32 Israeli FM says Chavez tied to Islamists; Ronaldo to star in film about Palestinian refugee

Israeli FM says Chavez tied to Islamists; Ronaldo to star in film about Palestinian refugee

Chavez and Ronaldo are very popular around the world - the Zionists are losing it.

Obama speech to Aipac during his election campaign:
http://theinfounderground.com/archives/TiU Radio 22nd-Jan-09 Obama The Latest Jewish President.mp3

(1) Concerts in Gaza (2008, 2009)
(2) Israeli FM using Hitler photo - what about TRANSFER AGREEMENT?
(3) Mossad's assassination attempt on Hamas head
(4) Israeli Foreign Minister accuses Chavez of ties to 'radical' Islamists
(5) Ultra-Orthodox money laundering scandal motivated by Resentment against Gentiles
(6) Jewish identity, politics & ideology based on 'self love' - Gilad Atzmon
(7) Brazilian soccer star Ronaldo to star in Iranian film about a Palestinian refugee

(1) Concerts in Gaza (2008, 2009)

From: Joe Fallisi <flespa@tiscali.it> Date: 30.07.2009 02:25 AM

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4e89xNcVTZM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1RQCar0eL0

(2) Israeli FM using Hitler photo - what about TRANSFER AGREEMENT?

From: set <setex01@yahoo.com> Date: 30.07.2009 02:22 AM

> http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/07/23/2633944.htm?section=justin

Why does Libermann not display information on the TRANSFER AGREEMENT? Maybe it would not really suit his purposes to demonstrate that the roots of the Israeli state - as is now - have been furnished by the Third Reich!
Well anyway: ceterum censio Israel esse delendam!

If Cato the Elder could say this sentence with umpunity in the Roman Senate, then it cannot be in any which way "bad" .... political expediencey is something that chosenites surely are familiar with...

fried t.

(3) Mossad's assassination attempt on Hamas head

From: Sadanand, Nanjundiah (Physics Earth Sciences) <sadanand@mail.ccsu.edu> Date: 01.08.2009 01:42 PM

"Killing" Khalid ... and censoring it

Broadcast: Australian Broadcasting Corporation: 05/03/2009, Reporter: Leigh Sales,

http://www.abc.net.au/lateline/content/2008/s2508773.htm

Respected Australian journalist Paul McGeough joins Lateline to discuss the progress of peace in the Middle East and how the key players can deal with the thorny problem of Hamas.

LEIGH SALES, PRESENTER: If the Obama Administration is serious about negotiating peace in the Middle East, it's going to have to work out how to deal with the thorny problem of Hamas. The Palestinian militant Islamic group is a designated terrorist organisation, but it controls Gaza, and its power has grown markedly in the past 10 to 15 years. It's led by Khalid Mishal, who lives in Syria. 12 years ago, the Israeli Government tried to assassinate Mishal to stem his influence. But the attempt was horrendously botched, and a great deal of fresh detail about it is included in a new book called 'Killing Khalid: Mossad's failed hit and the rise of Hamas', by the respected Australian journalist Paul McGeough. He's reported extensively from the Middle East, is a former editor of the 'Sydney Morning Herald' and is currently the paper's writer-at-large. He joined me earlier in the studio.

Paul McGeough, thanks for coming in.

PAUL MCGEOUGH, AUTHOR, 'KILLING KHALID': Thank you for having me.

LEIGH SALES: The starting point of your book is a failed Israeli assassination attempt in 1997 in Jordan on the Hamas leader Khalid Mishal. Tell us what happened.

PAUL MCGEOUGH: This was one of those amazing exercises by the Mossad. If they had pulled it off, it would have been quite stunning. The idea was that two agents would walk past Khalid Mishal in the street in broad daylight as he approached his office to go to work on a Thursday morning. As one of them passed him, a - he would open a shaken can of Coca Cola, causing a noise, a mess, a confusion, a distraction. And at that very moment, the second agent was to glide past on the other side of Mishal, and using a nebuliser disguised as a camera, was to squirt some poison, a modified version of the post-operative painkiller Fentanyl into his ear. Mishal would not notice, he would go home, he would feel tired, he would say, "I'm going to lie down, have a little nap." He wouldn't feel anything more than that, and he would never wake up again.

LEIGH SALES: But things did not unfold like this.

PAUL MCGEOUGH: Things did not unfold as they were intended to because Mishal's driver, who was present at the time, saw the attack, and his bodyguard, who was following him in a chase car also arrived on the scene. The bodyguard in particular was very determined. He gave chase, chased these guys for some distance, flagged down a motorist at one stage, and just jumped into his car and said, "Follow that Green Hyundai!" The Green Hyundai stopped a few blocks away. The Mossad guys jumped out and then took off on foot, with Muhammad Abu Sayyaf, the bodyguard, giving chase. As they passed a market garden in the middle of the city, he caught up with them, lunged at the two of them. A huge fight took place there in the garden. A passer-by joined in and helped Abu Sayyaf, and they collared the two Mossad agents and delivered them to the police who delivered them to King Hussein, who thereby had two trophy prisoners to give him the wonderful and rare vantage point for an Arab leader over Israel in terms of being able to call the shots and how the rest of the drama unfolded.

LEIGH SALES: So give us a sense of what the political context was like in the region at the time. Where was the peace process up to?

PAUL MCGEOUGH: The peace process was faltering. Hamas had been running a very hard campaign against Fatah, which was the Yasser Arafat faction, which was pretty well in control of the political and the security process in the occupied territories at the time. Hamas was trying to catch up. Hamas was trying to catch up. Hamas was opposed to the negotiated peace. It wanted to stick with its right to - as it thought - to use violence, and it refused - and refusing to recognise the state of Israel.

LEIGH SALES: And presumably that's why Israel wanted Mishal assassinated?

PAUL MCGEOUGH: Yes, and also because Mishal was, by then, an emerging new leader and a new kind of leader for Hamas. He didn't have the ragged beard, he didn't go around in robes, when he appeared on television he was particularly articulate and quite persuasive. He was an emerging new leader who Israel did not want to see taking control of the movement.

LEIGH SALES: And this assassination attempt put Jordan's King Hussein in a very difficult position, because he had only just recently taken a bit of a risk in stepping outside the Arab tent to sign a sort of peace treaty with Israel.

PAUL MCGEOUGH: Not only that, he was - he was often referred to as Israel's only friend in the Arab world. He was a staunch ally of Israel. He was a staunch ally of Washington. For the Israelis, and it was under the first prime ministership of Benyamin Netanyahu, who is now poised to become Prime Minister again, that this took place, that they thought they could get away with it was quite remarkable. The risks for Hussein were spectacular. Half his population were Palestinian refugees. He was going to - if Mishal were to die on his territory, there was no way that he would not be seen to have been complicit in the death, in the eyes of half his population, in the eyes of the Arab world, in the eyes of much of the Islamic world. His first - the first thing he had to do to save himself and to save his thrown was to save the life of Khalid Mishal.

LEIGH SALES: And he made a cold call to the White House, which is a pretty unprecedented sort of action.

PAUL MCGEOUGH: Unheard of. I mean, generals, prime ministers, kings call the White House by arrangement, by arrangement that takes two, three, four days of ambassadors, and diplomats organising to make sure the President is there. But out of the blue on a Thursday morning, the telephonist at the White House picks up the phone and this voice says, "This is King Hussein of Jordan. I need to talk to Bill Clinton now."

LEIGH SALES: The Mossad agents who were picked up had been posing as Canadian tourists, so the Canadian embassy in Amman unwittingly found themselves involved in this.

PAUL MCGEOUGH: Yes, and they were greatly confused because they had staff monitoring the local media and they were hearing two reports. They heard a report about an attack on the life of Khalid Mishal, and then separately they heard a report that two Canadian tourists had been arrested after being involved in a street scuffle. But they did not connect the two; they had no reason to connect the two. So they sent some diplomats off to the prison as they ordinarily would to offer consular assistance. One of the hitmen was - had lost his shirt in the street fight, and so concerned was one of the women diplomats that she raced home and grabbed one of her husband's shirts and brought it back for this nice Canadian man who was languishing in prison. She looked at their passports and she thought they appeared to be Canadian. So she went back and reported that indeed these were Canadians.

LEIGH SALES: And how did they find out they were not Canadian?

PAUL MCGEOUGH: Another diplomat went down, a chap by the name of Steve Bennett, who's now a very senior man in the Canadian security network. He went down and he smelt a rat, he wasn't sure and he decided that he would subject these men to a test, as he called it, of their "Canadian-ness". And, simple questions at first: could they name the town they grew up in? Could they name a teacher? No - no to both questions. Did they remember a particular sporting fixture in the previous year which caused a sensation in Canada? No. And then, his final question, which had the Jordanian guards killing themselves laughing, was he asked them if they would sing the first line of the national anthem.

LEIGH SALES: And they couldn't.

PAUL MCGEOUGH: He helped them along, he hummed it, and then he gave them the words, but they could not join in.

LEIGH SALES: It's a fascinating story, and it's obviously a key moment in the history of Hamas. Despite having the weight of the US, Israel and much of the Palestinian community as well against it, Hamas has managed to secure quite a foothold for itself in the region. How has it been able to do that?

PAUL MCGEOUGH: It has done it by, in a broad sense by being everything that Fatah, which was the Yasser Arafat faction, by being everything that Fatah wasn't. Fatah was corrupt, Fatah was venal, Fatah was self-serving. Fatah was running pretty much the - running its government pretty much the way most of the Arab rulers run - snouts in the trough, abuse of foreign aid. And what Hamas did was Hamas decided that they would run a very clean campaign, they ran a very clean organisation which set up welfare agencies, community groups, they went to - burrowed in at grassroots level in the Palestinian community, and won great respect for that. They raised a lot of money overseas - millions and millions of dollars, which was brought in to look after - to fill the gap that was not being filled by the Israeli occupation in terms of the services they needed in their daily lives and wasn't being filled by the Yasser Arafat run government of the Palestinian community, because that money was being syphoned off for corrupt purposes.

LEIGH SALES: But people weren't turned off by their terrorist tactics.

PAUL MCGEOUGH: It's an interesting thing. With Palestinians, they come to and from violence as a weapon. In the immediate aftermath of the Oslo agreement, the Oslo accords as they were known in 1993-94, there was great hope that there would be a genuinely negotiated peace process. And, in that period, the public opinion was strongly against violence as a weapon. There was a belief that negotiation and diplomacy would work. But as that system faltered, as the whole negotiation process faltered, as more and more land was taken up by - either by Israeli settlements on Palestinian land or by roads to the settlements, or by checkpoints to protect Israelis who were using those roads to get to those settlements, Palestinian support would increase for violence.

LEIGH SALES: You believe now that Hamas is an organisation in transition. Why?

PAUL MCGEOUGH: Because the organisation has demonstrated, at times subtly and at times quite dramatically, that it is prepared to go down the road of change, of changing itself. It opposed the Oslo process, but it was prepared to stand candidates in the elections that were - that were spawned by the Oslo process. It said that it wouldn't recognise Israel, but it now is prepared to talk about a two state solution. So, although it says it does not recognise Israel, it is in fact - that is de facto recognition. It says that they're prepared to have a - two states living side by side, but at some stage in the future, they believe that there has to be a referendum of Palestinians on their broader claim - do they drop that altogether? They have said that whatever is negotiated in peace talks, if it is put to a referendum of the Palestinian people, and the Palestinian people accept it, they will accept it. So they're now saying that they accept a negotiated peace.

LEIGH SALES: Do you think that their supporters would accept a negotiated peace, given that perhaps their thought might be, "Well, if we lockdown into this conflict for as long as possible, potentially years, decades, we've got a growing population; eventually we'll outnumber the Israeli's and we'll win."

PAUL MCGEOUGH: The Palestinians don't support Hamas because Hamas is a fundamentalist religious organisation. They support is because it's an organisation that works to look after people in adversity, and because it is a nationalist organisation. The idea that they're sort of clinging to some sort of religious belief doesn't hold up when you mix with Palestinians and talk to them and ask them: why do they support it? They support it because of what it does, and because of what it's not, which is to say because it's not Fatah.

LEIGH SALES: If they are given a seat at the negotiating table, given that the US, the EU, Israel, still consider them a terrorist organisation, will allowing them to be in the negotiations legitimise their approach?

PAUL MCGEOUGH: Yes, it would, obviously. For them to be accepted - they are being accepted gradually by significant voices either in the debate or on the periphery of the debate. People like Ephraim Halevy, the former director of Mossad. He's a very powerful voice in the Israeli security establishment. He has long been of the view that Hamas is not Al Qaeda, that Hamas is an organisation that is perceived to be capable of making choices, and therefore, it is expected that it should be allowed to make the choice. I mean as far back as '97, in the days before the hit on Khalid Mishal, King Hussein had sent a letter to Netanyahu saying that Hamas - he believed that Hamas was ready to negotiate a 30 year truce. Now in his memoirs, Halevy at the time was very disappointed that that letter wasn't tested, that instead the letter was pushed aside and forgotten in the drama over the assassination attempt. People like Colin Powell, George Bush's first Secretary of State: he has said that Hamas has to be brought in. Tony Blair is saying it more recently. So all the time, you've got these influential voices saying that Hamas must be brought in. Now, we're at a very interesting point where we have a new administration in Washington. We're about to have a new government in Israel. The new government in Israel - Netanyahu is strongly opposed to a two state solution. He talks about economic independence for Palestinians, rather than a sovereign freehold for their own state. So he's going away from the table, whereas Obama is coming to the table saying things that leave us not quite sure where he stands. He - before the election campaign he uttered words that were taken as comfort by the Palestinians. During the election campaign he uttered words that were taken as comfort by the Israelis. ==

Despite rave reviews in the US, Paul McGeough's book about a failed Mossad assassination attempt has been ignored by British media 

By Phillip Knightley, JULY 21, 2009

http://www.thefirstpost.co.uk/50995,news,british-media-kill-khalid-mishal-reviews-paul-mcgeough-mossad-israel-hamas-middle-east

In April this year Quartet Books published Kill Khalid: The Failed Assassination of Khalid Mishal and the Rise of Hamas. It was written by an Australian war correspondent, Paul McGeough, an expert on the Middle East.

The book had come out in the United States to ecstatic reviews. I had heard of McGeough and although I did not know him, when asked to provide a quote for the book's dust-jacket, I read the manuscript and was happy to do so.

I found it a rare and most exciting book - a serious political history that the author had made into a fast-paced thriller. At its core is the story of how, in 1997, the Israeli intelligence service Mossad tried to assassinate the Hamas leader, Khalid Mishal, in broad daylight on the streets of Amman, Jordan.

The Mossad agents bungled their escape, Khalid's bodyguards managed to capture two of them and the others had to hide in the Israeli embassy. As Khalid slipped into a coma, Jordanian troops surrounded the Israeli embassy and after a complaint from a furious King Hussein of Jordan, Bill Clinton pressured the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, to try to right matters.

At first Netanyahu pleaded that it was too late to reverse the effects of the poison. But when Hussein added the threat that if Khalid died, the Mossad agents who were being held by Jordan would all be hanged, the antidote was quickly produced. Khalid survived, just, and the stage was set for his phenomenal political ascendancy.

Containing interviews with all the leading players, including unprecedented access to Khalid himself, McGeough's book recounts the history of Hamas through a decade of suicide bombing attacks, political infighting and increasing public support, culminating in the battle for Gaza in 2007 and the present day political stalemate.

This is a serious book with an important message about one of the world's most turbulent trouble spots. But it received a strange reception in Britain. After two excellent reviews - in the London Review of Books and the Times Literary Supplement - it has been virtually ignored.

The chairman of Quartet Books, Naim Attallah, was so concerned about this that he contacted the literary editors of all the major publications. Most told him that they did not plan to review the book. Further, his sales force informed him that some bookshops were reluctant even to stock it.

Attallah then issued a press release accusing the literary establishment of "an unspoken tactic to limit the book's public circulation" because of a decision to "dismiss Hamas within the box of 'terrorist organisation' without granting a serious consideration to its valid aspects as a voice in the debate".

He added: "Anyone who hopes for peace in the Middle East must surely recognise that Hamas is an integral part of any move towards a peace settlement. No progress can be achieved without their involvement."

It is difficult to attribute motives to organisations for their non-action in any controversy. But it does seem to me that in this case the British literary establishment has a case to answer. I believe it has developed a mind-set that is adverse to controversy. Hamas has been designated a 'terrorist organisation'. Therefore to review a book about a 'terrorist organisation' would leave a book editor open to criticism.

Paul McGeough is the former executive editor of Australia's Sydney Morning Herald and the author of three books on the Middle East. He has twice been named Australian Journalist of the Year and in 2002 was awarded the Johns Hopkins University–based SAIS Novartis Prize for excellence in international journalism. ==

Hamas' Khalid Meshaal on Relations with Israel, US

http://enduringamerica.com/2009/03/26/hamas-khalid-meshaal-on-relations-with-israel-us/#more-7743

Hamas political director Khalid Meshaal spoke for three hours last week with Paul McGeough, an Australian journalist who has written a book about the rise of Hamas and Israel's attempts to kill Meshaal. In the interview, Meshaal talked about relations with Israel ("Hamas has declared it's acceptance of a Palestinian state in the occupied territories; we have joined the political process; we have entered short-term truces with Israel – this is the reality that the world needs to deal with" and relations with countries outside the region ("We're willing to open a new page with the US and Europe….But they have to be serious about dealing with us on Palestinian rights."), and the political prospects of the organisation ("If the Palestinian people were gamblers, they would bet on Hamas").

This is McGeough's summary, reprinted from Syria Comment:

DAMASCUS: The tea-cup stops short of his lip, as Khalid Mishal pauses to consider the ironies of trench warfare in the Middle East – a lurch to the political right has anointed as Israel's next prime minister the man who, 11 years ago, sent Mossad agents on a bizarre mission to assassinate Mishal.

It is late Wednesday evening – March 18 – and Mishal sits deep in a plump armchair, in a second-floor reception room. "Netanyahu…," he asks, returning to his cup of tea. "Its fate, God's destiny, but we can't set policy on the basis of personal grudges."

The Palestinian resistance leader, whose suicide bombers and assassins have taken their own toll on Israeli life over the years, then declares his would-be-killer to be a man of straw. "We've already experienced Netanyahu as prime minister of Israel, so Palestinians are not afraid of him second time round," Mishal vouches.

"After the battle of Gaza [in December-January] and the steadfastness of our people in the face of the Zionist war machine, do you expect a single Palestinian to be scared of this man? It doesn't matter if he tries again to kill me, because he's already killed my people." ...

(4) Israeli Foreign Minister accuses Chavez of ties to 'radical' Islamists

From: Josef Schwanzer <donauschwob@optusnet.com.au>  Date:  31.07.2009 03:23 AM

http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5go0x3z2mlvi2bKFpRVLPdB-KirhA
Israeli FM accuses Chavez of ties to 'radical' Islamists: report

(AFP) – 10 hours ago

BOGOTA — Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman has accused Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez of cooperating with "radical branches" of Islam and of anti-Semitism, according to media reports Thursday in Colombia.

"I will not speak about intelligence specifics, but we have enough to be concerned about the collaboration between radical branches of Islam and Hugo Chavez," Lieberman told the El Tiempo newspaper at the conclusion of a 10-day South American visit which included stops in Argentina, Brazil, Peru and Colombia.

Lieberman, an ultra-nationalist who is part of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's hawkish government, was responding to questions seeking evidence to support Israel's contention that Iranian-backed Shiite militia Hezbollah has cells in Venezuela.

An Israeli diplomat travelling with Lieberman, Dorit Shavit, made the claim in the Jewish News Agency of Argentina, home to the largest Jewish community in South America.

The foreign ministry in Caracas angrily denied the claim.

"Israel was devastated by the attacks in Buenos Aires," Lieberman said, referring to the 1992 bomb attack against the Israeli embassy that killed 29 people and another attack two years later on a Jewish community center, also in the Argentine capital, that killed 85.

Iran has denied being involved, but Israel has stressed that Tehran is intent on expanding its sway in South America. Lieberman's ministry had said his trip to the region was aimed in part at countering Iran's growing influence.

"Today we see the closeness between Chavez and the Iranians, and of course we want to prevent new attacks against Israelis."

Lieberman also accused Chavez of anti-Semitism for his comments on Saturday in which he warned that the United States was converting Washington's key ally Colombia into the "Israel of Latin America" by setting up a military platform there from which to "attack" its neighbors.

Such allegations, Lieberman warned, represent "xenophobia, anti-Semitism, anti-Israelism. It is not a new phenomenon, and it is regrettable that it exists in the 21st century after the Holocaust: terrorism against the people of Israel, and the use of such anti-Semitic language."

He also told El Espectador newspaper that the resumption of diplomatic ties -- severed by Caracas in January after Israel's Gaza Strip offensive -- rested in part on a Chavez apology.

Lieberman said he saw "no reason" to communicate with Chavez while he maintains "relations with Iran, with Hezbollah and with Hamas," the Islamist movement ruling Gaza.

Copyright © 2009 AFP. All rights reserved.

(5) Ultra-Orthodox money laundering scandal motivated by Resentment against Gentiles

Ultra-Orthodox Rabbis Begin To Question Their Own Insularity
Latest Scandal Prompts Self-Reflection and a Rare Apology

By Nathaniel Popper

Published July 28, 2009, issue of August 07, 2009.

http://forward.com/articles/110942/

A "wake-up call" is how a number of ultra-Orthodox Jewish leaders are describing the recent arrest of several New York-area rabbis on federal money laundering charges.

The clearest indication of the newly awakened state came at a public symposium on business ethics held in the middle of ultra-Orthodox Brooklyn just a few days after the arrests. Rabbi David Zwiebel, head of the main ultra-Orthodox umbrella organization, Agudath Israel, said that the event had not been on the schedule a week earlier. But the money laundering arrests reminded him and other leaders that the ultra-Orthodox, or Haredi, community was facing problems caused by the community's famous insularity.

"There are a lot of benefits of insulating oneself from the broader culture around us, as we do," Zweibel told the Forward. "But one of the costs of insularity is perhaps a lack of appreciation of the importance of compliance with secular law. That is a message that is important for people to hear."

The July 23 arrests primarily hit members of the Syrian-Jewish community, some of whom are ultra-Orthodox and some who are not. But Haredi Jews outside the Syrian community were also arrested, and the broad nature of the arrests has clearly hit home. The July 28 event was hosted in the Boro Park neighborhood of Brooklyn, at the crossroads of many Haredi communities, and an overflow crowd of thousands packed the main building of the Vizhnitz community. The flier that went out to advertise the men-only event said it was "of utmost urgency that every individual in the community attend."

Zweibel was not the only Haredi leader willing to assign some of the blame for the recent scandal on the Haredi culture. An editorial on the leading Haredi Web site, Voz Iz Neias, put the matter in strong terms. "The fault may partially lie with us and our system of education," the editorial writer, Rabbi Yair Hoffman, wrote in his July 27 post.

During the event in Boro Park, the crowd was shocked when the Grand Rabbi of the Spinka sect, Naftali Tzvi Weisz, made a surprise appearance to deliver his own mea culpa. Weisz was arrested in 2007 in a separate money laundering case and this July pled guilty to the charges. Before heading off to his jail sentence, the rabbi gave an obviously emotional speech of contrition, first in Yiddish and then awkwardly-translated English.

"Unfortunately we have to admit in public that things happened that were not supposed to happen," Weisz told the crowd. "We must have to express our wish that these matters will never happen — we have to commit that in the future this will never happen again."

This willingness to express self-criticism has come as a surprise to some longtime watchers of the Haredi world. Asher Lopatin, a Modern Orthodox rabbi in Chicago, has been critical of that culture after past controversies involving Haredi community members, and each time he came to expect the same response.

"These guys would basically say, 'The world is antisemitic, and we have to look out for our own interest,'" Lopatin told the Forward.

Now, though, Lopatin says he has seen a new self-reflection among a group of Haredi leaders who have begun to recognize that the ultra-Orthodox world may shoulder some of the blame for its problems.

"There's a little bit of self-awareness that we have not seen before, and that's exciting. I was expecting business as usual," Lopatin said.

One reason given for the bout of introspection was the timing of the money laundering arrests during the nine days that precede Tisha B'Av — a holiday commemorating the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem and other historical calamities. The days before Tisha B'Av are traditionally dedicated to contemplation and self-reflection.

But the arrests also come in the wake of a string of embarrassing controversies for the ultra-Orthodox. Several months after the arrest of the Spinka Grand Rabbi and other members of the Spinka community, the Haredi owners of the kosher meat company Agriprocessors were arrested for bank fraud and immigration violations after the company was the subject of a massive immigration raid.

More recently, the ultra-Orthodox world was rived by a series of riots in Jerusalem that pitted Haredi youth against the Israeli police. An entry on the Web site Cross-Currents, which features a number of Haredi writers, summed up the burgeoning sense of shame.

"It has been an awful week, and an awful few months, and that places a growing obligation on us to change the direction," Daniel Feldman, a rabbi at Yeshiva University, wrote in his July 28 post.

Certainly, not all Haredi authorities have joined this chorus of self-criticism. Outside the event in Boro Park, an older gentleman handed out pamphlets that accused the government of antisemitism in the arrest of the rabbis last week: "Had this been done to any other group in America — Christian pastors, Black preachers, Muslim imams, Catholic bishops — there would have been a huge outcry: "Racial Profiling, Bigotry, Entrapment…"

The pamphlet was signed by the Committee for Truth and Fairness in Media, though the man handing them out declined to identify himself or other members of the committee. As he spoke about why the committee was necessary, a crowd gathered around and a young man yelled out, "This is a blood libel!" Another said, "There's a pogrom going on here!"

Similar convictions have been expressed in the Israeli Haredi press.

Many observers of the Haredi world also say that during the Sabbath after the arrests, numerous Haredi rabbis placed much of the blame for the situation not on the behavior of the arrested men, but rather on the Jewish businessman who served as an informant for the government, Solomon Dwek. Harry Maryles, a Modern Orthodox blogger in Chicago who has been a frequent critic of the Haredi world, wrote that "those who continue to complain about [Dwek] and say nothing about these criminal rabbis once again show just how pervasive is the idea that what these rabbis did wasn't all that bad. What WAS too bad is that they were caught."

Hoffman, who wrote the Voz Iz Neias editorial, said that one of the main things that the Haredi world needs to change is an antagonistic relationship to the secular world that has formed over years of being treated as a scapegoat.

"We've got to re-conceive our relationship to the country we're in," Hoffman, a rabbi on Long Island, told the Forward. "This is a beautiful country. Its laws are proper laws that are designed to help its citizenry, and we're not dealing with a situation where Jews are necessarily the underdog — a situation that at times can contribute to a mindset of, 'Let's not necessarily observe the law.'"

"People are starting to feel that this stuff is not right," Lopatin added. "In the past, it was all about getting cheap meat and looking out for ourselves. I think it's permeating the Haredi world that it's not right to cheat the government."

Contact Nathaniel Popper at popper@forward.com

(6) Jewish identity, politics & ideology based on 'self love' - Gilad Atzmon

From: Erooth Mohamed <ekunhan@gmail.com> Date:  31.07.2009 09:59 PM From: Gilad Atzmon <gilad@gilad.co.uk>

The Erasure of Islam

http://palestinethinktank.com/2009/07/31/ziauddin-sardar-the-erasure-of-islam-introduction-by-gilad-atzmon/

The Erasure of Islam (by Ziauddin Sardar)

Introduction by Gilad Atzmon

Jul 31st, 2009 at 12:11

After a decade of elaboration on Jewish ideology and identity I came to a conclusion that Jewish identity, politics and ideology can be grasped as different manifestations of 'self love'. The Zionist loves himself being strong and crude (Sabra), the Jewish leftist loves himself being a 'humanist' and 'tolerant', yet, for some reason, he prefers to operate in 'Jews only' cells (Bund, Jews for Palestine, Jews for Peace, Jews against Zionism, etc.). It took me some years to gather that Jewish ideology, politics and identity is not just surrender to self-affection, it is also driven by resentment towards others. It would be correct to argue for instance that the Zionist mantra could be interpreted as "love yourself as much as you hate your neighbour". Other forms of Jewish ideologies may be slightly lighter on hatred but, generally speaking, they all resemble one another in their positive tendency towards segregation.

Enlightenment that is there to praise 'freedom', 'liberty', 'reason' and 'liberal thought' is not very different from Jewish ideology once put into political practice. In reality, it is just another form of a self-centred supremacist method of separation between the 'chosen' (labelled as progressive) and the 'inferior' (labelled as reactionary).

Enlightenment is anthropocentric in its essence, for it regards humans as the 'universe's most important entity'. Those who follow enlightenment ideology are basically different breeds of self -lovers. We are basically referring to humans who love themselves for being rational and liberated.  We are referring to humans who are convinced that they are at the core of the essence of our cosmos. Bearing that in mind, we may be entitled to regard the last two centuries of Western conflicts as futile battles between different kinds of 'self lovers'.

Enlightenment was there to invent a dichotomy between the progressive (the enlightened) and the reactionary (the other). Enlightenment thinkers "worked hard to provide a rational justification for colonisation." Since it is the spirit of Enlightenment that happens to be the driving force behind neo-conservative thought, dogmatic interventionalist secularism and ruthless technology, it would be intelligible to argue that if we want to save ourselves and our planet, we better be courageous enough to face our Enlightenment driven self-affectionate ideologies.  It is the Enlightened who puts humanity at risk whether it is nuking other humans, whether it is carpet bombardment, whether it is mass killing in the name of collectivisation, whether it is our ecological disaster and global warming or even killing in the name of democracy or liberation. For some devastating reason, it is always an Enlightened ideology behind all these well orchestrated genocides and human-inflicted tsunamis.

The following article by Ziauddin Sardar is a philosophical attempt to identify the conflict between Islam and lethal Western ideology. Sardar is a leading British intellectual. Some regard him also as a leading Muslim critic of Islam. In the following paper Sardar successfully challenges the notion of the clash of civilizations from the perspective of the other. GA ...

(7) Brazilian soccer star Ronaldo to star in Iranian film about a Palestinian refugee

From: World View <ummyakoub@yahoo.com> Date: 01.08.2009 06:29 PM

Brazil's Ronaldo to star as himself in Iranian film

Movie is based on Palestinian refugee teen fan's true story

Ronaldo will star as himself in an Iranian film about a Palestinian refugee in Southern Lebanon
Thursday, 23 July 2009
http://www.alarabiya.net/articles/2009/07/23/79583.html

DUBAI (Al Arabiya) Brazilian football star Ronaldo will star as himself in an Iranian movie based on the true story of a Palestinian girl who was killed before realizing her dream of meeting him, according to press reports Wednesday.

The film is based on the true story of 13-year-old Alneyrab who dreamed of meeting the sport superstar during his 2005 humanitarian mission to the region but was only able to watch him from a distance.
She dies in a refugee camp in Southern Lebanon after losing a leg to an anti-personnel mine without ever meeting her idol.

Palestinian refugees living in camps make up about 10 percent of the Lebanese population The three-time world player of the year has signed a pre-contract for the Iranian-directed film, his agent Fabiano Farah told the Brazilian sports website Globo website, though he still has to get permission from his club to act in it.

The 32-year-old two-time World Cup champion will appear in some dream scenes, said Farrokh Faradji Chadan, president of the Brazil-Iran chamber of commerce.

The film does not yet have a name.

The movie could start filming as early as September in Lebanon, where Ronoldo would only need to spend a few days shooting, he said, though he did not say how much the all-time leading World Cup scorer would be paid for his role in what Chadan called a "humanitarian" production.

He is set to be in Palestine September with his club Corinithians to play a friendly against another Brazilian club, the Fluminese. The teams rejected requests to play in Israel as well.

Ronaldo had previously visited Israel and the West Bank in 2005 as a U.N. Development Program goodwill ambassador on a campaign against poverty.