Texas Jewish Post (Fort Worth, Tex.), Vol. 58, No. 16, Ed. 1 Thursday, April 15, 2004 Page: 4 of 24
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Texas Jewish Post
In Our 58th Year
April 15,2004
1
1
t
By fames D. Besser
TJP Washington Correspondent
New Aid Crunch Ahead
American foreign aid was a major
sweetener for Israel and Egypt in the
1979 Camp David agreement, and
history could be repeating itself if
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s Gaza
disengagement plan—the center-
piece of his meetings with President
Bush this week—goes the way Wash-
ington wants.
But this time around, getting the
aid could prove more difficult for
both budgetary and ideological rea-
sons.
This week Palestinian Foreign
Minister Nabil Shaath told Reuters
that U.S. officials have promised to
“lead a major effort to provide finan-
cial aid not only for relief and
reconstruction but also for major
development and job creation in
Gaza."
Israel, too, is hoping for a major
aid package to help defray some of
the costs of the sweeping disengage-
ment. Israeli officials have insisted
that no concrete aid proposal is on
the table, but Prime Minister Sharon
was expected to propose up to $5 bil-
lion in extra aid—officially, to boost
development in the Negev.
Sharon wants the assurance ot
new U.S. aid to bolster his effort to
sell the controversial plan in the
upcoming I.ikud referendum.
But the requests for new aid come
at a particularly inopportune
moment.
Already, Congress is wrestling
with runaway federal deficits, and
the problem is expected to get worse
as the impact of recent tax cuts
grows and military and homeland
security spending continue to soar.
Many pro-Israel activists expect
an across-the-board cut in foreign
aid in the upcoming fiscal year that
would not exempt Israel's big aid
allotment.
And with hostility to Yasser
Arafat’s Palestinian Authority run-
ning high on Capitol Hill, it’s hard
to picture the conditions under
which U.S. aid might be approved.
“Nobody wants to be accused of
voting more money for the PLO—
especially before the election," said a
longtime pro-Israel lobbyist, who
added that any aid depends on “how
the PA handles the transition in
Gaza. If they include Hamas in the
process, there’s absolutely no way
this Congress will vote for aid.”
A modest appropriation of
humanitarian aid to help improve
conditions in Gaza is possible,
Capitol 11 ill sources say, but only if it
goes directly to non-governmental
human service organizations.
A f<*r the Israel portion of the
new aid, U.S. officials will be careful
any impression they are
Washington Watch
helping fund the relocation of set-
tlers, since U.S. policy has
consistently opposed the spread ot
settlements.
There were reports in the Israeli
press that the Prime Minister will
seek $5 billion for the development
of the Negev—and that some ot that
money could ultimately be used to
help with the relocation process,
since that could be the destination of
some uprooted Gaza settlers.
Congress will be more sympa-
thetic to the Israeli request, but
budget realities could make it an
extraordinarily hard sell, especially
as popular domestic programs get
slashed to the bone.
Also last week. Secretary of State
Colin Powell indicated that loan
guarantees for Israel will not be
reduced because of its controversial
security fence.
“We have expressed concern to
the Israelis over time about the route
of the fence and whether it intrudes
too deeply into Palestinian terri-
tory—more than is necessary for
legitimate right of self-defense,"
Powell told a Senate panel. “But at
the moment, we don’t have any plans
to dock them over the route of the
fence.”
Despite earlier reservations,
Powell endorsed the fence. “Israel
has the right to build a fence to pro-
tect itself if it feels that’s what it needs
to keep the terrorists from getting
into Israel,” he said.
A provision of the law authorizing
the new loan guarantees allows U.S.
officials to deduct for activities
deemed inconsistent with U.S.-Israel
understandings. Last year, adminis-
tration threats to impose that
reduction were a factor in Israel’s
decision to change the fence route.
The administration is still
expected to reduce the total amount
of the guarantees to reflect ongoing
Israeli settlement activity.
Charges Fly
in Presidential Race
Republicans continue their effort
to win Jewish campaign money and
votes by tarring Sen. John Kerry (D-
Mass), the presumptive Democratic
presidential nominee, as too close to
Islamic groups that support the ter-
rorists who attack Israel.
But that effort has produced little
controversy—in part because of
their own standard bearer’s ties to
the same groups.
Harder for the Dems to shake will
be recent comments of one of their
own: former President Jimmy Carter.
Last week Republican operatives
were spreading the word that Kerry
addressed the December convention
of the Muslim Public Affairs Council
(MPAC), a group that has defended
groups such as Hamas.
In that speech, Kerry appealed for
m.
Fife*
Muslim support and criticized the
Bush administration’s anti-terror
domestic policies for encroaching on
civil liberties.
What the Republicans failed to
mention is that President Bush met
with the groups leader, Salam Al-
Marayati, at the White House shortly
after the September 11 terror attacks.
That produced some sharp ques-
tioning at a September 28, 2001
White House briefing about why the
President would host someone who
suggested Israel should be a “suspect”
in the September 11 terror attacks.
Then-White House spokesman
Ari Fleischer downplayed the
meeting.
“I don’t think it would surprise
anybody that the President often has
meetings to discuss a whole host of
issues with people who he doesn't
agree with everything they may have
said in the course of their lives or
careers,” Fleischer said.
But Jewish Democrats say Repub-
lican ties to the same group will keep
the GOP charges from gaining any
traction among Jewish voters.
The recent comments by former
President Carter could prove more
awkward for the Kerry team.
#
At an informal session with
reporters in Texas, Carter was asked
about the source of anti-American
fervor across the Islamic world. His
answer was simple: this country’s
friendship with Israel.
“The prime source of animosity
towards the United States is the lack
of progress in dealing with the Pales-
tinian issue,” he said. “We have been
exclusively committed to the policies
of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and
Israel, and have made no effort to
have a balanced negotiating position
between Israel and the Palestinians.”
Abraham Foxman, national
director of the Anti-Defamation
League, blasted Carter’s statements
as an “outrageous distortion and
oversimplification.
Contrary to Carter s claims,
Foxman said, “the current adminis-
tration, as with previous
administrations, has sought to
achieve peace and security for all
people in the region through the pro-
motion of bilateral negotiations.”
Kerry campaign insiders say the
Carter flap will blow over quickly;
Jewish Democrats aren’t so sure.
“At a time when the Republican
effort among Jewish voters seemed to
be stalling, along comes Jimmy Carter
to give them a boost, said a longtime
Jewish Democrat. “That’s the kind of
help John Kerry doesn’t need.”
Schumerto Google;
Stop boosting hate site
Google, the popular Internet
search engine whose name has
entered the lexicon as a verb, claims
that it represents the ultimate in
objectivity: complex mathematical
algorithms, not humans, decide on
things like ranking in search results.
But that high-tech process can
also boost the hate groups that thrive
on the Internet, and now a leading
lewish senator wants the California
company to do something about it.
Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY)
recentlv wrote to the California-
i
based company demanding that it
“de-list” an anti-Semitic site that is
given special prominence by the
Google algorithms.
The problem: when users use
Google to search for the word “ Jew,”
the first site that turns up is “Jew
Watch, a site that Schumer’s office
called an “anti-Semitic site pro-
moting Holocaust conspiracy
theories.”
“As one of the most popular
search engines in the world, it’s out-
rageous that Google gives top-billing
to a hate-spewing group," Schumer
said in a statement. “They need to act
immediately to give users an appro-
priate link when they seek
information on the Jewish people.”
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According to Schumer, the reason
Jew Watch turns up first is that the
Google algorithm is based on the
number of other sites linked to the
one being searched. Because there is
a vast network of anti-Semitic and
Holocaust-denying sites around the
world that are linked to each other,
sites like Jew Watch turn up at the
top of the list of search “hits.”
Other search engines, Schumer
said, use different criteria in the
search process; the result is that Jew
Watch and other anti-Semitic sites
are ranked lower.
A similar search on Yahoo gener-
ates a list of Jewish organizations and
pro-Israel sites in the top ten; Dog-
pile, another major search engine,
puts a Jewish dating service first.
Schumer stressed that he wasn’t
calling for removal of the site, just for
a change in the search process so that
the offensive site does not appear
first when Web surfers enter “Jew” as
their search word.
Google officials say their hands
are tied, but that’s not good enough,
said Rabbi Abraham Cooper, asso-
ciate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal
Center.
“Their technology is being
manipulated for hateful purposes,"
he said. “Their response is to hide
behind that technology, saying that
there’s nothing they can do about it.”
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Wisch, Rene & Wisch-Ray, Sharon. Texas Jewish Post (Fort Worth, Tex.), Vol. 58, No. 16, Ed. 1 Thursday, April 15, 2004, newspaper, April 15, 2004; Fort Worth, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth755115/m1/4/: accessed June 10, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; .