For fifteen years, (1993-2008), Charlie Bernhaut of Americans for a Safe Israel has been sending Open Letters to the staff at the New York Times. Charlie loves Jewish cantorial music and Jewish jokes. He is an amiable, sociable man. So, what has driven him to launch such a lonely, one-man crusade?

I doubt he can stop himself. Perhaps the Biblical bush burned for him too, perhaps, like Moses, he could not refuse the mission–which consists of documenting and protesting the newspaper’s contemporary “use of photographs to prejudice their readers against Israel.” He was at this long before CAMERA, MEMRI, or HonestReporting saw the same burning bush. The Times has never acknowledged Bernhaut’s letters–nor have the Jewish media and organizations who also received copies.

Of course, as the author Laurel Leff, (Buried By the Times. The Holocaust and America’s Most Important Newspaper), has documented, the Paper of Record did not cover the Holocaust either, they did not document Jewish suffering or genocide.

The photos Charlie brought me were all taken by Rina Castelnuovo. Google her and you will find sixteen pages devoted to her photos in the Paper of Record, and to her gallery exhibits and prestigious awards. Castelnuovo was born in Tel Aviv but her focus is mainly upon the suffering of Israel’s non-Jewish Arab citizens and that of Arabs in the West Bank and Gaza. A minority of her photos focus on positive Israeli realities but there is no real balance or complexity to her photojournalism. Of course, the articles that accompany her work are similarly unbalanced. One might conclude that she has been asked to focus only on Palestinian grief and to avoid Israeli grief altogether.

Castelnuovo’s photos enjoy prominent placement and sometimes occupy an incredible one-third of a page. Obviously, so do the articles that her photos illustrate. Bernhaut believes that some, if not all of her work, is staged; it therefore pre-dates the kind of faux-tography that characterizes the full-steam-ahead Arab, Palestinian, and Islamist visual and narrative brainwashing of the world’s masses that gathered force during the al-Aqsa intifada.

Stay tuned for an interview with Phillipe Karsenty, the hero who has been battling France’s media over their use of the quintessential staged, fake event known as the Mohammed Al-Dura”Affaire,” in which a small Palestinian boy was “seen” being shot to death in his father’s arms by Israeli troops at the Netzarim junction.

It turns out that the Israelis did not shoot him. Actually, the boy was neither shot nor killed. The poster child and father for the al-Aqsa intifada were… actors. The harm is done. It cannot be repaired. But, perhaps the families of all those Israelis who were martyred between 2000-2008 can sue France’s Channel Two, the Palestinian Authority, Arafat’s estate, and the world media for damages.

The propaganda against the Jews and Israel is relentless and effective and has reduced the truth to a lie. After forty years of manipulating the truth, millions, perhaps billions of people view Israel as the “Nazi, apartheid, occupier” of noble, oppressed, and suffering Palestinian people.

They do not understand that the Palestinians have never existed as a group or as a nation-state; that early Zionist pioneers and Israelis improved both the non-Jewish Arab standard of living and life expectancy so much so that more and more family- and clan-identified non-Jewish Egyptians, Syrians, and Jordanians gravitated to Jewish lands; that, in 1948, the Arabs who occupied villages in Gaza and on the West Bank were not forced out by Israelis but rather by their own Arab leaders who wanted to use their homes for battle-purposes and who were absolutely convinced that they would drive the upstart Jews into the sea.

They failed to do so. However, thereafter, the Arab High Command and individual Arab tyrants refused citizenship to all “Palestinian” refugees and also kept the enormous sums donated to alleviate their suffering for themselves and for weapons. The Israelis wanted mutual cooperation and peace with their non-Jewish Arab neighbors. The Arab and eventually the “Palestinian” leadership only wanted to use the “Palestinians” as human fodder in their eternal war against the Jews and against the West.

Read Ephraim Karsh’s excellent piece on this very subject in the latest issue of Commentary magazine.

The first Castelnuovo photo that Bernhaut showed me appeared on February 17, 1993. It showed Muslims in full prayer position outside a mosque in Bir Nabala which the Israelis had “sealed.” The photo caption, the article , and the headline do not explain that Hamas was using the mosque to store weapons and that the Israelis had raided it for that reason. The fact that the Israeli government is a faithful protector of religious shrines of all religions is never mentioned–nor is the Arab and Muslim shameful record of burning down, building over, or using the religious shrines of non-Muslim faiths as garbage dumps.

On March 21, 1996, we see sorrowful, patient Palestinian women and children who have cancer “waiting for permission to go to Israel for treatment.” Not shown are the scores of Palestinian patients who are routinely treated in Israeli Jewish hospitals. Even Arab and Muslim “militants”/terrorists who are captured in battle are treated in Israeli Jewish hospitals. The Times provides no photos of them.

On September 11, (!) 1998, Castelnuovo provided a photo of the grieving family of a Palestinian woman shot “by accident.” It did not balance this photo with that of a grieving Israeli family whose civilian member was shot “on purpose.” As Bernhaut phrased it in his letter to Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, Jr. in April, 2000: “Of course, Jewish suffering is nonexistent (irrelevant).

Bernhaut’s latest letter is dated May 9, 2008 and addresses the two Castelnuovo photos that accompany the May 7, 2008 headline: “After 60 Years, Arabs in Israel are Outsiders and Their Anger is Growing.” Pictured is a traditionally dressed 84 year old Arab who is touching the door of Hittin, a former Arab village in the north of Israel. Bernhaut suggests that Castelnuovo must have said: “Go over to the wall and face the door..that’s it. Now, raise your hand…no, not the right hand, it will hide your face. That’s it, the left hand, raised. Now, look longingly at the wall..Perfect. Here’s the payment for your services.”

Yes, western journalists routinely pay for such theatrical participation. I am not saying that Castelnuovo did so in this particular instance.

Bernhaut brought me one other article, which was dated April 23, 2000 and which concerned the photo which, much earlier, depicted the evacuation of people from the roof of the American Embassy in Vietnam. According to New York Times journalists Fox Butterfield and Kari Haskell, this photo became the “most remembered photo of the fall of Saigon.” However, the caption in the New York Times was “wrong.” Those boarding the helicopter to flee Saigon were not Americans; they were Vietnamese.” Butterfield and Haskell write: “In it’s way, the photo is a metaphor for all the misunderstanding that plagued the Vietnam war.”

Bernhaut writes that perhaps one day the New York Times will also write: “In it’s way, the photographs that the New York Times featured to bias the public against Jews are metaphors for many of the misunderstanding that plagued the tiny, beleaguered Jewish state.”

I think Bernhaut is far too optimistic.

(Written with the help of Fern Sidman)

As a child, my mother took me to the Radio City Music Hall to see the dazzling, long-limbed Rockettes dance. For decades, the Music Hall symbolized glitzy entertainment, New York style. Radio City was also where I went when I was interviewed on NBC and when I dined at the Big Band-era Rainbow Room, a 65th floor precursor to and survivor of the World Trade Center’s Windows on the World. The Rainbow Room also has windows that look out onto the immediate world.

On Wednesday evening, May 7th, Jews around the world celebrated the miraculous 60th anniversary of the birth of Israel as a modern state. In New York City, an historic extravaganza took place at Radio City Music Hall. An attempt to Palestinianize this Art Deco palace also took place. It failed, it did not interrupt the considerable joy within but still, the Haters are everywhere, there is no event they do not picket.

Wherever one turns, one finds the same monotonous anti-Israeli, anti-American, and pro-Palestinian propaganda. It has invaded our air waves, our campuses, and the entire global internet. Complex realities and wrenching truths have been reduced to lying, paranoid hate speech which wraps itself in the righteous garments of “oppression” and “liberation.” On the march, its face is raging and hateful.

In Israel, its Arab citizens attended a mass rally and march to mark the 60th anniversary of “the Naqba” (Catastrophe). According to Ynet, Violence flared up when the Palestinian organizers failed to control their own demonstrators who repeatedly clashed with Israeli police and civilians. Five Israeli police were injured. A group of peaceful, young Israeli members who belong to the volunteer group,”If You Will,” raised an Israeli flag at a picnic–in their own country, as they celebrated their Independence. The Arab demonstrators demanded that they lower the flag. Arguments broke out. Violence ensued.

My colleague, the journalist Fern Sidman, called me from Radio City Music Hall. She sounded upset, anything but jubilant.

“A well organized bus-load of 75 pro-Palestinians with an excellent sound system and all the usual banners and posters are here. There are only a handful of Jews, maybe ten to fifteen, and mainly from Stand With Us, who are standing up for Israel.”

“Calm down,” I said. “After all, the UJA clearly commands the high ground. They’ve booked the Music Hall. They, their talent, their guests, are the insiders. Everyone else is outside, they’re outsiders, trying to spoil the event, hoping to get some air-time.”

Still, Fern’s distress got to me. That–and something else. In the past, I admit it, I have spoken for and marched with some of the very pro-PLO protestors who were there. I did not do so against Israel or for “Palestine,” but for women’s rights. (The left really knows how to infiltrate indigenous movements). I always thought they were harmless enough, but slightly nutty. They said they were “Maoists.” Since they seemed sane enough, I thought that perhaps one of them might be a CIA or FBI agent. Otherwise, I could not understand their relentless cheerfulness, incessant drive, and dark conspiracy theories.

Fern described them as “a vitriolic cadre of anti-Israel protestors” who “boisterously excoriated” both Israel and the United States for their “oppression” of the Palestinian people. An organization called “Palestinian Action–Union Square East” sponsored the protest along with members of the Revolutionary Communist Party, an anachronistic Maoist organization. The 75 demonstrators, organized and led by Mary Lou (McKinley) Greenberg, chanted such slogans as “From the River to the Sea, Palestine Will Be Free” and “Not a Nickel, Not a Dime, No more Money for Israel’s Crimes. ” They simultaneously drew parallels between the plight of the Palestinian people and the “racist” verdicts in the Sean Bell case in which three New York City detectives (two African-American and one Caucasian), were exonerated in the tragic, senseless shooting.

“We are calling for the absolute right of return of the Palestinian people to their homeland”, said Myka Abramson, 23, a protestor representing the Palestinian cause. Abramson, who identified herself as a “Jewish feminist,” added that, “a two state solution to the Middle East conflict is not acceptable. We are rallying our forces to demand a one state solution, a secular democracy in which the Palestinians are masters of their own fate.”

She did not address the reality that Hamas would not accept a secular democratic state. Oh, is this little one lost and she is not alone; so many others are lost right along with her.

None of the protestors addressed the issue of incessant rocket attacks launched against southern Israel by Hamas in Gaza, but instead, rather mindlessly castigated the IDF for committing “genocide” against Palestinians living in Gaza.

A male demonstrator who was selling copies of the Revolutionary Communist Party newspaper, formerly titled “The Revolutionary Worker, ” chanted, “from Harlem to Palestine to Haiti we call for a revolutionary struggle for freedom for all oppressed peoples and we call for an end to the Israeli apartheid regime.”

Fern bought a copy of this rag for $1.00. It displayed ancient photos of Iranian activists protesting the Shah in the late 1970s but not of the brave Iranian activists who routinely oppose the mullahs in the twenty-first century. It also presented China as a positive force for good–and did not note their recent brutalities in Tibet and elsewhere.

The Palestinian contingent was also joined by 15 members of the notoriously anti-Zionist Chareidi movement, “Neturei Karta” whose members held signs calling for the “Peaceful Dismantlement of Israel. ” They also claimed that “Jews in Exile are Forbidden to Have Their Own State”. They failed to mention that they are on Amadinejad’s payroll. Are these guys allowed out without a psychiatrist-on-board?

Although greatly outnumbered by the anti-Israel protestors, the members of Stand With Us proudly hoisted an Israeli flag and held signs saying, “Stop the Hamas Terror” and “End the Hamas Bloody Occupation of Gaza”.

An African-American woman named Coretta James joined the members of Stand With Us to express her unwavering support for Israel . “Israel is the only viable democracy in the Middle East and a loyal ally of the United States”, she said, adding that, “As a member of Christians United For Israel, I am here today to tell the world that Israel has every right to exist as a clearly identifiable Jewish state. Every nation of the world that has risen up to attack the Jewish people and the Land of Israel has eventually become extinct and so too, these demonstrators who dare attack God’s chosen people will also eventually disappear. The establishment of Israel as a Jewish nation is extolled in the Bible and those who curse the Jewish people and Israel will be cursed and conversely those who bless the Jewish people and the Land of Israel will be blessed by God. That is why I am here today.”

Sister James does not sound like she attends the Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s Church.

Another pro-Israel demonstrator said, “In many ways, it is purely illogical that Israel should still be in existence. After five major wars and unceasing terrorism, the continued existence of tiny Israel, outnumbered by adversarial forces much mightier than herself is nothing short of a Divine miracle of mammoth proportions.” He added, “I feel and I fear that the times ahead will not portend well for Israel, as a Jewish State. The entire world is turning against Israel and she is becoming more isolated and reviled. As the global influence of radical Islamists continues to dramatically escalate, our only hope lies with our return to the God that saved our ancestors.”

Another Isaiah in our midst.

But most of all, Radio City Music Hall and the UJA hosted thousands of pro-Israel supporters . The energy was very high. One friend tells me that “people stood on their seats, translated from Hebrew for their partners, laughed, applauded, almost danced in the aisles. Radio City Music Hall may not have seen anything like this before.”

Of course, there were serious speeches by Governor Paterson, Mayor Bloomberg, Ambassador Gillerman, who said that “in some ways, Israel faces greater threats today than ever before.” The actress Natalie Portman was the M.C. (I am told that when she left the stage, some members of the audience became distraught). Many Israeli stars appeared including David Broza, Idan Raichel, Rami Kleinstein, Habanot Nechama and Yael Naim. Also appearing on the bill were top American performer and Hasidic reggae phenomenon Matisyahu, and “Late Show With David Letterman” bandleader Paul Shaffer, who performed a comic skit. The event also included a moving tribute to Israel’s fallen soldiers and victims of terror as part of Israel’s Memorial Day.

I wish I could have been there. Next year I will be. But, I remember the block parties in Brooklyn when World War Two ended and I remember the thrilling moments of Israel’s perilous birth: Listening to the radio-vote at the United Nations, reading about the 1948 fighting and victories. I will never forget those moments, or that year. They will last me a lifetime.

Dear Readers:

Greetings! I am recovering rather slowly from a non-life threatening surgical procedure but will begin posting new material together with the ongoing retrospective of some of my writing.

The distinguished editor and author, Leo Haber, asked me to contribute an article about my memories of Israel for the venerable magazine Midstream’s lead section “Israel at Sixty: Reminiscences and Reflections.” I joined Elie Wiesel, Itamar Rabinovich, Edward I. Koch, Ram Belinkin, Vera Stern and Leo Haber. Here is part of what I said. The entire issue will appear online in the near future at www.midstreamthf.com.

ISRAELI MEMORIES. THE PRICE FOR SUPPORTING ISRAEL GROWS HIGHER BY THE MINUTE. By Phyllis Chesler

I can’t remember a time when Israel was not central to my imagination both as a model for heroism and as a transcendent, miraculous, reality.  From childhood on, Zionism was an ever-evolving example of political, theological, historical, and personal liberation.

I was born in 1940 and grew up in an Orthodox family in Borough Park.  In 1946, I started learning Hebrew. And, in 1948, I “rebelled.” I joined Hashomer Ha’Tzair, a left-wing socialist Zionist youth group. Within a few years, I joined Ain Harod, a group to the left of Hashomer. In the early 1950s, I packed machine gun parts for Israel.  Both Hashomer and Ain Harod shared a vision of Jews and Arabs living together in the Holy Land.  This utopian, agrarian vision, this defiant form of idealism, got me embroiled in dangerous adventures in the Islamic world but in Israel too.

In 1972, after having wrestled with anti-Semitism on the left and among feminists, I traveled to Israel for a long overdue, first-time visit.  I was newly famous–and I needed to go “home,” live anonymously, without having to give a speech or an interview. I instantly loved the land. I reveled in the beaches and cafes of Tel Aviv, the mountain-down-to-the-sea views of Haifa, the mystical desert of the Negev, the hot coral colors of Eilat, the radiantly golden Jerusalem.

At first glance, “everyone” (bus drivers, prime ministers, police officers, soldiers, farmers, physicians) were Jewish.  Jews seemed to occupy all the niches. Certainly, I saw Christians and Muslims too, (I also saw Arab Jews); what I mean is that, in Israel, Jews had crashed through all the occupational restrictions of exile and this consoled and uplifted me.  It also struck me as funny. Oh, how I did not want to return to America!  My dear friend, Molly Oren, who worked at the Weizmann Institute,  persuaded me to leave  the night before I was due to teach my university classes.

On this fateful trip, I met a Jewish-Israeli Prince. He was born after 1948, and he was a descendent of the Bal Shem Tov. He was innocent and beautiful and had no idea that I was a firebrand feminist. He followed me back to America.

Reader: I married him. He became an American citizen (perhaps my gift to him)–but we also had a wonderful son together (perhaps his gift to me). He did not want to live in Israel and so I never made aliya. He remained here and we divorced when our son was two years old.

I have often joked that my Zionism is a miracle because it both pre-dated and has survived even marriage to an Israeli!

Israel-related memories include: Housing and feeding some young Israelis who were pressed into government service in New York City during the 1973 Yom Kippur war; delivering feminist speeches in Tel Aviv and Haifa that galvanized what became the Israeli feminist movement; trying to get American celebrities and progressives to sign letters protesting the United Nations Zionism=Racism resolutions; choosing and accompanying journalists to Israel  in 1974-1975 in the hope that their views of Israel might be  somewhat tempered by reality; working with the nascent Israeli feminist movement–standing in Haifa with Israeli feminists and envisioning a future shelter for battered women and a rape crisis center where indeed, one now stands; working with Palestinian feminist for “peace.”

In addition: Walking with the late Meir Levin for hours in Netanya as he described the cruel reactions to his view that the Anne Frank story had been “hijacked” by Jews who wished to de-Judaize her story (he was obsessed, but he was also right); working with the Israeli delegation (Tamar Eshel, Mina Ben Tzvi, Yael Etzmon, Nitza Libai, and my own guest, Shula Aloni) at the United Nations conference in Copenhagen in 1980; flying to Israel immediately thereafter and meeting with David Kimche in the Foreign Office; trying to explain what anti-Semitism is and does to uncomprehending Israelis; being interviewed for Yediot Aharonot by the poet, Rachel Chalfi, on this very subject. We became close friends thereafter.

I remember davenning at the Kotel (Western Wall) with the women who did so for the first time in 1988; co-leading a delegation of American Jewish women who donated a Torah to the women of Jerusalem which became the basis for our entering the lawsuit on behalf of Jewish women’s right to pray at the Kotel.

In 2000, with the advent of the Intifada, I became an advocate for Israel and have been documenting Israel’s demonization by fairly lethal propaganda ever since. I have lost nearly all of my politically correct friends and allies, including other Jews and feminists, because I do not view Zionism as a form of racism; indeed, I view anti-Zionism as a form of racism and as the new anti-Semitism.

Once one is deemed a “traitor” to an ideology by ideological loyalists, funny things begin to happen to you. Your body of work gets “disappeared,” it is no longer mentioned or remembered where most appropriate. You yourself no longer get invited to events nor are you allowed to speak at such events. If you attend anyway–backs are either turned, or greetings grudgingly growled. When videographers have been hired to document the collective memories at Memorial Services for beloved, departed friends, you are not allowed to speak; this has already happened to me twice. In a third instance, I was slated to speak last, after four hours of speeches had already taken place and after many of the assembled had already left.

I am talking about Memorial Services for dear and long-time friends who also happened to be feminist pioneers.

I stand by my support of Israel with pride. My superlative education about how intolerant ideologues can be continues unabated.

While I know that Israel is far from perfect: Many of its leaders are arrogant and deluded and have not pursued justice on behalf of women or on behalf of other vulnerable citizens, I also see that Israel, alone among nations, is existentially endangered.

I understand more than ever how a Holocaust can happen. I hope and pray that God continues to watch over tiny Israel and that humanity refuses to collaborate with radical evil and chooses instead to resist it in heroic and principled ways.

Israel: Happy Sixtieth Birthday!

As you read this, I will be away from my desk. While I am gone, I will be posting a mini-retrospective of some of my previously published, copy-righted work. The articles seem to hold up. In some cases, I will introduce the piece. In most instances, I will let the piece speak for itself.

(This originally appeared as a blog on my own website. It was written before I started writing a blog for Pajamas Media. It also appeared in The Jewish Press.)

Clinging to Illusions for Dear Life

Let me state what is painfully obvious. Despite our most hopeful illusions, people are not really “good” nor do they really practice “peace”. While power corrupts, absolute powerlessness corrupts absolutely and there is no safe place, neither high nor low, for the most vulnerable of our citizens.

The world is always at war. People fight, it’s what we do. We quarrel, often in deadly ways with other family members and we fight bitter, brutal battles with anyone who is “different” in terms of gender, class, race, ethnicity, tribe, religion, and ideology. The planet is perpetually plagued by civil and national wars. Not to be outdone, persecuted peoples internalize the prejudice and hatred leveled against them and unleash it against others like themselves.

Despite what has been learned about the European Holocaust, genocide has since become commonplace; it advances with arrogant impunity and is neither stopped nor punished by the “international community.” (Think Bosnia, Rwanda, Sudan). Rape and repeated, public gang-rape have become calculated weapons of war. It is no longer (merely) a spoil of war to which drunken, woman-hating soldiers feel entitled. An era of gender-cleansing has begun.

Even so: World wars, especially those which may involve nuclear weapons, outclass (so to speak) this chronic buzz of destruction.

We are poised on the precipice of just such a moment. Yeats’s “rough beast” is Islamic fundamentalism and it, literally, “slouches toward Bethlehem,” intent on destroying Judeo-Christian civilization.

Whether we conceive of this moment as World War Three or Four matters little. I happen to think that the Cold War never really ended since a Palestinianized Marxist-Leninism utterly hijacked the western campuses and media where it now functions as a fifth column arguing the barbarian’s case. On the other hand, Norman Podhoretz is right: This is a new enemy, one who combines elements of fascism and totalitarianism but in fundamentalist religious form.

The Middle East and the Muslim world has, by and large, been judenrein for quite some time. It has also become increasingly Islamified. My friend, the Egyptian dissident, Tarek Heggy, recently wrote me about his recent visit to his hometown of Port Said. Now, he said, “women are everywhere sheeted and hate blares from every mosque around the clock.” Gone are the Jews and the Christians and the non-religious Muslims; gone is the cosmopolitan splendor of the colonial-era Islamic East.

The Taliban (and Taliban-like ways) continue to plague the girls and women of Afghanistan, where I once lived. (By the way: My colleague, Rosanne Klass, has just re-issued her wonderful and beautifully written Memoir of her time in Afghanistan in the 1950s. It is titled “Land of the High Flags. Afghanistan When the Going Was Good” and I strongly recommend it. While Klass does not focus on Afghan women, she nevertheless paints a charming portrait of a Muslim country in a softer, gentler, and more hopeful time.)

Al-Qaeda continues to morph and everywhere remains at large–although the battle is joined in Iraq. Bin Laden continues his career in global video-production from some cave or rat-hole in No Man’s Land along the Afghan-Pakistani border. Iran continues to call for the extermination of the Jewish state–and its President is about to be welcomed by the United Nations in New York City.

The Swedish cartoonist, Lars Vilks, against whom Al Qaeda has issued a death warrant, has just been informed by his government that he is no longer safe in his home or his country. Ayaan Hirsi Ali had to flee Holland; the late, great Oriana Fallaci fled her native Italy; I have dear friends who are either trying to leave England, France, and Germany or who are documenting the mounting tide of Jew- and America-hatred among European and immigrant Muslims. (At the same time, I know many Muslim dissidents who have found safer refuge in Europe and many Muslim feminists who are trying to rescue women from being battered, mutilated, and murdered on European soil).

Still, both America and Israel remain the world’s last best hope. American forces continue to engage the enemy in Afghanistan and Iraq. On September 6, 2007 Israel apparently bombed nuclear weapons in Syria that were acquired from North Korea or Iran. For once, the Israelis are neither denying nor admitting anything–nor are the Syrians.

More: As former Ambassador Yoram Ettinger pointed out in a lecture at my synagogue, Orach Chayim, during this last, awful period of permanent Intifada against Israel, Israel’s economy surged forward, Warren Buffett did not cancel his enormous investments in Israel just before the Lebanon war last summer–when he could have done so. Also, the demographic statistics have been greatly misunderstood. Based on Ettinger’s research, “the Jewish-Arab fertility gap has been reduced to one child (down from a 6 children gap in the 1960s)!”

Like Nobel Laureate, Professor Aumann, (about whom I have written before), Ambassador Ettinger is also urging that we look at the larger picture, examine the infra-structure, be prepared for the long haul.

Still, I remain distressed, uneasy, not only because the lives of both soldiers and civilians are being lost but because so many educated Americans continue to deny that we are really at war and that fundamentalist Islam (not merely terrorism) remains our Number One clear and present danger. Too many Americans are clinging to their illusions for dear life.

Fall has come in early this year and it is a soft and beautiful one here in New York City. Construction is booming, huge, new skyscrapers appear almost overnight, the long-awaited Second Avenue subway line is being dug out of the concrete. New Yorkers seem to be enjoying the weather, lingering at outdoor cafes, walking down streets and through parks, enjoying all the rich cultural offerings that characterize this great city which is also the capital of the world.

We can lose this in a second. And, we can also lose it slowly, in many seconds, if we do not fight back and fight to win. Indeed, we must win or we are doomed. As Edmund Burke has pointed out, evil inevitably triumphs when good people do nothing. We must all do something–actually, everything–if we are to save our way of life and our very lives.

September 18, 2007

As you read this, I will be in the hospital undergoing surgery. Fear not.  Now, we all get to live as our infra-structures continue to crumble. Thus, I will have a new hip and will join the growing ranks of all the other bionic human beings. While I am away, I will be posting a mini-retrospective of some of my previously published, copy-righted work of the last few years. The work seems to hold up.  In some cases, I will introduce the piece. In most cases, I will let the piece speak for itself.

But before we get in to this: CNN has continued to air the blatantly biased Amanpour series. No shame, no apology, no “other” point of view. The New York Times has just characterized the Muslim Brotherhood as “moderates” and al-Qaeda as “radically Islamist.” Yesterday, Palestinians marched in Copenhagen to condemn the “Judaization” of Jerusalem and Israel. Last week, poisonous, pro-Palestinian propaganda appeared all over the University of Santa Cruz; and at Columbia University, a handful of pro-Israel flyers posted by Jewish graduate students were completely disappeared and replaced with pro-Palestinian flyers.

On the home front: Please read Aaron Klein’s article about Pastor Otis Moss, Obama’s new pastor.

(This originally appeared as a blog on my own website. It was written before I started writing a blog for Pajamas Media. It also appeared in The Jewish Press.)

Christian Crusaders Also Want a Caliphate. The Gospel According to Christiane — August 24, 2007

In her three part series, Amanpour is far more combative and confrontational with both Jewish and Christian religious leaders than she is with Muslim leaders. She is warmer, softer, more “at home,” with even the most extreme of Islamist leaders, perhaps even more respectful, than she is with their allegedly Jewish or Christian counterparts.

Amanpour completely fails to make the distinction between Islamists who teach hatred of infidels and women and who blow infidel and Muslim civilians up (as well as honor-murder their own women); Israelis who are under perpetual terrorist siege and who are trying to defend themselves against Islamist attacks; and conservative Christians who are trying to mobilize votes, change laws, or win hearts and minds with words, not bombs (although she certainly has lots of footage of the bloody bombings at abortion clinics–bombings I personally abhor and mourn–as do many Christians).

Amanpour wants us to like Muslims–even the most extremist among them. They are human, prick them will they not bleed? But she does not want us to like Christians or Jews, especially those who are Zionists.

Amanpour does not seem to show the same respect towards conservative Christians who wish to dress modestly, remain chaste until marriage, and avoid a secular culture of rampant pornography and rape as she shows their far more extremist counterparts in the Islamist world or than she shows, at great length, one well-spoken Muslim-American woman who decides to “cover.”

In one instance, Amanpour accuses Ron Luce, a Christian leader of teenagers, as being like the Taliban. He actually answers Amanpour in a rather charming, disarming way. She will not be moved. Amanpour herself takes no stand on what Luce says about an American secular and popular culture which allows virgin teenager America to be raped on the sidewalk as we pass by without stopping or caring.

Perhaps Amanpour can’t forgive these “radical” Christians their support for Israel, their “Zionism.” She presents Pastor John Hagee (together with the late Jerry Fallwell) as Doctor Strangeloves. Hagee, by the way, sees Iran as a threat to America and Israel. As he speaks of his Christian love of Zion, Amanpour cuts to a presumed Israeli air attack against innocent civilians, replete with weeping, civilian Arab women.

Amanpour again returns to former President Jimmy Carter–this time to have him tell us that he had to break with evangelical Baptists over their sexist position on women in the church. Carter who believes that Israel is an “apartheid” state and whose library has been hugely funded by the Saudis is the new feminist in town.

Amanpour has a definite political agenda–no less so than the Christian conservatives whom she attacks for daring to conduct “stealth politics, under the radar” when they engage in Christian voter drives. Amanpour wants to put a Democrat in the White House. She wants someone there who will move against the so-called Israel Lobby and who will finally stop funding Israel. She wants our next Commander in Chief to engage in nicey-nice diplomacy with Iran. She wants Americans to stop fearing that every Muslim might be a terrorist and to start accepting a parallel Islamic/Islamist universe right here on our own soil.

Yes, our ethnically super-trendy, British-accented war correspondent really wants exactly this. And she wants us to see that such right-wing Christians are no different than Islamists, including Bin Laden, who want a world Caliphate. (We are all the same, all cultures are equal, remove the mote from your own eye before you judge anyone else, etc.)

To accomplish her goal, Amanpour presents Christian conservatives as truly scary, as mounting a Crusader-like Army against liberal secular America–but not necessarily a violent war against terrorist Islamism. Amanpour exploits America’s hottest domestic issues (abortion and gay marriage) in order to accomplish her own foreign policy aims.

By the end of her third and final segment we are meant to fear and loathe the Christian conservative right far more than we are meant to fear or loathe Amanpour’s Amadinejad whom –incredibly–she never accuses of funding Hezbollah’s terrorist work abroad. What she mainly shows us in Iran are Shi’a Muslims at prayer, engaged in theatrical-religious rituals. We do not see them funding and masterminding Hezbollah as it takes down civilian (and Christian) Lebanon, lays siege to Israel, blows up the Jewish Community Center in Argentina. She shows us the child-martyrs (one estimate has 850,000 dying in the Iran-Iraq war) as themselves true believers as opposed to victims of sadistic adult handlers.

Her third segment is one long running advertisement for a Democratic candidate for the next Presidency. She is electioneering as hard as she accuses the Christians of doing.

NEWSFLASH UPDATE:

Dear Reader: The rapid-action momentum that author Rachel Ehrenfeld has gathered on behalf of the First Amendment is incredible. Now, the Senate Judiciary Committee has introduced a Free Speech Protection Act which you may read below. Senators Spector and Lieberman are involved in this effort which is all based on “Rachel’s Law” (against libel tourism which persecutes and silences authors for telling the truth) which was signed into law by Governor David Paterson.

What is more incredible is the continuing disinterest in this case in the mainstream media.

Specter, Lieberman, King Introduce Free Speech Protection Act

WASHINGTON, D.C. (May 7, 2008)—U.S. Senator Arlen Specter (R-PA), Ranking Member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Senator Joseph Lieberman (I-CT), Chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, and U.S. Representative Peter King (R-NY), Ranking Member of the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Homeland Security, today announced the introduction of the Free Speech Protection Act of 2008. This bill would protect American journalists from libel suits brought in foreign courts that do not have the same protections for free speech that are found in the U.S. constitution. It mirrors H.R. 5814, legislation recently introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives by Representative King.

“Freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of expression of ideas, opinions, and research, and freedom of exchange of information are all essential to the functioning of a democracy, and the fight against terrorism,” Senator Specter said. “There is a real danger that American writers and researchers will be afraid to address the crucial subject of terror funding and other important matters without these protections.”

“Discovering the truth requires full and open debate, which is not possible when courts are used to chill inquiry and research,” Senator Lieberman said. “The freedom of American journalists should not be threatened by foreign courts that do not adhere to America’s principles of free speech.”

“Our journalists provide us with insight on issues that affect all Americans, such as war and terrorism,” Rep. King said. “We cannot allow their voices to be silenced by those who prefer to keep secret the inner details of these issues. American authors and journalists should be able to practice their first amendment right without the fear of a lawsuit.”

This legislation creates a federal cause of action and federal jurisdiction so that federal courts may determine whether there has been defamation under United States law when a U.S. journalist, speaker, or academic is sued in a foreign court for speech or publication in the United States. The bill authorizes a court to issue an order barring enforcement of a foreign judgment and to award damages.

The impetus for this legislation is litigation involving Dr. Rachel Ehrenfeld, a U.S. citizen and Director of the American Center for Democracy. Dr. Ehrenfeld’s 2003 book, Funding Evil: How Terrorism is Financed and How to Stop It, which was published solely in the United States by a U. S. publisher, alleged that a Saudi Arabian subject and his family financially supported Al Qaeda in the years preceding the attacks of September 11. He sued Ehrenfeld for libel in England, although only 23 books were sold there.

The United Kingdom has become a popular venue for defamation plaintiffs from around the world, because under English law it is not necessary for a libel plaintiff to prove falsity or actual malice as is required in the United States. The U.S. journalists or publications who are named as defendants in these suits must deal with the expense, inconvenience and distress of being sued in foreign courts, even though their conduct is protected by the First Amendment in the United States.

HERE IS THE ORIGINAL ARTICLE.
On Thursday, New York State Governor David Paterson signed “Rachel’s (incredible) Law” into being. Rachel Ehrenfeld issued a press release which you may read below.

Although I am still recovering from surgery, I wrote to congratulate her. I asked whether she was inundated by media requests and publishing offers. To date, Rachel has received no requests for interviews. As far as she knows, there are no articles in the works about her extraordinary victory on behalf of the First Amendment. Absent extensive media coverage, Rachel’s chances of raising monies for the next legal go-round are compromised.

The silence speaks volumes. Please write about this. Ask others to do so as well. It is crucial that this bill be widely understood and reported.

The Libel Terrorism Protection Act, also known as RACHEL’s LAW, signed by Governor Patterson:

Albany, NY (May 1, 2008) — New York State Governor David Paterson yesterday signed the “Libel Terrorism Protection Act” (S.6687/A.9652), which on March 31 passed the state’s Assembly and Senate unanimously.

Also known as Rachel’s Law, the bill sponsored by Assemblyman Rory Lancman (D-Queens) and Senate Deputy Majority Leader Dean G. Skelos (R-Rockville Centre) will protect American journalists and authors from foreign lawsuits that infringe on First Amendment rights. The bill also received unprecedented support from Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver.

“New Yorkers must be able to speak out on issues of public concern without living in fear that they will be sued outside the United States, under legal standards inconsistent with our First Amendment rights,” said Governor Paterson. “This legislation will help ensure of the freedoms enjoyed by New York authors.”

Reflecting the New York legislation’s importance, U.S. Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.) on April 16 introduced a similar bill, the Freedom of Speech Protection Act (H.R. 5814), in the House of Represenatives.

In Ehrenfeld v. Mahfouz, New York State’s highest court held that it was unable to protect Dr. Ehrenfeld from a British lawsuit filed by Saudi billionaire Khalid Salim Bin Mahfouz. Britain’s High Court ordered her to pay over $225,000 in damages and legal fees to Bin Mahfouz, apologize and destroy copies of her books.

Instead, November 2006, Dr. Ehrenfeld sought a U.S. federal court order to protect her constitutional rights. But a New York Court of Appeals ruling with national implications sent legal shockwaves throughout American newsrooms.

To continue reading, press here.