He now walks point in a vitriolic war over the
Pentagon's arsenal of it - thousands of shells and hundreds of tanks coated with the metal that is radioactive, chemically toxic, and nearly twice as dense as lead.

A shell coated with depleted uranium pierces a tank like a hot knife through butter, exploding on impact into a charring inferno. As tank armor, it repels artillery assaults. It also leaves behind a fine radioactive dust with a half-life of 4.5 billion years.

Depleted uranium is the garbage left from producing enriched uranium for nuclear weapons and energy plants. It is 60 percent as radioactive as natural uranium. The U.S. has an estimated 1.5 billion pounds of it, sitting in hazardous waste storage sites across the country. Meaning it is plentiful and cheap as well as highly effective.

Reed says he unknowingly breathed DU dust while living with his unit in Samawah, Iraq. He was med-evaced out in July 2003, nearly unable to walk because of lightning-strike pains from herniated discs in his spine. Then began a strange series of symptoms he'd never experienced in his previously healthy life.

At Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C, he ran into a buddy from his unit. And another, and another, and in the tedium of hospital life between doctor visits and the dispensing of meds, they began to talk.

"We all had migraines. We all felt sick," Reed says. "The doctors said, 'It's all in your head.'"

Then the medic from their unit showed up. He too, was suffering. That made eight sick soldiers from the 442nd Military Police, an Army National Guard unit made up of mostly cops and correctional officers from the New York area.

But the medic knew something the others didn't.

Dutch marines had taken over the abandoned train depot dubbed Camp Smitty, which was surrounded by tank skeletons, unexploded ordnance and shell casings. They'd brought radiation-detection devices. The readings were so hot, the Dutch set up camp in the middle of the desert rather than live in the station ruins.

"We got on the Internet," Reed said, "and we started researching depleted uranium."

Then they contacted The New York Daily News, which paid for sophisticated urine tests available only overseas.

Then they hired a lawyer.

___

Reed, Gerard Matthew, Raymond Ramos, Hector Vega, Augustin Matos, Anthony Yonnone, Jerry Ojeda and Anthony Phillip all have depleted uranium in their urine, according to tests done in December 2003, while they bounced for months between Walter Reed and New Jersey's Fort Dix medical center, seeking relief that never came.

The analyses were done in Germany, by a Frankfurt professor who developed a depleted uranium test with Randall Parrish, a professor of isotope geology at the University of Leicester in Britain.

The veterans, using their positive results as evidence, have sued the U.S. Army, claiming officials knew the hazards of depleted uranium, but concealed the risks.

The Department of Defense says depleted uranium is powerful and safe, and not that worrisome.

Four of the highest-registering samples from Frankfurt were sent to the VA. Those results were negative, Reed said. "Their test just isn't as sophisticated," he said. "And when we first asked to be tested, they told us there wasn't one. They've lied to us all along."

The VA's testing methodology is safe and accurate, the agency says. More than 2,100 soldiers from the current war have asked to be tested; only 8 had DU in their urine, the VA said.

The term depleted uranium is linguistically radioactive. Simply uttering the words can prompt a reaction akin to preaching atheism at tent revival. Heads shake, eyes roll, opinions are yelled from all sides.

"The Department of Defense takes the position that you can eat it for breakfast and it poses no threat at all," said Steve Robinson of the National Gulf War Resource Center, which helps veterans with various problems, including navigating the labyrinth of VA health care. "Then you have far-left groups that ... declare it a crime against humanity."

Several countries use it as weaponry, including Britain, which fired it during the 2003 Iraq invasion.

An estimated 286 tons of DU munitions were fired by the U.S. in Iraq and Kuwait in 1991. An estimated 130 tons were shot toppling Saddam Hussein.

Depleted uranium can enter the human body by inhalation, the most dangerous method; by ingesting contaminated food or eating with contaminated hands; by getting dust or debris in an open wound, or by being struck by shrapnel, which often is not removed because doing so would be more dangerous than leaving it.

Inhaled, it can lodge in the lungs. As with imbedded shrapnel, this is doubly dangerous - not only are the particles themselves physically destructive, they emit radiation.

A moderate voice on the divisive DU spectrum belongs to Dan Fahey, a doctoral student at the University of California at Berkeley, who has studied the issue for years and also served in the Gulf War before leaving the military as a conscientious objector.

"I've been working on this since '93 and I've just given up hope," he said. "I've spoken to successive federal committees and elected officials ... who then side with the Pentagon. Nothing changes."

At the other end are a collection of conspiracy-theorists and Internet proselytizers who say using such weapons constitutes genocide. Two of the most vocal opponents recently suggested that a depleted-uranium missile, not a hijacked jetliner, struck the Pentagon in 2001.

"The bottom line is it's more hazardous than the Pentagon admits," Fahey said, "but it's not as hazardous as the hard-line activist groups say it is. And there's a real dearth of information about how DU affects humans."

There are several studies on how it affects animals, though their results are not, of course, directly applicable to humans. Military research on mice shows that depleted uranium can enter the bloodstream and come to rest in bones, the brain, kidneys and lymph nodes. Other research in rats shows that DU can result in cancerous tumors and genetic mutations, and pass from mother to unborn child, resulting in birth defects.

Iraqi doctors reported significant increases in birth defects and childhood cancers after the 1991 invasion.

Iraqi authorities "found that uranium, which affected the blood cells, had a serious impact on health: The number of cases of leukemia had increased considerably, as had the incidence of fetal deformities," the U.N. reported.

Depleted uranium can also contaminate soil and water, and coat buildings with radioactive dust, which can by carried by wind and sandstorms.

In 2005, the U.N. Environmental Program identified 311 polluted sites in Iraq. Cleaning them will take at least $40 million and several years, the agency said. Nothing can start until the fighting stops.

___

Fifteen years after it was first used in battle, there is only one U.S. government study monitoring veterans exposed to depleted uranium.

Number of soldiers in the survey: 32. Number of soldiers in both Iraq wars: more than 900,000.

The study group's size is controversial - far too small, say experts including Fahey - and so are the findings of the voluntary, Baltimore-based study.

It has found "no clinically significant" health effects from depleted uranium exposure in the study subjects, according to its researchers.

Critics say the VA has downplayed participants' health problems, including not reporting one soldier who developed cancer, and another who developed a bone tumor.

So for now, depleted uranium falls into the quagmire of
Gulf War Syndrome, from which no treatment has emerged despite the government's spending of at least $300 million.

About 30 percent of the 700,000 men and women who served in the first Gulf War still suffer a baffling array of symptoms very similar to those reported by Reed's unit.

Depleted uranium has long been suspected as a possible contributor to Gulf War Syndrome, and in the mid-90s, veterans helped push the military into tracking soldiers exposed to it.

But for all their efforts, what they got in the end was a questionnaire dispensed to homeward-bound soldiers asking about mental health, nightmares, losing control, exposure to dangerous and radioactive chemicals.

But, the veterans persisted, how would soldiers know they'd been exposed? Radiation is invisible, tasteless, and has no smell. And what exhausted, homesick, war-addled soldier would check a box that would only send him or her to a military medical center to be poked and prodded and questioned and tested?

It will take years to determine how depleted uranium affected soldiers from this war. After Vietnam, veterans, in numbers that grew with the passage of time, complained of joint aches, night sweats, bloody feces, migraine headaches, unexplained rashes and violent behavior; some developed cancers.

It took more than 25 years for the Pentagon to acknowledge that Agent Orange - a corrosive defoliant used to melt the jungles of Vietnam and flush out the enemy - was linked to those sufferings.

It took 40 years for the military to compensate sick World War II vets exposed to massive blasts of radiation during tests of the atomic bomb.

In 2002, Congress voted to not let that happen again.

It established the Research Advisory Committee on Gulf War Veterans' Illnesses - comprised of scientists, physicians and veterans advocates. It reports to the secretary of Veterans Affairs.

Its mandate is to judge all research and all efforts to treat Gulf War Syndrome patients against a single standard: Have sick soldiers been made better?

The answer, according to the committee, is no.

"Regrettably, after four years of operation neither the Committee nor (the) VA can report progress toward this goal," stated its December 2005 report. "Research has not produced effective treatments for these conditions nor shown that existing treatments are significantly effective."

And so time marches on, as do soldiers going to, and returning from, the deserts of Iraq.

___

Herbert Reed is an imposing man, broad shouldered and tall. He strides into the VA Medical Center in the Bronx with the presence of a cop or a soldier. Since the Vietnam War, he has been both.

His hair is perfect, his shirt spotless, his jeans sharply creased. But there is something wrong, a niggling imperfection made more noticeable by a bearing so disciplined. It is a limp - more like a hitch in his get-along.

It is the only sign, albeit a tiny one, that he is extremely sick.

Even sleep offers no release. He dreams of gunfire and bombs and soldiers who scream for help. No matter how hard he tries, he never gets there in time.

At 54, he is a veteran of two wars and a 20-year veteran of the New York Police Department, where he last served as an assistant warden at the Riker's Island prison.

He was in perfect health, he says, before being deployed to Iraq.

According to military guidelines, he should have heard the words depleted uranium long before he ended up at Walter Reed. He should have been trained about its dangers, and how to avoid prolonged exposure to its toxicity and radioactivity. He says he didn't get anything of the kind. Neither did other reservists and National Guard soldiers called up for the current war, according to veterans' groups.

Reed and the seven brothers from his unit hate what has happened to them, and they speak of it at public seminars and in politicians' offices. It is something no VA doctor can explain; something that leaves them feeling like so many spent shell rounds, kicked to the side of battle.

But for every outspoken soldier like them, there are silent veterans like Raphael Naboa, an Army artillery scout who served 11 months in the northern Sunni Triangle, only to come home and fall apart.

Some days he feels fine. "Some days I can't get out of bed," he said from his home in Colorado.

Now 29, he's had growths removed from his brain. He has suffered a small stroke - one morning he was shaving, having put down the razor to rinse his face. In that moment, he blacked out and pitched over.

"Just as quickly as I lost consciousness, I regained it," he said. "Except I couldn't move the right side of my body."

After about 15 minutes, the paralysis ebbed.

He has mentioned depleted uranium to his VA doctors, who say he suffers from a series of "non-related conditions." He knows he was exposed to DU.

"A lot of guys went trophy-hunting, grabbing bayonets, helmets, stuff that was in the vehicles that were destroyed by depleted uranium. My guys were rooting around in it. I was trying to get them out of the vehicles."

No one in the military talked to him about depleted uranium, he said. His knowledge, like Reed's, is self-taught from the Internet.

Unlike Reed, he has not gone to war over it. He doesn't feel up to the fight. There is no known cure for what ails him, and so no possible victory in battle.

He'd really just like to feel normal again. And he knows of others who feel the same.

"I was an artillery scout, these are folks who are in pretty good shape. Your Rangers, your Special Forces guys, they're in as good as shape as a professional athlete.

"Then we come back and we're all sick."

They feel like men who once were warriors and now are old before their time, with no hope for relief from a multitude of miseries that has no name.

"Grass's confession right before the publication of his autobiography leaves behind a bad taste of book promotion," wrote Bild am Sonntag newspaper columnist Helmut Boeger.

"Even after his admission, Grass remains Germany's most important living author. But he has lost his standing as a moral authority. He cannot be castigated for being a member of the SS ... But he can be for lying about it for 60 years."

Hellmuth Karasek, a leading literature critic, agreed there was no reason to reproach Grass for his membership of the Nazi's elite SS. Grass now admitted he volunteered for submarine duty at 15 but was rejected. He was later called up to the SS at 17.

Grass had previously said he was drafted in 1944 as a flak helper and held as a prisoner of war until 1946. After the war, he become an outspoken pacifist and icon of the German left.

"The fact he was in the SS at 17 is by itself a misdemeanor -- had Grass not been one to throw his weight around as a moral authority so much since then," Karasek told German radio.

"If I were cynical, I would say he did not reveal it sooner at the risk of not winning a Nobel prize. Don't misunderstand me: Grass deserved the Nobel prize more than any other German writer. But everything now has to be seen in a new light."

Grass told the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on Saturday the dark secret had been weighing on his mind and was one of the reasons he wrote the book which details his war service.

"My silence through all these years is one of the reasons why I wrote this book," he said. "It had to come out finally."

Grass had for decades demanded that Germans come to terms with their Nazi past by coming clean on it. He won the Nobel prize for literature in 1999.

"After 60 years, this confession comes a bit too late," Joachim Fest, a leading historian, told Der Spiegel magazine. "I can't understand how someone who for decades set himself up as a moral authority, a rather smug one, could pull this off."

Grass biographer Michael Juergs was dumbfounded.

"I feel a personal disappointment," Juergs said.

One of the most powerful organizations in Nazi Germany, the SS was first an elite force of volunteers that played a key role in the Holocaust, operating the death camps in which millions died. But by the war's end, most were drafted and many under 18.

Ralph Giordano, a leading German-Jewish writer, said he would not condemn Grass and praised his belated confession.

"It's good what Gunter Grass has now done," Giordano said. "What's worse than making a mistake is not coming to terms with it. His example also shows how seducible young people can be."

The Geneva-based World Health Organization launched a hiring ban on smokers in December 2005, the same month Sophie Blinham was fired just minutes into her new job at an English data communications firm after admitting she smoked. Von Schnurbein insists the Commission's decision is not "a green light for employers to discriminate," but Tom Jenkins of the European Trade Union Confederation disagrees. "This opens the possibility for all kinds of discriminations," he says, citing the obese and alcoholics. The Dublin Internet entrepreneur who placed the ad, Philip Tobin, was quoted as saying that smokers "stink."

If you eat a pungent lunch, says Jenkins, "you might stink, too."

In a statement, he said: "I loved my job, but now need time to reflect and consider whether the police service is an organisation that I still wish to be part of.

"Throughout the last three years my name has been publicly damaged, my integrity has been questioned and I have been accused of being corrupt.

"I believe this has been a gross misuse of public money for which somebody ought to be held accountable."

The Lancashire Police Federation, which represents rank and file officers, is demanding a review of disciplinary procedures.

Chairman Steve Edwards said: "This case has removed a dedicated police officer from the streets for three years."

Lancashire police declined to comment.

"People who are bombarded by music tend to hear music," said Dr Aziz. "I suspect the rates of hallucinations in orchestral players will be higher than normal. So, as we hear more music every day, cases will probably go up."

His research suggests sound hallucinations occur when people move from a stimulusrich environment to one with few auditory stimuli - for instance, from using an iPod on the Tube to entering a quiet office.

With no sound via the ears, the brain generates random impulses it interprets to be sound. It then matches these to memories of music and a song begins in the head. This may explain why Beethoven was able to compose after going deaf.

Officially, one in 10,000 people over 65 suffers but Dr Aziz believes younger people are also affected and the true number with the condition is higher due to poor diagnosis. Some sufferers find the condition a comfort. One 28-year-old said it was like a film soundtrack. Twenty patients reported hearing religious music, with six hearing the hymn Abide With Me.

The proposed change includes provisions intended to prevent problems that plagued earlier programs. Nevertheless, it has dredged up a painful history of medical mistreatment and incited debate among prison rights advocates and researchers about whether prisoners can truly make uncoerced decisions, given the environment they live in.

Supporters of such programs cite the possibility of benefit to prison populations, and the potential for contributing to the greater good.

Until the early 1970's, about 90 percent of all pharmaceutical products were tested on prison inmates, federal officials say. But such research diminished sharply in 1974 after revelations of abuse at prisons like Holmesburg here, where inmates were paid hundreds of dollars a month to test items as varied as dandruff treatments and dioxin, and where they were exposed to radioactive, hallucinogenic and carcinogenic chemicals.

In addition to addressing the abuses at Holmesburg, the regulations were a reaction to revelations in 1972 surrounding what the government called the Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male, which was begun in the 1930's and lasted 40 years. In it, several hundred mostly illiterate men with syphilis in rural Alabama were left untreated, even after a cure was discovered, so that researchers could study the disease.

"What happened at Holmesburg was just as gruesome as Tuskegee, but at Holmesburg it happened smack dab in the middle of a major city, not in some backwoods in Alabama," said Allen M. Hornblum, an urban studies professor at Temple University and the author of "Acres of Skin," a 1998 book about the Holmesburg research. "It just goes to show how prisons are truly distinct institutions where the walls don't just serve to keep inmates in, they also serve to keep public eyes out."

Critics also doubt the merits of pharmaceutical testing on prisoners who often lack basic health care.

Alvin Bronstein, a Washington lawyer who helped found the National Prison Project, an American Civil Liberties Union program, said he did not believe that altering the regulations risked a return to the days of Holmesburg.

"With the help of external review boards that would include a prisoner advocate," Mr. Bronstein said, "I do believe that the potential benefits of biomedical research outweigh the potential risks."

Holmesburg closed in 1995 but was partly reopened in July to help ease overcrowding at other prisons.

Under current regulations, passed in 1978, prisoners can participate in federally financed biomedical research if the experiment poses no more than "minimal" risks to the subjects. But a report formally presented to federal officials on Aug. 1 by the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences advised that experiments with greater risks be permitted if they had the potential to benefit prisoners. As an added precaution, the report suggested that all studies be subject to an independent review.

"The current regulations are entirely outdated and restrictive, and prisoners are being arbitrarily excluded from research that can help them," said Ernest D. Prentice, a University of Nebraska genetics professor and the chairman of a Health and Human Services Department committee that requested the study. Mr. Prentice said the regulation revision process would begin at the committee's next meeting, on Nov. 2.

The discussion comes as the biomedical industry is facing a shortage of testing subjects. In the last two years, several pain medications, including Vioxx and Bextra, have been pulled off the market because early testing did not include large enough numbers of patients to catch dangerous problems.

And the committee's report comes against the backdrop of a prison population that has more than quadrupled, to about 2.3 million, over the last 30 years and that disproportionately suffers from H.I.V. and hepatitis C, diseases that some researchers say could be better controlled if new research were permitted in prisons.

For Leodus Jones, a former prisoner, the report has opened old wounds. "This moves us back in a very bad direction," said Mr. Jones, who participated in the experiments at Holmesburg in 1966 and after his release played a pivotal role in lobbying to get the regulations passed.

In one experiment, Mr. Jones's skin changed color, and he developed rashes on his back and legs where he said lotions had been tested.

"The doctors told me at the time that something was seriously wrong," said Mr. Jones, who added that he had never signed a consent form. He reached a $40,000 settlement in 1986 with the City of Philadelphia after he sued.

"I never had these rashes before," he said, "but I've had them ever since."

The Institute of Medicine report was initiated in 2004 when the Health and Human Services Department asked the institute to look into the issue. The report said prisoners should be allowed to take part in federally financed clinical trials so long as the trials were in the later and less dangerous phase of Food and Drug Administration approval. It also recommended that at least half the subjects in such trials be nonprisoners, making it more difficult to test products that might scare off volunteers.

Dr. A. Bernard Ackerman, a New York dermatologist who worked at Holmesburg during the 1960's trials as a second-year resident from the University of Pennsylvania, said he remained skeptical. "I saw it firsthand," Dr. Ackerman said. "What started as scientific research became pure business, and no amount of regulations can prevent that from happening again."

Others cite similar concerns over the financial stake in such research.

"It strikes me as pretty ridiculous to start talking about prisoners getting access to cutting-edge research and medications when they can't even get penicillin and high-blood-pressure pills," said Paul Wright, editor of Prison Legal News, an independent monthly review. "I have to imagine there are larger financial motivations here."

The demand for human test subjects has grown so much that the so-called contract research industry has emerged in the past decade to recruit volunteers for pharmaceutical trials. The Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development, a Boston policy and economic research group at Tufts University, estimated that contract research revenue grew to $7 billion in 2005, up from $1 billion in 1995.

But researchers at the Institute of Medicine said their sole focus was to see if prisoners could benefit by changing the regulations.

Windows runs most of the world's computers and has been a constant target of attacks by worms, trojans, viruses and other malicious software. Microsoft routinely releases security updates and patches.

However, it was unusual for the US government's anti-terrorism department to call on the public to seal a crack in Windows before attackers broke in.

"This vulnerability could impact government systems, private industry and critical infrastructure, as well as individual and home users," the DHS said in a release.

Attackers could take advantage of the software weakness to remotely take control of computers, according to the DHS.

PC users were called on to apply Microsoft security patch MS06-040 "as quickly as possible."

The department said its Computer Emergency Readiness Team was working with Microsoft to protect or minimize the damage to government machines.

Attempts to exploit vulnerabilities in operating systems typically spike in the days after security patches are released.

Computer security professionals advise people to keep their operating system software current and use up-to-date anti-virus programs.

Miss Burns said Baltimore prosecutors kept detailed statistics from the first nine months of the camera program. Most of the 500 cases forwarded to prosecutors were quality-of-life crimes, she said, and 40 percent of those cases were dropped by prosecutors or dismissed by the courts.

"We have not used any footage to resolve a violent-crime case," she said.

Miss Burns said police sometimes misidentify suspects because the cameras produce "grainy" and "blurry" images.

"We have had that happen more than once," she said.

The D.C. Council, faced with a sharp increase in crime, passed emergency legislation July 19 that allows the Metropolitan Police Department to use surveillance cameras in neighborhoods as part of an emergency plan.

D.C. workers on Thursday began installing the first four of an expected 47 cameras throughout the city. Officials said the four cameras are temporary and will be replaced by permanent ones later this month. About 24 cameras will be deployed by the end of August, and 23 more will be added in September, police said.

Police Chief Charles H. Ramsey is required to notify only two persons about plans to place a camera in any given neighborhood: an advisory neighborhood commissioner and the appropriate council member. The cameras will operate 24 hours a day, but police will review the images only when a known crime may have been recorded.

Chicago deployed a few dozen cameras in neighborhoods in July 2003. Authorities there captured their first drug transaction 19 months later, in February 2005.

Police arrested three suspects and confiscated 12 packets of heroin. However, the cameras have not helped in criminal investigations.

"From my perspective, I would love it if we had footage of the murderer leaving the house, but that hasn't happened yet," said Kevin Smith, a spokesman for Chicago's Office of Emergency Management and Communications, which administers and monitors the 170-camera network.

Police in San Francisco said a camera paid off in an investigation for the first time in June, when they arrested a man in connection with a shooting in April.

Nine months after the first cameras were installed in neighborhoods, a camera captured the image of a man getting out of a car. The man subsequently shot at another man and missed, injuring a 13-year-old girl. The image was not recorded, but police said the camera was key to the investigation.

Surveillance cameras also have generated headlines for the wrong reasons.

In April 2005, a San Francisco police officer was suspended from the department for using surveillance cameras to ogle women at San Francisco International Airport.

New York officials say surveillance cameras in public-housing projects have led to substantial decreases in crime.

Written policies and random audits help guard the system against abuse, but that proved ineffective when the tape of a 22-year-old man who fatally shot himself in the lobby of a housing project in March 2004 surfaced on a pornographic Web site.

Critics argue that cameras only push criminals into unobserved areas. A University of Cincinnati study in 2000 concluded that surveillance cameras have a short-term deterrent effect, which likely would increase when the public is notified about their presence.

Cameras in Baltimore, Chicago, New York and San Francisco are labeled as police property. No police department logos are affixed to the D.C. cameras that were in place before the recently crime emergency.

D.C. police spokesman Kevin Morison said police are required to post signs indicating that an area is under surveillance. He could not say whether such notification would be required under a clause dealing with "exigent" circumstances.

Mr. Morison said several neighborhood leaders have requested cameras.

Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the District-based Electronic Privacy Information Center, said he has heard neighborhood leaders express approval of the cameras at hearings but is not sure whether most residents share that support.

"It's very difficult to get a clear read on whether this is something that residents really want," Mr. Rotenberg said. "I don't think people understand that if you put these cameras in residential communities, you're talking about a telescopic lens that can zoom in and a 360-degree casing that can look into your bedroom."

As a public service, we present the following post war self-test, to assist readers in placing themselves along the continuum which stretches from taking rational issue with Israeli policy, and ends in Jew-hate.



1. There is only one neighborhood grocery store [makolet] still operating in the Katyusha-shredded northern town of Kiryat Shmona. Up from the bomb shelters during a lull in attacks, shoppers seeking milk, bread, infant formula and other staples, congregate outside the grocery, waiting to enter.

A Hezbollah rocket attack on the crowd is:



A. Morally indefensible. Israel is careful to bomb only Hezbollah targets, many of which the organization regrettably locates among civilians, who are thus forced to act as human shields.



B. Wrong, if understandable in the context of guerilla warfare. Both sides should make every effort to keep non-combatants from being hurt.

C. Heroic. An example of self-defense. The rockets, a relative slingshot compared to the Israel's Goliath-scale arsenal, cause negligible damage in comparison to the slaughter which Israeli has inflicted in massacre after massacre from air, land and sea. Moreover, there are no non-combatants in Israel. Every infant is a potential soldier, women serve in the army, even the handicapped and elderly volunteer for service in the armed forces.



_______

2. You are handsome, famous and inebriated when you are stopped driving in Malibu, California by the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Dept. Suspecting the arresting officer of Judaism, you consider informing him that "The Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world."

You would take this course of action:

A. Over your dead body.
B. Only after 6-8 drinks.
C. Cold sober.



_______

3. You are CNN. When Lebanese civilians are killed, injured or rendered homeless in Israeli air strikes, you identify the victims as Lebanese civilians and elaborate on their suffering. When Israeli civilians are killed in Hezbollah rocket attacks, you should:

A. Identify them as Israeli civilians and elaborate on their suffering.

B. Identify them as Israelis, thus calling into question whether they are civilians.

C. Omit them, and elaborate on the suffering of Lebanese civilians.



_______


4. The Jewish lobby in the United States:

A. Represents Israel's interests as pro-Arab lobbyists represent theirs.

B. Crosses the line at times, but serves a legitimate role.

C. Runs everything.



_______

5. Jostein Gaarder, author of the book "Sophie's World," last week sparked a storm in his native Norway by writing, in the context of IDF operations in Lebanon, that Israel had lost its right to exist.

Referring to the killing of Lebanese children, Gaarder said "We note that many Israelis celebrate such triumphs like they once cheered the scourges of the Lord as 'fitting punishment' for the people of Egypt."

Gaarder also wrote that the first Zionist terrorists started operating in the days of Jesus.

The proper response to Gaarder is:

A. Condemn him, to the point of boycott.

B. Encourage rational debate on the issues he raises, bearing in mind his subsequent statement saying that he was misunderstood.

C. Applaud him for braving the media's censorship of honest discussion of Israel and its supporters.



_______


6. The Jewish people

A. Have a right to a state of their own in the Holy Land.
B. Have a right to an independent state alongside Palestine
C. Have no inherent right to a state, nor an inherent right to reside in Palestine.



_______

7. You are watching BBC coverage of the Israeli military reading Guardian coverage of the Israeli military. Your blood pressure:

A. Goes through the roof. The aneurism light is on.
B. Is unchanged.
C. Improves.



______

8. Rising gasoline prices are a result of:

A. Oil industry profiteering, global warming, and growing consumption in the U.S., China, and elsewhere.
B. War and political instability in the Middle East.
C The actions of Israel and its supporters.



______


9.Israel's actions in Lebanon were:

A. Expressions of self-defense.
B. Misguided expressions of self-defense.
C. Worse than the Nazis.



_______


10. When Iranian President Ahmadinejad calls the Holocaust a myth and says that Israel should be erased from the map he:

A. Should be taken seriously, as Hitler's Mein Kampf should have been,
B. Should be viewed as a demagogue, exploiting and inciting Muslim anger at Israel.
C. Saying what millions of people honestly believe, and with good reason.



_______

To Rate Yourself:

Score 10 Points for every answer A.
Score 20 Points for every answer B.
Score 30 points for every answer C.

If you scored between 100-150:

You are not an anti-Semite, though you may have some issues with Arabs.

If you scored between 150-220

You are not an anti-Semite, though some to your right may call you one.

If you scored between 230-300

Just because you don't think of yourself as a flaming anti-Semite ...