Yaakov Katz
Egyptian and Saudi Arabian intentions to begin or revive their nuclear programs in the face of Iran's continued race toward nuclear power present an "apocalyptic scenario" for Israel as well as for the rest of the world, Strategic Affairs Minister Avigdor Lieberman told The Jerusalem Post on Thursday.
Lieberman's remarks came a week after Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak announced a decision to restart his country's nuclear program. On Wednesday, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad announced that his country had begun operating 3,000 centrifuges for the enrichment of uranium.
"If Egypt and Saudi Arabia begin nuclear programs, this can bring an apocalyptic scenario upon us," Lieberman told the Post. "Their intentions should be taken seriously and the declarations being made now are to prepare the world for when they decide to actually do it."
Lieberman also said Pakistan was a major threat to Israel due to the political instability there and the fact that the country had "missiles, nuclear weapons and a proven capability."
"We hope there will be stability and the [Pakistani] nuclear weapons won't fall into radical hands," he said. "If the Taliban or [al-Qaida leader Osama] bin Laden get control [of Pakistan] they will have nuclear weapons ...   more »

30 American physicians prepare for 'whatever Israel needs' in next emergency
Over 30 top physicians arrived in Israel Sunday for a grueling, 5-day state-of-the-art course in Israeli emergency and trauma medicine. Their goal is to come back on immediate notice in case of war or other national emergency to take the place of Israeli doctors called to the front as part of their IDF reserve duties.
The Ministry of Health, in cooperation with the IDF Medical Corps and the American Physicians Fellowship (APF) are organizing the "Medical Emergency & Disaster Preparedness" course, the 10th bi-annual mission brought to Israel for this unique training.
Dr. Rennie Geoffrory of NY (L) with Dr. William Cantor of Woodcliff Lake, NJ (Photo: Sasson Tiram)
"Israel has earned global respect for its incomparable emergency medical care," said APF Vice President, Dr. Mike Frogel, leader of the delegation, "this has come at a dear price, which APF physicians deeply honor. If we can help alleviate the strains of war-time health needs through this remarkable partnership with our Israeli colleagues, then we stand to both help the people of Israel in a critically important way and also draw immense satisfaction from our personal commitment. 
The invaluable experience ...   more »

Arab residents of the eastern half of Jerusalem insist they are "Palestinians," but they are coming in increasingly greater numbers to apply for Israeli citizenship over fears that an upcoming US-hosted peace summit could leave them living under Palestinian Authority sovereignty.
Of the 250,000 Arabs that live on the eastern side of Jerusalem only about 12,000 have sought Israeli citizenship since the city was reunited under Israeli rule in 1967. For a "Palestinian" to voluntarily become an Israeli is tantamount to treason within that community. But Interior Ministry officials told Ynet that many are now bucking that trend, with at least 3,000 applying for Israeli citizenship over the past four months alone.
The trigger for this reversal has been talk that Israel is prepared to surrender the Arab-dominated neighborhoods of Jerusalem to the Palestinian Authority within the framework of a final status peace agreement that the Bush Administration hopes to oversee in Annapolis, Maryland later this month.
Arabs living in eastern Jerusalem told Ynet that, all nationalism aside, they are fully aware that their futures are far brighter under Israeli rule. That revelation struck a blow not only to the viability of a sovereign Palestinian Arab state, but also to ...   more »

Yaakov Katz, Mark Weiss
A military operation is a viable option for dealing with the Iranian nuclear threat, Defense Minister Ehud Barak said Wednesday night, hours after Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said his country has 3,000 centrifuges at work enriching uranium.
"We cannot take any option off the table and we need to study operational aspects," Barak said at a Labor Party meeting in Beersheba, adding that he could not go into detail. "This is not just for the coming months but also for the coming two years," he said.
The new developments in Iran meant Israel had to hold a serious debate on the issue, Barak said. "We need to have a comprehensive discussion and to act when it comes to thwarting, gathering intelligence and [imposing] sanctions," he added.
Barak reminded his audience of Military Intelligence's assessment that Iran, if not stopped, could obtain a nuclear weapons by the end of the decade.
"Intelligence officials gave us an estimate that things are moving forward, and the assessment is that it will take between three and four years," he said. "That goes by very quickly."
Barak said the world needed to take additional diplomatic action against Iran as well as ...   more »

By Caroline B. Glick
 The battle of Iraq is nearly over. And the Americans have nearly won. Their enemies are on the run. Al Qaida forces have lost or are losing their bases of operations. Its fighters are being killed and captured in ever increasing numbers. Iraq's Sunni citizens who, until recently refused to take any part in the post-Saddam regime, are joining the army and citizens' watch groups by the thousands.
Local sheikhs in Baghdad, following the example set earlier by Sunni sheikhs in Anbar province are ordering their people to fight with the Americans against al Qaida. For their part, the Shiite militias know that they are next in line for defeat. As a result, Muqtada el Sadr ordered his forces to cease their attacks.
The numbers speak for themselves. Over the past month, some 46,000 Iraqi refugees returned home. Since May, the number of civilian casualties has decreased by 75 percent. US military casualties have also dropped precipitously after the death rate rose in recent months of hard fighting. Neighborhoods in Baghdad which had ceased to function under al Qaida's reign of terror have come back to life. Businesses are reopening. Citizens are rebuilding their homes. Even ...   more »

Dr. Joel Fishman(IsraelNN.com)
Last month in Jerusalem, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice articulated some of her personal views, which ultimately found their way into the press.
For Dr. Rice, the struggle of the Palestinians is analogous to that of the African-Americans for civil rights and she identifies with the Palestinians. She recalled what it meant to travel in segregated buses as a little girl in Alabama. She also compared the head of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, to Reverend Martin Luther King, because, in her mind, both were committed to peace. According to reporter Aluf Benn, Rice views Abbas as committed to the struggle for Palestinian independence and, like Martin Luther King, opposed to terror and violence (Haaretz, October 16, 2007). Independently, David Bedein reported Rice's statements in The Bulletin (Philadelphia, October 17, 2007).
While this juxtaposition of the African-American campaign for civil rights and the Palestinian (armed) struggle seems strange, by using methods of political analysis it is possible to appreciate the significance of this type of information. Condoleezza Rice has given us the "Attitudinal Prism" of her decision-making process. Political scientists Gabriel Almond and G. Bingham Powell defined the term and explained its importance:
"Men choose among ...   more »

Insanity, Albert Einstein supposedly said, is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. By that standard, the state of Israel has been stark raving mad for almost 60 years. Over and over again, Israel has tried to buy the love of its enemies by conceding territory. And over and over again, Israel has suffered the consequences of its foolhardy appeasement.
The latest incarnation of the tried-and-failed "land-for-peace" model comes from Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. Olmert, whose approval rating clocked in at 3 percent in May 2007, proposes that Israel put everything – including sovereignty over the Temple Mount, the holiest site in Judaism – on the table at upcoming negotiations in Annapolis, Md., with the Palestinian leadership. "All of the historical questions that overshadow the argument between us and the Palestinians are on the agenda. We will not evade any one of them," Olmert recently explained.
Olmert's desire for a comprehensive and final "peace" agreement is predictable; with his prime ministry resting on the thinnest of ice, Olmert hopes that an agreement will build support for him both domestically and abroad. His mindlessly quixotic quest for personal glory, however, further paves the way for ...   more »

Paganism has gone mainstream. But here's how to keep you and your loved ones from being ensnared by it.
Elaine Haft
BUMPER STICKERS appear on cars around my small town: "Born-again Pagan"; "Witches Heal"; "Life is a witch (lavender broomstick inserted) and then you fly."
Do I live in an odd little enclave of weirdos and eccentrics? No, I live in a major metropolitan area. But I live in the midst of a pagan revival—and so do you.
Of course, you could say it's that season. During Halloween, interest in the occult seems overt. Yet catalogs hawking ready-to-worship statues of Egyptian gods and goddesses come uninvited through my mailbox any time of year. Books on spellcasting and pagan ritual can be found in my local library and bookstores. Television and magazine ads trumpet the services of psychic counselors.
What's going on?
In a word, witchcraft.
Like many Christians, I knew little about the neo-pagan movement until five years ago, when I discovered that the name of a Seattle abortion clinic, "Aradia," named after a "goddess of healing arts," also was cited in witchcraft literature as the daughter of the moon goddess Diana and the sun god Lucifer sent to earth ...   more »

The fracturing of the American evangelist movement
Gerard Baker
So it's over. There we all were, thinking that the US presidential campaign was really just starting. That in the course of the next few months real voters in primary elections would determine who would be the Democratic and Republican candidates. That, in exactly a year from now, Americans would then pick the winner.
What fools we were! How could we ignore the possibility that God would simply short-circuit the process and pick the president Himself? Now, as he is wont to do, the Almighty has mocked our pretensions. This week, through His principal representative on Earth, He has spoken and He has chosen Rudolph Giuliani.
On Wednesday Pat Robertson, perhaps the best known of America's televangelists, endorsed Mr Giuliani, the former Mayor of New York, as the Republican nominee for president. It was stunning news for a number of reasons. Mr Robertson and his like have made a passionate cause - and a handy living - out of denouncing politicians with Mr Giuliani's political views. The “church” he leads, generally thought of as having outsized influence in the Republican Party, is fervently anti-abortion, anti-homosexual, pro-traditional family values.
But Mr Giuliani ...   more »

By Stephen Dinan - More than 80 House Democrats and Republicans yesterday teamed up to propose a new immigration-enforcement bill, saying they reject the Senate's two attempts at "amnesty" and signaling that only an enforcement measure can pass this Congress.
Led by Rep. Heath Shuler of North Carolina, a freshman Democrat who won election with a tough immigration-enforcement message, the bill also challenges conventional wisdom by showing a large number of rank-and-file Democrats agree with most Republicans that the first step should be a get-tough approach on border security.
That new approach includes going after businesses that hire illegal aliens, better information-sharing among federal agencies such as the IRS, Homeland Security and the Social Security Administration to track illegal aliens, and an increase in enforcement agents both at the border and in the nation's interior.
"The reason you're seeing so many of us standing here today, Democrats and Republicans, is this is the immigration reform bill the American people have been waiting for," said Rep. Jason Altmire of Pennsylvania, a freshman who is one of 44 Democrats signing on as original co-sponsors, along with 40 Republicans.
The bill is a rejection of the approach adopted by President Bush, who has ...   more »

Civil rights advocates criticized plans by the Los Angeles Police Department to map the city's Muslim communities, calling it racial profiling.
The LAPD's counterterrorism bureau plans to identify Muslim enclaves in order to determine which might be likely to become isolated and susceptible to "violent, ideologically based extremism," said Deputy Chief Michael P. Downing on Thursday.
"We want to know where the Pakistanis, Iranians and Chechens are so we can reach out to those communities," said Downing, who heads the counterterrorism bureau.
Downing said the plan is still in its early stages, but the LAPD wants to work with a Muslim partner and intends to have the data assembled by the University of Southern California's Center for Risk and Economic Analysis.
Downing testified about the plan before a U.S. Senate committee on Oct. 30.
In his testimony, Downing said his bureau wanted to "take a deeper look at the history, demographics, language, culture, ethnic breakdown, socioeconomic status and social interactions" of the city's Muslim communities.
There are an estimated 500,000 Muslims in Los Angeles, Orange and Riverside counties.
On Thursday, several Muslim groups and the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California sent Downing a letter expressing "grave concerns" about ...   more »

By Amanda Dyer
Still not satisfied with the treatment of religions in her son's seventh-grade textbook, Korina Self aired her concerns Tuesday night at Lodi Unified's board meeting.
Backed by nearly a dozen family members and friends, Self delivered a prepared statement asking the board to remove the book "History Alive!: The Medieval World and Beyond" from classrooms.
"To know that a textbook was selected and put into use by our district that is blatantly one-sided, whitewashed, and that our children are being spoon-fed this information with sugar on top ... I feel is negligent and intolerable," Self said.
Self stopped to gather herself several times during her statement, in which she said the book's description of the Crusades and its definition of several Islamic terms, including "Jihad" and "Shari'ah" are incorrect.
Korina Self and her husband Jim decided to review their 12-year-old son's textbook late last month after hearing that he was learning about the Prophet Muhammad.
After reading the book, which was published by the Teachers' Curriculum Institute, the Selfs took issue with what they feel is an undue amount of attention to the teachings of Islam, historical inaccuracies and a lack of information on other religions.
Initially, ...   more »

By Linda Harvey
"Guess what? I have my own demon!"
That's what some children may soon be telling – or not telling – their parents, encouraged by the movie "The Golden Compass," starring Nicole Kidman, which opens Dec. 7. Chances are your child's friends will be rushing to see it, but parents: beware.
In this movie, every human has a personal "daemon" (pronounced, yes, "dee-mon"), and on the film's official website, you can "Meet Your Daemon," which happens after one answers a questionnaire. The site explains that these daemons take the form of an animal and represent a person's soul living outside one's body.
And that's just for starters. As the pagan worldview continues, much of action in the film centers around a golden compass, which is a tool of divination. Only the girl heroine, Lyra, knows how to interpret its mysterious signs and symbols. A colorful representation of this device is featured on the film's website to further intrigue our youngsters, and plans are in the works for a toy replica. Soon, adoring fans can be seers right in their own bedrooms.  
This lavish production has Oscar written all over it. Based on the novel by Philip Pullman, ...   more »