Did FBI informant actually inspire Bronx synagogue plot?

By Amira Hass
Haaretz
6/15/2009

NEWBURGH, New York - The first time Kathleen Baines saw Maksud was on Wednesday, May 20. Like everyone else, she knew the well-to-do Pakistani by his first name only. He had started appearing here the previous September, wandering around outside Masjid al-Ikhlas (the "mosque of devotion") in town, meeting people in a popular local restaurant, paying for their meals and offering financial help.

Frequenters of the mosque, some of them immigrants from East Asia and others African Americans, could not help but notice that Maksud had five vehicles, including a Mercedes, a BMW and an ATV.

On that Wednesday in May, Maksud arrived in the neighborhood in one of his cars at about 4 P.M. and stopped at Baines' house. He has a narrow face, she recalls now, and peroxided hair. He would wear sunglasses and expensive shoes. Whenever he came to look for her partner, James Cromitie, in recent months, he would remain outside, and this time was no different.

"Where is the brother?" he asked, and she answered from the window: "James is on his motorbike with my son." Maksud asked her what his cellular phone number was. The question sounded strange to Baines since he was the one who had given James the phone.

When Cromitie returned with her son on the motorbike, he gave her a kiss and went over to Maksud's car. She saw on the seat of the car that three cellular telephones had been placed alongside one another and this also seemed strange.

"Where are you going?" she asked and James replied, "We're going to eat." "When will you get back?" she asked and Maksud answered, "about 8 P.M."

At around 8 P.M. she called her partner, but there was no reply. She was not surprised. "Maksud would always force him to turn off his phone when they met. He always tried to persuade James to leave me. He called me the 'boss-woman.' He would ask: Where is the bitch?" she said when we met last week in Newburgh.

Cromitie did his best to avoid Maksud, Baines says. They were relieved when he said he was leaving for Pakistan in November 2008, but in January 2009 he returned.

"I'm taking the brother to the mosque," Maksud would tell her. He paid for Baines' rent several times, gave Cromitie money and promised to bring them gifts. "Listen, sister," she remembers him saying, "if the brother wants $10,000, I'll give it to him." Maksud would add that this was in the spirit of Islam.

Baines is 42 and has two grown daughters, a 6-year-old son from a different man and a 2-year-old grandson.

"James treated all of us like his family," she says. She met him in a hostel for men, where she worked, four years ago. Cromitie, 53, was born in Brooklyn and spent 12 years in jail for various drug offenses. In 2005, a few months after he was released, he moved to Newburgh. "He is a gentleman. One doesn't find men like that today. He asked me to stop working. He converted to Islam in jail and from that I understood that Islam must be good because he treated me well."

On that day in May when she tried to reach him by phone, Baines did not know that Maksud, Cromitie and three of their friends were on their way to Riverdale in the Bronx, to carry out what Assistant U.S. Attorney Eric Snyder described later as an unimaginable, blood-curdling plot: planting bombs in parked cars next to a Riverdale synagogue and Jewish cultural center, and shooting missiles at a helicopter at Newburgh's Air National Guard base.

The lethal plot was foiled, however. One of the five men put the bombs in place while three others kept watch. But no one was aware that the bombs had been defused earlier by the Federal Bureau of Investigation - and that FBI officers, members of the New York Police Department and a joint anti-terror force were lying in wait for them.

When the men returned to the car, they were arrested at the height of an "painstaking operation," as one source said to The New York Times. According to official reports, the investigation started in June 2008. The FBI received a tip-off then that the men were planning to attack targets in the United States. Four of the men are converts to Islam; three were born in the U.S. and the fourth (said to have psychiatric problems) is from Haiti. They were all jailed in the past for drug offenses.

In a press conference held outside the Jewish center in the Bronx on May 21, the commissioner of the New York City Police Department, Raymond Kelly, said the four had been overheard saying they wanted to carry out a jihad because so many Muslims were being killed in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Democratic Party Assemblyman Jeffrey Dinowitz, who represents the Bronx in the state assembly, said in an interview with the Times that people are sometimes motivated by religious hatred and hatred of Jews, but it was fortunate that the FBI and police had uncovered this plot at an early stage.

On that fateful Wednesday evening, Baines still knew nothing - even when FBI agents carried out a search of her house and detained her for five hours. The following day, when it was reported that the driver of the car had cooperated with the FBI, Baines realized that this was Maksud - "the man who destroyed my life."

Salahuddin Muhammad, the imam of the local mosque, was not surprised. "We thought he was an informer," he told both journalists and the children who study in the mosque. The children saw all the media buzz and were disturbed that the name of their mosque had come up in connection with the plot. "We wondered what to do," the imam explained to the youngsters. "How should we tell the authorities that we suspected him? But it was the authorities who had sent him."

Maksud, it later transpired, is a Pakistani immigrant who was arrested in 2002 for selling fake driving licenses to immigrants. In order to avoid serving a jail sentence and being exiled, he agreed to work for the FBI. An on-the-ball journalist from The New York Post realized this was the same federal informer who had worked five years earlier in Albany, New York, in a similar fashion. He had appeared near a local mosque there, presented himself as religious and rich, and had become friendly with Musharaff Hussein, an immigrant from Bangladesh who owned a pizzeria and was having money troubles. According to the official version, the informer eventually helped to thwart a dangerous terror plot planned by the pizzeria owner and the mosque's imam, Yassin Arif, originally from Kurdistan. They were plotting to kill a Pakistani diplomat and to finance the murder by selling weapons. In Albany, Maksud used a different name.

An FBI spokesman in New York refused to confirm or deny that this was the same informer, but said, in a telephone conversation, that the prosecution had to prove the guilt of the four men while the defense had to prove that they had fallen into a trap.

Rights groups intervene

At the end of March, a federal judge demanded that the FBI provide 100 documents with details of the techniques used by agents tailing Islamic organizations in southern California. The directive came in the wake of a 2007 petition from the American Civil Liberties Union after Muslim communities revealed a number of incidents involving FBI informers in mosques. They said at least one such agent-informer, Craig Montal, had tried to convince people to blow up buildings in Los Angeles.

According to lawyers and activists in human rights organizations, Montal's system was used in most of the incidents involving exposure of terrorist plots in the U.S, since the September 11, 2001 attack. Agents, some of them with dubious backgrounds, have infiltrated the Muslim communities, and in at least one case, in Miami, communities of non-Muslim blacks. Without strong evidence, they hone in on weak elements in the society, spread around ideas for attacks and sometimes even supply explosives, rights groups say. According to this version, such exposure leads to giant headlines that feed the public's fear of Islam, makes heroes out of the FBI and garners support for aggressive internal security policy. When the details become clear at a later stage, no one is interested in them or in the families that have been destroyed.

The timing of the incident in Riverdale coincided with a stormy debate over changes required in America's internal security policy. On June 2, indictments were submitted against the four men from Newburgh. The following day they pleaded not guilty. Salahuddin Muhammad, the imam, does not make light of the fact that the four men who were presented as Muslims were part of a plot to place explosives next to Jewish institutions. He says, however, that the four were not regular worshipers at his mosque.

"I saw Cromitie only a few times in the mosque. If they had come to pray regularly, they would have known we were suspicious of 'Maksud' and they would have distanced themselves from him," Muhammad explains. "They would have continued to this day to wander around the streets and get high together."

Solicited by extremists? Report suspicious activity.

Jews and Muslims unite against Jerusalem Museum of Tolerance

By Nir Hasson
Haaretz

A new Jewish-Muslim initiative is seeking to derail the planned Museum of Tolerance, which is currently being built in Jerusalem on the site of a former Muslim cemetery.

The initiative's hopes to get the site declared ritually impure under Jewish law, due to the fact that the construction has involved unearthing the remains of hundreds of Muslims. Such a declaration would keep religious Jews from visiting the museum.

The proposal has already received the blessing of Rabbi David Schmidl, head of the ultra-Orthodox Atra Kadisha organization, which fights against the desecration of Jewish graves. Its Jewish sponsors - who include two left-wing activists plus one activist from the ultra-Orthodox Shas party - are also seeking support from Chief Sephardic Rabbi Shlomo Amar, but he has not yet replied to their letter.

The museum, which is being built in Jerusalem's Mamilla neighborhood by the Wiesenthal Center, occupies a site that served for hundreds of years as a Muslim cemetery, but was then turned into a parking lot. Because the work involves unearthing hundreds of skeletons and reinterring them at the margins of the site, it has aroused fierce opposition from Muslim groups, who petitioned the High Court of Justice against it.

However, the court accepted the museum's argument that the lack of Muslim objection when the site was turned into a parking lot indicates that it is no longer deemed holy ground.

The new initiative is the brainchild of Meir Margalit, a Jerusalem city councilman from the Meretz Party who is active in the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, and Gershon Baskin, who is co-CEO of the Israel/Palestine Center for Research and Information.

Three months ago, they approached Shas activist Meir Sheetreet, who is known to be close to the party's spiritual leader, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef. Sheetreet said he believed it would be possible to obtain a joint Jewish-Muslim declaration about the sanctity of the site. It was Sheetreet who approached Schmidl and secured his support for the initiative.

In return, Sheetreet asked his leftist partners to obtain a promise from Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas that the sanctity of Joseph's Tomb in Nablus would be respected, and Baskin did so.

"Because Joseph's Tomb is recognized in the [Oslo] Accords as a holy site, the PLO recognizes and honors what was agreed to," wrote Rafik Husseini, Abbas' bureau chief, in a letter to the activists. The Palestine Liberation Organization is the group that signed the Oslo Accords on the Palestinians' behalf.

Husseini also wrote that he expected Israel to recognize and respect the sanctity of the Mamilla cemetery and refrain from moving the remains of the people buried there.

After receiving the letter, Sheetreet asked Amar to issue a similar statement demanding respect for the sanctity of the Mamilla cemetery. However, that was more than a month ago, and he has yet to receive a reply.

Sheetreet told Haaretz yesterday that he was sorry the initiative was being publicized at this stage. The goal, he said, is a joint, public declaration by Jewish and Muslim religious authorities against "trampling on the honor of the dead."

He added that he has not approached Yosef on the matter because he wants to keep the initiative strictly religious, and due to Yosef's role in Shas, his involvement might make it seem political.

Time Magazine: Does Israel Mistreat Palestinian Child Prisoners?

By Tim McGirk / Jerusalem Tuesday, Jun. 30, 2009
Time Magazine

Walid Abu Obeida, a 13-year-old Palestinian farm boy from the West Bank village of Ya'abad, had never spoken to an Israeli until he rounded a corner at dusk carrying his shopping bags and found two Israeli soldiers waiting with their rifles aimed at him. "They accused me of throwing stones at them," recounts Walid, a skinny kid with dark eyes. "Then one of them smacked me in the face, and my nose started bleeding."

According to Walid, the two soldiers blindfolded and handcuffed him, dragged him to a jeep and drove away. All that his family would know about their missing son was that his shopping bags with meat and rice for that evening's dinner were found in the dusty road near an olive grove. Over the course of several days in April last year, the boy says he was moved from an army camp to a prison, where he was crammed into a cell with five other children, cursed at and humiliated by the guards and beaten by his interrogator until he confessed to stone-throwing...

Walid's story is hardly unusual, judging from a report on the Israeli military-justice system in the West Bank compiled by the Palestine office of the Geneva-based Defense for Children International, which works closely with the U.N. and European states...

The report states that "the ill-treatment and torture" of Palestinian child prisoners "appears to be widespread, systematic and institutionalized, suggesting complicity at all levels of the political and military chain of command."...

The Geneva organization's report alleges that under Israeli military justice, it is the norm for children to be interrogated by the Israeli police and army without either a lawyer or a family member present and that most of their convictions are due to confessions extracted during interrogation sessions or from "secret evidence," usually tip-offs from unnamed Palestinian informers. If so, the practice may violate the U.N. Convention Against Torture, which Israel ratified in 1991...

According to the Israeli human-rights group Breaking the Silence, a few Israeli soldiers are alarmed by their own troops' behavior. The group cites the testimony of two officers who complained before a military court that during an operation last March in Hares village, soldiers herded 150 male villagers, some as young as 14, into a schoolyard in the middle of the night, where they were kept bound, blindfolded and beaten over the course of more than 12 hours.

A U.N. Committee Against Torture, which met on May 15 in Geneva, expressed its "concern" over Israel's alleged abuses of Palestinian child prisoners...

Israel's treatment of Palestinian children and teens as combatants perpetuates the cycle of hatred. After a spell in an Israeli jail, it's hard for a young Palestinian to stay uninvolved. Walid says he never cared much for anything aside from his school friends and family before his incarceration. Now he bears a radioactive hatred towards Israelis. "The soldiers' curses and insults, I'll carry them to my grave," he says.

LAPD names its first Islamic chaplain

Email Picture

Jake Stevens / Los Angeles Times
Sheik Qazi Asad prays five times each day. The Pakistani-born immigrant, who is now a U.S. citizen, first got involved with law enforcement after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, working with the Sheriff’s Department.
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By Duke Helfand
June 29, 2009
Los Angeles Times

American Muslims have never been much of a presence in the Los Angeles Police Department, accounting for less than 1% of its nearly 10,000 officers.

But now, with department leaders eager to improve relationships with local Muslims, top brass have named the force's first Islamic chaplain: a Pakistani-born spiritual leader who has spent much of the last decade trying to build bridges between law enforcement and Los Angeles County's diverse Muslim communities.

Sheik Qazi Asad, 47, will serve as a reserve chaplain at the LAPD's North Hollywood station. The volunteer post requires about eight hours of service each month. But to Asad and his LAPD patrons, it represents an opportunity to expose officers to a culture and faith that many may find unfamiliar, even foreign.

And that, Asad and LAPD leaders hope, will enhance relations that have been strained at times, particularly in the aftermath of a much-criticized plan by the department in 2007 to map the city's Muslim population. The plan, which some critics equated to religious profiling, was scrapped after a week of protests.

"We need to establish very good communication . . . where both parties are talking to each other," Asad said. "This is just opening up the door."

...Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca asked Asad to join a news conference at which Baca and other elected leaders demonstrated their solidarity with the embattled Muslim community. Baca had met Asad in the 1990s at dinners with elected officials and community leaders in the South Bay, where Asad lives.

The bearded Asad, a U.S. citizen, came to the news conference wearing traditional Muslim attire -- a turban, long collarless shirt and trousers ending above the ankle. Soon after, he was asked to join Baca's Executive Clergy Council. He brought about a dozen other American Muslim leaders with him.

Baca said that Asad helps establish a bridge of trust between Muslims and police. "It doesn't surprise me that the LAPD would reach out to Qazi and give him a chance to continue his work," the sheriff said...

Like other candidates, Asad underwent an extensive background check that included fingerprinting, a review of his finances and employment history, and an interview with the department's senior chaplains.

LAPD leaders view Asad's chaplaincy work as an extension of his previous roles with law enforcement. Although chaplains are expected to serve in a nonsectarian capacity, LAPD authorities said they believe that Asad could be a source of information for officers curious about Muslims and their religion.

"Officers don't know about Islam or Muslim communities in Los Angeles. He's going to be a person who can educate them to that," said Lt. Mark Stainbrook, who oversees community outreach for the department's counter-terrorism and criminal intelligence bureau.

Some Muslim religious and civic leaders who belong to an LAPD Muslim advisory panel grumbled privately about not being consulted about Asad's selection, although they did not take issue with him. LAPD officials said that Asad applied for the post on his own, and that the department generally does not run chaplain appointments by outside advisory groups.

Even those Muslim leaders who voiced some disappointment with the process, however, said they believed that Asad's appointment would help nurture an emerging relationship with the Police Department.

"The position needs someone who has the basic knowledge and skills to bring people together, especially someone who understands the culture and nature of law enforcement," said Hussam Ayloush, Southern California executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations. "I think Mr. Asad has such abilities."...

Are orphans of Palestine and Iraq less-deserving human beings?

Worry over terrorism laws hinders giving, O.C. Muslims say
Fear that government might target donors leads to shift away from Islamic nonprofits, leaders say.

By SEAN EMERY
THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER


Muslim leaders already angered by allegations of FBI spying in Orange County mosques are backing the ACLU's assertion that terrorism-financing laws have had a chilling effect on donations to Muslim charities.

The ACLU says the Treasury Department's expanded authority to investigate terrorism-financing links in the wake of the 9/11 attacks has given the agency "virtually unchecked power" to designate groups as terrorist organizations, creating what local leaders describe as a "climate of fear" in the Muslim community.

The ACLU report, which is based on more than 100 interviews with Muslim community leaders, contends that:

•The Treasury Department operates under "overly broad" terrorism financing laws that fail to safeguard targeted charities against "government mistake and abuse."

•The FBI targets major donors to Muslim charities, approaching them at their workplace and homes to ask about donations.

•Law enforcement officials refuse to reassure donors that they will not be retroactively held liable for donations to organizations that are later shut down or placed under investigation.

•Federal and local law enforcement agencies have tried to convince community members to serve as informants in mosques in order to monitor donations.

The ACLU report, issued June 15, follows allegations that the FBI used a paid informant to infiltrate local mosques. Those allegations have frayed the relationship between federal officials and several high-profile Muslim groups.

The widening rift has drawn the ACLU into the fray, with that organization's lawyers celebrating an April ruling requiring the FBI to make available for federal court review surveillance records on Southern California Muslims.

"This has really undermined the ability to fulfill our religious obligations. Many of us believe that the practice of charity has become part of politics really," said Shakeel Syed, executive director of the Islamic Shura Council of Southern California. "I have to give, period. Giving is my faith, it is as important as breathing, so there is no option for me not to give."

Federal scrutiny has forced large donors who traditionally gave $10,000 or more to Muslim charities to distribute their donations in smaller increments, Syed said.

"In the local mosques the cash collections have increased, which implies that people are afraid of giving large checks," Syed said. "Instead they opt for cash."

Muslim leaders admit the increased scrutiny has prodded some Muslim organizations to tighten up their oversight efforts.

"Some (donors) became pickier in who they give to. They started requiring from recipients a heavy burden of accountability and transparency, making sure they check their nonprofit status and board of directors," said Hussam Ayloush, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relation's (CAIR) Southern California chapter. "That forced organizations to clean up their act and get a little more organized in anticipation of increased scrutiny by the government and donors."

But government pressure has also convinced many Muslim donors to avoid Muslim charities, Ayloush said, instead choosing to donate to less controversial nonprofits such as hospitals, universities, government programs such as USAID, and partnerships with Catholic and Mormon charities.

"That is a problem, because if all of us avoid giving to the orphans of Palestine and Iraq, who is going to take care of those children?" Ayloush said. "Are they less-deserving human beings?"

Treasury Department spokeswoman Natalie Wyeth said in a written statement that the agency is "increasing our engagement with the charitable community to help them protect against terrorist abuse … and to refine the guidance surrounding charitable giving."

"We're hopeful this ongoing communication will ensure all charitable groups, regardless of religious affiliation, have the ability to provide assistance where it's needed most, without empowering terrorist organizations," Wyeth wrote.

Justice Department officials declined to directly comment on the ACLU report, but indicated they "simply follow the money and evidence wherever they lead, without regards to race, religion or ethnicity," spokesman Dean Boyd said in a written statement.

Despite the disagreements between federal officials and the high-profile Muslim groups, FBI Director Robert Mueller reportedly described their relationship as "very good" in a Michigan speech earlier this month.

Muslim leaders also say they were encouraged by President Barack Obama's recent Cairo speech, which called for a new beginning between the United States and the Islamic world.

"We hope to see a shift in their attitude that will focus on real prevention of crime rather than the hyping of fear and paranoia," Ayloush said of federal agencies. "We do feel already an ease of that paranoia and unfair targeting, and we hope that will continue."

Contact the writer: 949-553-2911 or semery@ocregister.com

American Jewish Professor Cleared of Anti-Semitism Charges!

What? I know, that sounds absurd.

How can a Jewish professor be accused of anti-Semitism for criticizing Israel's brutal actions in Gaza? Can I or other Arab Muslims be accused of anti-Muslim or anti-Arab bigotry for continuously criticizing Egypt's shameful role in the inhumane siege on Gaza. Can Archbishop Desmond Tutu be accused of being anti-Christian for speaking out against the Apartheid that was then practiced by the South African rulers?

Such charges are nothing short of an attempt to defame and silence those who challenge injustice. This is not just a matter of free speech; it is about speaking and acting for peace, liberty and justice for all people.

May Allah/God bless those brave people, Jewish, Christian, Muslim, or whatever they claim to be.

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U.S. professor cleared over comparison of Gaza war to Holocaust
By Cnaan Liphshiz,
Haarez and The Associated Press


A committee at a California university has cleared a professor who sent an e-mail comparing Israel's policies in Gaza to the Holocaust.

Officials at the University of California, Santa Barbara, sent a letter Wednesday to sociology professor William I. Robinson saying the committee had closed the matter.

In January, Robinson offended some students and others with an e-mail to his "Sociology of Globalization" class that juxtaposed grisly photos from the Nazi era with a recent Gaza offensive. (The link I am providing as FYI possibly shows those images in the e-mail. Those images were sent over many e-mails during Israel's onslaught on Gaza.)

Jewish groups called the e-mail "hate spam" and claimed Robinson violated university policies barring professors from intimidating students and using campus resources for political reasons.

A leading pro-Israel student group blasted the move on Wednesday. "[The university] has blurred the lines between education and peddling of propaganda," the L.A.-based Israel advocacy group StandWithUs told Haaretz.

The affair was exposed by Santa Barbara student Leah Yadegar ? a graduate of the StandWithUs Emerson Fellowship program, which trains students in campuses in "response techniques" to anti-Israel efforts on campus.

"We are surprised and disappointed that the university chose not to uphold their standards for professional conduct," said Roz Rothstein, director and founder of StandWithUs, which filed the original complaint against Robinson.

"It is unfortunate that students will continue to be victims of partisan indoctrination and misinformation."

Robinson, who is Jewish, has said his justified criticism of Israel's policies should not be confused as anti-Semitism. Before the ruling, he had circulated a petition rallying colleagues and supporters against the internal probe into his actions.

Alaska priest to engage Islam at national level

By Joel Davidson
6/24/2009
Catholic Anchor

Photo: a mosque and a church, side-by-side, in Beirut, Lebanon

...Born, raised and ordained to the priesthood in Alaska, Father Walsh will leave his home state to work for at least three years with the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, where his primary task will be to facilitate greater understanding between Catholics and Muslims across the country...

Those dialogues will generally include bishops, academic experts and prominent Muslim leaders. The aim of the gatherings is to foster mutual understanding and find areas where greater unity and cooperation are possible.

“It is important for us to be in dialogue,” Father Walsh explained in an interview with the Anchor. “We’ve seen what happens when those prejudices and antagonisms are allowed to run unchecked.”

For example, Father Walsh pointed to the mischaracterization of Islam that occurs when memories of the September 11, 2001 attacks are the primary perception that people have of the religion.

“Dialogue is especially important because of how skittish people are today,” Father Walsh said. “Most people, you talk to them about Islam and they are going to mention 9/11 somewhere within the first three minutes of the conversation because that is the image in their mind. And believe me, it is the image in the Muslim’s mind too. They live with that every day.”

...Interreligious work is very much dependent on building human relationships, Father Walsh explained.

“It is not just comparative religion,” he said. “Religion is never lived in a vacuum. We engage and live in the community in which we are a part.”

...On the international front, Father Walsh noted that Pope Benedict XVI has provided strong leadership in reaching out to the Islamic world and inviting them to dialogue.

Father Walsh pointed to the Common Word Project in which 138 Muslim scholars agreed to an interfaith dialogue with Christians on the topic of love of God and love of neighbor...

MUST READ: Why aren't Jews outraged by Israeli occupation?

My note:
For the record, I personally and proudly know many Jews who are very outraged by the brutal and racist actions of Israel. More importantly, those brave Jews are not just being outraged, but are rather doing something to challenge such actions and promote justice and peace.

However, Mr. Loewenstein raises many valid questions. It is worth reading.

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Why aren't Jews outraged by Israeli occupation?
By Antony Loewenstein
Antony Loewenstein is a New York-based journalist and author of My Israel Question.
Haaretz; 6/17/2009


During this year's AIPAC conference in Washington, Executive Director Howard Kohr warned the 7,000-plus crowd that the global movement to "delegitimize Israel" was gathering steam.

"These voices are laying the predicate for an abandonment," he said. His sentiments were almost apocalyptic: "The stakes in that battle are nothing less than the survival of Israel, linked inexorably to the relationship between Israel and the United States. In this battle we are the firewall, the last rampart."

The age of Barack Obama has unleashed a global wave of Jewish unease over Israel's future and the Diaspora's relationship to the self-described Jewish state. It's a debate that is long overdue.

Zionist organizations in Australia campaigned loudly in May against the allegedly "anti-Semitic" play Seven Jewish Children, a ten-minute think-piece written by an English playwright accusing Jews of complicity in violence against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.

A Jewish columnist for The New York Times, Roger Cohen, argued in June that the key word among Palestinians now is "humiliation."

"It's not good for the Palestinians, the Israelis or the Jewish soul," he wrote. The Jewish Week editor chastised him for such views - for "the anger, blame and one-sidedness of his argument" - and wondered "whose heart?has grown brutal?"

An upcoming academic conference at York University in Toronto exploring the "one-state, bi-national solution" to the conflict was slammed last week by Gerald M. Steinberg, chair of the Department of Political Science at Bar Ilan University, for fueling "the vicious warfare and mass terror" against Israelis and Palestinians.

The decades-old ability of Zionist groups to manage the public narrative of Israeli victimhood is breaking down. Damning critics has therefore become a key method of control.

But, writes Salon.com's Glenn Greenwald, a leading Jewish-American blogger, "whereas these smear tactics once inspired fear in many people, now they just inspire pity. They no longer work."

He may be overly optimistic, but alternative Jewish voices are rising who are less concerned with being accused of "self-hatred" or treachery. They see it as their duty to damn what is wrong and not simply support Israeli government policies.

A thinking, more enlightened Judaism is emerging, a necessity in the face of apartheid realities. The cause is human rights, not Zionist exclusion.

Obama's recent speech in Cairo reflected the new Jewish consciousness. American Jews were certainly an intended audience because if it this group that must challenge their conservative spokespeople to undo years of following Likudnik thinking. As a candidate in 2008, the then Illinois senator said that, "there is a strain within the pro-Israel community that says unless you adopt an unwavering pro-Likud approach to Israel that you're anti-Israel and that can't be the measure of our friendship with Israel."

Many Jews in the Diaspora have never imagined anything else; it's been an imagined Israel in their minds for decades. Lawless behavior in the occupied territories is ignored through willful ignorance. Tellingly, the most reliable information about these truths in the West is found online, through blogs and activist Web sites, and not generally in the mainstream media. The gate-keepers are clinging on to the Exodus myths for dear life.

Defining a humane Judaism in the 21st century means condemning the brutal military occupation in the West Bank and resisting the ongoing siege of Gaza.

Jewish-American blogger Phil Weiss, who recently returned from the Strip, quoted a young Gazan saying in dismay: "We are being experimented on."

The Palestinian narrative is routinely ignored or dismissed in the U.S. and beyond. This must change quickly for any chance of peace to break out in the Middle East. However, peace without justice is guaranteed to fail.

After Obama's speech in Cairo, where which he almost acknowledged the Palestinian "Nakba" without mentioning it by name, most major Jewish-American groups reacted with caution.

The Anti-Defamation League said it was "disappointed that the President found the need to balance the suffering of the Jewish people in a genocide to the suffering of the Palestinian people resulting from Arab wars."

This was code for "Nakba"-denial, as pernicious as Holocaust revisionism.

But the liberal J Street lobby, still clinging to the delusion of a viable two-state solution and a "democratic, Jewish homeland," praised Obama's "active diplomacy" and claimed that the "overwhelming majority of American Jews" supported an end to the West Bank colonies.

Consistent polls suggest they are right, but the devil is in the detail. Is there real will to back the necessary steps, namely the removal of hundreds of thousands of Jewish settlers in the West Bank?

Co-Author of The Israel Lobby, Stephen Walt, said recently that he couldn't understand why more American Jews didn't realize the cliff Israel was running toward. Did they not see that repression in the occupied territories had defined Israel in the eyes of the world? Perhaps apartheid didn't bother them. Out of sight and out of mind. Benjamin Netanyahu's recent speech at Bar-Ilan University suggested he wasn't too fussed, either.

I recently attended the Salute to Israel parade in New York; picture 100,000 American Jews marching to celebrate the state, waving flags in praise of the IDF. It was a thoroughly depressing affair. Palestinians didn't exist; they were invisible. The world's biggest public display of pro-Israel feeling had no room for 20 percent of the Israeli population (let alone the millions in the West Bank and Gaza.)

These events are actually a sign of desperate projection, not strength. Mainstream Zionism wants to completely shield Jews from the uncomfortable facts of the Israeli occupation and Palestinian self-determination. Jews were a proud people, a clever people and a victimized people. There was no time to indulge in frivolous Arab trivialities.

But facts have an uncomfortable way of seeping back into view. Colonel Itai Virob, an IDF brigade commander in the West Bank, recently told an Israeli court that, "a slap, sometimes a punch to the scruff of the neck or the chest, sometimes a knee jab or strangulation to calm somebody [a Palestinian] down is reasonable."

Where is the Jewish outrage over this?

The Forgotten Faithful: How the West betrayed the Original Christians

The Forgotten Faithful

Followers of Jesus for nearly 2,000 years, native Christians today are disappearing from the land where their faith was born.

By Don Belt
National Geographic

...They come because this is where Christianity began. Here in Jerusalem and on lands nearby are the stony hills where Jesus walked and taught and died—and later, where his followers prayed and bled and battled over what his teaching would become. Huddled alongside Jewish converts in the caves of Palestine and Syria, Arabs were among the first to be persecuted for the new faith, and the first to be called Christians. It was here in the Levant—a geographical area including present-day Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel, and the Pales­tinian territories—that hundreds of churches and monasteries were built after Constantine, emperor of Rome, legalized Christianity in 313 and declared his Levantine provinces holy land. Even after Arab Muslims conquered the region in 638, it remained predominantly Christian.

Ironically, it was during the Crusades (1095-1291) that Arab Christians, slaughtered along with Muslims by the crusaders and caught in the cross fire between Islam and the Christian West, began a long, steady retreat into the minority. Today native Christians in the Levant are the envoys of a forgotten world, bearing the fierce and hunted spirit of the early church. Their communities, composed of various Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant sects, have dwindled in the past century from a quarter to about 8 percent of the population as the current generation leaves for economic reasons, to escape the region's violence, or because they have relatives in the West who help them emigrate. Their departure, sadly, deprives the Levant of some of its best educated and most politically moderate citizens—the people these societies can least afford to lose. And so, for Jerusalem's Arab Christians, there is a giddiness during Easter, as if, after a long and lonely ordeal, much needed reinforcements have arrived...

"You can't live alongside people for a thousand years and see them as the children of Satan," observes Paolo Dall'Oglio, an earthy, bear-size monk who hosts Muslims in interfaith dialogue at Deir Mar Musa, the sixth-century desert monastery he and his Arab followers restored between Damascus and Homs. "On the contrary, Muslims are us. This is the lesson the West has yet to learn and that Arab Christians are uniquely qualified to teach. They are the last, vital link between the Christian West and the Arab Muslim world. If Arab Christians were to disappear, the two sides would drift even further apart than they already are. They are the go-betweens."...

On Easter morning, Mark and Lisa make a handsome couple in their Sunday clothes, leading Nate and Nadia by the hand up the sidewalk to the family car, a middle-aged, maroon Honda. It's a proud moment, their first Easter together in the Holy Land, and Lisa, noticing the thick coat of dust on the car, asks Mark to give it a rinse. He fetches a hose and connects it to a faucet they share with their neighbors, who come out on the porch and stand, watching, in their kaffiyehs and head scarves. In an animated voice, Lisa explains to the kids that Daddy's giving the car a bath for Easter. Right on cue, with a playful flourish, Mark squeezes the nozzle on the hose. Nothing comes out. He checks the faucet, squeezes again. Still nothing. So there he stands, empty hose in hand, in front of his kids, his neighbors, and a visitor from overseas. "I guess they've opened the pipes to the settlements," he says quietly, gesturing to the hundreds of new Israeli housing units climbing up the hills nearby. "No more [water] for us." Lisa is still trying to explain this to the kids as the car pulls away from the curb.

"I hate the Israelis," Lisa says one day, out of the blue. "I really hate them. We all hate them. I think even Nate's starting to hate them."

Is that a sin? I ask.

"Yes, it is," she says. "And that makes me a sinner. But I confess my sins when I go to church, and that helps. I'm learning not to hate. In the meantime, I go to confession."...