In November 2000, the same month King first commented on Pacheco, the latter was again interviewed on NPR, the interview serving as yet another proof of the network's anti-Israel advocacy. CAMERA points out that NPR host Liane Hansen deceptively introduced Pacheco as simply a defender of Palestinian human rights, without telling listeners that she actively campaigned for the dissolution of the Jewish state. Unchallenged by Hansen and without another speaker to balance or correct her statements, Pacheco launched into a long diatribe against Israel as an apartheid Jim Crow state.

Pacheco has followed in the footsteps of Lea Tsemel, the Communist lawyer in Israel who defended Arab terrorists for many years, and for whom Pacheco interned. After several years in Israel, Pacheco set up shop in Bethlehem, defending Arabs accused of terrorist activity in Israeli courts. She spent 2001 as a Bunting Institute "Peace Fellow" at Radcliffe, writing an anti-Israel tract and energizing her groupies in Jewish Women for Justice. She recently married one of her imprisoned clients, and is now, along with her husband, employed by UNRWA in the camps, the only "Israeli" so employed.

Pacheco is now Mrs. Abed al-Ahmar (her husband is also a "human rights activist," Arab style, having spent almost ten years in Israeli prisons, suspected by Israeli authorities of being an activist in the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine). The pair live cozily at the edge of the Deheisheh refugee camp just outside Bethlehem. According to Pacheco's own account (to a sympathetic Israeli journalist from the Israeli daily Ha'aretz) the young carpenter who made their new kitchen turned himself into a human bomb in an Orthodox Jerusalem neighborhood, killing 10 and wounding 50.

When terrorists invaded the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, trashing the church and holding its priests hostage, Pacheco sent out an open letter insisting that the priests were not being held against their will, but were voluntarily "making bread for the men inside." The Israeli authorities clearly remain suspicious of the al-Ahmar couple, arresting him and holding her at gun point for several hours in November 2002 while they searched their home.

Pacheco's coterie in Jewish Women for Justice in Israel/Palestine are now participants in United for Justice with Peace, an umbrella for a number of radical groups engaged in a "Pledge of Resistance to War" campaign. The participating groups in this pro-Iraq and explicitly anti-Israel campaign (its statement of "principles" describes Israel as the "root cause" of Islamic anger at America) include, among others, the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, the Boston Coalition for Palestinian Rights, the American Friends Service Committee, the National Lawyers Guild, local Pax Christi chapters, and SUSTAIN (Stop U.S. Tax-Funded Aid to Israel Now). Indeed the campaign is so obviously opposed to Israel's existence that even "progressive" Jewish groups in the area have avoided it. Jewish Women for Justice is the only group with "Jewish" in the title.

Clearly, cooperation extends beyond the "Pledge of Resistance." The other groups demonstrating against Hillel Stavis are all fellows in the save-Saddam campaign: i.e. the umbrella United for Justice with Peace, Visions for Peace with Justice in Israel/Palestine and the National Lawyers Guild Boston chapter. It is no surprise to find the National Lawyers Guild involved. For many decades a member of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers (described in a 1978 CIA study as "one of the most useful Communist front organizations at the service of the Soviet Communist Party"), the Guild has periodically sent delegations to Israel to convict it of human rights crimes.

Pacheco works closely with the Guild, and made a formal proposal in December that the Guild send another of its "Human Rights" delegations to the "occupied territories" to "document" Israel's "violations of international law." To understand the Guild's notion of law, it helps to know that the Guild has formally condemned the American system of justice for being "used to hound, attack, imprison and execute the oppresed minorities, workers and political activists." It has described prisoners as the "revolutionary vanguard" who will "lead us in the streets."

In short, Hillel Stavis has been targeted by a collection of the worst perverters of truth, justice, law, and human rights in this country. He deserves our support. We encourage our readers to make a point of ordering books from his website. It's every bit as easy and efficient as Amazon. The website is www.wordsworth.com. Or you can phone toll free 800-899-2202.  

The Paulin Affair

(Editor's note: Following are two items relating to poet and anti-Israel activist Tom Paulin, the first a letter to Columbia's President by five alumni, spearheaded by Edward Alexander, professor of English at the University of Washington, and the second an article that appeared in the Harvard Crimson of November 26 by Ruth Wisse, professor of Yiddish Literature and Comparative Literature at Harvard, concerning Harvard's onagain, off-again, on-again invitation to Paulin.)

Thursday, December 12, 2002  

Dear President Bollinger,

One might have thought Columbia's perpetually troubled English Department had already brought enough shame upon the university. First came the Edward Said saga: membership in an international terror organization; fabrication of the facts of his life to fit the myth of Pales-

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