At the recent Annapolis meeting, behind closed doors, up close and personal, the assembled Arab foreign ministers refused to shake hands with Tzipi Livni, Israel’s Foreign Minister. She asked her Arab counterparts, especially her Saudi counterpart, why they did not want to shake hands with her. “I am not plague-ridden” Livni said. According to the Dutch minister, all the Arab ministers backed away from her as if “she were Dracula’s sister.” According to Fern Sidman, an unnamed Israeli source confirmed that PRESS HERE “the Saudis refused to shake hands and the Syrians refused to say anything nice.” (Of course, another unnamed Israeli source also told Sidman that “at least they came to the meeting”.) These details are also contained in the Washington Post and in Guysen International News.

My friend and colleague, Dr. Nancy H. Kobrin, had only three, chilling words for me about this: “Zainab Bint al-Harith”. That is the name of the Jewish woman long and falsely alleged to have poisoned the prophet Mohammed.

In addition, the United States, Israel’s strongest ally, apparently just circulated the Annapolis resolution to members of the UN Security Council–but without first showing anything to Israel’s Ambassador, Dan Gillerman who was, at the time, busy celebrating the General Assembly’s November 29th, 1947 resolution that created a Jewish state. What a difference sixty years can make! (These details are contained in the New York Sun).

Livni and Gillerman have just both been publicly shunned. Israeli diplomats will have to grow bionic skins in order not to suffer the effects of such interpersonally cruel behavior. But look: Israelis have been kidnapped, blown up and wounded for life by Islamist terrorists. It can always be worse but the two kinds of assaults are intimately connected. The fact that the world allows the state sponsors of terrorism to isolate and shame Israeli diplomats also allows and even encourages terrorist fanatics to continue their murdererous rampage. One breeds the other; this is the cycle of violence.

Israel’s civilian supporters have also been shunned, both behind closed doors and in public. May we all continue to bear this mistreatment with honor, patience, grace, and faith. And, as we count our blessings, let us also remember that Israel is a nuclear power whose military prowess has already proved essential in the battle against Iran and Syria–and that Saudi Arabia is also well known for refusing to extend its hand when it comes to aiding other Muslims.

The significance and consequences of the Annapolis meeting are far worse than I have so far suggested. But many people understand public slights more than they understand diplomatic negotiations; however, for those who primarily focus on the latter, let me stand on the shoulders of others and point out that 1) Israel- and Jew-hating Arabists in the State Department have won one more round; President Bush refuses to publicly criticize the Saudis and has also failed to appoint diplomats who might do so privately.

Worse: As former Minister Natan Sharansky PRESS HERE has just pointed out, while Iran may be perceived as a threat to the stability of Arab national despots, democracy is perceived as the second biggest threat to their continued rule. Sharansky also notes that Mahmoud Abbas has absolutely no power. Thus, what is the point of forcing Israel to negotiate with the powerless diplomat when the United States has failed to bring Hamas, which controls Gaza, to the table in Annapolis?

In addition, Ted Belman of Israpundit has sent me Carolyn Glick’s rather ominous report. Apparently, and not coincidentally, U.S. Ambassador Richard Jones just had an unprecedented meeting with the President of the Israeli Supreme Court, Dorit Beinisch, in which Jones demanded that the Israeli Court “interpret Israeli law in a prejudicial manner in order to demonize Israeli opponents of Palestinian statehood and the ethnic cleansing of Jews from Judea and Samaria.”

According to David Bedein in Frontpage, Prime Minister Olmert “stood down from his opposition to international supervision of the agreement’s implementation. Nothing remains of the principle established by Yitzhak Rabin, which was maintained by all Israeli prime ministers, that only Israel would decide whether the Palestinian side had met its commitments.”

NEWSFLASH! Four days later, on December 3, 2007, Benny Avni, in the New York Sun, reported that Zalmay Khalilzad, America’s Ambassador to the United Nations, had seriously “fumbled” in his attempt to have the UN Security Council sign onto the “internalization implementation” clause; both the Palestinians and the Israelis had already decided to “withdraw (their) own resolution proposal.” Thus, and happily, David Bedein (and everyone else) was wrong about this. In Avni’s view, Khalilzad “ended up with a big fat fumble for American diplomacy.”

Finally, according to Itamar Marcus and Barbara Crook HERE, one day after Annapolis, Abbas’s Palestinian Authority re-broadcast a map in which Israel was completely absent and the Palestinian state occupied what is now Tel Aviv, Ber-Sheva, Jerusalem, and Haifa.

And he’s the “good guy.”

Here’s what I have to say to the Israeli people: Vote Olmert out of office as quickly as possible. Do not, God forbid, assassinate him. President Beinisch: How dare Mr. Jones tell you what to do? Tell him to go to Hell–which is right next door in Sudan, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia. To Jews and to our supporters and to freedom-loving people everywhere: Hang in, hang on, trust no one. Be prepared for anything.

This year, summer eerily, languorously, lingered on. We enjoyed balmy days in New York City clear through November. Even now, the trees outside my window remain in full, green leaf. But winter is also here and the days are becoming bitterly cold and windy.

This is the first time in seven years that I have remained silent about so-called “peace” initiatives in the Middle East. What can I possibly add to what has already been said about the meeting in Annapolis? Or, for that matter, about the witch-hunt against AIPAC and the continued, ghastly imprisonment of Jonathan Pollard?

What more can I say about Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood? Or about Jew-hatred, Israel-bashing, anti-Semitism, the United Nations, or the Islamification of America which is now fully underway? Why should I write yet another piece about the French Intifada which seems to have turned into an annual uprising? Must I really keep repeating myself about how western intellectuals have betrayed the Jews, the truth, and democracy by their glamorization of terrorists, tyrants, and totalitarianism? What more can I say about Islamic Gender Apartheid? The reality outpaces my human indignation and nothing that anyone writes seems to stop it–at least, not immediately.

Well, I may not have to keep repeating myself. Others have gradually taken up many of these cries. Luckily, some people do not mind repeating themselves even when it seems to make little difference–or until it makes all the difference.

But also, the information is in. Everyone’s mind is made up. No one will budge. The polarization in America is written in stone. People either read The Weekly Standard and the Wall Street Journal–or the Nation and the New York Times. Few read all four publications. What’s worse: Since writers can only publish regularly if they, too, have implacably “chosen sides,” writers self-censor in order to remain published. We are all the poorer for it.

Even when the New York Times publishes articles which document that the “surge” seems to have worked in Iraq, that Iraqis are actually returning home, they do not connect the dots. They do not say that their earlier “yellow journalism” denunciations of the war may have been at least slightly wrong. And, the conservative media has a hard time acknowledging that many of its current, burning issues have been pioneered by–you guessed it! Second Wave feminists. Here, I am thinking about the following issues: trafficking and female sexual slavery, the sexual abuse of children, including incest, the necessity for a “law and order” approach to rape and domestic violence, but there are many more such issues.

Thus, I am grateful to the internet and to all the websites and blogs that speak in a million voices and that fly right under the polarizing radar.

Perhaps I should have titled this piece “Ode to Cyberspace.” Perhaps that’s a future blog. But, I am also weary, the year is ending, it is cold, and all the things that matter to me and to the well-being of so many seem to be frozen stuck.

Yesterday, I wrote a glowing piece about a glowing event: My son’s wedding. But let it not be said that I have deserted my post as a champion worrier. I remain on duty about:

The meeting in Annapolis which is hard upon us; Saudi Arabia’s hot and poisonous war against Israel and the West–a war that we ourselves are funding by our enormous dependence on Saudi oil; the insanely vindictive punishment meted out to a young female victim of gang rape in the Saudi Kingdom; the recent Islamist mob assault upon and expulsion of Bangladeshi feminist author, Taslima Nasrin, from two cities: Kolkata and Jaipur, in India; and the ongoing danger that both Wafa Sultan and Aayan Hirsi Ali must live with in America.

I recently worked with both Sultan and Hirsi Ali. Sultan is an intense and passionate speaker. She is also a tiny woman whose husband hovers protectively nearby. She wrings her hands about her security. Hirsi Ali is linguistically brilliant and cool-witted and cuts a somewhat hilarious (although sobering) picture since she travels with a posse, rock-star style. When I first met her, she was surrounded by four assistants from the American Enterprise Institute, three or four learned friends from Holland, and at least two indoor and possibly two outdoor security guards.

Alas, as everyone now knows, although Hirsi Ali is a Dutch citizen and a former member of the Dutch Parliament, the Dutch stopped funding her security. The question of whether private or governmental bodies should now undertake her security (and the security of all those who protest and resist Islamist totalitarianism and who have had fatwas issues against them) is also hard upon us.

Should private citizens take up alms to pay for Hirsi Ali’s security? Should Wafa Sultan, Taslima Nasrin, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali live and work together? Should the international community set up a sovereign state composed of dissidents and fund an army, navy, and airforce for them–because trust me, before this latest Islamist jihad abates, we may need an Israel-like state for anti-Islamist dissidents.

What do you think? Private funding for dissidents, both for their self-defensive lawsuits and for their security? Or should sovereign democratic governments fund their lawsuits and their security?

In the midst of my unshakable preoccupation with Hell, I suddenly found myself flung back into the Garden of Earthly Delights, where for six full hours I experienced holiness right here on earth. Time stood still, time no longer existed: a small, sure sign of eternity.

Ambassadors from many universes all came together to celebrate a peaceable, celestial, wedding. I felt as if we were participating in an episode of Star Wars–except we were not actors and the gathering was both real and yet beyond reality. So many different kinds of people were there. Jews, Muslims, Christians, Buddhists, pagans, and atheists, feminists and traditionalists, leftists, and rightists, gay and straight, and people with no overriding view of the events of the day whatsoever.

Very religious Jews rejoiced together with Jews whose practices are different than their own. This is uncommon, miraculous. The fiercest of atheists lovingly participated in the most traditional of religious rituals. People partied together whose ancestors hailed from Yemen, Israel, Italy, Turkey, Afghanistan, Russia, Romania, Poland, France, England, Ireland, Sweden, Belgium, Spain–and that’s just off the top of my head.

If only all humanity could do likewise, what a lovely world it might be. At least there would be more heavenly oases amidst Hell.

Last night, my beloved son Ariel married his beloved soul-mate Shannon, (”Shanie”) a woman whom he has known and treasured for exactly nine years. They alone planned each detail of this celebration. They chose the rabbi, Dr. Judith Hauptman, who just happens to be the first woman professor of Talmud at the Jewish Theological Seminary. (Trust me: This is a Big Deal). They expanded the traditional seven blessings to be recited under the chuppah (or weddding canopy) into nine blessings. Cantor Sam Levine of the East Midwood Jewish Center chanted the blessings in Hebrew which were also said aloud in English by carefully chosen others. Ariel and Shannon chose the kosher caterer, (Fusion), the location, (Bridgewaters at the South Street Seaport with a view of the water and the ever-amazing Brooklyn Bridge), the music, photographer, flowers–and they created the most interesting invitation in the form of a video.

The Ring Ceremony

There he was, the tiny being whom I gave birth to only yesterday, standing tall in a tuxedo, suspenders, and scull-cap, every inch a man, a husband, and a loving son. There she stood, the love of his life, beautiful in a carefully structured “princess style” white strapless dress with an elaborate and graceful mermaid-back. The two of them glowed, they were incandescent, their joy radiated through all who assembled there. We responded, or rather we vibrated Love! Happiness! Pleasure!

The Bride and Groom’s First Dance

Many miracles took place. Family members who had only recently refused to break bread together danced with each other. Nine year old boys with whom Ariel used to play had become grown men who now towered over me. Both Ariel and Shannon became the archetypal Bride and Groom; they were larger or other than merely themselves and as such, managed to magically expand their love for each other to include us all. They were young and yet mature, wise beyond their days.

My ex-husband, Ariel’s father, has not spoken to me for at least fifteen years, maybe longer than that. Thus, as I stood there trying to figure out how I could greet him and his extended Israeli family–suddenly, as if they composed a delegation, they were upon me; all together, they had formally come to wish me Mazal Tov! I kissed each one: him, his wife, their two children, his mother, Ariel’s grandmother, his sister (Ariel’s aunt) and her husband, his wife’s sister and her husband.

Later, I walked Ariel’s eighty-seven year old grandmother, Sarah, (whom I have always adored) from table to table to introduce her to some of my friends. I knew she was related to my Rabbi’s wife, who is also my dear friend Chai Shmidman. They both trace their roots back to the Bal Shem Tov, the founder of Jewish mysticism. I stood and beamed as they worked it all out.

By the end of the evening, I had spoken to my ex-husband four times. Ariel has no memory of our ever having interacted with each other outside of a courtroom. Thus, Ariel smiled and grinned and finally pronounced that this was “crazy,” meaning “far out”, good, unbelievable. At the end, on his own, Ariel’s father came over and formally kissed me goodbye. I returned the kiss.

Together, finally, we were pronouncing that what we two had created with God’s help was really, really good.

It is traditional when Jewish parents marry off their youngest child (in my case, my youngest child is also my oldest child) that they sit in the center of a circle with a garland of flowers on their heads and receive flowers from all their dancing and singing guests. Pearl Berkowsky, Shannon’s sweet, kind, and beautiful mother, arranged this. The ritual is called “The Mazinka”. Therefore, together with Pearl and her husband, Shannon’s father Harvey, I sat in the center of just such a circle, beaming like a five-year old at her birthday party–or so a friend described me. I wore the wreath of baby’s breath until bed-time and was so reluctant to remove it. It was so fragrant, it smelled like eternal springtime and I was reluctant to return to life at a less elevated level.

The Mazinka

There is so much more to tell but I will stop now. I want to congratulate and thank the newlyweds. What a gift they gave to us all. It will sustain me forever.

I was once held captive in Afghanistan. But before I write about this for us, I first want to convey the nature of the High Adventure upon which I had embarked. One way to do so is to share this review of Rosanne Klass’s reissued memoir about Afghanistan which I just published in City Journal on November 21st, 2007.

Land of the High Flags: Afghanistan When the Going Was Good, by Rosanne Klass (Odyssey, 358 pp., $19.95)

The history of Afghanistan, once known as the “crossroads of the world,” is riven with brutal invasions and world abandonment. Barbarism, slavery, ruthlessness, and disease existed side by side with the country’s enormous physical beauty and the elaborate, formalized hospitality of its people. Conquerors razed Afghanistan’s extraordinary ancient cities and exquisite court palaces—Herat, Ghazni, and Balkh. Genghis Khan, and later Tamerlane, slaughtered significant portions of the Afghan population and returned to the country to conduct raids on the survivors, leaving precious little in the way of art or architecture. Alexander the Great also conquered Afghanistan on his way to India, though his soldiers tended to leave behind descendants rather than smoldering ruins.

Most Afghan kings were brutal to their own people, who were, after all, a permanently armed male population, always ready to fight for village, tribe, or warlord against central governments, including those of native kings and would-be conquerors. Even the Victorian-era British learned that Afghanistan could not be tamed; so, too, did the Soviet Union. America’s intervention in Afghanistan, though based not on colonialism or aggression but rather on justified political goals, has failed in its own ways.

Yet despite the continued dangers of terrorism and political chaos, the land continues to attract Western traders, travelers, teachers, and do-gooders, with its real and imagined nobility, its charming hospitality, and its wondrous geographical beauty. It has also attracted its share of writers. Rudyard Kipling conveys the indigenous nature of Afghan barbarism (along with the indigenous foolishness of Westerners in search of gold and glory) in his story “The Man Who Would Be King.” In 2002, an intrepid Scotsman, Rory Stewart, published an account of his extraordinary walking trip through Afghanistan, The Places in Between. The next year saw the appearance of Norwegian author Asne Seierstad’s The Bookseller of Kabul, which describes her life with an Afghan family after the fall of the Taliban. And in 2007, Deborah Rodriguez published Kabul Beauty School: An American Woman Goes Behind the Veil, her memoir of teaching Afghan women the art of hairdressing.

Now comes a reissued edition of an extraordinary gem of a book: Rosanne Klass’s Land of the High Flags: Afghanistan When the Going Was Good. Klass first published the book in 1964, and she has added a new afterword. Hers is a world-class travel memoir that conjures all of the heart-stopping beauty that called out to me when I first traveled to Afghanistan in the early 1960s. Klass went there with her American husband in the 1950s to teach English in a school for men and boys from remote villages. It was the first school of its kind, and Klass was the first woman to teach male students in the country. As an “uncovered” woman—that is, one not wearing a burka—she handled the men’s inevitable fear and hostility with patience and grace. Ultimately, she befriended both her students and the recalcitrant mullahs who also taught at the school.

Klass returned to Afghanistan in the 1960s as a journalist. Later, after the Soviet invasion, she founded the Afghanistan Relief Committee, which provided medical and other humanitarian aid to victims inside the war-torn country. Her home in New York City became a first stop for her many Afghan friends and former students who were now ambassadors, cabinet ministers, or in exile. In the 1980s, Klass directed the Afghanistan Information Center at Freedom House, a major source of human-rights information for the American and international media.

The beauty of Klass’s writing recreates a shimmering and more hopeful time. Klass preserves for us in words, and with reverence, the Afghan people’s history and customs (the arts of long conversations and of reciting poetry by heart, for instance), as well as holidays, palaces, fortresses, precious artifacts, and the non-Muslim religious wonders—like the great Buddhas of Bamyan, destroyed by the Taliban—that have almost all disappeared from this seemingly cursed land. Such epic destruction has happened here before. Through Klass, I can once again see the kuchi nomads “impassively” passing through Kabul, with their long line of “shaggy Bactrian camels . . . the women walked proudly besides them—unveiled, vivid, dressed in black and scarlet, and decked with silver bangles. In the city, where purdah sent local women fluttering shyly from attention, the proud indifference of these handsome Kuchi women seemed imperious.”

Klass also renders the country’s geography: the towering mountains, the steep, winding roads, the torrential rivers, the Edenic valleys and forests—as well as the incredible flowers and brilliant gardens that were so much a part of the terrain, at least back then. She understands the hold that this landscape can exert upon a human being.

Klass’s descriptions also bring back to life the din and smells of the Kabul bazaars, fraught with clutter and exquisite finds. Through her, I can reenter the neighborhoods where I once lived or visited—Jaidi Maiwand, Shari-Nau, Carta Kia—and the nearby winter and summer villas and gardens in Jalalabad, Itstalif, and Paghman. She describes Da Afghanan, a lesser bazaar, as “an old Curiosity Shop of the world” in which ”these heaps of battered necessities were crowned with wild, gaudy jewels: a gilded French telephone or a sheaf of lacquered Uzbeck spoons; a volume of Sir Walter Scott, an exquisitely molded Greek coin turned up by some plow. . . . Once I found an old mortarboard cap from Oxford University and could only wonder what disillusion had banished it to lie amid a scattering of old crockery in a dark corner. It seemed as though, from the Universe of Objects, the crippled, the lame, the halt and the blind had all found their way here to await the day when someone might possibly look upon them again and find them good.”

The Land of the High Flags is many books: it is a thumbnail history of Afghanistan; a psychological and political analysis of its most powerful kings (Abdur Rahman, Habibullah, Amanullah); a list of its most important native literary sons; a travel guide to its cities, villages, and countryside, replete with personal and professional photos; an almost satirical analysis of the social pecking order; and the story of a country trying to enter the modern era while being brutally beaten down. Above all, it is a story about Klass’s relationship with individual Afghans and with the Afghan people as a whole. She renders a particularly touching portrait of Gul Baz Khan, her colonial-era “house-man”—something like a personal concierge or butler. Often inscrutable, comically manipulative, industrious, and proud, he ruled Klass’s heart and household with consummate deference and skill.

A few quibbles. Klass cannot tell us very much about Afghan women. Their absence haunts her pages, where they appear only briefly, just turning a corner, heard on the other side of a high wall, shrouded in burkas or chadaris. The portrait she paints of her male Afghan students, therefore, is also incomplete. She portrays them as bashful, innocent, noble, and good-hearted, people who, even when treated sadistically by tyrannical teachers and laid low by poverty, illness, and early death, remain stoic and uncomplaining. Yet many of these seemingly charming, tender boys are likely cruel toward their wives—and they probably have more than one, as revealed in books like Edward Hunter’s The Past Present, and confirmed by my own acquaintance, in Kabul, with women living in purdah and in polygamous marriages. However open-minded the boys may be about foreign women, their views about their “own” women are more subject to tradition. Even nearly half a century later, in The Bookseller of Kabul, author Seierstad describes being befriended by and invited to live with a bookseller, a man with a Western intellectual background who nevertheless was a brutal tyrant to the women of his family. Seierstad’s depiction of his behavior has led to a lawsuit as well as a published rebuttal.

These gaps notwithstanding, the beauty of Klass’s book both uplifts and consoles. I will leave the last word to her, as she describes a long trip outside Kabul: “You must live in a dry land to know what a garden is. The very word paradise comes from the Persian word for ‘garden,’ and Eden must have been much like the valley of Panjsher: an island of sunlit greenness and coolness and flowing water; that is what Genesis says: that Eden had trees and a river. It is a definition. Those who described this must have known waterless plains . . . where there is no sustenance but what can be wrenched from the earth by endless labor and unrelenting struggle. They knew what . . . I could here begin to comprehend: the terror of Adam and Eve, driven from such a world as this green valley out onto the sun-blanched rocky earth which they had hardly glimpsed, and never heeded, beyond the leafy edges of their paradise; and forbidden to return.”

According to the Department of Justice (DOJ) a prostitute or a victim of trafficking is entitled to justice but only if she has been “forced, tricked, or coerced” into doing what the DOJ calls “sex work”–and if she can prove it. Today, according to U.S. governmental Trafficking Prosecutors, a rescue-worthy prostitute is someone who has been forcibly “trafficked” or “tricked” into sexual slavery. If she is from a Third World country, she commands more DOJ sympathy that does an American child who has escaped from an incestuous and dangerously abusive family in Iowa or Minnesota and who has ended up in the arms of a violent pimp or brothel-owner in another American state. In addition, the DOJ does not seem to count minor children who are used in “commercial sex acts” as trafficking victims because, by definition, they have not necessarily been “coerced” or “duped.”

In September and October of 2007, The Coalition Against Trafficking in Women (CATW) sent careful letters to the Attorney Generals’ Office, one of which you may read HERE, which noted DOJ failures, asked critical questions, and called upon it to strengthen law enforcement in this area. (Full disclosure: I am one of the signatories of these letters as are The National Organization for Women, Equality Now, and feminists Melissa Farley, Diana Russell, and Gloria Steinem– but so are representatives of the National Association of Evangelicals, The National Congress of Black Women, American Values, the Southern Baptist Convention, the Salvation Army, etc).

In short, there is agreement about this across the political spectrum.

In April of 2007, five members of Congress (the Honorable Carolyn S. Maloney, Frank Wolf, John Lewis, Thelma Drake, and Hank Johnson), sent a letter to the DOJ which also criticized the DOJ’s failures in the “war against trafficking” and asked the DOJ to respond in a timely fashion to each of the issues detailed by CATW, a group which is led by two amazing lawyers Dorchen Leithold and Norma Ramos.

Why is the DOJ failing its historic task? Why is the public not pressing it on this matter? How does an improper emphasis on proving that “force” was involved lead to prosecutorial failure and to the continued abandonment of trafficking victims and sexual slaves?

Those who once argued for the legalization of “sex work” claimed that it was a “victimless” crime. Today, in an era in which the sale and kidnapping of children into sexual slavery has been better documented, these legalizers oppose abolitionists in a new way: They claim that only those who can testify to and prove that force was involved may claim victim-status. All others, including those who are too afraid or unable to testify, are on their own.

Once, “whores” and “sex-workers” were called prostitutes. They were viewed as evil and mentally ill man-haters who took revenge against men by “hooking” or addicting men (!) to sex for money. Prostitutes were not viewed as victims but as profiteering gold-diggers who knew what they were doing and deserved whatever they got. People also thought that women “turned tricks” in order to feed pre-existing drug and alcohol habits of their own; that prostitutes became wealthy and either retired at thirty for life–or attended medical school with their ill-gotten gains.

Alright, for the sake of argument I will admit, (but unwillingly), that 1%-5% of all prostitutes may prosper both economically and psychologically. I don’t really believe this but I will concede it. Perhaps there are literally a handful of real-life “Pretty Women” in every generation (Five? Twenty five? One hundred? Out of millions) who marry millionaire Johns who have fallen in love with them. However, these are the exceptions to the rule.

This pretty picture is not true for 95%-99% of all prostitutes. Today, most prostituted girls and women and the victims of trafficking are, at best, blue-collar workers whose average age is fifteen and who suffer and die too soon from the diseases that AIDS-infected Johns inflict upon them and from the drugs and alcohol which dull the consequences of their toxic, so-called “work.” Parents sell their five year-old daughters into sexual slavery; pimps seduce impoverished young adult women with promises of legitimate work, hide their passports, then break them with beatings and rape–or they kidnap them right off the street. Prostituted women are also hunted as “prey” by serial killers. Their mutilated corpses are rarely reclaimed by family or friends.

Studies document that prostitutes and the victims of trafficking are routinely raped, gang-raped, beaten, tortured, and “stiffed,” and are, therefore, more gravely afflicted with the symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress (anxiety, insomnia, flashbacks, paranoia, depression, suicidal ideation) than are combat veterans. Prostitutes are “disposable” people whom society still shuns and blames.

Human sexual slavery is a multi-billion dollar a year business. It is right up there with guns and narcotics. Radical feminists and Christian conservatives have spent years drafting legislation with “teeth.” Some survivors of prostitution who have miraculously managed to escape the clutches of pimps and kidnappers have become abolitionist-rescuers of others who also wish to escape. Their work is sometimes federally funded and often has a religious bent. For example, Wellspring, in Omaha, Nebraska, is a Salvation Army ministry; Dignity is a Catholic Charities ministry, based in Arizona. Survivors also direct Breaking Free, SAGE, Veronica’s Voice, and GEMS. (Press HERE to read more about these heroes).

According to trafficking legislation expert, University of Rhode Island Professor, Dr. Donna Hughes, DOJ officials fail to credit or utilize such survivor-rescuers. Worse. They also continue to distinguish between “voluntary” and “involuntary” prostitution or they propagate the myths that I have outlined above. This means that they find many ways to justify not doing their work.

Some law enforcement personnel have been effective in prosecuting both domestic and international traffickers. They have been maligned and sometimes punished. Stay tuned for more about this.

I would like to acknowledge the extraordinary work of the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women, the ongoing work of Professor Donna Hughes, and the rescue work of survivors in this area which bears more than a slight resemblance to the African slave trade.

I once worked at the United Nations and have vowed that someday I will write about what a soul-scorching experience it was–especially for someone who was and still is a white Jewish-American feminist and Zionist. I had to absorb the most virulent, almost surreal hatred because of who I am and for the views that I hold. This happened long before I was perceived to have crossed any political aisle.

At the time, when I tried to tell people about this, few wanted to understand. The UN diplomat’s dining room was so elegant, the parties and social circles so colorful and so career-building that even radical feminists did not want to understand that the tyrants and mediocrities that dominated the UN would never, ever police themselves and that sexism, racism, poverty, and even genocide would remain unchecked by this corrupt international body.

Friends: This was twenty-seven years ago and matters have only gotten worse. The United Nations has been effective in only one matter. It has increasingly legalized Jew-hatred by its demonization of Israel.

This past Sunday, a major conference on this very subject was held in New York City. Unfortunately, at the last moment, I could not attend it. To the best of my knowledge, only two articles about this conference have so far appeared: In the Jerusalem Post HERE and on the internet website War to Mobilize Democracy (WMD) HERE. However, journalist Fern Sidman, who wrote the WMD piece, has sent me an extended version of her piece which I have posted HERE.

Please understand that powerful figures spoke at this conference, including former American Ambassador to the UN, John Bolton, Senator Norman Coleman, and Congressman Thaddeus McCotter.

I share Congressman McCotter’s view that both the United States and Israel, who pay the largest amount of money to the UN, should pull out of it and form a new alliance of democracies, or as McCotter suggests, a “Liberty Alliance.” I know, there are other views that claim that the humanitarian work done by the UN justifies even the corrupt political hierarchy and that Israel must continue seeking a group that will allow her to join them; currently, Israel is not allowed to be part of either the Middle East or European group and is therefore a permanent non-member of the Security Council.

Let me congratulate Herb London and Anne Bayefsky who hosted this conference and who have continued to work on this important subject.

Dear Readers: What do you think? Should America leave the United Nations? If not, what chance do you think America has of reforming this body? And if you think it has absolutely no chance–what is your thinking about why we should still remain a dues-paying member? Do you want your taxes going to support non-intervention in Darfur and the demonization of Israel?

Does anybody know:

Why Hamas has arrested Jamal al Dura only days after the hotly contested video of the alleged death of his son Mohammed was aired in a Paris courtroom? It became publicly clear that the film was a piece of staged “fauxtography” and that little Mohammed did not die on camera. Who might not want al Dura to talk to journalists or judges? Actually, I am surprised that there really is a Jamal Al Dura…

Why do westerners believe that homosexuals in Arab and Muslim culture are, by definition, the standard-bearers for art and other progressive values? Yasir Arafat allegedly died of AIDS and was long known to be a homosexual. Did Arafat represent a model of liberatory values? Sheikh bin Mahfouz (who has sued at least 38 western authors and news publications and obtained letters of apology from all but Dr. Rachel Ehrenfeld who has counter-sued him in New York state) is also allegedly homosexual. Does that mean that he, too, represents ethical or progressive values? Of course, most Arab and Muslim homosexuals are also married and have wives and children.

Homosexuals in ancient Greece and Rome owned slaves and despised women. Some were brilliant philosophers. Many participated in a cult of man-boy love. The same contemporary western homosexuals who failed to condemn or abstain from the “bathhouse culture” which killed so many men in the West in the 1980s are now failing to distinguish between western idealizations of homosexuality as a symbol for both oppression and liberation and the nature of homosexuality among Arabs and Muslims.

Back on the Western ranch: Neither J. Edgar Hoover, who was a cross-dressing homosexual nor Roy Cohn, who was also a homosexual, could be viewed as symbols of aesthetic or political liberation either.

I am just raising some questions on a slow Sunday afternoon.

Yesterday, the indomitable Dr. Rachel Ehrenfeld had her day in court. This time, the New York State Court of Appeals heard her case. Ehrenfeld was sued by the ever-litigious billionaire, Sheikh Khalid Bin Mahfouz, who sued her in London for writing a book (Funding Evil) which was published in America where Ehrenfeld, an Israeli-American citizen, resides.

Ehrenfeld chose not to appear in the London courtroom and Mahfouz won a default judgment. Instead, she counter-sued Mahfouz here. Ehrenfeld is arguing that New York should have jurisdiction to decide whether such a judgment is enforceable in New York State where, after all, authors enjoy a First Amendment right to publish their views.

Ehrenfeld is doing the heavy lifting for us all. She is doing so on her own. A new, brief video about her important First Amendment/Libel case has just been released in both English and Arabic. PRESS HERE TO VIEW IT.

Indeed, western publishers are increasingly reluctant to publish work, however well documented or timely, if it exposes the Islamist funding of terrorism and the influence of the Saudi and Palestinian Lobbies. Publishers fear that they will be sued or bombed or that they, too, may have to pulp an already published book as Cambridge University Press has recently done to the book Alms for Jihad.

Thus, Free speech and academic freedom are indeed under siege in the West–not because of western government censorship but because Islamists like Sheikh Khalid Bin Mahfouz either sue authors and publishers or influence intellectual points of view by funding academic Institutes, organizations, and conferences.

In an era where fatwas have been issued against those who have exited and/or who criticize fundamentalist Islam (Salman Rushdie, Taslima Nasrin, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Flemming Rose, Lars Viks all immediately come to mind), an era in which countless authors and news media have written letters of apology to bin Mahfouz in order to avoid costly lawsuits, author Rachel Ehrenfeld’s principled stand is highly commendable.

My most recent work about Islamic religious and gender Apartheid (The Death of Feminism), has, for the first time, been unable to find a European publisher, including one in the UK–no matter that my publisher, based in both London and New York, submitted the manuscript to a grueling and careful review by a prominent First Amendment lawyer.

My circumstance is far from unique. I have written an Introduction to a cutting edge book by Dr. Nancy Kobrin, which explores the psycho-analytic roots of Islamic suicide terrorism. At the last moment, Dr. Kobrin’s American publisher backed out of the contract; they said that they could not afford to pay to protect their employees.

All people who care about freedom of thought and speech will either have to pay the high price such liberties exact or be prepared to lose them.

Yes, in case you were wondering: The video makes the rather sensational claim that Mahfouz has moved his young male lover into an exclusive mansion in Mayfair. He can do so in London; regrettably, if this is true, his life would be endangered in Saudi Arabia.

Is Jimmy Carter an anti-Semite? Even some of his critics concede that his biased views about Israel might not necessarily rise to the level of Jew-hatred. Surely, one can be critical of the Jewish state without necessarily being a Jew-hater, right?

Well–not exactly. Seven years ago I began writing about the ways in which anti-Zionism is indeed today’s “new anti-Semitism” and about how left-liberal progressives in the west were increasingly, perhaps unwittingly, allied with Islamist propagandists and terrorists in their joint betrayal of both the truth and the Jews.

The savage denunciation of the Jewish state has become an almost psychotic world-wide phenomenon. In fact, this coming weekend, the Hudson Institute is hosting a conference about the demonization of Israel at the United Nations. SEE HERE.

Now, back to our former President Jimmy.

In the late 1990s and into the twenty-first century, President Jimmy taught a series of Bible classes titled Sunday Mornings in Plains. Simon and Schuster has published a three volume set of compact discs that are available for sale online. A student at Columbia, Michael Miller, listened to these CDs and partially transcribed them with commentary galore.

Miller told me that he was so alarmed by what he heard that he tried to interest many major Jewish organizational leaders and journalists. For whatever reason, no one got back to him. Miller tells me that he focused on material that critics of Carter’s work have not yet discussed. Miller also points out that Carter has backtracked on some of what he has written: (I didn’t exactly mean that, perhaps that was a poor choice for a title, etc.). Here, while Carter may have said these things spontaneously, in a Bible class, he has nevertheless allowed a publisher to release the CDs for widespread use. He stands by what he has said.

I must admit, getting into the selected transcription and commentary was a daunting task. I nevertheless persevered. HERE is a brief excerpt from the transcription with Miller’s commentary.

I still believe–and have written as much many times–that now is the time for Jews and Christians to forge a radically new alliance. (I am not at all opposed to similar alliances with moderate Muslims). So, what I am about to say does not represent a change-of-policy on the subject.

Nevertheless, Carter sure sounds like one heck of a Jew-hater. Invidiously, almost hypnotically, he uses ancient Jesus-era history in order to demonize current day Jewish Israel and Israelis. He also uses this painful and tragic history as the basis for scapegoating contemporary Jewish Israelis for the the Islamic persecution of Christians in the Arab Middle East. Carter repeatedly whips up hatred towards modern-day Israeli Jews by telling lies, half-truths, and ancient, out-of-context truths. For example, he insists that (all) Jews view (all) Christians as “dogs” and despise and persecute (all) Christians because they are “unclean, uncircumcised.”

Anyone familiar with Middle Eastern realities will understand that it is Muslim fanatics who view Christians as unclean infidels and it is Muslims who persecute, exile, lynch, and be-head Christians. Palestinian Islamists have desecrated churches and murdered Christians. The very Israeli Jewish government whom Carter is railing against in his Bible classes has protected the holy sites of all religions. And, it is ethnic Arab Muslims who have been murdering black African Christians and Muslims in Darfur. Jewish Israelis have not mass-murdered Palestinian civilians or even those Palestinians who have been waging a fierce terrorist and propaganda war against them.

President Jimmy also presents the allegedly great power of Roman-occupied Jews in Jesus’ time as the emblem for the contemporary cabal of power wielded by Jewish and Israeli Zionists today. In his teachings, the stench of Messiah-murder clings to every possible Jewish deed.

Based on the transcription of these Bible classes, it seems that Carter’s Jew-hatred is classical Jew-hatred. It is theologically based. And its purpose is to stir up hatred for contemporary Israelis, not merely to teach an historical or religious lesson.

Yes, it is true: Jews did not and do not accept that Jesus is the Messiah or even the son of God. But so what? This should not be the source of resentment and enmity between Jews and Christians. Has Carter learned absolutely nothing from the Holocaust? Ah, maybe he has learned everything he needs to know: That the Jews were vulnerable, that their slaughter (in the Holy Land) might occasion no outcry until it is too late.

In my view, Carter might not be saying what he is saying in Palestine, Peace Not Apartheid because the Saudis have paid him off big-time (although the pay-off may certainly play a role). Carter may be the kind of old-fashioned Christian who believes that Jew-hatred is a sacramental article of faith. Most Christians, beginning with the Pope, have re-visited this issue. Perhaps Carter has yet to do so.

Of course, in America, anyone (Jimmy Carter, Ann Coulter, Ward Churchill) has the absolute right to express their political and religious views. And yet, Jew-hating views such as Carter’s have historically led to the persecution and mass murder of Jews.

And this man was once the President of the United States?

Maybe the crime of the Jew is that of having been there first, of being both the Mother and Father of religious monotheism. Maybe our descendents, whether they are rebellious followers or detractors, need to get out from under our looming parental shadow. But a true Christian is not supposed to hate. In fact, he is supposed to forgive even those who torment him. To demonize and scapegoat an essentially innocent people is so un-Christian that we might not only ask whether Jimmy Carter is a Jew-hater but whether he is really a good Christian.

What do you think?