Via Daniel Pipes: When I lived in Cairo in the 1970s, I conducted a little experiment: What, using only Arabic-language sources, could I learn about Jews, Judaism, Jewish history, Jewish culture, and the like? The paucity of resources stunned me; basically, the best way to learn about these subjects was to read between the lines of antisemitic tracts.It is therefore…
Via Daniel Pipes, Did Divine Intervention Fell Ariel Sharon?In January 2006, when Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon had a stroke, permanently incapacitating him, the American evangelical leader Pat Robertson attributed Sharon's medical condition to divine intervention resulting from Sharon's withdrawal from Gaza a few months earlier. The book of Joel, the prophet Joel, makes it very clear that God has…
From Daniel Pipes: Quiz time: Which Middle Eastern country disappeared from the map not long ago for more than six months?Answer: Kuwait, which disappeared from August 1990 to February 1991, becoming Iraq's 19th province. This brutal conquest by Saddam Hussein culminated intermittent Iraqi claims going back to the 1930s. Restoring Kuwait's sovereignty required a huge American-led expeditionary force of more…
Via Daniel Pipes: The Muslim Public Affairs Council and the Council on American-Islamic Relations each have a problem. As perhaps the most prominent and effective Islamist organizations in the United States, they have distinct stylistic and ideological characteristics but work together effectively as a one-two punch. Their problem concerns two of their most prominent staffers, Edina Lekovic of MPAC and…
From Reviving Hitler's "Big Lie" to Vilify the Jewish State: "If today's Arab anti-Israeli and anti-Jewish propaganda strongly resembles that of the Third Reich, there is a good reason." So writes an associate of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Joel Fishman, in "The Big Lie and the Media War Against Israel" (Jewish Political Studies Review, Spring 2007), an insightful…