Several weeks ago a few kooks were allowed to monopolize a weekend of airtime on KPFK in a paternalistic and insulting project to "educate" African Americans. The self-proclaimed leaders (who don't seem to have any followers) used the occasion to broadcast viciously homophobic and anti-semitic material; they also took a few swipes at feminism. By anti-semitic I do not mean anti-zionist; I mean full-blown Nazi-like stuff. The homophobic sleaze would have put Michael Savage to shame. Why did our allegedly progressive radio station broadcast slurs that even MSNBC had declared intolerable.
The station's dictatorial manager, Eva Georgia, who lacks even the most basic social skills in her dealings with others, has refused to answer people who have written in to complain. Apparently she sees herself as a monarch who has no need to answer missives from serfs. Don't let the KPFK management get away with this - get on their website and use the contact feature to demand answers.

You need to document exactly what you claim because your claims are obviously subject to interpretation. You need to make exact quotes of what is said when you find something offensive. Better still, make a recording, and then make an mp3 and put it on the web.

If you don't do this, it's impossible to segregate your complaint form the many others that come from either people that have an opinion that would be judged as incorrect by a "reasonable standard" of other listeners, or to make sure you're not just one of the many people that seek to discredit the station just for the sake of discrediting it. DON'T misunderstand what I'm saying. Read this slowly. I'm not claiming you are either of these two types of people. What I'm telling you is that if you don't take more professional actions to document what you say, other people will have no ability to determine if you are indeed not coming from one of the two categories above.

Until you document in exact detail, I suggest everyone ignore your message.

i've heard that eva can be a little harsh myself... no harsher than i've heard some on air personalities (that i respect, frankly) can be, too. sounds to me like all sides over there could use a boost in people skills. and a little contention at the station could be a good thing. you dont want everyone going around agreeing with each other (that's mark shubb's wet dream)

as far as hate speech on kpfk, its better than censorship. let's get these people exposed for what they are and hold the programmers accountable for what the hosts say! we don't know who's a racist unless we let em tell us!

i'm not happy with all of the changes in the schedule, but lets see where this goes. if yer really mad and think evas a threat (which i think is silly, although im not a fan) then i'll see you on the ballot for l.a.b. and you can fight her from there.

"Regular Listener" posted that KPFK "broadcast viciously homophobic and anti-semitic material; they also took a few swipes at feminism. By anti-semitic I do not mean anti-zionist; I mean full-blown Nazi-like stuff."

WHAT AN OUTRAGEOUS LIE! Just because it is alleged by an annoymous person that a "Nazi-like" broadcast was made on KPFK does NOT make it so. The accusation is not backed up by a SINGLE bit of evidence. We are offered none of the remarks from the broadcast in quotation marks... just a heap of slander and hearsay.

If you want to attack "African Mental Liberation" broadcasts on KPFK... give us transcripts and quoted material to prove your point. Otherwise... keep your mouth shut and don't make a fool of yourself.

This is a good idea:

http://la.indymedia.org/news/2003/07/71000.php

KPFK can do what WBAI does with thier web streaming and it's not going to cost a penny because I think live365.com will give it to them for free.

The streaming servers to KPFK.org have been swamped. I always listen on the web and within the last two weeks, they reached some critical mass or something and it's now almost always impossible to get it.

Spread that petition around. It's kind of a no-brainer, since the service extension can be done for free.

I listened to alot of that program and I didn't hear any ant-semetic stuff, but I did hear alot of racist hate whitey stuff. I aggree that Eva is causing problems which is why alot of programers like Christopher Sprinkle are leaving. There is alot of anamosity coming from the on air personalities as well. So much so they are complaining right on the air about upcoming changes. Everybody should pay close attention to the upcoming changes in the schedule.
This African liberation stuff is just like the skinheads or brown pride. We all need to unite and stop claiming that one people are better then the other.

enough said

It a white person speaks of racial issues, it's sensitive and informative. When a black person or other person of color speaks truths about racism, they are immediately labeled a racist, a double standard!

Get out if the box of your ethnic isolation, apathy and ignorance. There is a not well known illness suffered by many of African American decent, it's "post traumatic slavery syndrome.

Racism remains America's cancer, deal with it. If your not of hue, look at your self. Deal with it and try to read "Smartest White Men" start easy...Then get your hands on some Dick Gregory (then) or Cornell West (now).

I heard part of the weekend broadcasting, and I heard other parts of it described by people I trust. I don't have a "transcript" to give you, nor do I think that there are any listeners who heard the entire "show," which took up an entire weekend. But its purpose was clearly not to fight racism. It was to inspire hatred, and some of the alleged experts on race who took part in it sounded like they belonged in a psychiatric intitution getting needed treatment rather than behind a microphone. The hatred directed at Jews was direct and specific, and included claims that Jew have victimized Africans for thousands of years and actually stole the Hebrew alphabet from an African civilization (which apparantly immediately forgot it because Jews had stolen it from them). Gays and lesbians were also singled out as enemies of the African American community. Perhaps not surprisingly, these reactionaries who had so much time to spew this sewage had little or nothing to say about capitalism or its relationship to institutionalized racism. In fact the (not so implicit) message of the "Weekend" was get rid of the Jews and fags so we can get our share of the capitalist goodies.
This show needs to be reviewed by the Pacifica National Board. Presumably, KPFK can provide them with both a written transcript and a recording. If there really was nothing homophobic or anti-semitic about the program, the KPFK management should have no hesitancy in handing this material over.
The fact that Eva Georgia allowed this material to air needs to be considered in her next evalutation. (The last one was suppressed because it was highly negative and recommended that she be fired). One added worry is whether this disaster will aid Zionists and corporate radio conglomerates who have been pressing for KPFK to lose its broadcasting license. Nothing like playing into their hands. Eva has to go, and filth like the Liberation Weekend should never again besmirch KPFK's airwaves.

Sorry, but without a transcript or mp3, you can't realistically expect people to take your observations without a huge slab of salt. Everything is relative, including perspectives on racism.

Next time, roll a tape or something. Otherwise, you will not have an impact.

I listened to the entire weekend, taped it and don't know what you are talking about. If you want a copy to in order to substantiate your libelous claims, I believe the entire weekend is being sold at Eso Won Books on LaBrea Avenue. That being said, you can do some research and come back for an honest discussion. How does that sound?

If you listened to the whole thing and have it on tape and find nothing wrong with it, that says a good deal about you, and what it says is not very positive. By the way, the bookstore you mention made a big splash a few years ago when the first Liberation Weekend aired on KPFK; it marketed copies of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion as a good explanation of how Jews secretly control society. Easy to see where you are coming from - seig heil.

It is not up to you to tell me that I need tapes or anything else to express my anger at anti-semitism and homophobia at KPFK. And if Eva wasn't afraid that this issue is going to get her canned she would not be trying to avoid it by refusing to respond to listener complaints. She is the one who is gong to wind up producing tapes - either for the Pacifica board or maybe for the FCC. Thanks to her laziness in not reviewing the material that was going to be on that show before it aired Michael Powell and his billionaire friends might have the perfect excuse to take away the station's license. Clear Channel here we come. If that happens we can all thank Eva and the kooks who produced that piece of filth.

Let's go back to what I said in Take 1 as "x"

---------------------

"DON'T misunderstand what I'm saying. Read this slowly. I'm not claiming you are either of these two types of people. What I'm telling you is that if you don't take more professional actions to document what you say, other people will have no ability to determine if you are indeed not coming from one of the two categories above. "

=====================

No one said you couldn't rant and rave.

All I said was that it's impossible to objectively assess your views without you taking more effort to make sure your audience has the ability to assess your views.

Period.

Goodbye.

I am not a "professional" radio - or computer person, so don't give me any of that elitist crap. Listeners who hear right wing garbage on KPFK have every right to complain to the so-called station management and expect a response - and are under no obligation to provide you (maybe you are one of Eva's flunkies?) with a recording of anything. You sound like you would have been right at home back in the Schubb/Cooper days.

Like I said, I listened to the entire weekend and have it taped. If you had done even a minimum amount of research, you could find out on what day, at what time and what lecturer (there were many in the program) had the "offensive" material. I would be able to post what info I have so that IMCers could honestly disscuss it (to the best of my ability--I'm not posting the whole thing). But you don't want a discussion, as I suggested, only a platform to make unsubstatiated allegations. So I am suggesting that everyone ignore you.

Wrong again - KPFK listeners who heard deeply offensive material on that show don't owe it to to you or anyone else to "research" anything. And there are plenty of listeners who heard that sewage. What Eva owes to us, the listeners and subscribers, is an explanation of how it got on the air, an apology, and a pledge to never let Nazi-like bilge like that flow out of KPFK's studios again. Actually, what the network owes to us is an obligation to can this incompetent, dictatorial and abusive bureaucrat.

turning on a tape recorder.... then making quotes of what is said.......

anyone can do that

you're protestations about "elitist crap" is silly

Take your tape recorder and stick it up your ass. Or, better yet, use it to record some of Eva's remarkably stupid comments.

It's interesting that those who criticize KPFK are treated with venom lest they present the facts, but criticism of the major media outlets is treated with dignity and respect, and even w/o the facts, those presenting what they heard (minus an actual taped recording) are held in high esteem. Could you imagine anyone sending off a blistering post after someone might report what Dan Rather or whoever distorts one night because they didn't attach the proper mp3 file? All I'm saying is that proof is needed, but don't turn into Bush and demand it from one side then chuckle the other way when you need it from the other. Also, things would work a lot better no matter what your opinions if we'd quit blowing up at eachother over things like this.

You are boring me.

Fair enough, no more blowing up - and please don't give me instructions on when I am allowed to complain about offensive programming on a station that I have long supported financially.

pick up your copies of Afrikan Mental Liberation Weekend at Eso Won Bookstore

also support other independent bookstores in LA






anticrisis

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"It's interesting that those who criticize KPFK are treated with venom lest they present the facts"

what?

that's not what I did. Venom?

Look buddy, documenting what is done wrong in the mainstream with audio clips, or specific quotes or whatever is EXACTLY what people do when educating others about what the mainstream media does wrong.

If anyone has been venomous or screaming or anything, it's the guy I've been writing to above. (tape recording up my ass?)

Geeze, why is it so hard for people to understand that it's actually helpful to their effort to have documentation?

whatever........

Documenting specific cases so that other people can understand what is wrong IS EXACTLY WHAT IS DONE WITH THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA, and it is EXACTLY what other people do with media like KPFK. Don't be lazy. Don't be belligerent (tape recording up my ass?) Do yourself a favor and learn how to make your case so that people take you seriously, and/or so that people can have a discussion with you. Screaming at them isn't productive.

For an example of how documentation using specific quotes, you can look at some of the media activist alerts that FAIR.Org does when focusing on the mainstream media (yes, Virginia, people really do document when it comes to the mainstream media)

This programing was pure hate plain and simple. How would brown people feel if they had to listen to a weekend of Arian pride. I wonder if how if would go over if we had speakers like Matt hale telling us how the inferior non-white races are taking over and that Jesus was white and Ismael was a bastard. Hey they could even interview the author of the bell curve and get his prospective. Then even all these Kobe sm fuckers would listen to KPFK.
I'ts ok to take pride in your race and cellebrate your heratige
but when you start claiming racial superiority then thats exactly what hitler did.

The Pacifica radio network is exceeded only by Al Jazeera when it comes to innacurate reporting. You can pretty much figure that everything you hear on those airwaves is a lie.

I've listened to Amy Goodman for hours and hours and have yet to hear a single truthful statement. Pacifica is 'Disinformation Central.'

They're the lead propoganda organization for the deceitful and dishonest left wing extremists.

You get more honesty and integrity in any 5 minute clip of the Rush Limbaugh show than you get in a year of Pacifica.

We on the left can even see that not everything that Ann Coulter says is total bull shit (just a high percentage). You, on the other hand, are like some whacko robot that posts the most ridiculous statements here as if you really think you mater. In the hours and hours of reportage you've heard Amy Goodman deliver, you can't find one single fact?

God damn, you really do a good job showing everyone what a buffoon you are.

I'm not aware of any untrue statements by Ann Coulter.

I'm not aware of any true statements by Amy Goodman.

and you prove that all the time

"Bush Admirer"

circle
circle going nowhere
circle stuck in neutral

wavemaster: "This programing was pure hate plain and simple. How would brown people feel if they had to listen to a weekend of Arian pride. I wonder if how if would go over if we had speakers like Matt hale telling us how the inferior non-white races are taking over and that Jesus was white and Ismael was a bastard. Hey they could even interview the author of the bell curve and get his prospective. Then even all these Kobe sm fuckers would listen to KPFK.
I'ts ok to take pride in your race and cellebrate your heratige
but when you start claiming racial superiority then thats exactly what hitler did."

Ho HAAAAAAA. What a riot. White folks get so upset when white supremacy is exposed for the perfect little scam job that it is. Nothing in the Afrikan Mental Liberation weekend said anything about bombing, gasing, raping, enslaving or throwing white folks in jail (which has been white folks' policy toward non-whites since they stepped out of Europe). But somehow recognizing that through achaeology, epitemology, science and common sense, civilization and humanity itself originated in Afrika is hate speech. Kpfk doesn't have to have to have Aryan pride weekend. All anyone has to do is read the propaganda called history books and turn on the TV. And if you open your standard Bible, it will still have a picture of two Scandanavians posing as Adam and Eve. So get over it.

You mean etymology, instead of "epitemology". "Epitemology" sounds like some strange combination of etymology and epistemology.

...africa not afrika. white people didn't go through all that trouble to properly name a continent so you could fuck it up. also what's achaeology i've never heard of it?

Grammar, you're out of your jurisdiction. this is a spelling matter!

"Ho HAAAAAAA. What a riot. White folks get so upset when white supremacy is exposed for the perfect little scam job that it is. Nothing in the http://www.members.aol.com/spiritflight7/";>Afrikan Mental Liberation Weekend said anything about bombing, gasing, raping, enslaving or throwing white folks in jail (which has been white folks' policy toward non-whites since they stepped out of Europe). But somehow recognizing that through http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=archaeology";>archaeology, http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=etymology";>etymology, science and common sense, civilization and humanity itself originated in Afrika is hate speech. Kpfk doesn't have to have to have Aryan pride weekend. All anyone has to do is read the propaganda called history books and turn on the TV. And if you open your standard Bible, it will still have a picture of two Scandanavians posing as Adam and Eve. So get over it."

Now let's see what else they do to avoid actually dealing with the content of the message.

"All anyone has to do is read the propaganda called history books"

The reason for having Euro-centric history books is simply a matter of economics. History books are much slimmer when focusing on the modest achievements of European culture. It would take numerous volumes to include all of the scientific and cultural achievements coming out of Africa. I challenge you to think of any scientific or cultural achievement of the past 1000 years that did not come from Africa.

"The reason for having Euro-centric history books is simply a matter of economics. History books are much slimmer when focusing on the modest achievements of European culture. It would take numerous volumes to include all of the scientific and cultural achievements coming out of Africa."

This statement is only partially true. It would take very little space in a history book indeed to change "Christopher Columbus 'discovered' America," which is not only Eurocentric (no one can discover a place already populated), it's also inacurate. Archaelogical evidence proves that Africans traveled from the Old World to the Americas hundreds of years before Columbus. So why not change it? Because then we have to give up this whole romantic fairtyale about the origins of the United States as a white boy who "discovered" that the world was round, then sailed to the other side for "Gold, God and Glory". We all learned that propaganda in the fifth grade. Christopher Columbus sets the tone of the history of the Americas as a white (male) success story. Perhaps the biggest irony is that the end of the United States may prove to be the story of a great white male failure -- George W. Bush.

"Archaelogical evidence proves that Africans traveled from the Old World to the Americas hundreds of years before Columbus."

The earliest people in the Americas were people of the Negritic African race, who entered the Americas perhaps as early as 100,000 years ago, by way of the bering straight and about thirty thousand years ago in a worldwide maritime undertaking that included journeys from the then wet and lake filled Sahara towards the Indian Ocean and the Pacific, and from West Africa across the Atlantic Ocean towards the Americas.
According to the Gladwin Thesis, this ancient journey occurred, particularly about 75,000 years ago and included Black Pygmies, Black Negritic peoples and Black Australoids similar to the Aboriginal Black people of Australia and parts of Asia, including India.

http://www.raceandhistory.com/historicalviews/ancientamerica.htm

important related ideas:
Welsing's definition of racism
anarchist people of color conference



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anticrisis

Edwin Johnston of Houston is baiting the Los Angeles community with this post in an effort to undermine any hope for listener/subscriberes of KPFK and the rest of Pacifica to determine the future of the station they support. Ignore the rantings of this cointelpro loon.

Butt the hell out, Edwin. Go back to Houston.

about anonymous messages from people trying to wrap a snitch jacket on hardworking activists ...
One finger points out while three point right back.

Well, there he is. Proof positive that Edwin Johnston needs to mind his own business in Houston.

He complains that principled people throughout the Pacifica network comment on his activities in Houston, but can't help coming to LA to stir up the shit.

What a loon.

You just strapped on your own snitch jacket, Edwin. Deal with it.

It is impossible to assess this inflammatory statement without a transcript or a link to the audio version. Publishing such a comment without any evidence is irresponsible. I don't think the purpose of this post is to complain about biased content on the air, but to get people agitated enough to forget that we have bigger fish to fry. Not that racist remarks should not be dealt with, but that anyone who really wanted them dealt with would give us the actual words without the spin. When this stuff happens on the major news outlets, the papers reprint the exact words that caused the flap: where are the exact words? Without them, what are your motives?

Lew Hill, as most people who have studied the history of Pacifica, was it's founder. In the end, sadly, he committed suicide.
So, in oder to defame his name, a troll uses it here to falsely label me a CoIntelPro operative, and falsely stating that I am the anonymous author of the original post in this thread.
I like Eva Georgia, and would not attack her. I am in favor of her changing the KPFK schedule to serve a wider number of communities in the LA area.
But the troll, operating under the name Lew Hill, wants to use this discussion to sow distrust at LA IndyMedia, and is doing so in the exact manner which is being questioned here by some about not offering evidence to support one's claims. This is obvious for the proverbial ten yards away.
I hope that you continue to discuss and debate the changes at KPFK, so that it adds to the progress that the station is making.
There will be trolls attempting to short circuit your discussions, not only from LA, but wingnuts from Houston as well, and other Pacifica cities. Best to take them ins tride adn keep your eyes on the prize.

You smeared anyone from outside Houston who dared to comment on your cointelpro-like pro-behavior, and now you have the nerve to interfere with KPFK's business?

Mind your own business, you Houston buttinsky. We did need you screw ups telling LA folks what to do.

This thread is full of you and your kook powermonger pals.

Wakka, wakka, wakka, like some kinda wind up cymbal-clanging monkee doll.
Yes, we'll be waiting a long, long time before you present any evidence to back up your absurd claims.
Is this what IndyMedia needs: libelers hiding behind pseudonyms making false accusations and attempting to spread fear?
Infantile.

I think it would be excellent if the Homeland Security people makes lists of all KPFK subscribers so they can be rounded up at the appropriate time. As for the broadcasters, I can see the list of charges already: treason, incitement to riot, incitement to murder, solicitation for murder, solicitation for arson, being an agent of an (enemy) foreign power, spreading of hate speech, etc. Slander. Slander against elected officials. Incitement to violence against elected officials. You guys make the Symbionese Liberation Army look like pussies. Really, you rank right up there with Goebbels as the masters of disinformation and distortion. Except you have crossed the line way too many times, and you have forgotten that we are now at war.

Listen, traitors. We are living in a new world and have been since 9/11. You are backing the wrong side, be it France, the Taliban, Al Queda, or Fidel. In the Clinton era you could get away with it. But I predict your days are numbered and there will be some sedition laws with teeth in them, and soon.

I would like to go see you off on the day of the big KPFK roundup. I will stand by the curb and wave my hankie.

You know your proablably right, pego I'm sure Mr Ashcroft has a list of all KPFK subscribers, but don't forget the ANSWER mailing list as well. And guess what I'm a proud member of both of them. So if Ashcroft and his goons want to come get me then let them cause you right wing fucks won't scare me into submission while our boys are dying in an unjust occupation, not war! And Bush and the neocons days are numbered becuase they lied about WMD and everybody knows it. Why aren't we bombing Saudi Arabia their the ones who financed the hijackers which is why Bush won't let the commision see the documents he was privy to before 9-11. Bush Senior is a member of the Carlyle group who has a very close buisness relationship with the saudi family.
We all know that the neocons in the Bush regime are just defense lobbiest who rotate back and forth between the pentagon and the defense industry to keep the billions of our hard earned tax dollars flowing into the money pit that is the pentagon. Our military is being used as the strong arm for corporate gangster billionairs while the attack dogs like Sean Hanity in the media scream about social programs and illegal allians. When they say less government they mean less for everyday folk and more for the ultra rich and weapons merchents. So fuck you Pego cause you and your kind will be exposed

you said a mouthfull. Amen.

I am a Muslim - American who believes that a fascist element has infiltrated and taken over Islam, mainly from the Wahabbi sect in
Saudia Arabia, but also from Iran and from the Al Azhar Mosque in Cairo -- the school that produced Osama;s #2 and various other Egyptian extremists.

Once upon a time Islam was not so reactionery, there were multiple schools of thought, and a lot of Muslims were opposed to the fascist thinking of the Wahabbis and the reactionary elements in Iran. Oil revenues went straight into the pockets of these backwards hillbilly types. It would be like in America, if suddenly David Duke and other American nazi types suddenly inherited the entire oil sector....that is basically what happened in the Islamic world. The scum of the Islamic and Arab world, by a series of unhappy accidents of timing and politiics - this scum came into control of all of the oil revenues in this part of the globe. So of course they have used their vast revenues to fund these perverse schools of Islam for thirty plus years now, funding mosques and schools and charities all over the Islamic and Arab world. The net result is that any moderation and tolerance you might have once found in this part of the world has been eradicated. No one is willing to speak the truth anymore.

I may not agree with George Bush on everything but he was right to take out Saddam, and it will be a plus for the Islamic and Arab world if he de-legitimizes the regimes in the more repressive countries - Iran, Saudia Arabia, Syria, Egypt, Pakistan, Libya, and Sudan. Once the funding from these countries is no longer pouring into the hands of terrorists - that's right, terrorists and NOT militants - then maybe people in the Middle East can move forward. Because right now with the stranglehold the fascist element has on life and religion in the Middle East and South Asia - we are in trouble and either we will kill each other in various insane conflicts or our Islamic countries will provoke wars with India, the US, or Israel , that will result in terrible destruction.

KPFK is a real sewer of lies. It is lies about the Arab world. It is lies about Islam. It is lies about Cuba and lies about the so-called wonderful socialist paradise the USSR never was but that you guys shed crocodile tears over. I do not understand how people how are nominally intelligent can persist in these lies and this propaganda when at least some of you have actually been to or visited the places you report on, and you know what you are saying is untruths.

Thank you for the refreshing bit of truth that you posted at la-imc.

I totally agree with you. In my travels, I have worked with many Muslims, and the vast majority of them are concerned only with the same things we all are: family, job, home, etc. Without exception, they have been caring, friendly, helpful, humorous, and kind.

It's a terrible shame that some few extremists have gotten hold of sufficient power that allows them to export their hateful, violent perversion of Islam, which threatens not only non-Muslims, but the moderate Muslims as well.

I thank you again for your insight, but be aware...you're going to be attacked for your views. imc never met a Muslim extremist they didn't love, and anyone who disturbs this little fantasy of theirs is a heretic, and faces burning at the stake.

Thank you for the refreshing bit of truth that you posted at la-imc.

I totally agree with you. In my travels, I have worked with many Christians, and the vast majority of them are concerned only with the same things we all are: family, job, home, etc. Without exception, they have been caring, friendly, helpful, humorous, and kind.

It's a terrible shame that some few extremists have gotten hold of sufficient power that allows them to export their hateful, violent perversion of Christianity, which threatens not only non-Christians, but the moderate Christians as well.

I thank you again for your insight, but be aware...you're going to be attacked for your views. Republicans never met a Christian extremist they didn't love, and anyone who disturbs this little fantasy of theirs is a heretic, and faces burning at the stake.

Thank you for the refreshing bit of truth that you posted at la-imc.

I totally agree with you. In my travels, I have worked with many Jews, and the vast majority of them are concerned only with the same things we all are: family, job, home, etc. Without exception, they have been caring, friendly, helpful, humorous, and kind.

It's a terrible shame that some few extremists have gotten hold of sufficient power that allows them to export their hateful, violent perversion of Judiasm, which threatens not only non-Jews, but the moderate Jews as well.

I thank you again for your insight, but be aware...you're going to be attacked for your views. imc never met a Jew hater they didn't love, and anyone who disturbs this little fantasy of theirs is a heretic, and faces burning at the stake.

Thank you for the refreshing bit of truth that you posted at la-imc.

I totally agree with you. In my travels, I have worked with many idiots, and the vast majority of them are concerned only with the same things we all are: family, job, home, etc. Without exception, they have been caring, friendly, helpful, humorous, and kind.

It's a terrible shame that some few extremists have gotten hold of sufficient power that allows them to export their hateful, violent perversion of idiocy, which threatens not only non-idiots, but the moderate idiots as well.

I thank you again for your insight, but be aware...you're going to be attacked for your views. Republicans never met a idiot they didn't want to elect, and anyone who disturbs this little fantasy of theirs is a heretic, and faces burning at the stake.

Maybe Ashcroft et al will do to the ANSWER and ISM crowd what the victorious North Vietnamese did to the South Vietnamese who were ideologically tainted - send them all to re-education camps where thy can raise pigs or make bricks or something else - productive. Personally I would prefer a Red Guards style denunciatilon first, with Amy Goodman and Noam Chomsky and the rest forced to wear dunce caps while being pelted with garbage.

Ernesto you are too modest. I propose Amy and Noam and the rest of the ringleaders of the revisionists be kept naked in bamboo tiger cages , and their minions and lackeys shoud be forced to urinate on them and deposit fecal matter on them , as Amy, Noam , et al are wheeled down the street on floats.

Ernesto , Bob, you guys are on the right track, but allow me to please make a more compelling suggestion. The twin towers site can be used to put up a coliseum for gladiators. The captured enemy combattants from Guantanamo could be featured fighters, and Amy and Noam and various other pro Al Queada types (Yussuf Islam , otherwise known as Cat Stevens; Edward Said, Tom Friedman, the shill for the Saudis, and Reverend Farouk-ican and his gunsels,the DC Snipers, all could also be invited participate.

Imagine old Amy battling it out with Noam, one with the net and trident, the other with a spear and short sword! Who wouldn't pay to see that!

Recent historic battles could be re-enacted, such as the Battle of Tora Bora. Small scale Afghani mountains could be built, etc etc.

Since so many people are saying the US is Rome, why not eliminate the facade, and act like Rome? Besides, this would generate a whole lot of money that a bunch of slow to erect office buildings might not bring in so expeditiously. The money could go to the families of 9/11 fund, to the many pensioners whose savings went up in smoke, etc etc.

And since Al Jazeera loves blood and gore their cameramen could have front row seats (if they pay for them) and the folks back in Araby could watch their hometwon heroes battle it out, live from New York!

8/19, not a word of condemnation today from KPFK schlockmeisters when a bus full of children is blown up in Jerusalem by a Hamas suicide bomber.

Does any one else find this curious, that KPFK never says a word when Jewish children are massacred, but cries rivers of tears for every Palestinian piece of shit suicide bomber who is terminated before he can accomplish his mission?

I find it more than suspicious. Also I find very suspicious the funding for KPFK, which along with sister stations KPFA and WBAI, have become the official voice of Islamic terrorism and chief apologists for same, here in the USA. Now KPFK just announced today that running expenses for KPFK are $250k per month. That is for KPFK alone, not all of Pacifica. I think the only way possible for KPFK to come up with this much loot is if they get donations from Al Quaeda or various Palestinian groups or other Arab oil money. They can't possible come up with this kind of loot from their LA donors, who mostly are not too wealthy and can't piss money away.....

Here's hoping the Feds will do a full on audit of KPFK and see who is buying them new equipment, who is paying the bills, etc. etc. I bet some of the donors will either be non US citizens from Islamic countries, or shills and fronts for the same.

KPFK = Quisling Radio, the radio of Islamic Fascism here in the Southland

And we mean it.

just wonderin'....
how does it feel to have recessive genetic traits.
i mean....

as opposed to "dominant genetic traits"....

i mean do you feel very confident and strong around non-white people because you know that your traits are recessive?

just wondering.....

http://www.zmag.org/racewatch/racewatch.htm

you right wingers have gotten so quiet hahahaha

Well, well - now the ugly truth surfaces once again. Blacks are the most racist ethnic group out there today, aiming their intense hatred at not only Jews and gays, but more so at Asians. The fact that you sad little hippies condone this is not surpirsing, you fucking hypocrites.

"Blacks are the most racist ethnic group out there today..."

Really? Which European or Asian country have blacks enslaved, raped, bombed, looted its precious cultural artifacts and currently display them in African museums, stole its land and are currently living there comfortably rich today? Your definition of racism is a crock.

From Merriam Webster, http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary:

One entry found for racism.

Main Entry: rac·ism
Pronunciation: 'rA-"si-z&m also -"shi-
Function: noun
Date: 1936
1 : a belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race
2 : racial prejudice or discrimination
- rac·ist /-sist also -shist/ noun or adjective

That's funny...no mention of slavery, rape, bombing, looting, land theft or exploitation in there at all. And no, it's not because Merriam and Webster were white.

Methinks YOUR definition of racism is a crock. When are you going to stop living in a state of perpetual victimhood and take responsibility for your life? "My life sucks...the MAN'S keeping me down! When a brother is successful, he's sold out to the MAN!"

Why do you have to base your identity on what was over 150 years ago?

...and KPFK like all in God's Wonderous Creation is imperfect, but it is still very very good, and it brings truth is boatloads like no radio station out there.

LONG LIVE KPFK!!!

Support it now!

You are absolutely right. Black Americans who have never enslaved, raped, looted, lynched, dropped nuclear weapons, gased, placed in internment camps, incarcerated, disenfranchised, grown and flown in illegal narcotics, broke treaties, infected with diseased plankets, "accidentally" shot to death (as police), stole or polluted the resources and land of Europeans or Asians simply because they thought their race was superior are more racist than whites. That Merriam and Webster is a white/European dictionary has nothing to do with why all of those acts of white supremacy are missing from the defintion.

alternative definition of racism mentioned earlier in this thread

Bienas Noches

There are Africans selling their own people into slavery today even as we speak, just as they have done over the last few hundred years. Before we can correct the past, we need to stop the sins of the present.

What about that fachist nazi station KABC that screams bloody murder every time jewish people get killed but say nothing about what life is like under Isralie occupation for the average palastian. I know you zionest bastards expect the palastians to just lay down and sit on their hands while the jews exterminate them like Hilter did to you in Aushawitz , but their not gonna do that. I heard that uncle tom Larry Elder call them hommicide bombers, they are marters who give their lives up because they don't any other way of fighting back.
I don't support terrorisim on either side but at least fucking report it when palistian kids throwing rocks are gunned down by gustapo IDF terrorist. It's ok to use appache helicopters supplied by the US in crowded palastian neighboorhoods or buldoze homes with families still in them.

person: There are Africans selling their own people into slavery today even as we speak..."

White flight: Which European or Asian country have blacks enslaved..."

person: Before we can correct the past, we need to stop the sins of the present.

You got it backwards. The only way to stop the sins of the present is to correct the the injustices of the past. White supremacy is the biggest obstacle to peace.

...how you define racism as being only from whites. That certainly absolves you of any of your sins, doesn't it?

Nope. Merriam Webster has it right. Anyone is capable of racism; yes, even blacks. Look at Louis Farrakhan. He's definitely racist. You can't deny that.

When you start looking at the positive things blacks have accomplished, and stop defining yourself by past injustices done to your anscestors, then you can progress. Until then, you're just going to be wallowing in self-pity and hate.

By the way, can you prove your anscestors were enslaved? Not every African who came to America did so in the hold of a slave ship.

And if they were: do you realize that if they hadn't, you would never have been born?

"It's interesting, white flight....how you define racism as being only from whites."

Where did I say that?

[...]

"By the way, can you prove your anscestors were enslaved?"

Undeniably. But it matters little. Legal apartheid ended in the 1970s. And socio-economic apartheid still continues today.

"And if they were: do you realize that if they hadn't, you would never have been born?"

Translation: “Without slavery, you never would have been born and this more than compensates for the crime.”

Stop embarrassing yourself.

It's not me who's dead set on blaming others for my position in life.

it's not me demanding a free ride because of something that happened a long time ago.

It's not me who would rather wallow in self-pity instead of doing something constructive with my life.

So...if I am somehow responsible for the actions of my ancestors, then so are you.

Any criminals in your family tree? If so, are you willing to pay the penalty or their crimes?

And before you say that's different, it most definitely is NOT.

"Where did I say that?"

From the link you posted, which contained a link to here: http://www.thecode.net/welsinginstitute/functional_definition_of_racism.htm

**"Racism (White Supremacy) is the local and global power system and dynamic, structured and maintained by persons who classify themselves as white, whether consciously or subconsciously determined, which consists of patterns of perception, logic, symbol formation, thought, speech, action and emotional response, as conducted simultaneously in all areas of people activity (economics, education, entertainment, labor, law, politics, religion, sex and war), for the ultimate purpose of white genetic survival and to prevent white genetic annihilation on planet Earth - a planet upon which the vast majority of people are classified as nonwhite (black, brown, red and yellow) by white skinned people, and all of the nonwhite people are genetically dominant (in terms of skin coloration) compared to the genetic recessive white skin people".

Francis Cress Welsing MD**

So, I repeat...you define racism as being a white-only phenomona. I say, that's a load of crap. Every race is capable of racism.

As a matter of fact, white flight, you are a racist.

That is undeniable.

"So...if I am somehow responsible for the actions of my ancestors, then so are you."

What are you babbling about? Did I miss something here? Is there an African Empire in Europe that is currently bombing Japan?

[...]

>>Where did I say that?

"From the link you posted, which contained a link to here:

http://www.thecode.net/welsinginstitute/functional_definition_of_racism.htm";

You are silly. I did not post a link to that definition. lynx-13 did. I merely posted a reminder to the definition lynx-13 linked earlier in this thread (and everyone just ignored). I don't agree 100% with Dr. Welsing's definition. But it's a whole lot closer to the the tuth than Webster's definition which sounds more like prejudice or bigotry rather than racism. (Racism, like capitalism, socialism, and any other "ism" is an institution as well as a personal character trait.) Defining words and concepts is not a science. It's always subjective. And the cultural values and ideologies of the one doing the defining always plays a part in the way words are defined. That a racist society founded on such doctrines as Manifest Destiny could produce dictionaries that downplay racism is not incomprehensible, even for you. If everyone is equally racist, as Mr. Webster would have us believe, than no one, including whites, is really racist. There, conscience cleared, right? If so, why are you engaged in this discussion?

"So, I repeat...you define racism as being a white-only phenomona. I say, that's a load of crap. Every race is capable of racism.

As a matter of fact, white flight, you are a racist.

That is undeniable."

BwaHaAAAAAAAAAAAAA! Now that's really funny.

...not everyone will gladly be shoehorned into your reality.

In other words, "I don't think so. tpfkamw don't play dat."

I repeat: you are a racist. You hate whites. That is undeniable; don't even bother.

**"So...if I am somehow responsible for the actions of my ancestors, then so are you."

What are you babbling about? Did I miss something here? Is there an African Empire in Europe that is currently bombing Japan?**

You, by demanding reparations for the descendents of slaves, are holding me responsible for the actions of my anscestors (who, by the way, never owned any slaves). I asked if you were then willing to be held responsible for the actions of your anscestors. Only fair, y'know. What's in your family tree? Horse thief? Rapist?

As for your rant about M-W's definition being false because they're white, that is also a load of crap. But I suspect you will not be happy with any definition that does not hold only whites culpable.

You.

Are.

A.

Racist.

black people in Africa are accustomed to having a many children as possible. fertility and promiscuity were survival mechanisms in a harsh land with very high infant and child mortality.


technology and improved medicine have brought too many people. too many for the land to support. and the old behaviors of producing a lot of children rhat worked when 8 out of 10 children died young - do not work when 9 out of ten survive to compete against each other for diminishing resources.

aids means the promiscuity and high fertility that enhanced survival in pre technology africa - are now turned against black peoples continued survival. south africa will be majority white population in 30 years, if present trends continue.

WHO killed Africa?
http://www.trinicenter.com/kwame/2001/nov/152001.htm

?'The creation of the AIDS virus by the WHO was not just a diabolical scientific exercise that got out of hand. It was a cold-blood successful attempt to create a killer virus which was then used in a successful experiment in Africa'.?

is the white supremacist induced poverty they suffer from, especially women, not aids. All evidence supports the belief that when women are not dominated, uneducated and impoversished, birth rates go down and the health and prosperity of the community go up. Africa has plenty of food and resources which are all going to Europe through globalization. When Africans finally come together (which they will) Europe will starve to death. This is why the United States continues to funnel weapons to Africa to keep the Africans in a perpetual state of civil war. No weapons manufacturing plants actually exist in Africa. White nations bring them there like they bring guns to American urban centers to keep black and brown Americans killing one another. The falacy of your thinking is that with all of the death and destruction being engineered in Africa (and other places), whites on the other hand are proliferating. Every country where whites are the majority, there are negative birth rates. This means that the system of white supremacy is actually destroying ALL of humankind. If after all the destruction through disease, environmental pollution, and nuclear warfare that whites are using to depopulate non-white land, whites actually believe there will actually be any inhabitable land left, they are sadly mistaken. No, saving humankind means an end to global white supremacy. If white supremacy continues, we're all screwed.

It's vital to keep the violence at a crital level.
I'm so sick and tired of it.

At a certain point black countries in Africa have to take responsibility for themselves and have to stop blaming the white man. Africa has to be able to help itself. AIDS is not created by WHO and it is not an import from outside Africa. It is a disease with its origins in Africa and people have to stop the conspiracy horseshit and deal with the reality.

Does anyone ever ask themselves, why, with all the military weaponry, air lift capability, and light armored vehicles in the armies of Nigeria and / or South Africa, not one African nation lifted a finger to try to stop the genocide in Rwanda? Neither did the left's hero Bill Clinton who was supposed to be so pro-black. What is pro black about letting a million people get murdered in the period of a few weeks, while Clinton and Richard Boucher were wringing their hands and pretend that nothing was happening? Why didn't the black politicians in the Congress demand the US intervene? Why did no one point the finger at the State Department for its lies about Rwanda, "..not being genocide?"

Where was Pacifica when the massacres were happening? Why was more attention not paid to this? And after the fact, when a million people had been hacked to death, why did broadcasters on Pacifica blame colonialism and the white man , for what was black men and women, murdering other black men and women?

That was me. I hate niggers. I'm a conservative.

"At a certain point black countries in Africa have to take responsibility for themselves and have to stop blaming the white man. Africa has to be able to help itself."

You are absolutely right. Africa needs to become self-sufficent, just like peaceful white nations. So which European countries should Africans enslave and colonize in order to build their self-sustained Empire? Any suggestions?

CHALLENGE: (a call for white nations to develop self-suffiency) Stop leeching off Africa and take care of yourseves!

Talk about insulting the left. Bill Clinton is neither leftist nor pro-black.

Is this thread working again?

Radio Pacifica's taxpayer-funded hatred of Jews, patriots and internal dissent.
by Sara Yardley • Sunday August 03, 2003 at 10:25 PM


Radio Intifada



In June, Pacifica Radio's Los Angeles station, KPFK-FM, hosted a thirty-hour marathon of Dr. Kwaku Person-Lynn's anti-Semitic "Afrikan Mental Liberation Weekend." It was the first time this once-annual program appeared for almost a decade. It had been banned by station management in 1993, after a long, hard-fought pressure campaign to remove it. Afrikan Mental Liberation Weekend typically includes claims that the Jews disproportionately participated in the slave trade and persecuted blacks; in the past, he responded to criticism by calling the regional director of the Anti-Defamation League a "psychotic, idiotic, European Jew." He has regularly played tapes by Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, who told KPFK's audience that whites and Jews "were the pale horse (from the Book of Revelation - eds.) with Death as its rider and Hell close behind." Person-Lynn also has stated that Jews who were white weren't really Jews - they'd stolen their Jewish identity from black men. He's even allowed open calls for genocide on the air: When one caller suggested that "what's going to happen to them [the Jews] is going to make what Hitler did to them seem like a party," the California State University instructor let that slide by unchallenged, thanking the caller for his insights. Person-Lynn also has a violent history. According to former radio host Ian Masters, he threatened a staffer with a shotgun; according to former program director Clare Spark, he threw another staffer into a wall. Even without the anti-Semitism, he's not the type of employee you'd want. But thanks to recent changes at KPFK-FM, his yearly special's been fully reinstated.

It'd be bad enough if only one bigot was returning to Pacifica, but Person-Lynn's not the only one fighting to come back. Former programmer Ron Wilkins was fired from his show "Continent to Continent" in 1995, for admitting three previously dismissed programmers to the studio and allowing them to rant about the evils of "white Left." One of these speakers, discussing relations between blacks and whites, said, "I am a firm believer that we are at war." Now Wilkins, a fervent African nationalist, is campaigning hard for a return to prime time. Wilkins was always slightly more subtle than Person-Lynn - instead of referring directly to Jews, he talked incessantly about the "Westside." Wilkins dismissed any opposition to him as catering to the "affluent, Westside listener." But Wilkins isn't just talking about the wealthy. What group has been especially concentrated on the "Westside" in Los Angeles? Jews. What group are black racists referring to when they refer to the "Westside"? Jews. The only other group Wilkins dislikes more is the "paint-jobs," the blacks or Hispanics at KPFK-FM less prejudiced than himself.

These Jew-bashers already have plenty of company at Pacifica, disguising themselves as impartial, cutting-edge public affairs broadcasters. Don Bustany's been running an anti-Israeli show, "Middle East in Focus," since 1996, during which time he has turned"Focus" into an exquisite outlet for Palestinian propaganda. To his credit, Bustany occasionally - very occasionally - has a supporter of Israel on to present a pro-Israel viewpoint. Not so at another KPFK-FM radio show, Radio Intifada, named after the Palestinian terrorist campaign against the existence of the State of Israel, a campaign that has claimed countless lives. "Intifada" literally means "shaking off," and that's exactly what the hosts did with any pretence to objectivity. The host, Michael Shehadeh, is a long-time Palestinian activist; the United States government has been fighting in the courts to deport from these shores. The government claims Shehadeh has a history of raising funds for the terrorist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, leaders of the intifada. More recently, Shehadeh's been cooperating with the communist Workers World Party in their latest front group, International A.N.S.W.E.R.

Although these leftists claim they are simply "anti-Zionist," who have nothing against Jews or Judaism, even their fellow far-left broadcasters disbelieve them. In January 2002, the host of KPFK-FM's "Feminist Magazine," Tricia Roth, was so disgusted by the imbalance she resigned from her show. As she put it, "[e]very time Israel so much as burps, Pacifica covers it extensively. Yet, when information exists that may give context to Israel's actions, or could reflect negatively on the Palestinians, it's normally absent from Pacifica's airwaves." She described how listeners who complained were seen as unsophisticated rubes and their complaints ignored, even as outright instances of anti-Semitism at the station went unchallenged.

KPFK-FM supplements its bigotry against Jews with the presence of out-and-out cranks - for instance, Mike Ruppert, a former LAPD officer and now runs a small publishing company called "From the Wilderness Publications." His company specializes in publicizing unfounded conspiracy theories, e.g., claiming the CIA is secretly running a drug cartel; that Senator Paul Wellstone's plane crash was a government-sponsored murder; that the President of the United States had advance knowledge of 9/11 and simply allowed it to happen, etc. These theories are snapped up eagerly by the less rational of the President's detractors, despite a rather embarrassing lack of evidence. For instance, according to Ruppert, Wellstone's death was likely a murder because eight Democratic congressmen have died in plane crashes, versus only four Republicans. Once KPFK, which aspires to be a news organization, would have treated Ruppert's claims with the skepticism they deserved - and as recently as 2002, its programmers did just that, humiliating Ruppert with a grilling on their public affairs program, "The Morning Show." But ever since then, Ruppert's been given red carpet treatment, beginning with an appearance on radio host Michael Slate's Tuesday drive-home public affairs show and culminating with appearances on KPFK's news programs and fundraising drives. Of course, Slate is likely a more extreme radical than Rupert. Slate is a prominent member of C. Clark Kissinger's Revolutionary Community Party, a pack of Maoists with a long history of petty lawbreaking in America and support for mass murder abroad. Slate's regular columns can be found in the party press, the Revolutionary Worker. At KPFK-FM, this type of lunacy is rewarded with a prominent, afternoon drive-time program.

The new hosts took old places. Many volunteer programmers were yanked from KPFK-FM just this month - hosts with over thirty years of experience and some of the station's largest audiences were given less than two days notice that their shows were cancelled. Several popular, long-running music shows were removed, as was "The Car Show," one of the station's biggest fundraisers. Some of the hosts seem to have been purged for political reasons. During the war on Iraq, John and Deanne Davis, hosts of a folk music show called Heartfelt Music, asked their listeners to "pray for our troops and the innocent people of Iraq." Within hours, Pacifica's message boards were clogged with angry messages - not from Heartfelt Music's listeners, but the radicals that clogged KPFK's local advisory board. A Christian couple who supported America's troops was anathema to Pacifica's management, so the Station Manager, the Program Director and the Music Director made a conference call to the couple, telling them they were off the air. After 32 years of volunteering, the Davises were dismissed without a single note of appreciation; while the Program Director said it was for "diversity" and the need for more public affairs programming, only their on-air request for prayer distinguished them from the station's other, uncancelled folk music show, "Folkscene," which was cynically moved to the Davises' former time slot in an attempt to keep their listeners.

The Davises were not the only hosts to be harried off KPFK's airwaves. Marc Cooper, a writer for the Nation - arguably the furthest-left mass circulation magazine in America - was already well-despised for supporting a fired station manager and a previous board of directors. His weekly public affairs show, "RadioNation," was chopped, ostensibly for being "too conservative." Cooper's conservative crimes? He wrote in a column that activists against the death penalty could do wiser things than focus exclusively on convicted cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal. He also criticized those protesting the war on Iraq for allying with known Communists, and even had the nerve to debate conservative political figures on his show. Apparently even allowing the other side a moment's airtime is a cardinal sin, even if you denounce the opposition's views. KPFK claims it's run democratically, but this looks more like Stalinism. It's no wonder the existing programs are falling over each other to make themselves seem more radical. On July 20th, the long-running and plainly-named "Morning Show" changed its title to "Uprising."

KPFK's problems stem in part from its management. According to former station insiders, substantial loans to the interim board were made without any provisions for paying them back; in July 2002, when one young leftist responsible for co-signing Pacifica's checks called the action financially irresponsible, she was fired. The former webmaster of KPFK's internet site reported that even though funds for her salary were budgeted for and available, she was forced to participate in a job search and was eventually dismissed - and not only was no one was hired to replace her, the newly unemployed webmaster was asked to train unpaid volunteers to do her former job. Staff critical of management at staff meetings saw their hours chopped in half, forcing them to quit. All of these actions were overseen by Eva Georgia, the General Manager eventually hired by the new interim board to permanently replace Marc Shubb.

Georgia got her start in community radio in South Africa. In a complaint to a formal Commission of Inquiry there, an employee at her former station described her as verbally and physically abusive. Her radio station almost closed for financial mismanagement - according to Omar Dollie, who led the reconstruction effort at the radio station after Georgia left, "[t]here was never books kept in proper order. (sic.) There were never audited statements. It was a total disaster." Georgia emigrated to the United States, where she was fired from her next job, at the Gay & Lesbian Community Center in Long Beach. According to Georgia's own wrongful dismissal suit, her supervisor said she was a "liar," "cannot be trusted," "does not do her work," "physically attacks" and is "physically abusive." While Georgia said these claims were defamatory and untrue, a judge ended up throwing her case out of court. In spite of Georgia's prior employment record, Pacifica's interim board hired her on; since then, KPFK's own staff reported that "the state of staff / management relations at KPFK deteriorated significantly ... there is no workplace democracy...morale is very low." According to one rumor, Georgia was to be fired at the end of her probationary period - the interim national board only backed off when Georgia threatened to accuse them of racism and launch yet another wrongful dismissal lawsuit. It just so happens the majority of those fired by Georgia from KPFK have been visible minorities.

Georgia is aided at KPFK-FM by the new Program Director, Armando Gudino, described as a young man with limited experience. He had earlier been hired as a senior producer and was Georgia's and the local advisory board's preferred candidate for Program Director; the staff, however, felt otherwise. Georgia hired Gudino despite the fact that two P.D. search committees failed to nominate him for the job, inspiring staff members to resign from the committees in disgust. Gudino was likely pushed into the Program Director's seat because he's the obedient client of the chair of the local advisory board, Lydia Brazon. As the hard-left head of the Humanitarian Law Project, Brazon is favorably disposed to Central American extremist movements. According to one source, the only truly professional experience Gudino had before arriving at the station was a stint as Brazon's personal assistant when she was making a documentary on the Zapatistas. By getting Gudino installed in the lucrative position of Program Director, and protecting Georgia from her own staff, Brazon and the unelected local advisory board she chairs effectively control KPFK.

While no other station in the Pacifica network has management as cringe-worthy as KPFK, all five of Pacifica's stations have had similar problems with black anti-Semitism and political purges. Pacifica's New York City station, WBAI, has aired comments as bigoted as any coming out of KPFK. On December 26, 2002, one of their hosts, a union organizer for the SEIU named Kamau Khalfani, falsely claimed, "the Jewish community is the spoiled brat of America - they have been allowed for whatever reason to walk with free reign." (He also delightfully proffered that "the term Jewry came out of jewelry.") No action was taken. During a June 25th fundraiser at Houston's KPFT, "Minister" Robert Muhammad of the "Connect the Dots" program claimed he had lost the top spot on the Anti-Defamation League's "list" but vowed to get back on top.

On the political purges front, at least forty staff and volunteers have been thrown out for supporting former directors over the past 18 months. At four of Pacifica's five stations (all but KPFA in Berkeley) the Station Managers were dismissed in the first few months of 2002. In New York, Pacifica has begun union busting. Employees at WBAI decided that AFTRA, the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, offered better benefits than their current union, the United Electrical Workers, and therefore voted to switch unions in 2001. They didn't realize that the United Electrical Workers were the darlings of the radical Left and that the new interim board, after taking control of Pacifica, would refuse to recognize their employees' vote. In January 2002, the interim board unilaterally decided that the United Electrical Workers still represented employees at WBAI; on February 20, 2002, three of AFTRA's most militant supporters at WBAI were fired - they claim for their union activism. A complaint is currently before the National Labor Relations Board.

The Pacifica network has been leftist since the Pacifica Foundation was founded in 1946 by WWII conscientious objector Lew Hill. Their first radio station, KPFA in Berkeley, was founded in 1949 - the first in the country to be financially supported by listener-subscribers. A section station, Los Angeles' KPFK, was founded in 1959; a third, New York's WBAI, was given to Pacifica in 1960. Houston's KPFT and Washington's WPFW were founded in the 1970s. For all of its existence, Pacifica followed anti-American trends - it was opposed to the Cold War and intervention in Korea during the 1950s, opposed to American intervention in Vietnam from as early as 1963, and had its Communist affilitations investigated by the House Un-American Activities Committee. Their programmers and staff backed the 1960s New Left of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and defended the terrorist activities of the hard-left Weatherman and Symbionese Liberation Army; in the 1980s it supported brutal Marxist regimes in Latin America. But only rarely in its history has Pacifica been this consistently and completely a tool of anti-American class-warfare specialists. What's gone wrong at KPFK, and what's gone wrong at Pacifica?

Many of the radio network's current troubles can be traced back to a December 12, 2001, court decision, when Pacifica's national board, faced with four different lawsuits, agreed to resign. The 1990s were a difficult time for the network. The national board, all liberal-to-leftist individuals, were concerned about Pacifica's limited growth. The fifth station had been added back in the 1970s, and audience size remained small. They wanted their message to reach more people, and therefore decided to introduce national programming, to be carried by all five stations, in an effort to build a nation-wide identity. They also wanted to get the anti-Semites who were giving Pacifica a bad name off the air. Both of these moves annoyed the local station hosts, who preferred the status quo. When the national board began implementing their changes, these local radicals launched a smear campaign. When the board replaced old management who wouldn't implement their decisions, it was described as a "political purge." When the new management removed some of the worst bigots from the airwaves, it was "censorship," and, since many of the anti-Semites were black, it was also "racism."

In 1999, when the board adjusted its bylaws to make itself self-perpetuating, correcting a tax law violation and bringing it into line with the vast majority of non-profits, the radicals screamed "dictatorship" and launched a series of lawsuits. They also began an often vicious, occasionally criminal campaign against national board members. Attorneys for one threatened WBAI radio host have documented a campaign of harassment and intimidation against the national board's majority, details corroborated by a former national board member. Much of the harassment seems to have directed by the radical-Left 'Pacifica Campaign' organizer Denis Moynihan. The national board's chair, an accountant, was falsely accused of fraud before his profession's licensing organization. The Pacifica Campaign openly distributed his Social Security Number and credit information; later, they called and harassed his children at home. The clients of a New York-based member who worked as a consultant were called and told they had to stop giving her business or face boycotts and protests. An earlier executive director of Pacifica received anonymous death threats, and her car was tailed on the freeway. Another director received a series of threatening calls in the early hours of the morning. When that didn't budge him, the callers began harassing his employer. One director's workplace had its website hacked and its contact list spammed with calls for his resignation. Many directors had their houses picketed and their neighbors told the directors were criminals. Their employers' meetings and conferences were also disrupted. Thanks to this thuggery, several members of the old board resigned. While Moynihan has relocated to Kansas to better fulfill his role as a co-ordinator for the Leonard Peltier Defense Committee, his allies remain Pacifica activists.

Although no lawsuit was ever won, the intimidated liberals on the old board majority gave in and agreed to negotiate. A much-celebrated settlement saw the old board resign in favor of an interim board - five members of the old board, five "dissidents," and five directors chosen by the chairs of the stations' local advisory boards. This appointed interim board took power at the start of 2002, with a limited mandate: they were given the authority only to set new bylaws and hold elections as soon as possible. At this date, they have yet to make a bit of progress towards either goal. Instead, they violated the settlement that placed them in power by going after their political enemies at the stations and canceling the network-wide programs that angered them so much - in particular, the ninety-minute Pacifica News Network, which was completely shut down in February 2002. The interim board claimed the cancellation was for budgetary reasons, which may be partially true, since the lawsuits launched against Pacifica cost it over a million and a half dollars in legal fees. But few on the new board were sad to see Pacifica News Network go. Only on the far Left could a national leftist news program become a symbol of oppression.

As for their judge-mandated mission, the selection of new bylaws, the interim board needed a year and a half of bitter arguing to decide on a draft they could take to the local advisory boards for ratification, and that only after an incredibly petty dispute over Roget's Rules of Order. The local advisory boards promptly voted to reject the new bylaws, placing the interim board right back where it started in January 2002. The conflict was over whether the stations should institute racial quotas. (The national board's proposal created "Committees of Inclusion," which had the power to delay elections to the local boards in order to racially gerrymander the candidate pool, but that wasn't good enough for the local advisory boards.)

When one looks at the membership of the new board, their failure shouldn't come as a surprise. People who organize against management for a living don 't usually excel at management. Take Leslie Cagan, the chair of Pacifica's national board, who has a history of Communist Party membership dating back to the 1960s. In the early 1970s she was a member of the Venceremos Brigades, a group of American youth sent to Cuba for special political education and training. She remained a member of the CPUSA until at least the late 1980s; currently, she's a co-chair of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism, a spin-off of the Communist Party created after the Soviet Union imploded. She also heads up one of the main coalitions opposed to national security, United for Peace and Justice, a re-hash of the People's Coalition for Peace and Justice, the Communist Party's anti-Vietnam front. Like all Communists, Cagan never met a manager she didn't hate as a lackey for the ruling class, yet now she's supposed to manage a network of radio stations herself. The board's main representative for Los Angeles, David Fertig, has a similar background. A radical labor law attorney who refuses to represent management, Fertig is also a member of the neo-Communist National Lawyers Guild. The treasurer of Pacifica's national board, Jabari Zakiya, also has a radical pedigree, having served hard prison time in the mid-1990s for refusing to pay taxes or file returns. Despite their failure to get things done, Pacifica's fundraising drives have been raking in the contributions. They've got President Bush to thank for that - leftist groups always receive more contributions during conservative administrations. Now donors are realizing that many of the shows they supported were cancelled right after the latest fund drive.

While more and more of Pacifica's listeners are growing dissatisfied with "their" stations, there's not much they can do to reclaim them. Since Pacifica's sacking of black anti-Semites in the mid 1990s was mistakenly seen as a racist act against blacks, rather than an anti-racist act against bigots, the radicals who fought so hard to remove Pacifica's old board came primarily from the race-obsessed section of Left. This sector of the Left gains control of organizations by threatening to call their opponents racist. In left-wing groups like Pacifica, he who attends the most meetings wins, and no one is willing to attend meetings like a fanatic for the cause. When the race-obsessed leftists are lengthening already long meetings with discussions on how to achieve gender equity and adequate representation of historically oppressed minorities on the speakers list, you can be sure no one who disagrees with them will make the mistake of attending an organizational meeting twice.

Pacifica's internal problems will almost surely destroy it over the long run, but that's no reason for conservatives to cheer - not when tax-funded FM stations in major metropolitan areas are hijacked by bigots. Anti-Semitism has been the Left's secret vice since the late 1960s. The Freedom Riders of the civil rights movement hated discrimination against Jews as much as discrimination against blacks; in fact, the white civil rights activists were disproportionately Jews. Knowing what it was like to suffer from discrimination, they were all the more eager to stop it. Unfortunately, after the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act of the mid-1960s, many black radicals began to reject equality and integration in favor of separatism and "black power." All whites became hated, those who had allied with blacks most of all.

White leftists condescendingly coddled the black militants of the 1960s, tolerating opinions they would have abhorred in a white person, all because they felt these new black organizations were "progressive." Sooner or later, they reasoned, their black comrades would see the error behind their hate. But with their beliefs unchallenged, black anti-Semites became the Left's crazy aunt. In recent years, that crazy aunt seems to have driven a few others on the Left mad themselves, as more and more white activists have joined with their bigoted black brethren to espouse precisely the kind of racism that was unthinkable a generation ago. The opposition to the liberation of Iraq was liberally scattered with attacks on Israel and Jews within the Bush administration. Emboldened by the mainstreaming of hatred, traditional neo-Nazis began to use anti-war protests as recruiting grounds.

If there's one small blessing in the whole Pacifica crisis, it's that things haven't yet degenerated to the Pacifica of the early 1990s, when Nation of Islam lieutenant Steve Cokely claimed Jewish doctors were inoculating babies with the AIDS virus. There's still time to nip the new wave of bigotry in the bud; listeners appalled by the new Pacifica do have options. Pacifica's five stations receive more than $1,200,000 of taxpayers' money every year from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the same group that funds NPR and PBS. In 1992, Congress required the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to report on the quality, objectivity, and balance of the public broadcasting programs it funds, and take this into account when making grants. Yet KPFK slants so far Left, it considers The Nation conservative and Jewish hosts are leaving rather than hear anti-Semitic slander on the air. When the head "Feminist Magazine" claims Pacifica's news coverage is "one-sided to the point of actually distorting the facts," it's clear there's a serious problem. Fortunately, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting has established an e-mail address - comments@cpb.org - and a toll-free phone number - 1-800-272-2190 - to take comments on taxpayer-funded public broadcasting. When large numbers of complaints are received on the balance and objectivity of a program, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting is compelled to investigate.

Pacifica's staff and supporters can hear the anti-Semitism on their stations for themselves. They know that people at their stations have been fired or removed from the airwaves for political reasons, and not just by previous boards. They know their stations aren't being run democratically, and they know they serve the programmer more than the listening audience. They are repeating every misstep allegedly made by the board they ousted. They've become what they hate, or rather, what they pretended to hate, because their long struggle to take control of the board wasn't really about democracy, or censorship, or "serving the community." We see from their actions now the term "democracy" merely shielded the ugly politics their fight was really about, a crude racial identity politics based on hatred of whites, Jews and America itself. Their is a politics based on raw anger. Now that they're in power, the radicals at Pacifica will maintain the façade of democracy just enough to attract donations, as their newly-established committees of "inclusion" ensure everyone attached to the station thinks in lock-step with their leaders - or suffers the consequences.

From all accounts, KPFK-FM is no longer a very pleasant place to work, and less appealing to listen to. John Davis, host of the cancelled Heartfelt Music, said the new management was "strident, with no sense of humor." Although he had worked with leftists so extreme they went to jail rather than turn over communications from the Symbionese Liberation Army to the police, John could still get along with them, still work with them - but not these leftists. Last year was the first time in 32 years that John felt he was sacrificing his principles by working with extremists. John thinks the programming changes are a mistake; his own listeners, many of whom share the station's left-wing slant, told him they didn't want political rhetoric seven days a week. In a long departing missive, Tom Nixon seemed to concur. The day his show of 29 years, "The Nixon Tapes," was cancelled, he was given a business card at an art show. On it was written this: "As soon as an imperative is placed on art (it should be political, it should be beautiful, it should be subversive), one has already robbed it of its freedom." It appears Pacifica, through its insistence on hard-edged radicalism and tolerance for anti-Semitic extremism, is draining art of its freedom before attempting the same things on the United States.

Why the Muslims Misjudged Us

BY VICTOR DAVIS HANSON

Since September 11, we have heard mostly slander and lies about the West from radical Islamic fundamentalists in their defense of the terrorists. But the Middle Eastern mainstream--diplomats, intellectuals and journalists--has also bombarded the American public with an array of unflattering images and texts, suggesting that the extremists' anti-Americanism may not be an eccentricity of the ignorant but rather a representative slice of the views of millions.
Egyptian Nobel Prize-winning novelist Naguib Mahfouz reportedly announced from his Cairo home that America's bombing of the Taliban was "just as despicable a crime" as the September 11 attacks--as if the terrorists' unprovoked mass murder of civilians were the moral equivalent of selected air strikes against enemy soldiers in wartime. Americans, reluctant to answer back their Middle Eastern critics for fear of charges of "Islamophobia" or "Arab smearing," have let such accusations go largely unchecked.
Two striking themes--one overt, one implied--characterize most Arab invective: first, that there is some sort of equivalence--political, cultural and military--between the West and the Muslim world; and second, that America has been exceptionally unkind toward the Middle East. Both premises are false and reveal that the temple of anti-Americanism is supported by pillars of utter ignorance.
Few in the Middle East have a clue about the nature, origins or history of democracy, a word that, along with its family (constitution, freedom and citizen), has no history in the Arab vocabulary, or indeed any philological pedigree in any language other than Greek and Latin and their modern European offspring. Consensual government is not the norm of human politics but a rare and precious idea, not imposed or bequeathed but usually purchased with the blood of heroes and patriots, whether in classical Athens, revolutionary America or more recently Eastern Europe. Democracy's lifeblood is secularism and religious tolerance, coupled with free speech and economic liberty.
Afghan tribal councils, without written constitutions, are better than tyranny, surely; but they do not make consensual government. Nor do the Palestinian parliament and advisory bodies in Kuwait. None of these faux assemblies are elected by an unbound citizenry, free to criticize (much less recall, impeach or depose) their heads of state by legal means, or even to speak openly to journalists about the failings of their own government. Plato remarked of such superficial government-by-deliberation that even thieves divvy up the loot by give-and-take, suggesting that the human tendency to parley is natural but is not the same as the formal machinery of democratic government.
Our own cultural elites, either out of timidity or sometimes ignorance of the uniqueness of our own political institutions, seldom make such distinctions. But the differences are critical, because they lie unnoticed at the heart of the crisis in the Muslim world, and they explain our own tenuous relations with the regimes in the Gulf and the Middle East. Israel does not really know to what degree the Palestinian authorities have a real constituency, because the people of the West Bank themselves do not know either--inasmuch as they cannot debate one another on domestic television or campaign on the streets for alternate policies. Yasser Arafat assumed power by Western fiat; when he finally was allowed to hold real and periodic elections in his homeland, he simply perpetuated autocracy--as corrupt as it is brutal.
By the same token, we are surprised at the duplicity of the Gulf States in defusing internal dissent by redirecting it against Americans, forgetting that such is the way of all dictators, who, should they lose office, do not face the golden years of Jimmy Carter's busy house-building or Bill Clinton's self-absorbed angst. Either they dodge the mob's bullets or scurry to a fortified compound on the French coast a day ahead of the posse. The royal family of Saudi Arabia cannot act out of principle, because no principle other than force put and keeps them in power. All the official jets, snazzy embassies and expensive press agents cannot hide that these illegitimate rulers are not in the political sense Western at all.
How sad that intellectuals of the Arab world--themselves given freedom only when they emigrate to the United States or Europe--profess support for democratic reform from Berkeley or Cambridge but secretly fear that, back home, truly free elections would usher in folk like the Iranian imams, who, in the manner of the Nazis in 1933, would thereupon destroy the very machinery that elected them. The fact is that democracy does not spring fully formed from the head of Zeus but rather is an epiphenomenon--the formal icing on a pre-existing cake of egalitarianism, economic opportunity, religious tolerance and constant self-criticism. The former cannot appear in the Muslim world until gallant men and women insist upon the latter--and therein demolish the antidemocratic and medieval forces of tribalism, authoritarian traditionalism and Islamic fundamentalism.
How much easier for nonvoters of the Arab world to vent frustration at the West, as if, in some Machiavellian plot, a democratic America, Israel and Europe have conspired to prevent Muslims from adopting the Western invention of democracy! Democracy is hardly a Western secret to be closely guarded and kept from the mujahideen. Islam is welcome to it, with the blessing and subsidy of the West. Yes, we must promote democracy abroad in the Muslim world; but only they, not we, can ensure its success.
The catastrophe of the Muslim world is also explicable in its failure to grasp the nature of Western success, which springs neither from luck nor resources, genes nor geography. Like Third World Marxists of the 1960s, who put blame for their own self-inflicted misery upon corporations, colonialism and racism--anything other than the absence of real markets and a free society--the Islamic intelligentsia recognizes the Muslim world's inferiority vis-à-vis the West, but it then seeks to fault others for its own self-created fiasco. Government spokesmen in the Middle East should ignore the nonsense of the cultural relativists and discredited Marxists and have the courage to say that they are poor because their populations are nearly half illiterate, that their governments are not free, that their economies are not open, and that their fundamentalists impede scientific inquiry, unpopular expression and cultural exchange.
Tragically, the immediate prospects for improvement are dismal, inasmuch as the war against terrorism has further isolated the Middle East. Travel, foreign education and academic exchanges--the only sources of future hope for the Arab world--have screeched to a halt. All the conferences in Cairo about Western bias and media distortion cannot hide this self-inflicted catastrophe--and the growing ostracism and suspicion of Middle Easterners in the West.
But blaming the West, and Israel, for the unendurable reality is easier for millions of Muslims than admitting the truth. Billions of barrels of oil, large populations, the Suez Canal, the fertility of the Nile, Tigris and Euphrates valleys, invaluable geopolitical locations and a host of other natural advantages that helped create wealthy civilizations in the past now yield an excess of misery, rather than the riches of resource-poor Hong Kong or Switzerland. How could it be otherwise, when it takes bribes and decades to obtain a building permit in Cairo, when habeas corpus is a cruel joke in Baghdad, and when Saudi Arabia turns out more graduates in Islamic studies than in medicine or engineering?
To tackle illiteracy, gratuitous state-sanctioned killing, and the economic sclerosis that comes from corruption and state control would require the courage and self-examination of Eastern Europe, Russia, South America, even of China. Instead, wedded to the old bromides that the West causes their misery, that fundamentalist Islam and crackpot mullahs have had no role in their disasters, that the subjugation of women is a "different" rather than a foul (and economically foolish) custom, Muslim intellectuals have railed these past few months about the creation of Israel half a century ago, and they have sat either silent or amused while the mob in their streets chants in praise of a mass murderer. Meanwhile millions of Muslims tragically stay sick and hungry in silence.
Has the Muslim world gone mad in its threats and ultimatums? Throughout this war, Muslims have saturated us with overt and with insidious warnings. If America retaliated to the mass murder of its citizens, the Arab world would turn on us; if we bombed during Ramadan, we would incur lasting hatred; if we continued in our mission to avenge our dead, not an American would be safe in the Middle East.
More disturbing even than the screaming street demonstrations have been the polite admonitions of corrupt grandees like Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia or editor Abdul Rahman al Rashed of Saudi Arabia's state-owned Al Sharq al Awsat. Don't they see the impotence and absurdity of their veiled threats, backed neither by military force nor cultural dynamism? Don't they realize that nothing is more fatal to the security of a state than the divide between what it threatens and what it can deliver?
There is an abyss between such rhetoric and the world we actually live in, an abyss called power. Out of politeness, we needn't crow over the relative military capability of one billion Muslims and 300 million Americans; but we should remember that the lethal, 2,500-year Western way of war is the reflection of very different ideas about personal freedom, civic militarism, individuality on the battlefield, military technology, logistics, decisive battle, group discipline, civilian audit and the dissemination and proliferation of knowledge.
Values and traditions--not guns, germs and steel--explain why a tiny Greece of 50,000 square miles crushed a Persia 20 times larger; why Rome, not Carthage, created world government; why Cortés was in Tenochtitlàn, and Montezuma not in Barcelona; why gunpowder in its home in China was a pastime for the elite while, when stolen and brought to Europe, it became a deadly and ever evolving weapon of the masses. Even at the nadir of Western power in the medieval ages, a Europe divided by religion and fragmented into feudal states could still send thousands of thugs into the Holy Land, while a supposedly ascendant Islam had neither the ships nor the skill nor the logistics to wage jihad in Scotland or Brittany.
Much is made of 500 years of Ottoman dominance over a feuding Orthodox, Christian and Protestant West; but the sultans were powerful largely to the degree that they crafted alliances with a distrustful France and the warring Italian city-states, copied the Arsenal at Venice, turned out replicas of Italian and German canon, and moved their capital to European Constantinople. Moreover, their "dominance" amounted only to a rough naval parity with the West on the old Roman Mediterranean; they never came close to the conquest of the heart of Western Europe.
Europeans, not Ottomans, colonized central and southern Africa, Asia and the Pacific and the Americas--and not merely because of their Atlantic ports or ocean ships but rather because of their longstanding attitudes and traditions about scientific inquiry, secular thought, free markets and individual ingenuity and spontaneity. To be sure, military power is not a referendum on morality--Pizarro's record in Peru makes as grim reading as the Germans' in central Africa; it is, rather, a reflection of the amoral dynamism that fuels ships and soldiers.
We are militarily strong, and the Arab world abjectly weak, not because of greater courage, superior numbers, higher IQs, more ores or better weather, but because of our culture. When it comes to war, one billion people and the world's oil are not nearly as valuable military assets as MIT, West Point, the House of Representatives, C-Span, Bill O'Rilley and the G.I. Bill. Between Xerxes on his peacock throne overlooking Salamis and Saddam on his balcony reviewing his troops, between the Greeks arguing and debating before they rowed out with Themistocles and the Americans haranguing one another on the eve of the Gulf War, lies a 2,500-year cultural tradition that explains why the rest of the world copies its weapons, uniforms and military organization from us, not vice versa.
Many Middle Easterners have performed a great media charade throughout this war. They publish newspapers and televise the news, and thereby give the appearance of being modern and Western. But their reporters and anchormen are by no means journalists by Western standards of free and truthful inquiry. Whereas CNN makes a point of talking to the victims of collateral damage in Kabul, al-Jazeera would never interview the mothers of Israeli teenagers blown apart by Palestinian bombs. Nor does any Egyptian or Syrian television station welcome freewheeling debates or "Meet the Press"-style talk shows permitting criticism of the government or the national religion. Instead, they quibble over their own degrees of anti-Americanism and obfuscate the internal contradictions of Islam. The chief dailies in Algiers, Tehran and Kuwait City look like Pravda of old. The entire Islamic media is a simulacrum of the West, lacking the life-giving spirit of debate and self-criticism.
As a result, when Americans see a cavalcade of talking Middle Eastern heads nod and blurt out the party line--that Israel is evil, that the United States is naive and misled, that Muslims are victims, that the West may soon have to reckon with Islamic anger--they assume the talk is orchestrated and therefore worth listening to only for what it teaches about how authoritarian governments can coerce and corrupt journalists and intellectuals.
A novelist who writes whatever he pleases anywhere in the Muslim world is more likely to receive a fatwa and a mob at his courtyard than a prize for literary courage, as Naguib Mahfouz and Salman Rushdie have learned. No wonder a code of silence pervades the Islamic world. No wonder, too, that Islam is far more ignorant of us than we of it. And no wonder that the Muslims haven't a clue that, while their current furor is scripted, whipped up and mercurial, ours is far deeper and more lasting.
Every Western intellectual knows Edward Said's much-hyped theory of "Orientalism," a purely mythical construct of how Western bias has misunderstood and distorted the Eastern "Other." In truth, the real problem is "Westernism"--the fatally erroneous idea in the Middle East that its propaganda-spewing Potemkin television stations give it a genuine understanding of the nature of America, an understanding Middle Easterners believe is deepened by the presence in their midst of a few McDonald's franchises and hired U.S. public-relations firms.
That error--which mistakes ignorance for insight--helps explain why Osama bin Laden so grossly miscalculated the devastating magnitude of our response to September 11. In reality, the most parochial American knows more about the repressive nature of the Gulf States than the most sophisticated and well-traveled sheikh understands about the cultural underpinnings of this country, including the freedom of speech and inquiry that is missing in the Islamic press.
Millions in the Middle East are obsessed with Israel, whether they live in sight of Tel Aviv or thousands of miles away. Their fury doesn't spring solely from genuine dismay over the hundreds of Muslims Israel has killed on the West Bank; after all, Saddam Hussein butchered hundreds of thousands of Shiites, Kurds and Iranians, while few in Cairo or Damascus said a word. Syria's Hafez Assad liquidated perhaps 20,000 in sight of Israel, without a single demonstration in any Arab capital. The murder of some 100,000 Muslims in Algeria and 40,000 in Chechnya in the last decade provoked few intellectuals in the Middle East to call for a pan-Islamic protest. Clearly, the anger derives not from the tragic tally of the fallen but from Islamic rage that Israelis have defeated Muslims on the battlefield repeatedly, decisively, at will and without modesty.
If Israel were not so successful, free and haughty--if it were beleaguered and tottering on the verge of ruin--perhaps it would be tolerated. But in a sea of totalitarianism and government-induced poverty, a relatively successful economy and a stable culture arising out of scrub and desert clearly irks its less successful neighbors. Envy, as the historian Thucydides reminds us, is a powerful emotion and has caused not a few wars.
If Israel did not exist, the Arab world, in its current fit of denial, would have to invent something like it to vent its frustrations. That is not to say there may not be legitimate concerns in the struggle over Palestine, but merely that for millions of Muslims the fight over such small real estate stems from a deep psychological wound. It isn't about lebensraum or some actual physical threat. Israel is a constant reminder that it is a nation's culture--not its geography or size or magnitude of its oil reserves--that determines its wealth or freedom. For the Middle East to make peace with Israel would be to declare war on itself, to admit that that its own fundamental way of doing business--not the Jews--makes it poor, sick and weak.
Throughout the Muslim world, myth and ignorance surround U.S. foreign policy toward the Middle East. Yes, we give Israel aid, but less than the combined billions that go to the Palestinians and to Egypt, Jordan and other Muslim countries. And it is one thing to subsidize a democratic and constitutional (if cantankerous) ally but quite another to pay for slander from theocratic or autocratic enemies. Though Israel has its fair share of fundamentalists and fanatics, the country is not the creation of clerics or strongmen but of European émigrés, who committed Israel from the start to democracy, free speech and abundant self-critique.
Far from egging on Israel, the United States actually restrains the Israeli military, whose organization and discipline, along with the sophisticated Israeli arms industry, make it quite capable of annihilating nearly all its bellicose neighbors without American aid. Should the United States withdraw from active participation in the Middle East and let the contestants settle their differences on the battlefield, Israel, not the Arab world, would win. The military record of four previous conflicts does not lie. Arafat should remember who saved him in Lebanon; it was no power in the Middle East that brokered his exodus and parted the waves of Israeli planes and tanks for his safe passage to the desert.
The Muslim world suffers from political amnesia, we now have learned, and so has forgotten not only Arafat's resurrection but also American help to beleaguered Afghans, terrified Kuwaitis, helpless Kurds and Shiites, starving Somalis and defenseless Bosnians--direct intervention that has cost the United States much more treasure and lives than mere economic aid for Israel ever did. They forget; but we remember the Palestinians cheering in Nablus hours after thousands of our innocents were incinerated in New York, the hagiographic posters of a mass murderer in the streets of Muslim capitals, and the smug remonstrations of Saudi prince Alwaleed to Mayor Rudy Giuliani at Ground Zero.
Saudi and Kuwaiti Westernized elites find psychological comfort in their people's anti-American rhetoric, not out of real grievance but perhaps as reassurance that their own appetite for all things Western doesn't constitute rejection of their medieval religion or their 13th-century caliphate. Their apologists in the United States dissemble when they argue that these Gulf sheikhs are forced to master a doublespeak for foreign consumption, or that they are better than the frightening alternative, or that they are victims of unfair American anger that is ignorant of Wahhabi custom.
In their present relationship with the terrorists, these old-fashioned autocrats are neutrals only in the sense that they now play the cagier role of Franco's Spain to Hitler's Germany. They aid and abet our enemies, but never overtly. If the United States prevails, the Saudis can proclaim that they were always with us; should we lose a shooting war with the terrorists, the princes can swear that their prior neutrality really constituted allegiance to radical Islam all along.
In matters of East-West relations, immigration has always been a one-way phenomenon. Thousands flocked to Athens and Rome; few left for Parthia or Numidia unless to colonize or exploit. People sneak into South, not North, Korea--in the same manner that few from Hong Kong once braved gunfire to reach Beijing (unless to invest and profit). Few Israeli laborers are going to the West Bank to seek construction jobs. In this vein is the Muslim world's longing for the very soil of America. Even in the crucible of war, we have discovered that our worst critics love us in the concrete as much as they hate us in the abstract.
For all the frothing, it seems that millions of our purported enemies wish to visit, study or (better yet) live in the United States--and this is true not just of Westernized professors or globetrotting tycoons but of hijackers, terrorists, the children of the Taliban, the offspring of Iranian mullahs and the spoiled teenage brats of our Gulf critics. The terrorists visited lap dancers, took out frequent-flier miles, spent hours on the Internet, had cell phones strapped to their hips and hobnobbed in Las Vegas--parasitic on a culture not their own, fascinated with toys they could not make, and always ashamed that their lusts grew more than they could be satisfied. Until September 11, their ilk had been like fleas on a lazy, plump dog, gnashing their tiny proboscises to gain bloody nourishment or inflict small welts on a distracted host who found them not worth the scratch.
This dual loathing and attraction for things Western is characteristic of the highest echelon of the terrorists themselves, often Western-educated, English-speaking and hardly poor. Emblematic is the evil genius of al Qaeda, the sinister Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri. He grew up in Cairo affluence, his family enmeshed in all the Westernized institutions of Egypt.
Americans find this Middle Eastern cultural schizophrenia maddening, especially in its inability to fathom that all the things that Muslim visitors profess to hate--equality of the sexes, cultural freedom, religious tolerance, egalitarianism, free speech and secular rationalism--are precisely what give us the material things that they want in the first place. CDs and sexy bare midriffs are the fruits of a society that values freedom, unchecked inquiry and individual expression more than the dictates of state or church; wild freedom and wild materialism are part of the American character. So bewildered Americans now ask themselves: Why do so many of these anti-Americans, who profess hatred of the West and reverence for the purity of an energized Islam or a fiery Palestine, enroll in Chico State or UCLA instead of madrassas in Pakistan or military academies in Iraq?
The embarrassing answer would explain nearly everything, from bin Laden to the intifada. Dads and moms who watch al-Jazeera and scream in the street at the Great Satan really would prefer that their children have dollars, an annual CAT scan, a good lawyer, air conditioning and Levis in American hell than be without toilet paper, suffer from intestinal parasites, deal with the secret police, and squint with uncorrected vision in the Islamic paradise of Cairo, Tehran and Gaza. Such a fundamental and intolerable paradox in the very core of a man's heart--multiplied millions of times over--is not a healthy thing either for them or for us, as we have learned since September 11.
Most Americans recognize and honor the past achievements of Islamic civilization and the contribution of Middle Eastern immigrants to the United States and Europe, as well as the traditional hospitality shown visitors to the Muslim world. And so we have long shown patience with those who hate us, and more curiosity than real anger.
But that was then, and this is now. A two-kiloton explosion that incinerated thousands of our citizens--planned by Middle Easterners with the indirect financial support of purportedly allied governments, the applause of millions, and the snickering and smiles of millions more--has had an effect that grows not wanes.
So a neighborly bit of advice for our Islamic friends and their spokesmen abroad: topple your pillars of ignorance and the edifice of your anti-Americanism. Try to seek difficult answers from within to even more difficult questions without. Do not blame others for problems that are largely self-created or seek solutions over here when your answers are mostly at home. Please, think hard about what you are saying and writing about the deaths of thousands of Americans and your relationship with the United States.
America has been a friend more often than not to you. But now you are on the verge of turning its people--who create, not follow, government--into an enemy: a very angry and powerful enemy that may be yours for a long, long time to come.

'My facile path': a writer recants
By HELEN DARVILLE

(first published late September 2001)

In The Sydney Morning Herald last Thursday, columnist Miranda Devine assembled a sort of rogues gallery of US and Israel-bashers in the pages of this newspaper. Andrew Bolt did something similar in the Herald Sun. It seems that liberal intellectuals have taken to parroting Saddam Hussein and Mullah Mohammed Omar. John Pilger was particularly notable for his ability to regurgitate Taliban press releases.

That same Thursday morning, about a dozen people contacted me wanting to know why my name was on neither list. "Come on," said one close friend, a Jewess who cordially disagrees with me on just about everything. "You've got to be Australia's loudest, most visible Israel-basher. And not a peep since September 11."

I have watched, since that day, the cosy leftist pieties of my youth disintegrate. Those pieties will be familiar to many of you - chiefly, the old saw that in order to understand horrors, one must be willing to contextualise them, to understand them. And if that mitigates them, so be it.

Despite what some would have you believe, the person who wrote The Hand that Signed the Paper was a creature of the left: a treehugger, a "dreamocrat", a harsh critic of both globalisation and American foreign policy. My father stood for the Greens in the 1993 federal election; my sister was the first woman president of the Townsville Trades and Labor Council; I had a two-year stint on the University of Queensland's student union council - as a Democrat. I was so into siphoning blame away from the perpetrators of violent crime that friends tell me my views were parodic. Society did it. Arrest society.

Hence my willingness to take swipes at Israel and the Jewish lobby, to accuse both (without distinction) of paranoia, of reverse racism, of exploiting the Holocaust for political and territorial gain. "It's so much easier to clobber the Palestinians," I wrote at some point in 1995, "if the world feels sorry for you over something that happened 50 years ago."

The images of Palestinians cheering as planes carved into skyscrapers made me sick at heart. One fat woman in ugly specs will stay with me for a long time. "Don't go there," I chanted under my breath as she ululated with joy. "That's where the Nazis went, and that way lies madness. It's evil." There are many accounts of Eastern European peasants cheering German executioners on, trying to prise the carbines from their hands: "Let me shoot them, Herr Soldat ..."

Worse, these demonstrations of hate were repeated. The Palestinian Authority has prevented further filming. A friend at the BBC told me in a distraught e-mail that Yasser Arafat's police had both destroyed his camera and bashed him with a truncheon.

In a beautiful bit of double-think, liberal intellectuals would have us accept that the only country not permitted to fight in its own defence is the US. Americans are simultaneously expected to accept every carping criticism of their foreign policy, the deaths of thousands of their civilians and to respond peacefully. That the Americans - by the laws of war - are entitled to a ferocious military response is all but discounted.

Negotiate, the carpers say. End support for Israel. Acknowledge why the world hates you. Within this is a large amount of submerged anti-Semitism: Israel's brutality towards the Palestinians led directly to the attacks on America.

There's also a naive belief that were there no sanctions against Iraq, no babies would starve. Poor Saddam: just another victim of the wicked USA. "Now the Americans know how the Iraqis feel," wrote one fatuous Guardian columnist.

These arguments blur the fine line between what one understands about an atrocity and what one condones. I can be certain about the blurring, because I've been tempted down that road myself: "We all know the Holocaust was heinous, but ..."

In one sense, there's a childish honesty to the celebrating Palestinians, the Pakistanis shouting "Death to America!" They make no attempt to disguise their beliefs. Here in the West, no one can say directly that they hate America, so they do it circuitously: "It was an outrage, but ..."

There is one thing I know. Osama bin Laden, Mullah Mohammad Omar, the Pakistani and Palestinian demonstrators, Saddam Hussein and the folks who support them - they'd like to see all Jews dead. I know this because I know what Nazi propaganda looks and feels like, how it works on your mind. I know because writing The Hand that Signed the Paper forced me to grapple with certain of the aims and values of Nazism. These people hate Jews so much that, consciously or unconsciously, I'm unsure which, they've come to identify with Nazis.

Australia's own Nidalul Islam magazine features an Arabised version of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. My BBC friend tells me that a current hit song in Syria and Egypt is called I hate Israel. According to Dharb-i-Mumin, a Pakistani weekly, "4000 Jew employees in WTC were absent on day of attack". Yasser Arafat was last week forced to close an art exhibit at the West Bank's al-Najah University. It boasted a life-size recreation of the scene in Sbarro Pizzeria after the suicide bombing that killed 15. Oh, and a floor-to-ceiling mural of religious Jews being blown up.

I can't specify which incident in the last three weeks led me to abandon my old watchwords of understand, contextualise and explain. If this piece seems more exploratory than explicatory, it is only the beginning of an honest attempt to document a series of wrenching personal and political shifts.

In the past have I blurred the fine line between understanding and condoning atrocity? I hope I haven't but I fear, sometimes, that I have. In the midst of often bitter attacks on America and Israel, are others taking the same facile path I once took - thereby absolving not only the terrorists but their state sponsors of blame?

Helen Darville, author of The Hand that Signed the Paper, is a high school teacher and writer.

'My facile path': a writer recants
By HELEN DARVILLE
Monday 1 October 2001

In The Sydney Morning Herald last Thursday, columnist Miranda Devine assembled a sort of rogues gallery of US and Israel-bashers in the pages of this newspaper. Andrew Bolt did something similar in the Herald Sun. It seems that liberal intellectuals have taken to parroting Saddam Hussein and Mullah Mohammed Omar. John Pilger was particularly notable for his ability to regurgitate Taliban press releases.

That same Thursday morning, about a dozen people contacted me wanting to know why my name was on neither list. "Come on," said one close friend, a Jewess who cordially disagrees with me on just about everything. "You've got to be Australia's loudest, most visible Israel-basher. And not a peep since September 11."

I have watched, since that day, the cosy leftist pieties of my youth disintegrate. Those pieties will be familiar to many of you - chiefly, the old saw that in order to understand horrors, one must be willing to contextualise them, to understand them. And if that mitigates them, so be it.

Despite what some would have you believe, the person who wrote The Hand that Signed the Paper was a creature of the left: a treehugger, a "dreamocrat", a harsh critic of both globalisation and American foreign policy. My father stood for the Greens in the 1993 federal election; my sister was the first woman president of the Townsville Trades and Labor Council; I had a two-year stint on the University of Queensland's student union council - as a Democrat. I was so into siphoning blame away from the perpetrators of violent crime that friends tell me my views were parodic. Society did it. Arrest society.

Hence my willingness to take swipes at Israel and the Jewish lobby, to accuse both (without distinction) of paranoia, of reverse racism, of exploiting the Holocaust for political and territorial gain. "It's so much easier to clobber the Palestinians," I wrote at some point in 1995, "if the world feels sorry for you over something that happened 50 years ago."

The images of Palestinians cheering as planes carved into skyscrapers made me sick at heart. One fat woman in ugly specs will stay with me for a long time. "Don't go there," I chanted under my breath as she ululated with joy. "That's where the Nazis went, and that way lies madness. It's evil." There are many accounts of Eastern European peasants cheering German executioners on, trying to prise the carbines from their hands: "Let me shoot them, Herr Soldat ..."

Worse, these demonstrations of hate were repeated. The Palestinian Authority has prevented further filming. A friend at the BBC told me in a distraught e-mail that Yasser Arafat's police had both destroyed his camera and bashed him with a truncheon.

In a beautiful bit of double-think, liberal intellectuals would have us accept that the only country not permitted to fight in its own defence is the US. Americans are simultaneously expected to accept every carping criticism of their foreign policy, the deaths of thousands of their civilians and to respond peacefully. That the Americans - by the laws of war - are entitled to a ferocious military response is all but discounted.

Negotiate, the carpers say. End support for Israel. Acknowledge why the world hates you. Within this is a large amount of submerged anti-Semitism: Israel's brutality towards the Palestinians led directly to the attacks on America.

There's also a naive belief that were there no sanctions against Iraq, no babies would starve. Poor Saddam: just another victim of the wicked USA. "Now the Americans know how the Iraqis feel," wrote one fatuous Guardian columnist.

These arguments blur the fine line between what one understands about an atrocity and what one condones. I can be certain about the blurring, because I've been tempted down that road myself: "We all know the Holocaust was heinous, but ..."

In one sense, there's a childish honesty to the celebrating Palestinians, the Pakistanis shouting "Death to America!" They make no attempt to disguise their beliefs. Here in the West, no one can say directly that they hate America, so they do it circuitously: "It was an outrage, but ..."

There is one thing I know. Osama bin Laden, Mullah Mohammad Omar, the Pakistani and Palestinian demonstrators, Saddam Hussein and the folks who support them - they'd like to see all Jews dead. I know this because I know what Nazi propaganda looks and feels like, how it works on your mind. I know because writing The Hand that Signed the Paper forced me to grapple with certain of the aims and values of Nazism. These people hate Jews so much that, consciously or unconsciously, I'm unsure which, they've come to identify with Nazis.

Australia's own Nidalul Islam magazine features an Arabised version of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. My BBC friend tells me that a current hit song in Syria and Egypt is called I hate Israel. According to Dharb-i-Mumin, a Pakistani weekly, "4000 Jew employees in WTC were absent on day of attack". Yasser Arafat was last week forced to close an art exhibit at the West Bank's al-Najah University. It boasted a life-size recreation of the scene in Sbarro Pizzeria after the suicide bombing that killed 15. Oh, and a floor-to-ceiling mural of religious Jews being blown up.

I can't specify which incident in the last three weeks led me to abandon my old watchwords of understand, contextualise and explain. If this piece seems more exploratory than explicatory, it is only the beginning of an honest attempt to document a series of wrenching personal and political shifts.

In the past have I blurred the fine line between understanding and condoning atrocity? I hope I haven't but I fear, sometimes, that I have. In the midst of often bitter attacks on America and Israel, are others taking the same facile path I once took - thereby absolving not only the terrorists but their state sponsors of blame?

Helen Darville, author of The Hand that Signed the Paper, is a high school teacher and writer.

Special Dispatch Series - No. 564
September 3, 2003 No.564
Egyptian Ministry of Culture Publication: The Prophet Muhammad's 'Night Journey' was Not to Jerusalem but to Medina


Ahmad Muhammad 'Arafa, a columnist for the Egyptian weekly Al-Qahira, which is published by the Egyptian Ministry of Culture, wrote an article rejecting the established Islamic doctrine that the Prophet Muhammad's celebrated "Night Journey" (Koran 17:1) took him from Mecca to Jerusalem. 'Arafa, presenting a new analysis of the Koranic text, asserts that the Night Journey in Surat Al-Isra' (that is, "the Sura of the Night Journey") in the Koran does not refer to a miraculous journey from Mecca to Jerusalem, but to the Prophet's emigration (Hijra) from Mecca to Medina.

It should be noted that the belief that Muhammad's Night Journey (Koran 17:1) was a miraculous journey to Jerusalem is one of the most important foundations of the sanctity of Jerusalem in Islam. There is an extensive body of Islamic traditions related to this belief, and these are explicitly or implicitly rejected by the author. This article constitutes a dramatic departure from a standard Islamic doctrine. The fact that this article was published in a government journal adds to its political significance. The following is a translation of the article, titled "Was the Prophet Muhammad's Night Journey to Palestine or Medina?" which was published on August 5, 2003: [1]

Where Is Al-Aqsa Mosque?

"'Praise be to Him who took His servant by night (Asra) from the Al-Haram [Sacred] Mosque [in Mecca] to the Al-Aqsa [literally 'the most distant'] Mosque, whose environs We did bless, so that We might show him some of Our signs, for He is the All-Hearing and All-Seeing One' (Surat Al-Isra'[17]:1).

"This text tells us that Allah took His Prophet from the Al-Haram Mosque [in Mecca] to the Al-Aqsa Mosque. Thus, two mosques are [referred to] here, the first of which is the Al-Haram Mosque, and the second of which is the Al-Aqsa Mosque. 'Al-Aqsa' is a form of superlative which means 'the most distant.' Therefore, the place to which the Prophet was taken must be a mosque, and not a place where a mosque was to be established later, nor a place where a mosque had once stood. This place must be very far from the Al-Haram Mosque. It need not be [actually] built, as the Al-Haram Mosque [itself] was at that time merely an open space around the Ka'ba [and not a building].

"But in Palestine during that time, there was no mosque at all that could have been the mosque 'most distant' from the Al-Haram Mosque. During that time, there were no people in [Palestine] who believed in Muhammad and would gather to pray in a specific place that served as a mosque. Most of the inhabitants of Palestine were Christians, and there was among them a Jewish minority. Although the Koran refers respectfully to Jewish and Christian houses of worship, it does not call any of them a mosque, rather 'churches and synagogues' (Surat Al-Hajj [22]:40). The construction of the mosque situated today in Jerusalem and known as the Al-Aqsa Mosque began only in the year 66 of the Hijra of the Prophet – that is, during the era of the Omayyad state, not during the time of the Prophet nor that of any of the Righteous Caliphs. So much for the mosque."


The Night Journey – The Prophet's Flight From His Enemies

"As for the word Asra, if we open the Koran and trace the instances in which it occurs we find the following [five] verses.… [2] Hence [the verbal noun] Isra' means 'moving secretly from a place of danger to a safe place.' The meaning of the [Koranic] expression 'He took His servant by night' is that He ordered him to journey in secret from his enemies to a place where he and his mission would be secure. In other words, the text speaks of the Hijra of the Prophet from Mecca to Medina, and not of a visit to Palestine. [Indeed], the Hijra of the Prophet [to Medina] was carried out unbeknownst to his enemies.

"Let us go back to the beginning of Surat Al-Isra': Allah explains the reason for the Night Journey (Isra') by His words 'so that We might show him some of Our signs.' The exegetes and the transmitters of Hadith usually interpreted this as a reference to [Muhammad's] seeing the prophets and leading them in prayer. Some add [Muhammad's] ascent to heaven, and [his] seeing Paradise and Hell. How do we interpret the signs of Allah in this instance? Which of the interpretations is most acceptable?

"We [on the other hand] interpret this [i.e. the signs] as [signifying] the Prophet' s deliverance from his enemies who were cunningly plotting to murder or capture him, and Muhammad's founding of the [Islamic] state in Medina, his triumph at the Battle of Badr, his making the Al-Hudaybiyya Treaty, and then the conquest of Mecca, and the spreading of his call (Da'wa). These were palpable signs placed in the world of mankind, and they all resulted from the Prophet's Night Journey from Mecca to Medina.

"In contrast, the signs cited by the exegetes and the transmitters of Hadith are not of this world. They are [to be understood] either as shown to the Prophet metaphorically, or that the Prophet's physical nature underwent a change that permitted him to actually see them [that is, the heavenly sights]. Either way, these would not be signs, because the precondition for a sign being truly a [divine] sign is that it be actually seen, and that the man who sees it is in his real physical form. Furthermore, the fact that the reason for the Night Journey is explained with His words ' so that We might show him some of Our signs ' indicates that the Night Journey was a precondition for seeing these signs – that is, he [Muhammad] would not see any of these signs unless he went to a specific place."


The Night Journey Was to Medina , Not Jerusalem

"But we say that the triumph of the Prophet's call (Da'wa) was dependent on the journey to Medina, where the Ansar [i.e. the Prophet's supporters in Medina] were. In contrast, the Prophet's journey to Jerusalem is not a precondition for him seeing some or all of the prophets that preceded him, because the miracle of their being resurrected or the Prophet's admission into their [heavenly] abode does not depend on his journey to Jerusalem. Even if we assume, for the sake of argument, that all the prophets [who preceded Muhammad] were buried in Jerusalem and took it as a place of worship, it would be more fitting that they would come to him, to Mecca, out of esteem for him and for Mecca, which was about to be the new center of worship of God.

"If we move another step forward in the holy text, we findthat it says in what appears to be an explanation of the reason for signs seen by the Prophet: 'He is the All-Hearing and All-Seeing One.' This means that Allah took His Prophet from the Al-Haram Mosque to the most distant mosque because He heard and saw things which have connection with this event. Can anyone claim that the Prophet asked Allah to show him Palestine, or the site of the Temple of David, or a number of the prophets that had been sent [by Allah] before him, or the celestial world and Paradise and Hell? If anyone claims this, he is fabricating a lie about the Prophet.

"We, however, say that Allah [the All-Hearing One] heard the Prophet's supplication to protect him from the cunning plot of his own tribe [the Quraysh], and to provide for his mission a safe haven within the Arab environment. And He [the All-Seeing One] perceived their plot to murder or capture him [the Prophet]. Therefore, the Isra', which is the equivalent of emigrating (Hijra) in secret, took place on the very same day they decided to murder or capture him."

The Medina Mosque

"One of the traditions about the Hijra of the Prophet relates: 'He then continued on his way to Medina and entered it after 12 nights had passed from the month of Rabi' Al-Awwal. The Ansar [i.e. his supporters in Medina] gathered around him, each of them trying to grab the bridle of his camel and asking him to be his guest. But he [the Prophet] said: Let her [the camel] alone, for she has orders. His camel kept walking through the narrow paths and the alleyways of Medina until she reached a Marbid [a place where dates are put to dry] belonging to two orphan youths of the Banu Al-Najjar [clan], in front of the house of Abu Ayyub Al-Ansari. Then the Prophet said: 'Here is the stopping place, Allah willing. This place had been used by As'ad Ibn Zurara as a praying place before the Hijra of the Prophet, and he [Ibn Zurara] used to lead his friends in prayer there.' The Prophet then gave an order that this place be built as a mosque, and he bought its land for 10 dinars.' This is an abridgement [of this tradition] from the book Fiqh Al-Sira by Al-Buti. [3] The word 'praying place' [Musalla] occurring in the above text is the equivalent of the word Masjid [mosque]. In other words, this traditional account confirms that the final destination of the Hijra of the Prophet which was carried out secretly was a mosque – that is, a praying place – in Medina.

"In conclusion, the Night Journey (Isra') was not to Palestine; rather, it was to Medina. It began at the Al-Haram Mosque [in Mecca] after the Prophet had prayed there with his companion, [4] and both of them had left it, and the journey ended at the mosque of As'ad ibn Zurara, in front of the house of Abu Ayyub Al-Ansari, in Medina, where the Prophet built the mosque known as the Mosque of the Prophet. The details of the journey of the Hijra are the very same details of the Night Journey (Isra'), because the Night Journey is indeed the secret Hijra."



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1 Al-Qahira (Egypt), August 5, 2003.

[2] The author cites here and interprets five Koranic verses in which this verb appears -11(Hud):81; 15(Al-Hijr):65; 20 (TaHa):77; 26 (Al-Shu'ara'):52; 44 (Al-Dukhan): 23 - so as to establish the meaning of Isra' in Koranic usage.

[3] The religious scholar Dr. Muhammad Sa'id Ramadan Al-Buti.

[4] According to the generally accepted Islamic tradition, this companion was Abu Bakr.