Reader Mail: 27 December 2005

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Subject: VNN today...

"The Truth Is No Defence" - latest from VNN's Geoff Beck

http://www.vanguardnewsnetwork.com/2005/VNNB/gbttind.htm

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Subject: heim music in Germany offends SC dictators

Neo-Nazis Spreading Message and Recruiting Through Music

Neo-Nazis are branching out from rock to spread their message through other genres

Grossansicht des Bildes mit der Bildunterschrift: Neo-Nazis are branching out from rock to spread their message through other genres Germany's neo-Nazis are increasingly using music to spread their message, particularly among the unemployed youth of the former communist East Germany, according to experts on extremism. In 2004, neo-Nazis applied for permission to hold 137 concerts, mostly in the poor eastern provinces of Saxony and Thüringen, figures released by the federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution show.

From January to September 2005, the authorities had received 100 such requests and the "trend shows no sign of slowing down," said an official from the office, who asked not to be named.

He said the amount of racist audio and video material seized by the authorities had also increased. [Does a "journalist"-burrocrat ever pause when typing these words?]

Toralf Staud, a journalist and the author of "Modern Nazis," said the extreme right National Democratic Party (NPD) had developed a new strategy to spread its racist, anti-Semitic and anti-capitalist ideologies. The party launched a high-profile campaign against the socio-economic reforms of the government of former Chancellor Gerhard Schröder in 2004, but has now moved on to subverting the national cultural policies, he said.

Staub said the NPD was trying to win over future voters among the youth, and it was to this end that the party distributed thousands of free CDs in front of schools when Germans voted in national elections on September 18.

Ballads, rap and hip-hop adopted by skinhead bands

The neo-Nazis are known for so-called "skinhead hard rock" but has now branched out into ballads, hip-hop and "gangsta" rap.

A rap group from the eastern German city of Dessau called Dissau Crime has released a song called "Zyklon D," named after the type of gas used by the Nazis in their gas chambers during the Holocaust. The rappers have swapped the trademark neo-Nazi outfit of boots, tight jeans and flying jackets for running shoes, oversized clothes and camouflage gear.

But the lyrics are the same as always: the glorification of the Aryan race, the myth of the Nordic warriors and hatred of immigrants and Jews. The youth of the former East Germany, who have borne the brunt of the reunified country's economic slump and the impact of the opening of borders with Poland and the Czech Republic, are the target audience.

Former East Germany a target-rich environment

The NPD's support is strongest in the former German Democratic Republic, and it scored its first poll success in Saxony in 2004 when it claimed 9.2 percent of the votes in a regional election.

"In the new states, where unemployment stands at up to 40 percent, the NPD offers the youth a haven where they feel they are among friends, where they can drink beer and listen to music," said Patrick Moreau, a French researcher who studies extremist groups in Germany.

"It is a slow politicization through music. In the west, the strategy is less successful because there the authorities organize more leisure activities for the youth," added the researcher, who is based in the eastern city of Leipzig.

The main purveyor of neo-Nazi music is still the Internet, which offers free downloading sites set up in the United States and Denmark, but there is also a profusion of free "Nazi concerts" on the sidelines of political demonstrations, said Moreau.

Convicted neo-Nazi holds one final concert

Michael Regener [right] from the extremist band "Landser" was sentenced to three years

To see how closely the NPD and the neo-Nazi music scene is linked, he added, one only has to recall that the skinhead singer Michael Regener played his farewell concert before going to prison at the party's congress in Thüringen in March.

Regener was sentenced to three years and four months in prison for belonging to a criminal organization.

Here.

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Subject: Minutemen

Nonviolent Minuteman movement takes hold

By ARTHUR H. ROTSTEIN, Associated Press

December 25, 2005

TUCSON, Ariz. - The Minuteman Project was launched earlier this year amid fears that racist crackpots would rough up illegal immigrants trying to slip into this country. But there was no bloodshed when the hundreds of volunteers converged in the Arizona desert in April to watch for border crossers and report them to immigration authorities. Since then, the Minuteman movement has taken hold, with Minuteman-inspired organizations launched in several states. One of the movement's co-founders made a surprisingly strong showing in a bid for Congress earlier this month in California.

And even critics of the movement acknowledge its participants are not all bigots or extremists.

Attention surrounding immigration problems helped attract "a fairly broad cross section of middle Americans," said Mark Potok, director of the Southern Poverty Law Center's Intelligence Project, which monitors hate groups. "This is partly driven by politicians falling all over each other over an issue that they feel had some real resonance."

Potok said that "there are real strains of racism and anti-Semitism in this movement." Still, "the movement has attracted people who are not Klansmen or neo-Nazis."

The Minuteman Project was the brainchild of Jim Gilchrist, a retired accountant from Orange County, Calif., who recruited participants through the Internet. The idea, according to project organizers, was partly to draw attention to problems at the Arizona-Mexico border, the most porous stretch of the 2,000-mile southern border.

The group said about 900 people showed up for the April project. Schoolteachers and retired veterans, businessmen and former corporate executives, some of them armed, parked their pickup trucks and RVs along a dusty, rutted road near Naco, sitting in lawn chairs with binoculars to look for anyone trying to slip illegally into the country.

Organizers said the volunteers' calls helped lead authorities to about 330 illegal immigrants. Critics - the U.S. Border Patrol among them - said the Minutemen were little more than a nuisance. Among other things, officials said the volunteers disrupted Border Patrol operations by unwittingly tripping sensors that alert agents to intruders.

Nevertheless, the Minuteman Project succeeded in drawing attention to illegal immigration. In October, still more volunteers repeated the exercise in other states on the Mexican and Canadian borders. Chris Simcox, one of the movement's co-founders, said three dozen new chapters had formed by mid-November. "It has moved into politics on the local, state and federal level, what we hope is in every district in this country," Simcox said. "We mean business."

On Dec. 6, Gilchrist, a former Republican running as a third-party candidate in a special House election in Orange County, Calif., finished a strong third with 25 percent of the vote. "It was a clear sign from grassroots organizations that politicians ought to pay attention to the illegal immigration issue," Jack Pitney, a government professor at Claremont McKenna College, said at the time.

Gilchrist had hoped his showing could push federal immigration policy to the forefront in next year's congressional races and influence the 2008 presidential race. Many people in the district, situated about two hours from the Mexican border, have been frustrated with the growing population of illegal immigrants. Dan Stein, president of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which advocates limits on immigration, said the Minuteman Project reflects a visceral reaction to the "national intrusion" by illegal immigrants. "There's a genuineness to this that has won over the hearts and minds of the American public," Stein said.

Here.

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Subject: synagogue claimed vandalized

Edmonton Canada Synagogue Vandalized

17:13 Dec 27, '05 / 26 Kislev 5766

(IsraelNN.com) A black Nazi swastika and a circle containing a slash through the letters ZOG was discovered on an Edmonton, Canada, synagogue on Sunday, ahead of the first night of Chanukah. Local police are investigating the incident at Beth Shalom synagogue, which has suffered several anti-Semitic attacks in the past five years. Arab immigrant Yousef Sandouga was sentenced by a Canadian court to two and a half years in jail for a November 2000 firebomb attack on Beth Shalom. "ZOG" is the code among neo-Nazis, Islamists and other anti-Semitic organizations for "Zionist Occupied Government", alluding to the belief that Jews control world governments.

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/news.php3?id=95554

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Subject: interview with One People's Project

Interview with One People's Project

Anti-Racist ActionDaryle Lamont Jenkins talks about the creation of One People's Project, its current goals, racist ties amongst big name groups and individuals, and more. OPP celebrated its five year anniversary this past spring.

Interview with One People's Project

Daryle Lamont Jenkins talks about the anti-fascist group One People's Project.

By Stephanie

One People's Project has come a long way in the past five and a half years. You can engage in political dialogue in their online forums, read about current happenings on their website, or listen to their brand new radio show. Check them out at www.onepeoplesproject.com

On the front lines fighting fascism: an interview with Daryle Lamont Jenkins of One People's Project

The North Jersey based One People's Project has recently celebrated its five-year anniversary. The group has been fighting fascism through use of counter demonstrations, flyers, leaflets, and its website. Among other things, their website provides information on important racists, homophobes, and various hatemongers, provides up-to-date news on their main page, and also has a discussion board with several political topics on it. OPP has most recently been keeping an eye on the immigrant reform group The Minutemen Project while continuing to provide daily news on its front page. Daryle Lamont Jenkins is one of the driving forces behind OPP. Jenkins has gotten enough attention that some prominent right wingers have done all they can to denounce him, but Jenkins continues to fight against intolerance in our country, particularly racism. In August, I conducted an e-mail interview with Jenkins.

STEPHANIE: Could you give a brief history of One People's Project?

DARYLE LAMONT JENKINS: One People's Project started when a white supremacist decided he wanted to hold a rally on July 4, 2000 in Morristown [NJ]. We originally wanted our counterdemo to be more of a rally to celebrate us as a united people and to that end we named it the One People's Rally. We developed a GeoCities website that provided information on the rally and what our intentions were. We also provided a Rogues' Galley of those that we expected to march on the other side. At the time I was in the New Jersey Freedom Organization and producing a public access television program through my production company Flashpoint. Both were among the endorsers of the One People's Rally. After the rally, we needed to maintain the coalition we built, not to mention the website, to not only support those that eventually were arrested on the Fourth, but also to keep people informed about those elements in our society that promote hate and fascism. Because of that, we were able to shut down an "awards ceremony" from the same white supremacist in Manville a few months later. I left NJFO, and worked full time on what was then the One People's Coalition. It became One People's Project a few months later, after many of the others that were with us in those initial stages moved on and we figured that it wasn't much of a coalition anymore. Soon we started going after other groups and individuals, and the Rogues' Gallery, which was originally just paragraphs talking about certain people on the Flashpoint website, ended up going over to OPP's site and becoming even more extensive - and a bit more aggressive since we found out that anti-abortion activists were allowed by the courts to publish personal information of abortion providers on their websites. We decided that we should do that as well, and that was where things became a bit notorious for us.

S: Currently, what is the main focus of OPP?

DLJ: The main focus of OPP is to fight fascism. The way we do it is by showing where it is, who is responsible for it, and what we can do about it. As I noted earlier, that has meant us to be rather aggressive and controversial in some areas, such as when we publish the home addresses of neo-Nazis and even mainstream conservatives, like Sean Hannity, who lives at 27 Seacrest Drive, Lloyd Harbor, NY. I had to get that in there! Seriously, I think that we simply needed to force some hands out there. Fact of the matter is there are far too many people (I am not going to get into if they are in the majority or not, because in the end it doesn't matter) that do not want to live in the kind of world the right wants for us, but they have no clue in how to beat them back. We give them the clues.

S: How do you collect your information on some of the people on your site?

DLJ: That is something in the interest of maintaining confidentiality I shouldn't answer, but I can say that a lot of the info we have can be obtained through public channels.

S: Do you think displaying their personal info infringes on their privacy?

DLJ: No. Let me refer to Neil Horsley, the particular anti-abortion activist that was providing the personal info on abortion providers. He was allowed to do this by the courts saying that not allowing him to do so would be an infringement on his First Amendment rights. If that is the case, information on them is also allowed to be published. Back in Oct. 2003, some of the guys from Freak Republic asked me that and I told them the same thing. True to the conservative mantra of not allowing the same freedoms they enjoy to others that they don't agree with, they thought that a conservative winning the right to do so did not mean that I had that same right, [and that] especially in their minds, I advocate violence. Ironically, while OPP has never advocated violence or participated in it, Horsley crossed out the name of one of the providers in his lists when he was shot and killed.

S: Because you reference Horsley, you've been accused of advocating violence, and according to Hal Turner, promoting the murder of white activists. The only thing used to back this up is your mention of Horsley. Do you think they're blatantly lying, or do they actually think you're violent?

DLJ: They're lying. They know that there has been no acts of violence committed against them by anyone in OPP, nor would there be. Turner is someone who tries to promote himself with a lot of things said for shock value. Ironically, Turner is among those who openly advocates violence against others.

S: Who are some more famous groups and/or people who have racist ties?

DLJ: Well, there's the aforementioned Sean Hannity for one. I was interviewed for the Nation Magazine about him because five years ago he was good friends with a local boy named Hal Turner. Turner has an internet radio show where he goes on the usual White Power mantra of hating Jews, yada yada yada, but he also has that shtick that he curiously gets away with where he calls for someone to kill someone that he is in disagreement with. Sean apparently broke off their friendship in 2000, and he won't even mention the Nation article today. Ann Coulter is another one. She is friends with Joe Sobran, who is a big time white supremacist and anti-Semitic writer. Actually, he calls himself "counter-Semitic," whatever the hell that means. It is him that Ann Coulter is quoting when she blames blacks for slavery by saying that slavery is the only thing from Africa that we exported. The best place to find racist ties with the lunatic fringe racists and the mainstream conservative is in the anti-immigration scene. They are all over the place there.

S: Since you mention the anti-immigration scene, I was hoping you could fill us in a bit about the Minutemen Project and what role OPP has played in exposing their racist ties.

DLJ: The Minuteklan Project is a group of right-wing zealots who decided that the border patrol isn't doing enough to keep Mexicans from crossing the border into the U.S. They won't say that exactly though. They say that they are concerned that our country's security is weak at the borders and it needs to be tightened up. So what they decided to do is camp out along the border and “observe” those crossing it, at which time they notify authorities. Now they say they aren't about racism, and they discourage those with racist views from participating, but they have been more than open about the fact that they are involved with racist groups. Even the founder of the Minuteklan Project, a retired CPA named Jim Gilchrist, joined the California Coalition for Immigration Reform (CCIR), which is listed by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a hate group. It is also not lost on us that the Minuteklan Project was modeled after the Klan Border Patrol that made David Duke famous back in the seventies.

What OPP has been doing is going out there and showing people exactly who the Minuteklan Project is comprised of. We have gone to their meetings, hit their websites, held our noses and watched Fox News and we have been able to determine who were the "dirty folks" in the group. We then put all that information on the website and throw it back in the faces of those trying to pretend that they are this non-racist, all inclusive group that just happen to go after Mexicans a lot.

S: What do you think leads people to adapt racist views as strong as some of the people OPP has dealt with? Are there any characteristics that a lot of these people share?

DLJ: When I first got into learning about these folks, it was almost twenty years ago. Back then, you were talking about folks who either lived in the days of Jim Crow or the transitional period from that in the seventies. You were dealing with folks who wanted to preserve what they knew. It was still bullshit, but there was a little more grounding for them. Today, almost all the Nazis I come across are for the most part no older than 25, and have so much personal and mental baggage in their lives. They know nothing about life under segregation, and many of them even have friends of color! The thing is their lives are fucked up, and they want to make it matter somehow. Unfortunately, the wrong group got to them first, and while they think they are making some sort of difference, in the end they are killing themselves. No one is going to go back to the days of Jim Crow, and society abhors anyone that works to bring us back to those days. It doesn't matter to these cats because in the end they need to feel comfortable in their own skin somehow. Now those that are older than 25, they can possibly be someone who grew up in the WP circles or it has worked for them for now. They are more of a lost cause than the younger ones, because you can pull the younger ones out before they fuck themselves up. As you get older though, you lose more and more, and soon being a hatemonger is all you have. That's a shitty existence.

S: What are some ways you suggest for people to fight fascism in their everyday lives?

DLJ: We are not the problem. For the most part, we are in good shape. We get along relatively well. There may be a few questions about each other that we have to have answered, but at least the questions are being asked. For us on a personal level, we just have to keep ourselves in check and not let our misunderstandings morph into prejudice.

Every now and then, however, there are those who try to exploit the concerns and turn them into fear, which turns into anger, which turns into hate. That's where the Minuteklan Project comes from. That's where the calls for racist profiling comes from. That what not only the neo-Nazis do, but also mainstreamers like Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter, David Horowitz, Michelle Malkin and other conservative individuals do. What we have to do is recognize the game when it is being played. We have to reject this kind of campaign when we see it and stop allowing these scumbags to polarize us.

S: As it says on your website, Pat Robertson recently commented that we should assassinate Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. It seems that some figures can make the most absurd statements and just apologize and be done with it. Why are people so accepting of this?

DLJ: I think people want to start doing something about this. If someone on the left spoke like this, all hell would break loose and that person would lose their standing in society with a quickness. Now maybe that's the case with Robertson, but considering that it takes stupid remark after stupid remark from him for that to happen, maybe not. That's dangerous because of how he was once able to influence presidents at one time. We don't want anyone like this to have that kind of influence because it is only a matter of time before these same folks start calling for us to be shot!

S: What kind of projects do you have planned for the fall and winter?

DLJ: We are going to be all over the place getting people across the country involved in our form of activism. That has been a daunting task simply because of what it entails, but the effort has to be made.

S: Is there any other local activism you're involved with besides OPP?

DLJ: OPP takes up a lot of time, but whenever I can be involved in other things, I do.

Check them out at

http://www.onepeoplesproject.com

By Stephanie olafiancheeze@hotmail.com

http://www.onepeoplesproject.com/site/index.php

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Subject: one more year for Poland

WARSAW (Reuters) - Poland's government said on Tuesday it would keep troops in Iraq until the end of 2006, longer than earlier planned, reaffirming its backing for the United States despite growing opposition at home. But the present total of 1,500 troops will be cut to 900 by March.

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Subject: West 23,000 cleaner

Israel Jewish Agency: Record 23,000 New Immigrants Made Aliyah

By Joel Leyden

Israel News Agency

Jerusalem----December 28......The Israel Jewish Agency has announced that about 23,000 new immigrants have made Aliyah to Israel this year.

This represented a record number of new Jewish immigrants from the West. From France more immigrants arrived in 2005 than over the past 34 years and from North America, a record number was set for over 22 years. For the first time since the Palestinian Intifada and subsequent terror attacks, the downward trend has turned and more Jewish immigrants will arrive this year than last year.

There has also been a rise in the number of young people coming to Israel for short and long-term educational programs. Around 23,000 new immigrants will have arrived in Israel by the end of 2005 based on Jewish Agency preliminary figures for 2005.

From North America, 3,052 new immigrants will have made Aliyah to Israel, an increase from 2,640 last year. The last year when there was a higher number was 1983, when 3,806 olim arrived. Over 2,980 French Jews will have made Aliyah this year, as opposed to 2,415 in 2004. This is a record for 34 years, since 1972 when 2,356 new immigrants arrived.

From the CIS, the 2005 total is 9,124 new immigrants; this is a 10 percent decrease from last year. From Russia itself there is a small rise in Aliyah to Israel, and from Belarus there is a 26 percent increase from last year. From South America, 1,850 olim will have arrived in 2005, an increase from last year's figure of 1,348 last year (a 37.2% increase).

From England, over 450 olim will arrive this year, an increase from 435 last year. From Ethiopia, there will be a total of 3,700 olim, similar to last year.

On Wednesday December 28th the last special EL AL flight of immigrants this year will land in Ben Gurion Airport, with 220 new immigrants from the U.S. and Canada. This is the seventh special flight with immigrants for 2005 in the framework of the joint project of the Jewish Agency and "Nefesh B'Nefesh". There is also an increase in the number of Jewish youth from around the world participating in educational programs in Israel, supported by the Jewish Agency,both short-term and long-term.

This year, 29,712 young Jews took part in short-term programs (including Birthright Israel, Israel Experience and others), whereas last year the number was 28,822. There was an increase of 37 percent in participation in long-term educational programs: 5,583 students and youths this year took part, as opposed to 4,058 last year (relating to the 2004-2005 academic year).

The Chairman of the Jewish Agency, Zeev Bielski, stated : "I hope that this year will mark a turning point for aliyah and for participation of young people in educational programs in Israel. After several difficult years we've been through, we believe that the improvement in the security and economic situation will increase the feeling of security, and together with the Jewish Agency's new "aliyah of choice" strategies, aliyah will be on the rise in 2006 as well. I am happy that so many people are choosing to come to Israel".

For almost 75 years, the Jewish Agency for Israel has been synonymous with the efforts to rescue Jews at risk and the resettlement of the Jewish people in its homeland.

The history of the Jewish Agency in the pre-state era is inseparable from that of the Yishuv. In the early years of the state, the Jewish Agency's role was paramount in setting up an economic and cultural infrastructure for the country, still struggling for survival. Since the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989, the Jewish Agency has facilitated the aliyah and absorption in Israel over one million new immigrants - the equivalent of the United States absorbing the entire population of France! Today, too, the Jewish Agency's role remains central to countless Jews the world over as it continues to provide vital services in Israel and to the global Jewish community.

The Jewish Agency was established by the World Zionist Organization at the 16th Zionist Congress, in August 11, 1929 as a partnership between the WZO and non-Zionist Jewish leaders, among them such luminaries as Louis Marshall , Leon Blum, and Felix Warburg. The Agency was set up in accordance with the stipulation in the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine (1922) -- the goal of the mandate system was to eventually transfer authority over territories taken from countries defeated in World War to the local population -- that a "Jewish agency " comprised of representatives of world Jewry assist in the "establishment of the Jewish National Home . . . in Palestine."

The story of the Jewish Agency is virtually identical to the history of the Yishuv (the Jewish community of Palestine). As the de facto government of the state-on-the-way, it was recognized as the official representative of the Jewish community and world Jewry vis a vis the League of Nations, the British Mandate government, and foreign governments.

Its major political thrust was to influence the British Mandate administration to interpret liberally the clause in the Churchill White Paper of 1922, which linked Jewish immigration to the "economic absorptive capacity" of the country. The Jewish Agency was also responsible for the Yishuv's internal affairs: immigration - allocating certificates supplied by the Mandate Authority - and resettlement of new immigrants, the building of new settlements, economic development, education and culture, hospitals and health services.

Fearing economic domination by the Zionists, on August 23, Arabs began rioting and looting throughout Palestine. The violence, which started in Jerusalem, spread as far as Hebron and Safed. 133 Jews were killed, with more than 300 wounded. The Passfield White Paper, issued in the aftermath of the riots, stated that the development of a Jewish National Home in Palestine was not central to the Mandate. Together with other institutions, the Jewish Agency was severely criticized for promoting Jewish labor exclusively. The White Paper further stated that there was not enough cultivable land to support new immigrants, and called for the restriction of Jewish immigration. However, in response to a major campaign by the Zionist movement, the White Paper was effectively abrogated.

With the growing persecution of Jews in Germany after Hitler's rise to power in 1933, the number of immigrants to Palestine began to increase - going from 4,075 in 1931 to 37,337 in 1933 to a record 66,472 in 1935. Approximately 50,000 Jews emigrated to Palestine under the Ha'avara, or Transfer, Agreement (August 1933), between the Jewish Agency and the Nazi regime which allowed them retain some of their assets by transferring them to Palestine as German export goods. In 1934, Youth Aliyah was created under the aegis of the Jewish Agency to rescue young Jews from Nazi Germany and train them in the building of the yishuv. Some 5,000 youth were brought to Palestine from Nazi-dominated Europe before the War and educated at Youth Aliya boarding schools. In face of renewed Arab rioting in 1936, the Peel Commission (1936-7) called for the partition of Palestine, recommending transfer of populations. However, while this recommendation was subsequently dropped as being not practicable, terrorist attacks against Jewish settlements and clashes with the British forces intensified.

The British administration surrendered to Arab demands by drastically cutting the Jewish immigration quota for 1936 by more than two-thirds. Furthermore, the MacDonald White Paper (May 1939 ), which proposed the creation within ten years of a single state in Palestine, rang the death knell for hopes of a Jewish state. Jewish immigration was restricted to 75,000 within the next five years - and no immigration thereafter without Arab consent. Restrictions were placed on land sales to Jews, with 95 percent of the territory of Palestine allotted to the Arabs.

The White Paper remained the basis of British policy throughout the Mandatory period. And while the Nazi noose was tightening around the beleaguered Jews of Europe, the gates of Palestine remained shut. Arab immigration, however, was unrestricted, with British officials overlooking illegal Arab immigration from Egypt, Transjordan and Syria. In 1931, the Hagana became subordinate to the Jewish Agency, in cooperation with the Va'ad Le'umi (the supreme institution of the organized Jewish community in Palestine (founded in 1920). During the years of the Arab Revolt, the Hagana protected the establishment of scores of new Stockade and Watchtower settlements in the Jordan Valley and Galilee, built as strongholds to withstand Arab attacks and strategically defending the Jewish settlers.

The Arab violence came to an end in large measure due to Special Night Squads of Jewish volunteers that resisted the attackers, and a period of relative peace returned to the Yishuv. Back to top The Holocaust and restrictions on immigration As the plight of European Jewry worsened, the restrictions on immigration generated an "illegal" immigration movement. During the 1930s various efforts were made to transport "illegal" immigrants by sea, primarily by the Revisionists and Betar. In 1938, the Hagana set up the "Organization for Illegal immigration" - the Mossad l'Aliyah Bet.

When World War II broke out, the Jewish Agency set up a committee to help European Jewry by obtaining immigration certificates to Palestine for them, sending them food parcels, and maintaining contact with them. Simultaneously, the Jewish Agency fought the White Paper restrictions by organizing "illegal" immigration from Europe. David Ben-Gurion, who had served as Chairman of the Executive since 1935, rallied the Yishuv to help in the Allied war effort, calling on the residents "to fight the White Paper as though there were no war and to fight the war as though there were no White Paper." The post-war period After the war, a Jewish Agency delegation visited the DP camps to provide relief.

The Mossad resumed large-scale sea operations to rescue the 250,000 survivors who had escaped from Eastern Europe to various Mediterranean shores through the Berihah rescue operation organized by the Jewish Agency. From 1945 to 1948, 65 "illegal" immigrant boats embarked for Palestine. Most of the boats were intercepted by the British, and the passengers deported to detention camps, first in Palestine and later in Cyprus. Between 1934 and 1948 some 115,000 ma'apilim were brought into the country, in defiance of British restrictions, while another 51,000 were interned by the British authorities in Cyprus and admitted only after independence.

The end of the war brought the Agency to the forefront of the struggle for statehood. Under the leadership of the Jewish Agency an agreement was signed in October, 1945, between the Hagana, Irgun, and Lehi to establish the United Resistance Movement, which included joint operations against the British. Defiance of British authorities led to the arrest of members of the Jewish Agency Executive, along with thousands of other leading figures in the Yishuv, on Saturday, June 29, 1946 (what became known as Black Sabbath. The British also entered the Jewish Agency buildings and confiscated a large number of records, including documents that demonstrated the Agency's role in the leadership of the United Resistance Movement.

Starting in 1946 the Jewish Agency recruited the Hagana to defend all Jewish settlements and neighborhoods; it also set up the Palmach commando units and took on the task of procuring weapons, ammunition, etc. Independence Following the UN vote to partition Palestine on November 29, 1947, the Jewish Agency and the Va'ad Leumi set up a National Council and a National Administration, which, with the declaration of independence, became the State of Israel's provisional legislature and government. David Ben-Gurion, Chairman of the Jewish Agency Executive, became Prime Minister.

With the establishment of the state in May 1948, the Jewish Agency relinquished many of its functions to the new government, but retained responsibility for immigration, land settlement, youth work, and relations with world Jewry. This was confirmed by the World Zionist Organization-Jewish Agency (Status) Law adopted by the Knesset on November 24, 1952. On July 26, 1954 a formal covenant was signed between the Israeli government and the World Zionist Organization-Jewish Agency, recognizing the latter as the representative of world Jewry with regard to the above functions.

In 1949 the Jewish Agency brought 239,000 Holocaust survivors from DP camps in Europe and from detention camps on Cyprus to the Jewish homeland. They were provided with housing, instruction in Hebrew, vocational training, etc. to help them build new lives. That same year, the Jewish Agency airlifted 3,800 Yemenite Jews to Israel in Operation Magic Carpet. In 1950-1 some 343,000 newcomers arrived from Eastern Europe and North Africa. In 1951, 110,000 Iraqi Jews were evacuated in Operation Ezra and Nehemiah. Nearly the whole of Bulgarian Jewry, more than half the Jews of Yugoslavia, 40,000 Jews from Turkey,and 18,000 Jews from Iran, came to Israel during those first three years. During the first four years of its existence, while struggling for survival, the country absorbed over 700,000 immigrants!

The need for temporary housing resulted in the establishment of ma'abarot or transit camps. The number of people living in these facilities reached a peak at the end of 1951: 220,517. Aliyah from Eastern Europe and North Africa resumed in 1955-57 and 1961-64. Immigrants were sent directly to permanent homes in villages or development towns.

In 1984, brought 9,000 Ethiopian Jews to Israel In 1991, over 14,300 Ethiopian Jews were airlifted to Israel in 36 hours in Operation Solomon. Since the fall of the Iron Curtain, close to one million Jews have come to Israel from the former Soviet Union. Other activities In the first two decades of the state's existence the Jewish Agency established a wide variety of companies to develop the country's cultural and economic infrastructure. These include the national airline, El Al, Mekorot, the water supply company, land development companies, agricultural companies, real estate management companies, Binyanei HaOoma, the national theatre and convention center, museums, and others.

The Department for Education and Culture in the Diaspora and the parallel Department of Torah Education and Culture in the Diaspora were established to help replace the loss of centers of Jewish learning destroyed in the Holocaust: they trained Hebrew teachers, sent Israelis abroad to supplement local personnel in schools, camps, and youth organizations, and trained shohatim, mohalim, and hazzanim from Diaspora communities. The Department of Agricultural Settlement established 480 new villages after 1948, providing them with equipment, livestock, and irrigation installations, as well as expert instruction. Their aggregate production in the late 1960s constituted 70% of the country's total agricultural output.

The Jewish Agency has been pivotal to Israel's remarkable growth. As the only global Jewish partnership organization, linking Jews around the world with Israel as the focal point, it continues to play a central role in the lives of countless Jews. Major activities include the rescue of Jews in distress, facilitating aliyah and absorption, Jewish Zionist education, and building a global Jewish community. In addition to extensive programs in Israel, it operates in close to 80 countries on five continents through a network of over 450 emissaries, including hundreds of formal and informal educators. In 2002 its annual budget was $403 million. The world Jewish community participates in the Jewish Agency's decision-making process through the Assembly, its supreme governing body, and its Board of Governors, which is responsible for policy making and oversight.

Israel could not have received a more delicious Hanukkah / Chanukah gift. Immigration insures Israel's and the Jewish peoples survival. The Israel News Agency commends the Jewish Agency for its tireless, devoted and dedicated work in keeping Israel alive, vibrant, economically secure and smiling.

Here.

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Subject: Russia works with Iran on enriched uranium

Democracy and Iran tension to test Russia's G8 lead

By Richard Balmforth

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Moscow's tensions with the West over Iran's nuclear programme and its patchy record on democracy will test Russia's year at the helm of the G8 club of rich nations starting on Sunday. And, with the security of world energy supplies at the top of Russia's G8 agenda, Putin may have to do some fancy footwork if he is to stop a row over the price of gas supplies to Ukraine rebounding on its chairmanship from day one.

"The Russian presidency of the 'Eight' will be associated not with roses but with a large quantity of healthy thorns," the daily Moskovsky Komsomolets predicted. But Russia will still do its best to boost its international standing during its G8 presidency.

For the former KGB spy-turned-president, easing into the driving seat of the elite Group of Eight on January 1 will be a crowning moment after years of Russia being treated as a wild card by the United States and other G8 partners. In July, Putin will play the statesman when he hosts the key summit in his hometown of St. Petersburg with U.S. President George W. Bush and the leaders of Japan, Britain, France, Italy, Germany and Canada as his guests.

Analysts say his action to soften proposed curbs on human rights bodies and charities in Russia signals Putin's aim of making Russia's time in office smooth and non-controversial. So, Russia's G8 agenda comprises only non-contentious themes -- energy policy, fighting disease and the war on terror.

Held at arms-length by the G7 because of doubts about its democratic course and its commitment to the free-market, Russia has for some years been in the club but not fully a part of it.

"It will be very important for Mr Putin to show that Russia is not only a junior member of this very influential club, but a member who can chair the whole club for a while," said Nikolai Petrov of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "It is very important from a symbolic point of view."

While still not in the top-10 of the world's largest economies, Russia joined the group in 1998, but does not participate in meetings of G7 finance ministers. The G8 does not have a formal structure and its agenda is set by the presidency.

BOOM ECONOMY

Russia has rarely been in better economic shape. It has seen seven straight years of growth on record world oil prices and is now in the grip of a consumer boom. Its foreign exchange coffers more than cover its $91 billion government debt.

As it establishes itself as a major gas and oil-producing power, part of Russia's G8 message will be that, though traditional world energy sources are in unstable parts of the Middle East, it remains an exporter of cast-iron reliability.

But that boast could evaporate quickly if its gas row with neighbouring Ukraine is not settled soon, observers say.

Ukraine has rejected the nearly five-fold hike in the price of natural gas demanded by Russia's Gazprom monopoly for 2006, saying it needs a transitional period to adjust its economy. Without a compromise, Gazprom will stop supplies to its former ex-Soviet ally on January 1, the day Russia takes over the G8 presidency. That in turn could hit Western Europe customers -- with the finger of blame being pointed at Russia.

"If Western Europe shivers in the cold for even just two days, it will be a catastrophe for us," Moskovsky Komsomolets said. "Russia will acquire the reputation of an unreliable supplier with all the ensuing consequences".

DEMOCRACY, IRAN AND BELARUS

Mindful of Western unease over the course of democracy in Russia and the Kremlin's steady centralisation of power, Putin has prudently acted to improve his own profile ahead of time. Just this month, he stepped into a controversy over a draft law that would have imposed tough curbs on foreign non-state bodies in Russia, virtually forcing parliament to tone it down. Many Western critics, however, say the bill still provides for tough controls on non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and is in line with Putin's attempts to bring all aspects of Russian life under Kremlin control before elections in 2007-8.

With Tehran heading for a showdown with Western powers over their suspicions it is seeking nuclear arms, the Iran issue may also test the cohesion of the G8 under Russian chairmanship. Unconvinced by Western arguments, Moscow is still helping build Iran's first nuclear reactor and has blocked European Union moves to report Iran to the U.N. Security Council. And a final unexploded bomb under Russia's G8 chair could be Belarus, an ex-Soviet ally of Russia whose veteran leader, Alexander Lukashenko, is a pariah in the West.

Lukashenko is generally expected to secure a new term in a presidential election in March that many Western observers expect to be denounced as flawed by international monitors. Putin may thus find himself in the awkward position of having to congratulate Lukashenko on an election victory denounced by his G8 partners. "Belarus looks like being a bit of a train crash," said Katinka Barysch of the London-based Centre for European Reform.

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Subject: Russia works with Syria on oil

Russia and Syria to build $2.7-bln oil complex

DAMASCUS, December 27 (RIA Novosti, Nadim Zuaui) - Syria has signed a memorandum of understanding with a Russian company to build an oil refinery and petrochemical plant in northeastern Syria, the press service of the Syrian Oil Ministry said Tuesday.

The $2.7-billion project, which is to be completed within the next five years, will be located in the Deir Ezzor province, 430 kilometers (270 miles) north of Damascus. With an annual capacity of 1.6 billion metric tons of gasoline, the project will create 2,500 new jobs.

According to the document, the Syrian side is to set aside 1,600 acres for a platform for the project and to provide the necessary infrastructure and benefits, while Russia's Credit Line investment company is to provide funding, builders and raw materials. Several Russian and foreign companies are expected to take part in the project.

Crude oil will be imported to Syria from abroad. Syria produces about 450,000 barrels of oil daily for its domestic needs. Negotiations are under way on purchasing excess oil from Syria at world prices for the project. Syria will receive between 15% and 60% of revenues from the project for 25 years and will assume complete ownership thereafter.

http://en.rian.ru/world/20051227/42747908.html

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Subject:

Iran welcomes Russia's role in enrichment program

Iran said Monday that it welcomes participation of Russia and other countries in its uranium enrichment program, stressing such cooperation must be in line with Iran's principles.

"Russia as well as other world countries can participate in Iran's peaceful nuclear program within the framework of Iran's proclaimed principles," government spokesman Gholam-Hossein Elham was quoted by the official IRNA news agency as saying. Elham said uranium enrichment inside Iran, seeking an atmosphere of trust and providing objective guarantees on the peaceful nature of enrichment activities in accordance with international conventions are three principles of Iran to deal with its nuclear issue.

"The Iranian government has clarified its position on the issue for several times ... Iran has already announced the domain of its nuclear activities as a commercial one in which foreign investments would be welcomed," Elham added. Elham's comments came as Vyacheslav Moshkalo, counselor of the Russian Embassy in Tehran, said that Moscow was waiting for Tehran 's reply to Russia's offer to move Iran's uranium enrichment to Russia. "We presented an official memo to Iran on Saturday. We are waiting for a reply," Moshkalo was quoted by the Interfax news agency as saying.

The Russian proposal, firstly revealed in November but rejected by Tehran, is aimed at providing what the European Union (EU) and the United States ask for as objective guarantees that Iran's nuclear research will not be used for military purposes. On Sunday, Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Hamid-Reza Asefi denied receiving any substantial proposal from Russia, saying that Iran will consider proposals which recognize and secure the country's legal right for uranium enrichment on the Iranian soil. Alaeddin Borujerdi, chairman of Iran's Majlis (parliament) National Security and Foreign Policy Committee, said on Sunday that the government must clarify to Russia Iran's position on enrichment at home. Iran is under pressure of the European Union, the longtime broker of the Iranian nuclear issue, to accept the Russian proposal. The United States accuses Iran of developing nuclear weapons secretly, a charge rejected by Tehran as politically motivated.

Here.

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Subject: niggers can't infrastructure

Zimbabwe introduces road tollgates

Harare, Zimbabwe, 12/22 - Faced with deteriorating road infrastructure and financial constraints to fund re-construction, Zimbabwe Wednesday introduced tollgates around the country`s borders to raise funds to maintain the nation's highways.

Transport minister Christopher Mushowe said different charges would be levied on vehicles using the country's roads, depending on size and whether or not they were local. He said the toll gates would also be introduced inland in a major exercise to raise funds to re-construct the country's highways, which the government has been unable to maintain due to lack of funds. "The money that we would be charging would be used to rehabilitate and maintain those roads," he said. Mushowe said South African-registered light vehicles, for example, would pay 30 rand and those from Botswana 25 pula. Foreign-registered vehicles would pay in foreign currency, he said.

http://www.angolapress-angop.ao/noticia-e.asp?ID=401948

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Subject: niggers can't farm

Dream turns sour for Zimbabwe's resettled black sugarcane farmers

CHIREDZI - Jowaki Chauke's dream of becoming a sugarcane farmer appeared well set to become reality when the government land committee allocated him a plot on one of Zimbabwe's prime sugar estates in the country's south-eastern lowveld. But 15 months down the line, the sweet dream is gradually disintegrating into a nightmare not only for Chauke but for many of the 180 black villagers given land for free on the giant Mkwasine Estates under the government's controversial land redistribution exercise.

Mkwasine belonged to two South African-owned firms, Hippo Valley and Triangle Limited and was one of Zimbabwe's biggest sugar estates, producing up to 850 000 of sugarcane before it was seized by the government - together with sugar crop that was on it - and divided amongst Chauke and his fellow villagers. But ask Chauke or anyone of his fellow sugar farmers here at Mkwasine and they will tell you that while the gift of free land and sugar was most welcome, it would have been better had government land officers done a little planning and above all ensured that the beneficiaries would be allocated enough space on the sugar plots to build homes.

"It could have been better for us had these areas been demarcated in such a manner to allow us to build homes," bemoans Chauke, who was given 20 hectares of prime sugar growing land at Mkwasine. A father of three children, Chauke added: "I do not mean to be ungrateful to our government, but I do not know how they expected things to work out when they gave us land to grow cane without space to build homes."

In yet another vivid illustration of the chaos and shoddy planning that characterised President Robert Mugabe's controversial land reform programme, government land planners demarcated Mkwasine into fine sugar plots. But for some strange reason the government land planners decided to leave not even one inch of land on which the newly resettled farmers could build homes!

Agricultural experts meanwhile say the compulsory acquisition and subsequent subdivision of Mkwasine Estate by the government was done in a manner bound to weigh down heavily on production. The composite estate was parcelled out into uneconomic units that according to top agro-economist and main opposition Movement for Democratic Change party politician Renson Gasela cannot be economically cultivated.

Gasela, who is a former chief executive of the government's Grain Marketing Board, said: "The allocation was done in such a way that the fields for the new farmers are dotted about making any centralised operation impossible. This is done deliberately to make everybody fail. Otherwise why would the government allocate land in this manner?"

The opposition politician said Mkwasine Estate was developed as one unit comprising a network of fields, canals and dams for one owner. "Apportioning land to multiple owners has proved uneconomic," he added. About 2 700 hectares have so far been allocated to 180 new farmers but half the beneficiaries have since deserted their plots while some have left them under the care of relatives and friends. But even for those farmers like Chauke who are determined to stick it out and remain on the land to grown sugar - the odds are increasingly looking insurmountable.

For example, Chauke's neighbour, Tauzeni Mhlanguleni, says his cane has overgrown and will soon be worthless because he has no money to hire additional labour to help reap the cane. "We cannot afford the wages," said Mhlanguleni, adding that his most important lesson in the past 15 months at Mkwasine has been that sugarcane growing is both a capital and labour intensive project. "We have exhausted the initial government loans but have little to show for it after the state deducted from our first earnings all what we owed them," said Mhlanguleni.

And just to compound the despairing Mhlanguleni's problems are the fuel shortages gripping Zimbabwe which means that even if he eventually gets to cut his cane, it might still rot on his hands because he has no fuel to transport it to the mill about 65km away. A cursory glance at the statistics provides a good insight on how the government's land reform exercise has been in this particular instance, a giant leap backwards.

The figures show that just about a year ago, Mkwasine under its former owners produced 110 tonnes of sugarcane per hectare. Today, Chauke and his colleagues can only manage 40 tonnes of poor quality cane pre hectare - a yield not enough to cover the costs of transporting the cane to the mills let alone the cost of fertilizers and other chemicals. "It is obvious that the future of the farmers, without sufficient capital, without equipment, with no experience and working individually, is bleak," Gasela said. "The government is set to destroy the sugar industry just as they have done with tobacco, maize, wheat, beef, dairy, horticulture," he added.

It would be easy to dismiss Gasela's predictions as the typical ranting of an opposition politician were it not Mugabe himself who admitted just as much during the conference of his ruling ZANU PF party earlier this month. Mugabe - who has defended his chaotic and often violent land reforms as having been necessary to ensure blacks who were previously denied arable land by previous white rulers also owned land - told the ZANU PF conference that poor planning and corruption in the land reform exercise had contributed to food shortages in the country.

Zimbabwe has largely survived on food handouts from international donors since the government's land reforms destabilised the agricultural sector, knocking down food production by about 60 percent. An estimated three million people or a quarter of the country's 12 million Zimbabweans require more than a million tonnes of food aid between now and the next harvest around March/April 2006 or they will starve. But Mkwasine with its homeless and broke sugar farmers could be the most eloquent testimony yet to as what has gone wrong with Harare's controversial land redistribution plan.

Here.

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Subject: Freakins in Rus

African students in St Petersburg protest racism

ST PETERSBURG, Russia (Reuters) - Dozens of African students rallied on Tuesday to protest against the killing of a comrade in what is believed to be the latest in a string of racially-motivated attacks in Russia's second largest city.

One student from Cameroon was killed and another African badly injured on Saturday in an attack by unidentified young people. Police have launched an investigation under a criminal code article dealing with racially-motivated murders. Dozens of African and Asian nationals have been targeted by neo-Nazi groups which have mushroomed among young Russians humiliated by defeat in the Cold War and still recovering from post-Soviet political and economic instability.

In St Petersburg alone more than 10 Africans and Asians have been killed in such attacks in the past two years. In murders that shocked the nation, racists killed two Roma, or gypsy, girls aged five and nine. "The silence of city authorities and law enforcement bodies encourages skinheads," Tunkara Aliu, head of the African Unity group, told the rally, attended also by Russian supporters. "Authorities say hooligans stage those attacks, but this is not true," he added. "This is racism and genocide."

Rights groups have warned that mainstream politicians are increasingly embracing racist rhetoric. Early this month, the Rodina party was barred from competing in the Moscow city elections after a campaign clip urged Muscovites to "clean the city of rubbish" after showing a group of darker-skinned men from the Russian Caucasus.

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Subject: niggers believe in witches

Here.

Accused witch killed at Zimbabwe church service

HARARE (Reuters) - Three brothers stormed a church service and murdered a fellow villager they accused of witchcraft, attacking him with clubs and a hammer in front of a stunned congregation in rural Zimbabwe, police said on Thursday.

The incident took place last Sunday in Zimbabwe's southwestern Bulilima district and police said the brothers had killed the man at the open-air church service before horrified onlookers could intervene. They were arrested later after fleeing the scene, a police spokesman in the city of Bulawayo said, confirming a local newspaper account of the murder.

Belief in witchcraft is widespread in rural Zimbabwe and the government has imposed an "Anti-Witchcraft Suppression Act" in an effort to stop people making unfounded accusations against their neighbours and enemies.

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Subject: Czech nobles defend Zimbabwe farm

Czech noble family defending their farm in Zimbabwe

PRAGUE, Dec 19 (CTK) - The family of former Czech noble woman Elisabeth von Pezold, who is claiming the return of immense family property in the Czech Republic, has so far resisted all efforts to expropriate their farm and lands in Zimbabwe, the latest issue of the weekly Tyden writes. In the past few years, gangs of alleged "war veterans" have forced dozens of white farmers to leave their property in Zimbabwe in fears of death. It has led to a steep decline of the country's economy based on farming as a tragic consequence of President Robert Mugabe's "land reform," the weekly says.

In mid-April 2000 tens of "veterans" invaded the Pezolds' farm Forrester Estate, situated 100 kilometres north of Zimbabwe's capital Harare, and they threatened with violence to make the family leave their lands, Alzbeta Pezold's son Heinrich recalled. Luckily, their black employees armed with wooden sticks only defended the Pezolds and pushed the intruders from the farm.

The Pezold family employs 1,800-2,500 people at the farm covering 22-hectare area where they can live with their families. The Pezolds have also built up four schools for their employees' children. The family directly or indirectly provides work for a total of 10,000 locals, Tyden writes. That is why local workers are very loyal to the Pezold family. If the farm were expropriated by veterans, they would lose their jobs and would be expelled along with the white farmers.

Nevertheless, "veterans" have already occupied several areas on the Pezold land and the family must "coexist" with them. The occupants' neglected plots are easy to recognise from the cultivated neat tobacco fields and pastures run be the Pezold farm, Tyden says. Heinrich, who graduated from economics, history and philosophy, said he feels understanding for their "new neighbours" who have to a certain extent become "victims of propaganda and manipulations" and they suffered from hunger and poverty.

The Pezolds bought the Forrester Estate farm in 1988 and they invested high sums in its development, including the construction of large water reservoirs of 27 million cubic metres that cost about six million dollars, since the whole country is short of water sources.

The farm is situated in the middle of a beautiful hilly landscape with picturesque rocks and caves with some ancient native paintings preserved. However, the Pezolds have no time to enjoy the romantic scenery as they have to fight hard for survival every day.

The Pezolds, who hold German citizenship, are among the now 24 German farmers in Zimbabwe. Berlin is doing the utmost to protect their interests during Mugabe's regime.

Most of the German farmers want to stay in this African country. They believe that the situation will gradually improve. They usually bought their farms and settled down in Zimbabwe after the country became independent, so veterans cannot in their cases apply the practice of "just confiscations of colonists' lands," Tyden points out.

Moreover, the German-Zimbabwe agreement on the protection of investments plays into the farmers' hands, as it gives them the right to a full financial compensation if their farms were expropriated. "We are enormously grateful to Germany. Were it not for its embassy, we may have not existed at all," Heinrich's father, Ruediger Pezold, told the weekly. Heinrich said that they faced the first attempts to drive them out from the land ten years ago and since then they have regularly met with veterans' threats. Despite that they decided to resist.

Ruediger admits he cherishes hope in Zimbabwe's judiciary system, recalling that the Supreme Court decided in their favour three times, calling all attempts to expropriate their farm illegal. "It costs a lot of efforts and tomorrow anything can happen, but you must decide to hold on. Hold on and not to run away!" Ruediger stressed, adding that 83 white farmers from the surroundings have given it up and their nearest white neighbour lives 60 kilometres away.

The Pezolds are not willing to give up either their farm in Zimbabwe or the family property in the Czech Lands confiscated after WW2. Elisabeth von Pezold, heiress of the Schwarzenberg- Pezold noble family, has since 1992 led a number of restitution disputes, claiming the family estate in the Czech Republic, including famous chateaus in UNESCO-listed Cesky Krumlov and Hluboka, south Bohemia, and two palaces near Prague Castle. So far their pictures at least decorate the walls of the Pezolds' Forrester Estate in Zimbabwe, Tyden writes in conclusion.

Here.

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Subject: niggers can't electric

Massive power outages hit Zimbabwe!

Harare - Power outages blacked out most of the township of Chitungwiza, including an already ailing industrial district south of the capital, and may last for up to three weeks, Zimbabwe state media reported Monday.

A lightning strike hit a main power facility Sunday in the dormitory township of half a million people, 25km from Harare, causing a fire that destroyed a transformer station, state radio said.

James Maridadi, a spokesman for the state power company, said power to some areas could be restored within a week. Full repairs would be completed within 21 days, he said. The fire blazed for about six hours after firefighters had to be called in from Harare, bringing their own water.

Chitungwiza's own fire trucks were broken down and its fire hydrants were dry, Maridadi said. The township, along with most other urban areas in Zimbabwe, has suffered regular and lengthy power and water outages as the nation suffers its worst economic crisis since independence in 1980, with spiraling inflation of 502% and acute shortages of hard currency, gasoline, imported equipment and spare parts.

The magistrate's courts in Chitungwiza have been closed several times this year by utility outages. In Harare, police and prison authorities postponed cases, saying they did not have enough fuel to take suspects to court. Earlier this month, a state of the nation broadcast by President Robert Mugabe was blacked out for half an hour by a power outage.

Maridadi told state radio Monday power outages were worsened by the theft of oil used in small, local relay stations that was then sold on the back market in the fuel-starved nation. At last 40 such stations in Harare were out of action, some irreparably damaged after being drained of oil.

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Subject: niggers don't do free speech

Independent media outlet raided by police

Zimbabwe's only independent broadcasting station, The Voice of the People, was raided by Zimbabwean police and officials from the Broadcasting Authority of Zimbabwe last Thursday in Harare. Three journalists were arrested and their computers were seized.

This is a clear outrage against freedom of expression and freedom of the press, condemned by the Committee to Protect Journslists, which describes the act as "utter contempt" towards any view challenging President Robert Mugabe or his government.

The three journalists, Maria Nyanyiwa, Takunda Gwanda and Nyasha Bosha, were charged under the Access to Information and Protection of Privacy Act (AIPPA), and the Broadcasting Act, for violation of the law by practising journalism without the proper documentation, since the station was not licensed. In 2002, the VOP offices were destroyed by an arson attack.

However, if the VOP had asked for a licence, it is clear that the government would not have issued it. This station uses shortwave frequency and broadcasts its signal from the Netherlands.

Robert Mugabe is the worst sort of advertisement for Africa today, which under the able Presidency of Olusegun Obasanjo in the African Union, has managed to present a fresh image of accountability, responsibility and a firm stance against corruption.

Robert Mugabe is a symptom of what was wrong with old Africa, the one replaced by NEPAD and the African Union, the one of which so many Africans were ashamed.

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Subject: niggers hate humans

(see comments below article)

http://zimdaily.com/news2/article.php/20051223041537759.html

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Subject: let nigs vote, this is the inevitable result

Chiyangwa's Plunder Matrix Exposed As Tycoon Builds Z$1 trillion Mansion

Wednesday, December 21 2005 @ 12:05 AM GMT

Contributed by: correspondent

Zimdaily NationalPHILLIP Chiyangwa, Harare's ostentatious tycoon, is using US$200 000 externalized to capitalise a Namibian joint-venture company to develop a Z$1 trillion residential development situated just next to his multi-billion-dollar Prestwood Lane "White House" mansion in the exclusive Helensvale suburb, Borrowdale. The prestigious Crowhill Boulevard, will comprise 12 executive mansions and is a replica of the leafy Borrowdale Brook Estate, developed by world-renowned golfer Nick Price.

Sources in Kennan Properties, the official sales agents for the new property development told zimdaily that there was a Grace Marufu who had snapped up property number 4 among the 12 owners but it was not immediately possible to ascertain if the Marufu was the First Lady Grace. Zimdaily heard that Marufu's property had been quoted for $120 billion but the source added that Chiyangwa was the sole developer and financier of the whole estate development. Zimdaily understands that the mansions' expensive furnishings were imported from Namibia.

Documents obtained from Namibian sources reveal that the businessman misappropriated funds for the failed Crittal Hope Namibia (CHN). Information to hand further reveals that Chiyangwa used N$1 093 713 (the equivalent of US$200 000) through various withdrawals from Standard Bank Gustav Voigts branch in Windhoek, Namibia to purchase Italian fittings for the 12 executive mansions. The fittings were bought from Italian Lights and Furniture, Chris Carpets, and Casa Italia and LN Valetti.

Confidential documents to hand reveal that Chiyangwa was allowed by the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe to move money to Namibia, ostensibly to invest in a joint venture company there. Nothing has come of the envisaged deal and the foreign currency has not been repatriated to Zimbabwe. Zimdaily understands that the funds were remitted to Namibia but the joint venture was aborted and the capital was not repatriated. It is understood that Chiyangwa, through his investment vehicle, Native Investments Africa (Pvt) Ltd, wanted to forge an alliance with a Namibian company, Namibia Northern Investment Group (NNIG). Zimdaily understands that Chiyangwa has enlisted the services of his Native Security, a subsidiary of his Native Investments Africa Group, to guard the premises.

AR Project Services (ARPS) Namibia, a wholly owned subsidiary of ARPS Ltd, a company incorporated in South Africa and owned by self-exiled tycoon Mutumwa Mawere, was appointed the project consultant on behalf of NNIG. ARPS was charged with the responsibility of assisting in negotiations with Crittal Hope, a subsidiary of Chiyangwa's Native Investments. Zimdaily understands that the management of the envisaged joint venture company was to be assigned to ARPS. A memorandum of understanding was in December 2000 signed by Native Investments Africa (Pvt) Ltd Zimbabwe on behalf of Crittal Hope Zimbabwe, represented by Chiyangwa, and NNIG represented by the group chairman, Kelly Nghixulifwa.

Documents in our possession reveal that Native Investments had undertaken to provide plant machinery and necessary technical assistance while NNIG was to provide buildings and working capital for the envisaged joint venture. Both parties agreed to retain the services of ARPS Namibia, represented by Sebil Dhewa as a consultant during the preparation and up to the commencement of business after which date ARPS Namibia was to be retained as management contractor. Zimdaily understands that the joint venture partners agreed to register a company called Crittal-Hope Namibia (Pty) Ltd in which Nghixulifwa was the public officer and Dhewa the managing director. Chiyangwa went on to open a bank account in Namibia at Standard Bank, Gustav Voigts branch in Windhoek.

He later sought permission from the Bank of Namibia to operate a foreign currency account. In his application to the Reserve Bank of Namibia, Chiyangwa stated that the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe had approved the movement of US$200 000 under authority GC3148. The money was to be used by Chiyangwa for the preliminary costs of the joint venture. The RBZ is understood to have demanded quarterly progress reports on the envisaged alliance. Zimdaily understands that the Bank of Namibia approved the opening of the account under application number 547. The approval letter emphasised it was issued under "highly exceptional circumstances". Meanwhile, Chiyangwa had written to Standard Bank in Namibia requesting that he alone operated Crittal-Hope (Pty) Ltd's foreign currency account (FCA) and that he alone be the sole signatory.

Zimdaily was told that authority was granted and Chiyangwa operated a current account whose number was given as 04 272 6085. An FCA account was also opened with Chiyangwa as the sole signatory. The FCA account number was given as 022/20/101369/01. It is understood that Chiyangwa proceeded to deposit several US$20 000 bank drafts issued by at least three Zimbabwean banks, namely Zimbank, Barclays Bank, and Jewel bank. It is understood that Chiyangwa then transferred N$154 950 from the FCA to the current account. The balance in the current account as at December 24 2004 stood at N$16 807 (US$2 800). Zimdaily understands that a total of N$1 252 472 (US$208 745) was transferred from the FCA account to the current account as of last year. The entire amount was withdrawn from Standard Bank enabling the tycoon to embark on the Z$1 trillion project he is currently undertaking.

Zimdaily heard that to augment his financial resources, Chiyangwa had also sold his Bulawayo based leather and tanning company Midiron Enterprises to bankroll the extravagant property which is incongruous with the poverty currently stalking Zimbabwe.

http://zimdaily.com/news2/article.php/2005122013254130.html

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Subject: blame niggers

Swedish envoy blames land reform & bad laws for Zimbabwe's crisis

By Lance Guma

21 December 2005

Sweden's outgoing ambassador to Zimbabwe, Kristina Svensson has said the country's chaotic land reform coupled with bad laws and economic polices, were to blame for problems in the country. The envoy made the remarks to journalists on Wednesday ahead of her departure from Harare.

Although she said land reform was necessary, the manner in which it was implemented was not within the confines of the law and the haphazard approach had resulted in a decline in agricultural production. Svensson who has spent four years as ambassador to Zimbabwe also criticised what she called ‘bad laws and a bad economic policy', for the country's decline into a pariah state.

She made special mention of laws like the Public Order and Security Act (POSA), the Access to Information and Protection of Privacy Act (AIPPA) and the NGO (non-governmental organisations) bill, saying they scare away foreign investors. "The rules are changing every day and people ask themselves whether it's wise to invest in the country when they don't know what will happen to their business tomorrow," she said.

Svensson says when she was an ambassador in neighbouring Zambia she used to go into Zimbabwe and found lots of things to admire. "We noticed big grain silos, herds of healthy, fat cattle, green pastures and well-developed infrastructure. Now one sees abandoned tobacco barns, uncultivated fields, cattle looking thin and the general decline. It's very sad." She added that a change of policy could restore Zimbabwe to its former status as the breadbasket of Southern Africa.

Zimbabwean journalist Brilliant Pongo says the envoy's assessment is an accurate reflection of the situation on the ground but queried why she was making the statements only when was leaving the country. He urged other diplomats in Harare to come out of their closets and call a spade a spade. This he says, will help highlight the problems ordinary people are facing in the country.

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Subject: nigs steal more White land

Zimbabwe police boss evicts farmer to build houses for officers

HARARE - Zimbabwe Police Commissioner Augustine Chihuri has ordered a white farmer to close down his agro-export business because the police want to use the farmland to build low cost houses for its officers, ZimOnline has learnt.

The move to shut down Gletwin farm, which trades as Ross and Sons and is located near Harare's posh northern suburb of Glen Lorne, comes barely a fortnight after Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe governor Gideon Gono wrote to President Robert Mugabe pleading with him to stop fresh farm seizures.

In his letter to Mugabe, a copy of which was shown to ZimOnline, Gono said that Zimbabwe, which is already grappling severe food shortages, could next year face an unprecedented humanitarian catastrophe unless the few remaining white farmers in the country and newly resettled black farmers were allowed to grow food this farming season.

But State Security Minister Didymus Mutasa, who is in charge of land redistribution, yesterday vehemently defended the seizure of Gletwin farm and called ZimOnline reporters "insane" for questioning the government's decision to take the farm in order to build houses for police officers on the land.

"You would have to be insane to be worried that we are taking over a farm from a white man to build accommodation for our law enforcers," Mutasa said.

Gletwin farm, owned by Ian Ross, employs hundreds of permanent and seasonal workers who will now have to join more than 300 000 other former farm workers now jobless after their former white employers were chased from the land by the government under its controversial land reform programme. This, in a country where more than 70 percent of potential labour is unemployed.

The farm grows mainly potatoes for the local and export markets and in the process generating hard currency in critical short supply in Zimbabwe.

Ross said he had already been told by Chihuri to vacate the farm but said he was still waiting for a written order before deciding on his next course of action.

"There has been nothing in writing yet. It has been verbal but I will have to get something in writing," said Ross, who would not be drawn to divulge further details on the matter.

But the white farmer has little options after the government controversially changed Zimbabwe's constitution last August to bar white farmers from challenging in court the seizure of the farms by the state, while courts were also prohibited from entertaining such applications from farmers.

Powerful officials of Mugabe's ruling ZANU PF party and government as well as top army and police officers have since the amendment of the constitution launched a fresh wave of farm seizures across the country.

Many in Zimbabwe's ruling elite already own more than three or four farms seized from whites in flagrant violation of the government's publicly stated policy of one-man-one-farm.

In his letter Gono clearly urged Mugabe to personally intervene and stop his ministers, service chiefs and senior officials of ZANU PF from seizing farms, saying continued disruptions on farms could see the agricultural sector, the fulcrum of the economy, collapsing beyond redemption.

ZimOnline has as yet been unable to establish how Mugabe reacted to the letter by Gono, a close lieutenant he has tasked to lead efforts to revive Zimbabwe's crumbling economy.

But farm invasions have continued unabated since Gono's letter.

Zimbabwe has faced chronic food shortages since 2000 when Mugabe began grabbing productive farmland from whites to resettle landless blacks.

The United Nations says an estimated three million people or about a quarter of the 12 million Zimbabweans require food aid between now and the next harvest around March/April 2006 or they will starve.

Here.

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Subject: back to oxen in Zimbabwe

HARARE, Dec. 21 (Xinhuanet) -- Shortage of diesel is stalling efficient land tillage across Zimbabwe with most rural farmers resorting to draught power, an official said on Wednesday. The Department of Agricultural Research and Extension Services director, Shadreck Mlambo, said tillage was expected to go beyond early next year. "We have not yet compiled the total hectarage tilled and we should be in a position to do that once tillage has been completed throughout the country," Mlambo said.

A total of 1.3 million hectares are targeted to be put under maize by communal and A2 farmers with an average output of 1.6 million metric tons per ha expected. The central bank has introduced a maize and sorghum production facility of one trillion Zimbabwean dollars (about 12.5 million US dollars) to support A1 and communal farmers with seed and fertilizer. The government recently said the maize producer price for the 2005/2006 farming season would be announced after harvesting to factor in the actual costs incurred by farmers.

Zimbabwe has been experiencing fuel shortage for the past five years and recently the government said it would allocate 50 percent of all fuel imports to farmers. However, individuals are now allowed to import the commodity using free funds. The country requires 1.8 metric tons of maize for livestock and human consumption annually.

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Subject: Ukraine, Bulgaria troops out

Coalition partners pull out from Iraq

27/12/2005 - 18:28:49

The US coalition in Iraq saw its size dwindle today as Ukraine and Bulgaria said all of their troops had left the country while Poland said it would remain, but reduce its number of troops by 600 next year.

The Polish government's decision, which must be approved by President Lech Kaczynski, would be a boost for US President George W Bush, who has faced withering criticism at home and abroad ovr his handling of the Iraq war and the growing insurgency there. Polish Prime Minister Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz said keeping troops there longer would support "the growing democratisation of life" in Iraq after the country's constitutional referendum and parliamentary elections. "We would like to gradually carry the pull out of Polish troops from Iraq, not in an abrupt way, but gradually," he said in Warsaw. "Stabilisation is taking place. The high turn out in the October referendum and a still higher turnout in the elections on December 15 – all this suggests that within two or three months there will be a government of national unity in place created by all the political forces in Iraq."

Marcinkiewicz conceded it was "a very difficult decision." The deployment, which has cost the lives of 17 Polish soldiers, is unpopular with the public. Kaczynski, who took office last week, has until the end of the month to decide. As the armed forces' commander in chief, the president approves overseas military deployments. His approval, however, was considered largely a formality due to his closeness to Marcinkiewicz' government. Kaczynski is a leading member of the prime minister's conservative party, Law and Justice, while the party's chairman is his twin brother, Jaroslaw Kaczynski.

Ukraine and Bulgaria, which had troops serving in Iraq under Polish command, both announced that they had completed the withdrawal of their forces from Iraq.

Poland's own troop levels would be cut to 900 from about 1,500 in March, said the deputy defence minister Gen Stanislaw Koziej. The soldiers will focus on advising and training Iraqi security forces, he added. Marcinkiewicz said the decision also came upon appeals from US leaders, and considering the United Nations Security Council's extension last summer of its mission in Iraq. Ukraine's defence ministry said that its last troops had left Iraq, fulfilling a long-planned withdrawal pledged by President Viktor Yushchenko.

A column of eight armoured personnel carriers and 44 soldiers had left the country and arrived in Kuwait, the statement said. Ukraine had kept 867 soldiers in Iraq after partial pull outs earlier this year. By Friday, all are due back in Ukraine, where the deployment has been unpopular. About 50 Ukrainian military instructors will stay on to train Iraqi forces.

Ukraine opposed the invasion of Iraq but later contributed 1,650 troops to the US-led coalition, becoming one of the largest non-NATO participants. Eighteen Ukrainian soldiers have been killed and another 32 wounded. In Bulgaria, Defence Minister Veselin Bliznakov said that his country had completed its own military pull out from Iraq. Bulgaria began withdrawing its troops from the city of Diwaniya shortly after Iraq's parliamentary elections, transferring its military responsibilities to Iraqi forces. Bliznakov has said that Bulgaria will "most likely" continue its military involvement in Iraq next year by contributing a 120-strong non-combat unit tasked with guarding the Ashraf refugee camp.

http://breakingnews.iol.ie/news/story.asp?j=167241516&p=y67z4zzzz

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Subject: shitskin serial rapist nabbed

Update 18: Tip Leads to Recapture of Fla. Rape Suspect

By MICHELLE SPITZER

The serial rape suspect accused of terrorizing two neighborhoods smiled as police officers escorted him back to jail Tuesday, a week after he escaped by climbing through a vent and rappelling down the building using sheets. A tip led detectives to Reynaldo E. Rapalo, who was arrested about 10 p.m. Monday outside a video store in southwest Miami, said Amos Rojas Jr., Florida Department of Law Enforcement special agent in charge.

He had shaved his mustache and told officers who had chased him down that "he was a homeless guy from Nicaragua, that he was worried about immigration," Detective Alcides Velez said. "He was trying to mislead us in that direction." Rapalo, 34, escaped Dec. 20 as he awaited a February trial on felony counts of sexual battery and other charges that could have sent him to prison for life. He is accused of sexually assaulting seven women and girls, ranging from 11 to 79 years old, before his capture in 2003. "He is a very dangerous individual and we are very glad to have him back in custody," Miami-Dade Police Director Robert Parker said.

While being led to a police car Tuesday morning, Rapalo smiled as he spoke to the officers who held his arms. He was taken to a different jail from the one he escaped from. He was expected to appear in court later Tuesday.

Rapalo, 34, broke out of jail Dec. 20 by rappelling down the building on bed sheets. He was awaiting a February trial on felony counts of sexual battery and other charges that could have sent him to prison for life. He is accused of sexually assaulting seven women and girls. Rapalo, a Honduran native who had been living in Miami on an expired visa, was accused of terrorizing the city's Little Havana and Shenandoah neighborhoods in 2002 and 2003, including raping three young girls in the span of four weeks.

Parents walked their children home from school, sketches of the suspect were plastered across town, and a beauty salon owner kept her business door locked even during the day. Miami police also stopped more than 120 men, most of them Hispanic, and asked them to volunteer DNA samples, a tactic that was denounced by civil rights activists. The DNA samples did not lead to his capture. Rapalo was arrested September 2003 when officers noticed him driving suspiciously.

He and another inmate escaped from a Miami jail last week by climbing through a vent in the ceiling of a cell and onto a sixth-floor roof, police said. The vent was supposed to be locked, but it had been pried open, and bars blocking it were cut. The other inmate, also a sexual assault suspect, broke his legs when he jumped and was captured outside the jail. Police have said the tools used in the escape may have been smuggled in, and Rapalo apparently plotted the breakout for months.

Officers scoured neighborhoods, airports, train stations and ports for Rapalo, and guards were assigned to victims who still live in the area. Rapalo did not leave Miami-Dade County, and may have had accomplices who helped him elude police, Rojas said. "We think someone gave him some clothes and he's been communicating with some people," Parker said. "We took some things off of him - he still had the blade that he used to escape."

After his escape, the director of the Miami-Dade Corrections Department ordered that all vents at the jail be welded shut. Two corrections officers were placed on paid administrative leave. They were not accused of being involved in the escape, and they have not been disciplined.

The tipster who ultimately led authorities to Rapalo will get the $36,000 award offered for information leading to his arrest, police said. Just as the tipster described, detectives found Rapalo outside the video store wearing a fuzzy pink sweater layered under a black sweater, Rojas said.

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Subject: heating

Rising Home-Heating Costs Hitting Reptile Families Hardest

CHICAGO -- With government figures indicating double-digit home-heating cost increases in coming months, America's reptilian citizens are warning that, unless swift measures are taken to provide them with adequate warmth, many will face serious metabolic crises this winter.

"Unlike our mammalian citizens, who maintain a consistent body temperature and have the option of throwing on a sweater, reptiles are entirely dependent on external heat sources," Sen. Richard Durbin (D-IL) said. "All my constituents are facing rate hikes of 21 percent or more. But some of them, like it or not, may be forced into a quasi-hibernative state if they do not receive emergency fuel-price relief."

http://www.theonion.com/content/node/43696

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Subject: Forward on Dumper on Christians

Challenging the Right

November 25, 2005

There are many reasons to applaud this month's back-to-back speeches by Abe Foxman and Eric Yoffie on the dangers of the religious right, but here's the most important: They have given voice to something their constituents have been thinking and feeling for a long time. American Jews need a voice that articulates their concerns on the national stage. Foxman, speaking as national director of the Anti-Defamation League, and Yoffie, in his capacity as president of the Union for Reform Judaism, provided that voice this month. In doing so, they were doing their job and serving their community.

There's real cause for alarm. True, conservative Christian groups have long been active in promoting ideas and causes that most Jews disagree with; such debate is healthy in a democracy. But the debates have lately taken a disturbing turn. From persuasion and witness, many on the Christian right have begun raising their sights and seeking to use state power to impose their views. Some major groups have coalesced around a goal of a Christian America, as Foxman carefully documented in his speech.

In noting what Yoffie and Foxman said, it's important to note what they didn't say. Foxman was careful to insist that the right's new assertiveness is "not motivated by animus, and certainly not by antisemitism." Christians feel a religious obligation to evangelize. Jews feel just as deeply that they have a right to be left alone. The debate, Foxman said, must be conducted "carefully, delicately, respectfully." Moreover, as Yoffie noted, there are important areas where Jews and Christian conservatives can find common ground, from human rights abroad to charity at home.

Not surprisingly, the speeches have drawn a hail of criticism. Foxman himself noted in his speech that Jews are "a lot less united than we were 15 years ago." Some Jews openly worry that "it is unsafe to confront Christians," that Jews need to keep their heads down and avoid provoking their neighbors. Others fear jeopardizing evangelical support for Israel, regardless of other considerations. Still others want access to the state funding that they see opening up if the wall of church-state separation comes down.

Those sorts of fears have helped keep the major Jewish organizations quiet for the past four years, as the Bush administration has pursued a war against Islamic extremism abroad while promoting Christian extremism at home. Fearful of angering the administration or jeopardizing its support for Israel, most major agencies have failed to speak up on issues their constituencies care about deeply. It could be a sign of the administration's declining political fortunes that this Jewish debate has reopened, or it could be a sign that grass-roots impatience has finally filtered up to the leadership.

American Jews have achieved considerable security in the past half-century. That's due in no small part to the efforts of Jewish civil rights groups to preserve a neutral public square. Much ground has been lost in the past four years. It's the right time to speak up.

http://www.forward.com/articles/6918

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Subject: pro-American bill hated by jews

Anti-immigration Bill Pits Jewish GOPers Against House Hard-liners

By E.J. KESSLER

December 23, 2005

With the passage this week by the House of Representatives of tough new anti-immigration legislation, political observers are warning of a growing rift on the issue between moderate Republicans allied to the White House and party hard-liners in the House. The House passed the bill in a largely party-line vote, with 36 Democrats joining the Republican majority in favor and 17 Republicans voting no. The bill calls for a controversial new fence along parts of the Mexican border and imposes criminal penalties on those found aiding undocumented immigrants.

Before approving the bill, the House leadership flatly rejected an amendment, favored by President Bush, that called for a guest-worker program to help legalize some undocumented aliens. Nonetheless, the White House issued a statement supporting the House measure. The issue is also raising new barriers between Republican leaders and Jewish organizations, which have long advocated liberal immigration laws, based on humanitarian concerns and historic sentiment. Jewish Republicans, too, have emerged as key figures on the pro-immigration side in recent months, pitting many of them against the hard-liners who dominate the House leadership.

The debate has featured increasingly bitter rhetoric between the two sides. Hard-liners paint dark pictures of out-of-control borders and a growing immigrant population steeped in criminality. Some warn of a threat to America's "national identity" from immigrants with different cultures and support volunteer border patrols by armed vigilante groups. Opposing them, immigration advocates decry threats to immigrants' human rights and frequently condemn immigration foes as nativists and bigots.

"Unfortunately, throughout our history, there have always been Americans who believed that coming to these shores was a right reserved only for them and their ancestors, and for no others," Republican National Committee Chairman jewish fag Ken Mehlman said in a recent California speech to GOP governors. "Ladies and gentlemen, that was wrong then, and those who argue that now are wrong today," said Mehlman, whose mother once headed the Baltimore region of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society.

Pro-immigration Republicans have close ties to businesses that employ immigrants and would be hurt by tighter restrictions. Moderates also worry that anti-immigration sentiment will hurt party efforts to court Hispanic voters, a top priority in the Bush White House. The House measure approved this week would impose criminal penalties on those found in the country illegally or aiding illegal immigrants. It authorizes local police to enforce federal immigration law and sets fines as high as $25,000 on employers of undocumented aliens. It also calls for a controversial new fence along parts of the Mexican border.

Current law makes entering the country illegally a crime; once inside, however, undocumented immigrants incur only a civil penalty if they are discovered by the authorities. The centrist New Democrat Network declared in a statement that this week's House measure "sows the seeds of an immigration crisis unlike anything this country has ever experienced, making all 11 million immigrants felons."

The future of the House bill is uncertain. The Senate is due to take up at least two competing measures next year, including a bill by Arizona Republican John McCain and Massachusetts Democrat Edward Kennedy that combines tighter borders with relatively generous guest-worker provisions. House Republican leaders have vowed not to accept any legislation that includes a guest-worker program.

A second Senate measure, sponsored by Republicans John Cornyn of Texas and Jon Kyl of Arizona, calls for stiff border controls similar to parts of the House bill. Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, the nation's senior Jewish Republican lawmaker, recently introduced his own bill, seeking to marry the two competing approaches. Conservative critics say the Specter bill would more than double the number of employment-based visas, to about 300,000.

Jewish organizations, including the major Jewish civil rights agencies as well as the main federated philanthropic body, United Jewish Communities, support a mixed approach that emphasizes border control, increased legal immigration and paths to legalization for undocumented immigrants, such as guest-worker programs. Most groups say they follow the lead of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, which has aided immigrants for more than a century.

"As a community that's so conscious of security, to have a system with 11 million people living in the shadows creates a security risk because people could hide there," the Washington representative of HIAS, Gideon Aronoff, said this week after the House approved its bill. "If we have an illegal immigration system, authorities have to use limited resources to chase after busboys and nannies. That's a waste."

Beyond favoring more liberal immigration rules, some Jewish organizational leaders warn against what they see as extremist tendencies within the anti-immigration movement.

"We have spoken out on the vigilante groups patrolling the border," said the Washington representative of the Anti-Defamation League, Jess Hordes. "That is an important piece of [the anti-immigration movement] that has links to white supremacist groups. A lot of the mainstream press had missed this part of the story."

The leading House supporter of stricter immigration laws, Rep. Tom Tancredo of Colorado, who speaks of running for president in 2008, openly supports the Minutemen vigilante groups patrolling the border and advocates ending automatic citizenship for children born in this country.

Tancredo's political action committee, Team America PAC, which he co-founded with conservative activist Bay Buchanan, sister of commentator Patrick Buchanan, has a Web site that features links to the Minutemen. It also features news clips that seek to link undocumented immigrants to disease, crime and mayhem. "Illegal aliens decapitate children" one headline says. "Illegal immigrants bringing tuberculosis, our children at risk," says another.

Some Republicans worry that Tancredo's PAC is introducing an anti-immigrant edge into their politics that will hurt them at the ballot box. Political analyst Marc Ambinder, writing at National Journal blog Hotline on Call, reported recently that "in the immigration debate, many GOP pollsters and strategists and big thinkers believe that independent voters, especially women, and nearly all Latino voters, interpret 'preserving national identity' as a code word for 'keeping America white and Christian.' Some have tested the phrase in polls and focus groups and confirmed their findings."

Buchanan said the idea that "preserving national identity" was nativist code language was "ridiculous." "One of our great identities is as a melting pot," she said. "There's not anything mean-spirited on either side," Buchanan said of the immigration debate.

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Subject: meorah vs cross

Menorahs Light Path for Nativity Displays

By NATHANIEL POPPER

December 23, 2005

The Hanukkah menorah, valued by American Jews as a symbol of religious freedom, is becoming a rallying point for Christian activists seeking to put images of Jesus into the public square. In several recent cases, Christians have pointed to the erection of public menorahs as justifying their demand to put nativity displays on public property. The most recent incident was in Wellington, Fla., where Christian residents challenged the town's holiday display last month. The town had both a menorah and a Christmas tree. Residents, citing court rulings, argued that the tree was a secular symbol, and that they were entitled to a religious symbol to balance the menorah. The town council consented last week and erected a nativity scene on December 14, showing a baby Jesus in his mother's arms.

http://www.forward.com/main/printer-friendly.php?id=7053

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Subject: "Munich" review

Here.

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Subject: nogblog

Image Peddling

Since I'm going into the entertainment technology business, I'm probably going to spend a lot more time thinking about what's good entertainment. In a couple discussions chez Nykola and Tooley, the age-old question of black images has resurfaced.

Part of the plan which has a lot to do with the fortune I may leave to my offspring owes its economic deliciousness from the default and incompetence of communist regimes to sufficiently entertain their masses. There is probably no greater oxymoron in the modern world than Communist Entertainment. Anywhere you are likely to find a Ministry of Culture, you're not likely to find a production of Arthur Miller's "The Crucible".

Then again, my money says you won't find anything approaching that level of edification in Western popular culture either. This is half the unspoken gripe of the positive images crews, I think. I mean even though we have great culture, it's not all very entertaining. My smackdown says only 10% of the folks who complain about Hollywood images have any Shakespeare in their DVD collection, and I'm being generous. Yes I do have more than 3 including James Earl Jones rendition of King Lear, arguably the most outstanding portrayal ever filmed. There's no shortage of excellent, erudite and uplifting material out there, but who's buying?

But specifically to their points, is there something to the sexualization of black images? Only to honkies, is my answer. I think people give Hollywood and the entertainment industry too much credit for being persuasive and constructive. Surely the high-paid flunkies who fly around the country in service of Jennifer Lopez' highly crafted hair, nails, eyebrows and ass must think of her as a goddess, but do we? Really?

I can really not think of a more perfect example of this thing, this economy that the American entertainment business wants to create than the person of JLo, the ultimate sex symbol. It's probably not on point with regards to the aesthetic of hiphop's bling & bitches theme which is probably the cause of all the drama and ire at my fellows' blogs, but I think it is what Hollywood and America want most. Even so, is it really the perverted creations of the honky mind that is making millions of hiphop fans percieve all those images as 'real'? So let's keep it real, shall we? Nobody created Lil Kim but Lil Kim. Nobody wrote Ice Cube's lyrics but Ice Cube. They are exactly what they want to be, and the unwashed millions are buying just what they want to see.

So if this is a species of the argument that millions of [African] Americans are degenerate perverts consuming swill by the buttload, then I have no gripe or disagreement whatsoever. It's absolutely true. And if you think what's on TV is disgusting, take it from me, you really are incredibly naive. You have no idea what's going on in the massive American porno industry. Furthermore, on the world scene America is a prude.

However, if this complaint is a species of the argument that the [White] Man is destroying African America through a vast conspiracy aimed at distorting the truth about the value of our souls... Well, get a life. And take a long hard look at your own DVD collection.

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Subject: nogblog II

What I believe is that there is basically no excuse for six years to pass between learning fractions and doing elementary calculus. The fact of Cool Bob's ability to do it in one year is testament to the structural deficiency in our educational system, public and private. (I did go to a private highschool which also had no degreed math instructors.) And maybe the very liberal ambitions of Cool Bob are precisely what we need. You see, he threw a wrench in everyone's agenda. He actually loved Mathematics for its own sake. Nothing could make him happier than sharing that love with students. Kids from the 'hood came out of his class ready to beat down Calculus, and they knew what they were talking about. Not because they were patriots trying to outdo Sputnik, but because they finally got the competent Math instruction they deserved.

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Subject: nogblog III

Black as a 'Thing to Be'

Negrorage is a new blog out there which is fairly long on thought. Tagging along for the ride on the Black vs Nigger question we find ourselves deep into the existentials. I assert a thing or two, raising the stakes:

This is good stuff. But it's interesting how post-modern and abstracted it is, not that it's anyone's fault. We all suffer a bit of that. But I'm going to say two words that should kind of put all of this in perspective, and if you meditate on them long enough then they should be evocative enough to fill a stadium of proper associations. "Mahalia Jackson".

Sometimes I wonder how many black youth get all of their sense of blackness from reading the memories and fictions of black authors. As 'real' as 'Beloved' the novel is, it remains something created from the imagination of Toni Morrison. The fact of the matter is that I would prefer that such verisimilitudes become the blackground. They form a set of useful fictions. But evidently we are in a cycle in which Americans would prefer that every decade has a distinct meaning, and every generation has its own different mission. Brokaw is not far off when he asserts that his generation does not have a mission relatively speaking.

But the author has nailed a concept that I think is pretty sharp, which is looking at blackness as a 'thing-to-be'. It makes the distinction between an identity under the influence of cross-currents and redefinitions, and a placeholder for a future sense of being. It is this distinction, with an emphasis on the second part, which is really interesting to me. It relates very well to the state of ungrownupness I sense in a lot of these discussions, especially the latest one concerning the cinematic depiction of some fantastic creation of one Ursula Le Guin, named 'Ged'.

How do we get so far away from Mahalia Jackson that we need to complain about the shade of Ged? My answer is that we cannot unless we have completely dissed our parents. The very concept that America or anyplace has an endless supply of identity buckets for its youth to assume is very post-modern, weird and an enemy of the Old School. This longing for a proper black thing-to-be, this need for becoming is a little more twisted than the standard 'be-when-I-grow-up' and yet it's the same problem. There's not enough of something to anchor one in a set of circumstances that lock identity. We cannot accept the conditions (not me, we) of our nativity, so we become vulnerable to the fictions of those who would help us 'know ourselves' or be 'true to ourselves'.

So where is the black Popeye who says 'I yam what I yam'? All over. Not asking nor answering questions, I imagine.

It's true that in America we have too much space to negotiate our identity. We are not essentially anything. We are identity-mobile to the extreme. But I think we should nail that down and *add* to our basic selves some skills and abilities, rather than remake ourselves. The only glitch is that millions of Americans start off so twisted that they don't have a valuable enough self (to themselves) that they see it possible to augment that self towards nobility. They feel that they have an un-self-actualizable self. I accept that. I call such people peasants, and as far as I'm concerned that's what they are. A lot of African American fall into that peasant bucket, and those are the ones whom are especially suceptible to 50 page books: Afrocentrism, Message to the Blackman, The Isis Papers, et al. You can debate their value but the very fact that they exist at all is testimony to this craving desire to have a black thing-to-be.

Is it real, this hunger, this existential cesspool of confusion, this legacy of slavery, this native alienation? Yeah. Real enough. But it's not unique. There are peasants all over the world, and their difficulties with modernism are the same. I expect to find a great deal of it in China, which means as I have heard, that the emergent new money there is more addicted to bling than Puffy.

I suspect that people everywhere who will inevitably be empowered by new technologies will also inevitably deal with the pain of modernism and the need to become something other than what their parents expected them to be. It will be part of their struggle as individuals and as a people. If you get a chance, rent the video 'Brother' with Omar Epps. Watch what happens in the expressions of the young gangstas as they ineptly inherit power and wealth. They jump uncomfortably into the roles given to them by the man to whom they owe their lives. And they are trapped. But they were only vulnerable because they felt the need to become. It's the problem of peasants all over as they encounter the deadly liberation of the modern world.

Sometimes it's better to stay down in the piney woods and sing Precious Lord.

http://www.mdcbowen.org/cobb/archives/2004_12.html

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Subject: Kwanzaa



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Subject: nogblog IV

When To Worry

I just got off the phone with DP, the only guy I know who likes to talk economics and politics with me. Now that I don't owe him any money we'll probably talk more.

He seems convinced that the US economy is going to implode and maybe take the rest of the world with it. Why? Because we don't educate our people and everybody else is. I could buy it, but I think the problem is one with which Americans will live comfortably. How do I know? Because we don't make BMWs here. Daimler Chrysler notwithstanding, the overwhelming majority of Americans are quite capable of dealing with the fact that other nations are more capable at things we previously boasted about.

I had a bet with an intellectual associate. He guested that the price of gas would hit 6 bucks a gallon this past summer. I probably would have bet him that oil would not hit 60 bucks a barrel and he would have won, but tripling the price at the pump was inconcievable. But if there are inevitable shocks to the domination of the American economy on the world stage and millions of poor and middle class folks feel the big hurt, I say that they'll adjust. Sure there are millions of pampered poodles among us who will squeal and keel over in a squeeze, but the rest of us will get our hands dirty, tighten our belts and be happy to be middle class citizens of a second-class world power.

But none of this calamity will hit without warning. We'll have plenty of time to get used to it and, like boiling frogs, we won't notice it so much. Unlike boiling frogs, we won't become lunch. Even if 20% of the American economy is a bubble, it will pop in slow motion. What will we hear?

I think we'll see the Olympic gold medal count drop. People will stop going to football games. Marinas around the country will have slip rental rates drop and docks go empty. Lobster dinners will start costing even more. But here's the key. When McDonalds shrinks its menu and the 99 cent cheeseburger becomes a thing of the past, then it's time to worry. When people's light bill doubles, then it's time to worry.

When more sitcoms and romantic comedies start looking completely fantastic, we can worry. When small towns start filling up with ex-city slickers learning to hunt deer for food. When Americans really start to hate rich people. When street gangs overwhelm cops because cops don't get paid enough because tax revenues are too small because businesses are failing, in Chicago. When city people start buying cars that they can learn to repair themselves. When people stop putting swimming pools in their homes and buying aftermarket accessories in a variety of industries. When the two car family becomes a rarity.

These things are over the horizon of predictability. > 50 years.

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Subject: nogblog V

What Women Want.

What women want more than anything else in the world is to be heard out, understood and most importantly, forgiven.

What Women Hate.

Women hate the fact that there are other women who get away with it, whatever 'it' is.

Elaborating on the first secret. What a woman wants is to draw you down into the deepest darkest recesses of her psyche and for you to tell her, whatever it is, that's it's OK.

Understand, fellas, that women do not want solutions to their problems. They want understanding of their problems. Women's problems twist them up in knots and they beleive that these knots are written all over their faces. However we dumbass men are not paying attention to, and really cannot see these knots. All we see is what we want to see (and what we wish we could see). Women unknot themselves by coming to an understanding with someone else about what the problem is.

That means that when she takes you there, (which means conversation and communications) she doesn't want you to cut in and say "Look that's simple, all you need to do is just..." No. The proper response is, "Oh, I see why that makes you feel that way."

If you get her to say "Do you think I'm crazy?" or "Do you think I'm fat?", that means you are there at the end of the deep dark alley of her psyche. Affirm her and you win. Confirm her fears about herself and she doesn't need you any longer. In fact, watch your back.

OK? There it is. The secret of life. You happy now?

The problem with relationships is that they're relationships. People ought to be more honest and say that they want a lover, because that's what people really want. They want, as Pat Benetar sung, a lover who won't drive them crazy. The search for lovers boils down to the basic inability for people to be really honest about what they want the other person to do to and for them. That's what being a lover is all about, your ability to make your partner purr. (There's a really deep cat tangent here, but that's for another day). Men and women are looking for that someone who knows how to hit the spot. The problem with relationships is basically a problem with bargaining. People aren't good at negotiating things so precious to them. They put out too much too early. They misjudge the intentions of the other person. They screw up the deal a dozen different ways. Good relationships are about striking a good bargain with somebody who can deliver the goods. When it's mutual, you have a win win. But what you have is a great lover, not a great relationship. The sad fact of evolutionary biology is that it could be anybody. 'Chemistry' is luck.

The problem is that's not Marriage. Marriage is kind of a pro-forma contract. The negotiating is all done, and of course the ante is upped. That's why single people on the far side of Marriage are so utterly different from single people on the near side. Divorcees talk about getting a lover. They don't talk about relationships. Those that do, well... some people never get it.

Anyway, I have talked too much about sex again. I say it's overrated and that most talk about it is a pretext for seduction. Remember Aldous Huxley said that an intellectual is somebody who has found something more interesting than sex. Actually, it's not that so much. Talking about sex is like talking about sports. I'd much rather play.

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Subject: nogblog VI

Every man has a core, which may in the fullness of time prove to be absolutely insignificant. However, it is that man's core and it is the one strength that he will use to carve out his place in the world. Never, ever, ever, belittle that thing, or else you will find how deep the rabbit hole goes.

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Subject: media control

I see... a vast right-wing conspiracy

So, 33-year old Wil, in spite of his appreciation of his father's considerable accomplishments and intelligence, is unwilling to consider that perhaps, just perhaps, his father's wisdom might extend to politics as well. No, dear old dad been taken in by talk radio, which means that Wil can dismiss any ideas that do not conform to his own narrow, liberal world view as espoused by the "impartial" media (NY Times, CBS, et al). Polarize the country? Hey, here's a clue, Wil: the country has always been polarized; we just never used to hear the non-left point of view. Now we do, and the left doesn't like it one little bit, do they? I especially like how he managed to slip in that dirty (to liberals) little word, "profit" as if that's all the evidence any thinking reader could possibly need to confirm the nefarious right-wing plot to destroy America.

-- Frisco

Here.

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Subject: Dumper evacuateth

Stand up to Iran

By Abraham Foxman

The widely publicized and condemned remarks by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad about Israel and the Holocaust reflect the range of anti-Jewish thinking in the post-Holocaust era.

It has often been said that after 6 million Jews were murdered by the Nazis, it was not respectable to be openly anti-Semitic. Often hatred of Jews manifested itself in hatred of the State of Israel, not merely legitimate critiques of Israeli policy, but denial of Israel's right to exist and seeing the Jewish state as the source of all evil in the Middle East, if not the world. In recent years, however, in some circles there has been more of a willingness to express hatred of the Jews directly, without the mark of anti-Zionism.

The statements by Ahmadinejad in recent weeks reflect the evolution of several of these approaches. Take his words on the Holocaust and its relationship to the State of Israel. They contain within them the mode of anti-Israeli thinking that has existed in the Arab and Islamic world for decades. In their struggle against Israel's very existence, Arabs and Muslims for a long time acknowledged that the Holocaust happened and was a terrible event, but, they asked, why should we Middle Easterners pay the price for what the Europeans did to the Jews? In other words, they saw Israel's existence as an illegitimate imposition on the Arab Middle East by Europeans who felt guilty over the annihilation of the Jews. Of course, this reasoning ignores the fact that the Jewish claim to Israel rests on thousands of years of connection to the land and to the concept of return and not on the Holocaust. Still, this anti-Israel speech did not deny the Holocaust. Ahmadinejad's comments that the Europeans ought to set territory in Europe as a homeland for the Jews follows that long-standing approach.

At the same time, he brings into play the more recent view of the Holocaust that has grown in Arab and Muslim circles. According to this view, the Holocaust never really happened; it is a myth perpetrated by the Jews in order to gain sympathy and support for a Jewish state. Here Ahmadinejad makes a mockery of the idea that it is only Israel, not Jews, that is the problem. After all, denial of the Holocaust has at its core two anti-Semitic elements. By denying the greatest tragedy of the Jewish people, it demonstrates profound hatred of the Jews even during their most difficult moments. And, it suggests the old and potent anti-Semitic concept - that Jews control the international media and sources of power - for how could this myth of the Holocaust be seen as fact by everyone around the world if not for the notion that Jews manipulate and control sources of communication throughout the world?

The fact that Ahmadinejad's two basic points - that Israel should be wiped out and the Europeans should give territory to the Jews on the one hand, and that the Holocaust never happened on the other hand - are contradictory does not bother him at all. For after all, if the Holocaust never happened, then why should the Europeans owe the Jews anything?

Of course, when dealing with hatred of this kind, looking for logic and consistency is a waste of time. What is apparent and critical is the willingness to elide the line between anti-Israel and anti-Jewish expressions. This trend in parts of the Arab world has been visible for a number of years, where the conflict has devolved from a political-national one to an anti-Semitic one. Ehud Ya'ari, the Israeli commentator, has pointed out that too often the problem is now seen not as Israel being the source of all problems, but Jews and Judaism itself. Both are insidious approaches, but the latter is particularly so. It has one virtue: illuminating the fact that to a large degree the claim of being anti-Zionist and not anti-Semitic has little weight.

The only positive note in all of this is the broad condemnation by the international community of the Iranian president's posture. It is a shame that it takes such extremism to wake up the world if indeed it has awakened, but better late than never. Now the test is whether words of condemnation will be translated into actions - sanctions and isolation - against the regime in Tehran.

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Subject: HST

GONZO DEPARTURE. Hunter S. Thompson took his own life via gunshot, reportedly despondent over health problems. His last written words, found four days before his death, according to Rolling Stone: "No More Games. No More Bombs. No More Walking. No More Fun. No More Swimming. 67. That is 17 years past 50. 17 more than I needed or wanted. Boring. I am always bitchy. No Fun--for anybody. 67. You are getting Greedy. Act your old age. Relax--This won't hurt." His ashes were blasted into the sky from a 150-foot cannon on his fortified compound near Aspen, Colo.

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Subject: trends

WORD OF THE YEAR: "Podcast" (podcasts are downloadable audio files), according to the editors of the New Oxford American Dictionary. Other new words to be added to the online dictionary at the next update: "ICE," or emergency contact information; "IDP," or internally displaced person, like a Hurricane Katrina victim; "lifehack," as in a more effective way of completing a task, such as "I found a great lifehack for getting a cheap hotel room." My favorite: "squick," to cause immediate and thorough revulsion, as in "Was anyone else squicked by our waiter's piercings?"

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Subject: next stop Jeboo

SNAKE-OIL SELF-PUBLISHING. Infomercial pitchman Kevin Trudeau's Natural Cures "They" Don't Want You to Know About (which, among other things, claims magnetic toe rings reverse human aging) quickly rose to No. 1 on the nonfiction best seller list. Despite a host of debunking stories in the press by real doctors and legal entanglement with the Federal Trade Commission and the New York Consumer Protection Board, the book remains on Top 10 lists everywhere. So far, the gullible and the desperate have bought more than 3 million copies.

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Subject: public square

Robert P. George of Princeton takes me to task for an item in the Public Square section of the current issue of FIRST THINGS:

In the item "Are Jews Smarter?," paragraph six opens with your point about bright eighth graders congratulating themselves on the "discovery" that the assertion of the Declaration of Independence "is not literally true." "In ways important and unimportant, it is not the case that all are created equal. Call equality our 'founding mythology,' if you like, but it is crucial to the foundation of the American order . . . ." Well, I don't think this is right. "All men are created equal" is literally true. The equality in basic worth and dignity of every member of the human family is not a myth. (Or if it is a myth, as Flannery O'Connor might have said, to hell with it.) Of course, as you say, not all men are equal in every respect. That's obvious. Some are smarter than others, some are stronger, some are more creative, some are more virtuous, etc. But precisely in respect of the matter at issue in the Declaration -- basic worth and dignity -- all are, literally, created equal. That's not a myth, not a noble lie, not a generalization admitting of exceptions. It is why it would be profoundly and inherently wrong (and not just imprudent or dangerous because it's the sort of thing that could get out of hand) for someone to take the life of a single severely mentally retarded child in order to harvest organs to save the lives of Edward Witten (who, let's imagine, need a heart transplant), Michael Jordan (who needs a liver), and Bela Fleck and the Dalai Lama (both of whom need kidneys). Of course, it is not that the retarded child is as smart as Witten, possesses the athletic prowess of Jordan, displays the musical genius of Fleck, or is as holy as the Dalai Lama (I'm guessing at the Dalai Lama's holiness, by the way; maybe I should say Jimmy Carter here instead–just kidding! just kidding!!). Rather, it is that in basic worth and dignity the child really is the equal of these guys and everyone else. We don't just pretend that he is equal in dignity because it helps to support the kind of public order and political regime we happen to favor, or because social life would become unmanageable otherwise. We believe he is equal–literally–and we assert it as a matter of moral truth.

Mea culpa, albeit not maxima. I should have made it clearer that I was speaking about that eighth-grader's understanding of equality, not the understanding held by Robert George or the American founders, which I fully share. I would also note that "myth" and "mythology" need not suggest that something is untrue. There are true myths, as biblical scholars and J.R.R. Tokien remind us. But I have often criticized biblical scholars for their use of those terms because most people do associate myth with falsehood. I should not have done it myself. (Note to Hadley Arkes and Harry Jaffa: Please hold off on those letters of reproach. I am sorry.)

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Subject: stand up to the jews

Against the "Academic Intifada"

by David Hirsh

An international campaign for a boycott of Israeli artists, musicians, teachers, thinkers, writers, and researchers calls itself the "Academic Intifada." Two years ago, it proposed that the British Association of University Teachers (AUT) should require its members to blacklist colleagues who worked for Israeli universities. This boycott was rejected by the AUT.

This past year, the campaigners came back with what they thought was a more sophisticated approach. They argued for boycotts against particular Israeli institutions, in the hope that they would gather momentum for a total boycott in due course. They also responded to the objection that such boycotts would silence even Israeli academics who oppose the Occupation. They offered an exemption for professors who would denounce the "colonialist and racist" policies of Israel.

This political test would require that Israeli academics apply for exemption on the basis of their political cleanliness. The AUT would have endorsed the idea that "Zionists" had no place in academia, and some of its militants might have been tempted to extend the "Zionist" test to Jewish academics outside Israel.

Many in the Palestine Solidarity Movement have long claimed that "Zionism Equals Racism," that Israel is the only "illegitimate" state in the world, and that Jewish nationalism is irremediably worse than any other. This singling out of Jewish nationalism is anti-Semitic in effect, if not intention, because it licenses people to relate to Jews as though they were racists until they define themselves as "anti-Zionist." The Union of Jewish Students reports that campaigns to boycott Israel on campuses bring with them an increase in racist incidents against Jewish students.

An academic who comes originally from Poland wrote to me saying that the rhetoric of the boycotters reminded him of events there in 1968. Under the cover of solidarity with Palestinians, the Polish state had purged the Jewish intelligentsia. Jewish intellectuals were challenged to declare themselves anti-Zionist. Most of them refused, and many left the country; Poland lost a large number of its thinkers, teachers, writers, and researchers.

Something about the boycott effort brought a new group of people into open opposition. Personally, I had encountered some difficult moments while teaching. Some of my Masters students, for example, in a course on human rights, had created a swirl of half-baked anti-Semitic narratives in response to a lecture on the complexities of Holocaust representation. "What about the Holocaust industry?" "There is so much discussion of the Holocaust because of who controls the market." "Why does one group feel they own the Holocaust?" "The Holocaust myth." "It's the Zionists that insist on the ineffability of the Holocaust." In another class a student had repeated the claim that there were no Jews in the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001. I was already worrying about the connections between anti-imperialism, anti-Semitism, and hostility to Israel. Many colleagues had encountered similar attitudes in the classroom, in the union, and in public life more generally.

The mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, had hosted an Islamist cleric who had spoken in favor of suicide bombing against Israelis and had used unambiguous anti-Semitic language; the big anti-war demonstrations had linked opposition to the invasion of Iraq with demonization of Israel. Member of Parliament George Galloway claims that Jerusalem is in the hands of "foreigners," meaning Israeli Jews, who are perpetrating a rape of that city.

Many of us had stopped worrying about Israel and Palestine during the peace process; we were jolted out of our complacency by the boycotters. I was in touch with a few old political colleagues, people with whom I had fought against the banning of Jewish societies in the student movement in the 1980s. A number of people were coming alive again politically.

We wrote a letter to the Guardian, articulating our case against the boycott and, at the same time, our opposition to the Occupation. This letter flew around academia and was published alongside a blander one opposing the boycott on the basis of academic freedom and another that opposed the boycott tactically but ambivalently. Each of these was signed by about a hundred academics.

We were surprised when the boycotters won the initial vote. The argument put to academic trade unionists this April was straightforward: Israel is an apartheid state, so boycott it. At first glance this is appealing to people disgusted by the realities of the Occupation. The vote was taken at the end of the meeting; there was no time for speeches against the boycott, and there had been little debate in the branches. Under these circumstances, some honest delegates voted for what was effectively an anti-Semitic policy.

The boycott was anti-Semitic because it singled out Israel and Israeli academics for special treatment with no morally or politically relevant reason for doing so. Israel is not, as the boycott suggests, the worst human rights abuser or the most racist state in the world; it is not responsible for the most serious campaign of ethnic cleansing.

Those who agree that Israel should be singled out fail to agree on why. Some say that the Jews should know better, that Israel claims to be a democracy and so should be held to a higher standard than states that do not; some say that Israel plays a particular role at the vanguard of global imperialism. One academic at an AUT branch meeting said that the role of Jews throughout history has been destructive to all around them. Some say that Israel is particularly culpable because it occupies Muslim land.

The most common reason is that Israel, as a Jewish state, is by definition racist. This is not a claim about what Israel does, but an existential claim about what Israel is. Racist policy is presented as the inevitable product of a racist essence (even by people who are otherwise opposed to essentialism). What drives them to such intellectual lengths?

The boycott campaign tolerated incidents of open anti-Semitism in its midst. Some activists referred to "rich and powerful Zionists" who would stand in the way of their campaign. The General Union of Palestinian Students allowed a leaflet to be circulated from its stall at a student conference that peddled the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

These manifestations can't be unexpected. We argued for an analogy with institutional racism. Just as an institutionally racist police force does not necessarily contain racist officers, so parts of the left are politically hostile to Jews even if their activists do not feel anti-Semitic. But if you build a movement that is effectively if unconsciously anti-Semitic, then you cannot be surprised when it breeds and licenses hostility to Jews. Parts of the left in the United Kingdom are now allied with overt anti-Semitism, some of it Islamist, some of it native to its own ranks.

The boycott targeted the best of Israeli society. The universities are spaces where Jews and Arabs work, teach, learn, and think side by side; where debate rather than bloodshed is the norm. Haifa University and the Hebrew University have about 20 percent Palestinian students; there are Arab professors in all Israeli universities.

Ariel Sharon claims that all criticism of Israel is a manifestation of anti-Semitism. The boycotters say that criticism of Israel is not anti-Semitic. Both sides miss the point. Criticism of Israel is not necessarily anti-Semitic, but sometimes it is exactly that. Most critics of the boycott in the AUT are also critical of Israeli policy. But criticism that demonizes Israel and Jews lets Sharon off the hook; it moves the discussion onto ground where he can respond with righteous indignation. At the same time, it damages the most open and anti-racist institutions in Israel and pushes the already demoralized Israeli left toward the right.

The April decision plunged the AUT into crisis. A number of high-profile Jewish academics responded immediately with calls for resignation from the union. A group that had been doggedly fighting the boycott campaign for years declared that this was the final straw. But we wanted to be members of a union, and the AUT is the only one there is. We judged that it was better to take the fight into the union than to step outside, leaving it permanently in the hands of an unrepresentative minority. We decided to campaign against the boycott and set up the Web site Engage (www.EngageOnline.org.uk) to coordinate the campaign.

Jon Pike read the AUT rule book. "We can call a Special Council to discuss the issue," he told me on the phone, "if we get the signatures of twenty-five council members." Why not give it a go? So Jon worked within the union structures while I developed a Web site that would arm people with arguments for the coming debate. Jane Ashworth, with her huge experience of building campaigns, consolidated the network. A fresh wind of member participation blew through the cobwebbed cliques of the AUT. Open and democratic meetings were held in local branches, winning nearly all of them to anti-boycott positions.

The debate at the Special Council cannot be understood as a fight between the left and the right. Rather it was a fight between two souls of the left. There is a long tradition of anti-Semitism on the left and in the labor movement -- the "socialism of fools" as August Bebel called it. Stalinists used anti-Semitic motifs in the 1930s, and the clearly anti-Semitic "Doctors' Trial" was in preparation in the early 1950s, before Stalin's death. Before the Second World War, Oswald Moseley came out of the Labour Party to campaign on an anti-Semitic platform in the East End of London. Since the 1967 Israeli-Arab war, left anti-Semitism has disguised itself in the clothes of anti-Zionism. In the 1970s and 1980s the Soviet Union sent Jews who wanted to live in Israel to the Gulag. Anti-Zionists attacked the rights of Jewish students to organize Jewish societies in the UK in the 1980s. Since the collapse of the peace process, the attacks of September 11, and the War Against Terror, left and liberal currents that consider America to be the central force for evil in the world have gotten stronger; they have made both tacit and formal alliances with political Islamism and they have been responsible for a renewed focus on Israel and Jews as the vanguard of global imperialism.

Palestinians have come to symbolize the global struggle against imperialism while Jews have come to symbolize the veiled imperialist forces behind the fiction of "democratic values." Jews are Nazi-Zionists, Jews are rich capitalists, Jews are scheming communists, Jews are the shady neocons pulling the strings of American imperialism in the interest of Israel. All this is the expression of a false and racist radicalism. The left has to reeducate itself to recognize anti-Semitism when it sees it.

The AUT Special Council voted against the boycott and for the authentic values of the left, academic freedom and for democratic norms. At the same time, it was almost unanimous in its conviction that Palestinians suffer unjustly under Israeli occupation. The boycotters argued that theirs was the only way to support Palestinians. British academics decided instead to make positive links with Israeli and Palestinian universities, engage in joint research, joint teaching, and exchanges of students and ideas.

The weekend before the Special Council, there was a very small demonstration in London for Palestinian freedom. Why is there no mass movement for this cause -- in support, also, of the Israeli peace movement? The chief reason for this is that the existing Palestine Solidarity Campaign smells of anti-Semitism. Most people do not want to be involved with such a movement. In this way, the politics of Palestine solidarity does tremendous harm to Palestinians. Its unremitting hatred of Israel, its calls for divisive boycotts, its libeling of Jews as racists, and the crassness and one-sidedness of the stories it tells -- none of this serves its ostensible cause.

The boycotters learned nothing from their defeat. They reacted with a new barrage of anti-Semitic rhetoric, insisting that they were defeated by a well-funded global Zionist lobby that pressured the AUT.

Anti-Semitism is on the rise in Europe and the United Kingdom. Some of the post-Holocaust taboos are withering; some are being bypassed with rhetoric referring to Zionists rather than Jews. Implacable hostility to Israel functions as a centerpiece to some "anti-imperialist" worldviews, not only on the left but also in right-wing isolationism. This problem is exacerbated by confused thinking about the distinction between jihadi-fascist movements, which incorporate hostility to Jews at the heart of their ideology, and Islam in general. Many people find it difficult to oppose the politics of those movements that claim to be the authentic voice of Islam. A wish to oppose anti-Islamic racism sometimes slips into an implicit or overt alliance with Islam's self-appointed but in fact unrepresentative spokespeople. Today, at last, there are people organizing to resist this fake leftism, educating themselves to recognize talk of Jewish lobbies and Zionist power as a sign of a cancer within our movement.

David Hirsh is a lecturer in sociology at Goldsmiths College, University of London, author of Law against Genocide: Cosmopolitan Trials (GlassHouse, 2004), and editor for Engage at www.EngageOnline.org.uk.

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Subject: inside media

Darts & Laurels

By Gloria Cooper

Dart

To the Philadelphia Inquirer, for its extravagant production of an off-off little drama.

Scene I. In an article co-authored by the staff writer Mario F. Cattabiani, the paper throws its spotlight in the annual meeting of the National Conference of State Legislatures, held this year in Seattle, rigorously recording in minute detail the food and drunk and giveaways and entertainment provided by the conference's corporate underwriters.

Scene II. Daylin Leach, a Pennsylvania state representative and former processional stand-up comic, adds another of his sometimes x-rated political satires to the hundreds of others archived on leachvent.com, a personal Web site he maintains for family and friends. In this one, a fictitious reporter, sent by his clueless editors to cover the conference in Seattle, doggedly skilks around in nutty disguises hoping to catch a legislator in such bacchanalian acts as eating a corporate-funded muffin or (a running gag) "getting his jimmy pierced." The straight arrow legislator, for his part, tries in vain to convince the reporter -- named, most irreverently, "Mario" -- that the lawmakers are truly more interested in the seminars on education and the environment than in Geisha girls and karaoke.

Scene III. The Inquirer gives page-one play -- along with news of Katrina's cataclysmic devastation and a stampede in Iraq that left 800 dead -- to a 1,575-word news story about Mario C. Cattabiani headed PA Lawmaker's Blog: Funny -- Or Offensive? Laced with excerpts that show the lawmaker's irreverence, the story is also laced with quotes that testify to Cattabiani's enterprise -- quotes of outraged reaction that Cattabiani solicited from selected spokespeople who were bound to find Leach's blog offensive but who, it now appears, had never even heard of it until Cattabiani brought it to their attention.

Scene IV. The Inquirer follows its front-page revelations with a blistering editorial calling Leach "a joke." Titled What A Lame Attempt At Humor! The editorial blasts him for his distasteful references to sex and drugs, and cites, among other examples it disapproves of, "the Democrat's sarcasm about President Bush's intelligence" and the one about "getting stoned on hashish with Henry Kissinger." This indictment, however, fails to note that in Leach's most recent spoof, the target clearly mocked had been The Inquirer itself. Appearing a few days later will be a similarly bilious (and similarly incomplete) piece by columnist John Grogan.

Scene V. Leach rings down the curtain on leachvent.com (inspiring two more Cattabiani stories). "If anyone has been offended by anything I have written, I am truly sorry," Leach tells his Web site fans, none of whom he says has ever complained. "I was trying to make people laugh and think, not upset them."

Epilogue. Various observers (in the Allentown Morning Call, the Main Line Times) weigh in with less than rave reviews of the Inquirer's performance, and the paper runs some letters criticizing what one reader calls its "personal vendetta." But it is the Philadelphia City Paper, perhaps, that sums the whole thing up most bluntly: "The Inquirer savaged this young legislator because his satire was hitting the mark: Them."

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Subject: Mormon crit

A CLINTON CONNECTION

Re: David Holman's Romney's "Mormon Problem" and Reader Mail's Mormonism Spelled Out:

Mr. Tyrrell: Last week I read David Holman's article on Mitt Romney's "Mormon Problem," as well as the letters to TAS following up on it. This reminded me of a letter that I have wanted to write you since pre-internet days. Back in the 90s I read Boy Clinton and it struck me at the time how much the book reminded me of another biography I had recently read, No Man Knows My History: The Life of Joseph Smith by Fawn Brodie, first published in 1945 and revised in 1971.

The appendix to the revised edition, which interprets Smith's behavior in terms of a psychological type known as "The Imposter," could just as have easily been written about Clinton and appended to your book. I think you would find a comparison between the two men of the highest interest -- their inexhaustible energy and appetites, the curious amorality, the chronic lying that amounts to fantasizing, the flexible and pragmatic pursuit of self-interest, the ability to hoodwink their followers, the women, the partying, more women, the wife in denial, etc. The excerpts from Henry Adams's account of his visit with Smith are comic and priceless.

I know that Fawn Brodie is controversial because in her biography of Jefferson she came up with the Sally Hemmings theory. But the Smith book was written earlier and was a piece of totally original research that is still the basic work on its subject. The Mormons have since developed all kinds of arguments against it. But one might ask in comparison: Overall, which presents a clearer picture of the Big Creep, Boy Clinton or My Life?

I love TAS, but still wish you hadn't shrunk the paper version down to mortal size back in the early '90s -- Will Pickering

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Subject: art

From Publishers Weekly

As research director of the U.S. Presidential Advisory Committee on Holocaust Assets, Petropoulos (Art as Politics in the Third Reich) is at the forefront of the efforts to understand the full extent of Nazi plundering of art. (He is also professor of history at Claremont McKenna College in California.) Tirelessly scouring European archives, Petropoulos has compiled an invaluable account of how certain artists profited from the Nazi system. Moreover, he follows the story through the end of the war and describes how these profiteering artists fared after the fall of the Third Reich. Some, like the notorious sculptor Arno Breker, long a favorite of Hitler, amazingly escaped any major penalties or prosecutions. Detailed chapters describe the destinies of German art museum directors, art dealers, art journalists and art historians as well as artists, presenting a far broader picture than any previous study of the true artistic climate during the war years. Not only do we read about vile acts of cowardice and collaboration, but we get hints of the innocuous, everyday faces of the bureaucrats and journalistic hacks who committed crimes against art and humanity. With 69 pages of detailed notes, and an unusually useful and extensive bibliography, this book is sure to be a cornerstone for further studies of art in the Nazi period. Perhaps most impressively, Petropoulos manages to maintain a cool tone while recounting the spoilation of Jewish art collections for the profit of the Reich, a subject that even today raises emotions to fever pitch. This is the sort of book that literary prizes were invented to honor. (June)

From Library Journal

Since the publication of Lynn H. Nicholas's The Rape of Europa (LJ 5/1/94), a number of works have appeared that further document the cultural pillaging that took place during World War II. While books such as Hector Feliciano's The Lost Museum (LJ 8/97) have focused on the lost artworks, Petropoulos's study is the first to focus on the Nazis and Nazi sympathizers who made the looting possible. Spotlighting five groups--art museum directors, art dealers, art journalists, art historians, and artists--Petropoulos (history, Claremont McKenna Coll.) carefully and systematically details how each of these groups either directly or indirectly facilitated the theft of countless works of art and legitimized the Nazi regime. By following a number of individuals in each group through their rise in Nazi Germany and in a number of instances their "rehabilitation" in a postwar "de-Nazification" process, Petropoulos shows that justice is too often blind to the truth. Detailed notes document all of the author's allegations, and he supplies an extensive bibliography of primary and secondary materials that reinforce his arguments. Highly recommended for both public and academic collections. -Martin R. Kalfatovic, Smithsonian Inst. Libs., Washington, DC

An Academic and Moral Subject Undertaken in Engaging Fashion, September 10, 2005

Reviewer: Donata Guerra (Cary, NC United States) - See all my reviews

Jonathan Petropoulos, Professor of History at elite Claremont McKenna College, presents an academic subject with a style that reads as a "user-friendly" narrative. He explores the manner in which certain Nazi-era museum directors, art dealers, art journalists and art historians, and, finally, artists, themselves, negotiated the dangerous terrain of Hitler Germany in order to enjoy the benefits of Reich approval. Petropoulos keeps the reader aware of moral, ethical, and legal issues as he paints a damning portrait of opportunists, both talented and not, who sold their souls to the National Socialist devil. In the end, one is left with a sorrow for their choices, and, in all honesty, a realization that the art produced for this regime was weak, coarse, and ultimately foolish.

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3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

Fascinating reading, September 4, 2000

Reviewer: Phelps Gates (Chapel Hill, NC USA) - See all my reviews

Rather than producing another dry narrative of events in the artistic world during the Nazi era, the author brings the subject to life by taking a prosopographic approach: comparative biographies of a number of interesting figures in Nazi art (not only artists but critics, museum directors, etc.), following their careers both before and after 1945. A fascinating series of case studies. But I must agree with the previous reviewer that there are problems with editing: "prosopography" is misspelled throughout -- eek!

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5 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

it covers all the types that stayed behind, August 17, 2000

Reviewer: Hazel Clark (arizona) - See all my reviews

I've always wondered how I would have reacted had I lived in Germany in the 1930s. As a Jew, as a Lutheran, as a man or a woman, as an intellectual, as a peasant, as a business owner. The author does a fair job covering the members of the art world, artists, dealers, museum directors, critics. He picks one or two of the worst in each group and also a few shaded lighter grey. The only fact I would question is the name of the main Jewish bookdealer in Munich. Wasn't it Emil Hirsch rather than Heinrik Hirsch? Also it's slightly annoying to see some people's birth and death dates in brackets but not all and even more annoying to see a birth date and a questionmark for the death date. Did his editor not get around to filling in the dates?

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Subject: Fire Joe Morgan blog

Follow-Up

A follow-up to my previous post ("FJM Instant Classic," which, by the way, is in reference to the insanity of Joe Morgan's column, and not the quality of my critique):

In the 13th inning of tonight's Marlins-Braves game, right after Andruw Jones hit a slider about 750 feet to left for his 25th home run, Buck Martinez started talking about how before Chipper Jones was hurt, Andruw was hitting like .240, and had no power, and blah blah blah. Then, Chipper gets hurt, and Andruw suddenly turns it on and has a massive June and is going to win an MVP.

I've bitched about this in previous posts, but I am now ready to declare this my biggest beef with sportscasters: the inability to distinguish causality from coincidence.

For example.

Is there any actual proof that Chipper Jones getting hurt in any way helped Andruw Jones, physically or psychologically? Is there any explanation that makes any kind of sense? For that matter, can anyone even make one up? Martinez and Morgan (and others, I assume) just assert that the two are causally linked, but how? Why? If Andruw Jones is having a terrible April, and then one day he drinks a Diet 7-Up and watches the movie "Down Periscope," and then he hits fifty home runs, is it because he drank a Diet 7-Up and watched "Down Periscope?"

Or, for a better analogy, what if Andruw Jones is having a terrible spring, and then SOME OTHER GUY ON HIS TEAM, like, say Julio Franco, reads a "Bloom County" collection and punches his dog in the nose, and starting the next day Andruw Jones goes on a tear and hits 50 home runs, is it because anti-pooch feelings and pro-adorable penguin feelings have somehow passed trough Franco's body and unleashed something buried deep within Andruw Jones?

Why do people insist on finding links like this?

When the Mariners won 114 games a few years back, I heard one of their announcers (don't remember who) cite what he called a "telling" statistic: when Mark McLemore scores a run, the M's are [some kind of very good record]. I remember calculating the corresponding winning percentage, and finding it was within like .015 of the M's overall winning percentage. In other words, when McLemore DIDN'T score a run, the M's record was basically identical to when he did score a run. Thus, the stat was the exact opposite of "telling."

There are tons of these things. Like when a stat flashes on the screen that so and so's ERA in innings 4-6 is 4.50, but from innings 7-9 it's an incredible 1.35!!! Of course, as anyone could realize if (s)he thought about it for two seconds, the only times a pitcher goes 7+ are when he is performing well, hence his ERA will be lower. Or, this team must have a great bullpen, because it's an amazing 42-3 when leading after eight innings! Great. The league average winning % in that scenario is like 95%.

Starting now, I lead the crusade against misattributed causality! Who's with me?!!? No one?!?!? Awesome!!!!!!!!

Here.

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Subject: Lasorda

"And I guaran-fucking-tee you this, when I pitched and I was gonna pitch against a fucking team that had guys on it like Bevacqua, I'd send a fucking limosine to get the fucker to make sure he was in the mothefucking lineup because I'd kick that fucker's ass any fucking day of the week. He's a fucking motherfucking bigmouth, I'll tell you that."

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Subject: Aryans in India

The Aryan Connection

By Satya Sagar

South Asia Citizens Web

01 July, 2003

It is late night and I am still listening to this slick, pony-tailed, middle-aged Indian I chanced upon in a Munich café. "I meet them once in a while, the old Nazis" he tells me "They have a soft corner for Indians".

(Thanks, I tell myself, that's what I really need now ' a Nazi soft corner'.)

It is my keenness to get a tangential Indian view of Munich that keeps me here with this bloke. An architect by profession, X-Ray (let us call him that) has lived in Germany now for over three decades and obviously has a 'soft corner' for the Nazis too.

Not surprising at all. Many well-heeled Indians living overseas are ardent supporters of the quasi-fascist, Hindu chauvinist politicians ruling India right now. X-Ray's beloved Hindu right wing politicians, in turn, come from a long tradition of admiration for Hitler and everything he stood for- including the ethnic cleansing of the Jews in his times.

But why should the Nazis have a 'soft corner' for India? How did it fit into their Weltanschauung?

The answer lies in the 'Aryan' Connection. According to this piece of fiction the populations of Europe, India and Iran had a common ancestry in the Aryan Race, which migrated from the mountainous regions of Central Asia and produced some of the earliest human civilizations.

Over two centuries after the myth of the 'noble, superior' Aryan Race was first postulated the political, historical processes it set forth in motion are still with us in a variety of ways -- in South Asia, the Middle-East, Europe and even the United States. Though thoroughly discredited by modern scholarship as well as the horrific experiences of the Second World War, the Aryan Connection is still very much alive and killing.

Let me explain first with a little bit of history about the Aryan Race myth itself.

The origins of the concept partially go back to Sir William Jones, a 18th century judge in Bengal as part of the British Raj, who studied the Sanskrit language and discovered several structural affinities it had with Greek, Latin, Celtic and German. Later, other scholars showed that Avestan (from ancient Iran), Armenian, and the Slavic languages were also related. All these were referred to as the Indo-German, or Indo-European group of languages.

As translations of old Sanskrit texts like the ancient Vedas flourished in Europe (Napoleon apparently carried it on the battlefield !) and enthusiasm for everything Indian grew dramatically it was just a matter of time before the notion of a common Indo-European language gave rise to the idea of common 'racial' origins too. The Brahmins of ancient India, according to their traditional lore, were supposed to be descendants of Aryan conquerors who migrated to India from the highlands of Central Asia, a tale that blended perfectly with beliefs among European occultists that white 'Caucasians' too had originated from the same Central Asian mountains. Ergo, the concept of the Aryan Race as the creator of ancient civilizations was born.

Given the nineteenth century European obsession with 'race' and 'history' the theory of the 'noble, superior' Aryan race became wildly popular, took legs and ran all over the world posing as the answer to the mysteries of all ancient civilizations. By the early twentieth century this absurd concept had grown claws, a beak and even sprouted wings with the rise of Hitler before finally crashing to the ground in the flak and fury of the Second World War.

Let me explain why the idea of the Aryan race is so ridiculous. To begin with the category of 'race' itself is itself quite dubious. Genetically almost all of humanity is identical and the only 'race' we are all part of today, I believe, is the 'rat race' of global capitalism.

Secondly the seemingly logical leap from postulating a common set of 'Aryan' languages to the Aryan Race is also quite idiotic. A simple example will suffice to show its idiocy. If an extra-terrestrial studied the languages spoken on Planet Earth today and concluded that all those who speak, read and write English belong to the same race/ethnic group would he/she/it be right or wrong ? Obviously wrong unless I look like Tom Cruise, which I assure you - I don't. (I don't even look like Woody Allen)

Linguistic and cultural influences typically travel much faster than human populations (even in ancient times) and so the similarities that one sees between Sanskrit and Latin are entirely possible without both languages having a common origin. Even though it is safe to assume that there were several waves of migration from parts of central Asia into India over the millennia it does not follow that there is any one central source for Sanskrit. In all probability it evolved as a hybrid of both imported and indigenous languages native to ancient India.

How is all this discussion of the Aryan race, supposedly buried with the Nazis, so relevant to what is happening in our world today?

First of all, the idea of the 'Aryan race' is unfortunately not fully interred yet in popular consciousness in several parts of the world. Just do a search for the 'Aryan Race' on the web and see the number of sites that turn up talking about the term as a historical fact.

Secondly, the Aryan myth still plays an important role in the contemporary politics of South Asia.

In India, for example, the 19th century European notion of the ancient 'Aryans' as the fount of all human wisdom and civilization underpins the modern Hindu chauvinist worldview according to which:

a) The history of the Indian sub-continent is essentially an 'Aryan Hindu history' reaching back continuously over 5000 years (including the Indus valley civilizations) and interrupted only by the 'vicious' invasions of Muslims and later Christians during the last millennium. So if Muslims and Christians want to survive in India today they will have to 'Hinduise' themselves. If they don't do it on their own the Hindu storm troopers will force them to. The Aryans themselves in this version are believed to be completely indigenous to India and not migrants from Central Asia.

b) The Vedas, the world's oldest 'Aryan' literature, are the repository of all 'truth' and its wisdom needs to be revived and used in the modern Indian context irrespective of their relevance. So we now have courses in 'Vedic mathematics' and 'Vedic astrology' being taught in Indian universities thanks to the current Hindu chauvinist regime. Though they will never spell it out in so many words the more insidious part of this project to revive the 'virtues' of ancient India is to justify and perpetuate the Indian caste system with the fair skinned 'Aryans' at the top and the darker non-Aryan 'rabble' at the bottom of the pile.

c) India should aspire to be a 'great power' in world affairs today to recover the 'glory' of its ancient past. If necessary this should be done with the help of the nuclear bomb and strategic alliances with the only existing superpower- America.

In neighboring Sri Lanka the Aryan myth has played a devastating role in dividing the island's allegedly 'Aryan' Sinhalese population from the so called 'Dravidian' Tamil population over the past century or more. Several studies by Sri Lankan sociologists have traced the Orientalist propaganda of the Aryan race theory in the mid-nineteenth century as having shaped Sri Lanka's national consciousness drastically. While there were other factors also responsible for the eruption of this tragic island's two decade long civil war between Tamils and the Sinhalese there is no doubt that the Aryan fable has taken its deadly toll here too.

As for the Middle-East the role of the Aryan myth in shaping its modern history is quite obvious- through the creation of Israel in 1948. Quite simply put, if not for Nazi obsession with establishing 'Nordic Aryan purity' in Europe and the consequent Jewish Holocaust there would be no Israel today, the European Jews would still have been in Europe and Palestine might have been the most peaceful place on Earth (barring of course the chance of Bush Jr. searching for WMDs in Jerusalem!!).

Sure, Zionism pre-dates the Holocaust but then it was also born as an extreme reaction to the anti-Semitism widespread throughout Europe in the nineteenth century. An anti-Semitism that had always existed in Europe for two millennia but which acquired a particularly virulent form with the coming of the Aryan Race myth, which was used by anti-Semites, among other reasons, as a counter to the Jews calling themselves God's 'chosen people'.

Ironically the early Zionists picked up the dubious category of 'race' prevalent among their worst enemies and insisted that the Jews were one 'race' thereby lumping diverse people belonging to the same faith into one racial/ethnic category (so today we have people from the north-east Indian state of Manipur, thought to belong to the ancient Jewish Bnei Menashe tribe, freely migrating to Israel because they are all supposed to be part of the same 'race').

The basis for the creation of Israel, drawing as it does on nineteenth century notions of race and obsession with historical origins, was clearly the 'Jewish myth'- an inverted image of the Aryan myth. And when has an evil ever ceased to be so by merely putting a mirror to it.

Now coming to modern-day Europe, though there are signs of anti-Semitism on the rise in many countries, I do not think that the Aryan myth is still taken seriously by many people. (There is nothing like a World War to cure a continent of bad scholarship!)

But Europe still has a responsibility for the continuing global consequences of the Aryan Race theory and the anti-Semitism it spurred on in its past. Let me explain how.

Firstly, it is well known that anti-Semitism was not unique to Germany and widespread throughout Europe. This is a point worth focusing on, because the way the history of anti-Semitism and the Second World War has been popularly told the blame has been simplistically placed entirely on Nazi Germany whereas a lot more of Europe should be sharing such blame.

Apart from countries in mainland Europe, even in the United Kingdom and the United States anti-Semitism was rife in those days. (In 1938 four polls showed that up to 85% of the American public was opposed to increased immigration quotas which would have allowed Jewish refugees to escape Nazi Germany.)

Also, it has to be recognized that the way the Aryan Myth and anti-Semitism played out under the Nazis was only an extension, albeit an extreme one, of the notions of racial superiority that permeated all of European colonialism. The concepts of colonialism being a 'civilizational mission' , 'the white man's burden', the colonized natives being close to 'animals' and so on were all precursors to the deadly brew of fascism that Hitler finally stirred up. (And that is why as the US elites embark upon their own brazen colonial expedition in Iraq some of the justifications bandied about sound almost as if the word 'Aryans' has been just displaced neatly by 'Americans')

It is interesting to me, as a citizen of a former colony, that when the blame-game began following the defeat of the Nazis after the Second World War few scholars took up the link between fascism and European colonialism. To me it seems that the upstart that he was, Hitler upset the racist, colonial applecart by taking it to logical extent with his theories of Aryan superiority and the practice of holocaust. Basically the fellow thought he would outsmart his fellow Europeans at what they were doing in their colonies anyway.

Thirdly, the logic of the Allied action at the end of the Second World War vis a vis Europe's Jews seemed to be that a people who had been so grievously wronged by Europe certainly deserved to have a land of their own --- in faraway Asia ! (Imagine the much oppressed Kurds getting a homeland in Bavaria. Why not indeed ?)

I know all about the Balfour declaration of 1917 (who the hell were the British to 'promise' Palestine to a handful of Zionists) and also about the 2000 year old claim of the Zionists to Palestine (sure, and I am now about to grab some prime real estate in Tashkent).

In the process of accepting the creation of Israel the Allies also ironically fulfilled, wittingly or unwittingly, - a long-standing dream of all European anti-Semites ie. to get the continent rid of the Jews. Amazingly enough, the vanquishers of the Nazis did with the carrot of Israel what the Nazis failed to do with the stick of the Holocaust.

In fact, when I as a South Asian, look at the seemingly perpetual conflict between the Jews and the Palestinians- one desperately trying to hold on to a new born nation and the other desperately trying to retrieve an old one- what I see is a tragic conflict between two sets of victims. The Jews, victims of European and indeed Western racism/fascism pitted against the Palestinians, victims of Western colonialism/opportunism. There is nothing more terrible than two members from the same family fighting each other or the quarreling of two slaves owned by the same master (there is virtually no evidence of animosity between the Jews and the Muslims before the early twentieth century).

Since I have taken so much of your time explaining the Aryan Connection between India, the West and the Jewish Holocaust let me take a little more -- with a modest proposal towards what a solution to the so called Middle-East crisis could look like.

It is quite clear to me that the solution does not lie within the geographical or political parameters of the middle-east itself. The solution really lies with Europe, which while pretending to act as a broker of peace between the Jews and the Arabs- has not yet fully compensated for what its people did to the Jews of Europe or foisted upon the hapless Palestinians. (This is in fact particularly true of 'new Europe' which consists mostly of countries that have conveniently buried their anti-Semitic past in the fog of the Cold War.)

What Europe needs to do now is to undo that old Nazi and in fact old pan-European notion of making Europe 'free of the Jews' to 'settle the Jewish question'. Wait, I am not saying take the population of Israel back to Europe.

Be more creative- make Israel along with a newly independent Palestinian state full members of the European Union. Make the borders meaningless just like in Europe. Of course, all this with the United States bearing part of the expenses involved in such an initiative.

Stretch out your hand, be generous and help the Israelis and Palestinians achieve what the old warring nations of Europe themselves are doing so brilliantly- bury their differences and create a new, peaceful future.

As the current round of bloodshed between the Israeli government and Hamas shows, left to themselves the Zionists and Palestinian hardliners will enact nothing short of Armageddon in their ancient land. And already I can hear Adolf Hitler laughing in his grave, wherever that happens to be, at the prospect of these 'non-Aryans' doing to themselves - exactly what he wanted to do to them.

(Satya Sagar is a journalist based in Thailand. He can be reached at sagarnama@yahoo.com)

http://www.countercurrents.org/pa-sagar010703.htm

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Subject: Iran and German nationalists

Exposing Iran's Nazi Links

Edwin Black

DECEMBER 22, 2005

Washington

Iran's president has shot to the forefront of Holocaust denial in recent days, but it may seem more like self-denial: Mahmoud Ahmadinejad need only look to his country's Hitler-era past to discover that Iran and Iranians were connected to the Holocaust and the Nazi regime, as was the larger Arab and Islamic world under the leadership of the mufti of Jerusalem.

Iran's links to the Third Reich began during the pre-World War II years when it welcomed Gestapo agents and other operatives to Tehran, allowing them to use it as a Middle East base for agitation against the British and the region's Jews.

Key among these Gestapo men was Fritz Grobba, Berlin's envoy to the Middle East, and often called "the German Lawrence" because he promised a Pan-Arab state stretching from Casablanca to Tehran.

Relations between Berlin and Tehran were strong from the moment Hitler came to power in 1933, when Reza Shah Pahlavi's nation was still known as Persia.

The shah became a stalwart admirer of Hitler, Nazism and the concept of the Aryan master race. He also sought the Nazis' help in reducing British petro-political domination.

So intense was the shah's identification with the Third Reich that in 1935 he renamed his ancient country "Iran," which in Farsi means Aryan and refers to the Proto-Indo-European lineage that Nazi racial theorists and Persian ethnologists cherished.

The idea for the name change was suggested by the Iranian ambassador to Germany, who came under the influence of Hitler's trusted banker Hjalmar Schacht. From that point, all Iranians were constantly reminded that their country shared a bond with the Nazi regime.

Shortly after World War II began in 1939, the mufti of Jerusalem crafted a strategic alliance with Hitler to exchange Iraqi oil for active Arab and Islamic participation in the murder of Jews in the Mideast and Eastern Europe, predicated on support for a Pan-Arab state and Arab rule over Palestine.

During the war years, Iran became a haven and headquarters for Gestapo agents and German operatives. It was from Iran that the seeds of the abortive 1941 pro-Nazi coup in Baghdad were planted.

After Churchill's forces booted the Nazis out of Iraq in June 1941, the German air crews supporting Nazi bombers escaped across the northern border back into Iran. Likewise, the mufti of Jerusalem was spirited across the border to Tehran, where he continued to call for the destruction of the Jews and the defeat of the British. His venomous rhetoric filled the newspapers and radio broadcasts of Tehran.

From Tehran and elsewhere, the Mufti was a vocal and vigilant opponent of allowing Jewish refugees to be transported or ransomed into Palestine. Instead, he wanted them shipped to the gas chambers of Poland.

In the summer of 1941, with the support of key Iranian military and government leaders, the mufti advocated implementing in Iran what had failed months earlier in Iraq. The plan once again was for a total diversion of oil from the Allies to the Nazis in exchange for the accelerated destruction of the Jews in Eastern Europe and support for an Arab state.

Through the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, Iran already had been supplying Hitler's forces in occupied Czechoslovakia and Austria. Now the mufti agitated to cut off the British and the Allies completely and supply Germany in its push against Russia and the East.

In October, 1941, British, Russians and other Allied forces invaded Iran to break up the Iran-Nazi alliance. Pro-Nazi generals and ministers were arrested and the shah's Western-leaning son was installed.

The mufti scampered into the Italian Embassy, where he shaved his beard and dyed his hair, and was then allowed to exit the country along with the rest of the Italian delegation.

Once the mufti relocated permanently to Berlin, where he established his own Reich-supported "bureau," he was given airtime on Radio Berlin. From Berlin and other fascist capitals in Europe, the mufti continued to agitate for the destruction of international Jewry, as well as a pan-Arab and pan-Islamic alliance with the Nazi regime.

He called upon all Muslims to "kill the Jews wherever you see them." In Tehran's marketplace, it was common to see placards that declared, "In heaven, Allah is your master. On Earth, it is Adolf Hitler."

When the mufti organized three Islamic Waffen SS divisions to undertake operations in Bosnia, among the 30,000 killers were some volunteer contingents from Iran. Iranian Nazis, along with the other Muslim Waffen SS, operated under the direct supervision of Heinrich Himmler and were responsible for barbarous actions against Jews and others in Bosnia. Recruitment for the murderous "Handschar Divisions" was open and public in Iran.

Iran and its leaders not only were aware of the Holocaust, they played both sides. The country offered overland escape routes for refugee Jews fleeing Nazi persecution to Israel -- and later fleeing postwar Iraqi fascist persecution -- but only in exchange for extortionary passage fees. Thousands of Jews made their way to Israel via Iran both during the Holocaust and after the fall of Hitler, when Arab leaders, especially in Iraq, tried to continue Germany's anti-Jewish program. Iran profited handsomely.

To play all sides of the Holocaust drama -- and now to deny that the Holocaust even happened -- should be very difficult in a nation named for Hitler's master race.

This story reprinted courtesy of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

To read more, pick up a copy of the Jewish Times at one of our newsstand locations.

To purchase a subscription or send a gift subscription, fill out our on-line form.

http://www.jewishtimes.com/News/5272.stm

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Subject: Tajikistan

Tajikistan: Where the Swastika Is Welcome

By Gulnoza Saidazimova

Tajikistan - Swastika

The swastika, Tajik-style

(RFE/RL)

Like other post-Soviet countries, Tajikistan has taken a fresh look its history following independence in 1991. The result is a state campaign to promote the notion that the Tajiks as a Aryan nation – and the widespread use of the swastika.

Prague, 16 December 2005 (RFE/RL) -- The swastika may be known the world over as the symbol of Nazi Germany and it may be banned in some states for that reason, but in Tajikistan it appears on placards, banners, and billboards with the blessing of the state.

For officials in Dushanbe, the swastika is above all a symbol of national identity. Most Tajik historians now maintain that Tajiks are of Aryan origin, and argue that Aryan or Indo-European civilization must therefore be studied and promoted. It is an argument now accepted by the state. Indeed, the revival of Aryan culture is now official policy of Dushanbe: 2006 will be celebrated in Tajikistan as the year of Aryan civilization.

The authorities say the swastika's now widespread adoption in Tajikistan has nothing to do with Nazism and fascism. "Throughout history, interpretations of this symbol have changed," notes Abduhakim Sharipov, head of a department in the Soghd regional administration. He, like other officials, emphasizes the swastika is a symbol of Aryan culture that has existed for many centuries. "We all know that fascism used this symbol for its purposes. This symbol therefore carries negative connotations for many…[but] we should not limit ourselves to only one interpretation."

When the swastika first appeared, in India, it was as a sign of eternity and eternal motion. The newer, positive connotations that the Tajik authorities want the swastika to gain were outlined two years ago by President Imomali Rakhmonov when he declared 2006 the year of Aryan culture: the aim of the year is, he said, to "study and popularize Aryan contributions to the history of the world civilization; to raise a new generation [of Tajiks] with the spirit of national self-determination; and to develop deeper ties with other ethnicities and cultures."

Linguistically, the Tajiks are closely tied to the Persians, who since ancient times have used the term Aryan to describe themselves and their language.

The Tajik historian and ethnographer Usto Jahonov supports both the state's desire to raise awareness of Tajikistan's Aryan heritage and the use of the swastika. Using an argument employed by Tajik officials in numerous speeches, Jahonov contends that it is an inherent part of Aryan culture and a key to building national identity. A stronger national identity is itself "needed now because we live among [non-Aryan,] Turkic nations" that are, he says, rewriting "their history by claiming that they emerged in this area [Central Asia]. We should therefore go back to Aryan history, demonstrate and prove to others where our place is. Each nation should know its place."

An Ancient Symbol In The Shadow Of A Modern Taboo

But it is hard to rid the swastika of its negative associations. For many people in the West, the swastika is a taboo, synonymous as it is with Nazism, fascism, and white supremacy in general. Post-war Germany outlawed the swastika and other Nazi symbols for all but scholarly purposes.

Continued sensitivities were highlighted earlier this year when Britain's Prince Harry was criticized for wearing a Nazi swastika armband and a Nazi uniform to a fancy-dress party. The incident led to calls from German politicians for a ban on all Nazi symbols across the European Union, which was then followed by a debate in the European Commission in Brussels.

For similar reasons, the new prominence of the swastika is touching on sensitivities in Tajikistan, recently prompting a group of Tajik World War II veterans to write a letter to Rakhmonov asking him to end the use of the swastika.

The Tajik president has so far not responded.

"I am a veteran of World War II," says one Tajik former member of the Soviet army. "We veterans demand that this fascist cross, the swastika, be removed from placards. We fought against the Nazis, who had the swastika. Why should we propagate it now?"

The use of the swastika by skinheads has made the symbol even more controversial in recent years.

Due to high levels of unemployment and poverty, many Tajiks have had to work as illegal migrant laborers abroad, overwhelmingly in Russia. Many have been subjected to harassment and intimidation. Several have been killed by racist groups in recent years. The most prominent case was the murder, in February 2004, of a 9-year-old Tajik girl in St. Petersburg by a group of teenagers armed with chains, metal rods and knives. Khursheda Sultanova's father and her 11-year-old cousin were also savagely beaten.

This and other cases have provoked public outrage in Tajik society.

For one woman interviewed, both objections to the swastika originate close to home. "My grandfather died in a battle against Nazi Germany," she told RFE/RL, and "last year, my neighbor's son was killed by a group of skinheads in Russia."

"I am amazed to see [the swastika]. Why does our government recover and propagate the [hooked] cross now?"

This Tajik woman says she welcomes a rediscovery of the Tajik nation's history. But, she argues, historians should not forget the nation's recent past just to revive its ancient heritage.

(RFE/RL's Uzbek Service correspondent in Tajikistan, Alisher Akhmedov, contributed to this report.)

Here.

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Subject: no diversity in Africa, just niggers

From time to time we get tantalising glimpses of how previous dates have gone. "Despite listing 34 French erotic novels as your favourite reads, I liked you," writes F, 35. "Then you went and ruined everything by spending an hour ordering continental ales in the voice of Yoda."

Possibly the same woman ("once bitten, twice bitten, three strikes and you're all out") reports back from another evening: "Drawing little faces on your thumbs, getting them to order meals, then shouting at them for not being able to pay is no way to win a woman. You know who you are."

Here.

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