Arab states support Israel against Hamas: NYT

[Boiler 45,525]

The Israelis missed a trick.

They should have sent the Shiites in, body count would have been much much higher and nobody would give a damn.

[OriZ 3,157]

I didn't use a fox news quote, I used an interview with the son of one of Hamas' founders. I've shown other interviews of him before, that weren't on fox. This one happened to be on Fox. But of course, lets divert attention from the substance.

[Trumplestiltskin 5,791]

The problem here is not that Hamas aren't bad people, it's that a very repellent agenda is being pushed in relation to the Gaza offensive and that very few people here are willing to admit that Israel has any complicity in the death toll.

I think that's disgraceful.

Edited August 2, 2014 by Hail Ming!

[Karee 4,190]

I didn't use a fox news quote, I used an interview with the son of one of Hamas' founders. I've shown other interviews of him before, that weren't on fox. This one happened to be on Fox. But of course, lets divert attention from the substance.

I'm not sticking up for Hamas. I'm not getting why the son of one its founders is being interviewed on TV. Seems like a desperate PR move.

[Trumplestiltskin 5,791]

The story is being stage managed in the US media. It's why Sean Hannity would rather talk about the number of rockets fired rather than the bodycount

[Boiler 45,525]

Stories are often managed. Stories like this are always managed.

CNN had a brief window when I thought they were breaking free, but they went back.

[Trumplestiltskin 5,791]

There's an agenda in the news media to avoid any consideration of anything except 'Hamas are evil, Hamas are to blame for everything'. IMO that is wrong.

[Boiler 45,525]

Watch another channel?

There is more than just Fox.

PS Hamas are evil, however you spin it.

[Trumplestiltskin 5,791]

Watch another channel?

There is more than just Fox.

PS Hamas are evil, however you spin it.

Again, that's missing the point. Mainstream news media channels should not be in the business of advancing a fascist agenda.

[Boiler 45,525]

Again, that's missing the point. Mainstream news media channels should not be in the business of advancing a fascist agenda.

Do Fox or MSNBC for example meet that description?

[Trumplestiltskin 5,791]

I'm not sure what you're asking me. I thought what I wrote was pretty clear and unambiguous.

[Boiler 45,525]

You are mistaking what they and then deriding them because of it.

[Trumplestiltskin 5,791]

Fox deserves to be derided for that interview, but as it stands it's more of a scandal if a commentator suggests that a prominent politician eat feces than to push a fascist agenda in relation to a current event. Fascism should not be promoted in the mainstream media. It doesn't matter which network is doing it, it's perverse.

Edited August 2, 2014 by Hail Ming!

[OriZ 3,157]

July 2014

A letter from Ahmed, son of a friend of mine from Gaza.

This letter came to my hands from Ahmed that lives in Gaza.

Background:

I knew Ahmed’s father, Mussah, who worked many years ago at a metalworking shop in south Tel Aviv district.

A very nice man who used to leave every morning Gaza at 04:00 am and start working at 6:30am at the metalworking shop in the Tel Aviv.

Mussah worked hard in order to provide for his family to buy an apartment in the city of Gaza.

Ahmed, Mussah’s son used to come once in a while to help his father with his work.

Today Ahmed, a is a 30 year old father writes his history:

“Many years ago when my father had to leave his work in Tel Aviv he started to work in a small metalworking shop in Gaza.

Economy was hard and I used to help him work in order to provide for our family.

A minute after Israel had to leave the Gaza strip at 2006, Pickup trucks started driving around the city with thugs from Hamas raged the streets of the city, They were shooting everywhere and hitting every person that looked like he was against their agenda, people were afraid to walk the streets, my father banned my family to leave the house for a few days.

After a few days only me and my father went outside to the metalworking shop in order to provide for our family, every time we heard a vehicle we would fear and look for a hideout at the shop.

One day a pickup truck filled with Hamas thugs stopped by the shop, they went in and took the owner, two days after he came back with his face down and talked to my father, I sat aside and listened.

I understood Hamas notified him that from today his shop will work for Hamas, and Hamas only.

They set the prices and the demand that was ordered from the shop.

Since that day every morning an armed Hamas member used to come to the shop and give us orders to make winged metal pipes and straight ahead I understood that they were used to launch rockets.

One day a pickup truck drove by and stopped, the Hamas members came down and took my father from the shop, we never saw him again, later I understood they killed him and threw his body to a pit.

Life became harder and harder, work wasn’t easy, we got a small allowance that barely was enough for bread and milk.

One day a friend of mine offered me to come with him to do some work, since I needed the money I went with him.

We came to an apartment in Gaza, we were six guys, they put us at the back of a truck, we sat in the dark and couldn’t see where were going, we drove for an hour and finally they stopped and we come out of the truck standing in a closed building, we didn’t know where we are.

They showed us a whole in the ground and told us to go down, the slope was scary and we found ourselves inside a tunnel, we walked for a few hundred meters and we got to the end where two Hamas members waited for us, they gave us working tools and explained us what to do in order to make the tunnel longer.

Work was hard, we were suffocating from lack of air, we used to work 8 hour shifts and then 4 hours of rest, we stayed in the tunnel for 10 days.

The Hamas members changed every day, they used to scream on us and hit us when they thought supply of work was low, after 10 days they took us out, put us in a truck, gave us little money and drove us back to someplace in Gaza.

We didn’t know where we’ve been, what tunnel we dug, the pay was low but they did pay, I never came back to do that work.

I went back to try to get some work at the metalworking shop but I found that it was closed, I asked the neighbours what happened and they answered with fear that Hamas moved the shop to another location and nobody knew where, they told me that every morning a truck with Hamas members comes, picks up the workers, puts them at the closed back of the truck and drive them away and bring them back late at night.

I found my self working in temporary jobs in order to provide for my family.

We live in constant fear, once in a while a truck full with armed Hamas members comes by and attacks civilians.

We see in Gaza the rich Hamas members living in glamorous houses, driving new cars, sending their children to universities abroad while most of Gaza’s citizens living fear and poverty, without the ability to work.

Sometimes the kids are telling that Hamas giving away free candies in different locations around Gaza, the kids go to get the sweets and right after we hear that rockets were launched from the same location.

Israel retaliates to the same location and kids get hurt.

I write you this letter because the situation is very bad.

Luckily for us we are living in the city of Gaza but we have families that live in other parts of the Gaza strip, the Hamas runs a war against Israel, shooting rockets constantly on your communities and we the people of Gaza suffer the consequences, we just have no place to hide.

The members of Hamas are hiding in their bunkers under ground, some of them are not even in the Gaza strip, they are protected and they have no problem to continue to fight.

There were many families that rented Hamas rooms and yards at the back of their homes, the Hamas gave them money to put food on the table and now they fire rockets to Israel from those people’s homes, many of the homes get blown by your airforce strikes.

We suffer so much, we’re afraid of the Hamas, we’re afraid of your bombings, there are huge explosions all the time, we hear the sound of Hamas launching their rockets and we know that a minute their will be another sound of blast from your rockets.

We heard about the tunnels that Hamas dug and I understood that I helped them, what I don’t understand is why Hamas is doing everything possible to hurt Israel instead of developing the Gaza strip to make the peoples live better.

I hope everything will end and me and my family will survive, but I lost hope, I know that Hamas will take all the money that the world gives to restore Gaza and use it to build more tunnels, buy more weapons and build more villas for the heads of Hamas.

Hamas’s thugs will continue to drive the streets and hurt the civilians.

The only thing I can say is that some of Hamas leaders are hiding in bunkers under hospitals and schools because they know Israel won’t hurt them there and that’s a shame.

We part that the world will help to free us from the fearful and cruel Hamas rule in the Gaza strip.

I’m sure that if you’ll spread this letter you won’t expose my fathers real name who was your friend and neither my name.

I pray for death to all Hamas members and that we will get freedom and a chance to live a normal life for our children in Gaza.

I wish we can go back to the days my father worked in Tel Aviv with his good friends in Israel

Inshalla! مرحبا

[OriZ 3,157]

In his new book, “Making David Into Goliath: How the World Turned Against Israel” (Encounter Books), Joshua Muravchik, a fellow at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies, details the historic campaign to demonize the Mideast’s one consistent democracy. Here, he explains how the United Nations went from being an ally to Israel to one of its biggest threats.

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The United Nations Human Rights Council has voted to create an “independent international commission of inquiry to investigate all violations of international humanitarian law and international human-rights law” in the current war in Gaza.

Well, actually, not all violations. Only those attributable to Israel — as the resolution makes quite explicit.

And what might those violations be? The very same resolution spells them out, not as allegations but as established findings. “The Council,” it reads, “condemns in the strongest terms the widespread, systematic and gross violations of international human rights and fundamental freedoms arising from the Israeli military operations…since 13 June 2014.”

In other words, Israel’s guilt is already established, and the mandated “investigation” is but a method of punishing Israel by subjecting it to months of verbal laceration and then perhaps sanctions. As the Queen of Hearts said in Wonderland: “Sentence first! Verdict afterwards.”

Hamas is not subject to “investigation.” Its role is to be the star witness for the prosecution. This is not spelled out, but we know the script.

Four years ago, when Israeli forces last entered Gaza, this same council passed a similar resolution, condemning Israel and mandating an “investigation.”

This was the Goldstone Commission, and its principal source of information was testimony at hearings in Gaza arranged by Hamas where witnesses detailed the toll of Israeli strikes while denying the presence of military targets.

Even if not all of them were Hamas members, all knew what Hamas expected them to say — and none would dare defy it.

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Richard Goldstone’s report accused Israel of “crimes against humanity,” a special category of crime invented for Nazi war criminals. Two years later, Goldstone renounced his report, saying: “If I had known then what I know now, the Goldstone Report would have been a different document.”

More likely, what changed was not Goldstone’s knowledge but his inability to defend his work to the outside world once he was no longer ensconced in the anti-Israel hothouse that is the United Nations.

This, after all, is the same organization whose General Assembly chastises Israel three times as often as all other countries combined; that has declared Palestinian terrorism to be a “legitimate” means of “fulfilling…one of the goals and purposes of the United Nations”; that once classified Zionism as a form of racism; and that has three special bodies devoted exclusively to agitating against Israel although no other such body exists for any other country.

This astounding bias was not always present. In 1947, the UN voted to partition Palestine, thus legitimating Israel’s birth, and Israel was soon granted admission as a member.

In 1967 and 1973, UN Security Council resolutions 242 and 338 called for “secure and recognized boundaries,” thus implicitly acknowledging that Israel need not relinquish all of the territory captured in the Six Day War.

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Israeli forces have launched a ground incursion into Gaza.Photo: UPI

How did it all turn around so dramatically? During its early decades, in the aftermath of World War II, when American power and prestige was high, the US largely dominated the UN.

Washington pressured its European allies to relinquish their empires, and the UN pushed decolonization.

Thus were scores of new nations born in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. The UN grew from 51 to 193 members.

Many formed the Non-Aligned Movement. Originally this meant non-aligned in the Cold War, but NAM did not disappear with that conflict.

Today it has 120 members, thus controlling every UN body except the Security Council where the “Permanent Five” hold vetoes.

Fifty-seven of the NAM’s 120 members are members of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, meaning that the OIC dominates the NAM. And the core of the OIC is the 22-strong Arab League.

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An Israeli army self-propelled howitzer 155m cannon fires a shell.Photo: Getty Images

Thus, through telescoping leverage have the Arab states turned the UN into a kind of crusade organization against Israel.

The complement to the NAM/OIC/Arab dynamic was also on display in the Human Rights Council’s recent action.

Twenty-nine states voted for this blatantly prejudiced resolution, of which 21 are not free, according to Freedom House, making their presence on the council absurd. The United States alone voted “no.”

England, France, Germany, Italy and other free countries abstained. Beset by guilt over their colonial pasts, Europeans rarely buck the NAM.

This mindset works against Israel in the UN and beyond. In an era of “the rest against the West,” when global cultural elites find virtue only with the “rest,” Israel remains largely “Western.”

For this, it has been sentenced. The predetermined verdict will follow.

http://nypost.com/2014/07/26/how-the-united-nations-was-perverted-into-a-weapon-against-israel/