Reader TeddyFlipped alerts us to an article written by Harold Evans in the Times of London, that warns of the Anti-Semitic lies that threaten all of us.

UPI -A leader of the small worldwide Muslim reform movement warned the West Tuesday against wishful thinking as the U.S. government promotes an intensive dialogue with Islam.
Bassam Tibi, the Winston Smith of the Muslim world, sees things clearly:

The dialogue is not proceeding well because of the two-facedness of most Muslim interlocutors on the one hand and the gullibility of well-meaning Western idealists on the other...First, both sides should acknowledge candidly that although they might use identical terms these mean different things to each of them. The word 'peace,' for example, implies to a Muslim the extension of the Dar al-Islam -- or 'House of Islam' -- to the entire world

WAR IS PEACE.

Similarly, when Muslims and the Western heirs of the Enlightenment speak of tolerance they have different things in mind. In Islamic terminology, this term implies abiding non-Islamic monotheists, such as Christians, Jews and Zoroastrians, as second-class believers. They are 'dhimmi,' a protected but politically immature minority.According to Tibi, the quest of converting the entire world to Islam is an immutable fixture of the Muslim worldview.

FREEDOM IS SLAVERY.

In an article in the prestigious Hamburg weekly, Die Zeit, Tibi, gave anecdotal evidence of how daunting a task this dialogue with Islam can be.
The bishop of Hildesheim in Germany paid an imam a courtesy visit in his mosque. The imam handed the Catholic prelate a Koran, which he joyfully accepted. But when the bishop tried to present the imam with a Bible, the Muslim cleric just stared at him in horror and refused to even touch Christianity's holy book.

IGNORANCE IS STRENGH
(link via Charles Johnson of lgf)

Have a good weekend! No more posts until Sunday morning

European graffiti circa 1939: JEWS TO PALESTINE European graffiti 2002: JEWS OUT OF PALESTINE This is one of the depressing realities that Yossi Klein Halevi feels is turning The nation of Jews into "the Jew of nations."

Quote of the day: "The secret of success is sincerity. Once you can fake that you've got it made" - Jean Giraudoux

Mark Steyn Is pretty sure that Osama is dead

George Will takes on the Anti-choice liberals:

It has been well said that really up-to-date liberals do not care what people do, as long as it is compulsory. Many liberals are "pro-choice" only about killing unborn babies. Not about owning guns, driving large cars, wearing fur, smoking cigarettes, privately investing a portion of their Social Security taxes, saying the unedited (by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit) Pledge of Allegiance, and on and on and on. The opposition to school choice for the poor is the starkest immorality in contemporary politics. It is the defense of the strong (teachers unions) and comfortable (the middle class, content with its public schools and fretful that school choice might diminish their schools' resources and admit poor children to their schools) against the weak and suffering -- inner-city children.

CNN is really taking their pledge seriously, (CNN.com at least) this page is a must see

Letter To the editor of the Wall Street Journal (Here's the Link)

(I read your editorial about how the home video of Palestinian mother Naima al-Obeid and her 19-year-old son, Mahmoud, was made public, celebrating his decision to carry out a homicide mission, in which he was successful in being killed, while killing two Israelis. I submit the following letter, hoping to reach Naima al-Obeid.)

To Naima al-Obeid:

I want to buy your children. As I understand it, you have seven children still alive (your son Mahmoud killed himself, I'm sorry to hear). I'll offer more than Saddam Hussein has offered; he'll pay $25,000 each, if they are willing to turn themselves into human bombs, but I'll pay $30,000 each.

I want to buy them away from the god of death you worship. Perhaps I can help them convert to traditional Islam, a religion that abhors murder and suicide. Maybe they'll wish to become Christian or Jewish or Buddhist or atheist. That will be their choice, if I can raise them as Americans.

If you sell your children to Hussein, instead of me, they are guaranteed to die young, to die blown to bits, to die while perhaps killing innocent women and children. I can't guarantee them immortality (neither can that god of death you worship, I can assure you), but I can guarantee to try to keep them safe and allow them to live long, healthy and productive lives. That's our dream in America.

I will pay top dollar for your children. I will top the offer of Hussein, of the Saudis, of Hamas, or the Palestinian Authority put together.

For a long time my wife and I have wondered what we might do to help in the war on terror. In buying your children, I see an opportunity for us to save countless innocent lives, among them your seven children.

Contact me. I'll pay.

SCOTT MILLER, Atlanta
Thursday, June 27, 2002 12:01 a.m. EDT

Jay Nordlinger has been researching an article on Anti-Semitism on college campuses, and shares some of the details in his column.(scroll down a little) he also links to a story he has previously shared of his own Campus experience:

I’d like to say one more thing — something autobiographical. I have held off, but it seems appropriate, and — who knows? — it may be of some help to people, as they think our situation through.

When I was young, I was quite the little Arabist — cocksure, arrogant, wholly misguided. I grew up in Ann Arbor, Mich., and there were many Arab students — most of them Palestinian — in my high school. I befriended them, loved them. Was intensely interested in them. Some wore keys around their necks, and they claimed that these were the keys to the homes back in Palestine their families had been forced to abandon. I was mightily impressed. Later on, I knew to doubt the authenticity of those keys.

I remember one girl, who liked me, asking, “Jay, you’re not Jewish, are you?” She had to be reassured before our friendship could continue.

I was taught to believe that the Arab-Israeli conflict was very much like the American South: a civil-rights struggle. The Arabs were the blacks — the victims, the oppressed. The Israelis were the whites, the oppressors. Menachem Begin was pretty much George Wallace; his defense minister, Ariel Sharon, was Bull Connor (they even looked alike). Arafat, of course, was Martin Luther King. It seemed very clear.

In due course, I grew up, but it took a while. I enrolled in the Near Eastern Studies Department at the University of Michigan, where I took several courses, including the Arabic language. The department was dominated by extremists. The graduate assistants, certainly, were Arabs to the “left” of the PLO, meaning, they took Arafat and Co. to be sell-outs, untrue to the cause. There was no discussion of the legitimacy of Israel: It wasn’t discussable; Israel was illegitimate, and every worthy person knew it.

One day, we trooped into an auditorium to see a documentary on the conflict. I can’t remember the name of the documentary or of the documentary-maker, but I can see her, and she was on hand to introduce her film and to take questions. The film featured mainly radical Palestinians talking about dismembering Israel.

During the Q&A, a middle-aged white woman — a little fat — raised her hand and asked the following question: “These were such extreme voices. You’ve made a wonderful film, but couldn’t you have found some softer, more moderate voices?”

In the row in which I was sitting were several Arab students — older ones, graduate students — and one of them, in front of everybody, stood up and said words I will never forget. I won’t forget the words, or his face, or his relatively quiet, determined tone. He said: “I will kill you.” (This was directed at the woman who had asked the question.) His buddies got him to sit down.

But that’s not the important part — what he said is not the important part. The important part is, no one said a word. No one reacted. We all sort of coughed, and looked away, nervously. We all pretended that what had just occurred had not, in fact, occurred — or that it was normal, acceptable. We simply ignored it.

Eventually, I took another path, both at the university and in my own thought. I could never be convinced that America and its influence were evil. I could not be convinced that Israel was illegitimate. And I could not accept the “I will kill you” and our complete cowardice, or complicity, in the face of it.

I sort of vowed, inwardly, that I wouldn’t be afraid, wouldn’t be intimidated, by Arab extremism. We all dance delicately around it. We tend to sweep it under the rug. We look away, all politically correct, and cough . I further vowed that, unlike my fellow white liberals, I would pay Arabs the compliment of treating them as full human beings, accountable for their words and actions, capable of good or bad, like everyone else — morally responsible. I wouldn’t treat them as children, unable to help a certain savagery. I wouldn’t “understand” that savagery, in the sense my teachers intended. I wouldn’t have double, or triple, or quadruple standards. All men were equal.

My lessons were hard, but they have lasted, and I believe they are right ones.

FOUAD AJAMI has a great column in todays WSJ warning the palestinians of the prices they are going to have to pay for the choices they have made.

Jeff Jacoby makes an important point

...it is not only Arafat and his aides who are compromised by terror. The Palestinian people themselves are openly wedded to it and deeply opposed to coexistence with Israel. Bush fudged when he said, ''The hatred of a few holds the hopes of many hostage.'' The dismal truth is that among the Palestinians, it is the majority who nurse hatred and support the slaughter of civilians.

Just this month, a poll by the Jerusalem Media and Communication Center, a Palestinian institute, found that 68 percent of Palestinians approve of suicide bombings and 51 percent favor the liquidation of Israel. Palestinian TV extols the terror attacks that have been turning Israeli pizza shops and commuter buses into horrific scenes of massacre. Palestinian muftis preaching in the mosques of Gaza exhort the faithful to kill Jews ''wherever you meet them.'' Summer camps indoctrinate Palestinian kids in jihad; schoolbooks teach them that Israel must be destroyed.

Articles and opinion columns in the media too often make the claim that that the majority of Palestinians don't approve of the "extremists" that are "hijacking" the process.

I don't have much to say about the Pledge decision, (I'm against it) but Victor Davis Hanson does

Charles Krauthammer on Democracy and the Middle East

As long as Arafat is in control, the blood is guaranteed to flow. Of course he has to go. But President Bush went far beyond the obvious. He dared to apply the fundamental principle of American foreign policy--the promotion of democracy--to the one area where it has always been considered verboten: the Middle East.

Why is that important? Because the Middle East conflict is often dismissed as one of those incurable they-have-been-killing-each-other-for-centuries ethnic conflicts. So what can we do?

Do what Europe did. Europeans have been killing each other for millennia (see Heroditus, Thucydides, Caesar). But not anymore. Why? They discovered democracy, and the peace that comes with tolerant, open societies.

When CNN decided to no longer show the videos made by Palestinian "suicide" bombers, and to pay more attention to the plight of their victims, it was not simply an example of a media company “caving” under pressure from Pro- Israel letter writers and activists, or a planned one-day boycott by an Israeli cable company. There has also been a sweeping (if less noticed) shift in the coverage of the Arab Israeli conflict by the NY Times, who themselves were subject to a boycott by some American Jewish groups.

I know I’m going to take some heat for saying this, but I think that the Media, in general, has swung from being rabidly Pro-Palestinian to being, if not Pro-Israeli, somewhere in between (where they should be) I was watching MSNBC recently, and in a segment about the re-surrounding of Ramalah, the anchor (Lester Holt) tried in vain to get the reporter to say something negative about the Israeli troops. He asked the reporter to explain how uncomfortable the residents of the town must be with the troops there. The reporter refused to bite, claiming the troops were allowing the residents as much leeway as they possibly could, then called them “brave” for doing so. This was MSNBC! It is clear to me that something has changed. Did the media just cave to pressure to moderate their own views of the conflict? Not likely. What I think happened is this: Their views have simply changed.

One of the more popular claims about media bias from the Israeli side, is that the reporters were ignorant of the history of the conflict. The claim for the most part was true. Early this year the major television and print outfits sent reporters to the region that had no specific knowledge of the conflict. Their view of the conflict was, as was to be expected, a reflection of their liberal slant, their sympathy for the underdog, and their general moral and cultural relativism. (Whether there was some latent Anti-Semitism is another issue.) Namely they felt (naively) that most of the population on both sides wanted peace, but the events were being hijacked by extremists. They were quite susceptible to the lure of stories like Sharon vs. Arafat, the two teenage girls, bomber and victim, and concepts like the “Cycle of Violence.” When, early on, they saw evidence of evil on one side, they assumed they would find it on the other. Their identification with the underdog, and the belief that there were “extremists” on both sides, caused them to discount all the things they disagreed with on the Palestinian side of the aisle. When “moderate” Palestinians would say things like “I think killing of innocents is wrong, but you have to understand the environment of occupation that causes people to resort to suicide bombing” they would nod their heads, and think if only the Israelis were that sensitive, we could all just get along. (Or something like that) These ideas have fundamental inconsistencies that evaporate if examined too closely. The reporters are slowly learning that there really aren’t that many “moderates” in the west bank, Arafat really is a terrorist, (who would have thought?) and that most Palestinians do want all of Israel back. This turnaround is happening slowly, but I would bet that these reporters would not recognize the stuff they wrote during the Jenin frenzy. The editors back home meanwhile, are actually being forced (by pressure from both sides) to examine carefully the way they report these stories. The CNN producers were probably surprised to find out exactly how much more time they spent talking about the suicide bombers and their families then they spent on the victims. After all, reporters while they might be soft brained, are people too. They were biased at the start because they didn’t know any better. They are learning. The more the Arab Israeli conflict remains front-page news, the better Israel looks. This unfortunately doesn’t apply to the Euros, as they’ve got too much real Anti-Semitism bouncing around that place to chalk up their sympathy for the Palestinians to Ignorance.

The corruption of the U.N. is so accepted, that when Israel asks them, in their role as administrators of the refugee camps, to help stop the suicide attacks, it is seen as a "clear bid to embarrass an institution Israel has long seen as biased"
(link via Laurance Simon)

Quote of the day: I bet after seeing us, George Washington would sue us for calling him 'father'." --Will Rogers

Jonah Goldberg writes that when it comes to the Middle East, Honesty is the Best Policy He is sick of the illogical arguments used to justify, among other things "suicide" attacks:

my favorite example of this Mobius-strip logic: the people here in the U.S. who would justify suicide bombings because Palestinians don't have tanks and planes while insisting that the Palestinians want peace. Well, if they are only using suicide bombers because they don't have tanks and planes, logic suggests that if they had tanks and planes they would use them. In other words, they're at war with Israel, they're just poorly equipped. If a career armed robber doesn't have a gun and uses a crowbar instead, that doesn't change the fact that he's a robber. If he told the judge "I don't have guns and squad cars like the police, I have to use a crowbar," we wouldn't nod with appreciation at the impeccable logic. But if you make this point about Palestinians, eyes roll at your simplistic view of such a complicated situation.

Dennis Prager asks the question, Why does the left support the Palestinians? The Answer?

In general, the left does not care about women, independent judiciaries, minorities, democracy, gays or almost anything else for which it marches...Nearly all the causes the left speaks for are noble-sounding covers for its real agenda -- the overthrowing of Western, especially Judeo-Christian and capitalist, values. Remember the chant at Stanford, "Hey, hey, ho ho, Western civ has got to go"? That is what animates the left.

If you live in Michigan, vote for this guy.

The Arab News claims that "The West" is using "Psychological warfare" against Saudi citizens. This is the funniest thing I have read recently, made all the more so by the lack of intent. An example of the "warfare":

His operation, it must be admitted, was beautifully carried out: a polite handshake that was followed, after he was sure the female victim’s trust had been earned, by a dramatic series of penetrating questions regarding her assumed oppression as a woman, her assumed Al-Qaeda sympathies, and her assumed personal adoration of someone called Osama Bin Laden the poor girl had in fact never given much thought to before.

She later recalled through her sobs that he did not so much listen to her answers as command her in a most dictatorial fashion to make stereotypical statements about Islam and other subjects he knew nothing about so he could later force feed them to his largely ignorant readers back in Britain.

His strategy was to make his victim seem as though she were crazy whenever she objected to his extraordinary and bizarre suppositions.

But that was just the first phase of his operation.

(thanks to Instapundit)

Rich Lowry is reporting that the Saudis think they know where congress's hostility towards them comes from.

Defense Minister Prince Sultan Bin Abdul Aziz accused Jews of leading attack on Saudi Arabia in US congress and British media.On Saturday he told reporters after attending a military graduation in Al-Kharaj that you can see Jewish member of congress wearing their Jewish hats in congressional meetings. He said “we watch them on television wearing their yamaka in congress and that is enough evidence.”

Victor Davis Hanson writes of something there that doesn’t love a wall. He feels it's instructive to notice the reasons why Arafat doesn't like the wall, when it might be seen as a step toward a Palestinian state.

Mr. Arafat, whose state-run media glorifies suicide-murdering more than his aides pro forma denounce it, is aghast for other reasons. With this new fence, he really will have his own private state of sorts — a land cut off from the Jews but with an open border to all his beloved Arab neighbors. His ire, rather than delight, suggests that the Palestinian Authority is parasitic on Israel: It wants an open border with a free, democratic, and economically vibrant neighbor for profit and fun — but it also needs an indefensible populace "a stone's throw away" that it can threaten and from time to time vent frustrations at due to the failure of its own corrupt government. Without accessible Jews, who is Arafat to terrorize or profit from?

Eric Raymond (a.k.a Armed and Dangerous) has written an in important essay, Why Americans Don't Understand the Threat of Jihadism. It is the third of a series but it stands up beautifully on its own. Read it. Then bookmark him, He’s great

British journalist Melanie Phillips has written an excellent piece called Wake up Europe,that explains away the myth that Arab anti-Semitism is merely some form of anti-Zionism. The piece draws on Bat Ye’Or’s recent book Islam and Dhimmitude: Where Civilisations Collide as well as Robert S. Wistrich’s Muslim Anti-Semitism: A Clear and Present Danger, which you can read here.
(Link via Charles Johnson)

Loyal reader Teddyflipped alerts us to an article from the Jewish World Review describing the hideous physics of "suicide" bombing, (Visit Teddyflipped's website to support Israel by buying Israeli products)

Chuck Colson warns of the radical Islamists preying on our nation’s prison population. Though his answer to the problem is somewhat intellectually dishonest, he presents a problem that to my mind is quite serious.

One more thing - I understand the need to qualify statements about Islamofascism with sentences like this one-"Yes, most Muslims interpret jihad as an inner struggle." but I think the word "most" might be a little hopeful. Do more than half of Muslims feel that Jihad is something less than total war? I doubt it. And there is certainly no evidence to that effect. the word "some" is probably more honest.

CNN has decided that they have been showing more footage of Suicide bombers and their families than the Israeli victims and their families. While not admitting bias, CNN says it will no longer air videotaped footage of the suicide bombers

The Earth Island Journal, an environmentalist magazine, has an article fawning over Islam, calling it a "greener religion. They quote some passages from the Koran, talk to a few Imams, all peace and love, peace and love. The mere idea of environmentalists quoting scripture strikes me as hilarious. Oh, and did I mention that Islam is also very animal friendly? Apparently some women went to hell for locking her cat in the closet (says the Koran). So there you go, lock a cat in a closet, you’re going to hell. Kill some of the “apes and pigs”; you go straight to heaven. Every Shaheeds nightmare; you kill thirty Jews, and then find out you’re going to hell because you forget to let the dog out before you blew yourself to bits.

Jonah Goldberg of NRO has identified The Real Nazi's.

At some point the left is going to realize that the Arabs are screwing up all their arguments for cultural relativism. James Lileks has written a must read screed on the scary views that are common on our college campuses, and other bastions of soft-brained intellectualism.

Bruce Thornton, the second-most eloquent Classics professor at Cal State Fresno, claims he doesn't understand the Left's distaste for Israel. he then proceeds to explain it pretty well in this article for Frontpagemag.com.

Peggy Noonan has some interesting things to say about Smallpox vaccinations. If medical professsionals are claiming that it would be a good idea to vaccinate them for smallpox,it's a good bet it is good for everybody.

John Derbyshire thinks a "Provisional State" made up of the West Bank and Gaza is An Insanely Bad Idea. History, he points out, has never been kind to states that are made up of non-contiguous parts. He doesn't like the "solutions" that have been suggested:

The other day I was listening to some TV talking head explaining that it would be a good idea, following the establishment of a Palestinian state, for the West Bank and Gaza to be connected by an elevated expressway. That would (he explained) cause minimal bother to the Israelis, and would give the West Bank access to the sea. I was sitting there watching this person, who to the best of my recollection did not have bananas sticking out of his ears, and thinking to myself: You, Sir, are mad, crazy, deranged, delusional, barmy, wacko, and meshuga.

Does anybody disagree?

Fox news is reporting that the FBI is warning of possible attacks on American Jews and Synagogues using fuel trucks.

The American embassy in Saudi Arabia is warning all Americans in the country to "check their cars before starting them." The violence towards Americans in that country, and the Saudi’s obstruction of American investigations into any of the incidents is starting to get shameful. Are we that desperate for oil? Do the Saudi’s dictate our relationship or do we? They are clearly not our allies, yet the Bush administration seems unwilling to see it that way.

Paul Hollander, writes a great article about how the Islamofascists have ruined Hannah Arendt's theory of the Banality of Evil

Rarely in history has the relationship between belief and behavior been so clear as in the actions of the Islamic suicide pilots and bombers fortified and reassured as they had been by conceptions and personifications of evil defined with great clarity and held unhesitatingly. There was nothing banal, impersonal, dispassionate or detached about their behavior. A pure, burning hatred of the evil eagerly embraced motivated them as well as certain specific, if peculiar but deeply felt beliefs in other-wordily rewards.

Hollander goes on to warn of the danger inherent in divorcing the ideas of our enemies from their actions.

There have also been many attempts to deny that Islamic religious beliefs could have inspired or legitimated the murderous political impulses and behavior of the suicide bombers. These attempts are reminiscent of the old dispute about the relationship between Marxism and the practices of communist states. The repressive nature of these states cannot be directly blamed on Marx and his theories but there was a connection, at the very least in the sense of entitlement to ruthlessness on behalf of great ideals to be realized. A paradise awaiting the suicide bomber is such an ideal or aspiration, and it is a religious notion not invented by the individuals in question who act on it.

David Brooks writes in the Atlantic Monthly of the myth that is Yasser Arafat. Not surprisingly, almost everything that Abu Amar says about himself or his background, is untrue.

Charles Krauthammer's column on the State Department's new idea that is A Guarantee of More Violence

Update: Fred Barnes doesn't like the new "provisional state" idea either.

Anne Wilson has a fascinating post on the Pat Rousch story. Apparently the State Department had a page on their website asking American women to think twice before marrying those charming, "westernized," Saudi fellows (the problem doesn’t occur with Saudi women, who are banned from marrying non-Saudis). It warned of the possibilities of not being allowed to travel, work, drive a car, or see your kids should the marriage not work out. It also let on that the State department would be of no help whatsoever. The American Muslim Council complained, and the page was taken down. (The State flunkies can be of help sometimes; it just depends who you are) Gone, but not forgotten, the page can be viewed >here

From the Duh! file

The Forward is reporting on a new study of the Arab-Israeli conflict

Compared to Palestinian casualties, Israel's dead during the 21-month-old intifada include a higher percentage of noncombatants, women, children and people 40 and over, according to a new study.Due out next week, the study by the Herzliya-based International Policy Institute for Counter-Terrorism shows that only 22% of the 506 Israelis killed in the intifada through May were combatants, compared to 53% of the 1,450 Palestinians killed during the same period.The number of Israeli women killed (135) is twice as high as Palestinian women and the number of Israelis 40 and over killed (159) is 50% higher than the same Palestinian cohort — despite the fact that three times as many Palestinians have died overall.

So let me get this straight... the Palistinians are targeting...civilians? Who could of seen that coming?.

Mark Steyn is not frightened by the "Dirty Bomber," America's latest Scare of the week

a dirty bomb is a l'il ol' pissant firecracker that real men scoff at. "Mass death"? Dream on, jihadi losers. It might kill a few dozen folks, maybe a couple hundred, and turn a bunch of the stampeding pantywaists into panty-radioactive-waists, but that's no reason to get in a big panic. If you're, say, a 5' 2" gran'ma who happens to be in the right-hand seat of a mid-size sedan in the vicinity of Times Square when the dirty bomb goes off, you're more likely to be killed when a Chevy Tahoe fleeing the scene rear-ends you causing your lethal passenger-side air-bag to go off.

Dan Beste Of USS Clueless, has a pretty good discussion of Israel's options for fighting terror

Victor Davis Hanson is afraid that some of us have false hopes

Where do such optimistic (but quite dangerous) American assumptions about the human condition arise? Why do some of us believe that the hundreds of state-of-the-art M-1 tanks we shipped to Egypt will never be used against Israel, that the nuclear waste in Korea will not packed into missiles aimed at Japan, or that the guns we sent to Arafat will not be used to riddle Israeli schoolchildren? Most average Americans, of course, would never entertain such delusions.

He suggests that a few of the editors of our media elites, along with some of State Department should switch places with average americans for a year

I have no idea what havoc the local cesspool pumper, the peach picker, or real-estate hustler would do during a year's sojourn in the State Department or as hosts of NPR. Plenty, perhaps. But I do know that they would never provide nuclear expertise to North Korea — much less condone giving machine guns to the Palestinian Authority..

Martin Bodeck has come up with an interesting theory on why the West has been able to sustain democrocies while all those Arab countries can't. I'ts called Comedemocracy, and i'ts all about our ability to laugh.

We used to be British, but then sought out the Americas so we could drop our quasi-Aussie accents and find better methods of personal hygiene. We set out for America and found a funny native people making rain dances, naming their children after rivers, mountains, and other inanimate objects, and laying the grounwork for the second funniest Seinfeld episode ever, you know the one where he dates Winona? We couldn't quite understand this comedy, so we cut them to pieces. Why did we do this? Because of Comedemocracy Theory # 2.1b:
When a non-funny nation encounters a funny nation, the former will seek to destroy the latter.

The Arabs however,are

The most ticked off people on earth. Why? Because they're not funny, no sense of humor whatsoever, no Palestinian Comedy Awards show to speak of. Also, their women are covered up in Burkas, which is another theory I have that I'll discuss at another juncture. If Osama Bin Laden would've had a cave jester, he would've been happier and not have been so peeved at the U.S. Somebody's gotta e-mail these people some jokes, particularly the ones about Bin Laden himself, it'll liven 'em up a little.

News of Yesterday's Terror attack in Jerusalem was first picked up around 1 a.m. in the White House Situation Room, where staffers decided not to wake the President or his National Security Advisor. I'm not sure I have a problem with that decision, though others clearly do. Let's listen to the explanation from the sensitive Ari Fleischer, the man in whom the president entrusts the delicate task of putting just the right spin on things.

The sad fact is, after so many of these, as horrible as they are, the 10th and the 20th and the 30th just don't have the same emotional impact as the first

What an idiot.

Is there a connection between the recent attempts by the Islamists to boycott Starbucks and the recent revelation by James Lileks,(to use link, click, then scroll down to the post for the 13th) that their biggest competitor (Caribou Coffee) is 87.8% owned by First Islamic Investment Bank? Here is (fellow Detroiter) Debbie Schlussel with the story.

Laurence over at Amish Tech Support downshifts into seriousness to discuss the Jerusalem bombing, with a little experiment that can really make you think. He goes on:

Two mothers kissed their sons goodbye this morning, and one just killed the other.
One weeps, one cheers.
One ends up mourning, and one sees veneration of her son in collectible medallions and leaflets and videotapes.
One has neighbors and family gathering to grieve, and the other is probably celebrating and gathering up their things so that when the bulldozers come they'll be able to put them in the house that Saddam will build for them and they'll furnish it with the checks they'll get from Yasser and Saddam and all the others lining up to praise them.
One asks God for answers, and the other asks God for further bloodshed.
Think about that. Try to figure it out.

Are you street smart? Test yourself.

Hector knocked up three girls in his gang. There are 27 girls in his gang. What is the exact percentage of the girls in the gang that Hector knocked up?

Rufus is a pimp for three girls. If the price is $65 per trick, how many tricks per day must each girl turn to support Rufus' $800 per day crack habit?

These are actual questions from an exam given to 13 and 14 year old students in Thompson , Manitoba. The exam, which asked students for their name, gang name and home room is causing quite a stir in the town of 15,000. Supplied with the exact speed of travel and the number of seconds it takes to load a shot gun, another test question asked students to calculate the distance, Billie, a skateboard thief, would be able to flee before getting "whacked."

Jerusalem's worst suicide attack in six years has taken the lives of 19 and wounded over 40 others. The scene is horrific. A horrible excuse for a human has detonated a ball bearing studded bomb on a bus carrying students to school. The Arab world will certainly have a hard time holding in their glee. Just yesterday the Egyptian foreign minister scolded Israel for beginning to build a fence to separate the Palestinians from Israel. The fence is offensive, no doubt, because it will make it harder for Palestinians to kill Israeli civilians, which according their rhetoric, is the only form of “expression” they have. News reports suggest that Arafat is trying to prevent the Hamas leaders from talking to the press. Yeah, wouldn’t want them to say anything inflammatory.

Today, Ted Turner, in an interview with the British paper The Guardian, accused Israel of Terrorism.

Aren't the Israelis and the Palestinians both terrorizing each other? The Palestinians are fighting with human suicide bombers, that's all they have. The Israelis ... they've got one of the most powerful military machines in the world. The Palestinians have nothing. So who are the terrorists?

On a similar note, he went on to claim that the United States was at fault in the war on terror cause “after all we’re the ones with the A-bombs and Atta and those guys didn’t even have guns” …um… I might have made that part up. In fact, Turner took the opportunity to retract some earlier statements praising the WTC bombers for their bravery. Said Ted, "I made an unfortunate choice of words, look, I'm a very good thinker, but I sometimes grab the wrong word.” The Israeli government choosing their words with the utmost care, called Turner's comments “stupid”

Regulations require that passengers on outbound flights from Reagan National remain in their seats until 30 minutes after takeoff. While the rule was enacted to combat terrorism, it has recently led to an embarrassing political leak

Reader Janice (a.k.a Teddyflipped,) writes in with more information on Jewwatch. According to Access Whois, the website is run by Don Black, an infamous neo-nazi, and publisher of Stormfront.org

The Taliban's official website is still up, and is surprisingly up to date. Go there to vote in important polls such as, Do you believe the Taliban will defeat Army of disbelievers by the Grace of Mighty Allah? Or just get the "real facts" about the infidels.
(Thanks to Instapundit)

Khidhir Hamza, former director of Iraq's nuclear program, Warns that Al Qaeda, Is not the only threat.

Restricting the lookout for this source of terrorism to Al Qaeda is taking the easy way out. No matter how much their caves and former dwellings were searched, all that was found were some primitive documents about nuclear radiation. The real expertise--and the real stockpiles of nuclear material--remain in countries like Iraq and Iran. With Afghanistan removed as a safe haven, terrorist training grounds and sources of expertise have to come from these countries.

Are you a member of a Jewish hate group? I am referring of course to the ACLU, The B’nai Brith, or the Anti–Defamation League. Or are you a citizen of a country with a Zionist occupied government, like Poland, Austria, or Germany? Or maybe you’re a proponent of a Jewish mind control mechanism (Socialism, Liberalism, Civil Rights, Homosexuality, Freudianism, Atheism, Relativity, Paper Money) If you are guilty of any of these sins, be careful, you are being watched .

'Amer: What's your name?
Toddler: Basmallah.
'Amer: Basmallah, how old are you?
Toddler: Three and a half.
'Amer: Are you a Muslim?
Toddler: Yes.
'Amer: Basmallah, are you familiar with the Jews?
Toddler: Yes.
'Amer: Do you like them?
Toddler: No.
'Amer: Why don't you like them?
Toddler: Because . . .
'Amer: Because they are what?
Toddler: They're apes and pigs.
'Amer: Because they are apes and pigs. Who said they are so?
Toddler: Our God

Ain't she the cutest little thing? More Here

Huda Al-Husseini, who made the news recently after writing a poem glorifying suicide bombing, defended himself in an interview,(from MEMRI)against claims that he was an “Ambassador of death.”

That is incitement to murder... It is true that I have many faults, but fear of death is not one of them... I do not fear death - on the contrary, I long to die as a martyr, although I am at an age that does not allow me to carry out a martyrdom operation. My weight does not permit this. But I still hope to die as a martyr...

Remember, this guy is not some mullah, he is the Saudi Ambassador to London. His stay in the west has taught him a few things...

There is a cultural gap. We make fools out of ourselves when we say there are no differences between Islam and the West. The fundamental difference is that in Islam many of the rulings - those included in the right texts - don’t change, and people cannot change them. Yet the rulings in Western culture are the complete opposite. For Muslims, a ruling that has changed is not fit for human beings...according to the Islamic view, no one - the nation cannot, 1,200,000,000 Muslims cannot - make the forbidden permissible and cannot make the permissible forbidden. [In Islam] punishments have been set, and no matter what we say, the West will see them as barbaric and primitive. According to the Western view, flogging is illogical. Execution is unacceptable, and the same goes for amputating hands and stoning. These are things that in Muslim eyes are at the core of the Islamic faith.

So there you have it. The core of the Islamic faith. Flogging, execution,amputating hands and stoning. All the rest is commentary

The fearless John Derbyshire takes issue with the idea that the lack of democracy in the Middle East is All America's Fault.

Shoe bomber Richard Reid is facing one less charge today. U.S. District Judge William Young has thrown out one of the charges against him. The charge — attempting to wreck a mass transportation vehicle — was filed under the USA Patriot Act, which was passed by Congress after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. The reason, you ask? Apparently an airplane is not a mass transportation vehicle.

(Thanks to Laurence over at Amish Tech Support who never fails to amuse.)

Krauthammer writes from Jerusalem of an Israel that is Troubled, but Not Terrorized

For those of you who have not yet listened to Krauthammer's unbelievable speech, the transcript is now available here.

Just finished Michael Oren's fabulous book, Six Days of War. I recommend it highly to anyone with an interest in the Middle East conflict. If that's not good enough for you, read some reviews: Victor Davis Hanson - Amitai Etzioni

Bryant Preston of JunkyardBlog has an interesting theory about Jose Padilla. And lest you think Preston is merely a kook, check out his (unrelated, but interesting) article in the National Review. Actually he still might be a kook but he's a published, respectable, Kook

The Baby Face of Hate

David Tell, opinion editor of the Weekly Standard, attended a briefing on Arabic –language media given by MEMRI (Middle East Media Research Institute.) He was confronted with a glimpse of a culture where

the anti-Semitism is no longer ancillary but central, basic, and paramount. It turns out that the Islamic Middle East, just as the Israelis have been begging us for years to figure out, has got itself trapped in a deep, deep swamp of near-psychotic Jew hatred.

He cites several chilling examples of how much our societies differ:

The April 25, 2002 interview with Prof. 'Adel Sadeq, head of the psychiatry faculty at 'Ein Shams University in Cairo, for example. Professor Sadeq beams with glee as he explains how Western civilization "has no concepts such as self-sacrifice and honor," which is why Americans fail to understand that the suicide bomber experiences "the height of ecstasy and happiness" just at the moment when, "ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one, and then he presses the button to blow himself up." Big smile.

Then there's the May 9, 2002, program on "discipline in the family," featuring one Jasem Al-Mutawah, an "expert on family matters," who patiently describes to his viewers where on her body, how severely, with what weapon, and under what circumstances a man should beat his wife.

I’ll tell you, If Islam didn't mean "peace" I'd think they were complete barbarians

Update: Fox News has a story on the Toddler.

Mark Steyn worries that no matter how the terrorists act, and how much they stick out, we still can find excuses not to see them. Consider the now famous case of Johnelle Bryant, an official with the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Mark writes:

Ms. Bryant has come forward now because she thinks "it's very vital that the Americans realize that when these people come to the United States, they don't have a big 'T' on their forehead." No, indeed. In some cases, they have a big "T-E-R-R-O-R-I-S-T" flashing in neon off the end of their nose. Ten days ago, I pointed out that these fellows made virtually no effort to blend in. They weren't in "deep cover," they were barely covered at all. Atta was the brains of the operation, and he did a marginally better job of it than Leslie Nielsen would have. His one great insight into Western culture was his assumption that he could get a government grant to take out the Pentagon. Yet no matter how dumb he was, officialdom was always dumber.

Fresno cowboy Victor Davis Hanson calls for A New Tone for New Times. He has just been awarded the Breindel Award for Excellence in Journalism, a modest award, for as those who have been reading his columns recently know, he deserves a Pulitzer

Put Your Toothpicks in the Mail

William F. Buckley Jr writes a great column about the absurdity of airline "security." It includes a great story of a

"tall man with a moustache who checked in carrying a magnum automatic pistol, fully loaded. He got by the inspectors in the matter of the firearm, because he had a permit exactly describing and authorizing the weapon. The searcher then turned to a manicure set and removed from it a clipper, used to trim the traveler's moustache. He was told he would have to give up the clipper and have it mailed to his home address".

Charles Krauthammer gave a speech last night at Bar-Ilan University in Jeruselam entitled "He Tarries: Jewish Messianism and the Oslo Peace." Read about it in the Jerusalem Post or listen to the (30 minute) speech here

Thanx to Charles Johnson at Little Green Footballs.(Link at left)

James Taranto, who heads up the Wall Street Journal's Best of the Web, found this interesting item.

Two Palestinians gunned down 24-year-old Yael Sorek, who the Los Angeles Times (link requires free registration) says was "in the late stages of pregnancy" (the Jerusalem Post says she was nine months pregnant) and her husband, Ayal Sorek. An Israeli soldier also died in the attack.

This attack didn't occur in Israel but in Karmei Tzur, a neighborhood in the West Bank Jewish community of Gush Etzion. According to the L.A. Times, Karmei Tzur's establishment "is part of a plan to expand Jewish settlements in the West Bank, despite U.S. and other international calls for an end to the practice." The San Jose Mercury News picks up the L.A. Times piece, but in place of the word practice it uses the highly charged term colonization.

Colonization? According to the Israeli tourism site Travelnet, Jews were living in Gush Etzion as early as 1927, more than two decades before Israel was founded. Arabs drove Jews out of the area during Israel's War of Independence:

After Israel recaptured the West Bank in the 1967 Six Day War, many survivors of the 1948 siege returned to rebuild their community. To describe this as "colonialism" seems simplistic to say the least.

Reuters, in an article reporting on the Al Qaeda Operative recently arrested for planning to set off a "dirty" bomb inside the U.S., lets loose this doozy of a sentence:

The United States blames Saudi-born dissident Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda network for the Sept. 11 hijacking attacks on the United States that killed 3,000 people.

First of all, "dissident"? Are they crazy? Not terrorist? It's hard to believe that they feel "dissident" is the objective description. Secondly, the U.S. " blames Saudi-born dissident...for the Sept. 11 hijacking "; Reuters will not even cede that? I guess they are still working hard trying to get someone on the record about that Mossad plot.

( Thanks to Charles Johnson at Little Green Footballs)

Mary Eberstadt's well researched and fascinating piece The Elephant in the Sacristy (give yourself a little time, it's 16 pages) has caused quite a stir. What she makes clear is the centrality of Homesexuality to the scandal and the media's attempts to downplay it. Blogger Amy Welborn takes issue with some of the article but agrees with most of it

Why the U.S. Will Always Be Rich

David Brooks of the Weekly Standard, and author of Bobos in Paradise, gets his view of American wealth into the NY Times Magazine and it is basically, that we are rich, really rich, no no you're not getting it. Think of the largest number you can think of. Now double it. Multiply that by three and just maybe you can have an inkling of how rich we really are. Surprisingly enough it isn't just the rich that are rich but according to Brooks, it's the poor too (they just don't know it.) Brooks point (though I'm not sure I agree) is that while it should be going to our heads, it isn't.

All hail King Lou!
A letter from Glenn Gayer to Lou Dobbs:
Thank you, thank you Lou Dobbs, for fearlessly speaking the truths that dare not rear their politically incorrect heads on most of your network. This is truly a time for clarity and hard truths. This country is blessed to have individuals like yourself that refuse to to use absurd labels in order to hide the realities of the war America and The West find themselves in. Was it the War on Blitzkriegs? The War on Kamikazes? No, we properly called it the War on Facsism, Naziism. Straight thinking individuals like yourself, Mr. Dobbs, can bring this country the clarity it had back in those other dark days.

The Masai, a tribe that lives in a remote corner of Kenya, have just recently heard about Sep. 11. Their immediate reaction was to donate 14 cows to the United States. Leonard Pitts, in a beautiful column, says this proves the Whole world doesn't hate us, after all

The Spector of Terrorism
As the government tries to flesh out its Homeland security policies, David Tell and the editors of the Weekly Standard take to task those who are "unwilling or unable to engage the conversation on grownup terms." Like Sen. Arlen Spector who, while questioning FBI Director Robert Mueller, said in reference to the possible surveillance of Known al Qaeda in this country, "[I]t's troublesome to have surveillance unless there's a really good reason for doing so." Apperently Mr. Spector is willing to wait for the next attack before allowing the FBI too surveil known al Qaeda supporters.

IN THE PARTY OF GOD;

Are terrorists in Lebanon preparing for a larger war?

JEFFREY GOLDBERG



1-THE MEETING

The village of Ras al-Ein, which is situated in the Bekaa Valley of Lebanon, falls under the overlapping control of the Syrian Army, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, and the Shiite terrorist group Hezbollah, or Party of God. The village is seedy and brown, and is decorated with posters of martyrs and potentates-Ayatollah Khomeini is especially popular-and with billboards that celebrate bloodshed and sacrifice.

I visited Ras al-Ein this summer to interview the leader of a Hezbollah faction, a man named Hussayn al-Mussawi, who, twenty years ago, was involved in kidnapping Americans. Many of those kidnapped were held in Ras al-Ein; they were kept blindfolded, and chained to beds and radiators. It is thought that Ras al-Ein is where William Buckley, the Beirut station chief of the Central Intelligence Agency, was held for a time before he was killed by Hezbollah, in 1985.

When I arrived, it was midday; the air was still and the heat smothering, and the streets were mostly empty. A man was selling ice cream in a park at the center of town. Slides and swing sets, their paint peeling, dot the park; in the middle is a pond covered by a skin of algae. Several women and children were there. The women wore gray chadors, and their heads were covered by scarves, pinned high and tight under the left ear, so that no strand of hair could escape.

Like the rest of the town, the park was crowded with ferocious Hezbollah art. One poster showed an American flag whose field of stars had been replaced by a single Star of David. Another portrayed the Dome of the Rock, the Muslim shrine in Jerusalem, cupped in the bony hand of a figure with a grotesquely hooked nose. A third poster, extolling the bravery of Shiite martyrs, showed a Muslim fighter standing on a pile of dead soldiers whose uniforms were marked with Stars of David. The yellow flag of Hezbollah could be seen everywhere; across the top is a quotation from the Koran, from which Hezbollah took its name-"Verily the party of God shall be victorious"-and at the center is an AK-47 in silhouette, in the hand of the Shiite martyr Husayn, a cousin of the Prophet Muhammad. In the background is a depiction of the globe, suggesting Hezbollah's role in the worldwide umma, or community of Muslims. Along the bottom of the Hezbollah flag is written "The Islamic Revolution in Lebanon." I did not see the red-green-and-white flag of Lebanon anywhere in Ras al-Ein.

I had taken a taxi from Ashrafieh, the prosperous Christian neighborhood in Beirut, to Ras al-Ein, a two-hour trip over potholed roads and through a modest number of roadblocks. The soft Mediterranean air soon gave way to the dry-bones heat of the Bekaa. The taxi-driver, an elderly Christian, had been hesitant about the trip (Lebanon's Christian minority is fearful of Shiite gunmen), but he smoothly negotiated the passage through two Syrian Army checkpoints. At one, a sergeant of about thirty, who carried a side arm and wore a round helmet covered in black mesh, inspected my American passport, handed it back to me, and said, enigmatically, "Osama bin Laden."

We had by then reached the outskirts of Baalbek, the main Bekaa town. Baalbek is famous for three well-preserved Roman temples, of Jupiter, Venus, and Bacchus. (A statue of Hafez al-Assad, the late dictator of Syria and the father of the current dictator, stands at the entrance to the town.) The temples, which are enormous-the two main temples are larger than the Parthenon- are the site of an annual international cultural festival that draws the elite of Beirut, and Lebanese officials like to point to it as proof of Lebanon's normalcy. This year, the festival featured a performance of Michael Flatley's "Lord of the Dance." Ras al-Ein is a couple of miles from the temples, and we soon arrived at the Nawras Restaurant, next to the park, where I was to meet Mussawi. I sat at a table outside, with a view of the street. Two men nearby were smoking hookahs. I ordered a Pepsi and waited.

Shiism arose as a protest movement, whose followers believed that Islam should be ruled by descendants of the Prophet Muhammad's cousin Ali, and not by the caliphs who seized control after the Prophet's death. The roots of Shiite anger lie in the martyrdom of Ali's son Husayn, who died in battle against the Caliph Yezid in what is today southern Iraq. (I have heard both Shiites from southern Iraq and Iranian Shiites refer to their enemy Saddam Hussein as a modern-day Yezid.) At times, Shiism has been a quietist movement; Shiites built houses of mourn-ing and study, called Husaynias, where they recalled the glory of Husayn's martyrdom.

In Lebanon in the nineteen-sixties, the Shiites began to be drawn to the outside world. Some joined revolutionary Palestinian movements; others fell into the orbit of a populist cleric, Musa Sadr, who founded a group called the Movement of the Deprived and, later, the Shiite Amal militia. Hezbollah was formed, in 1982, by a group of young, dispossessed Shiites who coalesced around a cleric and poet named Muhammad Hussayn Fadlallah. They were impelled by a number of disparate forces, including the oppression of their community in Lebanon by the country's Sunni and Christian elites, and the rapture they felt in 1979 as Iran came under the power of "pure" Islam. A crucial event, though, was Israel's invasion of Lebanon in June of 1982.

Fatah, which is part of the Palestine Liberation Organization, had been firing Katyusha rockets into northern Israel from Lebanon, where it had its main base, and Prime Minister Menachem Begin, on the advice of his defense minister, Ariel Sharon, ordered Israeli forces into Lebanon. The stated purpose was to conquer what had come to be known as Fatahland, the strip of South Lebanon under Yasir Arafat's control, and to evict the P.L.O.'s forces. Sharon, though, had grander designs: to secure a friendly Christian government in Beirut and to destroy the P.L.O. It was not so much the invasion that inspired the Shiites, who were happy to see the South free of Arafat and Fatah. The Shiites took up arms when they realized that Sharon, like Arafat, had no intention of leaving Lebanon.

Hezbollah, with bases in the Bekaa and in Beirut's southern suburbs, quickly became the most successful terrorist organization in modern history. It has served as a role model for terror groups around the world; Magnus Ranstorp, the director of the Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence, at the University of St. Andrews, in Scotland, says that Al Qaeda learned the value of choreographed violence from Hezbollah. The organization virtually invented the multipronged terror attack when, early on the morning of October 23, 1983, it synchronized the suicide bombings, in Beirut, of the United States Marine barracks and an apartment building housing a contingent of French peacekeepers. Those attacks occurred just twenty seconds apart; a third part of the plan, to destroy the compound of the Italian peacekeeping contingent, is said to have been jettisoned when the planners learned that the Italians were sleeping in tents, not in a high-rise building.

Until September 11th of last year, Hezbollah had murdered more Americans than any other terrorist group-two hundred and forty-one in the Marine-barracks attack alone. Through terror tactics, Hezbollah forced the American and French governments to withdraw their peacekeeping forces from Lebanon. And, two years ago, it became the first military force, guerrilla or otherwise, to drive Israel out of Arab territory when Prime Minister Ehud Barak withdrew his forces from South Lebanon.

Using various names, including the Islamic Jihad Organization and the Organization of the Oppressed on Earth, Hezbollah remained underground until 1985, when it published a manifesto condemning the West, and proclaiming, "Every one of us is a fighting soldier when a call for jihad arises and each one of us carries out his mission in battle on the basis of his legal obligations. For Allah is behind us supporting and protecting us while instilling fear in the hearts of our enemies."

Another phase began in earnest in 1991, when, at the close of Lebanon's sixteen-year civil war, the country's many militias agreed to disarm. Nominally, Lebanon is governed from Beirut by an administration whose senior portfolios have been carefully divided among the country's various religious factions-Maronite and Greek Orthodox Christians, Sunnis and Shiites and Druze. But in fact Lebanon is under the control of Syria; and the Syrians, with encouragement from Iran, have allowed Hezbollah to maintain its arsenal, and even to expand it, in the interest of fighting Israel as Syria's proxy. The Syrians also allowed Hezbollah to control the Shiite ghettos of southern Beirut, much of the Bekaa Valley, and most of South Lebanon, along the border with Israel.

Hezbollah's current leader, Sayyid Hassan Nasrallah, is as important a figure in Lebanon as the country's ruling politicians and the Syrian President, Bashar al-Assad. Hezbollah officials run for office in Lebanon and win-the group now holds eleven seats in the hundred-and-twenty-eight-seat Lebanese parliament. But within Hezbollah there is little pretense of fealty to the President of Lebanon, Emile Lahoud, who is a Christian, and certainly none to the prime minister, Rafiq Hariri, who is a Sunni Muslim. The only portraits one sees in Hezbollah offices are of Khomeini and of Ayatollah Khamenei, the current ruler of Iran.

Hezbollah has an annual budget of more than a hundred million dollars, which is supplied by the Iranian government directly and by a complex system of finance cells scattered around the world, from Bangkok and Paraguay to Michigan and North Carolina. Like Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah operates successfully in public spheres that are closed off to most terrorist groups. It runs a vast and effective social-services network. It publishes newspapers and magazines and owns a satellite television station that is said to be watched by ten million people a day in the Middle East and Europe. The station, called al Manar, or the Lighthouse, broadcasts anti-American programming, but its main purpose is to encourage Palestinians to become suicide bombers.

Along with this public work, Hez bollah continues to increase its terrorist and guerrilla capabilities. Magnus Ranstorp says that Hezbollah can be active on four tracks simultaneously-the political, the social, the guerrilla, and the terrorist-because its leaders are "masters of long-term strategic subversion." The organization's Special Security Apparatus operates in Europe, North and South America, and East Asia. According to both American and Israeli intelligence officials, the group maintains floating "day camps" for terrorist training throughout the Bekaa Valley; many of the camps are said to be just outside Baalbek. In some of them, the instructors are supplied by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps and Iran's Ministry of Intelligence. In the past twenty years, terrorists from such disparate organizations as the Basque separatist group ETA, the Red Brigades, the Kurdistan Workers' Party, and the Irish Republican Army have been trained in these camps.

A main focus today appears to be the training of specifically anti-Israel militants in the science of constructing so-called "mega-bombs," devices that can bring down office towers and other large structures. The explosion of a mega-bomb is the sort of event that could lead to a major Middle East war. In fact, such attacks have been tried: in April, a plot to bomb the Azrieli Towers, two of Tel Aviv's tallest buildings, was foiled by Israeli security services; in May, a bomb exploded beneath a tanker truck at a fuel depot near Tel Aviv, but did not set off a larger explosion, as planned. Had these operations been successful, hundreds, if not thousands, of Israelis would have died. Salah Shehada, a Hamas leader in Gaza, is said by Israel to have been planning a coordinated attack on five buildings in Tel Aviv. (In July, an Israeli warplane dropped a one-ton bomb on the building where Shehada lived; he was killed, along with at least fourteen others, including nine children.)

Gal Luft, an Israeli reserve lieutenant colonel and an expert on counterterrorism, told me that Hezbollah's role in these plans is unknown. "Hezbollah has experience with bulk explosives," Luft said. "You can make the case that the Hezbollah provides inspiration and advice and technical support, but I wouldn't rule out its own cells trying this." Luft said that it is only a matter of time before a "mega-attack" succeeds.

Hezbollah agents have infiltrated the West Bank and Gaza, and Arab communities inside Israel, helping Hamas and Islamic Jihad and attempting to set up their own cells; many Palestinians revere Hezbollah for achieving in South Lebanon what the Palestinians have failed to achieve in the occupied territories. In the past year, Hezbollah has also been stockpiling rockets for potential use against Israel. These rockets, most of which are from Iran, are said to be moved by truck from Syria, through the Bekaa Valley, and then on to Hezbollah forces in South Lebanon.

Hezbollah has not been suspected of overt anti-American actions since 1996, when the Khobar Towers, in Saudi Arabia, were attacked, but, according to intelligence officials, its operatives, with the help and cover of Iranian diplomats, have been making surveillance tapes of American diplomatic installations in South America, Southeast Asia, and Europe. These tapes, along with maps and other tools, are said to be kept in well-organized clandestine libraries.

In recent days, top American officials have suggested that Hezbollah-and its state sponsors-may soon find themselves targeted in the Bush administration's war on terror. Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage recently called Hezbollah the "A-team" of terrorism and Al Qaeda the "B-team." The C.I.A. has lost at least seven officers to Hezbollah terrorism, including William Buckley. Sam Wyman, a retired C.I.A. official, who recommended Buckley for the job in Beirut, told me that "those who work the terrorism problem writ large, and those who are working the Hezbollah problem writ small, know that this is an account that has not been closed." The chairman of the Senate intelligence committee, Bob Graham, of Florida, says he wants the Administration's war on terrorism to focus not on Iraq but on Hezbollah, its Bekaa Valley camps, and its state sponsors in Iran and Syria. "We should tell the Syrians that we expect them to shut down the Bekaa Valley camps within x number of days, and, if they don't, we are reserving the right to shut them down ourselves," Graham said last month.

After drinking a third Pepsi, I watched a Land Cruiser pull up to the restaurant and deliver a stiff and unhappy-looking man with a well-kept beard. The man sat down silently across from me. Three men, one of whom wore a leather jacket, despite the terrific heat, stood quietly by the Land Cruiser.

The bearded man was not Hussayn al-Mussawi, whom I had hoped to meet. He said that his name was Muhammad, that he was an aide to Mussawi, and that he had been sent to assess my intentions. I was here, I said, to examine the claim that Hezbollah had transformed itself into a mainstream Lebanese political party.

I said that I also wanted to gauge the group's feelings about America, and look for any sign that its implacable opposition to the existence of Israel had changed.

"Are you going to ask about past events?" Muhammad asked. I indicated that I would.

When he pressed me further, I admitted that I was curious about one person in particular, a Hezbollah security operative named Imad Mugniyah. Mugniyah, who began his career in the nineteen-seventies in Arafat's bodyguard unit, is the man whom the United States holds responsible for most of Hezbollah's anti-American attacks, including the Marine-barracks bombing and the 1985 hijacking of a T.W.A. flight, during which a U.S. Navy diver was executed. He is also suspected of involvement in the attack on the Khobar Towers, in which nineteen American servicemen were killed.

Last year, the U.S. government placed Mugniyah on the list of its twenty-two most wanted terrorists, along with two of his colleagues, Ali Atwa and Hassan Izz-al-Din. (Atwa and Izz-al-Din are wanted specifically in connection with the hijacking of the T.W.A. flight in 1985.) The very mention of Mugniyah's name is a sensitive issue in Lebanon and Syria, which have refused to carry out repeated American requests-one was delivered recently by Senator Graham-to shut down Hezbollah's security apparatus, and assist in the capture of Mugniyah. Lebanon's Prime Minister Hariri became agitated when, in a conversation this summer, I asked why his government has refused to help find Mugniyah and his accomplices. "They're not here! They're not here!" Hariri said. "I've told the Americans a hundred times, they're not here!"

Seated in the Nawras Restaurant in Ras al-Ein, across from a man who called himself Muhammad, I said yes, Imad Mugniyah would figure in my story. At that, Muhammad rose, looked at me dismissively, and left the restaurant without a word.

II-THE GOAL

The chief spokesman for Hezbollah is a narrow-shouldered, self-contained man of about forty named Hassan Ezzeddin, who dresses in the style of an Iranian diplomat: trim beard, dark jacket, white shirt, no tie. His office is on a low floor of an apartment building in the southern suburbs of Beirut, which are called the Dahiya. Hezbollah has five main offices there, and all are in apartment buildings, which helps to create a shield between the bureaucracy and Israeli fighter jets and bombers that periodically fly overhead. The shabby offices are sparsely furnished; apparently, the idea is to be able to dismantle them in half an hour or less, in case of an Israeli attack.

The eight members of Hezbollah's ruling council are said to meet in the Dahiya once a week. Lebanese police officers are stationed at a handful of intersections, but they don't stray from their posts. The buildings housing Hezbollah's offices are protected by gunmen dressed in black, and plainclothes Hezbollah agents patrol the streets. Once, while walking to an appointment, I took out a disposable camera and began to take pictures of posters celebrating the deaths of Hezbollah "martyrs." Within thirty seconds, two Hezbollah men confronted me. They ordered me to put my camera away and then followed me to my meeting.

The Shiite stronghold in the southern suburbs of the city is only a twenty-minute drive from the Virgin Mega-store in downtown Beirut, but it might as well be part of Tehran. Ayatollah Khomeini and Ayatollah Khamenei stare down from the walls, and the Western fashions ubiquitous in East Beirut are forbidden; many women wear the full chador. The suburbs are the most densely packed of Beirut's neighborhoods, with seven- and eight-story apartment buildings, many of them jerry-built, jammed against one another along congested streets and narrow alleys. The main businesses in the Dahiya are believed to be chop shops, where stolen automobiles and computers are taken apart and sold.

I was introduced to Ezzeddin by Hussain Naboulsi, and he translated our conversation. Naboulsi is in charge of Hezbollah's Web site. He spent some time in America, and incorporates American slang unself-consciously into his speech. He is young and gregarious, but he grew evasive when the subject of his background came up. "We lived in Brooklyn, and I was going to go to the University of Texas, but then we moved to Canada. . . ." He trailed off.

Ezzeddin said that anti-Americanism is no longer the focus of his party's actions. Hezbollah, he said, holds no brief against the American people; it is opposed only to the policies of the American government, principally its "unlimited" support for Israel. Like all Hezbollah's public figures, Ezzeddin is proud of the victory over Israel in South Lebanon, two years ago, and he spoke at length about the reasons for Hezbollah's success. He quoted a statement of Hezbollah's leader, Sayyid Hassan Nasrallah, made shortly after the Israeli withdrawal: "I tell you: this 'Israel' that owns nuclear weapons and the strongest air force in this region is more fragile than a spiderweb." Ezzeddin explained that Ehud Barak pulled out his troops because the soldiers-and their mothers-feared death. This isn't true for Muslims, he said. "Life doesn't end when you die. To us, there is real life after death. Reaching the afterlife is the goal of life. Once you have in mind the goal of dying, you stop fearing the Jews."

After Israel withdrew from south ern Lebanon, many experts on the Middle East assumed that Hezbollah would focus on social services and on domestic politics, in order to bring about a peaceful transformation of Lebanon into an Islamic republic. Even before the Israeli pullout, a leading scholar of Hezbollah, Augustus Richard Norton, of Boston University, wrote a paper entitled "Hezbollah: From Radicalism to Pragmatism?" In his paper, Norton said that in discussions with Hezbollah officials he had got the impression that the group "has no appetite to launch a military campaign across the Israeli border, should Israel withdraw from the South."

But Hezbollah is, at its core, a jihadist organization, and its leaders have never tried to disguise their ultimate goal: building an Islamic republic in Lebanon and liberating Jerusalem from the Jews. Immediately after the withdrawal, Hezbollah announced that Israel was still occupying a tiny slice of Lebanese land called Shebaa Farms. The United Nations ruled that Shebaa Farms was not part of Lebanon but belonged to the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, and thus was a matter for Israeli-Syrian negotiations. Hezbollah disagreed, and, with Syria's acquiescence, has continued to launch frequent attacks on Israeli outposts in Shebaa.

Ezzeddin seemed to concede that the Hezbollah campaign to rid Shebaa of Israeli troops is a pretext for something larger. "If they go from Shebaa, we will not stop fighting them," he told me. "Our goal is to liberate the 1948 borders of Palestine," he added, referring to the year of Israel's founding. The Jews who survive this war of liberation, Ezzeddin said, "can go back to Germany, or wherever they came from." He added, however, that the Jews who lived in Palestine before 1948 will be "allowed to live as a minority and they will be cared for by the Muslim majority." Sayyid Nasrallah himself told a conference held in Tehran last year that "we all have an extraordinary historic opportunity to finish off the entire cancerous Zionist project."

The balance of forces on Israel's northern border suggests that Hezbollah's ambitions are unrealizable. Its fighters number in the low thousands, at most; the Israeli Air Force is among the most powerful in the world. But the pullout from Lebanon heightened Hezbollah's self-regard, its contempt for Jews, and its desire for total victory. "Everyone told us, 'You're crazy, what are you doing, you can't defeat Israel,' " Ezzeddin said. "But we have shown that the Jews are not invincible. We dealt the Jews a serious blow, and we will continue to deal the Jews serious blows."

The withdrawal of Israeli forces from southern Lebanon, after eighteen years, closed a disastrous chapter in Israeli military history. The conflict destroyed the government of Menachem Begin, and Begin himself; he lived out his final days as a recluse. An Israeli commission held Ariel Sharon, his defense minister, "indirectly responsible" for the massacre by pro-Israeli Christian militiamen of approximately eight hundred Palestinians at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps, in Beirut, in 1982. The Lebanon invasion seemed to have ended Sharon's career. By the time the troops left, more than nine hundred Israeli soldiers had been killed in Lebanon. The withdrawal was badly managed and chaotic. The Army abandoned equipment, and also deserted its Christian allies, a militia called the South Lebanon Army.

In one of the Israeli Army's final acts, sappers tried to bring down the twelfth-century Beaufort Castle, a fortress that sits high over the upper Galilee. The castle had served as a platform for P.L.O. rocket attacks on Israeli towns and farms before Sharon's invasion, and, in the final days of the occupation, the Army was hoping to deny the Palestinians the shelter of its battlements. The Israelis succeeded only in part. The walls did not crumble, and the Hezbollah flag now flies from the highest tower.

I visited Beaufort on a brilliantly hot day this summer, and the only people around were a handful of Hezbollah fighters, a group of Beirutis on a day-long excursion through the South, and two Iranian tourists, with cheap cameras hanging from their necks. One of the Hezbollah guerrillas, a pimply man in his early twenties named Na'im, showed me around. We picked our way across half-collapsed battlements, among thorn bushes and patches of purple and yellow wildflowers, to the remains of the outer rampart, which overlooks a steep drop to the floor of the Litani River valley. Na'im wore bluejeans and a redand-green plaid shirt. He carried a rifle, which he used as a walking stick. He told me that the castle dated back to the Islamic conquest of the Holy Land. In fact, Beaufort was built by the Crusaders, but in Na'im's version the castle began as a Muslim fortress. "Saladin used this to defeat the Crusaders," he said, in a rehearsed manner. "Hezbollah will use it to defeat the Jews."

From where we stood, we had a clear view into the Israeli town of Metulla, with its red-roofed, whitewashed houses, small hotels, and orchards. "The Jews are sons of pigs and apes," Na'im said. We walked down the crumbling rampart, past a dry cistern, and up a ridge to the high tower, where the Hezbollah flag waved in the wind.

From Beaufort, I headed to the village of Kfar Kila, and the border, where the Fatima Gate is situated. During the occupation, Israel called it the Good Fence; it was the entrance to Metulla for Lebanese workers. The Good Fence has been sealed, and is now famous as the place where Palestinians and Lebanese throw rocks at Israeli soldiers.

I saw, on my drive down, the digging of what appeared to be anti-tank trenches, but, though the South may be a future battlefield, it is also a museum of past glory. Of the four or five main Islamic fundamentalist terror organizations in the Middle East, Hezbollah has by far the most sophisticated public-relations operation, and it has turned the South into an open-air celebration of its success against Israel. The experience of driving there is similar in some ways to driving through Gettysburg, or Antietam; roadside signs and billboards describe in great detail the battles and unit formations associated with a particular place. One multicolored sign, in both Arabic and English, reads:

On Oct. 19, 1988 at 1:25 p.m. a martyr car that was body trapped with 500 kilogram of highly exploding materials transformed two Israeli troops into masses of fire and limbs, in one of the severe kicks that the Israeli army had received in Lebanon.

Most of the signs place the word "Israel" in quotation marks, to underscore the country's illegitimacy, and every sign includes a fact box: the number of "Israelis" killed and wounded at the location, and the "Date of Ignominious Departure" of "Israeli" forces. The historical markers also carry quotations from Israeli leaders praising the fighting abilities of Hezbollah's martyrs. One sign reads, "Zionists comments: 'Hezbollah's secret weapon is their self-innovation and their ability to produce bombs that are simple but effective.' " The attribution beneath the quote is "Former 'Israeli' Prime Minister Ihud Barak."

According to Israeli security sources, the Israelis have never been able to infiltrate Hezbollah as they have the P.L.O. One intelligence official told me that Hezbollah leaders have so far been immune to the three inducements that often lure Palestinians to the Israeli side. In Hebrew, they are called the three "K"s: kesef, or money; kavod, respect; and kussit, a crude sexual term for a woman.

The centerpiece of Hezbollah's propaganda effort in the South is the former Al-Khiam prison, a rambling stone-and-concrete complex of interconnected buildings, a few miles from the border, where I stopped on the way to Kfar Kila. For fifteen years, the prison was run by Israel's proxy force in Lebanon, the South Lebanon Army, with the assistance of the Shabak, the Israeli equivalent of the F.B.I. Prisoners in Al-Khiam-which held almost two hundred at any given time-were allegedly subjected to electric-shock torture and a variety of deprivations. The jail has been preserved just as it was on the day the Israelis left. There are still Israeli Army-issue sleeping bags in the cells. Hezbollah has added a gift shop, which sells Hezbollah key chains and flags and cassettes of martial Hezbollah music; a cafeteria; and signs on the walls of various rooms that describe, in Hezbollah's terms, the use of the rooms. "A Room for Investigation and Torturing by Electricity," reads one. "A Room for the Boss of Whippers." "A Room for Investigation with the Help of the Traitors." And "The Hall of Torturing-Burying-Kicking-Beating-Applying Electricity-Pouring Hot Water-Placing a Dog Beside." A busload of tourists, residents of a Palestinian refugee camp outside Beirut, were clearly in awe of the place, treating the cells as if they were reliquaries and congratulating the Hezbollah employees.

Like me, the tourists were headed for the border at Kfar Kila, where one can walk right up to the electrified fence, and where Israeli cameras feed real-time pictures to a series of fortified observation stations just south of the line. An Israeli bunker sits about fifty feet in from the fence-one man told me that the Israeli soldiers never show their faces-and the Palestinians took turns taking pictures and yelling curses. I drove a short distance to a Hezbollah position that faces a massive concrete Israeli fortress called Tziporen. The tour bus, headed for the same place, stopped on the way at an overlook, and the Palestinians got out. On the Israeli side, on a track that ran parallel to the Lebanese road, was a Humvee and three Israeli soldiers. They were protecting a group of workers who were repairing a section of the road. The Israelis were no more than forty feet away, on the lower part of the slope. The experience for the Palestinians-and for a group of Kuwaitis who arrived by car-was something like a grizzly sighting in a national park. "Yahud!" one Kuwaiti said, dumbfounded. "Jews!" His friends produced video cameras and began filming. The Israeli soldiers waved; the Arabs did not. A few began cursing the soldiers and, once it was decided that the workers were Israeli Arabs, cursed them, too. "Ana bidi'ani kak!" one Palestinian yelled at the soldiers-"I want to fuck you up." "Jasus"-"spy"-another called out. An argument broke out on the ridge, and the Palestinians decided that it was not right to curse the Arab workers, who were only earning a living in oppressive circumstances. Apologies were offered, and what was by now a cavalcade moved forward, to the Hezbollah position opposite the Israeli fortress.

Tziporen, the fortress, overlooks the mausoleum of a Jewish sage named Rav Ashi, who was the redactor of the Babylonian Talmud, and who died in 427. The modest mausoleum sits half in Lebanon and half in Israel. Barbed wire runs atop it, and, with the help of a southerly breeze, the Hezbollah flag planted on the Lebanese side of the mausoleum flapped into Israel. The fighters at the Hezbollah position warned us not to get too close to the fence; the Israelis might fire. Rock throwing from a comfortable distance was encouraged, and the Palestinians aimed for the roof of the fort. On weekends, when the crowds are thicker, villagers drive in tractors full of rocks to supply the tourists.

Because it was too risky to approach the fence, it was impossible to read a large billboard planted three feet north of the line. It faced south into Israel, carrying what was obviously a message for the Israelis alone. The border is, of course, sealed, so it was a month before I got a clear look at the billboard. It read, in Hebrew, "Sharon-Don't Forget Your Soldiers Are Still in Lebanon." The message was written under a photograph of a Hezbollah guerrilla holding, by the hair, the severed head of an Israeli commando.

III-THE SUICIDE CHANNEL

The true propaganda engine of Hezbollah is the Al Manar satellite television station. Unlike most of Hezbollah's public offices, the studios of Al Manar are not shoddily built or cheaply decorated. The station's five-story headquarters building in the Dahiya, at the end of a short side street, is surrounded by taller apartment buildings. Guards carrying rifles patrol its perimeter, but, inside, Al Manar has a corporate atmosphere. The lobby is glass and marble, and behind the reception desk a pleasant young man answers the telephone. He sits beneath a portrait of Abbas al-Mussawi, the previous Hezbollah leader, who was assassinated ten years ago by Israel. At the reception desk, women whose dress is deemed immodest can borrow a chador.

Al Manar's news director is Hassan Fadlallah, who is in his early thirties and is a member of the same clan as Muhammad Hussayn Fadlallah, the Hezbollah spiritual leader. Fadlallah, a studious-looking man who had several days' stubble on his face, is working on a Ph.D. in education. He apologized for his poor English. A waiter brought us orange juice and tea.

I began by asking him to compare Al Manar and the most famous Arabic satellite channel, Al Jazeera. "Neutrality like that of Al Jazeera is out of the question for us," Fadlallah said. "We cover only the victim, not the aggressor. CNN is the Zionist news network, Al Jazeera is neutral, and Al Manar takes the side of the Palestinians."

Fadlallah paused for a moment, and said he would like to amend his comment on CNN. "We were very happy with Ted Turner," he said. "We were so happy that he was getting closer to the truth." He was referring to recent comments by Turner, the founder of CNN, who talked about suicide bombers and the Israeli Army and then said, "So who are the terrorists? I would make a case that both sides are involved in terrorism." Turner was criticized harshly in the American press and by supporters of Israel, and later said that he regretted "any implication that I believe the actions taken by Israel to protect its people are equal to terrorism." Fadlallah claimed that Turner revised his statement because "the Jews threatened his life." He said Al Manar's opposition to neutrality means that, unlike Al Jazeera, his station would never feature interviews or comments by Israeli officials. "We're not looking to interview Sharon," Fadlallah said. "We want to get close to him in order to kill him."

Al Manar would not rule out broadcasting comments from non-Israeli Jews. "There would be one or two we would put on our shows. For example, we would like to have Noam Chomsky." Fadlallah suggested, half jokingly, that I appear on a question-and-answer show. (Later, another Al Manar official suggested that I answer questions about what he termed "the true meaning of the Talmud.")

Fadlallah said that one of Al Manar's goals is to set in context the role of Jews in world affairs. Anti-Semitism, he said, was banned from the station, but he was considering a program on "scholars who dissent on the issue of the Holocaust," which would include the work of the French Holocaust denier Roger Garaudy. "There are contradictions," Fadlallah said. "Many Europeans believe that the Holocaust was a myth invented so that the Jews could get compensation. Everyone knows how the Jews punish people who seek the truth about the Holocaust."

It would be a mistake, Fadlallah went on, to focus solely on Al Manar's antiIsrael programs. "We have news programming, kids' shows, game shows, political news, and culture." At the same time, he said, Al Manar is "trying to keep the people in the mood of suffering," and most of the station's daily schedule, including its game shows and children's programming, tends to center on Israel. A program called "The Spider's House" explores what Hezbollah sees as Israel's weaknesses; "In Spite of the Wounds" portrays as heroes men who were wounded fighting Israel in South Lebanon. On a game show entitled "The Viewer Is the Witness," contestants guess the names of prominent Israeli politicians and military figures, who are played by Lebanese actors. Al Manar also has a weekly program called "Terrorists."

Avi Jorisch, a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a pro-Israel think tank, who is writing a book about Al Manar, has visited the station and watched several hundred hours of its programming. The show "Terrorists," he told me, airs vintage footage of what it terms "Zionist crimes," which include, by Hezbollah's definition, any Israeli action, offensive or defensive. According to Jorisch, Al Manar, with its estimated ten million viewers, is not as popular in the Arab world as Al Jazeera, although he noted that Arab viewership is not audited. He said that his Lebanese sources credit Al Manar as the second most popular station among Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. (Al Manar can be received in the United States via satellite.)

Al Manar regularly airs raw footage of violence in the occupied territories, and it will break into its programming with what one Al Manar official called "patriotic music videos" to announce Palestinian attacks and applaud the killing of Israelis. When I visited the station, the videos were being produced in a basement editing room by a young man named Firas Mansour. Al Manar has modern equipment, and the day I was there Mansour, who was in charge of mixing the videos, was working on a Windows-based editing suite. Mansour is in his late twenties, and he was dressed in hip-hop style. His hair was gelled, and he wore a gold chain, a heavy silver bracelet, and a goatee. He spoke colloquial American English. I asked him where he learned it. "Boston," he said.

Mansour showed me some recent footage from the West Bank, of Israeli soldiers firing on Palestinians. Accompanying the video was a Hezbollah fighting song. "What I'm doing is synchronizing the gunshots to form the downbeat of the song," he told me. "This is my technique. I thought of it." He had come up with a title: "I'm going to call it 'Death to Israel.' " Mansour said that he can produce two or three videos on a good day. "What I do is, first, I try to feel the music. Then I find the pictures to go along with it." He pulled up another video, this one almost ready to air. "Try and see if you could figure out the theme of this one," he said.

The video began with Israeli soldiers firing on Palestinians. Then the screen filled with pictures of Palestinians carrying the wounded to ambulances, followed by an angry funeral scene. Suddenly, the scene shifted to Israelis under fire. An Israeli soldier was on the ground, rocking back and forth, next to a burning jeep; this was followed by scenes of Jewish funerals, with coffins draped in the Israeli flag being lowered into graves.

Mansour pressed a button, and the images disappeared from the screen. "The idea is that even if the Jews are killing us we can still kill them. That we derive our power from blood. It's saying, 'Get ready to blow yourselves up, because this is the only way to liberate Palestine.' '' The video, he said, would be shown after the next attack in Israel. He said he was thinking of calling it "We Will Kill All the Jews." I suggested that these videos would encourage the recruitment of suicide bombers among the Palestinians. "Exactly," he replied.

The anti-Semitism of the Middle East groups that oppose Israel's right to exist often seems instrumental-anti-Jewish stereotypes are another weapon in the anti-Israeli armamentarium. The rhetoric is repellent, but in the past it did not quite touch the malignancy of genocidal anti-Semitism. The language has changed, however. In April, in a sermon delivered in the Gaza Strip, Sheikh Ibrahim Madhi, a Palestinian Authority imam, said, "Oh, Allah, accept our martyrs in the highest Heaven. Oh, Allah, show the Jews a black day. Oh, Allah, annihilate the Jews and their supporters." (The translation was made by the Middle East Media Research Institute.) In Saudi Arabia, where anti-Semitism permeates the newspapers and the mosques, the imam of the Al Harram mosque in Mecca, Sheikh Abd al-Rahman alSudais, recently declared, "Read history and you will understand that the Jews of yesterday are the evil forefathers of the even more evil Jews of today: infidels, falsifiers of words, calf worshippers, prophet murderers, deniers of prophecies . . . the scum of the human race, accursed by Allah." Hezbollah has been at the vanguard of this shift toward frank anti-Semitism, and its leaders frequently resort to epidemiological metaphors in describing the role of Jews in world affairs. Ibrahim Mussawi, the urbane and scholarly-seeming director of English-language news at Al Manar, called Jews "a lesion on the forehead of history." A biochemist named Hussein Haj Hassan, a Hezbollah official who represents Baalbek in the Lebanese parliament, told me that he is not anti-Semitic, but he has noticed that the Jews are a pan-national group "that functions in a way that lets them act as parasites in the nations that have given them shelter."

The Middle East scholar Martin Kramer, a biographer of Sayyid Muhammad Fadlallah, told me that he has sensed a shift in hard-line Shiite thinking in the past twenty years. In the first burst of revolution in Iran, the United States was cast by Ayatollah Khomeini and his allies as the "Great Satan." Israel occupied the role of "Little Satan." This has been reversed, Kramer said. Today, Shiite authorities in Lebanon view America as one more tool of the Jews, who have achieved covert world domination. President Mohammad Khatami of Iran, who is often described as a reformer, last year called Israel "a parasite in the heart of the Muslim world."

There are bitter feelings, to be sure, about Israel's invasion of Lebanon, about Israel's treatment of Palestinians in the occupied territories, about the Israeli Air Force's not infrequent patrols in the skies over Beirut. But even some cosmopolitan Beirutis I met, Christians as well as Muslims, seemed surprisingly open to anti-Jewish propaganda-for instance, that the World Trade Center was destroyed by Jews.

A young Shiite scholar named Amal Saad-Ghorayeb has advanced what in Lebanon is a controversial argument: that Hezbollah is not merely anti-Israel but deeply, theologically anti-Jewish. Her new book, "Hezbollah: Politics & Religion," dissects the anti-Jewish roots of Hezbollah ideology. Hezbollah, she argues, believes that Jews, by the nature of Judaism, possess fatal character flaws.

I met Saad-Ghorayeb one afternoon in a cafe near the Lebanese American University, where she is an assistant professor. She was wearing an orange spaghetti-strap tank top, a knee-length skirt, and silver hoop earrings. She is thirty years old and married, and has a four-year-old daughter. Her father, Abdo Saad, is a prominent Shiite pollster; her mother is Christian.

Saad-Ghorayeb calls Israel "an aberration, a colonialist state that embraces its victimhood in order to displace another people." Yet her opposition to anti-Semitism seemed sincere, as when she described the anti-Jewish feeling that underlies Hezbollah's ideology. "There is a real antipathy to Jews as Jews," she said. "It is exacerbated by Zionism, but it existed before Zionism." She observed that Hezbollah, like many other Arab groups, is in the thrall of a belief system that she called "moral utilitarianism." Hezbollah, in other words, will find the religious justification for an act as long as the act is useful. "For the Arabs, the end often justifies the means, even if the means are dubious," she said. "If it works, it's moral."

In her book, she argues that Hezbollah's Koranic reading of Jewish history has led its leaders to believe that Jewish theology is evil. She criticizes the scholar Bernard Lewis for downplaying the depth of traditional Islamic antiJudaism, especially when compared with Christian anti-Semitism. "Lewis commits the . . . grave error of depicting traditional Islam as more tolerant of Jews . . . thereby implying that Zionism was the cause of Arab-Islamic anti-Semitism," she writes.

Saad-Ghorayeb is hesitant to label Hezbollah's outlook anti-Semitism, however. She prefers the term "antiJudaism," since in her terms anti-Semitism is a race-based hatred, while anti-Judaism is religion-based. Hezbollah, she says, tries to mask its antiJudaism for "public-relations reasons," but she argues that a study of its language, spoken and written, reveals an underlying truth. She quoted from a speech delivered by Hassan Nasrallah, in which he said, "If we searched the entire world for a person more cowardly, despicable, weak and feeble in psyche, mind, ideology and religion, we would not find anyone like the Jew. Notice, I do not say the Israeli." To Saad-Ghorayeb, this statement "provides moral justification and ideological justification for dehumanizing the Jews." In this view, she went on, "the Israeli Jew becomes a legitimate target for extermination. And it also legitimatizes attacks on non-Israeli Jews."

Larry Johnson, a former counterterrorism official in the Clinton State Department, once told me, "There's a fundamental view here of the Jew as subhuman. Hezbollah is the direct ideological heir of the Nazis." Saad-Ghorayeb disagrees. Nasrallah may skirt the line between racialist anti-Semitism and theological anti-Judaism, she said, but she argued that mainstream Hezbollah ideology provides the Jews with an obvious way to repair themselves in God's eyes: by converting to Islam.

IV-"THE LOGIC OF WAR"

One day near the end of my stay in Lebanon, I visited Sayyid Fadlallah, Hezbollah's spiritual leader, at his home in the Dahiya. Fadlallah, who is sixty-seven, is a surpassingly important figure in Shiism, inside and outside Lebanon. As many as twenty thousand people pray with him each Friday at a cavernous mosque near his home. He is a squat man with a white beard, and wears the black turban of the sayyid, a descendant of the Prophet Muhammad. Fadlallah has long denied any official role in Hezbollah. Some experts take him at his word; others believe that he is dissembling. However, intellectually Fadlallah has taken an independent course, and people close to him told me that he privately scorns Hezbollah's most important patron, Ayatollah Khamenei, as a mediocre thinker and cleric.

Several attempts have been made to assassinate Fadlallah. He believes that the C.I.A., working with Saudi Arabia, tried to kill him by setting off a bomb near his apartment building in 1985, an event cited in Bob Woodward's book "Veil: The Secret Wars of the C.I.A. 1981-1987," which, Fadlallah told me, he has read carefully and repeatedly. His offices are well guarded by men who have apparently been assigned to him by Hezbollah. My briefcase was taken from me for ten minutes and thoroughly searched by the guards. A man carrying a pistol sat in on our interview, along with three translators: Fadlallah's; mine (a Christian woman from East Beirut, who had been required to wear a chador for the occasion); and Abdo Saad, Amal Saad-Ghorayeb's father, who had arranged the interview.

Fadlallah entered the meeting room slowly and deliberately. He sat in a plush chair, the rest of us on couches near him. The room was lit with fluorescent light; as always, a picture of Khomeini stared down from the wall.

Fadlallah framed the core issues in political, not religious, terms. "The Israelis believe that after three thousand years they came back to Palestine," he said. "But can the American Indian come back to America after all this time? Can the Celts go back to Britain?" He said that he has no objection to Jewish statehood, but not at the expense of Palestinians. "The problem between Muslims and Jews has to do with security issues."

Like many Muslim clerics, he holds romantic, condescending, and contradictory views of the historic relationship between Jews and Muslims. He is aware that for hundreds of years, while Jews were persecuted and ostracized in Christian Europe, they were granted the status of protected inferiors by the caliphs, and subjected only to infrequent pogroms. Yet, despite his assertion that the dispute between Jews and Muslims was political, he made the theological observation that the Jews "never recognized Islam as a true religion." I asked him if he agreed with this passage from the Koran: "Strongest among men in enmity to the believers wilt thou find the Jews and Pagans." Yes, he said. "The Jews don't consider Islam to be a religion."

I tried to turn the conversation to Islamic beliefs-in particular, the rationale for suicide attacks. In the early nineteen-eighties, Fadlallah was accused of blessing the suicide bomber who destroyed the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983, a charge that he heatedly denied to me. He pointed out that he was among the first Islamic clerics to condemn the September 11th attacks, though he blamed American foreign policy for creating the atmosphere that led to them. He has, however, endorsed attacks on Israeli civilians. Suicide, he said, is not an absolute value. It is an option left to a people who are without options, and so the act is no longer considered suicide but martyrdom in the name of self-defense. "This is part of the logic of war," he said.

On the killing of Israeli civilians, Fadlallah said, "In a state of war, it is permissible for Palestinians to kill Jews. When there is peace, this is not permissible." He does not believe in a peaceful settlement between two states, one Palestinian, the other Israeli; rather, he favors the disappearance of Israel.

I thought about Saad-Ghorayeb's argument that many in Hezbollah consider all Jews guilty of conspiring against Islam, and I asked Fadlallah if it was permissible to kill Jews beyond the borders of Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza. Hezbollah and its Iranian sponsors are considered by the governments of Israel, the United States, and Argentina to be responsible for the single deadliest anti-Semitic attack since the end of the Second World War: the suicide truck-bombing of the Jewish community center in Buenos Aires, in 1994, which left more than a hundred people dead. As in the case of other accusations of terrorism, Hezbollah and Iran say that they were not involved in the attack. "We are against the killing of Jews outside Palestine," Fadlallah said. "Unless they transfer the war outside Palestine." When I asked if they had, Fadlallah raised an eyebrow, and let the question go unanswered.

Major General Benny Gantz is the chief of the Israeli Army's Northern Command, which is responsible for defending Israel from Hezbollah and Syria and any other threats from the north. Until recently, Gantz was the commander of Israeli forces in the West Bank.

When we met this summer, at an airbase outside Tel Aviv, he seemed pleased to have left behind the moral and strategic ambiguities of service in the West Bank. Gantz is forty-three, tall, lean, and cynical. Much of his career has been spent dealing with the Lebanon question. Before serving in the West Bank, he was the top Israeli officer in Lebanon in the days leading up to the withdrawal. A helicopter was waiting to carry him north to the border after our meeting. Gantz is almost certain that he will soon wage war against Hezbollah and Syria. "I'll be surprised if we don't see this fight," he said.

The Israelis believe that in South Lebanon Hezbollah has more than eight thousand rockets, weapons that are far more sophisticated than any previously seen in the group's arsenal. They include the Iranian-made Fajr-5 rocket, which has a range of up to forty-five miles, meaning that Israel's industrial heartland, in the area south of Haifa, falls within Hezbollah's reach. One intelligence official put it this way: "It's not tenable for us to have a jihadist organization on our border with the capability of destroying Israel's main oil refinery."

Hezbollah officials told me that they possessed no rockets whatsoever. But one reporter who has covered Hezbollah and the South for several years said he believes that Hezbollah has established a "balance of terror" along the border. The reporter, Nicholas Blanford, of the Beirut English-language newspaper the Daily Star, said that he is "pretty certain" that Hezbollah has "extensive weaponry down there, stashed away." He added, "Their refrain is, we're ready for all eventualities."

Blanford, who has good sources in the Hezbollah leadership, said, "They seem to be convinced that sooner or later there's going to be an Israeli-Arab conflict. In the long term, Israel cannot put up with this threat from Hezbollah." It seems clear that in ordinary times Israel would already have moved against Hezbollah. But these are not ordinary times. Intelligence officials told me that Israel cannot act preemptively against Hezbollah while America is trying to shore up Arab support for, or acquiescence in, a campaign to overthrow Saddam Hussein. To do otherwise would be to risk angering the Bush Administration, which needs Israel to show restraint. One Israeli Army officer I spoke to put it bluntly: "The day after the American attack, we can move."

Both Israel and the United States believe that, at the outset of an American campaign against Saddam, Iraq will fire missiles at Israel-perhaps with chemical or biological payloads-in order to provoke an Israeli conventional, or even nuclear, response. But Hezbollah, which is better situated than Iraq to do damage to Israel, might do Saddam's work itself, forcing Israel to retaliate, and crippling the American effort against an Arab state. Hezbollah is not known to possess unconventional payloads for its missiles, though its state sponsors, Iran and Syria, maintain extensive biological- and chemical-weapons programs.

If Hezbollah wants to provoke Israel, it has other options. Early this year, it tried to smuggle fifty tons of heavy Iranian weapons-including mines, mortars, and missiles-to the Palestinian Authority aboard a ship called the Karine A. The Israeli Navy seized the ship in the Red Sea. Intelligence officials believe that the operation was under the control of a deputy of Imad Mugniyah, the Hezbollah security operative. According to a story in the London-based Arabic newspaper Al-Sharq al-Awsat, King Abdullah of Jordan told American officials that Iran was behind attempts to launch at least seventeen rockets at Israeli targets from Jordanian territory. Hezbollah, meanwhile, is working with Palestinian groups, including Islamic Jihad, which, like Hezbollah, is sponsored by Iran, and which, like Hezbollah, is searching for the means to deliver a serious blow to Israel.

There is no affection for Saddam Hussein among the ruling mullahs in Iran, which lost a vicious war to Iraq in the nineteen-eighties, with hundreds of thousands of Iranians dead; or in the office of President Bashar al-Assad, in Syria. But some American analysts think that both regimes are alarmed by the prospect of Saddam's overthrow. Dennis Ross, the Clinton Administration's Middle East envoy, told me that American success against Iraq would legitimatize American-led "regime change" in the Middle East. It would also leave Iran surrounded by pro-American governments, in Kabul, Baghdad, and Istanbul. "They see encirclement," Ross said. "This explains the incredible flow of weaponry to Hezbollah after Israel left Lebanon."

Ross said that Bashar al-Assad's interest in forestalling an American attack on Iraq by igniting an Arab-Israeli war is more subtle, but still present. "Bashar realizes that if we go ahead and do this in Iraq he runs an enormous risk" by continuing to support terrorist organizations. The State Department lists Syria as a sponsor of terror. Ross also believes that Bashar, unlike his late father, is not thoughtful enough to grasp the cost of a war with Israel. "He still thinks that Israel will stay within certain boundaries," Ross said. "He needs to hear from us that, if he provokes a war, don't expect us to come to your rescue. He's playing with fire." Indeed, in April this year the Bush Administration had to intervene with Syria to halt Hezbollah rocket attacks on Israel.

General Gantz told me that if Hezbollah uses rockets against Israel his forces will be hunting Syrians as well as Lebanese Shiites. Lebanon may be the battlefield, he said, but the twenty thousand Syrian soldiers in Lebanon will be fair targets. "Israel doesn't have to deal with Hezbollah as Hezbollah," he continued. "This is the Hezbollah tail wagging the Syrian dog. As far as I'm concerned, Hezbollah is part of the Lebanese and Syrian forces. Syria will pay the price. I'm not saying when or where. But it will be severe."

The Syrian Army, which used to have the Soviet Union as its patron, is no match for Israel, Gantz said. "I think the Syrians can create a few problems for us. But it's very hard to see in what way they're better than us. I just don't know how Bashar is going to rebuild his army after this. Assad, the father, was a smart guy. He knew how to walk a tightrope. His son is trying to dance on it."

In conversations with people in Beirut, and especially in the Christian areas to the city's north, I found great anxiety about an Israeli counterstrike against Lebanon. Hezbollah understands that the Lebanese have grown used to peace, and that they fear an Israeli attack; many Lebanese would hold Hezbollah responsible for the devastation caused by an Israeli attack. Among some of Lebanon's religious groups, particularly the Maronite Christians and the Druze, there is a feeling that the Syrians have overstayed their welcome in the country. These groups fear Hezbollah, too, but they do not express it; after all, Hezbollah is the only militia that is still armed, long after the end of the civil war.

Israel's foreign minister, Shimon Peres, mentioned these constraints when I spoke to him recently. "Hezbollah must not appear to be the destroyer of Lebanon," he said. Peres noted, however, that Hezbollah is an organization devoted to jihad, not to logic. "These are religious people. With the religious you can hardly negotiate. They think they have supreme permission to kill people and go to war. This is their nature."

When I met with Prime Minister Hariri, he alluded to some of these worries. Hariri, a Sunni, is a billionaire builder who made most of his money in Saudi Arabia. We spoke in a building that he constructed in Beirut, with his own money, to serve as his "palace"; it seems to be modelled on a Ritz-Carlton hotel. Hariri has tense relations with Hezbollah, which has accused him of trying to thwart development in poor Shiite areas. Hariri understands that Israel will make the Lebanese people suffer for any attacks that are launched from Lebanese territory. He loathes and fears Ariel Sharon, and said to me that Sharon was "no different" from Hitler in his belief "in racial purity." The people of southern Lebanon do not want the Israelis provoked, Hariri said. "Look around the South," he said. "Look at all the building."

In recent weeks, the borderland has become even more unstable. An Israeli soldier was killed last month when Hezbollah fired on an Israeli outpost in Shebaa; and the Lebanese government, with the endorsement of Hezbollah, announced plans to divert water that would otherwise be carried by the Hatsbani River into Israel. Israel has said that it will not allow Lebanon to curtail its water supply. General Gantz assumes that internal political considerations will not trump its desire for jihad. As he prepared to board his helicopter and fly to the border, he said, "I was the last officer to leave Lebanon, and maybe I'll be the first one to return." (c)

(This is the first part of a two-part article.)

Updated: November 19 2002



America Must Go It Alone

By VICTOR DAVIS HANSON

The world suddenly appears a very strange place. Our friends act as if they were enemies, our allies pose as neutrals, and our foes claim they are poor victims. In the present lull before the storm, pundits and experts advise us what we cannot do rather than what we can and should, and what we are told is so often not at all what we perceive.

Just last week five Americans were blown apart in Jerusalem amid scenes of mass death and mayhem at Hebrew University. Palestinians reacted with glee as 10,000 poured into the streets to rejoice at news of the murders, leaving some doubt about past denials that earlier they had similarly celebrated on hearing that thousands of us were vaporized on Sept. 11.

The terrorists apparently have no expectation that such killing will draw an American response. Yet there was a time not long ago when the U.S. bombed Libya for its complicity in blowing up just a few Americans and let others sort out cause and effect.

Puzzlement

Americans are understandably puzzled at the macabre mix of murder and merriment. Why do we give millions of dollars to Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Authority, a regime that abets such belligerents? And why are thousands from the West Bank currently seeking entrance into the hated United States?

Meanwhile, Jordan's King Abdullah II politely lectures us about everything from the West Bank to Iraq. The recipient of nearly a half-billion dollars in annual American largesse, he has all but closed his borders to those from the West Bank, a humane stance in comparison to Kuwait's decision in 1991 to ethnically cleanse its Palestinian residents. For all his criticism of our support for Israel, the young king, like his father, wants no part of the extremists' pan-Islamic revolutionary fervor.

Saudi Arabia, the womb of Sept. 11, is considered equally restrained because it subsidizes terrorists covertly rather than publicly, and relegates its government-sanctioned anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism to zany clerics and unimaginative bureaucrats. Thousands of our troops stationed in the desert there are prevented from venturing into Iraq, and are not to fly out to hunt down the Taliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan. Instead our female soldiers remain veiled as our guns and planes protect the sheiks -- but from whom and what?

France and Germany have both announced that they will not support American efforts to topple Saddam Hussein without a clear mandate from the United Nations. They have more faith in a body in which Chinese autocrats sit on the Security Council, and rogue states like Syria, Libya, Iraq, Iran, North Korea and Zimbabwe vote on such resolutions in the General Assembly. St. Mihiel, Normandy Beach, an American-led NATO resistance to the Soviets, and the ghosts of 6 million gassed who flit still over the European countryside -- the great graveyard of the Jews -- are not so much rarely mentioned as utterly forgotten.

The events of Sept. 11 have stripped away the hypocritical veneer of the past, and Americans are just beginning to accept the way things are rather than the way they wish them to be. And such a revelation is stark indeed.

There is not a single consensual government in the Arab Middle East, so we ask autocracies like Egypt to help draft consensual government for the Palestinians. The past American policy of bribing or protecting purportedly pro-Western strongmen is in shambles. Terrorists who murder our innocents are more likely to come from Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Palestine, our supposed friends, than from our declared enemies in Iraq, Syria and Libya. The Palestinian Authority and other tyrannies of the Middle East are treated like the Soviet Union of the 1930s: Seen in the West as confused rather than evil regimes, they are given a pass to lynch their own and terrorize others without moral condemnation.

Our European allies -- whether out of military weakness, fear of its tumultuous past, envy, concern over oil, terrorists, the thin buffer of the Mediterranean, their own rising Islamic populations, or the old anti-Semitism -- are likely to oppose us on every issue that has arisen since last September. They have bristled over our tactics and strategy in Afghanistan, the treatment of captured terrorists in Cuba, support for Israel, resistance to Iraq, the former ABM treaty, and the nomenclature of the Axis of Evil. Indeed, India and Russia are more likely to voice encouragement than our sworn NATO allies, a group that more rapidly professed support for the travails of the Spanish navy off the Moroccan coast than it did for America after Sept. 11.

We should not be alarmed at all about this hypocrisy because paradox is to be expected in times of uncertainty. Instead, we should remember that in all the recent crises of the past, America has stood nearly alone. By 1942, Europe and most of Asia were fascist, the other continents neutral at best. England was our sole democratic ally. During the Cold War -- despite periodic appeasement in Europe and the venom of the elite Left -- the U.S. stopped the spread of Soviet communism and finally bankrupted its murderous hegemony. In neither case did the League of Nations or the United Nations offer much assistance; both passed sanctimonious resolutions while millions were butchered in silence by Hitler, Tojo, Stalin, and Mao. Our recent encounter with Milosevic was thus predictable.

The reason that we so often must stand by ourselves is that the United States really is different. Our Constitution singularly preserves the sanctity of the individual; American culture is truly a revolutionary society that has empowered millions of free and freed peoples without regard for religion, race, or background -- and so unleashed economic and military power never before seen. The common anti-American slurs of "exceptionalism" and "unilateralism" are, in fact, compliments of the highest order.

Clarity

If the past is any guide to the present, Americans -- hard to arouse and rightly reluctant to go to war -- will finally have enough of the present nonsense and so seek clarity out of the chaos. We will probably act alone against Iraq. We will defeat the fundamentalists and end the terrorist havens. As before, we will let Europeans stew in their own juices of resentment and inaction. And we will at last rediscover that democracy -- as was true in postbellum Germany and Japan -- must follow any victory over autocracy, as aftershocks in the Middle East will approach the magnitude that we witnessed in Europe in 1945 and 1989.

Expect most other nations publicly to condemn us as harshly during the ordeal as they will privately thank us in the aftermath. But then, they, not we, are once again on the wrong side of history.

Mr. Hanson, a military historian, is author most recently of "An Autumn of War" (Anchor, 2002).

Updated August 6, 2002