| The Museum of Palestinian Propaganda Posted: 30 Dec 2011 12:10 PM PST In 2008, there was a stone-laying ceremony in Bethlehem for a new museum called the Palestinian Riwaya Museum. Riwaya means "narrative." It is funded and supported by Norway and UNESCO. The curator of the museum, Samar Martha, was interviewed recently, and her words make it appear that this cultural institution is really more interested in propaganda than in truth. Are their specific historical aspects that you wish to emphasize?
We have only just begun work on the concept. But one important topic will certainly be that of the Palestinian refugees since 1948, because that has very much characterized our self-image. One idea is to ask people who fled from the territory of modern Israel in 1948 and today live in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip or overseas to tell their stories in video interviews. Yet I also wish to illuminate more recent historical events, such as the Intifada and the conflict between Fatah and Hamas in recent years.
Aren't these topics quite disputed among Palestinians?
They are. And that is why all decision-making politicians must be involved in the concept from the very beginning. It is, of course, an important issue who decides about the stories that will be told. We set up a number of discussion groups to deal with these questions. Also, UNESCO, which supports the project, must be convinced of our concept as well as the Peace Center, whose building we are using.
Why did you come up with the idea of this museum?
For a simple reason: because we've never had such a museum. Internationally, the perspective of Palestinian culture and history is very marked by the Israeli perspective. We would like to counter that with a museum that takes up a Palestinian perspective. ...
Do you plan to also involve Israeli artists or academics in the conception of the museum?
If they deal with Israeli history is a self-critical way, then yes.
In the conflict between Palestinians and Israel, violence has not only come from the Israeli side. Will the issue of Palestinian violence also be broached?
We will make an effort to show many sides. But every national museum has a specific, limited perspective. That is the case all over the world, perhaps with the exception of Germany, where the museums deal very critically with their own history. But for us, the main priority is to portray something like a Palestinian identity. A museum where politicians must approve the exhibits? And notice it isn't called the Palestinian Cultural Museum, or History Museum, or even the Palestinian National Museum - but the Palestinian Narrative Museum. The entire point, as the curator shows, is not to portray the truth but to portray a story - and avoid other viewpoints. Granted, national museums do tend to give the official perspective, but this is not called a national museum. It is specifically located next to the Church of the Nativity to attract tourists to swim in the propaganda it provides. Interestingly, the Arabic word Riwaya also means "novel" or "fiction." (h/t Silke) 
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| Unity! Hamas continues to arrest Fatah members in Gaza Posted: 30 Dec 2011 11:00 AM PST As we've been reporting every day this week, Hamas continues to harass Fatah members in Gaza. Today, they arrested 16 more prominent Fatah members. According to Palestine Press Agency, the urgency of the recent arrests is to stop Fatah members from putting on any demonstration to celebrate the 47th anniversary of the PLO on Sunday. Hamas has also been ripping down signs and posters that show support for Fatah. 
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| MB holds rallies all over Jordan Posted: 30 Dec 2011 10:10 AM PST Heads up.... Thousands of Islamist opposition supporters demonstrated Friday in Amman to demand reform, a week after the movement's offices in a northern city were torched during clashes with loyalists.
Chanting "enough is enough," around 7,000 people, including Islamists, youths and tribesmen, marched from Al-Husseini mosque in central Amman to the nearby city hall, an AFP correspondent said.
Carrying a large national flag, they called for "reforming the regime" and fighting corruption, rejecting "intimidation and bullying."
"The Muslim Brotherhood will not give up demands for reforms. We will not give in to the corrupt and those who are against reform," Rheil Gharaibeh, the movement's spokesman, told the crowds.
Last Friday, opposition Islamist demonstrators and government loyalists clashed in the northern city of Mafraq, where dozens, including police, were wounded and shops were destroyed.
The government has said it was investigating the clashes, during which the offices of the Islamic Action Front, the Muslim Brotherhood's political arm, were torched.
The Islamists have called for arresting the attackers, accusing security services of backing them.
Pro-reform demonstrations were also held in other Jordanian cities, including Irbid and Salt in the north as well as Karak in the south.
Islamists, youth groups and other parties have been protesting since January, demanding political and economic change and an end to corruption. Today's protests are getting lots of attention in Jordanian media. 
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| Top 18 EoZ posts of the year Posted: 30 Dec 2011 08:55 AM PST Well, I gave it a shot anyway. I wrote 3000 posts in 2011 and don't have time to go through them all, and even with skimming them I only made it to August. But here are some good and representative posts from 2011: And there are plenty of fiskings, historical research, original graphics, and journalistic scoops where those came from. If you like what you see - please consider a donation. 
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| Nice shooting Posted: 30 Dec 2011 07:45 AM PST Two communiques from the IDF this morning: A short while ago, IAF aircraft targeted a terrorist squad that was identified moments before firing rockets at Israel from the northern Gaza Strip. A hit was confirmed, thwarting the rocket fire attempt.
The aforementioned squad is responsible for the firing of rockets at Israel in the past number of days.
The terrorist who was targeted is Muaman Abu-daf, a senior operative in the Global Jihad terror movement. He orchestrated and executed numerous and varied terror attacks against Israeli citizens and IDF soldiers including laying explosive devices in the area adjacent to the security fence and was involved in different firing incidents. Furthermore, Abu-daf was actively involved in the preparations of the attempted terror attack on the Israel-Egypt border that was thwarted this week. Ma'an confirms the story and adds: That appeared to refer to Israel's killing on Tuesday of another Salafi fighter, Abdallah Telbani, who the military said had been plotting strikes in which gunmen would circumvent the fortified Gaza border by attacking south Israel from the Sinai.
"We shoot when we're being shot at," one Israeli security official said after Friday's air strike in Gaza. "It's clear that Hamas does not have an interest in fanning the flames at this time, but it's not dousing them either." Once again, a terrorist killed - and no one else. (h/t Silke) 
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| Israel, better than ever (Yaacov Lozowick) Posted: 30 Dec 2011 06:56 AM PST Yaacov writes one of his now-rare posts, and as always, it is a good one: Economics: While the European economy enters recession if not worse, and the American economy is in a protracted funk, the Israeli economy continutes to boom. Here, check it out at the Economist website, which tells that GDP is growing higher in Israel than in any European country, the US, and lots of other places too. Unemployment, you might be interested to hear, at 5.6%, is not only lower than in most countries, it's at its lowest in Israel for decades and by some estiamtes, the lowest ever. If things stay this way until the next elections there will be no need to speculate on how crazy the Israeli voters have become to re-elect that supposedly universally hated government: any government running for re-election with an economy like this would stand a fine chance of re-election.
The BDS campaign to destroy Israel is not obviously working, apparently.
Culture: is Jewish culture thriving, stagnating or declining in Israel? This is a rhetorical question. There's no measure I can think of by which to claim there's any stagnation or decline. It has been thousands of years since the Jews have had such a broad-based cultural creativity, which isn't surprising if you remind yourself that fo rthe first time in millennia there are millions of Jews living in their language in their own society (and their own land).
How does cultural creativity fit into disappearing freedom of thought, you ask? It doesn't. The disappearing freedom and democracy exist only in the minds of a certain section of Israeli society and the multitudes of ignorant foreign reporters and politicians who avidly agree with them whenever they criticise Israel. Apart from them, it's not happening. There's a racuous debate about all sorts of things, of course, but in other countries that would be called democracy, not facism.
Demography: here the question is simple: are the more Jews in Israel today than a year ago. Of course there are. In an aside, the are growing indications that the demographic pendulum has peaked and is swinging back in favor of the Jews over Palestinians, whose birthrate is either declining or tumbling, depending on the data-sets one uses. (Here, for example).
Terrorism is mostly dormant, by Israeli standards. 2011 was one of the most peaceful years Israel has had since 1947. (The Palestinians had a rather peaceful year, too, since there's some correlation between the two).
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Yes, there are lots of folks out there who dislike us, bt that's always been so. These days we don't have to give them too much attention. Seen historically, 2011 was probably one of the best years in millennia of Jewish history. Read the whole thing. 
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| Weirdest fatwas of 2011 Posted: 30 Dec 2011 05:55 AM PST I'm glad that Al Arabiya published these, because if anyone else did it would be considered Islamophobic (and might get one's website taken down.) One of the weirdest and most controversial fatwas in 2011 was one issued by an Islamist preacher who lives in Europe. According to this preacher, women are prohibited from eating phallic-shaped fruits and vegetables like cucumbers, bananas, and carrots. Touching or consuming those, he argued, are bound to turn women on and make them engage in sinful fantasies.
In Morocco, the head of the Moroccan Association for Jurisprudence Research stirred both outrage and controversy when he issued a fatwa allowing Muslim men to have sex with their just-deceased wives under the pretext that nothing in Islam prohibits sex with corpses. This fatwa followed a series of sex-related ones issued by the same cleric.
In Somalia, the ultraconservative al-Shabaab al-Mujahedin Movement issued a fatwa during the holy month of Ramadan prohibiting the consumption of sambousak, a triangular pastry stuffed with meat, cheese, or vegetables. The popular snack, they explained, is a symbol of the Trinity in Christianity and is therefore not to be consumed by Muslims.
In Egypt, religious edicts were in most cases mixed with politics. Sheikh Amr Sotouhi, head of the Islamic Preaching Committee at al-Azhar, issued in November a fatwa prohibiting fathers from marrying their daughters to members of the formerly ruling National Democratic Party owing to their "corruption."
A similar fatwa was issued by the late Sheikh Emad Effat, shot this month during recent clashes between Egyptian protestors and the army. Effat's fatwa prohibited Muslims from voting for members of the same disbanded party and cited the same reason: corruption.
Mohamed Abdel Hadi, deputy chairman of the Salafi al-Nour Party in the governorate of Dakahliya went as far as saying that the results of the parliamentary elections, in which the party scored an unexpected victory, were mentioned in the holy Quran.
The most outrageous fatwa in Egypt was one that came out last June and in which Egyptian preacher Mohamed al-Zoghbi said eating the meat of the jinn is permissible in Islam and left everyone wondering how anyone can get hold of them in the first place, let alone eat their meat. Why, you can buy jinn meat at your neighborhood grocery store! 
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| Latest Latma Posted: 30 Dec 2011 03:51 AM PST |
| Israel to demand compensation from Arab countries Posted: 30 Dec 2011 02:53 AM PST From Arutz-7: The government has decided to tackle head-on the alleged "Arab refugees" issue by renewing efforts for compensation for Jewish victims of Arab pogroms.
Estimates of property losses range from $16 billion to $300 billion in Arab countries where Arab leaders seized their property or took it over after Jews were expelled or forced to flee because of anti-Jewish violence and harassment.
Dr. Avi Bitzur, director-general of the Pensioners' Affairs Ministry, told Voice of Israel government radio it has created a new department to try to collect claims for more than 850,000 Jews from Iran and Arab countries. Approximately 80 percent of them moved to Israel.
Most of the refugees fled or were expelled after the violent Arab reaction to the re-establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, six months after it was recognized by the United Nations under the Partition Plan that the Arab world rejected.
"Israel has talked about this on and off for 60 years. Now we're going to deal with it as we should have all along," said Bitzur.
He added that the Cabinet is scheduled to decide in the next two weeks to raise the issue of Jewish refugees whenever the Palestinian Authority brings up the "right of return."
Bitzur added, "We should know the history of the pogrom in Baghdad in 1941, of the Libyan Jews who ended up in Bergen Belsen. It's time for people to know that there was this part of the Jewish people and its history was brought to an end."
"The UN has dealt at least 700 times with Arab refugees and their property, but not once with the issue of Jewish property." This all makes sense. This story has been picked up in the Arabic press, but with a bizarre addition. There is a second part of the law where the Israeli Foreign Ministry demands Saudi Arabia pay compensation of more than a hundred billion dollars for Jewish property in the kingdom since the time of the Prophet peace be upon him, a project which is currently being analyzed by top experts in international law, history and geography in the Bar-Ilan, Beer Sheva, Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and Haifa universities , with special funding set at U.S. $ 100 million carved from the budget of the Israeli Foreign Ministry in 2012. Israel is spending $100 million to make a claim against Saudi Arabia for the actions of Mohammed? Ummmm...I don't think so. Sounds like an Israeli official made a joke that they took seriously. 
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