Diana West has written a great piece on the silence of the mainstream media regarding the terrible ordeal that CBS News’ Lara Logan recently suffered at the hands of an Egyptian mob.

For those who don’t know the story (which might not be so far-fetched, considering the lack of reporting and outrage), ten days ago, Lara Logan, a CBS News correspondent, was sexually assaulted by a mob screaming “Jew, Jew!” in Egypt’s Tahrir Square. She was flown out of Cairo by a network-chartered jet hours later and the story was quelled.

When the story finally broke several days later, I could understand why it was kept quiet. After all, the ordeal was bad enough for Logan, and if it were possible to keep it out of the news and avert the need for her to relive it through everyone else’s eyes and ears, all the better.

But, once the story did break, there was no longer any excuse to cover up details—especially details that would not inflict additional hardship on her, and especially details that are relevant to the story!

The detail in particular that all the media has been silent about, until the NY Post finally came out with it was the fact that the animals who were assaulting her were shouting “Jew! Jew!” as they did it.

Political columnist and author Diana West, shining the spotlight on the guilty-as-usual mainstream media, gave a great analogy to show the hypocrisy of the MSM, and had a few more poignant points on the subject:

Such a news blackout is hard to imagine if, for example, a star correspondent had been similarly violated by a mob of tea party-goers at, say, a massive Glenn Beck rally — and particularly if other correspondents had previously suffered unprecedented assaults and threats from the same crowd. A keening outcry would have arisen from the heart of the MSM (mainstream media) against the mob, accompanied by a natural zeal to investigate cultural or other reasons for the brutality. Not excuses. And not disinterest.

But in this singular Logan case we’ve seen both. First, only after news queries indicated the story was breaking did CBS on Tuesday release a brief rap sheet on the Friday crime. We were told of Logan’s accidental separation from her crew in the crowd. The prolonged assault by over 200 people “whipped into a frenzy.” The rescue by a group of women and 20 soldiers. What CBS didn’t mention — what was later attributed to an unnamed network source — was that as the thugs assaulted the 39-year-old journalist and mother of two, they shouted, “Jew! Jew!”

This essential piece of the story, this clue to the hysterical, obsessive anti-Semitism of the Islamic world including Egypt, was broken by the New York Post. It has sparked little comment, which in itself is worth comment. Imagine, again, if a tea party mob were implicated in such an assault, and, as if in answer to fervent leftist fantasy, it came out that 200 Constitution-loving thugs had been yelling racial slurs. The MSM would directly attribute it the fact that George Washington owned slaves.

But Islam, even with its Koranically enjoined anti-Semitism and misogyny, isn’t considered a factor here. Islam might as well not exist. Islamic misogyny might as well not exist. Islamic anti-Semitism might as well not exist. But imagine further if the foundational documents of the tea party movement, its official leaders and heroes, were steeped in equivalent hatred and misogyny. There would be no instinctive reaction in the MSM to universalize the attack and strip away all possible cultural or (considering those shouts of “Jew! Jew!” in the Logan case) religious context.

But that’s exactly what happened here. It took a tweet from a movie critic even to broach the misogyny topic in the MSM when Roger Ebert wrote, “The attack on Lara Logan brings Middle East attitudes toward women into sad focus.” (Given that Israel is in the otherwise Islamically dominated “Middle East,” Ebert is employing the quasi-accepted euphemism for Muslim.) Those few reports that even discuss the anti-Semitic angle do so without comment, or let it go slack, as when Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen, noting the “undertones of pogromist anti-Semitism,” only concluded that “not everyone in Tahrir Square that night had democracy on their mind.” (The light might have dawnethed more brightly had the MSM actually reported on the widespread anti-Semitic iconography visible in the demonstrations, as amply archived by John Rosenthal at Pajamas Media.)

Missing is any acknowledgement of the fact — the overwhelming, highly upsetting but nonetheless unavoidable fact — that Islam’s teachings on women and particularly Jews are literally hateful. And that’s the Koranic truth, as copiously expressed by the late Muhammad Sayyid Tantawi, Grand Imam of Egypt’s Al-Azhar University, approximately Sunni Islam’s “pope.” As he put it, and with plenty of canonical support: Jews “are the enemies of Allah, descendants of apes and pigs.”

Rather than consider the sources of violent animus that appear to have been manifested in the assault on Logan, who, by the way, is not a Jew, the MSM let it all go. The crowd was “whipped into a frenzy” just as CBS said. But was the frenzy cultural? Religious? Don’t ask, and certainly don’t tell.

That would spoil the story.

A report from Fox News today, citing the Times of London, has revealed that “Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah reportedly told President Obama not to humiliate Mubarak and warned that he would step in to bankroll Egypt if the U.S. withdrew its aid program, worth $1.5 billion annually.”

Besides the obvious question of what the hell are we doing sending one and a half billion of our tax dollars a year to a dictatorship in the Middle East, one cannot help but wonder why Obama did not call Abdullah’s bluff on the “threat”?

In fact, Obama’s response should have been: “You call that a threat?! Sure! Go ahead and bankroll Egypt. In fact, why haven’t you been doing it all along, you cheap, pompous big talker?”

On a separate note: seriously, if Abdullah has that kind of money to spare (which he clearly does), why isn’t he helping his impoverished Arab brethren in his region? Why is he simply content to sit his fat inconsiderate ass back and let the Americans pour money there instead?

In light of the recent shark attack in Egypt, which Egypt is bizarrely trying to pin on Israel, Khaled Abu Toameh, a Palestinian journalist, points out the absurdly boundless paranoia that grips the Palestinians and extends to Israel’s other neighbors, like Egypt.

Reading some of these allegations, you can’t help but wonder why the Arabs are still trying to fight the Jews when they apparently believe that they are superhuman and possess such incredible powers!

This piece would be hilarious if these rabid idiots weren’t real people in positions of real power:

It seems that even the animals have now turned against Arabs.

The Western-funded Palestinian Authority in the West Bank have been using animals in its campaign against Israel. About two years ago, Mahmoud Abbas’s official news agency, Wafa, reported that Israel had released poison-resistant rats to drive Arab residents of Jerusalem out of their homes.

The report said that “Rats have become an Israeli weapon to displace and expel Arab residents of the occupied Old City of Jerusalem. Settlers flood the Old City of Jerusalem with rats.”

It is not clear how these rats were taught to stay away from Jews, who also happen to live in the Old City.

Such allegations reflect a sick mindset and are part of a long-standing tradition of blaming Israel and Jews for almost everything that goes wrong in Arab countries and the rest of the world.

The ultimate goal, of course, is to demonize Jews and de-legitimize Israel. This is the kind of incitement that prompts radical Muslims to wear explosive belts and set out on suicide missions against Jews.

To Western audiences, such charges may sound ridiculous and comical. But as far as many Arabs are concerned, the charges, which do not come as a surprise, are not funny.

In fact, the Arab masses have become accustomed to hearing such idiotic allegations from their governments and leaders, especially when they are directed against Israel and Jews. What is worrying that these rumors often find their way to mainstream thinking in the Arab world.

After the rats and wild boars — which the Palestinians also claimed were used by Israel to drive them out of their homes and lands — now the sharks have been recruited to destroy Egypt’s tourism industry.

Egyptian authorities say they do not rule out the possibility that Mossad was behind a recent shark attack that killed a tourist in the Red Sea resort of Sharm a-Sheikh.

According to South Sinai Governor Mohammed Abdel Fadi Shousha, “What is being said about the Mossad throwing the deadly shark [in the sea] to hit tourism in Egypt is not out of the question, but it needs to confirm.”

This was not the first time that Egyptians have made such stupid and dangerous charges. The Egyptians have already blamed Israel for spreading AIDS and other diseases in the Arab world. Moreover, they had accused Israel of flooding Egyptian markets with chewing gum that arouses women sexually with the intention of corrupting them morally.

The Palestinian Authority has also repeatedly accused Israel of using wild boars to destroy Arab crops in the West Bank and drive farmers out of their lands.

In light of these allegations, it remains to be seen whether Arabs and Muslims will now declare jihad on sharks, rats and pigs.

Herbert I. London wrote a great post for the HudsonNY blog, entitled “Egyptian Chutzpah“, in which he discusses Egypt’s new “apartheid wall” initiative. Of course, they wouldn’t call it an “apartheid wall”—that distinction apparently only applies when it’s done by Israel. Nevertheless, it’s the exact same thing (a wall) for the exact same reason (to keep the Palestinians out—terrorists, in the case of Israel; all Palestinians, in the case of Egypt).

It’s a great read—too good to excerpt. Here it is in its entirety:

How do you spell chutzpah in Arabic? The Egyptian government has railed against Israel for erecting a security fence in the West Bank for years, protesting, its construction in the United Nations and every other international body, and usually employing the phrase “apartheid wall.”

But now, mirabile dictu, Egypt is building a wall of its own along the border of the Gaza Strip — and, as one might guess, will not entertain any criticism of this project.

The Israeli barrier was built to prevent suicide bombing and other terrorist activities against Israelis; by contrast, the Egyptian fence is designed to stop Palestinians living in Gaza from entering Egypt.

One might well ask why President Hosni Mubarak would want to keep his Arab brothers locked inside the poverty-stricken area of Gaza, among the most congested places on the globe.

He contends, with some legitimacy, that Hamas’s presence in Gaza could be a destabilizing factor in Egypt if the border were porous. Yet Hamas poses a threat to Israel even more formidable than its threat to Egypt. The stated Hamas goal is “Liberate Palestine,” not “Occupy Egypt.” Moreover, if Hamas were an existential threat to Egypt’s national security, why has Mubarak been negotiating with Hamas leaders for years, and why has he been at the center of talks over reconciliation with Fatah?

In fact, by keeping the border crossing into Egypt closed, Mubarak is sending the Palestinians to Israel for help. In the Byzantine world of Middle East politics Arab leaders want the Gaza Strip to remain exclusively an Israeli problem.

The irony, of course, is that the millions of dollars required to build the new fence could have been employed to build hospitals, schools and housing. Palestinians crossing the border generally do so in search of employment or to be reunited with families residing in Egypt. At the moment even medical and humanitarian aid cannot get through the Rafah border crossing and human rights activists are invariably stopped at the border as well.

Recognizing the potential embarrassment of this security fence, Egyptian leaders denied its existence, until photographs made such denials laughable. The Egyptian fence is actually a ten kilometer underground metal barrier that will cost approximately $500 million. Whether it turns out to be a real barrier remains to be seen. Palestinians involved in the smuggling of contraband material are extremely adept at bypassing barriers. If anything, the Egyptian wall will probably escalate tensions in Gaza: it is the cap on a boiling pot of soup.

Palestinians in this tiny strip of land suffer from Hamas terrorism, lack of jobs, lack of basic facilities, congestion, and a host of corrupt and misguided leaders. Nonetheless, Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas has defended Egypt’s right to build a separation wall. Irony of ironies: this is the same Abbas who condemned Israel’s “Apartheid Wall” and urged the international community to tear it down.

In the Middle East, lies are verbal instruments to manipulate opinion.

And as this event on the Gaza border suggests, this time oppression is not a matter of Israelis against Palestinians, but Arabs against Palestinians.

The next time an Arab ambassador rises at the United Nations to criticize Israel, he should be reminded of the manifold ways Arabs contain, constrain and exploit fellow Arabs. If the term “apartheid” is used as a condemnation of Israel, it should be hurled back at Egyptians who sanctimoniously – and hypocritically — engage in the very actions they once condemned.

When it comes to Palestinians there is a monumental double standard in the world, such that Israel gets condemned right and left for their supposed “treatment” of the Palestinians, while Arab countries get a complete free pass for doing the exact same things (and often worse).

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.

Susan G. Komen for the Cure just narrowly escaped from a major PR problem.

They are holding a conference in Alexandria, Egypt which is being touted as an example of “unprecedented cooperation” in the region. The only problem with that regional cooperation is that Israeli doctors and participants were disinvited at the last minute by Egyptian officials. Arutz Sheva reported on the Egyptians’ ridiculous position:

Despite the cancellation of the Israeli presence at the event, Egyptian officials continued to praise the event as an example of regional cooperation. “The week’s events are a demonstration of the cooperation between countries, governments, civil society, advocates, survivors, and the global community as a whole,” Dr. Mohammed Shaalan of Egypt’s Breast Cancer Foundation told Reuters on Monday. “It shows that breast cancer has no boundaries and reveals the beauty of the world’s unity in its fight against breast cancer.”

Initially the Komen organization seemed to do nothing about it. They merely issued a lame statement saying that their plans were already underway, so they’re not changing anything and are just going to go along with this disgusting move. Upon hearing that, there was quite a ruckus raised, with the Anti-Defamation League issuing strong statements against both Egypt and the Komen organization. Some people (myself included) were even proposing a cessation of all donations to Komen. After all, how could they willingly go along with such a thing? If they had a functional moral compass and a backbone, they would simply pick up and move the conference next door to Israel instead, where all are welcome (especially considering that they were planning on going there the following week anyway).

Anyway, news is just out now that the Komen organization was able to launch a successful diplomatic effort to reverse the Egyptian decision, thereby granting them a narrow escape from the growing protests.