In the Name of Allah, the Compassionate, the Merciful
=== News Update ===
History will not treat us kindly
By Tim Andersen
12/11/06 “Information Clearing House” — – Most Americans are hiding. We are like the good Germans of 1933 who knew an authoritarian regime was consolidating its power, but thought we could avoid personal consequences if we kept quiet. We remained silent as enemies of the State were rounded up, and everyones’ liberties curtailed. It did not happen all at once. It was a process of conditioning.
The TSA cops at US airports were initially intended to create the perception of eminent threat: America under attack by evildoers! That perception has largely given way to weary travelers offended by the intrusive and slow inspections. I don’t fly that often, but last weekend at the airport it was clear TSA had adopted a new tact. Now they are the authoritarians. While we were trapped in the winding queue they yelled at us to listen up and follow their precise instructions. All liquids and gels (toothpaste!) must be in quantities of 3.4 ounces, or less, grouped together in a single, clear one liter bag. The yelling cop invited us to show our displeasure to any passenger who did not follow instructions, and held up the line. As I was inspected, the TSA cop took my shaving cream from the bag. The tube read 3.6 oz. She asked me what the maximum allowable size was. I told her that’s the only size it came in. She said she would allow it through this time only.
Who could have imagined ten years ago that Congress would permit the Bush regime to eliminate habeas corpus? Our founders understood this was the bedrock fundamental principle of a free people. No political opponents could be rounded up and jailed by a tyrant. No one could presume to be above the law. Yet there was hardly a peep from blasé American consumers. The mainstream press reassured us that good Americans had nothing to worry about.
Many people refuse to recognize the corruption and evil of our government, because the thought is simply intolerable. It undermines their fundamental beliefs and trust, and makes most of what occupies their days utterly trivial. The “solution” for these people is to tune-out any potentially upsetting epiphany. They welcome reassuring propaganda that reinforces our noble purposes in the Middle East and elsewhere. They do not care to investigate personally, or even listen to, the evidence of our considerable crimes.
So, it’s strange to realize we have no real representation in Congress or control over America’s future. Millions of Americans see the ship of state headed straight for an iceberg, and despite our protests the course will not change. It’s a classic nightmare.
History will not treat us kindly. We will be remembered as the Americans who insulated themselves from reality and remained self-absorbed, concerned with their own personal comfort and privilege while our government wrecked havoc on the world and destroyed our own culture. It will not be difficult for future generations to understand what happened and the sequence of events. The evidence is abundantly clear. The only question will be why Americans didn’t rise up and save themselves.
In the Name of Allah, the Compassionate, the Merciful
=== News Update ===
The Americans don’t see how unwelcome they are,
or that Iraq is now beyond repair
By Patrick Cockburn:
12/10/06 “The Independent” — – During the Opium Wars between Britain and China in the 19th century, eunuchs at the court of the Chinese emperor had the problem of informing him of the repeated and humiliating defeat of his armies. They dealt with their delicate task by simply telling the emperor that his forces had already won or were about to win victories on all fronts.
For three and a half years White House officials have dealt with bad news from Iraq in similar fashion. Journalists were repeatedly accused by the US administration of not reporting political and military progress on the ground. Information about the failure of the US venture was ignored or suppressed.
Manipulation of facts was often very crude. As an example of the systematic distortion, the Iraq Study Group revealed last week that on one day last July US officials reported 93 attacks or significant acts of violence. In reality, it added, “a careful review of the reports … brought to light 1,100 acts of violence”.
The 10-fold reduction in the number of acts of violence officially noted was achieved by not reporting the murder of an Iraqi, or roadside bomb, rocket or mortar attacks aimed at US troops that failed to inflict casualties. I remember visiting a unit of US combat engineers camped outside Fallujah in January 2004 who told me that they had stopped reporting insurgent attacks on themselves unless they suffered losses as commanders wanted to hear only that the number of attacks was going down. As I was drove away, a sergeant begged us not to attribute what he had said: “If you do I am in real trouble.”
Few Chinese emperors can have been as impervious to bad news from the front as President George W Bush. His officials were as assiduous as those eunuchs in Beijing 170 years ago in shielding him from bad news. But even when officials familiar with the real situation in Iraq did break through the bureaucratic cordon sanitaire around the Oval Office they got short shrift from Mr Bush. In December 2004 the CIA station chief in Baghdad said that the insurgency was expanding and was “largely unchallenged” in Sunni provinces. Mr Bush’s response was: “What is he, some kind of a defeatist?” A week later the station chief was reassigned.
A few days afterwards, Colonel Derek Harvey, the Defence Intelligence Agency’s senior intelligence officer in Iraq, made much the same point to Mr Bush. He said of the insurgency: “It’s robust, it’s well led, it’s diverse.” According to the US political commentator Sidney Blumenthal, the President at this point turned to his aides and asked: “Is this guy a Democrat?”
The query is perhaps key to Mr Bush’s priorities. The overriding political purpose of the US administration in invading Iraq was to retain power at home. It would do so by portraying Mr Bush as “the security president”, manipulating and exaggerating the terrorist threat at home and purporting to combat it abroad. It would win cheap military victories in Afghanistan and Iraq. It would hold “khaki” elections in which Democrats could be portrayed as unpatriotic poltroons.
The strategy worked – until November’s mid-term elections. Mr Bush was victorious by presenting a false picture of Iraq. It is this that has been exposed as a fraud by the Iraq Study Group.
Long-maintained myths tumble. For instance, the standard stump speech by Mr Bush or Tony Blair since the start of the insurgency has been to emphasise the leading role of al-Qa’ida in Iraq and international terrorism. But the group’s report declares “al-Qa’ida is responsible for a small portion of violence”, adding that it is now largely Iraqi-run. Foreign fighters, their presence so often trumpeted by the White House and Downing Street, are estimated to number only 1,300 men in Iraq. As for building up the Iraqi army, the training of which is meant to be the centrepiece of US and British policy, the report says that half the 10 planned divisions are made up of soldiers who will serve only in areas dominated by their own community. And as for the army as a whole, it is uncertain “they will carry out missions on behalf of national goals instead of a sectarian agenda”.
Given this realism it is sad that its authors, chaired by James Baker and Lee Hamilton, share one great misconception with Mr Bush and Mr Blair. This is about the acceptability of any foreign troops in Iraq. Supposedly US combat troops will be withdrawn and redeployed as a stiffening or reinforcement to Iraqi military units. They will form quick-reaction forces able to intervene in moments of crisis.
“This simply won’t work,” one former Iraqi Interior Ministry official told me. “Iraqis who work with Americans are regarded as tainted by their families. Often our soldiers have to deny their contact with Americans to their own wives. Sometimes they balance their American connections by making contact with the insurgents at the same time.”
Mr Bush and Mr Blair have always refused to take on board the simple unpopularity of the occupation among Iraqis, though US and British military commanders have explained that it is the main fuel for the insurgency. The Baker-Hamilton report notes dryly that opinion polls show that 61 per cent of Iraqis favour armed attacks on US forces. Given the Kurds overwhelmingly support the US presence, this means three-quarters of all Arabs want military action against US soldiers.
The other great flaw in the report is to imply that Iraqis can be brought back together again. The reality is that the country has already broken apart. In Baghdad, Sunnis no longer dare to visit the main mortuary to look for murdered relatives because it is under Shia control and they might be killed themselves. The future of Iraq may well be a confederation rather than a federation, with Shia, Sunni and Kurd each enjoying autonomy close to independence.
There are certain points on which the White House and the authors of the report are dangerously at one. This is that the Iraqi government of Nouri al-Maliki can be bullied into trying to crush the militias (this usually means just one anti-American militia, the Mehdi Army), or will bolt from the Shia alliance. In the eyes of many Iraqis this would simply confirm its status as a US pawn. As for talking with Iran and Syria or acting on the Israel-Palestinian crisis it is surely impossible for Mr Bush to retreat so openly from his policies of the past three years, however disastrous their outcome.
In the Name of Allah, the Compassionate, the Merciful
=== News Update ===
The U.S. government hates democracy
Lessons from Italy
By Mickey Z.
As far as I’m concerned, we can’t put forward enough reminders of how the U.S. government—and the corporations that own it—do business. Platitudes about peace, freedom, justice, etc., aside, the land of the free is not even remotely interested in spreading democracy. There is an abundance of evidence to back up this assertion. For now, I offer the example of post-World War II Italy. Mussolini was gone but the U.S. elites had no intention of letting Italy slip through the cracks.
When the war-weary Italian people went to the polls in 1946, the Italian Communist Party and the Socialist Party combined to gain more votes and more seats in the Constituent Assembly election than the U.S.-favored Christian Democrats. This was not surprising, considering that a worker- and peasant-based movement fought off six German divisions during the liberation of northern Italy…with the invaluable aid of the Communist party. As a 1948 election loomed on the horizon, however, the U.S. realized that certain perceptions of reality needed to be seriously altered. “It was at this point that the U.S. began to train its big economic and political guns upon the Italian people,” William Blum explains in Killing Hope. “All the good ol’ Yankee know-how, all the Madison Avenue savvy in the art of swaying public opinion, all the Hollywood razzmatazz would be brought to bear on the ‘target market’.”
Downplaying the quite impressive anti-fascist credentials of the communists and the potentially embarrassing record of collaboration with Mussolini displayed by the Christian Democrats, the U.S. cleverly framed the battle around, what Blum calls “the question of ‘democracy’ vs. ‘communism’ (the idea of ‘capitalism’ remaining discreetly to one side),” and the most powerful election issue was that of U.S. aid.
The influential American media obediently did its part with the January 21, 1947 New York Times proclaiming that, “Some observers here feel that a further Leftward swing in Italy would retard aid.” By March 22, 1948, Time magazine was labeling a potential leftist victory in Italy to be nothing short of “the brink of catastrophe.” As the election neared, the CIA pulled out all the stops. Blum has documented some of the steps taken in this “awesome mobilization of resources.” A few representative examples should offer an idea of the propaganda’s scope and depth:
A letter-writing campaign from Italian-Americans to their friends and families in Italy was guided by “sample letters” provided by the U.S., that included such passages as: “A communist victory would ruin Italy. The United States would withdraw aid and a world war would probably result.”
Short-wave broadcasts to Italy warned that “under a communist dictatorship in Italy,” many of the “nation’s industrial plants would be dismantled and shipped to Russia and millions of Italy’s workers would be deported to Russia for forced labor.”
The stars of Hollywood, like Gary Cooper and Frank Sinatra, were called upon to make Voice of America radio broadcasts and/or engage in fundraisers for causes like “the orphans of Italian pilots who died in the war.”
As for more direct aid, the CIA admitted to giving $1 million to Italian “center parties,” although Blum says the figure could be as high as $10 million. In case all the funny stuff failed, the CIA also took the precaution of organizing Operation Gladio, a secret paramilitary group in Italy, “with hidden stockpiles of weapons and explosives dotting the map,” says author Mark Zepezauer. While the rationale for such intervention was the always-handy “threat of Soviet invasion,” Zepezauer reveals the actual purpose of Operation Gladio, e.g. its “15,000 troops were trained to overthrow the Italian government should it stray from the straight and narrow.”
They needn’t have bothered because, after the circus left town, the Christian Democrats stood as the clear winner with 48 percent of the vote. The future course of Italy had effectively been charted.
In the Name of Allah, the Compassionate, the Merciful
=== News Update ===
Swiss Spy in a War of Words
By Sebastian Rotella, Times Staff Writer
May 22, 2006
An ex-informant who became a Muslim says his handlers wanted him to frame an Islamic scholar. Officials say he’s on a personal vendetta.
GENEVA — Along with banks and chocolates, this placid lakefront city has another claim to fame: It is full of spies.
Claude Covassi, a broad-shouldered, gray-eyed martial arts expert, was one of them. He became an informant for Swiss intelligence in early 2004, converted to Islam and infiltrated fundamentalist circles here in his hometown. He followed the trail of holy warriors all the way to mosques in Syria where aspiring foreign “martyrs” are groomed for Iraq.
But in February, the secret agent went explosively public. He revealed his mission to its prime target, a Muslim scholar here who has been periodically accused of extremism, and gave newspaper interviews accusing his handlers of trying to frame the cleric. Since then, Covassi has unleashed everything from confidential documents to details of clandestine operations.
The former spy insists that he abandoned his masquerade because he found faith.
“It is not great speeches that convinced me but the force of prayer and understanding of the Koran,” Covassi, 36, said in a recent interview by e-mail from his refuge in Egypt. “Islam transformed my existence.”
But Swiss anti-terrorism officials reject his allegations and accuse him of a personal vendetta. It’s unclear who was manipulating whom.
Covassi’s story gives a rare street-level view of the fight against Islamic extremism. All across Europe’s Muslim communities, security forces conduct aggressive surveillance of mosques, prayer halls, bookstores, butcher shops, Internet cafes and other outposts where legal fundamentalist activity converges with terrorism.
The case of the turncoat informant also reveals the risks involved for spy agencies — and for a scruffy legion of secret soldiers on the front lines.
Covassi alleges that he was a pawn in a turf war between domestic and foreign services in Switzerland that resembles the conflicts among anti-terrorism agencies in other countries.
“I think the situation would not have degenerated so seriously if our different intelligence services collaborated even a little,” he said. “In reality, I have been able to observe that they are in continual rivalry, trying even to damage each other.”
His war of words has shaken the anti-terrorism forces of a small country with a surprisingly active militant underworld. Questions abound about Covassi’s motivations. Is he retaliating over money or a grudge? Is he in league with extremists? Adding to the uncertainty about his credibility, a court last month sentenced him in absentia to eight months in prison for dealing anabolic steroids while he taught Thai boxing at a gym in 2002.
Some officials believe he’s trying to pressure the government to avoid the prison term.
“Sometimes you use a source and it goes wrong,” said a Swiss security official, who asked to remain anonymous. “How much of what he says is rubbish to help him get out of the criminal case, I don’t know.”
The Los Angeles Times confirmed essential parts of Covassi’s story in interviews with Swiss legislative and security officials, European anti-terrorism agents and others involved in or familiar with the events. And Covassi supports his account by providing names and phone numbers of his handlers and confidential e-mail exchanges with agents.
The intelligence oversight committee of the Swiss congress is investigating the case. But doubts persist, especially regarding Covassi’s allegation that spymasters plotted to smear the controversial Islamic scholar Hani Ramadan by linking him to Iraq-bound militants. Ramadan’s brother, Tariq, is an internationally known Islamic intellectual.
Without commenting on specifics, Federal Police Chief Jean-Luc Vez said he knew of no wrongdoing.
“The [domestic intelligence service] respects the law,” Vez said. “We do not know of a case in which they can be blamed for illegal activity.”
But Vez said the Ramadans’ history and high profile made them legitimate subjects for scrutiny. “Their writings are sometimes ambiguous,” he said. “It is quite normal that they would get particular attention.”
Hani Ramadan says he might sue the government, but will await the result of the legislative inquiry. He has declined to comment further.
“As I have always said, the Islamic Center of Geneva has nothing to hide,” Ramadan said in a prepared statement. “The two years of secret investigations by an agent … indeed prove that, because they have not resulted in any official investigation or sanction.”
Ramadan and Covassi are ambiguous figures in a city of shadows.
Geneva has long been a crossroads for intrigue because it is a base for international institutions, including the United Nations, as well as a haven for dissidents and a repository of colossal and dubious fortunes from around the globe. Soviet and Western agents sparred in this nominally neutral territory during the Cold War.
“It is a place that is crawling with spies,” said former legislator and author Jean Ziegler, a friend of the Ramadan family.
Since Sept. 11, 2001, the cloak-and-dagger game has had a new focus. Authorities have frozen millions of dollars of suspected terrorist financiers and investigated local groups allegedly linked to Al Qaeda.
Muslims make up about 4% of the Swiss population of 7.5 million, mostly Balkan immigrants considered moderates. But Geneva draws extremist Muslim ideologues and holy warriors, who have become top priorities for law enforcement.
***
Helped Out of Jail
Enter Covassi. Acquaintances, and his own account, depict him as engaging, athletic, restless and a slick operator.
The son of an Italian immigrant laborer, he grew up here and went to Paris to study philosophy. But he also racked up two misdemeanor convictions for fraud in Switzerland. Bouncing around Europe, he befriended far-left activists in Italy and hung out with cocaine dealers on the hard-partying Spanish island of Ibiza from 2001 to 2003, according to his account. Those contacts helped him develop a sideline as an informant for narcotics police in his hometown, said Covassi and Swiss officials.
A boyhood friend in police intelligence introduced him to agents of the domestic intelligence service, the Service for Analysis and Prevention, or SAP. The agents helped him get out of jail after an arrest on charges of credit card fraud in February 2004, he said, and enlisted him in a mission dubbed Operation Memphis.
“The SAP had the air of being worried about a terrorist threat in Switzerland,” Covassi said. “I didn’t know anything about Islam. The project of Operation Memphis seemed useful. I did not get a salary. I was repaid for expenses, along with some ‘gifts.’ I got paid a total of about $12,200.”
Covassi started attending the Islamic Center of Geneva, a mosque run by Ramadan, 47. Ramadan and his brother, Tariq, have been watched by the world’s spy services for decades.
Their maternal grandfather was Hassan Banna, an Egyptian who in 1928 founded the Muslim Brotherhood, a radical, sometimes violent group seeking to revive Islam and rejecting Westernization. The group’s philosophies have inspired Islamist movements across the world, including those that spawned Al Qaeda.
After Banna’s assassination in 1949, their father, Said Ramadan, helped spread the group’s influence across the Muslim world, but soon fled Egypt amid a government crackdown.
The Ramadan brothers were born and raised in Geneva, where their father was granted asylum in the 1950s. The two scholars say they have renounced the intolerant aspects of their legacy.
But several top European anti-terrorism officials and academics see them as sinister ideologues. The United States revoked a visa for Tariq Ramadan in 2004 as he was about to begin a professorship at the University of Notre Dame.
“We have been interested in the Ramadans for a very long time,” the Swiss security official said. “But we have found nothing for a criminal indictment. They are fellow travelers…. They are preaching. They are spreading radicalism.”
In 2002, the local government fired Hani Ramadan from his job as a French teacher in a public school because of an article he wrote about Islamic law in which he defended the stoning of adulterous women. A court later ruled the firing was excessive.
The Ramadans have defenders, too. The British government has appointed Tariq Ramadan, now a professor at Oxford, to an advisory committee on Islam. Ziegler, the former legislator, calls the brothers unfairly maligned moderates.
“There is a campaign of permanent defamation against the Ramadan brothers,” Ziegler said. “Hani is an organizer, a pedagogue, less brilliant than his brother. But there is a social dimension to his work at the Islamic Center, assisting families…. If you want Muslim immigrants to become European, you should support the Ramadans.”
In order to infiltrate Hani Ramadan’s inner circle, Covassi used his real name and a classic cover story: He presented himself as a troubled ex-convict looking for spiritual solace. Within two months, Ramadan encouraged him to convert, Covassi said.
“With other Muslims I founded a newsletter, Al Qalam, and an association to defend the rights of Muslims,” he said. “I was therefore in close contact with Ramadan and I spent many afternoons with him in his office.”
The SAP had to resort to an informant because domestic spying laws prohibit its agents from undercover work and wiretaps. The tough restrictions even put agents overseeing informants in danger of breaking the law.
In addition to trying to learn everything he could about Ramadan, Covassi investigated Islamic networks that recruit for Iraq, the new magnet for holy warriors. Radicalization is difficult to combat even in countries with robust anti-terrorism laws. The speeches and activities of many hard-core ideologues are not illegal, even if they ultimately push young men into violence.
“What’s illegal?” the security official said. “Telling the ‘brothers’ that the Iraq invasion was illegal and must be resisted? Giving someone the address of a friend in Jordan?”
Covassi said he did not turn up anything connecting Ramadan to terrorism.
“I won’t tell you that all the Muslims who frequent the center are all saints, but … the only men I met who were in contact with terrorist groups belonged to intelligence services of foreign countries,” he said.
As Covassi spent time at Ramadan’s Islamic Center and Geneva’s larger, Saudi-run mosque, he says he realized they were swarming with fellow operatives for European and Arab spy agencies. He briefed his handlers about an ardent extremist at the big mosque; they told him the man was a Syrian spy recruiting militants for combat in Iraq, he said.
Pursuing the Syrian connection, Covassi says, he accompanied Iraq-bound militants as far as Damascus, the Syrian capital, in January of last year. There, he spent time at the Fateh mosque and the Abu Nour Koranic school, which have been identified in other European investigations as hubs for international pipelines feeding the Iraqi insurgency. Militants there charged $600 for passage into Iraq and $4,000 for weapons, he said.
At both places, Covassi alleged, “the Syrian secret services recruit for Iraq.”
If true, his findings reinforce accusations that Syria aids the Iraq insurgency, a charge Damascus denies. European investigators said Syrian spies probably permit militant activity in Damascus, but proving direct involvement was another matter.
***
A Change of Heart
Upon his return, Covassi clashed with his handlers. He accuses them of pushing him to plant names of suspected Iraq-bound militants on computers at the Islamic Center to implicate Ramadan in the recruitment network.
Covassi said that by then he had come to admire the cleric “for his human qualities and the help he gave me in my knowledge of Islam.”
As a result, Covassi distanced himself from the SAP, but not from spying. He promptly went to work for the Swiss foreign intelligence service, known by the French initials SRS, infiltrating terrorist networks across Europe and the Middle East.
The new job embroiled him in the harsh rivalry between SAP and his new agency, he said. Covassi provided The Times with excerpts of confidential e-mail exchanges with his handler at the foreign spy service. Using code names, they discuss surveillance photos, a clandestine rendezvous at a train station and a suspected plot to attack an Israeli passenger plane with a rocket-propelled grenade at the Geneva airport late last year.
Covassi and the handler disparage agents at the SAP, whom they codename “the Bears.”
In an e-mail dated Dec. 3, an agitated Covassi complains that his former bosses had renewed pressure on him to spy on Ramadan, whom he calls “the Guru.” He refers to an apartment used for surveillance operations on the Islamic Center. And he threatens to go public.
“[The agent] talks to me every day about the apartment in front of the [Islamic Center] and has confirmed to me that the Bears want to use it to go after the Guru again,” Covassi writes. “I want to emphasize some points: 1) It’s out of the question for me to participate in this plan, and therefore to put names on photos that [the agent] shows me. 2) As I told you during our meeting in the mountains, if the situation degenerates for the Guru, I wouldn’t flinch from blowing the lid off my collaboration with the Bears and the information in my possession.”
Covassi soon went on a rampage. He had two angry meetings with his old handlers. He gave an interview to the Tribune de Geneve newspaper denouncing what he called the persecution of Ramadan.
In the following days, he alleges, he received threats, his studio apartment was burgled and he was mugged on a street by two Arabs who beat him bloody.
He decided to run.
Despite his public tirade, Covassi says, his handlers at the foreign spy service assisted him in his getaway Feb. 19. An agent drove him to the airport, paid for a ticket to Spain and gave him about $8,000 in cash, he said. The SRS had already paid about $33,000 for his services, he said.
Asked about the apparent conflict among spy agencies, Swiss officials said they were working to improve cooperation.
“There is always a certain competition among services,” Vez, the police chief, said. “It’s endemic. I think the role of a leader is to ensure that the competition is not counterproductive.”
Covassi said he made his way from the Canary Islands to Mauritania, narrowly avoiding arrest, and then to Egypt, where he had friends. He says he has been there since March.
>From his refuge, he fires off e-mails to journalists and politicians. He threatens to disclose well-documented secrets if the congressional commission does not bring him back to Switzerland to testify. Despite Ramadan’s family and ideological links to Egypt, Covassi insists that the Muslim Brotherhood has not given him shelter.
The runaway spy sounds plaintive, lost in his labyrinth.
“I don’t have money,” Covassi said. “I have made an effort to avoid being helped by any Islamist group so no one can claim that I am being manipulated or what have you. I am absolutely alone.”
The situation in Iraq has reached such a point of degradation and danger that I’ve been unable to return to report — as I did from 2003 to 2005 — from the front lines of daily life. Instead, in these last months, I have found myself in a supportive role, facilitating the work of some of my former sources, who remain in their own war-torn land, to tell their hair-raising tales of the new Iraq. While relying on my Iraqi colleagues to report the news, which we then publish at Inter Press Service and my website, I continue to receive emails from others in Iraq, civilian and soldier alike.
What I know from these emails is that the articles on Iraq you normally read in your local newspaper, even when, for instance, they cover the disintegration of the Iraqi health system or the collapse of the economy, are providing you, at best, but a glimpse of what daily life there is now like. After all, who knows better what’s happening than those who are living it?
I thought I might just give you a taste of the sort of private communications I read every day. Take my primary interpreter during my eight months in Iraq, Abu Talat. He was finally forced, like hundreds of thousands of his fellow Iraqis, to flee to a neighboring country due to the nightmarish security situation in Baghdad. Without a regular income, he struggled even to pay the rent for an apartment in a Syrian city, and finally had little choice but to return to Baghdad to sell what was left of his belongings. On November 18th, he wrote me from there:
“I am trying to sell my car. However, prices have plummeted so low that there is barely any active automobile dealing here, or any other marketing for that matter…Life ends at around 2-3 p.m., at which point Baghdad changes into a city of horror. The sounds of mortars and clashes erupt all through the night. (Two explosions just rumbled nearby, but we can’t tell the exact location.)”
The next day he wrote:
“Today, while I was arranging for the car to be sold at the highest price I could find, explosions burst almost 50 meters from the place where I was standing. I was forced to hide under the car I was selling for over 2 hours. There were ongoing clashes between the Iraqi Army and resistance fighters in broad daylight in the middle of the capital!”
Even from semi-independent, Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq, often described as the most peaceful and prosperous region in the country, the news I get is bleak. A November 28th email from a Kurdish friend (who is also a U.S. citizen) went this way:
“It is worse than ever. The problem is that our U.S. government and the Iraqi ‘Government’ tell the world that things are improving here when they are not. All of the rebuilding bull crap is nothing but a scam that is worse than the oil-for-food program [of the post-Gulf War I years]. We have ONE hour of electricity a day now. I have power to turn on some lights and my computer by way of a little generator that I hooked up to my office today. A gallon of gas costs over $4 now, when the salary of an engineer is less than $200 a MONTH.”
Terrible as life is when Iraqis across the country find themselves essentially camping out in their own homes with few or no basic services, it pales in comparison to life in Baghdad, the country’s capital and home to nearly one quarter of its population. A friend of mine, who works there as a freelance cameraman, sent me this grim summary a couple of weeks ago:
“Life here in Iraq has become impossible because of the militias, sectarian violence, and the occupation [U.S.] forces. Every day we see the dead bodies near our homes which have been killed by militias. We watch how the U.S. troops see these dead bodies and… do nothing to stop this violence. Two of my brothers just left their houses and rented a new place because they were living in a Shia area. They had to run away just because they are Sunni.
“Every day the U.S. troops raid so many houses in my area and arrest so many innocent people. Yet, when the Americans arrest one of the [Shia] militia members they release him the very next day! Why?
“I hope I can show you how the dogs have started eating the dead bodies which lie in the streets of Baghdad now. I filmed one of the dead bodies while there was a dog eating on it. The U.S. troops and Iraqi police leave the dead bodies in the streets for one or two days… I think they intend to do this because they want everyone, including the children, to see this. Three days ago my young son saw some of the Shia militia as they killed an innocent Iraqi in front of his eyes just near his school.
“Oh Dahr, I don’t know what to say about my wounded country. Every Iraqi wants to bomb himself because of this shit life. Now Iraq is nothing like it was when you were here last, as bad as it was then. It has become very difficult to find someone who smiles. Everyone is sad and crying. This is true and this is our life now.
“The problem is that I know everything because I am filming so many people who are suffering.”
Then there are the emails I get from American soldiers or their family members. In late October, I received one from a mother whose son is a Marine stationed in Ramadi where the fighting between U.S. forces and Sunni insurgents has been fierce and ongoing these last months. “Many, many atrocities on both sides,” she writes,
“because of course the town has deteriorated into nothing more than a horror flick. His emails are few because his outpost was mortared and he lost computer connection with me. He has to go to the Army side of the city and try to send email from there. I’ve gotten one email. The marines are not supplying the boys with working satellite phones. Instead they give those, along with money for bribes, to the Iraqis in hopes of obtaining information. So our marines sit there (only 400 patrolling half of Ramadi, a town of 400,000… talk about war crimes). This is such a nightmare. If my son survives, he’ll be embittered forever…This is a portion of his angry email….I found it very disturbing….please excuse the spelling, he’s in a hurry and exhausted when he writes….his point is to kill the Iraqis before they kill him. Now it’s just a race for life. Insane.”
Her son’s email reads in part:
“I was gonna call you but the phone is broken. I hate this place more than anywhere else i’ve been. I guess is a compilation of all the time I’ve done overseas fighting. Bullshit fights, its really bringing me down. I can’t wait till all this is over…I’ll be the biggest anti-war person this country will have… at least against this war in Iraq….Let’s go fight a different one somewhere else cause this one is lost. I swear i wish you could spend a week over here…you would know it’s lost. You can’t stop ‘holy warriors,’ especially in their territory. Tonight we are about to go drop off generators to the enemy (Iraqi civilians) hoping they will give us info about the enemy (bullshit storys). The shit your tax dollars go to would make you puke. You really would puke. I almost do when i think about it….. thomas jefferson would have a heart attack if he saw all the shit goin on today. Oh well. I really hope it changes soon when Bush is out…but i doubt it. I thinks its all Gods plan…he runs the show no matter what. Fate and all that…its good to trust him.
“…I’ll keep the machine gun lubed in hopes of killin em all at the first opportunity for you. I love you ma and i know that no matter what you support me. I hope you don’t find this email burdensome. Just hit delete if that’s the case.”
His mother added:
“You can see how the war is destroying my son’s morale, and whittling away at his spirit. Now it’s just a killing game.”
On November 29, I received the following email from Abu Talat in Baghdad:
“In the early morning, explosions woke me up in this apartment in the center of Baghdad. It was just before 5:30 a.m. when I heard four mortars exploding in their very horrendous voices. The Ministry of Health was hit the day before yesterday by not less than five mortars. This was followed by clashes which continued for less than an hour. The fighters were using all kinds of guns, starting with rifles and ending with real heavy weaponry.
“Another battle took place here after this. Since we are in a guarded area near a police station and on the fourth floor, I had the advantage of watching this entire battle from my balcony. It was a complete war battle, guns being fired from all directions. All kinds of weapons were used by the militia fighters who are also the “Iraqi security forces,” including the American helicopters which were hovering at a low altitude (just for moral support?). As if they are only for monitoring not for fighting! The mortars spread to the morgue area which is exactly behind the Ministry.
“Iraqi life has changed into some kind of hellish disaster. Sectarian feelings are following us everywhere. Everywhere around Baghdad that you stop at any of the checkpoints, which are spreading all over, the men hold their guns in their hands. I assume each man knows how to use it, but the problem is: Is this guard a Sunni or Shia? You cannot tell. The clashes I’ve been seeing haven’t spared any of the areas in the city, whether they are Sunni or Shia.”
Keep in mind that we’re talking about the capital of Iraq. Think Washington D.C. and try for a moment to imagine such daily scenes.
Recently, an Iraqi colleague and I wrote a news story about the abominable conditions in Iraq’s medical system — or what’s left of it. Upon reading the piece, a doctor in Baghdad, another of my contacts, sent me this:
“I haven’t written to you for awhile…but your last dispatch about the health conditions in Iraq incited me to do so. I write you while holding in my mind and heart a lot of sorrow and pain for all the innocent people I am encountering every day as victims of this blind violence. I have sorrow and pain for a steadily vanishing future which once I had thought of as hopeful — even after the U.S.-led invasion in 2003. Let alone my sorrow for the future of my one-and-a-half year-old daughter.
“The Iraqi health system has never been this bad before, and it is growing worse day by day. The Saddam regime always tried to show that the [UN] embargo affected the health system to the bone. That regime tried to show the shortage of medicines, equipment, and the high mortality rates of Iraqi children. Saddam used to emphasize the bad conditions through the media, and especially the western media, in an attempt to affect international public opinion.
“But what is happening today is the total opposite of this. The government is practicing a marked suppression of any revelation of the reality of the health system. This is obvious through the government’s underestimation of the figures of victims of violence and sectarian killing. It can also be exemplified by their prohibiting any workers in the health facilities from speaking to the media unless authorized. In many situations the government will give an optimistic view of our disaster in a time when there are no signs for a favorable view.
“During Saddam’s era we used to see western or even local media reporters visiting hospitals, conducting interviews with patients and doctors. I wonder why we can hardly see any now. It is a big question. Nobody now is aware of the critical situation in our health institutions — once huge attractors of therapeutic tourism in the Middle East. There has been a massive exodus of senior consultants and junior doctors which means a great absence of experience. There is a grave shortage of necessary medicines and other important logistics.
“Sectarian tension has its own enormous impact. Sunni people are afraid to attend hospitals run by the Mehdi Army [Shia Cleric Muqtada al-Sadr's militia] which leaves them with very limited options. I have encountered many Sunni patients in the hospital who use an alias to conceal their identity so that they could have some help. Hospitals are heavily infiltrated by active cells of Shia militias, which are ready to abduct anyone they do not like. Everyone here from the manager of the hospital down the administrative pyramid must have the approval of the Sadr officials. What adds to the disaster is that these people are not qualified; they only have the privilege of being loyal to their political party.
“The latest trend of mass abductions and kidnappings puts me under great pressure of fear and apprehension that someday I might be a victim myself. What happened in the raid on the Ministry of Higher Education [up to 150 academics, staff, and visitors were abducted on November 14th when roughly 80 gunmen stormed a research institute] is always echoing in my mind. Today the media announced two officials of those who were kidnapped were found tortured, blindfolded, murdered, and dumped in Baghdad.
“The burden of violence and terror is further intensified by the very bad performance of our hospitals. Now, many innocent people can’t find the proper care and the majority are fleeing to Iran, Syria, or Jordan for care. One of these is my uncle, who couldn’t find a working machine for lithotripsy for his kidney stones in all of Baghdad, so he was advised to go to Syria.
“We doctors are under unbearable stress. Aside from the scores of injured people we see daily, factors like limited experience and the horrible shortage of supplies have caused many doctors problems. When faced with a complicated case, doctors often refuse to handle the case and try to refer it elsewhere since a doctor has reason to fear reprisal actions from the family if he fails to manage the case successfully.
“One week ago, I was called to examine a 22 year-old college student afflicted with 60% burns after a blast injury. He had his face and limbs mutilated. One eye had been lost. Nearby was standing a decent-looking gentleman. His eyes were full of tears with breaths full of throes. He was the boy’s father. He was murmuring, ‘Those criminals targeted me but hit my boy. Why didn’t they just kill me instead?’
“It was an uneasy situation and I felt speechless. What kind of words would mitigate his pangs? I thought to myself, but I couldn’t find any to say to him. So I couldn’t do anything except have my long, plaintive face reflect my condolences. That gentleman was a college professor and he explained to me, ‘I will not remain for a second. I just want my son to be fine so that I can take him and leave this wrecked country.’ I nodded my head agreeing with him and replied, ‘Right, it’s a country that you and I can’t live in anymore.
“By nature I am not always morose like this, but sometimes a man is pushed beyond his will.”
The fact is, for most Iraqis, there is little hope left, though polls show that over 70% of them still want all occupation forces out of their country. I’ve long since abandoned asking myself the question: How much worse can it get in Iraq? My Iraqi friends and colleagues tell me that one of the more popular sayings in Baghdad nowadays is, “Today is better than tomorrow.”
Dahr Jamail is an independent journalist who reported from Iraq for over eight months from 2003-2005, as well as from Lebanon, Syria, Turkey, and Jordan. His reports have been published by the Independent, the Guardian and the Sunday Herald in the U.K. He writes regularly for Inter Press Service, as well as for Tomdispatch.com, and is currently finishing a book about his experiences in Iraq.
This is not news to anyone who has been following Israel’s history for any length of time, but it is a major problem for the Israel-firsters in the US, who justify the billions sent to Israel on the need for poor little Israel to defend itself against those mean ol’ Arabs.
But now it is confirmed, Israel isn’t defenseless. It has nuclear weapons, not subject to any controls at all, with which to threaten their neighbors.
Remember the invasion of Iraq? Remember the REASON we were told we had to invade Iraq, because Iraq had NOOKULAR BOMBS! Of course, as it turned out, they didn’t. The nukes are down in Israel, where the Arab nations, Mordecai Vanunu, and assorted bloggers have been telling you they were all along.
So, Olmert has just exposed the total hypocrisy behind the invasion of Iraq.
Needless to say, this also pounds a huge dent in Bush’s rush to attack Iran because they MIGHT have a nuclear weapon in ten years, versus Israel’s now officially admitted nuclear arsenal and a history of attacks against neighbor nations.
In finally admitting that Israel has had nuclear weapons all along, Olmert has made every US Politician who ever stood up and portrayed Israel as a weak and helpless nation deserving of our billions in tax dollars look like a total blithering idiot at best, at worst complicit in a defrauding of the American taxpayer for the benefit of a foreign nation.
Every politician who ever stood up in Congress supporting yet another appropriations bill for Israel with the claim, “Israel must be defended”, must be categorized as a liar. Israel didn’t need defending. They just wanted more of our money any way they could get it. And with a few contributions from Israel’s spies, they got it.
You, the taxpayer, have been SWINDLED! Israel has had a nuclear deterrent to protect itself all along, but still tricked you into paying for its “defense”. And your Congresscritters helped them do it.
UPDATE: Already this story has been “orwellized” to try to pull back from Olmert’s comment about Israel’s nuclear weapons. The current spin is that even though Olmert openly talked about Israel’s nuclear weapons, that this is not an “official” admission that Israel has them.
In the Name of Allah, the Compassionate, the Merciful
=== News Update ===
Saviours in a strange world
Heroism of Arabs saved Jews during Holocaust: UK Times
The Sunday Times December 03, 2006
Many Jews had a lucky escape during the Holocaust – when Arabs risked their own lives to rescue them. Deirdre Fernand reports
Anny Boukris was just a child when the soldiers came knocking at the door. The year was 1942, and German troops were occupying her town and her homeland of Tunisia. Boukris lived with her parents, Jacob and Odette, in the seaside town of Mahdia, along its eastern shore. She and her brothers and sisters wanted for nothing. Jacob, a Jewish businessman, was doing well; they could even afford a maid.
All that changed with the fist at the door. Since the arrival of German troops that year, the family had suspected something would happen. They had stocked up on food, packed their family heirlooms into a boxroom and placed a bookcase in front of the door.
All to no avail. The soldiers inspected the house, found the hiding place and took all their precious belongings. Anny minded her stamp collection being confiscated.
Their house was being requisitioned as a barracks, the soldiers said, and they had only an hour to leave. Anny’s father kept his wits about him. He quickly arranged for his family to find refuge in an old factory nearby. Aunts and uncles joined them, and although the living conditions were far from satisfactory for everyone, they all felt safe enough.
A few weeks later came another knock at the door. This time the caller was no German but a local man, the son of a wealthy landowner. “You are all at great risk,” he told them. “You must leave straight away.” In the middle of the night he drove them to his farm, about 20 miles away. There they stayed hidden for four months, until the Germans had been driven out of the country and they could return home. It was only then that Anny came to understand the significance of the rescuer in the night.
The man was 32-year-old Khaled Abdelwahhab, a prominent and well-connected Arab from Mahdia, who made it his business to fraternise with German officers so he knew what was going on. Handsome, sophisticated and educated in the West, he made an agreeable companion and would sit drinking with them into the early hours. He knew, for instance, which brothels they frequented, which females they lusted after. He had also heard tales of local girls, many of them Jewish, being abducted for sex and never being seen again.
One night, one of the soldiers confided to him that he had his eye on a beautiful Jewish woman with blonde hair and blue eyes, whom he was going to take away “for his own pleasure”. When Abdelwahhab realised that the blonde he intended to rape was Anny’s mother, Odette, he sprang into action. He plied the soldier with drink, and when he eventually fell into a stupor, Abdelwahhab drove directly to the farm and whisked everyone to safety. “We left like that,” Anny recalled. Abdelwahhab, who later married and had a daughter, became a lifelong friend of the Boukris family. Forever an honoured guest, he was always invited to celebrate the sabbath with them, sitting down to share chicken couscous and memories. There, around that table, they would talk of the war. Arab and Jew shared a special bond.
Abdelwahhab’s heroism in saving Odette from abduction and rape – and rescuing her entire family from persecution and possible death – would have been forgotten were it not for the efforts of one remarkable historian of the Middle East, Robert Satloff. A 44-year-old American of Jewish descent, he has devoted the past four years to searching out lost heroes of the Holocaust. Not just any heroes, but Arabs such as Abdelwahhab. “He could so easily have been killed if the German officer had found out that he had tricked him to save a Jewish woman,” he says. Executed swiftly, perhaps, or tortured to death in any of the 104 “punishment” camps then being built across the Sahara.
Satloff’s quest for good men took him not to Europe, where 6m perished under the Nazis and where virtuous men like Oskar Schindler and Raoul Wallenberg risked everything to save lives, but to the shores of North Africa, where France’s possessions of Morocco, Tunisia and Algiers – and its Jewish population – had fallen to the Germans.
“We all know the horrific stories of the Jews who died in Europe under the Nazis,” he says.
“I wanted to look at the long reaches of the Holocaust. Persecution was not just a European story. I wanted to investigate what happened to Jews living among Arabs when the Nazis arrived. Their stories have been overlooked for far too long.” He reminds us that had allied troops not driven the Germans from the African continent in 1943, then the 2,000-year-old Jewish communities of Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, and maybe Egypt and Palestine too, might have met the fate of their brothers in Europe.
The result of his detective work, which drew upon scores of interviews with witnesses and survivors of pogrom, is contained in his newly published book, Among the Righteous. “I set myself a simple goal,” he says. “To tell the story of one Arab who saved the life of one Jew.” He had in his mind a saying from the Koran: “Whoever saves one life, saves the entire world.” This passage echoes the Jewish exhortation: “If you save one life, it is as if you have saved the world.”
Satloff, who runs the influential think-tank the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, began to dig in wartime archives and libraries but could find little about the half-million Jews of North Africa. There were bare statistics – nearly 5,000 were killed in air raids or as a result of forced labour – but few details. Questions hung in the air. What became of the Jewish families in Casablanca and Algiers when the tanks rolled in and the jackboots marched? What happened when Vichy, the collaborationist government of Marshal Pétain, brought in anti-semitic laws?
As Sir Martin Gilbert, the respected historian of the Shoah, points out, the fate of Jews outside Europe has only recently emerged as a topic of interest. It was not until 1997 that Yad Vashem, Israel’s national memorial and library of remembrance, published its first volume on the wartime persecution of Jews in Libya and Tunisia. And it was only last year that three documentaries on the plight of North African Jews aired on Israeli television.
Then another, larger question began to bother Satloff. Could there ever have been an Arab Schindler? An Arab Wallenberg? As the world remembers, Oskar Schindler, whose story was told by Thomas Keneally in the award-winning Schindler’s Ark, was the German factory owner who defied the SS to rescue as many as 1,300 Jews. Wallenberg,
a Swedish diplomat working in wartime Budapest, is credited with saving as many as 100,000 Hungarian Jews.
In pursuit of his Arab Schindler, Satloff, who is fluent in Arabic, French and Hebrew, moved with his wife, an economist at the World Bank, and two young sons to Morocco in 2002 and began his research in earnest. He turned himself into a Simon Wiesenthal in reverse: where the legendary Nazi hunter, who died last year, sought criminals to bring them to justice, Satloff sought champions. Over steaming cups of sweet mint tea in houses and cafes, he listened to tales from the past. Some people were eager to speak of their wartime tribulations, as if they had been waiting all their lives to unburden themselves; others were more guarded. Acceptance and suspicion of him went hand in hand.
In the event, he found not one saviour but many. Wherever he went he collected stories about Arabs welcoming Jews into their homes, sharing their meagre rations, guarding their valuables so Germans could not confiscate them, and warning leaders about SS raids. Abdelwahhab, who died in 1997 aged 86, features prominently in his gallery of heroes, along with Si Ali Sakkat, a former mayor of Tunis who hid 60 Jewish workers who had fled a labour camp, and Si Kaddour Benghabrit, the rector of a Paris mosque, who helped 100 Jews evade persecution in 1940. Similarly, the Bey of Tunis, Tunisia’s wartime ruler under the Germans, is reported as having told members of his government: “The Jews… are under our patronage and we are responsible for their lives. If I find out that an Arab informer caused even one hair of a Jew to fall, this Arab will pay with his life.” As one old gentleman from a small town in Tunisia remarked, “The Arabs watched over the Jews.”
Satloff is prepared for such tales of Arab derring-do to stir controversy. Denial of the Holocaust in Arab lands is not uncommon. The leader of Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah, has declared to his supporters that Jews invented the “legend” of the Holocaust. Hamas’s official website has labelled the Nazi effort to exterminate Jews “an alleged and invented story with no basis”. And recently, President Bashar al-Assad of Syria told an interviewer he doesn’t “have any clue how [Jews] were killed or how many were killed”. So if the Shoah never happened, or has been exaggerated, how can Arabs such as Si Kaddour Benghabrit or the Bey of Tunis have played any part in it – noble or otherwise?
It was witnessing the 9/11 attacks that prompted Satloff to embark upon his book. Watching the twin towers collapse, an event he saw from the relative safety of a Midtown office building in Manhattan, he wondered what he, as a Jew, an American and an Islamic scholar, could do to bring together warring ideologies. In his mind, the plume of smoke rising from the towers conjured up the chimneys of the death camps. “I decided that the best thing I could do would be to combat Arab ignorance about the Holocaust,” he says. “And the most effective way of doing that was to tell a positive story. Any history that I wrote had to involve the Islamic world and its Arab heroes.” As he points out, in a fractured, fragmenting world, dialogue is both desirable and essential.
Today, Schindler and Wallenberg are perhaps the most famous men to have been officially recognised by Yad Vashem as “righteous among the nations”. They are just two of the 21,310 Gentiles honoured for risking their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust. Individuals come from Chile and Croatia, Lithuania and Latvia, but there is no representative on that list from Tunisia, Morocco or Algiers. “There are Turkish and Bosnian Muslims cited,” says Satloff, “but nearly 60 years after the war, no Arab has ever been officially recognised.”
Perhaps the testimonies of women like 71-year-old Anny Boukris, whose mother was rescued by Abdelwahhab, hold the clue. She spent years trying to tell people about her family and the debt they all owed to the dashing young Arab. But none of her neighbours wanted to know. Satloff, who checked her story with several sources, has his own explanation: “I came to the sad conclusion that there are two main reasons that no Arabs have been included among that righteous list. First, many Arabs (or their heirs) didn’t want to be found, and second, I think many Jews didn’t look too hard.”
Officials from Yad Vashem have expressed interest in Satloff’s work. Throughout his research he has been in contact with its Department of the Righteous, which scrutinises the credentials of candidates, and he will be making all his files available to them. The final decision to afford the honour is made by an independent public committee comprising Holocaust survivors, lawyers, historians and individuals, and is chaired by Supreme Court judges. “But Yad Vashem doesn’t act like a detective agency,” says Satloff. In practice, the process of recognition, a painstaking and laborious operation, is usually initiated by Holocaust survivors or their families – and that has not yet happened. “So far, the commission has yet to receive a request to recognise a person as ‘righteous among the nations’ from an Arab country,” says a spokesman.
Whatever the outcome, Satloff already has one victory under his belt. By providing documentary proof of their incarceration, he has helped dozens of survivors of 100 labour camps in Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia gain thousands of pounds’ compensation from the German government. And if he has his way, maybe Khaled Abdelwahhab, the elegant and good-looking man he calls “the Paul Newman of Tunisia”, will become the first righteous Arab. No wonder that after 25 years of writing about conflict in the Middle East, he calls this “the most hopeful story I’ve written”.
In order to understand the bravery of these Arab heroes, it is necessary to put their behaviour in context. As a remark by the philosopher Edmund Burke warns us, “It is necessary only for the good man to do nothing for evil to triumph.” There were plenty of men who did nothing.
From the beginning of the second world war, Nazi plans to persecute and eventually exterminate Jews extended throughout a great swathe of Arab lands. Though Germany and its allies controlled this region only briefly, they made substantial progress towards that goal. From June 1940 to May 1943, the Nazis, their Vichy French collaborators and their Italian fascist allies applied in Arab lands many of the precursors to the Final Solution. These included not only laws depriving Jews of property, education, livelihood, rights of residence and free movement, but also torture, slave labour, deportation and execution. Though there were no death camps, many thousands of Jews were consigned to more than 100 brutal labour camps. The very first concentration camps to be liberated by allied troops in late 1942 were in Algeria and Morocco. About 1% of North African Jews (4,000 to 5,000) died under Axis control, compared with more than 50% of European Jewry. As Satloff says, “These Jews were lucky to be in Africa, where the fighting ended relatively early and where boats – not just cattle trucks – would have been needed to take them to the ovens in Europe.”
In this world, Arabs were both willing participants and collaborators. They worked as interpreters, going house to house with SS officers pointing out where Jews lived, oversaw work gangs and guarded prisoners in labour camps. Without a compliant populace, the persecution of Jews would have been impossible.
Were Arabs merely following orders? An interviewer from the US Holocaust Memorial Museum once put that question to Harry Alexander, a Jew from Leipzig, Germany. After his father was taken to Sachsenhausen and his brother to Buchenwald, he managed to escape to France. There French authorities sent him to the notoriously harsh Vichy labour camp at Djelfa in the Algerian desert. “Nobody told them to beat us all the time,” he said. “Nobody told them to chain us together. Nobody told them to tie us naked to a post and beat us and to hang us by our arms and hose us down, to bury us in the sand… No, they took this into their own hands and they enjoyed what they did.”
Satloff tracked down another survivor of the camps, Morice Tondowski, a 92-year-old Polish-born Jew, to his retirement home in Ilford, Essex. He had joined the Foreign Legion in France but was stripped of his rifle under Vichy’s anti-semitic laws and sent to Berguent labour camp in Morocco. Tondowski told him about one of the worst kinds of punishment, the tombeau – French for tomb. Prisoners who were judged not to be working hard enough were forced to dig holes and lie in these faux graves for weeks on end, day and night. Surviving only on 175 grams of bread and one litre of water a day, they lay in their own waste. If they made the slightest movement they would be beaten. One of Tondowski’s best friends, a fellow Pole, died after weeks in the tombeau. “I think of him all the time,” the old man told him.
It is little wonder that Satloff prefers to dwell on the humanity of men like Si Ali Sakkat, another of his local heroes, who died in 1954. He was the Tunisian landowner who came from a noble Muslim family that could trace its lineage back to the Prophet Muhammad. After a career in public service, including a stint as mayor of Tunis, he retired to his splendid 740-acre farm outside the city with fields of grazing sheep and shady olive groves. Not far away from his land was an Axis labour camp. At a critical point of the battle for Tunisia, fighting broke out in a nearby valley. Amid the bombs and gunfire, a group of about 60 Jewish workers seized the opportunity to escape and found their way to Si Ali’s property.
“They were lucky to come to his door,” says Satloff, who struck up a friendship with Si Ali’s grandson. “He didn’t hesitate to offer each of them food and lodging. This was a man of ready and simple kindnesses.” Opening up his outbuildings and barns for them, the country squire sheltered them for weeks until allied troops, on their way to Tunis, could liberate them.
Just as remarkable are the actions of Si Kaddour Benghabrit. Perhaps the most influential Arab in Europe, he was the rector of the Great Mosque of Paris. Under the noses of German occupiers, he saved as many as 100 Jews by allowing his staff at the mosque to issue them with certificates of Muslim identity, with which they could evade arrest and deportation. Two months after the Germans took control of France, they caught up with the scam and ordered Benghabrit to stop. When Satloff visited the mosque to investigate this claim, he was shown a letter telling Benghabrit to desist. It read: “The occupation authorities suspect the personnel of the Mosque of Paris of fraudulently delivering to individuals of the Jewish race certificates attesting that the interested persons are of the Muslim confession.” For reasons that are unclear, or perhaps because the Germans lacked firm evidence, no action was taken against Benghabrit. He died in the 1960s and is buried in the same holy plac!
e that gave so many Jews a lifeline.
In recording these stories, Satloff’s work is far from finished. Now back living and working in Washington, a regular on the university-lecture circuit, he is still discovering more heroes. What next? A sequel? A film of the book? “I’ve only scratched the surface,” he says. “We know not all Arabs joined with the European-inspired campaign against the Jews. The few who risked their lives to save them provide inspiration beyond their numbers.”
In the final days of his last research trip, he came across the story of a group of Arab shepherds from western Tunisia, who hid fleeing Jews. “When the Germans came looking for Jews, the Arabs would say they are their cousins,” he was told. But the race against time is on. Those who lived through the war are dying out.
Just eight weeks after telling her story for the first time in 60 years in all its stirring detail – from the hammering on the door to the midnight flight – Anny Boukris breathed her last.
In the Name of Allah, the Compassionate, the Merciful
=== News Update ===
Saviours in a strange world : Heroism of Arabs saved Jews during Holocaust: UK Times
Many Jews had a lucky escape during the Holocaust – when Arabs risked their own lives to rescue them. Deirdre Fernand reports
Anny Boukris was just a child when the soldiers came knocking at the door. The year was 1942, and German troops were occupying her town and her homeland of Tunisia. Boukris lived with her parents, Jacob and Odette, in the seaside town of Mahdia, along its eastern shore. She and her brothers and sisters wanted for nothing. Jacob, a Jewish businessman, was doing well; they could even afford a maid.
A few weeks later came another knock at the door. This time the caller was no German but a local man, the son of a wealthy landowner. “You are all at great risk,” he told them. “You must leave straight away.” In the middle of the night he drove them to his farm, about 20 miles away. There they stayed hidden for four months, until the Germans had been driven out of the country and they could return home. It was only then that Anny came to understand the significance of the rescuer in the night.
The man was 32-year-old Khaled Abdelwahhab, a prominent and well-connected Arab from Mahdia, who made it his business to fraternise with German officers so he knew what was going on. Handsome, sophisticated and educated in the West, he made an agreeable companion and would sit drinking with them into the early hours. He knew, for instance, which brothels they frequented, which females they lusted after. He had also heard tales of local girls, many of them Jewish, being abducted for sex and never being seen again.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2099-2469952_1,00.html
===
A Muslim’s Response to Tony Blair’s December 8th Multiculturalism Speech
“Now let us examine some of Mr. Blair’s assertions. He talks about values of ‘the rule of law, tolerance, and equal treatment for all’. It is the propagation of these values that has led to the deaths of nearly three-quarters of a million civilians in Iraq. It is these values of his that have legitimised torture, rendition and detention without trail. It is these values that make him support the tyrant rulers of the Muslim world and it is these values of his that support the existence of illegal state of Israel and its murder and torture of the Palestinians. What sort of values does Mr. Blair hold that allows him to raze a country some 3,000 miles away that never threatened Britain? Having done this Mr. Blair expects the British people to remain silent and dutifully aqueous like the media. The British (including Muslims) are not ignorant.”
http://www.montrealmuslimnews.net/blairspeech.htm
===
9/11 : Swiss Spy in a War of Words
An ex-informant who became a Muslim says his handlers wanted him to frame an Islamic scholar.
GENEVA — Along with banks and chocolates, this placid lakefront city has another claim to fame: It is full of spies.
Claude Covassi, a broad-shouldered, gray-eyed martial arts expert, was one of them. He became an informant for Swiss intelligence in early 2004, converted to Islam and infiltrated fundamentalist circles here in his hometown. He followed the trail of holy warriors all the way to mosques in Syria where aspiring foreign “martyrs” are groomed for Iraq.
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-mole22may22,0,5675485.story?coll=la-home-headlines
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9/11 : WAS MOHAMED ATTA “CLOSE ASSOCIATE” IN FLORIDA A CIA PILOT?
Wolfgang Bohringer, the German pilot who was one of Mohamed Atta’s closest associates in Florida as well as the subject of an FBI terror alert in the South Pacific, was apprehended two weeks ago and taken into custody, but then was almost immediately released after he told authorities responsible for his capture that he works for the CIA.
http://www.madcowprod.com/120112006.html
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9/11 : Bush’s Torture Ticking Time Bomb: Sins of Commissionl
Bush endlessly reminds listeners that “the U.S. does not torture” and that “torture is not an American value.” But “What is torture?” is the Bush version of the Pontius Pilate question. Bush appears to be using the definition of torture crafted by Justice Department official John Yoo: if detainees weren’t maimed or killed, they weren’t tortured. And the Justice Department acts as if, even if detainees are killed during interrogations, it is best to treat the deaths as harmless errors.
http://jimbovard.com/blog/2006/12/08/american-conservative-bushs-torturedictatorship-scandal/
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9/11 : WTC witnesses to explosions
Posted Dec 11, 2006 07:55 AM PST – Category: 911
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Explosions on 911
Posted Dec 11, 2006 08:00 AM PST – Category: 911
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More 911 Explosions
Posted Dec 11, 2006 08:00 AM PST – Category: 911
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9/11 : Government refuses to authenticate bin Laden “confession video”
One can only assume that the interfere with enforcement proceedings segment means that if the truth were to be revealed to the world regarding the circumstances and authenticity of the December 13, 2001 Osama bin Laden confession video, the neo con would have a one dickens of a time enforcing its current policies – both foreign and domestic. The truth is all hell would break loose if it was widely reported in the mockingbird mainstream media that the December 13, 2001 Osama bin Laden confession video was a fabrication.
http://www.teamliberty.net/id284.html
The briefing was to discuss the October 2006 study Mortality after the 2003 invasion of Iraq: a cross-sectional cluster sample survey, which appeared in the British medical journal The Lancet. This study estimated that 655,000 more Iraqis had died (”excess deaths”) since the invasion than would have died if the prewar rate of death (mortality) had continued. It further estimated that about 600,000 of these had died from violence.
http://tinyurl.com/t3sm6
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The Americans don’t see how unwelcome they are, or that Iraq is now beyond repair
Manipulation of facts was often very crude. As an example of the systematic distortion, the Iraq Study Group revealed last week that on one day last July US officials reported 93 attacks or significant acts of violence. In reality, it added, “a careful review of the reports … brought to light 1,100 acts of violence”.
http://tinyurl.com/y6rlje
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History will not treat us kindly
We will be remembered as the Americans who insulated themselves from reality and remained self-absorbed, concerned with their own personal comfort and privilege while our government wrecked havoc on the world and destroyed our own culture.
http://tinyurl.com/y3s5sn
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Iraq as a Living Hell
The situation in Iraq has reached such a point of degradation and danger that I’ve been unable to return to report — as I did from 2003 to 2005 — from the front lines of daily life. Instead, in these last months, I have found myself in a supportive role, facilitating the work of some of my former sources, who remain in their own war-torn land, to tell their hair-raising tales of the new Iraq. While relying on my Iraqi colleagues to report the news, which we then publish at Inter Press Service and my website, I continue to receive emails from others in Iraq, civilian and soldier alike.
http://electroniciraq.net/news/2714.shtml
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MEDIA ALERT: THE BBC BURIES THE TRUTH WITH THE DEAD IN IRAQ
Giving Headline Billing To Military Spin. Last week, yet more innocent civilian lives were claimed by a US air attack in Iraq. How many times this tragedy has been repeated across that country is completely hidden from public view – a second, deeper tragedy.
http://www.medialens.org/
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Marauding militia butcher families as troops look on
Residents from the Hurriya District in Baghdad say they were attacked by militias of the so-called Mahdi Army who killed several women and children and forced more than 200 families to flee.
Shiite militias forcing Sunnis to abandon their Baghdad homes
Since Saturday Sunni residents have been displaced or voluntarily left the northwest Baghdad neighborhood of Hurriyah after police said three Sunni families were killed. Those who fled voluntarily said they did it because they did not trust the government forces to protect them. On Sunday, they continued fleeing, moving into schools or strangers’ homes, the best immediate refuge they could find.
http://www.thestate.com/mld/thestate/news/world/16210227.htm
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Bush Still Looking For A ‘Way Forward’ In The Face Of His Iraq Failure
Bush may have received the ISG report with the politeness of a condemned man before his executioners, but he really has no intention at all in voluntarily changing course in Iraq and bringing our soldiers home. In his radio address this weekend, Bush tried to paint the highly critical report as a validation of his Iraq strategy, instead of the accurate portrait of the stunning failure of the invasion and occupation the rest of the country and the world immediately recognized as a rare truth about the consequences of our nation’s involvement there.
http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_ron_full_061209_bush_still_looking_f.htm
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Prominent Saudi Muslim clerics urge Muslims to support Iraqi Sunnis against Shiites
Over 30 prominent Islamic clerics from Saudi Arabia on Monday called on Sunni Muslims around the Middle East to support their brethren in Iraq against Shiites and praised the insurgency.
http://tinyurl.com/y2a3rd
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Sunni and Shiite Resistance Remain Mystery to U.S., Iraq Report Charges
Nearly four years after the invasion of Iraq, the United States still does not understand the enemy that American troops are fighting, according to last week’s report by the Iraq Study Group.
http://tinyurl.com/wcf9k
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‘Iraq “insurgent” attacks to rise
A British military commander has warned that “insurgent” attacks on multi-national troops in Iraq would rise ahead of the planned security handover to local forces in the Basra area next year.
http://tinyurl.com/wyh6w
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Britain stops talk of ‘war on terror’
A Foreign Office spokesman said the government wanted to ‘avoid reinforcing and giving succour to the terrorists’ narrative by using language that, taken out of context, could be counter-productive’. The same message has been sent to British diplomats and official spokespeople around the world.
http://tinyurl.com/ygm8y8
Four American soldiers were killed today and another three injured when they were blasted by separate roadside bombs in or just west of the capital. This brings the total for December to 42 American servicemember deaths. One death was reported late Sunday night and the other three early the next morning. Also, at least 127 Iraqis were killed or found dead and another 47 wounded.
http://www.antiwar.com/updates/?articleid=10143
Baghdad- US troops mistakenly shot dead three Iraqi soldiers during a raid in Dolouiya, 80 kilometres north of Baghdad, early Saturday. As the US soldiers were performing a dawn raid on a house north of the city, the Iraqi soldiers approached them. Mistaking them for insurgents, the US troops shot them dead.
http://rawstory.com/news/2006/Three_Iraqi_soldiers_killed_by_US_f_12092006.html#comments
Iraqi Resistance Report for events of Sunday, 10 December 2006.
Shi’i sectarian attacks drive 1,000 Sunni residents out of Baghdad neighborhoods as effort to split Iraq along sectarian lines continues in accordance with Zionist and US schemes.
the Shi’i sectarian gunmen and puppet government troops used loudspeakers to declare: “To the children of Mu’awiyah the infidel and ‘Umar the homosexual, you have just half an hour to leave your houses or we will burn them over your heads.”
Local residents said that half of the weapons being carried by the Shi’i sectarians were Iranian made and new.
Jaysh al-Mahdi gunmen attack western Baghdad’s al-Ghazaliyah neighborhood.
Battle rages Sunday between Jaysh al-Mahdi attackers and Sunni residents in Baghdad’s al-’Amil neighborhood.
Resistance men ambush Jaysh al-Mahdi militiamen near Balad Saturday.
US soldier reported killed in Samarra’ Saturday.
Resistance sharpshooter reportedly kills two US soldiers Bayji Saturday.
US troops kill three of their allies, the puppet “Iraqi National Guard” by mistake near ad-Dulu’iyah on Saturday.
Resistance blasts US base in Rawah with Grad rockets Saturday evening.
Resistance fighters ambush US patrol in southwestern al-Fallujah Saturday.
Resistance bomb damages US Humvee; Resistance mortar blast US base in al-Fallujah.
Resistance bomb rips through puppet “National Guard” patrol in al-Fallujah Saturday night.
Resistance fighters gun down Iraqi puppet soldier on leave in al-Mawsil Saturday.
Taliban and Allies Tighten Grip in North of Pakistan
The militants, the officials say, are openly flouting the terms of the September accord in North Waziristan, under which they agreed to end cross-border help for the Taliban insurgency that revived in Afghanistan with new force this year.
Peace deals between Islamic militants and Pakistan’s government have created a virtual Taliban mini-state near Afghanistan, giving militants a “free hand” to recruit, train and arm for cross-border attacks, a think tank reported Monday.
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/12/11/terror/main2244835.shtml
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IT’S OFFICIAL! OLMERT CONFIRMS ISRAEL HAS NUCLEAR WEAPONS!
This is not news to anyone who has been following Israel’s history for any length of time, but it is a major problem for the Israel-firsters in the US, who justify the billions sent to Israel on the need for poor little Israel to defend itself against those mean ol’ Arabs.
But now it is confirmed, Israel isn’t defenseless. It has nuclear weapons, not subject to any controls at all, with which to threaten their neighbors.
Remember the invasion of Iraq? Remember the REASON we were told we had to invade Iraq, because Iraq had NOOKULAR BOMBS! Of course, as it turned out, they didn’t. The nukes are down in Israel, where the Arab nations, Mordecai Vanunu, and assorted bloggers have been telling you they were all along.
US Zionist Media and International Human Rights Day
Today is International human rights day. It is a start of a new week after a week of rabid racist and anti-human rights rhetoric and work carried around the US by the usual suspects (joined by a few others who finally outed themselves as racists). The US media has had little coverage of human rights issues. Instead the vicious attacks on Jimmy Carter continue even though many of us consider his book far too leaning and accommodating to racist Zionism (see below). Behind the scenes and with no debate allowed, a a bill passed in Congress to apply draconian sanctions on Palestinians, collective punishment, until they “elect” (I put quotes because people under occupation do not have full freedom to engage in modalities of elections as International and Human Rights laws require) more acceptable leaders who will agree to Israeli and US demands of surrender.
http://www.aljazeerah.info/11%20o/US%20Zionist%20Media%20and%20International%20Human%20Rights%20Day%20By%20Mazin%20Qumsiyeh.htm
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ISRAELI SPY RING PROBE WIDENS
While two executives of the powerful Israeli lobby group American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) await trial on charges of spying against the United States, the FBI has now broadened its investigation to look at whether the group tried to strike a deal with a leading member of Congress. In particular, federal investigators wish to know if AIPAC tried to reach a shady arrangement with Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.), the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee.
http://www.americanfreepress.net/html/israeli_spy_ring_probe.html
FLASHBACK: American Ambassador Recalls Israeli Assassination Attempt-With U.S. Weapons
Picked up by Lebanese security, the anti-tank canisters had made-in-America markings. After unanswered telegrams to the State Department and all but silent responses to his telephone inquiries, Dean eventually learned that the anti-tank weapons were sold and shipped to Israel in 1974. Dean apparently mused to himself on the irony of an American ambassador being subjected to an Israeli assassination attempt with American weapons supplied to Israel for defense.
http://www.wrmea.com/archives/november02/0211015.html
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FLASHBACK: Israel’s Failed Assassination Attempt on U.S. Ambassador Documented
Had Mossad, Israel’s secret intelligence organization, succeeded, it would have been the perfect crime-the crime of the century. The plan was breathtaking in concept: to assassinate the American ambassador to Lebanon, in Lebanon, with American weapons, intended for Israeli’s defense only. Everything about it would point to Lebanon as the culprit.
http://www.wrmea.com/archives/May_2004/0405013.html
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Occupied Gaza: 3 Children Killed: Mourners storm Gaza parliament
The children, sons of a Palestinian intelligence official loyal to Mahmoud Abbas, the president, were shot dead in a car outside their school in occupied Gaza on Monday.
http://tinyurl.com/wnolk
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Threat of Palestinian Civil War Looms
By threatening to ignite a Palestinian civil war, the killing of three children in the Gaza Strip on Monday has jeopardized Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s efforts to restart long-stalled peace talks. As the violence intensified, Palestinians moved further away from their hoped-for national unity government – seen as a precondition for renewed negotiations with Israel.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/story/0,,-6273587,00.html
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Tutu: Israel Refused Visas to Fact-finding Mission to Gaza Strip
“We find the lack of co-operation by the Israeli government very distressing,” Tutu told reporters after UN officials said Israel had blocked his UN fact-finding mission from entering the Palestine Authority-controlled Gaza Strip
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/news.php3?id=117209
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Full Text: Draft of speech in which U.N. secretary-general criticizes Bush administration
As far as I’m concerned, we can’t put forward enough reminders of how the U.S. government-and the corporations that own it-do business. Platitudes about peace, freedom, justice, etc., aside, the land of the free is not even remotely interested in spreading democracy. There is an abundance of evidence to back up this assertion. For now, I offer the example of post-World War II Italy. Mussolini was gone but the U.S. elites had no intention of letting Italy slip through the cracks.
http://www.altpr.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=698
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Against Torture : LATIN AMERICAN INTELLECTUALS PRESENT A MANIFESTO “AGAINST TORTURE”
The militarily organized practice of torture, the sexual abuse, and all other abuses of men and women, clandestine incarcerations and forced disappearances, are not new in the history of the Third World, and of Latin America in particular. It has been instead an historical constant of colonial, neocolonial and neoliberal domination.
http://tinyurl.com/y55v68
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Ohio Rep. Kucinich to run for president
The Ohio congressman said he was inspired to run because he disagrees with the way some of his fellow Democrats are handling the war, including approval of a proposal to spend $160 billion more on the conflict.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20061211/ap_on_el_pr/kucinich2008
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Inquiry Sought Over Evangelical Video
A military watchdog group is asking the Defense Department to investigate whether seven Army and Air Force officers violated regulations by appearing in uniform in a promotional video for an evangelical Christian organization.
http://tinyurl.com/yjxcbd
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-muslim voice-
______________________________________ BECAUSE YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO KNOW
(Disinformation Books). He can be found on the Web at 
