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Jewish Chronicle investigation reveals Jewish, Israeli academics justify their activity as part of struggle for Palestinian rights, ending Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories Hagit Klaiman Published: 06.15.07, 14:04 / Israel News LONDON – Many of the key players in the escalating British campaign to boycott Israel are Jewish or Israeli, the Jewish Chronicle revealed in an investigation published Thursday. According to the investigation, the Jewish academics justify their stance as part of the struggle for Palestinian rights and ending Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories. The report stated that a high proportion of the academics were deeply involved in UCU, the...

University lecturers today threatened to provoke international condemnation over academic freedom by forcing their union into a year-long debate over boycotting work with Israeli universities. Delegates at the first conference of the new University and College Union in Bournemouth voted by more than three to two to recommend boycotts in protest at Israel's "40-year occupation" of Palestinian land and to condemn the "complicity" of Israeli academics. The conference motion said there should be "a comprehensive and consistent boycott" of all Israeli academic institutions, as called for by Palestinian trade unions. Delegates voted by 158 to 99 in favour of the...

<p>CAIRO: Egypt criticized the United States after four members of Congress met with a lawmaker from the banned Muslim Brotherhood, less than two months after the House majority leader, Steny Hoyer, met the same politician.</p> <p>A bipartisan delegation headed by Representative David Price, Democrat of North Carolina, met with President Hosni Mubarak early Sunday before going to Parliament to talk to a group of lawmakers that included Mohammed Saad el-Katatni of the Brotherhood.</p>

May was another normal month in the war against Islamism. At home, a delusional Rosie O’Donnell was back at it. She reminded her viewers that the United States has killed over 600,000 innocents in Iraq. And in an impassioned plea, she and her cohorts reminded us dullards that zealous jihadists must have some understandable reason for being so, well, zealous. Perhaps she meant in the same way that the zealous Waffen SS must have had some legitimate reason for its strong feelings? Jimmy Carter was also plugging another book on his Christian piety by slandering a president at war for...

American Scholar Is Charged in Iran Tehran Accuses Her Of Seeking to Topple Ruling Establishment By Robin Wright Washington Post Staff Writer May 22, 2007 Noted American scholar and Potomac resident Haleh Esfandiari has been charged with "seeking to topple the ruling Islamic establishment," Tehran's state-controlled television reported yesterday. Esfandiari was charged with setting up a network that was working "against the sovereignty" of Iran, the government outlet said. "This is an American-designed model with an attractive appearance that seeks the soft-toppling of the country," state television reported, according to the Associated Press. In a separate statement, Iran's intelligence ministry...

We're waist-deep in George W. Bush's nightmarish Middle East misadventure as the new, theoretically empowered Democrats are difficult to distinguish from the old, hamstrung Dems of a year ago. They're still too timid. Rather than deftly acting to bring the troops home, the Democrats continue their eye-shifting and throat-clearing while the killing and dying go on and on. Last week, the new majority party yielded to the oxymoron argument that we have to support the troops by keeping them in the line of fire. The Feingold-Reid Iraq Bill that would have cut the funding and thereby forced the president to...

“Where else can you sit down in a single evening and listen to senior people from Hamas, Hezbollah, the Muslim Brotherhood, people from the revolutionary left and the antiwar movement from around the globe?” — British Trotskyite John Rees at the Cairo Anti-War Conference, April 2007 Over the past year, multiple international conferences have featured leaders of the anti-global left and Islamist groups working together. Go to any anti-war or anti-globalization demonstration in the West and chances are you will see the flags of Hezbollah and Hamas waved by people wearing Che Guevara T-shirts. And at some of these meetings,...

In today's Friday's NY Times, David Brooks presents some disturbing food for thought: The war on terror has shredded the reputation of the Bush administration. It’s destroyed the reputation of Tony Blair’s government in Britain, Ehud Olmert’s government in Israel and Nuri al-Maliki’s government in Iraq. And here’s a prediction: It will destroy future American administrations, and future Israeli, European and world governments as well. That’s because setbacks in the war on terror don’t only flow from the mistakes of individual leaders and generals. They’re structural. Thanks to a series of organizational technological innovations, guerrilla insurgencies are increasingly able to...

The subjection of women in Muslim societies--especially in Arab nations and in Iran--is today very much in the public eye. Accounts of lashings, stonings, and honor killings are regularly in the news, and searing memoirs by Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Azar Nafisi have become major best-sellers. One might expect that by now American feminist groups would be organizing protests against such glaring injustices, joining forces with the valiant Muslim women who are working to change their societies. This is not happening. If you go to the websites of major women's groups, such as the National Organization for Women, the Ms....

Despite Sen. Harry Reid's determination that the United States has lost the war in Iraq, our troops are still dug in like there's real hope. What are these guys thinking? Do they believe America, the world's only super power, has a real chance to beat a rag-tag group of terrorists who hide in caves and use cell-phone batteries and children's toys in their high-tech war on the West? If you listen to the left and their cohorts in the mainstream media, you might think we patriots who support this war on terror and our troops have given up the fight....

In a rare appearance of a female Middle Eastern leader, Qatar's first lady argued Islam has been incorrectly blamed for the rise of extremist violence when the real culprits include poverty, a lack of political freedom and "failed U.S. policies." Sheikha Mozah Bint Nasser Al Missned told the Los Angeles World Affairs Council Tuesday that societies worldwide were failing to provide jobs, hope and a feeling of greater good for their citizens. As a result, youth "are seduced by a global culture of violence that is fueled by cynicism," said Sheikha Mozah, dressed in pants, a business blazer and with...

TEHRAN, Iran (AP) A group of Iranian lawmakers wants to create a "friendship committee" that would open contacts with the U.S. Congress - an unprecedented attempt to build ties at a time when Iran's hard-line leadership also appears willing to talk with the country's No. 1 enemy. Proponents hope the effort, for which they were gathering petition signatures Tuesday, will be condoned by Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has final say in national matters. Contacts between the countries have long been taboo, a status enforced by Iran's top leadership - made up of Shiite clerics - since the...

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton separately declared their support Tuesday for a March 31, 2008 cut-off in funds for the Iraq war, two Democratic presidential front-runners abruptly shifting positions on an issue at the heart of the 2008 race. The twin announcements came on the eve of a largely symbolic Senate vote on legislation to cut off funds for the war, and as a third presidential contender, Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Conn., said in a campaign commercial it was unfortunate that his White House rivals "will not join me" in supporting the measure. In a written...

Liberals are engaged in an amazing display of myth-building and revisionism concerning the establishment media’s performance before the war, and it’s not just Bill Moyers. As NewsBuster Tim Graham noted yesterday, the Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz revealed on CNN’s Reliable Sources Sunday that “everybody at every news organization I’ve talked to said that the media were not aggressive enough during the run-up to war.” Appearing on the same program, ex-CNNer Bill Press went even further, alleging that the press “gave us this war.” He told Kurtz, “the media, in large part, gave us this war, because they went along and...

An unknown left-wing group calling itself the Iraqi Armed Revolutionary Resistance distributed leaflets in the Mid-Euphrates area around Najaf, Hilla and Karbala calling for “resistance against American, British and Zionist occupiers in order to liberate Iraq and form a free socialist, democratic alternative,” according to the Al-Badeel Al-Iraqi website. The group, which described itself as a “movement of Iraqi Communists and Marxists experienced in armed struggle, leftist Iraqi nationalists, and their supporters,” claimed responsibility for an attack against U.S. troops at the Khan Al-Nus area between Najaf and Karbla on Sunday. The leaflets, which carried a photo of Cuban Marxist...

Muslim groups in US should battle Islamophobia by explaining how America, Islam in fact share same values Published: 05.12.07, 15:15 / Israel Jewish Scene After six Muslims were arrested this week for plotting a terrorist attack on an American army base I heard an interview with a representative of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). He was expressing concern for the safety of his community and thus stressing that these six were in no way representative of Islam or American Muslims and he criticized the media for portraying them as such. As a Jew who has suffered from anti-Semitism I...

There Is No God but Politics by Theodore Dalrymple (May 2007) In my youth (in which I include my early adulthood), I read a lot of philosophy. In those days, I picked up books of metaphysics with an excitement that I cannot now recapture, and that completely mystifies me, indeed seems to me faintly ridiculous. I still cannot quite make up my mind, however, whether or not I wasted my time. After all, I was a medical student, not someone training to be an intellectual. I doubt that philosophy made me a better person, let alone a better doctor, but...

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) is threatening to take President Bush to court if he issues a signing statement as a way of sidestepping a carefully crafted compromise Iraq war spending bill. Pelosi recently told a group of liberal bloggers, “We can take the president to court” if he issues a signing statement, according to Kid Oakland, a blogger who covered Pelosi’s remarks for the liberal website dailykos.com. “The president has made excessive use of signing statements and Congress is considering ways to respond to this executive-branch overreaching,” a spokesman for Pelosi, Nadeam Elshami, said. “Whether through the oversight or...

Did the 4 Albanian terrorists have connections to Holbrooke, Clark? May 8th, 2007 According to Bloomberg the Kosovo Albanians that were planning to kill as many Americans as possible are: Dritan Duka, 28; Shain Duka, 26; Eljvir Duka, 23. Agron Abdullahu, 24. Bloomberg says that: The Dukas and Abdullahu are ethnic Albanians from the former Yugoslavia [read: Muslim-dominated Kosovo], U.S. officials said. The Duka brothers operated roofing businesses based in Cherry Hill… and Abdullahu worked at a supermarket, according to authorities. Now, the New Jersey is stone throw from New York where the big-dog in the roofing business among the...

Today's meeting at the Vatican between Mohammad Khatami and Benedict XVI was held under the banner of the "dialogue between civilizations." Iran's former president has for years been working for such dialogue which involves the clear expression of identity, profound respect for the religious element, and a critique of mathematical and materialistic reason. From this point of view, today's encounter is very much in line with the speech that the Pope made at Regensburg University last September.   Pope Benedict XVI's masterly lecture tended in fact to highlight a widening of reason that, by going beyond anti-religion Enlightenment thinking ("irrational"), allows for...