Authentic Supplications of the Prophet (saw)

by Waleed K.S. Al-Essa

http://www.muslimaccess.com/sunnah/duaa/tc.html

Please be aware that each link below corresponds to more than one page.
For example, "The Virtues of Remembrance" has 5 pages in it.
To get to successive pages, click on the "Next" link.
There are 255 pages in all.

System of Transliteration
Introduction
The Meanings of the word 'iläh
The Virtues of Remembrance
The Virtues of Tahmeed, Tahleel, and Tasbeeh
Remembrance of Allah at Both Ends of the Day
At Sleeping Time
Upon Having a Dream
When Waking Up at Night
Entering, and Exiting the Rest-Room
About Wudhu'
The Virtue of Praying After Wudhu'
The Virtue of Worship at Night
About the Witr Prayer
Upon Going Out of the Home
Upon Entering the Home
The Athan and Whoever Hears it
Upon Entering the Masjid and Leaving it
What the Imäm Says Before the Prayer
Opening Supplications in Salät
On Saying 'Ämeen
Crying in Salät
When Bowing,Getting up from a Bow, Prostrating,or Sitting in Between Prostrations
Supplication in the Prayer and after the Tashahhud
Loud Remembrance After Salät
Announcing Lost Property, or Selling in the Mosque
The Virtue of Reciting Surat Al-Kahf on Friday
Praising Allah Within Speech
Description of the Khutbah and the Prayer
State of the Khateeb, and What he Says
Saying Shahädah in the Khutbah
Abollt the Takheer in the `Eid Prayer
Surrender to Predestination Neither in Deficit nor in Exaggeration
Asking for Allah's Guidance in a Certain Affair (Istikhara)
Not to say "If You will then grant me"
Prohibition of Asking that Punishment be Hurried
What to Say at Times of Grief, Concern, and Sadness
About Minor and Great Afflictions upon the Believer
On Debt
Abandonment of Supplication for Sin and for the Severance of the Ties of Kinship
Truthfully Asking for Martyrdom
What to Say upon Confrontation of the Enemy and of People with Power
About Devils Presenting Themselves to Humans
On Incantations (Charms & Spells)
When Passing by the Graves of the Polytheists
Condition for Entering the Graveyards of the Tortured
Upon Entering Graveyards
How to Pray Upon the Dead
What is Said When Placing the Body in the Grave
With Respect to Allah's Bounties upon Man
What to Say to Someone Wearing New Clothes
What to Say When you Wear Something New
Being Presented A Gift and Supplicated for
Let your Brother Know you Love Him
Rewarding one that does you Good
On Seeing the First Fruits
Liked things and Fear of The Evil Eye
On Drawing Good and Bad Omens
Upon Seeing Inflicted People
Supplication for the Guidance of the Polytheists
On Asking tor Rain
When Windy
Time of Thunder
Upon Rainfall
Upon Sighting the Crescent
About Eclipses
When Going on a Journey
When Someone Else is Going on a Journey
Upon Mounting Mean of Transportation
When Beast of Burden Stumbles
Upon Entering a Town
When Lodging Somewhere
When Slaughtering
Eating and Drinking
What a Fasting Person Says Upon Iftar
On Asking Permission to Enter
Dislike of Saying: It's me!
What to Supplicate for your Host
About As-Salam
Conveyance of As-Salam
Who Should Petition Salam First
Prohibition of Beginning the Jews and Christians with As-Salam
Greeting Only Those Whom you Know is of the Signs of The Day of Judgment
On Letter Writing Format
On Praising and Complementing
On Sneezing and Yawning
What to Say to a Non-Muslim if he Sneezes
About Marriage
Upon Child Birth
Upon Crowing of the Rooster, Braying, and Barking
On Seated Gathering Places
About Anger
Upon Entering A Market Place

© 1993 Waleed Al-Essa This book may be photocopied for personal non profit use; otherwise, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission of the author

It Is Darwin Time: Will We Accept It?

Dr Q. Isa Daudpota, Pakistan Link, January 30, 2009


Charles Darwin was kind enough to publish his great work, On the Origin of Specieswhen he was exactly fifty years old. That will allow us to celebrate his 200th birthday anniversary and the sesquicentennial of the book this year.


His work's scientific, philosophical and social implications are revolutionary. Today all true scientists accept his theory of evolution as fundamental to understanding of life on earth. It underpins all modern biological and medical sciences and helps view life as a unified system based on rather simple yet profound rules. All his works are available at www.tinyurl.com/a96jkg.


The biggest ever Charles Darwin exhibition, www.tinyurl.com/aysymz, will run until mid-April in London. Not all is lost if you cannot get to it as much exists on the net that can help remove the misconceptions that many Pakistanis have about the theory, starting with this website and its excellent links. Several new books will appear as will documentaries and TV programs that will reach our shores if there is enough demand. Among the important recent audio visual presentations worth showing in Pakistan is the seven-part TV series Evolution prepared by the US Public Broadcasting Service. The accompanying book with the same title by Carl Zimmer is also useful to remove doubts about the theory. Supplement these with a study of the PBS website on evolution, www.tinyurl.com/783wm8 - it has a wealth of material, in text and video, for students and teachers.



What if one wants to visit one of our own museums to learn about evolution? One would naturally turn to our Museum of Natural History in Islamabad, www.tinyurl.com/9qshma. I in fact visited it about four years ago when asked to review the design of a planned extension to the building. Sadly the building, set in idyllic green surrounding of Shakarparian Hills, is poorly designed and constructed.

During the visit I walked to the lowest level, and have frequented later. This is where the museum explicitly shows how the evolution of life took place on earth. You enter the moderately sized room with its four walls painted to show quite nicely the story of life. Starting on the right one sees in almost seamless progression the appearance of primitive life forms in water, moving onto fish, reptiles, amphibians, land-based animals, primates and then early humanoids, the hunter-gatherers, finally getting to modern humans – this brings one back to the door where one began the journey. If you stand in the middle and turn around you see the panorama of life before you. A good teacher of biology could keep a class occupied for several hours in this room alone.


One wonders how many teachers in Pakistan would, however, notice the white pillar from floor to roof, over one foot wide, that separate the pictures of the hoards of apes from the hunting humanoids. (Nowhere else in this room are the different life forms shown separated from other groups). More importantly, will the teacher on noticing this anomaly, point it to the students and discuss it. A clear discussion on this issue alone could lead to a much better understanding of biology (and life generally) than a year of learning facts that fail to unify the subject.

I gathered a number of museum staff nearby to ask their opinion about why the Museum chose to separate the apes from the humanoid, given that after Darwin it was generally accepted that human are primates, i.e. closely related to monkeys and apes. Most remained quiet. One said, in true bureaucratic fashion, that I would need to contact the director who has designed the room. Another said that if the connection was shown the museum would be burned down by religious fanatics who think of humans as a special creation of the Lord, and were therefore unconnected with the earlier life-forms. The Museum's stagnant website, perhaps reflecting this attitude, has no mention of Darwin or evolution. Instead, it should be the main institute explaining and displaying artifact of Natural History on the foundations laid by scientific Darwinian ideas.



Then there are people like Harun Yahya, the prolific Turkish writer, whose slick books fill our bookshops and unambiguously oppose Darwin. I was once horrified to see a room full of talented Pakistani school students at a Space Camp subjected to a movie about creationism produced by Yahya's outfit. This is not an affliction particular to Pakistan or the Muslim world. In America about 55% of adults held a tentative view about evolution for the last decade. A third of adults firmly rejected the theory; only 14% thought of it as 'definitely true'. Only enlightened education, formal and informal can overcome this ignorance. Nature, the premier science magazine offers 15 examples from over the past decade or so to illustrate the breadth, depth and power of evolutionary thinking that totally demolishes the wrong headed ideas of people like Yahya. See www.tinyurl.com/a3n4nh.


For the Semitic religions to have relevance in today's world, they must accept that the rules of nature apply only to materials bodies, energy and the environment to create the immense variety of species and their evolution. That they arise from a single of a small number of basic primal organisms and transform due to mutations and natural adaptation was outlined carefully by Darwin. A good place to study the journey of life is the BBC page, www.tinyurl.com/7ngsqc and the links therein.

Darwin and his great work provided a revolutionary break from the past by placing humans as part of the evolving flux of life, not as special creation. He did what Copernicus managed in the 16th century by displacing Earth from its central position in the universe to being a mere planet moving around a rather ordinary star obeying physical laws that were formalized later by Newton. It should have taught us modesty.

Darwin is right up there with Newton in the greatness league. He, unlike his fellow Englishman, was a wise, modest gentleman. This year of Darwin should be when his ideas become better understood in this country, leading to revolutionary changes in our thinking.

http://pakistanlink.com/Opinion/2009/Jan09/30/04.HTM

RELATED LINKS:

The Muslim Responses to Evolution http://www.irfi.org/articles/articles_151_200/muslim_responses_to_evolution.htm

The Science of Evolution and the Nature of Science Peyton M. West, February 28, 2007http://www.islamonline.net/servlet/Satellite?c=Article_C&cid=1172571427008&pagename=Zone-English-HealthScience%2FHSELayout


Human Reproduction and DevelopmentDr. Gasser Hathout, July 17, 2005http://www.lubnaa.com/science (SEE Section: Perspectives)

How to be successful in life

Sheikh Muhammed Salih Al-Munajjid

How to obtain success and prosperity in this world and hereafter.What kind of success or prosperity that islam want the ummah islam gain in this world.


Praise be to Allaah.


Peace of mind, contentment, happiness and freedom from worries and anxiety… these are what everyone wants, and these are the ways in which people can have a good life and find complete happiness and joy. There are religious means of achieving that, and natural and practical means, but no one can combine all of them except the believers; although other people may achieve some of them, they will miss out on others.


There follows a summary of the means of achieving this aim for which everyone is striving. In some cases, those who achieve many of them will live a joyful life and a good life; in other cases, those who fail to achieve all of them will live a life of misery and hardship. And there are others which are in between, according to what the means he is able to attain. These means include the following:


1 – Faith and righteous deeds:
This is the greatest and most fundamental of means. Allaah says (interpretation of the meaning):


“Whoever works righteousness — whether male or female — while he (or she) is a true believer (of Islamic Monotheism) verily, to him We will give a good life (in this world with respect, contentment and lawful provision), and We shall pay them certainly a reward in proportion to the best of what they used to do (i.e. Paradise in the Hereafter)”
[al-Nahl 16:97]


Allaah tells us and promises us that whoever combines faith with righteous deeds will have a good life and a good reward in this world and in the Hereafter.


The reason for that is clear: those who believe in Allaah – with sincere faith that motivates them to do righteous deeds that change hearts and attitudes and guides them to the straight path in this world and the Hereafter – follow principles and guidelines by means of which they deal with everything that happens to them, be it the causes of happiness and excitement or the causes of anxiety, worry and grief.


They deal with the things that they like by accepting them and giving thanks for them, and using them in good ways. When they deal with them in this manner, that creates in them a sense of excitement and the hope that it will continue and that they will be rewarded for their gratitude, which is more important than the good things that happen to them. And they deal with bad things, worries and distress by resisting those that they can resist, alleviating those that they can alleviate, and bearing with goodly patience those that they cannot avoid. Thus as a result of the bad things they gain a lot of benefits, experience, strength, patience and hope of reward, which are more important and which diminish the hardships they have undergone and replace them with happiness and hope for the bounty and reward of Allaah. The Prophet (peace and blessings of Allaah be upon him) expressed this in a saheeh hadeeth in which he said: “How wonderful is the situation of the believer, for all his affairs are good. If something good happens to him, he gives thanks for it and that is good for him; if something bad happens to him, he bears it with patience, and that is good for him. This does not apply to anyone but the believer.” (Narrated by Muslim, no. 2999).


The Prophet (peace and blessings of Allaah be upon him) told us that the believer is always gaining and the reward for his deeds is always multiplying, no matter what happens to him, good or bad.


2 – Being kind to people in word and deed, and all kinds of doing good.
This is one of the means of removing worry, distress and anxiety. By this means Allaah wards off worries and distress from righteous and immoral like, but the believer has the greater share of that, and is distinguished by the fact that his kindness to others stems from sincerity and the hope of reward, so Allaah makes it easy for him to be kind to others because of the hope that this will bring good things and ward off bad things, by means of his sincerity and hope of reward. Allaah says (interpretation of the meaning):

“There is no good in most of their secret talks save (in) him who orders Sadaqah (charity in Allaah’s Cause), or Ma‘roof (Islamic Monotheism and all the good and righteous deeds which Allaah has ordained), or conciliation between mankind; and he who does this, seeking the good Pleasure of Allaah, We shall give him a great reward”
[al-Nisa’ 4:114]

Part of that great reward is relief from worry, distress, troubles, etc.


3 – Another of the means of warding off anxiety that stems from nervous tension and being preoccupied with disturbing thoughts is to occupy oneself with good deeds or seeking beneficial knowledge, for that will distract one from dwelling on the matters that are causing anxiety. In this way a person may forget about the things that are making him worried and distressed, and he may become happy and more energetic. This is another means that believers and others have in common, but the believer is distinguished by his faith, sincerity and hope of reward when he occupies himself with that knowledge which he is learning or teaching, or with the good deeds that he is doing.


The work with which he occupies himself should be something that he likes and enjoys, for that is more likely to produce the desired results. And Allaah knows best.


4 – Another thing that may ward off worry and anxiety is focusing all one’s thoughts of the present day, and not worrying about the future or grieving about the past. Hence the Prophet (peace and blessings of Allaah be upon him) sought refuge with Allaah from worry and regret, from regret for things in the past which one cannot put right or change, and worry which may come because of fear for the future. So one should focus only on the present day, and focus one's efforts on getting things right today. For if a person is focused on that, this means that he will do things properly and forget about worry and regret. When the Prophet (peace and blessings of Allaah be upon him) said a du’aa’ or taught a du’aa’ to his ummah, as well as urging them to seek the help of Allaah and hope for His bounty, he was also urging them to strive to attain the thing they were praying for through their own efforts and to forget about the thing which they were praying would be warded off from them. Because du’aa’ (supplication) must be accompanied by action. So a person must strive to attain that which will benefit him in worldly and spiritual terms, and ask his Lord to make his efforts successful, and he should seek His help in that, as the Prophet (peace and blessings of Allaah be upon him) said: “Strive for that which will benefit you and seek the help of Allaah, and do not be helpless. If anything (bad) happens to you, do not say, ‘If only I had done such-and-such, then such-and-such would have happened.’ Rather you should say, ‘Qaddara Allaah wa ma sha’a fa’ala (Allaah decrees, and what He wills He does),’ for (the words) ‘If only’ open the door to the Shaytaan.” (Narrated by Muslim). The Prophet (peace and blessings of Allaah be upon him) connected the matter of striving to achieve good things with the matter of seeking the help of Allaah and not giving in to feelings of helplessness which are a harmful kind of laziness, and with the matter of accepting things in the past which are over and done with, and acknowledging that the will and decree of Allaah will inevitably come to pass. He described matters as being of two types:


1 – Matters which a person may strive to achieve or to achieve whatever he can of them, or to ward them off or alleviate them. In such cases a person must strive and make the effort, and also seek the help of Allaah.


2 – Matters where such is not possible, so he must have peace of mind, accept them and submit to Allaah’s will.
Undoubtedly paying attention to this principle will bring happiness and relieve worry and distress.


5 – One of the greatest means of feeling content and relaxed and of acquiring peace of mind is to remember Allaah a great deal (dhikr). That has a great effect in bringing contentment and peace of mind, and relieving worry and distress. Allaah says:

“verily, in the remembrance of Allaah do hearts find rest”
[al-Ra’d 13:28]

A song for the children of Paletine

SONG FOR A PALESTINIAN CHILD
*******************************************

I am a Palestinian child. I am a Palestinian child.


People think, I am meek and mild.


I was born in the midst of fire,


Coffin on the body is my attire;


I can face everything, dark and dire,


The time fails to sink me in its mire.


I am a Palestinian child. I am a Palestinian child.


People think, I am meek and mild.


Always ready for bullets is my chest,


The bombs can never dampen my zest;


My blood is meant for my country’s best,


Only in the grave, I shall take my rest.


I am a Palestinian child. I am a Palestinian child

People think, I am meek and mild.


I aspire for peace , have love for all,


I want to demolish the religion’s wall;


When the world is weeping on my fall,


I must also try to rise high and tall .


I am a Palestinian child. I am a Palestinian child


People think, I am meek and mild.


Playing with death, is my ordinary game,


For me , earth and sky are all the same;


I am a violent storm, no power can tame,


My enemy will suffer a lasting shame.


I am a Palestinian child. I am a Palestinian child .


People think, I am meek and mild.


Desire for freedom makes me wild,


I am a Palestinian child. I am a Palestinian child


*************************************************
Dr. Mustafa Kamal Sherwani
All India Muslim Forum

The Gift of gratitude

Two old friends bumped into one another on the street one day. One of them looked forlorn, almost on the verge of tears. His friend asked, 'What has the world done to you, my old friend?'



The sad fellow said, 'Let me tell you. Three weeks ago, an uncle died and left me forty thousand dollars.'



'Wow! That's a lot of money.'



'But you see, two weeks ago, a cousin I never even knew died, and left me eighty-five thousand free and clear.'



'Sounds like you've been blessed....'



'You don't understand!' the sad man interrupted. 'Last week my great-aunt passed away. I inherited almost a quarter of a million'



Now his friend was really confused. 'Then, why do you look so glum?'



'Well, this week... Nothing!'



And that's the trouble with receiving something on a regular basis.



Even if it is a gift, we eventually come to expect it. Someone once suggested to me a way to test someone's character.



Give him (or her) $5 a day for a month. Then stop, and see what his reaction is. The natural tendency is that if we receive a gift long enough, we come to view it as an entitlement. We feel hurt, even angry, if we don't receive it any longer.



It's the same way with the blessings God gives us every day.....the comfortable home I live in, the beautiful scenery around me, the clean water that I drink. But after receiving these gifts (and a multitude of others) for years, I sometimes fail to be grateful. I've come to expect these good things



And when one of them is removed for a short while (like the water being cut off), I get upset. Make an effort today to recognize the blessings you've come to take for granted.



Focus on what you have rather than on what you don't have, and see if it doesn't improve your attitude.



Cultivate the gift of gratitude

Israel’s Lies

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n02/sieg01_.html

29 January 2009

Israel’s Lies

Henry Siegman

Western governments and most of the Western media have accepted a number of Israeli claims justifying the military assault on Gaza: that Hamas consistently violated the six-month truce that Israel observed and then refused to extend it; that Israel therefore had no choice but to destroy Hamas’s capacity to launch missiles into Israeli towns; that Hamas is a terrorist organisation, part of a global jihadi network; and that Israel has acted not only in its own defence but on behalf of an international struggle by Western democracies against this network.

I am not aware of a single major American newspaper, radio station or TV channel whose coverage of the assault on Gaza questions this version of events. Criticism of Israel’s actions, if any (and there has been none from the Bush administration), has focused instead on whether the IDF’s carnage is proportional to the threat it sought to counter, and whether it is taking adequate measures to prevent civilian casualties.

Middle East peacemaking has been smothered in deceptive euphemisms, so let me state bluntly that each of these claims is a lie. Israel, not Hamas, violated the truce: Hamas undertook to stop firing rockets into Israel; in return, Israel was to ease its throttlehold on Gaza. In fact, during the truce, it tightened it further. This was confirmed not only by every neutral international observer and NGO on the scene but by Brigadier General (Res.) Shmuel Zakai, a former commander of the IDF’s Gaza Division. In an interview in Ha’aretz on 22 December, he accused Israel’s government of having made a ‘central error’ during the tahdiyeh, the six-month period of relative truce, by failing ‘to take advantage of the calm to improve, rather than markedly worsen, the economic plight of the Palestinians of the Strip . . . When you create a tahdiyeh, and the economic pressure on the Strip continues,’ General Zakai said, ‘it is obvious that Hamas will try to reach an improved tahdiyeh, and that their way to achieve this is resumed Qassam fire . . . You cannot just land blows, leave the Palestinians in Gaza in the economic distress they’re in, and expect that Hamas will just sit around and do nothing.’

The truce, which began in June last year and was due for renewal in December, required both parties to refrain from violent action against the other. Hamas had to cease its rocket assaults and prevent the firing of rockets by other groups such as Islamic Jihad (even Israel’s intelligence agencies acknowledged this had been implemented with surprising effectiveness), and Israel had to put a stop to its targeted assassinations and military incursions. This understanding was seriously violated on 4 November, when the IDF entered Gaza and killed six members of Hamas. Hamas responded by launching Qassam rockets and Grad missiles. Even so, it offered to extend the truce, but only on condition that Israel ended its blockade. Israel refused. It could have met its obligation to protect its citizens by agreeing to ease the blockade, but it didn’t even try. It cannot be said that Israel launched its assault to protect its citizens from rockets. It did so to protect its right to continue the strangulation of Gaza’s population.

Everyone seems to have forgotten that Hamas declared an end to suicide bombings and rocket fire when it decided to join the Palestinian political process, and largely stuck to it for more than a year. Bush publicly welcomed that decision, citing it as an example of the success of his campaign for democracy in the Middle East. (He had no other success to point to.) When Hamas unexpectedly won the election, Israel and the US immediately sought to delegitimise the result and embraced Mahmoud Abbas, the head of Fatah, who until then had been dismissed by Israel’s leaders as a ‘plucked chicken’. They armed and trained his security forces to overthrow Hamas; and when Hamas – brutally, to be sure – pre-empted this violent attempt to reverse the result of the first honest democratic election in the modern Middle East, Israel and the Bush administration imposed the blockade.

Israel seeks to counter these indisputable facts by maintaining that in withdrawing Israeli settlements from Gaza in 2005, Ariel Sharon gave Hamas the chance to set out on the path to statehood, a chance it refused to take; instead, it transformed Gaza into a launching-pad for firing missiles at Israel’s civilian population. The charge is a lie twice over. First, for all its failings, Hamas brought to Gaza a level of law and order unknown in recent years, and did so without the large sums of money that donors showered on the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority. It eliminated the violent gangs and warlords who terrorised Gaza under Fatah’s rule. Non-observant Muslims, Christians and other minorities have more religious freedom under Hamas rule than they would have in Saudi Arabia, for example, or under many other Arab regimes.

The greater lie is that Sharon’s withdrawal from Gaza was intended as a prelude to further withdrawals and a peace agreement. This is how Sharon’s senior adviser Dov Weisglass, who was also his chief negotiator with the Americans, described the withdrawal from Gaza, in an interview with Ha’aretz in August 2004:
What I effectively agreed to with the Americans was that part of the settlements [i.e. the major settlement blocks on the West Bank] would not be dealt with at all, and the rest will not be dealt with until the Palestinians turn into Finns . . . The significance [of the agreement with the US] is the freezing of the political process. And when you freeze that process, you prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state and you prevent a discussion about the refugees, the borders and Jerusalem. Effectively, this whole package that is called the Palestinian state, with all that it entails, has been removed from our agenda indefinitely. And all this with [President Bush’s] authority and permission . . . and the ratification of both houses of Congress.

Do the Israelis and Americans think that Palestinians don’t read the Israeli papers, or that when they saw what was happening on the West Bank they couldn’t figure out for themselves what Sharon was up to?

Israel’s government would like the world to believe that Hamas launched its Qassam rockets because that is what terrorists do and Hamas is a generic terrorist group. In fact, Hamas is no more a ‘terror organisation’ (Israel’s preferred term) than the Zionist movement was during its struggle for a Jewish homeland. In the late 1930s and 1940s, parties within the Zionist movement resorted to terrorist activities for strategic reasons. According to Benny Morris, it was the Irgun that first targeted civilians. He writes in Righteous Victims that an upsurge of Arab terrorism in 1937 ‘triggered a wave of Irgun bombings against Arab crowds and buses, introducing a new dimension to the conflict’. He also documents atrocities committed during the 1948-49 war by the IDF, admitting in a 2004 interview, published in Ha’aretz, that material released by Israel’s Ministry of Defence showed that ‘there were far more Israeli acts of massacre than I had previously thought . . . In the months of April-May 1948, units of the Haganah were given operational orders that stated explicitly that they were to uproot the villagers, expel them, and destroy the villages themselves.’ In a number of Palestinian villages and towns the IDF carried out organised executions of civilians. Asked by Ha’aretz whether he condemned the ethnic cleansing, Morris replied that he did not:
A Jewish state would not have come into being without the uprooting of 700,000 Palestinians. Therefore it was necessary to uproot them. There was no choice but to expel that population. It was necessary to cleanse the hinterland and cleanse the border areas and cleanse the main roads. It was necessary to cleanse the villages from which our convoys and our settlements were fired on.

In other words, when Jews target and kill innocent civilians to advance their national struggle, they are patriots. When their adversaries do so, they are terrorists.

It is too easy to describe Hamas simply as a ‘terror organisation’. It is a religious nationalist movement that resorts to terrorism, as the Zionist movement did during its struggle for statehood, in the mistaken belief that it is the only way to end an oppressive occupation and bring about a Palestinian state. While Hamas’s ideology formally calls for that state to be established on the ruins of the state of Israel, this doesn’t determine Hamas’s actual policies today any more than the same declaration in the PLO charter determined Fatah’s actions.
These are not the conclusions of an apologist for Hamas but the opinions of the former head of Mossad and Sharon’s national security adviser, Ephraim Halevy. The Hamas leadership has undergone a change ‘right under our very noses’, Halevy wrote recently in Yedioth Ahronoth, by recognising that ‘its ideological goal is not attainable and will not be in the foreseeable future.’ It is now ready and willing to see the establishment of a Palestinian state within the temporary borders of 1967. Halevy noted that while Hamas has not said how ‘temporary’ those borders would be, ‘they know that the moment a Palestinian state is established with their co-operation, they will be obligated to change the rules of the game: they will have to adopt a path that could lead them far from their original ideological goals.’ In an earlier article, Halevy also pointed out the absurdity of linking Hamas to al-Qaida.

In the eyes of al-Qaida, the members of Hamas are perceived as heretics due to their stated desire to participate, even indirectly, in processes of any understandings or agreements with Israel. [The Hamas political bureau chief, Khaled] Mashal’s declaration diametrically contradicts al-Qaida’s approach, and provides Israel with an opportunity, perhaps a historic one, to leverage it for the better.

Why then are Israel’s leaders so determined to destroy Hamas? Because they believe that its leadership, unlike that of Fatah, cannot be intimidated into accepting a peace accord that establishes a Palestinian ‘state’ made up of territorially disconnected entities over which Israel would be able to retain permanent control. Control of the West Bank has been the unwavering objective of Israel’s military, intelligence and political elites since the end of the Six-Day War.[*] They believe that Hamas would not permit such a cantonisation of Palestinian territory, no matter how long the occupation continues. They may be wrong about Abbas and his superannuated cohorts, but they are entirely right about Hamas.

Middle East observers wonder whether Israel’s assault on Hamas will succeed in destroying the organisation or expelling it from Gaza. This is an irrelevant question. If Israel plans to keep control over any future Palestinian entity, it will never find a Palestinian partner, and even if it succeeds in dismantling Hamas, the movement will in time be replaced by a far more radical Palestinian opposition.

If Barack Obama picks a seasoned Middle East envoy who clings to the idea that outsiders should not present their own proposals for a just and sustainable peace agreement, much less press the parties to accept it, but instead leave them to work out their differences, he will assure a future Palestinian resistance far more extreme than Hamas – one likely to be allied with al-Qaida. For the US, Europe and most of the rest of the world, this would be the worst possible outcome. Perhaps some Israelis, including the settler leadership, believe it would serve their purposes, since it would provide the government with a compelling pretext to hold on to all of Palestine. But this is a delusion that would bring about the end of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state.

Anthony Cordesman, one of the most reliable military analysts of the Middle East, and a friend of Israel, argued in a 9 January report for the Center for Strategic and International Studies that the tactical advantages of continuing the operation in Gaza were outweighed by the strategic cost – and were probably no greater than any gains Israel may have made early in the war in selective strikes on key Hamas facilities. ‘Has Israel somehow blundered into a steadily escalating war without a clear strategic goal, or at least one it can credibly achieve?’ he asks. ‘Will Israel end in empowering an enemy in political terms that it defeated in tactical terms? Will Israel’s actions seriously damage the US position in the region, any hope of peace, as well as moderate Arab regimes and voices in the process? To be blunt, the answer so far seems to be yes.’ Cordesman concludes that ‘any leader can take a tough stand and claim that tactical gains are a meaningful victory. If this is all that Olmert, Livni and Barak have for an answer, then they have disgraced themselves and damaged their country and their friends.’

15 January

Israel has no plans for peace

CBS - Israeli settlers trying to prevent peace deal

CBS: Israeli settlers trying to prevent peace deal

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http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=S_UwGgLdmdI&feature=related

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http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=O8KwUSQL9zc&feature=related