US taxpayers are lavishly funding jailed Palestinian terrorists.

Fox News reports:

The Palestinian Authority is spending more than $5 million per month in salaries for 5,500 convicted and alleged terrorists imprisoned in Israel — payments that defy congressional rules for U.S. funding to the PA, according to a new report from an Israeli research institute. …

“The U.S. funds the PA’s general budget. Through the PA budget, the U.S. is paying the salaries of terrorist murderers in prison and funding the glorification and role modeling of terrorists,” the report reads.

The average salary of a prisoner is greater than Palestinian civil servants – prisoners on average receive $3,200 a month compared with $2,800 for civil servants. …

[But] under 2010 funding legislation that lays out the rules for supplying money to the West Bank and Gaza, the secretary of state “shall take all appropriate steps to ensure that such assistance is not provided to or through any individual, private or government entity, or educational institution that the secretary knows or has reason to believe advocates, plans, sponsors, engages in, or has engaged in, terrorist activity,” according to the report.

The State Department, which oversees foreign aid, did not return numerous messages seeking comment. …

Recently the House “introduced a foreign aid bill that would restrict President Obama’s authority to provide U.S. funds not only to the Palestinian Authority, but also to Pakistan and Egypt and cuts money for international organizations.”

On this measure the State Department had a comment to make: Secretary of State Hillary Clinton immediately objected to it.

The view from Foggy Bottom, it seems, is that some terrorists are deserving.

Its as bad as the idea, or another way of putting the same idea, that some victims deserve terrorism.

A leader of the Workers Youth League, the organization that was targeted in the Utoya attack, was himself a trained terrorist.

Here’s the story.

On May 15, 1974, three terrorists belonging to the Popular Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PDFLP) broke into an apartment at Ma’alot in Israel, and killed three members of the family who occupied it, the father, the pregnant mother, and their four-year-old child, and severely wounded another child. The terrorists then went on to a local school, where they found 100 teenagers and their teachers staying overnight on an outing from Safed. The terrorists held them hostage, using them as sandbags at the windows. Explosives were wired to the walls of the school. At one point the terrorists started singing songs of the Palmach, the commando force of the pre-1948 Jewish Defense Army. After sixteen hours the Israeli security forces stormed the building. The terrorists killed 22 of their hostages and one rescuing soldier, and wounded 56 others before they themselves were shot and killed.

Under the leadership of a Christian from Jordan, Nayef Hawatmeh, the PDFLP had broken away from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Both were self-declared Marxist groups. They  both joined the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) when it was reconstituted in 1968 under the leadership of Yasser Arafat, chief of Fatah.

Two years after the Ma’alot atrocities, the PDFLP [also known as the DFLP] acquired a Norwegian member, Lars Gule, who served as the head of the Workers Youth League – the organization that was running the youth camp on Utoya Island when Anders Breivik perpetrated his massacre.

Daniel Greenfield writes at Front Page that two years after the Ma’alot Massacre –

Lars Gule was trained by the DFLP and dispatched to Israel via Norway with explosives hidden in the covers of his books. …

None of this impeded Gule’s career in any way. He went on to the University of Bergen and served as the head of the Workers Youth League, the organization that was targeted in the Utoya attack. Today he is a prominent figure on the left.

How can we make sense of this? Glenn Beck compared the Workers Youth League camp to a Hitler Youth camp. He was close, but not entirely right. The roots of the Workers Youth League are actually Communist.

A very fine difference if any at all!

Norway’s Labour Party was a member of the Communist International. The Workers Youth League was formed by the merger of the Left Communist Youth League and the Socialist Youth League of Norway. We often use “Communist” as a pejorative– but in this case the Utoya camp, literally was a Communist youth camp.

The day before the massacre, Norwegian Foreign Minister Gahre-Store visited the camp and was greeted with banners calling for a boycott of Israel, and Gahre-Store responded with an Anti-Israel speech to cheers from the campers. …

There are few children of workers at the Workers Youth League camp. They are for the most part the children of the party, the sons and daughters of bureaucrats and party leaders, training the next generation to perpetuate the Labour Party state.

Breivik came from that same background. The son of the left wing elite. And if his parents’ marriage had not collapsed, with the young boy allotting a share of the blame to the Labour Party, he would likely have a comfortable spot in the socialist state. Breivik may have turned against his roots, but the idea that terroristic violence is a legitimate solution is one that he could have easily picked up on the left.

Gahre-Store may have been greeted with a banner calling for the boycott of Israel, but he would never have been greeted with one calling for a boycott of terrorists. And indeed if there is an Islamist terrorist group that Gahre-Store doesn’t support, it’s hard to find. Gahre-Store had called for negotiating with Al-Shahaab in Somalia, an Al-Qaeda offshoot, he spoke with Hamas leader Khaled Mashal and called for a reconciliation with the Taliban.

Nor is the Workers Youth League call for the destruction of Israel a recent one. In the 70′s … the man who led the organization [Johan Jurgen Holst] then went on to become the country’s Foreign Minister playing a key role in the Oslo Accords that turned Israel into a free fire zone for the terrorist allies of the League and the Labour Party.

Media commentators have made a great deal of Breivik’s radicalization, but despite his death toll, his radicalization seems to be an isolated event in comparison to the magnitude of radicalization at Utoya. If Breivik’s violence and bigotry is to be condemned – shouldn’t the species of violence and bigotry at Utoya be condemned as well?

The left can hold up Utoya as an example, but there are a legion of counter-examples. Not the least of which is Lars Gule, traveling with explosives in his backpack, on a journey that took him from DFLP terrorist to Workers Youth League leader.

And behind that is the larger string of DFLP and Fatah atrocities. And that of other terrorist groups around the world. The Utoya attack cannot be viewed as an isolated event. It must be seen within the context of support for terrorism as a valid tactic. An idea that goes back to the Marxist roots of the Labour Party and which is embodied in its political support for terrorism. …

Breivik and Lars Gule had their common origins in a country dominated by a political left which sees violence as a legitimate tool of political change, while dehumanizing its victims. Norway’s ambassador to Israel carefully distinguished between the Utoya attack and the terrorist attacks on Israelis. The latter would go away if Israel just followed Gahre-Store’s example and negotiated with Hamas.

But what Norway’s political elite failed to grasp is that the genie of terrorism cannot be kept in a lamp, to emerge only at your command. Once you legitimize terrorism as a tool of political change, you lose the ability to determine who will make use of it. Breivik followed the example of Lars Gule, that of the Marxist terrorists, whose intellectual legacy is the black tar that seeps through the painted walls of Norwegian foreign policy.

“All the dangerous reptiles and insects, and all the lethal bacteria are far less dangerous than the Jews.”

That’s the view from Islam.

A contrary opinion – one which we share – is put forward by George Gilder, author of The Israel Test. He assesses the value of Israel to the world, and points out that America needs Israel as much as Israel needs America:

Israel cruised through the recent global slump with scarcely a down quarter and no deficit or stimulus package. It is steadily increasing its global supremacy, behind only the U.S., in an array of leading-edge technologies. It is the global master of microchip design, network algorithms and medical instruments.

During a period of water crises around the globe, Israel is incontestably the world leader in water recycling and desalinization. During an epoch when all the world’s cities, from Seoul to New York, face a threat of terrorist rockets, Israel’s newly battle-tested “Iron Dome” provides a unique answer based on original inventions in microchips that radically reduce the weight and cost of the interceptors.

Israel is also making major advances in longer-range missile defense, robotic warfare, and unmanned aerial vehicles that can stay aloft for days. In the face of a global campaign to boycott its goods, and an ever-ascendant shekel, it raised its exports 19.9% in 2010’s fourth quarter and 27.3% in the first quarter of 2011.

Israelis supply Intel with many of its advanced microprocessors, from the Pentium and Sandbridge, to the Atom and Centrino. Israeli companies endow Cisco with new core router designs and real-time programmable network processors for its next-generation systems. They supply Apple with robust miniaturized solid state memory systems for its iPhones, iPods and iPads, and Microsoft with critical user interface designs for the OS7 product line and the Kinect gaming motion-sensor interface, the fastest rising consumer electronic product in history.

Vital to the U.S. economy and military capabilities, tiny Israel’s unparalleled achievements in industry and intellect have conjured up the familiar anti-Semitic frenzies among all the economically and morally failed societies of the socialist and Islamist Third World, from Iran to Venezuela. They all imagine that by delegitimizing, demoralizing, defeating or even destroying Israel, they could take a major step toward bringing down the entire capitalist West. …

U.S. policy is crippled by a preoccupation with the claimed grievances of the Palestinians and their supposed right to a state of their own in the West Bank and Gaza. But the Palestinian land could not have supported one-tenth as many Palestinians as it does today without the heroic works of reclamation and agricultural development by Jewish settlers beginning in the 1880s, when Arabs in Palestine numbered a few hundred thousand.

Actions have consequences. When the Palestinian Liberation Organization launched two murderous Intifadas within a little over a decade, responded to withdrawals from southern Lebanon and Gaza by launching thousands of rockets on Israeli towns, spurned every sacrificial offer of “Land for Peace” from Oslo through Camp David, and reversed the huge economic gains fostered in the Palestinian territories between 1967 and 1990, the die was cast.

It’s time to move on.

For the U.S., moving on means a sober recognition that Israel is not too large but too small. It boasts a booming economy still absorbing overseas investment and a substantial net inflow of immigrants. Yet it is cramped in a space the size of New Jersey, hemmed in by enemies on three sides, with 60,000 Hezbollah and Hamas rockets at the ready, and Iran lurking with nuclear ambitions and genocidal intent over the horizon.

Clearly, Israel needs every acre it now controls. Still, despite its huge technological advances, its survival continues to rely on peremptory policing of the West Bank, on an ever-advancing shield of antimissile technology, and on the unswerving commitment of the U.S.

The commitment has been swerving, almost making a U-turn under the Obama administration.

But this is no one-way street. At a time of acute recession, debt overhang, suicidal energy policy and venture capitalists who hope to sustain the U.S. economy and defense with Facebook pages and Twitter feeds, U.S. defense and prosperity increasingly depend on the ever-growing economic and technological power of Israel.

If we stand together we can deter or defeat any foe. Failure, however, will doom the U.S. and its allies to a long war against ascendant jihadist barbarians, with demographics and nuclear weapons on their side, and no assurance of victory. We need Israel as much as it needs us.

*

What the region was like before… and after…

From Planck’s Constant:

Photos

Top:

Mount Tabor in 1912 when the Ottoman Turks were in charge; a desolate, barren, inhospitable desert. However from Biblical times until their arrival, Mount Tabor was entirely covered with vegetation. When the Turks arrived, they began to deforest the land and overgraze the plains with their animals.

Between the Arab on horse and Mount Tabor (in the distance) is Jezreel Valley where the Battle of Megiddo was fought. In Christian Eschatology, this part of the valley is believed to be destined to be the site of a final battle, between good and evil, known as Armageddon..

 

When the Jews regained control of Israel they began to reforest the area. Today, most of Mount Tabor is covered with pine trees.

What the area looks like now:

How did the Gaza Palestinians treat the more than 3,000 greenhouses [left to them in good condition by the Israeli settlers whom the Israeli government forced to leave Gaza]?

Terrorism is a method. It is not an ideology, or a movement, or a disembodied force on which war can somehow be waged (as per President Bush’s “war on terror”). It is a means, a tactic to achieve objectives which can be of various kinds.

What is the method of terrorism? The use of systematic violence in order to create public fear.

It has been mainly used to attain political objectives (eg. Fatah, Hamas, IRA), religious objectives (eg. the Inquisition, the Salem witch-hunters), commercial objectives (the Mafia), and in modern times the personal objective of self-expression with idealistic pretexts (eg. Ulrike Meinhof, Che Guevara, Bernadine Dohrn, Anders Breivik).

The victims are usually targeted randomly. The deaths and injuries are as atrocious as the terrorist can make them. Randomly chosen victims, whoever and whatever they are, are always innocent in the context of the attack.

There is no actual or conceivable justification for the use of terrorism. It is evil, no matter why it is used and even if it achieves a desirable end.

Acts of terrorism are distinguishable from acts of war. It can be used within the context of war (eg. executions carried out on civilians by invaders as a warning to the invaded).

Communist regimes are terroristic by nature. Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot were terrorists, Castro and Kim Jong Il are terrorists.

All autocracies, such as those of Gaddafi of Libya and Assad of Syria, are terroristic. So are the mullahs who rule Iran.

Is there a test which can be applied to an act of violence (outside of war or democratic law enforcement) to determine whether it is terroristic? Not always, but broadly, yes. If the act makes most people feel less afraid – as when a tyrant is assassinated – then it is not. But , admittedly, examples can be thought of where the distinction is hard to make.

*

Here is an opinion of the Breivik massacre that is worth thinking about, bearing in mind that the use of terrorism is never justifiable.

Debbie Schlussel writes:

The Norwegian newspaper pictures from the “political youth camp” at Utoya Island, Norway – the day before terrorist Anders Behring Breivik attacked it – say it all. The boycott sign is obvious, and the other pic is a game, re-enacting of the HAMAS flotilla in which terrorists tried to murder Israeli soldiers (complete with Palestinian flags and Norwegian kids’ smiles). These kids who were killed by a terrorist . . . well, they sided with Islamic terrorists.  … The man in the pic happily encountering the boycott sign is Norway’s Foreign Minister Gahre-Store, who went on to praise Palestinian terrorists and condemn Israel.

“Victims” or Perpetrators?: Norwegian HAMASniks Join Norway Foreign Minister @ Utoya Island Camp

Funny how Glenn Beck has come under attack for comparing the camp to a Hitler Youth camp. Based on these pics, seems like he’s spot on, though he should have added, HAMAS Youth camp, too. As we all know, Nazis boycotted Jews and were Jew-killers. And these hateful, privileged brats at the camp boycotted Jews and sided with Jew-killers. I don’t condone violent massacres on innocent civilians, and I condemn what Breivik did. He is a terrorist just like the 9/11 hijackers, Hezbollah, HAMAS, and Nidal Malik Hasan. But what goes around comes around. You support terrorists against innocent civilians in Israel, then you get attacked by terrorists who are upset with your support.

For me, this is like Alien v. Predator. I’m not sad for either side. And I make no apologies for it. Now these kids’ families know what it feels like to be victims of the Islamic terrorists whose Judenrein boycotts and terrorist flotillas against Israel they support. We don’t live in a vacuum. I can’t feel sorry for those who support my would-be assassins. And I don’t get too upset when they face the karma that is their fate. HAMAS isn’t just against Israel, it’s against all Jews . . . and all Christians. Just ask the Christians who’ve had to flee Gaza for their lives. And read the HAMAS charter. I’ll bet that’s something these spoiled airheaded kids with their Boycott Israel signs and HAMAS flotilla re-enactment games never did.

Frankly, the HAMAS charter and HAMAS’ behavior, all of which these kids at the Norwegian HAMAS youth camp cheered on, is a lot more scary than the screed and deeds of Breivik.

My late grandfather, a Holocaust survivor, never shed a tear for dead Nazis. My late father, a Vietnam era Army veteran, never shed a tear for those who supported the killing of Americans and Jews. And I shed no tears for these HAMASnik campers with a Scandinavian dialect. Perpetrators are not victims. Sorry. HAMAS collaborators don’t get my pity. They never will.

The Norwegian ambassador to Israel fails to understand that the method of terrorism is wrong whenever, wherever, and by whomever it is used. He opined that it was good when used by Hamas on Israelis, bad when used by Breivik on Norwegians. Debbie Schlussel is not making the same mistake in reverse by condemning Hamas and excusing Breivik. She condemns Breivik’s act. But the act of terrorism in this case does not appall her as it appalls us. Most of the victims on Utoya Island were young. Their opinions were hand-me-downs from their parents and teachers, not arrived at through experience and reason. Some of them would probably have come to a better understanding of political issues as they matured.

However, our sense of justice is outraged – and our sense of irony overwhelmed – by this statement on the massacre issued by Fatah, the other major Palestinian terrorist group:

It is with consternation that we have received the dramatic news of an awful terrorist attack against a summer camp ran by our comrades of Norwegian Labor Youth, AUF.

Fatah Youth declares its consternation about the terror attack. There are no words to describe an attack against people that have been our comrades in our struggle for freedom and independence. Very few people have stood by our side as much as the Norwegian people, and particularly our AUF comrades.

We know those who have been cowardly assassinated. Those are people that have stood for the human and national rights of the Palestinian people both in Europe and while visiting Palestine.

Fatah Youth has participated for almost 15 years in the same summer camp and our youth has benefited by learning and sharing experiences on democracy and advocacy for peace and justice.

We hope that those responsible for this criminal terror attack will be brought to justice. Such sick minds should not have a place in any society.

As a people that has been victim of state terror for the last 64 years, the Palestinian people and particularly Fatah Youth presents its condolences to the families of those killed and sends a strong message of support to our comrades from the Norwegian AUF as well as from other sister parties that were participating in this summer camp.

 

Today the capital of Norway was bombed. As we are Islamophobic, suspicious by nature, and fairly well-informed, we leap to the conclusion that Muslims did it.

If we’re right, it’s a case of a biter being bitten.

Norway has long been cheering Islam on, because it’s a heavily leftist nation, and because most Norwegians hate Jews.

Bruce Bawer lives in Norway. He speaks authoritatively about Norway’s sentimental sympathy with Islam:

They’re overwhelmingly on the left, and intensely hostile to the West, to capitalism, to the US and to Israel. Before the fall of the USSR, an extraordinary percentage of them were Communists. They have replaced their affinity to the Soviet Union with sympathy for the great totalitarian ideology of our time: Islamism. Thus they romanticize Palestinians and despise Israel.

Part of the motivation for this anti-Semitism is the influx into Norway in recent decades of masses of Muslims from Pakistan, Iraq, Somalia and elsewhere. Multiculturalism has taught Norway’s cultural elite to take an uncritical, even obsequious, posture toward every aspect of Muslim culture and belief. When Muslim leaders rant against Israel and the Jews, the reflexive response of the multiculturalist elite is to join them in their rantings. This is called solidarity.

Norwegian history also plays a role in all this. Anti-Semitism has a long, deeply-rooted history here. This was never a cosmopolitan country – no nation in Europe was less ethnically or religiously diverse. On the contrary, Norway was a remote, rural, mountainous land of pious Lutheran farmers whose early 19th-century constitution banned Jews from its territory.

Norway was notoriously pro-Nazi. Later, after Germany was defeated –

The entrenched leftwing elite did its work through the schools, universities and media – producing a generation of Norwegians for whom being virtuous and intellectually sophisticated means, among other things, embracing the Muslim “victim,” and despising the Israeli “bully.”

On Oslo’s version of Fleet Street there is a bar, a journalists’ hangout, called Stopp Pressen (Stop the Presses). For years, there hung in its window a photograph of a smiling, beatific Yasser Arafat. From the way he was portrayed, you’d have thought he was Albert Schweizer. I walked by that picture almost every day for years. It was a good reminder of the sickness at the top ranks of this society.

How is modern anti-Semitism expressing itself in Norway?

Norwegian academics have sought to ban contacts with Israeli universities. Norwegian activists have encouraged boycotts of Israeli products. Every so often, a high-profile professor or activist, or some famous author … will write a virulent op-ed or give an angry speech denouncing Israel and insulting Jews as a people. …

Nothing … could be safer for them to say in this country; no one will seek to harm them physically or otherwise. On the contrary, their anti-Semitic drivel will only win them plaudits from their colleagues. Yet they are treated as bold, courageous, original truth-tellers. …

Well, they were safe enough from European Jews, who never hit back hard, even with mere words, more’s the pity.

But they were not safe from the very people they brown-nosed, if we’re right about who bombed them today.

How dangerous is political and radical Islam in Norway?

Terrifyingly dangerous. And what makes it dangerous is the eagerness of the cultural elite to whitewash it. Islamists are welcomed into the elite. In recent years, one high-profile Islamist has been given a coveted position as a columnist for the country’s newspaper of record, while another has become a leading member of one of the political parties, and has established himself as a powerful figure in Norwegian society.

These men are invited to parties at the US Embassy, and enjoy friendly relations with top members of the Norwegian government and with members of the royal family. It seems clear that they are being groomed for high political office …

Then there’s our resident terrorist, Mullah Krekar, and his family, who have long been the subjects of fawning newspaper and TV profiles in which they are depicted sympathetically as kind, gentle, suffering victims. (This is a man who founded the terrorist group Ansar al-Islam, and who is known to be guilty of murdering and torturing children.)

Oslo was violently attacked by Muslims two years ago when –

…  supposedly in response to Israel’s actions against Hamas, Muslims rioted in downtown Oslo, making a large area of the city look like Beirut or Sarajevo at their most violent moments in modern history. The violence was out of control, the damage extensive. Yet almost everyone got off scot-free.

Early last year, in the same Oslo Square where Quisling and his henchman once held rallies [Vidkun Quisling was the Minister-President of Norway 1942-1945 who collaborated enthusiastically with Hitler – JB], scores of radical Muslims gathered to hear a Nazi-like message of hate against Jews, gays, secular democracy, America, the West, Israel. The speeches were chilling. Yet the men who gave those speeches continue to be treated with respect by Norwegian authorities.

Will a bombing, by Muslims, of their capital city change the minds of Norwegians about Islam?

More likely they’ll cringe even lower and lick the boots of Muslims more zealously. We’ll wait and see.

Airports are on high alert for al-Qaeda terrorists plotting to blow up jets using “body bombs” surgically inserted in them.

Attempts are being made to implant explosives into the abdomens, buttocks and breasts of suicide bombers so they can pass undetected through new airport body scanners.

US security experts have warned airlines and airport authorities about the new threat … They fear fanatics could inject a detonating chemical into themselves to trigger the bombs. … Potential bombers would carry a letter from a doctor claiming they have had surgery and need to carry a needle and syringe for medical reasons. It would be sufficient to clear security during check-in for a flight.

Terror experts confirmed small pouches of high explosives such as Pentaerythritol Tetra Nitrate could be implanted into the body. The wounds would be allowed to heal over and the bomb, which would be detonated in mid air by injecting a chemical into the pouch. Just eight ounces of PETN, the weight of a Rubik’s Cube, could bring down a plane …

But are there doctors willing to help the cause by supplying false certificates and performing the surgery?

One security source said there is concern that the US may harbour a significant number of medical students sympathetic to al-Qaeda.He said: “There are a large number of students from Arab countries studying medicine in the US. … All that would be needed is a basic grounding in rudimentary surgery to help implant a small amount of explosive.”

In fact, terrorist doctors, fully qualified in the profession, are not in short supply: a number of Arab doctors have prostituted their skills to serve the Islamic ideology of torture and murder.

Michelle Malkin writes:

Our homeland security officials have sent fresh warnings to foreign governments that “human bombs” may try to board planes with surgically implanted explosives. The ticking terrorists are reportedly getting help from murder-minded Arab Muslim physicians trained in the West. Infidels beware: Dr. Jihad’s version of the health care oath omits the “no” in “Do no harm.”

The death docs may be using their expertise to play “Hide the IED” in body cavities that bomb-detection equipment cannot penetrate. At least one Saudi operative has been nabbed with explosives in his bum, and British intel picked up on Arab website chatter last year about possible breast-bomb inserts. Officials are now said to be on the lookout for physicians’ notes requesting that passengers be allowed to carry syringes — which could carry detonation chemicals. …

There should be no shock at the role of purported healers in these and other hellish plots to destroy masses of innocent lives in the name of Allah. …

Medical charities have long served as front groups for jihad. Palestinian jihadists used ambulances owned and operated by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) — subsidized with billions in American tax dollars — to ferry explosives and gunmen from attacks. Hezbollah terrorists used ambulances as props in Lebanon to stage anti-Israel propaganda and elicit sympathy from Western media.

Radical Islam’s bloody perversion of the medical profession traces back to the Egypt-based Muslim Brotherhood, the global terror operation that wooed wealthy young docs and other intellectual elites with cushy union benefits.

• Ayman al-Zawahiri, a surgeon from a family of doctors, was raised in the Muslim Brotherhood; helmed the murderous Islamic Jihad; and masterminded myriad al-Qaida plots before succeeding Osama bin Laden this summer.
• Former Hamas leader Abdel Rantissi, bent on wiping out the children of Israel, was a pediatrician.
• Convicted al-Qaida scientist Aafia Siddiqui studied microbiology at MIT and did graduate work in neurology at Brandeis.
• Rafiq Abdus Sabir was a Columbia University grad who served as an emergency room physician in Boca Raton, Fla., before his terrorism conviction in 2007 for agreeing to provide medical aid and treatment to wounded al-Qaida fighters so they could return to Iraq to kill American soldiers.
• Rafil Dhafir, an Iraqi-born oncologist, practiced in New York before being convicted in 2004 on 59 criminal counts related to violating Iraqi sanctions and committing large-scale medical charity fraud.
• A den of well-heeled jihadi doctors from around the world was implicated in the 2007 London/Glasgow bombings. At least one of the convicted terror MDs worked for Britain’s National Health Service.
• Mahmoud al-Zahar, another bloodthirsty Hamas biggie and medical doctor, described his specialty to a New York Times reporter in 2006 this way: ”’Thyroids: I’m very good at cutting throats,’ Dr. Zahar said, drawing his forefinger across his neck as a rare smile spread across his face.”

And at least one Christian Arab could be added to the list: George Habash, a Palestinian Greek-Orthodox Christian, leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), one of the terrorist groups that came together to form the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) under Arafat’s leadership. He qualified as a doctor of medicine at the American University of Beirut in 1951.

Michelle Malkin goes on to remind us of the Muslim psychiatrist who carried out the Fort Hood massacre:

Closer to home, Army psychiatrist Nidal Hasan starkly diagnosed the ideological fanaticism of every soldier of Allah in a Koranic-inspired PowerPoint presentation that concluded: “We love death more then (sic) you love life!”

Military officials plagued by political correctness ignored Hasan. Thirteen Fort Hood soldiers and civilian personnel, and one unborn child, paid with their lives.

How many more Dr. Jihads are operating in the open, exploiting our borders and tolerance, wielding medical licenses to kill?

Rick Perry, Governor of Texas and a probable presidential candidate, wrote to the Attorney General, Eric Holder, urging him to take action against Americans who sail with a flotilla to “break the Israeli siege of Gaza”.

Of course, Holder is very unlikely to do anything of the kind. He only enforces the law for or against persons according to whether he likes or dislikes them or their race. But it will be interesting to see what response, if any, he makes to Perry’s letter.

Here is what Perry wrote, according to the Washington Post:

“The state of Israel is a friend and critical ally of the United States, and the only stable democracy in an increasingly unstable and hostile region,” wrote Perry, a vocal supporter of Israel who is considering a run for president in 2012. “These initiatives to breach Israel’s maritime blockade of the Gaza Strip is an unacceptable provocation.”

Under federal law, anyone who “prepares a means for, or furnishes the money for, or takes part in, any military or naval expedition” against a friendly country can be fined or jailed for three years. Perry also suggested that Holder prosecute the protesters for providing materials or assistance to a terrorist organization. …

In his letter, Perry identified two of the ships as “The Audacity of Hope” and the “The Challenger II,” both of which he said were registered in Delaware. Perry also wrote that the ships will depend on U.S.-based Inmarsat for communications and navigation, suggesting that the organization could be held responsible for the protesters’ actions.

“I write to encourage you to aggressively pursue all available legal remedies to enjoin and prevent these illegal actions, and to prosecute any who may elect to engage in them in spite of your pre-emptive efforts,” Perry wrote.

Perry’s letter would make him our favorite among declared GOP presidential candidates, if he declares. True, he’s in the God camp, but so are they all.

We expect there will be a woman president, a Jewish president, even a president not born in the United States (although that would be in defiance of the Constitution), before there will be a self-confessed atheist president.

But maybe, for once, we are being too pessimistic.

Here are the answers to the questions we posed in Oppression in Palestine (June 25, 2011). We thank the commenters who played the guessing game.

The Jewish travelogue writer J. J. Binyamin recorded the following account after his 1847 sojourn in Palestine — the plight of the Jews he witnessed being consistent with their sacralized degradation under Islamic Law, and despite putative “reforms” of the Sharia imposed upon the Ottoman Muslim rulers in 1839 by the Western European powers:

Deep misery and continual oppression are the right words to describe the condition of the Children of Israel in the land of their fathers … They are entirely destitute of every legal protection and every means of safety. Instead of security afforded by law, which is unknown in these countries, they are completely under the orders of the Sheiks and Pashas, men whose character and feelings inspire but little confidence from the beginning. It is only the European Consuls who frequently take care of the oppressed, and afford them some protection. … With unheard of rapacity tax upon tax is levied on them, and with the exception of Jerusalem, the taxes demanded are arbitrary. Whole communities have been impoverished by the exorbitant claims of the Sheiks, who, under the most trifling pretences and without being subject to any control, oppress the Jews with fresh burdens … In the strict sense of the word the Jews are not even masters of their own property. They do not even venture to complain when they are robbed and plundered … Their lives are taken into as little consideration as their property; they are exposed to the caprice of any one; even the smallest pretext, even a harmless discussion, a word dropped in conversation, is enough to cause bloody reprisals. Violence of every kind is of daily occurrence. The chief evidence of their miserable condition is the universal poverty which we remarked in Palestine, and which is here truly astounding … It even causes leprosy among the Jews of Palestine, as in former times. Robbed of their means of subsistence from the cultivation of the soil and the pursuit of trade, they exist upon the charity of their brethren in the faith in foreign parts … In a word the state of the Jews in Palestine, physically and mentally, is an unbearable one.

Let’s compare briefly the condition of the Jews under Muslim rule as described by Binyamin with the condition of the Arabs now in the Palestine region (the area that was under British mandate after the 1914-1918 war, and was not handed over to the Hashemites to create the Emirate of Transjordan). The Arabs in Israel have all the rights of citizenship, including representation in parliament. As for the citizens of Gaza, ruled by the terrorist organization Hamas – for whom the heart of many a left-wing sentimentalist bleeds over claims that Israel “occupies” the strip and oppresses the people, that starvation prevails there and shortage of medicine (for which Israel is blamed), so flotillas are organized to bring relief to Gaza by sea – here’s a piece of recent news. It’s from the New York Times, which is not exactly a shill for Israel (read the whole article to find its blame-Israel policy confirmed):

Two luxury hotels are opening in Gaza this month. Thousands of new cars are plying the roads. A second shopping mall — with escalators imported from Israel — will open next month. Hundreds of homes and two dozen schools are about to go up. A Hamas-run farm where Jewish settlements once stood is producing enough fruit that Israeli imports are tapering off.

Note: We found the quotation from Binyamin in an essay by Andrew G. Bostom, titled Understanding the Jihad Against Israel and America. It is packed with information that everyone should know about Islam and its relentless jihad, and we strongly recommend that it be not only read, but printed out and kept for reference.

A guessing game.

In the passage quoted below, guess who the people are, by nationality and/or religion, or position of authority, whichever is suitable to the context. Fill in the blank spaces indicated by dotted lines. (The number of dots is no guide to the number of letters in the missing word.)

Suggest the time period in which it was written.

What would you suppose about the author?

Deep misery and continual oppression are the right words to describe the condition of the …… in the land of their fathers. They are entirely destitute of every legal protection and every means of safety. Instead of security afforded by law, which is unknown in these countries, they are completely under the orders of the …… and the ……,  men whose character and feelings inspire but little confidence from the beginning. It is only the European Consuls who frequently take care of the oppressed, and afford them some protection. With unheard of rapacity tax upon tax is levied on them, and with the exception of Jerusalem, the taxes demanded are arbitrary. Whole communities have been impoverished by the exorbitant claims of the  ……, who, under the most trifling pretences and without being subject to any control, oppress the …… with fresh burdens. In the strict sense of the word the …… are not even masters of their own property. They do not even venture to complain when they are robbed and plundered. Their lives are taken into as little consideration as their property; they are exposed to the caprice of any one; even the smallest pretext, even a harmless discussion, a word dropped in conversation, is enough to cause bloody reprisals. Violence of every kind is of daily occurrence. The chief evidence of their miserable condition is the universal poverty which we remarked in Palestine, and which is here truly astounding. It even causes leprosy among the …… of Palestine, as in former times. Robbed of their means of subsistence from the cultivation of the soil and the pursuit of trade, they exist upon the charity of their brethren in the faith in foreign parts. In a word the state of the …… in Palestine, physically and mentally, is an unbearable one.

The complete quotation and information about who wrote it will be posted soon.