Critic of Al Dura hoax fined

Philippe Karsenty has been convicted of defamation by a French court for claiming that France 2's Charles Enderlin fabricated at least part of the 'death' of Muhammad al-Dura.

A Paris court fined Philippe Karsenty 7,000 euros (NIS 33,000) in the defamation case filed by network France 2. Karsenty accused the network’s Jerusalem bureau chief, Charles Enderlin, of fabricating parts of the segment.

Leading Critic of French al-Dura Coverage Convicted for Revealing the Fraud

(Phillipe Karsenty was convicted of defamation by what passes for a Court in France for having the effrontery of revealing the fraud of the Al Dura affair and attacking the lies of the producer of the infamous child killing fraudulent video Charles Enderlin and the state owned France 2 TV News channel.)

Agreement Between Jordan, Palestinian Authority Officially Recognizes Jordan's Custodianship Over Jerusalem's Holy Places

(HT: Memri / Other)

Introduction: On March 31, 2013, an agreement that came as a surprise was signed between the Palestinian Authority (PA) and Jordan, which solidified Jordan's custodianship of the Islamic holy places in Jerusalem. The daily Al-Quds Al-Arabi reported that the agreement had been signed in total secrecy in the presence of Jordan's King 'Abdallah II, PA President Mahmoud Abbas, and the PA and Jordanian ministers of religious endowments.

The agreement states that "His Majesty King 'Abdallah II, as the custodian of the Jerusalem holy sites, will exert all possible efforts to preserve [these] sites, especially Al-Haram Al-Sharif [The Al-Aqsa Mosque]… and to represent their interests." The agreement states further that King 'Abdallah is responsible for ensuring respect for the holy places, guaranteeing the Muslims' freedom of movement to and from the sites, ensuring their maintenance and representing their interests in the international arena.

In practice, the Hashemite dynasty in Jordan has had stewardship over the holy places in Jerusalem since 1924. Even after the Six-Day War and Israel's conquest of East Jerusalem, Jordan continued to play a religious role in Jerusalem's holy places via the East Jerusalem Waqf, which it manages.

In 1988 Jordan did disengage itself from the West Bank by "severing its legal and administrative ties" with it, but this disengagement never applied to the holy places in Jerusalem. In 1994 this custodianship was reinforced via a Jordanian declaration that emphasized the kingdom's historic role in Jerusalem's holy places, as well as by the peace agreement between Israel and Jordan where Israel recognizes Jordan's special status in Jerusalem.

In June 2013, Hamas Prime Minister Isma'il Haniya disclosed that Egyptian President Muhammad Mursi plans to hold an international conference in Cairo on the issue of Jerusalem. He added that the issue of Jerusalem was prominent in talks that took place this month in Cairo between Mursi and Hamas representatives, and also in talks between the heads of Hamas and Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan.

The liberal website elaph.com assessed that Mursi has decided to convene the conference in response to the PA-Jordan agreement and with the aim of circumventing it, and that this move could negatively affect Egypt-Jordan relations.

The agreement, then, does not alter the decades-long status quo, under which the Jordanian Waqf manages the affairs of Jerusalem's Islamic holy places in coordination with Israel. Nevertheless, the agreement reinforces Jordan's status in the holy places in a manner that may restrict Israel's freedom of action in Jerusalem.

As the agreement does not constitute a tangible change to the status quo, what then were the motivations for its signing? This report will review these motivations as presented by Palestinian and Jordanian senior officials, commentators and journalists, and they include the desire to step up Jordanian-Palestinian coordination in order to "save" Jerusalem from "The city's Judaization and settlement construction within it"; bypass various parties such as Qatar, Hamas and the Islamic Movement in Israel, who are attempting to usurp Jordan and the PA's role vis-à-vis the holy sites; prepare the ground for a PA-Jordan confederation, and the US intention to reinforce Jordan's role in future negotiations between Israel and the PA.Read the full report here.

European Union decides to keep its mouth shut

(Jerusalem launched an intensive lobbying campaign last week to convince the EU countries that this was not the time to issue a detailed EU resolution on the Middle East that would be highly critical of Israel. It argued that this would undermine Kerry’s efforts, by giving the Palestinians the sense that if they rejected Kerry’s proposals to restart talks, they would get both an understanding ear and a better deal from the Europeans.) 

The End of the World

Two years ago, the media had a prolonged belly laugh at a group that predicted the end of the world. Now media outlets from The New York Times to The New Republic to The Economist are wrestling with the question of why their own ideology's doomsday predictions are not coming to pass.

Muslim convert, Gilberto Garcia Chavez, being lead away by Mexican police with a copy of the Koran in his lap.

http://9-11domorethenneverforget-stopislam.blogspot.com/2013/06/mexican-convert-to-islam-slaughter-his.html?m=1

Artists4Israel responds to Haaretz hatchet job

(Carl) I suppose it was just a question of time until Israel's Hebrew 'Palestinian' daily noticed Artists4Israel. In the weekend edition, Haaretz attacked the group that has done so much for so many people here, because they paint in Judea and Samaria. While I cannot get to the article, because like everything else at Haaretz it's behind a paywall (the only things I can get to there are Barak Ravid's reports if I click on them from Twitter), you can get a flavor for it by reading Craig Dershowitz's response. Full disclosure: Craig and his artists have been guests in our home a couple of times, and when one of our kids saw that I had their blog open, he immediately asked when the artists are coming back again.

At your own words (words you use twice in one sentence - high school writing 101 mistake), Artists 4 Israel is a "small organization", yet, you spend a whole half a page above the fold decrying our work. Must have been a slow news day or, perhaps, there is something more here. After all, if you are going to give us so much press (PS, thanks for that), you should at least really make your accusations sting and not just ridicule our size. Yet, the best you do is describe us as "right-wing" (again, using that phrase twice - seriously, can we buy you a thesaurus - maybe the JNF will pay for it) yet your only proof of this political orientation is that we paint "Pro-Israel" messages. Your equation then is that "Pro-Israel" is synonymous with "right-wing". We do not ascribe to a notion of right and left wing as such divisive politics is an invention of bigots like yourself who choose to separate and alienate. We choose to unite. We believe that beauty of art is pan-wing. However we do see your bias through this false equivalency. Yours is a sad belief which paints (pun intended) everything life affirming with the gloomy sepia of politrix (typo very much intended).

Spray-paint (I want to write "sic" here but I think it is more relevant to point out that you don't even copy edit your own work. It is spray paint - two words, no hyphen) is a form of creation. It is creation, like the Third Temple might be. It is creation like our paintings in Judea, Samaria, Tel Aviv, Ariel, Shiloh, Arab villages across Israel, mixed schools and community centers. We have created art in child daycare centers, in refuges for battered women and homes for at-risk children. It is creation like the JNF's planting of trees, building of parks, growing of flowers, green grass and a hopeful earth-driven future. It is the opposite of your attempts to destruct and to destroy. Grab a can of spray paint (hyphenate if you must) or a handful of seeds and earth and create something other than the fictions in your reporting. No one can hate life that much so, maybe there is something else going on here.

Your story's lies go from the wishful (saying we come to Israel to paint every few months (if only!) to the mundane (there are no videos on our website) to the slanderous (painting on a "Palestinian's" home never happened). The only truth in your fable comes from your uncredited appropriation of a JPR video. The JPR, unlike you, are serious, investigative journalists. Their story was timely (aka the "new" part of "news"), their reporters were on the ground, their sources were primary, their reporting comprehensive and multi-sided. You couldn't even post the video that matched your description of it! That is not me speaking on the video. That is SKI, a member of the UR New York art collective, a New Yorker of Dominican descent and Catholic beliefs. Yet, you hinted at some sort of racist, evil religious Jewish plot in our painting of the Temple. That makes no sense. Maybe there is something more going on here.

SKI's words are precious. He informs everyone (well, except for your editorial staff it seems) that he is there "spreading the word of peace through art". Peace. Art. Creation. How dare you respond to such unbridled life affirming actions with destructive lies and hate?

SKI's words are also prescient. Being in Israel to "see the reality - it is not what you read about." According to your words, Haaretz is "the world's leading English-language Website for real-time news and analysis of Israel and the Middle East" As such, it is the monolith of your bastardized reporting that is creating the misrepresentation of Israel that SKI had to venture into Hebron to expose.

And, SKI learned the truth well. While bricks and giant rocks were being hurled at him in an attempt to maim and kill an artist of the world by "Palestinians", SKI was being treated to watermelon and lemonade by his new Israeli friends. When a group of stick weilding "Palestinian" youth tried to ambush SKI, he was saved by an IDF soldier. When SKI asked the soldier why he wore his helmet in the sweltering heat he was told because it was too unsafe for him to take it off. SKI learned, even in the heart of Hebron, a site of so much ridicule from your paper, that he loves Israel. "this place is amazing. It is this little gem." And, he hadn't even seen the Tel Aviv beach.

Read the whole thing.

I believe that the second picture in this post comes from the incident involving SKI in Hebron. It's described here.

Turkish riots aren't just about a park

(h/t Carl) Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has plans to erase secularism from Turkey's history. The government’s plan to destroy Gezi Park, a section of Taksim Square, and build a replica Ottoman Army barracks and mall set off weeks of violent street protests, presenting Mr. Erdogan with the greatest political crisis he has faced in more than a decade in power. But the plan to build a large mosque in the square is, in the eyes of many analysts here, the real nub of the dispute.
The building of such a mosque is a decades-old hope of Turkey’s Islamists, and even played a role in the last military intervention in Turkish politics in 1997, when army generals maneuvered to overthrow an Islamist prime minister.
Now that the people — rather than the army — have risen up against the current Islamist government’s urban development plans, analysts have suggested that one of the consequences of the unrest is that Mr. Erdogan will ultimately be unable to realize his vision for Taksim.
If so, it will represent the second time he has tried and failed to build the mosque, and at serious political costs. As the mayor of Istanbul in 1997, he saw the same dreams dashed by the military’s intervention.
Not that he has given up. As the protests engulfed his government, Mr. Erdogan backed off from the plans for a shopping mall in Taksim, but he continued to promote the mosque.
“A mosque will be built in Taksim,” he said, in a recent speech. “I do not need permission from the main opposition and a few looters. We have been granted authority by those who voted for us at the ballot box.”
In the 1990s, under Turkey’s first Islamist prime minister, Necmettin Erbakan, Mr. Erdogan oversaw a local commission in charge of the mosque project, but the idea was anathema to Turkey’s secular elite, who could still count on the military to safeguard the country’s secular underpinnings.
A local news article published in January 1997 reported that secular Turks objected to the mosque because it would “symbolize the power of the Islamists over Taksim as well as the whole country.” Those words could easily be spoken by today’s protesters.
Ayse Hur, a historian and columnist for the newspaper Radikal, said, “The circles that oppose the project of a mosque at Taksim or the barracks may be interpreting this as an attempt to rewrite the official secular history.”CMORE)

Influential Egyptian sheikh says Jews control the media - in Egypt

(silly Egyptians. Only Jon Stewart controls the media and he loves you) Mohamed Mukhtar al-Mahdi, a professor at Al Azhar University in Cairo and head of at least one Islamic group, has claimed that Egypt's media is being run by Jews.
He said that the Egyptian media is the main reason for Egypt's political problems. His explanation is that the Egyptian media has become recently fallen into the hands of the Jews, and its slander and lies are part of the of the Zionist plan to demolish the country, as well as turn people against Islam.

Here is al-Mahdi with one of his fans: Morsi

China's Xinhua News Agency Condemns US 'Cyber-attacks'

Washington has often accused China of being behind US cyber-attacks.

But Mr Snowden has disclosed extensive gathering of phone and internet data by US agencies.

His latest revelations, published in the South China Morning Post, suggest a Beijing University was targeted.

He alleged that as recently as January this year the NSA hacked into computers and servers at the prestigious Tsinghua University in Beijing.

Mr Snowden is reported as telling the paper that on one single day in January, at least 63 computers and servers at the university were affected. »
In a commentary, it said the US had turned out to be the "biggest villain in our age".

#Feminist propoganda feel good story: Woman dressed as giant #vagina stops street attack on giant penis

(progressives believe this shit.)

Eugenics was the handmaiden of the Progressive era

They resent this country and resent the people who demand their own way rather than allow the "experts" and the ruling class dominion. So they want to import an alien people to reduce the stubbornness and independence that have traditionally characterized Americans. And it makes so much of the liberal agenda understandable: abortion, contraception, feminism, gay marriage, euthanasia, managed health care with death panels. All are aimed at reducing the number of old-time Americans. Reducing our usable land through government takeover helps, as do reductions in America's energy usage via "green" energy schemes. This agenda goes back to Paul Ehrlich and before him to Margaret Sanger and the eugenicists, and ultimately to

Thomas Malthus. But a large part of why they are doing it is to breed Americans for submissiveness. (Eugenics was the handmaiden of the Progressive era.)

Unlimited Power for the Chicken Littles of the game... the sky is not falling!

Even the Feminists on Israel's side don't get it

YNET: MK: Must give Israeli citizenship to Palestinians June 20, 2013 Deputy Transport Minister Knesset Member Tzipi Hotovely (Likud) participated in an event marking 20 years for the Oslo Accords and said: "The Oslo paradigm has crashed. It is time to abandon the two-state solution in favor of an annexation resolution, meaning applying Israeli sovereignty in Judea and Samaria and giving an Israeli citizenship to all Palestinians." Hotovely added that in order to "keep a demographic advantage", a national goal of bringing a million Jews to Israel in the next decade should be set. (Moran Azulay)

...as if Israel did not already have this goal?   (yeah... that is a Likud rep sounding like a bleeding heart because she doesn't know who is trying to kill her. Can you identify the female sensitivity that is killing you yet? The Feminists will rot common sense from within)

Speaking of Stupid Feminists

No good can come from this woman

Jon Stewart in Egypt causes controversy for the dumbest reason possible (Like Usual)

Jon Stewart, during his working summer vacation, visited his friend and fellow TV satirist Bassem Youssef in Egypt h/t EOZ

So what could be the problem?
Egyptian paper Al Mesryoon complained about this appearance, because of a comment he makes early on about not working. He says "As you know my people like to wander the desert, that's what I'm doing now...it's been two weeks, I've got 38 years and 50 weeks left."
Al Mesryoon, hilariously, says that Stewart was making fun of ...the Koran!
You see, the Koran says that the Jews wandered 40 years in the desert because of their sins. How dare Jon Stewart mock the Koran! And to add insult to injury (a topic covered in the interview,) Stewart makes fun of Cairo traffic!

Dhimmi Stewart just doesn't get how cursed everyone thinks he is in Egypt because of his arrogance... might be a good idea to not watch someone who is so completely oblivious that he has has feminists writing his jokes. That's Benghazi for humor... or maybe Tahrir Square.

GCHQ and the NSA are consequently able to access and process vast quantities of communications between entirely innocent people, as well as targeted suspects.

Hot Air (Britain’s spy agency GCHQ has secretly gained access to the network of cables which carry the world’s phone calls and internet traffic and has started to process vast streams of sensitive personal information which it is sharing with its American partner, the National Security Agency (NSA).

The sheer scale of the agency’s ambition is reflected in the titles of its two principal components: Mastering the Internet and Global Telecoms Exploitation, aimed at scooping up as much online and telephone traffic as possible. This is all being carried out without any form of public acknowledgement or debate.

One key innovation has been GCHQ’s ability to tap into and store huge volumes of data drawn from fibre-optic cables for up to 30 days so that it can be sifted and analysed. That operation, codenamed Tempora, has been running for some 18 months.

GCHQ and the NSA are consequently able to access and process vast quantities of communications between entirely innocent people, as well as targeted suspects.

This includes recordings of phone calls, the content of email messages, entries on Facebook and the history of any internet user’s access to websites – all of which is deemed legal, even though the warrant system was supposed to limit interception to a specified range of targets.)

the program disregarded P2P downloads, even though one might presume that this would be a potential method to use for illicit communication over the open-source Internet.

‘Color Purple’ Author’s New Virulently Anti-Semitic Book Draws Criticism

(Walker writes, “It amazes me, in these churches, that there is no discussion of the fact that the other behavior we learned about in the Bible stories: the rapes, the murders, the pillaging, the enslavement of the conquered, the confiscation of land, the brutal domination and colonization of all ‘others’ is still front and center in Israel’s behavior today.)

Skype Provided Backdoor Access To The NSA Before Microsoft Takeover

Skype Provided Backdoor Access To The NSA Before Microsoft Takeover.HT: Other and the InfiniteUnknown. Skype Provided Backdoor Access to the NSA Before Microsoft Takeover (Softpedia, June 20, 2013): The NSA saga continues in the Redmond-based empire, this time with a new report aimed at Microsoft’s flagship VoIP platform Skype. A report published by The New York Times and citing people who asked not to be named for obvious reasons, Skype developed its own user-monitoring system before the Microsoft acquisition in October 2011. It appears that US intelligence agencies have insisted that local software companies must cooperate closer with the NSA, so it asked several top vendors, including Skype, to put together secret teams to develop systems that would provide them with backdoor access to users’ conversations. The source claims that the NSA wanted “to control the process themselves” and thus skip the process of contacting the parent company and asking for details on select user accounts. This is how Skype Project Chess was born. “Less than a dozen people inside Skype” have been asked to develop a hidden system that would allow the NSA to access conversations and user details at any time. Skype officially joined the PRISM program on February 6, 2011, so it’s believed that the backdoor access system was already up and running at that time, more than half a year before the Microsoft acquisition was completed. It’s not yet confirmed, but it appears that those tools have already been removed from Skype, as part of Microsoft’s network updates over the years. Tipsters, on the other hand, claim that companies involved in this NSA secret plan have kept the monitoring systems to “control the process themselves.” The interesting thing is that Microsoft is now refusing to comment on this report, even though the company has often denied stories claiming that Skype calls can be wiretapped. The only thing we got from Microsoft in the PRISM scandal is the public statement rolled out this month and claiming that it never provides user details to the government on a voluntary basis.

“We provide customer data only when we receive a legally binding order or subpoena to do so, and never on a voluntary basis. In addition we only ever comply with orders for requests about specific accounts or identifiers. If the government has a broader voluntary national security program to gather customer data we don’t participate in it.”

....yeah right

So called Moderate Iranian President tied to mass terrorist attack on Jews

New Iranian President Hassan Rowhani Tied to 1994 Bombing of Jewish community center in Buenos Aires.(FreeBeacon).
Iranian President-elect Hassan Rowhani was on the special Iranian government committee that plotted the 1994 bombing of a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires, according to an indictment by the Argentine government prosecutor investigating the case.

Michael Hastings #MediaBurnOut: #Wikileaks claims #NSA conspiracy

Hastings, who covered the 2008 presidential election for Newsweek, was hired by Buzzfeed last spring to cover President Barack Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign

Michael Hastings contacted WikiLeaks lawyer Jennifer Robinson just a few hours before he died, saying that the FBI was investigating him.

Miss Alabama wants to be surveillanced. #cyberstalking

Turkey borrows money to sustain ISLAMist gov

http://daledamos.blogspot.com/2013/06/daniel-pipes-what-turkeys-riots-mean.html

Turkish banks have borrowed heavily abroad, and especially from supportive Sunni Muslim sources. The resulting current account deficit creates so great a need for credit that the private sector alone needs to borrow US$221 billion in 2013, or nearly 30 percent of the country's$775 billion GDP.

There was a #Benghazi before September11 with TWA 800

Flight 800, a Boeing 747, had just taken off from JFK airport with 230 people aboard on July 17, 1996, en route to Paris when it exploded and crashed off the coast of nearby East Moriches, Long Island, killing everyone on the plane.
“..This team of investigators who actually handled the wreckage and victims’ bodies, prove that the officially proposed fuel-air explosion did not cause the crash,” reads a statement by the producers of the film, which will debut on cable network EPIX next month. “They also provide radar and forensic evidence proving that one or more ordnance explosions outside the aircraft caused the crash.” However, the statement said they did not speculate about the source or sources of any ordnance explosions.
The whistle-blower team, which includes investigators -- at the time -- from the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), TWA, and the Airline Pilots Association, have since retired from their positions. They claim that at the time, they were placed under a gag order by the NTSB, which they charged falsified the official conclusion of the cause of the crash. They indicated they would elaborate more in a Wednesday media briefing.
The NTSB report, the culmination of a four-year investigation, suggested the cause of the explosion was due to an explosion in the gas tank caused by a short circuit.
With conspiracy theories immediately swirling around the crash -- one being that it was caused by a terrorist missile strike -- the FBI conducted  a 16-month investigation and concluded that there was no evidence to indicate that any criminal act occurred.
The author of a book and a previous movie about TWA 800 says that the tragedy has a lot in common with the Benghazi terror attack of September 2012, including one central player: Hillary Clinton. http://israelmatzav.blogspot.com/2013/06/was-twa-800-shot-down.html?m=1

depraved taste for equality

But one also finds in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to want to bring the strong down to their level, and which reduces men to preferring equality in servitude to inequality in freedom". http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexis_de_Tocqueville

“The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public's money.”

There were no WMDs in Iraq?

Jordan recently seized 20 tons of chemicals trucked in by confessed al-Qaeda members who brought the stuff in from Syria.

The chemicals included VX, Sarin and 70 others. But the media seems curiously incurious about whether one could reasonably trace this stuff back to Iraq. Had the terrorists released a "toxic cloud," Jordanian officials say 80,000 would have died!

#Stuxnet was out of control

http://israelmatzav.blogspot.com/2013/06/stuxnet-was-out-of-control-we-had-to.html

How many large-scale cyberattacks have taken place to this day?
“You can count them on one hand, but the pace of attacks is growing. Today there are various kinds of cyberattacks, and criminal organizations are entering this field and offering their services to governments and commercial companies. They have their own forums, their own social networks, and they run their own parallel world. Unfortunately, many countries suffer from these cyberwars.”
You are supposed to help the good guys stop the bad guys. If so, why did you reveal the Stuxnet [The Stuxnet computer worm of 2010, which destroyed several Iranian nuclear centrifuges, was revealed as a joint U.S.-Israeli cyberweapon aimed at specific Iranian nuclear facilities]?
“That virus spun out of control. Although it was intended to stop the progress of Iran’s nuclear program, it also damaged 100,000 computers all over Europe. There was a need to stop it. Cyberwars act like boomerangs. In the real world, when you launch a missile, it hones in on a target and then it is completely destroyed. A virtual missile, however, is not destroyed. The attacking side could intercept it, change a few lines of code, and send it back to whoever launched it in the first place. So it would be advisable for governments not to enter cyberwars because in a boomerang war there are no winners.”
The Stuxnet worm, which allegedly attacked the Natanz plant by altering the frequency at which motors connected to gas centrifuges that separate uranium isotopes turn, formed part of a wave of digital attacks on the country in 2009 and 2010.

#wikileaks #Palestine

Israel Matzav: 'Palestinian Authority' wanted Falk fired
A Wikileaks cable shows that in 2010, the 'Palestinian Authority' asked that UN 'human rights council' special envoy Richard Falk be fired... because he was too pro-Hamas (Hat Tip: Elder of Ziyon). The cable was written by Douglas Griffiths, then the American charge d'affaires in Geneva.

Golda said outside pressures would put off peace

Doc's Talk: Golda Meir: Israel would not withdraw to 1967 lines
Former Israeli prime minister Golda Meir. Photo: Wikimedia Commons
Anyone who creates illusions among the Arabs that it is possible to impose an Arab- Israeli solution from the outside is pushing off peace, then-prime minister Golda Meir told German chancellor Willy Brandt 40 years ago, in words that Israeli leaders continue to say to European counterparts today.

The comment was contained in one of the 28 documents that the Israel State Archives released on Sunday to mark 40 years since Brandt’s historic visit to Israel, the first ever by a German chancellor. The visit took place from June 7-11, 1973, some five months before the Yom Kippur War.

According to the documents, Meir told Brandt to relay to then-Egyptian president Anwar Sadat that Israel truly wanted peace.

Meir said he could tell him – according to a document summing up the main points of the Brandt-Meir meeting that focused on the Middle East – that “we don’t want all of Sinai, or half of Sinai, or the major part of Sinai.

Brandt can make it clear to Sadat that we do not request that he begin negotiations in public, and that we are prepared to begin secret negotiations.”
She also made clear that Israel would not withdraw to the June 4, 1967 lines.

German emissary Lothar Lahn relayed the message to Sadat’s senior advisor, Hafiz Ismail, who summarily rejected it. He also rejected Meir’s proposal for personal contact between Israel and Egypt. He said that as long as Israel was not willing to declare its willingness to withdraw, there was no sense in a meeting since it would only serve to concretize the status quo.
German documents, according to a summary narrative provided by the national archive, showed that Brandt was not at all enthusiastic about serving as Middle East mediator, concerned that this would negatively impact on Germany’s relations with the Arab states.
This was the third time Meir sent emissaries to Sadat with a proposal to negotiate.
The first time was in 1971 through US secretary of state William Rogers, and again in 1972 through Romanian leader Nicolae Ceausescu. All the offers were turned down.
The documents released showed the sensitivity of the Brandt visit, not only because of anti-German feelings in Israel because of the Holocaust, but also because the visit came less than a year after the Munich massacre at the 1972 Summer Olympics, and the German government’s release in September and October 1972 of the remaining terrorists responsible.
During the visit, Meir told the cabinet that there was a “very good atmosphere,” and then added bluntly that there was “much more understanding about the past than about the future – regretfully, I must put it that way.”
According to the summary Archives, Meir spoke of differences of opinion with Brandt, “especially on the issue of European intervention in the Middle East; and expressions by him and other members of the delegation about the need for ‘a balanced policy’ by Germany, which grated on Israeli ears.”
At the time of the meeting, voices were being raised in Germany to “normalize” relations with Israel, instead of the previous concept of “special relations.”
Israel was opposed to this, favoring the “special relationship” because – according to the summary – it enabled Israel to raise issues “such as relations with the Common Market; economic aid and German investment in Israel; and reparations to Holocaust survivors; and to benefit from a favorable attitude.”
Brandt sent a letter to Meir upon returning to Germany, summing up his impressions. In it he addressed a request that he take up the plight of Jews in Arab lands.
“I have also been able to take up, from humanitarian points of view, the problem of Jewish inhabitants of neighboring Arab states with which I was approached during my visit, but surely I need not tell you how hard it often is for humanity to prevail.”
Brandt said that as a result of his visit and talks in Israel, “we have been able, mindful of the burden of the past, to open up a new chapter in the relations between our two peoples.”

Michigan: Muslims halal legal jihad against McDonald’s results in…removal of all halal food

creeping 

Biting the hand that feeds them halal (see links below).  via The Arab American News – Local McDonald’s stops serving halal meat.

DEARBORN — Just one month after the McDonald’s Corporation and the Finley Management Company settled a non-halal class action lawsuit for $700,000, the owners of the Dearborn McDonald’s, located at 13158 Ford Road, have decided to no longer include halal items on their menu.

“McDonald’s is a system comprised of independent small business owners, who look to connect with and serve their local communities.There were two restaurants in Dearborn Michigan that served two Halal menu items for the past several years, and those items have now been discontinued, as a result of our continued efforts to focus on our national core menu. Our franchisees continue to be proud supporters of the Dearborn community,” McDonald’s Corp. told The Arab American News.

Al-Qaeda Members Arrested With Chemical WMD’s in Iraq for Attacks on America and Europe

From BBC: The authorities in Iraq say they have uncovered an al-Qaeda plot to use chemical weapons, as well as to smuggle them to Europe and North America. Defence ministry spokesman Mohammed al-Askari said five men had been arrested after military intelligence monitored their activities for three months. Three workshops for manufacturing the chemical agents, including sarin and mustard gas, were uncovered, he added. Remote-controlled toy planes were also seized at the workshops. Mr Askari said they were to have been used to release the chemical agents over the target from a “safe” distance of 1.5km (0.9 miles), reports the BBC’s Rami Ruhayem in Baghdad. All of the arrested men had confessed to the plot, and said they had received instruction from another al-Qaeda offshoot, he added. As the defence ministry spokesman spoke on Iraqi TV, footage was shown of four men with black hoods on their heads, our correspondent adds. Three of them were wearing bright yellow jumpsuits and a fourth was in a brown jumpsuit. Soldiers wearing gas masks hold bottles containing chemicals.