Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Monday, July 20, 2009

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."

IFJ likes some freedoms, not others

This past week the International Federation of Journalists was in the news, mostly because it decided to kick out the Israeli branch, the National Federation of Israeli Journalists. While the IFJ says that it was simply because the NFIJ wasn't paying its dues, the NFIJ thinks that there was a little bit more to it than that:

In January, the International Federation began issuing a series of letters condemning Israel for refusing to allow journalists to enter Gaza to cover Operation Cast Lead. The International Federation also published a report criticizing Israel's actions in Gaza and urging International Federation members and affiliated organizations to speak out against Israel's treatment of foreign journalists during the war.
According to Shibi, the International Federation report about Gaza was compiled without any Israeli input.
"No one called us to hear what we had to say," he said. Israeli journalists had things to say about the balance of rights of journalists to cover the war and the pressures coming from the army and the state, but the report was compiled without consulting a single Israeli source, he said.
"They are an organization fighting for ethics in journalism," he said. "Whoever may be the offended party, [everyone] has a right to say his piece; we were left out of the discussion completely."
"He [White] is kicking out the most free and fighting press corps in the region."
Shibi also mentioned that the International Federation had hosted a series of conferences in Europe about current media issues, but the Israeli unions were not invited.
The International Federation focused on the question of payments and how much the Israeli union should pay for membership.
Shibi said the Israeli union felt that it was not being accepted in the international framework. The National Federation of Israeli Journalists felt it should not pay "until we are full and equal members," he said. "No taxation without representation."

So a story that came out of Jordan yesterday is very interesting:

The Jordan Press Association (JPA) agreed to a request by the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) to hold its conference in the Kingdom in October, after the latter agreed to exclude Israel's participation, a JPA council member said on Thursday.
"We are against any form of normalisation with Israel, which still occupies Arab lands and violates Arab and Palestinian rights," JPA Vice President Hikmat Momani told The Jordan Times, adding that the JPA also agreed to the organisation of several training workshops for journalists from across the region by the IFJ, provided that Israel does not take part.

It is one thing for the IFJ to say that they are excluding Israel for non-payment of dues, but for them to agree to exclude Israel because the Jordanian Press Association demanded it for purely political reasons is a completely different affair.

If the IFJ had any integrity, it would inform the Jordanians that excluding an Israeli group is not acceptable, period, and should not be a prerequisite for the conference, irrespective of its dispute with the Israeli union.

Which means that it sure does appear that the IFJ is making decisions based on its antipathy towards Israel and not because of a dues dispute.