... but I don’t hear a lot of people talking about going after Europeans with the religious fervor modern terrorists reserve for America.

Bottom line is people can try to understand (in fact it’s vital) and maybe even empathize with the circumstances that created someone that is pledged to kill you, but that doesn’t extend to leaving yourself defenseless or unilaterally taking retaliation off the table.

Censored: Israel and Palestine
Alison Weir
Executive Director of If Americans Knew
Chapter "Israel and Palestine: Choosing Sides," from Censored 2005: The Top 25 Censored Stories

We have to stop torturing people into falsely confessing things that were not true.

The first thing one has to do is stop doing that which creates the hate ...

what are their demands?,......list them for me,....anyone,....please

Renewing his fatwah, bin Laden states, "We are confident that the Muslim nation would rid Islamic countries of the Americans and the Jews

Once they get a foothold in these countries the mandate is to spur further radicalization and unrest for the purpose of overthrowing the existing government and installing their brand of religious theocracy.

In particular, the unfairness of the yawning gulf between the haves and the have-nots has engendered the outrage that has led Islamic militants to pursue their restrictive interpretation of religious law. But in conversations with militants from both modest and privileged backgrounds, I have heard a common theme: many militants would relinquish their arms if the laws already in existence were applied fairly and equally.

A comparison to the U.S. youth movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s--when, similarly, super-size cohorts of impatient, idealistic young people felt largely left out of the political process--is tempting. No, Egyptian youth are not staging sit-ins and crashing the gates of the political arena. But the reason they aren't may have more to do with the class barrier and the skewed demographics of sitting politicians than any lack of political will. A substantial number of Egyptian ministers are more than sixty-five years old, belonging to an age group that makes up just 2.2 percent of the population. Most youths cannot visualize themselves to positions of power. What they hope for is that someone they trust, whether judge or religious leader or someone else in tune with their needs, will demand and achieve for them the fairness that, in principle, the law asserts.

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1134/is_4_113/ai_n6026418/pg_4/?tag=content;col1

Egypt's workers are too numerous and desperate. More than 40% of the country's 80 million people live under the UN poverty line of $2 per day.

http://www.challenge-mag.com/en/article__212

The time he had spent doing business in Northern Ireland confirmed Bruder's notion that the path to peace and democracy lay not in military intervention or political overhaul but in gainful employment for the people. Jobs, he believed, would produce a middle class; jobs would buttress faltering economies; and jobs would give young people hope, income and something to do other than succumb to extremist dogma.

But jobs are scarce and growing scarcer in Arab countries. The region already faces 15% unemployment, and 90 million new jobs will be needed by 2020 to accommodate the swell of young workers, according to the World Bank.

http://www.efefoundation.org/index.php?m=5&s=2&t=8

Beat your plowshares into swords, and your pruning hooks into spears: let the weak say "I am strong." — Joel 3:10

Complete severance of ties with Israel for the express purpose of removing the biggest remaining obstacle to the main goal of driving Israel into the sea and mass Jewish extermination in the land Jews presently occupy.

with the exception of get out of our countries and mind your own politics,....that one actually sounds reasonable,...by me

Not sure what any of it has to do with the fact that valuable information was attained due to the Enhanced Interrogation Methods and the water boarding of the three terrorists but it was a rant worth looking into.

Should the Holocaust Museum be notified?

As a Catholic I can safely say I have never been taught the ugly sentiments about Jews as expressed by an earlier poster.

Excerpts ...
Introduction
The intolerance against humans and religious wars committed before WWII comes from such abundant sources of Christian history that to deny an influential connection can only come from immeasurable ignorance. Moreover the justification for atrocious acts committed by Christians and priests during WWII could only have come from their own beliefs and faiths.

I charge that the major accountability for World War II and the Jewish holocaust must go to the ones who created the conditions for it to occur. And the people who created the conditions come in the form of the Christian churches-- the body of believing people who acted according to their Christian beliefs and who taught their children, preached to their congregations, and influenced their society's political leaders.

I aim to provide the reader with a flavor of the forgotten or denied role of Christians during WWII. Nothing here comes from a unique or original understanding. Rather, I have taken parts of what comes almost directly from established and well researched historical works on the Catholic and Protestant involvement in Europe.

The Catholic Church during WWII

Jewish persecutions: banning Jews from working for public office, the enforcement of wearing yellow badges, the Jewish ghettos, burning of synagogues, and the extermination of Jews remind us of the atrocities committed by Nazis in WWII. However the atrocities above do not pertain to Nazi actions but rather the practices of Catholicism, centuries before Hitler came into power.

The seeds of Christian hatred for Jews begins from the readings of the New Testament and the persecutions began when the Church first held power to enforce its dogmas. The Biblical Paul, for example, put the blame of Jesus's death entirely on the Jews. In the first epistle of Paul to the Thessalonians (2:14-15), it says, "the Jews who both killed the Lord Jesus, and their own prophets...." Also the gospel of John, makes it clear that the Jews represent an enemy (and John 8:44 puts the devil as the father of the Jews). Many prominent priests used Paul's epistles and the gospels as Biblical justification for Jewish persecution.

Historical Christianity makes it clear that the Jews formed an essential part of early Christian theology. Examples include the letter of Barnabas (circa 130), Justin the Martyr's "Dialogue with the Jew Trypho" (circa 160), Tertullian's treatise against the Jews (circa 200), Orgin's work against Celsus (circa 250). The sermons by John Chrysostom in 387, especially, show an indigence against the Jews. Origen had written, "The blood of Jesus falls not only on the Jews of that time, but on all generations of Jews up to the end of the world." John Chrysostom wrote, "The Synagogue is a brothel, a hiding place for unclean beasts.... Never has any prayed to God.... They are possessed by demons." [Cornwell, pp. 24-25]

When Christianity became officially accepted for the state in the 4th century, the Christians began to act against the Jews. Constantine imposed heavy penalties on anyone who visited a pagan temple or converted to Judaism. Mixed marriages between Jews and Christians were punished by death. In the Codex Theodosianus of Theodosis II (408-450), it forbade Jews to hold any public office. It first came from Justinian who legalized the burning and pillaging of Jewish synagogues by Christian bishops and monks (often canonized later). Thomas Aquinas, in the treatise De regimine Judaeorum ad Ducissam Brabantae, made it acceptable for popes and kings to dispose of property belonging to the Jews.

Compelling Jews to wear yellow badges came from an invention of the Catholic Church. The Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 set up the Inquisition along with enforcement of Jews wearing a yellow spot on their clothes and a horned cap (pileum cornutum) to mark them as the murderers of Christ and to remind them of their descent from the devil. During the Black Death plague which ravaged Europe in the 14th century, the Catholic clergy aimed its blame at the Jews claiming they worked for the Devil and had poisoned the wells and springs. Their extermination compares with the pogroms that took place in the 20th century under Hitler. During the Spanish Inquisition, the Catholic Church directed its actions against the baptized Jews, the marranos. They forbade them to hold any office in the Church or the state; many suffered torture or death.

Popes have traditionally supported anti-Jewish acts and beliefs. Pope Paul IV in the sixteenth century established the Roman ghetto (another Catholic invention). For more than two centuries afterward, Catholics humiliated the Roman Jews and degraded them at the annual carnival. In the same century, Pope Gregory XIII instituted enforced Christian sermons insulting Judaism. [Cornwell, p. 299]. In a Papal custom Popes performed an anti-Jewish ceremony on their way to the basilica of St. John Lateran. Here the Pontiff would receive a copy of the Pentateuch from the hand of Rome's rabbi. The Pope then returned the text upside down with twenty pieces of gold, proclaiming that, while he respected the Law of Moses, he disapproved of the hard hearts of the Jewish race. [Cornwell, p. 27]

Forcing Jews, and heretics into the Catholic faith, of course has always served as a hallmark of Catholicism. When they could not legally use strong-arm tactics they used propaganda. Although most people associate the term with Hitler, propaganda actually came as an invention by the Catholics long before the Nazis, from the Sacra Congregatio de Propaganda Fide, an organization established by Pope Gregory XV in 1622.

In the 1930s, as the Catholic leaders listened to Hitler's rhetoric against the Jews during his appeal for power, his speeches condemning Jews only correlated with the Church's own long history of Jewish hatred. Indeed, in Hitler's meeting with Bishop Berning and Monsignor Steinmann on April 26, 1933, Hilter reminded his Catholic guests that the Church, for 1,500 years had regarded the Jews as parasites, had banished them into ghettos, and had forbidden Christians to work for them. Hitler said he merely intended to do more effectively what the Church had attempted to accomplish for so long. [Lewy]

It should come to no surprise that at no time before or during Hitler's rise did the Catholic Church speak up against such talk. Sadly the Church remained mostly silent, with its main objections concerned with its own power structure in Germany. Thus it aimed to prevent loss of control and, indeed, to gain Church control through an expansion of papal power, control of appointment of bishops, and the control of Catholic schools. This self-serving interest gave the Vatican an impetus to form an agreement with Germany. In this sense, Hitler actually saved Catholicism in Germany, especially considering that Bismark before him had begun a Kulturkampf ("culture struggle"), a policy of persecution against Catholicism. [Cornwell, p.14]

Should the Holocaust Museum be notified?

How about the FBI?

Let's just agree murder and terrorism in the advancement of "any" religion is morally wrong and shouldn't be tolerated.

Does any of this have “any” bearing on the present discussion? No.

Retired FBI agent: Waterboarding produced 'crap' information from detainee

Contradicting the assertions of President Bush and waterboarding advocates at the CIA, federal investigators say a suspected al Qaeda operative who was subjected to the simulated drowning technique produced increasingly unreliable information after his interrogators began treating him harshly.

Abu Zubaida was captured in 2002 and moved through the CIA's secret prison system for much of that year. Although the FBI says Zubaida was a fairly low-level associate of some al Qaeda players, the CIA was convinced that he actually was a high-level terrorist who simply was holding out on them.

They turned to waterboarding and other unknown harsh interrogation techniques in an attempt to break the suspect, but ended up producing little more than a stream of specious claims delivered under duress from a suspect who was having water forced into his lungs, according to a former investigator who reviewed his case file.

In his first month of captivity, report the Post's Dan Eggen and Walter Pincus, Zubaida handed over information that led to the capture of Jose Padilla and identified Khalid Sheik Mohammed as a 9/11 plotter.

That was all before the CIA turned to harsh techniques. Instead of continuing what appeared to be working, though, the CIA was convinced Zubaida was holding out on them, and they decided to begin "not torturing" him by keeping him naked in his cell, subjecting him to extreme cold and playing loud rock music at all hours.

FBI agents had been pleased with Zubaida's earlier disclosures but were dismayed by the harsh treatment he was then subjected to.

"They said, 'You've got to be kidding me,'" Coleman told Eggen and Pincus, recalling accounts from FBI employees who were there. "'This guy's a Muslim. That's not going to win his confidence. Are you trying to get information out of him or just belittle him?'" Coleman helped lead the bureau's efforts against Osama bin Laden for a decade, ending in 2004.

http://rawstory.com/news/2007/Retired_FBI_agent_Waterboarding_produced_crap_1218.html

"The journalist was taken to the Pakistan city of Karachi, driven five miles into the countryside, blindfolded, then brought to a clandestine rendezvous on the fourth floor of a sparsely furnished flat. He believes that it was in Karachi."

"There he met Mr Mohammed and Ramzi bin al-Shibh, a former flatmate of Mohamed Atta, the hijack ringleader. Mr bin al-Shibh is a suspect in the bombing of the USS Cole, when 17 sailors were killed in the port city of Aden in Yemen in October 2000. He described himself as head of al-Qaeda's military committee. "

"The two men spoke of September 11 as "Holy Tuesday". They described the attacks using the Arabic word ghazwah, which means a raid against enemies of the Prophet, Mr Fouda wrote in The Sunday Times."

"It had taken 2 years to plan the attacks, the men disclosed. Al-Qaeda's military committee had decided there must be a "martyrdom operation" inside America. Nuclear targets were the first choice, but they were ruled out for now, Mr Mohammed said. "

http://www.talkleft.com/story/2007/3/15/13351/2245

After he was waterboarded, KSM provided the CIA with information that allowed the U.S. government to close down a terror cell already “tasked” with flying a jet into a building in Los Angeles.

“You have informed us that the interrogation of KSM — once enhanced techniques were employed — led to the discovery of a KSM plot, the ‘Second Wave,’ ‘to use East Asian operatives to crash a hijacked airliner into’ a building in Los Angeles,” says the memo, referring to information CIA provided to Justice.

“You have informed us that information obtained from KSM also led to the capture of Riduan bin Isomuddin, better known as Hambali, and the discovery of the Guraba Cell, a 17-member Jemaah Islamiyah cell tasked with executing the ‘Second Wave,’” said the memo.
http://www.luxlibertas.com/cia-waterboarding-produced-intel-that-stopped-attack-on-los-angeles/

Hambali used a series of safe-houses throughout Southeast Asia, especially Thailand and Cambodia to move around. While he was in Ayutthaya, Thailand, 75 kilometers north of Bangkok, he was planning a terrorist attack against several Thai hotels and the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation summit (APEC) in Bangkok on October 2003. Hambali had used a false Spanish passport to enter Thailand while his wife used her Malaysian passport.

Thai police found him as part of a joint operation between the Thai police and the CIA on August 11, 2003. The twenty uniformed and undercover police smashed down the door to his one bedroom apartment in Ayutthaya, and arrested him and 33-year old Noralwizah Lee Abdullah, a Chinese Malaysian who was considered to be his wife. Hambali was wearing a pair of jeans, a t-shirt, a baseball cap, and a pair of sunglasses. Police also seized explosives and firearms in the property. It marked the end of a 20-month hunt for Hambali, who was 37 years of age when he was captured.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hambali

By July 2002, Roche had finally realised the enormity of what he was being asked to do, and went to the US consulate in Sydney.

The embassy directed him to the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO), where "nobody seemed particularly interested in what was going on", Roche claimed.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/3757017.stm

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia -- A Malaysian recruited by al-Qaida to pilot a plane in a second wave of Sept. 11-style attacks on the United States has been in custody in his homeland since December 2002, Southeast Asian security officials said Friday.

The recruit, Zaini Zakaria, pulled out of the plot after seeing the carnage at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and was unwilling to die as a martyr for Islam, the officials said.

Bush said cooperation between Washington and several Asian countries helped expose the plot, which he said was derailed when a Southeast Asian nation arrested a key al-Qaida operative. Bush did not name the country or the operative.

The plan never appeared close to the stage where it could be put into execution. Scores of arrests after Sept. 11, 2001, severely curtailed al-Qaida and its Southeast Asian affiliate, Jemaah Islamiyah.

Zaini, a 38-year-old engineer, was among three men al-Qaida was preparing to take part in an attack on the U.S. West Coast, according to security officials and terrorism experts in Southeast Asia.

The two other men implicated in the alleged plans were Zacarias Moussaoui, who is now in U.S. custody, and Abderraouf Jdey, who remains at large.

After returning to Malaysia the same year, Zaini enrolled in a flight school and obtained a license to fly a small plane. He then began making inquiries in Australia about getting a license to fly a jet, the official said.

But Zaini apparently was never told what his mission would be. When he saw media coverage of the Sept. 11 attacks, he severed his ties with the militants, according to the official.

Zaini told Malaysian interrogators that he "didn't want that kind of jihad," the official said.

A second Malaysian security official said Zaini told the interrogators "he was not prepared to die as a martyr, so he backed out."

The report quoted Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the reputed Sept. 11 mastermind who was captured in 2003, as saying "three potential pilots were recruited for the alleged second wave." It identified them as Moussaoui, Jdey and Zaini.

However, Mohammed told his U.S. interrogators that "he was too busy with the 9/11 plot to plan the second wave of attacks," the report said.

Zaini, a native of the northeastern state of Kelantan, was doing some odd jobs before he surrendered to Malaysian authorities in Kelantan in 2002, apparently because he was worried about an ill relative, said his former lawyer, Saiful Izham Ramli.

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4188/is_20060211/ai_n16062261/

... the reason for the so-called terrorism (and just what would YOU call it???) and 911 is related to the US support of Israel, I noted that by continuing our support we make ourselves a target.

We support the killer, greedy Zionists. Live in denial if you want, but supporting such actions makes us just as guilty as if we were standing there pulling the trigger on the guns that kill the Palestinians, or running the bulldozers that ultimately kills them and levels their homes enabling the Israelis to go in and build settlements.

What we now have is another Holocaust and we are supporting it. (where, in Israel?…where is the proof of the mass extermination of Palestinians by Jewish hands???…show me!) As long as we do, we will set ourselves up as a target.

We support a greedy, killer regime and get targeted and attacked for it yet want to torture people to say it was for other reasons. Then we want to go and say that getting people to make false confessions saved lives?

If you look at it that way ... the torture DID NOT save lives.

The Palestinians are not calling for the "mass extermination" of jews. All they want is their land back and for the usurpers to leave--return to Eastern europe or to the US, whatever, just leave.

All this being said, it is not likely the zionists with US protection are not going anywhere. So why two states? Why not a single state with equal rights for all?

If they want land, they might try addressing Israel's security concerns.
... some are not equally devoted to the stability and peace of Israel as it's present citizens are.

Censored: Israel and Palestine
Alison Weir
Executive Director of If Americans Knew
Chapter "Israel and Palestine: Choosing Sides," from Censored 2005: The Top 25 Censored Stories
(Seven Stories Press; 2004)
{Excerpts}
I went to the Palestinian territories as a freelance reporter, traveling alone throughout Gaza and the West Bank. I saw tragedy and devastation far beyond what was being reported in the American media; I saw communities destroyed, ancient orchards razed, croplands plowed under. I saw children who had been shot in the stomach, in the back, in the head. I still see them.

I saw people convulsing and writhing in pain from a mysterious poison gas that had been lobbed at them; they said it felt like there were knives in their stomach. I talked to men who had been tortured.

I listened to old people who described the start of this holocaust – over fifty years ago, at the end of an earlier one. They described what it was like when three-quarters of your entire population is ethnically cleansed from their homes and land, children dying along the roadside while aircraft shell the fleeing families. They told of dozens of massacres of entire villages, and I’ve since read accounts by Israeli soldiers, published in Israeli publications, of how they raped the women, and then killed them, of how they used sticks to crush the skulls of children.

In the first three and a half months of the current Palestinian uprising against Israel’s continuing confiscation of Palestinian land and suppression of human rights, Israeli forces killed 84 Palestinian children. The largest single cause of their deaths was gunfire to the head. During this period, not one Israeli child was killed. Not one suicide bombing against Israelis occurred.

... one of the longest and most egregious cases of oppression of the 20th (and now 21st ) century.

Over fifty years ago, the massive dispossession of almost an entire indigenous population was carried out by a colonial population pursuing ethnic “purity” – a purity Muslim and Christian Palestinians did not fit into. Israeli writer Yshar Snmilasky described this beginning: “We came, shot, burned, blew up, pushed and exiled... will the walls not scream in the ears of those who will live in this village?”

In 1967 this nation then overran the small remnants of land left to the indigenous population, and placed the inhabitants under brutal military occupation. In 1982 this apartheid nation invaded yet another country in its quest to prevent the original inhabitants of what was now Israel from returning to their land. Some 20,000 men, women, and children in Lebanon were killed, and hundreds of thousands injured – through the illegal use of American-made weapons. One American physician wrote at the time that she had never before seen “such hideous injuries.” In one day, 1,000 mangled limbs were amputated.

In 1987 there was more violence, when the virtually unarmed indigenous population in the occupied territories attempted to rise up against their occupiers and died at the rate of 7 per every one Israeli death. The Palestinian death rate would have been higher, but the occupation forces chose a less reported form of violence to subdue the rebels – soldiers held them down and broke their bones. In the first three days of this new strategy, 197 people were treated for fractures at one hospital in Gaza alone. The policy was implemented by Yitzhak Rabin, the Israeli leader later known as a “peace-maker” before being assassinated by a Jewish extremist. One episode was caught on film, and can be viewed in various documentaries. The Israeli cameraman was later killed by Israeli forces.

Tens of thousands were tortured, humiliated, maimed. Homes were destroyed by the thousands, cropland plowed under and replaced with concrete colonies from which the ancestral owners of the land were to be eternally excluded. Families were ripped apart, sons deported, schools closed.

While Project Censored contained valuable information on “The Most Powerful Secret Lobby in Washington” (the Business Roundtable), there was no mention of the pro-Israel lobby that has been at the forefront of influencing US foreign policy in the Middle East for over half a century.

If space permitted, this list would go on and on.

Even last year, after Project Censored had begun to discover Palestine, the book’s top censored story of the year, which exposed the neoconservatives’ role behind the attack on Iraq, astonishingly omitted any mention whatsoever of these neoconservatives’ close, long-term ties to Israel and the documented record of their work on its behalf. Similarly, there was no mention of what should have been an award-winning exposé on Israeli torture of American citizens that came out the same year.

Without Hindrance? Israel’s Torture of U.S. Citizens

14 October 1999
CPAP: Without Hindrance? Israel’s Torture of U.S. Citizens

This information first appeared in Policy Brief No. 5, Center for Policy Analysis on Palestine, 14 October 1999.

Overview

For 30 years, the U.S. government has had evidence that the Israeli government has tortured American citizens, most of them Arab-Americans, whom the Israeli government has detained on suspicion of security violations. Despite the fact that some of these citizens have reported their experiences to the U.S. State Department, U.S. officials appear to have made few efforts either to secure the release of these victims or to vigorously protest their mistreatment. Instead, and in contrast to their behavior elsewhere, U.S. consular officials have told some victims that they can do nothing for them.