April 9, 2007
Shiite Cleric Urges Fight Against U.S.

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 12:28 a.m. ET

BAGHDAD (AP) -- The powerful Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr ordered his militiamen on Sunday to redouble their battle to oust American forces and argued that Iraq's army and police should join him in defeating ''your archenemy.'' The U.S. military announced the weekend deaths of 10 American soldiers, including six killed on Sunday.

Security remained so tenuous in the capital on the eve of the fourth anniversary of the U.S. capture of Baghdad that Iraq's military declared a 24-hour ban on all vehicles in the capital from 5 a.m. Monday. The government quickly reinstated Monday as a holiday, just a day after it had decreed that April 9 no longer would be a day off.

Among the 10 U.S. deaths announced Sunday were three soldiers killed by a roadside bomb while patrolling south of Baghdad; one killed in an attack south of the capital; and two who died of combat wounds sustained north of the capital, in Diyala and Salahuddin provinces. On Saturday, the military said, four U.S. soldiers were killed in an explosion near their vehicle in Diyala.

At least 3,280 members of the U.S. military have died since the beginning of the Iraq war in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count. The figure includes seven military civilians.

South of Baghdad, a truck bomb exploded near the Mahmoudiya General Hospital, killing at least 18 people and wounding 23. The pickup truck loaded with artillery shells blew apart several buildings in a warren of auto repair shops.

Violence in Iraq remained as relentless as the deepening debate in the United States about the way forward in the war four years after Marines and the Army's 3rd Infantry Division swept into the Iraqi capital 20 days into the American invasion.

At least 47 people were killed or found dead in violence Sunday, including 17 execution victims dumped in the capital.

Al-Sadr commands an enormous following among Iraq's majority Shiites and has close allies in the Shiite-dominated government. The statement Sunday carried his seal and was distributed in the Shiite holy city of Najaf, where the cleric called for an enormous demonstration to mark the fourth anniversary of Baghdad's fall.

U.S. officials have said al-Sadr left Iraq for neighboring Iran after the start of a U.S. and Iraqi security crackdown. His followers say he is in Iraq.

''You, the Iraqi army and police forces, don't walk alongside the occupiers, because they are your archenemy,'' the al-Sadr statement said.

He urged his followers not to attack fellow Iraqis but to turn all their efforts on American forces.

''God has ordered you to be patient in front of your enemy, and unify your efforts against them -- not against the sons of Iraq,'' the statement said.

Al-Sadr apparently issued the statement in response to three days of clashes between his Mahdi Army militiamen and U.S.-backed Iraqi troops in Diwaniyah, south of Baghdad.

In Washington, Sen. Joseph Lieberman, an independent of Connecticut, said al-Sadr's words showed the American troop surge was working.

''He is not calling for a resurgence of sectarian conflict. He's striking a nationalist chord. We're going to have to watch him closely. He's not our friend. ... He's acknowledging that the surge is working,'' the senator, a strong backer of the war, said on CNN's ''Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer.''

In Najaf, police spokesman Col. Ali Jiryo said cars were banned from entering the city for 24 hours starting 8 p.m. Sunday. Buses were to be at all entrances of the city to transport arriving demonstrators or other visitors to the city center. Najaf residents would be allowed to drive, he said.

Hours after the Mahmoudiya bombing, five charred bodies littered a courtyard. Most of the dead were mechanics in the repair shops, officials said. The hospital was slightly damaged by shrapnel. Many of the victims were in their homes at the time of the blast, 20 miles south of Baghdad.

While religious-based killings are lower in Baghdad in the eighth week of the security crackdown, Sunni insurgents -- including al-Qaida in Iraq -- and Shiite militia fighters have shifted their battleground to regions like Baqouba, the Diyala province capital northeast of Baghdad.

At least 62 bodies -- execution victims who were tortured -- were found in or near Baqouba last week alone.

In a rural area just east of Baghdad, three mortar rounds crashed into houses and six people were taken to a hospital in Sadr City with breathing troubles from a possible chemical agent, police said.

Doctors said the victims' faces turned yellow and they were unable to open their eyes. One hospital official said the chemical was chlorine, although such an effect was unlikely given the small amount of the chemical that could be fitted into the shells.

U.S. forces captured a senior al-Qaida leader and two others in a raid Sunday morning in Baghdad, the U.S. military said.

The al-Qaida figure was identified as ''the gatekeeper to the al-Qaida emir of Baghdad'' and was linked to several car bomb attacks in the Iraqi capital, the military said in a statement, without naming the captive.

Iraqis streamed toward Najaf for Monday's 4th anniversary demonstration. Witnesses said thousands of residents in Baghdad's largest Shiite slum, Sadr City, boarded buses and minivans Sunday for Najaf.

''The faithful should participate in a demonstration in Najaf on April 9, demanding that the occupiers withdraw from our lands. They should carry or wear Iraqi flags,'' al-Sadr's office said.

On Sunday, Iraqi flags flew from most houses and shops in Sadr City. Drivers and motorcyclists affixed them to their vehicles. Police escorted convoys of pickup trucks overflowing with young boys waving Iraqi flags, en route to Najaf.

An Iraqi flag was hoisted over a military base in Basra, Iraq's second-largest city, as Iraqi troops took control of the facility Sunday from British forces. The Shatt al-Arab base is the second to be transferred to Iraqi control in Basra over the past month.

April 7, 2007
Even as Africa Hungers, Policy Slows Delivery of U.S. Food Aid

By CELIA W. DUGGER
MULONDO, Zambia — Traveling to school in wobbly dugout canoes, Munalula Muhau and her three cousins, 7- and 8-year-olds whose parents had died from AIDS, held onto just one possession: battered tin bowls to receive their daily ration of gruel.

Within weeks, those rations, provided by the United Nations World Food Program, are at risk of running out for them and 500,000 other paupers, including thousands of people wasted by AIDS who are being treated with American-financed drugs that make them hungrier as they grow healthy.

“Not to put too fine a point on it,” said Jeffrey Stringer, an American doctor who runs a nonprofit group treating more than 50,000 Zambians with AIDS, “but it will result in the death of some patients.”

Hoping to forestall such a dire outcome, the World Food Program made an urgent appeal in February for cash donations so it could buy corn from Zambia’s own bountiful harvest, piled in towering stacks in the warehouses of the capital, Lusaka.

But the law in the United States requires that virtually all its donated food be grown in America and shipped at great expense across oceans, mostly on vessels that fly American flags and employ American crews — a process that typically takes four to six months.

For a third year, the Bush administration, which has pushed to make foreign aid more efficient, is trying to change the law to allow the United States to use up to a quarter of the budget of its main food aid program to buy food in developing countries during emergencies. The proposal has run into stiff opposition from a potent alliance of agribusiness, shipping and charitable groups with deep financial stakes in the current food aid system.

Oxfam, the international aid group, and other proponents of the Bush proposal say it would enable the United States to feed more people more quickly, while helping to fight poverty by buying the crops of peasants in poor countries.

The United States Agency for International Development estimated that if Congress adopted the Bush proposal, the United States could annually feed at least a million more people for six months and save 50,000 more lives.

But Congress quickly killed the plan in each of the past two years, cautioning that untying food aid from domestic interest groups would weaken the commitment that has made the United States by far the largest food aid donor in a world where 850 million go hungry.

Representative Tom Lantos, Democrat of California and chairman of the House Foreign Relations Committee, warned last year at a food aid conference in Washington that decoupling food aid from American maritime and agribusiness interests was “beyond insane.”

“It is a mistake of gigantic proportions,” he said, “because support for such a program will vanish overnight, overnight.”

But James Kunder, acting deputy administrator of the development agency, said in an interview that the administration proposal, which would affect less than half of 1 percent of American agricultural exports, would not undercut American interests.

“The burden of proof is on producers and shippers to show this is going to significantly damage their interests,” he said, “because we can provide compelling evidence that allowing local procurement is going to save lives by speeding up delivery of supplies.”

Here in Zambia, population 11 million, more than a million children are already orphaned, mostly because AIDS killed their parents. Life expectancy has plunged to 38 years, and countless sickened adults, unable to work, can no longer feed their families.

On a recent day, patients on American-financed AIDS drugs and their families streamed into a food distribution point at the Lewanika Hospital in the town of Mongu. Already, as the World Food Program’s stocks were running low, rations had been almost halved. Some were so hungry that they scooped handfuls of corn-soy powder into their mouths without even adding water to make porridge.

One of the patients, Annie Mubita, a 32-year-old mother of six, said her strength was returning, and so was her appetite, which had shriveled when she was sick. Mrs. Mubita assumes her children are also H.I.V. positive, she said, but has not had them tested because if they, too, go on the drugs, they will be as hungry as she is.

“If the children have an appetite like me, the food won’t last even two weeks,” she said. If the rations end, she said, “me and my children will die.”

Kandundu Litia, a 12-year-old orphan with AIDS, also fears a cutoff of food. The donated corn helps her impoverished foster family — an H.I.V.-positive aunt and uncle and their children — to take care of her. Only in the months since the rations began has there been enough for her to eat three meals a day. The short shock of hair springing from her head still had the telltale reddish tint of the malnourished.

David Stevenson, who leads the World Food Program’s Zambia office and has worked for the organization in Africa for 15 years, through war and drought, says he has never seen a crisis on the scale of what AIDS and drought have wrought in Zambia.

With cash donations, he and others say, the World Food Program could get Zambian corn to the hungry in a month.

The cash would also stretch further than importing food. In recent years, the World Food Program has procured 75 percent more food for Zambia, Kenya and Uganda by buying corn grown in those countries rather than shipping American food, according to Michigan State University agricultural economists who studied crop and shipping data.

There is hope that Zambia, a relatively stable democracy, can become a breadbasket in a region roiled by conflict, disease and economic collapse, at least in years when it is not devastated by drought.

In lean years, the World Food Program shuts down its buying operation here for fear of driving up the prices of corn, the main staple, beyond the reach of poor consumers. It imports food instead.

But during bumper harvests, the World Food Program has become a major buyer of Zambian-grown corn. One of its biggest suppliers is Zambia’s Food Reserve Agency, which buys from farmers’ cooperatives and unions as a way of helping small-scale farmers gain access to markets. Since 2001, it has bought more than $1 billion worth of food in some of the poorest countries on earth.

For farmers like Catherine Hangama, 36, that money makes all the difference. She works a small plot with her husband in the village of Nakandyoli in the Mumbwa district. For the first time last year, they sold a small surplus of corn — six 50-kilogram bags — for $53 to the Zambian government’s Food Reserve Agency, one of the World Food Program’s biggest suppliers here.

That money bought soap and paid for uniforms and fees to send three children to school. This year, she and her husband have planted more and hope to sell 15 bags after this year’s harvest.

“If I don’t plow well, the children won’t be able to go to school,” she explained, with one twin baby at her breast and the other on her back.

What Ms. Hangama earns is a pittance compared with the billions at stake for the main players in American food aid.

Over the past three years, the same four companies and their subsidiaries — Archer Daniels Midland, Cargill, Bunge and the Cal Western Packaging Corporation — have sold the American government more than half the $2.2. billion in food for Food for Peace, the largest food aid program, and two smaller programs, according to the Department of Agriculture.

Shipping companies were paid $1.3 billion over the same period to move the food aid overseas, the department’s figures show.

Nonprofit groups received over $500 million in donated American food, which they sold at market rates in developing countries to raise money for antipoverty programs, according to the international development agency, and a recent study by Emmy Simmons, a retired agency official.

Agribusiness and shipping groups vigorously oppose the Bush administration proposal to buy food in developing countries with cash, which they argue is more likely to be stolen. They say that American food is safer and of higher quality and that the government can speed delivery by storing it in warehouses around the world.

And they defend the idea that federal spending should benefit American business and farming interests, as well as the hungry. Without support from such interest groups, food aid budgets from Congress would wither, they say.

“It would be at extreme risk of being diminished,” said Paul B. Green, a consultant to the North American Millers’ Association, a trade group for the milling industry that counts Archer Daniels Midland, Bunge and Horizon Milling, a joint venture of Cargill and CHS Inc. among its members.

Gloria Tosi, a lobbyist and immediate past president of the American Maritime Congress, an association of United States-flag ship owners, agreed. “There’s no constituency for cash,” she said.

Many charitable groups involved in food aid share that worry, and also warn that a badly managed program to buy food in poor countries could drive up food prices and worsen hunger.

The Alliance for Food Aid, made up of 14 nonprofit groups involved in distributing and selling American food aid overseas, maintains that the Bush proposal is too ambitious and advocates a modest pilot program.

“Do a demonstration,” said Robert Zachritz, a senior policy adviser at World Vision. “Does it work? Then you can go from there.”

For now, the World Food Program says it hopes that other rich nations or individuals will donate cash to keep rations flowing for the half million needy Zambians, among them Munalula and 135,000 children fed through community schools.

The pupils in this grass hut schoolhouse are from families so poor they cannot afford the flip-flops and $6 uniforms required to attend public schools.

Beatrice Nyambe, 64, a retired public school teacher who serves without pay as principal, worries that when food from school runs out, most of the children will go back to day work in the fields so they can buy a few handfuls of cornmeal to fill their bellies.

Munalula, whose own mother was an untrained teacher before AIDS took her, is the best student in the school and wants to be a teacher as well. She helps her cousins with their homework, scratching out numbers in the dirt with a stick.

At school, she and 50 other children in the dirt-floored classroom in the village of Nalusheke fell silent but for the smacking sounds they made eating a boiled mush of American bulgur wheat. Each bowlful, topped with split peas from Canada, cost 12 cents. The bulgur came from sacks emblazoned with the words, “Gift of the people of the United States of America.”

Munalula and her barefoot cousins scraped their bowls clean, savoring each unsweetened bite. But some children barely touched theirs.

Sisi Negenda, a 6-year-old with little braids, shyly explained. She has a younger sister, 3, and several orphaned relatives at home. She said she wanted to share with them. She carried off the bowl, still heavy with porridge, as though it were a precious, breakable object.

April 8, 2007
Op-Ed Columnist
A War of Narratives

By DAVID BROOKS
On the Dead Sea, Jordan

I just attended a conference that was both illuminating and depressing. It was co-sponsored by the Center for Strategic Studies at the University of Jordan and the American Enterprise Institute, and the idea was to get Americans and moderate Arab reformers together to talk about Iraq, Iran, and any remaining prospects for democracy in the Middle East.

As it happened, though, the Arab speakers mainly wanted to talk about the Israel lobby. One described a book edited in the mid-1990s by the Jewish policy analyst David Wurmser as the secret blueprint for American foreign policy over the past decade. A pollster showed that large majorities in Arab countries believe that the Israel lobby has more influence over American policy than the Bush administration. Speaker after speaker triumphantly cited the work of Stephen Walt, John Mearsheimer and Jimmy Carter as proof that even Americans were coming to admit that the Israel lobby controls their government.

The problems between America and the Arab world have nothing to do with religious fundamentalism or ideological extremism, several Arab speakers argued. They have to do with American policies toward Israel, and the forces controlling those policies.

As for problems in the Middle East itself, these speakers added, they have a common source, Israel. One elderly statesman noted that the four most pressing issues in the Middle East are the Arab-Israeli dispute, instability in Lebanon, chaos in Iraq and the confrontation with Iran. They are all interconnected, he said, and Israel is at the root of each of them.

We Americans tried to press our Arab friends to talk more about the Sunni-Shiite split, the Iraqi civil war and the rise of Iran, but they seemed uninterested. They mimicked a speech King Abdullah of Jordan recently delivered before Congress, in which he scarcely mentioned the Iraqi chaos on his border. It was all Israel, all the time.

The Americans, needless to say, had a different narrative. We tended to argue that problems like Muslim fundamentalism, extremism and autocracy could not be blamed on Israel or Paul Wolfowitz but had deeper historical roots. We tended to see the Israeli-Palestinian issue not as the root of all fundamentalism, but as a problem made intractable by fundamentalism.

In other words, they had their narrative and we had ours, and the two passed each other without touching. But the striking thing about this meeting was the emotional tone. There seemed to be a time, after 9/11, when it was generally accepted that terror and extremism were symptoms of a deeper Arab malaise. There seemed to be a general recognition that the Arab world had fallen behind, and that it needed economic, political and religious modernization.

But there was nothing defensive or introspective about the Arab speakers here. In response to Bernard Lewis’s question, “What Went Wrong?” their answer seemed to be: Nothing’s wrong with us. What’s wrong with you?

The events of the past three years have shifted their diagnosis of where the cancer is — from dysfunction in the Arab world to malevolence in Jerusalem and in Aipac. Furthermore, the Walt and Mearsheimer paper on the Israel lobby has had a profound effect on Arab elites. It has encouraged them not to be introspective, not to think about their own problems, but to blame everything on the villainous Israeli network.

And so we enter a more intractable phase in the conflict, which will not be a war over land or oil or even democratic institutions, but a war over narratives. The Arabs will nurture this Zionist-centric mythology, which is as self-flattering as it is self-destructive. They will demand that the U.S. and Israel adopt their narrative and admit historical guilt. Failing politically, militarily and economically, they will fight a battle for moral superiority, the kind of battle that does not allow for compromises or truces.

Americans, meanwhile, will simply want to get out. After 9/11, George Bush called on the U.S. to get deeply involved in the Middle East. But now, most Americans have given up on their ability to transform the Middle East and on Arab willingness to change. Faced with an arc of conspiracy-mongering, most Americans will get sick of the whole cesspool, and will support any energy policy or anything else that will enable them to cut ties with the region.

What we have is not a clash of civilizations, but a gap between civilizations, increasingly without common narratives, common goals or means of communication.

April 8, 2007
Op-Ed Columnist
A Woman’s Work Earns Her Enemies

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
MEERWALA, Pakistan

You might think that the worst tragedy that could befall a couple would be for their young daughter to be raped and murdered.

But here in rural Pakistan, that was only the beginning for Hasina Bibi and her husband, Rashid Ahmed. Their story underscores how to be poor in the developing world often means having not only no food but also no justice — and how any war against poverty must be devised not only to enrich the world’s poorest people but also to educate and empower them.

On the morning of July 3 last year, Ms. Hasina and Mr. Rashid were cutting grass in the fields along with their daughter, Shamshad, who was 11 years old, and a group of other laborers. Shamshad carried a stack of grass to a pile across the field — and then disappeared.

Villagers found Shamshad’s body a few hours later. She had been raped and tortured: There were many bite marks, and burns from cigarettes.

Everybody guessed who could have done this: the grandchildren of the local feudal lord. These grandchildren, in their teens and 20s, often harassed girls.

The grandchildren, however, said that the culprits were their servants — and so the police arrested the servants (who presumably would be beaten until they confessed). But Ms. Hasina and Mr. Rashid knew that the servants could not be guilty, because they had all been together when Shamshad vanished.

“We went to the police, and after five minutes the police said, ‘Go home,’ ” Ms. Hasina related. The police told the parents to forget about making accusations against anyone in the feudal lord’s family.

So Ms. Hasina traveled to Islamabad, the capital of Pakistan, 400 miles to the north, to appeal for assistance from the government — but she received no help and her trip infuriated the feudal lord’s family. The feudal lord’s family members beat up her family members and warned them to be silent.

“They said, ‘We killed the girl, and if you don’t keep quiet we’ll kill all of you as well,’ ” Ms. Hasina explained. She sighed and added: “Everybody says, that is just what happens to poor people.”

Yet there is one place that Ms. Hasina and Mr. Rashid have found a sanctuary: the shelter run by Mukhtar Mai here in the remote village of Meerwala. Mukhtar (who also goes by the name Mukhtaran Bibi) survived a gang rape to become a fervent campaigner for voiceless women in Pakistan.

I’ve written about Mukhtar repeatedly over the last few years, and she now runs several schools, an ambulance service and a women’s aid group. Her home and courtyard are full of women and girls who trickle in each day, shellshocked by injustice or disfigured by beatings or acid attacks. Mukhtar arranges medical or legal help and does what she can to address their needs.

A year ago on a visit to Mukhtar’s village, I wrote about a young woman named Aisha Parveen who was fighting efforts by the police to return her to the brothel from which she had escaped. Mukhtar helped rescue Aisha, and now Aisha is trying to replicate Mukhtar’s work farther south. One of Aisha’s first cases was to help Ms. Hasina after her daughter’s murder.

Mukhtar is a hero of mine. But her work has earned her many enemies, particularly among the feudal lords — and even in the government of President Pervez Musharraf, who fears that Mukhtar displays Pakistan’s dirty laundry before the world. So the Pakistani authorities are harassing Mukhtar, trying to break her organization. (For readers who want to help, I’ve posted some ideas on my blog, www.nytimes.com/ontheground. You can also post your comments about this column there.)

Most of the pressure right now is on Mukhtar’s top aide and soul mate, Naseem Akhtar. Lately Naseem’s brother was in a mysterious vehicle accident, her father was ordered arrested for no apparent reason and her own house was broken into.

Farooq Leghari, a police chief, was transferred away from Meerwala because — he and others say — he tried too hard to protect Mukhtar. He now is police chief in another town and, when I visited him, he told me that “this harassment and pressure on them is from very high up, from Islamabad.”

“Their lives are in danger,” Mr. Leghari said of Mukhtar and Naseem, adding that they could be killed by assassins sent by feudal lords or by the Pakistani government itself (our close allies!).

So I have a message for President Musharraf: Don’t even think about it. Start protecting Mukhtar instead of harassing her. And if any “accident” happens to Mukhtar or Naseem, you will be held responsible before the world. We are watching.

By Solly Ganor
FrontPageMagazine.com | March 15, 2007
Five years ago, I had a conversation with a young Palestinian student who in short precise terms explained how Islam will defeat the West. The conversation opened my eyes to a much larger picture in which Israel plays only a minor role in the Islamic game of conquest. Since then I tried to speak to some Arabs who come to pray at the Mosque, but they were not as outspoken as the student.

Last week, I had another conversation with an Israeli Arab construction boss by the unlikely name of Francis who was in charge of building a villa near our house in Herzelia. He told me that his family was Christian, and his name was given to him in honor of the Franciscan monks. Our conversation was as interesting as the first conversation I had with the Arab student five years ago and I would like to share it with you. Francis frequently parked his car near our house and we would exchange polite greetings.

About a week ago, the water was shut off for repairs in the house he was building, and Francis asked me if I could give him some hot water for his coffee. He was a tall man of about forty, with reddish hair and blue eyes. He spoke a perfect Hebrew, and I naturally became curious about him. I felt that he may the right person to exchange some views with. By his looks, I assumed that he was either a Druze or from the Syrian region. He looked more like a teacher than a construction worker and, as I later found out, he was actually a teacher by profession. Since my conversation with the student five years ago, I was always curious to hear their side of the story; therefore, I decided to invite him for a cup of coffee to our house. I saw him hesitate for a moment; then he smiled and thanked me for my hospitality.

While we drank our coffee, he told me that he was from a small village in the Galilee called Jish, near the present Kibbutz Sassa. I remembered the village very well as I was one of the soldiers who captured the village while serving in the 7th Armored brigade during the War of Independence in 1948. I decided not to tell him about it because at the time we encountered some stiff resistance at that village and quite a few of the inhabitants were killed.

He went on to tell me a little about himself. "For a while I was a teacher and I loved teaching, but I couldn't make a living at it and I decided to join my father in law who is in the construction business." Judging by the large Honda he was driving, I figured that he didn't do too badly changing his profession.

Our conversation soon turned to the present situation in the Middle East, about Hamas winning the elections, the situation of the Israeli Arabs, and the last Lebanese war against Hezbollah. "As Christians we are in a difficult situation here in Israel. Unfortunately, the Moslems and especially the extreme Islamist section, are giving the tone here. My family who lived in Bethlehem probably since the Crusaders, had to flee for their life. The Moslems have been forcing us out, by threats and even murder. Bethlehem that was once predominantly Christian is now predominantly Moslem. Very little is written about it even in the Israeli press."

He sipped his coffee and gave me a long look. He seemed like someone who wasn't quite sure whether to say what he was about to say. I gave him an encouraging nod.

"I have to tell you something which very few of you seem to comprehend." He continued, "Your bungling war against a few thousand Hezbollah fighters which you should have crushed no matter what, considering the importance of the outcome, has created a completely new situation, not only for this area, but globally. Your inept leadership totally misunderstood the importance of winning this war."

"As a matter of fact, the whole Moslem world, not only the Arabs, simply couldn't believe that the mighty Israeli Army that defeated the combined Arab forces in six days in 1967, and almost captured Cairo and Damascus in 1973, couldn't defeat a small army of Hezbollah men. As usual the Moslems see things the way they want to see things. Most think that the present generation of Israelis have gone soft and can be defeated."

"The American bungling of the war in Iraq only added to their conviction that victory not only over Israel but also over t West is not only possible, but certain. The ramifications of these two bungling wars may bring an Islamic bloody Tsunami all over the West, not only in Israel. The sharks smell blood and these two wars gave them the green light to attack sooner than they had in mind. Your problem is that you are on the defensive and they have the option to choose the time and the places when and where to attack and there is nothing much you can do about it. When will you Westerners realize that half measures don't work with people who are willing to die by the thousands for Allah to achieve their goal? In their eyes the Western World is simply an abomination on earth that has to be wiped out."

He spoke quietly and I could just picture him in the school giving his students a lecture. I poured him another cup of coffee and encouraged him to continue.

"The Americans, the Europeans, and even you Israelis really don't know what it is all about, do you? During the last generation hundreds of thousands of chiden have been taught all over the Moslem world in Madrass schools to become martyrs for Allah in order to kill the infidels. These youngsters not only are ready to do it, but are actually in the process of doing it. Bombs are going off all over the world killing and maiming thousands of people, not only on 9/11 in the US, in London Madrid and Bali, but in Africa, India, Bengladesh, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and many other places. The first signs of the Islamic Tsunami is already here, but the West doesn't understand, or doesn't want to understand what is coming."

"The Americans, instead of realizing that this is as bad as World War Two, or even worse, are going to pull out of Iraq, handing it over to Iran on a silver platter. Next may come the Saudis and the rest of the Gulf states. When dirty bombs go off all over Western towns, who is going to stop the Iranians?"

"Now is the time to stop them, not only because they are developing nuclear bombs, but because Iran has become the base for all Islamic terrorist. They supply, money, men, and weapons to Islamic terrorist around the world, quite often through their diplomatic mail. Billions of petro-dollars that are pouring into Iran are being funneled into terrorist organizations world-wide. They believe, and perhaps rightly so, that the West will do nothing to stop them in achieving their goals. Is history repeating itself? Are the Iranians making the same mistake that Hitler made when he attacked Poland? Is the situation similar?"


"As a history teacher who studied the subject thoroughly I can tell you that Western victory in World War Two was not all certain. Hitler could have won the war if he would have gone ahead with the atomic bomb development before the Americans. The Germans began working on it in the thirties, and it was Hitler's decision to prefer building more conventional arms, as he considered atomic weapons sheer fantasy. Hitler made the wrong decision, but had he made the right decision the world would have been a different type of world today, wouldn't it? The West won the war against Hitler by sheer chance. Very few people seem to realize that."

I must say that his last words shook me up quite a bit. Had Hitler made a different decision, I would have died in Dachau, there wouldn't have been a Jewish state called Israel, and most likely there wouldn't have been any Jews left in the world. The idea that the Western democracies in general and the fe of the Jewish people in particular could have hinged on Hitler's one decision, is a scenario of the worst nightmare.

He notices that his last words had an effect on me, and he smiled. "I see that my words are not wasted on you," he said dryly. I nodded, and he continued with his lecture. "Coming back to our time, the Iranians rely on the West doing nothing about their development of nuclear bombs. They also rely on their secret weapon: an inexhaustible supply of Islamic suicide bombers, some of them who are already planted all over the Western World. Besides the Islamic countries that supply these suicide bombers, a second front has been opened, and that is the Internet with more than five thousand Islamic web sites, brain washing and urging young Moslems to become martyrs for Allah. They especially target young Moslems who live in Europe and the West in general. The Western intelligence authorities consider these web sites a bigger threat than the Iranian atomic ob. Al-Qaeda recently issued a television broadcast that promised a devastating attack against its enemies this spring. As we all know, Al-Qaeda doesn't make empty threats."

"Actually, I don't understand why the Iranians bother to develop atomic bombs and bring the whole world down on them. Every suicide bomber is a potential atomic bomb, or a biological, chemical or dirty bomb that can be no less devastating than an atom bomb. The Americans and Europeans have no defense against this type of war."

"What can we do against this type warfare?" I asked him. "Well, you Israelis, should better prepare yourself for another round against Hezbollah. It will not be long in coming. It depends on the Iranians to give the word. This time you will have to destroy Hezbollah no matter what the cost may be."

"Of course, your next round against Hezbollah may involve the Syrians and the Iranians against you. The Iranians declared that they will not allow Hezbollah to be defeated no matter what and my aunch their missiles against you. So will the Syrians. What will Israel do? It is unlikely that Israel will accept its destruction and may use their nuclear arsenal if the West will not come to their help. Perhaps our book of Revelation is not so wrong in describing that the end of the world would start at Armageddon, which we know as Har-Megiddo in Israel. The book of Revelations describe the last battle would be fought at Armageddon between the "Forces of good and the forces of evil."

"And who would you call the forces of good 'Israel or Islam?' I asked looking him straight in the eyes. He gave me a startled look. "If I were a Moslem, I would have no problem to name the forces of good and it wouldn't be Israel. As a Christian, I would probably name Israel, but as a Christian Arab I would prefer not to answer."


We looked at each other. His answer made it clear where the Israeli Arabs stood, whether they were Moslems or Christians. And why should I be surprised? After all the Israeli Arabs call the establishment of the State of Israel their nakbah (disaster).

Is there a way to avoid the "Armageddon"?

"I think there are two ways to avoid it. One can be a major war which the West can win. As in World War Two, had the West attacked the Germans in 1936 the war would have lasted not more than a month with very few casualties. Their procrastination resulted in World War II with all its consequences. Eventually, the West will have to tackle the Iranians, it is better that they do it now to avert a world catastrophe later. With Iran defeated the Islamic onslaught will lose its base, and it may be the turning point in history to defeat the menace of extreme Islam. The majority of the Moslems don't want this nfrontation anyway."

"You are painting a rather dark picture. When do you think we will have the next round against Hezbollah?" I asked. "I think they will attack again as soon as they are fully re-equipped and I think it will be during the summer, while Israel is still in a military and political turmoil."


For a while, we sat in silence. He finished his second cup of coffee and got up. "I know what I am going to do. I am going to Canada to join my brother. This country is becoming much too dangerous for Christians as well," he said. He thanked me for the coffee and we shook hands.

"You said there are two ways to avoid Armageddon?" I remembered to ask him.

"Sure, all the West has to do is follow Putin's ways. He assassinates his enemies without blinking an eye. Assassinate the four or five Mullahs who run the show, Ahmadinejad, and a few more Iranian fanatics, and the War can be avoided. It may be difficult to do, but not impossible. With today's hi- tech technology I am sure that new weapons against individuals are being prepared right now. I think it would be a better way of handling the matter than an all out war against Islam."

The conversation with Francis was not more encouraging than the one I had with the Palestinian student five years ago. It was becoming clear that Israel may be on the forefront for the coming war of the West against Islam, unless we follow Francis' suggestion to assassinate the heads of the snake, rather than going to war with Islam.

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