Blaming the Jews - Nothing Comparable in History

So many great articles today!

A recent post discussed why Israel differs from Europe.

A writer for Asia Times wrote this great article - at least Asia gets it!

Here's your final exam question in Middle Eastern studies:

A mass of Coptic Christians marches through Cairo to protest the military government's failure to protect them from Muslim radicals. They are attacked by stone-throwing, club-wielding rowdies. Armed forces security personnel intervene, and the Copts fight it out with the soldiers, with two dozen dead and scores injured on both sides. Who is to blame?

The full credit answer is: Benjamin Netanyahu, for building apartments in Jerusalem. If that's not what you wrote, don't blame me if you can't get a job at the New York Times.
Rarely in the course of human events have so few been blamed by so much for so many.

There are precedents, for example, when Adolf Hitler claimed that a Jewish "stab in the back" lost World War I for Germany. The notion that the problems of three hundred million Arabs revolve around the governance of a few million Palestinians has the same order of credibility.
Israeli-Palestinian negotiations always presumed that Israel's peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan would remain intact - that Egypt would interdict terrorists infiltrating Israel from the Sinai, stop weapons from reaching Hamas in Gaza, and otherwise fill its obligations. But Egypt is dissolving. The Egyptian army crossed a red line on October 9, according to Egyptian blogger Issander al-Armani. [1] Soldiers attacked Coptic demonstrators who were demanding protection from the army, The military not only shut down news coverage of the massacre, but used state television to call on Egyptian Muslims to "defend the army from the Copts".

On September 19, the Egyptian army showed that it could not protect Israel's embassy in Cairo; on October 9, it showed itself ready to murder members of the country's Christian minority. Egypt is dissolving because it can't feed itself, and it can't feed itself because it is going bankrupt. Former International Atomic Energy chief Mohamed ElBaradei, now a candidate for Egypt's presidency, warned last week that Egypt would run out of money within months, according to the English-language edition of Almasry Alroum:

Egypt might face bankruptcy within six months, Egyptian reform advocate and presidential hopeful Mohamed ElBaradei warned on Monday. During a meeting with labor leaders at the Center for Trade Unions and Workers Services (CTUWS) in Helwan, south of Cairo, ElBaradei attacked the "failing" policies of Egypt's ruling military council.He criticized the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) for what he called incompetence and lack of experience, saying that experienced government officials don't have enough power. Egypt is currently relying on its cash reserve with no gross domestic product, he said [2].

ElBaradei, the undeserved winner of the 2005 Nobel Peace Prize (he helped Iran cover its tracks en route to enriching uranium to near weapons grade), nonetheless is the closest thing to a responsible figure in Egyptian politics. His warning that Egypt is burning its cash reserves is accurate. On October 5, the Financial Times reported that Egypt's foreign exchange reserves had fallen from $35 billion in January to only $19.4 billion, [3] enough to cover less than five months' worth of imports.

The central bank had reported $25 billion of reserves in August, [4] so the monthly decline appears to be around $6 billion; it is hard to tell precisely because the Egyptian central bank publishes contradictory data about its reserve position. The earlier $25 billion figure might have counted loans expected from the Gulf states, but as the FT explains, "Only $500m of some $7bn of promised aid from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have arrived so far."

Almost 60% of Egyptians live in rural areas, yet the country imports half its caloric consumption and spends $5.5 billion a year in food subsidies. When it runs out of money, millions will starve. Many already are hungry. The state-controlled newspaper al-Dostour warned on October 9 that an "insane" increase in the price of food - up 80% so far this year - has left citizens "screaming". [5]

The newspaper added that the "current state of lawlessness has left merchants and businesses with no supervision", leading to hoarding, price-gouging and shortages. This was evident at the outset of the uprisings, [6] and a breakdown of the country's food distribution system was evident by May, as I wrote at the time. [7]

The Supreme Council of the Armed Forces appears baffled. Its leader, Field Marshall Hussein Tantawi, does not appear in public. Previously he ran Egypt's military industries. Prime Minister Essam Sharaf was briefly transportation minister, having taught highway engineering for most of his career.

He has spoken publicly about only one topic of political importance, namely the peace treaty with Israel, which he proposes to change, as he told Turkish television on October 8. [8] Egypt's leaders face a crisis brewing for two generations in which the Egyptian government kept half of its population illiterate and mired in rural poverty as an instrument of social control. As ElBaradei warns, they have no idea what they are doing.

Syria, meanwhile, is in civil war, which may turn into a proxy war between the Sunni powers and Iran. And Iraq's leader Nuri al-Maliki, the leader of the supposed Iraqi democracy we spent a trillion dollars and 4,000 lives to put in place, is backing the Bashar al-Assad regime in alliance with Iran. [9]

Turkey, the self-styled rising power in the region, is about to get its come-uppance in the form of a nasty economic downturn. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's belligerence has risen in inverse proportion to the market price of the Turkish lira:

...In short, there is not a patch of ground in Israel's proximity that is not roiling and boiling with political and economic turmoil. Echoing in the ears of Israel's leaders are the words of Isaiah (57:20-21), which Jews around the world read on October 8 on the Day of Atonement: "The wicked are like the troubled sea, when it cannot rest, whose waters cast up mire and dirt. There is no peace, saith my God, to the wicked."

Spengler's corollary states: Neither is there peace to the stupid. We have Nicholas Kristof writing in the October 6 New York Times: "Now it is Israel that is endangered most by its leaders and maximalist stance. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is isolating his country, and, to be blunt, his hard line on settlements seems like a national suicide policy. Nothing is more corrosive than Israel’s growth of settlements because they erode hope of a peace agreement in the future."

Kristof is talking about the Jerusalem neighborhood of Gilo, which was undeveloped land before 1967 and which every conceivable peace agreement would assign to Israel.

Nothing will appease the liberals, because if liberal social engineering can't fix the problems of the Middle East, the world will have no need of liberals. The New York Times will demand [14] that Israel concede and apologize, as surely as a gumball will roll out of the machine when I crank in a quarter. Existential need trumps rationality, most of all among the self-styled priesthood of rationality.

For extra credit, class: If 15 million Egyptians starve to death, and all the Copts are murdered, and Syria plunges into a genocidal civil war, and Turkey kills another 40,000 Kurds, and the Iraqi Shi'ites and Iraqi Sunnis all fight to the death, whose fault will it be?

I bet you guessed right this time. Israel's, for building apartments in Gilo.

Spengler is channeled by David P Goldman. Comment on this article in Spengler's Expat Bar forum.

Europe vs Israel - Democracy and Gilad Schalit

An amazing article in the Telegraph:

One of the supreme ironies among the European moral stances has to do with their discourse on the death penalty. It is a standard trope of European contempt for the USA that it still has a death penalty, a sign of its cowboy nature and its retardation in the moral progress of nations.

And yet when that same Europe turns its gaze on the Middle East, the country they have the most contempt for is the only country in the entire region to reject capital punishment, and they have the most admiration for a country that among a widespread political culture that extensively uses torture and execution for the maintenance of public order, shows perhaps the most contempt for the lives of its own peoples and its enemies.

Normally, this would not be even worth mentioning. Most people would just roll their eyes while others complain about Zionist imperialists trying to divert attention from their oppression of the Palestinians. But if you want to understand the “hostage-for-prisoner-exchange” that just took place in Israel and the Western media’s coverage of the event, then you need to pay attention to the issue.

Israel first outlawed the death penalty in 1954, thus reversing the Mandate Law, which, in most other instances, Israel took over from the British. They based themselves both on rabbinic precedent (concerns for both respecting the image of God in man and the unattainable burden of proof) and modern liberal sentiment. In doing so, they became the first modern Western democracy to ban the death penalty, followed a decade later by Britain (1965), Sweden (1972), Canada (1976) and France (1981).

...If the Israelis had hundreds of terrorists in their prisons, in some cases serving multiple life sentences, available to trade for Gilad Shalit, a soldier kidnapped from Israeli soil by Hamas combatants five years ago, it’s because of this attitude towards human life, both their own and those of the Palestinians. And that attitude was on full display throughout this exchange, with agonising over endangering future Israelis by releasing these men contrasting with a profound commitment to getting Gilad Shalit back. Some Arabs recognised the unflattering light this shed on their own culture, while others revelled in it.

Palestine, on the other hand, represents almost the polar opposite. This is a place in which killing daughters and wives and homosexuals for shaming the family with (even suspected and loosely interpreted) inappropriate sexual behavior is a regular feature of society, where “collaborators” are summarily executed, where official statistics for executions put the PA at a rate of formal, legal execution that cedes only to China, Iran, N Korea, Yemen and Libya.
The trade of over a thousand Palestinians for one Israeli highlights the radical differences between the cultures. As Hizbullah’s Nasrullah put it after a prison exchange in 2004: “We have discovered how to hit the Jews where they are the most vulnerable. The Jews love life, so that is what we shall take away from them. We are going to win, because they love life and we love death.”

If a European, concerned about the nature of the aggressive Islam that has begun to crop up in his cities, citing for example Sharia zones, wanted to understand the nature of the Arab-Israeli conflict, he might spend a moment visiting the sites of Palestinian anti-Zionists, where this profoundly perverse culture teems. But of course, that would be politically incorrect. To spend any time pointing out the problems here constitutes the highest level of politically incorrect Islamophobia.

So instead of helping Europeans understand what’s at stake, most of the media and the NGO community have spun this story as one of violations of human rights on “both sides” with a heavy focus on Israeli misdeeds. The prisoners were considered “equal,” and Israeli primarily held accountable by the Geneva Convention for the treatment of enemy combatants when, in reality, the only one protected under these conditions was Shalit, a uniformed soldier kidnapped on his own soil in non-combat situation, and the thousand Palestinian prisoners where convicted in a court, primarily of crimes related to terror attacks on civilians (an, alas, necessary redundancy in these days of sophism).

Thus, The New York Times’s Robert Mackee could speak glibly about the “joy of parents on both sides” at the return of prisoners, and the UN could voice its concern that the prisoners Israel released might be subject to illegal forced transfer. “Returning people to places other than their habitual places of residence is in contradiction to international humanitarian law.” The UN’s concern for the full exercise of free will by convicted mass murderers illustrates the problem. Humanitarian discourse has been turned on its head to protect the ugliest players in this particular game, threatened by ugly forces within their own society, all the while implying that Israel, in its haste to get its own soldier back, trampled their rights and violated humanitarian law. Not surprisingly this led Ban Ki Moon to a moment of moral vertigo where he denounced the violation of everyone’s rights.

Of course, in order to present the moral equivalence of all the “prisoners” in the swap, one has to play down the heinous nature of the crimes and personalities of the Palestinian prisoners released. BBC correspondent Jon Donnison showed the extent of ignorance among the supposedly professional news media by interviewing a man in prison for organising and abetting several suicide bombings. (Because the attacks only injured but did not kill, he did not receive life sentences.) “You are 31 years old, 10 years in prison, serving a life sentence for being a member of Hamas, I mean, how do you feel today?” BBC viewers could be excused for sympathising with a political prisoner, inhumanly incarcerated for belonging to an opposition party, free at last.

In acquiescing with a narrative in which hatred and murder are considered legitimate expressions of “resistance” to “occupation,” Western human rights activists – including many journalists – have degraded humanitarian language at the same time as they have allowed into the public sphere a discourse of genocidal hatred. They have excluded any sympathy for Israelis who defend themselves from the onslaught they have shut out from their and their audiences’ consciousness.

It may seem cost-free to Westerners, but it’s not. In misreading the nature of the threat Israel faces, in adopting a degraded language of human rights to protect the greatest enemies of human rights on the planet, in adopting a corrupted advocacy journalism that masquerades as empirically accurate, they embrace all the kinds of techniques that put them in danger when faced with the same enemy.

And an attempted massacre at Cave of Patriarchs... By an Arab

Look at my previous post to learn about the stabbing of a young man in Jeruaslem.

And now, the "peaceful resistance fighters who only want peace and nothing but peace" bring you this latest story.

JPost:

Police denied a renewal of terror attacks as being part of a greater struggle amid another attempted stabbing attack near the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron on Sunday, the third stabbing incident in five days.

In the most recent incident, a Palestinian armed with a 14- centimeter-long knife was arrested by Border Police, who took the suspect into custody for questioning, said he had intended to launch a knife attack on Israelis on the site.

Police continued their investigation into the stabbing of 17- year-old Jewish resident of the Jerusalem neighborhood Ramot on Saturday. Based on eyewitness accounts, after the suspect stabbed Yehuda Ne’emad, who was sitting on the street with a friend, the suspect fled into the wadi toward the neighboring Arab village of Beit Iksa.

Ne’emad was in moderate condition on Sunday, after being evacuated to the hospital from the site of the attack in serious condition. His sister, Yael Nikar, told Army Radio it was “miraculous” Ne’emad had not been stabbed to death.

Last Wednesday, a Palestinian woman was arrested at the Gush Etzion Junction after charging a group of soldiers and civilians waiting at a bus stop and brandishing a knife while yelling “Death to Jews!” There were no injuries.

A defense source said the security establishment was not viewing the recent stabbing attempts and incident as a coordinated wave of attacks.

“They’re not planned or directly related,” the source said Sunday.

Police Spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said police stepped up Border Police patrols throughout Jerusalem following the stabbing attack Saturday, adding that with the first day of school after the holidays police are “taking no chances whatsoever.”

A Jerusalem Youth is Stabbed

One of my friends is this victim's cousin.

In [ ___ ] is my own comment in the article.

Ha'aretz:

Police suspect that the stabbing of a 17-year-old in the Ramot neighborhood of Jerusalem yesterday afternoon was done by a Palestinian, and a manhunt is underway for the attacker. The youth was taken to Hadassah University Hospital, Ein Karem, in serious condition.

The youth, Yehuda Ne'emad, lives in one of the streets near the area where the stabbing took place. At about 3:30 P.M., he and a friend from the neighborhood were sitting on a stone fence that divides Ramot from the West Bank village of Beit Iksa. The friend, A., said that suddenly a person came from behind them and began stabbing Ne'emad. A. said the attacker tried to stab him too but he managed to evade him and ran toward the neighborhood.

"He [Ne'emad] told me: keep running. And he yelled out that he was in pain," A. said. "The attacker chased me but then he saw people coming ahead of him, which made him turn around and head for Jerusalem Forest, into the nearby wadi."

... The youth was operated on and doctors managed to stabilize his condition. His injuries are not life-threatening.
Ya'akov, the victim's father, said: "My younger son came and told me that Yehuda had been stabbed. These are good kids and this is a quiet neighborhood. You don't expect this to happen in this neighborhood. It caused a great scare but we are dealing with it and praying for his recovery."

The right-wing [normal, sane] parties claimed yesterday that the stabbing in Jerusalem, as well as the arson in the Galilee and the attempted terrorist attack on Gush Etzion last week, are the result of the Israeli "capitulation" to Hamas, and last week's release of hundreds of security prisoners as part of the deal for freeing Gilad Shalit [indeed, it has definitely motivated them, but one should keep in mind, these terrorist attacks have happened before and will always happen - it is merely the release of 1000 terrorists that is motivating it now].

MK Danny Danon (Likud ) said: "This despicable attack is an example of the Palestinians' culture of terrorism. We must find the terrorist and destroy his home. Only a firm response will succeed in stopping these events in the future.

"Following the generosity [shown] in the Shalit deal, the time has come to show determination in containing terrorism, and I turn to the prime minister in order to take action in razing the homes of terrorists," he added.

MK Aryeh Eldad (National Union ) echoed Danon's comments. "We are witnessing a new wave of terrorism, which stems from the encouragement of such actions. This resulted from the release of hundreds of murderous terrorists," he said.

Eldad added that he wanted to see Israel "quickly restoring the deterrent against Hamas by killing its leaders in Gaza, and first [Ahmed] Ja'abari - who had Gilad Shalit [kidnapped]. Only action now - and not in response to an attack with many victims - will be able to fend off the anticipated wave of terrorism and save lives."

Mahmoud Abbas - leader of Palestine?

Another great video by FreeMiddleEast!

Israel Online Ambassadors has issued a call to action:

Israel Online Ambassadors - נציגי ישראל ברשת via Free Middle East

NEW ACTION CALL - ACT NOW
================
Israel seems to care more about the Palestinians than Mahmoud Abbas does!
How can he even think of a unity government with such a vicious group like Hamas. Not only did they kidnap Gilad Shalit and torture him, look at how they treat their very own people!
======================
... ACTION CALL:
======================
1. Post this video on your walls. It is time we take the offensive against Abbas who has been prancing around the world stage attacking Israel. This is a small step, but it is a first step. EVERYONE share it on their wall.
2. Email this video to the world. More importantly, share it with your elected official. If you are in the United State, find their information here: http://www.contactingthecongress.org/
3. Choose a news organization and write a letter sending this video and explaining why Mahmoud Abbas's theatrics are hiding a vicious regime hurting not only Israelis but also Palestinians.



"Occupy Boston, Not Palestine" - and why I love Israel National News

Israel National News:

Taking advantage of the Occupy Wall Street protests that have hit the world in recent weeks, a group of about 40 people from the Jewish Women for Justice in Israel/Palestine joined together on Tuesday for an anti-Israel rally and march in Boston.

The Daily Free Press, a student newspaper at Boston University, reported that the demonstration, entitled ‘Occupy Boston — Not Palestine,’ protested U.S. support of Israeli military presence in “Palestine.”

One of the organizers of the demonstration, Anna Shenk, told the Daily Free Press that she came to give presence and voice to the “Palestinians.”

“I lived in Jordan for two years, working to provide food and clothing to Palestinian refugees,” Shenk said. “I learned firsthand what being chased out of your home does to you, no matter who you are, and it’s outrageous.”

She seemingly was uninformed about the fact that Jordan, as well as other Arab countries, refused to grant citizenship to these Arabs and their descendants who had left Israel in 1948 after being promised by their leaders that they would return to take over Jewish homes after Israel was destroyed. 

As an excuse for the protest, the group argued that the U.S. spends more than $8 million in taxes on military aid and support to Israel per day. Israel, however, is the only staunch ally the USA has and the only stable democracy in the entire Middle East, although the USA aids Egypt and Pakistan in comparable, if not greater, amounts.

Protest participant Nancy Murray said that the “occupation of Palestine” has gone on for far too long.

“Americans, open your eyes,” she said. “It’s because of your tax dollars that Israel occupies Palestine. We pay $8 million in military aid for Israel to do whatever the hell it wants.”
Murray added, “We need to build houses in the U.S. instead of destroying houses in Palestine. The occupation has gone on for so long because the U.S. vetoed 41 valid UN Security Council resolutions. They’ve given Israel the green light to abuse human rights.”

The houses destroyed in Judea and Samaria in recent years have been Jewish ones, however, while illegal Arab building is untouched.

Some protesters at the demonstration said they were concerned with the issue of violating human rights. One demonstrator, Anne Glick, accused Israel of violating human rights by building a fence to keep in the Palestinian Authority Arabs.

“What the U.S. is doing is taking away human rights,” Glick told the Daily Free Press. “The U.S. has to stop giving aid to Israel. $8 million of our tax dollars every day go to stop the Palestinians from living correctly.”

Glick failed to mention the endless murderous terror attacks originating from the Arab side, which is what forced Israel to build the fence in the first place.

And that is why I love Israel National News.  With the exception of Latma TV (which isn't a real media station, it's a satire), Israel National News reports with a bias - but that bias is crucial to so many readers to actually understand what's going on and the numerous lies reported by anti-Israel protestors.  A normal news organization would just report on what they said - and leave it out there in the open.

But no, not Israel National News!!!

You just don't see this type of reporting in JPost, Ynet News, or Ha'aretz.

Israel National News seems to be more of a news-commentary outlet.

Sukkot Freeze

In accordance with the holidy of Sukkot, this blog will not be updated until at least Saturday night.

An Arab Israeli's "Hair Strike" for Schalit

Amazing!

Ynet:

Unusual act of solidarity: Mustafa Salim, 35, an Arab Israeli resident of the northern village of Muqaibla did not shave or cut his hair for more than five years until this week.

Salim, who stresses he is not a religious person, refused to cut his fair since Gilad Shalit was abducted into Gaza in 2006. On Tuesday, upon the completion of the prisoner swap deal and with Shalit's return home, he was finally able to shave and get a haircut.

Read the rest here.

We're rounding them up already!

After we just released 400+ terrorists, we've begun to round up some already!

JPost:

An IDF force from the Kfir Brigade prevented a stabbing attack in the bloc of West Bank settlements called Gush Etzion by a Palestinian woman in her twenties Wednesday.

The Palestinian woman arrived at the the Gush Etzion Junction Wednesday afternoon and crossed the road, approaching soldiers and Israeli civilians standing at a bus stop. She then brandished a knife and ran towards the soldiers and civilians, screaming "Allahu Akhbar" and "Death to Jews," Channel 10 reported.

One of the soldiers at the junction who identified the situation as a possible attack pointed his weapon at the woman and shouted in Arabic for her to stop. The woman dropped the knife and dropped to the ground.

Soldiers detained the woman and she was subsequently arrested. No injuries were reported in the incident. According to the report, the woman told security forces who arrived on the scene that she had come to the junction with the intention of stabbing soldiers. She had waited until the release of Palestinian prisoners in the Gilad Schalit deal before attempting to carry out the attack.

There are a few possibilities about why this happened:

1. She was informed by one of her released terrorist relatives about the great treatment in Israeli jail (aka 4 star hotels), and how you can go there just for killing some Jews.  This immediately grabbed her attention.
2. She wanted to kill Jews anyways, and attempted to do so, but failed.
3. All of the above.

Now's a great time to start implementing the death penalty on terrorists.

Human Rights Watch Anti-Israel Bias - Schalit's Release

Check out this new video I made (and make sure to subscribe to the Israle Awareness YouTube Channel!)

How did the NGO Human Rights Watch handle the release of Gilad Schalit? Watch this short video to find out.

The fact that HRW has the words "Human Rights" and is an NGO should give it away - extreme anti-Israel bias and double standards and hypocrisy and no care for human rights.

Palestinian Children Following the Path of Would-be Suicide Bomber

JPost:

GAZA - A would-be Palestinian suicide bomber freed by Israel in the prisoner swap for soldier Gilad Schalit told cheering schoolchildren in the Gaza Strip the day after her release on Wednesday she hoped they would follow her example.

"I hope you will walk the same path we took and God willing, we will see some of you as martyrs," Wafa al-Biss told dozens of children who came to her home in the northern Gaza Strip.

Biss was traveling to Beersheba's Soroka hospital for medical treatment in 2005 when Israeli soldiers at the Erez border crossing noticed she was walking strangely. They found 10 kilograms (22 lbs) of explosives had been sewn into her underwear.A member of al-Aksa Martyrs Brigades, an offshoot of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas's party, Biss was sentenced to a 12-year term for planning to blow herself up.

After she spoke, the children cheered and waved Palestinian flags and chanted: "We will give souls and blood to redeem the prisoners. We will give souls and blood for you, Palestine."

Biss said she had planned to blow herself up at the checkpoint but her detonator malfunctioned.

I'm still waiting for condemnation that will never come from the Western world, from the U.N., and from Czar Morally Bankrupt UN Human Rights High Commissioner Navi Pillay.  You see, the Palestinains can get away with whatever they want - including brainwashing children to become suicide bombers (you still realistically expect peace? Look at how the future generation is brought up) - and the world won't even mention it.

It's disgusting.  If the world would wake up and see who the Palestinians are, they'd understand the conflict so much better, and maybe would actually be able to come up with something instead of failed negotiations for decades.

What do do About Palestinian Aid?

National Interest:

But this doesn’t mean the Palestinians should get a free pass. Specifically, Abbas’s recent diplomatic adventurism should not go unpunished. He manufactured the recent crisis at the UN. He also has presided over a corrupt political and economic system.

Until now, fear of an ascendant Hamas has prevented Washington from challenging Abbas. Because the Obama White House cannot identify a legitimate and moderate successor to Abbas, and because Hamas appears to be the only alternative, the PLO journeyman has been free to consolidate power—and, according to some, abuse it.

One egregious example is the Palestine Investment Fund, a sovereign wealth fund that Abbas controls through a board he handpicked and whose by-laws he rewrote. Since 2006, the PIF has awarded contracts exclusively to Abbas’s cronies, including his sons, Yasser and Tareq.

The Abbas family is now said to be worth millions, with lavish property holdings and investments throughout the Middle East.

Moreover, the Abbas machine quietly enriches Hamas as it enriches itself. According to a former Palestinian Authority adviser, Yasser Abbas staffed the Karni Crossing cargo terminal in the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip with the stated purpose of ensuring that goods and aid reached Gaza without reaching Hamas. But the customs and border unit at the crossing is not on the Palestinian Authority payroll, and it abuses its monopoly on Gaza’s only cargo terminal to pocket fees and kick them back to Hamas.

The PA also funds an electric power plant in Gaza but allows Hamas to collect the bills. In other words, Hamas raises funds for its operations by billing Gazans for electricity generated by the PA.

What’s needed here is not a wholesale cut in aid, which would punish the Palestinians who have been powerless under Abbas, but a concerted effort to root out PA corruption. This would include U.S. Government Accountability Office audits of Abbas’s presidential budget, international oversight of the PIF, and a much closer look at the troubling financial relationship between the Abbas machine and Hamas in Gaza.

Such an effort would not necessarily mean the end of Abbas’s rule—though his term ended in 2009—but it would entail curtailing his personal power while excising the cancerous parts of Palestinian aid. It would also put Washington back in the driver’s seat during an era of waning American power, keeping Europeans and other regional actors at bay.

Most importantly, it would give the White House and Congress what they both seek: new leverage over the wayward Palestinian leadership.

Human Rights In Iran? What a Joke!

Foreign Policy:

A forthcoming U.N. report, obtained by Foreign Policy in advance of its publication later this week, condemns the Iranian regime for wide-ranging human right abuses, including the secret killings of hundreds of prisoners under mysterious circumstances.

The report, compiled by Ahmed Shaheed, the new U.N. "Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Islamic Republic of Iran," makes for dismal reading: a compendium of violations of basic rights ranging from lack of free expression and assembly to summary executions and torture of detainees.
Iran's authoritarian rulers have abused their people for centuries; thousands died during and in the immediate aftermath of the 1979 revolution. The picture improved somewhat under the 1997-2005 presidency of Mohammad Khatami but has darkened again in recent years.

Read the rest here.

I'm sure that A-Jad (Ahmadinejad) is just bawling and crying his heart out over this.

"Me? Iran? What???? We're a democracy!!!! True, the election was rigged... And yes, if you criticize us, we kill you.  Or if you're an infidel... Or apostate...  And we torture... And I'm a wacko... But other than that, how are we not a democracy???" (what A-Jad is thinking)

A Shortlived Gain for Hamas

 JPost:

... But observers of the Palestinian scene say Hamas’s victory will likely prove ephemeral as the Palestinian public quickly forgets the achievement and the age-old debate remains unresolved among Palestinians – whether to achieve their state through negotiations, as Abbas advocates, or through armed struggle, as Hamas wants.

“Twenty days ago, Abbas gave a speech at the UN General Assembly and he was very popular. Nowadays, now one talks about that speech. No one talks about Palestine at the UN,” Mkhaimar Abusada, professor of politics at Gaza’s Al-Azhar University, told The Media Line. “The same thing will happen to Hamas.

The Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority ruling in the West Bank has been leading a drive to have the United Nations recognize a Palestinian state, a move its leaders say will enhance their standing and pressure Israel into peace talks. Hamas, which seized control of the Gaza Strip four years ago, rejects Israel’s existence and insists Palestinians can defeat it militarily.

While the prisoner swap doesn’t quite fit the description of armed struggle – Hamas negotiated the terms through Egyptian and German intermediaries – analysts and PA officials say that it does demonstrate the value of persistence and the refusal to compromise. They say it undermines in eyes of the Palestinian public the advantages of a negotiated solution.

Abusada said Hamas may enjoy a second wave of public adulation when a second group of 550 prisoners is released in two months, but the impact of that will also fade away, short of a more comprehensive answer to solving the Palestinians’ problems.

Although Hamas leaders have said the prisoner swap includes promises by Israel to ease the blockade it imposed on Gaza when Hamas took over in 2007, the movement can only suggest to Palestinians patience as a timetable to military victory. Hamas has stockpiled missiles and other weaponry in anticipation of another conflict with Israel, but its last fight with the Jewish state in the 2008-2009 Cast Lead Operation ended badly for it.

More recently, Hamas has seen its popularity slip amid a failure negotiate a national unity government with Fatah this year or to improve living conditions in Gaza. Its early hopes that the Arab Spring would improve its standing have been dashed. Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, who was cool to the Islamic movement, was ousted from power, but Bashar Assad, a key ally, is beset by popular rebellion at home.

...

What Hamas may not be able to do, however, is rebuild its organization with the released prisoners heading back to the Fatah-ruled West Bank, where Israeli and PA security forces have decimated the movement, analysts said. Their identities are already known and their movements are likely to be restricted.

Yoram Cohen, the head of Israel’s Shin Bet security agency and a supporter of the swap, said the number of prisoners being released was too small to change the balance of power between Israel and Hamas or between Hamas and the Fatah.

“The risk we are taking is on a level and a security challenge we will be able to deal with. There are 20,000 Izz Al-Din Al-Qassam fighters in Gaza, and another 200 terrorists won't make the world crash down upon us," Cohen told reporters last week, referring to the military wing of Hamas.

Hamas has also diminished the PR impact of the swap by failing to free some of the most high-profile Palestinians held by Israel and focusing on its own members at the expense of Palestinians affiliated with Fatah and other movements.

"This is not a deal," Fatah's Kadura Fares, who heads a Palestinian prisoner activist group and is a close associate of jailed Palestinian leader Marwan Barghouti. Fares told the Israeli daily Ha’aretz, "This agreement does not come close to respecting the principles and criteria which Hamas itself promised."

Among the celebrity prisoners still behind bars in Israel are Ahmad Sa'adat of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, jailed for his role in assassinating Minister of Tourism Rehavam Ze’evi in 2001; and Fatah leader Marwan Barghouti, who is serving multiple life sentences and is regarded as many as a possible successor to Abbas as Fatah chief.

Islamists also have their complaints about the prisoner list, said Zelkovitz. Abbas Al-Sayed, who helped plan to 2002 bombing of the Park Hotel in Netanya, was not released; nor were Abdullah Barghouti, a Hamas official in Gaza responsible for dozens of murders; or Ibrahim Hamed, the head of the movement’s military wing in the West Bank.

You hear that? It's not a good deal because only 1027 terrorists and murderers are being released... Pathetic...

Gilad Schalit, Hamas Captivity vs Palestinian terrorists in Israeli prisons

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