Sunday, April 29, 2007

Who is Charles Jacobs?

Who is Charles Jacobs?
by Karin Friedemann, Boston


A Polish immigrant armed with only a BA from Rutgers and a Masters in Education from Harvard has proven exceptionally effective in manipulating the US government and major American institutions into following policy blueprints created by his Israel advocacy organization, the David Project. Charles Jacobs, like Charles Krauthammer and Richard Perle, obtains speaking engagements through a PR firm called Benador Associates, which specializes in pro-Israel campus events focusing on Islam and terrorism. Like Alan Dershowitz, Charles Jacobs considers himself a progressive liberal. Fareeha Iqbal, a student at MIT, disagrees.

"Dr. Jacobs’ talk expressed blatantly racist and anti-Islamic views. In fact, I have never seen Islamophobia exuded so blatantly at a public forum at MIT, nor such racist views aired at a panel discussion on human rights.”

CAMERA

CAMERA, co-founded by Jacobs in 1982, is a media-monitoring organization dedicated to enforcing pro-Israel, anti-Arab and anti-Islamic bias in the news. It was a pioneer in the technological aspects of mass-marketing hate. One of the first media pressure groups to invest in the software necessary to create database capabilities for email blasting tailored messages to specific target groups, CAMERA sends out action alerts instructing its members to overwhelm newspaper and politicians’ offices with hundreds of emails and threatening phone calls to complain and argue about any media coverage critical to Israel or friendly to Islam.

Columbia Unbecoming

In 2002, a network of national Jewish organizations met to evaluate what they saw as an alarming rise in anti-Israel activity on campus. From those meetings emerged the Israel on Campus Coalition (ICC), which is founded in partnership with Hillel and the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation. (The three organizations share a building in Washington.) The David Project is an affiliate member of the ICC. In October 2003, the David Project agreed to provide funding for a film, produced by Ralph Avi Goldwasser, to slander professors Rashid Khalidi, Joseph Massad, Hamid Dabashi, and Georges Saliba of Columbia University's Department of Middle East studies. Joseph Massad became known as "one of the most dangerous intellectuals” on campus. Calls for the professor’s dismissal were issued by Congressman Weiner and by the editors of the Daily News and the New York Sun, and the propaganda film was shown in Israel before a government minister at an anti-Semitism conference.

Sheikh Zayed/Harvard

The David Project regularly placed racist anti-Arab and anti-Muslim speakers on Harvard campus, but its first major accomplishment was blocking a $2 million donation from the late president of the United Arab Emirates, Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan al-Nahyan, for a chair in Islamic Studies at the Harvard Divinity School. The Project's 2003 smear campaign was coordinated with the ADL. By preventing Zayed from contributing to Harvard, Jacobs sought to minimize future input from Arabs and Muslims into discussions of developments at Harvard University.

American Anti-Slavery Group
The American Anti-Slavery Group grew directly out of Jacobs' pro-Israel advocacy. The group supports the Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA), which has been employed by the US in order to destabilize the Islamic Republic of Sudan and is believed to have trained along with Israeli forces at Otis Air Force base in Massachusetts.

The American Anti-Slavery Group (AASG) is based in Boston and works with Christian Solidarity International. The organization has been closely involved in filming fraudulent "slave redemptions." Jacobs was presenting the issue as one of northern Arab "slavers" and African Christian southerners. In addition to claims of slavery, Jacobs has also described Sudan as a "terrorist, genocidal" state engaged in a "holy war." Charles Jacobs and his American Anti-Slavery Group's carefully designed "PR puff pieces" have managed to secure national media coverage. This campaign to vilify Arabs and Muslims is a multimedia effort that supplies huge quantities of lurid, both popular and pseudo-academic hate material.

Save Darfur

JCRC sponsored organizations that are staffed by Israel advocates trained by the David Project have further poisoned human rights discourse with the dishonest Save Darfur campaign aimed at divesting from Sudan as well as from any country which does business with Sudan. The David Project has proven uncommonly effective at changing US policy in a matter of months to listing Sudan as a terrorist nation and barring all trade with the country. While pro-Palestine activists have struggled for years to slow the stream of US public funds to Israel, Jacob’s anti-Sudan campaign is probably the quickest divestment success in US history. Thanks to the ongoing efforts of JCRCs and affiliated groups, Sudan divestment resolutions have become law in Iowa and are in the process of approval in 12 states. Although US involvement in Sudanese politics can only be a disaster for the Sudanese and for America, this sort of propaganda serves the purpose of turning Arab and African Americans against each other in order to prevent them from mounting any jointly organized political efforts. The David Project and the JCRC, who have had more than one director in common, work hand in hand to minimize the potential political influence of groups who might oppose continuing US funding of Israel.

Muslims Sue the David Project

In 2006, after the David Project was found instigating a lawsuit against the City over the construction of a new mosque, Dr. Yousef Abou-Allaban, chairman of the board of the Islamic Society of Boston, addressed Charles Jacobs in an open letter that was quoted in the Boston Globe.

"We would like to know why you and others at the David Project appear to be so intent on inflaming relations between our communities," Abou-Allaban wrote. "Do you really hate us that much?"

In a landmark defamation suit, the ISB detailed "a concerted, well-coordinated effort to deprive ... members of the Boston Muslim community of their basic right of free association and the free exercise of their religion." Discovery materials from the ISB lawsuit have exposed a network of Neocons in the establishment, pro-Israel organizations, the mass media, and Islamophobic academics, working together to make the public fear the Muslim community.

The list of defendants in the lawsuit include Steven Emerson, a self-proclaimed 'expert' on radical Islam whose documentary, “Jihad in America," has been widely discredited, William Sapers, a director of the Combined Jewish Philanthropies, the Boston Herald, Boston's FOX TV station, the David Project, and Citizens for Peace and Tolerance (CPT), whose president is Dennis Hale, a speaker for the David Project.

Some Jewish groups have distanced themselves from the conspiracy to deprive Muslim Americans of their constitutional rights, which is a federal crime, but Nancy Kaufman, executive director of the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Boston stated, "None of those organizations [who signed statements supporting the mosque] are members of the organizations of the JCRC. We don't consider them to be a part of the mainstream Jewish community."

Conclusion

Much of the mainstream media’s negative coverage of Muslims arises from the continuous stream of poisonous accusations and racist insinuations distributed as press releases by the David Project and its affiliates. Until recently, Israel advocacy organizations, which have been heavily engaged in subverting US foreign and domestic policy, have remained mostly invisible to American political scientists, who focused on traditional political lobbies like AIPAC.

Karin Friedemann is editor of World View News Service in Boston, focusing on the Islamic world. Please visit http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/wvns/.

Friday, April 27, 2007

Save Sudan

The Zionist Lobby and Coordinated Media have caused quite some concern about the civilian population of Western Sudan. Since the suffering in Sudan is at core an effect of Global Warming, the Zionists' attempts to hold the relatively penniless Sudanese government responsibile for all human tragedies in the region is just another defamation campaign against Muslims.

It appears that certain peace activists have borrowed the punishing language filtered down from the press releases connected to Bill Kristol and the neocons. They are calling for "non-violent means of action" - meaning starvation - to topple the Sudanese government.

I beg the reader to think deeply and not to jump too fast with this "humanitarian isolation" tactic, remembering that some well-meaning leftists engaged with neocons inadvertently not too long ago and pushed our nation to war against another country that did not threaten us, Afghanistan. America's leftists, steeped in anti-Muslim Marxist propaganda, were quick to assume the truth in the fraudulent press releases which originated in the Boston Jewish community, regarding the Taliban forcing Hindus to wear yellow armbands. There were reports spreading via the media that Afghan women were not being allowed to work outside the home, and that we must get rid of the evil Taliban.

The news of hundreds of thousands of people eating grass as there was no food because of the drought was conveniently omitted from the propaganda. Starving families left their farms and walked towards Kabul. The Taliban asked the UN for help to save these people's lives. The UN replied that they would not lift the sanctions against Afghanistan, but they would like to so some reparation work on one of Afghanistan's ancient Buddhist statues, carve out a piece of land around the statue and install UN troops to protect the tourists. We made a decision to let 100,000 innocent Afghans die of exposure. But that was not enough. Feminists and Democrats, led by Hilary Clinton and Oprah, and oddly enough, peace activists, pushed for war on Afghanistan to punish the Afghans for their barbaric tribal culture.

Now it's the same thing, people are saying the Islamic Sudanese government is so evil and barbaric that we must take it upon ourselves to get rid of them. The Afghan women are not better off without their husbands, as chauvenistic as they might have been. There are tens of thousands of homeless orphans eating garbage, sleeping in the streets of Kabul right now thanks to us. The druglords we employed to get rid of the Taliban piled thousands of men - these children's fathers - into containers, suffocating them to death as they were trucked hundreds of miles into the desert, so that by the time they arrived they were all dead, and then dumped in a mass grave, for the crime of declaring their country an Islamic Emirate. Now the leftists want us to punish Sudan for the crime of declaring their country an Islamic Republic.

We are not going to end dehydration and malaria in Sudan by depriving their country of much needed economic investments to provide jobs and infrastructure. This is the real genocide going on. Why does the US government want to oppose the development of Sudan? Don't forget Clinton bombed their malaria medicine plant and never paid for damages and never apologized. We committed an act of war against them. We purposely caused millions of Africans to die of malaria because they had no medicine. How is further depriving them of resources going to help the Sudanese people? We used Food for Oil to steal Iraqi resources. We gave the Iraqis two tablespoons of lentils a day as rations and refused to let them purify their water. Hundreds of thousands of children under the age of five died of hunger and diarrhea. Sanctions on Sudan would amount to the same thing but on a much larger scale. It's not going to help anyone. Do you think that putting sanctions on America would end inner city violence?

The idea that divestment or even a military invasion would be good for Sudan seems irrational. Zionists are urging "non-violent action" to end the violence in Sudan/Darfur. There is nothing non-violent about inflicting economic crisis on an already poor country, and economic sanctions with the intent to destabilize the government will certainly not promote law and order in Sudan. This sort of propaganda crafted and pioneered by Charles Jacobs with the American Anti-Slavery Group, a wing of the David Project, consciously serves the purpose of turning Arab and African Americans against each other in order to prevent them from mounting any jointly organized political efforts.

Perhaps the Sudanese government is capable of doing much more than it is doing to protect the well-being of all its citizens. The same could be said of our government. But Khartoum is not a government like in Europe or America. Other than in the capital city, Sudan has no paved roads, no water system, no electricity. It is vast open space filled with various tribes with conflicting interests and very little water.

The government of Sudan is not very effective at governing Sudan. Saddam Hussein had a lot of problems with his Shiite citizens. That does NOT imply that America had any business forcing Iraqis to be dependent on UN handouts or going in there to police. Right now the environmental crisis facing Sudan should be dealt with. The Sudanese government is allowing Muslim Americans to contribute funds to reforest Sudan. If the Jewish groups make it illegal for Muslim charities to help Sudan, like they did with Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine, it is unlikely to make the Sudanese government any more effective at governing or at feeding their people. So far, the Sudanese government has allowed American charities to dig a well, open a clinic, or provide shelter to refugees. They are not standing in anyone's way that genuinely wants to help the people of Sudan. They just said "NO" to foreign troops.

It's not our business what's wrong with the Sudanese government. Other African countries are even worse. If we want to help the needy, we are free to donate some money to some humanitarian aid organization. There are similar relief efforts in the Congo and Sierre Leone. I think we all agree that Africans' lives could use a lot of improvement. However, the Zionist demonization campaign has NOTHING to do with improving the lives of Africans and EVERYTHING to do with controlling human rights discourse in America. They want to create a "good guys" vs "bad guys" narration which simply does not work. Divestment from Sudan is not going to eliminate hunger in Africa. We need to start looking at local Zionist control over our politics as well as world hunger.

Anything we do to stop global warming will help Sudan indirectly. I strongly believe that humanitarian efforts in Sudan are very worthwhile, especially because, unlike Afghanistan, Iraq and Palestine, the humanitarian aid is pretty sure to get there, because, contrary to neocon press releases, neither the government nor the rebels are opposed to Americans coming in and drilling wells for the people. The people who live in the camps are relatively safe from violence, fed one meal a day, and the kids receive elementary schooling. The money we donate actually gets to the people, and because of the exchange rate, very little money can help a great deal. [See irw.org for a non-interventionist relief and development organization helping Sudan.]

"Divesting" from Sudan is nothing more than a code for stealing the oil from an African country in need because we can. If America wants Sudanese oil, let them pay the Sudanese government for the oil so that the Sudanese government can hire the police force they need to prevent crime. There is no excuse for us to occupy another country to steal its resources, especially since it is far cheaper to buy the oil than to invade the country and steal the oil. The oil revenue would create the means to build homes and businesses and create jobs for the Sudanese population. It's not our business who is president of Sudan, Bashir or Turabi. It's not our business. If we want business in Sudan, we should pay with our dollars and work with the government of Sudan, whoever is in power, to invest in the machinery needed to drill for oil.

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Wednesday, April 25, 2007

Polite Discussion on Zionism: Is it Possible?

The Zionist philosophizes that the Palestinian is not a human (Israel was a land without a people). The Anti-Zionist argues that the Palestinian is a human being. So what is the moderate viewpoint? The Palestinian is a quasi-human? Is this the American Progressive Jewish position?


Polite Discussion on Zionism: Is it Possible?
Karin Friedemann
April 25, 2007
World View News Service
http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/wvns/message/7271


I have dedicated my life to the study of our people's repressed racism. For this reason, I found the website www.realisticdove.org very interesting. Usually when confronted, we just get indignant and refuse to speak to you for a few months. I always wondered how a person could think that Israel has a "right"to "security" and shrug off this amazing assumption with the accusation that anyone who has questions about his definitions is accusing him of being an evil murderer. Why would any sane person think that he has the right to live unharrassed on someone else's stolen property? Even the cute kids waving Israeli flags are participating in a criminally insane political ideology.

Progressive Jews want to make the bottom line "Jews are nice people." But that is not the bottom line. As Hillel mentioned, the bottom line is that you don't do to others what you don't want others to do to you. What would we expect if our neighbor, with or without warning, bulldozed our house?

First, we would call the police. If the man with the bulldozer failed to stop bulldozing the house, the police officer would have the duty to disable the vehicle and he might even shoot him. I'm talking about American law. The primary concept of civil rights is that you and your neighbor are sharing the same set of laws and punishments. The bulldozer man would be stopped. Hewould be considered a criminal. He would be put on trial. He would go to prison. If he had killed people in the process of bulldozing the house, he might even be executed. The owner of the house that was bulldozed would be entitled to damages plus extra for pain and suffering. The law requires that his property be restored to the original state that it was in. That includes replanting the trees and fixing the pavement around the house.

The emotional defensiveness of Jews is actually quite amusing, where they want to argue that the bulldozer man was not evil, he was not a murderer. The family that moved into the stolen property are just innocent idealists. They may be misguided, or mistaken, but for some reason Jews want to argue that they are not evil. What they are really saying is that they don't want Jews to be held legally accountable for their actions. They want to enjoy the privilege of being "protected" from the laws that apply to other people.

A law does not cover the "evilness" of a criminal. It covers actions and consequences.

If international law were followed, the Israeli "government' would never have kicked out any Palestinians. The entire existence of Israel is based on the condition made by the UN that Palestinians would remain in their homes and receive equal citizenship in the new nation state. That condition was not followed. Therefore, there is no legal basis for any assumption that Israel has a right to exist according to the UN. In fact, Israel does not really exist. It is a figment of imagination, the defensive mechanism of the neurotic Jewish collective consciousness. I agree that we need to stop arguing about isms but the next step is to solve the problems. Don't wait for the world community to force Israel to do it. Why don't we, as Jews, just do it? Why are Progressive Jews wasting their time feeling emotionally threatened by a one state solution? The real problem is that we are feeling emotionally threatened by any solution. Because a solution means that Jews need to be prosecuted.

The refugees must be given back their property with extra for damages. Even if they fled their homes because Arab leaders told them to get out of the fighting zone in 1948, they have the legal right to return to their homes as soon as the fighting stops. Small wonder why Israel continues to attack people day after day. The refugees must be given full civil rights. Full water rights, full road rights, and the full right to prosecute every Jewish family in America that has any property in the Holy Land as part of an organized crime network. Especially if both the Palestinian and the Jewish persons are American citizens. For example one friend of mine, after her family was forced off their land by gunpoint, New York Jews bought the land, bulldozed everything, and planted orange trees. She knows where they live. She knows their names. Anyone who buys or sells stolen property is a criminal who needs to be prosecuted. Any Jew who owns Palestinian property in the Holy Land should have his property seized, including their US assets, just like we did to the rum smugglers who funded Jewish terrorism in the 1920s, and Progressive Jews should insist on it instead of doing these mental "I'm not evil" gymnastics.

The Jews need to give back what they stole. I am not sure why that is so confusing to people. There needs to be a world tribunal like the Nuremburg trials to determine what was done and who was responsible, and to put an end to this nonsense. But failing that, the US legal system could solve the problem within a year if we just prosecuted this obnoxious real estate mafia. Why are Progressive Jews not lobbying for criminal penalties on Jews who invest in property that was cleared of its original owners by force in the Holy Land? There is enough room in Bush's new prisons for all these shady real estate agents. This is a simple matter of holding people legally accountable for the harm they cause others and for undermining the security of the United States in the process. It is exactly the same issue with dispute over the Roxbury Mosque in Boston. Some shady white (Jewish) real estate dealers were furious that the black community benefited from this piece of land next to the subway station that they wanted to develop, so now they are engaging in extra-legal trickery and character assassination to try to get that piece of real estate away from the people who own it. Once the Palestinians get their land back and all the Zionist organizations' assets are confiscated to repair the damage they have done, then we can talk about whether or not "the Jewish People" have the right to "self-determination" in the form of an ethnocentric nation state.

I learned when I was a kid that the way to get self-determination - i.e., the ability to do what you want when you want how you want - is to behave yourself. The Jews are not behaving themselves, and there is nothing okay about it. When a Progressive Jew avoids discussion by whining, "You think I'm evil!!" he or she breaks the heart of the human being who is trying to have peace with this person. It ends all rational discussion. It ends all hope for peace.

Sometimes Palestinians find it easier to deal with right wing Zionists than left wing because at least they are honest. A Palestinian can say to a right wing Jew, "You stole my property." The right wing Jew will say, "Yeah, and what are you going to do about it? My religion says I can steal your property." Then the Muslim can with dignity say, "Well my religion says that God curses the man who puts another man out of his home, and that I have the right to fight you." That actually can be done in the context of a polite dialogue. A peace plan is even potentially possible. Because then the Jew can say, "Well, I don't want you to kill me and I can see why you would think that I deserved it, because if you did the same thing to me I would certainly kill you. So let's make a deal. I'll let you live in the garage." This is still insulting behavior, but it's in the process of becoming less sadistic.

On the other hand, if a Palestinian says to a Progressive Jew, "You stole my property!" the Progressive Jew will usually shut down entirely. I have seen a fifty year old man start crying and insisting he's not evil. This is the behavior of someone who is guilty as sin. Like when you accuse your husband of adultery and he starts guilt-tripping you about how you don't believe in him (hypothetical but common scenario).

The other reaction is to get maliciously angry and start doing character assassination via gossip so that none of the other Progressive Jews will greet that person who brought up the "touchy" subject. They will be told that this person is an "enemy of peace" - so that it will be politically correct to shun them the same way that we avoid eye contact with skinheads and Bible thumpers. Progressive Jews are the most amazingly idealistic people on the planet. They want to be able to continue to sit on someone else's stolen property (or at least vacation on it) and not only do they think they have a "right" to travel around unharmed, ride the buses, shop and eat pizza while the people they made homeless have no water or food - but they want their victims to LIKE them. The Jews are the only conquerors in the history of the planet that expected the conquered people to LIKE them! If they don't like us, we feel offended and outraged. And what Jews consider as "liking behavior" is never mentioning the property they stole.

I've discussed some of this with Avigail Abarbanel, an ex-Israeli psychiatrist in Australia. She views Zionism as a mental illness that can be treated. But Zionism is just a symptom of a deeper problem, the delusional belief that you have "rights" which do not exist. Like a kid thinking he has the right to hit his sister. It's a failure to apply the Golden Rule to one's personal sense of responsibility in certain situations. The inner conflict that arises from these "situational ethics" certainly does create a clinically diagnosable mental inability to process certain types of information that trigger the neurotic or sometimes even psychotic defensive reaction.

Unfortunately, when it comes to Israel, Jews are defensive in the sense that they cannot process the type of information that is necessary to create peaceful behaviors. For example, if a Jew and Palestinian live next door to each other in New Jersey, the Jew being the "owner" of a condo built on the Palestinian person's property, don't you think the Jew should offer to give it back, if he expects the other's friendship? If the Palestinian, as is normal, invites the Jew over for tea and politely doesn't bring up the subject, does the Jew feel that this means it's OK what he did? That he can forgive himself? That is what Jews want after all. We want to be forgiven without apology for everything we have done AND everything we are about to do.

Is this a rational approach to peace? Is it working?

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