Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Sunday, July 26, 2009

Zionists control the weather!

I just came across another of the usual nutty anti-semitic articles in Pakistan Daily where they claim that Zionists have a plan to depopulate the world with depleted uranium. It quotes one Leuren Moret:

Leuren Moret is a US expert on radiation and public healthcare. In her 2007 interview, she said: “The leadership in the US, the Congress, the White House, and the Pentagon have been taken over by a shadow government – that shadow from Wall Street and the city of London. The US is bankrupt and is being carved up like a turkey by the globalists. Europe is too… the US government nuked its own people with atomic bomb testing, nuclear power plants, and now depleted uranium…..So it is very clear that depleted uranium weaponry is being used for the purpose of depopulation in the Middle East, Central Asia, Lebanon, Yugoslavia… and these areas of course are rich in mineral resources that the Zionist Anglo-American economic empire wants to control. ... The Zionist Anglo-American banking establishment is an international permanent war economy, a war crimes racketeering syndicate, the most vicious and ruthless in the history of the world: once again, they are the greedy bankers of the Wall Street and the city of London, and let’s include the British throne which will soon crown a Rothschild as king….”

Moret herself found this article at the Pakistan newspaper and commented on it:

Excellent article and just precisely what the Zionists are carrying out – global depopulation.

What are Moret's qualifications as an expert on these issues? According to her Wikipedia entry, a bachelors in geology and a masters in Near East Studies. And she claims to have worked at Lawrence Livermore labs for a few years, although it is unclear if she did any scientific work whatsoever.

She has already been exposed as a fraud for her claims about birth defects in Gulf War veterans, especially as she refuses to abandon her claims after they have been disproven.

But it seems that her vitriol about that world Joooo conspiracy is not limited to merely wanting to destroy the world food supply and radiate the planet. No, the evil Joooos are up to something even more sinister, as this interview of her from last year shows:

HAARP: ZIONIST SCIENCE

by Leuren Moret

If you are wondering about strange weather, we haven't seen anything yet... the Zionist environmental weapons are being rolled out. The citizens of the world are engaged in a global war with their own institutions. Our children are the real target of wars now.

The greatest weapons system in the history of humanity is now in play - HAARP. First man discovered chemical energy and developed weapons such as gunpowder. Then man discovered nuclear energy and developed atomic bombs.

Now man has discovered electromagnetic energy and developed HAARP, an undeclared global electromagnetic war. It is the utlimate weapon of the global Zionist conspiracy and it must be stopped:

ROGUE OCEAN WAVES documented Jan. 1, 1995 the year HAARP was turned on.

200 Supercargo ships have disappeared in the oceans without a trace in
the past 20 years. BBC report: 5 ships a week now are disappearing.

TECTONIC EVENTS triggered by HAARP:

Kobe earthquake 1995 - bankrupted (the Queen's) Barings Merchant bank,
City of London;
Military excuse to put seismic (surveillance) network around Taiwan
and Japan

Sumatra earthquake 2004 - Military excuse to put seismic (surveillance)
network around Indian Ocean and shipping lanes for Asia's energy to
come from Israel - US/UK gas pump for Asian countries cut off from
central Asian pipelines

China earthquake 2008 - causing flooding and starvation; chaos before
Olympics; tremendous cost of disaster to China economy

WEATHER MODIFICATION - Hurricanes, cyclones, tornadoes, storms by heating
sea surface just 1 degree

Hurricane Katrina 2005 - attempt to implement landgrab in New Orleans
Black Sea Storm 2007 - environmental devastation of Black Sea created
at UK HAARP facility at Aquiteria, CYPRUS, as payback for Putin's
pipelines to Italy and southern Europe

Myanmar cyclone 2008 - flooded Myanmar one week before the rice
harvest; Myanmar produces more rice than the US, engineered famine
Iowa storms 2008 - destruction of major corn and soy crops, will drive
meat and dairy prices up in US, famine agenda in US

So when we joke around saying that we Jews are responsible for earthquakes, floods and global warming - people actually already believe it!

Even funnier, is that Ms. Moret has (claimed to have?) testified as an expert witness to various international committees and to have contributed to UN reports, which just goes to show that if you call yourself an expert, people tend to believe you, no matter how much of a quack you may be.

Egypt seizes 18,000 Viagra pills meant for Gaza

Palestine Press Agency reports on Egyptian officials seizing some 18,000 Viagra pills that were destines to be smuggled to Gaza in the Rafah tunnels.

I guess that the Israeli blockade really does leave Hamas impotent!

UPDATE 1: But don't blame Egypt....they were just trying to make sure that life in Gaza isn't so hard.

Frequent Flyer open thread

I am traveling today and will not be posting much more for a while.

Meanwhile, feel free to shoot the breeze.

Today's PalArab news 7-26-09

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Sixth Fatah Conference is going to be a zoo!

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

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

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

Islamic Jihad's memorial parade!

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

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

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

Coca Cola - the official soft drink of Islamic Jihad.

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

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

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

Target practice!

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

And the fans go wild!

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

Work accident!

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

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

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

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

Saudi Arabia mulls minimum age for marriage

The good news:

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

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

The bad news:

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

At the age of ONE???

Today's PalArab news 7-24-09

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Amazing Double Martyrs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When I looked at the PMoH Arabic list I saw

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

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

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

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

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

Arab News has classic anti-semitic article

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Middle East political anecdote

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Islamist territorial goals, illustrated

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

One of the speakers had an interesting presentation:

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

It seems we have the answer:

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

Not to mention China.

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

From YNet:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fatah's constitution still calls for:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Prominent Christian attacked in Gaza

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

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

Islamic shari'a finance in trouble

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

Well, you can flush that idea down the toilet:

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

And another article:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hamas invested in American strip clubs?

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

But it's to good not to share:

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

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

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

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

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

Deference

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Shepherd Hotel in Jerusalem, that was legally purchased by Irving Moskowitz decades ago and has now caused such an issue as the US considers it a "settlement," was once owned by the infamously anti-semitic Mufti of Jerusalem al-Husayni.

Since Husayni was an avid supporter of Hitler and was complicit in the Holocaust, Avigdor Lieberman wants Israel to distribute photos of Husayni with Hitler to blunt criticism of Israel's allowing the hotel to be turned into apartments where Jews could live.

It is unclear if the Mufti ever lived at the site, but it is indeed ironic that a building once owned by someone who wanted to make Jerusalem and all of Palestine Judenrein is the one that the State Department wants so badly to be - Judenrein.

And don't forget how much Hitler liked the Mufti, especially when he saw his Aryan features:

Notice the last line.

Irritating Blogger changes

Google has just made some changes to Blogger that are bugging me.

While I used to be able to search, access and edit any of my previous posts from within the Edit screen, now I am limited to my most recent 5000 posts. I have lost edit access to any post from my first 15 months of blogging, including being able to tag the posts appropriately. (For example, I recently tagged all my book reviews, but couldn't tag my review of the sixth Harry Potter book.)

Also, the search engine at the top of the page has changed from "find every match and list it in reverse chronological order" to "find best match." Which is sometimes better, but I could do a Google relevance search from Google. Sometimes I am looking for a specific post from a certain time period and now I can't find it anymore.

Oh, well.

Case study in hate: The Guardian looks at Moskowitz

The Guardian is nothing if not consistent.

It has an article on Jewish American millionaire Irving Moskowitz and makes it sound like he is victimizing poor Mexican Americans, leeching money out of them to send to evil Israeli settlers. The language is unbelievably misleading:

For the winning punters chancing their luck at Hawaiian Gardens' charity bingo hall in the heart of one of California's poorest towns, the big prize is $500. The losers walk away with little more than an assurance that their dollars are destined for a good cause.
But the real winners and losers live many thousands of miles away, where the profits from the nightly ritual of numbers-calling fund what critics describe as a form of ethnic cleansing by extremist organisations.
Each dollar spent on bingo by the mostly Latino residents of Hawaiian Gardens, on the outskirts of Los Angeles, helps fund Jewish settlements on Palestinian land in some of the most sensitive areas of occupied East Jerusalem, particularly the Muslim quarter of the old city, and West Bank towns such as Hebron where the Israeli military has forced Arabs out of their properties in their thousands.

Doesn't that make it sound like all of Moskowitz' money goes towards settlers and displacing Arabs? (As if the legal purchase of land in the West Bank is somehow evil.) You have to really parse the sentence hard to see that the Guardian isn't really saying that...they just want you to believe it.

The Guardian then goes on to the oldest trick in the book - finding a critic that they can quote extensively, ignoring anyone who can speak on Moskowitz' behalf. And the critic they found was a goldmine - a rabbi named Haim Dov Beliak, who as far as I can tell has no congregation (he used to be a rabbi of a conservative synagogue but his name is no longer on their website).

Beilak has been a severe critic of Moskowitz and of Israeli attempts to defend itself for a long time - he was against the Gaza operation, for example. He runs StopMoskowitz.org, a website that seems to have been inactive for years.

The website claims that the bulk of Moskowitz' money goes towards what it characterizes as "hard right" or "self-serving" organizations with only a tiny amount given to what it considers real charities. This is apparently where the Guardian gets its information from.

Charities that Beliak says are "hard right" include Bar Ilan University, the Zionist Organization of America, the National Council of Young Israel, a bunch of American yeshivas and Orthodox synagogues (as well as some Christian charities.)

Charities that he considers "self serving" include millions given to the local Little League, hospitals, scholarship programs and food banks for the area around the bingo hall.

In other words, the Guardian is trusting a wacked-out anti-Zionist "rabbi"'s lies to say that most of Moskowitz' dollars are going towards what Beliak calls "militants."

His foundation does give plenty to Jews in Judea and Samaria, no doubt, including many schools and charities there. But to the Guardian's readers, any money given to Israel altogether is considered evil:

But tax returns show that the bulk of the donations go to what the foundation describes as "charitable support" to an array of organisations in Israel.

Including such horrible places as Magen Dovid Adom.

The Arab media has jumped all over this, because this story is tailor-made for them - not only is an American Jew funding such horrible things as girls' schools in Kiryat Arba, but he made his money with a forbidden activity in Islam - gambling!

Time to dismantle UNRWA

The UNRWA is an organization that is dedicated to perpetuating the misery of Palestinian Arab refugees and their descendants forever. It does not act to resettle them, as the UNHCR does; it creates its own definition of "refugee" that is at odds with the definition of refugee for everyone else besides non-Jews who happened to live in Palestine in 1946-48, and it works hard to ensure that many Palestinian Arabs remain in camps rather than integrate into the countries in which they had been born.

A tiny number of Palestinian Arabs do end up under the aegis of the UNHCR rather than UNRWA, notably those who were kicked out of Iraq. Slovakia just agreed to accept nearly a hundred of them temporarily while permanent homes are found elsewhere. Arab nations, of course, have no interest in resettling them - although hundreds of thousands of Iraqi refugees did flee to Jordan and Syria, the ones whose ancestors lived in Palestine are not accepted.

The UNHCR, which is the UN organization that is responsible for every real refugee on the planet, just announced that because of a budget shortfall they wil not be able to extend medical care to some 600 Iraqi families in Jordan.

What are the budgets for the two refugee agencies, the one for Palestinian Arabs and the one for everyone else? As far as I can tell, the annual UNHCR budget is between $1 billion and $1.5 billion, and the annual UNRWA budget is about a half-billion dollars (possibly higher this year with extra appeals.)

However, the UNHCR is responsible for nearly 33 million people. UNRWA says that 4.6 million "refugees" fit under their definition but in fact there are less than two million registered "refugees" that take advantage of their services.

Which means that UNHCR's spends something less than $45 per refugee, while the UNRWA spends over five times that amount per fake Palestinian Arab "refugee."

If the world really cares about Palestinian Arab refugees, a number of tasks are way past due:

Discard the definition of "refugee" that guides UNRWA, immediately reducing the number of Palestinian Arab refugees from millions to the relatively few who were displaced in 1948.

Shame Arab countries into stopping their enforced discrimination against Arabs of Palestinian origin and start naturalizing the millions of Arabs who were born in their countries.

Dismantle UNRWA altogether, and place the few remaining real Palestinian Arab refugees under the umbrella of UNHCR where they can be resettled.

Take the bloated UNRWA budget, which now runs schools, medical clinics and other wonderful services that the real refugees of the planet cannot take advantage of, and re-allocate it to people who really need it.

The only reason this has not happened, and the only reason the number of "refugees" keeps increasing over six decades after the war that displaced them, is because of a lie - the idea that this is necessary to maintain Palestinian Arab "unity." If they are naturally unified, they don't need their brethren to oppress them to maintain that unity; if they aren't so unified then the entire idea of Palestinian Arab nationalism is a lie that is artificially maintained to pressure Israel.

The only way to find out would be to stop the endemic discrimination against Palestinian Arabs in the Arab world, allow them to become normal citizens - and see how many take advantage of that offer. In Lebanon, a number of loopholes have popped open through the years that tens of thousands of Palestinian Arabs took advantage of to become citizens, and then those loopholes were shut tight. Imagine how many would jump at the opportunity to become Arab citizens if they could?

Palestinian "SATs"

The biggest story in all the Palestinian Arab papers is that the results of the Tawjihi secondary school exams have been released.

According to Ma'an,

The exams are administered once a year, and comprise tests on a variety of different subjects, including English, Arabic, Science, Math, Religion (students can choose Islam or Christianity), Palestinian History, Geography, Biology, Physics, Industry and Agriculture.

It is interesting that a passing grade is only 51%. Even with that seemingly low threshold, out of 86,824 students registered for the exams, only 47,469 passed (55%), with only 27,724 passing in the humanities sections and 12,611 passing in the sciences.(Apparently, you only have to pass in one or the other in order to go on to college.)

I don't know, but do these results sound like a reason to celebrate? I suppose it is possible that the exams are really hard, but to craft an exam where students are only expected to know barely half of the answers seems strange.

Yet celebrate they did. Mahmoud Abbas congratulated the students who passed (and said "better luck next year" for those who didn't - you are allowed to take the exams 9 times). Massive gunfire and "fireworks" were heard in Gaza, scaring some residents.

Rachel Corrie propaganda at SF Jewish Film Festival

The San Francisco Jewish Film Festival is allowing virulently anti-Israel groups to present a film there that canonizes Rachel Corrie. The groups include the Jewish Voice for Peace and the American Friends Service Committee, which both call for divestment from Israel and love to participate in rallies that equate Zionism with Nazism. Cindy Corrie, fervent ISM supporter, will be speaking there as well.

And the San Francisco Jewish Federation continues to fund this festival.

The SFJFF justifies this event with the usual ultra-liberal platitudes that the film looks at all viewpoints, that it must present all sides of a story, blah blah blah. Demonizing Israel is not even trendy anymore in SF; it is de rigueur.

(I find it ironic that a Jewish film festival is scheduled during the Nine Days of mourning for the destruction of the Temples, when attending movies is highly inappropriate for religious Jews. And the Rachel Corrie video is being shown on Shabbat!)

If I would have known about this a few months ago, I would have submitted my own Rachel Corrie film to be screened. After all, it is controversial (banned by YouTube!) , at least as accurate, and almost certainly far more entertaining. If they want to be cutting edge and controversial, my film would fit the bill much more than another tired Israel-bashing fest.

Details about the problems at the festival and who you can contact can be found here.

Another airhead going Jewish?

Only a couple of months ago, Lindsay Lohan said she wanted to convert to Judaism. Now, Britney Spears is said to be going the same, um, derech.

Apparently, Kabbalah is no longer the "in" thing, not to mention that people in Hollywood think that becoming a Jew is a great career move.

Why do these airhead shiksas always wait until they are the punchlines to Conan jokes before they decide to join the Chosen People? And why do we have to be the ones chosen?

Don't they realize that the easiest way to turn off their Jewish significant others is to change from an irresistible shiksa into a JAP?

What-ever.

Anyway, Andy Borowitz in the New Yorker channels Britney's diary as she goes through the arduous process of becoming a yiddishe mamma(ry.)

Shalom, Diary:
I think Rabbi Pearlstein is really pissed at me. Today in Jewish class he was going through the Halakha, which I thought was the Jewish word for Hannah Montana but turns out to be like a whole bunch of boring laws about days of the week and pork and shit, and I was like, “Rabbi P., is there any way you could break this down into a bunch of tweets? I’ll read it on my phone on the way to rehearsal.” He got so mad those curls on the sides of his head started shaking. (I don’t know why he won’t let my stylist snip them off. They’re not a good look for him, K.?)

The story has a happy ending, though.

Ma'an proves its boar case by quoting itself

Ma'an has yet another of its articles about wild boars in the West Bank, but this one is a little bit more even-handed:

Salfit residents have continuously complained about the boars, which they say are not indigenous to the area, attacking residents and crops in the northern West Bank districts. Last February 53-year-old Hikmat Abdul Mu'ti from the town of Beit Rima was hospitalized after suffering "deep wounds," according to medics at Yasser Arafat Hospital in Salfit city.

Boars have been causing problems inside Israel, as well. Israel's Nature and Parks Authority instituted a massive cull in the northern Haifa region in May, following complaints similar to the Palestinians' in Salfit.

But you know that they can't report on the pigs without blaming the Jews somehow:

Environmentalists cite Israel's West Bank wall as a potential cause for the buildup of wild pigs in Salfit, as in recent years their annual migration toward the Galilee has been disrupted.

But...I thought they weren't indigenous to the area. Could it be that the residents of Salfit are being less than honest?

No matter. We have other bacon to fry:

Some Salfit residents claim that the wild boars have escaped or were released intentionally from nearby Israeli settlements such as Ariel, although pigs are generally considered unclean in Judaism, as well as Islam. The only known Jewish-run pig farm in the region, the Institute for Animal Research, operates inside Israel at the Negev kibbutz of Lahav.

Still others insist that they have witnessed the pigs being unloaded from trucks by settlers. Mohammad Hassan last month told a Land Research Center field researcher he saw settlers release some in the Al-Ashara region of the Salfit-area village of Iskaka.

Now comes the funny part:

The Applied Research Institute Jerusalem (ARIJ) also reports that settlers from Ariel "frequently" release wild boars into the area, causing economic damage and even physical attacks on people. The organization stated that there were four reported cases where children were injured by the animals.

Who is the ARIJ? Well, they have a very nice web page and they have a number of projects in the territories. So I looked at the last couple of their newsletters to see what they have to say about the boars. Here's one of them:

Boars set free by Israeli settlers damaged sheep barns and beehives in the northern West Bank village of Salem, east of Nablus. Boars attacked three homes and sheep barns, owned by Theib and Ziad Hasan, as well as 32 beehives owned by Taha Hamdan. The boars also attacked a car owned by
Baha’ Hussein on his way out of the village. Maannews (May 3, 2009).

In fact, at least for the past few months, every single story in ARIJ that said that settlers released boars was a direct quote from Ma'an itself!

Ma'an finally realized that its incessant insistence that the boars were raised by evil Jewish settlers made no sense, and it tried to craft this story to include the criticisms. But it is still invested in the idea of Jewish-owned pigs that it quotes a seemingly impartial scientific sounding organization that insists that Jewish settlers frequently release the pigs - an organization that gets all its boar information from the previous months of Ma'an lies!

The perfect feedback loop!

Another Hamas terrorist killed "on a Jihad mission"

The Al Qassam Brigades website mentions another Hamas member who accidentally got offed while training to kill Jews, this time in Gaza City.

The 2009 PalArab self-death count is now at 119.

Jordanian criminals disguising themselves as Muslim women

Al-Arabiya (Arabic) reports on a relatively new phenomenon - Jordanian criminals are disguising themselves with hijabs and niqabs to do various crimes.

The crimes include "robbery, theft, sorcery and sexual abuse."

The crimes have reportedly been inspired by robberies in Great Britain done by men disguising themselves in niqabs.

For the past few years there have been increasing reports of men with veils snatching purses, abducting women and holding up banks and stores.

They also go into apartment houses, ask around to verify that no men are around and then force themselves in and steal items.

Training for the Saudi Vice Squad

From the Saudi Gazette:

The British Council in Riyadh has begun teaching English to members of the Commission for Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice (Hai’a) as part of ongoing training to improve the organization’s skills in communication and dialogue.

Hai’a spokesman Abdul Mohsen Al-Qaffari said that the six-level course would help improve staff competence in their work.

The Hai’a office in the Eastern Province also plans to hold a five-day course on issues related to black magic and those who practice it for 25 of its members.

Because when you are in the Muttawa, you have to be prepared for anything: English-speakers and practitioners of black magic.

12 year old Saudi girl divorces her husband, 37

From the Saudi Gazette:

A Shariah Court in the Eastern Province has permitted the divorce of a 12-year-old girl from her 37-year-old husband after her siblings filed a complaint stating that their father married her off without their consent.

A judicial source said the 12-year-old’s siblings objected to the union on the grounds of her age as well as “other reasons related to marriage”, and that when the husband was summoned he agreed to the divorce at the request of the girl’s family.

I wonder how long she was married to her pedophile husband before this.

Open thread plus

It looks like I will not be able to post much today, and there is lots of leftover flotsam in the comments from yesterday's freak show, so feel free to discuss amongst yourselves the major issues of Life, the Universe and Everything.

And also check out Barry Rubin, who has been on an incredible tear lately.

Today's PalArab news 7-20-09

The Fatah infighting continues. A special session of the PLO Executive Committee met on Saturday to condemn Farouk Kaddoumi for his accusations that Mahmoud Abbas plotted to assassinate Arafat, but the session was clearly put together only by Kaddoumi's enemies. Meanwhile, four armed factions of Fatah, including the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades and a group of Israeli Arabs, declared their support for Kaddoumi. Dov Weisglass, who attended all the Sharon/Abbas meetings, says the entire episode was made up by Kaddoumi, and Suha Arafat is also upset because blaming Abbas takes away the responsibility from Arafat's real killers - Israel.

Palestine Press Agency quotes a US magazine as giving out specific details on how Israel would strike Iran, along with operational windows for the strike and where the IDF is practicing. Hard to say whether the articles, in Global Politician, are legit or not.

Egypt seized a half ton of explosives and ten mortars on their way to Gaza.

Two Gazans, including a 17-year old, were killed in a smuggling tunnel collapse.

The PA shot and wounded two Hamas members in the West Bank. Their neighbors in the Al-Jalazoun camp tried to protect the Hamas members from arrest.

A group of Israeli Arabs demanded that the Israel compensate them for damage done by wild boars. They didn't seem to blame "settlers," apparently boars inside the Green Line have different masters than those on the outside.

The 2009 PalArab self-death count is now at 118.

What is the goal of foreign policy?

Today was an extraordinary day for the blog, as my posting about how Iranian prison guards rape women before their execution was featured on Yahoo news story pages for much of the day, and the headline apparently attracted some 20,000 people to view the article.

As one could expect from such an influx of people, I received a lot of comments, and the quality of most of them were about what one would expect. There were many people who refused to believe the story, calling it a Zionist or Jewish conspiracy against Islam (even though the story was not about Islam, but Iran.) Some believed that this was a perfect opportunity to bring in lies about the Talmud. Others got into flamewars.

One commenter, "marie," dropped by another thread and said something that encapsulates much that is wrong with how Westerners tend to think nowadays. In response to my musings on Obama's naivete in trying to force Israel to abandon historic Jerusalem, she wrote:

Keep building settlements retards...that will get the palestinians to love you!

Notwithstanding the humor that results when someone who fancies herself an "intellectual" calls others "retards" as a rhetorical point, this comment struck me as emblematic of today's Western liberal thinking.

Is the point of foreign policy to make your enemy love you?

It appears that the foreign policies of many Western nations in recent decades has been built around just that desire.

The Western nations, wracked with guilt over colonialism and hegemony, believe that they deserve to be hated, and as a result they must bend over backwards to be loved by those they have wronged. It never works, of course, but that is just proof that they need to try harder.

In the case of Israel, the West thinks of Israel as a proxy for all their sins, the intellectual Jew imposing his will on the unwashed Arabs. The fact that Zionism is not a colonialist movement but rather a national restoration movement is lost on those who feel that guilt. To them, the Jews symbolize what they hate about themselves and their past evils, and the Arabs are symbolic of the put-upon aboriginal peoples forever sullied by European colonialism.

So to them, only one side is guilty - the "white" side.

Asking both sides to compromise is not how peace can come, according to this thinking. The Jews are guilty of the original Western sin and must pay for it. Forcing the Jews to pay for the sins of the British and French and Portuguese and Spanish is a way to displace the feelings of guilt over their own past injustices.

To this way of thinking, only the enemy can decide when enough concessions are made. The enemy - the pure, innocent victims - have complete veto power over every peace plan because this is not a negotiation: it is a capitulation, and admission of guilt, a plea for forgiveness. If you are not forgiven then you have not done a good enough job of penance, and the proof is - because you have not yet been forgiven.

The enemy - such a loaded term, we should say the "negotiating partner" - cannot be expected to compromise, ever. Only one side has the onus of guilt, and the non-Westerners are presumed innocent. Any crimes they commit must be looked at through the prism of the much more obscene Western sins.

Marie has stumbled upon the exact problem - the fact that many on the West hate themselves and the only penance is to gain forgiveness from those we think we have wronged. We must do whatever is needed to make them love us, and only then can we love ourselves.

Israel must also be forced to adhere to this formula. Every terror act is justified because it is a reaction to Israel's original sin of existing. Every defensive move Israel chooses to do is a painful reminder of its hostile, "colonialist" origins.

This is the subtext behind today's liberal attitudes to foreign policy. It is rooted in this deep sense of self-hate drenched in guilt. And this hate is projected into Israel, the lightning rod for all of the West's sins.

BBC doesn't recognize Israel as being part of Mideast

The BBC has a show called the "Middle East Business Report" that airs weekly. ifindterror tweeted me, saying that s/he never noticed anything about Israel on that program.

Sure enough, the word "Israel" does not appear in any of the synopses of shows over the past couple of months. Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Lebanon and Jordan all pop up, along with the impacts of Arab trade with China and the UK, but nothing about Israel's economy.

I guess Israel's economy is not very noteworthy compared to the other nations in the area. Or maybe Israel just isn't where we all thought it was.

The startling tone-deafness of the White House on settlements

When looking at this latest debacle of the White House demanding that Jews stop building and moving into East Jerusalem, it is remarkable how deeply naive and uninformed the Obama administration is.

The White House apparently cannot distinguish between the American Left, that dominates Obama's political thinking, and the Israeli Left. The administration apparently thought that they could split the Israelis along ideological lines by insisting on a settlement freeze, believing that the J Street crowd has the same mindset as Labor and Kadima. Instead, the White House has unified Israelis as never before, as even the most dovish, secular mainstream Israeli understands the need to keep large settlement blocs close to the Green Line and the importance of Jerusalem.

Despite all of the rumors about White House pressure on Arab governments, all of that is being done behind the scenes and outside the public eye. Only this one issue, that the White House clearly didn't understand in the least, has become a symbol of power, a political game of chicken between Israel and the US. The US promised its Arab allies that it would gain what it felt was a symbolic concession from Israel and, darn it, it has to keep its word, even if it had no idea that these issues weren't merely symbolic to Israelis. Once the White House made the demand public, it cannot back down.

And Netanyahu is not going to yield.

So something that could have been handled easily has turned into a major fissure, because President Obama naively thought that the Israeli left would abandon Netanyahu over the settlements issue. And he couldn't be bothered to actually talk to Netanyahu, someone he disparaged during the campaign.

Obama's naivete on this topic was revealed some 18 months ago. One would have thought he would have learned something in the meanwhile.

Jordan's Interior Minister defends discrimination against PalArabs

A few weeks ago I mentioned an issue that has been percolating in Jordan that has received no attention in the Western media - the increasing discrimination that Jordanians of Palestinian origin have been receiving from Jordan, as the citizenship rights of many have been stripped away and their remaining rights whittled down.

The issue has been picked up by London-based Dar al-Hayat (in Arabic only, of course.) They published an interview with Jordan's Interior Minister Nayef. The minister tries at first to deflect the question, blaming everything on Israel:

Is it true that you are withdrawing of nationality from the Jordanians of Palestinian origin?

This is a campaign of lies by... external and internal forces meant to tarnish the image of Jordan.

But is it true?

- We need to emphasize the need for the Palestinian land and not to waste the chance to uphold the allowance of "family reunions" carried by the [Israeli] occupation authorities, and that we should be thanked for standing up against Israeli ambitions of unloading of the Palestinian land of its people.

Do you mean that the ones on the Israeli right that propose the idea of «Jordan is Palestine»?

Yes. There are the secret Israeli proposals with undeclared aims to impose a solution to the issue of Palestinian refugees at the expense of Jordan...

But the interviewer is not cowed into accepting this deflection. He goes on to ask specific questions about Jordanian law in disenfranchising Jordanian Palestinians, where the minister stonewalls and insists that there has been no change in policy. One example is about the cases where Jordanians Palestinians who have never been on the West Bank have had their travel documents reduced from 5-year to 2-year renewals:

Some of the [5 year] yellow cards were turned to [2-year] green cards from owners who insist that Jordan is the only home they have ever known.

- We insist on the necessity of renewal of permits for "reunions", as acting otherwise would mean the achievement of the objectives of Israel in the Palestinian territories, drained from their owners. I do not think that any Arab accepts that the Palestinians lose their right to their land voluntarily, because it is contrary to the holding of Palestinian and Arab right of return.

In other words, Palestinian Arabs who happily live in Jordan are not pressuring Israel to create a Palestinian Arab state on the West Bank, and therefore not doing their jobs. He's just helping them do what they are meant to do. Jordan's hatred of Palestinian Arabs is highlighted in this exchange:

Why does Jordan refuse to grant citizenship to children of Jordanian women [and West Bank Palestinian Arab men]?

- We cannot because the current law does not allow it. There is a security and political dimension to this issue, there are 37 Palestinians married to Jordanians, and this means the naturalization of more than 200 Palestinians, and we cannot do it because it serves the goals of the Israelis [as they would live in Jordan], especially at this time.

The minister makes it crystal clear that official Arab policy is to ensure Palestinian Arab statelessness and misery, always in the guise of doing what's best for Palestinian Arabs themselves. (He also says that the PA has no problem with any of this.)

Of course, any other Arab can become a citizen of Jordan and other Arab countries, by law. The laws only exclude Palestinian Arabs.

And they are keeping them stateless for their own good, of course.

Such philanthropy and selflessness exhibited by the generous Arab patrons of the Palestinian Arab cause, willing to spare no effort in ensuring that they remain miserable for decades to come!

Iranians rape virgin girls before executing them

Here is a sterling example of Iranian human rights, from The Jerusalem Post:

In a shocking and unprecedented interview, directly exposing the inhumanity of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei's religious regime in Iran, a serving member of the paramilitary Basiji militia has told this reporter of his role in suppressing opposition street protests in recent weeks. ...
He said he had been a highly regarded member of the force, and had so "impressed my superiors" that, at 18, "I was given the 'honor' to temporarily marry young girls before they were sentenced to death."
In the Islamic Republic it is illegal to execute a young woman, regardless of her crime, if she is a virgin, he explained. Therefore a "wedding" ceremony is conducted the night before the execution: The young girl is forced to have sexual intercourse with a prison guard - essentially raped by her "husband."
"I regret that, even though the marriages were legal," he said.
Why the regret, if the marriages were "legal?"
"Because," he went on, "I could tell that the girls were more afraid of their 'wedding' night than of the execution that awaited them in the morning. And they would always fight back, so we would have to put sleeping pills in their food. By morning the girls would have an empty expression; it seemed like they were ready or wanted to die.
"I remember hearing them cry and scream after [the rape] was over," he said. "I will never forget how this one girl clawed at her own face and neck with her finger nails afterwards. She had deep scratches all over her."

Apparently, this was known. From a book review in 2002:

It remains to be said that the fate of women in the prisons of the Iranian Islamic Revolution is worse than the fate of men. It is not necessarily because women are less resistant and less tolerant to torture, but because women are considered from the theological perspective of the Iranian regime to be an element of seduction, and their bodies a place of evil and impurity. The torture of a woman's body may take the form of rape. Despite the necessity of secrecy that imposes itself in these cases, some women political prisoners have dared to speak up in their memoirs about the torture and rape they were subjected to. However most of the women either were not given the chance to talk or have chosen not to talk. In fact, raped women were often executed. A woman's rape is frequently the last act that precedes her execution. This is explained by the rule in Iranian political prisons that the sentence of execution cannot be carried out if the woman is a virgin. Since there is a theological belief that if a woman dies a virgin she will go to heaven, the politically active virgin is forced to "marry" before her execution and thus to insure she will go to hell. She is forced to "marry" the hangman who will carry out her execution.. This marriage is conducted as a legitimate and official contract which includes, among other things, an estimated dowry. This "dowry" is subsequently paid to the family of the victim; it simultaneously becomes the equivalent of an official notification that she was executed.

Another source:

Iran and children’s rights
Iran is the only country in the world where its legislations function directly against children.

Article 1210 of the constitution: The civil law sets the age of consent for girls to be 9 years of age!

Section 84, paragraph 179 of labour legislation defines the minimum age of prohibition of labour to be 15! The amendment article to this section, briefly, overrules the minimum age limits, should the parents or guardians of the children either give their consent or be the proprietors of where their children are employed! By parents’ or Guardians’ consent, children could also be contracted out and would be exempted from the minimum age restrictions.

Articles 623 to 625 relating to religious practices, authorises child chastisement up to causing death. Even where punishment by the father leads to the death of his child, the penalty for causing death by chastisement is 10 days in prison plus the payment of compensation!

In the Islamic Republic, the state has a free hand to suppress and terrorise, execute by stoning to death, and carry out hanging in public, Article 1210 of its constitution legalises paedophilia!

By lowering the age of consent, the abuse of children is legalised.

The signing of any international convention by the Islamic Republic is meaningless and it is only done in order to mislead the international community about its own internal affairs.

According to Islamic law, should a female die as a virgin, she will be considered a martyr and will be destined for heaven. Hundreds of 14-17 year old girls supporting the “The Peoples’ Mujahedeen” were forced to temporarily marry members of the “Revolutionary Guards Corps” before their execution. Some were forced to marry their own torturer and executioner. This was done to deny them going to heaven!

How could anyone expect respect for international conventions from such a brutal and medieval regime?

Forget WMDs, forget the theocracy, forget Iran's plans to dominate the world. I think we have the best reasons to topple the Islamic Republic right here.

UPDATE: While these stories appear to have taken place a few years ago, the Huffington Post has details on the apparent prison rape of an Iranian woman protester in the past month, as well as of an 18-year old boy.

And for those commenters who think I'm saying that Islam condones these acts, try to read what I'm actually saying. I'm talking about the Islamic Republic of Iran, not Islam.

UPDATE 2: More evidence. And yet more. This has been going on for a long time.

Black magic in Saudi Arabia

From the Arab News:

While the Saudi Border Guard continues its search for the body of Fatima, the 18-year-old woman who reportedly drowned in the Red Sea off Jeddah’s Corniche on July 9, reports have come out about some more “magical” underwater discoveries.
Twenty-two small bottles have been found a few meters underwater; inside them contained paper with names scrawled on them, as well as an occasional piece of jewelry or lock of hair. According to yesterday’s Al-Madinah newspaper these are magical spells.
A little explanation: It is common (and firmly discouraged by the country’s religious police) for some locals to cast spells on people.
There are variations to this process, but the spell typically includes the person’s name written on piece of paper and a stolen personal item, anything from a bank statement to a stolen ring or hair. These items are often placed in vessels and tossed into the Red Sea.
The newspaper interviewed Sheikh Faisal bin Salman, an Islamic scholar who tracked down one of the persons targeted by one of the spells. “One of the papers was a bank receipt which included the number and the name of that man. I called him immediately and it turned out that he started to suffer from a massive headache and dizziness 20 days ago. Exactly the date of the spell,” said bin Salman.
The man, whose name was not revealed, was identified as a senior telecommunications industry executive.
The newspaper said he is being treated for the black magic.
As the sheikh works diligently to undo magic, the body of teenager has yet to be found.

Notice that the sheikhs aren't saying that the black magic is nonsense and irrelevant to Islam; they are saying that it is real, it works and it needs to be exorcised.

Sounds like a good "weapon."