Lebanon Fears Palestine

Lebanon Fears Palestine
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When was the last time the United Nations Security Council met to condemn an Arab government for its mistreatment of Palestinians?

How come groups and individuals on university campuses in the US and Canada that call themselves "pro-Palestinian" remain silent when Jordan revokes the citizenship of thousands of Palestinians?

The plight of Palestinians living in Arab countries in general, and Lebanon in particular, is one that is often ignored by the mainstream media in West.

How come they turn a blind eye to the fact that Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and many more Arab countries continue to impose severe travel restrictions on Palestinians?

And where do these groups and individuals stand regarding the current debate in Lebanon about whether to grant Palestinians long-denied basic rights, including employment, social security and medical care?

Or have they not heard about this debate at all? Probably not, since the case has failed to draw the attention of most Middle East correspondents and commentators.

A news story on the Palestinians that does not include an anti-Israel angle rarely makes it to the front pages of Western newspapers.

The demolition of an Arab-owned illegal building in Jerusalem is, for most of these correspondents, much more important than the fact that hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in Lebanon continue to suffer from a series of humiliating restrictions.

Not only are Palestinians living in Lebanon denied the right to own property, but they also do not qualify for health care, and are banned by law from working in a large number of jobs.

Can someone imagine what would be the reaction in the international community if Israel tomorrow passed a law that prohibits its Arab citizens from working as taxi drivers, journalists, physicians, cooks, waiters, engineers and lawyers? Or if the Israeli Ministry of Education issued a directive prohibiting Arab children from enrolling in universities and schools?

But who said that the Lebanese authorities have not done anything to "improve" the situation? In fact, the Palestinians living in that country should be grateful to the Lebanese government.

Until 2005, the law prohibited Palestinians from working in 72 professions. Now the list of jobs has been reduced to 50.

Still, Palestinians are not allowed to work as physicians, journalists, pharmacists or lawyers in Lebanon.

Ironically, it is much easier for a Palestinian to acquire American and Canadian citizenship than a passport of an Arab country. In the past, Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza Strip were even entitled to Israeli citizenship if they married an Israeli citizen, or were reunited with their families inside the country.

Lebanese politicians are now debating new legislation that would grant "civil rights" to Palestinians for the first time in 62 years. The new bill includes the right to own property, social security payments and medical care.

Many Lebanese are said to be opposed to the legislation out of fear that it would pave the way for the integration of Palestinians into their society and would constitute a burden to the economy.

The heated debate has prompted parliament to postpone a vote on the bill until next month.

Nadim Khoury, director of Human Rights Watch in Beirut, said, "Lebanon has marginalized Palestinian refugees for too long and the parliament should seize this opportunity to turn the page and end discrimination against Palestinians."

Rami Khouri, a prominent Lebanese journalist, wrote in The Daily Star that "all Arab countries mistreat millions of Arab, Asian and African foreign guest workers, who often are treated little better than chattel or indentured laborers…The mistreatment, abysmal living conditions and limited work, social security and property rights of the Palestinians [in Lebanon] are a lingering moral black mark."

Foreign journalists often justify their failure to report on the suffering of Palestinians in the Arab world by citing "security concerns" and difficulty in obtaining an entry visa into an Arab country.

But these are weak and unacceptable excuses given the fact that most of them could still write about these issues from their safe offices and homes in New York, London and Paris. Isn't that what most of them are anyway doing when they are write about the situation in the West Bank and Gaza Strip?

via hudson-ny.org

Hamas claims the White Phosphorus Used Were Taken From Israel

The 'Palestinians' have admitted that they shot rockets laden with white phosphorus into Israel on Wednesday. The 'Palestinians' claim that they got the chemical from Israeli rockets that did not explode during Operation Cast Lead.

An activists in one of the Palestinian organizations admitted in a conversation with Ynet that a number of the mortar shells fired on Wednesday into the Eshkol Regional Council indeed contained phosphorus. According to him, the phosphorus was extracted from Israeli rockets and missiles fired at the Gaza Strip during Operation Cast Lead that did not detonate.
However, according to him, the Palestinian organizations do not intend to make extensive use of phosphorus bombs. "We don't have the phosphorus the Israelis are speaking of," he said.

But Israel used white phosphorus as a smokescreen, which is completely legal. The 'Palestinians,' on the other hand, attempted to use it as a chemical weapon. But hey, what's another chemical weapon between friends?

via israelmatzav.blogspot.com

of course their source for Phosphorous is probably not only stolen from Israel. What is Iran and Syria's take on Phosphorous? I'm betting their army has that available for distribution to their allies

Two Constant Mistakes of the Mass Media: Dictatorships Do not Dictate; Almost Eveyrone's a Moderate

Want to get along with Iran or Syria? Allegedly, be nice to the Iranian and Syrian regimes if at all possible, praise and flatter them.

via rubinreports.blogspot.com

noahdavidsimon's posterous

Networks Ignore Fired Koran Burner, Defended Teacher Who Compared Bush, Hitler

Derek Fenton, the man who burned pages of the Koran while protesting the planned Ground Zero Mosque in New York City, lost his job at NJTransit because of his demonstration. The network news outlets couldn’t care less. None of the networks – ABC, CBS, NBC – have mentioned Fenton’s name, according to a review of show transcripts.

Maybe they spent all their free speech-debate interest back in 2006 when they hurried to defend a Colorado teacher who was suspending after he compared President Bush to Adolf Hitler.

Jay Bennish made headlines in March 2006 after one of his students released a tape of Bennish comparing Bush to Hitler and declaring that America was the world’s most violent nation. Bennish was suspended – placed on paid leave – while officials reviewed his conduct. (He was eventually reinstated.)

All three networks defended him by characterizing his comments as free speech.

On ABC “Good Morning America” March 3, Bill Weir characterized the controversy as a “battle over free speech.” Reporter Dan Harris said the incident “provoked a national debate about academic freedom.”

The CBS “Early Show” on March 3 highlighted students protesting Bennish’s suspension, during which they chanted, “Freedom of speech, let him teach.” Co-host Harry Smith also downplayed Bennish’s comments, suggesting he “was suspended for saying that some people compared President Bush to Adolf Hitler,” even though Bennish himself had made the comparison.

On NBC’s “Today” show March 7, co-host Matt Lauer interviewed Bennish and portrayed him as the victim of a conservative smear job.

“They basically shopped it around to conservative media outlets, and when they finally released it to one, it created an uproar,” Lauer said of the student who released the tape. “And on the tape you can hear [student] Sean Allen asking you questions that seem to be egging you on a little bit. Do you feel you were set up?”

Even President Bush jumped into the fray, saying that “freedom for people to express themselves must be protected.” 

The near-universal defense of Bennish’s comment was that he was trying to provoke debate among his students. “His whole goal is to fire these kids up,” his attorney David Lane, said at the time, “and you have to take some extreme positions to fire these kids up. Let them debate it.”

Yet today, none of the networks have been eager to characterize Fenton’s protest as “free speech” or to suggest, as some politicians and civil liberties advocates have, that Fenton was wrongly fired.

“So long as his actions, however misguided, took place on his own time, and he was not acting in his capacity as a representative of NJTransit but as an American exercising his constitutional rights, then the agency is clearly in the wrong,” New Jersey State Sen. Raymond Lesniak said. 

via cultureandmediainstitute.org

Mohammad has a train to catch

noahdavidsimon's posterous

Identifying Palestinian Anti-Semitism Is Itself Racist?

No sooner had a three-day conference on contemporary anti-Semitism at Yale University ended than voices of disapproval arose over a perceived bias and even latent racism of the event. Sponsored by the Yale Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Antisemitism (YIISA) and bringing together some 110 scholars to present papers relevant to the theme of “Global Antisemitism: A Crisis of Modernity,” the conference had as its seemingly benign and productive objective a furtherance of the initiative’s primary role of identifying and seeking to explain current manifestations of the world’s oldest hatred.
The need for such a conference, though distressing, seems to be justified based on both anecdotal and statistic studies, including a 2009 report by the Stephen Roth Institute for the Study of Contemporary Anti-Semitism and Racism at Tel Aviv University, which noted a doubling of anti-Semitic incidents from the prior year: 1,129 in 2009 compared to 559 in 2008. Equally troubling were the 2008 findings of the European Commissioner for Justice, Freedom, and Security Franco Frattini, which revealed that of the documented anti-Semitic incidents on the European continent, Muslims were responsible for fully half, a statistic made more alarming by the fact that European Muslims, based on being only 3%-4% of the population, committed 24 to 32.3 times the number of anti-Semitic incidents as European non-Muslims.
None of this seemed to matter to critics of the Yale conference, who were incensed that many of the scholars who participated were “right-wing extremists” articulating “odious views” about the perpetrators of anti-Semitism, according to Maen Rashid Areikat, the U.S. representative of the Palestine Liberation Organization. “As Palestinians, we strongly support principles of academic freedom and free speech,” Mr. Areikat wrote, without a hint of irony, in an indignant open letter to Yale’s president, Richard Levin. “[H]owever[,] racist propaganda masquerading as scholarship does not fall into this category.”
Mr. Areikat’s assertion that academic freedom and free speech are cardinal principles in Palestinian culture is a novel, if not delusional, way of assessing what passes for scholarly, hate-free inquiry in the territories, particularly when it comes to discussing Jews and Israel. Perhaps he forgot the efforts of students at Al-Najah University, for example, who fondly remembered the outbreak of the Second Intifada by constructing a macabre attraction called “The Sbarro Cafe Exhibition,” named for the location of a 2001 suicide bombing of a Jerusalem pizza parlor, where fifteen Jews were murdered and dozens more wounded. Created not as a memorial but as an inspiration for further terror-laden savagery, the diorama included scattered pizza slices amid Israeli body parts, splattered blood, and calls to martyrdom with Koran and Kalashnikovs close by.
This was published by Richard L. Cravatts, in the American Thinker

Read the rest of the post, here.

via cifwatch.com

Emanuele Ottolenghi (2003)

Were you outraged when Golda Meir claimed there were no Palestinians? You should be equally outraged at the insinuation that Jews are not a nation. Those who denounce Zionism sometimes explain Israel's policies as a product of its Jewish essence. In their view, not only should Israel act differently, it should cease being a Jewish state. Anti-Zionists are prepared to treat Jews equally and fight anti-semitic prejudice only if Jews give up their distinctiveness as a nation: Jews as a nation deserve no sympathy and no rights, Jews as individuals are worthy of both. Supporters of this view love Jews, but not when Jews assert their national rights. Jews condemning Israel and rejecting Zionism earn their praise. Denouncing Israel becomes a passport to full integration. Noam Chomsky and his imitators are the new heroes, their Jewish pride and identity expressed solely through their shame for Israel's existence. Zionist Jews earn no respect, sympathy or protection. It is their expression of Jewish identity through identification with Israel that is under attack.

The argument that it is Israel's behaviour, and Jewish support for it, that invite prejudice sounds hollow at best and sinister at worst. That argument means that sympathy for Jews is conditional on the political views they espouse. This is hardly an expression of tolerance. It singles Jews out. It is anti-semitism.

Zionism reversed Jewish historical passivity to persecution and asserted the Jewish right to self-determination and independent survival. This is why anti-Zionists see it as a perversion of Jewish humanism. Zionism entails the difficulty of dealing with sometimes impossible moral dilemmas, which traditional Jewish passivity in the wake of historical persecution had never faced. By negating Zionism, the anti-semite is arguing that the Jew must always be the victim, for victims do no wrong and deserve our sympathy and support.

Israel errs like all other nations: it is normal. What anti-Zionists find so obscene is that Israel is neither martyr nor saint. Their outrage refuses legitimacy to a people's national liberation movement. Israel's stubborn refusal to comply with the invitation to commit national suicide and thereby regain a supposedly lost moral ground draws condemnation. Jews now have the right to self-determination, and that is what the anti-semite dislikes so much.

via challahhuakbar.blogspot.com

Diet Tips from Audrey Hepburn - Starved During War

Audrey Hepburn in Sabrina, 1954.
Audrey Hepburn's son, Sean, authored a lovely and loving memoir about his mother. There are no scandals, no beatings, no abuse. Hepburn was a genuinely good woman who valued family above career. In this brief passage, Sean discusses his mother's famously trim figure.

My mother didn't snack, but when she had a dessert, it had to be sweet. She loved a scoop of vanilla ice cream with maple syrup dribbled over it. After her afternoon nap, which she had learned to take because of the early calls and long hours of film production, she would often have a piece of chocolate—one piece! She said that chocolate chased away the blues.

Here is another secret: my mother really wasn't so thin. She used to refer to herself as “fake thin.” Her upper body, especially her thoracic cage, was thinner than average, thus her thin waist. The early whooping-cough incident, combined with malnutrition during the war, led to asthma in her youth, and she had somewhat weak lungs throughout her life. She smoked—like most dancers and just about everybody else at the time—and was told throughout her life that she might be in the early stages of emphysema. Her ballet training also played an important role in the development of her physique. Although her upper body was slight, her arms and her legs were athletic and she was well proportioned overall.

So if you want to be in good shape, it's pretty simple: Grow up during the war, suffer famine in your early life, exercise every day, and later in life eat reasonable amounts of everything and feel good about it. What this really means is that if we don't feed too many fats or sugar to our children, they will have an easier time of it later in life.

—Audrey Hepburn, An Elegant Spirit: A Son Remembers by Sean Hepburn Ferrer.
My thanks to Seraphic Secret reader Bill Brandt for bringing this fine book to my attention.

via seraphicpress.com

depressing

noahdavidsimon's posterous

Former Spanish PM fights delegitimization of Israel

finally some people in Europe are speaking out & supporting Israel.

Foreign Policy and the Jerusalem Post both carry interviews with former Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar. Both interviews were given on the occasion of the launch of Aznar's Friends of Israel initiative in Washington on Wednesday.
Here are some highlights from the Foreign Policy interview.

JR: How is your initiative different from all other pro-Israel initiatives?
JMA: At one point the question for us was, should we organize a new Jewish lobby, a new Jewish organization? The answer was no. The most important aspect of this idea is that to become a member of the board of this institution it is necessary to be a non-Jew, because what's important is the strategic alliance between Jews and non-Jews. Furthermore, it is not an organization linked to the Israeli government, it's not an organization dependent on the circumstances of the moment. We cannot act in reaction to the crisis in the Middle East because we can say everyday there is crisis in the Middle East. It is necessary to defend the strategic idea. I began in Europe: in Paris, in London, now here in D.C. In the next month I will be in Italy, in Rome, in Spain, in Czech Republic, South America.
JR: What is your view on the relationship between Europe and Israel?
JMA: We are perfectly aware of the situation in Europe regarding the state of Israel. If we defend the values of the West, we can find that the Judeo-Christian tradition is one of the most important values for us. Judeo-Christian values are the same for Jewish people and European Christian people.
What is relevant in this moment is not whether we are Jewish or not Jewish, the problem is to have or know the same strategic concept. And you can explain to the different parts of Europe the situation and why the existence of the state of Israel is so important for our interests. For example, if Israel at one moment disappeared or was attacked as a consequence of threats, the next territory to be confronted directly would be Europe. We share these interests with Israel. It is necessary to explain this to the people, because for the mass media today it is very easy to present things as simply right and wrong, and every day Israel is presented as the wrong option and guilty in all situations.
...
JR: Why do you say that the Obama administration is different from other American administrations on this issue?
JMA: I believe that Mr. Obama thinks that he can move the Muslim world and solve the problems of the Muslim world by making speeches. It is not true. Second, the position of the American administration is more or less that they prefer reaching an agreement with [the Muslim world] that defends Israel... but [their] priority is reaching an agreement with [the Muslim world], not to support Israel's government. So, if [their] priority is that, it is necessary to change the Israeli government and provoke a very strong policy against them. This policy is a serious failure.

via israelmatzav.blogspot.com

Former Spanish PM fights delegitimization of Israel
By HILARY LEILA KRIEGER via jpost.com 09/16/2010 04:36

José María Aznar warns of a ‘very non-kosher’ relationship between Iran and Venezuela.

WASHINGTON – José María Aznar, the former Spanish prime minister who came to the US capital this week to push his Friends of Israel initiative, blasted the Obama administration for its Middle East policies in discussing the need for his new group.
“To have good relations with the Muslim world is very important, but not at the cost of losing the trust and confidence of the Israeli people,” he said in response to a question from The Jerusalem Post, ahead of a dinner launching his initiative here on Tuesday night.

At an appearance before the Council of Foreign Relations on Wednesday he elaborated on his criticism, describing the current US posture as breaking with that of previous governments.
“All of them were unconditional supporters of Israel. This administration, in my view, is a conditional supporter of Israel,” he said.
Aznar stressed that his three-month-old organization dedicated to combating the delegitimization of the Jewish state was not affiliated with any political party in Israel or elsewhere and that members were free to disagree with the policies of the Israeli government and one another.
Other members include former US ambassador to the UN John Bolton, Nobel Peace Prize winner David Trimble of Northern Ireland and former Czech president Vaclav Havel, the newest member of the group. The organization is also seeking participation from prominent US Democrats, and is in conversations with Madeleine Albright and Bill Richardson, both of whom served as cabinet secretaries in the Clinton administration. In addition, a bipartisan group of members of the US House and Senate have proposed resolutions supporting the new initiative.
Joining Aznar at the Council on Foreign Relations was Alejandro Toledo, the former president of Peru who noted that he might seem to be an unlikely ally as a non-Jewish Peruvian Indian from a center- left political party.
But Toledo said that he was committed to Israel’s right to exist because of “shared democratic values,” and because Israel had a right to exist just as his people in Peru had a right to exist.
He also pointed to the growing threat that Iran poses to both Israel and Latin America, noting his concern about “a very non-kosher relationship between Iran and Venezuela.”
Indeed, Aznar said that a shared strategic view about Israel was the common denominator uniting those in Friends of Israel.
“Israel is an integral part of the West, and the weaker it is, the weaker the entire West will be perceived to be,” he declared at Tuesday’s dinner. “Letting Israel be demonized will lead to the delegitimation of our own cherished values. If Israel were to disappear by the force of its enemies, I sincerely doubt the West could remain as we know it.”

The message is one Aznar and other founding members have already begun
to repeat during press conferences, opeds and meetings with political
and academic leaders in Europe. They took their outreach to Washington
with Wednesday’s Council on Foreign Relations event.

Scott Lasensky, a Middle East expert with the US Institute of Peace, was
in the audience.

“Their message of support – especially the moral imperative – will
resonate strongly here in the US, as long as the group steers clear of
partisan politics and delegitimizing the current administration,” he
said.

via jpost.com