Tuesday, July 03, 2007

  • Tuesday, July 03, 2007
  • Elder of Ziyon
From the Jerusalem Post:
The Fatah-affiliated Palestine Press Agency reported that the Hamas camps had been established in closed areas in various parts of the Gaza Strip so that the families would not see what's happening inside them.

Some Palestinian parents in the Gaza Strip are up in arms over Hamas summer camps which are being used to train children on the use of weapons and other military equipment.

The families on Tuesday also accused Hamas of inciting their children against Israel and Fatah. Some of the families decided to pull their children out of the camps after discovering the goals of the camp. Most of the children who are participating in the current Hamas summer camps are between the ages of eight and 17.

The agency quoted eyewitnesses as saying that children were being taught how to fire automatic rifles and handle hand grenades.

"The military training is taking place in the early hours; children are being taught how to use Kalashnikov assault rifles and other weapons," said one eyewitness.

"The Hamas supervisors are also giving lectures to the children accusing Fatah of collaboration with Israel and betraying the Palestinians. They are also quoting phrases from the Quran that encourage the children to kill the 'traitors.'"

The children are recruited through advertisements in mosques that only promise to teach children about Islam.

A statement issued by Fatah accused Hamas of "kidnapping" and "brainwashing" the children.

"Hamas is helping create a culture of hatred and vengeance," the statement charged. "They are killing the innocence of children by forcing them to undergo military training and teaching them hatred. They want to use these children to fight their own people in the future.

The original article at Palpress.ps in Arabic is interesting not only for the details, but for the comments that the readers are leaving:

The talk keeps it every Muslim

Educate your children shooting, swimming, and riding horses

Ratified O Prophet of God and how we want to prevail over our enemies without that we train our children and teach them everything good moral courage much literature and no one can do that only ...... Islamic movement Hamas movement.

Why all this silence on this terrorist movement, why is dealing with Hamas as part of the national fabric, no one denies the weight of the Hamas movement within the Palestinian community, but criminal gangs of murderous terrorist and arms dealers blood and hashish justifying everything plea religion, Accordingly, the Palestinian people and all the free world to stand united in the face of this terrorism, which is no different from the Stern terrorist gangs and Alejanah Zionism.
We are not against arms training, but the youth and not children who can not afford report assumes great between what is right and wrong and as long Anu training for the Jews Why is it that they say the overdraft Ibderbohem to fighting the Jews but not training children for the Jews but people who are in their traitors if they claimed to use these weapons for the Jews we are with them, but I think that Hamas stood threw missiles at the settlements if Israel resistance was what stood throwing error Iraqi nor is logical, clear,

  • Tuesday, July 03, 2007
  • Elder of Ziyon
From Asharq Alawsat:

Arabsat, a leading satellite service provider in the Arab world, has threatened to suspend a number of satellite channels that it broadcasts stating that these channels promote magic and charlatanism and claim to have knowledge of the unknown.

Khaled bin Ahmed Belkhyour, the CEO of Arabsat who is also an engineer, told Asharq Al Awsat that the satellite operator will take practical steps during the next two weeks to stop such channels being transmitted if they continue to broadcast programs related to charlatanism. He highlighted that the organization had addressed officials responsible for managing these satellite channels four months ago to end what Belkhyour described as “myths, falsehood and charlatanism”. He stressed that Arabsat has taken legal action to suspend these channels as a result of public opinion, pointing out that the objectives of Arabsat are to uphold the pillars of religion, heritage and traditions.

...On June 11, 2007, the global forum for Muslim scholars and intellects in the Muslim World League called for the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) and the League of Arab States to seek to prevent the broadcasting of programs related to witchcraft via Arab satellite operators such as Arabsat and Nilesat. This is owing to the fact that some channels promote sorcery and recruit both male and female charlatans who claim to have knowledge of the unknown and to have capabilities to cure people from disease, to grant opportunities for work, to assist people in finding a spouse, and to read the future.

The global forum concluded that the majority of people who call in to these programs are women and youth. Hamza stated that these charlatans use religious terms in order to delude viewers in to believing them, distorting the image and teachings of religion.

The global forum warned against these channels due to the damage caused to religious beliefs as they drive viewers towards polytheism and to rely on people rather than God to solve their problems. The forum pointed out that it is religiously prohibited [in Islam] for people to contact these charlatans whether via the internet, television or any other means.

The forum further called for protection of Muslim communities against the practices of charlatans and such scams and stated that teachers and educators from all levels should highlight the dangers of these practices to their students. In addition, preachers and Imams should hold talks on the subject.

The popularity of charlatanism and magic has increased amongst Arab satellite channels, which, in turn, has led to an increase in the number of charlatans. These individuals aim to give off an image of a pious sheikh who can solve individual problems. There are others who have a strong sense of persuasion that has been learnt throughout many years of experience. His/her viewers feel compelled to watch and listen as if they have hypnotized the words and become convinced of his/her abilities to solve their problems.

Somehow, I don't think we'll be seeing Harry Potter on Arab satellite channels anytime soon.
A nice followup to yesterday's story about PalArab press freedom, from the Jerusalem Post:
A prominent Palestinian journalist from the Gaza Strip has sought political asylum in Norway, Palestinian journalists said Saturday.

Seif al-Din Shahin, the correspondent for the Saudi-owned Al-Arabiya news channel network, left the Gaza Strip together with his family, they said, noting that he had received many death threats over the past few months.

Shahin's request has yet to be approved by the Norwegian government. Several other Palestinian journalists are also reported to have fled the Gaza Strip out of fear for their lives.

Earlier this year, masked gunmen set fire to the offices of Al-Arabiya in Gaza City, causing heavy damage to furniture and equipment. Although no group claimed responsibility, Palestinian journalists blamed members of Fatah's armed wing, the Aksa Martyrs Brigades.

The group was also responsible for beating Shahin in two separate incidents in 2001 and 2004. The second assault followed Shahin's live broadcast of a rally held on Fatah's anniversary. The report angered Fatah leaders who had instructed Shahin and other journalists to report that tens of thousands had participated.

In 2003 he was arrested by the Palestinian Authority security forces because of his reporting. Al-Arabiya's offices in Ramallah have also been attacked by Fatah gunmen on a number of occasions.
I like the fact that Fatah threatens reporters for not lying about the size of their rallies. Which means, of course, that many reporters willingly lie to the world for the Fatah terror thugs. Nice!
  • Tuesday, July 03, 2007
  • Elder of Ziyon
Israel and Egypt came up with an agreement to allow thousands of stranded Palestinian Arabs to enter Gaza through the Kerem Shalom crossing. This will solve a humanitarian problem that Palestinian Arabs and their supporters have been complaining about for weeks.

The reason the Rafah crossing was closed is that the agreement that allowed it to open to begin with has been abrogated with Hamas' takeover of Gaza. The agreement was between the PA, the EU, Israel and Egypt, and now that the PA has nothing to do with Hamas and the EU observers cannot be assured of their safety the crossing had to be closed.

Silly Israel and Egypt actually believed that the issue was the 4000 people stuck at Rafah, and tried to come up with a solution for that problem. In fact, the real reason there have been complaints about Rafah was not the poor PalArab people, but because Hamas and the other Gaza terror groups wanted to control a border crossing where they can then smuggle in cash and weapons. The people were a nice cover for terror.

And here's the proof:
Gaza - Ma'an - The deposed government has criticised the decision to open the Kerem Shalom crossing, located on the Israel-Gaza-Egypt border at the southern most point of the Gaza Strip, to allow the thousands of Palestinians stranded in Egypt back to Gaza.

In a statement, the former unity government rejected the use of Kerem Shalom Crossing, stressing that the Rafah crossing, between Gaza and Egypt, should be opened instead. The opening of the Israeli-controlled Kerem Shalom Crossing represents an outside intervention and a violation of Palestinian rights, the deposed government said.

The deposed Palestinian government said in its statement that forcing the stranded Palestinians to travel through the Israeli-controlled crossing was "a dangerous violation of Palestinian rights", both to their "land and sovereignty."

In the same regard, an official source in the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) warned that accepting the transfer of the stranded Palestinians through Kerem Shalom represented an acceptance of a return to occupation of the Gaza Strip.

"In spite of our appreciation for the efforts made by the Egyptian brothers to end the suffering of the Palestinians stranded at the Rafah crossing, we would like to point out that this problem should be brought to an end through the use of the Rafah crossing," the PFLP source said. Furthermore, "We warn that the acceptance of transporting the [stranded] Palestinians through Kerem Shalom is considered as an acceptance of Israeli conditions and the return of the occupation to the strip in order for it to be controlled by the Israeli forces and authorities," the PFLP source warned in a statement.
So let's use thousands of suffering people as pawns to pressure Israel! This is the terrorist calculation, and it has been for decades.

UPDATE: Hamas claims to have shot rockets at the crossing which they call Karam Abu Salem. No confirmation from any other source.
  • Tuesday, July 03, 2007
  • Elder of Ziyon
The gross bias that the media has against Israel is not only the wire services' fault. Yesterday, Reuters released a "photo essay" of something that should be considered at least an interesting human interest story and that, from what I can tell, was not published by a single newspaper - because it doesn't fit the usual Middle East narrative:


Imad Yousef, a 17-year-old Palestinian from the Gaza Strip, enters a special clinic for prosthetics in Tel Aviv November 21, 2006. Yousef is one of three Palestinian youths who lost their legs after an Israeli tank shell targeting militants landed in the northern Gaza village of Beit Lahiya in January 2005. With the aid of various humanitarian organizations, they were transferred in February 2007 to the Reuth Rehabilitation center in the central Israeli city of Tel Aviv. Their medical treatment and rehabilitation were financed by Israel's Defence Ministry. REUTERS/Ronen Zvulun (ISRAEL) ATTENTION EDITORS - MOVING A PACKAGE OF TEN PHOTOGRAPHS AS PART OF A PHOTO ESSAY BY RONEN ZVULUN ON PALESTINIAN YOUTHS RECEIVING MEDICAL TREATMENT IN ISRAEL


Ibrahim Fate, a 16-year-old Palestinian from the Gaza Strip, undergoes an initial examination upon his arrival at Reuth Rehabilitation Centre in Tel Aviv February 11, 2007.


Imad Yousef, a 17-year-old Palestinian from the Gaza Strip, undergoes a physical therapy session at Reuth Rehabilitation Centre in Tel Aviv May 7, 2007.


The head nurse of Reuth rehabilitation centre touches the cheek of patient Issa Ramadan (L),a 15-year-old Palestinian from the Gaza Strip, upon Ramadan's release from hospital in Tel Aviv June 28, 2007.

This is one time that Reuters did what it was supposed to do - for once, to show that things are not what they seem, and to report the little-known fact that the Israeli defense establishment is paying to treat these boys.

But it is up to individual newspapers to choose to publish any Reuters pictures or captions - and this one is not considered newsworthy. It is too messy and confusing for their readers to even consider that Israel's evil IDF is anything but the state-sponsored terror organization that fits the usual Reuters meme, and rather than show a story that puts Israel in a good light, it is much safer to decide not to run the story altogether, or even a single photograph from the series.

Especially the last photo. A Palestinian Arab smiling at an Israeli in a Tel Aviv hospital? When there is a choice between showing this or the zillionth picture of old Arab women crying at the funeral of their dead terrorist sons, the choice is quite clear for the majority of photo editors in the world - stick with what they've done before.

Monday, July 02, 2007

  • Monday, July 02, 2007
  • Elder of Ziyon
From Jon Sanders at Town Hall:

He was a children's television hit; a giant, black and white mouse wearing white gloves and singing about world unification in a high-pitched, squeaky voice. Then a Jew killed him on the air.

He was "Hamas Mickey," also known as "Farfour," the mouse that preached Islamic dominance on Palestinian children's television. "You and I are laying the foundation for a world led by Islamists," he would tell his tyke viewers, singing "Rafah sings 'Oh, oh,' its answer is the AK-47," "Oh Jerusalem, it is the time of death," and other bomb-strapped kids' classics. Then Allah in his mercy saw fit to martyr the mouse.

On Friday, June 29, Hamas Mickey was martyred on the air by an Israeli who came to steal his land. He is now in the celestial palaces of Allah, engaged in the carnal delights of six dozen virginal vermin. Down here, the struggle continues.

Vowing vengeance for his friend, Don al-Duck intends to pursue Israelis across Palestinian children's networks, along with his nephews Huey, Dewey and Kablooey. They can be seen daily on Drakes and Jihad.

But O viewers, Drakes and Jihad is not the only show in Gaza laying the toddler foundation for a world led by Islamists. Allah forbid we should overlook the glorious Mahmoud bar-Ney and Friends! This week, for example, bar-Ney and his child army use songs, chants and special moments to teach Baby Blowup how to fake rage in the streets when Western camera crews draw nigh. Then the tune to "This Old Man" begins, and everyone joins together to sing bar-Ney's theme, "I Hate Jews."

A similar show features four brothers bringing songs, make-believe and dance in an Islamist world-domination context. And this week on The Wig Outs, Mullah Featherscimitar calls a halt to all soccer games, and the brothers work to convert soccer stadiums for executions. The letters T-N-T are highlighted, and the Wig Outs sing a rousing rendition of "Here Comes the Big Red Car Laced with Explosives."

Another blessed show fills little ones with the know-how of simplified suicide belt-making, roadside bombs, and other IEDs. Inspired by Baba the Bomber, the kids of Gaza confidently proclaim, "Can we bomb it? Yes, we can!"

For older children, Flight 29 Downed follows teenagers stranded in the land of the Great Satan. The teens form their own cell of jihadist operations whose goal is to stage a successful attack against a jet loaded with fat Western infidels bloated with oil and contempt for Allah. The teens must combat teenage angst, personality clashes, and their own budding desires in addition to waging war against their unsuspecting neighbors.

Beloved by children of all ages, the "mystery gang" in Scoo ibn Du, Where Are You? drives across Palestine in a beat-up Red Cross van unmasking the Zionist plots behind seemingly obvious Islamist attacks. The show contains numerous running gags, including Wafiyyah losing her hijab, Sharif's appetite, and talking dog Scoo's irrational fear of "rary Rews!" The gang's van is always filmed by idiot American journalists as proof of Israeli rocket attacks, and the show always closes with the Zionist conspirators cursing "the meddling kids" before being beheaded.

Oh, and may a thousand camels walk across me if I forget the classic animation in The Bugged Looney/Road Bomber Hour. Behold the hapless coyote and his IEDs that never quite work, yet that tireless son of Allah never gives up! Equally inspiring are the explosive rages of Yosem Sami, jihadist in the infidel's Western hinterlands. And who among us could ever forget the lines "Allahu akbar, doc?" "Jew season! Yankee season!" and "I tawt I taw a Dionist pig!"

Let it not be said, then, that the message of jihad and Islamist world domination is being neglected by Palestinian children's TV! O brothers, don't let it be said, or else there will be more riots in the streets and fellow believers trampled.

He forgot to mention the Magic Bullet-ridden School Bus, Jihad Squarepants, al-Dura the Exploder, Mighty 'Splodin' Allah Rangers, and al-Bahb the Bomb Builder.

Did I leave any out?
From Ma'an:
A Palestinian reporter for the Lebanese Al Akhbar newspaper in the West Bank has confirmed that he has been receiving threats via his Palestinian 'Jawwal' mobile phone.

In a phone call to Ma'an, the journalist, Sami Said, confirmed that he has received threats, ordering him to stop writing and to keep silent. He said that the threats came after he published news reports on internal Palestinian issues in Al Akhbar newspaper. He refused to name his intimidators.

Sami Said, a journalist from the West Bank city of Ramallah, is married with one child. He has worked as a reporter for many international agencies.

Once again, Palestinian Arab thug tactics have worked to silence criticism. (If they hadn't worked, Mr. Said would have named who he was threatened by.)

One would think that journalists would notice that the people whose cause they champion unabashedly are the same people who continuously threaten their lives. As much as the PalArabs try to paint Alan Johnston as a singular case, the fact is that many journalists in the territories have been threatened, kidnapped and killed over the years.

Yet another indication of what a Palestinian Arab state would look like.
  • Monday, July 02, 2007
  • Elder of Ziyon
This report, part of an Intelligence Review done by the Military Intelligence Division of the U.S. War Department in 1946, is really fascinating:
ISLAM: A THREAT TO WORLD STABILITY

With few exceptions, the states which it includes are marked by poverty, ignorance, and stagnation. It is full of discontent and frustration, yet alive with consciousness of its inferiority and with determination to achieve some kind of general betterment.

Two basic urges meet head-on in this area, and conflict is inherent in this collision of interests. These urges reveal themselves in daily news accounts of killings and terrorism, of pressure groups in opposition, and of raw nationalism and naked expansionism masquerading as diplomatic maneuvers. The urges tie together the tangled threads of power politics which—snarled in the lap of the United Nations Assembly—lead back to the centers of Islamic pressure and to the capitals of the world’s biggest nations.

The first of these urges originates within the Moslems’ own sphere. The Moslems remember the power with which once they not only ruled their own domains but also overpowered half of Europe, yet they are painfully aware of their present economic, cultural, and military impoverishment. Thus a terrific internal pressure is building up in their collective thinking. The Moslems intend, by any means possible, to regain political independence and to reap the profits of their own resources, which in recent times and up to the present have been surrendered to the exploitation of foreigners who could provide capital investments. The area, in short, has an inferiority complex, and its activities are thus as unpredictable as those of any individual so motivated.

The other fundamental urge originates externally. The world’s great and near-great powers cover the economic riches of the Moslem area and are also mindful of the strategic locations of some of the domains. Their actions are also difficult to predict, because each of these powers sees itself in the position of the customer who wants to do his shopping in a hurry because he happens to know the store is going to be robbed.

In an atmosphere so sated with the inflammable gases of distrust and ambition, the slightest spark could lead to an explosion which might implicate every country committed to the maintenance of world peace through the United Nations Organization. An understanding of the Moslem world and of the stresses and forces operative within it is thus an essential part of the basic intelligence framework......

...If the Moslem states were strong and stable, their behavior would be more predictable. They are, however, weak and torn by internal stresses; furthermore, their peoples are insufficiently educated to appraise propaganda or to understand the motives of those who promise a new Heaven and a new Earth.

Because of the strategic position of the Moslem world and the relentlessness of its peoples, the Moslem states constitute a potential threat to world peace. There cannot be permanent world stability, when one-seventh of the earth’s population exists under the economic and political conditions that are imposed upon the Moslems.

The original full PDF is here; the full transcribed text is here.

H/T: The Gathering Storm.

  • Monday, July 02, 2007
  • Elder of Ziyon
Imagine a nation where there is institutionalized racism. Imagine that in the workplace, blacks and whites must sit separately with partitions in between; where black workers can only deal with other blacks and white workers can only have white customers. Imagine that black people had to wear different clothing from whites and had to cover their faces.

Now try to imagine how the West would act towards that nation.

If you substitute sexism for racism, you don't have to imagine very much. As today's Saudi-based Arab News reports, it is happening now:
JEDDAH, 2 July 2007 — There will be stricter measures enforced to segregate men and women from each other at banks’ headquarters, but there is no official written circular yet regarding that.

According to various reports by news agencies that have spoken to bank managers and women bankers, Saudi authorities have ordered banks to separate female and male workers at their headquarters where they used to work together.

...Men and women bank customers have always been separated with their own branches. A manager at the National Commercial Bank said that female and male employees are completely separated even during training courses and at meetings. A partition has been placed at every floor where there are women employees, which was not the situation at the bank’s headquarters in Jeddah until a few months ago.

Another bank also confirmed that there are strict measures now for separating the male and female employees, but neither bank received any circular from SAMA, according to the managers.

The report by Reuters claims that officials from SAMA and the Labor Ministry held a meeting earlier this month with bank managers to inform of the new system and they had until the end of the summer holidays to implement these rules.

The banks are expected to provide separate floors, elevators, entrance and cafeterias for the men and women. The women bankers feel that this will hurt their careers because it will deprive them of the opportunity to exchange experiences, meet clients and compete for positions on equal basis with men.

An official in SAMA denied that there are new rules or directives but admitted that banks are expected to segregate.

There has been many complaints and written requests from different government agencies to strictly enforce the segregation because some banks continue to have mixed administrations at their headquarters,” he told Arab News.

Some of these government agencies included the Riyadh municipality and the Commission for the Prevention of Vice and Promotion of Virtue in addition to some civilians voicing their objections to the mixing.

A manager at a bank in Jeddah said that the Ministry of Labor also requires that there is strict separation and that there are inspection teams that visit the branches and headquarters, just as they do with other business and shops, to observe implementation of this rule.

Now, is this a Koranic rule? Does Islamic law state that men and women may not see each other at work? Were the banks that didn't segregate last year violate Shari'a?

Or is it more likely that the perverted men who run the "Commission for the Prevention of Vice and Promotion of Virtue" are flexing their political muscles?

Now, it would be very easy for the US to put a dent in this institutionalized sexism. But because of the fear of offending the Muslim street, we turn a blind eye to discrimination that is far worse than anything that apartheid South Africa ever contemplated.

I am not saying that Islamic law needs to be violated. I am saying that this clearly has nothing to do with Islamic law, and imposing a bizarre and arbitrary set of sexist standards on a society at large is something that should be fought with the same tenacity that other discrimination is fought.
  • Monday, July 02, 2007
  • Elder of Ziyon
I've mentioned before the "People's Voice" website, its anti-semitic articles and the fact that it is indexed at Google News. Apparently, for a couple of days in June, Google News stopped indexing them, and then reinstated them. I have no idea whether this has anything to do with complaints or whether it was a glitch in Google's software, but they are crowing about their ability to be indexed again and about the extremists - namely, me - who tried to shut them down:

In November of 2006, a person behind a blog called Elder of Ziyon launched an attack against the site. They couldn't silence us for telling the truth within the confines of our constitutional rights, so they started digging through the over 800 articles on our site searching for any piece of dirt they could use against us. If one were to search through the archive of any newspaper or magazine, one could reasonably expect to find something that offends somebody, particularly when taken out of context.

They found an article entitled 'Judaism is Nobody's Friend' by Mark Glenn written on November 7, 2006. The article is a factual critical examination of the negative aspects of Judaism, the belief system, not the people. At no point does Mark Glenn use insult or racial slur. It is not an attack against the Jewish people (as such), and can't be called racist or prejudice. The Elder of Ziyon web site wrote a very slanted piece about thepeoplesvoice.org branding us with the anti-Semitism label. They added a link back to Google News for people to complain and hopefully get us removed. After a few weeks of hate mail bombardment from the Ziyon site, Google relented, giving in to a lone provocateur with an e-mail link.
So am I a "lone provocateur" or do I have enough readers to bombard Google with hate mail for weeks? Isn't it strange that I looked through some "800 articles" in November and happened to find one also published in November? Did I try to take their website down? Their attempts to reproduce what happened are laughable and borderline paranoid. But I have to thank them for giving this blog publicity, because the only time I've ever been mentioned in Google News is from their site! (Although they wouldn't, of course, link to me - evidently they are afraid that the fragile minds of their readers might explode if they read something outside of their own echo chamber.)

Later on in their paranoid screed they accuse the Daily Kos far-left website of being in on this conspiracy to close them down. Way too funny:
The slander and repression that we had seen at the Daily Kos caused us to reassess our beliefs about the free and open internet. At first, because of the extremist character of the individuals that were attacking Eileen and thepeoplesvoice.org, it seemed as though a group with a Zionist agenda had infiltrated the Daily Kos. But after considering the content of a "My Left Wing" posting, we realized that there might be another twist to this story. The posting alleges that Marcos Moulitsas, the founder of Daily Kos, is the closest thing to a CIA agent that you'll ever find, short of a real one: one vetted and found worthy but unwilling (?) to seal the lifelong pact with this nefarious organization. For all intents and purposes, we probably would be erring on the safe side if we were to consider him a "real" agent. The fact that the spooks are onboard at Google is old news. It would appear that a possible connection between Kos and Google is likely, and with CIA associations it's not difficult to see why and how Daily Kos and Google are aligned with New World Order philosophy. The two were certainly in agreement when it came to simultaneously censoring thepeoplesvoice.org and Eileen Fleming.


Since the People's voice pretends to be so committed to "free speech," a simple thought experiment will suffice: Would they ever publish an article about Islam similar to the ones they have published about Judaism? And would Google News keep indexing them after such an article is published?
  • Monday, July 02, 2007
  • Elder of Ziyon
From Arab News:
...On her way out the woman said, “There is another type of marriage, which is much cheaper… But you will only be able to meet your wife for an hour each day. You’ll have to fix the time with her. You’re not allowed to ask her where she lives or where she goes.”

Intrigued, I continued listening. “This type of marriage will cost you only SR5,000 and SR1,000 each month for her expenses,” she added. I agreed to the offer and agreed to meet her the next day. The next day the woman arrived, accompanied by the bride — called Reem — and a man, who claimed to be a ma’zun. The woman asked me to come to her home but I suggested doing the marriage in a public place. They agreed and the marriage contract was written.

Surprisingly, the ma’zun did not even ask for my ID. He simply registered my name (Khalid) and wrote out a marriage contract. He asked us if we agreed to the marriage and congratulated us.

The man then asked if I have any conditions. “Faithfulness is the most important thing to me,” I replied innocently. They smiled at each other, and at my naivete.

He then asked the woman if she had any conditions. “I live with my family and I cannot spend the night outside. So we can meet at my friend’s apartment and do what we want to do there, without informing my family,” she said. I agreed.

The ma’zun then asked me for the dowry. I told him I did not have the money with me at the time and that I would bring the money next week. I then drove the group to the Al-Mansour District. I promised to meet them the next day, but I didn’t bother turning up, I had seen enough.

A few days later, I decided to marry another overstayer from the same district. With the help of some overstayers I made contact with a matchmaker, who asked for only SR2,000 and some time to find me a bride.

A few days later the matchmaker — an African woman — took me to the Sharea Ghourab District of Makkah. When we arrived in the area, she asked me to park my car and proceed on foot. Walking through narrow alleyways I saw a part of Makkah that I had never imagined existed.

Having climbed a steep mountain, we entered an old house. In the main lounge was seated a Nigerian man. The matchmaker spoke to the man in a foreign language at which the man nodded and left the room to return a short while later with three women. He then told me to choose whichever one I wanted. The first woman was a Yemeni national called Abeer, the second was an Ethiopian woman called Safiya and the third was a Nigerian woman called Safi. All three were aged in their 30s. “Abeer is divorced, Safiya is married to a man from Ethiopia and Safi is married on Mesyar to five men here, who visit her according to a fixed time schedule,” said the matchmaker.

“The dowry for anyone of them is only SR2,000. On the day you visit, the woman will be ready. So you choose the one you want,” she added. “I wouldn’t mind marrying all of them for that much,” I said, adding that I needed to go to an ATM machine to get some money for the dowry. The woman led me out and when I got to my car I drove off leaving her standing.

It does seem that such marriages involving overstayers are only a cover for prostitution. Even sincere marriages with overstayers only end in tragedy with the children paying the price for their parents’ mistakes.
By Saudi and Islamic law, only Muslims are allowed to step foot in Mecca.

The rest of the article is about the problems of foreign women in Saudi Arabia who cannot legally marry Saudi men by law and, when they break up, end up having to abandon their children because they can't get health care. Apparently, Saudi government hospitals will not take "unregistered" children.

Sunday, July 01, 2007

  • Sunday, July 01, 2007
  • Elder of Ziyon
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6
Part 7


On November 29, 1947, the UN voted to partition Palestine into separate Arab and Jewish states. This was immediately followed by the Arab Higher Executive calling for a three-day strike and Arabs throughout the land began a series of deadly riots, with all Jews as targets.

The Arab League worked against the establishment of a Jewish state in any part of Palestine, and dark warnings were given about how the Arab street would end up targeting Jews in Arab lands if the state would be born. They started organizing volunteers from neighboring Arab countries to fight the Jews.

The Jewish community in Palestine found itself being attacked from literally all directions. Jews were slaughtered in Haifa, in Jerusalem, and in the Negev. Jews were also targeted in Arab countries, with synagogues burned in Aleppo and scores murdered in Yemen. Jews were attacked wantonly, and virtually the entire Palestinian Arab community wholeheartedly backed the violence against the Jews. Many Jewish communities were cut off from supplies as Arab bands ambushed Jewish convoys and suppy trucks on the roads.

The massacres continued into the new year, with dozens of unarmed Jewish orange growers murdered in January. Also in January, the Arab League started to send its new army into battle to capture Jewish settlements. By February, the British admitted that some 1400 Arab fighters had infiltrated from Syria and Jordan into Samaria, and were being hidden by the local Arab population.

There is no evidence of any Palestinian Arab calls for peace during this time period. While the Chief Rabbi of Israel appealed for calm, while the Haganah and the Jewish Agency emphasized that they wanted to live in peace with the Arabs, no reciprocal calls were made from the Arab side. It appears that the Palestinian Arab community was unified in its desire to do everything necessary to stop Jews from controlling any part of Palestine.

This is not to mean that the Arabs were unified in other areas. Arabs who ignored the strike in December were killed, and the Arab Legion could not agree on strategy. Power struggles broke out between the Arab League-backed Husayni militant faction and the Nejada faction, which ended up fleeing the country. Jordan's King Abdullah, long a friend of the Nashabishis, backed a more representative Palestinian Arab leadership while the rest of the Arab League-backed Amin Husayni.

The Haganah, for the most part, stayed on the defensive and only shot back at the attackers during the first few months after the partition vote. The IZL and the Stern gang were not so circumspect and they would attack both the British and the Arabs without regard to civilian casualties. They were roundly criticized by the mainstream Jewish Agency but their reprisals got bloodier.

Even as these events were happening, the first wave of Arabs started leaving Palestine. Upper- and middle-class Arabs started leaving Jewish-majority areas as early as the first week of December, 1947, and by the end of March over 100,000 Arabs had left their homes, either to other Arab towns that were slated to be in the Arab Palestinian nation or to other Arab countries altogether. For the most part, these moves were voluntary. Almost certainly, this first wave of Arabs fleeing Palestine included many of the same people who left during the 1936-39 riots and then returned - people who had the means and the opportunity to escape what was sure to turn into a war zone.

By the beginning of April, 1948, the Haganah had to re-evaluate its defense policy. Almost every major road between Jewish towns and settlements was dominated by Arab villages and virtually all Arab villages were hostile towards the Jews, strangling the Jewish supply routes. The war against local Arab terror and foreign Arab irregulars needed to be won before the anticipated May 15 withdrawal of all British forces and the expected invasion from the surrounding Arab armies. Politically, things looked bad as well, as the US State Department started making noises that it was not supporting the May partition. The Haganah needed to act to gain the upper hand as soon as the Zionist state was to come into being.

This meant that the Arab villages that were responsible for the convoy attacks, especially within the Jewish partition, would need to be neutralized as a threat. The status quo could not be allowed to go on.

The name of the new Haganah offensive plan was Tochnit Dalet, Plan D. This plan allowed for the military disarmament and, if necessary, destruction of any Arab villages that were considered strategically critical for a contiguous Jewish hold on its areas. While the plan itself could have been theoretically used for "ethnic cleansing" of the Arabs, in reality most of the village populations evacuated ahead of the Zionist offensive in April and May, 1948. There is no indication of a deliberate, planned Jewish policy of "transfer" of Arabs out of the Jewish state. (The entire concept of "transfer" was not considered as distasteful then as it is now; it was almost a given that there would be a transfer of Jews from the Arab state to the Jewish state after partition.)

On the contrary, in Haifa after the Haganah had already won the battle for the city in late April, the Jewish leadership assured the Arab citizens' safety - and the Arabs decided to flee anyway, even though the fighting was over. It appears that they were threatened, explicitly or implicitly, by the Arab Higher Executive not to stay under Jewish protection.

Another instructive episode happened in Tiberias. The Jews and Arabs of Tiberias enjoyed pretty good relations, but outside Arab fighters came to Tiberias and forced the evacuation of the local population in order to be able to fight the Jews there.

The Jews were not entirely blameless in the flight of the Arabs. There were some massacres, including Deir Yassin by the Irgun, but the number of Arabs that fled massacres directly were relatively small. Many, and probably most, of the Arab refugees fled because of wildly inflated rumors of Jewish massacres in neighboring areas. Later in the war the Arabs of Ramle and Lydda were encouraged to leave by the Jews after their towns were captured in July, but those areas had been war zones: the Arab Legion had declared an offensive based out of Lydda towards Tel Aviv after a four-week truce expired, with many Arab soldiers were surrounded and captured during the offensive. Significantly, when the mayor of Lydda offered to surrender, he was shot dead - by the Arabs.

The standard Zionist histories of the war usually say that Arabs were urged to flee by their leaders. While there is little contemporaneous evidence of this happening, reports about such urgings surfaced from a variety of sources, many of which were Arab or pro-Arab. It seems clear that this did in fact happen on a number of occasions, including times where women and children were told to abandon villages (temporarily) so that the men can fight more effectively. It would not exaplin the great majority of Arab flight, however.

In the end, there were many cumulative factors that caused the bulk of Palestinian Arabs to decide to flee: fear of rumored massacres, the loss of their most prominent citizens in the initial flight in 1947, the desire not to live under Jewish sovereignty, the mob mentality that (mostly illiterate) Arabs had where a trickle can quickly turn into a torrent, the sudden loss of jobs in Jewish enterprises, and inter-Arab fighting. Historians have listed these factors in explaining the mass exodus of some 600,000 people. Above all, the major factor that all agree on can be broadly categorized as "fear."

But there is another critical part of the analysis that has not been spoken about, to my knowledge.

In 1948, the Arabs who lived in Palestine still did not consider themselves "Palestinians." They were, above all, Arabs. The nationalism that was pushed by Husayni and their other self-proclaimed "leaders" never really took hold on them, and a large percentage of them were either born in neighboring Arab countries themselves or their parents were. The reason that many of them were in Palestine to begin with was not because of a deep attachment to the land or even because their ancestors lived there - they were there for purely practical reasons, for jobs and money and a good place to raise their families.

The hostilities that started in 1947 changed the calculus in their minds of where they should live. Itinerancy was in their blood, and the idea of moving to another Arab country was not so forbidding - the borders between Arab nations were a fairly arbitrary Western invention and the typical Arab did not recognize them. Arabs had moved freely within the Middle East for centuries and they would continue to do so for centuries more as necessary, and Arabs are famously generous to their guests.

In other words, Arabs were not only calculating the costs/benefits of leaving Palestine, but they were also calculating the costs and benefits of moving elsewhere, where they can start life anew yet again, in honor and dignity.

To understand better why the Arabs left Palestine, it is instructive to ask another question: why didn't the Jews leave Palestine? They were being massacred, they were facing war, they had an uncertain future at best They had no less fear than the Arabs who were abandoning their homes by the hundreds of thousands.

But there were two major differences between the Palestinian Jews and the Palestinian Arabs.

While the Arabs moved to Palestine for mostly practical, economic reasons, the Jews moved there for ideological and religious reasons. Simply put, the Jews had a deep love of the land, and the Palestinian Arabs at the time had very little.

Even more important, though, is the differences in the incentives to leave. The Arabs didn't think that there was much of a downside to leaving - they would either live with their neighbors for a short time while the Arabs destroy the Jewish state and then they would return, or at worst they would be able to start over in another Arab area. The Jews, on the other hand, simply had no other place to go.

It wasn't until the end of 1948 that the Arabs of Palestine started realizing that their calculus was terribly wrong. Instead of being welcomed by their Arab brethren, they were dumped into refugee camps; instead of this being a temporary situation where they would be able to move to their homes in Palestine, the Jews had no interest in welcoming back people who effectively supported their annihilation.

This was only the beginning of their problems. It is truly ironic that the beginning of real Palestinian Arab peoplehood came as a result of them losing their chance at nationhood.

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