Clue: It involves a place on his anatomy where the sun don’t shine.

Updates (Israel time; most recent at top)

10:30PM: Media bias of the day:

In this picture taken Saturday, Nov. 7, 2009, a domestic cat – an unlikely edition to an aspiring zoo, is seen climbing its cage at the Marah Land Zoo in eastern Gaza City. There’s little to do for entertainment for Gaza’s 1.4 million residents because of a two-year Israeli and Egyptian blockade, and the territory’s zoos became a popular form of past time. In 2008 the Marah Zoo was a fully functioning zoo, but during Israel’s January offensive, 90 percent of the animals died. Due to restrictions of the Israeli and Egyptian blockade – new animals can not be obtained – unless they are transported through the tunnels. As a result, there are not as large a variety of animals as before, but Gazans still flock to the zoo, due to the lack of sources of entertainment in the Gaza Strip.
(AP Photo/ Tara Todras-Whitehill)

Despite this Wikipedia entry of a caption, Ms Todras-Whitehill did not see it fit to mention another important aspect of the zoo, which incidentally could also account for some of the animals dying during Operation Cast Lead. But then again, given the lengths she seems to have gone to in order to take a picture of a cat and turn it into a piece of anti-Israel propaganda, I’m not surprised.

9:56PM: Israeli President Shimon Peres has offered Brazil ‘100 years of friendship.’

Which means he’ll probably still be alive when that time period runs out.

7:48PM: Reasons to hate the French #869: Their Foreign Minister.

France fears that Israel no longer desires a Middle East peace deal, French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner said on Tuesday, adding that Paris remained deeply opposed to settlement building in the West Bank.

—-

Speaking on France Inter radio, Kouchner made clear he was not expecting any swift break through in Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations.

“What really hurts me, and this shocks us, is that before there used to be a great peace movement in Israel. There was a left that made itself heard and a real desire for peace,” Kouchner said.

“It seems to me, and I hope that I am completely wrong, that this desire has completely vanished, as though people no longer believe in it,” he added.

Why do you think that is, Douchner?

I posit that it is due to Israelis waking up to the fact that the more we appease palestinian terrorism, the further away from peace we move.

7:40PM: Music interlude, dedicated to PA President Mahmoud Abbas.

5:18PM: Dang! We’ve lost our number one ranking in the Al Qaeda Enemy charts to the Shi’ites who have reached number one with a bullet.

The leader of Al-Qaida in the Arabian Penninsula warned Tuesday that Shi’ite Muslims, particularly Iran, posed more danger to the world than either Jews or Christians.

“They [Shiites] are being driven by a greed to take over Muslim countries and they are full of a wish to annihilate Sunnis,” Mohammed bin Abdul Rahman al-Rashid said in an audio recording carried by the U.S. monitoring group SITE Intelligence.

“Their threat to Islam and its people is much bigger than that from Jews and Christians,” he added.

3:48PM: Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon in an interview with Danish TV.

Note: Don’t panic when you hear the interviewer at the beginning sounding like the Swedish chef. The interview itself is in English.

8:52AM: Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and US President Barack Obama have met for almost two hours, followed by a standard photo and press conference only a White House statement that “The president reaffirmed our strong commitment to Israel’s security, and discussed security cooperation on a range of issues.”

Hmmm.

5:48AM: Of buses and barriers:

A Palestinian child is reflected on the glass of a bus as it drives past a section of Israel’s controversial separation barrier in al-Ram between the West Bank city of Ramallah and Jerusalem.(AFP/Daniel Bar-On)

While on the subject of the barrier and buses, look here for a reminder of why the barrier exists.

Asaf Ramon, killed in yesterday’s F16 crash, is to be buried next to his father, in a ceremony attended by the Prime Minister of Israel, who is postponing his meeting with US special envoy George Mitchell to attend.

Updates (Israel time; most recent at top)

6:38PM: Together again: A few hours ago, Asaf Ramon was laid to rest next to his father Ilan Ramon.

5:05PM: Today’s must-read comes from my friend Richard Landes, who deals with the susceptibility of Western news media to palestinian disinformation.

4:40PM: Bizarro World: If George Galloway wasn’t the George Galloway we have to come to know and loathe.

4:22PM: Israeli PM Binyamin Netanyahu has stated there will not be a complete freeze on “settlement” building and that building in Jerusalem will proceed as usual.

“”The Palestinians expect a complete halt to building; it is now clear that this will not happen.. Jerusalem is not a settlement and the building [there] will continue as normal.”

“We clarified to the U.S. that we would continue building around 2,500 units whose construction had already begun. Two days ago, we authorized 450 additional units. I stated that we would consider reducing the extent of our building.”

“The reduction in building will be for a limited time and there is not yet an agreement with the U.S. on the period of time.”

11:00AM: Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden (or someone impersonating him, if you subscribe to the view that he has been roasting in hell for some time) has warned the American people over their government’s close ties with Israel in an apparently new audio tape posted on an Islamist website.

“The time has come for you to liberate yourselves from fear and the ideological terrorism of neo-conservatives and the Israeli lobby,” Bin Laden’s latest tape said.

“The reason for our dispute with you is your support for your ally Israel, occupying our land in Palestine.”

Bin Laden/Bin Laden impersonator is capitalizing on the West’s (misguided) belief that the Arab-Israeli issue is the root cause of terrorism and the existence of groups such as Al Qaeda. This is simply not true. As Dore Gold wrote in his paper Israel is Not the Issue: Militant Islam and America:

A 1998 fatwa (religious ruling) issued by bin Laden jointly with militant Islamic leaders from Egypt, Pakistan, and Bangladesh provides an insight into the sources of his anti-Americanism.9 The document calls “on every Muslim…to kill the Americans and plunder their money wherever and whenever they find it.” True, bin Laden uses language like “the Zionist-Crusader alliance” that sweeps in the issue of Israel, but the primary justification for doing so is that “for over seven years the United States has been occupying the lands of Islam in the holiest of places, the Arabian Peninsula, plundering its riches, dictating to its rulers, humiliating its people, [and] terrorizing its neighbors.” Having helped to defeat the Soviet Union in Afghanistan in the 1980s with other Arab volunteers, bin Laden has now turned his attention to the remaining superpower, the United States. U.S. forces are specifically described as “Crusader armies spreading…like locusts.”

A second bin Laden grievance is “the continuing aggression against the Iraqi people.” The “guarantee of Israel’s survival” appears only as the third reason for criticizing U.S. policy. Bin Laden also refers to the Jews’ “occupation of Jerusalem,” but gives no indication whatsoever of accepting Jewish statehood within any borders. In fact, in 1998 he was critical of the Saudis for their support of “Yasser Arafat’s regime” against Hamas.10 Israel’s very existence is the issue — not the status of the peace process. It is not surprising that the planning and training for the September 11 attack is believed to have begun several years ago, well before the current Palestinian intifada and the stalemate in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. There simply is no correlation between the new terrorism facing the U.S. and the Arab-Israeli peace process.

Meanwhile, look who has emboldened the terrorists:

The speaker also appeared to refer to criticisms former US President Jimmy Carter made in June of Israel’s Gaza invasion earlier this year.

5:45AM: Well done to the AP, who’s bias is so pronounced, they can manage to make a group of homeless-looking palestinians the focus of a photo dealing with the tragic death of Asaf Ramon.

Bonus points for using the words “warplane” (twice) and “combat helicopter.”

A Palestinian family walk on a hill as an Israeli air force combat helicopter flies over the crash site of a F-16 warplane that was flown by Assaf Ramon, the son of an Israeli astronaut who died in the space shuttle Columbia disaster, near the West Bank Jewish settlement of Pnei Hever, west of Hebron, Sunday, Sept. 13, 2009. The son of an Israeli astronaut who died in the space shuttle Columbia disaster six years ago was killed Sunday when his F-16 warplane crashed on a routine training flight, the Israeli military said. (AP Photo)

The Arab League and Hamas both said that Arabs should not normalize ties with Israel as long as we don’t implement a ” settlement freeze.”

“It is impossible to speak of normalization when Israel rejects any significant measure,” Arab League chief Amr Moussa said at a joint news conference in Cairo with Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal.

“Israel persists in its intransigent position and rejects every significant measure” concerning a freeze in settlement constructions, he said.

In case you hadn’t noticed, this is the first time the Arabs have spoken about a “settlement freeze,” and it certainly wasn’t included in any of the no’s of the the Khartoum Resolution. I also didn’t quite catch it in the Hamas charter.

Updates (Israel time; most recent at top)

9:50PM: Biased caption of the day:

Israelis soldiers stand in formation in front of a torch during a ceremony to mark the 80th anniversary of the 1929 riots in the West bank city of Hebron, Monday, Sept. 7, 2009. Jews lived and worshipped in Hebron for centuries but fled in 1929 after the city’s Arabs, angered by the increased Zionist presence in British-controlled Palestine, killed 67 Jews. (AP Photo/Sebastian Scheiner)

Well done AP, on trying to explain away the massacre of 67 Jews at the hands of Arab mobs, by portraying the Jews as occupiers. Reading this caption, it seems one is supposed to almost feel the Arab frustration.

If you want to know what really happened that fateful day 80 years ago, see here and here.

9:10PM: NGO Monitor has released “the first systematic study” on Human Rights Watch’s (HRW) activities in the Middle East over the past several years.

Publication coincides with the anticipated publication of the Goldstone committee’s Gaza report, and UN Human Rights Commissioner Pillay’s threat of  International Criminal Court (ICC) action. The Goldstone process closely echoes HRW’s agenda and faulty methodology, which are examined in NGO Monitor’s report.

NGO Monitor’s report of HRW’s Middle East activities from 2001 to 2009, with over 80 pages of case studies and analyses of HRW’s publications related to Israel, includes:

• Profiles of HRW’s Middle East division staff, led by ideologues with a history of pro-Palestinian activism, rather than human rights experts.  The division is headed by Sarah Leah Whitson (who actively supported the “Caterpillar” Israel boycott campaign, and led the HRW fundraising trip to Saudi Arabia). Similarly, deputy director Joe Stork, spent 20 years as a founder and editor of the radical anti-Zionist Middle East Report (MERIP), including participation in a “Zionism and Racism” conference in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, before joining HRW. Other in-depth profiles analyze the professional qualifications and biases of Executive Director Kenneth Roth, Reed Brody, Darryl Li, Nadia Barhoum and Lucy Mair.
• Methodological failures: HRW’s publications related to Israel, including the 2002 Jenin reports, the 2006 Lebanon war, and the flood of publications on Gaza, rely largely on claims from unreliable eyewitnesses, and local NGOs with limited or no credibility.  These reports consistently confuse speculation with fact, distort international law and omit evidence that does not support the predetermined conclusions. (In many cases, HRW ignored videos showing Hamas and Hezbollah use of human shields.) These practices systematically violate the NGO fact-finding guidelines of the International Bar Association.
• Comparative data showing the disproportionate emphasis on Israel:  This highlights HRW bias, and also diverts resources that should be focused on the oppressive regimes and absence of basic freedoms in other Middle East countries. Analysis of 2008 publications using a weighted quantitative methodology again shows HRW focused more attention on Israel than on Iran, Syria, Egypt, Jordan and others.
• HRW reports on Israel are focused on very narrow and artificial issues that strip the context of the conflict, and indict Israel from the beginning. This is demonstrated in HRW post-Gaza reports on white phosphorous, drones, and white flags, all based on unsupported Palestinian claims and speculation, while using terms like “war crimes” repeatedly.

These major flaws in HRW’s focus on Israel are also reflected in the activities of the Goldstone fact-finding mission on Gaza. Although Goldstone resigned as a Human Rights Watch board member after NGO Monitor noted a conflict of interest, his statements have strongly echoed and defended HRW’s bias, particularly in relation to the 2006 Lebanon War and over Gaza.

In parallel, HRW officials such as Kenneth Roth, have staunchly supported Goldstone, attacked the investigation’s critics, called for broad support of the investigation and reproached President Obama for neglecting to mention the commission in his Cairo address.

NGO Monitor’s President Prof Gerald Steinberg said “As shown by NGO Monitor’s unique in-depth analysis, HRW repeatedly applies unprofessional methodology in support of an anti-Israel bias.  Human rights values and research standards have been replaced by ideology. The evidence shows that the Middle East division of this powerful organization needs a full and systemic overhaul, to recover its moral foundation and relevance in promoting human rights, particularly in repressive regimes.

Furthermore, the UN human rights structure and the NGO community work in close coordination, and are mutually reinforcing.  Goldstone’s strong identification with Human Rights Watch forms the political foundation for his biased inquiry, while Pillay’s statement pushes the process further towards implementing HRW’s agenda”.

The study is available here.

Meanwhile, one-time Israellycool contributor Elder of Ziyon analyzes the pattern of bias in HRW’s “Precisely Wrong” report.

8:12PM: Palestine Today reports (auto-translated):

Gaza: Palestinian doctor out a pencil from the top baby rare, marathon surgery

Enable the surgeon nerves in the Shifa Hospital in Gaza, a doctor determined Kahil and his team of its doctors, anesthesia technicians, and nurses from a rare surgery in the infant Bakr Ghazal year-old son.

The baby deer was severely injured due to head into a pencil in the head, resulting in a deterioration in the degree of awareness and expand in the right eye pupil admitted to the intensive care unit and underwent the process successful.

This is disturbing all round: the idea of having a pencil lodged in your head, the quality of the auto-translation, and the picture accompanying the report:

That’s some one-year old.

7:20PM: Roseanne Barr continues to demonstrate the unfunny side of mental illness:

Did someone neglect to tell Madonna

that Netanyahu is a fascist and a war criminal, and that lighting shabbat candles with him would turn the stomachs of all jews who are interested in peace in israel and palestine??!!!!

Did someone neglect to tell Barr that she doesn’t know the first thing about what turns people stomachs, because if she did she wouldn’t be subjecting people to her offensiveness?

5:08PM: Separated at Birth? IAEA (potato) head Mohamed ElBaradei = fail

3:50PM: Quote of the day:

“Netanyahu’s policies are the policies of a small-time politician…The decision isn’t on the question of [settlement] construction. The decision is whether or not there will be two states here for two peoples, things that Kadima has already declared its support for..It’s not just that he doesn’t make fateful decisions, he doesn’t want to make them. He makes do with speeches and photo-ops.”

Israeli opposition leader Tzipi Livni, who clearly hates photo-ops.

12:06PM: Jane Fonda responds to claims she supports the destruction of Israel.

So– I wake up this morning to a barrage of emails giving me a link to a web posting that has been widely picked up. It says that Rabbi Hier at the Simon Wiesenthal Center (he and I were friends—I thought) claims I support the destruction of Israel because I signed (along with many other artists, historians, including eight Israelis, mostly filmmakers) a petition protesting the Toronto International Film Festival’s decision to feature a celebratory “spotlight” on Tel Aviv. We understand that by doing this the festival has become, whether knowingly or not,  a participant in a cynical PR campaign to improve Israel’s image, make her appear less war-like. The Israeli Consul General said a year ago that Toronto would be the launch site of an extensive “Brand Israel” campaign. Artists and others of us who love Israel do not want art to be used to whitewash the tragedies committed against Palestinians, most recently in last winter’s terrible war in Gaza (1400 Palestinians dead, mostly civilians, many more wounded, and there are documented human rights violations) and the ongoing blockade of Gaza that is deepening a serious humanitarian crisis, wreaking havoc on the lives of innocent people, and preventing reconstruction in the aftermath of the attack.
The letter we signed did not —repeat: DID NOT–call for a boycott of any part of the Toronto Film Festival. In fact, many of the people who signed the letter are showing films there and many of the Israeli filmmakers that go to the festival show films critical of Israel. We protest the use of Tel Aviv to rebrand Israel. We are standing up for integrity of art, not censoring anyone. The letter certainly did not call for the destruction of Israel or call into question the legitimacy of Tel Aviv as a city. But In the year when Gaza happened there shouldn’t be a celebratory spotlight on Tel Aviv.

I have been to Israel many times. The first was in the early 1980s and it was love at first sight…for the country and for its people. I stayed in a Kibbutz with the great Israeli novelist, Amos Oz, and his family. I raised money for a senior center in Haifa, for a girl’s shelter in Jerusalem. I have spoken at the Hebrew University. I traveled into Lebanon with the Israeli army in 1981. I went deep into Russia in the  80s to secretly meet with Soviet Refusenik, Ida Nudel, after which I a national speaking tour in the U. S. to build support for letting Ida go to Israel where she now lives. In other words, I have been intimately involved with Israel over 3 decades. On almost every visit I also went into the West Bank, met with Palestinian artists, visited Palestinian refugee camps, drove through the Israeli settlements that encroach increasingly into Palestinian territory. I have seen suffering on both sides. It is out of love for Israel and all that it promised to be that I protest the use of art (which is meant to search for truth) in this branding campaign. The greatest “re-branding” of Israel would be to celebrate that country’s robust peace movement by allowing aid to be delivered to Gaza and stopping expansion of the settlements. That’s the way to show Israel’s commitment to peace, not a PR campaign. There will be no two-state solution unless this happens.

My response to Ms Fonda.

1. If Israel appears “war-like”, it is because she has constantly been defending herself since her inception in 1948. You are old enough to remember what happened in 1967, including the Arab statements threatening Israel with annihilation. But in case you were too busy protesting the Vietnam War at the time, I suggest you pick up any reputable history book and read for yourself. You may also learn that the Arabs attacked Israel on the eve of her independence, after having rejected the 1947 UN Partition Plan, which would have seen the two-state solution you claim to support.
2. You stated as fact that 1400 Palestinians were killed in Operation Cast Lead, and these were “mostly civilians.” Where did you get this information? According to an IDF investigation, 1,166 palestinians were killed, with 709 belonging to terrorist organizations. And even if you are not willing to accept these figures, do you not accept the fact that Hamas terrorists were deliberately operating out of civilian areas?
3. You mention visiting palestinian refugee camps. Have you even questioned why these camps still exist? Why is it that Israel has absorbed Jewish people from all around the world,  yet the Arab world does not take in the palestinians for which they claim to care so much?
4. If “expansion of the settlements” is really the big issue, why did the Arab states attack Israel prior to the 1967 war, in which Israel captured these lands? Why was the PLO formed in 1964, three years earlier? Have you ever read the Hamas charter? The issue is, and has always been, the Arab refusal to accept Israel’s very existence.
5. Why is it that you question Israel’s commitment to peace, and not the palestinians, despite the fact the latter have met Israeli peace overtures with terrorism? Why do you question Israel’s commitment to peace and not the palestinians after Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from Gaza was met by palestinian rocket fire into Israeli population centers?

10:06AM: Over 73 aid trucks and 440,000 liters of fuel and gas are scheduled to cross into Gaza today.

We still haven’t quite mastered that whole genocide thing.

6:08AM: The leader of Gaza’s al Qaeda-inspired palestinian terrorist group Jaljalat revealed his men recently tried to assassinate former Jimmy Carter and Tony Blair.

The failed assassination attempt on Prince Muhammad Bin Naif, Assistant Minister of Interior for Security Affairs, Thursday night was planned by Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula which operates from Yemen, sources confirmed.

The suicide bomber was recruited by Yemeni Nasser Al-Wohaishi, known also by the nom de guerre Abu Baseer, the sources said.
Al-Wohaishi is the head of Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, which had announced in an Internet posting last January the merger of the Saudi and Yemeni branches of Al-Qaeda.

The merger was seen by analysts as an attempt to consolidate after the Saudi branch of Al-Qaeda was practically wiped out following a vigorous counter-terrorism campaign led by Prince Muhammad.

According to Okaz sources, the bomber who detonated himself only a meter away from the Prince was part of a terrorist cell formed to target oil installations and public figures.

The sources said the bomber stayed in an apartment on Sari Street, northwest of Jeddah, Thursday.

He had slipped into the Kingdom from Mareb, east of Sana’a, Yemen’s Foreign Minister Abu-Bakr Al-Qirbi told The Associated Press.
“He was in Yemen,” said Al-Qirbi. “He claimed that he was going to hand himself over to Saudi authorities and make a statement to his followers to abandon Al-Qaeda principles.”

Okaz sources said the bomb was implanted in the attacker’s rectum, which could explain why he refused to drink coffee at the Prince’s Court.

The bomber had sent word he wanted to surrender personally to the Prince who had ordered that he not be searched to encourage others to come forward.

At the Prince’s home in Jeddah’s north Obhur beach area Thursday night around 11.30 P.M., the attacker was in line to enter a gathering of well-wishers for Ramadan when he blew himself up. The Prince was lightly injured in the attack. The bomber died.

While the joke possibilities are endless, here are but a few initial observations:

• Not quite what comes to mind when I think of an ass bomb, but each to their own.
• I’m wondering if the bomber messed up his instructions. He was told to target public figures, not pubic fissures.
• Alternatively, perhaps the tactic is not so bad. After all, if he somehow survived and was sent to prison, it’s not like his anus (or what remained of it) was going to stretch any further.

(hat tip: Elder of Ziyon)

A little on his new wife, Aloysia Brooks:

Ms Brooks studied at the University of Sydney’s Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies and writes poetry on human rights issues.

Yep. Who better for her to marry than an anti-Semitic, ex Islamic terrorist.

Not to be confused with Adam Gadahn, Al Qaeda’s senior surfer stoner dude.

Australia has been singled out as a target for “forest jihad” by a group of Islamic extremists urging Muslims to deliberately light bushfires as a weapon of terror.

US intelligence channels earlier this year identified a website calling on Muslims in Australia, the US, Europe and Russia to “start forest fires”, claiming “scholars have justified chopping down and burning the infidels’ forests when they do the same to our lands”.

The website, posted by a group called the Al-Ikhlas Islamic Network, argues in Arabic that lighting fires is an effective form of terrorism justified in Islamic law under the “eye for an eye” doctrine.

The posting — which instructs jihadis to remember “forest jihad” in summer months — says fires cause economic damage and pollution, tie up security agencies and can take months to extinguish so that “this terror will haunt them for an extended period of time”.

“Imagine if, after all the losses caused by such an event, a jihadist organisation were to claim responsibility for the forest fires,” the website says. “You can hardly begin to imagine the level of fear that would take hold of people in the United States, in Europe, in Russia and in Australia.”

With the nation heading into another hot, dry summer, Australian intelligence agencies are treating the possibility that bushfires could be used as a weapon of terrorism as a serious concern.

Attorney-General Robert McClelland said the Federal Government remained “vigilant against such threats”, warning that anyone caught lighting a fire as a weapon of terror would feel the wrath of anti-terror laws.

“Any information that suggests a threat to Australia’s interests is investigated by relevant agencies as appropriate,” Mr McClelland said.

Adam Dolnik, director of research at the University of Wollongong’s Centre for Transnational Crime Prevention, said that bushfires (unlike suicide bombing) were generally not considered a glorious type of attack by jihadis, in keeping with a recent decline in the sophistication of terrorist operations.

With attacks like bushfires, yes, it would be easy. It would be very damaging and we do see a decreasing sophistication as a part of terrorist attacks,” Dr Dolnik said.

“In recent years, there have been quite a few attacks averted and it has become more and more difficult for groups to do something effective.”

Dr Dolnik said he had observed an increase in traffic on jihadi websites calling for a simplification of terrorist attacks because the more complex operations had been failing. But starting bushfires was still often regarded as less effective than other operations because governments could easily deny terrorism as the cause.

The internet posting by the little-known group claimed the idea of forest fires had been attributed to imprisoned Al Qaeda leader Abu Musab Al-Suri. It said Al-Suri had urged terrorists to use sulphuric acid and petrol to start forest fires.

It’s amazing to think how much effort these people put into destruction.

And I mean lovers.

Besides the terrible killings inflicted by the fanatics on those who refuse to pledge allegiance to them, Al-Qa’eda has lost credibility for enforcing a series of rules imposing their way of thought on the most mundane aspects of everyday life.

They include a ban on women buying suggestively-shaped vegetables, according to one tribal leader in the western province of Anbar.

Sheikh Hameed al-Hayyes, a Sunni elder, told Reuters: “They even killed female goats because their private parts were not covered and their tails were pointed upward, which they said was haram.

“They regarded the cucumber as male and tomato as female. Women were not allowed to buy cucumbers, only men.”

And the war on cucumbers has continued in the palestinian-controlled territories.

Palestinian security forces confiscated the property the Society for the Care of the Mother and Child, after breaking into the office.

Suhad Shahin, the head of the society, said in a telephone call with Ma’an that “members of the Palestinian public intelligence forces presented [themselves]at the complex at 12:30 at night.”

Shahin said that everything in the office was confiscated, including furniture, computers, refrigerators with food stuff inside them.

The society uses the refrigerators and cooking equipment as a means of employment for women, they sell the food to earn money for women in need.

According to Shahin, even the pickles and turnovers that women from the society had made were confiscated by security forces.

Answer: At least one million dollars.

Former Guantanamo Bay detainee David Hicks will go from broke to millionaire overnight if he accepts the latest mega-offer to tell his story.

Channel 9’s 60 Minutes has put $1million on the table for an exclusive interview with the convicted terrorism supporter.

With the queue of media outlets begging to interview with Hicks first now numbering 40, his lawyer David McLeod said he had “not heard” about the $1 million bid from 60 Minutes which could trump them all.

But Mr McLeod said his client was focusing on getting his life together.

“(Hicks) hasn’t made up his mind whether or not he wants to tell his story, so no decision has been made, as far as I know,” Mr McLeod said.

Hicks, 32, has been lying low since he walked free from Adelaide’s Yatala maximum security jail in December.

Mr Hicks said his son was not ready yet to speak publicly.

A Channel 9 spokesman last night denied the station had made an offer to Hicks, however it is understood discussions have taken place about drafting reporter Ray Martin for the job.

If this is true, it is yet another reminder of how far from North society’s moral compass is pointing.