Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Tuesday, August 14, 2007

Interview with Saraa, Hamas' 11-year old terror apologist

From McClatchy Newspapers (h/t Jihad Watch):

GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip — Saraa Barhoum picked at the buttons on her pink bellbottom jeans as she twisted on a chair inside the bustling new Hamas television headquarters. The afternoon light bounced off the sparkly outlines of butterflies on her frilly top, and a colorful hijab framed her 11-year-old face.

Saraa wants to be a doctor. If she can't, the young star of Hamas television's best-known children's show said, she'd be proud to become a martyr. Saraa says little Jewish girls should be forced from their homes in Israel so that Palestinians can return to their land.

With the show's producer helpfully offering written tips during an interview, Saraa didn't get into how she hopes to die for her cause, be it suicide bombing, fighting the Israeli military or some other way. She carefully sidestepped any suggestion that she's subtly calling for the destruction of Israel .

" Israel says that we are terrorists," Saraa said minutes before an interview with her was interrupted by an errant Israeli airstrike that slammed into an apartment building on the adjacent block. "But they are the ones that must stop their attacks against us and our kids."

Saraa is the sweet face of "Tomorrow's Pioneers," a weekly, hour-long Hamas television children's show best known for bringing the world a militant Mickey Mouse look-alike and then having him killed off by an Israeli interrogator.

With her jarring mix of innocent charm and militant rhetoric, Saraa is at the center of the militant Islamist group's increasingly sophisticated campaign to become the dominant force in Palestinian politics.

Since it went on the air last year in the Gaza Strip , the Hamas -funded al Aqsa television has gained momentum and expanded its audience to include the West Bank .

Taking a lead from Hezbollah's al Manar television station in Beirut , Hamas is using al Aqsa to promote its agenda and challenge its rivals, in this case Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and his fractured Fatah allies.

During its decisive June military showdown with Fatah in Gaza , Hamas used its television station to broadcast footage of Fatah leaders joking with U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and other Bush administration officials. The message was clear: Fatah is in bed with America. After Fatah lost Gaza to Hamas , Fatah forces laid siege to al Aqsa's offices in the West Bank and arrested several employees.

The station, which operates with a license from the Palestinian Authority, also features religious lessons, cartoons, advice shows and militant music videos. One video hailed a female suicide bomber whose young daughter vows to follow her mother's example.

"Tomorrow's Pioneers" sparked an international furor in April when it began featuring Farfour, the Mickey Mouse look-alike who sounded more like Iran's firebrand President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad than a Disney character.

After two months, Farfour was beaten to death on the show by an Israeli interrogator. Nahoul, a larger-than-life bee, is now carrying his message.

"A lot of people in Palestine have died as martyrs, and lots of Palestinians hope to be martyrs," Saraa said of Farfour's demise. "This is one of the ends."

Asked if she hoped one day to be a martyr, Saraa instinctively nodded her head.

"Of course," Saraa said. "It's something to be proud of. Every Palestinian citizen hopes to be a martyr."

Saraa helps deliver similar messages to Palestinian children from a Hamas TV set filled with colorful numbers and pictures of kittens. During the show, Saraa fields calls from Palestinian children who warble songs about Islam, liberating Jerusalem and finding answers in the barrel of a machine gun.

On one show, she cut off a caller who was singing about surrendering herself, presumably to God's will.

"We don't want to surrender," Saraa told the caller. "We want to resist."

On the show, Saraa offers moral lessons to viewers and urges them to do what they can to fight Israeli occupation. After some prodding in an interview, Saraa offered a personal message for Israeli girls her age.

"They have to leave," she said. "This is our country. They kicked us out and stole our happiness. This is a natural result."

This is pure child abuse and brainwashing for the singular purpose of ridding the Middle East of Jews.Teaching children to aspire to death shows, better than anything I can write, the depravity of Islamism.

Israeli research helps keep breasts perky

Sure, Israeli research is helping fight terrorism, reduce our dependence on Arab oil and save people's lives. But they are also doing their part for women's breasts worldwide.

What's not to love?

The MIM technique (Minimally Invasive Mastopexy), developed by the startup of the same name, promises to reshape, support and lift breast soft tissue in a much more minimally invasive manner than today's cosmetic breast surgery. They're calling their breast support kit the 'Cup&Up'.

"Today in aesthetic surgery, plastic surgeons reshape many body parts - the nose, butt, hands, tummy - most of the procedures are very intensive, risky ones, with long recovery periods, problems with scars, inconvenience. We're trying to develop a method to replace those surgical procedures with minimally invasive kits," says the MIM CEO Adi Cohen.

..."What we've done is build a silicon bra, insert it into the body and attach it to the ribs and to the fascia. It's like a normal external bra," he continues, "where a strip lies on the shoulder and attaches around the body. We attach it to the ribs instead of to the shoulder, and to the fascia in the lower part of the body."

...The procedure is minimally invasive requiring two small openings through which the device is attached to the ribs.

"It may sound scary but take a look at cosmetic and plastic surgery - that's much more invasive," said Gur. "The most prevalent procedure in the world is breast implantation. Who is the crazy woman who agreed to be the first woman to put silicon into her body? Very strange things happen within the cosmetic world and the MIM is not as crazy as it sounds; that's the end point of what I'm saying."

Cohen founded MIM in 2004 as part of the Meytav technological incubator in Kiryat Shmona. Within three years they have produced a final prototype which has undergone rigorous testing.

According to Gur, tests applied included strength, fatigue and endurance "because the device in the body will have to endure running, spinning, bike riding."

In the holy city of Medina, a Bangladeshi man decided to wash his car.

Luckily, our heroes at the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice noticed him and arrested him.

As you may have surmised by now, he was washing the car during prayer times.

Unfortunately, after his arrest there was a horrible accident, he "fainted" and died while in custody of the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice.

The head of the Muttawa said that three Commission officers were questioned and found completely without guilt in the man's death.

Once again, our heroic Vice Squad has been proven to be an effective force in stopping immorality and vice, and promoting virtue, all throughout the Kingdom!

The last episode can be found here.

"Peace activists" with sledgehammers

Backspin links to a video of "peace activists" damaging Israel's security fence (somehow, it doesn't look like a wall in their video, even though the name of their organization is "Anarchists Against the Wall") :

The same "activists" evidently did the same thing recently in another section of the fence:

The only possible foreseeable result from these peaceful people poking holes in the fence is to allow Palestinian Arab terrorists to get through and blow up Jews. Makes you wonder what their definition of "peace" is.

Suha Arafat loses Tunisian citizenship

From IMEMC:

The London-based newspaper Al-quds Al-Arabi reported on Monday that Suha Arafat, the wife of the late Palestinian President Yasser Arafat, lost Tunisian citizenship after it was granted to her in the fall of 2005.

According to the newspaper, the report was first made by a local Tunisian newspaper that claimed the Tunisian President had issued a decree cancelling Mrs. Arafat’s citizenship over the weekend.

The report did not reveal the reasons behind the decision, but commentators have suggested that Shua’s departure from Tunisia is related to a conflict between her and her Tunisian business partners.

Suha Arafat, along with her daughter Zawha, moved to Tunisia in 2004, shortly after Yasser Arafat died in a military hospital in France after suffering a rare disease.

Well, AIDS isn't that rare anymore.

Maybe the Tunisians are afraid they'll catch AIDS from Suha?

Freedom of the Press, PalArab-style (VIII) (UPDATED)

The series continues....

Hamas' Executive Force on Monday banned any form of demonstration in Gaza unless its organisers obtain permission.

Spokesperson of the EF, Saber Khalifeh, issued a statement announcing that "for the sake of the general benefit and to secure the rule of law, it is totally forbidden to demonstrate without getting permission from the Executive Force."

The Palestinian factions called a rally on Monday in protest against EF actions in the Gaza Strip.

Eyewitnesses at the rally of Palestinian factions said the Executive Force banned journalists from covering the events.

A journalist who attempted to film the demonstration on his mobile phone was arrested.

Of course, Hamas' many repressive actions don't stop idiots in Britain from trying to increase ties with the terror group:

"The government should urgently consider ways of engaging politically with moderate elements within Hamas," the all-party group of lawmakers said.

UPDATE: PCHR adds lots of details of this morning's moderate Hamas activities:

The Center’s preliminary investigation indicates that at approximately 11:00 on Monday, 13 August 2007, tens of members of the Executive Force deployed around the “Tomb of the Unknown Soldier near the Palestinian Legislative Council building. They prevented dozens of civilians from reaching the area to attend a rally organized by several PLO factions to protest the attacks of the Executive Force in the Gaza Strip. In addition, the Force prevented journalists from covering the rally, and confiscated the camera of Ahmad El-Ras, cameraman for Ramattan News Agency, and detained him in one of their vehicles. The Force members used sticks to disperse the demonstrators.

Ahmad El-Ras gave the following statement to PCHR’s fieldworker:

“At approximately 10:30, two colleagues and I went to cover the rally in the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier area. When I disembarked from the agency vehicle carrying a camera, 2 members of the Executive Force raised their weapons at me; and one of them said to me, “If you take photage, we’ll put an end to you.” I answered them that I have not taken any photage; and I went back to the car to leave the area. Then, two Executive Force vehicles intercepted us. Force members took me and put me in one of their vehicles. They confiscated my camera. Several journalists gathered around the vehicle in which I was detained. They talked to the Force members. The latter stated that they would release me only if the camera tape is confiscated. And this happened.”

At approximately 11:35, two Executive Force gunmen raided the offices of Al-Arabiya and MBC satellite stations in the 12th floor of Al-Shoroq building in Gaza City. They confiscated the camera and rally photage belonging to Al-Arabiya. Reem Abd El-Karim, the director of the offices, informed PCHR’s fieldworker that the Executive Force gunmen raided the office and requested the rally photage. A verbal exchange took place when she refused to hand over the materials. However, the Executive Force took the camera and photage by force. The Executive Force returned the confiscated equipment to Al-Arabiya at approximately 15:30.

Exclusive: PRC brags of targeting Israeli reporters

From Palestine Today (English):

The An Nasser Salah Addin Brigades, The military wing of the Popular Resistance Committees (PRC), have announced responsibility for setting a trap for an Israeli Press vehicle on a road, east of Gaza City, on Friday.

The brigades claimed that one of the Israelis in the vehicle was injured.

Many of these tyes of reports end up being fabricated or exaggerated, but the point is not whether the PRC actually succeeded in targeting Israeli journalists - it is the fact that they are bragging about targeting them, thus violating international law (the Geneva Conventions define journalists as civilians and therefore as protected.)

Reporters Without Borders has a number of articles about alleged Israeli targeting of Palestinian Arab journalists, and about reporters being caught in the crossfire between warring PalArab factions, but I could not find a single mention of Palestinian terrorists targeting Israeli reporters.

Exclusive: One third of PalArab youth want to get the hell out

Palestine Today (Arabic) reports that the Palestine Central Bureau of Statistics announced this morning that one third of Palestinian Arab youth between the ages of 15-29 would consider emigrating. Fully 45% of young Palestinian males would leave, and the top reasons cited were the economy, security, and political reasons.

Now, who exactly is stopping them from leaving and making new lives in other countries? It appears that while the "right of return" is sacrosanct, the "right to emigrate" is not quite up there in the list of human rights that Palestinian Arabs like to talk about.

In addition, 59% of Palestinian Arab youth use the Internet. Evidently, the starvation we keep hearing about still allows the purchase of computers.

A Psychological History of Palestinian Arabs, part 12

The Palestinian Arab psyche underwent tremendous changes in the years after the 1948 war. In some ways, the Palestinian Arabs were more fragmented than ever before - certainly physically - but in some very important ways, for the first time in their history, they were turning into a people.

It is difficult to overemphasize the amount of shame that the 1948 war inflicted on both the Arab nations and the Palestinian Arabs themselves. This unprecedented disgrace informs most of the actions taken by the Arabs during the 1950s and 1960s, and nothing took priority over erasing this shame from their collective minds.

In the early years after 1948, the refugees tended to blame the Arab countries for their fate. For their part, the Arab nations looked at Palestinian Arabs as embarrassing reminders of their impotence in 1948, and this is one of the reasons that there was so little interest shown by the Arab nations in helping out Palestinian refugees at all, let alone allowing them to resettle in their countries (again, with the exception of Jordan, who used them to help expand their own boundaries.)

As has always been the case, there were extremists and pragmatists among the Palestinian Arab populations. The influence of Amin Husayni was still felt as it was a Palestinian Arab who assassinated King Abdullah of Jordan in the Dome of the Rock in 1951, and his co-conspirators had ties to the ex-Mufti. In the following years, communism made ideological inroads into the refugee camps as well. The philosophy that made the greatest and broadest inroads in the Palestinian Arab consciousness, however, was that of pure hatred towards Israel.

Hate is not too strong a word to describe the feelings that Arabs, both Palestinian and at-large, felt about the Zionists and, by extension, all Jews. Loathing towards the Jews poured out of the Arab media. The disgrace of 1948 could not have elicited any other reaction to a people who are as proud as Arabs are. They seethed, they detested, they were disgusted by Jews. In the aftermath of the 1948 war the Jews of Arab countries were accused of being spies, many were tortured and ultimately most were expelled and their possessions confiscated.

The Arab nations' propaganda against Jews and Israel, and their pretense of caring about the refugees, seeped into the Palestinian Arab viewpoint. Although the Arab nations as a whole were using the Palestinians as pawns, often in conflicting ways, the cognitive dissonance of believing that their brethren were not interested in their well-being was too much for Palestinian Arabs to handle. It was much easier to blame Israel and the West for all their troubles than to see how they were being used for selfish, political gain.

No matter what their disposition - Christian or Arab, religious or secular, in camps or in houses in Israel - Palestinian Arabs created their own fictional accounts of the war in 1948 to mitigate some of their feelings of shame at having been in the forefront of their ignominious defeat. They made up stories of massacres by Jews (although practically none of them knew anyone who had been killed,) they claimed that the US and/or Britain had conspired against them, they claimed that the Arab nations swooped into Palestine in 1948 to defend them from the Jews, they claimed that they all had palatial homes in Palestine and huge tracts of land they owned that were stolen by the Jews. They kept inflating their fantasies and they taught them to their children, the next generation to carry on their tradition of hate.

As the UNRWA tried to employ them and fix the refugee problem by building the economy of the Middle East itself, the Palestinian Arabs had no qualms about taking every advantage of the system. They never reported any deaths in order to get more ration cards, and a black market in food rationing cards flourished in the camps. They started businesses in the camps but didn't put up signs for fear of losing their benefits. They happily took in all the free perks of refugeehood - by the early 1960s they were better fed, better educated and better equipped to work than their non-refugee neighbors. While their situation in 1950 was desperate, by 1960 the Palestinian refugees under UNRWA were doing better than most Arabs.

But if the UNRWA expected to see appreciation and thanks from the Palestinian Arabs, they were sorely mistaken. The Palestinians attacked the agency both verbally and physically. To the Palestinian Arabs, all the free schooling and aid - more than most refugees worldwide have ever received - only symbolized their dependence on Western charity. Their pride wasn't strong enough to say no to the benefits, but it was quite strong enough to despise the people who were providing them.

This was one manifestation of the defining characteristic of Palestinian Arabs that started in the 1950s: that of selfishness.

Even though they had supported a war that they lost, even though they had for the most part chosen to flee their homes in the expectation of a quick victory, even though they were to a large extent responsible for their own troubles, the Palestinian Arabs of the era had little capacity for self-examination nor for self-criticism. All the bad things that happened were the fault of others, and anything that could compensate for these bad things were their inherent right.

Another example of this selfishness was their utter inability to empathize with anyone besides themselves. Had the tables been turned, they would have happily cheered their Arab brethren dumping all the Jews into the sea, and the very idea of compromise with Jews when they were in the superior position was unthinkable. Now, in defeat, they clung to the 1947 UN Partition plan as their right - they wanted the victors to share the spoils with them, even though they would have laughed had someone asked them to do the same.

This selfishness stems from a number of factors: Arab supremacism, the desire to reinstate the Arab empire of the early part of the millennium, and Arab pride -where it is easier to deny history than to submit to the shame that accompanies defeat, especially defeat at the hands of a seemingly weak foe. Mostly, though, the selfishness comes from the "us vs. them" mentality that Arabs have had for their entire history, pre-dating Islam. The Arab nation is the only important fact; any other nation can be used if they are needed but the are effectively irrelevant. The fact that Arabs routinely accuse Jews of this very behavior, despite the thousands of counterexamples where Jews over-empathize with their oppressors to the point of self-annihilation, is but one outstanding example of Arab projection of their own attitudes on their enemies.

This selfishness is all the more notable since the 1950s was the lowest point in Palestinian Arab history. One would expect a people who are hated by those who profess to love them, and who hate those who were doing the most for them, to have some ability to step back and see where their problems may have started so as not to repeat them. But in fact the 1950s Palestinians were buffeted by competing Arab leaders trying to use them against each other. In the few cases where Arab leaders tried to help resettle the Palestinians, the criticism was so withering that the plans were abandoned. In 1952, Syrian "strongman" Colonel Adib Shishekly worked with UNRWA to create a plan where the agency would provide $30 million to irrigate undeveloped northern Syria with the intent of resettling 80,000 refugees there; he became president in 1953 but was overthrown in 1954. A 1953 plan of resettlement and job creation, close to being agreed by Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and Israel, was shot down in 1955 by the Arab League. Even plans to plant trees or build permanent housing in refugee camps were criticized as diluting the desire for Palestinian Arabs to want to return to their homes.

There is of course an irony here - just as the Arab leaders in the 1940s claimed to be doing things for the good of the Palestinian Arabs that ended up hurting them the most, so were the 1950s leaders prepared to do the same. In reality, it was pride that forced them to act this way, because if the Palestinian refugee problem would be solved by the Arabs, it would be an indirect belated admission of defeat in 1948. As long as the refugee issue could be kept alive, the Arabs could pretend that they still had a chance to destroy Israel without firing a shot.

The Egyptian leader, Gamal Abdul Nasser, said this explicitly in 1961: "If the refugees return to Israel, Israel will cease to exist." Year after year the Arabs would lobby the UN for Palestinian Arab return, and their goals were hardly altruistic for their suffering brethren.

The only people who were truly working to solve the problem of Palestinian Arab misery were Westerners. Saudi Arabia contributed no money to UNRWA, but Israel did.

For their part, the refugees would say themselves that they would never return to any part of Palestine that is controlled by Jews. Even Israeli Arabs, enjoying benefits undreamed of before the war, still claimed that they were in worse shape and would prefer Arab rule, at least when talking to Westerners. Privately, some admitted that it may be possible to compromise. It is difficult to discern how many Palestinian Arabs were pragmatic and how many were truly hardline in their beliefs, but in an atmosphere where moderation could be construed as weakness and collaboration with the hated West, it makes little difference.

For a while, Gamal Abdel Nasser used radio broadcasts effectively to incite Palestinian Arabs against Jordan. To the refugees, Nasser was a true Arab leader that they thirsted for. Nasser, along with his rhetoric supporting the refugees, became a hero. In 1956, Egyptian incitement caused Palestinian Arabs in Jordan to riot and, in one case, the young King Hussein's troops had to quell a riot in a refugee camp, killing 100.

Nasser's fortunes with Jordanian Palestinians dipped, however, after the 1956 Sinai campaign where he very quickly lost the Sinai militarily (although he gained it back diplomatically.) Even so, his major incentive remained to right the perceived wrongs of 1948 and to become a pan-Arab leader, and even his survival after the 1956 war was considered a victory by many other Arabs. Hussein's rule over Palestinian Arabs in his country was far from absolute; terror attacks against Jordan included the bombing of an Amman office buildingin 1958.

The Palestinian terrorism of the 1950s, whether the fedayeen attacks against Israel or the attacks on Western interests of Jordan, were still planned and funded by the Arab states. Only in the end of the decade were the first stirrings of a new independent Palestinian Arab initiative starting - but rather than trying to unify Palestinian Arabs for peaceful purposes, this initiative was also centered on terror and violence.

The Fatah movement was started by a few Palestinian Arabs who had managed to move out of the refugee camps, into college in Cairo and then to jobs in the Persian Gulf. Even though they would have been considered the success stories of the West - people who managed to get off the UNRWA dole and find jobs - they would be the vanguard of the most destructive period of Palestinian Arab history, a period that is synonymous with terror and yet which made them heroes to the entire Arab world.
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Part 10
Part 11

Terrorist prisoners still get their PA salaries

Isn't it wonderful to see how well the PA is spending the millions of dollars they have gotten from Israel and the West? This "peace dividend" has so far paid for Hamas terrorist salaries (they now claim a PA member was bribed to transfer that money over - I guess that the Palestinian Arab audit department is not too skilled) and now, they are paying salaries to another group of people who haven't gotten much productive work accomplished over recent years:

Ajrami: 2-month's salary to be paid to prisoners

Bethlehem – Ma'an – The minister of prisoners' affairs, Ashraf Ajrami, said on Sunday that two-month's allowance for Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails will be paid on Monday.

The terrorists are really loving the PA for how well it takes care of them.

As far as building libraries, schools and hospitals, well, let's just say that the PA has its priorities exactly where they want them.

HH CXXIX (I think)

Haveil Havalim is the weekly round-up of the best of the JBlogosphere, and this week I am honored to have been mentioned three times:

Hamas blaming internal fighting deaths on Israel?
A Grim Milestone - 500 PalArabs killed by each other this year
Bat Mitzvah girl donates $100K for playground in Israel.

The last couple of Haveil Havalim were not numbered, but I think that the current HH at Jack's Shack is number 129. Check it out!

Another Ma'an headline that lies

We noted last week that the Palestinian Arab Ma'an news agency wrote a headline accusing Israel of crimes that even its own article contradicted. Well, they've done it again:

Palestinian women in Israeli jails risk rape, says director of research institute

Gaza – Ma'an – Director of the Prisoners Center for Studies and Research, Rifat Hamdona, said on Saturday that female Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails are at risk of rape.

Hamdona said that the Israeli prisons' officers are threatening to rape women during interrogation in order to force them to confess to crimes.

However, Hamdona said that there have been no documented cases of rape in the prisons and expressed doubt that such cases exist. He said that the threat of rape is only used in order to exert pressure on female detainees to obtain a confession.

"Many Palestinians in Israeli jails have died to preserve their dignity and are regularly on hunger strikes, but I have not heard of any case of rape," said Hamdona.

So he is saying that there's a "risk for rape" but admits that it is highly doubtful that any rape would ever occur. The one accusation he has, that Israelis threaten to rape Palestinian Arab women prisoners, is stated with no corroboration whatsoever.

Yet another example of the quality of the best of PalArab journalism.

The utter lack of Arab empathy for others

As I research the next chapter of my series on the history of Palestinian Arabs, I have been having some troubles finding sources on how ordinary PalArabs were living or thinking in the 1950s and 1960s. But tonight I found a single article that is a goldmine - a long article in The Atlantic from Martha Gellhorn, who visited many Palestinian Arabs in a number of countries in 1961.

One part of this article is very illuminating (although the entire article is very worthwhile). Gellhorn spent a large part of her time trying to understand the PalArab mindset and how they can be understood by Westerners,and then she came across an Israeli Arab man who also clung to fantasies about 1948:

At this point, I decided to make one long, determined stand to see whether there was any meeting ground of minds on a basis of mutually accepted facts and reasoning.
"Please bear with me and help me," said I. "I am a simple American, and I am trying to understand how the Arab mind works, and I am finding it very difficult. I want to put some things in order; if I have everything wrong, you will correct me. In 1947, the United Nations recommended the Partition of Palestine. I have seen the Partition map and studied it. I cannot tell, but it does not look to me as if the Arabs were being cheated of their share of good land. The idea was that this division would work, if both Jews and Arabs accepted it and lived under an Economic Union. And, of course, the Arab countries around the borders would have to be peaceful and cooperative or else nothing would work at all. The Jews accepted this Partition plan; I suppose because they felt they had to. They were outnumbered about two to one inside the country, and there were the neighboring Arab states with five regular armies and forty million or more citizens, not feeling friendly. Are we agreed so far?"

"It is right."

"The Arab governments and the Palestinian Arabs rejected Partition absolutely. You wanted the whole country. There is no secret about this. The statements of the Arab representatives, in the UN are on record. The Arab governments never hid the fact that they started the war against Israel. But you, the Palestinian Arabs, agreed to this, you wanted it. And you thought, it seems to me very reasonably, that you would win and win quickly. It hardly seemed a gamble; it seemed a sure bet. You took the gamble and you lost. I can understand why you have all been searching for explanations of that defeat ever since, because it does seem incredible. I don't happen to accept your explanations, but that is beside the point. The point is that you lost."

"Yes." It was too astonishing; at long last, East and West were in accord on the meaning of words.

"Now you say that you want to return to the past; you want Partition. So, in fact you say, let us forget that war we started, and the defeat, and, after all, we think Partition is a good, sensible idea. Please answer me this, which is what I must, know. If the position were reversed, if the Jews had started the war and lost it, if you had won the war, would you now accept Partition? Would you give up part of the country and allow the 650,000 Jewish residents of Palestine -who had fled from the war--to come back?"

"Certainly not," he said, without an instant's hesitation. "But there would have been no Jewish refugees. They had no place to go. They would all be dead or in the sea."

He had given me the missing clue. The fancy word we use nowadays is "empathy"--entering into the emotions of others. I had appreciated and admired individual refugees but realized I had felt no blanket empathy for the Palestinian refugees, and finally I knew why--owing to this nice, gray-haired schoolteacher. It is hard to sorrow for those who only sorrow over themselves. It is difficult to pity the pitiless. To wring the heart past all doubt, those who cry aloud for justice must be innocent. They cannot have wished for a victorious rewarding war, blame everyone else for their defeat, and remain guiltless. Some of them may be unfortunate human beings, and civilization would collapse (as it notoriously did in Nazi Germany) if most people did not naturally move to help their hurt fellow men. But a profound difference exists between victims of misfortune (there, but for the grace of God, go I) and victims of injustice. My empathy knew where it stood, thanks to the schoolteacher.

"Do you follow the Eichmann trial?" I asked. An Arabic daily paper, weeklies, and radio station thrive in Israel.

"Yes. Every day." He wrinkled his nose with disgust.

"Do you not imagine that all the Jews in Israel believe this massacre of their people could have been prevented if the Jews had had a homeland to escape to? Don't you think that they knew,, also, what you just said: there would have been no Jewish refugees from here--they would be dead or in the sea? Doesn't that perhaps explain them to you a little?"

He shrugged, he smiled; with these gestures he tacitly admitted the point, but it was of minor importance.

This is a brilliant observation. The Palestinian Arabs (who, for the most part in 1961 were living better lives than other Arabs due to the UNRWA and US aid) didn't want justice - they wanted to see all the Jews dead. When they whine about "justice" what they really mean is "give us everything we demand and ask nothing in return." In their mindset, they have no blame, no guilt, no shame - everything is always the Other's fault.

This is not only a Palestinian Arab trait - it is universal among Arabs. The Arabs, by their nature, seem to feel that they deserve everything and no one else deserves anything. You will not see Arab charities giving aid to non-Arabs or non-Muslims. You will not see them say that the Jews (or Kurds...) have a right to live in peace in their own country. What few concessions some of them may have made towards the West have been out of political necessity, never out of a true belief that these concessions were the right thing.

The absolute lack of Arab empathy is the key reason why true peace is illusory. Without empathy you cannot even begin to see how the other side thinks; you cannot even begin to come up with an equitable solution. The entire Arab point of view is not one based on a win/win or an accommodation, it is based on the pure selfishness that is a component of the inability to empathize.

How can two sides come to an agreement when one side has no ability to think past his own self?

Another section later in the article, starting with a conversation with her Israeli Jewish driver:

"What's the matter, Nissim?"
"Nothing. What the children say."

"You mean just now, shouting?"

"Yes. They say: 'Where you going, bastard? I spit on you.'"

What for, I thought, what for, and will it never stop?
"Do you hate the Arabs, Nissim?"

"No. Of course no."

"Why not?"

"What is the good of hate?"

What indeed? Arabs gorge on hate, they roll in it, they breathe it. Jews top the hate list, but any foreigners are hateful enough. Arabs also hate each other, separately and, en masse. Their politicians change the direction of their hate as they would change their shirts. Their press is vulgarly base with hate-filled cartoons; their reporting describes whatever hate is now uppermost and convenient. Their radio is a long scream of hate, a call to hate. They teach their children hate in school. They must love the taste of hate; it is their daily bread. And what good has it done them?

This week's episode of Saudi Vice

In this week's episode of Saudi Vice...

Muslims like to point out that in Mecca, it doesn't matter what race you belong to or what country you are from; there is a beautiful feeling of unity with all other Muslims worldwide for the pilgrims who travel there from near and far. As Ummah.net describes it:

Although Makkah is always filled with visitors, pilgrims wear special clothes: simple garments which strip away distinctions of class and culture, so that all stand equal before God.
Peace is the dominant theme. Peace with Allah, with one's soul, with one another, with all living creatures. To disturb the peace of anyone or any creature in any shape or form is strictly prohibited.
Muslims from all walks of life, from every corner of the globe assemble in in response to the call of Allah. There is no royalty, but there is loyalty of all to Allah, the Creator....It is also to remember the great assembly of the Day of Judgement when people will stand equal before Allah.

A group of eight pilgrims from the US and Britain of Iraqi descent visited Mecca last week with the intention of participating in this holy rite where all are equal before Allah.

But they were Shi'ite.

When they tried to perform a Shi'a - flavored version of the holy ritual while circling the holy Kaaba stone, they were arrested by our heroes, the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice.

As was described by an infidel newspaper:

“While in police custody we were handcuffed and savagely beaten with chairs, bats, sticks, shoes and police radio communication devices,” 24-year-old pilgrim Amir Taki said.

He said they were refused food, water, medicine and access to toilets. One was told they would be “killed and thrown to the dogs”.

The group, aged between 16 and 26, said they were not allowed to contact their embassies or relatives.

However, using a cell phone hidden by one of the pilgrims, they were able to contact family members and were released after intervention from the embassies.

The Shi'ite infidels may have won this round, but the Commission (known as the Muttawa) will be ever vigilant to make sure that the sanctity and holiness of Mecca is unsullied by the infidels again.

Last week's episode is here.

Watching the Watchers

For the past two weeks, posts of mine have been nominated to the weekly Watcher of Weasels list of the best posts of the week (for non-Council members.) While I didn't win. I didn't expect to - when up against serious heavyweights from serious on-line sources and authors like Newsweek or Michael Totten.

Thanks to Soccer Dad who nominated me and to those who voted for me or just read the nominated articles: the article I wrote on the "Grim Milestone" (which has to date received roughly 5000 hits) and "The Extremism and Bigotry of PA 'Moderates' " from last week.