WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Bush administration appears set to offer Israel a powerful radar system that could greatly boost Israeli defenses against enemy ballistic missiles while tying it directly into a growing U.S. missile shield.

President George W. Bush is expected to discuss the matter during a visit to Israel on Wednesday to mark the 60th anniversary of the Jewish state amid mounting U.S. concerns about perceived threats from Iran, people familiar with the matter said.

This is “probably the No. 2 issue” on Bush’s agenda for the visit, second only to the Middle East peace process, said Rep. Mark Kirk, an Illinois Republican who has spearheaded calls in Congress for tighter U.S. missile-defence ties with Israel. Read more »

Russian oil magnate Roman Abramovich has bought the Colorado ranch of surgical-equipment tycoon Leon Hirsch for $36.3 million. Together with another house purchased for $11.8 million in February, this brings Mr. Abramovich’s known real-estate investments in the area to almost $50 million.

The latest purchase is of a 14,300-square-foot, split-level house in Snowmass, near Aspen, set on 200 acres. It has 11 bedrooms, 12 baths, a media room, a climate-controlled wine room with a tasting area, a hot tub and a spa.

Read more »

Kevin MacDonald had just completed the first in a series of books that would come to define him. Awaiting feedback from his publisher 15 years ago, MacDonald sent his manuscript to a colleague in the psychology department at California State University Long Beach (CSULB). The feedback was not encouraging.

“What troubles me most is that your criticism of Jews may be taken seriously by groups and individuals who both fear and hate Jews,” Martin Fiebert wrote in a 12-point reply. “Your manuscript, unintentionally perhaps, reinforces the stereotype that all Jews, be they assimilated or not, are clannish, deceptive, and exploitive. I’m sure you would be dismayed to find that your book has a treasured place in the bookcases of neo-Nazis along with ‘Mein Kampf’ and the ‘Protocols of Zion.’” Read more »

Long before the first rapper stopped snitching or any Mafiosi swore an oath of omertà, there was the Jewish law of mesira.

The tenet that forbids Jews from informing on fellow Jews is one of the hurdles facing Brooklyn prosecutors probing the April 14 attack on a black man by two Jewish men, sources told the Daily News.

Authorities - invoking a complaint long cited in cases involving rappers - said the initial probe was hindered by the local Hasidim’s refusal to cooperate.

One source suggested the Orthodox community was taking a page from the rap world’s “stop snitching” handbook. But it was actually lifted directly from the Code of Jewish Law. Read more »

JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Prosecutors are investigating whether Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert took “significant sums” in illegal payments from one or more foreigners, police said on Thursday in a move likely to raise pressure on Olmert to resign and upset peace talks with the Palestinians.

A judicial source told Reuters that Olmert was suspected of taking hundreds of thousands of dollars before he became prime minister in 2006. A police spokesman, lifting a media gag order, named New York financier Morris Talansky as a key witness.  SOURCE>>>

Keeping high school students quiet is a tough job, but not for Leo Adler, the son of Holocaust survivors and a Holocaust expert who gave a presentation to the students of Birchwood Intermediate school Monday.

The cafeteria was filled with silent students following Adler’s every word, eager to hear what he had to say about the Holocaust.

Adler talked about his father and grandfather, who both were targeted by the Nazis, as well as the current issues evolving around racism. Read more »

News from the West provides the evidence that a disproportionate number of the most radical elements in the militant homosexual rights lobby are of Jewish origin. . .
Here is an exhaustive list proving, once and for all, that the radical homosexual movement in the United States is a Jewish movement. Jews created it and run it from top to bottom. They are pushing the perversion and degeneracy that is spreading disease, sin and sickness through America like a wildfire.
-The West

Larry Kramer — co-founder of “Act Up,” a homosexual/AIDS activist organization; co-founder of the Gay Men’s Health Crisis

Alan Klein — co-founder of group ACT UP, co-founder of group Queer Nation, National Communications Director and chief spokesperson for the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation [GLAAD]. Klein also co-founded the successful multimedia campaign STOPDRLAURA.COM Read more »

Even Jimmy Carter, who single handedly (without much Jewish appreciation) has done more to make Israel secure than any other living person, can’t change the march of demographics. Within the boundaries of the State of Israel and the occupied territories there are 5.4 million Jews and 4.6 million Palestinians. The Palestinian birth rate is almost three times that of the Israeli Jews. If anything the Jewish population is starting to fall as an increasing number of Jews decide that Israel has no future for them and in significant numbers emigrate. The far seeing Richard Nixon, when asked by Patrick Buchanan and his wife, how he saw the future of Israel, turned down his thumb “like a Roman emperor at the gladiators’ arena”.

Perhaps we are witnessing the death of Israel by a thousand cuts, the attrition of conflict and the attrition of population. Maybe after all the rabbis of Vienna who were sent in 1897 on a fact-finding mission to Palestine to investigate whether it was a suitable place for Jewish settlement were right. Read more »

LONDON - Documents released Monday show how the British government tried to send thousands of Palestine-bound Jewish survivors of the Nazi genocide back to postwar Germany without inflaming world opinion.

Could it be done? The answer was no. It was just two years after the end of the war and the world was outraged by the systematic murder of 6 million Jews by the Nazis in what became known as the Holocaust.

Despite the best efforts of early spin doctors to portray the move in the most sympathetic light, the decision to turn away the more than 4,500 Jews on board the Exodus refugee ship turned into a humanitarian and public relations debacle for Britain. Read more »

JERUSALEM (AFP) - Israel’s attorney general on Sunday announced the indictment of a former finance minister and close ally of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert over charges of embezzling over one million dollars.

Attorney General Menachem Mazuz published the indictment in a letter sent to parliament speaker Dalia Yitzik requesting the removal of Avraham Hirshson’s parliamentary immunity in view of the indictment.

The 37-page indictment included charges of embezzlement, graft and money laundering of over one million dollars that Hirshson had allegedly carried out when he headed the National Workers Federation between 1998 and 2005. Read more »

A university has withdrawn a researcher’s fellowship after he published an article claiming that the gas chambers of Auschwitz never existed.

Nicholas Kollerstrom, an academic specialising in astronomy, posted the article, The Auschwitz “Gas Chamber” Illusion, on the website of the revisionist Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust.

He claimed that only one million Jews died in the war and that “the only intentional mass extermination program[me] in the concentration camps of WW2 was targeted at Germans”. Read more »

Seven Palestinians have been killed in a raid by the Israeli army in the northern Gaza Strip, including four children and an elderly man.

The children’s mother was taken to hospital but died later.

The health ministry said shells were fired at a house in the town of Beit Hanoun where the family were eating breakfast.

The Israeli army denied attacking the house, saying instead that an air raid targeted armed men near the house.

Read more »

Israel dismissed on Friday a proposal by Hamas to call a conditional six-month truce in the Gaza Strip, calling it a ruse aimed at allowing the Palestinian Islamist group to recover from recent fighting.

“Hamas is biding time in order to rearm and regroup. There would be no need for Israel’s defensive actions if Hamas would cease and desist from committing terrorist attacks on Israelis,” Israeli government spokesman David Baker said.

In apparent reference to Israeli air strikes and commando raids in Gaza, Baker added: “Israel will continue to act to protect its citizens.” Read more »

TEL AVIV, ISRAEL - Doron Efrati was assigned to the Kfir Brigade, part of an infantry battalion that was especially created to serve in the West Bank following the outbreak of the second intifada.

He figured if he was going to be drafted anyway, he would agree to serve in the Israeli-occupied territories, “to see what really happens, and maybe to change things,” he says. “But I didn’t succeed.”

Today, he is one of 39 recently discharged soldiers whose testimonies are part of a grim new report on the situation in the West Bank city of Hebron, where the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) oversee a volatile population of 700 to 800 Jewish settlers living amid nearly 170,000 Palestinians. The 118-page report, which tells of systematic mistreatment of local Palestinians by both soldiers and settlers, was released during this week’s Passover holiday. Read more »

Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations on Thursday called former President Jimmy Carter “a bigot” for meeting with the leader of the militant Hamas movement in Syria.

Carter, a Nobel Peace Prize winner, “went to the region with soiled hands and came back with bloody hands after shaking the hand of Khaled Mashaal, the leader of Hamas,” Ambassador Dan Gillerman told a luncheon briefing for reporters.

The diplomat was questioned about problems facing his country during a wide-ranging discussion with reporters lasting more than an hour. The briefing was sponsored by The Israel Project, a Washington-based, media-oriented advocacy group. Read more »

Envoys from the U.S. and several nations walked out of a U.N. Security Council meeting Wednesday after Libya compared the situation in Gaza to Nazi concentration camps, council diplomats said.

The walkout was a rare protest by diplomats on the U.N.’s most powerful body against one of their own members. Libya is the only Arab representative on the council.

Council members held a closed meeting to discuss the possibility of issuing a press statement following a briefing on the situation in the Middle East. Assistant Secretary-General Angela Kane had reported on the escalation in violence and growing humanitarian plight in Gaza as well as rocket attacks against Israel. Read more »

Tzahi Hanegbi, who heads the Israeli parliament’s defence and foreign affairs committee, insisted in an interview with public radio that Israel fully respected its commitment “not to conduct espionage activities in the United States since the Pollard affair”.

The government publicly admitted in 1998 that Pollard had been an agent acting on its behalf and awarded him Israeli citizenship.

“What apparently is irritating the Americans is that we had told them Pollard was our only agent, and this new affair could raise questions,” said former Mossad boss Danny Yatom, now a member of parliament. Read more »

The research center where Kadish worked on the Army base housed a library of documents, including many with classified information related to U.S. national defense. From 1979 through 1985, Kadish signed out at least 35 classified documents, according to the complaint.

Kadish told the FBI that he knew that one restricted document he provided to the agent included atomic-related information and that he did not have the required clearance to borrow it, according to the complaint.

Prosecutors say the Israeli called Kadish on March 20 and told him to lie to federal law enforcement agents who were investigating possible espionage. Read more »

MyFoxNY.com  –  New York — A U.S. Army mechanical engineer has been arrested on charges that he slipped classified documents about nuclear weapons to an employee of the Israeli Consulate.

The arrest of Ben-ami Kadish is being detailed Tuesday by the U.S. attorney in Manhattan and FBI officials.

A criminal complaint says the activities occurred from 1979through 1985. Kadish worked at the U.S. Army’s Armament Research,Development and Engineering Center in Dover, N.J. Read more »

A pro-Israel pressure group is orchestrating a secret, long-term campaign to infiltrate the popular online encyclopedia Wikipedia to rewrite Palestinian history, pass off crude propaganda as fact, and take over Wikipedia administrative structures to ensure these changes go either undetected or unchallenged.

A series of emails by members and associates of the pro-Israel group CAMERA (Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America), provided to The Electronic Intifada (EI), indicate the group is engaged in what one activist termed a “war” on Wikipedia.

A 13 March action alert signed by Gilead Ini, a “Senior Research Analyst” at CAMERA, calls for “volunteers who can work as ‘editors’ to ensure” that Israel-related articles on Wikipedia are “free of bias and error, and include necessary facts and context.” However, subsequent communications indicate that the group not only wanted to keep the effort secret from the media, the public, and Wikipedia administrators, but that the material they intended to introduce included discredited claims that could smear Palestinians and Muslims and conceal Israel’s true history. Read more »

A group of German politicians cut their visit to the West Bank short due to threats from Jewish settlers. Israel should curb the fanaticism of Jewish settlers, said the delegation. The committee members had said that Israeli security forces were unwilling to intervene when Hebron residents began hurling insults and threats at them and that their visit could not be continued.

“Many of us lost German roots and family members during the holocaust,” said David Wilder, (spokesman for the Jewish community). “When Germans come to Hebron, they should at least meet with members of the community.”

Jerzy Montag (a parliamentarian for the German Green Party) called this a “grotesque twisting of the truth.” he said he was willing to talk with the settlers, but not after being insulted and threatened. SOURCE>>>

The founding fathers of modern-day Israel likewise knew how to play a good game of geopolitics. Chaim Weizmann and David Ben-Gurion took advantage of, at various times, British, French, American and Soviet interests to secure the Balfour declaration, the United Nations resolution dividing Palestine, and military support for the War of Independence. The strength and heroism of the Haganah obviously mattered quite a bit, but without the right allies, Israel would likely never have come into existence.

The Jewish state is today militarily and politically stronger than at any time in its history. At the same time, plenty of threats remain — and the future of Israel may again depend on correctly reading the geopolitical trends and making the best of them. It may even require Jerusalem to look for allies besides America, perhaps ones in unexpected places. Read more »

A leading human rights group called on Friday for an independent investigation into the death of a Reuters cameraman and other civilians in Gaza this week, saying Israeli forces may have targeted the media.

Reuters cameraman Fadel Shana, a 23-year-old Palestinian, was killed in the Gaza Strip on Wednesday while covering events in the enclave for the international news agency. He had been filming an Israeli tank dug in about 1,000 yards away.

“Human Rights Watch’s investigations at the site found evidence suggesting that an Israeli tank crew fired recklessly or deliberately at the journalist’s team,” the New York-based group Human Rights Watch said in a statement. Read more »

Israel announced plans Friday to build 100 more homes in two West Bank settlements, one deep inside the territory sought by the Palestinians for their future state.

Israel’s housing minister said Israel never promised to freeze all such construction, although a U.S.-backed peace plan calls for a moratorium on settlement building.

In a television interview, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said the expansion of settlements has emerged as a key obstacle to progress in peace negotiations with Israel.   MORE>>>

Pope Benedict XVI became the first pope to visit an American synagogue Friday, bringing greetings for the Passover holiday and accepting gifts of matzo and a seder plate. Benedict, 81, stopped briefly at Park East Synagogue on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, near the Vatican residence.

“I find it moving to recall that Jesus, as a young boy, heard the words of Scripture and prayed in a place such as this,” he said.

At a Roman Catholic church in Manhattan, the pope later warned other Christian leaders against “so-called prophetic actions” that conflict with traditional views of the Bible, a reference to the debate over Scripture that is fracturing churches in America and around the world. Read more »

Senator Obama counts among the writers who have influenced his thinking two giants of Jewish American letters, Saul Bellow and Philip Roth. The Democratic presidential hopeful shared his admiration for the two authors yesterday at a meeting with Philadelphia-area Jewish leaders, addressing the crowd from the bima as his campaign passed out buttons with the candidate’s name spelled in Hebrew letters, according to a pool report released by the campaign.

…he went out of his way to accent his support for the Jewish state. For the first time, he pledged explicitly that if he won the presidency he would appoint an ambassador to the United Nations who would veto any anti-Semitic resolutions against Israel. “Part of the task, I think, of the United States and part of–part of the leadership I think I can prove is, I think I can be a powerful voice on the world stage in saying, ‘Let’s stop with the nonsense with respect to Israel,” he said. FULL ARTICLE>>>

“In political life in America today, everyone says they’re a friend of Israel.” That is one of the conclusions Aaron David Miller draws in his powerful new book on America’s elusive search for Arab-Israeli peace, entitled The Much Too Promised Land. Miller, a long time member of the State Department’s peace team, is absolutely right.
That is a phenomenal achievement — primarily for America’s Jewish community, and for Israel itself. And that achievement also begs a question — how does that friendship translate into policy; how is it put to use?

For many Israelis who define themselves as progressives, myself included, the friendship has come to resemble a rather abusive relationship. Israel is cast as the distant, idealized and embattled homeland whose role is not to cede any inch of territory and not to talk to the bad guys. No, we should send generation after generation to defend illegal settlements and to guard the very checkpoints that give rise to yet more frustration, anger and ultimately violence. Ofcourse, Israelis are first and foremost responsible for solving our own problems. It is however not made any easier when our greatest ally and enabler encourages our most self-destructive instincts. A friend does not hand over the car keys to a drunken soul mate. A friend does not turn a blind eye to the folly and entanglement of endless settlement expansion. Periods of Jewish sovereignty and distant history begin to be self-inflicted wounds of homegrown zealots. Read more »

The Israeli newspaper Ma’ariv on Wednesday reported that Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu told an audience at Bar Ilan university that the September 11, 2001 terror attacks had been beneficial for Israel.“We are benefiting from one thing, and that is the attack on the Twin Towers and Pentagon, and the American struggle in Iraq,” Ma’ariv quoted the former prime minister as saying. He reportedly added that these events “swung American public opinion in our favor.” Read more »

American Christian fanatics gathered to celebrate a racial-religious extremist government that occupies other’s land and murders civilians on a daily basis.  This picture is a of Palestinian infant who must have been terrorising this ‘holy’ country of Israel.  Throw the Christians and the Jews to the lions….

Victory Christian Center was nearly full Monday night as some 3,200 people turned out to show their support for Israel and the Jewish people.

“A Night to Honor Israel” was a festive event, with a full orchestra, choir and soloists singing Israeli music to images of Jerusalem on a large screen, laser lights, dancers, a drum choir and the blowing of the shofar, the traditional ram’s horn.

The event, which included people from dozens of churches and several synagogues and organizations, was held as part of the celebration of the 60th anniversary of the modern state of Israel and was shown live on the church’s Web site. Read more »

PETER KOHN

CIVIL liberties arguments do not apply when extremist organisations use the internet to spread hatred, B’nai B’rith Anti-Defamation Commission (ADC) chair John Searle said last week.

“Clearly a line has to be drawn between freedom of speech, voicing of differing opinions – and material that just incites racial hatred, religious intolerance and violence. When that line is crossed, that material ought not to be freely available to all who log onto the web.” Read more »

Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter met an ex-minister in Hamas’ government on Tuesday, defying Israeli leaders who shunned the Nobel Peace Prize laureate over his contacts with the Islamist group.

Naser al-Shaer, who served as deputy prime minister in the Hamas-led government that the United States and other Western powers boycotted, was greeted by Carter with a hug and kisses to both cheeks, a member of Carter’s delegation said.

“Mr. Carter wanted to listen to the positions of different Palestinian figures. The meeting was very good and he promised to continue such meetings,” said Shaer, who was among several Palestinian political figures to meet with the former president. Read more »

British Jewish activists, decrying the far-right British National Party as anti-Semitic and racist, are urging former Londoners living in Israel to vote in the upcoming mayoral and council elections in an attempt to foil the BNP’s bid to secure seats.A joint campaign against the BNP’s bid for electoral success is being mounted by the Board of Deputies of British Jews, the umbrella group representing U.K. Jewry, anti-racism and fascism organization and the UJS.

It is important that olim [immigrants to Israel] vote, because any vote is one to keep the BNP out. It doesn’t matter who you vote for, so long as it isn’t for the BNP, and that will help keep the BNP out of the London assembly,” said Jenni Woolf, National Campaigns Fieldworker for the Union of Jewish Students (UJS), speaking to Haaretz on Monday. Read more »

It is still unclear what happened late on Sunday night and early Monday morning at Kibbutz Ein Gedi, next to the Dead Sea.

What is known is that two Scandinavian women tourists, aged 17 and 19, returned to the guest house where they were staying and said they had been raped by three men from the kibbutz.

The women said they had gone late at night to the room of one of the men, where they were later attacked and raped. The guest-house manager called the police who arrested the three suspects. The young men told the police they had had sex with the young women with their full consent. Read more »

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