Iran already weaseling out of agreement

Iranian military parade. The banner under the missile reads: Wipe Israel off the map

Iran is pursuing two paths to a nuclear bomb: it’s refining uranium and it's building a heavy water reactor near the city of Arak so that it can create plutonium. 

Under the Geneva Accord between Iran and the great powers, Iran has, for the first time, been given the world’s blessing to refine uranium to 5% purity – by far the most difficult part of the process. After six months (barring an unlikely permanent agreement), Iran will resume quickly refining this uranium up to the 95% purity needed for a bomb. (More about this aspect of the Accord here).

Under the Geneva Accord, Iran is also supposed to stop work at the Arak nuclear reactor. Except as it turns out, it doesn’t plan to. "Capacity at the Arak site is not going to increase,” said Iran’s Foreign Minister. “It means no new nuclear fuel will be produced and no new installations will be installed, but construction will continue there."

Iran is obviously testing the Americans to see how much push back they’ll get, and the answer so far is none whatsoever. 

Moreover, apart from continuing construction work at Arak itself, Iran can weasel around the Geneva Accord by making “new installations” off-site. Then when the six months of the Accord are up, they'll be able to quickly finish the Arak reactor with pre-constructed components.

Here’s the story from Reuters…

The Arak heavy-water reactor 190 km southwest of Tehran January 15, 2011.

(Reuters) - Iran will pursue construction at the Arak heavy-water reactor, Foreign Minister Mohammed Javad Zarif was quoted as saying on Wednesday, despite a deal with world powers to shelve a project they fear could yield plutonium for atomic bombs.

France, one of the six powers that negotiated Sunday's landmark initial accord with Iran to curb its disputed nuclear program, said in response to Zarif's statement that Tehran had to stick to what was agreed in the Geneva talks.

The uncompleted research reactor emerged as one of several big stumbling blocks in the marathon negotiations, in which Iran agreed to restrain its atomic activities for six months in return for limited sanctions relief. The agreement is intended to buy time for talks on a final settlement of the dispute.

Western powers fear Arak could be a source of plutonium - one of two materials, along with highly enriched uranium, that can be used for the core of a nuclear weapon - once it is operational.

According to the agreed text, Iran said it would not make "any further advances of its activities" on the Arak reactor, under construction near a western Iranian town with that name.

"Capacity at the Arak site is not going to increase. It means no new nuclear fuel will be produced and no new installations will be installed, but construction will continue there," Zarif told parliament in translated comments broadcast on Iran's Press TV.

When asked about this, French Foreign Ministry spokesman Romain Nadal said: "In the interim accord, the Arak reactor is specifically targeted and the end of all work at this reactor. In the agreement and the text, which has been approved by the Iranian authorities, the Arak reactor is clearly targeted."

Banners in Tehran

Israel has denounced the nuclear agreement with Iran as an "historical mistake" as it does not actually dismantle the program.

"The ink has not even dried on the agreement and already we are hearing provocative announcements from Iran, like this, whose coyness and ambiguity could well augur a breach of the deal," Israeli Strategic Affairs Minister Yuval Steinitz told Reuters when asked about Zarif's statement.

DEAL "SILENT" ON KEY COMPONENTS

However, nuclear expert Mark Hibbs of the Carnegie Endowment think-tank said, "It doesn't matter whether Iran is doing excavation work or civil construction work around the reactor."

"What matters for now is that there is no fuel production and testing, that there is no installation at the reactor. Freezing much more than that might be seen by hardliners as suspension of the project and therefore unacceptable."

Other experts have said that an apparent loophole in the Geneva agreement could allow Iran to build components off-site to install later in the reactor.

"The agreement is silent on the manufacturing of remaining key components of the reactor and its continued heavy-water production," former chief U.N. nuclear inspector Olli Heinonen wrote in an analysis.

"Technically, such efforts are not reasonable if the goal is either to dismantle the reactor or modify it to a more proliferation-resistant, smaller light-water reactor as one of the alternative paths of producing isotopes for medical and industrial purposes," he said.

American intelligence estimates accord delays Iran's ability to build a nuclear bomb by "Only a month to a few months"

A poster of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini is seen next to bank of centrifuges in a facility in Natanz. (Reuters)

What has the accord with the Iranians bought us?  It's supposed to be a six-month pause in Iran's bomb program. But in fact it's only a partial pause. Iran is free to continue enriching uranium to 5% — and that's by far the most difficult step. It's free to repair its (many) broken centrifuges, it's free to continue research and development, it's free to continue it's bomb design program and its ballistic missile program. Also, intelligence agencies all assume Iran has hidden facilities, where it will continue with nuclear activities that the agreement does forbid.

Bottom line: this six-moth accord buys us a one-month delay in how long it will take Iran to build a bomb — maybe two or three months if we're lucky. In return the western powers gave Iran $6 or $7 billion in sanctions relief, a delay in further sanctions, and an effective "right" to enrich uranium, a concession which virtually guarantees that Iran can eventually get a bomb. 

To get even this much took a decade of increasingly harsh sanctions, the threat of an imminent military attack from Israel and a full year of negotiation. 

Five years ago, Iran had enough uranium enriched to 5% to build one bomb. Today, it has enough to build four. In six months when this agreement expires, it will have enough to build five or six. That's the bottom line.

Iranian revolutionary guards are helping the Syrian regime to crush the revolution

From the New York Times

WASHINGTON — The interim accord struck with Iran on Sunday interrupts the country’s nuclear progress for the first time in nearly a decade, but requires Iran to make only a modest down payment on the central problem.

The deal does not roll back the vast majority of the advances Iran has made in the past five years, which have drastically shortened what nuclear experts call its “dash time” to a bomb — the minimum time it would take to build a weapon if Iran’s supreme leader decided to pursue that path.

Lengthening that period, so that the United States and its allies would have time to react, is the ultimate goal of President Obama’s negotiating team. It is also a major source of friction between the White House and two allies, Israel and Saudi Arabia, which have made no secret of their belief that they are being sold down the river.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel has described the terms of the accord announced early Sunday as a “bad deal” that does not require Iran “to take apart even one centrifuge.” That bitter assessment reflects the deep suspicion inside Mr. Netanyahu’s government that Mr. Obama will settle for a final agreement that leaves Iran a few screwdriver turns short of a weapon.

The Saudis have been equally blistering, hinting in vague asides that if the United States cannot roll back the Iranian program, it may be time for Saudi Arabia to move to Plan B — nuclear weapons of its own, presumably obtained from Pakistan, which entered the nuclear club on Saudi subsidies.

Iran’s agreement to convert or dilute the fuel stocks that are closest to weapons grade, Mr. Obama said, means that the deal would “cut off Iran’s most likely paths to a bomb.” But it would cut them off only temporarily, long enough to pursue negotiations without fear that Iran would use the time to inch closer to a weapons capability.

But the rollback he won for this first stage, according to American intelligence estimates, would slow Iran’s dash time by only a month to a few months.

Mr. Obama met with senators from both parties last week, hoping to dissuade them from imposing new sanctions just as he is lifting some in an effort to coax Iran toward disarmament. But even some of his closest allies are unconvinced: Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, signed a letter to Secretary of State John Kerry last week noting that the temporary accord “would not require Iran to even meet the terms of prior United Nations Security Council resolutions,” which require complete suspension of nuclear production.

On the Iranian side, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, which American intelligence agencies have accused of running a secret weapons-design program, may try to chip away at the accord as well, arguing that the sanctions relief is puny and that even the caps on enrichment will slow Iran’s efforts to build its nuclear capabilities.

Mr. Kerry and his chief negotiator, Wendy Sherman, say they have no illusions that the interim agreement solves the Iranian nuclear problem. It simply creates time and space for the real negotiations, they say, where the goal will be to convince Iranian leaders that the only way to get the most crippling sanctions — those that have cut the country’s oil revenue in half — lifted is to dismantle large parts of a program on which they have spent billions of dollars and staked national pride.

Lurking over the American negotiating team is the specter of what can go wrong even with a seemingly good deal to buy time. As Ms. Sherman was coaxing Iran’s foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, toward the interim agreement, the North Koreans were restarting a nuclear reactor that they had partly dismantled in a similar agreement struck late in the administration of President George W. Bush — a deal meant to halt North Korea’s ability to produce plutonium fuel for weapons.

The North Korean example has become Exhibit No. 1 in Israel’s argument that the deal struck on Sunday gives a false sense of security. “There are two models for a deal: Libya and North Korea,” Israel’s minister of strategic affairs and intelligence, Yuval Steinitz, said in an interview during a recent trip to Washington. “We need Libya.”

Mr. Steinitz was referring to a 2003 agreement in which Libya gave up all of its nuclear equipment and was left with no ability to make nuclear fuel. 

At the beginning of Mr. Obama’s presidency, Iran had roughly 2,000 kilograms of low-enriched uranium, barely enough for a bomb. It now has about 9,000 kilograms, by the estimates of the International Atomic Energy Agency. A few thousand centrifuges were spinning in 2009; today there are 18,000, including new models that are far more efficient and can produce bomb-grade uranium faster. A new heavy water reactor outside the city of Arak promises a new pathway to a bomb, using plutonium, if it goes online next year as Iran says it will.

True rollback would mean dismantling many of those centrifuges, shipping much of the fuel out of the country or converting it into a state that could not be easily adapted to bomb use, and allowing inspections of many underground sites where the C.I.A., Europe and Israel believe hidden enrichment facilities may exist. There is no evidence of those facilities now, but, as a former senior Obama administration official said recently, speaking anonymously to discuss intelligence, “there has never been a time in the past 15 years or so when Iran didn’t have a hidden facility in construction.”

There is also the problem of forcing Iran to reveal what kind of progress it has made toward designing a weapon. For years, its leaders have refused to answer questions about documents, slipped out of the country by a renegade scientist nearly eight years ago, that strongly suggest work on a nuclear warhead. Inspectors have never been able to interview Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, the academic believed to be in charge of a series of weapons development projects.

Toronto high school teacher links to antisemitic websites

A teacher at a Toronto public high school recently posted a link on the school’s Facebook page to an article on the antisemitic website Veteran’s Today. The article itself wasn’t antisemitic; more anti-Canadian, but it raised my eyebrows, especially when I saw other articles that had been linked to.

Virginia Pang, the principal of The Student School, told me that the article was for a politics class about the Canadian electoral system and whether it’s fair and open.  The teacher’s mistake, Pang said, was not to check out the website.

I’ll say. The article was originally published by Iran’s Press TV, which has been conducting a propaganda offensive against Canada since our government broke off diplomatic relations with Iran. (More on Iran's anti-Canadian propaganda here.) This particular article claims that a Canadian court ruled that the 2011 federal election was fraudulent.

The story was also covered by all the legitimate Canadian media. The court did find that fraud was committed in the election by persons unknown, but contrary to Iranian propaganda, the fraud had no effect on the election’s outcome. 

“Fascist,” said a comment on the school’s Facebook posting, apparently in reference to  Stephen Harper, and a teacher at the school “liked” this comment.

Perhaps the teacher did so to encourage discussion, the principal suggested.

Unfortunately, the teacher himself wouldn’t talk to me. If he had, I might have suggested that a high school teacher should understand enough history to know that the government of Canada isn’t fascist.

The teacher did take down the link to Veteran’s Today as soon as he learned he’d directed students to an antisemitic website. Since my chat with the principal and with Ryan Bird, a communications officer with the Toronto District School Board, The Student School has taken down its whole Facebook page and is combing through it to remove other inappropriate postings.

David Duke, former Grand Wizard of American's most notorious racist organization, the Klu Klux Klan, is one of the "experts" Press TV likes to interview.

One posting linked to an article on Press TV. As a propaganda arm of the Iranian government, Press TV is antisemitic and shares the Iranian government’s malice toward Israel. I asked the principal if the teacher understood what Press TV is. She said she didn’t think so.

The linked article accuses Israel of ethnic cleansing against its Bedouin population. There is a plan to move many of the Bedouin of the Negev Desert from their current homes in impoverished unregulated villages. The plan is highly controversial and has been covered in detail by the legitimate media in Israel. (Outside Israel, there’s little interest in the issue.)

But unlike Press TV, the legitimate media explains the plan is not to remove the Bedouin from the Negev – as suggested by the phrase “ethnic cleansing.” 

Nor - even in the Press TV coverage - is there any suggestion the Israelis are committing murder, torture, rape, or any other heinous practices associated with ethnic cleansing in Yugoslavia, where the term originated.  

Rather, the Bedouin are to be moved into towns close to their current homes, but with running water, flush toilets and schools. They will also receive cash compensation.

The Press TV article is just as weak on what’s wrong with this plan. Reading Israeli media, you’d learn that at least some Bedouin want the government to bring running water and other municipal services to their villages, rather than moving elsewhere to get these services and complain they weren’t consulted about this plan for them.

But these sorts of real and substantial issues are largely absent from the Press TV article. Also, of course, in keeping with its standard practices, Press TV doesn’t interview anyone actually responsible for the plan, because after all, they’re Jews.*

Ryan Bird, the TDSB communications officer I spoke to, told me that the teacher had said the purpose of these postings was to spark a conversation in class. “It’s not a one-sided discussion,” he said.

Good. Still, given that there are many high quality articles about the planned relocation of the Bedouin, I would have liked to ask The Student School teacher why he chose to link to an article composed of baseless accusations and containing almost no facts.

Cartoon from Richard Falk's blog: Dog in Jewish skull cap and American sweater eats people and pisses on Justice

Another posting by a Student School teacher linked to an article on Richard Falk’s blog about “heroic” Palestinians hunger strikers, protesting their detention by Israel.

Falk is the UN’s Special Human Rights Rapporteur to the Occupied Territories and a notorious anti-Israel bigot. The governments of Canada and the UK have condemned Falk for antisemitic comments and material he’s posted on his blog which The Student School linked to.

Falk has approved suicide bombings, compared Israelis to Nazis and the Hamas terrorist group to French resistance fighters, suggested the US was behind the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and blamed Israel for the terrorist bombing at the Boston Marathon.

As Falk has never had any problem with Palestinian terrorism, naturally he also supports their hunger strike.

Hopefully, the class discussion about this article at The Student School concerned why the UN has a human rights rapporteur who’s a bigot.

Another posting by a Student School teacher linked to a petition calling on the Red Hot Chili Peppers to cancel their performance in Israel;* another linked to an article about Teacher’s Union of Ireland voting to support an academic boycott of Israel.

Hopefully, the teacher opened the class discussion about that article by noting that in Canada the Human Rights Act prohibits discrimination on the basis of nationality. Thus, for a school to support an academic boycott and to spurn a teacher or student because they’re Israeli would be illegal.

I do believe the teacher does his best to make sure in-class discussions don’t give only one side of controversial issues, but a discussion that begins with Israel in the dock, accused of some crime, is imbalanced from the get go.

Besides, I doubt a teacher who doesn’t know what Press TV is understands the Middle East well enough to guide a classroom discussion of such controversial issues.

And given, the articles The Student School links to, I can’t help but worry that its teachers are biased against Israel, regardless of reassurances from the principal and from Ryan Bird, the School Board’s communication officer.

Chili Peppers rock Tel Aviv

However, things clearly have improved at the school. Back in 2008, The Student School founded the first high school chapter of the Coalition Against Israeli Apartheid, an odious group that calls on people to shun Israelis.

Readers will recall that in 2010, all parties in the Ontario Legislature unanimously condemned CAIA’s annual Apartheid Week.

 Ryan Bird reports that this group doesn’t exist at the school anymore and that the school absolutely does not support a boycott against Israel.

Well good! But still, as a parent and as a Canadian, schools such as The Student School that define their purpose as the pursuit of “social justice” or "social activism" make me nervous.

Too often, “justice” is just a name people give to their political agenda. And even well-meaning teachers, without an agenda, are unequipped to navigate controversial issues. Because unfortunately, the world of “activism” is full of people untethered to reality and seething with anger, bigotry and antisemitism.

*

*Note: The Press TV article linked to by The Student School also accuses Israel of ethnic cleansing during its War of Independence. Anyone who can count knows the real ethnic cleansing in 1948 took place on the other side, as following ’48 the Jewish population of the Gaza strip and of Judea and Samaria was reduced to zero while many Arabs remained in Israel and still compose 20% of its population today.

But who knows? Perhaps the complexities of the 1948 conflict were covered during an in-class discussion, which perhaps also touched on the marked disappearance of Jews from Iraq, Syria, Egypt and the other Arab countries. (More on how Jews were driven out of Arab countries here.)

*Whenever a big name act announces a visit to Israel, the anti-Israel crowd deluges the performer with emails begging them to ostracize the Jewish state and threatening them if they don’t. I’m happy to report that the Chili Peppers ignored the haters and played to a sold-out crowd of 50,000 in Tel Aviv.

A slightly shorter version of this article appeared in the Jewish Tribune. A hat tip for information used in this article to Eye on a Crazy Planet and to Socialist Studies.

Al-Quds Day in Toronto, a multicultural event celebrating the murder of both Jews and Palestinians

Al-Quds Day is often used to introduce children to antisemitism. This year, at Toronto's al-Qud's Day, this child gave a speech claiming that "Zionist thugs" are behind the Syrian revolution against dictator Bashar al-Assad.
Actually, the rebels are a mix of pro-democracy Syrians, Kurds, and al-Qaeda terrorists, none of whom much like Jews.

This year’s al-Quds Day rally in Toronto drew a lot of media attention because Elias Hazineh voiced his enthusiasm for killing Israelis. But what struck me most forcibly about this annual spectacle of antisemitism was the continued support for Hezbollah, a terrorist group which these days spends its time killing Syrians.

Of course, Elias Hazineh deserves attention because he’s a Liberal insider and an object lesson in the dangers of ethnic group politics. Hazineh was an aid to Liberal MP Caroline Parrish and he ran Liberal MP’s Omar Alghabra’s election campaign. He himself ran (and lost) to be the Ward 10 councillor in Mississauga.

Hazineh is also a former president of Palestine House, the political and cultural centre for Palestinians in the Toronto area. Last year, Palestine House had its funding cut off because of its support for extremism. (See here.)

This year, Hazineh was a featured speaker at the annual al-Quds Day rally at Queen’s Park. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini established International al-Quds Day shortly after the Iranian revolution brought him to power in 1979. Quds is the Arabic name for Jerusalem, and Khomeini created the holiday to urge Muslims on in their efforts to take Jerusalem from the Jews and wipe Israel off the map.

In keeping with the spirit of al-Quds Day, at the Toronto rally, Hazineh suggested that Israelis live on stolen land, and rather than negotiate with Israelis, Palestinians should kill them.

“When somebody tries to rob a bank, the police get in,” said Hazineh. “They don’t negotiate. And we have been negotiating with them {Israelis} for 65 years. We say, ‘Get out or you are dead.’ We give them two minutes and then we start shooting, and that’s the only way they’ll understand.”

Other Liberals quickly condemned Hazineh. MP Carolyn Bennett tweeted: “We are all appalled by Hazineh remarks promoting violence & killing, at Al Quds rally.”

Liberal Justice critic Irwin Cotler tweeted: “Hazineh's remarks constitute clear incitement to hatred and violence – prohibited under Canadian law. Action warranted.”

And indeed because of his remarks, Hazineh is currently under investigation by the police. (See here.)

Hezbollah flags at 2013 al-Quds Day rally in Toronto

Hazineh should also be under investigation by the historians. Sixty-five years ago, the Palestinians and Arabs did not negotiate; rather than accept a compromise that would have given birth to a Palestinian state at the same time as Israel, they followed Hazineh’s advice and came in shooting, trying to kill the State of Israel at its birth. That worked out badly for them then and has ever since.

Calls for violence and extremist rhetoric is nothing new at al-Quds Day in Toronto. Because of the hate-filled speeches at previous years’ rallies, this year, the legislature’s sergeant-at-arms, banned the al-Quds group from holding their rally at Queen’s Park (see here). Unfortunately, they held it anyway.

As in previous years, participants were waving the flag of their heroes: the Lebanese terrorist group Hezbollah. You might find this strange, as currently Hezbollah is helping the Syrian dictator to put down a revolt against his regime. To date, with Hezbollah’s help, the Syrian army has killed 100,000 civilians, plus a few rebel fighters.

Moreover, Syria is home to a million descendants of Palestinians displaced when the Arab armies came in shooting sixty-five years ago. Now half the Syrian Palestinians have become refugees, just like their grandparents were. On top of this, the Syrian army and their Hezbollah allies have killed about 500 Palestinians.

Indeed, the Syrian Palestinians are worse off than other Syrians, for Lebanon, Egypt and Jordan have all closed their borders to them. These countries continue to welcome other Syrian refugees, but they don’t want any more Palestinians.

Of course the leaders of the United Church and the Canadian Peace Alliance and the other usual suspects aren’t protesting this blatant and deadly discrimination. These groups love to protest against Israel, but in truth being against Israel is what they’re all about. They couldn’t care less about the Palestinians.

Still being indifferent is one thing. To be waving Hezbollah flags in the streets of Toronto while Hezbollah is busy murdering Syrians is quite another.

It’s a vivid reminder that Muslims and Christian Arabs have been the main victims of the seething hatreds and violence that grips too much of the Islamic world. To put things in perspective: more people have been killed in the past two years of civil war in Syria than in the past century of Jewish-Arab conflict over Israel’s existence. 


Note: The annual al-Quds Day rally in Toronto is sponsored by the Islamic Society of York Region. Back in 2008, this group actually sent me an invitation to help them celebrate the 29th anniversary of Iran's revolution. Naturally, I wrote about it ... here.

Anti-Semitism comes to Richmond Hill in celebration of Iran's Islamic Revolution

Ahmedinejad's Iran

I originally wrote this piece in February 2008 for the Jewish Tribune and for Engage, an anti-racism site published by British academics. It’s amazing how little has changed over the years…

February 14, 2008, I received a startling Valentine the other day: an emailed invitation to a lecture in the Toronto suburb of Richmond Hill – the topic: “Iran’s President Ahmedinejad: the embodiment of a Sincere Muslim.” 

Well, I know that President Ahmedinejad sincerely hates Jews, that he calls Israel a “filthy Zionist entity,” and that he’d like to “wipe it off the map.” But perhaps Ahmedinejad has a more pleasant side and the talk would concentrate on that – sort of like a lecture on Hitler’s vegetarianism. Or perhaps not. 

The Islamic Society of York Region was presenting the lecture as part of a conference to celebrate the 29th anniversary of Iran’s Islamic revolution. 

Scheduled speakers included Imam Muhammad al-Asi of Washington D.C. Al-Asi is a Jew-hater and a research fellow at the Institute of Contemporary Islamic Thought, a pro-Iranian, pro-Hezbollah think tank that publishes the Crescent International magazine. 

In a speech at the University of California at Irvine, Al-Asi said:

We have a psychosis in the Jewish community that is unable to co-exist equally and brotherly with other human beings. You can take a Jew out of the ghetto, but you can't take the ghetto out of the Jew. And this has been demonstrated time and time again in Occupied Palestine. And now they have American diplomats and politicians and decision makers and strategists in their pocket because they have the money.

According to al-Asi Jews run the world. In an on-line article, al-Asi refers to the power of “the elders of zion” and claims that Jews “are in virtual command and control of the American and Russian administrations; not to mention their political and foreign policy clout in the European continent." 

But nonetheless al-Asi promises that the power of Allah will destroy “this zionist forgery,” “this Israeli atrocity.” Citing the prophet, al-Asi writes: “The Muslims will deal the deathblow to Yahud [the Jews]. These Yahud will hide behind timber and boulder that will call out on Muslims: 'O Muslim there is a Yahudi in disguise, come and annihilate him.” 

Whoa! It’s not every day you get to hear someone preach genocide. Well, not in Canada. In Ahmedinejad’s Iran, it’s government policy. 

{Now of course in 2013 Iran has a new supposedly more moderate president, but his inauguration featured the traditional chant of “Death to America! Death to England! Death to Israel!” (here). Doesn’t sound moderate to me.}

The Islamic Society of York Region was also sponsoring a panel discussion on Valentine’s Day, featuring one of al-Asi’s colleagues: Iqbal Siddiqui, editor of Crescent International in the UK. 

In January 2006, Siddiqui was one of the featured “experts” on a Holocaust-denial program aired on Iranian TV. The other two experts discussed “the myth of the gas chambers,” gave high marks to Hitler’s favourite propaganda tract, “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” and regarding Israel, stated: “The only solution for this cancerous tumour is surgery.” 

For his part, Siddiqui referred to the “supposed Holocaust,” and claimed: “The attitude of the Jews and the Zionists [is] that as a result of the suffering in Europe under Hitler, for the rest of history, the rest of the world owes them a living, and that they must be treated now as a special people, the chosen people, who are entitled to do whatever they like.” 

And what do the Jews like to do? According to Siddiqui, they like to act like Nazis and to inflict “acts of equal and equivalent evil on their part against the Palestinians." 

Charming fellow. He’s going to be on a panel with Dr. Mohamed Elmasry, president of the Canadian Islamic Congress. Elmasry once asserted on the Canadian TV program the Michael Coren Show that every adult Israeli is a legitimate target for terrorists. 

Muhammad al-Asi will also be paired with other local talent. A surprise guest was advertised as “a family member of the Toronto 18.” These are 18 people arrested in Toronto on terrorism charges. Until proven guilty, I presume the 18 were hoarding three tonnes of ammonium nitrate to fertilize their house plants, not for making bombs. 

Still, I think it’s odd to have a speaker whose only qualification is that one of his or her relatives was allegedly plotting to bomb public buildings in Canada and to storm Parliament and behead the prime minister. 

James Clark of the Toronto Coalition to Stop the War was also on the speakers’ list. Last year, Clark and other members of the ironically named “Canadian peace movement” went to Cairo, Egypt, for a conference dedicated to “An International Alliance Against Imperialism and Zionism."

At the conference, the self-described “anti-imperialist left,” represented by people like Clark, and a representative of the Canadian Union of Public Employees met with terrorist organizations such as Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Egyptian branch of al-Qaeda, Jamaat al-Islamiya. (See here.) 

The Reverend Karin Brothers will also speak in Richmond Hill. Rev. Brothers and a half-dozen other members of the United Church’s World Affairs Committee tried to get the UC to adopt an anti-Israel boycott resolution. Fortunately, though, the Church decided to try to encourage peace between Israel and the Palestinians, rather than taking the side of the terrorists. 

I don’t hold it against the United Church that they have a few fanatics in the fold. But maybe they should take their cue from the Islamic Center in Washington D.C. Al-Asi was once an Iman there, but in 1983 the center barred him from holding any position. Very sensible of them. After all what respectable church or mosque needs extremists like this around? 

As for me, I've declined my invitation to help celebrate the 29th anniversary of fascism in Iran. It’s Valentine’s Day. My wife and I can find something better to do. 

Afternote: In 2013, The Islamic Society of York Region remains as hateful as ever. It sponsors the annual al-Quds Day Rally in Toronto. After last year's hate-filled rally, they were banned from the grounds or the Ontario legislature. But this year, they gathered there anyway, calling for killing Israelis and waving the flag of the favourite terrorist group: Hezbollah. Even though, these days, Hezbollah is busy killing Palestinians. More here.

The one thing that has changed in the years since I wrote this article is that, sadly, in the United Church of Canada, antisemitism has moved from the fringes to become official church policy. More here. 

Celebrating International al-Quds Day: "Death to America! Death to Israel!"

Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini established International Al-Quds Day shortly after he came to power in 1979. Translated, Quds means Jerusalem. Khomeini – who was nothing if not a vicious Jew-hater – created the holiday to demonstrate Iran's solidarity with Palestinians and to urge them on in any efforts to kill Jews and wipe Israel off the map.

In 2011, in honour of al-Quds Day, Iran’s current supreme leader Ayatollah Khamenei tweeted: "Israel is a hideous entity in the Middle East which will undoubtedly be annihilated." 

In 2012, this jolly anti-Israel hate festival will again be celebrated throughout much of the world. In Toronto, local antisemites and Israel-haters will gather at Queen’s Park on Saturday, Aug 18, at 2 p.m. After some rousing denunciations of the little satan, our local fanatics will march to the U.S. consulate to demonstrate their peaceful nature in traditional Khomeinist fashion ….