CAIR Doesn't Like Rabbis?

Interfaith? On behalf of the hikers jailed in Iran?

Were there any Rabbis involved, according to the Washington Post?

An interfaith delegation of religious leaders from Washington didn’t come home from Iran on Monday with the news it had hoped for, but members said they remain optimistic about what they call the “imminent” release of two U.S. hikers.

The delegation hoped to return with hikers Shane Bauer and Joshua Fattal, who have been jailed on spying charges since July 2009. But members of the group said conversations with Iranian authorities led them to believe that the release of the men, who maintain that they accidentally crossed the Iraq-Iran border, could come within days.

According to AP, no:-

A group of U.S. Christian and Muslim envoys was returning from Tehran Monday after holding talks with Iran's president over the possible release of a pair of Americans jailed as spies for more than two years.

But aren't the hikers Jewish? Yes:-

...three American-Jews hikers, who were arrested in Iran, on 31 July 2009, accused of espionage, who are recent UC Berkeley graduates.

Sarah Shourd, Joshua Fattal and Shane Bauer were detained July 31 when they crossed into Iran while on a hike in Iraq’s Kurdish region. Friends and family said the trio had become disoriented and accidentally crossed the border. Shourd, 31, and Bauer, 27, were visiting from Damascus, Syria, where Shourd teaches English and Bauer is a freelance journalist. Fattal, 27, who works for an environmental group in Oregon, was visiting Shourd and Bauer when the trio were arrested.

Yes, here.

So, either Iran was aginst Rabbis - but they love Neturei Karta.

Or the families didn't want to highlight the Jewishness of the issue.

Or CAIR wasn't happy about cooperating with Jews.

All bad.

Oh, CAIR?

See its involvment as per the WashPost:-

Nihad Awad, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), said the delegation plans to present the U.S. State Department with a list of 50 to 60 cases it wants the United States to examine. CAIR will also look into several cases of alleged mistreatment, Awad said.

“We heard heartbreaking stories [of Iranian detainees], truly,” Awad said. “The suffering is on both sides. Unless we address these legitimate issues we cannot move forward.”

Is that a bit of blackmail?

^

Spies in Washington - And They're Not Jewish

Gosh what is the world coming to?

State Dept. Retiree Accused of Spying

Official, Wife Passed Secrets to Cuba For Decades, Federal Prosecutors Say

A former State Department official with top-secret security clearance and his wife have been charged with spying for Cuba over the past three decades, passing information by shortwave radio and correspondence exchanged in local grocery stores, federal prosecutors said.

State Department officials said last night they were still assessing the potential damage to the government's security and intelligence operations and declined to comment further.

...The couple, Walter Kendall Myers, 72, and his wife, Gwendolyn Steingraber Myers, 71, were charged with conspiring to act as illegal agents and to communicate classified information to the Cuban government. They pleaded not guilty and were ordered held in jail pending further court proceedings.

Myers is the scion of one of Washington's most storied families. His mother, Elsie Alexandra Carol Grosvenor Myers, was the granddaughter of Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone.

The allegations are "incredibly serious and should serve as a warning to any others in the U.S. government who would betray America's trust by serving as illegal agents of a foreign government," said David S. Kris, assistant attorney general for national security.

...The court papers describe several conversations in which Myers and his wife express their strong emotional ties to the communist country...

Safire's "Headline of the Year"

Headline of the Year

Writers of headlines — their words cabin’d, cribb’d and confined in capturing the gist of an article — on rare occasion break through with an inspiring turn of phrase. My nomination for Headline of the Year appeared early this month above a full-page commentary infused with original reporting by the Pulitzer-winning Dorothy Rabinowitz of The Wall Street Journal.

Her subject was a largely downplayed instance of the current campaign to undermine the First Amendment by Justice Department prosecutors and their F.B.I. satraps of entrapment. Having failed for years to find the “mole” inside the F.B.I. who sold out to the Russians, the agent sought to salvage his reputation by running a “sting” operation. The F.B.I. found a Pentagon analyst who had foolishly taken home papers and — by threatening him with prosecution — induced the analyst to type a supposedly classified document about policy toward Iran and fax a “leak” of it to two staff members he knew in the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. F.B.I. agents then wired him for sound and further drew the unsuspecting targets — whose jobs were to stay in touch with analysts and known journalists — into the trap.

The Pentagon analyst pleaded guilty to keeping classified documents at home, for which big shots draw a fine. He is trying to reduce his 12-year sentence by testifying in June, as Rabinowitz reported, in “the first ever attempt by government prosecutors to convict private citizens under the 1919 Espionage Act.” That F.B.I. bell tolls for thee and me.

Here is the headline in the Journal that Rob Pollock, who grasped the universal civil-libertarian point of her article, put across the top of the page: “First They Came for the Jews.”

Those words are from an approximation of what Martin Niemoeller, the German pastor who outspokenly opposed the Nazis and suffered through concentration camps, said to a seminary audience in Georgia in 1959: “First they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out because I was not a Jew. Then they came for the Communists, and I did not speak out because I was not a Communist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak out for me.”