The *FREE ARAB VOICE*
December 16, 1997

In this issue of the Free Arab Voice we present:

1)U.S. Mideast Policy from Failure to Failure: An Analysis of the
Strategic Loopholes in the U.S. Policy in the Middle East
 by Munir Shafeeq

2)A Statement on the Execution of Four Jordanians in Iraq and the
Whipping of Fourteen Women in Sudan
 by the Free Arab Voice

3)The Story of the non-Semitic Jews: A Historical Perspective on the
Lack of Connection between Western Jews and Palestine
 by Tawfic Abdul-Fattah

4)AL-AMARIYAH: Thoughts on the Murder of Hundreds of Innocent Iraqi
Civilians by an Allied Smart Bomb Dropped on that Bomb Shelter during
the Gulf War
 By E.Wasfi

5)Action Alert: A Petition Center on Iraq and other Issues
- a New Website by the Free Arab Voice

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For back issues of the Free Arab Voice and relevant
 articles, please go to:
*AL-MOHARER AL-AUSTRALI* (Arabic/English)
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1) U.S. Mideast Policy from Failure to Failure   by Munir Shafeeq
   ===========================================

There's an Arab and international near-consensus holding the U.S.
government as first culprit for the breakdown that has beset the
'peace process' recently.

Total bias by the Clinton administration in favor of Israeli policies
under both the Labor and the Likud governments left it semi-isolated on
the official Arab level.  Other great powers, especially France and
Russia, seized the opening to play ever-growing roles in the very region
that U.S. foreign policy always wanted to set apart solely by and for
itself.

But recent developments have shockingly demonstrated that even when the
U.S. throws all of its weight behind it, a mideast settlement purely on
Israeli terms is NOT a feasible proposition.

Moreover, recent developments have shown that the American role in the
region has begun to shrink off, and that U.S. prestige has begun to
break down.

Three fine examples of recent American foreign policies blunders in the
region illustrate the point:

First there's the dismal lack of success of the State Department in
harnessing meaningful official Arab participation in Ad-Doha's regional
economic conference.  Instead, all it got from the larger Arab states
like Saudi Arabia, and especially from Egypt and Morocco, was a big NO.

Yet that only made Albright stand shaking behind the podium in Ad-Doha
without finding anything to say except blazing Iraq!  And that was an
act bereft of courtesy vis-a-vis the Qatari hosts as well as the few
other Arab delegations participating in the convention.  Then very
shortly after her speech, Albright deserted the convention which she had
before braced herself to lead.

The second foreign policy failure was the collective official Arab
refusal last month to partake in the U.S. administration's plan to deal
Iraq a devastating military blow.. Subsequently U.S. diplomacy retreated
before and grudgingly accepted a Russian initiative to resolve the
festering crisis with Iraq.  That was a retreat that can't be diluted by
the fact that the [Russian] initiative incorporated the American
condition of a full return of U.N. inspectors to work, because the U.S.
really wanted to resolve the crisis differently, i.e., by force with
official Arab blessing.  Neither does it make the U.S. happy to see
Russian diplomacy snatch the initiative, or for Russia and France to set
the Iraqi issue on a different track from that which was previously
imposed by the governments of the U.S. and the U.K.

But the third foreign policy blunder is perhaps the cruelest. It stems
from the extraordinary success of the Islamic Summit in Tehran, Iran,
regarding both the resolutions adopted and the reconciliations, or dual
agreements, that took place behind the scenes there.  That failure was
further highlighted by the stark contrast between the relative positions
of the U.S. administration and the Iranian leadership in the week during
which the summit took place: The U.S. administration seemed deprived of
its closest allies in the Islamic world while fifty-four Islamic states
crowded all around Iran in an atmosphere of friendship.

Thus the success of the Islamic Summit in Tehran simply put the U.S.
administration in an unenviable position as it lost the initiative while
the momentum began to turn against it.  Additionally, that may carry the
probable consequence of encouraging other hitherto pliant states to
defend their interests and to seek a more just world order, instead of
submitting meekly to an unjust Zionist world order that is run by a U.S.
administration that thrives on arrogance and wallows in double
standards.  That should be good news even to Iraq as well as Libya,
Syria, and Sudan.

Undoubtedly the U.S. administration is getting busy right now trying to
extract lessons from and to contain the consequences of the three
aforementioned failures.  Several statements made by Clinton a couple of
weeks ago hinted that these recent U.S. foreign policy failures may be
attributable to the stalemate in the 'peace process'.  Some analysts
henceforth interpreted Clinton's statements as indicative of
dissatisfaction with Netanyahu's policies, thus rendering them their due
share of blame for the official Arabian scattering away from the
American line on the Middle East, and for the growing Iranian, Russian,
and French roles in a traditionally American dominion.

Nevertheless, if we assumed that the logical conclusion of Clinton's
statements will manifest itself in a serious and credible attempt to
distance American from Israeli positions, we have to first figure out
with Clinton how he may pull off such a policy shift while he remains a
powerless prisoner in the grip of the Zionist lobby in his National
Security Council, his administration, Congress, and the Media!!  We
can't either forget the Attorney General and the big file full of
scandals he's got on the Clintons.

Yet and in spite of all that, if Clinton doesn't make for a significant
foreign policy change, his administration will continue to leap swiftly
from one mideast failure to another.

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2) A Statement from the Free Arab Voice on the Execution of Four
Jordanians in Iraq and the Whipping of Fourteen Women in Sudan:

Just as much as we should all condemn the siege on Iraq and the
sanctions on Sudan as inhumane weapons of mass destructions,

Just as much as we should all support Iraq and Sudan in their struggle
against the international forces of death and destruction arrayed
against them,

Just as much as we should all recognize that the U.S. government and
"Israel" only insincerely toy with the issue of democracy for the sake
of political expediency,

We should also speak out against the execution of four Jordanians in
Iraq for petty crimes, and the whipping of fourteen women in Sudan for
objecting to enlisting high school kids in the war in the South because
that is simply WRONG.

It is wrong morally as well as politically.  It was wrong not only
because the residents of Jordan are some of the staunchest supporters of
Iraq, or because the Sudanese women were punished even though they
didn't violate any Islamic or secular code, but also because these
violations gave political ammunition to the proponents of sanctions, to
those who never flinched as five Jordanians farmers were killed by
Israeli soldiers in the Jordan valley more than a year ago, and because
it embarrassed those who always argued for lifting the sanctions.

But it really shouldn't embarrass us! Because we should continue our
work to lift the criminal sanctions that kill our people with external
hands while we fight to achieve democracy on the internal front.
Eventhough death from without is more serious and much more extensive,
the people have to be free from within if they are to fully mobilize
against Zionism and the unjust new world order.

That's why we have no choice but to fight on both fronts.

That is our destiny.
                                    The Free Arab Voice
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3) The Story of the non-Semitic Jews    by Tawfic Abdul-Fattah
   =================================
Once upon a time in ancient Khazaria the entire kingdom converted to
Judaism by decree from the king.

Arthur Koestler, a Jew born in 1905 in Budapest, writes that
the Khazars who flourished from the 7th to the 11th century were in
those bygone days a major political power.

Their empire extended from the Black Sea to the Caspian and from
the Caucasus to the Volga. They were located "between two major
world powers: the Eastern Roman Empire in Byzantium and the
triumphant followers of Muhammad".

Since the world was then polarized between these two superpowers,
representing Christianity (western style) and Islam, the Khazar empire
representing a third force could only maintain its political and
ideological independence by accepting neither Christianity nor Islam
"for either choice would have automatically subordinated it to the
authority of the Roman Emperor or the Caliph of Baghdad."

Not wishing to be dominated by either of the two, the Khazar king
"embraced the Jewish faith" in AD 740 and ordered his subjects to
do the same. Judaism thus became the official state religion of the
Khazars.

Obviously the king's motives in adopting Judaism were purely political.

"The bulk of modern Jewry is not of Palestinian, but of Caucasian
origin", Koestler writes. "Their ancestors came not from the Jordan but
from the Volga, not from Canaan but from the Caucasus."  And he
stresses: "The mainstream of Jewish migrations did not flow from the
Mediterranean across France and Germany to the east and then back again.
The stream moved in a consistently western direction, from the Caucasus,
from the Ukraine into Poland and thence into Central Europe".

While Jews of different origin also contributed to the existing Jewish
world community, "the main bulk originated from the Khazar country" in
the Ex-Soviet Union.

Based on his research which was summed in his book "The Thirteenth
Tribe", Koestler refutes the notion of a Jewish "race" stating that most
Jews of the contemporary world did not come from Palestine and are not
even of Semitic origin. In fact, his research shows that most Jews
originated in what today is the Ex-USSR. And that a group of people
there became Jews through conversion, on the orders of their king.

People under Khazar dominion included the Bulgars, Burtas, Ghuzz,
Magyars (Hungarians), the Gothic and Greek colonies of the Crimea,
and the Slavonic tribes in the northwestern woodland.

According to the Jewish Encyclopedia, in the 16th century Jews
numbered about one million. Koestler quotes scholars documenting that at
the time "the majority of those who professed the Judaic faith were
Khazars."

As Koestler points out, Jews of our times fall into two main
divisions: Sephardim and Ashkena-zim.

The Sephardim, the descendants of the Jews who had lived in Spain until
their expulsion, with the Muslims, at the end of the 15th century, and who
later settled in the countries bordering on the Mediterranean, spoke a
Spanish-Hebrew dialect, Ladino. In the 1960s, the Sephardim numbered about
500,000.

The Ashkenazim at the same period were about 11 million. Thus, "in
common parlance, Jew is practically synonymous with Ashkenazi Jew".
However, Koestler adds, the term Ashkenazim is misleading because it is
generally applied to Germany, thus contributing to the legend that
modern Jewry originated on the Rhine. There is, however, no other term
to refer to the non-Sephardic majority of contemporary Jewry, which came
after conversion to Judaism from the Khazar country.

After the destruction of their empire (in the 12th or 13th century), the
Jewish Khazars migrated into those regions of Eastern Europe, mainly
Russia and Poland, where at the dawn of the modern age the greatest
concentrations of Jews were found. It is "well documented", Koestler
writes, that the numerically and socially dominant element in the Jewish
population of Hungary during the Middle Ages was of Khazar origin.

An Israeli scholar, A. N. Poliak, a Tel Aviv University professor of
medieval Jewish history quoted by Koestler, states that the descendants
of Khazar Jews, "those who stayed where they were (in Khazaria), those
who emigrated to the United States and to other countries, and those who
went to Israel--constitute now the large majority of world Jewry."

Since Israel's support among millions of American Christians is
founded on a concept that God had bequeathed territory to a biblical
"tribe" of Oriental Middle Eastern Jews, it becomes ironic to learn
from Koestler's research, that most Jews today are neither hereditary
natives from the "holy land" nor any other eastern tribe.

Koestler, who originally published the Thirteenth Tribe in 1976, noted
that the story of the Khazar empire "begins to look like the most cruel
hoax history has ever perpetrated." The Palestinians, imprisoned and
brutalized by this Zionist "hoax" and showered by ink based resolutions,
the likes of UN 194, would be the first to agree.

In sight of these findings, one might naively infer that the only thing
standing between the Palestinians and their rightful land is nothing but
a Rabbi waiting to bless them with his faith, hence making them worthy of
their homes.

Shall we then say, Mazeltov, or shall we concur that the Palestinian,
under the eyes of his father, is being once more. . . . Crucified !

P.S. The book "The Thirteenth Tribe has been difficult to find. It
disappeared from many library shelves. A check at the Library of
Congress reveals that the most prestigious library in the U.S had one
reading copy.  That one copy, however, is "missing from the shelf" :)

[Arthur Koestler (1905-83)is Hungarian-born British author].

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4)AL-AMARIYAH: Thoughts on the Murder of Hundreds of Iraqi Civilians
by Allied Bombs during the Gulf War in Al-Amariyah Bomb Shelter
  by  E. Wasfi

The acrid smell of burning flesh
Rises above the smoking ruins;
A child once laughed no longer cries,
The shelter she sought is now her grave.

"This Bud's for you," the pilot yelled,
And clicked the button dropping the bomb;
The crisscross target in his sight,
A surgical strike, then head for home.

There are no pictures in the news
To tell the story of this holocaust;
Only reports of collateral damage
And sanctions in place to finish the job.

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5) Action Alert: A Petition Center for Iraq and Other Issues.
The Free Arab Voice will soon launch its new website which will have a
special section for petitions and action alerts on Iraq and other Arab
causes.

The idea is to post any petition or action alert there that serves the
purpose of lifting the sanctions on Iraq so those interested can visit
the site and sign or join the action announced.

The new FAV website will be open to all individuals and groups who want
to work sincerely for Palestinian, Iraqi, or other Arab causes.

If you or your group are interested, please contact the FAV's webmaster
Tawfic Abdul-Fattah:  tfatah@ibm.net

We believe in collective effort and cooperation, and will be open to
suggestions.

If you want to visit the site which is still under construction, please
go to http://www.mindspring.com/~fav

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