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In this mailing:
by Salim Mansur
• July 24, 2014 at 5:00 am
What we are
witnessing is Israel engaged in a struggle against Hamas, against
Palestinians, against Arabs, against Muslims, and against an expanding
body of opinion in the West that is less and less inhibited from
displaying the rancid anti-Semitism behind its support for those who
openly call for another Holocaust for the Jews.
Gaza was
returned to the Palestinians in 2005 as a test for building trust.
This verse
[31:27 ] means that no one Muslim should claim that he has a monopoly
over the reading of the Quran, for that would amount to reducing the
majesty of God to the smallness of man.
The sound
of battle is louder than the call to prayer.
Chaim
Weizmann, a Zionist leader and future President of Israel (L), meets with
Emir Feisal in 1918.
When a few years ago I travelled to Israel, I had the specific
purpose in mind of making my own pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Looking back on
that summer of 2010, Israel was enjoying an interlude of uncertain peace.
More than a year earlier, in December 2008-January 2009, the Israel
Defense Forces [IDF] had been sent into Gaza to disarm Hamas because of
their launching rockets into Israel; then two years later, in November
2012, the IDF went back into Gaza again for similar reasons.
As I watch with people across the world, the IDF has once more been
reluctantly forced into military action to stop Hamas from firing
hundreds of rockets capable of reaching deep inside Israel, I shall try
to go beyond simple and easy condemnations of the brutality of wars and
ritualistic sympathy for its victims.
by Khaled Abu Toameh
• July 24, 2014 at 4:30 am
Evidently
Abbas has reached the conclusion that unless he hurries up and declares
his support for the Palestinian "resistance" in the Gaza Strip,
his people will march on his office and force him to quit. Abbas's fear
of a revolt has driven him into the open arms of Hamas and Islamic Jihad.
Another
reason for the unexpected change in Abbas's policy might be the promise
of financial aid he received from Qatar -- an enemy of Egypt's al-Sisi,
but the largest funder of the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas.
Abbas know
that if he wants to survive, he will have to be on the side of the
radicals.
Mahmoud
Abbas (r) meets with the Hamas political bureau chief Khaled Mashaal in
Qatar, July 20, 2014. (Image source: Handout from the Palestinian
Authority President's Office/Thaer Ghanem)
Until recently, Palestinian Authority [PA] President Mahmoud Abbas
was very critical of Hamas and Islamic Jihad for their refusal to accept
the Egyptian-brokered cease-fire with Israel.
But now Abbas appears to have made a 180-degree turn and has even
endorsed the conditions of Hamas and Islamic Jihad for a cease-fire.
The shift in Abbas's position became evident after he visited Doha,
Qatar, where he held separate talks with Emir Tamim bin Thani al-Hamad
and Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal.
Prior to his visit to Doha, Abbas was in Cairo, where he met with
President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi and discussed with him ways of ending the
fighting in the Gaza Strip.
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