Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Monday, March 26, 2007

Some hypocrisy from Saudi Arabia

The Saudi Foreign Minister, Prince Saud Al-Faisal said Monday that the Palestinian cause is the first of Arab cause and the axis of the problems that plague our region.

It warms my heart to know that Saudi Arabia is so concerned with the welfare of Palestinian Arabs.

Especially since Palestinian Arabs are the single exception to a 2004 Saudi naturalization law:

JEDDAH, 21 October 2004 — Expatriates of all nationalities are entitled to apply for Saudi citizenship and their travels abroad with re-entry visas will not disqualify them, press reports said yesterday quoting senior officials.
...
Shubaily ibn Majdoue Al-Qarni, chairman of the security committee which supervised amendments to the law, said Saudi citizenship would be open for all nationals working in the Kingdom. “The law does not aim at a particular nationality. On the other hand, it covers all expatriates in the country,” he told Al-Madinah.

But Al-Watan Arabic daily reported that the naturalization law would not be applicable to Palestinians living in the Kingdom as the Arab League has instructed that Palestinians living in Arab countries should not be given citizenship to avoid dissolution of their identity and protect their right to return to their homeland.

Diplomatic sources have estimated the number of Palestinians in the Kingdom at about 500,000. There are large concentrations of Palestinians in the country’s western, central, eastern and northern provinces.

So the Kingdom has no problem disenfranchising a half-million Palestinian Arabs, most of whom would undoubtedly be happy to become citizens of Saudi Arabia, to "avoid dissolution of their identity."

If Palestinian Arabs have such a strong identity, why would they need the Arab League to protect it by punishing millions of them, leaving them stateless?

Apparently, when Arabs speak about "helping the Palestinian cause," they really mean "keeping Palestinian Arabs in misery for the next few generations."

Liking Israel despite themselves

The Guardian "Comment if Free" column has an article by Alex Stein, clearly not a fan of Israeli policies, who was impressed with the welcome that English fans received from Israelis:

Normalisation is the desire to be a country like any other. Israelis are fiends for it. Whatever the circumstances, they see it as their birthright - the final piece in the Zionist jigsaw. Israel's most virulent critics take the opposite view. Whatever the circumstances, they wish Israel to be made into the exception. And last weekend's festivities in Tel Aviv, in which the drab goalless draw in Ramat Gan was only a sub-plot, provided the perfect opportunity to further assess Israel's place in the world.

The match was an unequivocal hasbara success for Israel. For England, this was just another tiresome away game. For Israel, this was one of the biggest games in the country's history, and a chance to welcome the mythical England supporter - tattooed and bevvied-up, but cheerful and decent all the same. Despite this, most countries tend to greet English fans with fear. The Israeli authorities, however, preferred to adopt Jay-Z's dictum that sensitive thugs need hugs. English flags were paraded throughout Tel Aviv, supplies of beer were increased dramatically, and free transport was laid on. A special one-day festival was held in Tel Aviv's Hayarkon Park, with fun and frolics, including a chance for some of England's fans to see if their beer bellies could defeat their leaner Israeli counterparts in some friendly wrestling.

The fans could not believe the welcome. They are used to being received by riot police, not adoring admirers. This kind of revelry is normally reserved only for the World Cup. But, for a country that's not always so competent at crowd control, police were sparse. I witnessed a friendly face-off between the two sets of fans on Tel Aviv's beach, in which the Israelis' rendition of Shalom Aleichem, was greeted with English cries of "Let's go fucking mental". Unable to free myself of inherited prejudices, I wondered whether I might hear the occasional anti-semitic chant. Not a whisper, although - on a different tack - I did hear a bit too much of "No surrender to the IRA".

Of course, however friendly the banter, it doesn't take much for trouble to start. But the hands-off approach to security was a tremendous success. Hopefully there's a lesson to be learned.

The match also provided an opportunity to highlight the work of Kick Racism out of Football, an English creation which has now been exported to Israel. The New Israel Fund organised a weekend of activities to showcase the work of the organisation. The legendary John Barnes led a British delegation on a visit to Hapoel Abu Ghosh-Mevasseret Zion, Israel's first joint Jewish/Arab professional team. And at a gala dinner held by the New Israel Fund, Israel's first Arab minister, Raleb Majadele, gave his first official address. Much work remains to be done before the promise of kicking racism out of Israeli football (not to mention the wider society) is complete. But it's vital to know that serious work is being put into achieving this goal.

However, we mustn't forget the arguments of the "exceptionalists". Last week on Comment is free, Ismail Patel argued that Israel should be expelled from Uefa. Patel focused on the problems experienced by the Palestinian football team. These range from a missile hitting Gaza's only football stadium, to the difficulties faced when the team tries to go abroad to play a match. But because boycotting a team because of the policies of its government isn't a particularly frequent occurrence, Patel had to adopt the incoherent strategy tried by others who seek to demonise Israel - weird attempts to establish a universal principle through twisted logic: "Although in an ideal world sports should be kept separate from politics, there is a different reality. Nazi Germany used the 1936 Olympics to showcase Hitler and his fascist ideology, which culminated in the Holocaust and the tragic deaths of 6 million Jews."

And therein lies the rub. Nazi Germany did indeed use the 1936 Olympics to showcase Hitler and his fascist ideology. As we have noted, the Israeli football authorities used the occasion as an opportunity to welcome thousands of people from another country, and as a shot in the arm for the campaign to kick racism out of the sport. Followers of Patel might respond to this by admitting the value of these initiatives, and by arguing for them to be spread more deeply into society. This would not weaken their basic thesis. But, as ideological anti-Zionists, they are engaged in a project to systematically reject every aspect of Israeli society that does not proclaim its own deviance. And so they label projects such as Kick Racism out of Football as superficial attempts to cover up the deeper crimes of the Zionist project.

Despite all this, there is a part of me that's not comfortable with thousands of Englishmen coming to Israel and thinking it's just the Republic of Tel Aviv, a sun-drenched paradise with beautiful girls and uber-chic bars. I have no problem with them knowing about the darker side of life here, which is one of the reasons I try and write as frankly as I can in this space.

But I also want them to know the positive things. If someone like Ilan Pappe can speak of the "many, many good things in Israel, it's an impressive project that the Zionist movement did, the way it saved Jews, the way it created a modern society almost out of nothing", then why can't Ismail Patel? I don't want people to boycott Israel, I want them to engage with it. I want people who are interested to come here and take an honest look at the good and bad things that are going on. Then, in whatever small way they can, to try and strengthen the forces of progress within Israeli society. This, and not the cowardice of boycott, is the imperative that faces all tourists, even England football fans.

The easiest way to distinguish anti-Zionists from anti-semites is to see if they have the ability to say anything nice about Israel.

An interesting reaction to the Rachel Corrie play

The Jerusalem Post reports that the Portland pro-Israel community responded to the play "My Name is Rachel Corrie" in an interesting way: by setting up a website of facts about Corrie and the ISM, and buying ads in the playbill.

The website, rachelcorriefacts.org, is low-key and filled with context and links to show the context about Corrie. It meant to be used where ever the play is staged. It synopsizes the facts nicely:

My Name is Rachel Corrie is a simplistic, incomplete, one-sided portrayal of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The show, based on Rachel's diaries and letters, does not attempt or claim to be an objective or balanced report from the region. It contains many factual errors and myths. [More...]

The International Solidarity Movement (ISM) is a Palestinian-run organization that lures its members into war zones to act as human shields in obstructing counter-terrorism efforts.
The ISM describes itself as a peaceful humanitarian group, but in reality it is sympathetic to terrorist tactics and lures well-intentioned, idealistic young adults to the Palestinian Territories to promote its anti-Israel views. The ISM then knowingly leads its members into war zones, placing them directly in harm's way as human shields in an attempt to obstruct Israel's counterterrorism operations. [More...]
Rachel Corrie's death was a tragic accident.
On March 16, 2003, Rachel, acting as a human shield, attempted to deter bulldozers clearing brush and earth around homes in Rafah. According to a witness, Rachel slipped as she moved in front of the bulldozer, fell in front of the slow moving blade and was crushed by unearthed debris. An investigation, which included extensive interrogation of the driver and his commanders, using polygraphs and video evidence, revealed that the driver's view had been obstructed by the debris and by the bulldozer’s protective driver cage. An autopsy confirmed that the bulldozer had not touched Rachel. [More...]
Gaza was, and still is today, a hotbed and source of violent terrorism against Israeli civilians.
Between 2000 and early 2003, hundreds of Israeli men, women and children had been murdered and thousands were injured in suicide bombings and other attacks by Palestinian terrorist groups. Israel had escalated its military operations against Palestinian terrorist groups and infrastructure in 2002 and 2003 in an effort to protect Israeli citizens from terrorist violence. [More...]
Israel wants peace and has made sacrifices and territorial concessions in its quest for a peaceful solution to the conflict.
Israel has always sought long-lasting peace with its Arab neighbors. Israel gave up all of the Sinai Peninsula in 1982 to achieve peace with Egypt, left its security zone in Lebanon in 2000, and withdrew soldiers and settlements from the Gaza Strip in August 2005. Israel remains ready to negotiate peace based on a two-state solution. [More...]

Understandably for the liberal audience it aims to educate, the site avoids showing that Corrie herself was a rabidly flag-burning anti-American idiot who was supporting murderers and was protecting a weapons smuggling tunnel.

This approach to the play avoids the label (and libel) of "censorship" that dogs the usual approach that American Jewish groups use in cases like this.

Peaceful PalArab Poll

There were some interesting results in the latest An-Najah poll of Palestinian Arabs: (h/t Barak)

Do you support or reject concentrating Palestinian resistance within the
1967 borders alongside with political negotiations?
24.5%-I strongly support
43.7%-I support
22.4%-I reject
3.4%-I strongly reject
6.1%-No opinion/I do not know

Do support or reject firing rockets by Palestinian factions from the Strip
against Israel?
19.7%-I strongly support
29.9%-I support
37.5%-I reject
9%-I strongly reject
3.9%-No opinion/I do not know

Do you think that firing rockets from the Gaza Strip against Israel hurts or
helps Palestinian national struggle?
32.9%-It helps
40.4%-It hurts
20.8%-It is useless
6%-No opinion/I do not know

Under your current circumstances, do you think of emigrating to another
country?
29.4%-Yes(34.1% in Gaza)
69.9%-No
0.7%-No opinion/I do not know

If proper conditions are made available to you to live outside Palestine,
will you think of emigrating?
33.1%-Yes (41.7% in Gaza)
65.7%-No
1.2%-No opinion/I do not know

So fully 68% of Palestinian Arabs support terror attacks against civilians inside the Green Line. There's a statistic that Jimmy Carter is not likely to quote.

Even more interesting are the next two questions: a plurality support firing rockets into Israel, even as only one third feel that it helps the Palestinian Arab cause. The only conclusion one can come up with is that the purpose of the rockets is not to help their cause, but rather to kill Jews. This is that honor/shame culture again - blowing up a Jewish kid in the Negev is a "victory" that is worth it even though it will not help the PalArabs one bit, even in their own estimation!

Finally, we see that despite decades of indoctrination to generations of Palestinian Arabs that they should want to live in "Palestine", well over one third would like to emigrate to somewhere else. They do not love "their land" as much as everyone likes to pretend they do.

Which brings up an interesting question: why can't they emigrate? Who is stopping them from moving to other Arab countries, or South America, or anywhere else?

We know the answer. The Arab leaders themselves are the ones who are the most keen at keeping PalArabs in refugee camps and in misery, and they have been since 1948 as I have shown many times.

One would think that it would be a basic human right to be able to emigrate to other welcoming countries. Yet no Arab countries are willing to give Palestinian Arabs citizenship (except Jordan, which already had for the West Bank PalArabs but not for anyone else.) So where are the screams from the UN and HRW and Amnesty slamming Arab countries - the most natural destination - from allowing PalArabs to move and integrate there as equal citizens?

100K

I just received my 100,000th hit.

Thanks to all my readers!

(For those interested, number 100,000 was from San Francisco, running Firefox on Windows XP, who has visited me 31 times and who linked to me from Israellycool.com . )

Open season on women in Gaza

The Australian has a highly disturbing story about "honor killings" in Gaza. Apparently, there are many that never get reported by any Palestinian Arab media or "human rights" organization. (Hat tip: Kalen)

Hunted women of the Gaza

ON a windswept winter day last week, just before afternoon prayers, three gunshots rang out across the damp sand dunes of northern Gaza. Mohammed Yousef was just about to climb the minaret of the beach mosque to summon the faithful when he heard the distinctive crack of a Kalashnikov, a sharp, violent, intrusion that has become a soundtrack for the turbulent Gaza Strip, especially this month.
He hurried outside, looking first down a rubbish-strewn strip of beach that leads to the Mediterranean, then left towards a low-set concrete fence. Just inside a narrow entrance lay the crumpled body of a small woman, wearing a green Islamic gown and a full black veil. Her blood seeped into the puddles of sandy water around her head. Mohammed didn't bother with an ambulance. He need not have bothered with the police.

The dead woman was Dalal al-Behtete, a young woman from a struggling family in central Gaza. Seven other women have met the same violent and lonely fate across Gaza during a 10-day stretch this month. According to their assassins, their deaths gave them honour that their conduct in life had not. All the women had been accused of immoral behaviour. Some had been labelled prostitutes; others were branded for fraternising with men outside their immediate families.

So-called honour killings have been carried out here in the past, but even in this ramshackle, anarchistic and fractured society, women have never before been hunted down so blatantly.

Gaza, more so than anywhere else in the Palestinian territories, has been a feudal battleground of countless agendas, historical enmity, ideology and greed. Historically, clans and tribes have ruled the roost here, with factionalised militant ideologies running a close second. But the balance appears to have shifted during the past six months. Strict observance of Sunni Islam seems to have encouraged a fundamentalist trend that is making a play for influence, through the rigid enforcement of radical Islamic law espoused by the global jihad network that follows the bin Laden world view.

Sharia law appears to have drifted into Gaza, alarming Muslim and militant groups alike and sharply rattling the neighbour across the security barrier, Israel.

Change had begun in Gaza long before its women began to fall. Late last year, several internet cafes and music stores were bombed. In February, six pharmacies in the southern town of Rafah were also attacked because they persisted in selling Viagra to youths. In the past year, the name of a new group, first heard of after the capture of Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit last June, persistently has been linked to the unrest.

It calls itself the Army of Islam and consists of self-styled morality warriors who claim links to al-Qa'ida. Hamas, the most powerful of the militant groups and a joint partner in the new unity government, steadfastly denies that al-Qa'ida has established an organised presence in Gaza. If it is true that al-Qa'ida has done so, it cripples Hamas's claims to be fighting for a Palestinian state alone and not being standard bearers of the global jihads.

Saha Rijab had never heard of the Army of Islam until she was dragged by her hair and tossed into a car by masked men with assault rifles hours before Dalal was murdered. From her hospital bed in central Gaza, she agrees to tell Inquirer of the ordeal that has left her legs riddled with bullets and nearly led her to become the eighth victim of Gazan women's most terrifying month.

"I was taking clothes to my female neighbour and I had to pass my cousin's house to get there," she says, wearing a yellow-knitted cardigan and a brown hijab. "My cousin was inside and saw me passing and he opened the door and came outside. I didn't look at him and he slammed the door against the wall."

Saha's cousin, Wael Rijab, is the head of the Hamas executive force in the northern Gaza Strip, the vanguard of the militant group's strike power and a key player in the blood-soaked factional in-fighting of the past three months. He has accused his cousin of immorality for the past five years, seemingly because of her preference for jeans, tops and sometimes flowing hair instead of the Islamic jilbab. Just as damaging was his accusation of treachery; she was an avowed supporter of the Fatah movement that Hamas deposed in elections 14 months ago. Both groups have since been entangled in a struggle for power in Palestinian society.

"I kept walking and gave my neighbour the jilbab, then came back home," Saha says, with her shocked 12-year-old son sitting beside her. "After that I took a taxi to the shop to buy fruit and some militants from the Hamas executive force were sitting in a Mitsubishi with darkened glass. Their windows were half open and they were looking at me.

"I was scared but I decided to just keep walking to my street. What else could I do?

"I was 20m away from my home, then their car moved and another one arrived; the cars started moving closer to me. They opened the door. They were masked and they were running after me, the driver and two others. I was a few metres away from a clothes shop, but they reached me and put their hands on me. They dragged me by the hair and clothes and pushed me inside the car. They blindfolded me and they tied my hands.

"When I took the blindfold off I was in a street full of taxis. They said: 'Where are you going?' And I said: 'I am going to my street, I swear to God.' They said: 'You know God and you dress like this?' I said: 'I know God better than you.' They said: 'Are you Fatah or Hamas?' I said: 'I am Fatah', and they replied: 'We spit on Fatah."'

Then they announced their allegiance as followers of the Army of Islam and told Saha she should dress liberally only for her husband.

She retorted: "This is politics and you are trying to avenge something. I have nothing to do with it. If this is just about the way I dress I will start wearing the jilbab.

"They said: 'We will beat you and force you to say, 'I had sex with my son.' Then they covered my eyes again. I could hear the sound of the sea and their mobiles were ringing all the time. We went to a market and they said: 'So, you promise you have not been in contact with any other men?"'

Terrified and haunted by the recent deaths of other women, Saha drew little comfort from the next words she heard: "OK, don't worry. We will take you home."

She was right to be wary. Minutes later, she tells Inquirer, the car stopped and she was thrown outside into the dirt. She wriggled furiously to free herself as the first bullet thudded into the bone just below her knee. Two more pierced her lower legs before the gunmen sped off.

At the Jabaliya police station, which notionally investigates crime in the north of the Gaza Strip, five officers usher us inside the dingy office of the lead junior officer. Two officers sit behind a desk, and others sit on old foam mattresses on single beds along the wall. There is no computer, let alone a typewriter, no files or cabinets, not even a notepad. The officers received about 30 per cent of their annual salary last year and have no operational budget of which to speak. But it isn't their dearth of resources that has left them hamstrung; it is the impossible task of taking on the perpetrators.

"What could we do even if we wanted to?" asks an officer, who refuses to be named. "We are ruled by the tribes and we will not fight the Hamas executive force."

In the case of Dalal, after escorting her body to the morgue and advising her distraught father of her death, the police will play no further role. Justice, if it is delivered, will be played out Gaza-style, in a cycle of vengeance.

But with the rising power of the so-called Army of Islam, even that seems unlikely. Dalal and three other women murdered during the 10-day stretch - Ibtisam Mohammed Abu Genas, Samira Tohami Debeki and Amany Khamis al-Hussary - were victims of killers who claimed the ideological backing of the fledgling group, even if the murders stemmed from bids for family honour.

The deaths pose a significant issue for the new unity government on many fronts, especially Hamas. No one in the uneasy Fatah-Hamas alliance wants to be seen to be linked to extremism, especially of the Salafi-Islamic kind.

Israel has long feared that Gaza will be turned into a platform for al-Qa'ida and the consortium of international jihadis that have emerged in its likeness. Creeping sharia law at the border is a worst-case scenario for the Jewish state; it fears it will lead to imported and intensified jihadism.

For Hamas, the links appear to be just as troubling. Saha says she recognised her tormentors as being members of the Hamas executive force.

Soon after Inquirer's visit to Dalal's grieving family, our translator receives a phone call from a cousin confessing to the murder. In a menacing tone, the man says he too is an executive force member and warns us not to publish the dead woman's story.

"These are the worst days ever here," Saha says, knowing well the risks she faces for speaking out.

"Hamas believes that women cannot be the ones who lead. So long as Hamas is in Gaza, the situation will keep developing."

As horrible as this is, I question the reporter's credibility.

Chulov has in the past shown almost an admiration for Hamas, so this article can hardly be accused of having a Zionist agenda. Chulov seems to accept fairly fantastic stories without proper skepticism from all sources (he defended his story last summer of the UN ambulance supposedly bombed by Israel in Lebanon even after contradicting himself numerous times, and last week he wrote a story that uncritically repeats Hamas' claim that Israel has 50,000 collaborators in the territories.)

Even this story has a self-contradiction - in one place he mentions seven other murders besides Dalal al-Behtete, and another time he says that Saha Rijab nearly became the eighth victim, although she would be the ninth. I don't like to count deaths where the names of the victims are not mentioned, and only one name was mentioned here that I hadn't listed previously. In addition, he said that these killings happened this month when they happened last month.

I will not accuse him of willfully lying, but Chulov does have a tendency to be reckless with facts in seeming pursuit of a good story, or journalistic awards.

For these reasons, I will only add one to my count of Palestinian Arabs violently murdered by each other. This brings our 2007 PalArab self-death count to 152.

But this also brings up the question of how many other deaths have gone unreported in the peaceful, unified PalArab territories, and whether the ones reported in the PA press are only the tip of the iceberg.

UPDATE: A PalArab in Nablus came to work and killed his boss, no doubt because of Zionist colonialism. 153.

UPDATE 2: A PalArab succumbed to a gunshot wound from last month when his friend was playing wih a gun and it accidentally fired. On that same day were two other accidental gunshot wounds, one other death. 154.

UPDATE 3: A Hamas terrorist blew himself up Monday while on training exercises near Khan Younis. 155.

HH CXI

Haveil Havalim #111 is now up at Dafnotes.

It is a low-key but quite comprehensive roundup of the JBlogosphere for this week. (My post on the Hadassah Hospital attacks of 1948 is listed.)

Check it out!

Your tax dollars at work

AP has some somewhat homoerotic pictures of Fatah's Force 17 terrorists training:

Masked members of the Palestinian Force 17, an elite secuity unit linked to President Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah movement train in the Bureij refugee camp in the Gaza Strip Saturday, March 24, 2007.

It is not unusual to see wire service photos of masked Fatah terrorists.

What makes this noteworthy is which group this is: Force 17, otherwise known as the Presidential Guard.

These are the people that the United States has been training to strengthen Mahmoud Abbas.

Never mind that Force 17 has a long history of terror attacks.

What does it say when the most respected, "elite" members of the Palestinian Arab security forces - the ones that the US pins hopes on - are too afraid to show their faces?

Two Palestinian Arabs riddled with bullets. Ain't unity great?

Just another peaceful weekend in the unoccupied Gaza Strip:

Palestinian medical sources stated that the corpses of two Palestinians were found on Friday evening.

The sources added that the corpses are a Palestinian teacher and a preventive security officer.

The teacher was found in the area of Salateen street in the north of the Gaza Strip, the officer was found in Al Mughraqa in the central Gaza Strip.

Sources from Ash Shifa hospital said that the teacher, 40 year old Mohammad Aishan from Sheikh Radwan, Gaza City, arrived at the hospital dead, his body riddled with bullets.

The body of the preventive security officer, Arafa Nofal, who was abducted by masked gunmen in Gaza on Friday, was found dead just hours after his abduction. Medical sources said that Nofal was found with more than 30 bullets in his body.

Fatah is blaming Hamas and vowing revenge.

Also, a teacher apparently committed suicide. but I don't count that in my Palarab self-death count, which is now at 151 for this year.

UPDATE: A 24-year old man was shot and injured in Khan Younis. When the ambulance came to pick him up and his brothers climbed in, "gunmen" shot at the ambulance too, injuring 3 brothers.

This will certainly be on top of HRW and AI's agenda next week. Right after they finish condemning Israel for a Zionist dog biting an Arab woman in Hebron.

Neturei Karta nut wants to be a minister in PalArab unity gov't

Ma'an (Arabic) published an interview with Israel Hirsch, the anti-Zionist self-styled "rabbi" from Neturei Karta who is the son of the equally deranged Moshe Hirsch.

It includes the usual drivel but here are some gems from the Jew that the terrorists love to pretend to love:

Q : You have representation in the Legislative Council?
A: We are working on that we have representation in the government of National Unity.

Q: Do you prefer Fatah or Hamas?
A: We are not a political movement nor interfere in the policy of the State again, we Jews want to live, submit to the Palestinian state because the Palestinians of the right does not matter if Hamas or Fatah.

Q : Even if the government composed of an Islamic regime?

A: We prefer the Islamic regime of the Zionist regime.

Q : To what extent is your relations with Mahmoud Abbas?
A: Abu Mazen is subject to the American administration and Zionist, so it is bound to affect people's admiration for the "remains" to remain abroad and maintain informal relations and not public because this could harm him in the international arena, and we contacted as well as with Hamas and we are working on that we have a representative in the government.

Q : What do you think members of the Knesset Arabs?
A: Itattakdon Arab Knesset members, such as "Haredim," that they could fight for their rights through their presence in the Knesset and this is not true and therefore they recognize the Zionist Perkins says every time the Zionists occupy the ground and you sit down with them and recognize them.

Q : What is your opinion in Islamic thought by the Islamic world?
A : We prefer the control of the the Islamic movement to the world at this moment...

So NK is to the left, politically, of Arab Knesset members as well as Abbas.

There are some lessons that Zionists can learn from how NK is treated in the Arab world. Whether we like it or not, they look at NK the same way many Zionists look at "Secular Islam" or other progressive Islamic groups. Both groups get loads of publicity, both groups benefit from immeasurable wishful thinking on "the other side," and both groups represent essentially nobody.

Westerners would love to see progressive Muslims gain political power, but we need to understand that mainstream Muslims loathe these people as much as we hate NK.

From Al-Qassam's English website:

When asked about that the what you expect this resistance to comprise from the new government , Abu Obaida, the spokesman of the Qassam Brigades answered that We don’t' expect the government to take any security action against resistance factions as with the case in previous governments but the government will not be involved directly in the resistance that is for the resistance factions to conduct .

Our task is to resist the occupation and reply to its crimes through out the Gaza Strip and the West Bank We don't expect the government to help us directly but we don't expect the government also to coordinate with occupation forces against resistance activists.

Abu Obaida added that " I would expect that Palestinians as a whole are in support of resistance and trying to grow the wide between government and resistance factions is not something accurate."

Regarding any action from the Qassam Brigades against the occupation forces , the Brigades will not stop its military operations as the occupation forces did not stop their aggression against the Palestinian people.

It appears that the new "unity government" will be acting as the silent partners for the terrorists.

Let's give them more money!

Marwan Barghouti being released? (update - no)

At this moment, Maan News (Arabic) has a "breaking news" story:

Occupation released Qassam Marwan Barghouti after 39 months and oblige him to house arrest

I don't see this reported anywhere else yet.

This may mean that a deal for Gilad Shalit is imminent.

Barghouti was of course convicted of five counts of murder in Israeli court.

UPDATE: It was his son, Qassam. I assumed that was a translation error.

Baby killers? Nah, just Palestinian Arabs. They don't count.

A two-year old was killed in Hamas and Fatah crossfire today. I wonder if it was this kid whose picture I posted earlier?

A child holding a gun stands next to Palestinian militants of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades, a group linked to the Fatah movement, standing guard outside the house of their leader Sameh Al Madhoun in Beit Lahiya northern Gaza Strip, Thursday, March 22, 2007. One of the group's militants was killed nearby on Wednesday during clashes between Fatah and Hamas militants.

And another dead PalArab was found as well, which raises Thursday's PalArab self-death toll to 4, and puts the 2007 count total at....147.

And for the 15th week in a row, more PalArabs died by their own hands than by Israel, by a score of about 6-2 (PCHR counts a week as being from Thursday to Wednesday.)

If you think I am being disrespectful by keeping such a macabre count, I must be just as moral as AP and Reuters who spent the first few years of the Intifada keeping painstaking track of every single Palestinian Arab killed - but only by Israel.

Because, evidently, the PalArabs that are killed by other PalArabs just aren't very important.

Only 200 or so have been killed since the last Human Rights Watch report condemning PalArab infighting for endangering civilians - back in October, 2006. (The last report condemning Israel was last week.)

UPDATE: Another Fatah fatality. 149.

PalArab fun and games

No matter what part of the world you look at, people are all the same. They just want to kick back and have fun, like anyone else. It would be highly insensitive to demean others just because their cultural mores are somewhat different.

Cops and robbers is fun no matter which part of the world you live in. In Gaza, it's known as "Cops and Cops." Here is one participant and his adult pals, who are nice enough to use real guns to add authenticity. (And in the background are some kids playing "Capture the Flag.")

It gets hot in the desert, and nothing says "refreshment" like some ice cream.

Even better is when you can eat it in front of a guy wearing a ski mask with a submachine gun.

Different cultures have different playgrounds. In Hamastan, the friendly local police like to shoot RPGs into trucks of rival militias to cheaply create a paradise of fun for the kiddies. These kids are learning to share an axe so they can learn demolition - a highly useful skill.

Kids aren't the only ones who have fun in Palestan, though. The adults like to play a game called "tire fire":

Dance is an important part of PalArab culture. This is the traditional "Rocket Rockettes" dance.

But Western culture seeps in as well. Here is the Palestinian Arab production of Saturday Night Fever:

This is the side of Palestinian Arabs that the world doesn't see enough of, and we need to make sure that everyone understands that PalArabs just want to have fun.

Poor, misunderstood Hamas

Hamas TV plays this lovely video, of a girl singing to her dead terrorist mother and vowing to follow in her footsteps.

Background:
Reem Riyashi blew herself up at a Gaza checkpoint in January, 2004. She told the Israeli guards that she had a medical problem so they let her in to check her privately. Her explosion killed four Israelis.

She was the first Hamas female suicide bomber and she had two children, 3 years and 18 months old. Many think that she had an affair and this was a form of honor killing.

Because of her actions, Israel started cracking down on PalArab women as well as men at checkpoints, and much of what people see as Palestinian Arab suffering today is a direct result of her actions.

But Hamas is already indoctrinating her daughter and other PalArab girls to follow in her footsteps.
(H/T Palestinian Media Watch and LGF.)