A Palestinian boy named Mohammed Al-Farra, now 3 1/2, was born in Khan Younis, Gaza with a genetic disease which led to amputations of his feet and hands, and left him with a compromised immune system and other debilitating conditions.
Though the boy naturally became completely dependent on others, his parents abandoned him and the Palestinian government refused to pay for his medical care. So, he now lives at Safra Children’s Hospital, in the Israeli city of Ramat Gan, where doctors began treating him when he was just an infant.
Mohammed spends his days undergoing treatment, getting around in a tiny wheelchair and learning how to use prosthetic limbs – and is cared for by his 55-year-old grandfather, Hamouda. The Israeli doctors have reportedly grown quite attached to the boy, and fundraise to cover the cost of his care, and which also allows him and his grandfather to live in the pediatric ward.
Hamouda Al-Farra puts his grandson Mohammed in a wheelchair in the Tel Hashomer Hospital
A recentreporton the young disabled Palestinian boy in AP noted the following, which, though quite moving, wouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone who has spent any time in Israeli hospitals.
On a recent day at the children’s hospital, patients and medics chatted in Hebrew and Arabic. Women in Muslim headscarves strolled in a corridor. An Orthodox Jewish woman affectionately patted Mohammed on his head. She nodded kindly at al-Farra.
Hamouda Al-Farra holds his grandson Mohammed as they speak with Israeli doctor Raz Somech
In 2012, Israeli authorities approved 91.5 percent of applications from Gaza to receive medical care in Israel, a year in which a total of 219,469 Palestinian patients from the West Bank and Gaza received treatment in Israeli hospitals - a number which includes over 20,000 children.
However, as the blog Mostly Kosher revealed, contrary to Sherwood’s claim, this isn’t “the first time”. In fact, State Department reports from 2004, 2008, 2009 and 2010 similarly characterized specific acts of settler violence as “terrorism”.
Moreover, while these ‘price tag’ attacks have indeed grown in recent years,the overwhelming majority of Israelis deplore them. Additionally, a quick comparison between how the Israeli government and Palestinian Authority have respectively responded to these waves of violence reveals an Israeli resolve to address the issue rubbing up against predictable Palestinian cynicism aimed at exploiting it for political gain.
While the PA is quick to condemn price tag attacks on West Bank mosques, it actively glorifies acts of terror perpetrated by Palestinians against Israelis. The Palestinian Authority – a supposed island of moderation in a sea of Islamist-lead governments – simultaneously gives its assent to murder and entices future terrorists with assurances of glory and honor.
Sherwood goes beyond just whitewashing official PA compliance in such heinous acts: she doesn’t mention the Palestinian Authority once in her piece. And this is no mere oversight. By portraying the Palestinians as innocent and helpless, the taint and stink of institutionalized corruption and officially sanctioned terror is kept from contaminating the fairy tale that has been created of jackbooted Jewish thugs running roughshod over the perpetually persecuted Arabs.
Were that it were so. It makes for such delicious drama, doesn’t it? The truth is that while the PA lacks many powers associated with a proper state—such as complete control of its territory—it is responsible for providing such varied government services as education, criminal justice and health care for approximately three million Palestinians.
And the Palestinian Authority is not content to leave the dastardly deed of killing Israeli Jews to others. The PA does not just glorify or outsource terrorism, it actively funds it by paying monthly salaries to thousands of prisoners in Israeli prisons, including terrorists with blood on their hands. The source for these salaries is the Palestinian Authority’s general budget.
Sadly, the PA’s decades-long campaign to honor terrorists, presenting them as heroes and role models, has borne fruit. According to a new poll conducted by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey (PSR), nearly half of all Palestinians (47.5 percent) support terrorist attacks on Israeli civilians inside the 1949 armistice lines.
And while the Palestinian Authority has fanned the flames of racist incitement among its people, the Israeli government has loudly condemned any and all attacks on Palestinians. From Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to Yesha settlers council head Danny Dayan, the response from Jerusalem has been uncompromising and clear: such acts “… of lawlessness and intolerance…” are committed by “criminals” and the government will “…act swiftly to bring the culprits to justice.”
Yet, Sherwood must have run up against a hard deadline since she neglected to include any of this historical and political context in her report. For while Jewish criminal elements must be held to account and brought to justice, their behavior has not occurred in a vacuum. To focus only on settler misbehavior is to ignore the context in which attacks on Jews in the West Bank is a regular occurrence, including Arab attacks on synagogues and other Jewish holy places.
Sherwood, while seemingly enthralled with the Palestinian narrative, evidently holds the Palestinian people and their government in such low regard that Arab violence is perceived as par for the course while Jews behaving badly illicits cries of condemnation that spill over into a questioning of Israel’s moral legitimacy.
While Sherwood’s talents and value as a reporter of news are questionable, she has a bright future as a romance novelist or fantasy writer. Perhaps she can call her first official work of fiction: “Arabian Knights Versus the Jewish Horde”.
(Editor’s note: I had to make a few ‘minor’ revisions to my original story.)
Israeli Palestinian Authority police arrested six Jews Muslims in Jerusalem Nablus and Jericho for publicly eating on the fast of Tisha B’Av Ramadan.
One Jew Muslim was sentenced to one month in prison by Israeli courts the PA.
Breaking religious fasts are prohibited in Israel many Arab and Muslim countries, with legal penalties varying from fines to short prison terms. According to Israeli law article 274 of the Palestinian penal code, citizens who violate Tisha B’Av Ramadan by eating in public risk up to one month in prison or a fine of the equivalent of $21.
In addition, Israeli religious authorities Chairman of the PA Supreme Court for Shari’ah Law said Israeli PA law should prohibit even non-Jews non-Muslims and those who cannot fast for health reasons from eating in public during the month. Israel’s Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi Yona Metzger Sheikh Yusuf Ida’is explained: “Our streets are Jewish Islamic,” and formal legislation should be enacted to “severely punish” anyone who eats publicly during Tisha B’Av or Yom Kippur Ramadan.
Rabbi Metzger Sheikh Yusuf Ida’is told Israeli Palestinian TV that Tisha B’Av Ramadan offenders should be jailed as a warning to others.
“I call upon others to be considerate of Jews’ Muslims’ feelings,” Metzger Ida’is added, asking non-Jewish non-Muslim Israelis Palestinians to refrain from eating in public on the holiday as well.
The Guardiandevoted considerable coverage to ignored the Israeli Palestinians’ egregious violation of religious freedom.
Several human rights NGOs announced that they will issue a special report turn a blind eye to such anti-democratic and illiberal laws in Israel the Palestinian Authority.
Remember the wacky Palestine Quiz and the fun we all had getting everything wrong?
Now here’s a bonus question:
Which country stuck its neck out and tried to borrow to borrow $100 million from the IMF to give to the Palestinian Authority to prevent its potential collapse?
a) Turkey
b) Saudi Arabia
c) United States
d) Venezuela
e) None of the above
Answer: e) None of the above.
It was, in fact, Israel. For the sake of peace and security no-one on earth has done more to build the foundations of a Palestinian state than its neighbour, Israel. The thanks it has received both from the Arab world and the laughingly named International Solidarity Movement is as miserable as Israel has been generous.
Here was the cover from The Economist, inApril 2012.
The UK magazine, in editorializing against Scottish independence, argued:
“The future, however, looks much dicier [for an independent Scotland]. This is a stormy economic world, and an independent Scotland would be a small, vulnerable barque. It would depend on oil for some 18% of its GDP, making it subject to shifts in global commodity prices. Though high oil and gas prices have pushed up tax revenues, if they drop production as well as receipts would plummet. The richest reserves have already been exploited, leaving inaccessible oil that becomes uneconomic when prices fall. North Sea production has been falling by about 6% a year for the past decade. Eventually the oil will run out entirely.”
“A small country is more vulnerable to other shocks. In 2008 the British government had to bail out Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) and HBOS, Scotland’s two biggest banks.”
“…if they vote for independence they should do so in the knowledge that their country could end up as one of Europe’s vulnerable, marginal economies.”
Now, close your eyes, and imagine if the Economist had employed similar logic with another group’s national aspirations.
While Scotland had a Gross Domestic Product in 2011 of $186 billion, the West Bank’s was $12.79billion.
More facts to consider which may make you wonder why the push for Palestinian statehood has taken on something of a religion among the activist class:
The PA receives an enormous amount of aid each year from Western states, largess unlikely to end, or even decrease, in the event of statehood.The UK provided £78.8 million. Other countries which provided the PA with enormous amounts of aidare as follows (all calculated in U.S. dollars: U.S.: $667 million, EU: $600 million, UNRWA: $476 million, Arab countries combined: $110 million, Norway: $108 million Spain: $101 million, Germany: $89 million.
While the Palestinian economy remains in a state of “severe fiscal crisis”, wages for Palestinian Authority staff eat up a remarkable 20 per cent of their total GDP, according to a World Bank report recently released.
Despite this continuing budget crisis of their own making,Palestinian Media Watch recently reported on the salaries paid by the PA to terrorists and their families – which, in total, is the equivalent of over $51 million per year.
In short, there is every reason to believe that the new state of Palestine would be an economic basket case, at the very least, and dependent for years to come on foreign largess.
However, the Economist was only expressing skepticism towards Scottish independence due to such economic factors, not, as in the case of Palestine, fears of a newly sovereign state which could launch deadly terrorist attacks, continue fomenting a culture of antisemitic incitement - a nation which indoctrinates their citizens with the belief that they can never, ever, live at peace with a Jewish state.
“Palestinianism” has never been, for all but a small number of its proponents, a sober reflection of the social, economic, political, and military costs and benefits of creating the 23rd Arab state (next to the world’s only majority Jewish state).
No, such advocates typically can’t be bothered with such quotidian concerns, messy realities and real world consequences.
The chic Palestinian political badge they wear so proudly will not be parted with so easily.
It’s impossible to read the following story, as reported by Sky News, without recalling the Guardian’s advocacy on behalf of Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorist Khader Adnan, whose administrative detention by Israeli authorities made him a cause celeb among the anti-Israel ‘journavist’ community.
The Guardian publishedfive separate sympathetic pieces about Adnan (including a risible CiF essay by his wife who characterized the spokesperson for a group responsible for terror attacks which murdered hundreds of Israelis as “selfless”) who they comically referred to as a Palestinian “baker”.
Likely never to grace the pages of the Guardian, nor interest their Israel correspondent Harriet Sherwood, is the story of two Palestinian journalists arrested by the PA for criticizing Palestinian leadership.
Tarek Khamis, who works for a West Bank news agency, was detained by Palestinian security forces inRamallah after he used the social networking site to condemn the arrest of another local journalist and blogger.
Esmat Abdel Khalik is being held in solitary confinement after she accused Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas of being a “traitor” on her Facebook page.
A spokesman for the Palestinian Authority said Ms Abdel Khalik was being held for “extending her tongue” against the elected Palestinian leadership.
In a sign of a deliberate crackdown against local reporters, a third Palestinian journalist was arrested last week after writing an article alleging corruption in the Palestinian diplomatic mission in France.
Youssef al Sahyeb has been charged with slander and defamation after a complaint lodged by the Palestinian foreign minister Riad Malki. The reporter was released on $7000 (£4,400) bail after protests by fellow journalists in the West Bank.
The Arabic Network for Human Rightshas accused the Palestinian Authority of “assaulting the freedom of expression in the Palestinian territories”.
“Journalists are entitled to express their opinions without fear of being imprisoned and harassed,” the organisation said in a statement.
The Palestinian Authority has denied claims that it has set up a special unit to monitor blogs and social network postings.
Press freedom is meant to be protected under Palestinian law but the legislation allows for journalists to be prosecuted for activities which threaten “Palestinian unity or values”.
If you go to the Palestinian Territories page of the Guardian there’s no report on this flagrant assault on freedom of the press in PA.
Do I even have to ask what kind of coverage the Guardian would provide if Israel arrested Ha’aretz (or +972) journalists for criticizing Prime Minister Netanyahu?
Of course, such a scenario is inconceivable, as journalists here routinely engage in the most scurrilous critiques of Israeli leaders with complete impunity.
Moreover, those on the left who passionately advocate for the creation of a Palestinian state strangely never seem bothered by such stories – political phenomena in the PA which demonstrates their decidedly illiberal political culture.
Can any true progressive sincerely argue at this point that the new nation of “Palestine” will be even marginally democratic, pluralistic, or tolerant?
On Thursday, Abdel Khalik’s detention was extended for 15 days and she was put into solitary confinement. Ma’an News Agency now reports that, according to a member of the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate, Khaleqwas transferred, on Tuesday, to a hospital after her health deteriorated.
The past twelve months have seen unpredicted political and social upheaval throughout the Middle East and North Africa and currently just about the only certainty is that there is still much more to come.
With the cards still very much in the air and last January’s confident assertions on the part of the various Middle East experts – who informed us that the two countries in which revolution would definitely not be taking place were Syria and Libya – still ringing in our ears almost as loudly as Hillary Clinton’s bizarre assurance that Bashar Assad was ‘a reformer’, only fools would try to predict how the MENA region might look in five years’ time.
What is clear, however, is that the general trend appears to be towards a rise in power on the part of religiously motivated political elements and a deepening of the Sunni-Shia sectarian rift which has long existed in the region, alongside real cause for worry about the futures of other minorities.
In this volatile climate and with the fate of existing peace treaties between Israel and some of its Arab neighbours far from guaranteed, the Middle East Quartet (comprised of the United Nations, the European Union, Russia and the United States) is to meet next week in Jerusalem for another session of flogging the dead horse known as ‘the peace process’.
Amazingly, with the Palestinian Authority having trawled up every possible excuse for not renewing negotiations over the past three years, having opted to pursue the unilateral option at the United Nations, and with Hamas-Fatah reconciliation as much of a pipe-dream as ever, the Quartet is still promoting the anachronistic notion that a peace agreement can be reached by the end of 2012.
This year marks the fortieth anniversary of the commencement of European Union contributions to the Palestinians. The EU has been UNRWA’s largest donor since 1971 and over the last decade has provided that organisation with almost one billion Euros. Since the establishment of the Palestinian Authority under the Oslo Accords in 1993 it has, in addition, been a major donor to that administration.
The numbers are truly staggering; the EU has pledged to provide 28.4 percent of the total humanitarian aid budget for 2011 – US $60,013,647 – making it the top contributor. That figure does not include donations from individual EU member countries or separate donations to shore up the PA budget. In 2010,EU contributions to the PA budget as set out in the Palestinian Reform and Development Plan amounted to 199.90 million Euros. Funds donated by member states of the EU amounted to an additional 62.70 million Euros.
When combined with the additional donations from the World Bank, the United States, Japan and the notably less significant , the total amounts of money donated (US $3.96 billion in 2009-2010) mean that the Palestinians are still the highest per capita recipients of aid in the world, even 18 years after the establishment of the Palestinian Authority.
As Europe sinks ever deeper into financial turmoil itself, taxpayers in EU countries must be asking themselves if the tax money paid both directly to their own governments and indirectly to the EU could not be better employed in reviving their own economies and supporting unemployed and poverty-stricken residents of the EU. They may also be wondering if their 40 years of investment in UNRWA and 18 years of investment in the Palestinian Authority have actually brought any benefit to the Palestinian people. After all, throwing money at an investment which yields no returns is not financially savvy.
Not only has EU and other investment in UNRWA not solved the problem of Palestinian refugees, it has actually perpetuated it by forcibly keeping second, third and even fourth generations in permanent statelessness.
PA minister Issa Karake handing the family of terrorist Abbas Al-Sayid an honorary plaque from the PA. (March 28)
The Palestinian Authority has just honored Abbas Al-Sayid, the terrorist responsible for planning the ‘Passover Massacre’ which claimed the lives of 30 innocent Israeli citizens (including some Holocaust survivors) and injured 140 attending a Passover meal at Netanya’s Park Hotel on March 27, 2002.
On March 28, Issa Karake, the Palestinian Authority Minister of Prisoners’ Affairs, visited the family of the Hamas suicide-bomb mastermind (who’s serving a life sentence in an Israeli prison), awarding them with an official, festive plaque, in celebration of the anniversary of the massacre.
On that fateful day in 2002, a terrorist walked into the dining room of the hotel, in the center of the city, and detonated an explosive device. The terrorist was identified as Abdel-Basset Odeh, a member of the Hamas Iz a Din al-Kassam Brigades, from the West Bank city of Tulkarem, which is just 10 kilometers east of Netanya. He was on the list of wanted terrorists Israel had requested be arrested.
Here are the victims of the attack. You can click on their name to learn more.
While in Ramallah on Thursday I noticed a public square which seemed dedicated to someone with a terrorist affiliation, and took this photo of the sign marking the site.
Sure enough, a friend who’s fluent in Arabic confirmed that the sign (in a prominent retail district) says:
Of course, this isn’t the first public square in Ramallah to be named after a terrorist. Dalal Mughrabi, who led one of the most lethal terror attacks in Israel’s history, was also memorialized in the city as a hero by the Palestinian Authority.
(Two days before the latest round of peace talks, PA TV broadcast a Palestinian dance group singing about military conquest of Israel.)
The following is a transcript and description of the performance:
Band member recites a poem:
“Fight, brother, the flag will never be lowered,
the torches will never die out.”
On [Mt.] Carmel (in Israel) and in the [Jordan] Valley,
we are rocks and streams.
In Lod (Israeli city) we are poems, and in Ramle (Israeli city) – grenades.
We, my brother, shall remain the revolution of the fighting nation.”
Vocalist sings:
“The Zionists went out from [their] homelands,
compounding damage and enmity.
But the Palestinian revolution awaits [them].
The orchard called us to the [armed] struggle.
We replaced bracelets with weapons.
We attacked the despicable [Zionists].
This invading enemy is on the battlefield.
This is the day of consolation of Jihad.
Pull the trigger.
We shall redeem Jerusalem, Nablus and the country.”
Wherever there are Jews, you will find them being introspective today. It’s the eve of the Jewish New Year, a time for trying to understand what this year just ending has meant to us. Also what we want in the year about to start unfolding.
As bereaved parents, thoughts of what terror and its exponents do to people’s lives are never far from the surface. On days like today, they are right at the top of the pile.
Our lives and those of our children – and we imagine the lives of many of our neighbours and friends too, but there we speak with far less familiarity – are permanently changed in the wake of the murder of our Malki. The extent of the impact naturally varies in both extent and nature. But it’s there.
The idea that there are people who can harbor a hatred so profound that they will happily die in their own man-made explosion just so long as they know they killed some of the people they hate (us), is incomprehensible. The more you think about it, the more impossible it is to understand.
But not for everyone.
The Palestinian Authority sat down, via its highest representatives, in Washington this past week to talk peace with representatives of Israel. A little earlier (as reported in the PA’s official newspaperAl-Hayat Al-Jadida on Aug. 28, 2010 and via the invaluablePalestinian Media Watch) other representatives of the same Mahmoud Abbas PA regime bestowed a public honour on a woman called Um Youssef Hamid a resident of the Al-Amari neighbourhood of Ramalla, the seat of Abbas’s PLO-dominated government.
Knowing about this honour, about Mrs Um Youssef Hamid and the values she has inculcated in her offspring and, by extension, the values that the political leadership of the Palestinians seeks to inculcate in their society, is – to say the least – illuminating. The sort of insight that might contribute hugely to one’s introspection.
We don’t know more about Mrs Um Youssef Hamid than what the handful of news reports – until now, allof them Israeli since this event is evidently of no interestto the wider ranks of the global media – can tell us. Here’s what they tell us.
Mrs Um Youssef Hamid was honoured in a special ceremony (depicted onthis Hebrew-language Israeli news site) by the Minister for Prisoners Affairs in the PA government based in Ramallah, the part of the Palestinian Arab polity not yet controlled by Hamas, and his senior officials. She was honoured because her sons were responsible for dozens (dozens!) of attacks on Israelis, the overwhelming majority of them on civilians. The sort of attacks that we call terrorist. The sort of cold-blooded and deliberate terrorist attacks that took the lives of more than 1,100 Israeli civilians, including the life of our fifteen year-old daughter Malki.
The sons of Mrs Um Youssef Hamid brought tremendous honour on her, on her family, on her people and on the Mahmoud Abbas regime. Nasser Abu-Hamid killed 7 Israelis and tried to murder 12 more. Today he is in an Israeli prison serving seven life sentences plus 50 years. The second son, Nasr Abu Hamid is serving 5 life sentences for his involvement in two terror attacks and arms dealing. Sharif Abu Hamid: 4 life sentences for involvement in several terror attacks and accompanying a jihadist bomber to a March 2002 attack. Muhammad Abu Hamid – serving 2 life sentences plus 30 years for involvement in multiple terror attacks. Rounding out the family’s distinctive specialness, a fifth son – Abed Almun’am Muhamed Yousef Naji Abu-Hamid – was apprehended and terminated by Israeli forces in a firefight in 1994 after carrying out several terrorist murders.
Enough. That’s them. Those are theirvalues. What’s important for our society is to know against whom we are defending ourselves, and the ideas and ideology that motivate them.
We, for our part, and our neighbours and our society are driven to do acts of a very different sort. Our Malki’s death left an unfillable hole in our lives. For the past nine years, her family and friends have been engaged in creating an honour of an infinitely more constructive kind than the one we just described. It’s called Keren Malki, the Malki Foundation.
As we go into Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year, this evening, we ask you to spend five minutes viewing a new videoproduced by Keren Malki UK, the London-based group of volunteers who are helping us communicate and support Keren Malki’s message of goodwill and good deeds.
Please click below to view the video, and please condider passing it along to your friends.
We don’t need ministers and ceremonies to articulate the values that animate the Jewish people and that run like a golden thread through three thousand years of Jewish history. All we need to do is remember lives like that of Malki, and the good that she embodied.
Shana tova! May this new year be a year of happiness, good health, peace and accomplishment for all people of goodwill.
