Einladung zur Pressekonferenz zum 110. PRESSEBALL BERLIN

Sehr geehrte Damen und Herren,

hiermit erhalten Sie die offizielle Einladung zur Pressekonferenz zum 110. PRESSEBALL BERLIN – inklusive einer Übersicht der dort anwesenden Gesprächspartner.

Mit freundlichen Grüßen

Andreas Dorfmann
Geschäftsführer

PRESSEBALL BERLIN GMBH
Spilstraße 10
14195 Berlin (Dahlem)
Telefon: 030 – 80 60 21 77
Telefax: 030 – 80 60 21 78
eMail: andreas.dorfmann@presseball.de
Internet: www.presseball.de

Le Grand Meaulnes

Il ne sert à rien d’éprouver les plus beaux sentiments si l’on ne parvient pas à les communiquer. (Stefan Zweig, Extrait de Clarissa)

Stefan Zweig aurait pu appeler cet univers enchanteur le monde d’hier (Die Welt von gestern), qui n’était pas seulement celui de l’écrivain bref et tragique d’avant-guerre Alain-Fournier (en réalité Henri-Alban Fournier), auteur légendaire du Grand Meaulnes, mais aussi et surtout de toute une génération d’écoliers rompus aux âpres du devoir et de la droiture…à une époque où l’amitié demeurait une valeur indefectible.

Chapitre premier: Le Pensionnaire.

“Il arriva chez nous un dimanche de novembre 189…

Je continue à dire «chez nous», bien que la maison ne nous appartienne plus. Nous avons quitté le pays depuis bientôt quinze ans et nous n’y reviendrons certainement jamais.

Nous habitions les bâtiments du Cours Supérieur de Sainte-Agathe. Mon père, que j’appelais M. Seurel, comme les autres élèves, y dirigeait à la fois le Cours supérieur, où l’on préparait le brevet d’instituteur, et le Cours moyen. Ma mère faisait la petite classe.

Une longue maison rouge, avec cinq portes vitrées, sous des vignes vierges, à l’extrémité du bourg ; une cour immense avec préaux et buanderie, qui ouvrait en avant sur le village par un grand portail ; sur le côté nord, la route où donnait une petite grille et qui menait vers La Gare, à trois kilomètres ; au sud et par derrière, des champs, des jardins et des prés qui rejoignaient les faubourgs… tel est le plan sommaire de cette demeure où s’écoulèrent les jours les plus tourmentés et les plus chers de ma vie – demeure d’où partirent et où revinrent se briser, comme des vagues sur un rocher désert, nos aventures.

Le hasard des «changements», une décision d’inspecteur ou de préfet nous avaient conduits là. Vers la fin des vacances, il y a bien longtemps, une voiture de paysan, qui précédait notre ménage, nous avait déposés, ma mère et moi, devant la petite grille rouillée. Des gamins qui volaient des pêches dans le jardin s’étaient enfuis silencieusement par les trous de la haie… Ma mère, que nous appelions Millie, et qui était bien la ménagère la plus méthodique que j’aie jamais connue, était entrée aussitôt dans les pièces remplies de paille poussiéreuse, et tout de suite elle avait constaté avec désespoir, comme à chaque «déplacement», que nos meubles ne tiendraient jamais dans une maison si mal construite… Elle était sortie pour me confier sa détresse. Tout en me parlant, elle avait essuyé doucement avec son mouchoir ma figure d’enfant noircie par le voyage. Puis elle était rentrée faire le compte de toutes les ouvertures qu’il allait falloir condamner pour rendre le logement habitable… Quant à moi, coiffé d’un grand chapeau de paille à rubans, j’étais resté là, sur le gravier de cette cour étrangère, à attendre, à fureter petitement autour du puits et sous le hangar.

C’est ainsi, du moins, que j’imagine aujourd’hui notre arrivée.

Car aussitôt que je veux retrouver le lointain souvenir de cette première soirée d’attente dans notre cour de Sainte-Agathe, déjà ce sont d’autres attentes que je me rappelle; déjà, les deux mains appuyées aux barreaux du portail, je me vois épiant avec anxiété quelqu’un qui va descendre la grand’rue. Et si j’essaie d’imaginer la première nuit que je dus passer dans ma mansarde, au milieu des greniers du premier étage, déjà ce sont d’autres nuits que je me rappelle; je ne suis plus seul dans cette chambre; une grande ombre inquiète et amie passe le long des murs et se promène.

Tout ce paysage paisible – l’école, le champ du père Martin, avec ses trois noyers, le jardin dès quatre heures envahi chaque jour par des femmes en visite – est à jamais, dans ma mémoire, agité, transformé par la présence de celui qui bouleversa toute notre adolescence et dont la fuite même ne nous a pas laissé de repos.

Nous étions pourtant depuis dix ans dans ce pays lorsque Meaulnes arriva.”

Lire la suite.

Montréal

Le désormais légendaire hymne à Montréal en particulier et au Québec en général interprété pour la première fois en 1976 par le non moins légendaire artiste québecois Robert Charlebois.

JE REVIENDRAI à MONTREAL
paroles: Daniel Thibon
musique: Robert Charlebois

Je reviendrai à Montréal
Dans un grand Bœing bleu de mer
J’ai besoin de revoir l’hiver
Et ses aurores boréales

J’ai besoin de cette lumière
Descendue droit du Labrador
Et qui fait neiger sur l’hiver
Des roses bleues, des roses d’or

Dans le silence de l’hiver
Je veux revoir ce lac étrange
Entre le crystal et le verre
Où viennent se poser des anges

Je reviendrai à Montréal
Ecouter le vent de la mer
Se briser comme un grand cheval
Sur les remparts blancs de l’hiver

Je veux revoir le long désert
Des rues qui n’en finissent pas
Qui vont jusqu’au bout de l’hiver
Sans qu’il y ait trace de pas

J’ai besoin de sentir le froid
Mourir au fond de chaque pierre
Et rejaillir au bord des toits
Comme des glaçons de bonbons clairs

Je reviendrai à Montréal
Dans un grand Bœing bleu de mer
Je reviendrai à Montréal
Me marier avec l’hiver
Me marier avec l’hiver

Die Hamas – eine Terrororganisation mit Regierungsauftrag

Die Charta der “Islamischen Widerstandsbewegung” (HAMAS)

Die Hamas ist eine fundamentalistisch-islamische Terrororganisation. Am 18. August 1988 gab die Islamische Widerstandsbewegung ihre Charta heraus. Sie propagiert als zentrales Ziel des Hamas die totale Zerstörung des Staates Israel durch den Heiligen Islamischen Krieg (Jihad).

Nachfolgend Auszüge aus der HAMAS-Charta:

Die Ziele des Hamas:

“Die Islamische Widerstandsbewegung (…) strebt danach, das Banner Allahs über jedem Zentimeter Palästinas zu entfalten.” (Artikel 6)

Die Zerstörung Israels:

“Israel existiert und wird weiter existieren, bis der Islam es ausgelöscht hat, so wie er schon andere Länder vorher ausgelöscht hat.” (Präambel)

Der Aufruf zum Jihad:

“Der Jihad ist die persönliche Pflicht jedes Moslems, seit die Feinde Teile des moslemischen Landes geraubt haben. Angesichts des Raubes durch die Juden ist es unvermeidlich, dass ein Banner des Jihad gehisst. wird.” (Artikel 15)

Ablehnung von Friedensinitiativen:

“Friedensinitiativen und so genannte Friedensideen oder internationale Konferenzen widersprechen dem Grundsatz der Islamischen Widerstandsbewegung. Die Konferenzen sind nichts anderes als ein Mittel, um Ungläubige als Schlichter in den islamischen Ländern zu bestimmen … Für das Palästina-Problem gibt es keine andere Lösung als den Jihad. Friedensinitiativen sind reine Zeitverschwendung, eine sinnlose Bemühung.” (Artikel 13)

Antisemitismus und Anti-Freimaurer:

“Das jüngste Gericht wird nicht kommen, solange Moslems nicht die Juden bekämpfen und sie töten. Dann aber werden sich die Juden hinter Steinen und Bäumen verstecken, und die Steine und Bäume werden rufen: “Oh Moslem, ein Jude versteckt sich hinter mir, komm” und töte ihn.”" (Artikel 7)

Die Feinde haben lange Zeit Ränke geschmiedet … und riesigen, bedeutungsvollen, materiellen Reichtum angesammelt. Mit ihrem Reichtum haben sie weltweit die Kontrolle über die Medien übernommen, … mit ihrem Geld haben sie in verschiedenen Teilen der Welt Revolutionen gesteuert … Sie standen hinter der Französischen Revolution, der Russischen Revolution und den meisten anderen Revolutionen … Mit ihrem Geld bildeten sie geheime Organisationen, z. B. die Freimaurer, die Rotary Clubs und die Lions Clubs, welche über die ganze Welt ausgebreitet sind, um Gesellschaftssysteme zu zerstören und zionistische Interessen wahrzunehmen … Sie standen hinter dem I. Weltkrieg und bildeten den Völkerbund, mit welchem sie die Welt regierten. Sie standen hinter dem II. Weltkrieg, durch den sie riesige finanzielle Gewinne erzielten … Sie sind die Drahtzieher eines jeden irgendwo in der Welt geführten Krieges.” (Artikel 22)

“Der Hamas betrachtet sich selber als Speerspitze und Vorhut des gemeinsamen Kampfes gegen den Welt-Zionismus … Islamische Gruppen in der ganzen arabischen Welt sollten das gleiche tun, da sie für ihre zukünftige Aufgabe, den Kampf gegen die kriegstreiberischen Juden, bestens gerüstet sind.” (Artikel 32)
 
Auch wenn die Informationen über die Hamas nicht tagesaktuell sind, so hat der Terror der Hamas in den letzten Jahren nichts an Grausamkeit eingebüßt.

Thomas Hardy’s great poem on the turn of the year

The Darkling Thrush

I leant upon a coppice gate
When Frost was spectre-gray,
And Winter’s dregs made desolate
The weakening eye of day.
The tangled bine-stems scored the sky
Like strings of broken lyres,
And all mankind that haunted nigh
Had sought their household fires.

The land’s sharp features seemed to be
Century’s corpse outleant,
His crypt the cloudy canopy,
The wind his death-lament.
The ancient pulse of germ and birth
Was shrunken hard and dry,
And every spirit upon earth
Seemed fervorless as I.

At once a voice arose among
The bleak twigs overhead
In a full-hearted evensong
Of joy illimited;
An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small
In blast-beruffled plume,
Had chosen thus to fling his soul
Upon the growing gloom.

So little cause for carolings
Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
Afar or nigh around,
That I could think there trembled through
His happy good-night air
Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
And I was unaware.

31 December 1900

Thomas Hardy (1840-1928)

HIRAM7 REVIEW Statement of Support for Israel

HIRAM7 REVIEW calls on international leaders and all people of good conscience to support Israel as it acts to protect its citizens from systematic attacks from Gaza.

Israel needs your support now!

HIRAM7 REVIEW supports the nation of Israel and her war on Islamic terrorism.

The international community and all those who seek the rule of law, moderation and democracy should now stand with Israel, in this effort to turn the tide against the extremists who not only threaten Israel, but the whole Middle East and the entire civilized world.

We are particularly outraged that the UN Security Council, in an act of hypocrisy, issued a statement suggesting an “equivalency” between Hamas’ terrorism and Israel’s attempts to eliminate that terrorism. The UN Security Council statement ignores Israel’s fundamental right and responsibility to protect its people.

The UN Security Council needs to understand that it is encouraging and emboldening Hamas and other Islamic extremists whose ideology seeks to undermine the rule of law and democracy. The UN Security Council must understand that this is a critical moment in the struggle against Islamic extremism.

As President-elect Barack Obama said a few months ago during his visit to Sderot, Israel: “If somebody was sending rockets into my house where my two daughters sleep at night, I’m going to do everything in my power to stop that. And I would expect Israelis to do the same thing.”

Hamas and its supporters bear sole responsibility for any harm to Gaza’s civilians. The United States of America, France, Russia, the president of the Palestinian Authority, and other international leaders have blamed Hamas’ escalating rocket attacks for Israel’s current military action. The White House has backed Israel’s attacks, saying Hamas remains a terrorist group. Other countries, including Germany, also voiced support for Israel.

Hamas and other Iranian-supported extremists chose to renew their war against Israel instead of renewing the six-month “calm” that ended on December 19th. In the week after December 19, 2008, Gaza’s terrorists committed war crimes and collective punishment by launching over 280 rockets and mortars that targeted civilian men, women, and children in southern Israel.

Israel seeks peace. It withdrew from Gaza in 2005, but instead of nation-building, Hamas seized control and has abused Gaza to build its terrorist capabilities and incite hatred and violence.

Israel respected the June 19th agreement for six months of “calm,” even as Hamas strengthened its terrorist infrastructure and launched over 377 attacks during the agreement.  Israel exhausted all diplomatic channels to renew the “calm,” but Hamas responded only with escalating terrorism.

Israel has exercised extraordinary restraint even as Hamas has systematically targeted Israeli civilians, and Hamas has left Israel no choice but the military option it began on December 27, 2008. Israel’s stated goal is to destroy the terrorist infrastructure while avoiding harm to Palestinian civilians.

Hamas’ fanatical commitment to its founding document’s mission of “obliterating” Israel and murdering Jews is once again causing suffering for Palestinians living in Gaza. When Israel employed non-violent strategies to pressure Hamas to moderate, the terrorist organization cynically exploited them to accuse Israel of human rights’ abuses. Hamas attacks on Israel-Gaza crossings have impeded humanitarian aid deliveries. Hamas rocket misfires and “work accidents” have killed Palestinian children.

Hamas’ ruthless use of human shields and densely populated neighborhoods has endangered Palestinian non-combatants. Hamas’ refusal to let wounded Gazans cross into Egypt for medical care  is compounding casualties.

We join other international leaders in unequivocally condemning Hamas and its crimes against Palestinians and Israelis.

We call on the civilized world to support the right and above all, the duty, of every sovereign nation – including Israel – to defend its citizens from armed aggression. No nation can or should allow daily, incessant attacks against its people.

There is no justification their terrorizing and intentionally murdering innocent men, women, and children.

Hamas could have easily changed Israeli policies merely by renouncing extremism and terrorism. It chose war instead. We hope the day will soon come when Hamas’ self destructive battle against Israel ends, and Israelis can live with their neighbors in prosperity and peace.

We urge you to send this statement or your own letter with some of the above facts to national or international leaders.

For addresses of US officials, click here.
     
Dont forget to copy the following officials:

President George W. Bush
President of the United States of America
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue
Washington, D.C. 20500
Phone: 001 202 456-1111
E-Mail: president@whitehouse.gov

President-Elect Barak Obama
Contact the Obama administration transition team here.
 
Secretary of State, Condoleeza Rice
U.S. Department of State
2201 C Street, NW
Washington, D.C. 20520

Secretary of State Nominee, Hillary Rodham Clinton
Contact Hillary here.
Phone: 001 202 224-4451
 
Secretary General of the UN Ban Ki-Moon
The Honorable Ban Ki-Moon
Secretary General
760 United Nations Plaza
United Nations
New York, NY 10017

Israel wants peace and would have done anything to avoid this conflict.  Hamas has been acting in accordance to its founding document (its charter) which calls for the elimination of Israel. The leaders of Hamas have been inflicting terrorism on Israel, and hiding among the Palestinian people in Gaza, using Palestinian children as human shields.

Thank you in advance for caring and for standing up for Israel.

Since last Friday, even before Israel struck at Hamas in Gaza, HIRAM7 REVIEW has been operating around the clock, using a variety of communications vehicles to convey our strong support for Israel. Early Saturday morning, we stepped up our public relations and communications network.

We will continue to keep you updated, and encourage you to bookmark www.hiram7.wordpress.com.

HIRAM7 REVIEW

Coup leaders appear to consolidate control in Guinea

NPR reports that the leaders of a recent coup in the west African country of Guinea are tightening their grip on the country’s government, following initial uncertainty about who was controlling the country.

Read full story.

EU Presidency Turnover

TIME previews the transfer of power of the EU presidency from French President Nicolas Sarkozy to Czech President Vaclav Klaus and says some western European nations are concerned about the turnover.

Read full story.

Peace through War

Israel launched its third straight day of air strikes on the Gaza Strip today, following last week’s end to a truce between the Israeli government and Hamas militants. The BBC reports today’s attacks targeted symbols of Hamas’ leadership in the territory, including Gaza’s interior ministry and Islamic University. Israeli officials declared areas around Gaza a “closed military zone“, and several news sources indicate a buildup of Israeli troops on the Gazan border, raising speculation about possible land raids.

In an editorial in The Wall Street Journal, the paper defends Israel’s right to self-defense and argues that Barack Obama is about to discover that the terrorists of the Middle East aren’t about to change their radical ambitions merely because America has a new President.

“Israel’s air assault on Gaza in response to Hamas rocket attacks is inspiring familiar international denunciations. But the best commentary we’ve heard might be this one: ‘If somebody was sending rockets into my house where my two daughters sleep at night, I would do everything to stop that, and would expect Israel to do the same thing.’

Barack Obama said those words in July 2008 while visiting Israel as a Presidential candidate.”

Read full story.

The Israeli newspaper Haaretz says that Israel’s initial aerial assault on Gaza should lead to a diplomatic move whose goal is a genuine cessation of fire and the return of Gilad Shalit. Israel is entitled to exercise its right to self-defense, the paper adds, but warns against a ground invasion.

Read full story.

Francis Scott Fitzgerald’s Ivy League Code: Harvard for Sissies, Princeton for Layabouts

In Slate Magazine, Juliet Lapidos recalls Francis Scott Fitzgerald‘s university years on the occasion of the world premiere of the new movie version of his short story, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, which seems to differ too far in taste and integrity from the intention of the great author of The Great Gatsby.

“There’s a chapter in the life of nearly every major F. Scott Fitzgerald protagonist-after boarding school, before dissipation in New York – when he attends Harvard, Princeton, or Yale. The hero of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Fitzgerald’s short, fantastical story about a man who ages backward, is no exception: Benjamin goes to Harvard. Sadly, this detail is absent from David Fincher’s new screen adaptation. Compared with other liberties the film takes with the story – Benjamin now has a black adoptive mother – this omission may seem inconsequential. But if you’re a Fitzgerald devotee, it’s a significant change. Cut out the Ivy League pride, and you might as well read Hemingway.”

Read full story.

Israelische Militäroperation im Gaza-Streifen

Eine Viertelmillion israelischer Bürger wird seit acht Jahren unaufhörlich von palästinensischen Terroristen aus dem Gaza-Streifen mit Tausenden von Raketen beschossen. Vor einer Woche hat die Hamas entschieden, die von Ägypten vermittelte Waffenruhe der letzten Monate endgültig zu zerstören.

Die unvermeidbare Militäroperation der israelischen Armee, die seit Samstag im Gange ist, dient dem langfristigen Schutz israelischer Bürger im Süden des Landes. Zu diesem Zweck soll die Infrastruktur des Terrors im Gaza-Streifen zerstört und der Hamas sowie ihren Verbündeten die Möglichkeit entzogen werden, Raketen und Mörsergranaten abzuschießen und andere Terrorakte zu verüben.

Die Waffenruhe wurde von der Terrororganisation Hamas nicht nur zur Fortsetzung des Terrors gegen israelische Bürger, sondern auch zur massiven Aufrüstung genutzt. Dies zeigt sich an dem sprunghaft angestiegenen Waffenschmuggel und der Erweiterung des Arsenals von Raketen mit immer längerer Reichweite.

Die Hamas missbraucht Zivilisten nicht nur als Zielscheiben (auf israelischer Seite), sondern auch als menschliche Schutzschilde (auf palästinensischer Seite), indem sie ihre Operationszentren inmitten von Bevölkerungszentren in Gaza platziert. Israel ist hingegen darum bemüht, die Verletzung von Zivilisten zu vermeiden. Die Verantwortung für zivile Opfer liegt einzig und allein bei der Hamas.

Beim Großteil der Opfer der gegenwärtigen Militäroperation im Gaza-Streifen handelt es sich jedoch ohnehin um Terroristen der Hamas.

Ohne Frage stellt die absichtliche Platzierung militärischer Ziele im Herzen bewohnter Gebiete durch die Hamas eine ernsthafte Verletzung des internationalen Rechts dar. Demgegenüber anerkennt das internationale Recht das Recht auf Selbstverteidigung, wie es Israel derzeit für sich in Anspruch nimmt.

Wer auch immer Israel dazu aufruft, die Kampfhandlungen einzustellen, muss sich an die Adresse der Hamas wenden. Sobald sie das Feuer einstellt, wird auch Israel dies tun.

Die vom Iran unterstützte Hamas will die Zerstörung Israels. In ihrer Charta vom 18. August 1988 propagiert die Terrororganisation dies als ihr zentrales Ziel.

Im Gegensatz dazu möchte Israel lediglich seine Bürger vor der Bedrohung des palästinensischen Terrors schützen. Israel hat den Gaza-Streifen im Sommer 2005 nicht vollständig verlassen, um in ihn zurückzukehren.

Botschaft des Staates Israel in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland

L’humour au vitriol du cinéma français des années soixante-dix

Pierre Malaquet est distrait, doté d’une imagination fertile mais teintée d’humour macabre. Il est engagé dans une agence de publicité où il multiplie les gaffes qui sont autant de coups médiatiques.

Une conversation quelque peu incongrue et burlesque entre Pierre Richard, Pierre Tornade, Daniel Prévost, Bernard Blier et Pierre Repp, qui illustre avec brio la grandeur inégalée du cinéma français des années soixante-dix.

La scène légendaire de la pétanque

Jahresrückblick 2008: Prosa, Polemik und Dynamit

Das Spektakel ist die ununterbrochene Rede, die die gegenwärtige Ordnung über sich selbst hält, ihr lobpreisender Monolog. Es ist die Sonne, die in dem Reich der modernen Passivität nie untergeht. Es bedeckt die ganze Oberfläche der Welt und badet endlos in seinem eigenen Ruhm. Es ist das Gegenteil des Dialogs. Denn es stellt alles zur Debatte – nur nicht sich selbst. (Guy Debord, Die Gesellschaft des Spektakels)

MANN DES JAHRES 2008 – Bundeswirtschaftsminister Michael Glos bei der Pressekonferenz zur Vorstellung des Jahreswirtschaftsberichts 2008 bzw. Verleihung des Eigenlobpreises: “Liebe Mägde und Knechte, alles wird gut! Den Steuersatz für die Putzkolonne der oberen Zehntausend haben wir drastisch gesenkt, damit die Oberschicht bis zu 20.000 Euro jährlich Kosten für Haushaltshilfe von der Steuer absetzen kann. Sozialismus für Reiche!”

FRAU DES JAHRES 2008 - Germany’s Next Topmoppel, Grünen-Vorsitzende und Bundesempörungsbeauftragte Claudia Roth:”Ein Satz, den ich oft höre ist: Sie sind zwar furchtbar aber wenigstens echt” gesteht sie als gelernter Menschenrechtsprofi und umgeschulte Atomkraftaussteigerin. Atomkraftausstieg? Morgen, Morgen, nur nicht heute… Oder lieber doch Ausstieg aus dem Ausstieg? Hoffentlich finden die Wähler einen Ausstieg für Claudia Roth…aus der Politik.

TIEFPUNKT DES JAHRES 2008 – Die Gesellschaft des permanenten Spektakels feiert sich selbst und koppelt sich damit immer mehr von der Wirklichkeit ab…

Liebe Leser und Sponsoren der HIRAM7 REVIEW, und nicht zuletzt Freunde der offenen Gesellschaft,

unser besonderer Jahresrückblick für das Jahr 2008 kann hier ab sofort heruntergeladen und gelesen werden.

Unser besonderer Dank gilt natürlich den Selbstdarstellern des Polit- und Medien-Schmierentheaters, die (auch wenn unfreiwillig) diesen hoffentlich scharfsinnigen Rückblick ermöglicht haben…

Viel Spaß beim Lesen und Nachdenken wünscht allen HIRAM7 REVIEW, und möge 2009 genauso satirereif wie 2008 werden!

Mit freundlichen Grüßen

HIRAM7 REVIEW

***

Zum guten (Jahresab)Schluss und zur künftigen Eröffnung der Jagdsaison bzw. Bundestagswahl 2009: ein ironisches und prophetisches Gedicht von Heinrich Heine.

Die Wahlesel

Die Freiheit hat man satt am End’,
Und die Republik der Tiere
Begehrte, dass ein einz’ger Regent
Sie absolut regiere.

Jedwede Tiergattung versammelte sich,
Wahlzettel wurden geschrieben;
Parteisucht wütete fürchterlich,
Intrigen wurden getrieben.

Das Komitee der Esel ward
Von Alt-Langohren regieret;
Sie hatten die Köpfe mit einer Kokard’,
Die schwarz-rot-gold, verzieret.

Es gab eine kleine Pferdepartei,
Doch wagte sie nicht zu stimmen;
Sie hatte Angst vor dem Geschrei
Der Alt-Langohren, der grimmen.

Als einer jedoch die Kandidatur
Des Rosses empfahl, mit Zeter
Ein Alt-Langohr in die Rede ihm fuhr,
Und schrie: “Du bist ein Verräter!

Du bist ein Verräter, es fließt in dir
Kein Tropfen vom Eselsblute;
Du bist kein Esel, ich glaube schier,
Dich warf eine welsche Stute.

Du stammst vom Zebra vielleicht, die Haut,
Sie ist gestreift zebräisch;
Auch deiner Stimme näselnder Laut
Klingt ziemlich ägyptisch-hebräisch.

Und wärst du kein Fremdling, so bist du doch nur
Verstandesesel, ein kalter;
Du kennst nicht die Tiefen der Eselsnatur,
Dir klingt nicht ihr mystischer Psalter.

Ich aber versenkte die Seele ganz
In jenes süße Gedösel;
Ich bin ein Esel, in meinem Schwanz
Ist jedes Haar ein Esel.

Ich bin kein Römling, ich bin kein Slaw’;
Ein deutscher Esel bin ich,
Gleich meinen Vätern. Sie waren so brav,
So pflanzenwüchsig, so sinnig.

Sie spielten nicht mit Galanterei
Frivole Lasterspiele;
Sie trabten täglich, frisch-fromm-fröhlich-frei,
Mit ihren Säcken zur Mühle.

Die Väter sind nicht tot! Im Grab
Nur ihre Häute liegen,
Die sterblichen Hüllen. Vom Himmel herab
Schaun sie auf uns mit Vergnügen.

Verklärte Esel im Glorialicht!
Wir wollen euch immer gleichen
Und niemals von dem Pfad der Pflicht
Nur einen Fingerbreit weichen.

O welche Wonne, ein Esel zu sein!
Ein Enkel von solchen Langohren!
Ich möcht es von allen Dächern schrein:
Ich bin als ein Esel geboren.

Der große Esel, der mich erzeugt,
Er war von deutschem Stamme;
Mit deutscher Eselsmilch gesäugt
Hat mich die Mutter, die Mamme.

Ich bin ein Esel, und will getreu,
Wie meine Väter, die Alten,
An der alten, lieben Eselei,
Am Eseltume halten.

Und weil ich ein Esel, so rat ich euch,
Den Esel zum König zu wählen;
Wir stiften das große Eselreich,
Wo nur die Esel befehlen.

Wir alle sind Esel! I-A! I-A!
Wir sind keine Pferdeknechte.
Fort mit den Rossen! Es lebe, hurra!
Der König vom Eselsgeschlechte!”

So sprach der Patriot. Im Saal
Die Esel Beifall rufen.
Sie waren alle national,
Und stampften mit den Hufen.

Sie haben des Redners Haupt geschmückt
Mit einem Eichenkranze.
Er dankte stumm, und hochbeglückt
Wedelt’ er mit dem Schwanze.

Die geheime Waffe der Elite oder Über die moralische Verwahrlosung des öffentlichen Raums

In Zeiten von Handy-Klingeltöne, Käse-Quatsch-Shows  und Ratgeber-und Bevormundung-Sendungen, werden Otto-Normal-Verbraucher Gegenstand des öffentliches Diskurses, während alles was öffentlich ist, privatisiert wird. Damit wird das Politische zur Unterhaltung degradiert. Differenzierung und Komplexität sind eben nicht zur Unterhaltung tauglich.

Dies ist gewiss die sicherste Methode um jegliche Kritik an dem System ins Lächerliche zu ziehen und von den wirklich wichtigen Themen abzulenken: wenn jeder Politiker sein Privatleben erzählen darf, und jeder Hans und Franz ein Promi werden darf, ist das System doch perfekt und gerecht. Der sakrale Charakter des öffentlichen Raums verliert langsam an Bedeutung, je mehr Menschen ihn zu ihrem privaten Wohnzimmer mißbrauchen, stellt in dieser Hinsicht die kroatische Schriftstellerin und Heinrich-Mann-Preisträgerin Dubravka Ugrešić in der heutigen Ausgabe der Neuen Zürcher Zeitung fest:

“Die Grenze zwischen Privatheit und Öffentlichkeit ist unscharf geworden in einer Zeit, die ungeniert nach Selbstverwirklichung drängt. Wo dem Einzelnen unter dem Eindruck des Beobachtetwerdens einst die Kontrolle der persönlichen Gefühle auferlegt war, droht sich dies heute ins Gegenteil zu verkehren. Die Strasse gerät zur Bühne des eigenen Selbst – die Freiheit, die sich einer herausnimmt, wird zur Unfreiheit der anderen.”

Zum Artikel.

Happy Hanukkah!

The celebration of Hanukkah was established to remember the Jewish Maccabees’ military victory over the pagan armies of the Syrian King and the conversion of the Second Temple of Jerusalem, which had been dishonoured by the Greek-Syrians, to the worship of The Supreme Being, i.e. The Great Architect of the Universe. Consequently, Hanukkah is a celebration of Jewish national survival and religious freedom.

The chronicle of the Maccabees’ military feats has been conserved in The First Book of Maccabees. In short, in response to religious persecution, Judah Maccabee and his four brothers organized a group of resistance troop known as the Maccabees. The Maccabees, using guerrilla warfare, miraculously succeeded to drive the far larger Greek-Syrian army out of Judea. The Hanukkah story proclaims the message of the prophet Zachariah: “Not by might, not by power, but by My spirit.”

Judea Pearl’s Articles

I would just like to say, how much I enjoyed Daniel Pearl’s articles in the Wall Street Journal. His insight and skill as a reporter has helped me to better understand the world. In addition to being a great journalist, he seems to have been a wonderful and caring human being filled with love for his fellow man and a true joie de vivre. I have shared so many of Daniel Pearl’s articles with my family and friends, and they have stimulated a lot of great discussion. All our hearts go out to Mariane and their unborn child, and our hopes for them. (Nathan Manwaring from Phoenix, Arizona, in a letter to the editor of The Wall Street Journal, February 27, 2002)

As president of the Daniel Pearl Foundation, Judea Pearl (a Californian computer scientist and father of Daniel Pearl, a Wall Street Journal reporter who was murdered in Pakistan in 2002) spoke throughout the USA this year on topics ranging from “Carving a Path for Interfaith Dialogue,” “The Ideological War in the Middle East,” to “Being Jewish in the Post 9/11 Era,” and “Israel and Palestine: The Case for Coexistence.”

He also has published numerous Op-Ed pieces that have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times and the Jerusalem Post, among others.

• The forgotten miracle: November 29, 1947

• It’s Time for Words to Push for Peace

• Early Zionists and Arabs

• A Clash of Two Birthdays

• Why Al-Jazeera Owes an Apology

• History Disproves Myth that Founding Zionists Were Naïve

• Daniel Pearl’s Last Words

• Paving the Path to Dialogue

• The Daniel Pearl Standard

• A culture of violence of a cult of the superficial?

• Chanukah – The Pink Elephant of Annapolis

• Saudi King’s Gift Should Fulfill ‘Contract with Humanity

• In Quest for Meaning

• The Right to Be Offended

• Stemming the Tide of Terror

• Why Peace Camps do not Make Peace

• Tsunami of Hatred

• What Israel Means to Me: On her 59th Birthday

• On Israel’s Right to Exist

• On Reciprocity

• Peacemaking: The Refugees Issue

• A Meaningful Peace Plan

• Palestinians Generate Cheer and Gloom

• Al-Jazeera: Another Perspective, or Jihad TV?

• Ahmadinejad’s Obsession

• Shoah Denial Conference: Damage Assessment

• Future of Islam

• Remembering Ilan Halimi

• Carving the Path for Muslim-Jewish Dialogue

• Munich – Missing from the Script

• A Thought for Musharraf

• Islam Struggles To Stake Out Its Position

• Islam is a Weapon that can be Turned Against the Suicide Bombers

• Soft on Terrorism

• Anti-Zionism as Racism

• Key to Peace in Palestine: The Postage Stamp Question

• An Open Letter to the People of Italy

• Sense From Senselessness

***

On November 18, 2008, Dr. Pearl was invited with Condoleezza Rice to make keynote remarks at the American Red Cross Humanitarian Prize ceremony, honoring Dr. Noam Yifrach, Chairman, Magen David Adom Israel, and Mr. Younis Al-Khatib, President of the Palestine Red Crescent, for collaborating to establish an integrated humanitarian response to the needs of Palestinians and Israelis. See full transcript of the speech below.

***

Remarks from Dr. Judea Pearl made at the American Red Cross luncheon presenting the 2008 Humanitarian Award to Noam Yifrach and Younis Al-Khatib

Washington DC, November 18, 2008

Thank you Mr. Bennett, Secretary Rice, distinguished guests,

I am humbled and honored by the opportunity to speak at this important event of the American Red Cross, an organization that has pioneered border-less Humanity much before it became a standard of necessity in our global society.

And I am doubly honored to direct my remarks at two champions of humanity, Noam Yifrach and Younis Al-Khatib, who are recognized today for demonstrating that courage and commitment are truly border-less and can yield magical results even in the most volatile regions of the world.

By honoring me as your guest speaker, you have honored my son Daniel, and by honoring Danny you have honored hundreds of young men and women who roam the world with laptops and cameras, so that you and I could see the world through a sharper lens, from a deeper level of understanding, and so that millions of people around the world will see themselves, not as strangers, but as partners to the blazing orbit of this planet.

These young men and women are not normally in the medical profession, and the services they provide is not normally classified as “humanitarian”. Yet they are as essential to the mission of the red cross as the Medics and Doctors in your volunteer force, for they spread understanding, tolerance, empathy and humanity before grievance turns into anger, and before anger erupts into violence, injury, ambulances and hospitals.

In other words they are the “preventive medicine” department of the great army of humanitarian aid that the red-cross has come to represent.

Danny was one of those troopers.

He lived a life that knew no geographical boundaries, with a spirit that knew no shred of prejudice. Through words and music, he communicated joy, humor, friendship and understanding in many parts of the world.

He was a bridge builder who befriended and gave voice to millions of voiceless Muslims in the Balkans, Middle East and South Asia.

A story teller who traveled the dusty roads of the Middle East with his laptop and violin, and unveiled to readers in the West the human faces behind the news.

He wrote about neighborly Serbs and Albanians in Kosovo, imaginative carpet weavers in Tehran, singing pearl divers in Baharain, Yemenites and Ethiopians quibbling on who owns the true Queen of Sheba, creative money changers in Pakistan and angry gem miners on the slopes of Mount Killemanjaro.

Six and a half years ago, in a desolate dungeon in Karachi, Pakistan, in the midst of the great madness, he was looking straight in the eyes of evil, and proclaimed his identity.

“My name is Daniel Pearl,” he said before his captor’s video camera, “I am a Jewish American journalist from Encino, California.”…

“My father is Jewish, my mother is Jewish, I am Jewish.”

“Back in the town of Bnai Brak (Israel) there is a street named after my great grandfather, Chaim Pearl, who was one of the founders of the town.

These were his last words.

And as he stood there, demanding sanity in the face of madness, his words assumed a universal dimension, and have come to symbolize not only the right of every individual to assert his faith, heritage and identity.

But also the amazing capacity of the human spirit to weave together the dignity of being different within the sanctity of being ONE.

His murderers schemed to sow fear and division among us but, remarkably, with all their technical sophistication, they made a critical miscalculation and the outcome turned against them.

How?

The respect that Daniel earned on both sides of the East/West divides, the principles by which he lived, the goodness of his smile, and the sound of his last words became iconic personal reminders to millions of principled people around this planet that the current tide of violence and hatred is not an expression of an ordinary conflict between tribes, countries or religions but threatens to erode the very fabric of civilized society.

Consequently, what emerged from Danny’s tragedy and vividly displayed on the screens of the world’s consciousness was an urgent call for people of all faiths to recognize the dangers threatening us, and to lift our common humanity above the differences that set us apart.

It was this urgent call that compelled my family and I to establish the Daniel Pearl Foundation and to take upon ourselves the task of channeling all the energy and goodwill that the tragedy had evoked into one and only one aim:

fighting the hatred that took Danny’s life.

Of course we do not have the resources to move armies or conquer territories, but we have the goodwill of millions of principled people around the world, Christians, Jews and Muslims, Pakistanis, Europeans and Americans, Israelis and Palestinians, Journalists and musicians, who are determined to form what I call “a Coalition Of The Decent” and work together to contain the rising Tsunami of anger and hatred that have swept our planet.

Yet as we looked around us, we quickly discovered a strange phenomenon. We found dozens of celebrities and philanthropist fighting diseases and natural disasters all over the world. We found Bono, Bill Gates, and Madonna competing with each other on fighting aids and malaria in Africa. These are noble causes, undeniably.

But we could not find a celebrity dedicated specifically to fighting the culture of hate that has been rising steadily in the past two decades and now threatens to heat up our planet much before global warming does.

What can we do about it?

In an open letter to the people of Pakistan, published in Karachi in July 2002, I wrote: “The loss of Danny will forever tear my heart, but I cannot think of a greater consolation than seeing your children [in Pakistan] pointing at Danny’s picture one day and saying: ‘This is the kind of person I want to be.

Like him, I want to be truthful, and friendly, open-minded and, above all, respectful of others.’”

I was in a rather imaginative mood when I wrote this letter, and I did not really envision it would materialize in my lifetime.

I was surprised therefore last week, when I received a message with the following photos from Faisalabad, Pakistan, 1. High school Lecture on “Who was Daniel Pearl”, 2. Inauguration of the World Tolerance Organization, 3. Celebration of the Daniel Pearl World Music Days.

As you probably know, the Daniel Pearl World Music Days is celebrated worldwide each year to commemorate Daniel’s birthday of October 10. This year it has embraced 1,150 concerts, in 59 countries, all united in a call for tolerance and humanity.

We registered concerts in Pakistan, as you can see in this photo, Montenegro, Jerusalem, Johannesburg, New York and of course, Washington DC. The last registration came from Kabul, Afghanistan.

What does it all represent?

It represents a tremendous undercurrent of courage and decency that is awaiting for a leader, a banner and an action to claim back this planet and restore it to an orbit of sanity.

It represents a world that is thirsty for an icon of peace, and this photo here is one such icon – there aren’t many faces around at which both a Muslim and a Western can point and say: Here goes a man of peace.

Compelled by the power of this icon, we started the Daniel Pearl Dialogue for Muslim-Jewish Understanding, a conversational road-show in which I and my partner, Professor Akbar Ahmed, travel from city to city and discuss Jewish-Muslim relationships before mixed audiences, in a town-hall setting.

It was initiated out of our joint concern for the deteriorating relationships between the two communities, and out of an unshaken belief that, these relationships could be improved by engaging in a frank, respectful and rational dialogue, based on our common Abrahamic tradition.

We see our mission in this dialogue as that of carving a path of legitimacy for on-going grass-root conversations aiming, in the best case, at achieving understanding and collaboration and, at the very least, acknowledgment of, and familiarity with each other narrative.

Neither of us is an official representatives of his community, I am not an ordained Rabbi and my friend Akbar is not an appointed Imam. Still, we are very much in tune with the sentiments of our respective communities, and we feel qualified therefore to communicate those sentiments, including grievances and sensitivities, faithfully and frankly.

Two rules guide our discussions:

1. No topic is a taboo;

2. Respect at all time.

And these I believe are the reasons that audience flock to our humble show — there aren’t many occasions for people to see their sentiments echoed and listened to with respect. TV discussions quickly deteriorate into shouting matches and conventional interfaith meetings never touch on the hot issue — participants are reluctant to spoil the cozy atmosphere.

And because we touch on the hot issues, theological, social, historical and political, we have a chance to understand the reasons that communities are angry at each others.

And, given that this meeting is about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it would be criminally dishonest if I told you that there is no anger around. Lots of anger!

Muslims are angry at Jews for supporting a state which they perceive to be an outpost of European imperialism.

And Jews are angry at Muslims for upholding this perception, namely, for failing to see that Jews are no less indigenous to the Biblical landscape than their Palestinian neighbors.

This clash is historical, not theological, which is why we are optimistic; historical clashes can be reconciled through education and communication by placing the two narratives side by side.

And this became our motto – two narratives side by side.

In this spirit, I would like to say a few words to Dr. Al-Khatib, in the name of my friends in Israel, who grew up with me in the pre-1948 years and still remember the days that we lived together side by side.

You are my brother Younis, not because we are both children of Abraham but because we played in the same sand box. I played there 2000 years ago, and you played there since, I came back in 1948 after having some rough time in other neighborhoods, and we are bound to play together in the very near future – it could be a fun sand box.

In my home town, Bnai Braq, children learned to say “peace” before they could say “give me”.

My friends and I went to schools where Arabs were considered future neighbors, despite the hostilities. I remember to this very day one of my teachers roaring in anger: “Don’t you ever let me catch you saying it about an Arab – today they are our enemies, tomorrow our neighbors.”

We grew up with folk songs in which the frequency of the word “peace” exceeded that of the words “I love you” – I dont think you can find many such cultures today.

Why am I telling you all this? Because I want to confess our weaknesses to you and to your friends in Palestine: Yes, we are afflicted with a secret addiction called “yearning for peace”.

And I implore you and your friends: take advantage of this weakness, please, exploit it.

I will end on a hopeful note, that next time we meet, we will see our two peoples playing in that old sand box again, enjoying peace and freedom in two democratic states living side by side, equally viable, equally secure, equally legitimate and, in what says it all: equally indigenous.

Thank you.

Deutschland – eine Winterreise

In einem Artikel erschienen in der Frankfurter Rundschau, berichtet der niederländische Autor Cees Nooteboom von seiner Lesereise durch das vorweihnachtliche Deutschland:

“Überall gab es Weihnachtsmärkte mit Glühwein und viel Licht, als wolle jeder schnell noch möglichst viel Licht für die wirklich düsteren Zeiten sammeln, die nun bald anbrechen würden, und für die absolute, globale Katastrophe, die einer Sturmflut ohne Rettungsboote gleich über alle fünf Kontinente hereinbrechen würde.”

Zum Artikel.

Brazil signs arms deal with France

Two-day summit talks between Brazilian and European leaders in Rio de Janeiro concluded with Brazil and France signing a $12 billion arms deal in which Brazil agreed to buy fifty helicopters and technology to build five submarines, including a nuclear-powered submarine from France.

Read full story.

Coup d’État in Guinea

The government of Guinea has been thrown into turmoil following the death of the country’s president, Lansana Conte, who had ruled the country since he took power in a military coup in 1984.

Lansana Conte died last night, and the Guinean government announced his passing at around 2 am. The announcement was followed by a coup attempt.

Within hours, a group led by military officials moved to dissolve the country’s government and suspend its constitution. A leader of the group, Captain Moussa Dadis Camara, said in a radio address that a “consultative council” of civilian and military leaders is being set up in place of the former government.

Guinea is situated in western Africa on the Atlantic Ocean coast. It boasts abundant mineral resources but remains one of the poorer countries in West Africa, and has been ruled by two successive strongman leaders since it gained independence from France in 1958.

The BBC provides more depth on the country’s resources and political situation.

Update (December 24, 2008): Meanwhile, members from Guinea’s preexisting government have appealed to international authorities to refuse to recognize the putschists as legitimate leaders of the country. The head of Guinea’s national assembly called on international authorities to “prevent the military from interrupting the democratic process.” Yet the leaders of the coup pressed ahead with their claims, saying they would hold elections in December 2010.

Ten worst news stories of 2008

by David A. Harris
Executive Director of the American Jewish Committee (AJC)
New York, December 22, 2008

This year, it wasn’t difficult to identify candidates for the worst news stories. The challenge was limiting them to ten. Here’s my list:

An ethical meltdown

An Israeli prime minister compelled to leave office, on the heels of an Israeli president who was obliged to leave his post under a cloud in 2007, sent another disturbing message that all is not well in Israeli politics.

The Bernie Madoff story, embodying greed and fraud to the Nth degree, inflicted more harm this year on the Jewish world than all of our external enemies combined.

And the front-page stories on the accusations against Agriprocessors, the kosher meat plant in Iowa charged with massive labor violations, triggered shock and embarrassment.

For a people whose mission statement puts a moral code front and center, clearly, there’s remedial work to be done.

An American meltdown

For those who believe that a strong, robust United States is critical to the defense of freedom and protection of human rights worldwide, there were troubling signs in 2008.

The world’s leading nation was revealed to have major cracks in its foundation.

Wall Street is teetering and Main Street is reeling. Detroit’s car manufacturers are on the brink of collapse, while many of the nation’s bridges and roadways aren’t far behind.

America was revealed to be #1 in the rates of obesity and incarceration, and at the bottom in the rate of savings. It was strikingly absent from the top ten countries in the Human Development Index, the global barometer of quality of life.

Iran’s nuclear ambition

Iran kept brazenly marching ahead toward nuclear weapons capability. It added substantially to the number of centrifuges – last month, it claimed 5,000 – and was revealed to have enriched sufficient uranium for one nuclear bomb.

At the same time, it brandished its latest missiles with a range of more 2000 kilometers.

Various diplomatic efforts, including sending a senior U.S. official, Bill Burns, to join talks with the Iranians, came up empty.

Legitimizing evil

While Iran violates UN Security Council resolutions, many nations carried on with a business-as-usual attitude toward Tehran.

Iranian President Ahmadinejad, who has repeatedly called for a world without Israel, denied the Holocaust, and trampled on the human rights of his own citizens, visited India, Turkey, and China in 2008. Brazil extended an open invitation for him to visit.

In addition, he returned to New York for the opening of the UN session, where he was literally embraced by UN General Assembly President Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann, and hosted at a dinner by Mennonite and Quaker groups.

And the reluctance of China and Russia to support toughened sanctions measures against Iran has stymied the efforts of the U.S., France, and Britain, the other three permanent members of the Security Council.

Swiss Foreign Minister Micheline Calmy-Rey traveled to Tehran in March, where she met with Ahmadinejad and was caught on camera laughing with a leader who should be a pariah.

And despite public proclamations to the contrary, many European countries actually increased their volume of commercial dealings with Iran. EU exports for the first eight months of 2008 rose 13 percent over the same period in 2007. Iran’s three largest European partners all increased their exports. Italy registered the most significant jump, followed by France and Germany.

Iran’s proxies gain ground

Hamas and Hezbollah emerged stronger in 2008. The two Iranian-backed terrorist groups are better armed, prepared, and fortified than one year ago.

In the case of Hamas, the just-ended six-month “lull” with Israel allowed it to add to its extensive tunnel network, command-and-control structure, arsenal of advanced weaponry, and training of forces, while keeping a tight grip on Gaza and holding on to kidnapped Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit.

Hamas believes it can have the best of both worlds – the right to attack Israel at will, while complaining about Israeli counter-measures and seeking sympathy from the international community.

In Lebanon, Hezbollah’s position was strengthened. True, UNIFIL forces deployed in southern Lebanon have prevented further fighting with Israel. But intelligence reports indicate that Hezbollah, with Syrian and Iranian help, has doubled its arsenal of missiles from 2006 and increased their range to include most, if not all, of Israel.

Child murderer honored

In a highly controversial exchange, Israel released Samir Kuntar. He was involved in a terrorist attack, in 1979, in the Israeli seaside town of Nahariya. Among his victims was a four-year-old girl, Einat Haran, whose skull was smashed.

Unrepentant, Kuntar returned to Lebanon, where he received a hero’s welcome. In fact, the country was given the day off to celebrate.

Not to be outdone, Syrian President Bashar Assad awarded Kuntar the Order of Merit, the nation’s top honor!

Anti-Semitism on the rise

In September, the highly regarded Pew Global Attitudes Project released its latest report.

Of European countries, Spain had the highest rate of negative attitudes toward Jews. By a margin of 46 to 37 percent, more Spaniards had an unfavorable image of Jews than favorable. In fact, more than twice as many Spaniards hold negative views of Jews than in 2005.

The same study revealed that, since 2004, negative views of Jews have also risen in France (from 11 to 20 percent), Germany (from 20 to 25 percent), Poland (from 27 to 36 percent), and Russia (from 25 to 34 percent).

Previous Pew studies revealed that 76 percent of Turks have a negative view of Jews, while the same figure for Lebanese is 97 percent, Jordanians 96 percent, and Egyptians 95 percent.

The Mumbai massacre

Once again, an open, multicultural society was the terrorists’ target. Once again, Jews were among those sought out for the “crime” of simply being Jewish. As a result, two-year-old Moshe Holtzberg will go through life as an orphan, his parents having been among the targeted victims.

The story is yet another reminder that Pakistan is “ground zero” in the war against radical Islamic forces.

With a weak government, nuclear arsenal, intelligence service with questionable loyalties, Saudi-funded madrassas spreading radicalism, and vast swaths of the country beyond central control, it’s not at all clear how to rein in the forces wreaking havoc in neighboring Afghanistan or plotting terrorist attacks at home and abroad.

Add places like Somalia and Sudan, also havens for jihadists, and the extent of the global challenge becomes still starker.

Russia is back

After reeling toward third-world status in the ’90s, Russia is back, its reemergence highlighted by its August conflict with Georgia.

Though largely dependent on high commodity prices to fuel its superpower ambitions, Russia has the talent and resources to be a major factor once again on the world stage. And it’s wasting no time in underscoring the point.

In 2008, Russia went ahead with providing fuel for the Bushehr nuclear reactor in Iran, after stalling for several years. And it discussed major arms deals with Iran, Lebanon, and Syria, all of which, if they go forward, will prove destabilizing in a region not known for its stability. (At the same time, ironically, Russia seeks to purchase weapons from Israel.)

And Russia’s coziness with Hugo Chavez, underscored this year by major weapons deals and warships arriving in Venezuelan ports, is a reminder of Moscow’s capacity for long-distance reach. Cuba, Nicaragua, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Venezuela, linked by anti-American sentiment, must be joyful at Russia’s reemergence as an alternative big-power address.

Self-inflicted wounds

With all the external challenges faced by Israel and the Jewish people, it would be nice to think that internal differences could be minimized. Hardly.

Instead, the Jewish world continues to be riven by an ever-growing profusion of organizations battling each other for funds, members, publicity, and access. And in tough economic times, the atmosphere only becomes more highly charged.

Moreover, some individuals and organizations hurl charges – privately or publicly – at one another with abandon, as if anyone with an opposing perspective needs to be cut off at the knees.

But then again, what’s new? In 1914, the legendary jurist Louis Marshall, president of AJC, spoke of the threats to Jews in Europe triggered by World War I:

“Unity of action is essential. There should be no division in counsel or in sentiment. All differences should be laid aside and forgotten. Nothing counts now but harmonious and effective action.”

Ninety-five years later, despite the external challenges, we’re no closer to Marshall’s idealistic goal. If anything, we’re only further away.

What a pity!

The Defamation of Human Rights

 

 

 

 

Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty
December 22, 2008

by Hillel Neuer, executive director of UN Watch

For the fourth straight year, the UN General Assembly last week ignored pleas by human rights defenders and passed a resolution condemning the “defamation of religion“, especially Islam.

Optimists hailed the move by citing the shift of several “yes” votes to abstentions, but the reality is that this totalitarian initiative is spreading throughout UN bodies – and now threatens to rewrite a core human rights treaty of the post-war era.

The campaign by the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), a bloc of 56 states at the UN, began in 1999 with annual resolutions at the discredited and now-defunct Human Rights Commission. In the wake of the post-9/11 war on Islamist terror, and especially after the 2005 controversy sparked when a Danish newspaper printed cartoons of their prophet, Islamic states pursued the diplomatic battle with a vengeance.

Proponents of the latest resolution argue that its intent is to protect religious believers from discrimination, particularly Muslims living in Western countries.

In reality, the resolutions pose a major threat to the premises and principles of international human rights law and harm Muslims as much as non-Muslims. International law already protects victims of religious discrimination, with guarantees under the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, as well as the 1966 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. The resolution is silent, though, on Saudi Arabia’s prohibition of any religious practice other than Islam; on Iran’s oppression of Baha’is; on the persecution of Christians in Egypt, Iraq, and Pakistan

Indeed, according to the UN’s own designated defender of freedom of religion, Asma Jahangir of Pakistan, existing international agreements protect against “imminent acts of violence or discrimination against a specific individual or group,” including on the basis of religion.

In other words, the OIC is not really trying to protect individuals from harm, but rather to shield a set of beliefs from question or debate and to ban any discussion of Islam that may challenge state orthodoxies or offend Islamic sensibilities.

The very term “defamation of religion” is a distortion. The legal concept of defamation protects the reputations of individuals, not beliefs. It also requires an examination of the truth or falsity of the challenged remarks — a determination that no one, especially not the UN, is capable of undertaking concerning any religion.

What is at stake? Potentially, a great deal. If the defamation resolutions are implemented worldwide, it would become impossible to legally protest violence perpetrated in the name of religion because of the risk of offending believers. “Accusations of defamation,” Jahangir wrote recently, “might stifle legitimate criticism or even research on practices and laws appearing to be in violation of human rights but which are, or are at least perceived to be, sanctioned by religion.”

Protecting Muslims

In too many countries, religion is invoked to persecute minorities, women, and homosexuals, or to justify acts of violence and terrorism. International laws should protect those who protest such crimes, and not those who justify the crimes and suppress dissent.

In addition, the resolution’s focus on the Islamic faith is discriminatory as well as misleading.

The initial Pakistani draft in 1999 was actually titled “Defamation of Islam.” Despite the broadened title, the resolution singles out “Islam and Muslims in particular” as the primary victims in need of protection, specifying no other religious faith or community.

Similarly, another of its chief concerns is that “Islam is frequently and wrongly associated with human rights violations and terrorism.”

The resolution is silent, though, on Saudi Arabia’s prohibition of any religious practice other than Islam; on Iran’s oppression of Baha’is; on the persecution of Christians in Egypt, Iraq, and Pakistan; on the death penalty for conversion from Islam in Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Sudan; and on the incitement to hatred against Jews in textbooks and on television screens throughout the Arab world, including anti-Semitic images of religious-looking Jews.

The greatest victims of blasphemy laws are reform-minded Muslims, especially women. For example, 23-year-old Sayed Pevek Lambaksh languishes in an Afghan prison because he “defamed” Islam by circulating an article that criticized the status of Muslim women. Similarly, Pakistan persecutes Ahmadi Muslims by claiming that their interpretation of the faith is an invalid affront to “true” Islam. Muslims – not Danes – are the first victims of this campaign.

All of this is taking place not just at the General Assembly, but throughout the UN. Consider the past year:

In March, the Islamic-controlled Human Rights Council rewrote the mandate of the monitor on freedom of expression. Instead of scrutinizing government restrictions on free speech, he is now required to police individuals’ “abuse” of that freedom – i.e., defamation of Islam.

In June, after a NGO representative spoke in the council about the use of shari’a to justify violations of women’s rights, the council president ruled that any negative mention of shari’a law was forbidden. The activist was interrupted 16 times, with Egypt saying that Islam should not be “crucified in this council.”

In October, the UN released a draft declaration for its upcoming Durban II racism conference, replete with provisions that decry the “defamation of Muslims, their faith, and beliefs.”

What most shocked Western states, though, was last week’s proposal by a Durban II subcommittee, chaired by Algeria, to revise the Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, by introducing a ban on defamation of religion. Unlike declaratory resolutions, this would alter hard treaty law, directly affecting legal systems worldwide.

Last week the world celebrated the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. At the UN, however, its core principles are now under assault.

War without Borders: The Colombia-Ecuador Crisis of 2008

In a new report written by Dr. Gabriel Marcella from the Department of National Security and Strategy at the U.S. Army War College, the concept of war without borders is used to analyze the strategic implications of the Colombian attack against a FARC camp inside Ecuadorean territory on March 1, 2008. Lessons learned apply directly to the policy of the United States and the hemispheric community.

“The lessons of the March 1 crisis are fundamental for security cooperation in the Hemisphere. The crisis is superimposed upon a Latin American tradition of laissez faire on ungoverned space and border control and continuing disagreement on what to do about terrorism. Moreover, the institutional capacity, political will, preventive diplomacy, and the mechanisms for security cooperation and conflict resolution between states have not caught up to the demands of wars without borders. An assortment of terrorists, contrabandists, and drug traffickers depend on weak borders and weak states. Though Clausewitz may have been right that war is the continuation of politics (or policy) by other means, the politics of wars without borders have changed that equation. Yet the analytical and institutional capacities of governments have not caught up to that change.

The United States can and must be a catalyst for confidence-building between Ecuador and Colombia in order to restore the full gamut of security cooperation between the two countries. At the same time, the United States needs to be more sensitive about the immense power it wields in its dealings with small states, such as Ecuador. The United States has been less than forthcoming in addressing Ecuador’s security needs in the last 10 years, at times for the noblest of intentions. Noble intentions can have profound negative impact if policy is not pursued pragmatically.”

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The Politics of Chaos in the Middle East

Book Review

Michael Rubin, senior lecturer at the United States Navy Postgraduate School and editor of the Middle East Quarterly (MEQ), reviews The Politics of Chaos in the Middle East, a new book written by Olivier Roy, research director at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) and a lecturer for both the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (EHESS) and the Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris (IEP).

Olivier Roy, research director at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris, is best known for his work on political Islam. In The Politics of Chaos, he transitions from scholarly research to policy advocacy and presents a sharp indictment of U.S. foreign policy in general and neoconservatives specifically.

“While it is fitting to blame the arrogance and incompetence of the Bush administration” for instability in the Middle East, Roy argues, “the ideas that drove the American neoconservatives are still part of the current climate, muddying the traditional left/right divide.”

Some of Roy’s criticisms are valid: The Bush administration poorly described its adversary after 9-11, and postwar planning left much to be desired. Roy understands traditional neoconservatism better than most and explains the nuances of neoconservative views toward democratization, civil society, and free markets. He assesses the failure of U.S. democratization policy and suggests the problem underlying U.S. policy has been choosing wrong interlocutors. “Negotiation is always possible and, furthermore, it is desirable,” he declares. There follows a plea to engage political Islam and groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah.

Roy’s arguments are nuanced. He separates terrorists from Islamists (who campaign for a political entity), from fundamentalists (who seek Islamic law), and from “cultural Muslims” who may promote the veil, for example, but also pave the way for the other two. He examines Arab state and Iranian concerns and grievances and argues that the West should “abandon” the global war on terror because it “leads to the wrong perceptions and policies.”

However, Roy’s polemic falls flat. He is sloppy, has a tendency to make straw-man arguments, and shows little understanding of how U.S. policy develops. Rather than use primary source documents to support his descriptions of U.S. policy and its practitioners’ motivations, Roy provides vanity references to his own work. On occasion, he appears to embellish. He relates a November 2001 conversation with the “Deputy Secretary of State for Defense” in which Paul Wolfowitz confided that the “true objective” was “Iraq, of course!,” comments both inconsistent with Wolfowitz’s style and fact.

To advance his belief that the campaign against Iraq was preordained, he ignores the 2002 National Security Strategy that outlined the concept of preemption, Saddam’s bluff with regard to his weapons capability, and the fact that presidents make decisions based on the intelligence they have, which is sometimes flawed. Nor is Roy’s dismissal of Saddam’s relationship with radical Islam justified. The official study of documents seized from Iraq demonstrates cooperation between Saddam’s regime and Ayman al-Zawahiri, Al-Qaeda’s number two.[1]

Roy also gets wrong the discussions surrounding the decision to occupy Iraq. In contrast to his narrative, neoconservatives sought to transfer sovereignty and authority immediately to a new Iraqi council; they opposed occupation of Iraq until the president made the decision.

Exaggeration undercuts his analysis in other ways. He criticizes neoconservative “unconditional” support for Israel, an argument that may play well in Europe. Neoconservatives certainly argue that the United States should not force allies to make concessions to terrorism, but the same neoconservatives also condemned Israel for its earlier military dealings with China. This suggests that Israel is not the primary issue but rather U.S. national security.

Rather than provide a basis upon which U.S. policymakers might better approach the Middle East, as some of the book’s endorsers have suggested, what Roy produces is an impassioned plea for surrender, and through sloppy methodology and logical somersaults, he provides yet more evidence of just how poor a resource so many professors are when it comes to formulating foreign and national security policies.

Note

1. Saddam and Terrorism: Emerging Insights from Captured Iraqi Documents, Vol. 1 (Redacted) (Alexandria, Va.: Institute for Defense Analyses, Nov. 2007), p. 42.

Searching for the next U.S. Intelligence official

“To combine experience with fresh thinking,” was President-elect Barack Obama’s declared goal in selecting his Cabinet.

Robert Michael Gates, who has agreed to stay on as U.S. Secretary of Defense, aims  to complement the Pentagon’s strength in conventional warfare with stronger counterinsurgency capabilities.

Other key Cabinet appointees include Hillary Rodham Clinton as Secretary of State and Bill Richardson as Secretary of Commerce.

Nevertheless, The Wall Street Journal looks at obstacles facing the Obama team in their search for senior intelligence officials.

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Two Battles That Saved the West: Lepanto 1571 and Vienna 1683

Revisiting a topic from the first Bradley Lecture Series in 1988-1989, Michael Novak delivered the fourth installment of The American Enterprise Institute’s twentieth-anniversary Bradley Lecture Series on December 8, 2008, at Washington, D.C. The author is a leading Catholic theologian, former U.S. ambassador, and George Frederick Jewett Chair in Religion and Public Policy at the American Enterprise Institute.

Click here to download or listen to audio of the lecture at The American Enterprise Institute (AEI). Special thanks to Veronique Rodman, AEI’s Director of Communications, for recording and streaming the event.

How Europe Escaped Speaking Arabic

by Michael Novak

The Western world has never taken Islam with the full seriousness it has earned. Down through history, once Islamic armies have conquered a land, with very few exceptions, that land has remained Muslim.

A Christian will wish in vain that the great circle of Christian lands around the Mediterranean (and on up into Syria, Iraq, Iran, and northwards into Georgia) had not fallen irretrievably into Muslim hands, most of them before 732 A.D. For Christians who think that the future of the world favors movement in their direction, a study of the latent dynamism of Islam is not a little unsettling.

Edward Gibbon, finishing up his The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-78), was able to imagine how easily serene little Oxford could have been dominated by tall Islamic minarets before his birth, and the accents in its markets would have been Arabic: ” . . . the interpretation of the Koran would now be taught in the schools of Oxford, and her pulpits might demonstrate to a circumcised people the sanctity and truth of the revelation of Mahomet” .

Gibbon was writing about the decisive battle of Poitiers in 732 A.D., when at last a Christian leader, Charles Martel, drove back the Muslims from their highwater mark in Western Europe with such force that they went reeling backwards into Spain. From there, it took Spain another 750 years – until 1492 – to drive Islamic armies back into North Africa, whence they had invaded. Even so, the Islamic terror bombers who just a few years ago killed more than a hundred commuters in Madrid did so (they announced) to avenge the Spanish “Reconquista” of 1492. For Islam, to lose a territory once Muslim is to incur a religious obligation to wrest it back.

It had been a marvel in 732 that a mere one hundred years earlier, Mohammed had launched his army from Medina, to conquer in rapid fire so many of the most glorious capital cities of Christianity – Jerusalem, Antioch, Alexandria, Hippo, Tunis, Carthage, and then all of Spain. More amazingly still, Muslims went very quickly further into the Far East than Alexander the Great ever had.

Even today, in the eyes of influential Muslims, the expansion of Islam (although it covers a huge swathe of geography) is far from finished. The religious obligation at the heart of Islam is to conquer the world for Allah, and to incorporate it all into the great Islamic Umma. Only then will the world be at peace. Submission to Allah is the reason why the world was created.

In any case, Islam began making war on the Christian world from the very first moments of its birth. For a thousand years afterward, it fell to southern Europe, and in particular the Pope, to give active military resistance to the “Saracens” (as the Islamists came to be known in the West). From 632 A.D. until about 1292, Arab nations led the Muslim onslaught on the West. After that, the Turks established their dominion (the caliphate) over most of the Arab world. For hundreds of years a huge sea war ensued for control of the Mediterranean. But war by land was not called off.

The Turks expanded their empire in all four directions on the map. For more than a century they made attempt after attempt to take down the largest and richest of the Christian capitals, Constantinople, whose walls they finally breached in 1453. There followed great plunder, huge fires of destruction, the desecration of Christian basilicas and churches, murder, torture and thousands of Christian men, women, and children marched off in long lines toward slavery in the East.

A long line of great warrior-sultans sponsored Turkish advances in shipbuilding, gunnery, military organization, and training. By the mid 1550s, they had slowly conceived of a long-term offensive, a pincers movement first by sea and then by land, to conquer the whole northern shore of the Mediterranean. They first launched a massive sea attack in 1665 on the crossroads of the Mediterranean, the strategically placed island of Malta, and were repelled after an epic siege (which in itself is one of history’s great stories). Their penultimate aim was to take all Italy; then all Europe. 

The northern pincers movement by land was aimed at an attack up through the Balkans for the onquest of Budapest and then, in a northeast arc into Slovakia and Poland. In this way, the Muslim forces would essentially encircle Italy from the North.

Because by 1540 the Reformation was separating the Christian nations of the north from Rome, the Sultans soon recognized that the Christian world would no longer fight as one. The next hundred years or so would be the most fruitful time since Mohammed to fulfill the destiny of Islam in Europe.

The Preliminary Battles on Malta (1565) and at Famagusta (1571)

Each new caliph of the Islamic empire was expected to expand the existing Muslim territories, in order to fulfill the mission given Islam, and to gain for the leader the necessary popularity and legitimacy. So it was that in the pleasant springtime of 1571, an entire Muslim fleet under Ali Pasha was ordered by the Sultan to seek out and destroy Christian dominance of the Mediterranean Sea, all the way up to Venice. During the summer, Ali Pasha raided fort after fort along the Adriatic Shore, picked up thousands of hostages as slaves, and sent at least a small squadron to blockade for two or three days the approaches to St. Mark’s Square in Venice, not least to plant a seed of terror about worse things to come.

Meanwhile, another large Muslim force soon conquered Cyprus, most practicing ritual cruelties on the defeated population of Nicosia, setting fire to churches, beheading the older women, and marching all younger Christians of both sexes into slavery. The Muslim armies then headed north for the fortress of Famagusta, the last Venetian stronghold on the island, the “extended arm” of the trading posts and protective forts of the Venetian navy in the entire eastern Mediterranean. An army of 100,000 opened the siege, against a force of 15,000 behind the walls.

Under the energetic generalship of the elderly General Marcantonio Bragadino, the small band of defenders held out for week after week, despite receiving more than 180,000 incoming cannonballs. The defenders ran so short of food that in the end they were eating cats, until they consumed their last one. The Muslim general was outraged by the length of the siege, which had already cost him 80,000 of his best men, despite the fact that Famagusta’s fate was sealed from the first days. Yet there were still long days and sometimes nights of hard hand-to-hand fighting just outside the walls. Muslim losses kept getting fully replenished by sea, and the Muslim forces grew stronger even as the Christians got down to their last six barrels of gunpowder, and had only four hundred men still able to fight.

On August 1, General Bragadino finally accepted surrender terms, which guaranteed safe passage of all his men to sail home to Venice, and safety to all citizens of the walled city. He walked with the full scarlet regalia of his office out from the walls and down to the tent of the Alfa Mustafa, the victorious commander. There the two leaders conversed. Then something went wrong, and Mustafa grew visibly angry and called for his men to behead the full complement of 350 survivors who had laid down their arms to march out with Bragadino. All 350 bleeding heads were piled up just outside Mustafa’s tent.

Mustafa then ordered Bragadino’s ears and nose chopped off, and forced the man to go down on all fours wearing a dog’s collar around his neck, to the jibes, mockery, and horror of the onlookers. Bags of earth were strapped over Bragadino’s back and he was made to carry them to the walls of the fortification, and to kiss the earth each time he passed Mustafa. As the old man grew fainter from the loss of blood from his head, he was tied to a chair, put in a rope harness and hoisted up to the highest mast in the fleet, so that all survivors of the city might see his humiliation. Then Bragadino’s chair was dropped in free-fall into the water and brought out again. The tortured Venetian was led in ropes to the town square and stripped. At a stone column (which still stands today), Bragadino’s hands were tied outstretched over his head, and an executioner stepped forward with sharp knives to carefully remove his skin, keeping it whole. Before the carver had reached Bragadino’s waist, the man was dead. His full skin was then stuffed with straw, once again raised up to the highest mast, and sailed around to various ports as a trophy of victory, and finally taken back to Istanbul for permanent exhibition.

Meanwhile, Don Juan had put the Christian fleet of some 200 vessels on course toward Lepanto, where Ali Pasha was refitting his vessels in the safe protection of an impregnable harbor. On board the Christian ships, the Spaniards were under secret orders to avoid fighting, only to keep their honor by going along, while urging reasons to turn back. By contrast, when a fast corsair dispatched from Famagusta arrived to deliver the tale of the last dishonors visited on General Bragadino and his 350 surviving soldiers, the blood of the Venetians boiled. They now allowed no question of turning back. They were determined to avenge the horrors suffered by their comrades in arms.

The young Don Juan was buoyed by this new resolve. Now he would be able to keep the vow he had made to Pope Pius V, to seek out and destroy the threatening enemy. The young admiral – he was twenty-two when he became commander of this fleet – felt confident in his battle plan. He had taken care to have his whole fleet rehearse their roles in the quiet seas of the Adriatic, just before turning toward Lepanto.

Don Juan and many of his men spent much of the night before battle in prayer. The fate of their civilization, they knew, depended on their good fortune on the morrow. The uncertainties of the changing winds and choppy seas, and the speed of the two onrushing lines of ships rapidly closing on each other, would erupt in unpredictable havoc. The odds against the Christians in ships were something like 350 ships to 250. But the Christians had a secret weapon.

The Greatest Sea Battle in History: Lepanto, October 1571

For more than three years Pope Pius V had labored mightily to sound alarms about the deadly Muslim buildup in the shipyards of Istanbul. The sultan had been stung by the surprising defeat of his overwhelming invasion force in Malta in 1565. The savagery of Muslim attacks on the coastline villages of Italy, Sicily, Dalmatia, and Greece was ratcheted upwards. Three or four Muslim galleys would offload hundreds of marines, sweep through a village, tie all its healthy men together for shipment out to become galley slaves, march away many of its women and young boys and girls for shipment to Eastern harems, and then gather all the elderly into the village church, where the helpless victims would be beheaded, and sometimes cut up into little pieces, to strike terror into other villages. The Muslims believed that future victims would lose heart and swiftly surrender when Muslim raiders arrived. Over three centuries, the number of European captives kidnapped from villages and beaches by these sea pirates climbed into the hundreds of thousands. 

The reason for this kidnapping was that the naval appetite for fresh backs and muscles was insatiable. Most galley slaves lived little more than five years. They were chained to hard benches in the burning Mediterranean sun, slippery in their own excrement, urination, and intermittent vomiting, often never lying down to sleep. The dark vision that troubled the pope during the late 1560s was of even more horrible calamities to befall the whole Christian world, bit by bit. But unity in Europe was hard to find, and even more scarce was the will to fight for survival.

Finally, Don Juan of Austria, the younger brother of the King of Spain, an illegitimate son, stood erect and summoned allies to repel the much-anticipated Muslim advance. He aimed at leading a large fleet to go after the new Muslim fleet preemptively, before they could depart from their home seas. Having seen Muslim ferocity first hand, the Venetian public was eager to contribute a fleet to the task. Their support was crucial, for Venice was in those days the shipbuilding and gunnery capital of the world, producers (for a profit) of the most innovative, most versatile, stoutest, and most seaworthy armed vessels in the world. The best sea captains of Venice were the most eager to avenge their friends and fellow citizens. 

For years, Venice had preferred peace with the Muslim East, in order to carry on their lucrative international trade. Now there was a cause that took precedence over the traditions of commerce. Genoa, too, contributed a fleet under their famous but now elderly Admiral Andrea Doria, these days a less bold warrior despite the glory of his earlier exploits.

The Knights of Malta, the premier sea warriors of the time, offered their small but highly skilled fleet in support of the Pope’s appeal, and agreed to work cooperatively with Don Juan.

The latter, whom his contemporaries described as a modest and humble man, characteristically set aside his own ego for the sake of the cause that engaged him. He pledged to the armada a large contingent supplied by Spain and Portugal. By the end of September 1571, eager to get their job done before winter turned the seas choppy and unfit for battle, the four distinct parts of the Christian fleet sailed past Italy, hugging the coasts, sending teams of observers to land to pick up the latest intelligence on the Muslim force. Finally, they learned that an enormous Muslim fleet, nearly 100 ships larger than their own, was sailing near to land toward the Gulf of Lepanto. No more talking, Don Juan told his leading admirals; now, battle.

Keeping the Knights of Malta in reserve just a short distance behind the main battle line, Don Juan assigned the impassioned Venetians the important left flank, with its leftmost ships close to the shore line. He himself commanded a hundred vessels at the center. In plain sight was his capitol ship, the Real, its banners of leadership visible to all. To the right flank he assigned the venerable Andrea Doria and the Genoese fleet. The plan was to hold his ships in as long and straight a line as seamanship in a besetting wind would allow, while heading directly for the Muslim line.

At his front, however, Don Juan placed a nasty surprise for Ali Pasha. Six new, taller, sturdier ships packed with cannons (especially in the bow) and heavily laden with lead and shot placed themselves a mile forward of the Christian line. They looked flat on top, like merchant ships. No one had ever seen such ships before. They lacked a bow rising up skywards, the one necessary weapon for vicious ramming. For the purpose of these new galleasses, as they were called, was not to ram oncoming ships but to blast them with an array of cannons. Their shot could carry a mile with great accuracy. When the galleasses turned sideways, they could blast with even more cannons, designed for shorter ranges, often aiming their cannon just at the waterline of their foes. They had the power to sink a smaller, lighter, faster Muslim galley with a single burst.

At first, the two fleets spotted each other on the horizon as single masts, then small numbers, and only as the two fleets closed to about two miles of each other could any one of the two hundred thousand sailors, marines, and janissaries on board catch a glimpse of the lines and dispositions of the fleets. The Muslims preferred to attack in a crescent rather than a straight line, but the winds at their back and tricky tides from the shoreline to their north forced them to straighten up their lines. Those who gazed on the massive array of ships and sails were filled with awe. On deck, one of those to be wounded in this battle, the great author Miguel de Cervantes wrote of “the most noble and memorable event that past centuries have seen.” Just over six hundred ships in two amazingly orderly lines, each stretching three miles from end to end, silently bore down on one another as the distance between them closed. The Muslim fleet outnumbered the Christian fleet by nearly a hundred ships. A sense of destiny weighed upon all who watched and waited.

The huge green battle flag of Allah – his name embroidered on it in Arabic some 29,800 times – marked out the tall capital ship Sultana, on which the fearsome young admiral Ali Pasha held command. Pasha was puzzled by the six more or less flat barges out in front of the Christian lines. His own armed soldiers were reliant mostly on clouds of arrows. His sailors had mastered the arts of ramming, and disgorging massive boarding parties onto the enemy’s slippery decks, then beating down their defenders by a sort of fierce land warfare out on the open seas. In those days, sea warfare was like land warfare, only carried out on open decks side-by-side instead of in open fields. Ship was lashed to ship, sometimes a dozen together. Hand-to-hand combat was the key.

There is no point here in giving the whole narrative of the battle. Suffice it to say that in the center the volleys from the galleasses out in front destroyed one Muslim vessel after another. Masts snapped, the oars of the galleys were shattered, and huge holes opened up the thin wooden sides of the galleys to the boiling sea. The Muslim ships that were not sunk were easily boarded by the Christian ships coming alongside, built a little higher, and amply supplied not only with boarding nets but, even more important, with ranks of the old-style predecessors to rifles – the arquebuses – directing point-blank rifle balls into the unarmored flesh of Muslim archers. It is true that in a few cases whole clouds of Muslim arrows felled many in the Christian ships, including the great Venetian admiral Marcantonio Bragadino shot in the eye. Mostly, the Christian warriors wore the latest in body armor, which often repelled wooden arrows harmlessly. Nonetheless, at least one Christian ship was later found aimlessly afloat, with every single man dead or wounded.

At the last, the two capital ships Real and Sultana clashed head-on, and Don Juan led the final boarding party which in its ferocity drove Ali Pasha to the aft poop, where he soon fell with a bullet in his eye. The Muslim admiral’s head was cut off and borne aloft on a pike to be mounted on the bow of the Real. The seas around were filled with cloaks, caps, struggling bodies, the vast wooden wreckage of battle, and large splotches of red blood.

On the Christian left, the Venetians attacked with almost blind rage and broke the line of the Muslim right with relative ease. They were aided by a revolt of the galley slaves on board a number of Muslim vessels, who in the explosions on board had their chains broken, and poured up on deck swinging their chains to left and right. So great was the Venetian fury that even after the battle, many of its sailors spent hours using their pikes to kill Muslim sailors and soldiers struggling in the sea. They tried to excuse their bloodlust by saying that they never wished to see those individuals sailing against the West again.

In four hours the battle was over. More than forty thousand men had died, and thousands more were wounded, more than in any other battle in history, more even than at Salamis or, in years to come, at the Somme. Never again did the Muslim fleets pose a grave danger to Europe from the South, although of course Muslim fleets kept busy expanding their bases on the African coast, harassing Western ships and territories across the Mediterranean. Technology, especially that pioneered by Venice and by ocean-going Portugal and Spain, had made the decisive difference. As Victor Davis Hanson writes, it was to capitalism that the victory was owed, for it was open markets that spurred competition to keep improving gunnery and ships, and it was the great merchant and commercial cities that built these new technologies. After Lepanto, the arts of gunnery replaced the arts of the bow and arrow, however deadly for many centuries those weapons had proved to be. Ships were made stouter, taller, more able to carry heavy armaments–and new methods had to be sought to replace locomotion by galley slaves.

As news of the great victory of October 7 reached shore, church bells rang all over the cities and countryside of Europe. For months, Pius V had urged Catholics to say the daily rosary on behalf of the morale and good fortune of the Christian forces, and above all, a successful outcome to the highly risky preemptive strike against the Turkish fleets. Thereafter, he declared that October 7 would be celebrated as the feast of “Mary, Queen of Victory.” A later pope added the title “Queen of the Holy Rosary” in honor of the laity’s favorite form of prayer. All over the Italian peninsula, great paintings were commissioned – whole galleries were dedicated – to honoring the classic scenes of that epic battle. The air of Europe that October tasted of liberties preserved. The record of the celebrations lives on in glorious paintings by Titian, Tintoretto, and many others.

The Northern Pincers and the Siege of Vienna, September 1683

Of necessity, our consideration of the Battle of Vienna must be briefer than our attention to Lepanto. But many of the same forces were at play as before, only this time by land, not by sea. The Protestant nations regarded the expanding Ottoman Empire as a Catholic problem. Few Catholic nations took the Muslim threat as seriously as it deserved. The French, in particular, had become used to buying off the Turks with trade and commerce, rather than resisting them in war. The French even preferred the defeat of their most dreaded rivals, the German-speaking Austrians. The nation Germany did not yet exist, only a number of smaller political units – Brandenberg, Saxony, Bavaria, and others, some Protestant and some Catholic. And so the Muslim overland advance through the underbelly of Europe seemed not only relentless but mostly unopposed.

The sultan of all Islam, Mehmet IV, spent his days in his unrivalled harems and on his huge hunting territories, some of them as large as nation-states. Thousands of mostly Slavic serfs were required to service his hunting party, in part by driving deer and other game animals his way. To uphold his obligations to Islamic expansion, however, Mehmet stirred himself to choose Kara Mustafa to be general of all his forces in the final conquest of Hungary, Slovakia, and the south of Poland – the greatest of all ventures on which the sultan’s historical reputation would rest. The sultan directly warned Mustafa not to try to take Vienna, for doing so would arouse the West to retribution. He gave Mustafa the long green cord of the Prophet to wear around his neck, both to signal the importance of his commission, and to warn him that failure meant that he must be hanged–must even hang himself.

For the drive northward, Kara Mustafa sent messengers throughout Anatolia, through Greater Syria, and out to the scores of Muslim nations from Morocco to India. He marched northwards with an ever-increasing army of more than three hundred thousand, many on horseback as cavalry to spread terror in advance of his main forces, other scores of thousands in his supply trains. This huge army took some five months to occupy Budapest, rest, and then push on northwards. They swatted resistance away like flies, and sometimes bypassed walled cities that refused instant surrender, to deal with them later with special severity.

By July 7, they were in sight of Vienna, which in those days was a walled and heavily fortified city, well designed by its military engineers to lay down fields of fire by which each strong point could assist its neighbors. Compared to today, Vienna within its walls was a small city, and yet large enough in those terrorized days to admit refugees from nearby villages who hurriedly sought safety. For the next weeks the sultan’s armies kept tightening the ring they had established on all sides of Vienna. Both Mustafa with his green cord around his neck and the leader of the Viennese defense, General Lubomirski, now knew that they were fighting to the death.

Meanwhile, the Turks launched massive engineering works, including many honeycombed tunnels beginning from long distances away, out of sight, and burrowing underneath strong points and vulnerable walls that ground troops might breach. These veteran and highly skilled sappers – the best in the world – dug all the way underground both to the wide moats at the base of the walls and still further underground to the very center of Vienna. Beginning in mid-August, without any warning, huge explosions tore gaping holes in one strongpoint after another, and sometimes beneath homes in the very center of the city. The twenty thousand or so warriors within the city fought with great determination and intelligence to drive back the screaming, bloodthirsty men who were storming through the breaches, while all around them Viennese civilians rushed to make repairs to the breaches in the walls. The Christians also sallied forth themselves, often at night, to drive far into the Turkish lines to blow up engineering devices and stockpiles of gunpowder.

Relentlessly, the Turks kept heaving up huge mounds – small mountains – of earth and sand just outside the walls, from which fire might constantly be poured down into the doomed city, from above its walls. With every Muslim attack, fewer and fewer Christian soldiers were left to repel them. In late August, supplies of meat ran out, and the population was reduced to eating horses and stray dogs. A very strict rationing of water became necessary. The elderly began to die off from starvation.

Meanwhile, the Christian relief forces were belatedly and all too slowly advancing from the north in four separate columns, from Catholic Germany and from Poland, to lift the siege. For nearly forty miles around the beleaguered city, Muslims had ravaged the land, and sent refugees fleeing by foot in all directions. Thus, making use of captured Muslim cavalrymen and foot soldiers, as well as the fleeing Christians, the Germans and the Poles picked up enough intelligence to learn that their best chances lay to the southwest, through the Vienna Wood. It would be hugely difficult terrain for cavalry, and also for quick forced marches by the infantry. But one other factor spoke for that line of attack: the supply trains and Mustafa’s luxurious tents, with their splendid harems and rich treasury, were also located on that side of Vienna. The approaching Christian generals met together to go over the plan of attack, and then rapidly set off to their southwest, far enough from the city to advance mostly undetected.

At intervals, back in Vienna, Mustafa had messages in German tied to dozens of rocks, which he had his catapults shoot over the city walls. One such message read:

Surrender now and you will be saved. Open your gates, turn your churches over to us and lay down your arms, and no one will be killed. If you resist the will of Allah, your leaders, and all of them, will be slain. Able men and women will be sold into slavery. You will be allowed no rights of worship, and your mighty walls will be thrown down. Fight and you die! Surrender and you live!

For more than four hundred years, hundreds of Christian villages and cities had received such messages. The duplicity and primitive brutality of Muslim conquerors were well known to hundreds of thousands of Christian families, through the fate of relatives in other overrun communities. Nevertheless, sometimes terror overwhelmed them and they surrendered. At Vienna, behind fearless and determined leaders, they chose to die fighting rather than to surrender. So the issue inside Vienna became whether food and gunpowder would give out before the long-promised army of relief would arrive. Dauntless messengers slipping in and out of Vienna kept hope at least flickering. The commander in Vienna promised he could hold out until September 1. The advancing army of relief replied that they would need almost two weeks more than that. Only gritted-teeth determination could bridge that gap in time.

One thing the Muslim armies were not trained to do, as were the Christian armies of that time, was to fight on two fronts – against the city ahead and against any oncoming forces that might arrive to break the siege. For this, Kara Mustafa relied on his mobile cavalry, some twenty thousand Tatars from the Asian steppes in camp about twenty miles south of Vienna. Because of the density of the Vienna Wood to the southwest of the city, this was the one region which the cavalry could cover only lightly. Still, if even small bands of mounted Tatars had infiltrated the hills and valleys of the Wood, no Christian soldiers could have made it through the narrow passes. Unaccountably, Mustafa forbade the Tatar leader to launch an attack on the Wood.

King Sobieski of Poland had drawn the privilege of advancing on the right flank, right through the heart of the Vienna Wood. His army’s double-time march through the Wood was arduous, by narrow valleys and slow but deep summer streams. Late on September 11, just as his men were making their initial contact with the Turkish outposts, and the final battle began to be joined, the King formed a resolution to attack on the morrow as swiftly and with as much surprise as possible, to overwhelm Mustafa’s bodyguard of cavalry and rush on with force as close to the supply trains as he could, and to conclude the matter on the next day. In the rough terrain where his troops broke out from the Wood on September 12, Sobieski held his famed hussars back. They were his best, his ultimate, weapon.

For hours all day long, left, center, and right flanks of the Christian army advanced far more steadily than expected, although the hand-to-hand fighting was furious, and the Turkish lines were yielding only a yard at a time. The last four hundred yards took an immense effort, but the Christian forces reached open ground with less than an hour of daylight left. This is when Sobieski made a huge gamble and boldly released his much-feared hussars. These famous horsemen wore special caps with strips of leather flying behind them in the wind, lined with feathers like the headdresses of American Indians, and the wind whistled through the leather with an eerie tone. As they charged across the open land the low, melancholy wail of the wind through their feathers frightened the Arabian horses – and their Turkish riders, too.

The sheer speed and force of the Polish hussars was too great and too surprising to be resisted. Mustafa escaped, but his tents and treasury were captured (one of his green velvet tents sits now in the Czartoryskis Museum in Krakow). The Muslim lines nearby broke, and their men began looting Mustafa’s rich supply wagons and pleasure tents on their panicky flight southward. The entire Muslim ring surrounding the city melted away, back whence it had come.

Mustafa, slowed by a bad wound to his eye, was rushed southward by his remaining bodyguards. From the first moments of crushing defeat he began plotting his reports to the sultan, shifting the blame onto one of his subordinates. Yet as the Christians pursued the once-great Muslim army down through Hungary, retaking one city after another from Muslim control, and in effect laying the groundwork for the future Austro-Hungarian Empire, the sultan’s anger against Mustafa finally exploded. Mustafa recognized what must happen. He was hanged on December 25, 1683, by the green cord that he had worn round his neck, a little more than three months after he had imagined he had Vienna in his grasp.

***

Thus, once again, this time by land, the Muslims had attempted to fulfill the Prophet’s command to spread Islam to all corners of the world decisively, with force. The sultans had long had the advantage of an enormous standing army ready for all seasons, and swiftly added to when larger ambitions demanded. This time, however, the siege-lifting battle outside the walls of Vienna marked the high-water mark of Muslim power. After September 11-12, 1683, that power kept receding, on into modern times.

Still, it should surprise no one that the date chosen to bring the new resurgence of modern Muslim ambition to the whole world’s attention was also September 11, 318 years after 1683. The announcement came in the vivid orange bursts of blossoming flame and dark black smoke from two of the tallest towers of the West’s financial capital. Muslim memory runs very deep, and so does the Muslim imperative to conquer the world for Allah, not just by force of arms but by conversion to Islam. The West has always refused to give this long and deeply rooted Muslim threat against the West’s own soul the sustained attention it requires.

Nonetheless, four centuries after Lepanto, three centuries after Vienna, today in most of the capitals of once-Christian Europe, there are more Muslims attending services in mosques on Fridays, than Christians at worship on Sundays. In some ways, the pluralism of the West is a blessing, even an advantage to the West – and yet its profoundest historical weakness lies in its own divided spirit. The ultimate issue between Islam and the West is not military force. It is the depth of intellect and engagement. In matters of the spirit, we seem always to become tongue-tied, as if lacking in spirited confidence. We do not insist on presenting better arguments in recognition of the inalienable rights to human liberty that our totalitarian opponents deny. Mere secular force will not do, when the fundamental battle is spiritual. Thus, the same movie seems to be played over and over.

That is the historical record, it seems, at least in regard to October 7, 1571, and September 11-12, 1683, after Lepanto, and after Vienna.

Media Contact:
Veronique Rodman
American Enterprise Institute
1150 Seventeenth Street, N.W.
Washington, DC  20036
Phone: +001 202-862-4870
E-mail: VRodman@aei.org

Suffering Hopes in Congo

In an op-ed in The Washington Post, columnist Michael Gerson urges the creation of “a capable, hard-hitting European military force, supported by the United States” to stabilize the dramatic situation in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

“The setting of this city is all contrast and drama – nestled along a vast, placid lake but dominated by a volcano that steams by day and glows faint and red on a clear evening. A city living in the shadow of sudden violence.

Driving north from Goma, one passes through wide lava fields – black, broken and sharp to the feet. About seven miles along the rutted road, the uniforms of the soldiers change, from the solid green of the FARDC (the Congolese military) to the camouflage of the CNDP (the rebel forces led by Laurent Nkunda). For civilians, the colors of the uniforms often matter little – all the groups are capable of pillage and rape.

Less than a mile from the front, a left turn brings you into the Kibati I camp – more than 6,000 men, women and children displaced by nearby fighting. The camps channel the problems of Congo like a storm drain after a flash food – skin diseases, worms, diarrhea and respiratory ailments. A teenage girl wears a heavy coat against her malarial chills. An 8-year-old boy named Glory smiles for the camera, even though his  body is hot with fever.

When the various armies move, whole towns flee, causing spikes in sexual violence and acute malnutrition. And this individual suffering gathers into shocking statistics. Perhaps 4 million deaths related to war over the past decade.”

Read full story.

Offener Brief an UNO-Generalsekretär Ban Ki-moon für die Freilassung des französisch-israelischen Soldaten Gilad Shalit

von Narcisse Caméléon, Ressortleiter Deppologie der HIRAM7 REVIEW

Hamburg, den 10. Dezember 2008

Verehrter Herr Generalsekretär Ban Ki-moon,

hiermit darf ich Sie darum bitten, dass Sie sich für die rasche Freilassung des 22-jährigen französisch-israelischen Soldaten Gilad Shalit entschlossen einsetzen. Gilad Shalit wurde vor über zwei Jahren von der mörderischen islamischen Bande Hamas entführt.

Gilad Shalit, seit dem 25.06.2006 in Gefangenschaft

Sie könnten zum Beispiel die Freilassung von Gilad Shalit an Verhandlungen über Fördergelder oder andere der (zu) vielen Leistungen der UNO binden.

In diesem Zusammenhang möchte ich Sie auch bitten, der einseitigen anti-Israel Haltung der UNO die Stirn zu bieten, insbesondere bei der UN-Menschenrechtskommission (in der die islamischen Nationen inzwischen die Macht übernommen haben), wo nun jegliche Diskussion über die islamische Sharia Tabu ist. Die Fakten sollten Ihnen bekannt sein. Es gibt keinen humanen Grund für dieses menschenverachtende Verhalten und die fast pathologische Kampagne der UNO gegen Israel, außer Ablenkung vom eigenen Versagen (zum Beispiel in Kongo, Kosovo oder Zimbabwe).

Der Franzose Noam Shalit, Vater von Gilad

Für Ihre Mühe und Ihre Geduld bedanke ich mich im Voraus.

Ich schließe mit dieser frohgemuten Hoffnung, und habe die Gnade Euer Exzellenz in tiefstem Respekt zu versichern, dass ich nicht aufhören werde, wie Sie, für die gute Sache zu kämpfen, oder anders ausgedrückt und wie mein Landsmann und Vorbild, der Marquis de La Fayette, einst verkündete: “Die Menschenrechte beginnen, wo die Vorurteile enden”.

Mit erwartungsvollen Grüßen

Narcisse Caméléon