(splcenter.org)
In the wake of Sept. 11, new light is thrown on the international ties increasingly linking Muslim and neo-Nazi extremists
As Germany's defeat loomed during the finals months of World War II, Adolf Hitler increasingly lapsed into delusional fits of fantasy. Albert Speer, in his prison writings, recounts an episode in which a maniacal Hitler “pictured for himself and for us the destruction of New York in a hurricane of fire.” The Nazi fuehrer described skyscrapers turning into “gigantic burning torches, collapsing upon one another, the glow of the exploding city illuminating the dark sky.”
An approximation of Hitler's hellish vision came true on Sept. 11, when terrorists destroyed the Twin Towers in New York, killing nearly 3,000 people. But it was not Nazis or even neo-Nazis who carried out the attack the deadliest terror strike in history allegedly came at the hands of foreign Muslim extremists.
Still, in the aftermath of the slaughter, white supremacists in America and Europe applauded the suicide attacks and praised Osama bin Laden, the mastermind of the massacre. An official of America's premier neo-Nazi group, the National Alliance, said he wished his own members had “half as much testicular fortitude.” The awestruck leader of another U.S. Nazi group called the terrorists “VERY BRAVE PEOPLE.” Neo-fascist youth in France celebrated the event that evening with champagne at the headquarters of the extreme right Front National. German neo-Nazis, some wearing checkered Palestinian headscarves, rejoiced at street demonstrations while burning an American flag. Jan Kopal, head of the Czech National Social Bloc, declared at a rally in Prague that bin Laden was “an example for our children.” Horst Mahler, a former left-wing terrorist and prominent member of the neo-Nazi National Democratic Party (NPD) in Germany, proclaimed his solidarity with the terrorists and said America had gotten what it deserved.
What's going on here? For decades, American extremists have lumped Arabs in with dark-skinned “mud people.” In Europe, neo-Nazis have been implicated in countless xenophobic attacks on Arabs, Turks and other Muslims. Extremist parties on both sides of the Atlantic hope to bar entrance to non-white immigrants.
The peculiar bond between white nationalist groups and certain Muslim extremists derives in part from a shared set of enemies Jews, the United States, race-mixing, ethnic diversity. It is also very much a function of the shared belief that they must shield their own peoples from the corrupting influence of foreign cultures and the homogenizing juggernaut of globalization. Both sets of groups also have a penchant for far-flung conspiracy theories that caricature Jewish power.
But there is more. Even before World War II, Western fascists began to forge ideological and operational ties to Islamic extremists. Over the years, these contacts between Nazis and Muslim nationalists developed into dangerous networks that have been implicated in a number of bloody terrorist attacks in Europe and the Middle East. Wealthy Arab regimes have financed extremists in Europe and the United States, just as Western neo-Nazis have helped to build Holocaust denial machinery in the Arab world. In the 1970s, Saudi Arabia hired an American neo-Nazi as a lobbyist in the United States. In the 1980s, U.S. neo-Nazi strategist Louis Beam openly called for a linkup of America's far right with the “liberation movements” of Libya, Syria, Iran and Palestine. In the 1990s, an American Black Muslim was convicted in a plot to bomb the United Nations and other New York landmarks that was masterminded by a blind Egyptian cleric (see story on Black Muslims at bottom of this article). Just last year, a meeting sponsored by a U.S. Holocaust denial group brought together Arab and Western extremists in Jordan (see story on Holocaust denial, also at bottom of this page). And after the Sept. 11 attacks, a spate of articles by American neo-Nazis and white supremacists appeared in Islamic publications and Web sites.
Although links like these illustrate the ties between Muslim extremists and Americans, such ties are far more developed in Europe. But since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, there are a number of signs including a spate of articles by American neo-Nazis that have appeared in Islamic publications and Web sites that an operational alliance may be taking shape in the United States as well.
Banking for Allah
Perhaps the best contemporary snapshot of this Nazi-Islamist extremist axis comes in the person of one Ahmed Huber, a neo-Nazi whose home in a suburb of Berne was raided by Swiss police on Nov. 8, after U.S. officials identified him as a linchpin in the financial machinations of Osama bin Laden. The raid was part of a coordinated law enforcement dragnet that seized records from the offices of Al Taqwa, an international banking group. Al Taqwa, which literally means “Fear of God,” had been channeling funds to Muslim extremist organizations around the world, including Hamas, a group active in the Israeli-occupied territories.
Huber, a former journalist who converted to Islam and changed his first name from Albert, served on the board of Nada Management, a component of Al Taqwa. After Swiss authorities froze the firm's assets and questioned Huber, the 74-year-old denounced Washington for doing the bidding of “Jew Zionists” who “rule America.” In January, Nada Management announced that it had gone into liquidation.
A well-known figure in European neofascist circles, Huber “sees himself as a mediator between Islam and right-wing groups,” according to Germany's Office for the Protection of the Constitution. Portraits of Hitler and SS chief Heinrich Himmler adorn the walls of Huber's office, alongside photos of Islamic political leaders and a picture of Jean-Marie Le Pen, the present-day boss of the French Front National.
In accordance with his self-proclaimed mission to unite Muslim fundamentalists and extreme right-wing forces in Europe and North America, Huber has traveled widely and proselytized at numerous gatherings. In Germany, he speaks often at events hosted by the neo-Nazi National Democratic Party, which publicly welcomed the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Huber also befriended British author David Irving and other Holocaust deniers while frequenting “revisionist” conclaves.
A Bin Laden Fan in Chicago
At the same time, Huber made the rounds of the radical Islamic circuit in Western countries. In June 1994, he spoke about the “evils of the Jews” at a mosque in Potomac, Md. (just outside Washington, D.C.), where videotapes of Huber's speeches are reportedly on sale. During a subsequent visit to Chicago, he attended a private assembly that brought together, in Huber's words, “the authentic Right and the fighters for Islam.” Huber told journalist Richard Labeviere that “major decisions were taken [in Chicago]. … [T]he reunification is under way.”
Huber acknowledges meeting al-Qaeda operatives on several occasions at Muslim conferences in Beirut, Brussels and London. He has been quoted in the Swiss media as saying that bin Laden's associates “are very discreet, well-educated and highly intelligent people.” The U.S. government claims that Huber's banking firm helped bin Laden shift financial assets around the world. But Huber denies any involvement in terrorist activities. He insists Al Taqwa was engaged in charitable work, providing aid for social services that benefited needy Muslims.
Described as “the financial heart of the Islamist economic apparatus,” Al Taqwa is intertwined with the Muslim Brotherhood, a longstanding, far-right cult whose emblem is a Koran crossed by a sword. The influence of the Brotherhood extends throughout the Muslim world, where it vigorously, and often violently, opposes secular Arab regimes. In 1981, partisans of the Muslim Brotherhood were implicated in the assassination of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat. Several members of Islamic Jihad, an extremist sect closely associated with the Brotherhood, were also involved in the Sadat assassination. By the early 1990s, Islamic Jihad would closely ally itself with bin Laden's al Qaeda network.
Back to the Beginning
The roots of the Muslim Brotherhood and, in many ways, the Nazi-Muslim axis go back to the organization's formation in Egypt in 1928. Marking the start of modern political Islam, or what is often referred to as “Islamic fundamentalism,” the Brotherhood from the outset envisioned a time when an Islamic state would prevail in Egypt and other Arab countries, where the organization quickly established local branches. The growth of the Muslim Brotherhood coincided with the rise of fascist movements in Europe - a parallel noted by Muhammad Sa'id al-'Ashmawy, former chief justice of Egypt's High Criminal Court, who decried “the perversion of Islam” and “the fascistic ideology” that infuses the world view of the Brothers, “their total (if not totalitarian) way of life . . . [and] their fantastical reading of the Koran.”
Youssef Nada, current board chairman of Al Taqwa, had joined the armed branch of the Muslim Brotherhood as a young man in Egypt during World War II. Nada and several of his cohorts in the Sunni Muslim fraternity were recruited by German military intelligence, which sought to undermine British colonial rule in the land of the sphinx. Hassan al-Banna, the Egyptian schoolteacher who founded the Muslim Brotherhood, also collaborated with spies of the Third Reich.
Advocating a pan-Islamic insurgency in British-controlled Palestine, the Brotherhood proclaimed their support for the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin Al-Husseini, in the late 1930s. The Grand Mufti, the preeminent religious figure among Palestinian Muslims, was the most notable Arab leader to seek an alliance with Nazi Germany, which was eager to extend its influence in the Middle East.
Although he loathed Arabs (he once described them as “lacquered half-apes who ought to be whipped”), Hitler understood that he and the Mufti shared the same rivals - the British, the Jews and the Communists. Indicative of the old Arab adage, “The enemy of my enemy is my friend,” they met in Berlin, where the Mufti lived in exile during the war. The Mufti agreed to help organize a special Muslim division of the Waffen SS. Powerful radio transmitters were put at the Mufti's disposal so that his pro-Axis propaganda could be heard throughout the Arab world.
A Mecca for Fascists
After the defeat of Nazi Germany, the Grand Mufti fled to Egypt. His arrival in 1946 was a precursor to a steady stream of Third Reich veterans who chose Cairo as a postwar hideout. The Egyptian capital became a safe haven for several thousand Nazi fugitives, including former SS Captain Alois Brunner, Adolf Eichmann's chief deputy. Convicted in absentia for war crimes, Brunner would later reside in Damascus, where he served as a security advisor for the Syrian government.
Several American fascists visited the Middle East during this period, including Francis Parker Yockey, who made his way to Cairo in the summer of 1953, a year after the corrupt Egyptian monarchy was overthrown by a military coup. The Brotherhood had played a major role in instigating the popular uprising that set the stage for the emergence of Col. Gamal Abdel Nasser as Egypt's new leader. But Nasser, who had little interest in mixing politics and religion, would subsequently have a falling out with the Islamic fundamentalist sect.
When Nasser wanted to overhaul Egypt's secret service, he asked the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency for assistance. But the U.S. government “found it highly impolitic to help him directly,” cia agent Miles Copeland recalled in a memoir, so the cia instead secretly bankrolled more than 100 German espionage and military experts who trained Egyptian police and army units in the mid-1950s.
An American Reaches Out
During this period, the Grand Mufti maintained close relations with the burgeoning Nazi exile community in Cairo, while cultivating ties to right-wing extremists in the United States and other countries. H. Keith Thompson, a New York-based businessman and Nazi activist, was a confidant of the Mufti. “I did a couple of jobs for him, getting some documents from files that were otherwise unavailable,” Thompson acknowledged in an interview.
Thompson also carried on a lively correspondence with Johannes von Leers, one of the Third Reich's most prolific Jew-baiters, who converted to Islam and changed his name to Omar Amin after he took up residence in Cairo in 1955. “If there is any hope to free the world from Jewish tyranny,” Amin wrote Thompson, “it is with the Moslems, who stand steadfastly against Zionism, Colonialism and Imperialism.” Formerly Goebbels' right-hand man, Amin became a top official in the Egyptian Information Ministry, which employed several European fascists who churned out hate literature and anti-Jewish broadcasts. Another German expatriate, Louis Heiden, alias Louis Al-Hadj, translated Hitler's Mein Kampf into Arabic.
The Egyptian government also published The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the infamous anti-Semitic forgery that purports to reveal a Jewish master plan for taking over the world. A staple of Nazi propaganda, the Protocols also are quoted in Article 32 of the charter of Hamas, the hard-line Palestinian fundamentalist group that is supported by the Muslim Brotherhood even though Muslim scholars say such views are an anathema to mainstream Islam. “There are no historic roots for anti-Semitism in Islam,” says Hasem Saghiyeh, a columnist at Al Hayat, a London-based Arab newspaper. “The process of translating books like The Protocols of the Elders of Zion on a popular scale started in Nasser's Egypt, but only the Islamic fundamentalist movement incorporated them into its literature.”
Mercenaries for Palestine
After Israel's overwhelming victory in the Six Day War in June 1967, a mood of desperate militancy engulfed the Palestinian refugee camps. Deprived of a homeland, the leaders of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) apparently felt that they couldn't afford to turn down offers of help, no matter how unsavory the donors. Karl von Kyna, a West German neo-Nazi mercenary, died during a Palestinian commando raid in September 1967. Eager to continue their vendetta against the Jews, several right-wing extremists subsequently joined the Hilfskorp Arabien (“Auxiliary Corps Arabia”), which was advertised in the Munich-based Deutsche National-Zeitung, a pro-Nazi newspaper, in 1968.
The following year, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) hijacked several commercial airplanes. When three PFLP members stood trial after blowing up an Israeli jet in Zurich, the legal costs for their defense were paid by Francois Genoud, an elusive Swiss banker described by the London Observer as “one of the world's leading Nazis.” Genoud had previously picked up the tab for Adolf Eichmann's legal defense, and a number of other Nazi war criminals and Arab terrorists would also benefit from his largesse. Where did the money come from? According to European press accounts, Genoud was managing the hidden Swiss treasure of the Third Reich, most of which had been stolen from Jews. “Security services claim he transferred the defeated Nazis' gold into Swiss bank accounts,” reports Gitta Sereny, who called Genoud “the most mysterious man in Europe.”
After World War II, Genoud served as the financial advisor to the Grand Mufti. In 1958, the Swiss Nazi set up the Arab Commercial Bank in Geneva to manage the war chest of the Algerian National Liberation Front, whose partisans were fighting to free their country from French colonial rule. Several Third Reich veterans, including Maj. Gen. Otto Ernst Remer, who had served as Hitler's bodyguard, smuggled weapons to the Algerian rebels, while other German advisors provided military instruction. Under the guise of supporting the Arabs' struggle against French colonialism, Genoud and his Nazi cohorts were following the same geopolitical strategy that Hitler had pursued in the Middle East.
Europeans and Pro-Palestinian Terror
In addition to brokering arms sales to Arab militants, Genoud helped subsidize terrorist networks in Europe and the Arab world. This financier of fascism waited until the statue of limitations ran out before admitting that he had personally written and sent ransom notes demanding $5 million to the German airline Lufthansa and several news services after PFLP terrorists hijacked another jet in 1972. That same year, the Black September organization murdered nine Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics. When Black September leader Hassan Salameh needed medical attention, Genoud arranged for him to be treated at a private clinic in Lausanne.
In 1974, PLO chief Yasser Arafat publicly indicated a willingness to renounce international terrorism and declared his interest in a settlement that would finally establish a Palestinian homeland in the Israeli-occupied territories. These steps toward moderation angered Arab hardliners, who ruled out any compromise with Israel. Not surprisingly, Genoud and other neofascists favored the most belligerent factions that kept calling for the annihilation of the Jewish state.
After bombing four U.S. Army bases in West Germany in 1982, Odfried Hepp, a young neo-Nazi renegade, went underground and joined the Tunis-based Palestine Liberation Front (PLF). Hepp, one of West Germany's most wanted terrorists, was arrested in June 1985 while entering the apartment of a PLF member in Paris. Four months later, PLF commandos seized the Achille Lauro cruise ship and murdered Leon Klinghoffer, a wheelchair-bound Jewish American. Included on the PLF's list of prisoners to be exchanged for the Achille Lauro hostages was the name of Odfried Hepp.
Fundamentalism and the Iranian Revolution
Islamic fundamentalism got a tremendous boost when the Ayatollah Khomeini toppled the Shah during the 1979 Iranian revolution. The Ayatollah's description of the United States and the Soviet Union as “the twin Satans” dovetailed neatly with the “Third Position” politics of many European and American neofascists, an ideology that rejects both American capitalism and Soviet Communism. Some white supremacists also shared Khomeini's dream of launching a “holy war” against what was seen as decadent, Western-style democracy. When Iran issued a call for the assassination of author Salmon Rushdie for writing The Satanic Verses, several neo-Nazi groups supported the Iranian fatwa.
Far-right fanatics also hailed the 1983 suicide car-bombing by Iranian-backed Shiite terrorists that killed 271 U.S. Marines in Beirut. The British National Front had nothing but praise for Khomeini's Islamic Revolutionary Guards: “Their belief in their cause is so strong that they will run through mine fields unarmed to attack enemy positions; their ideals are so all-consuming that they will drive truck bombs into enemy camps knowing full well their [own] death is inevitable. … This power, this contempt for death, is the stuff of which victories are made.”
In 1987, French police cordoned off the Iranian embassy in Paris and demanded that a magistrate be allowed to interrogate Wahid Gordji, an Iranian official suspected of orchestrating a series of bombings that rocked the French capital during the previous a year. French investigators got on to Gordji's trail after they discovered a check for 120,000 francs (about $20,000) that he had written to Ogmios, a neo-Nazi publisher and bookstore in Paris. The money was used to underwrite a slick catalogue promoting The Myth of the Jewish Holocaust and similar titles. But the Iranian government rebuffed the French authorities who wanted to question Gordji, causing a rupture in diplomatic relations between Paris and Tehran. The six-month embassy stand-off was finally resolved after French officials met with representatives of a group called “The Friends of Wahid Gordji” a group which included the redoubtable Nazi banker Francois Genoud.
Nazis in Baghdad
Links between white supremacists and the Iranian government continued after Khomeini's death in 1989. On several occasions in recent years, American neo-Nazi chieftain William Pierce has been interviewed by Radio Tehran. U.S. white supremacists have also snuggled up to Iran's archenemy, Saddam Hussein. In 1990, Gene Schroder, an ideologue of the far-right “common-law court” movement, joined a delegation of Midwest farmers to Washington for a meeting in the Iraqi embassy, where Iraqi officials were trying to drum up opposition to the impending Persian Gulf War. During that 1991 war, Oklahoma Klan leader Dennis Mahon organized a small rally in Tulsa in support of Saddam. Mahon says he later received a couple of hundred dollars in an unmarked envelope from the Iraqi government.
In addition, shortly before the war, German neo-Nazis solicited support from Iraq for an anti-Zionist legion composed of far-right mercenaries from several European countries. The members of this so-called international “Freedom Corps” pretentiously strutted around Baghdad in SS uniforms. But as soon as bombs started to fall on the Iraqi capital, the neo-Nazi volunteers scurried back to Europe.
A number of prominent neo-fascists have expressed support for Saddam, including Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the Russian demagogue, who visited Iraq after the Gulf War. Jean-Marie Le Pen of the French Front National also got the red-carpet treatment when he met Saddam in Baghdad. Although he built his political career by disparaging Arab immigrants, Le Pen now claims that he is deeply concerned about the plight of Iraqi children who have suffered under sanctions imposed by the United Nations. His wife, Jany, who heads a group called SOS Children of Iraq, has joined Le Pen on several trips to Baghdad. Thus far, however, Arab children in France have yet to benefit from the supposed good Samaritan act of the Le Pens.
The Libyan Connection
On June 28, 2000, the Times of London reported that Libyan leader Muammar Ghaddafi had ordered the deposit of $25 million into a bank in Carinthia, the Austrian province governed by Jorg Haider, de facto leader of the far-right Freedom Party. (The Freedom Party is an immigrant-bashing organization that is home to many neo-Nazis and former Nazis and has downplayed German war atrocities.) Col. Ghaddafi's cash gift - which Haider described as “Christmas for Austria” - was meant to ease the strain of sanctions imposed on Austria by the European Union after the Freedom Party joined Austria's national governing coalition.
This was the second rabbit Haider pulled from his hat as a result of two private forays to Tripoli, where he met Ghaddafi. After his first Libyan excursion, Haider announced he was tackling Austria's high gas prices by arranging for Libyan gasoline to be sold in Carinthia at a discount. News photos showed Haider, the Porsche-driving populist, beaming as he pumped gas for motorists.
Over the years, Ghaddafi has been wooed by several neofascist leaders, including Italian fugitive Stefano delle Chiaie, who was accused of masterminding a series of bomb attacks in Rome and Milan. Described in a 1982 cia report as “the most prominent rightist terrorist … still at large,” delle Chiaie wrote a letter to Ghadaffi, inviting him to join in a common struggle against “atheistic Soviet Marxism and American capitalist materialism,” both of which were supposedly controlled by “international Zionism.” Delle Chiaie added: “Libya can, if it wants, be the active focus, the center of national socialist renovation [that will] break the chains which enslave people and nations.”
Ghaddafi, the Green Book and Western Extremism
Links between Libya and the European far right have been scrutinized in several parliamentary and judicial probes in Italy. One Italian judicial inquiry found that the Libyan embassy in Rome had provided money to aid the escape of Italian terrorist suspect Mario Tuti shortly after the bombing of an express train near Florence in 1974. Tuti was later captured and sentenced to a lengthy prison term for orchestrating the attack, which killed 12 people and injured 44 others.
Ghadaffi's financial largesse and his militant anti-Zionism has generated support for the Libyan regime among right-wing extremists around the world, including in Great Britain, where the Green Book, Ghaddafi's political manifesto, was promoted by the neo-Nazi National Front. In 1984, according to former British Nazi leader Ray Hill (who later renounced racism and worked with antiracists), the Libyan People's Bureau put up money for a special anti-Semitic supplement to the National Front's monthly magazine. In addition, Ghadaffi's government picked up the tab for several junkets so that neofascists from England, France, Canada, the Netherlands and several other countries could visit the Libyan capital.
Col. Ghaddafi is also widely admired by white supremacists in the United States. The Green Book has been featured as the top online book on the Web site of the American Front, whose professed aim is “to secure National Freedom and Social Justice for the White people of North America.” Asserting that he is “against race mixing,” American Front leader James Porazzo praises Libya and says that his group has much in common ideologically with Louis Farrakhan's Nation of Islam, which has its own links to Ghaddafi (see “Strange Bedfellows” below). Porazzo also says he has “great respect for the actions of Hamas and Hezbollah,” two radical Islamist groups involved in suicide bombings, as long as they “see that their home is in the Mideast and that their religion is great for their people but not intended for all mankind.”
'Working for Their Races'
The Philadelphia-based American Front thinks highly of Osama bin Laden, too, describing him as “one of ZOG [Zionist Occupation Government, the name many extremists give to the federal government, which they believe is run by Jews] and the New World Order's biggest enemies.” And it is not alone. Wolfgang Droege, one of 17 Canadian racists who traveled on a “fact-finding mission” to Libya in 1989, is similarly enamored of bin Laden, seeing parallels between bin Laden's struggle and others supporting “racial nationalism” in North America. “I've had dealings with Black Muslims, I've had dealings with Arabs, I've had dealings with people of various races, and I realize that some of these people are as motivated as I am in working for the interest of their race,” Droege told MacLean's magazine.
While they wouldn't want bin Laden, or anyone of non-European descent, living next door, leaders of the hard-core racist movement in the United States have seized upon the Sept. 11 attacks as an opportunity to expand their strategic alliance with Islamic radicals under the pretext of supporting Palestinian rights. After hijacked airplanes demolished the World Trade Center and damaged the Pentagon, a number of Muslim newspapers published a flurry of articles by American white supremacists ranting against Israel and the Jews. Anti-Zionist commentary by neo-Nazi David Duke appeared on the front page of the Oman Times, for instance, and on an extremist Web site based in Pakistan (www.tanzeen.com). Another opinion piece by Duke ran in Muslims, a New York-based English-language weekly, which also featured a lengthy critique of U.S. foreign policy by William Pierce, head of the rabidly racist National Alliance. In the wake of Sept. 11, several American neo-Nazi web sites also started to offer links to Islamic Web sites.
The psychological dynamics that propel the actions of Islamic terrorists have much in common with the mental outlook of neo-Nazis. Both glorify violence as a regenerative force and both are willing to slaughter innocents in the name of creating a new social order. The potential for an alliance between American neo-Nazis and Islamic terrorists an alliance that could develop into strong operational ties cannot be ruled out given the long and sordid history of fascist links to the Muslim world.
Strange Bedfellows
Some American Black Muslims make common cause with domestic neo-Nazis and foreign Muslim extremists
In 1961, Elijah Muhammad, founder of the black supremacist Nation of Islam, met with Ku Klux Klan leaders at the Magnolia Hall in Atlanta. Although they had different ideas about the skin color of the master race, they shared the belief that blacks and whites should stay separate. The following year, Muhammad invited American Nazi Party chief George Lincoln Rockwell to address a Nation convention in Chicago, even though Rockwell had often called blacks “the lowest scum of humanity.” Flanked by a dozen storm troopers in swastika armbands, Rockwell told an audience of 5,000 Nation devotees that he was “proud to stand here before black men. … Elijah Muhammad is the Adolf Hitler of the black man.”
Sporadic contacts between Black Muslims and white supremacists continued after Louis Farrakhan set up his own branch of the Nation of Islam in 1975. Klan leader Tom Metzger was so impressed with Farrakhan's anti-Semitic bombast that he donated $100 to the Nation after a Farrakhan rally in Los Angeles in September 1985. A month later, Metzger and 200 other white supremacists from the United States and Canada gathered on a farm about 50 miles west of Detroit, where they pledged their support for the Nation of Islam. “The enemy of my enemy is my friend,” explained Art Jones, a neo-Nazi militant from Chicago. “I salute Louis Farrakhan and anyone else who stands up against the Jews.”
The Nation's contacts with non-black extremists has not been limited to domestic neo-Nazis and Klansmen. During his international travels, Farrakhan has been officially welcomed in a number of countries, including several repressive Arab states. The Final Call, Farrakhan's newspaper, describes one such globetrotting expedition in 1986, when he visited Libya for discussions with Col. Muammar Ghaddafi, who had given Farrakhan a $5 million interest-free loan the previous year. After Libya, Farrakhan ventured to Jeddah, where he conferred with top Saudi Arabian officials before paying a courtesy call to Idi Amin, the exiled Ugandan despot. Farrakhan was also warmly received by General Zia-ul-Huq, the military dictator of Pakistan, whose abysmal human rights record coincided with efforts to impose a harsh Islamic fundamentalist regime in his country.
An American Takes Up the Cause
During the 1980s, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan played a crucial role in supporting the U.S.-backed mujahedeen resistance forces that were fighting to expel the Soviets from Afghanistan. Islamic volunteers from all over the world flocked to mujahedeen training camps in Pakistan to help win this holy war against godless Communism. They were joined by scores of combatants from the United States, including Clement Rodney Hampton-El, an American Black Muslim unaffiliated with the Nation, who suffered arm and leg wounds in Afghanistan.
After returning to Brooklyn, Hampton-El worked closely with a shadowy splinter group called al-Fuqra, whose followers in the United States and Canada are predominantly Black Muslims. Several other al-Fuqra initiates had also trained in Pakistan as part of the effort to throw the Soviets out of Afghanistan. Founded in 1980 by a Pakistani mystic named Shiek Mubarik Ali Jilani, al-Fuqra was organized into independent terrorist cells. An avowed enemy of the Nation of Islam, al-Fuqra has been linked by U.S. officials to 17 homicides and 13 firebombings in the United States. Its targets were usually other minorities or rival Muslim leaders.
In 1995, Hampton-El was sentenced to 35 years in prison for his involvement in a failed plot to bomb the United Nations and other New York City landmarks. Nine other Muslim extremists were convicted as co-conspirators in this case, including Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, a blind Egyptian cleric, who is serving a life sentence for his role as ringleader of the plot. The blind sheik has also been linked to the terrorists who bombed the World Trade Center in 1993, killing six people and injuring more than 1,000. Hampton-El told an FBI informant that he had participated in a test explosion for the first attack on the World Trade Center.
According to recent reports, the Justice Department is probing possible links between al-Fuqra and Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda network. American officials have obtained a videotape of a December 1993 meeting in Sudan, then a nerve center for the bin Laden organization, where al-Fuqra leader Shiek Mubarik Ali Jilani met with members of Islamic Jihad, Hamas and other Islamic terrorist groups. Representatives of al-Qaeda are also believed to have been present at this meeting. Federal officials also believe that al-Fuqra members collaborated with Wadih El-Hage, who was sentenced to life in prison this year for conspiring with Osama bin Laden in the bombings of two American embassies in Africa in 1998.
Between Friends
U.S. Holocaust deniers help unite neo-Nazis, Arab extremists
American extremists who claim that Jews fabricated the Holocaust to discredit Hitler and to justify the dispossession of Palestinians have made common cause on the propaganda front with jihadists from the Middle East. At the forefront of this collaborative effort is the Institute for Historical Review (IHR), the leading promoter of Holocaust denial in the United States.
Founded in 1978, the Southern California-based IHR distributes books, pamphlets, audio and videotapes that purport to prove the Holocaust never happened. These “assassins of memory,” as French literary historian Pierre Vidal-Naquet calls the Holo-hoaxers, also publish the Journal of Historical Review, which tries mightily to impress its readers with footnotes and other scholarly trappings. A recent issue spoke breathlessly of a “white-hot trend: the rapid growth of Holocaust revisionism, fueled by increasing cooperation between Muslims and Western revisionists, across the Islamic world.”
Early last year, the IHR organized a conference on “Zionism and Revisionism” that was set for Beirut that March. Billed as an opportunity for North American and European extremists to meet their counterparts in the Islamic world, the event was delayed and relocated due to complaints by Jewish groups and diplomatic pressure from the United States and Europe. An open letter signed by 14 leading Arab intellectuals also denounced the conference, which was eventually held in Amman, Jordan. The featured speaker at this scaled-down meeting, hosted locally by the Jordanian Writers' Federation, was French negationist Robert Faurisson, a longtime IHR advisor, who told a sympathetic audience that “Hitler never ordered or allowed the killing of anyone on account of his or her race or religion” and that “the Germans suffered, in reality, a fate far worse than that of the Jews.”
Feeding the Propaganda Machine
Driven by the proliferation of neo-Nazi propaganda and antagonism toward Israel, Holocaust denial has gained widespread acceptance across the Arab world in recent years. It's no coincidence that commentary on the IHR Web site is translated and posted in Arabic, as well as in German and English. IHR director Mark Weber takes pride in the fact that he and other “revisionists,” as they like to call themselves, have been interviewed on Iranian state radio. Iran's Islamic fundamentalist regime has granted refuge to several European Holocaust-deniers, who were convicted of hate speech crimes in their home countries. Jürgen Graf, an IHR editorial advisor, fled to Tehran rather than serve a 15-month sentence in a Swiss prison.
A key IHR ally among Muslim extremists is Ahmed Rami, a former Moroccan army officer who fled his native country after joining a failed coup attempt against King Hassan in 1972. Today Rami runs Radio Islam, a Stockholm-based neo-Nazi propaganda outfit. In addition to articles such as “USA's Rulers: They are all Jews,” the Web site of Radio Islam carries the full text of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, one of the vilest forgeries in modern history.
For many Palestinians, denying the Holocaust is an effective way to reject any Jewish claim to Israel. Columbia University professor Edward Said, a Palestinian American, laments the proliferation of this tendency among Arabs. “If we expect Israeli Jews not to use the Holocaust to justify appalling human rights abuses of the Palestinian people,” Said says, “we too have to go beyond such idiocies as saying that the Holocaust never took place.”
Holocaust denial has become increasingly common in leading newspapers in Egypt, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Syria and other Arab countries, where official thinking is reflected in tightly controlled national media. Support for denial enables corrupt Arab governments to deflect attention from their own failures, including their own exploitation of Muslim populations and brutal repression of many peoples, including Kurds, Berbers, Egyptian Copts and Maronite Lebanese.
Saudi Arabia at the Forefront
Of all the Arab nations involved in promoting anti-Semitic propaganda, Saudi Arabia is perhaps the most egregious offender. In the late 1970s, for instance, the Saudi government retained the services of American neo-Nazi William Grimstead as a Washington lobbyist. During this period, the Saudi royal family lavished funds on numerous Sunni fundamentalist organizations, including the Pakistan-based World Muslim Congress (WMC), which was headed by the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, an anti-Semitic Nazi collaborator, until his death in 1974.
A few years later, the WMC mailed Holocaust denial literature to every member of the U.S. Congress and the British parliament. Issah Nakleh, a Palestinian writer affiliated with the WMC, became a fixture at IHR conferences in the United States and a regular contributor to the Journal of Historical Review. Nakleh was also well known to readers of The Spotlight, the anti-Semitic weekly published by the IHR's now-defunct parent organization, the Liberty Lobby. Acknowledging their political kinship, WMC secretary-general Dr. Inamullah Khan, a trusted advisor to the Saudi royal family, sent a letter to The Spotlight, praising its “superb in-depth analysis” and stating that the paper deserved “the thanks of all right-minded people.”
Like many American and European neo-fascist groups, the WMC espoused a “Third Position” ideology critical of both Cold War superpowers, as underscored by this headline from Muslim World, the WMC's official mouthpiece: “U.S. and USSR Both Serve Zionist Interests.” But the WMC tempered its anti-American tirades when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979. Working closely with Saudi and U.S. intelligence, the WMC supported the Afghan mujahedeen in their struggle against the Soviet-backed rulers in Kabul. During this period, WMC chief Inamullah Khan also served as head of the Pakistani section of the World Anti-Communist League, an international umbrella organization that included fascist collaborators from Europe, Latin American death squad bosses, and right-wing extremists from Asia and North America. After the Soviets abandoned Afghanistan, the World Muslim Congress and several other Islamic extremist groups once again turned their fundamentalist wrath against the United States.
Not to get totally cynical on your ass, but you could read this article backwards and call it "The Southern Poverty Law Center" and the Star of David. Teach Tolerance. The Intelligence Project? Gathering intelligence for whom? Too many agendas.
LONDON, April 13 (Reuters) - An investigation was launched on Saturday after a fire devastated a chemical factory in northeast England, police said.
More than 500 people were evacuated from nearby houses after fire swept through the Distillex factory in North Shields, Tyneside on Friday, police said.
"An investigation is starting this morning involving police, the fire brigade and the Health and Safety Executive," a spokesman for Northumbria Police said. "We still don't know what caused the fire."
Flames shot 50 ft (15 metres) into the air and thick black smoke could be seen more than 15 miles (24 km) away in the second chemical scare at the plant in the last three months.
No one was injured in the blaze and residents were allowed back to their homes overnight after the area was declared safe, police said.
On Saturday three fire crews damped down the smouldering remains of the plant which was badly damaged in the blaze, the Tyne and Wear Metropolitan Fire Brigade said.
No one from Distillex Ltd was immediately available for comment on the cost and extent of the damage.
Distillex apologised to local residents after a cloud of toxic gas escaped during a chemical scare at the same plant in January.
Lancashire-based Distillex Ltd is a privately-owned company which supplies and recycles up to 10,000 tonnes of industrial chemical solvents each year.
Founded 18 years ago, it employs 44 staff in South Shields and Leyland in Lancashire, according to its website.
April 13, 2002
RIYADH, Saudi Arabia- More than $100 million has been collected in a telethon that ended Saturday to raise money for the Palestinians and also allowed Saudis to vent their anger against Israel and the United States on state-owned television.
Ordinary Saudis taking part have shown support for Palestinian suicide bombings at a time when President Bush is demanding that all Arab governments unequivocally condemn such attacks.
A 6-year-old boy, with a plastic gun slung over his shoulder and fake explosives strapped around his waist, walked into a donation center and made a symbolic donation of plastic explosives, according to Al Watan daily.
Another Saudi, 26-year-old Mohamed al-Qahtani, offered his car, saying he hoped it will "reach the Palestinian areas so a Palestinian fighter could use it to blow up a military barracks and kill (Israeli) soldiers," Al Watan reported.
Saudi Arabia's ruler, King Fahd, ordered the fund-raising drive to help channel mounting public anger against Israel and the United States away from street protests, which the kingdom bans for fear they would get out of control.
The campaign was criticized by some in the United States as an incitement to violence. But Saudi officials in Washington have assured the Bush administration that proceeds raised are intended to serve humanitarian purposes, not help the families of Palestinian suicide bombers.
Defense minister, Prince Sultan, on Saturday criticized public demonstrations in the Arab world, asking "how does the demagoguery of the streets and the burning and ripping of flags help Palestinians in their country?"
Charitable donations to help the Palestinians "are what would help," Sultan said in comments carried by the official Saudi Press Agency.
The Saudi Committee for the Support of the Intefadeh, or uprising, which has organized the telethon, said in a statement that it will also send $10.5 million in emergency aid to 200,000 Palestinians, whose West Bank towns have been besieged by Israeli forces since March 29.
Several other Gulf states have staged telethons. One Friday in the United Arab Emirates on Abu Dhabi TV raised more than $50 million. Another in neighboring Bahrain saw more than $10.5 million pledged. Telethons held in Dubai and Qatar this week raised $35 million and $8.2 million respectively.
In Jerusalem, Secretary of State Colin Powell noted the dire situation in some Palestinian towns. He announced a $30 million U.S. contribution for the U.N. Relief and Works Agency on top of the $80 million already contributed annually.
I wonder what the Saudi Jerry Lewis looks like? Instead of sending them money why don't these countries take back the Palestian refugees they expelled to Palestine after the creation of Israel?
April 13, 2002
TORONTO (AP) - The Toronto Jewish Film Festival is dropping a documentary on Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon due to security concerns.
The festival's organizers say the award winning film, "The Accused," based on Sharon's life, could invite unwanted attention from interest groups.
"This seems to be a more explosive year security-wise, so we're just trying to be careful," Helen Zukerman, the festival's executive director, said Friday. "We don't want it co-opted by some special interest groups that might seize it to make their own political statement."
The BBC film was to be screened Tuesday, April 23, and was to be followed by a question and answer session with its English producer, Aidan Laverty, who is working on a project in Afghanistan and could not be reached for comment.
The film investigates Sharon's involvement in the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, which was sparked by the attempted assassination of Israeli Ambassador Shlomo Argov in London.
Sharon, who was the Israeli defense minister at the time, allegedly facilitated the assault on the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Beirut by the Maronite Christian Phalange militia.
The assault turned into a massacre. Death toll estimates range from 700 to 3,500.
Man, the definition of hypocrisy this one. Looks like Adam Shapiro's parents aren't the only ones recieving death threats from Sharon's 'Mediawatch brigade'. Slobodan looks so parochial next to this guy.
Washington Post
April 11, 2002
President Bush has approved widespread changes at the top of the U.S. military that will put in place a new generation of relatively nonconformist officers who are likely to be more supportive of the administration's goal of radically changing the armed forces, Pentagon officials said last night.
The changes will, among other things, for the first time put a Marine in charge of U.S. military operations in Europe and Africa, officials said.
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has worked for months on filling the top command slots, which involve the chiefs of U.S. forces in every region of the world except the Pacific, as well as the heads of two of the four armed services. He has said he expects the moves to be among his most significant acts at the Pentagon.
For two of the most important positions -- the top military job in Europe and the new head of the Army -- Rumsfeld has selected people who stand out among the current top brass as unconventional thinkers who are likely to be supportive of his drive to "transform" the military to better address terrorism and other new challenges.
The changes come as part of the normal rotation of the top slots in the military. But Rumsfeld's decision to package them together is a marked departure from the usual practice of filling the jobs in a piecemeal fashion and underscores his goal of bringing radical change to the military when it is waging a global war on terrorism.
Rumsfeld has not disclosed to aides how and when he plans to officially announce the nominations. But by reaching his decisions, discussing them broadly within the administration and securing the president's approval, Rumsfeld has effectively made lame ducks of current holders of the positions.
In the most significant move, Gen. James Jones, the Marine commandant, is slated to become Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, a position once held by Dwight D. Eisenhower and currently occupied by Air Force Gen. Joseph Ralston. Jones was picked, said a senior defense official, because "he dared to be different."
The selection of Jones is not expected to be announced for several months and, like the other positions, requires congressional approval. His nomination is unusual for three reasons. It will be the first time a Marine has held the position. It will be the first time a Marine commandant has moved on to another top job in the U.S. military. And it will be the first time that the U.S. military commander in Europe will be someone born there. Jones was born in Paris and "spent his formative years" there, according to his official biography.
By picking a general from the Marines, the service most comfortable with being "expeditionary" -- that is, being able to deploy quickly to Third World hot spots and engage in a variety of missions, from full-scale combat to peacekeeping -- Rumsfeld also may be seeking to shake up the U.S. military in Europe. There are few Marines based in Europe, but there are several major Army headquarters there, and Pentagon officials have hinted that those offices will be cut or abolished in the coming years.
It could not be learned whether Rumsfeld has picked Jones's successor as head of the Marine Corps.
In another unusual move, Rumsfeld has tapped Army Gen. John Keane, the No. 2 officer in the Army, to succeed the current chief of that service, Gen. Eric Shinseki, whose term runs out next year. Selecting a successor for the current chief so far in advance is highly unusual.
Popular in the Army, Keane, a career infantry officer who once commanded the 101st Airborne Division, nearly was selected for the job in 1999 by Defense Secretary William S. Cohen. But Cohen passed him over out of concern that picking someone who was then a relatively junior general, with just three stars, would be a slap in the face of the Army's four-star officers and might unnecessarily disturb a service already troubled by its sideshow role in the war in the Yugoslav province of Kosovo.
Rumsfeld also has picked Army Lt. Gen. James "Tom" Hill to become the new chief of the Southern Command, which oversees U.S. military operations in South and Central America. That move has not been approved by the White House, officials said. Among top commands, the Southern Command slot is considered a relative backwater, most important for its command of the U.S. anti-drug effort. But it could become more significant if the aging of Fidel Castro brings political turnover or instability to Cuba, or if U.S. military operations expand in Colombia.
In moves that have been expected, Army Gen. Tommy R. Franks, who is overseeing the war in Afghanistan as head of the Central Command, is being retained in that position. And Air Force Gen. Ralph Eberhart, head of the North American Aerospace Defense Command, has been chosen to run the new Northern Command, which is being created to take responsibility for homeland defense.
Keane and Jones are veterans of the Vietnam War. Keane was a platoon leader and company commander in Vietnam with the 101st Airborne Division, and he received the Silver Star. Jones served there as a platoon and company commander with Company G of the 2nd Battalion of the 3rd Marines.
Picking Jones to be the top U.S. military officer in Europe may be a way for Rumsfeld to signal to the Army that he wants it to be more innovative. The Army traditionally has held the top slot in Europe and had hoped to regain it after the expiration of the term of Ralston, an Air Force officer. Ralston took office in May 2000 and is expected to step down around year's end.
Rumsfeld aides have privately expressed surprise at what they say is a lack of fresh thinking in the Army. Partly for that reason, Rumsfeld decided he could not afford to place Keane, whom he considers innovative, in a top regional command. He instead needed to position him to take over running the Army.
But winning the European job may prove to be a mixed blessing for Jones and the Marine Corps. It has long been considered a difficult job, requiring its holder to straddle U.S. and European defense concerns. Many worry that those concerns are drifting apart, with the United States developing unique military abilities in precision warfare that the European militaries cannot match.
The U.S. commander in Europe also sometimes clashes with the Pentagon. Most notably, during the 1999 Kosovo campaign, Army Gen. Wesley K. Clark fought bitterly with Cohen. Less than three months after the United States won that war, Clark was unceremoniously dumped by Cohen and replaced by Ralston.
But Jones's background appears to have prepared him for the tightrope nature of the European command. Jones, who is a close friend of Cohen, is savvy in the ways of Washington.
Contrary to the knuckle-dragging image some Marines like to cultivate, Jones has shown a bent for diplomacy from an early age. He is fluent in French and graduated in 1966 from Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service.
(WSWS.org-World Socialist Web Site)
12 April 2002
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The Israeli military onslaught on the West Bank has left nearly a thousand Palestinians dead, thousands wounded or jailed, and the entire population of 3.2 million under siege. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, his Likud and Labor Party coalition partners, and the Israeli Defense Forces command are guilty of barbarities on a scale not seen since the US war in Southeast Asia.
With the surrender Wednesday of the remaining Palestinian fighters in the refugee camp outside Jenin, large-scale military combat has come to an end on the West Bank. The resistance in Jenin against heavy odds was so determined and heroic that even in the Israeli press the battle has been referred to as the Palestinian Masada.
After losing 13 soldiers to a booby-trap set up by Palestinian snipers, the Israeli Army resorted to even more indiscriminate killing methods in Jenin, retargeting antiaircraft weapons which fire 3,000 20-millimeter rounds a minute and using them to destroy houses in which Palestinian fighters were holed up. An Israeli reservist interviewed on Israeli television described the city as “Vietnam—something like that. There’s nothing there now.” Palestinian spokesmen described the events in Jenin as a massacre in which as many as 500 men, women and children may have lost their lives.
Israeli tanks, armored cars, helicopter gunships and fighter jets continue to range throughout the occupied territory, targeting smaller groups of fighters and destroying buildings, factories, utilities and individual homes. Even the pro-Israeli American press has been compelled to take note of the extent of the damage.
The New York Times reported, “The images are indelible: piles of concrete and twisted metal in the ancient casbah of Nablus, husks of savaged computers littering ministries in Ramallah, rows of storefronts sheared by passing tanks in Tulkarm, broken pipes gushing precious water, flattened cars in fields of shattered glass and garbage, electricity poles snapped like twigs, tilting walls where homes used to stand, gaping holes where rockets pierced office buildings.”
When Sharon ordered the Israeli invasion of the West Bank March 29, he declared his purpose was to “uproot the infrastructure of terror.” In practice, the Times admitted, “it is safe to say that the infrastructure of life itself and of any future Palestinian state—roads, schools, electricity pylons, water pipes, telephone lines—has been devastated.”
Israeli troops have also ravaged the Education Ministry, the statistics bureau, the local television and radio stations, and the homes of the Palestinian information and culture minister.
Mass arrests and detentions
The Sharon government now places the total number of Palestinians detained during the two-week assault at 4,185, nearly all men between the ages of 15 and 50. The figure is staggering, not only in absolute terms, but even more as a proportion of the population. It is the equivalent of half a million Americans being seized, stripped, beaten and jailed.
Of these 4,185 Palestinians, only 121 were wanted by the Israeli authorities before the attack began. This demonstrates that the vast majority of those detained are not “terrorists,” even by the elastic Israeli definition, which includes nearly every Palestinian political activist. Many Palestinians took up arms only when their own towns and cities were invaded by Israeli tanks. Many never took up arms at all. They were arrested because, as teachers, administrators, lawyers, technicians, doctors, college students, they would play an important role in a future Palestinian state.
International aid agencies said that the Israeli military blockade was becoming a catastrophe, with hundreds of thousands of Palestinians confined to their homes by a 24-hour curfew enforced by shoot-to-kill orders for Israeli troops. These imprisoned people lack access to food, running water, electricity, prescription drugs and medical treatment.
Jessica Barry, spokeswoman for the International Committee of the Red Cross, said, “I cannot stress more strongly how serious the medical situation is. People who are sick, people who need dialysis, women who are giving birth need to get to the hospital. It’s truly a humanitarian crisis.”
Reports continue to filter out of the West Bank of specific atrocities committed by Israeli soldiers, who have been encouraged by the Sharon government to regard all Palestinians as their enemies. The Israeli human rights group B’Tselem reported that Israeli soldiers grabbed patients at an emergency clinic in Nablus April 8, rested guns on their shoulders and forced them to walk in front of the soldiers as “human shields.” In Jenin, homes were demolished with bulldozers while their residents were still inside, the group said.
Released Palestinian prisoners told of being ordered to strip naked—allegedly to prove they were not wearing explosives—and then enter homes ahead of soldiers, to draw fire or set off booby traps. The military issued an order prohibiting lawyers from visiting Palestinian prisoners in detention for 18 days after their arrest, an action upheld by the country’s Supreme Court. All these actions are violations of the Geneva Convention and would subject Israeli leaders, civilian and military, to prosecution as war criminals.
It is obvious why the Israeli government has forbidden media access to most of the West Bank, and why Israeli soldiers have shot, gassed or beaten journalists who have attempted to report on conditions there: those guilty of great crimes have something to hide.
Enter Colin Powell
It was said of Nero that he fiddled while Rome burned. Colin Powell’s slow-motion trip to the Middle East has something of the same character. He proceeded from Morocco to Egypt, then back to Spain, then on to Jordan, while the Israeli military set fire to Jenin, Nablus, Bethlehem and other Palestinian cities. Powell finally arrived in Israel late Thursday for talks on the Mideast crisis, more than one week after Bush’s announcement that he was sending the US secretary of state to the region.
The events of that week have confirmed that Bush’s Rose Garden speech was not a shift in American policy on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but merely a cover for continuing US support to the atrocities on the West Bank. The Bush administration was seeking to prop up the reactionary Arab bourgeois regimes in the region, especially Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan, which have not lifted a finger to defend the Palestinian people.
Powell’s trip will do nothing to help the Palestinian people. It will rather serve to provide an American stamp of approval for the “new realities” which the Sharon government is seeking to create on the West Bank. As he arrived in Israel, there was a noticeable softening in official US statements about an Israeli withdrawal. Powell himself made no criticism about Sharon’s declaration that the offensive would continue for many more weeks.
The cynical double-standard of the American media is shown by its debate on whether Powell should visit Yasser Arafat in the two rooms he still controls at the Palestinian Authority headquarters in Ramallah, surrounded by Israeli tanks. Arafat must denounce the suicide bombings in Israel to “deserve” a Powell visit, one section of the media declares. Such a statement cannot be believed, and Powell should avoid Arafat, the opposing side argues.
No media pundit asks the question whether Powell should visit Ariel Sharon, guilty of major war crimes in 1982 in Lebanon, and now in 2002 on the West Bank. No one discusses how it is possible to have peace or even dialogue in the Middle East by refusing to speak with Arafat, the longtime leader of the Palestine national movement and the elected president of the Palestinian Authority.
Secretary of State Powell has repeatedly emphasized that whatever the intensity of the current fighting, talks between the two sides must ultimately take place. At one press conference he declared, “However long the Israeli incursions continue, whether they pull out of everywhere today or whether they pull out of everywhere they are now in over a longer period of time, the problem will still be there, people who need to be brought into a negotiating process that will lead to peace.”
This conceals the ominous political logic of Sharon’s invasion of the West Bank. His goal is to put an end to the problem—i.e., the existence of the Palestinian people on the Israeli-occupied territory. It is not to work out an agreement between two states which will divide the territory of pre-1948 Palestine, but to create the conditions for a new dispossession of a people already dispossessed.
The logic of Zionism
No credibility can be given to the claims that Israeli forces will withdraw from the West Bank after the current offensive is completed. Sharon himself declared, in a rabid, militaristic speech to the Knesset Monday, that “our forces will deploy to constitute a buffer between Palestinian territories and our territories, in order to prevent any penetration in Israeli communities.”
The creation of a buffer zone has been widely discussed in Israel in recent months. This would involve expelling Palestinians who live near the border with Israel proper or close to the settlements which dot the West Bank, creating a largely “Arab-free” cordon around these settlements.
There is good reason to believe that the buffer zone proposal is only a pretext for keeping Israeli troops actively deployed on the West Bank, pending much more drastic measures against the Palestinian population. (One Israeli critic noted that the IDF has been unable to patrol the current 200-mile border between the West Bank and Israel, while the convoluted borders of all the buffer zones would be 10 times as long.)
American official and media criticism of Sharon has been limited to suggesting that his attack on the West Bank represents blind reliance on military force, in the absence of a more long-range policy. But there is a political strategy underlying the military aggression, one which cannot, for diplomatic reasons, be stated openly.
The logic of the Sharon government’s actions is to create the conditions for the expulsion from the West Bank, not merely of Yasser Arafat personally, but of millions of Palestinians. The Likud Party has never renounced the position, first enunciated by the Zionist terrorist Menachem Begin, that the West Bank is really Judaea and Samaria, part of the ancestral Jewish homeland, destined for integration into a Greater Israel.
Both Sharon and his chief rival within Likud, Benjamin Netanyahu, have long subscribed to the notion that the only defensible border for the state of Israel is the Jordan River. This necessarily requires changing the “facts on the ground” in the West Bank, where 400,000 Israeli settlers are greatly outnumbered by 3.2 million Palestinians.
Sharon’s speech to the Knesset was undisguised in targeting the Palestinian people as a whole. He denounced “the murderous insanity which has taken hold of our Palestinian neighbors”—at a time when the death toll of the past 18 months stands at 400 Israelis and nearly 2,000 Palestinians.
He declared, “We hoped that the Palestinians would understand, as they promised, that ruling does not mean a license to kill, but rather the assumption of responsibility for the prevention of killing.” Yet Sharon has given Israeli forces precisely a “license to kill” on the West Bank.
Sharon’s actions demonstrate the real goal of his policies. In his first year in office, he authorized the beginning of work on at least 30 new Jewish settlements on the West Bank. As many as 400,000 Palestinians, an eighth of the total West Bank population, would have their homes and livelihoods threatened by incorporation into the proposed buffer zones.
The essence of this policy was suggested in the speech delivered by Netanyahu, who has signed on as Sharon’s traveling ambassador, to a US Senate hearing in Washington. While Powell was flying to the Middle East, Netanyahu dismissed the mission, saying it “won’t amount to anything.” He called for the expulsion of Arafat from the West Bank and the overthrow of the Palestinian Authority. His audience of congressional Democrats and Republicans gave him warm support.
Netanyahu concluded his speech as follows: “No part of the terrorist network can be left intact. For if not fully eradicated, like the most malignant cancer, it will regroup and attack again with even greater ferocity. Only by dismantling the entire network will we be assured of victory.”
If one substitutes “Palestinian people” for “terrorist network,” the real program of Netanyahu and Sharon is spelled out.
Apr 12
(By William F. Buckley Jr. -US Right-wing pundit)
My vote is that Ariel Sharon 's offensive is the stupidest campaign in recent memory. Defined here as a campaign that has solved nothing, increased Israel's problems, intensified Palestinian hatred of Israel, estranged many Europeans and Americans, and fanned Islamic hostility. What is General Sharon up to?
What he said was that he was determined to destroy the "infrastructure" of the suicide terrorists.
Well, how do you do that?
We Americans are trying to do that to al-Qaida. This involved a war on the government of Afghanistan , a nation formally identified with terrorists it sheltered, trained and dispatched to do their grisly work. The United States, in effect, declared war on the Taliban government and pursued that war as best it could. Having toppled Kabul, our anti-terrorist forces are now deployed here and there, doing such things as raiding a terrorist nest in Pakistan and hauling in a suspect leader.
Sharon's policy is scorched-earth. Under his command, the Israeli army has engaged not in isolating the infrastructure of the suicide terrorists. What he is engaged in is wanton damage. The New York Times' Serge Schmemann, reporting from Jerusalem, tells it in a dispatch on Thursday with a memorable lead:
"The images are indelible: piles of concrete and twisted metal in the ancient casbah of Nablus, husks of savaged computers littering ministries in Ramallah, rows of storefronts sheared by passing tanks in Tulkarm, broken pipes gushing precious water, flattened cars in fields of shattered glass and garbage, electricity poles snapped like twigs, tilting walls where homes used to stand, gaping holes where rockets pierced office buildings." And he uses Sharon's missionary mandate without apparent irony: "It is safe to say that the infrastructure of life itself and of any future Palestinian state -- roads, schools, electricity pylons, water pipes, telephone lines -- has been devastated."
How's that for retaliation for the Passover massacre?
What Sharon has been doing is to give way to Israeli rage. The rage is hot, deserved and purposive. But to proceed on the assumption that water and electricity lines and schools and hospitals are vital organs of terrorist excursions is untenable except on an understanding that General Sharon hasn't articulated. If you say: The poison that animates the suicide bombers is endemic in every stick and stone that make up the West Bank, then it would follow that a destruction of everything and of everybody standing would follow, as an inoculation would serve to chase down the infection in any part of the diseased body. Sharon hasn't ordered his soldiers to mow down every Palestinian standing, but his artillery and air force haven't been discriminating.
There is no way to be entirely discriminating in a military offensive designed to find something that can't be found, namely the fuse box that causes an 18-year-old Palestinian girl to arm herself with a bomb and detonate it in an Israeli mall. There aren't, sitting about, neat paramilitary kiosks with explosives and rosters of willing terrorists. The search for these was bound to be fruitless, rather like looking for the infrastructure of lechery in Gomorrah.
General Sharon might have sent in a platoon, pulled out Arafat and his 100 lieutenants and executed them on the entirely reasonable grounds that they embodied the terrorist movement in the West Bank. A bullet into the heart of Arafat is not a wayward contribution to the search for the infrastructure of the evil and genocidal war against Israel. So Palestine would be left leaderless? Such a problem would be that of the Palestinians who have tolerated Arafat for so many years.
What has been done is to enhance and even legitimize Palestinian grievances. "After four days of heavy fighting," the Times dispatch goes on, "the Casbah, as the centuries-old warren of shops and homes at the center of this city (Nablus) is known, has been utterly destroyed."
How would we feel in analogous circumstances? What happened to Atlanta in 1864 at the hands of Gen. Sherman was perceived through the lens of a great civil war, a surrender of the losing side, and the heart and mind of a magnanimous national leader who sought to heal the wounds of a nation torn asunder. Such elements aren't there in the Mideast. Sharon has wounded the state of Israel incalculably, causing ache and pain not only to Palestinians, but to his people, and to friends of Israel everywhere.
(The Jerusalem Post)
February 14 2002
"And thereafter We said to the Children of Israel: 'Dwell securely in the Promised Land. And when the last warning will come to pass, we will gather you together in a mingled crowd."
Can't remember coming across this particular verse of scripture in either the Old or New Testaments? That's because it's from the Koran (17:104, The Night Journey).
Rarely in the Arab-Israeli dispute do we hear those Koranic passages, which could be interpreted as setting out an Islamic basis for the establishment of a Jewish state in Israel. Thus, the message a visiting iman (Moslem cleric) brought to Jerusalem last week - that Jews retaining sovereignty over the Temple Mount presents no theological problem as long as Moslems' religious rights are safeguarded, and that Zionism is the fulfillment of Koranic prophecy - took many who heard it aback.
Sheikh Prof. Abdul Hadi Palazzi, Secretary General of the Italian Moslem Association and Moslem co-chair of the Islam-Israel Fellowship of the Root and Branch Association - which promotes the study and practice of universal Jewish teachings - believes this strongly. So strongly, in fact, that he arrived last week, while the "Aksa intifada" was still raging, to be the keynote speaker at the association's Conference on Jerusalem, held at the Jerusalem City Council chambers.
In his speech, Palazzi called for Israel's continued sovereignty over Jerusalem, and noted that Jerusalem's holiness in Islam was derived from two sources: It is the city of the pre-Islamic biblical prophets also revered by Islam (King David and King Solomon), and it is the site of the Dome of the Rock from which Mohammed ascended to Heaven (the Night Journey).
During his visit, Palazzi was also received by President Moshe Katsav and a delegation including Likud MK Ayoob Kara, a Druze; Sheikh Abdul Aziz Bukhari, an east Jerusalem resident who heads both the Nakshbandi Sufi Order and the Uzbek Moslem Community in Israel; and Zuhair Hamdan, the Sur Baher resident who claims to have collected 10,000 signatures from his fellow Arab east Jerusalemites on a petition demanding a referendum before their areas are transferred to the Palestinian Authority.
Upon Katsav's election, Palazzi had written him a congratulatory note, suggesting that if Israel would keep her religious faith and commandments, she would triumph in her age-old struggle for survival. Asked if he thinks that by becoming more observant Israel would find more favor in the eyes of her Moslem neighbors, Palazzi responds, "If there is a sincere attachment to religious values, especially in the case of Judaism and Islam, with their unique links, then peace becomes more than a relationship between two cultures. A religious basis of understanding is more effective and stable than a politically opportune one, for it demands the duty of a human being towards another human being in front of God."
PALAZZI, 40, was born in Italy to a Moslem mother whose grandfather immigrated from Aleppo and an Italian father who converted to Islam.
He holds a doctorate in Islamic Sciences, granted by the Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia and studied at Al-Azhar University in Cairo, and currently serves as the imam of the Italian Islamic Community. Since 1991, he has directed the community's Cultural Institute, which promotes Islamic education in Italy, fights Islamic fundamentalism and fanaticism, and advocates interreligious dialogue.
For Palazzi, pluralism starts at home: He is married to a Catholic, and they are raising their two-year-old son Omar as a Moslem. Palazzi also teaches at the Institute of Anthropological Research in Rome, and was formerly a lecturer of religious history at the University of Velletri, also in Rome.
Asked how he came to his views, Palazzi reflects that in addition to his traditional Sunni university education, his position as a minority in his homeland must have also influenced him. Indeed, much in Palazzi's character mirrors the experience of the Diaspora Jew's mixed cultural heritage. His warm, positive demeanor is characteristic of Sufi teachers - Sufism is a mystical dimension and discipline of Islam rejected by some Moslems as too esoteric in relation to more orthodox teachings - but in his case it is also fused with an unmistakably Italian taste for good living.
Palazzi cites Koran passages showing that the Land of Israel was given to the Jews, and that Jews would be brought back to Israel before the end of days, such as, "Bear in mind the words of Moses to his People [Children of Israel] ... Enter, my People, the Holy Land which God has assigned for you. Do not turn back, and thus lose all."
Not surprisingly, Palazzi has been criticized by some of his co-religionists for his messianic interpretation of such passages. One liberal Moslem academic living in Jerusalem who prefers not to be identified objects to Palazzi's stepping so far out of line with the current Moslem consensus.
But Palazzi says in response that his view more closely reflects traditional Islam, as opposed to today's politicized Islamism. While he agrees that consensus is an important concept in Islam, he explains that "consensus" means that "major Islamic scholars around the world have no objection to a specific stance - it [consensus] is not a referendum of popular thinking."
This, he says, is why he has not been the target of death threats. Nothing he says is heretical, and none can take issue - whether theologically or traditionally - with his views. Although he is, as he says, out of the current consensus, he is not totally out of the religious loop.
In fact, Palazzi's is not the only Islamic voice speaking out for Israel. He is joined by many Sufi masters, both here and abroad. Sufi Sheikh Mehmet Selim of Turkey has even said that Israel should be admired for its staunch defense of human rights.
But while Sufism may be considered marginal, the non-Arab Moslem world - including such as Malaysia and Indonesia, as well as Turkey itself - is not. And Palazzi reports that there, his views are not considered entirely outr*. Indonesian President Abdurrahman Wahid, also a leading Moslem scholar, has come out in favor of improving his country's ties with Israel.
Palazzi also acknowledges the observation that governments like those of Egypt and Turkey promote the Sufi tradition of non-political spirituality and mysticism in order to deter Islamism. The reverse is also true, he says; those countries with a strong Sufi tradition, such as Turkey, have been least receptive to what is known as "fundamentalist Islam" or "Islamism."
Palazzi is encouraged, he says, by traditional Islamic (as opposed to what is today called "fundamentalist Islam" or "Islamist") views coming out of the Moslem republics of the former Soviet Union. In fact, the credo of the new Islamic University of Tashkent, as outlined by Uzbekistan President Islam Karimov, sounds anything but Islamist: "[The university's aim is] to cultivate the study of our religion from a broad and humane perspective, taking into account developments in the natural sciences and world civilization. We intend to make a noble contribution to the development of morality and ethics, and to strengthen peace and stability in our land, and the whole world, by inspiring feelings of mutual love and respect between peoples."
A GENERATION ago, even some sectors of the Arab Moslem world were more willing than they are today to show flexibility in their dealings with Israel. When the late Egyptian president Anwar Sadat came on his peace trip to Jerusalem in November 1977, he was accompanied by Sheikh Sha'rawi, the revered former mufti of Egypt who had resigned from public office to devote himself to the study of Sufism.
By this act, Sha'rawi, a universally-recognized Islamic authority, refuted the claim that peace with Israel was impossible from the Islamic perspective. Praying together with Sadat at al-Aksa Mosque, he flew in the face of calls for Moslem leaders to refrain from going there as long as it remained under Jewish rule. Sha'rawi's influence was so strong that it even compelled the mufti of Saudi Arabia to declare that a peace treaty with Israel was permissible as long as it served Moslem interests.
But all that changed with Sha'rawi's death, and the assassination of Sadat. The Hamas terror organization, which recognizes the Saudi Arabian mufti as its religious authority, has taken advantage of the loophole in his ruling, and now proclaims that it no longer serves Moslem interests to develop peaceful relations with Israel.
Today's politicized religious leaders, says Palazzi, especially the popular charismatic preachers, are usually far from being scholars. Often they are unordained, either in the traditional teacher-to-disciple sense, or in the sense that they had never attended institutions of Islamic studies. Palazzi recalls an al-Quds interview with Sheikh Ahmed Yassin in which the charismatic Hamas leader revealed that he had never studied beyond elementary school, and that his "Sheikh" title was merely honorary, because of his age and status.
Palazzi also points to the denial by the Palestinian Authority-appointed Mufti of Jerusalem Ikramah Sabri that a Jewish Temple had ever existed on the Temple Mount. This, he says, is a flagrant slap at Islamic tradition.
Imam Qurtubi, the Islamic counterpart of the Jewish commentator Rashi, quotes the earlier commentator Imam Tabari who related the Prophet Mohammed's response to a follower's query about the ruins of the fabled Jewish Temple. Qurtubi sets out in writing Tabari's words about the destruction of the Temple, which tally in every detail with biblical accounts of the Temple's destruction by the Babylonians, reconstruction, and final destruction by the Romans.
Palazzi speculates that Sabri had been a PLO flunky before his appointment to his current position. Sabri had in fact complained to the director of the Mosque of Rome about Palazzi and the unusual views he had voiced as the Moslem representative a 1996 conference on Jerusalem held here. Palazzi asked the mosque's director to give Sabri his address and fax number, so that Sabri could address him directly - but Palazzi is still waiting to hear from him.
PALAZZI says it is the Wahabi sect, that rules Saudi Arabia, that is responsible for the politicized Islam so dominant in the Middle East and throughout much of the Islamic world.
He calls the Wahabis, once a tribe of Beduin nomads, "primitive literists"- a case in point is the two Saudi princes who accompanied astronauts on a NASA mission ten years ago, in order to give official witness before a religious court that the earth was, in truth, not flat - and asserts that the Wahabis have made tremendous efforts to transform Islam from a religion into a totalitarian political ideology.
The Wahabis had themselves been branded heretics by hundreds of fatwas before the British brought them to prominence to help them take control of Mecca and Medina. Girded with physical power through their oil wealth, and spiritual power through their control of Islam's holiest sites, Saudia Arabia and the Moslem Brotherhood that it supports wield tremendous influence over the Moslem world.
In Europe, Palazzi charges, local Moslems are confronted by "religious colonialism." While he estimates that only about 200 out of the half-a-million strong Moslem community identifies with the Moslem Brotherhood, the Brotherhood controls more than 90 percent of Italian mosques. He also says that Saudi ambassadors pressure local European governments to look upon Moslem Brotherhood clerics as the official representatives of local Moslems. However, they have a counterbalance in the ambassadors from countries like Morocco and Egypt, who point out that the extremist Moslem Brotherhood is banned in their own country.
Palazzi also notes that in the US, Islamist influence is even stronger, thanks to the Saudis' strong government and business (i.e. oil) links. It is ironic, he notes, that the only organization authorized to train military chaplains in the US is one religiously tied to the Hamas - although the US has outlawed Hamas, declaring it a terrorist organization.
(Ananova)
A Danish man having surgery on his backside broke wind and set his genitals alight.
A surgeon was removing a mole on his backside with an electric knife when the man broke wind, lighting a spark.
His genitals had been washed with surgical spirits and caught fire.
He's suing the hospital for pain and suffering and loss of income.
He says he had to take extra time off work and can't have sex with his wife. The hospital says it was an unfortunate accident.
"When I woke up, my penis and scrotum were burning like hell," the man told Danish Newspaper BT.
Surgeon Dr Jorn Kristensen said: "No-one considered the possibility the man would break wind during the operation, let alone that it would catch fire. It was an unfortunate accident."
The 30-year-old patient said: "I've had to be booked off work for longer than expected and, besides the pain, I can't have sex with my wife."
The operation which was being carried out at the Kjellerups hospital, was aborted immediately after the accident.
Reports say it's unlikely the doctor will face disciplinary action.
(Vancouver Sun)
April 15, 2002
LONDON -- Scientists have discovered vast quantities of hydrogen gas, widely regarded as the most promising alternative to today's dwindling stocks of fossil fuels, lying beneath the Earth's crust.
The discovery has stunned energy experts, who believe that it could provide virtually limitless supplies of clean fuel for cars, homes and industry.
Governments across the world are urgently seeking ways of switching from conventional energy sources such as coal, gas and nuclear power to cleaner, safer alternatives.
Energy specialists estimate that oil production will start to decline within the next 10 to 15 years, as the economically viable reserves start to run out.
Hydrogen gas has been hailed as the ultimate clean fuel, as it produces only water when burned. Until now, however, moves to switch to a "hydrogen economy" have been dogged by the cost of making the gas. The two most common ways -- extraction from natural gas and sea water -- are expensive and create environmental problems.
Now scientists at the American space agency Nasa have found that the Earth's crust is a vast natural reservoir of hydrogen which has become trapped in ancient rocks.
The team made its discovery while trying to explain how bacteria live many miles below the Earth's surface. Such bugs have no access to sunlight, forcing them to rely on another source of energy for life. Scientists suspected that hydrogen was the source.
According to Professor Friedemann Freund and colleagues at Nasa's Ames Research Center in California, the gas is produced when water molecules trapped inside molten rock break down to release hydrogen.
"In the top 20 kilometres of the Earth's crust, the conditions are right to produce a nearly inexhaustible supply of hydrogen," said Professor Freund.
Studies by the team of common rock types such as granite and olivine have revealed extraordinarily high levels of trapped hydrogen. Professor Freund said that his team had "tantalizing evidence" that as much as 1,000 litres of hydrogen may be trapped in each cubic metre of rock.
Although formidable engineering problems remain to be overcome in abstracting the gas, the sheer volume of the Earth's crust means that such a high concentration would solve the world's energy problems.
"Everyone thinks of gas and oil as the main sources, and it's very difficult to get anyone to take alternatives seriously," said Dr. David Elliott, the professor of technology policy at the Open University in London. "The possibility of vast reserves of hydrogen in the Earth's crust could change that mindset."
The low yield of energy from burning hydrogen compared to gas, however, means that vast quantities of rock would have to be mined.
Professor Freund believes that the extraction and crushing of rock to extract the trapped hydrogen is likely to be prohibitively expensive. The reaction which creates the gas takes place at depths far below those involved in oil extraction, which are typically about two miles down.
The most promising source of the hydrogen may be geological "traps" similar to those now drilled for natural gas. Professor Freund said: "One of these natural hydrogen fields is already known to exist in North America, and extends from Canada to Kansas."
(AAP)
April 13 2002
Gary Carlos was intrigued by tales from fishermen who noticed there seemed to be right-foot beaches and left-foot beaches.
After examining the footwear drifting onto Queensland's north coast, the Townsville-based researcher offered an explanation.
"My proposal is that right-footed thongs will be separated from left-footed thongs as they drift down the ocean currents," Mr Carlos said.
"So in theory, left-footed thongs should be pushed to the outside of the South Pacific and right-footed thongs should be pushed to the centre of the South Pacific."
The separated thong theory is based on ocean currents and the fact that right- and left-foot thongs are asymmetric.
According to the hypothesis, Australia's east coast and countries on South America's west coast, such as Peru, would have a left-foot bias.
"But the island nations right in the centre of the Pacific like French Polynesia, maybe Samoa, they would have a heap of right foot thongs," Mr Carlos said.
"The countries in between would have a bit of a mix."
But Mr Carlos said his hypothesis could only be proved by a research expedition to key areas of the South Pacific.
Thongs dominate the footwear that washes up on Australia's north coast, thanks largely to their popularity in the tropics.
But in the northern hemisphere, all sorts of things turn up on beaches and islands due to crates falling overboard during storms, Mr Carlos said.
Items believed to be floating in the world's oceans include 29,000 rubber ducks and five million lego pieces, he said.
"In 1990, 80,000 Nike (runners) went over the side in the North Pacific, and they've been turning up on the beaches from Canada to Mexico."
Editor's note:Thongs are called flip-flops in the UK
(Scripps Howard News Service)
April 05, 2002
There is increasing evidence that giant dust storms originating in China and Africa may be blowing a toxic soup of air pollution, pesticides, insects, bacteria and viruses thousands of miles across the ocean to the United States.
While dust has blown across oceans for time immemorial, scientists believe that prolonged drought and increasing desertification that began in Africa in the early 1970s, and more recently in parts of China, is intensifying the giant dust storms.
At the same time, industrialization in China and greater use of pesticides and other pollutants in Africa may be worsening the toxic mix of substances that get blown along with the dust.
Recent studies indicate that several species of soil fungus carried in African dust to the Caribbean may be connected to large coral die-offs in the region. A bacterial disease that threatens Florida's citrus crop may also have blown in from Africa. And iron rich African dust may play a role in bacteria blooms and the noxious red algae known as red tide that have killed hundreds of manatees and millions of fish.
Scientists have monitored African and Chinese dust storms for decades. Nutrients from Africa fertilize Amazon rainforests and Asian dust nourishes Hawaiian rainforests. But as the storms have intensified and satellite photos have brought the storm data into sharper focus, some experts have begun to question whether the storms are causing environmental damage and bringing disease to the United States.
The Chinese storms tend to be worst in the early spring. Last year, a record dust storm began in drought-stricken northwestern China, blew across the Pacific and all the way across the United States before it finally dissipated over the Atlantic, halfway to Europe.
In March, a massive dust storm from China forced closure of airports and schools in Korea. Much of it had dissipated by the time it crossed into the United States along the Washington-Oregon coast, but its whitish haze was still visible when it reached Colorado, said Russ Schnell, director of observatory operations for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's climate monitoring laboratory in Boulder, Colo.
The major concern is not the dust, but the pollutants that get blown along with it, Schnell said.
"You have all of the pollution of this tremendous, concentrated number of people on the eastern seaboard (of China) and they produce a lot of pollution in late winter and early spring. When the dust storm comes through, it's like a huge snowplow just pushing everything in front of it,'' Schnell said.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is scheduled to open a monitoring station in California later this month to track the flow of Asian dust and air pollution into the United States.
"What happens when five years from now California is at their allowable peak ozone levels (under the federal air pollution laws) and in comes 10 percent more ozone from China and the alarm goes off?'' Schnell said. "Do you shut down an American power plant? Do you ignore it? Or do you get mad at China?''
Ozone is the principal smog-forming air pollutant.
At the University of Miami's Cooperative Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Studies, professor Joseph Prospero's research shows that the dust from African storms that reaches the Caribbean and the United States intensified in the early 1970s. That occurred about the same time that a period of extended dryness began in Africa, which continues to this day.
Each year the storms transport hundreds of millions of tons of dust, the chief pollutant in the air in South Florida during the summer. African dust has been measured as far West as Carlsbad, N.M., and in virtually every national park in the eastern United States. Occasionally, the dust storms extend as far north as New England.
One particularly severe storm in the 1980s brought millions of African locusts to islands in the Caribbean. The insects survived the journey, but have not proliferated. Among the pollutants that have been measured in African dust are the pesticide DDT, banned in the United States but is used in parts of North Africa to kill locusts, and highly-toxic mercury, believed to originate in open-pit mercury mines in Algeria.
At the U.S. Geologic Survey's Center for Coastal Geology in St. Petersburg, Fla., scientists are drawing connections between an African soil fungus, Aspergillus sydowii, and major die-offs of coral and a species of sea urchin in the Caribbean.
Government agencies concerned about stemming the tide of foreign pests into the United States, such as the notorious Asian beetle, have focused almost exclusively on cargo and tourists and have ignored the role of wind storms, said Gene Shinn, a senior geologist at the coastal geology center.
"The Department of Agriculture just doesn't get it,'' Shinn said. "If a three-inch grasshopper can make it that far, then any small bug can make it. There are orchid growers in Florida who will tell you about three new species of African orchids that have just popped up in South Florida that they think came with the wind. If you talk to the nursery owners, they'll tell you the Citrus Leaf Miner (an insect that damages citrus trees) came with Hurricane Andrew, and the list just goes on and on.''
12 April 02
(NewScientist)
A new El Niño is building in the waters of the tropical Pacific Ocean, US government scientists warned on Thursday. Sea temperatures continue to rise and are now up to 3°C above normal off the shore of Ecuador and Peru, said the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Huge shoals of cold-water anchovies - one of the world's great fish stocks - have disappeared from the waters of Peru. This is a classic indication of the onset of the climatic aberration, which can bring chaos across the world.
NOAA's Climate Prediction Center also reports heavy rains over the Galapagos Islands in recent weeks. "It is likely that these conditions represent the early stages of El Niño, and that mature conditions will take at least several more months to develop," says NOAA. It predicts a "weak to moderate" event.
The El Niño phenomenon is a reversal of ocean and wind currents across the equatorial Pacific. It happens when a pool of very warm water normally present around Indonesia spreads across the ocean. It typically happens every three to five years and lasts up to a year. The event could also make 2002 the hottest on record worldwide.
Flood and forest fires
El Niño brings drought to normally wet Indonesia, storms in the south seas and floods to the deserts of the American Pacific shoreline. Often, as during the major El Niño of 1998, its influence extends to Africa, North America and even Europe. That event is estimated to have cost the world more than $30 billion in floods, forest fires and lost crops.
Some countries have already warned of reduced harvests this year. Indonesia expects a five to 10 per cent drop in its rice harvest, according to Widjanarko Puspoyo, the chairman of Bulog, the state logistics agency.
Climate models based on sea surface temperatures and currents have been predicting a new El Niño since autumn 2001. In March, the World Meteorological Organisation concluded there was a 60-per-cent chance of it occurring in 2002. But NOAA says not all indicators point to an El Niño. "The period from now till May is critical," it said.
Long term trends in the Pacific Ocean could mean that it could be less strong that four years ago. Scott Yuknis, a Minneapolis-based meteorologist, said in March that after two decades of strong El Niños, a switch in another phenomenon, known as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, could see weaker El Niños for the next 20 years.
(The Associated Press)
April 5, 2002
ORLANDO, Fla. –– A top hurricane forecaster Thursday predicted a busier-than-average season this year, with 12 named storms, seven of which will develop into hurricanes, three of them major.
Typically during the June-through-October hurricane season, there are about 10 named storms, with six hurricanes, two major. A major hurricane has sustained winds of 111 mph or more.
William Gray, an atmospheric scientist at Colorado State University, also told the 2002 National Hurricane Conference that the season will be quieter than he first forecast because of a strengthening El Nino system in the eastern Pacific.
There is a 75 percent chance that a major hurricane will make hit the U.S. coast, Gray said.
The period of 1995 through 2001 was the most active seven consecutive years on record, with the Atlantic witnessing 94 named storms, 58 hurricanes and 27 major hurricanes. But only three of the 27 major hurricanes crossed the U.S. coastline.
April 11 2002
Scientists believe a new Australian volcano is in the making after the apparent awakening of a volcanic hot spot off the Victorian coast.
Geologists suspect an earthquake 50 kilometres from King Island in February signalled the stirring of the volcano breeding ground, a region in the Earth's crust where the planet expels some of its massive internal heat.
There are more than 100 hot spots worldwide.
Australia's hot spot is several hundred kilometres wide and lies under the Bass Strait and parts of Victoria and Tasmania.
Vulcanologist Wally Johnson, of Geosciences Australia, said the fact that there were earthquakes in the area "means that geologically, the hot spot has to be regarded as active, even though it hasn't produced volcanic eruptions as such".
Mr Johnson said it could spawn a volcano within 100 years.
April 15, 2002
(Cosmiverse)
Until recently, geologists believed that northern Chili's Chiliques, an 18, 957-foot stratovolcano with a 1,640-foot diameter circular summit crater was dormant. But a nighttime thermal infrared image taken January 6th from Aster found a hot spot in the summit crater and several others on the upper flanks of the volcano's edifice, which indicates new volcanic activity.
10 April, 2002
The Earth is surrounded by space junk
Ugandan police say a mysterious object which landed in the garden of a peasant woman in central Uganda is part of a space rocket.
Initially, it was thought to be a meteorite, but further investigation revealed it to be man-made.
Curious visitors are reported to have flocked to the site where the object landed at the end of March.
It was dusk when the unidentified object hurtled into the garden of an elderly peasant woman.
And, astonished eyewitnesses reported hearing a thunderous noise as it landed.
Pot shaped object
At first, the villagers thought it might be a bomb, but further scrutiny revealed something more mysterious. The object is spherical, like a big pot, and about a metre in diameter.
Ugandan police who removed it from the garden concluded that the object is a booster for a space rocket.
Experts say it is extremely rare for man-made space debris to fall to earth - most of it gets burnt up as it re-enters the atmosphere.
But occasionally, perhaps once or twice a year, a big chunk of it gets through. What is virtually unheard of is for it to land in someone's garden.
Tourist attraction
Sightseers have reportedly been flocking to the woman's farm. They have been trampling through the back yard of her mud house to see where the rocket fragment buried itself in the earth.
Ugandan police say the booster is now under lock and key in their stores.
They would like its owner, most likely either the American or the Russian government, to come forward and retrieve the lost property.
Star wars fallout?
(UKGuardian)
April 11, 2002
Throw a stone into a pond and the ripples take just seconds to spread to the banks. Drop an asteroid into the Atlantic and you get much the same effect, but on a grander scale. Hours later, the coastlines are deluged.
When the possible consequences of cosmic impacts on our planet are discussed, people take comfort from the fact that 70% of the Earth's surface is ocean. In reality, we would not want a small asteroid to land in the open sea: it would cause more damage and kill more people.
Consider a lump of space rock 200 metres in diameter, colliding with our planet at 12 miles per second, a typical speed. As it is brought to an abrupt halt, it releases its kinetic energy in an explosion equivalent to 600 megatons of TNT, 10 times the yield of the most powerful nuclear weapon tested (underground). The asteroid vaporises, and the rapidly expanding shock wave carries away its energy. For a land impact, the area devastated would be about 10,000 square miles: everything within a 60-mile radius would be obliterated. Beyond that, the destruction would still be substantial.
However, the implications for humanity would likely be worse if the open ocean were struck instead. An asteroid landing in an ocean produces a phenomenal tsunami (often mistakenly called a "tidal wave"). Even though only about 10% of the energy of the impactor would be transferred to the tsunami, such waves are effective at carrying that energy over the large distances to the coastlines. They therefore cause destruction over a much wider area than is the case for a land impact. In the latter, the interaction between the blast wave and the irregularities of the ground (hills, buildings, trees) limits the area damaged, but on the ocean, the wave propagates until it runs into something.
Paradoxically, ships at sea are little affected by tsunamis. They simply ride the waves that move outward from the epicentre at well over 100mph. On the open ocean, a major tsunami may be only 10 to 50cms high; it is the run-up that occurs as the wave reaches the continental shelf that causes the wave height to increase markedly, and they can penetrate miles inland.
During the past century, several significant tsunamis have swept across the Pacific, provoked by undersea landslips, earthquakes or volcanic eruptions. A major rumble off the coast of Chile in 1960 induced a series of waves that killed more than a thousand people on the mainland. The waves reached Hawaii 15 hours later, drowning more than 60 people. As the main wave smacked Hilo harbour it was over 10 metres high. Seven hours later, it killed hundreds in Japan. In July 1998, an earthquake-generated tsunami in Papua New Guinea swept more than 2,000 coastal dwellers to their deaths.
Dr Steven Ward, who works in the Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics at the University of California at Santa Cruz, modelled a 200-metre asteroid slamming into the Atlantic about 700 miles west of the tip of Cornwall. The transient crater formed in the three-mile deep ocean is about four miles wide and a mile-and-a-half deep. It's like throwing a big rock into a vast pond, although at hypervelocity. One hour later, the outermost edge of the wave has spread about 300 miles from the epicentre. The greatest wave amplitude is further back, because the tsunami continues to be boosted by the water oscillating up and down at the epicentre. To see what happens, over a much shorter time scale, drop a sugar cube into a cup of coffee.
After two hours, the tsunami is just reaching the south-western tip of Ireland. The distortion of the wave from circularity is clear, due to the crossing of the continental shelf, where the water is much shallower. This slows the wave, but considerations of conservation of momentum say that it must get taller. This is called "shallow water shoaling". Three hours post-impact, the west coast of Ireland is inundated: goodbye Galway and Donegal, although Limerick and Cork may survive, shielded by their natural harbours. In this scenario, Ireland provides a singular service to the rest of the British Isles, bearing the brunt of the tsunami. Five to six hours after the strike, Cornwall, Devon and south Wales are hit, as are the Western Isles of Scotland, but the ports lining the Irish Sea escape the worst.
Further south, the news is not so good. The shallow waters of the English Channel cause the wave to elevate, and seaside resorts to Brighton and beyond would be swept away. One must hope that eight hours - the time the tsunami would take to reach the Isle of Wight - are enough to organise an evacuation. Shortly after, the wave would penetrate between Dover and Calais, and the dykes of the Netherlands would provide little resistance. With no offshore shield, the coasts of France, Spain and Portugal are pummelled by the tsunami.
The shadowing effect provided by islands is most obvious in the case of the Azores. When a tsunami hits a coast, it ramps up in height by a factor that depends upon the profile of that coastline and, in particular, the gradient of the sea bottom. That factor may be only two or three, but it may be more than 10. The latter would mean that waves 10 metres in amplitude on the open sea would attain a height of 100 metres as they hit land. We are not talking of a simple flood, then. We are talking about a coastline swept clean.
How often does such an event occur? Asteroids around 200 metres in size strike the Earth about once every couple of thousand years. The Atlantic has about a one-in-10 chance of being the next target.
A parting thought. Last time I checked my house insurance, I was covered for tsunami damage. Trouble is, tsunamis were defined in the small print as being large sea-waves produced by sub-oceanic volcanoes, landslips or earthquakes. Asteroid impacts don't count, it seems.
· Duncan Steel conducts research on asteroids at the University of Salford.
Apr 15 2002
(Associated Press)
WASHINGTON - A supercolony of ants has been discovered stretching thousands of miles from the Italian Riviera along the coastline to northwest Spain.
It's the largest cooperative unit ever recorded, according to Swiss, French and Danish scientists, whose findings appear in Tuesday's issue of Proceedings of the Naional Academy of Science.
The colony consists of billions of Argentine ants living in millions of nests that cooperate with one another.
Normally, ants from different nests fight. But the researchers concluded that ants in the supercolony were all close enough genetically to recognize one another, despite being from different nests with different queens.
Cooperating allows the colonies to develop at much higher densities than normally would occur, eliminating some 90 percent of other types of ants that live near them, said Laurent Keller of the University of Lausanne, Switzerland.
The Argentine ants were accidentally introduced to Europe around 1920, probably in ships carrying plants, Keller said in an interview via electronic mail.
Richard D. Fell, an entomologist at Virginia Polytechnic Institute, said Argentine ants have been known to form large colonies — the size of several city blocks, for example — but he had not heard of any as large as that cited in the new report.
"It may be that certain ant colonies will bud off, form satellites and remain connected with one main colony," he suggested.
The European researchers said that in addition to the main supercolony of ants they found a second, smaller but also large colony of Argentine ants in Spain's Catalonia region.
When ants of the two supercolonies were placed together they invariably fought to the death, while ants from different nests of the same supercolony showed no aggression to one another.
"It is interesting to see that introduction in a new habitat can change social organization," Keller said of the behavior of Argentine ants that had been relocated to Europe. "In this case, this leads to the greatest cooperative unit ever discovered."
However, in the long run the very cooperation that seems to make them successful could lead to the supercolony's self-destruction, he suggested.
That's because in such a giant colony many workers are unrelated to the queens they help to raise. "Thus, in the long term, selection should decrease the altruistic behavior of workers," he said, because their efforts are not helping transmit copies of their genes via related queens.
April 10, 2002 by CommonDreams.org by Sarah Shields
Dear Dad,
It was an enormously heavy responsibility you raised me with. You taught me that the Jews have been oppressed for centuries. You taught me that the holocaust could only happen because the Germans were silent. You taught me that Jews must never, never, never be silent when injustice occurs, because our silence makes us complicit.
You taught me about history, and you taught me by your actions. As a rabbi, you preached against racism in the south, and had to leave a pulpit in Louisiana when they threatened to kill our family. You worked for open housing laws, insisting that there should be no ghettos in America like the ones your parents had lived in in Europe. You counseled Jewish kids who were conscientious objectors, eliciting the hostility of many who believed that the Vietnam war was a valiant struggle for justice in our time.
It is a heavy responsibility I carry now. Because now I am complicit. I have not stood in front of the tanks that are killing other mothers' children in refugee camps. I have not ridden in ambulances to help them get past checkpoints so that the injured could be cured. I have not laid in front of the bulldozers to prevent their destroying a family's shelter.
What can I do about this injustice?
Palestinians are losing their property, their lives, and their children every day. The Israeli army shoots at unarmed civilians, imposing collective punishments that make it impossible for Palestinians to get food, water, or power. For decades, Israel has paid settlers to move into occupied territory.
International law reflects the consensus of the world’s sense of right. International law seeks to protect the powerless. And international law is clear. Occupying countries have to protect the lives and property of the local population. It is not legal to establish settlements at all. Why do Israel and the US pay Israelis to move into them?
There are Palestinian terrorists. They have been raised under occupation. Know what? Israeli soldiers treat occupied people the same way other armies have treated occupied people. The stories are horrendous. Arbitrary beatings. Tauntings. Killings. Arrests without charge. Torture. Threatening parents in front of children. Stepping on “prisoners” trying to move between check points. Strip searches. The use of power to humiliate.
When people are humiliated, and have no homes to return to because the homes have been destroyed by the occupying army, When people are humiliated, and have no family to hold them in their arms because they have been shot and unable to get medical care, When people are humiliated, and have no hope for the future, They see no alternative to violence.
You taught me Judaism’s universal message. “I am a Jew because in all places where there are tears and suffering the Jew weeps.” I believed Edmond Fleg’s words, “I am a Jew because Israel places man and his unity above nations and above Israel itself.”
Dad, we have become the oppressors. One rabbinic student told me years ago when I lived in Israel that this was the meaning behind the warning to remember that we were slaves in the land of Egypt. We were warned to remember, because sometimes slaves want to become masters.
We are the oppressors, and we are also the victims. Jews are being killed, and at the same time, the moral imperative that you taught me was part of being Jewish seems to be vanishing. I believe that Jews are being used by an American administration to accomplish its own ends, ends that have nothing to do with the ideals of Jews. We need to shout aloud that 80% of the billions that the US gives Israel in aid must be spent on weapons, and that more than half of those weapons are built in Texas. And Jews are being used by an Israeli government that has no interest except territorial expansion. Sharon is the ideological heir to Jabotinsky. Land for peace was never in that ideology. War makes conquest possible, and all the people of Israel and Palestine are being drawn, tragically and together, into that war.
We must act, and we must act immediately. Jews are being used to legitimize the slaughter of Palestinians.
Please, Dad, tell me how to be like you taught me to be. How do I stop being complicit?
I love you.
Sarah
Sarah Shields is an associate professor of Middle East history at UNC Chapel Hill.
(The Madison Capitol Times)
4-10-2
The theory that the Israeli government is the best or even the closest ally of the United States in the Middle East lost a good deal of credibility over the weekend as Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon willfully defied the call of President Bush for withdrawal of Israeli defense forces from the Palestinian Authority "without delay."
Sharon did not merely delay, he ordered troops to aggressively extend an assault on Palestinian communities that is destroying lives, infrastructure and the prospects for an honest peace. Even after repeated calls from Bush and other U.S. officials, Sharon made a mockery of the U.S. initiative. The weekend that should have seen Israeli soldiers pulling out of the West Bank instead saw the Israeli military engage - on Sharon's orders - in the wholly unnecessary bulldozing of civilian homes in Jenin, Nablus and other Palestinian communities. Additionally, Israeli generals continued to refuse to allow ambulances to aid wounded civilians, drawing loud objections not merely from Palestinians but from Israeli human rights groups.
Bush's understanding of the Middle East is, to be sure, rudimentary. And his penchant for following the fierce anti-Palestinian line of congressional allies such as Tom DeLay is even more surely a factor in his approach to the region. But can the president really believe that he is not being played for a fool by Sharon? If that is the case, then he is not being played for a fool - he is a fool.
Sharon and his allies in Israel claim that Palestinian Authority leader Yasser Arafat is an illegitimate negotiating partner in any new peace process. At least some in the Bush administration have bought into the lie that says Arafat's inability to control militant Palestinian groups has rendered him an untrustworthy player. This calculation suggests that it is possible for Israel and the United States to pick the Palestinian negotiator.
That cannot be the case if there is to be any prospect for peace.
But this notion of focusing on preferred negotiating partners should not be ruled out altogether. If the United States wants to be a responsible partner in the search for Middle East peace, Secretary of State Colin Powell should use his trip to the region to meet with Israeli leaders who believe in making peace, and he should be signaling that these are the Israelis - as opposed to Sharon and his wrecking crew - that the United States respects.
Powell would find no shortage of legitimate partners.
On Saturday night in Tel Aviv, 15,000 Israelis rallied to oppose their government's occupation of Palestinian territories and military assaults on West Bank cities. A rally of an equivalent proportion of the U.S. population would have drawn almost 700,000 Americans.
Those who rallied were not the political fringe. While American media point to snapshot polls that suggest there is broad Israeli support for Sharon's approach, Haaretz, Israel's most respected daily newspaper, notes, "A large majority in Israel - albeit not necessarily Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, his pending partner, (anti-Palestinian extremist) Effi Eitam, and political elements such as (right-wingers) Benjamin Netanyahu and Avigdor Lieberman - will go for President Bush's security and political manifesto. This majority will be satisfied with a State of Israel that lives in peace with its neighbors, including a Palestinian state ... secure in defensible borders and without existential dangers and daily terror."
Among those at Saturday night's rally were Israeli Knesset Speaker Avraham Burg and Knesset member Yael Dayan, the daughter of Israeli Gen. Moshe Dayan.
"By reoccupying, we will not prevent (the establishment of) a Palestinian state, which is the only solution," declared Dayan. "Our (peace) camp is not ashamed and is coming out. Sharon and Netanyahu do not have any monopoly - not over the peace, not over bereavement, and not over the army."
If the United States is serious about promoting peace in the Middle East, Colin Powell should spend a lot more time with Yael Dayan and Avraham Burg and a lot less time with Ariel Sharon and Benjamin Netanyahu.
(NYObserver)
4/15/2002
Structural engineer Nausherwan Hasan used to talk about the sturdiness of the Indian Point nuclear power plant in Westchester, 30 miles north of Manhattan, and took pride over the years as the facility churned out safe, relatively clean power for much of metropolitan New York. Mr. Hasan knows about these things: He helped build Indian Point, doing repairs and reconstruction on the oldest parts of the facility in the late 1980’s.
But things are different now. These days, Mr. Hasan worries about the storage of nuclear waste at the facility; Indian Point, he says, was never designed to hold such waste for long periods of time. He’s also concerned about the reports he’s heard about corrosion in one of the reactors’ domes. And Mr. Hasan, who had an office in the World Trade Center until Sept. 11, doesn’t want to think about what could happen in the event of a similar attack at Indian Point.
“The plants have a lot of safeguards to protect them,” he told The Observer. “But then again, nobody perceived that we could be shot at from the air, and it happened. The plants are not designed for that kind of direct hit. Things like that disturb you.”
Mr. Hasan’s sentiments help to explain the groundswell of opposition to Indian Point’s continued operation. For years, the plant’s critics were the usual suspects: no-nukes activists, assorted dissident scientists and the odd not-in-my-backyard local public official. After the cataclysmic events of Sept. 11, however, the mainstream has joined the fringe, united in fear of a nuclear catastrophe. It’s no longer just the no-nukes crowd that’s haunted by visions of horrendous carnage and the nation’s largest city being rendered uninhabitable for generations.
“I always thought there were enough safeguards built into this thing to withstand any accident,” said one former Con Edison executive who worked at Indian Point. “But now it’s different. You’re talking about the possibility of planes flying into this thing, and there would be no way to protect the whole plant against an attack like that. What are you going to do, put up some kind of invisible force field?”
The rising anxiety level has not been especially surprising given the dire scenarios that were hashed out following Sept. 11. (A worst-case terrorist attack, according to reports, would result in 50,000 deaths in the first year, unquenchable radioactive fires and widespread contamination that would leave lower Westchester County and the five boroughs hopelessly poisoned by radioactivity.) More recently, the issue has been taken up in the city media, making the front page of the Daily News and attracting the attention of The Times’ Bob Herbert.
Even before the World Trade Center attack, the 36-year-old facility had its share of safety concerns. Two years ago, when the plant was still owned and run by Con Edison, one of two working reactors was given the lowest possible safety rating by the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission because of “ongoing substantive” problems with plant operations. It continues to be ranked as one of the worst-operated plants in the country. And it’s had to be shut down twice since 2000 because of operational mishaps.
Under the Entergy Corporation—a company with lots of experience running nuclear plants, but which had the unbelievably bad luck to take over Indian Point on Sept. 5, 2001—public fears have grown. Residents in Westchester and Rockland counties have heaped scorn on a number of the plant’s emergency measures in the case of a meltdown, most notably an “evacuation plan” that seems about as realistic as taking cover under a desk in the event of a nuclear attack. The system of storing “spent” fuel—deep pools containing radioactive uranium rods—has been widely criticized as being a potential target for suicide hijackers. And there have been fresh concerns about the plant’s security personnel after a recent incident, in which local police had to be called when one security guard allegedly pulled his gun on a colleague over a personal dispute. (The guard has since been fired.)
Then there’s the larger question of site security: With the F.B.I., C.I.A., New York State Police, U.S. Office of Homeland Security, Coast Guard and Entergy’s private security force all contributing to site security, who is ultimately responsible for defending the plant in an emergency?
“I guess ultimately the N.R.C. is, though it’s not as simple a question as it used to be,” said Jim Steets, a spokesman for Entergy. “Primarily, it’s Entergy’s responsibility.”
Neil Sheehan, a spokesman for the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission, was asked the same question. “[Entergy] bears the ultimate responsibility,” he said. “We have primary responsibility.”
Then he clarified the matter. “It would depend on what type of an attack,” Mr. Sheehan said. “If we’re talking about two intruders on foot, it’s pretty obvious that’s the plant security force’s responsibility. If we’re talking about a 757 hitting the plant, there’s the question of who bears responsibility.”
Indeed, while Entergy may be equipped to deal with intruders, there isn’t much the company—or anybody else—can do about the airspace over Indian Point. After Sept. 11, planes were banned from flying near the plant, but that ban has been lifted. “That barely existed in the first place,” Mr. Steets said, before noting, “The Department of Defense is, you know, the best judge of what’s appropriate.”
Lt. Col. Michael Humm, a spokesman for the Department of Defense, referred questions about the plant to “the security folks at Indian Point for the answers that you’re looking for.”
Back to Mr. Steets: “We have a well-armed, well-trained security force,” he said. “These are not your movie-theater, shopping-plaza security; these are well armed and well trained.” And, he said, “the National Guard is on-site and the Coast Guard is patrolling the river.”
Whatever difficulties exist, they are unlikely to lead to a closure of Indian Point anytime soon, for a number of reasons. For one, opponents can express all the displeasure they want, but any decision to decommission would ultimately have to be made by the N.R.C.’s board, an appointed body that has defended the plant’s safety.
For another, some of the state’s most influential public officials, whose support would be necessary to close the plant, are keeping their distance from calls to shut it down. Senators Hillary Clinton and Charles Schumer have expressed concern over the plant’s safety, as has Governor George Pataki, who stands to have the most influence over what would ultimately amount to the Bush administration’s decision. But none has shown much appetite for actually closing Indian Point, perhaps because it would cut off one of the region’s main sources of energy and a major employer.
Lights Out?
What impact any closure would have on New York’s energy supply is a matter of dispute. The plant’s operators say that closing down Indian Point would result in massive price increases for New York consumers and a greatly increased likelihood of blackouts. They point to Con Edison’s shutdown of one of Indian Point’s reactors in the summer of 2000, which helped drive price increases of 25 percent.
As for the plant’s safety, Indian Point defenders also say that safety issues have been exaggerated in order to frighten people about the facility. “A lot of people are being misled,” said Mr. Steets, the Entergy spokesman. “It’s important to us to get our message out, which is that the plants are safe, secure and vital.”
Some of the officials charged with defending the facility say that closing it wouldn’t necessarily even improve safety in the short term. “People want to shut the plant down, but it would only make a minimal impact on security,” said James Kallstrom, Governor Pataki’s director of the Office of Public Security. “We’d have to live with the [radioactive] fuel rods for five years anyway.”
Environmental activists, on the other hand, contend that the impact of an immediate closure of Indian Point would be safe and manageable. “We don’t believe that shutting it down would cause any brownouts or blackouts, and any increase in price that would occur would be mitigated,” said Ashok Gupta at the National Resource Defense Council. “[The plant owners] are the ones engaging in scare tactics to take advantage of people: ‘It’s either this or freezing in the dark.’ There are other options.” Mr. Gupta said that with new, conventionally fired power plants, energy conservation measures and heavier reliance on renewable resources, New York could make up the energy lost by closing Indian Point.
Other Indian Point opponents suggest that the public would support a shutdown even if it did mean enduring hardships. “I think if people knew what the risks were here, they’d eat by candlelight if they had to,” said Robert Kennedy Jr. of Riverkeeper, an environmental group that has been organizing efforts to close Indian Point.
Whether people are actually willing to make those sorts of sacrifices—or whether they’re are even aware of them—an increasing number of Indian Point critics seem prepared to deal with the consequences in exchange for peace of mind.
“It shouldn’t come as a surprise that this issue is really taking off,” said Representative Elliot Engel, a Democrat whose district takes in parts of the Bronx and Westchester. “We know that 9/11 is probably not the last terrorist attack in this country, and Indian Point is an accident waiting to happen anyway. I’m not an anti-nuclear person, but as long as Indian Point has the potential to be—God forbid—the biggest disaster ever, we should shut it down.”
by Ted Rall (Rall.com)
PARIS-On September 11th, Osama bin Laden, originally hired by the Central Intelligence Agency to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan, is working on a new project: the derussification of Central Asia. The spooks have offered him the same quid pro quo they'd cut with Lee Harvey Oswald 38 years earlier: If he takes the heat for what's about to go down, they'll make it worth his while.
What goes down, according to French author Thierry Meyssan, is this: Two passenger jets smash into the World Trade Center a few minutes apart; each under the control of fewer than half a dozen amateur hijackers fending off ten times their number with boxcutters.
Hitting a 70-yard-wide building with a 52-yard-wide Boeing 767 at 500 miles per hour requires virtually instantaneous reflexive response time-a lightening-quick three-tenths of a second. Professional pilots are puzzled by the kamikazes' virtuoso performance that sunny morning, but there's an explanation: someone has placed homing beacons in each tower beforehand. A 1997 Defense Department acquisition, the Global Hawk system, has guided American Flight 11 and United Flight 175 to their respective dooms.
That device was planted by U.S. government agents.
Shortly afterward, Pentagon officials set off an explosion in a mostly disused section of their own headquarters. It isn't certain whether they've used plastique or a missile to do the damage; what's obvious is that the official version of the building being hit by a third hijacked airliner doesn't hold up. Why not? A photo of the "crash site" proves that the hole in the building is smaller than the plane that supposedly struck it. Moreover, the "plane" impacted without leaving residual debris. And circumstantially, no one "important"-a general, say-works in that area.
It's all in Meyssan's L'Effroyable Imposture ("Frightful Deception"), a 9-11 conspiracy theory title. "Copies have been flying off shelves," a saleswoman at Paris' FNAC bookshop says of the nation's number-two bestseller.
To be charitable, Meyssan is president of the respected Reseau Voltaire think tank. Unfortunately, his book is long on insinuation and short of proof.
Among its more questionable assertions are those that read a coup d'état by Christian fundamentalists in George W. Bush's September 14th prayer service at the National Cathedral, wholesale government fraud in the "ridiculous" discovery of Mohammed Atta's passport in the rubble and foreknowledge of 9-11 in Bush's first statement to the media. (On the last point, Meyssan mistranslates Bush's syntax to force his already tortured conjecture.) Numerous grammatical errors and typos further undermine the already strained credibility of the tome's slapdash tone.
The book's central thesis is that the Bush Administration planned and executed September 11th in order to justify a huge defense build-up, stifle domestic political opposition, curtail civil liberties, and invade Afghanistan to lock up Central Asia's enormous untapped oil reserves. The Kennedy Administration, Meyssan points out, contemplated a similar scenario in its Internet-famous 1962 Northwoods memo. Northwoods suggested launching acts of domestic terrorism against Cuban exiles and others in order to galvanize support for a Cold War defense expansion. September 11, Meyssan posits, is Northwoods for the 21st century.
There's little doubt that the Bushies took advantage of 9-11 just as Meyssan describes. And his assertion that figures like Donald Rumsfeld had been planning an Afghan invasion back in July 2001 ring true to many Central Asia watchers. But he fails to prove, or even begin to prove, the monstrous accusation that Bush ordered the murder of more than 3,000 Americans. Northwoods and plans like it fill the archives of every presidential administration. The U.S. government likes to think out loud, on paper; the vast majority of such schemes, like a U.S. plan to subject France to Allied military governance at the end of World War II, are ultimately ruled out.
As Meyssan notes, Bush has already outlied Clinton during the 15 months he's been in office. September 11th accelerated that dissembling to a frantic pace. Who can forget the classic administration story that Islamic terrorists had targeted Air Force One as it zigzagged across the Midwest? Students of international law had a field day with the bizarre notion that Afghan POWs are subject neither to U.S. law because Guántanamo is in Cuba or to Cuban law because the base is leased (illegally) by the U.S. Meyssan reminds us that Bush's top dogs have been implicated in almost every political and business scandal in memory: BCCI, Keating, Iran-Contra, Enron. These guys lie more often than they breathe.
Meyssan's research never extended beyond use of a search engine, yet he nonetheless unearths new lies and discrepancies. An Arabic-language document described by the FBI as an instruction manual for suicide pilots found among their personal effects hilariously contains such obvious American linguistic tics as "you must confront and understand this 100 percent." It was obviously forged. ABC television's 9:42 am news item on 9-11 about an apparent arson attack on the Executive Office Building appeared and disappeared without follow-up. Why was it suppressed? And that hole in the Pentagon is smaller than "they don't build `em like they used to" can explain.
Meyssan asks: "Could such an operation been conceived and directed from an Afghan cave and carried out by a handful of Islamists?" Here's the converse of the standard retort to those who accuse the government of running conspiracies because they're too big and disorganized to pull them off. Neither line of reasoning makes sense, of course. Big things can be carried out by either big or small groups; series of coincidences neither prove nor disprove the existence of conspiracies. 9-11 probably wasn't carried out by Afghan cave dwellers, but that doesn't mean Bush did it either.
Meyssan's book adds no blood to the hands of Mssrs. Bush, Rumsfeld, Ashcroft or Ridge beyond those of 10,000 Afghans no one cares about and a few dozen American troops. But it's an inevitable response to the arrogance, obsessive secrecy and dogmatic opportunism they've exhibited since September 11th.
If they keep it up, as they surely will, look for more of the same.
(Yahoonews)
April 12 2002
Smokers may reach for their cigarettes the minute they feel stressed, but an increasing body of research suggests smoking could in fact be the cause of their frayed nerves.
While the damaging effects of smoking on the body are well documented, studies are only beginning to focus on the possibility that nicotine might have an effect on mental health. According to an article in New Scientist magazine, smoking may worsen or even trigger anxiety disorders, panic attacks and depression, and perhaps even schizophrenia.
Cigarettes and mental illness have always tended to go together, but doctors have generally assumed that the illness comes first - mentally ill people take up smoking or smoke more to alleviate some of their distress, they say. Even when smoking starts before the illness, most doctors believe that early invisible signs of the disorder spark the desire to light up.
Studies in the US, however, suggest smoking is the cause, not the consequence, of clinical depression and several forms of anxiety.
One study by researchers at the Children's Hospital Medical Center, in Cincinnati, followed the health of more than 15,000 teenagers. After a year, they found that, although depressed teenagers were more likely to have become heavy smokers, previous experimentation with smoking was the strongest predictor of such behaviour, not the depression itself.
Crucially, teenagers who started out mentally fit but smoked at least one packet of cigarettes per week during the study were four times more likely to develop depression than their non-smoking peers.
Another study by Dr Jeffrey Johnson from Columbia University showed that people in good mental health who smoked a packet or more of cigarettes a day at age 16 were 16 times more likely to develop panic disorder, 7 times more likely to become agoraphobic and 5 times more likely to develop generalised anxiety disorder than people who stuck to less than one pack a day.
And because anxious adolescents were not any more likely than non-anxious teenagers to become adult smokers, it is more likely that smoking is a cause, not a consequence, says Dr Johnson.
Some people remain to be convinced by the argument, however. Professor David Balfour of Dundee University, in Scotland, says epidemiological studies do not go far enough to show that smoking is a cause rather than a consequence of mental illnesses.
His work has shown that nicotine can make rats more anxious, but only when it is given in amounts that only the most dedicated chain-smokers could achieve. Prof Balfour says more research needs to be done to show what nicotine does in the brain.
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Rumours than Sharon is having one made of Bush remain unfounded
April 15, 2002
(TimesOfLondon)
A UNIQUE community of savage, man-eating lions may share a bond with bald men, scientists have found.
The infamous Tsavo lions in eastern Kenya killed more than 130 people during a reign of terror in the 19th century.
One unique characteristic of the lions, which still inhabit Tsavo East National Park, is that the males have no manes.
Scientists have now confirmed for the first time that this is a genetic trait and suspect that high levels of the male hormone testosterone may account both for the lack of manes and the lions’ unusual aggression.
Testosterone is known to cause male-pattern baldness in human beings, and heightens aggression and territoriality. It also helps to explain the peculiar social system of the Tsavo lions, which is shared by no other lion population in Africa.
Whereas other lion prides consist of a few females and two to four males, Tsavo lions live in groups of seven or more females ruled by a single, highly dominant male.
The lions’ reputation grew after more than 130 men building a railway bridge across the Tsavo River were killed and eaten by two of them in 1898. The episode was recounted in the 1996 film, The Ghost and the Darkness.
Construction was halted until the lions were hunted and killed. Their bodies were stuffed and are now on display at the Field Museum, Chicago.
Bruce Patterson, a member of the research team, said: “Tsavo lions are thought to be especially aggressive, and high levels of male hormones may simultaneously underlie this aggression, their unique social system, and manelessness.”
A British biochemist is joining Dr Patterson and other scientists in Kenya today to help them to investigate the theory.
Dr Julie Thornton, from the University of Bradford, will examine samples from the lions to measure levels of testosterone. “I’ll be staying safely in the laboratory,” she said.
Earlier research was published online last week by the Canadian Journal of Zoology.
April 13, 2002
AMSTERDAM, Netherlands (Reuters) -- Tired and sweaty after sex? A Dutch doctor said Friday he is studying a rare new syndrome among middle-aged men who complain of flu-like symptoms for up to a week after having an orgasm.
Marcel Waldinger, head of the department of psychiatry and neurosexology at Leyenburg Hospital in The Hague, said he planned to publish a report on "post-orgasmic illness syndrome" in the U.S. Journal of Sex and Marital Therapy this month.
Waldinger has seen five Dutch men in as many years in his practice complaining of flu-like symptoms including a sore throat, sweating, extreme fatigue and eye irritation after sex.
"Men developed influenza-like symptoms within minutes of having an orgasm. It is like having a serious flu. This happens as soon as they have an orgasm," said Waldinger.
"It is a new syndrome or a syndrome which is old but has not been looked at properly."
The syndrome could be a physical disorder caused by an allergic reaction of the immune system in direct response to the release of chemicals in the body after sex. The symptoms lasted between three and seven days, he said.
"We know that during orgasm and ejaculation very specific compounds like hormones are released into the nervous system. One hypothesis is that they might have had an allergic reaction to one of those compounds," Waldinger said.
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