WAS NEMIROVSKY AN ANTI-SEMITE?

Life After Death
"Suite Française" made Russian-born Irène Némirovsky a posthumous literary sensation. Now a newly published work raises the question: Was Némirovsky a Jewish anti-Semite? (Salon)

ISLAMISTS FOCUS ON CAPTURE OF JERUSALEM

Islamists See Capture of Jerusalem as Precursor to the Fall of the West - Melanie Phillips
As Dore Gold authoritatively documents in The Fight for Jerusalem, the Jews have a unique and overwhelming claim to Jerusalem which is central to the unique nature of the Jewish state. Israel should remind the world of the world's own conclusion back in 1920 that the Jews had a unique claim to the entire land of Israel, including Jerusalem. Jordan illegally occupied eastern Jerusalem until 1967, it desecrated Jewish holy sites, ripping up Jewish gravestones on the Mount of Olives to use them for latrines.

The Islamic claim to Jerusalem is not so much religious as political. As Gold states in his book, since the capture of Jerusalem is seen as the precursor to the fall of the entire West, the division of the city would recruit untold additional numbers to the global jihad. (Jewish Chronicle-UK)

BUSH: U.S. SHOULD HAVE BOMBED AUSCHWITZ

70 YEARS TOO LATE.

Bush: U.S. should have bombed Nazi camps (JTA)
The United States erred in not bombing Auschwitz during the Holocaust, President Bush said.

Bush made the comment to U.S. Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice while viewing an exhibit at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem of U.S. aerial photographs of the Nazi concentration camps, according to the memorial’s chairman, Avner Shalev.

Shalev took Bush on an hour-long tour of the museum on Friday; it was Bush’s second visit to Yad Vashem, a requisite stop for foreign dignitaries visiting Jerusalem. Avner reported that the president’s eyes welled up with tears twice during the tour.

"I wish as many people as possible would come to this place. It is a sobering reminder that evil exists, and a call that when evil exists we must resist it," Bush said.

Wearing a yarmulke and flanked by Israel’s president and prime minister, Bush also laid a red-white-and-blue wreath at the center’s main memorial -- a stone slab that covers ashes of Holocaust victims taken from six Nazi extermination camps.

CHECK OUT THESE BOOKS: The Bombing of Auschwitz: Should the Allies Have Attempted It? by Michael J. Neufeld and Michael Berenbaum and The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust, 1941-1945 by David S. Wyman

BOOK: SARKOZY'S GREEK-JEWISH ROOTS

Sarkozy's Greek-Jewish roots (JTA)
A new book describes the Greek-Jewish roots of French President Nicolas Sarkozy.

CHURCHILL AND THE JEWS

A review of two new books on Winston Churchill's Zionism.

IRAQI JEWS

Iraqi Jews (Contentions)
Readers may recall a Time magazine article from July, “The Last Jews of Baghdad,” reporting that, in the Iraqi capital, only eight Jews remain of a population that numbered around 150,000 in the 1940’s, before decades of anti-Semitic persecution forced them to flee. This Diaspora is the subject of a moving, deftly written 1975 memoir Farewell Babylon: Coming of Age in Jewish Baghdad by the Baghdad-born Canadian author Naïm Kattan (born 1928). The book is newly reprinted by David Godine Publishers.

In his book, Kattan describes the culture of Baghdad’s ancient Jewish community, which produced the Babylonian Talmud. By the modern era it was a teeming, multi-lingual society that was doubtless inspiring to a young writer. One of Kattan’s boyhood friends, described in Farewell, Babylon, was Elie Kedourie (1926-1992), the distinguished anti-Marxist historian (who memorably asserted that Marxism turned the Middle East into a “wilderness of tigers”).

Kattan poignantly offers an eyewitness account of the 1941 anti-Jewish pogroms, which incited a mass exile of Jews from Iraq. During the so-called Farhud or “violent dispossession” of June 1 and 2, 1941, hundreds of Iraqi Jews were murdered. As Kattan related at a 2004 Jewish Book Week event in London, he was twelve years old at the time and

suddenly felt that I was going to be killed. We were sitting on the roof and then we tried to hide and listening to firearms coming closer and closer…. And all that my father could do to protect us, the only thing that he had to protect us, was to recite the psalms. He spent all the night praying and reciting psalms. Fortunately he knew a lot of psalms by heart.

Before this savage violence, despite ambient anti-Semitism, Kattan and his fellow Jews felt at home in Baghdad. An avid filmgoer, Kattan explains that he never went to the movies alone: “As I was a Jew, the young boys of my age, Christians or Muslims, would have attacked me with kicks and slaps.” Still, he recalls exulting in the Arabic films of the Egyptian singer Umm Kulthum (1898-1975) who made audiences “throb with joy.”

I myself met Naïm Kattan, a diminutive, mustachioed gentleman, at a 2003 Quebec writer’s conference at the time of the invasion of Iraq and toppling of Saddam Hussein’s regime. I recall that Kattan kept silent as other Canadian writers around him expressed their outrage with anti-American tirades. Despite its context of grief and exile, Farewell Babylon has a tone of secure survival, inspired by the faith expressed by Kattan at London’s Jewish Book Week: “The Jews have this kind of difference: it is that they have a Book. Wherever they go they can refer to a Book…. They live by that Book and I hope they will continue to do so.”

PRIMO LEVI'S UNKNOWN TEXT

Primo Levi’s Unknown Text (Contentions)
Local media outlets have been curiously silent about a story reported by Haaretz involving last month’s discovery in a Yad Vashem archive of a previously unknown 1960 text by Primo Levi (1919–1987), the Turin-born chemist and author of Holocaust memoirs. This article-length deposition of around 850 words, printed in L’espresso in September, apparently was solicited when the Israeli government was gathering testimonies for the prosecution of Adolf Eichmann. Only weeks before Levi’s testimony was taken on June 14, 1960, Israeli security agents nabbed Eichmann in a Buenos Aires suburb.

The Haaretz article points out that “it is known that Primo Levi was not called to the witness stand facing Eichmann’s glass booth,” a fact that stirs the imagination. Marco Belpoliti, who edited a definitive two-volume edition of Levi’s works, calls the newly discovered essay “tranquil, precise and elegant.”

Punctuated with repeated exclamation points for dramatic emphasis, the text echoes the author’s greatest works, like The Periodic Table, whose pellucid style answers the much-debated question of whether art can exist after Auschwitz. Perhaps even more impressively, Levi’s books testify that rational thought can survive the concentration camp experience. In the newly found testimony, Levi describes how he and his friends were denounced as partisans and arrested in 1943, and later transferred to a fascist militia camp. There, Levi notes, a guard treated them decently “after learning that we were Jews and not ‘true partisans.’” Levi adds: “He was later killed by partisans in 1945.” In 1944 the friends were transferred to another camp, where they worked as kitchen servants: “We also put together a cafeteria, in truth a rather poor one!!” Arriving at Auschwitz after further deportation, such productive labors were exchanged for daily agonies.

In the deposition Levi describes the barracks kapo, a “Dutch Jew, Josef Lessing, an orchestral musician by trade, who oversaw between twenty and 60 men, and as the 98th barrack’s supervisor, proved to be not only unyielding, but also evil.” Levi also mentions the camp’s Jewish doctors, some admirable and some not: “I recall Dr. Coenka of Athens, Dr. Weiss of Strasbourg, and Dr. Orensztejn, a Pole who behaved fairly correctly; I cannot say the same of Dr. Samuelidis of Thessaloniki, who did not listen to patients who consulted him and denounced the diseased ones to the German SS!!!”

Why the New York media silence about this real find? The account is only 850 words long, but every word matters in Levi’s chiseled prose. Could it be a question of the “Holocaust glut” that has affected the media and publishing industries ever since 1945? Levi himself was unable to find a publisher for his works in Israel until 1979 because, as he recounted, when he presented his books earlier to Israeli publishers, their response was: “Holocaust? We are up to our ears in it. No one will buy it.” Holocaust fatigue or not, this newly revealed text by a great writer demands attention.

"LINCOLN AND THE JEWS" BOOK ONLINE

'Lincoln and Jews' online (JTA)
A long out-of-print account of Abraham Lincoln's dealing with American Jews is now available online.

"Abraham Lincoln and the Jews," a self-published book by Isaac Markens in 1909, is believed to be the fullest account of Lincoln's dealings with Jews before and during the Civil War.

Referring to contemporary letters and documents, it recounts Lincoln's reversal of a law that allowed only Christians to serve as military chaplains and his rescinding of a notorious 1862 order by Gen. Ulysses Grant expelling all Jews from Kentucky, Mississippi and Tennessee.

Grant's order appeared in part motivated by anti-Semitism, but Jewish peddlers who roamed the region despite orders against such transience also frustrated him. Troops forced 30 Jewish families out of Paducah, Ky., under the order.

Jewish leaders from the region appealed directly to Lincoln, who ordered Gen. Henry Halleck to tell Grant the order was unacceptable.

"The President has no objection to your expelling traitors and Jew peddlers, which I suppose was the object of your order," Halleck wrote, according to Markens' account, "but as in terms proscribed an entire religious class, some of whom are fighting in our ranks, the President deems it necessary to revoke it."

The book recounts the outrage Grant's order provoked in the U.S. Senate and in newspapers across the nation. Featured in a recent issue of Secrecy News, the publication of the Federation of American Scientists, the book is available at http://books.google.com/books?id=-OxMjGRkFXwC&printsec=titlepage#PPA27,M1.

PALI TERRORISTS LOVE SEAN PENN

Sean Penn, Pali Pawn (Atlas Shrugs)
Palestinian terrorists are raising a loud applause and calls of "bravo!" for Sean Penn, the self-styled foreign minister of Hollywood. Terror chiefs from Islamic Jihad and Al Aqsa Martyr's Brigades, two of the most deadly terror organizations in the world, praise Penn's stance on Iran, Iraq and the war on terror. The terror leaders go so far in the adoration of Penn that they are tapping as the official spokesman of their terror rings.

"I tell Penn that we don't have the money that the Zionists have, therefore we don't own and we don't have access to your media, and we hope you would ... represent our pain and our cause," stated Abu Hamed, northern Gaza Strip commander of the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades Palestinian terrorist organization....

Other terror leaders echo the praise for Penn and other far left-wing American celebrities like Richard Gere and Rosie O'Donnell in the new book, "Schmoozing With Terrorists.". The book's author, journalist Aaron Klein, read some of Penn's speeches and statements about Iran and Iraq to the terror leaders.

In response to the speeches, Ala Senakreh, leader of Al Aqsa Martyr's Brigade in the West Bank, said he feels " deep respect for Penn and people like him that prove that America is not only the country that sponsors the Israeli terrorists and all evil forces in the world, but also a country of brave people who want a different policy based on justice and peace."

BOOK REVIEW

Book Review: A People and a Nation - Anthony Julius
Jews and Power by Prof. Ruth Wisse of Harvard celebrates the Jewish return to sovereign power, in all its promise and complexity. It offers a simple argument: Zionism is the solution to Jewish powerlessness; Israel is the guarantor of the Jews' safety. Further, the Jewish nation's resumption of sovereignty in 1948 created opportunities for the Jews to bring benefits to humanity as a whole. Wisse begins her book, "The loss of Jewish sovereignty was the defining political event in the life of the Jewish people." And she ends it, "In defending themselves, Jews have been turned into the fighting front line of the democratic world." (New York Times)

BACKLASH OVER ANTI-ISRAEL, JEWISH CONSPIRACY BOOK

Backlash Over Book on Policy for Israel - Patricia Cohen
The forthcoming publication of The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy by Professors John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt is stirring a backlash, with several institutions backing away from holding events with the authors. An article last spring in the London Review of Books outlining their argument - that a powerful pro-Israel lobby has a pernicious influence on American policy - set off a firestorm of charges of anti-Semitism and shoddy scholarship.

Opponents are prepared. The Deadliest Lies: The Israel Lobby and the Myth of Jewish Control by Abraham H. Foxman, the national director of the Anti-Defamation League, includes a foreword by former secretary of state George P. Shultz who says the notion that pro-Israel groups "have anything like a uniform agenda, and that U.S. policy on Israel and the Middle East is the result of their influence, is simply wrong....This is a conspiracy theory pure and simple, and scholars at great universities should be ashamed to promulgate it." (New York Times)

NEW JEWISH CONSPIRACY BOOK ON THE WAY

Waiting For Walt and Mearsheimer (BackSpin)
In a few weeks, this book might actually push Harry Potter out of the news. MondoWeiss points out that people are already lining up on the issue of Walt and Mearsheimer's "The Israel Lobby," due to be released in book form this September. Spoiler alert.

SEE: ANTI-SEMITIC PROFESSORS TO WRITE BOOK ; PROFESSOR: ISRAEL LOBBY CAUSED 9/11 ATTACK AND IRAQ WAR ; PROFESSORS OF HATE FEATURED AT ANTI-ISRAEL FORUM ; JUST A WEE BIT OF ANTI-SEMITISM ; WALKS LIKE A DUCK ; NOT SO GREAT MINDS THINK ALIKE

EGYPTIAN ITALIAN JOURNO IN TROUBLE OVER NEW BOOK PRAISING ISRAEL

New "Salman Rushdie" in Italy? (Al-Bawaba-Jordan)
Magdi Allam, 55, an Egyptian-born Italian writer and journalist and deputy chief editor of Italy's most influential newspaper, Il Corriere della Sera, is again at the center of the storm following his seventh book, Viva Israele (Long Live Israel). The book is the tale of his life under the regime of Egyptian President Nasser. According to Allam, Nasser is responsible for having turned Egypt - and the rest of the Arab world - into the cradle of the "ideology of death." Allam claims Nasser brought about an aggressive pan-Arabic dream based on the denial of Israel's right to exist. The need for the destruction of Israel is the dominant theme that made death and destruction the core values of a once liberal Islamic culture.

The new book defends the existence of Israel and terms armed Palestinian groups as "dangerous terrorist threats." Allam added that the main cause for the Israeli-Palestinian dispute stems from Palestinian terror. His interest in the history of Zionism and a meeting with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat brought him to realize that "Arafat was responsible for Palestinian terrorism" and that "the predication of the ideology of death eventually hit and harmed the Palestinians themselves." Many Muslims in Italy denounce Allam as a new "Salman Rushdie," the British writer who was forced into hiding in the 1990s after Iran's religious leaders issued a fatwa (religious edict) calling for his death.

IRAN IS HOLDING HOSTAGES AGAIN

I've just finished reading Mark Bowden's "Guests of the Ayatollah," a chronological and detailed history of the 1979-1980 Iranian hostage crisis. It may be the best book I've read in several years; not just because of the previously unknown details of the day to day suffering of the hostages, brutality of the Iranians, the tragedy of the failed rescue attempt, and the frustration of the negotiations. Most interesting of all is how the hostage crisis may have been the first shot in the West's war against radical Islam. A battle that the U.S. lost. It is ironic to read Jimmy Carter's free use of the word "terrorist" in light of his recent behavior.

On a related note, here's a recent editorial by Mark Steyn: Look who's holding hostages again (OC Register)

How do you feel about the American hostages in Iran? No, not the guys back in the Seventies, the ones being held right now. What? You haven't heard about them? Odd that, isn't it? But they're there.

For example, for two months now, Haleh Esfandiari has been detained in Evin prison in Tehran. Esfandiari is a U.S. citizen and had traveled to Iran to visit her sick mother. She is the director of the Middle East program at the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars, which is the kind of gig that would impress your fellow guests at a Washington dinner party. Unfortunately, the mullahs say it's an obvious cover for a Bush spy.

Among the other Zionist-neocon agents currently held in Iranian jails are an American journalist, an American sociologist for a George Soros-funded leftie group, and an American peace activist from Irvine, Ali Shakeri, whose capture became known shortly after the United States and Iran held their first direct talks since the original hostage crisis.

Two months in an Iranian jail is no fun. Four years ago, a Montreal photo-journalist, Zahra Kazemi, was arrested by police in Tehran, taken to Evin prison, and wound up getting questioned to death. Upon her capture, the Canadian government had done as the State Department is apparently doing – kept things discreet, low-key, cards close to the chest, quiet word in the right ears. By the time Zahra Kazemi's son, frustrated by his government's ineffable equanimity, got the story out, it was too late for his mother.

Still, upon hearing of her death, then-Canadian Foreign Minister Bill Graham expressed his "sadness" and "regret," which are pretty strong words. But then, as Reuters put it, this sad regrettable incident had "marred previously harmonious relations between Iran and Canada." In his public pronouncements, Graham tended to give the impression that what he chiefly regretted and was sad about was that one of his compatriots had had the poor taste to get tortured and murdered onto the front pages of the newspapers.

With an apparently straight face, Graham passed on to reporters the official Iranian line that her death in jail was merely an "accident." The following year, Shahram Azam, a physician who'd examined Kazemi's body, fled Iran and said that she had broken fingers, a broken nose, a crushed toe, a skull fracture, severe abdominal bruising, and internal damage consistent with various forms of rape. Quite an accident.

The longer American prisoners are held in Evin, the more likely it is they'll meet with a similar accident. It would be nice to think the press has ignored these hostages out of concerns that they might inflame the situation. (To date, only National Review, Bill Bennett on his radio show and various doughty Internet wallahs have made any fuss.) Or maybe the media figure that showing American prisoners on TV will only drive Bush's ratings back up from the grave to the rude health of intensive care. Or maybe they just don't care about U.S. hostages, not compared to real news like Senate sleepovers to block unblocking a motion to vote for voting against a cloture motion on the best way to surrender in Iraq.

But I'll bet the mullahs wouldn't really care if everyone put Haleh Esfandiari on the front pages 24/7. It's only a few months since they seized a bunch of Royal Navy sailors and Royal Marines in international waters (an illegal act) and paraded them all over Iranian TV (in breach of the Geneva Conventions) and dressed up the female sailor in Islamic garb (another breach).

And the U.N. and the EU and all the other transnational arbiters of global order sent a strong message: "Whoa, you guys really need to tamp things down, de-escalate, defuse the confrontation." But, for some reason, they sent the strong message to the British government, not the Iranians. And, with the sailors' humiliation all over the media, the British public was inclined to agree. Almost to a man, they rose up and told Tony Blair: "This is all your fault for getting us into Iraq."

But outrage at Iran? There was none.

The ayatollahs figure that's how it usually goes with a plump, complacent Western world that just wants to be left alone and wishes these crazies would stop trying to catch its eye. Officially, Iran is "negotiating" with the European Union over its nuclear program. If this were a real negotiation, instead of a transnational pseudo-negotiation, the Iranians would be concerned to stop any complicating factors coming into play. Instead, every week they gaily toss new provocations into their EU chums' laps: In recent days, they've stoned to death various fellows for adultery and homosexuality, two activities to which Europeans are generally very partial.

But why let a few stonings throw your negotiations off track? And, if the Americans are so eager to get a seat at the negotiating table, why not remind them of the rules of the game? Last week, the Iranians paraded their U.S. hostages all over TV as they confessed to engaging in espionage, along the way fingering the Woodrow Wilson Center and George Soros as key elements in the plot to overthrow the ayatollahs. If only.

The week before, Iran captured 14 spies near the Iraqi border who it claimed were agents of American and British intelligence equipped with surveillance devices. The "spies" in question were squirrels – as in small furry animals very protective of their nuts (much like the Democratic Party regarding Mr. Soros). I'm prepared to believe that a crack team of rodents from NUTS (the Ninja Undercover Team of Squirrels) abseiled into key installations in Iran and garroted the Revolutionary Guards, but not that the U.S. and British governments had anything to do with it. If they have any CIA or MI6 training at all, they must be rogue squirrels from the Cold War days who've been laid off and gone feral.

In America, public opinion is in no mood for war with Iran. In Washington, Congress is focused on finding the most politically advantageous way to lose in Iraq. In Europe, they've already psychologically accepted the Iranian nuclear umbrella. In the Western world, where talks are not the means to the end but an end in themselves, we find it hard despite the evidence of 30 years to accept that Iran talks the talk and walks the walk. Once it goes nuclear, do you think there will be fewer fatwas on writers, stonings of homosexuals, kidnappings in international waters, forced confessions of American hostages and bankrolling of terror groups worldwide? These latest hostages are part of a decades-old pattern of behavior. The longer it goes without being stopped, the worse it will be.

IRAN: HARRY POTTER A ZIONIST CONSPIRACY

Iranian Daily: Harry Potter, Billion-Dollar Zionist Project (MEMRI)
In an article, the Iranian daily Kayhan, which is identified with Iranian Supreme Leader 'Ali Khamenei, criticized Iran's Culture and Islamic Guidance Ministry for approving the distribution of the new book in the "Harry Potter" series.

The paper said that "Harry Potter" was a Zionist project in which billions of dollars had been invested in order to disrupt the minds of young people.

HEZBOLLAH APOLOGIST AT BOSTON UNIV.

Answering the call of jihad (Jerusalem Post)
Here we go again: yet another American "scholar" who apologizes for an Islamist terrorist group that exists first and foremost to murder, maim and destroy. With Hezbollah: A Short History, Augustus Richard Norton, a Boston University professor of international relations and anthropology, has joined the ranks of dozens of US academics who inexplicably teach the kinder and gentler side of terrorists.

Norton, a former observer with the United Nations Truce Supervision Organization, states in his prologue that he seeks to provide "a more balanced and nuanced account" of Hizbullah, which he calls a "complex organization."

HARRY POTTER CREATES SHABBOS CONTROVERSY

Harry Potter 7 creates row in Israel (JPost)
The figure responsible for Israel's latest religious row is a bespectacled British teenager who is gifted with magical powers, world famous and entirely fictional.

The synchronized worldwide launch of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the seventh and last installment in the wildly popular series, falls at 2:01 a.m. local time this Shabbat, when the law requires most businesses to close.

With Israelis already clamoring for Deathly Hallows, many bookstores are planning to launch the book on time anyway. That has drawn fire from haredi lawmakers, including Industry, Trade, and Labor Minister Eli Yishai (Shas), who threatened to fine any store that opens Saturday.

"Israeli law forbids businesses to force their employees to work on the Sabbath, and that applies in this case as well. The minister will fine and prosecute any businesses which violate the law," said Roei Lachmanovich, a spokesman for Yishai.

MK Avraham Ravitz (UTJ) slammed the Potter books for their "defective messages."

"We don't have to be dragged like monkeys after the world with this subculture, and certainly not while violating our holy Shabbat," Ravitz said in a statement.

Steimatzky, Israel's biggest bookstore chain, is holding a gala event in Tel Aviv beginning Friday night to launch the book, and the company has no plans to change the time, said spokeswoman Alona Zamir.

"We're required by our agreement with the book's publisher to launch the book at the same time as everywhere else in the world," Zamir said.

HUNGARIAN HOLOCAUST SURVIVOR WINS LITERATURE NOBEL

A Hungarian Jew who survived Auschwitz wins Nobel for literature (JTA)
BUDAPEST, Oct. 10 (JTA) — An Auschwitz survivor who recently was criticized for defending Israel became the first Hungarian to win the Nobel prize for literature. The award to Imre Kertesz, 72, was announced Thursday. Hungarian Jews said the prize was gratifying to the entire community, while

Prime Minister Peter Medgyessy told Kertesz that because of him, “the citizens of Hungary can be proud to be Hungarians.”

Kertesz was deported from Budapest to Auschwitz and from there to Buchenwald, where he was liberated in 1945. His books, all of which deal with the Holocaust, have been especially popular in Germany.

Among his most popular books are “Without Fate,” an autobiographical account of his experiences in the Holocaust, and “Kaddish for a Child Not Born,” in which he condemned a world that permitted the Holocaust.

Kertesz has been a frequent target of the Hungarian far-right. Far-right writer Istvan Csurka condemned Kertesz for saying that “my luggage is never unpacked, waiting in my house to leave Hungary.”

Kertesz has been an outspoken critic of the far-right, often writing in Hungarian newspapers to condemn the anti-Semitism espoused by the nation’s extremists.

This spring, after Kertesz visited Jerusalem for a conference of Holocaust survivors sponsored by Yad Vashem, he was criticized in a Hungarian literary journal for writing a pro-Israel article.

ISLAMIC ANTI-SEMITISM

MUHAMMAD "PROMISED" ALL JEWS WILL DIE (Political Mavens) By Judith A. Klinghoffer

MEMRI Special Dispatch: contains not only Muhammad promise based on a Hadith based escathology explained bellow but also brings forth the idea that the Arab world is motivated by fear of Iran. It is a must read: The following are excerpts from an interview with Muhammad Nimr Al-Zaghmout, head of the Islamic Palestinian Council in Lebanon, which aired on Al-Kawthar TV on May 15, 2007:Muhammad Nimr Al-Zaghmout: "Palestine will be regained only by fighting the Zionists. I'm not saying 'fighting the Jews,' because these people are a bunch of plundering Zionist gangs, who came at the command of Britain, and later of America and Europe. I believe that the only way to liberate Palestine is by jihad."[…] "The [Arab] initiative came into being at the order of Bush, Blair, and Jacques Chirac. Condoleezza Rice came carrying a stick, and dragged them by the ear… She dragged by the ear all the leaders and the heads of security, and ordered them to come one by one. She said: 'You must do one, two, three, four, five…' She said to all the leaders: 'We want you to come up with an initiative,' and to declare their loyalty and obedience to what's-his-name…" Interviewer: "Olmert…" Muhammad Nimr Al-Zaghmout: "Yes. 'Otherwise, here's the stick.' 'We will stop protecting you from Iran.' They made Iran into such a bogeyman… 'We want to protect you from Iran, but if you don't meet our demands we will allow Iran to devour you.' […] "If King Abdullah relieves us of his evil, and does not protect the Zionist entity, we will be ready to liberate our country. He should not serve as a border police [defending Israel], he should not fight and kill the mujahideen, and should not prevent the aid from the mujahideen. He should relieve us of his evil, and we know our country's affairs best." […] "If you prevent me from waging jihad – [you should remember] that the friend of my enemy is my enemy, and the enemy of my enemy is my friend." […] "We are living in times when jihad is called perdition, prostitution is called tourism, cowardice is called wisdom, and collaboration is called diplomacy. By Allah, these concepts have not changed for us. Jihad will remain jihad, cowardice will remain cowardice, treason will remain treason, collaboration will remain collaboration, and prostitution will remain prostitution." […] "Our number one enemy is Satan, and then comes the greatest taghout idol, in the form of Bush, Blair, and the Zionist Crusaders. These have become the mentors of our Arab leaders." […] "The Koran says: 'Make ready for them what strength you can…' But we say to Allah: We don't want to, because we're afraid that they will call us terrorists. If killing the Zionist Jews, the Americans, the English, and the French in Palestine, in Iraq, and in Afghanistan is considered terrorism – I am the number one terrorist." […] "The Prophet of Allah has promised us that the Jews will gather in Palestine, and that the Muslims will fight them, and totally kill them. Even the stone and the tree will say: 'Oh Muslims, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.' You might tell me that I am relying on supernatural hadiths. I believe this is not supernatural but is the core of our belief." Andrew Bostom sent me an email explaining the origin of the doctrine undergirding Muhammad Nimr Al-Zaghmout pronouncements: "In my forthcoming book entitled The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism: From Sacred Texts to Solemn History I discuss the Judenhass motifs in Islamic eschatology to which this typically ecumenical Palestinian cleric is referring. The Vajda referred to below, is Georges Vajda, the greatest scholar of the Antisemitic motifs in the hadith. His 70-page essay from 1937 is reproduced in full for the first time in English (from the original French) in the book:" "In my forthcoming book entitled I discuss the Judenhass motifs in Islamic eschatology to which this typically ecumenical Palestinian cleric is referring. The Vajda referred to below, is Georges Vajda, the greatest scholar of the Antisemitic motifs in the hadith. His 70-page essay from 1937 is reproduced in full for the first time in English (from the original French) in the book:" Vajda's research further demonstrates how Muslim eschatology highlights the Jews supreme hostility to Islam. Jews are described as adherents of the Dajjâl—the Muslim equivalent of the Anti-Christ—and as per another tradition, the Dajjâl is in fact Jewish. At his appearance, other traditions state that the Dajjâl will be accompanied by 70,000 Jews from Isfahan wrapped in their robes, and armed with polished sabers, their heads covered with a sort of veil. When the Dajjâl is defeated, his Jewish companions will be slaughtered— everything will deliver them up except for the so-called gharkad tree.Thus, according to a canonical hadith (Sahih Muslim, Book 40, Number 6985), if a Jew seeks refuge under a tree or a stone, these objects will be able to speak to tell a Muslim: "There is a Jew behind me; come and kill him!" 257 Another hadith variant, which takes place in Jerusalem is described by James Robson. 258 …most of the Arabs will be in Jerusalem when Jesus [i.e., Isa, 259 the Muslim Jesus] will descend. The imam will give place to him, but Jesus will tell him to lead the prayers. Afterwards, Jesus will order the door to be opened, and the Dajjal will be seen there will 70,000 armed Jews. The Dajjal will begin to melt, but Jesus will pursue and catch him and kill him at the east gate of Ludd. God will rout the Jews who will find that even the places where they shelter will shout out where they are hiding. Vajda emphasizes how the notion of jihad "ransom" extends even into Islamic eschatology: 260 Not only are the Jews vanquished in the eschatological war, but they will serve as ransom for the Muslims in the fires of hell. The sins of certain Muslims will weigh on them like mountains, but on the day of resurrection, these sins will be lifted and laid upon the Jews.

BOOK REVIEW: HISTORY OF JERUSALEM

Book Review: The Fight for Jerusalem: Radical Islam, the West and the Future of the Holy City - Jonathan Schanzer (JPost)

Wearing the hats of historian, archeologist, theologian and political analyst, Dore Gold provides a short but thorough tour of Jerusalem's complex history, demonstrating persuasively that the interests of Jews, Christians and Muslims there were always safeguarded best when Jews were the city's custodians.

Gold notes that Jerusalem was an obscure backwater during the Abbasid era (750-945). Islamic scholar Taqiyy al-Din ibn Taymiyya (1263-1328) ruled it inappropriate to pray toward Jerusalem. Broadly speaking, the Muslim world grew enraged over Christian or Jewish attempts to control Jerusalem, but often neglected the city when other religions were uninterested in its conquest. On the other hand, Jerusalem had a Jewish majority in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Jews comprised nearly 50% of the population in 1842 and 65% in 1914.

Israel's leaders hoped Jordan's King Hussein would sit out the 1967 Six-Day War. However, Jordan launched 6,000 artillery shells into Jewish Jerusalem, causing indiscriminate death and destruction. Israel captured the entirety of Jerusalem on June 8, 1967, in what can only be seen as a defensive war.