End the injustice

Islamists to Playboy Model: 'Hope Your Daughter Gets Raped'

Islamic protesters hurl abuse at Indonesia's first Playboy centerfold model

The Associated PressPublished: January 18, 2007

JAKARTA, Indonesia: Islamic protesters hurled abuse at Playboy magazine's first Indonesian centerfold Thursday, calling her a prostitute and saying they hoped her daughter would be raped.

Andhara Early did not respond to demonstrators — among them several women wearing Islamic headscarves — as she left the South Jakarta District Court after testifying in the indecency trial of editor Playboy's Indonesia editor, Erwin Arnada.

Islamic conservatives loudly protested what they dubbed a global icon of pornography when a toned down version of Playboy hit the streets in the world's most populous Muslim nation last year.

Arnada could face 32 months in prison if convicted of violating indecency laws by publishing the magazine, which typically contains several shots of women in swimsuits or underwear along with feature articles.

Thursday's appearance by Early was the first by a model at the trial.

Protesters called Early a "cheap prostitute" who would go to hell and said "I hope your daughter gets raped." She later told reporters that the taunts had upset her.

Her testimony, like that of other witnesses at the trial, is closed to the media and the public.

Indonesia is a secular country with a population of some 190 million Muslims. While most practice a moderate form of the faith, conservatives are pushing hard to impose strict Islamic law.

http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2007/01/18/asia/AS-GEN-Indonesia-Playboy-Trial.php

Saudis May Ban Letter ‘X’

A group of Islamic clergy in Saudi Arabia has condemned the letter "X” because of its similarity to a hated banned symbol – the cross.

The Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, which has the ultimate say in all legal, civil and governance matters in the kingdom, issued a fatwa, or religious edict, against the "X.” It came in response to a Ministry of Trade query about whether a Saudi businessman could be granted trademark protection for a new service with the English name "Explorer.”

The request from the businessman, Amru Mohammad Faisal, was turned down.

"Experts who examined the English word ‘explorer’ were struck by how suspicious that ‘X’ appeared,” Youssef Ibrahim writes in the New York Sun.

"In a kingdom where Friday preachers routinely refer to Christians as pigs and infidel crusaders, even a twisted cross ranks as an abomination.”

In response to the turndown, Faisal wrote an article that appeared on several Arabian Web sites, sarcastically suggesting that the authorities might consider banning the "plus” sign in mathematics because of its similarity to the cross.

Among the commission’s earlier edicts is the 1974 fatwa declaring that the Earth is flat.

http://newsmax.com/archives/ic/2007/1/15/101803.shtml?s=ic

Gaza's cyber cafés and music stores now sit on front line

SONIA VERMA
Special to The Globe and Mail

GAZA CITY, GAZA STRIP -- When a pipe bomb ripped through his Internet café late one night last week, Omar Otlah made a mental list of his known enemies.

After careful consideration, he ruled out an attack by the Israelis. Nor could he blame fallout from fighting between rival Palestinian factions, which has claimed more than 30 lives in the past month alone. This bombing was the work of a new foe, one that's been waging a much quieter war along an emerging front line that runs right through Gaza's bustling cyber cafés, music shops and universities.

The new group, calling itself the Swords of Islamic Righteousness, recently declared open war on any business, or Palestinian, it considers immoral. Among its targets: Internet cafés, for providing access to online porn; CD shops, for playing racy pop music; and pharmacies, for peddling drugs it deems recreational.

Palestinian culture in Gaza has always been more conservative compared with the West Bank. There are no bars and most women wear head scarves and long robes.

But even in Gaza, radical interpretations of Islam have rarely taken root on a social level. For most Palestinians, Swords of Islamic Righteousness ranks somewhere near the Taliban in its extreme interpretation of Islam.

Palestinian police have traced 47 bombings in the past month to the fundamentalist group.

And, as fighting rages between Fatah and Hamas, the attacks by Swords of Islamic Righteousness are becoming increasingly brazen and going largely unpunished because security forces are embroiled in the inter-Palestinian conflict.

"The situation in Gaza these days prevents us from working on the ground to stop them," said a senior Palestinian police source in Gaza.

"We are trying to arrest them, but there is only so much we can do," said the officer whose works with a security branch loyal to Fatah.

Last month, Swords of Islamic Righteousness circulated a letter in Gaza's busiest business districts threatening to "impose the laws of God" against anyone transgressing its fundamentalist interpretation of Islam.

It claimed responsibility for "shooting rocket-propelled grenades at internet cafés in Gaza" because they "prevented people from praying to God" and boasted of blowing up a car to punish the driver who played his stereo too loud.

The group also claimed to have thrown acid on unveiled women studying in Gaza's Islamic University and promised to ensure the "honour" of all Palestinian women.

"If people don't listen, we'll take further steps," the militants warned in the letter.

Although the group is new to the Gaza, the attacks have sent a chill through its conservative streets. Local entrepreneurs say dozens of businesses have been forced to close over the past few months.

Human-rights advocates complain women are particularly vulnerable.

"Many are too scared to walk down certain streets without a male relative. It's become really bad," said Farah Abdullah, who runs a women's support group at Gaza's Islamic University.

Mr. Otlah figures it's far too risky to reopen his Internet café. Most of his customers were students who dropped by after class. The morning after the bombing, a letter signed by 'Swords' landed on his front doorstep claiming responsibility for the attack and warning of another strike if he went back into business.

"They said they bombed my shop in the name of Islam. They said it was a message from God," said Mr. Otlah, 37, holding the letter in his trembling hand.

All of his computers were equipped with filters preventing anybody from surfing online porn, he said. "I am a devout Muslim. I go to mosque. Now I have no way to feed my family," he said.

Even if he did reopen, he doubts any of his regular patrons would return. He filed a complaint with the Palestinian police, but so far, there have been no arrests.

Down the street, Amar Hasoon's Internet café is one of the few still open. "I have no choice but to continue working," he said.

He is the only member of his extended family pulling in a paycheque since a boycott against the Hamas-led Palestinian government froze the salaries of most public employees.

In the charged streets of Gaza, rival Palestinian factions blame each other for the rise of the new group. "We think this group is close to Hamas, but so far we can't prove it," said the police source aligned with Fatah.

Fatah alleges Hamas is orchestrating the crackdown on secular life, using the new militant group as a front.

But Fawzy Barhoum, a Hamas spokesman, insists his movement is innocent.

"We said from the beginning that we are not interested in imposing morality. This group is not related to Hamas. It is simply the result of no security on the Palestinian street."

Arabs Palestine & Jews Israel - History of the Middle East

Oh those whacky Arabs.

Has Carter crossed the line?

By ALAN DERSHOWITZ


Have former US president Jimmy Carter's recent statements crossed the line from legitimate criticism of Israel to illegitimate anti-Semitism? In his book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, Carter unfairly, one-sidedly, a historically - even indecently - condemns Israeli policies, but in my view he does not cross the line into overt anti-Semitism. His book is riddled with factual errors, virtually of them unfavorable to Israel. His history is all wrong.

He claims that Israel launched a preemptive attack against Jordan. Historians all agree that Jordan attacked Israel first.

Israel tried desperately to persuade Jordan to remain out of the war with Egypt and Syria, and Israel counterattacked after the Jordanian army surrounded Jerusalem, firing missiles into the center of the city. Israel then captured the West Bank, which had been occupied by Jordan for nearly 20 years, and which Israel was willing to return in exchange for peace and recognition from Jordan.

Carter repeatedly condemns Israel for refusing to comply with Security Council Resolution 242, which called for return of captured territories in exchange for peace, recognition and secure boundaries, but he ignores that Israel accepted and all the Arab nations and the Palestinians rejected this resolution. The Arabs met in Khartoum and issued their three famous noes: "No peace, no recognition, no negotiation." But you wouldn't know that from reading the Carter version of history.

Carter faults Israel for its "air strike that destroyed an Iraqi nuclear reactor" without mentioning that Iraq had threatened to attack Israel with nuclear weapons if it succeeded in building a bomb and that the UN refused to intercede

Carter, who thinks Israel isn't religious enough, faults Israel for its administration of Christian and Muslim religious sites, when in fact Israel is scrupulous about ensuring those of every religion the right to worship as they please - consistent, of course, with security needs. He fails to mention that between 1948 and 1967, when Jordan occupied the West Bank and east Jerusalem, it destroyed and desecrated Jewish religious sites and prevented Jews from praying at the Western Wall. He also never mentions Egypt's brutal occupation of Gaza between 1949 and 1967.

Carter blames Israel for the "exodus of Christians from the Holy Land," totally ignoring the Islamization of the area by Hamas and the comparable exodus of Christian Arabs from Lebanon as a result of the increasing influence of Hizbullah and the repeated assassination of Christian leaders by Syria.

Carter blames Israel, and exonerates Yasser Arafat, for the Palestinian refusal to accept statehood on 95 percent of the West Bank and all of Gaza pursuant to the Clinton-Barak offers at Camp David and Taba in 2000-2001. He accepts the Palestinian revisionist history, rejects the eyewitness accounts of president Bill Clinton and Dennis Ross and ignores Saudi Prince Bandar's accusation that Arafat's rejection of the proposal was "a crime" and that Arafat's account "was not truthful" - except, apparently, to Carter. The fact that Carter chooses to believe Arafat over Clinton speaks volumes.

Carter also uses maps derived from Dennis Ross's book The Missing Peace without attribution. He mislabels one of the maps as representing "the Israeli interpretation" of the December 2000 Clinton parameters, when in fact the map represents the actual US proposal, as drawn up by Ross, which was understood by all parties, accepted by the Israelis and rejected by the Palestinians.

THESE ARE all grievous and one-sided errors, especially for a former president who has easy access to the historical facts. And there are more - too many to list here. Yet they do not qualify as anti-Semitic.

Since the publication of the book, however, Carter has been on a whirlwind tour featuring television, radio and print appearances. In his interviews - and without the benefit of the kind of reflection and self-restraint that comes with the writing and editing process - Carter has gone well beyond what he says in his book and may have crossed the line into bigotry. I will lay out the facts and leave it to the readers to decide.

First, Carter has strongly implied - based on an entirely false factual premise - that Jews control the media, academic and political process in the United States. In interview after interview, he has stated - quite categorically and quite falsely - that the plight of the Palestinians in the West Bank is "not something that has been acknowledged or even discussed in this country... You never hear anything about what is happening to the Palestinians by the Israelis."

This, of course, is entirely false. The situation with regard to the Palestinians has become the number one human right issue on American university campuses - exceeding the attention paid to Rwanda, Darfur, the former Yugoslavia, Tibet, Chechnya and other places where actual genocide has taken place. The West Bank and Gaza are regularly and extensively covered by all major US newspapers. The indisputable fact is that more space per capita is devoted to the Palestinians than to any other occupied or victimized group in the world.

Why, then, would Carter promote this canard? There is only one answer: to play into the old anti-Semitic stereotype of Jewish control of the media. When Carter has been asked why does he think there has been no media attention paid to the Israeli aggression against the Palestinians, he smiles and says, "I don't know," but goes on to say that he has "witnessed and experienced the severe restraints on any free and balanced discussion of the facts" - thus implying that someone or some group is restraining free discussion. In his appearance on Meet the Press, Carter pointed to "the Jewish lobby" as "part" of the problem. What exactly the "Jewish" lobby - as contrasted with the Israel Lobby - is, Carter, never explains.

In a recent op-ed article, Carter was even more specific - and more nonfactual: "Book reviews in the mainstream media have been written mostly by representatives of Jewish organizations..." Again, total nonsense. Whose reviews is he referring to? Certainly not mine, which was among the first to appear and which has been used by several interviewers to challenge Carter. I am not a "representative of Jewish organizations." I am a longtime supporter and admirer of Jimmy Carter, and I speak for no one but myself.

Nor are the other reviewers, who have blasted his book as "moronic" (Michael Kinsley, Slate) and "cynical... anti-historical" (Jeffrey Goldberg, The Washington Post), representatives of any Jewish organizations - except in the warped eyes of Jimmy Carter. Despite its demonstrable falsity, Carter has repeated this claim about "Jewish organizations" on recent talk shows.

CARTER GOES on to complain about Jewish control - this time over universities:

He is referring there to Brandeis University, whose president said he could speak if invited by a faculty member or student group - which he has been - and that the president of Brandeis would extend an invitation if Carter would agree to discuss his book publicly with a knowledgeable critic. Carter declined, insisting on speaking alone with no one presenting an opposing view. Why would Carter distort the truth of this conversation? To make a point about Jewish control over academic freedom at universities "with high Jewish enrollment"?

Carter then moves on to the political process, where he overstates the reality even more:

It would be almost politically suicidal for members of Congress to espouse a balanced position between Israel and Palestine, to suggest that Israel comply with international law or to speak in defense of justice or human rights for Palestinians. Very few would ever deign to visit the Palestinian cities of Ramallah, Nablus, Hebron, Gaza City or even Bethlehem and talk to the beleaguered residents.

Again this is total nonsense. Many American political figures have visited Palestinian cities. I know. I have seen them and spoken to them about their visits. Why would Carter so overstate the truth and play into the stereotype of undue Jewish influence over the political process?

By promoting these false stereotypes - Jewish control over the media, academia and politics - Carter has contributed to the growing acceptability of anti-Semitism around the world. But he does even worse. By exaggerating the evils of the Israeli occupation and casting the blame for Palestinian suffering almost exclusively on Israel, he has legitimated the comparison - often made by the most extreme anti-Semites - between the Jewish state and the world's worst human rights offenders.

Asked whether he believed that Israel's "persecution" of Palestinians was "[e]ven worse... than a place like Rwanda," Carter answered, "Yes. I think - yes." The comparison is absurd. Hutu militias slaughtered an estimated 800,000 Tutsis (and raped thousands) in an attempt to eradicate those people from the country. During any comparable period, the number of Palestinian casualties has never exceeded the hundreds, and for the most part, they have been either combatants, human shields or civilians inadvertently killed in efforts to kill combatants.

Further, the Tutsis never had a chance to prevent their slaughter, whereas the Palestinians initiated the violence against Israel and repeatedly refused - and continue to refuse - to agree to any sort of peace agreement, be it the Peel Commission, the UN partition plan or the 2000 Camp David proposals.

The idea of uttering Israel and Rwanda in the same sentence - and citing Israel as the greater offender of human rights - is obscene. It is also deeply insulting to the memory of those Rwandans who were murdered, raped and mutilated in what could only be characterized as genocide.

This is precisely the sort of exaggeration that caused Congressman John Conyers, a founding member of the Congressional Black Caucus, to take Carter to task for using the word "apartheid" in the title of his book, thereby belittling the horror of real racial discrimination and apartheid. As Conyers said, accusing Israel of apartheid "does not serve the cause of peace, and the use of it against the Jewish people in particular, who have been victims of the worst kind of discrimination, discrimination resulting in death, is offensive and wrong." (By the way, Conyers does not represent any "Jewish organizations," to my knowledge.)

To be sure, Carter seems to have backed away from his comparison to Rwanda, just as he did with the comparison to apartheid - but only after first making a splash. He said he doesn't want to go "back into ancient history about Rwanda." But this is disingenuous. Rwanda, when invoked in the context of a human rights discussion, stands for genocide, just like apartheid stands for the oppressive discriminatory and segregationist practices in pre-1990 South Africa. Everyone understands these symbols, and Carter recklessly traffics in them, until someone calls him out and he's forced to backtrack.

HE ALSO claims, despite his book's title, that there is no apartheid in Israel, only in the Palestinian territories, but that is not the impression the reader gets, nor the one apparently intended by the author's invocation of this powerful symbol of oppression. And, in fact, in a recent PBS interview, Carter re-avowed the canard: "I would say, in many ways [Israel's treatment of Palestinians is] worse than the treatment of black people under apartheid. It's worse!"

At any rate, the important point is that Carter's immediate answer - his true instinct - is to accuse Israel of crimes worse than those committed in Rwanda. Carter has become so unhinged in his campaign against the Jewish state that he is now parroting - and legitimizing - the campus activists who delight in calling Israel a genocidal terrorist state and comparing it to Nazi Germany and apartheid South Africa.

In my book, The Case for Peace, I argued that criticism of Israel - even unfair and strident criticism - should not be equated with anti-Semitism. I went on to list a series of criteria for determining whether the line had been crossed into the abyss of anti-Semitism. Among these criticisms are:

* Employing stereotypes against Israel that have traditionally been directed against "the Jews."

* Characterizing Israel as "the worst," when it is clear that this is not an accurate comparative assessment.

* Singling out only Israel for sanctions for policies that are widespread among other nations, or demanding that Jews be better or more moral than others because of their history as victims.

* Emphasizing and stereotyping certain characteristics among supporters of Israel that have traditionally been used in anti-Semitic attacks, for example, "pushy" American Jews, Jews "who control the media" and Jews "who control financial markets."

* Accusing Jews and only Jews of having dual loyalty.

* Blaming Israel for the problems of the world and exaggerating the influence of the Jewish state on world affairs.

* Falsely claiming that all legitimate criticism of Israeli policies is immediately and widely condemned by Jewish leaders as anti-Semitic, despite any evidence to support this accusation.

* Seeking to delegitimate Israel precisely as it moves toward peace.

* Circulating wild charges against Israel and Jews.

I invite you, the readers, to review these factors and to decide for yourselves whether you believe Carter's post-publication remarks have crossed the line from legitimate criticism of Israel to illegitimate anti-Semitism.

More on the religion of peace.

The Genocide against Hindus perpetrated by Islamic militants in Kashmir. Islamic terrorism was a truth long before America experienced 9/11.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=842219646390515565

This is an Indian ex-intelligence officer giving out facts and figures on Islamic terrorism in Jammu and Kashmir. He describes how Kashmir Hindus were driven out from their homelands in the name of Islam. It also describes facts pointing out Pakistan’s hand in promoting terror.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-7288210828786167939

Of course the real truth is this is all the fault of the Jews. Those Islamic innocent lovers of peace could not be the fanatics responsible for such terrible atrocities could they?