AP: JERUSALEM - A Jewish-American businessman testified Tuesday in a corruption probe that threatens to bring down Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, saying he handed cash-stuffed envelopes to the Israeli politician he described as a bon vivant with a penchant for fancy hotels, fine cigars and first-class travel.

Morris Talansky's testimony offered an unflattering portrait of Olmert just as the already unpopular Israeli leader seeks to rally reluctant public support for peace talks with Syria and the Palestinians.

Police suspect Olmert illicitly took up to $500,000 from Talansky in illegal campaign contributions or bribes before becoming prime minister in 2006. Olmert, who denies wrongdoing, says the funds were legal contributions but has promised to step down if indicted.

Legal affairs analyst Moshe Negbi said Talansky's testimony suggests Olmert could face charges of bribery and breach of trust. "I don't think that there were ever such grave suspicions against a prime minister in Israel," Negbi said.

Olmert's lawyer Eli Zohar labeled Talansky's testimony "twisted" and said the truth would be revealed in the cross-examination, which is set for July 17.

"In general, we're saying that we're not talking about criminal activity whatsoever," he said.

Olmert, whom police have questioned twice, had no comment on the testimony.

Israel TV said late Tuesday that Defense Minister Ehud Barak, leader of the Labor Party, Olmert's main partner in the governing coalition, was considering calling on Olmert to suspend himself from office or resign. Opposition politicians called publicly for his resignation.

Talansky told the court he turned over about $150,000 of his own money to Olmert, directly and through political aides, at meetings in New York and Jerusalem over a 15-year period.

He said much of the money was raised in New York "parlor meetings," where Olmert would address American donors who then would leave contributions on their chairs.

Throughout his eight-hour testimony, Talansky spoke of his love for Israel and his conviction that Olmert was the right man to lead the country. For that reason, he said, he "overlooked" nagging doubts about why Olmert insisted on receiving the money in cash...

WaPo: Former White House press secretary Scott McClellan writes in a new memoir that the Iraq war was sold to the American people with a sophisticated "political propaganda campaign" led by President Bush and aimed at "manipulating sources of public opinion" and "downplaying the major reason for going to war."

The criticism of Bush in the book is striking, given that it comes from a man who followed him to Washington from Texas.

Bush is depicted as an out-of-touch leader, operating in a political bubble, who has stubbornly refused to admit mistakes. McClellan defends the president's intellect -- "Bush is plenty smart enough to be president," he writes -- but casts him as unwilling or unable to be reflective about his job.

"A more self-confident executive would be willing to acknowledge failure, to trust people's ability to forgive those who seek redemption for mistakes and show a readiness to change," he writes.

Internationsl Herald Tribune (hat tip Brussels Journal): BRUSSELS: On the street, Malika El Aroud is anonymous in an Islamic black veil covering all but her eyes.

In her living room, El Aroud, a 48-year-old Belgian, wears the ordinary look of middle age: a plain black T-shirt and pants and curly brown hair. The only adornment is a pair of powder-blue slippers monogrammed in gold with the letters SEXY.

But it is on the Internet that El Aroud has distinguished herself. Writing in French under the name Oum Obeyda, she has transformed herself into one of the most prominent Internet jihadists in Europe.

She calls herself a female holy warrior for Al Qaeda. She insists that she does not disseminate instructions on bomb-making and has no intention of taking up arms herself. Rather, she browbeats Muslim men to go and fight, and rallies women to join the cause.

"It's not my role to set off bombs - that's ridiculous," she said in a rare interview. "I have a weapon. It's to write. It's to speak out. That's my jihad. You can do many things with words. Writing is also a bomb."

El Aroud has not only made a name for herself among devotees of radical forums where she broadcasts her message of hatred toward the West. She also is well known to intelligence officials throughout Europe as simply "Malika" - an Islamist who is at the forefront of the movement by women to take a larger role in the male-dominated global jihad.

The authorities have noted an increase in suicide bombings carried out by women - the American military reports that 18 women have conducted suicide missions in Iraq so far this year, compared with 8 all of last year - but they say there is also a less violent yet potentially more insidious army of women organizers, proselytizers, teachers, translators and fund-raisers, who either join their husbands in the fight or step into the breach as men are jailed or killed.

"Women are coming of age in jihad and are entering a world once reserved for men," said Claude Moniquet, president of the Brussels-based European Strategic Intelligence and Security Center. "Malika is a role model, an icon who is bold enough to use her own name. She plays a very important strategic role as a source of inspiration. She's very clever - and extremely dangerous."

El Aroud began her rise to prominence because of a man in her life. Two days before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, her husband carried out a bombing in Afghanistan that killed the anti-Taliban warlord Ahmed Shah Massoud at the behest of Osama bin Laden. Her husband was killed, and she took to the Internet as the widow of a martyr.

She remarried, and she and her new husband were convicted in Switzerland for operating pro-Qaeda Web sites. Now, according to the Belgian authorities, she is a suspect in what the authorities say they believe is a plot to carry out an attack in Belgium...

After all, she said, she knows the rules. "I write in a legal way," she said. "I know what I'm doing. I'm Belgian. I know the system."

That system has often been lenient for her. She was detained last December with 13 others in a suspected plot to free a convicted terrorist from prison and to mount an attack in Brussels. But Belgian law required that they be released within 24 hours because no charges were brought and searches failed to turn up weapons, explosives or incriminating documents.

Now, even as El Aroud remains under constant surveillance, she is back home rallying militants on her Web site - and collecting more than $1,100 a month in government unemployment benefits...

Reading articles like this one in New Duranty this morning makes one wonder if it might be time to scrap the university system altogether. The encroachment of science on the humanities described is barbaric.

...It’s been some 50 years since the physicist-turned-novelist C.P. Snow delivered his famous “Two Cultures” lecture at the University of Cambridge, in which he decried the “gulf of mutual incomprehension,” the “hostility and dislike” that divided the world’s “natural scientists,” its chemists, engineers, physicists and biologists, from its “literary intellectuals,” a group that, by Snow’s reckoning, included pretty much everyone who wasn’t a scientist. His critique set off a frenzy of hand-wringing that continues to this day, particularly in the United States, as educators, policymakers and other observers bemoan the Balkanization of knowledge, the scientific illiteracy of the general public and the chronic academic turf wars that are all too easily lampooned.

Yet a few scholars of thick dermis and pep-rally vigor believe that the cultural chasm can be bridged and the sciences and the humanities united into a powerful new discipline that would apply the strengths of both mindsets, the quantitative and qualitative, to a wide array of problems. Among the most ambitious of these exercises in fusion thinking is a program under development at Binghamton University in New York called the New Humanities Initiative.

Jointly conceived by David Sloan Wilson, a professor of biology, and Leslie Heywood, a professor of English, the program is intended to build on some of the themes explored in Dr. Wilson’s evolutionary studies program, which has proved enormously popular with science and nonscience majors alike, and which he describes in the recently published “Evolution for Everybody.”...

One goal of the initiative is to demystify science by applying its traditional routines and parlance in nontraditional settings — graphing Jane Austen, as the title of an upcoming book felicitously puts it....

Other researchers who have reviewed the program prospectus have expressed their enthusiasm, among them George Levine, an emeritus professor of English at Rutgers University, a distinguished scholar in residence at New York University and author of “Darwin Loves You.” Dr. Levine has criticized many recent attempts at so-called Literary Darwinism, the application of evolutionary psychology ideas to the analysis of great novels and plays. What it usually amounts to is reimagining Emma Bovary or Emma Woodhouse as a young, fecund female hunter-gatherer circa 200,000 B.C.

God help us.

....must not be confused with Michel Fourniret, although they are both French and about the same age (66 and 64, respectively).

Michel Fournier is a retired French Army officer, who hoped to fly a giant helium balloon about 25 miles above Earth and parachute down. He failed:

Tuesday morning before dawn, Fournier and his team of 40 readied for what he has called Le Grand Saut (The Great Leap) from an airport in North Battleford, Saskatchewan. But as spectators watched, his 650-foot-high balloon inflated, then suddenly floated away, leaving the gondola with Fournier inside on the ground. The damaged balloon was recovered 25 miles away.

Michel Fourniret is a serial killer, known as the Ogre of the Ardennes, who has just been jailed for life.

Don't give him a balloon. He'll be over the wall and up to no good before you can say zut alors in a silly high-pitched voice.

Instead of confusing "Michel Fournier" with "Michel Fourniret" -- a most implausible entry in some proper-name version of the well-known Dictionary of Confusibles, or is it the Dictionary of Confusables? -- I keep getting them confused but I mean the book written by Adrian Room (or was it by Adrian Broom, not as in the “broom” of the broomstick on which the witch rides, but the humble roadside broom in bloom of which Leopardi sang at length in “La Ginestra,” unless I'm confusing him with another poet altogether (oh, I'm so confused)  it is far more likely that Michel Fournier would be confused not with the man referred to as “the ogre” (as Michel Fourniret is known) but with the writer Michel Tournier, whose most famous book, Le roi des Aulnes, has been englished as “The Ogre” thus giving him, the confusable or confusible Michel Tournier, a confusible or confusable connection not only to Michel Fournier but also to the very Michel Fourniret whom, you claim, could be confused with Michel Fournier.

Got that, or are you confused?   

The recent issue of The New Criterion has many articles on the state of lower and higher education in the United States, including pieces by Charles Murray on the consequences of the No-Child-Left-Behind business, which in turn is based on a belief that all children are educable, that we are supposed to ignore I.Q. differences and the fact that many of them are, in fact, hopeless cases for book-learning  (sometimes because of I.Q., sometimes because their backgrounds which so often, though not always, reflect the I.Q.s of their parents).

Murray misstates one thing: he appears to believe that the McGuffey's Readers, the contents of which are so horrifyingly advanced compared to the fill-in-the-blank "language arts workbooks" of today, were not used in the lower grades where there was still universal education; he's wrong, and anyone who buys the Smithsonian reprint of the full McGuffey's series can see that they include textbooks for lst, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, and 6th  grades -- in other words, the very grades that everyone, including those who left school. Murray suggests that the measurement of educational performance today would be impressive, would go sky-high, if one were to throw out or not count the test scores of those who, in the 19th century, would never have stayed beyond the elementary-school years. He's wrong; the test results today, the generally low standards -- low by comparison with many European and Asian school systems -- right down the line have affected the people about whose schooling one should care about most, that is those who are most intelligent and most able to be schooled, and who remain, as they have been for some time, the most persecuted minority in America today.

Murray also goes into the attempts to downplay or ignore the value of I.Q. tests, and the various strategies employed to pretend that I.Q. results do not matter (they do), or do not have predictive value (they have very high predictive value), and the attempt by Howard Gardner and others, to muddy the waters with this "multiple intellligences" business, the kind of thing that Gardner has been getting all kinds of grant money at the Harvard School of Education, for decades, to promote, for it fits so well into the simpering sentimentalizing idiotic spirit of the age.

There is a good piece by Victor Davis Hanson that lists many, though not all, of the things that have gone wrong with higher education. What a relief not to have him writing on the war in Iraq, where he has crazily defended what he should long ago have seen through, and because he has a loyal claque, has been partly responsible for many of those Bush loyalists, those self--described "conservatives," continuing to give their support to the idiotic policy that has squandered all kinds of resources. But on the various distempers to be found in academic life, his jaundiced view is just what the doctor ordered.

Hanson does not say, but I will here, that education or higher education in the humanities (the sciences are a different matter, but the fact that instruction is offered in the same institution, for very different subjects requiring very different things of the faculty members involved, but with the science-envy of the humanities professors helping to further distort their mission, or rather their transmission, of a certain kind of knowledge), would benefit from a lot less hectic pressure to do "scholarly research" (with a nice stay at Bellagio to "finish that book") and a lot more attention to hiring those who regard teaching as a fine art, requiriing a certain charm and allure, and a keen awareness that students today are harmed, not helped, by the too-professional study of literature, and in any case, they come without the knowledge that, fifty years ago, one could assume they possessed, and unless their incredible ignorance is recognized, and grasped, by those teachers of literature and history, unless that nearly-universal lack of a solid foundation is understood, even the little that might be done will not be done.

I scanned the issue the other day in the library, and I can't remember what else there was in it on the subject of education, and I may have forgotten something else that was very good. I don't recall an all-out dismissal of the very idea of mass education -- shades of Albert Jay Nock -- but some passages in both Hanson and Murray skirt that idea.

"If having 27 million Arabs in the middle of the Islamic world the majority of whom are coming to the realization that there is a better way is not a very strong and basic threat to Islam, what is?

    -- from a posting at Jihad Watch here

First, about those "27 million Arabs" you describe as liviing in Iraq. Let's break that down:

Not all of those you call "Arabs" are Arabs.

There are six million or more Kurds living in Iraq. Thanks to American air cover from 1991 on, the Kurds were able to live without the threat of mass-murder from Saddam Hussein (and those "Arabs" in Iraq and outside Iraq who, as Kanan Makiya has noted, never uttered a syllable of protest at Operation Anfal, and the 182,000 Kurds murdered by Arab troops). Because they feel their Kurdishness so strongly, and because they are keenly aware of what they have suffered from Arabs, they are also more likely to understand, or at least be amenable to understanding, that Islam is a vehicle for Arab supremacism. And that realization needs to be encouraged, in all sorts of ways, among not only the Kurds but also the Berbers, and not only the Berbers, but also the black African Muslims in Darfur and elsewhere. For if the advances of Islam are to be halted and then pushed back in sub-Saharan Africa, it will be important to publicize the Arab view of blacks, and the history of the Arab slave trade, and the present-day Arab enslavement of blacks in the Sudan and Mauritania and even, one has good reason to suspect, deep within Darkest Saudi Arabia (where slavery was formally abolished, because of Western pressure, only in 1962, at a time when there were still hundreds of thousands of -- mostly black -- slaves, and where there is evidence that some Saudi masters treat many of their workers not merely as cruelly-treated wage-slaves butsimply as slaves). And all of this connects to Kurdistan, and the usefulness of an example of a non-Arab Muslim people throwing off the Arab yoke.

What about the remaining "Arabs" in that group? As almost every schoolboy now knows, those Arabs are both Sunni and Shi’a. One schoolboy who did not know, however, was George Bush, who as President of the United States, hearing someone mention “the Sunniis and the Shi’a in Iraq” interjected, in a state of some confusion, “I thought they were all Muslims.” The Sunnis make up about 19% of the population of Iraq, which means even less of the total Arab population. The Shi’a, however, who have over the entire history of modern Iraq  steadily outbred the Sunnis and also had some success in converting Sunnis to Shi’a Islam. The Sunnis are outraged at this, and refuse to accept the true figures, claiming that they constitute “at least” 42% of the population (perhaps they first count all the Kurds, who are mostly Sunni, as Sunni Arabs, and then begin, as the Arabs so often do about so many things, to believe their own propaganda).

The Shi’a, on the other hand, constitute at least 65% of the population of Iraq, which means they are well over 4/5 of the Arab population. So they outnumber the Sunni Arabs roughly 4 to 1. However, the Sunnis always formed the officer corps, before Ba’athism, and after, and have historically been more aggressive than the Shi’a (who, after all, have a religio-mytholigical  narrative of suffering, to both sustain and to mold them). So a future fight between Sunnis and Shi’a would not be quite so lopsided as it might appear.

I’ve left out the Assyrians, and the Chaldeans, who constitute the two large Christian groups, and the tiny Mandeans, and the Turcomans, of whom there are about a million.

But I think the point has been proven: Iraq is not a country whose population is adequately described by the phrase “27 million Arabs.”

And if you fail to identify the different and mutually hostile groups, you leave out the essence of Iraq, and the essence of what the Administration sees as a problem to be solved and as I have argued, as a situation to be exploited.

But your assertion, which in full read thus:

"If having 27 million Arabs in the middle of the Islamic world the majority of whom are coming to the realization that there is a better way is not a very strong and basic threat to Islam, what is?”

has something else wrong with it, besides that “27 million Arabs” business. When you say that the “majority” (of which? The Sunnis? The Shi’a? The Sunnis and the Shi’a? The Arabs only? The Kurds only? The Arabs and the Kurds?)  “are coming to the realization that there is a better way” and that this “realization” that they are coming to “is a very strong and basic threat to Islam” then I have to stop you right there and ask you to please tell me in what that “better way” consists, and how it is different from, a possible alternative to, Islam?

The Sunni Arabs and the Shi’a Arabs give no signs of abandoning Islam. If anything, Islam is now back, unconstrained, as it was constrained, for his own self-interested purposes, by Saddam Hussein (who is not to be confused, in that constraining, with Ataturk). There are far fewer women unhijabbed or even, in the south, unburqaed. Christians have been murdered and the majority have left, and among those murdered have been priests and even bishops. That ballyhooed Iraqi Constitution contains the chilling phrase that nothing in it, and no subsequent legislation, may stand if it contradicts the principles of Islam, that is of the Shari’a. That puts not the document called the Iraqi Constitution, but rather the Shari’a, in the same supreme position, as the final authority, as in this country is our written Constitution.

What is “the better way”? Elections? You mean simple vote-counting, like that purple-thumbed affair, where all the Shi’a eagerly took part, and voted as a group, for the Shi’a, as a sign of the new transference of power, already accomplished and now merely being ratified, to the apparent great satisfaction of George Bush and his myopic administration, as an exercise in “true democracy.” It was nothing of the kind. It was an exercise in vote-counting and group politics, without any of the solicitousness for individual rights and autonomy (people did not vote as individuals, but as members of this or that group). And if the Shi’a participated happily, the Kurds voted to keep their oar in, but at the same time, 98% of those who took part in a Kurds-only referendum on independence, voted for such independence. This was and is still being ignored. As for the Sunnis, they voted with great reluctance, for they knew such a vote would only ratify the loss of power that the overthrow of Saddam Hussein made inevitable.

Again, tell me what that “better way” is, the one  that you claim so many of those “27 million Arabs” are “coming to the realization” exists, and which, when chosen – as you think that vague “better way” is being chosen – will lead, so you tell us (and I suppose you think we will take it on faith), to becoming a “very strong and basic threat to Islam.”

Tell me, while you are at it, how you think the first-time-ever elections held by the “Palestinians” that gave Hamas such a victory managed to become “a very strong and basic threat to Islam”? Tell me how the situation in quasi-democratic Lebanon, where the heretofore underrepresented and downtrodden Shi’a have managed to make their voices heard, and thereby, presumably, have discovered a “better way” that will inevitably constitue a “very strong and basic threat to Islam”?

And tell me too, what you think of the only Muslim regimes that managed, for a long or a short period, to constrain Islam, and allow some time and civil space for a secular class to develop? I have in mind Tunisia, under Habib Bourguiba and the one-party rule of the Destour Party, with his successor Ben Ali keeping in check through police-state methods those who favor putting Islam front and center, and I have in mind Ataturk, who was a despot, who first systematically constrained Islam and only then, allowed for some elements of democracy to emerge, and today, the Turkish democracy has had to be intermittently corrected by the keepers of Kemalism, the officer corps of the Turkish army.

And it was the Shah of Iran, an imperfect (because vain and not very intelligent and certainly insufficiently ruthless man) Ataturk, who allowed non-Muslims in Iran to be treated decently, even to flourish, while it was Khomeini, the trogolodyte, who in “democratic elections” won in a walk.

When one looks at the Muslim lands, it is not “democracy” that offers a way to constrain Islam, but the enlightened despot – Bourguiba or the Shah or Ataturk.

But apparently those who keep supporting, because they can’t admit how wrong they have been, and for how long, and in how many ways, the Bush Administration’s policy in Iraq, are determined not to look at the reality of Islam and what helps to constrain it, but to offer more burnt offerings to the Idol of the Age, something they call, not quite accurately I’m afraid, “democracy.”  

Breaking news from This is Exeter
Police investigating an explosion at the Giraffe restaurant in Exeter have made a third arrest.
Officers are also searching a Muslim community centre in Plymouth.At a press conference in Plymouth tonight, Assistant Chief Constable Bob Spencer said: "At 5.30pm today Devon & Cornwall Police arrested and detained a third man in connection with the explosion in Exeter on Thursday 22 May 2008.  This arrest is part of our wide-ranging and complex investigation into last week's incident, therefore we are unable to give any further details on it at this stage.  We can also confirm that the force has begun a search at the Muslim Community Centre in St Jude's, Plymouth".
In a statement the Trustees of the Muslim Community Centre, St Judes, Plymouth, said: "We, the trustees of the Muslim Community Centre at St Jude's are as shocked as everyone by the recent events that have unfolded at Exeter and Plymouth".

• Quranet transforms the Quran into a unique and useful educational tool for parents and teachers, and thereby renders the beneficial power of the Quran widely accessible.
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UNRWA is at this point a wholly-owned subsidiary of the PLO, or the "Palestinian" Authority, or of the Arab League, or of the two slightly-diuverting branches of the PLO,  the Fast Jihadists of Hamas and the Slow Jihadists of Fatah, who share the same ultimate goals (an end to a non-Muslim nation-state called Israel, with its Jews being forced to cry "give me dhimmitude or give me death") but differ only on tactics and timing.

The personnel of UNRWA, save for a camouflaging handful at the top, are all Arabs -- all "Palestinian" Arabs, adept at promoting the Arab cause, and in misusing funds, and demanding still more, as those funds are used to promote that cause -- the cause not of Arab well-being, but of Arab rage, and Arab propaganda, against the scarcely-to-be-discerned-on-a-world-map tiny Infidel nation-state of Israel.

No one ever dies, practically, who has ever been on the UNRWA rolls, and all kinds of local Arabs, who never lived, and therefore never left, "Palestine" -- in Lebanon, in Jordan, in other places, all saw the UNRWA gravy-train and signed right up as that shape-shifting thing, "refugees."

UNRWA is corrupt and corrupting,  a crock, a disgusting if so far successful effort to monopolize the attention and money of the U.N. and the soi-disant "international community" for the sake of the Jihad against Israel, while real refugees, who are not the children or grandchildren of Arabs yet are permitted to hand down, forever it seems, the doubtful-in-the-first-place self-description of themselves as refugees, when of the hundreds of millions of other, much more worthy-of-attention refugees who exist, right now (and have existed during the past fifty years), none of them have received the same kind of monomaniacal attention, and the endless billions of Western aid, and been the cynosure of all those ngo'ed and quango'ed and international-community eyes, and come to be regarded by some dopes and of course the perennial antisemites who make up a small, but nonetheless very committed group -- Jimmy Carter, for example, belongs to both groups, though he would deny membership in at least the latter and assume that no one would think him, a "nuclear engineer," a member of the former.

About 560,000 Arabs actually left Mandatory Palestine in the months before the Arabs attacked the nascent state of Israel, and then during that war. And, during that period and in the few years following, where Jews in all the Arab countries were subject to intermittent pogroms, about a million Jews fled, with certainly far more than 560,000 of them coming to Israel. That is what is called an "exchange of populations," and it happened after World War I, with Greeks in Turkey and Muslims in Greece, and after World War II, during the Partition, with Muslims going to Pakistan (West and East) and Hindus going to India from the territories assigned to Pakistan.

Those Arabs -- or some of them --  who did leave may well believe, at this point, that they really do constitute a separate "Palestinian people," but most of them know perfectly well that they are simply the local Arabs, sharing the same language, religion, culture, and all the other identifying characteristics of a people, with Arabs of the same cult in Jordan, Syria, Egypt, and so on.

And they know, some of them, that their own connection to the land that Israel now possesses is quite recent, for in the nineteenth century the Ottoman vilayats that went later into forming the Mandate for Palestine were reduced to ruin and desolation, and the biggest town, Jerusalem, had a mere 15,000 residents. When the Zionists arrived, this was a late-19th century equivalent of the oil boom in the Gulf, and Arabs swarmed in, before and during and after World War I, and continued to arrive -- more of them arrived as illegal immigrants than did Jews, who were kept out, in many cases, by the unsympathetic British authorities. How many Arabs know this? How many, for that matter, Israelis know this? And, of course, how many in the "international community" know much, know anything, about the land ownership (with 90% of the land being owned by the Ottoman state, land that then devolved to the Mandatory Authority, held essentially in trust for the intended beneficiary of the Mandate for Palestine --- there were other mandates for the Arabs, and besides, they already had vast swaths of territory under their control, as all of the Arabian peninsula, that never fell within the League of Nations' Mandate system -- under the Mandate system ) which was, or became, the state of Israel.

Those Arabs who were called, however inaccurately, the "Arab refugees," after the Six-Day War started to be called "the Palestinians" for obvious propagandistic effect. And those "refugee camps" are not, as the name suggests, places full of transitory tents. They are whole cities, even in "impoverished Gaza" (where  "the worst human rights crisis in the world" according to the well-known antisemite Jimmy Carter, is currently to be seen, and he knows this, because the "Palestinians" including those who staff UNRWA -- there's always a non-Arab, for camouflage purposes, at the top, but the whole thing is Arab-run, Arab-doominated, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Arab war effort against Israel).

Almost all of the Arab states have decided not to allow, uniquely among their "Arab brothers," the "Palestinians" to acquire citizenship or, in Lebanon, to hold jobs. They would, ideally, like those "Palestinians" to be as ostentatiously wretched as possible (even though plenty live very well, their UNRWA dole supplemented by all kinds of activities, not all of them criminal in nature). And while even some of the "Palestinians" have publicly (well, publicly to fellow Arabs) discussed how the Arab states urged the Arabs of Mandatory Palestine to flee, and therefore have a responsbility to help pay for them, no Arab states, though many are swimming in gold, have felt the slightest need to help those "Palestinians."

Of course, the invention of that “Palestinian people” – and the careless way in which Israelis, too, contribute to the propaganda of their enemies by appearing to accept that very notion – did a great deal to harm Israel (and the rest of the West) by providing a “national-liberation” cover for what was, is, and always will be a classic Jihad against an Infidel nation-state, a Jihad not to end, nor its supporters assuaged, by a further reduction in the size of Israel.

The Arabs sometimes have a habit of letting things slip. Zuheir Mohsen, the leader of the terrorist group As Saiqa, happened to give an interview to James Dorsey for the Dutch newspaper Trouw in March 1977:

"The Palestinian people does not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel for our Arab unity. In reality today there is no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese. Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people, since Arab national interests demand that we posit the existence of a distinct "Palestinian people" to oppose Zionism.

For tactical reasons, Jordan, which is a sovereign state with defined borders, cannot raise claims to Haifa and Jaffa, while as a Palestinian, I can undoubtedly demand Haifa, Jaffa, Beer-Sheva and Jerusalem. However, the moment we reclaim our right to all of Palestine, we will not wait even a minute to unite Palestine and Jordan."

Read the U.N. records, the records of what every Arab said, threatening or cajoling, from 1948 or well before 1948, right up to the Six-Day War, and even for a short period beyond, and it is only then that, out of the blue, comes this phrase “the Palestinian people.”

Before all that “Palestinian people” business, and before Israel came into the possession of the unallocated parts of the mandate, the “West Bank” and Gaza, that Jordan and Egypt had seized in 1948-1949, without Ben Gurion, unduly cautious, had not had the wit to seize back, there were far more people who had not been subject to a decades-long onslaught of Arab propaganda, and saw things more clearly.

One such person was Elfan Rees, the Adviser on Refugees to the World Council of Churches on Refugees, who in 1957 wrote  in “The Refugee Problem Today and Tomorrow”:

”I hold the view that, political issues aside, the Arab refugee problem is by far the easiest postwar refugee problem to solve by integration. By faith, by language, by race and by social organization, they are indistinguishable from their fellows of the host countries. There is room for them, and land for them, in Syria and in Iraq. There is a developing demand for the kind of manpower that they represent. More unusually still, there is the money to make this integration possible. The United Nations General Assembly, five years ago, voted a sum of 200 million dollars to provide 'homes and jobs' for the Arab refugees. That money remains unspent, not because these tragic people are strangers in a strange land, because they are not; not because there is no room for them to be established, because there is; but simply for political reasons."

And that is where things stand now. These are the shock troops of the Jihad, and they are no longer, if they ever were, a “tragic people,” but have managed to turn themselves into people – just look at every photograph of those car-swarms in Gaza, and those Hitlerian rallies, and those Der-Stuermer like photos and television shows that the “Palestinian” Arabs feed themselves, battening on a steady diet of hysteria and hate.

And as long as they are the spoiled children of the “refugee” world, as long as they hog the money and the limelight at the U.N. and in all of its constuent succursales and meetings (in Durban on “Racism” that turned into a kind of  lynch-mob against Israel, on Cairo on “the family” that turned into a kind of lynch-mob against Israel, and so on), several hundred millions real refugees, not political pawns, including a great many who are refugees because they are non-Muslims or non-Arab Muslims who have been fleeing the discrimination, persecution, and murder that Musliim Arabs have inflicted on them, will never get the attention they rightly deserve.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1lzNhvi4G2c&feature=related