Alan K. Henderson's Weblog

The pope has made better relations between the branches of the church a priority of his long papacy, and both he and Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I, his spiritual counterpart among the world's Orthodox, spoke of reconciliation at a ceremony yesterday morning under the grand dome of St. Peter's.

Bartholomew I, seated at the altar next to the pope, said the return of the bones — revered as relics and packed in boxes of crystal and alabaster — showed that "in the Church of Christ, there exist no insurmountable problems when love, justice and peace meet."

In 1986, Defence Minister Robert Coates was hounded out of office after he visited a strip club in Germany. Eighteen years later, the immigration minister - a Liberal female, no less - is defending a policy which allows women to emigrate to Canada to work as exotic dancers. I leave it to you to determine whether this should be considered progress.

In a recent episode of the Palestinian version of "Sesame Street," a furry chick character threatens to get an AK-47 and massacre people who have torn down his olive trees, a common complaint by Palestinians against Israeli Defense Forces in the region.

In a scene rebroadcast Saturday by the Fox News Channel, a little girl asks the talking chick, "What would you do if someone cut down your olive tree?"

"I'll fight them and make a big riot," the chick replies. "I'll call the whole world. I'll bring AK-47 assault rifles and commit a massacre in front of my house."

City officials are considering charging grocery stores 17 cents apiece for the bags to discourage use of plastic sacks.

Plastic is the choice of 90 percent of shoppers, but the sacks are blamed for everything from clogging recycling machines to killing marine life and suffocating infants.

Paper is recyclable, but city officials propose to include them as well to help reduce overall waste.

"One thing we've learned is that sending a financial signal to the marketplace tends to modify behavior much better than voluntary approaches," Mark Murray, executive director of Californians Against Waste, told the San Francisco Chronicle.

But grocers and the plastics industry oppose the measure.

"We think essentially it's an unnecessary and misguided approach," said Tim Shestek, spokesman for the American Plastics Council. "This tax is going to hurt those who can least afford it."

In addition, customers often simply buy more plastic bags to use for waste disposal.

The proposal parallels efforts in Ireland, South Africa, Bangladesh, Australia, Shanghai, Taiwan and other countries where the government bans plastic bags or charges a fee to use them.

State legislators defeated a bill last year that would have charged 2 cents on each non-recyclable disposable bag.

A resolution will be considered Tuesday by the city's Commission on the Environment. Mayor Gavin Newsom is reviewing the idea, while Supervisor Ross Mirkarimi is in favor.

"We all have a responsibility to promote a healthy and sustainable environment, and by doing that, it means we need to help change people's patterns, and that even means their shopping patterns," said Mirkarimi, who will take office in January. "This is a sensible user fee."

The city's Department of the Environment estimates San Francisco grocery store customers bring home about 50 million bags each year. That accounts for about 2 percent of waste, at an annual cleanup cost of about $8.4 million.

The film does not come right out and say that we should all accept homosexuality. And, naturally, children should be taught to be accepting of others. But as Plugged In's Steven Isaac notes, "Had this movie been released 20 years ago, nobody would have been calling attention to this subject." Two decades ago, accepting differences meant accepting a person who might have a different skin color, or be from a different ethnic background. Such differences are immutable characteristics, however, and not sexual choices. In this respect, Shark Tale comes far too close to taking a bite out of traditional moral and spiritual beliefs.

But Lenny is more than just a vegetarian. He turns out to enjoy dressing as a dolphin, an obvious allusion to cross-dressing, as noted in a review of Shark Tale by Ed Park in The Village Voice.

"Lenny flees his old life by disguising himself as a dolphin and indulging his happy side," Levy says, calling it "a barely hidden subtext here about letting your closeted inner self emerge ...."

When Lino finally sees Lenny dressed as a dolphin, he explodes angrily: "Are you kidding me? Are you kidding me? Are you out of your mind? Do you have any idea how this looks?" Lino blames Oscar, saying, "[Y]ou turned Lenny into a dolphin!

That's what a priest at St. Pius X School told students as young as 5 during morning Mass on Wednesday, a revelation that is causing a furor among parents who claim the priest overstepped his boundaries by speaking so frankly about the much-loved Christmas figure.

During the Mass, school officials admit, the Rev. Ruben Rocha repeatedly told the students in grades K-3 that there is no Santa Claus.

Like all Hardee’s burgers, the Monster Thickburger features 100 percent Angus beef patties. In this case, it’s got not one, but two 1/3-lb. charbroiled patties, topped with no less than four strips of crispy bacon, three slices of American cheese, and some mayonnaise – all on a buttered, toasted, sesame seed bun.

Still fewer know that in March 1973, Arafat ordered a Black September attack on the Saudi embassy in Sudan, where our Ambassador Cleo Noel, our Deputy Chief of Mission George C. Moore and Belgian diplomat Guy Eid were taken hostage at a reception. They were brutally murdered, said to have been shot in a way that made their deaths especially agonizing.

These murders were front-page news for days, but Arafat's role is little known because it was discovered in super-secret communications intercepts of the National Security Agency (NSA). It was kept secret for years until James J. Welsh, who was the NSA's Palestinian analyst, decided that his obligation to let the truth be known outweighed his pledge to keep his work secret...

Welsh said that in 1973, Arafat's number two man had ordered the Black September operation and that NSA learned just the day before it took place that the Saudi embassy in Khartoum was to be taken over during a reception that was being held there. A warning was sent to our embassy via the State Department, but for some reason it was delayed and the takeover of the Saudi Embassy was successful. NSA then picked up two more communications, including one from Arafat confirming the execution order. His calls came from the Shatila refugee camp in Lebanon, which was the site of the PLO headquarters and a known terrorist training facility. The Black September murderers surrendered to Sudanese authorities, but they were later released to the PLO and flown out of the country.

[A] Romanian intelligence adviser assigned to the PLO headquarters in Beirut reported that Arafat and his KGB handlers were preparing a PLO commando team headed by Arafat's top deputy, Abu Jihad, to take American diplomats hostage in Khartoum, Sudan, and demand the release of Sirhan Sirhan, the Palestinian assassin of Robert Kennedy.

"St-stop th-them!" Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu yelled in his nervous stutter, when I reported the news. He had turned as white as a sheet. Just six months earlier Arafat's liaison officer for Romania, Ali Hassan Salameh, had led the PLO commando team that took the Israeli athletes hostage at the Munich Olympic Games, and Ceausescu had become deathly afraid that his name might be implicated in that awful crime.

It was already too late to stop the Abu Jihad commandos. After a couple of hours we learned they had seized the participants at a diplomatic reception organized by the Saudi Embassy in Khartoum and were asking for Sirhan's release. On March 2, 1973, after President Nixon refused the terrorists' demand, the PLO commandos executed three of their hostages: American Ambassador Cleo A. Noel Jr., his deputy, George Curtis Moore, and Belgian charge d'affaires Guy Eid. In May 1973, during a private dinner with Ceausescu, Arafat excitedly bragged about his Khartoum operation. "Be careful," Ion Gheorghe Maurer, a Western-educated lawyer who had just retired as Romanian prime minister, told him. "No matter how high up you are, you can still be convicted for killing and stealing."

During the 1980s, Arafat received financial assistance from Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, which allowed him to rebuild the battered PLO. This was particularly useful during the first Palestinian intifada in 1987. Arafat took control of the violence from afar, and it was mainly due to Fatah forces in the West Bank that the anti-Israel terror and civil unrest could be maintained. Arafat would then become nearly the only world leader to support Saddam Hussein in the 1991 Gulf War. (Saddam would later repay this loyalty by sending $25,000 checks to families of Palestinian suicide bombers.)

To this day, Arafat has never honestly admitted what was offered to the Palestinians—a deal that would have resulted in a Palestinian state, with territory in over 97 percent of the West Bank, Gaza, and Jerusalem; with Arab East Jerusalem as the capital of that state (including the holy place of the Haram al-Sharif, the Noble Sanctuary); with an international presence in place of the Israeli Defense Force in the Jordan Valley; and with the unlimited right of return for Palestinian refugees to their state but not to Israel...

Had Palestinians honestly known what Arafat was unwilling to accept, would they have supported violence against the Israelis, particularly given the suffering imposed on them? Would Arafat have remained the "only Palestinian" capable of making peace? Perhaps such domestic pressure would have convinced Arafat, the quintessential survivor, that the political costs of intransigence would be higher than the costs of making difficult concessions to Israel.

In the past, whenever Arafat cracked down or threatened to do so, the militants backed down. But that stopped in September 2000 with the eruption of the Al-Aqsa Intifada. Those who say Arafat cannot carry out his security responsibilities because Israeli military incursions have devastated his capabilities fail to recognize that Arafat didn’t act even before Israelis destroyed his infrastructure. In the 20 months leading up to May 2002, he never gave unequivocal orders to arrest, much less stop, those who were planning, organizing, recruiting, financing, or implementing terror attacks against Israelis. Whether one thinks—as the Israelis believe recently captured documents demonstrate—Arafat directs the violence or that he simply acquiesces to it, the unmistakable fact is that he has made no serious or sustained effort to stop the violence.