Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Sunday, July 26, 2009

Today's PalArab news 7-26-09

One more man killed in a smuggling tunnel collapse in Rafah.

Hamas' Interior Minister, who succeeded Said Siyam, vowed to hunt down all "collaborators." His predecessor was probably pinpointed by one of them, so he is saying he wants to make sure he doesn't end up dead.

The PCHR condemned Hamas' insistence that female lawyers in Gaza wear the hijab and jilbab.

One of the more popular, and extreme, PalArab English-language commentators thinks that the claims that Abbas and Dahlan plotted to assassinate Arafat are quite believable.

The Abu Rish Brigades of Fatah say they believe the claims about Abbas and Dahlan.

Hamas' minister of justice says he is ready to put anyone accused of assassinating Arafat on trial in Gaza.

The Sixth Fatah Conference is going to be a zoo!

Hamas is still threatening to stop Gaza Fatah members from attending the Fatah conference on August 4th, unless the PA releases a bunch of Hamas members from prison. In a hilarious response, PM Fayyad said that he doesn't have the power to do that, because the judicial system of the PA is completely independent of the legislative and executive divisions. It took him ten minutes to get that sentence out with a straight face. Fatah did say that the conference will go on without the Gaza members.

Also, Marwan Barghouti will nominate himself to the Fatah central committee from his jail cell in Israel.

The 2009 PalArab self-death count is now at 122.

Islamic Jihad's memorial parade!

Islamic Jihad held a rally in Khan Younis to memorialize the "martyrs" of Gaza, and it is everything you'd expect it to be. Here are only a few of the many pictures that Palestine Today published, with my own captions:

"He went that-away!" "No, he went that-away!"

"We protect our children with RPGs! Even Americans can't say that!"

Coca Cola - the official soft drink of Islamic Jihad.

"The enemy will not withstand our secret snake dance!"

Of course, ushers are needed to shoot any in the audience who spills popcorn.

The amount of ammunition is in inverse proportion to the size of ....

Target practice!

Five elite members of Islamic Jihad take aim at a particularly irritating fly.

And the fans go wild!

"Yeah, I'm covering my face on the hottest day of the summer. Make fun of me and I shoot."

Work accident!

Two Hamas members were killed in yet another "work accident" on Friday night in a "jihad mission" in central Gaza, Hamas announced.

The statement identified the victims as members of the Al-Qassam Brigades Osama Kamal Nabaheen and Bakr Jamal Nabaheen from Al-Bureij Camp.

Hamas announced deathd of the two activists over loudspeakers calling on Gaza residents to participate in their funeral processions on Saturday.

The 2009 PalArab self-death count is now at 121.

Saudi Arabia mulls minimum age for marriage

The good news:

A new law on child marriage from the Ministry of Justice which currently has the issue under study may set the legal age of marriage at 18 while also imposing greater restrictions on persons permitted to authorize the marriage of minors.

OK, the two clauses are slightly contradictory but any way you look at it, the number of sickening marriages of pre-teens to men triple their age in Saudi Arabia would be reduced.

The bad news:

Lawyer Adnan Al-Zahrani was quoted as saying in the report that guardians – the fathers - were permitted to marry off a minor of either sex and could contract marriage for their daughters even at the age of one. Al-Zahrani said that when girls reached the age of puberty they were permitted to choose whether to accept or reject a marriage contract.

At the age of ONE???

Today's PalArab news 7-24-09

Here are some interesting items I didn't get to this week....

A number of English-language stories came out about Jordan revoking Palestinian Arabs' citizenship. I mentioned that last month.

The current Mufti of Jerusalem condemned the publication of photos of the former Mufti talking with Hitler, saying it was "published out of context and was meant to incite violence against Palestinians." Actually, the context couldn't be clearer - his predecessor was a rabid anti-semite, terrorist leader, Nazi sympathizer and war criminal, and the current Mufti is defending him.

Maariv is quoted as saying that UNRWA head John Ging was threatened by Hamas and forced to flee Gaza. UNRWA denies it.

Children and the elderly are being discouraged from attending Hajj this year, as there is a fear that swine flu would spread among the millions descending to Mecca.

The An Nasser Brigades took credit for shooting "projectiles" towards Israeli forces near Gaza.

The Arabic press is again a-twitter over "far right" Jews visiting the Temple Mount again, which is of course "provocative." (In other articles it is described as "storming.")

Hamas now requires female lawyers to cover their hair and (apparently) wear veils in the courtroom.

Next year Mahmoud Abbas is expected to step down as "president" of the PA and Hamas plans to try to take over the position.

The Amazing Double Martyrs

Ma'an published an exclusive story detailing the "fact" that there are still many missing people from the Gaza operation presumed to be under rubble that has not been cleared.

While it is possible that there are still bodies in the rubble, Ma'an wants to add these missing people to the casualty count, to pad the total number killed. Even though the PCHR's list has 1314 people (of whom a few are duplicates of each other,) and the Palestinian Ministry of Health's list has 1352, Ma'an says"

At least 1,505 victims had been identified before Ma'an's investigation. From the Health Ministry's original list of 90 missing Palestinians, researchers determined that 31 of them have been found, identified and reburied.

The 59 Palestinians still thought to be missing are listed below, in order of age, along with the cities or areas in Gaza where they were last seen alive.

1. In'am Ra'fat Al-Masri, 12, Ash-Shati Refugee Camp
2. Abed Ar-Rahman Ahmad Al-A'tawnah, 15, Al-Faloja
3. Jihan Sami Al-Helu, 17, Al-Karama Tower
4. Ahmad Yousef Ibrahim Al-Batsh, 18, At-Tuffah
5. Sabrin Mohammed Abu Samaha, 18, Beit Lahiya
6. Jebreel A'teiyah Mansour (Abu Al-Hasna), 18, Ezbat Abed Rabu
7. Husein Sa'eed Abdallah An-Nuthur, 20, Ezbat Abed Rabu
...

The list of missing people is most interesting. Taking the first six of them, these "missing" people are already listed as killed by both PCHR and the PMoH.

As PTWatch noticed,
Maan #1 = PCHR #1372
Maan #2 = PCHR #1377
Maan #3 = PCHR #516
Maan #4 = PCHR #506
Maan #5 = PCHR #466
Maan #6 = PCHR #827

When I looked at the PMoH Arabic list I saw

Maan #1=PMoH #290
Maan #2=PMoH #54
Maan #3=PMoH #215
Maan #4=PMoH #73
Maan #5=PMoH #83
Maan #6=PMoH #792
Maan #7=PMoH #794

The pattern seems clear: these "missing" people have already been counted as dead for months.

I'm not certain about how much information is shared between the Gaza and Ramallah health ministries, but almost certainly Ramallah got its information from Gaza - and it includes where these "missing" people were killed, as does PCHR.

It sounds like the Gaza MoH and Ma'an are trying to pad the list of "martyrs" by counting dozens of people twice. Perhaps this is how the number of "martyrs" has gone up by nearly 200 since the war ended (the number who succumbed to injuries since the PCHR and PMoH lists were compiled that were reported in the Arabic press has been extremely low; I don't think I have seen more than five.)

Perhaps these "double martyrs" will qualify for 140 virgins now!

Arab News has classic anti-semitic article

Here are excerpts of the article, by Jeff Gates, subtly titled How Israel lobby controls US:

The influence-peddling process works like this. Candidates are summoned for in-depth AIPAC interviews. Those found sufficiently committed to Israel’s agenda are provided a list of donors likely to “max out” their campaign contributions. Or the process can be made even easier when AIPAC-approved candidates are given the name of a “bundler.”
Bundlers raise funds from the Diaspora and bundle those contributions to present them to the candidate. No quid pro quo need be mentioned. After McCain-Feingold became law in 2003, AIPAC-identified bundlers could raise $1 million-plus for AIPAC-approved candidates simply by contacting 10 like-minded supporters. Here’s the math:
The bundler and spouse “max out” for $9,200 and call 10 others, say in Manhattan, Miami, and Beverly Hills. Each of them max out ($10 x $9,200) and call 10 others for a total of 11. (111 x $9,200 = $1,021,200.)

Wow, Jeff Gates has discovered geometric progression! But why did he stop there? Each of the hundred can call ten more, and each of them can call ten more - and AIPAC would have not a mere million, but a hundred million dollars! How stupid those Jews are to stop at a mere million! And how stupid the goyim must be (besides Gates himself, of course) for not realizing how easy it is to make trillions of dollars by just adding to the pyramid!

But it gets better, as Gates drops the pretense of talking about Zionists and gets to those he really can't stand:

Of the Forbes 400 richest Americans, 25 percent are Jewish according to Michael Steinhardt, a key funder of the Democratic Leadership Council. The DLC was led by Jewish Zionist Sen. Joe Lieberman when he resigned in 2000 to run as vice president with pro-Israeli presidential candidate Al Gore.
Money was never a constraint. Pro-Israeli donors were limited only by how much they could lawfully contribute to AIPAC-screened candidates. McCain-Feingold raised a key limit. The full impact of this foreign influence has yet to be tallied. What’s known, however, is sufficient to apply the Foreign Agents Registration Act. Of the top 50 neoconservatives who advocated war in Iraq, 26 were Jewish (52 percent).
...To buy time on the public’s airwaves, money raised from the Israel lobby’s network is paid to media outlets largely owned or managed by members of the same network.

Yet Gates never quite explains how the vast majority of Jews managed to vote for the candidate that was against the Iraq war, or how the current administration of Zionist-owned America is now making larger demands on Israel than at any time since 1956.

But Jeff Gates doesn't need logic. He has a ready audience willing to drink up his dripping Jew-hatred - in Saudi Arabia's Arab News, as well as Middle East Online,

A Middle East political anecdote

Plans are underway for the first Fatah conference in twenty years to be held in Bethlehem in August.

One of the problems, though, is a question about whether Hamas and Israel will allow Fatah members from Gaza to attend. Israel has said it would study the matter.

Hamas, however, arrested some of the Fatah members slated to go to the conference, and one PA leader said that Hamas is the only obstacle to the conference right now.

Meanwhile, PA negotiator and serial liar Saeb Erekat met with Iranian Foreign Minister Mottaki over the weekend. He wanted to meet with Israel's security chief Uzi Arad to talk about whether Israel will give permission for Gaza Fatah members to travel to Bethlehem, and Arad turned him down because of Israel's displeasure that its "peace partner" was meeting with a country committed to destroying Israel.

Now, Mahmoud Abbas has already said that he would not have any peace negotiations with Israel until there is a complete halt to all construction in the West Bank and east Jerusalem. This doesn't mean that Israeli and PA officials don't meet on other matters all the time, but that fact is not publicized very much.

So when the Israeli newspapers had headlines that Arad refused to meet with Erekat, it looked to the Palestinian Arabs like Erekat was a liar when he said that he wouldn't meet any Israelis for peace talks.

Instead of explaining that he anted to talk to Israelis to get the Fatah members out of Gaza for the conference, Erekat instead denied a story that never happened. He said that he never asked to meet with any Israeli teams for peace negotiations. That is true, but he made it sound like he was denying wanting to meet Israeli officials altogether, which is not true at all.

This way, Erekat plays to his audience, publicly showing off his intransigence, and implying that Arad is a liar, when in fact he is being purposefully deceptive secure in his knowledge that no Palestinian Arab reporter will call him on it.

Here's a story that shows a more accurate picture about Israel, the PA, Hamas and even Iran than the MSM ever covers. The simplistic story lines that Israel is running a "prison" in Gaza when Hamas is often the one keeping people in, that the PA is "moderate" even as they meet with Iran, that Erekat is flexible even as he brags in Arabic about how he will never compromise with Israel and won't even talk to Israelis, all to save face - this is what really happens. People who don't understand these multiple layers of what is happening will never get it.

Islamist territorial goals, illustrated

Recently, radical Islamist group Hizb ut-Tahrir held a rally in Gaza, drawing hundreds of people.

One of the speakers had an interesting presentation:

Now, it is well known that Hizb ut-Tahrir calls for the establishment of a unified Islamic caliphate. But what exactly would its borders be?

It seems we have the answer:

Greece, Spain, Albania, Romania, all appear to be Muslim territory according to HuT.

Not to mention China.

"Moderate" Fatah doesn't recognize Israel, supports terror

From YNet:

As the Fatah movement prepares for its upcoming leadership convention, a senior group member says the event will be used to display Fatah's commitment to the armed struggle against Israel.

Preparations for the convention, scheduled for August 4, are in full force at this time. During a series of preliminary meetings ahead of the event, senior Fatah official Rafik al-Natsheh said that the group will not be recognizing Israel.

'We will maintain the resistance option in all its forms and we will not recognize Israel," he said. "Not only don't we demand that anyone recognize Israel; we don't recognize Israel ourselves. However, the Palestinian Authority government is required to do it, or else it will not be able to serve the Palestinian people."

"I am certain that we will hinder all the traitors who wish to remove the resistance option from the movement's charter," Natsheh added.

The Palestinian Authority (as it stands today) is dominated by Fatah, that "moderate" alternative to Hamas.

al-Natsheh is admitting that the PA has to pretend to have peaceful intentions for political reasons, but in reality there is no change - Fatah is just as radical as Hamas, albeit less religious.

Fatah's constitution still calls for:

Complete liberation of Palestine, and eradication of Zionist economic, political, military and cultural existence.

The only way to change that would be during this upcoming conference. That doesn't look likely.

Some people, including Israelis, tend to say that the Fatah charter is irrelevant since it is subsumed under the PLO which has recognized Israel. But if Fatah is so irrelevant, why is this upcoming Fatah conference considered such a big deal to Mahmoud Abbas (who is the leader of Fatah as well)? Would it not be reasonable to ask him if Fatah is irrelevant?

Saudi Vice, episode 28: Don't brag about sex

Mazen Abdul Jawad is a hip, modern kind of Arab guy. He is macho and proud of it. So proud, that we went on Lebanese TV to brag about his sexual conquests. As Arab News reports:

Mazen Abdul Jawad appeared on the program last week in a red button-down shirt and open collar bragging in graphic detail about his sexual conquests.
In the segment, Abdul Jawad talks about having slept with a neighbor when he was only 14 and how this got him interested in sex. After discussing sex and foreplay in graphic detail and providing a recipe for an aphrodisiac, Abdul Jawad is seen getting into his vehicle at night on a Jeddah street.
“It all starts with turning my Bluetooth on while cruising around in my car,” he tells the camera.

Our heroes, the Saudi Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, sprang into action. How dare a Saudi man go on TV and brag about the women he scored with?

Ahmad Qasim Al-Ghamdi, director of the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice for Makkah, told Arab News that speaking so openly about vice is a punishable offense and that everyone involved with the broadcast is culpable.

“It is wrong to host people on television to speak publicly about vice and issues against our religion,” he said. “The program presents anomalies and deviancy in society that are unacceptable and immoral and should be punished according to Shariah.”

For Abdul Jawad to be punished on the basis of admitting to pre-marital sex he would have to confess in a court-approved manner.

However, speaking publicly about vice is also a punishable offense. Both offenses are subject to lashing and/or jail time at the discretion of the court.

The world is a little safer now, thanks to our heroes at the Muttawa!

Prominent Christian attacked in Gaza

Palestine Press Agency reports that Constantine Dabbagh, executive director in Gaza of the Middle East Council of Churches Department of Service to Palestinian Refugees, was attacked along with his wife on Tuesday morning in his house.

The three masked intruders handcuffed the 70-year old man and his wife, ransacked his house looking for "radio transmitters and gold."

Islamic shari'a finance in trouble

Since the economic downturn, fans of Islamic shari'a-compatible investments have been touting that their financial institutions are immune to the problems that have plagued Western banks, and that their funds are inherently more secure.

Well, you can flush that idea down the toilet:

For the first time since the initial issuance of a Sukuk bond in Malaysia in 2001, cases of payments being defaulted on have occurred in the USA, Kuwait, and Malaysia. There are five legal cases that involve the default on payment of Sukuk [so far]. There are also some Sukuk cases that involve technical failures that are expected to develop into cases of legal default at any moment. Therefore the legal risk surrounding this type of [financial] bond – that falls under the provisions of Islamic Shariaa law – is beginning to become apparent.

And another article:

KUALA LUMPUR, July 16 — First defaults of sukuk are set to expose the vulnerabilities of Islamic finance, with most investors expected to have no better legal redress than conventional bondholders as underlying assets have not been truly transferred to them.

The current financial and economic crisis is a first for the US$1 trillion (RM3.5 trillion) Islamic finance industry, which over the past few years has been spoilt by cheap oil money, and legal provisions and protection clauses in sukuk worth billions of dollars are being tested for the first time.

Islamic bonds, or sukuk, are structured as profit-sharing or rental agreements and their returns are derived from underlying assets. Islamic finance caters to investors who would like to avoid paying or earning interest, prohibited by Islamic law.

Kuwait’s Investment Dar said in May it had defaulted on a US$100 million sukuk registered in Bahrain and in the United States a court case is ongoing on the East Cameron Partners Sukuk by bankrupt Texas-based East Cameron Gas Company.

Despite its earlier billing as a safer alternative to traditional banking due to its requirement for assets to underpin deals, Islamic bondholders may not have any more legal safeguards than conventional counterparts in case of default.

With rare exceptions, sukuk issuers have created special purpose vehicles (SPV) to pool assets underlying the issue, but they have not been securitized for a true sale to investors.

“Secular, non-Sharia courts upholding those structures are more likely to consider sukuk holders to have contractual rights as opposed to proprietary rights and as a result rank them as creditors rather than equity holders,” said Muneer Khan, partner and head of Islamic finance at law firm Simmons and Simmons.

So the idea that investors in Islamic bonds have real assets in their name, as opposed to paper, is pretty much a fiction.(This also means that the idea that the investors in these bonds are not receiving interest is probably also a fiction, but I am neither a financial nor a shari'a expert.)

Hamas invested in American strip clubs?

Firas Press quotes Kuwaiti newspaper Al-Watan with some news that I cannot verify anywhere else. And Kuwaiti newspapers have been less than reliable in their "scoops."

But it's to good not to share:

Two weeks ago, an American court sentenced a number of Palestinians to prison terms ranging from 15 years to 65 years the on charges of fraudulently collecting more than 60 million dollars under the guise of helping those affected by the war in the Gaza Strip.

The first defendant in this case is the half-brother of Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal, and the second defendant is the son-in-law Abu Marzouk, a senior leader in the movement itself, and the third defendant is the representative of Hamas in the Yemen!!

Interestingly, part of this money was in banks within the Cayman Islands. The bulk of it was invested in the purchase of cafes and restaurants within the United States, including a building in Minneapolis that has on its ground floor one of the most famous striptease clubs "Alstervtiz"(?) in the state of Minnesota near the U.S. border with Canada.

When the judge asked the first defendant how he could invest Muslim charity monies into strip clubs when that is against Islamic law, Meshal's half-brother said that "necessities permit taboos."

Even though it is probably not true, it shows that Hamas' prestige has gone way down for stories like these to be made up and spread to begin with.

Deference

From all accounts, Barack Obama went to Saudi Arabia last month asking for some specific symbolic concessions - and was rebuffed:

Mr. Obama, officials said, was frustrated by his recent trip to Saudi Arabia, when he met with King Abdullah and failed to extract any meaningful gestures toward Israel to revive the peace process.

But two sources, one a former U.S. official who recently traveled there and one a current official speaking anonymously, say the meeting did not go well from Obama's perspective....

Sources say Obama was hoping to persuade the king to be ready to show reciprocal gestures to Israel, which Washington has been pushing to halt settlements with the goal of advancing regional peace and the creation of a Palestinian state.

"The more time goes by, the more the Saudi meeting was a watershed event," said the former U.S. official who recently traveled to Riyadh. "It was the first time that President Obama as a senator, candidate, or president was not able to get almost anything or any movement using his personal power of persuasion."

Another official, speaking not for attribution, said last month that the 85-year-old Saudi monarch had launched a tirade during Obama's long meeting in Riyadh, and that other Saudi officials had later apologized to the U.S. president for the king's behavior.

The Obama administration pushed back hard on those allegations about the meeting, and said furthermore that the sources could not know what went on. "It was a very small group of folks who planned that trip," a White House official said, disputing every aspect of the accounts. "The Saudi addition came on late."

Assuming that it is true, it would hardly be the first time that an Arab ally told the United States to drop dead. It happens all the time. Egypt reacted furiously to Congressional moves to tie US aid to Egyptian cooperation on weapons smuggling, Saudi Arabia told President Bush that it had no intention to increase oil production during last year's gasoline crisis, Lebanon rejected Condi Rice when she asked the government to treat Hezbollah as a terror group in 2002, saying that Hezb was a perfectly fine resistance organization that happened to have an independent army on its territory.

And all of these disagreements were handled quietly. No one ever seriously suggested that these serial rebuffs of US requests and demands were going to affect the relationship between the countries. The Saudi kerfuffle is being strenuously downplayed and denied by the Obama administration.

Only when Israel - a true ally, not an ally of convenience - disagrees with the US, does everybody freak out. People are demanding that Israel be punished, that aid be jeopardized, that Israel's intransigence is endangering the entire region. Mahmoud Abbas, who has added new demands before deigning to negotiate with Israel (demands he never made before,) is not vilified at all for his intransigence. No, only Israel's government - the supposedly right wing obstructionist racist government that has done more for Palestinian Arabs in four months than the dovish peace-loving Kadima did in years - gets slammed for attempting to keep a status quo that has existed since 1967.

There is something seriously wrong when real friends get treated worse than fake friends, let alone enemies.