An independent audit of the IDF procedures

The Goldstone report recommends that Israel set up an independent commission of inquiry into Operation Cast Lead. Israel is reluctant to do so for a number of reasons: the IDF already has an investigation procedure that is similar to those of all Western nations; if it caves on this demand then it will look like an admittance of errors, and others.

In my opinion, what is needed is not so much a commission about Cast Lead. Instead, there should be an independent audit of the IDF investigation processes and procedures.

Auditors know how to check not only whether the processes and procedures are effective (in this case, for investigations) but also whether the IDF is accurately following their own procedures. If the audit comes out clean, then the IDF procedures would be "certified."

These external audits should happen regularly, perhaps annually. They can be done by a Big 4 accounting firm without compromising Israeli security. They should happen regardless of any political events like Goldstone. They should not be done to mollify the world, rather to ensure to the IDF and the GOI that IDF procedures are effective, fair and accurately followed - which should be welcomed by all.

This would solve all the problems. If the audit comes up clean, fair minded people can look at the sanitized results of the report certifying that the procedures are valid just the way that audit firms validate all sorts of procedures. If it doesn't, the IDF and the Government of Israel would be the first to want to know how to improve their procedures.

An audit procedure would address the root issue - whether IDF investigation procedures are adequately independent, effective and adhered to. Instead of spinning up a commission for every alleged war crime that some NGO screams about, this would be a reproducible, self-correcting and certified process that is used by major corporations daily.

It is entirely possible that the IDF does this already, but if not, it should.

(I briefly discussed this idea in a comment on this blog, and I sent it to a mailing list with really smart people, and no one responded. So either it is a brilliant idea or it is incredibly stupid.)

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UNRWA doesn't acknowledge a murder

On Thursday morning, there was a double murder in Ramallah. Two Palestinian Arabs were found stabbed to death.

One of the was reported to have been a UNRWA teacher in Gaza.

Usually, when UN workers are killed, there are press releases by the appropriate agencies to announce the news. For some reason, UNRWA has not yet acknowledged the murder of one of their employees.

Last night I emailed UNRWA spokesperson Chris Gunness, who has been busy lately making a one-man play about how horrible Israel is, asking him:

Can you confirm that this happened? Do you know the circumstances of the murder? Has there been any official UNRWA statement about this?

So far, I have not received a reply.

The cynical part of me thinks that UNRWA does not want to publicize anything that makes Palestinian Arabs look bad - even when their actions affect UNRWA itself. They've done that before.

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Goldstone Report inaccuracies, part 23

The Goldstone Report has a section about the booby-trapping of Palestinian Arab houses by Hamas.

If Hamas booby-trapped houses in civilian neighborhoods, that would violate the principle of distinction, which is a major claim that Goldstone accuses Israel of routinely violating during the operation. It would mean that Hamas disregarded the lives of its own people to at least the same extent that the report claims the IDF forces did.

Goldstone looks at the evidence, and starts off with an absurd paragraph:

461. In chapter XIV the Mission will report on different incidents in which witnesses have described the circumstances in which they had been used by the Israeli armed forces during house searches and forced at gunpoint to enter houses ahead of the Israeli soldiers. These witnesses testified that they had been used in this way to enter several houses. None of them encountered a booby trap or other improvised explosive devices during the house searches. The Mission is also mindful of other incidents it has investigated that involved entry into civilian
houses by Israeli soldiers in different areas in Gaza. None of these incidents showed the use of booby traps.

Goldstone begins his analysis of whether Hamas booby-trapped houses and civilian areas by saying that none of its eyewitnesses, who were handpicked by the Commission to prove the worst allegations of Israeli abuses, verified that they saw any Hamas booby-traps - while they were detailing highly suspect testimony that Israel used these witnesses as human shields.

Besides the fact that these people were not chosen to investigate booby-trap claims, Goldstone is implying that since they didn't see the booby traps, there is no direct evidence that such traps existed. One does not have to be a military expert to realize that if Hamas did booby trap homes, they would not have wired up every house in every neighborhood; rather they would only choose a sample of homes that they would try to lure IDF soldiers into. Saying that supposed witnesses did not see any booby traps is, literally, meaningless as proof one way or the other.

In addition, it also proves that Goldstone did not set out to investigate Hamas war crimes, and only would report on things that the commission found out about while they were investigating alleged Israeli crimes.

Goldstone then allows that there were reports of booby-traps:

462. The Mission, however, recalls the allegations levelled in the reports that it has reviewed. The Government of Israel alleges that Hamas planted booby traps in “homes, roads, schools and even entire neighbourhoods”. It adds, “in essence, the Hamas strategy was to transform the urban areas of the Gaza Strip into a massive death trap for IDF forces, in gross disregard for the safety of the civilian population.”317 The Mission notes that the existence of booby-trapped houses is mentioned in testimonies of Israeli soldiers collected by Breaking the Silence. One soldier recounts witnessing the detonation of a powerful explosion inside a house as a bulldozer approached it. A second soldier stated “many explosive charges were found, they also blew up, no one was hurt. Tank Corps or Corps of Engineers units blew them up. Usually they did not explode because most of the ones we found were wired and had to be detonated, but whoever was supposed to detonate them had run off. It was live, however, ready…”.318 Also the reports published by Palestinian armed groups, on which the submission to the Mission on the tactics of Palestinian combatants by the Jerusalem Centre for Public Affairs is based, suggest that booby-trapped civilian houses were a frequently used tactic.319 According to the Israeli Government, “because roads and buildings were often mined, IDF forces had to target them to protect themselves”.320

So after writing an initial paragraph whose only purpose is to cast doubt on any claims of Hamas booby traps, Goldstone briefly lists some damning evidence that such devices did exist. The Breaking the Silence testimonies, which Goldstone accepts uncritically when it slams the IDF, is quoted as having "mentioned" seeing booby traps, and terrorist websites themselves bragged about using such tactics. By any reasonable standard, this would appear to be real proof, not simply "allegations." Yet Goldstone places it after a paragraph that starts off the discussion by casting doubt that such devices existed and clearly downplays all of this evidence by lumping it all together into a single paragraph.

His final paragraph on the topic shows the unbelievable bias that the Commission had:

463. While, in the light of the above reports, the Mission does not discount the use of booby traps by the Palestinian armed groups, it has no basis to conclude that civilian lives were put at risk, as none of the reports record the presence of civilians in or near the houses in which booby traps are alleged to have been set.

Again, if Hamas placed live bombs in civilian areas, they are violating international law. Yet this report soft-pedals this war crime by saying that there is no evidence that any civilians were nearby - in civilian neighborhoods! Goldstone seems to be adding a new caveat to the Geneva Conventions - saying that civilian objects can be used by terrorists if there is no evidence that any civilians are there at the time they are planted. Perhaps Goldstone did not envision the civilians ever returning to their houses and opening their own front doors. This is mind-boggling.

While Israel is castigated by Goldstone for not being specific enough in dropping hundreds of thousands of flyers warning civilians to leave areas before they bombed. Hamas booby traps buildings in these same areas, and does not warn residents to leave at all - yet their actions are not condemned at all!

If using civilian areas as a base of attack in order to protect the attackers is illegal under international law, shouldn't the purposeful use of civilian objects themselves as weapons (something that Geneva didn't seem to imagine) be considered even worse?

This pseudo-legal stretching to absolve Hamas of responsibility for booby traps is not even the most egregious problem. These three paragraphs constitute the entirety of Goldstone's investigation into this topic. Yet Goldstone ignored the most obvious evidence of Hamas' use of booby traps.

One is the well-known video of the booby-trapped zoo and school in Gaza that the IDF discovered:


Another is this map, captured by the IDF, that showed the placement of booby traps in the Al-Atatra neighborhood:


The map shows placement of bombs in houses and near gas stations.

In addition, here is a photograph (from a JCPA PowerPoint) of a booby trap in a house:


Both the video and the map were well publicized during Cast Lead, and it is not possible that the Commission would have been unaware of this evidence.

In short, this short section on booby-traps shows Goldstone's bias against Israel, his bias towards Hamas, his playing fast and loose with the law, and his purposeful ignoring of evidence that goes against his apparently pre-formed conclusions.

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Islamic Jihad celebrating defeats

Islamic Jihad today is holding a festival to commemorate both the 14th anniversary of Israel's assassination of its founder, Fathi Shikaki, as well as the 9th anniversary of the beginning of the second intifada.

In other words, it is celebrating two major defeats.

And while most of the photos it is publishing seem to show lots of people attending these celebrations, one of the photos at Palestine Today betrays that they were expecting a lot more people than they got, based on all the empty seats:

To be consistent, maybe next year they will celebrate the first anniversary of this massive rally.

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Those wily Israelis and their Katyushas

On Tuesday, a Katyusha rocket was launched from Lebanon into Israel.

Who could have shot it? Hezbollah? A different terror group?

According to Lebanese president Michel Suleiman, of course not:

Lebanese President Michel Suleiman on Thursday put the blame on Israel regarding the Katyusha attack on northern Israel on Tuesday night. According to him, an "Israeli agent" was responsible for the action. "This work is a pretext for Israel to continue to violate Lebanese sovereignty, and a swift interpretation of what it had said about an expansion of intelligence activity in Lebanon because of Hizbullah's presence," Suleiman conveyed.

Meanwhile, an al-Qaeda-linked group claimed responsibility for the attack:

A group linked to Al-Qaeda claims it fired the Katyusha rocket attack from Lebanon that hit northern Israel earlier this week, a US-based group that monitors jihadist websites said on Thursday.

The Brigades of Abdullah Azzam, Battalions of Ziad Jarrah, said it was responsible for Tuesday's attack, according to a statement released on Thursday by the Al-Fajr Media Centre, SITE Intelligence Group said.

The group said it had prepared five rockets but only fired one, adding that the attack was to protest a Sunday raid by Israeli police on Jerusalem's Al-Aqsa mosque compound.

"The occupying Jews have dared to repeatedly raid the courtyard of Al-Aqsa Mosque ... In response to this aggression, a battalion among the Battalions of Ziad Jarrah" fired the Katyusha, it said.

Which is, of course, more proof that Al Qaeda is really a Zionist group.

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Rachel's Tomb and the making of an Arab lie

Today was the traditional anniversary of the death of the matriarch Rachel, and thousands of Jews went to Rachel's Tomb to pray. Ma'an reported it this way:

Thousands of Israelis, most of them ultra-Orthodox Jews, descended on the tomb of the Biblical matriarch Rachel in a militarized compound in the West Bank city of Bethlehem on Thursday.

Right-wing religious groups petitioned Israel’s highest court in 2004 to re-route the wall to include the tomb on the western side. To this day the site, formerly known as the location of the Bilal Bin Rabah Mosque, is accessible only from the Israeli side.

Was Rachel's Tomb ever really known as the Bilal Bin Rabah Mosque?

The answer is, of course, no. That name was created relatively recently - believe it or not, in the 1990s!

As Nadav Shragai revealed in a 2007 article:

In 2000, after hundreds of years of recognizing the site as Rachel's Tomb, Muslims began calling it the "Bilal ibn Rabah mosque."20 Members of the Wakf used the name first in 1996, but it has since entered the national Palestinian discourse. Bilal ibn Rabah was an Ethiopian known in Islamic history as a slave who served in the house of the prophet Muhammad as the first muezzin (the individual who calls the faithful to prayer five times a day).21 When Muhammad died, ibn Rabah went to fight the Muslim wars in Syria, was killed in 642 CE, and buried in either Aleppo or Damascus.22 The Palestinian Authority claimed that according to Islamic tradition, it was Muslim conquerors who named the mosque erected at Rachel's Tomb after Bilal ibn Rabah.

The Palestinian claim ignored the fact that Ottoman firmans (mandates or decrees) gave Jews in the Land of Israel the right of access to the site at the beginning of the nineteenth century.23 The Palestinian claim even ignored accepted Muslim tradition, which admires Rachel and recognizes the site as her burial place. According to tradition, the name "Rachel" comes from the word "wander," because she died during one of her wanderings and was buried on the Bethlehem road.24 Her name is referred to in the Koran,25 and in other Muslim sources, Joseph is said to fall upon his mother Rachel's grave and cry bitterly as the caravan of his captors passes by.26 For hundreds of years, Muslim holy men (walis) were buried in tombs whose form was the same as Rachel's.

Then, out of the blue, the connection between Rachel, admired even by the Muslims, and her tomb is erased and the place becomes "the Bilal ibn Rabah mosque." Well-known Orientalist Professor Yehoshua Porat has called the "tradition" the Muslims referred to as "false." He said the Arabic name of the site was "the Dome of Rachel, a place where the Jews prayed."27

Only a few years ago, official Palestinian publications contained not a single reference to such a mosque. The same was true for the Palestinian Lexicon issued by the Arab League and the PLO in 1984, and for Al-mawsu'ah al-filastiniyah, the Palestinian encyclopedia published in Italy after 1996. Palestine, the Holy Land, published by the Palestinian Council for Development and Rehabilitation, with an introduction written by Yasser Arafat, simply says that "at the northwest entrance to the city [Bethlehem] lies the tomb of the matriarch Rachel, who died while giving life to Benjamin." The West Bank and Gaza - Palestine also mentions the site as the Tomb of Rachel and not as the Mosque of Bilal ibn Rabah.28 However, the Palestinian deputy minister for endowments and religious affairs has now defined Rachel's Tomb as a Muslim site.29

On Yom Kippur in 2000, six days after the IDF withdrew from Joseph's Tomb, the Palestinian daily newspaper Al-Hayat al-Jadida published an article marking the next target as Rachel's Tomb. It read in part, "Bethlehem - ‘the Tomb of Rachel,' or the Bilal ibn Rabah mosque, is one of the nails the occupation government and the Zionist movement hammered into many Palestinian cities....The tomb is false and was originally a Muslim mosque."30

Indeed, the earliest reference I can find to such a name is from the BBC in 1997, and for the rest of the 90s that is the only news outlet I can find that ever used that terminology.

Looking at some old books, I see it was called "Kubbet Rahil" by Muslims in 1901. This travelogue from around 1880 says:

...We came to Rachel's tomb, a small square whitewashed domed building, part of which dates back to the twelfth century. It stands by the side of the road, a mile short of Bethlehem. It is in possession of the Jews, and is only opened on Thursdays; but we looked in through a small aperture on the south side.

Many other 1800's-era books do describe Rachel's Tomb as a mosque or as a place of worship for both Jews and Muslims. But none of them give any Arabic name that doesn't include the word "Rachel" in some form. And certainly none of them describe the spot as being exclusively Muslim.

Similarly, in 1949 the UN listed major holy sites according to religion. Here is what they said about Rachel's Tomb as being claimed by both Muslims and Jews:

Rachel died giving birth to Benjamin, when Jacob was travelling from Bethel to Hebron. A pillar was set up over her grave, and the spot was a familiar landmark in the time of Samuel. Several medieval writers refer to it as a Jewish Holy Place. The Arab writer Mugeir-al-Din described it as built of "eleven stones and covered with a cupola which rests on four pillars, and every Jew passing writes his name on the monument."

The tomb lies on the Jerusalem-Hebron road just before it enters Bethlehem. It consists of an open antechamber and a two-roomed shrine under a cupola containing a sarcophagus. The building lies within a Moslem cemetery, for which it serves as a place of prayer. The tomb is a place of Jewish pilgrimage. The Jews claim possession of Rachel's Tomb by virtue firstly of the fact that in 1615 Mohammad, Pasha of Jerusalem, rebuilt the Tomb on their behalf and by a Firman granted them the exclusive use of it; and secondly, that the building, which had fallen into decay, was entirely rebuilt by Sir M. Montefiore in 1845. The keys were obtained by the Jews from the last Moslem guardian at this time.

The Moslem claim to own the building rests on its being a place of prayer for the Moslems of the neighbourhood and an integral part of the Moslem cemetery within which it lies. The Moslems state that the Ottoman Government recognized it as such and further that it is included among the Tombs of the Prophets for which identity signboards were issued by the Ministry of Waqfs in 1328 A.H. They also assert that the antechamber was specially built, at the time of the restoration by Sir M. Montefiore, as a place of prayer for the Moslems. The Moslems object in principle to any repair of the building by the Jews although (up to the recent war) free access to it was allowed at all times.

In 1912 the Ottoman Government permitted the Jews to repair the shrine itself, but not the antechamber. Three months after the British occupation of Palestine the whole place was cleaned and whitewashed by the Jews without protest from the Moslems. In 1921 the Chief Rabbinate applied to the Municipality of Bethlehem for permission to repair the shrine. This gave rise to a Moslem protest, whereupon the High Commissioner ruled that, pending appointment of the Holy Places Commission provided for under the Mandate, all repairs should be undertaken by the Government. However, so much indignation was caused in Jewish circles by this decision that the matter was dropped, the repairs not being considered urgent. In 1925 the Sephardic Community requested permission to repair the Tomb. The building was then made structurally sound and exterior repairs were effected by the Government, but permission was refused by the Jews (who had the keys) for the Government to repair the interior of the shrine. As the interior repairs were unimportant, the Government dropped the matter, in order to avoid controversy.

The claim that Moses Montefiore built a mosque at Rachel's Tomb is laughable. Montefiore was a religious Jew, and he and his wife, who could not have children, identified so strongly with the biblical Rachel that they now lie in a replica of Rachel's Tomb that he built in England.

As far as the Muslim cemetery surrounding Rachel's Tomb is concerned, it is also relatively recent. Photographs of the area from the early 1900s show no such cemetery.


Once again, we have a case of where Muslims claim shrines of other religions as being their own. In this case, they added a completely new reason to venerate the site - specifically to take away the obvious fact that Rachel herself is associated exclusively with Jews.

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Work accident!

Hamas' Al Qassam website reports that Suleiman Abu Hassanein was killed this morning in a "special Jihad mission" in Rafah.

"Special Jihad mission" almost always translates to "accidentally blew himself up," although I suspect that on a couple of occasions it has meant "got killed by a co-terrorist."

Either way, time for another round of sweets!

The 2009 PalArab self-death count is now at 207.

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Two shot at LA synagogue

From AP:

LOS ANGELES—Los Angeles police have detained a man near the North Hollywood synagogue where two people were shot in the legs.

Officer Rosario Herrera says she was unsure if the arrest was connected with the shooting Thursday at the Adat Yeshurun Valley Sephardic synagogue.

Police say a black man with a handgun entered the building at about 6:20 a.m. and shot two Jewish people. Police are investigating the shooting as a hate crime.

The victims were taken to a hospital.

It was not clear how many people were in the building at the time.

The shul has a minyan at 5:30 and at 6:15 AM, so one would expect at least 10-20 men there at that time in the morning.

UPDATE: Many more details from the LA Times.

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Ancient Egyptian Baseball

The October 27, 1949 Palestine Post has this intriguing article:It appears that there is something to it. From Sports Illustrated in 2003:

Peter Piccione translates hieroglyphs for his history students the way a horror-movie archaeologist deciphers ancient curses from sarcophagi -- slowly and portentously. During slide presentations at the College of Charleston, he'll run through images ranging from papyrus paintings to the Pittsburgh Pirates before posing a question seemingly out of leftfield: "Did the Egyptians invent baseball?"

It's a rhetorical question for Piccione. For years this 51-year-old academic sleuth has investigated the mysteries of seker-hemat, a bat-and-ball game that predated Wee Willie Keeler and Big Train Johnson by at least four millennia. Piccione's seminal lecture lures crowds far outside Charleston -- he's given his baseball talk in Chicago, Dallas and Cooperstown; this month he's booked at Emory University in Atlanta -- and the way he tells it, the original sandlot was the Sahara. And the top hitter of 1475 B.C. was the pharaoh Thutmose III, a Near Eastern Leaguer as immortal as Babe Ruth.

An authority on ancient Egypt for three decades -- his doctoral dissertation decoded the rules of the Egyptian board game senet, a distant uncle of Parcheesi -- Piccione is the first scholar to propose that baseball grew out of a Pharaonic fungo. [Not quite, see above.] By decoding reliefs and texts on the walls of temples, the Brooklyn-born Egyptologist has determined that the really old ball game was played by kings during the festivals of certain goddesses and in front of the statues of deities. References to seker-hemat (roughly, "batting the ball") go back 4,400 years. In Piccione's reading of Pyramid Texts Spell 254, gods command a pharaoh to cross the heavens and "strike the ball" in the meadow of the sacred Apis bull.

A thousand years later, at the shrine of the love goddess Hathor in Deir-el-Bahari, Thutmose III was depicted playing pepper. In one hand T-3, as Piccione calls him, brandishes a sort of Memphis Slugger; in the other, a ball resembling the stitched leather orbs that have been found in excavations. Two priests, arms upright, grasp balls in their hands. The inscription: "Catching it for him by the servants of god."

The aim of the game, Piccione reckons, was to swat at and destroy the evil eye of Apopi, the serpent of chaos. Though it's unclear if T-3 was a designated Hittite, the professor suspects seker-hemat involved umpires, baserunning ("Running was a big part of Egyptian games" ) and huge crowds. "Who wouldn't want to see the Pharaoh beat Apopi?" Piccione asks.

The pictures above link to other articles on the topic. The first one is in the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown.

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Today's PalArab news (10/29)

Two Gazans were found stabbed to death in Ramallah. One of them was a UNRWA teacher. So far the UN has been silent on the issue.

PA president Mahmoud Abbas reiterated that he is seeking conciliation with Hamas. At the same time he blames Israel for trying to trying to start a religious war over Jerusalem. He's so...so...moderate!

Hamas in Gaza sentenced an alleged "collaborator" to death by firing squad.

Hamas is again considering the creation of an alternative PLO-type organization. They threatened the same thing last January.

Al Jazeera reports that the Goldstone commission was the brainchild of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC.) Who'da thunk it? (h/t Israel Matzav)

Israel intends to send 3000 cattle to Gaza over a ten day period starting next week.

A Gazan who took a detour from his Hajj pilgrimage has been stranded in the Jordan airport for ten days, with both Saudi Arabia and Cairo refusing to allow him in their countries.

And, in the Adventures in Autotranslation department, this anti-Hamas article in Palestine Press Agency features this indecipherable section translated by Google:

Our people have become immune to the lies that the smallest Atntli Palestinian boy sits on the ruins of the destroyed home in Gaza and the expected election promises are of the view vulva vagina coming down heavily on the heads of the leaders and members of Hamas.

There's a mental image I want to erase.

UPDATE: Gaza soccer and politics, from CNN. (h/t Media Backspin tweet)

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If I wrote this I would be called an Islamophobe - part 2

The Daily News Egypt has an op-ed about how freedom of thought is nonexistent in Egypt. While it starts off saying that Western societies suffer from the same malady of self-imposed thought censorship, auther Nael M. Shama ends off his piece with a bang:

In Egypt, the space for thought and expression has been tightening at alarming rates, with the mind of Egyptian society tilting towards the right. The heated discussion over whether niqab is religiously obligatory or not makes any contentions that the hijab (headscarf) is not obligatory (a debatable issue among theologians) seem awkward and intolerable, and thus excludes it from public debate. Under this suffocating censorship, no one would dare — like Ismael Adham did in the 1930s — write a book entitled “Why Am I Atheist?”

Censorship went hand in hand with the scarification of unsacred parties and issues. For instance, any explicit or implicit critique of the military establishment (or, say, its performance in the 1973 War against Israel) is today inadmissible. The number of sacred cows has been increasing.

Prolonged practice is the most effective means of indoctrination. After long periods of time of exposure to the same ideas, censorship of other ideas becomes voluntary. In Egypt, Islamists are not currently in power, but they need not worry much. That introspection is inhibited by intimidation and dissent is discouraged denotes that the doctrine of rigid Islamists has already been underway. History tells us that the control of power is often preceded by the control of ideas.

Already under a secular regime, novels have been banned by a “liberal” minister on the grounds they are blasphemous, various intellectuals were convicted by courts of being apostates and citizens were arrested for eating during the fasting hours of Ramadan.

Creativity and imagination recede when the mind is constrained by so many restrictions. Scrutiny and inquiry are substituted by stereotypic answers to all questions of life and destiny.

The withering away of the critical evaluation of ideas, thoughts and beliefs is giving way for the triviality and fundamentality of extremist minds. So at a time when the advanced world has been exploring the applications of Nanotechnology, investigating the secrets of the big bang and decoding the map of the human genome, our minds have been preoccupied with discussing the possibility of marriage between man and jinn [genie, h/t Jeff], figuring out the mandatory length and width of the piece of cloth covering women’s bodies and preaching about the benefits of drinking Prophet Mohamed’s urine.

Pity the nation that was once the hub of thought and knowledge in the region.

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If I wrote this I would be called an Islamophobe

Elaph.com, a popular liberal pan-Arabic news site based out of London, has an article that you won't see in most Arab media:

A recent report from the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life in America, has estimated the number of Muslims around the world as being one billion and five hundred and seventy million people.

Apart from the exaggerated number, something found in all the reports in which [Dalia] Mogahed is involved which are always clearly biased to the Muslims, the actual number is certainly at least one billion three hundred million people, while the number of Jews around the world is only about 14 million. Yet comparing what the Jews accomplished and what is done by Muslims over the last hundred years, in my estimation is the difference between mental health and serious mental problems saturated with religious bombast.

When you read the figures and statistics you immediately discover that science and scientific research is the one subject that elevates nations and creates glory for them.

There are 56 states calling themselves Islamic, but in all these countries there is not one university among the top 500 universities in the world, while small Israel has 6 universities on the list.

Islamic countries spend on average less than .02% percent of their GDP on scientific research, while Israel will spend 2.53% of their GDP on scientific research.

No wonder then that Jews have wons 180 Nobel Prizes in the last hundred years compared to only 9 Muslims.

No wonder then that the Jews excel in all areas as a result their respect for science and their investment in their children's education in the most important and best universities in the world. It is difficult to count the number of Jewish geniuses in all areas around the world from Albert Einstein to Sigmund Freud to Karl Marx to Paul Samuelson and Milton Friedman, Nobel Prize winner in economics ... and the list goes on.

[he then lists a whole bunch of prominent Jews in industry and science.]

In conclusion, the Islamic countries do not participate in the making of knowledge and do not participate in the dissemination of this knowledge, given that the number of books translated from all languages into Arabic since the time of Caliph al-Mamun is equivalent to those translated into Spanish in a single year, according to the Arab Human Development Report issued in 2002.

Islamic countries are busy complaining about the Jewish global conspiracy against the Muslims, while at the same time the Jews themselves are busy achieving more success and excellence through science and hard work.

Islamic countries are busy persecuting women and the non-Muslim minorities, and always blame the victims... The presence of a non-Muslim person in itself is a provocation to the Muslim extremist, while Muslim refugees from more than 90% of the number of refugees in the world, yet refugees to Israel from Muslim countries were absorbed.

There is no hope in the progress of Islamic science, except for scientific research, but this research is impossible when Islamic religion controls to all aspects of life ..... Here we go back to square one in which is the influence of religion causes the failure of these countries and communities.

The author, Magdi Khalil, is a liberal director of the Egypt-based Middle East Freedom Forum.

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PA minister: Selling "settlement" goods is treason

From Ma'an:

The Palestinian Authority’s new minister of national economy vowed on Wednesday to bring to justice anyone who deals in products produced in Israeli settlements as traitors.

“Those who trade these products will bear the stigma of treason,” Hassan Abu Libdeh told private sector and civil society figures at the offices of the ministry in Ramallah.

The minister said that the top priority of one of the ministry’s organs, the Palestinian National Committee for Organizing Domestic Market, is to enforce a boycott of settlement products.

Boycotting products made by Jews east of the Green Line is a "top priority" for the PA?

You would think that building their own tattered economy would be a bit more important.

The ironic thing is that these boycotts never work. Enterprising Arabs will always find ways to buy the best goods at the lowest prices, no matter where they come from, and edicts like these will just ensure that the underground economy prospers and no taxes are paid, further destabilizing the already teetering PA.

As usual, this will only hurt ordinary Palestinian Arab businessmen and consumers, and the trials for "treason" will cause infighting and resentment. It's happened before and it will happen again, as long as Palestinian Arab "leaders" define themselves as being anti-Israel (trying to hurt Jews) as opposed to as a true people in their own right (trying to help Palestinian Arabs.)

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Fayyad's plan exposes real Palestinian Arab goals

If one assumes that the goal of Palestinian Arab nationalism is the establishment of an independent state, the Arabs of Palestine have consistently made wrong decisions time after time again. From rejecting the Peel Commission recommendations in 1937 (where the Jewish State would have been minuscule and unsustainable) to the UN Partition through Camp David and Barak's offer, the answer has always been a resounding "NO!" This would appear strange, as the primary goal of nationalism is the establishment of a nation-state.

It has been pointed out many times that Israel was built by Zionists who created and expanded the institutions of statehood while under the control of the British. Their goal was a state, and they instinctively realized that the foundations must exist before such a state could be realized. So through the first half of the century, Jews built the infrastructure of the future Jewish state - hospitals, schools, quasi-government offices, social programs, an economic infrastructure, cultural institutions and more. They organized themselves and acted state-like way before 1948.

Palestinian Arabs have done no such thing. Any infrastructure they have has been mostly built either by Israel or by external parties like UNRWA.

Palestinian Arab prime minister Salam Fayyad is aiming to change that.

Fayyad is an anomaly in Palestinian Arab history; he has little following of his own and he did not come up through the terror ranks. His tenure as prime minister has been consistently pragmatic; he cleaned up a lot of the corruption and made the donor economy of the PA much more transparent to the West. He is not associated with any major political group.

Fayyad has put together a two-year plan of massively building Palestinian Arab institutions with the goal of unilaterally declaring an independent Palestinian Arab state in 2011. In a very real sense, this plan is a far bigger challenge to Israel than decades of terror have been. And it has not been lost on observers that Fayyad is using Zionism as his blueprint.

Fayyad's goal (at least initially) is clearly to build an independent nation-state. This is in direct opposition to the primary goal of Palestinian Arab leaders since Haj Amin al-Husseini - the destruction of Israel. Although they cloaked this goal in nationalist terms, their decisions over the years have proven that statehood was a political cover for their real aim. As such, Fayyad poses a challenge to the traditional Palestinian Arab mindset no less than it does to Israel.

In today's Comment is Free, former Palestinian Arab negotiator Ahmad Samih Khalidi tries to articulate to a Western audience why he is against Fayyad's plan. His article is convoluted and bizarre, as he attempts to hide the ingrained PalArab goals of destroying Israel while also trying to find a logical problem with statehood. It reveals much about the Palestinian Arab psyche. (Khalidi cannot even mention Fayyad's name.)

At the heart of the PA's programme lies a basic contradiction: while it claims to be building a state against the occupation, it is in practice building state-like structures with the occupation. No genuinely sovereign state has been or can be built while still under occupation, and nothing in Israel's current stance on the basic issues of Palestinian sovereignty (territorial extent, control over borders, the right to self defence, and so on) suggests otherwise.

Yet somehow Israel was built while under British occupation and with the presence of hostile Arabs surrounding the Zionists from within and without. Khalidi pretends to explain that:

The second problem stems from a total misreading of history. The Zionist movement may indeed have developed its state-building capacity while under the British mandate, but Israel only came into being as a state by using force against British and Palestinians alike. By way of contrast, the only military capability the PA is building under US supervision is directed against those who seek to take up arms against the occupation. The "Zionist" option of military self-reliance and readiness to use force for political-territorial ends is totally absent from the PA's new approach and is inimical to its political outlook.

In other words, Khalidi (besides making up a history where Israel was the aggressor in 1948) is saying that a Palestinian Arab state must by definition come into existence by successfully defeating Israel in battle.

The state-first approach carries other significant risks: it threatens to transform any final status negotiations into a prolonged state-to-state dispute whereby the fate of Palestinian refugees, the future of Arab Jerusalem and other critical issues will be indefinitely deferred. The urgency of dealing with Palestinians' national grievances as a whole will diminish, and their interests will be gradually pushed to the margins of international and regional concerns on the grounds that they have already fulfilled their major aspiration by being granted statehood.

Here Khalidi admits, in a backhanded way, that statehood is not the goal for the vast majority of Palestinian Arab leaders and thinkers: it is "dealing with Palestinians' [national] grievances." Addressing grievances are the goal: destroy Israel demographically with a "right of return," making Jerusalem Judenrein, and do everything necessary to avoid having a real state where the world will notice that Palestinian Arabs really do not have the will to be independent.

To Khalidi, and to generations of Palestinian Arabs, the goal is the negation of Israel, preferably by violence:

The first essential duty of a state is defending its citizens against foreign incursions and threats.

He believes that an army defines a state and that infrastructure is secondary. Terrorism, in this mindset, is more honorable than a negotiated peace, and humiliating the enemy trumps helping your own people. This is the reason that one hears the words "justice" so often in the words of Palestinian Arabs and their supporters: "justice" is a keyword that ensures that there will never be a compromise and that PalArabs (especially those who remain stateless in Arab countries) will remain in misery indefinitely.

Generations of a mindset where Palestinian Arab "nationalism" was defined in terms of what Jews control, rather than what would help ordinary Palestinian Arabs live their lives honorably, cannot be easily erased by Salam Fayyad.

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Hamas website brags about "humiliating the Jews"

The Hamas al-Qassam Brigades website has a long article bragging about how successful they believe they have been in kidnapping Israeli soldiers over the decades.

The headline is most instructive as to their goals in such operations:

Al-Qassam Brigades ... a long history of abducting soldiers and humiliating the Jews

Of course, this is another attribute of the psychological projection that most Arabs have; they are deeply humiliated every day by Israel's existence and they think that this is Israel's raison d'etre; and their goal is likewise to pay back that humiliation.

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