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Boko Haram: African Taliban of Nigeria

Nigeria's militant Islamist group Boko Haram - which has caused havoc in Africa's most populous country through a wave of bombings - is fighting to overthrow the government and create an Islamic state. Keep reading >>>>
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In Nigeria, a Deadly Group’s Rage Has Local Roots


KANO, Nigeria — In an imam’s quiet office, two young men in long hooded robes, their faces hidden by checked scarves, calmly described their deadly war against the Nigerian state.
The office door was open. Children from the Koranic school adjoining the mosque streamed past, laughing and jostling. Worshipers from the evening prayer service, which the young men had just left, poured into the parking lot. If the police had been alerted in any way, the two young men would have been instantly arrested, or worse. But neither appeared nervous about possible betrayal.
“It is not the people of Nigeria, it is only the army and the police who are against us,” said one of the men, explaining their membership in Boko Haram, the militant group that has claimed responsibility for killing hundreds in its battle against the Nigerian government. “Millions of people in Kano State are supporting us.”
His bravado notwithstanding, the violent Islamist army operating out of these dusty alleyways, ready to lash out and quickly fade back, is deeply enmeshed in the fabric of life in this sprawling metropolis, succored by an uneasy mix of fear and sympathy among the millions of impoverished people here.
The group’s lethality is undeniable. Boko Haram unleashed a hail of bullets and homemade bombs here last month to deadly effect: as many as 300 were killed in a few hours in the group’s deadliest and most organized assault yet after two years of attacks across northern Nigeria. It was an unprecedented wave of coordinated suicide bombing, sustained gunfire and explosions, much of it directed against the police.
But while Western and local officials cite the militants’ growing links to terrorist organizations in the region — presenting the ties as a reason behind the group’s increasingly deadly tactics and a cause for global concern — Boko Haram is not the imported, “foreign” menace Nigerian authorities depict it to be.
Since 2009, the group has killed well over 900 people, Human Rights Watch says. Yet on the streets of Kano, the government is more readily denounced than the militants. Anger at the pervasive squalor, not at the recent violence, dominates. Crowds quickly gather around to voice their heated discontent, not with Boko Haram, but with what they describe as a shared enemy: the Nigerian state, seen by the poor here as a purveyor of inequality.
“People are supporting them because the government is cheating them,” said Mohammed Ghali, the imam at the mosque where the two Boko Haram members pray. Imam Ghali is known as an intermediary between the militants and the authorities, and while open backing for the group can put almost anyone in the cross hairs of the Nigerian security services, there appears to be no shortage of Boko Haram supporters here.
“At any time I am ready to join them, to fight injustice in this country,” said Abdullahi Garba, a candy vendor who came into Imam Ghali’s office.
Of course, Boko Haram is feared and loathed by countless residents as well. Its brutal show of firepower here in Kano, a commercial center of about four million that for centuries has been a major entrepôt at the Sahara’s edge, has left many residents in shock. The attackers came on foot, by motorcycle and by car, throwing fertilizer bombs and pulling rifles from rice sacks, mowing down anybody who appeared to be in uniform. There were even decapitated bodies among the mounds of corpses the day after, said a witness, Nasir Adhama, who owns a textile factory with his family near one of the attack sites.
“When you saw this road, it was just shed with blood,” Mr. Adhama said. “Everywhere there were dead bodies. They passed through this place, just firing and shooting.”
One of the young men at the mosque said he had participated in the planning for the attack, asserting that the group had received no outside help.
But a United Nations report published in January cited regional officials as saying that “Boko Haram had established links with Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb,” and that “some of its members from Nigeria and Chad had received training in Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb camps in Mali during the summer of 2011.” Seven Boko Haram members passing through Niger were arrested with “names and contact details” of members of the Qaeda affiliate, the United Nations report said.
For now, Boko Haram’s targets remain largely local, despite its bombing of a United Nations headquarters in Abuja, the capital, last summer. The Nigerian state is typically the enemy, and many analysts see the nation’s enduring poverty as one reason.
This month figures were released in Abuja indicating that poverty has increased since 2004, despite the nation’s oil wealth; in the north, Boko Haram’s stronghold, about 75 percent of the population is considered poor. Overall, 60 percent live on less than $1 a day. Every citizen appears aware of the glaring contrast between his or her own life and those of the elite.
Ado Ibrahim, a 22-year-old sugar cane vendor wearing a yellow soccer jersey, suspected more violence could be ahead.
“Injustice, and misgovernance by officials,” he said, adding, “It’s possible, as long as injustice persists, it’s possible to have another flare-up.”
Down the street, squatting in his open-air stall where he sells cooked yams, Abdullahi Dantsabe had a similar point of view. Why had the attacks occurred? “Injustice,” he said. “The leaders are not concerned about the common man.”
One resident argued that Boko Haram made some effort to protect civilians. “They told us to move away,” said Mohammed Danami, a motorcycle taxi driver, describing a devastating police station attack on Jan. 25. “They said, ‘We are not here for you,’ ” he recalled.
But the fate of Alhaji Muhammadu suggests otherwise. He was fatally shot on Feb. 9 as he walked along a sandy alley to his cinder-block home. His son said that his father had alerted the police to a booby-trapped car in the neighborhood, several days before the shooting. Boko Haram found out. Two masked men on a motorcycle shouted: “Just try that again. Now you are dead,” recalled the son, Sudaifu Muhammadu, a 27-year-old student at Bayero University, shuddering.
“They are all around,” Mr. Muhammadu said.
Last July the Nigerian news media reported on a letter of warning from the group to Kano’s leaders, including the emir, the traditional ruler of this ancient aristocratic city: “All those arrested should be released immediately, otherwise, I swear with Almighty Allah, we may be forced to deploy our men to Kano,” the letter said.
Six months later, on Jan. 20, the group struck. The planning had gone on under the noses of the authorities. “What happened in Kano was something which the security agencies had foreseen,” said Dr. Bashir Aliyu, a prominent imam in Kano.
There were up to five suicide bombers that day, at least 20 explosions, assaults on what were thought to be well-guarded state and regional police headquarters, on the State Security Service, an immigration office and the residence of a high police official. Gunmen entered a police barracks and opened fire, killing dozens.
Kano officials have said little since the attacks, and the precise sequence of events that day remains a mystery. The police commissioner here declined requests for an interview, and the state’s information commissioner did not respond to a message or phone calls.
An elderly aristocrat with connections to the royal palace here, Yusuf Maitama Sule — Nigeria’s former United Nations ambassador, he was one of those to whom Boko Haram’s letter was addressed, according to the Nigerian media — said in an interview at his home here: “We are making some efforts quietly. I don’t think it is proper for me to speak out.”
Mr. Sule acknowledged, however, that the country faced deep social and economic challenges.
“Because of this oil habit, we are sending our girlfriends to do their hair in Paris,” he said.
For some analysts, the challenge posed by Boko Haram is a serious one for the Nigerian government.
“They’ve built cells in Kano,” said Paul Lubeck, a northern Nigeria expert at the University of California, Santa Cruz. “They have much deeper networks in Kano than anybody ever assumed. My position is, this is a remarkably successful insurrection, more than anybody ever could have thought.”
In the imam’s office, the two young men spoke calmly and confidently of ultimate triumph. “God has already positioned us to follow his rule,” said one of the men, 25. “At any time, we can gain victory. Because God will give it to us.”

A mind-boggling mix: Chinese hackers, Russian gangsters, Al Qaeda operatives and much more..

TO describe Reamde as fun would be akin to describing murder as “a little bit of mischief”. This, Neal Stephenson’s 13th novel, is literary haute couture; it’s smart, it’s edgy, it’s mind-bendingly layered, and it has a complexity that will make you weep. Whether said weeping will be from joy or frustration is debatable, but rest assured — there will be tears.

There is one really fundamental difference between Reamde and Stephenson’s earlier works. Canonical as they are, Snow Crash, Cryptonomicon and The Diamond Age are all very much ‘niche’ publications: their appeal is primarily to sci-fi aficionados. The Baroque Cycle on the other hand, steps far out of sci-fi into the realms of speculative fiction/alternate history, but is still dense and sometimes painful to read. Reamde, however, is immensely accessible, even to those of us who may still be Luddites. That said, devout Stephenson fans — those people who are constantly thrilled by his erudition and scope — will probably also love Reamde, which is in many ways a pre-cursor to his earlier cyberpunk novels.

The plot of Reamde is particularly ridiculous at first glance: Richard Forthrast, a former marijuana smuggler, founds a Fortune 500 mega-corporation based on a virtual gaming world called T’Rain that is the basis for an entire shadow economy; real-life gamers wind up treating it as a full-time job, “farming” gold pieces and developing virtual characters from within the game to sell for actual real-life currency and thereby earning a living. As the novel begins, Richard has hired Zula, an Eritrean orphan who is his adopted niece, whose boyfriend, Peter, is involved in selling stolen credit card information. The buyer of said information is an associate of the Russian mafia, and during the data transfer, finds his computer system — and by extension, those of his criminal cohorts — compromised by a virus, “Reamde”, that is the brainchild of a Chinese T’Rain player. In an
effort to recover the virus — rather than pay the $73 worth of T’Rain’s virtual currency in ransom — the Russians kidnap Zula and Peter, along with a Hungarian hacker, and fly to Xiamen in China to locate and eliminate the hacker.

While involved in tracking down the hacker and preparing to terminate him with, as spy thrillers would put it, “extreme prejudice”, the Russians come into contact with Al Qaeda operative Abdallah Jones, a wanted terrorist, who
despite being black and Welsh, seems to think that China is the perfect place to hide. Oh, and that kidnapping Zula will somehow further his goals. Seven hundred pages later, having completed a quick circuit of the world and a massive discussion of aeronautical navigation, philology, virtual economies, technology and the epistemology of colour palettes, the plot widens just a tiny bit more to incorporate a jihadist attack on Las Vegas, something odd going on in the world of T’Rain, and a Hollywood Western-style shootout with more guns than actual people. This, for the sake of perspective, is a short version of the plot.

The fact that Stephenson is able to maintain even a vestige of narrative control over this runaway juggernaut of a novel is testament to his abilities as a writer. While Reamde occasionally transitions from novel to spatterfest-in-book-form, it is constantly entertaining, and Stephenson demonstrates just how much of a polymath he really is. Between detailed explanations of T’Rain’s mythology (what, asks a remarkably pretentious English fantasy writer, is the reason for naming the Tolkien-ish elf-analogues in T’Rain “K’Shetriae”? Why the apostrophes and the uppercase letters?) and an equally detailed exposition on how T’Rain managed to convert artificial currency into real-world wealth (a sly dig at investment banking, one wonders?), Stephenson ranges far and wide over literary territory. His exposition is dense, technical and highly readable — there is no way to avoid being sucked into the text of Reamde.

The only real issue that one faces with Stephenson is his characterisation. Almost every single person in Reamde is so astoundingly competent and level-headed that it is not hard to imagine them fixing the whole planet in under a week if
given the chance. No matter what sort of psychotic-breakdown-inducing situation they are in, whether it’s plotting international flights to avoid detection by national air forces, finding a single Chinese hacker with only a smart-phone while being menaced by an unstable Russian gangster gone rogue, or hiking across inimical terrain, they radiate a sense of perspective that is practically Zen in its serenity. These aren’t protagonists; frankly, they start to seem like über-mensch. By page 500, I was wondering why they hadn’t yet solved the problems of world hunger while curing cancer and fixing the Eurozone crisis.

To his credit, Stephenson is meticulous about explaining the acquisition of each character’s particular highly-specialised skill-set. All the exposition in the world, however, is insufficient to mitigate the suspension of disbelief required as the characters of Reamde steal private jets, turn DVDs into lethal weapons, slip in and out of China without visas and — my
favourite — manoeuvre wild mountain lions into attacking their enemies. These are the people who I would want on my side if aliens were ever to invade Earth.

There is humour among all of this though. Stephenson spins dual plot-lines, allowing them to run parallel before a final act of convergence; while the real-world antics of hackers and gangsters are painfully rooted in actual events, the world of T’Rain has a hilarious civil war between “the Earthtone Coalition” and “the Forces of Brightness”, all over a question of the colour palettes used in designing virtual characters. As terrorists commit acts of grievous bodily harm on one another, authors argue about the semantics of right and wrong in a world of pixels and bytes. Spies shoot at each other and assume identities at the drop (or addition) of a hat, while a formerly obese programmer tracks his caloric intake on a multitude of computer screen.

It is difficult to not be amused — or at least engaged — on some level by Stephenson and his writing. Although Reamde admittedly falls short of the quantum meta-philosophy of Anathem or the historicism of The Baroque Cycle, it still manages to keep itself relevant and stimulating. Much like Stephenson himself, it is wide-ranging, unpredictable and clever. It may not aspire to be much more than a thriller, but Reamde manages to encompass far more than just guns and mayhem of the physical sort.

Reviewed by Mohsin Siddiqui :Reamde (NOVEL), By Neal Stephenson, William Morrow, New York, ISBN 0061977969, 1056pp.
http://www.dawn.com/2012/01/22/fiction-a-mind-boggling-mix-chinese-hackers-russian-gangsters-al-qaeda-operatives-and-much-more.html


When is a terrorist not a terrorist?




War with Iran or not?  By Alan Hart
The longer and complete form of the first question in the headline is – When is a terrorist not a terrorist in the eyes of the Obama administration (not to mention all of its predecessors) and the governments of the Western world?
Answer: When he or she is an Israeli Mossad agent or asset. In the case of the assassination of Iranian scientists, the Mossad’s assets are almost certainly members of the Mujahedin-e Khalq Organization (MKO) also known as The Peoples’ Mujahedin of Iran, which is committed to overthrowing the regime of the ruling mullahs. Many of its activists are based in Iraqi Kurdistan where Mossad has a substantial presence. It does the training there, selects the targets in Iran and provides the bombs and other weapons, and MKO members do the actual killing.
It’s reasonable to presume that Mossad is more comfortable operating out of Iraqi Kurdistan with Iranian MKO assets than it was when its own agents were posing as CIA officers to recruit members of Jundallah, a Pakistan-based Sunni extremist organization, to carry out assassinations and attacks on installations and facilities in Iran.
Some of the essence of that Israeli false flag operation has been revealed by Mark Perry in an article for Foreign Policy. His report is based on information he acquired about memos buried deep in the archives of America’s intelligence services which were written in the last years of President George “Dubya” Bush’s administration, plus conversations he had with two currently serving U.S. intelligence officials and four retired intelligence officers who worked for the CIA or monitored Israeli intelligence operations from senior positions inside the U.S. government.
According to Perry’s sources, one of whom has seen the memos, the Mossad agents who were posing as CIA agents to recruit Jundallah operatives had American passports and were “flush” with American dollars.
The memos tell the story of an investigation which debunked reports from 2007 and 2008 accusing the CIA, at the direction of the White House, of covertly supporting Jundallah. The investigation apparently showed that the U.S. “had barred even the most incidental contact with Jundallah.”
The memos also gave details of CIA field reports on Mossad’s recruitment of Jundallah operatives, mainly in London and “under the nose of U.S. intelligence officials.”
Perry’s sources confessed to being “stunned by the brazenness of Mossad’s efforts.” And one of them said: “It’s amazing what the Israelis thought they could get away with. Their recruitment activities were nearly in the open. They apparently didn’t give a damn about what we thought.”
I take issue with the first part of that statement. What is really amazing is not what Mossad and almost of Israel’s political and military leaders think they can get away with, but what they KNOW they can get away with because of the Zionist lobby’s control of Congress on all matters relating to policy for the conflict in and over Palestine that became Israel.
And that in turn is why, generally speaking, Israel’s leaders don’t give a damn about what American administrations think, They come and go but the Zionist lobby’s control of Congress is a permanent fixture. (In private conversation with General Moshe Dayan when he was Israel’s defence minister, I once summed up Israel’s unspeakable but implicit message to the governments of the world in the following way. “We know we shouldn’t have done this but we’ve done it because we also know there’s nothing you can do about it.” Dayan didn’t comment but the look on his face said something like, “You’re right but I’m not going to say so.”)
Though Israel doesn’t usually comment on reports about Mossad’s activities, a senior government spokesman described Perry’s account of Mossad agents posing as CIA agents as “absolute nonsense.” As I was reading the denial I used a Jimmy Carter expression – “BS” (Bull Shit).
After the latest assassination of an Iranian scientist, Rick Santorum, the right-wing religious joker in the pack of Republican presidential hopefuls, said this: “On occasions scientists working on the nuclear program in Iran turn up dead. I think that’s a wonderful thing.”
A different view was offered by Jewish American journalist Richard Silverstein. For his weblog Tikun Olam he wrote this: “These are shameful acts by a shameful Israeli government exploiting Iranian terrorists for their own ends.  I find it disgusting that Israel can get away with such acts with impunity.”
Disgusting it certainly is but there’s no mystery about why Israel can commit crimes including acts of naked state terrorism without fear of being called and held to account for them by the UN Security Council. When after the 1967 war it refused to label the Zionist state as the aggressor and require it to withdraw from the newly occupied Arab lands without conditions, it effectively created, at the insistence of the U.S., two sets of rules for the behaviour of nations – one set for all the nations of the world minus Israel and the other exclusively for Israel. That was the birth of the double standard which is the cancer at the heart of Western foreign policy.
Now let’s pause for a moment to imagine what the response would have been if Iranian agents or assets had assassinated an Israeli scientist (just one) in the Zionist state.
Led by America, Western governments would have bellowed their condemnation of the terrorism and pledged full support for all efforts to hunt the terrorists down and bring them to justice. And they would, of course, have blamed the government of Iran even if there was not one shred of evidence of its authorization. The assassination of an Israeli scientist might even have tipped the Washington decision-making balance in favour of the mad men who want the U.S. either to attack Iran or give Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu the green light to go, with or without nuclear tipped, bunker-busting bombs.
And Israel? How would it have responded? With or without a green light from President Obama it almost certainly would have bombed selected targets in Iran, even if doing so was likely to set the region on fire and do vast damage to Western interests in the region and the whole Muslim world. (As I note in my book Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews, in the chapter headed The Liberty Affair – “Pure Murder” on a “Great Day”, the lesson of the cold-blooded Israeli attack on the American spy ship was that there is nothing the Zionist state might not do, to its friends as well as its enemies, in order to get its own way).
Now… At the risk of inviting a charge from some and perhaps many readers that I am naive in the extreme, I have to say I am inclined to the view that the Obama administration was telling the truth when it strongly denied any American complicity in the latest Israeli/MKO assassination. The New York Times put it this way:
“The assassination drew an unusually strong condemnation from the White House and the State Department, which disavowed any American complicity… ‘The United States had absolutely nothing to do with this,’ said Tommy Vietor, a spokesman for the National Security Council. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton appeared to expand the denial beyond Wednesday’s killing, categorically denying any United States involvement in any kind of act of violence inside Iran.”
The NYT report then quoted Mrs. Clinton as saying this:
“We believe that there has to be an understanding between Iran, its neighbours and the international community that finds a way forward for it to end its provocative behaviour, end its search for nuclear weapons and rejoin the international community,”
That in my opinion is code for something very like: “This administration is not completely mad. We know that an attack on Iran could have catastrophic consequences for the region and the world. Despite the mounting and awesome pressure we are under from Netanyahu and those who peddle his propaganda here in America, we know that the nuclear problem with Iran must be solved by jaw-jaw and not war-war.”
How catastrophic the consequences of an Israeli attack on Iran could be for the region and the world has been put into words by Philip Giraldi, currently the executive director of the Council for the National Interest and a former CIA counter-terrorism specialist and military intelligence officer. The scenario he presents under the headline What War With Iran Might Look Like takes us all the way to World War III. His article can be found at http://www.councilforthenationalinterest.org/news/the-cost-of-israel-to-the-us/item/1319-what-war-with-iran-might-look-like
So I believe NYT reporter Scott Shane was on the right track when he wrote that the statements by U.S. officials appeared to reflect serious concern about the (Israeli/MKO) assassinations of Iranian scientists because they could “backfire” and make Iran’s leaders less willing to talk. And, I add, more willing to give in to those forces in Iran, the Revolutionary Guards in particular, who might well be saying that Iran must possess nuclear weapons for deterrence.
My guess is that U.S. officials are also concerned by the possibility that more assassinations could provoke an Iranian response which would give Israel the pretext to attack. (It’s by no means impossible that the main purpose of the assassinations is to provoke an Iranian response to give Israel the pretext for an attack).
That brings me to my own speculation about what is really going on behind closed doors in the Obama administration. At executive level it is, I think, in a state of something close to total panic about what to do to prevent an Israeli attack on Iran if Netanyahu is not bluffing.
My reading of Obama’s latest turn of the sanctions screw on Iran is that it’s his way of not only putting more pressure on the ruling mullahs. It’s also his way of saying to Netanyahu something like, “Give me more time to solve the Iranian nuclear problem by all means other than war.”
Obama needs more time not only to try to get serious and substantive talks with Iran going but also to establish beyond any doubt whether Israeli threats to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities are a bluff (to put pressure on the U.S.) or not. In an article for Ha’aretz under the headline Israel and U.S. at odds over timetables and red lines for Iran, Avi Issacharoff and Amos Harel wrote:
“Do Barak and Netanyahu really intend to attack on their own, or is Israel only trying to prod the West into more decisive action? That is the million-dollar question. It has been discussed intermittently for the past three years and it seems that Washington does not have a satisfactory answer to it.”
In a few days time General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, is scheduled to arrive in Israel for talks with Defense Minister Ehud Barak, Chief of Staff Lt. General Benny Gantz and other senior Israeli defense and intelligence officials.
Dempsey knows that when U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta met with Netanyahu and Barak last November, they refused to give him a commitment that Israel would not attack Iran without informing America of its intention to do so.
If I am right about the panic in the Obama administration, my guess is that Dempsey will try to obtain the commitment Panetta failed to get. What if Dempsey does not succeed?
My guess is that whatever he may say in public after his meetings, Dempsey will tell the Israelis in private that if they go to war with Iran they will be on their own. The U.S., I can almost hear him saying, will not become engaged except to defend its own national interests if and as necessary “because the American people, most of them, are tired of war.” He could add “and we don’t have the money to pay for it.”
An interesting question for the coming days is something like this: What if Dempsey returns to Washington without being able to give behind-closed-doors assurance that Israel (despite what it might continue to say to the contrary in public for propaganda purposes) will not go it alone with an attack Iran?
In theory there is a card President Obama could play. He could put Israel on public notice that if it attacked Iran and if as a consequence America’s own bests interests were harmed, the U.S. would have to rethink its relationship with the “Jewish state”. A statement to that effect would imply that the days of America’s unconditional support for Israel right or wrong could be coming to an end.
But that’s not a statement Obama could make this side of November’s presidential election. So if Netanyahu is not bluffing, and if he was determined to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities before November’s election, there’s nothing Obama could do to stop him, even knowing that the end game could be, as Giraldi speculated, World War III.
My own view has always been that Netanyahu is bluffing to the extent that he even he is not crazy enough to order an Israeli attack on Iran without a green light from the U.S. and American cover and participation,
I hope I am right. If I am it could be that General Dempsey will return to Washington with the news Obama wants and needs – that without a green light from the U.S, Israel will not bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities.
http://www.opinion-maker.org/2012/01/when-is-a-terrorist-not-a-terrorist/#
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The Divergent Faces of Israel

An Analyses: By Lawrence Davidson

Part I – Zionist Reality

Last month Amira Hass, one of Israel’s best, bravest and most disliked journalists wrote a short piece in Haaretz entitled "When ‘fascist’ is not a rude word." Here she tells us that "in fascist regimes the state is above all" and then notes that the sort of fascist style bills pouring out of Israel’s Knesset would "make Jean-Marie Le Pen and his daughter [the leaders of the far right party of France] look like amateurs."

Could this be so? Could that singular country which, for 64 years made every effort to show but one face to the American public, the face of a Dr. Jekyl, be hiding the hideous features of a Mr. Hyde? Could it be that the "only democracy in the Middle East," the friend and ally that allegedly reflects American values, the mighty dam protecting the West from the flood of Islamic radicalism, the supposed champion of gender equality in the patriarchal East, and the reliable, if indirect, source of financial support for 99% of the U.S. Congress, is morphing into a fascist state?

 Deeply indoctrinated Americans are going to need more than Amira Hass’s word on this. They are going to need supporting evidence and so here are some other "experts" they might consult.

Your average pro-Israel Americans might look up Danny Danon, who is a good looking, clean shaven sort of fellow as well as a Likud Party member of the Israeli Knesset. Danon has been working very hard to pass laws that would root out all those who might not be loyal to his Jewish state. It seems that, in his efforts to be "just like us," he is following in the footsteps of Senator Joseph McCarthy. One can hear the echo when Danon proclaims, "there are many people who act against the State that protects them. Anyone who is not faithful to the State should not be a citizen." He mainly has in mind that quarter of the population who are not Jewish, but he would also throw into this category those Israeli Jews audacious enough to stand up for political equality for all citizens. In other words, Danon’s aim is to manufacture statelessness. And as both 20th century European history and Israel’s 45 years in the Occupied Territories attests, statelessness is a one-way road to physical and cultural destruction.


When our figurative American supporters of Israel are done talking to Danny Danon, they might move on to consult Benni Katzover. Katzover is a major figure in the Israeli "settler movement" and a supporter of the terrorist activities of the Zionist "price tag" campaign, a bunch of "patriots" who attack Palestinians and Israeli peace groups whenever the government frustrates their helter skelter expansionist activities on the West Bank. Katzover may well have the same ends as Danon, but he is much more out front about them. "I would say that today, Israeli democracy has one central mission, and that is to disappear. Israeli democracy has finished its historical role, and it must be dismantled and bow before Judaism." All those leftists who find this proposal frightening are just "against anything that smells of holiness, and…act against the foundations of Jewish faith." One wonders what American Zionists who see Sharia law undermining the foundations of democracy make of Benni Katzover?

While estimates vary, it is not unreasonable to assume that Danny Danon and Benni Katzover together command the support of at least 25% of the Israeli Jewish population. Otherwise the Israeli Knesset would not look and act as it does and the settler movement would not be so openly aggressive. And this category of Israelis are nothing if not aggressive. According to a recent survey the Danon-Katzover types are mostly young and express their opinions in an "open and unabashed" racist way. They express open hatred for Arabs and a wish that those under Israeli control would die.

Part II – Jewish Humanitarians

Of course, there are other Israelis who represent the opposite point of view. Thus, our figurative American supporters of Israel might also want to interview some of them.

First they should look up Uri Avnery. Avnery is a founding member of Gush Shalom, the Israeli Peace Bloc. Avinery has solid Israeli credentials: he was a heroic fighter in the 1948 war, a well known journalist and was a distinguished past member of the Knesset. However, he has also always asserted that Israel evolved along the wrong path. It should not be a "nationalistic, theocratic ‘Jewish State’" but rather a "modern, liberal state belonging to all its citizens irrespective of national or religious roots." This position earned him a lot of enemies including Israel’s first Prime Minister David Ben Gurion and his successor Golda Meir. Both considered Avnery a "public enemy." Subsequently there was an assassination attempt and the office of his newspaper, Haolam Hazeh, was bombed. Avnery is a shining light of humanism in Israel’s dark corner, but he is not the only one.

After talking to Avnery our figurative inquirers should move on to Rabbi Arek Ascherman, the Director of Special Projects for Rabbis for Human Rights in Israel. Ascherman’s position is that the only legitimate way you can have Israel be a Jewish place is by having its institutions uphold Jewish values. For Ascherman that means getting in the way, as best one can, of the "ugly side" of Israeli behavior and policies such as standing against the house demolitions, land confiscations, settler encroachments, arbitrary arrests, beatings, and killings of Palestinians, etc. For his efforts Ascherman and his organization have suffered the same sort of attacks as has Avnery. Asherman’s car has been stoned (by Israelis), he has been arrested and beaten up. His fate reminds one of the treatment received by civil rights workers in the 1960s U.S. This seems to be another way that Israel is "just like us."

Avnery and Ascherman are but drops in a very shallow bucket. They and the other Israeli Jewish men and women who fight for human decency in the a country falsely rumored to be "a light unto the nations" probably command the support of, at most, 15% of the Israeli Jewish population.

Part III – The Indifferent

And what of the rest of Israel’s Jews? Well the survey mentioned above found that the other 60% are indifferent to the Palestinians, but in a generally negative way. For instance, many in this category (up to 46%) "would not be willing to live next door to them." It is actually the negatively tinged indifference of this majority of Israeli Jews that allows the more assertive and aggressive 25% to gain power and assure the country’s status as a truly apartheid state. The 15 % that may support Avnery and Ascherman essentially become social mistakes within the Israeli milieu. They have somehow escaped the full impact of Zionist education and ideology. They have broken free of the conformist pressures of family, community, army and media propaganda. And, having freed themselves from what Gabriel Kolko calls "enforced consensus," they collectively become a fringe element.

Part IV – Conclusion

It is strange, all countries have such self-aware and active humanitarians and all of them probably have these people in the same relative proportion–about 15%. This is just large enough to remind us of what good humanity is capable of, but just too small to help us realize that good.

Zionism, Israel & Pelistine:
http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLB1773E4A1EDD2F41


History of Israel:Power Point Slide Show

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الديمقراطية؟ خمسة دروس يمكن لمصر أن تتعلم من باكستان ; Democracy? Five Lessons Egypt Can learn from Pakistan

Pakistan is a perfect example of what not to do with a military junta. When Hosni Mubarak resigned from the Egyptian presidency in February, many commentators asked whether Pakistan--an unstable Muslim country outside the Arab Middle East--would go the way of Egypt, experiencing what was then thought to be revolutionary change.They should have asked whether Egypt would suffer the fate of Pakistan: a parliamentary democracy with a freely elected government but dominated by a military with a host of extraconstitutional powers.Today, the question remains as valid as it was last winter. Egypt is on course to follow Pakistan's quasi-praetorian path. There has been a change in government. Mubarak is gone. But the regime lives on through the powerful Supreme Council of the Armed Forces. Egypt's democrats can learn from the successes and failures of their Pakistani counterparts. Here are five lessons from Pakistan.


1) Don't let the military divide and rule the civilians.

In Pakistan, warring parties managed to pass a constitutional amendment that reduced presidential powers and the dominance of the Punjab province. But the collapse of a coalition between the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) and the Pakistan Muslim League (Nawaz) caused a political crisis in which the army had to intervene, albeit short of a coup. The army has not fully retreated to the barracks since then.

To avoid the same fate, Egypt's political parties must cooperate, leaving no vacuum for military intervention. The generals there have signaled that they want to influence the composition of a constitution-drafting Constituent Assembly. Though it has since backtracked, the military could again try to interfere with the constitution-drafting process by leveraging secular and Coptic Christian fears of Islamist influence. To keep the military at bay, it's key that the Muslim Brotherhood--which, combined with the Salafist movement, won over 60 percent of the vote--ensures that the drafting process won't be a majoritarian enterprise alienating non-Islamists.

Egypt's major political parties have real competing interests and values. But these differences should not inhibit them from ensuring that elected representatives, not the military, choose who drafts a new democratic constitution.

2) Empower parliament and improve its capacity and competence.

Pakistani politicians pronounce the sovereignty of parliament, yet its National Assembly is inefficient, has a meager attendance rate and inadequately staffed oversight committees. This has created a vacuum in Pakistan that is filled by an activist Supreme Court, agenda-driven media and an interventionist army.

Egyptian democrats should avoid the fate of Pakistan by not only bestowing parliament with real legislative, budgetary and oversight powers but also improving the capacity and competence of legislators. After Egypt's 2005 elections, the Muslim Brotherhood actively worked to enhance discussion of the federal budget and increase the competency of its legislators over policy issues through its "parliamentary kitchen." But these efforts should be expanded to include formal educational programs for legislators on policy issues and legislative strategies.

3) Selectively roll back the military's powers.

In Pakistan, the prime minister, president and army chief--known as the troika--meet informally to determine foreign and security policy. The army chief-dominated troika has contributed to political stability in the country. But it is inherently antidemocratic, not sustainable beyond the current cast of characters and offers little depth to policy making.

Egypt can avoid this kind of concentration of power through an informal civil-military consensus. Egyptian democrats should carefully select which powers they will rescind from the military. They should block the military's attempts to create a presidential system that would allow it to contain parliament. But too aggressive a rollback of the military would likely result in a backlash that could jeopardize gains made this year. A more prudent course would be to create a consensus-building national-security council led by the elected prime minister that can provide a platform for civil-military dialogue.

4) It's the economy, stupid.

Since Pakistan's 2008 elections, which brought in a democratic government, the country has gone from being one of Asia's fastest-growing economies to the continent's sick man. Economic growth is stifled by poor governance: the state-owned airlines and railways are bleeding billions of dollars a year, and electricity blackouts often exceed twelve hours a day. Ninety-two percent of Pakistanis feel their country is going in the wrong direction, with inflation their primary concern.

Egypt also faces a tough economic outlook. The Cairo Stock Exchange's main index has dropped by 40 percent this year. Egypt's economy has grown by around one percent. Unemployment and inflation, causes of the revolution, have risen since Mubarak's resignation. Foreign direct investment has dropped by 20 percent. Without competent economic stewardship, public stamina for a democratic transition will be weak.

To avoid the post-transition loss of confidence experienced by Pakistan, Egypt's democrats must develop a coherent economic policy that combats corruption and puts the country back on the path of structural reform while also building jobs. They will need to privatize state-owned companies, deftly reduce subsidies, and bring back foreign investment and tourism. A technocrat untainted by association with previous autocratic governments should serve as finance minister.

5) Minority rights are key to maintaining a big-tent coalition.

In Pakistan, the fragile coalition government led by the PPP has managed to survive nearly four years in part due to concessions made with small, regional parties. Politics is the art of compromise. Some Pakistani politicians have succeeded due to clever management of coalition politics.

Egyptians should follow this example of compromise. A civilian-led constitution with an empowered parliament will require a big-tent coalition. The Muslim Brotherhood-led Freedom and Justice Party (FJP) will need to ally with the secular Egyptian Bloc and Wafd Party and guarantee that Copts and secular Egyptians do not become second-class citizens under the next constitution. While the FJP could ally with the Salafist-led al-Nour Party to push through Islamic measures, doing so risks an intractable intracivilian conflict, potentially even pushing secular politicians into the arms of the military.

The recent decision by the Muslim Brotherhood to protect churches during New Year's is a step in the right direction. But Egyptian Christians do not simply want to be a protected minority: they want to be full citizens with the same rights as Muslims.

Egypt is in the midst of a difficult and uncertain transition. Its embryonic democratic experiment could fail for many reasons. But Egyptian democrats will increase their odds of victory if they learn from the mistakes of their Pakistani counterparts. Civilian leaders must close ranks, adopt a consociational model, and isolate the increasingly feckless leadership of the armed forces.

This article originally appeared at NationalInterest.org, an Atlantic partner site.
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/01/5-ways-egypt-can-avoid-becoming-pakistan/251393/
OH! do not do this>>>> ‘Memogate’ Scandal - Zardari, Haqqani & Keyani

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Open Letter to Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, New Ruler of Egypt. Also Applicable to All kings and dictators. رسالة مفتوحة إلى المشير حسين طنطاوي محمد ، الحاكم الجديد لمصر. كما ينطبق على جميع الملوك والحكام ...
Open Letter to Kings and Dictators of Arab World - Free your People Now. "القذافي العرب الملوك والطغاة مجانا شعبك لا تتصرف مثل صدام حسين هو المسؤول عن تدمير بلاده". Arab Kings and Dictators! ...

How Thomas Jefferson’s secret Bible might have changed history

Thomas Jefferson and his Bible

The 'Jefferson Bible' was Thomas Jefferson's attempt to extract an authentic Jesus from the Gospel accounts.by Marilyn Mellowes.The White House, Washington, D.C. 1804.
Thomas Jefferson was frustrated. It was not the burdens of office that bothered him. It was his Bible. Jefferson was convinced that the authentic words of Jesus written in the New Testament had been contaminated. Early Christians, overly eager to make their religion appealing to the pagans, had obscured the words of Jesus with the philosophy of the ancient Greeks and the teachings of Plato. These "Platonists" had thoroughly muddled Jesus' original message. Jefferson assured his friend and rival, John Adams, that the authentic words of Jesus were still there. The task, as he put it, was one of abstracting what is really his from the rubbish in which it is buried, easily distinguished by its lustre from the dross of his biographers, and as separate from that as the diamond from the dung hill.
With the confidence and optimistic energy characteristic of the Enlightenment, Jefferson proceeded to dig out the diamonds. Candles burning late at night, his quill pen scratching "too hastily" as he later admitted, Jefferson composed a short monograph titled The Philosophy of Jesus of Nazareth. The subtitle explains that the work is "extracted from the account of his life and the doctrines as given by Matthew, Mark, Luke & John." In it, Jefferson presented what he understood was the true message of Jesus.
Jefferson set aside his New Testament research, returning to it again in the summer of 1820. This time, he completed a more ambitious work, The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth Extracted Textually from the Gospels in Greek, Latin, French and English. The text of the New Testament appears in four parallel columns in four languages. Jefferson omitted the words that he thought were inauthentic and retained those he believed were original. The resulting work is commonly known as the "Jefferson Bible."
Who was the Jesus that Jefferson found? He was not the familiar figure of the New Testament. In Jefferson's Bible, there is no account of the beginning and the end of the Gospel story. There is no story of the annunciation, the virgin birth or the appearance of the angels to the shepherds. The resurrection is not even mentioned.
Jefferson discovered a Jesus who was a great Teacher of Common Sense. His message was the morality of absolute love and service. Its authenticity was not dependent upon the dogma of the Trinity or even the claim that Jesus was uniquely inspired by God. Jefferson saw Jesus as
a man, of illegitimate birth, of a benevolent heart, (and an) enthusiastic mind, who set out without pretensions of divinity, ended in believing them, and was punished capitally for sedition by being gibbeted according to the Roman law.
In short, Mr. Jefferson's Jesus, modeled on the ideals of the Enlightenment thinkers of his day, bore a striking resemblance to Jefferson himself.
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Editor's noteMitch Horowitz is editor-in-chief of Tarcher/Penguin and editor of Penguin’s new reissue of The Jefferson Bible.
By Mitch Horowitz, Special to CNN
(CNN) – Imagine the following scenario: A U.S. president is discovered to be spending his spare time taking a razor to the New Testament, cutting up and re-pasting those passages of the Gospels that he considered authentic and morally true and discarding all the rest.
Gone are the virgin birth, divine healings, exorcisms and the resurrection of the dead, all of which the chief executive dismissed as “superstitions, fanaticisms and fabrications.”
Such an episode occurred, although the revised version of Scripture remained unseen for nearly seven decades after its abridger’s death. Thomas Jefferson intended it that way.
During most of his two terms in the White House, from 1801 to 1809, and for more than a decade afterward, Jefferson  the third U.S. president and the principal author of the Declaration of Independence  committed himself to a radical reinterpretation of the Gospels.
With a razor and glue brush at this side, Jefferson lined up English, French, Greek and Latin editions of Scripture and proceeded to cut up and reassemble the four Gospels into an exquisitely well-crafted, multilingual chronology of Christ’s life.

Jefferson lined up different editions of Scripture.
In Jefferson’s view, this revision represented a faithful record of Christ’s moral code, minus the miracles that the Enlightenment-era founder dismissed as historical mythmaking.
The book eventually became known as The Jefferson Bible and is now being rediscovered in new editions, including one published this month by Tarcher/Penguin, and as the focus of a Smithsonian exhibit.
Ask most people today if they have heard of Jefferson’s Bible and you will receive blank stares. Indeed, for much of American history, The Jefferson Bible was entirely unknown. Jefferson intended it as a work of private reflection, not a public statement.
As contemporary readers discover the work, it is tempting to wonder how American history might look different had Jefferson’s radical document come to light closer to its completion.
Jefferson was still working on his Bible during his presidency, so its theoretical publication wouldn’t have compromised his electability. But if the book had been made public after its final completion in 1820, when Jefferson had only six more years to live, it likely would have become one of the most controversial and influential religious works of early American history.

A curator handles a "source" Bible from which Jefferson cut out passages.
That was a scenario Jefferson took pains to avoid. After being called an “infidel” during his 1800 presidential race, Jefferson knew the calumny he could bring on himself if word spread of his “little book.” Although he had his work professionally bound, he mentioned it only to a select group of friends. Its discovery after his death came as a surprise to his family.
Jefferson’s wish for confidentiality held sway until 1895 when the Smithsonian in Washington made public his original pages, purchased from a great-granddaughter. In 1904, Congress issued a photolithograph edition and presented it for decades as a gift to new legislators, a gesture that would likely cause uproar in today’s climate of political piety.
Because of the book’s long dormancy following Jefferson’s death, and its limited availability for generations after  arguably the first truly accessible edition didn’t appear until 1940 The Jefferson Bible has remained a curio of American history.
So how would the earlier publication of The Jefferson Bible have changed American history? It's impossible to know for sure, but the 1820s inaugurated a period of tremendous spiritual experiment in America: It was the age of Mormonism, Unitarian Universalism and Shakerism, among other new faiths.
There’s little doubt that many Americans, who were already fiercely independent in matters of religion, would have seen The Jefferson Bible as the manifesto of a reformist movement call it “Jeffersonian Christianity”  focused not on repentance and salvation but on earthly ethics. Such a movement could have swept America, and also have spread to Europe, where Jefferson was esteemed.
A broad awareness of Jefferson’s work would have surely engendered a more complex view of the religious identity of Jefferson and other founders. Indeed, one of Jefferson’s most trusted correspondents while he was producing his Bible was his White House predecessor, John Adams, who in turn confided to Jefferson his distrust of all religious orthodoxy. These men were impossible to pin pat religious labels on.
Because Jefferson published relatively little during his lifetime, the appearance of The Jefferson Bible would have created a different, and more confounding, public image of the statesman as someone struggling deeply with his own religious beliefs. The Jefferson that appears behind his reconstruction of Scripture is someone who brushed aside notions of miraculous intervention and canonical faith.
As The Jefferson Bible conveys, however, Jefferson considered Jesus’ moral philosophy the most finely developed in history, surpassing the ethics of both the ancient Greeks and the Hebrews. He insisted that Christ’s authentic doctrine was marked by a stark, ascetic tone that clashed with the supernatural powers attributed to him.
“In extracting the pure principles which he taught,” Jefferson wrote in 1813, “we should have to strip off the artificial vestments in which they have been muffled by priests, who have travestied them into various forms. ... There will be found remaining the most sublime and benevolent code of morals which has ever been offered to man.”
Jefferson’s minimalist approach to the Gospels reveals an attitude that he disclosed only privately, just months before his death: “I am of a sect by myself, as far as I know."
In that sense, Jefferson the politician wouldn’t have stood a chance in the current presidential race, where faith and piety are on constant display. The political process might be more open today to candidates of varying degrees and types of belief if The Jefferson Bible were more central to the nation’s history.
The Jefferson Bible opens a window on Jefferson’s struggle to find a faith with which he could finally come to terms. It was this kind of intimate, inner search  not the outward pronouncement and establishment of religious doctrine  that the man who helped shape modern religious liberty sought to protect in America.
The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Mitch Horowitz.
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Jefferson's Bible - C-SPAN Video Library

c-spanvideo.org30 min
In his retirement years Thomas Jefferson compiled his own version of the four ... Former President Jefferson ...






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Jefferson, Thomas, 1743-1826 . The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth: Extracted Textually from the Gospels Greek, Latin, French, and English 
Electronic Text Center, University of Virginia Library
The entire work (15 KB) | Table of Contents for this work |
| All on-line databases | Etext Center Homepage |






  • Header

  • Front Matter

  • Chapter 1 CHAPTER 1

  • Chapter 2 CHAPTER 2

  • Chapter 3 CHAPTER 3

  • Chapter 4 CHAPTER 4

  • Chapter 5 CHAPTER 5

  • Chapter 6 CHAPTER 6

  • Chapter 7 CHAPTER 7

  • Chapter 8 CHAPTER 8

  • Chapter 9 CHAPTER 9

  • Chapter 10 CHAPTER 10

  • Chapter 11 CHAPTER 11

  • Chapter 12 CHAPTER 12

  • Chapter 13 CHAPTER 13

  • Chapter 14 CHAPTER 14

  • Chapter 15 CHAPTER 15

  • Chapter 16 CHAPTER 16

  • Chapter 17 CHAPTER 17

  • Courtesy: http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/toc/modeng/public/JefJesu.html
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