IRIS Blog

They told me that if Hamas took over Gaza, they’d turn their attention to routine stuff like public education. And they were right!

Hamas Backers Replace Gaza's Teachers

The ruling Hamas movement on Wednesday replaced hundreds of striking teachers with its own supporters, purging Gaza's education system of its political rivals and deepening its control of the coastal territory.

During the takeover, Hamas routed forces loyal to the rival Fatah movement. The local teachers' union, one of the last remaining Fatah strongholds in Gaza, called its strike this week to protest the transfers of dozens of educators to new schools. It said Hamas forced the transfers to give its supporters key posts in the education system.

Hamas denied this, but then installed hundreds of new teachers almost immediately after the strike began.

"Anybody who left their job will not be allowed to return," said the Hamas education minister, Mohammed Askoul. "They have become irrelevant and cannot be trusted anymore as educators." He estimated 2,000 teachers have been replaced. About 9,000 teachers work in Gaza's public schools.

The move ensures Gaza's education system will now be stacked with Hamas loyalists. While the group has said it would not impose its strict Islamic views on society, its control of the classrooms is likely to change the tone of instruction and create more sympathy for the group's ideology among the territory's 250,000 public school students.

Hat tip: Dan Friedman

Vice Presidential nominee Joe Biden sure has some interesting impulses with his famous temper. On Tuesday, we reported on his post-9/11 response of sending a $200 million "blank check" to Iran.

In a 1992 Jerusalem Post story, Biden threatened to cut off all aid to Israel unless all settlement activity was stopped:

In a conversation with Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, after a sharp confrontation in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on the subject of the settlements, Begin defined himself as "a proud Jew who does not tremble with fear" when speaking with foreign statesmen.

During that committee hearing, at the height of the Lebanon War, Sen. John [sic] Biden (Delaware) had attacked Israeli settlements in Judea and Samaria and threatened that if Israel did not immediately cease this activity, the US would have to cut economic aid to Israel.

When the senator raised his voice and banged twice on the table with his fist, Begin commented to him: "This desk is designed for writing, not for fists. Don't threaten us with slashing aid. Do you think that because the US lends us money it is entitled to impose on us what we must do? We are grateful for the assistance we have received, but we are not to be threatened. I am a proud Jew. Three thousand years of culture are behind me, and you will not frighten me with threats. Take note: we do not want a single soldier of yours to die for us."

After the meeting, Sen. Moynihan approached Begin and praised him for his cutting reply. To which Begin answered with thanks, defining his stand against threats.

Rudy Giuliani famously had Yassir Arafat ejected from a party he had hosted, while Barack Obama consorted with a paid PLO spokesman from its terrorist heyday in the 1970s. Rudy thinks we should be very worried about Obama:

"There's no question he's ambiguous about" his stand on Israel, Giuliani said, citing specifically that Obama said months ago before a Jewish political group that he supported an undivided Jerusalem, and later aides clarified it.

"I think that his position in dealing with the issues that are important to Israel, like they are important to me in America, is -- (the) best and kindest thing you can say is, ambiguity," he said, clearly referring to security.

Giuliani added it's "of grave concern. It either comes from deeply held views that he has or lack of experience, one or the other. But in either case he's too close to the presidency not to have formed views about this that don't require having to explain it two or three different times."

Senator Joseph Biden was ostensibly chosen by Barack Obama for his foreign policy gravitas. Get a load of this excerpt from the liberal New Republic in the wake of 9/11:

At the Tuesday-morning meeting with committee staffers, Biden launches into a stream-of-consciousness monologue about what his committee should be doing, before he finally admits the obvious: “I’m groping here.” Then he hits on an idea: America needs to show the Arab world that we’re not bent on its destruction. “Seems to me this would be a good time to send, no strings attached, a check for $200 million to Iran,” Biden declares. He surveys the table with raised eyebrows, a How do ya like that? look on his face.

The staffers sit in silence. Finally somebody ventures a response: “I think they’d send it back.” Then another aide speaks up delicately: “The thing I would worry about is that it would almost look like a publicity stunt.” Still another reminds Biden that an Iranian delegation is in Moscow that very day to discuss a $300 million arms deal with Vladimir Putin that the United States has strongly condemned. But Joe Biden is barely listening anymore. He’s already moved on to something else.

Some facts seem to have eluded the foreign policy specialist:

-Iran is Persian, and is therefore not part of the Arab World.

-It is the leading sponsor of Global Jihad terrorism, which is the force that struck America on 9/11.

Far more serious than the bizarre 'brainstorming' idea is the paradigm it reveals--the universally held notion among Democrats that the proper response to the Global Jihad is gift offerings to Muslim countries to demonstrate goodwill. This is the definition of dhimmi behavior.

This may be the most idiodic mainstream media analysis I have ever seen...

The cyanide found in this Somali Muslim's Denver hotel room could have killed hundreds, yet terror has been ruled out.

Apparently being wrong about a large number of "sudden jihad" incidents does not stop this irresistible impulse on the part of law enforcement. Apparently they are not familiar with the fallacy that absence of evidence does not constitute evidence of absence.

In this case, however, a man with this name posted a threat calling for the murder of Christians on July 11th.

Then, after the death, someone posted mocking comments on the same Internet site under the same name, pretending to be writing from Paradise lamenting his lack of 72 virgins. The Rocky Mountain News considers this to be proof that the July 11th poster was the same person "unless someone had taken the name as a joke." I kid you not.

Let me repeat this in case the journalist is trying to understand this. Someone who posts on the Internet after a Muslim death using the name of the deceased claiming to be writing from Paradise lamenting his lack of 72 virgins has most certainly posted the comment as a joke. There is only one other possibility: that it is indeed the deceased, that he has an Internet connection in Paradise, that he mistakenly received male virgins as prizes for his martyrdom, and that he has taken up the term "dudes" to refer to them.

Prediction: this case will be revealed to be yet another case of sudden jihad syndrome.

The number of 'returnees' that Olmert agreed to repatriate in Israel is not important; the principle it establishes is key. Also, it supports the all-important myth that 'Israel is displacing Palestinian natives through occupation:'

One thousand exiled Palestinians will be allowed to reunite with their families in the West Bank and Gaza after Israel agrees to issue permits, Hussein Ash-Sheikh, head of the PA civil affairs department, said Saturday.

Reunification permits were to be issued to a thousand Palestinians living without permits in Palestinian areas, as well as Palestinians living abroad.

Israel agreed to issue the permits during a meeting between Mahmoud Abbas and Prime Minister Olmert last Wednesday.

This is obviously nothing new to IRIS readers, but Jacoby encapsulates the phenomenon in masterful writing:

NO ONE knows just how many Muslim girls and women are murdered each year in the name of family "honor," since their deaths frequently go unreported and unpunished. The cases that do come to light are ghastly. "Women and young girls are set ablaze, strangled, shot at, clubbed, stabbed, tortured, axed, or stoned to death," a United Nations report noted in 2004. "Their bodies are found mutilated with their throat slit, or they are chopped into pieces and thrown in a ditch."

The report singled out as especially horrifying the honor killing in Pakistan of "a 16-year-old girl who was reportedly electrocuted to death after being drugged with sleeping pills and being tied to a wooden bed with iron chains." Her offense: marrying a boy from the wrong community. Countless others have lost their lives for refusing an arranged marriage, wearing Western-style clothing, having a boyfriend, or even being raped.

Recently, the Saudi human rights activist Wajeha al-Huwaidar wrote a scathing essay characterizing honor killings as a scourge peculiar to the "Greater Middle East," with its entrenched culture of misogyny and male supremacy. Her article was prompted by the lynching of 17-year-old Du'a al-Aswad, a Kurdish girl stoned to death by a mob of Iraqi men. (The essay has been translated by the Middle East Media Research Institute, which also provides a link to a gruesome cellphone video of the lynching.) "From Pakistan and Afghanistan through Iran, the Middle East, and all the way to Morocco," Huwaidar wrote, "this entire part of the world [is full of] defeated and dejected men, whose only way to gain some sort of victory is by beating their women to death."

In the last few months, there have been news reports of a Jordanian man murdering his daughter "to cleanse the family's honor" after she kept leaving home without permission; another Jordanian, 22 years old, who gave the same reason - "family honor" - for killing his pregnant sister; a Saudi woman beaten and shot by her father after he discovered her having an online correspondence with a man on Facebook; and two Arab brothers in Israel, who strangled their sister after learning that she was involved in a romantic relationship.

But while honor killings may be more prevalent in the Middle East, no longer are they unknown in the West.

Read the whole thing...

There's only one objectionable sentence in the piece, the de rigeur "look at me, I'm a moderate" line:

Islamic religious tradition does not sanction honor killing

Here is an article which describes the link in much more depressing terms. One fact worthy of note is that religious elements are often the ones opposed to the enactment of punishments for honor killings.

Western apologists parrot the line that extremists twist the Koran, when it is they who are doing the spinning:

There is no minimal age for entering marriage. You can have a marriage contract even with a one-year-old girl, not to mention a girl of nine, seven, or eight. This is merely a contract [indicating] consent. The guardian in such a case must be the father, because the father's opinion is obligatory. Thus, the girl becomes a wife...

But is the girl ready for sex or not? What is the appropriate age for having sex for the first time? This varies according to environment and traditions. In Yemen, girls are married off at nine, ten, 11, eight, or 13, while in other countries, they are married off at 16. Some countries have legislated laws forbidding having sex before the girl is 18....

The Prophet Muhammad is the model we follow. He took 'Aisha to be his wife when she was six, but he had sex with her only when she was nine."

Here is an update on a previous story. It should be noted that because of universal persecution, the only non-Muslim population growing in a Muslim-majority area is Israel. All others are fleeing:

For a second consecutive night some 580 students from the Arastamar Evangelical School of Theology (SETIA) in East Jakarta slept in the lobby of Indonesia’s parliament yesterday following demonstrations against the school that left at least 17 students injured.

Urged on by announcements from a mosque loudspeaker to “drive out the unwanted neighbor,” hundreds of protestors shouting “Allahu-Akbar [God is greater]” and brandishing machetes, sharpened bamboo and acid continued to attack 1,400 students and school staff members even as they were evacuated over the weekend (July 26-27).

Besides the students in the parliamentary building, hundreds of others were evacuated to area denominational and medical facilities. The violence took place in spite of the efforts of 400 police officers summoned after tensions erupted on Friday (July 25).

Students and school staff taking refuge in the parliament building lobby asked government officials to return them to the college and guarantee their safety there. They talked with members of parliament, particularly from the Prosperous Peace Party (PDS), a Christian party led by Karol Daniel Kadang.

The parliamentary members promised the students, staff members and their lawyers that they would contact the head of the National Police Department to file a complaint about officers who failed to protect them during the July 25-27 violence that caused 85 million rupiahs (US$9,325) in damages.

Lawyers for the students and staff members also demanded capture of those responsible for the violence, as well as the firing of the mayor of East Jakarta, known as Murdani, for blaming the Christian students whom he referred to as a minority group that “should behave.”

A seemingly harmless incident touched off the protests. Local sources said that at 10:30 p.m. on Friday (July 25), two SETIA students, Julius Koli and Jonny Gontoh, returned to their dormitory to find a large rat, and one of them threw his sandal at it. The sandal fell onto a neighbor’s property, and when the two went there to retrieve the sandal, area residents shouted “Thieves!”

By midnight mobs had formed and were attacking two male dormitories. At 2:30 a.m., mobs had reached the third floor of one of the dormitories and were trying to burn it down. Local sources said that when they set the building on fire, gasoline spilled onto the leg of one of the attackers, and they ran away.

Here are two articles that show the writing on the wall. The PA is essentially a front for the receipt of Western cash and Israeli land concessions, which will be left in place as long as it serves the interests of Hamas:

Peace Talks with PA Purely Cosmetic

According to the IDF General Staff, the IDF is the only force preventing a Hamas takeover in the West Bank. The talks between Israel and the PA are purely cosmetic, since Israel's negotiating partner does not represent any real political force.

Anyone who is counting on Fatah to reform itself in order to serve as a counterweight to Hamas in the West Bank is fooling himself.

If Israel frees Hamas' West Bank political leadership - which was arrested two years ago in the wake of the kidnapping of Cpl. Gilad Shalit - in a prisoner exchange for Shalit, this will only help Hamas to take over of the West Bank.

This article confirms the above assessment:

Hamas Prepares for West Bank Takeover
With the most recent fighting, Hamas has ended the role of Fatah in Gaza and is patiently organizing toward the next stage, which includes the takeover the West Bank.

This is to occur after the completion of a prisoner-exchange deal for Gilad Shalit, in which key Hamas cadres and parliament members will be released from jail and return to the West Bank.