<< FRIDGE II ~ MAIN ~ COLLECTION SAD >>
TILES STOLEN
Hamas stomps Fatah:
Hamas gunmen overran the mainstream security forces loyal to Mr Abbas’s secular Fatah faction in the Gaza Strip yesterday after a week of bitter internecine fighting that killed more than 110 people.
Fatah storms back:
Witnesses say Fatah gunmen storming Hamas-controlled government offices.
Yasser’s wall tiles stolen:
A crowd on Saturday looted the home of longtime Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, destroying one of the strongest symbols of the Fatah movement in the Gaza Strip, witnesses and Fatah officials said.
Fatah officials said the crowd took furniture, wall tiles and Arafat’s personal belongings.
Hamas gets pro-active, Fatah gets out of town:
Hamas gunmen were going house to house in search of Fatah rivals to seize their weapons. At least 200 Fatah men have already fled the territory to neighbouring Egypt.
Samih Madhoun closes his account:
Women waved their hands and screeched in celebration. A gathering mob shouted “Film the dog! Film the dog!” as a battered body was dragged through a dusty hallway, then shot twice, ending the life of hated Fatah militiaman Samih Madhoun ...
For his part, Madhoun had boasted in a radio interivew of his role in killings and kidnappings of Hamas members and vowed to “slaughter” more “like sheep in the streets” after Hamas burnt down his house.
An understatement:
The current internecine conflict between Hamas and Fatah is preventing the unity needed for a Palestinian state.
UPDATE. A partial mask-ban is in place:
In their first order since seizing control of the Gaza Strip, Hamas Islamists banned gunmen from wearing masks - unless they are shooting at Israel.
UPDATE II. They stole more than Yasser’s tiles:
"They stole almost everything inside the house, including Arafat’s Nobel Peace Prize medal,” said Ramallah-based Fatah spokesman Ahmed Abdel Rahman.
UPDATE III. The bearded are victimised:
"Nowadays a beard is no longer a religious decree, it’s a clear and present danger,” one of the merchants told Ynet. “Fatah harasses anyone with a beard and beats them, so may Allah forgive us if we remove ours to stay safe. As it is the beard is optional and not mandatory,” he said.
UPDATE IV. A best-selling author threatens the region:
My name is Antony Loewenstein and I’m an Australian about to hit Damascus.
I’m convinced that the best thing possible for “Palestine"* is block it off, and refuse entry and exit to anyone and anything, with one exception.
That one exception would be weapons and ammunition, all they want, anything conventional, short of rockets and missiles. When no one picks up a few deliveries, either they’ve gotten sick of killing each other, or they’ve eradicated each other. In either case, Gaza and the West Bank might be allowed to rejoin civilization.
Under parole.
==============
*: Danger quotes used because it’s more and more clear that “Palestine” was either an excuse to kill Jews, or a fantasy of clueless fools. The former describes Muslims and Jimmy Carter. The latter describes lefties and Jimmy Carter.
Posted by The_Real_JeffS on 2007 06 16 at 04:51 PM • permalinkA couple of days ago, while commuting into London on the Tube and browsing through the latest on the Gaza mess in my Daily Telegraph, I was amused to read about Palestinian quoted as saying, “The Jews never did to us what our own people are now doing to us.”
Posted by JJM Ballantyne on 2007 06 16 at 05:30 PM • permalink#4 paco
From Paco’s Dictionary:
Palestinian State - see “herding rabid feral cats”.
Suggestion for the updated edition.
Posted by Spiny Norman on 2007 06 16 at 05:38 PM • permalinkImus coverage of Arafat’s funeral http://rhhardin.home.mindspring.com/imuscut.arafatfuneral.ram is a valuable lesson in multiculturalism.
Imus’s description : ``You have teeming hordes of nitwits with flags just milling around...’’ Andrea Mitchell joins the coverage noticing nothing unusual.
Here’s Australian aid worker Daryl Jones giving her account of what the world sees of Palestine. It’s not pretty watching a woman realise that all she believed about a situation was just lies towards wider propoganda. Whether she came back to Oz and told her story to the wider community, I don’t know.
In other religious news:
The Stem Pell debate: Pell’s stem cell vote warning ‘hypothetical’
2006/06/06:
“It is a serious moral matter and Catholic politicians who vote for this legislation must realise that their voting has consequences for their place in the life of the Church,” he said.‘Taken out of context’?
He needs Kayser for his PR man.state of origin! state of origin! Advice to Abbas: do NOT under ANY circumstances put Brett Kimmorley in charge of ANYTHING.
aaaaallllllllllllll Israel’s fault. Of course. Israel has brutalised the poor muslims. The long arm of zionist brutalisation reaches into Egypt, Sudan, Algeria, Morocco, Iran, Iraq, France, Britain, Thailand, the Phillipines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Chechnya, Turkey, etc etc etc, etc, etc, etc.
I just read an article in July’s Australian Personal Computer about how Israel - Intel’s Israel Development Centre - is at the world’s cutting edge of Pentium chip development. I thought hmmm...there’s not of lot of high-powered chip development going on in the Arab world; indeed, not much science at all.
In contrast the Arab/Islamic world is a cesspit of violence and corruption that leeches off the civilised world when it comes to science and medicine. I stand to be corrected if someone can point out an exception.
Posted by walterplinge on 2007 06 16 at 07:52 PM • permalinkSpeaking of advice, here’s some belated advice to Dr Phillycheese in the other thread (also posted there but no-one’s reading that because of a blockade of fridges!)
Dear Dr Philadelphia Freedom
you and the rest of your fellow white middle-class toytown radicals are a disgrace to the ideals you purport to represent. You flounce around in the sheltered workshop of your universities, writing indescribably indulgent garbage about exhibiting your hymen, pouring scorn and derision on your own culture, fixated with marginalised victimhood salesmen like Mamdouh Habib. Why are you so fixated with these shysters? Because you need so desperately to manufacture victims to swallow up into your nurturing matriarchal maw. Look at what you and your kind have done to the aborigines. Shutting them up in reservations, denying them property rights, forcing them to live on sit-down money and insisting they refuse to join the modern world and live with real individual pride. And what happens now that they are eating their women and children alive? Are you going to change your tune? Not bloody likely. Read Nicholas Rothwell you silly twat. Read Noel Pearson. And hang your pretty little head in shame.
Further, why are you so fixated with Howard’s ‘white picket fence’ family policies (that help my highly-qualified wife CHOOSE to stay home with our three kids), when millions of women suffer agonies of pain and hopelessness under islam, and in violently patriarchal subsistence societies? Why can you not acknowledge, as Camille Paglia did a decade ago, that it is white man’s technology, white man’s prosperity, and white man’s free common law institutions that have given you the freedom to be such a well-paid, indulgent little leftie douchebag? Will you ever give Caesar his due? Will you ever honour those like General Monash, who built this society and kept it strong in times of great darkness? Will you ever see the real enemies of women, and the real enemies of ‘difference?’ Get your head out of the post-modernist relativist quicksand and have a good look at Gaza you stupid preening fluff-head. Then fucking grow up.
Hey, why be so pessimistic about Hamas? They’re already laying down the law:
Hamas bans masks for Gaza gunmen.
IN their first order since seizing control of the Gaza Strip, Hamas Islamists banned gunmen from wearing masks - unless they are shooting at Israel.
Death to Hamas (westside blue tea-towel) and Fatah (east-side beardless)!
Posted by Margos Maid on 2007 06 16 at 08:38 PM • permalinkThe world can no longer ignore the pathetic cowardice of these bloodthirsty savages. I love how media talk about the rout of Arafat’s “elite” guard. What does that mean, their shirt matches their pants? I agree with #6, let them exterminate each other, then bring in Trump to build a new city on oceanfront property.
This is priceless: I think “generals” should be in quotes as well: Generals Flee
Re #21, SteveGW, my comment was neither schadenfreude, despair, nor horror. It was simple, stark reality. The Palestinians have breed a generation of homocidal maniacs, and that generation is already working on their children to inherit this sickness.
Truly, the only cures that I see is either they utterly reject killing, or (more likely) they kill each other off.
And I’d rather have them shooting each other than any other third party.
Posted by The_Real_JeffS on 2007 06 16 at 08:48 PM • permalink...it’s more and more clear that “Palestine” was either an excuse to kill Jews, or a fantasy of clueless fools. The former describes Muslims and Jimmy Carter. The latter describes lefties and Jimmy Carter.
Last I heard Carter has moved on to demanding that the US open talks with Nepalese Maoists. Carter’s kind of an evil Mr. Magoo.
Re #37, oh, that just drips with irony, Dan.
Of course, I doubt that we’ll see that headlined in the NYT or other major papers after the Baghdad museums were “looted” “clean”.
Double standards for the MSM? No, of course not! [snickers uncontrollably...]
Posted by The_Real_JeffS on 2007 06 16 at 09:37 PM • permalinkYes, Hamas have been preparing for this battle for years. All their attacks against Israel have just been training runs in preparation for the big war against the real enemy.
Themselves.
Posted by mr creosote on 2007 06 16 at 10:00 PM • permalink#15, Why thank you for the kind words, kae.
Just think what they’d get if they put Arafat’s Peace Prize up on E-bay. It might go as high as one penny—that’s my offer, I want to see how far across a pond I could skip it.
And apparently a bunch of Gaza based Palestinians want to escape into Israel. Whatever for? Couldn’t be for peace and security.
Slightly OT, more green on green violence.
Posted by flying pigs over mecca on 2007 06 16 at 10:10 PM • permalinkspare a thought for the woman and young children in all of this. That’s the only reason I would not advocate an ‘Escape from New York’-type scenario.
To think, what Arafat and his cronies could have done, with billions upon billions of Eurodollars, if they’d truly had the interests of their people at heart. It makes one weep.
#34 TheRealJeffS
If their territories are sealed off they will continue as now, and there will soon be dreadful famine and disease - which the world will not allow. If monetary assistance is given it will be diverted by the strongest gangs for their benefit and to attack Israel. If Israel tries to reconquer the territories they will again have a problem of occupation on their hands and the condemnation of the world. The Israelis, being civilized, can’t do what is needed to destroy the terror gangs. The Egyptians could or the Jordanians (see Muslim Brotherhood and Black September) but why would they want to accept a population of millions of apparent psychopaths into their society? And so on.
I just really cannot see a way to get from this point to something acceptable, and in the meantime we have an apparent safe haven for the very worst terrorists and an inspiration for the jihadists and an Iranian agent on Israel’s border, so the situation cannot be allowed to continue.
What is to be done?
#12, That link was really upsetting. There really does seem to be no hope as generation after generation repeats the same, violent mantras, even with Israel pretty much out of the picture.
In the cover story of the May edition of Prospect magazine (UK), Edward Luttwak argued that the Middle East is less relevant than ever and it probably would be better if the rest of the world learned to ignore it.
He thought that while Israelis and Palestinians might settle their differences, it would do little or nothing to calm the other conflicts in the Middle East, or to stop Muslim-Hindu violence in Kashmir, Muslim-Christian violence in Indonesia and the Philippines, Muslim-Buddhist violence in Thailand, Muslim-animist violence in Sudan, Muslim-Igbo violence in Nigeria, Muslim-Muscovite violence in Chechnya, or the different varieties of inter-Muslim violence between traditionalists and Islamists, and between Sunnis and Shia.
Note the one word common to all.
#46, I have thought about the women and children of Gaza, and the ugly fact is, they will suffer no matter what. The proof is muzzie zapper’s link. If you’ve seen the pictures of Palestinians escaping to Israel, please note that they’re all young men. No women or children to be seen, no doubt abandoned. Also please remember that some of these women teach their children to aspire to martyrdom, although that’s bound to be Islamic brainwashing.
These people won’t be forced into the 21st century until they’ve murdered and terrorized themselves into exhaustion. We need to face reality and stop hoping they’re going to somehow spontaneously come to their senses.
What is to be done?
Steve, I don’t much like human suffering either. But the Palestinians largely brought this upon themselves, and I refuse to pity them. There are indeed innocents in there (as JonathonH so rightly points out), but if the Palestinians don’t want to help themseleves, there is little that anyone can do to resolve the problem.
Need I go over their history? They’ve had a couple tries at having a “Palestine”, and the Palis have fucked it up every time. They’ve had billions of dollars pumped into the area, and the place remains a third world shit hole. Ironically, right next to one of the gems of the Western world, Israel.
The only option that I can see is building a tall wall around Gaza and the West Bank, with no doors, only chutes to dump weapons and ammo into.
Will that work? Probably not. But it’s a damned sight more practical than supporting a bunch of thugs and barbarians in their quest for blood with endless streams of cash.
We’ll probably end treating “Palestine” like we do any other third world shit hole that barely deserves aid. Just enough to keep the least despicable bastards in power, not enough to give them ideas of conquest.
ann j in #55 notes that the Middle East may be coming less relevant. I don’t entirely agree, but I certainly think that we will end up ignoring “Palestine” for a couple of generations.
Posted by The_Real_JeffS on 2007 06 16 at 11:32 PM • permalink#43, I’d lay down a couple c-notes for that piece of junk, just so I could take it down to the range and unload a hundred rounds of .308 at it. That won’t undo the damage Arafatt did, but I can relieve some frustration through shooting that bastard by proxy.
In fact, I could earn the money back by offering it up to the public. At a dime a shot, I’d be rolling in the dough.
Posted by The_Real_JeffS on 2007 06 16 at 11:37 PM • permalinkPS: I just looked at the link muzzie zapper posted. In this part of the world, that “husband” would be in jail faster than you could say “San Fran Nan”. Says a lot about that culture, huh?
Posted by The_Real_JeffS on 2007 06 16 at 11:40 PM • permalinkIf people really give a damn about these people , they will allow this evil to play itself out and quit aiding and abetting it.
That isn’t what is going to be done apparently. This AP article at My Way begins:
The United States strengthened its offer of support for President Mahmoud Abbas on Saturday, telling him an international aid embargo against the Palestinians would end as soon as he forms a new government without Hamas, aids to Abbas said.I don’t understand this blindness.
#12 Holy cripes! Did you read the comments?
#26 “For the first time in memory, there was no longer enough food and water for all. Fighting broke out.”
Holy cripes, again! Did they drop the Sahel drought of the ‘70s down the memory hole?
Posted by Harry Eagar on 2007 06 17 at 12:24 AM • permalinkJeff, Geoff, etc.
I largely agree with you about walls and history and blame and so on. Let me explain why I still feel that something more is owed to these people out of simple humanity.
The Arab refugees were refused the opportunity to integrate into larger societies. They were made the propaganda tools of others who judged that the more miserable they were the better. They were placed in the care of those who had no interest in helping them. They were allowed or encouraged to be indoctrinated with a nihilistic or brutalist ideology. Their current state is to a very large degree the perfectly foreseeable result of deliberate abuse. I don’t want to get into a long debate about Free Will, but I see this as calling for some degree of ‘understanding’. It’s as if someone had put a lot of dogs in an overcrowded cage and chosen to torment them by starving them and poking them with sticks. The dogs will turn into savage animals, but the fundamental blame for their savagery must go to others. In both cases, I’d prefer to find some way to bring the abused back into an acceptable state.
(PS. I like dogs. The comparison isn’t meant to be an insult.)
#72 SteveGW,
You are right to bring up free will, because that is exactly what must be negated in order to bring an individual to a point of submission. There have always been people who endured injustices--these particular people perpetrate injustice against a people who have endured some of the worst injustice ever perpetrated against a people (and still are, for that matter). What is the difference between them? One is brought up to submit his mind to anybody and everything besides himself, and the other is brought up to think. The results of these two philosophies is so apparent that it cannot be ignored, and yet it is ignored on a daily basis in the name of mercy for one. The problem is that mercy for one requires further injustice to the other.
As I said earlier, if we really care about these people, we will allow them to learn the lesson of their savagery. How does it help the generation coming up to allow them to remain in that vicious society? How does it show any compassion to condemn their children to suicide belts, and all the rest of the cult of death and the destruction it brings? How can it be moral to continue to support this cult of death?
Let them sate themselves in their own blood. Let them learn that if they want to join the civilized world, that they must use their reason and not their emotions and guns. They must want it more than they want death. Life is a choice. They must choose it. That is what they must learn about free will.
And that is what must come first, before we offer them any help. And, by the way, this is why we’ve run into the kinds of problems we’re facing in Iraq. Sherman, and WWII, taught that people must want peace and actively seek it. Altruism in war is self-defeating. So far in this war, all it has caused is the needless death of our own people, and it hasn’t spared the civilian population at all--in fact, I would say that the civilian population has suffered much greater casualties than anything our forces would have done by protecting themselves first. The same may be said in the way we’ve handled the “Road” to nowhere in dealing with the PA. All we’ve done is embolden Iran, Syria, Hezballah, Hamas, Al Qaeda, and all the rest. We’ve given them hope--real hope that they can win, and the death toll continues to rise.
Sorry if that is rambling. I’m a bit under the weather tonight.
I made a comment at #31 about beards, having no idea that there really is a beard issue (as per update 3).
I hate it when reality makes satire redundant.
Posted by Margos Maid on 2007 06 17 at 01:31 AM • permalinkRe update III
At least we know which side Ant Loewenstein is on.
Posted by Margos Maid on 2007 06 17 at 01:36 AM • permalinkThe only thing for me that is important here is that these creatures keep killing each other, because that in the long run means that our children and grandchildren will have a little bit less to do in order to survive and prosper. From my perspective,as the third generation (known) of my family to fight for democracy, I thank God that my son will not, because of age. I believe though that a period 20-30 years from now will be climatic, and my grandbabies will be right in the window. I wish them the skill, luck and ruthlessness that our civilisation will need. Simply being better won’t do it.
Cheers
RodCRe #72, Steve, I hear you, but this is not a situation where a group hug or an open hand works. The Palestinians have created a culture of death; that they were egged into it is immaterial, as they fully embrace it, of their own will. Until they shake off this attitude (e.g., the bearded merchants rise up against Hamas and Fatah) or die, this will not change.
It’s out of control, and all we can do is watch the machine crash and burn.
Posted by The_Real_JeffS on 2007 06 17 at 02:18 AM • permalink#76
At least we know which side Ant Loewenstein is on.
I think we already did…
Not that many people read his blog (and even fewer are permitted to comment there), but he and co-moron Andre are furiously spinning this to try and blame Israel and the US for every single bit of it. I’ve just saved you a visit.
Let’s hope the Syrian Fatah supporters don’t find out about Ant’s backing of Hamas.
Posted by Margos Maid on 2007 06 17 at 04:48 AM • permalink#46. Jonathon, I don’t spare a thought for the women. They are complicit in this - Umm Nidal who’s lost 3 children in jihadi actions and wants to lose more is a member of parliament for Hamas, for example.
There was the case a few months back where women swarmed to provide a shield against Israeli bullets for gunmen holed up in a mosque or something.
As for the children?
That’s where I am at a loss. It’s very easy to brainwash when you get them from birth, but how can you be sure you can undo it?
They come out of kindergarten wanting to blow themselves up for allah.
How can you fix that?
Posted by Nilknarf Arbed on 2007 06 17 at 08:52 AM • permalinkAn interesting and perhaps insightful comment appears on Loewenstein’s blog. It wasn’t even censored, like all of mine!
Antony had mentioned in a post, he was in Iran. This was one response:
I shall assume Antony is receiving Iranian funding for his ‘work’.
Surely his book sales and ‘journalism’ wouldn’t even cover an average electricity bill.
It certainly wouldn’t pay for a lot of international travel either. I wonder who’s bankrolling him.
I also wonder, whether at any stage on his impromptu Middle Eastern tour he’ll visit Israel. I doubt it of course. However if he does, having only been there once before on a token visit, when border security notice the Syrian and Iranian stamps in his passport, he will get the royal treatment. No doubt he’ll blog all about the “humiliation”.
Let’s hope Yasser’s red binder - the fiendish red binder - didn’t get stolen.
Posted by Jim Geones on 2007 06 17 at 09:34 AM • permalink#83 Ash, I finally figured it out!
You know the practically zero worth of his tome My Israel Question?
Well it all becomes clear once you realise the acristic behind the title…
My
Israel
Question...
Posted by carpefraise on 2007 06 17 at 11:03 AM • permalink...I’m an Australian about to hit Damascus
At terminal velocity, one may hope?
Posted by The_Real_JeffS on 2007 06 17 at 12:22 PM • permalinkhow about this for an understatement:
“The civil war between Hamas and Fatah will likely do little to bring the creation of a Palestinian state any closer.”
You think?
http://www.spiegel.de/fotostrecke/0,5538,PB64-SUQ9MjI0NDUmbnI9MTE_3,00.html
#104
Yes. They have bigger idiots to worry about than Loewenstein. In fact, he has such a self-inflated ego that he’d probably be convinced they were ‘punishing’ him should he get the third-degree at the airport.
Of course if he’d been to Israel more than once in his life, like most “proud Jews”, he would realise it is quite normal. If you went for the first time, you would cop it as well.
I’m sure they saw right through him anyway, when he said “I’m Jewish” and they said “Oh yeah? What does “Ben Zonar” mean” :-)
Of course I don’t think he’d bother going though. It’s not like seeing anything there changed his opinion. I am convinced he only went in the first place so that people couldn’t entirely dismiss him for having never set foot in the joint. Having spent 3 weeks there, mostly visiting Palestinian strongholds, he has made the token effort.
#97, well, you’ve been busy! *g*
#100, thank you Paco, you’re too kind. *wipes sweat off fevered brow*...
Posted by carpefraise on 2007 06 18 at 03:00 AM • permalinkOT but regarding the Palestinians, the bbc and MPACUK, have a look at this
and this
and thisPosted by carpefraise on 2007 06 18 at 10:21 AM • permalink
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Let the memory of Yasser Arafat disappear forever into history’s toilet. He, more than anyone, was responsible for the dysfunctional dungheap Palestinian society is today.