Author Archives: Arab America

Egypt signed a 5.2 billion-euro ($5.92 billion) deal to buy French weaponry on Monday, Egyptian media said, in a move Cairo hopes will boost its military power as fears grow of conflict in neighbouring Libya spilling over its border. The agreement is for 24 Rafale combat jets made by Dassault Aviation, a multi-mission naval frigate, … Continued

By: Ahmad K Minkara

With kinky underwear and a wild imagination, Rana Salam spent 25 years working as a designer for London’s top brands – now she has returned to Beirut and is making her mark.
Rana Salam is not just a leading Arab graphic designer – she revolutionised the idea of Arab folk and street art.

Rana was born to the pioneer Lebanese architect Assem Salam and Josephine Bisharat from Jerusalem.

Her educational journey started at the International College Beirut, which led her to The Royal College of Art in London, where she engrossed herself in the study of visual and graphic design. 

Source: www.alaraby.co.uk

Israeli Minister of National Infrastructure, Energy and Water Silvan Shalom banned water connection to the new West Bank Palestinian city of Rawabi, which is to house around 40,000 Palestinian families, Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported yesterday.

Israeli Defence Minister Moshe Ya’alon and the Coordinator of the Israeli Government Activities in the Palestinian Territories Major General Yoav Mordechai had ordered the Israeli Water Authority to provide water to the city.

However, Shalom refused Ya’alon’s instruction saying that water and sewage projects in the West Bank require Israeli-Palestinian Join Water Committee’s (JWC) approval.

Shalom blamed the Palestinians, calming they have been refusing to convene the committee since 2010. The response from Shalom’s office stated that according to an agreement with the Palestinians singed in 1995, the committee is the principal party which decides on such issues in the West Bank communities.

Haaretz reported the Palestinian side confirming that the committee had not convened since 2010, but they insisted this does not justify the ban to connect water to the city.

The head of project department in the Palestinian Water Authority Ihab Al-Barghouti said: “The reason why the committee has not convened was the Israeli condition that the committee must approve an Israeli settlement project in return of any approval of any Palestinian project.”

Al-Barghouti insisted that the Palestinians refused this condition, thus, they do not attend the committee’s meetings.

Source: www.middleeastmonitor.com

by Sami Jamil Jadallah
 

The cold-blooded murder of the three Muslim students (Deah Shady Barakat, his wife Yusor Mohammed Abu-Salha and her sister Razan Mohammed Abu-Salha, should not come as a shock. Well-organized, well-funded American Jewish/Zionist and Evangelical Christians and mainstream media have been demonizing Muslims in America for years.

Source: www.veteranstoday.com

Western coverage of the Arab Spring was often simple-minded, as journalists focused on the dramatic confrontations between the police and protesters in Tahrir Square in Cairo or on Libyan militiamen fighting Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s soldiers on the road south of Benghazi. Uprisings were reported like scenes out of “Les Misérables,” with an oppressed people battling a brutal tyranny everywhere from Tunis to Bahrain.

There was nothing culpable about this. Genuine revolutions may seem to succeed at first because they are the unexpected outcome of contradictory forces coming together almost by chance. When the first protest began in Cairo on the morning of Jan. 25, 2011, the demonstrators chanted: “Bread! Freedom! Social Justice! The people demand the fall of the regime.” Up to the last moment the organizers were uncertain that anybody would dare come out onto the streets to support them.

Source: www.nytimes.com

Israeli war is as about as representative of the Jewish faith as Islamic State terror is of Islamic values. Terror committed by both Israel and Islamic State should be equally loathed. Unfortunately, they are not. When the so-called Islamic State torched a helpless young Jordanian pilot, the whole world understandably reacted with disgust. An almost universal outpouring of grief commenced, from Muslims, Jews and atheists alike. So why then do some people find it hard to muster even a hint of outrage at murder committed in the name of Israel? Worse still, why do they defend it?

Over two thousand civilians were killed, one quarter of them children, in last summer’s “resumption of violence” in Gaza (Jonathan Freedland’s words, not mine). If 500 children had been slaughtered by Muslims armed with zeal and hell bent on territorial expansion, defending a religious state drunk on supremacy, you can bet the language used by the Guardian’s executive editor would have been a little more suggestively charged. Maybe he would have used his new favourite term “fascist death cult”, which he exclusively attaches to terror perpetrated by those who purportedly claim to represent Islam. In the world of white liberalism only certain people are black enough to make it into the death cult. 

Five hundred innocent children left the world last summer in a haze of disintegrated concrete. Tens of thousands more were left to breathe in the aftermath. Disabled and mentally scarred they watched the dust settle, until another day an Israeli leader wishing to win an election decides to mow the lawn.

But something was unique about this war and it wasn’t just an increase in body count. New technology had enabled Palestinians to bypass a media sieve that all too often refines terror committed by Western allies. News now came direct from source, the victim. Uploaded to Twitter and Facebook shock was shared socially. The smartphone stripped us of any defence of pleading ignorance. Of course, the BBC tried its hardest to sell us a narrative of equals. But even the heaviest of make-up failed to hide the bodies as they mounted up; fractured and limp, children were plucked from the rubble, limbless.

Some people tried to bury their heads in the sand, making a conscious and cowardly decision to remain mute. As much as I find silence a guilty party in aiding ascents of terror – 1930s European fascism is testament – there were much more worrying acts afoot. Loud and proud voices unmoved by images of bloodied children armed themselves with myths of supremacy, cheerleading death from the comfort of their centrally heated homes. Industrialised violence and mass murder are perfectly rational if they exterminate future terrorists: an operative word for Palestinian children.

The Jewish community, just like their Muslim brethren, should never be held accountable for the actions of a militant few. Jews in London should not have to be asked to apologise for hawks in Tel-Aviv. Therefore it goes without saying that synagogues should not be attacked and no Jew anywhere in this world should have to suffer any form of malicious hate; the Jews have suffered enough for a lifetime.

Judaism is a lot wiser and a lot older than the state of Israel. Jewry is not a homogeneous, monolithic ball of perpetually defensive machismo. A people rich in humour and philosophy cannot be whittled down to brute force and occupation. Or can they? Zionism would like to think so. Zionism wants you to subscribe to the idea that the only safe place in the world for a Jew is Israel, a heavily fortified war zone, but a war zone nevertheless. Grab yourself an AK-47 and join the party.

Someone who hopes you buy the notion that Israel is a synonym for Jew is Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Bibi sees himself as a modern-day Moses; ironically he’s more Pharaoh. Last Sunday Netanyahu proclaimed proudly that he would go to Washington just like he marched on Paris, “not just as the prime minister of Israel but as a representative of the entire Jewish people”. Netanyahu is an opportunist who manipulates fear of anti-Semitism to recruit new settlers to a brand of neo-colonial nationalism that should have never made it out the sixties. The state of Israel is no stranger to such exploitation; it was founded on it.

Let me be clear: Nowhere in the Torah does it state thou shalt occupy your neighbour, imprison his children, cover his wife in white phosphorus and run over Rachel Corrie. There are more Jews living in New York than there are in the whole of Israel. Equally, nowhere in the Quran does it say you should chop the heads off aid workers or people who write or take pictures for a living. There are 1.6 billion Muslims worldwide and maybe just a few tens of thousands Islamic State fighters. Politics manipulates religion in order to rally the troops. Religion takes a back seat to the driving force of political ideology.

Last week on BBC’s Question Time, Jonathan Freedland aided the conflation by giving credence to an audience member’s unsubstantiated accusation that parliamentarian of 27 years George Galloway fuelled a rise in anti-Semitism because of his vocal opposition to the Gaza war. With very little in the way of defence is it any wonder that defenders of the indefensible have no option but to fall back on slander and defamation as ways to shut down debate? By equating earnest criticism of inhumane action carried out by the state of Israel with attacks on Jews, apart from trying to silence debate, journalists like Freedland are implying that Israel and Jews are somehow the same. They are not. More worryingly, the British government are currently considering censoring comments critical of Israel; deeming them anti-Semitic.

Judaism the religion, hijacked by politicians, risks being totally absorbed by the divisive ideology of Zionism. Members of the Jewish community who blindly pledge allegiance to Israel in the face of overwhelming evidence of it’s barbarity, in order to tribally justify crimes against humanity as noble self-defence, are not only on the wrong side of history but playing a very dangerous game; one that will only aid the rise of abhorrent anti-Semitism.

After every Israeli war comes a spike in anti-Semitism just as there is always a spike in Islamophobia after al-Qaeda terror. Therefore, is it not imperative that all of us, Muslims, Jews, atheists alike, be vocal in opposition to brutality, no matter who holds the butcher’s knife? Are we not members of one global community?

Hypocrisy needs to be highlighted. All racism needs to be vehemently challenged. But in a world of war on terror some forms of racism are useful in the service of imperial hegemony, and therefore made acceptable. Today, Islamophobia is anti-Semitism, in the same way that the Iraq War is the Vietnam War. Targets, locations and generals may change but key tenets never do. If you understand racism only through the prism of yourself or one dimension, you fail to comprehend it for what it really is: an exploitative tool working to divide and rule on behalf of a system built upon spurious and unjust economics.

From slavery to the Holocaust to today’s imperial misadventures, the cancer of racism remains steadfast in its principles. If you recoil in horror at the thought of the Holocaust but defend genocide in Gaza, then there is something seriously flawed with your understanding of racist oppression.

This weekend’s wholly unjustifiable attacks in Copenhagen hammers home the increasingly urgent need to bridge a gap, widening each day, between two Abrahamic religions that are ultimately at root brothers.

My son straddles both the Jewish and Muslim faiths; therefore it is personally imperative for me to build a better, less polarised worldview; clawing back Judaism from Zionism is part of that mission. Embrace and celebrate our intricate and beautiful differences, always, but we would do well to remember that under every skullcap and taqiyah lies a human being, of one race. All forms of racism are wrong, all forms of racism are evil. In the spirit of “never again”, whether in our own communities or not, let’s oppose all racism against all people. 

Source: www.middleeasteye.net

ADELSON’S CONNECTION with Israel is personal. On a blind date, he fell in love with an Israeli woman.

Miriam Farbstein was born in Haifa, attended a prestigious high school, did her army service in the Israeli institute which deals with bacteriological warfare and is a multifaceted scientist. After one of her sons (from her first marriage) died of an overdose, she is devoted to the fight against drugs, especially cannabis.

Both Adelsons are fanatical supporters of Israel. Not just any Israel, but a rightist, supremacist, arrogant, violent, expansionist, annexationist, non-compromising, colonialist Israel.

In “Bibi” Netanyahu they found their man. Through Netanyahu they hope to rule Israel as their private fief.

To assure this, they did an extraordinary thing: they founded an Israeli newspaper, solely devoted to the furthering of the interests of Binyamin Netanyahu. Not of the Likud, not of a specific policy, but of Netanyahu personally.

Years ago I invented a Hebrew word for papers which are distributed for nothing. “Hinamon” translates, roughly, into “ragratis” or “gratissue” and was intended to denigrate. But I did not dream of a monster like “Israel Hayom” (“Israel Today”) — a paper with unlimited funds, distributed every day for nothing in the streets and malls all over the country by hundreds, perhaps thousands of paid young persons.

Israelis love getting something for nothing. Israel Hayom is now the daily paper with the widest distribution in Israel. It drains readers and advertising revenue from its only competitor — Yedioth Ahronoth (“Latest News”), which held this title until then.

Yedioth reacted furiously. It became a ferocious enemy of Netanyahu. Yossi Werter, a commentator of the center-left Haaretz (which has a far lower circulation) even believes that the present election boils down to a contest between the two papers.

That is vastly exaggerated. Judged by political and social content, there is little to differentiate the two. Both are super-patriotic, war-mongering and rightist. That is the journalistic recipe for attracting the masses anywhere in the world.

Yedioth is owned by the Moses family, a business-minded clan. The present, third-generation publisher is Arnon (“Noni”) Moses, the publicity-shy boss of a large economic empire based on the paper. The paper serves his business interests, but he has no special political interests.

Source: www.opednews.com

The 12-year-old boy, who calls himself Mohamed, stared out of the shelter’s window, his words as sparse as his frame, and his eyes melancholy as he described the beatings.

A hammer was the weapon of choice of his former boss at the car repair shop, where he worked 14-hour days after first arriving in Lebanon two years ago from neighbouring Aleppo, to help provide for his family of 10.

“I don’t get tired,” he said defiantly when asked how he endured the long hours, which earned him just $100 (£65) a month, a chunk of which was sometimes taken by a co-worker who beat him.

Mohamed is now in a shelter school in Beirut that doubles as a vocational training centre for Syrian and Lebanese children often forced by circumstance into the harsh and exploitative world of child labour.

Children are not only the face of the catastrophic refugee crisis that has spilled out from the Syrian civil war. Overwhelmingly, they are also its main victims, with tens of thousands forced to sleep rough, thousands more prey to exploitation – even sexual abuse – and an entire generation displaced by war, and ravaged by deprivation. The effects will take decades to undo.

Source: www.theguardian.com

According to the Times’ report, Operation Avarice revolved around a single Iraqi who sold the weapons to the Americans in batches.

Run by the CIA office in Baghdad and the Army’s 203rd Military Intelligence Battalion, the program destroyed most of the rockets it recovered — along with thousands of other chemical weapons recovered throughout the American occupation of Iraq — though some rockets were tested in rudimentary ways that may have exposed soldiers to dangerous chemicals.

One source said operatives would place warheads in “an old cast-iron bathtub” and drill through the metal exteriors to extract the liquid sarin nerve agent within.

Manufactured by Saddam Hussein’s regime in the 1980s, the Borak rockets were found to contain surprisingly pure sarin despite their age, the Times reported.

Source: www.theblaze.com

Egyptian warplanes struck Islamic State targets in Libya on Monday in swift retribution for the extremists’ beheading of a group of Egyptian Christian hostages on a beach, shown in a grisly online video released hours earlier.

At the same time, Egypt called for international intervention in Libya against the Islamic State group. Loyalists of the Syria and Iraq-based group have risen to dominate several cities in the chaos-riven North African nation, just across the Mediterranean Sea from Italy.

After the release of the beheading video Sunday night, the tiny Christian-majority home village of more than half of the 21 Egyptians believed killed by the extremists was gutted by grief. Inside the village church, relatives wept and shouted the names of the dead in shock.

“What will be a relief to me is to take a hold of his murderer, tear him apart, eat up his flesh and liver,” said Bushra Fawzi in el-Aour village, as he wept over the loss of his 22-year-old son Shenouda. “I want his body back. If they dumped it in the sea, I want it back. If they set fire to it, I want its dust.”

The 21 — mainly young men from impoverished families — had travelled to Libya for work and were kidnapped in two groups in December and January from the coastal city of Sirte. In the video, the group is marched onto what is purported to be a Libyan beach before masked militants with knives carve off the head of each. The killing of at least a dozen of them is clearly visible, though it was not clear from the video whether all 21 hostages were killed.

On Monday morning, an Egyptian armed forces spokesman announced the strikes on state radio, marking the first time Cairo has publicly acknowledged taking military action in neighboring Libya.

The statement said the warplanes targeted weapons caches and training camps before returning safely. Libya’s air force commander, Saqr al-Joroushi, told Egyptian state TV that the airstrikes were coordinated with the Libyan side and that they killed about 50 militants.

The strikes hit four IS positions in the eastern Libyan city of Darna, an extremist stronghold that was taken over by an Islamic State affiliate last year, a Libyan security official told The Associated Press. Two Libyan security officials said civilians, including three children and two women, were killed in the strikes. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media.

Libya’s air force meanwhile said it had carried out its own strikes in Darna, without providing further details.

Source: www.mintpressnews.com

Palestine and The Arab World lost an eminent academic scholar, an internationally recognised and highly respected intellectual, a committed and unwavering Palestinian patriot and a progressive Arab nationalist. Dr. Naseer Aruri passed away on February 10th, 2015. Dr. Aruri was a leading voice in the field of human rights and an authoritative reference on US foreign policy in the Middle East, particularly towards the Palestine/Israel conflict. Born in 1934 in Jerusalem, Palestine, Dr. Aruri held a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, and was a prolific writer and lecturer who appeared often in the media throughout the past half century.

Dr. Aruri served on the faculty of the University of Massachusetts – Dartmouth from 1965 to 1998 and, at the time of his retirement, was Chancellor Professor of Political Science at that university. This life of academic excellence was matched by a prolific activist career dedicated to the service of Palestinian and Arab causes. As a member of the Palestinian National Council, the Palestinian’s Parliament in exile, and the Central Council of the PLO, he was widely known and admired by Palestinians everywhere for his vast knowledge, complete dedication, and unmatched honesty. He was keen on building and strengthening Palestinian, Arab and Arab-American institutions. Dr. Aruri was a founder and two times President of the Association of Arab-American University Graduates, which was the first Pan-Arab organisation in North America when it was established in 1968 and had the largest membership of Arab academics outside the Arab World. In 1998, he co-founded Trans-Arab Research Institute (Boston), and served as Chair of its Board of Directors until 2006. Dr. Aruri dedicated himself to the support of human rights. He was a member of the Independent Palestinian Commission for the Protection of Citizens Rights (Ramallah) since its inception in January l994; a founding member of the Arab Organisation for Human Rights in 1982, and a key participant in the drafting of the Arab Covenant of Human Rights in December 1986. He was also a member of the Board of Directors of Human Rights Watch/Middle East, 1990-1992, and a three-term member of the Board of Directors of Amnesty International, USA (1984-1990). Dr. Aruri served on the boards of Third World Quarterly (London), the Jerusalem Fund – Palestine Center (Washington, D.C.), and the International Institute for Criminal Investigations (The Hague). In his struggle on behalf of Palestine and the Palestinians, the lifetime aim of Dr. Aruri was to promote a solution to the Palestine/ Israel conflict based on the establishment of one democratic state in historic Palestine in which all its citizenry, regardless of their ethnicity or faith, are free and equal.

Dr. Aruri’s many publications include The Palestinian Resistance to Israeli Occupation (1970), Enemy of the Sun: Poems of Palestinian Resistance, with Edmund Ghareeb (1970), Occupation: Israel Over Palestine (1983), The Obstruction of Peace: The U.S., Israel and the Palestinians (1995), Palestinian Refugees: The Right of Return (2001), Dishonest Broker: The U.S. Role in Israel and Palestine (2003), co-author with Samih Farsoun of Palestine and the Palestinians: A Social and Political History (2006) and Bitter Legacy: The United States in the Middle East (2014). The private library and papers of Naseer Aruri have been preserved and are on display at the Claire T. Carney Library Archives and Special Collections at UMASS-Dartmouth.

Dr. Aruri is survived by his wife Joyce and four children; Faris, Karen Leila, Jamal and Jay Hatem and their spouses and 13 grandchildren.

Source: www.middleeastmonitor.com

Israeli control of the Dead Sea deprives the Palestinian Authority of nearly $1 billion every year, the Ministry of National Economy said on Sunday. That is the estimated value of a share in mineral sales from the area.

According to World Bank and international reports, Israel and Jordan earn nearly $4.2 billion from annual sales of Dead Sea products which represent about 1 per cent of the world’s supply of potash and 12 per cent of the world production of bromine.

The ministry said in a press statement obtained by Al-Araby Al-Jadeed, “If we measure the average added value of these industries to the Jordanian and Israeli economy, then the Palestinian economy will be able to increase by $962 million per year, which is equivalent to 9 per cent of the GDP in 2011, and roughly the size of the entire Palestinian manufacturing sector.”

The statement noted that if the Palestinians could access the Dead Sea mineral and energy resources, and establish large investment projects including shale, sand, asphalt, bitumen, oil and natural gas production, as well as tourism and the agricultural sector, they will be able to establish sustainable economic development.

According to the head of the mining department at the ministry, Ziad Malki, the Israeli occupation authorities allowed the establishment of several companies and factories which invested in Dead Sea resources on Palestinian territory. One of them is the well-known Israeli-owned Ahava cosmetics company which carries out its industrial activities in the Mitzpe Shalem settlement in the occupied West Bank.

Source: www.middleeastmonitor.com