Sacramento’s carefully cultivated interfaith bonds are being stretched to the limit by an 86-year-old Holocaust survivor who is scheduled to speak at a local mosque about the Nazi Holocaust and Israel’s treatment of Palestinians.

Auschwitz survivor Hajo Meyer makes the 11th stop on his national “Never Again for Anyone” tour at the Sacramento League of Associated Muslims Islamic Center at 7 p.m. tonight.

Meyer has equated the Holocaust to Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories, drawing intense fire from Sacramento’s Jewish community and the Anti-Defamation League.

“Comparing Israel to Nazi Germany is repugnant, anti-Semitic and defiles the sacred memory of millions who perished during the Holocaust,” said Rabbi Reuven H. Taff, president of the 13-member Board of Rabbis of Greater Sacramento, in a civil but emotional exchange of letters with SALAM’s Imam Mohamed Abdul Azeez. [emphasis added] (Read more from sacbee.com)

I would like to point out to Rabbi Reuven that Albert Einstein also cmpared Israel to Nazi Germany. (more)

Rand Paul: And, he said, giving money to the country is especially unwise considering Israel’s relative wealth. “I think they’re an important ally, but I also think that their per capita income is greater than probably three-fourths of the rest of the world,” he said. “Should we be giving free money or welfare to a wealthy nation? I don’t think so.” (Read more from politico.com)

JIDF’s twitter: I urge all supporters to go to http://reddit.com and register many accounts, learn the system, etc. We’re gonna have some fun w/ Jew haters

The reddit community picked up on this. Here is their discussion.

Tea party-backed Republican Sen. Rand Paul favors cutting U.S. aid to Israel as part of a deficit-driven effort to slash government spending by $500 billion this year, drawing criticism from Democrats and Republicans who argue the U.S. must be unwavering in its support for the longtime Mideast ally. (Read more from washingtonpost.com)

See also: U.S. Democrats and pro-Israel lobbies slam Republican Senator’s call to halt Israel aid

Israel called on the United States and a number of European countries over the weekend to curb their criticism of President Hosni Mubarak to preserve stability in the region.

Jerusalem seeks to convince its allies that it is in the West’s interest to maintain the stability of the Egyptian regime. (Read more from haaretz.com)

Shaked considers the West’s demands for more openness and democracy in Egypt to be a fatal mistake. “It is an illusion to believe that the dictator Mubarak could be replaced by a democracy,” he says. “Egypt is still not capable of democracy,” he adds, pointing out that the illiteracy rate is over 20 percent, to give just one example. The Muslim Brotherhood is the only real alternative, he opines, which would have devastating consequences for the West. “They will not change their anti-Western attitude when they come to power. That has not happened (with Islamist movements) anywhere: neither in Sudan, Iran nor Afghanistan.”

Ultimately the choice is between a pro- or an anti-Western dictatorship, says Shaked. “It is in our interest that someone from Mubarak’s inner circle takes over his legacy, at any cost.” In the process, it is not possible to rule out massive bloodshed in the short term, he says. “It would not be the first time that riots in Egypt were brutally crushed.” (Read more from spiegel.de)

The role of the United States as the largest single donor to both Israel and the Palestinians was thrown into sharp relief last November when the Israeli government rejected 20 U.S. F35 Joint Strike Fighter jets worth $2.75 billion in return for extending a West Bank settlement freeze by 90 days.

The offer — some called it a “bribe” — of military material equal in value to nearly an entire year’s worth of U.S. aid to Israel, renewed questions about the purpose of U.S. aid in the region and whether it might be more effectively deployed to better serve American strategic interests.

Israel receives more U.S. foreign aid than any other country, now around $3 billion every year. (Read more from globalpost.com)

US forces have fired so many bullets in Iraq and Afghanistan – an estimated 250,000 for every insurgent killed – that American ammunition-makers cannot keep up with demand. As a result the US is having to import supplies from Israel. (Read more from belfasttelegraph.co.uk)

Officials at the U.S. Department of State, we learned from the secret cables released by WikiLeaks last week, have serious questions about the accuracy — and sincerity — of Israeli predictions about when Iran will obtain a nuclear weapon. As one State official wrote in response to an Israeli general’s November 2009 claim that Iran would have a bomb in one year: “It is unclear if the Israelis firmly believe this or are using worst-case estimates to raise greater urgency from the United States.”

So we thought this was as good a time as any to look at the remarkable history of incorrect Israeli predictions about Iran — especially given that the WikiLeaks trove is being used to argue that an attack on Iran is becoming more likely.

According to various Israeli government predictions over the years, Iran was going to have a bomb by the mid-90s — or 1998, 1999, 2000, 2004, 2005, and finally 2010. More recent Israeli predictions have put that date at 2011 or 2014.

. . . .

Here we go:

October 1992: “Warning the international community that Iran would be armed with a nuclear bomb by 1999, Peres told France 3 television in October 1992 that ‘Iran is the greatest threat [to peace] and greatest problem in the Middle East … because it seeks the nuclear option while holding a highly dangerous stance of extreme religious militantism.’”

Source: Then-Foreign Minister Shimon Peres in an interview with French TV, as described in the book ” Treacherous Alliance .”

November 1992: “But the Israelis caution that a bigger threat to Middle East serenity — not to mention their own country’s security — lies in Teheran, whose regime they say is sure to become a nuclear power in a few years unless stopped.”

Source: New York Times, “Israel Focuses on the Threat Beyond the Arabs — in Iran”

January 1995: “Iran is much closer to producing nuclear weapons than previously thought, and could be less than five years away from having an atomic bomb, several senior American and Israeli officials say.”

Source: New York Times, “Iran May Be Able to Build an Atomic Bomb in 5 Years, U.S. and Israeli Officials Fear”

1995: “The best estimates at this time place Iran between three and five years away from possessing the prerequisites required for the independent production of nuclear weapons.”

Source: Benjamin Netanyahu, in his book “Fighting Terrorism: How Democracies Can Defeat the International Terrorist Network”

February 1996: “On February 15, 1996, Israeli Foreign Minister Ehud Barak told members of the UN Security Council that Iran would be able to produce nuclear weapons within eight years.”

Source: Barak comments reported in ” Treacherous Alliance ”

April 1996: “I believe that in four years they [Iran] may reach nuclear weapons,” [Israeli Prime Minister Shimon] Peres told ABC television during an interview.

Source: Agence France Presse, “Iran could have nuclear weapons in four years: Peres” (via Nexis)

November 1999: “Unless the United States pressures Russia to end its military assistance to Iran, the Islamic republic will possess a nuclear capability within five years, a senior Israeli military official said Sunday.”

Source: Associated Press, “Israeli official: U.S. must pressure Russia to end military cooperation with Iran” (via Nexis)

July 2001: “‘I mentioned to our friends, the Turkish leadership, that we are more than worried about the very rapid development taking place regarding nuclear weapons,’ [Minister of Defense] Binyamin Ben-Eliezer told reporters. ‘As far as we know by the year 2005 they [Iran] will, they might, be ready.’”

Source: Associated Press, “Israeli defense minister: Iran could have nuclear weapons by 2005″ (via Nexis)

August 2003: “Iran will have the materials needed to make a nuclear bomb by 2004 and will have an operative nuclear weapons program by 2005, a high-ranking military officer told the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee on Monday.”

Source: Jerusalem Post, “Iran can produce nuclear bomb by 2005 – IDF”

February 2009: “Netanyahu said he did not know for certain how close Iran was to developing a nuclear weapons capability, but that ‘our experts’ say Iran was probably only one or two years away and that was why they wanted open ended negotiations.”

Source: Then-candidate for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in conversation with an American congressional delegation, as described in a cable released by WikiLeaks

June 2009: Barak estimated a window between 6 and 18 months from now in which stopping Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons might still be viable.

Source: Defense Minister Ehud Barak in conversation with members of Congress, as described in a cable released by WikiLeaks

June 2009: “Unless their programme experiences technical problems, the Iranians will have by 2014 a bomb ready to be used, which would represent a concrete threat for Israel,” said [Mossad chief] Meir Dagan.

Source: Agence France Press, “Iran will have nuclear bomb by 2014: Mossad”

November 2009: “General Baidatz argued that it would take Iran one year to obtain a nuclear weapon and two and a half years to build an arsenal of three weapons.”

Source: Brigadier General Yossi Baidatz, an Israeli military intelligence official, in conversation with an American defense official, as described in a WikiLeaks cable.

September 2010: “The reasoning offered by Israeli decision makers was uncomplicated: Iran is, at most, one to three years away from having a breakout nuclear capability (often understood to be the capacity to assemble more than one missile-ready nuclear device within about three months of deciding to do so).”

Source: Jeffrey Goldberg, reporting the Israeli point of view in a cover story on Iran in the Atlantic (Read more from salon.com)

Important article from a few months ago:

If you are worried that the United States might be foolish enough to attack Iran, then you might take comfort from Jeffrey Goldberg’s lengthy and alarmist Atlantic article on the subject. Based on a flock of mostly anonymous interviews, Goldberg has concluded that odds are better than 50-50 that Israel will attack Iran sometime next spring. Given his track record as a Middle East analyst — particularly when it comes to the wisdom of using force — you might be justified in viewing that prediction as a sign that war was in fact quite unlikely.

I’ve said plenty already about the reasons why Iran is not a grave threat that justifies preemptive war, and why neither the United States nor Israel should be thinking about a military strike, so I don’t feel compelled to dismantle Goldberg’s restating of the hawks’ case yet again. And I don’t have to, because others have already done so quite ably.

Instead, I’d just like to highlight what’s really going on here. (Read more from veteranstoday.com)

Politico‘s Laura Rozen reports, via the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, that House Republican whip Eric Cantor “would propose separating U.S. aid to Israel from the foreign operations budget, which the GOP may vote to defund”:

Cantor, of Virginia, said he wants to protect funding for Israel should that situation arise.

“Part of the dilemma is that Israel has been put in the overall foreign aid looping,” he said when asked about the increasing tendency of Republicans in recent years to vote against foreign operations appropriations. “I’m hoping we can see some kind of separation in terms of tax dollars going to Israel.”

Cantor’s statement was a sign that the Republican leadership was ready to defer to the party’s right wing on this matter. Some on the GOP right have suggested including Israel aid in the defense budget, and a number of Tea Party-backed candidates have said they would vote against what is known in Congress as “foreign ops.”

(Read more from alethosnews.wordpress.com)

U.N. Report finds Israel “summarily executed” U.S. citizen on flotilla
Last week, the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights released a comprehensive report detailing its findings regarding the May, 2010, Israeli attack on the six-ship flotilla attempting to deliver humanitarian aid to Israel-blockaded Gaza. The report has been largely ignored in the American media despite the fact (or, more accurately: because) it found that much of the Israeli force used “was unnecessary, disproportionate, excessive and inappropriate and resulted in the wholly avoidable killing and maiming of a large number of civilian passengers”; that “at least six of the killings can be characterized as extra-legal, arbitrary and summary executions” (Read more from salon.com)

Auschwitz survivor: ‘Israel acts like Nazis’
One of the last remaining Auschwitz survivors has launched a blistering attack on Israel over its occupation of Palestine as he began a lecture tour of Scotland.

Dr Hajo Meyer, 86, who survived 10 months in the Nazi death camp, spoke out as his 10-day tour of the UK and Ireland – taking in three Scottish venues – got under way. His comments sparked a furious reaction from hardline Jewish lobby groups, with Dr Meyer branded an “anti-Semite” and accused of abusing his position as a Holocaust survivor. (Read more from heraldscotland.com)

A tale of two ghettoes
Why is Shoppers Drug Mart pulling 3,500 copies of Adbusters, my magazine, off its shelves?

A week ago, in the National Post, the Canadian Jewish Congress (CJC) accused Adbusters of anti-Semitism for publishing side-by-side photographs of the Gaza and Warsaw ghettos ( “Anti-Semitism on your magazine rack — courtesy of Adbusters,” Oct. 23). The CJC has since successfully lobbied senior management at Shoppers Drug Mart into pulling our magazine off the Canadian newsstands. (Read more from nationalpost.com)

Israeli Artists Boycott New Theater in Settlement
An artists’ boycott of a $11 million performing arts center opening Monday in the Jewish settlement of Ariel is giving a new twist to a pressing question — where should Israel’s permanent borders run?

Leading Israeli playwrights, actors and artists say they will not cross the “Green Line” — Israel’s frontier before it captured the West Bank in 1967 — to perform in the new theater in Ariel, an Israeli enclave of 19,000 people.

The artists wrote in a letter explaining the boycott that Ariel was built in the heart of a war-won land to prevent creation of a Palestinian state. (Read more from artdaily.com)

Tutu begs singers to call off Israel tour
Desmond Tutu has urged the Cape Town Opera to call off its tour of Israel “until both Israeli and Palestinian opera lovers have equal opportunity and unfettered access to performances”. (Read more from timeslive.co.za)

US government offers Israel $3 billion weapons deal in exchange for 3-month settlement freeze
After US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton met with the Israeli Prime Minister on Friday, the US set out an offer of additional military assistance to Israel in exchange for a 90-day moratorium on new settlement construction in the West Bank. Construction already in progress on hundreds of units of housing would be allowed to continue during the ‘moratorium’, which also does not include East Jerusalem.

Some Palestinian analysts say the US offer is weak, as it does not pressure Israel in any way to adhere to past signed agreements or international law, but merely forestalls the inevitable failure of ‘peace talks’ between two vastly unequal players. Some have even suggested that this is an attempt by the US to bribe Israel to do what it is required to do under international law.

Since the ‘moratorium’ would not include East Jerusalem, where the majority of current construction of Israeli-only homes and displacement of indigenous Palestinian residents is taking place, some Palestinians feel that it is only a token gesture that does not in any way address their concerns.

In exchange for the temporary, partial moratorium on construction, the Israeli military would receive a gift of 20 F35 fighter jets, worth $3 billion, from the US. (Read more from alethonews.wordpress.com)

Israel plans 1,300 homes in Arab East Jerusalem
JERUSALEM (Reuters) – Israel is pushing ahead with plans to build 1,300 new apartments for Jewish families in Arab East Jerusalem, the Interior Ministry said on Monday, despite fierce opposition from Palestinians.

The timing of the announcement could prove an embarrassment for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is in the United States looking for ways to revive Middle East peace talks that have stalled over the issue of Jewish settlement building. (Read more from af.reuters.com)

How the state helped right-wing groups settle East Jerusalem
The state has transferred hundreds of assets to both groups without the requisite tender process. Each year, the state also allocates millions of shekels for security at these sites, including security cameras and fences that separate the settlers from the neighborhoods’ Palestinian residents.

Information revealed here for the first time provides a glimpse of the relationship between the state and these Jewish organizations. The information was made available to leftist activist Dror Etkes by court order following a three-year legal battle.

Elad, arguing that disclosure would lead to bloodshed, fought to prevent publication of the information. The state supported this claim by furnishing cautionary opinions by security experts. But in the end, Etkes obtained a list of 11 assets relayed by the state to Elad and Ateret Cohanim, mainly from 2003-2008, without full transparency and at eyebrow-raising prices. (Read more from haaretz.com)

Galilee politician works to prevent sale of homes to Palestinians
Residents of Karmiel are invited to report Arabs who intend to buy flats in the town, said Karmiel’s deputy Mayor, Oren Milstein, in an interview on the Internet site “Besheva”. In the same interview he mentioned a weekly ad in the local press which calls on residents to report such information to a special “purple email address”. Milstein went on to say, using the first person: “Residents are welcome to turn to us the moment they become aware of a flat which is about to be sold to someone from one of the [surrounding Arab] villages. Once a flat in Karmiel is sold to an Arab family – it is a solid fact for generations to come”.

Milstein intimates that the selling of 30 flats has already been prevented in this way. (Read more from mondoweiss.net)

US activist’s family sue Israel
A civil lawsuit brought by the parents of a US peace activist who was crushed to death by an Israeli forces bulldozer in the Gaza Strip in March 2003 has begun being heard in the Israeli city of Haifa.

The driver of the bulldozer that crushed Rachel Corrie to death will testify in court on Thursday, while the military commander in charge of the unit on the day will give evidence at a future date. (Read more from english.aljazeera.net)

Bulldozer driver [contradicts affidavit]
The lawyer also pointed to discrepancies in the driver’s testimony regarding how far he continued driving after crushing Corrie. The driver told the court he drove another 20 meters (66 feet) before stopping, but in his affidavit he said he stopped after three meters (10 feet). In addition, the driver claimed Corrie’s body was found between the bulldozer and a mound of dirt, while another soldier said the body was behind the mound. During the hearing, Attorney Hussein displayed a photo in which no mound of dirt can be seen at all. (Read more from ynetnews.com)

IDF prosecutors chided for using testimony of mentally disabled Palestinian witness
(Read more from haaretz.com)

Jewish Extremists Try to Kill Chilean Tourist, Mistaken for Palestinian
Jerusalem – PNN – Israeli newspaper Yediot Ahronoth published a report on Monday about the attempted murder of a Chilean tourist in Jerusalem by eight Jewish extremists who mistook him for an Arab.

Jose Dominus Nolido, 43, came to Israel to celebrate the wedding of his son’s Jewish friend and visit holy sites. As he returned to his hotel, Nolido said he was accosted by youths.

“I decided to return to my room and I went through Independence Park,” Nolido explained. “Suddenly a youth attacked me. I thought he was a soldier, since he had on Israeli army pants. I tried to flee, but I ran into seven others. I fell on the ground and couldn’t get away from the blows. Then I lost consciousness. I was convinced they wanted to kill me because I looked like an Arab.”

Nolido was taken to a Jerusalem hospital, bleeding from the head and eyes. Doctors said they feared loss of vision in his right eye. (Read more from pnn.ps — or in Spanish)

US snubs Israel over threat to Iran
US rejects Israeli request for military threat against Iran over its nuclear programme, favouring continued sanctions. (Read more from aljazeera.net)

Video: Settlers commit arson on Palestinian vehicles in Qusra: Oct 14th, 2010

Israeli settlers burn yet another mosque in occupied Palestine
Israel is worried that Jewish militants torched a West Bank mosque overnight Monday in a bid to undermine peace negotiations with the Palestinians.

A mosque in the Palestinian village of Beit Fajar, just south of Bethlehem, became the fourth in the last two years to be the target of an arson attempt, according to human rights workers. The attack is believed to be part of a campaign by vigilante settlers to ignite violence by attacking Muslim holy sites. (Read more from csmonitor.com)

Israel is in talks to build the wings for about a quarter of the United States’s new F-35 stealth fighter aircraft, an Israeli official said on Monday.

Lockheed Martin currently plans to build some 3,200 F-35s costing about $96 million each.

An Israeli official who declined to be named said state-owned Israel Aerospace Industries would build the wings.

“We are in advanced talks for the IAI to produce around 800 sets of wings,” he told Reuters.

Lockheed Martin declined to comment on the details of a possible deal involving the aircraft, also known as the Joint Strike Fighter (JSF). (Read more from reuters.com)

Why the hell do we need 3,200 Joint Strike Fighters? Can we afford 3,200 Joint Strike Fighters? Would they have stopped the 9/11 attacks? Will they protect my liberties? No, they won’t. In fact, they’ll further violate my liberty, because I’m forced to pay for them with my labor. This is nothing but a transfer of wealth from the American public to the military industries of the United States and Israel.