| Radical Islam Terrorizes the World see below James Thompson Article... By Richard H. Rolnick, M.D. 21 Jan 2002 Anti-Semitism has been defined as a non-Jew killing another non-Jew and then blaming it on the Jews. James Thompson continues this tradition in his Houston Chronicle piece (Jan. 20, 2002). Muslim Arabs massacre innocent people at the World Trade Center, including many Jews, and he has the audacity to blame the Jews. Arabs massacre 241 US Marines in Beirut. Who does Mr. Thompson blame? You got it, the Jews! Arab Christians killed Arab Muslims at Sabra and Shatila in Lebanon in 1982. Who does Mr. Thompson blame? The Jews. This is equivalent to blaming President George Bush for any brutality perpetrated by Afghanis against the Al Quida during the liberation of Kabul. What audacity! He regurgitates the lie of the battle of Deir Yasin. The battle occurred during Israel’s War of Independence in 1948. During that battle both sides suffered heavy casualties. Mr. Thompson deliberately omits the fact that the civilian population of Deir Yassin was given a warning. The Israelis utilizing a loud speaker prior to the battle exhorted, in Arabic, all civilians to leave and to take shelter on the slope of the hill. By giving this humane warning the Israeli troops threw away the element of surprise and thus increased their own risk in the ensuing battle. This was a factor in the high Israeli casualties. The number of Israeli casualties was nearly forty percent of the total number of their troops! It doesn’t sound like the massacre Mr. Thompson attempted to portray. The sad reality is that radical Islam has chosen to wage war throughout the world against those who do not accept its creed. Long before there was a Likud political party in Israel, Arab Muslims committed massacres. In 1929 the Jewish community of Hebron was brutally massacred. This occurred long before the modern state of Israel came into being in 1948. This pattern can be seen in the building of mosques on Christian holy sites in Bosnia and on Hindu holy sites in India. It is seen in terrorist activities by Muslims in the Philippines. It is a radicalism that is manifested throughout the world. Nice try, Mr. Thompson, but no cigar. Texans are not fooled. Many who work in the oil industry will tell you of their experiences in Saudi Arabia. The Muslims will not allow even the entrance of non-Muslims in cities they deem holy, such as Mecca and Medina. They will not allow the display of a cross or any religious symbol other than their own. Americans are coming to understand that the real enemy is radical Islam. Israel is hated precisely because of the fact that it represents Western democracy in the Middle East. It is precisely because of this fact that no Israel of any size will ever be accepted by the Arab world. The Arab rejection of all of Israel’s concessions has proven that. No amount of lies and distortions will prevent decent people from standing together to prevent radical Islam from terrorizing the world. Dr. Rolnick is Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Freeman Center for Strategic Studies in Houston B"H Dear Friends, The enclosed article appears in today's Houston Chronicle. I kindly ask you to flood them with angry letters. It does not have to be long. Just let them know you are angry. LETTERS POLICY: We welcome and encourage letters from readers. Letters can be mailed to Viewpoints, C/O Houston Chronicle, P.O. Box 4260, Houston, Texas 77210. Letters may also be sent by e-mail to viewpoints@chron.com or by fax to 713-220-3575. Letters must include the name, address and telephone numbers for verification purposes only. All letters are subject to editing. NEW OUTLOOK ADDRESS: Readers interested in expressing their opinions and views in Outlook may now send essays to our new e-mail address outlook@chron.com. Op-ed pieces can still be submitted by fax at 713-220-3575 or by regular mail to the Houston Chronicle, P.O. Box 4260, 77210, attention Outlook Editor. Thank you. Richard H. Rolnick, M.D. HoustonChronicle.com -- http://www.HoustonChronicle.com | Section: Viewpoints, Outlook To understand bin Laden, begin with Israel's Likud By JAMES THOMPSON My, how times have changed. I recall during the Vietnam War how a significant minority of the faculties of American universities was in ardent opposition to America's attempt to save South Vietnam from the communist government of Giap and Ho Chi Minh. Many of those faculty now have become the presidents, deans and provosts of many of today's leading universities. Yet one hears little opposition to the Bush campaign in Afghanistan from these graying activists. Similarly, such newspapers as The New York Times and The Washington Post are solidly in support of U.S. military actions against al-Qaida. Then there are the leaders of the U.S. television and film industries. No Hanoi Janes anymore. Suddenly, Hollywood is peopled solely with patriots. It would be pleasant to hope that some sort of intellectual conversion, one which extends even to the universities and the media, had taken place. Still, one has to wonder. ABC News President David Westin disdained to deny that the Pentagon had been a legitimate target on 9-11. What might have been the response of our opinion-makers if the attack had been on "only" the Pentagon. Would the "objectivity" of the media have moderated the patriotic zeal which they have recently exhibited in full measure? Would peace rallies have dotted the campuses? Would the Rev. Jesse Jackson have been on an airplane to seek accommodation with Osama bin Laden? I hope not and propose not to look too carefully for contrary evidence. And yet it is the business not only of academics but of all Americans to try and see what we can do to eliminate future 9-11 tragedies. In my opinion, the doctrinaire and predictable "blame America" remarks of professor Robert Jensen of the University of Texas at Austin are well off the mark. As much as Jensen might like to believe otherwise, his views are shared by precious few in academia, including those on the far left. In his Sept. 20 speech to a joint session of Congress, President Bush said about the terrorists: "They hate us for what they see right here in this chamber: a democratically elected government. Their leaders are self-appointed. They hate our freedoms: our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other." All perfectly true, no doubt, but the backgound for an environment in parts of the Muslim world that tolerates monsters like bin Laden is worth examination. To understand that mind-set it is necessary to begin with the importance of Israel's far-right party, the Likud. Former Israeli Likud Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has argued that the long-standing military and financial support of America for Israel had had nothing to do with the terrorist attack on America. Moreover, he argued that the terrorist attacks on Israel were not due to anything Israel had done but rather were caused by Israel's long-standing friendship with the United States. Nice try, Mr. Netanyahu, but no cigar. In Israel, within a short walk of the Yad Vashem memorial to Jewish victims of the Holocaust, is the site of Deir Yassin, where the Stern Gang/Irgun activists of Yitzak Shamir and Menachem Begin(later Likudist prime ministers of Israel) slaughtered all the men, women and children in that unfortunate Arab village on April 9, 1948. This was the beginning of a consistent policy of the extreme right-wing Israeli parties, which ultimately became the Likud, to see to it that the Palestinians would be terrorized into leaving the land of their forefathers or suffer the fate of the Canaanites of 3,500 years previous. The United Nations peace envoy of that time, Count Bernadotte, was assassinated by Sternists who feared that he might actually achieve a just and lasting peace between Palestinians and Jews. The majority party during most of modern Israel's history, the Mapai, seriously advocated and continues to advocate peaceful coexistence among the inhabitants of the Holy Land. One of their leaders, Prime Minister Yitzak Rabin, hero of the Six-Day War of 1967 and a major advocate of peace, was assassinated in 1995 by an extreme right-wing Israeli youth, for much the same reasons that Bernadotte was killed. Rabin's widow, Leah, never absolved the Likud leaders of their responsibility in creating the situation which led to her husband's murder. Israel has had four chiefs of state: Begin, Shamir, Netanyahu and Sharon who are members of Likud. Their implicit "final solution to the Palestinian problem" is not something of which most Americans would approve. According to Pulitzer-Prize winning columnist Seymour Hersch in The Samson Option, under a Likud government in the early 1980s, [the Israeli intelligence agency] Mossad recruited Jonathan Pollard to spy on the United States. Ultimately, the equivalent of 500,000 pages of high-security U.S. documents was transferred by Pollard to Israeli intelligence. Hersh writes, "In fact some of the most important Pollard documents were retyped and then made available to the Soviet Union as a gesture of Israeli good will, at the specific instructions of Yitzhak Shamir, a longtime advocate of closer Israeli-Soviet ties." Then-Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger described the strategic intelligence losses to America from the Pollard spying as the greatest in American history. In September 1982, armed men passed freely through the Israeli lines surrounding the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila in Lebanon. Around 1,000 people were slaughtered. Such was the outrage of the Israeli people that the Likud defense minister of the time, Ariel Sharon, was forced to resign his post. On Oct. 23, 1983, suicide bombers in Beirut killed 241 U.S. Marines in the largest loss of American military personnel in a single day between the first day of the Tet offensive and the attack of 9-11. There is evidence that the Likud government knew in advance an attack was in the works but declined to inform Israel's American friends. The point I am trying to make is that the Likud Party in Israel includes some leaders outside the boundaries of what most Americans would deem to be "friendly." On Sept. 28, 2000, accompanied by hundreds of shock troops, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon "visited" the Dome of the Rock. This was a provocation pure and simple. Sharon has followed with the bulldozing of Palestinian villages, the blockading of others and the use of American helicopters to fire upon crowds. A desperate and militarily impotent subset of the Palestinian population has sent forth its young men in evil and counterproductive acts of terrorism against Israelis, providing Likud's Prime Minister Sharon with an excuse to drop the peace process altogether. Sharon's hope has been to bring us into his conflict with the Arabs. At first blush, it would appear that this has happened. The 9-11 attack on America is something Americans will never forgive or forget. But both President Bush and his secretary of state, Colin Powell, seem disinclined to let Sharon have his way and drive America into a conflict with the Islamic world. Our quarrel is with terrorism, not with the Muslims. For the first time, an American administration is talking seriously about setting up a secure nation-state for the Palestinians. Bush is doing everything possible to assure Muslims worldwide that America is not their enemy. America seeks justice in the Middle East. We Americans are not, as professor Jensen would have it, bloody minded imperialists. We are most happy when we are left alone to get on with our lives in the only land on Earth we want, the United States of America. But sometimes we make mistakes. Our long-term policy in the Middle East has been flawed. Six billion dollars in foreign aid annually to Israel (including $2 billion to Egypt to keep Israel's southwestern border pacific), with no strings attached, do not a wise foreign policy make. It is in the nature of Americans that we learn from our experiences. We mourn our dead, thrash our enemies and try to prevent such tragedies from happening in the future. That appears to be what the Bush administration is doing and doing well. We should all wish it Godspeed. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Thompson is Noah Harding Professor of Statistics at Rice University and a Fellow of the American Statistical Association and the International Statistical Institute. His latest book, Statistical Process Control: the Deming Paradigm and Beyond, has recently been published by Chapman & Hall. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- HoustonChronicle.com -- http://www.HoustonChronicle.com | Section: Viewpoints, Outlook This article is: http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/story.hts/editorial/outlook/1217678 |
The Case Agianst Israel's Enemies by Alan Dershowitz 
Coming from England and particularly from the BBC, MUST BE SEEN VIDEO! ANOTHER MUST SEE VIDEO |