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Mn. Muslim Congressman Ellsion gos on Hajj by Moslerm brotherhood

Congressman Keith Ellison (D-Muslim Brotherhood) likens resistance to Islamic
supremacism to racism
$13,350 from the group that wants to destroy the West from within

In December 2008, when it was first revealed that Ellison's Hajj was paid for
with $13,350 from the Muslim American Society:
The Muslim Brotherhood "must understand that their work in America is a kind of
grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within
and "sabotaging" its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the
believers so that it is eliminated and God's religion is made victorious over
all other religions." -- "An Explanatory Memorandum on the General Strategic
Goal for the Brotherhood in North America," by Mohamed Akram, May 19, 1991.
What does that have to do with Congressman Ellison? Everything. The Muslim
American Society paid for his Hajj. And what is the Muslim American Society? The
Muslim Brotherhood.
"In recent years, the U.S. Brotherhood operated under the name Muslim American
Society, according to documents and interviews. One of the nation's major
Islamic groups, it was incorporated in Illinois in 1993 after a contentious
debate among Brotherhood members." -- Chicago Tribune, 2004.
Imagine if a conservative Congressman had taken a trip that had been paid for by
a Christian group that was, according to one of its own documents, dedicated to
"eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and
'sabotaging' its miserable house" so that Christian law would replace
the U.S. Constitution. I expect we would hear more of an outcry than we ever
heard about Ellison's Brotherhood-funded hajj.
Yet I am pretty much the only one calling attention to Ellison's having taken
money from the Brotherhood. But also remember that the Muslim Brotherhood is a
pro-Sharia group -- i.e., it opposes the freedom of speech, the freedom of
conscience, and the equality of rights before the law of women with men and
non-Muslims with Muslims. I, am fighting to defend those rights against Islamic
supremacists who would chip away at them. So who is really fronting for "hate,"
Congressman -- you or I? I'd say you.
An aside: several people have written to me asking why I was so quiet during the
ABC "This Week" panel hosted by nakedly biased pseudo-journalist Christiane
Amanpour. In fact, I wasn't: they taped two hours and only broadcast one,
cutting out much of what I said. I also learned later that my microphone was
off, such that I could be heard commenting in the background, being picked up
faintly on other people's mics, but what I said was consequently too faint to be
heard on the show itself. Par for the course for the mainstream media.
Oddly enough, Ellison is unhappy about the ABC show, even though it was a patent
whitewash of the jihad and Islamic supremacism. "Should we fear Islam?," by
Congressman Keith Ellison in the Washington Post, October 7:
At a time when our nation is seeing a rise in intolerant behavior, crossing
every cultural line, whether based on race, religion or sexual orientation, we
seem simultaneously stuck with a national news media that is preoccupied with
conflict and controversy when we desperately need one that weighs facts and
reports fairly. A recent national news program reinforced these concerns. Let me
explain what I mean.
>Imagine a respected TV show or news magazine article with the title, "Should
>Americans Fear Black People?"..

How make peace with them?

PA Continues to Teach Denial of Israel's Existence - Itamar Marcus and Nan Jacques Zilberdik
The PA continues to educate its people to envision a world without Israel, presenting Israeli cities and regions as "Palestinian." Last week, PA TV rebroadcast an educational documentary that describes the Israeli cities of Haifa, Acre, Ashkelon, Jaffa and the Sea of Galilee as Palestinian. PA TV is under the direct control of the office of PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas. (Palestinian Media Watch)

Rick Sanchez's antisemitism

When ‘Bigotry’ Backfires: The Rick Sanchez Affair
4Share
Tuesday, October 5, 2010
Abraham H. Foxman
Special To The Jewish Week



So now CNN host Rick Sanchez has added his name to the long list of public figures, here and abroad, who accuse the Jews of control, in this case of control of the television news business. Others gear the accusation to the media in general or the entertainment world or government or the international economy.



For those of you who may have missed his remarks, which nearly overnight turned the popular, pugnacious host of CNN’s “Rick’s List” into the ranks of the unemployed, here’s a quick recap: In a Sept. 30 interview with the comedian Pete Dominick on satellite radio, Sanchez suggested that as a Cuban-American, he had experienced subtle forms of discrimination in his career as a television reporter and anchor. He then accused Jon Stewart of “The Daily Show” of being “a bigot.”

When pressed on that characterization by one of the show’s hosts, who pointed out that Stewart was Jewish and like Sanchez a member of a minority group, Sanchez’s response was to suggest that, “Everybody that runs CNN is a lot like Stewart. And a lot of people who run all the other networks are a lot like Stewart. And to imply that somehow they — the people in this country who are Jewish — are an oppressed minority? Yeah.” CNN fired Sanchez on Friday, a day after the interview.

As often is the case with these situations, it took an unguarded moment for Sanchez to reveal his own bigotry, ironically, in awkwardly fashioning the same accusation against another media type. And there it was again: the age-old conspiracy theory about Jewish control of the news media, this time brought to the fore by a well-known television personality with a loyal audience following on CNN.

What’s interesting about a person like Sanchez making this claim is that he is not an extremist, not a religious fanatic and not an ideologue.

Jewish conspiracy theories coming from extreme anti-Semites are par for the course and a recurring theme in the history of the Jewish people. In the Middle Ages it took the form of blood libel charges or accusations that Jews were responsible for the Black Plague because it was said that they were poisoning the wells. In modern times, the infamous phony document “The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion,” allegedly the secret plan of Jewish leaders to take over the world, resonated and still resonates with millions.

It is true that there are many Jewish executives and owners of news outlets and entertainment vehicles. There is nothing wrong with saying that — indeed, Jewish accomplishments in these areas are something to be proud of. But to say that Jews control these areas is a whole other thing. That reflects the age-old canard because it doesn’t focus on individual Jews who may have a talent for these fields (like non-Jewish Americans who have talents in their fields), but suggests Jews working in conspiracy to serve their narrow interests. Anti-Semites never sees Jews as individuals but rather as a coordinated group to serve Jewish interests against the interests of others.

The fact that individuals who are not usually associated with extremism feel comfortable making similar charges shows how deeply embedded such ideas are in Western civilization, even in America, where by any standard anti-Semitism is not as powerful a force as it has been historically and as it continues to be in other parts of the world.

Some of the more well-known examples of this kind of thing include filmmaker Oliver Stone’s recent reference to “Jewish domination of the media;” Mel Gibson’s notorious comment in 2006 that “Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world;” and Ralph Nader’s statement in 2004 that the “Israeli puppeteer travels to Washington, meets with the puppet in the White House and goes down Pennsylvania Avenue and meets with the puppets in Congress.”

Others in the mainstream who have voiced similar themes were Rep. Jim Moran of Virginia, who in 2003 suggested that we are at war in Iraq because of American Jews, and country singer and entertainer Dolly Parton, who in a 1994 Vogue interview blamed Jews in Hollywood for not getting her pet project produced.

There is a tendency to want to shrug off these sad cases as not typical of what America is about. And surely, we should keep such statements, no matter how disturbing, in perspective. However, they do speak to what is unique about anti-Semitism and what urges all of us not to be complacent about the subject even when and where things are a lot better than they used to be.

Anti-Semitism shares with other forms of hatred a number of well-documented elements such as stereotyping, discrimination and fear of difference.

What has been the special characteristic of anti-Semitism and what goes a long way to explain why it has lasted so long, why it has been so lethal and why it exists in so many contradictory settings is the idea that Jews are not what they appear to be, that they are, in fact, secretive, poisonous, all-powerful and acting as a cabal.

As a result, since according to this view, reality is not what it seems to be, Jews can be and frequently are conjured up for all kinds of ills of mankind.

Is the Rick Sanchez episode important? Yes — not because of his influence, which I would hope will be in decline, but because this dangerous notion has shown a resiliency and life of its own, even in very surprising places. n

Abraham H. Foxman is the national director of the Anti-Defamation League. His books include “The Deadliest Lies: The Israel Lobby and the Myth of Jewish Control” and the forthcoming “Jews and Money: The Story of a Stereotype” (Palgrave Macmillan, November 2010).

UN United Nuts

UN Poisons Its Human Rights Mission - Irwin Cotler
The UN Human Rights Council is the mandated UN body responsible for the promotion and protection of international human rights. But the council has turned its mandate on its head. It has turned a blind eye to the world's most serious human rights violators, failing to adopt any resolution or investigative mandate for such human rights violator countries as China, Cuba, Libya, North Korea, Russia or Iran, to name but a few - all being listed on Freedom House's list of the 20 worst human rights abusers. While the UN General Assembly calls for countries to be elected to the council based on their human rights records, 24 out of 47 present members (51%) fail to meet fundamental standards of democracy and human rights.
Since its 2006 creation, 80% of the council's resolutions have singled out one member state - Israel - for differential and discriminatory treatment, thereby breaching the UN charter's foundational principle of "equality for all nations, large and small." The tragedy in all this is that a UN body, established for the protection of human rights, has become a human rights violator. In particular, these violations now take place under the protective cover of the UN, invoking the imprimatur of international law and marching under the banner of human rights. The writer is a former minister of justice and attorney-general of Canada. (The Australian)

worm attack on Iran's nuks

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International

The Stuxnet outbreak
A worm in the centrifuge
An unusually sophisticated cyber-weapon is mysterious but important

Sep 30th 2010 | From The Economist print edition

IT SOUNDS like the plot of an airport thriller or a James Bond film. A crack team of experts, assembled by a shadowy government agency, develops a cyber-weapon designed to shut down a rogue country’s nuclear programme. The software uses previously unknown tricks to worm its way into industrial control systems undetected, searching for a particular configuration that matches its target—at which point it wreaks havoc by reprogramming the system, closing valves and shutting down pipelines.

This is not fiction, but fact. A new software “worm” called Stuxnet (its name is derived from keywords buried in the code) seems to have been developed to attack a specific nuclear facility in Iran. Its sophistication suggests that it is the work of a well-financed team working for a government, rather than a group of rogue hackers trying to steal secrets or cause trouble. America and Israel are the obvious suspects. But Stuxnet’s origins and effects are unknown.

Stuxnet first came to light in June, when it was identified by VirusBlokAda, a security firm in Belarus. The next month Siemens, a German industrial giant, warned customers that their “supervisory control and data acquisition” (SCADA) management systems, which control valves, pipelines and industrial equipment, were vulnerable to the worm. It targets a piece of Siemens software, called WinCC, which runs on Microsoft Windows.

For security reasons SCADA systems are not usually connected to the internet. But Stuxnet can spread via infected memory sticks plugged into a computer’s USB port. Stuxnet checks to see if WinCC is running. If it is, it tries to log in, to install a clandestine “back door” to the internet, and then to contact a server in Denmark or Malaysia for instructions. (Analysis of traffic to these servers is continuing, and may offer the best chance of casting light on Stuxnet’s purpose and origins.) If it cannot find WinCC, it tries to copy itself on to other USB devices. It can also spread across local networks via shared folders and print spoolers.

Initially, Stuxnet seemed to be designed for industrial espionage or to allow hackers to blackmail companies by threatening to shut down vital systems. But its unusual characteristics suggest another explanation. WinCC is a rather obscure SCADA system. Hackers hoping to target as many companies as possible would have focused on more popular systems. And Stuxnet searches for a particular configuration of industrial equipment as it spreads. It launches an attack only when it finds a match. “The bad news is that the virus is targeting a specific process or plant,” says Wieland Simon of Siemens. “The good news is that most industrial processes are not the target of the virus.” (Siemens says it knows of 15 plants around the world that were infected by Stuxnet, but their operations were unaffected as they were not the intended target.)

Another odd feature is that Stuxnet uses two compromised security certificates (stolen from firms in Taiwan) and a previously unknown security hole in Windows to launch itself automatically from a memory stick. The use of such “zero-day vulnerabilities” by viruses is not unusual. But Stuxnet can exploit four entirely different ones in order to worm its way into a system. These holes are so valuable that hackers would not normally use four of them in a single attack. Whoever created Stuxnet did just that to boost its chances. They also had detailed knowledge of Siemens’s industrial-production processes and control systems, and access to the target plant’s blueprints. In short, Stuxnet was the work neither of amateur hackers nor of cybercriminals, but of a well- financed team. “Behind this virus there are experts,” says Mr Simon. “They need money and know-how.”

So what was the target? Microsoft said in August that Stuxnet had infected more than 45,000 computers. Symantec, a computer-security firm, found that 60% of the infected machines were in Iran, 18% in Indonesia and 8% in India. That could be a coincidence. But if Stuxnet was aimed at Iran, one possible target is the Bushehr nuclear reactor. This week Iranian officials confirmed that Stuxnet had infected computers at Bushehr, but said that no damage to major systems had been done. Bushehr has been dogged by problems for years and its opening was recently delayed once again. Given that history, the latest hitch may not have been Stuxnet’s work.

A more plausible target is Iran’s uranium-enrichment plant at Natanz. Inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency, the UN’s watchdog, have found that about half Iran’s centrifuges are idle and those that work are yielding little. Some say a fall in the number of working centrifuges at Natanz in early 2009 is evidence of a successful Stuxnet attack.

Last year Scott Borg of the United States Cyber-Consequences Unit, a think-tank, said that Israel might prefer to mount a cyber-attack rather than a military strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities. That could involve disrupting sensitive equipment such as centrifuges, he said, using malware introduced via infected memory sticks.

His observation now looks astonishingly prescient. “Since the autumn of 2002, I have regularly predicted that this sort of cyber-attack tool would eventually be developed,” he says. Israel certainly has the ability to create Stuxnet, he adds, and there is little downside to such an attack, because it would be virtually impossible to prove who did it. So a tool like Stuxnet is “Israel’s obvious weapon of choice”. Some have even noted keywords in Stuxnet’s code drawn from the Bible’s Book of Esther—in which the Jews fight back to foil a plot to exterminate them.