What Is Behind Salam Fayyad's Call for "Economic Intifada?"

by Khaled Abu Toameh
December 20, 2012 at 5:00 am

http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3508/economic-intifada

Send

Comment

RSS

Be the first of your friends to like this.

Instead of seeking way to solve the financial crisis, Fayyad chose to call on Palestinians to boycott all Israeli goods. He is hoping that by calling for an economic intifada, he will succeed in diverting the anger and frustration on the Palestinian street outward to Israel. This has always been the Palestinian Authority's way of avoiding responsibility for anything that goes wrong — by putting all the blame on Israel.

Salam Fayyad, the prime minister of the Palestinian Authority, this week called for an economic intifada against Israel.
Fayyad, whose government is facing a severe financial crisis, wants Palestinians to boycott all Israeli goods in response to Israel's decision to seize tax revenues belonging to the Palestinian Authority.
The revenues were seized and transferred to the Israel Electric Company to cover Palestinians' debts to the firm.
Fayyad is angry because the Israel Electric Company finally collected its debts from Palestinian consumers. Speaking to Palestinian reporters in Ramallah, he denounced the transfer of the funds to the company as "illegal and immoral."
Fayyad knows better than anyone else that, for various reasons, many Palestinians have not been paying their electricity bills.
Many Palestinians refuse to pay water, electricity and other bills because they believe the international community, primarily the Americans and Europeans, should be covering all their expenses. Others refuse to pay because they believe the money eventually falls into the hands of corrupt Palestinian Authority officials.
Earlier this year, the Palestinian Authority announced a series of measures to persuade Palestinian consumers to pay their electricity bills, but to no avail. The Palestinian Authority even announced a new law that allows it to imprison any Palestinian who is caught practicing the widespread phenomenon of "electricity theft."
Because of the financial crisis, Fayyad's government has also failed to pay full salaries to its employees, sparking a two-day general strike of the public sector in the West Bank.
The transfer of funds to the Israel Electric Company, and the Arab world's failure to fulfill promises to support the Palestinian Authority financially, have created a severe financial crisis in the Palestinian Authority.
This is not the first time that Arab countries lie to Palestinians. Over the past two decades, Arab nations have promised the Palestinians billions of dollars in aid. But, according to officials in Ramallah, the Palestinians have received less than 10% of what they had been promised.
Instead of seeking ways to solve the crisis, however, Fayyad chose to call on Palestinians to boycott all Israeli goods. How does that help solve the financial crisis? Fayyad did not have an answer. He just wants to punish Israel for collecting on the debt for the electricity bills.
He is hoping that by calling for an economic intifada, he will succeed in diverting growing anger and frustration on the Palestinian street towards the Israelis. This has always been the Palestinian Authority's way of avoiding responsibility for anything that goes wrong -- by putting all the blame on Israel.
Fayyad wants Palestinians to boycott Israel, but at the same time is unable to provide them with better alternatives. Does he really think that Palestinians will stop buying Israeli-manufactured medicine, for example?
As one Palestinian public servant asked, "How can our prime minister ask us to boycott Israeli goods when we can't even afford to purchase Palestinian goods because he's not paying us our salaries?"
Added another Palestinian who has been working as a school teacher for 25 years: "If Fayyad wants us to boycott Israel, why doesn't he himself set an example? Why is he living in Jerusalem, under Israeli rule, and enjoying, together with his family, most privileges offered to Israeli citizens? Today, I'm ready to go and work in an Israeli settlement to feed my children and I don't care whether Fayyad likes it or not."

Related Topics: Khaled Abu Toameh

"I Go to Sleep Fatah and Wake Up Hamas"

by Anat Berko
December 20, 2012 at 4:30 am

http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3507/fatah-hamas

Send

Comment

RSS

Be the first of your friends to like this.

"In our hearts, we are all Hamas..." — Veteran member of Fatah

Contrary to what many people think, there is no profound division between Fatah and Hamas. Palestinians often shuttle from one to the other; members of the same family belong to different groups. Jibril Rajoub, for example, is often interviewed by the Israeli media as representing Fatah (Palestinian Authority), while his brother, Naif, was a minister in the de-facto Hamas administration.
Before 2007, when Hamas took over the Gaza Strip and suppressed the Fatah presence there, there was a considerable amount of back-and-forth between the organizations. On one occasion a Fatah operative in jail smiled and said he found it hard to say which organization he belonged to. "There are days," he said, "when I go to sleep Fatah and wake up Hamas..."
Last week, masses of people marched through the streets of the West Bank holding green signs with Hamas slogans, all with Fatah's blessing, and chanting, "death to the Jews," and "death to Israel." As one veteran Fatah member said, "In our hearts we are all Hamas."
Mahmoud Abbas's so-called "pragmatism" is music to Western ears, but not to the Arabs'.
Thus, when he came back from the UN with the title of "president of Palestine" in his pocket, he allowed Hamas and others to hold parades and rallies, released Hamas prisoners, and has given instructions that those planning terrorist attacks against Israel are to be left to do as they please.
Today the Palestinian Authority can barely stay afloat, and every mass march organized to palliate Hamas can slide into factional Palestinian violence and anti-Israeli terrorism.
Hamas, with the help recently and willingly given it by Mahmoud Abbas, will take over, just as it took over the Gaza Strip. Israel can never accept a radical Islamist emirate in the West Bank of the sort Hamas has created in the Gaza Strip, any more than Paris, London or Washington could accept al-Qaeda or the Taliban in Monaco, Wales or Virginia.
This time, no one can promise that Israeli soldiers will continue to act as bodyguards for Palestinian leaders when their lives are threatened. That movie, which we have all seen, is no longer playing.
Dr. Anat Berko, a visiting professor at George Washington University and a research fellow at the International Policy Institute for Counter-Terrorism, is the author of The Smarter Bomb: Women and Children as Suicide Bombers.

Using Children as Weapons

by Nonie Darwish
December 20, 2012 at 4:00 am

http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3506/children-weapons

Send

Comment

RSS

Be the first of your friends to like this.

If these are not abuses of the human rights of the child, what is?

In the Middle East, children are being used by the adults who should be caring for them to turn them into jihadist weapons to conquer the world -- sometimes with bombs strapped onto them to kill their perceived enemies. Children are given gun training to learn how to kill Jews, and are told that dying for the sake of jihad is the highest honor and the only guarantee to go to heaven. If these are not abuses of the human rights of the child, what is? In the elementary school we attended in Gaza, the political and cultural agenda of the Arab world was pushed down our throats in effectively every subject.
American children today are also suffering from adult agendas shoved down their throats: the environmental agenda, the feminist agenda, the gay agenda, the Islamist agenda, the class-envy agenda, the racial-divide agendas, the animal-rights agenda, ad infinitum. What people in the West fail to see is that they, too, are using their children as weapons: as tools to bring about social, cultural and political change, often to destroy the American system as we know it and replace it with a new America that the popular culture and many Americans seem so desperate to accomplish.
Experiments in child rearing do not only happen in ignorant third world countries, where people do not know better. My daughter came home from high school asking which topic to pick for an essay she was asked to write. The topics were: suicide, mass murder, or being bullied and oppressed because you are gay or from a certain race or national background. When I suggested "none," her answer was that this was the list the teacher given.
Boys are told that what was once considered normal boy play, roughhousing, has now become a crime, bullying. Girls are encouraged to perceive themselves as victims of men and marriage, and to feel hurt about it.
The American political and social divides are trickling down to our schools and placing horrific pressure on our kids. In divorces, the father is watching his kids taken away from him while the mother is told she can do everything on her own without a father. In political and cultural divisions, adults are also acting like hostile, divorcing parents tearing their kids apart during custody battles. As in the Middle East, where kids are unintentionally hurt for political, social and psychological experimentation, in America we are also usurping their innocence.
Adam Lanza, mentally ill or not, may not have had to end the way he did. He lacked fear of authority while living in the isolation of a large home with a mother desperate to please him by taking him shooting, buying assault weapons, guns and ammunition for a son she knew was not well. This mother was told by the popular culture that she could replace the father in her son's life, and that the son would not feel any difference whether the father's activities were done by the father or her. This poor mother told her friends she was trying to bond with her 20-year-old son -- what she unfortunately did not know was that this is an age when young men hate to be seen with their mothers.
American culture has hurt women, children and the family structure by telling women they could do everything, by telling men they are disposable and by telling girls that motherhood and marriage are unnecessary.
In the larger picture, the American epidemic of mass gun shootings by young men could be a cry for help by several generations of American kids who have suffered under decades of experimentation and indoctrination in our public schools. It could also be a cry for help by American single mothers, who are told they can take the role of both men and women in the family including the difficult task of raising young boys to adulthood alone. Women need a break; and kids need fathers as much as they need mothers. They also need the traditional extended family relations: the nurturing grandmother, the funny uncle or aunt, cousins. It is time for America to end the self-righteous pressure on our kids to change America.
Nonie Darwish is author of "The Devil We Don't Know" and president of FormerMuslimsUnited.org

Related Topics: Nonie Darwish

To subscribe to the this mailing list, go to http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/list_subscribe.php

Gatestone Institute