Lockerbie bomber's release - something rotten?

Those of us who follow the health of convicted Lockerbie bomber Abdel Baset al-Megrahi are surprised that the man is alive. After all, weren't we told that he was released from prison because he was dying from cancer and had only weeks to live.

Now there are rumors that oil giant BP might have had a say in al-Megrahi's release. Secretary of State Clinton is looking for answers and Senators from New Jersey and New York are planning to meet British PM Cameron while he is in Washington.

No one seems to know all the circumstances surrounding al-Megrahi's release and it's something worthwhile to investigate. Did BP violate law? Did Scot politicians and government officials? Let's see.

Read the full article from the Star-Ledger, British prime minister to meet with N.J. Sens. Lautenberg, Menendez to discuss Lockerbie bomber.

Daniel Gordis: Rest in pieces

Those who come across Terror Victims' Voice on a regular basis know that I am a fan of Daniel Gordis. The reason for that is that Gordis is one of the finer writers addressing Israeli affairs. His writing is most elegant and to the point. He expresses in words what many feel but find difficulty expressing. His July 16, 2010 column in the Jerusalem Post is no exception.

Gordis writes about his encounter with his Israeli Arab handyman Khaled. Khaled comes across a photo on Gordis's wall of broken tombstones in a Jewish cemetery. Khaled is shocked that people would destroy Jewish tombstones. Even in death, Jews are hated.

When we come across people such as Khaled, and I have been in that situation myself, you don't know quite how far to go when explaining facts that may be unknown to your listener. Gordis, too, runs into that problem.

Gordis then shifts from Khaled to the speaker at a program in Tel Aviv. Contrary to what might have been Khaled's open mind, Gordis comes up against Dr. Raif Zreik of Tel Aviv University.

Zreik, it was immediately obvious, is an intellectual to be reckoned with. Educated at Hebrew University, Columbia and Harvard, he is extraordinarily articulate, speaks a mellifluous Hebrew and doesn’t pull punches. Nor did he waste any time.

Zreik began by explaining why he knew he wouldn’t change our minds. The difference between an intellectual and an ideologue, he said, is that an intellectual can surprise himself. Intellectuals are sufficiently open-minded and rational that they occasionally find themselves adopting positions different from what they’d originally thought. An ideologue can never do that, he said.

By the end of the evening it is clear that it is Zreik who turns out is the ideologue.

This week, Jews will mark the fast day of Tisha B'Av (the 9th of the month of Av.) It's a date set out in Jewish history with one tragedy after another happening on that date. It was the destruction of the second Temple in Jerusalem on that date almost 2,000 years ago that resonates with Jews around the world today. But is Tisha B'Av still relevant in modern times?

Gordis thinks so.

For me, moments like an evening with Dr. Zreik, articulate and brilliant though he is, make the case for this period of mourning. It’s not just about the past, but also about the future, about what could still happen, and what may already be beginning.

Read the full column Rest in pieces .

Well, that's what I have to say.
Stephen M. Flatow

Jeff Jacoby - "There is no ‘good’ communist "

Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby comments on the acceptability of Communism to a liberal world.

IF JOSÉ Saramago, the Portuguese writer who died on Friday at 87, had been an unrepentant Nazi for the last four decades, he would never have won international acclaim or received the 1998 Nobel Prize for Literature.

But Saramago wasn’t a Nazi, he was a communist. And not just a nominal communist, as his obituaries pointed out, but an “unabashed’’ (Washington Post), “unflinching’’ (AP), “unfaltering’’ (New York Times) true believer.

Without a hint of irony, AP’s obituary quoted a comment Saramago made in 1998: “People used to say about me, ‘He’s good but he’s a communist.’ Now they say, ‘He’s a communist but he’s good.’ ’’

But the idea that good people can be devoted communists is grotesque. The two categories are mutually exclusive. There was a time, perhaps, when dedication to communism could be absolved as misplaced idealism or naiveté, but that day is long past.

Communist regimes have murdered, according to Jacoby, 100 million men, women and children. And Communism is still a horror to those who live under it.

Anyone who imagines that the horrors of communist rule is a thing of the past ought to spend a few minutes with, say, the State Department’s latest human rights report on North Korea.

Jacoby's position, and it should be ours, is that there is no such thing as a good Communist. Read the full column - There is no ‘good’ communist

American home grown terrorists sentenced in Pakistan

From the New York Times of June 24, 2010,

A Pakistani court sentenced five American Muslim men who had been arrested in Punjab Province to 10 years of labor in prison on Thursday for conspiring to carry out terrorist attacks, in a case that amplified worries about the radicalization of Muslims in the United States.

We spend a lot of time in America trying to understand the mindset of young men and, perhaps, women, who yearn for a jihadist lifestyle.

Experts say that the young Americans, often children of integrated Muslim immigrants, are not immune to the calls of jihad by militant organizations, which play on feelings of frustration and confusion about identity common in young, first- and second-generation men.

Once again, let's blame "confusion of identity" for sending these young men off the path. Perhaps a Muslim lifestyle is to blame; perhaps it is a lifestyle that cannot coexist within America's melting pot. Nonsense, there are many sects and people of deep religious belief whose children do not dream of jihad and martyrdom. Stop blaming society and point the finger where the trouble lies-- propagators of those who would harm us picking on susceptible and impressionable young men to do their dirty work.

Well, that's what I think. Read the full story.

The West is backing the wrong side

Caroline Glick writes in the Jerusalem Post,

By backing the terrorist group against Israel, western countries are backing Hamas against Fatah and Islamist states against ME moderates.

The leader of the group is America's own Barack Obama.

Led by US President Barack Obama, the West has cast its lot with Hamas. It is not surprising that Obama is siding with Hamas.

Is this just another incident of "he just doesn't get it," or something worse for the Israelis, that is, a reversal of a decades old alliance between the U.S. and Israel? While Glick understands Obama's shift because of his associations and actions, how about the leadership of other western countries?

What is alarming however is how leaders of the free world are now all siding with Hamas. That support has become ever more apparent since the Mossad’s alleged killing of Hamas terror master Mahmoud al-Mabhouh at his hotel in Dubai in January.

Israel is not the only player affected by these steps.

As for Fatah, it is hard not to feel sorry for its leader Mahmoud Abbas these days. In what was supposed to be a triumphant visit to the White House, Abbas was forced to smile last week as Obama announced the US will provide $450 million in aid to his sworn enemies who three years ago ran him and his Fatah henchmen out of Gaza.

So too, Abbas is forced to cheer as Obama pressures Israel to give Hamas an outlet to the sea. This will render it impossible for Fatah to ever unseat Hamas either by force or at the ballot box. Hamas’s international clout demonstrates to the Palestinians that jihad pays.

This is the Obama's foreign policy? What a mistake. And it's one that can only lead to more bloodshed in the Middle East.

Read Our World: Hamas rises in the West