The Arabs, though some may be talented, have a lot of loud-mouthed activists who scream and spew hatred.

By RAY HANANIA
Jerusalem Post, 24/01/2012

If Palestinian groups would band together, perhaps they would achieve something- after 100 years of failure.

If the Israelis wanted to defeat the Palestinians, Israel would immediately recognize a Palestinian State in Gaza, the West Bank and even east Jerusalem rather than embrace policies that push Palestinians to unite. If they did that, all the Israelis would have to do is sit back and watch as the Palestinians tear themselves apart.
Yes, the tragedy of the Palestinians isn’t that they are victims of injustice at the hands of the Israelis. It is their own tendency to destroy themselves from within.
The most powerful factor keeping Palestinians together as a people is the anger they share in response to injustices by Israel. But that’s a pathetic reason for unity. Worse, anger easily turns into hatred and hatred easily turns into violence, terrorism and killings. And violence undermines even the most just of causes.
Palestinians hate Israelis but they hate themselves even more.
Palestinian activists spend as much time bashing their own people as they do bashing Israel. The truth is that for the Palestinians, bashing Israel results in nothing but more defeats and losses. Bashing other Palestinians makes them feel better, and serves to distract their community from their inherent leadership failures.

Yes, it’s true. The Palestinian leadership is a failure, and the activists who lead the hatred, for example against Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, a moderate Palestinian like myself, and against anyone who dares to challenge their fanaticism, are the primary cause.
Let’s define failure. In nearly 100 years of battling Jewish immigrants and then the Israeli people, the Palestinians have failed to establish sovereignty over one inch of historic Palestine.
THE DIFFERENCES between Israelis and Jews on one side and the Palestinians and the Arab World on the other is striking.
For example, Israelis and Jews recognize that the American public is the single most important public constituency in the world. The Arab World marginalizes the American public, brushing them off as “ignorant” and “uneducated.”
That may be. But there’s a reason the most powerful lobbying group in the world, AIPAC, operates out of Washington, DC, not London, Paris or the Hague.
And recognizing the importance of the American public means recognition of the significance of American politics. Some of the wealthiest people funding the presidential candidates in the United States are not Arabs who have billions at their disposal, but Jews.
Newt Gingrich this week pulled to the front of the Republican field of candidates seeking to unseat Democrat President Barack Obama in November’s presidential election.
Gingrich did that with the backing of one of the wealthiest people in the world, Sheldon Adelson.
Adelson is the publisher of an Israeli newspaper, Israel Hayom, and the owner of lucrative casinos in Las Vegas. He put up more than $5 million to fund a “Super Pac” that has been bashing Mitt Romney and that is helping Gingrich.
Although Arabs hate Gingrich because he called the Palestinians an “invented people,” the fact is that Gingrich has very moderate views on Israel and Palestine. In interviews with my journalist colleague Ali Younes, who covered the South Carolina Republican primaries, Gingrich explained that he would recognize and support a Palestinian state if Hamas and the Palestinians recognized Israel and renounced violence.
Forget about the politics of Gingrich’s words. Mainstream Palestinians renounced violence years ago and continue to live in the limbo of occupation, while Hamas goes back and forth, one day pretending to be moderate and the next vowing retaliation for brutal Israeli air strikes.
But as a veteran journalist and now columnist, I know presidential candidates will say anything to win elections. In other words, that Gingrich called Palestinians an “invented people” is meaningless in terms of what he might do to bring about compromise if elected president.
The bigger question, though, is where is the Palestinian or Arab version of Sheldon Adelson who is willing to put up much of his wealth to support the interests of his people? Arabs do not own newspapers, television stations or put any real money into the Palestinian lobbying. Pro-Israel groups have donated more than $51 million to candidates, according to the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs. In contrast, Arabs have only donated $61,000.
The Arabs, though some may be talented, have a lot of loud-mouthed activists who scream and spew hatred. There’s the great jazz musician whose hatred of Israel borders on anti-Semitism. There’s the talented writer at the Electronic Intifada whose words are driven by hatred of Jews.
These hate-driven activists have compromised mainstream Arabs, putting them in a headlock of oppression. Moderate Arabs are discouraged from expressing their views or espousing moderation in the face of the bullying and threats from the fanatics who spend more time and energy beating up their own people than turning legal claims against Israel into meaningful reality.
I was sitting with a group of Arab journalist friends recently at al-Manar restaurant outside of Chicago in Bridgeview, which is the hub of the local Palestinian Muslim community.
What struck me as odd was the restaurant was empty, save for our group. It was lunchtime on a Sunday. Down the street, Arabs were standing in line at two American restaurants owned by Greek Americans.
The real secret is that the Israelis don’t have to work hard at defeating the Palestinians. All they have to do is let Palestinians undermine themselves.

The writer is an award winning columnist and radio talk show host. He can be reached at www.RadioChicagoland.com

Photo by: YouTube / Al Jazeera

Film shows Palestinians, Jews saving lives

By JUDY SIEGEL-ITZKOVICH
Jerusalem Post, 27/01/2012

Film shows cooperation between Jewish and Palestinian volunteer paramedics in United Hatzalah.

No one believed it could happen, but it has: An Israeli living in England has made a politics-free film about cooperation between Jewish and Palestinian volunteer paramedics for the Orthodox Jerusalem organization United Hatzalah, who save lives together in the capital’s western and eastern neighborhoods.
The 25-minute program has been broadcast four times this month by the global Arab TV network Al Jazeera in English, which has also put it online for all to see.
It is an unusual sight: Arabs wearing orange vests printed with the red Star of David team up with haredi (ultra- Orthodox) Jews wearing black kippot, their sidecurls and tzitzit (ritual fringes) blowing in the wind. And the partners have only praise for each other.
“I don’t care which person I’m saving. I even go to [the ultra-Orthodox neighborhood of] Mea She’arim on Shabbat,” says Fadi, one of 100 Arabs currently volunteering for UH.
“Saving lives is a religious act for me. Forget all the politics and the mess. People need to live.”
“The Arabs are so devoted,” says a haredi paramedic.
“Their chest compressions are incredible. They respect Jewish sensitivities, especially on Shabbat.”
Eli Beer, the haredi founder and head of the lifesaving rescue organization, commented Thursday, “It’s amazing to see how well we all get along together, without conflict.
Everybody knows and respects each other.”
In a phone interview from London on Thursday, the filmmaker, Keren Ghitis, told The Jerusalem Post how the piece came together.

“I started teaching people how to make videos in Latin America and Africa so they could tell their own stories. I made this video as part of the Ir Amim Initiative, which solicited ideas for films from Palestinian and Israeli filmmakers.
We were asked to tell things that usually do not get attention,” she said.
She submitted it to Al Jazeera, which, she said, was very interested in broadcasting it. Nothing was censored or dictated to toe any line. The first showing was on January 16 at prime time.
“The comments from around the world, including the Arab world, have been very positive. There has also been a lot of mention of it on Facebook. A Palestinian community in the US even asked us for permission to use it for educational purposes,” she said, adding, “It broke a lot of stereotypes.”
The Al Jazeera Network has more than 65 bureaus around the world, with a staff of 3,000 – including more than 400 journalists from more than 60 countries. There is a bureau that hires Israeli Jews and Arabs. The English station has more than 1,000 experienced staffers of more than 50 nationalities and broadcasts to some 220 million households in more than 100 countries.
“I wanted to reach people and see more collaboration between Arabs and Jews,” Ghitis explained when asked why she chose the subject. “More support is needed for medical services in east Jerusalem.”
The UH-trained Palestinian paramedics note in the film that there are often delays in Magen David Adom reaching the sick and wounded in east Jerusalem because no ambulance can get there without being accompanied by a police or military escort. UH Arabs and Jews often get there first on their ambucycles. In addition, many streets are unnamed, and houses have no identifying numbers.
Beer said Al Jazeera had set no conditions for the broadcast.
Speaking to the Post from Davos, he said he had just met Muhammad Yunus of Bangladesh, who received the Nobel Prize.
“He was amazed,” he said.
“He and lots of people from all over the world tell me that the fact that I am a proud Jew and Israeli makes Israel look very good.”
Beer wants to have Arabs all over the country working hand-in-hand with haredi, religious and secular Jews for his rescue organization. “I want about 3,000 volunteers, about 15 percent of of them Christian and Muslims.”
Jews and Muslims do not oppose working together, he says, despite the invisible boundaries and suspicions that separate their communities.
“In the beginning, I met a few who were surprised about working together, but after they saw that they are great people and really professional, they all like it,” said Beer.
The Jews also work on Shabbat and festivals in an emergency, and the Muslims on Fridays and Ramadan.
The film follows volunteers like Hezi – a former yeshiva student who works in a fishmonger’s shop and has volunteered with UH for 15 years – and Fadi, a security guard at Al-Aksa Mosque.
Fadi, presented as a loving father hugging his young children at home, has been an assistant to the Jewish owner of a Mea She’arim hardware store since the age of 14. His family encourages him to go any time he gets an emergency call, as does Shlomo, the shop owner. “He is like a son to me,” says the Mea Shearim retailer.
Hezi is not worried when dispatched to the Damascus Gate in east Jerusalem, and works with Red Crescent medics.
“Since they started working together in 2010, hundreds of lives have been saved,” Ghitis concluded.

By Dexter Van Zile, Algemeiner

January 25, 2012

It’s time for journalists, human rights activists and church leaders in the U.S. to confront the prospect of Christianity’s destruction in the region of its birth.

That’s the message that came out of a one-day conference that took place in Framingham, Massachusetts on Jan. 21, 2012. The conference, titled The Persecuted church: Christian Believers in Peril in the Middle East was sponsored by the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA), which is celebrating its 30th anniversary in 2012.
Andrea Levin, CAMERA’s executive director said the goal of the conference was to draw attention to the plight of Christians in the Middle East.

“If the media shines a light consistently and clearly on the persecution of Middle Eastern Christians, that can make a crucial difference in restraining potential violence,” she sa“Silence on the other hand may do the opposite.”

Walid Phares, a Maronite Christian from Lebanon and author of The Coming Revolution: The Fight for Freedom in the Middle East said Christians and other minorities have been the victims of violence for decades. “I lived through it in the 20th century. Now we’re all living it, trying to witness for it,” he said. “We have crossed the threshold of a new century and yet it’s still happening.”

Attendees of the conference heard testimony from Juliana Taimoorazy, founder of the Iraqi Christian relief council and Egyptian human rights activists Cynthia Farahat. Taimoorazy, who reported on the plight of Assyrians in Israq stated that since June 2004, churches in Iraq have been bombed more than 80 times. Sometimes, multiple churches would be bombed at the same time as part of a coordinated attack.

“Most of these attacks happened on Fridays, marking the day of Islamic prayer,” she said. Clergy have been routinely kidnapped and killed on a regular basis. Even children have been killed by Islamists, Taimoorazy reported.

“In October of 2006 – in the 21st century – a 14-year-old boy was crucified in Basra, in the center of the city,” she said.

Farahat reported that Copts are second-class citizens in their homeland

“But for me, as a woman and a Copt, I am a fourth-class citizen,” she said. “The first class citizen is the Egyptian Sunni Muslim male, the second class is the Sunni female. The third is the Christian male. The fourth is the Christian female. I’m a fourth-class Egyptian citizen with absolutely no legal rights.”

The plight of religious and ethnic minorities in Muslim and Arab majority countries in the Middle East has largely been ignored because of an obsession with the Arab-Israeli conflict, Phares said during his keynote address. Phares first witnessed this after immigrating to the U.S. from Lebanon in the 1990s.

“In the 1990s, if there as an incident in the West Bank, the son-in-law, the mom, the uncle of both sides would be interviewed and the psychologists would come in and talk about the deep roots of the conflict,” Phares said. “At the same time, two villages were burned in Egypt or the Kurds would be gassed. Zero [coverage] in the New York Times.”

Franck Salameh, assistant professor of Near Eastern Studies at Boston College, echoed Phares’ complaint.

“There’s clearly a prevailing hierarchy in the media’s treatment of Middle Eastern violence,” he said. “Some victims get airtime on prime time, all the time. Others simply don’t. Middle Eastern Christians are not a top priority. Those uncouth, cross-wearing primitives are not cause for curiosity. They are too Christian in a world plagued by political correctness, cultural relativism and a false conception fo the Middle East as an Arab Muslim preserve.”

Documenting attacks on Near Eastern minorities is not fashionable, Salameh said, because it is viewed as being anti-Arab and anti-Muslim and part of a Western attempt to divide a cultural and linguistic monolith. If this thinking were applied to North America, no one would talk about the plight or fate of Native Americans because it would be regarded as subversive to the Anglo-European paradigm.

“Middle Eastern minorities, Christians and Jews, are the native Americans of the Middle East,” Salameh said. “The dominant Arab-Muslim culture is indeed the colonizing intruder culture here.”

Richard Landes, associate professor of history at Boston University and author of Heaven on Earth: The Varieties of Millenial Experience reported that Islamists have worked assiduously to disarm Westerners by engaging in cognitive warfare against democracies. This cognitive warfare is pursued, Landes explained, by using self-criticism and concern for the other to undermine the ability of democracies to defend themselves. “The purpose of cognitive warfare is to turn your own people into patriots and your enemies into pacifists,” Landes said.

This strategy has had “staggering success” over the past few years, he said. The success is due to “an unholy marriage between pre-modern sadism and post modern masochism,” Landes said.

“The pre-moderns accuse us of the most vicious things in the world and we say, ‘You’re right, I’m sorry,” Landes joked.

Posted by Ted Belman, January 25, 2012

Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch

Senior Rabbi, Stephen Wise Free Synagogue

Posted: 01/25/2012 4:38 pm

In early Jan. 15 senior rabbis, ministers and imams traveled together to Israel and the Palestinian territories. We are from among New York City’s leading religious institutions. Collectively, our houses of worship are home to tens of thousands of prominent New Yorkers.

Anyone who appreciates the hectic schedules and unique demands upon congregational clergy realizes that it is no small matter to bring 15 spiritual leaders together for five days. So why did we leave our congregations for a week? Why did our congregants insist that we go and even pay for our mission?

In the post 9/11 world, religious rapprochement is no longer a luxury; it is a necessity. To ignore dialogue is to invite destruction. If we do not find ways to live together in dignity we will die together in agony. Religious moderates must build new bridges of coexistence or religious extremists will burn the last bridges of peace.

Our presence in the Middle East was intended to broadcast that we can live together, work together, travel together, dream together and build together. In a world awash in religious conflict, we wish to model a different way: the way of coexistence, respect and peace.

It was a tough trip. We did not paper over our differences. We visited the heart of the conflict. There were moments of despair. We met with presidents, prime ministers, members of parliament and mayors on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian divide. We met with priests, imams and rabbis. We met with journalists, academics, students, villagers and farmers.

Daily headlines do not begin to tell the story. None of the people we met — not one — believed that the Middle East is closer to peace today than ten years ago. If this is the truth, we need to hear it. Progress rests upon the solid rock of reality, not the shifting sands of fantasy.

Despite it all, many of us returned to New York guardedly optimistic. None of the people we met — not one — felt that the status quo was sustainable. Everyone understood that a way must be found to break out of the suffocating reality. There is broad agreement that the present is not working and that a new future must be forged.

People of faith have a unique role to play. Both Israeli President Shimon Peres and Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad urged us to engage. Both of them emphasized that religion could be a source of enormous support as the politicians seek a political solution. We can help to create a context that is conducive to peace.

Religion specializes in hope. We are good at articulating our common humanity and giving voice to the better angels of our nature. We were also cautioned that if we do not step up the forces of religious intolerance will continue to drag the rest of us towards war. Our era has placed a sacred obligation on the forces and figures of religious moderation to speak out and act out.

There are many good people working to build bridges. In Haifa we met Christians, Muslims and Jews who have built a true house of coexistence. In Tel Aviv we met doctors, nurses and hospital staff who treated illness without regard to race, religion or creed. Even on the Gaza border, in Israeli towns that were fired upon in a barrage of missiles, there were people who were reaching out to the other side.

Peace is made piece by piece, from the bottom up. Progress is advanced day by day, person by person, each laboring in their own corner of the universe, connecting with others who together create an irresistible force. We should connect with those people and strengthen their hand. This daily labor is heroic work.

Jewish sages ask: Who is a hero? They respond: He who turns an enemy into a friend.

This is our task: person by person to help turn enemies into friends.

By Ira Sharkansky, Tuesday Jan 24, 2012

We are never far from a reminder that the Israel-Palestinian conflict has a strong element of religious animosity.

Those who aspire to solve this with a simple agreement about lines on a map will be better off refereeing a football match (American or European). The Middle East is not for them.

The latest reminder occurred at an anniversary of the Palestinian political movement Fatah. It currently rules the West Bank, although tenuously, with help from Israel and other outsiders. Hamas and other extremists are nipping at its heels, and may enjoy the support of most residents.

Featured at the “moderate’s” celebration was a master of ceremonies who introduced the Mufti of Jerusalem by saying “His words are necessary because our war with the descendants of the apes and pigs is a war of religion and faith.”

He then introduced the Mufti of Jerusalem, the family member of the Mufti who incited deadly riots in the 1920s and 1930s, and later collaborated with the Nazis.

The present Mufti said, “In both collections of the Hadith . . . Judgment Day will not come before you fight the Jews, and the Jew will hide behind a stone or a tree, and the stone or the tree will say: Oh Muslim, oh servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him, with the exception of the gharqad tree, and this is why it is common to see gharqad trees around the (Jewish) settlements.”

The comments received condemnations from Britain’s Foreign Office, and calls from Israel’s President Shimon Peres and Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu for judicial authorities to open an investigation about incitement. Even the Jewish peace group that typically condemns Israeli actions, Americans for Peace Now, condemned the comments as

“belligerent anti-Jewish . . . We are appalled by these comments, coming from the most senior Muslim cleric on the Palestinian Authority’s payroll . . . What we find particularly disturbing is that these vile comments were broadcast on the Palestinian Authority’s official television channel, amplifying their “inciting” effect . . . People in positions of religious authority, on all sides, bear a heavy responsibility of avoiding incendiary rhetoric. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a dispute between two national movements with conflicting claims to the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean. Clerics on both sides must prevent this conflict from being perceived as a religious conflict and from becoming one.”

The Mufti, for his part, described the Hadith as an end-of-times prophesy, not a political precept. “”There is nothing in my speech that calls for killing. . . I was speaking about my people, its steadfastness and its existence in this land until the hour (of resurrection)”.

According to the PA religious affairs minister, “Our political position remains unchanged. We believe in peace. He (Hussein) was simply quoting a Hadith that talks about destiny, about what could happen in the future.”

For the sake of candor and balance, I should note that the Palestinian News Agency Maan is as good a source as any for the details on this issue. http://www.maannews.net/eng/ViewDetails.aspx?ID=454753

The Mufti of Jerusalem is not alone among those who play on the borders of fanatacism and the endorsement of peace. Also indicative of Muslim extremism are school books that show maps of Palestine from the Jordan to the Mediterranean, and Turkey’s fanatic insistence that Armenian genocide is a reason to break diplomatic relations with France. Those who look at www.memri.org see no end of mad Mullahs who preach the most hateful of doctrines about Jews, as well as indications that large segments of Muslim populations and politicians view The Protocols of the Elders of Zion as a legitimate description of history and current reality.

Initial feelings at all these indications  can be intense rage, a wondering if we can co-exist with them, or should employ our military might before it is too late.

Then come thoughts about Jewish equivalents, and the problems of the democratic and rational Jewish state to deal with them. Recent incidents include rabbis who endorsed a text that justifies the killing of Gentiles, including children, and the rabbis of Safed who called on people of the city to avoid renting apartments to Arabs. In both cases, judicial authorities dither about pursuing actions against incitement. (See http://www.irac.org/NewsDetailes.aspx?D=1128;

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2011/07/05/117043/israels-probe-of-radical-jewish.html; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yitzhak_Shapira)

No less troubling then religious extremism hereabouts is the naivite heard from American and European officials and commentators. Simplistic actions, such as don’t build here or there, may be appropriate for local disputes in Omaha, Oxford, or Leiden, but not in the Middle East. Buidling restrictions against Jews would not longer be acceptable in any of those places overseas. Here the explosive material is in the air, capable of being exploded by a traffic accident or a comment.

Beyond cursing their house and our own, there may be no alternative beyond hoping that the religious devil remains well capped in its bottle, and that there is enough sanity in both communities to pursue the paths of politics, compromise, and accommodation.

For our friends elsewhere, best to watch football until someone wiser than the present crowd comes up with a bright idea.

January 21, 2012, The Daily Star

Lebanese lawmaker Antoine Zahra speaks during an interview with The Daily Star in Beirut, Lebanon, Tuesday, Oct. 27, 2009. (Mahmoud Kheir/The Daily Star)

BEIRUT: Politicians from the opposition March 14 coalition lashed out Friday at the head of Iran’s elite Al-Quds Force of the Revolutionary Guards Corp, Brig. Gen. Qassem Suleimani, saying his remarks that south Lebanon fell under Iran’s influence have confirmed Hezbollah’s subservience to Iran. They demanded that Hezbollah clarify his statement. Suleimani, speaking in a conference on youth and the “Islamic Awakening” in Tehran Wednesday, said: “In reality, in south Lebanon and Iraq, the people are under the effect of the Islamic Republic’s way of practice and thinking.” But Suleimani’s remarks, which were carried by Iran’s official news agency IRNA Friday, were mistranslated by Arabic media and interpreted by March 14 politicians to mean that south Lebanon was under Iran’s influence.

Batroun MP Antoine Zahra, a Lebanese Forces official, said he was not surprised by Suleimani’s statement about Iran’s influence in south Lebanon and Iraq. “But we were surprised by this frank declaration which involved embarrassment, especially for Hezbollah, which claims that it is putting Lebanon’s interest above its regional links and its ideological loyalty,” Zahra said in a statement.

He asked whether the government, which is dominated by Hezbollah and its March 8 allies, was aware of this situation in south Lebanon.

“If it [government] is aware, what are the measures it plans to take at least to save its face when it claims that it is a government that is exercising sovereignty over all Lebanese territories,” Zahra said.

Fares Soueid, coordinator of March 14 General Secretariat said the remarks violated Lebanon’s sovereignty and demanded that Hezbollah clarify them.

“The remarks by the commander of Al-Quds force have unmasked Hezbollah when he said that south Lebanon falls under Iran’s influence, while the party is seeking through its political activity to convince the Lebanese and the world that it is a Lebanese party that is working to achieve Lebanese goals,” Soueid said.

“Suleimani’s remarks are rejected because they clearly violate Lebanon’s sovereignty on the one hand, and put the residents of the south in great danger, turning them into a mailbox between Iran and America, on the other,” Soueid added.

Mustafa Alloush, a former MP and Future Movement official, said Suleimani’s remarks have confirmed Hezbollah’s subservience to Iran.

Suleimani’s stance “has confirmed what we have been saying over the past years that Hezbollah is part of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard,” Alloush said.

A version of this article appeared in the print edition of The Daily Star on January 21, 2012, on page 2.

Read more: http://www.dailystar.com.lb/News/Politics/2012/Jan-21/160604-iran-generals-remarks-on-south-lebanon-draw-march-14-ire.ashx#ixzz1kHsR77Ot
(The Daily Star :: Lebanon News :: http://www.dailystar.com.lb)

Hugh Naylor (Foreign Correspondent), The National

Jan 20, 2012

BEIT LAHIA // When they later recalled the siege by Hamas security forces, it was not its ferocity that astonished the residents of Beit Lahiya. It was the target – Shiite Muslims gathered in the building to commemorate the death of Imam Hussein, the Prophet Mohammed’s grandson.

Up to 100 policemen and masked men in civilian clothes stormed an apartment building in the Gaza enclave late on Saturday.

Minutes later, they emerged dragging 15 men, whom they then beat with truncheons and denounced as infidels. Neighbourhood residents drawn to the commotion said they were shocked.

"The police showed everyone black Shiite headbands and were yelling to the crowds, ‘Look at these kafirs [unbelievers]!’," said Yasser Ziada, 23. "It was like they were putting on a show for us, beating them in front of everyone. No questions – just beatings."

The onlookers had not known that Shiites lived among them.

If they occasionally referred to Hamas as "Shiites", it was because the rulers of the Gaza Strip received money from predominantly Shiite Iran.

Everyone knew, though, that members of Hamas – like every other Muslim in the Gaza Strip – were Sunni. Or so they thought.

For others in the Gaza Strip, Saturday’s anti-Shiite crackdown was an epiphany for another reason.

The main allies of Hamas, Iran and the Lebanese movement Hizbollah, are predominantly Shiite, or in the case of Syria’s Alawites, an offshoot of Shiism.

For years they have formed an axis of revolutionary Islam that has concerned the predominantly Sunni governments of the Middle East and their allies in the West.

Saturday’s crackdown on Shiites – occurring as Hamas dismantles its headquarters in Damascus amid Syrian president Bashar Al Assad’s political troubles – is an obvious affront to its long-time patron and may be a sign that one strut of that axis is rickety.

It also may be an indication that the tectonic political shifts underway since the Arab Spring erupted last year may be affecting the Gaza Strip.

"Because Hamas is straying from this Hizbollah-Syria relationship, that means they are freer to do these kinds of things," said Hani Habib, a political analyst and writer, who lives in Gaza.

That freedom, which has also seen Hamas gravitate towards newly empowered Sunni Islamist groups in the Arab Spring countries of Egypt and Tunisia, opens opportunities for hard-line Hamas members to settle sectarian scores at less cost, Mr Habib said.

In a statement released after the assault, the interior ministry in Gaza admitted carrying out the operation.

But it denied attacking Shiites, saying only that the people gathered in the building were seeking to create a "fitna", or societal crisis.

"The Gaza Strip and Palestine in general is a society that believes in Sunni Islam," said the statement, which added that there were "no Shiites in Palestine".

Some Hamas officials acknowledge, however, that Shiism has a toehold in the Gaza Strip.

Mustafa Sawaf, an official at the culture ministry and an expert on Gaza’s Islamist groups, said there was a small but increasing number of Shiite converts, some of them fighters from such groups as Islamic Jihad, who had received training in Iran.

"They are growing in number, but we are a Sunni society, so Hamas felt like it had to take action against them," he said, adding that Saturday’s attack was "dramatised [by Hamas] to show people in Gaza that it does not tolerate Shiites".

At the centre of the Shiite group was Mahmoud Joudeh, 52.

For years, he led a group of Salafi Muslims that lived in a compound near the Gaza city of Rafah.

Called the Excommunication and Migration Group, its members deemed greater society as un-Islamic and lived in isolation, according to a May 2010 report about Salafism in Gaza by the Institute for Middle East Studies, a research organisation in Washington DC.

Mr Joudeh recently turned away from Salafi teachings and towards Shiism, Mr Sawaf said.

At his compound on Tuesday, he received dozens of visitors wishing him a quick recovery from the wounds he said he sustained during the attack.

In an interview, he described how Hamas police violently disrupted the commemoration of Imam Hussein’s death.

"They just burst into the house and started beating us," he said, displaying a cast on his right leg and left arm, both broken during the violence. "There were no questions. They just started breaking our bones until none of us could stand."

Mr Joudeh said that under the circumstances, the group’s particular brand of Islam was not relevant.

"We are Muslims and no Muslim should do to a fellow Muslim what was done to us on Saturday."

hnaylor@thenational.ae

Reprinted from Daily Alert, January 18, 2012

• Hamas Attacks Shiites in Gaza – Avi Issacharoff
  Armed Hamas men attacked a gathering of 30 Shiite worshippers in Gaza last Friday, arrested 14 of the men and beat the rest. Gazan sources said that Islamic Jihad now contains a group of converts to Shia Islam, led by Iyad al-Hosni. Becoming Shiite is a growing trend in Gaza, where hundreds of Sunnis are known to have converted. (Ha’aretz)

• The Gap between Resistance and Governance in Gaza – Mahmoud Abu Rahma
  Neither the government nor the resistance in Gaza is willing to step in to protect people who dare to criticize them. Every day we see detention and summoning of citizens by the dozens; not for unlawful acts they committed, but mostly for who they are and what they think, or for their mere political affiliation. There are reports of hundreds of cases of torture and abuse.
      Numerous people have been injured from live fire coming from resistance group training sites. Training sites function in places very close to neighborhoods and/or schools, from where firing rockets also occurs. The state of carelessness on the part of the resistance is also causing continued victims of the misfiring of rockets that fall on houses inside Gaza.
      If the people do not enjoy respect and rule of law from the resistance groups and the government, they will all go down together. The writer has been a human and civil rights activist in Gaza for 15 years. (Maan News-PA)
   
•   See also Palestinian Rights Activist Stabbed after Criticizing Gaza Government
  Mahmoud Abu Rahma, 38, international relations director at the Al Mezan Center for Human Rights, was stabbed multiple times by several masked attackers on Friday. Abu Rahma has received many threats since he published an article warning that both the Palestinian “resistance” groups and government were failing ordinary citizens. (AFP)

Shabbas wants to turn teachers into agents who, in their classrooms, will present Muslim myths as "history," will endorse Muslim religious claims, and will propagate Islamic fundamentalism.

By Janet Tassel

January 15, 2012, American Thinker

It was the first week in October in Newton, an upscale suburb of Boston, and Tony Pagliuso’s daughter, a sophomore at Newton South High School, was visibly disturbed. When Tony asked her the problem, she showed him a passage from the chapter she was assigned in her World History Class. It was a chapter called "Women, an Essay," from a supplemental text called The Arab World Notebook. In a paragraph devoted to women "in the struggle for independence from colonial powers," we find:

Over the past four decades, women have been active in the Palestinian resistance movement. Several hundred have been imprisoned, tortured, and killed by Israeli occupation forces since the latest uprising, "intifada," in the Israeli occupied territories.

Pagliuso assured his daughter that this was "total propaganda," and took the matter up with the young teacher, a Miss Jessica Engel, who couldn’t understand what all the fuss was about. The material had been "vetted" and was deemed "appropriate," she said, "and would stay in the curriculum. After all, she continued, the head of the history department had gotten this material at an outreach workshop of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard!

Thence to the principal,  Joel Stembridge, who glared at Pagliuso and asked, "How do you pronounce ‘Pagliuso’?" and dismissing him brusquely with a refusal to apologize, added: "If you’re unhappy with this, you should know that next year we’re planning to teach material that will be even more inflammatory to your sensibilities." (Where is Ferris Bueller when you need him?) Since Miss Jessica Engel had devoted one day each to Judaism and Christianity while spending 2 ½ weeks on Islam, Tony wasn’t sure how much more inflammatory things could get.

A couple of weeks later, nine stalwart Newton citizens presented themselves at the Newton School Committee meeting, where superintendent David Fleischman, and even the mayor, Setti Warren, were present. The citizens were courteously received, and as it happens Fleishman announced shortly thereafter that indeed the chapter "didn’t meet the learning goals of the class" and had been removed from the curriculum.

"Didn’t meet the learning goals" is Eduspeak for "What the hell is this and how the hell did it get in?" The answer to the latter is, as noted, Harvard, which, as it happens, held a seminar on Israel and Palestine at Newton South in April 2011. And Newton is far from the only community to take its lead on matters Islamic from Harvard.  Public and private schools all over Massachusetts send teachers to the Outreach Center at Harvard for guidance and (free) materials. The program, like the Center for Middle Eastern Studies itself, is heavily Saudi-funded.

The answer to what it is can be found in a number of places. In 2005, responding to a complaint from a teacher in Anchorage, Alaska, the American Jewish Committee published a thorough critique of the Notebook (the full report Propaganda, Proselytizing, and Public Education, is available at the AJC website), thanks to which Anchorage stopped using the book. As background, the AJC report explains:

The Arab World Studies Notebook was first published in 1990 under the title Arab World Notebook [apparently Newton was using this edition], but was updated and republished in 1998 with its current title.  The funding for the publication was provided by the Middle East Policy Council, formerly the Arab American Affairs Council….The Notebook was published in conjunction with Arab World and Islamic Resources (AWAIR), founded by Audrey Shabbas, who penned many of the articles…as well as the editorial commentary throughout.

Who is this Audrey Shabbas?  The moving spirit behind AWAIR, she says all she wants from teachers is to "let you step with me to the inside, to see what a Muslim worldview looks like and feels like, so you can bring it back to your students." This from an adoring 2002 interview posted, fittingly, at Saudi Aramco World.

A little earlier than the AJC’s report, in 2003, William J. Bennetta, president of The Textbook League, produced a preliminary assessment of the Notebook. He gives a little background:

The Middle East Policy Council, a pressure group based in Washington. D.C…adopted its present name in 1991.  The MEPC’s activities include the sponsoring of "teacher workshops" that allegedly equip educators to teach about "the Arab World and Islam.   AWAIR, which operates from Abiquiu, New Mexico, distributes printed items and videos for "ALL LEVELS-Elementary to College" and runs the "teacher workshops" sponsored by the MEPC."

But on to the meat in Mr Bennetta’s scathing report:

The promotion of Islam in the Notebook is unrestrained, and the religious-indoctrination material that the Notebook dispenses is virulent. Muslim myths, including myths about how Islam and the Koran originated, are retailed as matters of fact, while legitimate historical appraisals of the origins of Islam and the Koran are excluded. [Audrey] Shabbas wants to turn teachers into agents who, in their classrooms, will present Muslim myths as "history," will endorse Muslim religious claims, and will propagate Islamic fundamentalism. In a public-school setting, the religious-indoctrination work which Shabbas wants teachers to perform would clearly be illegal.

Or, in the words of Tony Pagliuso, "total propaganda." What is striking, though, is how amateurish the chapter on women is. Taqiyya — telling falsehoods for Islam — is a well-known tool of Islamic propagandists, but this shoddy merchandise is so riddled with lies and half-truths that no respectable Arab merchant in the shuk would hang it in his market. Just a sample:

Women’s Rights in Islam. There is no basis in Islam for the subjugation of women or their relegation to a secondary role. Far in advance of women’s emancipation in Europe, Islam made revolutionary changes in the lives of women in 6^th-century Arabia.

The alert reader will observe that there was no Islam yet in 6^th-century Arabia, Muhammad himself having been born in about 570, and having been tapped by the angel Gabriel no earlier then about 609. Then too we think of the unpleasantries swept under the Oriental carpet — such as permissible rape, clitorectomies, honor killings, child marriage, indeed the whole sorry gamut of women’s trials under Islam, including those specifically decreed by the Koran.  As Robert Spencer sums up:

–Women are inferior to men, and must be ruled by them: "Men have authority over women because God has made the one superior to the other" (4:34).

–It [the Koran] likens a woman to a field (tilth), to be used by a man as he wills: "Your women are a tilth for you to cultivate so go to your tilth as ye will" (2:223).

–It declares that a woman’s legal testimony is worth half that of a man: "Get two witnesses, out of your own men, and if there are not two men, then a man and two women, such as ye choose, for witnesses, so that if one of them errs, the other can remind her" (2:282).

–It allows men to marry up to four wives, and also to have sex with slave girls: "If ye fear that ye shall not be able to deal justly with the orphans, marry women of your choice, two or three or four; but if ye fear that ye shall not be able to deal justly (with them), then only one, or (a captive) that your right hands possess, that will be more suitable, to prevent you from doing injustice" (4:3).

–It rules that a son’s inheritance should be twice the size of that of a daughter: "Allah (thus) directs you as regards your children’s (inheritance): to the male, a portion equal to that of two females" (4:11).

–It allows for marriage to pre-pubescent girls, stipulating that Islamic divorce procedures "shall apply to those who have not yet menstruated" (65.4).

"Such a verse might have made its way into the Koran," writes Spencer, "because of the notorious fact that Muhammed himself had a child bride." That would be Aisha: As the hadith says, "The prophet married her when she was six years old and he consummated his marriage when she was nine years old, and then she remained with him for nine years (i.e. till his death)."  Newton’s Notebook chapter mentions Aisha in passing, that she heroically promulgated Islam after the Prophet’s death, but neglects to tell us how old she was when Muhammed found her, as the story goes, playing on a swing.

It turns out, not surprisingly, that most of the Notebook is as slipshod, even farcical, as the chapter on women. But it is no less dangerous for being slovenly. As the AJC report confirms, "Teachers are subjected to heavy propaganda, both in the Notebook and in the teacher workshops sponsored by MEPC and conducted by AWAIR, in which the Notebook is the primary source material….The Notebook critiques other educational materials for being Eurocentric; yet it provides students with a completely Muslim-centered perspective."

Worst of all, educationally speaking, in addition to inventing history, the Notebook is guilty of two cardinal sins, according to the AJC: "It uses no qualifiers to differentiate between fact and interpretation; and it fails to clarify that, like the stories behind many other religions, some of the stories within traditional Islam are disputed or unverifiable."  The all-important qualifier, "Muslims believe," or "Islam teaches that" is entirely eliminated. Imagine all the Miss Engels in the world preaching to the class, "And God chose Abraham." Or "Jesus performed miracles."

Other innovations from the Notebook, these concerning what the author calls "the Israeli ‘fetish of Jerusalem’":

When people talk of Jerusalem and consider the historic rights over the city and claims to it, they are not talking about the European-type colonial suburb-turned-city which foreign Jews built next to the historic religious city-shrine, even though they called it Jerusalem too.  They are talking about the walled city, fully built up, containing a small Jewish quarter, it is true, but almost exclusively a home to Christian and Muslim Palestinian Arabs.

Yet the "Old City," the Jerusalem that most people envisage when they think of the ancient city, is Arab.  Surrounding it are ubiquitous high-rises built for Israeli settlers to strengthen Israeli control over the holy city.

Other colonial suburbs were built by foreigners in Arab countries, but today no one suggests that Algiers, Tunis, Casablanca, etc., may be rightfully claimed by the Europeans who settled there during their colonial period of recent history.  Only in the case of Jerusalem does colonialist thinking still predominate.

How many high-school students would be able to repudiate "facts" like these? Or total falsehoods such as, "In 1948, between 50 and 70 percent of Palestine’s Christians were driven from their ancestral homes with the creation of the Jewish state"?

Moreover, in an earlier version, we are told "that Yasir Arafat was president of a newly declared State of Palestine, that the United Nations General Assembly had voted to recognize this state in 1988, and that the Canaanites were the ancestors of many present-day Palestinians."  Sandra Stotsky, a professor at the University of Arkansas, deals with these gems and others in her 2004 report for the Fordham Foundation, The Stealth Curriculum, which has now been updated for a new book published by Palgrave MacMillan. She points to one article, ascribed to Audrey Shabbas and Abdallah Hakim Quick, titled "Early Muslim Exploration Worldwide: Evidence of Muslims in the New World Before Columbus." The article claims that

Muslims from Europe were the first to sail across the Atlantic and land in the New World, starting in 889… [and that]West African Muslims had not only spread throughout South and Central America, but had also reached Canada, intermarrying with the Iroquois and Algonquin nations so that, much later, early English explorers were to meet Iroquois and Algonquin chiefs with names like Abdul-Rahim and Abdallah Ibn Malik.

Stotsky interjects,  "The idea that English explorers met native Indian chiefs with Muslim names in the middle of the Northeast woodlands sounds almost like something a Hollywood film writer dreamed up for a spoof." (Mel Brooks, of course.) Interestingly enough, the Algonquin Nation itself demanded a retraction of this "indefensible" farce. But seriously, as Stotsky continues, "What is most astonishing about this ‘historical information’ is that it seems not to have been recognized as fake history by all the satisfied teachers that MEPC claims have participated in its workshops over the years."

Ay, there’s the rub.  Thanks to the Tony Pagliusos of this world, perhaps more parents will rear up on their hind legs and shout, "Who’s teaching my kids? And what in God’s name are they teaching?"

Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/../2012/01/taqiyya_for_kids.html at January 17, 2012 -

Western commentary on Arab Spring usually downplays Islamist anti-Semitism

Robert S. Wistrich, January 15, 2012

The Muslim Brotherhood did not initiate the current upheavals in the Middle East, but the Islamist parties in Egypt, as in Tunisia and Libya, have been the chief beneficiaries of the collapse of long-standing authoritarian repressive regimes across North Africa.

In Egypt itself, the two largest Islamist groups (the Brotherhood and the Salafists) won about three quarters of the ballots in the second round of legislative elections held in December 2011, while the secular and the liberal forces took a battering. The Brotherhood (which garnered over 40% of the votes) is an organization founded by an Egyptian schoolteacher, Hassan el Banna, back in 1928. It has never deviated from its founder’s central axiom: “Allah is our objective; the Prophet is our leader; the Koran is our law; Jihad is our way; dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope.”

It is this radical vision which animates all those in the region who seek a fully Islamic society and way of life.

The Muslim Brotherhood has always been deeply anti-Western, viscerally hostile to Israel and openly anti-Semitic – points usually downplayed in Western commentary on the “Arab Spring.” Indeed, the anti-Jewish conspiracy theories promoted by the Brotherhood and its affiliated preachers are in a class of their own.

This is especially true of Egyptian-born Yusuf al-Qaradawi, undoubtedly the most celebrated Muslim Brotherhood cleric in the world. The still vigorous 84-year-old, often misleadingly depicted in the West as a “moderate,” flew in from Qatar to Cairo’s Tahrir Square on February 18, 2011 to lead a million-strong crowd in Friday prayers, thereby ending 50 years of exile from his native land. He called for pluralistic democracy in Egypt while at the same time offering the hope “that Almighty Allah will also please me with the conquest of the al-Aqsa Mosque (in Jerusalem.)”

Two years earlier, in a notorious commentary on Al-Jazeera TV, the “moderate” Qaradawi had provided religious justification for both past and future Holocausts:”

“Throughout history, Allah has imposed upon the Jews people who would punish them for their corruption…The last punishment was carried out by Hitler. By means of all the things he did to them – even though they exaggerated this issue – he managed to put them in their place. This was divine punishment for them…Allah willing, the next time will be at the hands of the believers.

In other words, the loathing of Jews, the Holocaust and the destruction of Israel by Muslims were linked by Qaradawi as things mandated by God himself.

‘Kill all Jews’

Regarding Israel and the Jews, fundamentalist Muslim attitudes have never deviated since the 1940s. Islamist ideologues, despite their virulent anti-Westernism, have had no problem in drawing on Western sources for their radical anti- Semitism – whether these libels come from Protocols of the Elders of Zion forgery, Henry Ford’s The International Jew, Hitler’s Mein Kampf, fantasies about Judeo-Masonic plots, or have their origin in Christian anti-Talmudism, medieval blood-libels and the slanders of contemporary or Holocaust deniers in America and Europe.

The current swelling of Islamist ranks within Egypt and across the Arab world has hardly improved matters. At a vocal Muslim Brotherhood rally in Cairo’s most prominent mosque on November 25, 2011, Islamic activists ominously chanted “Tel Aviv, judgment day has come,” vowing to “one day kill all Jews.”

The rally, which sought to promote the “battle against Jerusalem’s judaization,” was peppered with hate-filled speeches about the “treacherous Jews.” There were explicit calls for Jihad and liberating all of Palestine as well as references to a well-known hadith concerning the future Muslim annihilation of the Jews. Dr. Ahmed al-Tayeb, the head of Egypt’s Al-Azhar University (the most senior clerical authority in Sunni Islam) even claimed that Jews throughout the world were seeking to prevent Egyptian and Islamic unity, as well as trying to “Judaize al-Quds (Jerusalem).”

This kind of incitement and the pressure from the Egyptian street does not mean that the fragile peace treaty with Israel will be cancelled overnight. But calls for such a step have been repeatedly heard in recent months even from the “liberal” and more “progressive” sectors of the political spectrum as well as from the Islamist parties.

Dr. Rashad Bayoumi, the deputy leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, bluntly told the Arabic daily al-Hayat on the first day of 2012 that his organization will never “recognize Israel at all”, whatever the circumstances. Israel, he emphasized, was a “criminal enemy” with whom Egypt should never have signed a peace treaty in the first place. If this treaty is not to be abrogated, much will depend on the United States making clear to Egypt how dire the economic and political consequences for its wellbeing would be.

It is particularly chilling to note that the Islamic wave already dominates not only in Iran, which is on the verge of nuclear weapons, but also in Turkey, Libya, Tunisia, Morocco, the Gaza Strip under Hamas and the Lebanese state, currently in the iron grip of Hezbollah.

Apart from seeking to impose Sharia law, and to further downgrade the status of women – while repressing Copts and other non-Muslim minorities – the neo-Islamist movements and regimes remain as determined as ever to wipe out Israel and to radically reduce American influence in the region. Needless to say, like the Brotherhood itself, Islamists consider themselves to be the sole authentic interpreters of the divine will.

In the face of this mounting fundamentalist danger, Israel has no choice but to consolidate its deterrent capacity, close ranks and treat with the upmost skepticism any siren voices calling on it to take unreasonable “risks for peace.” At the same time it will have to develop a new regional strategy that takes into account the seismic changes currently shaking the Middle East.

Prof. Robert S. Wistrich is the director of the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Anti-Semitism (SICSA) at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and author of A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad (Random House, 2010)