Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News: nepotism

Showing posts with label nepotism. Show all posts

Wednesday, March 29, 2023

In October, the Palestinians enacted their own draconian judicial reforms. The West ignored it.

Abbas with members of the Supreme Constitutional Court that he appointed

During these tumultuous times of anger and angst over the future of Israel's judiciary, it is worth looking at recent changes to the judicial system under the Palestinian Authority that received next to no Western coverage.

On October 28, Mahmoud Abbas issued a presidential decree creating the Supreme Council of Judicial Bodies and Authorities.

This Council has full control over the the Palestinian Authority‘s judicial system - the Supreme Constitutional Court, the Supreme Judicial Council, the Court of Cassation, the Supreme Administrative Court, the judicial authority of the security forces, the Shariah Judicial Council, the ministry of justice and the attorney general.

The head of this council? Mahmoud Abbas, himself!

Abbas has complete and direct control over the entire Palestinian judiciary.

A few years ago he created the Supreme Constitutional Court and handpicked all the members, he then used that court to dissolve the Palestinian Legislative Council so he could be the head of the legislative branch of the government as well as the executive. And he uses his power to create hundreds of laws by presidential decree using the excuse that there is no legislative branch to do the job.

The media is silent. NGOs are nearly silent (Amnesty gave this a brief mention in their annual report, Human Rights Watch didn't mention it at all.)

A website by the European Council on Foreign Relations, called Mapping Palestinian Politics, describes in detail how Mahmoud Abbas has complete control of nearly every important Palestinian institution.

Since succeeding Yasser Arafat as Palestinian leader in 2004, Abbas has consolidated his grip on power within the Palestinian Authority (PA), the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), and Fatah. Over the years, Abbas has steadily purged or constrained his political rivals, monopolised the various Palestinian decision-making processes, and pursued increasingly authoritarian measures to stifle dissent and shrink the space for Palestinian democracy and popular participation.

Why is there so much global criticism of Israel considering changes to the judiciary, and near complete silence when the Palestinian president rips up any pretense of a division of powers and installs himself as the head jurist as well as dictator? More importantly, how can anyone look at the Palestinian Authority and think that this should become an independent state when it its current state it runs roughshod over the rights of its citizens?

The bigotry of low expectations hurts Palestinians. And it is ingrained in the world's psyche - mostly because the Palestinian leaders have encouraged this bigotry by blaming all of their problems on the Jews.

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

How Palestinian laws are made. Step 1: Mahmoud Abbas declares them. (There is no step 2.)

Today, a new law is on the Palestinian books.

The General Intelligence Law No. 17 of 2005 said said that the head of Palestinian general intelligence must be less than 60 years old and can only remain in the job for three years, perhaps extending to four. (Oh, and he also is not allowed to be married to a non-Arab woman.)

But Mahmoud Abbas likes his loyal intelligence chief, "Major General" Majed Faraj, who has been in office for well over three year now, so Abbas changed the law as an early 60th birthday present to him.

Faraj now can stay in office forever, or until Abbas removes him. He is also now promoted to the rank of minister.

That's it.

No legislative meetings, no committees to discuss the law, no input from the the PLO Executive Committee or Palestinian National Council or Palestinian Central Council or Palestinian cabinet.

Mahmoud Abbas decided to change a law, he wrote it, he implemented it and that's it.

At a time that Israel is struggling over balancing powers between the legislative and judicial branches, there are no such problems in the Palestinian territories.

Because they have a dictator who decides everything.

And no one - media, politicians, pundits, diplomats - seems to be gnashing their teeth over this.

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

Dictator Abbas attempts to replace doctors' union with his own people

Mahmoud Abbas, the ruthless dictator who already controls the executive, legislative and judicial branches of the Palestinian government, is now going after....the unions.

On Tuesday, the Palestinian Authority president issued a presidential decree to dissolve the Doctors' Syndicate and to replace it with another union headed by his own pick, Shawki Sabha.

The Doctors Syndicate stated that Abbas's decision wants to replace the current elected council for the group with handpicked cronies.

Abbas consistently goes after any organization that does not toe his line. And he's been doing this for over 15 years.

Palestinian human rights groups Al Haq and the Independent commission for Human Rights denounced the decision. But outside of those, the media and major human rights organizations let Abbas do whatever he wants.

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

Palestinians angry at obvious nepotism in Palestinian Authority

Recently, a position as Palestinian "Minister of Local Government" was given to the daughter of another minister, causing Palestinian social media to erupt with anger and jeering for a history of nepotism and favored appointments to friends.

There's a history here. Last year several envoys to foreign countries were given to relatives of senior Fatah officials.

Palestinian officials defended the recent appointment, saying that the women was well qualified. Palestinians are responding with skepticism, to say the least, especially since unemployment is high and good jobs are perceived to be going to favored individuals.

On Twitter, the hashtag #عظام_الرقبة - an Palestinian euphemism for nepotism that literally means "neck bones" - is getting many posts, as people complain that in the West, you need a resume for a job, but for Palestinians you need to be related to someone.

Everyone knows about Palestinian Authority corruption - except, apparently, the hundreds of Western journalists whose jobs are to cover Palestinian topics.

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

Used to be, Palestinian terror leaders could get automatic throngs for demonstrations.No more.

Not too long ago, whenever Hamas or Islamic Jihad or Fatah wanted to fire up their people, they would put together a massive rally where tens of thousands could be summoned at seemingly the snap of a finger.

Here's a Hamas rally from 2017:

An Islamic Jihad rally from 2016:

But on Thursday, The Palestinian Authority and Islamic Jihad held a rally to protest President Biden's visit to Israel.

And the turnout was pathetic.

Here was Islamic Jihad's rally:

And here is another demonstration in Ramallah:

In Gaza, with a captive audience, a couple hundred people came to a rally organized by several socialist groups.

It looks like it is not only other Arab nations who are sick of Palestinian leadership.

Palestinians are, too.

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

The media completely ignores the corruption inherent in the PLO and PA

On Thursday, Mahmoud Abbas led a meeting of the PLO Executive Committee, for which he has been the chairman since 2004.

Here is what the meeting looked like as they prayed to open the session:

Sixteen older white men, almost all Muslim.

Hanan Ashrawi, a Christian woman, was a member of this committee but she resigned in 2020 - partially because all the decisions were being made by old men.

Keep in mind that the Palestinian Authority (or, as they call it, the "State of Palestine") reports to the PLO. This non-elected organization is what really makes the decisions, not the PA. So for example, in 2009 the PLO Executive Committee - headed by Abbas - voted to allow Abbas to remain the president of the PA indefinitely, even in the absence of elections. This power also allowed Abbas to dissolve the High Court and replace it with his own appointees, and to sideline the legislative branch of the government when Hamas won those elections.

This is dictatorial power, and the Western media just shrugs - or pretends that the PA is a democracy because it sometime stages meaningless elections.

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

Palestinian vaccine hypocrisy continues

This week there was more of a circus when it came to COVID-19 vaccines to the Palestinians.

The Palestinians sent a truck with supposedly 1000 double-dose vaccines to the Beitunia crossing on Monday to go to Gaza. They didn't coordinate this with Israel and Israel didn't do anything.

So the Palestinians and the haters started the story that Israel was refusing to send vaccines to Gaza.

The Israeli government did indeed debate whether to allow the vaccines to enter Gaza, knowing that it would go to terrorists and knowing that Hamas still held Israelis and the bodies of soldiers. The haters spent all day Tuesday tweeting about how terrible it was that Gaza had to wait to get the vaccines.

But on Wednesday, Israel allowed the vaccines to go to Gaza. The delay was only a little more than a day.

Now that the vaccines are in Gaza, when will they be distributed?

According to Hamas officials, not until Sunday.

There were dozens of articles and hundreds of tweets complaining about a one day delay for vaccines to Gaza, but a four day delay to actually distribute them? No one says a word.

Because Israel cannot be blamed.

One would think that Gaza is the worst possible place to be for the coronavirus given the amount of media attention. Yet is has suffered only about 270 deaths per million, which is better than 64 countries. (The US is at 1460 deaths per million.)

Meanwhile, in another COVID-19 story that the Western media ignores, Palestinians in the West Bank are complaining about the favoritism surrounding who received the first shots distributed there. Besides the 200 doses that were sent over to Jordan seemingly to relatives of Palestinian officials, there were complaints that vaccines went to highly placed Palestinian officials, tribal leaders, clerics and media professionals ahead of health workers.

The "pro-Palestinian" crowd is curiously silent about this.

Another development today is that Israel announced it intends to vaccinate 120,000 Palestinian workers, which will also be twisted into something evil in about an hour or two.