A new study reveals cigarettes may contain traces of pig's blood which could be “very offensive” to Muslims and other religious groups, Australia’s The Australian reported on Tuesday.
University of Sydney Professor Simon Chapman referred to a “recent Dutch research which identified 185 different industrial uses of a pig - including the use of its haemoglobin in cigarette filters,” The Australian said.
"I think that there would be some particularly devout groups who would find the idea that there were pig products in cigarettes to be very offensive," Chapman.
The discovery places more than 100 million Muslim Arabs in an extremely awkward situation, especially considering that several fatwas have already been issued prohibiting smoking altogether. This new information would make the previous prohibition all the more valid for Muslims.
Armed elements from Hamas today took control of a branch of the Bank of Palestine in the Rimal neighborhood of Gaza City, and confiscated a million shekels.In a completely different news story, the PA announced a $3.9 billion budget for 2010, of which some $1.5 billion will go towards the Gaza Strip.
Local sources reported that, in the wake of this incident, the management of the bank decided to close all its branches in the Gaza Strip.
Well, bank robbing is pretty easy for Hamas. They already have the masks.
Hamas security forces took $400,000 from a bank in the Gaza Strip on Monday, in a direct challenge to Palestinian authorities in the West Bank who had frozen the money to comply with money laundering regulations.
Hamas, which runs the Gaza Strip, said the men were executing a court order to seize the assets of a medical organization, the Patient's Friend Association.
Seeking to apply global regulations against money laundering, the Palestine Monetary Authority (PMA) froze the association's account after its board fell under Hamas control, banking sources said.
The PMA described Monday's seizure, the first time Hamas had challenged the authority, as a "sinful attack".
Ehab al-Ghsain, spokesman for the Hamas-run Interior Ministry, said Monday's move was "the implementation of a judicial decision." The association had "resorted to court after the Fatah government froze its account in the bank," he said.
One employee of the Bank of Palestine, who declined to be named because of the sensitivity of the situation, said the Hamas policemen had forced the staff to open the bank's vault and acted "aggressively"."They took 1.5 million shekels ($400,000) and signed a paper showing the amount of money they had taken," the employee said.
It was the first time Hamas had challenged the PMA, which functions as regulator of the Palestinian banking system in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.
"This is a serious development. We are investigating the matter and then we will take the appropriate action," Jihad al-Wazir, the governor of the PMA, told Reuters. He declined to give details about the raid.
In a statement, the PMA called on Hamas to "abide by the rule of law to safeguard the soundness of the banks so that they can keep providing services to the people."
Banks in the Gaza Strip would stage a strike on Tuesday to protest at the raid, Wazir said. Around a dozen banks, Palestinian- and Arab-owned, still function in the Gaza Strip, though their headquarters are in the West Bank.
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned, it seems, to direct the Middle East policy of the Obama administration.Read the whole thing.Since the Oslo Accords of 1993, 17 years of efforts under three American presidents and six Israeli prime ministers have taught five clear lessons. Each of them is being ignored by President Obama, which is why his own particular “peace process” has so greatly harmed real efforts at peace. Today the only factor uniting Palestinian, Israeli, and Arab leaders is distrust of the quality, sagacity, and reliability of American leadership in the region.
What are the lessons the Obama team is ignoring?
1. Israel’s flexibility is dependent on its sense of security.
2. The failure to set standards for Palestinian conduct hurts the cause of peace.
3. Israeli withdrawals do not lead to peace unless law and order can be maintained by responsible security forces.
4. The Israeli-Palestinian dispute is not the center of world, Arab, or Muslim politics.
5. The ‘peace process’ retards peace.
(h/t Yaacov Lozowick in a great essay of his own)
Wishing a happy Passover to all my readers, and trying to get my wishes in to those about to start the holiday in Israel.The tie-up between Arab entertainment giant Rotana and pro-Israel media mogul Rupert Murdoch is viewed in Egypt not only with suspicion but as signalling the decline of Arab film and art heritage.Ironically, there is one rich person in this story who is explicitly hoping to affect news coverage with business deals - and it is not Murdoch:
In a country where film and television attract some of the largest audiences across the Arab world, the tycoon's foray into the Middle East is widely seen in cultural circles as a ruse to benefit Israel.
Murdoch's News Corp last month acquired a 9.09-percent holding in the Rotana Group of Saudi royal and business tycoon Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, with an 18-month option to double the stake.
Rotana is one of the largest film producers in Egypt and also owns the rights to hundreds of Egyptian motion pictures.
In Egypt, which signed a 1979 peace treaty with Israel but has resisted a warming of cultural ties, there has been wide suspicion that the tie-up with Rotana is part of a Murdoch scheme to thaw frosty Arab views of Israel.
"Murdoch will enter every Arab home to impose normalisation" of ties with Israel, said Egyptian film critic Ola al-Shafei.
The partnership amounts to "a defeat for the Arab film and art heritage," she added.
Scriptwriter Osama Anwar Okasha wrote that Murdoch's stake in Rotana was a "Trojan horse" designed to stealthily penetrate Arab culture.
"The important thing is not the share sold by Alwaleed, but a person who hands over nine percent can also sell off the rest of the company," said novelist Ezzat Qamhawi.
"We are now facing the reality of the sale of Arab films and music to an investor whose media empire is one of the causes of the erroneous image of the Arab-Israeli conflict in the West," he added.
Egypt's state-owned film company has already threatened to stop working with Rotana, whose bouquet of free-to-air satellite channels target an Arab audience across the Middle East that is equally opposed to Murdoch's politics.
[Prince Alwaweed] said last month that he hoped the partnership could help moderate the widely-perceived anti-Arab bias of some of News Corp's most strident outlets, such as Fox News.
"It's not only Fox that in general is against the Arab world. It's an American syndrome," he said at a news conference in Riyadh when the deal was announced.
"We will always do our best to lower that tone," he said.
When in 2005 Alwaleed was reported as saying he had influenced how Fox News depicted rioting in heavily Muslim suburbs in France, the conservative Accuracy in Media group called for an investigation.
After Alwaleed, who owns a seven-percent stake in News Corp, gave an interview to Fox News this January conservatives blasted the network for its alleged kid-glove treatment.
The UN Human Rights Council slammed Israel in 4 resolutions today, with another scheduled tomorrow. The Council’s five against Israel surpass the total combined amount of resolutions it will dedicate to all other countries in the world — one each on Burma, North Korea and Guinea.The nation that has the best record on human rights in the Middle East is considered to be worse than every other nation combined by the esteemed UNHRC. And no one even considers this unusual anymore.
I mentioned an Arabic news story last week that Gaza authorities rejected Israel sending clothing and shoes to Gaza because the number of daily truckloads were too low.
The U.N. Human Rights Council on Thursday narrowly passed a resolution condemning Islamaphobic behavior, including Switzerland's minaret building ban, despite some states' major reservations.
The resolution, which was criticized by the United States as "an instrument of division," "strongly condemns... the ban on the construction of minarets of mosques and other recent discriminatory measures."
Some 20 countries voted in favor of the resolution entitled "combating defamation of religions," 17 voted against and eight abstained.
The resolution also "expresses deep concern ... that Islam is frequently and wrongly associated with human rights violations and terrorism."
It "regrets the laws or administrative measures specifically designed to control and monitor Muslim minorities, thereby stigmatizing them and legitimizing the discrimination they experience."However, the European Union pointed out that the concept of defamation should not fall under the remit of human rights because it conflicted with the right to freedom of expression, while the United States said free speech could be hindered by the resolution.
"The European Union believes that reconciling the notion of defamation with discrimination is a problematic endeavor," French ambassador Jean-Baptiste Mattei said on behalf of the bloc.
Eileen Donahoe, the U.S. ambassador to the U.N. also slammed the resolution as an "ineffective way to address" concerns about discrimination.
"We cannot agree that prohibiting speech is the way to promote tolerance, and because we continue to see the 'defamation of religions' concept used to justify censorship, criminalization, and in some cases violent assaults and deaths of political, racial, and religious minorities around the world," she said.
"Contrary to the intentions of most member states, governments are likely to abuse the rights of individuals in the name of this resolution, and in the name of the Human Rights Council," added the U.S. envoy.
When the story broke that one of the organisation’s most prominent and vocal members of staff might be a collector of Nazi-era military memorabilia it felt like some sort of sexual scandal had erupted in the Victorian church. For a lobbying group accustomed to adulatory coverage in the media, it was a public-relations catastrophe.This is exactly the hubris and doubletalk that we have seen time and time again from HRW over Garlasco. There is zero evidence that the Saudi fundraising dinner had a single Saudi dissident or critic in attendance, yet HRW defends itself as if that was the focus of the dinner - not to line its pockets with money from people who share its loathing for Israel.Human Rights Watch is one of two global superpowers among the world’s myriad humanitarian pressure groups. It is relatively young — established in its current form in 1988 — but it has grown so quickly in size, wealth and influence that it has all but eclipsed its older, London-based rival, Amnesty International.
Unlike Amnesty, HRW, as it is known, gets its money from charitable foundations and wealthy individuals — such as the financier George Soros — rather than a mass membership. And, also unlike Amnesty, it seeks to make an impact, not through extensive letter-writing campaigns, but by talking to governments and the media, urging openness and candour and backing up its advocacy with research reports. It is an association that is all about influence — an influence that depends on a carefully honed image of objectivity, expertise and high moral tone. So it was perhaps a little awkward that a key member of staff was found to have such a treasure trove of Nazi regalia.
Every year, Human Rights Watch puts out up to 100 glossy reports — essentially mini books — and 600-700 press releases, according to Daly, a former journalist for The Independent.
Some conflict zones get much more coverage than others. For instance, HRW has published five heavily publicised reports on Israel and the Palestinian territories since the January 2009 war.
In 20 years they have published only four reports on the conflict in Indian-controlled Kashmir, for example, even though the conflict has taken at least 80,000 lives in these two decades, and torture and extrajudicial murder have taken place on a vast scale. Perhaps even more tellingly, HRW has not published any report on the postelection violence and repression in Iran more than six months after the event.
When I asked the Middle East director Sarah Leah Whitson if HRW was ever going to release one, she said: “We have a draft, but I’m not sure I want to put one out.” Asked the same question, executive director Kenneth Roth told me that the problem with doing a report on Iran was the difficulty of getting into the country.
I interviewed a human-rights expert at a competing organisation in Washington who did not wish to be named because “we operate in a very small world and it’s not done to criticise other human-rights organisations”. He told me he was “not surprised” that HRW has still not produced a report on the violence in Iran: “They are thinking about how it’s going to be used politically in Washington. And it’s not a priority for them because Iran is just not a bad guy that they are interested in highlighting. Their hearts are not in it. Let’s face it, the thing that really excites them is Israel.”
Noah Pollak, a New York writer who has led some of the criticisms against HRW, points out that it cares about Palestinians when maltreated by Israelis, but is less concerned if perpetrators are fellow Arabs. For instance, in 2007 the Lebanese army shelled the Nahr al Bared refugee camp near Tripoli (then under the control of Fatah al Islam radicals), killing more than 100 civilians and displacing 30,000. HRW put out a press release — but it never produced a report.
Such imbalance was at the heart of a public dressing-down that shook HRW in October. It came from the organisation’s own founder and chairman emeritus, the renowned publisher Robert Bernstein, who took it to task in The New York Times for devoting its resources to open and democratic societies rather than closed ones.
He said: “It broke my heart to write that article… Of course open societies should be watched very carefully, but HRW is one of the very few organisations that is supposed to go into closed societies. Why should HRW be covering Guantanamo? It’s already covered by a lot of other organisations.”
Associates of Garlasco have told me that there had long been tensions between Garlasco and HRW’s Middle East Division in New York — perhaps because he sometimes stuck his neck out and did not follow the HRW line. Garlasco himself apparently resented what he felt was pressure to sex up claims of Israeli violations of laws of war in Gaza and Lebanon, or to stick by initial assessments even when they turned out to be incorrect.In June 2006, Garlasco had alleged that an explosion on a Gaza beach that killed seven people had been caused by Israeli shelling. However, after seeing the details of an Israeli army investigation that closely examined the relevant ballistics and blast patterns, he subsequently told the Jerusalem Post that he had been wrong and that the deaths were probably caused by an unexploded munition in the sand. But this went down badly at Human Rights Watch HQ in New York, and the admission was retracted by an HRW press release the next day.
Since the Garlasco affair blew up, critics of Human Rights Watch have raised questions about other appointments. An Israeli newspaper revealed that Joe Stork, the deputy head of HRW’s Middle East department, was a radical leftist who put out a magazine in the 1970s that praised the murder of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics. In 1976 he attended an anti-Zionist conference in Baghdad hosted by the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.
Stork’s boss, Sarah Leah Whitson, and most of his colleagues in the Middle East department of Human Rights Watch, also have activist backgrounds — it was typical that one newly hired researcher came to HRW from the extremist anti-Israel publication Electronic Intifada — unlikely to reassure anyone who thinks that human-rights organisations should be non-partisan. While it may be hard to find people who are genuinely neutral about Middle East politics, theoretically an organisation like HRW would not select as its researchers people who are so evidently on one side.
While HRW was dealing with the fallout from the Garlasco affair, it was already on the defensive as a result of criticism of a fundraising effort in Saudi Arabia, one of the world’s worst human-rights violators. This involved two dinners for members of the Saudi elite in Riyadh, at which Sarah Leah Whitson curried favour with her hosts by boasting about HRW’s “battles” with pro-Israel pressure groups, such as NGO Monitor.
I asked the HRW executive director Kenneth Roth about the controversy that surrounded the Saudi dinners. He said: “Because somebody is the victim of a repressive government, should they have no right to contribute to a human-rights organisation?” Even if they had been invited, few victims would have been able to make the dinners — most Saudi dissidents are either in prison or live abroad in exile.
The only thing that this article didn't mention was HRW's crude use of sockpuppets to defend itself during the Garlsaco affair.Many of those on the left of the human-rights “community” may feel conflicting emotions when it comes to dealing with radical Islam, as if the former is somehow a dangerous distraction from the real struggle. In 2006 Scott Long, the director of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights programme at Human Rights Watch, attacked the British campaigner Peter Tatchell, accusing him of racism, Islamophobia and colonialism for having the temerity to lead a campaign against Iran’s executions of homosexuals — a campaign that Long believed was unconstructive and based on “a Western social-constructionist trope”.
Human Rights Watch does perform a useful task, but its critics raise troubling questions that go beyond Garlasco’s hobby or raising money from Saudis. Why put such effort into publicising alleged human-rights violations in some countries but not others? Why does HRW seem so credulous of civilian witnesses in places like Gaza and Afghanistan but so sceptical of anyone in a uniform?
It may be that organisations like HRW that depend on the media for their profile — and therefore their donations — concentrate too much on places that the media already cares about.
HRW’s reaction to the scandals has perhaps cost it more credibility than the scandals themselves. It has revealed an organisation that does not always practice the transparency, tolerance and accountability it urges on others.
A delegation of Palestinian journalists from the Gaza Strip and the West Bank toured Tel Aviv on Thursday, as part of an initiative to build bridges between the Arab media and their peers in Israel.The question is, did the BBC end up running the story anyway?
Among those present were three reporters from the Gaza Strip and two from the West Bank. The reporters work for a variety of news outlets, both in the Arabic and English-speaking worlds....
One of the journalists, Palestinian TV broadcaster Lana Shaheen, said she appreciated the opportunity to meet fellow reporters in Israel and described the difficulties of being a reporter in the Gaza Strip.
...Shaheen says she has to contend with significant censorship from Hamas on what journalists can report from the Gaza Strip. Such limits make it very difficult to present a completely objective picture of the situation on the ground.
Shaheen said “to some extent” Hamas controls what they can report. She used the example of a friend who works for the BBC who produced a report on the rather widespread making of homemade wine in Gaza, “and the next day we receive a statement from a Hamas spokesman saying they are supporting the enemy and this is immoral.”
The Obama Administration is demanding that Israel hand over more West Bank land to exclusive PA control, including the Abu-Dis area adjacent to Jerusalem, Palestinian sources told Ynet Thursday.Because what could possibly be wrong with turning back the clock to the day before a war began that killed a thousand Israeli civilians?According to the US vision, the move will take place as part of reverting to the state that prevailed in the West Bank before the outbreak of the last Intifada.
"The most significant demand is to restore the situation to what it was on the eve of the Intifada," one source said.
Starting and losing a war has consequences in every part of the world except for one. Since 1967, the world - and "international law" as interpreted by most - is fixated on the idea that the Arabs can start all the wars they want against Israel. If they lose, international pressure will ensure that the previous status quo can be returned to, so there are no consequences for losing.
We have seen Egypt, Syria, the PLO, the PLO again, Hezbollah and Hamas start wars with Israel, secure in the knowledge that they will not lose anything of consequence if they lose the war. Just expendable people who are less important than "The Struggle" and perhaps a few years of negotiations and pressure.
It wasn't that many years ago that Israelis were putting their lives on the line in order to take a bus or go to a restaurant. Their government finally went on the offensive to fix this intolerable situation - it built a fence, it took actions against terrorists, it added checkpoints both in the territories and all over Israel itself that every citizen had to go through many times daily, and it took actions to stop giving Hamas materials to build rockets and tunnels with.
All those defensive actions, meant to save lives, appear to be now "unacceptable," in the term that the Obama administration uses with serious conviction against Israel and with fake conviction against Iran.
Now, the surviving Palestinian Arab leaders who wholeheartedly supported the intifada are being given an opportunity to turn back the clock, so they can come up with a new way to destroy Israel without losing any leverage.
The strategy is simple. When the Arabs win, militarily or politically, they win. When Israel wins, it is a draw at best. So all the Arabs have to do is keep trying.
While the White House thinks in terms of four-year chunks of time, the Arabs think in terms of centuries. To them, the Crusades were a mere blip in time.
And so is Israel.
So, backed by Westerners who cling to the false hope that a temporary peace treaty will somehow stop worldwide Islamic terror, the Arabs can keep trying to shave parts of Israel off until there is nothing left. After a Palestinian Arab state will come demands for the Arab parts of Israel, then demands for the 1947 partition lines, then demands for Arabs to "return" to lands that they never owned to begin with. There will be demands for "Palestine" to have full control over its airspace, to have the full ability to invite Iran or Syria to place an army on its territory, all in the name of fairness and independence.
The demands,and the supporting wars, will not stop because there is no incentive to stop them. They know that the West will always want to turn the clock back if they lose, so why fear losing?
There is a basic fact that should be self-evident, but years of double-talk and wishful thinking has rendered it invisible in the Middle East:Our incredible, magical control of the world allowed us to ensure that 1 million of us would be driven from homes in Arab and Muslim countries *cough Egypt cough* by Nazi-inspired repression, pogroms and threats of genocide, and allowed us to ensure that these refugees ended up in tent cities near present-day Sderot, where nobody but the Jews shouldered the burden of helping them and integrating them into Israel's population.
Our control further ensures that the Palestinians' childrens' childrens' children are not allowed to return to the countries from which many of their fathers and grandfathers came, and are living in squalid camps, supported by the taxes of people whom they hate. This is a big part of the Plan - to make sure that these people are kept on the dole, all the while being brainwashed to kill us.
Our control ensures that Israel gets rocketed and nobody worries about it, and that Israel is continually and uniquely attacked by one United Nations resolution after another, while most of Europe and Asia watch the spectacle. We are very clever, we who ensure that no other national state on earth receives such "special handling!"
Our absolute control of the world enables us to ensure that otherwise "caring" governments don't raise a finger to help Jews who are physically attacked or threatened in places like Oslo and Malmo, and it's why, when a Jew displays an Israeli flag in his window in Germany, we ensure that the German authorities make him take it down - while allowing a crowd of vicious anti-Semites to issue threats of violence against us without challenge.
And we control elected governments, and NGOs! Never mind that there are only 11 million of us in the world. Pay no attention to the fact that governments blatantly don't give a fig what we think about Jerusalem, about Iran, or about most other major topics. But have no fear. We control with our JOO RAYS! We're mind-controlling politicians with our wily ways. Except when we're not. Do not be distracted by the relentless way in which major NGOs bash Israel in order to raise money from oil dictators. We control them!
And oh, boy! Our cabal is such a secret cabal! Every Jew participates in this network! Except for Norman Finkelstein. And Jeremy Ben-Ami. And just about all of the left-wing Jews. And the Neturei Karta. And the Israeli supreme court. And the settlers. And the millions of other Jewish people who can't be bothered to show up at the synagogue. No, wait! Sorry! I forgot! We're ALL conspirators; we just don't realize it! I don't realize it either. It's such a clever plan that nobody in the world knows what the plan is! We have endless, friendly debates about it in public forums, using such friendly pet names as "heartless neocon", "self-hating dhimmi", "naive liberal" and (whispers) "Zionist". Yes, Zahi is right. We Jews are so powerful because we are completely and totally united! Bibi is in league with Noam Chomsky! And Tzipi Livni! And Amira Hass! Danny Ayalon is consorting with Rahm Emanuel! And we have kept all of this a secret for thousands of years!
Oh, it's a fiendishly clever Plan.
Sssshh.
And it's all about humiliating Egypt. By signing a peace treaty with it and giving back the Sinai. Oops, wait. I think the idea is to humiliate the Arab world by continuing to breathe. Elder, help! I've lost the threads of our super-secret conspiracy!
[It is all very complicated, as you can imagine. A lot of it is centered around lawn darts, SETI, women's pro wrestling and shaitel machers. When you reach the rank of Elder Daled Zayin you will gain more knowledge.]
Israel should pay Palestinians reparations for loss and damages suffered during last year’s war in the Gaza Strip, the UN Human Rights Council said Thursday.Here are some expenses that the UN did not feel worthy of compensation:The 47-nation body didn’t call for similar payments by Palestinians to Israelis. The resolution was opposed by the United States and five European countries.
The council, which has been criticized for excessively focusing on Israel in the past, approved four other resolutions condemning the Jewish state on Wednesday.
In an earlier article in Asharq Al Awsat, he said " "The concept of killing women, children and elderly people... seems to run in the blood of the Jews of Palestine" and that "the only thing that the Jews have learned from history is methods of tyranny and torment - so much so that they have become artists in this field."Zahi Hawass: "For 18 centuries, [the Jews] were dispersed throughout the world. They went to America and took control of its economy. They have a plan. Although they are few in number, they control the entire world."
Interviewer: "Dr. Hawass, you are a great historian and archaeologist. I would like to figure out the mystery of how 15 million people, 5 or 6 million of whom do not share this vile Jewish logic... With regard to Israel and Zionism – we are talking about 7 or 8 million. How is it possible that these 7 or 8 million have taken control of the entire world, and have convinced the world of their cause, while we, over one billion Muslims, cannot convince the world of our cause? How would you explain this from a historical perspective?"
Zahi Hawass: "The reason is that they are always united over a single view. They always move together, even if in the wrong direction. We, on the other hand, are divided. If even two Arab countries could be in agreement, our voice would be stronger. Look at the control they have over America and the media."
Interviewer: "So in your opinion, the secret lies in unity?"
Zahi Hawass: "Yes. It was unity that gave them this power..."
Interviewer: "You mean from a historical perspective?"
Zahi Hawass: "Of course."
What Israel is doing now is a violation of the rules and values, and the Ibrahimi Mosque and the Mosque of Bilal Ibn Rabah [The Cave of the Patriarchs and Rachel's Tomb] has no connection whatsoever with Jewish history, it is a product of and part of the culture and heritage of Palestine.He must also think that the Talmud Yerushalmi is also "part of the culture and heritage of Palestine." After all, it is sometimes referred to as the "Palestinian Talmud."
The corollary to this argument is that if, at some time, Holocaust denial becomes a more effective argument, then that would be the preferred weapon.
The only thing missing from his argument is any reference to the truth. Truth, he believes, is completely irrelevant - absurd Holocaust analogies must be used as a club to beat Jews with, because that hurts them more than denying the Holocaust does, and the goal, of course, is to hurt the Jews.The Palestinian situation is now at its worst stage with division and conflict between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority. Even if reconciliation efforts are successful, mutual confidence between the two parties is something that may remain absent for a long time. This would mean continuation of a state of weakness and the absence of true bargaining power. To be clear, the Palestinians should not expect an Arab miracle that will result in all their dreams and aspirations being fulfilled. The current Arab situation is extremely frail, and even if there is a desire to take serious steps to support the Palestinian negotiator, this is something that would require the Arab position to derive its strength from the cohesion and strength of the Palestinian position.
It is not logical for the government of President Mahmoud Abbas to pin all of its negotiation hopes on the US effort, just as it is not acceptable for Hamas to stall reconciliation and subject the fate of the Palestinians in Gaza to the calculations of Tehran. While Fatah and Hamas fight over power, Palestinian suffering is increasing; their lands are being confiscated, and the dream of a Palestinian state is diminishing day by day. What is currently required of the Palestinian leadership is for it to rise to the level of responsibility and stop jeopardizing the rights of its people. Without complete reconciliation, neither the Arab states nor Washington will be able to do anything for the Palestinians.
"Only argue with the People of the Book in the kindest way - except in the case of those of them who do wrong - saying, 'We have belief in what has been sent down to us and what was sent down to you. Our God and your God are one and we submit to Him."Appeal to all Muslims living in the Land of Israel
We want to explain to you in this letter the opinion of the Torah for the accommodation of non-Jews in the land of Israel. According to the Torah, every human being is created from the same God, and should be treated with respect. Do not look at the Jewish religion as racist or inhumane, this is a scriptural duty.
The origin of our religion is faith in God, King of the world, and according to our belief and faith God has given us the Torah and the commandments, messages and we must do.
In the Holy Qur'an there is no contradiction between what the Bible ordered us to do and what is commanded you by the Koran. Jews must assume the duties of the Torah, and in the Torah it is written in several places that the land of Israel was promised to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and their descendants. We are descendants of the ancient people of Israel, the descendants of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.
It is also written in the Torah that the land of Israel, this small land, is the property of the Jewish people only, and others are prohibited from permanently living here.
Also written in the books of the Prophets is that due to how we're doing the Divine will, the Jewish people were exiled for 2000 years. Now the return of the people of Israel to the Land of Israel, as promised the prophets, has occurred, and it is time for the people of Israel to implement this divine command, so we ask you to leave the land of Israel.
We say that from a religious point of view, to ensure peace in the land of Israel, we explain to you the biblical and Qur'anic statements...
This is what the Lord God said to Moses:
Numbers 33:50-56:
50 And the LORD spoke unto Moses in the plains of Moab by the Jordan at Jericho, saying: 51 'Speak unto the children of Israel, and say unto them: When ye pass over the Jordan into the land of Canaan, 52 then ye shall drive out all the inhabitants of the land from before you, and destroy all their figured stones, and destroy all their molten images, and demolish all their high places. 53 And ye shall drive out the inhabitants of the land, and dwell therein; for unto you have I given the land to possess it. 54 And ye shall inherit the land by lot according to your families--to the more ye shall give the more inheritance, and to the fewer thou shalt give the less inheritance; wheresoever the lot falleth to any man, that shall be his; according to the tribes of your fathers shall ye inherit. 55 But if ye will not drive out the inhabitants of the land from before you, then shall those that ye let remain of them be as thorns in your eyes, and as pricks in your sides, and they shall harass you in the land wherein ye dwell. 56 And it shall come to pass, that as I thought to do unto them, so will I do unto you. :
In the Holy Qur'an:
Surat Al-Isra: And we said to the Children of Israel afterwards, "Go live into this land. When the final prophecy comes to pass, we will summon you all in one group."
...Surat Al-Maida: "Lo! We did reveal the Torah, wherein is guidance and a light, by which the prophets who surrendered (unto Allah) judged the Jews, and the rabbis and the priests (judged) by such of Allah's Scripture as they were bidden to observe, and thereunto were they witnesses. So fear not mankind, but fear Me. And barter not My revelations for a little gain. Whoso judgeth not by that which Allah hath revealed: such are disbelievers. "
After you saw the heavenly words, and because Islam is a religion of morality you should not be opposed to this - and you have other countries where you can live - and you will understand that we must do as is written in the Torah.
Because it is not easy to leave millions of people without financial assistance, we suggest that you have to negotiate with the State of Israel (which reflects the promises of the prophets), that you can obtain economic aid for moving elsewhere.
When we all obey God, we can live in peace, we and you, our children and your children for many years, as the Prophet Isaiah: "Nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more."
Ask who lives in that apartment. Ask what happens to her as the city fossilizes because foreign leaders want to impose that insane plan on her city.
Last year I made a religious Zionist Haggadah, using commentaries from various Internet sites. About a thousand people downloaded it.Early on in this challenge, I included the noun “Jew” in a Google search. I received in return an automated response from the ADL implying that I was an anti-Semite. Why? More importantly, how did a Google response appear in my e-mail inbox — automatically — from the ADL?
The opposition does not use Zionist communications consultants to woo nor attract support, said Parti Keadilan Rakyat (PKR) vice-president Azmin Ali on Wednesday, March 24.Azmin, who is also the Gombak member of parliament (MP), also debunked the theory that opposition and PKR de-facto leader Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim (Permatang Pauh-PKR) was a Jewish agent.
During the debate on the royal address last Wednesday, Khairy Jamaluddin (Rembau-BN) had questioned Anwar on his relationship with former US ambassador to Indonesia Paul Wolfowitz.
“While it’s true that the Permatang Pauh MP has known Wolfowitz for a long time, their relationship has not reduced Anwar’s Malay-ness or his faith,” said Azmin in Dewan Rakyat.
But Zamin did make Zionist accusations:
Gombak MP Azmin Ali has urged Defence Minister Ahmad Zahid Hamidi to come clean about his alleged secret meeting with Israeli counterpart Ehud Barak in Paris last year.It's nice to know that in the 21st century, politicians can still get mileage around meeting with Jews and Israelis.“I want the defence minister and Umno deputy president to come into this House and explain Umno’s motive for meeting the Zionist at the Paris Air Show. Don’t deceive the Malays… don’t lie to the officers and don’t twist the facts,” he said in parliament.
(h/t to Meryl Yourish who coined the term "Jew-cooties.")
which seems to indicate that they were good videogame players. In fact, the word is "Qassami", or simply members of the al-Qassam Brigades.
