by Sara Akrami and Saeed Ghasseminejad

When the Islamic Republic of Iran was established in 1979, its leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, formed a notorious organization called the “Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps.” Its major goal is the protection of the country’s Islamic system of government, and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) works to prevent any uprisings or internal dissent. It has also been linked to terrorist activities around the world and it supports terrorist organizations. In recent years, especially under the government of the inhumane and Holocaust-denying President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the IRGC has taken over many aspects of Iranian society. It has influence in the political, social, military, and especially economic systems. The Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps has turned into a business empire in Iran and is known as one of the wealthiest organizations after the National Iranian Oil Company.

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By Fern Sidman

Since Friday morning, November 11th, Jews around the world and especially in the Orthodox enclaves of New York have been recoiling in horror over the overtly anti-Semitic vandalism that took place in the early morning hours near Ocean Parkway and Avenue I in the Midwood section of Brooklyn. Three vehicles were torched and a gruesome array of hideous epithets as well as the perfunctory swastikas and KKK emblem were indiscriminately scrawled on cars and benches. As community outrage reached a fever pitch, it was duly noted that this attack was clearly planned to coincide with the 73rd anniversary of Kristallnacht, (the night of broken glass), when on November 9-10 1938, as a pogrom of mammoth proportions erupted in Hitler’s Europe, almost 200 synagogues were destroyed, over 8,000 Jewish shops were sacked and looted, and tens of thousands of Jews were deported to concentration camps.

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By Gary Gerofsky

Richard Falk has no problem “put(ting) aside his ethnic identity,” because, in my opinion, he is a Jewish anti-Semite and he proudly carries out his maliciousness while the entire Middle East burns in the fires created by Islamic dictators and fascist religious fanatics.

The people “willing to confront the Zionist furies of Israel” as Falk puts it, are grounded in their vision of a world forced to suffer under terrorism, nuclear destruction, misogyny, oppression, honour killings, Koranic Jew-hate, and revisionist historical propaganda that distorts reality beyond recognition.

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by David Barnett and Efraim Karsh*

Of the countless threats of violence, made by Arab and Palestinian leaders in the run up to and in the wake of the November 29, 1947 partition resolution, none has resonated more widely than the warning by Abdul Rahman Azzam, the Arab League’s first secretary-general, that the establishment of a Jewish state would lead to “a war of extermination and momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacre and the Crusades.”

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by Steven Shamrak

Most people of this planet do not care or even know about Israel and Jews. Many of them receive glimpses of information about the Arab-Israel conflict from reports they accidentally hear on radio, see on TV, or read on newspaper headlines. Unfortunately, under bombardment from the modern media, some of them have adopted the main stream “understanding” of the issue, but still they do not care about the factual truth behind reports. Even many members of the Jewish tribe, who are still suffering from the Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) inflicted on Jewish people during two millennia of living in exile and persecution by Christians and Muslims, have become believers of these opinions continuously propagated by the world press and Western governments who are oblivious to the danger of Islamic expansion. Strangely, the fake opinions about the Arab-Israel conflict have not been refuted by the string of Israel’s governments or the Jewish leadership of the Diaspora.

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by Phyllis Chesler

I recently attended a Hebrew poetry class taught by a friend, Atara Fobar, who translates Hebrew poetry into English. Atara is a serious teacher and is the distinguished translator of Moshe Itzhaki. Every month, Atara teaches poetry to religious Jews of a certain age–to the kind of people whose delight in learning is almost child-like and which renders them ageless.

We are a bit like those Jews who continued to write and produce plays, newspapers, and musical evenings in Holocaust era ghettos, who so optimistically kept taking books out of libraries (and returning them) until they could no longer do so.

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by Ian Johnson*

In early 1959, a small West German intelligence operation stumbled over a sensational find: U.S. collusion with the Muslim Brotherhood. According to the West German sources — two ex-Wehrmacht soldiers who were in Washington’s pay but still felt loyalty to their old German bosses — Washington was supporting one of the Brotherhood’s top men, the Geneva-based Said Ramadan, son-in-law of the movement’s founder Hassan al-Banna, in the hope of using him in the global battle against communism. The U.S. double-agents wanted to know if the West Germans would also help support Ramadan.

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by Steven Shamrak

On September 28th, the world was supposed to celebrate, but conveniently forgot the anniversary of the Israeli-Palestinian Interim Agreement, widely known as the Oslo Accords. Three political stooges, Yasser Arafat, Yitzhak Rabin, and Shimon Perez received the Nobel Peace Prize for signing this worthless piece of paper, which was based on fake promises made by Yasser Arafat in a letter to then Israeli Prime Minister Rabin on September 9, 1993.

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by Daniel Pipes*

Western diplomats and journalists fell for Stalin’s show trials but eventually learned not to accept developments in the Soviet Union at face value. In the Soviet Union’s later years, a crowd assaulting a foreign embassy would have been assumed to have state approval.

Other autocrats engage in similar tricks and illusions. Indeed, it’s often best to bring the U.S.S.R. to mind while trying to understand tyrannies. Specifically, that was the case concerning the Sep. 9 mob attack against the Israeli embassy in Cairo.

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by Daniel Pipes*

In a Middle East wracked by coups d’état and civil insurrections, the Republic of Turkey credibly offers itself as a model thanks to its impressive economic growth, democratic system, political control of the military, and secular order.

But, in reality, Turkey may be, along with Iran, the most dangerous state of the region. Count the reasons:

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by Amitai Etzioni*

The 2001 attacks on the United States have intensified the debate that has existed since the dawn of Islam: How is the West to respond to the followers of Muhammad? Some — most famously Bernard Lewis and Samuel Huntington — held that the contest is between two rather monolithic civilizations that are bound to clash. In a 2007 award acceptance speech at the American Enterprise Institute, Lewis described a history of clashes between Islam and the West. He stated that at first Muslims sought to spread their nascent faith through conquest throughout the then-Christian world; then the Christians invaded the Muslim world (the Crusaders); then the Muslims pushed back into Europe (the Golden Age of Islam); then the West retaliated by colonizing the Muslim world; and now the Muslims are again rising against Christendom by terrorism and flooding Europe with immigrants.[1] Huntington argued that “Islam’s borders are bloody, and so are its innards. The fundamental problem for the West is not Islamic fundamentalism. It is Islam, a different civilization whose people are convinced of the superiority of their culture and are obsessed with the inferiority of their power.”[2] By contrast, President George W. Bush stated in the wake of the 9/11 attacks that “Islam is peace,”[3] while British prime minister Tony Blair argued that the problem was not Islam but “extremists trying to hijack it for political purposes.”[4]

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by Steven Shamrak

There are many lands around the world that have been occupied not so long ago by other countries. Many of them are still subjugated to the rule of an occupying power. They were conquered during offensive or defensive wars, throughout the process of establishment of statehood or as a part of colonial and imperial policy. The following is a far from complete list of the lands currently occupied under such circumstances:

Great Britain still occupies Gibraltar, 17 provinces of Ireland, and is holding on to the many residual symbols of her former colonial glory around the world.

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by Efraim Karsh*

Sixty-four years after partitioning Palestine into two independent states — one Jewish, the other Arab — the UN General Assembly is set again to vote on the same issue. While this time around Palestinian leaders appear to be preaching compromise, closer scrutiny reveals this to be a tactical rather than a strategic change of heart, stemming from the different circumstances of the two votes and aimed at disguising their lingering unwillingness (or perhaps inability) to live with a two-state solution.

In 1947, prior to the first UN General Assembly vote, Palestinian leaders rejected any form of Jewish self-determination in Palestine. Hajj Amin Husseini, their most prominent leader from the early 1920s to the late 1940s, upheld that “there is no place in Palestine for two races.” All areas conquered by the Arabs during the 1948 war were cleansed of Jews.

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by Jonathan Schanzer*

In its final report of July 22, 2004, the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States (commonly known as the 9/11 Commission) charged that Congress had failed America. In the commissioners’ judgment, Congress had “adjusted slowly to the rise of transnational terrorism as a threat to national security. In particular, the growing threat and capabilities of [Osama] bin Laden were not understood in Congress … To the extent that terrorism did break through and engage the attention of the Congress as a whole, it would briefly command attention after a specific incident, and then return to a lower rung on the public policy agenda.” Indeed, the commission was unequivocal about “Congress’s slowness and inadequacy in treating the issue of terrorism in the years before 9/11.”[1]

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By Fern Sidman

On Sunday afternoon, September 11th over 500 people gathered at Park Place and West Broadway in lower Manhattan to mark the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon that left close to 3000 Americans dead. Organized by the American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI), a human rights organization headed by author and activist Pamela Geller, (who achieved notoriety for spearheading the campaign against the construction of a mosque at Ground Zero), the 9/11 Freedom Rally featured members of the clergy, New York City firefighters and police, 9/11 first responders, and 9/11 family members who were barred and/or not invited to the official ceremonies that took place earlier in the day.

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