Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, May 2000, page 114

Publishers’ Page

American Educational Trust

First the Good News.

We’ve spent a lot of money on our Web site over the past few years, to put on it the entire contents of every issue of this magazine since we started it in April 1982. It’s been disheartening, at times. Improvements in technology made it necessary to start all over again more than a year into the project, which was originally to be a CD-ROM copy of all our files to be sold to researchers, and then replaced every year with an annual updating for a small fee. But even as we worked on it, it became possible to make every page searchable for everyone who has access to the Internet, anywhere in the world. So by now the reference library on our Web site has passed the 12,000-page mark and is still growing as we repeat some badly scanned material from 1986, 1987 and 1988, and add 116 new pages every month from the year 2000.

To Be Perfectly Frank…

Since it’s cost us several paid man and woman years we couldn’t afford, we had to make some hard decisions. We could have charged for its use, or we could keep it free to all. We chose to keep it free. So it’s available, at no cost, to everyone everywhere in the world. We had 33,700 “visitors” to the site during the first three months of 2000. Those weren’t mere “hits.” They were people who stayed and read a while. In fact, they read more than 110,000 pages, keeping us always among the top five most visited Middle East Web sites in the world. What’s more, the numbers are growing. In January the visitors totaled 8,800, in February 10,400, and in March 14,500. Obviously there still are many times more of our pages being read on paper than on the Internet, but that line may be crossed some time in the next few years. We think we’re making a big, perhaps decisive, contribution toward breaking the mainstream media block on keeping good news about Arabs and Muslims and bad news about the Israelis padlocked away from America’s mainstream readers and voters.

We Mentioned Last Month…

That Charles Maria of San Diego told us he would be sending us $20,000 worth of stock annually. Since then, his accountant has told him he can donate up to $32,000 annually to us and deduct it all from his income tax. Meanwhile Dr. Henry Zeiter of Stockton, CA has sent us another very generous contribution in stock, an anonymous (we know his identity but he’s not too eager for his family to know) donor has done likewise, and we’ve received inquiries from others about how it works.

Here’s an Example:

Someone has invested $2,000 in stock. Since then it has appreciated to a value of $10,000. If the donor sells it, he’s going to pay capital gains on $8,000, which isn’t going to leave a lot for him or her to donate. But if he donates the stock to a tax-exempt organization like the AET Library Endowment, the endowment keeps the entire $10,000 realized from sale of the stock and the donor can list the entire $10,000 as a deduction from his income tax. It’s a great way to stretch one’s charity dollars, and the recipient organization may get nearly twice the benefit it would have otherwise.

We Were Touched Also…

By a two-sentence letter received just as we went to press from Carolyn Reilly of Brownsville, TX which read: “The enclosed check in the amount of $2,300 is your portion of an inheritance I recently received. Unfortunately, I will be unable to contribute anywhere near this much in the future.” So we’ll send our condolences and thanks to Ms. Reilly, along with our assurance that if every one of our paid subscribers were as generous as she has just been, we would not have to ask for any more donations from anyone, ever. We would finally have that endowment for which we’ve searched for 18 years, and could easily finance from it all expenses beyond our earned income from subscriptions, advertising, editorial services and book sales, which already cover more than two-thirds of our budget.

We Were Reassured by a News Item…

About an editorial shakeup at the Forward, a Jewish community weekly published in New York. What caught our eye was the fact that the newspaper, with circulation comparable to ours, loses some $2 million a year—more than our entire annual budget. Yet the shakeup was about editorial policy, not financial management. Maybe this is a good place to mention, also, that a lot of well-wishers have suggested we could perhaps save money by following the example of Amazon.com which, if we understand it correctly, doesn’t maintain a warehouse of books, but simply draws on other book retailers, like (and including) us, to fill the orders received. But there is no other bookseller from whose stocks we could draw, since we’re the only people who keep most of our 200-plus titles in print in the U.S. But that’s not the point, which is that we believe we read that to date Amazon.com has lost $21 million. So people who have said that they wish our editorial savvy were matched by our financial savvy might think again. We’ve created the only readily accessible reference library in North America of truth and facts about the U.S. and the Middle East, without an endowment, and we’re still here, although just barely, thanks to lots of people like Ms. Reilly and Messrs. Maria, Zeiter and Anonymous.

Now the Bad News.

There’s nothing new about the harassing calls we get. Thanks to caller ID, we now can identify them quickly and report them to the phone company and the police. The worst harasser has even served jail time for the habit. But the FBI says it will step in against him only when the call seems to be a threat. We also know that callers sometimes threaten our advertisers, and from their reports it seems those calls all come from the same jailbird who harasses us. Now, however, we’ve discovered on the Web site of Irving J. Moskowitz, the bingo parlor king who finances some of the most dangerous Israeli settlers, a letter to one of our advertisers from Morton Klein. He’s the way-over-the-top guy who took over the Zionist Organization of America a few years ago, and uses his new platform primarily to harass Israeli and American Jewish peace groups. Klein’s letter to an advertiser in our March issue seems to threaten a Jewish community boycott if the recipient continues to advertise in our magazine, which the letter describes as “anti-Israel.”

Here are the Final Sentences:

“It is both immoral to support such a publication as well as unwise from a business point of view. You must realize that if the Jewish community or other communities became aware of this matter, the impact would be detrimental to Startec. We are also troubled by the fact that your advertisements in the Washington Report about phone calls to the Middle East make no mention of Israel, yet do list ‘Palestine,’ a country that does not exist. We urge you to immediately rectify this in all of Startec’s advertisements.”

We Have Published Advertising…

For several long-distance telephone carriers over the years. If you haven’t already dealt with one of them, the company which was the subject of Klein’s threatening letter posted on the Internet is Startec, which responds in Arabic on its customer service line, 1 (800) 584-1655, and has an advertisement on the inside back cover of this issue. A company that advertised on the inside back cover in our April issue is Global Telecom Inc., whose number is 1 (888) 744-5623, and which answers in English. Another regular advertiser is Primus, telephone 1 (800) 276-1075. If you give any or all of these companies a call, perhaps based on which language you prefer to deal in, and use their services, you can…

Make a Difference, This Month!

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