Editor and Researcher Elisa Vandernoot

American Freedom Alliance Weekly Gazette

THE WEEK AT A GLANCE

This Week's Editorial

Is Love All You Really Need?
By Avi Davis

Forty years ago this week the world received the staggering news: Paul McCartney was leaving the Beatles.  Together with the release of   McCartney’s  self-titled solo album on that day in London, came an announcement that he had no further  intention of recording with the group.  A Beatles without Paul in the line up seemed unimaginable.  The Beatles, it became evident to everyone, were dead.

The Beatles had not only dominated the charts on both sides of the Atlantic for better part of a decade.  They had been a leading force in 60s cultural revolution and had shaped an entire generation’s consciousness with their hairstyles, clothing, conduct and musical messages.

What brought about the end of such a successful musical partnership and cultural odyssey?   Countless books and articles have been devoted to that subject but it boils down to infighting, bad business decisions and increasingly strained personal and artistic differences.

Subsequent accounts by group members (poignantly recounted in their own words in The Beatles Anthology) indicated that the rot has set in years before.   Following the death of their manager Brian Epstein in August 1967, the four men had chosen not to appoint a new manager but to steer their own course.   By that time, however, liberated from the social and musical constraints of  their mop top selves and having given up the exhausting rigors of touring, they were all headed in very different directions.

John Lennon was soon to meet Yoko Ono and become immersed in the avant garde and the lure of radical politics; George Harrison was undergoing a spiritual transformation that would draw him deeply into introspection and far from the limelight; Ringo Starr was increasingly anchored to family life and had become a homebody.

It was only Paul McCartney, at the height of his powers as a musician and producer – and the only member of the group  to remain unmarried – who retained the enthusiasm and drive  to propel the group forward.

The tension between their competing drives and needs can be heard in the pastiche nature of 1968’s White Album, released in November, in which the group members often recorded their compositions on their own or with hired help.  The January, 1969  filming of the Let It Be recording sessions was, by the group’s own admission, a disaster, at which George Harrison, incensed over McCartney’s officiousness and Lennon’s seeming indifference, actually left the group.

Still the musical chemistry between the four men remained vigorous, resulting  (in their last eighteen months together) in such extraordinary pop classics as Hey Jude, Something, Here Comes the Sun, Across the Universe and Let It Be.    Not to mention the second side of their final recorded LP Abbey Road, which remains one of the great masterpieces of modern  popular music.

There is no telling what they might have achieved had they had remained together.  Certainly all four men produced great  pop tunes on their own in the years following the break up.   Lennon’s Imagine (1971), McCartney’s Maybe I’m Amazed (1970), Harrison’s My Sweet Lord (1971) and Ringo Starr’s  Photograph (1973)  all stand as equal to almost anything in their Beatles canon.   The reunion of the surviving members, in the early 90s to complete two unfinished Lennon tunes, suggests that they had not lost touch with their musical sympatico.

But now 40 years after they left the scene as a united group, we might ponder their ultimate legacy.   Sunny, sparkling pop, with a hint of humor and broad optimism about life, may be one of them.   The Beatles were working class lads from Liverpool who as individuals never forgot their modest origins and showed no reluctance in celebrating their childhood haunts and antics.   Songs such as Penny Lane, Eleanor Rigby, Strawberry Fields Forever and Julia gave us a window into their lives and the opportunity to meet  some of the characters with who had populated their youth.    A deep loyalty to family and friends threaded its way through their music and imbued it with a sentimentality that was never twee nor forced, but profoundly affecting.  Beatles music was buoyed by a sense of possibility and a celebration of  the wonder, miracle and beauty of life – a euphoric element that can be heard in even their earliest recordings.

Yet there is another sense in which the Beatles’ influence may not have been all positive.  Lennon’s All You Need Is Love, composed in time  for the first satellite television broadcast  in June, 1967, was a statement of the the emerging Beatles credo – that love could cure all societal ills  and heal all problems.  Brotherly love, free love, maternal love,  sex as love, love as sex -  it was all the same.   Little wonder that ‘Love’ then was the title chosen for  the Cirque de Soliel extravaganza which co-opted Beatles songs for a lavish production in Las Vegas.  All four Beatles in their solo careers would harp on love as the world’s panacea.  In fact, almost every one of Ringo Starr’s latter day albums sports a song devoted to peace and love, words now adopted as his motto.

The problem is that love doesn’t always cure all society’s ills and it is dangerous to believe that it can.  The Beatles saw the Cold War, not as a conflict between good and evil, or a contest between democracy and totalitarianism, but as a misunderstanding between individual leaders  (the tongue -in-cheek  Back in the U.S.S.R. notwithstanding);  they saw the cultural revolution which they helped ignite, with its sweeping rejection of adult moral authority and the elevation of teenage sensitivity as a value in itself, as a sign of human progress;  they felt that authority always needs to be questioned and political leaders of  all parties (see Harrison’s Taxman where he expressly names them), not to be trusted.  They failed to accept and appreciate that their own system of government, built after centuries of bloodshed and the struggle between the people and the Crown, was the one thing that guaranteed their freedom to sing and perform largely without constraint or control.

A generation that grew up singing along to Can’t Buy Me Love and I Wanna Hold Your Hand also was deeply affected  by the idea that all war is wrong and that conflict could be avoided through demonstrations of  compassion and sympathy.  But the Cold War was not eventually won through displays of love but determined policies that quarantined the Russian communist regime and threatened aggression when challenged.  Love would certainly not have defeated Nazi Germany or a militarized Japan in the 1940s, nor will it defeat militant Islam.

Perhaps Paul McCartney finally understood this when, in 2001, in response to the 9/11 attacks –  having been in New York at the time of their perpetration, he composed the song Freedom             Read More

Avi Davis is the President of the American Freedom Alliance in Los Angeles. His writings and blog entries can be found at The Intermediate Zone. 

 

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View the best of The Intermediate Zone from last week:

TO BADGER HUNTERS EVERYWHERE: WE WILL ROCK YOU Sunday, April 18, 2010THE COLOR OF HISTORY Saturday, April 17, 2010
LADY GAGA’S SHOCK VALUE Friday, April 16, 2010
THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING DESMOND TUTU Thursday, April 15, 2010
IS LOVE ALL YOU REALLY NEED? Wednesday, April 14, 2010
THE MEMORY OF KATYN Tuesday, April 13, 2010


Avi Davis can be contacted at adavis@americanfreedomalliance.org

NEWS: EUROPE AND AMERICA

Sens. Lieberman, Collins accuse Obama administration of stonewalling probe into Fort Hood massacre-JAMES GORDON MEEK
WASHINGTON - Two top senators on Thursday accused the Obama administration of stonewalling their probe of the Fort Hood slaughter. Senate Homeland Security Committee chairman Joseph Lieberman (I-Conn.) and Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) said they'll subpoena the Justice Department and Pentagon by Monday if documents aren't coughed up fast. The lawmakers want to know who knew Army Maj. Nidal Hasan was chatting up a radical Al Qaeda cleric, and why they didn't tell Hasan's superiors. "The idea [our probe] somehow is going to compromise the ability to prosecute the case is just foolish," Collins complained. She added that the refusal to fork over files shows "an inexplicable determination to stalemate and slow-walk our investigation." Other congressional committees have opted not to probe the killings of 13 people in Hasan's November shooting spree until the end of the joint FBI and Army criminal investigation. But Lieberman said danger looms from waiting. "I worry that terrorist groups and extremist groups may be attempting to compromise other citizens and members of the military," he said. (Nydailynews)

Militant group trains children to kill ‘infidels’-Stewart Bell, National Post
TORONTO -- "Do you know who I will kill with this gun?" a little boy says into the video camera, waving his toy pistol. "Who will you kill with this gun?" the cameraman asks. "The infidels." The scene appears in a new video by the al-Qaeda-linked Al-Shabab that shows the Somali militant group indoctrinating children, some of whom appear to be toddlers. Among those seen in the 28-minute video urging the children to fight and become "martyrs" is a former Toronto resident, Omar Hammami, alias Abu Mansour the American. The video, distributed on the Internet this week by Al-Shabab's propaganda arm, shows a "children's fair" hosted by Al-Shabab leaders. The boys and girls, identified as the children of "martyrs," are given balloons and snacks and rewarded with toy guns for correctly identifying the late leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Musab Al Zarqawi, from a picture. "What brought us together today is the blood of the martyrs," Mr. Hammami tells the children, according to a translation by the SITE Intelligence Group. "So on the necks of the attendants today rests the responsibility of blood. Each of us should assume a part of this responsibility. "As men, we have to continue the fighting started by those heroes. We have to abide by the principles for which those heroes were martyred. They honoured the responsibility on them." (Nationalpost)

Reaching Out Quietly to Muslims in America-ANDREA ELLIOTT
When President Obama took the stage in Cairo last June, promising a new relationship with the Islamic world, Muslims in America wondered only half-jokingly whether the overture included them. After all, Mr. Obama had kept his distance during the campaign, never visiting an American mosque and describing the false claim that he was Muslim as a “smear” on his Web site. Nearly a year later, Mr. Obama has yet to set foot in an American mosque. And he still has not met with Muslim and Arab-American leaders. But less publicly, his administration has reached out to this politically isolated constituency in a sustained and widening effort that has left even skeptics surprised. Muslim and Arab-American advocates have participated in policy discussions and received briefings from top White House aides and other officials on health care legislation, foreign policy, the economy, immigration and national security. They have met privately with a senior White House adviser, Valerie Jarrett, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. to discuss civil liberties concerns and counterterrorism strategy. The impact of this continuing dialogue is difficult to measure, but White House officials cited several recent government actions that were influenced, in part, by the discussions. The meeting with Ms. Napolitano was among many factors that contributed to the government’s decision this month to end a policy subjecting passengers from 14 countries, most of them Muslim, to additional scrutiny at airports, the officials said. (NYT)

The Swiss army recently approved an arrangement for non-Christian soldiers.
The regulations cover both dietary customs and hours of prayer. Muslim soldiers can turn to Mecca, for example, only once a day. This document corresponds to a tradition in the Swiss army. The army has always made exceptions, Martin Bühler, spokesperson for the federal ministry of defense told ATS. He confirmed the information on NZZ am Sonntag. There are already regulation for Jewish soldiers and recruits. In another field, farmers are also entitled to exceptions, when they lack manpower, explains Bühler. Muslim recruits can now report to their commanding officer before starting training that they do not eat pork. In certain recruit academies, Muslims make up practically 10% of the manpower. They will now be offered an alternative menu. They can also arrange for their own food. In addition to the dietary requirements, the new document also regulates the issue of leave during religious festivals and prayer times. As a Muslim in the armed forces can hardly pray five times a day, he must compact it into a single prayer after the end of his duty shift. According to the army, the regulation was developed in collaboration with two Muslims who agreed to this solution. Facilities are available to believers of all religions. In some places the army arranges for a lace of meditation. Otherwise, it's possible to use a classroom. (islamineurope)

Prison is 'not taming' radicals-Gail Champion
Government efforts to de-radicalise jailed Islamic extremists are failing, former inmates have told the BBC.
The prison service employs Muslim chaplains to "challenge and undermine extremist ideology". But former prisoners claim the imams are viewed as "puppets" and allege some have even been assaulted. The Ministry of Justice said it was working "with a number of third-sector partner organisations" to rehabilitate prisoners. Around 200 extremists have been jailed since the 2005 London bombings and some are now due for release from prison and are returning to their communities. Londoner Qasim (not his real name), who was 17 when he was jailed for three and a half years after admitting attending a place used for terrorist training, said the prison imams failed to challenge his core beliefs. "They didn't try to de-radicalise me. There wasn't much of that at all to be honest. There was a prison imam but he only came on a Friday to lead prayers," he told BBC Radio 4. Other former prisoners claimed that the 200-strong prison imam service is not equipped to address the core ideology which led to their crimes. Shah Jalal Hussain, who also lives in London and spent 18 months in prison after being convicted of raising funds to support terrorism, claimed that prison imams were viewed with open hostility and as "puppets of the regime". "A number of times he [the imam] was even attacked physically. He tried to press charges, but dropped them in the end. Prison didn't change my views at all, in fact it made me stronger in my beliefs," he said. (BBC)

Copenhagen: City council approves plans for Grand Mosque
The Copenhagen city council approve the controversial Shia Muslim Grand Mosque in Copenhagen. The city council approved land use plans for building the mosque, with 35 votes from the social Democrats, Social Liberals, Socialist People's Party and Red-Green Alliance The Conservatives and Danish People's Party opposed, while six members of the Liberals and one from the Red-Green Alliance abstained. The approval was expected, but the mosque plans have been a subject of a lot of debate, because the mosque will be built like a traditional mosque with 32 meter high minarets, the first in Denmark, and a blue dome. Additionally, there's been criticism that the Grand Mosque is allegedly financed by the Iranian theocracy. According to the plans, the building will include a prayer area, amphitheaters, conference rooms, overnight accommodations for guest imams and a library. The association behind the new mosque on Vibevey in Copenhagen, Ahlul Biat, promised before the vote that they'll never have a call to prayer, reports radio DR P4. This preempted the mosque critics. A group of Muslims in Roskilde are also planning a new mosque, and they are currently not willing to promise they'll never have a call to prayer.

ACADEMIC FREEDOM

Saudis Coming to a School Near You-Ibn Warraq
Some Americans have been aware of the fact that 15 of the 19 terrorists involved in the September 11, 2001 attack were Saudis. As a report by the Rand Corporation in July 2002 stated, this was “not a coincidence”. The Rand report went on to claim that “The Saudis are active at every level of the terror chain, from planners to financiers, from cadre to foot-soldier, from ideologist to cheerleader. ... Saudi Arabia supports our enemies and attacks our allies.” It went even further, describing Saudi Arabia as "the kernel of evil, the prime mover, the most dangerous opponent" in the Middle East. Saudi Arabia has long had an ambition “to spread Islam to every corner of the earth”, and it is an Islam founded on the teachings of Sheikh Muhammad ibn abd al-Wahhab (1703-1787, ed.). To this end, Saudi Arabia has funded, for the last 30 years, the creations of schools, madrassas, and academies. A book published in 1995 by the Saudi Cultural Mission to the U.S. explains how students are taught early on that their prime allegiance is to Islam, and that they should denounce any system that conflicts with Islamic Law, the Sharia. The students also have an incumbent religious duty to spread Islam throughout the world, a fundamental pillar of the Saudi educational system, even if it means fighting “physically”. (Sappho.dk)

Cultural Marxism in Education: The Gathering Revolt-Chuck Roger
For decades now, American schools corrupted by cultural Marxism have been eroding the moral fiber and judgment skills of schoolchildren. Unless sensible parents and teachers put a stop to the indoctrination, today's free speech-crippling political correctness, tolerance of immorality, and lack of knowledge of our country's birth will continue to grow until America is no more. To stop the indoctrination, parents and teachers must understand how cultural Marxism came to permeate school curricula. In the 1920s and 1930s Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, who argued that traditional values must be obliterated in order to free "oppressed" social groups, called for eliminating social decorum and glorifying perverse behavior in order to destroy the Western middle class and collapse society from within. Translated into today's terminology, the plan prescribed the commandeering of news and entertainment media, religious and financial institutions, organized labor, health care, and education. Gramsci's cultural Marxism began to reach throughout society when Frankfurt University's Institute for Marxism -- renamed the Institute for Social Research and informally called the Frankfurt School -- fled Nazi Germany, took up temporary residence at Columbia University in 1933, and then, during World War II, began using Gramsci-derived "critical theory" to "deconstruct" American society. German-born philosopher-writer Herbert Marcuse and other Marxists carried cultural Marxism beyond Columbia, and progressives adopted the disease as a weapon of "change" to be deployed within the education system. (Americanthinker)

MEDIA BIAS

Jane Mayer’s Disaster-MARC A. THIESSEN
A dishonest, error-filled review provides a textbook case of how the Left smears the CIA and its defenders.
With her recent review of my book, Courting Disaster, Jane Mayer may have done a service to future generations of public servants. The week her article appeared in The New Yorker, former CIA director Mike Hayden handed it out in his class at George Mason University’s School of Public Policy as an example of all that is wrong with intelligence journalism today. Little wonder General Hayden chose Mayer’s piece as a teaching moment. Her review is replete with factual errors, contradictions, and straw men. She repeatedly misrepresents what is said in my book, and leaves out vital details that undermine her arguments. Mayer declares categorically that “the Bush administration’s interrogation policies . . . yielded no appreciable intelligence benefit.” Really? She must not have been listening when Barack Obama’s director of national intelligence, Admiral Dennis Blair, declared: “High value information came from [CIA] interrogations in which those methods were used and provided a deeper understanding of the al Qaeda organization that was attacking this country.” She must have forgotten that when she herself interviewed Leon Panetta, Obama’s CIA director, he told her, “Important information was gathered from these detainees. [The CIA program] provided information that was acted upon.” And she must have forgotten her 2007 interview (also quoted in the Panetta article) with John Brennan (now Obama’s homeland-security advisor), in which she asked him if enhanced interrogation techniques “were necessary to keep America safe,” and he replied: “Would the U.S. be handicapped if the CIA was not, in fact, able to carry out these types of detention and debriefing activities? I would say yes.” (Nationalreview)

NY Times Calls Neighborhood in Jerusalem 'West Bank Settlement'-Tzvi Ben Gedalyahu
(Israelnationalnews.com) The New York Times, in keeping with the Obama adminstration's policy that many Jewish neighborhoods in Jerusalem are "settlements," has corrected a photo caption in which it used that term for a Jewish neighborhood in the city, also stating it is the "West Bank." The mistake was published last Thursday in a photo caption that read, “Ultra-Orthodox Jews last month in Ramat Shlomo, a Jewish settlement in the West Bank,” the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA) reported. The following day, the Times wrote, “A picture caption on Thursday with the continuation of a news analysis article about a shift in the Obama administration's Middle East policy referred incorrectly to Ramat Shlomo, the name of a Jewish housing development that Israel says it is expanding despite objections by the United States and the Palestinian Authority. It is a neighborhood in East Jerusalem, not a settlement in the West Bank.” However, the term “East Jerusalem” also is inaccurate. It refers to all parts of the city that were restored to Israel in the Six-Day War in 1967, and those areas include neighborhoods in southern and northern Jerusalem as well as in the eastern part of the capital. The term "East Jerusalem” also implies that it is a separate political entity, unlike the term “eastern” or “southern” Jerusalem, which refers to an area in relationship to the rest of the city. (INN)

In New Orleans, Media Incuriosity When the News Doesn’t Fit the ‘Narrative’-Frank Ross
The tragedy of the unprovoked attack on Allee Bautsch and Joe Brown in New Orleans recently is intensified by the media’s near-silence on the matter. In another example of its no-enemies-to-the-left mentality, the MSM has gone to ground. Not a word is issued in print condemning the attacks. No reporters are calling members of Congress, the White House or the head of the DNC for comment. No talking heads on television are pulling their chins and wondering if there’s a “climate of hate” loose in the French Quarter. What we have here is effective MSM news blackout on a vicious, and most likely politically motivated attack. Has the fourth estate falling into such a swoon with the progressive talking points, that they too believe like the attackers that Ms. Bautsch was a “lil blond b*tch” and thus deserved the beating she got? Does the local press in New Orleans not want to dig into the works of local progressives and their propensity for violence? Does the complete lack of fitting the narrative of “right-wing violence” keep the press far from watchdog mode and squarely in lapdog mode? Here we have a beautiful 26-year-old woman who has pins and screws keeping her leg together. We have her boyfriend with a broken jaw and nose. At what point does the media become a willing accomplice, through its silence and utter lack of curiosity, in these crimes? For more than a year, we have heard about putative violence from the Tea Party and right-wing homeland security threats, yet so far the only violence has come from the other side [1]. The media has presumptively declared the Tea Partiers racists, yet the proof is strangely lacking [2]. Andrew Breitbart has offered $100,000 for video proving that racist taunts were shouted at members of the Congressional Black Caucus, as alleged by the progressive left and its willing accomplices in the media. The money is still on the table. (Big Journalism)

FREEDOM OF SPEECH

Was Marco Polo an ‘Islamophobe’?-Raymond Ibrahim
If the same exact criticisms being made against Islam today were also made centuries ago, is it reasonable to automatically dismiss them all as “Islamophobic” — that is, as “unfounded fear of and hostility towards Islam,” as the Council on American Islamic Relations [1] would have it? This is the question I often ask myself whenever I read pre-modern writings on Islam. Take that elementary schoolbook hero, Marco Polo and his famous memoirs [2], for example. By today’s standards, the 13th century Venetian merchant would be denounced as a rabid “Islamophobe.” For me, however, his writings contain a far more important lesson — one in continuity — and deserve closer scrutiny. Before examining Polo’s observations, it should be noted that his anthropological accounts are, by and large, objective. That is, unlike simplistic explanations [3] that portray him as a prototypical “Orientalist” with an axe to grind against the “Other” — specifically non-whites and non-Christians — in fact, Polo occasionally portrays the few Christians he encountered in a negative light (such as those of the island of Socotra) and frequently praises non-Christians, including Muslims. For example, he hails the Brahmins of India as being “most honorable,” possessing a “hatred for cheating or of taking the goods of other persons. They are likewise remarkable for the virtue of being satisfied with the possession of one wife (p.298 [4]).” And he refers to one Muslim leader as governing “with justice” (p.317 [5]) and another who “showed himself [to be] a very good lord, and made himself beloved by everybody (p.332 [6]).” That said, Polo clearly had no problem being blunt about Islam (political correctness being nonexistent in the Middle Ages). Whereas he praised the Brahmins for their “hatred for cheating or of taking the goods of other persons,” regarding the Muslims of Tauris, (modern day Iraq), he wrote:
According to their doctrine, whatever is stolen or plundered from others of a different faith, is properly taken, and the theft is no crime; whilst those who suffer death or injury by the hands of Christians, are considered as martyrs. If, therefore, they were not prohibited and restrained by the powers who now govern them, they would commit many outrages. These principles are common to all Saracens (p.63 [7]). (Pajamasmedia)

ANTISEMITISM

Rabbi Abraham Cooper, Testimony
US HOUSE COMMITTEE ON FOREIGN AFFAIRS
International Organizations, Human Rights and Oversight
All of the distinguished presenters this afternoon have shared the shocking statistics—with 100% rise in violent acts against Jews the world over. The Roth Institutes provides the overview:
“…[The 1,129] violent incidents recorded by the Institute in 2009, represented an increase of more than 100 percent over the 2008 figure of 559. In addition, many more hundreds of threats, insults, graffiti signs and slogans and demonstrations featuring virulently anti-Semitic content were registered, sometimes resulting in violence… According to our criteria and data, the highest rise in numbers of violent incidents was registered in 2009 in the UK – 374 compared to 112 in 2008; France recorded 195 violent events compared to 50 in 2008; Canada – 138 compared to 13, and the US – 116 compared to 98. In Germany, the final reports for 2009 may show a slight increase in the overall number of anti-Semitic manifestations, but the community feels threatened − a major incident has greater impact than several minor ones. The figures for Russia and Ukraine declined, from 40 and 38 to 28 and 20, respectively. In most other countries, numbers ranged from 1 to 30, but even low numbers when doubled or tripled compared to previous years might indicate the beginning of a tendency: for instance, from 1 to 6 violent cases in Norway, from 0 to 15 in Brazil, and from 0 to 22 in Austria, where the extreme right scored impressive electoral gains. In the UK, the Jewish community's long-established monitoring system logged over a three-fold increase in anti-Semitic manifestations of all kinds since 1999, and Canada recorded a five-fold rise since the beginning of the decade. With Jewish synagogues, schools and community centers receiving better protection, close to half of violent cases were perpetrated, sporadically and spontaneously, against persons, and about a sixth against private property, far from Jewish institutions.“ (Simonwiesenthalcenter)

UK’s Zionist Federation urges review of banned Kotel ad-Jonny Paul
LONDON – A Jewish community organization is campaigning to overturn the decision by Britain’s advertising watchdog to invalidate the use of a picture of the Kotel, with the Dome of the Rock in the background, for an Israeli tourism advertisement. The UK’s Zionist Federation (ZF) is calling for a review of last week’s decision by the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) saying that there is not “the slightest risk” that the people would be misled by the inclusion of photos. In its ruling, the ASA said last week: “We understood, however, that the status of the occupied territory of the West Bank was the subject of much international dispute, and because we considered that the ad implied that the part of east Jerusalem featured in the image was part of the State of Israel, we concluded that the ad was likely to mislead.” “This adjudication is grossly disproportionate since there is not the slightest risk that the British public would be misled by the inclusion of photos of the Western Wall and the Dome of the Rock into thinking that East Jerusalem was not disputed territory,” the ZF said, in a mailing that called on people to back the campaign. “There is no other way for tourists to see these sights other than through Israel. Indeed Israel took responsibility to support the religious sites of all denominations, a commitment which formed part of the obligations of an agreement with the Palestinian Authority signed in 1995. East Jerusalem was annexed by Israel over 40 years ago. Legally, from Israel’s point of view, it is one city with no difference between East and West,” said the ZF. The ZF said that according to ASA rules, the decision can be reviewed if requested by the advertiser – which in this case is the Israeli Government Tourist Office. (Jpost)

The View From Jerusalem
Why Israel is anxious about the Obama Administration.
Imagine that you're an Israeli perusing the past week's headlines. Senior U.S. military officials have told Congress that Iran may be a year away from producing a bomb's worth of fissile material. Efforts to sanction Iran are again bogged down at the U.N., even as the sanctions are watered down to insignificance. And senior Israeli officials now say that Syria has supplied Hezbollah with Scud-D missiles that can hit every city in Israel with a one-ton warhead to an accuracy of 50 meters. Oh, and now the Obama Administration seems increasingly of the view that Israel is the primary cause of instability in the Middle East. In a press conference last week, President Obama said the U.S. had a "vital national security interest" in resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, on the theory that "when conflict breaks out . . . that ends up costing us significantly in terms of both blood and treasure." The remark, which echoes previous comments by senior Administration and Pentagon officials, is being widely interpreted as presaging a concerted Administration effort to press even harder for an Israeli-Palestinian agreement over territory. After the recent flap over Jewish settlements north of Jerusalem, concern is growing that the U.S. wants Israel to return to its pre-1967 borders. At their narrowest, those borders give Israel a nine-mile margin between the West Bank and the Mediterranean Sea. Israel could conceivably withdraw to something close to that border if it had credible assurances that a future Palestinian state would be peaceful, stable and well-governed. But the Palestinian reality today is that it is riven politically and geographically between two camps, one of which (Hamas) is armed by Iran and sworn to Israel's destruction. (WSJ)

Amnesty slammed for Israel 'apartheid' event-Simon Rocker
Amnesty International has defended its decision to hold a meeting on Israel's policy in east Jerusalem under the title of "Capital Murder", featuring the author of a book on Israeli "apartheid". Journalist Ben White, who published Israeli Apartheid: A Beginner's Guide, last year, is due to speak alongside an East Jerusalem activist at the headquarters of the organisation's UK's branch in London next month. Amnesty UK explained that the title of the meeting referred to "widely-held concerns that Israeli policies over East Jerusalem represent a fatal threat to a fair resolution to the conflict". It added: "Like Ben White, Amnesty is seeking to address issues of institutional and direct discrimination, forced expulsions, displacement and other unfair treatment against Palestinians because they are Palestinians." But Eric Lee, a longstanding critic of Amnesty's stance towards Israel, condemned the event as "completely inappropriate. It commits Amnesty to the idea that Israel is an apartheid state, which is a contemptible lie." Both the title and the invitation to Mr White indicated that Amnesty has "a political agenda", he said.
Amnesty said that the event would be one of a series on Israel and "the occupied Palestinian territories" to take place this year. Mr Lee, who is awaiting the results of his bid to be elected to the organisation's UK section board, also criticised last week's departure of Gita Sahgal, the interim head of Amnesty International's gender unit. (Thejewishchronicle)

A dangerous silence-Ed Koch
Where is the outrage of Israel’s supporters as Obama changes the US-Israel relationship into one of no trust.
I weep as I witness outrageous verbal attacks and distortions on Israel. What makes them all the more painful is that they are being orchestrated by President Barack Obama. For me, the situation today recalls what occurred in 70 CE, when the Roman emperor Vespasian launched a military campaign against the Jewish nation. Masada became the last refuge of the Jewish people, and the Jews of Masada committed suicide rather than let themselves be taken captive. In Rome itself, I have seen the Arch of Titus with the sculpture showing enslaved Jews and the treasures of the Temple including the menora – the symbol of the Jewish state – being carted away as booty. Oh, you may say, that is a far fetched analogy. Please hear me out. The most recent sacking of the Old City of Jerusalem – its Jewish Quarter – took place under the Jordanians in 1948 in the first war between the Jews and at least five Muslim states – Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and Iraq. At that time, Jordan conquered east Jerusalem and the West Bank and expelled every Jew living in the Jewish Quarter, destroying every building, including the synagogues, and expelling from every part of Judea and Samaria every Jew living there, so that for the first time in thousands of years, the old walled city and the adjacent West Bank were judenrein – a term used by the Nazis to indicate the forced removal or murder of all Jews. (Jpost)

Irish Union Wants Boycott on Israel; FM Says ‘Siege’ is Medieval-Tzvi Ben GedalyahuIsraelnationalnews.com) Irish trade union leaders and its Foreign Minister have issued separate statements that call for a “boycott” of Israel while the Jewish State’s counterterrorist sanctions against Hamas were termed a “medieval siege.” Foreign Minister Michael Martin recently wrote in The New York Times, “I genuinely believe that the medieval siege conditions being imposed on the people of Gaza are unacceptable.” He did not refer to Hamas' smuggling of advanced weapons from Iran and Syria. His comments have given encouragement for the Irish Congress of Trade Unions to pursue a boycott against Israel, which Martin says he opposes. The ICTU held a special conference to examine how it can implement a boycott but heard Martin address them on Friday, “The government does not agree with or support any form of boycott which would be completely inimical to the frank and honest dialogue we have always pursued with the Israeli government.” Although he did not comment on Gaza-based attacks on Israel in the NY Times article, he told the union that they are “completely unjustified, indiscriminate and deadly attacks and added, “Hamas must also cease the insidious practice of kidnapping. I again call on Hamas to release the young Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit." While saying he opposes boycott, he nevertheless backed an embargo on Jewish products made in Judea and Samaria, which the EU does not recognize as part of Israel. Trade union president Jack O’Connor defended a total boycott of Israel and insisted it does not represent “hostility to the People of Israel” but rather is motivated by “a sense of obligation.” (INN)

TERRORISM, security and policy

Suicide bombs kill 50 in Pakistan-Times Online
Up to 50 people have been killed in a series of suicide bombings in southern Pakistan over the weekend. This morning a suicide bomber killed seven people and wounded 26 when he rammed a truck loaded with explosives into a police station in the town of Billitung, in the Kohat region on the border with Afghanistan. The vehicle was carrying around 550lb (250kg) of explosives, according to police. Twin suicide attacks in the neighbouring town of Kohat on Saturday killed 41 refugees from the Orakzai tribal area, where the Pakistani Army is conducting an operation against militants. The victims were queuing to register for food and relief supplies. The bombers were men disguised in burkas, police said. They struck within minutes of each other, with the second blast the bigger and more deadly. This morning’s blast damaged the wall of the police station and destroyed several neighbouring shops. Tents were draped over the police station to prevent people from being able to see the damage inside. Local security forces suspect that the attack was the work of the Taleban. Responsibility for Saturday’s attack was claimed by the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi al-Alami group, a militant Sunni Muslim organisation that targets the Shia minority The United Nations said that it was temporarily suspending work helping displaced people in Kohat and neighbouring Hangu as a result of the attack. The tempo of the operations in Orakzai has picked up since March, with frequent aerial bombardment. Almost 50,000 people have fled the area in the last month. (Timesonline.co.uk)

Muslim converts raise fears in Switzerland-Julia Slater
Some young Swiss converts to Islam are a potential threat to the country’s security, according to the head of the Migration Office.
Alard du Bois-Reymond was speaking about the Central Islamic Council (IZRS), founded by young converts in the western town of Biel. The group strongly denies his assertion. Du Bois-Reymond told the German-language newspaper NZZ am Sonntag that such converts include people who want a “radically different society” and pointed to examples in Britain and Germany where such demands had provided “fertile ground for potential terrorists”. The IZRS was also the subject of a recent highly critical article in the German-language magazine Weltwoche, which described its leader, Nicolas Blancho, as “the most dangerous Islamist in Switzerland”. It described his preaching based on the strict form of Islam practised in Saudi Arabia and quoted examples of intolerance towards women and non-Muslims. One of the IZRS’s long term aims is certainly to establish schools where conflicts that some Muslims currently face in public schools – such as obligatory swimming lessons for girls at mixed primary schools – would not arise. But the accusations of terrorism are roundly rejected by IZRS spokesman, Qaasim Illi. There is no parallel with converts in other countries who have been involved in terrorist acts, he told swissinfo.ch. “Those converts, did they speak in public, did they work for some kind of ideal or political aim which they discussed in public? Of course not. “And that’s the point: they are people who went to some sort of back street mosque, far away from the media. We are just the opposite: from the beginning we said we would address the public. Our methods are based on the rule of law, not on terrorism,” he said. (Swissinfo.ch)

Backup Plans for Iran-PETER SPIEGEL
Gates Sought New Ways to Curb Tehran's Nuclear Program
As the White House's campaign to impose international sanctions against Iran extends months beyond deadlines, some U.S. officials are pushing for other options to curb Tehran's nuclear program. In one of the clearest signs of the growing concern among top Obama officials over how the U.S. should respond to Iran's accelerating nuclear program, Defense Secretary Robert Gates in January wrote a three-page memo warning that the U.S. needed new policies to deal with Iran's progress toward developing a nuclear weapon. According to a U.S. official who read the memo, it raised new concerns about how to verify if Iran had developed enough technology to build a nuclear bomb and how to contain Tehran if it became a nuclear power. Mr. Gates's memo came amid rising concerns in the administration that time was running out for efforts to stop Iran from becoming a nuclear power. Senior U.S. officials have been engaged in a debate about whether to push for tough sanctions against Iran in the United Nations Security Council—which have faced opposition from countries such as China—or to go for a quick U.N. resolution with limited effectiveness. The Gates memo, the existence of which was reported Sunday by the New York Times, sent ripples through the upper reaches of the administration, according to the U.S. official. "Did it stir up a bunch of new meetings and PowerPoint presentations? No," said the U.S. official. "But a memo from the secretary of defense about anything carries weight, and I think the Gates memo had the desired effect." (WSJ)

Ohio: Muslim arrested after AK 47s, semiautomatic rifle, 1,000 pounds of ammo, pipe bomb materials found in home
COLUMBUS, Ohio — Federal officials said on Friday that a large amount of weapons were found at the home of a man who allegedly stole the identity of someone bound to a wheelchair and suffering from cerebral palsy, and used it to try to flee the country. Abdullah Mohammed Muslim, formerly known as Johnnie Clagg, faces felony gun charges, 10TV's Andy Hirsch reported. Muslim, 38, allegedly stole personal information from people and tired to use it to get a passport to leave the country. Police stopped Muslim's vehicle on the city's southwest side in October. He was wanted on charges of identity theft and trying to falsify a passport.
After being arrested, federal agents went to his home and said they found an arsenal inside, Hirsch reported. Investigators said they found two AK 47s, a 9mm semiautomatic rifle and more than 1,000 rounds of ammunition, pipe bomb materials, a ballistic face mask and vest, and a flak jacket. Muslim's attorney said his client traveled from Columbus to tribal areas of Pakistan and that he converted to Islam while spending time in prison. He said his client has no ties to any terror organizations.
Federal authorities agreed, saying this was not a case of terrorism, but they would not elaborate on a motive or other details in the case until he is sentenced, Hirsch reported. Muslim remained in the Franklin County Jail. A sentencing date in federal court has not yet been set. (10tv.com)

All the News That’s Fit to Leak-Gabriel Schoenfeld
(This article orginally appeared in the Weekly Standard)
Was the Bush administration’s Terrorist Surveillance Program a violation of the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which forbids domestic wiretapping without a warrant? And was the New York Times’s decision to reveal the existence of the highly classified program, against warnings that it would gravely damage national security, an act of journalistic heroism and a powerful blow on behalf of civil liberties? Affirmative answers to both questions have been the standard liberal line ever since the Times broke the story of the NSA wiretapping program in December 2005. With a verdict on March 31 in the al Haramain Islamic Foundation case, the Times is claiming a stamp of approval for its actions from the courts. In a thunderous editorial, the paper declared that federal judge Vaughn Walker’s decision means that the NSA program was not only founded upon “spurious, often ludicrous, claims of national security” but that it was also flatly illegal: When the Bush administration, in investigating the terrorist ties of the al Haramain foundation, “failed to get a warrant to wiretap, it broke the law.” Yet the facts of the al Haramain litigation are not as uncomplicated as the Times would have it. They are a reminder both of the terrorist danger we face and our vulnerabilities as an open society trying to counter it. The episode is a classic example of lawfare, with a terrorist-supporting outfit turning the rule of law and due process against us. After September 11, the al Haramain Islamic Foundation, a “charity” based in Saudi Arabia with branches in Afghanistan, Somalia, Pakistan, Nigeria, and a number of other equally disagreeable locales, was banned worldwide under the strictures of a U.N. Security Council resolution aimed at cutting off support for “al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden and/or the Taliban wherever located.” (Hudsoninstitute)

The Kids Are Alright-ANDREW C. McCARTHY
Holder cows Republican senators into silence on the Gitmo Bar and the CIA.
So now we know why the self-proclaimed “most transparent administration in American history” continues to stonewall rather than reveal the official responsibilities of Justice Department lawyers who volunteered their services to America’s enemies during wartime. Like any good Democrat, Eric Holder says he is doing it for the children. The attorney general bristled during Senate testimony on Wednesday that he was “not going to allow these kids” to have their reputations dragged “through the mud.” The “kids” coddled in this touching paternal display include 45-year-old Tony West, who now supervises hundreds of lawyers as chief of DOJ’s Civil Division. It’s been 17 years since Tony the Kid first served as an influential official in the Clinton Justice Department. From there, he went on to nine-year stint as a hot-shot partner at a prestigious San Francisco law firm — in his spare time running both Barack Obama’s lavish presidential campaign in California and the defense of John Walker Lindh, the “American Taliban” convicted on terrorism charges after making war on his country. They grow up so quickly, don’t they? Kids like 40-year-old Neal Katyal, the current deputy solicitor general who, as Byron York observes, was a Georgetown law professor when he volunteered to represent Salim Hamdan, Osama bin Laden’s personal driver and bodyguard, who was apprehended transporting missiles in Afghanistan. Then there’s precocious 38-year-old Jennifer Daskal. Over Holder’s dead body will anyone drag her reputation through the mud, insinuating that she spent her pre-DOJ years cheerleading for terrorists and running down her country when, in point of fact, Daskal spent her pre-DOJ years . . . cheerleading for terrorists and running down her country.

GLOBAL GOVERNANCE AND RADICAL ENVIRONMENTALISM

Climate scientists at East Anglia University cleared by inquiry-
Ben Webster, Environment Editor
Climate scientists at the centre of the row over stolen e-mails acted with integrity and made no attempt to manipulate their research on global temperatures, an external inquiry has found. Their research was, however, misrepresented by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which failed to reflect uncertainties the scientists had reported concerning the raw temperature data. An inquiry panel of leading scientists, nominated by the Royal Society, said that the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit may not have used the best methods for analysing temperature records. The unit had also failed to store all its data and keep full records of exactly what it had done, preventing other scientists from checking all its findings. But after interviewing the unit’s scientists and studying 11 of their reports, the panel concluded: “We found them to be objective and dispassionate in their view of the data and their results, and there was no hint of tailoring results to a particular agenda. “Their sole aim was to establish as robust a record of temperatures in recent centuries as possible.” (Timesonline.co.uk)

The EPA Monster-Alan Caruba
Among the legacies of Richard M. Nixon, famed for the Watergate scandal that forced his resignation, it should be noted that he created the Environmental Protection Agency. There was no vote in Congress. He did it with an executive order. Today the EPA has an annual budget of $9 billion and some 18,000 employees.
Not satisfied with the authorized powers given it to ensure clean air and water, the EPA has never ceased to seek expanded powers, culminating soon with a battle over whether it can regulate carbon dioxide (CO2) as a “pollutant.” Labeled a “greenhouse gas,” in the eyes of the EPA it is an “endangerment” to the health of humanity in general and Americans in particular. CO2 is as vital to all life on planet Earth in the same way as oxygen. It is what plants consume in order to grow, much as oxygen is essential for life among living creatures that, in turn, are dependent on vegetation, crops, for their sustenance. It’s a neat little cycle that has existed since life emerged on Earth. If the EPA gains the power to regulate CO2, it will have the power to regulate the activities of every individual and the entire economy of the nation. Traditional sources of energy, with the exception of nuclear and hydroelectric power, involve the emission of CO2. A modern society cannot function without CO2 emissions, but they have nothing to do with global warming because there is NO global warming. CO2 represents a mere 386 parts per million of the Earth’s atmosphere. Humans are responsible for 3 percent of its generation; Mother Nature produces the other 97 percent. And the EPA wants to regulate ALL of it! (Familysecuritymatters)

Climategate: a scandal that won’t go away-Christopher Booker
From Macbeth to Watergate, it’s not the act that leads to nemesis, but the attempts to 'trammel up the consequence’ , writes Christopher Booker.
If you were faced with by far the biggest bill of your life, would you not want to be confident that there was a very good reason why you should pay it? That is why we need to know just how far we can trust the science behind the official view that the world is threatened with catastrophe by global warming – because the measures proposed by our politicians to avert this supposed disaster threaten to transform our way of life out of recognition and to land us with easily the biggest bill in history. (The Climate Change Act alone, says the Government, will cost us all £18 billion every year until 2050.) Yet in recent months, as we know, the official science on which all this rests has taken quite a hammering. Confronted with all those scandals surrounding the “Climategate” emails and the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the political and academic establishments have responded with a series of inquiries and statements designed to show that the methods used to construct the official scientific case are wholly sound. But as was illustrated last week by two very different reports, these efforts to hold the line are themselves so demonstrably flawed that they are in danger of backfiring, leaving the science more questionable than ever. The first report centred directly on the IPCC itself. When several of the more alarmist claims in its most recent 2007 report were revealed to be wrong and without any scientific foundation, the official response, not least from the IPCC’s chairman, Dr Rajendra Pachauri, was to claim that everything in its report was “peer-reviewed”, having been confirmed by independent experts. (Telegraph.co.uk)

SCIENCE, SOCIETY AND CULTURE

New Tools to Detect Alzheimer's-SHIRLEY S. WANG
Avid, Bayer, General Electric Push Agents to Spot the Disease From Brain Scans
Companies specializing in medical imaging are pushing to develop chemical agents to detect Alzheimer's disease from brain scans, a process that one day may make it possible to predict who will suffer from the progressive ailment before symptoms appear. Avid Radiopharmaceuticals Inc., a tiny imaging company based in Philadelphia, and multinationals like Bayer AG and General Electric Co., are among those working on imaging compounds to help doctors spot signs of the memory-robbing disease. Such chemical compounds would be a first of their kind and would help their makers tap into the multibillion dollar Alzheimer's diagnostic market. Currently, Alzheimer's disease can be diagnosed definitively only by taking samples of brain tissue after death and looking for signs of sticky substances called amyloid plaques. An accumulation of such plaque between brain cells is thought to contribute to the disease. However, whether the plaque causes Alzheimer's is much debated. The imaging compounds under development are molecules with radioactive markers attached, which bind to amyloid plaques. After patients are injected with the compound, regions of the brain take on color under scanning devices, showing where the chemical has adhered and presumably indicating Alzheimer's-related plaque. (WSJ)

A Shakespeare Scholar Takes on a 'Taboo' Subject-Jennifer Howard
James Shapiro explores the authorship question—and why few in academe will touch it
The most startling thing about Contested Will, James Shapiro's new book about the Shakespeare authorship debate, is not what it concludes about who really wrote Hamlet and King Lear. Shapiro, a professor of English at Columbia University, is an unrepentant Stratfordian, a firm believer that William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon created the plays and poems associated with his name. What will surprise fellow Stratfordians—as well as doubters who want to dethrone Shakespeare and install Christopher Marlowe, Edward de Vere (the Earl of Oxford), Francis Bacon, or another contender in his place—is Shapiro's argument that the different camps have more in common than they admit. As Shapiro sees it, Stratfordians, Marlovians, Oxfordians, Baconians, and the rest share an anachronistic insistence on what he calls "reading the life out of the works." In other words, they try to find autobiographical details in the plays and poetry that will confirm the true identity of the author. Among mainstream Shakespeare scholars, Contested Will may be disconcerting for another reason. The book, just out from Simon & Schuster, argues that the authorship question is the one subject that they have deliberately neglected. "More than one fellow Shakespearean was disheartened to learn that I was committing my energies to it," Shapiro writes in the prologue, "as if somehow I was wasting my time and talent, or worse, at risk of going over to the dark side. I became increasingly interested in why this subject remains virtually taboo in academic circles, as well as in the consequences of this collective silence." Shapiro has not, in fact, gone over to the "dark side." Contested Will includes a chapter on why he continues to believe that the Stratford candidate is the genuine article. But rehashing the authorship debate is not the purpose of the book. It does not attempt an exhaustive review of the merits of the competing claims. As Shapiro explicitly says, what interests him is not what people think about the authorship question but why they think it and how their personal and historical circumstances help shape that. (Thechronicleofhighereducation)

Revisiting the Suicide Doctor-Amy Chozick
HBO makes a house call, with Al Pacino as Jack Kevorkian
A character nicknamed "Dr. Death" was probably bound to get a movie one of these days. "You Don't Know Jack," produced by HBO and premiering April 24 on the pay-cable channel, stars Al Pacino as Jack Kevorkian, the controversial Michigan doctor who helped some 130 terminally or chronically ill patients die during the 1990s. The debate over physician-assisted suicide has been recently overshadowed by health care, and the abortion wars continue. But back then, the right-to-die issue raged, with Mr. Kevorkian at its center. He was convicted of second-degree murder in 1999 after sending a videotape of himself euthanizing a terminally ill man to "60 Minutes." He also lost his medical license. Released from prison in 2007, Mr. Kevorkian sees the film as a way to revive the discussion. "I've always said someone would have to go to prison before anything would happen on this issue," he says over coffee at the Four Seasons hotel in New York Thursday. HBO used some of the former doctor's archives to make the film, which was five years in the making. It's already been criticized in the assisted death community, which thinks Mr. Kevorkian's tactics and notoriety hurt the movement. The HBO team says "You Don't Know Jack" is no polemic. "You lay out what in fact took place. You don't want to recolor it or make it something it's not," says director Barry Levinson, whose films include "Diner" and "Rain Man." The controversial Kevorkian story is perfect fodder for HBO, which lives on buzz rather than ratings and advertising. "It feels like we're taking on the last taboo," says Len Amato, president of HBO Films. The incendiary material also helped the TV network attract Mr. Levinson, who says movie studios would shy away from the topic. (WSJ)

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