Dear Friends:

Creating a newsletter in days of such copious news is no easy task. Not only do we have to pick and choose very carefully among the cacophony of reports from Iraq, Israel, and elsewhere, but we also have to watch for propaganda (from Iraq, Palestine, CNN, New York Times, etc.) and we have to remain timely.

Space is limited with each newsletter, and some articles get left out. Last month there were several insightful articles that had to be dropped at press time, and we will reprint those below so that they aren’t lost as other issues come up.

Therefore this letter will be devoted in large part to catching up with news stories that are still pending.


After The Fall
By Cal Thomas, Tribune Media Services

The demise of Saddam Hussein’s killing regime offers the West an opportunity to open a window of freedom and prosperity in Iraq. But the window will not be open long before political and religious opportunists try to close it.

For a new Iraq to rise from the ruins of Hussein’s genocidal and maniacal rule, at least three institutions must be immediately changed.

The first is the media. Iraqi state television will be gone with Saddam, but much of the Arab media—from Al Jazeera to state-run media in virtually every Arab country—continue to present an inaccurate image of the West. The United States and Britain need to replace Iraqi media with a balanced and accurate news and information service modeled on the Voice of America.

The second Iraqi institution that must be changed is education. Children’s textbooks and other teaching tools in Iraq and throughout the Middle East present a propagandistic view of the world that is angry, hostile and negative. Instead of learning about enemies and how to kill them, or the way of martyrdom, Iraqi children should be taught about friendship and how to lead good and productive lives.

The third and possibly most important institution in need of change is religion. Not all Muslims and their clergy believe in the forceful obliteration and domination of those with whom they might disagree theologically or politically. Let’s find them and help them to reshape the theology and worldview of Iraqis.

Sermons throughout the Middle East regularly condemn all things Western and most Western leaders. Typical was a March 14 sermon by Sheikh Abd al-Razzak Al-Sa’adi, at the Umm al-Ma’arek (Mother of All Battles) mosque in Baghdad: “Oh God, curse upon the face of the Americans. Oh Allah, curse upon the face of the British…. Oh Allah, strike the oppressors with each other and let us come out of it safely…. Oh Allah, sink their ships….” And so on.

The transformation of Iraq may be a greater task than the war of liberation. But the effort must be made, otherwise we risk another Saddam Hussein and another war, neither of which anyone wants.


This is from Professor Steven Plaut of Tel Aviv University (taken from his article “Terror Is Not ‘Resistance,’ It Is Terror” which appeared in FrontPageMagazine.com). In the past the media has tackled the difficult task of trying to make the Palestinian terrorists sound like freedom fighters much like the US Founding Fathers or those of the French Revolution. Thus the common street killers among the Palestinians have at one time or another in the past been called “freedom fighters,” “militia members,” “militants,” or the like. Other Arab terrorists are called terrorists. But not the Palestinians when it comes to the Arab or the Western press. Now, as Professor Plaut notes below, the media are trying some new mental gymnastics to distance these murderers and thugs from Arafat and newly-appointed “Prime” “Minister” Abu Mazen (we use the double quotation marks because he is not “prime,” but merely Arafat’s flunky, and we add quotes here around “minister” because that is a title forced upon this “unfortunate terrorist”).

The media have a new term for Palestinian mass murderers. No longer do the media restrict themselves to “activists” and “militants”. Now the terrorists are from “breakaway” militias even when they are under the direct personal command and control of Yasser Arafat and Abu Mazen. The media are describing the [April 30th] bombing… in Tel Aviv as an act perpetrated by the “breakaway” Al-Aqsa Martyrs terrorist organization. The Al-Aqsa Martyrs are exactly as “breakaway” as was the Soviet communist party under Stalin. It is under the direct command and control of Arafat personally and does nothing without the personal approval of His Ugliness.

The press is also pontificating about how the blast… was a “signal” to Israel that “resistance” will continue until Israel grants yet more appeasements. But in fact it was not meant at all as a signal to Israel. It was simply a signal to the Palestinians, sent by Arafat and Abu Mazen, that in spite of all the nonsensical talk yesterday by Abu Mazen about abandoning terror, Palestinian “peace seeking” would continue to take the exclusive form of random genocidal massacres of Jews.


When reality clashes with propaganda and lies, it can lead to terrible depression among those who have been misled. The truth inevitably catches up with many Palestinians in the aftermath of Saddam’s fall, as noted in the following article.

Israel After Saddam
www.bridgesforpeace.com

The Middle East is a different world than it was just a couple of months or even weeks ago. Saddam Hussein was a known sponsor of terror. After 911 when the world was searching for Al-Qaida members in order to arrest and neutralize the terror organization, Saddam was hosting senior Al-Qaida leaders who lived openly in Baghdad.

Saddam was openly funding Palestinian terror and contributed between US $30 – $35 million to families of Palestinian homicide bombers. The money was channeled through the pro-Iraqi Arab Liberation Front, a tiny Palestinian faction operating in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The last time Saddam’s representative handed out checks to Palestinians was the first week of April. He also sent 40 truckloads of food and medicine through Jordan to the Palestinian Authority (PA) at the start of the Intifada.

The PA and other sponsor organizations for terror in Israel, Hamas and Islamic Jihad, were recipients of Iraqi funding and were unabashedly in support of Saddam. During the Gulf War in 1991, the Palestinians stood on their roofs to cheer the incoming Scud missiles that fell on Israel. This time, mass demonstrations in the Palestinian Authority areas were punctuated with the chants, “Strike Tel Aviv with chemicals” and, “Bush, the little one, you are a coward. The land of Iraq is not for you.” In Hebron, Palestinians marched in solidarity with Iraq, chanting, “With our blood, with our soul, we will redeem you, Saddam,” as they waved Iraqi flags and posters of the Iraqi leader.

Yasser Arafat, Chairman of the PA, sent hundreds of fighters to Iraq to fight for Saddam, and, along with Hamas and Islamic Jihad, sent homicide bombers. On April 5th, Ibrahim Sabri, the Palestinian Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, issued his first “fatwa,” an Islamic decree, barring US. President George Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair from setting foot on the “sacred, holy land of Palestine.”

Now that Saddam’s regime has fallen, the Palestinian leadership and the man in the street are in “shock and awe” at how quickly and easily Saddam and his feared Revolutionary Guard were defeated.

Reality would dictate that it is time that the Arab/Muslim nations wake up and join the 21st century and work to stop terrorism instead of supporting it. However, given Islamic pride, theology of superiority, and militancy, this may be impossible. The Palestinian newspaper, Al-Quds, in an editorial on April 10, 2003, drew conclusions on the swift fall of Saddam Hussein, “This catastrophe, that adds to the series of Arab defeats throughout the last century, may create a new consciousness and profound clarity of mind within the Arab nation and Muslim world, since everyone knows they are in a state of regression, cultural backwardness, and disintegration, being unable to cooperate with each other and with the entire world…”

Let’s hope this reality will be understood in the Muslim world.


Can’t Anybody Here Read a Road Map?
By Wesley Pruden, The Washington Times

From the mountains of fire came the rebels
Everywhere there are settlements
Oh, brave Nablus, keep the cauldron alive
Pour over the settlements great flames
Foreigners have no place on this land.

This heroic Palestinian doggerel, not much in the way of art, is part of a video broadcast by Official Palestinian Authority Television on the eve of the occasion we’ve all been sitting up for, the introduction of the celebrated “road map to peace” in the Middle East.

The words to the music, which every Palestinian child will want to sing on the road to peace—or at least to the peace process—urges killing Jews and seeks to inspire with scenes of masked gunmen firing their AK-47s, and aerial photographs of targeted Israeli towns, of an Israeli couple on a stroll, and of groups of teenage Israeli girls. Young Palestinian men are encouraged—usually by old Palestinian men who keep themselves carefully out of harm’s way—to prove their manhood by killing women and children, the frailer, the smaller, the more vulnerable the better.

The Palestinian “martyrs” of Hamas and Fatah, armed with the new road map, celebrated the beginning of the journey by dispatching a homicide bomber to kill three Israelis and wound 55—the dead after these bombings are often more fortunate than the hideously wounded—in a seaside pub just a few dozen yards from the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv. Message sent, if not necessarily received.

The new prime minister of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, alias Abu Mazen, took office saying brave things. “There is only one authority,” he said, and told his thriving terrorist groups that “there is no military solution to our conflict.” He vowed to take guns out of the hands of troublemakers.

Taking “the peace process” seriously requires a strong stomach and a taste for fantasy and satire. Mr. Abbas was sworn in on Holocaust Remembrance Day, but the irony was lost on the new prime minister because he says there was never a Holocaust to remember. He wrote his doctoral thesis at Moscow University on Holocaust denial, entitled “The Other Side: The Secret Relationship Between Nazism and Zionism.” The sheer unreality of this whole business is underlined by the fact that the great moderate hope is a man with a past that sickens decent men and women.

This is the man who was chief Palestinian negotiator at Camp David three years ago, scorned a far better deal than any road map will lead to, and was pleased with his display of bad faith. “Camp David was a trap,” he said of the agreement that gave the Palestinians 97 percent of what they had bargained for, “and we managed to get out of it.”

The grotesque rhetoric, wrapped in a bitter ideology masquerading as religious faith, from men the West must take seriously, or at least pretend to, sounds to us like something from a backwoods minstrel show. But they believe it, and they don’t read road maps.


At the Zionist conference of Zurich in 1937, Ben Gurion, who later became the first prime minister of Israel as well as a founding father, noted that, “No Jew has the right to relinquish the right of the Jewish people over the whole land of Israel. No Jewish body has such authority, not even the whole Jewish people has the authority to wave the right to the land of Israel for future generations for all time.”

This business of even fooling with the idea of a Road Map to set up a Palestinian state on land belonging to Israel is mortally dangerous for our people and our nation. The abject stupidity of Washington in trying to create a Palestinian state is almost beneath comment. The idea that a democracy should share its land with those intent on murdering its people defies all logic. Here’s a thought-provoking commentary on both the Palestinian leadership as well as that in Washington.

Israel Observed Holocaust Remembrance Day
Ruth Matar, www.IsraelNationalNews.com

Many are placing their new hopes on Gaza Preventive Security Service head Mohammed Dahlan. He is being presented as the man who can unify all of Arafat’s Security Forces and bring order to the Palestinian Authority. This is a most strange delusion. Dahlan has presided over an ever-fortified terrorist network.

On his watch, Mr. Dahlan permitted Gaza to become a safe haven for hundreds of fugitive terrorists fleeing Israeli forces. Among those being sheltered is his childhood friend Mohammed Dief, a leading Hamas mastermind, with the blood of scores of Israelis on his hands. Mr. Dahlan’s district is the primary launching ground for the hundreds of Kessem missiles fired at Israel.

Mr. Dahlan is the primary suspect in the attack on an Israeli school bus in Kfar Darom in November 2000. As a matter of fact, the CIA is alleged to have a tape of Mr. Dahlan ordering the bombing of this school bus.

The biggest disappointment, however, is the Bush administration [which] is forcing Israel to accept the murderers, Arafat, Mazen and Dahlan, as a new PA regime, to which Israel is now expected to give part of their own divinely promised land. It is not only incredible, it is totally in contradiction to what this US administration has promised the world since Al Qaida and Iraq: There will be no deals with terrorists, period; much less reward them with their own independent state.


My schedule for speaking at colleges across America’s Midwest has open dates in August and September. Since I’d like to visit as many places as possible, churches from the Midwest to Denver are very welcome to give Claudia a call at (817) 417-0059 to see if we can work a few more stops into our calendar.

I’ll be leading a tour to Eureka Springs’ famed Passion Play June 14-15. This includes insightful teachings, the chance to see a wonderful reproduction of the “Holy Land,” and a presentation of the Lord’s Passion Week—all a great gift for Father’s Day. For further information, call Tony at (214) 696-9760.

Our fall Israel tour is set for November 2-12 with a Greek island cruise departing October 29th and the Grand Petra tour (of Israel and Petra) November 2-16. Check with Tony at (214) 696-9760 during business hours for more information and confirmation of tour dates. You can also call 1-800-WONDERS (1-800-966-3377) anytime for a brochure on this or any of the other tours.

Remember to pray for the peace of Jerusalem.

Your Messenger,

Zola

P.S. I welcome your comments regarding the May/June Levitt Letter, which we moved to a faster, larger print shop.

Zola Levitt Ministries is ECFA approved and has Charity Navigator’s top rating of 4 stars.

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