SPJ follows through and retires Helen Thomas award

As I mentioned last week, the Society of Professional Journalists officially decided to retire their Helen Thomas Award.

From SPJ:

INDIANAPOLIS – The board of directors of the Society of Professional Journalists voted Friday to retire the Helen Thomas Lifetime Achievement Award.

The vote means the Society will not give out an award for lifetime achievement. The action does not rename the award or remove Thomas’ name.

Both the board of directors and the executive committee heard from many people inside and outside of SPJ’s membership and journalism. SPJ fully understands the concerns expressed by both sides regarding whether renaming or retiring the award is necessary or improper.

A prominent objection to taking any action was that of Helen Thomas’ free speech rights. SPJ staunchly believes Helen Thomas and all people in the United States have a right to free speech. The Society defends that fundamental legal right as a core organizational mission, even when the speech is unpopular, vile or considered offensive.

However, the controversy surrounding this award has overshadowed the reason it exists. To continue offering the award would reignite the controversy each year and take away from its purpose: honoring a lifetime of work in journalism. No individual worthy of such honor should have to face this controversy. No honoree should have to decide if the possible backlash is worth being recognized for his or her contribution to journalism.

“As I said last week after the executive committee meeting, it’s time we in SPJ stop focusing on this divisive topic and start focusing on what unites us,” SPJ President Hagit Limor said. “There’s tremendously important work for us, like training our members for our ever-changing industry and fighting to ensure journalists and citizens have access to public records.”

A very proper decision.

Thomas' Arab defenders like Ray Hanania should note that the SPJ understood what Thomas really said, even as they continue to deny it:

The Jan. 8 executive committee meeting marked the second time in nearly six months the committee considered removing Thomas’ name, stemming from an incident earlier in 2010 when the longtime White House reporter and columnist commented to a rabbi on video that Jews in Palestine should “go home.” Thomas drew widespread criticism after the video was posted online, and she later resigned her job as a Hearst Newspapers columnist. The executive committee considered removing Thomas’ name during a July meeting but did not, noting it was a one-time, spontaneous remark for which she apologized.

In December, Thomas reiterated her previous comments before a speech in Dearborn, Mich., the Detroit Free Press and Detroit News reported. The News quoted her at the time as saying, “Congress, the White House and Hollywood, Wall Street are owned by the Zionists. No question.”

The SPJ knows very well what Thomas meant when she said "Zionists." Apologists for her are the ones who look like fools.

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Statistics fun: Freedom House vs. HRW

I am no math wizard, but I was wondering after my last blog post  if there was any correlation - positive or negative - between the scores that Freedom House uses to determine how free a country is, and how much attention that country receives by Human Rights Watch, in the Middle East and North Africa region (MENA.)

I calculated Freedom House's score by adding their two values for political rights and civil liberties, each on a scale of 1-7, so the freest countries would have a score of 2 and the least free a score of 14.

I used Google to estimate the number of mentions of each country at the HRW.com site.

Here is a chart with the raw numbers.

Country	HRW mentions	Freedom House score
Oman	328	11
Qatar	456	11
Bahrain	460	11
Algeria	787	11
Yemen	999	11
Morocco	1060	9
Kuwait	1130	9
UAE(+United Arab Emirates)	1200	11
Libya	1240	14
Jordan	1300	11
Lebanon	1450	8
Syria	1510	13
Tunisia	1530	12
Egypt	1930	11
Iraq	2170	11
Israel	3940	3
Saudi Arabia	4140	13
Iran	5730	12

And graphically (I normalized the freedom score to put them on the same visual scale):

In a sane world, one would expect a positive correlation between how unfree a nation is and how many mentions it receives in Human Rights Watch. However, there is practically no correlation between the two mathematically in the MENA region - in fact, there is a weak negative correlation between them (-0.13).

Perhaps a reader will take it upon himself to see if this lack or correlation extends to other parts of the world, or if it is only in the Middle East that HRW's emphasis is so skewed. 

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The 2% that drives the hypocrites crazy

Freedom House put out their annual survey of how free every country in the world is.

Here's the graphical representation of freedom in the Middle East and North Africa. Click to enlarge.

In the Middle East and North Africa, only 2% of the population live in countries that are considered "free" while 88% live in countries considered "not free" and 10% in "partially free" countries.

In fact, out of the five regions that Freedom House used for their statistics, the Middle East/North Africa was by far the least free in the world. In sub-Saharan Africa, for example, only 37% live in "not free" countries.


And the 2% in the Middle East/North Africa who do live in freedom? All of them happen to live in Israel.

It puts the Middle East problem in perspective, doesn't it?

(h/t Mostly Kosher)

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The first Elder of Ziyon art exhibition

In Edinburgh there is a new art exhibition:

Prompted by the invasion of the Gaza Strip by the Israeli Defense Force (27 December 2008 - 21 January 2009), John Goto has made a new series of apparently abstract images entitled Mosaic. 

Access to the conflict was denied to the international press. One common means of censoring digital images is the application of a standard graphics filter named Mosaic. Having mapped a grid across the chosen area of the picture, the filter averages the tones and colours within each rectangle. When applied by Goto to documentary images, the filter transforms them into ’abstracts’ reminiscent of the colour systems paintings made by artists Johannes Itten, Paul Klee and Max Bill.

Documentary images from the conflict that appeared on the internet were often made, not by professional photo journalists, but by eye-witnesses using mobile phones or small digital cameras. Goto explores the characteristically pixilated look to be found in such images. The artist has solved the problem of representing censored, hidden images by making double-sided prints onto single sheets of paper. Specially designed frames allow viewing from both sides. For this exhibition Goto has also created two mural size images. 

John Goto would like to acknowledge the support of D-MARC Digital and Material Arts Research Centre, University of Derby.

It is amazing how many images Goto managed to find of this "censored" war!

Here's a sample of his "art" - which any person even slightly familiar with computer graphics can tell you, involved absolutely no talent, and yet which Goto still needed to rely on a digital arts research center to do for him!

He's selling these prints for about $1400 each - unframed!

Because this is so successful, I am making my own on-line art exhibition of photos taken in Gaza, normally not visible to the world at large because of the sanctimonious posturings of people like Goto. It sounds like this is a pretty good racket.

My art exhibit took me all of five minutes to create, and I wish to thank a Windows paint package that was written in 1996 that happens to have a "mosaic" function (Paint Shop Pro v. 4.12):

Gaza's Crazy Water Park

Gaza's Roots Restaurant

Hamas burning American and Israeli flags in Gaza

The limited edition, signed color original prints - reminiscent of works by Johannes Itten, Paul Klee and Max Bill - can be purchased from the Elder of Ziyon Virtual Fine Arts Museum, starting at a mere $1100 each. Such a bargain! Contact me for details. I might even throw in a frame!

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Sunday afternoon links

A new research paper confirms that the PA is heavily dependent on foreign aid - and is not building a state infrastructure with the billions it is getting.

Daphne Anson has another exhaustive blog post - this time on the history of how Britain's Foreign Ministry has been pandering to Islamists and selling out Israel.

CiFWatch asks whether the editors of the Guargian are guilty of conspiracy with their part in Wikileaks.

Ashley Perry on the best decision he ever made - moving to Israel.

And I forgot to mention a couple of days ago a report that Hamas' successor to the assassinated Mahmoud al-Mabhouh has been arrested in the UAE - for money laundering. Stratfor reported it as well.

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Islamic leader in Israel demands mezuzot be removed from Old City gates

From The Muqata, a translation of an article in Ma'ariv:

The Israeli Northern Branch of the Islamic Movement, led by Sheikh Raed Salah, is now demanding the removal of all "Mezuzot" on the gates of Jerusalem's Old City.

According to the movement, the mezuzot are an attempt to Judaize the "Arab heritage" of the Old City.

In a statement issued by the movement, it stated that during a patrol in the Old City, they saw mezuzot on the various gates, and Jews touching the mezuzot as they passed through the gates.

"This is a disgusting attempt to Judaize the Arab and Islamic heritage of the Old City," the statement said, "and all the relevant Islamic institutions are called up to to act quickly to remove the mezuzot."

Mahmoud Abu Atta, spokesman for the institution "Mossad Al-Aqsa" said that he sees these mezuzahs "as continued attempts to Judaize the Old City. A Mezuzah is put on the door of a Jewish home yet this [the Old City of Jerusalem] is an Arab city."

A mezuza is a (protected) parchment handwritten with Judaism's holiest profession of faith, the Sh'ma, Deuteronomy 6:4-9 and 11:13-21. The Sh'ma itself is the source for Jewish law mandating that its words be affixed to the doorposts and gates of all areas controlled by Jews.

It is most appropriate to have mezuzot on the gates of Judaism's holy city!

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Iraq Christians fleeing to Turkey

From Al Arabiya/AFP:

Terrorized by increasing extremist attacks, more and more Iraqi Christians are fleeing in panic to neighboring Muslim-majority Turkey, among them solitary minors sent away by desperate parents.

In Istanbul, a tiny Chaldean Catholic community has embraced the refugees, serving as their first point of shelter before the United Nations or local civic groups offer a helping hand.

The number of arrivals, available statistics show, has sharply increased since October 31 when gunmen stormed a Baghdad church, killing 44 worshippers, two priests and seven security guards, in an attack claimed by Al-Qaeda's local affiliate.

"We saw many newcomers after the attack. We saw they had made no preparation and had no savings," said Gizem Demirci, an activist at the Association for Solidarity with Asylum-Seekers and Migrants.

"Moreover, we began to receive minors... whose families are still in Iraq but had just enough money to send away a son or a daughter," she added without offering any exact figures.

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My New York Times prophecy

On Friday, I tweeted:

Death toll in Tunisia riots tops 60. Must be Israel's fault.

My sarcastic point, which I had made Monday in a similar post, is that Arabs will blame Israel for every problem in the Arab world - and credulous Westerners will happily believe it.

At least I thought I was being sarcastic. But mainstream Middle East reporting has a way of outdoing even the most outrageous satire.

From the New York Times on Saturday:

Tunisia’s uprising electrified the region.... Yet the street protests erupted when Arabs seemed more frustrated than ever, whether over rising prices and joblessness or resentment of their leaders’ support for American policies or ambivalence about Israeli campaigns in Lebanon in 2006 and Gaza in 2009.

...That the events in Tunisia took place far beyond the region’s traditional centers of power did little to diminish the enthusiasm they seemed to generate. In fact, the very spectacle of crowds surging into the streets and overwhelming decades of accumulated power in the hands of a highly centralized, American-backed government seemed an antidote to the despair of past years — carnage in Iraq, divisions among Palestinians and Israeli intransigence and the yawning divide between ruler and ruled on almost every question of foreign policy.

Note the NYT's belief that Israel is the intransigent party in the conflict. It doesn't say "alleged" or "belief of" - the NYT is saying that the fact of Israeli intransigence riles up the Arab world, despite the fact that the Palestinian Arabs have not made a single real concession since 1988.

Only in paragraphs 18-20 does this writer, Anthony Shadid, mention the actual reason for the protests - well after he talks about his absurd guesses:

Tunisians’ grievances were as specific as universal: rising food prices, corruption, unemployment and the repression of a state that viewed almost all dissent as subversion.

Smaller protests, many of them over rising prices, have already taken place in countries like Morocco, Egypt, Algeria and Jordan. Egypt, in particular, seems to bear at least a passing resemblance to Tunisia — a heavy-handed security state with diminishing popular support and growing demands from an educated, yet frustrated, population.

In Jordan, hundreds protested the cost of food in several cities, even after the government hastily announced measures to bring the prices down. Libya abolished taxes and customs duties on food products, and Morocco tried to offset a surge in grain prices.

Ordinary Arabs have long ago stopped caring about their Palestinian brethren, and ordinary Arabs are the ones who are doing the rioting. But idiotic - or perhaps malicious - reporters like Shadid, and their NYT editors, will not bother to actually ask members of the Arab street what they think. They will uncritically parrot the lies of the leaders - the very leaders the people are protesting against!

(h/t Challah Hu Akbar)

UPDATE: The American Thinker has more on this article.

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Will STL find Iran behind Hariri murder?

From YNet: and other sources:

Sources familiar with the investigation into the assassination of Rafik Hariri in 2005 told Newsmax that the United Nations Special Tribunal for Lebanon will accuse Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei of giving the order to murder the former Lebanese prime minister, according to the Lebanese website Naharnet.

The sources told Newsmax, an American news website, that the tribunal will lay out evidence showing that the murder was committed by Iran's Quds force and Hezbollah.

The order to murder Hariri was transmitted to Imad Mughniyeh, Hezbollah's top commander at the time, by Quds force chief Qassem Suleymani, sources familiar with the investigation told Newsmax.

The sources said Mughniyeh and his brother-in-law, Mustapha Badr al-Dine, put together the hit team that carried out the attack. "The Iranians considered Hariri to be an agent of Saudi Arabia, and felt that killing him would pave the way for a Hezbollah takeover of Lebanon," one of the sources said.

According to the sources, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, and his brother-in-law, Assef Shawkat, the head of Syrian intelligence, also played key roles in the assassination plot.

The order to murder Hariri was transmitted to Hizbullah’s military leader, Imad Mughniyeh, by Quds force chief Qassem Suleymani, sources told Newsmax.

Mughniyeh was killed in a car bombing in Damascus on February 12, 2008. According to Saturday’s report, Mughniyeh put together the hit team that carried out the attack at the behest of Iran, with the help of his brotherin- law.

“The Iranians considered Hariri to be an agent of Saudi Arabia, and felt that killing him would pave the way for a Hizbullah takeover of Lebanon,” a source told Newsmax.

Iran was not the only country involved in the assassination plot, they said. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, and his brother-in-law, Assef Shawkat, the head of Syrian intelligence, also played key roles in the plan to murder Hariri, a source was reported as saying.

This is most interesting, and would have huge repercussions, but I have one question:

Why is the media suddenly quoting a Newsmax article from six weeks ago?

It appears that Lebanon's Naharnet found the Newsmax article earlier today, and when it published it then all these other outlets followed immediately.

Newsmax is a conservative-leaning site. I have no idea how good their reporting is, although I seem to remember this reporter, Ken Timmerman, appearing to have some good sources in the past.

So why is a six-week-old news item suddenly considered "news"?

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Did Israel test Stuxnet in Dimona?

A fascinating NYT article on Stuxnet:

The Dimona complex in the Negev desert is famous as the heavily guarded heart of Israel’s never-acknowledged nuclear arms program, where neat rows of factories make atomic fuel for the arsenal.

Over the past two years, according to intelligence and military experts familiar with its operations, Dimona has taken on a new, equally secret role — as a critical testing ground in a joint American and Israeli effort to undermine Iran’s efforts to make a bomb of its own.

Behind Dimona’s barbed wire, the experts say, Israel has spun nuclear centrifuges virtually identical to Iran’s at Natanz, where Iranian scientists are struggling to enrich uranium. They say Dimona tested the effectiveness of the Stuxnet computer worm, a destructive program that appears to have wiped out roughly a fifth of Iran’s nuclear centrifuges and helped delay, though not destroy, Tehran’s ability to make its first nuclear arms.

“To check out the worm, you have to know the machines,” said an American expert on nuclear intelligence. “The reason the worm has been effective is that the Israelis tried it out.”

...
The project’s political origins can be found in the last months of the Bush administration. In January 2009, The New York Times reported that Mr. Bush authorized a covert program to undermine the electrical and computer systems around Natanz, Iran’s major enrichment center. President Obama, first briefed on the program even before taking office, sped it up, according to officials familiar with the administration’s Iran strategy. So did the Israelis, other officials said. Israel has long been seeking a way to cripple Iran’s capability without triggering the opprobrium, or the war, that might follow an overt military strike of the kind they conducted against nuclear facilities in Iraq in 1981 and Syria in 2007.

Two years ago, when Israel still thought its only solution was a military one and approached Mr. Bush for the bunker-busting bombs and other equipment it believed it would need for an air attack, its officials told the White House that such a strike would set back Iran’s programs by roughly three years. Its request was turned down.

Now, Mr. Dagan’s statement suggests that Israel believes it has gained at least that much time, without mounting an attack. So does the Obama administration.
...
[Security expert Langer] quickly discovered that the worm only kicked into gear when it detected the presence of a specific configuration of controllers, running a set of processes that appear to exist only in a centrifuge plant. “The attackers took great care to make sure that only their designated targets were hit,” he said. “It was a marksman’s job.”

For example, one small section of the code appears designed to send commands to 984 machines linked together.

Curiously, when international inspectors visited Natanz in late 2009, they found that the Iranians had taken out of service a total of exactly 984 machines that had been running the previous summer.

Read the whole thing.

(h/t Challah Hu Akbar)

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Ken O'Keefe says Jews who do not criticize Israel are like pre-war Germans

From OyVaGoy:

When he gives interviews to the media, Ken O’Keefe usually concentrates on his favourite topics: himself and how heroic he is. However, of late he has been getting ever more angry, as even his own side begins to wisen-up to what a spectacular fake he is.

Here, during an interview on Press TV, he speculates whether Jews “as a people are a threat to every ounce of decency and humanity that exists”. He adds that if the Jewish people of the world do not turn against Israel, then they will be akin to Germans who failed to stop the rise of Hitler. What a creep.

Being insulted by Ken O'Keefe is perhaps the biggest compliment one can get.

But just to cover my bases, maybe I should ask every gentile on the planet to dissociate themselves from this lying nutcase, or else I will hold them responsible when he one day goes on his inevitable murder spree.

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Gellhorn on Meron

Two related excerpts from Martha Gellhorn's 1961 Atlantic article:

HIGH on a mountaintop [in Lebanon], with a down-sweeping view of orange groves and the satin blue of the Mediterranean, is a small Muslim camp named Mia Mia. Here one whole Palestinian village, amongst others, had landed; they came from a mountaintop in Galilee, a place called Meron. Their headman, or village leader, the Muktar, plied us with Coca-Cola and Turkish coffee in his exile's parlor. He is a beautiful man, perhaps sixty-five years old, lean, with exquisite manners. He wore the handsome white Arab headdress, held in place by the usual black double-corded crown; he was dressed in a well-preserved cream silk jacket, a white silk shirt, pressed gray flannel trousers, polished Italianate black shoes.

Whilst we sucked Coca-Cola through straws and studied his son's pitifully bad but lovingly executed paintings—a portrait of Nasser; Christ and the Virgin—the Muktar talked. Seventeen people of his village were massacred, which was why they fled, but an old blind woman of 104 was left behind and the Jews poured kerosene over her and burned her alive. How did they know, if they had all fled? Well, then the Jews went away and some villagers crept back and found her, and besides, the United Nations Truce Commission also found her.

My guide looked embarrassed. The Truce Commission was a shaky point. It was a strain to believe that the UN military observers, occupied with armies and frontiers, would have had time to investigate each atrocity story in the country. I wondered where the families of the massacred and the cremated were; everyone knows everyone else in a village, surely the surviving relatives were the best witnesses.

"I could tell you many such stories," said the Muktar.

"I am sure of it," said I. "But please tell me about Meron."

So I heard of Meron, their beautiful stone houses, their lovely, groves, their spacious and happy life in Eden; all lost now. I could readily imagine this aristocrat living in a palace on a mountaintop and decided that I would later go and see his home; but for the moment I accepted a rose from him, and we set off to pay calls in the camp.

---
The driver of my car, on the journey in Israel, was an Israeli Jew, born there, who speaks Arabic as his second mother tongue and looks so like Nasser that it is a joke. I said I wanted to visit the village of Meron, on a mountaintop in Galilee. He said that at Meron there was an ancient, temple of the Jews, the grave of a famous rabbi, a synagogue, a Yeshiva (the Orthodox Jewish equivalent of a Catholic seminary), but nothing else to his knowledge. Let us go and find out, I said. So we drove north through this country,' which is a monument to the obstinate, tireless will of man. In 1949, the new immigrants, like ants on the hillsides, were planting trees: their first job. It looked as if they were planting blades of grass and seemed a pitiful act of faith. Now the trees have grown.

There are countless changes in Israel, but the Arab villages along the road to Nazareth have not changed. The old adobe or field-stone houses cling to and grow from each other. They are charming, picturesque, primitive, and wretched; but not to Arab peasants. This is the way it always was; this is the way they like it and want to keep it.

We drove up the mountain. Between the synagogue and the heroic ruins of the two-thousand-year-old temple, we did indeed find Meron, the home of the aristocrat who had offered me a rose on a mountaintop in Lebanon. There were not more than twelve houses in the village. The Muktar's palace is a long narrow stone shed, with an ugly narrow porch along the front. Instead of beams, bits of rusted railway track hold up the porch. The other small houses were built of the honey-colored, rough field stone, with traditional graceful doors and windows. Inside, the houses were like stables unfit for decent animals. The rich fields and groves the Meron refugees had described were the steep slopes of the mountain behind, where the villagers cultivated tobacco and some fruit and fig trees. In their day, the village had no electric light or water; the women carried water on their heads from 'the wadi at the foot of the mountain. The view is a dream of beauty. Hardship for hardship, Meron is no better than their refugee camp, Mia Mia, perhaps not as good; but memory is magical, and Meron was home.

Beside these pretty stone hovels tower the remains of a great temple. The blocks of granite in the fragmented, wall are as massive as those' in the wall of Solomon's Temple in Jerusalem. The broken pillars are enormous, unadorned, and suddenly Samson is real and pulled down real, pillars as heavy as these. Here, two thousand years ago, the Jews were praying in a new temple, for two thousand years is not all that much in the history of the Jews or of this land. And here, with weeds around their low walls, stand the abandoned houses of the descendants of warrior strangers, the Arabs who came to this country and conquered it when the temple was some six hundred years old, doubtless already a ruin. Were the villagers of Meron happy when they lived on this mountain; did they think it Eden then? And why did they run away? The war never touched this place.

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Colbert on the Israeli spy vulture

And remember - I had the story first!

Israeli Vulture Spy

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog</a> Video Archive

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Gaza,1961 (Martha Gellhorn)

I had forgotten much of the 1961 Martha Gellhorn article, where she visited Palestinian Arab refugees, that I had excerpted on a tiny portion of a couple of years back.

Look at her description of Gaza in 1961:

TO ENTER the Gaza Strip you require a military visa from the Egyptian government in Cairo. I had arrived in Cairo expecting to proceed like the wind directly from there to Gaza but was informed, by the local UNRWA press officer, that this permit took two or three weeks to get, and sometimes you never got it. Besides, there was only one UNEF army plane to Gaza each Saturday, and they didn't like carrying anyone except their own personnel; besides, it was now Thursday, and tomorrow was the Muslim Sunday, and indeed all looked hopeless. I foresaw bumming a jeep ride over the sand-storming desert and infiltrating into the Strip somehow; but meantime I called on the Egyptian authorities.

Because of the Muslim holy day, and the number of passport photos I needed and the number of offices I had to run between, it took about four days to get the visa, and every minute was enjoyable. ...

THE Gaza Strip, from all accounts, would be a real hell hole. It is a roughly rectangular slice of land, on the southernmost Mediterranean frontier of Israel, some forty kilometers long by five to ten kilometers wide, and 365,000 people, refugees and residents, live on it. I imagined it as a sand dune, packed solid with human flesh, blazing hot, hideous, and filthy. It is none of these. The weather was so idyllic—a china-blue sky and a constant cool breeze—that I assumed this was special luck and at once asked my charming landlady about it. No, the weather in Gaza was always delightful. She had lived here for thirty years; there were two "sticky" weeks in the summer, otherwise you could not find a more benign climate. Flying over the Strip, I had noted plenty of sand, but also plenty of green. There were always citrus groves in Gaza, my landlady reported, Gaza was famous for them, but since the refugees came these had greatly increased, as had the general cultivation. Anything grows here, she said, exhibiting her blossoming garden.

Then I remarked that Gaza town was a beehive of activity, with all the UNEF soldiers, Danes, Norwegians, Indians, Canadians, Yugoslavs, who patrol the Israeli-Gaza border and spend money in the town in their free time, and the Egyptian upper crust which oversees the Palestinian officials, and UNRWA and visitors and the local residents and, indeed, the refugees. The refugees seemed to bring prosperity with them; it was most mysterious.

Not at all, said my landlady, we do not know why we are not completely bankrupt; but she was adding a third floor to her already roomy house, so great is the demand for lodgings. Sizable villas are being built in what must be the fashionable section of Gaza. The main square boasts an array of parked Mercedes, finned pastel American cars, and humbler Volkswagens. The taxis in Gaza are new. There is an imposing movie theater, in the ugly world-wide chromium-and-junk style; there are abundant cafés and numerous ill-lit dingy shops, typical of the region. An economist could surely answer this riddle: if no one has any money, what are these eccentric merchants and purveyors of services doing?

The refugee camps are much larger than those in Lebanon, small towns by Middle Eastern standards. They are by no means luxury establishments, but many people live in a nastier state in American and European slums. The poor villagers of Gaza are not as well housed or cared for as the refugees. The Gaza Strip is not ,a hell hole, not a visible disaster. It is worse; it is a jail--with a magical long white sand beach, and a breeze, and devoted welfare workers (UNRWA) to look after the prisoners.

The Egyptian government is the jailer. For reasons of its own, it does not allow the refugees to move from this narrow strip of land. The refugees might not want to leave at all, or they, might not want to leave for good; but anyone would become claustrophobic if penned, for thirteen years, inside 248 square kilometers. A trickle of refugees, who can prove they have jobs elsewhere, are granted exit visas. The only official number of the departed is less than three hundred, out of 255,000 registered refugees. It seems incredible. Rumor says that more refugees do manage to go away illegally, by unknown methods.

These locked-in people--far too many in far too little space--cannot find adequate work. Naturally, there is less chance of employment than in the other "host countries." Meantime, they are exposed to the full and constant blast of Egyptian propaganda. No wonder that Gaza was the home base of the trained paramilitary bands called commandos by the Egyptians and Palestinians, and gangsters by the Israelis--the fedayin, whose job was to cross unnoticed into Israel and commit acts of patriotic sabotage and murder. And having been so devastatingly beaten by Israel again, in 1956, has not improved the trapped, bitter Gaza mentality; it only makes the orators more bloodthirsty.

ANOTHER Mad Hatter conversation, practically a public meeting, took place in the office of the leader of two adjacent camps, a man in charge of some 29,000 people. The camp leader, the self-appointed orator, sat behind his desk. The Secret Service youth, mentioned earlier, the quiet UNRWA Palestinian, my regular chaperone, and the three uniformed cops of highish rank completed the company.

First the camp leader told me how rich they had all been in Palestine and how miserable they were now and how much land they had all owned. I do not doubt for one minute how much land some of them owned, nor how rich some of them were, and I did not point out this subtle distinction: if everyone owned the land claimed, Palestine would be the size of Texas; if everyone had been so rich, it would have been largely populated by millionaires. To gild the past is only human, we all do it; and to gild it with solid gold is even more human if you are a refugee.

This part of his address was already so familiar that I could have recited it for him.

Then he spoke of Jaffa, his native town. The Jews surrounded the city, firing on all sides; they left one little way out, by the sea, so the Arabs would go away. Only the very old and the very poor stayed, and they were killed. Arab refugees tell many dissimilar versions of the Jaffa story, but the puzzler is: where are the relatives of those who must have perished in the fury of high explosive the infallible witnesses? No one says he was loaded on a truck (or a boat) at gun point; no one describes being forced from his home by armed Jews; no one recalls the extra menace of enemy attacks, while in flight. The sight of the dead, the horrors of escape are exact, detailed memories never forgotten by those who had them. Surely Arabs would not forget or suppress such memories, if they, too, had them.

As for those Arabs who remained behind, they are still in Jaffa--3000 of them--living in peace, prosperity, and discontent, with their heirs and descendants.

"The Jews are criminals," the camp leader continued in a rising voice. "Murderers! They are the worst criminals in the whole world."

Had he ever heard of Hitler?

He banged his table and said, "Hitler was far better than the Jews!"

"Far better murderer? He killed six million Jews as a start," I observed.

"Oh, that is all exaggerated. He did not. Besides, the Jews bluffed Hitler. They arranged in secret that he should kill a few of them--old ones, weak ones--to make the others emigrate to Palestine."

"Thirty-six thousand of them," said the Secret Service man, proving the point, "came here, before the war, from Central Europe."

"It's amazing," I said. "I have never before heard anywhere that the Jews arranged with Hitler for him to kill them."

"It was a secret!" the camp leader shouted. "The documents have been found. Everyone knows. It was published. The Jews arranged it all with Hitler."

There is a limit to the amount of Mad Hattery one can endure, so I suggested that we visit the camp. I knocked on a door at random, before the camp leader had a chance to steer me anywhere. Two young married couples lived here. In a corner by the courtyard wall stood a group of visitors, silent Arab women, in their graceful long blue dresses, slightly hiding their faces behind their white head veils. The older women wore silver coins on chains across their foreheads; this is very pretty and is also guaranteed to prevent sickness of the eyes. It was useless to try to lure the women into talk, but one of the husbands talked freely. The Secret Service youth translated.

"It is the blame of America that this happened, because they help the Jews. We only want America to help us to get back to our land."

"How?" I asked. "By war?"

"When the Arabs are united, we will make the war."

"What do you want from us then? Arms to make this war with?"

"No, we want you to stop giving arms and money to Israel. Just now Kennedy has given Israel $25 million for arms"

"I do not believe that the U.S. government has ever given or sold arms to Israel. What about the arms Nasser gets from Russia and Czechoslovakia?"

"That is all right. That is different. They are peace-loving nations. They only want to help the undeveloped countries."

The Secret Service man put in: "America offered us arms, but with conditions. We will not accept conditions. So we take from the Eastern countries, who give without conditions."

"What do you do?" I asked the fat young husband.

"Nothing."

"What would you like to do?"

"Be a soldier and fight Jews."

This oratory pleased the public very much.

"Do you all like Nasser?" I asked, politely.

Wide smiles. General joy.

"We do. Certainly. Oh, of course. He will unite us and make us strong. He is our leader."

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Latest Latma (1/14/11)

A lot of political jokes that only Israelis would get, but a very good short commercial for a new horror-film sequel.

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