Saudi Arabia held its first beauty pageant over the weekend and already they're embroiled in their own scandal.
Topless photos of Miss Saudi Arabia have surfaced ... you can see her entire forehead.
(from Giglish)
Iran has arrested individuals behind a scheme to 'smear the government' through importing alleged Israeli oranges into the country.I like the "anti-racism" line.
"We are absolutely certain that the oranges were not imported from Israel and that the stickers were fabricated," Iran's Intelligence Minister Gholam-Hossein Mohseni-Ejei told reporters after a cabinet meeting on Wednesday.
"It is obvious that the move was aimed to smear the government and overshadow its anti-racism activities," he explained.
"[In addition to those detained,] some people have been summoned or invited for further study of the case, the result of which will be announced accordingly," the minister went on to say.
The oranges which were allegedly imported from Israel sparked controversy in Iran, as Tehran bans any sort of dealings with Tel Aviv.
The oranges had stickers with a sign that read Jaffa Sweetie Israel PO. However, they were distributed in boxes bearing 'made in China' imprints.
The Al-Qassam brigades, the military wing of Hamas, on Thursday morning, announced the death of 20-year-old Khaled Ghalban of Khan Younis during his "mission of jihad in particular."That means either he blew himself up or another Hamas member killed him. There have been recent reports of Hamas infighting.
The announcement said Qassam Ghalbanwas killed in the performance of his duty of jihad, particularly in the task, without giving any details.
GAZA CITY, May 14 (IPS) - A founding member of Hamas says he hates all weapons and insists that his organisation is not anti-Jewish.The Hamas Charter includes such loving statements towards Jews as:
In an interview with IPS, Sayed Abu Musameh described frequent claims in the European and U.S. press that Hamas's charter is based on enmity towards Jews as a "big lie".
"In our culture, we respect every foreigner, especially Jews and Christians," he said. "But we are against Zionists, not as nationalists but as fascists and racists."
Musameh also contended that Hamas has long been ready to agree a truce - known in Arabic as a hudna - with Israel but that Israel had refused all offers and imposed a crippling economic blockade on Gaza. The firing of Qassam rockets on the Israeli cities of Ashkelon and Sderot was designed "not to destroy Israel or to destroy Israeli people" but to "make them notice our siege."
"I hate all kinds of weapons," said Musameh. "I dream of seeing every weapon from the atomic bomb to small guns banned everywhere."
...our struggle against the Jews is extremely wide-ranging and grave...As far as that "hudna" that Hamas has offered, it had a few small preconditions - like Israel surrendering Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria first.
The prophet, prayer and peace be upon him, said: "The time will not come until Muslims will fight the Jews (and kill them); until the Jews hide behind rocks and trees, which will cry: O Muslim! there is a Jew hiding behind me, come on and kill him! This will not apply to the Gharqad, which is a Jewish tree (cited by Bukhari and Muslim)."
The Nazism of the Jews does not skip women and children, it scares everyone.
The other Arab and Islamic states are required, at the very least, to facilitate the movement of the Jihad fighters from and to them. We cannot fail to remind every Muslim that when the Jews occupied Holy Jerusalem in 1967 and stood at the doorstep of the Blessed Aqsa Mosque, they shouted with joy: "Muhammad is dead, he left daughters behind." Israel, by virtue of its being Jewish and of having a Jewish population, defies Islam and the Muslims.
...more steps need to be taken by the Arab and Islamic peoples and Islamic associations throughout the Arab and Islamic world in order to make possible the next round with the Jews, the merchants of war.
Following are excerpts from an interview with PLO Ambassador to Lebanon Abbas Zaki, which aired on ANB TV on May 7, 2009:And he is exactly right.Abbas Zaki: What is needed is a settlement, not a hudna [truce]. After 45 years of struggle, we have the right to reach a conclusion to this conflict, rather than extending the hudna, enabling Israel to expand on a daily basis.
My advice is: we should not give Israel a hudna, because whenever Israel is given a hudna, it consolidates its position and becomes more deeply rooted. What hudna? If they do not withdraw from the 1967 lands – what hudna? Israel will become a fact on the ground, and we will end up as small enclaves, and should be driven out with time.
Therefore, it is high time that we found a final, comprehensive solution. The Arabs talk about a comprehensive solution and present initiatives, and the world talks about a solution, yet we say: Let's stick to the hudna. No, my friend. I personally joined Fatah somewhat belatedly, in 1962. Work out how many years that is. Should I keep on extending the hudnas? Impossible. We want a solution now.
They talk about a two state solution, and when that is achieved...even Ahmadinejad, the leader of the rejectionists throughout the region, said he supports a two-state solution. Nobody fools anybody.
With the two-state solution, in my opinion, Israel will collapse, because if they get out of Jerusalem, what will become of all the talk about the Promised Land and the Chosen People? what will become of all the sacrifices they made--just to be told to leave?
They consider Jerusalem to have a spiritual status. The Jews consider Judea and Samaria to be their historic dream. If the Jews leave those places, the Zionist idea will begin to collapse. It will regress of its own accord. Then we will move forward.
This is the real reason that Arabs insist on Jerusalem - not because of their love of the city that they ignored for a thousand years, but because they know that the Jewish connection to the city is so strong and so powerful.
As a result, the Arabs aren't scared of secular Israelis, socialist kibbutzim, Israeli robotic jeeps, drones or even the IDF altogether. They believe that all of those can be defeated by appealing to liberal sensibilities of the West and slowly chipping away at the resolve of the Zionists who desperately want peace more than anything else.
What they are scared of are Jews who are unapologetically proud of their Judaism and of their deep, emotional ties to the Land of Israel.
While they consider everyone else a pushover - they are patient, and will wait decades to wear them down - the Jews who have a pure, emotional, and especially religious connection to the Land are the ones that they know they cannot defeat. Because deep down they know that their own connection to the land is derivative, a mere shadow of the Jews' deep love of Israel.
They know that the Dome of the Rock and the Al Aqsa Mosque were close to being ruins before the Jews started returning to the Land of Israel in large numbers. They know that they showed almost no interest in Palestine before the 20th century.
They know that if the Jews had not started moving back to Palestine, their own mythology would never have started.
This is why their goal is Jerusalem. This is why they raise a stink at every new building built or purchased by Jews, at every synagogue, at the slightest hint of Jewish permanence in the city that Jews have been praying towards and crying over for millenia.
And this is why Jews - even the ones who, for whatever tragic reason, don't feel the same connection that their ancestors did - cannot compromise on Jerusalem.
Last week in London I spoke with Liam Fox, a conservative Member of Parliament and "shadow defense secretary." Fox told me, "There is a belief in some quarters that if only you can resolve the problems between Israel and Palestine, all the other problems in the Middle East, in a domino-like fashion, will fall into place. That is absolute nonsense."This simple fact is what Westerners fail to grasp: Hezbollah and Hamas are proxies for Iran - and they intend to surround Israel.
Indeed, it is.
Fox said on a recent visit to Iran that Iranian politicians told him they realize they lack an air force to fight back if they are attacked by Israel, so they would use Hezbollah and Hamas. "They are part of our defense policy against Israel," Fox quoted them as saying, "Hamas is not part of the Palestinian problem. Hamas is the foreign-policy wing of Iran in Israel."
Israel has announced it will open an embassy in Turkmenistan’s capital of Ashgabat, located just 32 kilometers from the Iranian border.Even if Israel/Turkmenistan cooperation never reaches the point where this is strategically important, just knowing how much it ticks off Iran - that a neighboring Muslim state would open an embassy of the hated Zionists - makes it all worth it.Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman held a series of "secret talks" with officials in Ashgabat and a team of Israeli diplomats and security personnel will visit the Turkmen capital later in May to select a "suitable building" to house the Israeli diplomatic mission, Israel National News reported May 13.
Turkmenistan and Israel established formal diplomatic relations 17 years ago, but to date no Israeli ambassador has resided in the Central Asian state.
Ashgabat is situated in the foothills of the Kopet-Dag mountain range and is just a short drive from the Bajgiran border point. Turkmenistan and Iran share a 994-kilometer long border.
That last sentence could be the slogan of this blog.
The Palestinian national movement started life with a vision and goal of a Palestinian Muslim Arab-majority state in all of Palestine — a one-state “solution” — and continues to espouse and aim to establish such a state down to the present day. Moreover, and as a corollary, al-Husseini, the Palestinian national leader during the 1930s and 1940s; the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), which led the national movement from the 1960s to Yasser Arafat’s death in November, 2004; and Hamas today — all sought and seek to vastly reduce the number of Jewish inhabitants in the country, in other words, to ethnically cleanse Palestine. Al-Husseini and the PLO explicitly declared the aim of limiting Palestinian citizenship to those Jews who had lived in Palestine permanently before 1917 (or, in another version, to limit it to those 50,000-odd Jews and their descendants). This goal was spelled out clearly in the Palestinian National Charter and in other documents. Hamas has been publicly more reserved on this issue, but its intentions are clear.The Palestinian vision was never — as described by various Palestinian spokesmen in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s to Western journalists — of a “secular, democratic Palestine” (though it certainly sounded more palatable than, say, the “destruction of Israel,” which was the goal it was meant to paper over or camouflage). Indeed, “a secular democratic Palestine” had never been the goal of Fatah or the so-called moderate groups that dominated the PLO between the 1960s and the 2006 elections that brought Hamas to power.
Middle East historian Rashid Khalidi has written that “in 1969 [the PLO] amended [its previous goal and henceforward advocated] the establishment of a secular democratic state in Palestine for Muslims, Christians and Jews, replacing Israel.” And Palestinian-American journalist Ali Abunimah has written, in his recent book, One Country: “The PLO did ultimately adopt [in the late 1960s or 1970s] the goal of a secular, democratic state in all Palestine as its official stance.”
This is hogwash. The Palestine National Council (PNC) never amended the Palestine National Charter to the effect that the goal of the PLO was “a secular democratic state in Palestine.” The words and notion never figured in the charter or in any PNC or PLO Central Committee or Fatah Executive Committee resolutions, at any time. It is a spin invented for gullible Westerners and was never part of Palestinian mainstream ideology. The Palestinian leadership has never, at any time, endorsed a “secular, democratic Palestine.”
The PNC did amend the charter, in 1968 (not 1969). But the thrust of the emendation was to limit non-Arab citizenship in a future Arab-liberated Palestine to “Jews who had normally resided in Palestine until the beginning of the Zionist invasion” — that is, 1917.
True, the amended charter also guaranteed, in the future State of Palestine, “freedom of worship and of visit” to holy sites to all, “without discrimination of race, colour, language or religion.” And, no doubt, this was music to liberal Western ears. But it had no connection to the reality or history of contemporary Muslim Arab societies. What Muslim Arab society in the modern age has treated Christians, Jews, pagans, Buddhists and Hindus with tolerance and as equals? Why should anyone believe that Palestinian Muslim Arabs would behave any differently?
Western liberals like, or pretend, to view Palestinian Arabs, indeed all Arabs, as Scandinavians, and refuse to recognize that peoples, for good historical, cultural and social reasons, are different and behave differently in similar or identical sets of circumstances.
Pope criticises 'tragic' West Bank barrierIt doesn't sound to me like the Pope is criticizing the security barrier - it sounds more like he is lamenting the terrorism that forced Israel to build the security barrier.Pope Benedict XVI today lamented the "tragic" building by Israel of the West Bank separation barrier in a speech to Palestinians at a refugee camp in Bethlehem in the shadow of the 25ft structure.
In sentiments that are sure to anger Jerusalem – who had blocked the building of a stage for the Pope next to the concrete and steel wall – the pontiff said the barrier was a symbol of the stalemate in relations between Israel and the Palestinians.
“Towering over us... is a stark reminder of the stalemate that relations between Israelis and Palestinians seem to have reached – the wall," he told a crowd at the Aida refugee camp.
“In a world where more and more borders are being opened up – to trade, to travel, to movement of peoples, to cultural exchanges – it is tragic to see walls still being erected,” he said.
“How earnestly we pray for an end to the hostilities that have caused this wall to be built."
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!