amnesty deal would be known here in Mexico and in other countries immediately, if not sooner. A few years ago I had a sixth-grade student informing me there was to be another amnesty.

Amnesty sends a message to immigrant-sending countries that America is a pushover, and that future illegal aliens are also likely to be amnestied as well.

Back in 1986, there was a big amnesty that was supposed to be the amnesty to end all amnesties. Now there are more illegal aliens in the United States than in 1986. (One set of calculations puts the figure at about 11 million, with about 3 million from Mexico alone, though no mortal knows for sure).

Granting any or all of these illegal aliens an amnesty is not a solution because it encourages more illegal immigration. Which means at a future date, another amnesty will be promoted as the solution....

2. AN AMNESTY IS A SLAP IN THE FACE TO LEGAL IMMIGRANTS WHO PLAY BY THE RULES


A legal immigrant expressed it to this way, "Here I am like an idiot, applying to immigrate, filling out papers, learning English, getting a job, paying taxes, becoming part of the American community – and for what? So that my taxes can support the 3 million illegals who cross the border, get on welfare, send their kids to Spanish schools, get free health care (for which I have to pay of course) and wait for their citizenship to show up at the door, then turn around and vote for people who will raise my taxes to let in another 3 million?"

It’s hard to argue with such logic. The correspondent also told me that. "I have been here for almost 20 years. America has changed so drastically and for the worse. If I had it over today I would stay home. Very sad."

An amnesty sends a powerful message to prospective immigrants in other countries. It tells them that it’s simpler, and more rewarding, to emigrate illegally than legally.

3. IN CASE YOU HADN’T NOTICED, THE INS HAS ENOUGH PROBLEMS WITHOUT AN AMNESTY

The INS is a bureaucracy with serious problems.

Need I remind readers that the INS issued visas to two dead 9/11 terrorists – on March 11? The INS is so over-loaded with processing visas that it can’t properly investigate prospective immigrants. The present INS commissioner, James Ziglar, was appointed with no qualifications whatsoever to run the agency and once publicly expressed his uncertainty as to whether he even believes in controlling the border!

The real culprit of course is Congress, who sends the INS conflicting directives and then fails to exercise oversight.

The solution is to fix the presently existing problems by adopting clear guidelines and reduce immigration so the INS can do its job properly. An amnesty would just add to their backlog of unprocessed visas and make a bad situation even worse.

4. AMNESTY IS A SECURITY BREACH

The 9/11 attack was, among other things, a failure of U.S. immigration policy. We are all paying for it.

Our troops are laying their lives on the line in Afghanistan and may soon do so in other places.

At home, thousands of National Guardsmen have been separated from their families and activated to guard airports, the border and military bases.

To me, this is more than a news item. I have been called up by my National Guard unit and must report soon to participate in Homeland Security. I may be gone for a year.

And, as always in times of national stress, our civil liberties too could be in danger if we’re not careful.

How then could national leaders, of both parties, have the unmitigated gall to amnesty people who did not respect our laws and entered our country illegally, or over-stayed their visas?

Bear in mind that the already existing infrastructure supporting illegal immigration (document fraud, etc.) can be easily utilized by terrorists. Seven of the 9/11 suicide attackers acquired phony identification with the aid of illegal aliens, using the fraudulent infrastructure that already exists to serve illegals. An open border, by its very definition, does not discriminate between those who want to work illegally and those who wish to wreak havoc.



5. NO AMNESTY SHOULD PRECEDE OUR DEALING WITH MORE BASIC QUESTIONS

Before we enact an amnesty to further swamp the INS, there are basic questions that should be answered.

Immigration is a public policy issue that the American people have the right to decide upon. The basic question, usually ignored, is, " What kind of immigration system should we have?" It’s not wrong for American citizens to ask this question, nor is it wrong for them to question the present system.

The present legal immigration system is based on nepotism, i.e., the majority of legal immigrants are accepted because they have relatives already in the country. Is such a system really appropriate for 21st-century America?

What about dual citizenship? More and more people have it, but our leaders are afraid to deal with it. How does dual citizenship impact American civic values and equality before the law?

And how about those anchor babies? Is it fair to reward illegal immigrants by automatically declaring their children citizens?

Furthermore, it is no longer necessary for prospective voters to even prove their citizenship.

These are important questions that should be dealt with and resolved before ANY amnesty is even considered.

6. AMNESTY, AND EMIGRATION IN GENERAL, DOESN’T REALLY HELP MEXICO ANYWAY

An amnesty would signal to Mexico’s leadership that it can continue to send its poor to the U.S. rather than solve Mexico’s problems in Mexico.

Certainly, the existence of a more prosperous Mexico is in the best interests of the United States. Yet, as I have argued elsewhere, the present mass immigration policy is hardly bringing about that goal. Mass emigration serves as an impediment to Mexico’s development. Why take the difficult decisions to improve Mexico’s long-term prospects when the poor people can be sent northwards?

The career of Vicente Fox is a prime example of this phenomenon.

Candidate Fox promised prosperity and a new Mexico which would provide jobs for all Mexicans IN Mexico.

After 15 months in office, however, the magic has begun to fade. Fox’s incoherent economic program has stalled. The presidente has failed to even attempt really substantial measures that could make Mexico more prosperous – breaking up the government energy monopolies, fixing the country’s pathetic property title system, making it easier for entrepreneurs to start new businesses, improving the taxation system, etc. Now Fox’s main economic program is to keep the U.S. borders open!

How can we help Mexico prosper? By cutting off the safety valve that encourages its leadership to dodge the tough decisions. When that happens, you can expect to see some real reform, but not until then.

Then if we wanted to design some kind of Marshall plan to help Mexico, we could. The Marshall Plan that rebuilt Europe, remember, was based on helping Europe rebuild, not encouraging Europeans to move to the United States.

Helping Mexicans IN Mexico – now that’s a novel concept!


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Allan Wall is an American citizen who has lived and worked in Mexico since 1991. Presently employed as an English instructor, Allan has legal permission from the Mexican government to live and work in Mexico under the rubric of an FM-2 migration document. Allan welcomes questions or comments (pro or con) at allan39 [at] prodigy.net.mx .

We ought to face squarely the origins of the Palestinian descent into barbarism. In July 2000, Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak made a peace offer that stunned Israel and the world: Israel would re-divide Jerusalem--would turn over large pieces of its ancient capital to the same people who had destroyed its synagogues, desecrated its cemeteries, and banned Jews from entering when they last ran the show. Arafat rejected the offer. Then in September 2000 the new wave of murderous violence began, supposedly triggered by Ariel Sharon's visit to the Temple Mount.

In short, the Palestinian response to Israel's generous peace offer was, "Drop dead." How could that possibly have happened? A trick question--because the obvious but wrong answer is so close to the right one that it's hard to tune the right one in. You have to fiddle the dial back and forth. Yet the difference between the two is crucial. The "lesson of appeasement" is not that appeasement is futile. Appeasement is not futile, it is dangerous. Israel's enemies claim that Israel herself provoked the ongoing Palestinian pogrom, and in a sense they might well be right. Outlaws interpret an openhanded offer as weakness, not generosity. They interpret weakness as an incitement to violence. You can goad a dangerous animal to attack by threatening or by shrinking back. Unless you want to fight, the only safe maneuver is to stand still.

Everyone knows about Munich, September 1938: Britain and France generously donate a big slice of Czechoslovakia to Hitler, in exchange for "peace with honor," "peace in our time," and the Brooklyn Bridge. Many people know about the Kristallnacht pogrom, November 1938: Germany's approach to the Jews turns from mere oppression to bloodthirsty violence. Kristallnacht was "triggered" by the murder of a German diplomat by a deranged Jew. But some (not all) historians point out the obvious: A leading cause of Kristallnacht was Munich itself. Hitler read the Munich agreements as a proclamation by England and France stating: "We are weak; you have nothing to fear; do what you like."

The analogy is not close, just close enough. Israel is no Czechoslovakia and was not sold down the river. Barak made his offer freely and in good faith. But to a significant number of Palestinians, the offer obviously said: "We are weak; you have nothing to fear; attack." Appeasement doesn't merely fail to prevent catastrophe, it provokes catastrophe.

Now everything has changed, and we are only gradually coming to grips with the implications. Evidently the whole world is outraged by Israeli settlements on the West Bank. Even before the new violence, the world's outrage was hard to swallow. Some Israelis live among Arabs in settlements on the West Bank, some Arabs live among Jews in "settlements" (otherwise known as towns and cities) in Israel proper. What's the difference? The Israeli settlements are new, the Arab ones old. But if old settlements are legitimate and new ones aren't, what are all those mosques doing on the Temple Mount? Some European journalists refer to the great Temple Mount plaza as the "supposed" site of ancient Israel's holy temple--as in, "that beat-up white shell on the hill in mid-Athens is supposedly the 'Parthenon.'" The plaza was expanded to its current enormous size by King Herod of Judea during the final years of the last century B.C.E. During the peace talks two thousand years later, in July 2000, a Palestinian negotiator helpfully explained why Barak's offer of control but not legal sovereignty over the Mount had been rejected: "We can't sell our Haram to the Jews," even though (he forgot to add) they built it. (Arabs refer to the Temple Mount as the Haram.)

"New" and "old" depend on your point of view. Jews have as much right as anyone to settle on the West Bank. But it long seemed to me (as to many other American Jews) that, leaving right and wrong out of it, the settlements were causing Israel more grief than they were worth and ought to be stopped. But everything has changed. Who in his right mind could still believe today that to stop building new settlements (or even to abandon old ones) would appease the Palestinians? On the contrary: Such a move is likely to be dangerous, as Barak's offer turned out to be.

We now know what Palestinians want, and what they think of Israelis. After all, what exactly is the point of sending killers to massacre children at random? What do you accomplish? You impose hatred. You ask Israel, in effect: What do we need to do to make you all (not some of you; everyone) hate us? To make you unable to look at a Palestinian without revulsion? To force you eventually to take the terrible step of setting up enclaves where Arabs are banned? Palestinians don't want to live peaceably among Israelis; the natural conclusion is that they think about Israelis as they choose for Israelis to think about them.

Everything has changed, including (for many of us) our ideas about Islam. We ought to have paid more attention to the latest developments. We now learn that suicide bombers are told to expect a heaven full of comely virgins as their next assignment. To the suicide-murderers, those waiting virgins are real as dirt. The killers call themselves "martyrs," but in their own minds they are the next thing to sex criminals. "Pardon me, sir or madam, do you know why I plan to murder your child? Because the authorities are offering me great sex--and, after all, I don't get many opportunities."

People who think this way are shielded from view, up to a point, by their own sheer evil. They are painful to contemplate. We instinctively look away, as we do whenever we are confronted with monstrous deformity. Nothing is harder or more frightening to look at than a fellow human who is bent out of shape. And moral deformity is the most frightening kind by far. How can Muslims of good faith allow such people to call themselves Muslim? But they do allow it. What does that mean? And is it possible that we have located here, in this inspiring vision of heaven as a whorehouse, the most loathsome idea in the history of human thought? This is the civilization that condemns "licentious" America?

And what is Israel to do? Kill terrorists? Lock up incipient terrorists? Fine, but not enough. Develop the Palestinian opposition also. People who say there is none can't be serious. Among all those mothers and fathers of children who have become suicide-murderers, not one? Not one who believes: "The 'leaders' who did this to my child must be stopped"? Of course you don't dare say such things in the territories. But surely (one optimistically assures oneself), Israeli intelligence could locate a few such families if it tried, and if they were removed to safe ground and protected. . . ."Safe ground" couldn't be Israel or America, or the credibility of this new opposition would be fatally compromised. But it could be Europe. (Khomeini preached the Iranian revolution from France.) Those few families would be mere people, not "leaders," not politicians. But prospective leaders and politicians would come. Being (as a rule) without passion themselves, they are drawn by passion. The Palestinian leadership would try hard to silence these families and their followers, but the message would get through: Our barbaric leadership is destroying us.

But what of Europe? Not long ago I picked up a copy of Le Monde, which reports on the recent meeting where work was started on a constitution for Europe--the goal being to allow Europe to campaign, as the equal of any great power, "pour affirmer ses valeurs," to assert its values; and you can't help but wonder, exactly what "valeurs" are we talking about? Indifference? Complacency? Spiritual exhaustion? "European values" (certainly "French values") has come to sound like "Palestinian moderates"--a contradiction in terms. To any instance of Western man--American or not, Jew or gentile, male or female--Europe's spiritual collapse is heartbreaking. It is strange but true that the only European country one can picture (by the remotest stretch of the imagination) cooperating on the sly with Israel to help create a Palestinian opposition is Germany--or maybe, if the United States made an issue of it, Britain.



THERE ARE LARGER questions about Israel's role in the world that have been pressing for years, but nowadays seem to grow more acute by the hour. The axioms that underpinned Zionism have been turned inside out. Modern Israel was conceived as a safe haven for Jews. It had other reasons for existing--but safety, and the dignity that only comes with safety, were Zionism's emotional mainsprings. In recent decades, though, especially since the end of Soviet tyranny, the safe-haven idea has lost cogency like an unwound watch running down. In the last few years, Israel has started to look (on the contrary) like the most dangerous place for Jews in the world--if we exclude the small Jewish communities that still exist in Arab countries. Israel must change the way in which it explains itself. (Yoram Hazony made essentially this claim in his seminal "The Jewish State" of 2000.)

When we look at Israel today, it is crucial that we not allow Palestinian barbarism to distract us from another part of this picture: the everyday heroism that lights the whole place up from end to end. A large proportion of Israelis have relatives or connections abroad, mainly in the United States, and they could run to safety if they wanted to. Who would blame them? Who would even have the theoretical right to blame them? But overwhelmingly they have chosen to stay and stand fast. The whole population, man, woman, and child, is holding (is refusing to abandon) a dangerous forward position under fire. It's hard for Israelis to praise Israeli courage, but Americans ought to.

Why do they do it? Partly for powerful negative reasons. It isn't easy to leave home; and many Israelis are determined that Jews will never again be driven from their homes into alien lands by thug mobs. But there is more to Israel than resolve in the face of a uniquely tragic history. Israel still pays its way using the world's only emotional currency denominated entirely in negative numbers. It needs a new currency with positive markings.

Israeli thinkers ought to speak less about the tragedy (or the ordinariness) of Israel's 3,000-year history, and more about its luminous greatness; ought to talk up the nation's brilliant prospects, and the central role it has played from Moses to Wittgenstein in creating and molding Western civilization. They don't like to talk this way, but they ought to steel themselves and do it anyway. "The Jew is a desert region," Wittgenstein wrote, "but underneath its thin layer of rock lies the molten lava of spirit and intellect." Israeli thinkers have talked enough desert; it is time to talk lava. Much of the world is at a spiritual lowpoint right now, dragging its belly on the ground. Israel has known before what to do about that. Israel has addressed the whole world and wrought spiritual revolutions, and ought to do it again now.

Here's a good Mideast article for you.

http://www.washtimes.com/commentary/20020311-47701864.htm
Flawed premise in Mideast conflict

Imagine for a moment that all reporting about the U.S. war on terrorism was presented without reference to September 11. American attacks from the air using B-52s and F-16s against fighters armed with smaller weapons would seem quite disproportionate. Our stated intention to kill as many members of al Qaeda as possible might be condemned, by our own State Department as "excessive" and "contributing to the cycle of violence."

But U.S. actions are never presented that way, because everyone acknowledges that we have the perfect right to defend ourselves against those who have done us grave harm. Nor are we asked to sit by and wait for our enemies to do us even more catastrophic damage if they get the chance.

But when it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the context is removed. Bleeding Israel is daily exhorted to stop contributing the cycle of violence. Her teen-agers are blown to bits at discotheques. Her babies are approached outside a synagogue by a suicide bomber who waits until he is next to the strollers before blowing himself apart. Her adolescent boys who wander off in the desert and get lost are torn to pieces. And all this is applauded and celebrated by Yasser Arafat and most of the Arab governments in the region.

Some Arabs (those among the minority who acknowledge that Arabs are responsible) condemned the bombing of the World Trade Center. But not a single Islamic scholar or cleric has condemned the systematic policy of blowing up Israeli civilians. Israelis are demoralized and terrified. Restaurants and shops are nearly empty. And alone among nations apparently, Israel is not permitted to engage in simple self-defense.
Nearly every dispatch from the Middle East lacks basic context. Here are some of the facts to keep in mind when reading these flawed reports.

• The Palestine Liberation Organization was not formed in order to secure a Palestinian state on the West Bank and Gaza. It was created in 1964, when both territories were under Arab sovereignty. Jordan and Egypt did not create a state for the Palestinians because they preferred to keep the refugees angry and homeless.

• It is not "Palestinian land." There has never been an independent Palestinian state on the land between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River. The area — which always contained Arabs and Jews — was under Ottoman control for several hundred years until World War I, then British control under the League of Nations Mandate and finally under United Nations control.

The United Nations approved a partition plan in 1947 that would have created two states, one Jewish and one Arab. The Jews accepted this arrangement. The Arabs refused. Five Arab armies invaded the new state of Israel. In the ensuing war, thousands of refugees fled. Jews fled Arab nations for Israel, and Arabs fled Israel for Jordan, Egypt and Lebanon. The Jewish refugees became full citizens of Israel. The Palestinian refugees became pawns.

• If the Palestinians are fighting for a state on the West Bank and Gaza, why do their maps show Palestine as filling the entire territory that is now Israel? Why do they marinate their people in Hitlerian anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism? Further, why — when Ehud Barak offered just such a state, or 95 percent of it — did Mr. Arafat walk away and start this latest round of violence? Palestinian spokesmen say it wasn't everything they wanted. But if they truly want a separate state on so-called "occupied territory," why did Mr. Barak's offer not form the basis for further talks?

• The Palestinians are said to be chafing under the "occupation." But in obedience to the Oslo process, Israel has given administrative authority over 98 percent of the Palestinians in the disputed territories to Mr. Arafat. Israel has further permitted the Palestinian Authority to arm 40,000 "police."

• If the Saudi "peace plan" were serious — and not an attempt to divert attention from the Saudi role in September 11 and its sponsorship of Islamic extremism worldwide — why didn't Saudi Arabia offer it before?

• Why is it impossible for the Palestinian Authority to give Israel what Mr. Sharon has demanded — just three days of respite from terror attacks?

The Myth Of The Palestinian People
Yehezkel Bin-Nun 26 December 2001

The general impression given in the media is that Palestinians have lived in the Holy Land for hundreds, if not thousands of years. No wonder, then, that a recent poll of French citizens shows that the majority believe (falsely) that prior to the establishment of the State of Israel an independent Arab Palestinian state existed in its place.

Books, such as Battleground by Samuel Katz and From Time Immemorial by Joan Peters long ago detailed the history of the region. Far from being settled by Palestinians for hundreds, if not thousands of years, the Land of Israel, according to dozens of visitors to the land, was never populated with Palestinians. Alphonse de Lamartine visited the land in 1835. In his book, Recollections of the East, he writes "Outside the gates of Jerusalem we saw no living object, heard no living sound…." None other than the famous American author Mark Twain, who visited the Land of Israel in 1867, confirms this. In his book Innocents Abroad he writes, “A desolation is here that not even imagination can grace with the pomp of life and action. We reached Tabor safely…. We never saw a human being on the whole journey.” Even the British Consul in Palestine reported, in 1857, “The country is in a considerable degree empty of inhabitants and therefore its greatest need is that of a body of population…”

In fact, according to official Ottoman Turk census figures of 1882, in the entire Land of Israel, there were only 141,000 Muslims, both Arab and non-Arab. This number was to skyrocket to 650,000 Arabs by 1922, a 450% increase in only 40 years. By 1938 that number would become over 1 million or an 800% increase in only 56 years. Population growth was especially high in areas where Jews lived. Where did all these Arabs come from? According to the Arabs the huge increase in their numbers was due to natural childbirth. In 1944, for example, they alleged that the natural increase (births minus deaths) of Arabs in the Land of Israel was the astounding figure of 334 per 1000. That would make it roughly three times the corresponding rate for the same year of Lebanon and Syria and almost four times that of Egypt, considered amongst the highest in the world. Unlikely, to say the least. If the massive increase was not due to natural births, then were did all these Arabs come from?
All the evidence points to the neighboring Arab states of Egypt, Syria, Lebanon and Jordan. In 1922 the British Governor of the Sinai noted that “illegal immigration was not only going on from the Sinai, but also from Transjordan and Syria.”

In 1930, the British Mandate -sponsored Hope-Simpson Report noted that “unemployment lists are being swollen by immigrants from Trans-Jordania” and “illicit immigration through Syria and across the northern frontier of Palestine is material.” The Arabs themselves bare witness to this trend. For example, the governor of the Syrian district of Hauran, Tewfik Bey el Hurani, admitted in 1934 that in a single period of only a few months over 30,000 Syrians from Hauran had moved to the Land of Israel. Even British Prime Minister Winston Churchill noted the Arab influx. Churchill, a veteran of the early years of the British mandate in the Land of Israel, noted in 1939 that “far from being persecuted, the Arabs have crowded into the country and multiplied.”

Far from displacing the Arabs, as they claimed, the Jews were the very reason the Arabs chose to settle in the Land of Israel. Jobs provided by newly established Zionist industry and agriculture lured them there, just as Israeli construction and industry provides most Arabs in the Land of Israel with their main source of income today. Malcolm MacDonald, one of the principal authors of the British White Paper of 1939, which restricted Jewish immigration to the Land of Israel, admitted (conservatively) that were it not for a Jewish presence the Arab population would have been little more than half of what it actually was. Today, when due to the latest “intifada” Arabs from the territories under 35 are no longer allowed into pre-1967 Israel to work, unemployment has skyrocketed to over 40% and most rely on European aid packages to survive.

Not only pre-state Arabs lied about being indigenous. Even today, many prominent so-called Palestinians, it turns out, are foreign born. Edward Said, an Ivy League Professor of Literature and a major Palestinian propagandist, long claimed to have been raised in Jerusalem. However, in an article in the September 1999 issue of Commentary Magazine Justus Reid Weiner revealed that Said actually grew up in Cairo, Egypt, a fact which Said himself was later forced to admit. But why bother with Said? PLO chief Yasir Arafat himself, self declared “leader of the Palestinian people”, has always claimed to have been born and raised in “Palestine”. In fact, according to his official biographer Richard Hart, as well as the BBC, Arafat was born in Cairo on August 24, 1929 and that’s where he grew up.

To maintain the charade of being an indigenous population, Arab propagandists have had to do more than a little rewriting of history. A major part of this rewriting involves the renaming of geography. For two thousand years the central mountainous region of Israel was known as Judea and Samaria, as any medireview map of the area testifies. However, the state of Jordan occupied the area in 1948 and renamed it the West Bank. This is a funny name for a region that actually lies in the eastern portion of the land and can only be called “West” in reference to Jordan. This does not seem to bother the majority of news outlets covering the region, which universally refer to the region by its recent Jordanian name.

The term “Palestinian" is itself a masterful twisting of history. To portray themselves as indigenous, Arab settlers adopted the name of an ancient Canaanite tribe, the Phillistines, that died out almost 3000 years ago. The connection between this tribe and modern day Arabs is nil. Who is to know the difference? Given the absence of any historical record, one can understand why Yasser Arafat claims that Jesus Christ, a Jewish carpenter from the Galilee, was a Palestinian. Every year, at Christmas time, Arafat goes to Bethlehem and tells worshippers that Jesus was in fact “the first Palestinian”.

If the Palestinians are indeed a myth, then the real question becomes “Why?” Why invent a fictitious people? The answer is that the myth of the Palestinian People serves as the justification for Arab occupation of the Land of Israel. While the Arabs already possess 21 sovereign countries of their own (more than any other single people on earth) and control a land mass 800 times the size of the Land of Israel, this is apparently not enough for them. They therefore feel the need to rob the Jews of their one and only country, one of the smallest on the planet. Unfortunately, many people ignorant of the history of the region, including much of the world media, are only too willing to help.

It is interesting to note that the Bible makes reference to a fictitious nation confronting Israel. “They have provoked me to jealously by worshipping a non-god, angered me with their vanities. I will provoke them with a non-nation; anger them with a foolish nation (Deuteronomy 32:21).”
On second thought, it may be unfair to compare Palestine to Disneyland. After all, Disneyland really exists.

http://www.indymedia.org/front.php3?article_id=154577&group=webcast

Last year, the Palestinians were offered at state at Camp David and Taba. They were basically offered everything by Barak, except Israel letting in million of Palestinian IslamoNazis, so Israel will be destroyed. The Palestinians rejected this out of hand. They rejected it, because if they had accepted it, then they would have to give up their fondest desire which is the total Nazi like "final solution" of all Jews in the region. In stead of making Peace, Arafat launched a terrorist war against Israeli civilians. Not since the Nazis, have a group of people targeted civilians for mass murder like the Palestinians have. Today, the World community has the gaul to blame Israel for the state of affairs. This is totally ridiculous! Israel is merely acting in self defence!

Every Palestinian militia including Arafat's fatah faction, Tanzim Militia, PFLP, Islamic Jihad are all terrorist organisations. These terrorist organisations DELIBERATELY target Israeli civilians in schools, shopping centres, restaurants, in Synagogues, on the beach and on buses. Not since the Nazis has a political organisation shown such disregard for Human Life as the Palestinians. Moreover, the Palestinians indoctrinate their children to hate Jews with such a passion that the only comparison is the Hitler Youth movement. Palestinian heroes and role models are drawn from the ranks of suicide bombers who are nothing but NAZI BUTCHERS who go out and kill innocent Israeli civilians. After every suicide attack in Jerusalem or Tel Aviv or Haifa or Netanya or anywhere else there are scenes of jubilation in the Palestinian towns. Palestinian mothers ullulate with joy and men hand out sweets as the scenes of carnage are displayed on TV. The Palestinians danced in the streets in exactly the same way when the terrorists committed their heinous crimes in New York and Washington on Sept 11 last year.

And its no wonder because during WWII, the leading Palestinian of the day, the Mufti of Jerusalem spent the entire war years in Berlin as the honoured guest of none other than Adolf Hitler himself. The Mufti and Hitler formulated plans for committing genocide on the Jews in Israel. Today, Arafat is merely continuing in this purpose. The Palestinians will not make peace until they have butchered every Jewish man, woman and child in Israel.

The underlying cause of the Arab Israeli conflict is not land nor is it Palestinian refugees, which the Arabs created in 48. The underlying cause is the Arab desire to commit genocide on the Jews. The evidence for this abundant. For starters, the Arab were butchering Jews long before their own belligerency caused them to lose territory. In 1929, the Palestinians butchered the entire Jewish population of the ancient city of Hebron...today the Palestinians tell the World that Hebron which is on the West bank is "occupied territory". Hebron contains the Cave of Macphela in which is buried the first Jewish family ie Abraham and his wife and their children. In fact Hebron is the second holiest site in Judaism and yet the Arabs will not let the very small remnants of the Jewish community live there in Peace. Its not as if the small number of Jewish families there actually pose a threat to anyone and yet the Palestinians snipers regularly pick them off one by one.

That questions that have to be asked.

QUESTION 1: Why are there more Palestinians killed, then Israelis?
Nobody can argue that Palestinians have not commited innumerable terrorist atrocities
But if the Palestinians are the "bad guys" and the "terrorist", why is there about three times more Palestinians who died then Israelis?

ANSWER
There are more Palestinians killed because there are more Palestinians who mount attacks. I read that in one month the Palestinians mount 5,000 attempted terrorist attacks against Israelis and that most of these fail due to extremely good Israeli security but maybe 20% succeed and those are the ones you hear about. The question is who starts each engagement and without doubt virtually every "cycle" in the current Intifada has been initiated by Palestinian terrorist attacks. The Palestinians simply DO NOT WANT A CEASEFIRE. They want to make the Israelis bleed even at the expense of their own casualties whom they believe will be given instant entry to heaven as a "martyrs" as compensation.

The most important statistic is the ratio between deliberate civilian casualties to combatant casualties on both sides. Quite simply the Israelis have not DELIBERATELY TARGETED ANY PALESTINIAN casualties at all whilst virtually all Israeli casualties were deliberately targeted

QUESTION 2:
And how do you expect Palestinians to defend themselves when the Israelis uses tanks, helicopters and war planes to bomb a virtually 'defenseless' "nation"?

ANSWER
Well the truth is that the Palestinians have nothing to defend themselves against as the Palestinians are doing all the attacking. It's pretty simple all the Palestinians have to do is STOP KILLING ISRAELIS and start talking..That simple. Arafat was offered a very good deal for a State by the previous Israeli government but Arafat refused this and in stead launched a terrorist war against ISraeli civilians. Arafat could have called a halt to this at any time in the last 18 months but Arafat is quite happy to see the death toll mount because every death means more power to him and more international statesmen at his door!

The Palestinians are hardly defenceless . The Palestinians are armed with their extreme fanaticism and irreconciliable hatred of Israelis and Jews. This is why they use their own form of "smart bombs" ie suicide bombers but unlike the Israeli smart bombs which hit terrorists and avoid civilians the Palestinian version deliberately searchs out as many Israeli civilians it can find before it detonates.

QUESTION 3:
>And plus, how do you expect Arafat to control the terrorists when the Israelis bomb already insufficient ressources and facilities (police station, headquarters, >etc.)

ANSWER
Arafat has something like 40,000 men under his control..all armed..all able to insist that every Palestinian house has a picture of Arafat in every room..so he is more than capable of disarming "Islamic Jihad" and "Hamas Terrorists". The truth is he doesn't want to disarm them. Morever it is not even that he gives the passive green light to terrorism. He is an ACTIVE participant. For it is his own Fatah, Force 17, Al Aksa brigades that have been directly involved in carrying out terror attacks. Arafat is purported to have directly ordered the most recent attacks against Israeli civilians in Afula and Jersulam. At the start of the Intifada, Arafat released convicted Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorists from prison so that they could organise a campaign of terror against Israeli civilians. This is exactly what happened!
Arafat is by all definitions of the word, a WAR CRIMINAL

It's not simple when Israel is occupying a people which kills them daily, and generally utterly humilitates them. Lets see.. isn't it 3 palestinians die for every israeli? How in your twisted "logic" do you explain this? The truth of Zionist expansionism is coming out and you fucking scum can either quit your opressive state terror/occupation/expansionism, or you will face continued resistence in whatever form it takes. No more colonization.

End the Occupation now.

Maybe I missed something. We're the Jews in Europe in the 1920's, 30's, and 40's trying to drive the Germans into the sea?

by both sides in all wars Dov.

Wisely, Arafat has clearly and consistently condemned the killing of all innocent civilians, as have other PA leaders. Unfortunately, this is not done by the Israelis leaders. I do not ever recall Sharon and his cronies ever condemning the killing of all civilians---Israelis and Palestinians.

To date the total body count in the past 17 months is 1230 Palestinians and 315 Israelis. As in most wars most of those killed on both sides are civilians. As long as American politicians keep giving the Israeli apartheid government $3,000,000,000 a year, the killing will continue.

Of course, many right-wing, racists Israeli supporters will say that the lives of Palestinians are not equal to that of Israelis.

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It's oh so simple,i just don't understand why no-one can't see the solution.Maybe they can visualize it, but are to afraid to say.Well ,i will be the first person to lay out the master plan.
Let's round up all the Palistinians,by force if need be.Better yet ,lets get all the Arabs.No, still not enough.What we should do ,is just get every Muslim, from every country they live in on the planet,and ship them over to Afghanistan.But while were rounding them all up,because that will take a little time.We should start building huge fernaces,and make them look like shopping malls.Give them all Canadian currency,(that's not really worth anything)and open the sliding doors.Once inside,close the doors and turn on the gas.Flip that match in ,and boom ,problem solved,
Now,once those filthy,backward,uncooperative nonconforming Muslims are fried , we can get rid of the evidence by providing a hugh humanitarian aid drop to the remaining black Christian population in Africa.Fatten them up and continue into phase3 of human slavery. Problem solved. The Jews, all over the world will be happy, especially those in the illegally occupied country of Palistine.

F.N.

It's oh so simple,i just don't understand why no-one can't see the solution.Maybe they can visualize it, but are to afraid to say.Well ,i will be the first person to lay out the master plan.
Let's round up all the Palistinians,by force if need be.Better yet ,lets get all the Arabs.No, still not enough.What we should do ,is just get every Muslim, from every country they live in on the planet,and ship them over to Afghanistan.But while were rounding them all up,because that will take a little time.We should start building huge fernaces,and make them look like shopping malls.Give them all Canadian currency,(that's not really worth anything)and open the sliding doors.Once inside,close the doors and turn on the gas.Flip that match in ,and boom ,problem solved,
Now,once those filthy,backward,uncooperative nonconforming Muslims are fried , we can get rid of the evidence by providing a hugh humanitarian aid drop to the remaining black Christian population in Africa.Fatten them up and continue into phase3 of human slavery. Problem solved. The Jews, all over the world will be happy, especially those in the illegally occupied country of Palistine.

F.N.

It's oh so simple,i just don't understand why no-one can't see the solution.Maybe they can visualize it, but are to afraid to say.Well ,i will be the first person to lay out the master plan.
Let's round up all the Palistinians,by force if need be.Better yet ,lets get all the Arabs.No, still not enough.What we should do ,is just get every Muslim, from every country they live in on the planet,and ship them over to Afghanistan.But while were rounding them all up,because that will take a little time.We should start building huge fernaces,and make them look like shopping malls.Give them all Canadian currency,(that's not really worth anything)and open the sliding doors.Once inside,close the doors and turn on the gas.Flip that match in ,and boom ,problem solved,
Now,once those filthy,backward,uncooperative nonconforming Muslims are fried , we can get rid of the evidence by providing a hugh humanitarian aid drop to the remaining black Christian population in Africa.Fatten them up and continue into phase3 of human slavery. Problem solved. The Jews, all over the world will be happy, especially those in the illegally occupied country of Palistine.

F.N.

Are Muslims worth the match it would take to light the gas? I don't think so. Better get another idea.

The Palestinians are useless dangerous people who enjoy killing just a little too much, like many of their muslim brothers who in the name of God blow people up. They have no sympathy or pity from me-in fact each day my hate for them grows, they are animals with no respect for life-and i have no respect for them.