Friday, May 25, 2012

Gatestone Update :: Hisham Jarallah: What CBS Does Not Want to Hear, and more



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What CBS Does Not Want to Hear

by Hisham Jarallah
May 25, 2012 at 5:00 am
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A few weeks ago, veteran CBS News correspondent Bob Simon reported on the plight of Christians of the Holy Land who have been leaving the region for many years.
In large part, Simon blamed the Christian exodus on Israel.
But had Simon visited the Christian village of Taybeh in the West Bank, he would have heard "the other side to the story."
This is a village whose population is 100% Christian. It is surrounded by a number of Muslim villages, some of which are extremely hostile.
The number of Christians living in Taybeh is estimated at less than 2,000. Residents say that another 15,000 Taybeh villagers live in the US, Canada and Europe, as well as South America.
Over the past few years, the Christian residents of Taybeh have been living in constant fear of being attacked by their Muslim neighbors.
Such attacks, residents say, are not uncommon. They are more worried about intimidation and violence by Muslims than by Israel's security barrier or a checkpoint. And the reason why many of them are leaving is because they no longer feel safe in a village that is surrounded by thousands of hostile Muslims who relate to Christians as infidels and traitors.
Just last week, scores of Muslim men from surrounding villages, some of the men armed with pistols and clubs, attacked Taybeh.
Fortunately, no one was harmed and no damage was caused to property.
Palestinian Authority policemen who rushed to the village had to shoot into the air to drive back the Muslim attackers and prevent a slaughter.
The attack, residents said, came after a Muslim man tried to force his way into a graduation ceremony at a girls' school in Taybeh.
The man, who had not been invited to the ceremony, complained that Christians had assaulted him. Later that day, he and dozens of other Muslims stormed the village with the purpose of seeking revenge for the "humiliation."
Were it not for the quick intervention of the Palestinian security forces, the attackers would have set fire to a number of houses and vehicles and probably killed or wounded some Christians.
Palestinian government and police officials later demanded that the Christians dispatch a delegation to the nearby Muslim villages to apologize for "insulting" the Muslim man. To avoid further escalation, the heads of Taybeh complied.
Also at the request of the Palestinian government, residents of the village were requested not to talk to the media about the incident.
Even some of the leaders of the Christian community in the West Bank urged the Taybeh residents not to make a big fuss about the incident.
This was not the first time that Taybeh had come under attack. In September 2005, hundreds of Muslim men went on rampage in the village, torching homes and cars, and destroying a statue of the Virgin Mary, after learning that a Muslim woman had been romantically involved with a Christian businessman from the village.
The 30-year-old woman had been killed by her family.
Western journalists based in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv have refused to report about the most recent attack on Taybeh, most probably because the story does not have an "anti-Israel angle."
Like Bob Simon, most Western journalists prefer to see only one side of the story. All they want is to find stories that shed a negative light on Israel.
Simon, by the way, has probably never heard of Taybeh.
The next time anyone wants to learn about the true problems facing the Christians of the Holy Land, he or she should head to Taybeh and conduct off the record and private interviews with the villagers.
Hisham Jarallah is a journalist based in the West Bank.

Counting Palestinians

by Shoshana Bryen
May 25, 2012 at 4:00 am
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"When we have a state accepted as a member of the United Nations, this is not the end of the conflict." Abdullah Abdullah, Palestinian Ambassador to Lebanon.
Senator Mark Kirk (R., Ill.) has offered an amendment to the FY 2013 funding bill for the State Department that would require the Department to provide two numbers to Congress: 1) the number of Palestinians physically displaced from their homes in what became Israel in 1948, and 2) the number of their descendants administered by the United Nations Relief Works Agency (UNRWA). [1]
Palestinians are the only people for whom refugee status passes along through the generations (a condition adopted by the UN in 1965 over the objection of the United States), so they are also the only refugee population that grows exponentially over generations rather than declining as the original refugees pass away and their descendants become citizens of other places. Sen. Kirk seems to think the numbers would provide insight into whether the billions of U.S. tax dollars that have been provided to UNRWA over the years are making the problem better – or worse.
The State Department, naturally, is appalled, believing getting a handle on the numbers is prelude to cutting off the dollars. And further, it appears to believe that how our money is spent is not our business. Deputy Secretary Thomas Nides wrote to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, "This proposed amendment would be viewed around the world as the United States acting to prejudge and determine the outcome of this sensitive issue." As if the world's view of the problem is more important than transparency with the American people.
In any event, the U.S. would not be prejudging anything, but only be determining how many people live off our dole.
The possible outcomes of the Palestinian refugee issue are three: to allow them to go to Israel (the so-called "right of return"); to formulate their resettlement (and compensation) in the new State of Palestine; or formulate their resettlement (and compensation) somewhere else. The first means the dissolution of the State of Israel – which cannot possibly be among the State Department's acceptable outcomes. (Can it?) In either of the other two scenarios, counting would be a prerequisite to resettlement.
The problem for the State Department is that the Palestinians have rejected the second and third outcomes.
In a little noticed interview in the Lebanese newspaper, The Daily Star, the Palestinian Ambassador to Lebanon, Abdullah Abdullah, said even if the UN established a Palestinian State, the refugees would not become citizens of it. "They are Palestinians, that's their identity. But … they are not automatically citizens. Even Palestinian refugees who are living in [refugee camps] inside the [then-Palestinian] state, they are still refugees. They will not be considered citizens."
Why? Because to become a citizen of "Palestine" if Palestine is less than the entire territory west of the Jordan River would obviate the so-called "right of return," which postulates that Palestinians who left the territory that became Israel – and their descendants – are entitled to go to where they claim to have come from, namely pre-1967 Israel. That is to say, Abdullah Abdullah is choosing the first option – the dissolution of Israel and explicitly rejecting the others.
Abdullah told the paper that U.N. statehood would not affect the planned return of refugees to "Palestine." "How the issue of the right of return will be solved I don't know, it's too early [to say], but it is a sacred right that has to be dealt with and solved [with] the acceptance of all." Statehood "will never affect the right of return for Palestinian refugees… The refugees are from all over Palestine. When we have a state accepted as a member of the United Nations, this is not the end of the conflict. This is not a solution to the conflict. This is only a new framework that will change the rules of the game."
The creation of a Palestinian state in territories bordering Israel then would only be a way-station to the establishment of "Palestine" in place of Israel. Abdullah said the new Palestinian state would "absolutely not" issue Palestinian passports to refugees, lest they be understood to be citizens of Palestine.
UNRWA, he said, would continue to be responsible for the "refugees" after the creation of the Palestinian state, at least until the "right of return" is enacted.[2]
Senator Kirk, a former prosecutor, has worked tirelessly for years to force the State Department to quantify U.S. assistance to the Palestinians through UNRWA. He has been thwarted at every turn. An aide to the Senator said, "This amendment simply demands basic transparency with regard to who receives U.S. taxpayer assistance." The Palestinians have been entirely transparent about their goals; we should expect nothing less from the Department of State.
Shoshana Bryen is Senior Director of The Jewish Policy Center. She was previously Senior Director for Security Policy at JINSA and author of JINSA Reports from 1995-2011.
[1] It would be interesting to compare the first number to the number of Jews of the Middle East made refugees by Arab governments; they would be similar. The second number could be compared to the number of Jews who remain refugees today, which would be 0.
[2] The position of Palestinians in Jordan is also largely unremarked upon. Jordan's illegal annexation of the West Bank in 1949 made Jordanian citizens of West Bankers. But in 1988, King Hussein renounced Jordan's claim to the West Bank territory and withdrew Jordanian nationality/citizenship from the Palestinian residents there. In later years, thousands of West Bank-origin Palestinians residing in Jordan had their citizenship revoked as well. According to Human Rights Watch, "Jordanian officials have defended the practice, as a means to counter any future Israeli plans to transfer the Palestinian population of the Israeli-occupied West Bank to Jordan." And to limit as much as possible the percentage of Palestinians who are citizens of the Hashemite Kingdom.
Related Topics:  Shoshana Bryen

Why Greece Is In a Tailspin

by Malcolm Lowe
May 25, 2012 at 3:00 am
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Whatever happens in Greece on June 17, here you can understand why and what it means.
A previous article explained why the euro crisis goes on and on. Put briefly, the modern Greek state has faced bankruptcy several times in the past because of the style of Greek political life. The leaders of Europe are ignorant of that Greek history, so their approach to the latest Greek bankruptcy permitted the crisis to spiral into a threat to the whole eurozone.
There was also the warning that the upcoming Greek elections would merely add a new twist to the spiral. The election results confirmed that prognosis, although at first the European leaders did not realize it. Now those leaders are worried, but they still do not understand.
What has particularly exacerbated the crisis is the Greek electoral law. The law is intended to force the Greeks to form a stable central government, despite the chronic inability of Greek politicians to agree upon anything. This time round, the law had the contrary effect of making the formation of a government impossible.
The electoral law has three main features. First, any party that receives at least 3% of the total votes cast will be represented in the parliament. Second, the party that receives the largest number of votes gets a bonus. When introduced in 2004, the bonus consisted of forty seats out of the three hundred in the parliament; now it is fifty seats. Third, the remaining seats are distributed among the parties in proportion to the percentage of votes received. (There are further details to the law, but their impact is marginal.)
The bonus replaced an electoral law of 1990 that had the same aim of promoting stable government. Both laws were based on the observation that in every election from 1977 on either the center-right New Democracy (ND) or the Panhellenic Socialist Party (PASOK) had received between 40-50% of the votes cast. The laws aimed to ensure that this would suffice to give the winner an absolute majority in the parliament. Currently, the winner is assured of that majority with 40.4% of the votes cast but may get it with several percent less, depending on which parties pass or fail the 3% threshold.
Up to the latest election, consequently, the Greek public concentrated its votes on those two major parties. A few diehards insisted on voting for the Greek Communist Party (KKE), while the loony left voted for an alliance of leftist factions, currently operating under the acronym SYRIZA. More recently, some Greek Orthodox nationalists got into parliament under the acronym LAOS (which in Greek also means "the people" in the religious as well as the political sense).
Thus the election of 2009 produced the following result in seats and percentages: PASOK 160 (43.92%), ND 91 (33.47%), KKE 21 (7.54%), LAOS 15 (5.63%) and SYRIZA 13 (4.60%). A mere 4.7% voted for parties that failed to enter the parliament; the figure was 3.0% and 4.9% in the elections of 2007 and 2004. The electoral bonus had achieved its aim.
This time round, however, 19.0% of the votes cast went to parties that failed to enter the parliament. Opinion polls in advance of the election suggested that up to ten parties might reach the 3% minimum. In the event, no party got as much as 20%, seven parties got in, and two others failed by a tenth of a percent. Also 35% of the electorate failed to vote for any party, up from 29%, 26% and 24% in the three previous elections.
To explain how the electoral bonus lost its deterrent effect, we must recall some details of the unfolding crisis. The election of 2009 was called because the then ND prime minister, Kostas Karamanlis, felt that he could not pursue needed austerity measures with a tiny majority in parliament. PASOK's leader, George Papandreou, successfully campaigned on the demagogic slogan lefta uparxoun ("There's money!"). Having won the election, he discovered that there were even less lefta available than Karamanlis had claimed because Greek financial statistics had been fiddled for years.
Faced with Greece's inability to redeem government bonds, Papandreou admitted, to his credit, that drastic austerity was unavoidable. In 2010, he negotiated with European leaders a "memorandum" that specified the measures that Greece would take in return for loans from eurozone members, especially Germany, and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The measures included a program of cutting the numbers of government employees as well as reductions in their salaries and pensions. Taxes would also be raised, tax avoiders would be rigorously pursued, government companies would be privatized. Greek compliance with the austerity measures would be monitored by a "troika" consisting of the European Commission, the European Central Bank (ECB) and the IMF.
In the Greek parliament, the PASOK majority voted for the memorandum, while ND allowed itself the luxury of voting against what it had advocated while in government. One ND politician with an illustrious record, Dora Bakoyannis, voted in favor. She was immediately expelled from ND by its new leader, Antonis Samaras.
By late 2011, it became evident that the euro crisis could not be resolved without writing off much of Greece's public debt. The eurozone and the IMF agreed to this on condition of yet more austerity. Revolts in PASOK meant that Papandreou could no longer command a majority in parliament. Samaras agreed to the formation of a national emergency government that would ratify the agreement, but on two conditions: Papandreou should be replaced by a technocrat as prime minister and an election should be held as soon as possible, which Samaras expected to win.
Led by Lucas Papademos, vice-president of the ECB before his appointment as prime minister, the caretaker government achieved many of its designated aims, as a recent report of the European Commission testifies. Evangelos Venizelos, who had replaced Papandreou at the head of PASOK, served on as deputy prime minister. In the meantime, however, the parliament was descending into chaos.
Bakoyannis had formed a new faction, calling itself the "Democratic Alliance." Other ND parliamentarians voted against the appointment of Papademos and left ND to form a rightist anti-memorandum party, the Independent Greeks. Members of SYRIZA and PASOK defected to form a new group, the Democratic Left (DEMAR). Among parties that had failed to enter the parliament in 2009, the Ecological Greens were attracting leftists and an upstart nationalist organization, the Golden Dawn, was stealing voters from LAOS. This is a party whose electoral symbol is reminiscent of the swastika and which uses Nazi-style salutes. Its excuse is that both symbol and salute have ancient Greek antecedents.
On May 6, Samaras got his victory, but a Pyrrhic one. ND lost 48% of its voters of 2009; PASOK lost 72% of its own. As my previous article had expected, there was no longer a clear distinction between "major" and "minor" parties. A slim majority of the new parliament consisted of leftist or rightist parties that had campaigned for repudiation of the 2010 memorandum. Without the bonus for ND, it would have been a 60% majority. This, just as Greece needs the upcoming tranche of loans within weeks.
Specifically, the result was: ND 108 (18.85%), SYRIZA 52 (16.78%), PASOK 41 (13.18%), Independent Greeks 33 (10.60%), KKE 26 (8.48%), Golden Dawn 21 (6.97%) and DEMAR 19 (6.10%). Close to entering parliament were: Ecological Greens (2.93%), LAOS (2.90%) and the Democratic Alliance of Bakoyannis (2.56%). Over ten percent went to other lesser parties.
Three consequences of the results deserve note. If Samaras had kept Bakoyannis within the party, ND might have obtained enough seats to form a narrow majority with PASOK. Golden Dawn bounded into the parliament from nowhere (0.29% in 2009). SYRIZA leapt from last place in 2009 to second and almost to first place in the new parliament.
The Greek constitution, with the aim of forcing Greeks to agree among themselves, defines the procedure following an election in strict terms. The President of the Republic summons the leader of the largest party and gives him or her three days to find a majority in the new parliament. If that leader fails, the President summons the leader of the second largest and then that of the third largest party with the same commission. Should they also fail, the President calls all the party leaders to see if they can somehow create a government or, if not, whether they can agree upon a temporary prime minister who will organize a new election.
If the parties cannot even muster a majority in parliament to appoint a temporary prime minister, the President must dissolve the parliament forthwith and appoint a leading judge as the temporary prime minister. All that happened this time, leading to a new election on June 17; let's see how.
Responding to the election of May 6, the leaders of Europe expressed their firm and urgent expectation that a new Greek government would quickly be formed and energetically continue Greece's compliance with its international obligations. They should have realized immediately that this was an absurd hope.
For one thing, several parties were officially opposed to cooperating with others. Thus the Independent Hellenes, though rightist, were vehemently against joining an ND government. KKE declared that to collaborate with SYRIZA, though leftist, was like collaborating with ND. And no other party could cooperate with Golden Dawn. Moreover, SYRIZA was for new elections as soon as possible, since new opinion polls showed that it would now win first place and the bonus of fifty seats.
The bonus, that is, has become a destabilizing instead of a stabilizing factor. The assumption on which the bonus was created – that at least one party would receive close to a majority of votes – has vanished and is unlikely to return any time soon.
So Samaras of ND told the President within hours, not days, that he could not find a majority. Alexis Tsipras, the leader of SYRIZA, spent his three days in antics that had nothing to do with forming a government. Third, Venizelos tried diligently to persuade DEMAR to join an "ecumenical" government with PASOK and ND. But DEMAR laid down two conditions, both impossible: the ecumenical government must include SYRIZA and its first priority must be to renegotiate the 2010 memorandum. The European leaders had already repeated emphatically that Greece's obligations could not be evaded if it wanted the next tranche of loans, due shortly. And SYRIZA refused, of course.
It is worth describing the antics of Tsipras in detail, since they show how detached SYRIZA is from reality. This party is a conglomerate of – to date – twelve groups of Trots and what-nots; it would never agree on what to do, but only on what to oppose. It imagines that Greece can keep the euro while disregarding the 2010 memorandum. Opinion polls show that Greeks indeed overwhelmingly share both those wishes. Most Greeks, that is, are convinced that they can have their cake and eat it.
Tsipras only consulted other parliamentary parties briefly at the end of his three days. He began, instead, by talking to extra-parliamentary groups that he hoped would vote for SYRIZA in a new election. Then he turned to the public sector trade unions, which are his natural allies since they have conducted endless strikes against the implementation of the 2010 memorandum. But their leaders told him that they wanted no part in the political process. That is, they refuse to commit themselves in any way even to parliamentarians who would fulfil all their wishes.
On the same May 6, the socialist François Hollande had replaced Nicolas Sarkozy as President of France. So Tsipras wrote to him, asking for an urgent meeting. But Hollande replied that he would meet only a head of government, not a head of party. In the meantime, however, Hollande has received his fellow socialist Venizelos in Paris, so his reply to Tsipras can be seen as a brush-off.
Next Tsipras wrote letters to various leaders of European countries and institutions, informing them that the Greek people had "annulled" the 2010 memorandum in the election. He gave the same message to Greeks themselves, claiming that Greece's international commitments merely bore the "personal signatures" of the leaders of PASOK and ND, but that the Greeks had now annulled those signatures by electing a parliamentary majority of opponents of the memorandum. Needless to say, this is an impudent and outrageous repudiation of a fundament of international law: that an incoming government must honor the international commitments of its predecessors.
Finally, he gave interviews in the same vein to the international press. In a conversation with the Wall Street Journal, for example, he was sure that Greece would continue to receive loans from the eurozone countries even if he, as prime minister, cancelled all the cuts in the Greek bureaucracy. Otherwise, he threatened, he would simply refuse to pay Greece's debts. In any event, he was sure that Greece could evade its commitments and still stay in the eurozone.
What Tsipras ignores here is that Spain and Italy are also enforcing major budget cuts like the Greek ones. Even the Dutch, with their much stronger economy, have had to cut back on government expenditure and raise taxes in the so-called "Spring Agreement" (Lenteakkord) of May 16 this year. If all of them followed Greece in abandoning those policies, the euro would collapse. So the European leaders, if Tsipras forces their hand, must rather kick Greece out of the euro, cost what it may. And it will cost Greece most, since nobody will then lend money to Greece or risk investing money there.
Nothing dismayed, Tsipras also told the Greeks that Angela Merkel, the strong woman of Germany, had more to fear from him than vice versa. If Greece left the euro, he said, German voters would punish her. How little he knows! The Bild Zeitung, Germany's lowbrow mass circulation newspaper, has already branded him as "the Greek who wants to keep our billions" and asked "Will he lead Greece to catastrophe?" Nothing would delight Germans more and boost Merkel's popularity than taking Greek hands off their money pots.
No doubt, Tsipras feels himself reinforced by the statement of Obama at the recent G8 meeting that all the political leaders wanted Greece to stay in the eurozone. But Greeks should have no illusions. Handing over power to the temporary prime minister, Panagiotis Pikrammenos, Lukas Papademos unambiguously defined the choices facing the Greek people in an Open Letter to the Greeks that was posted on the official Website of the Greek Prime Minister. He repeated the same message in his own interview with the Wall Street Journal. The latter article, too, was widely reported in the Greek press, together with a list of similar warnings from the IMF and European political leaders.
Nor could Tsipras form a government even if SYRIZA wins the election, receiving over a hundred seats including the bonus. His rise in the polls has come at the expense of other leftist parties. Though his ambition is to lead a coalition of the left, both PASOK and KKE refuse to serve under his leadership, leaving him only DEMAR. Such a parliament would contain a majority of opponents of the 2010 memorandum, whether on the left or on the right, but no possibility of forming a government.
This would be like Germany in the last years of the Weimar Republic, when Nazis and Communists together formed a majority of the Reichstag. The prospect for Greece is to be both out of the euro and ungovernable.
Greece's last hope for sanity is that ND is trying to rally other center-right groups to its support, so as to gain the edge on SYRIZA and retain the fifty-seat bonus. Some LAOS members who lost their seats in parliament on May 6 have now switched to ND. Dora Bakoyannis has been told that all is forgiven and she can have a secure place on the party list. Her party has agreed to a merger with ND, although her initial reply was that she was thinking of leaving politics altogether. She lost her first husband, by the way, to a political assassination.
Whatever happens in Greece on June 17, here you can understand why and what it means.
Related Topics:  Malcolm Lowe
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