• Reports
  • October 27, 2006
  • 20 minutes read

What You Need To Know About Alyssa A. Lappen

In her response to Alexis Y. Debat’s rebuttal to her article “Islam’s useful idiots”, posted on Ikhwanweb on 25 October, Ms Alyssa A. Lappen made numerous mendacious claims about Islam and Judaism.
 
For example, she claimed that the Shas religious party in Israel “has never advocated violence” against Arabs.
 
This is not true. In April 2000, the Hebrew press and the Israeli Public Radio (call Yisrael) quoted Rabbi Ovadia Yosef,  Spiritual Leader of Shas, as saying the following:
 
“It is forbidden to be merciful to them (the Arabs). You must send missiles to them and annihilate them. They are evil and damnable. The Lord shall return the Arabs’ deeds on their own heads, waste their seed, and exterminate them, devastate them and make them vanish from this world.”
 
Yosef also strongly opposed the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza and is now opposed to ending the Nazi-like Israeli military occupation of the West Bank.
 
Indeed, Yosef and the rest of his followers never uttered a word against the criminal Israeli policy of killing, starving and hounding the Palestinians.
 
Lappen  also claims that Jews have no programs to conquer the world.
 
This is also not accurate, because some Jews do.  Nearly all messianic Jews, e.g. settlers, believe they must commit every conceivable act of violence and terror, e.g. blowing up mosques and churches, in order to expedite the appearance of the Redeemer who will rule the entire world from Jerusalem. Besides, doesn’t the Zionist movement already control the policies and politics of the only superpower in the wrold, the US, today? If this is not world domination, then how global domination should look like? Doesn’t the Zionist movement, through AIPAC, control Congress? Doesn’t Zionism control in one way or the other the media and show biz in the US?
 
Finally, Lappen quotes highly selectively and in a brazenly tendentious and de-contextualized manner from some classical Islamic  references as to Islam’s treatment of non-Muslims.
 
Well, I advise here to pay some attention to the  numerous Jewish texts that  view non-Jews as either children of a lesser God or outright animals. Has she ever heard of a book called “hatanya,” for example. She should read it very carefully.
 
Indeed, we here in Palestine have rabbis and Knesset members and cabinet ministers  who believe that non-Jews are simply  animals and they say so openly and brazenly.
 
One rabbi and Knesset member by the name of Arieh Eldad last year castigated the Israeli army and police for “treating human beings (Jewish settlers) like Arabs (animals).
 
In short, Lappen should pay more attention to her own glass house. Maybe she should also read some Talmudic texts as  Chesronot Shas before spewing her hatred of Islam and Muslims.


Khaled Amayreh


Ikhwanweb, West Bank


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Jewish Rabbis Allow Killing Of Innocent Children In Lebanon
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(No innocents in Qana), Yesha Rabbinical Council
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information clearing house


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Lappen, a Senior Fellow at the American Center for Democracy (ACD), frequently co-authors articles with Dr. Rachel Ehrenfeld, ACD Director and a member of the Committee on the Present Danger. She describes herself as “a freelance journalist and poet, whose work frequently focuses on Jewish themes.”


For the past few years, Lappen has written for websites such as FrontPageMag.com  and Campus-Watch and print publications like Midstream Magazine, “A Monthly Jewish Review”. Several websites re-post her articles. Lappen has also published in, or her articles have been republished in,
Middle East Forum (the Daniel Pipes related “forum”)
DiscoverTheNetwork.


Some of her articles have been added to the “research” section of the Campus-Watch-like project. Jihad Watch/JihadWatch.org. Although her articles often appear on this site, her relationship to it are unknown. Lappen has praised Jihad Watch (Director Robert Spencer) on the web.
 
 
Alyssa A. Lappen, another FrontPage and Campus-Watch “journalist”, is a prolific Amazon book “reviewer”. Her reviews tend to have the following defining characteristics: if the book is favorable to Israel it is generally issued glowing remarks, if the book is critical of Israeli policies it is denigrated, and books that present the Palestinian narrative are similarly savaged. Books like Joan Peter’s From Time Immemorial are issued such glowing praise as “This monumental and fascinating book.” Note that Prof. Norman G. Finkelstein and Prof. Yehoshua Porath have demonstrated that this book is a “threadbare hoax”, a product of the shoddiest “scholarship”, and a book written for propaganda purposes.


Lappen issued glowing reviews of dubious texts published by Encounter Books, an enterprise run by Peter Collier, Horowitz’s longtime buddy. Lappen’s activities undermine what could be a valuable resource of bona fide book reviews; instead her propaganda imperatives transforms the book review section to just another ideologically debased space. Amazon may well want to implement a more stringent policy to avoid dragging its website further into the mud.



In her FrontPage articles, Lappen often demonstrates a similar lack of intellectual integrity to that found in her book “reviews”. Some of her articles deal with the professors of Middle East Studies at Columbia Univ. (MEALAC), a current Zionist pet hate. Another favored target for smearing is the ISM, the non-violent volunteer group opposing the Israeli occupation. To smear the ISM she quotes Walid Shoebat, a dubious “Zionist Palestinian” who broadcasts from a settler radio station and wears a kippa. To score cheap propaganda points, Zionist organizations have put Shoebat on tour around the US , and Lappen quotes him extensively. Her technique amounts to the journalistic equivalent of quoting the village idiot. Shoebat often talks about the hateful nature of “jihad theology”, and Lappen uses this to smear the ISM and its founders:
“Not surprisingly, Beit Sahour is also home to Ghasson [sic] Andoni and George Rishmawi, are the co-founders of the Rapprochement Center . They also co-founded the International Solidarity Movement with Huwaida Arraf and Adam Shapiro. Both organizations appear to be driven by the malevolent jihad ideology that Walid Shoebat describes.”
Now, even a group advocating non-violent resistance and dialog with the Israelis is smeared with Lappen’s favorite term of abuse. Never mind that most of the leading Palestinian activists of the ISM are Christians and that roughly a third of the overall ISM membership is Jewish (including one of the co-founders, Adam Shapiro) — they still deserve Lappen’s “jihadist” scurrilous smear. It is too much for Zionists to acknowledge that there are sensible and courageous Palestinians seeking to defend their rights using non-violent means. Lappen and her FrontPage ilk smear Palestinians in the ISM and all other Palestinians with wide brushstrokes, and in the process demonize and dehumanize all Palestinians.


Ahmed El Gaseer


Ikhwanweb, Washington


Other Topics


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Antiwar.com – Redwood City,CA,USA
Rebuttal and response(1)
American Thinker – Berkeley,AZ,USA

Response and rebuttal (2)
American Thinker – Berkeley,AZ,USA
Nick Fielding’s Speech At The NYU Forum On The MB
Ikhwanweb, London-UK
Ikhwanweb Covers The NYU Forum On The Muslim Brotherhood
Ikhwanweb, London-UK
Waiting for Futouh
DemocracyArsenal.org – New York,NY,USA
Open Forum At NYU On The Muslim Brotherhood 
Ikhwanweb
Denied Entery
 Newsweek
Muslim Brotherhood Member Blocked From Participating in NYU Panel 
NY Sun
British Muslim leader barred from US entry
The News – International – Pakistan
Muslim Brotherhood Member Blocked From Participating in NYU Panel
New York Sun – New York,NY,USA
Open Forum on The Muslim Brotherhood
Ikhwanweb, London-UK
United States stops entry of British Muslim leader
Reuters – USA
Muslim Brotherhood Opens Office in Washington
AINA – Modesto,CA,USA
NYU IN ISLAM FUROR
NYPOST.COM
Engaging Moderate Muslims—Really?
Steven Brooke, National Interest Online – Washington, U.S
Waiting For Futouh
Shadi Hamid, Democracy Arsenal , USA


 


External Links


Mark A. Levine, “Joining the Blogiverse, Entering the Fray,” History News Network Blogs, March 30, 2004. An anti-Lappen commentary.


Paul de Rooij, “Undermining Civil Society: David Horowitz’s CorrosiveProjects“, CounterPunch, April 11, 2005. An editorial opposing Lappen’s work