By Omar Barghouti

When I watched Oscar-winning film The Pianist I had three distinct, uneasy reactions. I was not particularly impressed by the film, from a purely artistic angle; I was horrified by the film’s depiction of the dehumanization of Polish Jews and the impunity of the German occupiers; and I could not help but compare the Warsaw ghetto wall with Israel’s much more ominous wall caging 3.5 million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza in fragmented, sprawling prisons.

In the film, when German soldiers forced Jewish musicians to play for them at a checkpoint, I thought to myself: “that’s one thing Israeli soldiers have not yet done to Palestinians.” I spoke too soon, it seems. Israel’s leading newspaper Ha’aretz reported last week that an Israeli human rights organization monitoring a daunting military roadblock near Nablus was able to videotape Israeli soldiers forcing a Palestinian violinist to play for them. The same organization confirmed that similar abuse had taken place months ago at another checkpoint near Jerusalem.

In typical Israeli whitewashing, the incident was dismissed by an army spokesperson as little more that “insensitivity,” with no malicious intent to humiliate the Palestinians involved. And of course the usual mantra about soldiers having to “contend with a complex and dangerous reality” was again served as a ready, one-size-fits-all excuse. I wonder whether the same would be said or accepted in describing the original Nazi practice at the Warsaw ghetto gates in the 1940’s.

Regrettably, the analogy between the two illegal occupations does not stop here. Many of the methods of collective and individual “punishment” meted out to Palestinian civilians at the hands of young, racist, often sadistic and ever impervious Israeli soldiers at the hundreds of checkpoints littering the occupied Palestinian territories are reminiscent of common Nazi practices against the Jews. Following a visit to the occupied Palestinian territories in 2003, Oona King, a Jewish member of the British parliament attested to this, writing: “The original founders of the Jewish state could surely not imagine the irony facing Israel today: in escaping the ashes of the Holocaust, they have incarcerated another people in a hell similar in its nature - though not its extent - to the Warsaw ghetto.”

Even Tommy Lapid, Israel’s justice minister and a Holocaust survivor himself, stirred a political storm last year when he told Israel radio that a picture of an elderly Palestinian woman searching in the debris for her medication had reminded him of his grandmother who died at Auschwitz. Furthermore, he commented on his army’s wanton and indiscriminate destruction of Palestinian homes, businesses and farms in Gaza at the time, saying: “[I]f we carry on like this, we will be expelled from the United Nations and those responsible will stand trial at The Hague.”

Some of the war crimes that concern people like Lapid have been lately revealed in eyewitness accounts given by former soldiers, who could no longer reconcile whatever moral values they held with their complicity in the daily humiliation, abuse and physical harm of innocent civilians. Such crimes have become normalized in their minds as acceptable, even necessary, acts of “disciplining” the untamed natives, as a measure to maintain “security.”

According to a recent report in the Israeli media, an army commander was accused of gratuitously beating up Palestinians at the notorious Hawwara checkpoint. Ironically, the most damning evidence presented against him was a videotape filmed by the army’s education branch. In that particular episode, the senior officer at that roadblock, knowing that an army film crew was located nearby, and without any provocation, beat a Palestinian “flanked by his wife and children,” punching him in the face, and “even kicked[him] in the lower part of his body,” the report said.

A recent exhibit titled “Breaking the Silence,” organized in Tel Aviv by a number of conscientious Israeli soldiers who served in occupied Hebron, exposed in photographs and objects more serious belligerence towards defenseless Palestinians. Inspired by Jewish settlers’ graffiti that included: “Arabs to the gas chambers”; “Arabs = an inferior race”; “Spill Arab blood”; and, of course, the ever so popular “Death to the Arabs,” soldiers used a myriad of methods to make the lives of average Palestinians intolerable. One photograph showed a bumper sticker on a passing car, perhaps explaining the ultimate goal of such abuse: “Religious penitence provides strength to expel the Arabs.” The exhibit’s main curator described a particularly shocking policy of randomly spraying crowded Palestinian residential neighborhoods, like Abu Sneina, from heavy machine guns and grenade launchers for hours on end in response to any minor shooting of a few bullets from any house in the neighborhood on the Jewish colonies inside the city.

The Hebron horrors pale, however, in comparison to what Israeli army units have done in Gaza. In an unnerving interview with Ha’aretz in November last year, for instance, Liran Ron Furer, a staff sergeant (res.) in the Israeli army and graduate of an arts school, described the gradual transformation of every soldier to an “animal” when staffing a roadblock, irrespective of whatever values he may bring with him from home. From his perspective, those soldiers get infected with what he calls “checkpoint syndrome,” a glaring symptom of which is acting violently towards Palestinians in “the most primal and impulsive manner, without fear of punishment ….” “At the checkpoint,” he explains, “young people have the chance to be masters and using force and violence becomes legitimate … .”

Furer cites how his colleagues degraded and mercilessly beat a Palestinian dwarf just for fun; how they had a “souvenir picture” taken with bloodied, bound civilians whom they’d thrashed; how one soldier ****ed on the head of a Palestinian man because the latter had “the nerve to smile” at a soldier; how another Palestinian was forced to stand on four legs and bark like a dog; and how yet another soldier asked Palestinians for cigarettes and when they refused “broke someone’s hand” and “slashed their tires.”

The most chilling of all the incidents was his own personal confession. “I ran toward [a group of Palestinians] and punched an Arab right in the face,” he admitted. “Blood was trickling from his lip onto his chin. I led him up behind the Jeep and threw him in, his knees banged against the trunk and he landed inside.” He then goes on to describe in gruesome details how he and his comrades stepped on the tightly handcuffed captive, dubbed “the Arab;” how they hit him until “he was bleeding and making a kind of puddle of blood and saliva;” how he “grabbed him by the hair and turned his head to the side,” until he cried aloud, and how the soldiers then “stepped harder and harder on his back,” to make him stop crying.

Furer then reveals that the company commander cheered them on: “Good work, tigers.” And after they took their prey to their camp, the abuse continued in different forms. “All the other soldiers were waiting there to see what [my emphasis] we'd caught. When we came in with the Jeep, they whistled and applauded wildly.” One of the soldiers, Furer said, “went up to him and kicked him in the stomach. The Arab doubled over and grunted, and we all laughed. It was funny ... I kicked him really hard in the *** and he flew forward just as I'd expected. They shouted … and laughed ... and I felt happy. Our Arab was just a 16-year-old mentally retarded boy.”

As savage as it is, checkpoint abuse is not unique in any sense. It fits perfectly well into the general picture of viewing the Palestinians as relative humans who are not entitled to the dignity and respect that full humans deserve. At the height of Israel’s massive reoccupation of Palestinian cities in 2002, for example, soldiers used their knives to engrave the star of David on the arms of a number of detained Palestinian men and teenage boys. The haunting pictures of the victims were first shown on Arab satellite TV channels and eventually exposed on the internet.

In the same year, at al-Amari refugee camp, during a mass roundup of Palestinian males, teenagers and elderly included, Israeli troops inscribed identification numbers “on the foreheads and forearms of Palestinian detainees awaiting interrogation.” The late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat compared the act to well known Nazi practices at concentration camps. Tommy Lapid was incensed, saying: "As a refugee from the Holocaust I find such an act insufferable.” Nonetheless, Raanan Gissin, a spokesman for Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon, was worried only about Israel’s image being tarnished: “clearly it conflicts with the desire to convey a public relations message,” he told Israel Army Radio. Parroting that line, the mainstream media in Israel, too, were far too concerned about the “public relations disaster” to express any abhorrence or protestation at the immorality of the act and the irony of it all.

Yoram Peri, a professor of politics and media at Tel Aviv University, sees PR as “a fundamental issue in Israeli life.” “We do not think we do anything wrong,” he clarifies in an interview with the Guardian, “but we think we explain ourselves badly and that the international media is anti-Semitic.” Obsessed with how Israel is seen rather than with what it actually does, Israelis, according to Peri, are mostly worried that “we do not explain ourselves well. When we discuss the horrible things that happen in the West Bank, we don't talk about the issue but about how it will be seen.”

Recognizing this prevailing cynicism, apathy and acquiescence among the majority of Israelis in the criminal oppression of the Palestinians, former Knesset member Shulamit Aloni pronounced in a recent interview with the Irish publication the Handstand that “gross insensitivity” was threatening a moral disintegration of Israeli society. Referring to the Germans during the Nazi rule, she added, “I am beginning to understand why a whole nation was able to say: ‘We did not know.’”

I wonder when the time will come when a glamorous, award-winning director braves predictable intellectual terror and intimidation tactics to expose the venomous Israeli cocktail of racism and impunity by making a Palestinian version of “The Pianist.”

-Omar Barghouti is an independent political analyst based in Palestine.

Source: www.zmag.org, November 29, 2004.

Remember the support for Pinochet,"He is a bastard but he is our bastard" The same goes for Israelis
P.S."If you do it with an army its war if you do it without one its terrorism" GWB

If the Palestinians didn't try to blow up Israelis at discos and celebrating Passover every chance they get, there would be no checkpoints. Think a little harder here folks.

I'm not even sure the story is true, we don't have both sides. I need to take a medical device on planes with me, and I am often asked to plug it in to make sure it is real, and not a bomb. I suspect that the checkpoint guard was making sure the violin didn't carry an explosive and he could really play. The Palestinians have used wheelchairs, babies, ambulences and every other ploy possible to murder innocent Israelis - why not a violin? The rest of the stuff just cited Palestinian agitators - the same ones who called Jenin a civilian massacre - when it was clearly a pitched battle between armed sides, and where the IDF went far above international moral standards to protect civilians.

There is actually video of the fellow playing the violin in front of the checkpoint guards. There is also an middle aged Isreali human rights observer nearby who is visibly quite upset by the spectacle. And it is a spectacle because the fiddler is barely busker quality. The observer is later interviewed and it is she who says that the guards insisted that he play after thoroughly inspecting the fiddle and specified that he play something 'sad'. The observer shares with the author that all too often Israeli guards set out to humiliate Muslim Arabs reminiscent of German soldiers.

I do however want to note that while the behavior of some guards and soldiers is despicable and therefore deserving of censure and punishment, I cannot believe for a moment that Israelis would support racial policies even remotely similar to the Nazis. Isreal is still the only functioning representative government based on constitutional law in the region despite its theocratic tendencies. That fact that many Israelis (soldiers included) are openly critical of some government policies towards Arab Palestinians is testament to its committment to open governance.

The analogy between Israel and Germany and the Gaza strip and the Warsaw ghetto doesn't hold up. The Palestinians have the ability to free themselves from this situation. Israel doesn't want to be this way, but when faced with an enemy it is difficult not to dehumanize them. Israel made itself vulnerable, tried to move towards peace but all it got in return was a worsening situation. Hopefully with Yasser Arafat gone a Palestinian state will rise, will take care of its own internal security and peace will flourish until terrorists are moved to the fringes until they finally fade away.

Point taken Kincaid re the Warsaw Ghetto analogy. Perhaps the special treatment Stalin meted out to 'cosmopolitan Zionists' from about 1949 until his death is a much more fitting analogy.

I don't know enough about Stalin to agree or not. What I do know about his legacy (mass murder, gulags, Siberia) doesn't seem to apply.

No the Stalinist Terror does not directly apply. As well Stalin himself was never the rabid ant-Semite that Hitler was. Yet there is suffcient evidence to suggest that had Stalin lived longer he was preparing to launch an all out attack against Soviet Jewry and another blood purge of the CPSU. Have a look at the "Anti-Zionist" campaigns and "the Doctor's Plot". Jews were increasingly becoming scapegoats for everything that was not right with the CPSU and the USSR.

Wrong and wrong. The Israeli propaganda machine is busy obscuring the obvious evil behind their actions. We hear that the Israelis are "bulldozing suicide bombers' homes" and "clearing way for a wall to keep out terrorist." Sounds defensive, doesn't it? Both are plainly "land-grabs." Unless you believe in "woe to the vanquished" is valid in the 20th century, Israelis have no right to keep the illegal settlements. Yet, they continue to expand.

If the Palestinian resistors stopped attacking, do you believe that Israelis will reward them by returning occupied land? Allow displaced Palestinians to live inside Israel? Sharon may have had a change of face recently but the big picture doesn't change. Is Sharon's plan for pulling out of the 'entire' Gaza strip a fair compromise for continuing the illegal settlement activities in the West Bank? Here is a rather large map dated January 2004:


EDIT: Removed too big picture.

Hey, cool map! Can ya' shrink it down a bit? I'll try to get back and reply later.

Hmmm, it does widen the page but I can't find smaller one.

y: "displaced Palestinians to live inside Israel"

First, Sharon's actions killing the Yassin and Rantisi have worked - terrorism is way down. They say you can't fight terrorism with force - but Sharon proved them wrong. You don't have to appease them - you can just kill them. Funny how most liberals don't get this. He also locked Arafat up, which probably worsened his health, allowing the region to start to look up again. Notice all the peace moves that are happening from Egypt and Kuwait etc. They know Sharon is a pragmatist, and that he can take action. Brilliant move on Sharon's part, helping Arafat on his way in a politically acceptable manner.

Second - only a few ten thousand Palestinians are "displaced," compared to about 800,000 thousand Jews expelled from Arab lands around the same time. Most of the Palestinians moved aside because they wanted the Arab armies to kill the Jews. Jews legally bought land there, cultivated it, immigrated, and created the wealthy State of Israel, from a mediocre desert. Why should a bunch of UN charity cases get anything? The only reason Israel controls the land there, is that they won a war the Arabs started. If you start a war and lose, there are consequences. At any rate, if the world wants to pay some compensation to the handful of peaceful Palestinians caught up in the melee of 1948-1949, I have no problem with that, so long as the 800 thousand Jews expelled from Arab lands are also compensated, along with all the Jews who had to flee Europe over the last 200 years due to pogroms, death camps etc. Until that happens, you can be quite sure that Israel will not let anti-semitic world opinion try to settle Palestinians in the country that the Jews built.

As for the map - I don't see the point. Jews have a moral and legal right to settle wherever they want in the land now controlled by Israel - Hebron is one of the oldest continuous Jewish communities in the world. The only time Jews did not live there is in the 1930's after several Arab riots killing Jews forced Jews to leave their ancestral homes. The Jews there now are only re-creating this 3000 year old tradition. Why does a Palestinian state have to be Judenrein?? Why not just let them live where they are (as a Jewish minority in a Palestinian state, just as there are Palestinians as a minority in the Jewish state?) The very assumption that Jews must leave the "West Bank" settlements at all shows the anti-Jewish bias of the whole discussion.

That was the one of the dumbest most ignorant and racist reply that I have read in a while. Obviously your parents, pastor or whoever was very busy working on you.

You don't know the difference between correlation and cause, do you? Furthermore, your murderous tendencies are disturbing; I would lock you up if you were my patient.

Your inclination to lump citizens of various countries as one broad "Arab" group (may be appropriate when studying Medieval and earlier history but certainly innappropriate now) further confirms your raging racism, bigotry and prejudice, especially when you declaim a blanket blame. Omar conquered in 600AD the land that is now Palestine. The population since then has been primarily Muslim...

You know, forget it. You read a textbook. Even the most Conservative textbook will fix most of your prejudices. It looks like you wrote that intentionally to incite anger anyways.

y - My, my. Not being very civil here are we? There are a whole bunch of concurrent threads here about being polite to your interlocutors. I didn't call you stupid or any such thing (readers of your posts may make up their own minds on that topic). You post supporting mass murderers, I reply demonstrating how to reduce the death of innocent civilians (namely, kill the terrorists rather than negotiate with them), and you call *me* a bunch of names, and accuse me of "murderous tendencies". *You* are the one who supports murdering innocent civilians.

At any rate, the main thing I want to point out is that contrary to conventional opinion, you don't have to negotiate with murderers or appease them, you can just kill them. Sharon is a military and political genius and shows the way to end terorrism - kill the terrorist leaders like Yassin and Rantisi, regardless of world opinion. Terrorists are rational - they act to achieve concrete goals. If you negotiate with them you reward them, and create more terrorism, if you kill them, you punish them and you reduce terrorism. It's very simple. Again, terrorists are rational creatures and will respond to either rewards or punishments. Negotiate with terrorists if you want more terrorism. Rewarding a certain behavior will create more of that behavior. You claim to be some kind of shrink - surely you learned this in school. Now that Arafat is out of the way (and his confinement surely didn't help his health), we see all kinds of tentative peace moves afoot. The Palestinians could have had a state or their own territory many times, the last during the Clinton years. But Clinton and Barak foolishly thought you could stop terrorism by rewarding it. There could only be the hope of peace once terrorism was defeated, which Sharon has done.

Oh, and I suspect I have read more on this topic than you have, from Said and Rashid Khalidi and Chomsky and Shahak to Benny Morris and Ze'ev Shiff and Alan Dershowitz.

By the way, you seem to need more information on these topics - please check out www.memri.org.


Also, you say "Furthermore, your murderous tendencies are disturbing; I would lock you up if you were my patient."

Interesting. You have read about projection, haven't you? You seem to have something of a control complex here. Do you always threaten to lock up people you disagree with? This is the terrorist view of life - force other people to do what you want rather than negotiate or discuss with them. You seem to have a very rigid view of life. Do they actually allow you to talk to people in need of psychological help? Do your superiors know your controlling, violent views?

You could have, but naming names certainly didn't do anything of asserting your knowledge.

No. Only the insane and dangerous ones. Hint: you qualify.
That's not just the terrorist's view of life. That's the desire of any individual or group with power.
Yes.
"They" is an ambiguous pronoun.
Superiors? As in my boss? I'd think they'd promote me to management.

y - Sharon's actions prove that killing terrorists stops terrorism. Clinton's and Barak's actions of negotiating with terrorists proves that negotiation causes more terrorism. The Palestinians, led by Arafat, started the second Intifada to kill the Jews and destroy Israel. They failed: their economy is in tatters, the terrorist leadership was killed or imprisoned and at the end Arafat wasn't even mourned in the Arab world, because he was an incompetent delusional loser. They lost the war, and Sharon won. Everyone says you have to negotiate with terrorists, and Sharon proved by killing Yassin and Rantisi that this view was false. They were killed, Hamas was weakened, and has been able only to blow up one or two busses since then. Justice was done, and many lives were saved.

Oh, and regarding murder - killing a known and avowed terrorist leader is justice, and effective in saving lives. Blowing up teenagers in a disco is murder. You seem to be unaware of the difference, so I thought I would point it out to you.

"You missed Rabin. I would say something obvious here but I think you know what is coming."

No, as you pointed out, I am very stupid. I just know that killing terrorists stops terrorism, rewarding terrorism (aka "negotiations") increases it, as Sharon has proved. Go ahead, spell it out for me.

"You don't know the difference between correlation and cause, do you?"

Yes - I certainly do know the difference. Sharon killed the terrorists and CAUSED a reduction in terrorism. The Palestinians were defeated, and the Palestinian economy is in tatters. They lost almost everything they gained in the '90's and that they could have had if they had taken the Clinton peace deal (and you may be very sure Sharon won't give any where near as much). The issue is really very clear and simple. You try to make it complex, but it is very simple. Your posts are CORRELATED with the onset of winter.

I love this oft heard remark.Israel doesn't want it this way but we are forced to do it.The same goes for Palestinians. Nobody is born a suicide bomber, check out the conditions in the refugee camps and you'll know why this is nothing but an act of desperation.
As far as negotiations are concerned why should the Palestinians say yes just because the Americans and the Israelis want them to say so
The great Ammerican motto
A red Indian walks into town and meets an Uncle Sam look alike
Uncle Sam lok alike "Hows my town"
The Red Indian "Hows my country"
"Hey but we have given them reserves what more do they want"
Guess whom the Israelis look upto for their views on justice.Happily the the rest of the world doesn't think like wise

An update on the benefits for the region from Arafat's death: http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=511377&displayTypeCd=1&sideCd=1&contrassID=2

Even France (!) may come to its senses after years of vitriolic anti-Israeli propaganda: http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=1102432934146

Such are the benefits of Arafat's death, which, as I said, I hope Sharon helped along as best he could.

vgeorge: "Nobody is born a suicide bomber"

Of course not, it takes years of ideological training in Islamic hate and anti-Jewish propaganda. Terrorism is not caused by poverty and dispair and desperation, but by hope of gain and a religion of hate. That is why defeating terrorism militarily is the only solution. Terrorism is caused by hope and optimism, not dispair and poverty. Terrorism is dropping in Israel now becuase it is being defeated and is not a winning strategy, and is not achieving the success the Palestinians hoped for, not because Sharon gave in to their demands. Again, terrorism is caused by practical hope for gain, not desparation. A good lesson for all of us to learn.

As for the conditions in the so-called refugee camps - what do you expect from a UN supervised situation? This shows the destructive results of bureaucratic welfare. If I wanted to destroy the Palestinian people, or any other for that matter, I would put them under the protection of a UN welfare agency, rather than encourage self-reliance, and a "move forward" attitude. They want to mire themselves in the past and be dependent on others, while nursing delusional revenge fantasies (something both y and v seem to encourage) they can be my guest - but they will continue to ruin their lives that way, while being a bother to everyone else as well. v - you really ought to read up on the historical situation, you seem to have been fed some serious lies about how the Jews immigrated to the area. Again, I suggest www.memri.org for an analysis of current affairs to you.

At any rate, the Jews have a right to live in their historic homeland. They bought the land and immigrated and/or lived there for centuries and created a modern developed economy, while the rest of the region is mired in economic, intellectual and cultural backwardness. It is necessary to have a militarily powerful Jewish nation-state to avoid the murder, persecution, and discrimination visited on Jews in both European and Arab lands for centuries. The Arabs could have chosen to benefit from the influx of hard-working, economically-productive, educated people to the Middle East, but they chose the way of xenophobia, armed conflict, and resentment. Their loss.

oh boy posting again about my neck of the woods...

sigh...

all i can say is you'll never understand until u live here, and even then its not so easy. nothing is black and white, all grey.

although i find the comparison between israel and nazi era germany so odious and ridiculous, although this is the way of the world...

as is says in the psalms, "eyes have they, but they cannot see..." (psalms 115:4, as usual much more poetic in hebrew)

response to mr omar...

A View from the Eye of the Storm

Talk delivered by Haim Harari
at a meeting of the International Advisory Board
of a large multi-national corporation, April, 2004

As you know, I usually provide the scientific and technological "entertainment" in our meetings, but, on this occasion, our Chairman suggested that I present my own personal view on events in the part of the world from which I come. I have never been and I will never be a Government official and I have no privileged information. My perspective is entirely based on what I see, on what I read and on the fact that my family has lived in this region for almost 200 years. You may regard my views as those of the proverbial taxi driver, which you are supposed to question, when you visit a country.

I could have shared with you some fascinating facts and some personal thoughts about the Israeli-Arab conflict. However, I will touch upon it only in passing. I prefer to devote most of my remarks to the broader picture of the region and its place in world events. I refer to the entire area between Pakistan and Morocco, which is predominantly Arab, predominantly Moslem, but includes many non-Arab and also significant non-Moslem minorities.

Why do I put aside Israel and its own immediate neighborhood? Because Israel and any problems related to it, in spite of what you might read or hear in the world media, is not the central issue, and has never been the central issue in the upheaval in the region. Yes, there is a 100 year-old Israeli-Arab conflict, but it is not where the main show is. The millions who died in the Iran-Iraq war had nothing to do with Israel. The mass murder happening right now in Sudan, where the Arab Moslem regime is massacring its black Christian citizens, has nothing to do with Israel. The frequent reports from Algeria about the murders of hundreds of civilian in one village or another by other Algerians have nothing to do with Israel. Saddam Hussein did not invade Kuwait, endangered Saudi Arabia and butchered his own people because of Israel. Egypt did not use poison gas against Yemen in the 60’s because of Israel. Assad the Father did not kill tens of thousands of his own citizens in one week in El Hamma in Syria because of Israel. The Taliban control of Afghanistan and the civil war there had nothing to do with Israel. The Libyan blowing up of the Pan-Am flight had nothing to do with Israel, and I could go on and on and on.

The root of the trouble is that this entire Moslem region is totally dysfunctional, by any standard of the word, and would have been so even if Israel would have joined the Arab league and an independent Palestine would have existed for 100 years. The 22 member countries of the Arab league, from Mauritania to the Gulf States, have a total population of 300 millions, larger than the US and almost as large as the EU before its expansion. They have a land area larger than either the US or all of Europe. These 22 countries, with all their oil and natural resources, have a combined GDP smaller than that of Netherlands plus Belgium and equal to half of the GDP of California alone. Within this meager GDP, the gaps between rich and poor are beyond belief and too many of the rich made their money not by succeeding in business, but by being corrupt rulers. The social status of women is far below what it was in the Western World 150 years ago. Human rights are below any reasonable standard, in spite of the grotesque fact that Libya was elected Chair of the UN Human Rights commission. According to a report prepared by a committee of Arab intellectuals and published under the auspices of the U.N., the number of books translated by the entire Arab world is much smaller than what little Greece alone translates. The total number of scientific publications of 300 million Arabs is less than that of 6 million Israelis. Birth rates in the region are very high, increasing the poverty, the social gaps and the cultural decline. And all of this is happening in a region, which only 30 years ago, was believed to be the next wealthy part of the world, and in a Moslem area, which developed, at some point in history, one of the most advanced cultures in the world.

It is fair to say that this creates an unprecedented breeding ground for cruel dictators, terror networks, fanaticism, incitement, suicide murders and general decline. It is also a fact that almost everybody in the region blames this situation on the United States, on Israel, on Western Civilization, on Judaism and Christianity, on anyone and anything, except themselves.

Do I say all of this with the satisfaction of someone discussing the failings of his enemies? On the contrary, I firmly believe that the world would have been a much better place and my own neighborhood would have been much more pleasant and peaceful, if things were different.

I should also say a word about the millions of decent, honest, good people who are either devout Moslems or are not very religious but grew up in Moslem families. They are double victims of an outside world, which now develops Islamophobia and of their own environment, which breaks their heart by being totally dysfunctional. The problem is that the vast silent majority of these Moslems are not part of the terror and of the incitement but they also do not stand up against it. They become accomplices, by omission, and this applies to political leaders, intellectuals, business people and many others. Many of them can certainly tell right from wrong, but are afraid to express their views.

The events of the last few years have amplified four issues, which have always existed, but have never been as rampant as in the present upheaval in the region. These are the four main pillars of the current World Conflict, or perhaps we should already refer to it as "the undeclared World War III". I have no better name for the present situation. A few more years may pass before everybody acknowledges that it is a World War, but we are already well into it.

The first element is the suicide murder. Suicide murders are not a new invention but they have been made popular, if I may use this expression, only lately. Even after September 11, it seems that most of the Western World does not yet understand this weapon. It is a very potent psychological weapon. Its real direct impact is relatively minor. The total number of casualties from hundreds of suicide murders within Israel in the last three years is much smaller than those due to car accidents. September 11 was quantitatively much less lethal than many earthquakes. More people die from AIDS in one day in Africa than all the Russians who died in the hands of Chechnya-based Moslem suicide murderers since that conflict started. Saddam killed every month more people than all those who died from suicide murders since the Coalition occupation of Iraq.

So what is all the fuss about suicide killings? It creates headlines. It is spectacular. It is frightening. It is a very cruel death with bodies dismembered and horrible severe lifelong injuries to many of the wounded. It is always shown on television in great detail. One such murder, with the help of hysterical media coverage, can destroy the tourism industry of a country for quite a while, as it did in Bali and in Turkey.

But the real fear comes from the undisputed fact that no defense and no preventive measures can succeed against a determined suicide murderer. This has not yet penetrated the thinking of the Western World. The U.S. and Europe are constantly improving their defense against the last murder, not the next one. We may arrange for the best airport security in the world. But if you want to murder by suicide, you do not have to board a plane in order to explode yourself and kill many people. Who could stop a suicide murder in the midst of the crowded line waiting to be checked by the airport metal detector? How about the lines to the check-in counters in a busy travel period? Put a metal detector in front of every train station in Spain and the terrorists will get the buses. Protect the buses and they will explode in movie theaters, concert halls, supermarkets, shopping malls, schools and hospitals. Put guards in front of every concert hall and there will always be a line of people to be checked by the guards and this line will be the target, not to speak of killing the guards themselves. You can somewhat reduce your vulnerability by preventive and defensive measures and by strict border controls but not eliminate it and definitely not win the war in a defensive way. And it is a war!

What is behind the suicide murders? Money, power and cold-blooded murderous incitement, nothing else. It has nothing to do with true fanatic religious beliefs. No Moslem preacher has ever blown himself up. No son of an Arab politician or religious leader has ever blown himself. No relative of anyone influential has done it. Wouldn’t you expect some of the religious leaders to do it themselves, or to talk their sons into doing it, if this is truly a supreme act of religious fervor? Aren’t they interested in the benefits of going to Heaven? Instead, they send outcast women, naïve children, retarded people and young incited hotheads. They promise them the delights, mostly sexual, of the next world, and pay their families handsomely after the supreme act is performed and enough innocent people are dead.

Suicide murders also have nothing to do with poverty and despair. The poorest region in the world, by far, is Africa. It never happens there. There are numerous desperate people in the world, in different cultures, countries and continents. Desperation does not provide anyone with explosives, reconnaissance and transportation. There was certainly more despair in Saddam’s Iraq then in Paul Bremmer’s Iraq, and no one exploded himself. A suicide murder is simply a horrible, vicious weapon of cruel, inhuman, cynical, well-funded terrorists, with no regard to human life, including the life of their fellow countrymen, but with very high regard to their own affluent well-being and their hunger for power.

The only way to fight this new “popular” weapon is identical to the only way in which you fight organized crime or pirates on the high seas: the offensive way. Like in the case of organized crime, it is crucial that the forces on the offensive be united and it is crucial to reach the top of the crime pyramid. You cannot eliminate organized crime by arresting the little drug dealer in the street corner. You must go after the head of the "Family".

If part of the public supports it, others tolerate it, many are afraid of it and some try to explain it away by poverty or by a miserable childhood, organized crime will thrive and so will terrorism. The United States understands this now, after September 11. Russia is beginning to understand it. Turkey understands it well. I am very much afraid that most of Europe still does not understand it. Unfortunately, it seems that Europe will understand it only after suicide murders will arrive in Europe in a big way. In my humble opinion, this will definitely happen. The Spanish trains and the Istanbul bombings are only the beginning. The unity of the Civilized World in fighting this horror is absolutely indispensable. Until Europe wakes up, this unity will not be achieved.

The second ingredient is words, more precisely lies. Words can be lethal. They kill people. It is often said that politicians, diplomats and perhaps also lawyers and business people must sometimes lie, as part of their professional life. But the norms of politics and diplomacy are childish, in comparison with the level of incitement and total absolute deliberate fabrications, which have reached new heights in the region we are talking about. An incredible number of people in the Arab world believe that September 11 never happened, or was an American provocation or, even better, a Jewish plot.

You all remember the Iraqi Minister of Information, Mr. Mouhamad Said al-Sahaf and his press conferences when the US forces were already inside Baghdad. Disinformation at time of war is an accepted tactic. But to stand, day after day, and to make such preposterous statements, known to everybody to be lies, without even being ridiculed in your own milieu, can only happen in this region. Mr. Sahaf eventually became a popular icon as a court jester, but this did not stop some allegedly respectable newspapers from giving him equal time. It also does not prevent the Western press from giving credence, every day, even now, to similar liars. After all, if you want to be an antisemite, there are subtle ways of doing it. You do not have to claim that the holocaust never happened and that the Jewish temple in Jerusalem never existed. But millions of Moslems are told by their leaders that this is the case. When these same leaders make other statements, the Western media report them as if they could be true.

It is a daily occurrence that the same people, who finance, arm and dispatch suicide murderers, condemn the act in English in front of western TV cameras, talking to a world audience, which even partly believes them. It is a daily routine to hear the same leader making opposite statements in Arabic to his people and in English to the rest of the world. Incitement by Arab TV, accompanied by horror pictures of mutilated bodies, has become a powerful weapon of those who lie, distort and want to destroy everything. Little children are raised on deep hatred and on admiration of so-called martyrs, and the Western World does not notice it because its own TV sets are mostly tuned to soap operas and game shows. I recommend to you, even though most of you do not understand Arabic, to watch Al Jazeera, from time to time. You will not believe your own eyes.

But words also work in other ways, more subtle. A demonstration in Berlin, carrying banners supporting Saddam’s regime and featuring three-year old babies dressed as suicide murderers, is defined by the press and by political leaders as a “peace demonstration”. You may support or oppose the Iraq war, but to refer to fans of Saddam, Arafat or Bin Laden as peace activists is a bit too much. A woman walks into an Israeli restaurant in mid-day, eats, observes families with old people and children eating their lunch in the adjacent tables and pays the bill. She then blows herself up, killing 20 people, including many children, with heads and arms rolling around in the restaurant. She is called “martyr” by several Arab leaders and “activist” by the European press. Dignitaries condemn the act but visit her bereaved family and the money flows.

There is a new game in town: The actual murderer is called “the military wing”, the one who pays him, equips him and sends him is now called “the political wing” and the head of the operation is called the “spiritual leader”. There are numerous other examples of such Orwellian nomenclature, used every day not only by terror chiefs but also by Western media. These words are much more dangerous than many people realize. They provide an emotional infrastructure for atrocities. It was Joseph Goebels who said that if you repeat a lie often enough, people will believe it. He is now being outperformed by his successors.

The third aspect is money. Huge amounts of money, which could have solved many social problems in this dysfunctional part of the world, are channeled into three concentric spheres supporting death and murder. In the inner circle are the terrorists themselves. The money funds their travel, explosives, hideouts and permanent search for soft vulnerable targets. They are surrounded by a second wider circle of direct supporters, planners, commanders, preachers, all of whom make a living, usually a very comfortable living, by serving as terror infrastructure. Finally, we find the third circle of so-called religious, educational and welfare organizations, which actually do some good, feed the hungry and provide some schooling, but brainwash a new generation with hatred, lies and ignorance. This circle operates mostly through mosques, madrasas and other religious establishments but also through inciting electronic and printed media. It is this circle that makes sure that women remain inferior, that democracy is unthinkable and that exposure to the outside world is minimal. It is also that circle that leads the way in blaming everybody outside the Moslem world, for the miseries of the region.

Figuratively speaking, this outer circle is the guardian, which makes sure that the people look and listen inwards to the inner circle of terror and incitement, rather than to the world outside. Some parts of this same outer circle actually operate as a result of fear from, or blackmail by, the inner circles. The horrifying added factor is the high birth rate. Half of the population of the Arab world is under the age of 20, the most receptive age to incitement, guaranteeing two more generations of blind hatred.

Of the three circles described above, the inner circles are primarily financed by terrorist states like Iran and Syria, until recently also by Iraq and Libya and earlier also by some of the Communist regimes. These states, as well as the Palestinian Authority, are the safe havens of the wholesale murder vendors. The outer circle is largely financed by Saudi Arabia, but also by donations from certain Moslem communities in the United States and Europe and, to a smaller extent, by donations of European Governments to various NGO's and by certain United Nations organizations, whose goals may be noble, but they are infested and exploited by agents of the outer circle. The Saudi regime, of course, will be the next victim of major terror, when the inner circle will explode into the outer circle. The Saudis are beginning to understand it, but they fight the inner circles, while still financing the infrastructure at the outer circle.

Some of the leaders of these various circles live very comfortably on their loot. You meet their children in the best private schools in Europe, not in the training camps of suicide murderers. The Jihad "soldiers" join packaged death tours to Iraq and other hotspots, while some of their leaders ski in Switzerland. Mrs. Arafat, who lives in Paris with her daughter, receives tens of thousands Dollars per month from the allegedly bankrupt Palestinian Authority while a typical local ringleader of the Al-Aksa brigade, reporting to Arafat, receives only a cash payment of a couple of hundred dollars, for performing murders at the retail level.

The fourth element of the current world conflict is the total breaking of all laws. The civilized world believes in democracy, the rule of law, including international law, human rights, free speech and free press, among other liberties. There are naïve old-fashioned habits such as respecting religious sites and symbols, not using ambulances and hospitals for acts of war, avoiding the mutilation of dead bodies and not using children as human shields or human bombs. Never in history, not even in the Nazi period, was there such total disregard of all of the above as we observe now. Every student of political science debates how you prevent an anti-democratic force from winning a democratic election and abolishing democracy. Other aspects of a civilized society must also have limitations. Can a policeman open fire on someone trying to kill him? Can a government listen to phone conversations of terrorists and drug dealers? Does free speech protects you when you shout “fire” in a crowded theater? Should there be death penalty, for deliberate multiple murders? These are the old-fashioned dilemmas. But now we have an entire new set.

Do you raid a mosque, which serves as a terrorist ammunition storage? Do you return fire, if you are attacked from a hospital? Do you storm a church taken over by terrorists who took the priests hostages? Do you search every ambulance after a few suicide murderers use ambulances to reach their targets? Do you strip every woman because one pretended to be pregnant and carried a suicide bomb on her belly? Do you shoot back at someone trying to kill you, standing deliberately behind a group of children? Do you raid terrorist headquarters, hidden in a mental hospital? Do you shoot an arch-murderer who deliberately moves from one location to another, always surrounded by children? All of these happen daily in Iraq and in the Palestinian areas. What do you do? Well, you do not want to face the dilemma. But it cannot be avoided.

Suppose, for the sake of discussion, that someone would openly stay in a well-known address in Teheran, hosted by the Iranian Government and financed by it, executing one atrocity after another in Spain or in France, killing hundreds of innocent people, accepting responsibility for the crimes, promising in public TV interviews to do more of the same, while the Government of Iran issues public condemnations of his acts but continues to host him, invite him to official functions and treat him as a great dignitary. I leave it to you as homework to figure out what Spain or France would have done, in such a situation.

The problem is that the civilized world is still having illusions about the rule of law in a totally lawless environment. It is trying to play ice hockey by sending a ballerina ice-skater into the rink or to knock out a heavyweight boxer by a chess player. In the same way that no country has a law against cannibals eating its prime minister, because such an act is unthinkable, international law does not address killers shooting from hospitals, mosques and ambulances, while being protected by their Government or society. International law does not know how to handle someone who sends children to throw stones, stands behind them and shoots with immunity and cannot be arrested because he is sheltered by a Government. International law does not know how to deal with a leader of murderers who is royally and comfortably hosted by a country, which pretends to condemn his acts or just claims to be too weak to arrest him. The amazing thing is that all of these crooks demand protection under international law and define all those who attack them as war criminals, with some Western media repeating the allegations. The good news is that all of this is temporary, because the evolution of international law has always adapted itself to reality. The punishment for suicide murder should be death or arrest before the murder, not during and not after. After every world war, the rules of international law have changed and the same will happen after the present one. But during the twilight zone, a lot of harm can be done.

The picture I described here is not pretty. What can we do about it? In the short run, only fight and win. In the long run – only educate the next generation and open it to the world. The inner circles can and must be destroyed by force. The outer circle cannot be eliminated by force. Here we need financial starvation of the organizing elite, more power to women, more education, counter propaganda, boycott whenever feasible and access to Western media, internet and the international scene. Above all, we need a total absolute unity and determination of the civilized world against all three circles of evil.

Allow me, for a moment, to depart from my alleged role as a taxi driver and return to science. When you have a malignant tumor, you may remove the tumor itself surgically. You may also starve it by preventing new blood from reaching it from other parts of the body, thereby preventing new "supplies" from expanding the tumor. If you want to be sure, it is best to do both.

But before you fight and win, by force or otherwise, you have to realize that you are in a war, and this may take Europe a few more years. In order to win, it is necessary to first eliminate the terrorist regimes, so that no Government in the world will serve as a safe haven for these people. I do not want to comment here on whether the American-led attack on Iraq was justified from the point of view of weapons of mass destruction or any other pre-war argument, but I can look at the post-war map of Western Asia. Now that Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya are out, two and a half terrorist states remain: Iran, Syria and Lebanon, the latter being a Syrian colony. Perhaps Sudan should be added to the list. As a result of the conquest of Afghanistan and Iraq, both Iran and Syria are now totally surrounded by territories unfriendly to them. Iran is encircled by Afghanistan, by the Gulf States, Iraq and the Moslem republics of the former Soviet Union. Syria is surrounded by Turkey, Iraq, Jordan and Israel. This is a significant strategic change and it applies strong pressure on the terrorist countries. It is not surprising that Iran is so active in trying to incite a Shiite uprising in Iraq. I do not know if the American plan was actually to encircle both Iran and Syria, but that is the resulting situation.

In my humble opinion, the number one danger to the world today is Iran and its regime. It definitely has ambitions to rule vast areas and to expand in all directions. It has an ideology, which claims supremacy over Western culture. It is ruthless. It has proven that it can execute elaborate terrorist acts without leaving too many traces, using Iranian Embassies. It is clearly trying to develop Nuclear Weapons. Its so-called moderates and conservatives play their own virtuoso version of the “good-cop versus bad-cop” game. Iran sponsors Syrian terrorism, it is certainly behind much of the action in Iraq, it is fully funding the Hizbulla and, through it, the Palestinian Hamas and Islamic Jihad, it performed acts of terror at least in Europe and in South America and probably also in Uzbekhistan and Saudi Arabia and it truly leads a multi-national terror consortium, which includes, as minor players, Syria, Lebanon and certain Shiite elements in Iraq. Nevertheless, most European countries still trade with Iran, try to appease it and refuse to read the clear signals.

In order to win the war it is also necessary to dry the financial resources of the terror conglomerate. It is pointless to try to understand the subtle differences between the Sunni terror of Al Qaida and Hamas and the Shiite terror of Hizbulla, Sadr and other Iranian inspired enterprises. When it serves their business needs, all of them collaborate beautifully.

It is crucial to stop Saudi and other financial support of the outer circle, which is the fertile breeding ground of terror. It is important to monitor all donations from the Western World to Islamic organizations, to monitor the finances of international relief organizations and to react with forceful economic measures to any small sign of financial aid to any of the three circles of terrorism. It is also important to act decisively against the campaign of lies and fabrications and to monitor those Western media who collaborate with it out of naivety, financial interests or ignorance.

Above all, never surrender to terror. No one will ever know whether the recent elections in Spain would have yielded a different result, if not for the train bombings a few days earlier. But it really does not matter. What matters is that the terrorists believe that they caused the result and that they won by driving Spain out of Iraq. The Spanish story will surely end up being extremely costly to other European countries, including France, who is now expelling inciting preachers and forbidding veils and including others who sent troops to Iraq. In the long run, Spain itself will pay even more.

Is the solution a democratic Arab world? If by democracy we mean free elections but also free press, free speech, a functioning judicial system, civil liberties, equality to women, free international travel, exposure to international media and ideas, laws against racial incitement and against defamation, and avoidance of lawless behavior regarding hospitals, places of worship and children, then yes, democracy is the solution. If democracy is just free elections, it is likely that the most fanatic regime will be elected, the one whose incitement and fabrications are the most inflammatory. We have seen it already in Algeria and, to a certain extent, in Turkey. It will happen again, if the ground is not prepared very carefully. On the other hand, a certain transition democracy, as in Jordan, may be a better temporary solution, paving the way for the real thing, perhaps in the same way that an immediate sudden democracy did not work in Russia and would not have worked in China.

I have no doubt that the civilized world will prevail. But the longer it takes us to understand the new landscape of this war, the more costly and painful the victory will be. Europe, more than any other region, is the key. Its understandable recoil from wars, following the horrors of World War II, may cost thousands of additional innocent lives, before the tide will turn.

im reposting this article in a new theread so it can be read without the annoying screen width problem...