Gaza, PA health ministries trade accusations

From Ma'an:

Gaza's health sector is on the verge of collapse due to a lack of medicine, a Gaza hospital director said Sunday.

Medhat Abbas, general director of the Ash-Shifa medical complex in Gaza City, said medical care must be separated from political disputes.

Gaza's Health Ministry has blamed its counterpart in Ramallah for a shortage of medicine in the Strip.

Bassem Naim, health minister in the Hamas-led government, said Thursday that Gaza was lacking about 40 percent of basic medicines and accused the Palestinian Authority of withholding key stocks.

PA Health Minister Fathi Abu Mughli immediately rejected the charge, and said the shortage was the result of "mismanagement" by the Hamas health ministry which he said had sacked 1,600 ministry of health employees and replaced them with people "with no experience in dealing with or storing medicine."

Gaza medical director Medhat Abbas said hundreds of patients were at risk due to the shortage of medicines, particularly those needing cancer treatment, dialysis and insulin.

As we've reported in the past, there is evidence that Hamas confiscates medicines meant for Gaza hospitals and sells them to pharmacies at a profit:

“They are as big harami as Dahlan,” he said, using the Arabic slang for “thieves”. “They used to be mujaheddin, but today they are fat millionaires with nice cars,” he added, pointing to his flat stomach. “Look, you can either be a millionaire or you can lead a resistance. But you if you take the medical aid sent by Europe to help the poor people of Gaza and sell it in your own pharmacies to make money for yourself and the government, you can’t have both.”

At this point he pulled a packet of antibiotics from his pocket; it is stamped: “A gift of the people of Norway. Not for resale.”

“I just bought this from a Hamas-run pharmacy here in Rafah for my son,” he said. “I had to go to a Hamas pharmacy to make sure the pills weren’t fake or made from poor materials in Egypt. If you want real medicine, you have to buy the aid Europe sends us.”

Meanwhile, at the very same time that Hamas' medical director said that "medical care must be separated from political disputes," he accused Israel of using illegal weapons in Gaza:

Abbas said doctors examined samples taken from the bodies of those killed in the 3-week war and found evidence that Israeli forces used internationally prohibited weapons against Gaza's residents.

He condemned the silence of the international community over what he described as Israeli war crimes.

Goldstone, about 8 HRW reports, a number of Amnesty reports, many art and photo exhibits on Gaza, massive anti-Israel demonstrations in Europe, daily incitement against Israel, and entire worldwide BDS movement, highly publicized "flotillas" ... and Hamas whines that they aren't getting enough publicity!

For big, bad mujahadeen, Hamas members sure act like babies!

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Two top UNRWA officials resign

From Ma'an:

The directors of the UN's Palestine refugee operations in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank resigned Monday morning, an UNRWA spokesman said.

Adnan Abu Hasna said Barbara Shenstone, the West Bank director, and John Ging, based in the Gaza Strip, were stepping down.

UNRWA says:

John Ging is to take up a senior position in the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in New York and Ms Shenstone is to return to her native Canada.

This creates more questions than it answers. Two resignations on the same day seems unlikely to be coincidental. UNRWA will furiously spin this to make it appear that this does not indicate a problem at the agency.

UNRWA is far from transparent, especially given that it gets all of its funds from the nations of the world. For example, it never acknowledged the UNRWA West Bank workers' strike that started last October.

It is likely that the UNRWA strike is what caused Shenstone to resign. Here is an editorial in Ma'an calling for her to do exactly that in December:

The events of the past month show Shenstone as a stubborn leader, tough and determined to act on principle. It seems, however, that she has also taken the matter personally, and is exacting a grudge without feeling the responsibility for the loss of UNRWA services to Palestinians.

As a result, many notable figures in the country have asked her to leave the West Bank and return home. We have enough extremists and we do not need her. It would be better if she worked in the UN Archives.

While Shenstone has all the credentials of a good leader, she lacks wise management skills. This became apparent as we watched her react to the workers on strike.

On Sunday she described the demands of the workers as "absurd," and said it revolved around a demand that workers be "paid hourly wages they didn't receive the last time they went on strike, and we're not willing to do that."

Since the start of the strike, 56,000 children in UNRWA schools are wandering the streets waiting for Shenstone to act generously and give up her pride and cede the demands of the union.

Thirty clinics in 19 refugee camps shut down, patients with high blood pressure, diabetes, sick children are suffering and piles of rank garbage are collecting in the streets, while Shenstone moved her administrative offices to the Ambassador Hotel in Jerusalem and rejected mediation efforts from the Prime Minister, the Minister of Justice and other lawmakers. She has divorced herself from reality.

Even if the union is in the wrong, Shenstone's insistence on carrying out this stupidity is a crime against the children of the camps and their parents. We need leaders who work miracles and ensure that children in the camps are helped in whatever way they can be, we do not need suborn leaders.

Residents, planning action in support of the union, have prepared signs with Shenstone's photo, and the words "Go back to your country, you are persona non grata."

Let's hope that Ging and/or Shenstone will start talking about how things really are at UNRWA, the way that James Lindsay did after he left the agency.

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SPJ follows through and retires Helen Thomas award

As I mentioned last week, the Society of Professional Journalists officially decided to retire their Helen Thomas Award.

From SPJ:

INDIANAPOLIS – The board of directors of the Society of Professional Journalists voted Friday to retire the Helen Thomas Lifetime Achievement Award.

The vote means the Society will not give out an award for lifetime achievement. The action does not rename the award or remove Thomas’ name.

Both the board of directors and the executive committee heard from many people inside and outside of SPJ’s membership and journalism. SPJ fully understands the concerns expressed by both sides regarding whether renaming or retiring the award is necessary or improper.

A prominent objection to taking any action was that of Helen Thomas’ free speech rights. SPJ staunchly believes Helen Thomas and all people in the United States have a right to free speech. The Society defends that fundamental legal right as a core organizational mission, even when the speech is unpopular, vile or considered offensive.

However, the controversy surrounding this award has overshadowed the reason it exists. To continue offering the award would reignite the controversy each year and take away from its purpose: honoring a lifetime of work in journalism. No individual worthy of such honor should have to face this controversy. No honoree should have to decide if the possible backlash is worth being recognized for his or her contribution to journalism.

“As I said last week after the executive committee meeting, it’s time we in SPJ stop focusing on this divisive topic and start focusing on what unites us,” SPJ President Hagit Limor said. “There’s tremendously important work for us, like training our members for our ever-changing industry and fighting to ensure journalists and citizens have access to public records.”

A very proper decision.

Thomas' Arab defenders like Ray Hanania should note that the SPJ understood what Thomas really said, even as they continue to deny it:

The Jan. 8 executive committee meeting marked the second time in nearly six months the committee considered removing Thomas’ name, stemming from an incident earlier in 2010 when the longtime White House reporter and columnist commented to a rabbi on video that Jews in Palestine should “go home.” Thomas drew widespread criticism after the video was posted online, and she later resigned her job as a Hearst Newspapers columnist. The executive committee considered removing Thomas’ name during a July meeting but did not, noting it was a one-time, spontaneous remark for which she apologized.

In December, Thomas reiterated her previous comments before a speech in Dearborn, Mich., the Detroit Free Press and Detroit News reported. The News quoted her at the time as saying, “Congress, the White House and Hollywood, Wall Street are owned by the Zionists. No question.”

The SPJ knows very well what Thomas meant when she said "Zionists." Apologists for her are the ones who look like fools.

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Statistics fun: Freedom House vs. HRW

I am no math wizard, but I was wondering after my last blog post  if there was any correlation - positive or negative - between the scores that Freedom House uses to determine how free a country is, and how much attention that country receives by Human Rights Watch, in the Middle East and North Africa region (MENA.)

I calculated Freedom House's score by adding their two values for political rights and civil liberties, each on a scale of 1-7, so the freest countries would have a score of 2 and the least free a score of 14.

I used Google to estimate the number of mentions of each country at the HRW.com site.

Here is a chart with the raw numbers.

Country	HRW mentions	Freedom House score
Oman	328	11
Qatar	456	11
Bahrain	460	11
Algeria	787	11
Yemen	999	11
Morocco	1060	9
Kuwait	1130	9
UAE(+United Arab Emirates)	1200	11
Libya	1240	14
Jordan	1300	11
Lebanon	1450	8
Syria	1510	13
Tunisia	1530	12
Egypt	1930	11
Iraq	2170	11
Israel	3940	3
Saudi Arabia	4140	13
Iran	5730	12

And graphically (I normalized the freedom score to put them on the same visual scale):

In a sane world, one would expect a positive correlation between how unfree a nation is and how many mentions it receives in Human Rights Watch. However, there is practically no correlation between the two mathematically in the MENA region - in fact, there is a weak negative correlation between them (-0.13).

Perhaps a reader will take it upon himself to see if this lack or correlation extends to other parts of the world, or if it is only in the Middle East that HRW's emphasis is so skewed. 

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The 2% that drives the hypocrites crazy

Freedom House put out their annual survey of how free every country in the world is.

Here's the graphical representation of freedom in the Middle East and North Africa. Click to enlarge.

In the Middle East and North Africa, only 2% of the population live in countries that are considered "free" while 88% live in countries considered "not free" and 10% in "partially free" countries.

In fact, out of the five regions that Freedom House used for their statistics, the Middle East/North Africa was by far the least free in the world. In sub-Saharan Africa, for example, only 37% live in "not free" countries.


And the 2% in the Middle East/North Africa who do live in freedom? All of them happen to live in Israel.

It puts the Middle East problem in perspective, doesn't it?

(h/t Mostly Kosher)

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The first Elder of Ziyon art exhibition

In Edinburgh there is a new art exhibition:

Prompted by the invasion of the Gaza Strip by the Israeli Defense Force (27 December 2008 - 21 January 2009), John Goto has made a new series of apparently abstract images entitled Mosaic. 

Access to the conflict was denied to the international press. One common means of censoring digital images is the application of a standard graphics filter named Mosaic. Having mapped a grid across the chosen area of the picture, the filter averages the tones and colours within each rectangle. When applied by Goto to documentary images, the filter transforms them into ’abstracts’ reminiscent of the colour systems paintings made by artists Johannes Itten, Paul Klee and Max Bill.

Documentary images from the conflict that appeared on the internet were often made, not by professional photo journalists, but by eye-witnesses using mobile phones or small digital cameras. Goto explores the characteristically pixilated look to be found in such images. The artist has solved the problem of representing censored, hidden images by making double-sided prints onto single sheets of paper. Specially designed frames allow viewing from both sides. For this exhibition Goto has also created two mural size images. 

John Goto would like to acknowledge the support of D-MARC Digital and Material Arts Research Centre, University of Derby.

It is amazing how many images Goto managed to find of this "censored" war!

Here's a sample of his "art" - which any person even slightly familiar with computer graphics can tell you, involved absolutely no talent, and yet which Goto still needed to rely on a digital arts research center to do for him!

He's selling these prints for about $1400 each - unframed!

Because this is so successful, I am making my own on-line art exhibition of photos taken in Gaza, normally not visible to the world at large because of the sanctimonious posturings of people like Goto. It sounds like this is a pretty good racket.

My art exhibit took me all of five minutes to create, and I wish to thank a Windows paint package that was written in 1996 that happens to have a "mosaic" function (Paint Shop Pro v. 4.12):

Gaza's Crazy Water Park

Gaza's Roots Restaurant

Hamas burning American and Israeli flags in Gaza

The limited edition, signed color original prints - reminiscent of works by Johannes Itten, Paul Klee and Max Bill - can be purchased from the Elder of Ziyon Virtual Fine Arts Museum, starting at a mere $1100 each. Such a bargain! Contact me for details. I might even throw in a frame!

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Sunday afternoon links

A new research paper confirms that the PA is heavily dependent on foreign aid - and is not building a state infrastructure with the billions it is getting.

Daphne Anson has another exhaustive blog post - this time on the history of how Britain's Foreign Ministry has been pandering to Islamists and selling out Israel.

CiFWatch asks whether the editors of the Guargian are guilty of conspiracy with their part in Wikileaks.

Ashley Perry on the best decision he ever made - moving to Israel.

And I forgot to mention a couple of days ago a report that Hamas' successor to the assassinated Mahmoud al-Mabhouh has been arrested in the UAE - for money laundering. Stratfor reported it as well.

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Islamic leader in Israel demands mezuzot be removed from Old City gates

From The Muqata, a translation of an article in Ma'ariv:

The Israeli Northern Branch of the Islamic Movement, led by Sheikh Raed Salah, is now demanding the removal of all "Mezuzot" on the gates of Jerusalem's Old City.

According to the movement, the mezuzot are an attempt to Judaize the "Arab heritage" of the Old City.

In a statement issued by the movement, it stated that during a patrol in the Old City, they saw mezuzot on the various gates, and Jews touching the mezuzot as they passed through the gates.

"This is a disgusting attempt to Judaize the Arab and Islamic heritage of the Old City," the statement said, "and all the relevant Islamic institutions are called up to to act quickly to remove the mezuzot."

Mahmoud Abu Atta, spokesman for the institution "Mossad Al-Aqsa" said that he sees these mezuzahs "as continued attempts to Judaize the Old City. A Mezuzah is put on the door of a Jewish home yet this [the Old City of Jerusalem] is an Arab city."

A mezuza is a (protected) parchment handwritten with Judaism's holiest profession of faith, the Sh'ma, Deuteronomy 6:4-9 and 11:13-21. The Sh'ma itself is the source for Jewish law mandating that its words be affixed to the doorposts and gates of all areas controlled by Jews.

It is most appropriate to have mezuzot on the gates of Judaism's holy city!

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Iraq Christians fleeing to Turkey

From Al Arabiya/AFP:

Terrorized by increasing extremist attacks, more and more Iraqi Christians are fleeing in panic to neighboring Muslim-majority Turkey, among them solitary minors sent away by desperate parents.

In Istanbul, a tiny Chaldean Catholic community has embraced the refugees, serving as their first point of shelter before the United Nations or local civic groups offer a helping hand.

The number of arrivals, available statistics show, has sharply increased since October 31 when gunmen stormed a Baghdad church, killing 44 worshippers, two priests and seven security guards, in an attack claimed by Al-Qaeda's local affiliate.

"We saw many newcomers after the attack. We saw they had made no preparation and had no savings," said Gizem Demirci, an activist at the Association for Solidarity with Asylum-Seekers and Migrants.

"Moreover, we began to receive minors... whose families are still in Iraq but had just enough money to send away a son or a daughter," she added without offering any exact figures.

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My New York Times prophecy

On Friday, I tweeted:

Death toll in Tunisia riots tops 60. Must be Israel's fault.

My sarcastic point, which I had made Monday in a similar post, is that Arabs will blame Israel for every problem in the Arab world - and credulous Westerners will happily believe it.

At least I thought I was being sarcastic. But mainstream Middle East reporting has a way of outdoing even the most outrageous satire.

From the New York Times on Saturday:

Tunisia’s uprising electrified the region.... Yet the street protests erupted when Arabs seemed more frustrated than ever, whether over rising prices and joblessness or resentment of their leaders’ support for American policies or ambivalence about Israeli campaigns in Lebanon in 2006 and Gaza in 2009.

...That the events in Tunisia took place far beyond the region’s traditional centers of power did little to diminish the enthusiasm they seemed to generate. In fact, the very spectacle of crowds surging into the streets and overwhelming decades of accumulated power in the hands of a highly centralized, American-backed government seemed an antidote to the despair of past years — carnage in Iraq, divisions among Palestinians and Israeli intransigence and the yawning divide between ruler and ruled on almost every question of foreign policy.

Note the NYT's belief that Israel is the intransigent party in the conflict. It doesn't say "alleged" or "belief of" - the NYT is saying that the fact of Israeli intransigence riles up the Arab world, despite the fact that the Palestinian Arabs have not made a single real concession since 1988.

Only in paragraphs 18-20 does this writer, Anthony Shadid, mention the actual reason for the protests - well after he talks about his absurd guesses:

Tunisians’ grievances were as specific as universal: rising food prices, corruption, unemployment and the repression of a state that viewed almost all dissent as subversion.

Smaller protests, many of them over rising prices, have already taken place in countries like Morocco, Egypt, Algeria and Jordan. Egypt, in particular, seems to bear at least a passing resemblance to Tunisia — a heavy-handed security state with diminishing popular support and growing demands from an educated, yet frustrated, population.

In Jordan, hundreds protested the cost of food in several cities, even after the government hastily announced measures to bring the prices down. Libya abolished taxes and customs duties on food products, and Morocco tried to offset a surge in grain prices.

Ordinary Arabs have long ago stopped caring about their Palestinian brethren, and ordinary Arabs are the ones who are doing the rioting. But idiotic - or perhaps malicious - reporters like Shadid, and their NYT editors, will not bother to actually ask members of the Arab street what they think. They will uncritically parrot the lies of the leaders - the very leaders the people are protesting against!

(h/t Challah Hu Akbar)

UPDATE: The American Thinker has more on this article.

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Will STL find Iran behind Hariri murder?

From YNet: and other sources:

Sources familiar with the investigation into the assassination of Rafik Hariri in 2005 told Newsmax that the United Nations Special Tribunal for Lebanon will accuse Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei of giving the order to murder the former Lebanese prime minister, according to the Lebanese website Naharnet.

The sources told Newsmax, an American news website, that the tribunal will lay out evidence showing that the murder was committed by Iran's Quds force and Hezbollah.

The order to murder Hariri was transmitted to Imad Mughniyeh, Hezbollah's top commander at the time, by Quds force chief Qassem Suleymani, sources familiar with the investigation told Newsmax.

The sources said Mughniyeh and his brother-in-law, Mustapha Badr al-Dine, put together the hit team that carried out the attack. "The Iranians considered Hariri to be an agent of Saudi Arabia, and felt that killing him would pave the way for a Hezbollah takeover of Lebanon," one of the sources said.

According to the sources, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, and his brother-in-law, Assef Shawkat, the head of Syrian intelligence, also played key roles in the assassination plot.

The order to murder Hariri was transmitted to Hizbullah’s military leader, Imad Mughniyeh, by Quds force chief Qassem Suleymani, sources told Newsmax.

Mughniyeh was killed in a car bombing in Damascus on February 12, 2008. According to Saturday’s report, Mughniyeh put together the hit team that carried out the attack at the behest of Iran, with the help of his brotherin- law.

“The Iranians considered Hariri to be an agent of Saudi Arabia, and felt that killing him would pave the way for a Hizbullah takeover of Lebanon,” a source told Newsmax.

Iran was not the only country involved in the assassination plot, they said. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, and his brother-in-law, Assef Shawkat, the head of Syrian intelligence, also played key roles in the plan to murder Hariri, a source was reported as saying.

This is most interesting, and would have huge repercussions, but I have one question:

Why is the media suddenly quoting a Newsmax article from six weeks ago?

It appears that Lebanon's Naharnet found the Newsmax article earlier today, and when it published it then all these other outlets followed immediately.

Newsmax is a conservative-leaning site. I have no idea how good their reporting is, although I seem to remember this reporter, Ken Timmerman, appearing to have some good sources in the past.

So why is a six-week-old news item suddenly considered "news"?

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Did Israel test Stuxnet in Dimona?

A fascinating NYT article on Stuxnet:

The Dimona complex in the Negev desert is famous as the heavily guarded heart of Israel’s never-acknowledged nuclear arms program, where neat rows of factories make atomic fuel for the arsenal.

Over the past two years, according to intelligence and military experts familiar with its operations, Dimona has taken on a new, equally secret role — as a critical testing ground in a joint American and Israeli effort to undermine Iran’s efforts to make a bomb of its own.

Behind Dimona’s barbed wire, the experts say, Israel has spun nuclear centrifuges virtually identical to Iran’s at Natanz, where Iranian scientists are struggling to enrich uranium. They say Dimona tested the effectiveness of the Stuxnet computer worm, a destructive program that appears to have wiped out roughly a fifth of Iran’s nuclear centrifuges and helped delay, though not destroy, Tehran’s ability to make its first nuclear arms.

“To check out the worm, you have to know the machines,” said an American expert on nuclear intelligence. “The reason the worm has been effective is that the Israelis tried it out.”

...
The project’s political origins can be found in the last months of the Bush administration. In January 2009, The New York Times reported that Mr. Bush authorized a covert program to undermine the electrical and computer systems around Natanz, Iran’s major enrichment center. President Obama, first briefed on the program even before taking office, sped it up, according to officials familiar with the administration’s Iran strategy. So did the Israelis, other officials said. Israel has long been seeking a way to cripple Iran’s capability without triggering the opprobrium, or the war, that might follow an overt military strike of the kind they conducted against nuclear facilities in Iraq in 1981 and Syria in 2007.

Two years ago, when Israel still thought its only solution was a military one and approached Mr. Bush for the bunker-busting bombs and other equipment it believed it would need for an air attack, its officials told the White House that such a strike would set back Iran’s programs by roughly three years. Its request was turned down.

Now, Mr. Dagan’s statement suggests that Israel believes it has gained at least that much time, without mounting an attack. So does the Obama administration.
...
[Security expert Langer] quickly discovered that the worm only kicked into gear when it detected the presence of a specific configuration of controllers, running a set of processes that appear to exist only in a centrifuge plant. “The attackers took great care to make sure that only their designated targets were hit,” he said. “It was a marksman’s job.”

For example, one small section of the code appears designed to send commands to 984 machines linked together.

Curiously, when international inspectors visited Natanz in late 2009, they found that the Iranians had taken out of service a total of exactly 984 machines that had been running the previous summer.

Read the whole thing.

(h/t Challah Hu Akbar)

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