Let's see how those anti-Israel boycotts are doing

From Globes:

The IMF has raised its growth outlook for Israel by 0.3 percentage points in a new World Economic Outlook report published today, on the eve of the World Bank Group and IMF 2007 Annual Meeting. ...It now predicts 4.8% growth in 2007, and 4.2% growth in 2008. The IMF’s growth forecast for Israel is one of the highest for developed countries; the IMF categorizes Israel as such. The IMF predicts higher growth rates in 2007 for Hong Kong and Singapore, at 5.5% each, and for Ireland, at 5%. It predicts 4.4% growth for South Korean, 2.9% growth for the UK, 2.3% for Japan, 2.2% for the US, and 1.8% for Germany. The IMF also predicts 0.1% deflation for Israel this year; the only developed country for which it predicts this. The IMF predicts that Israel’s unemployment rate will fall to 7.5% of the civilian labor force in 2007 and 7.2% in 2008, down from 9% in 2005 and 8.4% in 2006.

I've mentioned before how when Arab nations enforced a boycott against Palestinian Jews in 1946 it backfired spectacularly. One would think that they and their Jew-hating colleagues would learn by now.

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PalArab news accidentally shows Israeli sensitivity to Arabs

The Ma'an News headline says:

Israeli soldiers force women wearing 'niqab' to reveal their faces at Huwwara checkpoint

Sounds like an insult to Islamic law is being perpetrated! Sounds like there's going to be some rioting over Islamic women's "honor!"

But then the story actually gives some details:

Nablus - Salfit - Ma'an - The Israeli female soldiers at the Huwwara checkpoint, south of Nablus city in the north of the occupied West Bank, intend to search women wearing the face veil, the 'niqab', who wish to pass through the checkpoint.

One of the women wearing niqab told our Nablus correspondent, "The women soldiers asked the women in niqab for their identity cards and detained them to one side."

They added that the female soldiers forced every woman wearing niqab to enter a special room near the checkpoint where they were body-searched.

The female soldiers asked the veiled women to uncover their faces and lift their clothes to reveal their abdomens while the female soldier stays outside the room and gives orders through a small opening in the door of the small room.

So is there any Islamic law against Islamic women being seen by other women? Obviously not. Is this any worse than what happens at airports every day? Obviously not.

So why exactly is this a news story? Unless it is to show how the monstrous Zionists are bending over backwards to show cultural sensitivity towards those who would love to see them all dead.

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A true, religious, moderate Muslim leader

Reading this, one can almost have hope.

BY BRET STEPHENS
JAKARTA, Indonesia--Suppose for a moment that the single most influential religious leader in the Muslim world openly says "I am for Israel." Suppose he believes not only in democracy but in the liberalism of America's founding fathers. Suppose that, unlike so many self-described moderate Muslims who say one thing in English and another in their native language, his message never alters. Suppose this, and you might feel as if you've descended into Neocon Neverland.

In fact, you have arrived in Jakarta and are sitting in the small office of an almost totally blind man of 66 named Abdurrahman Wahid. A former president of Indonesia, he is the spiritual leader of the Nahdlatul Ulama (NU), an Islamic organization of some 40 million members. Indonesians know him universally as Gus Dur, a title of affection and respect for this descendant of Javanese kings. In the U.S. and Europe he is barely spoken of at all--which is both odd and unfortunate, seeing as he is easily the most important ally the West has in the ideological struggle against Islamic radicalism.

Conversation begins with some old memories. In the early 1960s, Mr. Wahid, whose paternal grandfather founded the NU in 1926 and whose father was Indonesia's first minister of religious affairs, won a scholarship to Al-Azhar University in Cairo, which for 1,000 years had been Sunni Islam's premier institution of higher learning. Mr. Wahid hated it.

"These old sheikhs only let me study Islam's traditional surras in the old way, which was rote memorization," he recalls, speaking in the excellent English he learned as a young man listening to the BBC and Voice of America. "Before long I was fed up. So I spent my time reading books from the USIS [United States Information Service], the Egyptian National Library, and at the cinema. I used to watch three, four movies a day."

As Mr. Wahid saw it, the basic problem with Al-Azhar was that the state interfered in its affairs and demanded intellectual conformity--a lesson he carries with him to the present day. In 1966 he left Cairo for Baghdad University, where he encountered much the same thing: "The teaching [suffered from] conventionalism. You were not allowed to go your own way."

Here Mr. Wahid digresses into Islamic history. "In the second century of Islam, the Imam al-Shafi'i began remodeling the religion," he says. "He put into place the mechanism of understanding everything through law [Shariah]. Now people can't talk about that anymore. We cannot attack al-Shafi'i."

The point is crucial to Mr. Wahid's understanding of Islam as being something broader, deeper and better than the tradition-bound view of life imposed by traditional schools of Islamic law (all the more striking because Mr. Wahid is himself a leading theologian of the Shafi'i school). It is equally crucial to Mr. Wahid's politics, not to mention his relaxed approach to social issues.

"The globalization of ethics is always frightening to people, particularly Islamic radicals," he says in reference to a question about the so-called pornoaksi legislation. For the past three years Indonesian politics have been roiled by an Islamist attempt to label anything they deem sexually arousing to be a form of "porno-action." Mr. Wahid sees this as an assault on pancasila, Indonesia's secularist state philosophy from the time of its founding. He also sees it as an assault on common sense. "Young people like to kiss each other," he says, throwing his hands in the air. "Why not? Just because old people don't do it doesn't mean it's wrong."

Mr. Wahid is equally relaxed about some of the controversies that have recently erupted between Muslims and the West. Pope Benedict's Regensburg speech from last September was "a good speech, though as usual he pointed to the wrong times and the wrong cases." As for the furor over the Danish cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad, he asks "why should we be angry?" And he dismisses Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi, the al-Jazeera preacher who helped incite the cartoon riots, as an "angry, conventional" thinker.

What really concerns Mr. Wahid is what he sees as the increasingly degraded state of the Muslim mind. That problem is becoming especially acute at Indonesian universities and in the pesantren--the religious boarding schools that graduate hundreds of thousands of students every year. "We are experiencing the shallowing of religion," he says, bemoaning the fact that the boarding schools persist in teaching "conventional"--that word again--Islam.

But Mr. Wahid's critique is not just of formal Islamic education. He also attacks the West's philosophy of positivism, which, he says, "relies too much on the idea of conquering knowledge and mastering scientific principles alone." This purely empirical and essentially soulless view of things, broadly adopted by Indonesia's secular state universities, gives its students a bleak choice: "Either they follow the process or they are outside the process."

As a result, Western-style education in Indonesia has come to represent not just secularism but the negation of religion, to which too many students have responded by embracing fundamentalism. At the University of Indonesia, for example, an estimated three in four students are members or sympathizers of the "Prosperous Justice Party," or PKS, an ultra-radical Islamic party.

This raises the subject of religion and politics. "For us, an Islamic party is not a thing to follow," he says, adding that "religion and morality is tied to person, not a party." To illustrate the point, he observes that religious parties in the Muslim world have more often been the handmaids of dictatorship than democracy. "Whenever governments tried to enforce their institutions they use 'Islamic' people as potential allies." The Front for the Defense of Islam (FPI), a radical vigilante group that uses violent means to suppress "un-Islamic" behavior, was, he observes, originally a creature of the Indonesian military.

So why did Mr. Wahid, as a religious leader, make the choice to go into politics himself? He demurs at the suggestion of choice. "I am against politics, so to speak. In 1984 I tried hard to convince people that the NU should not be in politics." He was overruled by others in the organization, and eventually he founded the Party of National Awakening, or PKB. Yet the party, he insists, is "based on non-Islamic principles," a fact he illustrates by pointing to a nearby aide who is an Indonesian Protestant. "We have to go for plurality, for tolerance."

He also believes that the "only solution" to the challenge of Islamic radicalization in Indonesia is more democracy. But what about the example of Hamas, which came to power through democratic means, and of other groups like Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood that would probably do the same if given the chance? Mr. Wahid's answer is to distinguish between what he calls "full democratization" and the "hollow imitation of democracy" that he sees taking place in Indonesia as well as among Arabs in Palestine and Iraq.

"The problem is not personalities, it is institutions," he says. "For the past 250 years the Americans have had not just Jefferson's concept of the rights of the individual but also Alexander Hamilton's belief in a strong state." In order to function properly, democracy requires competent government that can effectively uphold the rule of law. It also requires a broadly understood concept of self-rule, which is missing in too much of the developing world: "Here, ordinary citizens expect the government to do everything for them."

He therefore takes a fairly dim view of Iraq's democratic prospects. "Iraqis understood that Saddam had caused them trouble," and were grateful to be rid of him, he says. "But as for the U.S. concept of democracy, they don't understand it at all." The problem, he adds, goes double in the rest of the Arab world, where, he says, the prevailing view is that being a democracy is an expression of weakness, while being a dictatorship is a sign of strength.

What's needed, in other words, is for countries like Indonesia and Iraq to find a way to combine effective government with a powerful respect for the rights of the citizen. But how one goes about doing that is itself a deeper problem, a problem of culture. "How do we follow the West without [becoming] Westerners? How do you do that? I don't know."

In fact, Mr. Wahid has begun to develop an answer through two organizations he chairs, the Wahid Institute, run by his daughter Yenny, and LibForAll, an Indonesia- and U.S.-based nonprofit run by American C. Holland Taylor, which works to discredit Islamism's ideology of hatred. "It's up to LibForAll to introduce both sides to Muslims; to show that common principles are also the principles of Islam," Mr. Wahid says. "Hundreds of thousands of Muslim youth learn in countries where there is technological modernity. We need to [nurture] the emergence of a new kind of people who think in terms of being modern but still relate to the past."

In fact, that perfectly describes Mr. Wahid, who is keenly aware of his own roots in both Islamic and Javanese traditions. Among his ancestors are the last Hindu-Buddhist king of the Javanese Majapahit dynasty, and Sunan Kalijogo, a Sufi mystic who married Islamic and local traditions and, according to lore, defeated Islamic extremism in the 16th century. Can Mr. Wahid, heir to this venerable tradition, accomplish the same feat? "Right now, the fundamentalists think they're winning," he once told a friend. "But they're going to wake up one day and realize we beat them."

Possibly the most unbelievable part of his website is a joke page, filled with religious humor (some stolen Jewish jokes reworked as Muslim, but still...)

Unlike the Muslims that too many people pin their hopes on (see my comments here,) who generally have much larger numbers of Western followers than Muslim followers, this guy seems like the real deal - someone who can speak about Islam in the Islamic playing field and not be dismissed easily as a heretic or crackpot.

40 million followers is of course only a small percentage of the Muslim world, and he probably has no Arab followers at all, but this is the sort of person who could truly effect change and show the world's Muslims that there is another way to remain Muslim and not have to blindly follow the corrupt, immoral and shortsighted sheikhs and ayatollahs.

(Robert Spencer disagrees, saying that Wahid's views of the religion are so against a literal reading of the Koran as to make him meaningless. But in any religion that has reformed and changed over time there are going to be new ways to adapt the religion and parts that end up being all but ignored, which is effectively what Wahid is doing - and more importantly, succeeding at. If he has millions of followers, that indicates that his message is being accepted as being a valid interpretation of Islam; that is more important than finding Koranic texts that seem to disprove him. Both Christianity and Judaism have source texts that contradict themselves when read literally; this does not stop the religions from continuing on. Similarly, Islam can thrive with a less-literal interpretation of the Koran as long as there are respected leaders espousing it.)

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The next best thing to killing Jews

When Palestinian Arab terrorists get frustrated that they aren't killing as many Jews as they did in the good old days, they sit back and start thinking:

"Jews are smart. Jews like to read. Jews are cultured. Jews are progressive.

"Let's attack all the Palestinian Arab institutions that remind us of Jews!"

And so they do.

In Beit Hanoun one can find the "El-Ata Charitable Society," which offers social and cultural services to people in the area. El-Ata has a library and, today, El-Ata was to open up a new computer lab.

At 1:00 PM, people broke in and burned down the computer lab and library.

Back in February, a theatre and another library in a cultural center was burned down, that time in Jabalia.

What a great society!

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Witness the birth of an Arab lie

On the Hamas website, they report on Israel arresting 19 people connected with a plot to bomb Tel Aviv on Passover:

Zionist sources reported that its forces arrested 19 of Hamas members claiming that they were planning to explode e a car in Om Khalid city ( Tel Aviv).

The implication is that Tel Aviv was built on top of an ancient Arab city named "Om Khalid".

Of course, Tel Aviv was built on land purchased by Jews from Arabs. (See Wikipedia for details.)

A Google of "Om Khalid" found almost nothing. The only hit I saw was from the same Hamas source, where they called Netanya "Om Khalid" as well!

I couldn't find any mention of this Om Khalid in any maps that pre-dated Tel Aviv.

The town or village may be a complete fiction. More likely it is a forgotten hamlet that had nothing to do with Tel Aviv or Netanya.

So we may be in a position to witness exactly how Arab lies about Palestine have started. Just as other lies about Israel become commonly accepted "facts" in time due to Arab repetition, it will be worth looking at how this lie starts and spreads.

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"Destitute" PalArabs lose millions to con man

This story has a little of everything. From YNet:

Gun-battles ravaged Nablus on Tuesday as Palestinian security forces attempted to prevent members of the al-Aqsa Martyr's Brigades from seizing property belonging to a local con man who stole hundreds of thousands of dollars from dozens of Palestinian families.

The man is reportedly being held in a Palestinian Intelligence facility in Jericho where he is being questioned about his involvement in the alleged crimes.

A senior al-Aqsa source told Ynet that the man, who owns several exclusive auto-dealerships among other businesses, offered his victims lucrative investment deals. The man promised the potential investors they would receive over 10 percent in interest every month in return.

Many Palestinians – including families of members of al-Aqsa – bought into the scheme and gave the man large sums of money. The source told Ynet that his family gave the con man $97,000 and indeed, the next month they received a check for over $107,000.

Word spread quickly throughout Nablus and beyond the city limits, the businessman was heralded as an 'investment genius' and dozens of families rushed to offer him millions upon millions of dollars.

However for over a fortnight no one could locate the man, who had stopped answering phone calls and was nowhere to be found. In response members of Al-Aqsa seized control of homes and businesses owned by the con man, evicted the tenants and assumed ownership of them.

According to the source he himself took control of an auto-dealership, a house and three additional stores. "I don't know if this will compensate us," he said, "my family and the families of three other members gave him almost $500,000, but the dog vanished. We will bring him in and deal with him."

Palestinian security forces tried to prevent the takeover and exchanges of fire broke out between them and the Al-Aqsa gunmen.

When asked how their families were able to recruit such large sums of money at a time when most Palestinians are destitute, the al-Aqsa source said that the families sold their jewelry.

"My brother sold his Mercedes, the women sold their gold and the families spent every last cent they had. Now everything is gone. We are left with real estate we don't know the value of or who it will compensate."

Those poor, starving Palestinian Arabs who are forced to become Al Aqsa terrorists because of their extreme poverty and Israel's oppression were forced to liquidate their luxury cars and huge amounts of jewelry chasing a classic con.

The con man himself owned a luxury car dealership. In the poverty-stricken PA territories.

And now the families lost their gold although they seized his property. They must be really hungry by now as they are forced to drive their old, beat up BMWs to get their UN food handouts.

Here's an idea - sell the real estate to those Jews who are happy to pay double the going rate. A win-win! The only downside is that selling land to Jews is a crime that gets the death penalty. Very progressive, these PalArabs!

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"Boy" electrocutes himself hanging Hamas flag

Sometimes, the autotranslated Arabic cannot be improved upon:

Boy died Sameh Mahmoud Khalilih Raja (17 years) after exposure to electric shock while trying to raise the banner of the Hamas movement, one of the pillars of electricity in the town of Deir al Ghusun north of Tulkarm.

The correspondent quoted security sources as saying that the Boy Khalilih one of the Hamas activists, died instantly when exposed to a high-pressure electric waves on an electric pole in the town of Deir al Ghusun, where the public hospital in the city of Tulkarem lifeless corpse.

This brings the count of PalArabs violently killed by each other (in this case, by their own stupidity) to 163 for this year.

UPDATE: Clan clash! 3 dead. 166. (One more died Tuesday from the Clan Clash - 167.)

UPDATE 2:

Palestinian Preventive Security officer Tahsin Ghalban, 33, has died hours after he was shot by unknown gunmen in east Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip, Palestinian medical sources have reported.

168.

UPDATE 3: Clan clash! 2 more dead. 170.

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Children as would-be murderers

HEBRON, West Bank: A Palestinian attacker stabbed and wounded two Israeli police officers Sunday at a checkpoint outside a Hebron shrine that has been a flashpoint for violence in the past, the Israeli army said.

Israeli forces responded by shooting the attacker in the leg, the army said.

The attack — during the weeklong Jewish holiday of Passover — occurred at a checkpoint outside the shrine, known to Jews as the Tomb of the Patriarchs and to Muslims as the Ibrahimi Mosque.

In the early afternoon, a Palestinian, who appeared to be about 17 years old, pulled out a knife and stabbed two policemen at the checkpoint, the army said. One was lightly wounded and the other was more seriously injured, the army said.

The news media doesn't refer to this teenager as a "child," and for good reason - he was acting as an adult and tried to murder two people. It would be silly to call him a child. The word "child" evokes a pre-teen, not a 17-year old.

Yet "human rights" organizations routinely use the word "child" to refer to any Palestinian Arab victim who is under 18 years old. This is consistent across B'Tselem, the UN, PCHR, DCI and all others. The age 18 is a convenient though arbitrary benchmark.

As far as I can tell, not a single one of these "human rights" organizations records the circumstances of what exactly the "child" was doing at the time of death. The only attempt that I have seen by anyone was by the ICT in 2002, so its data is quite out of date.

When looking even at Palestinian Arab statistics on "child fatalities" one can see that only 30% of them are under 13, hardly a random distribution. Couple this with the fact that over 50% of PalArabs are under 18 and it would appear that the number of both teenage and preteen victims is relatively small considering that the terrorists work in urban areas.

In other words, it is remarkable that the IDF has kept the number of noncombatant child victims as low as it has, and the percentage of teenage victims that are also combatants is simply never measured.

But somewhere in the air-conditioned offices of so-called human rights organizations today, a spreadsheet is being updated with another "child victim." And next month or next year, when "human rights" organizations issue press releases of "child victims of the intifada," the would-be murderer in Hebron will be counted as another "child injured by the IDF."

UPDATE: The always disgusting IMEMC reported the story this way:

Israeli soldiers in the West Bank city of Hebron shot and wounded Sunday a Palestinian boy after two soldiers were stabbed near the Haram Alibrahimi mosque “Cave of Patriarch”.

In paragraph 3 does the story allow that it is possible that the "boy" is the one who stabbed the soldiers.

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Some Muslim Brotherhood facts

In the wake of the Democratic House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer meeting with the Muslim Brotherhood head in Egypt, it makes sense to look back at the Brotherhood itself and what it stands for.

First, here is an article about the rise of Islamic fundamentalism from the October 19, 1948 Palestine Post that gives an excellent background of the Muslim Brotherhood and other Egyptian fundamentalist movements at that time:



Since then, the MB became the ideological godfather to Hamas and Al Qaeda, although as it has risen in power politically it has officially distanced itself from terror.

Which doesn't mean that it no longer advocates terror - it is just a bit more circumspect. Its current web page is slick and seems downright mainstream.

However, the truth comes out a bit clearer in this other webpage that spells out more explicitly the movement's goals:

A huge tree of "sub-goals" branches from these main objectives which are derived from the Quran and the tradition of the prophet (pbuh) [3,4]:

1- Building the Muslim individual: brother or sister with a strong body, high manners, cultured thought, ability to earn, strong faith, correct worship, conscious of time, of benefit to others, organized, and self-struggling character [3].

2- Building the Muslim family: choosing a good wife (husband), educating children Islamicaly, and inviting other families.

3- Building the Muslim society (thru building individuals and families) and addressing the problems of the society realistically.

4- Building the Muslim state.

5- Building the Khilafa (basically a shape of unity between the Islamic states).

6- Mastering the world with Islam.

Only world domination - no big deal, right?

Here's their theme:

Allah is our objective.
The messenger is our leader.
Quran is our law.
Jihad is our way.
Dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope.

So while they are all smiles (the current website features an article showing their smiling leader with a baby!) and have effectively hijacked the language of liberalism (democracy, free speech, freedoms) they are aiming at nothing less than a world-wide Islamic caliphate where non-Muslims are second-class citizens, at best.

This may not be the best people for Democratic leaders to meet with.

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New PalArab "military group"

It is hard enough to keep track of the al-Aqsa Martyrs, Al-Qassam Brigades, Islamic Jihad, PFLP, DFLP, Popular Resistance Committee, Abu Raish Brigades, Force 17, Tanzim, Abu Nidal group and the Swords of Truth.

Now there's a new group with the catchy title of "The Committee for Recruiting and Guiding:"

A new Palestinian military group announced responsibility for stealing two intelligence cars in the central Gaza Strip.

The group is called 'the Committee for Recruiting and Guiding'.

The group issued a statement claiming that they released all the men who were in the two cars but they have kept the two cars, the incident was confirmed by the intelligence department.

No deaths yet can be claimed by the CRG, so we'll have to see if they can make it to the big leagues.

No doubt the tens of thousands of "security forces" will quash that group immediately. Any...minute...now.

Meanwhile, we had the usual shootings and bombings and kidnappings this weekend, but no PalArab self-deaths so far.

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Venezuelan Jew-haters didn't get the memo

From JTA, in a larger article about Venezuelan Jewry under Chavez:

Chavez repeatedly compared Israel's behavior to that of the Nazis, a stance that locals say encouraged a wave of similar slanders. Sammy Eppel, a Jewish journalist in Caracas, catalogued a host of violently anti-Israel and anti-Semitic writing and cartoons in the local government and pro-government media.

In one article, which appeared last September in Diario de Caracas, a pro-government newspaper, journalist Tarek Muci Nasir wrote of the "Jewish race" that "the only resource they have left to stay united is to cause wars and genocide."

A cartoon that ran last year in Diario VEA, a state-owned newspaper, depicted Hitler saying, "How they've learned from me, these Israelis!"

One worrying trend is the extent to which these sentiments appear to be approved and encouraged by the government. The Ministry of Information last year organized a demonstration outside the main Sephardi synagogue in Caracas.

After the demonstration, the wall outside the synagogue was daubed with "Jews, killers – leave" and "Zionist baby-killers." At other times, graffitti has appeared there with slogans such as "Jews go home" and "Here are the murderers of the Palestinians."

Apparently the Venezuelan anti-semites didn't get the memo telling them to try to appear to only dislike Israel, not Jews. Too bad...versions of the memo are all over the place.

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Thinking Bloggers Meme

The Thinking Blog started a meme called The Thinking Blogger Awards. They are not really awards, even though they have a neat graphic:

But since it is a meme, and all "winners" are requested to list 5 additional blogs that make them think, the value of the award goes down exponentially with every generation. And since the meme started in February, chances are that the entire blogosphere has been already named at least once.

Nevertheless, I am honored that Garbanzo Toons chose to nominate me on his iteration, and keeping with the rules of the meme, I'll be happy to mention five other blogs that make me think:

• On the Main Line (plus its sister blogs)
• Vital Perspective
• ShrinkWrapped
• Mere Rhetoric
• Gates of Vienna

If any of these want to participate in this meme/social virus, the participation rules are:

1. If, and only if, you get tagged, write a post with links to 5 blogs that make you think,
2. Link to the original Thinking Blog post so that people can easily find the exact origin of the meme,
3. Optional: Proudly display the 'Thinking Blogger Award' with a link to the post that you wrote.

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Dallas Muslim women, just acting naturally

Here's a classic case where two women, acting suspiciously under any circumstances, yell "Islamophobia" when confronted: (H/T: Jihad Watch)

Dallas police and federal terrorism officials are investigating two women, both dressed in camouflage pants under their traditional Muslim robes and scarves, who were seen conducting what appeared to be surveillance and acting suspiciously at Dallas Love Field.

One of the women, Kimberly "Asma" Al-Homsi, 42, of Arlington, who is on probation for a 2005 Garland road rage incident involving a fake grenade, is said to have long-range assault rifle and explosives training, according to a Dallas police intelligence bulletin issued March 5.

"I'm a trained sniper and proud of it," Ms. Al-Homsi said in an interview Thursday after first refusing to comment on whether she has any terrorism ties. She then said no.

Police officials said they have no direct evidence the women have ties to terrorism.

"I am not a dangerous individual," said Ms. Al-Homsi, who said she is an accountant who has dual Syrian-U.S. citizenship.

On the afternoon of Feb. 25, Ms. Al-Homsi and a friend who could not be reached for comment, Aisha Abdul-Rahman Hamad, 50, of Irving, were spotted at Love Field wearing Muslim robes and camouflage pants and "acting suspiciously," the bulletin states. The surveillance video shows one of the women walking back and forth, apparently pacing off distances.

When confronted, the women told officials they were looking for the Frontiers of Flight museum. They left in a red Honda. Descriptions of the incident and the car were circulated at the airport.

Two days later, the museum executive director was leaving for the evening when he noticed the Honda parked facing the runway. A woman, later identified as Ms. Al-Homsi, was sitting on the hood, looking through binoculars at the airplanes. He told the women the museum was closing, and they left.

Dallas officers stopped the car nearby, but the women refused to let police search their car, , according to a police report. The women had digital camera memory cards, binoculars, a flashlight and several lighters on them.

Police issued one of them a citation for having no front license plate and failing to change her address on a driver's license. They were released.

"We were watching the airplanes," Ms. Al-Homsi said. "That's not a crime, unless you're Muslim."

On Dec. 20, 2005, Ms. Al-Homsi was arrested after a report that she waved a grenade at a motorist on Central Expressway near LBJ Freeway. Richardson police stopped her car and arrested her. The Garland bomb squad determined the grenade was a fake. She was released the next day, after officials charged her with making a bomb hoax. She was placed on probation.

Law enforcement sources acknowledge that activities of both women have garnered substantial attention.

"We are aware of the activities that occurred at Love Field in February and are giving it appropriate consideration," said Lori Bailey, spokeswoman for the Dallas FBI.

Ms. Al-Homsi said that she has been questioned by local authorities "maybe a dozen times."

She said that she practices her rifle skills at the Alpine Shooting Range in Fort Worth. An employee confirmed that she's been going there for years.

"In all the Muslim garb, shooting an assault weapon, it seemed at first like she was trying to draw attention," said Dave Rodgers. "But then she came out so much, it became normal."

He said federal agents have talked to range employees about Ms. Al-Homsi, which is not uncommon of their clientele. He recalls seeing the fake grenade hanging from Ms. Al-Homsi's rearview mirror before she was arrested.

Just ordinary peaceful Muslim women who like to go out (unaccompanied by a Muslim male, as per shari'a) and shoot rifles, decorating their car with a hand grenade ornament, wearing camouflage pants, with citizenship in a nation that arms terrorists.

Nothing unusual about this at all.

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Friday news links

• British teachers not teaching the Holocaust to avoid upsetting Muslims
• Many more Israeli Arabs volunteer for National Service
• Israeli Arabs love to eat Matzah!
• Anti-semitic incidents over Passover:
• Chicago synagogue defaced with Arabic graffiti
• A bomb exploded outside a Jewish community center in Montreal
• UK Chelsea soccer team warns fans not to shout anti-semitic slogans during games
• Anti-semitic graffiti in a park in Northern New Jersey
• Swastika painted on a liberal San Francisco synagogue
• Swastika and crude cartoon on chalkboard at Princeton University
• 10% of Swiss said to be anti-semitic; another 28% harbor some anti-semitic attitudes
• White supremacist and anti-semitic literature distributed in Berkeley

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The ninth Abu-Ghanem honor killing victim

Ha'aretz has a followup of a story I linked to here about eight women in one Ramle family being murdered in "honor killings."

It appears that the main witness herself has become a victim, and as a result the case is now falling apart.

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