Ritual Murders of Jews in Paris

By Alyssa A. Lappen
FrontPageMagazine.com | December 4, 2003

After a European Union poll found that nearly 60% of Europeans consider Israel the greatest threat to world peace, the British Broadcasting Corp. on November 26, asked if anti-Semitism is really increasing. “There was outrage and shock over the recent EU poll,” observed Robert Wistrich, director of Jerusalem’s Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of anti-Semitism. Many Israelis consider mainstream labeling of “Israel as a Nazi state” a sort of anti-Semitism.

But the BBC gave the final word to Vienna’s Edward Serotta. The increasingly “shrill” debate often “paints the entire European continent as a cesspool of hatred for Jews,” griped the Central Europe Center for Research and Documentation director. “One prominent Jewish leader recently said the climate was just like 1933 – this is absolutely absurd.”

Oh really? Serotta made this bizarre claim precisely a week after two Paris Jews were brutally murdered and disfigured–because they were Jewish. A minor tabloid, Le Parisien, reported the grisly events. But not a single major French newspaper Le Monde, Figaro or Libération covered the stories, according to an interview with a victim’s mother, distributed by Rosenpress in Revue-Politique.com. In one case, the police advised the family not to call the crime anti-Semitic. [1]

Sebastian Sellam, 23, was a popular disc jockey at a hot Parisian night club called Queen. At about 11:45 p.m. on Wednesday November 19, the young man known as DJ Lam C (a reverse play on his surname) left the apartment he shared with his parents in a modest building in of Paris’ 10^th arrondissement near la Place Colonel Fabien, heading to work as usual. In the underground parking lot, a Muslim neighbor slit Sellamâ€™s throat twice, according to the Rosenpress interview. His face was completely mutilated with a fork. Even his eyes were gouged out.Following the crime, Rosenpress correspondent Alain Azria reported, Sellam’s mother said the Muslim perpetrator mounted the stairs, his hands still bloody, and announced his crime. “I have killed my Jew. I will go to heaven,” he reportedly said. The alleged murderer’s family was well known for rabid anti-Semitism, Mrs. Sellam reportedly told Rosenpress, a point confirmed by the victim’s brother. Within the previous year, Sellam’s mother reportedly said, the family found a dead rooster outside their apartment door with its throat slit, and their Mezuzah was ripped from their door post. Leaving dead roosters is reportedly a traditional warning of impending murder.

The homicide especially traumatized the Paris Jewish community: According to Rosenpress, another gruesome murder, also allegedly committed by a Muslim, occurred earlier that evening. Chantal Piekolek, 53, was working in her Avenue de Clichy shoe store when Mohamed Ghrib, 37, stabbed her 27 times in the neck and chest.

Piekolekâ€™s 10-year-old daughter hid in the storeroom behind the shop with a girlfriend and heard the entire crime. There was no evidence of sexual assault, according to Rosenpress. Paris reporters believe the cash remained in the shop’s register, but this detail remained unconfirmed at press time.

A report apparently based on Le Parisien appeared in France’s biggest Jewish newspaper, Actualité Juive, but added little. The report strangely named the DJ’s alleged murderer only by his first name. No surname was given. A reliable Paris journalist says the story is correct.

Initial reports in small news outlets naturally terrified and confused the French Jewish community. Intense anti-Semitism has been building for more than a decade, according to Nidra Poller, an American expatriate in Paris for several decades. Anti-Semitic crimes frequently go unreported in the major press, she said, suppressed by French authorities, victims fearing retribution–and news agencies. Jewish community members thus usually learn of attacks as they did during previous centuries in North African and Eastern European ghettos–by word of mouth.

In 2001, a rabbi in Poller’s neighborhood was kidnapped and held hostage in a car for two hours. Another religious Jew was kidnapped in similar fashion, Poller reported. A Jewish woman and her husband, whom she had just picked up at a local hospital, were abused and threatened with murder for several hours by their Muslim taxi driver, she said.

The charged, anti-Semitic atmosphere in France engenders panic each time a Jewish community member suffers an attack. Crimes typically include harassment, kidnapping, assault, rock-throwing, arson and other abuse, Poller said. Victims usually report the incidents to officials, families and friends. Stories thus spread like wildfire, terrifying people, she noted. Just as frequently, authorities refuse to investigate. Reports are then followed by official and other denials–stoking the community’s fear. People don’t know what to believe, Poller said. Desperate for verifiable data, they attempt to trace reports through sources back to the victims. But those seeking information are generally told to back off. “They are left wondering whether their sources are correcting wild rumors or covering up dastardly anti-Semitism,” said Poller.

French Jews live in constant fear, Poller said. Everyday activities, such as taking a taxi, going to synagogue or shopping can bring attacks. The entire community is traumatized. This pattern was effectively repeated with the November murders in Paris after initial reports indicated that both cases were anti-Semitic crimes.

Then the respected Guysen Israel News clarified essential details. It seemed, the news service claimed, that Piekolek was not Jewish, although her husband was. In a subsequent editorial, Guysen opined that while Sellam’s murderer was a known anti-Semite, he was also mad and jealous of the successful DJ he had known since boyhood. The news agency insists that it would label the crimes anti-Semitic if they really were. But other reporters and agencies disagree, and label the murders anti-Semitic.

Parisian Jews are frightened and confused, Poller said. If Sellam’s murderer was mad, why wasn’t he previously committed to psychiatric confinement? Were initial Rosenpress and Revue-Politique reports on Piekolek correct? Was her murder verifiably not an anti-Semitic crime? Or are subsequent denials based on terrified rejection of facts? (Her husband was Jewish, so it was not “anti-Semitic.”) Are Paris Muslims really starting to slaughter Jews?

“In Paris, a lot of Jews already had to leave countries in North Africa,” Poller said. “Now, they are told not to talk about anti-Semitism. And they are going to have to flee again?”

Alas, it is easy to believe the worst. A few days earlier, an anti-Semitic arson attack hit the Jewish Merkatz Hatorah boys’ school on the outskirts of Paris. Prime-Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin later said he hoped to identify “those who carried out this shameful attack.”

Given intense and worsening anti-Semitism in France and Europe, there seems little hope that the government will actually investigate the arson, much less prosecute the perpetrator if it finds one. After all, EU officials deny the severity of the problem. Last week, they shelved an EU report on the subject for fear of antagonizing Muslims, who were behind many of the incidents examined.

Two Muslim students at Paris’ well-regarded Lycée Montaigne recently beat an 11-year-old Jewish classmate while reportedly yelling at him, “We’ll finish Hitler’s job.” Headmaster Jean-Marie Renault sued the accused aggressors and plans “a debate on the dangers of xenophobia” next term. Complaints rarely produce criminal sanctions, however. Many anti-Semitic crimes are never even reported, Poller said–especially in the housing project cités that ring Paris, where residents are one third North African Muslims. “La Zone is foreign country,” writes Theodore Dalrymple.

But is it? Poller left France for a U.S. speaking tour in November with one week’s news publications to read on her flight–two weekly magazines and three major newspapers. All of them, she said, were “reeking with hatred [for Jews].” They also sympathized extensively with terrorists. News reports are not factual. “They are sermons,” Poller said. A profile of philosopher Gilles Deleuze in the weekly Nouvel Observateur, for example, praised his defense of the Palestinians, citing an article he wrote on “le grandeur de Arafat,” despite his personal responsibility for more than 1,000 civilian murders.

EU officials may not want to admit it. But attacks on Jews have been mounting since the terrorist war on Israel began in September 2000. In the last year, however, anti-Semitic attacks in France have grown increasingly bold. In January, Paris Rabbi Gabriel Farhi was attacked several times. In April 2002 alone, the French Interior Ministry recorded nearly 360 anti-Semitic crimes against Jews and Jewish institutions, according to Washington Times reporter Al Webb. [2] In May 2002, a mysterious fire erupted at the Israeli embassy in Paris.

“Yes, a synagogue was burned,” Frenchmen routinely admit, according to Poller. “But how do we know this was anti-Semitic?” Sellam’s murder was handled in much the same way, she said, although 2,000 mourners attended the popular young disc jockey’s funeral. Le Parisien, according to Poller the only print newspaper to report the crime, noted that Sellam was Jewish and his alleged murderer Muslim, but explained the crime as an outburst of jealousy by a lifelong friend. “Sebastian was successful and his murderer was unsuccessful and jealous.”

Something considerably darker than professional jealousy must be at work, however, when a murderer completely mutilates his victim’s face with a fork and gouges out his eyes or stabs a 53-year-old mother 27 times in the chest and neck.

Indeed, in Sura 8, verse 12, the Qur’an instructs Muslims, “Remember thy Lord inspired the angels (with the message): ‘I am with you: give firmness to the Believers: I will instil terror into the hearts of the Unbelievers: smite ye above their necks and smite all their finger-tips off them’.”

Evidently, some Muslims take this literally. The theme repeats in Sura 47, verse 4: “Therefore, when ye meet the Unbelievers (in fight), smite at their necks.“Citing this verse, Shafi’i jurist al-Mawardi (d. 1058) prescribes exactly such behavior. When Allah gives Muslims victory over mushrikun in “The Amirate of Jihad”–the non-Muslim region of war, or Dar al-Harb–he advises, “their women and children are taken prisoner, and their wealth is taken as booty, and those who are not taken captive are put to death.” [3]

Meanwhile, in Germany, neo-Nazis were arrested in September for planning an arson attack on a Munich synagogue to commemorate Hitler’s November 9 Kristallnacht of 1938, in which thousands of Jewish homes and shops were destroyed, hundreds murdered and thousands arrested and sent to concentration camps.

Right. And two grisly ritual murders last week in Paris, France were not anti-Semitic.

Notes

[1] Digital video film interview by Â© Alain Azria / Avi Rosen / Rosenpress Agency

For further information:

[2] Al Webb, “Synagogues Burn as Europe Rages,” Washington Times, Apr. 23, 2002

[3] Abu’l Hasan al-Mawardi, al-Ahkam as-Sultaniyyah: The Laws of Islamic Governance (Ta-Ha, 1996), p. 76. Continue reading “Ritual Murders of Jews in Paris” →

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Jihad Slavery: An Ugly Living Legacy

By Alyssa A. Lappen
FrontPageMagazine.com | October 17, 2003

Escape from Slavery: The true story of my ten years in captivity–and my journey to freedom in America,
Francis Bok with Edward Tivnan, St Martins Press 2003, 285 pages, $24.29.

The cruelty that Francis Bok experienced at age seven defies civilized human conception. One day in 1986, his mother Marial sent him to Nyamlell’s market from their Southern Sudan Dinka village of Gourion to sell eggs and peanuts. His father Pial Bol Buk had recently called Francis “Muycharko” — “like twelve men.” He would be successful and achieve something important. Eventually, his father’s hope proved prophetic. But in 1986 Francis could count to no more than ten and still played alweth and Madallah — Dinka hide-and-seek and cricket. His mother sent older friends to supervise his first independent market trip.

That day, the Catholic boy nicknamed Piol, for rain, lost his childhood and world to the murahaliin. After torching the nearby villages and slaying their inhabitants, 20 light-skinned Juur horsemen charged into Nyamlell. They severed the heads of all Dinka men with single sword strokes, left them rolling in the blood-soaked market dust and stole off Piol’s older friends Abuk, Kwol and Nyabol in different directions. A rifleman permanently silenced a crying girl with a bullet to her head. A swordsman more “mercifully” sliced off her sister’s leg at the thigh like the branch of a small tree. Francis tried to flee. Terror squelched his cries. He was halted at gunpoint, grabbed and slung astride a small saddle, crafted specifically to carry abducted children, and ridden far north.

After President George W. Bush signed the tough Sudan Peace Act on October 18, 2002 — improving on earlier measures — many Americans became increasingly aware of ongoing Islamist Sudan’s government support for mass enslavement and genocide of Southern Sudanese Christians and animists. Following the heroic efforts of Boston philanthropist Charles Jacobs to denounce black bondage in sub-Saharan Africa and abolish slavery globally in his lifetime, John Eibner’s Christian Solidarity International began his revolutionary work to purchase and liberate Southern Sudanese slaves from Arab Muslim bondage. Village Voice columnist Nat Hentoff also covered the genocide in a series of ongoing exposes.

But few have noted that the experience of Francis Bok–and the ongoing Arab Muslim oppression and genocide against Southern Sudan’s Dinka–is merely the modern manifestation of Islamic Jihad tradition established by the Prophet Mohammed and pursued aggressively ever since by Islamic jurists and rulers–from the Caliphs to the Ottomans, to current-day Islamic tyrants like Sudan’s Hasan at-Turabi and Gen. ‘Umar al-Bashir. “Jihad,” wrote Rashad Ali in Khilafah Magazine in December 2001, “is the removal of obstacles, by force if necessary, that stand between people and Islam. It is the practical method of spreading Islam. The call to Islam is compulsory on Muslims.” Moreover, “Jihad is continuous and will always be so.”

Even victims like Bok are seldom aware of the history. During 10 long years of enslavement by Giemma Abdullah in Kerio, Francis Bok had no idea why he was victimized. He learned soon enough that the Arabic word abeed carried three meanings–“slave,” “black” and “filth.” Half his lifetime among Muslims taught him that they considered themselves better than Southern Sudanese infidels. But this hardly informed him of the history of the jihad institution to which his 20^th century captors and masters subjected him. He could not recognize himself as an inferior, non-Muslim dhimmi. Continue reading “Jihad Slavery: An Ugly Living Legacy” →

Enemy With A Human Face

By Alyssa A. Lappen
FrontPageMagazine.com | September 2, 2003

As a young woman in 1968, I worked briefly with Christian leaders to fight mass starvation inflicted on Biafra’s Ibo people. Joan Baez and Bob Dylan also raised money for the afflicted Biafrans. In this, my family and I followed the late Father Aloisius Dempsey, a Jesuit priest who had spent his life tending to sick and impoverished disaster victims worldwide, may he rest in peace. Never did Father Alo or his peers call on peace activists to engage in “resistance.” Peace activism then consisted of marching and raising funds to feed the starving.

Not that Biafra lacked cause. Nigeria’s so-called “civil war” actually constituted a Muslim jihad genocide that felled one million victims. Biafran Col. Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu explained in his June 1969 Ahiara Declaration, the Ibo were threatened with “total destruction,” and their secession resisted “the Arab-Muslim expansionism which has menaced and ravaged the African continent for twelve centuries.” Nigerian troops in 1966 slaughtered 50,000 “like cattle.” In one village, in 1968 they murdered the entire adult male population. Nigerian Lieut. Col. Murtala Mohammed declared in September 1967, “My destination is Onitsha, brothers and sisters. Let nobody stand on my way, for anything that stands on my way would be crushed.” Indeed, the Ibo people were crushed. As Karl Maier expertly describes in This House Has Fallen (2000), Nigeria’s Islamization continues today and the Ibos have become its second class citizens.

Now “peace activism” ironically sides with jihad, at least as embodied by the International Solidarity Movement, which claims a Palestinian Arab “right to resist” “via legitimate armed struggle,” including murder by suicide. ISM is just ending its six week “Freedom Summer Palestine Campaign.” Ostensibly to “challenge Israel’s brutal occupation policies,” this sought to halt construction of Israel’s security fence, which ISM derisively labels an “apartheid wall.”

To Israel, the fence represents a life-saver to keep suicide killers out. ISM wants them to get in. A fence can be removed; lives cannot be replaced. Continue reading “Enemy With A Human Face” →

The Dawning of Dawa

By Alyssa A. Lappen
FrontPageMagazine.com | July 15, 2003

Search recent international news for the word, “Dawa,” and you’ll see it occurs rarely, usually in proper names — Iraq’s Shi’ite newspaper Al Dawa, its radical Dawa sect, and its Islamic Dawa Party, banned under Saddam Hussein, blamed for his war on Iran, and now, resurgent. It repeats in names of radical Pakistani groups linked to the banned Lashkar Tayyaba [Lashkar-e-Toiba] — Dawatul Irshad, Markaz Dawa al-Irshad, and the moniker-du-jour, Jamaat ud-Dawa.

In Saudi Arabia, in Ain Al Yaqeen‘s official news of 21 arrests for al-Qaeda’s Riyadh bombings in May, King Fahd Ibn Abdul Aziz and Crown Prince Naif Ibn Abdul Aziz offer simultaneous praise for the “Joint Islamic Work in the field of Dawa,” headed by Muslim World League chairman and Grand Mufti Sheikh Abdul Aziz Ibn Abdullah Al El-Sheikh.

Since September 11, Americans have learned, many groups with Dawa-derived names now operate and plot violence from bases in the U.S. But a greater danger may reside in Dawa’s largely invisible nationwide success.

What’s Dawa? Although a common Islamic proper noun, Dawa is actually a dynamic, an obligatory duty (fard) for Muslims of all sects and degrees of (im)moderation. Muslims call it “inviting others to Islam.” Really, it’s proselytizing, which Islam encourages the faithful to achieve at any cost. In fact, al-Qaeda lieutenant Abu ‘Ubeid Al-Qurashi boasted last year that September 11th gave Islam enormously effective publicity. It also marked the launch of a massive global Dawa campaign. Al-Qurashi called Dawa “integral to triumph in fourth-generation warfare.”

Of course, simply explaining one’s faith to prospective converts hardly constitutes an illegal or inherently dangerous act. Proselytizing for any faith, despite the negative connotations some attach to it, is not threatening. The freedom of faith guaranteed in the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights, however, rests on the Judeo-Christian concept that all individuals have the right to choose and follow any faith, or none at all.

But Islam essentially contradicts this Judeo-Christian principle. All people, it holds, are born Muslim. Converts actually “revert.” By its very nature, this belief denies faith as a personal choice–and minimizes freedom of will. [1] Learning Islam from a righteous teacher, Muslims avow, compels one to accept the faith, or suffer serious consequences. Moderates argue that no one today has the Islamic authority to impose such consequences. As a practical matter, the sharp debate within Islam remains irrelevant in the many Muslim states that do impose them. Moreover, even moderates admit, the authority is politically “not spiritually” derived. Few Muslims would question Islam’s stand as first and last among faiths, which renders it equally political and spiritual–and denigrates the position of non-Muslims.

Islam has had 1,400 years to develop political savvy, as Eastern Churches (but few Americans) recognize. That (partly) explains how Dawa has become a vibrant, political force throughout the U.S.–virtually undetected. In The Decline of Eastern Christendom under Islam: From Jihad to Dhimmitude, scholar Bat Ye’or isolates an 8th to 17th century Islamic phenomenon that resonates in our own age. To consolidate its formidable hold on Europe, the Muslim Ottoman empire “‘won hearts’ at Serbian, Bosnian, Bulgarian, and Greek princely courts.” Among Slav and Greek clergy, they financed “a Turcophile party which nourished pessimism, preached the inevitability of the triumph of Islam, and spoke highly of the economic advantages that Muslim markets offered.” Islam was stopped at Vienna’s gates in 1683. [2]

Today, foreign states have again invested huge sums to slickly market Islam’s supposedly gentle face to the West. In March, 2002, Saudi Arabia’s Ain-al-Yaqeen reported the fundamentalist Wahabbi crown had spent billions of dollars to build Islamic centers, mosques and schools, the world over. Post September 11, Council of American Islamic Relations Arab affairs director Alaa Bayumi claimed in London’s Arabic daily, Al-Hayat that U.S. libraries had run out of books on Islam and that English translations of the Qu’ran were bestsellers in the U.S. CAIR chairman Nahid Awad told Saudi Arabia’s ‘Ukaz that 34,000 Americans had converted.

Even if Awad inflated these numbers, mainstream America had already been primed. Islamic groups have long been spreading Dawa deep into U.S. society, donating tens of thousands of Qu’rans and other books, sponsoring Muslim speakers regularly at churches, and multi-cultural and multi-faith gatherings. They grab for interfaith grants. They’ve blanketed police departments and the media.

And most of all, Muslims have focused Dawa heavily where they can achieve the most leverage–in schools. Individuals and networks have written sophisticated public and private school marketing plans that attack the U.S. educational market on all fronts. Noted Middle East scholar Martin Kramer highlighted one such example in his July 2 Sandstorm, “Outreach” Outrage.

Since 1997, federal Title VI funds have helped Georgetown University’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies sponsor events like its April 9 “Crisis with Iraq” teach-in, where speakers did’t promote Islam exactly, yet inveighed against the U.S. to 140 Washington area K-12 teachers. No wonder Title VI gets high marks from Arab American Anti-Discrimination Committee PR chief Hussein Ibish: it greases Islamic “Outreach,” — English for this religious “obligation.” Indeed, CAIR spokesman Ibrahim Hooper once said he’d “like the government of the United States to be Islamic sometime in the future.” To get there, he promised, “I’m going to do it through education.”

CAIR and the ADC are widely recognized as extremist organizations. Their events often feature rabidly anti-American and anti-Israel speakers. But they’re not alone in promoting Dawa in the U.S. Long before September 11, Islamic Supreme Council of America chairman Shaykh Muhammad Hisham Kabbani heroically and publicly warned of Islamic extremism and terrorism. Some 80 percent of American mosques and Islamic centers were dominated by extremists, he told the State Department. Naturally, such groups also proselytize.

Dawanet, for example, was founded in 1999 “to establish a network of Muslims…committed to inviting others to Islam.” At first glance, the website looks clean. Its guiding principles insist that operations be legal and financially sound. It claims to teach Muslims “appropriate and effective methods of dawa” through mosques, schools and Islamic centers. But like many sites suggesting effective Dawa methods, this one recommends less-than-complete-candor, “appropriate to the target audience.” Methods are neither completely straight forward nor above-board. Really, the goal is to make America an Islamic nation.

Not surprisingly, Dawanet links into sites run by Islamist groups like the Institute of Islamic Information and Education, whose Dawah page allies with the Islamist World Assembly of Muslim Youth, Islamic Society of North America and Islamic Circle of North America. Surfing Islamic Networks Group, one will soon land at a Dawa site based in Madinah, not exactly a seat of moderation. Meanwhile, you can learn how Muslims do Dawa under your nose, at school districts, among teachers and school administrators, and at your local grammar, middle and high-schools, often with civic or government funding.

But Islamists are not the only ones proselytizing. Several supposedly moderate groups recommend similar, equally slick techniques. Shaykh Kabbani’s Islamic Supreme Council, for example, defines modern jihad as primarily Dawa–“presenting the message of Islam.” Indeed, ISCA’s leaders contend that “the foundation of Jihad is Islamic propagation (da’wah).” Similarly, the Council on Islamic Education co-published, with the First Amendment Center, a slick Internet brochure called Teacher’s Guide to Religion in the Public Schools [first published by the Saudi-influenced CIE, with a branch in Nashville, but later moved to the “First Amendment Center’s Freedom Forum” to disguise its origin and true purpose]. It claims to seek public schools that neither “inculcate nor inhibit religion” (emphasis added).

That seems a doubtful interpretation of First Amendment guarantees. It’s still more doubtful, however, that Christian or Jewish groups backing the CIE brochure realized it effectively licenses chauvinist Islamic instruction in U.S. public schools. Far from safeguarding religious rights, false “liberties” have opened U.S. schools to Islamic exploitation. Indeed, several U.S. textbooks and curricula have already been rewritten, infringements of Constitutional protections that could take years to correct.

The Supreme Court may have ruled in 1960 that Bible or religious study could legally be “presented objectively as part of a secular program of education,” (emphasis added). Surely, that did not give schools or textbooks carte blanche to fudge distinctions of faith in place of history–or lower the bar between church and state. Surely textbooks cannot legally instruct: Mohammed’s God was the same as the “God of other monotheistic religions, Judaism and Christianity,” or created man “from a clot of congealed blood.”

Parents, teachers, are you listening? We have nefarious work to undo.

ENDNOTES:

[1] The Cow: 31-40; see also Mark Durie, “Isa, the Muslim Jesus.” Islam regards itself, not as a subsequent faith to Judaism and Christianity, but as the primordial religion, the faith from which Judaism and Christianity are subsequent developments. In the Qur’an we read that Abraham “…was not a Jew nor a Christian, but he was a monotheist, a Muslim” (al ‘Imran 3:66). So it is Muslims, and not Christians or Jews, who are the true representatives of the faith of Abraham to the world today. (Al-Baqarah 2:135).”

[2] Bat Ye’or, The Decline of Eastern Christianity: From Jihad to Dhimmitude (1996), p. 67; The expression “won hearts” derives from “men whose hearts are to be won over,” a classical interpretation offered by renowned Hanbali jurist Ibn Taymiyya (d. 1328). He observes: “If they are infidels, it is hoped that by these gifts an advantage may be obtained: for example, to induce them to convert, or avoid some misfortune, on condition that it is impossible to act otherwise…These gifts, granted to the powerful and withheld from the lowly…are to serve the common interest of the Muslim religion and of Muslims…” Bat Ye’or, Decline, “Documents: I. 2. ‘The Theory of Jihad’,” p. 298.

Hamas and the Palestinian Authority are One

By Alyssa A. Lappen
FrontPageMagazine.com | June 19, 2003

Dear Mr. President: The Road Map dangerously subverts the U.S. War on Terror.

As a journalist specializing on Middle East history, I urge you to refocus on the goals you brilliantly outlined on June 24, 2002. We must not ask Israel to negotiate for a Palestinian State until the renewed terrorist attacks stop and the terrorist infrastructure is dismantled.

Hamas is not at war with the Palestinian Authority, despite a PR campaign to the contrary. The PA has worked actively with Hamas for years. In 1995, it wrote a pact with the Islamist terrorists in Hamas. Mahmoud Abbas’ protests are evidently for show. On March 3 of this year, Abbas urged that violence continue.

A draft of the Hamas-PA pact, appended below, ran on Sept. 20, 1995 in Egypt’s Al-Ahram government weekly. Article 12 requires the PA to cease all preventive security and let Hamas operate without PA interference. The agreement gives Hamas a role in the PA government, which Abu Mazen fulfilled by naming a Hamas partisan as education minister.

Indeed, PLO political chief Farouq Al-Qaddoumi confirmed on Jan. 3, 2003, Fatah was “never different from Hamas: Strategically, we are no different from it.” Continue reading “Hamas and the Palestinian Authority are One” →

Beyond Noah, Beyond Laughter

Enid Dame’s Stone Shekhina
(Three Mile Harbor, 2002; 69 pp., $9.95)

by Alyssa A. Lappen
Big City Lit | May 2003

It is not easy to place words in the mouth of a Biblical figure and refashion her story, creating new dimensions. Enid Dame attempts this feat in Stone Shekhina, her seventh book, sometimes more successfully than others.

A longtime teacher of creative writing and bible as literature, Dame clearly knows her Tenach–the Hebrew Old Testament. She gleans heavily from biblical stories and Midrashim, commentaries on Biblical tales, retold to teach new lessons in the telling. At the dawn of the Christian era, as the Jewish people were forced into exile in Babylonia and beyond, almost always at the point of a sword, Jewish sages began constructing Midrashim to render their faith’s greatest lessons real and as accessible as Jerusalem and the Holy Temple had once been.

Like most modern Jews, Dame tends to neglect the elegant, native Israeli Midrashic traditions of Jerusalem’s early 8th century revenant Karaites, who became the ancient Jewish capital’s majority before its Muslim conquest and considered life outside Israel a violation of Torah. [1] Great Karaite sages like Ya’aqov al-Qirqisani, Yefet Ben-‘Eli HaLewi and Sahl Ben Masli’ah created a large body of work, including Qirqisani’s masterful code of law, Kitabu ‘l-Anwar wa-‘l-Maraqib (Book of Lights and Watchtowers) and commentary on Torah’s non-legal portions, Kitabu ‘r Riyad wa-‘l-Hada’iq (Book of Gardens and Parks). [2]

This oversight has apparently contributed to the mistaken presumptions that surface in several poems–that Israel’s Jewish presence is not rooted and the Jewish people are still at sea. Continue reading “Beyond Noah, Beyond Laughter” →