Canary In The Coal Mine

Obama Administration Says It Talked With Muslim Brotherhood to Promote Small Business

By Terence P. Jeffrey | April 25, 2012 | CNSNews.com

The Obama administration says that it has talked with members of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood in order to promote small business.

The Muslim Brotherhood, which was banned in Egypt during the regime of former President Hosni Mubarak, leads the Freedom and Justice Party which, according to the Congressional Research Service, won 235 of the 498 seats (47 percent) in Egypt’s new People’s Assembly, which convened in January. The fundamentalist Islamist Alliance won another 125 seats (or 25 percent of the assembly).

In an online briefing for foreign reporters last week, Undersecretary of State Robert Hormats ( Pictured) said that the State Department is trying to promote collaboration between small and medium-sized businesses in the United States and businesses overseas.

In this context, he said he had talked to members of the Muslim Brotherhood about promoting smaller enterprises. He said he would be having similar discussions this week with leaders from Middle Eastern and North African countries.

“America's a big economy with a number of big companies. We also have a lot of small and medium-sized companies. And we know in many parts of the world, there is an effort to support small and medium-sized enterprise,” said Hormats.

“Just one example: I’ve been spending a lot of time in the Middle East and North Africa in support of the kind of reforms that are now going on in that region,” said Hormats. “And one of the things that I have picked up by people throughout the region is their emphasis on support for small and medium-sized enterprises. American companies would like to buy from and collaborate with small and medium-sized enterprises in North Africa, the Middle East. I’ve had conversations in Egypt, with business people members of the Muslim Brotherhood; the same is true in Tunisia, and other parts of the world.

“So this is not an ideological issue. This is not a political issue,” said Hormats. “This is a practical issue of collaboration between the United States and companies around the world and governments around the world, all of whom want to create jobs, want to work together, and to improve the living standards of their citizens. American business is very supportive of this.

“The State Department is very supportive of American business and of cooperation between American business and businesses in other countries who want to create jobs, who want to innovate, and want to strengthen their global ties in a mutually constructive way,” said Hormats.

A reporter from the Arabic-language newspaper Al Sharq al-Awsat asked Hormats: “Post the Arab Spring, changing nations are struggling. What is the support that is taking place there?” In responding, Hormats said that the Obama administration is interested in supporting Middle Eastern countries "by helping them to deal with opportunities for strengthening small and medium sized enterprises"--mentioning, again, in this context, his meeting with members of the Muslim Brotherhood.

"The United States is strongly committed to supporting the economic and the political reforms that are going on in the region. Each country is in a somewhat different position. They're not all the same. They don't have the same approaches to change," Hormats responded. "But they do have many things in common: the emphasis on dignity, the emphasis on job creation, the emphasis on strengthening opportunity for their people to participate in the political process and participate to a far greater degree in the economic benefits of growth and giving them more opportunities.

"We have had very good conversations," said Hormats. "In fact, over the next few days, I plan to meet with representatives of all of the Middle East-North Africa countries, first in Paris next week, early next week, and then later in that week during the World Bank-IMF meetings. Ive been playing a very active role myself, as have my colleagues here in this building and throughout our government. Secretary Clinton regards this as a very high priority. And of course, President Obama regards this as very important. So we intend to support countries of the region by helping them deal with their financial situations, by helping them to deal with opportunities for strengthening small and medium sized enterprises.

"I mentioned representatives from the Muslim Brotherhood with whom I've had an opportunity to meet, have emphasized that point very substantially," said Hormats. "We agree with that, helping them to take advantage of new export opportunities, export facilitation. How do they take better advantage of generalized preferences, which many of them have? Or in some cases, some of have free trade agreements that we would like to see them be able to take more advantage of technical assistance, education assistance, a whole range of things."

In mid-January, Hormats joined Deputy Secretary of State William Burns on a U.S. delegation to Egypt that included talks with leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood.

According to a Jan. 26 report in Daily News Egypt, Hormats said he believed the Muslim Brotherhood leaders he spoke with were “very pragmatic."

The Daily News Egypt report said: "Hormats described the half-dozen Brotherhood officials he met with as 'very pragmatic. They understand; they're the majority party now in the parliament. They are going to be the primary political party in Egypt. They need to deliver results.' 'And their focus primarily is on small- and medium-enterprise' as generators of job creation, he said."

The Daily News Egypt, which described itself as the only English language daily in Egypt, published its last edition yesterday, Sunday, April 22, 2012.

Source: http://cnsnews.com/news/article/obama-administration-says-it-talked-muslim-brotherhood-promote-small-business

Convicted Nazi Criminal John Demjanjuk Dead at 91

by Reuters  |  JPost.com  |  March 17, 2012

 

Photo: Reuters

 

Ukrainian-born man convicted last year for assisting in the murder of nearly 28,000 Jews dies in German care home.

John Demjanjuk, convicted last year for his role in killing 28,000 Jews at a Nazi death camp during World War Two, died on Saturday at the age of 91 in a care home in southern Germany, police said.

A Munich court convicted Ukrainian-born Demjanjuk in May 2011 of helping to kill the Jews at the Sobibor death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland. He was sentenced to five years in prison but freed, pending appeal, because of his age.

The Bavarian police said in a statement Demjanjuk had died in the early hours of Saturday at the care home near Rosenheim, south of Munich, where he had been living.

Demjanjuk was extradited to Germany from his home in the United States in 2009 to stand trial. He attended the 18-month court proceedings in Munich -- birthplace of Adolf Hitler's Nazi movement -- in a wheelchair and sometimes lying down.

He denied the charges against him but otherwise did not speak at his trial.

The court verdict said guards had played a key role at extermination camps like Sobibor, where at least 250,000 Jews are thought to have been killed despite only 20 German SS officers being there.

Once top of the Nazi-hunting Simon Wiesenthal Center's list of most wanted Nazi criminals, Demjanjuk said he was drafted into the Soviet army in 1941 and then taken prisoner by the Germans.

Prosecutors had faced several hurdles in proving Demjanjuk's guilt, with no surviving witnesses to his crimes and heavy reliance on wartime documents, namely a Nazi ID card indicating he had worked at Sobibor.

Demjanjuk was initially sentenced to death two decades ago in Israel for being the so-called "Ivan the Terrible" camp guard at Treblinka in Poland.

The guilty verdict was overturned on appeal by the Supreme Court in 1993 after new evidence emerged pointing to a case of mistaken identity.

Demjanjuk emigrated to the United States in the early 1950s and became a naturalized citizen in 1958, working as an engine mechanic in Ohio.

 

Source: http://www.jpost.com/International/Article.aspx?ID=262214&R=R1&t=t

Jewish Group Ignores the Elephant in the Room - An Open Letter to Abe Foxman, National Director of ADL

by Charles Jacobs  |  FamilySecurityMatters.org  |  November 8, 2011

 

Dear Abe,

 

As you yourself have said, Islamic anti-Semitism constitutes the largest threat faced today by world Jewry.  Funded in the main by Saudi petro dollars, mosques and madrassas around the globe teach millions of Muslims that Jews are the sons of monkeys and pigs, the murderers of prophets and the enemies of Islam.  This poison has reached beyond Muslim lands and into Europe where Jews and Jewish institutions have become under increasing physical assault.  It has also reached onto American shores, and radical Muslim leaders here teach American Muslims to hate Jews.  Muslims have targeted and murdered Jews in America and mounted many plots to attack Jewish institutions. As you have said, nothing is now more dangerous for our people.

 

Yet the ADL, the Jewish people's largest and most important defense organization, has done little to educate Jews about this daunting problem. Nor has the ADL developed a strategy or even a campaign to adequately address it.  

 

Indeed, as our recently completed study - at www.charlesjacobs.org  -- shows, over the last 15 years, fewer than 8% of ADL press releases address Islamic extremism,  Arab anti-Semitism and terrorism. And in recent years, as the problem grows, ADL generates even fewer press releases on the matter.  

 

Further, while FBI statistics show that hate crimes against Jews in America are eight times the number of crimes against Muslims, the ADL has sought to validate the Islamist claim - contrary to all objective data -- that hatred of Muslims is a major problem in America, and spends Jewish resources to fight "Islamophobia" because, in your words, "You can't fight the fight against anti-Semitism without fighting against bigotry." And "You cannot ask people to stand with you unless you are ready to stand with them."

 

While these statements may at first sound and feel good, upon reflection they seem more like posturing, and they convey a superficial moral symbolism. If Blacks and gays and women can fight the hatred directed against them without taking on "hatred" in general, why are you diverting the precious resources of our tiny Jewish community to fight bigotry against every group, including 1.5 billion Muslims?   In any case, why does standing up against anti-Muslim bigotry mean that ADL has to shy away from standing against anti-Jewish bigotry by Muslims? And how do you come to the idea that Muslims will stand up for Jews because, or only when, Jews stand up for them?

 

In the soon-to-be-released major documentary, "Unmasked: Judeophobia," over 30 scholars, policy makers and rabbis soberly and compellingly describe the clear and present danger of Islamic anti-Semitism.  ADL's failure to aggressively counter Muslim Jew-hatred is a problem that can no longer be ignored.  

 

I and others have written and spoken about this for several years. Your public response this has been to deny the claim that ADL is being negligent on this vital matter. The data in the just-released study shows otherwise.  The Jewish community deserves to know what percent of the ADL budget is devoted to what you described as the "largest threat faced today by world Jewry." The Board, which is ultimately responsible for ADL operations, needs to focus on their primary mission -- "To Stop the Defamation of the Jewish People."

 

Today more than ever, Jews need an effective and assertive ADL, with strongleadership that can fulfill the organization's mission and commitment to its donors and constituents. There are many reasons to vacillate, to temporize, to appease. None of them are ever any good.

FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Charles Jacobs is a political activist who co-founded the American Anti-Slavery Group and also the David Project, and also the organization Americans for Peace and Tolerance. He can be contacted at:CJ@peaceandtolerance.org.

 

Source: http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.10770/pub_detail.asp

Anti-Semitism, a Growth Industry in Bad Times

by Alan Caruba  |  CanadaFreePress.com  |  November 8, 2011

 

In bad times, anti-Semitism seems to crawl out of the sewers like a repugnant odor. It is not subject to a rational response. It is pure emotion and a very nasty one at that. Lately we got a whiff of it at some of the Occupy protests.

 

On November 3rd, the Anti-Defamation League released a nationwide study that found that “anti-Semitic attitudes have risen slightly in America, demonstrating once again that ‘anti-Semitic beliefs continue to hold a vice-grip’ on a small but not insubstantial segment of America.”

“The ADL survey found that 15 percent of Americans—nearly 35 million adults—hold deeply anti-Semitic views, an increase of 3 percent from a similar poll conducted in 2009, and matching the levels of anti-Semitic propensities recorded in the U.S. in 2005 and 2007.” Even so, what passes for anti-Semitism today is not remotely comparable to earlier, pre-World War Two generations.

One of the lesser reported aspects of the Occupy Wall Street movement has been a strong element of anti-Semitism. Little wonder that it has been endorsed by the American Nazi Party and other extreme groups, both Left and Right.

As Abraham H. Foxman, the ADL National Director, noted, “The fact that anti-Semitic attitudes have increased significantly over the past two years is troubling and raises questions about the impact of broader trends in America—financial insecurity, social uncertainty, the decline in civility and the growth of polarization—on attitudes toward Jews.”

For example, 19 percent of those polled answered “probably true” to the statement that “Jews have too much control/influence on Wall Street”, an increase from 14 percent in 2009. This indicates that Jewish stereotypes remain strong; particularly claims that Jews control Wall Street and the media.

This reflects events and attitudes in Europe as well. In an article published in the UK newspaper, The Guardian, on November 6, Emine Bozkurt, a Dutch MEP who heads the anti-racism lobby at the European Parliament, was quoted saying that “We are at a crossroads in European history. In five year’s time we will either see an increase in the forces of hatred and division in society, including ultra-nationalism, xenophobia, Islamaphobia and anti-Semitism, or we will be able to fight this horrific tendency.”

Thomas Klau of the European Council on Foreign Relations, referring to the study, said, “As anti-Semitism was a unifying factor for far-right parties in the 1910s, 20s and 30s, Islamaphobia has become the unifying factor in the early decades of the 21st century.”

The difference worth noting is that the Jews of Europe never had any intention of taking over those nations while Muslims have made it clear they want to impose Sharia law.

Kristallnach 1938

November 9-10 is the anniversary of Kristallnach in 1938 (the Night of Broken Glass) in which Jews and their synagogues suffered violent attacks throughout Germany, the recently annexed Sudetanland, in Hanover, and the free city of Danzig. It was the beginning of what would evolve into the Holocaust, the deliberate extermination of Europe’s Jews.

Some Jews, in response to Europe’s entrenched anti-Semitism, joined the Zionist movement, beginning in the 1890s to create a Jewish homeland in Israel, moving there before the cataclysm of the Holocaust. At the time it was a protectorate of the British. Post-World War Two Holocaust survivors moved there and, in 1948 Israel declared its sovereignty. Thereafter, many Jews fled Middle Eastern nations for the sanctuary Israel provided and were later joined by Russian Jews fleeing the Soviet Union.

These days, the Holocaust-deniers in Iran openly boast of their intent to destroy Israel (and America) with the nuclear weapons they are developing.

The ADL report’s findings are unpleasant, but hardly surprising. Anti-Semitism in America is a phenomenon of the fringes of political movements of the Far Right (neo-Nazis) and Far Left (Communists).

In these times, however, Israel has no greater support than among American conservatives and evangelicals; Jews have no better friends.

The American historian and scholar, Thomas Cahill, said, “The Jew gave us the Outside and the Inside—our outlook and our inner life. We can hardly get up in the morning or cross the street without being Jewish. We dream Jewish dreams and hope Jewish hopes. Most of our best words, in fact—new, adventure, surprise, unique, individual, person, vocation, time, history, future, freedom, progress, spirit, faith, hope, justice—are the gifts of the Jews.”

Source: http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/42160

Poland Reopens Investigations Into Nazi-Era Crimes

by Gareth Jones, Reuters  |  af.reuters.com  |  October 27, 2011

 

Nazi soldiers round up Polish Jews: The Germans arrived at Plonsk, Poland -- with its 6,000-strong Jewish community -- on September 5, 1939, then established a Judenrat (Jewish council) the following July and a ghetto that September. Here, German troops assemble the Jews soon after the town's capture. During the next two years, as many as 12,000 Jews from Plonsk and the surrounding area passed through the ghetto. It was eventually emptied in November 1942 when its remaining inhabitants were consigned to Auschwitz for extermination. Few, very few, Righteous Poles were able to find hiding places for their Jewish neighbours.

http://history.howstuffworks.com/world-war-ii/start-world-war-24.htm

 

WARSAW - Poland has reopened investigations into crimes committed at the Nazi death camp of Auschwitz during World War Two, in an effort to track down any surviving camp employees before they die.

Up to 1.5 million people, mostly Jews, perished at Nazi German hands at Auschwitz, near the city of Krakow in southern Poland, during the war that ended in 1945.

In the postwar communist era, Warsaw launched probes into crimes committed at Auschwitz, but closed them in the 1980s because questioning witnesses and perpetrators based abroad was too hard at a time when Poland was part of the Soviet bloc.

"We do not exclude the possibility of finding alive former employees of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp," Piotr Piatek of Poland's Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) told the PAP state news agency Thursday.

"In this case they may be accused of crimes against the Polish nation," he said.

The IPN is a state institution that investigates communist-era and Nazi-era crimes and can prosecute those it considers to have committed "crimes against the nation."

It was not immediately clear whether the reopened investigation would cover other Nazi death camps that operated on Polish soil during the war.

Jewish groups welcomed Thursday's announcement by the IPN.

"(We) welcome this effort to belatedly bring to justice and public awareness the perpetrators of the monstrous crimes the Nazis inflicted on the world's conscience more than half a century ago," said Elan Steinberg of the American Gathering of Holocaust Survivors and their Descendants.

"It is not only justice that is being served, but the purposeful values of education and remembrance that will give meaning to this undertaking."

 

Source:  http://af.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idAFTRE79Q7ME20111027

Kent State Professor Shouts ‘Death to Israel’ at Former Diplomat

From: JTA  |  JTA.org  |  October 27, 2011

 

A Kent State University professor shouted “Death to Israel” at a lecture given by a former Israeli diplomat.

Ishmael Khaldi, the former deputy consul general at the Israeli Consulate in San Francisco, was confronted by Professor Julio Pino (Pictured) during a question-and-answer session following Khaldi's speech on Tuesday, according to Kent Wired, a student publication. Khaldi was speaking about his life as a Bedouin in Israel who rose through the ranks of the Foreign Ministry, as well as Middle East issues.

Pino, a convert to Islam and a tenured professor, asked Khaldi how the Israeli government could justify providing aid to countries like Turkey with “blood money” from the deaths of Palestinian children. After briefly arguing with Khaldi, Pino left the auditorium shouting “Death to Israel.” An audience member responded by shouting “Shame on you” after him.

Pino has courted controversy for years, writing an opinion column in 2002 in which he praised a suicide bomber. In 2007 he was accused of running the blog Global War, which bills itself as “a jihadist news service.” Pino refused to discuss the allegations, describing it as a freedom of speech issue.

After Pino’s departure, Khaldi answered more questions, but also addressed the incident. He called for respect in discussion and suggested that people are misunderstanding the situation in Israel.

“Is this what the professor is telling you?" Khaldi asked. "It is my responsibility to tell the truth and build relationships.”

Source:  http://www.jta.org/news/article/2011/10/27/3090001/kent-state-prof-shouts-death-to-israel-at-former-diplomat

Video: Pamela Geller Speaks at the Sugar Land Tea Party

Uploaded to YouTube.com by JihadWatchVideo on Oct 26, 2011

 

Screen Shot of Pamela Geller

 

 

 

Source:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=RGYjLAgJfD8

Twisted Mea Culpa From Deborah Orr of The Guardian

Why it's right to weigh your words carefully

by Deborah Orr  |  Guardian.co.uk  |  October 26, 2011

 

 

 

 

 

I was wrong to use poorly chosen words to describe Israel, but that doesn't mean the country is above criticism.

Last week, I upset a lot of people by suggesting Zionists saw themselves as "chosen". My words were badly chosen and poorly used, and I'm sorry for it. But accusations of antisemitism have also been intemperate. One can accept the right of Israel to exist, while still believing that the manner in which the nation was created – against the wishes of many of the people already living there, hundreds of thousands of whom became refugees – was problematic and made a contribution to Israel's subsequent and terrible troubles. (This, in turn, does not imply that the violence against Israel has been either justified or deserved. It has done the Palestinian cause much damage, and rightly so.)

Nevertheless, it would be absurd to believe that Jewish people are any more or less capable of making geo-political miscalculations than anybody else, or any more or less likely to be called to account for them. Evidence from every corner of the world, throughout the ages, attests to the fact that such behaviour is all too typical of humans, as is reluctance to accept that such actions are bound to have their critics.

 

Source:  http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/oct/26/call-israel-to-account?newsfeed=true

 

Archbishop Makes Anti-Jewish Statements in Sermon

by JTA  |  JTA.org  |  October 26, 2011

 

A Catholic archbishop in Trinidad and Tobago made anti-Jewish remarks during a sermon.

Edward Gilbert (Pictured), the leader of the Catholic Church in the Port of Spain, compared politicians in the southern Caribbean republic to Jews, who he said only care about their own.

“The Jews were compassionate and caring for their own, they were compassionate and caring to the people of their nation, to the people of their race, to the people of their ethnic communities," Gilbert said during a Jubilee Mass Oct. 24 at Our Lady of Perpetual Help Roman Catholic Church in San Fernando, Trinidad, to celebrate the 225th anniversary of the Roman Catholic mission there. "However, that wasn’t enough for Jesus. Jesus took that teaching and universalized it.

“In many cases in this country, there are people who love one another, who are compassionate, but they have the mind-set of the original Jewish people. They are good to their own ... but they have not universalized the concept of love.”

The Anti-Defamation League called the statements “a disturbing repackaging of ancient anti-Jewish canards and supersessionist beliefs.”

“Archbishop Gilbert devalues Judaism over and against Christianity," ADL National Director Abraham Foxman said in a statement. "The false notion that Jews only care about themselves and don’t care enough about others is one of the major pillars of classical anti-Semitism.”

Rabbi David Rosen, the American Jewish Committee's international director of interreligious affairs, said "such prejudicial comments not only reflect personal ignorance, but also ignorance of the teaching of the Catholic Church since Nostra Aetate."

The 1974 Vatican Guidelines on Nostra Aetate warn against such misrepresentation and generalizations, Rosen added.

“Archbishop Gilbert’s comments again highlight the need for more effective global Catholic education regarding the Holy See's official teaching on Jews and Judaism,” he said. 

Source:  http://www.jta.org/news/article/2011/10/26/3089965/archbishop-makes-anti-jewish-statements-in-sermon

Voices of Palestine: Mahmoud al-Zahar

by Frank Crimi  |  FrontPageMag.com  |  October 26, 2011

 

Editor’s note: Below is the second profile of Frontpage’s new series, “Voices of Palestine,” which will illuminate the core beliefs, in their own words, of leading figures in the Palestinian death cult. To view the profile of Ahmad Bahr, click here.

When Hamas released Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit after five years in captivity in exchange for over 1,000 jailed Palestinian terrorists, it was met with considerable opposition from those who believed it would only encourage more kidnappings and terrorism. Almost immediately, Hamas leader Mahmoud al-Zahar fully confirmed this worry, saying in a newspaper interview, “The lessons we’ve learned by kidnapping soldiers leads us to continue the kidnappings. We still have 7,000 prisoners in (Israeli) jails, and they also need to be released.”  But, unlike Israel, al-Zahar is not interested in these prisoner exchanges for the purpose of liberating innocent Palestinians. Rather, he is determined to amass as many foot soldiers as possible in order to obliterated Israel and drive its Jewish population into the sea.

To achieve this goal, al-Zahar’s Hamas has for decades employed suicide bombings and rocket attacks against Israeli military and civilian targets. While al-Zahar currently resides in the “political-wing” of Hamas, prior to that he cut his teeth planning these attacks in Hamas’s “armed-wing,” the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades.

When al-Zahar first ascended to his ministerial post in 2006, he outlined Hamas’s foreign policy agenda in a series of public broadcasts. In one broadcast, al-Zahar said Hamas “would not change a single word in its covenant,” which calls for the destruction of Israel and Jewish genocide. He added, “Israel is not a legitimate entity, and no amount of pressure can force us to recognize its right to exist.” Then, for those who may still not have understood the message, al-Zahar further assured them, “By God, we will not leave one Jew in Palestine. We will fight them with all the strength we have. This is our land, not the Jews.”

In a 2010 television broadcast, al-Zahar intoned, “We have liberated Gaza, but have we recognized Israel? Have we given up our lands occupied in 1948? We demand the liberation of the West Bank, and the establishment of a state in the West Bank and Gaza, with Jerusalem as its capital – but without recognizing [Israel]. This is the key – without recognizing the Israeli enemy on a single inch of land…I say this loud and clear so that nobody will accuse me of employing political tactics. We will not recognize the Israeli enemy.”

Of course, even if Israel were to cede all “disputed territories,” as they’re called, that wouldn’t be enough to satisfy al-Zahar and his Hamas compatriots. Al-Zahar made that point clear as early as 2005 when he said, “Neither the liberation of the Gaza Strip nor the liberation of the West Bank or even Jerusalem will suffice us. Hamas will pursue the armed struggle until the liberation of all our lands. We don’t recognize the state of Israel or its right to hold onto one inch of Palestine. Palestine is an Islamic land belonging to all the Muslims.”

Al-Zahar has been equally clear as to his plans for the Jews after Palestine is “liberated”: “We are no weaker or less honorable than the peoples that expelled and annihilated the Jews. The day we expel them is drawing near…We have learned the lesson – there is no place for you among us, and you have no future among the nations of the world. You are headed to annihilation.”

It should be noted that al-Zahar’s mission to annihilate the Jews comes with several preconditions. As he explained in 2006, “Before Israel dies, it must be humiliated and degraded. Allah willing, before they die, they will experience humiliation and degradation every day.”

Only a problem for Israel and the Jews? Not according to al-Zahar.  Achieving Allah’s directive in “Palestine” is only the beginning. In 2004 al-Zahar said:

We are part of Allah’s promise that Islam will enter Palestine and every home in the world, with a revelation of the power of Allah the Omnipotent, and a revelation of the inferiority of the infidels. Hamas is leading this plan in Gaza, the West Bank, and the 1948 territories, and the Muslim Brotherhood is leading it everywhere else. This is part of Allah’s predestination.

Al-Zahar’s Islamist vision was on display later that same year when he spoke at the funeral of the first female Hamas suicide bomber, promising, “She is not going to be the last because the march of resistance will continue until the Islamic flag is raised, not only over the minarets of Jerusalem, but over the whole universe.”

Al-Zahar’s admiration for death and destruction is not confined to Palestinian suicide bombers. He also praises his Islamist brethren in Afghanistan, the American-killing Taliban:

The Taliban are 1,000 times more honorable than the American occupation and its collaborators…Everyone must stop blaming the Taliban for things that in fact characterize the people of the West, who seek to turn the international community into a swamp of corruption and destruction, and to spread abomination and disease in the name of absolute freedom.

Perhaps al-Zahar’s admiration for the Taliban arises from that terror group’s frequent use of suicide bombers, many of whom are women and children forced into the act. During the al-Aqsa Intifada from 2000-2004, Hamas and its allies launched 138 suicide attacks against Israelis, killing 319 Israeli soldiers and 745 civilians, and wounding 2,430 soldiers and 5,032 civilians. Sixty-nine of the suicide attacks were carried out by children under the age of 18.

One might be misled into thinking that al-Zahar’s recent call for Mahmoud Abbas, leader of Fatah (Hamas’s rival), to abandon his unilateral UN statehood bid was an indication that his views are softening. But, in actuality, al-Zahar opposes the move because he does not want a Palestinian state side by side Israel. He is only interested in one Judenrein Palestinian state. As he once said, “I dream of hanging a huge map of the world on the wall at my Gaza home which does not show Israel on it. I hope that our dream to have our independent state on all historic Palestine.”

No amount of prisoner exchanges or concessions by the Israelis will allow that dream of al-Zahar’s to die. He’s made himself perfectly clear on the subject. If only the world would take his words seriously.

Source:  http://frontpagemag.com/2011/10/26/voices-of-palestine-mahmoud-al-zahar/