THE AZTEC CLUB

December's Fisk Chomsky goes to this beauty:

"I've been to Auschwitz concentration camp. Nuclear weapons are only gas chambers perfected, ... and for a people who know what gas chambers are, how can you even think of building perfect gas chambers?"

Mairead Corrigan Maguire, Irish Nobel Peace Prize laureate 12/19/2004

The Jews are lectured on what is, and what is not anti-semitism, and now they are lectured on Auschwitz by Maguire, a supporter of Vannunu the traitor, who would have been executed in most countries in the world. Look up a web site supporting Vannunu [a sad little man] and you find the inevitable links to the extreme right, extreme left and Islamofacism. Well done Mairead you beat out Kofi and Jacques [he could be a contender every month].

No dear Mairead you will not get us through those gates again.

For a people who know what religious strife is all about how can you even think that we should be defenseless against vicious child murderers.

So sometimes I just write as I think. Right now is one of those moments. Really I don’t care if it doesn’t make sense sometimes. I sit here writing with tears building in my eyes. The screen is blurry because my emotions are at my eyelids. Some things just don’t seem fair. Yeah I know life isn’t fair. Some would say we don’t belong there anymore. Bring us home! Understand this, with every generation there have been things worth fighting for. We have lost our loved ones in the past to great causes. Our roots bare the fruits of freedom. We are there to give peace to people who have not truly seen it for decades. We are there to allow people to not live under a dictator who kills his own people. A person who did nothing but instill fear amongst his own people.

I am confident that we will not turn our backs on them. We will not pull out like we did in Vietnam. We will stay the course. There is going to be many more lives lost. I could be one of them. However I will stare fear in the eyes and do what it takes to help bring a country together. Even if my part is miniscule compared to the big picture. So children who have yet to be born in Iraq can experience freedom like I did as a child.

To allow a child to develop emotions freely and not be oppressed by anyone. Maybe they child who grows up free and with values will someday make a difference in someones life. Without that freedom and without some sense of value, that child may just grow up to confused and misguided. Instead of making good, he or she does harm.

*deep swallow*

To let a child in Iraq, yet to be born, experience life without tyranny. I am sad because more US Soldiers died to allow that possibility to happen. I just hope in the end that I am right in my thought. I hope it was worth all the sacrifice. I hope by going there, that I will be able to take home a sense of accomplishment in my heart. My mind may take years to heal but my heart will know that I gave another his or her freedom and independence.

Bless those familys who lost their loved ones on 12/21/04. I am sorry.

Posted by American Soldier |

“Allah said, ‘No Prophet before Muhammad took booty from his enemy nor prisoners for ransom.’ Muhammad said, ‘I was made victorious with terror. The earth was made a place for me to clean. I was given the most powerful words. Booty was made lawful for me. I was given the power to intercede. These five privileges were awarded to no prophet before me.’” “Allah said, ‘A prophet must slaughter before collecting captives. A slaughtered enemy is driven from the land. Muhammad, you craved the desires of this world, its goods and the ransom captives would bring. But Allah desires killing them to manifest the religion.’” -Ishaq 326-327

No comment as two Aussie Christian pastors have been convicted of villifying the religion of Islam. How?

There is so much bad news at the moment that I am going to buck the trend and just post the story of an American Jew of Iraqi origin lighting Chanukah candles in Saddam's palace. Noting that the Jews were in Iraq for 2,900 years, way before Islam, reminded me of another dictator Mussolini standing on top of a Jewish catacomb 2,000 years old talking about the strangers in our midst. Appeasers say things are worse now in Iraq than they were under Saddam, 60 years ago they said Mussolini made the trains run on time!

This is not only a battle with the murderers but with the media and fifth columnists, who want to see blood to make a good story.

God bless the people of Iraq, and the forces of the Coalition who are fighting against those who would put us back in the Dark ages.

Banu hoshekh legharesh -- "We have come to banish darkness." Thus begins a famous Chanukah song, and no phrase better encapsulates the holiday's deeper meanings. This year, as a United States soldier serving in Iraq, I and several of my colleagues lit a Chanukah lamp and uttered those words in a place that had never before heard them: the former presidential palace of Saddam Hussein, in the capital city of a new and free Iraq.
I myself have seen some of the evidence of his horrors, and I am sickened by them. I have met Iraqis who lost their closest relatives to Saddam's killing machines. I have walked the halls of the decadent monuments he built for himself while his people wasted away for want of food and freedom. I have visited Saddam's execution chambers at the notorious Abu Ghreib prison. I saw the ceiling hooks that were used to torture prisoners. I saw the prison's infamous "medical wing," used for human experimentation. And most shattering of all, I saw the desperate messages scratched on the walls of hideous cells next to the death chambers. Some of those messages appear to have been scribbled in excrement. I shuddered as I imagined the suffering endured by the forgotten victims of that terrible place -- the excruciating physical pain, the agony over loved ones left behind, the devastating sounds of executions conducted only a few feet from their cells. I could almost hear the screams of torture and soft whimpers of despair echo along the walls' unforgiving concrete.
GRANDFATHER IN PRISON
Perhaps I am especially prone to feel empathy for Iraq's prisoners of conscience, for my grandfather was one of them. He and other leaders of the once large Iraqi Jewish community were arrested, paraded through the streets in leg irons, and summarily jailed. But my grandfather was comparatively fortunate, for he was imprisoned many years before Saddam took the country to new depths of depravity. And after serving the prison sentence given him, my grandfather was released. Many of Saddam's prisoners were not so lucky. Many Iraqis unfortunate enough to be deemed ethnically or religiously undesirable, or who displayed the intolerable audacity of free thought, entered Saddam's prisons with the knowledge that they would never again see their loved ones. And in the twisted reality of the former Iraq, they may well have hoped never again to see their loved ones, for Saddam's regime was known to torture children in front of their parents. Whereas my grandfather was able to assuage his suffering by rejoining the people he loved most in this world, the victims of Saddam's apparatus of death could only console themselves by scrawling desperate messages on the walls of their cells.
LIGHT IN THE PALACE
It is the defeat of this sort of profanity that Chanukah celebrates. It was Antiochus' consummate ungodliness -- all the more so when contrasted with the sacred Temple worship that he prevented and defiled -- that the Jews succeeded in vanquishing. But what can be more ungodly, what more profane, than torture, mass murder, and genocide? Such evil had been a staple of life in Iraq. But not any more. We have come to banish darkness.
This Chanukah in Baghdad, in a large and lavish building, the gentle glow of a Chanukah lamp shimmered throughout a cavernous room. One of the objects caught in its radiance is a gilded chair that used to serve as the tyrant's throne, and the palace in which it sits used to be the capital building of his reign of terror. Today, the chair is empty, and the palace houses the apparatus of Iraqi reconstruction.
As my colleagues and I remember the Maccabee bravery of yesteryear and the re-sanctification of the Temple, we pray also for the brave and indefatigable people of Iraq, who day by day are rekindling their flames of hope and re-sanctifying their great land. They are banishing the darkness, and we wish them Godspeed.
A version of this article originally appeared in The Miami Herald.

The requiem mass for Margaret Hassan was a chance to honour a life of peace and selfless dedication that ended with such brutality.
Family, friends and work colleagues were joined by row-upon-row of strangers in the 2,000-plus congregation at Westminster Cathedral, with many more forced to stand.
They had followed news of her October abduction and her apparent murder, and came to pay their respects, to show her loved ones they were not alone in their grief.
Before Saturday's service, they knew her from the videos, broadcast around the world, that showed the aid worker in captivity in Iraq, weeping and begging for her life.

But inside the majestic cathedral, as shafts of light pierced the clouds of sweet-smelling incense, they learnt about Margaret Hassan the woman.

She was persecuted - brutally slain - because she was working in the cause of right

Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor said
"She was the wife, the sister and the aunt. She was known in the slums of Baghdad, by the people she worked tirelessly to help, as Madam Margaret. "

Full of ritual, emotion and solemn dignity, the service was a traditional Catholic funeral mass.
It included the cathedral choir's singing of the haunting Mass for the Dead in Latin as they progressed through the congregation to the front.
But there was one poignant difference - a picture of Margaret cradling an Iraqi child lay by the altar instead of her coffin, as her body has still not been found.

Why did the Western media and Al Jazeera not mention that the 5 Israeli soldiers murdered by Hamas yesterday were all Bedouin Arabs? Did they think that mentioning that they were all members of a Bedouin Scouting unit would delegitimise the Hamas case? Or don't they want to face the truth that there are Bedouin Arabs and Druze in the Israeli Defence Force, and that the vast majority of the Israeli Arabs would probably rather retain Israeli citizenship than join the Arab states around them. Yes I know they don't have 100% equality but they are still better off than in Syria. Lapps don't have 100% equality in Sweden so I was told by a Lapp on a train from Stockholm to Upsaala, but democracy is better than dictatorship or anarchy.

Last Update: 13/12/2004 11:03


Fallen in Gaza blast

By Haaretz Service


Five members of the Israel Defense Forces Bedouin reconnaissance battalion were killed in the Gaza Strip when a booby-trapped tunnel blew up under an army outpost near Rafah on Sunday.

Private Adham Samir Shehada, 19 from Turan
Dozens of family members and friends assembled on Sunday night at the house of the Shehada family in the Lower Galilee village of Turan on hearing of the death of Adham Samir Shehada in the attack earlier in the evening.

Adham was the oldest of Samir and Maisar Shehada's five children. His friends described him as a young man known for his joie de vivre, pleasant temperament, numerous friends and good heart.

Adham had spoken to his family and friends recently about making a career out of his service in the army.

Adham Samir Shehada will be laid to rest in his village at 2.30 P.M. on Monday.

Sergeant Araf al-Zabarga, 20, from Kseifeh
Araf al-Zabarga, 20, from the Negev village of Kseifa, was also among the dead in yesterday's attack.

Friends of Zabarga said last night that he had planned to go to university after completing his military service, adding that he was a quiet man, well-liked among the residents of his village and was happy to be in the army.

On hearing of the incident, Zabarga's father rushed to Soroka Hospital in Be'er Sheva believing his son had been injured. He commented later that he had been constantly filled with a sense that the news was even worse.

Later that evening, the family received confirmation of Zabarga's death

Hussein Abu Leil, 23, from Ein-Ma'ahal
Hussein Abu Leil, 23, from the village of Ein Ma'ahal in the Nazareth hills, was also killed in Monday's attack.

Shortly after the incident, rumors of Abu Leil's death began to spread through the village. His parents, however, didn't want to believe them.

"I called Hussein a number times in the afternoon, but he didn't answer," said his father, Talal. "When he didn't answer his brother's calls either, I started to worry."

Talal added that he had not supported his son's desire to enlist in the army. "But from the moment he did enlist, I supported him and backed him up, despite the fact that many in the village didn't support his step."

Hussein Abu Leil is survived by his parents and three siblings.


Sergeant Sayid Jaja, 19, from Ararah
Sayid Jajawill be laid to rest in his village cemetery at 2.30 P.M.

Tarek al-Zidaina, 20, from Rahat
A deep sense of mourning came over the town of Rahat which had one of its own stolen Sunday.

Al-Zidaina's uncle from his fathers side, Kamel, said Sunday, "he was a good kid, an amazing kid that we loved very much. He joined the Israeli Defense Forces more than a year ago and it was not his custom to talk much about his service. This coming summer his father was planning to marry him and was building him a home near the family."

The first born son in his family is survived by his parents and his seventeen brothers.

May these brave Israeli heroes rest in peace, and my deepest condolences to their families.

Sad picture of the week.

I am fortunate and proud to have been born in Israel.

Azzam Azzam, upon his release from Egyptian captivity 12/5/2004

Ordinary Muslims who believe their money donated to Palestinian charities goes to improve conditions in the disputed territories will have to reconsider their good hearted actions. Some of the money clearly keeps Suha Arafat in luxury in Paris and the rest goes to Hamas and assorted gangs, or so this court judgement makes one believe.

The parents of a 17-year-old slain by Hamas terrorists in Israel were awarded $156 million Wednesday in what plaintiffs called a precedent-setting, historic victory for terrorism victims and a blow to U.S-based Islamic groups that fund terror overseas. "I see now, finally, justice for David. David I'll never see again, but justice I have," said David's mother, Joyce Boim, who wept after the verdict. "I hope to see more of these terrorist organizations put in their place and stopped."
The 12-member jury that deliberated since Tuesday found the Quranic Literacy Institute of Oak Lawn liable for funding Hamas terrorists and awarded Stanley and Joyce Boim $52 million.
A statute requires U.S. District Judge Arlander Keys to triple the damages. Three other defendants -- Texas-based charity Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development, the Islamic Association for Palestine and alleged Hamas fund-raiser Muhammad Salah -- will share in paying damages after Keys previously ruled they were liable.