| Jordanian pulls gun against fellow panelist on TV Posted: 06 Jul 2012 03:30 PM PDT From the Times of Israel: Jordanian member of parliament pulled a gun on a political activist during a furious debate live on Jordanian TV on Friday.
The MP, named in a YouTube clip of the confrontation as Mohammed Shawabka, was debating a political activist named in the clip as Mansour Sayf al-Din Murad, discussing aspects of Jordanian politics including attitudes surrounding the uprising in Syria.
As the discussion became more heated, each of the men accused the other of various crimes and deviancies, including working for the Israeli Mossad intelligence agency. "You're a Mossad agent," said one. "You're a big crook," said the other.
The MP stood up and began screaming and pointing at the activist, who was sitting opposite him, while the host of the program, Mohammed Habashneh, seated in the center, desperately urged his guests to "calm down."
Instead, the MP sat back down, bent over and took off his right shoe, and threw it at the activist, who ducked behind his desk, knocking it over.
Then the MP pulled a gun — a silver pistol — out of his waistband and briefly brandished it toward the activist, who walked toward him. The MP kept holding the gun, but was no longer pointing it at his critic.
The two men struggled, with the parliamentarian again careful now not to point the gun at his adversary, while the panicked host circumnavigated the strewn furniture to try to break up the fight.
But the two men would not be easily separated, and the brawl continued for some time before the program cut to the credits. This is just so much fun to watch: 
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| Iranian TV stops poll showing Iranians want to stop nuke development Posted: 06 Jul 2012 01:50 PM PDT From Al Arabiya: Iran's state-run TV was forced to cancel two polls after the majority of voting came against the policy of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
The first poll, launched by Iran's state broadcaster IRIB, was about how the Iranians regarded a possible halt in the uranium enrichment operations, which would accordingly halt the whole nuclear project in the country, in return for stopping the international economic sanctions imposed against Tehran.
But the gambit turned into a spectacular own goal after two days of voting when IRIB's news channel screened results showing 63% of respondents in favor of suspending uranium enrichment in exchange for the gradual easing of sanctions.
The TV quickly stopped the poll and replaced it with one seeking viewers' opinions on an Iranian parliament proposal to close the Strait of Hormuz, a strategically vital waterway in the Arabian Gulf that is the passageway for about one-fifth of the world's oil supplies.
But that too appeared to backfire when 89% of respondents opposed closing the strait.
It was subsequently replaced by another survey about the popular Iranian football club, Persepolis. Maybe they are too scared to ask "Do you hate Israel?" On a related note, from AP: She's Israel's top diva, the Jewish state's beloved national singer.
So when Rita released an album entirely in the language of her country's arch-enemy Iran, naturally more than a few eyebrows were raised.
"Even my friends, when I told them I was going to do a whole record in Persian, said 'Whoa, you are going to sing in the language of (Mahmoud) Ahmadinejad,'" she said, referring to the Iranian president who has called the Holocaust a myth and threatened to wipe Israel off the map. "I'm combining Hebrew and Persian so much together and I am showing that it is possible."
The album, "My Joys," went gold in Israel within three weeks. More significantly, though, it seems to have generated a following in the underground music circuit in Iran at a time when tensions are high between the two countries over Iran's suspect nuclear program. 
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| Ramadan TV channel where every woman wears a garbage bag Posted: 06 Jul 2012 11:45 AM PDT From Egypt Independent: State-run Al-Ahram newspaper said Thursday that there are plans to launch a satellite channel during Ramadan featuring only women who wear the niqab.
Safaa al-Refa'ei, a Qur'an teacher who is in charge of the channel, called "Maria," refused to disclose the channel's funding.
Refa'ei stressed that wearing a niqab is one of the main requirements for workers in the channel as well as guests, saying "Niqab is a red line that cannot be bypassed."
Some current staff members do not wear niqab, but Refa'ei explained that this is only temporary until they can be replaced by niqab-wearing workers.
Refa'ei said that the idea of the channel is not discriminatory at all.
"Sheikh Abu Islam opened this channel to regain the dignity of women in niqab who have been persecuted and were subject to dismissal from work over the past decades," Refa'ei said. She refused to disclose the identity of the man who she called Abu Islam.
Al-Ahram said that the channel is scheduled to broadcast programming for 6 hours per day, during which there would be interviews with women in niqab. It added that the majority of programs would be on niqab and marital life. I had reported on this in May, but it takes a bit of extra significance after the Egyptian presidential elections. 
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| Friday links by Ian Posted: 06 Jul 2012 10:13 AM PDT Latma summer short The Dour old Man Caroline Glick Yitzhak Shamir's good, great life Sarah Honing Polonium poisoning? London Olympics may include memorial for Israeli victims of Munich attack Jewish Chronicle reports that Opening Ceremony won't have moment of silence, though
"The news that there might be a memorial during the opening ceremony for the Israeli sportsmen murdered in Munich is positive, but I still the urge the IOC to accept what is being asked from them from around the world, namely a one minute silence at the opening ceremony," Ayalon told The Times of Israel. "Such a request has been made by many government and parliaments, which showed that it was never a political or a contentious demand, but a request for a basic humanitarian gesture." Palestinians' Islamist Spring by Khaled Abu Toameh "Yet in the absence of a credible and organized Palestinian opposition in the West Bank, it is most likely that Hamas will hijack any "Palestinian Spring." Unfortunately, the young men and women who are leading the anti-Palestinian Authority campaign in the West Bank do not represent the majority. That is why a Palestinian Spring could quickly turn into an Islamist Spring, paving the way for Hamas to seize control over the West Bank." Hezbollah setting IDF up for another Goldstone' Senior IDF officer says destruction in Lebanon will be extensive due to Hezbollah establishing command posts, bases in villages. Anti Israel culture war of British liberal elites is not a grassroots movement "Too many of our leading British academic and cultural institutions are in the thrall of left-wing activists, but anti-Semitism is far from rife at the British grassroots" Toulouse yeshiva student beaten up in anti-Semitic attack Florida DNC member quits, apologizes over Israel attack "Evelyn Garcia wrote in 2011 email the Palestinians made to suffer a 'guilt trip' for the Holocaust" State Department investigating UN agency for computer shipments to Iran and North Korea Israeli company offers first 'medical smartphone' "LifeWatch Technologies has developed a device that essentially lets users get a full medical checkup just by picking up the phone" 
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| Juan Cole thinks Morsi is just like Jefferson Posted: 06 Jul 2012 09:00 AM PDT I really can't believe that people still take this joker seriously. We should remember that the Thirteen Colonies that made the revolution starting in 1776 were religious societies. They had undergone the Evangelical Great Awakening, and millenarian and anti-papal movements were rife. Religious Americans fought the British for religious as well as material reasons.
...So if you are dismayed that the Muslim an-Nahda Party now dominates the Tunisian cabinet, you may as well be angry about bigotted Congregationaiists coming to power in some of the Thirteen colonies after 1776. (You could argue that the House of Representatives even today is highly religious; and the South Carolina state legislature is apparently a tailgate party for the Southern Baptist convention). Yup, the Founding Fathers sounded just like this: Mohamed Morsi: [in the 1920's, the Egyptians] said: "The constitution is our Koran." They wanted to show that the constitution is a great thing. But Imam [Hassan] Al-Banna, Allah's mercy upon him, said to them: "No, the Koran is our constitution."
The Koran was and will continue to be our constitution.
The Koran will continue to be our constitution.
Mohamed Morsi: The Koran is our constitution.
Crowds: The Koran is our constitution.
Mohamed Morsi: The Prophet Muhammad is our leader.
Crowds: The Prophet Muhammad is our leader.
Mohamed Morsi: Jihad is our path.
Crowds: Jihad is our path.
Mohamed Morsi: And death for the sake of Allah is our most lofty aspiration.
Crowds: And death for the sake of Allah is our most lofty aspiration.
Mohamed Morsi: Above all – Allah is our goal.
[…]
The shari'a, then the shari'a, and finally, the shari'a. This nation will enjoy blessing and revival only through the Islamic shari'a. I take an oath before Allah and before you all that regardless of the actual text [of the constitution]… Allah willing, the text will truly reflect [the shari'a], as will be agreed upon by the Egyptian people, by the Islamic scholars, and by legal and constitutional experts…
Rejoice and rest assured that this people will not accept a text that does not reflect the true meaning of the Islamic shari'a as a text to be implemented and as a platform. The people will not agree to anything else. In Egypt, the MB said they wouldn't get involved in the protests - then they did. They claimed they would not run for parliament - then they did. They claimed they would not run for president - then they did. But Cole believes them when they claim they will allow regular elections and listen to what the people want. It is the "intellectual" equivalent of the mythical " law of averages," I guess. (h/t Ron, O) 
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| Hamas now bizarrely claims Ranaja's death in Damascus was an accident Posted: 06 Jul 2012 07:30 AM PDT Remember Kamal Ranaja, the Hamas member in Syria who was seemingly killed in Damascus a couple of weeks ago? First some Hamas sources blamed the Mossad, then they blamed Syria for the assassination. Palestine Today reports that now some Hamas sources are saying it was an accident. According to the story, Ranaja was trying to run an electric generator in his home when electricity went out. After a while the generator stopped, and Ranaja tried to restart it, but apparently he used a cigarette lighter to see how to fix it. The fuel in the generator caught on fire. Ranaja desperately tried to reach a window, but was overcome by smoke and succumbed. This new story makes no sense. Electric generators that run on gasoline should never be running indoors, for example, because their exhaust is deadly.. And how does this story square with earlier reports that he was assassinated in an unusually brutal way, with him ending up decapitated and his body parts in a closet? It seems more likely that Syria reacted to the accusations that their agents killed him with some threats against Hamas, and they concocted this story to take some of the heat off. See also Challah Hu Akbar who has followed all the twists and turns. 
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| A nutcase American spouts anti-semitism on Iranian TV Posted: 06 Jul 2012 06:00 AM PDT From MEMRI: Following are excerpts from a TV program with the participation of Holocaust denier Joachim Martillo, who was presented on the show as a financial analyst. The program aired on Press TV and was posted on Youtube on June 26, 2012.
Joachim Martillo: […] 90% of the people that were convicted of fraud with regard to the S&L meltdown were Jewish. Now, I have worked in Wall Street, I do consulting there. I am always asked whether I am Jewish, so I can take part in the social networks on Wall Street, and whether I can share insider info and help protect other people, and basically exchange critical information that could be extremely valuable.
We have these vast, essentially ethnic networks on Wall Street. They have been there for a long time. People have written articles about them, but we are not allowed to talk about them.
Well, guess what - the people that Obama brought into his administration to deal with the crisis were people like Larry Summers and [Peter ] Orszag, and it goes on and on if you look at the names, people who belong to these social networks. And they protected themselves, because if anything, the percent that should have gone to jail was higher than the 90% that we saw in the S&L meltdown. But these people were all shielding one another, and therefore, they are protected, and it is quite possible that they will get away with it totally.
So we have to start looking at the ethnic manipulation, the corruption, and conspiracy on Wall Street in a serious way.
[…]
This is not real capitalism, This is crony capitalism, and we have to understand how this whole mortgage construction developed.
What was the big event of the 1970's? That was the Arab oil embargo, which sent up the prices of oil, and basically gave your Arab oil countries a great deal more money to invest in the US.
These financial instruments for securitizing mortgages were used, essentially, as a way to bring Arab oil money into the US as investments and, essentially, loot it for the private gain of a rising class of Eastern European Jewish bankers.
They basically supplanted the older German-American Jewish bankers on Wall Street. So there was sort of an inner conflict on Wall Street.
Once this took place, you saw Wall Street policy - if you can talk of that - being directed to the benefit of serving an international Zionist class, and I know this all sounds like conspiracy theory; but why not? There have been conspiracies on Wall Street since the 19th century.
[…]
There is an intimate connection between the collapse of the financial system both in the United States and worldwide and US international policy and its manipulation by a class of hyper-wealthy Jewish Zionists.
[…] Full PressTV interview here. The only reason that I'm posting this is because Martillo was a famous nutcase in Usenet in the 1980s and 1990s. In 1985, he called himself "Yehoyaqim Shemtob Martillo" or simply "Yakim Martillo" and claimed that he was a Sephardic Jew whose grandfather was a dayan or, minimally, hakam. He espoused extreme hate for pretty much everyone who was not a pure Sefardic Jew - all Ashkenazim, all Muslims, and he antagonized people on newsgroups far and wide from India to Malaysia. But sometimes he would call himself "Joachim Carlo Santos Martillo Ajami". In the 1990s, he started claiming to be a Muslim, I remember a post (can't find it now) where he claimed that the earlier Sefardic posts were written by a friend of his who used his account. Of course, his vitriol and style was identical to his "friend's." I remarked in 2005 that he had married a Muslim named Karin Friedemann who would write things like "Don't trust any kaffirs." Then in 2008 I noted a blog he started called "Ethnic Ashkenazim Against Zionist Israel" where he now claimed to be an "Ethnic Ashkenazic" Jew. He claimed that the Holzbergs, murdered in Mumbai, were spies for the international Chabad spy organization. After all this time, I had never seen what he looked like until now. Even though this is unsubstantiated, here is a hilarious post by someone who did a bit of research on Martillo around 1991. And, yes, he did work for Prime: Some time ago, joakim martillo was hired as an ISDN
telecommunications expert by a company named Prime Computer in
Framingham, Massachusetts. In the one and half year that he
worked there, he did not complete a single project. When
professors were invited to visit Prime Computer, he would
purposely go through the texts they had written to find some
minor point that was arguable and make the professors look
stupid in public. (Sounds familiar?)
One sunny day, one of his supervisors happened to read one of
martillo's postings, you know the ones with the flames(what
else?). The rest is history. Martillo was considered "a
security risk due to his sociopathic personality" and was
forced to resign(that's how I heard it, they didnt say FIRED,
they said "Forced to resign".
Martillo-darling didn't give up though. He had stock in
Prime, and is now suing the Board of Directors of Prime
because he lost money on the stocks. He is suing not for
the money, but for the "principle". Aha! Sure! I buy that!
(I'll give you twice as much as you are asking, if you go jump
from some bridge martillo)
He never took baths - for weeks at a time. He would never
change his clothes. He would have old underwear laying around
his office!! Two of his fellow employees that had to work near
him in a cubical transferred out of the department because of
the smell. A "rodent expert" was called in to check if it was
possible that an animal died in his office.....
Martillo also claims to have attended Harvard, MIT and Yale,
and that he has worked for the NSA(yes that's right, the
National Security Agency). Sure babe, tell us more, now we
know you have also attended PRIME COMPUTER!
Martillo married a moslem Chinese Indonesian out of convenience.
Yeap, yeap, she was going to get deported. Hey man, how much
did you charge her? Tell us, oh please tell us...
Is it not true martillo that in your place right now, your "wife"
lives and sleeps upstairs, while you sleep downstairs? Pretty
convenient way to have the same address martillo, but now you
know that you can't fool all of the people all of the time! I haven't seen his Holocaust denial that MEMRI mentions, but it is entirely in character for this lunatic. (h/t O) 
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| PCUSA members defeat divestment proposal; BDSers whine (updated) Posted: 06 Jul 2012 04:30 AM PDT From the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: By a hairbreadth vote of 333-331, the Presbyterian Church USA rejected a proposal Thursday to divest from companies whose products are used by Israel to enforce occupation of the West Bank.
The vote, at the church's biennial meeting held this year at the David L. Lawrence Convention Center, Downtown, followed weeks of lobbying and days of impassioned testimony by American Jews, Palestinian Christians and Presbyterians. In proceedings that are being watched around the world, Presbyterians voted to replace the divestment proposal with a separate one calling for positive investment in businesses in the West Bank.
The vote represented a surprising reversal after a smaller committee voted by a 3-to-1 margin earlier this week to support divestment.
The vote brings PCUSA into line with other mainline U.S. Protestant denominations that have rejected divestment. The United Methodist Church voted in May not to divest from Caterpillar, Hewlett-Packard and Motorola Solutions, the same three companies targeted by PCUSA. The Evangelical Lutheran Church rejected divestment in 2007 and 2011.
The Rev. Matthew Miller from Iowa said before the body that divestment would "privilege Palestinian suffering over the suffering of Israelis" and jeopardize close collaboration with American Jews.
"No one cares about our symbolic action," he said. "It will achieve nothing other than alienation."
The Rev. Susan Andrews, a former moderator of the General Assembly and an influential liberal in the church, said she had been to the West Bank but opposed divestment.
She explained that the church's twin moral imperatives to "stand in solidarity against the pain and oppression" of Palestinians and to "stand in solidarity with our historic Jewish partners in Israel and the U.S." demanded that it take a more positive course. The BDSers threw everything they had at this, and after the committee vote it looked like they would win. But apparently, those who make the most noise are not always the the ones who carry the day. Now the BDSers are howling on Twitter. A typically funny line that they are retweeting like crazy is "Palestinians are not victims in need of aid, they're an occupied people in need of freedom" - a pithy statement that is deceptive on at least four levels: - PalArabs beg for more and more aid all the time
- PCUSA was not advocating aid but investment in the West Bank, something that the pro-Israel crowd has no problem with
- They aren't "occupied" for many reasons, legal and definitional
- Divestment from those three companies wouldn't bring "freedom" any closer; only negotiating with Israel would
The vast majority of American Jews were not even aware of the PCUSA convention. All the Israel-haters were. Yet with their 100% effort, filling sessions with stories of poor oppressed Palestinian Arabs, they still lost. That's gotta hurt. UPDATE: My understanding is that the BDSers have some procedural options; one to resubmit the same proposal and one to only vote to divest from Caterpillar. We'll see. UPDATE 2: They did overwhelmingly vote to boycott Ahava. Peter Beinart was cited to help them make that decision. UPDATE 3: They overwhelmingly defeated a declaration that Israel practices apartheid against Palestinians. 
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| Will anyone call this Jordanian action "apartheid"? Posted: 06 Jul 2012 02:30 AM PDT I noted back in April that Jordan was segregating Palestinian Syrians from other Syrians fleeing across the border, not allowing most of them to enter the country. HRW just caught up: The Jordanian authorities have forcibly returned some newly arriving Palestinians from Syria and threatened others with deportation, Human Rights Watch said today.Since April 2012, the authorities have also arbitrarily detained Palestinians fleeing Syria in a refugee holding center without any options for release other than return to Syria. The Jordanian authorities should treat all Palestinians from Syria seeking refuge in Jordan the same as Syrian asylum seekers, who are allowed to remain and can move freely in Jordan after passing security screening and finding a sponsor.
"To its credit, Jordan has allowed tens of thousands of Syrians to cross its borders irregularly and move freely in Jordan, but it treats Palestinians fleeing the same way differently," said Gerry Simpson, senior refugee researcher and advocate for Human Rights Watch. "All those fleeing Syria – Syrians and Palestinians alike – have a right to seek asylum in Jordan, move freely in Jordan, and shouldn't be forced back into a war zone."
Since April, Jordanian authorities have automatically detained all Palestinians who enter Jordan without passing through an official border post, without the possibility of release. No such policy exists for thousands of Syrians entering the same way.
The Palestinians are arriving under the same circumstances as the fleeing Syrians and should not face threats of forced return, Human Rights Watch said. None should be detained unless for compelling and legally prescribed reasons and for a limited period of time, with judicial review. Like Syrian refugees, Palestinians from Syria interviewed by Human Rights Watch in Jordan said they had fled the country due to violence and general insecurity in their home areas. Isn't this "apartheid"? Where are the protests, the boycotts, the empty-headed entertainers who are so keen on showing how well they understand human rights? Where are the "pro-Palestinian" groups? Where are the petitions and Twitter hashtags and Facebook groups? I mean, these are Palestinian Arabs being discriminated against, which usually elicits outrage because they are so victimized. I can't figure out why this issue has been essentially ignored. A real mystery. (h/t Ian) 
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