Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Friday, October 23, 2009

Hasbara that falls short

YNet reports:

Israel decided to dispel rumors according to which excavations under Temple Mount were the reason behind recent riots in Jerusalem.

As part of the public relations campaign, the Government Press Office held a tour of the Western Wall tunnels for foreign reporters.

Some 70 reporters participated in the tour, during which they received briefings from engineers, archeologists, members of the Antiquities Authority, as well as from the Western Wall's Rabbi, Shmuel Rabinowitz.

"Under the instructions of Minister of Information and Diaspora Yuli Edelstein, the Government Press Office will resume PR activities with foreign reporters," Daniel Seaman, head of the Government Press Office, told Ynet.

"During the tunnel tours we explained that we are not excavating, but merely exposing the past, in order to learn what happened here. Unfortunately there are those who are looking to discredit our right to the Temple Mount by painting a distorted image of our actions, as part of a de-legitimization campaign against the State of Israel," added Seaman.

Mary Ann Hock, a journalist who participated in the tour, was impressed by Israel's transparency. "There were some new things they showed us.

"I was impressed; we entered areas that are not open to visitors. It was very intriguing because we saw the depth of the excavations, and I never realized how many layers existed," said Hock.

According to Hock, the explanations given by Rabbi Rabinowitz clarified the picture. "I understood there is no way Jews are conducting excavations here; certainly not underneath the Temple Mount.

This all sounds good, and is much overdue.

The bad news? So far, I can only find one reference to this tour in the world media: from Al Quds newspaper, showing a picture of the tunnels and not explaining any facts.

These 70 journalists might now be better informed, but they have little incentive to report the truth.

And enthusiastic journalist Mary Ann Hock does not show up in any Google searches as a reporter.

Today's PalArab news (10/23)

A Jordanian newspaper claims that the US is telling the PA that it will cut aid to the group immediately and comprehensively if they go ahead and reconcile with Hamas without adhering to the Quartet's conditions. Mahmoud Abbas implied this pressure exists, telling Egyptian newspapers that certain international parties asked him not to sign a reconciliation agreement, and he is ignoring them.

More friction between Khaled Meshaal, the exiled Hamas leader who lives in Damascus, and the Gaza Hamas leadership. Meshaal is trying to stop any reconciliation with Fatah and he is sending money directly to the Qassam Brigades, bypassing the Hamas leadership.

Turkey censored parts from new episodes of a TV series after Israeli complaints of scenes showing Israeli soldiers murdering children.

In two separate incidents this month. Gaza folk singers were kidnapped, beaten and robbed:

According to Al-Qeshawi's statement to Al Mezan Centre, the armed men were wearing military uniforms and were repeating the word 'atheist' while beating them. The armed men said to the young boy 'Don't ever sing, singing is haram (religiously forbidden)'.

A Jordanian geologist is warning that a devastating earthquake is likely to hit southern Jordan, as they come every 75-100 years, and that building nuclear reactors in that area is dangerous. The last one was in 1927.

At least one Palestinian Arab newspaper took note of yesterday's amazing Independent article about how Arab governments treat Palestinian Arabs in their countries.

A Palestinian Arab inventor created an electrical generator that is powered by ocean waves. He can join the list.

A Gaza social worker is holding workshops on the problems of intolerance. It seems that many potential marriages are being stopped by families who do not like the political affiliation of the prospective spouses' families, and political differences have also caused divorces in Gaza.

News snippets from Al Arabiya

Some articles in the English-language Al-Arabiya website today:

A Sudanese court on Thursday sentenced two women to 20 lashes for dressing "indecently," an AFP reporter said.

The two women, who have not been identified, were arrested in Khartoum in July along with journalist-turned-activist Lubna Ahmed Hussein who spent a day in jail after refusing to pay a fine for wearing "indecent trousers."

A self-styled sheikh has been arrested in Australia over letters sent to widows of soldiers killed in Afghanistan, accusing their partners of murder, as Canberra mulls an early withdrawal from the troubled country.

The Iranian-born Muslim spiritual leader, who calls himself Mufti Sheikh Haron, was charged with sending hate mail to families of seven Australian soldiers killed fighting Taliban and al-Qaeda militants in Afghanistan over a two-year period.

"I feel bad that you have lost your son but I don't feel bad that a murderer of innocent civilians has lost his life," Haron allegedly wrote to the family of one Australian commando killed in January, the Daily Telegraph newspaper said on Thursday.

A top hardline Iranian cleric said on Thursday that "God's fury" would be unleashed if Iran appoints women as governors of some provinces, as was raised as a possibility by a minister last week.

"If some people want to change the principles and values of the revolution without considering the views of clerics, they will face the fury of God and of the people," Grand Ayatollah Lotfollah Safi Golpayghani said on his website.

Hamas backs down from shutting down human rights org

From Ma'an:

The Independent Commission for Human Rights (ICHR) said on Thursday that Hamas-allied security forces briefly ordered their office in Gaza to close, before government officials denied there had been such an order.

Sources in the organization in the West Bank city of Ramallah told Ma’an that three members of the security forces entered the office and ordered everyone, including director Jamal Sarhan, to leave.

Later, Salah Abed Al-Ati, the director of ICHR’s operation in Gaza City and northern Gaza, said that a delegation of government officials visited the office to explain that there had never been a decision to shut down the organization.

The delegation included Comptroller-General Hassan As-Sayfi and Interior Ministry Spokesperson Ihab Al-Ghusein. They told ICHR that the organization could continue working "with a few minor reservations" on the part of the authorities.

ICHR sources said that the apparent initial decision to close the office came from Fathi Hammad, the minister of the interior in the Gaza administration. The security officers who had first appeared presented warrants from the Ministry of the Interior and the General Secretariat of the Gaza-based cabinet.

(Palestine Press Agency thought it was the PICCR that was closed, which I am pretty sure is a different organization.)

Hamas seems to have no compunction about throwing its weight around.

By the way, this article highlights Ma'an's methods of criticizing Hamas since the coup: it refuses to print any article that makes Hamas look bad, until it can find a different reason to mention the facts that it is reluctant to report. In this case, it waits until Hamas backtracks on closing down a HR organization before reporting that the action happened to begin with.

Worth reading

Been too busy to post, but it is worthwhile to read this piece by David Bogner in response to a troll who called all Israelis "colonialist." Punch line:

As a parting gift, I would direct you to the U.N. Declaration Of Human Rights; a document which is so often mis-quoted as a weapon against us. It clearly states that "Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country". You can't turn over a stone anywhere in the length and breadth of this country (especially in Judea and Samaria; the areas you refer to as occupied Palestinian territory) without finding hard, indisputable evidence of an ancient and continued Jewish presence here. The very label 'Jew' comes from the word 'Judea'; the real name for the southern half of the so-called 'West Bank'.

You want to engage me in an intelligent discussion of prejudice, of second-class status, of disenfranchisement and confiscated property? I won't rub your face in your own country's shameful conduct against the Jews (although by all rights I should). Instead I will freely admit that like most countries in the world, Israel has many social and legal hurdles to clear before we have the Utopian society we would all prefer. But our societal shortcomings and ills are not unlike the problems each and every one of your countries has had to face in trying to balance civil liberties and homeland security.

But if you want to call me a Nazi? If you want to tell me I'm a colonialist? That tells me that not only are you not interested in an intelligent discussion... but that you don't even understand the meaning of those words.

And by the way... in reference to your continued reference to Palestinians as the only indigenous people of this land, I am still awaiting the discovery of the first 'Palestinian' artifact tying that people to my homeland and giving them a greater claim to it than mine.

Why Did the Arabs Run?

Part of a 1948 article from The Nation, by Freda Kirchwey, reprinted this year:

Jaffa and Tel Aviv were like hostile Siamese twins, joined in uneasy physical union by a slum area in which the mingled blood of both formed a poisonous, explosive compound. Murders, riots and clashes between Arabs and Jews had happened at frequent intervals long before the real fighting began last spring. Then the bad feeling between the two cities exploded into open warfare, and on April 25 the Irgun moved into Jaffa with armored cars and mortars and took the Manshieh district that borders Tel Aviv. The British rather than the Arabs stopped them; but Haganah sent in reinforcements, and four days later the Jews had surrounded the city. Within another few days the Arabs had gone; only a couple of thousand out of an all-Arab population of more than 70,000 hung on. The largest Arab city of Palestine, headquarters of nationalist activity, chief center of Arab business and intellectual life, was silent and deserted.

I drove through Jaffa with a man from the Israel press office. The Manshieh district was pretty badly damaged, partly by fighting in the streets and partly by shell and mortar fire. I saw small shops open to the street, empty, their interiors wrecked. "There was a lot of looting, especially in this section," my companions said. "Who?" I asked. "Both. Our men too. There had been a lot of trouble here; the feeling was very bad. But this is disgusting, this sort of thing." He waved his arm at the damaged shop fronts. "What can you expect," I asked, "especially after what went before? This was a clash between people that hated each other. Suppose the Arabs had swept into Tel Aviv? You think only a few streets of deserted small shops would have been smashed and looted?" He didn't answer the last question. He said, "I expect Jewish soldiers to act like civilized human beings. They had captured the town; they should have protected it. They've done so in most places -- protected both property and life." I was more impressed by his severity than I was shocked by the damage done by the soldiers. I was later told, not by him but by someone else, that a good part of the looting in Jaffa was the work of assorted Europeans fighting in the Arab ranks--Nazis, Chetniks from Yugoslavia, and Balkan Moslem soldiers--who lingered after the defeat long enough to do some profitable marauding.
Most of Jaffa was in good shape. The Arab masses, when they fled, took what little they could carry; the wealthy Arabs, who had left during the months before the real fighting began, often salvaged the greater part of their portable possessions. A good many of the undamaged houses in Jaffa and elsewhere are now being used for newly arrived Jews; so the Arab refugees unwittingly helped make a place for the Jewish refugees their leaders were so determined to keep out. This means hardship for individuals; collectively it is obviously fitting and just.

Why did the Arabs run? Their mass flight from Tiberias, Haifa, Safed, Jerusalem, Jaffa and from the village in those areas, seemed to have little to do with the fighting itself. Anyhow, down the ages civilians have traditionally stuck to their homes and their land, through wars and alien occupations, surviving as best they could, waiting for the end of their troubles. Why should the Arabs have behaved differently, even those who had been on good terms with the Jews? Some blame it on the Mufti. Arabs told their Jewish neighbors that agents of the Mufti said they should go or they'd get their throats slit by the Israelis. Some professed not to believe this, but thought they'd better do as they were told. Other Arabs thought Jewish control would be temporary, a matter of weeks, and that their safest bet was to get out until the Arab forces came back; otherwise they might be regarded as collaborators and suffer at the hands of their own bosses. Others may have been merely defeatist, assuming Jewish victory and preferring to live under Arab rule: the sense of national boundaries is not strong in most of the Arab world. Another likely cause was the example of the wealthy Arabs. When the poor worker in the town or on the land saw his betters disappear with their belongings, he was likely to conclude that the same danger existed for him, too. A dozen reasons probably combined to create the vast epidemic of fear that drove some 500,000 Arabs out of Jewish Palestine into the already overcrowded ranks of homeless, penniless "displaced persons." Should Israel take them back if they want to come? No one I talked to believed they should be readmitted -- any of them -- before the war ends. Aside from those who are hostile and potentially under the orders of Fawzi el Kaukji or the Mufti, they would be an intolerable burden on the new state's already staggering economy. Besides, the Jews feel no responsibility for. their flight and, consequently, little obligation to help them return. After the war the question of the refugees can be discussed on its long-range merits.

Hamas attacks another human rights organization

Palestine Press Agency reports this morning that Hamas militants stormed and closed the Palestinian Independent Commission for Citizens Rights in Gaza City.

The Hamas members barred employees from going to work and threatened them if they didn't comply.

This follows Hamas' reported attack on an international charity on Monday.

These attacks on Gaza institutions have accelerated sharply since the UNHRC's one-sided condemnation of Israel last week. From Hamas' perspective, the UN has just given them much more honor and legitimacy than they had before, as the Goldstone report was respectful towards Hamas and created artificial distinctions between the Hamas Gaza government and its terrorist wing.

Guess who Muslims believe Gog and Magog are?

The idea of Gog and Magog being harbingers of the Messiah is indicated in Ezekiel, Revelations and the Quran. So I suppose that it is not surprising who some modern Muslims identify as these villains:

We find Gog and Magog in the Surah Kahf, which we discussed on day two. Surrah Kahf describes a righteous leader named Dhul-Qarnayn, literally "He of the Two Horns" but also meaning "He of the Two Epoches." He travels between two bodies of water which scholars have identified as the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea, which means that he was traveling over the Caucasus Mountains. Then he travels North and comes across a people between two mountain ranges who spoke a unique language. They were being persecuted by a people so powerful none but Allah could destroy them, so Dhul-Qarnayn built a barrier made of iron. These people, behind the barrier, are Gog and Magog, and it is expected that in the Last Age that barrier is broken, and Gog and Magog are released into the world, using their power to oppress people of faith and control the entire world, politically, economically and culturally.

The Hadith Qudsi tell us that Allah will command Adam to select out the people for the Hellfire. Out of every 1,000 Adam will take 999, and they would all be the people of Gog and Magog. For this reason Shaikh Imran believes that Gog and Magog are not a race of people or an army, as many have argued in the past, but a global society. In this way an African, or Indian or Chinese man, who may have no ancestral roots in the Caucus Mountains may still be from among the people of Gog and Magog by dressing and acting and thinking like they do. Eventually all of mankind will be carbon copies of one way of life.
The only other reference to Gog and Magog in the Quran is when Surah Anbiya refers to a town which Allah destroyed, and it's people were expelled and banned from returning to the town until Gog and Magog are released. Shaikh Imran interprets, from various evidences outlined in his book, that the town is Jerusalem, which was given to the Israelites, and subsequently destroyed when the Israelites were banned from returning. So, the creation of the secular state of Israel as a Jewish homeland is an indication that we are living in the age of Gog and Magog's release, and Gog and Magog can be recognizes and modern western civilization.
t is recorded in the hadith that the prophet awoke suddenly, his face red with fear and proclaimed "Woe unto the Arab!" He said that on that day a small hole was made in the barrier built by Dhul-Qarnayn. So, we know that they began being released in his time.

It is also recorded in the hadith that Gog and Magog will drink from the Sea of Galilee until it is dried up. Today the Sea of Galilee is the primary source of fresh water in Israel, and it is already dangerously low. In fact, water has to be pumped uphill to keep the Jordan River flowing. It's a basic fact of nature, making a dessert [sic] bloom is unsustainable.
The Shaikh goes back to that region in the Caucasus Mountains to try to refine the search. He cautioned people away from making blanket statements about all Jews and all Christians, or even all European Jews and European Christians. Instead he focuses specifically on a tribe called the Khazar.

The Khazars were a tribe of nomadic Turkic people from the Northern Caucasus Mountains. So, this fits the geographic description in Surah Kahf. In the 8th century the Khazars embraced Judaism making it the official state religion. So, for the first time in history a tribe of non Semitic, non Israelite people, became Jewish.

The Khazar spread through Europe and Russia and as they did they also became Christian. He credits them with the Bolshevik Revolution and the French Revolution. He says, as evidenced in his book, that it was these European Jews and European Christians who formed the alliance that gave birth to the Zionist Movement, which is an essentially European achievement. Shikh Imran insists that Zionism has absolutely nothing to do with traditional Judaism.

Yes indeed, today's [Ashkenazic] Jews and some European Christians clearly fit the bill!

Must read: The tragedy of the Palestinian Arab diaspora

The Independent has an excellent, and lengthy, article about the plight of Palestinian Arab "refugees" stuck in Arab countries and how they are treated. It starkly brings up points that this blog has been emphasizing for years about how Arab leaders have used them as pawns and how their definition of "refugees" has allowed these nations to flout their legal responsibilities. Here are some highlights:

It is a cynical but time-honoured practice in Middle Eastern politics: the statesmen who decry the political and humanitarian crisis of the approximately 3.9 million Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and in Gaza ignore the plight of an estimated 4.6 million Palestinians who live in Arab countries. For decades, Arab governments have justified their decision to maintain millions of stateless Palestinians as refugees in squalid camps as a means of applying pressure to Israel. The refugee problem will be solved, they say, when Israel agrees to let the Palestinians have their own state.

Yet in the two decades since the end of the Cold War, after two Gulf wars, and the rise and fall of the Oslo peace process, not a single Palestinian refugee has returned to Israel – and only a handful of ageing political functionaries have returned from neighbouring Arab countries to the West Bank and Gaza. Instead, failed peace plans and shifting political priorities have resulted in a second Palestinian "Nakba", or catastrophe – this one at hands of the Arab governments.

The inclusion of the descendants of Palestinian refugees as refugees in UNRWA's mandate has no parallel in international humanitarian law and is responsible for the growth of the official numbers of Palestinian refugees in foreign countries from 711,000 to 4.6 million during decades when the number of ageing refugees from the 1948 Israeli war of independence in was in fact declining. UNRWA's grant of refugee status to the children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the original Palestinian refugees according to the principle of patrilineal descent, with no limit on the generations that can obtain refugee status, has made it easy for host countries to flout their obligations under international law. According to Article 34 of the UN Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, "The Contracting States shall as far as possible facilitate the assimilation and naturalisation of refugees," and must "make every effort to expedite naturalisation proceedings" – the opposite of what happened to the Palestinians in every Arab country in which they settled, save Jordan.

[T]he doveish former Israeli foreign minister Shlomo Ben Ami, who negotiated directly with Yasser Arafat at the failed Camp David meetings in 2000, asserted that...[i]ndifference to the refugees' plight was shared by Israel's negotiating partner in the Oslo years – Yasser Arafat. "He was not a refugee man," Ben Ami said flatly. "He was much more centred on the question of Jerusalem. I heard him say to [Mahmood Abbas] in my presence, 'leave me alone with your refugees'."

[T]he record of Arafat's Palestinian Authority in its territories during the 1990s attests to the truth of Ben Ami's observation, which applies both to Arafat's Fatah and to Hamas. Despite $10bn in foreign aid, not one refugee camp in the West Bank or Gaza has been replaced by modern housing.

After 60 years of failed wars, and failed peace, it is time to put politics aside and to insist that the basic rights of the Palestinian refugees in Arab countries be respected – whether or not their children's children return to Haifa anytime soon. While Saudi Arabia may not wish to host Israeli tourists, it can easily afford to integrate the estimated 240,000 Palestinian refugees who already live in the kingdom – just as Egypt, which has received close to $60bn in US aid, and has a population of 81 million, can grant legal rights to an estimated 70,000 Palestinian refugees and their descendants. One can only imagine the outrage that the world community would rightly visit upon Israel if Israeli Arabs were subject to the vile discriminatory laws applied to Palestinians living in Arab countries. Surely, Palestinian Arabs can keep their own national dream alive in the countries where they were born, while also enjoying the freedom to work, vote and own property?

...[E]ven in Jordan, which is in many ways a model for the humane treatment of a large refugee population, Palestinians today feel markedly less secure than they did two decades ago, or even five years ago.

The fact that the living standard of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon has been deemed "catastrophic" by both UNRWA and by the Lebanese government can therefore be understood as a deliberate result of official state policy that is supported by all parties across Lebanon's divided confessional spectrum. As a member of the Lebanese parliament, Ghassan Moukheiber, explained in an interview with the ICG, "our official policy is to maintain Palestinians in a vulnerable, precarious situation to diminish prospects for their naturalisation or permanent settlement".

The article emphasizes the political reasons that Arab countries do not want to integrate millions of people who were born and live their entire lives there, but it only touches upon (as I quoted above) how the Palestinian Arab leadership has encouraged this decades-long abuse of their brethren. The fact is that the PalArab leaders are afraid that their nationalism, carefully and artificially nutured by misery, would disappear if Palestinian Arabs would have full rights in Arab countries. This passage illustrates what would happen:

He seems perplexed when asked which is his country – Jordan or Palestine. "We have no security here, but we are Jordanians," replies Mustapha, who lounges on a mattress in a two-storey cement house down the road while one of his five daughters offers tiny glasses of steaming herbal tea and cardamom-scented coffee. "Everything I have is here. This house. My car. My job. What would I have in Nablus or Be'ersheba?" he declares. "My children know nothing but Jordan. And we will stay here."

So would millions of others, if given the chance. And the sixty-year old fear is that if that happens, the world will realize that Palestinian nationalism and identity is a purely 20th century phenomenon, artificially nurtured by twin policies of demonization of Israel and purposeful abuse of millions of people.

This article is way overdue and will hopefully be followed by others in other outlets.
(h/t Media Backspin)

The 3-0 count: As off-topic as I can get

I cannot say that I am a big baseball fan. When I was a kid, sure, I knew all the players and the statistics, I memorized records, I knew batting lineups. Since then, my baseball knowledge has atrophied and I certainly do not watch any games during the season.

But I still follow my Philadelphia Phillies in the standings, and I try to watch their post-season games even as I am blissfully ignorant of the players and what they did all year outside of the standings.

So I am catching up, hoping for a Phillies/Yankees (Turnpike?) World Series, as nothing would give me greater pleasure than to see the Phillies beat the despised Yankees.

But, you gotta admit - much of the game is really boring. Sure, the sportscasters try to make up for it with flashy graphics on the screen; the pitch placement chart that TBS' HD games show is fairly cute, as are the graphics showing the pitching count and the speed of the fastballs and the first base runner lead. Even so, the fact that there is no problem with going to an interview of the first base coach during the gameplay itself indicates that, for most of the three hours, the game is pretty dull. The very dullness is what spawns the new statistics that the viewers are peppered with, of how well a certain player did against left-handed pitchers in odd-numbered years when the temperature was between 45 and 50 degrees Fahrenheit.

Which brings me to the point of this post: the 3-0 count.

It is accepted wisdom that almost invariably, a batter will take a 3-0 pitch, and get the green light for a 3-1 pitch. For the life of me, I cannot figure out the former.

In both cases the pitcher does not want a walk and will try to keep the ball over the plate. Why not swing away at 3-0? 3-0 pitches are hardly ever balls; they are hardly ever breaking pitches. Unless the batter is a singles hitter and the pitcher is struggling (where the odds of a walk are higher than of a single) wouldn't it make sense for batters to get the same green light for 3-0 as they do for 3-1?

Am I missing something?

(Now that I wrote this, I see this article makes a pretty good case for taking, but I think the stats are deceptive. The NYT looked at this a couple of years ago and gave reasons to swing away. This article is interesting as well.)

Allah Save the Queen

From The Sun(UK):

HATE preacher Anjem Choudary sparked fury yesterday after calling for the Queen to become Muslim.

He demanded an Islamic revolution across Britain.

Choudary, 42, said Her Majesty - head of the Church of England - should convert to ensure her place in paradise.

He also wants to see senior members of the Government switching faiths. Choudary, a key henchman of rabble rousing cleric Omar Bakri, said: "We invite everyone from the Queen, to the ministers, to the Parliament, to the aristocracy, to the ordinary person in Britain to embrace Islam.

"Save yourself and your children in this life from misery and prepare them for a great destiny in the hereafter."

He made his call during an internet rant to promote a march in London later this month supporting Sharia law.

The ex-lawyer also made a scathing reference to the next general election, declaring: "Britain does not need a new leader, it needs a revolution - an Islamic revolution."

Labour MP Andrew Dismore said: "It'd be laughable if we didn't know that some take this man seriously." A Muslim group branded Choudary an "extremist nut".

Sounds like he's saying that the Queen is going to hell, so he is clearly showing his concern for her.

Good news from Morocco

From Al-Arabiya:

This year's festival of the Atlantic Andalusias, held in the Moroccan port of Essaouira, will focus on a Moroccan Jewish musical tradition known as Matrouz, organisers announced Thursday.

During the festival, to be held from October 29 to November 1, there will be concerts to gather together "our poets, our musicians and our singers, Muslims and Jews, to sing and dance together," Andre Azoulay, festival chairman and an advisor to Morocco's King Mohammed VI, told AFP.

The north African country's Jewish art is a "major component of the cultural wealth and identity in Morocco," Azoulay said. "It shouldn't just be reduced to folklore (...). It gives the best example of how to make mentalities evolve by going out to meet other people."

Matrouz is a tradition that dates back several centuries. One example of the art form will be a concert in which the rabbi Haim Louk will sing accompanied by the Zyriab orchestra from Oudja in east Morocco.

A victory for Kuwaiti women

From the Kuwait Times:

The Constitutional Court yesterday issued a landmark ruling by abrogating an article in the 1962 passports law that banned Kuwaiti women from obtaining their own passports without the prior approval of their husbands.

The ruling, which is final and cannot be appealed, said that the article in the law violates a number of articles in the constitution, especially articles 29, 30 and 31 which guarantee personal freedom. In the ruling, the court also stated that under the constitution, women right to travel cannot be denied by anyone including their husbands because this is one of their basic rights in the constitution.

This is a big deal, because it is directly against sharia law (as I understand it.)

A fluffier but similarly good story for women from Jordan (and the UAE):

A Royal Jordanian flight from Athens to Amman could have passed off as any other routine trip except this RJ 132 flight was a little different as it boasted a female pilot leading an all female crew.

Carol Rabadi captained her first flight of 100 passengers after working as a co-pilot for six years, a move that has been hailed as a new era set to end the male domination of the Jordanian aviation industry.

“It was a wonderful feeling,” Rabadi told Al Arabiya. “It was a very safe and we proved ourselves as women without any problems.”

Meanwhile in related news the UAE saw two of its nationals become the first women to complete the first level of pilot training with the Abu Dhabi-based Etihad Airways.

The two women were expected to become fully fledged first officers, or co-pilots, in just eighteen months, a landmark achievement in the country, which for generations has kept women out of fields such as aviation.

HRW tries, and fails, to rebut founder's comments

From Commentary's Noah Pollak:

In case you missed it, yesterday something very important happened: Bob Bernstein, the founder and for 20 years the chair of Human Rights Watch, published an op-ed in the New York Times criticizing the organization for its obsessive attacks on Israel. He wrote that HRW is “helping those who wish to turn Israel into a pariah state.”
HRW was quick to offer a response — and it is a pathetically weak and deceptive one. A quick fisking:

Human Rights Watch does not believe that the human rights records of “closed” societies are the only ones deserving scrutiny.

A classic red-herring argument. Nowhere did Bernstein argue that open societies should not be subject to scrutiny. What he said is that the amount of attention HRW pays to Israel is wildly out of proportion to Israel’s violations, especially when Israel is compared with the Middle East’s dozens of dictatorships. Misrepresenting the plain meaning of Bernstein’s argument allows HRW to rebut an accusation that he never made. The press release continues:

Human Rights Watch does not devote more time and energy to Israel than to other countries in the region, or in the world. We’ve produced more than 1,700 reports, letters, news releases, and other commentaries on the Middle East and North Africa since January 2000, and the vast majority of these were about countries other than Israel.

Another red herring — this one with some clever weasel phrasing. Bernstein never said that HRW “devotes more time and energy to Israel than to other countries in the region.” He wrote that “Human Rights Watch has written far more condemnations of Israel for violations of international law than of any other country in the region.” The obvious difference is that Bernstein was comparing the number of reports on Israel to the number of reports on any other individual country in the Middle East. HRW presents Bernstein as claiming that HRW writes more reports on Israel than on all the countries in the Middle East combined. Obviously, HRW cannot contest the accuracy of Bernstein’s statement, so it dishonestly responds to a charge he never made.

It is not the case that Human Rights Watch had “no access to the battlefield” after the Israeli operation in Gaza in January 2009. Although the Israeli government denied us access, our researchers entered Gaza via the border with Egypt and conducted extensive interviews.

Human Rights Watch is apparently incapable of dealing with criticism on its own terms. Bernstein did not argue that HRW had no access to the battlefield after the war was over, as HRW claims he said. What Bernstein in fact said was that HRW was not present on the battlefield during the war, therefore limiting its ability to know what happened and to make war-crimes judgments.

The dishonesty and manipulativeness of HRW’s response to Bernstein is but a small manifestation of the organization’s larger problems: its inability to engage honestly with the arguments of its detractors, and the related problem of the unreliability of the group’s reporting on the Middle East.

Someone else noticed report didn't condemn Hamas

Jonathan Dahoah Halevi, who has done similar work to mine concerning Gaza casualties, noticed the same thing I noticed yesterday about the Goldstone Report not condemning Hamas. The only differences are that he publishes his findings in major newspapers and writes better (and goes farther) than I do!

From YNet:

The Hamas de-facto administration in the Gaza Strip received nothing but respect from the Goldstone Committee, which never mentioned it was an Islamist, fascist, terrorist organization, that it supported the murder of the Jews in “Palestine” (by burning, according to one Hamas leader), threw rival Fatah supporters off roofs and shot them in the knee, had taken over the administrative institutions of the Gaza Strip in a military bloodbath and were currently imposing on the Gaza Strip Islamic law (the Sharia), with its binding restrictions on women and with its gross, blatant disregard for basic human rights.

On the contrary, the Goldstone Committee viewed the Hamas de-facto administration as legitimate in every respect and made an artificial distinction between it and the “Palestinian armed groups operating in the Gaza Strip,” as if such “groups” did not kowtow to Hamas and had somehow spent eight years methodically launching rockets and mortar shells into Israel in opposition to Hamas policy.

The Goldstone Report implies and claims that the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades, Hamas’ military-terrorist wing, is not under the control and authority of the Hamas de-facto administration and its “political” leadership, and for that reason the Committee did not find Hamas responsible of the rocket and terrorist attacks against Israel. Those “responsible,” according to the report, are anonymous operatives in the field whose names are revealed only after they have died and find their way onto Hamas posters of “shahids,” and when bringing them to trial at the International Criminal Court in the Hague is no longer relevant.

Even Hamas rejects the Committee’s interpretation and does not bother to hide the fact that the “military wing” answers to the “political wing” and that the two are inextricably bound up. Ismail Haniyeh explained in an interview in 2007 (and there are many other examples) that “Hamas is the jihad wing of the Muslim Brotherhood in Palestine,” and that it was a military wing. When asked what the connection was between Hamas and its military wing, the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades, he said that “the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades are part of the Hamas movement, but security considerations require the separation of politicians and military men, and that is what has happened during the past 10 years, but both the politician and the soldier (sic) have to carry out the movement’s policies.”

Moreover, the Hamas de-facto administration and its leadership boast of their responsibility for the rocket and terrorist attacks against Israel and have even documented them in a “victory album” of videotapes on their websites.

It does not seem that ignorance was responsible for the way the Goldstone Committee ignored the direct connection between Hamas and “Palestinian armed groups.” It is a fair assumption that its bias was deliberate and that the Committee’s curious methodology no less than its “ignorance” were behind the way it took statements from Palestinian “eyewitnesses” failing to ask basic questions on terrorist activities during the war.

The issue of Hamas’ invisible responsibility for war crimes, like many other claims made by the report, shows that it is a masterpiece of deception and manipulation whose only intention is to frame Israel for war crimes and exonerate Hamas. Khaled Mashaal and Ismail Haniyeh can take a vacation to The Hague without having to worry about the Goldstone Report. Unfortunately, the same is not true of Gabi Ashkenazi, Israel’s chief of staff.

Originally I was giving Goldstone the benefit of the doubt, first that he really thought that he was making the mandate even-handed and then that his main problem was that he subconsciously framed the report in ways that made Israel more culpable, but as time goes on I am more convinced than ever that he was knowingly duplicitous. Between his ridiculous "legal findings" where he jumps through hoops to find only Israel guilty of bizarre interpretations of international law and the now apparent facts that he misrepresents and distinguishes between Hamas and "armed terror groups", one cannot look at Goldstone as fair-minded nor even as simply naive.

(h/t t34zakat)