While the former U.S. president’s daughter advocates interfaith cooperation inside the JCC, protesters gather outside demanding an apology for the creation of programs that bring together members of mosques and synagogues.

By Shlomo Shamir

A new star has risen in support of efforts to strengthen ties between American Jews and Muslims; Chelsea Clinton, the daughter of former U.S. President Bill Clinton.

Chelsea Clinton moderated a public dialogue on Wednesday night at the Jewish Community Center in Manhattan featuring two outspoken advocates of building a Muslim-Jewish alliance, Rabbi Marc Schneier and Imam Shamsi Ali. After speaking before an overflowing audience, which included her proud father, the younger Clinton told Haaretz, "I am honored to have been invited to take part in this event, and to support the work of the rabbi and the imam. I believe deeply in the importance of talking to each other and also in moving beyond conversation to working together."

Walkout comes after UN secretary-general and human rights high commissioner tell session gay people should be protected

Monday, 27 February 2012

By AFP
Warsaw

Israeli youth comprising a multi-cultural group of Jews and Arab Muslims, Christians and Druze high school students have completed a landmark Holocaust study tour in Poland, organizers said Monday.

“We are 300 kids, from 18 schools from across Israel with nearly half and half Jews and Arabs, and it’s working,” Tamar Gal Sarai, a Jewish educator working with the Amal Group School System of Israeli told AFP.

“We’ve been to (former Nazi German death camps) Auschwitz, Majdanek and Treblinka,” Gal Sarai said of the innovative Holocaust education project dubbed “We Are All One Living, Human Tapestry.”

“We’re trying to create a multi-cultural dialogue, because most of the motivation for hate is fear,” Gal Sarai said.

“We believe that if you bring up the universal values, everyone can get attached to it and learn: Yes, the Holocaust was mostly against Jews, but if the Muslims were there with us in those years, they would have been killed with us too,” she told AFP, pronouncing the trip “an amazing success.”

“We have been very touched here as humans,” said Galal Safadi, an Arab-Israeli educator in charge of non-formal education for Arab youth in Israel at the education ministry.

“It’s not easy to bring Arabs here because of the Palestinian issue,” Safadi admitted.

“But I told my students that if we were living in Europe, (Nazi German dictator Adolf) Hitler would have killed us too because he wanted just the Aryan people to control the world,” Safadi said, adding that there were plans to bring Arab Israeli students to Poland on a regular basis.

“The students want to know about the problems of Jews in history, especially that we are living inside these problems and we suffer too,” said Abed Buerat, a teacher from Umm al-Fahm, a majority Arab Muslim city in northern Israel.

“When they saw these death camps they were all shocked, some were crying,” he said.

“I learned about the Holocaust, but it’s one thing to read a book and something completely different to see Auschwitz. ... I was very shocked,” Mohammed, an 18-year-old Arab Israeli high school student, told AFP.

On the eve of Nazi Germany’s invasion in 1939, Poland had Europe’s largest Jewish community -- around 3.2 million people, or some 10 percent of its population.

Polish Jews made up half of the six million victims of the Holocaust, as well as half of the six million Polish citizens who perished under Nazi Germany during World War II.

http://english.alarabiya.net/articles/2012/02/27/197395.html

Makor Rishon reports on an interesting, if quixotic, conference that took place at Ariel University.

They were there to debate "What is the best peace plan?"

It was sponsored by an Israeli organization that had already held similar conferences in Tel Aviv, eastern Jerusalem and Beit Jala. The Ariel conference was attended by Palestinian Arabs, Jews who live in Samaria, students with yarmulkas together with Muslim men and women.

While the organizers were upset that some of the Arab invitees were barred and others were held up at checkpoints, the atmosphere was described as intimate as the groups mingled over coffee and cookies.

(Text link to video)

Arabs and Jews...working together! :-)

Nigeria's main opposition leader accused the government of incompetence on Monday after Islamist militants killed more than two dozen people in Christmas Day attacks on churches and other targets.

The Boko Haram Islamist sect, which aims to impose sharia, Islamic law, across Africa's most populous country, claimed responsibility for three church bombings, the second Christmas in a row it has caused carnage at Christian houses of worship.

They all advertise on All-American Muslim!

Romney said radical, violent Islamists pose a threat to Americans and others around the world. However, he said, “they take a very different view of Islam than the Muslims I know.”

Is Obama conducting a "war on religion" as some have charged? Watch the video (starting at about 3:10) and decide for yourself. 

(Hat tip: Harry's Place)

The FBI's annual hate crime report shows no significant change in the level of crimes motivated by bias.

The largest category of hate crimes involved race, accounting for nearly half of more than 6,000 incidents, with 58% of known offenders classified as "white" and 18% listed as "black."

More than 70% of religious bias was aimed at Jews, compared with 9% of cases labeled anti-Islamic and 4% anti-Catholic.

Fed up with a decade of the police spying on the innocuous details of the daily lives of Muslims, activists in New York are discouraging people from going directly to the police with their concerns about terrorism, a campaign that is certain to further strain relations between the two groups.

Muslim community leaders are openly teaching people how to identify police informants, encouraging them to always talk to a lawyer before speaking with the authorities and reminding people already working with law enforcement that they have the right to change their minds. Some members of the community have planned a demonstration for next week.

Thousands marched from the Coptic Orthodox Cathedral in Abbasseya to Tahrir Square Friday to commemorate those killed when the military brutally dispersed a Coptic-led march to the Maspero state television building on 9 October, leaving 28 dead.

(Little Green Footballs editorial)

In the perpetual race to the bottom of a bottomless pit that is the right wing blogosphere, a new outrageous outrage has arisen, more outrageous than all the other fake outrages of wingnut history.

My friends, can your hearts stand the awful truth of the Barack Hussein Obama Christmas Tree Tax?!

Text books in Pakistani schools foster prejudice and intolerance of Hindus and Christians, while most teachers view religious minorities as " enemies of Islam", according to a study by a US government commission released on Wednesday.

The world’s religions have also been favorite targets of the paper . . .the cover page of one recent issue featured a cartoon of three rolls of toilet paper, labeled Bible, Koran and Torah, and the headline: “In the toilet, all the religions.”

But the most recent issue ... was received with particular dismay among many French Muslims

In an uncommon show of unanimity, politicians from across the ideological spectrum were up in arms last week, pledging to defend the “freedom of expression” of a publication with which their relations are generally strained.

On Sunday, the antiracism advocacy group S.O.S. Racisme organized a protest in Paris against “religious fundamentalisms,” insisting that democracy requires “the absolute right to blasphemy.”

Pat Buchanan brought his bigotry parade to a place where it is warmly welcomed, going on Bryan Fischer’s radio show and agreeing with Fischer’s position that the United States should ban all mosques and all Muslim immigration. Right Wing Watch has the audio and the transcript:

Thousands of far-right nationalists and neo-Nazis marched through Moscow on Friday to call for ethnic Russians to "take back" Russia, as resentment grows over dark-complexioned Muslim migrants from Russia's Caucasus and the money the Kremlin sends to those restive regions.

Violently xenophobic groups have flourished in Russia over the past two decades. They kill and beat non-Slavs and anti-racism activists, and crudely denounce the influx of immigrants from the Caucasus and from Central Asian countries that were once part of the Soviet Union.

A George Washington University law professor who filed a human rights complaint against Catholic University this summer when it eliminated coed dorm floors has filed a second complaint against the school, saying the rights of Muslim students are being violated.

Not only was his family behind him, but the entire nation of Israel was behind him.

So many times, Israelis - from government on down - mentioned that they will never abandon one of their own.

No matter how one feels about the Arab-Israeli conflict, it must be said that the tenacity of the Israeli people over Gilad Shalit is truly admirable. I even saw someone wearing a shirt saying "Free Gilad Shalit" during the 2011 Chicago Marathon this year. And it begs a very important question: do we as Muslims have this same tenacity over "our people"?

Sadly, the answer is "no." In so many places around the world, Muslims are being slaughtered like animals, and the Muslim world hardly lifts a finger for their aid.

A day after Egypt’s military rulers provided their account of this week’s deadly clashes between soldiers and mostly Christian protesters, activists responded with an opposing narrative that accused the army of committing brutalities hitherto unseen under former President Hosni Mubarak

Can the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) now claim it decided not to open fire on Egyptians during the revolution?

Can it make such a claim after what happened on the evening of 9 October?

Or was the SCAF only talking about Egyptian Muslims when it pledged not to shoot at Egyptians? The horrific events that took place on this sad Sunday evening must not pass without identifying the aim behind it, as well as the plan by which it was carried out.

12:18 am: Eyewitnesses in downtown Cairo report that groups of thugs are attacking Christian-owned businesses, including a liqour store on Mahmoud Bassiouni St., near Abdel Mon

Hundreds from both sides fought with sticks on a Cairo bridge. Protests later spread to the central Tahrir Square, the focal point of the February uprising. Witnesses said the army had moved into the area.

Tensions between Christians and Muslims have increased since the February uprising.

Local communities in France’s immigrant suburbs increasingly organize themselves on Islamic lines rather than following the values of the secular republic, according to a major new sociological study.

CAIRO (AP) — On her first day to school, 15-year-old Christian student Ferial Habib was stopped at the doorstep of her new high school with clear instructions: either put on a headscarf or no school this year.

Habib refused. While most Muslim women in Egypt wear the headscarf, Christians do not, and the move by administrators to force a Christian student to don it was unprecedented. For the next two weeks, Habib reported to school in the southern Egyptian village of Sheik Fadl every day in her uniform, without the head covering, only to be turned back by teachers.

Since Mitt Romney is battling suspicion among Christian conservatives about the depth of his opposition to same-sex marriage and abortion, it is no surprise that he is joining the other major Republican candidates this week to speak at the annual Values Voters Summit, a celebration of the political aims of the religious right.

The conference planners have obliged Mr. Romney, scheduling him to speak right before Bryan Fischer, who is chief spokesman for the family association and is known for his strident remarks on homosexuality, gay rights, Muslims and Mormons. Their talks will be followed by a panel of same-sex marriage opponents.

The liberal advocacy group People for the American Way has called on the presidential candidates, and especially Mr. Romney because he will share a stage, to publicly disassociate themselves from Mr. Fischer and what it called, in a statement on Wednesday, his “unmitigated bigotry.” The Southern Poverty Law Center has made similar appeals to the candidates.

PARIS — The stories of the Holocaust have been documented, distorted, clarified and filtered through memory. Yet new stories keep coming, occasionally altering the grand, incomplete mosaic of Holocaust history.

One of them, dramatized in a French film released here last week, focuses on an unlikely savior of Jews during the Nazi occupation of France: the rector of a Paris mosque.

Muslims, it seems, rescued Jews from the Nazis.

Food is handed out to anyone in need...

Naguib Gobrail, a lawyer and the head of the Egyptian Union of Human Rights Organizations (EUOHR), has called for the protection of Egypt's Copts from what he described as increasing violence from Salafi groups.

“Copts feel like strangers in their own country; many are being forced to leave Egypt as a result,” Gobrail told journalists during a press conference at the Cairo headquarters of the EUOHR.

A group of hard-line Muslims attacked a church building in Upper Egypt this afternoon, torching the structure and then looting and burning nearby Christian-owned homes and businesses.

The 3,000-strong mob of hard-line and Salafi Muslims gutted the Mar Gerges Church in the Elmarenab village of Aswan, then demolished much of its remains, multiple witnesses at the scene said. The mob also razed four homes near the church and two businesses, all Christian-owned. Looting was also reported.

A group of Muslims burnt part of a church in a village in Aswan Governorate, 800km south of Cairo, eyewitnesses said Friday.

Security sources said a group of Muslims clashed with the village's Christian residents and destroyed their shops, adding that Central Security Forces cordoned off the village to control the clashes.

An immigrant group based in Bern has called for the emblematic white cross to be removed from the Swiss national flag because as a Christian symbol it “no longer corresponds to today’s multicultural Switzerland.”

Thousands of Muslims held a rally in London on Saturday to fight extremism and promote a moderate, inclusive version of Islam.

The event in Wembley arena was led by Muhammad Tahir-ul-Qadri, a respected Pakistan-born Islamic scholar, who gained recognition outside the Muslim world after he published a detailed fatwa — or religious ruling — against terrorism and suicide bombings last year.

Muhammad's message, they believe, ranking above all other prophets except for Muhammad himself. The 12th, Muhammad al-Mahdi, is believed by these Shiites to have been born in present-day Iraq in 869 and never to have died, only gone into hiding. Twelvers -- not other Shiites or Sunni Muslims -- believe that al-Mahdi will return as a messiah with Jesus to bring peace to the world and establish Islam as the ruling faith across the globe.

Critics of the Islamic Republic allege that Ahmadinejad and the supreme leader would even go so far as to hasten a nuclear showdown and cataclysmic strike -- perhaps an attack on Israel and inevitable retaliation -- to hasten the arrival of the 12th Imam. Ahmadinejad has even called for the reappearance of the 12th Imam from the podium of the United Nations General Assembly. During his speeches within Iran, Ahmadinejad has said that the main mission of the Islamic Revolution is to pave the way for the reappearance of the 12th Imam.

When NBC News' Ann Curry interviewed Ahmadinejad in Tehran in September 2009, she asked him about the Mahdi:

It is as lucid as daylight that the same slave masters and colonial powers that once instigated the two world wars have caused widespread misery and disorder with far-reaching effects across the globe since then," Ahmadinejad said. "Do these arrogant powers really have the competence and ability to run or govern the world?"

Ahmadinejad made no mention of his disputed re-election in June 2009 when security forces systematically crushed opposition protests, the current internal political turmoil that has sharply diminished his power, or Iran's nuclear program which the U.S. and its allies believe is aimed at producing nuclear weapons.

"While President Ahmadinejad is lecturing the world from the U.N. podium," Human Rights Watch's U.N. Director Philippe Bolopion said, "dissent is still being crushed ruthlessly in Iran and basic rights demanded by millions in the Arab world are brutally denied to Iranians who are demanding the same."

Rye Playland was shut down Tuesday after cops scuffled with Muslims upset that women wearing head scarves were barred from the rides, witnesses said.

The ban, which is not Muslim specific, was imposed about 3 years ago mostly to prevent hats from falling onto the tracks of roller coasters and other rides, park officials said.

"She just wanted to get on a ride. That was it," Dena Meawad said of the initial confrontation. "It's clear, this all happened because we're Muslim."

"My job is to reach out to different communities, including communities that have been connected with Israel and those who have not," Oren said in an interview Thursday. "Israel is a country with a large and respected Muslim minority. I just got back from Jerusalem two days ago and it's all decorated for Ramadan. They're an important part of our society."

The ambassdor, who has a Ph.D. in near eastern studies from Princeton University, also said he has a "personal interest" in Islam and the religion's traditions.

GIVEN how much sway the Tea Party has among Republicans in Congress and those seeking the Republican presidential nomination, one might think the Tea Party is redefining mainstream American politics.

Polls show that disapproval of the Tea Party is climbing. In April 2010, a New York Times/CBS News survey found that 18 percent of Americans had an unfavorable opinion of it, 21 percent had a favorable opinion and 46 percent had not heard enough. Now, 14 months later, Tea Party supporters have slipped to 20 percent, while their opponents have more than doubled, to 40 percent.

When war broke out in Europe again, and Jewish lives were in danger, Benghabrit used the mosque as a hiding place, issuing each person with a fake certificate of Muslim identity. One North African Jew named Albert Assouline who had escaped from a German prison camp, wrote of his experience hiding in the mosque, “No fewer than 1,732 resistance fighters found refuge in its underground caverns.

These included Muslim escapees but also Christians and Jews. The latter were by far the most numerous.” Accounts differ on the number of those saved, yet it remains a shining story of human solidarity.

BIRMINGHAM, England -- With police nowhere to be seen, the Muslims of Dudley Road armed themselves with bricks and stones, clubs and cricket bats to fend off carloads of marauding gangs.

Their vigilante stand in Birmingham's west end saved a humble row of family-run shops and a red-brick mosque from the looters' grasp - but at a terrible cost.

A carload of rioters sped into a fleeing crowd of shop defenders, witnesses said, hurling three young men into the air and killing amateur boxer Haroon Jahan, 21, and brothers Shazzad Ali, 30, and Abdul Musavir, 31.

 

The knee-jerk, anti-Muslim theorizing in the immediate aftermath of Friday's terrorist attacks in Norway was not the American media's finest moment.

In fact, it was a moment perfect for mockery, as Stephen Colbert deftly demonstrated on "The Colbert Report" last night. Colbert targeted both the left and the right as he used clips from  MSNBC, Fox News, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and CNN to illustrate his point.

(Note: This article is a week and a half old, but still quite relevant!)

Muslim Americans are now more optimistic about their lives than any other major American faith group as their economic well-being improves and they feel more politically enfranchised.

Pollsters noted in particular the rapid surge in positive sentiment among Muslim Americans. The percentage of Muslims who were "thriving" grew by 19 points since 2008, double that of any other major faith group.

While anti-Muslim advocates like Frank Gaffney, Rep. Allen West (R-FL) and Rep. Peter King (R-NY) have been outspoken advocates of the theory that radical Islamists are infiltrating the U.S., a poll released today by the Abu Dhabi Gallup center shows that American Muslims are the religious group in America most likely to reject violence against civilians.

A museum on the road separating Jewish west Jerusalem from the Arab neighborhoods in the city's east is attracting a daring group of artists from Middle Eastern nations that shun contact with Israel, trying to erode political barriers through art.

It's been a years-long process for the Museum on the Seam, which is one of the few art museums in Israel that aggressively tries to convince Arab and Muslim artists to show in its galleries. Many of their governments, notably Iran, make contacts with Israel illegal. In Egypt, which signed a 1979 peace treaty with the Jewish state, rules by many artists organizations forbid members to engage in any "normalization" with Israel.

Interfaith Health Fair provides free medical screenings for working poor who don't qualify for government-provided health care or other discounted programs

Muslim women would have to remove veils and show their faces to police on request or risk a prison sentence under proposed new laws in Australia's most populous state that have drawn criticism as culturally insensitive.

Contentions

Equivalence between Israeli Self-Defense and a Tyrant’s Crackdown

Omri Ceren 06.06.2011 - 12:39 PM

Yesterday was “Naska Day,” as Evelyn points out, the day on which the Syrians commemorate their failure to invade Israel by trying to invade Israel. Since we live in a media environment that’s fundamentally insane, partisans with press cards lined up to condemn the Israelis for defending their borders. The problem, of course, is that it’s hard to justify hysteria over Israel when Assad has killed over 1,000 Syrians in the last few months. Critics would point to the disproportionate obsession with the Jewish State and suggest that it had long ago reached pathological levels.

The criticism would apply doubly since the IDF was blaring warning announcements across the border and limiting itself to shots at rioters’ feet. Assad’s snipers and thugs, in contrast, are mowing down people in the streets. Just yesterday 35 protesters were killed in Jisr al-Shughour and Khan Sheikhoun, a number that by qualitative and quantitative measures exceeds what happened at the Golan border.

Quite the quandary. How can one justify focusing on the Israeli-Syrian border when objectively worse violence is taking place deeper inside Syria? This is a problem analogous to the one that anti-Israel journalists and human rights activists always face. They have to justify condemning Israeli operations despite how Palestinian atrocities (brainwashing children into becoming terrorists, targeting civilian centers with rockets, etc.) are much worse. In response, an entire cottage industry has taken root to manufacture moral and tactical equivalences between Israelis and Palestinians.

Not coincidentally, media outlets yesterday stumbled into the same trick.

Yahoo’s approach was obnoxious but not blatant. Recognizing the need at least to gesture in the general direction of Assad’s atrocities in northern Syria, they posted a story about the violence headlined “35 reported killed in crackdown in northern Syria.” To illustrate the post, however, they inserted pictures of the riot on the Golan with the caption “Demonstrators flee Israeli fired tear gas as they gather along Syria’s border with Israel.”

Some people might accuse the editors of intentionally trying to obscure the nature of the violence, and of drawing a straightforward equivalence between Assad’s brutal crackdown and Israel’s defense of its sovereignty. But it’s more likely a function of how there just aren’t many pictures coming out of the cities that Assad is leveling, while the regime helpfully opened up the Golan area to stringers and journalists. Since Yahoo’s editors needed something to illustrate Syrian violence, they reached for the only pictures that were available—which is exactly, of course, what the regime was counting on. Why media outlets would want to make themselves willing dupes for tyrants is a different question, but at least this wasn’t an issue of explicit equivocation.

Bloomberg’s editors and journalists don’t have that excuse. The outlet published breathless a breathless report with the headline “Syria, Israel Target Separate Protests in Middle East.” The lead was even worse:

Israeli forces fired on a crowd marking the anniversary of the 1967 Middle East War by trying to cross the border from Syria, which Israelis said was an effort by Syria’s regime to divert attention from its internal woes. Inside Syria, forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad killed 25 protesters and a general strike took place for the second day yesterday in the Syrian city of Hama in mourning for dozens of people killed there last week, according to the Web site Syrian Observatory, which monitors the unrest.

Anti-Israel partisans really, really want an excuse to focus on Jerusalem’s self-defense rather than Damascus’s atrocities. But this approach is lazy, and even putting aside the obvious lack of professionalism, it’s tired.

Media outlets should really switch back to the theory that Israeli self-defense on Golan bolsters Assad by giving him a distraction. That’s a transparently poor argument—Syrians know that Assad is just using the Golan to create a distraction, so in theory they’re not going to be unwillingly distracted if they’re already committed to reform—but at least it’s an argument. These equivocation gambits are just strained.

Although they make up approximately 10 percent of Egypt's population, Coptic Christians understand that the sensibilities of the Muslim majority are such that any assertion of equal rights or self-defense against discrimination is treated as a blow against Islam that will not be accepted. Thus, they must hope that whatever government emerges from the post-Mubarak transition will be able to protect them against the whims of an intolerant majority.

At the same time, it must also be understood that much of the anger against Israel in the region has little to do with disputes about borders as it does with revulsion against a Jewish majority state in which Muslims are the minority. As it happens, Israeli Arabs have, as has often been pointed out, more democratic rights (including the right to vote and hold office, seek legal redress in independent courts, and speak out via a free press) than those living in any Muslim country. But the idea that the Jews—who were reduced to dhimmitude in the Muslim world for 13 centuries—now rule over even a tiny portion of that part of the world is simply unthinkable to many Muslims.

After almost five years of war, many young Iraqis, exhausted by constant firsthand exposure to the violence of religious extremism, say they have grown disillusioned with religious leaders and skeptical of the faith that they preach.

In two months of interviews with 40 young people in five Iraqi cities, a pattern of disenchantment emerged, in which young Iraqis, both poor and middle class, blamed clerics for the violence and the restrictions that have narrowed their lives.

"The world Muslim population in 2030 is expected to reach 2.2 billion from 1.6 billion in 2010, with Pakistan becoming the largest Muslim nation, a study said.

" A leader of the Southern Baptist Convention has withdrawn from a coalition that supports the rights of Muslims to build mosques in their communities. Richard Land, the head of the SBC's Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, said he heard from many Southern Baptists who felt the work of the Interfaith Coalition on Mosques crossed the line from defending religious freedom to promoting Islam.

"The Coalition was formed last year as an initiative of the Anti-Defamation League, a Jewish group that fights discrimination

"The New Year's Day suicide bombing of a church that killed 21 people has opened up a vein of fury among Egypt's Christians, built up over years of what they call government failure to address persistent discrimination and violence against their community.

Two weeks ago, a Palestinian from Bethlehem was arrested by the US-financed and trained Palestinian Authority security forces. He was charged with "carrying out commercial transactions with residents of a hostile state."

No, he was not buying uranium from Iran. His purported crime was purchasing wood products from an Israeli community located beyond the 1949 armistice lines.

Denied bail by the US-funded PA magistrate's court in Bethlehem, he has been remanded to custody pending the conclusion of his trial.

This man's arrest is part of what the unelected, US-supported Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad has touted as his "National Honor Fund." The goal of this project is to ban all economic contact between Palestinians and Jews who live and work beyond the 1949 armistice lines. As far as the supposedly moderate Fayyad is concerned, those Jews and Israel generally comprise the "hostile state," that the Palestinians under Fayyad's leadership are being compelled to boycott.

The UN was only able to fund 52 percent of the humanitarian aid it wanted to provide to Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza in 2010, according to statistics it released on Wednesday at a press conference in Jerusalem.

It's the first time such a large gap has existed between the initial aid request and the amount of money donated since the UN began a humanitarian appeal for Palestinians to member states and international organizations in 2003.

It seems that even the animals have now turned against Arabs.

The Western-funded Palestinian Authority in the West Bank have been using animals in its campaign against Israel. About two years ago, Mahmoud Abbas's official news agency, Wafa, reported that Israel had released poison-resistant rats to drive Arab residents of Jerusalem out of their homes.

The report said that "Rats have become an Israeli weapon to displace and expel Arab residents of the occupied Old City of Jerusalem. Settlers flood the Old City of Jerusalem with rats."

It is not clear how these rats were taught to stay away from Jews, who also happen to live in the Old City.

Such allegations reflect a sick mindset and are part of a long-standing tradition of blaming Israel and Jews for almost everything that goes wrong in Arab countries and the rest of the world.

"Egyptian newspapers on Thursday wrote of a devastated nation marred by mass killing and torture.

For the second consecutive week, Egypt's papers find themselves busy with covering acts of sectarian violence, of which the latest manifestation occurred Tuesday when a Muslim policeman allegedly shot dead a Coptic Christian on a train and wounded five others.

"The train shooting was even worse than the New Year's Eve church bombing in Alexandria," said Coptic Bishop Makarios, who was present at the scene. "The church attack was organized, while the train shooting simply reflected the chaotic situation on the Egyptian street."

The myriad of reasons given for the mass deaths of various species of animals around the world is almost as baffling as the events themselves, lending credence to the notion that something very strange is going on. The list of incidents grows by the day and reaches staggering proportions. We must find an answer, and soon.

South Sudan, currently part of Sudan - the largest country in Africa, is holding a historic referendum this week following a 2005 peace treaty, where its citizens will decide whether to remain unified, or for South Sudan to secede and become a new nation. The 2005 treaty brought to an end decades of civil war between the Islamic north and predominantly Christian and animist south.

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NV Group: Action for Africa!

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"The massacre of 21 Copts at a New Year's Eve mass has been called 'a watershed moment'.

"The Salafist war on Christians in the Middle East is intensifying fairly rapidly, with profound consequences not only for Christians in the lands of their faith's earliest history (keep in mind that Christianity had planted itself in Egypt well before the birth of Muhammad) but for the rights of all ethnic and religious minorities in the greater Middle East".

"Egypt tightened security around churches on Thursday, the eve of Coptic Christmas, after a New Year's Day bombing killed up to 23 and sparked angry protests by Christians demanding more protection from Muslim militants.

"The car explosion that went off in front of Saints Coptic Orthodox Church in Alexandria killed 21 and injured 96 parishioners who were attending a New Year's Eve Mass.

"Eyewitnesses confirmed that security forces guarding the church withdrew nearly one hour before the blast, leaving only four policemen and an officer to guard such a big church and nearly 2000 people attending the midnight mass. "Normally they would have waited until the mass was over," said el-Gezeiry. He also commented on the Muslim's schadenfreude at the massacre at the church, who were heard chanting "Allah Akbar."

"Is this a victory?" He asks. "Whoever saw this fire and people dying and body parts all over the place and could still chant 'Allah Akbar' is a terrorist."

(Ehav Ever is an Israeli ethnographer who traces his roots-- on one side of his family-- to Senegalese Jews).

About this video:
"It is on various documents that talk about the Jewish migrations into West Africa that came from three sources.

1) Southern Arabia
2) North Africa
3) Spain and Portugal

The Simon Wiesenthal Center, the Los Angeles-based human rights organization, has taken the unusual step of issuing a travel advisory about security concerns in Sweden because of growing anti-Jewish discrimination.
"We reluctantly are issuing this advisory because religious Jews and other members of the Jewish community there have been subject to anti-Semitic taunts and harassment. There have been dozens of incidents reported to the authorities but have not resulted in arrests or convictions for hate crimes", said the two Wiesenthal Center representatives in a statement.

"Bridge Over the Wadi" is the name of a very unique elementary school in the Wadi 'Ara area in Israel: a jointly-managed Jewish-Arab school for Jewish and Arab kids, where teachers instruct in both languages and teach both cultures and narratives.

Fanatics from a banned Islamic hate group have launched a nationwide poster campaign denouncing Christmas as evil.

Organisers plan to put up thousands of placards around the UK claiming the season of goodwill is responsible for rape, teenage pregnancies, abortion, promiscuity, crime and paedophilia.

They hope the campaign will help 'destroy Christmas' in this country and lead to Britons converting to Islam instead.

"Around a third of young British Muslims favour killing in the name of Islam, according to a survey revealed by the WikiLeaks' publication of U.S. diplomatic cables.

"The Islamic Society of North America slammed Tuesday the Hamas for attempting to block a group of Gazan youth from visiting the Washington Holocaust Museum, saying they "strongly recommend" the visit.

DON - It is a Sunday night in London's East End and the self-styled "most hated man in Britain" is holding court, reveling in his vision of a Taliban victory over America and a world under Islamic Shariah law.

The crowd of about 250 listens intently as Anjem Choudary issues a call to arms in the pristine surroundings of the newly refurbished art deco conference center, built to host weddings and business meetings.

"There are many battlefields," he says calmly into a microphone. "There's a battlefield outside 10 Downing Street [home to Britain's prime minister] and in the mountains of the Tora Bora [in Afghanistan]."

Any man who fails to fight, he warns, will face difficulty when the "angel of death" arrives and he is forced to explain to Allah why he did not raise his hand "against the oppressor" out of fear. "Allah will say to him, 'Am I not more worthy to be feared than them?'" Choudary says.

"Allahu Akbar!" the men shout out in unison, as if a war cry, during his speech. "Allahu Akbar." God is great.

A group of women, all heavily veiled and sitting in a screened-off area, remain quiet throughout.

As former leader of the banned Islamist organizations al-Muhajiroun and Islam4UK, Choudary was kept off the bill and appeared as the surprise star speaker at the rally.

His groups may be outlawed but, unlike his female followers, Choudary will not be silenced.

His message is one that echoes across Europe, which experts say is home to thousands of people who would wholeheartedly support Choudary's "ultimate objective" — the "domination of the world by Islam."

The majority of Muslims are not Islamists, who believe in a society based on Islamic law, and not all of the latter are seeking world domination or are willing to use violence.

But fear of another Islamist-inspired atrocity after Madrid in 2004 — 191 dead — and London in 2005 — 53 dead — remains high.

Rightly so, according to Dr. John J. Le Beau, a former CIA officer and now professor of strategy and security studies at Germany's George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies.

"It's a mathematical certainty there will be a successful attack in Europe at some point," he told msnbc.com. "The amount of attempted plots we see is not decreasing. I think what we have seen is a ... strengthening of attempted attacks that in some cases have come pretty close."

Le Beau, who cautioned that putting a figure on the number of Islamists was a "soft science," estimated there were between 5,000 and 10,000 people in Europe "willing to engage in violence."

In 2007, the German Central Institute Islam Archive said there were 53.7 million Muslims living in Europe.

A backlash is growing. Support for the far-right in normally liberal countries like Sweden and the Netherlands is on the rise. French lawmakers voted for a ban on full face veils. Protest groups, such as the English Defense League which has been linked to soccer hooligans, have made headlines.

Le Beau warned of "an incipient clash of cultures." The consequences of another terrorist spectacular — intelligence reports recently warned an al-Qaida-linked group was planning to hit Western Europe with a commando-style raid like that on Mumbai, India — could be profound, he suggested.

"I could see that leading to a spontaneous violent reaction on the part of others. Could this spin out of control? Sure," he said. "I think that would be very dangerous because ... it runs the risk of sectarianizing or 'Balkanizing' Western Europe."

Europe is home to ancient conflicts. The Balkans, which includes the former Yugoslavia, has been the scene of intermittent religious strife stretching back to the fall of Constantinople, now Istanbul, to the Muslim Ottoman Empire in 1453.

After the fall of Yugoslavian Communism, a resurgence of ethnic tensions led to the 1992-1995 Bosnian War, during which 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys were massacred by Bosnian Serb forces in a single act of genocide.

The U.K., far removed from such turmoil, has a long tradition of tolerating other countries' dissidents. In the 19th century, political philosopher Karl Marx took refuge in London after outraging authorities in his native Germany and France.

But that tradition has been frayed by the increasingly vocal presence of Islamists in the U.K.

'Crazies' flock to 'Londonistan'
In the 1990s, the city became so popular for Islamists fleeing authorities in Muslim countries that some commentators dubbed it "Londonistan."

Citing the WikiLeaks cables,
the Guardian newspaper last week reported that the future U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron told an American official in April 2009 that the former Labour government had "let in a lot of crazies and did not wake up early enough" to the danger posed by Muslim extremists.

Le Beau said while Choudary and others like him were unlikely to fight themselves, they were helping to recruit people to the cause who would.

"These groups are not the terrorist cells that are going to launch an attack," he said. "These are the groups that radicalize individuals and put them in the frame of mind where they might engage in an attack."

Richard Reid, the so-called "shoe bomber" who attempted to blow up a flight from Paris to Miami in December 2001, was radicalized after meeting extremists at mosques in London, his father Robin tearfully told BBC News.

Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a Nigerian dubbed the "underwear bomber" after being accused of trying to blow up a Detroit-bound flight on Christmas Day last year, studied at University College London. Yemeni officials told the BBC he became an Islamist in the U.K., although the British government has denied this.

And London's Finsbury Park Mosque, now renamed after a takeover by moderates, was once the power-base of radical cleric Abu Hamza, a former nightclub bouncer who organized a conference praising the 9/11 attackers. He was later sentenced to seven years in prison for inciting murder and racial hatred.

A reformed Islamist
Ghaffar Hussain once counted himself among London's Islamists.

His reaction to the Sept. 11 attacks was "well, so what?"

"I felt it was kind of redressing some of the imbalance," Hussain said. "'They've done this to the Palestinians by supporting the Israelis, this is the price you pay.'"

However, he now battles the Islamist ideology as head of outreach at a British counter-extremism think tank, the Quilliam Foundation.

"London is like the heart of the Arab world," Hussain said. "The political dissidents are all based here."

In the 10 years before 9/11, foreign Arab dissidents "set up shop and carried on doing what they were doing in their own countries: Preaching violent jihad," he explained.

They found a ready-made constituency of young, disaffected, second-generation Muslims who had "experienced racism when they were younger."

"Merge those two together and you have a recipe for disaster," Hussain said. "I was caught up in that ... and became active in my own area, doing speeches, giving out leaflets for about three years.

"I abhor any kind of extremism, anything that takes innocent life. I look back with surprise at the things I used to believe."

His "wild guess" on the number of Islamists in Europe was "less than 5,000 hardcore activists" with a further 20,000 to 30,000 people who are "broadly sympathetic at times."

Al-Qaida's propaganda gives an indication of where they believe support is strongest, Hussain said, as they tend to publish only in English and German, not French, Spanish or Dutch.

Fears of a terrorist attack may have recently gripped Germany, but Hussain said authorities there had not done enough to minimize the risk. Many of the 3 million Muslims there came as "guest-workers" and he said there had been little attempt to integrate them into society.

"Germany is a bit of a basket case. Those communities are very hard to penetrate. Guessing, I'd say it’s probably not as bad as the U.K., but nobody really knows," he said.

Angry young men
As for Choudary, "he’s got about 50 followers, all young men — I know some of them personally — very, very ill-informed," Hussain said. "All they know is they are angry about something."

Choudary has achieved infamy in Britain, particularly after announcing an Islamist parade through the town of Wootton Bassett, where local people have taken to lining the streets to pay respects to dead soldiers as they return home through a nearby air force base.

The event, which would have seen the Islamists carrying empty coffins to symbolize Muslims "mercilessly murdered" in Afghanistan, did not take place but still sparked public anger.

Given his rhetoric, some in Britain question Choudary's right to freedom of speech.

And the European Union is taking steps to limit the flow of Islamist propaganda, putting itself at odds with the U.S. and its adherence to the First Amendment.

Gilles de Kerchove, the EU's counterterrorism coordinator, said legislation would soon be implemented which would allow "even 'free speech' member states to shut down websites, to bring people to court when they cross the line."

"That's where we have a problem with the U.S.," he told msnbc.com. "Most of the neo-Nazi and most radical Islamist websites are hosted by U.S. servers."

The EU has invested millions of dollars on research to develop programs capable of monitoring the internet for the "automatic detection of threats and abnormal behavior or violence," the Sunday Telegraph reported.

According to de Kerchove, collecting more information about flights, passengers and cargo and using computer programs to analyze this data could prevent terrorist attacks.

The attempt to send bombs hidden in printers from Yemen to Chicago in October was detected by Saudi Arabian intelligence. However, a surveillance program might have red-flagged the shipment as a U.S. synagogue was likely to purchase office equipment closer to home.

"It's stupid to send a printing machine from Yemen to a synagogue in Chicago," de Kerchove said. "That does not make sense."

He insisted the danger to Europe remained real, despite the lack of a major attack since London in 2005.

"That's not because there's no threat. It's because the security services have been very effective," de Kerchove said, highlighting recent arrests in connection with an alleged plot to kill the moderate head of a Paris mosque.

Like Le Beau, he thought it likely that a significant attack would eventually slip through. "Since the threat is becoming more ... diverse and complex, it's not that risky to speak like this and say, 'It's not if, but when,'" he added.

Choudary, who rose to prominence in 1999 when media reports described him as a key figure in the recruitment of fighters for Islamist forces around the world, insists that his beliefs did not mean "I'm going to kill you."

'There will always be wars'
The mild-mannered Choudary told msnbc.com that some "battlefields" were merely "ideological" ones.

The former lawyer said he "cannot have a friendship" with a non-Muslim but different religions could live side-by-side "peacefully."

"As long as my life and wealth is protected in Britain, I do not target the life and wealth (of people here)," Choudary said, citing a passage from the Quran to that effect.

However, he cautioned this stance was a matter for legitimate religious debate. "There are many Muslims who do not believe that," he said. "(London suicide bomber) Mohammed Siddique Khan didn’t believe that."

And he appeared almost to relish the prospect of ethnic violence.

"There will always be wars. The conflict will continue always. I think it's a matter of time before another 9/11 takes place and another 7/7 (London bombings)," Choudary said.

"I think we are on the brink of many more operations in the West. This is going to be very, very nasty ... The Muslims engaged in jihad are not going to stop. People will declare jihad in Britain and America. I don't think you can stomach something like that."

"While American officials have publicly been relatively upbeat about their progress in disrupting terrorist financing, the internal State Department cables, obtained by WikiLeaks and made available to several news organizations, offer a more pessimistic account, with blunt assessments of the threats to the United States from money flowing to militants affiliated with Al Qaeda, the Taliban, Hamas, Lashkar-e-Taiba and other groups.

The Palestinian Authority expressed "surprise" over the participation of senior representatives of the Greek Orthodox Church in the recent ceremony marking the reopening of the access road to the Monastery of St. George in Wadi Kelt, courtesy of the State of Israel. The Tourism Ministry, National Roads Company and Civil Administration for Judea and Samaria on Tuesday held a ceremony marking the end of five months of work to improve accessibility to the fifth-century monastery, undertaken at the behest of Greek Orthodox Patriarch Theophilos III to improve pilgrim and tourist access to the site.

The "politically correct" view in much of the Arab world has been that the only real obstacle to peace in the middle east has been the existence of Israel. However, the recent release of Wikileaks information has shown that this is not really true-- while hesitant to express it publically, many Arab countries in the area feel that the main threat is actually from Iran and not from Israel.

Much of the mainstream media has acted as if this is a new bit of information, when in fact informed observers have known this for some time. This article-- from early 20008 (!) provides excellent background, and puts recents Wikileaks info in perspective!

""As soon as Obama took over, he said he would do this and that -- a lot of things. But he still hasn't met a single goal," said Saad Zaki Khalil, 56, who was selling cigarette lighters in central Cairo.

Seventeen months after Obama's Cairo University speech, al Qaeda is still threatening the West, peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians remain stalled over the issue of West Bank settlements and U.S. troops remain in Iraq and Afghanistan.

"The peace process in the Middle East might not be the bearer of good news, but it appears that off camera there is a glimmer of hope when it comes to cooperation in the region.

"For the past decade Israeli and Arab students from different countries have been involved in a joint medical program, which understandably has been kept secret.

What if, instead of slavery, the United States had murdered all of the African Americans? What if, instead of relocating some Native American tribes, they were completely wiped out? This annihilation is essentially what happened with the Armenians in the early 1900's and the Kurds in the 1980's.

Both the U.S. and Thailand agree that inserting Americans into the fight could transform Thailand into the terror war's next international front. Neither country wants to attract global networks supplying cash, weapons and young ideologues willing to die.

"We're very concerned and very interested," Bennett said. "But this is an internal insurgency. The U.S. is not going to step into that. If we step into that, we're inviting transnational global terrorism to provide support. It's completely the wrong approach."

The U.S. can never put "boots on the ground" in the Thai-Malay borderlands, Bennett said. But, he said, agents can assist with "equipment, training and advice."

Though less conspicuous and less sophisticated, Thailand's insurgency is no less savage than Pakistan's. A loose network of militants in the three southernmost provinces is fighting to restore a lost Islamic sultanate known as "Pattani," annexed by Thailand (then Siam) in the early 1900s. They have torched state-run schools, beheaded monks and targeted civilians with remote bombs.

The century-long insurgency reignited in 2004 when separatists seized assault rifles and grenade launchers from an armory, shot troops and went on an arson spree. Since then, the insurgency has led to 4,100 deaths and 7,100 injuries, according to Human Rights Watch.

"A lack of mosques and halal food outlets in the north were especially serious problems, said the letter to Napolitano (photo), written by the union of Islamic communities in Italy (UCOII).

"It would be another test of a question they wondered when they first set off from New York three weeks earlier: Is America still the accepting nation that embraced our forebears or has it reached a new level of intolerance?

Far from the media frenzy dominating headlines, from the so-called "ground zero mosque" to a pastor's planned Quran burning, Aman Ali and Bassam Tariq traveled more than 13,000 miles into the heart of America over the last month, visiting 30 mosques in 30 days for Ramadan.

"Conspiracy. Just saying the word in conversation can make people politely edge away, looking for someone who won't corner them with wild theories about how Elvis, John F. Kennedy, and Bigfoot are cryogenically frozen in an underground bunker.

""About 200 people pelted stones at our mosque and clashed with the police for about an hour. It is not clear yet who was the organiser of the mob," Nurahim, the local general secretary of the sect, told the AFP news agency.

"Al-Shabab, the Somalia Al-Qaeda affiliated militant group, says it is close to the presidential palace in capital Mogadishu which will allow it to control the southern part of the country.

In a 10-minute video obtained exclusively by Adnkronos International labelled "The African Crusaders" (www.adnkronos.com/AKI/Italiano/hp.), Al-Shabab refers to troops from the African Union, primarily in Mogadishu to defend the airport, as "crusaders."

"Israel's Muslim and Christian Arabs can develop expertise in biotech and life sciences thanks to a national business project created in 2002. While the Jewish state was founded as a home for Jewish people from all over the world, it is also home to Arab Muslim and Arab Christian minorities, mostly living in the Galilee region in the north of the country.

In the United States, equal opportunity initiatives are well developed to ensure that blacks, Asians, Latinos and every other minority can access education and find gainful employment and opportunities. Israel is providing something similar for its minorities.

"Gaza markets booming with produce and goods and people. These pictures of Gaza were taken in late 2009 from Palestine Today. I do not know the source of the other pictures from the Muslim world. Note the Palestinian Flag flapping in the breezes of the Gaza Beach in the bottom left photo.

"Founded by Anat Pinto in 2005 and turned into a non-profit in 2009, Galilee Moms enables mothers from different cultures around the Galilee and Israel to get to know each other through their common interest in sharing culinary recipes.

Readers of my commentaries know that I usually send one a week. Last week, however, I sent two because the Helen Thomas incident occurred after I had finished my regular weekly article, and I thought the Thomas affair required a response from me. I called for her to step down, which she did.

Occasionally, readers say that I write too much regarding the hostility directed toward Israel, particularly by the United Nations. My reply is this: shouldn't I defend Israel when I believe it is being unfairly attacked day after day at the U.N. and throughout the world? Shouldn't I defend Israel when it is undeniably mistreated by the President of the United States, who enlisted me in his campaign in 2008 to campaign for him in Jewish communities in Florida? Shouldn't I defend Israel when I believe much of the anti-Israel invective is actually a manifestation of anti-Semitism, which is rising throughout the world?

"Muslim states said on Wednesday that what they call "islamophobia" is sweeping the West and its media and demanded that the United Nations take tougher action against it.

"Diplomats say the resolution, which also tells the investigator to make recommendations to the Human Rights Council on how its strictures might be implemented, is bound to pass given the majority the OIC and its allies have in the body.

The countries of the majority group, which also include India and Brazil, ensure that its members and their friends outside the council -- such as Sri Lanka and Iran -- are shielded from any serious criticism of their rights record.

"nmates are converting to Islam in order to gain perks and the protection of powerful Muslim gangs, the Chief Inspector of Prisons warns today.

Dame Anne Owers says that some convicted criminals are taking up the religion in jail to receive benefits only available to practising Muslims.

"The number of women being recruited to Al-Qaeda is growing exponentially and European and American converts to Islam are swelling their ranks. These so-called "mothers of terror" are taking up the armed struggle to prove their devotion to their new-found faith, according to a report due to be presented in Rome on Monday to Italy's interior minister, Roberto Maroni.

"Most people in the UK associate Islam with extremism and the repression of women, a survey has suggested.

"Human rights group Amnesty International has released images of what it claims is US involvement in air strikes on an alleged Al-Qaeda training camp in Yemen late last year. It also criticised Washington for allegedly using cluster munitions and failing to prevent civilian casualties.

Israel of course is the US's most threatened ally. And Obama's treatment of Israel has been uniquely shabby--and dangerous. Guided by his ideological worldview which argues that US support for Israel is the root of the Arab and Islamic world's animus towards the US, Obama has advanced a policy of punishing Israel and wooing its worst enemies that has radically changed the Islamic power calculus. By seeking to appease Iran and Syria for their aggressive behavior and by courting an ever more radical Turkish regime, Obama has humiliated Egypt and Jordan that signed peace treaties with Israel. In so doing, he has convinced the Arabs that the only way to retain and expand their power is by attacking Israel.

THIS BRINGS US to Israel's current quandary about how to respond to the international campaign against it. Israel of course can do nothing to change the potency of Jew hatred in the Islamic world. It can also do nothing to change American behavior. For as long as Obama is president, US foreign policy can be expected to remain on its current trajectory. That is, for at least the next two and a half years, the US will continue to play a destabilizing and hostile role in the region.

What this means is that Israel should adopt a strategy that minimizes the international lynch mob's ability to get close to it and maximizes Israel's ability to knock the mob off balance.

...

And as to that campaign, it is time for Israel to launch a counter-offensive. Its representatives at the UN should demand an investigation into Turkey's illegal sponsorship of the pro-Hamas flotilla. They should raise such protests at every UN forum and continue to protest until they are thrown out of the meetings and then return, the next day to relaunch their protests.

" A concert by Elton John has tested the limits of Morocco's drive for modernity, probing this Muslim nation's complex and ambiguous attitudes toward homosexuality like rarely before.

Islamists in the North African kingdom were outraged by the gay pop star's visit, while the royal palace, government and his many fans backed his appearance Wednesday night.

An historic speech-- now more important than ever: "This is a video of then President George W. Bush's entire "Islam is Peace" speech that was delivered at the Islamic Center in Washington D.C. 6 days after 911.

"Morocco has expelled foreign Christians who tried to convert Muslims because, as a moderate Islamic state, it wants to foster "order and calm" and avoid a clash between faiths, its Islamic affairs minister said.

The government has expelled around 100 foreign Christians since March, many of them aid workers, in what Western diplomats have called an unprecedented crackdown on undercover preaching.