The Spread of Sedition
July 2007
Arab newspaper
Asharq Al Awsat recently published an article that discussed the comments made by one of the most prominent advisers of the Supreme Guide of the Iranian Republic, Ali Khamenei, whereby he stated that Bahrain is an Iranian province that was separated from Iran under the Shah. Such comments were preceded by another official statement from an informed source that claimed that the three UAE islands that are occupied by Iran are “100%” Iranian and this fact is irrevocable. The truth is that we must not be surprised, amazed or bewildered by these comments as they simply serve the widespread Iranian project in the region. Iranian activity, which is clearly reflected in areas such as Lebanon, Iraq and Palestine, takes another form that is replete with resilient language at times and terrifying “slips of the tongue” at other times. Nevertheless, the wider picture, which is the dominance of a Persian project that is tainted by sectarianism, remains integrated and consistent.
It seems that the aim behind the explicit as well as implicit increasing Iranian presence in the Arabian Gulf region is the transformation of the term “Persian Gulf” from a geographical term to a real and tangible geo-political reality. There is much evidence to support this argument. Iranian intervention in the latest elections in Bahrain was blatant and unabashed and so was the case, yet to a lesser extent, in Kuwait. It is no secret that a number of Iranian studies and research stress the importance of controlling the Gulf seas “comprehensively”, not only the Strait of Hormuz.
The principle of exporting the revolution, which was active in the 1980s, has been revived today but from a different perspective. Perhaps the example of Hezbollah in Lebanon and what it has done and continues to do serves in consolidating the new look of exporting the revolution through local dignitaries who adopt religious discourses that provoke emotion and tears and surfaces with its pure money in hand; the same money that has come to finance sedition, division and dissent.
With all this tension being released by Iran and delivered to Arab countries, I hope that individuals will no longer be surprised or question the secret behind the tension and concern of Arab countries in general and the Gulf states in particular towards the intentions of Iranian policy. For example, Saudi-Iran relations, when at their worst during the reign of the Shah, were always restrained by a firm rule of non-interference in internal affairs of the two countries and respecting the diplomatic relations between the two states. Such fact was explained by Prince Faisal bin Salman bin Abdulaziz, in his important thesis on diplomatic relations between the two countries. However, what was once forbidden has now become possible and what was once inappropriate has become a duty in political discourse. The political plan itself is aimed at the Gulf States from Iran.
Before, we used to talk about “identified Iranian ambitions” within the Gulf States and such talk was usually surrounded by ambiguity and fear and did not go into detail. But now with the public declaration of what is taking place in the heart of Iranian policy, it has become a right for states to take all precautions since the cost would be too high otherwise at the expense of security, stability and development.
Iran is a country that prefers to present its revolution and its "glories" as slogans to distract its people and the whole region. The truth is that Iran is in a serious crisis; whilst it is one of the most important oil-producing countries; it regulates the process of fueling cars with gasoline and imports it from abroad. Its youth suffer horrific levels of unemployment and from the alarming spread of drugs. Instead of tackling serious internal problems, Iran senselessly decides to blow the whistle and declare that the entire Arab Gulf has become an open ground since it believes it has been robbed of its territories and what it considers strategic borders. The least that could be said about this kind of thinking is that it resembles a fire of sedition that everyone can do without.
http://www.aawsat.com/english/news.asp
Saturday, July 21, 2007
Editor's Notes: Hamas's new buzz
Two weeks ago, the Jerusalem weekly Kol Ha'ir, as its cover story, attempted a journalistic "hatchet job" on Yuval Shemtov - known to many, probably most, of the nation's children as Yuval Hamebulbal (Yuval the confused).
For reasons best known to its editors, Kol Ha'ir has it in for Yuval, the croak-voiced clown who has graduated from boisterous puppetry, jerky dances and excruciating rhymes at kids' parties to boisterous puppetry, jerky dances and excruciating rhymes on big-selling DVDs and a colorful afternoon children's TV show.
When he wasn't away on reserve service with his paratroop unit, Yuval was a birthday regular for all three of my children; his was the first and for a long time the only phone number my first-born had memorized; when my kids were sick one time, he popped in to cheer them up. In short, my family adores him.
Nothing in the article detracted from that affection. It focused heavily on the escalating fees Yuval has charged as his fame has spread, attempting to depict pricing that puts him out of the birthday party league as tantamount to criminal. It tried to highlight a purported lack of educational value in his material. And it really took exception to his rhymes. But the piece - and it certainly wasn't for the lack of trying - had absolutely no dirt on him. He's not a child molester. He doesn't cheat on his taxes. Indeed, as the selection of furious letters in his defense in last week's paper attested, he's a thoroughly decent individual, who does a great deal of unpublicized charity work and gives a lot of children in this country something to smile about.
There is, however, every reason to write huge-headlined, horrified newspaper articles about another popular, colorful afternoon children's TV show, whose producers and content truly are despicable and worthy of every ounce of condemnation that journalism, and the rest of society, can muster.
I'm referring to the Friday afternoon Tomorrow's Pioneers show disseminated to most Palestinian households and, nowadays, across the Arab world via Hamas's Al-Aksa satellite TV station.
Farfur, the life-size Mickey Mouse lookalike, was killed in a recent episode, murdered off-screen by an Israeli interrogator infuriated by the mouse's heroic refusal to sell his homeland for lots of money to the Jews. "Yes, our children friends, we lost our dearest friend, Farfur," the program's little girl host, Saraa, who must be all of 10, told her viewers sadly. "Farfur turned to a martyr while protecting his land. He turned into a martyr at the hands of the criminals and murderers. The murderers of the innocent children... You saw that the Jews let Farfur die as a martyr." (The translation comes from Palestinian Media Watch.)
Saraa even took a phone call in the studio on the subject from three-year-old Shaimaa: "We don't like the Jews because they are dogs! We will fight them!" this toddler declared on air.
"That's right, oh Shaimaa," Saraa sagely agreed. "The Jews are criminals and enemies. We must expel them from our land."
Last week, Tomorrow's Pioneers introduced a fresh cuddly-toy role model, Nahool the bee, self-proclaimed cousin of Farfur. He buzzed from up near the studio ceiling, so that young Saraa was filmed looking up at him with innocent childish fealty as he vowed to stick to "the path of heroism, the path of martyrdom, the path of the Jihad warriors.
"Me and my friends shall continue the path of Farfur," Nahool declaimed high-pitchedly. "And in his name we shall take revenge upon the enemies of Allah, the murderers of the prophets, the murderers of innocent children, until Al-Aksa will be liberated from their filth."
IN THE five-year update this week of his landmark address on the need for non-terrorist leadership to steer the Palestinians to statehood, President Bush set out a long register of things the Palestinians must do to create the climate in which peaceful co-existence alongside a secure Israel could flourish. "The Palestinian people must decide that they want a future of decency and hope - not a future of terror and death. They must match their words denouncing terror with action to combat terror. The Palestinian government must arrest terrorists, dismantle their infrastructure... They must work to stop attacks on Israel... They must enforce the law without corruption..."
In essence, then, one fears, the speech amounted to a triumph of hope over experience.
Israel's recent leaders, despairing of viable Palestinian partners, attempted to create a better, safer reality by acting unilaterally, hoping that if we chose to leave the Palestinians alone in Gaza (as we had done with Hizbullah in southern Lebanon), and potentially in much of the West Bank, they might just leave us alone, too.
Internalizing both the absence of a credible partner and the abject failure of unilateralism, the US president is now formalizing what amounts to Tony Blair's West Bank Correctional Facility, aimed at dragging a Fatah leadership that has been demonstrably disinclined to act on any of Bush's long list of "musts" toward acceptable norms of behavior.
It is a tall order, probably an impossible one, and Blair's successes in Northern Ireland serve as no real basis for heightened expectation.
Attitudes to Israel in Fatah range from intolerance to ambivalence, with only a very few of its leaders prepared to publicly uphold terms for peace that Israel might find viable. And Abbas has proved himself thoroughly incapable of imposing a shift toward wider moderation or to root out the corruption that paved the way for Hamas's parliamentary takeover and its subsequent violent confirmation of control in Gaza.
While some Israeli analysts complacently argue that no similar coup is imminent in the West Bank, Hamas has already been voted into power there at the local council level, and is concertedly spreading its ideology of adamant resistance to Israel via its clerics, its politicians and, don't forget, its kids' TV shows.
Israel, self-defeatingly, meanwhile, sometimes seems to be helping legitimize the very terrorism we most need to marginalize. Where, one wonders, is our interest in facilitating a West Bank homecoming for the veteran head of a murderous Palestinian rejectionist group, Nayef Hawatmeh? Why would Abbas, the head of a hierarchy ostensibly now determined to chart a new, constructive course, have wanted him there, either?
Why, for that matter, would Israel, at the same time as it rightly berates France for its legitimizing dialogue with the murderous Hizbullah, set free convicted members of terrorist organizations formally committed to our destruction or tell those of them still on the loose that they will no longer be hunted, their crimes unpunished? Think of the soldiers' lives risked in capturing and trying to capture such men. And why would we make a further mockery of our own rule of law - even as we protest the absence of proper legal procedures in the PA - by contemplating the release of other dangerous enemies, including Marwan Barghouti, the Tanzim chief convicted by our courts of direct involvement in several murderous conspiracies? Nelson Mandela he ain't.
Israel has already been down the path of wiping from the legal records acts of terrorism carried out by Palestinians, justifying the pardons in the hope of building a better future in the course of a coordinated peace process. In many cases, the killers' purported rehabilitation proved false, and the diplomatic process collapsed as a direct consequence of the maintenance of a murderous, uncompromising Palestinian ideology on Israel.
Today, though, we are not even at step one of a negotiated process. We are not freeing the men of violence within a robust framework of historic reconciliation, a break from the bloody past. Israel is, rather, merely making gestures - disavowing our judicial principles en route - in the faint hope of sparking such a process.
Yet the very nature of the gestures is utterly at odds with the intended result. We are setting free the violent opponents of reconciliation, emboldening them and legitimizing them, further marginalizing and discrediting the dwindling constituency of genuine moderates, and simultaneously endangering ourselves. Israel understandably wants to bolster relative moderates to offset the rise of Hamas, to take steps to demonstrate to the Palestinian public that negotiation and compromise, not extremism, represent the way forward. Is that the message the Palestinian public will absorb from these particular gestures?
LESS THAN a month after packing up and moving out of 10 Downing Street, the estimable Blair is due here on Monday to begin the Herculean task of building a better future. In his last House of Commons appearance, he declared his belief that a solution to our conflict could be found, provided there was "a huge intensity of focus and work." Wishful thinking? We are about to see.
One can only implore Blair to impress upon Abbas, or PA Prime Minister Salaam Fayad, or whichever Palestinian figures he considers have the will and the means to extricate their people from the tentacled embrace of the secular and the Islamic extremists, that pressing for the return of exiled terror chiefs, or the release of jailed ones, is the wrong course. The killers must be sidelined, not appeased.
And one can only wish, without much confidence, that he will be savvy enough to recognize that new generations of young Palestinian minds - tomorrow's pioneers, indeed - are being poisoned every time they sit down in front of their television sets to watch the cynically choreographed interplay between Hamas child-host Saraa and her incendiary mouse, bee or other toy du jour.
Oslo Accords, road maps, Saudi proposals, Tenet, Zinni and Dayton plans and, now, the Blair Wish Project - any and all of them could serve as a basis for negotiated progress if a genuine desire for coexistence flourished on the Palestinian side. In the absence of such desire, any and all of them can only founder.
And every Friday's squeaking visit by Farfur, every stinging intervention from Nahool, can only further reduce the dwindling reservoir of hope.
The Persistence of Islamic Slavery
By Robert Spencer
FrontPageMagazine.com | July 20, 2007
The International Criminal Court recently issued warrants for the arrest of Ahmed Haroun, the minister for humanitarian affairs of Sudan, and Ali Kosheib, a leader of that country’s notorious janjaweed militia. The Sudanese government has refused to hand over the two for prosecution. Charges include murder, rape, torture and “imprisonment or severe deprivation of liberty.” Severe deprivation of liberty is a euphemism for slavery. Egypt’s Al-Ahram Weekly observed not long ago that in Sudan, “slavery, sanctioned by religious zealots, ravaged the southern parts of the country and much of the west as well.”
Muslim slavers in the Sudan primarily enslave non-Muslims, and chiefly Christians. According to the Coalition Against Slavery in Mauritania and Sudan (CASMAS), a human rights and abolitionist movement, “The current Khartoum government wants to bring the non-Muslim black South in line with Sharia law, laid down and interpreted by conservative Muslim clergy. The black animist and Christian South has been ravaged for many years of slave raids by Arabs from the north and east and resists Muslim religious rule and the perceived economic, cultural, and religious expansion behind it.”
The BBC reported in March 2007 that slave raids “were a common feature of Sudan’s 21-year north-south war, which ended in 2005….According to a study by the Kenya-based Rift Valley Institute, some 11,000 young boys and girls were seized and taken across the internal border -- many to the states of South Darfur and West Kordofan….Most were forcibly converted to Islam, given Muslim names and told not to speak their mother tongue.” One modern-day Sudanese Christian slave, James Pareng Alier, was kidnapped and enslaved when he was twelve years old. Religion was a major element of his ordeal: “I was forced to learn the Koran and re-baptised “Ahmed.” They told me that Christianity was a bad religion. After a time we were given military training and they told us we would be sent to fight.” Alier has no idea of his family’s whereabouts. But while non-Muslims slaves are often forcibly converted to Islam, their conversion does not lead to their freedom. Mauritanian anti-slavery campaigner Boubacar Messaoud explains: “It’s like having sheep or goats. If a woman is a slave, her descendants are slaves.”
Anti-slavery crusaders like Messaoud have great difficulty working against this attitude because it is rooted in the Qur’an and Muhammad’s example. The Muslim prophet Muhammad owned slaves, and like the Bible, the Qur’an takes the existence of slavery for granted, even as it enjoins the freeing of slaves under certain circumstances, such as the breaking of an oath: “Allah will not call you to account for what is futile in your oaths, but He will call you to account for your deliberate oaths: for expiation, feed ten indigent persons, on a scale of the average for the food of your families; or clothe them; or give a slave his freedom” (5:89). But while the freeing of a slave or two here and there is encouraged, the institution itself is never questioned. The Qur’an even gives a man permission to have sexual relations with his slave girls as well as with his wives: “The believers must (eventually) win through, those who humble themselves in their prayers; who avoid vain talk; who are active in deeds of charity; who abstain from sex, except with those joined to them in the marriage bond, or (the captives) whom their right hands possess, for (in their case) they are free from blame…” (23:1-6). A Muslim is not to have sexual relations with a woman who is married to someone else – except a slave girl: “And all married women (are forbidden unto you) save those (captives) whom your right hands possess. It is a decree of Allah for you” (4:24).
In the past, as today, most slaves in Islam were non-Muslims who had been captured during jihad warfare. The pioneering scholar of the treatment of non-Muslims in Islamic societies, Bat Ye’or, explains the system that developed out of jihad conquest:
The jihad slave system included contingents of both sexes delivered annually in conformity with the treaties of submission by sovereigns who were tributaries of the caliph. When Amr conquered Tripoli (Libya) in 643, he forced the Jewish and Christian Berbers to give their wives and children as slaves to the Arab army as part of their jizya [tax on non-Muslims]. From 652 until its conquest in 1276,
Nubia was forced to send an annual contingent of slaves to Cairo. Treaties concluded with the towns of Transoxiana, Sijistan, Armenia, and Fezzan (Maghreb) under the Umayyads and Abbasids stipulated an annual dispatch of slaves from both sexes. However, the main sources for the supply of slaves remained the regular raids on villages within the dar-al-harb [House of War, i.e., non-Islamic regions] and the military expeditions which swept more deeply into the infidel lands, emptying towns and provinces of their inhabitants.[1]
Historian Speros Vryonis observes that “since the beginning of the Arab razzias [raids] into the land of Rum [the Byzantine Empire], human booty had come to constitute a very important portion of the spoils.” As they steadily conquered more and more of Anatolia, the Turks reduced many of the Greeks and other non-Muslims there to slave status: “They enslaved men, women, and children from all major urban centers and from the countryside where the populations were defenseless.”[2] The Indian historian K. S. Lal states that wherever jihadists conquered a territory, “there developed a system of slavery peculiar to the clime, terrain and populace of the place.” When Muslim armies invaded India, “its people began to be enslaved in droves to be sold in foreign lands or employed in various capacities on menial and not-so-menial jobs within the country.”[3]
Slaves faced pressure to convert to Islam. In an analysis of Islamic political theories, Patricia Crone notes that after a jihad battle was concluded, “male captives might be killed or enslaved…Dispersed in Muslim households, slaves almost always converted, encouraged or pressurized [sic] by their masters, driven by a need to bond with others, or slowly, becoming accustomed to seeing things through Muslim eyes even if they tried to resist.”[4] Thomas Pellow, an Englishman who was enslaved in Morocco for twenty-three years after being captured as a cabin boy on a small English vessel in 1716, was tortured until he accepted Islam. For weeks he was beaten and starved, and finally gave in after his torturer resorted to “burning my flesh off my bones by fire, which the tyrant did, by frequent repetitions, after a most cruel manner.”[5]
Slavery was taken for granted throughout Islamic history, as it was, of course, in the West as well up until relatively recent times. Yet while the European and American slave trade get stern treatment attention from historians (as well as from reparations advocates and guilt-ridden politicians), the Islamic slave trade, which actually lasted longer and brought suffering to a larger number of people, is virtually ignored. (This fact magnifies the irony of Islam being presented to American blacks as the egalitarian alternative to the “white man’s slave religion” of Christianity.) While historians estimate that the transatlantic slave trade, which operated between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, involved around 10.5 million people, the Islamic slave trade in the Sahara, the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean areas began in the seventh century and lasted into the nineteenth, and involved 17 million people.[6]
And when pressure came to end slavery, it moved from Christendom into Islam, not the other way around. There was no Muslim William Wilberforce or William Lloyd Garrison. In fact, when the British government in the nineteenth century adopted the view of Wilberforce and the other abolitionists and began to put pressure on pro-slavery regimes, the Sultan of Morocco was incredulous. “The traffic in slaves,” he noted, “is a matter on which all sects and nations have agreed from the time of the sons of Adam...up to this day.” He said that he was “not aware of its being prohibited by the laws of any sect” and that the very idea that anyone would question its morality was absurd: “No one need ask this question, the same being manifest to both high and low and requires no more demonstration than the light of day.”[7]
However, it was not the unanimity of human practice, but the words of the Qur’an and Muhammad that were decisive in stifling abolitionist movements within the Islamic world. Slavery was abolished only as a result of Western pressure; the Arab Muslim slave trade in Africa was ended by the force of British arms in the nineteenth century.
Besides being practiced more or less openly today in Sudan and Mauritania, there is evidence that slavery still continues beneath the surface in some majority-Muslim countries as well -- notably Saudi Arabia, which only abolished slavery in 1962, Yemen and Oman, both of which ended legal slavery in 1970, and Niger, which didn’t abolish slavery until 2004. In Niger, the ban is widely ignored, and as many as one million people remain in bondage. Slaves are bred, often raped, and generally treated like animals.
A shadow cast by the strength and perdurability of Islamic slavery can be seen in instances where Muslims have managed to import this institution to the United States. A Saudi named Homaidan Al-Turki, for instance, was sentenced in September 2006 to 27 years to life in prison, for keeping a woman as a slave in his home in Colorado. For his part, Al-Turki claimed that he was a victim of anti-Muslim bias. He told the judge: “Your honor, I am not here to apologize, for I cannot apologize for things I did not do and for crimes I did not commit. The state has criminalized these basic Muslim behaviors. Attacking traditional Muslim behaviors was the focal point of the prosecution.” The following month, an Egyptian couple living in Southern California received a fine and prison terms, to be followed by deportation, after pleading guilty to holding a ten-year-old girl as a slave. And in January 2007, an attaché of the Kuwaiti embassy in Washington, Waleed Al Saleh, and his wife were charged with keeping three Christian domestic workers from India in slave-like conditions in al-Saleh’s Virginia home. One of the women remarked: “I believed that I had no choice but to continue working for them even though they beat me and treated me worse than a slave.”
All this indicates that the problem of Islamic slavery is not restricted to recent events in the Sudan; it is much larger and more deeply rooted. The United Nations and human rights organizations have noted the phenomenon, but nevertheless little has been done to move decisively against those who still hold human beings in bondage, or aid or tolerate others doing so. The UN has tried to place peacekeeping forces in Darfur, over the objections of the Sudanese government, but its remonstrations against slavery in Sudan and elsewhere have likewise not resulted in significant government action against the practice. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have also noted the problem, but as HRW observes, “the government of Sudan has stonewalled on the issue of slavery, claiming it was a matter of rival tribes engaging in hostage taking, over which it had little control. That is simply untrue, as myriad reports coming out of southern Sudan have made abundantly clear.” For Islamic slavery to disappear, a powerful state would have to move against it decisively, not with mere words, and accept no equivocation of half-measures. In today’s international geopolitical climate, nothing could be less likely.
Notes:
[1] Bat Ye’or, The Decline of Eastern Christianity Under Islam: From Jihad to Dhimmitude, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1996, p. 108.
[2] Speros Vryonis, The Decline of Medieval Hellenism in Asia Minor and the Process of Islamization from the Eleventh through the Fifteenth Century, Berkeley, 1971. P. 174-5. Quoted in Bostom, Legacy of Jihad, p. 87.
[3] K. S. Lal, Muslim Slave System in Medieval India, Aditya Prakashan, 1994. P. 9.
[4] Patricia Crone, God’s Rule: Government and Islam, Columbia University Press, 2004. Pp. 371-372. Quoted in Bostom, Legacy of Jihad, p. 86.
[5] Giles Milton, White Gold: The Extraordinary Story of Thomas Pellow and Islam’s One Million White Slaves, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004. P. 84.
[6] Andrew Bostom, The Legacy of Jihad, Prometheus, 2005, pp. 89-90.
[7] Quoted in Bernard Lewis, Race and Slavery in the Middle East, Oxford University Press, 1994. Reprinted at http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/med/lewis1.html.
By Robert Spencer
FrontPageMagazine.com | July 20, 2007
The International Criminal Court recently issued warrants for the arrest of Ahmed Haroun, the minister for humanitarian affairs of Sudan, and Ali Kosheib, a leader of that country’s notorious janjaweed militia. The Sudanese government has refused to hand over the two for prosecution. Charges include murder, rape, torture and “imprisonment or severe deprivation of liberty.” Severe deprivation of liberty is a euphemism for slavery. Egypt’s Al-Ahram Weekly observed not long ago that in Sudan, “slavery, sanctioned by religious zealots, ravaged the southern parts of the country and much of the west as well.”
Muslim slavers in the Sudan primarily enslave non-Muslims, and chiefly Christians. According to the Coalition Against Slavery in Mauritania and Sudan (CASMAS), a human rights and abolitionist movement, “The current Khartoum government wants to bring the non-Muslim black South in line with Sharia law, laid down and interpreted by conservative Muslim clergy. The black animist and Christian South has been ravaged for many years of slave raids by Arabs from the north and east and resists Muslim religious rule and the perceived economic, cultural, and religious expansion behind it.”
The BBC reported in March 2007 that slave raids “were a common feature of Sudan’s 21-year north-south war, which ended in 2005….According to a study by the Kenya-based Rift Valley Institute, some 11,000 young boys and girls were seized and taken across the internal border -- many to the states of South Darfur and West Kordofan….Most were forcibly converted to Islam, given Muslim names and told not to speak their mother tongue.” One modern-day Sudanese Christian slave, James Pareng Alier, was kidnapped and enslaved when he was twelve years old. Religion was a major element of his ordeal: “I was forced to learn the Koran and re-baptised “Ahmed.” They told me that Christianity was a bad religion. After a time we were given military training and they told us we would be sent to fight.” Alier has no idea of his family’s whereabouts. But while non-Muslims slaves are often forcibly converted to Islam, their conversion does not lead to their freedom. Mauritanian anti-slavery campaigner Boubacar Messaoud explains: “It’s like having sheep or goats. If a woman is a slave, her descendants are slaves.”
Anti-slavery crusaders like Messaoud have great difficulty working against this attitude because it is rooted in the Qur’an and Muhammad’s example. The Muslim prophet Muhammad owned slaves, and like the Bible, the Qur’an takes the existence of slavery for granted, even as it enjoins the freeing of slaves under certain circumstances, such as the breaking of an oath: “Allah will not call you to account for what is futile in your oaths, but He will call you to account for your deliberate oaths: for expiation, feed ten indigent persons, on a scale of the average for the food of your families; or clothe them; or give a slave his freedom” (5:89). But while the freeing of a slave or two here and there is encouraged, the institution itself is never questioned. The Qur’an even gives a man permission to have sexual relations with his slave girls as well as with his wives: “The believers must (eventually) win through, those who humble themselves in their prayers; who avoid vain talk; who are active in deeds of charity; who abstain from sex, except with those joined to them in the marriage bond, or (the captives) whom their right hands possess, for (in their case) they are free from blame…” (23:1-6). A Muslim is not to have sexual relations with a woman who is married to someone else – except a slave girl: “And all married women (are forbidden unto you) save those (captives) whom your right hands possess. It is a decree of Allah for you” (4:24).
In the past, as today, most slaves in Islam were non-Muslims who had been captured during jihad warfare. The pioneering scholar of the treatment of non-Muslims in Islamic societies, Bat Ye’or, explains the system that developed out of jihad conquest:
The jihad slave system included contingents of both sexes delivered annually in conformity with the treaties of submission by sovereigns who were tributaries of the caliph. When Amr conquered Tripoli (Libya) in 643, he forced the Jewish and Christian Berbers to give their wives and children as slaves to the Arab army as part of their jizya [tax on non-Muslims]. From 652 until its conquest in 1276,
Nubia was forced to send an annual contingent of slaves to Cairo. Treaties concluded with the towns of Transoxiana, Sijistan, Armenia, and Fezzan (Maghreb) under the Umayyads and Abbasids stipulated an annual dispatch of slaves from both sexes. However, the main sources for the supply of slaves remained the regular raids on villages within the dar-al-harb [House of War, i.e., non-Islamic regions] and the military expeditions which swept more deeply into the infidel lands, emptying towns and provinces of their inhabitants.[1]
Historian Speros Vryonis observes that “since the beginning of the Arab razzias [raids] into the land of Rum [the Byzantine Empire], human booty had come to constitute a very important portion of the spoils.” As they steadily conquered more and more of Anatolia, the Turks reduced many of the Greeks and other non-Muslims there to slave status: “They enslaved men, women, and children from all major urban centers and from the countryside where the populations were defenseless.”[2] The Indian historian K. S. Lal states that wherever jihadists conquered a territory, “there developed a system of slavery peculiar to the clime, terrain and populace of the place.” When Muslim armies invaded India, “its people began to be enslaved in droves to be sold in foreign lands or employed in various capacities on menial and not-so-menial jobs within the country.”[3]
Slaves faced pressure to convert to Islam. In an analysis of Islamic political theories, Patricia Crone notes that after a jihad battle was concluded, “male captives might be killed or enslaved…Dispersed in Muslim households, slaves almost always converted, encouraged or pressurized [sic] by their masters, driven by a need to bond with others, or slowly, becoming accustomed to seeing things through Muslim eyes even if they tried to resist.”[4] Thomas Pellow, an Englishman who was enslaved in Morocco for twenty-three years after being captured as a cabin boy on a small English vessel in 1716, was tortured until he accepted Islam. For weeks he was beaten and starved, and finally gave in after his torturer resorted to “burning my flesh off my bones by fire, which the tyrant did, by frequent repetitions, after a most cruel manner.”[5]
Slavery was taken for granted throughout Islamic history, as it was, of course, in the West as well up until relatively recent times. Yet while the European and American slave trade get stern treatment attention from historians (as well as from reparations advocates and guilt-ridden politicians), the Islamic slave trade, which actually lasted longer and brought suffering to a larger number of people, is virtually ignored. (This fact magnifies the irony of Islam being presented to American blacks as the egalitarian alternative to the “white man’s slave religion” of Christianity.) While historians estimate that the transatlantic slave trade, which operated between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, involved around 10.5 million people, the Islamic slave trade in the Sahara, the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean areas began in the seventh century and lasted into the nineteenth, and involved 17 million people.[6]
And when pressure came to end slavery, it moved from Christendom into Islam, not the other way around. There was no Muslim William Wilberforce or William Lloyd Garrison. In fact, when the British government in the nineteenth century adopted the view of Wilberforce and the other abolitionists and began to put pressure on pro-slavery regimes, the Sultan of Morocco was incredulous. “The traffic in slaves,” he noted, “is a matter on which all sects and nations have agreed from the time of the sons of Adam...up to this day.” He said that he was “not aware of its being prohibited by the laws of any sect” and that the very idea that anyone would question its morality was absurd: “No one need ask this question, the same being manifest to both high and low and requires no more demonstration than the light of day.”[7]
However, it was not the unanimity of human practice, but the words of the Qur’an and Muhammad that were decisive in stifling abolitionist movements within the Islamic world. Slavery was abolished only as a result of Western pressure; the Arab Muslim slave trade in Africa was ended by the force of British arms in the nineteenth century.
Besides being practiced more or less openly today in Sudan and Mauritania, there is evidence that slavery still continues beneath the surface in some majority-Muslim countries as well -- notably Saudi Arabia, which only abolished slavery in 1962, Yemen and Oman, both of which ended legal slavery in 1970, and Niger, which didn’t abolish slavery until 2004. In Niger, the ban is widely ignored, and as many as one million people remain in bondage. Slaves are bred, often raped, and generally treated like animals.
A shadow cast by the strength and perdurability of Islamic slavery can be seen in instances where Muslims have managed to import this institution to the United States. A Saudi named Homaidan Al-Turki, for instance, was sentenced in September 2006 to 27 years to life in prison, for keeping a woman as a slave in his home in Colorado. For his part, Al-Turki claimed that he was a victim of anti-Muslim bias. He told the judge: “Your honor, I am not here to apologize, for I cannot apologize for things I did not do and for crimes I did not commit. The state has criminalized these basic Muslim behaviors. Attacking traditional Muslim behaviors was the focal point of the prosecution.” The following month, an Egyptian couple living in Southern California received a fine and prison terms, to be followed by deportation, after pleading guilty to holding a ten-year-old girl as a slave. And in January 2007, an attaché of the Kuwaiti embassy in Washington, Waleed Al Saleh, and his wife were charged with keeping three Christian domestic workers from India in slave-like conditions in al-Saleh’s Virginia home. One of the women remarked: “I believed that I had no choice but to continue working for them even though they beat me and treated me worse than a slave.”
All this indicates that the problem of Islamic slavery is not restricted to recent events in the Sudan; it is much larger and more deeply rooted. The United Nations and human rights organizations have noted the phenomenon, but nevertheless little has been done to move decisively against those who still hold human beings in bondage, or aid or tolerate others doing so. The UN has tried to place peacekeeping forces in Darfur, over the objections of the Sudanese government, but its remonstrations against slavery in Sudan and elsewhere have likewise not resulted in significant government action against the practice. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have also noted the problem, but as HRW observes, “the government of Sudan has stonewalled on the issue of slavery, claiming it was a matter of rival tribes engaging in hostage taking, over which it had little control. That is simply untrue, as myriad reports coming out of southern Sudan have made abundantly clear.” For Islamic slavery to disappear, a powerful state would have to move against it decisively, not with mere words, and accept no equivocation of half-measures. In today’s international geopolitical climate, nothing could be less likely.
Notes:
[1] Bat Ye’or, The Decline of Eastern Christianity Under Islam: From Jihad to Dhimmitude, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1996, p. 108.
[2] Speros Vryonis, The Decline of Medieval Hellenism in Asia Minor and the Process of Islamization from the Eleventh through the Fifteenth Century, Berkeley, 1971. P. 174-5. Quoted in Bostom, Legacy of Jihad, p. 87.
[3] K. S. Lal, Muslim Slave System in Medieval India, Aditya Prakashan, 1994. P. 9.
[4] Patricia Crone, God’s Rule: Government and Islam, Columbia University Press, 2004. Pp. 371-372. Quoted in Bostom, Legacy of Jihad, p. 86.
[5] Giles Milton, White Gold: The Extraordinary Story of Thomas Pellow and Islam’s One Million White Slaves, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004. P. 84.
[6] Andrew Bostom, The Legacy of Jihad, Prometheus, 2005, pp. 89-90.
[7] Quoted in Bernard Lewis, Race and Slavery in the Middle East, Oxford University Press, 1994. Reprinted at http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/med/lewis1.html.
Friday, July 20, 2007
A Risky Bet on Fatah
Posted by Editor on Jul 20th, 2007
By Mortimer B. Zuckerman
It is futile to put a gloss on what has been happening in Gaza. The prospects are grim—in fact, worse than they look. The brutal Hamas coup is the first Islamic takeover of an Arab country in the past 35 years and the first in that period by military putsch: It was not a conflict waged or won by a majority of the population but one fought by a tiny armed faction with the political will to destroy a fragile government. The fear in the region is that it is a harbinger of turmoil affecting Egypt, Lebanon, and Jordan. The takeover has already destroyed the Mecca agreement mediated by Saudi Arabia between Fatah and Hamas, undermined the moderating role of Saudi Arabia, and sabotaged the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.
Hamas seized Gaza by the methodical, barbaric exercise of terrorism. Opponents were made to jump off high-rise buildings; young children were shot in cold blood, often in front of their parents, or the reverse: Mothers and fathers were shot execution style in front of their children. Other Palestinians were permanently crippled with shots fired from the back of the leg so that the kneecap shattered when the bullet exited. Clerics, mosques, and churches were attacked. The presidential palace and the home of Yasser Arafat were looted, not sparing even Arafat’s Nobel Peace Prize medal. Hamas-controlled Gaza is now an “Islamist emirate,” a new power center for Iran and Syria. Gaza is a new location for every brand of radical Islamist from al Qaeda to Hezbollah to meet and conspire now that the “treacherous apostates,” i.e., Fatah, are defeated. The radical extremists are on the march, and the West is in retreat.
Look at the hot spots:
Egypt. Next door to Gaza, Egypt has much to fear from Hamas, an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, which is the major opponent of President Hosni Mubarak’s regime and has ties to Iran. Mubarak will have to get serious about stopping the arms flow from Sinai into that terrorist enclave.
Lebanon. The Syrians—backed by Iran militarily, politically, and financially—are inciting Palestinian terrorist groups to fight the Lebanese Army, even as they continue to assassinate their Lebanese political opponents and help rebuild the military capacities of Hezbollah. Lebanese President Emile Lahoud will leave office in September. He is a Syrian puppet and will nominate—with the blessing of Hezbollah—a caretaker government to rival the government of Prime Minister Fouad Siniora, which currently has a parliamentary majority. Two rival stalemated governments are likely in that tormented state, with Hezbollah resorting to antigovernment violence inspired by the resurgence of the Islamists in Gaza and by its patron, Iran.
Jordan. The Jordanians are menaced by Islamic extremists on their border with Iraq and now must fear that an Islamist Hamas will end up in control of the West Bank on the other side of the Jordan River.
No wonder then that Egypt, Jordan, the United States, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, and Israel seek to work together to contain the influence of extremist Islam. Every Arab state knows it might soon be well within the range of Katyusha rockets, Kassams, Scuds, and other arms, which are multiplying every day within the extremist camps. (Incidentally, just think how imperiled the West Bank now would be if Israel had gone along with Lt. Gen. Keith Dayton’s U.S. plan of several months ago to allow truck convoys carrying Hamas fighters to connect Gaza and the West Bank.)
Could the West Bank prosper under Fatah and Gaza fail under Hamas? That is the hope. Fatah’s Mahmoud Abbas and Salam Fayyad, a former World Bank official well liked in the West, will receive hundreds of millions of dollars in western and Israeli support. As a political gesture, Israel has released 250 prisoners and will also remove some of the internal checkpoints in the West Bank.
The trouble is that Fatah is a broken reed. It lost elections in Gaza because of rampant financial corruption, abuse of power, mismanagement, and weak leadership. Its leadership is likely to go on in the same style with fancy villas and chauffeur-driven Mercedeses. Abbas is a pathetic figure. He has always found it hard to take decisive action. He even failed to order his Presidential Guard to fight back in Gaza when it had more than twice the number of guns as Hamas. When he finally ordered his men to fight, the die had been cast. Fatah’s divisions, and its corruption, began with Arafat, but Abbas must bear responsibility now. Indeed, he is a part of it. At the time of the Gaza crisis, he was about to leave for Qatar, his usual refuge in stormy times, where he carries on his multiple lucrative private businesses. He has never proven himself as a leader in easier situations, so why should we suddenly expect him to display strong leadership now?
By contrast, Hamas enjoys a clear-cut and decisive political leadership. Its lifestyle is simpler, more in touch with the people. Conceivably, it might be able to end the chaos and anarchy engendered by the varying criminal gangs in Gaza and secure a safe day-to-day life for the average Palestinian. That would have a powerful effect on the West Bank.
The United States must not fall for the simplistic assumption that the West Bank is totally controlled by Fatah while Gaza is totally supportive of Hamas. Yes, Fatah gunmen now control the streets of the West Bank, but many Palestinians are fed up with them and disgusted by their humiliating performance in Gaza. The Fatah leadership of the Gaza armed forces fled weeks and months before the battle—including the commander, the deputy commanders, and 30 lower-level commanders. The West Bank Palestinians saw Fatah leaders leaving their soldiers behind to fight and leaving behind the weapons that the American military advisers persuaded the Israelis and the Americans to send to the Presidential Guard. Many of the weapons fell straight into the hands of Hamas. Nor did it help that when Abbas mounted punitive operations against Hamas operatives in the West Bank, he used the armed terrorist gangs of the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades rather than Fatah’s legitimate security organizations. This enraged many Palestinians, for it raised the specter of the rule of armed gangs—even if this time they were pro-Fatah. For example, for a few days Fatah gunmen in black masks ruled the streets of Nablus—a city of 180,000 in the West Bank—abducting rivals, looting and burning their property, and intimidating elected officials in the Hamas-run City Hall. Now, al-Aqsa, Fatah’s longtime military wing and terrorist appendage that has killed and maimed hundreds of Israelis in a relentless wave of suicide bombings, has rejected Abbas’s decree that it must disband and disarm and reaffirmed that it will not be committed to a truce with Israel.
Fatah is despised and discredited in the West Bank, as much as it was in Gaza. This was apparent even before the coup. In Ramallah, where the Fatah government sits, Hamas won a decisive victory in the last elections: four seats in the parliament for Hamas and only one for Fatah. In all the cities of the West Bank, Hamas won 40 parliamentary seats while Fatah got 12—and Hamas won a plurality of the vote in all the West Bank as well.
Fatah’s failures.
The only remedy for this lack of support is with Fatah. But throwing money at Fatah will not give it a missing spine. As we saw in Gaza, most of the corrupt Fatah officials just took the money and sat out the crisis with their wives and mistresses in their villas and flats in Cairo, Ramallah, Jerusalem, Paris, and the French Riviera. Discipline, command, and conviction are what matter, and Fatah and its security services just do not have them.
Unless there is a way to rebuild Fatah as a cleaner, more legitimate organization that can realize the aspirations of its people and improve their day-to-day realities, Fatah will fail. If elections were held tomorrow morning in the West Bank, Hamas could win. There is a high probability that this is what will happen when the next election is held a year from now. That would end the Palestinian national dream, since Hamas is dedicated only to the destruction of Israel, not to the two-state solution. A revealing poll by the respected Khalil al Shakaki showed the weakness of Fatah; 41 percent of Palestinians support the idea of dismantling the Palestinian Authority, while 42 percent support a confederation with Jordan. The current Fatah government does not represent the Palestinians; it represents instead the illusions and hopes of the West.
What Fatah needs in the West Bank is radical re-form. It must convince the Palestinian people that it has rooted out corruption. Hamas does not yet have sufficient power in the West Bank to challenge Fatah, given the Israeli presence and arms. But if the money provided to Fatah ends up in the pockets and bank accounts of the same Fatah crooks who lost Gaza or ends up in the pockets of the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, Fatah’s political position will be dramatically compromised.
We should not be fooled by the rhetoric of Abbas. His words are cheap. It is doubtful that he has it in him to be what he should be for the sake of the Palestinians—a strong leader willing and able to take a stand for peace and confront Hamas. Investing in Abbas is like investing in Enron. The militias and the thugs associated with the PLO’s 13 security services control Abbas, not the other way around. To cede financial and military assets to an unreformed Fatah is to take the huge risk that they will end up in the hands of the terrorist groups associated with Fatah or eventually in the hands of Hamas, just as they did in Gaza.
Tony Blair, the former British prime minister whose task will be the restoration of the Palestinian economy, must demonstrate to Abbas that massive corruption, as well as terrorism and incitement to hatred and violence, is an unacceptable cost and that continued aid must be tied to performance in this key dimension. The West must understand not only that any sovereign government based on the rotten foundations of the Palestinian Authority is doomed but also that, unless there is a transformation in Palestinian governance and policy that will one day create the basis for pragmatic compromise, there is no way Fatah can make the historic concessions to reach agreement with Israel.
The stakes are high. This is a time not for rolling the dice but for prudent, tough-minded diplomacy—and realism. Or else we are doomed to repeat the past failures.
This story appears in the July 23, 2007 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.
A Risky Bet on Fatah
Posted by Editor on Jul 20th, 2007
By Mortimer B. Zuckerman
It is futile to put a gloss on what has been happening in Gaza. The prospects are grim—in fact, worse than they look. The brutal Hamas coup is the first Islamic takeover of an Arab country in the past 35 years and the first in that period by military putsch: It was not a conflict waged or won by a majority of the population but one fought by a tiny armed faction with the political will to destroy a fragile government. The fear in the region is that it is a harbinger of turmoil affecting Egypt, Lebanon, and Jordan. The takeover has already destroyed the Mecca agreement mediated by Saudi Arabia between Fatah and Hamas, undermined the moderating role of Saudi Arabia, and sabotaged the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.
Hamas seized Gaza by the methodical, barbaric exercise of terrorism. Opponents were made to jump off high-rise buildings; young children were shot in cold blood, often in front of their parents, or the reverse: Mothers and fathers were shot execution style in front of their children. Other Palestinians were permanently crippled with shots fired from the back of the leg so that the kneecap shattered when the bullet exited. Clerics, mosques, and churches were attacked. The presidential palace and the home of Yasser Arafat were looted, not sparing even Arafat’s Nobel Peace Prize medal. Hamas-controlled Gaza is now an “Islamist emirate,” a new power center for Iran and Syria. Gaza is a new location for every brand of radical Islamist from al Qaeda to Hezbollah to meet and conspire now that the “treacherous apostates,” i.e., Fatah, are defeated. The radical extremists are on the march, and the West is in retreat.
Look at the hot spots:
Egypt. Next door to Gaza, Egypt has much to fear from Hamas, an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, which is the major opponent of President Hosni Mubarak’s regime and has ties to Iran. Mubarak will have to get serious about stopping the arms flow from Sinai into that terrorist enclave.
Lebanon. The Syrians—backed by Iran militarily, politically, and financially—are inciting Palestinian terrorist groups to fight the Lebanese Army, even as they continue to assassinate their Lebanese political opponents and help rebuild the military capacities of Hezbollah. Lebanese President Emile Lahoud will leave office in September. He is a Syrian puppet and will nominate—with the blessing of Hezbollah—a caretaker government to rival the government of Prime Minister Fouad Siniora, which currently has a parliamentary majority. Two rival stalemated governments are likely in that tormented state, with Hezbollah resorting to antigovernment violence inspired by the resurgence of the Islamists in Gaza and by its patron, Iran.
Jordan. The Jordanians are menaced by Islamic extremists on their border with Iraq and now must fear that an Islamist Hamas will end up in control of the West Bank on the other side of the Jordan River.
No wonder then that Egypt, Jordan, the United States, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, and Israel seek to work together to contain the influence of extremist Islam. Every Arab state knows it might soon be well within the range of Katyusha rockets, Kassams, Scuds, and other arms, which are multiplying every day within the extremist camps. (Incidentally, just think how imperiled the West Bank now would be if Israel had gone along with Lt. Gen. Keith Dayton’s U.S. plan of several months ago to allow truck convoys carrying Hamas fighters to connect Gaza and the West Bank.)
Could the West Bank prosper under Fatah and Gaza fail under Hamas? That is the hope. Fatah’s Mahmoud Abbas and Salam Fayyad, a former World Bank official well liked in the West, will receive hundreds of millions of dollars in western and Israeli support. As a political gesture, Israel has released 250 prisoners and will also remove some of the internal checkpoints in the West Bank.
The trouble is that Fatah is a broken reed. It lost elections in Gaza because of rampant financial corruption, abuse of power, mismanagement, and weak leadership. Its leadership is likely to go on in the same style with fancy villas and chauffeur-driven Mercedeses. Abbas is a pathetic figure. He has always found it hard to take decisive action. He even failed to order his Presidential Guard to fight back in Gaza when it had more than twice the number of guns as Hamas. When he finally ordered his men to fight, the die had been cast. Fatah’s divisions, and its corruption, began with Arafat, but Abbas must bear responsibility now. Indeed, he is a part of it. At the time of the Gaza crisis, he was about to leave for Qatar, his usual refuge in stormy times, where he carries on his multiple lucrative private businesses. He has never proven himself as a leader in easier situations, so why should we suddenly expect him to display strong leadership now?
By contrast, Hamas enjoys a clear-cut and decisive political leadership. Its lifestyle is simpler, more in touch with the people. Conceivably, it might be able to end the chaos and anarchy engendered by the varying criminal gangs in Gaza and secure a safe day-to-day life for the average Palestinian. That would have a powerful effect on the West Bank.
The United States must not fall for the simplistic assumption that the West Bank is totally controlled by Fatah while Gaza is totally supportive of Hamas. Yes, Fatah gunmen now control the streets of the West Bank, but many Palestinians are fed up with them and disgusted by their humiliating performance in Gaza. The Fatah leadership of the Gaza armed forces fled weeks and months before the battle—including the commander, the deputy commanders, and 30 lower-level commanders. The West Bank Palestinians saw Fatah leaders leaving their soldiers behind to fight and leaving behind the weapons that the American military advisers persuaded the Israelis and the Americans to send to the Presidential Guard. Many of the weapons fell straight into the hands of Hamas. Nor did it help that when Abbas mounted punitive operations against Hamas operatives in the West Bank, he used the armed terrorist gangs of the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades rather than Fatah’s legitimate security organizations. This enraged many Palestinians, for it raised the specter of the rule of armed gangs—even if this time they were pro-Fatah. For example, for a few days Fatah gunmen in black masks ruled the streets of Nablus—a city of 180,000 in the West Bank—abducting rivals, looting and burning their property, and intimidating elected officials in the Hamas-run City Hall. Now, al-Aqsa, Fatah’s longtime military wing and terrorist appendage that has killed and maimed hundreds of Israelis in a relentless wave of suicide bombings, has rejected Abbas’s decree that it must disband and disarm and reaffirmed that it will not be committed to a truce with Israel.
Fatah is despised and discredited in the West Bank, as much as it was in Gaza. This was apparent even before the coup. In Ramallah, where the Fatah government sits, Hamas won a decisive victory in the last elections: four seats in the parliament for Hamas and only one for Fatah. In all the cities of the West Bank, Hamas won 40 parliamentary seats while Fatah got 12—and Hamas won a plurality of the vote in all the West Bank as well.
Fatah’s failures.
The only remedy for this lack of support is with Fatah. But throwing money at Fatah will not give it a missing spine. As we saw in Gaza, most of the corrupt Fatah officials just took the money and sat out the crisis with their wives and mistresses in their villas and flats in Cairo, Ramallah, Jerusalem, Paris, and the French Riviera. Discipline, command, and conviction are what matter, and Fatah and its security services just do not have them.
Unless there is a way to rebuild Fatah as a cleaner, more legitimate organization that can realize the aspirations of its people and improve their day-to-day realities, Fatah will fail. If elections were held tomorrow morning in the West Bank, Hamas could win. There is a high probability that this is what will happen when the next election is held a year from now. That would end the Palestinian national dream, since Hamas is dedicated only to the destruction of Israel, not to the two-state solution. A revealing poll by the respected Khalil al Shakaki showed the weakness of Fatah; 41 percent of Palestinians support the idea of dismantling the Palestinian Authority, while 42 percent support a confederation with Jordan. The current Fatah government does not represent the Palestinians; it represents instead the illusions and hopes of the West.
What Fatah needs in the West Bank is radical re-form. It must convince the Palestinian people that it has rooted out corruption. Hamas does not yet have sufficient power in the West Bank to challenge Fatah, given the Israeli presence and arms. But if the money provided to Fatah ends up in the pockets and bank accounts of the same Fatah crooks who lost Gaza or ends up in the pockets of the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, Fatah’s political position will be dramatically compromised.
We should not be fooled by the rhetoric of Abbas. His words are cheap. It is doubtful that he has it in him to be what he should be for the sake of the Palestinians—a strong leader willing and able to take a stand for peace and confront Hamas. Investing in Abbas is like investing in Enron. The militias and the thugs associated with the PLO’s 13 security services control Abbas, not the other way around. To cede financial and military assets to an unreformed Fatah is to take the huge risk that they will end up in the hands of the terrorist groups associated with Fatah or eventually in the hands of Hamas, just as they did in Gaza.
Tony Blair, the former British prime minister whose task will be the restoration of the Palestinian economy, must demonstrate to Abbas that massive corruption, as well as terrorism and incitement to hatred and violence, is an unacceptable cost and that continued aid must be tied to performance in this key dimension. The West must understand not only that any sovereign government based on the rotten foundations of the Palestinian Authority is doomed but also that, unless there is a transformation in Palestinian governance and policy that will one day create the basis for pragmatic compromise, there is no way Fatah can make the historic concessions to reach agreement with Israel.
The stakes are high. This is a time not for rolling the dice but for prudent, tough-minded diplomacy—and realism. Or else we are doomed to repeat the past failures.
This story appears in the July 23, 2007 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.
Stay out of trouble in Riyadh
Saudi Arabia is 80 beheadings ahead of last year's pace and is on track to surpass its 2005 record of 191, for those keeping track
Tanks a lot
QT Corporate Patriotism in Time of War (cont'd):
The profit margins of American oil refineries are two to three times larger than the profit margins of foreign oil refineries.
Stay out of trouble in Riyadh
Saudi Arabia is 80 beheadings ahead of last year's pace and is on track to surpass its 2005 record of 191, for those keeping track
Tanks a lot
QT Corporate Patriotism in Time of War (cont'd):
The profit margins of American oil refineries are two to three times larger than the profit margins of foreign oil refineries.
Stay out of trouble in Riyadh
Saudi Arabia is 80 beheadings ahead of last year's pace and is on track to surpass its 2005 record of 191, for those keeping track
Tanks a lot
QT Corporate Patriotism in Time of War (cont'd):
The profit margins of American oil refineries are two to three times larger than the profit margins of foreign oil refineries.
Thursday, July 19, 2007
'Iran must support Palestinian struggle'
Associated Press, THE JERUSALEM POST Jul. 19, 2007
Ahmadinejad
Iran's role in the Middle East is "to support the armed struggle of the Palestinian people," Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad told the Islamic Jihad Secretary General Ramdan-Abdullah Shalakh during a meeting in Damascus on Thursday.
Ahmadinejad stressed the importance of unity between all Palestinian factions.
The Iranian president also called on all countries in the region to be vigilant of Israel's attempts to revive itself following its "failure" of the Second Lebanon War.
During his visit to Syria, Ahmadinejad is also scheduled to hold talks with his Syrian counterpart Bashar Assad. The talks are expected to focus on the Iraq situation, the Palestinian territories and Lebanon, where both Teheran and Damascus wield influence.
Ahmadinejad, accompanied by a high-level delegation, was greeted at Damascus airport by Syrian Foreign Minister Walid al-Moallem ahead of the official reception by Assad at the People's Palace later Thursday. Assad was sworn in Tuesday for a second seven-year term.
Syria is Iran's closest Arab ally. The two countries have had close relations since 1980 when Syria sided with Persian Iran against Iraq in the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war.
Both countries face US accusations of fueling violence in Iraq, supporting Lebanon's Hizbullah guerrilla group, which Washington labels a terrorist organization. They are also accused of supporting anti-Israeli Palestinian groups, like the Islamic Hamas.
In addition, Iran is locked in a diplomatic confrontation with the West over its nuclear program.
Ahmadinejad's visit posed a snub to Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who has called on Syria to cut its relations with Iran as a precondition to restart peace process, deadlocked since 2000.
Syrian officials have shunned Olmert's demand and stressed that Syria's relations with Iran are a matter of sovereignty.
As in past visits, Ahmadinejad was expected to also meet in Damascus with leaders of other Syria-based radical Palestinian factions and Hizbullah. He was also expected to visit the shrine of Sayyedah Zeinab, the granddaughter of Prophet Mohammad.
Syria's official news agency SANA Thursday underlined the need for closer cooperation between the two countries "to ensure the factors of security and stability in the region."
The two have growing economic ties, with the annual two-way trade estimated at about $200 million. Iranian companies have invested more than $1 billion in Syria, in sectors such as power generation, automobiles, cement and agriculture, Syrian newspapers reported Thursday.
Syria's most important exports to Iran are cotton and textiles, olive oil and fruits. Iranian exports to Syria are mainly industrial equipment, spare parts, chemicals and locomotives.
More than half a million Iranian tourists visit Syria annually, touring Shi'ite Muslim religious sites.
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1184766015038&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull
Associated Press, THE JERUSALEM POST Jul. 19, 2007
Ahmadinejad
Iran's role in the Middle East is "to support the armed struggle of the Palestinian people," Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad told the Islamic Jihad Secretary General Ramdan-Abdullah Shalakh during a meeting in Damascus on Thursday.
Ahmadinejad stressed the importance of unity between all Palestinian factions.
The Iranian president also called on all countries in the region to be vigilant of Israel's attempts to revive itself following its "failure" of the Second Lebanon War.
During his visit to Syria, Ahmadinejad is also scheduled to hold talks with his Syrian counterpart Bashar Assad. The talks are expected to focus on the Iraq situation, the Palestinian territories and Lebanon, where both Teheran and Damascus wield influence.
Ahmadinejad, accompanied by a high-level delegation, was greeted at Damascus airport by Syrian Foreign Minister Walid al-Moallem ahead of the official reception by Assad at the People's Palace later Thursday. Assad was sworn in Tuesday for a second seven-year term.
Syria is Iran's closest Arab ally. The two countries have had close relations since 1980 when Syria sided with Persian Iran against Iraq in the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war.
Both countries face US accusations of fueling violence in Iraq, supporting Lebanon's Hizbullah guerrilla group, which Washington labels a terrorist organization. They are also accused of supporting anti-Israeli Palestinian groups, like the Islamic Hamas.
In addition, Iran is locked in a diplomatic confrontation with the West over its nuclear program.
Ahmadinejad's visit posed a snub to Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who has called on Syria to cut its relations with Iran as a precondition to restart peace process, deadlocked since 2000.
Syrian officials have shunned Olmert's demand and stressed that Syria's relations with Iran are a matter of sovereignty.
As in past visits, Ahmadinejad was expected to also meet in Damascus with leaders of other Syria-based radical Palestinian factions and Hizbullah. He was also expected to visit the shrine of Sayyedah Zeinab, the granddaughter of Prophet Mohammad.
Syria's official news agency SANA Thursday underlined the need for closer cooperation between the two countries "to ensure the factors of security and stability in the region."
The two have growing economic ties, with the annual two-way trade estimated at about $200 million. Iranian companies have invested more than $1 billion in Syria, in sectors such as power generation, automobiles, cement and agriculture, Syrian newspapers reported Thursday.
Syria's most important exports to Iran are cotton and textiles, olive oil and fruits. Iranian exports to Syria are mainly industrial equipment, spare parts, chemicals and locomotives.
More than half a million Iranian tourists visit Syria annually, touring Shi'ite Muslim religious sites.
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1184766015038&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull
Wednesday, July 18, 2007
The "Legal" War on Israel
By Moshe Dann
FrontPageMagazine.com | July 18, 2007
For nearly four decades the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) has carried on a relentless battle against the right of Jews to live in Yehuda, Shomron, and Aza (YeShA). Declaring all Jewish presence beyond the 1949 Armistice lines "illegal," they condemn Israel for violating the Fourth Geneva Convention (GC IV). Acting as judge and jury in secret deliberations, they decided that Israel was guilty. And, despite objections from distinguished international legal experts, the ICRC refused to consider any appeal. There's only one problem: they made up 'the law' to fit their politics.
Several years ago, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) joined this effort by declaring Israel's 'security barrier' and all Israeli settlements "illegal" because they were built beyond the boundaries of 1949 on "occupied Palestinian territory." That territory was never defined; it couldn’t, since there is no such entity. And their conclusions ignored the facts.
Divided between two terrorist organizations, Fatah and Hamas, the Palestinian Authority is not a state, nor does it comply with the recognized attributes of statehood. Defining "Palestine" as a single unit between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River, most Arabs agree that Israel has no right to exist. "The Nakba" (Catastrophe) was not in 1967, but 1948.
The ICJ, which includes former ambassadors of Jordan and Egypt, didn't consider any Israeli arguments (according to one of its members); in fact, Israel refused to participate in the charade, knowing the outcome had already been determined.
In other words, unlike domestic law which is made by legislatures and administrative bodies, the ICJ's decisions, as international "law," reflected political bodies (like the UN), or NGO's (like the ICRC) who are accountable only to themselves and whose criteria for decision-making when it comes to Israel lack objectivity, impartiality, or careful evaluation. Yet, that became "the law."
To read more, go to: http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=29202
By Moshe Dann
FrontPageMagazine.com | July 18, 2007
For nearly four decades the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) has carried on a relentless battle against the right of Jews to live in Yehuda, Shomron, and Aza (YeShA). Declaring all Jewish presence beyond the 1949 Armistice lines "illegal," they condemn Israel for violating the Fourth Geneva Convention (GC IV). Acting as judge and jury in secret deliberations, they decided that Israel was guilty. And, despite objections from distinguished international legal experts, the ICRC refused to consider any appeal. There's only one problem: they made up 'the law' to fit their politics.
Several years ago, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) joined this effort by declaring Israel's 'security barrier' and all Israeli settlements "illegal" because they were built beyond the boundaries of 1949 on "occupied Palestinian territory." That territory was never defined; it couldn’t, since there is no such entity. And their conclusions ignored the facts.
Divided between two terrorist organizations, Fatah and Hamas, the Palestinian Authority is not a state, nor does it comply with the recognized attributes of statehood. Defining "Palestine" as a single unit between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River, most Arabs agree that Israel has no right to exist. "The Nakba" (Catastrophe) was not in 1967, but 1948.
The ICJ, which includes former ambassadors of Jordan and Egypt, didn't consider any Israeli arguments (according to one of its members); in fact, Israel refused to participate in the charade, knowing the outcome had already been determined.
In other words, unlike domestic law which is made by legislatures and administrative bodies, the ICJ's decisions, as international "law," reflected political bodies (like the UN), or NGO's (like the ICRC) who are accountable only to themselves and whose criteria for decision-making when it comes to Israel lack objectivity, impartiality, or careful evaluation. Yet, that became "the law."
To read more, go to: http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=29202
Tuesday, July 17, 2007
AND THE WORLD PAYS: Despite the fact that the Palestinians are receiving aid at a scope that other countries can only dream of, they are still pitied, Thus the wretchedness has turned into an industry.
By Ben-Dror Yemini, Ma’ariv, January 5, 2007
(Third article in the series)
According to world opinion, the Palestinians are the most wretched people in the world. The most oppressed people on earth. This is a national group that incorporates a significant part of the image of the victim. Numerous publications deal with this wretchedness, with the poverty, with the refugee status that has continued for decades. Here, too, the connection between the facts and the publicity is less than nothing.
In the first article in the series, “And the World Remains Silent,” which was published in the Rosh Hashana supplement, we dealt with the mass murder that Arabs and primarily Moslems perpetrate against Moslems and Arabs, compared with the relatively minimal number of Arabs killed in general, and Palestinians in particular, in the framework of the dispute with Israel. The second article in the series, “And the World Lies,” which was published in the Yom Kippur supplement, dealt with manipulation of the Palestinian refugee problem: even though almost 40 million people have experienced population exchanges for the purpose of creating states with a national, ethnic or religious identity, only the Palestinians of all the tens of millions, have remained refugees.
This article will examine the myth of Palestinian misery. The Palestinians are, indeed in a bad situation. No one disputes that. The question is whether this is a self-inflicted Palestinian product for which the Palestinians are responsible, or it is international harassment, primarily American or Israeli.
The myth, which is cultivated by the "forces of progress," says that, naturally, the United States is the root of all evil. Not only does it have an "unbalanced policy," it is also the oppressor of the legitimate aspirations of the Palestinian people. And Israel, of course, is worsening the general oppression. Is that really so?
While the Palestinians have acquired a place of honor on the world’s list of wretchedness, well oiled public-relations have turned them into a nation of victims. The facts are different in essence from the myths and the plethora of academic and journalistic publications that are perpetrating a mass fraud on world opinion.
Misery pays. It has turned into an industry. The world opens its pockets. The “great Satan,” the country most hated by the Palestinians, the United States, which vies for precedence only with Israel, the “small Satan,” is the country that has helped the Palestinians since the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993 more than any other country in the world. Not Saudi Arabia alone, and not the Gulf states, separately or together. Not the countries of Europe, who donate separately and not even the European Union.
They have been showered with dollars and they respond with criticism
These are the facts: according to a report by the World Bank, from 1994 to 1998, the United States was the largest contributor to the Palestinians. The figures are no different in the years after that, but the 1990s, which ended with the Intifada, are particularly important. It is true that Israel receives more aid. The military aid stems from strategic reasons and this is not the place to discuss them. Most of it, in any case, assists American industry, because Israel must spend the money only in America. With regards to the economic aid, in recent years it has become marginal and it is less than the aid given to the Palestinians.
In everything pertaining to per capita aid for the purposes of Palestinian development welfare, they receive far more aid than the aid given, for example, to Egypt. But the myth repeatedly claims that the Palestinians are the "victims," that they must be given more and more because that, perhaps, will convince them to want peace and to abandon terrorism.
According to the World Bank Report, in the abovementioned years, Washington contributed close to $345 million, compared with the European Union, which contributed $298 million. Japan is also at the top of the list, with a contribution of $306 million during those years.
The American contribution is actually much greater: during those years, just like during all the past few decades, the United States has been the largest contributor to UNRWA the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for refugees, which is assisting the Palestinians. UNRWA’s annual budget was close to $300 million a year during that period. Out of that amount, $600 million were sent to the West Bank and Gaza.
Even by a multiyear calculation, from 1994 to 2004 the United States is in first place with $1.3 billion in aid. After the U.S. comes the European Union - 1.11 billion, then Japan - 0.5 3 billion. Here, too, these amounts do not include the contributions to UNRWA and the "Dawa" (the “charity”), which is used in large part to fund terrorism. We must remember that Hamas operated another, separate fund raising channel, some of which actually went to welfare, education, health and publicity infrastructures, and some of which went to strengthening the military arm and terrorists activities.
Billions have been given to the Palestinians. This money could have led to tremendous change in the Palestinian economy. This money, excuse the cliché, could have turned Gaza into Beirut (except that Hizbullah would turn Beirut into Gaza). But the Palestinians chose another path. The world rained dollars on them and the Palestinians responded with criticism. They were not the oppressed of the world, but rather the pampered of the world. Most of Africa’s inhabitants, suffering a great deal more, can only dream of aid at the magnitude that was given to the Palestinians. There is poverty in the world. There is exploitation. There is oppression. But the Palestinians are not at the top of the list. They are far from that. They have never suffered from hunger. Their distress is mostly of their own devising.
They preferred the struggle to prosperity
Back before the Oslo Accords, money was flowing to the Palestinians. 1992 was a peak year for the Palestinian economy. The GDP per capita reached $1,999, and the actual GNP per capita was $2,683. The gap stems from supplements from foreign sources: some came from the UNRWA budget, some was transferred from Palestinians working abroad who sent money, and a significant part came from the work performed by many Palestinians in Israel.
Theoretically, if not for the terrorism, which forced Israel to impose closures and curfews, the Palestinian economy in the 1990s would have turned into one of the leading economies in the Middle East, after Israel. That is the point in time during which the secret talks were being held in Oslo, after which, following the signing of the Accords, the great flow of international aid to the Palestinians began. But these were also the years of large waves of terrorism. The Palestinians preferred the struggle to prosperity.
During those years, countries like Yemen, Chad and Nigeria, for example, had per capita GDPs of about $1,000 and they were not the poorest countries in the world. These were the years in which there were African communities of millions, in Congo, in Sudan, in the Sahara, which became refugees. But the international community abandoned them. The black people of Africa, of course, did not create terrorism and did not present a strategic threat. The moral conscience of the world in general and of the West in particular is activated in a very selective manner: by the television screen, by threats of terrorism, by the danger of a rise in oil prices. So the far greater suffering of tens of millions of black people in Africa is ranked much lower than the far lesser suffering of the Palestinians.
The distress of the Palestinians is apparently their most successful industry. This is distress that both perpetuates itself and serves as the basis for more and more payment demands. What is it for? Not for building infrastructures. Not for building an improved education system. Not for rehabilitating the hundreds of thousands who are living in refugee camps. The money went to three main objectives: perpetuating the political situation and the wretchedness; purchasing weapons and materiel for terrorism; and for corruption, by paying enormous amounts that went constantly into the pockets of cronies and hangers-on, such as the millions of dollars that went into the bank accounts of Yasser Arafat in banks around the world, and the coupons clipped by the heads of the Palestinian Authority from almost every economic development deal in the territories.
The supreme objective: Wiping Israel off the map
Israel is not innocent of mistakes, but all Israel's mistakes are dwarfed by the Palestinian liability. Living under an occupation is no great joy, and criticism of the occupation in general and of the settlements in particular, is legitimate. More than legitimate. We are not dealing with theory, however, but with facts: huge sums of money that were given to the Palestinians went down the drain. And the opportunities to win independence and prosperity were rejected in favor of the supreme objective: wiping Israel off the map.
The most important turning point was, of course, the Oslo Accords. The entire world volunteered to help the Palestinian Authority, which was established following the Accords. The Palestinian Authority did, indeed, grow and blossom. The big money began to flow. But the Palestinians themselves did not enjoy the fruits of the peace. To the contrary. They went into an economic decline.
Various research entities present contradictory data on the changes in the per capita GNP or the purchasing power of the Palestinians before and after the Oslo Accords. But even the contradictory data present consistent lines: on the one hand, there was an astonishing, unprecedented flow of funds to the Palestinian Authority, and on the hand, along with the enormous flow of funds, there was also a drop in per capita GNP. The explanation is simple: after the Oslo Accords, there were several waves of terrorism, which led to a series of closures. Fewer and fewer Palestinians worked in Israel.
But the change came. In 1997 there was a turning point and the Palestinian economy began to recover. The Palestinians began to feel the benefits of peace. According to Palestinian data, from 1994 to 2000 there was a real increase of 36% in the GDP. And yet, despite the dramatic improvement, the recovery was short-lived and it ended with the outbreak of the second intifada in September 2000. Again, the chance for prosperity was destroyed. Again, the Palestinians chose the path of violence.
This is an important point in time. The violence broke out precisely after Israel extended to the Palestinians the most generous offers it the history of the conflict between the two nations. The myths of "Palestinian suffering" and of the "horrors of occupation" are inconsistent with reality.
Far from last place in suffering and poverty
Firstly, the uprising began after two years of the waning of the terrorism and the rise of the economic prosperity. Secondly, these were the days in which the Palestinians had a Palestinian state in hand. It began at the Camp David summit, at which Ehud Barak, then Prime Minister, proposed something that no Israeli leader had dared to propose before him. It continued under the guidance of Bill Clinton and the essence was a Palestinian State at the 1967 borders with the exception of minor border adjustments of a few percent, including substantial parts of Jerusalem, and exchanges of territory, as compensation for the Palestinians.
And how did the Palestinians respond? This is how Bandar bin Sultan, the highly influential Saudi ambassador in Washington at that time, describes the events of that historic day, January 2, 2001: bin Sultan was sitting with Arafat at the Ritz Hotel before he went into the meeting with Clinton. Ben Sultan told Arafat that this was a historic opportunity, that he had the support of Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and most of the Arab world, and that if he refused the proposal, "It would be a tragedy, it would be a crime." It did not help. Arafat went to Clinton and said: "No." Arafat did not want a Palestinian state. Arafat did not want prosperity. Arafat did not want an end to the occupation. Arafat wanted war.
Israel was forced to respond in order to protect itself from the enormous wave of terrorism. Yes, Israel made mistakes. But all of its mistakes are dwarfed, we must repeat, by the Palestinian intransigence against ending the occupation and the conflict, and the refusal to establish a Palestinian state alongside Israel.
We will continue with the facts. The flow of funds for economic aid, for human development, to prevent hunger, is supposed to be in accordance with the state of the needy community. Were the Palestinians the neediest community? Comparative data show that the Palestinians are far from last place in poverty. While the GNP was not at Western levels, even among the Muslim or Arab countries the Palestinians are not the last on the list.
The Human Development Index for 2003 places the "occupied Palestinian territories," as the Palestinian Authority is defined there, in the 102nd place out of 180 countries. Since 2003 represents one of the low points, at the height of the intifada, and since the GNP during the 1990s was far higher, we can assume that the Palestinians’ ranking during the 1990s was higher. And in any case, even in the dire situation of 2003, the Palestinians were ahead of Algeria (ranked 103) Syria (ranked 106) Egypt (ranked 116), Morocco (ranked 126), Yemen (ranked 156) and certainly most of the countries in Africa and some of the countries of South America.
The Palestinians are ranked high in human development, relative to other Arab states, even though the GNP is lower than in those countries. And yet, a comparison of GNP and the international aide, relative to other countries and relative to the size of the population, yields an amazing result: the Palestinians received the greatest amount of aid in the world. Actually, it has been a decade and a half that the Palestinians have been far from being the poorest, but they received the most aide. The facts tell the story.
For example, from 1994 to 1998, the Palestinians in the territories received more than $2.6 billion in aid from the donor countries, and another $600 million through UNRWA, but that is only part of the picture. An enormous number of Palestinian NGOs received support from many funds, primarily in Europe.
Additionally, "charity organizations" sent money, mainly to entities that engaged in terrorism and/or religious activities. The money came from Muslims in America and Europe, from Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states. The cumulative amount each year comes to hundreds of millions of dollars.
Comparative data for 2003 shows an even more surprising picture. While the poverty-stricken Yemen received external aid of $30 per capita, each person in the Palestinian Authority received $470. Even in absolute terms, this is distorted. Egypt received external $1.286 billion in aid while the Palestinian Authority received $1.616 billion in aid. It is superfluous to say that the population of Egypt is 73 million and the Palestinians population is only 3 million.
This is not the end of the Palestinian audacity - an audacity in which American support, both economic and political, is met with ingratitude. In 2003, among other things following the terrorist bombings, Washington decided to make its aid to NGOs around the world conditional on the signing of an agreement under which the recipient does not support terrorism. We should clarify that this was the policy vis-à-vis every entity in the world and not just the Palestinians. However, some of the Palestinians did not like that. They wanted both money and support for terrorism. An internal debate developed, with the expected nationalistic rhetoric. The radical elements prevailed and at the beginning of June 2004, the Palestinian legislative Council passed a resolution rejecting the American conditions.
The Palestinians wanted both aid and the option that the aid would go to terrorist entities or to entities that support terrorism. Why? Because of the Palestinian "national honor," which includes supporting terrorism, was more important than the possibility of obtaining American aid.
Weapons are more important that welfare, education and prosperity
Three researchers - Michael Keating, Anne Le More and Robert Lowe - edited a comprehensive book of articles on the aid, called “The Case of Palestine: Aid, Diplomacy and Facts on the Ground,” which was published in 2005. The three will never be accused of being overly sympathetic to Israel. However, two clear facts emerge from the book: first, that the Palestinians have received the greatest amount of aid since World War II, not just in absolute terms, but also taking into account the adjustment for the various indices. And, in effect, relative to the number of inhabitants, the Palestinians have received more aid than the Marshall Plan, which was designed for the recovery of Europe after the Second World War. Second, in the words of the book, "Aid may have been part of the problem rather than the solution, and massive international aide has not prevented the decline of Palestinian society."
As usual with books of this type, it is also full of allegations against Israel, such as the claim that the aid contributed to perpetuating the occupation (how does that fit in with the Palestinian intransigence in refusing a Palestinian state and the Clinton initiative?), but if we relate solely to the data - of the World Bank, of the International Monetary Fund, of research institutes - they tell us the story.
Throughout the territories there are now tens of thousands of privately held weapons, which are not part of the weaponry of the Palestinian security forces. The price of a rifle, according to type and period, ranges between thousands of shekels and thousands of dollars. When we talk about Palestinian distress, it is also worth remembering Palestinian priorities, both national and private: weapons are more important than welfare, than education, than prosperity. The problem is not money. The problem is the preference for weapons.
If the Palestinians had been fighting the occupation - they would have had an independent Palestinian state long ago, very close to the 1967 lines. But the Palestinians have made every effort to convince public opinion in Israel that the goal is not the end of the occupation. The Palestinian goal was and, for many, remains - the end of the State of Israel. Fantasy has overcome reality.
Like the dream that has been nurtured about the right of return, which only increased the misery of those who have been forced to remain refugees, so the dream of the destruction of Israel has only increased the wretchedness of the Palestinians. The blame is not theirs alone. The blame also belongs to their propaganda agents in the West. The blame belongs to the propaganda agents who treated them like oppressed wretches and not like people with equality who are responsible for their actions. There is no other explanation for the fact that since the Oslo Accords, the Palestinians in the territories alone have received $5.5 billion, if we do not take into account additional sources that are not manifested in the official reports. This comes to about $1,300 per capita. Just for the sake of comparison, under the Marshall Plan, every European received only $273 (after adjustment for the index).
The Palestinians deserve to receive this aid. They have many good reasons. However we now see what happened to this vast amount of money. It was spent on corruption and the Fatah movement was removed from the government. It was spent on weapons at the encouragement of the central government and the result is social breakdown and anarchy. And above all, the blame belongs to those who helped in the flow of this enormous amount of money without making the Palestinians undergo a process of withdrawal from their futile dreams of the destruction of Israel. The result is mainly the continued destruction of Palestinian society.
By Ben-Dror Yemini, Ma’ariv, January 5, 2007
(Third article in the series)
According to world opinion, the Palestinians are the most wretched people in the world. The most oppressed people on earth. This is a national group that incorporates a significant part of the image of the victim. Numerous publications deal with this wretchedness, with the poverty, with the refugee status that has continued for decades. Here, too, the connection between the facts and the publicity is less than nothing.
In the first article in the series, “And the World Remains Silent,” which was published in the Rosh Hashana supplement, we dealt with the mass murder that Arabs and primarily Moslems perpetrate against Moslems and Arabs, compared with the relatively minimal number of Arabs killed in general, and Palestinians in particular, in the framework of the dispute with Israel. The second article in the series, “And the World Lies,” which was published in the Yom Kippur supplement, dealt with manipulation of the Palestinian refugee problem: even though almost 40 million people have experienced population exchanges for the purpose of creating states with a national, ethnic or religious identity, only the Palestinians of all the tens of millions, have remained refugees.
This article will examine the myth of Palestinian misery. The Palestinians are, indeed in a bad situation. No one disputes that. The question is whether this is a self-inflicted Palestinian product for which the Palestinians are responsible, or it is international harassment, primarily American or Israeli.
The myth, which is cultivated by the "forces of progress," says that, naturally, the United States is the root of all evil. Not only does it have an "unbalanced policy," it is also the oppressor of the legitimate aspirations of the Palestinian people. And Israel, of course, is worsening the general oppression. Is that really so?
While the Palestinians have acquired a place of honor on the world’s list of wretchedness, well oiled public-relations have turned them into a nation of victims. The facts are different in essence from the myths and the plethora of academic and journalistic publications that are perpetrating a mass fraud on world opinion.
Misery pays. It has turned into an industry. The world opens its pockets. The “great Satan,” the country most hated by the Palestinians, the United States, which vies for precedence only with Israel, the “small Satan,” is the country that has helped the Palestinians since the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993 more than any other country in the world. Not Saudi Arabia alone, and not the Gulf states, separately or together. Not the countries of Europe, who donate separately and not even the European Union.
They have been showered with dollars and they respond with criticism
These are the facts: according to a report by the World Bank, from 1994 to 1998, the United States was the largest contributor to the Palestinians. The figures are no different in the years after that, but the 1990s, which ended with the Intifada, are particularly important. It is true that Israel receives more aid. The military aid stems from strategic reasons and this is not the place to discuss them. Most of it, in any case, assists American industry, because Israel must spend the money only in America. With regards to the economic aid, in recent years it has become marginal and it is less than the aid given to the Palestinians.
In everything pertaining to per capita aid for the purposes of Palestinian development welfare, they receive far more aid than the aid given, for example, to Egypt. But the myth repeatedly claims that the Palestinians are the "victims," that they must be given more and more because that, perhaps, will convince them to want peace and to abandon terrorism.
According to the World Bank Report, in the abovementioned years, Washington contributed close to $345 million, compared with the European Union, which contributed $298 million. Japan is also at the top of the list, with a contribution of $306 million during those years.
The American contribution is actually much greater: during those years, just like during all the past few decades, the United States has been the largest contributor to UNRWA the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for refugees, which is assisting the Palestinians. UNRWA’s annual budget was close to $300 million a year during that period. Out of that amount, $600 million were sent to the West Bank and Gaza.
Even by a multiyear calculation, from 1994 to 2004 the United States is in first place with $1.3 billion in aid. After the U.S. comes the European Union - 1.11 billion, then Japan - 0.5 3 billion. Here, too, these amounts do not include the contributions to UNRWA and the "Dawa" (the “charity”), which is used in large part to fund terrorism. We must remember that Hamas operated another, separate fund raising channel, some of which actually went to welfare, education, health and publicity infrastructures, and some of which went to strengthening the military arm and terrorists activities.
Billions have been given to the Palestinians. This money could have led to tremendous change in the Palestinian economy. This money, excuse the cliché, could have turned Gaza into Beirut (except that Hizbullah would turn Beirut into Gaza). But the Palestinians chose another path. The world rained dollars on them and the Palestinians responded with criticism. They were not the oppressed of the world, but rather the pampered of the world. Most of Africa’s inhabitants, suffering a great deal more, can only dream of aid at the magnitude that was given to the Palestinians. There is poverty in the world. There is exploitation. There is oppression. But the Palestinians are not at the top of the list. They are far from that. They have never suffered from hunger. Their distress is mostly of their own devising.
They preferred the struggle to prosperity
Back before the Oslo Accords, money was flowing to the Palestinians. 1992 was a peak year for the Palestinian economy. The GDP per capita reached $1,999, and the actual GNP per capita was $2,683. The gap stems from supplements from foreign sources: some came from the UNRWA budget, some was transferred from Palestinians working abroad who sent money, and a significant part came from the work performed by many Palestinians in Israel.
Theoretically, if not for the terrorism, which forced Israel to impose closures and curfews, the Palestinian economy in the 1990s would have turned into one of the leading economies in the Middle East, after Israel. That is the point in time during which the secret talks were being held in Oslo, after which, following the signing of the Accords, the great flow of international aid to the Palestinians began. But these were also the years of large waves of terrorism. The Palestinians preferred the struggle to prosperity.
During those years, countries like Yemen, Chad and Nigeria, for example, had per capita GDPs of about $1,000 and they were not the poorest countries in the world. These were the years in which there were African communities of millions, in Congo, in Sudan, in the Sahara, which became refugees. But the international community abandoned them. The black people of Africa, of course, did not create terrorism and did not present a strategic threat. The moral conscience of the world in general and of the West in particular is activated in a very selective manner: by the television screen, by threats of terrorism, by the danger of a rise in oil prices. So the far greater suffering of tens of millions of black people in Africa is ranked much lower than the far lesser suffering of the Palestinians.
The distress of the Palestinians is apparently their most successful industry. This is distress that both perpetuates itself and serves as the basis for more and more payment demands. What is it for? Not for building infrastructures. Not for building an improved education system. Not for rehabilitating the hundreds of thousands who are living in refugee camps. The money went to three main objectives: perpetuating the political situation and the wretchedness; purchasing weapons and materiel for terrorism; and for corruption, by paying enormous amounts that went constantly into the pockets of cronies and hangers-on, such as the millions of dollars that went into the bank accounts of Yasser Arafat in banks around the world, and the coupons clipped by the heads of the Palestinian Authority from almost every economic development deal in the territories.
The supreme objective: Wiping Israel off the map
Israel is not innocent of mistakes, but all Israel's mistakes are dwarfed by the Palestinian liability. Living under an occupation is no great joy, and criticism of the occupation in general and of the settlements in particular, is legitimate. More than legitimate. We are not dealing with theory, however, but with facts: huge sums of money that were given to the Palestinians went down the drain. And the opportunities to win independence and prosperity were rejected in favor of the supreme objective: wiping Israel off the map.
The most important turning point was, of course, the Oslo Accords. The entire world volunteered to help the Palestinian Authority, which was established following the Accords. The Palestinian Authority did, indeed, grow and blossom. The big money began to flow. But the Palestinians themselves did not enjoy the fruits of the peace. To the contrary. They went into an economic decline.
Various research entities present contradictory data on the changes in the per capita GNP or the purchasing power of the Palestinians before and after the Oslo Accords. But even the contradictory data present consistent lines: on the one hand, there was an astonishing, unprecedented flow of funds to the Palestinian Authority, and on the hand, along with the enormous flow of funds, there was also a drop in per capita GNP. The explanation is simple: after the Oslo Accords, there were several waves of terrorism, which led to a series of closures. Fewer and fewer Palestinians worked in Israel.
But the change came. In 1997 there was a turning point and the Palestinian economy began to recover. The Palestinians began to feel the benefits of peace. According to Palestinian data, from 1994 to 2000 there was a real increase of 36% in the GDP. And yet, despite the dramatic improvement, the recovery was short-lived and it ended with the outbreak of the second intifada in September 2000. Again, the chance for prosperity was destroyed. Again, the Palestinians chose the path of violence.
This is an important point in time. The violence broke out precisely after Israel extended to the Palestinians the most generous offers it the history of the conflict between the two nations. The myths of "Palestinian suffering" and of the "horrors of occupation" are inconsistent with reality.
Far from last place in suffering and poverty
Firstly, the uprising began after two years of the waning of the terrorism and the rise of the economic prosperity. Secondly, these were the days in which the Palestinians had a Palestinian state in hand. It began at the Camp David summit, at which Ehud Barak, then Prime Minister, proposed something that no Israeli leader had dared to propose before him. It continued under the guidance of Bill Clinton and the essence was a Palestinian State at the 1967 borders with the exception of minor border adjustments of a few percent, including substantial parts of Jerusalem, and exchanges of territory, as compensation for the Palestinians.
And how did the Palestinians respond? This is how Bandar bin Sultan, the highly influential Saudi ambassador in Washington at that time, describes the events of that historic day, January 2, 2001: bin Sultan was sitting with Arafat at the Ritz Hotel before he went into the meeting with Clinton. Ben Sultan told Arafat that this was a historic opportunity, that he had the support of Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and most of the Arab world, and that if he refused the proposal, "It would be a tragedy, it would be a crime." It did not help. Arafat went to Clinton and said: "No." Arafat did not want a Palestinian state. Arafat did not want prosperity. Arafat did not want an end to the occupation. Arafat wanted war.
Israel was forced to respond in order to protect itself from the enormous wave of terrorism. Yes, Israel made mistakes. But all of its mistakes are dwarfed, we must repeat, by the Palestinian intransigence against ending the occupation and the conflict, and the refusal to establish a Palestinian state alongside Israel.
We will continue with the facts. The flow of funds for economic aid, for human development, to prevent hunger, is supposed to be in accordance with the state of the needy community. Were the Palestinians the neediest community? Comparative data show that the Palestinians are far from last place in poverty. While the GNP was not at Western levels, even among the Muslim or Arab countries the Palestinians are not the last on the list.
The Human Development Index for 2003 places the "occupied Palestinian territories," as the Palestinian Authority is defined there, in the 102nd place out of 180 countries. Since 2003 represents one of the low points, at the height of the intifada, and since the GNP during the 1990s was far higher, we can assume that the Palestinians’ ranking during the 1990s was higher. And in any case, even in the dire situation of 2003, the Palestinians were ahead of Algeria (ranked 103) Syria (ranked 106) Egypt (ranked 116), Morocco (ranked 126), Yemen (ranked 156) and certainly most of the countries in Africa and some of the countries of South America.
The Palestinians are ranked high in human development, relative to other Arab states, even though the GNP is lower than in those countries. And yet, a comparison of GNP and the international aide, relative to other countries and relative to the size of the population, yields an amazing result: the Palestinians received the greatest amount of aid in the world. Actually, it has been a decade and a half that the Palestinians have been far from being the poorest, but they received the most aide. The facts tell the story.
For example, from 1994 to 1998, the Palestinians in the territories received more than $2.6 billion in aid from the donor countries, and another $600 million through UNRWA, but that is only part of the picture. An enormous number of Palestinian NGOs received support from many funds, primarily in Europe.
Additionally, "charity organizations" sent money, mainly to entities that engaged in terrorism and/or religious activities. The money came from Muslims in America and Europe, from Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states. The cumulative amount each year comes to hundreds of millions of dollars.
Comparative data for 2003 shows an even more surprising picture. While the poverty-stricken Yemen received external aid of $30 per capita, each person in the Palestinian Authority received $470. Even in absolute terms, this is distorted. Egypt received external $1.286 billion in aid while the Palestinian Authority received $1.616 billion in aid. It is superfluous to say that the population of Egypt is 73 million and the Palestinians population is only 3 million.
This is not the end of the Palestinian audacity - an audacity in which American support, both economic and political, is met with ingratitude. In 2003, among other things following the terrorist bombings, Washington decided to make its aid to NGOs around the world conditional on the signing of an agreement under which the recipient does not support terrorism. We should clarify that this was the policy vis-à-vis every entity in the world and not just the Palestinians. However, some of the Palestinians did not like that. They wanted both money and support for terrorism. An internal debate developed, with the expected nationalistic rhetoric. The radical elements prevailed and at the beginning of June 2004, the Palestinian legislative Council passed a resolution rejecting the American conditions.
The Palestinians wanted both aid and the option that the aid would go to terrorist entities or to entities that support terrorism. Why? Because of the Palestinian "national honor," which includes supporting terrorism, was more important than the possibility of obtaining American aid.
Weapons are more important that welfare, education and prosperity
Three researchers - Michael Keating, Anne Le More and Robert Lowe - edited a comprehensive book of articles on the aid, called “The Case of Palestine: Aid, Diplomacy and Facts on the Ground,” which was published in 2005. The three will never be accused of being overly sympathetic to Israel. However, two clear facts emerge from the book: first, that the Palestinians have received the greatest amount of aid since World War II, not just in absolute terms, but also taking into account the adjustment for the various indices. And, in effect, relative to the number of inhabitants, the Palestinians have received more aid than the Marshall Plan, which was designed for the recovery of Europe after the Second World War. Second, in the words of the book, "Aid may have been part of the problem rather than the solution, and massive international aide has not prevented the decline of Palestinian society."
As usual with books of this type, it is also full of allegations against Israel, such as the claim that the aid contributed to perpetuating the occupation (how does that fit in with the Palestinian intransigence in refusing a Palestinian state and the Clinton initiative?), but if we relate solely to the data - of the World Bank, of the International Monetary Fund, of research institutes - they tell us the story.
Throughout the territories there are now tens of thousands of privately held weapons, which are not part of the weaponry of the Palestinian security forces. The price of a rifle, according to type and period, ranges between thousands of shekels and thousands of dollars. When we talk about Palestinian distress, it is also worth remembering Palestinian priorities, both national and private: weapons are more important than welfare, than education, than prosperity. The problem is not money. The problem is the preference for weapons.
If the Palestinians had been fighting the occupation - they would have had an independent Palestinian state long ago, very close to the 1967 lines. But the Palestinians have made every effort to convince public opinion in Israel that the goal is not the end of the occupation. The Palestinian goal was and, for many, remains - the end of the State of Israel. Fantasy has overcome reality.
Like the dream that has been nurtured about the right of return, which only increased the misery of those who have been forced to remain refugees, so the dream of the destruction of Israel has only increased the wretchedness of the Palestinians. The blame is not theirs alone. The blame also belongs to their propaganda agents in the West. The blame belongs to the propaganda agents who treated them like oppressed wretches and not like people with equality who are responsible for their actions. There is no other explanation for the fact that since the Oslo Accords, the Palestinians in the territories alone have received $5.5 billion, if we do not take into account additional sources that are not manifested in the official reports. This comes to about $1,300 per capita. Just for the sake of comparison, under the Marshall Plan, every European received only $273 (after adjustment for the index).
The Palestinians deserve to receive this aid. They have many good reasons. However we now see what happened to this vast amount of money. It was spent on corruption and the Fatah movement was removed from the government. It was spent on weapons at the encouragement of the central government and the result is social breakdown and anarchy. And above all, the blame belongs to those who helped in the flow of this enormous amount of money without making the Palestinians undergo a process of withdrawal from their futile dreams of the destruction of Israel. The result is mainly the continued destruction of Palestinian society.
The news is getting bad to worse
And I am mad as hell,
The Bush and Peres speeches made -
I sure ain't feelin' well.
The foolishness of presidents
Whose judgments one must question,
The 'gifts' proposed to terrorists
Just give me indigestion!
Create a state of Palestine
When they excel at terror?
Too late we'll learn the lesson that
They've made a tragic error!
A state that sends its kids to kill
Morality corruption,
Create a state whose goal it is
For Israel's destruction?!
Apartheid state where only they
Determine who may dwell
Committed also - with their guns
That others live with hell!
And Shimon-Ehud acquiesce
To everyone' seduction -
They kiss the hand that's out to kill -
A media production.
It's time for Isr'al to announce -
We citizens have clout -
Our leaders can't destroy our land
'cause we ain't gettin' out!!
Monday, July 16, 2007
This movement on behalf of Jewish refugees form Arab countries is long overdue. The Palestinians have been screaming about their displaced refugees, the world has paid no attention to the hundreds of thousands of Jewish citizens who were expelled from many Arab countries in 1948, often with just 24 hours notice, making it impossible to take more than they could carry. International law demands that all refugees be treated equally.
Thanks to special lawyer Aggie Hoffman for bringing to our attention the following announcement:
US Congress to Hold Hearing on Jewish Refugees From Arab States
US Congress to Hold Hearing on Jewish Refugees From Arab States
Israel National News / 1 Av 5767, July 16, '07
THIS IS HUGE NEWS
The Congressional Human Rights Caucus (CHRC) of the US legislature is set to hold a first-of-its-kind hearing next week on the hundreds of thousands of Jews who were forced to flee their homes in Arab countries as a result of the Arab-Israeli conflict.
The July 19 hearing in Washington DC, under the heading "Jewish Refugees from Arab Countries: Truth, Justice, and Reconciliation," is to be hosted by the CHRC in conjunction with B'nai Brith International and Justice for Jews from Arab Countries. It will be the first time that the US Congress will hear testimony on the issue of Jewish refugees from Arab countries.
The expert witnesses invited to address the US legislators include: Dr. Irwin Cotler, a member of Parliament and a former Justice Minister from Canada who is well-known for his advocacy on behalf of prisoners of conscience around the globe, including Professor Saad Edin Ibrahim, the leading democracy advocate in the Arab world; Dr. Henry Green , a professor of Religious Studies and Sociology at the University of Miami, and the former director of the Judaic and Sephardic Studies Department; Mrs. Regina Bublil Waldman, a recipient of the prestigious Martin Luther King Jr. Humanitarian Award , is a co-founder of Jews Indigenous to the Middle East and North Africa (JIMENA), a US-based advocacy group. Mrs. Waldman was born in Libya and her family was nearly murdered while escaping that country in 1967.
The expert witnesses invited to address the US legislators include: Dr. Irwin Cotler, a member of Parliament and a former Justice Minister from Canada who is well-known for his advocacy on behalf of prisoners of conscience around the globe, including Professor Saad Edin Ibrahim, the leading democracy advocate in the Arab world; Dr. Henry Green , a professor of Religious Studies and Sociology at the University of Miami, and the former director of the Judaic and Sephardic Studies Department; Mrs. Regina Bublil Waldman, a recipient of the prestigious Martin Luther King Jr. Humanitarian Award , is a co-founder of Jews Indigenous to the Middle East and North Africa (JIMENA), a US-based advocacy group. Mrs. Waldman was born in Libya and her family was nearly murdered while escaping that country in 1967.
The CHRC hearing will also include a screening of The Forgotten Refugees, produced by the David Project. The film is a documentary about the mass exodus of almost one million Jews from Arab countries . The July 19 congressional hearing on hearing on Jewish refugees has an immediate, practical goal of providing US congressmen with preliminary information ahead of voting on House Resolution 185 and Senate Resolution 85. According to the proposed legislation, the US president would be obligated to instruct all official representatives of the United States that "explicit reference to Palestinian refugees be matched by a similar explicit reference to Jewish and other refugees, as a matter of law and equity." ( See Senate Res 85 for the full text.)
A JIMENA statement calls the proposed resolutions "the strongest declaration adopted by the US Congress acknowledging the rights of Jewish refugees who were forced to flee Arab countries."
As JIMENA notes, "There were two major population movements that occurred during years of great turmoil in the Middle East, from 1948 to 1968." Arabs and Jews were "both determined to be bona fide refugees under international law. In fact, more former Jewish refugees were uprooted from Arab countries (over 850,000) than Palestinians who left Israel in 1948 (UN estimate: 726,000)."
The CHRC, convening the unique hearing, is chaired by Representative Tom Lantos (D-CA), Chairman of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs.
This movement on behalf of Jewish refugees form Arab countries is long overdue. The Palestinians have been screaming about their displaced refugees, the world has paid no attention to the hundreds of thousands of Jewish citizens who were expelled from many Arab countries in 1948, often with just 24 hours notice, making it impossible to take more than they could carry. International law demands that all refugees be treated equally.
Thanks to special lawyer Aggie Hoffman for bringing to our attention the following announcement:
US Congress to Hold Hearing on Jewish Refugees From Arab States
US Congress to Hold Hearing on Jewish Refugees From Arab States
Israel National News / 1 Av 5767, July 16, '07
THIS IS HUGE NEWS
The Congressional Human Rights Caucus (CHRC) of the US legislature is set to hold a first-of-its-kind hearing next week on the hundreds of thousands of Jews who were forced to flee their homes in Arab countries as a result of the Arab-Israeli conflict.
The July 19 hearing in Washington DC, under the heading "Jewish Refugees from Arab Countries: Truth, Justice, and Reconciliation," is to be hosted by the CHRC in conjunction with B'nai Brith International and Justice for Jews from Arab Countries. It will be the first time that the US Congress will hear testimony on the issue of Jewish refugees from Arab countries.
The expert witnesses invited to address the US legislators include: Dr. Irwin Cotler, a member of Parliament and a former Justice Minister from Canada who is well-known for his advocacy on behalf of prisoners of conscience around the globe, including Professor Saad Edin Ibrahim, the leading democracy advocate in the Arab world; Dr. Henry Green , a professor of Religious Studies and Sociology at the University of Miami, and the former director of the Judaic and Sephardic Studies Department; Mrs. Regina Bublil Waldman, a recipient of the prestigious Martin Luther King Jr. Humanitarian Award , is a co-founder of Jews Indigenous to the Middle East and North Africa (JIMENA), a US-based advocacy group. Mrs. Waldman was born in Libya and her family was nearly murdered while escaping that country in 1967.
The expert witnesses invited to address the US legislators include: Dr. Irwin Cotler, a member of Parliament and a former Justice Minister from Canada who is well-known for his advocacy on behalf of prisoners of conscience around the globe, including Professor Saad Edin Ibrahim, the leading democracy advocate in the Arab world; Dr. Henry Green , a professor of Religious Studies and Sociology at the University of Miami, and the former director of the Judaic and Sephardic Studies Department; Mrs. Regina Bublil Waldman, a recipient of the prestigious Martin Luther King Jr. Humanitarian Award , is a co-founder of Jews Indigenous to the Middle East and North Africa (JIMENA), a US-based advocacy group. Mrs. Waldman was born in Libya and her family was nearly murdered while escaping that country in 1967.
The CHRC hearing will also include a screening of The Forgotten Refugees, produced by the David Project. The film is a documentary about the mass exodus of almost one million Jews from Arab countries . The July 19 congressional hearing on hearing on Jewish refugees has an immediate, practical goal of providing US congressmen with preliminary information ahead of voting on House Resolution 185 and Senate Resolution 85. According to the proposed legislation, the US president would be obligated to instruct all official representatives of the United States that "explicit reference to Palestinian refugees be matched by a similar explicit reference to Jewish and other refugees, as a matter of law and equity." ( See Senate Res 85 for the full text.)
A JIMENA statement calls the proposed resolutions "the strongest declaration adopted by the US Congress acknowledging the rights of Jewish refugees who were forced to flee Arab countries."
As JIMENA notes, "There were two major population movements that occurred during years of great turmoil in the Middle East, from 1948 to 1968." Arabs and Jews were "both determined to be bona fide refugees under international law. In fact, more former Jewish refugees were uprooted from Arab countries (over 850,000) than Palestinians who left Israel in 1948 (UN estimate: 726,000)."
The CHRC, convening the unique hearing, is chaired by Representative Tom Lantos (D-CA), Chairman of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs.
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