Author: Helena

NTFU website owner arrested

Chris Wilson, the Florida man who owns and runs the NTFU body-part pornsite, was arrested yesterday by the police in Polk County, Florida.
(That site was the one that posted grisly pictures of dead Iraqis and Afghans interspersed with links to other forms of photographic “trophies”, that is the sexual tropies of its numerous male participants… See how JWN helped break this story in late August, here.)
Wilson was charged with one count of wholesale distribution of obscene material and 300 misdemeanor counts related to 20 online films and 80 photographs obtained from his Web site. Bail was set at $151,000.
However, this Orlando Sentinel story revealed today that,

    Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd said late Friday that the 300 obscenity-related charges against Wilson all involve sexual content on his Web site — and not graphic war-scene images posted by soldiers.

Sentinel reporter Anthony Colarossi added that,

    Judd said his obscenity charges have nothing to do with the Army’s interest in the case, and he maintained in a lengthy interview that he was not pressured to investigate Wilson.
    “We unilaterally initiated the investigation without any support, help or encouragement from the federal government,” Judd said.
    … Before Wilson’s arrest, Polk County Judge Angela Cowden found probable cause that the images and tapes were obscene, Judd said. The obscenity statute is one of the few in which a judge must make such a determination before an arrest is made. Investigators also obtained a search warrant and removed computers from Wilson’s home.
    They will be looking for customer lists and other documents to assist the investigation. Information that Army investigators might need in their search will be made available, Judd said.
    Though Wilson’s equipment was removed, his Web site remained in operation Friday because the servers used to run the site are overseas.
    “It’s never our intent to put somebody out of business,” Judd said. “All we ask is that they obey the laws of Florida. We’ve been investigating vice and pornography long enough to know pretty much what crosses the line. This didn’t just cross the line. This left the line many miles behind.”

It should be an interesting case. When Chris Wilson came onto this JWN comments board back in August, he argued about the pictures of body-parts of dead Iraqis and Afghans on his site that:

    I think everyone should see them. This is a side of the war that is shown from the soldiers THEMSELVES. Where else can you go see that? Right now all we see are pics from the media. I don’t like the media feeding me things, I want to see first hand what’s going on there.
    No one making you look, if you don’t like it; don’t look. You know exactly what you are going to see when you go there. There are no tricks, it’s spelled out in plain english.

His lawyer was quoted as saying much the same thing in Colarossi’s story. (Hat-tip to JS who sent me the tip-off on the arrest story.)

HC column on risk of broad Iranian-Arab war

My latest column for al-Hayat was posted on their English-language website Thursday. I’m not sure which day it was in their Arabic edition, but most likely a little earlier…

    Update Sunday a.m.: Actually it is in the October 9 edition. Thanks to Gilbert Achcar for that link.

In the column, I warned of the danger of another full-scale war breaking out between “Iran” (though perhaps, to be more specific, with some ethnic-Arab Shiites also in their camp) and the “Arab world”, with this war spurred by, and indeed also foreshadowed by, the existing grave Sunni-Shiite tensions inside Iraq.
From this perspective, the ghastly sectarian killings that are already taking place inside Iraq could just be a small prelude to what many countries in the region might see in the months ahead.
The “transmission belts”, if you like, for this magnification of sectarian strife, have already started to appear. We have had Jordan’s (Sunni) King Abdullah II warning of the dangers of “Shiite crescent” starting to operate throughout the whole Mashreq… We have had a high official in Iraq’s (Shiite-dominated) transitional government publicly deriding Saudi Arabia’s extremely urbane– and indeed, Princeton-educated– Foreign Minister, Prince Saud al-Faisal, as “a bedouin riding a camel.” I think the Iraqi official in question was not, actually, a Shiite but a Kurdish Iraqi (and therefore probably himself a Sunni). Still, that kind of an insult, voiced in public from Baghdad evidently stung a lot.
In my Hayat column, I recall that during the Iranian-Arab war that continued throughout most of the 1980s, “around one million people—nearly all of them Muslims—died and the economies of two sizeable countries were devastated.” I did not recall there, though perhaps I should have, that the policies of the Regan administration did a lot to foment that war and keep it going when its energy seemed to lag. Back then, Washington shoveled arms shipments to whichever of the two sides looked as though it might lose the war– including during Donald Rumsfeld’s notorious 1983 visit to Baghdad and later the whole Iran-contra arms shipment episode…
In the column, I look at the broader dynamics of the current US-Iran interaction, inasmuch as it’s an important factor in the whole regional dynamics of the Gulf.
Up near the lead of the column, I wrote,

    I am hopeful that cool heads will prevail, and that ways can be found for everyone’s fears and concerns to be aired, for differences to be discussed and resolved through means other than warfare and killing, and for intra-regional hot-lines and other mechanisms to be put in place to limit and prevent any escalation. I remain hopeful even though I know that inside Iraq today, sectarian and apparently sectarian killings are already being perpetrated on a completely unacceptable scale.

Am I actually hopeful today that cooler heads will prevail? The trouble is, is it so darned hard to remain hopeful when the daily news is saturated with news of killing and sectarian strife. We really need to find ways to reverse the dynamic whereby despair, grief, and fear can so easily fuel more and more of the same and then also the kinds of escalatory and nihilistic actions that can easily flow from that…

Gilbert Achcar’s letter


Iraq developments — Oct. 8, 2005

by Gilbert Achcar



1) How US and British Forces help Iraqis recover
their sovereignty



For any person believing in good faith that occupation troops in Iraq are
helping the Iraqis build independent institutions in order to recover their
sovereignty, recent events in Basra—the way British troops stormed police
headquarters in that city—and their aftermath ought to be enough to prove
the contrary.


Yesterday, Reuters (
British troops seize 12 in Basra raids
) and other agencies reported
how British troops arrested 12 persons, including police officers, in Basra.
The account by Reuters correspondent is interesting
(my emphasis):


“Sources in Sadr’s office in Basra said those
detained included several lieutenants in Basra’s interior affairs department,
which is part of the Interior Ministry, and an official with the local electricity
authority.


‘They are mostly Sadr people,’ one of the sources
said.


He said some of the suspects were seized from the police building which was
attacked by British forces last month to free two undercover soldiers who
had been detained by Iraqi police.
The British military said only that the raids took place in the
Hadem district of Basra.


Another source said all 12 men were seized from one house.


The arrests run the risk of increasing tensions between the 8,500 British
troops serving in Iraq and the local population.


After the detention of the two British soldiers last month, angry crowds
of young men attacked British military vehicles with petrol bombs and rocks,
forcing units to pull back.


took place late on Thursday, shortly after the men had broken fast on the
second day of Ramadan, the Muslim holy month, in what could be seen as a
slight and provoke more anger.”


Karbala—after
Najaf, the second major Shiite holy city in Iraq—was supposed to have
come under full Iraqi sovereignty. In his Radio Address of October 1, Bush
boasted that “this week coalition forces were able to turn over security
responsibility for one of
Iraq
’s largest cities,
Karbala
, to Iraqi soldiers.”


Today, Voice of Iraq broadcast the following report, posted by
nahrainnet (my translation from Arabic) revealing what US forces have
done in Karbala at the same time that their British
counterparts in Basra:

Continue reading “Gilbert Achcar’s letter”

New group blog on Transitional Justice

Ahem… I have an important announcement to make… Jonathan Edelstein, a South African social psychologist called Brandon Hamber, and I are launching a new group blog called Transitional Justice Forum.
The subhead of the new blog says, “resources and multi-disciplinary discussion on the challenges of justice during transitions to a better world. Join us!” So this is my invitation to JWN’s readers to do just that.
As you can see, we have just us three as authors for now, though we are definitely planning to bring more on board. Nominations– including self-nominations– are very welcome! (Send me a note with any suggestions.)
I’d also love it if JWN readers could participate in the comments-board discussions over there some– especially right now, while we’re still trying to launch the blog– and if y’all could also help us to publicize TJF by telling any of your friends or colleagues who work in a relevant field about it.
Rest assured: I intend to continue putting the same amount of energy into JWN as I always have. The idea with the new baby is to make it “a widely networked collaborative project,” rather than somethng that only I– or only Jonathan and I– do all the work on.
In fact, the readership here at JWN has been rising in a very satisfactory way over the past few weeks. So I’d be foolish to let this well-established old blog wither on the vine right now, wouldn’t I?

Can Bush speech buttress collapsing polls?

In his much-heralded (by him) speech to the National Endowment for Democracy yesterday, President Bush rolled out some of his old (and a little bit of new) pugnaciousness, along with a good few of his always noticeable smirks.
Will the speech help him deal with daily collapsing poll numbers?
Among the new rhetorical flourishes that Bush used were his validation of the term “Islamo-fascism” to describe the threat the US faces. Among the old ones were his calls to action against both Iran and Syria, and his attempt to link Islamic radicalism in people’s minds with both Hitlerite Nazism (as in, “Islamo-fascism”) and with the evils of communism…

    Also, as commenter John C. noted in the comments section of this recent JWN post, it is remarkable how many of the accusations that Bush made against Bin Laden could also be made against himself… I particularly liked these ones that John identified:

      These are people who:
      – “exploit local conflicts to build a culture of victimization in which someone else is always to blame and violence is always the solution”
      – “exploit modern technology to multiply their destructive power”
      – “target nations whose behavior they believe they can change through violence”
      – are “elitist, led by a self-appointed vanguard that presumes to speak for the . . . masses”
      – have as their chief visionary a man “who grew up in wealth and privilege” and encourages poor people to become killers, “though he never offers to go along for the ride”…

Anyway, back to the falling poll numbers. The CBS poll conducted October 3-5 found that 58% of all (US) adults polled disapproved “of the way George W. Bush is handling his job as president”, while only 37% approved. That 58% is an all-time high for disapproval of his job performance, the numbers having risen continuously since a poll at the end of July– i.e., since before Hurrican Katrina.
Concerning Bush’s handling of Iraq, specifically the disapproval is even stronger: now at an all-time high of 64%, according to that same poll.
Asked whether, “Looking back, do you think the United States did the right thing in taking military action against Iraq, or should the U.S. have stayed out?”, 55% of respondents now say “Should have stayed out”– up from 31% back in December 2003.
Then this:

    “Should the United States troops stay in Iraq as long as it takes to make sure Iraq is a stable democracy, even if it takes a long time, or should U.S. troops leave Iraq as soon as possible, even if Iraq is not completely stable?”

Opting for “Leave asap” were 59% of all respondents, as opposed to 36% saying “stay as long as it takes.”
These poll numbers are really good news. They would be even better if we had an opposition party in the country capable of taking advantage of the voters’ judgments.
But what can Bush do about them? In other times, he might have sought to reverse the decline by ratcheting up tensions and even launching a little war someplace to distract the public’s attention. I really don’t think that’s an option for him today. And I very much doubt that even a whole series of “stirring” sppeches like yesterday’s could win him more than a couple of points, total, increase in his approval ratings. Meantime, Plame-gate is still threatening to burst into flames and his old friend and enforcer Tom Delay is somewhat on the ropes.
The months ahead could be very interesting ones. They would be even better if we had an opposition party in the country capable of taking advantage of the Bushies’ disarray…

Congratulations to ElBaradei!

Heartiest congratulations to Mohamed El-Baradei, the talented, judicious Egyptian national who, as head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, has just been named along with the IAEA as the winner of the 2005 Nobel Peace Prize.
In that citation from the Norwegian Nobel Committee, which awards the prize every year, the Committee states that the award is being made to this year’s two winners,

    for their efforts to prevent nuclear energy from being used for military purposes and to ensure that nuclear energy for peaceful purposes is used in the safest possible way.

It goes on to say:

    At a time when the threat of nuclear arms is again increasing, the Norwegian Nobel Committee wishes to underline that this threat must be met through the broadest possible international cooperation. This principle finds its clearest expression today in the work of the IAEA and its Director General…
    In his will, Alfred Nobel wrote that the Peace Prize should, among other criteria, be awarded to whoever had done most for the “abolition or reduction of standing armies”. In its application of this criterion in recent decades, the Norwegian Nobel Committee has concentrated on the struggle to diminish the significance of nuclear arms in international politics, with a view to their abolition. That the world has achieved little in this respect makes active opposition to nuclear arms all the more important today.

As I learned when I wrote my 2000 book on some past winners of the Nobel Peace Prize, the all-Norwegian committee that makes the award generally seeks not just to recognize past achievements, but also to encourage and draw attention to ongoing efforts to make the world a more peaceful place.
From that point of view, we should read the citations for ElBaradei and the IAEA as strongly critical of the Bush administration’s moves toward abandoning the (by aspiration) “universal” approach of the Nucler Nonproliferation Tearty, and of the IAEA which embodies and operationalizes its provisions. The Bushies prefer instead to try to use small ad-hoc coalitions of likeminded (i.e. pro-US) states to pursue its more aggressive and escalatory counter-proliferation –as opposed to non-proliferation– policies.
Also, at the political level, while the Norwegian Nobel Committee has indeed over the years “concentrated on the struggle to diminish the significance of nuclear arms in international politics, with a view to their abolition”, the Bush administration– like all preceding US administrations, and all other members of the hyper-privileged “P-5 club” in the United Nations– has had a very different view of the desirability of the nuclear-weapons states continuing to exercise quite undue influence in international affairs…
Yes indeed, it would be great if we could reduce the significance of nuclear arms in international affairs, and also abolish all the world’s nuclear arsenals! The NPT offers one, carefully ngotiated and nearly universally agreed, way to do this. Althought it institutes, for an interim phase of unspecified duration, a highly discriminatory regime in which just five states are “entitled” to continue to hold nuclear arsenals for some time, nevertheless it mitigates the effects of that discrimination in two ways:

    1. It states clearly (Article 6) that the goal of all signatories is complete and general disarmament, and
    2. It establishes a network of reciprocal obligations between the nuclear weapons ‘have’ states and the nuclear weapons ‘have not’ states. For example, parties in a position to do so should indeed “co-operate in contributing… to the further development of the application of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes, especially in the territories of non-niuclear weapon States Party to the Treaty, with due consideration for the needs of the developing areas of the world.” (Art.4)

No U.S. administration has ever taken any serious steps toward operationalizing Article 6. And as we know, the Bush administration has been extremely busy since 2001 trying to find a way to impose harsh punishment on Iran for seeking to exercise its rights under Article 4.
Just Wednesday, ElBaradei made an important speech in Moscow in which he proposed a way to defuse current US-Iran tensions over the nuclear issue. (Hat-tip here to Scott H for signaling this one.)
According to the LA Times report linked to there, ElBaradei said that,

    The most effective way to stop the spread of nuclear weapons is for the international community to guarantee the supply of nuclear fuel to countries that agree not to produce it themselves…
    ElBaradei… said that approach would undercut the argument of countries such as Iran that acquiring the ability to produce their own nuclear fuel is the only way to shield a civilian energy industry from disruptions in supply.
    “Objective, apolitical, nonproliferation criteria” should be used to guarantee the fuel supplies, ElBaradei said in a speech here. “If a country meets these criteria, it would be assured of the supply of fuel. That, I think, would take care, in my view, of at least 80% of the problem.”
    …
    ElBaradei spoke at a luncheon meeting and subsequent news conference organized by the Nuclear Threat Initiative, a Washington-based foundation that works to prevent the spread of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons. The group was founded by former Sen. Sam Nunn (D-Ga.) and media mogul Ted Turner.

So there we have an international civil servant and diplomat who is coming forward with concrete, moderate proposals on an issue like the US-Iran nuclear-supplies standoff that have the potential for defusing all the US-hyped international tension over that issue… I doubt that Mohamed ElBaradei would have won George Bush’s nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize. (Kind of scary to speculate who might have, don’t you think?)
But ElBaradei’s nomination certainly wins my support. Well done, the Norwegian Nobel Committee.

US Senate flexes muscles on control of the war?

I was really delighted to learn from the WaPo today that,

    The Senate defied the White House yesterday and voted to set new limits on interrogating detainees in Iraq and elsewhere, underscoring Congress’s growing concerns about reports of abuse of suspected terrorists and others in military custody.
    Forty-six Republicans joined 43 Democrats and one independent in voting to define and limit interrogation techniques that U.S. troops may use against terrorism suspects, the latest sign that alarm over treatment of prisoners in the Middle East and at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, is widespread in both parties. The White House had fought to prevent the restrictions, with Vice President Cheney visiting key Republicans in July and a spokesman yesterday repeating President Bush’s threat to veto the larger bill that the language is now attached to — a $440 billion military spending measure.

The interrogation rules are, as I have argued endlessly on JWN all along, a really important issue in themselves. We have yet to see whether, as the deliberations over this particular spending bill proceed, the Senate negotiators can succeed in imposing their will (or a substantial portion of it) on the generally much more unprincipled people in the House of Representatives, and on the unarguably more unprincipled man in the White House. But 90 Senate votes are certainly enough to overturn a Presidential veto, if it should come to that, if all those Senators just hang in there…
It was Sen. John McCain (R, AZ), who had led the fight in the Senate on this issue, and he prominently mentioned the anguished communications he had had from Capt. Ian Fishback. (Thank you, Capt. Fishback: One person’s principled actions can indeed make a difference in the world.) The WaPo piece noted that McCain’s key allies in this battle were “Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), a former military lawyer, and Armed Services Committee Chairman John W. Warner (R-Va.) ” Alert readers might note that none of these three named sentaors is affiliated with the supposed “opposition” party here in the US…
The McCain measure would limit all US forces– and also, I think, all “other government agencies”, codewords for the CIA– to using only interrogation techniques authorized in the U.S. Army Field Manual on Intelligence Interrogation. If enacted, this legislation would materially improve the situation of the 10,000 or more people around the world– mainly, in Iraq and Afghanistan– who are currently in the custody of US forces.
This is in itself a great reason to support this legislation– and also, to give due credit to Sens. McCain, Graham, and Warner for their postion.
But I wonder: Is this also the beginning of a broader process whereby the US Congress attempts to regain more control of the country’s war-fighting processes and decisionmaking in a broader sense? Under the Constitution, only Congress can “declare war” on foreign enemies, but it is up to the executive branch to handle the waging of the war– within the broad, continuing parameter that Congress always retains the power of the purse.
But back in October 2002, both houses of Congress disgracefully fell asleep at the wheel of their very solemn responsibilities regarding declaring (that is, initiating) a war, and they gave GWB a totally blank check to do whatever he wanted with regard to Iraq. And since then, whenever he’s come back in with one more bloated war-spending request after another, they have continued to give him a blank check– and even, as I recall, to allocate him meven more war-fighting mega-bucks than what he was asking for.
And now, as we know, states and localities throughout the country– not only in our hurricane-ravaged Gulf coast region– are paying the price for those failures by Congress to take a responsible stand on war-spending.
In one sense, the fight over the interrogation rules can be seen as a tiny microcosm of the broader battle over control over this war effort thathas run– continues to run!– so horribly amok. The White House had tried to argue to the senators that tightening the interrogation rules “risked undermining US success in the war on terror”. The senators confronted that argument head-on and said, “No it won’t.”
Maybe as a next step they’ll look at the whole ball of wax, and say, “You know what, the whole ‘war on terror’ as currently being fought by the Bush administration isn’t actually reducing terror at all… It’s time for a radical rethink here.”
We can hope… And maybe as a way of pushing this process forward, we should all mail copies of General Odom’s great remarks to any US Senators and members of Congress that we can think of!

Gen. Odom battles the war, the Dems, the MSM

This, from Gen. William Odom, who capped a distinguished career in the US Army by serving as Director of the National Security Agency from 1985 through 1988.
Just the title of this text is great, and explosive, since it bursts through much of the namy-pamby political “positioning” that so many antiwar folks (self included) have engaged in during discussions of the US presence in Iraq up until now.
Here is Odom’s title:
What’s wrong with cutting and running?
I got this text today via Today in Iraq, who got it from Antiwar.com, who got it from the Neiman Foundation’s “Nieman Watchdog“…
One very interesting question is why, if this text was already available at the Watchdog on August 3, it hasn’t received more attention in the US national discourse before now? This is a very germane questiont. The Nieman Foundation, located at Harvard University, is a very well-funded media-studies center that is connected with many very well-funded media outlets and media “personalities”. The context for Odom’s text seems to be that it was part of (perhaps a transcript of?) an interaction with journalists at the Foundation, perhaps in some kind of seminar with working journos, or whatever.
Odom started out there saying,

    If I were a journalist, I would list all the arguments that you hear against pulling U.S. troops out of Iraq, the horrible things that people say would happen, and then ask: Aren’t they happening already? Would a pullout really make things worse? Maybe it would make things better….

He then lists nine of the key argument against pulling out, and one by one he refutes them. JWN leaders may be very interested to read these refutations– and to use them in discussions with fence-sitters… They are generally very well constructed and well worded.
But at the end of that sustained piece of argumentation on the substance of the troop-presence argument, Odom then gets into some very serious criticism of the Dem Party leaders and the US media establishment:

    Most surprising to me is that no American political leader today has tried to unmask the absurdity of the administration’s case that to question the strategic wisdom of the war is unpatriotic and a failure to support our troops…
    So why is almost nobody advocating a pullout? I can only speculate. We face a strange situation today where few if any voices among Democrats in Congress will mention early withdrawal from Iraq, and even the one or two who do will not make a comprehensive case for withdrawal now.Why are the Democrats failing the public on this issue today? The biggest reason is because they weren’t willing to raise that issue during the campaign. Howard Dean alone took a clear and consistent stand on Iraq, and the rest of the Democratic party trashed him for it. Most of those in Congress voted for the war and let that vote shackle them later on. Now they are scared to death that the White House will smear them with lack of patriotism if they suggest pulling out.
    Journalists can ask all the questions they like but none will prompt a more serious debate as long as no political leaders create the context and force the issues into the open.
    I don’t believe anyone will be able to sustain a strong case in the short run without going back to the fundamental misjudgment of invading Iraq in the first place. Once the enormity of that error is grasped, the case for pulling out becomes easy to see.
    Look at John Kerry’s utterly absurd position during the presidential campaign. He said “It’s the wrong war, in the wrong place, at the wrong time,” but then went on to explain how he expected to win it anyway. Even the voter with no interest in foreign affairs was able to recognize it as an absurdity. If it was the wrong war at the wrong place and time, then it was never in our interest to fight. If that is true, what has changed to make it in our interest? Nothing, absolutely nothing…
    The wisest course for journalists might be to begin sustained investigations of why leading Democrats have failed so miserably to challenge the US occupation of Iraq. The first step, of course, is to establish as conventional wisdom the fact that the war was never in the US interest and has not become so. It is such an obvious case to make that I find it difficult to believe many pundits and political leaders have not already made it repeatedly.

Well, here was Gen. Odom, telling some of the leading lights of US (mainstream) journalism how to do their jobs! And also, by very strong implication, chiding them– and the Dem Party leaders– for not having done their jobs up in the past. Is it any surprise that his remarks somehow didn’t get amplified into the echo-chamber of what passes for US mainstream discourse for more than two months after he made them?
What can we all do to amplify them some more at this point?

Still tweaking comments control here…

More apologies this evening on the comments. This new software has an automatic comment-controller that– unknown to me– was eating up most of your comments and describing them as (sad to say!) “junk”!
Don’t feel bad about it. It even ate up a comment I was trying to post and described it as junk.
So I had to go in and change the settings on that. That freed up everyone’s comments… So let’s hope that I have now finally licked the last software glitch here??
Maybe tomorrow I’ll even have some time to write something substantive. H’mmm.
Meantime, please, y’all keep the comments coming so I can see if my settings are working! (Also, so you can express yourselves.) Thanks!
Update Wed. morning: It looks as though I got the junk filter tweaked just about right here. The filter let through a bunch of y’all’s legitimate comments but caught and put into a buffer-zone five comments that were ads for some male-enhancement product. One of the problems is that when I use words like “porn” in the title of a post they tend to attract certain spambots. But this filter on MT 3.2 seems good.
Can any readers familiar with MT 3.2 or similar tell me whether I can just rely on its integral filter and stop using MT-Blacklist now? Would that speed up the comment-posting process for legitimate commenters?
Also, what are the advantages and disadvantages of instituting a commenter’s registration process?
Thanks for any advice!

Kahanism and pornography

A friend just contacted me to send Jewish New Year greetings (and I should take this opportunity to wish Shana Tova to all JWN readers who would appreciate the greeting, too. I hope the next 12 months are good ones for all JWN readers.)
My friend also told me that she has been put on something called the S.H.I.T. list— which stands for Self-Hating and/or Israel-Threatening Jews.
It turns out this is a magnificent list of some 7,000 or so Jewish people from around the world who have expressed open criticisms of the policies of one or more governments of Israel. Many of my Jewish friends are on it, it turns out… Scrolling through it indicated to me just how widely criticism of Israeli government policy has been expressed among Jewish people worldwide.
How come I never heard of it before? Here, you can learn about such people as (quite randomly):

    Al Kagen… a professor of library administration at the Urbana campus of the University of Illinois, [who] has been active in the movement to get that institution to divest from investing funds in the Israel, as well as with firms that do business with the Jewish state, or
    Holly Kosisky, who (shockingly!)… “signed a petition calling for Israel to remove its security wall so that PLO Arab sharpshooters and bus bombers can more easily murder Jews.”

…I’m sure you get the drift. Some of these people are principled leaders in the struggle for human equality in the Holy Land… Others have merely “signed a petition against the Wall”.
In case you want to know more about the organization that keeps this list, Masada 2000, you can go to its home-page, which is graced at the very top by a quote from the late Meir Kahane and then spends most of that page explaining to readers why There has never been a civilization or a nation referred to as “Palestine” (bolded in the original.)
Read here about the organization’s truly scary Solution(s) to the Israeli-“Palestinian” Conflict:
Or you can contact the folks to at the website to send on the names of any Jewish people you know who should be included on the S.H.I.T. list. (“You will remain anonymous.”)
But there’s something else about this site that’s even more intriguing…. Many of the people on the S.H.I.T. list only have their names listed. Others have hyperlinks to their email addresses– I suppose, to make it easier for the Kahanists who created the site to send hate-mail to them.
Around 10% of the names listed have their jobs or place of residence identified, and a little description of their supposedly “Israel-threatening” activities. Many of these descriptions have some extremely sarcastic “editorial comment” attached: “Lady, you should feel embarrassed and inferior but mostly ashamed of yourself! ” (Or this, for Noam Chomsky: ” In other words, Chomsky is a thoroughly despicable human being.”)
But sometimes, the sarcasm and nastiness in these listings take on a distinctly feminophobic and even faintly pornographic coloration. I was a little puzzled by this. Then I found a link to this truly disgusting page on the M2000 site. It’s quite a long page, so keep on scrolling down. [Warning: this page reportedly includes sound, too.]
You will see, respectively:

    * a female sexual-pleasuring object in the image of Yasser Arafat,
    * an “endorsement” for this product from a supposedly satisfied customer (presumably one of the women on the S.H.I.T. list?)
    * a list of the different “designs” in which this product is available, including “The Monster Mohammed”, etc etc, then–
    * a poster-type display with photos, that is titled A few leftist chicks in need of a good reaming — these ones, again, taken from the S.H.I.T. list .

This stuff is revolting. It’s a rampant call to woman-hatred, the physical abuse of women, and the demeaning of all women who attempt to enter the public discourse.
In this latter respect, I can recall some of the terrible cartoons that were published by the genocidaires in Rwanda, in the lead-up to the genocide, in which lewd sexual suggestions were made about the (generally pro-coexistence) female Hutu prime minister Agathe Uwilingiyimana. The pro-genocidaire publications ran cartoon after cartoon after cartoon of this genre in those weeks…. And then, as one of the first acts during the genocide, the genocidal militias stormed Ms. Uwilingiyimana’s home, took her out, and subjected her to the most grotesque forms of sexual mutilation (in front of her children) before finally they killed her.
The people who run this Masada2000 website should take down this page immediately… Spewing hate in the way they do on their other pages is bad enough. But spewing hate with an incitement to rape is, I think, even worse.