Has the UN Finally Recognized Anti-Semitism?

By Alyssa A. Lappen
FrontPageMagazine.com | June 30, 2004

Will international policy makers truly address resurgent anti-Semitism after a landmark June 21 United Nations symposium on the subject? The early signs are not encouraging.

However, the conference’s opening day rhetoric was soothing, something too often absent from UN rhetoric about Israel and the Jewish people. In opening remarks, Secretary General Kofi Annan acknowledged the unique nature of this “hatred, intolerance and persecution,” and the UN’s past failure to address it.

He noted that he UN General Assembly in 1948 adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and recognized barbarities that “outraged the conscience of mankind.” The day before, it codified the international Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. But “a human rights agenda that fails to address anti-Semitism denies its own history,” Annan admitted.

While welcome, Annan’s strong words drew, at best, guarded hope from most of the other 17 illustrious speakers: Since September 2000, as hatred and terrorism against Israel and the Jews have intensified throughout the world, the UN remained largely silent, its agents often lending its support. In October 2000, UN forces videotaped UN vehicles used by Hezbollah terrorists to violate Israel’s borders, murder three Israeli soldiers and steal their bodies. The “anti-racism” conference in Durban a year later prompted William F. Buckley to recall his 1973 observation that the UN General Assembly had evolved “into the most concentrated font of anti-Semitism in the world.” In 2002, UN special envoy Terje Roed-Larsen condemned Israel for perpetrating a Jenin massacre that had never actually occurred.
For more than 50 years, UN Relief and Works Agency administrators ignored abuses, hatred and terror fomented in their camps, said Malcolm Hoenlein of the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish organizations. Last month, Israeli television aired footage of UNRWA ambulances transporting armed Arab Palestinian terrorists

On Monday, protestors previously forced to contest UN intolerance and inaction by chaining themselves to the fence outside its New York headquarters were grateful for the opportunity to speak inside a UN conference hall. But Joseph Potasnik, President of the New York Board of Rabbis, rebuked the UN in recalling the Talmudic discussion of moral choices when two desert travelers have only enough water for one to survive.

The one who drinks, he observed, must assume responsibility to carry on for the one left to die in the wilderness. A repentant UN would humiliate Holocaust deniers with a memorial in its headquarters to 6 million Jewish civilians—and one for 1,000 Israeli victims felled by genocidal Islamic terror since September 2000. But only the dismissal of terrorist nations like Libya, Syria and Sudan from the Human Rights Commission, he said, would reassure skeptics. Otherwise, “the inmates are running the asylum,” Rabbi Potasnik said.

Non-Jewish speakers likewise expressed impatience with international policy. “Each and every one of us has an obligation to work against hatred and intolerance in every form,” said Sister Ruth Loutt of St. Dominic of Amityville. “But when it comes to the ancient sin of anti-Semitism, we have a particularly grave responsibility.” Princeton University New Testament professor James Charlesworth concurred: anti-Semitism foreshadows the demise of humans, he said, with respect for the Jewish foundation of every Christian creed and an admonition that anti-Semitism is Christianity’s greatest heresy.

“Zionism is not racism,” declared William Sutter, executive director of The Friends of Israel. “It is the Jewish liberation from oppression and fear.” He urged the UN to enlist evangelical Christians to help fight the ancient evil of anti-Semitism.

Laban Seyoum, a young Christian Orthodox Ethiopian, echoed his sentiments with quiet eloquence, moments before Under-Secretary General Shashi Tharoon urged patience in the day’s closing summation. “I find it shocking that in the twenty-first century we still have to deal with anti-Semitism,” said Seyoum. “It’s a disgrace to humanity. We must stop it.”

Seyoum’s support for the Jewish people has made him a pariah in his college class, he later confided privately. He considers this inconsequential, however, as prejudice against the Jewish people mounts worldwide.

Few speakers now believe UN words can now blunt the malign effects of verbal and visual missiles that for years have poured from government-sponsored newspapers, radio and television broadcasts in the 57 Muslim nations of the Middle East and Asia. Islamic preachers of hatred, from Gaza and Egypt to Pakistan, Malaysia and Indonesia “exhort their followers to blow up Jews,” said Anne Bayefsky, a senior fellow at Hudson Institute and an adjunct professor at Columbia University Law School. Bayefsky rebuked Annan for his weak reactions to two Jerusalem suicide bombings that killed 19 civilians this year and wounded 110. “Refusing to name the perpetrators,” she warned “is a green light to strike again.”

Bayefsky demanded that the UN unconditionally condemn anti-Semitism, appoint officials to confront and monitor anti-Semitic attacks, and fund annual reports on the unprecedented terror unleashed against Jewish people and institutions worldwide in September 2000. She further challenged the UN to label as terrorists those who kill Jews because of their ethnicity, to condemn human rights abuses in Riyadh and Damascus, and to stop reprimanding the Jewish people for defending themselves against their would-be killers. Finally, she asked that Annan never again dishonor Israel Independence Day joining a moment of silence for “Al Naqba” or “those who would destroy the state of Israel.”

If Bir Zeit on the Hudson rejects Bayefsky, at the UN her refreshing candor earned a standing ovation.

Hoenlein came closest to defining the central role of Islam behind the rise in anti-Semitic hatred. He asked the UN to establish a special office to monitor and combat Muslim government and institutional sponsors of anti-Semitism and xenophobia.

Even this, were it accomplished, would be a major achievement.

It could hardly tame the beast unleashed by thousands of anti-Semitic websites, where Judeophobes lurk behind anonymous screen names to spew venomous hatred, according to Jacob Levy of Gallup Israel. Nor would it blunt the stereotypes of Jews as conspiratorial moneygrubbers and murderers that have filtered dangerously into mainstream Western media editorials, cartoons and news columns or diminish the increasing hostility and assaults faced by Jewish students on American college campuses, where professors encourage support for the Palestinian “struggle”—including suicide bombers.

But Rene Wadlaw and David Littman, Geneva non-governmental representatives for the Association for World Education, in 1997 detailed UN precedents likely to block progressive ideas like Hoenlein’s. That March, Palestinian Authority ambassador Nabil Ramlawi falsely accused Israel of injecting the AIDS virus into 300 Palestinian children during the 1987-1992 intifada. The Jerusalem Post duly exposed this calumny; U.S. Deputy Permanent Representative to the Economic and Social Council denounced the HIV libel as patently false and malicious. Yet the charge remained on the UN Commission of Human Rights record.

Later in 1997, a UN Special Rapporteur on Racism was accused of blasphemy. On behalf of the Organization of the Islamic Conference, Indonesia’s representative thanked the UN for excising “a blasphemous reference to the Holy Qur’an in the report of the Special Rapporteur on Contemporary Forms of Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance—in consultation with the parties concerned.” In 1994, Sudan had objected to a report on its human rights abuses which “contained abusive, inconsiderate, blasphemous and offensive remarks about the Islamic faith.”

In short, the overarching influence of 57 Muslim nations at the UN has already seriously compromised the body’s ability to uphold even the most basic principals of its own 1948 Declaration of Human Rights; in most instances, Muslim nations argue, these conflict with precepts of Islamic law, or Sharia. And a clear majority of dictatorships among UN member states back them up.

Those harboring illusions might consult a seminal work by Islamic scholar Raphael Israeli, Islamikaze: Manifestations of Islamic Martyrology. “Durban 2001 should remain for ever a warning on the level of hatred and bigotry to which the United Nations today is capable of stooping,” he writes (2003, p. 452).

So malign is the UN agenda that democratic nations should abandon it, he advises, to form a new Alliance of Western and Democratic States (AWADS) with the United States, Canada, Australia and Western Europe at its core. This group might ensure the survival of Western norms and universal human rights in the West at least, by admitting as members only those Muslim nations agreed to maintain liberal democratic, accountable, non-hereditary governments, elected freely and practicing orderly and peaceful transfers of power; free press; free, equal and unassailable property rights for citizens of every creed; free real estate and funds transactions; freedom of the arts, humanities, literature and protection for individual creations; and a strong and independent judiciary with oversight.

But no UN speaker recognized the hatred of non-Muslims fundamental to classical Islamic law and practice, much less the judicial and sacred traditions of Islamic anti-Semitism dating back to the faithâ€™s founding by its Prophet, Mohammed, who utterly destroyed the Jewish population of Yathrib, plundered their homes, plantations and fields and built from their ruins an army of unprecedented strength in Arabia. [1]

In 629, Mohammed’s army forced the Jews of Khaybar to grant half their date crops to the Muslims, along with titles to their palm trees; He similarly subjugated Jewish farmers in nearby Fadak and Wadi’l-Qura, on Palestine’s border. Mohammed’s repeated assaults on Mu’ta consolidated Islam on Palestine’s borders. He forced conquered Jewish residents of Eilat, Maqna and Adhruh to pay extortionate taxes. They must “accept Islam, or pay the tax, and obey God and His Messenger and the messengers of His Messenger” to guarantee them security “on land and on sea.” Failure to pay would earn his promise to “fight you and take you as captives and slay the elderly.” [2] In 634, a Syriac chronicle describes a battle 12 miles from Gaza, in which Muslims massacred 4,000 poor Palestinian Christian, Jewish, Samaritan and Arab villagers. [3]

The UN’s sole Muslim panelist, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf of the American Sufi Muslim Association, claimed to support the Jewish right to a state in Israel, yet claimed anti-Semitism would die only when Israel resolves its differences with the Palestinians. He denied the Islamic apocalyptic vision, calling upon Muslims worldwide to slaughter Jews (and all “infidels”) to hasten Islam’s victory over all other faiths. And he also falsely attributed benevolence to Umar, the second Caliph, who conquered Jerusalem in 638 after a gruesome two-year siege. Far from inviting the Jewish people to return, Umar’s covenant banished them, promising that “No Jew shall live among them in Jerusalem.” Theophanes chronicled Umar’s pretention and hypocrisy and his demand to see Solomon’s Temple to “return it into a prayer site for his own…blasphemies.”

Indeed, Umar required Christians to pay the extortionate jizya tax to guarantee “safety of their persons and that of their churches and crosses.” [4] Umar exemplified neither Zionism nor human rights.

On June 22, the New York Times highlighted the problem without reporting a single word on the UN conference. One news item features UN World Health Organization fears that Africa is “on the brink of the biggest polio epidemic in recent years,” but ignores the epidemic’s cause — an Arab Muslim genocide targeting black non-Muslims and Muslims. Another under the headline “U.S. Envoy Wants Israel Settlement Freeze” suggests that removing Jewish “settlers” could magically engender peace.

When genocidal terrorists escape responsibility for their crimes, they are invited to sow more destruction. And when Israel’s progress — which flows from economic growth, resourceful agriculture and human settlement — is denigrated simply because its developers are Jewish, this is anti-Semitism. The UN, both in this conference and as a body, is far from a meaningful solution; it is not even clear they have yet comprehended the extent of the problem.
ENDNOTES:
[1] Gil, Moshe, A History of Palestine: 634-1099 (1997 ed), p. 11.
[2] Gil, Moshe, pp. 21-30.
[3] Gil, Moshe, p. 38.
[4] Gil, Moshe, pp. 53-54.

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Islamism’s Poster Boy

By Alyssa A. Lappen
FrontPageMagazine.com | April 15, 2004

On Thursday November 6, 2003, Jordanian Amer Jubran shocked the U.S. Immigration Court at his final deportation hearing and agreed to leave the U.S. voluntarily, no later than March 5, 2004. That date has come and gone, but Jubran may remain in the U.S. If so, his presence is apparently without sanction.

On March 22, Jubran wrote for the (misnamed) Axis of Logic—purportedly from Jordan—“on Israel’s assassination of Ahmad Yassin. Perhaps the Amman dateline was a ruse: He was listed as a “confirmed speaker” at a March 27 and 28 “Land Day” conference designed by Al Awda radical Mazin Qumsiyeh to “confront Zionism.” Jubran may have “appeared” at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology event on tape, phone or video-conference. He may have gone to Jordan after settling with U.S. immigration and returned to Boston later to address “Resistance and the Strategy for Liberation.” Or maybe he never left the U.S. In cases of voluntary departure, the Homeland Security Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement reports, it cannot release information publicly.

Although Jordanian, Amer Jubran describes himself as Palestinian Arab. He reportedly arrived in the U.S. on a student visa in 1988. In 1997 he married an American born in Puerto Rico and began an obsessive effort to obtain a green card, which he received in 1999. By then, however, his allegedly bogus marriage had ended; he was officially divorced in February 2000.

Perhaps the swirl of controversy that enveloped Jubran was circumstantial. Yet he could not have conceived of a more successful public relations campaign for Islamic causes if he had tried. In hindsight, Jubran looks less a victim than a man on a jihad mission.

Jubran’s immigration difficulties apparently began with his June 10, 2001 arrest at Coolidge Corner in Brookline Massachusetts, where tens of thousands of Jews and Christians celebrated Israel’s 53^rd Independence Day. While leading 60 or so anti-Zionists in protest, Jubran allegedly kicked a Jewish spectator from nearby Waltham.

Already, Jubran belonged to the Islamic Society of Boston. But three months before September 11, no one cared about its embedded terror network. Literally hundreds of articles on Jubran followed his reputed 2001 fracas. The alternative Boston Phoenix alone reported his link to the city’s Islamic Society—a point it failed to investigate further.

By October 2003, Boston Muslims had obtained local approval for a gigantic $22 million mosque, despite their support from Egyptian cleric and staunch suicide bombing advocate Yusuf Abdullah al-Qaradawi—and their ties to Abdurahman Alamoudi, a lobbyist indicted for alleged terror funding activities.

Their longtime Saudi mosque director, Walid Ahmad Fitaihi, before his return to Arabia, asked in
Arabic how anyone could naively consider peace possible with the Jewish “people who hide that which Allah has shown them, and who distorted the words and wrote the Book with their own hands; a people who have betrayed the trust of Heaven and who have killed prophets” He predicted Islam’s utter defeat of Jews, Judaism and Israel for a “second transgression” he alleged to be in progress. In this, Fitaihi was simply describing the Islamic apocalypse that Muslim radicals expect to culminate soon. Perhaps Jubran did not share his views, but he in any case relished controversy and press.

The average internet search for “Amer Jubran” today instantly lands nearly 900 hits. Most plead on behalf of a purported victim, but skirt his radical views. Was Jubran really the prescribed target of government abuse?

A well-aimed kick with a hard-soled shoe could of course prove deadly. But in 2001, Jubran allegedly committed the kicking. He said he had done no such thing. Brookline police had “grossly violated” his rights. He was “slapped with a racist frame-up.” If deported, he ludicrously claimed, Israel might assassinate him. Israel intentionally assassinates only proven progenitors of terror, not “activists.” But Jubran fashioned his arrest and felony assault charges into publicity for “Palestinian free speech rights.”

His adept use of faulty logic and aggressive bluster defeated the allegations and turned the entire affair to Muslim advantage. He was simply demonstrating as part of an “ongoing campaign” to highlight “the illegal occupation of Palestinian land since 1948.” In other words, he considers Israeli statehood illegal, and all that implies.

Jubran won round one in a personal jihad against seemingly reasonable charges and official demands. He effectively twisted events to evoke sympathy, in turn to advance illicit claims—and lower the social barriers to aggression against innocent parties. Americans may not recognize such actions as weapons, but scholars of Islam frequently attribute their like to a potent form of perpetual jihad.

Upon his November 4, 2002 arrest in Rhode Island for alleged U.S. immigration violations, Jubran redeployed tactics he had successfully used earlier. The federal proceedings helped him generate reams more sympathetic ink in radical outlets worldwide; the Irish anti-War Movement, Muslim Civil Rights Center, Independent Race and Refugees Network and American Civil Liberties Union all bemoaned his “illegal” detention and U.S. government “abuse. They screamed over infringements of his free speech. Even Amnesty International took notice.
ACLU advocacy on Jubran’s behalf is not that surprising, since Nancy Murray heads the Massachusetts chapter’s Bill of Rights Education Project—and efforts for the state to join Alaska, Hawaii, Vermont and Maine by passing a resolution that would give unquestioned sanctuary to illegal aliens. Coincidentally (or is it?), Murray is mother of International Solidarity Movement leader Rebecca Murray, who two years ago made a fawning visit to Arafat in the Mukata and has since spent her time glorifying the memory of senior Fatah terror official Ziad Dias, [1] and on road shows to accuse Israel of war crimes.

These advocacy circles meanwhile furthered general acceptance of radical goals. One could almost imagine Jubran blessing his troubles. His “human rights” lingo fooled many. But even without Jubran his “Defense Committee” continues its apparent soft-core jihad. It links to Boston’s A.N.S.W.E.R. and a Muslim-Arab-South Asian unity movement dubbed Blue Triangle. It features Richard Hugus’ October al Jazeerah commentary (since reproduced at radical addresses everywhere). It ties to something called “Defend Palestine”—though “defend” is a stretch, given its claim to all of Israel.

Denying the place for any Jewish homeland in Israel is not humanism. Neither is sympathy for terrorists. Jubran does both. “We are living in an evil empire far worse than Hitler’s,” he told an October anti-war rally in San Francisco; [2] he also praised anti-American “resistance” and empathized with suicide bombers. Was this frustration, or an unguarded expression of jihad ethics, which for radicals are embedded in Islam? Was he building support for global Islamism?

Jubran probably overstayed his U.S. student visa. He allegedly married on false pretenses to obtain a green card. He certainly used more than a decade in the U.S. to foment hatred. At Harvard and MIT, students report, Jubran physically harassed and threatened political opponents. One student reports three encounters; each time, Jubran grew intimidating and physically forceful. In March 2003, he screamed at an Iraqi man at a pro-war rally, “Who pays you? The CIA?” To prevent him from attacking the Iraqi, Jubran’s “Defend Palestine” friends were forced to physically restrain him. In November, at another pro-Palestinian propaganda event, Jubran referred obliquely to activities in Jordan that he said he couldn’t discuss, reports the student, who believes Jubran may still be in the U.S. and fears him.

The Jubran imbroglio raises questions about the U.S. right to deport illegal aliens; and whether the latter may nevertheless flaunt federal laws or promote bold-faced hatred, disguised thinly for university circles as something else.

A more pressing issue concerns the legality of supporting terror groups like Hamas. Jubran recalls arch-terrorist Ahmad Yassin with praise. He describes not the mass-producer of legions of guided-human-missiles, not the chief architect of hundreds of intentional civilian murders or thousands of horrid permanent injuries—but a “crippled” 67-year-old, better left to murder and maim more innocents. He negates the roots of Hamas in Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, founded by Hassan al-Banna in 1928, decades before Israel’s 1948 birth—and glosses Hamas espousal of violent jihad. Hamas grew from “its [own] resources, constituencies, sacrifices, religious identity, political clarity, and membership base,” Jubran claims.

Reading this, one wonders: Do any of the “activist” groups established by Jubran in Boston play some role for Brotherhood offspring—Hamas, Islamic Jihad and al Qaeda? Jubran ignores the genocidal nature of both Hamas and its Charter. To him, its jihadis are providers of “social programs and services to the poor and victimized in Gaza and the West Bank,” suppliers of “schools, housing, health care, social welfare, and mentor support to many individuals and families.”

Suicide mentoring

The “activist” Jubran exposes the true nature of his humanism. Britain now plans to jail anyone so much as sympathizing with extremists.

This leaves the question of Jubran’s whereabouts. If he is still in the U.S., his friends are coy about it. On March 24, “Axis” editor Les Blough noted that Jubran had “lived for many years in the United States, until January 4” but was now “in Jordan, as a result of the efforts of Homeland Security to silence his speech.” An end note reiterated, “Submitted directly to Axis of Logic by Amer Jubran, writing from Amman, Jordan.

Still, in Boston Jubran’s site on April 8 announced an “emergency protest in support of the Iraqi uprising” at 5 p.m. in Copley Square. Almost pointedly, its main page prominently featured an announcement of the previous MIT event held on March 27 and 28. For two full days speakers challenged “the Zionist agenda” with jihad topics like

the Right to Resist; the Right to Return; the illegitimacy of the State of Israel and the need for a single, unified, democratic Palestine; the U.S. role in the Conflict; Palestine and the anti-war movement; and repression in the U.S. against activists.

The notice said,

Confirmed speakers include;

Dr. Samia Halaby — “Women in the Palestinian Struggle”
Dr. Jess Ghannam, ADC-SF — “Peace Negotiations and Land Dispossession”
Saja Raouf, Iraqi Law Student — “Iraq and Palestine: What is the link?”
Amer Jubran — “Resistance and the Strategy for Liberation”

But Jubran is supposedly in Amman, Jordan. Or is he? If the U.S. government knows, it isn’t saying.

NOTES:
[1] Margot Dudkevitch, “Female would-be suicide bomber indicted,” Jerusalem Post, Aug. 30, 2002.

[2] Josh Gerstein, “Jordanian Praises ‘Resistance’ in Iraq,” New York Sun, Oct. 27, 2003.

Former Terrorist Speaks

By Alyssa A. Lappen and Jerry Gordon
FrontPageMagazine.com | April 2, 2004

On Thursday March 25, former PLO terrorist Walid Shoebat mesmerized a Wesleyan University audience. Nearly 200 students, faculty and Connecticut residents cleared ironclad security and packed room 107 in Shanklin Hall: According to Wesleyan Public Security and the Middletown police, an email from the Bank of Bahrain had placed a $10 million price on Shoebat’s head.

The crowd took no comfort from the technical deficiencies of this particular Islamic threat: It arrived unaccompanied by a fatwa (religious ruling)—and unsigned by a Muslim sheikh. Concern for Shoebat’s safety was nevertheless palpable: His rejection of Islam, to which he was born, his avowal of Christian faith and his support for Israel, all make Shoebat a potential target of his own Muslim family and other Islamic radicals. Shoebat’s peril is all the greater for his intimate acquaintance with many PLO terrorists and their operations, in which he once willingly participated.

Turnout at Wesleyan was bolstered by Shoebat’s 30 minute interview that morning on Hartford’s WTIC news talk radio, an Infinity broadcasting affiliate. After Jim Vicevich featured Shoebat on Connecticut Today, WTIC’s switchboard lit up. Eager listeners swamped the station with calls, says producer Mike Constantino, who immediately invited Shoebat to return to the show.

Jerry Gordon conceived of Shoebat’s Wesleyan appearance after the university hosted a radical February 7 “training day,” co-sponsored by Students for a Free Palestine (SFP) and Al Awda. The latter group seeks Israel’s political destruction through a supposed Arab “right of return.” Gordon connected with Shoebat and Irish Jewish publicist Keith Davies through New York playwright Glyn O’Malley, whose one-act drama Paradise concerns Islamic suicide bombing and earlier earned him Muslim ire. After reading of Shoebat, O’Malley contacted and spoke at length with him. He then emailed Gordon, extolling Shoebat’s message. Gordon contacted Davies and obtained a preview DvD.

Gordon had learned of Wesleyan’s plan to host radicals on February 7 in an urgent February 1 email from New York Jewish activist Janet Lehr: over Tu B’shevat weekend—the Jewish Arbor Day—the university would feature an Al Awda “training day” anchored by the group’s anti-Semitic chief, Yale Medical School geneticist Mazin Qumsiyeh. Coincidentally, Shoebat grew up with Qumsiyeh in the village of Beit Sahour near Bethlehem. Their families are well acquainted. Qumsiyeh participated in terrorist activities as a teenager in the 1970’s, according to Shoebat. Continue reading “Former Terrorist Speaks” →

The Ravages of the Jihad-Occupied Mind

By Alyssa A. Lappen
FrontPageMagazine.com | February 17, 2004

To devout Muslims, renouncing the “one true faith” is an act of apostasy warranting a death sentence. By Islamic measures, however, Walid Shoebat has three strikes against him: In 1993, he renounced Islam, converted to Christianity — and, unlike most Middle Eastern Christians tutored in replacement theology, Shoebat adopted ardent Zionism along with his new found faith.

“Christ is a Jewish rabbi,” he insists today. “He was a Zionist.” Shoebat believes that God loves Israel. “How can anyone claim to be Christian and hate Zionism?” he asks, citing Psalm 53. “Christians seek ‘salvation’ and true Christians know that ‘salvation’ comes out of Zion, ‘When God bringeth back the captivity of his people’.”

A Muslim who converts to Christianity takes his life in his hands. Even in the U.S., according to Shoebat, former Muslims are often murdered by their families. In such cases, he adds, news reports seldom cover the Islamic motives. One noted scholar of Islam, the former Muslim Ibn Warraq, writes under a pseudonym to protect his life. In Leaving Islam he collects the accounts of more than two dozen apostates that poignantly demonstrate the need of former Muslims for security precautions.

Yet Walid Shoebat’s journey from Islam to Christianity and Zionism is especially remarkable. A self-described former Palestinian terrorist, Shoebat’s dream in the 1970s was to die as a “shaheed, a martyr.” He spent his youth engaging in riots. He confronted soldiers, hoping to be shot — a virtual impossibility, since the Israelis never targeted the torso “without good reason.” Once, he tossed a fire bomb. Another time, he nearly killed an Israeli solider, who was saved only when Israeli reinforcements arrived. Today, Shoebat seeks forgiveness for his terrible crimes.

Born in 1960 in Beit Sahour near Bethlehem — in so-called West Bank territory that Jordan occupied illegally in 1948 — Shoebat was raised in the jihad doctrine. Under Islam, he reports, Palestinian children are inculcated to hate non-Muslims, and especially to hate Jews and Israel.

“The Arab war against Israel is a jihad,” Shoebat says. “Of course it’s a jihad. It is a religious, holy war. What part of ‘religious, holy war’ can’t the world understand?” Even Christians are indoctrinated in jihad ideology, he notes. Rejection of Jewish rights and history in Israel underlies the foundation of this Islamic jihad doctrine. [1]

In the Middle East, jihad theology has deep historical roots even for some churches. In the mid 19^th century, according to noted Islamic scholar Bat Ye’or, the papacy allied with French imperialists to promote Arab nationalism among Arabized Middle Eastern Christians in the Ottoman provinces. They hoped to defeat Britain and Zionism. These efforts failed, she writes in her seminal Islam and Dhimmitude. But in 1970, the Vatican dispatched an apostolic delegate to Jerusalem to establish a Catholic Justice and Peace Commission. That was when the Latin Catholic, Orthodox and other Palestinian churches began building “an Arab Palestinian identity hostile to Israel and shared by Christians and Muslims.” [2]

Coincidentally, as the seeds of these alliances began to bear their malicious fruit, Walid Shoebat came of age in Beit Sahour. Until fifth grade, he was the sole Muslim in a Christian school. He was taught that Jews were usurpers and thieves, fit only to be “beneficiaries” of virulent, mass-produced hatred — and all that implies. In Islamic school in sixth grade, Shoebat’s jihad indoctrination continued along the same lines. Every song he learned incited blood and murder. “The end product was a terrorist,” he explains.

Not surprisingly, Beit Sahour is also home to Ghasson Andoni and George Rishmawi, are the co-founders of the Rapprochement Center. They also co-founded the International Solidarity Movement with Huwaida Arraf and Adam Shapiro. Both organizations appear to be driven by the malevolent jihad ideology that Walid Shoebat describes. Indeed, at the third annual Palestine Solidarity Conference at Ohio State University in November, ISM featured such radical speakers as Khalid Turaani, executive director of American Muslims for Jerusalem. According to Steven Emerson, AMJ is a radical group that “routinely invokes ‘Zionist’ conspiracies and has featured calls at its conferences for the killing of Jews.” [3] Last May, the ISM held a $40 per plate dinner co-sponsored by an Islamist group, the Muslim Public Affairs Council. Another sponsor: the American Friends Service Committee.

The jihad against the Jewish people in the holy land dates back centuries. But in March 1920, Yasser Arafat’s idol and relation, Jerusalem Mufti Hajj Amin el-Husseini, reignited the Islamic reign of terror, says Shoebat. El-Husseini sent for muhajideen from Syria to stage bloody riots. Soon afterwards, he led violent agitations to win the coveted role of Jerusalem Mufti over another candidate who apparently did not espouse jihad. [4]

As a child, Shoebat heard tales of jihad incitements from Beit Sahour elders like Dheib Abd Rabbo: “Hajj Amin el-Husseini said, ‘Do not have pity on them. Take your gun and your sword, and murder the Jews and rape their women.’ At that point, Rabbo decided he would not do this. He would not rape. So he took his gun and his sword and he went home.”

Plenty of others participated, however. “In Hebron and in our village, even before World War II, jihad was genocide,” Shoebat notes. In 1920, Arabs murdered nine Jews in Halsa and Bnei Yehuda. On August 26, 1929, they killed 133 Jews in Hebron, Safed, Motza, Tel Aviv and elsewhere and wounded 339. In 1936, they murdered at least another 70 Jewish civilians, wounded hundreds more, and destroyed Jewish farms, homes, villages, crops and cattle. [5] El-Husseini influenced Hitler, saluted the Nazi Arab legion, helped create the Muslim S.S. unit that committed genocide in Bosnia and, in 1944, broadcast another call to jihad from Berlin:

“Kill the Jews wherever you find them. This pleases God, history and religion. This saves your honour. God is with you.” [6]

Michael Sabbah, the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, taught Islamology and Arab philology for decades. According to Shoebat, he hews to Islamic jihad dogma as well. The church doctrine of Jew-hatred rests on an Islamic foundation well-laid by Sabbah’s predecessors, Bat Ye’or confirms. In the 1970s, the Greek Melkite Archbishop Hilarion Capucci was convicted of gun-running for the Palestine Liberation Organization and deported to Brazil. Shoebat, who joined the PLO in the 1970s, once started a major riot in Beit Sahour at Capucci’s command.

Islamic thinking motivated one high-ranking official to recommend that European churches subordinate to Islam through an Eastern “wisdom of sufferance.” Thus Kenneth Cragg, assistant and honorary Latin Bishop of Jerusalem from 1970 to 1985, ignored frequent historical collaboration of church leadership with Islam for personal gain. He also minimized Islamic destruction of holy land churches, abductions, assassinations and forced conversions of pilgrims — Muslim practices ongoing in Israel today — and the Turkish jihad that decimated 1.5 million Christian Armenians. To avoid blaming the real enemy of Eastern Christians, Cragg usurped the false, inverted characterizations first used by Arnold Toynbee, who maliciously cast Jewish victims of Islamic genocide as Nazis who “crucified” Palestine. [7] “Christians should be appalled by this rendering,” says Shoebat.

Jerusalem Patriarch Sabbah also promotes Islamic loathing of Jews in Palestinian churches. Following a theological map created in 1983 by the al-Liqa Catholic center and a CJPC pamphlet, “Moslems and Christians on the Road Together,” Sabbah supports the Sabeel “Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center,” whose very name suggests a Christian brand of jihad. [8] In language “stuffed with expressions of compassion, justice, and peace toward and evil Israel,” Sabeel director Naim Ateek refined his perverse jihad ideology, [9] which Palestinian churches now export to the U.S. at every opportunity.

Palestinian Christians behave much like medieval serfs, and function as subservient little dhimmis. But their acceptance of jihad dogma is a futile enterprise, Malik stresses. Even “removing Israel from the equation and satisfying the Palestinians beyond their wildest dreams would not eliminate the violence against non-Muslims inherent in political Islam.” [10]

Other Middle Eastern Christian churches better deflected Islamâ€™s corrupting jihad ideology. Rooted in indigenous pre-Islamic cultures, languages and faiths, the Armenian, Assyrian, Serbian, Coptic and Lebanese Maronite churches maintained some religious autonomy before Islamâ€™s timeless advance, according to Bat Yeâ€™or. However they also â€œreact as hostages struck dumb with fear,â€? she observes. [11]Â

Only in 1998 did the Middle East Council of Churches at last awaken to its peril. That year, the council expanded its agenda from a “hitherto exclusive fixation on the Arab-Israeli conflict and the Palestinian problem,” observes Maronite Lebanese scholar Habib Malik. Now they now also address the welfare of native, mainly Christian non-Muslim minorities, Christian unity and human and women’s rights. [12]

No one better understands the dangers that Islam presents to Middle Eastern Christianity than former Islamic terrorist Walid Shoebat. “The slogan known to all Palestinians is, ‘Saturday people first and Sunday people next’,” he reports. “It means if Israel and the Jewish people were ever defeated, Christians will be next.” From recent events, that should be obvious. By fighting Israel, Christian leaders like Hanan Ashrawi and George Habash abet their own people’s demise, Shoebat says.

Unfortunately Palestinian Christian leaders stand neck deep in corruption. They take extensive profits from dealings with Islamic terrorists, according to Shoebat. “For American churches, their packaged message is ostensibly peace and justice,” he says, explaining a policy of blatant duplicity. “Do you really think Capucci reformed? He’s a terrorist. They facilitate terrorists. Their message at home is very different from the one they deliver here.”

Occasionally, the politically correct facade maintained for U.S. churches cracks open. Emil Salayta, who heads the Latin Patriarchate schools in Jerusalem, once spoke on “peace” at the Presbyterian Church in Walnut Creek, California. Shoebat attended and challenged Salayta. Could peace be achieved by bombing Israeli buses, he asked. “I have him on tape. ‘Israel must be eliminated, by whatever means,’ he replied.” No one else seemed concerned.

Shoebat cautions U.S. churches and universities to be more wary. “These people back terrorists,” he warns. “Michael Sabbah, Niam Ateek, Elias Chacour, Riah Abu el-Assal and Emil Salayta are evil.” In 1993, at age 33, Shoebat read the Bible for the first time. Only then did he learn — contrary to everything he had been taught — that it was written in Hebrew, and repeatedly invokes peace and praises Israel. He was shocked.

The Palestinian Authority condemns the supposed Israeli theocracy. Yet in December 1920, Musa Kazem el-Husseini, of the Mufti’s clan, demanded restoration of Islamic theocracy in Palestine in a letter to British High Commissioner Herbert Samuel. [13]. The PA Constitution, moreover, formally adopted the rigid, anti-democratic Islamic sharia. Lest there be any doubt of its meaning, Islamic law carefully spells out the institutional inferiority that has been forced on non-Muslims by majority Muslim societies since the time of Mohammed. As Sheik Muhammad Ibrahim al-Mahdi explained on official Palestinian Authority TV in 2001, Muslims

“of Palestine want to meet Allah and we are the soldiers of the Caliphate, that was announced by the Prophet… Therefore, the Caliphate will be in accordance with the prophecy, in Al-Aqsa, in Jerusalem, and in its surroundings…

“We welcome, as we did in the past, any Jew who wants to live in this land as a Dhimmi, just as the Jews have lived in our countries, as Dhimmis, and have earned appreciation, and some of them have even reached the positions of counselor or minister here and there. We welcome the Jews to live as Dhimmis, but the rule in this land and in all the Muslim countries must be the rule of Allah… Those from amongst the Jews and from amongst those who are not Jews who came to this land as plunderers, must return humiliated and disrespected to their countries.” [14]

Shoebat relates historical and current incitements in Israel to the Armenian genocide, which was also religious war. Armenian Christians were poor and weak, he says, but Muslims were told, “Do not have pity on them. It is your duty to cleanse the land of these people.”

In late 1914, pamphlets throughout the Muslim world called for jihad, Peter Balakian reports in The Burning Tigris. The Ikdam Turkish paper underscored the call to jihad. “The deeds of our enemies have brought down the wrath of God. A gleam of hope has appeared. All Mohammedans, young and old, men, women and children must fulfill their duty…. If we do it, deliverance of the subjected Mohammedan kingdoms is assured.” [15]

A 31-page Universal Proclamation to all the People of Islam circulated widely in 1915 urged Muslims to complete “the deliverances of all the Islamic kingdoms from the hands of the infidels.” Muslims everywhere must, it continued,

“rise up and as the rising up of one man, in the one of his hands the word and in the other the gun, and in his pocket balls of fire and annihilating missiles and in his heart the light of the Faith, and that we lift our voices to the utmost, saying—-India for the Muslim Indians, Java for the Muslim Javanese, Algeria for the Algerians among the Muslims, Morocco for the Moroccans, Tunis for the Muslim Tunisians, Egypt for the Muslim Egyptians, Iran for Muslim Iranians, Turan for the Muslim Tureks, Bokhera for the Bokharians, Caucasus for the Caucasians and the Ottoman kingdoms for the Muslim Turks and Arabs.” [16]

Often, Islamic clerics called directly for the extermination of Armenian Christians.

“Despite a previous decision concerning the elimination of the Armenia Race, as the necessities of time did not allow the fulfillment of this holy intent, and now, after we eliminated all obstacles, and seeing that the time has come to redeem our nation from the dangerous race. We have in-trusted you, and we insist, that you do not surrender yourselves to the feelings of pity, as you face their miserable situation. For the cause of putting an end to their existence, you need to work with all your strength, to completely destroy the Armenian name in Turkey, once and for all.” [17]

Jihad pogroms began exterminating countless Armenian Christians in the late 19^th century, according to Balakian. But calls to jihad reached a crescendo in 1914 and 1915. This led Turkish Muslims to butcher 1.5 million Armenian Christian men, women and children. They openly sought to destroy Christianity in the Islamic Ottoman Empire, says Shoebat.

The current jihad in Israel, he says, is of precisely the same nature. “Thomas Friedman wrote that terrorism is an issue of education and an issue of jobs,” says Shoebat. “Excuse me. It isn’t. My own family is very well off.”

Shoebat’s family is better off since his conversion to Christianity: They stole his property in Beit Sahour, he says, and Islamic law prohibits his reclaiming it. An attorney he knows called to warn him: “If you ever go back to Beit Sahour, you will lose a lot more than property. Your children will be taken, and your wife will not be yours.” Islam allows no rights whatever to born Muslims who leave the faith — formally, murtadd fitri — including the right to life.

Frequently, extra-judicial executions of former Muslims and non-Muslims are conducted by slitting the victim’s throat. Former Muslims must therefore sometimes live under police protection. This is the sad case for Sabatina James, who immigrated to Austria with her family from Pakistan. As a former Muslim convert to Christianity, the young woman requires constant protection from family threats.

“I was a terrorist,” says Shoebat today. After coming to the U.S. in 1978 as a student, he participated for years in Arab Muslim “activism,” attended political events, and called, like most Palestinian Americans, for Israel’s destruction. In 1993, he married a Christian woman and now has Christian children.

Shoebat also rescued his American mother from Beit Sahour, where he says she was effectively held prisoner by Islam for 40 years. He was never told that she was herself a Christian. He remembers that once, his mother took him and his brother to run away. But the neighbors spying from their balconies reported her departure. When they arrived at the station, Muslim relations were waiting to take them back. Shoebat’s father cracked his mother’s skull with a hammer. After that, he watched her closely.

Now, Shoebat is surprised by reporters’ facile acceptance of Palestinian political goals. He worries that too many U.S. churches and universities promote Palestinian “peace” emissaries so unquestioningly. Their apparent messages of “justice,” in reality, are thinly-veiled calls to jihad and genocide, he says. “They have no shame for killing. If a Jew ever walks in the streets of the West Bank, he’s dead.”

Despite all this, Shoebat says he loves his fellow Palestinian Arabs as much as he loves the Jewish people and Israel. How so? “Terrorists are also victims. They suffer an occupation of the mind.”

NOTES:

1 Bat Ye’or, Islam and Dhimmitude: Where Civilizations Collide (2002), pp. 279-286.

2 Bat Ye’or, Islam and Dhimmitude, p. 280.

3 Steven Emerson, American Jihad: The Terrorists Living Among Us (2002), p. 203.

4 Zvi Elpeleg, The Grand Mufti: Haj Amin al-Hussaini Founder of the Palestinian National Movement (1993), pp. 10-15; Samuel Katz, Battlegroud, pp. 63, 68.

5 Martin Gilbert, Routledge Atlas of the Arab Israeli Conflict (2003), pp. 10-13,

6 Bat Ye’or, Islam and Dhimmitude, p. 283.

7 Bat Ye’or, Islam and Dhimmitude, p. 284-285.

8 Bat Ye’or, email correspondence, Aug. 5, 2003.

9 Bat Ye’or, Islam and Dhimmitude, p. 281.

10 Bat Ye’or, Islam and Dhimmitude, pp. 289-291.

11 Bat Ye’or, Islam and Dhimmitude, p. 289-290.

12 Bat Ye’or, Islam and Dhimmitude, p. 290.

13 Bat Ye’or, Islam and Dhimmitude, p. 153.

14 “A Friday Sermon on PA TV: We Must Educate our Children on the Love of Jihad,” special dispatch # 240, Memri.org, Jul. 11, 2001.

15 Peter Balakian, The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America’s Response (2003), pp. 169-170.

16 A Universal Proclamation to all the People of Islam, National Society of Defense, Seat of the Caliphate, 1333 (Muthba’atâ’el Haireyet, 1915) p. 21.

17 Na’aeem Bek, Armenian Atrocities, p. 43.
Continue reading “The Ravages of the Jihad-Occupied Mind” →

Ford Has a Better Idea: One Nation Under Allah

By Alyssa A. Lappen
FrontPageMagazine.com | December 30, 2003

This is the first in a series of articles FrontPage Magazine will present on the misdeeds of the Ford Foundation. A recent, disturbing editorial in the Wall Street Journal has scratched the surface of this heavily funded, tax-exempt, politically leftist organization. We hope to continue to expose Ford’s sponsorship of far-Left causes in the days to come. — The Editors.

To most Americans, it may seem unlikely that the U.S. Constitution could — or should — ever be revised to conform to strict Islamic law. But an educational program funded by the Ford Foundation has explored that very possibility, challenging our right to unfettered freedom of speech. The program, administered by the woefully misnamed Constitutional Rights Foundation, asks students to ponder how the Constitution could be amended or otherwise interpreted to prohibit blasphemy against Allah.

Just how piddling are the offenses in question? Ask a group of young party-goers in Seattle. They printed a flyer advertising a “rave” and unknowingly decorated it with a verse from the Koran. Ali-Salaam Mahmoud, head of the Sea Tac, Washington Majid As Salaam mosque demanded the rave promoters recall and destroy their 50,000 brochures. The rave promoters did not comply, but 400 Seattle Muslims organized a taxi work stoppage in protest. Several Jewish and Christian leaders supported the offended Muslims.

To take another example: In 1997, Nike recalled 38,000 pairs of sneakers after CAIR and other Muslim groups instigated an international Nike boycott; the word–designed on the sneaks resembled Arabic script for “Allah.” Nike even cut a $50,000 check for the northern Virginia Dar-Al-Hijrah Islamic Center and made educational videos and CDs about Islam. Continue reading “Ford Has a Better Idea: One Nation Under Allah” →

Peeling Columbia’s Middle East Mask

by Jerry Gordon and Alyssa A. Lappen
Jewish Internet Association
December 14, 2003

An anti-American geyser erupted December 5 at a daylong Columbia University conference, entitled “US Imperialism in the 21st Century.” The university’s Center for Comparative Literature and Society co-sponsored the event with its controversial Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures program to honor MEALC founder, the late polemicist Edward Said. It filled the Teatro at Casa Italiana to capacity, apparently through email notices sent “entre nous” to like-minded students and faculty.The eventâ€”chaired by newly tenured MEALC professor and former Palestine National Committee negotiator Rashid Khalidiâ€”capped a period specially marking the university’s intellectual decline. Fresh from the University of Chicago, Khalidi filled the $4 million, anonymously endowed Edward Said chair to advance Palestinian and Arab causes at Columbia, and appear frequently on PBS and NPR.Neither Columbia nor the taxpayer-funded TV and radio networks publicize Khalidi’s reverence for the memory of mass murderers like Black September terrorist Abu Iyad [1] or his support for violence: Palestinian society “comes through during these uprisings,” he said in October 2000. “It is civil society that carried the first uprising.” [2]

On December 5, MEALC’s targets were U.S. global imperialism and Israel’s Second Intifada–what London University Middle East analyst Ephraim Karsh more aptly calls “Arafat’s War.” The U.S. global war on terror seeks to defeat the state and Islamic terror sponsors that perpetrated and facilitated the September 11th attacks. Israel seeks to defeat a terrorist infrastructure that over the last three years is responsible for more than 20,000 suicide and other attacks that maimed or killed nearly 7,000 Israeli civilians. Continue reading “Peeling Columbia’s Middle East Mask” →