Hamas, Fatah officials renew commitment to reconciliation

[P F Tinmore]

GAZA, (PIC)-- Hamas and Fatah officials concluded a meeting in Gaza on Sunday evening with assertion that the reconciliation process was irreversible.

The PIC reporter said that the meeting progressed amidst a positive atmosphere, and that officials of both factions agreed on activating work of joint committees.

Fawzi Barhoum, a Hamas spokesman, told the PIC that his movement renewed demands for ending the political detention and releasing all those detained for political affiliation in the West Bank.

The officials discussed arrangements for the Hamas-Fatah meeting in Cairo on 18 December that would be followed by a meeting for all factions, Barhoum said.

For his part, Abdullah Samhadana, a Fatah leader attending the meeting, said that an agreement was made by which both parties would table names of their political detainees to a committee that would determine whether the detainee was held for political or other reasons.

Hamas, Fatah officials renew commitment to reconciliation

 

[Trajan]

Oh, I thought it meant reconciliation with Israel...silly me.

 

[P F Tinmore]

It is Israel's war. It can stop it any time it wants.

 

[JStone]

The Economist Magazine: Arab World Self-Doomed To Failure

WHAT went wrong with the Arab world? Why is it so stuck behind the times? It is not an obviously unlucky region. Fatly endowed with oil, and with its people sharing a rich cultural, religious and linguistic heritage, it is faced neither with endemic poverty nor with ethnic conflict. But, with barely an exception, its autocratic rulers, whether presidents or kings, give up their authority only when they die; its elections are a sick joke; half its people are treated as lesser legal and economic beings, and more than half its young, burdened by joblessness and stifled by conservative religious tradition, are said to want to get out of the place as soon as they can.

One in five Arabs still live on less than $2 a day. And, over the past 20 years, growth in income per head, at an annual rate of 0.5%, was lower than anywhere else in the world except sub-Saharan Africa. At this rate, it will take the average Arab 140 years to double his income, a target that some regions are set to reach in less than ten years. Stagnant growth, together with a fast-rising population, means vanishing jobs. Around 12m people, or 15% of the labour force, are already unemployed, and on present trends the number could rise to 25m by 2010.

Freedom. This deficit explains many of the fundamental things that are wrong with the Arab world: the survival of absolute autocracies; the holding of bogus elections; confusion between the executive and the judiciary (the report points out the close linguistic link between the two in Arabic); constraints on the media and on civil society; and a patriarchal, intolerant, sometimes suffocating social environment. The great wave of democratisation that has opened up so much of the world over the past 15 years seems to have left the Arabs untouched. Democracy is occasionally offered, but as a concession, not as a right. Freedom of expression and freedom of association are both sharply limited. Freedom House, an American-based monitor of political and civil rights, records that no Arab country has genuinely free media, and only three have “partly free”. The rest are not free

Knowledge. “If God were to humiliate a human being,” wrote Imam Ali bin abi Taleb in the sixth century, “He would deny him knowledge.” Although the Arabs spend a higher percentage of GDP on education than any other developing region, it is not, it seems, well spent. The quality of education has deteriorated pitifully, and there is a severe mismatch between the labour market and the education system. Adult illiteracy rates have declined but are still very high: 65m adults are illiterate, almost two-thirds of them women. Some 10m children still have no schooling at all. One of the gravest results of their poor education is that the Arabs, who once led the world in science, are dropping ever further behind in scientific research and in information technology. Investment in research and development is less than one-seventh of the world average. Only 0.6% of the population uses the Internet, and 1.2% have personal computers.

Women's status. The one thing that every outsider knows about the Arab world is that it does not treat its women as full citizens. How can a society prosper when it stifles half its productive potential? After all, even though women's literacy rates have trebled in the past 30 years, one in every two Arab women still can neither read nor write. Their participation in their countries' political and economic life is the lowest in the world.

Arab development: Self-doomed to failure | The Economist

 

[P F Tinmore]

Why doesn't Israel want to end its war?

 

[JStone]

Why doesn't Israel want to end its war?

Arab Author Anwar Malek

The Arabs are afflicted with fantasies and obsolete bravado. False, empty bravado, which does no good to anybody. The Arabs invented or discovered the zero--but what did they do with it? Some of them sat on it, some put it on their heads, while others wore it around their waists and began shaking their hips, their belies, and their breasts in order to sell to the world the idea that modern Arabs are doing something

Today, the Arabs constitute nothing but thousands of zeros to the left. The Arabs have lost their worth, their humanity, their culture, and everything. There is nothing to suggest that the Arabs can be relied upon to produce anything. This false bravado is deeply rooted in the Arabs to an unimaginable degree. It is so deeply rooted that the Arabs believe they can go to the moon. If you asked your viewers whether the Arabs would be able to reach the moon by 2015, they would say, "Yes, the Arabs will get to the moon" By Allah, the Arabs will not go more than a few hundred kilometers from their doorsteps.

In all honesty, the Arabs are backward and are not fit for civilization at all. I am talking about the Arabs of today who have begun to export shawarma, falafel and lupin beans to Europe and they purport to be bringing something Arab to Europe

the reality of the Arabs is one of defeat, hitting rock bottom We are defeated, politically and militarily and economically, socially, and even psychologically. We have a discourse of conspiracy, and we blame everything on others. Take Egypt--What does Egypt--that superpower--have to offer? Nothing, it is incapable of doing anything. It has nothing but lupin beans. It is incapable of anything.

Look at how the Arabs live in the West. By Allah, they are a bad example. If you hear about thieves, they are always Arabs. Whenever a young man harasses a girl on the streets of London or Paris, he turns out to be an Arab. All the negative moral values are to be found in the Arab individual

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYgrziadQIo]Algerian author Anwar Malek talks about the arab world. - YouTube[/ame]

 

[P F Tinmore]

That doesn't say anything about why Israel does not want to end its war.

 

[JStone]

That doesn't say anything about why Israel does not want to end its war.

Burak Bekdil, Hurryet Daily News [Turkey]: Hamas Are Terrorists

Anyone who is mystified by [Turkish] Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s great quotes, like me, should remember well this one from earlier this year: “Calling [Hamas] terrorists would be disrespectful to the will of the Palestinian people.” I asked, at that time, “Which man of peace, unless from Jihad, would ally with an organization whose charter declares members to be Muslims who ‘fear God and raise the banner of Jihad in the face of the oppressors?"

I know Messrs. Erdoğan and Davutoğlu are not convinced that Hamas is a terrorist organization even though Hamas’ charter vows to annihilate a legitimate state – Israel. I know they did not link Hamas with terrorism when their darling Khaled Mashaal described the 10,000 rockets Hamas sent to Israeli territory as “modest, homemade rockets,” one of which in 2004 killed 4-year-old Afik Zahavi

I know Messrs. Erdoğan and Davutoğlu simply shrugged off the U.N.-sponsored Goldstone report, which stated: “[Hamas’s activities] constitute a deliberate attack against the civilian population. These actions would constitute war crimes and may amount to crimes against humanity ... The rocket and mortar attacks launched by armed Palestinian groups have caused terror.”

Forget all of that. Not even the Hamas statement over the killing of Osama bin Laden tainted Mr. Erdoğan’s love for Hamas: “Hamas condemns the assassination and the killing of an Arab holy warrior, Osama bin Laden” (whose skilful operatives had once bombed Istanbul, killing mostly Muslim Turks). Last year, in this column, I wrote: “When combined into one compact idea, the picture is telling us that ... The Turkish government views as a great friend, an entity [Hamas], which views the boss of Istanbul’s bombers as a holy warrior.” Bizarre? Maybe.

How does Mr. Erdoğan really justify that Hamas is not a terrorist entity but a political party like his own when it trades a foreign soldier for terror convicts?

The Arab-Israeli exchange rate (part II) - Hurriyet Daily News

 

[P F Tinmore]

I know Messrs. Erdoğan and Davutoğlu simply shrugged off the U.N.-sponsored Goldstone report...

Israel said that report was crap.

 

[JStone]

Former Gazan Nonie Darwish, Human Rights Activist, Founder, Arabs For Israel... An Arab-Made Misery - WSJ.com

International donors pledged almost $4.5 billion in aid for Gaza earlier this month. It has been very painful for me to witness over the past few years the deteriorating humanitarian situation in that narrow strip where I lived as a child in the 1950s.

It is Hamas, an Islamist terror organization supported by Iran, which is using and abusing Palestinians... While Hamas leaders hid in the well-stocked bunkers and tunnels they prepared before they provoked Israel into attacking them, Palestinian civilians were exposed and caught in the deadly crossfire between Hamas and Israeli soldiers.

Both Israel and Egypt are fearful of terrorist infiltration from Gaza -- all the more so since Hamas took over -- and have always maintained tight controls over their borders with Gaza. The Palestinians continue to endure hardships because Gaza continues to serve as the launching pad for terror attacks against Israeli citizens. Those attacks come in the form of Hamas missiles that indiscriminately target Israeli kindergartens, homes and businesses.

And Hamas continued these attacks more than two years after Israel withdrew from Gaza in the hope that this step would begin the process of building a Palestinian state, eventually leading to a peaceful, two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. There was no "cycle of violence" then, no justification for anything other than peace and prosperity. But instead, Hamas chose Islamic jihad. Gazans' and Israelis' hopes have been met with misery for Palestinians and missiles for Israelis.

Hamas, an Iran proxy, has become a danger not only to Israel, but also to Palestinians as well as to neighboring Arab states, who fear the spread of radical Islam could destabilize their countries.

Arabs claim they love the Palestinian people, but they seem more interested in sacrificing them. If they really loved their Palestinian brethren, they'd pressure Hamas to stop firing missiles at Israel. In the longer term, the Arab world must end the Palestinians' refugee status and thereby their desire to harm Israel. It's time for the 22 Arab countries to open their borders and absorb the Palestinians of Gaza who wish to start a new life. It is time for the Arab world to truly help the Palestinians, not use them.

 

[P F Tinmore]

And Hamas continued these attacks more than two years after Israel withdrew from Gaza...

Israel imposed a blockade on Gaza.

A blockade is an act of war.

 

[JStone]

And Hamas continued these attacks more than two years after Israel withdrew from Gaza...

Israel imposed a blockade on Gaza.

A blockade is an act of war.

New York Times...

A long-awaited United Nations review of Israel’s 2010 raid on a Turkish-based flotilla in which nine passengers were killed has found that Israel’s naval blockade of Gaza is both legal and appropriate..

The report, expected to be released Friday, also found that when Israeli commandos boarded the main ship, they faced “organized and violent resistance from a group of passengers” and were therefore required to use force for their own protection
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/02/world/middleeast/02flotilla.html?pagewanted=all

 

[P F Tinmore]

..they faced “organized and violent resistance from a group of passengers” and were therefore required to use force for their own protection

Only in Zioland do attackers "defend" themselves.

 

[JStone]

..they faced “organized and violent resistance from a group of passengers” and were therefore required to use force for their own protection

Only in Zioland do attackers "defend" themselves.

Sir Geoffrey Winston Russell Palmer, KCMG, AC, SC (born 21 April 1942), served as the 33rd Prime Minister of New Zealand from August 1989 until September 1990, leading the Fourth Labour Government. He was responsible for considerable reforms of the country's legal and constitutional framework, such as the creation of the Constitution Act 1986, New Zealand Bill of Rights, Imperial Laws Application Act and the State Sector Act.

Palmer later went on to serve as Professor of Law at Victoria University again. He also held a position as Professor of Law at the University of Iowa, and worked for a time as a law consultant. The MMP system which he had helped promote was adopted in a 1993 referendum. In 1994, he established Chen Palmer & Partners, a specialist public law firm he began with Wellington lawyer Mai Chen. In December 2002, Palmer was appointed to be New Zealand's representative to the International Whaling Commission (IWC). Palmer continued his involvement with, and teaching at Victoria University of Wellington and was regularly engaged as an expert consultant on public and constitutional law issues. His son Matthew Palmer is also a prominent legal academic and public servant.

Palmer is a member of Her Majesty's Privy Council. He was created a Knight Commander of the Most Distinguished Order of St Michael and St George in 1991 and made an Honorary Companion of the Order of Australia in the same year. In 1991 he was listed on the United Nations Global 500 Roll of Honour for his work on environmental issues. These included reforming resource management law. Geoffrey Palmer has also sat as a Judge ad hoc on the International Court of Justice in 1995. He holds honorary doctorates from three universities. In 2008 Palmer was one of the first people appointed as Senior Counsel during the temporary change from Queen's Counsel in the Helen Clark Government.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoffrey_Palmer_(politician)