Yasser Abbas Suing Foreign Policy Magazine

("I became wealthy before my father was elected president and I will continue to do business after his term in office expires.")

Yasser Abbas is suing Foreign Policy magazine for the article The Brothers Abbas (h/t IMRA):
(Daled) The June 5 Foreign Policy report examined Yasser and his brother Tariq's leadership of a number of Palestinian companies in light of recent corruption allegations by Muhammad Rashid, former adviser to late President Yasser Arafat.

Rashid, who was convicted by a PA court of embezzlement last week, has threatened to reveal financial corruption within the current Palestinian leadership.

Yasser Abbas said the Foreign Policy report was "dependent on lies, because it did not make its own investigations, but instead depended on other sources, of which the main source seems entirely unreliable."

Apparently, one of the pastimes of the Abbas family is to sue news organizations that report on them. They've sued Al-Jazeera, Reuters, and Israel's Channel 1. (Thanks to In Context for the research.) I guess when you can't jail the journalists, you sue them.
Among other things Yasser Abbas objects to having his company described as a monopoly.
I found this interview with Yasser Abbas and here's part of it:

A: Falcon, Falcon Tobacco Company – we are the importers of British-American tobacco. We have negotiated this, and it is one company, and it is not the monopoly of the importation of cigarettes in the world. I hope you understand this. British-American is one company. Philip Morris is another company. Gauloise is another company. And all the other importation from Israel is another company. So. it’s a big, broad market. BAT – British-American Tobacco – happens to be one of the largest in the world. We are their importers since nine years. Hamas went into my stores and robbed all my stores, and our loss was greater than any other.

It's an interesting argument. Because there are multinational companies selling cigarettes, he doesn't have a monopoly. Of course, the charge is that he's the exclusive seller in the Palestinian territories.
I'm sure it's related, though not sure how, but Yasser Abbas's biography disappeared!

Jewish 16-year-old branded in Norway attack

A 16-year-old Jewish student was branded with a red-hot coin at a school barbecue on Monday in Oslo, Norway, the Simon Wiesenthal Center reported on Wednesday.
According to Jewish-Danish website Israwhat.com, the perpetrator of the attack, an ethnic Norwegian student, pressed the hot coin into the back of the victim’s neck, resulting in visible burning. School officials did not contact the family after the incident.

The student has reportedly been the target of repeated anti-Semitic bullying and violence because his father is Israeli. He said he planned to hide his Jewish identity when he transfers to a new school and would not associate with ethnic Norwegians or Muslims, the main sources of the bullying.

The student’s mother had complained in 2010 in a radio interview about the anti-Semitic atmosphere in the school and said that the school’s administration had not intervened.

“I see this avoidance as a dangerous development among both ethnic Norwegian and immigrant groups. And nobody, neither teachers or principals, intervenes in this matter. There is a refusal to address this issue — it is too sensitive,” she said at the time.
In a letter to the Norway Department of Justice, the Simon Wiesenthal Center wrote that “these young school hatemongers point to a new generation of Breivik-style racists for Norway’s future. You have a responsibility to protect every threatened child and, especially, this victim targeted simply for being Jewish. The silence of the school, the police and your government is too reminiscent of another Norway, under the WWII Nazi collaborator, Quisling.”

via timesofisrael.com

How Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez is Using Anti-Semitism to Maintain His Power—Against a Challenger Who Isn’t Even Jewish

Venezuelan opposition leader Henrique Capriles delivers a speech in Caracas on June 10, 2012 (Leo Ramirez/AFP/Getty Images) The Dispossessed (Tablet/By Matthew Fishbane) Hugo Chávez is ramping up his assault on Venezuela’s upper class, and now a rare Jewish paradise is squarely in his sights. Can it be salvaged? Four days ago, Henrique Capriles, the youthful governor of Miranda state in Venezuela, launched his campaign to rid the country of Hugo Chávez at the presidential election scheduled for October this year. Joined by thousands of supporters, the newly minted candidate led a six-mile procession through the capital city, Caracas. Their final destination was the office of the national election board, where Capriles formally registered his candidacy. The march showcased Capriles, whose Jewish origins have been mercilessly attacked by the Chavistas, as the anti-Chávez—not just figuratively, but literally as well. By marching for a long distance over a short space of time, Capriles wanted his fellow Venezuelans to see him as the picture of health, in marked contrast to the ailing Chávez. For more than a year now, Chávez’s physical condition has been subjected to the sort of rolling speculation typically reserved for dictators. Until Saturday, Chávez had released virtually no information about the terminal cancer he is widely believed to be suffering from. Then, one day before the Capriles march, he summoned journalists to his presidential palace to tell them, “I feel very good.” The following day, Chávez held a buoyant election rally of his own.
The rally didn’t disguise the fact that Chávez, who is currently serving his third term as president, has never looked so vulnerable. His failing health is only part of the story; in the six years that have passed since the last election, the country has become mired in poverty, violent crime, and corruption. Fired by the high price of oil, Venezuela’s principle export, Chávez lavished cash on social spending, while the underlying economy suffered from inflation and capital flight. These days, Venezuela looks less like a socialist version of Singapore and more like the Latin American equivalent of Zimbabwe. According to Sammy Eppel, the head of the Human Rights Commission of the Venezuelan Bna’i Brith and a frequent commentator on Venezuelan affairs, not even the 8 million beneficiaries of Chávez’s grandiose social justice programs, who combined make up nearly half of the electorate, can be relied upon to cast their votes for the commandante. Capriles, a moderate leftist who leads a coalition of 30 opposition parties, plans to capitalize on this uncertainty.
Yet in a country like Venezuela, where infrequent elections are the only glimmer of democratic hope in the face of a regime that has acquired the core features of a dictatorship, no opposition candidate can be considered a shoo-in. Most polls show Chávez comfortably in front; nonetheless, the regime has several options up its sleeve in the event of a Capriles victory.
There is the prospect of Chavismo without Chávez, whereby a handpicked successor continues the path of the revolution; Chávez’s daughter and brother are spoken of as possible candidates, as is current Foreign Minister Nicolás Maduro. There is the constantly swirling talk of a military coup, a measure that the country’s generals, who are immersed in drug trafficking worth hundreds of millions of dollars, might decide is a preferable alternative to being arrested and imprisoned by a democratic government. In addition, Chávez could follow the example of his close ally Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and simply steal the election. “We do not have an electoral arbiter,” I was told by Diego Arria, a leading opposition figure and former Venezuelan U.N. ambassador. “We have what I call the ‘Ministry of Elections of Mr. Chávez.’ And they will do whatever they have to in order to prevent a defeat.”
Lastly, and arguably most importantly, Chávez can marshal his extraordinary media and propaganda resources to pound away at Capriles’ reputation. Central to that effort is the demonization of Capriles as an agent of capitalism, gringoism, imperialism, and—critically—a concoction of conspiratorial tropes that point to the greatest lurking danger of all: “Zionism,” which for many is interchangeable with “Judaism.” As a recent headline in the weekly pro-Chávez rag Kikiriki so elegantly put it, “We are fucked if the Jews come to power.”
***
Henrique Capriles may be a devout Catholic, but he comes from Jewish stock. His mother’s family, the Radonskis, were Jewish émigrés from Poland; his great-grandparents were exterminated in the Treblinka concentration camp; and his grandmother spent nearly two years in the beleaguered Warsaw Ghetto. His father, meanwhile, is descended from the long-established Sephardic community on the Caribbean island of Curaçao. Although Capriles has expressed pride in his background, his family never considered themselves part of Venezuela’s diminutive Jewish community. For the purposes of the regime’s propaganda operation, that brooks no difference.
“The best opposition candidate for Chávez is Capriles,” said Sammy Eppel. “Any other candidate, like Diego Arria, would be different—they couldn’t call him a Zionist. But Capriles fits the bill perfectly.” Eppel points out that the cartoons lampooning Capriles in the Chávez-controlled press invariably feature him wearing a Star of David. And because Capriles is unmarried, the Chavistas can’t resist a homophobic swipe either; in many of these same cartoons, he wears a pair of pink shorts.
“There is no anti-Semitic tradition in Venezuelan culture,” asserts Daniel Duquenal, one of the few dissident bloggers in Venezuela. “But Chávez has been systematically developing anti-Semitism in Venezuela.” All of which is eerily reminiscent of “anti-Semitism without Jews,” a phenomenon that emerged in the eastern bloc and in certain Arab countries following the Second World War. Absent a numerically significant Jewish community, anti-Semitism becomes a largely ideological weapon, designed to stoke fears of shadowy outside forces hatching conspiracies.
What, if any, are the potential gains of such a strategy for Chávez? Diego Arria is adamant that while the regime is unambiguously anti-Semitic, its deployment of anti-Semitic discourse will yield few concrete advantages. “Capriles says, ‘I am a mariano, a follower of the Virgin Mary,’ ” says Arria, who attended school with Capriles’ father. “People in Venezuela do not see him as a Jew. I don’t believe that an anti-Semitic campaign will have much impact on the Venezuelan population.”
Contrastingly, Duquenal argues that the value of anti-Semitism lies outside the domestic arena, pointing to Chávez’s geopolitical calculations. Chávez has actively promoted a close commercial and political relationship with the mullahs in Iran. He has established himself as a loyal ally of Syrian dictator Bashar al Assad going so far as to dispatch 300,000 tons of diesel, which arrived on a Venezuelan freighter, La Negra Hipolita, two days before the gruesome massacre in the town of Houla. Last week, Chávez ended another long period out of public view by publicly welcoming a delegation from Belarus sent by that country’s dictator, Alexander Lukashenko, who plans to visit Caracas personally in a few weeks from now.
“Anti-Semitism has been created artificially because Chávez wants to align himself with radical regimes against the United States,” Duquenal said. “That’s the only logical explanation I can find for why Chavismo has deliberately decided to become an anti-Semitic political movement.” Continue reading: ‘The Jewish Problem’ Both Duquenal and Sammy Eppel point to the enduring influence over Chávez of Norberto Ceresole, the late Argentinian fascist intellectual with whom he struck up a friendship. “Ceresole was like the parrot on Chávez’s shoulder,” Eppel says. “He wanted bring the far left and the far right together, and he persuaded Chávez that he was the man to do that.” Once Chávez, following Ceresole, aligned the dregs of fascism with those of communism, anti-Semitism became the ideological glue binding the Chavismo model of government, in which the relationship between the leader and his people is central, unencumbered by pesky interferences like an independent judiciary. It is no accident, Eppel believes, that the first chapter of a book by Ceresole extolling this model was titled “The Jewish Problem.”
Occasionally, the vulgar rhetoric of Venezuelan anti-Semitism has strayed into physical attacks. In January 2009, an armed gang stormed the Tiferet Israel synagogue in Caracas, spraying choice slogans like “Damned Israel, Death!” on its walls. This particular theme echoed a speech that Chávez delivered in China in 2006, in which he claimed that Israel had “done something similar to what Hitler did, possibly worse, against half the world.”
In a monograph published in April, “Chávez, The Left and The Jews,” the academics Claudio Lomnitz and Rafael Sanchez contend that in Chávez’s Venezuela, “politics and political life represent a kind of hand-to-hand combat between the ‘people,’ united by ‘love,’ and its enemies, united by hatred—the ‘ire’ that Ceresole imputes to the Jews.” Such cloyingly emotional, anti-rational politics are the perfect breeding ground for the fantasies about Jewish power that Chávez has actively promoted and that will doubtless be wheeled out against Capriles as the election approaches.
***
For Venezuela’s remaining Jews, these anti-Semitic fantasies underline their own harsh reality. Diego Arria describes the community as having been “decimated”; under Chávez, its numbers have declined from a height of 30,000 to just 9,000. Moreover, the Chavista bureaucracy seemingly delights in placing obstacles in the community’s way. Just before Passover this year, the interior ministry announced that extra sanitary permits would be needed if the importation of matzo, the unleavened bread consumed during the festival, was to be approved. And when the Jewish community needs to make official representations, its leaders are directed to the Foreign Ministry—proof, Sammy Eppel asserts, that the regime fundamentally regards Jews as aliens, not Venezuelan citizens.
All the indicators are that Venezuelan Jews will continue to leave the country, heading for more benign destinations like Colombia, Mexico, and Miami. “They are an integrated Latin community, so they go where there is a Latin culture,” says Eppel. “This isn’t a Polish shtetl.” It is possible that a Capriles victory will stem the tide of emigration, but even then, the years of destruction wrought by Chávez will remain a powerful push factor for Jews and non-Jews alike.
***

Vatican silent as UNESCO to register Church of the Nativity in 'Palestine'

Israel is working to prevent the 'Palestinian Authority' from registering the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem as a UNESCO historical site of the imaginary state of 'Palestine.' The gory details of the application are here, and it is not certain that the application will be granted at this time. But given how the 'Palestinians' treat Christians generally, and given how they have treated the Church of the Nativity in particular, isn't the Vatican's silence on the issue rather odd? To remind you of how the 'Palestinians' treated the Church of the Nativity:

Here's a brief summary of what happened:

On April 2, 2002, as Israel implemented its Defensive Shield operation to combat the Palestinian terrorist infrastructure, in Bethlehem "a number of terrorists took over St. Mary's Church grounds and...held the priest and a number of nuns there against their will. The terrorists used the Church as a firing position, from which they shot at IDF soldiers in the area. The soldiers did not return fire toward the church when fired upon [emphasis added]. An IDF force, under the command of the Bethlehem area regional commander, entered the Church grounds today without battle, in coordination with its leaders, and evacuated the priest and nuns."
That same day, "More than 100 Palestinian gunmen...[including] soldiers and policemen, entered the Church of the Nativity on Tuesday, as Israeli troops swept into Bethlehem in an attempt to quell violence by Palestinian suicide bombers and militias." The actual number of terrorists was between 150 and 180, among them prominent members of the Fatah Tanzim. As the New York Times put it, "Palestinian gunmen have frequently used the area around the church as a refuge, with the expectation that Israel would try to avoid fighting near the shrine" [emphasis added].
And in fact this was the case. The commander of the Israeli forces in the area asserted that the IDF would not break into the church itself and would not harm this site holy to Christianity. Israel also deployed more mature and more reserved reserve-duty soldiers in this sensitive situation that militarily called for more agile, standing-army soldiers.
On the other hand, the Palestinians did not treat it the same way. Not only did they take their weapons with them into the Church of the Nativity and fire, on occasion, from the church, but also reportedly booby-trapped the entrance to the church.
On April 7, "one of the few priests evacuated from the church told Israeli television yesterday that gunmen had shot their way in, and that the priests, monks and nuns were essentially hostages....The priest declined to call the clergy 'hostages,' but repeatedly said in fluent English: 'We have absolutely no choice. They have guns, we do not.'"
Christians clearly saw the takeover as a violation of the sanctity of the church. In an interview with CWNews, Archbishop Jean-Louis Tauran, the Vatican's Undersecretary of State and the top foreign-policy official, asserted that "The Palestinians have entered into bilateral agreements [with the Holy See] in which they undertake to maintain and respect the status quo regarding the Christian holy places and the rights of Christian communities. To explain the gravity of the current situation, let me begin with the fact that the occupation of the holy places by armed men is a violation of a long tradition of law that dates back to the Ottoman era. Never before have they been occupied - for such a lengthy time - by armed men." On April 14, he reiterated his position in an interview on Vatican Radio.
On April 24, the Jerusalem Post reported on the damage that the PA forces were causing:

Three Armenian monks, who had been held hostage by the Palestinian gunmen inside Bethlehem's Church of the Nativity, managed to flee the church area via a side gate yesterday morning. They immediately thanked the soldiers for rescuing them.
They told army officers the gunmen had stolen gold and other property, including crucifixes and prayer books, and had caused damage....
One of the monks, Narkiss Korasian, later told reporters: "They stole everything, they opened the doors one by one and stole everything.... They stole our prayer books and four crosses...they didn't leave anything. Thank you for your help, we will never forget it."
Israeli officials said the monks said the gunmen had also begun beating and attacking clergymen.

When the siege finally ended, the PA soldiers left the church in terrible condition:

The Palestinian gunmen holed up in the Church of the Nativity seized church stockpiles of food and "ate like greedy monsters" until the food ran out, while more than 150 civilians went hungry. They also guzzled beer, wine, and Johnnie Walker scotch that they found in priests' quarters, undeterred by the Islamic ban on drinking alcohol. The indulgence lasted for about two weeks into the 39-day siege, when the food and drink ran out, according to an account by four Greek Orthodox priests who were trapped inside for the entire ordeal....
The Orthodox priests and a number of civilians have said the gunmen created a regime of fear.
Even in the Roman Catholic areas of the complex there was evidence of disregard for religious norms. Catholic priests said that some Bibles were torn up for toilet paper, and many valuable sacramental objects were removed. "Palestinians took candelabra, icons and anything that looked like gold," said a Franciscan, the Rev. Nicholas Marquez from Mexico.

A problem that arose during the siege again shows Christian fear of Muslim domination. Two Palestinian gunmen in the church were killed, and the PA wanted to bury them in the basilica. "With two Muslim bodies inside the Church of the Nativity, Christianity could be facing an absolute disaster in Bethlehem," said Canon Andrew White, the special representative of the Archbishop of Canterbury in the Middle East. "It would be catastrophic if two Muslim martyrs were buried in the church. It could lead to a situation like that in Nazareth," he said. Only after intensive mediation efforts were plans to bury the bodies inside abandoned.

Given this history of 'Palestinian' mistreatment of the Church of the Nativity, isn't it odd that the Vatican is silent as UNESCO plans to put the 'Palestinians' officially in charge of the church?

via israelmatzav.blogspot.com

considering the Pact of Umar... it's amusing: http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/jewish/jews-umar.asp