Hamas' Gaza anniversary draws tens of thousands

[P F Tinmore]

GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip (AP) — Tens of thousands of Gazans turned out Wednesday for an anniversary rally of the ruling Hamas, a demonstration of strength for the Islamic militant movement ahead of Palestinian general elections tentatively set for the spring.

Hamas organizers said some 350,000 people attended Wednesday's rally. The estimate could not be confirmed independently, but the rally site, a large open area, was packed and an overflow crowd spilled into adjacent streets.

The rally came a week before another round of reconciliation talks between Abbas and Hamas' top leader in exile, Khaled Mashaal.

Addressing the crowd, Haniyeh called for continued armed struggle against Israel.

"We affirm that armed resistance is our strategic option and the only way to liberate our land, from the sea to the river," he said. "God willing, Hamas will lead the people ... to the uprising until we liberate Palestine, all of Palestine."

Hamas' Gaza anniversary draws tens of thousands - Yahoo! News

 

[JStone]

Time Magazine: Globally Isolated and Economically Crippled: Why Hamas is Losing Gaza

Besieged by Israel and the West, which regards it as a terrorist group, and cut off from the Palestinian majority in the West Bank, Hamas has little to offer beyond its jihadist credentials — and the promise of clean government. So it's hardly surprising that the party has been rapidly losing ground in its stronghold. Recent surveys by leading pollsters conclude that if elections were held in Gaza today, Hamas, an acronym in Arabic for the Islamic Resistance Movement, would not be returned to power. A June poll by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research found that Hamas would get just 28% of the vote, a steep decline from the 44% plurality it won in 2006.

Especially alarming for the Islamists is a precipitous drop in support for the party among Gaza's youth: two-thirds of the population is under 25. In a March survey taken in the afterglow of the protests in Cairo's Tahrir Square that led to the ouster of Egypt's dictator, Hosni Mubarak, more than 60% of Gazans age 18 to 27 said they too would support public demonstrations demanding regime change.

Soon after that poll, 10,000 turned out at a rally to voice a more modest demand — that Hamas end the bloody rift with Fatah, the secular party it bested six years ago. Hamas sent thugs to break up the demonstration. "We came out to say the people should be united, and they attack us!" says Shadi Hassan, 22, who lives in a refugee camp and sells cigarettes. "We are suffocated, and we need regime change."

Even party stalwarts agree that they've lost the street. "The majority of people want a change, yes," says Ahmed Yusuf, a former deputy foreign minister for Hamas who now runs a think tank called House of Wisdom. "They are not happy with the way Hamas is governing Gaza. Wherever you look is miserable life." Forty percent of Gazans live in poverty. The rate of unemployment is approaching 50%, among the highest in the world, and is likely to worsen as the population of 1.6 million doubles in the next 20 years. "Because they believe in God, they don't think a lot about the future," says Gaza economist Omar Shaban, who heads the Pal-Think think tank. "You won't find someone in Hamas who is thinking about 2045. They say, 'Oh, God will provide.'"

Globally Isolated and Economically Crippled: Why Hamas is Losing Gaza - TIME

 

[P F Tinmore]

Yeah, right.

Hamas organizers said some 350,000 people attended Wednesday's rally. The estimate could not be confirmed independently, but the rally site, a large open area, was packed and an overflow crowd spilled into adjacent streets.

 

[JStone]

Gaza's Elected Islamist Rulers Crack Down on Secular Community

After nearly four years of Hamas rule, the Gaza Strip's small secular community is in tatters, decimated by the militant group's campaign to impose its strict version of Islam in the coastal territory.

Hamas has bullied men and women to dress modestly, tried to keep the sexes from mingling in public and sparked a flight of secular university students and educated professionals. Most recently, it has confiscated novels it deems offensive to Islam from a bookshop and banned Gaza's handful of male hairdressers from styling women's hair.

Gaza, a tiny sliver of land squeezed between Egypt and Israel, always had a significant Islamic flavour, but once tolerated bars and cinemas, especially during Egyptian rule from 1948 to 1967. A conservative religious movement began to take hold in the 1980s, as part of a larger, region-wide religious awakening.

The trend toward religious fundamentalism preceded the Hamas takeover. In recent years, hardliners have burned down the cinemas. Their charred remains are still visible in Gaza City. Militants blew up the last bar in 2005.

Gaza women, whose attire once varied from Western pants and skirts to colourful traditional embroidered robes, began donning ankle-length loose robes. Women with face veils, once rarely seen in Gaza, are now a common sight.

Today, plainclothes officers sometimes halt couples in the streets, demanding to see marriage licenses. Last year, the Interior Ministry banned women from smoking water pipes in public. Islamic faith does not ban women from smoking, but it is considered taboo in Gaza society.

"In the end, the people who think differently are leaving," said Rami, a 32-year-old activist in one of Gaza's few secular groups. He refused to give his last name, fearing retribution
Gaza's elected Islamist rulers crack down on secular community - Telegraph

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IxAKFlpdcfc]Applause - YouTube[/ame]

 

[docmauser1]

Addressing the crowd, Haniyeh called for continued armed struggle against Israel.

That schmuck should get a life and a job, of course.

 

[JStone]

Palestinians: Other Arabs Who Can't Accomplish Anything In Life And Would Rather Wrap Themselves In The Seductive Melodrama Of Eternal Struggle And Death

Historian Sir Martin Gilbert, Official Biographer of Winston Churchill

I cannot stress enough the importance of the few days Churchill spent throughout Palestine in 1921. The contrast between the extraordinary negative points of view put forth by the Palestinian Arabs and the equally positive ones put forth by the Zionists struck him enormously. Churchill didn't like negativism and he couldn't comprehend why the Palestinian Arabs were being so negative. It's quite curious. If you have a look at what the Palestinian Arabs told him, you'll find that three or four are actually in the Hamas Charter today, such as the world Jewish conspiracy and so on and so forth. That said, the Palestinian Arabs just made a bad impression on him and subsequently, he became very negative toward them; in modern terms, almost racist. When Churchill spoke to the Palestinian Arabs, he actually said to them, 'You've got to help the Zionists. They're people of quality and inasmuch as they'll succeed, you'll succeed. Without them you won't succeed.'

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IxAKFlpdcfc]Applause - YouTube[/ame]

 

[P F Tinmore]

'You've got to help the Zionists. They're people of quality, blah, blah, blah...

 

[JStone]

'You've got to help the Zionists. They're people of quality, blah, blah, blah...

Massachussets Institute of Technology [MIT]...

As a world leader in science and technology, Israel excels in such areas as genetics, medicine, agriculture, computer sciences, electronics, optics, and engineering. Scientists at Israeli universities such as Bar Ilan University, Ben Gurion University, Haifa University, Hebrew University, The Technion--Israel Institute of Technology, Tel Aviv University and the Weizmann Institute of Science are pioneers in areas such as stem cell-based tissue engineering, nanotechnology, high-resolution electron microscopy, and solar energy. Israeli companies have developed such diverse products as the first anti-virus package, technologies that allow you to leave voice mail on mobile phones, and stents that save lives by keeping the arteries to the heart open.
MISTI MIT-Israel

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]

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.

Of course that does not apply to Palestine.

 

[JStone]

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.

Of course that does not apply to Palestine.

"Palestine" is an English word invented by the British to call Israel during the British Mandate based on the Latin "Palestina" invented by the Romans to call Israel during the Roman Empire based on ancient enemies of the Israelites, the Philistines who originated from Greece. "Philistine" is based on the Hebrew word Peleshet meaning "invader" that is found in the Hebrew Bible.

So-called Palestinians are calling their country Palestine that is English, Latin, Greek and Hebrew in its origin? They couldn't think up an original name for their own identity and own country?

 

[P F Tinmore]

So what.

It is just more spam.

 

[JStone]

So what.

It is just more spam.

Fakestinians go back to the dinosaur age [lol] yet haven't figured out an original name for their own identity?

Too funny.