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Five Sept. 11 Suspects to Face Trial in New York

The Obama administration has announced it will try 9-11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and other 9-11 Gitmo detainees in a civilian federal court in New York, allowing them the protections of the U.S. Constitution even though they are not U.S. citizens.

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Four Radical Chinese Muslims Transferred to Bermuda

Four Chinese Uighers (radical Chinese Muslims) were recently transferred to Bermuda. Do you think it's a good idea to release Gitmo detainees to idyllic vacation retreats?

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June 4, 2008

Exclusive: A Second Slice of Life in Israel Today

Ron Marlar

Truth is difficult to come by in our present world of agenda-driven propagandists and biased (often to the Left) mass media. Many times the propagandists and media are the same. Some say popular media, but I prefer my made-up word - massiveinfoentertainment media.

In my present location - Israel - what comes to mind is the perfidy of the media during the 2006 Katyusha War, when over 3000 rockets were fired into Israel by Hezbollah from Lebanon.

During that time, some specific examples of the media's treachery were:

-Reuters, who doctored Israeli air strike photos by "photoshopping" in more smoke around bombed buildings to make their pictures seem more dramatic.

-Videos of an allegedly wailing Lebanese woman over her destroyed home(s). (Either this woman is the Queen of Lebanon's Slumlords, or she has more homes than any just laws, religion, or good sense should allow.)

-Videos of a purported Lebanese man in a white emergency helmet at several alleged collateral damage death scenes. In one of these scenes, victim bodies are so obviously arranged one was hardly surprised when reports were verified that the "victims" got up and walked away after the videotaping.

-Video of an allegedly dead baby, cradled by the same white-helmeted man. I have seen cradled dead babies before; this one did not even look injured, let alone dead. The baby was not as relaxed as any dead person, pre- or post-rigor mortis, I have ever seen.

So, driven by propagandists and the massiveinfoentertainment media, I seek truth from as close to the on-scene sources as I can get. Two of these sources on this, my seventh visit to the Middle East in four years, are Esther Guterman and Tamar.

Esther Guterman is an 80-year-old Jewess born in 1928 in Tel Aviv. During what she calls "the European pogroms," she and her family were urged to emigrate to Bogota, Colombia, by an uncle living there. They did. So Esther grew up with Spanish as her first language. She now lives in Broward County, Florida, and she speaks little Hebrew.

She is now in Israel with a daughter visiting her aunt; her aunt's husband who speaks Spanish, also Hebrew and English; and other members of her family. Grandmother of six grandchildren, Ester is here to celebrate the bar Mitzvah of a nephew. On a previous visit she fell and broke her femur. She has diabetes, almost went blind from it, but is being treated by an East Indian woman doctor in her hometown in Florida.

I met Esther and Tamar at breakfast on May 24th in Beersheba, Israel. After breakfast I waited with Esther on a garden veranda at the gated hostel and other facilities complex. The complex is overseen by an armed guard doubling as a desk clerk on the eve of and during Shabat, the Jewish Saturday Sabbath. Esther read in the Bible's book of Psalms in Hebrew.

"It is a daily habit," she said. "I find peace, comfort and promise in the Psalms."

Tamar, also at breakfast with us, is a married mother and works for a manufacturer and worldwide distributor of large aquariums, equipment, parts and supplies. Most of their current business is with China and Japan. Tamar is from South Africa, speaks English with a Boers accent, and is a convert to Judaism from Catholicism. She is in Beershebe to visit a friend in hospital.

The women agree they feel safer and better cared for in Israel than in the U.S. or South Africa. Esther said, "I was safer in Bogota, Colombia, than in Florida." I agree with both of them about Israel being safer than the U.S. currently.

Tamar and I talked about apartheid. We agreed the Palestinian Arab Muslim propaganda alleging apartheid in Israel, and accepted by U.S. and other liberals around the world, is not in any way comparable to apartheid in South Africa as the propagandists would have us believe. The situation in Israel is, in fact, not even approaching apartheid as Arabs have been well blended into Israel's population, although it has not been presented that way in the media. There are no well blended Jews into Arab populations in Arab countries that I know of.

We also discussed how Israeli Jews, Palestinians, Christians and others must protect themselves against Islamic JIhadist criminals. To do so, the Israelis are erecting and enforcing a wall. Some propagandists, fuzzy-minded liberals, anti-Jewish, anti-Israel and other cruel, heartless, biased and Godless people - my choices of nouns and adjectives - and the media also compare the wall wrongly with the Berlin Wall. Get real, people! The Berlin Wall was built to keep captives inside Soviet Communist East Berlin. The partial wall in Israel is to keep out terrorists who wantonly murder innocent men, women and children.

Likewise we discussed how the "Palestinian refugee camps" are not primitive tent compounds in a remote desert as they are presented in the mass media. They are rather more like urban ghettos, made so by the Palestinians themselves. Also they are not only in Israel or Palestine. They are in such places as Amman, Jordan, and many locations in Lebanon too as I have visited, seen, heard, felt, tasted and smelled.

If you seek your truth through the so-called popular media with your eyes and minds open, you might have seen them too. One in Lebanon was most visible for weeks in 2007 as Lebanese soldiers and police laid siege to the urban ghetto to root out determined-to-the-death Islamic Jihadist criminals.

But Palestinians destroy more than their own surroundings. As reported by the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA):

As the IDF left the Gaza Strip, ending the Israeli presence there, Palestinians charged in, looting, burning and destroying the synagogues left behind. One can only imagine the international outcry had Israelis destroyed even one deserted Muslim mosque-the mere rumor that a Koran may have been mishandled was enough to spark widespread media condemnation-but here much of the media, following the Palestinian lead, justified the rampaging as an understandable reaction to what they called "38 years of Israeli occupation" in the Gaza Strip and turned the tables to criticize Israel.

I enjoyed my conversation with Esther and Tamar but these remain the subjects worthy of discussion here - the comparative safety in Israel, apartheid propaganda in Israel, Islamic jihadist criminals, Liberals, anti-Semitics, Godless people, the walls in Israel, Palestinian refugee camps and the West Bank. I wish it were not so, but we must continue to discuss and argue them because propagandists and Liberals force us to do so.

In wrestling with the subjects, I ask myself (and wish others did as well):

• - Why would any sane, rational person even think about giving up the Golan Heights?
• - Why do President Bush and Secretary of State Rice want to take the division(s) in Jerusalem even further by formalizing them more? Is there not in fact a Jerusalem and East Jerusalem? Are there not distinct political, religious, ethnic and different culture quarters in Jerusalem? Does the al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock sit on the Temple Mount or not?
• - How many past Presidents have failed to bring peace to the Middle East? What happened to all the talk about former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair being a sort of permanent envoy for peace in the Middle East?
• - What really is a Palestinian? Can even they define and describe themselves in a rational, reasonable and convincing way?
• - When was the name Palestine first used, thus Palestinians? By whom? Why? Where was Yasser Arafat born? And to people of what language(s), heritage, ethnicity, dress, foods, standards, values and beliefs including politics and religions?
• - Assuming there are such people as Palestinians, what did they do to develop the land during their years, as arguably the dominant, controlling population in the Land?

I have at least tentative, working answers to all these questions and more. I pose them here for readers to seek and examine the truth.

In such a globalized and dangerous world with so many biases in the media, we cannot afford to be duped by propagandists or by massiveinfoentertainment media. Our very lives depend on the truths they and we personally hold for ourselves, our children and our grandchildren.

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