By Alyssa A. Lappen
FrontPageMagazine.com | October 12, 2005

Autumn tours of North America may become an annual ritual for rabidly anti-Israel Naim Ateek, the founder and director of the Jerusalem-based Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center. Following an October 2004 “exclusive” Canadian speaking tour, Ateek this month is attacking Israel in a series of U.S. church conferences before heading to a World Council of Churches gathering in Toronto, Canada.

This year’s anti-Israel barrage began in Chicago on October 7 and 8 at Hyde Park’s Lutheran School of Theology, where several Sabeel proponents held that the time for a two-state solution has past. Besides for that, Sabeel and Ateek are champions of a broad Israel-divestment campaign and advocates of replacement theology. Indeed, their work parallels that of other fraudulent peace groups, which also ultimately seek Israel’s dissolution.

While Sabeel in April 2004 ostensibly called for two states — Israel and Palestine — the group at the same conference contended that “the ideal and best solution has always been to envisage ultimately a bi-national state in Palestine-Israel where people are free and equal, living under a constitutional democracy that protects and guarantees all their rights, responsibilities, and duties without racism or discrimination — one state for two nations and three religions.”

The same two-faced pattern applied in Chicago, where Ateek described Sabeel as a non-violent organization seeking a Palestinian state alongside Israel — but then disparaged Christian Zionists. “We believe the Bible has been used as an instrument of oppression,” he said. Next, Harvard-educated Palestinian Authority legal adviser Michael Tarazi openly contended that a two-state solution will no longer work. Many others agreed.

In short, Ateek and Sabeel believe that while 22 Arab and 57 Muslim nations have unceremoniously expelled or excluded Jews and discriminated harshly against Christians, the Jewish people should not have a Jewish state in Israel, even one that gives full citizenship and rights to Christians and some 1 million mostly Muslim Arabs.

Tarazi went on to describe Israel’s separation barrier as a consequence of Israeli greed for more land, but failed to note that ceaseless terrorism and suicide attacks made the fence necessary, much less that the barrier has saved countless lives. Tarazi encouraged the crowd to support “morally responsible divestment” as the “only way to hold Israel accountable.”

He described Israel’s Gaza withdrawal as a “meaningless concession,” calling that territory as “the largest open air prison in the world.” He termed Israeli policies as “ethnic cleansing.” He also derided the offer of land at Camp David in 2000: “Isn’t it weird that they never showed you a map,” he asked rhetorically, ignoring the clear outlines of a map offered for a Palestinian state, according to negotiator Dennis Ross.

Also in Chicago on October 7, International Solidarity Movement co-founder George Rishmawi claimed that Israel uses special gas to impair the musculature of Palestinians, making them easier to arrest, according to StandWithUs activists and Evangelical Lutheran Dexter Van Zile, a United Church of Christ (UCC) member and Executive Director of the Judeo Christian Alliance, who attended the two-day meeting. When asked the name of the gas, Rishmawi skirted the issue, claiming that the Israel Defense Forces always quickly collect gas canisters so that no one will know what chemical is used. Rishmawi is well-known for his espousal of Christian jihad ideology, disseminated through both the ISM and the Rapprochement Center.

Rishmawi’s patently false charge (which nevertheless went unchallenged) parallels several other blood libels against Israel, including a 1983 incident in which Palestinian doctors falsely alleged that Israel had poisoned students en masse at several girls’ schools. As Professor Raphael Israeli carefully shows in Poison, that case was conclusively proven to be one of mass hysteria—although the international mainstream media never corrected the record.

Sabeel’s Chicago speakers included several other well-known Israel bashers too. According to both the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Abunimah, Ali Abunimah, a Sabeel board member, the co-founder of Electronic Intifada and vice president of the Arab-American Action Network, spearheaded a successful effort to have Investigative Project Director Steven Emerson banned from National Public Radio. In Chicago on October 7, Abunimah said “You cannot make a case for what Israel is doing because Israel will always lose the argument. So there is no discussion and the struggle will continue.”

Abunimah simply does not accept Israel’s right to statehood, much less the equal rights of Jews. “Ending the occupation does not solve the problem,” he said. “The Jews do not view all human beings as equal. The 1948 borders were calculated to harm Christians, Arabs, Palestinians and Muslims.”

Tel Aviv University Professor Yigal Bronner describes himself as a “conscientious objector who sat in military prison last year for refusing to serve in the occupied territories” and contributed to Alexander Cockburn’s anti-Israel and anti-Semitic Politics of Anti-Semitism. He too predictably disparaged Israel, showing the perfunctory anti-Israel images, including photos of Palestinians crossing through security checkpoints.

Among the church, Jewish and African American organizations present were Churches for Middle East Peace, American Friends Service Committee, Tikkun, the Lutheran Church, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, Wheat Ridge Ministries, August Victoria Hospital in Jerusalem, International Solidarity Movement, Peace Not Walls, the Committee for Peace and Justice in Palestine, Committee for a Just Peace in Israel and Palestine, Americans for Middle East Understanding, American Educational Trust, Jews for Peace in Palestine and Black Voices for Peace.

According to the NGO Monitor, reliable funding information is unavailable for Sabeel, “but support is apparently provided by church-based groups in North America and Europe, including the Mennonite Central Committee.” Indeed, the Friends of Sabeel North America reported in its August newsletter that “Gifts and pledges from $500, $1,000, $2,500, $5000 and more are providing the funding needed for years to come.” Donations are taxpayer-supported in the U.S. The North American FOS has a Canadian, unit; the group also has Australian, U.K., Scandanavian and International branches.

The extent of Sabeel’s U.S. and international support should concern Christians and Jews alike. In addition to seeking an end to Israel, the organization mourns the “loss” of master terrorist Yasser Arafat and excuses suicide bombing: While easy to “quickly and forthrightly condemn it as a primitive and barbaric form of terrorism against civilians.” Ateek wrote in the summer of 2002, people of conscience must understand that “the phenomenon of suicide bombings …arises from the deep misery and torment of many Palestinians.” He blames the phenomenon entirely on Israel’s “illegal occupation of the Palestinian territories.” But now, according to Abunimah, discussing the occupation is no longer an Arab cause. In other words, Arabs will understandably continue suicide bombings in Israel until they take the entire land.

Sabeel’s position on suicide bombing fails to explain its frequent occurrence in Iraq, much less in Britain, Indonesia, Turkey or elsewhere. Then again, not only is Sabeel opposed to the war against terrorism in Iraq, but the organization actually argues that the “extremist elements in the governments of Israel and the United States,” are “presently seeking to impose their unilateral preemptive strategies and militaristic rule over others, including Palestine and Iraq.” Forget Saddam Hussein. Israel, according to this view, is partly responsible for the conflict. Furthermore, in Chicago, Sabeel speakers blamed the attacks on September 11 2001 on Israel’s “intransigence” concerning the establishment of a Palestinian state. “When the next 911 happens look to Israel for the cause,” said Tazari, a point with which several others concurred.

At times, the out-and-out Jew-hatred advanced in Chicago even came from Jews themselves. Baylor University professor of American and Jewish Studies Marc Ellis, for example, gave a power-point presentation featuring photographs of a Torah scroll superimposed with pictures of Israeli tanks and helicopters and Palestinians climbing over Israel’s security barrier. “He delegitimized everything Jewish,” says Allyson Rowen Taylor, a western region American Jewish Congress Associate Director who attended. “He said that now, when he reads the Torah to his son, he is afraid. When he sees the Torah taken from the Arc [in a Jewish sanctuary], he is afraid, and he has taught his son to feel the same way. He is basically indoctrinating every Christian at Baylor” to accept classic anti-Semitic portrayals of Jews.

Citing Richard Rubenstein’s landmark book, After Auschwitz, — which brought laughter from the audience of 200 — Ellis rhetorically asked, “What can Jews say about the covenant after Auschwitz?” and then sarcastically answered his own question. “It’s broken. There is a necessity for Jews to have power, … and Israel is an embodiment of that power. No one can ever tell Jews how to have power. They dictate.” As Ellis sees things, Israel’s victory in the Six Day War was sinful since the Jewish state’s weaponry was superior to that of its enemies — even though they hoped to consign Israel’s Jewish population to another Holocaust. Now, he says, in reference to the 613 good deeds required by Jewish law, the “614^th commandment” is that “Jews cannot let Hitler win.” He sees Jews in Hitler’s role.

Not everyone in the mainstream North American church establishments is happy with these positions. The National Council of Churches hailed as a success its September trip to Israel with of a delegation from American Jewish communities. The groups’ visit to Sabeel’s Ateek left some UCC members cold, however. The UCC Truths website cites a September Anti-Defamation League report that lays responsibility for the divestment campaigns of “a few mainline churches” including UCC at Sabeel’s door. “Unfortunately, the story many in the UCC hear about Ateek and the Sabeel Center is incomplete and ignores [their] anti-Semitism….” The website also bemoans UCC sponsorship of this year’s conference in Canada.

Ateek told the September conferees that Israel should have been founded in Munich, Germany after World War Two and not the Holy Land. When challenged concerning his replacement theology, Ateek effectively suggested that Christians have a right to tell their own story, the Jewish people be damned.

But these Palestinian Christians — who behave with the classic dhimmitude of victims of Muslim aggression — go far beyond telling the “Christian” story, says UCC member Dexter Van Zile. “Look, the deicide imagery has been taboo since the Holocaust,” he says. “Ateek is not just telling the Palestinian story. He’s telling the Israeli story as well, and if he is truly interested in peace he would never use that language. He would know that that language is deeply troubling to Jews and many many Christians.”

_____________________________________

[Update: 12/26/2011]

To Alex B. Kane, purported journalist

On 12/26/2011 05:54 PM, Alyssa A. Lappen wrote:

Dear Alex [B. Kane] —

This afternoon, it was brought to my attention that Ali Abunimah now claims his quotations cited in my Oct. 12, 2005 piece were “fabricated,” and does so based on a twisted and incomplete version of my reply to your late Friday Dec. 23, 2011 inquiry to me. In other words, you misrepresented yourself to me as a journalist. You acted in this instance as a go-between and ally of Mr. Abunimah, not a journalist. Clear enough.

This is a preposterous claim, particularly at this late juncture.

I never fabricated any quotation of Mr. Abunimah — or anyone else — as I most certainly indicated to you. Nor for that matter have I ever previously been accused of fabricating a quotation. I am astounded that you gave an incomplete version of my response to Mr. Abunimah, who therefore concluded that I “fabricated” the quotation, when I clearly indicated that my follow-up investigation would continue into this week.

The piece in question was published in FrontPage Magazine, a widely read online journal, more than six years ago. Since then, the speaker Ali Abunimah never contacted me. Nor did I receive an inquiry from the magazine regarding these quotations — or any content of my Oct. 12, 2005 piece. Had Mr. Abunimah contacted the magazine, or retained legal counsel to do so for him, the editors would undoubtedly have asked me to respond and I would have so responded in my usual timely and complete fashion. Let there be no doubt as to my longstanding professional record, or veracity.

Several First Amendment attorneys who served as counsel to two major U.S. print magazines that I long served on staff notably advised journalists that we need not retain written notes for more than five years after publication dates to which they pertained. Again, it has been more than six years since the article in question first appeared.

Nevertheless, subsequent to your inquiry late Friday afternoon on Christmas 2011 weekend, I discovered in my electronic archives an email exchange in which I arranged an interview pertaining to the Oct. 7, 2005 event at which Mr. Abunimah served as keynote speaker — as I also so informed you in a response on Dec. 23.

Still later on Dec. 23, 2011, I found electronic notes from interviews pertaining to the same Oct. 7, 2005 conference. It is now clear that I interviewed at least two people who were present at that Oct. 7, 2005 Chicago conference and probably three. My electronic notes further corroborate that quotations in my article were given to me exactly as I cited them by a witness or witnesses present.

Based on the records I have already located, I stand by my story.

There is no doubt whatever that Mr. Abunimah made the statements that now embarrass him so deeply he has claimed that they were fabricated. He made those statements before a public audience, and witnesses heard him and noted his comments. Repulsive though they are, those comments do not differ entirely from others Mr. Abunimah has either written or stated in other public venues. On the contrary, they are quite similar.

Best regards–
Alyssa A. Lappen
Investigative journalist

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By Alyssa A. Lappen
FrontPageMagazine.com | September 20, 2005

When Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty announced on Sunday September 11 that Ontario would outlaw all forms of religious arbitration, including Islamic law or Shari’a, Western civilization won a great victory. For that success, Canada and the U.S. owe their thanks to Iranian exile Homa Arjomand, director of the International Campaign Against Sharia Court (ICASC).

Arjomand sprang into action in December 2003, when McGuinty appointed former Ontario Attorney General Marion Boyd to review the province’s Arbitration Act. Since 1991, this law allowed Ontario courts to pass family and business legal disputes on to religious bodies. McGuinty was responding to the Islamic Institute for Civil Justice (IICJ), which applied to arbitrate civil cases in the Muslim community according to Shari’a.

From then until December 2004, when Boyd proposed instituting Shari’a law in Muslim family arbitrations, Arjomand devoted every leisure moment to defeating this measure. “We can stop it,” she said last year, despite her fear that Pakistani, Iranian, and Saudi Arabian governments backed the IICJ push for Shari’a rule in Ontario’s family courts. Continue reading “Ontario: A Shari’a-Free Zone” →

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By Dr. Rachel Ehrenfeld and Alyssa A. Lappen
FrontPageMagazine.com | September 16, 2005

Not even the July attacks in London have stopped the UK legal and political systems, media and academia from serving the Islamist terror agenda. Although new anti- terrorism laws were hastily adopted after the July bombings, if the past is any guidance, the implementation of the new anti-terrorism laws will be as ineffective as the earlier laws.

The Terrorism Act of 2000, in section 59 1(a), “Inciting Terrorism Overseas,” clearly states, “a person commits an offence if he incites another person to commit an act of terrorism wholly or partly outside the United Kingdom.”

Needless to say, such an act also constituted an offense when committed in England. Yet Islamist imams were allowed with impunity to incite suicide bombing in British mosques, on the Internet and in the media. They were allowed to do so because this incitement chiefly targeted Israel.

Although such incitement has recently lessened in intensity, the very same Islamist leaders, preachers, imams and scholars who supported it have been appointed by British Prime Minister Tony Blair to a new task force to tackle extremism among young Muslims. Among the appointees are Tariq Ramadan, the Swiss grandson of Hasan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, and Inayat Bunglawala, the spokesperson of the Muslim Council of Britain.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security revoked Ramadan’s visa to the U.S. last year, under the Immigration and Nationality Act, which covers undocumented immigrants who have used a ”position of prominence within any country to endorse or espouse terrorist activity.”

The UK, however, welcomed Ramadan not only to its anti-terror task force but also to teach at Oxford University. To top it, in August, Scotland Yard paid $15,000 to Ramadan to speak at a conference for Muslim youth.

According to Spanish judge Balatasar Garz’n, Ramadan had “routine contacts” with Ahmed Brahim, an Algerian, believed to be both the financial chief of al-Qaeda, and the financier of the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania. In 1995, during a series of terrorist attacks in Paris perpetrated by the Algerian Armed Islamist Movement (AIM), French Interior Minister Jean Louis Debre forbade Ramadan to enter France because of his connections to that terrorist group. And according to the French daily newspaper Le Monde, Ramadan is suspected of having links with al-Qaeda, and is believed to have organized a 1991 meeting between al-Qaeda second-in-charge, Ayman al Zawahiri, and Omar Abdel Rahman, who was convicted in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center which killed six people and injured more than 1,000.

Another task force appointee, Bunglawala, a month before the first World Trade Center bombing, wrote a letter to the British magazine Private Eye calling Sheikh Rahman “courageous.” When Rahman was arrested, Bunglawala said it was only because he was “calling on Muslims to fulfill their duty to Allah and to fight against oppression and oppressors everywhere.” Five months before 9/11, Bunglawala also “circulated writings of Osama bin Laden,” calling bin Laden a “freedom fighter.”

UK support for terrorism is not limited to Muslim scholars. The leading cheerleaders for suicide bombers include many public officials. Take MP Jenny Tonge who was reelected to her seat in Parliament with a big majority despite her infamous statement: “I am a fairly emotional person and I am a mother and a grandmother. I think if I had to live in that situation [under Israeli rule], and I say this advisedly, I might just consider becoming one [a suicide bomber] myself.”

Then there is the London Mayor Ken Livingstone, who blamed the London bombings on “80 years of Western intervention into predominantly Arab lands because of the Western need for oil.” Also in July, Livingstone praised Sheik Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the Egyptian Muslim scholar and resident of Qatar who supports suicide bombing, “The Palestinians don’t have jets and bombs, they only have their bodies to use as weapons.” On September 13, Livingstone said: “Sheik Qaradawi is, I think, very similar to the position of Pope John XXIII. An absolutely sane Islamist,”

Another Islamist supporter is MP George Galloway, who on August 21 announced, “Blair must go; Bush must go. Victory to the Intifada. Long Live Palestine. Long live the people of Iraq, thank you.” A fervent fan of Saddam Hussein, Galloway made £150,000 in his libel suit against the London Telegraph.

Articles published by the Telegraph detailed how Galloway received bribes as part of the United Nations oil-for-food program. Yet, Galloway won his libel case not by disproving these allegations, but because the judge ruled that he did not “have a fair or reasonable opportunity to make inquiries or meaningful comment upon them [the documents] before they were published.”

The use of the English libel laws to silence those who expose alleged supporters of terrorism is not limited to the Telegraph. Sheikh Khaled bin Mahfouz won many libel cases in the UK. Bin Mahfouz is the founder and funder of the Muwafaq Foundation, which according to testimony of former National Security advisor Richard Clarke on Oct. 22, 2003, “transferred at least $3 million, on behalf of Khalid bin Mahfouz, to Usama bin Laden [sic] and assisted al Qida [sic] fighters in Bosnia.” Bin Mahfouz and other wealthy Saudis regularly use the British court to attack reporters and news agencies. Most apologize and settle the cases, thereby avoiding the pro-plaintiff laws and the exorbitant cost of British litigation.

Earlier this week, a Palestinian NGO used the British legal system to issue an arrest warrant against Maj. Gen. (res.) Doron Almog, a former Commander in charge of the IDF’s forces in Gaza, for “war crimes,” i.e. for protecting Israel.

London is also home to HAMAS’ most active front organization–Interpal. In 2003 alone it sent more than $20 million to different HAMAS organizations in the Palestinian territories. Despite the new UK anti-terrorism laws, Interpal sill lists on its website four different bank accounts to which contributors can send money to support HAMAS. Yet, the UK Charity Commission allows it to operate.

Despite the terror attacks in London and mountains of evidence that the Islamist agenda is the same as that of al Qaeda, the UK seems to lack the political will to save itself.

Dr. Rachel Ehrenfeld, author of Funding Evil; How Terrorism is Financed–and How to Stop It, is director of American Center for Democracy and member of the Committee on the Present Danger and Alyssa A. Lappen is a freelance journalist who frequently contributes to FrontPageMagazine and other online journals.

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