Tag Archives: Arab

After The Damage Has Been Done…

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On Wednesday, Breitbart reported the following:

The UK state broadcaster issued an apology on Wednesday after incorrectly reporting Israeli soldiers were targeting “medical teams as well as Arab speakers” while clearing Hamas terrorists out of a Gaza hospital.

The BBC said its report on the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) taking on Hamas terrorists inside a hospital “fell below our usual editorial standards” after the newsreader stated attacks were targeting medics and Arabic speakers.

According to the Guardian:

Hiram Johnson (1866-1945) – a Progressive Republican senator in California. His actual quote, ‘The first casualty, when war comes, is truth’, was said during World War 1. He died on Aug. 6, 1945, the day the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima.

The Breitbart article continues:

The Board of Deputies said they were “absolutely appalled” that the BBC had misreported that the IDF was taking medical teams and Arabic speakers into the hospital to help patients there so catastrophically. “At best”, they said, the misreading of the situation showed a “staggering lack of care” which made a mockery of the BBC’s “oft-stated dedication to professionalism and impartiality”, behind which the Corporation has hidden in the past month to justify not calling the Hamas attack on Israel a terrorist act. The BBC was also criticised for the error by the Israeli Embassy in London.

…The broadcaster issued an apology on Wednesday, and said on air:

And now, an apology from the BBC. BBC News as it covered initial reports that Israeli forces had entered Gaza’s main hospital, we said that medical teams and Arab speakers were being targeted. This was incorrect and misquoted a Reuters report. We should have said IDF forces included medical teams and Arabic speakers for this operation. So we apologise for this error, which fell below our usual editorial standards. The correct version of events was broadcast minutes later.

How many of the people who heard the initial report will hear the apology? This is the sort of sloppy (or biased) reporting that helps terrorists justify their actions (yes, I know there is no justification for terrorism, but in their own minds, the terrorists regard what they are doing as their ticket to paradise).

In general, the media has forgotten the horrors of October 7th and replaced them with criticism of Israel defending its people.

This Is Not According To The U.S. Constitution

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On Tuesday, PJ Media posted an article about a Pastor who was arrested at the Mall of America in Bloomington, Minnesota. Ramin Parsa is a Christian pastor who fled Iran as a religious refugee.

The article reports:

Parsa, a pastor at Redemptive Love Ministries International in Los Angeles, Calif., traveled to Minnesota for two days to visit two different churches. He went to the Mall of America (MOA) on Saturday, August 25, with an elder from one of the churches, and with the elder’s 14-year-old son. Shortly after entering the mall, he struck up a conversation with two Somali-American women.

“Our conversation was casual. At first, we were not talking about the gospel,” Parsa recalled. “They asked me, ‘Are you a Muslim?’ I said, ‘No, I used to be a Muslim and I’m a Christian now.’ I was telling them the story of how I converted.”

A passerby could not stand the discussion, however. “Another lady told the guard, ‘This guy is harassing us!'” MOA security came and told Parsa to stop soliciting. “I said, ‘We’re not soliciting.’ But we just left,” the pastor explained.

The pastor and his friends went into a coffee shop, bought a latte, and came out. Parsa told PJ Media he thought that would be the end of it. He was sorely mistaken.

“When we came out of the coffee shop, three guards were waiting for us, and they arrested me right there,” the pastor recalled. “They came after me and arrested me, and said, ‘You cannot talk religion here.'”

Parsa told security he was a pastor. “They told me, ‘We arrested pastors before,'” he recalled, still shocked by the answer. “It was something normal for them, they were used to it.”

Meanwhile, the two Somali-American women who wanted to hear the pastor’s story argued with the woman who reported him to security. They defended Parsa. Onlookers asked why the man was being arrested. “They said, ‘Because he’s a Christian,'” Parsa told PJ Media.

That is not supposed to happen in America.

He was held at the Mall by security until the police came. During that time he was denied water and trips to the bathroom.

The article continues:

After nearly four hours, the police arrived.

“The police came to open my handcuffs, and the handcuffs were very tight. It was hurting my hands,” Parsa recalled. “The guard said, ‘I don’t think it hurts that much.'”

He suggested that the security guards treated him with special malice because he is a pastor. “I believe they treated me worse,” he insisted.

The Mall of America did not respond to PJ Media’s request for comment.

After the police took the pastor’s mugshot and fingerprints, they charged him with criminal trespassing. He paid $78 to bail himself out, and his friends picked him up at 2 a.m. While that bail amount may seem low, the pastor insisted, “Every cent is too much for something I haven’t done.”

“I’ve gone through this before — in Muslim countries I was arrested for passing out bibles,” Parsa said. “I didn’t expect that would happen in America. As a citizen in America, I have rights. They denied my basic rights.”

The article concludes:

While Parsa lives in California, he will have to appear in a Minnesota court to face the charges. He told PJ Media, “We just consulted with a lawyer — we’re going to fight this, to drop the charges.”

If the pastor can confirm his story, it seems the Mall of America may end up facing charges.

This is not the first time Christians have been arrested in America for sharing The Gospel with Muslims. In 2012, a group of Christians was arrested for preaching outside an Arab festival in Dearborn, Michigan (article here). The Islamic religion does not recognize free speech as a right. We need to make sure that Muslims who settle here understand that free speech is a right in America and will be protected. The arrest of the Pastor at the Mall of America is a disgrace to America. I hope the Pastor sues the Mall for damages and uses the money to build a beautiful church!

 

Some Good News From The Middle East

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There is not a lot of good news coming out of the Middle East these days, but there is some. CBN News posted a story today about SodaStream, the company that makes a do-it-yourself-at-home soda machine. The company is located in Mishor Adumim Industrial Park, just outside of Jerusalem, in Israel, in the West Bank. in a building that used to be a munitions factory.

The article reports:

According to Birnbaum (Daniel Birnbaum, CEO of SodaStream), SodaStream is the “largest employer of Palestinian people in the world outside of the Palestinian Authority.”

“We employ 500 Palestinians here. Side by side, we have 350 Israeli Arabs and another 300 Israeli Jews. And we get along together. They’re not killing each other! They go to lunch break. We break bread together and we get to know each other,” he said.

SodaStream pays Israeli wages — four times what workers would earn in the Palestinian Authority, where unemployment is 30 percent.  And the workers say they’re happy, too.

Yousef Besharat is a Palestinian Arab who works at the factory. He told CBN News his salary helped him to build a home in just a year. He said there’s no discrimination between Jewish and Arab workers at the plant.

The article further reports:

Birnbaum gave CBN’s Ross a tour of the factory. He said he calls the room where they assemble the valves “the United Nations.”

“We have people from all over here. You’ll see Palestinians and Israelis. You’ll see Russian immigrants and Ethiopians, Bedouins, women and men. I love this hall,” Birnbaum said.

He introduced CBN News to the shift manager, whom he called “a wonderful Palestinian fellow who started as an entry level and built himself up here at SodaStream in the last few years to shift manager.”

Nabil Besharat is a father of six who has worked at the plant for four years. As shift manager, Besharat is in charge of about 25 people, including Jews and Arabs.

Nabil says he came to the company “for good opportunities, for a good job, for good money,” and he found those things here.

“We work here with Jews, with Christians, with Muslims — all — with Druze,” Nabil told CBN News. They don’t even mention the word conflict, he added.

Israel is one of the few places in the Middle East where people of all faiths are welcome to worship according to their own tradition. It is wonderful to see that they are also willing to encourage Arabs and Jews to work together to manufacture a great product and to build bridges between the two cultures.

This May Make The Peace Process Rather Difficult

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Yesterday The Times of Israel posted a story quoting Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas.

The article states:

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas said there is “no way” he will recognize Israel as a Jewish state and accept a Palestinian capital in just a portion of Israeli-annexed east Jerusalem, rebuffing what Palestinians fear will be key elements of a US peace proposal.

…Speaking to youth activists of his Fatah party, he suggested he would stand firm again, particularly over the demand that the Palestinians recognize Israel as a Jewish state.

“They are pressing and saying, ‘no peace without the Jewish state,’” he said, though not spelling out who is applying the pressure. “There is no way. We will not accept.”

I may be missing something here, but it seems to me that if Palestine is demanding to recognized as a state that they should also be willing to recognize Israel as a state. I have seen the maps drawn by various Arab countries that do not include Israel, and it seems to me that if we are ever going to have peace in the Middle East that kind of foolishness has to stop. If the Palestinian government is going to demand recognition as a Palestinian state, they should be willing to recognize Israel as a Jewish state.

In case you are new to reading this blog, I am going to end this article with something I have quoted before. To me, this quote sums up the history of the Palestinians. It is a quote by Walid Shoebat: “Why is it that on June 4th 1967 I was a Jordanian and overnight I became a Palestinian?” There has never been a Palestinian state (unless you consider Jordan, which is made up of land promised to Israel and then given to the Arabs to form a Palestinian state and then given to the Hashemites when they were driven out of Mecca). The whole argument for a Palestinian state is a rewriting of history. The land has never belonged to the Palestinians–the British called it Palestine as an affront to the Jews.

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Look! A Shiny Object!

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I was listening to the news this morning and heard the criticism of Governor Romney’s speech in Israel. I wondered what he had said that had caused the problem. The press reported that the Palestinians were upset because the Governor commented that the culture of Israel provides a fertile ground for economic prosperity. That statement really doesn’t seem all that offensive. I knew that the Governor had stated that Jerusalem was the capital of Israel, and wondered if that were the real source of the problem. Anyway, I went to Governor Romney’s campaign website to read the speech. The attacks on the speech are another example of the mainstream press’s “Look–a shiny object over here! Don’t look there!” campaign for President Obama.

Governor Romney’s speech outlined some of the political and cultural ideas that have allowed both America and Israel to prosper. Those ideas included democracy, the rule of law, God-given rights, and free enterprise. I can understand how the Palestinians would be upset at these concepts–generally speaking, these are foreign ideas to all of the Arab countries in the region.

One of the things that under-girds national prosperity is the rule of law as it applies to property rights. A man is less likely to improve his property if he does not own it. Also, property rights give the average citizen a means to acquire an asset that will increase in value (generally real estate increases in value) and gain some measure of wealth that he can pass on to his family.

Another thing not mentioned in the Governor’s speech that plays a very important role in a nation’s prosperity is the use of all human resources. When a country excludes women from participating in the work force and excludes the voices of women from government, it decreases by half the flow of ideas and innovation into the economy and into the government. I am not saying that every woman should work or be involved in government, but I am saying that every woman who has something to contribute should be allowed to contribute it.

The corrupt governments of the nations that surround Israel do not encourage prosperity for the average man. The well-connected steal the wealth of the country and the average citizen lives in poverty. The culture of respecting your fellow man and helping him become prosperous is not part of that society. That may be the biggest reason that the culture of Israel creates prosperity and the culture of the Arab nations surrounding Israel does not.

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One Weapon Against Terror Is Paying Attention

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 The Israel National News reported today on an incident near Har Bracha in central Samaria. An IDF soldier stopped an 18-year old Arab man who was climbing in the hills approaching Har Bracha. The soldier noticed that the Arab was carrying an unusually large bag. When the soldier grabbed the Arab’s bag and examined the contents, he found two large pipe bombs, a molotov cocktail and ammunition. After a further search of the area, soldiers found a second bag with similar contents.

The article reminds us:

It should be noted that the spot where the Arab was arrested is mere meters away from the former location of the Hawara checkpoint, which was removed at the orders of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak. Arabs who attempted to smuggle weapons were routinely caught at this crossing, into and out of the Shechem area.

 Somehow, I think they need to put the checkpoint back up.

This is yet another reminder that the quest for peace in the Middle East is not simple. As long as young Arabs are taught that it is noble to kill Israelites, it is futile to even consider negotiations

 
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Some Interesting Thoughts On Peace In The Middle East

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Peasant family of Ramallah. Bauren-familie von...

Image via Wikipedia

William Levinson posted an article today at the American Thinker that had a very interesting perspective on peace in the Middle East.

In the article, Mr. Levinson cites a program used in the automotive industry:

The Automotive Industry Action Group’s CQI-10, “Effective Problem Solving Guideline,” includes a technique called “Is/Is Not.”  This is “a process that distinguishes those aspects associated with a problem from those that might be, but are not” and adds the instruction to “Focus on FACTs, not Opinions.”  If a manufacturing process made the same kind and quantity of defects before installation of a new machine as it did afterward, the machine is clearly not the root cause of the defects.
Obviously that is basic common sense, but somehow common sense never gets applied to the Middle East. Mr. Levinson points out that the premise that creating a Palestinians state out of land Israel gained in the 1967 war will result in peace in the Middle East does not hold up logically–the Arabs attacked Israel in May of 1948 as soon as it became a nation. The only disputed territory that was the basis for that attack was the nation of Israel itself.
Mr. Levinson further points out:

Even though Israel would not “occupy” Gaza, Judea, and Samaria for another nineteen years, its Arab neighbors then began a long litany of terroristic violence against it.  The two-state argument therefore confuses cause with effect.  The “occupation” is the consequence and not the cause of Arab violence, and it is past time to say this openly and without apology or equivocation.  The Arabs did not conspire to attack Israel in 1967 because Israel had occupied their land any more than the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in retaliation for Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Mr. Levinson finally concludes:

The Allies could rehabilitate Germany and Japan economically only after they removed these countries’ warlords from power.  If Israel cannot apply the same remedy to its attackers, it must put them down in such a way that they will never get up again.  This is the only way to achieve lasting peace, and it is the only thing the world’s aggressors fear or understand.

These are lessons we need to apply to Iraq and Afghanistan, but we are choosing to ignore those lessons.

 

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November 3rd In Stoughton Massachusetts

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AN EVENING WITH KENNETH TIMMERMAN
“The 12th Imam, Iran and the Bomb”
November 3, 2011 @ 7:30 PM
Ahavath Torah Congregation
1179 Central Street
Stoughton, MA 02072
Admission: $10
Ken Timmerman is one of the half-dozen true experts on the Islamic Republic of Iran in the U.S. today. Prominently featured in the recent documentary, “Iranium,” he heads the Foundation for Democracy in Iran. FDI is the only group among all those with Iran-related programs that works actively and closely with the pro-freedom movement inside Iran. Ken has spent much of this summer (2011) meeting with Iranian dissidents in Europe, and regularly briefs the U.S. intelligence community on their activities and beliefs. Amongst his experiences, Ken spent 5 months in a PLO jail in Lebanon.
Ken has also been the lead investigator for the “Iran links” lawsuit by families of 9/11 victims. He was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize along with John Bolton for his work on Iran in 2006, and won the Reed Irvine Accuracy in Media award for investigative reporting in February 2011.

More information on Ken can be found at: www.kentimmerman.com, or at his foundation’s website: www.iran.org.

For information email office@atorah.org
Cosponsored by Americans for Peace and Tolerance, ACT Boston



 

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