By Andrew L. Jaffee

In Saudi Arabia, you can get killed just for suggesting that religions besides Islam be respected. From the McClatchy-Tribune News Service:

… A few weeks ago, one of the nation’s most senior religious authorities directed that two reporters for a mainstream Saudi newspaper be executed for publishing stories suggesting that religions other than Islam are worthy of respect. …

Abdul-Rahman al-Barrak, a 75-year-old sheik, issued the fatwa calling for the journalists’ death. …

“It’s disgraceful that articles containing this kind of apostasy should be published in some papers in Saudi Arabia,” he wrote last month. If the reporters do not repent, they “should be killed.”

Barrak is not just some cranky old miscreant. He is a member of the Saudi legislature, appointed by the king. Barrak spent a long career in senior positions at a respected government-funded university.

Soon after, 20 other senior Saudi clerics stood up to endorse enthusiastically Barrak’s fatwa. Later, about 100 human-rights advocates from across the region condemned the edict, calling it “intellectual terrorism.” That had little visible impact in Riyadh.

But a striking feature of this episode is that the Saudi government has not said or done anything about it — probably because King Abdullah realizes that many and perhaps most members of Saudi Arabia’s religious establishment agree with Barrak. After all, two weeks after he issued that fatwa, the legislature soundly defeated a proposal, favored by the Arab League, to adopt a law promoting respect for other religions. The vote was 77 to 33. …

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by Daniel Pipes*

When I lived in Cairo in the 1970s, I conducted a little experiment: What, using only Arabic-language sources, could I learn about Jews, Judaism, Jewish history, Jewish culture, and the like? The paucity of resources stunned me; basically, the best way to learn about these subjects was to read between the lines of antisemitic tracts.

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By Andrew Whitehead

Joseph Farah is irate. And rightly so.

The highly respected founder, editor, and CEO of WorldNetDaily was blatantly slandered last week by CAIR’s communication director, and terrorist supporter, Ibrahim Hooper.

The Daily News had a column that referred to a new book from WND Books called “Why We Left Islam: Former Muslims Speak Out.”

Looking for a quote from a Muslim about the book, the columnists at the Daily News went to CAIR, specifically; Ibrahim Hooper:

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Daniel Nassif is the news director of Alhurra, a U.S.-funded Arabic satellite television news network created in 2004, and has also been news director of its sister network, Radio Sawa, launched in 2002. Nassif was born in Lebanon in 1958. He immigrated to the United States in 1977 and finished his undergraduate and graduate studies in political science and public policy for international affairs at the University of Michigan in 1986. He currently resides in northern Virginia with his wife and two sons. Adam Pechter, deputy publisher of the Middle East Quarterly*, interviewed Nassif on October 19, 2007, in Alhurra’s offices in Springfield, Virginia.

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Join the Boycott, a watchdog and protest website addressing anti-Israel bias in the Los Angeles Times and the rest of the media, and hosted by Yahoo Geocities, is calling for a high level investigation of Yahoo’s practices, following Yahoo’s repeated interruption of its website service.

In early March, Yahoo took Join the Boycott offline and has kept it offline since. When surfers click on the Join the Boycott website

http://www.geocities.com/truthmasters/jointheboycott.htm

they receive the message “this page is not available”.

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By Barry Rubin

It’s hard to satirize a lot of media coverage about Israel and the Arab-Israeli or Israeli-Palestinian conflicts. The truly dreadful stuff is in the details, the small stories and big assumptions on which they are based, rather than in any "scoops" or blockbuster articles.

There are basically two types of such articles. In one, the author’s basic and extreme political bias comes out clearly. The writer is consciously determined to slam Israel. This happens more often in large elements of the European press and in Reuters.

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By Phyllis Chesler

This was my first piece for Frontpage Magazine and I gave it to them only after both the New York and LA Times turned it down. A group of Israeli feminists wanted to show a film. The Swedish filmmaker absolutely refused his film to be shown in Israel. Within 48 hours of posting my article, Lukas Moodysson, the filmmaker, changed his mind and allowed his brilliant anti-trafficking film, “Lilya-4-ever” to be shown on a one-time basis at an anti-trafficking conference in Israel. Moodysson knew my work in Swedish and he wrote to me, furious that I had challenged his reputation as “prejudiced.” But he changed his mind.

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By Barry Rubin

Many years after September 11, despite more than 10,000 terrorist attacks by radical Islamist groups alone, there is still an amazing amount of confusion and falsehood over what should be a very simple point: What is terrorism all about?

The answer is politics and, to be specific, revolutionary politics. Most obviously, terrorism is a tactic used by political groups but, most importantly, it is a strategy. Defining who and what is “terrorist” should be neither a moral judgment nor a propaganda exercise. It is a simple use of political analysis.

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By Fern Sidman

Several renowned academics and researchers participated in a most revealing and highly informative event on Sunday, March 30th entitled, “Columbia and the Nazis: New Research, New Concerns”. The event, designated as a special session of the Organization of American Historians annual conference was held at The Center for Jewish History in Manhattan and was sponsored by the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies.

The session was chaired by esteemed historian and prolific author, Dr. Rafael Medoff. Dr. Medoff is the director of the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies and has recently co-authored a book with former New York City Mayor Ed Koch titled, “The Koch Papers: My Fight Against Anti-Semitism” (Palgrave MacMillan).

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By Andrew L. Jaffee

LiveLeak has re-posted Geert Wilders’ film “Fitna,” after having pulled the video off its site due to death threats. LiveLeak is the British video/media sharing service which first released Wilders’ movie. Following suspension of “Fitna,” LiveLeak issued a statement alluding to several British newspapers’ complicity in the death threats. According to the Daily Kos, “various British newspapers actually printed the names and addresses of Liveleak staffers. Needless to say, lots of very pointed death threats followed.” Whatever the details, LiveLeak has refused to succumb to Islamist intimidation and has stated (with admirable attitude):

On the 28th of March LiveLeak.com was left with no other choice but to remove the film “fitna” from our servers following serious threats to our staff and their families. Since that time we have worked constantly on upgrading all security measures thus offering better protection for our staff and families. With these measures in place we have decided to once more make this video live on our site. We will not be pressured into censoring material which is legal and within our rules. We apologise for the removal and the delay in getting it back, but when you run a website you don’t consider that some people would be insecure enough to threaten our lives simply because they do not like the content of a video we neither produced nor endorsed but merely hosted.

You can watch “Fitna” at LiveLeak by clicking here. Note that “Fitna” has been continuously available on sites like Google and here at netwmd.com.

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By Phyllis Chesler

I am intimately surrounded by enemy propaganda and I’ve only myself to blame. For example, I have been reading Publishers Weekly (PW) for a very long time. I don’t have to but I won’t give it up. Yes, I have noted the leftward drift of their reviews but, like the New York Times, whose editors and book reviewers have drifted similarly left-ward, PW remains a “must” for all those who want to read reviews of upcoming book titles and who want to know what publishing deals are in the works.

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By Phyllis Chesler

How do we cut down on honor murders in the West? According to some people, you do whatever it takes to keep the girls from dishonoring their families so that their families do not have to honor-murder them.

According to the New York Times, “home schooling” the girls in America, re-creating a feudal, rural, parallel universe in California in which girls and women are kept hidden and apart, is the sensible, merciful alternative to honor murders in The New World.

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By Phyllis Chesler

In June of 1982, in the pages of Ms. Magazine, Letty Cottin Pogrebin earned her reputation as a Jewish feminist by writing about anti-Semitism among feminists. She did so by standing on the shoulders of other Jewish feminists who had been wrestling with this “problem without a name” since the early 1970s and whose cries Pogrebin finally heard.

Pogrebin’s article in Ms. Magazine was brave and she was, at the time, both attacked and disbelieved. But she was also respected for writing the piece. By 1991, Pogrebin had expanded her article about Jew-hatred among feminists into a book about Judaism and feminism, Deborah, Golda and Me. The book’s index contains at least 30 references to anti-Semitism/anti-Zionism and the women’s movement. There is also a whole chapter titled “Special Jewish Sorrows and Women and Anti-Semitism.” Since Pogrebin published her book, she has risen to prominence as a spokeswoman for all things Jewish and feminist.

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By Andrew L. Jaffee

Bestowing us with her infinite wisdom, CNN’s Gloria Borger told us what the American presidential election is all about. According to Gloria, all women are voting for Hillary, all black people are voting for Obama, and all the rest of the electorate — white men — will decide the outcome. Thanks, Gloria, I’ve seen the light. I understand. Things are so simple. If you feel like a good laugh, watch Ms. Borger for yourself. (I think I need to add a blog category for “Political Idiots.”)

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PHILADELPHIA* — The Muslim Weekly, a London-based publication, issued an apology today to Daniel Pipes, director of the Middle East Forum, concerning a defamatory article it published in February 2007.

That article repeated a false allegation made by Tariq Ramadan that Daniel Pipes had lied to a conference hosted by London mayor Ken Livingstone in January 2007. (For details of what did occur, see the article by Mr. Pipes, “Is Tariq Ramadan Lying [about Magdi Allam]?“)

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