In 2001 Sergey Zvezdin was a teenager with dreams of becoming an athelete. In 2001 Sergey was riding on an Egged bus on the way to get a haircut when a Hamas suicide bomber detonated a bomb killing 15 of those on the bus and leaving 38 with severe injuries. Sergei was one of those 38.

He suffered a concussion, a punctured eardrum, missing teeth and a piece of sharpnel that lodged itself deep in the tissues of the face, close to his brain. Israeli surgeons despaired of removing the fragment and Sergei experienced blinding headaches, he could not speak properly and he was unable to close his mouth or eat.

American surgeons performed an operation on Sergei free of charge cutting through his skull working to remove the fragment. His damaged eardrum and missing teeth and other injuries were repaired as best as possible. Sergey returned to Israel and resumed his life again. He joined the IDF and Sergey Zvezdin, whose last name means 'of the stars,' contemplated his dreams of becoming an athelete again.

On August 20th 2005 as Sharon unleashed his forces on anyone who opposed his illegal and undemocratic plan of ethnic cleansing in Gaza and untied the hands of police to do anything they liked without resource to law or justice, Sergey Zvezdin was in Haifa again sitting with his friends when he talked back to a police inspector. The inspector called for backup and police officers arrived. As has happened to so many, he was beaten. His friends asked the police officers not to beat him in the head telling them that he had undergone surgery. The police officers did not stop. They knocked out some of his teeth. When they were done, they left him bleeding and unconscious on the sidewalk calling him, "Zevel."

As he was after the suicide bombing, Sergey is back now in a hospital ward with severe injuries. He has severe head injuries, a concussion, numerous injuries and damage to the same eye which had been damaged in the terrorist attack and damaged hearing along with one of the three teeth that had been replaced.

"What the terrorist failed to do to me, the police nearly succeeded," Sergey said from his hospital bed.

And so too what the terrorists have failed to do to Israel, Sharon has succeeded in doing.

"There is one particular gole that I want to achive. That gole, is getting a hier education. By a hier education, I mene going to college or university for sevrel years and excelling in the particular subjects that I think I'm good at." (Benny, 19)

This is supposed to be footsteps.org, an organization that is supposedly dedicated to helping transitition ex-frum people into the real world doing this worst imitation of fake mispelling.

Supposedly poor Benny can't spell 'goal', yet he can spell 'education.' He can't spell 'mean', yet he can spell 'particular,' and he can't spell 'higher' but he can spell 'education.'

Seems like footsteps.org couldn't find a test subject who was ex-frum who is actually english impaired. They should spend more time on the internet.

The organization's listed phone number which is supposed for Malkie Schwartz actually turns out to be listed for a Marcia Ramirez. Anyone wanting to deal with footsteps.org had better think twice.

It is no coincidence that as Iran is developing its nuclear capability, North Korea continues to press into the nuclear age and China has made explicit threats once again about using nuclear weapons against American cities, that a new program has been rolled out. A junior version of Star Wars that features lasers mounted on jets supposedly capable of shooting down ICBM's in their boost phase.

While the new laser which fuses solid state and liquid lasers appears to be a significant technological advance, the problem is that the war on terror cannot be won and the United States cannot be protected by lasers and myths. It was not Star Wars that brought down the USSR and the dubious threat of new defensive weapons cannot and will not prevent the advance of new threats. Ultimately such weapons are merely high tech versions of Maginot and Bar-Lev lines, fortifications that cannot stop or even deter a genuinely aggressive foe.

The United States is losing the War on Terror and it is facing aggressive enemy coalitions. China drew together with Russia to demand the expulsion of US forces from asian bases. North Korea and Iran are boldly pursuing atomic programs. Vaporware from the US military will not fight this threat, only agressive action will secure the future of America and the world.

Like a finely aged wine in the wineglass of a viniter terrorists can savor the aroma of this year as the forces battling Islamic terrorism are increasingly in disarray and ceding ground as the terrorists count their gains in land and dead.

Two world leaders who were thought to be aggressively leading the War on Terror, American President George W. Bush and Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon have not only turned out to be paper tigers but are increasingly turning on their own people and allies in order to appease terrorists. Bush and Sharon who early on seemed to be strong fighters against terrorism when they brought the war home to terrorists with invasions of enemy held territories, have become the poster children for appeasement instead.

It is as if in the middle of the Battle of Normandy, Churchill had looked around, put out his trademark cigar and announced that there was no hope of winning this thing and we would just have to find some middle ground for dealing with Hitler. This is what has happened to the hopes of the west in this third world war we are now engaged in.

Bush, whose administration once boasted formidable figures such as Rumsfeld and Cheney who understood and articulated the need for a strong offensive, is now led around by the nose by James Baker Institute affiliated diplomat Condoleeza Rice who has America making so many deals with terrorists we might as well be on Al Jazeera sawing our own heads off, even as she continues demanding that Israel give up more land to the forming of a terrorist state.

Sharon who came into power strongly fighting Palestinian terrorism saw a bushel of distorted demographics and decided to retreat, build a tall wall out of whatever territory he delusionally thinks the United States will allow him to keep and has torn apart Israeli society in order to force his will to carry out an illegal and undemocratic ethnic cleansing of Jews.

This year it is ironically not the left wing, the liberals, the appeasers, the ACLU and Peace Now and Amnesty International and ISM which has brought the terrorists their victory. It is the weak willed and shortsighted political calculations and profit motives of the so-called conservatives who were supposed to be fighting a War on Terror instead of being terrified of it.

As American troops are being slaughtered day by day in the streets of Baghdad in order to protect and uphold the formation of a government based on Islamic law and composed of many of the same terrorist factions who have been murdering Americans and handing a victory to the Iranian Mullahs, Israeli troops were forced on penalty of imprisonment to expell families out of their homes and see those houses demolished so they can be handed over to the same terrorists who have been murdering them and us all along.

In Gaza and in Baghdad the terrorists are celebrating. Thanks to Bush and Sharon they have a lot to celebrate.

Agent France Presse is reporting that the PA is considering what to name the various towns they plan to build on the rubble of the Jewish towns whose residents were expelled. PA officials have said one town will definetly be named after Yassir Arafat. The nest of terrorist spawn that rises over the ruins of Kfar Darom may be named after Hamas leader Sheikh Yassin and Atzmona may be named after a suicide bomber.

It is sad however that the Palestinians are neglecting to name a town after the man who truly made all this possible, Ariel Sharon. Perhaps somewhere between Arafat City and Yassin Township and Sharonville, they can also find a place for Beilinsgard and Peres Hills and Kfar Lapid and Kiryat Eliyashev and of course New Rice City.

It is not after all the terrorists who made this day possible but their enablers in the ranks of the politicians of America and Israel who brought about the terrorist's latest victory.

The Prime Minister paused leaning forwards in his chair. Around him microphones were being arranged and cameras positioned. Channel 1 and Channel 2 and Army Radio and many more foreign reporters had come. This was not entirely usual but then his speech would be entirely unique and of integral importance. The speech had been extensively prepared and written for him. It had been tested on selected audiences but still he knew it would be a difficult one to make. He leaned into the microphone.

"Fellow Citizens of the State of Israel,

My brothers and sisters. We have fought together in battles, lived and worked together in one country as one nation. I come today with a great sadness in my heart to deliver a speech to you as significant as Ben Gurion's declaration of independence.

As you know we have struggled for many years with scourge of terrorism only to watch our children die. We have fought to exist in a hostile area surrounded by countries determined to consider us their enemies. We have tried many solutions to appease or defeat them but they have all failed. Today we embrace a final solution to the problem, disengagement.

Disengagement remains controversial to some. You have lived in this state all your lives. Many of you have fought and shed blood for it, as have many of your children. But disengagement is absolutely necessary and though I do it with a great pain in my heart, I am resolved to execute the disengagement of the State of Israel from the Middle East.

Experts have told you how unsustainable the demographics of a Jewish State in the Middle East are. I need not repeat what they have said. Every schoolchild is well aware that we surrounded on all sides by hostile Arab nations and that a large and growing percentage of our population is Arab. We have attempted to address the situation by smaller disengagements. We have disengaged from Gaza and the West Bank. We have disengaged from East Jerusalem. We have disengaged from the Galilee. We have disengaged from the Negev. We have disengaged from Haifa. We have disengaged and uprooted every Jewish community living in a portion of Israel with an Arab majority or a large Arab minority. Yet this has not helped.

The terrorism has continued as has the hostility of our Arab neighbors as has the demographic problem posed by an Arab population inside Israel with a much higher birth rate than us. As we have continued to retreat, we have come to see that we have only two options. We can either expel the Arabs, which unlike expelling Jews is an unacceptable act of racism and ethnic cleansing, or we can choose to depart from this land entirely. It is a difficult decision yet the way has become clear to me. For Israel to survive, Israel must be destroyed.

Surely we all aware of the tremendous cost of maintaining our army and navy and air force and intelligence services. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers and reservists risk their lives on a regular basis to protect the security of a handful of Jews among over a hundred million Arabs. It is an impossible burden to ask them to bear. Disengagement will free them from that burden, forever.

The Palestinians have told us time and time again that there would be peace if there was no Israel and if they could claim all the territory of the State of Israel and build a state on that land. Now while each time the Palestinians have promised us anything they have not proven trustworthy, yet the international community has continued to support them. Now when we abandon the land entirely to them and they will still not build a working state, it will prove once and for all to the world that the Palestinians are not reliable partners in peace for us or anyone who in the future tries to make peace with them.

Many of you I know are concerned about the loss of your homes and businesses. You have spent a lifetime working to build them and now you fear that the disengagement will take them from you. I however can reassure you that the government of Israel will be providing fair compensation for your losses. As the Disengagement liquidates the State, the State will liquidate all its assets at home and abroad ranging from embassies to the military and even the Knesset and Yad Vashem buildings, which the Palestinians or some international party may choose to buy from us. Using those funds we will return you up to ten percent of the value of your home or business in what was the former Land of Israel.

Some of you I know are concerned about where you will go after the Disengagement. The government in close cooperation with the international community is seeking solutions to just that question. Many countries have generously offered to take in Jews. Germany, Poland, France and Holland, Spain and Russia are just a few of the countries that have offered to take in Jews whose ancestors immigrated from those countries. We are also negotiating with Iraq, Iran, Libya, Syria and Morocco for the return of the Jews from those lands back home. The Jewish Agency is transforming its mission from encouraging Aliyah to encouraging Yeridah and the departure of every Jew from the land by Motzei Tisha Bav.

Those who resist the democratic will of the government and defy its authority with acts of incitement and disobedience will nevertheless be forcibly expelled by the IDF as their final mission to former Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon and Jordan which are being made ready to hold them. I know this will be a difficult mission for the IDF to engage in but it may be a comfort to our brave soldiers to know that their final mission will be to uphold the democratic authority of the government seeking to tear down the State of Israel against those lawless elements which would seek to illegally perpetuate the existence of this country and this state.

I thank you all for your cooperation and for the difficult labors of the past and the brief labors still to come as we complete the task of dismantling this country and our land. It is a painful and difficult task, yet we are determined to fulfill it. On Tisha Bav two temples were destroyed and now a third will fall as well. As Prime Minister I ask that we bow our heads for a moment of silence and go into exile again among all the nations where surely we will find peace and safety."

The Prime Minister leaned back in his chair. It was done. The State of Israel was destroyed. At last the terrorism would end. At least the Jews would be accepted among the nations. At last the Anti-semitism that he had been told was caused by Israel's occupation of Palestinian lands would end. At last he could rest.

"Based on the Law for Implementation of the Disengagement Plan 5765/2005, and in accordance with the decision of the government of Israel and the order of the prime minister, you are required to evacuate your homes and leave the territory of the Gaza Strip by Motzaei Tisha B'Av (14/08/2005) at 24:00. From that time on, the phase of "voluntary" evacuation will end, the checkpoint at the entrance to the Gaza Strip will be closed, and the entry of civilians will not be permitted (rather only their exit), since from that time, the 14/08/2005 at midnight, presence in the Gaza Strip is not legal."

General Dan Harel


"Therefore, we, with the counsel and advice of prelates, great noblemen of our kingdoms, and other persons of learning and wisdom of our Council, having taken deliberation about this matter, resolve to order the said Jews and Jewesses of our kingdoms to depart and never to return or come back to them or to any of them. And concerning this we command this our charter to be given, by which we order all Jews and Jewesses of whatever age they may be, who live, reside, and exist in our said kingdoms and lordships, as much those who are natives as those who are not, who by whatever manner or whatever cause have come to live and reside therein, that by the end of the month of July next of the present year, they depart from all of these our said realms and lordships, along with their sons and daughters, menservants and maidservants, Jewish familiars, those who are great as well as the lesser folk, of whatever age they may be, and they shall not dare to return to those places, nor to reside in them, nor to live in any part of them, neither temporarily on the way to somewhere else nor in any other manner."

King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain

The great yellow digital clock and thermometer on the skyscraper read 96 degrees. The actual heat was even greater. The burning sun created a patch of daylight inside the wooden barricades like a magnifying glass over an ant and below the tall buildings we looked like ants indeed. We may have looked like ants but we did not feel like ants.

Opposite us, both geographically and politically, the Israeli consulate on the 13th floor showed no visible life as we prayed. We prayed for the soldiers of Tzahal, soon to be misused on the terrible duty of expelling their fellow Jews from their home. We prayed for Medinat Yisrael, the nation whose leader was misguiding and misleading it. We read the prayers of former Sephardi Chief Rabbi Mordechai Eliyahu for Gush Katif which had been recited at rallies in Eretz Yisrael.

We recited Tehilim spelling out Gush Katif as to the side a handful of Neturei Karta scowled under a Palestinian flag. They had been barred from every Jewish community and now they waved the flag of the one place in the world they belonged. As we read the words of David HaMelech, they waved banners with the Magen David crossed out. A few girls drowned out the scowling old men with their youthful voices and they retreated behind their police barricades.

Two hours passed in the sun like the patch of shadow that crept along 2nd avenue and on we marched to the UN. In our day the UN represents the widest consensus of anti-semitism. It is the organization that brings together those who despise Jews, those who hate Jews and those who outrightly reject our right to exist as a nation. The green glass of the UN towered glittered and wavery reflections passed over it like a bad dream. We stopped by the Isaiah Wall. The wall that proclaims words of peace which the Soviet Union had refused to allow to be signed with the name of a Jewish prophet.

Year after year, Rabbi Avi Weiss' AMCHA organization has held its annual Tisha Bav prayer rally here. Rabbi Weiss himself has gone far from the Bronx, from protesting against the convent desecrating the Jewish dead at Auschwitz to Gush Katif where he spoke to us over a bad cell phone connection. The words were faint and crackling with static but the hope and determination were as always there. Rabbi Weiss had been beaten by Polish mobs and Pat Buchanan's thugs. Amcha activists been dragged out of Bnai Zion when Arafat was holding a lovefest with the leaders of the major Jewish organizations. Arafat was dead but his legacy lived on and in Ramallah and Jenin and all across the holdings of our enemies; the celebrations at a major Jewish defeat had begun.

In Ralph Bunche Park, named after the ambassador who had helped negotiate the treaty between Israel and the Arab states that founded Israel as a nation, we prepared to pray Mincha for the first time today in Talit and Tefilin. Those who had prayed already and the media stood on the Sharansky steps, named after Soviet Refusnik Natan Sharansky, whose courageous refusal and defiance of those in power had not ended in the USSR, when he defied the government of Ariel Sharon and departed it and his post over the expulsion of Jews from Gush Katif. On the wall itself above us were carved the words of the prophet Isaiah, whose words our makeshift outdoor congregation would soon read in the Haftorah. Truly we prayed surrounded by ghosts of the past to inspire us.

Men in everything from black hats and coats to shorts and orange t-shirts drew out of their bags our legacy. Their talit and tefilin. In this week's parsha we read of the commandment of Tefilin. "And these words which I command you this day shall be upon your heart...and you shall tie them as a sign on your hands and place them over your eyes." After all these thousands of years, in the face of persecution and martyrdom, torture and an assimilationist ethos that is the creed of the UN we stood opposed to, these Jews gathered here kept the sign still. The grim steel obelisk known as 'Peace Form One' soon became covered in talit and tefilin bags and a sea of black and white rose across the plaza. A chorus of blessings were heard and knotted white fringes and black and white stripes flew like the banners of an ancient flag in the growing cool wind from north.

In the counterculture wars of the 60's, a crowd of hippies had surrounded the Pentagon attempting to lift it telepathically into the air. We did not try to the lift the UN, it could not be lifted in any case and was fixed to the dirt it was sunken into. We lifted something far more heavier and more difficult and yet more joyful instead. We lifted a Sefer Torah up and a thousand hands reached out to touch it inside and around the barricades. Inside the fortified UN compound their blue flag, blue for disengagement, flew limply. A large fountain full of cool waters splashed behind black barred gates. But our banners were our taleitim and our water was the water of Torah.

"Nachamu, nachamu ami." Comfort, comfort our people, we sang on Tisha bav, chanting the words opposite the organization that claimed to better the world but only worsened it. Unlike some misguided liberal Jews we did not place our faith or trust in them. We did not put our faith on mortal politicians but on the one above.

"Hashivenu Hashem Eleha Ve'nashuva." Return Us To You Lord and We Shall Return. "Hadesh Yameinu Ki'Kedem." Renew Our Days as in the Beginning.

The UN did not answer our appeal but then of course our appeal was not directed at them. As we finished reciting the kaddish after aleinu, the prayer that proclaims the greatness of G-D, cool raindrops began to fall. We had stood under a burning sun all day and now there was a kind of mercifull relief and an answer to the prayers prayed. We walked back home through a pounding rain of heaven's tears.



For more photos of today's rallies click here

As the 60th anniversary of Hiroshima approaches so do the theatrics typically associated with that event and the two mythologies of World War II that still haunt our history. First is the lie that the atom bomb was a horrific atrocity. Secondly that Japan was a victim of the bomb.

The anti-war activists who only protests wars in which America fights a non-Western nation and see America as the source of all evil in the world are gearing up for it. Signs hang featuring the mushroom cloud beneath the slogan, 'Never Again.' It is a despicable enough form of Holocaust revisionism to transfer the slogan used against the Holocaust to defend the allies of its perpetrators. But such is the revisionism of the left.

The creation of the mythology of the atomic bomb is a key element in the arsenal of the left in demonizing and delegitimizing America as the only nation to have used an atom bomb in warfare. It is intended to make Americans fearful and doubtful of the necessary actions they take to defend themselves and to save millions of lives, a propaganda coup which continues to resonate today in the fearful and hesitant approach to the war on Islamic terrorism. The mythology though is a lie.

The mythology claims that the atomic bomb was the most terrible weapon ever unleashed. This however is utter nonsense. The firebombing raids of Tokyo claimed over 100,000 lives. The atomic bombs by contrast claimed somewhere around 60,000 and 40,000 lives respectively. The majority of those killed by the atomic bombs died of burns, as did those killed in the firebombing raids. Japan has continually worked to inflate the numbers of casualties to an absurd degree, even calling an old man who died several years ago, another of the victims of Hiroshima. But that is not a legitimate method of counting up casualties, anymore than calling a Vietnam Veteran whose life is shortened by an old wound and dies today, another casualty of the Vietnam War.

When actual casualties of the bombing are counted, the death toll for the bombs was lower than that of the firebombing raids as well as the invasion of Okinawa which claimed casualties 3 or 4 times as high. The fighting and civilian casualties would only have grown much worse in the event of an actual invasion of the Japanese islands. The Japanese military at the time was calling on their civilians to commit suicide or die fighting the Americans and showcasing plans to drive 4 or 5 million Japanese civilians directly against the Americans to prevent an invasion. The casualties for any invasion of Japan would have been horrendous, on the American side and even more so on the Japanese side. Hiroshima and Nagasaki brought some sense to a maddened regime that was prepare to wipe out millions of their own people to stop the Americans and in doing so saved millions of Japanese lives.

The demonizing the atom bomb is neither honest nor truthful. Any weapon of war is horrific. The shrapnel that tears out a man's intestines and leaves him dying painfully of a gut wound has nothing merciful about it. What is considered an amoral weapon of war varies from a thousand perspectives. Many campaign against mines. The Germans thought the Americans evil for deploying shotguns in combat while the Allies found German poison gas to be an atrocity. The Japanese had a horror of the flame throwers and the atom bomb and the Americans of the kamikaze and the Bushido warrior uncaring whether he lived or died. None of these weapons are pretty. Their purpose is to kill with the objective of attaining victory.

There are no amoral weapons, only amoral aims. The weapon is neither moral or amoral. It is only a tool. It is he who wields it that truly matters. The gun in the hand of an SS stormtrooper was wielded for evil and in the hand of an American GI for good. The difference is not in the gun but in the man. The German atomic project was evil because it was intended to be used to dominate a world and eradicate tens of millions and enslave the rest. The American atomic project was good because it was meant to put an end to a brutal war, to rebuild both Japan and Germany and bring peace.

"The moment of truth has arrived," Netanyahu said. "At the moment of truth, a man - especially a leader - must ask himself: 'What are you doing, what do you stand for, what are you fighting for?'"

The three girls who had been arrested and detained by the Sharon regime, most prominently 14 year old Chaya Belogorodsky who had been the subject of rallies and outrage on both the left and the right are to be freed. And since nothing in this world occurs without balance, three more have been indefinetly jailed, on administrative detention, without benefit of trial. A tactic typical of tyrannical regimes.

Even as the Sharon regime is raising more roadblocks and dedicating the efforts of soldiers and police to stopping Jews from entering Gush Katif, area roadblocks have gone down that allowed the terrorists to carry out a shooting attack wounding a 10 year old boy. As Al Aqsa, which was and likely is still funded by rhe PA, claims credit for the attack, as terrorist groups announce they are moving into the West Bank and as 55,000 PA troops, most of them former and current terrorists, are prepearing to deploy in proxmity to where disarmed IDF soldiers will be operating, the focus of Sharon's regime and law enforcement and Shaul Mofaz remains the 'threat' of Jewish extremists.

The message is clear as it has always been, Jewish blood is cheap, Arab blood is priceless. As the terrorists advance, the government retreats mumbling absurdities about not retreating under fire, even as they retreat under fire and all the while dedicating all their military genius to planning how to pry a few thousand men, women and children from their homes. And the lies continue to mount.

Of the many lies Sharon spewed to try and defend the expulsion plan, one was that the economy would be somehow hurt by failing to implement it. Netanyahu, has resigned as Finance Minister and the stock market is falling again, even as Sharon's Labor and left wing allies are celebrating. The lies are unraveling, the death toll is mounting and the hour draws near.

A balance of terror, a balance of fates hangs in the balance.

Addressing the nation Prime Minister Ariel Sharon gave new details of his plan for defeating Palestinian terrorism. Here is what he said.

"My Brothers and Sisters,

For many years we have suffered in the grip of terrorists who have murderered our loved ones, set off bombs in our streets and cities and murdered mothers and children together. I speak to you now to announce that we have a plan for defeating terrorism. A plan of which the withdrawal from Gush Katif is but the first of many steps that will ensure a secure state for ourselves and our children.

The plan is called 'Victory through Retreat.' In the past the Palestinians have attempted to force us to retreat through terrorism. We will retreat on our own to show that terrorism has no power over us and that only our government has the power to retreat and drive out Israelis out of their homes and no other.

In the past the Israeli people have feared Palestinian terror as the greatest threat to their homes and loved ones. Now as the government terrorizes them we will demonstrate our qualitative superiority to Fatah, Hamas and Islamic Jihad in terrorizing our own people.

Today as we prepeare for the first of many retreats I tell you this, we have only begun to retreat. We shall retreat from Yehuda and Shomron and then from Yerushalayim. We shall retreat from the Galilee and then the Negev to which we are sending those same families we are expelling from Gush Katif, only so that we may expell them yet again. We will retreat from every town and every city which is adjacent in any way to large arab populations and as the arab populations grow larger, we shall retreat even further.

Some extremists inciting against this democratic government and its policies claim that this is an unsustainable approach and I tell you that my ancestors in Russia during the second world war excercised exactly this approach to defeat the Nazi armies and we shall utilize this approach to defeat the Palestinians as well.

We shall withdraw, expell and retreat and let the arabs advance. And then we shall wait for winter.

Le'Shana Haba Be'Siberia"

"They are now being asked to relinquish these accomplishments for the greater good." - Israeli Foreign Ministy press release on the Expulsion

"All for the Greater Good." - motto inscribed over the entrance of a Soviet Gulag

The New Prisoners of Zion are not in Russian jails anymore. They do not sit in cells in the Lubyanka or work in the Soviet gulags in Omsk, Archangelsk or Vorkuta. The New Prisoners of Zion are not imprisoned in foreign lands for wishing to reach Zion but in Zion itself for wishing to hold on to it, against the will of the Mapai inheritors of the philosophy and tactics of the USSR.

Vitaly Vovnoboy, who had himself come out of the USSR was arrested for the crime of owning a website that encouraged non-violent civil disobedience. Likud Party forms meant to be filed with the purpose of removing Sharon from the leadership of the Likud Party were confiscated from him and returned only after the deadline for submitting them had passed. 15 of the former Prisoners of Zion, the Asirei Zion, who had fought to reach Israel from behind the Iron Curtain, appealed on behalf of a man who had become one of Israel's New Prisoners of Zion.

The New Prisoners of Zion are an odd group. From old men to fourteen year old girls, some religious and some secular, the one thing they have in common is their opposition to a government determined to expell thousands of Jews from their homes and land and to tolerate utterly no opposition to its decrees.

In 1929, the USSR initiated the process of collectivization which removed the peasants from their land and resettled them on Kolhozes, collective farms. The peasants resisted burning their crops and destroying their tools. Troops went sent to take them, some were shot, others forcibly expelled and resettled on the new collective farms with slogans of building 'A New Socialist Future.'

Stalin's, 'New Socialist Future' was built in Siberia where the expelled farmers were sent. Sharon's 'New Socialist Future' is meant to be built in the Negev. One wasteland is exchanged for another. Blistering desert for frozen tundra. The principle though is the same and resistance to both were brutally crushed. To both Stalin and Stalin, the peasants and settlers represented an obstructive force, strongly religious and nationalistic as well as independent, they had to be crushed to make way for the stability of their regimes.

The New Prisoners of Zion, like the old, are being ground under the remorseless gears of the same socialist systems which are antitethical to democracy and freedom and can only rule through tyranny and the brute suppression of dissent. But the key to all prisons is held not by Stalin or Sharon but by the one above and a people can only be tyrannized for so long. The old Prisoners of Zion knew it and the New Prisoners of Zion know it too.

“If the police estimates that the crowds that will arrive in Sderot might endanger the Disengagement plan, then it will be legitimate to stop the protesters, even at the early stages of their trip,” Attorney General Mazuz said Sunday afternoon.

There is a crucial distinction between two types of nations, one ruled by a justice system in which law is the basis for an evenhanded system that applies to all and the other in which law is a tool for enforcing the policies of a government and suppressing political opposition.

The Attorney General quoted above ruled that buses and cars suspected of going to a protest that may make the implementation of a government policy more difficult can be stopped. This is not a legal reason, it is a purely political reason.

Chaya Belogorodsky, a slight, fair-haired and devout 14-year-old girl, is considered such a grave "danger to public peace" that Israel's highest judges dare not let her out of prison and back to her home in a Jewish settlement. Supreme Court Justice Ayala Procaccia wrote that Chaya must remain in jail for a period that could last months because she constitutes a "danger to the society because of her ideological motivation."

When law becomes the the tool of politicians to suppress dissent it becomes the tool of tyranny. The application may be cloaked in rhetoric about the 'Greater Good' or 'Civil Society' but it is the nature of tyrannies to cover their moral and legal blemishes with propaganda. Either law is an evenhanded system for maintaining a civil society or it is a farce meant to maintain a political faction's grip on power.

As his friend and colleague Peres did after Rabin's assassination, Sharon has inaugurated a reign of political terror against his opposition employing political, propaganda and law enforcement means to break the will of those who stand in his way. Peres and Sharon, both neo-communist Mapai hacks, have no concept of democracy or freedom. To them there is only the government's policy and everyone who opposes it is an enemy to be crushed. Under such tyrants, law becomes a criminal law and Israel drifts towards tyranny.

At 5 a.m. on July 4, six men, in civilian dress, five of them armed with M-16 rifles, forcibly entered the Vovnoboys' home in Karnei Shomron. They proceeded to confiscate two of the family's computers, and membership forms for the Likud Party that were piled on his desk. Vovnoboy was remanded in custody for four days the next morning by a Jerusalem district judge in spite of the fact that his lawyer showed that the arrest and search had been conducted illegally. According to the warrant, two witnesses were supposed to have been present during the execution of the warrant, and none were.

The forms confiscated from his home were signatures from Likud Central Committee members demanding a convening of the committee to debate the removal of Sharon from his leadership of the party. In order to convene the committee, 20 percent of its members must sign requests to do so. Vovnoboy had planned to submit the forms the day after he was arrested. The deadline for submission was the day before he was released. The police returned the forms to him two days after the deadline passed.

Traditionally embedded reporters are meant to accompany troops into battle, meanwhile the Jerusalem Post has a logo complete with military insignia for a reporter accompanying troops to throw families out of their homes by force, as if this was something glamorous or heroic.

The Jerusalem Post which despite running some excellent collumns by Glick have joined the rest of the Israeli media in acting as cheerleaders for expulsion, is now boasting of a reporter accompanying troops as 'embedded' as if he was heading into a war zone or under fire instead of to beat fathers, mothers and children out of their homes.