Is Fatah Moderate?

Fatah Central Committee Member Abbas Zaki Calls Netanyahu and Obama "Scumbags" and Says: "The Greater Goal Cannot Be Accomplished in One Go"
Al-Jazeera TV (Qatar) - September 23, 2011 - 01:49

Maior parte dos "palestinos" prefere ser israelense

http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/story/2011-09-19/east-jerusalem-palestinian-state-arab-israel/50470736/1?csp=34news


Há dois dias o jornal americano USA Today publicou uma pesquisa feita pelo 'Palestinian Center for Public Opinion' que mostra que 35% dos 288.000 árabes que vivem em Jerusalém oriental preferem ser cidadãos de Israel, enquanto só 30% querem ser cidadãos de um estado palestino.

Ou seja: a maioria dos árabes que vivem em Israel querem ser israelenses, e não palestinos. O duro é explicar isso pra imprensa e governantes que não acreditam que esses árabes devam ter opinião ou que Israel deva existir…

Os outros 35% dos entrevistados preferiram não responder a pergunta. O motivo é fácil de entender, já que por lei qualquer palestino que venda terras a um judeu ou seja considerado um "colaborador" de Israel é condenado a morte depois de um julgamente que deixaria Cuba parecendo um paraíso democrático...

Selling Land to Jews 'Punishable by Death'

Por “proteção”, minorias na Síria defendem o regime

Natural de Homs, cidade que virou o centro dos protestos contra o regime sírio, o cristão Shaher Meida explica em bom português por que apoia incondicionalmente o ditador Bashar Assad. “Com ele temos proteção”, diz ele, que morou um ano em Belo Horizonte. “Sem Assad, o risco é a Síria virar um novo Iraque”. O temor de Meida é uma das explicações por trás do apoio que as minorias do país devotam ao regime, ainda que muitos critiquem o Estado policial e anseiem por mais liberdade. Formado por cristãos, muçulmanos, alauítas, drusos, ismaelitas e uma microscópica comunidade judaica, a Síria é o único país do Oriente Médio em que diferentes grupos religiosos e sectários coexistem, afora o Líbano.

Mas essa aparente harmonia começou a sofrer rachaduras com os protestos iniciados em março, despertando fantasmas de uma guerra sectária. Esse risco é ressaltado pelo regime. A alternativa a Assad, adverte, é o caos. Real ou exagerado, o perigo colocou as minorias em pânico, sobretudo a cristã, que constitui 10% da população de 23 milhões. O temor é que se repitam as perseguições ocorridas no Egito e no Iraque ou um cenário de guerra civil, como no Líbano.

________________________________________________

Setenta e cinco anos atrás um grupo de seis notáveis alauítas (grupo religioso do qual faz parte o ditador Bashar el-Assad e a elite política da Síria) enviaram uma carta aos franceses, na época em que eles e os britãnicos dividiam arbitrariamente o Oriente Médio, destruindo comunidades milenares para apaziguar os muçulmanos. Na carta eles explicavam o motivo de se recusarem a fazer parte da Síria muçulmana e dominada por sunitas [que os consideram infiéis]. Como exemplo eles apontam o tratamento dispensado aos judeus pelos muçulmanos na Palestina:

“The condition of the Jews in Palestine is the strongest and most explicit evidence of the militancy of the Islamic issue vis-à-vis those who do not belong to Islam. These good Jews contributed to the Arabs with civilization and peace, scattered gold, and established prosperity in Palestine without harming anyone or taking anything by force, yet the Muslims declare holy war against them and never hesitated in slaughtering their women and children, despite the presence of England in Palestine and France in Syria.
Therefore, a dark fate awaits the Jews and other minorities in case the Mandate is abolished and Muslim Syria is united with Muslim Palestine… the ultimate goal of the Muslim Arabs.”

Entre os signatários estava Suleiman (Sulayman) el-Assad, avô de Bashar el-Assad.

Syria's crackdown
The Lost Cause of Alawite Zionism

The Other Tsunami

There is no parallel on earth to what “Jew” means to millions of Muslims.

It is very difficult to hate babies.

It takes a special person.

As morally wrong as it is to murder innocent adults, mankind seems to have a built-in revulsion against killing babies. If a baby does not evoke any tenderness, if a baby is regarded as worthy of being deliberately hurt or murdered, we know that we have encountered a degree of evil that few humans — even among murderers — can relate to.

That is why what Palestinian terrorists did to a Jewish family on the West Bank this past weekend deserves far more attention than it received. Normally Palestinian atrocities get little attention — certainly far less attention than an Israeli apartment building on the West Bank receives. But this particular atrocity got even less attention than usual because the world was focused on the terrible tsunami that hit Japan.

On Friday night, Palestinian terrorists slipped into a Jewish settlement, entered a home, and stabbed the father, the mother, and three of their children to death: an eleven-year-old, a four-year old, and a three-month-old baby.

In order to understand what those actions mean, a seemingly separate incident needs to be recalled: the prolonged sexual attack by up to 200 Egyptian men on Lara Logan, chief foreign-affairs correspondent for CBS News, in Tahrir Square, Cairo, a few weeks ago. It was reported that after stripping her naked and then molesting and beating her, the men kept shouting “Jew, Jew!”

The two incidents tell the same tale. In much of the Arab Muslim world, and some of the non-Arab Muslim world (such as Iran) today, “Jew” is not a person. “Jew” is not even merely the enemy. In fact, there is no parallel on earth to what “Jew” means to a hundred million, perhaps hundreds of millions of Muslims.

Think of any conflict in the world — Pakistan–India, China–Tibet, North Korea–South Korea, Tamil–Sinhalese. There are some deep hatreds there, and atrocities have been committed on one or both sides of each of those conflicts. But in none of those conflicts nor anywhere else is there something equivalent to what “Jew” means to millions of Muslims.

There really is only one historical parallel, and it, too, involved the word “Jew.” The Nazis also succeeded in fully dehumanizing the word “Jew.” Thus, for Nazism, it was as important (if not more so) to murder Jewish babies and children — often through as cruel a means as possible (being burned alive, buried alive, or thrown up in the air and impaled on bayonets) — as it was to murder Jewish adults.

The human being does not have to learn to hate. It seems to come pretty naturally. Nor does the human being have to learn to murder, steal, or rape. These, too, seem to be in the natural human repertoire of evils.

But the human being does have to learn to hate children and babies, and to regard the torture and murder of them as morally desirable acts. It takes years of work to undo normal protective human attitudes toward children.

That is precisely what the Nazis did and what significant parts of the Muslim world have done to the word “Jew.” To them, the Jew is not just sub-human, the Jew — and his or her children — is sub-animal.

Palestinian and other Muslim spokesmen and their supporters on the left argue that this unique hatred is the fruit of Israeli policies, not decades of Nazi-like Jew-hatred saturating Islamic education, Islamic television and radio, and the mosque. But for this to be true, unique hatred would have to be matched by unique evil on the Israelis’ part. Yet, among the injustices of the world, what the Israelis have done to the Palestinians would not even register on a moral Richter scale. The creation of Israel engendered about 750,000 Palestinian refugees (and an equal number of Jewish refugees from Arab countries) and the death of perhaps 10,000 Palestinian Arabs. And all of that came about solely because Arab armies invaded Israel in order to destroy it at birth. Yet, when Pakistan was yanked from India and established as a Muslim state at the very same time Israel was established, that act engendered 12.5 million Muslim refugees, and about a million dead Muslims (and similar numbers of Hindu refugees and deaths). Why then doesn’t “Hindu” equal “Jew” in the Muslim lexicon of hate?

Israel Palestinian Conflict: The Truth About the Peace Process

Israel's Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Danny Ayalon explains the historical facts relating to the Israeli Palestinian conflict. The video explains that the reason there is no successful peace process is because of decades of Palestinian and Arab recalcitrance and the main reason for the conflict is not Israel's presence in the West Bank, but successive Palestinian leaders resistance to Jewish sovereignty.

Note to Erdogan: Nobody Likes the Turks

In 1822, the Ottomans dispatched 40,000 Turkish troops to the Greek island of Chios with orders to kill all infants under three-years-old, all males over 12-years-old, and all females over 40-years-old, except those willing to convert to Islam. Some 20,000 Greeks were killed and the island was depopulated, eradicating a 2,000 year culture. Two years later, Ottoman soldiers burned the island of Kasos to the ground and killed 7,000 of its inhabitants. Eventually, Europeans navies dispatched by Britain and France, and a navy dispatched by Russia, intervened to stop the atrocities.

In 1876, 8,000 Turkish troops were dispatched to the Bulgarian town of Batak where, after promising to withdraw in exchange for the Bulgarians disarming, they beheaded or burned alive 5,000 of the city’s now-unprotected civilians. The massacre was part of a broader Turkish campaign in which 15,000 Bulgarians were eventually murdered, and which a British investigator described as “perhaps the most heinous crime” of the 1800s. Eventually, the Russians intervened to stop the atrocities.

I only bring these up because Israel and Greece just signed a military cooperation pact, and Israel and Bulgaria just signed a military cooperation pact, and European Union officials are slamming Turkey for sabre-rattling, and the Russians today committed to patrolling Eastern Mediterranean waters in response to borderline explicit Turkish military threats against Cyprus’s gas drilling.

Erdogan and his neo-Ottoman ilk seem to have forgotten a fairly straightforward regional reality: nobody likes them.

Per JE Dyer’s trenchant analysis, the collapse of Pax Americana has caused the region to revert to somewhere in between 18th century Ottoman naval hegemony and the 19th century Pax Britannica. There are a lot of reasons for everyone to be worried about that dynamic – you’ll recall that this book ended badly – but it has predictable consequences for Turkey’s current resurgence. The AKP’s years of trying to repair regional relations with “good neighbor” and “zero problems” policies — which as recently as last year involved removing historical rivals like Russia, Bulgaria and Greece from Ankara’s “threats list” and replacing them with Israel – have been reversed in a few months.

Presumably, the Turks intend to compensate for alienating Europe by expanding their influence into the Arab and Muslim world, an “eastern turn” that fits their neo-Ottoman pretensions nicely. They’ve opened up border crossings and boosted trade with Iran. They’ve conducted unprecedented joint military drills and emphasized cultural exchanges with Syria, resulting in New York Times articles with fawning lines like – quote unquote – “people in Syria love Turkey because the country supports the Arab world, and they are fellow Muslims.” Erdogan became a Palestinian champion, valorizing Hamas while hosting confabs to hammer out strategies for the Palestinians’ Fatah-driven UN gambit. He even offered the Taliban an office in Istanbul, because why shouldn’t they have an outpost in the revived center of all Muslim life?

And of course most recently, Ankara immodestly declared it was shaping the Arab Spring via its Islamist engagement.

Except the AKP is screwing all of that up, too. Egypt’s Islamists are in a row with Erdogan, which is a little ungrateful on their part given how he empowered them by calling for Mubarak’s ouster early and often (albeit in the context of anti-Israel bluster, naturally). Even worse, having invested so much in now-impossible Iranian and Syrian alliances – to such an extent that Ankara’s efforts strained relations with the 2010 Obama White House – Turkey’s foreign policy is now in shambles:

The bottom line is that from aspiring to having zero problems with neighbors, Turkey has today surrounded itself with problems with all of its key neighbors, and other countries in the region. Ties with Israel are all but broken, dialogue with Syria is all but non-existent, and the extremely warm atmosphere between Tehran and Ankara of only a year ago has all but dissipated due to serious differences over Syria, as well as Turkey’s decision to participate in NATO’s missile defense shield… As for ties with Armenia, they are not going anywhere.

There’s also a limit on how long Turkey can keep boosting Hamas while routinely killing hundreds of Kurds. Something’s going to give and, as Michael Rubin explained not too long ago, it might already be giving.

Meanwhile the Israelis – much to the chagrin of Turkey and the Arab world – cooperated closely with the Europeans to shut down Flotilla II. Israel’s military, economic, and cultural ties with Greece are blossoming, in contrast to the physical wall Greece is building on its Turkish border. The Bulgarian foreign minister recently chastized his Turkish counterpart over Turkey’s anti-Israel diplomacy.

No one is under any illusions that there’s love lost between the Jewish state and many European countries and publics (witness the ongoing hand-wringing over Palestinian UDI and Durban 3). But in between the smug “analysis” declaring that Israel is isolated — a literal Erdogan talking point that’s been gleefully parroted by the likes of Robert Malley and Roger Cohen – it might be worth noting that, at least versus Turkey, the Jewish state is actually slightly up on allies gained during the last few months.

Judenrein: PLO Ambassador Says Jews NOT Allowed in Palestinian State

So this is what they mean by a "two state solution:"



"After the experience of the last 44 years of military occupation and all the conflict and friction, I think it would be in the best interest of the two people to be separated," Maen Areikat, the PLO ambassador, said during a meeting with reporters sponsored by The Christian Science Monitor. He was responding to a question about the rights of minorities in a Palestine of the future.

Such a state would be the first to officially prohibit Jews or any other faith since Nazi Germany, which sought a country that was judenrein, or cleansed of Jews, said Elliott Abrams, a former U.S. National Security Council official.

Israel has 1.3 million Muslims who are Israeli citizens. Jews have lived in "Judea and Samaria," the biblical name for the West Bank, for thousands of years. Areikat said the PLO seeks a secular state, but that Palestinians need separation to work on their own national identity.

The Palestinian demand is unacceptable and "a despicable form of anti-Semitism," Abrams said. A small Jewish presence in a future Palestine, up to 1% of the population, would not hurt the Palestinian identity, he said.

"No civilized country would act this way," Abrams said.

Abrams should know that using the terms "Palestinian" and "civilized" in the same sentence can't be reconciled.

See also: The Progressive West Supports the Quest for a Judenrein State of Palestine