GayandRight

My name is Fred and I am a gay conservative living in Ottawa. This blog supports limited government, the right of the State of Israel to live in peace and security, and tries to expose the threat to us all from cultural relativism, post-modernism, and radical Islam. I am also the founder of the Free Thinking Film Society in Ottawa (www.freethinkingfilms.com)

Sunday, February 28, 2010

Hamas extends arrest of British reporter...

Nothing like the Hamas legal system....
Hamas announced Sunday that it would extend the detention of Paul Martin, a British reporter and filmmaker arrested in Gaza two weeks earlier. No charges against Martin have been made public.

Martin was arrested while in court to testify on behalf of an Arab friend accused of “collaboration with Israel.” One Arab-language newspaper suggested that Martin was trying to locate where terrorists are holding Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, whom they kidnapped more than three years ago.

Hamas spokesmen claimed Martin was guilty of “violating Palestinian law and security in the Gaza strip,” but did not mention more specific accusations. They said the journalist would be held while Hamas authorities in Gaza continue to investigate.

Ahmadinejad foams at the mouth....

Why isn't the world listening to what he is saying???
In a rant that reeked of old-fashioned anti-Semitism, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said Sunday that the "Zionist regime" was seeking to control the world.

Addressing the International Conference on National and Islamic Solidarity for Future of Palestine, Ahmadinejad said that the existence of the "Zionist regime" is an insult to all of humanity, asserting that it had lost its raison d'être.

He said it was "well-known for all that the Zionist regime’s mission is threat, violence and beating drums of war," according to an IRNA translation.

"Supporters of the Zionist regime who are shouting slogans of human rights and anti-terrorism, support systematic crimes of the occupying regime," he said at the Teheran conference, adding that "everybody knows that the regime is seeking hegemony over the world."

He said that the "Zionist regime" is the "origin of all the wars, genocide, terrors and crimes against humanity" and that they are "the racist group not respecting the human principles."

"With God's grace and thanks to the Palestinian resistance the occupying Zionist regime has lost its raison d'être," Ahmadinejad continued. "The only way to confront them (Israelis) is through the Palestinian youths' resistance, and that of the regional nations.”

Hamas chief Khaled Mashaal, Islamic Jihad leader Ramadan Abdullah Shalah and the head of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine Ahmed Jibril were among those in attendance at the conference.

Christopher Hitchens slept with two members of Thatcher's government...

He had a 'relapse' into homosexuality....
He said these alleged encounters were a "mildly enjoyable relapse" into homosexuality that had begun for him at Leys School, the Cambridge independent where he was educated.

Hitchens, 60, who studied politics, philosophy and economics at Balliol College in the late 1960s, has made his claim in his memoir Hitch-22, to be published in June.

He declined to name with whom he claimed to have slept.

An extract of the autobiography was published in The Sunday Times.

Hitchens wrote that while at Oxford "every now and then, even though I was by then fixed on the pursuit of young women, a mild and mildly enjoyable relapse would occur and I suppose that I can 'claim' this ... of two young men who later became members of Margaret Thatcher's government."

He added: "For this reason I can't really give any more names."

Hitchens did not specify whether by "Margaret Thatcher's government" he meant only cabinet ministers, or junior ministers as well; or if the phrase meant Conservative MPs and lords more generally.

Now Magazine: Ezra Levant and Jason Kenney the cause of anti-semitism....

Now Magazine of Toronto - the only magazine that has a mandatory anti-Israel article in every issue, gets to the bottom of anti-semitism...
Enter Levant. The former Reformer and Canadian Alliance disciple has been flogging that canard pretty hard ever since the Standard, his news and views mag (now online only) republished the infamous Muhammad cartoons in 2006. Talk about stirring an anti-Jewish backlash.

The ramblings of the immigration minister Jason Kenney himself have provided cover for white supremacists. Has there been an immigration minister who has been so anti-immigration? Not exactly an advocate of the melting pot, to say nothing of the government’s neglect of Canadian detainees in foreign countries who happen to have brown skin.

Kenney’s called the claims of refugees to this country “bogus.” And once flipped, “I plead guilty, I’m a racist.” That was last October when the minister was cornered by protestors from No One Is Illegal at McGill. The group was pressing the case of a Mexican woman who was denied refugee status twice and then found dead in Mexico. His reaction speaks to a frightening mindset.
Where does one start with such tripe??? It's clear that this author has never met Jason Kenney or Ezra Levant. I have...and I can attest that Kenney is a very principled man who doesn't have a racist bone in his body. Levant is one of my heroes for his principled stand on free speech.

But to Now Magazine, Levant and Kenney are the villains. And, they are playing sort of mis-direction game - look at the anti-zionists while the Nazi go free.

The plain fact of the matter is that there are parts of the left that have a lot to answer for. Their incessant demonization of Israel have poisoned the atmosphere at our Universities. And, in their rush to vilify Israel (and their hatred of the West), they have sometimes embraced Islamists - people who, in a hearbeat, would betray the values these leftists hold so dear...

Anti-semitism in Sweden.....

We've blogged on the anti-semitism sweeping Sweden many times...here's a good overview...
A rapid increase in anti-Semitic hate crimes is tarnishing Sweden's reputation as a tolerant and harmonious land and leading some Jews to quit the country for good.

Swedish police recorded 79 anti-Semitic incidents in the southern region of Skanska last year -- roughly double the total for 2008. (Statistics for the whole of the country will be published in June.) Jonathan Leman, a spokesman for the Swedish Committee Against Anti-Semitism, told AOL News that the actual number of hate crimes committed was probably far higher, as "police believe many more incidents were not reported."

At the center of this hate wave is the city of Malmo (population 300,000), just across the Oresund Strait from the Danish capital, Copenhagen. Forty-nine anti-Semitic acts were reported in Malmo last year. Swastikas were painted on Jewish buildings, a funeral chapel in a Jewish cemetery was torched and masked men chanted "Hitler" at worshipers walking home from prayers, among other incidents.

This air of hostility is causing Malmo's already small Jewish population of 700 to shrink even further. Some 30 families recently left the city for Stockholm, London and Israel. Marcus Eilenberg, a 32-year-old father of two, told the Swedish daily Skanska Dagbladet he was moving to Israel in the spring, as he was no longer willing to be called a "damn Jew" in the street or see his family and friends harassed.

"My children aren't safe here. It's going to get worse," Eilenberg said. "Imagine that my family can't feel safe in fantastic Sweden. It's really terrible."

Although neo-Nazis are believed to be responsible for some attacks, police and the local Jewish community say the majority were carried out by Muslims, who now make up one-fifth of the city's population. Just as Jews were welcomed to Malmo after World War II, the city in recent years opened its arms to people escaping tyranny and terror in the Middle East.

But these new arrivals brought old hatreds with them. "Muslim schoolchildren often ignore me now when I talk about my experiences in the camps," Judith Popinski, 86, who settled in Malmo after being rescued from a Nazi death camp, told The Sunday Telegraph. "It is because of what their parents tell them about Jews. The hatreds of the Middle East have come to Malmo. Schools in Muslim areas of the city simply won't invite Holocaust survivors to speak any more."

Anti-semitism in Spanish Schools...

This is a disgusting campaign....
Israel on Sunday filed a formal complaint with Spain, charging that anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism are being instilled in grade-school students across parts of the country.

The Israeli embassy in Madrid has received dozens of postcards addressed to the Israeli envoy - from students ages 5 and 6 - including hand-written messages such as "Jews kill for money," "Evacuate the country for Palestinians," and "Go to someplace where someone will be willing to accept you."

According to sources in the Foreign Ministry, this is an organized campaign by officials outside the education system in Spain that have been given permission to work with the students.

How nuclear equipment reaches Iran...

Can sanctions ever work against Iran???
Early last year, a Chinese company placed an order with a Taiwanese agent for 108 nuclear-related pressure gauges. But something happened along the way. Paperwork was backdated. Plans were rerouted, orders reconfigured, shipping redirected.

And the gauges ended up in a very different place: Iran.

The story behind the gauges shows how Iran is finding its way around international sanctions meant to prevent it from getting equipment that can be used to make a nuclear bomb. At least half a dozen times in recent years, the Persian Gulf nation has tried to use third countries as transshipment points for obtaining controlled, nuclear-related equipment.

In the case of the pressure gauges, it succeeded. In the process, the Swiss manufacturer and the Swiss government were duped, a Chinese company went around its own government's prohibition on moving nuclear-related equipment to Iran, and Taiwanese authorities showed themselves unwilling or unable to get into step with the international community.

The deal was a huge victory for Tehran, which had been seeking the gauges for months, said nuclear proliferation expert David Albright, president of the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security. It also reflected the uneven enforcement of international sanctions against Iran, at a time when the U.S. and other Western countries are pushing hard to expand them.

"The (Iranian) government looked everywhere -- Russia, Europe, the U.S., and they were being thwarted by the international community," Albright said. "It's really unfortunate they succeeded in using this Taiwan-China connection...This case is a wake up call of the importance of universal and timely application of sanctions on Iran."

Hamas U.....

Now you can get a degree in Islamism....
Behind the arabesque arches of the five-story university library here, students occupy every available seat, cramming for finals in their humanities classes. Outside, a lucky few nap beneath palm and ficus trees on the cramped urban campus. At lunch, engineering students balance their books upright in the cafeteria and absent-mindedly munch subsidized falafel. This is exam period at the Islamic University of Gaza, charged with the bustle and anxiety of college life.

The first sign that this is a different place from the Western universities it resembles comes when a bell rings in the library. Quickly the students on odd-numbered floors - all men - gather their books and file into the stairwells. Women file in to take their turn. In keeping with a puritanical interpretation of Islamic law, men and women aren’t allowed to study together, so they switch floors every two hours. They lounge in separate student unions and eat in separate cafeterias. At intervals during the day, the call to prayer sounds from the minarets of the campus mosque, and classes come to a halt.

Their strict observance might sound extreme, but the Islamic University is no fringe institution: It’s the top university in Gaza. The majority of students here study secular topics; not all of them are even religious. If you want to get a degree in Gaza, a territory that is home to more than a million people, it’s simply the best place to go.

At the same time, the university is something else again: the brain trust and engine room of Hamas, the Islamist movement that governs Gaza and has been a standard-bearer in the renaissance of radical Islamist militant politics across the Middle East. Thinkers here generate the big ideas that have driven Hamas to power; they have written treatises on Islamic governance, warfare, and justice that serve as the blueprints for the movement’s political and militant platforms. And the university’s goal is even more radical and ambitious than that of Hamas itself, an organization devoted primarily to war against Israel and the pursuit of political power. Its mission is to Islamicize society at every level, with a focus on Gaza but aspirations to influence the entire Islamic world.

In recent decades, as Islamism has grown from a set of isolated radical movements to a fully realized political philosophy, its powerful fusion of intellect, pragmatism, and fundamentalist faith has refashioned societies from the Gulf to Turkey, Egypt to Pakistan. For outsiders who want to understand its power and appeal, the Islamic University of Gaza is probably the best place to begin.

When the Islamic University was founded in 1978, there wasn’t a single institution of higher education in the Gaza Strip. Its founders were members of the militant Muslim Brotherhood, believers that society should be organized according to Koranic principles, and they conceived the university as a sort of greenhouse for their brand of pure, uncompromising Islamism. At the time, Gaza was a freewheeling resort city, its seaside restaurants full of visiting Israelis and Egyptians attracted by Gaza’s famous grilled fish. Secular Palestinians dominated society and the power structure in the 1970s, and scoffed at the prospect of Islamists making inroads.

With no local competition, the Islamic University had the market on higher education all to itself, a monopoly that took on greater importance as Israel made it harder and harder for Gazans to leave their territory to study in the West Bank. Meanwhile, the Muslim Brothers running the university turned their efforts to community and political organizing, leading within a decade to the establishment of Hamas, whose name in Arabic is an acronym for “Islamic Resistance Movement.” By the dawn of the new millennium, the Oslo Accords were collapsing, the secular Palestinian Authority was proving an ineffectual government, and Israelis were souring on the peace process. Gaza’s culture transformed in a historical blink: Hamas had risen in a couple of decades from an underground network of imams, teachers, and militants to a juggernaut that dominated Gaza’s increasingly pious and conservative population.

Today Hamas doesn’t run the Islamic University, but the overlap of the party and the school is nearly seamless. Scientists and academics at the university double as Hamas technocrats: doctors, engineers, economists, teachers, and media specialists. The Islamic University serves as an employment program and intellectual retreat for Hamas leaders, giving a perch to the prime minister, the foreign minister, and bureaucrats in charge of ministries.

In neighboring Israel, the Islamic University has become a symbol of recalcitrant Palestinian hatred. Many faculty members share Hamas’s most hard-line beliefs, which include denying Israel’s right to exist. Israelis often talk about the university as if it were a key source of Hamas suicide bombers and missile manufacturers, a kind of clubhouse and recruiting ground. But to blame the university is to ignore the fact that much of Gaza is full of underground weapons labs and volunteers for martyrdom. In this, the university reflects the culture around it as much as it shapes it.

The scholarship and instruction at the Islamic University offer a map of the world Hamas’s leaders would build if they had no political constraints. More than any single idea, the Islamic University promotes a view of a society inescapably suffused with religious doctrine. The questions at the start of any inquiry - how does this work, and how to do it best - must be joined immediately with another: What does God permit on this matter?

In any field - including math, engineering, and medicine - scholars are expected to consult the Koran, or Islamic jurists, as well as academic texts. In the natural sciences, the results don’t look all that different from scholarship in the West, such as a recent research study that assessed the value of a particular protein for diagnosing rheumatoid arthritis. But in the social sciences, the imperative of hard-line Sunni Islam has yielded a body of work with a nearly Soviet ideological rigidity and predictability. One paper in the Series of Islamic Studies “proves” that a country’s social development increases in proportion to the number of people who memorize the Koran. Another considers and dismisses Shia Muslim conceptions of the attributes of God for “contradicting the Koran” and other canonical Islamic texts.

In secular societies like the United States, similarly strict religious universities exist on the margins, attracting a devout subculture seeking a counterweight to mainstream values. In contrast, the Islamic University of Gaza - like a growing number of religious institutions across the Islamic world - has simply become the mainstream.

Many students at the Islamic University see themselves as a privileged elite with an obligation to help the transnational “ummah,” or global Islamic community. Almost every student I met - I was only allowed to speak to men - expressed a desire to continue his studies abroad.
Oh my god...they want to come here??? Let them stay in Gaza, please...

Masked Palestinians riot at Temple Mount...

So, they throw things at Jews and rocks at policemen on Purim....
Israeli police forces stormed the most contentious holy site in Jerusalem on Sunday to disperse masked Palestinian protesters hurling objects at visiting foreign tourists.

The incident was over quickly, but the area remained tense afterward. In the past, violence at the site -- known to Jews as the Temple Mount and to Muslims as the Noble Sanctuary -- has erupted into deadly battles.

Police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said police dispersed some 20 masked protesters who had holed up overnight in Al-Aqsa mosque building inside the hilltop compound. The protesters pelted tourists with objects early Sunday, and threw rocks at the police when they responded to the incident, he said.

Calm was quickly restored, he said, and about a thousand tourists have since visited the area.

However, small groups of masked Palestinians continued to clash with police elsewhere in Jerusalem's Old City and in a nearby neighborhood just outside the walled area.

I am happy Harper Prorogued....

Hey, I am one Canadian who is really happy that Harper allowed the Olympics to monopolize our TV screens for two weeks. What a great games, and no distractions from our politicians.

Canada has had a very good two weeks! Some of the stories coming out of the Olympics have been just fantastic.

Have we ever felt so good as a country???

Thank you, Stephen Harper!

Saturday, February 27, 2010

Have Islamists infiltrated the Labour Party???

What about the other political parties????
The Islamic Forum of Europe (IFE) — which believes in jihad and sharia law, and wants to turn Britain and Europe into an Islamic state — has placed sympathisers in elected office and claims, correctly, to be able to achieve “mass mobilisation” of voters.

Speaking to The Sunday Telegraph, Jim Fitzpatrick, the Environment Minister, said the IFE had become, in effect, a secret party within Labour and other political parties

“They are acting almost as an entryist organisation, placing people within the political parties, recruiting members to those political parties, trying to get individuals selected and elected so they can exercise political influence and power, whether it’s at local government level or national level,” he said.

“They are completely at odds with Labour’s programme, with our support for secularism.”

Mr Fitzpatrick, the MP for Poplar and Canning Town, said the IFE had infiltrated and “corrupted” his party in east London in the same way that the far-Left Militant Tendency did in the 1980s. Leaked Labour lists show a 110 per cent rise in party membership in one constituency in two years.

In a six-month investigation by this newspaper and Channel 4’s Dispatches, involving weeks of covert filming by the programme’s reporters:
* IFE activists boasted to the undercover reporters that they had already “consolidated … a lot of influence and power” over Tower Hamlets, a London borough council with a £1 billion budget.
* We have established that the group and its allies were awarded more than £10 million of taxpayers’ money, much of it from government funds designed to “prevent violent extremism”.
* IFE leaders were recorded expressing opposition to democracy, support for sharia law or mocking black people. The IFE organised meetings with extremists, including Taliban allies, a man named by the US government as an “unindicted co-conspirator” in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, and a man under investigation by the FBI for his links to the September 11 attacks.
* Moderate Muslims in London told how the IFE and its allies were enforcing their hardline views on the rest of the local community, curbing behaviour they deemed “un-Islamic”. The owner of a dating agency received a threatening email from an IFE activist, warning her to close it.
* George Galloway, a London MP, admitted in recordings obtained by this newspaper that his surprise victory in the 2005 election owed more to the IFE “than it would be wise – for them – for me to say, adding that they played a “decisive role” in his triumph at the polls.
Mr Galloway now says they were one of many groups which supported his anti-war stance and had never sought to influence him.

The IFE has particularly close links to Tower Hamlets council. Seven serving and former councillors said Lutfur Rahman, the current council leader, gained his post with the group’s help.

An important article by David Matas...

Matas was one of the two new appointees to Rights and Democracy by Stephen Harper (and a very wise appointee as well)...here's a piece that corrects some of the ridiculous slander about the Board of this troubled group...
Gerald Caplan wrote about Rights and Democracy last week under the headline “What every office needs to succeed in Harper's Canada.” The piece is centred around this statement: “In a confidential evaluation of the organization's late executive director [Remy Beauregard], Mr. Gauthier pointedly noted the perhaps telltale absence of Jews on staff.” Mr. Caplan launched from this observation a satirical attack on Mr. Gauthier and the government.

The opinion piece refers to Jacques Gauthier as one of three new appointees to the Board. But he was not. There was only one new appointee besides me, Michael Van Pelt. Jacques Gauthier is one of the oldest appointees on the board, along with three others, appointed February of 2008. However, that is the least of the problems with Mr. Caplan's article.

Since my appointment to the board on Nov. 13, 2009, I have sought out and read relevant documents that preceded my appointment. I have read from start to finish the performance evaluation of the late president, dated May 15, 2009, co-authored by Mr. Gauthier and Elliot Tepper. The statement Mr. Caplan says is in the evaluation is in fact not there. Nor is there anything in the evaluation resembling it. Nor is there anything there that could be mistaken for it.

I have also read a memorandum Mr. Gauthier wrote and sent to other members of the performance review committee dated May 21, 2009. One of these matters, in its entirety, is this:
“During a dinner that took place in the context of the Board of Directors meeting of March 2009 in Montreal, I was asked by one of the members of the management staff about my knowledge about certain Jewish customs and traditions in Europe. I was surprised by his question and I asked him why he thought I would be able to explain these customs and traditions. He replied that he thought I would know these things since he believed I was Jewish. Astonished by his statement, I indicated that I was not Jewish and that I was brought up in the Roman Catholic faith. He then assumed that my wife must be Jewish. I had to again correct him and told him my wife was not Jewish. This individual was quite stunned by my responses.

This exchange was very peculiar and deeply troubling. It seemed that this key staff member was referring to the belief of others in management staff as well. My only explanation for his inquiries related to a number of positions I took as interim Chair in respect to the Durban II Review Conference in Geneva and the conflict in the Gaza Strip.

I was also very surprised to be informed subsequently that there are no Jewish employees in the office of R&D in Montreal. I continue to be quite perplexed about the insinuations and meaning of the questions raised by this member of the management staff.”
The former president prepared a written response dated Sept. 4 in which he commented not only on his evaluation but also on the Gauthier memo. He said: “This entire memo should be removed from the record.”

One has to ask, what record? The Gauthier memo was marked “strictly confidential.” It was not sent to the board nor to the Privy Council, the destination for the performance review report. It was sent only to other members of the performance review committee. As well, Mr. Gauthier prefaced the memo by writing that it referred to matters which “were deliberately excluded from the evaluation report” of the president.

The response that Mr. Beauregard wrote to this component of the Gauthier memorandum, again in its entirety, was this: “It is both forbidden and illegal to ask staff to disclose their religious affiliation. How Mr. Gauthier came across this information is a mystery.”

After Mr. Beauregard's death, reporters indicated they had seen his reaction to his performance evaluation and to the Gauthier memorandum but had not seen the texts to which he was reacting. Abstracted from the original Gauthier memo, the response gives a misleading impression of what that memo contains.

There is nothing in the Gauthier memo to indicate that he had made any inquiries about Jews on staff. The memo shows only that he received information on that subject. It seems odd, to say the least, that Mr. Beauregard should inveigh against Mr. Gauthier for receiving information about religious affiliation but say nothing about a member of Mr. Beauregard's own staff, a person subject to Mr. Beauregard's direction and control, who went about eliciting from Mr. Gauthier information about his and his wife's religious affiliation.

The whole piece by Mr. Caplan then is constructed around a false premise. It is wrong to describe something deliberately excluded from an evaluation as part of an evaluation.

Moreover, though one can see that, in the Gauthier memo, there is something sort of resembling the comment to which Mr. Caplan refers, it is twisted and taken out of context. Mr. Gauthier came away from a discussion he had with a member of the management team with the impression that the management team believed that views a person held that were hostile to the Middle East activities of Rights and Democracy could be attributed to the fact the person was Jewish or that his wife was Jewish.

One form of prejudice against Jews is that they are suspected of disloyalty because they are Jewish. What Mr. Gauthier heard sounded very much like that. Mr. Gauthier wondered whether the attitude he heard expressed had had an impact on the hiring of Jewish staff.

Assuming that a person holds certain non-religious beliefs based on his religion or ethnic identity is a form of prejudice. Had the management team of Rights and Democracy adopted this form of prejudice?

In itself, the presence or absence of Jewish employees on the staff of a small organization means nothing. But once there are apparent prejudicial attitudes against not only Jews but those married to Jews, one can legitimately ask whether the absence of Jews on staff is linked to those prejudicial attitudes.

In the memo, Jacques Gauthier came to no conclusion. He merely expressed a concern. But it was a legitimate concern, at least in the terms in which it was framed. To turn it around the way Gerald Caplan has done in his opinion piece is most unfair.
The press and the blogosphere are missing some of the big questions on Rights & Democracy. Why is it necessary to have 47 staff people to dole out $11 million in grants? Why was the staff resistant to taking direction from the Board of Directors? Why were they funding organizations known to have links to terrorists?

Gays and Israel Apartheid Week...

Leonard Stern of the Ottawa Citizen looks at Israel Apartheid Week...
Of all the sponsors of Israeli Apartheid Week, the participation of gay and lesbian groups is most disheartening. Harvard University’s Alan Dershowitz tells an anecdote about the time he gave a speech and spotted an anti-Israel sign in the crowd, held aloft by a gay rights group. Dershowitz reminded the protesters that Israel is the one country in the Middle East where they’d be able to hold a gay rights sign in public and not be lynched.

Israel’s official government website celebrates Eytan Fox, one of the country’s best known filmmakers. Fox’s recent movie The Bubble, about a love affair between two men, Arab and Jew, won an award from the U.S.-based Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, for its sensitive depiction of gay people.

Films like that aren’t being made in Syria or Gaza. Gay Muslims have to flee to democratic countries if they want to come out. Israel itself recently took in a gay Palestinian from the West Bank town of Jenin. The man settled in Tel Aviv, moving in with his partner, an Israeli. Thousands of couples — Arab, Jewish, mixed — show up for the gay pride parade in Tel Aviv.

Yet back in Canada, gay student groups denounce Israel as their enemy. They aren’t protesting against the many Muslim countries where homosexuality is criminalized — where, as Der Spiegel recently reported, men suspected of being gay are found with their genitals amputated and anuses sealed with glue.

(When Israel last year suffered an isolated act of homophobic violence — a gunman shot up a gay nightclub — Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu publicly expressed his personal horror.)

More on York's University's one-sided approach to Israel....

We blogged this item earlier this week..here's David Frum's take...
Next week, York University will once again open its halls and classrooms to “Israel Apartheid Week,” so-called. This year as every year, militants and activists will use the taxpayer-funded facilities of York to vilify the Jewish state.

Well, that’s free speech, isn’t? Everybody gets to express his or her point of view, no matter how obnoxious, right?

No, not right. Not at York. At York, speech is free — better than free, subsidized — for anti-Israel haters. But for those who would defend Israel, York sets very different rules.

In advance of York’s annual hate-Israel week, the campus group Christians United for Israel applied to use university space to host a program of pro-Israel speakers.

The university replied that this program could only proceed on certain conditions.

It insisted on heavy security, including both campus and Toronto police — all of those costs to be paid by the program organizers. The organizers would also have to provide an advance list of all program attendees and advance summaries of all the speeches. No advertising for the program would be permitted — not on the York campus, not on any of the other campuses participating by remote video.

These are radically different and much harsher terms than anything required from the hate-Israel program. The hate-Israel program is not required to pay for its own security. It is free to advertise. Its speakers are not pre-screened by the university.

The pro-Israel event, scheduled for this past Monday, Feb. 22, was cancelled when the organizers declined to comply with the terms. A university spokesman told the Jewish Tribune that it insisted on the more stringent requirements on pro-Israel groups “due to the participation of individuals who they claim invite the animus of anti-Israel campus agitators.”

The logic is impressively brazen: Since the anti-Israel people might use violence, the speech of the pro-Israel people must be limited. On the other hand, since the pro-Israel people do not use violence, the speech of the anti-Israel people can proceed without restraint.

Over the past days, however, the university appears to have realized that this “We brake for bullies” policy on speech might present some PR problems.

So now it seems they have reverted to a bolder policy: flat-out denial.

I called York on Thursday for comment on the incident. York’s smooth chief communications officer was out for the day. So apparently was his deputy. I got instead an audibly nervous substitute.

I asked: Is it York’s policy to allow thugs to decide what may be said on campus, and what can’t? He insisted that, no York had the same rules for all.

“Are you telling me,” I asked, “that York imposes precisely the same requirements on all student groups?”

“All student groups that request university space, yes.”

I said: “I’m going to print that answer in the newspaper. It’s going to be kind of embarrassing if you are quoted as saying something blatantly untrue. Do you want to modify your statement in any way?”

The spokesman said he would stick with his “precisely same requirements” quote.

I offered one more chance to amend the answer. Pause. And then burst forth a flood of amazing flack-speech reprising Chevy Chase’s legendarily incoherent performance in Spies Like Us.

What he meant, he said, was that it was the “process” and the “protocols” that were the same, leading to a “needs-based assessment” of each particular case. Hemina, hemina, hemina.

The truth is this: York students are treated “the same” only in the sense that every student is equally exposed to the utterly arbitrary ad hoc decision-making of a fathomlessly cowardly university administration.

Some good news for free speech...

Saskatchewan's high court rules for free speech...
Saying there is a difference between criticizing homosexual acts and condemning gay people themselves, Saskatchewan's top court has overturned a human rights tribunal decision against a religious activist who distributed anti-gay pamphlets. Bill Whatcott will not have to pay the $17,500 in compensation a provincial tribunal awarded in 2005 to four people who complained his flyers exposed them to hatred, the Court of Appeal ruled this week. The pamphlets -- one of which was entitled "Sodomites in our Public Schools" -- used crude and offensive language, but they were protected by freedom of expression provisions in the Saskatchewan Human Rights Code, the Thursday ruling concluded. The pamphlets were distributed in Saskatoon and Regina in 2001 and 2002. The flyers were expressing moral objections to homosexual practices rather than condemnation of gay people themselves, and they were part of a public debate about sexual information taught in schools, the court decision states.
I hate these flyers, for sure...but they should not be illegal.

Thursday, February 25, 2010

Why are hate mongers invited to speak at Universities...

This is from the UK...
Three universities have been slammed for hosting an extremist Muslim who has expressed antisemitic views. Sheikh Abdullah Hakim Quick has previously denounced Jews and homosexuals as "filth".

He was due to speak at King's College London yesterday after being invited by its Islamic Society.

The Qabeelat Al Shams group, a student section of the Islamic education group Al Maghrib Institute, asked him to appear at the University of East London (UEL) this weekend and at City University last week.

Sheikh Quick is an American who converted to Islam in 1970. He has previously given lectures saying homosexuals are "not natural".

Peter Tatchell, of lesbian and gay rights group OutRage!, said: "King's would not host a white supremacist.

"The complacent, hands-off attitude of the vice-chancellor is appalling. King's is not a safe place for Jewish and gay students when it facilitates a speaker like Sheikh Quick."

The Federation of Student Islamic Societies failed to comment on why Sheikh Quick had been invited to speak.

But a UEL spokeswoman said it was "obliged to allow freedom of expression" where it believed speakers would not break the law.

A City spokeswoman said: "It was agreed with the speaker that his content would adhere to the University's values and behaviours."

Chris Coe, a spokesman for King's, said the university had only just been made aware of the issue and would be investigating. However, he said that the Sheikh was speaking on ecology to the Islamic Society "with whom we have very good relations."

Wente on the Olympics....

There have some incredibly fantastic stories coming from the Olympics....we should be proud...
No matter how cynical you are, you can't help being moved by the triumph of Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir, the sweet-faced young ice-dancers who've skated together since they were 6. Theirs is a classic tale of sweat and sacrifice, but it's also a family story too, of parents who spent endless hours in cold rinks and remortgaged their houses, and would do it all again, because they love their children. Long after you forget how many medals we won, you'll probably remember the story of Alexandre Bilodeau and his greatest inspiration, his disabled brother Fred, and of Joannie Rochette, the skater who gave the performance of her life just days after her mother's sudden death. What Canadians will remember is not how many of our athletes won the podium. It's how they won our hearts.

Malaysian Deputy Prime Minister: Caning Must be explained...

Once people understand it, they will like it...
Days after three Muslim women were whipped for having illicit sex, Malaysian Deputy Premier Muhyiddin Yassin on Friday said religious authorities must explain properly the issue of caning under Sharia law to avoid the punishment from being viewed negatively by local and global communities.

The Deputy Prime Minister said many, including Malaysians, were horrified at the idea of a woman being caned because they did not know how it was executed.

"The caning punishment meted out by the Shariah court is legal and how the international community looks at it, is up to them. But I believe it is important that authorities make an effort to explain the procedure because it is far different from the impression many have," he said.

"While the caning sentence meted out by civil courts can cause hurt and sometimes even death, caning according to Shariah law is light. It is more to educate and remind Muslims to honour and abide by their religion," he said after chairing the Cabinet committee on human capital development.

A Fatwa battle....

I suggest best of three falls at the Kaaba in Mecca...
Scholars at Egypt's al-Azhar were outraged at a fatwa issued by Saudi cleric Abdul-Rahman al-Barrak that states that all those who promote the mingling of sexes are apostates that should to be killed.

Barrak's fatwa comes in contradiction to earlier statements by al-Azhar, the world's leading institution of Sunni Islam, that claimed that mixing is permitted within limits.

Islam allows the mixing of men and women as long as it within the limits of decency and respect, said Sheikh Abdul-Hamid al-Atrash, former head of al-Azhar's Fatwa Committee.

"A woman can go out to work as long as she is modestly dressed and will not deal with men in a way that arouses them" he told Al Arabiya. "Indecent mixing is what should be prohibited."

Atrash argued that even if the mixing exceeds the limits allowed by Islam, neither those who do it nor those who promote it should be called apostates nor punished by death.

"It could be considered a sin, but not one that is punishable by death."

We need to see more of Dubai's greatest hits...

Claudia Rosett asks some good questions about the police in Dubai...
Rarely has Big Brother been so generous with his video clips. Last week Dubai authorities released surveillance camera footage of 11 suspects wanted for the assassination of a top Hamas terrorist, Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, found dead in his room on Jan. 20 in a Dubai luxury hotel. Spliced together and embellished by the Dubai police with helpful captions and red circles to highlight the suspects, it's an enthralling show. If a picture is worth a thousand words, video is the lingua franca of the modern world. At speed, around the globe, this footage has fueled interest in the case and stoked speculation about whodunnit.

Not that the Dubai authorities have been coy about their suspicions, with guesses pointing to Israel's secret service, the Mossad. Israeli officials have followed their policy of neither confirming nor denying. Conspiracy theories abound. The story is still playing out under a global spotlight, with the Dubai police enlisting the help of Interpol and naming another 15 suspects on Wednesday this week.

Whatever the mysteries, this much is clear: Dubai's security apparatus has just given an impressive display of its surveillance abilities. Closed circuit cameras followed members of the alleged hit team arriving and departing the airport, and tracked them at a shopping mall and at various hotels, including al- Mahbouh's. Dubai authorities were able to supplement that information by tracing cell phone calls that some of the suspects made to Austria, and are probing credit cards they used. The Dubai Police, on their English language Web site, boast of their own efficiency, saying they were able to put together the movements of these suspects "after identifying them, in a record time that did not go beyond 24 hours."

Elsewhere on their site, the Dubai Police describe themselves as "the most forward-thinking and progressive Arab police force today!" They have 15,000 personnel, and employ electronic finger printing, satellite technology and--obviously--quick access to lots of surveillance cameras.

All of which points toward a big question. If Dubai surveillance is this adept, where's the rest of the Dubai video collection?

One might reasonably suppose there are some fascinating scenes squirreled away. The assassination of al-Mabhouh is hardly the only case in which international killers have prowled the streets, malls and hotels of Dubai. Liveliest sheikhdom of the United Arab Emirates and busiest entrepot in the Gulf, Dubai has had a reputation for years as a frontier of the Wild East. That has its upside. Dubai is host to plenty of legitimate enterprise. But it also has its uses as a way station, meeting place and financial center for tyrannical regimes and terrorists.

The U.S. 9/11 commission noted that for al-Qaida terrorists in 2001, "Dubai, a modern city with easy access to a major airport, travel agencies, hotels and Western commercial establishments, was an ideal transit point." More than half the September 11 hijackers passed through Dubai en route to attack the U.S., two of those hijackers came from the U.A.E., and the 9/11 Commission reported that roughly half the $250,000 the hijackers spent preparing for the attacks was wired to them via Dubai banks. Following the 2003 overthrow of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, documentation emerged--in U.S. federal courts,, as well as in both Congressional and United Nations investigations-- suggesting that Saddam's regime had used Dubai as a hub for sanctions-busting front companies, kickback collection and, according to the U.S. Treasury, efforts to buy surface-to-air missiles.

Today, Dubai is Iran's top trading partner, doing billions worth of business every year. Dubai was described in a recent paper by Suzanne Maloney of the Brookings Institution as playing "a critical role as Iran's offshore banker and exporter."

So what else lies in the surveillance archives of the Dubai security services? If Dubai's authorities can piece together within 24 hours the trail of the alleged killers of one top terrorist, might we reasonably suppose they could also exhume quite a collection of clips providing more context? Could they perhaps give the global public a much better window on the deadly nature of the business pursued in airports, malls and hotel rooms by such killers as the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, or by Iran's pet terrorist organizations, Hezbollah and al-Mabhouh's outfit--Hamas?

For starters, where's the full surveillance footage of al-Mabhouh himself? He was a killer from way back; a founding member of Hamas's violent Izzedine al-Qassam Brigades, who bragged about his role in the 1989 kidnapping and murder of two Israeli soldiers. The Wall Street Journal, among others, reports that al-Mabhouh at the time of his death "was a key link in smuggling operations ferrying Iranian weapons to Hamas militants in the Gaza Strip." He reportedly arrived in Dubai last month from Damascus, which serves as a haven of hospitality for Hamas' top terrorists. Dubai authorities say he was traveling on a false passport, but apparently they have been able to piece together enough of his trail to inform the press that just before he was murdered, he "met with members of his group and bought a pair of shoes."

Please, tell us more--or better yet, show us any accompanying video clips. In whose blood was al-Mabhouh planning to dip those new shoes? Who, exactly, did he meet in Dubai? What for? Did he do any banking in Dubai? How often had he visited before? In recent years have Dubai authorities perchance stored away enough video of al Mabhouh and his terrorist comrades for a full-length feature film? Queried about these matters, the U.A.E. embassy in Washington referred me to the Dubai Police, who did not respond to phone calls or emailed questions.

Time for Islamic Self-Examination???

Hege Storhaug of Norway's Human Rights Service looks at recent demonstrations by Muslims in Norway...
The Muslims who have recently been demonstrating and agitating in Norway in reaction to the publication of a Muhammed cartoon in Dagbladet should be asking themselves: What is it about us Muslims that causes so much hubbub? Why don’t any other groups occupy as much space in the public square, in public debate, as we do? Why do we so often represent ourselves as victims, as having been offended, and react with aggression?

Sunday, February 14, marked the 21st anniversary of Ayatollah Khomeini’s death fatwa against Salman Rushdie for writing the book The Satanic Verses — a fatwa that marked the beginning of the contemporary confrontation between Islam and the Christian world. As Kenan Malik notes in his book From Fatwa to Jihad, Peter Mayer, who was then the CEO of Rushdie’s publishing house, Penguin, understood instantly how important the publisher’s public reaction would be, insisting that the firm take the long view. To give in now, he recognized, would be only to encourage future acts of terrorism by people who, for whatever reason, objected to the contents of some book or other.

We’ve grown accustomed to the fact that in our society certain elements of the Muslim population, which make up about three percent of the total population, are all over the media. This situation amounts to a kind of permanent exception in which demands and aggression dominate the picture, along with major doses of victim rhetoric. No other group demands anywhere near as much attention or demonstrates so clearly that it is dissatisfied with our liberal values. What, people ask with concern, will our society be like when Muslims make up 10 percent of it, or 20 percent? How many demonstrators will they manage to muster at University Square in 2020, if something goes against them? Will the police be able to maintain order? What do the events we are witnessing now portend?

To witness the demonstration at University Square was to be reminded of the 1930s, when Vidkun Quisling’s Nazi group, the Nasjonal Samling, held mass rallies at the same spot. There was the same feeling of being in the presence of dark, aggressive forces. No humility; hardly any freedom of thought. Leaders in uniforms copied from the seventh-century Arabic Bedouin culture — a culture that represents the very opposite of humanism, human rights, democracy, and freedom.

What’s paradoxical is this: like other immigrants to Norway, Muslims have had all kinds of benefits served to them on a silver platter by the Norwegian state: full political and civil rights, free education, and health care. We even fund their mosques in the same way that we fund other houses of worship, despite the fact that organized Islam is as much a political phenomenon and a system of laws as it is a religion — a fact plainly illustrated in Oslo last weekend. But many of its adherents are not satisfied; they want more. Or, more correctly, they want less freedom and more Islam in our society.

They should take a look at the UN reports, written by Arabic researchers since the turn of century, about the causes of the deplorable conditions in the Arabic League’s 22 member countries, which share a lack of freedom and low standards of living. Probably the most difficult criticism for them to swallow will be this: the authors of the UN reports (which make up the series entitled “Arab Human Development Reports”) believe that modernity and development are brought about by not mixing politics and religion, and they point up the need for new perspectives, such as “the creation of paradise on earth and the enjoyment of the earth’s bounties.” One report enumerates the values that Muslim countries should strive to cultivate: “curiosity, reason, science, the senses, vision.” The report’s conclusion, in regard to religion, is that it must be liberated from political control. My own conclusion, then, is as follows: that the more sizable the place that Islam occupies in a society, the more it will approach the tragic Arabic conditions from which tens of thousands flee every year. Islam, in short, has not managed to create free societies based on human rights. On the contrary. And everyone should take a serious look at this fact.
Please read the whole article...

Pro-Israel events cancelled at York University...

It would upset the anti-Israel people...
At the last minute, York University has cancelled events organized by a coalition of Canadian pro-Israel students and organizations due to “security” concerns. The events organized by the Imagine With Us coalition were scheduled for this week in anticipation of Israel Apartheid Week (IAW), which begins on March 1.

The Imagine With Us coalition – a “multi-faith, multi-political movement that is concerned with maintaining Canadian values and keeping our campuses safe from hatred, discrimination and radical incitement, particularly from those subscribing to radical Islam,” explained Michael Mostyn, national director of public affairs for B’nai Brith Canada – is led by My Canada, a non-partisan organization of young adult Christians who are passionate about a variety of social justice issues, and B’nai Brith Canada.

On Monday and Thursday of this week, events were scheduled at York which included the participation of Middle East expert and political commentator Daniel Pipes, Israeli scholar of Arabic literature and political discourse Dr. Mordechai Kedar, ormer PLO terrorist Walid Shoebat, human right activist Rev. Majed El Shafie, social justice activist and founder of My Canada Faytene Kryskow, and B’nai Brith Canada CEO Frank Dimant. The events were scheduled to be streamed live to campuses across Canada and to be viewable online internationally.

On Monday morning, York University informed Imagine With Us campus partners Christians United for Israel (CUFI) that the university was cancelling the event due to the fact that Imagine With Us did not meet their requirements. York had required that the organizers include a formidable police and campus security presence paid for by the organizers, a list of all attendees in advance, a minute-by-minute synopsis of all speakers’ talking points and a ban on public advertising of the event at York and on satellite campuses.

York University has said that the requirements were demanded of the event organizers due to the participation of individuals who they claim invite the animus of anti-Israel campus agitators.

Wednesday, February 24, 2010

Son of Hamas founder speaks the truth..

Thanks to Tony for sending this...
The son of one of Hamas’s founding members was a spy in the service of Israel for more than a decade, helping prevent dozens of Islamist suicide bombers from finding their targets, it emerged today.

Codenamed the Green Prince by Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security service, Mosab Hassan Yousef, the son of Hamas co-founder Sheikh Hassan Yousef, supplied key intelligence on an almost daily basis from 1996 onwards and tracked down suicide bombers and their handlers from his father’s organization, the daily Haaretz said.

Information he supplied led to the arrests of some of the most wanted men by Israeli forces, including Marwan Barghouti, a Fatah leader often tipped as a potential president who was convicted of masterminding terrorist attacks, and one of Hamas’ top bomb-makers Abdullah Barghouti, who is no relation of the jailed Fatah chief.

Mr Yousef, a 32-year-old convert to Christianity who now lives in California, has revealed the intrigues of his years as a spy in a new book called Son of Hamas, much to the concern of Shin Bet, whose operations will be revealed in detail. While the revelations may give a boost to Israel’s intelligence service, whose external counterpart Mossad is still grappling with the diplomatic fall-out of last month’s Hamas assassination in Dubai, there will be concern that the account may give too many insights into the murky world of espionage.

However, Mr Yousef’s work will be far more damaging to Hamas, whose brutality he denounced. Dubai police have suggested that Mahmoud al-Mabhuh, the top Hamas militant found dead in a hotel room in the emirate on January 20, may have been betrayed by an insider from the Islamist movement itself.

And Mr Yousef had harsh words for the movement that his father helped form, and which now rules the Gaza Strip after a bloody takeover in summer 2007. “Hamas cannot make peace with the Israelis,” he told the daily. “That is against what their God tells them. It is impossible to make peace with infidels, only a cease-fire, and no one knows that better than I. The Hamas leadership is responsible for the killing of Palestinians, not Israelis."

Gee, am I a suspect???

Dubai names 15 MORE suspects....sounds like way too many people for a targeted hit....and this time, some of them escape to Iran....
Dubai police on Wednesday afternoon revealed that fifteen more suspects have been connected to the mysterious assassination of Hamas terror chief Mahmoud al-Mabhouh at a hotel in the emirate last month, and that three of the suspects later fled Dubai through Iran.

According to new intelligence cited by the Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya news networks, the suspects – among them five women – came to Dubai from six European countries and from Hong Kong. Three of them were found to possess Australian passports, while the remaining twelve possessed passports from the UK, Ireland and France.

“The extensive investigation has led to a total of 26 suspects so far involved in the crime,” read a Dubai government statement quoted by Al Arabiya. The statement also disclosed the names of all fifteen new suspects.

Anti-semitic incidents in Canada in 2009

B'Nai Brith has published their annual report on anti-semitism in Canada...here are some of the incidents of the year.

January

Toronto, ON – Chants at an anti-Israel street rally include “Jews are our dogs”, and “Jewish child, you’re gonna f***in’ die. Hamas is coming for you.”

Montreal, QC – A young man wearing a kippah is assaulted on a public street.

Toronto, ON – A 13-year-old student is assaulted by a group of students as they
shout references to Jews smelling like ashes[a reference to the concentration camp crematoria] and make the Heil Hitler salute.

Montreal, QC – Seniors in a Jewish residential building receive anonymous phone calls to their apartments, threatening that “1000 Jews will die”.

Calgary, AB – During an anti-Israel rally, Jews are compared to Nazis and a rabbi is subsequently spat on as he enters a nearby synagogue.

Vancouver, BC – Jewish students are chased and assaulted on campus.

February

Surrey, BC – A Jewish professor is sent an email from ‘Youth of Islam’ threatening, “I am Hitler 2009”.

Saint-Sauveur, QC – Jewish students on a Grade 6 ski trip are taunted with antisemitic slurs.

Toronto, ON – A business owner’s storefront is defaced, and he is sent a letter
threatening “to blow [the] heads off [the] Jewish congregation”.

Toronto, ON – Jewish students on campus fear for their own safety, as they are
swarmed by other students who shout antisemitic slurs and death threats.

March

Whistler, BC – White Power flyers are distributed denouncing the Chabad Jewish religious movement as a hate group.

Ottawa, ON – A blog containing ugly antisemitic content threatens a university’s Jewish Studies Centre: “We need to identify the Zionist Kikes and their handmaiden. Time to draw up list, time is soon.”

Woodstock, ON – Public sites are defaced with neo-Nazi hate symbols.

Winnipeg, MB – A Jewish boy playing junior hockey is called a “f***ing Jew” by an opposing team member.

Toronto, ON – A Jewish university student challenging a point at a debate on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is told to “Shut up or I’ll saw your head off”, and then dragged out of the room.

April

Toronto, ON – A playground is defaced with the words “Jew free zone”, “Jews not welcome” and Nazi symbols.

Montreal, QC – A visibly Jewish man is beaten up in a park.

Pickering, ON – A local elementary school is defaced with hate messaging, including “We hate Jews”, “I love Hitler” and “Die Jews”.

Thornhill, ON – Mezuzahs on Jewish homes are defaced during the Jewish religious holiday of Passover.

Labelle, QC – A sign at a Mexican restaurant reads “September 11 because of Jews”.

May

Grand River, ON – A hospital worker is told not to wear a Magen David (Jewish Star of David) to work.

Toronto, ON – A driver gestures to a father and two young children wearing kippahs in the next car, signaling that he wants to slit their throats.

Huntsville, ON – A manager at a resort tells a Jewish patron: “I know you’re Jewish. You have to lose your Jewish attitude.”

Toronto, ON – Emails are circulated in a workplace, blaming Jews for creating swine flu as a method of destroying the world.

Montreal, QC – A %yer depicting Jews as genocidal murderers is distributed throughout the Outremont area.

Masonville, QC – Vandals deface a park bench with the words "Jews sit here only", marking off half of it as a ‘Jew-free’ zone.

June

Toronto, ON – A British pop singer on tour in Canada assures her audience during a rant about a shopkeeper who was rude to her, “Don’t worry, he wasn’t Canadian, he was Jewish.”

Ottawa, ON – A high school student tells his classmates that Jews control the media and the government, and is neither corrected nor reprimanded by his teacher.

Hamilton, ON – A home is defaced with swastikas and the slurs “Jewishwelfarebums [sic]”, “burn” and “go back to homeland”.

Montreal, QC – A blog describes Chassidic Jews in Outremont as unwanted foreign invaders.

Victoria, BC – Jewish day school is property is defaced.

July

Thornhill, ON – Antisemitic slurs and threats are shouted at a community-based baseball game.

Regina, SK – Internet material is posted, charging that Jews “are NOT God’s Chosen People. They are in fact the most hate "filled, unforgiving people on the planet.”

Richmond Hill, ON – Swastikas and Hitler images are spray-painted onto playground equipment.

Thornhill, ON – A Jew receives a call to his cell phone in which the caller threatens “to slit Jewish throats”.

Calgary, AB – A professional is told his position is not being renewed since a “Canadian [is] preferred over a Jew”.

Ennismore, ON – A Jewish summer camp is targeted with antisemitic graffiti.

August

Toronto, ON – The apartment doors of three Jewish residents are defaced with “Hate Jewish swine”, and mezuzahs are ripped off.

Edmonton, AB – A Jewish day school is vandalized, with “F*** Jew Bitches” spraypainted on the playground equipment.

Winnipeg, MB – Garbage is thrown from a car at a visibly Jewish group of worshippers walking home from synagogue.

Thornhill, ON – A synagogue’s interior is defaced with antisemitic slurs.

September.

Edmonton, AB – Eggs are thrown at the front door of a synagogue.

Guelph, ON – Antisemitic graffiti is daubed on the door of a university campus residence where Jewish students live.

Pointe-Claire, QC – A publicly-posted sign reads “9-11 was an inside job. Learn the truth about the Jews…”

Halifax, NS – A Jewish university professor is sent a letter with antisemitic slurs addressed to “Tribe of Judah” at his home address.

Montreal, QC – Four synagogues in the same area are vandalized and their windows smashed during the night of the 25th of September, just before the holiest day of the Jewish year, Yom Kippur.

October

Toronto, ON – Online propaganda is found declaring “Kikes are the maggots of the human race! e sooner the kike plague is destroyed the better! It will be a GREAT day when the last kike vampire breathes it’s [sic] last foul breath and dies!”

Winnipeg, MB – A Facebook page for a school reunion complains that the school is letting “all those dirty Indians in the school… not to mention all those f***ing Jews and Negroes”.

Ottawa, ON – Jewish cemetery walls, signs and headstones are desecrated with praypainted swastikas and antisemitic slurs, including “F*** the Jews”.

November

Sainte Agathe, QC – A local synagogue is vandalized with swastikas.

Calgary, AB – Numerous sites including schools, community centres and synagogues are defaced with swastikas and racist messages such as “Six million more”.

Oshawa, ON – A synagogue in a small Jewish community is spray painted with a swastika.

Toronto, ON – Antisemitic remarks that call Jews murderers who are pushing Canada to war, are written on cards that are being sent to thank Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan.

Barrie, ON – A swastika defaces the wall of a local synagogue.

December

Charlottetown, PEI – A private home with a Chanukah menorah in the window is vandalized.

Winnipeg, MB – An entry on an Internet forum by the founder of White Pride Warriors, a Winnipeg-based hate group, states that “Jews are "lthy creatures that will continue to bring the white race down. We must conquer those who oppose us and our views or we will be overrun by vermin.”

Vancouver, BC – A blood libel alleging organ theft by Israelis and Jews is circulated in an Islamic community newspaper.

Toronto, ON – A Jewish reporter is spat on while covering an anti-Israel rally.

Vancouver, BC – Jewish day school students are subjected to ongoing antisemitic slurs outside their school by students from other schools.

No talks with the Taliban..

Terry Glavin has just returned from Afghanistan...and here's his story about one of the respected warlords in Afghanistan...
The godfather of Afghanistan's warlords is throwing his weight behind growing opposition to President Hamid Karzai's negotiations with the Taliban.

"There is a limit to the patience of the people," said Bernahuddin Rabbani, 70, a former Afghan president.

"Beyond that limit, no one can be patient any more."

He fears a return to the fratricidal warfare that preceded the Taliban's ouster if Mr. Karzai attempts to cut a Western-backed deal that betrays Afghanistan's embryonic democracy.

"As I read history, when a nation's problems become this complex and they are not solved, that could result in violence and revolutions and other unwanted things," he said.

"Water is very soft, but if you put it under pressure, it will explode."

An impromptu alliance of Afghan democrats, women's rights leaders, reformers and MPs has sprung up in defiance of Mr. Karzai's "peace at any cost" approach.

His policy of detente is also forging a rare consensus across the political class, uniting pro-democracy Pashtuns with former northern warlords.

Mr. Rabbani's involvement is bound to give the anti-appeasement opposition a sharper edge. It was only with his blessing that Mr. Karzai became president of the interim government in 2002.

Also, events in recent days have boosted the opposition's belief a sellout is not necessary. Opponents point to successes in capturing Taliban leaders.
Please read the whole thing, and for more information, please visit Terry's excellent blog.

Michael Totten on Israel's targeted assassinations...

Few people can say it better than Totten....
I can understand why Dubai authorities aren’t happy about the killing of Hamas senior military commander Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, presumably by Israeli Mossad agents, in one of the city-state’s hotel rooms last month. More than most countries in the Middle East, the United Arab Emirates has stayed out of the Arab-Israeli conflict and would rather it not wash up on the beach.

Even as European Union officials perfunctorily squawk about the use of forged passports by the assassins, few others have grounds to complain. Al-Mabhouh was a terrorist commander on a mission to acquire Iranian weapons for use against civilians. He was a combatant. Unlike his victims, he was fair game. He would have been fair game for even an air strike if he were in Gaza. As he was, instead, in Dubai, he was taken out quietly without even alerting, let alone harming, any of the civilians around him.

If only Israel could fight all its battles this way. It would be the cleanest and least-deadly war in the history of warfare. Even some of Israel’s harshest critics should understand that.

“The Goldstone Report,” Alan Dershowitz wrote in the Jerusalem Post, “suggests that Israel cannot lawfully fight Hamas rockets by wholesale air attacks. Richard Goldstone, in his interviews, has suggested that Israel should protect itself from these unlawful attacks by more proportionate measures, such as commando raids and targeted killing of terrorists engaged in the firing of rockets. Well, there could be no better example of a proportionate and focused attack on a combatant deeply involved in the rocket attacks on Israel than the killing of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh.”

Hamas and Hezbollah use civilians as human shields. Hezbollah uses an entire country as a vast human shield. Some critics, for various reasons, are more interested in lambasting Israel than the terrorist organizations it’s fighting. That’s easy when you live in New York or Brussels. People in the Middle East have to live with (or die because of) what happens. How Middle Easterners fight wars isn’t political or academic to me. I’ve never been inside Gaza, but I once lived in Lebanon, I travel there regularly, and there’s a real chance I’ll be there when the next war pops off. I’d rather not be used as a human shield if that’s OK with those who give Hamas and Hezbollah a pass. And I’d much rather read about Hezbollah leaders getting whacked by mysterious assassins with forged passports than dive into a Beirut bomb shelter during Israeli air raids.

But I’m not particularly concerned about my own skin here. Nobody forces me to travel to war zones. I don’t have to visit the Middle East ever again if I don’t want to. Every trip I’ve ever taken has been voluntary, and I can leave whenever I’ve had enough.

A lot of people I care about live in Lebanon, and some of them can’t leave. They never volunteered to be used as human shields by Hezbollah, and in fact had their neighborhood — my old neighborhood — shot up and blown up by Hezbollah gunmen recently. Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah doesn’t consult them or their elected officials on his foreign policy and would sooner shoot them than be relieved of his ability to declare war unilaterally or on the orders of Tehran.

It’s unlikely that Israel can avert the next war by assassinating its enemy’s leadership, but it’s always better to take out a high-level target in person whenever possible than with a blockbuster bomb from a distance. I can’t help but wonder if those griping about the recent hit in Dubai — assuming the Mossad actually did it — care less about the lives of real human beings than the latest excuse to bash Israel. If the Arab-Israeli conflict will continue — and it will continue — civilians on both sides should prefer combatants be taken off the board quietly while everyone else goes about their daily business in peace.

Tuesday, February 23, 2010

Diversity trumps....everything...

A good case study for a change in some of our values...
Army superiors were warned about the radicalization of Major Nidal Malik Hasan years before he allegedly massacred 13 soldiers at Fort Hood, Texas, but did not act in part because they valued the rare diversity of having a Muslim psychiatrist, military investigators wrote in previously undisclosed reports.

An obvious “problem child’’ spouting extremist views, Hasan made numerous statements that were not protected by the First Amendment and were grounds for discharge by violating his military oath, investigators found.

Examples of Hasan’s radical behavior have previously been disclosed in press accounts based on interviews with unnamed Army officials, including his defense of suicide bombings and assertions that Islamic law took priority over his allegiance to the United States.

But the Pentagon’s careful documentation of individual episodes dating back to 2005 and the subsequent inaction of his superiors have not been made public before.

The Globe was permitted to review the Army’s more complete findings on the condition that it not name supervisory officers who did not act, some of whom are facing possible disciplinary action.

In searching for explanations for why superiors did not move to revoke Hasan’s security clearances or expel him from the Army, the report portrays colleagues and superiors as possibly reluctant to lose one of the Army’s few Muslim mental health specialists.

The report concludes that because the Army had attracted only one Muslim psychiatrist in addition to Hasan since 2001, “it is possible some were afraid’’ of losing such diversity “and thus were willing to overlook Hasan’s deficiencies as an officer.’’

“Several of his supervisors explicitly mentioned Hasan’s potential to inform our understanding of Islamic culture and how it relates to the current conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan,’’ the investigators found.

In one classroom incident not previously described by the Army - which parallels another episode around the same time that has received press attention - Hasan gave a presentation in August 2007 titled “Is the War on Terrorism a War on Islam: An Islamic Perspective.’’

But the presentation was “shut down’’ by the instructor because Hasan appeared to be defending terrorism. Witnesses told investigators that Hasan became visibly upset as a result.

“The students reported his statements to superior officers, who took no action on the basis that Major Hasan’s statements were protected by the First Amendment,’’ the investigation found. “They did not counsel Hasan and consider administrative action, even though not all protected speech is compatible with continued military service.’’

It added: “Soldiers have rights under the First Amendment, but they are not the same rights as civilians. . . . [T]hese statements violated the Army . . . standard to hold a security clearance.’’

Dutch election June 9th...

We wish Geert Wilders the best of luck...
Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands on Tuesday ordered an early general election on June 9 after the ruling coalition fell apart over whether to extend the Netherland's military mission in Afghanistan.

The Palestinians go ballistic...

Now, they are threatening religious war...
The Palestinian president warned Tuesday that the region could plunge into a "religious war" over Israel's plans to recognize a disputed West Bank shrine as one of its own national heritage sites.

Mahmoud Abbas spoke during a visit in Belgium, following an announcement by the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu about the Cave of Patriarchs in Hebron earlier this week.

The Hebron site is holy to both Jews and Muslims. Jews revere it as the traditional burial place of the Bible's Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Muslims also see Abraham as their forefather, and control of the shrine is a flashpoint between Palestinians and Israelis.

Palestinians in Hebron rioted Monday to protest the Israeli decision, and tension there continued Tuesday.

After Abbas spoke, Nir Hefetz, a spokesman for Netanyahu, denounced the criticism of the Israeli move. "This is a hypocritical campaign of lies," Hefetz said in a statement, insisting that Israel is "dedicated to the freedom of worship of the members of all religions at all the holy sites."
Jewish historical sites have never been well-treated by the Palestinians or the Arabs - just witness the destruction of synagogues in the Old City of Jerusalem. But, Israel has always respected Muslim holy sites. This action by the Israeli government is needed and necessary...

CBC runs a story on male spousal violence victims...

Wow...has the world turned???
In the almost 40 years since the first shelter for battered women opened its doors, we have made noticeable progress in dealing with and denouncing domestic violence.

Nevertheless, much still needs to be done and the biggest challenge, in my view, is what to do about men.

Not men as perpetrators — there we seem to have a handle on things. Rather, I'm talking about the hundred thousand or so confirmed male victims who are, often violently, abused by their female partners every year.

Domestic violence is not a gender-specific reality. Women are capable of hitting, beating, abusing and killing their male partners.

Just how prevalent these attacks are depends on what statistical study you choose to highlight.

But based on what we know, there should be no argument that female violence against men is at least a problem worthy of much greater consideration than we have given it so far.
Gender neutral

According to a large-scale Statistics Canada study in 2005, the likelihood of a man being the victim of violent abuse by his female partner is almost the same as it is for a woman.

In this study, an estimated seven per cent of women and six per cent of men surveyed had encountered some form of spousal violence over the previous five years.

This means, StatsCan said, that roughly 653,000 women and 546,000 men considered themselves the victims of violence at the hands of a current or previous spouse or common-law partner, an estimate that was unchanged from an earlier study.

However, if you look simply at cases that are reported to police, the victim profile changes significantly.

In 83 per cent of these cases, women are the victims, according to a different Statistics Canada survey.

There may be a simple reason for this. "Men are less likely to report domestic violence to police than women are, and police are less likely to take male complaints seriously," says Don Dutton, professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia.

As a result, he says, we end up with a reporting system on the subject in which "men are selected out" and then "government agencies say 'look, it is only women who are the victims,' which of course is a self-fulfilling prophesy."

A Human Rights Set-up...

Karen Selick has a very scary story....
One of the most preposterous cases in the field of so-called human rights law in recent years has quietly evaporated into the ether, leaving a relieved but nevertheless injured victim.

The victim is John Fulton, owner of the Downtown Health Club for Women in St. Catharines, Ont. In 2006, an individual dressed as a woman visited the club and applied for membership. The person then told Fulton, "I'm really a guy" -- a man planning to have a sex-change operation.

With only one change room and shower room in the club, admitting this individual would have meant allowing a man to observe the other patrons -- all female -- in various stages of undress. As well, the women could have been subjected to seeing a naked man in their dressing room. Unable to figure out how he could distinguish the applicant from a voyeur or an exhibitionist, Fulton hesitated to grant him membership. Within a week, two more "transitioning" men tried to join the women's gym, even though there's a co-ed gym right next door. The whole scenario screamed "set-up!"

But before he could even obtain legal advice, Fulton had been slapped with a so-called human rights complaint.

At mediation, the complainant demanded a large sum of money to drop the complaint. But Fulton declined to capitulate to this example of what author Ezra Levant has labelled a "shakedown." Instead, he hired lawyer Andrew Roman, who tells me the "going rate" for such settlement demands is $20,000 to $25,000.

Roman raised legal objections to the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario's jurisdiction to entertain the bizarre claim. The Ontario Human Rights Code specifically permits facilities to serve a single sex on the grounds of public decency, and ordains that such restrictions do not constitute illegal discrimination. Therefore, how could anyone reasonably claim that the club had a legal duty to admit a biological male to the women's locker room simply because he intended, some day, to become a woman?

Fulton also raised constitutional arguments -- most importantly, that admitting the complainant would violate the rights of club members to freedom of association under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

The case was finally set for hearing in late 2009 when the complainant suddenly, without explanation, withdrew the complaint.

Although Fulton was no longer in jeopardy of being "convicted" of a human rights violation, he now had legal bills of roughly $150,000 to pay. He had also suffered considerable stress from the prolonged, highly publicized proceedings, and he felt maligned by the accusation of bigotry that he was never given the opportunity to disprove. In actuality, Fulton is a model of tolerance who was recently awarded a plaque for community service for his long-standing support of AIDS Niagara.

Fulton applied to the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario for an award of costs to help pay his legal fees. He was turned down flat. The tribunal lacks the legal authority to award costs, it ruled.

Monday, February 22, 2010

Now, here's a good deed....

This sort of surgery is needed in Iran...
Ibrahim, a 20-year-old Galilee Muslim whose failed circumcision two years earlier left him with too little penile skin to perform his matrimonial duties, was abandoned by his fiancee prior to their wedding. But plastic surgeon Prof. Yaron Har-Shai eventually enabled Ibrahim to get engaged to another woman by adapting – for the first time in the world – a technique used on hand and facial burns to rehabilitate his penis, restoring normal function.

Har-Shai and colleagues at Haifa’s Carmel Medical Center and the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology’s Rappaport Faculty of Medicine have just published their report on the highly unusual case in the British Journal of Plastic, Reconstructive & Aesthetic Surgery, which presents not only the details of the procedure but also ‘before’ and ‘after’ photos. The doctors’ careful search of the Medline database showed that the technique had not been used previously to correct such a problem.

The man, now 21, is due to wed a different woman who accepted his marriage proposal after hearing about the normal appearance and functioning of his penis. Upon hearing the news, the Carmel staff who treated him sent the couple a huge bouquet of flowers and wishes for good luck and many children.

Instead of undergoing a ritual circumcision at the conventional age for Muslims – 13 years – the man waited until 18, apparently because he comes from a secular family and didn’t think it was important, Har-Shai told The Jerusalem Post on Monday.

The procedure was performed by an overzealous traditional practitioner, who botched the job. Instead of removing just the foreskin, he also cut off ventral penile skin, a complication that occurs in 0.2 percent of circumcisions.

Although able to have erections before the accident, the unfortunate man found that the error shortened his organ by causing the development of scar tissue that prevented the skin from expanding with increased blood supply. Skin webbing developed from the sub-coronal groove to the anterior scrotal base. Intercourse was impossible, and when his first fiancee learned about his condition, the wedding was off.

An anesthesiologist who knew the family turned to Har-Shai, a Technion graduate who worked at Haifa’s Rambam Medical Center until he was invited to head the plastic surgery department at Carmel.

Surgeons abroad trying to treat similar injuries in the past took skin from other parts of the patient’s body and transplanted it onto the penis; the result, however, was not only of a different color but the penis also sometimes developed a web texture and became too small to allow for intercourse.

First, Har-Shai performed a known procedure called Z-plasty, a technique used to improve the functional and cosmetic appearance of scars. It can elongate a contracted scar or rotate the scar tension line. The procedure, however, was unsuccessful.

Har-Shai’s father, Prof. Bernard Hirshowitz, was a pioneer in plastic surgery at Rambam before his retirement and years ago developed the “flap technique-5” procedure to enable webbed skin between fingers to become flexible after suffering a burn and shrinking, as well as for treating facial skin injuries. But it had never been used to rehabilitate a shrunken penis.

Har-Shai decided to adapt his father’s innovation – for the first time in the world – to the young man’s problem. He created five flaps from small bits of skin left on the man’s penis itself so they were not rejected and did not turn into webbing.

“Although previous surgery had been executed at the surgical site, uneventful healing of the skin flaps and complete relaxation and elongation of the skin web [was] achieved,” the team wrote.

The man’s penile length measured 11 centimeters after the procedure – eight centimeters longer than it was after the complications from the circumcision set in. Two months after the operation, the patient had functional erections, Har-Shai told The Post.

“It also looks great, very aesthetic,” he enthused. He added that his father’s flap technique-5 could also be used on baby boys if they have a shortage of skin.

There have been no previous reports of such a complication in circumcisions in Israel, even though some 50,000 ritual procedures are performed here each year. Har-Shai said he saw references to the complication occurring in Iran.

“I would have no problem treating Iranians who need it,” he said, though there are no diplomatic relations between the two countries.
They'll have to give up nuclear weapons to get this surgery...

A honour mobile phone killing....

You can't make this stuff up....
A Jordanian on death row for the murder of his married sister who used her mobile too often in an apparent "honour killing" has had his term commuted to 10 years in jail, a judicial official said Monday.

"The man confessed to the crime after he was arrested shortly after the crime," the official told AFP.

The defendant said "he stabbed his sister, who was in her 40s, in the stomach, back and chest because she frequently talked over her mobile phone and allegedly had suspicious behaviour," said the official, on condition of anonymity.

The man, 21, was charged with premeditated murder, which is punishable by death, but the court reduced the sentence on Sunday after the family dropped all legal claims against him, the official said.

He said the 2007 killing took place in Jabal Akhdar, near the centre of Amman.

Between 15 and 20 women are murdered each year in Jordan in so-called honour crimes, in which male relatives kill female kin they suspect of illicit behaviour with men.

Filipina slaves in Dubai...

I wonder how many other Filipina slaves there are in other muslim countries...
In November 2009, five Filipino prosecutors from the Department of Justice visited Dubai to attend an international conference.

There, they were welcomed to a party organised by a Filipino woman. They went to a hotel and were greeted by another Filipino who was assigned in the front desk. Later on, they found out that the coordinator of the conference was a fellow Filipino.

The events led to an impression that Filipino women in Dubai were better off in terms of employment compared to their counterparts toiling in other parts of the globe.

And when the group - Amor Robles, Marlet Balagtas, Eden Wakay-Valdes, Elizabeth Berdal, and Lourdes Zapanta - saw other Filipinos shopping and strolling in the mall where many cashiers were Filipino women too, it became easier for them to believe this.

"One of the staff in the conference told us that they hire Filipinos because we are very reliable, hardworking, clean, pleasant, and always smiling," said one of the Filipino workers.

But when the group made a courtesy call to the Philippine Overseas Labour Office days before leaving for Manila, their first impression was shattered.

At the Filipino Workers Resource Centre, which can accommodate about 25 people, they encountered 140 distressed Filipino women dying to go back to the Philippines, but couldn't do so.

According to Zapanta, these Filipino workers, aged between 20 and 40, were considered slaves, "abused either physically or sexually" by their foreign employers.

One of the victims narrated that she was frequently beaten up by her employer so she had no choice but to flee. This story was echoed by the experience of another, who suffered a graver fate when she escaped jumping from a window: The incident then left her with broken bones and black and blue all over.

And now...a conference on caning!

I guess they have to discuss methods, etc....
MALAYSIA will be organising an international conference on the caning sentence for Muslim women.

The country recently caned three women for having illicit sex and the case is expected to fuel a debate over rising 'Islamisation' in Malaysia, where religious courts have been clamping down on moral offences, as well as applying a ban on Muslims consuming alcohol that had previously rarely been enforced.

Home Minister Hishammuddin Hussein had said that the caning of the three women 'is to teach and give a chance to those who have fallen off the path to return and build a better life in the future'.

Women, Family and Community Development Minister Shahrizat Abdul Jalil said the caning conference, organised through the Secretariat of Advocacy and Empowerment of Muslim Women, will discuss the caning sentence among Muslim countries.

'The ministry hopes that through the conference, which will be attended by ministers and experts, we can make a comparative study on whether the sentence is normally practised among Muslim countries,' she told reporters yesterday, after signing a memorandum of cooperation between the ministry and Oman's Social Development Ministry.

Tom Brokaw explains Canada to Americans....

Sunday, February 21, 2010

How low can the BBC go????

Well, pretty low....
The New York-based American Jewish Committee blasted the BBC on Sunday for airing an accusation that Jews around the world assist in supposed Mossad assassinations.

The AJC said in a statement that it was “dismayed that a guest on BBC Radio 4 was allowed to state unchallenged” that the Mossad relies on Jews for assassination plots.

“This baseless accusation crosses every red line between legitimate public discussion and bigoted fear-mongering,” said AJC executive director David Harris. “In less than a minute, the BBC has cast a shadow on the lives of Jews worldwide.”

BBC Radio 4’s PM program interviewed Gordon Thomas, author of Gideon’s Spies, a book about the Mossad, about the January 20 assassination of Hamas military commander Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in Dubai.

Local authorities and many international media outlets believe that the killing of Mabhouh, who bought rockets for Hamas forces in the Gaza Strip, was carried out by the Mossad.

In explaining the Mossad’s operating methods outside Israel, Thomas told PM host Eddie Mair, “They have a whole backup system called ‘asylum.’ These are people, local residents, Jewish people, who help the Mossad. It is estimated to be in the world about half a million; some people say a million; I tend to say it’s about half a million, all of them Mossad people.”

“Of course, Mr. Thomas is irresponsible in making such unfounded assertions on a radio program heard around the world,” said Harris, “but even more shocking is BBC, a premier public broadcaster with a far-reaching global network. How can the interviewer allow such aspersions to be cast on a community without the reporter calling the so-called expert to order?”

The comments also drew condemnation from observers of the BBC.

“Unfortunately, such ugly and nonsensical statements on the BBC come as no surprise. The BBC often handpicks interviewees who are likely to say such things as part of a wider pattern to demonize the State of Israel,” said Tom Gross, a former Middle East correspondent for The Sunday Telegraph and a Middle East analyst who has long been critical of BBC coverage of the region.

Anti-semitic incidents at highest level since WWII...

This is very alarming....
Nearly half of Western European believe that Jews exploit the persecution of their past as a method of extorting money, according to an annual Jewish Agency report released on Sunday.

A joint report on anti-Semitism conducted by the Agency and the Ministry of Diaspora Affairs found that 42 percent of those polled by the University of Bielefeld in Germany agreed that "Jews exploit the past to extort money."

The countries in which the highest percentage of the population agreed with that statement were Poland and Spain.

According to the Jewish Agency, there were more anti-Semitic incidents in 2009 than in any year since the Second World War. In the first three months of 2009 - immediately following Israel's three-week offensive on the Gaza Strip - there were as many anti-Semitic incidents recorded as in the entire year of 2008.

In France, for example, there were 631 anti-Semitic incidents recorded in the first half of 2009, compared to 474 in all of 2008.

Worldwide, eight people were killed in attacks last year.

The report indicates that there were two murders linked with anti-Semitism in the United States in 2009 - one of a female university student in Connecticut and the other of a non-Jewish guard at the Holocaust museum in Washington, D.C.

This rise in anti-Semitism is stemming from both the political Left and Right, according to the Jewish Agency.

At the press conference at which the report was released, officials referred to a film that has been making the rounds in recent days that charges Israel with stealing organs at the IDF hospital in Haiti.