While most critics of Israel at least acknowledged the humanitarianism and generosity of the country, there are still some despicably evil, black-hearted people so full of hatred that they cannot even recognize an altruistic action for what it is, and instead look for ways to slander and malign what every sane person agrees is an outright kindness.

For one of the most disgusting examples of this, here is a transcript of a couple of verminous bottom-feeders on Syrian TV actually spinning Israel’s benevolence into some sort of conspiracy to harvest organs for trafficking. All I can say is: may these sick, twisted maniacs wake up one day in an alley somewhere missing a kidney (or worse) and know what real organ harvesting is.

The transcript is from MEMRITV.org, and the actual video can be viewed at this link.

The following are excerpts from a televised debate on the so-called Israeli trafficking in human organs, which aired on Syrian TV on January 27, 2010.

Reporter: Israel is aiding the people stricken by the Haiti earthquake. This is a wonder unto itself. But the real reason is to steal organs from the corpses of the Haitian dead, in the greatest catastrophe this poor country has ever witnessed. Once the reason is known, there is no need to wonder – the Israeli delegation, which came to Haiti under the pretext of helping these fate-stricken people, exploited the tragedy and the suffering of the Haitians, by stealing their human organs for trafficking.

This was confirmed by American activist T. West, who documented this heinous crime and posted the film on Youtube. The film shows Israelis engaged in stealing organs from the earthquake victims. It seems that the [Israeli] entity of killing, destruction, and terrorism, which has become skilled in killing women and children in ice-cold blood, is now expert in stealing human organs and trafficking in them.

For years, human organ trafficking has been on the rise in Israel. The work of the traffickers has become an international trade, with offices in Europe and Africa. This has brought Israel to the third place in the world in organ trafficking.

Swedish journalist Donald Boström, who visited the occupied territories, confirmed, in a report published by the Swedish paper Aftonbladet, that the occupation soldiers were kidnapping Palestinian youth in the West Bank and Gaza, and were returning them to their families as stiff corpses, after having ripped out their organs. In addition, the Israeli authorities force Palestinians sentenced to death to sign documents consenting to organ donation after they are hanged.

The Swedish report linked these acts to the Jewish network that was caught last July in the American city of New Jersey, and to the rabbis who were accused of trafficking in human organs, in Israel and other countries.

[...]

Moderator: Dr. Jassem, the question poses itself.

Dr. Jassem Zakariya, Professor of International Relations, Damascus University: Of course, when we watch the scenes in this fine report, Shakespeare immediately comes to mind…

Moderator: Shylock…

Dr. Jassem Zakariya: Shylock, yes. As we see, the Jew has not changed – especially the Zionist Jews, who are now gathered in the so-called “Israel,” which is the largest concentration in history of war criminals, who committed crimes against humanity. This is how they will be remembered if they continue with this.

Of course, the fact that the tragedy of the Haitian people benefits them is undoubtedly evidence of the imminent end of this entity, because this is the ultimate crime.

They began with our folks in Palestine – with the prisoners, the wounded, and the martyrs. They began with terrible crimes, through which they established their entity. To this day, they persist with their crimes, while the loathsome image of the Jew, the Zionist, the alien who came as an invader, an occupier, makes another appearance – this time in Haiti, not Palestine – so the whole world – anyone with a heart, ears, eyes, and insight – can realize that these people are the enemies of all mankind, not just of the Palestinians, the Arabs, and the Muslims.

This is a very important matter. At the very time that we are witnessing the dignity, courage, and humanity of the besieged people of Gaza, who make donations to Haiti… This is civilization, this is Arab identity, this is history, while these [Israelis] are just a bunch of murderers and criminals. They have never been anything else, and therefore, they will pay the price, sooner or later.

Moderator: Dr. Mustafa, is Israel really in need of these organs, or does it reflect their total disdain for the human soul? Before the show, you mentioned something about Abu Ghreib, and I told you to keep it for the show.

Dr. Muhammad Mustafa Al-Habash, Department of Transplantation, Al-Mouassat University Hospital: Israel is a country devoid of moral values and principles. When it takes human organs from various places worldwide… I have read many reports, over many years, about how they took organs from Croatia. I recently read on the Internet that an American activist claimed that Israel had taken organs from prisoners in Abu Ghreib in Iraq.

In the face of such a thing, I say: “How can Israeli doctors act this way?” After all, they are part of this system. Medicine is like music. It is a universal language of ethics…

Moderator: It does not officially prohibit the stealing of human organs…

Dr. Muhammad Mustafa Al-Habash: That’s true. Israel is not deterred by this abomination.

Let’s start with the headline: “Dozens hurt in clashes at revered Jerusalem mosque“. As you can see, the focus is on those Muslim terrorists hurt at the “revered mosque”. Reuters conveniently fast-forwards already past the whole first half of the story, which is the reality that the “clash” started with those same terrorists hurting Jewish worshipers below, unprovoked.

Immediately in the second paragraph, Reuters reports that, “In a statement, Abbas appealed to Washington to hold Israel back to prevent a ‘war of religion’ in the Middle East.” Abbas’s incredibly loaded and baited statement is one of such hyperbole, and for Reuters to repeat it as though it has any validity is evidence of their bias. How does stopping terrorists from harming innocent civilians amount to a “war of religion”?

In the third paragraph, they start rewinding the story a little, by saying, “It started after weekly prayers at the third holiest site in Islam, in an area that Jews also revere as the site of their biblical Temple.” Interesting to note how the mosque is unequivocally declared the “third holiest site in Islam”, while the Western Wall, the absolute holiest site in Judaism, is merely described as “an area that Jews… revere.”

Then, you have this paragraph:

Several witnesses, including a Reuters journalist, said squads of police fired stun grenades to disperse several dozen youths. Five people were arrested, said police, who also said Palestinians threw stones at Jews worshipping at the Western Wall, below the compound housing the mosque.

Here, Reuters pits actual eyewitnesses describing police action against “youths” (funny how terrorists are whitewashed as youths) against police who “also said” that these Palestinians were committing acts of terror. So, the reports of the Israeli police response comes from “witnesses”, while Reuters somehow could only get the stories of what caused that response in the first place from those same “violent” police, and  apparent not from any actual witnesses. (Makes you wonder who those Reuters reports prefer to talk to…)

Reuters then goes on to describe the injured Palestinians, without nary a word on who was injured at the Western Wall. In fact the only mention of the entire violent terrorist provocation in the whole story remains just that of the “police” who “also said”.

And Reuters wonders why their credibility is going down the toilet amongst intelligent people.

The Mossad needs to be ashamed of its actions… They sent 26, 27 persons to assassinate one man who was involved in the capturing and killing of two Israeli solders.

So, let me get this straight: because they sent an overwhelming search-and-assassinate party to take out a known terrorist with blood on his hands—as even admitted by the moronic Dubai police chief himself (not to mention Hamas’s admitting it themselves)—that this somehow makes it a “shameful action”?

By his logic, most large-scale police manhunts that take place around the world would fall under such as “shameful” label.

And this idiot is actually a police chief?!

While I’m on the subject, I can’t help but notice the bizarre focus that is being made by a number of governments on the subject of the phony passports that the Mossad agents supposedly were using. Did everyone conveniently forget the fact that al-Mabhouh himself was traveling with multiple phony passports?

I’d love to hear one single plausible explanation as to why no one is investigating all his phony passports, and instead everyone is focusing on the assassins’ passports.

This beautiful compilation includes an all-star cast of Obama, Biden, Reid, Clinton, Feinberg, Schumer, Dodd, and more, all of whose words are now coming back to bite them in the ass, as they once attacked the Republicans for considering the option (which the Republicans never ultimately utilized).

How about Biden telling Republicans at the time: I pray God when the Democrats take back control we don’t make the kind of naked power grab you are doing.

Or Obama: He [Bush] hasn’t gotten his way, and that is now prompting, you know, a change in the Senate rules that really I think will change the character of the Senate forever… That’s just not what the founders intended!

Or Hillary Clinton: So this president [Bush] has come to the majority here in the Senate and basically said, “Change the rules! Do it the way I want it done!” And I guess there just weren’t very many voices on the other side of the aisle that acted the way previous generations of senators have acted and said, “Mr. President, we’re with you! We support you! But, that’s a bridge too far. We can’t go there. You have to restrain yourself Mr. President!”

Or Schumer: We are on the precipice of a crisis, a constitutional crisis… the checks and balances which have been at the core of this republic are about to be evaporated by the nuclear option. The checks and balances which say that if you get 51% of the vote, you don’t get your way 100% of the time. It is amazing, it’s almost a temper tantrum… They want their way every single time, and they will change the rules, break the rules, misread the Constitution… so that they will get their way.

The most incredible part about this is that these shameless self-righteous blowhards probably don’t even realize how ridiculously hypocritical and idiotic they sound!

These brazen crooks should all be thrown out on their asses, and replaced with people who have actual integrity and honesty. How long are we going to put it with sanctimonious, pompous phonies like this???

Enjoy this hilarious video and pass it along so that everyone can enjoy it to the fullest!

This is no way for our undergraduate students to behave. We have an opportunity to hear from a policy-maker relevant to one of the most important issues facing this planet, and you are preventing not only yourself from hearing him but hundreds of other people in this room and hundreds of other people in an overflow room. Shame on you! This is not an example of free speech.

This was particularly insightful because he made sure to call them on their presumable “free speech” defense, which is an incredible farce. Too many people use “free speech” as a cover to stifle other people’s opinions. One such clown is Salam al Marayati, the Executive Director of the Muslim Public Affairs Council.

As Dr. Albert Arking eloquently puts it:

Salam al Marayati is asserting a new civil right that has not heretofore been recognized: the right to deny other people their rights.  He defends the action of the 11 students at UC Irvine who were arrested for attempting to prevent Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren from speaking.  The defense amounts to an assertion that the students were exercising their rights when they repeatedly interrupted Ambassador Oren with loud shouting.  The hecklers ignored the moderator, who implored the protesters to allow the speaker to be heard, after which there would be time for questions and discussion.

In making such an assertion, Mr. Marayati is making the work of his organization, in protecting the rights of Muslims against discrimination, that much more difficult.  How would the Muslim Public Affairs Council react to someone asserting a right to prevent Muslims from speaking?

Of course, we all know the answer to that likely rhetorical final question, because anyone following Palestinian politics knows quite well the double standards that are employed almost as a matter of Palestinian policy. So, what’s considered “free speech” for a Palestinian would of course be “hate speech” or “discriminatory speech” for an Israeli.

To watch these Muslim students disgracing themselves (and to hear Michael Oren speak), the video can be viewed here:

If there was ever a time for any world leader to take a stand against a U.S. president, this is it. After all, you’re talking about a president who is used to getting denied his requests all the time (remember this great post?), and who bows down to dictators and despots the world over.

In fact, for a man who has a humongous individual superiority complex, he has what is amazingly an equally humongous national inferiority complex.

So, for Netanyahu to be one of the only world leaders to actually give a damn about what Obama thinks, is just monumentally disappointing and not a good sign of things to come in Israel.

Well, in case you hadn’t noticed, insensitive statements of that caliber only warrant such serious repercussions when made by Republicans. When Democrats make them, hey, it’s no big deal. Just issue a half-hearted apology and everything is hunky-dory again.

Case in point: During Obama’s primary campaign, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) described him as “light skinned” and “with no Negro dialect—unless he wanted to have one”!

Reid just recently apologized, saying, “I deeply regret using such a poor choice of words. I sincerely apologize for offending any and all Americans, especially African-Americans for my improper comments.”

Why is he apologizing now if this statement occurred a while back? Don’t think for a minute that his callousness was haunting his sensitive conscience all this time. No, it was simply because he is about to be exposed. A book is about to be published this Monday with that statement in print (Game Change, by Time Magazine’s Mark Halperin and New York magazine’s John Heilemann), so he figures he’ll preempt it with an apology. How clever. As if we don’t see right through that (by “we”, I mean level-headed conservatives; after all, the Democrats certainly aren’t going to see through that ruse!).

With hypocrisy being the Democrat party’s #1 strength, it’s no wonder Obama is so good at it!

Speaking of Obama, here’s what he actually said back when the Trent Lott story was unfolding (courtesy of Weekly Standard):

In light of President Obama’s decision to forgive Harry Reid’s remarks about Obama’s skin color and lack of a “Negro dialect,” check out what Obama said about Trent Lott in 2002:

Illinois Senator Barack Obama (D-13th), who hosted WVON’s Cliff Kelley Show, challenged the Republican Party to repudiate Lott’s remarks and to call for his resignation as senate leader.

“It seems to be that we can forgive a 100-year-old senator for some of the indiscretion of his youth, but, what is more difficult to forgive is the current president of the U.S. Senate (Lott) suggesting we had been better off if we had followed a segregationist path in this country after all of the battles and fights for civil rights and all the work that we still have to do,” said Obama.

He said: “The Republican Party itself has to drive out Trent Lott. If they have to stand for something, they have to stand up and say this is not the person we want representing our party.”

–From the December 12, 2002 issue of the Chicago Defender.

And, speaking of presidents whose words can sure come back to bite them, here’s what Bill Clinton said of Obama (also to appear in the new book coming out):

A few years ago, this guy [Obama] would have been getting us coffee.

Priceless.

The London Times is reporting that scientists at the University of East Anglia (UEA) have admitted throwing away much of the raw temperature data on which their predictions of global warming are based. The findings of the university’s CRU (Climatic Research Unit) are one of the main pieces of evidence used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which says global warming is a threat to humanity, and now it has been revealed that this foundation that is supposed to be holding up the whole theory is not at all solid.

Something tells me, though, that this won’t slow down some of those global warming alarmist nuts one bit.

The most famous one is probably Al Gore, who came out with a whole pseudo-documentary to try to convince people to change their evil carbon-emitting ways—and had the sheer audacity to actually ask people (via the camera): “Are you ready to change the way you live?”—when the blathering moron flies around in a private jet and lives in a mansion that sucks up power like Good Humor on a hot day, complete with an indoor swimming pool that costs $500 a month to heat. I guess that’s one hypocrite just not yet ready to change the way he lives.

Well, the London Times put together a great list of these hypocrites (probably the most comprehensive such list I’ve seen so far), including John Travolta; Oprah Winfrey; Sting’s wife, Dame Trudie Styler; Tom Cruise; Sheryl Crow; Jennifer Aniston; Coldplay’s Chris Martin; and others.

If only this sort of public ridicule would get these people to finally shut up.

Naturally, with this being big news now, a lot of not-so-recent news stories and special editorials are making their way around the internet. Among them is a really detailed and riveting expose, written by Johann Hari for the Independent, of the outright slavery and exploitation that exists on a huge scale—openly—in Dubai.

Read this incredible story, “The dark side of Dubai“, and you will be blown away by how much of an illusion this “paradise” is, and just how close this bizarre society lives to all hell breaking loose.

Recently, I read a piece in the Weekly Standard by Steven Menashi which brings a different perspective to the whole czar issue. He points out that the whole idea of the Senate approving every single advisor to the president severely detracts from the separation of powers that our founding fathers put in place. What right does the legislative branch have to pick the staff for the executive branch?

Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX)  said that “it is Congress’s duty to know who is serving at the highest levels of government, what they are doing, and what qualifications or complications these people bring to the job… The deployment of this many czars sets a dangerous precedent that undermines the Constitution’s guarantee of separated powers. It must be stopped.”

But, as Menashi points out:

When the executive branch formulates policy through czars accountable only to the president, does that not leave the legislative and executive powers more separate, rather than less?

The president should be entitled to choose whomever he wants as advisors. After all, he can clearly formulate his opinions in any way he chooses, provided that he ultimately puts forth his own decisions and stands behind them. In fact, if he so chooses, he can form his opinions by watching Saturday morning cartoons and there’s not a damn thing anyone can do about it.

The key is that if Congress doesn’t like what he’s doing, there are clear checks and balances which Congress can employ to overrule the president. That’s the point of the separation of powers together with checks and balances.

Menashi says:

Congress may reject whatever policies the president formulates with the aid of his czars, of course, but Byrd and Hutchison want the legislature to oversee policy formulation within the executive. That seems to be the greater threat to separated powers.

Senators expect to exercise such oversight because Congress has intruded upon the executive branch throughout the last half-century. Since the expansion of the federal bureaucracy during the New Deal, agencies nominally within the executive branch receive mandates directly from Congress, bypassing the president. So executive authority, which Alexander Hamilton expected to be characterized by energy and dispatch, is fragmented and divided between the president, Congress, and agency heads invested with their own independent authority. It’s not surprising that presidents, who are after all elected to implement new policies, have responded to the fragmented executive by seeking independent advisers who can help formulate policy and monitor the bureaucracy in hopes of keeping it in line. FDR had his Brain Trust; Obama has his czars.

I have to say that this really has me rethinking my whole previous stance. He has a very good point. How did we get to a place where the executive branch is so fragmented and divided between all these other authorities? And, Obama’s incompetence aside, do we really want those morons in Congress choosing the president’s advisors?

And, hey, if we let the president continue to choose his own advisors, then when any of his advisors turn out to be lunatics (think: Van Jones), all the blame will still clearly lie on the shoulders of the president and he will have to deal with the repercussions and any fallout over his apparent lack of judgment.

Apparently, one woman started coughing without covering her mouth, prompting another woman, worried about the Swine Flu, to reprimand her (so to speak; after all, being NYC, I would probably not rule out vulgarity) for her lack of etiquette and consideration. The reprimanded woman obviously didn’t like to be reprimanded because she responded by spitting on the “reprimander”. One thing let to another and a fistfight broke out, also involving one of the women dragging the other to the floor by her hair.

In general I would either stay away from some other people’s fight on the subway (or, if it involved some gross injustice, I might try to stop it). In this case, though, I probably would have joined in and helped beat that coughing woman silly. Why? Because I’m absolutely fed up with the lack of etiquette and consideration on the subway today, and sick people are only the tip of the iceberg.

To paraphrase the hundreds of posters all over the MTA transit system say: if you’re sick, stay home (or at least don’t ride the subways and buses). After all, you’re in a small, closed car for a long period of time with vulnerable strangers, including pregnant women, children, and the elderly… all of whom can suffer from further complications if they catch the germs that you’re spewing all over the place every time you sneeze and cough.

If you insist on going to work anyway (or wherever else you’re going) and you can’t find any alternative mode of transportation, or if you have no choice for one reason or another, at least do it at a time when the trains would be mostly empty and make sure to have plenty of tissues on hand in your hand.

But, as I said, that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

What I find at least as disgusting are those pigs who think the subway car is their private bathroom. You know the ones I’m talking about. The ones who have no compunction about whipping out their nail clippers and sending nail clippings flying all over the place.

In fact, just this morning, I had to change seats because the woman next to me suddenly pulled out a nail file and started spraying pulverized nail dust all over the place to the point where I actually saw a layer starting to form on my attache case. I gave her a look of disgust and moved across the subway car to a somewhat less filthy location.

And just last week, there was some inconsiderate pig clipping his nails, the incessant CLIP… CLIP… CLIP… making me want to throw something at his head, especially when I literally saw a nail clipping go flying past me. I am not making this up.

But, the mother of all pigs has to be the woman I saw several years ago (this memory has unfortunately been burned into my brain) who apparently thought nothing of tweezing her nose hairs right there in the subway car. Yes, you read that correctly: TWEEZING HER NOSE HAIRS. I wanted so badly to bump her hard while the tweezers were in position, hard enough to send those tweezers straight up her nose and into her brain… but I didn’t want to run the risk of getting one of those hairs anywhere on me, so I remained very, very far away from her.

I have many stories… and anyone else who has ever ridden the NYC subway probably has plenty of their own… but, to come back to my point: I fully support the woman who started the fistfight and I hope she put the other woman in the hospital long enough to keep her off the train until she learns manners.

It’s high time these inconsiderate pigs learned a lesson.

Squalid Palestinian refugee camps are not only found in Israel’s disputed territories. They are also found in the neighboring Arab countries, but you’d never know that from most of the mainstream media. And you’d also never know that they are often in even worse conditions there than in Israel, that they contain even more Palestinian refugees than those in Israel, and that they are often treated to persecution even worse than the supposed “persecution” in Israel.

Every once in a long while, a newspaper decides to do the rare report on this, and this time the honor goes to Britain’s The Independent. In a special report by Judith Miller and David Samuels, the Palestinians’ treatment by their brethren is laid bare for all to see. It’s a great article to read in full, but here are some excerpts (emphasis mine):

It is a cynical but time-honoured practice in Middle Eastern politics: the statesmen who decry the political and humanitarian crisis of the approximately 3.9 million Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and in Gaza ignore the plight of an estimated 4.6 million Palestinians who live in Arab countries. For decades, Arab governments have justified their decision to maintain millions of stateless Palestinians as refugees in squalid camps as a means of applying pressure to Israel. The refugee problem will be solved, they say, when Israel agrees to let the Palestinians have their own state.

In other words, these people are used as pawns by their own brethren just to make Israel look bad. The more these Arab countries persecute their Palestinians brethren and keep them in the dirt, the more they could spotlight it and bizarrely blame Israel for their conditions!

Yet in the two decades since the end of the Cold War, after two Gulf wars, and the rise and fall of the Oslo peace process, not a single Palestinian refugee has returned to Israel – and only a handful of ageing political functionaries have returned from neighbouring Arab countries to the West Bank and Gaza. Instead, failed peace plans and shifting political priorities have resulted in a second Palestinian “Nakba”, or catastrophe – this one at hands of the Arab governments. “Marginalised, deprived of basic political and economic rights, trapped in the camps, bereft of realistic prospects, heavily armed and standing atop multiple fault lines,” a report by the International Crisis Group (ICG) in Lebanon recently observed, “the refugee population constitutes a time bomb.”

The fact that the divided Palestinian political leadership is silent about the mistreatment of the refugees by Arab states does not make such behaviour any less reprehensible – or less dangerous.

Just as bizarre, you have the Palestinian leadership themselves, based in Israel, not defending their own across the border and not calling attention to their plight, only because it would detract from the world’s hate that they are too busy directing at Israel. So, you have hundreds of thousands of Palestinians getting kicked around Iraq, Kuwait, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, etc… and the Palestinian leaders apparently care only about the fewer numbers living in Israel. Again, because it’s not the plight of their own people that they primarily are concerned with, but rather the inverse: the vilification of Israel is all they really care about, their brethren be damned.

The report then provides some examples:

Some 250,000 Palestinians were chased out of Kuwait and other Gulf States to punish the Palestinian political leadership for supporting Saddam Hussein. Tens of thousands of Palestinian residents of Iraq were similarly dispossessed after the second Gulf war.

In 2001, Palestinians in Lebanon were stripped of the right to own property, or to pass on the property that they already owned to their children – and banned from working as doctors, lawyers, pharmacists or in 20 other professions. Even the Palestinian refugee community in Jordan, historically the most welcoming Arab state, has reason to feel insecure in the face of official threats to revoke their citizenship. The systematic refusal of Arab governments to grant basic human rights to Palestinians who are born and die in their countries – combined with periodic mass expulsions of entire Palestinian communities – recalls the treatment of Jews in medieval Europe.

The only difference is that Jews were bounced around Europe by the Christians. Here, it’s Palestinians getting bounced around the Middle East by their own Arab brethren.

The report then highlights the ridiculous new definition of a “refugee”, the redefinition coming about especially for the Palestinians:

The only governing authority that Palestinians living in the camps have ever known is UNRWA – the United Nations Relief and Works Agency. Established by the UN on 8 December 1949 to assist 650,000 impoverished Palestinian refugees from the 1948 war, UNRWA has been battling budget cuts and strikes among its employees as it struggles to provide subsidies and services to Palestinian refugees, who are defined as “persons whose normal place of residence was Palestine between June 1946 and May 1948″.

The inclusion of the descendants of Palestinian refugees as refugees in UNRWA’s mandate has no parallel in international humanitarian law and is responsible for the growth of the official numbers of Palestinian refugees in foreign countries from 711,000 to 4.6 million during decades when the number of ageing refugees from the 1948 Israeli war of independence in was in fact declining. UNRWA’s grant of refugee status to the children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the original Palestinian refugees according to the principle of patrilineal descent, with no limit on the generations that can obtain refugee status, has made it easy for host countries to flout their obligations under international law. According to Article 34 of the UN Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, “The Contracting States shall as far as possible facilitate the assimilation and naturalisation of refugees,” and must “make every effort to expedite naturalisation proceedings” – the opposite of what happened to the Palestinians in every Arab country in which they settled, save Jordan.

So, what to do with all of these so-called “refugees” (most of whom actually never personally left any place to seek actual refuge someplace else)?

Daniel Kurtzer agrees no one is likely to make a deal that includes a substantial return of the Palestinian diaspora. “Most Palestinian refugees know it, as do the settlers,” he says. So rather than wait for American mediators or Arab states to impose solutions on them, the Palestinians themselves should begin to tackle the diabolically difficult issues inherent in the resolution of their political and economic future. “What we need is a refugee summit,” he says. “I’m looking for a real conversation that must start internally and soon.”

After 60 years of failed wars, and failed peace, it is time to put politics aside and to insist that the basic rights of the Palestinian refugees in Arab countries be respected – whether or not their children’s children return to Haifa anytime soon. While Saudi Arabia may not wish to host Israeli tourists, it can easily afford to integrate the estimated 240,000 Palestinian refugees who already live in the kingdom – just as Egypt, which has received close to $60bn in US aid, and has a population of 81 million, can grant legal rights to an estimated 70,000 Palestinian refugees and their descendants. One can only imagine the outrage that the world community would rightly visit upon Israel if Israeli Arabs were subject to the vile discriminatory laws applied to Palestinians living in Arab countries. Surely, Palestinian Arabs can keep their own national dream alive in the countries where they were born, while also enjoying the freedom to work, vote and own property?

A practical solution to the crisis of the Palestinian refugees in Arab countries will focus on Lebanon, Syria and Jordan, which together play host to approximately 3 million of the estimated 4.6 million Palestinian refugees living outside the West Bank and Gaza. While each of these countries has chosen different legal and political approaches to the 1948 refugees and their descendants, they share a political desire to sublimate the rights of Palestinian residents, treating them as unwanted guests or as tools to be used in pursuing wider political interests – but rarely as fully-fledged members of society. Lebanon, where Palestinians led by Yasser Arafat are widely blamed for having sparked the 1975 civil war, is the worst offender against international norms. Yet even in Jordan, which is in many ways a model for the humane treatment of a large refugee population, Palestinians today feel markedly less secure than they did two decades ago, or even five years ago.

The report then provides some more examples of their treatment by their Arab brethren:

Outside of Iraq, whose Palestinian population fled en masse after the fall of Saddam, nowhere has the situation of the Palestinian refugees worsened so dramatically as in Lebanon. Since the early Sixties, Palestinians there have been barred from working in medicine, dentistry and the law. In 2001, the Lebanese parliament adopted an amendment to the country’s property laws that prohibited the acquisition of real estate by “any person not a citizen of a recognised state” – meaning the estimated 250,000 to 400,000 Palestinians living in Lebanon. Palestinians who had acquired real estate prior to 2001 were barred from bequeathing property to their children.

Right-wing Christians and Shi’ite radicals alike support discriminatory legislation that further impoverishes Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, with the stated goal of preventing them from beginning the process of naturalisation, known as tawtin. In his inaugural speech in May, 2008, Lebanese President Michel Suleiman, a Christian and former head of the country’s armed forces, reaffirmed “Lebanon’s categorical refusal of naturalisation”, a statement echoed by the former Lebanese ambassador to the US, Nassib Lahoud, who told us recently in Beirut: “The confessional balance does not allow these things to happen … at the moment the Palestinians are citizens of a state that does not exist.” His sentiments were echoed by Hizbollah’s spokesman on the Palestinian question, Hassan Hodroj. “The threat of tawtin is genuine,” Hodroj explained. “It is one of the ways in which Israel, backed by the US, is endangering the region.”

The fact that the living standard of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon has been deemed “catastrophic” by both UNRWA and by the Lebanese government can therefore be understood as a deliberate result of official state policy that is supported by all parties across Lebanon’s divided confessional spectrum. As a member of the Lebanese parliament, Ghassan Moukheiber, explained in an interview with the ICG, “our official policy is to maintain Palestinians in a vulnerable, precarious situation to diminish prospects for their naturalisation or permanent settlement“.

…While Palestinian refugees and their descendants inside Syria are not allowed to vote or hold Syrian passports, they are free from the overt discrimination that has turned Lebanon into a recruiting ground for al-Qa’ida. The legal status of Palestinians inside Syria is defined by a 1956 law that states that grants them “the right to employment, commerce, and national service, while preserving their original nationality”. More than 100,000 of the estimated 450,000 Palestinians in Syria live in or around the Yarmouk refugee camp, which long ago became a neighbourhood of Damascus.

While Palestinians are reasonably well integrated into the Syrian socio-economic structure, according to the scholar Laurie Brand they do not have the right to vote, nor can they stand for parliament or other political offices. Palestinians are barred from buying farmland and prohibited from owning more than one house. The female descendant of a Palestinian refugee can become a Syrian citizen by marrying a Syrian man. The male descendants of Palestinian men and their children are barred from acquiring Syrian citizenship, even if they marry Syrian women.

These are all things you’d never know just from listening to most news reports. The double-standard applied to Israel and the hypocrisy and false piety of the world when it comes the the “plight” of the Palestinians is just sickening, and more people need to be aware of the truth.

Richard Goldstone, having read the draft of today’s United Nations resolution which was ultimately approved later in the day—officially endorsing his virulent, anti-Semitic, slanderous report—is reported to have said, “This draft resolution saddens me as it includes only allegations against Israel. There is not a single phrase condemning Hamas as we have done in the report. I hope that the council can modify the text.”

Now, any adult living in today’s world for more than five minutes can tell you that the news is always full of “atrocities” committed by Israel, and full of condemnations of Israel by other countries and organizations for these “atrocities”… while you hear comparatively nothing about the Arab world, with their customs of imprisoning political dissidents, beheading Christians, stoning rape victims, performing forced clitoridectomies on teenage girls, forcing women to be subordinate to their husbands, committing the occasional genocide here and there in Africa, and of course bombing civilian areas and using human shields while committing acts of terrorism.

So, either Goldstone is:

(a) a naïf who miraculously made it this far in his adult life unaware of the twisted ways of the world, and who actually thought he could put out such a sham of a report and not have it immediately snatched up by everyone to be used against Israel and Israel alone, ignoring the few mentions of Hamas in there (get out your magnifying glass…);

(b) an idiot who might have been aware of that global phenomenon, but stupidly thought his report was some kind of magical one that would ward of any such uses, or maybe that he is a special kind of guy who wouldn’t be used like the foolish anti-Semitic tool that he turned out to be; or

(c) an “excrement-peddler” (euphemistically-speaking, of course), who knew exactly what he was doing when he put out that crock of excrement, and is now following it up with more excrement to have you believe that he’s innocent of any such vicious intentions, when he is in reality so obviously full of excrement because he knew what he was doing and just didn’t care.

My vote is with (c) and, I pray, may he get slammed with an equally vicious and slanderous “assessment” on his own Judgment Day.

The Guardian, a newspaper not exactly known for ever having anything nice to say about Israel, published a listing of what it referred to as “every peace prize winner ever” since the award’s inception in 1909. The only problem is that it left out every single winner from Israel. The names of Menachem Begin, Yizhak Rabin and Shimon Peres all disappeared from the list.

Arutz Sheva reports that the Guardian—after seeing a significant backlash from readers—added the names back to the list and blamed it on “technical issues”, a completely unbelievable answer that abysmally fails the “smell test”. After all, has anyone ever seen a technical glitch with such uncanny precision? Has anyone ever seen a computer make such a particularly accurate and specific “mistake”?

Anyone believing that ridiculous story is a bigger idiot than the liars at the Guardian who concocted it in the first place.

Here are the pictures of the “glitch” in action (thanks to Tom Gross). Notice how the “glitch” forgot to remove the country (Israel) from the listing… and also notice how the “glitch” astoundingly had no problems with every other multiple-winner year (like the 1993, 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998, etc.)… only those exact years where the multiple winners involved one or more from Israel, and only those winners who were from Israel: