In Pursuit of Justice

During the day,
Olmert embraces
Mahmoud Abbas
And speaks about
Permanent peace
And a rosy future
For the Palestinians.

During the day - deception.
During the night - reality.

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August 31, 2007

This 1 minute clip from Sheikh Mokhtar Mighrawi’s lecture captures so much wisdom…may Allah (swt) bless him and increase him in knowledge, ameen.

Even when true Muslims are faced with injustice and oppression…they are peaceful at heart. 

Watch video here

“After watching this and knowing that not a single Israeli academic, cultural or environmental institution raises an eyebrow about such gross human rights violations, what do you say about the cultural, academic, and other boycotts
of Israel?” - Dr. Mazin Qumsiyeh

Also check out this excellent article by John Pilger on the global boycott movement against the Apartheid state of Israel.

This article in the Financial Times captures a lot of my thoughts after the recent Turkish elections.  Had I written the article, I would have been harsher on the EU, noting their islamophobic stance highlighted by the Pope’s remarks. 

Excerpts below:

Three reasons for the AKP’s success seem to stand out.

First, it helps to be competent and to have a national project. When Mr Erdogan’s party first won office in 2002 the nationalist right was a howling irrelevance, the left a museum-piece, and the liberal and social democratic centre had fragmented into shrinking personality cults for giant egos, cut off from the conservative heartland of Anatolia and, indeed, the lives of ordinary Turks they did so little to improve.

The AKP, by contrast, is a considered project. Recycled from the wreckage of two banned Islamist parties, liberally seasoned with mainstream conservatives and Turkey’s new business class, Mr Erdogan and his friends did their homework while they were putting the party together. They interviewed 41,000 people nationally, learning that ties to Europe and an economy in the worst recession since 1945 overwhelmingly dominated Turkish concerns; headline issues such as headscarves came a distant ninth.

The AKP has since provided good governance, with high economic growth and stability, rocketing inward investment, 2.5m new jobs and near doubled per capita income, while raising spending on education and infrastructure. It has also, as part of Turkey’s attempt to meet the criteria of European Union membership, presided over a constitutional revolution: abolishing the death penalty and criminalising torture, introducing democratic freedoms of expression and association and minority rights for the Kurds – and, above all, subordinating the army to civilian authority.

But a second reason for the AKP’s success is its astute reading of the social transformation of the country. The party is now the chosen path to modernity of the socially conservative, religiously observant but at the same time dynamic and entrepreneurial middle classes of central Anatolia, who now demand their rightful share in power, hitherto monopolised by a self-perpetuating secular elite.

The AKP’s appeal is aspirational, about giving people the chance to build fulfilling lives; but reassuring, by holding fast to the moorings of family, religion and the villages from which many Turks are just a generation away. In Islamist terms this is a traditionalist world-view that looks forward, rather than a radical outlook that harks backwards in a violent lament for past glory.

Many Turkish secularists know full well this is not theocracy by stealth; there is, indeed, a definite whiff of class animus in their resistance to the shift in the balance of power towards Turks from the provinces and the countryside. Their outlook is ossified. They are shrine-keepers for Mustafa Kemal Atatürk who, like many of those who built republican Turkey from the remains of the Ottoman empire, was a refugee, regrouping behind an essentially defensive political (and military) culture.

The AKP’s third ace – and Turkey’s – has been Europe. EU membership, finally under negotiation but now stalled, is still a popular and unifying idea in Turkey. Just about. Until reluctant partners such as France, Germany and Austria raised the bar for Turkish entry, the European project provided Turkey with not only an engine of reform but the glue of political cohesion. The Kemalists and military saw in the EU a fulfilment of the country’s western vocation forseen by Atatürk, while the AKP saw in the EU’s democratic club rules a shield against the generals.

Read on here

Excellent article by Azmi Bishara in Al Ahram on the current situation in South Africa and ofcourse tiying that back to the Palestinian situation.  Excerpts below:

The world looks different from the southern tip of Africa. There, in that country that liberated itself from a colonialist apartheid regime a decade ago, the people have embarked on a bold venture to build a nation. They have a sophisticated democratic constitution that officially recognises 11 languages within the framework of a multi- ethnic, multi-tribal, multi-religious civil polity founded on the concept of equal citizenship. This constitution embodies different aims and different priorities. It embodies a revolution that has transformed itself into a state, not only by means of the fight until victory but also by means of the arts of negotiation and compromise that made the transition possible.

The ANC and the apartheid elite struck a comprehensive and long-range deal. But ultimately that deal was founded upon the recognition of the justice of the cause of equality and the rejection of racism. It did not equate the state of liberty with a state of slavery, or the act of oppression with the act of resistance. It did not produce a middle ground between two antithetical rights: the rights of the victim and the rights of the criminal. The deal arose from the momentous and final defeat of the apartheid system, the recognition that its inherent racism and oppression were incontrovertibly evil, and the admission that it was now time for that system to consign itself to history. The deal, moreover, went into the details of how these principles should be put into effect: the steps that were needed, the timeframes of implementation, the costs they would entail and how to bring the past to account. But there was no leniency with that past. Leniency was shown to the people who had served as the tools of the old order and even with some of the people who had been in charge, as long as they were not directly responsible for crimes against humanity. The deal accomplished its objective. It abolished apartheid rule in a way that spared the country massive bloodshed and years of strife. It made it possible for the old order to dissolve itself and for the leaders of that order to relinquish power without fear of revenge against their own persons and against whites in general. This was the spirit of tolerance and magnanimity at work, not some obfuscation between the oppressor and the oppressed or between an unjust regime and the justice of the cause of those who fought to overturn it.

Isn’t it amazing that discussions of this sort could arise at a time when the Palestinians and their cause against the colonialist apartheid system in Palestine are in such a tragic plight? While the Palestinians are mired in turmoil and confusion, their friends in South Africa and elsewhere are in a quandary over whether to be more Palestinian than the Palestinians: Should they support Hamas or Fatah? Is it right to boycott Israel when the Palestinian leadership, itself, is busily normalising relations with the Israeli government? One can understand their predicament. However, they should bear in mind that in Palestine this “normalisation” is taking place before any deal has been struck and that whatever deals are in the works do not aim to alter the existing racist order.

So what are friends of the Palestinian people supposed to do if they feel that racism and colonialism are universal moral questions and not foreign or domestic policy issues in this day and age? Here are Israel and the Palestinian Authority on the verge of producing some vague declaration of principles that will offer the Palestinians even less than what Barak proposed in Camp David II. There’s a conference in the works that the Americans tentatively called a “meeting” (so as to spare the participants any embarrassment and so as to keep people from pinning too high expectations on what is essentially a PR gambit). But the contours of the outcome of that meeting have been clear for quite a while. They have been shaped by current balances of power. There will be no right of return for Palestinian refugees; East Jerusalem will not be the Palestinian capital; and there will be no dismantlement of all Israeli settlements and no return to pre-June 1967 borders. At the same time, the Zionist regime will remain fully intact and its inherent racism will become a domestic issue.

It seems that it is time to make a choice. Either people can go along with that settlement that will take endless years to put into effect while Israel milks the opportunity to normalise relations with Arab governments, while anything that could be termed Palestinian unity is reduced to a vestige, while even water and air become issues to be haggled over across the negotiating table and while prisoners of conscience becomes a cause that supersedes the cause they were imprisoned for; or they can come up with an alternative solution, one that lets everyone know what it means to take a stance against the occupation and for national liberation within the framework of a democratic political agenda.

Read on here

“Oh Zionists, if you think of launching a war on Lebanon, and I don’t advise to do it, … I promise you a big surprise that could change the fate of war and the fate of the region

I make this commitment with the resistance to protect Lebanon and the Lebanese people,” Nasrallah said, drawing cheers from the crowd. “If the war occurs, God forbids — and I repeat that we don’t want it — we must be ready for it in the resistance, the army, the people and the state.”

“They (America and Israel) wanted to tear us apart,” the Shiite Muslim leader said.

“They wanted to use war to isolate us one country after the other, one people after the other, one sect after the other and one party after the other,” Nasrallah said. “When we are divided, they will win and we will be defeated.”

“The most serious accusation was the sectarian issue,” he added. “They told the Christians that the fighting was with a Muslim group and that it has nothing to do with you. They told Sunni Muslims that the fighting was with a Shiite group and was targeting the Shiite project (in the region),” he said

Read on here and more on speech in Al Akhbar article here

Full text of speech in Arabic here (I hate to link to the racist, blood thirsty L.F. but that’s the only source I could find)

May Allah (swt) bring victory to those who sincerely fight in His way to lift oppression and bring a just peace, Ameen!

I cannot believe that Time magazine would publish anything close to this article, reflecting for once the true nature of Hamas’s role in Gaza. 

Check it out for yourself:

On Patrol in Shijaiyah, the toughest neighborhood in Gaza City, Lieut. Naim Ashraf Mushtaha, 31, an officer of the Hamas Executive Force, spots a man in civilian clothes carrying an M-16 assault rifle and walking through the street suqs in broad daylight. His officers quickly encircle the suspect and demand that he identify himself and turn over the weapon. The man turns out to be a member of one of the neighborhood’s most powerful clans, and he refuses to give up his gun. “What’s my name, boys?” he shouts to the gathering crowd of curious onlookers. “Mohassi Abbas!” they shout back. “See, everyone knows who I am,” says the gunman. “I don’t care who you are,” says Mushtaha calmly, without raising his voice or his weapon. “No one is above the law.”

The rule of law has returned to Gaza. Just two months ago, this beachfront slice of sand dunes and concrete jungles, home to about 1.5 million Palestinians, was one of the most dangerous places on earth. In June, after a few days of internecine warfare, Hamas, the Palestinian militant group, took control of Gaza from its rival, Fatah. Since then, Gaza has been under siege. Almost all shipments except for basic humanitarian supplies are barred from entering, and almost nothing comes out. The blockade is part of an Israeli and American strategy to isolate Hamas in the hope that Palestinians will turn away from its Islamist leaders, who have never recognized Israel, and toward Fatah, which is willing to restart the peace process. So far, the plan isn’t working. With a free hand to govern as it pleases, Hamas is building popular support and military capability that may well outlast the international blockade.

Security is key to support for Hamas. Within a week of the takeover, crime, drug smuggling, tribal clashes and kidnappings had largely disappeared. According to human-rights groups, the ability of the Executive Force to achieve such a result is an indictment of the corruption and criminal collusion at the top of the Fatah-dominated security services that once controlled Gaza. “For the last year and a half, there has been an orchestrated escalation of chaos by some Banana Republic officers to show that Hamas does not have control of Gaza,” said Raji Sourani, director of the Palestinian Center for Human Rights. “Gaza became like Somalia, Afghanistan and Iraq. Thugs and gangsters were ruling, and some were supported and protected by our own security forces.”

There have been isolated cases of civil rights abuses by the Executive Force since the takeover. But Hamas hasn’t set up Shari’a courts. Without any help from the regular police, prosecutors and judges–all of whom have been barred from returning to work by the Palestinian government–Hamas is slowly trying to train itself in the administration of Palestinian law. Mushtaha and his officers spend most of their time delivering subpoenas and telling the families of wanted men to turn the suspects in. In Gazan neighborhoods, everyone knows everyone else, and there’s no place to hide: crooks certainly can’t flee to Israel.

With peace on the streets, civil society is returning to Gaza. On Friday night in downtown Gaza City, the streets are clogged with motorcades taking newlyweds and their families to seaside banquet halls. Just one thing is missing: celebratory gunfire. Hamas has banned partying with firearms. But there has been no cultural crackdown since Hamas took over. Gaza has long been more religious and conservative than the rest of Palestinian society–alcohol disappeared from public view here long ago. But secular women who walk the streets of Gaza City without head scarves or veils say they were more likely to be harassed by criminals in the old Gaza than by religious conservatives today. Rumors that Hamas is ordering barbers not to shave beards are just that. I got mine shaved off by Hossein Hussuna, the barber of Hamas leader Ismail Haniya, who told me that most of Haniya’s eight sons are clean shaven.

Only if business owners like my barber succeed will normality return to Gaza. Mohammed Telbani owns the largest factory in Gaza, making cookies and ice cream. But he can’t get his raw materials and packaging through the Israeli embargo, and he can’t send his finished products to the West Bank, where distributors have started buying cookies from Lebanon instead. “I’ve worked on creating that market for 30 years, and now it’s gone,” Telbani said. Gaza’s beaches may be packed and its streets safe, but its factories are shut, and its stores have almost no customers. The economic damage caused by the siege is immense, with unemployment at around 44%; about 80% of the population receives food aid from U.N. agencies. Nasser el-Helou, a hotel owner and a spokesman for the Chamber of Commerce, said the Gazan economy would collapse within weeks if the siege continues.

Continue here

Overall, I think the article does a good job of summarizing the situation from all sides.  Compared to other recent articles on the issue, this one definately shows more understanding of the government’s position  Excerpts below:

After several years of unprecedented labor unrest, the government is seeking peace with this army of sweat-stained migrants who make local citizens a minority in their own country and sustain one of the world’s great building booms. Regulators here have enforced midday sun breaks, improved health benefits, upgraded living conditions and cracked down on employers brazen enough to stop paying workers at all.

Change here is constrained by rival concerns of the sort that shape the prospects of workers worldwide. Like many countries, only more so, the United Arab Emirates needs the foreign laborers but fears their numbers. The recent focus on the workers’ conditions still leaves them under close watch, segregated from the general population, with no right to unionize and no chance at citizenship.

“We want to protect the minority, which is us,” Mr. Kaabi said.

The results form a portrait of halting change in a region synonymous with foreign labor and, for many years, labor abuse.

Many rich countries, including the United States, rely on cheap foreign workers. But no country is as dependent as the United Arab Emirates, where foreigners make up about 85 percent of the population and 99 percent of the private work force. From bankers to barbers, there are 4.5 million foreigners here, compared with 800,000 Emirati citizens, according to the Ministry of Labor. About two-thirds of the foreigners are South Asians, including most of the 1.2 million construction workers.

The labor agitation came as a surprise in this city of glass towers and marble-tiled malls where social harmony is part of the marketing plan and political action can seem all but extinct. But when thousands of migrant construction workers walked off the job last year, blocking traffic and smashing parked cars, it became clear that the nonnatives were restless.

Change here is constrained by rival concerns of the sort that shape the prospects of workers worldwide. Like many countries, only more so, the United Arab Emirates needs the foreign laborers but fears their numbers. The recent focus on the workers’ conditions still leaves them under close watch, segregated from the general population, with no right to unionize and no chance at citizenship.

“We want to protect the minority, which is us,” Mr. Kaabi said.

Read on here

I must say though that Mr. Kaabi’s above statment about protecting “the minority” seems ridiculous to me.  How does forbidding labor unions protect the minority?  All it does is protect the interests of money-hungry investors and business men.  Although many emaratis are of that category, there are many others who are not.

I guess “minority” has a different meaning in the GCC.

The Civil Administration confiscated a tractor and a water tank belonging to Palestinian shepherds living in the northern Jordan Valley.

This was the only readily available water source for the approximately 60 members of the Basharat and Bani-Oudeh families and their 1,500 heads of sheep and goats.

Below are excerpts of a speech delivered at a rally against the demolition of 30 Mizrahi families’ homes in Kfar Shalem, Israel, July 7th, 2007:

There are around a million Israeli citizens these days, mostly Ashkenazim, who brandish an EU passport. But we, Mizrahim, have nowhere to go. We were brought here as their “natural laborers,” and from the early 1950s on, were stuffed by the master into the spacious Nakba villages, but in crowded conditions, to eliminate any possibility for the Palestinians to enact their right of return.Today, these are our homes. This is why we have to do our homework: delve into the history of our mothers’ and fathers’ Jewish homes: Yemeni homes. Persian homes. Iraqi homes. Syrian homes. Turkish homes. In short, Mizrahi homes. These are the homes that our master has forced us to unlearn and hate from 1882 on.

Complete speech at Electronic Intifada

Again, racism is alive and well in Israel, and it’s directed not just at the Palestinians.

Jonathan Cook’s recent article in Al Ahram provides insight into the causes and consequences of the new law passed by the Knesset regarding land owned by the Jewish National Fund.  It paints a very scary picture.  Racism is alive and well in Israel.

Excerpts below:

The legislation is designed to nullify the threat posed by a Supreme Court judgment, reached in 2000, that potentially opens the door to thousands of Arab families leaving the tightly controlled areas assigned to them and choosing where they live. Currently Arab citizens, who comprise a fifth of the population, are barred from buying homes in most of the country.

The move is the latest in a series of battles since Israel’s establishment in 1948 to ensure exclusive Jewish control of land through an international Zionist organisation known as the Jewish National Fund (JNF). By the time of Israel’s founding, the JNF had bought about six per cent of historic Palestine for Jewish settlement. Rather than demanding that these territories be handed over by the JNF, the new state authorities assigned the organisation a special, quasi- governmental status. The JNF was also given a significant share of the lands and property confiscated from hundreds of thousands of Palestinians expelled during the 1948 War.

Today, the state has nationalised 80 per cent of land inside Israel, and the JNF holds another 13 per cent. Neither sells land to private owners on the grounds that it is being held in trust for worldwide Jewry. Instead, they offer long-term leases on the land in their possession.

Arab Knesset member Wassel Taha, of the National Democratic Assembly, said: “Only an insane Knesset would pass a racist law that affirms the great land theft of 1948 and turns it into Jews- only property.”

Read on here