IRIS Blog

By Hazem Saghieh (Dar Al-Hayat-Lebanon)

We have just seen how Egypt voted in big numbers for the Muslim Brotherhood, and how Iran left behind the peaceful Islamism represented by President Mohammad Khatami for a rougher kind, represented by his successor, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. After the fall of Saddam Hussein, Iraq has revealed two radical Islamic currents, one Sunni and one Shiite, while in Syria, it's said that the Islamists will take over from the Syrian Baath Party, if the regime falls.

When it comes to Palestine, we see the rise of Hamas in local elections (and probably in legislative elections in a few weeks' time). We also see it in the street, with clothing, behavior, and general appearance, in Islamic countries and in the diaspora.

The heresy that all of the Middle East's problems are not due to the Arab-Israeli conflict is now being openly stated in the Arab World. Maybe Bush could launch a war to liberate US Middle East Studies departments?

By Khaled Abu Toameh

Three armed Palestinian groups in the Gaza Strip on Monday threatened to continue their attacks on Israel and said they have long-range missiles capable of reaching more Israeli towns and cities. The Aksa Martyrs Brigades, the armed wing of Fatah, claimed it possessed Grad missiles with a range of 25 km. The 122-mm. Grad missile, officially known as BM-21, was first used by the Soviet Red Army in 1963. The Popular Resistance Committees claimed its members had developed a homemade rocket with a range of 15 km.

I have been warning since August that this would be the main post-Gaza withrawal goal of the Palestinians--arming Gaza as a world terror hub, and then creating arms canals to Judea and central Israel. The Rafah border-crossing deal was an Israeli capitulation on every strategic front. Eventually the goal is to create this nightmare scenario. Other essential IRIS security maps are here.

From Fafo:

According to a survey of Palestinian opinion financed by Norway's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 65% support al-Qaeda actions in the U.S. and Europe, 32% support al-Qaeda actions in Iraq, and 13% support al-Qaeda actions in Jordan.

Some 69% of Palestinians see violent action as legitimate and half believe that suicide attacks are necessary to force Israel to make political concessions. However, 57% believe the intifada should stop and 74% think that attacks from Gaza should cease. 83% think it is in the Palestinian people's interest to keep the ceasefire with Israel, but only 26% support the use of force by Palestinian security services against those who break the calm.

How could two news stories reach opposite conclusions about the same event?

Bethlehem Hosts Huge Christmas Crowds

Tourists Lacking in Bethlehem at Christmas: Security Wall Blamed for Lack of Visitors

Although the articles' titles are diametrically opposed, what is important is the greater truth--both stories present Israel as ruining Bethlehem's Christmas, precisely the same story that is run every year at this time. The mainstream media simply substitute different facts into the template in order to draw the same conclusion. This, of course, despite the larger truth inversion: Israel has been the greatest of defenders of Christian religious rights and the Palestinian Authority has caused Bethlehem's Christians to flee.

This year, however, is funny. A large number of stories plagiarize the same idea--that Israel would have ruined the trip of Joseph and Mary. Here is a sampler, beginning with the two articles cited above:

The barrier put a damper on the Christmas spirit, preventing tourists from walking into town on the biblical-era route likely used by Joseph and Mary.

By some accounts, if Mary and Joseph were to travel from Nazareth to Bethlehem today, they'd have to pass through more than a dozen military checkpoints.

Today's Joseph and Mary Would Face 15 Checkpoints

If Mary and Joseph had to get to Bethlehem this year, they would find themselves confronted with a 9-metre high concrete wall and a sophisticated, high-tech checkpoint

For the first time since, perhaps, Mary and Joseph walked there, you cannot walk the traditional path the young couple followed to the nondescript cave where Christ was born. You can't walk the route because the security wall cuts right across it.

The dusty road to the town of Jesus?s birth has been the gateway to Bethlehem since biblical times and would have been the likely path taken by Mary and Joseph. But today it leads to what the mayor of Bethlehem calls ?the world?s largest prison?.

Pilgrims taking the road from nearby Jerusalem -- the likely path taken by Mary and Joseph in the Christian narrative -- cannot miss the biggest change to Bethlehem this year: the completion of an eight metre (26 foot)-high concrete wall.

"If Mary and Joseph were here today, they would go through the checkpoint just like everybody else," Sister Erica, a nun, complained to a reporter last week after making the crossing.

It shows Mary and Joseph blocked from getting to Bethlehem by a graffiti wall ? mimicking the Israeli barrier round the Palestinian territories

For a similar, extraordinary example, see: IRIS Exposes Reporters Stealing Others' Errors.

Within the Gates - Fouad Ajami (U.S. News-summarized by the Daily Alert):

-An opponent of the autocracy of President Hosni Mubarak, Yasser Sirri had initially fled to Yemen, then to Sudan. He found refuge in London, where he runs an "Islamic observation center" and carries on with the "holy struggle" against "ungodly" Arab regimes and their supporters in the West.

-The Islamists are now within the gates. They fled the fires and the terrors of the Arab-Islamic world but brought ruin with them. This new Islamism mocks the borders of nations and the very idea of nationality. "We may carry their nationalities," a Wahhabi preacher decreed recently, "but we belong to our religion." The geography of Islam has altered. A religion of Afro-Asia has migrated westward.

-Then the migrants were joined, in the 1980s, by preachers and militant men who had fought and lost cruel, bloody wars against the regimes in Syria, Egypt, Algeria, Tunisia, and other despotic lands. These plotters hated the West but were drawn by its magnetic power. There were liberties in western Europe to be used, and welfare subsidies, and laws against extradition.

-London was the most accommodating of cities. It was there that the big Arabic newspapers, denied oxygen by the repressive regimes of Araby, were published. And it was there that men and women from Arab and Islamic lands built new lives, free to live the life of the faith.
The vulnerability of Europe to the furies of this malignant Islamism is a defining feature of its contemporary life. Still, liberty is not a suicide pact. We should be done with the search for "explanations" that dignify the hatreds, that attribute them to Western deeds and policies. We should see the new hatred dressed in religious garb for what it is: a war against the very order of contemporary life.

By Neal Sandler:

For Israel's high-tech industry, it's beginning to look a lot like the 1990s. Demand for high-tech workers is up almost 19% this year, foreign investment rose sharply in 2005, and exports continue to climb. The number of new startups rose for a second year in a row. Economic recoveries in the U.S., Western Europe, and the Far East have sparked an upturn in demand, with 85% of the local high-tech industry's production earmarked for foreign markets.

Israeli civilian high-tech exports rose by nearly 10% in 2005, to $16.6 billion, representing nearly half of Israel's industrial exports, the highest percentage anywhere in the world. In 2005, local and foreign venture-capital funds plowed $1.5 billion into new ventures in communications, software, the Internet, and life sciences. Foreign investment totaled $6.8 billion in the first three quarters of 2005.

On Dec. 1, Intel announced that it was building a $3.5 billion chip plant in Israel, the largest investment ever by an industrial company in Israel. Israel was responsible for the development of Intel's Centrino mobile technology that powers millions of laptops. Other big names in high tech - including Cisco, Hewlett-Packard, Vishay Intertechnology, IBM, and Siemens - have all announced large-scale investments or have acquired Israeli startups in recent months. Most projections are for Israel's economy to grow by more than 5% in 2006.

Israel is a mix of world-class efficiency and third-world sloth. The critical factor? Government involvement. Israel's high-tech sector has relatively low official intervention (despite their frequent photo-ops to take credit). Where regulation and taxes do interfere, Israeli technology companies relocate to America, particularly Delaware (where there is the least government meddling).

By Jonathan Jaffit

A $2.5 million endowment was made to the Harvard Divinity School by Sheikh Zayed, the dictatorial ruler of the emirate of Abu Dhabi, for the creation of a chair of Islamic studies. Upon learning of this donation, Rachel Fish, a graduate student at the school, took the initiative to expose Sheikh Zayed's multiple abuses of human rights, including the use of child slave labor, and his indulgence in anti-Semitic propaganda. This led to the closure of the Zayed Center, the sheikh's think tank in Abu Dhabi. Fish's almost single-handed action led Harvard to suspend the funding for lengthy investigations. Ultimately, Sheikh Zayed withdrew his donation.

By Alyssa A. Lappen:

On Dec. 13, I attended an emergency conference at the UN's New York headquarters to discuss "Protection of Religious Sites and Prevention of the Use of Violence to Incite Terrorism/Violence." It was called by the Ethics Initiatives Consortium (EIC) and the World Conference of Religions for Peace (WCRP). EIC co-chairs Prof. Amir al-Islam and Shoshana Bekerman wrote in their invitation that they hoped "to prevent future tragedies such as the desecration of the Gush Katif synagogues." Unfortunately, the conference suggested that the UN will do nothing to stop murder or desecration of holy sites in the name of religion - for it seems that no one is willing to confront Muslim denial that fanatics use Islam to incite religious hatred and destruction - much less stop the fanatics.

Talal A. Turfe, co-chairman of the National Conference for Community and Justice, proposed that the conference adopt a project to protect holy sites in Jerusalem. No one, not even the Israeli rabbis, protested. In reality, the only Jerusalem religious site in danger from human destruction is the Temple Mount, which Muslims have excavated, thereby destroying priceless Jewish artifacts and undermining the Mount's foundation itself.

By Amira Hass

"We are Muslims," says Munir, a Hamas activist and former member of Fatah, who is not an official Hamas spokesman. "We vote for Islam because Islam is the solution - on every level....From a religious perspective, Muslims cannot legitimize a State of Israel in this region. The Islamic movement would lose its identity if it recognized Israel as a state."

"People don't turn to religion out of despair. Palestinians are religious by nature. They are what you call mesorati [Munir uses the Hebrew word] - traditional. An overwhelming majority are mesorati. And secondly, the PA may have failed, but in the meantime, the Palestinians have grown up. This process of maturation has led them to seek a better alternative."

Editorial (Washington Post):

Egypt's Ayman Nour, a 41-year-old member of parliament and a secular democrat, is back in prison, having been deprived by fraud of his parliamentary seat. On Saturday, an Egyptian judge notorious for handling Mubarak's dirty work is expected to sentence him to prison. Nour is one of Egypt's foremost proponents of a secular liberal democracy, credited with 8% of the vote in the presidential election. The charge against him, forgery, was proved a fabrication five months ago, when one of the principal witnesses recanted in court, saying he had been forced by state security police to invent his testimony. If Bush's commitment to freedom fighters means anything at all, he cannot allow this blatant act of injustice to go unchallenged.

Each year, the U.S. provides Mubarak's regime with $1.8 billion in military and economic aid; without that money for his generals it's doubtful the aged president could remain in office. Mubarak's vindictive persecution of Nour, whom he perceives as a political rival to his son Gamal, has outraged much of Egypt's political establishment, which would quietly welcome U.S. intervention. The imprisonment of Nour will provide Bush with an opportunity - and an imperative - to fight for the cause of democracy in the heart of the Arab Middle East. Standing with Ayman Nour means standing against military aid for Mubarak until this democratic reformer is free.

Yasser Abbas, an absolute must-read by Tom Gross (Wall Street Journal-summarized by the Daily Alert):

-On the very day that five Israelis were murdered and over 60 injured in a suicide bombing outside a shopping mall in Netanya earlier this month, the official Palestinian newspaper Al-Hayat Al-Jadida reported that Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas had approved fresh financial assistance to the families of suicide bombers. Altogether, the families of these so-called martyrs and of those wounded in terrorist attempts or held in Israeli jails might receive $100 million.

-For over a year now, since Abbas succeeded Arafat, many in the West have done their utmost to "explain" or ignore Abbas's failings. His outright refusal to confront and disarm terrorists, in violation of the Road Map, hardly registers anymore in the Western media. However, the media also give very little idea of the extent to which the PA continues to glorify terrorists.

-This month, the PA renamed the Rafah border crossing "in honor of Shahid (martyr) Al-Agha," who murdered five Israelis in a suicide bombing there in December 2004. There is the soccer tournament named in honor of the terrorist who murdered 30 people at a Passover celebration in Netanya, and a girls' high school named by the PA Ministry of Education after a female terrorist who murdered 36 Israeli civilians. A poetry collection published by the PA Ministry of Culture honors "the Rose of Palestine," a suicide terrorist who killed 21 at a restaurant in Haifa.

-Until Palestinian attitudes change, the Israelis have no choice but to put considerations of security first.