Anything I can think of, they've already done.
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Did Israel ever commit to any of these? Plus, this sounds like four issues, not one.Ahmad Abed al Rahman, the spokesperson of the Fatah movement and President Abbas' advisor said in a statement on Tuesday that the Palestinian side focuses in its meetings and negotiations on two basic issues.Firstly, is the need for Israel to abide by its commitments to remove military checkpoints, release detainees and halt the construction of settlements and the Separation Wall.
Apparently, the chief "negotiator's" entire role is to try to extract everything he can from Israel and not to give anything in return - and then prepare for the next summit, where the exercise will be repeated. This farce is official PA policy.
The second issue relates to the final status issues and the necessity for Israel to be ready for dialogue over these issues in order to arrive at a solution. Otherwise everything that has been done up to this point will be useless.
Abed al Rahman denied the rumours in some of the media, that the US Secretary of State is trying to convince the Palestinian to lower their demands regarding a joint agreement between them and the Israelis, on the kind of document to be presented to the international conference in Annapolis in November. He declared that Palestinian participation in the conference will help them to restore their legitimate rights.
He also said that the ongoing meetings between the Palestinians and the Israelis in recent weeks have been mainly aimed at reaching a final agreement to end the Israeli occupation. He added that negotiations are another form of resistance through which Palestinians can bring an end to the occupation. He clarified that one form of struggle is the international conference which President Bush had called for, especially as most officials are saying that had this is the moment for the establishment of an indepenent Palestinian state.
Abed al Rahman went on to say that even if the Israeli side was behaving in an arrogant way, this does not mean the Palestinians should despair as the negotiating team will continue to work with all means possible.
In response to reports that Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has demanded more compromises as a condition of his government's acceptance of a formula for a joint document, he said that " The Israeli side does not want to end the occupation and the settlements. All they think about is plastic surgery for the reality of occupation; this will not lead to peace. The Israelis should take a historical decision to end their occupation of Palestinian territory."
He concluded by saying that the Palestinian side has nothing to give up.
During the shmita [Sabbatical] year the IDF will accommodate the stringent kashrut demands of about 2,000 Nahal Haredi soldiers by providing fruits and vegetables grown by Arab Israelis and Palestinians, including those living in Gaza, Judea and Samaria.It is bad enough to buy vegetables from the PA and its corrupt, terrorist government - but the IDF buying vegetables from Hamas?
The vast majority of IDF soldiers, who do not adhere to haredi standards of kashrut, will eat fruits and vegetables provided by Jewish farmers according to a halachic loophole called heter mechira [permitted sale] in which farmers' land is "sold" to a non-Jew for the duration of the shmita year.
However, haredim reject heter mechira as a halachic option and are careful to eat only fruits and vegetables that are grown by non-Jewish farmers in land that does not belong to Jews.
The first shipment of vegetables under the supervision of Rabbi Yosef Yekutiel Efrati, who is closely associated with Rabbi Yosef Shalom Elyashiv, the most important halachic authority of Lithuanian Ashkenazi Jewry, will be delivered on Chanukah, which begins December 5.
Allegations that poisonous Zamzam water is being smuggled into Britain are exercising the minds of UK Muslims. The containers, which sell for the equivalent of SR25 each, are purporting to come from Makkah on their labels.As opposed to....?Containers that have been analyzed by UK health and safety officials have been found to hold water that contains raised levels of arsenic and nitrates that, if consumed over extended periods of time, could prove fatal.
Saudi Arabia forbids the sale of Zamzam. The holy water is freely distributed at its source. Its bottling and distribution is strictly controlled and monitored by the government and commercial export is illegal. Each year, however, millions of foreign pilgrims carry containers home as private export.
Genuine Zamzam, analyzed in 1971, contains greater quantities of calcium and magnesium salts than most other waters. It also contains fluorides that strengthen teeth’s enamel.
However, some of the fake Zamzam has been analyzed and found to contain almost three times as much nitrate and twice as much arsenic as the World Health Organization believes is safe. Children under six months and elderly people are particularly vulnerable to excessive nitrate while regular consumption of arsenic in water is responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths a year in southeast Asia.
...The Health and Social Services website of the Central London Mosque (www.iccservices.org.uk) quotes a BBC article reporting the seizure of a consignment of suspected fake Zamzam at the start of Ramadan by Westminster City Council.The “Muslim Weekly” in the UK reported last week that inspectors in the London Borough of Hackney seized a vanload of contaminated counterfeit cases of the water.
Similar seizures have been carried out in Gloucester, Barnsley and Leicester.
The potential for fraud and the profit in sale of fake Zamzam to the unwary is huge. In a recent case quoted by Teinaz, an Islamic bookshop was selling an estimated 20,000 liters of Zamzam water a week.
Teinaz said he “was aware” of examples of vans transporting vast quantities of the fake water to mosques where their imams ordered their followers to buy the substance. Some of the water, according to customs officials, is smuggled into Britain in crates of vegetables and furniture.
Speaking to “Muslim Weekly”, Teinaz said traders had misled the authority at air and seaports for years telling them that Zamzam was for external use.
“I would like to urge those selling the water to fear Allah. They’re making money at the expense of their brothers and sisters’ health who will end up very ill by consuming the contaminated water,” he said. “It is very sad to see a Muslim cheating another Muslim.”
Himmelberger Gallery, a well-known art gallery located in San Francisco’s tony Union Square, has decided to cancel plans to publish an art catalogue of one of its represented artists, noted author Alan Kaufman, who is under contract to the gallery. The decision is due to use of the word Zionism in the catalogue’s title ‘Visionary Expressionism: A Zionist Art.” Kaufman said in response:The Himmelberger Gallery website seems to have deleted its web pages that used to feature Alan Kaufman (the Google cached versions are here. )For myself, I want to say that to see oneself and ones colleagues censored for expression of a Zionist perspective is one of the most shocking experiences I’ve ever had as an artist, or writer. But what made it especially hard was to see my fellow writers, David Twersky, David Rosenberg, Etgar Keret, Polly Zavadivker, also censored. It was then that I understood that this was not merely censorship of me: this was censorship of an entire community, of my people, the Jewish People; of my colleagues, my fellow writers and artists. This drove home to me like nothing else that I must never accept such censorship from anyone, under any circumstances. I must stand up proudly as a Zionist and express myself freely, without shame or reservation.
The gallery objects to the expressly Zionist focus of several essay contributions to the catalogue by well-known authors and journalists, including David Twersky, contributing editor of the New York Sun and senior adviser, International Affairs for American Jewish Congress; noted scholar David Rosenberg, author (with Harold Bloom) of The Book of J and most recently of Abraham: The First Historical Biography; Etgar Keret, widely acknowledged as Israel’s most popular young writer, and whose books include The Nimrod Flip-Out and The Bus Driver Who Wanted To Be G-d ; and Polly Zavadivker, a young scholar completing graduate studies in Hebrew and Judaics at New York University and currently working as a grants officer at the Jewish Federation in Oakland, California. Kaufman, whose critically acclaimed books include the memoir Jew Boy and the novel Matches has an essay and an interview, conducted by Zavadivker, in the catalogue.
The catalogue was to present 15 of Kaufman’s paintings which are under contract to the gallery and whose subjects range from the Holocaust to Israel to the New Antisemitism. The gallery’s prices for the works in question have been cited at between $3,275 and $36,000. The works have hung in the gallery and a cross-section of them also appeared on the gallery website .
At a meeting between gallery head David Himmelberger and Kaufman, Himmelberger surprised the artist and author with an eleventh hour decision not to proceed with the catalogue due to the Zionist “agenda” of the essays as well as some of the paintings. Himmelberger said that such a presentation was antithetical to the aims of the gallery, which promotes “international understanding” and forswears all forms of nationalism and religion. But the authors see this as a transparent example of the way in which the word Zionism has been exiled from civil discourse and has been turned by the cultural establishment into a refugee of a word, a pariah of an idea, and a euphemism for Antisemitism.
The GrassRoots TV board of directors voted Monday to ban a controversial Holocaust-denial film.As I mentioned last week, the Aspen Times newspaper editorialized that the film be shown.
Steve Campbell, founder of Citizens for 9/11 Truth, asked the station to air "Judea Declares War on Germany: A Critical Look at World War II" on Oct. 1.
But after prescreening the film, which questions conventional wisdom about the Holocaust, GrassRoots TV board members stopped the airing, pending further debate.
The board held an open forum on the matter Oct. 11 to gauge community reaction.
"The GrassRoots Television board has decided not to air the film 'Judea declares War on Germany,'" GrassRoots TV board chairman Alan Feldman said in a statement after the board meeting Monday.
"After careful consideration and community input, the board concluded that this film is obscene, repugnant to the generally accepted notion of what is appropriate in our community. GrassRoots TV will not allow the station to be used as a vehicle to incite hatred against any group. GrassRoots Television will issue a more detailed statement to our community in coming days."
Feldman promised a board policy in the future: "Our community spoke, and we have given it a lot of rational thinking," Feldman said. "We have the ability to refuse to air something if we believe it's obscene."
Campbell called it a "poor decision."
"Unfortunately, it shows basically what I and others have tried to say about this whole issue," Campbell said. "There are those who don't want you to see this information, and they'll do anything they can to stop you from watching it. And that's just what they're doing."
Campbell has shown other controversial films on GrassRoots, as well as on Rifle's public access station, he said.
He called the debate over "Judea Declares War on Germany: A Critical Look at World War II" a matter of "conscious-raising."
"I just think that it's a travesty what's going on," Campbell said.
Campbell said he is not planning any legal action against GrassRoots but added, "By censoring this film, it's only going to make people watch it more."
Campbell said that while he is being censored now, "The truth will come out. It's just like the grass that grows between the cracks in the sidewalk."
He said he might try and air the film in another venue, but he was disappointed that the large audience in Aspen wouldn't see it.
"This is part of the beginning of the loss of our freedoms of expression and speech and the dissemination of information just so certain people can maintain their status quo," Campbell said.
Secretary of State Condoleezza said Monday it was "time for the establishment of a Palestinian state," and described Israeli-Palestinian peace efforts as the most serious in years.Let's see. In the seven years since the last great lame-duck presidential push to create a Palestinian Arab state, what have the Palestinian Arabs done to make them more deserving of a state?
A Jewish colleague recently returned to his desk at the United Nations to discover someone had anonymously dropped off a full-colour map showing Nazi-controlled Europe in 1942.An Israeli, he had days earlier been among journalists Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the anti-Israel Iranian President, had approached after giving a press conference.
Ahmadinejad had no idea who any of the journalists were as he sought to charm them with a handshake, and quickly withdrew his hand when my colleague announced he was a "proud Zionist."
The colleague could have made all sorts of fuss about the appearance of the Nazi map, suggesting there had been a connection between that occurrence and the handshake with Ahmadinejad, or even other anti-Israel sentiment at the UN, of which there is much.
To my surprise, he did not dwell on the incident, saying only he wouldn't mind knowing who exactly left the map and why.
It seems likely the map depositor was trying to make some sort of negative -- even threatening -- point. My colleague's reaction disempowered that person.
With all due respect to Mr. Edwards and his friend, an explicit anti-semitic act at the United Nations should be exposed. This is not the same as a random swastika in a public place, which is bad enough, but this implies that an employee or associate of the organization that is supposed to be a major upholder of peace is guilty not only of misoziony but also of naked Jew-hatred. That is, by definition, newsworthy.
It is arguable whether the Jewish victim disempowered his attacker by ignoring him, or it is entirely possible that his ignoring it could empower that person to do something worse later, but what cannot be denied is that this event is something that should have been exposed.
For that matter, so should the handshake incident between this Israeli and Ahmadinejad. I could find no record of this, from any of the hundreds of journalists that covered the Iranian thug's visit, just as they ignored Karnit Goldwasser's encounter with Ahmadinejad - witnessed by dozens of reporters and academics.
What the hell is wrong with journalists when they argue that they should be reporting less, or when they accept invitations from a dictator for dinner and refuse to report it, as Brian Williams and Christiane Amanpour evidently did?
Journalistic bias should be towards more news, not less, especially in an era of unlimited Internet bandwidth. Imagine the outcry from journalists if a politician would argue that they shouldn't have covered the Columbia bias cases last week.
These stories not being reported seem to indicate that the mainstream media is an old-boys club as opposed to a group of people dedicated to exposing real news.
The Israeli Antiquities Authority (IAA) is set to renew its excavations soon at the Al-Magharebah Gate in the Al-Aqsa Mosque Compound near the Western Wall (Al-Buraq Wall) in Jerusalem after receiving the approval of an Israeli ministerial committee, which may exacerbate tensions with neighboring countries ahead of next month’s planned Annapolis peace summit, the Israeli organization Ir Amim reported yesterday.
US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said yesterday she will tell Israel that its expropriation of Arab lands erodes confidence in its commitment to a two-state solution.
Buy EoZ's book, PROTOCOLS: EXPOSING MODERN ANTISEMITISM
If you want real peace, don't insist on a divided Jerusalem, @USAmbIsrael
The Apartheid charge, the Abraham Accords and the "right side of history"
With Palestinians, there is no need to exaggerate: they really support murdering random Jews
Great news for Yom HaShoah! There are no antisemites!