WORTH READING

James R. Russell, Mashtots Professor of Armenian Studies, Harvard University writes about Ideaology over intergrity in Academe in The Current. It starts thus:

Is this Columbia University? A professor of anthropology calls for a million Mogadishus, a professor of Arabic and Islamic Science tells a girl she isn't a Semite because her eyes are green, and a professor of Persian hails the destruction of the World Trade Center as the castrating of a double phallus. The most recent tenured addition to this rogues' gallery is to be an anthropologist, the principal thrust of whose magnum opus is the suggestion that archaeology in Israel is a sort of con game meant to persuade the unwary that Jews lived there in antiquity.

Turkey tries to have its cake and eat it too or as R. Krespin writes Turkey's Parallel Policies – One for Peace, One Against:

Two conferences took place last week in Turkey. The first, a summit held November 13, 2007 in Ankara, was dedicated to advancing the peace process, with the participation of Turkish President Abdullah Gul, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, and Israeli President Shimon Peres.

The second, held November 15-17 in Istanbul and titled The Al-Quds International Forum Meeting, was dedicated to support for jihadist organizations' quest for Jerusalem, and was hosted by Turkey's Waqf for Volunteering Organizations (TGTV), whose leaders include AKP officials, current and former MPs, and government ministers and which has been linked in international intelligence reports to other Islamist organizations suspected of transferring funds to Al-Qaeda.

The good news, not everybody approved!

Israel abandons Pollard yet again. I do understand it is a sensitive issue both to the government of Israel and the Jewish diaspora but enough is enough.

Watch Anti-Semitism redefined:

Pamela has more on the antics of UN's Human Right Council. It includes ending the scrutiny of Cuba and Belarus and indicting Israel.

I grant you none of this can be classified as news. Still . . .

Nathan Sharansky explains that the folly of Annapolis lies in Strengthening them again. Money paragraphs:

"We must strengthen Abu Mazen," say Israel's leaders as a kind of mantra. It is of no importance that along the way they are educating another generation of Palestinians to hatred, violence and the aspiration to destroy Israel. It is of no importance that the way to the strengthening is the diametric opposite of peace and dialogue. The main thing is that we are strengthening Abu Mazen.

The old argument of President Shimon Peres and Meretz MK Yossi Beilin and Defense Minister Ehud Barak on"with whom to make peace, a strong leader or a weak leader" is no longer relevant. A look back over the years since the Oslo Accords shows clearly that the direction in which Palestinian society has marched is not the direction of peace. It was all in all just a hudna (truce) before another intifada. And when the society is becoming more extreme, what difference is it to us if the leader is strong or weak?

Finally, for the benefit of those likeme who are not subscribing to the Wall Street Journal, I posted bellow Boris Volodarsky's Terror's KGB Roots

Terror's KGB Roots By BORIS OLODARSKY
A year ago today, my friend Alexander Litvinenko died in a London
hospital, leaving behind a wife and young son. Sasha was poisoned by a
tiny nuclear device containing polonium-210 -- which, the British Crown
Prosecution Service concluded, was planted on him by Russian secret
agents.

In its way, his murder was an act of state-sponsored terrorism.

This is nothing new for Russia. The KGB has long used terrorist tactics
and worked closely with organizations like Yasser Arafat's PLO.

The year before, in July 2005, Sasha wrote in a confidential report prepared for a
special commission of the Italian Parliament investigating KGB activities
in Italy that, "Until recently the KGB had been in charge of all
international terrorism." The manner of his death suggests that Russia
today, under the leadership of former KGB lieutenant colonel Vladimir
Putin, is up to its old tricks.
* * *
The KGB's forerunner, the Cheka (later NKVD), was created by Lenin and
Felix Dzerzhinsky expressly to eliminate Russia's aristocracy,
intellectuals and dissidents -- anyone who threatened the Soviet state
from the inside.

Under Stalin, the NKVD started to murder its opponents abroad:

Ignatz Reiss near Lausanne in 1937, Yevhen Konovalets in Amsterdam
in 1938, Leon Trotsky in Mexico in 1940. In 1953, the Soviet secret
service tried to kill Marshal Tito in Belgrade.

Stalin's death didn't dampen the Kremlin's appetite for international
terror. After the Litvinenko murder, the Russian foreign intelligence
service claimed that Russia had not taken part in any assassinations
abroad since 1959. That is not true.
An Afghan leader, Hafizullah Amin, was first poisoned and then shot by a KGB special squad in Kabul in 1979. A former Chechen president, Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev, was blown up by Russian agents in Qatar in 2004.

In 1964, the KGB station in Mexico City set up a sabotage and intelligence
group led by Manuel Andara y Ubeda, a Nicaraguan KGB agent. He led a group
of Sandinistas to scope out the U.S. border with Mexico for possible
targets, such as oil pipelines, for KGB sabotage teams. Its codename was
Iskra, or "spark," inspired by the title of Lenin's revolutionary
newspaper.

The KGB also trained and financed the Sandinistas who seized
the National Palace in Managua and dozens of hostages in 1978. They
briefed a senior KGB official on the plan on the eve of the raid.

In the Mideast, one of the KGB's star recruits was Wadi Haddad, the deputy
leader and head of foreign operations of the Marxist-Leninist Popular
Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP).

In 1970, the KGB made him an agent, according to files delivered to British intelligence by Vasili Mitrokhin, a former KGB archivist who defected to the U.K. in 1992. The
most dramatic terrorist strike organized by Haddad was the Sept. 6, 1970
attack on four airliners bound for New York. The hijacking attempt on an
El Al Boeing 707 departing from Tel Aviv failed after one of the two
terrorists was shot by an air marshal. The other three airlines were
successfully diverted to other landing strips by the hijackers.

The passengers and crew of a Pan Am Boeing 747 were evacuated and the plane
was blown up; in the other two cases, the terrorists negotiated prisoner
swaps. (Those were more innocent pre-9/11 times.) Thanks to the Mitrokhin
files, we know that the KGB provided arms to Haddad, and it is a fair
assumption that his handlers were aware of his plans.

A KGB officer, Vasili Fyodorovich Samoilenko, cultivated Arafat for a long
time.

A 1974 photograph shows them together at a wreath-laying ceremony in
Moscow; during this visit, the Soviets called the PLO "the sole legitimate
representative of the Arab people of Palestine," a controversial stance
for that era that sealed their close alliance.

From then on, the KGB trained PLO guerrillas at its Balashikha special-operations training school east of Moscow and provided most of the weapons used in its attacks
on Israeli targets. PLO intelligence officers also attended one-year
courses at the KGB's Andropov Institute; some of them ended up being
recruited by the KGB.

Soviet satellites did their share. During the late 1960s Arafat had also
been courted by the Cairo station chief of the Romanian foreign
intelligence service (DIE), Constantin Munteanu, who brought him to
Bucharest. Arafat and Nicolai Ceausescu became good friends.

Late in 1972 Romanian intelligence formed an alliance with the PLO, according to former KGB Colonel Oleg Gordievsky, who said the Romanians "suppl[ied] it with
blank passports, electronic surveillance equipment, and weapons for its
operations."

Ceausescu told acting head of the DIE (and future defector)
Gen. Ion Mihai Pacepa: "Moscow is helping the PLO build up its muscles. I
am feeding its brains." According to Mr. Pacepa's 1987 book, "Red
Horizons": "Arafat and his KGB handlers were preparing a PLO commando team
headed by Arafat's top deputy, Abu Jihad, to take American diplomats
hostage in Khartoum, Sudan."

According to various sources, Ilyich Ram.res S.nchez, better known as
Carlos the Jackal, the most notorious terrorist in the 1970s and early
1980s, was among those who attended Soviet and Cuban training camps. He
lived for a time in East Germany.