Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News: death penalty

Showing posts with label death penalty. Show all posts

Sunday, March 26, 2023

More "Apartheid:" Israel helps free Israeli Arab anti-Zionist activist from UAE prison

An Israeli woman was released from prison in the United Arab Emirates on Saturday night and was flown back to Israel early Sunday, after UAE President Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan granted her amnesty as a personal gesture to President Isaac Herzog.

Fidaa Kiwan was serving life in prison for drug smuggling. She was originally sentenced to death in April 2022, but the Abu Dhabi Federal Appeal Court canceled the punishment and sentenced her to life behind bars in July.

Kiwan, a 44-year-old Haifa resident who owns a photography studio, reportedly came to Dubai for work at the invitation of a Palestinian acquaintance. She was arrested a short while later, on March 17, 2021, after a search of her apartment turned up the drugs. She claimed that the cocaine was not hers.

World Israel News fills in some details:

Kiwan, a staunch anti-Zionist, previously made headlines in 2010 for refusing to serve a uniformed IDF soldier in a café she once owned. The café eventually closed.

According to Hebrew language media reports, her brother, a one-time employee of public broadcasting station Kan, trashed a room at his workplace in which Israeli flags were displayed.

After her Kiwan’s arrest in Dubai, she initially resisted help from Israeli officials because of her political views. However, she eventually reached out to Israeli authorities for assistance.

Her family vocally accused the Israeli government of racism, claiming in a press conference that officials weren’t doing enough to help her case because of her Arab ethnicity.

President Isaac Herzog personally asked UAE President Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan to pardon Kiwan and he agreed, according to a statement from Herzog’s office.

Kiwan’s release came on the first day of Ramadan.

The president of the Jewish state put a great deal of his own political capital on the line to save the life of an anti-Zionist Arab - because she is a citizen of Israel and that is the government's job.

(h/t iTiIL972)

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Palestinian news stories you probably didn't know about

During the funeral of Abdel Fattah Kharousheh, who murdered the Yaniv brothers, Palestinian police fired tear gas and tried to take away Hamas flags. This resulted in Kharousheh's body falling to the ground.

A 37 year old Palestinian in Taffouh was shot in the head and killed during a "family dispute."

Another was killed in a dispute over a coat.

Hamas sentenced three people to death in Gaza, two of them for "collaborating" with Israel and one for drug charges.

A gang of 11 people were arrested in Jenin for threatening other people with sharp objects, and one tried to run over others with his car. A number of victims were hospitalized.

The Palestinian Supreme Fatwa Council said "our Palestinian people are facing a war of extermination, which is being carried out by the occupation authorities and herds of settlers."

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Two stories the mainstream media will miss from Knesset's death penalty bill

A death penalty bill for terrorists passed a preliminary hearing in the Knesset today, and we can expect the normal outrage to ensue.

I don't think that such a bill would serve as a disincentive to terror - after all, terrorists expect to be killed during their attacks - but there are a couple of subplots to this story that are more important than the story itself.

One is that the chances that the bill actually passes is fairly low - and that is because the religious parties in the coalition are against the death penalty. As JPost writes:

Sephardi Chief Rabbi Yitzhak Yosef has ruled that the death penalty violates Halacha. The Shas Party, which represents the Sephardi haredi (ultra-Orthodox) electorate, said it would support the bill only in its preliminary reading at this point, out of coalition obligations, but that it would follow Yosef’s ruling in the future, which is unlikely to change, according to Yishai Cohen, a reporter for the Kikar HaShabbat news site.

Supporters of the law, without Shas and UTJ but with Yisrael Beytenu, would likely have 52 votes. Assuming that Shas and UTJ abstain and the opposition parties oppose the bill, there would be 50 votes against it. This means that if either of the haredi parties, or even if any of the two factions that make up UTJ – the Lithuanian Degel Hatorah and the hassidic Agudat Yisrael – vote against the law, it would not have a majority in the Knesset.

The parties that are decried as the most extreme factions in Knesset may be the ones who block the bill. This violates the Western media narrative, where the extremists could never agree with the "progressives."

So they almost certainly will not report that.

Another story is the Palestinian reaction to the bill. See what Hussein al-Sheikh, Secretary General of the Executive Committee of the PLO, tweeted:

He calls all of the potential targets of the death penalty "freedom fighters."

Even though the bill is aimed only at murderers.

Most of the murderers in Israeli prison are members of Hamas, Islamic Jihad or other groups opposed to the PLO. But when given a choice, the leaders of the Palestinians always side with the terrorists against Israel.

Meaning, even the most moderate Palestinian leader is a de facto supporter of terrorism, and considers the most heinous murderers of Jewish children to be "freedom fighters."

Good luck finding a word of criticism against Al Sheikh or any Palestinian leader in the mainstream media. That is a story that must be silenced, at least until antisemitism is so normalized that the Palestinian position supporting terror becomes itself mainstream.

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"Human rights" activists and groups silent as Hamas executes "collaborators"

Times of Israel reports:

The Hamas terror group announced on Sunday that it had executed five Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, including two for “collaboration” with Israel.

“On Sunday morning, the death sentence was carried out against two condemned over collaboration with the occupation (Israel), and three others in criminal cases,” Hamas, which rules Gaza said in a statement.

It added that the defendants had previously been given “their full rights to defend themselves.”

Hamas media is reporting that "experts" and "activists" are supporting the executions. Many use a hashtag, #القصاص_حياة, "Retribution is Life," from a Quran quote.

I can find no "progressive" anti-Israel activist who is condemning Hamas' death penalty for either the Gazans convicted of murder or of "collaboration."

Moreover, the "human rights" groups that Israel has outlawed are not saying a word either. Al Haq, "Protecting and Promoting Human Rights & the Rule of Law in the Occupied Palestinian Territory," is silent.

Also silent, as of this writing, are the social media of Amnesty and Human Rights Watch, who regularly condemn the death penalty in the US.

PCHR, a Palestinian human rights group not considered illegal by Israel, to its credit, does consistently condemn the death penalty. But B'Tselem hasn't said anything about this.

So-called human rights groups pretend that they are even handed and condemn Hamas when appropriate. But except for rocket fire, they tacitly support everything Hamas does with their silence, while they spend thousands of hours looking for new things to accuse Israel of.

The "collaboration" crimes occurred in 1991 and 2001.

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Iraq shooting itself in the foot with anti-normalization law

A week ago, the Iraqi parliament unanimously passed a law criminalising any form of normalisation with Israel. The law threatens the death penalty or life imprisonment for anyone calling for normalisation.

The law says that any Iraq who visits Israel will be sentenced to life imprisonment, and those who establish any political, economic, or cultural relations with Israel institutions, even through social media, will be sentenced to death.

An analysis in The New Arab - which is very anti-Israel - indicates that Iraq might suffer from this law if it enforces it, which it might not do:

The new anti-normalisation law could also be weaponised against Sunni Arab dissidents, warned Tallha Abdulrazaq, an expert in Middle Eastern strategic and security affairs, in an interview with The New Arab.

“I’m a British-Iraqi and in my academic work I engage sometimes with Israeli academics, policymakers, and even lawmakers on occasion…I’m exactly the kind of target whom they’d like to sweep up in this sort of thing because I’m a dissident of the political process and I’m a Sunni. There’s a political aspect and a sectarian aspect to this…So, if you have any interactions with an Israeli entity, they can target you with this law.” He added that “this is going to have a chilling effect on academics abroad and people who work in the media.”

This legislation could also have negative implications for Iraq’s economy and foreign investment climate. Depending on the extent to which authorities enforce this law, investors might worry more about the potential risks of doing business in Iraq on top of concerns surrounding the country’s overall state of insecurity.

There could be “possible obstacles to foreign direct investment in Iraq by companies that feel constrained by their own policies or the laws in their home countries that would penalise anything that looks like cooperating in a boycott of Israel,” according to analysts Yerevan Saeed and Hussein Ibish.

Yet, Abdulrazaq believes that this law will not be weaponised against foreign corporations with links to Israel given Iraq’s current economic problems.

“The Iraqi economy is in absolute shambles…They need these foreign companies [and] foreign direct investment…This is more for popular consumption. It’s not meant as a stick meant to beat foreign companies with. They need them for their economy…If these guys were to leave, then that’s it for Iraq. There’d be almost nothing there for them. Even in terms of their oil sales, it’s not enough. It’s not enough to sustain Iraq itself. They will not chasing any foreign corporations any time soon.”

The initial consensus is that this law is simply a means to unite Iraqis with anti-Israel rhetoric, a time honored tradition in the Arab world that is quickly losing its effectiveness. There seems little appetite to have Iraq allow foreign investors to be chased away because they also have ties to Israel, which was the Arab League position for decades.

(h/t JW)

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