The Happy Muslims Who Confuse You. Mona

http://www.time.com/time/video/?bcpid=1485842900&bclid=0&bctid=19402457001

Mona at her Best

The Happy Muslims Who Confuse You

Video:
When columnist Mona Eltahawy talks about the Islamic world, she often has to compete with the usual stereotypes
http://www.time.com/time/video/?bcpid=1485842900&bclid=0&bctid=19402457001

On the Road from Doha to Damascus. Mona.

On the Road from Doha to Damascus

Nov. 26, 2008
Mona Eltahawy , THE JERUSALEM POST

An article in Issue 17, December 8, 2008 of The Jerusalem Report.

DAMASCUS: As a Cairene who grew up in
London and now lives in New York City, my standards for what constitutes a "real city" are high. It's difficult to get my attention unless we're talking about at least 8 million inhabitants or a long history, the more convoluted and troubled the better.
Jerusalem might be small but it makes up for it with bucketfuls of trouble.

Cairo has a daytime population of around 18 million people so I had to raise my hat to Mumbai during a visit there in June, jam-packed as it is with 24 million. It was Cairo on cocaine - frenetic, bursting at every seam and nook and disarmingly high.

With Damascus, which I first visited in 1999 on a reporting assignment for the British paper The Guardian, it was love at first traffic jam, even before I'd been to the Old City or learned that it's the longest-inhabited city in the world.
And here I am back again for the fourth time, staying at the same hotel as I did in 1999 and the view from my room and the dinner in the Old City last night is just the same as it was back then. More restaurants, perhaps, but no rush for reinvention here.

Two weeks ago, I was in Doha, Qatar, and although it was also my fourth visit to that capital, I drew back the curtains of my hotel room there and recognized nothing. On the surface at least, Doha has changed more since I first started to visit in 2006 than Damascus has over the past nine years since our first introduction.

Neither Syria nor Qatar is a democracy. They also share a love of maverick political alliances that distinguish them from powerful neighbors. Syria's neighbors are not just Israel and Turkey, but an Arab world where the powerhouses such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia have Sunni Muslim majorities. Another neighbor, Iraq, until the invasion and war, was ruled by a leader of the Sunni Muslim minority.

Syria is Iraq's mirror reflection - made up of several religious and ethnic groups and ruled by the son of the minority Alawite sect, an offshoot of Shi'ite Islam. When you look around at those Sunni-led powerhouses, you can see why Syria is Iran's best friend in the Arab world.
For Qatar, the powerful neighbor is Saudi Arabia with which it shares being richer than is possible to imagine but also the ultra-conservative Wahhabi interpretation of Islam.

Saudi Arabia is the biggest and most powerful of the Arab Gulf countries and emirates, home to the two holiest sites of Islam and it sits upon the largest oil reserves in the world.
So how does Qatar, tiny in geography and even smaller in population but with an abundance of natural gas and supersize ambitions, maintain a separate identity?

It talks to everyone and it keeps its Wahhabism in the background.

I call Qatar the Bermuda Triangle of the Middle East. Whatever you think "common sense" is in the rest of the Arab Middle East vanishes in Qatar, home to the outspoken Al Jazeera TV network, as well as the largest U.S. airbase in the Arab world and an Israeli trade interest office.

I wonder sometimes if the points of that triangle think of the other points. Are Al Jazeera viewers aware of those two other points, for example?

I've taken you on this journey with me on the road from Damascus to Doha with one destination in mind - debunking the myth of the "Arab street." What a reductive and insulting concept to think that 300+ million people think alike just because they speak the same language.
Imagine some journalist citing "the American street." You would hear howls of protest from every corner of the United States. Would such an imaginary street be in New York or Los Angeles - the only two cities jokingly acknowledged in a New Yorker cartoon map of the United States? Or would it lie somewhere along the Midwest and its claims to represent the backbone of all that is "American?" Or is it somewhere in the South, amid the churches and troubled history of the Bible Belt? Or, in the stubborn independence of the Pacific Northwest?

And yet we hear again and again of the "Arab street."

It doesn't help of course that many media outlets have closed their offices in Arab cities. And it certainly doesn't help that some parachute writers into the region and when those writers find people with ideas that don't fit the ones they flew in with, they simply dismiss them as irrelevant or out of touch.

There are multitudes of Arab streets and - my snobbery aside - cities that span the spectrum from the megalopolis to the eerily empty. The entire population of Qatar - around 800,000 could fit into a corner of the Cairo neighborhood of Shubra, population 7 million.
Here's one thing you can generalize on when it comes to the Arab world - it is very young. The majority of people in the region are younger than 30. Like Qatar, they are trying on new hair colors and trying to figure out what they want to be. There's another street where you can find those young people - it ain't the "Arab street" but the "information super highway" - i.e. the Internet.

More on that next time. •

17th May 1977 and Netanyahu's Mistakes Today

Just like last year, Netanyahu Automaticly Supports Going to War and He continues to lie to us and himself:
In May 1977 they did not say "Only Not Begin" as Netanyahu incorrectly said twice Today on Galey Zahal and Reshet Bet. They Did say "Rak Lo Maarach" "Only Not Maarach" Labour and voted DASH
and as a result got Begin. Begin led the largest Party but Did not win the Elections!

More important:
Begin as Leader of Opposition did not tell Golda Why are you not speaking to Saadat in 1972.
Thus avoiding 1973 War.
Bibi in 2006 and Now Supports Violence and War.
Does not criticize Government for not having a Policy, And not Setting Long Range Aims.

My NAKBA What we have to Fight Against, Disgusting!

15th May is Nakba day for the Palestinians. This is Disgusting News. I lived near Yonah Hanavi st. near Carmel Market. I was near there yesterday. I hope I do not know this French Jew.
Jerusalem mayor seeks terror victim status for murdered Arab
By Roni Singer-Heruti, Jonathan Lis and Avi Issacharoff, Haaretz Correspondents
Last Update from Haaretz 14:42 15th May 2007
Jerusalem Mayor Uri Lupolianski urged the state on Tuesday to grant the family of East Jerusalem taxi driver Taysir Karaki, who was murdered Monday, the benefits reserved for families of terror victims. Lupolianski instructed the city's social welfare department to aid the family.

On Monday, 26-year-old Tel Aviv resident Julian Soufir, who is suspected of having committed the murder, told police "I decided to murder an Arab."

The police was preparing for a possible retaliation Monday, fearing a reciprocal murder in a mixed Arab-Jewish town, or a Jewish city situated in close proximity to an Arab population.

Police said their initial investigation revealed that the suspect, an immigrant from France whose family lives in Netanya, went to Jerusalem on Monday morning to find a taxi driver to murder.

They discovered the murder of Taysir Karaki, 35, from Beit Haninah north of the capital, almost by chance after they stopped two young men walking down the middle of a Tel Aviv street at around 4:00 P.M., near Yonah Hanavi Street.

The police approached them with a routine request for identification. One of the men told the police that he had "done something in the apartment," and asked the police to accompany him to the nearby dwelling, where they found the victim lying dead inside. "I turned around and immediately handcuffed him," said Avrahali Vanda, one of the arresting officers.

Police said the victim's throat had been slit a few hours before the body was found. His taxi was parked outside.

The Tel Aviv Magistrate's Court extended Soufir's remand by 10 days Tuesday, and the remand of his 21-year-old brother, whom they believe reached the apartment shortly after the murder and remained with the killer until the two were apprehended, by two days. However, the police do not believe the brother took part in the crime.

At the remand hearing, Soufir's attorney argued that the suspect is not fit to stand trial. "As far as we understand, he can't differentiate between good and bad, makes things up and speaks to ghosts and goblins that dictate his life," Soufir's attorney said. Apparently, the police were called to Soufir's Tel Aviv apartment about a month ago after his wife complained that he had attacked her. The suspect's mental stability was questioned during that incident as well and he was sent to Abarbanel mental hospital for an evaluation, but he was released shortly after.

In contrast, the police claim that it seemed to them that the suspect "knew exactly what he was talking about when he described the event, and his memory was good. He also supplied a logical explanation for his actions."

Soufir is scheduled to unergo a psychiatric evaluation prior to standing trial.

Police say the suspect, who is newly religious, seems to have had no prior acquaintance with the victim. "Therefore, at the crime scene itself we began to suspect that this might be a case of murder stemming from nationalistic motives," said Chief Superintendent Avi Neuman, a Yarkon region detective.

The suspect said he went to Jerusalem because he thought he would be able to find an Arab victim more easily there. "We don't know whether he planned it two hours before or two weeks before, but there are certainly signs he planned it," Brigadier General Hagai Dotan, the commander of the Yarkon region police, told Haaretz.

The suspect entered the victim's taxi in Jerusalem and asked to be driven to Tel Aviv. They apparently made one stop along the way at the suspect's request. "When they arrived, the suspect persuaded the victim to come up to the apartment," apparently with an offer to use the bathroom before going home, Neuman said. The suspect then allegedly attacked the victim with a knife he had prepared ahead of time.

The suspect rented the apartment with his wife two months ago, but they are apparently now separated. Neighbors said they did not know the couple, except that they were French. One neighbor said she saw the suspect arrive for prayers daily at the neighborhood synagogue.

Karaki's father, Yasser Karaki, told Haaretz his son, who was married and the father of four children ages six to 12, had driven the children to school and set off for work at 8:30 A.M. "He was a good guy, he was not involved in politics; all he wanted to do was make a living for his children," the elder Karaki said.

The few dozen friends and relatives who gathered on Monday at the Karaki house seemed shocked at the idea Karaki was murdered for nationalistic reasons. A neighbor, Wahib Liftawi, said the police called his nearby grocery store.

"They told us Taysir had had an accident and we should go to the police station in Neve Yaakov," Liftawi said. "Khaled, Taysir's brother, went there and then to Tel Aviv to identify the body. We heard on the news that French people took him to Tel Aviv. They asked him to help them to the apartment with their luggage and then they stabbed him. Allah will not forgive them; he was a good boy."

Jaffa Demo I took part 27th April 2007

Protestors rally in Jaffa against move to evict local Arab families
By Yigal Hai, Haaretz Correspondent

Hundreds of Jaffa residents on Friday participated in a march to protest measures that the Israel Lands Authority and the Amidar housing company have taken in the past year to evict Arab families from Jaffa.

The Israel Lands Authority and Amidar claim the families invaded the properties and built on them illegally.

The march was organized by The Popular Committee to Defend the Land and the Right to Residency, which was established by the Arab residents of Jaffa several weeks ago.

According to the committee's leaders, the Authority and Amidar in the past year issued 500 eviction notices to Arab families from the Al Ajami and Givat Aliya neighborhoods, and some of the notices have evolved into eviction lawsuits.

The organizers of the march questioned why the Authority and Amidar have taken a sudden interest in the matter in the past year, when the families have been living in their homes for several decades. They say the families have held a status of protected tenants who pay rent.

The residents' representatives say the authority and Amidar are attempting to Judaize Jaffa while also making a profit from selling the properties, which are near the seafront, to an affluent Jewish population.

The protesters in the march shouted various slogans such as "Jews and Arabs against house demolitions" and "The transfer won?t happen."

According to the "This is a tsunami of evictions and demolitions," said Al Ajami neighborhood chairman, Camel Agbaria. "The struggle for a roof over one's head should be the ultimate struggle. Instead of firing bullets, they fire dollar bills here."

March participants included Meretz MKs Yossi Beilin and Ran Cohen and Hadash MKs Dov Khenin and Hanna Swaid.


Throughoutt the past week, the Popular Committee handed out flyers to Jaffa residents, calling on them to join the protest. The flyer, entitled "The residents of Jaffa are at risk of being evicted and expelled again," presented a picture from 1948 of an Arab family reluctantly leaving its Jaffa home along side a picture from 2005 of a tractor demolishing the home of an Arab family in Jaffa.

"500 families are at risk of being expelled," the flyer read. "Thousands of people remain with no roofs over their heads for the benefit of the wealthy and rich entrepreneurs."

The Housing Authority and Amidar reject the accusations. A statement issued by the Housing Authority said, "The documents in question are warning letters issued by the Amidar company, which manages the Authorities properties and deals with invaders." Only several dozens of letters have been issued."

"If anyone has any complaints, they are welcome to visit the Amidar offices and prove they have a legal claim to the property," the statement read. "The claims that this is a transfer are demagoguery. No person will be evicted without a court order."

According to the head of the Amidar directorate, Doron Cohen, Amidar rejects "with scorn the demagogic attempt by the 'Popular Committee' to use the events of the War of Independence to protect those who break the law. Amidar works to protect the State's property rights regardless of the tenants' character, religion or nationality."

Iran: There is still Hope, Rafsanjani won!

Today from the BBC:
Iran reformist regains influence
Iran's moderate former President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani has won election to Iran's powerful clerical body, the Assembly of Experts, results show.

With more than half the votes counted, Mr Rafsanjani, who was defeated in the 2005 presidential election, had a clear lead at the top of the list.

The election - and simultaneous local polls - was seen as a test of support for President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Early results suggest liberals and moderates have regained some influence.

Official results have not yet been announced in either of the two elections.

Political revival

Displaying what correspondents describe as a new lease of political life, Mr Rafsanjani led the poll with 1.3 million votes as counting continued.
IRANIAN ELECTIONS
Iranians are voting in two sets of elections
Assembly of Experts poll: Powerful clerical body which supervises the Supreme Leader
Local council polls: More than 250,000 candidates for around 100,000 seats nationwide
46.5 million eligible voters


He is almost half a million votes ahead of the second placed candidate.

His main rival, Ayatollah Mohammad Taghi Mesbah Yazdi - seen as a political mentor to President Ahmadinejad - is trailing in sixth place, but with enough votes to retain a seat on the Assembly of Experts.

Mr Rafsanjani's strong performance has exceeded his supporters' expectations after his humiliating defeat in 2005, the BBC's Sadeq Saba in Tehran says.

The assembly of 86 theologians supervises the activities of Iran's supreme leader and chooses his successor when he dies.

Mr Rafsanjani's success was helped by an unexpectedly high turnout and by a new alliance between him and the reformists, our correspondent says.
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/middle_east/6188207.stm

Published: 2006/12/17 18:17:44 GMT