Many Western audiences are led to sympathize with Hamas due to biased reporting from mainstream-media sources. Holly Williams from CBS News focuses on the small picture Hamas wants the world to see- Gazan casualties. That's what damns Israel and draws international aid, which Palestinian leaders live off (and steal from). CNN removed reporter Diana Magnay for tweeting Israelis were "scum."
Particularly biased reporting has come from NBC News' Ayman Mohyeldin, who finally got replaced by Richard Engel. But leftist pressure has persuaded NBC to over-ride the withdrawal decision and put the former Al Jazeera star back in. Oddly, he never reported about the Palestinians' institutionalized Jew-hatred.
NBC resumed Ayman Mohyeldin in Gaza
Walid Phares says, "What the American public is not able to see is a rise of significant criticism in Egypt against Hamas. While Muslim Brotherhood and pro-Iranian propaganda networks thrive on US campuses, a wave of popular rejection of Hamas is spreading throughout Egypt. And that is what really count in the equation. In this video a powerful criticism by a national commentator of Hamas' "irresponsible actions." In the US, CAIR would have called him "Islamophobe," but in Egypt he -the Muslim moderate- called CAIR's allies, Hamas, "reckless."
In "Why Hamas Said No to Egypt's Sisi" Khaled abu Toameh explains why Hamas rejected the same ceasefire terms from Sisi which they accepted from Morsi.
Gazans attack PA Health Minister Jawad Awwad
By rejecting the cease-fire, Hamas has shown that it prefers Israel's bombs to Sisi's offer. For Hamas, Sisi represents a hostile regime that has declared war on the movement and its Muslim Brotherhood allies in Egypt.
Hamas holds Sisi responsible for tightening the blockade on the Gaza Strip by keeping the Rafah border crossing closed and destroying hundreds of smuggling tunnels along the border between Egypt and the Gaza Strip. The last thing Hamas wants is to award Sisi -- and enhance his standing in the regional and international arena -- by accepting cease-fire "initiative" from him. Similarly, Hamas does not want Abbas to play any role in a cease-fire agreement lest that strengthen his standing as the representative of all Palestinians. Statements by Hamas leaders over the past week have been extremely critical of Abbas's stance regarding the war with Israel. Top Hamas officials have gone as far as condemning Abbas for conspiring with Israel and Egypt to eliminate the Islamist movement and end its control over the Gaza Strip.
What to do with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad—the big question led to a big protest of about 300 Syrian Americans the Los Angeles Federal Building last month.
But the demonstrators were split. Supporters of Assad and protestors against his regime chanted, sang and danced, and accused the other side of lying. Both sides got into arguments, throwing derogatory terms at the opposition. Police were on hand to occassionally calm tensions.
The Anti-Assad demonstrators explained their movement and goals at counter-rally at Federal Building in Los Angeles. Ms. Hadia Attar, Dr. Azzawi, and Hicham Alani explain why they condemn the Assad regime.
Many supporters of the Assad regime played patriotic music to dance with during the protest. They said they didn’t want American intervention in the conflict, a move they said would likely be in the interest of profit.
Johnny Achi, of Arab-Americans for Syria, said dialogue was the way to peace, and blamed terrorists armed by the U.S., Saudi Arabia and Qatar for the massacre.
“Today in Syria, we have 50 Bin Ladens,” Achi said. “The suicide bombers are killing the policemen and minorities. We are all threatened.”
Achi said he thought his president had done well in trying to reach out to the opposition. “We are more democratic than other countries in the region."
But the other side doesn’t agree. Anti-Assad protestors said the president was responsible for the mass killings. Demonstrator Omar Attar said everything is monitored there, she said, including the Internet and phone calls. Neighbors disappear for no reason.
The world is confused about the real reasons for U.S. military action. Obama's reneging on his Red-Line promise to act when chemical weapons would be used has Israel worried that she trusted his promise to take care of Iran's nuclear weapons if she laid-back before the 2012 election, which she did. What is the Syrian issue all about? Michael Snyder puts forth an educated a theory in "Is the U.S. Going to War with Syria over a Natural Gas Pipeline?"
Why has the little nation of Qatar spent 3 billion dollars to support the rebels in Syria? Could it be because Qatar is the largest exporter of liquid natural gas in the world and Assad won't let them build a natural gas pipeline through Syria? Of course. Qatar wants to install a puppet regime in Syria that will allow them to build a pipeline which will enable them to sell lots and lots of natural gas to Europe. Why is Saudi Arabia spending huge amounts of money to help the rebels and why has Saudi Prince Bandar bin Sultan been "jetting from covert command centers near the Syrian front lines to the Élysée Palace in Paris and the Kremlin in Moscow, seeking to undermine the Assad regime"? Well, it turns out that Saudi Arabia intends to install their own puppet government in Syria which will allow the Saudis to control the flow of energy through the region. On the other side, Russia very much prefers the Assad regime for a whole bunch of reasons. One of those reasons is that Assad is helping to block the flow of natural gas out of the Persian Gulf into Europe, thus ensuring higher profits for Gazprom. Now the United States is getting directly involved in the conflict. If the U.S. is successful in getting rid of the Assad regime, it will be good for either the Saudis or Qatar (and possibly for both), and it will be really bad for Russia. This is a strategic geopolitical conflict about natural resources, religion and money, and it really has nothing to do with chemical weapons at all. Read more: Preparing for a strike A limited Western attack on Syria will do more damage than good, claims one Arab columnist quoted in Ha'aretz.
In the new film "Conflict: The Power of Propaganda," director Chris Atkins goes behind the headlines and past the media bias against Israel to present a fair and realistic picture of what is happening in the Islamic conflict to conquer Israel.
The fast-paced documentary exposes rampant Palestinian propaganda and challenges viewers to recognize the calculated deception - and its ties to both extremism and terrorism on a global scale. Executive producer Joe Amaral and his filmmakers go inside the world of the Palestinian media, documenting how Palestinian propaganda seeks to rob the Jewish people of their rich history in the Land of Israel. Alarming video evidence shows how school children are taught and encouraged to aspire to kill Jews and to become suicide bombers.
Western groups and leaders, including the US State Department, supported "Reporters without Borders" in petitioning Middle East governments to free arrested dissenter bloggers, including the Saudi Arabian, Fouad al-Farhan.
On January 1st, The Washington Post published: "Farhan's is the first arrest of a blogger in Saudi Arabia. Two Egyptian bloggers and one Tunisian are currently behind bars, according to Sami ben Gharbia, advocacy director for Global Voices, an international research group focused on the Internet and founded at Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet and Society.
Farhan told The Washington Post and others in early December that an Interior Ministry official had warned him that he would be detained because of his online support for a group of men arrested in February and held without charge or trial.
At the time of their arrest, the government accused the Jiddah-based group, made up of a former judge, academics and businessmen, of supporting terrorism. The men's attorney, Bassim Alim, had said they were arrested for their political activism and their plans to form a civil rights group.
Farhan wrote that he was told he would be released if he signed an apology for his activism. "I'm not sure if I'm ready to do that. An apology for what? Apologizing because I said the government lied when they accused those guys of supporting terrorism?"
"One day before President Bush arrived here to meet with King Abdullah, he spoke out against Middle Eastern governments that crush dissent and punish political or religious speech.
“You cannot expect people to believe in the promise of a better future when they are jailed for peacefully petitioning their government,” Mr. Bush said Sunday during a speech in Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates.
“And you cannot stand up a modern and confident nation when you do not allow people to voice their legitimate criticisms,” he said.
But when Mr. Bush arrived in Saudi Arabia yesterday, he stepped into a kingdom where some crimes, including apostasy from Islam, are punished by beheading, and where expressing one’s views on a blog can land you in prison.
Mr Bush said to Gulf Arab leaders in the UAE in the major speech of his nine-day Middle East trip, "The best way to defeat the extremists in your midst is by opening your societies, and trusting in your people, and giving them a voice in their nation." While Mr Bush continued to tout democracy, he put more emphasis on the need for "justice" and broader societal changes, offered a cautious critique of political repression in the Middle East- reassuring nervous Arab leaders of continuing US support.
But Michael Hirsh in "The Growing Power of Petro-Islam" published in Newsweek, calls the President hypocritical in not publicly advocating in Saudi Arabia for the high-profile, jailed civil-rights journalist, Farhan, despite Mr. Bush's inaugural address proclamation,"It is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture," while he stumped in Saudi Arabia (pledging his support to sell the monarchy a $20 Billion smart-bomb package) for them to hopefully use to contain Iran's nuclear program, and not against Israel - seeking their support for the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.
"The Saud family's legitimacy is built not on law but on an extremist brand of Islam, Wahhabism, in which Osama bin Laden was schooled, much as Tony Soprano's power is based on violence. (Remember when people used to talk about forcing the Saudis to change their radical Islamist views after 9/11? Didn't happen. Instead we invaded somewhat secular Iraq—at least it was next door to the real problem—and found ourselves preoccupied.) Imagine if Tony S. ran much of the world's oil supply and used the vast profits to fund more Bada-Bing fronts for organized crime all over the world? Don't you think governments would band together to stop it? Well, that's not unlike what's happening today, with Saudi Arabia's financing of anti-Western sentiment—but no one's doing anything about it, starting with George Bush. Simply because it's the Saudi government. Our "friends."
Clearly King Abdullah and other senior members of his government are not unfriendly to Washington. But many other Saudis are. This is what some experts have called petro-Islam. The Saudis have used their vast profits to fund not Bada-Bing clubs but Wahhabist mosques around the world, even in the United States. Wahhabists—or Salafists, as members of the broader movement are called—believe in a strict interpretation of the Qur'an and a pure, self-contained Islamic state. Many also embrace the idea that integration into the West—or American society—is profane. This never represented mainstream Islam.
In fact, the creator of Wahhabism, the 18th-century thinker Mohammad Ibn Abd al-Wahhab, was notorious among Muslims of his time for being something of an extremist himself. He vandalized shrines, and he was denounced by many Islamic theologians for his "doctrinal mediocrity and illegitimacy," as the scholar Abdelwahab Meddeb notes in "Islam and Its Discontents." The upshot is that Western consumers are paying hundreds of billions of dollars in oil profits to help educate and fund their own potential murderers.
None of this would have happened had it not been for the petro-dollar. The Saudis would have stayed obscure Bedouins and Wahhabism little more than a cult. But because of their oil wealth, the Saudis were able to spread Wahhabism's seed worldwide, making it far more mainstream than it would have been otherwise. As one Egyptian intellectual described it me, "It's as if Jimmy Swaggart had come into hundreds of billions of dollars and taken over most of Christianity."
Saudi Arabia was always the problem, and not just because 15 of the 19 9/11 hijackers were Saudi. It is because of the rise of petro-Islam in this troubled land. And as oil climbs in value, and research lags on alternative energy sources, this pathological family concern known as Saudi Arabia only grows. Even now no one is really doing anything about this critical problem.
Bush was right when he said in his second inaugural address, "The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands." If only he had taken himself seriously on this trip. Perhaps next time he ought to insist on seeing a few dissidents.
Israel's Prime Minister Ehud Olmert hasn't missed the White House's complacency against the persecution of political critics.
"WORSE EVEN than the media's intimidation of Zionists is the official harassment suffered by those who insist on speaking out. And as Olmert moves ahead with the leftist establishment's program of expelling Israelis from their communities and transferring them to Palestinian terrorists, that harassment is becoming more and more palpable. {...}
On January 9, three activists stood in front of the Dan Panorama Hotel in the capital where the foreign press accompanying Bush on his visit to Israel was being housed. Jeff Daube, Susie Dym and Yehudit Dassberg were attempting to distribute a report on Fatah's support for and involvement in terrorist attacks against Israel to members of the foreign press. The report, written by veteran researcher Arlene Kushner, contained no policy recommendations. It simply documented Fatah's terrorist activities. For their efforts, they were detained by the police and accused of distributing "seditious materials" and causing a public nuisance.
Beyond its harassment of street protesters and activists, the government is now attempting to silence online protests of its policies. Last week, the ministerial committee on legislation approved a bill that would make Web site owners and editors legally responsible for comments published on their sites. Given the government's arbitrary and biased definition of sedition and incitement, if the law is passed it will effectively force bloggers and Web site operators to block all comments to their Web sites. Yet another avenue of protest will be silenced.
The cumulative impact of these phenomena has been the fifth and perhaps determinative factor enabling Olmert to continue in office. Simply stated, between the media's intimidation and the official harassment of citizens who dare to protest or even disagree with the government's policies, the public has simply lost faith its ability to influence the course of the country. This sense of disenfranchisement has demoralized the public into silence.
For those who wish to help end the tenure of a government pushing a radical, post-Zionist agenda with the support of a mere eight percent of the public, it is important to understand this state of affairs. All ameliorative actions must be geared towards ending the stranglehold of the radical Left on the national debate, and towards defending the civil rights and upholding the reputations of those who protest.
Will all the Western sympathy afforded to Mid-East bloggers' political free-speech also be extended to nationalistic, Israeli bloggers (or blog-commenters) to be jailed for criticizing PM Olmert's "land-for-peace" policies?
