Winfield Myers posted the following at Democracy Project:

[In] an interview... the president of Al-Quds University in Jerusalem, Sari Nusseibeh, makes anti-Semitic remarks during a rant against the presence of Jews in any future Palestinian state. (See them, indented, below.)

Key to the interest of Campus Watch in this case is that Al-Quds has partnered with several American and Canadian universities to offer programs, classes, and research opportunities. The schools involved include the University of Michigan at Dearborn, Northeastern University, York University in Ontario, Brandeis, and George Washington University. Al-Quds also receives U.S. government support.

This afternoon, I sent the email below to the heads of each of these schools. If they reply, we'll make their remarks available; they may choose to speak through the media. Most important is that they not stand for such blatant anti-Semitism from the head of an institution that is supported by the schools they lead.

Dear President X,

I am the director of Campus Watch, a project of the Middle East Forum in Philadelphia.

The Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) has released the translation of a November 30, 2007 interview in Arabic of the president of Al-Quds University, Sari Nusseibeh.

http://www.memritv.org/clip/en/1630.htm

In this interview, President Nusseibeh states:

The Israelis now living in the territories of the future Palestinian state should return to living within the borders of the state of Israel. No Jew in the world, now or in the future, as a result of this document, will have the right to return, to live, or to demand to live in Hebron, in East Jerusalem, or anywhere in the Palestinian state.

Given that X University has close relations with Al-Quds ( link to university web page ), I wondered if you had any public comment on the remarks of President Nusseibeh.

Thank you very much,

Winfield Myers
Director
Campus Watch

Update: James R. Russell, Mashtots Professor of Armenian Studies at Harvard, sends the following comment for posting:

I, James Russell, Mashtots Professor of Armenian Studies at Harvard University, have read the statement by Sari Nusseibeh in his official capacity as President of Al Quds University: "No Jew in the world, now or in the future... will have the right... to live... in East Jerusalem" and so on. In response I declare that I refuse to teach or collaborate in any way professionally with any person having any connection whatsoever to Al Quds University, which must be regarded as an anti-Semitic and racialist entity. Furthermore I will oppose by every possible means, including prosecution under the laws of the United States, any association or cooperation of Harvard University with Al Quds. I urge all scholars and teachers of good will to join me.

WND: JERUSALEM – Members of the most active West Bank terror organization are set to participate in security forces being deployed to protect President Bush during his visit to the Palestinian territories next month, WND has learned.

Bush is due in the region Jan. 9 as part of a follow-up to last month's U.S.-led Israeli-Palestinian Annapolis summit.

During his trip, the American president is scheduled to hold talks with Israeli leaders in Jerusalem, and meet quickly with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas in the West Bank city of Ramallah.

According to Israeli security officials coordinating deployments of forces with the PA for Bush's Ramallah visit, members of the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, Fatah's declared military wing, have been called upon by the PA to participate in the protection of Bush's convoy and in securing the parameter during the meeting with Abbas.

The Brigades is listed as a terror organization by the U.S. State Department. The group took credit along with the Islamic Jihad terror organization for every suicide bombing in Israel between 2005 and 2006, and is responsible for thousands of shootings and rocket firings. Statistically, the Al Aqsa Brigades perpetuated more terrorism from the West Bank than Hamas, according to the Israeli Defense Forces...

The Israeli Defense Forces will protect the main West Bank highway Bush's convoy will use to approach Ramallah. Security for Bush will be largely turned over to the Palestinians once he enters Ramallah, although security plans are being heavily coordinated with the U.S.  

ABC: Pakistani opposition leader Benazir Bhutto was killed in a gun and bomb attack after a rally in the city of Rawalpindi on Thursday, her party said.

"She has been martyred," said party offical Rehman Malik.

Police at the scene said about 15 people had been killed.

A Reuters witness said he saw about eight bodies on a road as well as a mutilated human head.

An Interior Ministry spokesman said initial reports suggested it was a suicide bombing and more than 10 people had been killed...

Earlier, gunmen opened fire on supporters of another former prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, from an office of the party that supports President Pervez Musharraf, killing four Sharif supporters, police said.

Sharif was several kilometres away from the shooting and was on his way to Rawalpindi after attending a rally.

Sharif, who was overthrown by Musharraf in a 1999 coup and allowed back into the country just last month after seven years in exile, blamed supporters of the pro-Musharraf party for the violence.  

In the Netherlands Hizb ut Tahrir is circulating the following pamphlet in opposition to Geert Wilders and his upcoming movie on the Koran.

I CALL FOR A HALT! AGAINST THE SLANDERING OF ISLAM

During the past years, Holland has been dominated by a climate of slander and common insult towards Islam and Muslims. It is also evident that certain politicians and influential people are behind the current hostility. In answer to this we, the shabab of Hizb ut Tahrir in Holland, have initiated the campaign "Stop the slandering of Islam".

With the help of this campaign, which entails a substantial signature petition, we want to give the Muslims a voice. This will enable them to react in a respectful and proper manner to the constant slandering of high values within Islam and the feelings of insult and anxiety that are the result of this.

At the same time, the campaign "Stop the slandering of Islam" also makes clear that the common insult of Islam and Muslims creates an altercation in the Dutch society and hereby seriously disturbs the harmony of the Dutch society.

We can report that the first weekend of this campaign has lead to positive reactions from the community. The initiative has been welcomed and we have received messages of support from both Muslims as non-Muslims.

Brian of London writes:

This week's show features an extended piece by Tom Paine on his thoughts of London and a three way chat between Meryl, Damian and Brian of London.

We've not really got Blog News this week so not much to link to. I do mention a new Egyption Coptic site, www.sonsofapesandpigs. org and we have a song at the end of a show that has a rather good video. Go and look at it: The Nose on your Face.

Tom used some spoof tube announcements from Emma Clarke. Go to her site to hear more and check out her hilarious spoof sat nav voice overs.

We will try our very best to be more regular next year. Honest.

You can find Meryl's blog here and Damian Penny posts here.

In the meantime thank you all for listening and for commenting and supporting us all year. We do it all for you and believe me, this is not a simple undertaking. I'm not complaining though, one comment saying we've opened someone's eyes is enough to cheer us all up for a week.

Aspirants to the American presidency should hope to score so highly in the United States. In Pakistan, though, the al-Qaeda emir easily beat out that country’s current president, Pervez Musharraf, who polled at 38 percent.

President George Bush, the face of a campaign to bring democracy — or, at least, some form of sharia-lite that might pass for democracy — to the Islamic world, registered nine percent. Nine!

If you want to know what to make of former prime minister Benazir Bhutto’s murder today in Pakistan, ponder that.

There is the Pakistan of our fantasy. The burgeoning democracy in whose vanguard are judges and lawyers and human rights activists using the “rule of law” as a cudgel to bring down a military junta. In the fantasy, Bhutto, an attractive, American-educated socialist whose prominent family made common cause with Soviets and whose tenures were rife with corruption, was somehow the second coming of James Madison.

Then there is the real Pakistan: an enemy of the United States and the West.

The real Pakistan is a breeding ground of Islamic holy war where, for about half the population, the only thing more intolerable than Western democracy is the prospect of a faux democracy led by a woman — indeed, a product of feudal Pakistani privilege and secular Western breeding whose father, President Zulfiquar Ali Bhutto, had been branded as an enemy of Islam by influential Muslim clerics in the early 1970s.

The real Pakistan is a place where the intelligence services are salted with Islamic fundamentalists: jihadist sympathizers who, during the 1980s, steered hundreds of millions in U.S. aid for the anti-Soviet mujahideen to the most anti-Western Afghan fighters — warlords like Gilbuddin Hekmatyar whose Arab allies included bin Laden and Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, the stalwarts of today’s global jihad against America.

The real Pakistan is a place where the military, ineffective and half-hearted though it is in combating Islamic terror, is the thin line between today’s boiling pot and what tomorrow is more likely to be a jihadist nuclear power than a Western-style democracy.

In that real Pakistan, Benazir Bhutto’s murder is not shocking. There, it was a matter of when, not if.

It is the new way of warfare to proclaim that our quarrel is never with the heroic, struggling people of fill-in-the-blank country. No, we, of course, fight only the regime that oppresses them and frustrates their unquestionable desire for freedom and equality.

Pakistan just won’t cooperate with this noble narrative.

Whether we get round to admitting it or not, in Pakistan, our quarrel is with the people. Their struggle, literally, is jihad. For them, freedom would mean institutionalizing the tyranny of Islamic fundamentalism. They are the same people who, only a few weeks ago, tried to kill Benazir Bhutto on what was to be her triumphant return to prominence — the symbol, however dubious, of democracy’s promise. They are the same people who managed to kill her today. Today, no surfeit of Western media depicting angry lawyers railing about Musharraf — as if he were the problem — can camouflage that fact.

The rest is here.

"If the IFA [Israeli Football Association] feels that 'Mohammed is dead' is a racist chant than we think that they should also take action against the Sakhnin fans shouting 'Allah Akbar'. We hope the IFA's Supreme Court will overturn this decision." --from this news article

Any phrase about Muhammad, or any other significant figure important to anyone, is not a "racist" phrase. It may be true or false, clever or silly, in good or in doubtful taste. But whatever it is, it is not "racist." Distinctions matter. Carelessness with words should not be tolerated.

Stuart Jeffries writes about the unintentionally hilarious spat between Ted Honderich and Colin McGinn (hat tip: Arts & Letters):

It is probably the most negative book review ever written. Or if there is a worse one, do let me know. "This book runs the full gamut from the mediocre to the ludicrous to the merely bad," begins Colin McGinn's review of On Consciousness by Ted Honderich. "It is painful to read, poorly thought out, and uninformed. It is also radically inconsistent."

The ending isn't much better: "Is there anything of merit in On Consciousness? Honderich does occasionally show glimmers of understanding that the problem of consciousness is difficult and that most of our ideas about it fall short of the mark. His instincts, at least, are not always wrong. It is a pity that his own efforts here are so shoddy, inept, and disastrous (to use a term he is fond of applying to the views of others)."...

Don't you regret writing the review that way, I ask McGinn? "I know Ted and know I don't think much of him as a philosopher. But if you ask did that affect the way I wrote the review, absolutely not. If you allow personal hostilities to distort what you write, you're going to get caught out.

"It would have been different if it had been a junior person. I wouldn't do it to a junior. But Ted deserved it. It had to be done."

Honderich replies: "For McGinn to say that is for him to be a philosopher on the moon. Nobody on Earth believes that his review is not motivated by animus. To suggest the tone wasn't dictated by any history of hostility between us is crazy."

Intellectually, they hold very different views on one of the hottest, and most intractable of philosophical problems, consciousness. Honderich calls himself a radical externalist on consciousness, meaning, he writes in his book, that "my perceptual consciousness now consists in the existence of a world".

McGinn thinks Honderich's brand of radical externalism is bogus. "Ted's saying that one's perceptual content just is that thing, a table for example. But if you close your eyes, does the table stop existing? On Ted's account it seems to, which is just wild."

McGinn, by contrast, is the world's leading proponent of the so-called new mysterian position (named after the rock band Quark and the Mysterians) whereby some philosophical problems, consciousness among them, are insoluble. In this, he claims other leading thinkers - Noam Chomsky and Thomas Nagel among them - are new mysterians, too. Chomsky, for instance, maintains that just as a mouse will never be able to speak like a human (because of its biology), so certain problems may be beyond human understanding.

Honderich heaps derision on this new mysterian position, describing it as a "form of intellectual wimpishness". "And in any case, how dare McGinn rubbish my position. Twelve leading philosophers contributed to a book about my theory [in a special issue of the Journal of Consciousness Studies last August] and not one of them was as abusive as he was."

Honderich believes there is more than intellectual difference behind his and McGinn's row. "At UCL we had a jokey locker-room relationship," recalls Honderich. "But then I made a misstep. I suggested to him that his new girlfriend was not as plain as the old one, and I could see the blood drain out of his face. That was possibly the start of our frostiness." Forget, perhaps, abstruse philosophical disputes in understanding the men's mutual bile. Rather, cherchez la femme...

Flemming Rose writes at Northern Light (thanks to Alan):

A study commissioned by Germany’s Interior Ministry warns that 180.000 of the country’s 3 million Muslims are willing to commit violence in the name of Islam, which amounts to 6 percent of the Muslim population of Germany. The number is alarmingly high because a similar study a year ago showed that just 32.000, slightly more than 1 percent, were radical islamists representing a potential security threat.

Interior Minister Wolfgang Schäuble says in a foreword that the study leads to the ”worrying conclusion that a serious potential for Islamist radicalization has developed in Germany”.

Christine Haderthauer, secretary general of the conservative the Christian Social Union, told Der Spiegel that her party ”has always warned against the dangers of parallel societies. Our fears have been confirmed in a shocking manner.”

The study was conducted by two researchers from the Institute of Criminology at the University of Hamburg. The authors interviewed 1,750 Muslims of whom around 40 percent were German citizens. Almost 40 percent of the respondents think that ”physical violence is justified as a reaction against the threat of the West’s threat to Islam”. The study doesn’t clarify what is meant by ”threat” and for what exactly the West should be hold accountable.

The survey found that more than half of the respondents felt themselves excluded from German society, and felt they were being treated as foreigners. the study has caused a big debate in Germany about the need for better integration...

[T]he publication of the Mohammed cartoons in Denmark was an act of inclusion and integration of Muslims into the Danish tradition of religious satire, though a majority of Muslims saw it differently. The cartoons send an important message to Muslims saying: We don’t expect more or less of you, we expect exactly the same of you as of everybody else, and that’s a full recogniction of your presence in society as equal citizens.

Islamabad, Pakistan (AHN) - Following the assassination of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, opposition groups have warned of a civil war in Pakistan. Riaz Malik, of the opposition Pakistan Movement for Justice party (Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf), warned, "The impact will be that Pakistan is in more turmoil - it will be the start of civil war in Pakistan." --from this news article

Those nuclear weapons -- what about those nuclear weapons? It was the incredible negligence of Western intelligence agencies and Western governments made possible: A. Q. Khan stole plans from laboratories in the West; the necessary technology came from that West; the money for that nuclear weapons program came from the West -- chiefly the United States, giving aid to its "staunch ally" Pakistan to use to support the "brave Afghani mujahideen" etc. It is the responsibility of Western governments to get those weapons back, or make sure they are handed over "for safekeeping" during this "temporary" (i.e., permanent) "time of troubles" in Pakistan. Musharraf must be threatened with a total collapse of Pakistan, of its economy: no aid, no favorable treatment for its textiles, no travel to and from the West, no children of the zamindars who own, and the generals who run, Pakistan to be allowed to study, work, or remain in the West. A declaration of war, with a non-negotiable demand: give up those weapons.

As for the rest of Pakistan, it can hold together, it can disintegrate, it can do this or do that. Baluchistan may declare itself independent, and the Punjabis may crush them. Or not. The Sunnis may kill Shi'a, or not.  Who cares, as long as Pakistan  ceases to have control over, and has no chance to re-acquire or transmit to others, such weapons as it was foolishly allowed to acquire. That's all that Infidels should worry about  -- what actual damage they can inflict on us, by what means. 

Because, you see, that's the country. That's Pakistan.