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And some would argue quite logically that the NEVER WAS a Palestinian state.
Why are palistanian settlers "protected persons"? Why the discrimination, anyone?Israeli settlers and Palestinian militants are not considered protected persons.
Why are palistanian settlers "protected persons"? Why the discrimination, anyone?Israeli settlers and Palestinian militants are not considered protected persons.
Read the Fourth Geneva Convention for clarification.
Why are palistanian settlers "protected persons"? Why the discrimination, anyone?
Read the Fourth Geneva Convention for clarification.
Inapplicable, doofus. Pallies are not signatories.
Inapplicable, doofus. Pallies are not signatories.
Well there you go. Then it is not illegal for Palestinians to attack Israelis. The law does not apply.
Hamas police proceeded to close a water park in Gaza due to the presence of "degrading and unethical gender mixing" according to the justification reported in the news. Subsequent information about this incident revealed that the citizens who were removed from the water park, following the Hamas decisions, had just sat down to break their fast [during the holy month of Ramadan], and those evicted from this water park included a charity organization that looked after orphans.
The media in our region only briefly reported this news, mainly because we do not understand how breaking one's fast during Ramadan could be considered "degrading and unethical." What exactly is the criteria for this?
In any case, this news did not gain a lot of media attention in the Arab world. In fact, those media outlets that covered this story included it on the inside pages of their newspapers or as part of a news round-up, and that is when it was reported at all.
Yet the Gaza Water Park closure is not an isolated incident, in fact similar events occur routinely [in the Gaza Strip]. Only a few weeks ago, gunmen burned down a summer camp for children organized by UNRWA because young boys and girls would be mixing together, and there was a possibility of them swimming together.
Indeed, the siege imposed upon Gaza, and the continuing strain that this has had on its people, has not prevented Hamas from overseeing ‘public morals’. For example, Hamas ensures that women's clothing stores respect the principle of modesty with regards to the mannequins on display at the shop's entrances, with the shop's who fail to do so being subject to punishments. The hardships suffered by the people of Gaza has not prevented Hamas from ensuring that women do not smoke shisha in public places, or that men do not work in female clothing shops.
And who could forget how the Ministry of Education in Gaza banned the book ‘Speak, Bird, Speak Again’ which was a collection of Palestinian folk tales, saying that this contained "shameless sexual expressions?"
What is happening in Gaza is certainly far from an accident, or a miscalculation on the part of Hamas, and in fact this represents the essence of the Hamas movement and its true religious viewpoint. Hamas took over the Gaza Strip through force of arms, and it is impervious to being held to account for its actions. One cannot question its daily practices, or its oppression of the people of Gaza as Hamas practices tyranny in the name of resistance, and hides behind slogans.
Hamas does not tire from changing the features of the Palestinian cause, and obscuring its humanitarian aspects by continuing to obscure and eradicate Palestine's secular history and reality. Those who are united in support for Gaza and its people do not extend their solidarity towards the subsequent injustices inflicted upon the people of Gaza by Hamas, who have seized control of their lives. The means of resisting the Israeli blockade [of Gaza] are well known, and are sometimes productive, however as for the darkness that is being imposed upon the lives of the people of Gaza by Hamas, this cannot be dealt with whilst people are saying that they are in solidarity with the people of Palestine. What was inspiring with regards the Freedom Flotilla that came to challenge the Israeli blockade was that this also challenged the blockade that is being imposed by Hamas upon the lives of the people of Gaza.
When we read the daily reports about what is happening in Gaza under the shadow of Hamas, we cannot help but recall the final verse of the last poem written about Gaza by [Palestinian poet] Mahmoud Darwish before his death:
“If we can’t find someone to defeat us again, we defeat ourselves with our own hands”
There's nothing there on palistanian settlers.Read the Fourth Geneva Convention for clarification.Why are palistanian settlers "protected persons"? Why the discrimination, anyone?Israeli settlers and Palestinian militants are not considered protected persons.
So, who was that shakh, emir, sultan, sheikh, president, prime-minister of that "palestine newly created"?A dispute regarding the status of the territories was settled by an Arbitrator appointed by the Council of the League of Nations. It was decided that Palestine and Transjordan were newly created states according to the terms of the applicable post-war treaties.[/size]
[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYgrziadQIo]Algerian author Anwar Malek talks about the arab world. - YouTube[/ame]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
Of course! Nothing there neither on palistan, nor on palistanian settlers.You just said that the Geneva Convention does not apply to Palestine.
You're still blowing smoke.
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
