September 20, 2012 | 2:17 pm

Late news: Zionists corrupted Napoleon

Posted by  Tom Tugend

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Amidst the plethora of news reports, keen analyses and entrails divinations on the Muslim Middle East, MEMRI stands out as a key resource in grasping what the Arab man-in-the-street is absorbing through his newspapers, radio and television broadcasts, mosque sermons and school text books.

The acronym stands for Middle East Media Research Institute and day-by-day it shows video clips and interviews from the Arab media, translated into English and 10 other European and Asian languages.

Occasionally, MEMRI cheers its Western viewers with pronouncements by courageous men and women, who speak out against their countries’ corruption, oppression of women, and the corrosive conviction that none of the ills afflicting Arab societies are in any way the fault of their own leaders and people.

Mostly, however, the voices we hear are those of anti-Jewish and anti-Israel ideologues, whose outlandish conspiracy theories might give pause to the inventors of “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.”

Those wild fantasies are not uttered by provincial imams addressing illiterate peasants, but by the supposed intellectual elites of their respective countries.

During two recent days, MEMRI featured four such probing minds.

My personal favorite was Syrian-French writer Adnan Azzam, who, not surprisingly, attributed the year-long internal fighting in Syria to a Zionist plot.

But, embarking on a more original path, Azzam revealed that Zionist interference in global affairs goes back to the 18th century when “they changed the course of the French Revolution, and beheaded the King of France within 24 hours, without trial.”

Not satisfied with that bloody regicide, “The Zionists took Napoleon, the young boy from Corsica, and said to him….We will give Corsica back to Italy and Corsica will be independent again… They showered him with money and sent him to Egypt in order to lay the foundation for the State of Palestine.”

That was a hard act to follow, but Sheik Bassam Al-Kayed, head of the Islamic Scholars Association in Lebanon, gave it a try.

The sheik assured his TV audience that the Jews were behind just about every civil strife in the world and when the interviewer asked whether such plotting was continuing today, Al-Kayed quickly enlightened him.

“Don’t you know what’s going on in Burma?” the sheik asked. “The Buddhists are trained by the Jews to do what they are doing (to the Muslims).”

His colleagues having exposed Jewish scheming in the French Revolution and present-day Burma, Ahmad Sabi, media adviser to the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, uncovered some Zionist machinations closer to home.

Under the 1979 Camp David peace accord, Sabi revealed, “carcinogenic pesticides were imported from the Zionist entity…and Egypt now suffers from endemic diseases, such as various types of cancer, hepatitis and kidney infections.”

After these presentations on Jewish chicanery past and present, Gamal Zabran, head of the political science department at Port Said University, looked to the triumphant future.

He assured his Egyptian listeners that “the elimination of the Zionist entity is beyond debate, and the only question has to do with the circumstances.”

When the interviewer had the temerity to ask why the Arab regimes didn’t act on their endlessly repeated promise to “liberate Jerusalem,” Zabran quickly updated the time line by predicting that “By next year, Allah willing, Israel will be annihilated.”

September 2, 2012 | 12:09 pm

Democratic convention picks Rabbi Wolpe

Posted by Tom Tugend

Rabbi David Wolpe of Sinai Temple has confirmed that he will deliver the invocation at the Wednesday (9/5) evening session of the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, North Carolina.

His prayer will focus on the ideals animating the United States, Wolpe said, and will precede speeches by Elizabeth Warren, Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate seat from Massachusetts, and former President Bill Clinton.

In a bipartisan endorsement of the American rabbinate, the presentation by the Conservative Rabbi Wolpe will balance the invocation given by Orthodox Rabbi Meir Soloveichik at the opening session of the Republican National Convention in Tampa.

This year, Wolpe was named the most influential rabbi in America by Newsweek magazine and one of the 50 most influential Jews in the world by the Jerusalem Post.

He is the author of seven books and widely known as a newspaper columnist for national dailies and the Jewish Journal, and as a radio and television commentator.

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