Category: Free Press

Financing jihad: did he or didn’t he?

Letters to the Editor
WashingtonTimes.com | October 18, 2006

“Those who cannot remember the past,” as George Santayana taught us, “are condemned to repeat it.” Likewise, when governments seek to rewrite history, citizens and non-citizens alike are exposed to the dangers that accompany official revisionism. A recent opinion column in this newspaper demonstrates these lessons all too clearly. The United States Department of Justice has indicted a Boston businessman, Emadeddin Z. Muntasser, our client, for his involvement in the 1980s and early 90s in a Boston-based Muslim charity that, the indictment alleges, was involved in supporting Afghan mujahideen engaged in pursuing jihad. Rachel Ehrenfeld and Alyssa A. Lappen (“Jihadists and Jews,” Op-Ed, Monday) would have readers of this newspaper believe that in asking the federal court in Massachusetts to dismiss this indictment on constitutional grounds, we are seeking to establish that the First Amendment’s speech and religion protections apply to what the authors term “a now-defunct Boston-based al Qaeda front organization” that engages in support of a terrorist organization that advances “holy war against the United States.” Continue reading “Financing jihad: did he or didn’t he?” →


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Jihadists and Jews

By Rachel Ehrenfeld and Alyssa A. Lappen
Washington Times | October 16, 2006

Democratic strategist and former Michael Dukakis campaign manager Susan Estrich, and the former American Civil Liberties Union president in Massachusetts, Harvey Silvergate, recently joined the attorneys representing two alleged Boston al Qaeda funders.

Emadeddin Z. Muntasser and Muhammed Mubayyid face charges in U.S. District Court of Massachusetts for the soliciting and expenditure “of funds to support and promote the mujahideen and jihad, including the distribution of pro-jihad publications.” Their Care International “charity,” a now-defunct Boston-based al Qaeda front organization, published, among other things, the English version by al Qaeda co-founder Abdullah Azzam of “Join the Caravan,” which states: “[t]he obligation of Jihad today remains [individually required] until the last piece of land, which was in the hand of the Muslims, but has been occupied by disbelievers, is liberated.”

In their Oct. 5 request for a dismissal, the defendants effectively — and unwittingly — explain all the reasons why the federal government should outlaw Islamic charitable giving in the United States.

In their motion, attorneys Mrs. Estrich, Malick Ghachem, Norman Zalkind and Elizabeth Lunt, argue that the defendants merely exercised their religious freedom and obligation to give “zakat” (Islamic charity).

Their motion cites Chapter 9, verse 60 of the Koran, which describes “those entitled to receive zakat.” According to the definition of zakat in The Encyclopedia of Islam, “category 7” of eligible recipients are “volunteers engaged in jihad” for whom the zakat cover “living expenses and the expenses of their military service (animals, weapons).” Continue reading “Jihadists and Jews” →


All Articles, Poems & Commentaries Copyright © 1971-2021 Alyssa A. Lappen
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Printing is allowed for personal use only | Commercial usage (For Profit) is a copyright violation and written permission must be granted first.

England’s chilling forecast: the case for granting declaratory relief to prevent English default actions from chilling American speech

By Raymond W. Beauchamp
Fordham Law Review | 2006 Vol. 74

Notes:
9: Alyssa A. Lappen, Libel Wars, FrontPagMag.com, July 18, 2005
29: Lappen supra note 9
37: see Lappen supra note 9


All Articles, Poems & Commentaries Copyright © 1971-2021 Alyssa A. Lappen
All Rights Reserved.
Printing is allowed for personal use only | Commercial usage (For Profit) is a copyright violation and written permission must be granted first.

Hamas’ Determination to Perpetuate the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: The Critical Role of Hate Indoctrination

by Justus Reid Weiner | Noam Weissman
Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs | 1 August 2006
  • Prospects for peace in the Middle East have been dealt an enormous blow by the election triumph of Hamas in January 2006. Palestinian education, television shows, websites, and even families are all being mobilized in an intensified environment of agitated hatred toward Israel and Israelis.
  • Even prior to the Hamas election victory, anti-Israel rhetoric was already embedded in Palestinian school textbooks and other educational materials, and ideas such as romanticizing martyrdom and “reconquering” the land were taught in the classroom. Bitter hostility towards Israel’s very existence is currently woven into the entire Palestinian educational system.
  • UNRWA educational institutions are controlled by individuals committed to Hamas ideology and they are educating terrorists. Numerous terrorist operatives and Hamas political leaders have been educated in UNRWA schools.
  • The idea of martyrdom has become so ingrained in Palestinian culture that it is a major theme in religious practice, television broadcasting, posters, pre-suicide eulogies, summer camps, children’s trading cards, movies, music, and games.Palestinian newspapers report that the number of children who express a willingness to become martyrs exceeds 70 percent. Palestinian psychiatrist Dr. Shafiq Massalha, after finding that over half the Palestinian population aged 6 to 11 dream of becoming suicide bombers, concludes that the next generation of Palestinians will be a very murderous population full of anger and hatred.

    The raison d’etre of Hamas – the Islamic Resistance Movement, an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, is the complete annihilation of the State of Israel and the establishment of an Islamic state in its place. Prospects for peace in the Middle East have been dealt an enormous blow by the election triumph of Hamas in January 2006. Palestinian education, television shows, websites, and even families are all being mobilized in an intensified environment of agitated hatred toward Israel and Israelis. Continue reading “Hamas’ Determination to Perpetuate the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: The Critical Role of Hate Indoctrination” →


    All Articles, Poems & Commentaries Copyright © 1971-2021 Alyssa A. Lappen
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    The Other War

    By Alyssa A. Lappen
    AmericanThinker.com | March 11, 2006

    In The Other War: Israelis, Palestinians and the Struggle for Media Supremacy, veteran journalist Stephanie Gutmann provides careful documentation of the myriad ways in which the mainstream media coverage of the Middle East has been grossly compromised. Gutmann spent part of her teenage years in Israel and the disputed territories with her psychologist father, who studies ‘cross-cultural features of aging.’ On her return to the U.S., she was hardly a Zionist. On the contrary, throughout her college years in Ann Arbor, and later, she hung out with the solidly anti-Israel ‘left.’

    But in September 2000 when the current war against Israel began, Gutmann found herself glued to her television, and increasingly disturbed by the inaccurate portrayal of Israel as the next Tiananmen Square, where ‘Large Mechanized Brutes’ converged on ‘Small Vulnerable Brown People.’ Even in her leftist experiences, Israel was simply not a country that ‘would countenance regular, systematic brutality against civilians, [or] produce soldiers capable of doing such a thing.’

    Thus in October 2000, she followed the ‘great herd of foreign press’ and freelancers that decamped to Jerusalem to cover some action and pad their bank accounts. She found the press, then and during a return trip in 2002, almost universally pro—Palestinian and anti—Israel. Many foreign reporters, who habitually hang out in the American Colony Hotel, ‘on the other side of the Green Line, in East Jerusalem,’ cheerily announced this fact. Of course, this attitude does not make for unbiased, complete or factual news. But in general, whatever Palestinian officials say, reporters in Israel accept as unmitigated truth, without question or challenge. And whatever Israeli officials say, the same reporters consider suspect propaganda. The press rarely if ever applies equal skepticism to both sides. Continue reading “The Other War” →


    All Articles, Poems & Commentaries Copyright © 1971-2021 Alyssa A. Lappen
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    Printing is allowed for personal use only | Commercial usage (For Profit) is a copyright violation and written permission must be granted first.

    Ports and pitchforks

    By Diana West
    Washington Times | March 3, 2006

    One of the weirder sideshows to open alongside a main event — the proposed operational transfer of six major American ports to a firm owned by the United Arab Emirates — is the growing chorus of road-company Zolas, “J’accusing” everybody opposed to the sale of “xenophobia,” “isolationist mass hysteria,” “bigotry,” “nativism,” “panic,” and “prejudice” against innocent Araby.

    Such accusations are supposed to make you hang your head in shame. They make me shake mine in consternation — wondering how in tarnation a hefty chunk of the American elite has the chutzpah to castigate the American people (64 percent of whom, says a Rasmussen poll, think the deal is a Bad Thing) for “xenophobia” and “prejudice” on behalf of a culture that is the embodiment of xenophobia and prejudice. The words precisely describe the official state of normal in the Arab-Islamic world since at least 1948, when the modern state of Israel was founded.

    Nonetheless, we’re the “pitchfork-wielding xenophobes” en route to the “Dark Ages,” says the New York Times‘ Thomas Friedman. I’d say we’re heading in the other direction, trying to escape the Dark Ages — as represented by the spreading influence of sharia (Islamic law), which, in terms of the sharia-compliant port deal, would make deep inroads into global financial markets. I would add, as Rachel Ehrenfeld and Alyssa A. Lappen have suggested in this newspaper, “It’s time for the United States to limit financial transactions that involve American companies” — and the U.S. government — “to governance by secular laws.” Continue reading “Ports and pitchforks” →


    All Articles, Poems & Commentaries Copyright © 1971-2021 Alyssa A. Lappen
    All Rights Reserved.
    Printing is allowed for personal use only | Commercial usage (For Profit) is a copyright violation and written permission must be granted first.