JONNY PAUL

Over 30 American trade u n i o n s ranging from the American Federation of Teachers to the American Postal Workers have condemned the spate of boycott initiatives by trade u n i o n movements in the UK, branding them "inimical" and questioning the motives for singling out Israel.

The University and College U n i o n motion to boycott Israeli academic institutions came in for strong criticism.

"Calls for academic boycotts of Israel are inimical to and counter to the principles of academic freedom and freedom of association, key principles for which academics and educational u n i o n s have struggled over many years. Rather than limiting interactions with Israeli educators, academics and educational institutions, we see the importance of maximizing, rather than proscribing, the free flow of ideas and academic interaction between peoples, cultures, religions and countries," the u n i o n s said in a statement issued late Thursday evening.

Steven Edwards

NEW YORK - Former justice minister Irwin Cotler and other Canadian scholars presented the U.S. Congress yesterday with its first testimony on Jews driven from Arab lands following Israel's creation in 1948.

The group was among experts helping U.S. lawmakers decide on a pair of bills that would oblige the Bush administration to actively oppose the Arab-led practice in Middle East peace efforts to speak only of Palestinian refugees.

Mourning the Architect of Modern Terror

 Mark Armstrong

Mourning the Architect of Modern Terror 
 
            The world’s first awareness of Palestinian terror came when Israeli athletes were murdered at the Munich Olympics in 1972 in an unbelievable incident carried out by Black September and Fatah, Arafat’s forerunner of the Palestinian Liberation Organization.   I well remember when Yassir Araftat stood before the General Assembly at the United Nations in 1971 holding an olive branch in one hand and waving a pistol in the other.  “Do not let the olive branch fall from my hand!” he warned. 

Our former president Jimmy Carter has released statements that can only be construed as honor and praise, saying that Arafat was a “powerful human symbol and forceful advocate” who organized the movement for a Palestinian homeland.

So, looking over this whole piece of work, it becomes clear to me what's missing.

I actually answered very few of the questions I raised here, so i'm just going to take a minute to wrap a few up.

What happened to Marijuana in history?

I apologize for my ignorance of the Arab/Islamic history of Marijuana. No real description of the evolution and devolution of Cannabis culture in Israel and Jerusalem is going to be whole without that detail, of the last two thousand years of history. It's a problem with Israel, the two thousand middle years of her life are blurred over in the Jewish folk memory, and while that isn't something inherently shameful, it is a bit dishonest and regrettable, especially if I'm trying to uncover a hidden history.

I tried in my early days in Jerusalem to find out about the Morrocan and Yemenite religious jewish cannabis tradition, and was always a little heart broken at how unseriously pious oriental Jewish Mystics who DID smoke hashish would take the substance itself.

from The Encyclopedia of Psychoactive Substances

Richard Rudgley

Although the cannabis plant is now ubiquitous, unlike other wide-spread types of hallucinogen (such as Psilocybe 'magic mushrooms' or 'Datura'), it is not native to more than one continent. Cannabis is a plant native to Central Asia that has spread all over the world and is probably the most widely used recreational and usually illegal drug in the world, being smoked from the inner cities of America and Europe to the outlying atolls of Micronesia. The plant's natural homeland is most likely in the regions north of Afghanistan and the Altai mountains of southern Siberia. Its cultural and cosmopolitan distribution is no doubt due to a combination of cultural and natural factors. As Brian Du Toit, following Darwin, puts it: 'plant distribution can be brought about by winds, currents, and similar natural forces. It can also follow animal activity and migration by becoming attached to their feet or hooves, or by being eaten by birds.' In the case of cannabis, much still remains to be discovered about both these natural forces and the cultural contacts that were equally important.

Israeli terror victims and their families have today scored a landmark victory in their legal struggle to win compensation from the Palestinian Authority (PA) for its role in perpetrating and financing acts of terror . In a sparsely written decision handed down this morning by the Israeli Supreme Court, the Justices held that cases brought against the PA by Israeli citizens must be allowed to proceed in the Jerusalem District Court. 

Attorneys for the PA had sought to argue that the PA was a state and had sovereign immunity which shielded it from civil lawsuits brought by the victims of  PA  sponsored terror. Although the District Court had rejected this defense and ordered the cases to go forward, the PA filed an interim appeal of  the lower court's decision to the Supreme Court.