Haneyya visits Tunisia Thursday

[P F Tinmore]

TURKEY, (PIC)-- As part of his regional trip, Palestinian premier Ismail Haneyya intends on Thursday to make a two-day visit to Tunisia at the invitation of his Tunisian counterpart Hamadi Al-Jebali.

Haneyya will be received at the airport by the Tunisian premier before heading to meet president Moncef Marzouki, a senior official from Ennahda Movement, Tunisia's biggest party, told the French news agency (AFP) on Tuesday.

Haneyya will also meet during his visit head of Tunisia's constituent assembly Mustapha Ben Jaafar and he is expected to deliver a speech before members of the assembly.

Earlier on Monday, the Palestinian premier arrived in Turkey after visiting Egypt and Sudan in the context of his first official trip abroad.

The Turkish lawmakers gave the Palestinian leader a standing ovation as he made a surprise entry into parliament as premier Recep Erdogan was making his weekly address to the parliament.

Haneyya visits Tunisia Thursday

 

[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 Bernard Lewis

If the peoples of the Middle East continue on their present path, the suicide bomber may become a metaphor for the whole region, and there will be no escape from a downward spiral of hate and spite, rage and self-pity, poverty and oppression.

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.'

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

 

[P F Tinmore]

Now both the elected government in Gaza and the illegal government in Ramallah have diplomatic tours.

It will be interesting to see how this pans out.

 

[JStone]

"The Misery of Arabs/Apple R&D In Israel"

Apple will open a research and development center in Israel that will focus on semiconductors

The R&D center in Herzliya, Israel’s version of Silicon Valley, would be Apple’s first outside California

Earlier this week, Israeli media reported Apple was in advanced talks to buy Anobit, an Israeli maker of flash storage technology, for $400-$500 million

It is so sad and frustrating to see APPLE investing in Israel, while we as Arabs are not able to attract these investments to our countries! I don’t know what our leaders are doing to create proper environment for such investments!

I would prefer seeing APPLE as well as MICROSOFT having their R&D in Lebanon or any other Arab Country instead of being in ISRAEL!

WISH THE ARAB LEADERS WILL WAKE UP AND CARE FOR DEVELOPING THEIR COUNTRIES AND SOCIETIES INSTEAD OF APPLYING DICTATORSHIP AND KILL THEIR PEOPLE!

The Misery of Arabs ! Apple R&D in ISRAEL! | What do You Think ?

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yA4wnqRAuhI]Apple to set up Israel development center - YouTube[/ame]

 

[P F Tinmore]

Haneya is not out begging for a "state" like Abbas.

This is part of Hamas' non violent campaign.

 

[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

 

[JStone]

Sudanese President Meets With Hamas Leaders

The Sudanese president Omer Hassan al-Bashir met on Thursday with a visiting delegation from the Palestinian Hamas movement that currently controls the Gaza strip.

The delegation included Gaza’s Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas co-founders Mahmood al-Zahar and Mousa abu-Marzook as well as politburo Chief Khalid Meshaal.

Meshaal expressed the gratitude and appreciation of Palestinian people to the support extended by the government and people of Sudan to their cause and the issue of Jerusalem in particular.

He added that they were briefed by Bashir on the developments in Sudan and noted that links between Palestine and Sudan are “strong”.

Sudanese president meets with Hamas leaders - Sudan Tribune: Plural news and views on Sudan

UN

Sudan’s President Omar al-Bashir continues to commit crimes against humanity and carry out genocide against the residents of Darfur in defiance of the United Nations, the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), Luis Moreno-Ocampo, told the Security Council today

Sudanese leader still committing crimes in Darfur, Security Council told

The genocide in Darfur has claimed 400,000 lives and displaced over 2,500,000 people. More than one hundred people continue to die each day; five thousand die every month.

Since February 2003, the Sudanese government in Khartoum and the government-sponsored Janjaweed militia have used rape, displacement, organized starvation, threats against aid workers and mass murder. Violence, disease, and displacement continue to kill thousands of innocent Darfurians every month.

Genocide in Darfur, Sudan | Darfur Scorecard

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L-ojg9UjMk0]The Genocide In Darfur - YouTube[/ame]