Code Pink's Medea Benjamin appears on Iranian TV to criticize AIPAC

Press TV, the Iranian regime's main English language propaganda outlet, has aired an interview with Medea Benjamin of Code Pink. The Press TV website containing the interview describes Benjamin as a "human rights advocate". Iran has by far the greatest number of executions per capita, state-sanctioned rape and torture, and many thousands of political prisoners. They apparently love a friendly "human rights advocate" like Medea Benjamin who is willing to overlook those facts when they appear on Iranian TV to condemn Jews for having too much influence in the U.S. 

(video here: PressTV - ‘AIPAC supports both US parties to guarantee influence’)

Al-Qaida to Ahmadinejad: enough with the 9/11 conspiracy theories

From the Guardian:

Al--Qaida has sent a message to the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, asking him to stop spreading conspiracy theories about the 9/11 attacks.

Iranian media on Wednesday reported quotes from what appears to be an article published in the latest issue of the al-Qaida English language magazine, Inspire, which described Ahmadinejad's remarks over the 11 September attacks as "ridiculous".

In his UN general assembly speech last week, Ahmadinejad cast doubt over the official version of the 2001 attacks.

"The Iranian government has professed on the tongue of its president Ahmadinejad that it does not believe that al-Qaida was behind 9/11 but rather, the US government," the article said, according to Iranian media. "So we may ask the question: why would Iran ascribe to such a ridiculous belief that stands in the face of all logic and evidence?"

Ahmadinejad said in New York that the "mysterious September 11 incident" had been used as a pretext to attack Afghanistan and Iraq. He had also previously expressed scepticism at the US version of events.

"By using their imperialistic media network which is under the influence of colonialism, they threaten anyone who questions the Holocaust and the September 11 event with sanctions and military actions," said Ahmadinejad.
The al-Qaida article insisted it had been behind the attacks and criticised the Iranian president for discrediting the terrorist group.

"For them, al-Qaida was a competitor for the hearts and minds of the disenfranchised Muslims around the world," said the article published in the Inspire magazine. "Al-Qaida … succeeded in what Iran couldn't. Therefore it was necessary for the Iranians to discredit 9/11 and what better way to do so? Conspiracy theories."

(Source: Al-Qaida calls on Ahmadinejad to end 9/11 conspiracy theories | World news | guardian.co.uk)

Galloway calls Rushdie a coward

Former politician George Galloway has issued a statement denouncing author Salman Rushdie as a "renegade" and "sneaky". Galloway's statement also challenged Rushdie to a debate, stating that a refusal would indicate that Rushdie lacks "moral fibre".

Salman Rushdie, one of the world's greatest living novelists, famously survived years in hiding after Iran's ruling clerics issued a death sentence for him, literally offering a massive bounty for his murder.

George Galloway, a former Member of Parliament, has worked on behalf of a number of brutal dictatorships, including those of Iran, Syria, Gaza and Saddam Hussein's Iraq, the latter, allegedly, at Galloway's great personal benefit and in contravention of a British ban on doing business with Saddam's regime.  Galloway has, for a number of years, worked as a broadcaster for Iran's state propaganda television station, Press TV.

It is bad enough that Galloway, a braggart, bully, liar and hater who works as a professional toady of tyrants should slander Salman Rushdie in this manner.  But the gist of this recent comment arguably represents something far worse about him.  Is it too much to ask that those who would serve in Britain's government not defend those who would murder its greatest artists? 

Twitter / @georgegalloway: I challenge the renegade R ...



Afterthought:  A comment at Harry's Place rightly points out that, by "renegade", Galloway means to say that Rushdie is an apostate.  The terms are both used to translate the Arabic term for what Muslim religious law considers a very serious crime, one which is commonly punishable by death.  (Read more about that here.)  As I see it, by using this term, Galloway implicitly argues in favor of the fatwa authorizing Rushdie's murder.  He is saying that Rushdie did exactly what the ayatollahs accused him of.

Now, with that, lets take a walk down memory lane with video of Galloway praising some of of his friends.

Two planeloads of Basij militia reportedly arrive in Syria. Protesters opposing Iran and Hezbollah as well as Assad regime.

Elder of Ziyon relays reports that Iran is sending their brutal secret police force to put down Syrian anti-government protests. He also reports that YouTube has video of mourners at a funeral for a slain Daraa protester chanting "Neither Iran nor Hezbollah ... only to be a Muslim who is afraid of God."

read here: Elder of Ziyon: Report: Two planeloads of Basij militia arrived in Syria on Saturday

A commenter has complained that the sources for this report are weak, or as he puts it "the story is complete crap".  Although it has been reported by the Beirut Observer and by Kol Israel's Arabic edition, with details including the airlines and airport used, flight numbers and the times of arrival, both articles rely on anonymous sources.  I'll keep an open mind with respect to information contradicting these articles, but feel that they're worth reporting here with a grain-of-salt alert based on the anonymous sources and lack of corroborating reports from other media outlets.

(Thanks to the commenter.)


UPDATE (3/25/2011 7PM):  According to a report on Ynet (read here):

Deraa's Mukhtar (village chief) Muhammad al-Mehamid claimed that protestors in the city captured an Iranian sniper brought into the area to fire at protestors. "What's happening in Deraa is a great embarrassment to President Assad," he said in a TV interview. "Images of weapons which Syrian TV said came from Deraa are baseless. The Syrian intelligence cooked it up. The fire came from one source only – the Syrian's regime."

According to al-Mehamid "we have captured a man and we're waiting for the media to publish the truth. See that the man caught is a bearded Iranian who can't speak Arabic and has come to shoot us. We ask the international media – come see the truth."

Iran's dictators support some social-media uprisings, oppose others.

Iran's dictatorship struggles to find ways to support the democracy movements spreading through other Muslim countries while violently suppressing free expression at home. They attempt this to accomplish this act of radical compartmentalization by characterizing the democracy movements as expressions of Islamist, anti-secular ideology.  In doing so, they contradict most participants in these movements and many of their western supporters who tend to minimize the role of political Islam and portray Islamists as moderate or even secular. In a speech broadcast on the main station of Iranian state TV on February 4, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran's so-called "Supreme Leader", announced Iran's support for the uprisings in Tunis and Egypt, characterizing them as representative of popular support for theocratic rule, and as fundamentally opposing Israel and the U.S.  Khamenei also began enunciating Iran's opposition to moderate, non-Islamist elements within those uprisings.  Those he characterized as the products of American and Israeli conspiracies to counter the wave of Islamism he purports to be sweeping the region.  (Click here to view video of his speech.)

After violently suppressing peaceful pro-democracy demonstrators in Teheran with police and troops on Monday, Iran's rulers showed their vision of legitimate expressions of Islamic democracy by using a session of their parliament to rally support for the summary execution of opposition party leaders.  Video of this amazing spectacle, which comes from Press TV via CNN, is viewable below.  Watch it and imagine this parliament in control of a nuclear arsenal.

As Iranian pro-democracy activists begin a new wave of Facebook and internet-based organizing in opposition to state repression, Iran has found an "off switch" to interrupt such organizing in Egypt during the uprising there.  The now-departed Egyptian regime used their control of the physical and logical means of international communication to shut down the internet (read here).  In the case of Iran, which had already blocked an estimated 5 million websites containing material deemed threatening to the survival of the Islamic Republic, they added a block on all sites containing the term "bahman", the Farsi name for the current month in the Iranian calendar, have slowed broadband speeds to a crawl and interfered with cell phone service. (Read here.)

Now Iranian TV has revealed in the below-embedded news report the shocking news that the internet and Facebook are the products of American imperialist and Zionist conspiracies to monitor and control the world.  The report also reveals that Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has offered to reward Israelis who kill Palestinians a payment of an unstated quantity of gold coins, presumably what the target audience for the report would believe to be the preferred form of payment for Zionist assassins .  This theater-of-the-absurd disinformation, which features an overdubbed mistranslation of a speech by Israel's Minister of Science Daniel Hershkowitz, is viewable below.





(Source: MEMRI: Iranian TV: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg Is a Zionist who "Offered a Prize for Israelis who Kill Palestinians"  Hat tip: Harry's Place)

PressTV blames Israel for Egypt church bombing

Iran's English-language TV propaganda outlet, PressTV, has reported that Israel's Mossad intelligence agency was responsible for the Christmas day bombing of a Coptic Christian church in Alexandria, Egypt, which killed more than 20 worshippers. PressTV headlines an article on the bombing "Mossad behind Egypt church blast". While the article offers no evidence for this outrageous claim, they reach their conclusion based on the following points:

Although, at first glance, the finger is pointed at extremist Wahabi or Salafi groups, it goes without saying that no Muslim, whatever their political leanings may be, will ever commit such an inhumane act.

and

Attacks on churches in Egypt, Lebanon, Iraq and Tunisia can be analyzed in the context of a Zionist scenario aimed at driving a wedge between Muslims and Arab Christians. Since the emergence of Islam, Muslims and Christians in the East have always coexisted peacefully as Islam pays due respect to the freedom of divine faiths -- especially Christianity [sic]. In Egypt, too, Muslims and Christians are living in peace and harmony. Never, ever have the Christians in Egypt complained of any problems keeping them from carrying out their religious duties [sic]. The fresh plot by terrorists to target churches is an organized Zionist scenario aimed at creating a rift between Muslims and Christians.

PressTV infers from these "facts" a grand conspiracy involving the Sudan civil war, water rights in North Africa and incitement of Egypt's Copts to rise up against the Muslim majority.

After south Sudan is separated from the north, the Israeli regime will, thanks to its physical presence on the ground, take control of the water flow in the river and hold the 11 countries on both sides of the Nile to political ransom. Leaders in south of the African country had already announced they would establish broad political relations with Tel Aviv once they break away from the north [sic]. Another scenario on the West's agenda is to lay the groundwork for the formation of a Coptic government in Upper Nile in Egypt [sic].

PressTV thus blames the victims of oppression in Sudan and Egypt, and infers without benefit of evidence a most unlikely conspiracy of Jews behind these Christian-Muslim conflicts. The absurd icing on this crazy cake:

All the existing evidence proves that the Alexandria church explosion, though appearing to have been carried out by extremist groups, is the handiwork of the Israeli intelligence service Mossad.

In other coverage of the attack on the PressTV website, an article on Coptic protests against the terrorist attack emphasized the threat posed to the Muslim majority by Copts, claiming that 45 policemen had been wounded by Coptic protesters and ominously pointing out that 10% of the Egyptian population is Christian.  AFP coverage of the protests indicate that Egyptian police killed two Copts, arrested more than 160 and injured countless others, eliciting the condemnation of Coptic leaders.  (Read here.)

The PressTV article on the protests quoted President Mubarek to the effect that "foreign hands" were responsible for the bombing, thus leaving vague the question as to whether Islamists or Israelis were responsible, as did another article on their website. They also quoted Hezbollah's Naharnet website to support their Mossad conspiracy theory. Another article on the PressTV website quotes spokesmen for Islamic Jihad, Fatah and the Palestinian Legislative Council opposing the bombing. That article cites unnamed "experts" blaming Mossad for the bombing.

The AFP paints a much different picture of the attack and its aftermath. Their coverage of Egypt's investigation of the bombing reports that the Ministry of the Interior blames foreign terrorists both because the attack was a suicide bombing and because al-Qaeda has indicated a motive.

Al-Qaeda has called for punishment of Egypt's Copts over claims that two priests' wives they say had converted to Islam were being held by the Church against their will.

After a similar bomb attack on a Christian cathedral in Bagdhad that killed 44 worshipers, 2 priests and 7 police, al-Qaeda took responsibility and connected it to Egypt.

(Responsibility for the Baghdad cathedral attack) was claimed by Al-Qaeda's Iraq affiliate, the Islamic State of Iraq, which said its purpose was to force the release of the two women in Egypt.  

"All Christian centres, organisations and institutions, leaders and followers, are legitimate targets for the mujahedeen (holy warriors) wherever they can reach them," the group said.   "Let these idolaters, and at their forefront, the hallucinating tyrant of the Vatican, know that the killing sword will not be lifted from the necks of their followers until they declare their innocence from what the dog of the Egyptian Church is doing," the ISI said.

That threat, issued two months ago, seems very clear.  PressTV's coverage has thusfar failed to report it.

Iranian regime marks 9/11 by promoting "9/11 truth" conspiracy theories

In honor of the ninth anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, PressTV, Iran's primary English language propaganda outlet, has published articles stating that "9/11 truth" conspiracy theories have exonerated Islamist terrorists for the attacks. These conspiracy theories, which allege that the World Trade Center was destroyed not by plane crashes but by explosives planted in the buildings by conspirators, were presented in a New York City press conference timed to coincide with 9/11 commemorations being held there. (Read here: PressTV - 'Evidence proves 9/11 story is a lie', and here, in an article concerning President Obama's 9/11 commemorative speech. 1/3 of that article is devoted to spurious claims by a group called Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth.) Here's a portion of the former article, which PressTV claims to prove the official story of 9/11 to be a lie:

A day before the ninth anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks, Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth say evidence regarding the destruction of the World Trade Center towers has emerged that show pre-set explosives were used in the demolition of the buildings.

Gregg Roberts, who is a member of the non-profit organization disputing the results of official investigations into the September 11 attacks, says the “official story is a lie, it is a fraud.”

According to experts, the Twin Towers suffered total destruction within 10-14 seconds in near free fall accelerations which can only occur as a result of pre-set demolition explosives.

“There had to be explosives, there is no other way for the building to come symmetrically straight down... like a tree if you cut into the tree it falls to the side, that you cut,” said Steven Dusterwald, another member of the truth seeking organization.
The group also asserts that molten metal was found after the 9/11 inquiry.

“Jet fuel and office fires cannot melt iron or steel. They don't even get half as hot as that and so something else was there, very energetic material that had to be placed throughout the buildings,” Roberts said.

“Once we take the blinders off, we can see. There are very few people in America who have taken the blinders off. So we are assisting people by showing them the evidence,” said founder of Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth Richard Gage.

“The 600 architects I represent are most concerned about the freefall collapse of [World Trade Center] Building 7, the third skyscraper [that was] not hit by an airplane to fall on the afternoon of 9/11...the whole building is destroyed in 6.5 seconds,” the American Free Press quoted Gage as saying.

World Trade Center 7 reportedly collapsed about eight hours after the main World Trade Center towers fell.

The new evidence makes void the official story line that 19 al-Qaeda terrorists hijacked four commercial airliners and crashed into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York City.

The PressTV article fails to specify the "new evidence (that) makes void the official story" of 9/11, only citing the assertions made at this press conference concerning the impossibility for the towers to have collapsed in a downward direction unless they were helped along by planted explosives. I know from their organization's title that these people are architects and engineers, so I can't explain their confusion on this subject. In my experience, objects tend to fall in a downward direction, so the trajectory of the falling towers presents no mystery. Of course, in my experience, I have never seen a massive high-rise building "fall like a tree" as they have. While the truther architects and engineers have yet to cite examples of such tree-like high-rise building collapses, they continue to assert them to be typical. It seems that they know something that everyone else doesn't.

To be clear: as a rule, 9/11 truth conspiracy theories raise easily answered questions concerning how the towers were destroyed, claim that they are unanswered by "the official story", then offer easily refuted counter-theories as to what really happened. The assertions of this truther group and the credulous report by PressTV follow precisely this pattern.

Having thus exonerated al-Qaeda for 9/11, PressTV found an authority to quote on who actually was to blame. Mike Gravel, a quirky dark-horse presidential candidate in the 2008 Democratic primaries proclaims the truth of "9/11 truth", although he is neither an architect nor an engineer. Here's how PressTV quotes him:

“If there is a responsible party,” former US Senator Mike Gravel told Press TV, “it ends with [former US President George W.] Bush and it comes down to [Former Vice President Dick] Cheney and then it comes down to the military and the various bureaucracies. No question that this kind of activity goes to the very top.”

In reaching the conclusion that 9/11 was an inside job, PressTV, Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth and Mike Gravel follow the pattern they see in the collapsing buildings. They have reached that conclusion more quickly and in a straighter line than mere reliance on the evidence can explain. This logical collapse must have been helped along by bias and bad faith.

Marcy Winograd in the Tehran Times: ‘U.S. policy is nuclear narcissism’

Marcy Winograd, who's running in the Democratic primary for U.S. Congress in Jane Harmon's district in California, has given an interview to the Mehr News Agency, the official news agency of Iran's dictatorship. In that interview, which was published in the Tehran Times, Winograd condemned President Obama's Iran policies, calling them "nuclear narcissism". She also described herself, apropos of nothing, as a "non-Zionist Jew".

Read here: Tehran Times : ‘U.S. policy is nuclear narcissism’ and here: Politico: Harman, Winograd spar over Iran

The madness of Michael Scheuer

Michael Scheuer, who headed the CIA's so-called "bin Laden unit" during the Clinton presidency and in that role helped develop and put into practice "extraordinary rendition", has taken a trajectory toward increasingly radical and, frankly, batty thinking in recent years. That may explain his attraction to the equally batty Ron Paul, for whose 2008 presidential campaign Scheuer served as chief foreign policy adviser and legitimacy fig leaf. Scheuer's ideas on foreign policy now sometimes encompass contradictory extremes concerning the United States' role in the world -- a sort of cognitive dissonance tolerable only to an ideologue with an inflated opinion of his own abilities. Thus Scheuer the advocate for American exceptionalism and extraordinary rendition is also Scheuer the critic of American intervention who blames the United States for creating terrorism. His latest piece, published on Antiwar.com, is a case in point. It's title alone speaks volumes about Scheuer's confusion: Barack Obama, Interventionist and Ultimate Jihadi Hero. Here's a quote:

Then there is Iran. Listening to Obama as he spoke gave the impression that he was eager to get the Detroit-attack stuff out of the way so he could rhetorically intervene in Iran’s internal affairs. Joining with our allies — read other Western interventionists and pawns of Israel — Obama said he wanted to condemn the Tehran regime’s at-times-lethal crackdown on opposition demonstrators. He said that Ahmadinejad and the ruling clerics were trampling on the "universal rights" of Iranians, and that such actions must stop. There are, of course, no universal political rights; this idea is the pipedream of Western secular intellectuals and interventionists, and is part and parcel of the interventionist nonsense Obama included in his Nobel speech about the "perfectibility" of the human condition through the efforts of "enlightened" men and women.

Obama’s mind is emerging as a mind filled with war-causing secular theology of the French Revolution. That revolution was all about enlightened leaders "perfecting" the common man for what the revolutionary elite deemed to be his own good, and using the vehicles of government edict, fanatic secularism, and force to do so. (Sounds a bit like the universal health-care plan, doesn’t it?) The French Revolution went on to father Hitler, Stalin, the Khmer Rouge, and other mass-murdering regimes. In the American context, the revolution’s impact has been the slow but increasingly complete replacement of the Founders’ sturdy non-interventionism — which recognized the pivotal and necessary role religion plays in all polities — by our current bipartisan elite’s obsession with interfering in other peoples’ internal affairs, especially if those internal affairs are interwoven with religion. For Obama and most members of our governing elite, today’s Iran fairly screams for Western intervention to break the mullahs’ backs and install secularism; to destroy an Israeli foe and ensure AIPAC funds to continue to flow into their pockets; and to make them feel good about themselves, no matter the cost to Americans and their children.

Bad writing doesn't always reflect bad ideas, but in this case that connection is clear. Let's take the errors in that excerpt in order:

1) President Obama's reaction to the attempted airline bombing in Detroit has not been to avoid dealing with it, as Scheuer and others on the right (such as Dick Cheney) contend. The president has ordered immediate reviews of the errors which allowed the bomber to get a visa and board a plane with a bomb before issuing an official, in-depth response. That decision to get as much information about the issue as quickly as possible before he acts seems a wise one for any leader in such a situation, regardless of their ideological orientation. (The previous administration had no need for such a deliberative process considering that they predetermined their course of action before a review of facts. Their only consideration was how to sell that decision to the public in light of those facts.) When President Obama does issue a comprehensive official statement on the attack, such pointless criticisms as those made by Scheuer, Cheney, etc. will disappear to be replaced, no doubt, by other criticisms similarly motivated mostly by a desire to sling mud. Such criticisms really say nothing about the president's policies or his decision-making processes, but say a great deal about the partisan motivation of the critics.

2) Criticizing the horrendous human rights abuses committed by the Iranian regime hardly constitutes "rhetorically interven(ing) in Iran’s internal affairs" as Scheuer puts it. Those words, which could have come directly from the mouth of a spokesman for Ahmadinejad, set a ridiculous standard of what constitutes intervention. Scheuer's isolationism, in this instance, excludes any response whatsoever to the outrages committed by Iran's leaders against those unfortunate enough to live under their rule. That simply takes isolationism, or as he would term it "non-interventionism", to an absurd extreme.

3) Scheuer argues against the idea of universal rights, calling the very concept "the pipedream of Western secular intellectuals and interventionists". Setting aside the evident anti-intellectualism of the comment (and its inexplicable use of the word "secular"), Scheuer's idea that the concept of inalienable human rights -- the sort advocated by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison -- is somehow the product of elitist war-mongers is simply astounding. Scheuer, like Ron Paul, argues that he is motivated by a desire to restore the U.S. to a state envisioned by its founders, yet is painfully ignorant of American history. He absurdly links the Jeffersonian ideas embodied in the Declaration of Independence to "Hitler, Stalin, the Khmer Rouge, and other mass-murdering regimes", tenuously arguing that the French Revolution believed in those same ideas and (he says) that revolution went on inspire Hitler, Stalin, et al. As if that French connection weren't tenuous enough, Scheuer finds a way to throw the idea of universal health care into this logical morass, saying it's all a part of a plan by elites to control the lives of the masses. (Scheuer previously demonstrated a weak grasp of U.S. history by attributing the "America First" slogan of World War II isolationists to the founding fathers. Read here.)

4) Speaking of elites, Scheuer has no trouble identifying the "elite group" he claims to be behind the president's criticism of the Iranian regime's brutality: it's the Zionists. The president's condemnation of Iranian abuses, he says, is just part of a conspiracy to vanquish a foe of Israel which is being carried out by cash-wielding agents of AIPAC. Scheuer's anti-Israel paranoia is nothing new. In the past, he accused those who wanted to build the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum of putting Israel's interests before those of the United States. (Read here.) He also accused Americans who serve in the IDF of disloyalty, singling out for criticism Rahm Emanuel who actually served Israel in a civilian capacity. (Read here.) Scheuer likes to accuse Jews of being traitors.

The absurdity and bigotry of these paranoid views is evident. What remains unclear to me is how this man still maintains a good enough reputation as an expert on foreign affairs to qualify him to be interviewed on topics such as Afghanistan, about which he was interviewed recently by BBC World Service. How on earth can anyone read his ravings and continue to maintain that he is an expert on anything? It is bad enough when paranoid views are promoted on Fox News by a self-described "rodeo clown" such as Glenn Beck. Scheuer may be a clown, but he doesn't describe himself as one. Neither does the BBC. Maybe they should.

Judging by that BBC interview, Scheuer seems to have broken his habit of compulsively addressing his interviewers as "sir" or "ma'am" at least once per answer. That odd mannerism of excessive politeness just sounded a little quirky. However, he has already shown himself in many interviews and columns to be a proponent of paranoid views concerning Jews, dangerously ignorant about history, and biased beyond reason against President Obama. Now that he has added this column defending the right of the Iranian regime to oppress its people, condemning those who criticize that horror, and summarily dismissing the Jeffersonian ideals upon which this country is based as being of a piece with Nazism and Stalinism, maybe its time for news organizations and presidential candidates to stop giving Scheuer a forum.

Traficant to testify for Demjanjuk; working for neo-fascist website

Reposted here: http://adamholland.blogspot.com/2009/11/traficant-to-testify-for-demjanjuk_04.html

Fascist follies in the European Parliament

Csanád Szegedi (pictured at right), one of three newly elected Hungarian members of the European Parliament (MEPs) from the fascist Jobbik party, came to the parliament's July 14 opening session wearing the uniform of the party's illegal Magyar Garda militia. (Read here, and here, in an article auto-translated from Slovak. Background here in an article in French.) This uniform is based on that of Hungary's Arrow Cross, a pro-Nazi party which committed mass murders of Jews during the Holocaust. (Read here.) A ruling declaring the Magyar Garda illegal was affirmed by a Hungarian appeals court on July 3. The original ban followed a rising tide of anti-Roma violence, in which the paramilitary conducted several pogroms culminating in the murder of a Roma man and his young son.

Szegedi's two fellow Jobbik MEPs, Krisztina Morvai and Zoltán Balczó (pictured below on an earlier occasion), came to the EP opening session attired in 19th Century Hungarian military uniforms. Jobbik advocates returning Hungary to what they regard as its "golden age" by expanding its borders to include Slovakia, Transylvania, Ruthenia, and other areas it lost after World War I. That sort of populist nationalism tends to appeal to the far-right. It bypasses the brain and goes straight to the gut. It even reaches across the Atlantic and appeals to American neo-Nazis at Stormfront (here) and the Ron Paul crowd (here).

After the Hungarian fascists had their costume party, a MEP representing Hungary's ruling Socialist Party moved that the EP ban the wearing of paramilitary uniforms in parliament sessions. (Read here.)

Meanwhile the two British National Party (BNP) representatives, Nick Griffin and Andrew Brons, were assigned seats in the back of the room. Another British non-aligned party MEP refused to be seated next to them. (Read here.)

When Krisztina Morvai gave her first speech to the parliament, she first identified herself as a "human rights attorney" (her usual shtik), then argued against a proposal that the EP study what action to take with respect to Iran. She claimed that Hungary's human rights record was worse than that of Iran, and that any look at the crimes of the Iranian dictatorship must be preceded by a study of Hungary's treatment of its far-right.

Nick Griffin later rose to support Morvai's argument, parroting her speech and taking it a bit further. Griffin claimed that the west focused on Iranian human rights violations and not on Hungary's purported suppression of its fascists because of a shadowy international conspiracy. He went on to claim that, if the EP studied the Iran question, British soldiers would soon be returning from a war with Iran with horrific injuries. (He also indicated that British soldiers live on the banks of picturesque rivers.) Based on his concern for British young people, Griffin demanded an inquiry into Hungary's suppression of its fascist militias.

Watch them here:

With respect to the Magyar Garda uniform's similarity to that of the Arrow Cross, as a point of reference, pictured below are Arrow Cross militiamen circa 1944-1945 wearing their winter uniforms. You may be interested to know the current views of an Arrow Cross leader who escaped justice in Australia. Read about that here.

Arrow Cross militia receiving machine guns from German Consular employee, 10 Pasar�ti avenue, Budpest (Source: Hungarian National Museum)

Magyar Garda demonstration

London Starbucks attacks linked to boycott Israel movement, conspiracy theories

In recent days, there has been a wave of anti-Israel violence and vandalism in reaction to Israel's war against Hamas in Gaza. Most of that has been directed at innocent third parties who are thought to have connections to Israel. One of the odder manifestations of this trend has been the sudden morphing of a campaign to boycott Starbucks shops into actual attacks on two shops in London and demonstrations at several others in Britain, Europe and the Middle East.

JTA has published a brief piece with more information on the violent attacks on two London Starbucks shops by people who had participated in a rally at Trafalgar Square which featured various pro-Hamas and anti-Israel speakers. Read it here. It directly links these violent attacks to calls to divest from and boycott businesses alleged to be connected to Israel. It also tracks the origins of conspiracy theories motivating the attacks. (Also read this piece by Brendan O'Neill which provides greater detail.) The allegations behind these boycotts and the nature of their supposed remedy are vague and subject to interpretation. The rioters in London provided one form of interpretation.


from the JTA:

Calls to boycott Starbucks, based on false claims that the company helped finance Israel’s military operation in Gaza, led to violent attacks on two of its cafes in London.

In the past two weeks, the call to boycott Starbucks have been circulating by e-mails and SMS messages with the claim that Starbucks and McDonald’s were donating their next two weeks' revenues to Israel. Some claimed the donations are to the “Israeli military.”

On Jan. 17, during an anti-Israel rally at Trafalgar Square in central London, the rapper Lowkey attacked companies, including Starbucks, that have "Zionist" links." "You say you know about the Zionist lobby," he told the crowd, "but you put money in their pockets every time you’re buying their coffee." After the rally, two groups of a few dozen people each smashed the windows of two branches of Starbucks cafes and looted the shops.

Those calling for a boycott of Starbucks claim they have a letter from 2006 that proves their claim about company CEO Howard Schultz's support of Israel. Apparently the letter was published on an Internet site by an Australian anti-Zionist, who made it clear that he wrote the letter as a parody. Statements by Starbucks denying the claims did nothing to stop the campaign against the “Zionist coffee.”

Starbucks does not operate in Israel. In 2003 the company closed its branches there after being unable to break into the extensive cafe market.

One of the groups behind Britain's boycott campaign is Inminds, an Islamist group which works to support the Iranian dictatorship. Inminds issue a list of corporations and products which they assert are linked to Israel and are therefor "support(ing) baby killers". Their flyer is available on their website in Word format here. The website says the flyer is intended "to accompany the family on shopping trips, etc., to ensure guilty brands are avoided." (They don't specify whether "etc." includes vandalism of shops and attacks on workers.) The list of products to be boycotted includes clothing, food and cosmetics; not a single arms manufacturer is on the list. The connection of these products to Israel is not indicated.

Inminds has also published a flyer and webpage baselessly accusing Starbucks of complicity in violence against civilians. (Their flyer, entitled "Starbucks contribution to violence", is readable here in pdf. The Inminds anti-Starbucks webpage is here.) Their flyer features a bloody graphic portraying the following equation: U.S. flag + Israeli flag + Starbucks logo = horrific image of dead baby. It (ungrammatically) claims that "(b)y boycotting Starbucks, we're engaging in an essential key role to stop funding the Israeli and American Governmental Terrorism taking place worldwide and especially in Palestine, Iraq, Lebanon and Afghanistan!" (According to their website, Inminds' allegations concerning Starbucks role in Iraq and Afganistan deal with Starbucks collaboration with the Red Cross to provide free coffee to troops. The connection to Lebanon goes unstated.) The unfounded allegations of Starbucks' complicity in violence, the conspiracy theories and the violent imagery promoted by Inminds may have played a role in motivating the recent attacks on London Starbucks.

I was disturbed to discover that Inminds' anti-Israel boycotts are currently being promoted on Talking Points Memo, a highly reputable U.S. blog. (Read here.) The author of that post, Salman Ranaw, gives some background to the attacks in London, stating that "(a) few Muslims in Birmingham got together and paid for the printing of 10,000 colour boycott leaflets (which they approached us to design). The leaflets were distributed through out (sic) the UK."

(More on the London attacks at Harry's Place here and here. Other U.K. reports here and here. The story of an attack on a Starbucks in Beirut can be read here, on a blog of the L.A. Times and here, on a leftist French blog.)



The idea of anti-Starbucks activism connected to opposition to Israel has been floating around for quite some time. As I discussed here in a piece about Seattle's proposed anti-Israel divestature measure last year, Starbuck's has been a target of anti-Israel boycotters in the U.S. as well as in Europe and the Muslim world. Here (about a third of the way down the page) and here (in a pormotional flyer in MSWord) is a 2002 example of three boycott-Starbucks demonstrations staged in New Brunswick, N.J. by a local ISM (International Solidarity Movement) affiliate called New Jersey Solidarity, which is based at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. (As an aside, I noted with interest that, concurrent with their anti-Starbucks campaign, the Rutgers group hosted -- on campus -- an infamous anti-Semitic web polemicist who calls himself Joachim Martillo. The flyer for that event is available in pdf here. To cite a recent example of his writing, Martillo recently wrote here that not blaming Jews as a group for the world financial crisis "is comparable to Holocaust denial". To get the gist of the ISM agenda, check out the New Jersey ISM group's flyers for its 2002-2003 events here.)

The website ziopedia.org coninues to diseminate the phony 2006 Starbucks letter discussed in the JTA piece above. (Read here. WARNING: the ziopedia.org website features violent, disturbing imagery and language. It also promotes Holocaust denial.) Ziopedia also diseminates the following anti-Semitic image



[NOTE: Since this was written, the ziopedia website has taken this material offline. I've found this archived version of the phony letter, with a confession by Andrew Winkler, ziopedia's publisher, that he was its true author. A larger version of the below image, which was formerly linked to from ziopedia above, has since been removed from that website.

>


The website arabnews.com promoted the boycott of Starbucks in this 2006 post. This 2006 report from the Jewlicious website concerns an Arab blogger who adds his own twist to the usual Zionist conspiracy: he believes that the Starbucks logo depicts Queen Esther. This string on an Arab bulletin board connects Starbucks to Zionism to saturated fats.

According to one Arab-American blogger (read here), these rumors and conspiracy theories have recently found fertile ground in the U.S. Arab community in reaction to the fighting in Gaza. Jamal Dajani writes:

BTW, did I mention that here in the U.S. Arab Americans in solidarity with Gaza have been boycotting Starbucks? For the last couple of weeks, internet conspiracy theorists have been spreading a story that Starbucks is funding the Israeli attacks on Gaza!

With respect to the various internet and text message campaigns spurring anti-Starbucks actions throughout the world, we have the following from ynet.com (read here):

The Starbucks coffee company, which operates many stores in the Arab world, especially in the Persian Gulf, also issued a statement denying the message, and also denied rumors that the company's Jewish CEO Howard Schultz expressed support for the military operation in Gaza. Similar rumors about Shultz were spread during the Second Lebanon War, sparking a greater row than the present one. Starbucks ... denied (those) reports ... as well.

Note to readers: if you know of more conspiracy theories involving Starbucks and Israel and feel like posting them to the comments section of this post, be my guest...

UPDATE: According to MEMRI, al-Jazeera is promoting the boycott and the whole Protocols of the Elders of Starbucks conspiracy theory. (Read here.)

Juan Cole defends Ahmadinejad, condemns Obama's denunciation of his anti-Semitic U.N. speech

As I recently posted, Barack Obama has strongly condemned the bigotry of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's statement to the U.N. and called for increased pressure on Iran to thwart their developing nuclear weapons (read here).

Ahmadinejad said the following to the U.N. General Assembly:

"A small but deceitful number of people called Zionists ... dominat(e) an important portion of the financial and monetary centers ... (in) a deceitful, complex and furtive manner."

Obama said this in response (read here):

"I strongly condemn President Ahmadinejad's outrageous remarks at the United Nations, and am disappointed that he had a platform to air his hateful and anti-Semitic views. The threat from Iran's nuclear program is grave. Now is the time for Americans to unite on behalf of the strong sanctions that are needed to increase pressure on the Iranian regime.

"Once again, I call upon Senator McCain to join me in supporting a bipartisan bill to increase pressure on the Iranian regime by allowing states and private companies to divest from companies doing business in Iran. The security of our ally Israel is too important to play partisan politics, and it is deeply disappointing that Senator McCain and a few of his allies in Congress feel otherwise."

Now Juan Cole has written a lengthy column for Salon in which he condemns Obama's condemnation while entirely glossing over Ahmadinejad's outrageous bigotry. To Cole, it's as if it never happened.

from Salon:Obama goes over the top in bashing Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

"Sen. Barack Obama responded with outrage to the remarks made Tuesday by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad before the United Nations General Assembly, expressing regret that the quirky little president was even allowed to speak."

--cut

"In his speech, Ahmadinejad said "the American empire ... is reaching the end of the road" and accused the U.N. Security Council of allowing "Zionist murders" because of "pressure from a few bullying powers." Obama issued a statement saying, "I strongly condemn President Ahmadinejad's outrageous remarks at the United Nations, and am disappointed that he had a platform to air his hateful and anti-Semitic views." He added, "The threat from Iran's nuclear program is grave." Obama then called on his rival in the presidential race, Sen. John McCain, "to join me in supporting a bipartisan bill to increase pressure on the Iranian regime by allowing states and private companies to divest from companies doing business in Iran." He slammed McCain, saying that the senator was playing partisan politics by declining to join Obama in this divestment campaign.

"In the heat of the campaign, Obama surely overreached himself in appearing to advocate barring leaders of member states from addressing the United Nations because their views are obnoxious to Americans. He also fell into the trap of declining to make a distinction between anti-Zionist views and anti-Semitic ones."

Cole has swallowed whole Ahmadinejad's substition of the word "Zionist" for "Jew" in the context of a classic anti-Jewish stereotype: Jewish control of international finance. Moreover, Cole says that he doubts that Ahmadinejad has any ill intentions for Jews because he hasn't killed them in Iran.

"If Ahmadinejad wanted to launch a second Holocaust, would he not begin at home?"

So Cole is satisfied that Ahmadinejad is just a quirky guy who means no harm to Jews. The problem as he sees it is that bad guys like Barack Obama just don't understand Ahmadinejad like Cole does. After all, all Ahmadinejad wants to do is wipe out the state of Israel. But according to Cole, that's really no big deal, and people who do think it's a big deal are playing the anti-Semitism card. That kind of person just won't accept any criticism of Israel, and they will unfairly destroy the reputation of anyone who opposes them.

Cole says that Ahmadinejad merely supports what Cole calls the "vanishing of the regime" and replacing it with "a single democratically elected state in Israel and Palestine". Cole goes on to say:

Committed Zionists, that is to say, Jewish nationalists, who believe that Israel must remain a Jewish-majority state, often see the advocacy of a one-state solution (in which Israeli Jews might be reduced to a simple majority or even only a plurality of the population) as a dire threat to the Jewish people. They are also known to smear anyone who demurs from their rigid conception of nationalism as an anti-Semite or even a terrorist. However, neither their conviction that any criticism of Israel must be prohibited, nor their insistence on a state dominated by a single ethnicity, nor their often unpleasant tactics of the destruction of reputations should stand in the way of Americans seeking an unblinkered understanding of contemporary Iran and pursuing American interests in regard to relations with Tehran.

Wow.

Cole is very "understanding" of Ahmadinejad. He seems to think of him as a fellow misunderstood victim of Zionist smears.

Argentina asks Iran to hand over suspects in 1994 Jewish center bombing

from Reuters via Haaretz: Argentina asks Iran to hand over suspects in 1994 Jewish center bombing

Argentine President Cristina Fernandez asked Iran on Tuesday to hand over several citizens suspected of planning the deadly 1994 bombing of an Argentine Jewish center, so they can face a local trial.

"I would ask the Islamic Republic of Iran in accordance with international law...accept that Argentine justice can put on trial...those citizens who have been accused," Fernandez told the U.N. General Assembly in New York.

Argentina has asked for the arrest of former Iranian President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, seven other Iranians and a former Hezbollah guerrilla leader on charges they masterminded the blast, which killed 85 people.

Interpol, the international police agency, has issued arrest orders for six of the suspects. Interpol notices seek the arrest of a suspect so that they can be extradited.

But they do not force a country to arrest a suspect.

Iran has repeatedly denied any involvement in the attack and blames the United States for trying to implicate the Islamic Republic.

Tehran has made an Interpol request for the arrest of five Argentines for making false charges against Iran and bribery.

The bombing of the AMIA Jewish center in Argentina came two years after an explosion destroyed the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires and killed 29 people. Neither crime has been solved.

Iran Promotes Holocaust Denial in U.K.

This post follows up on an earlier post concerning Nicholas Kollerstrom (read here), a former research fellow in the Science and Technology Department of University College of London who uses his respectable credentials to market Holocaust denial, "9/11 Truth", and other insane conspiracy theories (read here and here and here, in an article called "Nutball City Limits" and here). Professionally, Kollerstrom specializes in using computer technology to analyze the work of historical astronomers such as Issac Newton. He also devotes a great deal of time to attempting to put a respectable veneer on Holocaust denial of the sort espoused by Fred Leuchter, and promoting "9/11 truth", such as the idea that neither of the American Airlines flight that were crashed into the World Trade Center on 9/11 actually flew on that day and that the victims on board the planes are actually still alive or never existed (read here or here).

Kollerstrom's wackjob activism recently got him dismissed from his fellowship (read here). Some of his allies in the "truth" movement have now decided that he's a Mossad mole deliberately disgracing their cause (read comments here).

While making enemies at home, this nutty professor has found friends among the lunatics running Iran. Iran owns an 24-hour English language TV news station (available on cable in the UK) called PressTV via which it promotes the truth according to the Islamic Republic of Iran. Their version of truth seems to correspond to the truth according to Kollerstrom with respect to the Holocaust. In fact, they've given over a substantial webpage on the PressTV website to promoting Kollerstrom's pseudo-scholarly Holocaust denial (read here).


Kollerstrom


Iran also uses PressTV to promote conspiracy theories about the July 7, 2005 London subway bombings. Here, from Youtube, is a PressTV program promoting "London Subway Bombing Truth". This slick interview program was produced in Britain and hosted by PressTV presenter Yvonne Ridley (read here and here and here and here), the British journalist who was taken hostage by the Taliban in 2001 and subsequently converted to Islam. Before working for PressTV, Ridley worked for al-Jazeera, but was fired either for accusing her boss of shopping at the Jewish-owned Marks & Spencer (read here) or (as she claims) for refusing to suppress news of U.S. atrocities against children in Iraq and Afganistan (read here).

Ridley

By the way, Ridley's program features Bilderberg conspiracy fruitcake Tony Gosling. (Read about him here. PLEASE read Gosling's website either here or here. Another of his websites is here.) Chip Berlet has called Gosling "a major source of right-wing populist conspiracy theories tinged with apocalyptic millennialism". I would agree with that, but without limiting Gosling to right wing ideas. Gosling, a quirky sort of guy, identifies himself as a leftist and is a member of the Green Party, while promoting ideas associated with the extreme right and with cultists such as David Icke. Gosling's conspiracy theories are explicitly religious (some based on the Bible, many focusing on Masons, Illuminati, Jews, etc.) and transcend limitations of standard political ideology. (Some of his ideas about Jews are available here and here.) Incredibly, Gosling has been a candidate for local political office and is an officer of the National Union of Journalists (NUJ). To bring this full circle, Gosling and Kollerstrom are associates (read here). Gosling recently posted here (about 3/4 of the way down the page) that Kollerstrom is considering a lawsuit against bloggers who reveal his Holocaust denial activism.


Gosling



A side note: As you know, Iran is led by a self-described "academic". Ahmadinejad uses his degree in traffic control (of course, without specifically describing his field of expertise) to put a veneer of respectability on his espousal of Holocaust denial, conspiracy theory and religious fanaticism. He also uses this credential to pose as an advocate of academic freedom, even as he imprisons and kills professors and students who are accused of holding ideas contrary to his own (i.e. sane ideas as opposed to his mad ones). He may be one of history's best examples of why academics should stay within their area of expertise. (I also hear that Teheran's traffic is terrible.)

An important story that you probably haven't heard

from JewishJournal.com: Iranian American Jews by Karmel Melamed

Iranian American Jews still haunted by anti-Semitism from Iran

Often times I am approached by total strangers in the Iranian Jewish community here in Los Angeles who feel the urge to share their personal family's stories of tragic anti-Semitism dating back to the earlier part of the 20th century. These stories are both heart wrenching and historical but not really newsworthy enough for me write an article about. Nevertheless, I'd like to share one special story I was recently told with the names of the parties changed because the person who told the story to me requested anonymity for his family.

Hamid P. a Los Angeles area Iranian Jewish businessman approached me at a local Jewish fundraiser and was telling me the story of his great grandmother Sara. "She lived in the Jewish ghetto in Tehran nearly 100 years ago with my great grandfather Asher and I was told by my grandfather that his mother was absolutely gorgeous," said Hamid. The couple had only one son age 9 and made a meager living but were happy with little they had. One day, Sara ventured out of her home to purchase goods and was covered in traditional chador or an open cloak worn by Iranian women. After hours had passed since Sara had left, her husband Asher grew worried and nervous. Sara was not the type of woman to go out for long periods of time and everyone including the other Jews in the community grew frightened by the news of her disappearance. Finally after many days of no news, Asher was finally informed by members of the Jewish community that his wife had been kidnapped by local Muslim men under the direction of their wealthy Muslim boss who had been admiring Sara for a while. "This Muslim man had fallen in love with Sara and decided to just take her against her will and there was nothing anyone could do to save her," said Hamid. "She was prisoner in this strange man's house and was sexually and physically abused during that time". The Jews living in Iran at that time could not seek justice nor help from the authorities who were a part of the country's Muslim majority because the Jews had no rights and were considered inferior to Muslims. So Asher had no way to save his wife, said Hamid.

Just as Hamid was about to continue the story of his great grandmother, his cousin who was an older woman in her 70's suddenly stepped into our private conversation and snapped at Hamid. "What the hell are you doing tell him our family's private story?!" she said. "That story you're telling him is hush hush and a source of shame for us!". Hamid's great grandmother's story had been kept a secret and was not spoken about even after a century because it was not only a source of pain for the family but also a source of shame since Sara was taken away from her family. Hamid's family members years ago were also likely worried that negative gossip may brew in the Jewish community in Iran about Sara that may have hurt her family's reputation.

I smiled at the older woman who had chastised Hamid and told her that she did not have to worry about her family's reputation because Sara, her child and the others involved in the incident had long passed away in Iran. She looked at me in shock and was unable to respond. It was so taboo to openly discuss the story for years and years that this older woman had naturally brought up her defense mechanisms to keep the story under wraps.

Getting back to the story...Sara was abused and finally fell ill while being held captive in the Muslim man's home. Her brother was informed of her whereabouts many months later when she was very ill. He was permitted by Sara's captor to visit her. With great difficulty, Sara's brother convinced the Muslim man that hold his sister was unjust and to release her because she had little time to live. Finally Sara was taken home and reunited with her husband and young son. "A few weeks later Sara died after she got her final request to see her son before dying," said Hamid.

I share this very sad personal story with the readers of this blog to offer a better understanding of some of the deep scares Iranian Jews still carry after centuries of living under difficult conditions in Iran. Even after generations have passed on, Hamid's story is relevant today as Jews still live in Iran and face similar danger to their lives from the Iran's radical Islamic government.

lgf: Did Israel Strike Syrian Nuke Facilities?

Very good question.

from little green footballs:

Those Israeli airstrikes inside Syria have been confirmed, and the New York Times has a bit of tossed-off information that really should be bigger news: U.S. Confirms Israeli Strikes Hit Syrian Target Last Week.

One Bush administration official said Israel had recently carried out reconnaissance flights over Syria, taking pictures of possible nuclear installations that Israeli officials believed might have been supplied with material from North Korea. The administration official said Israeli officials believed that North Korea might be unloading some of its nuclear material on Syria.

“The Israelis think North Korea is selling to Iran and Syria what little they have left,” the official said. He said it was unclear whether the Israeli strike had produced any evidence that might validate that belief.

Ynet has a report that the target was a Syrian-Iranian missile base, citing an Israeli Arab source.

Meanwhile on Wednesday the Nazareth-based Israeli Arab newspaper The Assennara cited anonymous Israeli sources as saying that Israeli jets “bombed a Syrian-Iranian missile base in northern Syria that was financed by Iran... It appears that the base was completely destroyed.”

Bush State Dept. Considers Talks With Muslim Brotherhood

This could be a neutral development--part of a strategy of countering one horrible group by lending limited support to another. I am frankly afraid that the State Department is in over it's head and not thinking clearly about the blowback. Why do I think this? Take a look at everything else that's been done in the Middle East over the past 6 years. Setting aside questions concerning the degree to which cynical self-interest trumped good intentions in our Middle East policies under Bush/Cheney, the net results have been disastrous. The United States' main (unstated) long-term goal for the Middle East should be a balance between stability and instability: stable enough to prevent terrorist groups from taking control, unstable enough to prevent adventurism resulting from power imbalances within the Muslim world. This strategy under Clinton, Bush, Sr., and Reagan sometimes involved dealing with the devil. Sometimes, those deals backfired. Right now, with Islamists in control in Gaza, in ascendancy in Lebanon, Egypt and, frankly, Iraq, the Bush/Cheney bias toward Middle East instability is looking pretty foolish. They've already done more to help Islamists than their predecessors, at least since Carter let Khomeini take Iran.

My personal view is that any legitimation of Islamism is a mistake--one to be strongly opposed. They should be taken at their word, just as the Nazis should have been. Their must be some sense among administration pragmatists that they can "play" allegedly moderate Islamists against more extreme groups. The question for the State Department is whether their reaching out to the Muslim Brotherhood reflects a pragmatic recognition of a flawed reality, or is it a further blunder in a comedy of errors?

From the New York Sun:

Bush Weighs Reaching Out To ‘Brothers'

BY ELI LAKE - Staff Reporter of the Sun
June 20, 2007
URL: http://www.nysun.com/article/56899

WASHINGTON — The Bush administration is quietly weighing the prospect of reaching out to the party that founded modern political Islam, the Muslim Brotherhood.

Still in its early stages and below the radar, the current American deliberations and diplomacy with the organization, known in Arabic as Ikhwan, take on new significance in light of Hamas's successful coup in Gaza last week. The Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood is widely reported to have helped create Hamas in 1982.

Today the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research will host a meeting with other representatives of the intelligence community to discuss opening more formal channels to the brothers. Earlier this year, the National Intelligence Council received a paper it had commissioned on the history of the Muslim Brotherhood by a scholar at the Nixon Center, Robert Leiken, who is invited to the State Department meeting today to present the case for engagement. On April 7, congressional leaders such as Rep. Steny Hoyer of Maryland, the Democratic whip, attended a reception where some representatives of the brothers were present. The reception was hosted at the residence in Cairo of the American ambassador to Egypt, Francis Ricciardone, a decision that indicates a change in policy.

The National Security Council and State Department already meet indirectly with the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood through discussions with a new Syrian opposition group created in 2006 known as the National Salvation Front. Meanwhile, Iraq's vice president, Tariq al-Hashemi, is a leader of Iraq's chapter of the Muslim Brotherhood. His party, known as the Iraqi Islamic Party, has played a role in the Iraqi government since it was invited to join the Iraqi Governing Council in 2003.

These developments, in light of Hamas's control of Gaza, suggest that President Bush — who has been careful to distinguish the war on terror from a war on Islam — has done more than any of his predecessors to accept the movement fighting for the merger of mosque and state in the Middle East.

Should Mr. Bush ask his diplomats to forge new channels to the Muslim Brotherhood it would also be a recognition of the gains their parties have made in elections in the last three years. In Egypt, Iraq, and the Palestinian territories, Islamist parties trounced their secular rivals. In part this was because these parties offered an uncorrupt alternative to the more secular parties in power, but some advocates inside the administration also say it reflects a tangible momentum for parties that seek to create Islamic republics. One State Department official yesterday said, "Our policy has to change from more democracy, fewer headscarves."

Nonetheless, administration officials this week also stressed that no decisions have been made as to a new initiative. One leading European Islamist, Tariq Ramadan, who is the grandson of the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, is being denied a visa to assume a professorship he has been offered at Notre Dame University. The policy debate inside the administration is also contentious, with law enforcement agencies such as the FBI skeptical that the Muslim Brotherhood is not clandestinely more involved in supporting violent jihad than the organization's emissaries let on.

A State Department spokesman for the Bureau of Near East Affairs, David Foley, confirmed the meeting Wednesday to discuss a new approach to the Muslim Brotherhood. "We do these seminars, they help inform the policy making process. I am not suggesting someone would decide on a new policy on the Muslim Brotherhood as a result of this," he said. "This is the kind of consultations we often do. When there are alternative views, let's hear both sides. We are certainly willing to listen to voices from the outside."

Making the case today for outreach is Mr. Leiken, who co-authored with Steve Brooke a paper for the March-April issue of Foreign Affairs titled, "The Moderate Muslim Brotherhood." That paper argues that Ikhwan has drawn contempt from violent Islamists such as Al Qaeda for its general disavowal of armed struggle. Tracing its history to its founding, the paper says the group today, particularly in Egypt, is genuine in its desire to participate in democratic politics.

Mr. Leiken said yesterday that there are two reasons why America should begin to rethink its prohibition of meeting with the brothers. "A new policy begins to combat some of our isolation in the Muslim world. I see the Muslim brotherhood, particularly in Egypt, as having what the communists used to call a two-line struggle, between moderate and dogmatic factions. Our outreach would help the moderates. That would strengthen those forces who are most willing to recognize the fact of Israel's existence and more democratic."

Mr. Leiken is a Harvard graduate and longtime expert on Latin America who broke with the hard left in the 1980s to oppose the Sandinistas in Nicaragua and who became associated with Social Democrats such as Penn Kemble and Joshua Muravchick. He said he thinks diplomacy with Ikhwan could help us help them to moderate Hamas. "It is conceivable that the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, aware Gaza could serve as an index, will try use its influence to get Hamas to be constructive," he said. The Egyptian government has used the Muslim Brothers for at least 10 years as a back channel to Hamas.

Mr. Leiken's Foreign Affairs paper and classified study for the National Intelligence Council has gotten the attention of senior National Security Council officials and Secretary of State Rice, according to two administration officials.

"The NIC asked me to provide an analysis of the Muslim Brotherhood and I was happy to oblige," Mr. Leiken said.

Arguing against a new policy on the brothers today will be a Hudson Institute expert on Islam, Hillel Fradkin. Mr. Fradkin declined to comment on his presentation ahead of the meeting. A colleague of his at the institute who has also taken a skeptical view of the brothers, Zeyno Baran, did say she was worried about a new direction by the Bush administration.

"The thinking is that to deal with terrorism, we need to deal with Muslims who will take care of their communities so there will not be people here and there doing terrorism," she said. "So we treat the brotherhood like an umbrella organization, like the Council on American Islamic Relations or the Islamic Society of North America. You make them partners. They might Islamize the Muslims, but it's okay because they can think or do what they want as long as they are not violent. That is the misunderstanding and mistake."

The issue of the Muslim Brotherhood has also come up in the presidential contest for 2008. At the May 3 debate of Republican contenders for the presidential nomination, a former Massachusetts governor, Mitt Romney, included the Muslim Brotherhood as a component of the "worldwide jihadist threat."

"This is about Shia and Sunni. This is about Hezbollah and Hamas and Al Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood. This is the worldwide jihadist effort to try and cause the collapse of all moderate Islamic governments and replace them with a caliphate," he said in response to a question about what he would do to capture Osama bin Laden.

One of the more contentious issues with the Muslim Brotherhood is whether the group was connected to the 1981 assassination of an Egyptian president, Anwar Sadat. This reporter was told by leaders of the group last year that the ex-president's killers were from a breakaway faction known as the Islamic Group and that his murder was not condoned by Ikhwan. Sadat softened the government policy against the brothers in the early 1970s, allowing them to organize in universities, a decision many of the Brotherhood leaders in Cairo credit with laying the foundation for their gains in the 2005 parliamentary elections.

I think that Melanie Phillips has it right:

This is madness. The Brotherhood is at the very epicentre of the jihad. It is committed to instituting Islamic rule over the world. But mad as it is, the argument has a constituency among those who believe that because parts of the Brotherhood argue against violence, it can be used as an antidote to the bits that endorse it. What such people fail to grasp is that promulgating the idea that Muslims are divinely instructed to destroy the west and take over the world creates a continuum of extremism which leads directly to war, even though some parts of that continuum do not themselves promulgate violence. The Brotherhood is the enemy of the secular world, period. Promoting it is this way is exceptionally ignorant, irresponsible and dangerous. But now the State Department — not exactly a byword for robust analysis or moral clarity —is falling for it.

Not exactly the Merv Griffin Show

lgf: Iranian Talk Show From Hell

Muhammad Nimr Al-Madani: "The secret about which few people talk today is that Europe wanted to get rid of the Jews. The Jews in Europe – and I emphasize Europe - were not very popular. Therefore, in order to get rid of the European Jews, the European countries had to accept the Zionist plan that was formulated, and to agree to the transfer of Jews to Palestine. Hitler agreed to this and agreed to the transfer of these Jews to Madagascar. This was Hitler’s idea, in order to create a Jewish state on Syrian land. When Hitler occupied territories in East Europe, the idea of establishing a homeland and a state for these Jews arose. But the Europeans did not agree to this, because both Germany and England were each searching for ways to get rid of their Jews. Therefore, Hitler was falsely accused of committing genocide against the Jews. This is a lie, and we know full well that Hitler never did such a thing. It was a premeditated lie by the Zionist regime."