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Reporting on the Middle East, Science, and Education for October 5, 2008 - ו' תשרי תשס"ט
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What can save Israel and Iran from destroying each other? Only the seeds of peace lying dormant in both countries. These seeds lie in the Iranian and Israeli people. They need to be cultivated with civil society exchanges – between students and intellectuals, scientists, doctors, engineers, university professors, and even clerics – where both sides share their experiences in fighting common challenges.
WASHINGTON – On its 60th anniversary, Israel is still concerned about survival. Even with nuclear weapons and the strongest military in the Middle East, the Jewish state remains anxious. Iranian leaders are similarly concerned about the future of their administrations, even as the country approaches the 30th anniversary of its Islamic Revolution.Israel fears any potential threat, whether it comes from Hamas, Hezbollah, or political Islamic groups. Israel also has begun to fear its shifting demographics, where birth rates are significantly higher among Palestinians than Jews. But above all, Israel perceives a threat from Iran
In a similar vein, Iran is threatened by an outside force that would roll back its revolution. The religious conservatives in Iran are resistant to perceived reformists, which at various times have been supported by the United States, and stands alone as one of the only Shia majority countries in the region.
Yet the conservatives of Iran, heirs to Ayatollah Khomeini’s Islamic Revolution, also face the possibility of seeing their regime replaced by the followers of former Iranian president Mohammad Khatami.
Iran and Israel share a sense of isolation: Israel is comprised of an ethnic and religious minority (Jewish) in a largely Arab and Muslim Middle East. Likewise, Iran’s government is an ethno-religious minority (Shi’a Persians) surrounded by Sunni countries. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by CNP Webmaster as Education Report, Islam, Judaism, Middle East, Middle East Report, Monotheistic Religions, Opinion, Recent Posts on October 5, 2008 - ו' תשרי תשס"ט at 10:39 am
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Editor’s Note: Hardly a day goes by when Palestinian sympathizers aren’t bemoaning the “plight of the oppressed Palestinians suffering from the brutal Israeli occupation.” Mostly they cite the security checkpoints which make it difficult for the West Bank and Gaza Arabs to go into Israel for free medical care. They long for the “good ol’ days” of the Armistice Lines of 1949 when Jerusalem was divided and the Arabs controlled the West Bank. As it turns out, these “good ol’ days” are no more than a poor selective memory for erroneous fantasies. The following travel advisory from the US Department of State in 1954 demonstrates the travel difficulties which resulted from the 1949 Armistice Lines and Arab intolerance. Thanks to Les Barany for submitting this valuable document which is reprinted verbatim.
Submitted by Les Barany exclusively to CN Publications
AMERICAN TRAVELERS TO THE ARAB COUNTRIES, ISRAEL, AND JERUSALEM
As an aftermath of the hostilities in 1948 and 1949 between certain Arab states and Israel, which ended in the division of Jerusalem into Israel- and Jordan-held sections, the regulations governing travel in Arab countries are subject to frequent change. At the present time, the Arab countries usually, with the exception of Egypt and sometimes Lebanon,
(1) refuse entry to persons of Jewish faith and background regardless of nationality, and
(2) either refuse entry or make it very difficult for travelers with Israeli visas in their passports.
It is, therefore, suggested that travelers visit the Arab countries first through Lebanon or Egypt and enter Israel from Jordan via Jerusalem. An Israeli visa can be obtained there upon entry.
Once the traveler crosses from one territory to another, he must continue his journey and cannot recross either to Israel or Jordan. Exception is usually made for Christians residing in or visiting Israel who may cross over and back for the Christmas and Easter services in Bethlehem and Jordan-held (or “Old City” of) Jerusalem, where the majority of the Holy Places are located. Permission for those crossings must be obtained well in advance.
Posted by CNP Webmaster as Middle East, Middle East Report, News Articles, Recent Posts on August 12, 2008 - י"א אב תשס"ח at 10:13 am
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by Asaf Romirowsky, Washington Times, August 4, 2008
http://www.meforum.org/article/1965
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict long ago spilled over into America’s departments of Middle East studies. In an attempt to appear balanced in the face of charges of anti-Israel biases, some departments or programs of Middle East studies have added Israeli scholars to their ranks—a move that at first glance appears welcome.
Yet many of these Israeli academics have built their reputation on scholarship that is harshly critical not only of Israeli policy, but of Israel’s very existence. Anti-Israel scholars who hail from Israel are cited favorably by the entire range of Israel’s critics, from pro-Palestinian groups like PSM, the Committee to Stop Demolition of Houses in Palestine, the Committee to Stop Torture, and Breaking the Silence to Jewish anti-Zionist groups like the American Council for Judaism, from neo-Nazis to Islamists.
The international standing of such scholars received a boost in the mid-1980s with the rise of the so-called “new historians” in Israeli universities. These scholars sought to debunk what they claim is a distorted “Zionist narrative” in Israeli historiography. In practice, they twisted the history of Israel’s rebirth by, among other tricks, dismissing the efforts of the Arab states to destroy the new-born Jewish state as a Zionist myth, and claiming that Israel is built on ethnic cleansing and brutality towards the Palestinians.
Posted by CNP Webmaster as Education Report, Judaism, Middle East, Middle East Report, Opinion, Recent Posts on August 4, 2008 - ג' אב תשס"ח at 10:21 am
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Wednesday, July 23, 2008 Israel Today Staff
A leader of Israel’s Druze Arab community on Wednesday said that the events surrounding a second bulldozer terrorist attack in Jerusalem a day earlier was evidence of the sect’s ongoing loyalty to the State of Israel.
Tuesday’s attack, which left at least 16 people wounded when a Jerusalem Arab plowed into traffic with an earth-moving bulldozer, came to an end when an armed Israeli civilian and a Druze Border Police officer attacked the terrorist.
The armed civilian, Yaakov Asael, was reportedly the first to fire, with Border Police officer Amal Ganem quickly joining the fight with his assault rifle. After initially firing from skewed angle, Ganem moved to another side of the still-rampaging bulldozer and opened fire again, this time killing the terrorist.
Druze community leader Sheikh Muafiek Tarif told Ynet that “the Druze sect has shown its loyalty to the State of Israel for years now. Today, the resourcefulness of Amal Ganem, a Druze community member, proved our loyalty to the State of Israel.”
Tarif continued by calling Ganem, “who acted quickly and without hesitation in order to prevent further casualties,” a “model to thousands of young Druze who have acted and are acting on behalf of the State of Israel.”
The Druze, whose religion lies somewhere between Islam and Judaism and reveres Moses’ father-in-law Jesse as its patriarch, are usually fiercely loyal to whatever nation in which they reside, including the Jewish state. Following the establishment of State of Israel, Druze leaders insisted that the Israeli army impose mandatory military service on their community’s young men just as it does on Israeli Jews.
Posted by CNP Webmaster as Islam, Judaism, Middle East, Middle East Report, News Articles, Recent Posts on July 23, 2008 - כ' תמוז תשס"ח at 12:01 pm
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By Israel Zwick, CN Publications, July 15, 2008
See Also: Al-Quds Times
Author’s Note: It is common knowledge that Israeli intelligence agents monitor the meetings of Arab leaders. Recently there was a secret meeting in Tehran that the Israeli agents missed. Fortunately, an anonymous source sent a transcript to CN Publications.
Editor’s Note: Though the following story is fictional, most of the details provided are true and have been vetted from a variety of sources.
CHARACTERS:
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, President of Iran
Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen), President of the Palestinian Authority
Bashar Assad, President of Syria
Ismail Haniyah, Hamas leader in Gaza
Hassan Nassrallah, Hizbullah leader in Lebanon
TIME: the present
SETTING: secret underground concrete bunker somewhere in Tehran
Ahmadinejad: My dear friends, I have asked you to come here so we can discuss how we can finally eliminate the Zionist entity from our midst. It must be completely wiped off the map of our region, which belongs solely to the people of Islam. It has become evident that those martydom operations, which killed 20 or 30 Zionists riding in a bus or eating in a restaurant, would not be sufficient to drive them away. On the contrary, it only strengthened their resolve. What we need is to mount a full multimodal assault involving military, political, social, and economic measures that would completely devastate the Zionist entity. To that end, we have been supporting both Shiite and Sunni insurgencies against the American and Zionist enemies. We have been developing our Shahab-3 missile that will soon be able to reach the enemy with both conventional and nuclear warheads. If we shoot 100 missiles and only one in five reach their target, we can cause significant death and destruction to the Zionists.
For the last few years, I have been providing you all with financial and military assistance for your efforts to defeat the Zionist enemy. I have gathered you here to obtain a progress report of your efforts and to hear your plans for the future. Ismail, let’s start with you. What have you been doing in Gaza with all the money I gave you besides shooting off all those harmless firecrackers?
Haniyah: First of all, I wouldn’t minimize the effects of the rockets and mortars that we have been firing on a daily basis. We have succeeded in reducing the Zionist population and military along the border. We have disrupted their lifestyle and economy. The Zionists don’t want to live or work within the range of our rockets. Their industrial centers are threatened and they have to spend huge sums on security.
Now that they have agreed to a temporary truce, we are using the time to develop our military forces and arsenal. We have an army of 20,000 men with 30,000 rifles, 6 million rounds of ammunition, 230 tons of explosives, and scores of advanced anti-tank and anti-helicopter weapons.
Posted by CNP Webmaster as Fun Stuff, Islam, Middle East, Middle East Report, Opinion, Recent Posts, Zwick's Picks on July 15, 2008 - י"ב תמוז תשס"ח at 4:03 am
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Written by Masimba Biriwasha, Ecoworldly.com, July 9, 2008
The Middle East and North Africa is also faced with acute water shortages, a situation that will pit the countries in the region against each other.
“The only matter that could take Egypt to war is water,” the late Egyptian President Anwar Sadat said tellingly in 1979.
Water security is increasingly becoming a military priority for many of the countries in the Middle East, and the threat of wars between countries is real.
There is no consensus among water analysts on whether there will be global wars over water ownership.
According to UNESCO, globally there are 262 international river basins: 59 in Africa, 52 in Asia, 73 in Europe, 61 in Latin America and the Caribbean and 17 in North America — overall, 145 countries have territories that include at least one shared river basin.
UNESCO states that between 1948 and 1999, there have been 1,831 “international interactions” recorded, including 507 conflicts, 96 neutral or non-significant events and, most importantly, 1,228 instances of cooperation around water-related issues.
As a result, some experts argue that the idea of water wars is rather farfetched given the precedent of water cooperation that has been exhibited by many of the countries around the world.
“Despite the potential problem, history has demonstrated that cooperation, rather than conflict, is likely in shared basins,” says UNESCO.
However, the fact remains that throughout the world water supplies are running dry and the situation is being compounded by inappropriate management of water resources that will likely unravel previous international cooperation around water.
Posted by CNP Webmaster as Air & Water, Alternative Energy, Climate Change, Middle East, Opinion on July 11, 2008 - ח' תמוז תשס"ח at 3:43 am
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Asharq Alawsat, 20 June 2008
By Abdul Rahman Al-Rashed
Iran’s followers committed massacres and evicted people from their homes in a way unprecedented in Iraq’s history. Iran today wants to attain its goals regardless of the weapons used. It funds and sponsors all extremist Sunni groups like the Palestinian Hamas, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and other extremist Sunni groups in north Lebanon and North Africa.
Paradoxically, Iran, an extremist theocratic Shiite regime with Ahmadinejad at its helm, is orchestrating and funding the activities of extremist Sunnis in the region.
The paradox is most striking in the case of Al-Qaeda, the most extremist Sunni organization, which has joined, in the full sense of the word, the Iranian apparatus. The alliance between the two enemies began in the wake of the defeat of Al-Qaeda and the organization’s flight from Afghanistan to all Sunni countries. The first group of Al-Qaeda, which was led by Egyptian national Saif Al-Adel, and included Saad bin Laden, Osama bin Laden’s son, fled to Iran immediately after the fall of the Taliban regime. I do not know whether the first group of Al-Qaeda entered Iran by mistake, after its members roamed aimlessly in the rugged mountainous region on the Pakistani-Afghan border, or as a result of contacts who arranged for the Iranian hosting. We were initially puzzled by the rumors that Iran had arrested a group of fleeing Al-Qaeda members who crossed its border from Afghanistan, only to realize later that the story had far deeper implications. The investigators of the attack that Al-Qaeda carried out in Riyadh found evidence indicating that the operation came from Iran and that the perpetrators were Al-Qaeda members. This was confirmed after satellite mobile telephone recordings were discovered between Saif Al-Adel and the Saudi commander of the group. The communication clearly showed that the call originated in Iran. Those concerned with this were surprised because Iran did not deny the call, but quickly admitted that it had a number of Al-Qaeda members in a certain prison. It justified the incident by saying that the group members perhaps broke the rules of their hosting. Crude though it was, the justification might have been deliberate. Perhaps Iran wanted to tell concerned parties that it was now in control of Al-Qaeda. In the past four years, the largest number of Al-Qaeda members have made Iran their headquarters. It has even been suggested that Ayman Al-Zawahiri, who some consider to be Al-Qaeda’s actual leader, is also being hosted by Iran, as evidenced by his many relaxed audio and video statements, and especially his famous public criticism of the late Al-Qaeda agent in Iraq, Abu-Musab al-Zarqawi, for attacking Shiites.
Posted by CNP Webmaster as Islam, Middle East, Middle East Report, Opinion, Recent Posts on June 20, 2008 - י"ז סיון תשס"ח at 4:52 pm
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By Linda S. Heard, Special to Gulf News, June 17, 2008
What would happen if Arab oil producers together with their Muslim allies were to give Israel and its US backer a deadline to make visible progress in the Palestine-Israel peace process or else the tap is turned off?
British Member of Parliament George Galloway speaking on an Arabic satellite channel recently blamed Arabs for failing to solve “this Palestine problem”.
With 300 million Arabs and “oil at $136 per barrel” they could do so in six days, he said. Six days may be a slight exaggeration but Galloway isn’t known for his use of great British understatement.
He’s a black-and-white kind of guy and on this subject his basic premise seems to me to be spot on. Some Arab countries are floating on a sea of oil, a resource as precious as gold nowadays, but they shy away from using their not unsubstantial clout within the international arena. Why?
Oil shouldn’t be used as a weapon, say their leaders. That’s true but why shouldn’t it be a bargaining chip with which to advance Arab causes, as Galloway seems to suggest?
Is there a higher moral imperative that rules this out? Leaders of Western nations would like their Arab counterparts to believe so.
Oil is a commodity that should be shared by the planet even if it does happen to be gurgling away underneath your sands and seas, they say.
Posted by CNP Webmaster as Alternative Energy, Middle East, Middle East Report, Opinion, Recent Posts on June 17, 2008 - י"ד סיון תשס"ח at 9:27 am
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One wonders what the real motives of the objectors are
By GEOFFREY BERG, Houston Chronicle, June 13, 2008
Some have criticized our presidential candidates’ positions on Israel as being in lockstep with the “hawkish” views of the Jewish state and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the pro-Israel lobby.
On this page and others, critics have suggested that some coercive force is at play, compelling all of our would-be presidents to toe a conservative Israeli line. These critics point in particular to speeches given by the candidates at AIPAC’s recent policy conference in Washington.
That view is demonstrably false and says more about the malevolence or ignorance of those who hold it than it does about either the candidates who spoke or the audience that listened.
Posted by CNP Webmaster as Judaism, Middle East, Middle East Report, Opinion, Recent Posts on June 14, 2008 - י"א סיון תשס"ח at 8:25 am
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Gal Luft, June 2nd 2008, Cutting Edge Contributor
Photo: AFP
“We do have to do something about the energy problem. I can tell you that nothing has really taken me aback more, as Secretary of State, than the way that the politics of energy is […] ‘warping’ diplomacy around the world. It has given extraordinary power to some states that are using that power in not very good ways for the international system—states that would otherwise have very little power.” Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, testimony before the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, April 5, 2006.
Throughout the 19-century nearly half of the world’s crude oil supply came from the gushing oilfields surrounding the Azeri city of Baku. At that time, petroleum supplied only four percent of the world’s energy, giving the Caspian region little strategic advantage on the international stage. But as the world economy embarked on a steep growth trajectory, dependence on petroleum grew significantly. Today, oil supplies about 40 percent of the world’s energy and 95 percent of its transportation energy. As a result, those who own the lion’s share of the reserves of this precious energy source are in the driver’s seat of the world economy and their influence is steadily growing.
Since the 1930s the Middle East has emerged as the world’s most important source of energy and the key to the stability of global economy. Today, this tumultuous region produces 37 percent of the world’s oil and 18 percent of its gas. When it comes to reserves, the Persian Gulf is king. It is home to 65 percent of global oil proven reserves and 45 percent of its natural gas. The Middle East also controls a significant portion of the hydrocarbons that are yet to be discovered. According to the U.S. Geological Survey, over 50 percent of the undiscovered reserves of oil and 30 percent of gas are concentrated in a region primarily in Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, UAE, and Libya.
The concentration of so much of the world’s hydrocarbons in this geographical location means that as long as the modern economy depends on the supply of oil and natural gas, the Middle East will play a key role in global politics and economy. As it is, most of the world’s countries are heavily dependent on Persian Gulf oil. In 2006, the Middle East supplied 22 percent of U.S. imports, 36 percent of OECD Europe’s, 40 percent of China’s, 60 percent of India’s, and 80 percent of Japan’s and South Korea’s. Even oil-rich Canada is dependent on the Middle East. Forty five percent of Canada’s oil imports originate in the region.
Posted by CNP Webmaster as Alternative Energy, Business and Commerce, Climate Change, Middle East, Middle East Report, Recent Posts on June 3, 2008 - כ"ט אייר תשס"ח at 6:47 am
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