In this mailing:
- Khaled Abu Toameh: Egypt Blockades Gaza
- Fiamma Nirenstein: Pakistan: Giving Away Babies on Television
- Nina Rosenwald: Gatestone Weekly Roundup
Egypt
Blockades Gaza
Where Are the Flotillas?
by Khaled Abu
Toameh
August 9, 2013 at 5:00 am
August 9, 2013 at 5:00 am
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The
activists do not care about the Palestinians' suffering as much as they are
interested in advancing their anti-Israel agenda. They rarely have anything
good to offer the Palestinians.
Hamas has finally admitted that it is the Egyptians, and not Israel, who
have turned the Gaza Strip into a "big prison."Ghazi Hamad, a senior official with the Hamas-controlled foreign ministry, was quoted this week as saying that the Gaza Strip has been turned into a "big prison as a result of the continued closure of the Rafah border crossing by the Egyptian authorities since June 30."
Hamad said that since then, the number of Palestinian travelers at the Rafah terminal has dropped from 1,200 to 200 per day.
The Rafah border
crossing between Egypt and Gaza, January 2009. (Source: International
Transport Workers' Federation)
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To make matters worse, the Egyptian authorities announced that the Rafah terminal would be completely closed during the four-day Muslim feast of Eid al-Fitr, which began on August 8.
Until recently, the charge that the Gaza Strip has been turned into a "big prison" had been made only against Israel, capturing the attention of the mainstream media and human rights organizations around the world.
But now that the charge is being made against Egypt, most international journalists, human rights organizations and even "pro-Palestine" groups, especially at university campuses in the US, Canada and Australia, have chosen to look the other way.
Residents of the Gaza Strip are asking these days: Where are all the foreign solidarity missions that used to visit the Gaza Strip to show support for Hamas and the Palestinian population? Where are all the press, human rights groups, activists?
In July, only two foreign delegations visited the Gaza Strip. By contrast, between January and June this year, about 180 delegations entered the Gaza Strip .
The "pro-Palestine" activists say they are unable to enter the Gaza Strip because of the strict security measures and travel restrictions imposed by the Egyptian authorities.
But why haven't these activists tried to organize another flotilla aid convoy to the Gaza Strip to break the Egyptian blockade?
Why haven't the "pro-Palestine" activists been sent to the Egyptian side of the Rafah border crossing to voice solidarity with the residents of the "big prison"?
The answer is obvious: First, the activists' main goal is to condemn Israel and hold it solely responsible for the miseries of Palestinians.
The activists do not care about the Palestinians' suffering as much as they are interested in advancing their anti-Israel agenda. They devote most of their energies and efforts to inciting against Israel and rarely have anything good to offer the Palestinians.
Second, the "pro-Palestine" activists know that it would be foolish of them to mess around with the Egyptian army and security forces. The last time foreign nationals tried to stage a peaceful protest on the Egyptian side of the Rafah terminal, the Egyptian authorities did not hesitate to assault and deport many of them from the country.
Similarly, there is a problem with the way the international media is handling the current crisis in the Gaza Strip.
While the Egyptian authorities are tightening the blockade on the Gaza Strip, dozens of trucks loaded with goods and construction material continue to enter the area through the Erez Terminal from Israel.
Just this week, more than 500 truckloads containing a variety of goods and 86 tons of cooking gas were delivered from to the residents of the Gaza Strip through the Erez Terminal.
In the last week of July, 1,378 trucks carrying 37,306 tons of goods entered the Gaza Strip from Israel and a total of 2,203 people crossed through the Erez Terminal.
Since the beginning of the year, nearly 34,000 trucks carrying more than 950,000 tons of goods entered the Gaza Strip through Israel.
The Egyptians, like most Arabs, do not care about the Palestinians. They want the Palestinians to be Israel's problem and to continue relying on handouts from Western countries.
The Arabs do not care if the residents of the Gaza Strip starve to death as long as Israel will be blamed.
So why should any Arab country care at all if the international community and media continue to adopt an ostrich-like attitude toward Egypt's responsibility for the aggravating humanitarian and economic crisis in the Gaza Strip?
Related Topics: Egypt
| Khaled Abu
Toameh
Pakistan: Giving Away Babies on Television
by Fiamma
Nirenstein
August 9, 2013 at 4:00 am
August 9, 2013 at 4:00 am
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Even if
some of the children might be fortunate enough to find loving homes, turning
these children into gifts, treated as objects -- slaves -- is just as
dehumanizing as the terrible alternatives from which they are supposedly being
protected. It is not a problem that is being fixed.
In Pakistan, a country beset by problems of violence, poverty and
illiteracy, a famous anchorman, Aamir Liaquat Hussain, a religious Muslim as
well as a local sex symbol, hosts a "The Price is Right" type of
show, call "Gift from God". During Ramadan, it is aired seven hours a
day, and the grand prize is a newborn baby.A special prize for special days. Win and take home a small child. Hussain explains that, in any event, they are "abandoned children that are condemned to grow up in the street, only to be enlisted by terrorists and to end their days as suicide bombers. We offer them an alternative. What is wrong with that?"
Aamir Liaquat Hussain
holds the prize -- a baby -- in the Pakistani television show "Gift from
God".
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The problem is that Hussain, far from providing an alternative to this situation, uses it to his advantage: he hands the children as if they are objects, prostituting them for the audience, and placing them in the arms of unknown customers. More broadly, the society to which he belongs tosses 1,200,000 children into the streets. You see them wander around searching for leftovers in the heaps of trash; come across them as they work, pushing overloaded carts by hand 15 hours a day; prostituting themselves, or when they try sell contraband goods. You see them with their eyes eaten by flies or brought to the ground by AIDS and they tell you that for years they have not known where their mother is.
The people to whom he gives them, might, for all we know, have answered a quiz on television, to the sound of drums; but could, in turn, exploit them just as horrendously as others might. Turning these children into gifts, treated as objects -- slaves, really -- is just as dehumanizing as the terrible alternatives from which they are supposedly being rescued.
The enormous disaster to which he has become an accomplice is not Hussain's fault; he may well have good intentions, and some babies might even be fortunate enough to find loving homes. But treating children as abandoned trash on Pakistani television is revealing of the Third World landscape.
Several days ago the letter of a Taliban leader, whose group had assaulted then-15-year-old Malala Yousefzai simply because she wanted to go to school, dared to explain why he had decided, knowingly and with regret, to shoot her in the head and burn down the school -- a gesture similar in misguided compassion to Hussain's for the children he gives away.
Meanwhile, the Americans have decided to negotiate with the Taliban. A letter of this kind should end that thought. Although Hussain is not a member of the Taliban, his talk show, in so casually discarding and possibly harming helpless children, nevertheless profits from a dreadful situation that apparently no one is even thinking about fixing. American moral equivocation only reinforces unacceptable behavior.
The Europeans might ask the Pakistani government if it would like to remain a friend; then ask for a clarification of its policy on child exploitation -- and then hold them to it.
Fiamma Nirenstein, journalist and author, former Vice-President of the Committee on Foreign Affairs of the Italian Chamber of Deputies, and member of the Italian delegation at the Council of Europe.
This article originally appeared in slightly different form in Italian in Il Giornale; English copyright, Gatestone Institute.
Related Topics: Pakistan
| Fiamma
Nirenstein
Gatestone Weekly Roundup
by Nina Rosenwald
August 9, 2013 at 3:00 am
August 9, 2013 at 3:00 am
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Be the first of your
friends to like this.Now that Egypt has finally not only blockaded Gaza, but admitted it, as Khaled Abu Toameh asks: where are the flotillas, the activists, the media, the human rights groups?
Samuel Westrop reports on yet another double standard, arather chilling one. While the scholar Robert Spencer was denied entry to Britain last month because of his criticism of Islamist extremism, Saudi Arabian hate preacher Muhamed Al-Arifi was welcomed there, despite slurs against Shiites and his outspoken support for killing Jews.
Raymond Ibrahim writes that, bad as it has been for Egypt's Christians over the past few months, in recent days, attacks have escalated; al-Qaeda flags flying over churches. "With the ouster of Muhammad Morsi," he relates, "Egypt's Islamists have finally gotten the pretext they need to cleanse the nation of its Christian minority, the Copts -- ironically, Egypt's native sons."
Related Topics: Nina Rosenwald
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