There is no idea so hateful or useless that some university somewhere won’t hold a conference on it. The latest example of this unfortunate truism is the recently announced “Israel/Palestine and the One-State Conference” scheduled for early March at the Harvard Kennedy School. Nineteen speakers and ten panels will spend two days explaining why “’two-states for two peoples’ is no longer a viable option for Israel/Palestine,” as the organizers assert, and discussing a “solution” to the Israeli-Arab crisis that has absolutely no chance of ever being implemented.

The adherents of this veiled assault on Israel argue that the “two-state solution,” “in which Israel is secure and the Palestinians have sovereignty,” as President Obama told Time magazine, has been a failure. Of course, the two-state solution has failed because since 1948, the first time Arabs rejected a Palestinian state, a critical mass of Palestinian Arabs have wanted something more than sovereignty: they want Israel destroyed and her land possessed by Arabs from “the river to the sea,” as PLO chief Yasser Arafat used to say. The one-state solution, which envisions a single nation comprising Arabs and Jews under a single government, is a way to achieve the same aim. Such a state would obviously require the end of Israel’s Jewish identity, and would result in an Arabic demographic explosion that in any kind of representative government would marginalize Jews. Moreover, we can see the most likely sort of regime that would rule the “one state” by looking next door at Egypt, where Islamists are now in control and relations with Israel have deteriorated. Whatever the result, such a state would not resemble the liberal democracy of Israel today.

Perhaps the conference will address issues like Arab intransigence, genocidal anti-Semitism, and terrorist violence, but judging from some of the speakers, such balance seems unlikely. Among the usual obscure academics and Palestinian activists camouflaged as scholars, one finds anti-Israel luminaries like Stephen M. Walt, who along with John Mearshimer in 2007 published The Israel Lobby, an academic recycling of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in which nefarious American Jews secretly control U.S. foreign policy in service to their Zionist puppet-masters. Even more suggestive of the conference’s bias is the presence of Ilan Pappé, whose scholarly malfeasance got him cashiered from Haifa University over his involvement in a student’s master’s thesis that fabricated an Israeli massacre of Palestinians. Such an episode will surprise no one familiar with Pappé’s own work, which as historian Efraim Karsh has written, displays a “consistent resort to factual misrepresentation, distortion, and outright falsehood.” Pappé is clearly an ideologue and propagandist, as he frankly admits: he sneers at “objectivity,” professes that he is “not as interested in what happened as in how people see what’s happened,” and crows that “my ideology influences my historical writings.” That such a travesty of the profession of history is invited to speak at a prestigious university testifies to how intellectually and morally corrupt the American academy has become.

This rather loose attitude towards evidence and fact embraced by Pappé reveals itself as well in the on-line descriptions of the panel topics, where one finds libels such as references to “the original 700,000 [Arabs] who were ethnically cleansed from Palestine in 1948 and 1967,” moral cowardice in phrases such as “a great deal of violence has isolated the two peoples from one another,” and the de rigueur question-begging epithet: “How can justice for the victims of racism or violence be achieved?” You get the picture: racist Israelis who ethnically cleansed Arabs from their homeland and incited a “cycle of violence” need to abandon their Jewish identity and their ancestral lands in order to resolve a bloody conflict.

The Kennedy School conference, then, is a propaganda exercise the effect of which is to further the Palestinian Arab “phases” strategy for destroying Israel. In this regard, history provides an interesting parallel to the way the Arabs have manipulated Westerners and obscured their true aim, the destruction of Israel. In 1938, Hitler began fulfilling his plan to create a racial German empire, one that also was put into place by “phases.” Just as the Middle East regimes today claim that their hostility to Israel results from the maltreatment of the Palestinians, who have been dispossessed of their homeland by an oppressive invader, Hitler justified his aggression against Czechoslovakia as in fact the liberation of his fellow Germans from an alien government oppressing them and violating their rights. Thus Hitler’s pretext that national and ethnic self-determination for the Sudeten Germans, necessary because of the Czechs’ “brutal treatment of mothers and children of German blood,” as Propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels put it, was the reason he was interfering in Czechoslovakia.

This weekend I’ll be participating in the Is the (Real) News Dead? International Conference at Pepperdine University in Malibu.

The conference is being put on by American Freedom Alliance and the list of participants can be found here.

I’ll tentatively be speaking on two different panels:

The first is “Impact of the media on the political process,” a breakout panel in the morning.

The second is an afternoon breakout panel exploring social media: “News in 140 Characters or Less: What role does social media play in shaping the news?”

I have plenty of things to say on both subjects but if anyone has any ideas to suggest then please let me know in the comments below.

KABUL, Afghanistan - Taliban suicide attackers struck at the national peace conference as it opened Wednesday in the Afghan capital, waging gunbattles near the venue. At least two attackers were killed but no delegates were hurt, officials said.

The attack, including rocket fire, started minutes after President Hamid Karzai began his opening address to some 1,600 dignitaries gathered for the conference, in which he appealed for rank-and-file Taliban members to stop fighting for the sake of the country.

The Taliban, which had earlier threatened to kill anyone who took part, claimed responsibility for the attack in a phone call to The Associated Press, saying they intended to sabotage the three-day conference.

The conference, known as a peace jirga, continued despite the attack....

Karzai's remarks were interesting:

"There are thousands of Taliban and Hizb-i-Islami, they are not the enemies of this soil," Karzai said.

He said continuing fighting would only prevent the withdrawal of international forces from Afghanistan.

"Make peace with me and there will be no need for foreigners here. As long as you are not talking to us, not making peace with us, we will not let the foreigners leave," Karzai said.

About 10 minutes into his speech, Karzai was briefly interrupted by an explosion outside, which police said was a rocket. Karzai heard the thud, but dismissed it, telling delegates, "Don't worry. We've heard this kind of thing before."

Soon afterward, an AP reporter nearby heard a loud explosion and saw smoke rising from a second apparent rocket attack that struck about 100 meters (yards) from the venue, a huge tent pitched on a university compound.

Bursts of gunfire could be heard to the south of the venue, and security forces rushed to the area. Helicopters flew overhead....

If anyone had any lingering doubts as to this administration’s position towards Israel — and it would take a narcoleptic not to have figured it out at this point — it was made painfully obvious a few days ago in, of all places, the UN.

On Friday the United Nations adopted a resolution for a nuclear free Middle East, specifically singling out Israel but curiously making no mention of nuclear powers-in-waiting such as Iran.

From Marius Schattner (AFP):

The resolution adopted by the United Nations on Friday calls on Israel to join the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and urges it to open its facilities to inspection.

It also calls for a regional conference in 2012 to advance the goal of a nuclear-free Middle East.

[…]

The document, which singles out Israel but makes no mention of Iran’s controversial nuclear programme, drew a furious reaction from the Jewish state who decried it as “deeply flawed and hypocritical.”

(Full article here.)

That last quote is a masterpiece of understatement. It doesn’t take Count Metternich to read beyond the language and figure out the true intent, which is to further weaken Israel, seriously compromise its greatest and possibly final deterrent, and generally make it more pliable to acceptance of “peace plans” which amount to capitulation and a  slow path to extinction.

The resolution itself is unremarkable. The UN is basically a Third World kleptocracy long since hijacked by a loose coalition of mullahs, commissars and tin pot dictators. There are no surprises when they trash Israel — that’s what they do. Israel for its part is giving the resolution the weight it deserves and has already indicated it won’t participate in the 2012 conference laid out in the resolution.

What is remarkable is the United States supported this resolution.

But it was US backing for the resolution which has caused the most consternation among Israeli officials and commentators, who interpreted the move as “a resounding slap around the face” which has dealt a very public blow to Israel’s long-accepted policy of nuclear ambiguity.

[…]

According to the top-selling Yediot Aharonot daily, the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was “furious with the Obama administration for having failed to prevent the resolution from passing… and for choosing to support it.”

[…]

“In the secret talks that Netanyahu held with Obama’s men… Israel was promised that the resolution would not focus on Israel and that if it did, the Americans would vote against.”

Short of publicly kicking Benjamin Netanyahu in the groin I can’t think of any clearer signal the Obama White House could have sent regarding their attitude towards, and plans for, Israel. In the alternate universe of Obama’s mind Israel is the problem, its national interests nothing more than one more impediment on the road to “peace in the Middle East,” which ultimately equates to Arab hegemony.

Others have stated that for the first time the United States is on the wrong side of history. Unfortunately, as this administration continues to embrace its enemies and vilify friends, it’s becoming a habit.

President Obama would have us believe that his administration has been in charge from Day 1, addressing the catastrophic oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.  He said at his first solo White House press conference in nearly a year that:

I take responsibility. It is my job to make sure that everything is done to shut this down. This is what I wake up to in the morning, and this is what I go to bed thinking about – the spill.

Apparently, even Obama’s daughter is waiting for action.  According to the President, his daughter Malia knocked on the bathroom door while he was shaving a couple of days ago and asked:

Did you plug the hole yet, Daddy?

Of course, as Bill O’Reilly repeatedly points out on The Factor, nobody seriously expects the President of the United States to put on a deep sea diving suit and do a James Bond act to fix the leak.  Obama rightly says that it is British Petroleum that has the knowledge, technical expertise, resources and ultimate responsibility to plug the hole.  And he said that he was wrong to take BP’s assurances at face value.  BP will have to face the consequences of its own decisions to save money at the expense of safety and not adequately plan for the worst case scenario that has ensued.

However, where the  Obama administration has failed miserably is in its own response to the crisis.

Democratic strategist James Carville said it best, speaking from Louisiana:

Man, you got to get down here and take control of this and put somebody in charge of this thing and get this thing moving. We’re about to die down here.

I assume that Obama’s plan to briefly interrupt his holiday weekend trip to Chicago for a photo op in Louisiana is not what Carville has in mind.

The Obama administration failed to mobilize in a timely fashion the equipment and ships requested by BP and Louisiana state officials.  It is allowing its environmental bureaucrats to slow down remedies to disperse the leaked oil on the grounds that an environmental impact study is needed to be done first.  Meanwhile, the spill is already creating the most serious environmental disaster in the nation’s history and anything that can remediate its effects – even with some minor adverse consequences of its own – is better than waiting weeks or months for the completion of an environmental impact study.

More than two weeks after Louisiana’s governor first requested permission to build sand barriers to protect marshes threatened by the oil, Obama finally gave his OK for just half of the 86 miles requested.

During his news conference yesterday, Obama struck back at his critics, saying that they did not know what they were talking about.  He took a swipe at the oil industry and at Sarah Palin’s slogan of “drill-baby-drill.”  Ironically, if the environmentalist crowd had not succeeded in blocking drilling in Alaska and other locations on land, there might not have been the need to drill for oil so far below sea level.  Obama, who had moved to allow expanded drilling just a few weeks before the rig exploded, is now going overboard in the other direction by ordering a suspension of virtually all current and new offshore oil drilling activity until a comprehensive saftey review is completed.  Most oil drilling has been done safely for years; yet one of Obama’s only decisive actions is to throw out the baby with the bathwater.

Obama also tried to use the failure to plug the hole in the Gulf as another opportunity to plug his cap-and-trade energy bill.  All that will do is increase the cost of energy considerably for every American.  That is certainly not the kind of  hope or change we can believe in.

This week brought the Heartland Institute’s Fourth International Conference on Climate Change to Chicago. That may sound like last December’s climate conference in Copenhagen, but this gathering of scientists and policy-makers is unlike any other in the mad and often maddening world of global-warming debate. What separate’s Heartland’s gathering from the more famous Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s doom-fests is that Heartland’s conference actually features a diversity of opinions and conclusions. It’s science the way it ought to be.

By and large, the mainstream media does it best to ignore the Heartland conference, since it’s far easier to dismiss something out of hand than to actually evaluate the arguments presented. Happily, this is increasingly not the case for the rest of the nation. This was Heartland’s biggest conference yet, attracting a number of politicians from across the country, bloggers and media from around the world and a surprising number of average Joes who are frustrated with the fallacy of “scientific consensus” about climate change and decided to further their personal climate-science education.

There are a number of misconceptions that progressives and environmentalists toss about when it comes to the Heartland conference, in an effort to smear the event so people don’t listen to the science that’s being presented. Let’s deal with a few of those myths up front. Heartland is not funded by Exxon-Mobil, Koch Industries, or Richard Scaife. In fact, Heartland hasn’t taken any money from any of them for years and – as a matter of policy – doesn’t not allow any group or industry sector to provide more than five per cent of its funding.  The sponsors of the conference (some of which do have ties to industry) don’t pay for that privilege. It’s rather the other way around: Heartland subsidizes their attendance in a number of cases. The scientists and policy-makers at the conference aren’t in the pocket of the energy companies either. Respected, distinguished scientists like ex-NASA climatologist Dr. Roy Spencer, MIT atmospheric physicist Dr. Richard Lindzen, University of Colorado atmospheric scientist Dr. William Gray and a host of others are independent voices of integrity and sanity when it comes to climate research.

Most important, there’s no marching in lockstep among these brave dissenters. Opinions vary, as they should in a field so intricately complex and poorly-understood as global climate. There’s no “consensus” at the Heartland conference. That’s a refreshing, invigorating atmosphere when one is used to being beaten about the head over and over again with the same, tired arguments that some alarmists wield like a club. There’s a decidedly friendly, open-minded tone to this conference, at once intellectually challenging and entertaining. The global warming argument, such as it is, is often advanced using this sort of statement: “human activities are causing catastrophic climate change.” That over-simplification disguises at least five, more subtle arguments, each of which is critical to making the case that mankind ought to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in order to avoid planetary disaster. These are: 1) the climate is changing, 2) that change is alarmingly different than changes in the past, 3) that change is not occurring naturally, 4) greenhouses gases generated by mankind can affect the planet’s climate, and 5) it can therefore be proven that greenhouse gases generated by humans actually are affecting the planet’s climate in an unprecedented, catastrophic manner. The experts and policy-makers attacked at the Heartland conference tackled each of these issues, in accordance with their particular expertise.

No one, on any side of this debate, disputes proposition number one. As Professor Bob Carter of James Cook University (Queensland, Australia) adroitly put it: the phrase “climate change” is a tautology. You can’t have climate without change. The climate today is different than it was fifty years ago, fifty centuries ago and fifty millennia ago. Is the climate changing? Of course it is. That’s what climate does. Some scientists at the Heartland conference even presented evidence that we’re about to enter a significant cooling phase. That did not appear to be the majority view, but everyone I listened to agreed on the basic point: climate does indeed change, whatever mankind does or does not do.

The importance of proposition number two, that today’s changes are markedly different from historical climate changes depends on a couple of things, a) how far back you are willing to look, and b) how much faith you place on a given temperature record data set. The shorter the “look back” the more alarming recent climate changes appear. Viewed over geologic time spanning millennia, today’s variations are trivial. If one considers only the past century and a half or so, and if one ignores several troubling issues with temperature records over that period of time, today’s changes appear much more worrisome. This is a tough one to argue for the alarmist set and I’m not sure why they spend so much time trying to argue it. You can’t write off Ice Ages.

Proposition three is the most important battleground issue in this debate. Nobody disputes the fact that we experienced a warming cycle from about 1970 through 1998 and that this trend has since leveled off. Scientists like Phil Jones and Michael Mann attribute that warming trend to greenhouse gas emissions. Other scientists like Roy Spencer, Richard Lindzen, Jay Lehr and

Chris De Freitas used the Heartland conference to advance their arguments that natural forces have dominated, and will continue to dominate the climate picture. Using satellite and weather balloon data, contrasted against gaping flaws in the surface temperature record, Spencer, Lindzen and Lehr argued that greenhouse gases have a weakly negative feedback effect on climate. “Feedback” is the key here, because no scientist on any side of this debate believes that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases generated by man can directly influence planetary climate to a large degree. Rather, as the theory goes, the climate is so sensitive that a small increase in greenhouse gases will “force” stronger greenhouse gases – chiefly water vapor – to retain more heat in the atmosphere. However, an increasing body of data suggests that the opposite is true. Spencer has long advanced the theory that cloud over (which reflects sunlight and therefore has a cooling effect) is the misunderstood, underestimated factor in the global climate equation and that increased greenhouse gas concentrations marginally enhance this effect.

The scientific community has long recognized that the “El Nino Southern Oscillation” (ENSO) has a big effect on the climate, the only question is: how much? ENSO refers to the heat absorbing/heat releasing cycle associated with the Pacific Ocean. Phil Jones, Michael Mann and the like believe that ENSO explains roughly thirty per cent of recent global warming. Chris De Freitas presented a peer-reviewed paper that suggests that ENSO is responsible for about eighty per cent of the temperature rise. If one combines the importance of clouds with ENSO effects, there is a strong case to be made that recent temperature increases are largely – if not entirely – natural and that conclusion would rip the heart out of anthropogenic global warming theory.

No serious scientist disputes proposition number four, that greenhouse gases generated by man can affect the climate, it’s simply a question of how much. That question leads us to proposition number five. Most (though not all) alarmists rely on the surface temperature record to “prove” the case that human activities have been unduly influencing planetary temperatures. The invaluable work of Anthony Watts, and others, has shown how deeply flawed the surface temperature record really is. Moreover, as Spencer and some his colleagues have demonstrated, the atmospheric temperature record – the one that really matters – tells a much different story.

If cap and trade loving policy-makers and alarmist researchers were really serious about this issue, they would have been at the Heartland Conference, learning, discussing and exchanging information. One prominent scientist who continues to believe in AGW, Dr. A. Scott Denning of the Colorado State University, did show up and, at the end of the conference, he asked to address the crowd of skeptics that had gathered for the closing ceremonies. While Denning didn’t back off his basic positions, he did say that “it’s really too bad that more of my colleagues in the scientific community didn’t attend this…” and that “we have much more in common than our differences…” while calling for more discussion and less name-calling on all sides of the debate. (You can watch his remarks here). Kudos to Dr. Denning for doing what scientists are supposed to do: keeping an open mind. Would that more of his colleagues and the politicians pushing for climate change legislation did the same.

Every five years or so the United Nations hosts a foreign minister level conference to review the implementation of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT).  The United Nations has been hosting the latest such review conference this month.

This year, Iranian strongman Mahmoud Ahmadinejad decided to join the party.  He delivered, on the first morning of the review conference, his customary condemnation of Israel and of the United States while defending his country’s nuclear program.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton spoke later the same day, accusing Iran of being the only country attending the UN review conference that is acting with impunity when held to account by the International Atomic Energy Agency and Security Council.  Iran, she said, is consistently violating its obligations under the NPT.   That was a good start, but then she rhetorically crouched into a defensive position.

Clinton said that President Obama had come to office with “an open hand” extended to the Iranian regime.  We “reached out” in many ways, she said, without elaborating and without acknowledging the fact that we have wasted over a year in this futile exercise while Iran marches on towards developing nuclear weapons.

Then, in order to show how transparent the United States really is, Clinton announced that the Obama administration had decided to unilaterally reveal the number of nuclear arms in our arsenal.  She reiterated Obama’s unilateral pledge to develop no new nuclear weapons.  And, in an implied threat to Israel, Clinton said that the United States was “prepared to support practical measures” towards the objective of a nuclear-free Middle East – a stalking horse pushed by Egypt and other Muslim countries in the region to force Israel to give up its suspected nuclear arsenal without any means of assuring that Iran or the other Islamic countries would desist from pursuing their own nuclear arms ambitions.  This was not just feel-good rhetoric.  U.S. officials are reportedly in talks with Egypt over a plan to make the Middle East a nuclear-free zone.

Some have criticized Israel for not joining the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and refusing to declare its suspected nuclear arsenal.  However, Israel has observed the conduct of rogue states that have joined the NPT like North Korea, which quit the treaty once it had successfully tested nuclear weapons, and Iran which regularly flouts its NPT obligations.  Faced with existential threats from Iran and its armed terrorist surrogates, Israel is correct in asserting that there must be real peace in the Middle East before agreeing to any nuclear-free zone.

Hillary Clinton also mentioned in her speech at the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty review conference that the Obama administration would submit Protocols to the Senate for ratification regarding nuclear-free zones in Africa and the South Pacific.  However, our Secretary of State said nothing about maintaining a nuclear-free zone in Latin America even though there is a real threat of the spread of nuclear arms technology from Iran and North Korea to Venezuela.  The reason for Clinton’s silence on Latin America, I believe, was not to embarrass Brazil, whose foreign minister addressed the UN conference immediately after Clinton.

Brazil, according to some reports, is busy moving forward with its own nuclear development program.  It has already had three secret military nuclear programs between 1975 and 1990, and is now embarking on the building of nuclear-powered submarines.  During his election campaign, Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva criticized the NPT, calling it unfair and obsolete.  Although Brazil has signed the treaty, it has placed restrictions on inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency and has defended Iran’s nuclear program.

President Obama has called Lula, as the Brazilian president is called, “my man.”  Obama said he “loved this guy,” calling him “the most popular politician in the world.” Yet Lula is the same man whose pals include Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez.  He is the same man who said that there was “no fraud in the Iranian election,” congratulating President Ahmadinejad on his stolen election.   He is the same man who decided to open a Brazilian embassy in North Korea shortly after Kim Jong Il’s missile testing. And he is the same man who laid flowers in the terrorist Yasser Arafat’s grave, but refused to follow the custom of other visiting presidents to Israel of laying down flowers in the grave of Theodor Herzl, revered in Israel as its founder.

Obama loves Lula and trusts him more than he trusts the leader of one of our closest allies, Israel.  He is willing to press Israel to give up its nuclear deterrent in pursuit of a nuclear-free Middle East that Iran is certain to ignore, while giving Lula (not to mention Hugo Chavez in Venezuela) a free pass to possibly pursue a nuclear arms capability.

Hillary Clinton’s speech to the UN Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty review conference was yet another demonstration of the appeasement policies that the Obama administration is recklessly pursuing.  It wants to show the world the virtues of nonproliferation by unilateral actions that put our security at risk.

The Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty is ineffective and Clinton even admitted in her speech that it would not be fixed anytime soon to give it the enforcement teeth that it would need.  Yet the treaty appears to be a centerpiece of President Obama’s nuclear disarmament policy along with unilateral actions he is taking.

Not once did we hear Clinton mention the only multilateral mechanism that has proven effective in preventing dangerous nuclear proliferation – the Proliferation Security Initiative.  This Bush administration initiative involved naval surveillance and interdiction to stop the transport of nuclear arms materials and missile technology to and from states and non-state actors of proliferation concern.  It was used successfully, for example, to effectively end Libya’s nuclear ambitions.

President Obama has expressed support for enhancing the PSI, but there is scant evidence to date that he means it.  Instead of emphasizing muscular diplomacy to stop dangerous nuclear proliferation backed by a credible threat of interdiction, Obama wants to lead the way to total nuclear disarmament.  He may lead the way, but the world’s dictators who get their hands on nuclear materials will surely not follow.

A conference at the University of California, Berkeley, on April 28-29, 2010 (and continued at UC Davis on April 30), “Muslims and Jews Together: Seeing From Without; Seeing From Within,” was billed as a major international symposium for “the inauguration of the Program for the Study of Muslim-Jewish Relations at UC Berkeley and the establishment of a UC-wide and West Coast working group for the study of Muslim-Jewish relations .”

The conference was a collaborative effort between the Center for Middle Eastern Studies (CMES) at UC Berkeley and the Jewish Studies Program at UC Davis. Its stated purpose was to use the frameworks of traditional Middle East studies and Jewish studies to develop a new academic field focused on the historical interaction between Muslims and the Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews who once lived among them. Most of the participants were historians or anthropologists specializing in North African Jewry, particularly Morocco.

CMES chair Nezar AlSayyad introduced the conference with a discussion about “building bridges” by re-framing the term, “Jews of Islam,” into something that could be equated with Judeo-Christian civilization: something he called “Judeo-Muslim civilization.” CMES vice-chair and conference organizer Emily Gottreich echoed AlSayyed’s comments in her introduction to the first panel, describing the “Jews of Islam” as “an awkward and unfortunate” construction and seconding the notion of “Judeo-Muslim civilization.”

The emphasis throughout this first panel, which was titled “Framing,” was on synthesis, symbiosis, and challenging “the dichotomy.”  How does one teach about Jews in a Muslim country and teach about Muslims in a Jewish country? The first part of the question, however, cannot be answered, because very few Jews remain in the same Muslim countries where, prior to 1948, there were large, ancient communities. The reason for this exodus—the forced removal of Jews in response to Israel’s founding that year—went unexamined by panelists.

Oren Kosansky, an anthropology professor at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon, and the first speaker on this panel, brought up the concept of the dhimmi: the historical subservient, second class citizenship of Jews and other minorities in Muslim lands. Although dhimmi legal status entailed a whole series of humiliations and penalties for Arab Jews, Kosansky did not elaborate on the details. He claimed that the research on dhimmi status was “overstated” and that an “overly dyadic picture has been drawn, and relationships in daily life have been under-emphasized.” Religious identity was not the only identity, he continued, as there was also economic, gender, regional, and class identities. In what seemed to me a Western-centric omission, he left out clan or tribal identity. Kosansky then claimed that the “emergence of Zionism exaggerated the differences” between Moroccan Jews and Muslims. In fact, the function of Zionism was to rescue these Jews from intolerable environments.

During the discussion period for this panel, Lital Levy, assistant professor of comparative literature at Princeton University and a panelist at the UC Davis “Muslim-Jewish” conference, contradicted Kosansky. She disagreed that Zionism had resulted in an exaggeration of differences, and she pointed out that Jews who had converted to Islam were still considered Jews. It was, she maintained, an identity, a specificity that stuck to the individual in the Middle East over many centuries. She asked for a comment, but none of the panelists were willing to respond.

Daniel Tsadik, an assistant professor of Sephardic and Iranian Studies at Yeshiva University in New York and a visiting assistant professor at the Yale Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Anti-Semitism, spoke next on the first panel. He claimed that the emphasis on religion blurs other, more significant, factors, and said he wished scholars would focus more on the reality of Jews and Muslims living together in a given place and as members of one society, rather than as majorities or minorities.

Tsadik questioned whether the framework of “Jews in Muslim lands” focuses on a true common denominator. He lamented the alleged political agenda of Jewish scholars attempting to “know the enemy,” as well as the dependence on written texts, which, he worried, could create unbalanced data. As an example, he brought up the edicts of the Iranian ulema (Muslim legal scholars), which record all the fatwas against Jews, thereby providing written evidence of a bleak fate. However, this “bleak fate” isn’t too far from the truth.

The major theme the following morning at the second panel, “Problematizing,” was to get beyond the Arab-Israeli conflict, or what participants described simply as “the Conflict.” Almost uniformly, speakers reiterated that “the Conflict” was not the eternal metaphor or model for the 1,400 year history of Muslim-Jewish relations; rather, it was a distorting mirror.

Nonetheless, there were plenty of distortions of “the Conflict” on this panel. Joel Beinin, Stanford University history professor and well-known anti-Zionist, claimed that Iraqi Jews fled to Israel in 1950-51 due to “collusion between the Israeli state and the Iraqi government of the time.” He offered no explanation or historical record of this alleged “collusion.”

It should be noted that Beinin was one of the signatories to a statement from California faculty members (posted at the website for the “U.S. Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel”) urging the UC Berkeley student senate to vote “yes” on a divestment bill. Fellow signatory, UC Berkeley Jewish studies professor Daniel Boyarin, chaired the second panel.

Matthias Lehmann, associate professor of history and Jewish studies at Indiana University, lamented that the conflict is always perceived as religious when it’s actually—according to his view and that espoused regularly by anti-Israel propagandists—between two nationalisms. To consider it a religious conflict, he continued, is “anachronistic, ahistorical, and irrelevant.” He said nothing about the role of radical Islam in furthering strife. Extending this theme, Sami Shalom Chetrit, a Mizrahi professor at Hebrew University who recited his poetry at the conference, said that calling it a religious conflict was “the big tragedy.”

During the roundtable portion of the second panel, Lehmann did question the lack of commentary—in a discussion by UC Irvine history professor Marc Baer on Jewish to Muslim conversions that conveniently left out the concept of dhimmi— on power differentials. Panel chair Daniel Boyarin softly interjected that power differentials depended upon whether the location was “Dar al-Harb” (house of war) or “Dar al-Islam” (house of Islam), to which the audience laughed knowingly. No one pointed out that Dar al-Harb and Dar al-Islam are religious concepts that just might relate to the supposedly non-religious conflict.

Considering the downplaying of such important concepts, one has to wonder if future students in the Program for the Study of Muslim-Jewish Relations will be able to ask questions pertaining to apostasy, infidels, honor killings, Jews as “apes and pigs,” or global jihad?  In addition, will the program offer an equal number of scholars to represent both Jews and Muslims?

The makeup of the conference certainly did not inspire confidence. The brochure stated that “scholars of Middle Eastern Studies have returned—after a long hiatus—to re-discover the importance of non-Muslims within Muslim societies,” leading one to expect an inter-faith dialog. Yet, the panels consisted mostly of Jewish academics—a pattern that predominates at Muslim-Jewish inter-faith conferences.

During the reception, I pointed this out to Susan Miller, UC Davis history professor and one of the conference organizers,  and she replied that it was “not an inter-faith conference, but an academic conference, and that is who is here. It is irrelevant who they are; what matters is what they say.” In other words, she skirted the issue.

There was only one Muslim panelist on the two panels I attended: Mohammed Kenbib, a specialist in Moroccan Jewish history at Mohammed V University in Rabat, Morocco. At the reception I raised this omission to him directly by stating that “there should be more Muslims here.” To my surprise, he responded by leaning towards me and lightly kissing me on the forehead. “This is quite a warm, fuzzy event,” I said, smiling. His response was profound: “We are very far from the Middle East here.”

Indeed, and so too is the Program for the Study of Muslim-Jewish Relations.

Rima Greene wrote this article for Campus Watch, a project of the Middle East Forum.

Patron of world terrorism, financier of Hamas and Hizballah, accuses the U.S. of being a patron of world terrorism. "Ahmadinejad likely to stir sanctions debate with address at U.N. nuke summit," by Bridget Johnson for The Hill, May 2 (thanks to Weasel Zippers):

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will stir the already stormy debate over sanctions on Iran's nuclear program when he pops in at the United Nations on Monday to address its nuclear nonproliferation conference.

Ahmadinejad's sudden intention to attend caught many by surprise, and comes on the heels of the Islamic Republic's vow last month to formally complain to the U.N. that President Barack Obama was threatening Iran.

What a ludicrous idea. I wonder if he himself believes it.

Before leaving Tehran on Sunday, Ahmadinejad gave a glimpse into the tone he would likely be taking into the U.N. "We have documents that prove [Washington] is the root of world terrorism," Ahmadinejad said in a speech Saturday, according to Iran's Press TV. "It has been aiding and abetting extremist groups over the past years."

Iranian media outlets reported Ahmadinejad saying that he was coming to the U.S. with the goal of global nuclear disarmament, criticizing the International Atomic Energy Agency for not reaching this goal and lamenting that nuclear weapons have posed "the single greatest threat" to the world for more than 60 years.

"I don't know what he's showing up for," Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said Sunday on "Meet the Press."

"If Iran is coming to say we're willing to abide by the Non-Proliferation Treaty that would be very welcome news," Clinton said. "I have a feeling that's not what they're coming to do. I think they're coming to try to divert attention and confuse the issue."

What was your first clue?

Lawmakers had swiftly sounded off about the visit, admonishing Clinton to not allow Ahmadinejad in the country.

"This is preposterous, and allowing it to happen will make a mockery of the effort to stop the spread of nuclear weapons to rogue states and terrorist groups," a group of 14 Republican senators led by John Cornyn (Texas) wrote to Clinton on Friday. "There is simply no compelling reason for Ahmadinejad to be allowed to enter the United States."

In the lower chamber, Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.) led a similar yet bipartisan letter.

"Make no mistake: Ahmadinejad's attendance will make a mockery of a conference meant to stop the proliferation of nuclear weapons," the lawmakers wrote. "...The U.S. must not allow this dangerous tyrant to use our freedoms and our obligations as a host country for the UN to force himself upon our country to spread his message of hate and violence."...

Reps. Jesse Jackson Jr. (D-Ill.) and Mike Pence (R-Ind.) sent a letter to Obama on April 19 with 366 House signatures calling on the president to "fulfill your June 2008 pledge that you would do 'everything in my power to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon'" and urging Obama to use whatever presidential powers at his means to impose "punishing measures" on Tehran.

The letter, to which Obama has not yet issued a response, according to Jackson's office late Friday, also asks the president to "rapidly" implement the sanctions legislation -- passed in December by the House and the following month by the Senate -- when it comes out of conference....

Huey Long was once asked whether he thought fascism could ever come to America. His answer was “Yeah, but it’ll come calling itself anti-fascism.” America isn’t close to such a future, but I couldn’t help thinking about Long’s comment in connection with an episode that occurred recently at my alma mater.

The occasion was a conference at Columbia University, scheduled by a conservative organization called Accuracy in Academia. The conference title was “A Place at the Table: Conservative Ideas in Higher Education” and its purpose was to highlight the lack of intellectual diversity in the highly politicized environments of academic institutions like Columbia. Among the announced speakers were two university trustees, Ward Connerly and Candace DeRussy, as well as Dinesh D’Souza, the urbane author of “Illiberal Education.”

The ceremonies were to begin with a Friday evening dinner, addressed by Connerly, who is currently heading a national civil rights campaign. Connerly was coming off an important victory at the polls Nov. 3, when Washington state became only the second (after California) to ban racial preferences. According to Accuracy in Academia president Dan Flynn, 140 students and professors attended the dinner, which was held in the East Room of Columbia’s Faculty House.

But guess who else came to that dinner? The mere presence of Connerly, who expresses ideas the campus left doesn’t want to hear, was enough to rouse 100 raucous radicals into action. They threw up a picket line outside the dinner and hurled obscenities and racial epithets at those entering the building. Keep in mind that these students, like Columbia itself, had previously welcomed such rabid antisemites and racial demagogues as Khalid Muhammad, and had honored unrepentant Communists like Angela Davis, who in a recent appearance at Michigan State told students that the main problem in the world was white people. Columbia not only welcomes such race-haters, but pays them handsomely out of student funds to propagate their bigotry.

By contrast, the conservative conference featured no rabble-rousers, no hate-agendas, and actually paid the university $11,000 to hold its event on campus.

– Fascism by any other name

If you have a favorite Horowitz quote you want to highlight for others then please submit it here. Please include:

1. “Horowitz Quote of the Day” in subject line.
2. A link to where the quote is from. (No need to include this if it’s from a book.)
3. Any remarks you’d like published explaining what value you take from it.
4. Your preferred name and a link to your blog or homepage (if you have one.)

A conference at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) on April 16, 2010, offered “Critical Perspectives on the Criminalization of Islamic Philanthropy in the War on Terror.” Co-sponsored by the UCLA International Institute, the Critical Race Studies Program, and the UCLA Journal of Islamic and Near Eastern Law—and including speakers from UCLA’s Center for Near Eastern Studies (CNES)—the conference proffered the usual apologist fare.

It was also an echo chamber. Of the approximately 30 people in attendance, 20 of them were academics. Several students showed up, in addition to the usual assortment of aging leftist revolutionaries.

The thrust of the conference was simple: The war on terror has led to a crackdown on Muslim charities, which has had a chilling effect on Muslims by rendering them unable to engage in Zakat (charity), one of the five pillars of Islam.

Unmentioned throughout this eight-hour infomercial was that the majority of the charities that have been investigated for financially aiding terrorism were found guilty and that decent Muslims are capable of giving to charities that do not foment bombings and beheadings.

Asli Bali, acting professor of law at UCLA, organized the conference and acted as one of the principal moderators. She responded to challenging questions from the audience by stating: “We will take three questions from presenters; others will have to wait.”

Jennifer Turner of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) Human Rights Program was the speaker over whom everybody seemed to be fawning. Her presentation was titled, “Blocking Faith, Freezing Charity,” and, in typical ACLU fashion, she made excuses for Islamists’ bad behavior while bashing America.

She began by stating: “I’m not a social scientist. I am not here to offer any statistical analysis”—a fig leaf she employed to make wildly unsubstantiated claims, as when she announced that “the conviction in the Holy Land Foundation case was based on faulty evidence.” She didn’t bother to elaborate.

It turned out her “research” that had the entire room in a swoon consisted of the following:

I did 120 interviews with American Muslims in Michigan and Texas. People reported that they were unable to give Zakat. Some had stopped giving entirely. Some felt fear of deportation or denial of citizenship.

Turner excused her extremely small sample size with more platitudes about not being a statistician. She insisted that she did not ask leading questions, although the process was clearly an exercise in promoting victimhood. She did not verify the accuracy of her respondents or analyze any tax returns. In short, she relied on her own biased views to justify a predetermined conclusion.

University of Michigan, Dearborn, history professor Sally Howell actually found oppression in increased giving. As she put it:

Since 2001, there have been 14 new mosques, and 17 mosques have doubled in size. This is proof that people are not donating overseas.

Howell followed this with more bizarre commentary:

“The Arab charity LIFE [Life for Relief and Development] had their board resign one year after Israel invaded Lebanon.”

Foiled again!

“As a result of restrictive policies” a board member of another charity, according to Howell, “embezzled $10,000.”

Yes: and as a result of inconvenient and restrictive securities laws, Bernie Madoff was forced to steal. It was all America’s fault.

“Does government get to decide what is good Islam and what is bad Islam?,” she asked.

No, but it does get to decide what constitutes funding terrorism.

Howell concluded, “The FBI has to show results or lose resources.”

Erica James, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) anthropology professor, offered proof—of nothing:

“I have an anthropology background. I am here to theorize what is happening.”

Her solution to the supposed problems faced by Muslim charities? “Defiant giving.”

During the question and answer period of this panel, an audience member—resorting to the usual name calling directed at critics of Middle East studies— proclaimed that “well-known bigot Daniel Pipes wrote an article about ‘stealth Islamists.’”

The panelists all nodded in agreement. There was no word on Pipes’s findings regarding UCLA law professor—and moderator at this conference—Khaled Abou El Fadl’s status as, in fact, a stealth Islamist.

Laila Al-Marayati, the chairperson of KinderUSA—a charity that terrorism analyst Matthew Levitt included in his book on funding Hamas—portrayed the terrorist groups Hamas and Hezbollah as harmless. As she put it, “Hamas helps Palestinian children in Gaza. I don’t consider Hamas and Hezbollah as threats to me and my family.”

Jonathan Benthall of University College, London, gave a talk that can be summed up in one quote: “The United States is the key to the problem.”

Mona Atia, assistant professor of geography and international affairs at George Washington University, claimed that “Egypt has been a model of fighting terrorism.”

Meanwhile, McGill University political science and Islamic studies professor Khalid Medani demonstrated willful blindness by opining, “Somalia is a place where Islamic terrorism is not possible because they are not organized.”

When asked if the definition of a terrorist was hard to prove, Medani responded, “You’re right. I try to critique them based on their own terms. I’m not a lawyer.”

No UCLA conference would be complete without offensive commentary from a member of the Center for Near Eastern Studies faculty. This time, CNES director and anthropology professor Susan Slyomovics—speaking during a break with colleagues about a book she’s working on—said:

If Jews can get reparations from Germany, then Palestinians should get reparations from Israel. After all, what the Germans supposedly did to the Jews [emphasis added] is what Israel is doing to the people of Palestine.

All the while, she kept smiling and laughing. Nothing makes for a good academic sitcom like Holocaust denial from a prominent professor of Middle East studies.

Despite eight hours of groupthink, I was able to finally cut through the leftist clutter to determine why the U.S. is investigating Muslim charities: 9/11 actually did happen, and the majority of the charities accused of funding terrorism actually did.

Only a UCLA Middle East studies conference could deliberately fail to grasp this.

Eric Golub is the publisher of the Tygrrrr Express blog. He wrote this article for Campus Watch, a project of the Middle East Forum.

The Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) has announced it is setting up a special division that will deal with human rights.

Following a Tuesday meeting with the UN's High Commissioner for Human Rights Navanethem Pillay in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, OIC Secretary-General Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu said the organization was on the verge of creating a permanent and independent committee for human rights.

Ihsanoglu said he hoped that the committee's creation would bring about a "paradigm shift" in the OIC....

The OIC spans 57 countries over four continents, making it the second-largest inter-governmental organization after the United Nations. It was established in 1969 and aims to be the "collective voice of the Muslim world."

However, Mona Abousenna, secretary general of the Averroes and Enlightenment International Association, said the committee would only be effective if it avoided religious influences.

"Setting up a human rights committee at the Organization of the Islamic Conference could be a positive move in one case only, and that is if this committee does not derive its principles of human rights from Sharia [Islamic Law] and other divine sources, but from human principles and ideals," she told The Media Line.

But of course there is no chance of that whatsoever.

Her comments reflect a belief among some Islamic critics that Islamic tenets do not fall in line with principles of human rights.

That's obvious from any honest look at the teachings of Islamic law, and the day's headlines.

"Having stated what it is against, it has also to announce what it is for," she said of Islam, "namely, freedom of expression and acceptance of difference of opinions and, above all, a mind-set that is not absolutist and accepts a secular method of thinking - by which I mean thinking about relative issues in a relative, and not in an absolute way. It must accept all religions of the world as equal to Islam and respect their followers as much as it should embrace nonbelievers and skeptics."...

With freedom of expression under attack from Muslims in the U.S. today -- South Park, our bus ads, Franklin Graham, the Elyea case -- it is hardly likely that the OIC, which is trying to compel the UN to criminalize criticism of Islam, is going to come out in favor of freedom of expression.

Bat Ye'or, a British scholar and specialist on the history of non-Muslims in the Middle East, said the OIC's charter included the propagation, promotion and preservation of Islamic teachings and values based on moderation and tolerance.

"It is clear to me that the OIC needs to improve the image of human rights in Muslim countries, although these are not uniform," she told The Media Line. "It also needs to establish a general framework for its member countries. However, these human rights will be rooted in the Quran, the Sunna and the Shari'a. They will not be similar to the Universal Declaration, which is secular. They will be rooted in the religion, in Islam....

Indeed.

Iran's supreme spiritual leader Ali Khamenei has said Islam precludes the use of nuclear weapons. In his message to the participants in an international disarmament conference in Tehran he said the people of Iran are fully aware of the danger of the spread of weapons of mass destruction. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has called for an independent panel to oversee nuclear disarmament. Delegates from 56 countries are attending the disarmament conference in Tehran....

 "The single most important event of this three-day conference." -- Mark J. Koenig at David Horowitz's NewsReal Blog

The Freedom Defense Initiative conference "Jihad: The Political Third Rail -- What They Aren't Telling You," held at the site of the Conservative Political Action Conference 2010, was the only event at this most pivotal of conservative gatherings to discuss the single greatest threat our nation faces today: that of the global jihad.

The crowd was standing room only; many had to be turned away at the door. But now this ground-breaking event is available in its entirety on DVD! This professionally shot DVD includes all the dynamic and eye-opening talks in crisp video and clear audio.

This DVD is an extraordinary teaching tool: you can use it to awaken your civic or church group, or even your family and friends, to the reality of jihadist activity -- both violent and stealthy -- in the U.S. and around the world, and to how seriously our freedoms are imperiled.

Learn from the courageous ex-Muslim Wafa Sultan about the everyday miseries to which Muslim women are subjected as a matter of course; from ex-Pentagon official Steve Coughlin about the appalling extent of Muslim Brotherhood infiltration in the U.S. government, and how it hamstrings our ability to head off terror attacks; from Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff of Austria and Anders Gravers of Denmark about Europe's rapid abandonment of the freedom of speech in the face of Islamic infiltration; and from Simon Deng about the final outcome of the jihad: the complete subjugation and even outright enslavement of non-Muslims. Then Allen West delivers a speech for the ages -- an informed, passionate indictment of the politically correct fog that blankets us today, and a ringing call to defend our freedoms before it's too late.

All of it is hosted by the directors of FDI and SIOA: Pamela Geller, one of the most dynamic, charming, and well-informed speakers on the scene today, and the scholar of Islam and jihad Robert Spencer.

Get this unique and extraordinary DVD now for only $18.00! (This price includes the cost of shipping.) Send check or money order to:

Pamela
Freedom Defense Initiative
PO Box 121
1040 1st Avenue
NY NY 10022

Order now! Supplies are limited!

JERUSALEM, April 9 (Reuters) - Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has cancelled a planned trip to Washington next week for President Barack Obama's 47-country nuclear security conference.

He made the decision after learning Egypt and Turkey intended to raise the issue of Israel's assumed atomic arsenal at the meeting, a senior government official said on Friday.

Israel is believed to be the only nuclear-armed power in the Middle East, but has never confirmed or denied it. It has not signed the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).

Netanyahu saw Obama at the White House late last month to discuss the stalled Israeli-Palestinian peace process. But they failed to see eye to eye and bilateral ties remain strained.

"The prime minister has decided to cancel his trip to Washington to attend the nuclear conference next week, after learning that some countries including Egypt and Turkey plan to say Israel must sign the NPT," the official said....

"This conference is about nuclear terrorism," Netanyahu told reporters on Wednesday. "And I'm not concerned that anyone will think that Israel is a terrorist regime. Everybody knows a terrorist and rogue regime when they see one, and believe me they see quite a few -- around Israel."...

"Israel is our strongest ally in the Middle East and one of our strongest allies anywhere around this globe," Liz Cheney, daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney, told the Southern Republican Leadership Conference in New Orleans.

"And President Obama is playing a reckless game of continuing down the path of diminishing America's ties to Israel."

Indeed.

If you live in or near New York City, a rally will be held for Nigeria's Christians on April 7 at the Permanent Mission of Nigeria, 2nd Avenue and 44th Street.

On Wednesday, April 7th from 4:45 pm on, religious, civic and human rights leaders of many faiths and backgrounds will gather in front of the Nigerian Consulate in New York City to raise their voices of conscience about the continuing massacres of Christians as well as the ongoing barbaric persecution of non-Muslim minorities by jihadists in Nigeria and elsewhere across the globe.

While there are no official figures yet to confirm the numbers killed in the March 7th Massacre of Christians in Nigeria, we do know that many of the victims were children, women and the elderly. They were hacked to death, beheaded, and set on fire. Those arrested reportedly belong to the Muslim Fulani terror group.

A press conference is expected to take place from 4:30-5:00 PM.The rally, sponsored by members of Action Alliance, First Things, and the Institute for Religion and Democracy, begins directly after the press conference and will run until 7:00 PM.

Please join us and fight Islamic jihad.

India has long been regarded as an American ally but a series of missteps by the United States may be driving a strategic American partner directly into China’s embrace. One sign of that comes from India’s ministry of defense, which released its annual report last week. Cloaked in bureaucratic language is the highly significant revelation that relations between India and China have “generally progressed well in the last year based on their strategic and cooperative partnership” and that “there has been a convergence of views and actions on various issues of international fora.” This is bad news for the United States, but an outcome largely of its own making. Washington has needlessly provoked India on a vital issue, pushing New Delhi towards Beijing.

The American blunder has come over climate change policy at the United Nations, and reached its peak at the Copenhagen conference last December. Meeting in Beijing November 29, officials from Brazil, South Africa, India and China (known as BASIC), and Sudan (chair of the Group of 77 developing countries) drafted a joint document with four “non-negotiable” elements that would guide their behavior in Copenhagen. They would never accept legally binding greenhouse gas emissions cuts, mitigation actions that are not paid for by the developed countries, international (foreign) measurement of their mitigation actions, nor the use of climate change as a trade barrier by the developed countries. Having protected their economies from outside pressure, they would then insist that legally binding restrictions be imposed on the developed countries. As Indian Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh stated, “BASIC countries are basic reality.

The BASIC-Group of 77 bloc deadlocked the UN conference, as the U.S. insisted that no agreement was possible without some mandates being imposed on all parties. As the summit neared its end, President Barack Obama barged into a private meeting between Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and demanded a compromise be reached. The resulting Accord did not impose mandates on any country, and thus should have diffused the confrontation. But the UN process continues, officially still based on conflict between the developed and developing nations over who will be required to make cuts. The next negotiating session is scheduled for April 9-11 in Bonn, Germany. It is likely two additional sessions will be scheduled before December when another large Copenhagen-style meeting is set for Cancun, Mexico.

If the Obama administration renews its push to impose mandatory emission controls on India and the other developing countries, it will push New Delhi even closer to Beijing. India understands that UN controls would be devastating to its economy, and its scientists are very skeptical about the entire climate change issue (as they should be). Washington must understand India’s position and back off, so the two countries can better cooperate on the much more important strategic interests which they share.

India and China may be allies at the UN, but they are rivals in Asia. The Indian ministry of defense report notes, “India also remains conscious and alert about the implications of China’s military modernisation….Rapid infrastructure development in the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR) and Xinjiang province has considerably upgraded China’s military Force projection capability and strategic operational flexibility.” The MoD says that, “Necessary steps have been initiated for the upgradation of our infrastructure and force structuring …along the northern borders.” Tibet is a sour spot between India and China, as it has become between the U.S. and China. Beijing declared that relations with Washington have been “severely undermined” by the February meeting between President Obama and the Dalia Lama.

Tibet has historical and cultural links to India which have been severed by China’s occupation. India moved 60,000 additional troops to the border last summer, a deployment condemned by Beijing. An editorial in the Communist Party’s publication Global Times stated, “The tough posture Singh’s new government has taken may win some applause among India’s domestic nationalists. But it is dangerous if it is based on a false anticipation that China will cave in.” The editorial went on in a very harsh tone,

India is frustrated that China’s rise has captured much of the world’s attention. Proud of its “advanced political system,” India feels superior to China. However, it faces a disappointing domestic situation which is unstable compared with China’s.

India likes to brag about its sustainable development, but worries that it is being left behind by China. China is seen in India as both a potential threat and a competitor to surpass.

But India can’t actually compete with China in a number of areas, like international influence, overall national power and economic scale. India apparently has not yet realized this.

The editorial also raised the specter of India joining with the United States and Japan in creating a “ring around China.” It is just such an alliance of Asian democracies that should be the objective of American diplomacy.

Washington and New Delhi also have a common interest in defeating Islamic radicalism. The MoD reported favorably the deployment of more U.S. troops in Afghanistan, stating that “the security and stability of Afghanistan is critical to India’s own security concerns.” The use of Pakistan as a sanctuary for Islamic terrorist has been a concern of India since long before 9/11 because of attacks in Kashmir. A government in Islamabad that sees Islamic terror as a threat to its own security, rather than an opportunity to conduct proxy wars against its neighbors, is in both U.S. and Indian interests.

The MoD report says “all parameters of proxy war are at an all time low and the current situation indicated a shift towards normalcy and peace.” This is to a large extent due to American influence on Pakistan. The problem has not gone away completely, however, as the MoD notes, “The continued infiltrations across the LoC [Line of Control] and the existence of terrorist camps across the India-Pak border however, demonstrate the continuing ambivalence of Pakistan in its actions against terrorist organisations.”

American and Indian influence and pressure on Pakistan reinforces the efforts of both nations to keep a more moderate, democratic Islamabad focused on eradicating terrorist sanctuaries to avoid a wider war.

There is a China angle to this issue as well. Beijing has long counted Pakistan as an ally against India and has been happy to see tensions on India’s northwest frontier divert New Delhi’s military resources away from the Chinese front. Beijing continues to provide Pakistan with most of its armaments, including help with its missile and nuclear programs. The Chinese are completing a new deep-water port at Gwadar, where they have also helped to build a major new international airport. Beijing intends that the port will give their expanding navy access to the Indian Ocean and to the world’s key oil-shipping routes. The U.S. and India (as well as Japan) have a common strategic interest in preventing such an expansion of Chinese power.

A new year of UN negotiations on climate change should not be allowed to disrupt U.S.-Indian relations. The Accord reached last year was the best of all possible outcomes in what has been a fatally flawed process. The Accord should be interpreted as acknowledgement that all nations have the right to pursue economic and environmental policies in their own interests. It should be seen as the end of the UN madness about climate as a zero sum game of international conflict. Moving forward, the U.S. should build on its agreement with India to cooperate in the expansion of nuclear power on the subcontinent. This is a positive program that supports growth while also minimizing green house gas emissions for those who are concerned about such things.

Climate change is a chimera that can only detract from the real factors that will govern the balance of power in Asia and thus the evolution of international politics. Handing China an issue with which it can unite the developing world against the United States has been a mistake of the first order that must be put to an end.

"Iran to host nuclear disarmament conference," from AP, April 4 (thanks to Phil):

TEHRAN, Iran (AP) -- Iran said Sunday it will host a nuclear disarmament conference later this month, part of Tehran's efforts to show it is not seeking to develop nuclear weapons.

Iran's top nuclear negotiator, Saeed Jalili, was quoted by state television as saying the two-day meeting -- dubbed "Nuclear Energy For All, Nuclear Weapons For No One" -- will start April 17, just days after a U.S.-hosted summit on nuclear security.

"Iran, as a country supporting global disarmament, invites the world to disarm and prevent proliferation," Jalili said.

Jalili also said that China, which has resisted U.S.-led efforts to impose new U.N. sanctions on Iran over its disputed nuclear program, would attend the meeting in Tehran....

Muhammad, the prophet of Islam, is said to have predicted the Islamic conquest first of Constantinople ("the city of Heraclius" below) and then of Rome. An Islamic conference to be held in London on April 10 boasts about what the conference organizers see as the looming fulfillment of the second part of that prophecy: the Islamic conquest of Rome.

But remember: if you speak about Islamic supremacism and the global jihad aspiration to impose Sharia over the world, you're an "Islamophobe"!

From the Italian Muslims site (thanks to Bat Ye'or):

ISLAM IN ITALY - FULFILLING THE PROPHECY

Date: Saturday 10th April 2010
Time: 1.45 pm - 4.30 pm
Venue: Toynbee Hall, 28 Commercial Street, London, E1 6LS

"Are they waiting for anything except the Hour to come to them suddenly? But its Signs have already come!" (Al-Quran, 47:18)

As one of these signs, Imam Ahmad reports in his Musnad that Abdullah bin Amr bin Al-'As (ra) mentioned: "Whilst we were around the Prophet (saw) writing he was asked, 'Which of the two cities will be opened first, Constantinople or Rome?' He (the Prophet Muhammad) answered, 'The city of Heraclius will be opened first!'"

The Great Ottoman, Sultan Muhammad Fatih (rh) fulfilled the first part of this prophecy by conquering Constantinople. Thus, remains the second part. Having been forced out of
Andalusia, and more recently, dispersed across the Balkan states, the city of Gaius Julius Caesar (Rome) remains. So let the da'wah begin ...

There will be a short presentation on Islam in Italy by the Association of Italian Muslim Sisters with proceeds going towards supporting Italian Muslims. Also, enjoy a 3-course
home made Halal Italian buffet. The menu includes: Crodino, Rustici, Pizza, Spiedini Tricolore, Pomodori al Tonno, Pasta Primavera, Lasagne, Polpettone, Insalata di Patate, Tiramisu. Entrance is by online booking and payment only. Tickets are £20 for adults and £10 for children, but kindly no children under the age of 10 years.

For further information please contact:
Tel: 07880 744 198
E-mail: info@italianmuslims.com
Website: www.italianmuslims.com