by Adam Pechter*

On November 8, 2005, Syrian police arrested Syrian physician and political activist Kamal al-Labwani as he arrived at Damascus International Airport upon his return from a trip to France and the United States. In Washington, he had met with officials at the White House.[1] A Syrian court charged him with “communicating with a foreign country and inciting it to initiate aggression against Syria.”[2] While imprisoned, his fate remained uncertain pending sentencing. On December 13, 2006, President George W. Bush called for Bashar al-Assad’s regime to “immediately free all political prisoners” and named six imprisoned dissidents, including Labwani.[3]

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By Fern Sidman

Today, a most important conference entitled, “Hijacking Human Rights: The Demonization of Israel by the United Nations” was held at the UN Millennium Plaza Hotel in midtown Manhattan. The nine hour conference, sponsored by Touro Law School, the Hudson Institute, a conservative think tank and the American Association of Jewish Lawyers and Jurists featured a veritable cornucopia of speakers representing a broad spectrum of political, religious and academic life.

The credit for spearheading and organizing this conference goes to Anne Bayefsky, a senior fellow with the Hudson Institute, Director of the Touro Insitute on Human Rights and the Holocaust, and editor of www.EYEontheUN.org, as well as www.bayefsky.com, a major human rights website. Professor Bayefsky has served on various delegations to the UN for over twenty years, including the Canadian delegation to the UN General Assembly and Commission on Human Rights, as well as various delegations to the 1993 Vienna World Conference on Human Rights, the 1995 Beijing World Conference on Women and the infamous 2001 Durban Racism Conference. She is a graduate of the University of Toronto and Oxford University, and is a barrister and solicitor of the Ontario Bar.

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By Phyllis Chesler

Does anybody know: Why Hamas has arrested Jamal al Dura only days after the hotly contested video of the alleged death of his son Mohammed was aired in a Paris courtroom? It became publicly clear that the film was a piece of staged “fauxtography” and that little Mohammed did not die on camera. Who might not want al Dura to talk to journalists or judges? Actually, I am surprised that there really is a Jamal Al Dura…

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by Michael Rubin*

On Oct. 17, President Bush raised the specter of war with Iran. “If you’re interested in avoiding World War III,” he said, it’s necessary to deny the Islamic Republic “the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon.” Condemnation of his comments was swift. Sen. Robert Byrd (D-WV) accused the President’s of using “rhetorical ghosts and goblins to scare the American people, with claims of an imminent nuclear threat in Iran.”

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By Stanislaw Krajewski

Abstract: This paper studies the problem of Jews, communism and Jewish communists, primarily with a Jewish audience in mind. Despite there having been Jewish communists, who like other communists may have been victimizers, there was no such phenomenon as Jewish communism. The Jews who remained in Eastern Europe were often victims rather than victimizers. The number of Jewish communists was important, but not as large as antisemites asserted. The problem lies in the quasi-religious zeal of communists who were Jews. The message is that communism does pose a moral problem to Jews.

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By Phyllis Chesler

Yesterday, the indomitable Dr. Rachel Ehrenfeld had her day in court. This time, the New York State Court of Appeals heard her case. Ehrenfeld was sued by the ever-litigious billionaire, Sheikh Khalid Bin Mahfouz, who sued her in London for writing a book (Funding Evil) which was published in America where Ehrenfeld, an Israeli-American citizen, resides.

Ehrenfeld chose not to appear in the London courtroom and Mahfouz won a default judgment. Instead, she counter-sued Mahfouz here. Ehrenfeld is arguing that New York should have jurisdiction to decide whether such a judgment is enforceable in New York State where, after all, authors enjoy a First Amendment right to publish their views.

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by Bill Levinson

The Anti-Defamation League has done many questionable things in the past, such as whitewashing MoveOn.org’s propagation of anti-Semitic and other forms of hate speech. There is no conceivable excuse for its recent legitimization and empowerment of one of the United States’ most vicious racists and anti-Semites: Al Sharpton of the National Action Network

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By Andrew L. Jaffee

Our “friends,” the Saudis… This is their version of “justice” for women:

… the 19-year-old woman, who is from Saudi Arabia’s Shia minority, was gang-raped 14 times in an attack in Qatif in the eastern province a year-and-a-half ago. …

The rape victim was punished for violating Saudi Arabia’s laws on segregation that forbid unrelated men and women from associating with each other. She was initially sentenced to 90 lashes for being in the car of a strange man.

On appeal, the Arab News reported that the punishment was not reduced but increased to 200 lashes and a six-month prison sentence. …

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By Phyllis Chesler

Is Jimmy Carter an anti-Semite? Even some of his critics concede that his biased views about Israel might not necessarily rise to the level of Jew-hatred. Surely, one can be critical of the Jewish state without necessarily being a Jew-hater, right?

Well—not exactly. Seven years ago I began writing about the ways in which anti-Zionism is indeed today’s “new anti-Semitism” and about how left-liberal progressives in the west were increasingly, perhaps unwittingly, allied with Islamist propagandists and terrorists in their joint betrayal of both the truth and the Jews.

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by Jonathan Schanzer and Asaf Romirowsky*

“Peace is achieved through concessions. We all know that,” said embattled Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to crowd of businessmen last week, implying that parts of Jerusalem could be offered to the Palestinians in exchange for peace.

This is not the first time Olmert indicated that he was willing to split up Israel’s capital. Last month, he publicly pondered whether it was really “necessary to also add the Shuafat refugee camp, Sawakra, Walaje and other villages and define them as part of Jerusalem.”

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By Jonathan Spyer

The possible emergence of a nuclear-armed, Islamist Iran committed to the destruction of the Jewish state is the key security issue currently occupying the attention of Israel’s political and security elite. It is one of the few issues upon which there is near (but not total) consensus. Israel has watched the growing power of radical elements within the Iranian ruling elite in the last half-decade with concern. These elements, of which President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad is the most prominent representative, openly reject Israel’s right to exist. Ahmedinejad’s comments advocating Israel’s destruction and denying the Holocaust are part of a larger project to recover the original fervour of the 1979 Islamic revolution. The expansion of Iran’s regional role is also part of this, and Israeli strategists note that the influence of Iran in all areas of key strategic concern to Israel is being felt, in a negative way. Iran’s alliance with Syria underwrites Damascus’s increasingly bellicose stance. Iran’s creation and sponsorship of Hizbullah has enabled it to come to constitute the powerful militia opponent seen in last year’s war. Iranian assistance to Hamas and Islamic jihad may be in the process of turning these organisations into analogous forces.

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by Daniel Pipes*

The Bush administration’s counterterrorism policies appear tough, but inside the courtroom, they evaporate, consistently favoring not American terror victims, but foreign terrorists.

Consider a civil lawsuit arising from a September 1997 suicide bombing in Jerusalem. Hamas claimed credit for five dead and 192 wounded, including several Americans. On the grounds that the Islamic Republic of Iran had financed Hamas, five injured Americans students sued it for damages.

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By Phyllis Chesler

Shades of Harvard’s Larry Summers! Columbia’s President, Lee Bollinger, has just come under faculty-fire for having mistreated Iran’s President Ahmadinejad, and in so doing, having “sullied the reputation of the University with (his) strident tone.” Bollinger has also been castigated by seventy faculty members for having “allied the University with the Bush administration’s war in Iraq” and for taking “partisan political positions concerning the politics of the Middle East.”

This is no parody. This is a seventy-gun opening salvo and the unmistakable sound of a bloody drumroll; the French Revolution has returned to Columbia’s campus.

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by R. John Matthies*

The Netherlands, one reads, has come to accept that magistrates require a generous range of motion to prevent radical clerics from “exercising their profession.” But empowering judges will clearly not suffice to promote the “integration” of imams, or to groom a crop of clerics attuned to Western values. So while lawmakers across the Continent consider means to douse inflammatory speech and detain troublemakers “constitutionally,” it’s time again to consider l’exception française.

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From the GOP entitled, “What’s Hillary Hiding?” Yes, partisan, but a good question:

In 2004, Hillary claimed that all of the records at the Clinton Library would be opened. She said on CNN’s Larry King Live, “That’s one of the things the library really stands for. It physically stands for openness with all the glass and the light. But he wants it to be a place where people come and really study. And everything’s going to be available.”

Nearly three years after the opening of the Clinton Presidential Library and the ensuing Freedom of Information Act Requests, less than half of one percent of the library’s documents are open for review.

ABC News reported on November 6, 2007 that another Arkansas library containing documents related to Clinton won’t be available until after the 2008 election.

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