MR's Blog » Middle East

“Niggers don’t expel Jews! This isn’t what we brought you to Israel_for!”

MR — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 17:21:08 +0000

Border Guard officers of Ethiopian descent report rising number of racially motivated verbal attacks from Hebron_youths; Druze officers also suffer racist remarks

Not only do they serve long and tiring hours in the reserve forces, and not only are they forced to deal with violent clashes with settlers, but now, Border Guard officers of Ethiopian descent are also faced with rising racism.

“Niggers don’t expel Jews! This isn’t what we brought you to Israel_for!” are just some of the degrading slurs Border Guard officers reported hearing from masked settlers.

During the violent clashes between Israeli forces and settlers in Hebron_on Tuesday “a bunch of veiled people started yelling at us: Who are you to expel us from our home? An Ethiopian does not expel a Jew! A nigger does not expel a Jew!” one Border Guard officer of Ethiopian descent recounted.

“I just didn’t know what to do with myself,” he said.

Source

Dozens killed in Yemen air strike on al-Qaeda suspects, al-Awlaki may have been amongst them UPDATE: Awlaki is reported to be alive and well

MR — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 15:23:26 +0000

UPDATE: According to this article Anwar al-Awlaki is alive and well.

_____________

At least 30 suspected al-Qaeda militants have been killed by an air strike in a remote mountainous area of Yemen, security officials say.

An unnamed official told reporters the strike took place as dozens of militants gathered in Shabwa province, east of the capital, Sanaa.

Two senior al-Qaeda commanders in the Arabian peninsula could be among the dead, he said.

Al-Qaeda has carried out frequent attacks in Yemen in recent months.

The Saudi government has recently expressed its concern about the resurgence of the movement in the region.

According to the BBC, a Yemeni official said that Anwar al-Awlaki was amongst the dead. Inna lillahi wa inna ilayhi rajioon.

Update: Apparently other news agencies are reporting the same thing. Most likely the same one source.

Reuters news agency cited a security official saying that a radical Muslim preacher linked to the US army psychiatrist charged over the fatal shooting of 13 people at a US army base was suspected to be among those killed.

Yemen-based al-Qaeda sympathiser Anwar al-Awlaki, who was released from a Yemeni prison last year, and Maj Nidal Hasan had exchanged e-mails before the shooting at Fort Hood last month, US officials say.

Sources:BBC, Washington Post, Reuters

Jerusalem Mayor okays baby Clinic for Jews but not for Palestinians

MR — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 16:19:12 +0000

Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat has rejected the recommendation of municipal professionals and will not include the establishment of a well-baby clinic in the Silwan neighborhood in the coming year’s budget. The proposed clinic would have served some 100,000 Arabic-speaking residents. On the other hand, the 7,000 residents of the Old City’s Jewish Quarter will receive a well-baby clinic in 2010.

Source

So 7,000 Jewish citizens can get healthcare for their babies, while 100,000 Palestinians can’t.

The MacBook is a threat to the security of Israel

MR — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 00:58:08 +0000

I guess Steve Jobs is a an anti-Semite. Update: Oh snap! Steve Jobs’ father is Abdulfattah Jandali from Syria! LOL! Related posts: Olives, Hummus, Pita and some Cheese are a threat to the Security of Israel Rahm Emmanuel: “If Israel wants US help to defuse the Iranian threat then get ready to start evacuating settlements [...]

UK to label products “Israeli Settlement Produce” from illegal settlements in Palestine

MR — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 03:58:09 +0000

Props to the UK government for doing this. Boycotting these products will be boycotting terrorists.

Britain has acted to increase pressure on Israel over its West Bank settlements by advising UK supermarkets on how to distinguish between foods from the settlements and Palestinian-manufactured goods.

The government’s move falls short of a legal requirement but is bound to increase the prospects of a consumer boycott of products from those territories. Israeli officials and settler leaders were tonight highly critical of the decision.

Until now, food has been simply labelled “Produce of the West Bank”, but the new, voluntary guidance issued by the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), says labels could give more precise information, like “Israeli settlement produce” or “Palestinian produce”.

Egyptians building wall on Palestinian border? Flooding supply tunnels?

MR — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 12:14:48 +0000

Is the Egyptian government on crack or something? Related posts: Egyptians Attack Palestinians at Border America Building Military Base to control Africa – Literally Israeli TV ad shows Israeli Soldiers Playing Football (Soccer) over the Wall, Palestinians try it out for real and get tear gassed

“Al-Qaida Kills Eight Times More Muslims Than Non-Muslims”

MR — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 18:11:29 +0000

Seems Muslims are collateral damage on all sides of the “war on terror”. Really sad. May Allah protect the innocent.

Few would deny that Muslims too are victims of Islamist terror. But a new study by the Combating Terrorism Center in the US has shown that an overwhelming majority of al-Qaida victims are, in fact, co-religionists.

In the battle against unbelievers, can one also kill Muslims? Even the terror network al-Qaida is troubled by this question.

A leading al-Qaida ideologue for the terror network, Abu Yahya al-Libi, has developed his own theologically-based theory of collateral damage that allows militants to kill Muslims when it is unavoidable.

Even the Iraqi affiliates of Osama bin Laden’s terror group, who are known to be particularly bloodthirsty, claim that they too consider this question. For instance, in a message claiming responsibility for an August attack in Baghdad, the group wished those Sunnis injured in the “operation” a speedy recovery and expressed their hope that those killed would be accepted by God as “martyrs.”

But even as such apologetic communiqués from al-Qaida show the terror network stylizing itself as a defender of the true faith wrestling with religious concepts, they also make it look as though any dead Muslims are regretful but isolated cases. The facts, though, tell a different story.

Between 2004 and 2008, for example, al-Qaida claimed responsibility for 313 attacks, resulting in the deaths of 3,010 people. And even though these attacks include terrorist incidents in the West — in Madrid in 2004 and in London in 2005 — only 12 percent of those killed (371 deaths) were Westerners.

New Report Shows Many More Muslims Killed Than Non-Muslims

It is, of course, no surprise that al-Qaida kills more Muslims than non-Muslims — particularly for people in the Islamic world. But a new report by the Combating Terrorism Center (CTC) at the United States’ Military Academy at West Point in New York — which has gathered together these and other relevant figures in one report (“Deadly Vanguards: A Study Of al-Qaida’s Violence Against Muslims “), spells out the discrepancy in black and white.

The authors of the study admit that their report likely omits a number of Muslim victims. But that was the price of their rigorous methodology, used in an effort to avoid accusations of partisanship.

The researchers only counted the attacks for which al-Qaida claimed responsibility, thus preventing accusations that they were seeking to make al-Qaida look even worse than it is. Still, it is well known that al-Qaida does not claim responsibility for every attack perpetrated, meaning that many victims are likely left out of the report. Furthermore, the researchers only included attacks reported on by the Arab media and relied on the numbers they reported — out of a conviction that the Arab media is more highly regarded in the Muslim world than the Western media. That, though, is not always the case.

Blurred Figures And Inexact Categories Are Problematic

The greatest potential for inaccuracy in the report, however, is the placing of victims into only one of two categories: Western or non-Western. The assumption being that Western would also mean non-Muslim and vice versa. The problems with such a system of categorization are myriad. Not all those living in the Muslim world are Muslim: In Iraq, al-Qaida has launched attacks against Kurds, Yazidi and Christians. Secondly, a lot of the Muslim victims are actually — and deliberately — Shiites. A Sunni group, al-Qaida considers the Shiites to be unbelievers.

Unfortunately news reports don’t tend to differentiate between Sunni and Shiite Muslims, explains Scott Helfstein, one of the writers of the report. This is also the reason for the non-Western and Western categories. “It is easy for journalists to count nationality but they rarely, if ever, identify religion,” Helfstein writes in reply to e-mailed questions from SPIEGEL ONLINE. The report’s writers were well aware of the problem. “But we were not able to find a way around it,” Helfstein notes.

Indeed, the report’s authors confront the shortcomings of their methodology head on. In one passage, they remove attacks in Iraq and Afghanistan from their calculations altogether, resulting in the share of Westerners killed in al-Qaida attacks rising to a much more significant 39 percent. If one removes the Madrid and London attacks from the statistics, though, the share of murdered Westerners drops back down to 13 percent.

Perhaps more significantly, if one only examines attacks in 2007 and disregards those having been perpetrated in Iraq and Afghanistan, the share of non-Westerners killed by al-Qaida rises to 99 percent. In 2008, it was 96 percent.

Non-Westerners 38 Times More Likely To Be Killed

Put another way, between 2006 and 2008, non-Westerners were 38 times more likely to be killed by an al-Qaida attack than Westerners.

“Since al-Qaida has limited capability to strike against its Western enemies, the group maintains its relevance by attacking countries with Muslim majorities,” the study concludes.

The conclusions reached by Helfstein and his co-authors are hardly world changing. They are valuable nonetheless, in that they provide a numerical foundation to the relationship between Muslim and non-Muslim al-Qaida victims.

Still, critics will no doubt point out that the study comes from the CTC, an organization that is part of an American military school. In recent years, the CTC has released a number of excellent studies on terrorism. But because it is actually supplying arguments, backed by scientific research, for the fight against terrorism to decision makers, politicians and military personnel in the US, it cannot be considered strictly neutral. That also applies to this case, especially since a number of American officials have recently begun stressing the point that al-Qaida is particularly violent toward Muslims and can now rely on solid data to back up their argument.

This perceived lack of neutrality doesn’t change the fact that the fundamental findings of the report are correct and meaningful. The authors conclude that if they compare statistics for the years from 1995 to 2003 (excluding the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks in the US as a solitary event), they find that al-Qaida is becoming more violent and “increasingly indiscriminate” in its attacks.

Just how big a problem this discrepancy between Muslim and non-Muslim victims will become for al-Qaida remains to be seen. Even prior to the report’s release, however, it had become a subject of intense debate within the Jihadist seen — with more and more ideologues coming to the conclusion that al-Qaida’s fight on behalf of the downtrodden Muslims isn’t worth it.

Source

While America continues to occupy Iraq and Afghanistan, 600,000 Americans will lose health care

MR — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 20:07:28 +0000

What goes around comes around. While the “collateral damage” continues to climb in Iraq and Afghanistan, the American people are losing their health as well. According to this study 45,000 Americans die annually due to the simple fact that they don’t have health insurance. That’s about 1/3 to the death toll of Iraq. Now AETNA, a major health insurance provider wants to cut over 600,000 Americans from their health insruance. Why? In order to make a profit.

Health insurance giant Aetna is planning to force up to 650,000 clients to drop their coverage next year as it seeks to raise additional revenue to meet profit expectations.

In a third-quarter earnings conference call in late October, officials at Aetna announced that in an effort to improve on a less-than-anticipated profit margin in 2009, they would be raising prices on their consumers in 2010. The insurance giant predicted that the company would subsequently lose between 300,000 and 350,000 members next year from its national account as well as another 300,000 from smaller group accounts

Looks like there is another terrorist entity right here in America.

FIFA, France and Germany build Soccer stadium in Palestine, Israel wants to Demolish it

MR — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 02:31:26 +0000

Kicking footballs is a threat to the national security of Israel.

A friendly game between an Arab soccer team and a Palestinian team was supposed to inaugurate the new stadium being built in the eastern part of Al-Bireh, near Ramallah, at the end of the year. “Supposed to” because the Civil Administration, an arm of the Defense Ministry, has ordered that the work be halted and is threatening demolition.

FIFA, the international soccer federation, financed the stadium as part of a larger program to promote Palestinian soccer. The stadium covers 11 dunams (2.75 acres) and will hold 8,000 seats. An Israeli contractor, in partnership with a Dutch company and a Palestinian subcontractor, constructed the field.

n October 2008, when the field was ready, FIFA president Joseph Blatter and Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Salam Fayyad laid the cornerstone for the stadium. The governments of France and Germany are paying for the construction of stands. The outer wall, the lighting and the scoreboard are being financed by the Al-Bireh municipality, which owns the land and within whose jurisdiction the stadium is located.

Source

Abraj al Bait of Mecca: 2nd Largest Tower in the World

MR — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 06:00:11 +0000

Click here to view the embedded video.

A video of the Zamzam Tower (one of the buidlings part of the Abraj al Bait)

Click here to view the embedded video.