We said we'd go. We didn't say we'd be nice.

The US attended an "anti-terrorism conference" in Saudi Arabia, but refused to put on a friendly face for representatives of the IRI regime in Tehran. In fact, Frances Townsend had some harsh words for the islamist entity. This Agence France-Presse story reports that

Delegates from the United States and archfoe Iran engaged in a "heated" exchange at a counter-terrorism conference in Saudi Arabia, the local media reported but a US official insisted the encounter was "professional."

(Hat tip: Little Green Footballs, which turns 4 today. Happy birthday LGF!)

"The exchange that took place in the first general assembly was a professional one reflecting differences in views between the US and Iranian delegations," a US embassy spokesperson in Riyadh told AFP. But the English-daily Saudi Gazette said the Iranian and US delegations at the closed-door conference were reportedly "locked in a heated exchange... when the issue of what constitutes terrorism arose." Diplomatic sources told AFP that Saturday's address by US Homeland Security Advisor Frances Townsend had prompted the head of the Iranian delegation to give a speech in response. There were no details on the content of his speech.

Read the whole thing at the link. Go Frances Townsend!

Morning Report: February 2, 2005

Memories of an African genocide. Reflecting on the UN's refusal to recognize the killing in Sudan as "genocide", Mamamontezz recalls an encounter with survivors of another crime against humanity: 'I approached the man and asked him if he wouldn't mind answering a few questions about Rawanda. I didn't have to ask...he said it was all true. His wife showed me what was left of her left hand--her thumb, index, and middle finger. I also noticed sever burn marks on her face, but knew better than to inquire. The man unbuttoned his collar and showed me where a Hutu had tried to slit his throat. The man told me he only survived because he thought that since he was going to die, it was better to fight like a man, than die like a dog.' (Mamamontezz)

Allawi slams ABC insult. Iraqi Interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi was "disappointed and insulted" by statements from producers at ABC News, Allawi's office said. ABC had suggested that Allawi's refusal to grant an interview to Peter Jennings ' equates to the prime minister not being caring about American soldiers or being grateful for the United States’ leading role in the coalition', according to this Fox News item. (Fox)

Dean likely to lead Democrats. According to this New York Times article, Howard Dean may succeed in his quest to become the next leader of the Democratic National Committee: 'Dr. Dean's dominance was secured after Martin Frost, a former representative from Texas, whom many Democrats viewed as the institutional counterpart to Dr. Dean, dropped out after failing - in what had become an increasingly long-shot effort - to win support from national labor unions. The A.F.L.-C.I.O. announced instead that it would remain neutral, freeing its affiliate members to do what they wanted, which proved in many cases to be boarding the Dean train. "It's a fait accompli, it's over: Dean's going to be it," said Gerald McEntee, head of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, who runs the umbrella political organization for all the unions in the A.F.L.-C.I.O. Actually, the final word rests with the 447 members of the Democratic National Committee, who will vote on Feb. 12 in Washington on a successor to Terry McAuliffe. And Dr. Dean faces a last obstacle, the candidacy of Donnie Fowler Jr., a Democratic operative from South Carolina. Fowler aides said they hoped to benefit from the appearance of this as a two-man race with an opponent with a history of sometimes unorthodox political behavior. Still, they acknowledged that the possibility of a real competition was dimming.' (New York Times via College Republicans)

Debka on Rice, Israel, Palestine. A new analysis by Debka looks at US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's stated policies toward Palestine and Israel. 'New US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice’s upcoming visit to the Middle East next week has galvanized the region’s leaders into a frenzied round of travel and summit consultations. The centerpiece summit will bring together Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon, Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak and Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) at Sharm al Sheikh next Tuesday. Jordan’s King Abdullah has also been invited.' Debka notes the points of disagreement between Washington and Jerusalem: 'Amid this flurry of movement, nothing has happened to change the fundamentals at stake between Israel and the Palestinians. Rice made this clear on Monday, January 31, ahead of her visit to the region and at the previous Senate hearings before her confirmation last week: “Without a viable and contiguous Palestinian state that represents the aspirations of the Palestinian people – meaning enough land to function well - there will be no peace for either Palestinian people or Israelis.” This statement does not address the concerns troubling Jerusalem. ... ' Read the full article at the link. (Debka)

New website traces African-American history. A new website by the Schomburg Center of the New York Public Library offers a fresh take on African-American history: 'The transatlantic slave trade has created an enduring image of black men and women as transported commodities, and is usually considered the most defining element in the construction of the African Diaspora, but it is centuries of additional movements that have given shape to the nation we know today. This is the story that has not been told. In Motion: The African-American Migration Experience presents a new interpretation of African-American history, one that focuses on the self-motivated activities of peoples of African descent to remake themselves and their worlds. Of the thirteen defining migrations that formed and transformed African America, only the transatlantic slave trade and the domestic slave trades were coerced, the eleven others were voluntary movements of resourceful and creative men and women, risk-takers in an exploitative and hostile environment. Their survival skills, efficient networks, and dynamic culture enabled them to thrive and spread, and to be at the very core of the settlement and development of the Americas. Their hopeful journeys changed not only their world and the fabric of the African Diaspora but also the Western Hemisphere.' In Motion: the African-American Migration Experience offers access to an enormous database of documents relating to the transatlantic slave trade, the domestic slave trade, Caribbean migration, and other chapters of African-American history. (NYPL via CNN)

Haim Harari: At the Eye of the Storm

You may be wondering why I don't spend more time covering the Israeli/Palestinian conflict in this blog. After all, the dispute between Palestine and Israel is the central issue in the Middle East, right?

No; I don't think that it is. And neither does Israeli physicist Haim Harari, whose article The View from the Eye of the Storm attracted some well-deserved attention in the blogosphere recently. I'm getting around to Harari a little bit late, but the article is just as relevant now - in the wake of the Iraqi elections - as it was last spring.

Why do I put aside Israel and its own immediate neighborhood? Because Israel and any problems related to it, in spite of what you might read or hear in the world media, is not the central issue, and has never been the central issue in the upheaval in the region. Yes, there is a 100 year-old Israeli-Arab conflict, but it is not where the main show is. The millions who died in the Iran-Iraq war had nothing to do with Israel. The mass murder happening right now in Sudan, where the Arab Moslem regime is massacring its black Christian citizens, has nothing to do with Israel. The frequent reports from Algeria about the murders of hundreds of civilian in one village or another by other Algerians have nothing to do with Israel. Saddam Hussein did not invade Kuwait, endangered Saudi Arabia and butchered his own people because of Israel. Egypt did not use poison gas against Yemen in the 60's because of Israel. Assad the Father did not kill tens of thousands of his own citizens in one week in El Hamma in Syria because of Israel. The Taliban control of Afghanistan and the civil war there had nothing to do with Israel. The Libyan blowing up of the Pan-Am flight had nothing to do with Israel, and I could go on and on and on.

The root of the trouble is that this entire Moslem region is totally dysfunctional, by any standard of the word, and would have been so even if Israel would have joined the Arab league and an independent Palestine would have existed for 100 years.

Harari goes on to say:

I should also say a word about the millions of decent, honest, good people who are either devout Moslems or are not very religious but grew up in Moslem families. They are double victims of an outside world, which now develops Islamophobia and of their own environment, which breaks their heart by being totally dysfunctional. The problem is that the vast silent majority of these Moslems are not part of the terror and of the incitement but they also do not stand up against it. They become accomplices, by omission, and this applies to political leaders, intellectuals, business people and many others. Many of them can certainly tell right from wrong, but are afraid to express their views.

He then develops the idea that today's terror/fascism structure rests on four "pillars": (1) the use of suicide-murderers by wealthy elites; (2) the use of propaganda to incite, and to conceal, the killing of innocents; (3) the channeling of money through three "concentric spheres" - (a) the innermost circle of the terrorists themselves, (b) the infrastructure of preachers, planners, and supporters who make a "very comfortable living" supporting the killers, and (c) the outer circle, which serves as the guardian, and consists of "religious" organizations, "news" media, and "educational" and "welfare" institutions, and provides the ideological environment needed to nurture the terrorist apparatus; and finally (4) the fourth pillar is the total anarchism, atavism, and nihilism of the terrorist movement:

The civilized world believes in democracy, the rule of law, including international law, human rights, free speech and free press, among other liberties. There are naïve old-fashioned habits such as respecting religious sites and symbols, not using ambulances and hospitals for acts of war, avoiding the mutilation of dead bodies and not using children as human shields or human bombs. Never in history, not even in the Nazi period, was there such total disregard of all of the above as we observe now.

Go take a few minutes to read Harari's article. I'm planning to post more on it soon.

A Beautiful Day

Today, January 30, 2005, a new Iraq was born.

As fate would have it, today is also my birthday - so this comes as a very special "birthday present" for me. A little background: fourteen years ago, my unit was stationed on the Saudi/Kuwaiti border awaiting our orders to go into Kuwait. On the night of January 29, we got the word that a column of enemy armor had crossed into Saudi Arabia and attacked the town of Khafji. We engaged them, and lost two vehicles and several men that night - the first Allied casualties of the ground conflict. For me, the anniversary of our losses at Khafji cast a shadow over my birthday each year since then - as did our failure to finish the job back in 1991.

Today, I can celebrate my birthday with unmingled joy, because it is also the birthday of a free and democratic Iraq.

Morning Report: January 30, 2005

Iraqis vote in free elections. Iraq the Model declares, "The people have won." Free Iraqi writes, "It's like the Eid but only a thousand times better." Iraqi Bloggers Central has all the latest updates from the Iraqi blogosphere. Kat at The Middle Ground rates media coverage. (Can you say "big fat F"?) Roger L. Simon takes on the reactionaries.

"This is Iraq's army, not Allawi's."

A soldier gets a lesson in democracy in this election day post at Iraq the Model.

"I felt like a king walking in his own kingdom." Ali writes about his feelings on voting for the first time in a REAL election. I don't think any of us born and raised in the US can imagine what it's like to fear for one's life because of having voted "NO" to a dictator. Ali doesn't have to imagine.

Some hard questions. Reader warriorjason posts this comment:

Where are all the Human sheild that went to Iraq to protect the Ba'ath Party before the invasion? Why have they not come out to protect the Iraqi voter from the terrorists? Why aren't American feminist organizations holding a rally in support of their sisters in Iraq who voted for the first time? These are serious questions that need to be answered by the world and American left.

Indeed.

Above and Beyond

Voter turnout exceeded expectations in Iraq's first free election of the post-Saddam era, according to news reports.

Please

go read this post by Ocean Guy. In commemoration of the liberation of Auschwitz.

The Holocaust

This post is part of a Blogburst commemorating the liberation of Auschwitz by the Red Army in 1945.

The Holocaust, symbolized by Auschwitz, the worst of the death camps, occurred in the wake of consistent, systematic, unrelenting anti-Jewish propaganda campaigns. As a result, the elimination of the Jews from German society was accepted as axiomatic, leaving open only two questions: when and how.

As Germany expanded its domination and occupation of Austria, Czechoslovakia, France, the Low Countries, Yugoslavia, Poland, parts of the USSR, Greece, Romania, Hungary, Italy and others countries, the way was open for Hitler to realize his well-publicized plan of destroying the Jewish people.

After experimentation, the use of Zyklon B on unsuspecting victim was adopted by the Nazis as the means of choice, and Auschwitz was selected as the main factory of death (more accurately, one should refer to the “Auschwitz-Birkenau complex”). The green light for mass annihilation was given at the Wannsee Conference, January 20, 1942.

The Wannsee Conference formalized "the final solution" - the plan to transport Europe's Jews to eastern labour and death camps. Ever efficient and bureaucratic, the Nazi kept a record of the meeting, which were discovered in 1947 in the files of the German Foreign Office. The record represents a summary made by Adolf Eichmann at the time, even though they are sometime referred to as "minutes".

Several of the Conference participants survived the war to be convicted at Nuremberg. One notorious participant, Adolf Eichmann, was tried and convicted in Jerusalem, and executed in 1962 in Ramlah prison.

The mass gassings of Europe's took place in Auschwitz between 1942 and the end of 1944, when the Nazis retreated before the advancing Red Army. Jews were transported to Auschwitz from all over Nazi-occupied or Nazi-dominated Europe and most were slaughtered in Auschwitz upon arrival, sometimes as many as 12,000 in one day. Some victims were selected for slave labour or “medical” experimentation before they were murdered or allowed to die. All were subject to brutal treatment.

In all, between three and four million people, mostly Jews, but also Poles and Red Army POWs, were slaughtered in Auschwitz alone (though some authors put the number at 1.3 million). Other death camps were located at Sobibor, Chelmno, Belzec (Belzek), Majdanek and Treblinka. Adding the toll of these and other camps, as well as the mass executions and the starvation im the Ghettos, six million Jews, men, women, the elderly and children lost their lives as a consequence of the Nazi atrocities.

Auschwitz was liberated by the Red Army on 27 January 1945, sixty years ago, after most of the prisoners were forced into a Death March westwards. The Red Army found in Auschwitz about 7,600 survivors, but not all could be saved.

For a long time, the Allies were well aware of the mass murder, but deliberately refused to bomb the camp or the railways leading to it. Ironically, during the Polish uprising, the Allies had no hesitation in flying aid to Warsaw, sometimes flying right over Auschwitz.

There are troubling parallels between the systematic vilification of Jews before the Holocaust and the current vilification of the Jewish people and Israel. Suffice it to note the annual flood of anti-Israel resolutions at the UN; or the public opinion polls taken in Europe, which single out Israel as a danger to world peace; or the divestment campaigns being waged in the US against Israel; or the attempts to delegitimize Israel’s very existence. The complicity of the Allies in WW II is mirrored by the support the PLO has been receiving from Europe, China and Russia to this very day.

If remembering Auschwitz should teach us anything, it is that we must all support Israel and the Jewish people against the vilification and the complicity we are witnessing, knowing where it inevitably leads.

For more information, see Israpundit blogburst info.

See also this special edition of Morning Report.

Indestructible

Go check out this new Volkswagen ad. It'll make your day.

Hat tip to Iraq the Model.

New Reports on Armanious - Garas Killings

The New York Post reports that a "bloody vendetta" pre-dating the family's immigration to the United States may have led to the murders of Hossam Armanious, Amal Garas, and their two daughters in New Jersey, in this article. "We're trying to develop their history right now," Hudson County Prosecutor Edward DeFazio said yesterday of the brutal quadruple slaying. Read the whole article at the link.

"Nothing indicates" that religion was the prime motive, DeFazio says in this article at NorthJersey.com.

Shortly after the bound and gagged bodies were found on |Jan. 14, friends of the family circulated word that Armanious had angered Muslims with Internet postings in a religious chat room.

The claims resulted in widespread tension between Christians and Muslims in Jersey City, which led to numerous scuffles at the family's funeral. But authorities said nothing so far supports the theory.

"Is it possible? Yes," DeFazio said. "Do we have anything that gives us reason to believe this is what it was, factually? No. Nothing indicates that was the prime motivation for this. That we can clearly say."

This appears to be a significant development. DeFazio is now saying that "nothing indicates" a religious hate crime, which is different from the "no proof" line the big media have been giving us all along.

DeFazio said no motive has been established in the case.

In addition to the Internet theory, investigators continue to look at robbery as a possible motive, because the home was ransacked and money was taken from the victims. Detectives are reviewing the family's finances to see if there are any obvious motives.

Hudson authorities have enlisted the FBI to scrutinize the family's activities in Egypt before they came to this country in 1997.

"It could be that it's a vendetta that might go back to the old country," DeFazio said. "We're going to try to look into that."

Update: 1/26, 6AM Pacific:

Michaelangelo Conte of the Jersey Journal gives a good roundup of developments in this Wednesday article at NJ.com. DeFazio, quoted in the article:

"We have more work to do, including on the computer angle, the financial profile and history of the family, including any information on the family or associated people in Egypt. All of that is being done, but it's taking time."

Joseph Farah speaks out in a column carried by Assyrian International News Agency and WorldNetDaily:

Yet, the media's focus hasn't been the horror of this kind of centuries-old anti-Christian persecution apparently coming to America. Instead, there has been a concerted effort, it seems, to downplay this gruesome slaughter as some kind of anomaly, to search desperately for motives other than religious hatred -- in effect, to ignore the kind of oppression that Christians and Jews in the Middle East have been experiencing since Islam became dominant in that part of the world more than 1,300 years ago.

I don't like it.

As an Arab-American, Christian journalist, it reminds me of the way law enforcement officials and the news media discarded any evidence that the Washington-area "Beltway snipers" had an Islamic terrorist motive. This mindset almost certainly resulted in more deaths as vital information -- the kind of descriptions that ultimately led to the capture of John Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo -- was withheld from the public to avoid "hysteria," "panic" and, worst of all, "racial or ethnic profiling."

Let me add a strong second to Farah's comments. I disagree with the headline "Jihad in Jersey City" simply because we do not yet know for a fact that "jihad" was involved - a point I have continually stressed here at Dreams Into Lightning. We do, however, have evidence that allows us to entertain that as a plausible theory - and we have a Big Media that wants to steer us away from that theory by withholding relevant facts (as CNN and NYT ignored reports of death threats against Armanious).

I don't like it either.




Note to readers. As promised, I will continue to follow this case. Some of you will recall that I'm in light-posting mode this week (due to an exam this Thursday), so coverage may not be as prompt or as thorough as I'd like, but I will post as much as I can. If you become aware of any new developments, please send a link. I'll post my own thoughts on this when time permits.

Morning Report: January 19, 2005

Debka: US, Israeli special ops teams active. 'DEBKAfile Reports: US and Israel beef up counter-terror warfare with crack intel-sniper units behind enemy lines. In Iraq, the 42nd Infantry Division’s 173rd Long Range Surveillance Detachment is deployed with dozens of snipers. In Gaza Strip, Shimshon Battalion 92 undertakes intel-targeting missions against small Palestinian terrorist units.' (Debka)

"Outposts of tyranny." 'In our world there remain outposts of tyranny and America stands with oppressed people on every continent... in Cuba, and Burma (Myanmar), and North Korea, and Iran, and Belarus, and Zimbabwe,' said Secretary of State nominee Condoleezza Rice in her opening statement delivered at Senate confirmation hearings last week. (Free Iran)

Gillian "Scully" Anderson marries. 'Former "X-Files" star Gillian Anderson has married longtime boyfriend Julian Ozanne,' CNN reports. 'The couple exchanged vows December 29 at a friend's beach house on Lamu's Shella island, off Kenya's Indian Ocean coast, People magazine said Tuesday. The ceremony, which included hymns sung by a Kenyan choir in Swahili, was attended by immediate family and a handful of close friends.' (CNN)